All these questions are essential to ensuring your content gains traction, drives traffic and generates leads, yet they only scratch the surface of your big picture content marketing strategy.

The foundation of that strategy can be built through research assessments that analyze your audience, media outlets, trends and competitors, as shown in the diagram below.

Together, these assessments can be covered by 19 unique research tactics that will allow you to piece together a comprehensive strategy for your content marketing initiatives.

Audience Research Tactics

1. Keyword research: Identifying the target keywords and related search terms used by your audience is critical for understanding how customers research products and services.
2. User-generated content analysis: Researching forums and relevant social media platforms will provide a better understanding of your prospects’ pain points, the terminology they use and their preferred forms of content.
3. Customer interviews: Hearing directly from customers in a more personalized, non-digital setting will provide greater context and understanding of their pain points.
4. Expert interviews: Industry experts will have a forward-facing perspective on where the market is heading, and their opinions will allow you to better understand the relevant conversations happening in your space.
5. Web analytics assessment: Diving into your web analytics will help you understand who your target demographic is, how they interact with your website, how to leverage your current content, how to track appropriate behaviors and how to optimize your website for conversions.

Trends Research Tactics

6. Response analysis: By diving into audience conversations, you can determine the nature of content that drives them to certain behaviors, such as call-to-action language or special offers.
7. Angle identification: Identifying the forms, voices, popular social media outlets and dynamic features that define compelling content will allow you to take your content to the next level by motivating readers to engage and share.
8. Topic identification: Tracking and understanding long-tail keyword searches will allow you to identify specific topical pain points for your customers.
9. Compelling questions identification: All prior research tactics will eventually give way to identifying compelling questions, or the primary questions that your content should focus on answering.
10. Resources cited: Understanding how research is shared in your space, what the most reliable sources are, and who the authoritative figures are will provide general inspiration for your content marketing strategy.
11. Quoted experts identification: Quotes from experts, industry influencers and internal members of your organization will help you better understand the ecosystem of engagement between businesses and consumers in your space, thus adding credibility to your content.

Media Research Tactics

2. Industry publications analysis: Creating a database of popular and relevant industry publications is crucial for building your promotion strategy.
3. Social influencer & expert analysis: Utilizing social networks, groups and lists will allow you to aggregate data and identify the most significant social influencers.
4. Social engagement analysis: Knowing what’s trending on social media in your space will help you shape your creation strategy, and content analysis tools can measure engagement across social platforms to expose the most popular content.

Competitive Research Tactics

5. Competitive content inventory: Building an inventory of your competitors’ content will provide you with an overview of the key pages, assets and resources you’ll be going up against.
6. Competitive sentiment analysis: Taking a qualitative inventory of format, tone, emotion and readership level of your competitors’ content will expose opportunities for your own.
7. Keyword gap analysis: An analysis of the primary keywords your brand is targeting, compared to those of your competitors, will allow you to locate content gaps and keyword opportunities.
8. Site architecture & navigation audit: Assessing your competitors’ site architectures and navigation flows from SEO and UX perspectives can provide inspiration and clarity for creating the ideal customer experience on your own website.
9. Local SEO evaluation: Local SEO audits allow you to narrow in on your product and service conversion opportunities while identifying variations between competitors.

From ideation and production to promotion and measurement, it’s crucial to develop and implement an overarching strategy that guides your content marketing efforts. By truly understanding the needs of your audience, the influential media channels, trending topics and your competitive landscape, you’ll be better suited to create and promote content that drives meaningful returns for your organization.

For more details on the 19 tactics listed above, or to see Relevance’s recommended tools for executing those tactics, check out new Quick Guide for Content Marketing Research. A concise and printable 10-page guide, this is a great tool for content marketers to keep at their desks.

The post 19 Research Tactics for Bulletproof Content Marketing appeared first on Relevance.

Online sales have seen a growth rate of 10 times more than offline sales, but with store owners and sales people physically cut out of the equation, how can you offer the same personalized recommendations you would at your physical store?

Marketing automation, while helpful, is a bit too static and impersonal, not to mention boring. What if you could personalize the online shopping experience with interactive content that you’ve come to recognize as a staple of social media?

“I Got Peridot! What Kind Of Gem Are You?”

Quizzes have become a viral sensation over the past few years if Buzzfeed hasn’t made that obvious already. Marketers are beginning to use quizzes as an effective method of generating leads, segmenting their database and increasing e-commerce sales. And quite frankly, you might want to consider it, too.

I’ve personally been a part of the making of more than 25,000 quizzes at Interact and have learned a lot about what makes an effective piece for generating sales and driving leads. Today, I’ll answer the questions I presented above with five examples that illustrate how you can use quizzes to personalize the online shopping experience and help drive online sales for your company.

1. How Z Gallerie Personalized Their Product Line Through Quizzes

Z Gallerie is a company that provides their customers with creative products procured from all over the world. They attend to both professional and amateur interior designers alike with a strong online presence and locations across the United States. Z Gallerie created the quiz “What is your Z Gallerie Style Personality?” to personalize their product line and to generate leads.

The purpose of Z Gallerie’s quiz is to provide a personalized experience for every potential and current customer that visits their website. After answering several questions, Z Gallerie collects contact information through a lead-capture form which allows them to follow up in a personal way with the help of marketing automation.

After filling out the lead capture form, Z Gallerie gives you your “Style Personality” with a link to learn more about it. Clicking the link brings you to a personalized page with product recommendations based carefully on the answers you chose on the quiz.

With the help of their personality quiz, Z Gallerie was able to deliver a very personalized shopping experience that brings in a considerable amount of leads per day. This personalized approach keeps customers engaged and allows the brand to suggest products custom-fit for their personal preferences. This gives Z Gallerie an opportunity to establish a connection with customers that can convert them into repeat purchasers in the future.

Here’s how you can deploy this strategy for your brand: Create a quiz with personalized results for each customer so that you can recommend products tailored to their preferences. This can be done by either recommending a single product or by assigning people a “personality” that corresponds to a group of products. Follow up with marketing automation to keep your customers interested and engaged.

2. How Birchbox Differentiated Their Products Using A Personality Quiz

Birchbox specializes in a monthly delivery of personalized product samples along with original content and an exciting online shop. Birchbox created the quiz “Find Your Face Mask Soul Mate in One Minute” to give personalized recommendations on which facemask customer should purchase.

What distinguishes Birchbox’s strategy from Z Gallerie’s is their execution. Although Birchbox practiced the same tactic of creating a quiz that suggests products based on personal preferences, they used theirs to differentiate similar products, most of which were variants of facemasks.

While Birchbox did not use their quiz to generate leads, they used it to place an emphasis on the most suitable face mask for their customers. The quiz made a personal connection with Birchbox’s customers by offering products catered specifically to them. Personalized experiences like this encourage the growth of a relationship between customer and retailer.

Here’s how you can emulate this method: Create a personality quiz with results based on your customer’s personal preferences. From there, recommend the most suitable product, as personalized suggestions convert better than generalized ones.

3. How BioLite Used A Quiz To Raise Awareness And Promote Their Product Line

BioLite’s strategy is surprisingly simple. They created a quiz to help raise awareness on power outage and lack-of-power preparedness. After the taking their quiz and getting the results, regardless of how prepared consumers may be, BioLite still recommends products that may be useful in similar situations.

With the use of a lead capture form, BioLite asked quiz-takers if they would like to submit their contact information to receive updates on environmentally friendly products and as an entry into their giveaway as an incentive. The form brought in 4,852 leads.

Here’s what you can do to replicate this strategy: Create a quiz that makes people think about situations that would require them to use products that you offer. It will encourage customers to make purchases based on their ability to rationalize the need for said products in various scenarios.

4. How The Elephant Pants Used Quizzes To Fund Their Kickstarter Campaign

Before establishing themselves as the successful company they are today, The Elephant Pants relied on the support of fundraising through a Kickstarter campaign. By creating the quiz “Which Pair of Elephant Pants Are You?” and linking it to their Kickstarter, The Elephant Pants were able to generate enough leads to fund their launch.

Just like the previous examples that we’ve taken a look at so far, The Elephant Pants also used their quiz to deliver personalized results that recommended a particular kind of product to customers—in this case, a specific kind of Elephant Pants.

The Elephant Pants provided a link at the end of the results of the quiz to help fund their Kickstarter. It also opted potential customers in to their email newsletter to keep them updated with any new developments.

By the end of their campaign, The Elephant Pants Kickstarter raised over $8,500 through their quiz, which was enough to help the retail startup to get off the ground.

Here’s how you can recreate this type of success: Create a quiz that recommends possible products that would encourage customers to fund a new product line, or new business altogether. When it takes off, you’ll have already established a loyal customer base from your humble beginnings.

5. How Aaron Brothers Uses Quizzes To Convert Leads Into Local Purchasers

Aaron Brothers (Michael’s) specializes in offering their customers merchandise in the form of custom framing, art supplies, and home decor. With a dedicated focus on art, they created a quiz to generate leads with an emphasis on targeting location.

The quiz, entitled “What’s Your Color?”, is entertaining, shareable content made with the sole purpose of generating leads based on location. Quizzes that categorize quiz-takers into personalities are heavily favored on social media, so the shares are frequent. It’s generated over 500 leads and has been the most successful part of Aaron Brothers’ campaign.

Here’s how you can paint the same picture: Use an entertaining quiz to collect leads earmarked by location so you can sell more seasonal and regionally-favored products offline by suggesting the nearest physical store location.

Many retailers are making the leap to online marketing, but the shopping experience isn’t quite the same as walking into a typical department store. Retailers want to emulate the same personalized customer service that they provide in person, and quizzes help bridge that gap.

Use a personality quiz to create personalized product recommendations as the end result. Or, use the same kind of quiz to differentiate between products or to encourage the funding of a product that’s in development. No matter how you use your quiz for retail, it will still have the innate ability to generate leads for your brand.

So get out there, be creative and make your mark in the world of e-commerce with the Internet’s next irresistible quiz.

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The post Successfully Driving E-Commerce Sales With Quizzes appeared first on Relevance.

However, it’s one thing to witness the success of others, but it’s another thing to actually take action and replicate that success.

Those five different examples demonstrated how quizzes were utilized along with different marketing strategies, but how does one go about making an effective quiz in the first place?

Let’s take a closer look at one of the brands highlighted in the previous article, Z Gallerie, and their quiz “What is your Z Gallerie Style Personality?”

The following step by step guide will show you how to go about creating a similar quiz of your own; from the title to the questions, to the lead capture form and the results. We’ll discuss effective ways to promote your quiz through social media to increase its popularity and further drive online sales and generate leads.

Part I: Creating Your Lead Generating Quiz to Drive Sales

Z Gallerie provides and caters to an audience of professional and amateur interior designers alike. Having established a strong online presence and in brick and mortar locations across the United States, Z Gallerie executed on their quiz perfectly, asking “What is your Z Gallerie Style Personality?”

By using quizzes to deliver personalized product recommendations, Z Gallerie was able to develop a deeper connection with their customer base to generate a massive success.

Concept Crafting & Title Choices

Every innovative content piece starts with an idea, right? Before we jump right into the quiz creation process, you’ll need a concept to wrap your quiz around. In Z Gallerie’s case, their quiz was based on what they were good at: interior design.

They modeled their questions after some of the basic concepts interior designers look for. So when it comes to your quiz, make it about something you have considerable knowledge on. Once you’ve got that figured out, here are a couple foundations you can build your quiz upon:

• The “Event” Based Quiz: This kind of a quiz revolves around the idea of an event or campaign. Taking this quiz is an added bonus to an on-going event that drives customer interaction. If you choose to go this route, think about tying it in with a contest or a giveaway to spur even more audience engagement. For example, if Halloween is approaching, you could have a spooky themed event that your quiz revolves around.

• The “Your Products” Based Quiz: If you don’t have some kind of promotional campaign going on at the moment, your best bet would be to go down the simpler route of creating a quiz based on what your brand sells. This places a deeper focus on your products, especially if you make your results personalized product recommendations. Z Gallerie used this method to place customers in “personality” categories that suggest suitable interior design recommendations based on your personality.

Crafting the Questions to Your Quiz

Now we’re onto the body of your quiz. This is where you establish your connection with the customer.

When formulating your questions, ask yourself how likely you might be to answer them. Here are some important ideas to keep in mind when coming up with your questions:

• Use Your Personality in the Questions – Let your personality shine in your quiz. When creating your questions, the quiz becomes a representation of your brand, so ask questions pertinent to the products you want to put an emphasis on in the results. Don’t be afraid to speak informally. You want to build trust with your quiz-takers by being you. Act as if you were speaking to someone in person.

• Use Images to Your Advantage – You’ll notice that a lot of the quizzes you encounter have images for questions. Pictures keep things relevant (assuming you chose relevant pictures to the quiz) and interesting at the same time. Using images also makes the quiz feel more like a game than some knowledge test on the internet. It lets people get comfortable and makes them more likely to opt-in at a later point. Because Z Gallerie has a deep focus on visual presentation, they made sure to use appropriate images that correlate to what you might find visually appealing.

• Keep Things Short and Simple – There’s a sweet spot when it comes to the number of questions you ask your quiz-taker. That sweet spot is between six and ten questions. As short as people’s attention spans are today, you need to ask as few questions as possible. Z Gallerie kept their quiz at a minimum of six questions, so they did an excellent job in keeping things simple and sweet.

Creating the Lead Capture Form for Your Quiz

As an online retailer, you want to generate leads to drive revenue in the future. This is where the lead capture form comes in handy. By increasing your email subscriber list, you can group potential customers together to target every week (or however often you send marketing messages) with brand new products or deals, thus increasing your chances of making sales.

The lead capture form’s placement in a quiz is crucial. Don’t put it right at the beginning, because that can scare people away. Don’t put it right at the end either because what incentive does anyone have to fill it out after they’ve gotten what they want? Gating it right before the results of a quiz makes it so that your quiz-taker must fill it out to advance.

Here are some guidelines to follow when creating your lead capture form:

• Give Your Customers a Valued Promise: Try to give your audience something more than just their results. Incentivize your lead capture with things like a giveaway entry to win free stuff, a free resource like an e-book or e-magazine, a weekly newsletter, coupons or discounts, or even just personalized advice. Birchbox’s incentive is their personalized message based on the quiz taker’s sense of style.

• Be Honest With Your Marketing Strategy: We’re not trying to pull any fast ones on our audience by having them opt-in and not letting them know what they’re getting into. Be honest with your marketing strategy. Let your quiz-taker know that you’ll be emailing them with content pertaining to the quiz they just took, be it a one-time email or a weekly follow-up. Don’t leave your audience in the dark.

• Ask Only For What You Need: When using a lead capture form, only ask for information you’ll actually use. This could be a name and an email address at the most. Don’t ask for someone’s phone number if you aren’t going to call them. Birchbox’s lead capture only requires a first and last name along with an email address. Simple, yet effective.

Creating Results That Will Get Your Quiz Shared

The results of your quiz have as much impact as the questions. When you scroll through your social media feed, what are you more likely to come across? Someone posting about a quiz or someone posting their results? The answer should be the latter.

Here are some key factors to creating share-worthy results:

• Give Positive Comments Without Lying: It isn’t a bad idea to have fun with people’s egos and emotions to generate shares. Tell everyone how awesome they are. Focus on the good traits to evoke positive emotions. People are more willing to share something that says something positive about them. However, avoid telling your quiz-taker that they’re something they aren’t.

• Use Captivating Images for Your Results: When people post their results on social media networks, what’s the first thing you see? It’s usually an image, yes? When creating your results, include relative, attractive images that will encourage people to take notice of someone’s results when posted. Z Gallerie makes sure to include an image of a fully-furnished room in correlation with the personality style a quiz-taker gets.

• Capture Your Audience’s Interest With Something Short: The results to your quiz shouldn’t be the end of your interaction with the quiz-taker; it shouldn’t be a paragraph long either. Keep your results down to about 3-5 sentences. Make your results lead to something more, for instance, to your website, or a handful of recommended products. Z Gallerie’s results encourage you to click on a personalized link to your style with product recommendations tailored around it.

Part II: Distributing Your Quiz on Social Media

Now that we’ve finished the quiz creation process, let’s talk about quiz distribution. Facebook and Twitter make up a large representation of social media, so we’re going to target these two as the main sources of generating social traffic.

Sharing Results on Facebook and Twitter

1. Use a captivating image to represent your quiz.

2. Come up with an attention-grabbing headline.

3. Share both the image and the caption with a shortened link to track results.

Using Paid Advertising to Promote Your Quizzes

Promoting your quiz on Facebook is an intricate process on its own, but for time’s sake, here’s the gist of the more important things to note when it comes to using paid Facebook advertising:

• Select Your Target Audience – You can select your target audience through various categories such as location, demographics, interests, behaviors, and connections. Each category can be narrowed down even further. For instance, if all of your stores are located in California, you can narrow down the Facebook ads to just that state.

• Create a Custom Audience – Creating a custom audience lets you work with an existing list you’ve uploaded onto Facebook. This audience will be similar to the list of current customers that you already have.

Part III: Following Up to Drive Revenue

After collecting leads, your job is to convert them into paying customers. Warm them up by keeping them interested through a series of marketing automation emails.

Let’s break it down into a four-step follow-up sequence:

1. The First Follow-Up: Thank You for Taking the Quiz

It’s imperative that you thank your audience for taking your quiz. It reminds them that they opted in and it helps to assert the name of your brand. If you forget this very first step, people won’t remember who you are and they’ll quickly write your email off as spam. There goes your chance. Don’t blow it!

2. The Second Follow-Up: Increase Interest Through Curiosity

A few days later, send your audience a list of other possible results that they could have gotten through your quiz. It piques their interest and encourages them to retake the quiz to see if they can get a different result. It’s the perfect natural transition from your “thank you” email to sending out other content.

3. The Third Follow-Up: Build Trust Through Experiences

After about a week, send out another email that highlights a customer case study or testimonial. Customer stories are perfect for building up trust, especially if you target people based on the result they got. This is the last step in convincing your leads to become paying customers.

4. The Fourth Follow-Up: Closing the Sale

After two weeks or so have passed, it’s time to finally convert your leads into customers. Use incentives like coupons, discounts or a webinar signup to close the deal. Give your audience a reason to buy into your brand.

The last time we were together, we looked over five different companies and how they used quizzes to personalize the shopping experience. This time around, we went through the steps to create your own quiz similar to the ones we’ve examined.

We went over title choices and the kind of quiz to create, followed by several key factors in crafting quiz questions. We then touched base on the basic guidelines for creating a lead capture, and most importantly, creating share-worthy results. It’s not enough just to make a quiz, so we also introduced several methods of distributing your quiz through social media. Lastly, we went over how you can follow-up on your leads through marketing automation.

With all of the information we’ve gone over today, you should be ready to create and promote your own quiz which—with the right amount of exposure and social traffic—can generate leads and increase online sales.

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The post How to Create a Quiz for Lead Generation and Online Sales appeared first on Relevance.

Baby, it’s cold outside. It’s time to warm up your cold feet leads.

Common sense tells you that if a lead hasn’t heard from you in a while, they’ve probably forgotten who you are. We’re fighting for attention – and REtention – more and more each day.

So, how do you re-engage old leads? Is it worth it? Are there risks involved, like getting flagged as spam?

At AmeriFirst, we tackled these issues over the last year, and have found success in turning cold leads into warm prospects and even potential customers. Here’s a look at how we did it.

1. Refine the List

First, we honed in on a list we knew was a bit stale. For our purposes, we developed a list of leads that seemed interested in credit and mortgages.

In HubSpot, we created a list of everyone who had visited a product-specific web page during a specific time frame (this calendar year) and wasn’t already a customer. This list fed a workflow that sent an email to re-engage them or allow them to opt-out of future communications.

It’s important to note here that we were clear in why we were emailing them and we offered an opt-out feature. Because this list had leads who had potentially forgotten who we were (shocker that someone might forget a business when signing up for emails, I know), we wanted to remind them of why we were already connected. This reminder at the top of the email helped keep spam reports low.

In the email, we gave a choice: do nothing & get more email or let us know you want something different. If they didn’t open it at all, they were automatically opted out, too. This put the power in the hands of the contact. They could choose to stay or make the effort to do something else. Our opt out CTA linked to our Learning Center, giving them one last chance to possibly find another resource of interest.

2. Implement the Workflow

Those contacts that chose to re-engage put themselves back into circulation. Then we walked those folks through the process of getting their credit mortgage-ready. They expressed an interest in credit and what that means during the home buying process, and they let us know they want to learn more.

The workflow is essentially a lead-nurturing email journey that takes them through the steps to rebuilding credit, establishing credit, and generally understanding the world of FICO scores and mortgage loans.

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Because we wanted to make sure our leads stayed engaged (and that we were helping them, not just spamming them), we established two points in the workflow with branching logic to once again re-engage if needed. Each of these milestones in the campaign helped us keep the most interested leads engaged, completing the workflow and (hopefully) moving on to the sales team.

For instance, if a person hadn’t opened an email in a specific amount of time, we sent an email right away with a personalized subject checking in with them. We addressed the fact that they hadn’t opened emails (without being creepy) by saying something like, “Sometimes we miss the mark, and our content doesn’t speak to you. We get it. Help us help you better.”

This gave them the chance to once again opt-out by clicking on a CTA. It’s kind of like the old choose-your-own-adventure books. Your fate is up to you.

As you can see in the example, click-through is zero percent, which is what we want. By opening and not clicking the opt-out CTA, you stay in the email workflow.

3. Analyze The Results

Success is “Leads that turned into Sales Qualified Leads”( i.e., people who are ready to talk to a mortgage consultant) and, obviously, those who closed.

We started with a list of 555. Of those, 131 made it into the workflow (23.6 percent of the original list) and 73 completed the whole workflow (55.72 percent of all who started).

We have 14 customers, 12 of which have close dates after the start of the workflow (10.69 percent of those that started the workflow became customers) and 83 SQLs (63.36 percent of those that started the workflow became SQLs).

We called this a successful campaign to re-engage our cool-to-cold leads and will be duplicating these efforts in future. You, too, can reap these kinds of benefits from similar work.

First, narrow in on a segment of your audience that’s been low on engagement and send them an email to let them know you’re ready to reconnect. Then, make opting out easy—but make opting in even easier. Finally, over time, nurture them with highly relevant content, and consider checking in at multiple points in the campaign to make sure they’re still engaged. Monitor the impact of your efforts and, if it’s successful, plan to repeat the process periodically.

Special thanks to the AmeriFirst marketing analyst, Jill Perney, for providing the statistics and for doing the heavy lifting on this workflow.

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Consumers are actually more willing than you might imagine to share content they see online. Huffington Post found that nine out of ten consumers want brands to share content online and those same consumers actually trust content from brands nearly as much as they do from established media sources. So how does a brand go about building trust within their content?

Most brands will simply slap their logo or their branding in the corner of their content and expect it to be trusted by their audience. This is wrong. Let’s examine the guidelines that brands should follow in order to build trustworthy content that is also shareable.

Reflect Your Brand

The first step to making shareable and trustworthy content is to make sure the content is an accurate representation of your brand. Not only should you stay true to your brand’s design guidelines, you also need to make sure your content addresses your customers’ interests in an authentic and believable way. Consumers want to do business with companies that share similar values as their own.

Make it Educational

People tend to seek out content that is educational in nature. The more someone can learn and take away from a content piece, the more likely they are to want to share it with their audience. Seventy-four percent of consumers trust editorial content when it comes across as educational and not promotional. This holds true even if it comes from a business.

Originality Counts

With so much content being published and shared on a daily basis, you have to take the extra step to ensure that your content stands out from the crowd. Over 30 percent of content readership will fall off if you try to take shortcuts like using stock photography in your content. Your consumers want to know your opinion on the subject matter as opposed to someone else’s. Original content means an original idea with original visual content. Take the extra step to make something truly unique and you will reap the benefits.

Cite Information Sources

One of the quickest ways for your content to lose trust in the minds of your readers is by not properly showing your sources. In fact, almost half of all consumers believe a brand’s credibility is lost when the information in the content cannot be verified by outside sources. On top of this, most media outlets will not reference content if there is not proper sourcing.

Earn Media Mentions

Content that is shared organically comes across as trusted content. Word-of-mouth recommendations and media mentions go a long way in building trust in both your content and your brand. When unaffiliated, third parties share your content, it comes across as authentic and, as a result, builds trust in your content. Indeed, content marketing comes across as more authentic than ads in the eyes of most consumers.

Make it Easy to Share

Making your content as easy to share as possible via social sharing buttons is an easy start to the conversation over your content. It is worth noting that most people prefer to share good news over bad news. And make sure that your content does not come across as a sales pitch for your product or brand, as brand or service mentions within the content can turn off consumers.

To help ensure that your audience and consumers share your content, it has to be both trustworthy and easily shareable. If you incorporate these various trust signals, you’re on your way to making content that’s both endorsed and shared.

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The post How to Create Trustworthy Content That Gets Shared appeared first on Relevance.

Businesses follow many ways to implement hashtags on social media. Some create their own hashtags, while others search for existing ones. If however, these techniques don’t work for you, you can use social media account management tools like DrumUp which suggest relevant hashtags and mentions before scheduling the post.

Hashtag tips and tricks for a successful social media campaign

To help you have a hassle-free hashtag journey, we have listed out a few tips that you can use to effectively implement hashtags in your social media marketing:

1. Use a campaign hashtag to introduce a new product

Companies who are at the cusp of launching a new product or service can benefit greatly by using a campaign hashtag. These hashtags can contain anything from the company/product name to a cool catchphrase.

Coca-Cola re-introduced their iconic beverage globally with a new customized label and their new hashtag #shareacoke.

The hashtag was a huge hit, with audiences posting images of themselves with loved ones sharing a coke.

2. Include industry-specific hashtags to get the conversation flowing

If all you want is likes, follows and re-tweets, then we suggest using industry-specific hashtags. For example, you’re a ballet shoe manufacturing company and you want to increase your brand’s visibility. Using hashtags related to ballet would be a good start; for example #ballet and #dance.

3. Piggyback on trending hashtags to be in the limelight

When it comes to hashtags and trends, there are two ways you could play it:

• Use all-time favorite trending hashtags like #lovewins or #photooftheday to interact with users. These are evergreen and can be used for absolutely anything. Take a look at how Harley-Davidson used a trending hashtag.

• Leverage the current trends and change the hashtag when the trend changes; like how master marketer Starbucks Coffee does. Autumn saw the company using #starbucksfallcup and in preparation for Christmas, they have their new #givegood.

4. Use a niche hashtag to find specific clients

Say you’re a gym looking to promote your fitness training sessions. Using specific hashtags such as #wateraerobics, #zumbadancer or #trx can help you find people who are actively interested in the sport you’re offering.

These hashtags will increase the chances of social media users actively searching for your business, while eliminating your expenses of marketing to a group who have a marginal chance of conversion.

5. Use locations as hashtags to connect with audiences

Posts with locations have a 79% higher engagement than others. So, if you have a business in New York, using #newyork is a great way to turn up in the feed of users who reside in or around NYC.

You can also use location hashtags to inform your followers of any events you’re hosting or supporting. Check out how Little Mix supported a toy donation camp in Vegas.

6. Restrict to 2 hashtags in a single post

Contradictory to popular belief, using too many hashtags doesn’t help you reach your target audience. Instead, they display your marketing to audiences who aren’t interested in your brand or your offering.

Oftentimes, an effective social media marketing campaign is one that is highly focused. Take a look at how UK cosmetics brand The Body Shop handles its hashtags.

7. Use the same hashtags across platforms

Using the same hashtags across social media platforms has some obvious benefits. For one, you allow audiences to find you easily across platforms, and two; common hashtags allow you to measure the cumulative benefits of your social media marketing campaign across channels.

By using the same hashtag on all social media accounts, you also increase the likelihood of turning your plain-Jane hashtag into a trending force. KFC is a great example of this strategy.

8. Create your own hashtag and start a trend

When Oreo Cookie wanted the world to talk about its Oreos, it introduced its self-created #oreohorrorstories, an absolute gem of a hashtag. The hashtag picked up momentum so fast, it almost broke social media.

9. Avoid making hashtag mistakes

Isn’t your hashtag brining in the desired results? Maybe you’re doing something wrong. Some common hashtag mistakes are:

• Adding the # symbol both before and after the keyword
• Punctuating hashtags
• Using numbers or adding spaces between keywords
• Using words that sound wrong when added together
• Implementing negative hashtags

Susan Boyle’s failed media strategy is what comes to mind here. What Susan intended was ‘Susan Album Party’, but the hashtag #susanalbumparty was construed as something entirely different.

Another hashtag fail to avoid – banned hashtags.

10. Skip the tag if it’s unnecessary

The reality is, not all posts need a hashtag. Sometimes, hashtags just look forced and unnatural, detracting from the quality of your social media post. In these cases, it’s best to just skip over the hashtag.

Take a look at how the National Geographic Channel showcased their photo of the day, without the hashtag. Still looks good, doesn’t it?

Tying it all together

Hashtags are a great way to interact with your audiences. Follow these tips to make your social media marketing strategy more fruitful. Happy tagging!

The post Top 10 Ways to Use Hashtags for Effective Social Media Marketing appeared first on Relevance.

Millennials and Gen Z audiences are really smarter and they can certainly distinguish between quality content and poor content.

You must not view content marketing as an amateur but as a professional whose ultimate goal is sales. As content marketers, you need to constantly produce good quality content that goes well with both the search engines and your target audiences.

Here are 6 new content marketing ideas that will perfectly align with your content strategy in 2026 and ahead.

Content Marketing Innovation in 2026: 52% of content marketers are shifting budgets toward video and multimedia in 2026 (Siege Media). AI use in content is evolving: 47% now use AI for generating design ideas (up from 25% in 2025), while 38% use it for editing. Global podcast listenership reached 584 million and is expected to exceed 650 million by 2027. TikTok is projected to generate close to $44 billion in ad revenue in 2026 (HubSpot).

1. Use Micro Influencers To Pen Your Content

The time is just ripe to leverage the power of micro influencers to pen and promote your content. You can invite micro influencers to guest post on your blog and they are more likely to share and link to the content they have written.

This will offer you two major advantages. Number one, loyal followers of micro influencers will come to your blog to read the content written by the person they follow and micro influencers will link back or share your content.

The best part is, you can do all of this for free because you don’t need to pay anything to micro influencers as they are most likely to accept your guest posting proposal for free. Brand24 is a great platform to find micro influencers related to your niche.

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2. Reach The Next Level of Content Personalization With Chatbots

[bctt tweet=”Chatbots is certainly the next big thing in the world of content marketing.” username=”relevance”]

Answer me a simple question – What’s your purpose of content marketing? Umm, you’re right – conversions! Chatbots can get you conversions by directly interacting with your potential customers 24×7.

Take the example of Casper’s Insomnia bot 3000. The bot chats with the customers when they are awake at night. This helps with the brand’s mission- helping people with trouble sleeping.

3. Leverage The Power of Topic Clusters

Topics clusters are not new but you can use them in a new way in 2026. Topic clusters revolves around the idea of pillar content. You create a piece of content on your targeted topic and this content serves as the pillar content.

Now you create several smaller pieces of content that are related to your main pillar content. These are known as the cluster content. Now, you link back to the main pillar content page from each of the cluster content pages.

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Main topic pages are based on high traffic keywords, hence require more backlinks than the ones focused on long tail keywords. Cluster content is often based on low competition, long tail phrases while pillar content comprised of competitive keyword having high search volume.

The idea of doing this is to improve the Page Rank of the main pillar content and improve its organic rankings. You can create several topic clusters like these and dominate your niche.

4. Combine The Potential of Historical Optimization and SkyScraper Technique

I simply love both of these techniques. Historical optimization means optimizing your old blog posts so that the content remains fresh. Most of the marketers focus their strategy on creating new content but never rewrite the older content pieces.

[bctt tweet=”Older content has high potential of ranking higher in the search engines.” username=”relevance”]

Therefore, it is important to regularly update old content pieces so that they remain fresh and comprehensive.

Skyscraper technique involves choosing your main keyword and creating a content piece that is best than all the other web pages already ranking on Google for that main keyword.

When you combine both the techniques (Historial optimization and Skyscraper technique), you focus your efforts on optimizing older pages on your website and make them better than the existing web pages ranking for your main keywords or topic.

Use this strategy to optimize your existing content and rank new keywords in the search engines.

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5. Use UGC To Generate Question and Answer Pages

Question and Answer pages are those pages that are created by the users. These pages are present under a forum or community where some members ask questions while others provide answers to the asked questions. This form of UGC content is an awesome way to get your site site ranked under featured snippets.

Google has recently launched an update to rich results. Under this update, Google will pick the best answers from Question and Answer pages depending on the question asked by the user and display them in the search results.

If you create a section in your site where people can post question and answers then you will increase your chances of getting featured under the rich results. (Please note: You need to add proper schema data in order to be eligible to appear in the search results).

6. Generate Engagement With Interactive Storytelling

Interactive storytelling is the best way to engage your audience. For content marketers, engagement is the key, hence interactive storytelling should be an important part of your overall content marketing strategy.

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A great example of interactive content marketing in action is the McDonald’s Create Your Taste campaign. Under this campaign, touch screens were set up in specific locations and users were asked to create their own burgers by choosing their own ingredients. Users also had the option to vote for their best burgers.

You can think of unique interactive campaigns related to your niche that can be run online. Interactive storytelling can help you to distinguish yourself from your competitors because people are facing information overload. With interactive content marketing you are able to stand out in the crowd.

Final Thoughts

Content marketing is certainly going to be more interactive and video based in 2026 and ahead. You need to follow the above ideas to constantly improve the ROI.

The post 6 New Content Marketing Ideas to Use in 2026 appeared first on Relevance.

However, having an Instagram business account doesn’t mean getting wonderful results as users miss 70% of the posts on their Instagram feeds.

To reach your target audience and interact with your followers, it’s important to increase Instagram engagement. The more popular your business profile is, the more people will see your posts as Instagram algorithm shows content that people view, like, comment, share, and save.

Thus, it’s important to keep up with the trends to understand how to increase Instagram engagement in 2026, and here are 8 proven ways how to do it:

Instagram Engagement Data for 2026: Instagram’s average engagement rate sits at 0.48% overall, with engagement down ~24% YoY (Social Insider). Carousels remain the strongest format at 0.55% engagement, while static image engagement dropped 17%. The ideal 2026 Instagram mix is 60-70% Reels for discovery and 20-30% carousels built for saves. TikTok now leads all platforms with a 3.70% engagement rate (Social Media Today).

1. Keep Your Instagram Feed Cohesive

According to Forbes, 65% of people are visual learners which means they perceive visual information better. Having an eye-catching and cohesive Instagram feed is a great way to grab and hold the attention of your target audience, convince visitors to follow your brand, and give your followers a reason to check your business profile regularly. Simply put, it helps to increase engagement rates.

It’s no wonder many brands create a series of product photos that match each other perfectly as it’s the easiest way to look cohesive on Instagram. But if you don’t have budget to take various photos of your product, you can still use authentic stock photos to create a cohesive Instagram feed that grabs the attention. Here’s what it can look like:

Since people process visual information better, we always pay close attention to beautiful things, so having a cohesive Instagram feed is a great way to attract new followers and make them want to come back for more. All in all, it helps to increase Instagram engagement with ease.

2. Develop a Content Strategy

If you want to interact with people who want to check your profile regularly, you need to publish interesting and engaging content daily. Thus, sharing one brand post per week isn’t an option; you need to develop a content strategy that keeps your target audience engaged and plan publications in advance.

Why? Developing a content strategy helps to:

• produce eye-catching content
• save time
• plan ahead
• build your ideal calendar

However, you also need to stay up-to-date and react to breaking news when needed. For example, it’s a good idea to publish time-sensitive content that people discuss around the globe.

[bctt tweet=”Just put your audience first and try to understand what your followers want to see and discuss.” username=”relevance”]

3. Start a Conversation with Your Audience

The days when brand content could interest potential customers are far behind us. Modern consumers are savvy and they crave communication with brands on social media. According to The Manifest, 74% of customers follow brands on social media, and 96% of them interact with the brands they follow. Simply put, it’s important for brands of all sizes and niches to start a conversation with the target audience to understand customers better.

Here’s an example of this strategy from Starbucks:

Want to know the best part? Since people love talking about themselves, they will be more likely to share their thoughts and preferences when you ask them. Thus, starting a conversation helps to encourage interactions and therefore boost engagement.

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4. Publish Fan-Made Content

The idea of using fan-made content (also known as user-generated content) isn’t new. It’s said that fan-made content is 76% more trustworthy than branded advertising which means it helps to build brand trust.

Have you ever heard about the sense of belonging? It’s proven that people want to be a part of something important, so it explains why big brands like Starbucks and Dunkin’ receive so many user-generated content for nothing. Moreover, customers crave authenticity, so they love creating fan-made content to help other customers make the right purchase decision.

If you want to get more UGC photos from your customers, always ask people for permission to publish their posts and tag them to give credits. Not only does it help to satisfy customers’ ego, but it also boosts engagement as people are more likely to share posts with mentions on their social media which means driving extra traffic to your account.

To avoid missing out fan-made content on Instagram, you can use SocialPilot to track brand mentions. Moreover, this tool helps to increase engagement as it’s perfect for analyzing your performance and scheduling posts. Plus, don’t forget to check out your direct messages, brand hashtags, and photos you’ve been tagged in.

5. Interact with Your Target Audience

Here comes the ugly truth: social media ‘likes’ impact our brains and behavior, so Instagrammers crave for likes and comments when they share something on the platform. Moreover, people are more likely to pay attention to accounts that interact with them, so it’s a proven way to show you care about customers and you have interest in their content.

Here are several ways to interact with your target audience on Instagram:

• follow your target audience
• like posts
• comment on photos
• watch Instagram Stories
• vote on IG polls, join chats, etc.
• tag people

6. Make Instagram Stories a Part of Your Strategy

Back in 2016, Instagram has copied Snapchat’s feature of sharing ephemeral content—Instagram Stories. Over the last three years, the number of users who watch Instagram Stories has grown to 500 million users, making this type of content a successful feature.

People spend much time interacting with short-lived content on Instagram, so it’s no doubt that Instagram Stories help to boost engagement, especially if you know Instagram Stories hacks that help to increase organic reach. For example, it’s a good idea to use geotags and hashtags, and SproutSocial does it often:

When you use geotags or hashtags in your IG Stories, you make it easier for other people to find your content and follow your brand. So, why sharing Instagram Stories is important?

• Create the FOMO (fear of missing out) effect
• Beat the Instagram algorithm
• Drive website traffic
• Humanize your brand
• Interact with target audience

So, do you use Instagram Stories as a part of your strategy? If not, you’re falling behind your competitors, and nothing kills engagement like it.

7. Post When Your Audience is Online

Modern users share around 95 million photos and videos on Instagram each day. For brands, this means your content can get buried in the newsfeed unless you post when your audience is active.

Not only does it help to improve the customer experience as people won’t miss your content, but it also affects your Instagram engagement rate as people can see and interact with your content which means your content is marked as popular on Instagram. Moreover, you can use Instagram’s in-house analytics or any marketing tool to get the data about your followers’ activity with a few clicks.

8. Work with Nano-Influencers

In the era of paid posts, word-of-mouth marketing works well as 92% of people trust recommendations from friends and family more than branded content. Today, opinion leaders affect the purchase decisions of their followers, so brands seek out relevant influencers to secure collaboration opportunities with them.

Just imagine: The number of sponsored posts in the first half of 2019 reached 1.7 million.

If you want to get wonderful business results without investing much, consider working with nano-influencers – those opinion leaders with less than 1000 followers. They have in-person connections with the majority of their followers, so their posts get higher engagement rates. Big brands like Dunkin have already realized the power of nano-influencers:

Moreover, it can be an opportunity to invest in long-term collaboration. Here’s how to establish a strong connection with nano-influencers if you invest in your relationships (communicate with them and help them grow).

It’s Time to Increase Instagram Engagement

Instagram prioritizes content from friends and family, so it’s getting harder for brands to achieve organic reach. However, if you experiment to find out what helps you increase engagement, you can reach your target audience, interact with interested followers, and bring your business to the next level.

So, who else wants to boost Instagram engagement in 2026?

The post How to Increase Instagram Engagement in 2026 appeared first on Relevance.

Sure, you could concentrate on the volume and try to bring even more traffic, but increasing traffic by 50% or by 100% is difficult, time-consuming, or too expensive. 

On the other hand, improving your on-page lead conversion from 1% to 2% can be a matter of a change of color, repositioning of the button, or a more sophisticated sales statement. 

In this post, we will target exactly that, how to improve your on-page lead conversion, and leverage the incoming traffic to the max!

Lead Conversion Benchmarks for 2026: The average conversion rate across industries is 2-3%, with landing pages averaging 6.6% (Martal Group). Automated campaigns deliver 2,361% higher sales funnel conversions, and personalized CTAs convert 202% better than generic ones. LinkedIn drives roughly 80% of B2B social media leads, while first-party data audiences convert 4x higher than cold traffic (First Page Sage).

Set Your Goal

While this is of course more of an overall tip, you would be surprised how many marketers are startled by the question “What is the goal of this page?” Many will you “To Convert” but convert to what? 

• Are you looking to take an email? 
• Would you rather get a qualified lead?
• Maybe you need to convert to a free trial? 

The list goes on. On your sales funnel you must identify where the page stands. 

Is it a cold lead page? In that case, you may just have a two-row email opt-in with a freebie. 

Should the result be a qualified lead? For this situation, you are probably looking for more information from the visitor even for the sacrifice of the volume. You will receive fewer leads but more of them will be qualified.

Setting your goal for a particular landing page is a key ingredient in improving your lead conversion.

A/B Test Your Landing Page

You have to challenge the status quo from time to time. It may seem that the landing page is working well, but there is always space for improvement.

You can start with testing with colors and moving some of the boxes, but if you are looking for a total overhaul you may want to use the landing page builder. These tools will allow you to easily create several variations of your landing page and switch seamlessly between them.

Only after you will be able to make such overhauls with just a couple of clicks you will really start experimenting with various designs. 

Let’s have a look at some areas which you can concentrate on when considering an A/B test on your page:

Complete Layout Change

You may want to consider a complete change in the layout of your page. If you have an older web that should be updated this would be one of the situations for a complete layout change. It is possible that your page does not allow you to include the modifications you are planning to make. 

In some cases is possible that you see your page conversion rates slowly dropping. The market is moving and so should you. Here are some examples of the major sites and the changes they went through in just 5 years.

While this may not seem as much, such a change is huge for Google. The search bar is the alfa and omega of their business. So they took away the things that might disturb you and left just the bar, so you can quickly concentrate on your search. 

Imagine how much testing and risks are to be taken to completely change the main page of eBay as you see in the examples above. eBay receives around 900mil views a month, and they completely changed their layout. 

Change the Copy or Product Description

Ahrefs, which is one of the best online marketing tools, recently rolled out a completely new copy on their homepage. They claim they’ve spent over $33k on the copy, and did not do any A/B tests. While their argument on ignoring A/B testing s very interesting, let’s concentrate on the copy factor.

Copy plates a key role on your page, even better than design. While a good copy will save a bad design, a good design can not save a bad copy. 

If you do not want to completely redesign the page, or just do not have time or resources to do so – consider updating/refreshing your copy. 

Every couple of months market moves and you become a more experienced marketer. When I look back at posts I did 12, 6, or even 3 months ago – I see a lot of space for improvement. 

I am not talking about changing “Join” to “Subscribe” and expecting a revolution in conversion, but really reworking the whole page.

When changing a copy you have to properly test it, or commit to the new one (as Ahrefs did). You can not test for a day or two. In order to get serious results, you need to leave the new copy running for several months. Only after then you can compare the engagement. 

Change the Offer

Check out your top competitor and see what they are doing differently than you. For eCommerce, product sales, or service goals it could be:

• Discount
• Free Shipping
• Trial
• Trial with “No Credit Card Required”
• Free Consultation Call
• Free Evaluation

If your goal is to step up your progress in email marketing and you are looking to increase your email conversions, possibly you need to change the offer on your opt-in form, for example:

• Offer a freebie
• Prepare 5-day free email course
• Decrease the number of fields

An important step to consider when improving lead conversions is of course the CTA which is also our next point. 

Improve Call To Action

Do not be afraid of asking your visitors to do the action that you need them to do. If your CTA will be in a grown color somewhere in the corner, no one will see it and you are just losing the visitor.

Improving CTA is not just about switching places, changing shapes, and making a couple of color variants.

A good example of a clear CTA is Mailshake Outreach Automation:

This is a portion of their main page. Let’s analyze it. 

Clear sales message

All your problems will be solved in 5 minutes. If somebody was looking for “email automation, “outreach automation” or “Mailshake” they were trying to solve a problem of the time spent when sending out emails manually. 

Mailshake has only one product. So when visitors land on the page, it is obvious what they are looking for. Mailshake leverages this product’s simplicity by immediately telling you that the problem you have will be solved in 5 minutes. 

Social Proof

Right under it, we can see a strong testimonial. Phil Chambers was able to get $100,000 just from a single Mailshake campaign. The wheels in the visitor’s head start rolling – what if you make 2 or three campaigns? 

There is a picture, full name, position, and company. Making it trustworthy and believable. This helps visitors to connect with the author of the testimonial. 

Numbers and Stats

To make sure you have all the proof you need to make an immediate decision, Mailshake shows the numbers of their clients and the total leads it generated. The numbers are impressive and give you additional reassurance of the quality of the service. 

Colors and Whitespace

Mailshake already has quite a contrasting color – purple. But notice the very good use of it. Other colors are non-existent on the page. There is slight use of blue but otherwise just white, making the purple pop out even more. 

The white space also makes you concentrate on the things that matter. They are not taking your attention elsewhere. 

When using colors, make sure to use a “hot” color. Red and Orange will always perform better than blue and green.

In this simple color test, Dmix found out that just switching the button to red improved the conversions by 34%.

Work On Images

Visuals represent a major part of the lead conversion success, and it is important to pay separate attention to them.

Tie the image to your offer.

Do not just use any stock image that you will find. Make sure that the image resonates with your offer or is complementary to the overall theme of your site. There are plenty of places to search for free images for commercial use:

• Pixabay
• Unsplash
• Pexels 

Just to give you a few, there are many more sources such as these out there. 

Use only quality images

Never use images with bad resolution or images that are not properly cropped. Each such mistake is making a dent in the overall authority of your copywriting as it gives the sloppy unfinished feeling.

This great example comes from store:

Followed by a “detail and in use” picture:

This is particularly important if you have a product page. Show the product in detail and show how it is used, possibly by your customer. 

Humanize your page

Consider using pictures with faces, just make sure that they do not look like stock photos and are somehow relevant to the overall theme. 

Just by putting a picture on your product page or a customer service page, you can increase conversions by close to 20%.

Use images to guide visitors

If you want to draw particular attention to a point on your page, you can also do so with images. 

This study has proven (again) that you can guide the visitors’ attention with the correct eye position of the “hero shot” Make sure to consider that when making a redesign of your landing page.

Use Opt-in Bars 

opt-in bars are email opt-in forms positioned on the top or the bottom of the page. The opt-in bar may also be floating, following you when you scroll or appear at a particular time.

This is an example of an opt-in bar on Brian Tracy’s page:

The goal is convenience for your visitor. Visitors will not return to look for the place to put their email in, so you must place the possibility to leave their contact through the page. 

There is a thin line between convincing and irritating. Do not overdo it, one bar for the whole page is enough to complement the opt-in form on the side menu or in post. Additional opt-in popups, float-ins, or scrolling bars would just deteriorate the users’ experience. 

Implement Exit Popups

An exit popup is triggered when visitors’ cursor gets from the screen frame. Alternatively, it can be triggered after a particular amount of time (that would not qualify it as an exit popup but the logic remains the same). 

To give you an example right from the source, Optinmonster has this full-screen exit-intent popup when you point your cursor away from the site after some time:

As you can see there is a very interesting offer. As this popup appears only if you spent some time on the site, Optinmonster is trying to catch visitors that were interested in their product but are now leaving because they are on the fence.

To help them make that final decision they are providing a notable discount and adding a clock for the sense of urgency. 

Notice that the CTA button is not a “Yes”, “Buy Now” or “I want The Discount”. It speaks directly to the business of the visitor. Same as if it would be saying “Yes, I want $1,000 Now”.

You can expand to other popups as well, there are a wide variety of choices of popup placements and templates. No coding skills are needed, so you can experiment very easily.

As with the landing pages, make sure to A/B test your popups from time to time. While changing the whole landing page is a big project, switching between various popups is a matter of a couple of minutes. 

Don’t Forget About Traffic Quality

Imagine if you click on a link about cats and get to a landing page about fitness programs. You will be out from the page in a second and no images or exit popups will stop you.

If you are just starting, you may have a feeling that you just need to throw volumes of traffic on your page, no matter where it comes from. Anything to get those cheap clicks and see how your Google Analytics is growing. If those clicks are not converting, you start optimizing your landing page. 

That is the wrong approach. Right from the moment the user sees your link, ad, or a piece of content to the moment of conversion everything should be coherent and in full harmony. 

Content optimization matters

Your title, h2, and h3 tags, and a meta description should all be in line with your goal. You know that Google is not ranking just based on keyword richness but search intent. That is your goal too. You want the SEO of your content to be in line with the search intent you are looking for. For instance my post on the best webinar services:

While meta is sometimes tricky to directly influence, there is much less work to be made when a visitor clicks. The title explains in detail what the post is about, so if they click – there are no surprises. The search intent is fulfilled. The FAQ section is reflected in Google, so users can have an answer to some of their basic questions.

If they come on the page there is navigation to lower the bounce rate (as it is a longer piece of text.): 

The average time spent is over 1 minute 35 seconds, which is exactly what I was looking for. 

The first impression is created right at the doorstep, so do not forget to keep your content optimized. If not for Google, then for your visitors. They are much more likely to convert if they received the answers that they were looking for in the first place. 

Giveaways will help

With giveaways, you are completing two tasks with one strategy. You are both increasing the number of visitors, followers, and subscribers while at the same time increasing your conversion rates. 

Here is how it works. You launch a campaign asking your visitors to do something and promising that you will choose a winner from those that did tasks. You limit the time and at the end of this period, you choose the winner and them the prize. 

Every step is promoted on social media for better engagement. You take a statement from the winner to make sure that even more visitors subscribe to your site.  There are many giveaway examples, but what does it have to do with conversions? 

The task is usually subscribing to or following your social media channels. That is why giveaways and various contests are gaining popularity. 

Let’s say you have a product or service. You launch a giveaway saying that you will give out a 3 x 3 month free trial for your product to 3 lucky ones who subscribe to your list, fills out the form, or do anything else that you need to do. It might be a combination of tasks. For example email option and Facebook page subscription. 

For the users, leaving their email and following you is not a big deal compared to the potential prize that they may win. So with this strategy, you are promoting your product, page, or service while at the same time getting leads for your sales funnel.

Most importantly – this of course significantly increases your conversion rate. Even though it is just at the time of the giveaway. But what is the difference between giving out a free report of 3 months of free product use? It is all a freebie for the users to convert, so leverage it to the max. 

Conclusion

As you have seen from our tips, the perfect lead conversion rate is hard to achieve. There is always something to improve. 

In addition to that, the digital marketing environment is constantly changing. New competitors are coming every day. It is not possible to hold any kind of status quo, you have to constantly develop and move forward. 

That is why if there would be one suggestion that we would like to leave you with it would be testing. You never know how something would work for you until you try it and it is much better to try, fail, and try again than to never try at all. 

The post 7 Tips For Improved Lead Conversion In 2026 appeared first on Relevance.

The increasing ROI from the influencer activities have made the brands collaborate and increasingly spend more on content creators, and micro and macro influencers.

Now, if you thought that becoming a social media influencer is an easy and fun job, you’ve got it all wrong. Social media influencers are 100% committed to their job and market brands that align with their personality.

So, let us get into the ways and tips on becoming a social media influencer and making it big online.

1. Find your niche

Just because travel blogs and accounts are a hit among people, you cannot become a social media influencer in traveling if you are simply not interested in it.

Your first task is to find a topic that interests you. If you are passionate about dancing, then you can go ahead with it.

Travel, fitness, style, music, dance, acting, sports, stories, food, online gaming, shopping – there are many topics to select from. While some may be too common, others may be quite different.

But be cautious that you have to be comfortable putting it forth to the audience.

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2. Prepare

Follow the top blogs and articles to see what improvements can be made. Try to familiarize yourself with all the new things about it.

[bctt tweet=”When you have selected your niche, you need to research about the subject. Consume everything you know about it.” username=”relevance”]

Carefully analyze other social media influencers in this area and assess how they go about their task and what uniqueness they offer to their followers that get them more likes and comments.

3. Be unique

Social media influencers need to have unique plans that will set them apart from the rest.

Some ideas may click while others may fail miserably. But always try to incorporate different things that will set the tone for you to be different.

Do your research on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram to get ideas and suggestions.

Unboxing was a unique concept that rapidly gained popularity. So, you never know what and when something clicks.

Your aim is to try to be as unique as possible.

Also Read:Influencer Marketing: From Mystery to Data Science

4. Plan it out

Once you have done your research on your topic, the next step would be to formulate a plan.

Take help from your friends. Ask them for input and feedback.

Make a checklist of all the things that you have to do, like creating social media accounts, content strategy for your profile, videos, topics, followers, and so on. Make a rough schedule of what and how you would post the content.

Get to know the features and operations of popular social media accounts. Know how to schedule posts and plan the frequency of posts on each social media account. Learn about the usage of hashtags by following popular accounts.

5. Create accounts on popular social media sites

There are so many social media platforms to choose from and create your account. Decide on your target audience and then decide on creating accounts. Some platforms enable sharing simultaneously on their other social media accounts.

Another important aspect is social media optimization. Your profile should be filled out properly so that you are able to score high on search engine page results.

Your profile has to be captivating with the right content and images. Try to keep your profile name across all accounts.

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6. Build a real community

Once you create an account and set your profile, the next step is to get followers.

First, fill in the account with good posts. Start with a few followers who are your friends and relatives. Gradually, start building a community by inviting people who follow similar interests.

[bctt tweet=”Aggressive marketing is the order of the day. Be actively engaged in forums and other similar groups.” username=”relevance”]

Attend webinars, answer questions on Quora, tweet through your Twitter account, and share ideas on LinkedIn.

As you grow, engage with your followers and see what they expect from you.

7. Network with and follow like-minded people

An influencer grows when they have loyal and authentic followers. As an influencer, you are as good as your followers.

But do not make the mistake of buying likes and followers on your social media accounts. They will guarantee you followers, but they remain inactive.

Never hurry to get the quantity of followers. Focus on the quality followers first and keep them engaged. This will help you to grow organically.

Also Read:Get Started With Youtube Influencer Marketing

8. Experiment and Grow

Social media influencing is all about experimenting. You cannot afford to be ignorant about the latest developments on social media.

Stay ahead of your competitors. Research and innovate for ideas. Repost photos of customers wearing your promoted products so that you are able to gain their trust. Use location tags and hashtags, and provide a story behind the post. Reference your other social media profiles in the post.

You can gradually start your own website and blogs. Provide links to your website through your social media accounts.

9. Collaborate with other influencers and brands

Being a social media influencer doesn’t mean that you promote brands left, right and center. The brand you choose to promote has to align with your personality.

Work closely with other social media influencers so that you are able to get followers from them as well. It is a win-win situation for both.

Guest posting on other websites increases your visibility and this, in turn, increases the traffic to your account.

10. Be consistent

Influencing is hard, but don’t let any setbacks hinder your growth. This is one of the most important tips to becoming a social media influencer. Along with being consistent, you have to work hard. Influencing takes both time and dedication.

[bctt tweet=”Consistency is the key to grow organically. Post regularly to keep your followers engaged.” username=”relevance”]

Make good use of social media features to cross-promote your other accounts. Always look out for trending topics and new features to follow.

And, do not forget to answer the queries raised by followers in the comments section. Engaging your followers through opinion and comment makes them trust you and become loyal.

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Conclusion

Social media influencers cannot afford slackness. With intense competition all around, they have to keep themselves updated all the while. A million followers can be a reality provided you work hard towards the goal.

The community has the power to decide if you can become a famous celebrity social media influencer. With consistent planning and a focus on these tips, you can become a social media influencer too!

The post 10 Sure-Shot Tips to Become a Social Media Influencer appeared first on Relevance.