Monthly Archives: July 2020

In 2020, 1.5 billion text content, 140 million tweets, and 2 million videos are created each day. With this amount of abundant data online, it is hard to put your content on top of the list and get the maximum viewers and readers for your content.

This is the reason that marketers are trying really hard to grab the attention of audiences. Several techniques such as animations, short videos, funny content, informative content in different forms are applied to achieve maximum results out of their efforts. 

One such technique that is bringing wonders to any website is the use of infographics. Before we discuss how infographics are helping digital marketers generate more leads and their customer base let’s know in brief what infographics are.

What are Infographics?

When some big data is presented in the form of design, analysis, writing in short where viewers can understand the conclusion of research or study or when some big information is portrayed in a small place, the particular design is known as an infographic.

Thus, infographics refer to the attractive way of communication through well-thought visuals. When created effectively, they can help you communicate complex information easily and is understood by the users and can potentially go viral.

According to a social network “Digg”, infographic use has increased by 250 times since 2007 due to the high response of customers they get on their infographics.

Wharton School of Business conducted a test where they created two presentations in which one of them contained visuals along with the text while the other one consisted of only text content.

These two presentations were shown to the same audience. It was concluded that 67% of the audience found the first presentation more engaging compared to the 50% audience who found the second presentation to be more helpful.

In another study, it is found that an infographic is likely to be read 30 times more compared to a full text-based article.

In the year 2013, Google found that the term ‘infographic’ or ‘infographics’ was searched 67,000 times per month which is quite a big number and it is on the rise year after year.

People tend to remember 80% of the things they visualize compared to only 20% of the things they read.

KISSmetrics, the web traffic specialists, received over 41,000 retweets on their infographic posts from the year 2010 to 2012.

Thus, the use of infographics in the digital world is increasing day by day owing to its high level of engagement and thereby increasing the number of customers for the marketers.

Infographics are used primarily to achieve two objectives by the business owners, marketers, etc. These are:

• To Generate Inbound Links

Infographics consist of colored visuals in an organized form that catches the attention of viewers. If you create an infographic with the targeted content, you’ll generate more inbound links. According to research, colored infographics increase engagement by up to 80%.

• To Increase Shareability

Visual content tends to get shared more than the plain text. The reason is simple, it is more fun, makes its point clear in an attractive manner and is understood by the audience easily.

According to research, visual content is shared 40 times more compared to pure text content. And, among the visual content, infographics are shared 3 times more than other types of content.

Effective Ways to Generate Leads from your Website using Infographics

Represent an Offer

Along with the data and information you share through an infographic, offer something that attracts the customers. These offers could be anything from making your content downloadable, free trial, etc. 

Utilize the Design Resources

If you are not a designing professional, you need not worry as there are a lot of resources; both paid and free that you can use and create attractive and informative infographics by yourself.

MS PowerPoint offers the five infographic templates for free. They can be customized easily.

Other websites like Canva and Venngage also offer to create visual content including infographics. These websites offer both paid and free subscriptions.

Write Blog Posts

After you have created your infographic, you need to post it somewhere online so that your audience may see it. One of the best places to showcase your infographic is through a blog post on your website.

In this case, you would not have to write long-form blogs as the images will tell the whole story. All you need to do is to write some introductory paragraphs before the image and any other relevant information that you consider are required to be written.

But make sure that you write an interesting heading that could grab the attention of users and you may attain maximum shares for your post.

Make the Shearability of your Infographic Easy

Many blogging networks, such as the HubSpot’s Content Optimization System, comes up with a default social sharing button that will be added to your article by default.

But many other networks do not offer this feature and in such cases, you will have to add the sharing button manually. You can do so easily by using other websites such as ‘AddThis’. 

If you are posting your infographic on Pinterest, you may add the sharing button or “Pin It” buttons by using their widget builder.

You should also try to break your infographics into sections that can be tweeted as images on twitter. But remember that making the shareability of your infographic easy is not all that you need, the content on infographic must be effectively placed so that it drives the attention of viewers and is worth sharing.

This is because leads could be generated only through quality content. In a report, it was found that 42% of B2B professionals were not able to generate leads due to the low-quality content in their posts.

Launch your Infographics as Newsletters

Newsletters should be attractive and pleasing enough to compel the customer to click on them. It should also contain relevant information that is relevant and useful to the customer.

For this reason, you may use infographics in your newsletters. All you need to do is to follow your usual format and insert an infographic between the main text.

You can also use multiple images by breaking the infographic into sections.

You can do so by cropping the infographic into the header, main text, footer and anything else that you may consider fit for your particular infographic.

In this way, you can make use of the existing templates of email platforms like MailChimp, AWeber, etc. You can also insert hyperlinks which will increase the credibility of your newsletters.

Repurpose Infographics into Slideshows

Since creating an effective infographic takes a lot of your efforts and time, you should use them for your benefit as much as possible and should repurpose them in as many ways as possible. 

One effective way in which you can repurpose your infographic is by creating slideshows out of them.

Just like we have discussed above in this article about breaking the infographic into various sections, you can create these sections in this case also and use each section to create a slide.

You can create slides using applications like Microsoft Office PowerPoint. You can then publish these slideshows on platforms like SlideShare.

Offer Infographics in Your Online Course

You can use infographics to increase the value of your online courses. If you are not aware of the benefits of using online courses for your business, you are losing a big opportunity to reach more potential customers.

Online courses help your brand establish as an expert in your niche and give you an opportunity to monitor your content.

You can create and publish your online course either by building your own eLearning network or by using the already developed platforms like Udemy,  Teachable, etc. Using these platforms, you can create your course material, manage your subscribers, etc and manage your online course effectively.

Again, make sure that you offer quality content that is not available elsewhere for free. You can use infographics along with the other content to make it more informative to the users.

Share your Infographics on Instagram

Since Instagram is an image and video sharing social network, you can share your infographics on Instagram and reach a greater audience.

This won’t be anything difficult for you as infographics are after all images.

Again, you should share infographics by dividing it into various relevant sections and post them from time to time throughout the day depending on your audiences’ availability to view your posts.

Write the image caption very carefully and include your website’s URL to drive traffic to your website. Keep in mind that getting quality traffic to your website is better than getting more followers on Instagram.

Social media is a platform where every business-big or small invests time and energy to grab the attention of its customers and excel over competitors. No matter what business you are in, you must be facing huge competition.

To succeed in your business and getting an edge over your competitors, you need to look out the activities of your competitors. When it comes to social media competitor analysis, it is though not an easy job but not that difficult too.

You can follow your competitors; sign up on business apps like ‘Perch’ to know the activities of your rivals.

Through competitive analysis, you would be able to determine the competitor’s business behavior, their customers, recent developments, and much more.

Based on the competitive analysis, knowing their marketing strategies, you may design your marketing strategy, working harder at points that you see are not very helpful to your competitors, doing what yields them the best results, etc.

But make sure your strategy is not completely dependent on your competitors’ activities, you should always try new things, new strategies as per your business, your schemes, your goals, etc.

Let’s find out some of the benefits of following and undertaking a competitive analysis of your competitors on social media.

Get an idea of what to do.

By following your competitors on social media, you can get an insight into what you should be doing to attract the attention of users. For example, if you see a funny video posted by your competitor that has engaged a lot of customers, you may also try the same kind of video.

In contrast, if you see that your competitor has posted an informational video that didn’t help the competitor, you may avoid doing so, even if you were thinking of doing the same earlier.

Get an idea of what not to do

Learning from another person’s faults is one of the ideal ways for you to succeed since it isn’t you who takes care of the tab for going the incorrect way. Checking your rivals’ social media efforts will give you an insight into what functions admirably and what doesn’t for them.

Watch out for the primary market players in your industry to fuel your techniques and avoid such activities, which may have brought them negative results or not so many gains. Or on the other hand, if you want to use your marketing skills, avoiding the mistakes of your competitors, you may try out those, and you will succeed.

A splendid model for this sort of strategy is the situation of bending the iPhone 6 Plus and brands that exploited Apple’s product failure.

 Determine market opportunities

By following your competitors on social media and closely monitoring what they are doing, you may come across the customer’s reaction. By knowing how the customers are behaving in response to a post, you can determine opportunities for your business.

For example, if your competitor has posted information about a new product or service, you may analyze and collect customer feedback and decide your strategy. If you find the users behaving positively, you may also come up with a similar product or service.

Determine the sources of their backlinks

Getting backlinks from other sources is a major factor in your Google rankings. But it depends on the type of sources you get the backlinks from.

You will rank higher only if you get backlinks from high-quality sources. Getting links from low-quality sources such as from a spammy website may yield you negative results.

But, backlinks from other high-quality sources is not an easy job. By knowing what sources your competitors are getting their backlinks from, you may also try to get backlinks from the same sources.

In order to determine the sources from where your competitor is getting the backlinks, various tools are available such as Ahrefs, Open Site Explorer, Seokicksderor Openlinkprofiler.

You can also use other tools like ‘Brand24’ wherein you can set a particular domain as a keyword to get an insight into the backlinks of your competitors.

Generate leads

Would you like to realize the way to adapt to competitors’ research? Indeed, locate their troubled clients and offer them your, ideally better answer for the issue. Not very pushy, however, yet to truly help.

Recollect the thing Gary Vaynerchuk said about selling? “Selling is the demonstration of giving, not getting; serving, not selling” Monitoring your rivals will give you insights of what their customers and users opinion about them is, including their distresses and grievances.

With the help of applications like ‘Brand24’, you can get access to these comments continuously and have the option to address them before another competitor does. Thus following competitors is one of the great ways to generate new leads

 Maintain your reputation

It is sometimes possible that your competitors don’t speak nicely about your business. By following your competitors, you may know who is speaking what about your business.

In case someone speaks ill of your business, we recommend not to get into an ugly fight with your competitor, but instead, you can choose to comment with the correct information on the same portal, or you can use your properties to let consumers know the correct information. 

If you do not follow your competitors and your competitor bad mouths about your business, you may never know about it and may lose your customers as they will believe your competitors only in the event they do not hear anything from you.

Know your competitors’ social media strategies

By following your competitors on social media, you can get a thought of their content strategy.

By observing them, you can perceive how they are getting along with content and engagement with the users.

Based on this information, you can determine how well your content strategy is designed. You can revise your strategy if you find some important aspects missing or if you have something that your competitor had that didn’t yield them worthy results.

If you and your competitor have similar ideas for future posts, whoever does it first will be considered the originator of the idea. 

Know your rankings

Analyzing your competitors will help you gain insight into your rank based on customer engagement, customer feedback in your niche market, region, and industry. If you do not rank higher than your competitors, you may look at where you are lagging and what your competitors are doing.

Also, if you rank higher than your competitors, you need to make sure that you remain in that position and keep your competitors down. You can apply this factor to each social media platform you use.

Apply useful market trends to your strategy

Another significant advantage of following your competitors on social media will be in spotting and utilizing market trends. Your marketing strategy should be based on what is in current demand and may also be altered from time to time, depending upon the market changes.

With the help of abundant information that can be derived using social media platforms, you can conclude your current status in the industry as well as device your future strategy.

You can act according to the current market trends, and your strategy shall be based on what’s trendy in the market.

For this purpose, you can use various tools available such as social media listening tool.

Analyze your strategies

With the help of the information gathered by following and analyzing your competitors on social media, you can analyze your own social media strategy and your performance on these networks.

Let’s take an example to understand this point.

If you are not getting the desired results out of your social media strategy, you may think that your strategy is somewhere at fault, but when you analyze your competitors having the same content in his strategy, you may conclude whether you were at fault or that something out of your knowledge is making that happen.

If they are also not getting the expected results, such as a fall in user engagement, this may be a sign of a change of your network’s algorithm, and you might be applying correct strategies.

With the help of a detailed competitive analysis report, you will have a better understanding of what your competitors and you are doing and where corrections are required, if any; and thus, you can make better informed and effective decisions for a better content strategy.

You should never underestimate the importance of following and analyzing your competitors on social media as this information is priceless as it could lead you to sky-high levels leaving your competitors behind.

Social media is a platform where you can communicate with your users, engage with them, help them with their queries, bring recent developments in your business to your customers, all in one place.

The aim behind using social media by any business is to create brand awareness, gain customer loyalty and acquire new leads and thereby conversions. To attain this objective, every business wants to communicate with more and more users.

To bring a brand to the notice of the audience, it becomes important that you get in touch with the maximum number of people possible.

But how will you do that?

There are two ways to reach your audience through social media channels. These are:

1. Through paid advertisements
2. Organically

In this article, we share some very important points that you can make use of to increase your reach through social media organically.

1. • Learn social media algorithms

   The first and the foremost step in reaching your audience through social media organically is to know the basics of each social media channel. More importantly, you should know the algorithm of each social media network. These algorithms will tell you what appears on the timeline of the users. 

Below is a brief of some of the very famous social networks’ algorithms.

• Facebook Algorithm

The Facebook algorithm comprises four factors; inventory, signals, forecastings and relevancy which determines the content people see in their News Feed.

The way that your audience interacts with your content is deeply observed.

Activities like comments and shares are considered more interactive than likes alone.

The best-ranking factor in the Facebook algorithm is the ‘Comments’ as it builds conversations among the users.

So, your aim should be to drive more and more comments to your posts to rank higher and for a wider reach.

• Instagram Algorithm

The posts that appear in Instagram feeds of a user are determined by three factors. These are:

Interest

The post that Instagram considers might be of interest to the user will appear on top of his feeds.

Timelines

Newer posts appear higher than the older posts.

Relationship

The posts from the accounts that a user has viewed earlier also appear higher compared to other posts.

Also, the posts that get higher engagement appears higher in the feeds of the user and tend to get a better ranking and wider reach.

• Twitter Algorithm

The posts on Twitter are usually reverse chronological. The posts that Twitter thinks are relevant to the user are displayed higher on the timeline.

Some of the factors that Twitter considers while displaying posts on a user’s timeline are:

• It considers the recency of the post along with the images and videos contained in a post. It also considers the engagement a post receives based on clicks, retweets, etc.

• It takes into account the previous post of the author that a user has shown interest to.

• It considers the type of post she got engaged in in the past and also how often the user uses Twitter.

Once twitter gives a relevancy score to the posts based on the above factors, each tweet is categorized under one of the following heads:

1. Ranked tweets
2. In case you missed
3. Remaining tweets in reverse-chronological order

2. Analyze which channel serve you best

You should analyze which social media channel yields you the best results.

Your audience may not be present on each social media channel. For example, if you deal in B2B business, LinkedIn will serve you the best, while Pinterest may be of less importance to you.

You should focus your efforts on the channel that your user makes the most use of.

Some quick tips to determine which channel serve you the best are:

• Ask the users

The best and the easiest way is to simply ask the users which channel they use the most. You can do so by contests, polls, surveys, emails, etc.

Once you know the answer, you may divert all the attention to the channel you find in the results.

• Analyze your share counts

Whenever you post anything on social media, adding the share button is a mandate.

When your post is liked by the users, they share it. You should keep an eye on who shared your content and at what place.

Once you know the user’s behavior, you can put your energy to the platform from where you get the maximum shares and to the platform where your content is being shared. 

• Analyze your competitors

Get an insight into your competitors’ activities.

Know where they are posting and from where they are getting the maximum results. You may also use the channels they are using.

3. Optimize your profiles on social media

You should optimize your social media profiles for keywords.

This will help you in search rankings. You may rank higher if you use your targeted keyword in your social media profile name or your social media business page name. You should also use your targeted keyword in your subcategory.

If you are using Twitter, make sure that you do not use the hashtags in your bio.

You can use only those hashtags that you own in your bio on Twitter.

Some basics to optimize your social media profile are:

• You can show your expertise using the free social space and also make your profile look powerful using images, usernames, etc.
• Your audience should easily understand your brand by the description provided. You can also provide links to your website that may add value to your content.
• Your information section should be completed and you should use your targeted keywords in this section.
• You should not promote your brand all the time. The content you share should be able to help people.
• You should focus on using high engagement keywords to boost your engagement which in turn will boost your search rankings.

4. Post your content correctly

You should post the type of content that does not expire. You can try to post something funny or informative. People tend to share positive content more than negative content. Also, make sure that your posts are mobile-friendly.

A large number of users use social media through their mobile phones only.

Also, you can make use of various tools like Google Analytics, SimilarWeb to determine which type of content engages most of the users and share your content accordingly.

You can also use the inbuilt monitors of social media platforms like ‘Facebook Insight’, ‘Twitter Analytics’ for the purpose.

5. Prefer quality over quantity

According to Facebook, on average, a Facebook user is exposed to approximately1500 posts daily. But Facebook only shows around 300 of these to boost engagement.

It shares those posts with the users that it thinks are most relevant to the users. This statement clarifies that posting too much may not be a big help.

Whatever you post should be of high-quality and be able to engage your audience.

According to research by ‘Buffer.com’, posting twice a week on your social media channel is preferable. You should also never do clickbait.