How to Create an Engaging Holiday Social Media Campaign

We all know that setting up the right social media campaign is great for your business. It’s also a known fact that social media plays a big part in holiday shopping, which can mean more views for your social media pages and website. Timing is crucial, and you will greatly benefit from running the right campaign at the right moment during the holiday season. Let’s go over a few ideas for you and your business to help set up and run the right social media campaign through some great holiday marketing!

Have a Good Strategy

No matter when you run your social media campaign, the success of it is built upon solid planning and research done by you. Your first step is to look back at the responses you’ve gotten from your previous campaigns. There’s no reason to reinvent something that is already working for you. Using an approach that has worked for you in the past is a great way to easily run a successful holiday marketing campaign. You know it will bring you customers, and you don't have to start completely from scratch.

If this is your first social media campaign, you can still use information from your sites to help with planning. Use resources such as Google Analytics to track which kinds of content get the most response from your viewers, and also find out exactly who your audience is. Also keep in mind that different companies’ advertising, marketing, and online campaigns are always building off of each other. Don’t shy away from looking around at what other people are doing. Develop a strategy that incorporates other people’s good ideas while also using your own personal style!

Use the holidays to enhance your marketing. To make the most of it, you should use the power of social media to increase your sales and strengthen your brand. Build from what has worked before to gain those new customers that you will then have throughout the year.

Questions to Ask as you Plan Your Holiday Social Media Campaign

Ask yourself these key questions as you look at last year’s results and get ready to set up your current holiday social media campaign:

• What were your goals?
• What were the actual results?
• What worked well?
• What did poorly?
• How can you improve the outcomes this year?

Once you've answered these questions, you can use them to help build a foundation and go from there.

Choose Your Marketing Tactics and Stick With Them

Using your research from previous years, you can create new campaigns that show the strength of your brand and reaches out to your customers, both returning and new. This is also a great time to sprinkle in some holiday cheer to engage even more with your audience.

Use a holiday theme by using holiday hashtags, or create a contest to celebrate the holiday giving spirit. You can also use limited time offers to give a sense of urgency to sales, which can inspire your customers to visit your page at certain times of the day. Doing this can increase sales, as well as get more eyes on your page if you encourage them to visit at the right times.

Tips for Successful Facebook Marketing During the Holidays

Set up a pre-promo plan - Know what your promotions will be and how you are going to execute them.

Deploy multiple posts - Have posts written and ready to go, so that you can just log in and post them. Set up a time frame that you want each post to go out. Some social media sites let you schedule posts months in advance.

Spread the news with your blog - Write up a blog hyping up your upcoming holiday marketing campaign. This gets your faithful readers excited and looking forward to the campaign. Some of them will tell their friends and followers about it, and that can get you a lot more traffic.

Share on social media - Announce that the social media campaign is coming on all of your social media pages. Don’t forget to share your blog post as well.

Use Facebook Ads for targeting - If you have a spending budget for this campaign, you will want to do the research so you know just where to target your ads. Set these ads up to run at the right times during your campaign. Here’s a guide for writing Facebook Ads, if you want some more information on that topic.

Announce via Email marketing - Send out an email blast to all of your current and past customers to let them know about the upcoming social media campaign. This will generate a buzz, get your customers excited to see what you will be offering, and bring traffic back to your site.

Knowing your audience and you customer base is key to making any social media campaign work. During the holidays, it’s great to incorporate the cheer of the season into the marketing that you know already works for you. If done right, there is a large chance that you will get many new potential customers looking at your campaign and visiting your site during this season. Use the holidays to you and your business's advantage by doing the research and making sure you are ready to engage your customer base.

If you want more information on creating content (which can help you out with your social media campaign), check out Virtual Market Advantage’s blog on SEO Copywriting here!

Why You Need a Business Address

For many small businesses, the business address is also the home address of the business owner. There are several reasons why this happens. First, it’s simple to just keep your business at home when it's so small and just starting out. Second, having the business in your home does not cost any extra money.

In many cases, the use of a home address as the business address is not a huge problem. However, for SEO purposes, it’s always best to have a separate business address that you can use to connect with your online content. And in some cases, there can even be downsides and legal consequences for using a home address for your business. Let’s go over some of the issues to consider if you have a home-based small business:

Liability and Safety

Any LLC or corporation should think long and hard about using a home address for its business. A major benefit of having a business entity is the limited liability for business debts and activities. You should know that this protection only applies if you keep your business and personal activities completely separate. If you do decide to use a personal address for your business, you could hinder that limited liability and end up personally liable for any business debts and obligations.

Trust and Credibility

There is a chance that if someone finds your business and they see no contact address or even a PO box, they may steer clear of using your services entirely. Some people feel that without a physical address for the business, it’s going to disappear quickly.

Based on what your business is, it may be beneficial to present your potential clients with a physical address where they can contact you or set up a meeting. Having a physical address that is dedicated solely to your business and nothing personal helps your business build up trust and credibility with both current and future clients.

Online Credibility

A physical business address also adds to your credibility online. As soon as you set up a location, you need to register and verify it with all of the online maps and location services, like Google Maps. You also need to register the location with social media sites like Facebook. Once these steps have been completed, you should see a spike in your SEO statistics, as your business becomes more established online with one simple change!

A Meeting Place for Clients

Sure, you can meet your clients out somewhere for lunch or even meet at their office, but what if your business changes its focus? What if you need to set up client meetings more and more often? You may eventually want to have your own place of business to start holding these meetings. Having a single place where you can meet your clients will also help your business on the path to building trust and credibility. Overall, it will enhance your business's professional image to others.

Professional Image

The U.S. Census Bureau released findings in 2011 that more than half of the businesses that responded to the survey of business owners were home-based businesses. Home-based business is alive and well, but there are times when it can be very difficult for a home-based business to shake the negative images. Many people envision home-based business owners chilling out in their pajamas while they relax and work from bed.

Having a physical address and location can help provide your business with a more professional, polished image for incoming clients.

How to Get a Physical Business Address

There are many places out there that you can rent as office space for your business, and they will all come with some type of cost to you. Here are a few different ways you can get a business address:

Mailbox Services - If you rent a mailbox at a service that is offered at places like the UPS store or Mail Boxes Etc., you can use the store’s street address with your mailbox number as a suite or office number. If you are a business that does a lot of shipping, you get the added bonus of being able to make use of the other services these locations offer.

Virtual Office Space - These spaces are also known as virtual business addresses. They can provide you with a professional-looking mailing address as well as offer other features and facilities. Some locations even offer receptionist services and meeting spaces that can be rented out when you need them!

Coworking Space - This is like a virtual office space in that it gives you a professional looking business address as well as the use of meeting space and conference rooms. The other thing a co-working space offers you is a physical space to actually work in along with use of shared resources like a Wi-Fi connection.

Office Space – If you want your own business space to work in and don’t want to share, you will probably just need to find a regular office space. This does not mean renting out a whole building or floor. Most towns and cities will have small spaces for rent or sale that can be used by small businesses. Keep an eye out on the listings!

No matter if it is for legal reasons, your stress level, or looking more reputable for future clients, there are many things to consider when you are looking at an actual business address. If your business is growing and you don’t have a separate place to call your own, it’s probably time to get into an office space and take your business to the next level. There are options available that can work for nearly any business budget.

If you want more information on how to get your business established online, check out Virtual Market Advantage’s blog on improving your online advertising and marketing here!

SEO Copywriting

When you hear the phrase “SEO copywriting,” what comes to mind? You probably think of website content and blogs. These are part of the whole, but more broadly, SEO copywriting is the ability to write copy that ranks well in search engines. It can be easy to do and often is a great way to gain good, valuable traffic to your website that does not cost you hundreds of dollars like paid advertising would.

While gaining traffic using copy is great, it's not solely about speaking to the search engines. Good search engine optimized content is just as much about engaging your readers, helping sell your product with trust, and helping you build authority on the Internet. You not only want the SEO to get the traffic to your site, you also want that content to have purpose once the traffic is there.

Here are some tips for you as you start out developing your SEO copywriting skills:

Build a Foundation First

Before you really dive in, you need to set up a structure for your content. You need to establish what you want from your future content. Your writing will become more effective and simpler if you have specific goals and a vision of the end product in mind.

Think about where in your content you will place your keywords and any links you use. Establish a framework for headings and paragraphs. Knowing where to place these things will make it easier to set up, and will also provide a better experience for your readers and can increase the shares of your content.

Make it Readable

If you have a good foundation set up before you begin, readability should come easier. The easier your content is to read, the more likely it becomes that a reader will share it with others.

Make sure your paragraphs have one thought instead of each one being packed with multiple topics. Add space between paragraphs to help the reader visually separate the ideas. This makes it easier for the reader to consume your content again, creating a higher chance of them sharing it.

Shorten Your Paragraphs

This goes along with readability. Most people that read or come across an interesting blog want it to be quick and to the point. They do not want a long and drawn-out article. Use bold type to draw attention to each topic of the blog. It also helps if you make your content read like a list of items, so numbering your points or making them bullet points draws the reader in more.

Proofread

Proper proofreading is crucial in any copywriting. You can have wonderful and engaging content, but if a reader comes across one mistake, it might negate the whole feel of the content. Simple grammar and spelling errors will make your credibility take a nosedive. Sure, spellcheck exists, but it is not guaranteed to catch everything. The safest policy is to have a second person read your content and see if they catch anything you missed.

Give Credit

If you have done your research for a piece of content, then you need to make sure that you give your research the credit where it's due. The Internet is all about sharing, but you need to make sure you share it correctly or you could start receiving letters from lawyers and webmasters. Make sure you take the time to learn about correctly citing authors and blog writers. It will be worth it in the long run.

Add Pictures for More Visitors

The Internet has a seemingly short attention span, and most people want what they are looking for fast. Articles that include photos or graphics have a view rate of up to 94%. Not adding a visual to your content can be a costly mistake. If you take the time also to optimize your images correctly, they will also have a good rating with SEO.

To get better SEO on your images, make sure you have a descriptive caption under your photos or images. People visiting your post read those captions, as do the search engines. A great caption under your image improves the indexing of your content and can help you match keywords as well.

Write in Active Voice

If you write your content with a passive voice, it becomes more wordy while watering down your message. If you write in an active voice and sound like you are having a personal conversation with your reader, your message comes across as crisp and direct. This is more persuasive and engaging to the reader.

Know Your Audience

Before you even start the process of writing your content, it’s important to know just who you are writing for – your audience. You can do all the right things to get your content to rank well, but if you do not have content that appeals to the particular audience or consumer you’re trying to reach, it will never really work well, and you won’t find your customers. Do your homework before you start and it will pay off big in the end.

Tools like Google Analytics can help you keep track of who makes up your current audience.  There are many other resources out there to help you get the right keywords for your topic and to make sure you get it optimized right in a search. If you take the time beforehand to make sure you can connect with the correct audience, you will be amazed at how many visitors will come to your website and blog!

If you want more information on copywriting, check out Virtual Market Advantage’s blogs, such as this one that goes over some copywriting exercises, and this one that explains what makes good copywriting. You can also learn about evergreen content, or content that will remain relevant for years to come. Time to get writing!

6 SEO Tips for Small Businesses

Starting your business is hard enough, but then you realize how important it is to have a big web presence these days. Not only are you competing with other businesses on the storefront, but you will also have to compete with the businesses on the Internet. You’ve created a beautiful website and put yourself out there to be seen on the Internet, only to not be found anywhere! Search engine optimization, or SEO, can be a difficult thing to implement for small businesses, but Virtual Market Advantage can help you with some SEO tips to get you started!

It’s tough to get your business ranked in Google to the point where it can be found on the front page, especially if your business has a lot of competition. It’s even harder if you are doing it organically. However, there are ways to face these challenges and get a leg up on your competitors. Let’s go over a few things that your small business can do with your SEO strategy.

Local SEO

There is a chance that you are an online retailer only, but many small start-up businesses have a storefront. If this is the case for you, the best place for you to start is with a local SEO. This will be a core part of your search marketing. Local SEO will go through Google maps, but first you will need to connect with third-party directory and review sites such as Better Business Bureau and Angie's List. You would want to localize your content strategy and make sure to work location names into your content, headings, and URL so that Google will search and rank based on where you are.

Having an actual address to connect with your business online is a huge benefit for your SEO. If you’re unsure where to start, try linking your business location with every major website, including search engines like Google and social media sites like Facebook. Here’s a guide on how to get that accomplished with Siri.

Tactical Link Building

Link building for your page can be tricky, but it’s best to remember that quality beats quantity when you are looking at inbound links. With this in mind, it’s best for you to get links from sites that have a higher domain authority than you do. Try to have guest blogs that link back to you and target trusted publishers that can link back to you as well. This will help you grow your link building in a big way.

Above all, you need to make sure that your content is good enough to earn links and shares back to your site from other people. As your audience grows and becomes large enough to take care of itself through link building, you will need to become more focused on your approach. One great way to establish a lasting presence online is to provide evergreen content that will last for years to come.

Connect with Local and Relevant Publications

This goes along with good link building but can also help you as you establish your site with Google. Search engines like to see a brand mentioned in publications that are relevant to your industry or within your local area. When you’re just starting out with SEO, securing a mention in a publication is very helpful.

Being mentioned in a relevant publication will help you because of the expanded audience. Just having those trusted readers see your link or business in there will mean more traffic for you. This also helps you gain brand awareness by being regularly featured in that publication. If you can gain that regular feature, over time you can get in touch with their regular audience and make it your own!

Target High-Intent Users with SEO

Even without using paid advertising, SEO allows the focus to be on users who are still looking for specific content. This means targeting users who have not totally made up their minds yet. For example, they may know that they want a new appliance or electronic but are not sure of the exact model yet. By using SEO, you are helping them make a buying decision.

To make your SEO campaign really work, you first need to understand what users look for as they proceed through that buying decision journey. Once you understand that, you can base your SEO campaign around those who are on the next to last step before buying. If they come across your site at the right time, they will be more likely to make that final decision and purchase from you. This is what we mean by targeting the high-intent users in your campaign. One great way to focus your targeting is by using long tail keywords.

Automate Everything

Although it’s important to reach out to your audience personally, you’ll want to balance your efforts by automating everything you can about your website. One big challenge for a small business is having good marketing efficiency. The simple steps of a keyword search and competitor analysis quickly take up valuable time. This time adds up quickly and pulls you away from your actual business work.

If you simply automate these things and have them working for you in the background, it will give you that valuable time back while still helping you build your online presence. Automation will cut down your workload.

Build a Team or Hire an Agency

You are a small business and your budget is also small, but there are local agencies out there around you that are small business too. If you want a more hands-on approach to SEO for your business while keeping yourself from becoming overworked, you can rely on a company like Virtual Market Advantage to handle the entire process for you! We strive to help other small businesses like you. Your business has a lot to gain from hiring a company that can help you with SEO and your web presence. You can pay for only what your business needs at the moment and then adjust that as your business grows.

Hiring a web marketing team or building that team within your company will ease your mind and let you get back to running your business from the front end. It’s a small expense that can pay off big for you in the long run. Alternately, if you feel confident in your ability to run your SEO for yourself, get it going with smart link building and keywords, local outreach, and tactical automation!

How to Improve Your Business’s Advertising and Marketing

Within the history of business, copywriting, advertising and marketing, there comes a history of a friendly competition. With everything from the type of product or service to the ads a company runs to get its customers, there is certain to be another business out there doing nearly the same thing. Businesses use the same concepts and tools for their copywriting and design, but there are differences to be seen in the land of marketers and advertisers. By knowing this difference, you can create better copy for your business's ads and content.

Advertising and marketing seem like one in the same, right? People use advertising to market a product. But the truth is, both of these tools are used to help each other in slightly different ways. Sure, you will see the ad for the product, but when you go to the website to purchase what have seen, you are looking at marketing content. Marketing provides copy for the pages on the website as well as content such as blogs written about the product. When it comes to advertising and marketing, you must have one in order to get the full effect of the other.

The Written Word

Before the world of shared videos on LinkedIn or seeing those ads on Facebook, the only way to share what you wanted people to know about was by different types of written copy. Newspapers tossed in your driveway, marketing postcards sent to your mailbox, and other sources of physical copy ruled advertising.

Using written copy in a non-digital world had its share of unknowns. This being a business’s only means of content marketing meant that they waited for longer periods of time to see any feedback from the marketing campaign. Having to wait and see if these new ideas would work led these businesses to a wide range of failures and successes. There were few that made it out successfully and could go on to share how they made it work. The great thing is, if we look at that information today, it can still ring true for modern content marketing. If you want more information on using old-fashioned methods to help your content, check out Virtual Market Advantage's blog here.

The Materials Used for Marketing

When you look at types of marketing, you will see that one of the biggest differences between advertising and marketing is the length of the material involved in each. Ads are there to quickly grab your attention within the typical seven seconds that a person gives to something that they see. If you then go talk to a content marketer, you will quickly learn that they hope to earn the greater attention of their audience with informative, thoughtful content. Ads are meant to quickly manipulate you into looking further into something or going for the impulse buy, while content is meant to be informative and build a trusting relationship with the audience.

While you may think that content and copy will be long and drawn out, that is not always the case. You can create shorter sentences for dramatics, as well as get your point across with fewer sentences and paragraphs. Just because you hear the words 'content' or 'copy' does not mean it will be a long and boring read. There are many times where content can give the audience just as much impulse to buy as an ad, all while giving the customer just that much more information before the purchase.

Empathy – The Key to Content Marketing

Advertisements are meant to be seen briefly, which means they can sometimes come across as untrustworthy (and sometimes are). Content marketers like to think that the job they do goes beyond that level and really gets in touch with the audience.

Think about it this way: would you lie to your family to get them to buy something? No? Then why would you go and lie to someone else? It’s easy to lose that sense of caring for the audience when you, the marketer, are just simply out there competing with the other companies. It’s easy to want to grab the attention of your audience fast instead of sending them a nice welcome with your content.

When you are developing your marketing strategy, think about how you come across to your audience. Are you just building a revolving door, hoping to catch that one sale? Or are you there to answer questions and guide that potential customer to a sale as well as create a long-time customer? Both ways can work for your business, but creating a revolving door feeling to your copy can leave a bad taste with your visitors and word will get around. If you are stuck on finding ways to make your content more authentic, try and pull from personal experience and place that into your ad copy.

Working Past the Rivalry

While there will always be the debate of how to deal with close competitors, there are ways to work together as advertisers and marketers. Sure, advertising looks different than it did in the twentieth century, we can still look to its wisdom for content creating today and collaborate to create better content all around.

You can get to your audience quickly without shying away from quality content. Being authentic with your audience will always get you more leads and clicks in the long run. You want those clicks to be real interactions and not just a person passing through your revolving door. Your data needs to reflect who your audience actually is. Allow for the content marketers to work through and come up with what works best and learn to better understand and appreciate the traditions in advertising that still work today.

The Top 6 Coding Languages of 2017

If you are just starting out in the world of coding and do a simple web search for top programming languages, you can quickly be overwhelmed by the hundreds of options that pop up. Simply jumping down the rabbit hole of coding languages is not the way you want to start your coding experience. It’s always better to start a task with all the information you need to make an informed decision. Which coding language you choose will be determined by what kind of coding you intend to do and what kind of job you want to snag by learning it.

There are many ways that the popular coding languages are ranked. It can be as simple as how often it is used to build websites or the ones that get the most Google search results. To make the task of searching for the best coding languages out there easier for you, let’s go over some of the most popular coding languages of 2017 to give you a place to start:

SQL

The number of job descriptions that included the knowledge of SQL (Structured Query Language) increased by almost 50,000 from 2016 to 2017. This gives SQL a huge lead over the other languages right now. The statistic could be due to more SQL jobs popping up or a change in how the job market is changing overall. Either way, it is clear that SQL is the top in coding languages this year.

SQL is used to communicate with as well as manipulate databases. It is fairly simple and has many variations such as MySQL and Microsoft SQL. Microsoft released their SQL Server 2016, which proved to be very popular. It introduced some new features to make the language more open-source and has a Linux version.

Java

In the recent job market, the number of Java positions available went up by almost 30,000 in 2017 compared to last year. This could be due to the larger number of Android users and the steady growth of its developer community. Some of its characteristics definitely make it worthwhile to learn.

Java is a simple, readable programming language used by millions of developers as well as billions of devices worldwide. All the native Android apps are built in Java, and around 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies use Java as a server-side language for their backend development.

Python

This is the third top coding language on the list. It is a general-purpose programming language that emphasizes code readability and increased developer productivity. It is also used for desktop apps, web apps, and data mining. In October 2016, Microsoft launched a beta version of its Cognitive toolkit that included support for Python. The full version was released in June 2017.

JavaScript

JavaScript is different from Java. It is mostly a client-side, dynamic scripting language that is used for front-end development. It is compatible across all browsers and is used in over 90 percent of all webpages you see. Compatibility as well as adoption of JavaScript 6 spurred on its growth from 2016 into 2017, and progressive web apps became more usable. This allowed for offline-first functionality for web apps.

C++

This coding language is built on C, which is the matriarch of all coding languages. It is a powerful, high performance language that is used to build systems software, game engines, and desktop web apps. Many of the beginners to coding find that C++ is harder to learn than the dynamically typed languages like Python or JavaScript, but if you are interested in jobs that require the more fundamental aspects of coding, it is a great option to learn.

C#

C# (C sharp) is a coding language that saw a small increase in popularity this year. It is the language developed for Microsoft's .NET software and can now be used on non-Windows machines since the release of the newer .NET open source development platform. Its main use is building Microsoft enterprise software. Most of the features in C# 7.0 were released last year and include language support for Tuples, pattern matching, local functions, and many other things.

While there are many more coding languages out there, these are the top 6 right now due to the job demand and the overall ease of use of the languages themselves. These coding languages are used often in app building, game design, and website development. While you may find later that you prefer a different coding language, these are great options for starting out. Learning to code is like any other type of language. The most difficult part is learning that first brand new language, and after that, you will find that learning more new coding languages will come easier!

If, instead of learning a new coding language, you want to start designing your website right now, check out Virtual Market Advantage’s blog here. It goes over how to design a beautiful website that performs great without any previous coding knowledge at all!