by Sofi | Nov 17, 2017 | Other
If you’re planning to set up an online store, you’re facing the challenge of choosing an appropriate e-commerce platform. There are multiple platforms which offer great e-commerce solutions, but Shopify is a leader on the market and a go-to choice for many businesses. The reason for this is that the platform has many great features, and it’s relatively easy to use.
So, without further ado, here are the benefits of using Shopify.
#1 Affordability
Shopify offers monthly plans which are relatively cheap and affordable for any business.
- Lite plan – this plan gives you tools for selling on social media and buy buttons you can put on your website or blog. You don’t get too many options with this plan, but it goes for only $9 a month.
- Basic Shopify plan – with the Basic plan you get a hosted shop and blog with additional options such as adding unlimited number of products, fraud analysis tool, ability to add discount codes, a free SSL certificate and 24/7 customer support. This plan costs $29 a month.
- The Shopify plan – with this plan you can take advantage of all the options from the basic plan, plus additional options such as the abandoned cart recovery tool, which lets you get contact details from people that didn’t finish their orders, and send them reminder or promo message later. This is the most popular Shopify plan and is priced at $79 a month.
- Advanced Shopify plan – this plan has all the features from the other plans, with the addition of advanced report builder, dashboard access of 15 users, and third-party shipping calculation. This is the most expensive plan and it goes for $299 a month.
#2 Easy setup and use
The platform offers an easy way to setup and launch your online store. It has a nice admin interface, which is very well structured and easy to use. There is also a Shopify Help Center where you can find all the necessary information and guides about setting up and managing your store.
#3 Hosted platform
To use Shopify, you don’t need to have a lot of technical expertise or coding skills. They take care of your site’s server, software, website management, hosting, payment gateway, as well software updates. Therefore, you don’t have to worry about technical issues and you can just focus on running your business.
#4 Marketing apps and tools
Shopify provides all the key marketing apps and tools you need to promote your e-commerce business. It has integrated SEO features, advanced analytics, social network integrations, targeted e-mail marketing, discount codes, custom gift cards, coupon engine, etc. You can use any of the marketing apps and tools to generate more traffic to your site and boost your sales.
#5 Mobile friendly
Shopify includes mobile commerce features and can be managed from a mobile phone. All the themes are mobile responsive, and it includes a built-in mobile commerce shopping cart which means customers can buy from your store using a mobile phone. In addition, you can manage your store from anywhere using the Shopify mobile app, available for iOS and Android.
#6 Security and reliability
Shopify keeps your site secure by handling security compliance, security upgrades and hacker protection. They also provide reliability, by maintaining and upgrading your server in order to make sure your shopping cart is always available and loading quickly.
***
If you want to easily launch and manage an online store, without having to bother with technical issues, then Shopify is the right choice for you.
by Sofi | Nov 10, 2017 | Other
What is mobile marketing?
Mobile marketing is a type of digital marketing aimed at reaching specific audiences on their cell phones, smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices via SMS, MMS, email, social media, and mobile applications.
Considering the rapid pace of technological advancement, mobile marketing is becoming an indispensable part of an effective marketing strategy. Some companies have been slower in adopting this concept, mainly due to the belief that this type of marketing only targets the younger population. But the truth is that people of all ages are using smartphones and other mobile devices, and this trend will continue in the future.
According to a statistic by Express Pigeon, “over 50% of smartphone users grab their smartphone immediately after waking up.” This shows how much people are attached to their devices, and this type of information should encourage companies to direct more of their efforts towards mobile marketing.
Companies need to constantly improve and adjust their strategies to succeed in the mobile world. Although effective, it’s no longer enough to connect with customers only by sending text messages, because people now use smartphones to engage in all the kind of online activities they can engage on desktop and laptop computers. This means that companies need to catch up with the times and evolve their mobile strategies to fit the current wishes, needs, and habits of their customers.
Benefits of using mobile marketing
Reach – Majority of people nowadays own smartphones, and spend a lot of time online, so mobile marketing can help companies reach very wide and diverse audiences. It’s also very important to be present on social media, since people regularly check into their social media networks on their smartphones. People share stuff they like online, so good social media presence will increase your brand awareness as well.
Immediacy – You can get immediate responses from your customers when you reach them by mobile, because people carry their smartphones with them almost all the time. If you send them a text message or an email, they will immediately receive it. If in your message or email you include a link to your new product, they might like it and decide to make a purchase right away.
Enhanced customer experience – Many businesses still don’t have optimized websites for smaller screens, and that results in inconvenience for users who surf the internet on their smartphones and other mobile devices. Adjusting your web content to fit on smaller screens will enhance the experience of your customers and increase engagement.
Location awareness – If you own an app for your business, you can track the location of your users by technologies such as GPS or beacons. You can deliver different information to your users by sending push notifications, at any time. With analytics, you can gather different types of data for your users, such as the time they visit a certain location, how long they stay there, and more. The location insights can help you create more personalized marketing strategies, and boost the odds of engagement and conversions.
Cost-effectiveness – Compared to other marketing techniques, mobile marketing is very affordable. You don’t need a big budget for an SMS campaign, and you can create any other kind of mobile marketing campaign at a relatively low cost. This makes mobile marketing a good option for small businesses that have a limited budget.
***
Mobile marketing brings companies many opportunities for development and improvement of their business endeavors. It helps them reach many people at the same time, inexpensively, easy and fast. Think of all the benefits mobile marketing can bring to your business, and make it a part of your marketing strategy, if you haven’t done so already.
by Sofi | Nov 3, 2017 | Other
The holiday season is an opportunity for your business to grow in both sales and customer base, so it’s important for you to optimize your marketing strategy, and make the most of it. Here are some tips on how to make the busiest season of the year, the best part of the year for your business.
#1 Prepare social media content
People spend a lot of time on social media during holiday season. Before they go on their holiday shopping, they often go online to check for discount announcements, ask for product prices, and search other information about their favorite brands. Therefore, it’s essential for you to prepare a great holiday content for your social media profiles. Publish the kind of content your audience liked in the past, share some exciting news, discount offers, post cute holiday photos, or organize fun events.
By posting on social media during the holidays, you can reach a wider audience, and consequently increase engagement. A good idea is scheduling your posts for publishing in advance, instead of publishing each post individually. This can save you a lot of time that you can use to focus on other business issues, and you can schedule posts to be published at optimal times of the day when your audience is active the most. So, prepare awesome content and then schedule it for publishing at specific dates during the holidays.
#2 Optimize your website
Optimize the content and the look of your website for the holidays. Add relevant information, feature new products/services and discount offers, and include CTAs. Update your website with news about your work, your company, and your brand. Add the kind of content you think your website visitors would like, then organize it and make it easy to find.
Also, try to create a great user experience for people who visit your website. Consider editing the look of your website by adding a holiday flair. Design some cool graphics, change website colors, get creative with it and give it a nice festive look.
#3 Send emails to business clients
If you work with business clients, send a nicely crafted email to all of them, and wish them a great holiday season. You can design beautiful email templates in MailChimp, which is a great online platform for email marketing. It offers plenty of cool layouts and themes you can choose from, as well as content and design editing tools.
Sending a holiday email is a great opportunity to express your appreciation and gratitude for the opportunity to work with your clients, as well as your hopes for further collaboration. This is a great time to remind them of how great it is to work with you and strengthen your relationship. Show them how much you value them, and your clients will appreciate the attention.
***
Use the holiday season to promote your business, attract new customers, and strengthen the relationship with your clients. It’s the busiest and most cheerful time of the year. Use this to your advantage, and prepare your marketing strategy accordingly.
We wish you a joyous and prosperous holiday season!
by Sofi | Oct 27, 2017 | Other
Content is a key part of a good digital marketing strategy. It’s what gets people interested in your brand and products. And the goal of every business is to reach as many people as possible, who can later become its followers, fans, and customers.
Creating viral content is one of the best ways to reach many people at once, so here are some tips you should keep in mind.
#1 Target people’s emotions
Content that arouses some kind of emotional response in people is always an attention-grabber. People can’t stay indifferent to content that makes them feel happiness, anger, shock, surprise, or any other emotion. They tend to like it, comment it, and share it with other people. Create content that strikes a chord with people and it will become viral in no time.
#2 Make it relatable
People are triggered by things they can relate to. Relatable content increases engagement. People click on it and share it with other people, because it means something to them. To create this type of content means you know and understand your audience. So, consider publishing content that is in some way relatable to many people.
#3 Make it positive
Positive online content performs better than negative online content. People like when they see something that makes them feel good. For instance, consider including humor in your posts, because everybody likes a good laugh. If you publish something that improves the mood of your online audience, they are very likely to want to share it with others.
#4 Make it short and useful
Although the optimal length of your posts depends on your business and your goals, short content is more likely to go viral. It’s easy to consume, it saves people time, and they are more likely to engage by posting comments, participating in discussions, and so on. They will be even more interested in your content if they find it useful. So, try to make it educational, practical, helpful, and informative.
#5 Include visuals
Visuals enrich your content and make it more compelling. Photos, videos, graphs and illustrations make your content eye-catching, and increase the chance of your content getting noticed by more people. So, include beautiful and useful visuals in your content to make it more attractive and share-worthy.
#6 Stand out
If you want to get people genuinely interested in your content, you need to make it unique. Try to make it different and better from the content of your competitors. Try to be original, and don’t copy ideas from other places. Include something new, something nobody else has thought of. Think of your audience and what they might like, and come up with something inventive and creative.
***
Using the above tips, you can create content that people will notice and share. Creating viral content is important, if you want your business to grow. However, this doesn’t mean all your content needs to be viral. Just remember that it’s useful to create viral content from time to time, to increase your fan base, and get new customers.
by Sofi | Oct 20, 2017 | Digital Marketing Tools, Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is all about creating and publishing awesome content on social media, with the aim of getting and retaining customers. Although it sounds easy, it can sometimes be a very demanding job. Luckily, there is a variety of online tools that you can use for creating and managing your social media content. So, I made a list of 5 handy tools that can help you work on your social media marketing projects.
#1 Canva
Canva is an online tool for creating graphic designs and documents. It is used by both professionals and non-professionals. You can use Canva to create many different types of designs such as: social media posts, presentations, posters, postcards, flyers, and many others. There are number of different layouts and elements you can choose from when creating your designs. In the free version of Canva there are a lot of photos, icons, illustrations and other elements that you can use for free, but there is also a great choice of priced elements that you can buy for 1 dollar. There are also paid versions of Canva (Canva for work and Canva Enterprise) which offer additional options, but the free version works good enough for most people.
Page link: https://www.canva.com/
#2 Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media management platform, for managing multiple social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google +, Instagram, and many more. This tool is great if you need to manage a few different social media accounts. There is a dashboard where you can publish and schedule content on all your accounts, you can receive messages, monitor the activities of your followers and interact with them, etc. You can do all of this for free if you manage up to 3 different accounts, or you can upgrade for an additional cost, and get more options.
Page link: https://hootsuite.com/
#3 Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a great content tracking tool. When you want to track information on a certain topic, Google Alerts can notify you via e-mail about the most recent articles, web pages, blogs, scientific studies and other information sources, which are on that topic. This way you can be constantly updated with new information about any search term you want to track, without spending time doing your own research. This can be very helpful if you’re writing blogs or any kind of content. You can set either g-mail or a different e-mail address to receive your Google Alerts, and you can use this tool for free.
Page link: https://www.google.com/alerts
#4 Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free website analytics service, that tracks website traffic using a tracking JavaScript code, and creates reports. It’s one of the most powerful tools businesses use for getting different website statistics and data about their customers. So it provides you with great insight you can use for your marketing strategies. In Google Analytics you can set and track different social media goals and metrics, which can help you make appropriate marketing decisions in the future.
Page link: https://analytics.google.com/
#5 Asana
Asana is a web-based tool, that teams use to track their tasks and projects. It allows them to easily coordinate their work by online collaboration. You can use Asana to organize your team, supervise the work progress of your employees, or to work together with your colleagues on certain tasks. Using this tool, you can more conveniently share and comment projects with your team, compared to using an e-mail. This tool can be also helpful for coordinating your social media marketing activities, especially if you have an outsourcing job.
Page link: https://asana.com/
