JUMP START Blog and Online Community

In this week's #TBT post, we take a look back at Digital Marketer's 2013 blog "They won't buy without these 3 elements (and they won't even know why)."

What are those three magical marketing strategies?

Have you been staying on top of the latest social media news updates? If not, the team here at Flair Interactive has you covered. Here are five of the latest social updates for this week: 

• 12 overlooked Facebook features That Help Marketers (Social Media Examiner)

Just about everyone and their mother (and their grandmother, at that) is on Facebook, or at least has used it at some point. But do you know all the helpful tools and features you can use on Facebook as a marketer? This article takes you through 12 such features that might be helpful to you in your social media marketing.

• 4 Social Media Hacks You Overlooked That'll Skyrocket Your Traffic (Neil Patel)

Overlooked features seems to be a theme this week. But this article doesn't just talk about Facebook; it talks about how to make sure your marketing is effective among ALL social networks you choose to use in your social media marketing strategy.

Back in 2014, we wrote a blog post that offered a few social media tips. Four years later, social media is as important as ever. 

In our last blog post, we noted that the majority of marketers use social media for:

• customer loyalty
• improving SEO
• brand recognition and
• to drive sales

Social media can also be a great way for your potential customers and leads to get to know you and your company. Often, potential customers may be interested in what you do and want to know more, but they don't feel comfortable enough to reach out yet. When you give them a little peek into your company, they'll start to get more comfortable and may reach out themselves to start a conversation.

Back in 2012, MOZ posted a great blog and video about how to delight the pants off of your community. 

It had some helpful tips, including:

• Give them points/thumbs up/stars
• Thank them
• Be human
• Show personality
• Make it easy
• Take it to email
• Take it offline
• Make it personal

You know how all of those so-called "marketing experts" are telling you that they know the ONE guaranteed way for you to increase traffic or generate more leads and conversions online?

Or do you ever feel like you can't keep up with the latest industry terms and "sure-fire tactics" that everyone insists are the ONLY way to go to increase traffic, leads and conversions? It's enough to make your head spin sometimes.

Here at Flair, we don't offer a cookie-cutter or one-size-fits-all approach and we don't rely on one approach for our own internal marketing efforts either. However, we do carefully track what we're doing to determine which tactics, campaigns and content work best for our own particular audience and business, just as we do with our clients.

That's why some metrics from a marketing campaign that we did this week really caught our attention. Yesterday (Thursday, June 1 2017), we published a blog post with an infographic titled "5 quick ways to improve your SEO and rankings" at 2:09 p.m. We then shared it on all of our social media channels and boosted the post for $63 (a max of $9 per day for 7 days), choosing to show it to people who fit our target audience for that particular service (owners and managers at small businesses within the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom and India).

There’s no doubt that social media has become an indispensable tool for business. With the continuing evolution of social platforms and technologies, it’s critical to be equipped with the right social media approaches to meet your goals.

To keep you current, competitive, and equipped, here’s an overview of the latest social media trends and tools:

According to the Radicati Group, email use worldwide will top 3 billion users by 2020. While some industry experts are convinced that social media’s convergence with the ever depleting millennial attention span is going to erode email just as email depleted print, that number certainly presents a very different picture.  

Back in November 2013, Flair Interactive provided tips on building a successful email campaign. While that post is still relevant and accurate, in 2017, there are some definite changes in what defines and drives a successful email campaign.

So, what has changed in the last three years to keep email relevant, effective, and aligned with the technological trends that are impacting marketing as a whole? Let’s take a look:

Want to stay up-to-date about the latest news, updates and happenings in the world of online marketing? Subscribe to our mailing list for weekly updates. This week, we've compiled a list of the latest Facebook updates for the week ending March 4, 2017:

1) 5 Tips To Creating An Unbeatable Facebook Ad Campaign:

Are you trying to nurture leads through Facebook ad campaigns? This Kissmetrics blog post describes the tweaks that you should implement while running your ad campaigns. Follow these tips to improve your ad campaigns.

 2) How To Refine Your Facebook Audience For Better Ad Targeting:

Another great post related to Facebook ads is published by Social Media Examiner. This article explains how three Facebook custom audience segments can be built and analyzed.

Clamoring for new ideas to apply to your content marketing strategy? Get helpful content marketing insights from February's top five infographics:

If Collette, the CMO of a leading ERP software company, opened up a meeting with, “We’re not getting a lot of traffic on social media. I don’t think it’s necessary to maintain a presence anymore,” more than likely she’ll be laughed out of the meeting (at best). At worst, she’ll be packing up her desk.

Social media has made its mark as a viable marketing channel, and it’s not going anywhere any time soon. And for good reason…it works when executed in the right way.

But all too often, businesses set up their profiles and, after a few months, throw their hands in the air when they don’t instantly see a return on their efforts and investments. Having a social media presence simply becomes one of those "marketing things” that gets a checkmark on the list with very little strategy or structure behind it. Companies who don't wrap strategy around their social media profiles will undoubtedly see it less as a lead generator and more as a resource drain.

So how does Collette get the traffic she needs to meet her top-of-the-funnel goals?