Digital Information World

If you are into online marketing, it is likely that you are already aware of influencer marketing by now. They play a strong role in establishing the brand image of a company. But at the same time, these influencers are quite expensive and their rates do not fit into the budget of smaller companies.

Influencer marketing emerged as a trend few years back and it is still going strong with online marketers trying to reach out to their target audience by leveraging the influence of the influencers. But smaller companies missed out on that opportunity and it is here where the role of micro influencers came to play.

For decades, business owners and marketers alike relied on various medium to get their message across their preferred audience. However, when it comes to the capability of telling compelling stories that resonate across different niche, nothing can beat content marketing.

As a process, content marketing involves creating high-quality materials such as blogs, articles, videos, infographics, and emails that aim to educate, entertain, and inform the buyers. While it shares the same end goal as traditional marketing i.e. achieve higher quality leads and sales, the way content marketing draw attention and establishes a genuine relationship with the audience is what truly sets it apart from the scene.

Nowadays, people are becoming more hostile towards aggressive marketing aka in-your-face sales tactics. In response to this changing mindset of the market, smart marketers use content marketing to approach their target audience in a subtler way – by giving them content that can help them create informed a purchase decision. This ensures that their customer’s needs are met, while at the same time placing the brand as a reliable and trustworthy business that customers would love to have business with in the long run.

This inherent nature of content marketing pretty much explains why it’s still relevant this 2017 and in the years to come. But if you want a more detailed explanation, check the infographic provided by our peers from Harris Myers.

In case you have a small business and you have not built a mobile app for your business then you definitely need to get developed one. Nowadays, having an online presence alone is no longer enough, since online activities continue to shift to the smartphone. To put it in simple terms, mobile device apps have become too essential a marketing medium for entrepreneurs of small business to do without.

From the past decade, the usage of mobile devices has been increasing at a faster pace. Almost 3/4th of smartphone users in America check their mobile devices at least twice per hour, according to a survey by Gallup. This means, nearly 90% of the smartphone time is now completely dedicated to utilizing applications, the study says. Not just Americans, but people around the globe now spend time checking at their smartphones than doing something else.

This growth in smartphone usage indicates that mobile phone applications have indeed become an important marketing tool for organizations of all sizes, comprising small businesses. Mobile apps improve engagement with consumers. They increase return visits and allow a comprehensive variety of online transactions, which includes the deployment of loyalty tickets, push notifications, and e-commerce transactions.

Applications that offer coupons and send messages that develop your sales with consumers. Apps also stimulate communication with your business, which improves relationships with consumers in a society where rapid answers are appreciated by customers. Smartphone icons even assist develop companies by offering a visual design which consumers understand.

Several entrepreneurs of small businesses still believe that building an app is costly and tough. They are bothered about the requirement to develop various apps for the various platforms that their users or customers are on such as iOS, Android, Windows, Blackberry, etc.

They are not quite sure about developing dynamic or static applications, and the hard part is coming up with a perfect app design. Furthermore, many of the small business owners don’t even have the required experience to develop apps by themselves.

Some fresh organizations are optimizing the process of building and testing smartphone applications, placing the tools efficiently in small business owners’ affordability. Of course, small businesses have to test their applications to make sure that they are working fine on all platforms and major mobile devices. A recent study shows that the users are 42% more likely to uninstall apps which have errors and bugs.

For a much better understanding, here are our 5 top reasons for to get a mobile app done for your small business.

Apple’s impact on the world we live in spans far beyond telecommunications. Over the past decade, the iPhone has grown to become Apple's biggest moneymaker and its influence on human behavior and interaction continues to inhabit our everyday life. Today, most people wouldn’t even consider leaving home without it.

Wake up to your alarm. Listen to your favorite song while tracking a morning run. Check some emails and the status of your commute. Find the perfect #throwbackthurday photo. Read an article about productivity, then check some things off your to-do list. Chat with friends. Map directions to tonight’s restaurant. Remind yourself to buy toilet paper.

All on your mobile device.

10 years ago on June 29th, 2007, Apple launched the iPhone, the world’s first multi-touch smartphone. Since then, the iPhone has revolutionized our visual communication, from the rise of vertical video and a new world of UX design, to real-time journalism and ubiquitous, user-friendly photography.

It has also changed some things for Shutterstock. The number of iPhone photos uploaded to Shutterstock has risen drastically, with an expected 1.5 million iPhone photos to be uploaded to stock photo giant in 2017. Now anyone can take high-quality images and share them within seconds. Capturing glimpses of everyday life and moments that define history.

A few trends have unfolded in this visual era of mobile photography. Selfies have become a new form of self-expression thanks to a front-facing camera. And real-time news has emerged from the camera’s ease of use during real-time events as they unfold.

Explore the infographic to see how the iPhone has revolutionized design and photography.

We have been eagerly awaiting virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) – FINALLY, today it’s accessible, affordable and a proven digital marketing tool. Still, the technology is no less intimidating or understood by most people (even by those considered savvy e-marketers). In [actual] reality: more than 50 percent of marketers say, they do not fully understand how the technologies apply to their brands/clients.

Not yet mainstream, brands and consumer are embracing the emerging technologies. Today 7.5 percent of brands are using AR or VR in marketing efforts (Ray-Ban, Marriott, Walgreens, Lacoste – only to name a few); 25 percent claim they will be integrating within marketing communications in the immediate future. Which supports the projected growth of worldwide VR headset users to reach 154 million by 2020.

In for us to speak the jargon and explore VR versus AR possibilities, MDG Advertising has developed an infographic to visually explain:

• How VR and AR are similar and how they differ
• Examples of how brands are using them today (& how it’s proving beneficial for business)
• Best applications for both VR and AR

There’s a reason social media is a big deal. By its very definition, it’s a platform, in this case the Internet, in which people can interact with and share information to the public. And to think the whole concept came from the idea of communicating with faraway friends and relatives.

Still, there’s much that can be taken from the initial and contemporary definitions of the term. The moment businesses tried their hand at social media, the game changed. They possessed a real-time tool to monitor statements concerning them that were posted by users on the same platform. A few technological advances later, even content from non-social media websites became possible sources of good and/or bad news about a specific company. Sound familiar? That’s a facet of social media analytics for you.

Then again, aren’t business entities bound by ethical protocols and thus shouldn’t be posting willy-nilly? It’s not like they can openly lambast their competitors or publish malicious posts just to further their own agendas. Different from how people use their profiles for personal reasons to share updates and events with their friends and family, official corporate accounts are rather more sensitive—most of the time, anyway—about what they share.

Owe this to their social media strategies. And like them, you might know a thing or two about planning a campaign that can net you a good number of customers. But just because you have one doesn’t mean it’s the best, and it doesn’t mean you’re going to succeed as well.

How do you create a social media marketing strategy that doesn’t flop? And how do you execute it without fail? It turns out that sticking to your roots and careful planning are good processes to start with. Check the following infographic from SlideGenius and see whether you have the resources for a winning campaign.

It's not hard to get lost and drowned in the sea of content that is available online in every second of every day. There has been 2 million new pieces of content published every day back in 2015, and we can only imagine how big that number is today, in 2017. So, how does one “swim out” of the water and sails away into the sun?

Going back to the basics is always a good idea, and reading through an alphabet is a great way to do it. The below infographic is here to help with that, with a selection of key terms in content marketing that even the experts with years of experience might forget about and could use them in every day struggles.

As it always is, the letter A is the beginning, the core of the whole alphabet - and in content marketing it is about the Audience. Those are the people you create the content for and who need to like it, consume it and, ideally, share it around.

To reach the audience, you are creating content, which the basis of any content marketing campaign. Marketers and website owners these days are still mostly using blogging as the best way to create and publish content. They use editorial calendars to plan and arrange their content marketing strategy, and come up with ideas for types of content that will be created – from blogs to infographics and videos.

After the content is created, it's time for promotion, which these days is mostly done through social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, where it's important to monitor hashtags, join in conversations and groups and, after a while, retarget your whole campaign. Just like in good old alphabet, every term in this content marketing alphabet can be connected to another one to create a meaningful “sentence”, or in this case a great content marketing strategy.

Content marketing is one of the key parts of digital marketing today. In times when something goes viral one day and drops back to oblivion the other, it's not easy to grab attention online and get best results from digital marketing campaigns. One thing is still the same, a "safe bet" you might say, and that is high quality content will always be the king and the most important part of any online marketing campaigns.

75% of marketers have recognized that and are investing more in their content marketing campaigns and plan to work on creating high quality content more in general. To show the importance even more, it's good to note that 70% of people want to learn about a brand from quality articles rather than the usual adverts.

That's a part of the reason why 45% of marketers still look at blogging as main content strategy, and people still like reading and shearing blogs (especially if they are long form). More and more marketers are using social media and video as part of the content marketing strategy as well, to keep up with the original premise of good digital marketing strategy - stay on trend and create content that your audience wants to see and consume. It's estimated that by 2018, 79% of internet traffic will be video, so it would be a huge error not to get on that trend!

The importance of good content marketing strategy is even bigger when you find out that over 300 million people in the world are blocking ads on their devices which makes it impossible to reach them with traditional forms of online advertising.

Content marketing budgets and investments are growing year in year out – experts and researches expect it to become a $300 billion industry by 2019, so now is the time to take a leap and invest in creating high quality content and implementing a marketing strategy based around it.

All of these and more stats that will demonstrate the importance of content marketing can be found in the infographic below, which comes courtesy of PointVisible.

This means that even Facebook and Twitter are becoming more and more visual that means that when it comes to your marketing strategy, you need to keep up with the latest trends and requirements before your competitors do.

To help give you a solid foundation, here are a list of techniques, tips and methods that will allow your social media visuals to stand out from the crowd, making a real impact with your target audience, consequently generating those potential sales leads, helping you drive your business towards success.

Social media platforms for content marketing

Many of you reading this article must be aware of the huge potential of the social media platforms to reach a huge no. of targeted audiences. Among many ways of getting organic traffic, social media is one of the best ways to get some quality organic traffic. Furthermore, it’s also one of the cheapest ways to get exposure.

Many popular social media platforms are out there like the SnapChat, the Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and more. They have their own specialty, and all of them have millions of active users. The Facebook is the most popular out of them all with the statistic showing over 1.9 Billion monthly active users, and it’s still growing.

However, only posting something on the social media platforms is not enough to make your post viral. There are millions of posts revolved around various social media platforms. What does it take to make your post viral? We will discuss this question in the next part of this article.

10 creative ideas to effectively promote your content on the social media

You may have tried out many ways to promote your content on the social media, but I can assure you that these 10 creative ideas will open up your mind in many ways.