Marketing, Web

3 Marketing Tools That Can Be Used to Create Instagram Content

Instagram has become one of the most popular social media marketing platforms. This is for small businesses, particular.

With an average engagement rate of 4.21 percent, it shouldn’t be hard to see just why. Twitter comes in 0.4 while Facebook managed 0.7 percent only.

That said, it can also be time consuming to market on Instagram but for the presence of certain online tools.

So, here are 3 marketing tools that can be used to create content for Instagram:

1: Canva

This website offers several design templates that can be used for social media among other purposes. Select the ‘Instagram Post’ option and then pick the layout accordingly. Next, pick the text style that will suit your brand most and add your copy. You can either use the Canva library for backgrounds or even add your own. Also, you can use the ‘Design School’ feature to create professional-looking graphics.

2: Hashtagify

This tool lists the most popular trending hashtags. You can look at 30 hashtags to find popular topics or even use in your posts for maximum visibility. You also get daily, weekly or monthly updates too. Finally, you can learn more about hashtags at the Hashtagify University. There are paid plans that start at $9.99 per month.

3: Schedugram

It is an excellent time-saver and while being a bit clunky sometimes, can be effortless as well. All you have to do is upload the graphic and copy, pick the date according to your calendar and you’re good to go. Prices to use this tool starts as $20 a month but vary on the number of followers too.

Marketing, Web

3 Usability Errors That Can Take Visitors Away From Your Website

Not only should your website be easy on the eye but also should be as user-friendly as possible. There’s just no point in having the right colors, photos and the best headlines if your users find it difficult to navigate through the site.

Having said that, here are 3 mistakes, in terms of user-friendliness, that you might be making with your website:

#1: Not Easy to Search the Entire Website

As a rule, it is important for your users to look for pages and their content from the home page itself. Also, limiting your search to only static pages would be a mistake too. Make sure you add file archives, events, blog posts and news items in the search results.

What would make a real difference is giving your users an input box to enter search terms instead of just a link to a certain page.

#2: No Copy on Home Page

This is another big mistake that a number of website make – not having copy when it can impact the site’s SEO for the better. Without a doubt, having some quality copy covering aspects such as what your company does for your clients as well as how you differ from your competitors can improve the impression that visitors will have of your website.

#3: Contact and Request Forms are Difficult to Use

Ensure that your contact and request forms are easy to complete. Avoid asking too many questions or having too many fields to fill up. When you are creating these forms, ensure that you only use form fields that are deemed necessary and which will result in more leads. You can also save a lot of money just by omitting just one field.

Marketing, Web

4 Common Content Marketing Mistakes

While it’s all well and good that businesses are actively working on content marketing strategies, there are a number of mistakes that are usually made.

Checking for whether or not you are committing any mistakes can go a long way in bringing more profitability to the business for obvious reasons.

That said, here are 4 common content marketing mistakes that you might be making:

#1: No Strategy

Knowing your business goals and how content marketing can get you there is probably the most important thing to think about before investing resources. But that’s not all – determining what strategies you will spend time on to achieve these goals have to be clarified before doing anything else.

#2: No use of an Editorial Calendar

Without a doubt, content marketing takes years to build a following where consumers get into the habit of reading your content and sharing it in the process too. Even the smallest content marketing plan involves a number of moving parts – be it the coordination of a marketing manager, a designer and a writer. This is why it is absolutely necessary for you to have an editorial calendar.

#3: No Keyword Research

Search engine optimization and content marketing go hand-in-hand. It is imperative that you use a keyword research tool. In other words, with the help of finding the right keywords, you will create something that people actually want. One tool you can use is Inbound Writer.

#4: Not using multiple formats and platforms

Internet users aren’t interested in just words anymore. Infographics and tweets with pictures tend to get more shares than articles that contain words. In order to get used to this, it is important that you get used to creating videos. Never hesitate to add pictures either. Also, podcasts, animated GIFs and SlideShares are popular too.