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Instagram for Businesses: Why Bother With Insta Stories?

The Instagram Story feature lets you share photos and videos with your followers for 24 hours. Although stories, filters, effects and tags may feel trivial and just another thing for you to remember in your marketing strategy, Instagram stories create easy and fast content with many benefits. Allowing you to show off your business’ personality and drive authentic customer engagements, here’s why the Insta story is an integral tool in your marketing strategy.

Tell a great story

Instagram stories are like your own personal TV channel. They’re designed for mobile users to quickly flick through, making them great for businesses who want to spark engaging, casual conversations with their customers. Your business can combine stories and live videos to open up to your followers and reveal what goes on behind the scenes.

Create easy content

What’s great about stories is that there is no set rule for how often you should post. Similar to Snapchat stories, Instagram stories are designed for continuous watching, meaning the more content you put out, the better! Plus, unlike regular Instagram posts, Insta stories are all about being in the now. Instead of curating the perfect picture and caption, you can use your story to humanize your brand and give it some personality.

Take creative risks

The temporary nature of stories makes them perfect for creative risks. You can be spontaneous and test out new content, safe in the knowledge that users are much more forgiving when it comes to stories. By testing and experimenting with new ideas, you can learn what your audience responds best to, and adapt successful stories into permanent posts.

Drive traffic and engagement

Instagram stories make it easy for you to connect with your audience. Not only can they respond to your stories with direct messages, but the poll feature allows you to hear the collective voice of your customers. You can also link to other Instagram profiles and add links to each story through the swipe up feature. This allows you to direct your audience’s attention towards specific blog posts, products, or news articles.

Boost organic reach

Due to the change in algorithm, Instagram sorts your feed by what it thinks you will like the most. Usually accounts with active stories tend to show up higher in the search results. To boost your organic reach and increase your visibility, you’ll need to post regularly to make sure that you’re staying in current feeds. You can also add hashtags and locations that will increase your reach and enable your account to pop up in different search related results.

Like any social media platform, it can take a bit of finessing to master Instagram and use it most efficiently. But don’t let that put you off! With the help of Cloud9 Marketing, we can manage your social media to boost your brand awareness, improve online credibility, and increase sales and/or customer acquisition. Please get in contact to put us to the test!

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How to Launch a Successful Email Marketing Campaign

Despite an ever-growing surge of social media apps and platforms, email is still a major consistent player in the marketing world. Email marketing allows brands to connect and respond to their target audience, and has the highest return on investment of all online marketing channels. Plus it’s super affordable, which makes it great for small businesses. However, with over 269 billion emails sent each day, there’s a lot of competition out there. If you want to know how to run a successful marketing campaign that will drive engagement and sales, here’s our step-by-step guide.

Step 1: Define your goals

Your goals for your email marketing campaign should line up with the overall objectives of your company. Pinpoint exactly what you want your campaign to achieve, whether it’s welcoming new subscribers or boosting engagement. From there, your goals will give you a good indication of whether you should be sending promotional, relational or transactional emails.

Step 2: Build your email list

If your primary aim is to nurture existing subscribers, then you should already have a bunch of known contacts at your fingertips. However, if you’re starting from scratch you’ll need to build a list of promising email addresses. Google Analytics is a great starting point when it comes to finding valuable leads. Alternately, nonintrusive popups on your site that offer irresistible incentives – like discounts or free shipping on first orders – gain immediate attention, and immediate results.

Step 3: Craft your email

A great email starts with a great subject line. Personalizing your email and creating a hook right at the start will encourage subscribers to read on. When it comes to copy, keep it direct and simple, and break up your text with blank spaces and images so the reader can quickly scan the page.

The end of your email copy will contain your call to action (CTA). This reinforces what you want your subscribers to do. For example, a property management company in Whistler would use their CTA to encourage subscribers to book their winter vacation before a certain date to secure the best deals.

Step 4: Test it out

Your email marketing campaign will need to be constantly evolving to stay ahead of the competition. A/B testing is a great way to see which kind of email designs, subject lines and CTAs perform best. Alongside this, you should also regularly monitor your email list so that you can re-engage inactive subscribers, and remove them if your attempts fail.

Step 5: Be consistent!

Once all of the hard work is done, it’s important to keep at it! If you do choose to manage your email campaigns by hand, we highly recommend you use email templates to save time. Email automation is also a cost-effective option that enables you to enhance the customer experience by responding to customers immediately – at all hours.

If you need any help launching an email marketing campaign, or if you would like detailed tracking and reporting of your marketing efforts, please contact Cloud9! Our experienced team build successful email marketing strategies that cultivate audiences and connect businesses with their growing online communities.

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How to Measure Social Media ROI

To measure social media Return on Investment (ROI), most businesses use the following formula:

Profit/ Investment x 100 = Social Media ROI

But this can be more complicated that it seems. For starters, how do you calculate profits? How do you work out which social media goals to set in the first place? And how do you prove which specific marketing campaigns were the ones to spark interest and drive sales?

If the concept of social media ROI feels a little daunting, you’re not alone. But calculating ROI doesn’t have to be complicated and time-consuming. We’ve composed a simple step-by-step guide that will help you measure your social media profits, and save a whole lot of time and money in the long run.

By seeing which of your marketing efforts deliver great results, and which ones don’t do so well, you can focus on the campaigns that really matter to maximize your ROI.

#1 Define your goals

Before anything, you will need to carefully identify your key performance indicators. KPIs will show you the progress of your business goals, and make sure you stay on track.

The more specific your goals, the better. Brand awareness means something different to everyone, so make sure you agree on a single, quantifiable awareness goal that you will be able to measure afterwards. For example, you could track new followers, clicks on links, or online purchases made.

#2 Track your goals

With your goals clearly defined, it’s time to start tracking. An easy – and free! – way to track website actions like sales and downloads is with Google Analytics. For tracking social media interactions such as shares and likes, Buffer is also a great tool to use.

#3 Attach a dollar amount

Once you’ve tracked your actions, you’ll need to assign them a monetary value. This is where it gets interesting, as there are many ways to do this. You could…

  • Work out how much you earn on average from each customer
  • Calculate how much each online visit is worth to your business
  • Work out how much the average purchase is through your site
  • And finally, work out your PPC costs e.g. how much you would end up paying to achieve the same actions through ads.

#4 Track your social media expenses

For the final step, you’ll need to deduct your investments from your overall ROI. These often include:

  • Man-hours- Deduct the amount of time you or your employees spend on each specific social media campaign.
  • Content- If you paid for content, such as a freelance blogger, you will need to factor this in.
  • Social media tools- While Twitter and Facebook are free, often social media tools and services are not.
  • Ad costs- Remember to deduct the amount you spend on social media advertising, such as boosting Facebook posts and promoting tweets.

With your stats in front of you, you can calculate your ROI using the formula at the top of the page and see which of your social media marketing campaigns come out on top. Just remember your social media investments might be paying off whether or not you see a direct, immediate increase in revenue- so stick with it!

We understand that social media takes practice and may not be at the top of your to-do list if you’re running a small business. Our team at Cloud9 Marketing are social media whizzes, and would love to give a helping hand to boost brand awareness, improve online credibility, and increase sales. To put our social media management to the test, please get in contact! 

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