7 Social Media Tools Every Content Creator Needs In Their Toolkit

Social media has become an inseparable part of our lives, and most of us can’t imagine a future without social networks within reach. The ease of letting the world know your thoughts, feelings, opinions, and even what you’re having for lunch today has become a day-to-day activity for millions of people, and it’s no wonder that corporations and brands are taking their social media strategies more seriously than ever.

Social media contains a wealth of opportunities for marketers to push their products and services to the world, and it isn’t an easy feat. Great social media marketing takes careful planning, analysis, curation, and management to work.

As overwhelming as it might sound, it’s 2020 and there are tons of tools out there to help you with your social media marketing. Read on to find the best social media tools to add to your toolkit:

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Measure Your Social Media Performance With These 6 Key Metrics

Social media marketing is one of the most important tools you can have under your belt, and with that comes the wealth of data and analytics for you to learn from and track. There are certain metrics that are especially important to track, in order for you to see if you’re on the right path with your marketing strategy, which will inadvertently help your business grow.

Which metrics you need to track comes down to your marketing goals, but the following metrics will give you insight into your followers and their behavior when it comes to your content, as well as what aspects of your social media you should hone and improve.

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Keyword Research: How To Find Your Next Viral Content Idea

Content marketing is one of the most important mediums of marketing you can have under your belt, since pushing your marketing efforts makes it 13x more likely for you to see a positive ROI.

This means that making the effort to push out blog posts and email campaigns can have significant outcomes for you and your business. It may be difficult to find the time to do so, but the results generated over time are worth it.

With that, though, comes the question, “What should I be writing about?”. An easy solution to this is by doing some keyword research. What that means is finding out which keywords get the most clicks and views, based on current trends. This way, you can target the topics that people are more likely to read!

Let’s take a look at some handy tools to help with keyword research and how they work:

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The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide To LinkedIn Lead Generation

Lead generation is arguably one of the most important (and tricky) parts of the sales process. Gathering leads, reaching out to them, and funnelling them into your sales funnel is a time-consuming process, but if done well, can result in lots of closed deals and network connections down the road.

Nowadays, marketers are turning to every medium possible to generate new leads, and that include social media. LinkedIn, specifically, is a wonderful tool to generate leads, seeing as it comprises of 500 million+ professionals, 75% of which have incomes of over $50,000.

It’s no wonder that 80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn, and 92% of B2B marketers leverage LinkedIn over other social media networks.

Generating leads on LinkedIn is a simple but gradual task, bringing in results over periods of time. We’ve put together the steps you need to take to build up your LinkedIn profile and get hundreds of sales leads in no time.

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What’s The Best Time To Post On Social Media?

Social media marketing is one of the best ways to get your business out there and increase your reach. Seeing as social media websites are the top visited sites online, with an estimated 3.09 billion users by 2021, it makes sense for you to tap into this resource to grow your business.

With that being said, there are certain rules you should follow with your social media postings to maximize your reach, including the timing of your posts. There’s no point sharing great posts at 5am when there isn’t anyone to see it! CoSchedule conducted and compiled studies on the best times to post on the most popular social media platforms. Hence, here’s a handy guide to when you should post on your socials:

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Eliminate The Biggest Headache In Email Marketing

Email marketing is no longer what it used to be. It has a low conversion rate, which means that we need to have a huge email list to make up for the small percentage and drive sales.

Finding prospects is also incredibly tedious. Before I created my tool, there were generally 3 ways to find prospects:

  1. Networking events
  2. Email lists
  3. Manual search on Google

 

Networking Events

To build our network, we go to conferences, trade shows, networking lunches, business networking events and seminars. There, we hope to find people who are interested in our product. And usually we do. These events tend to give us a higher chance to close a deal, but they are very expensive and time-consuming.

 

Email Lists

The alternative to networking events is to buy email lists. However, email lists also come with their own problems.

  • They are ridiculously overpriced
  • They are obsolete or completely incorrect (Out of 10,000 emails, at least 6,000 bounce because they are no longer in use.)
  • These emails are so flooded with emails from hundreds if not thousands of people that the receivers are either stop bothering with unknown emails or have implemented strong filters that auto-junk emails

 

THE BIGGEST HEADACHE

The biggest headache in email marketing is COST. For anyone who has tried to find email leads without burning cash, you probably tried to manually search for emails on Google. You search for your industry and click on every single search result and scroll through the chunk of text to find an email address. But that is not effective.

I used to source for emails manually from Google, which took me 4 hours to get 50 emails. But now, I take 4 minutes to get 50 emails.

Now that I have eliminated the entire process, I save over 100 hours to focus on important tasks like meeting prospects and clients.

To explain without the technical details, I built a tool that extracts every single email within a single Google Search.

 

So here is how it works. For example, if I search “Property Agency Singapore”, I will do this:

If I want to manually select results to add, I click:

This tool is completely FREE for you to use.

 

We originally built this tool to recruit >40,000 vendors for our e-procurement marketplace. But now we are making it available for everyone. If you do sales or merchant acquisition, this tool is for you. Seeing is believing. Experience the difference HERE.

 

ThunderQuote is the most comprehensive business services portal in Singapore, Australia and ASEAN , where hundreds of thousands of dollars of procurement contracts are sourced every month by major companies like Singapore Press Holdings, National Trade Union Congress and more.

How To Reduce Unsubscribers For Your Email Marketing

When people unsubscribe from our email marketing, it can be extremely painful and demotivating. It feels like a form of rejection, especially when you truly believe in the value you provide to people and they just don’t see it.

But that is the reality of sales and marketing. You and I do not meet EVERYONE’s needs. We have a target group of prospects and we want to capture as much market share as possible. Sometimes it takes a longer process of persuading, but getting a “no” does not really mean “no”. It just means “not now, maybe later.”

Understanding why your prospects unsubscribe is important to learning how to keep them on your mailing list. I have compiled some ideas for you to refine your email marketing strategy and keep your subscribers engaged.

 

State Your Objectives Clearly

It is not enough to simply say “sign up for our newsletter.” What are your subscribers going to get out of it? You need to be very clear about what you are offering, otherwise you will have mismatched expectations or worse people feel like you are just spamming them.

 

Segment Your Subscribers

Do your subscribers only want to learn about a particular topic or product out of an entire range you cover? Do varying demographics and geographies affect your readers’ expectations? How committed are your customers? Are they loyal, sceptical, deal finders or just window shoppers? Segment your email list by meaningful categories.

 

Test Email Frequency

Do your subscribers appreciate daily, weekly or monthly updates? It depends on the industry and value you are offering. Which day of the week do you receive a higher open-rate and conversion rate? Test that too.

 

Test Subject Lines

Do clickbait subject lines work well? Or do they frustrate your readers? I wrote a full-length article about the new expectations of email marketing that your readers never told you. Hope it is useful.

 

Be Personal

Rather than going “Hey friend” or worse still “Dear valued subscriber”, use your subscriber’s name! Collect names along with emails. A simple guideline is to mention your subscriber’s name once in every paragraph or so.

 

Offer Real Value

Give useful and relevant information that value-adds to your readers. Give offers, discounts and promotions exclusively to subscribers to make them feel appreciated.

 

Use Creative Formatting

Get un-boring. Refresh your style continually for visual appeal.

 

Optimise For Mobile

Why are we still saying this? Most of us read emails on mobile, so if you haven’t already considered this step, please do it. It will really help you to engage >70% of your audience reading on mobile.

 

OH NOOO! THEY STILL UNSUBSCRIBE!

This is inevitable. Rejections are a harsh reality. BUT we can do our best to minimise unsubscribes. The following techniques can help you save some prospects from flying out of your nest.

 

Allow More Options

You need to get out of the mindset that subscription is binary, either “Subscribe” or “Unsubscribe”. Think of it as a full spectrum. Your subscribers have different levels of relationships with you, and it is important to treat them differently to minimise total “unsubscribes”.

The following Email Subscriber Relationship Spectrum was developed by ThunderQuote inhouse to help us with relationship management.

 

Recognise Unsubscribe Trends

You need to be sensitive to patterns especially when they cause people to unsubscribe from your newsletter. Often it is clickbait subject lines, routine and ugly formats and poor value offered. Pay special attention to the feedback you get.

 

Building relationships with your subscribers is not easy, but we can definitely use some of these ideas to improve and give subscribers what they really need.

BONUS: We built a FREE tool that helps you find 200 email leads in 10 minutes. If you want to supercharge your email marketing campaign, click on this link.

 

ThunderQuote is the most comprehensive business services portal in Singapore, Australia and ASEAN , where hundreds of thousands of dollars of procurement contracts are sourced every month by major companies like Singapore Press Holdings, National Trade Union Congress and more.

10 Ways to Increase Email Marketing Sales

You need a killer strategy for your email marketing campaign. Many mediocre marketing emails do not even get opened because your readers’ expectations have changed. To make full use of this platform, you also need to ensure that you do not fall into the trap of getting into the Promotions Tab.

If you struggle to make sales through your email marketing campaign, you are not alone. Here are email marketing best practices that will maximise your click-through and conversion rate. So let’s dive in. Continue reading “10 Ways to Increase Email Marketing Sales”

The Next Big Thing In Digital Marketing And How It could Cost You Your Job

Technological disruption is upon us. The world is changing too fast for us to be comfortable with our jobs. Every industry is being disrupted. Transport, finance, law, medicine, manufacturing, you name it. Everything is changing.

We are long past the dawn of Industry 4.0. Early adopters of these technologies are already reaping the benefits even at the cost of jobs. Just a few years ago, Artificial Intelligence, IoT, blockchain, 5G and cloud computing were cliché buzzwords.

But now they are here to stay. And they are disrupting every industry, including yours.
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5 Free Tools To Make Email Marketing Work Harder For You

Email marketing can become a laborious process that can seriously suck the joy out of your passion. Let’s keep things simple here. I have a few email marketing software tools that I highly recommend for any marketer to use. Coming from a start-up background, a lean team really needs some serious automation firepower. Let’s fire away.
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