Be In The Know Blog

Brand engagement is vital for gaining and retaining customers, and a strategy can be a tricky thing to craft. However, a look at how the sports world has successfully used social media to engage and energize fans can give you a few ideas about how to drive engagement in a way that will truly grow your online presence.

Make Fans a Part of the Conversation

Being a part of the online conversation is essential for today's brands, as more and more consumers expect to have instant access to companies via Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms. However, it's not enough just to post the occasional update or response to a comment or message. Marketing Land columnist Sanjay Dholakia has observed how thoughtful, deliberate interaction has helped sports teams develop brand loyalty and increase fan attention. You can emulate this by posting regular updates, as well as links to content and interactivity invitations (for polls and contests) that will help followers feel like a part of the community.

New Year's can be overlooked as a holiday, but with this list of New Year marketing ideas, you won't make that mistake. While it's true that consumer spending drops in January — as shown in this chart from Gallup polls — it doesn't disappear altogether. Let's count down six ways to take advantage of this sometimes neglected holiday before the ball drops in 2016:

6. Continue a Campaign

If you offered a prize for pictures of a holiday meal, follow up by asking what fans did with their leftovers. You can offer a prize for the Best Use of Cranberry Sauce or even Best Neighborhood Service (for followers who donated time or food). It doesn't need to tie directly to your brand — this is more about building relationships.

Emerging digital channels — the rise of social media, the influence of online reviews, the importance of running a blog and publishing content — all seem to demand more than most marketers can afford to give. What's sometimes lost in the shuffle is the enduring value of a good business website.

While you need a variety of digital strategies in place to increase visibility and traffic to that website, there's a lot that simple digital property can do to improve its own value. Website performance metrics aren't only a gauge of your overall digital strategy — they also illustrate the efficacy of your website's offerings and design.

While the mobile revolution of the 21st century has changed the face of modern business in nearly every industry, the medical industry has been particularly affected by the rise of smartphones in the U.S. More than half of all smartphone owners have used their phones to look up a medical condition in the past year, and two out of three seeking immediate treatment (at an urgent care facility, emergency room, etc.) check their devices to find the locations closest to them. With mobile healthcare searches on the rise, providers may be wondering how they can connect with new patients and take advantage of this growing trend. Fortunately, the solution starts with two little words:

Yes, it's time to start your 2017 advertising plan. You know that ads can draw huge traffic to your site and generate business, but without a plan in place, you can quickly overspend without getting much in the way of results. If you're already a forward-thinking person, you might be asking, "But what about products that will be coming onto the market that we don't even know about yet?" This is exactly why you really need to plan.

One of the essential elements of an advertising plan is establishing goals. The path becomes clearer once you know where you're going. Determining your best response to various market trends is more doable when you have an advertising plan, which is not the same thing as a buy.

While marketers spend a lot of time looking at how page layout, button design and font size on a landing page influence conversions, they may be inadvertently ignoring one of the biggest factors that influences consumers — landing page copy. If you've tried everything and are still not meeting conversion goals, it may be time to go back to the basics and take a hard look at your copy. Keep an eye out for these three common mistakes.

The services they provide are much different than your typical organization, but just like those businesses, health care companies need to make their offerings known to the public.

If you're in the industry, you know that marketing is a critical component of your business' long-term success — but the keys to success are much different for you than they are for, say, a retail company or a restaurant chain. You're tasked with promoting your services while establishing your expertise and building considerable trust among your potential patients. There's plenty to balance in terms of professional ethics, sensitivity to patient needs, and the duty to provide the highest standard of care possible.

So how can you reflect these core values through your marketing? Here are some tips.

In a world where almost anything can be bought on Amazon or eBay for a rock-bottom price, many business owners have been dismayed not only by decreased foot traffic, but also the practice of "showrooming," where consumers use brick-and-mortars merely as comparison shopping venues, to then purchase an item online, later. Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have been fighting back in recent years, though, with some proven tactics that are helping to stem what can feel like an overwhelmingly negative tide.

Almost every commercial brand looks forward to certain holidays with great anticipation. Taking advantage of these seasonal spikes in business can occupy the better part of a marketing department's calendar year, and for good reason: Some industries see the bulk of their annual sales generated in a single month leading up to some of the most sales-heavy holidays.

With digital and traditional channels to choose from, you have a lot of options at your disposal to create a successful seasonal campaign. That means making the right choices while avoiding costly mistakes. Here's a primer on how to build a local strategy that accomplishes both goals.

Brand awareness should be a focal point of any marketing campaign. This tough-to-pin-down metric is a general reflection of how well a given audience recognizes and knows a particular brand. For companies trying to earn recognition, patronage and sustained loyalty from a base of dedicated consumers, developing a brand awareness strategy is the place to start.

Awareness isn't easy to come by: It takes a combination of time, money, resources and creativity to build it among an audience large enough to sustain a company. For a business like Coca-Cola, it's a decades-long work in progress, and one of its best drivers of sales. Few companies today, if any, have the luxury of planning out that far ahead, but there's a simple, universal lesson from Coca-Cola's example: When executed properly, brand awareness strategies can pay dividends for years to come.