Companies are withdrawing their regular business activities to save money, abide by social distancing guidelines and mitigate business risks. Hence, now is the time to bring your business on social media platform and connect with people on social media who are looking for respite or wanting to connect with friends and family during these tough times of coronavirus pandemic.

Check the points discussed below indicating how businesses can take advantage of social media in these difficult times:

Provide Honesty, Clarity and Transparency

The honesty and transparency of communication gives more impressions and grabs attention of people online.You can communicate honest information about your brand such as how is your brand coping up with the current crisis, your future endeavours for the brand and new product development.
> A great way to impact your brand community is through video or photo updates.
> Share the content from experts and authoritative sources who are reliable and trustworthy. Include the details regarding incorporation of these expert ideas in your brand.
> Share your brand’s concern regarding the uncertain future and spread positive messages and helpful insights to present the human side of your business.
> Tell the truth regarding your brand’s situation and steps taken by your business to stop spreading of any rumours or assumptions during the pandemic.

Provide Entertainment or Value

Social media was introduced to connect with people and get entertained from the content. Businesses become so engaged in making sales and finding leads that they forget the prime purpose of social media that is maintain a personable platform on which your audience can connect with your brand.
> It is an excellent opportunity to connect with your patrons. Show behind the scenes, share about your employees, create interactive videos about your brand’s processes. Showcase the cool ways your brand helps the community and create interest on social media.
> Social media is filled with serious and informative posts regarding the outbreak of Covid-19. A humorous perspective such as funny or silly video that has a slight characteristic of your brand can provide business promotions and attract a lot of people towards your business and your brand will become popular.
> Social media is about creating connections and building relationships. Hold a Q&A solving with your team. Talk about your brand’s vision and goals. Ask your community base about their interests and what they would like to ask you and answer their questions in an engaging video or in photo posts and stories.

Conclusion
The pandemic has given ample time to businesses for returning to basics by maintaining relationships, provide entertainment and revaluate their social media presence to increase the brand value. It’s time to connect, engage and share whether you’re a business, a brand, or a human being. During this time you may not make great sales, but it’s an excellent time to build the foundations of business. Global Infocloud is a leading IT, automation and digital marketing company providing contemporary marketing solutions on social media. Register your business with us and get a seamless solution to handle your social media and make the most of it during this pandemic.

The post Why Social Media is More Important Than Ever for Businesses During the Coronavirus appeared first on GIC.

Conclusion
Social media is a widely accepted platform across people. It has now been used for strengthening business and build a brand image to reach more number of audience who are already present over this platform. We at Global Infocloud provide you with the best team of experts to dictate your brand on social media.

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Connect with your audience

Apart from providing customized deals to your customers, keeping your audience in the loop and taking their opinion is a great way to connect with them. In the era of modern marketing appreciating customer feedback is very important. To understand the needs and wants of your customer taking these small surveys once in a while will be of great importance. This will also help you to make promotions of your retail business on social media more efficient. For faster processing of surveys, you can access various survey tools available on the internet.
You should also respond to the reviews and comments by consumers to make yourself more available amongst them.

Conclusion

Spreading about your social media account everywhere and rewarding customers who are active followers will definitely lead to a loyal patronage. Promoting your retail business on social media is not a difficult job however you need to plan it properly. We at Global InfoCloud help you with the digital marketing of your brand and promise you with great results.

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1. Dedicated Support Handle

The best way to start a dedicated social channel for customer support is to create a dedicated support handle on social media, include that handle in your brand’s other social profile bios. This lets people know where to reach out for support-related requests. Separate support handle makes sure your potential customer will not be landing on your brand’s business handle and see complaints and queries. Usually customers ignore these separate handles and uses your main business handle in their query; you can respond via this separate handle and move the query towards the right team.

2. Monitor Brand Mentions

The onset of social media rise has put the reputation of your company in customer’s hand. The digital development has led to various customer reviews live on these social media platforms which you can’t control.
Patrons are always looking for customer service on social media platform, a lack of which will harm the reputation of your company. Customers seek for response from your brand by tagging your brand name (@yourbrandname) on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. You must check these mentions and resolve the queries as soon as possible and create goodwill amongst them.
You must monitor any conversations on social media regarding your brand where they have been tagged to resolve their issues and form a positive brand image.

3. Form Social Media guidelines

Similar to guidelines formed for customer support in general on your business website, you must have some guidelines on you social media support handle. These guidelines should include the points like friendly tone of voice, quick response time, protocol in escalations of customer issues and a message approval procedure on resolving problems.

4. Prioritize Social Media Customer Service

Social media plays a massive role in building your brand image, it is as important for your company as other digital marketingtools. Providing quick responses to social media queries and prioritizing the customer response will pour success and pose positive impact on your brand. Make sure your social media support team responses to each and every query online and try to give personal support to each one of them.

5. Proactive content

Predict questions and potential customer service issues that patrons may face. Use that future search data to create educational videos or blogs and share it on social platform.
You can share how-to-do video or Frequently asked questions in a blog on your handle
Social media customer service handles are a great platform to share such informative content. This builds customer interest in purchasing your product and reduces the number of personal queries from each customer.

6. Respond to all queries

Although its very obvious as we have mentioned the pros of customer service handles, support team must reply to each and every post in which they are tagged or hash tagged (#).
Answering all queries on social media be it negative or positive shows that your brand is concerned about customers and their needs. By being active on social media, you enjoy loyal and long-term patronage and an increased number of followers.

7. Expand your Customer Service

Sometimes customers might not directly tag you in a post or ask queries. However, you can find social media users who might just post something interesting online and put a hashtag (#) with your brand name. Responding to these indirect posts induces interest amongst users and push them towards buying your products and follow you on social media.

8. Quick Response

Just responding to messages is not sufficient for a great customer service. If a customer reaches out to you on social media, they expect a fast and friendly response.
As per data collected by Twitter, 71% of users expect quick response from brands on social media. Facebook has also conducted similar studies which inferred that online users expect very fast response through social media messaging platform. You don’t have to stay online to respond to all the messages, one can decide certain timings for response post that customers can Direct message on the same social media page.

9. Automated Chatbots

Customers who are user friendly with social media are comfortable with ‘non-human’ customer service interactions. These automated chatbots are an excellent way to provide 24/7 customer services without having to involve any support team. They are efficient in solving frequently asked queries. Some social media platforms provide these automated response feature which you can add in your account.

10. Project the right channel

A brand needs to understand the right social media platform to respond to their customers. You can collect data and target the social media page where you get the maximum queries and response.

Conclusion

We at Global InfoCloud provide complete social media handling solution for your business. As you can understand from the above points that social media is a great platform for supporting your business, we have a team of well-trained professionals to handle your social media platform.

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Facebook has many tools for promoting a business or brand, and one can easily get confused with which one is suitable for them. Facebook marketing approach that incorporates many of Facebook’s features helps shape a larger and more targeted social strategy or campaign.

Here is an A – Z list of Facebook features available for marketing:

Ads Manager: A tool that helps you create and manage Facebook ads.

Bots and Business in Messenger: It enables people to browse and find perform automated task.

Boost post: Effective, yet inexpensive way to gain more exposure of your posts. You can choose your audience by age, gender and location and by selecting interests.

Customer Service: This social platform can be used to respond for customer query. Facebook offers options to show the responsiveness of your business.

Company Page: Set up a company page so potential customers can find you. Company contact details, ‘about us’ section and post regular updates to keep audience engaged with your brand.

Call-to-Action: Add buttons to posts with specific a Call – to – Action (Learn more, Shop now etc.)

Dynamic Ads: Dynamic ads have been successful for retailers using retargeting within Facebook.

Events: Promote events through sponsored ads. this is a great way to raise awareness – the event page shows up on the newsfeed when a ‘friend’ likes the event.

Edge Rank: This Facebook algorithm decides what stories, or posts, appear in each user’s newsfeed. Every action a person takes (a like, a comment, responding to an event etc.) creates an ‘edge’. A story about that ‘edge’ might show up in a user’s newsfeed.

Facebook Exchange: Retargets users who have expressed an interest in a related product/service.

Groups: Creating a company group is a great way to interact with your current customers and make them feel connected and respected by the company.

Insights: Audience Insights allows better targeting, which helps you understand the impact and interactions with your posts.

Live: Keep your audience engaged and informed with live videos – this can be Q&A sessions to help your customers or potential customers, how- to videos and lots more.

Lead Ads: Lead ads let users input special information to receive calls or quotes. Ideal for B2B businesses.
 

Messenger Ads: Messenger is a chatting platform on Facebook which a lot of users prefer to interact, ads here can bring their notice to a certain brand or product.

Messenger Codes: Brands can now display codes which can be scanned by users to start conversations on Facebook Messenger.

Offer Claims: Promote offer content through adverts.

Pop-up chat-bots: The chat box pops up when a user visits a company’s page. The purpose of this feature is to prompt visitors to start a conversation with the page via Messenger.

Pinned Posts: Pin your most important/ informative post to the top of your company page.

Power Editor: Power editor makes it easy to manage multiple ads at once and import ads via excel.

Reactions: Facebook counts reactions to posts (love, shocked, angry and laughing) as a more precise feedback.

Shopping Sections: Facebook has added a shopping feature which helps you to directly sell your products on Facebook.

Video Views: promote in-ad video content.

Verification: businesses can claim their Facebook page to prove they own it, and will appear higher in searches.

Watch: Facebook’s newest feature watch is a new video platform. Users can expect to see targeted advertising before and during the videos.

Conclusion
Facebook has a huge array of features to help you promote your brand. Choose the right audience and target the right tool and for endless conversions.Global InfoCloud is a digital marketing company providing solutions to various businesses. Our team of experts have experience of Facebook marketing and can guide you to select the right tool for the promotions.

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If you often read business publications or frequent professional forums online, you have likely come across the abbreviation “B2B” and “B2C”. Talking specifically about B2B here, it stands for “business to business”, which simply refers to any company primarily focused on selling products and services to other businesses rather than to consumers.It will help to automate your business.

What is B2B marketing?

As the name suggests, business-to-business (B2B) marketing refers to the marketing of products or services to other businesses and organizations. B2B marketing techniques rely on the same basic principles as B2C marketing but are executed in a unique way. In a broad sense, B2B marketing content tends to be more informational and straightforward than B2C (Business-to-Consumer). Finding new ways to engage with prospective clients through social media is currently a hot topic in the B2B marketing world.

Types of B2B Marketing

Below are a few of the most common B2B marketing types and channels:

1. Blog Posts: Blog posts are a mainstay for almost any content team and they should make buyers aware of and interested in your product. It’s important to update blogs regularly on your site to have organic visibility and attract inbound traffic. Marketing leaders must highlight the problems their products or services can solve and incorporate them into engaging blog posts.
2. SEO Search: SEO search is a prominent channel for B2B marketing. If you want your blogs to actually work, you need to distribute and optimize them for search engines. For better engagement, B2B companies can use brand names as keywords in an effort to catch clicks from those further in the buying cycle looking for business-specific information.
3. Social Media Marketing: Social media marketing is the modern-day billboard. It’s a must-have for any B2B company because 75% of B2B buyers use social media to research potential vendors for purchase decisions. Social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn are the most preferred choices for businesses to find their prospects. Both organic and paid marketing should be in the mix. Social networks allow you to reach and engage prospects where they are active.
4. Whitepapers/ eBooks: E-books are standalone assets containing valuable information. They are often used as a B2B lead generation tool. To make the best use of e-books, make sure you provide the readers with actionable takeaways as well as valuable resources like checklists, tips, and actual guides.
5. Videos: Videos are the fastest and easiest way to get information, be it any topic. Many B2B companies are inheriting video marketing in their marketing strategies because viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video compared to only 10% when reading in a text. This content type can be applied in several of the previous categories mentioned here like blogs and social media but is worth singling out because it is growing so important to B2B strategies.

Who employs B2B marketing?

Any company that sells to other companies falls under the B2B umbrella. B2B companies can be found in every industry, from manufacturing to retail, software-as-a-service (SaaS) subscriptions, security solutions, tools, accessories, office supplies, you name it. The B2B market is the largest of all the markets due to its wide range of applications in several industries.

B2B marketing can be better understood by an example of automobile manufacturing. We all know some of the biggest consumer-facing brands, but in every model of car or truck they produce are dozens of other companies’ products. These include the tires, batteries, and electronics that are essential for the vehicle to operate properly. The manufacturer purchases these products from its various suppliers and then finishes them into the final product. So when you buy a car from one company, you are actually purchasing parts that were created by dozens of other companies from all around the world.

B2B Marketing Strategies

B2B marketing success doesn’t come from broadcasting a product over traditional media such as radio or television. B2B marketing success comes from embedding your company name in the industry and making your product seem like a staple. Here’s a look at the process B2B companies use to stand out in a crowded marketplace:

1. Identify your goals: Before you start with the marketing strategies you need to specify your goals and then work accordingly to achieve them. Take a look at your digital competitive analysis. Where do you need to be in order to pull ahead of your competitors? Is it more leads? More Conversions? Better branding? Identify your goals, note them down, and review them frequently.
2. Identify your target audience: Once you have your goals set, it’s time to identify your target audience. This is a very important step for B2B organizations. B2B products and services are usually marketed to a distinct set of organizations with particular challenges and needs. The more narrowly you can define this audience, the better you will be able to speak to them directly with relevant messaging.
3. Create Assets and Run Campaigns: With a plan in place, it’s time to put it into motion. Follow best practices for each channel you incorporate into your strategy such as hosting informational webinars, setting up booths at popular industry tradeshows, sending out email newsletters positioning your company as the industry expert, maintaining an active, interactive social media presence, attending industry networking events and building buyer relationships.
4. Measure, Tweak, Improve, Repeat: This is the ongoing process that keeps you moving in the right direction. You would want to know which strategies are working and which ideas are failing so that you can make smarter decisions concerning your money and time. You need to tweak the campaigns based on the results and have a flexible approach. The more vigilant you are about consulting analytics and applying your learning’s, the more likely you are to surpass your goals and improve continually. Once you get your flow right, just repeat the process. The result is snowballed digital marketing success.

Conclusion:

B2B marketing is a whole wide concept and requires a lot of strategic planning to get the best results. Hopefully, now you have got a fair bit of understanding about B2B marketing, to get started on your B2B marketing plan.

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Everyone knows the story of Facebook and how it started. The hero of the story is Mark Zuckerberg, and he brought change with his superpowers and skills. That change is known as Facebook. Since 2004, Facebook has changed a lot with time and generation and adopted according to technology, which is why Facebook is so relevant until now. After Facebook, a lot of other social media platforms came such as WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. All these social media platforms can be used for growing and marketing the business.

Talking about digital marketing, Facebook is also used as a means of marketing, and there is nothing wrong in that. Having said that, Facebook is known as one of the cost-effective and cheapest means to market the business and products. But why only Facebook and why not other social media platforms? Yes, nowadays the trend is changing, businesses are using Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube to market and promote their businesses.

But why Facebook won the first hand? Facebook has a huge amount of users as compared to other social media platforms and which is why businesses prefer Facebook over other platforms. Facebook lets you market your business with unlimited means and with the wide audience available you can easily set and target your audience which helps.

Why should you use Facebook for marketing in 2019?

According to facts shown in the Statista website, India now has over 300 million Facebook users which are 100 million more as compared to the United States.

But, how to use Facebook advertisement and channelize the resource in a proper manner is the main concern. There are a lot of things one should keep in mind before starting marketing on Facebook. Here is the list of those things which one should keep in his or her mind before starting a Facebook page.

Creating a Facebook Page

The first step is to create a Facebook page and not a Facebook account. Facebook account is not for businesses as such as it has some demerits. A Facebook account user can only add 5000 friends and if someone wants to see the content, they need to send friend request which is time-consuming. That’s why businesses should consider making a Facebook page, as it doesn’t have any limitations, anyone can see the page, it has more freedom than a Facebook account.

Simple steps to create a Facebook business page

Steps to create a Facebook business page account includes, Select Facebook business page while creating a page and then while selecting a business classification one should click on business or brand. The third step is to add the company’s information such as the name of the brand, category of the page, address and phone number is optional. Upload photos for the Facebook page, it is recommended that the Facebook profile photo should be the logo of the brand. With profile photo, there is a section for uploading a cover photo of the brand which should be used effectively by putting a photo of the employees of the company or any recent accomplishment of the company. Next step is the about section, where you can give some information about the company and its achievements. The second last step is to add a description of the page within one or two sentences. The last and most important step of all is to keep posting on the Facebook page to grab the attention of the audience and to increase the audience on the page.

Let us understand a few more points about why and how one should use a Facebook page?

As said in the above points, Facebook has a wider audience which helps in effective marketing. A wider audience means the marketing has to be planned to work effectively. One must understand that these audiences are of different ages, gender, and locations. To capture such a huge market one need to make proper strategies and set a target audience for whom the marketing should be done and which can affect them.

Various types of Facebook content        

Once you find your audience, the next step is to create content, so that more and more people get attracted towards the page. The content should be such that it helps you to engage and inform the audience. But there is a catch in all of this that the one who creates a successful content should understand how to use status, images, and video as a means for Facebook marketing.

Let’s talk about status first. Status helps you to write a short description, easy and simplest format for updating information about the brand. The next more engaging content you can create is by images. No doubt, images are more engaging as compared to texts. Images are visually pleasing and easy to understand. You can use high-quality photos which can reflect your brand as more exciting. With images, you can also add some short description with that to explain more about the image. Videos are most engaging as compared to both images and statuses. They are easy to understand and are more visually appealing.

After deciding which means to use for content, the next step is to plan the calendar accordingly in the most effective way. For that one need to understand when and what to post, so that you can engage more and more audience within less time. Scheduling posts reduce the efforts and also increase the engaging ratio of the page.

Let’s now discuss something about Facebook ads.

Once you understand your audience and content, the final step is to market the post using Facebook ads. It helps you to reach your target audience. It appears on the news feed of your audience. You can decide your target audience depending upon their age, gender and location which is the most effective way. Depending upon your need, you can decide your budget. Once you decide your budget, you can start your campaign. The best thing about Facebook is that it provides you with analytics of how the advertisement performs. It gives you all the basic information which will help you to focus more on the target audience efficiently.

Facebook polls are the most helpful way to understand the current mindset of the audience. It can be used for any specific event or brand. It is engaging and easy to create at the same time. Facebook groups are a more personalized way of engaging. These groups can be public or private, more specific to a certain type of audience.

These are some of the ways you can use Facebook Marketing, for gaining a wide range of audience.

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Marketing helps to widen the reach of the product. With proper planning and methods, marketing can do wonders. Traditional marketing techniques are hectic. A lot of resources are used in marketing. But with the advancement of technology, there has been a change in the methods of marketing and business. The traditional method of marketing is unpopular. Businesses prefer digital marketing over the traditional method of marketing.

Why is digital marketing so popular and effective?

There are many things to cover in this. But let me first address the fact that digital marketing is less stressful as compared to traditional ways of marketing. Digital marketing helps you to utilize the resources at the fullest. It also helps the business to widen the reach.

With the development of the nation, there were many things that changed with it. Demand for real estate also increased with the rise in the population. The high population demanded new houses, which help them to expand the market. Real estate is a vast topic which includes residential, commercial, industrial and land. It’s difficult to cover the real estate market, as it consists of many areas to market. Focusing on a single area and ignoring others might lead to losses.

The digital market covers all the drawbacks of traditional marketing techniques. The digital market allows real estate to maximize its resources to reach its maximum output.

Social media

Social media allows you to reach various places and reach a wide range of customers. Using social media is a must to succeed in the real estate sector. Digital marketing should be one of the heads of the lineup while starting a real estate business. If used in the right manner digital marketing can do wonders for you. Digital marketing helps you to build a strong image in the market.

Just like visiting card, a website of your business works as a visiting card for your business. Your website must showcase all the work currently going on, what are the projects that have been completed as of now, and what are the other facilities provided by you.

Website in 2019

In 2019, a website helps you to build an image, so make sure that the website of your company represents all your work and accomplishments. It is a good way to target your audience, and it is not easy to provide all the information on a single web page. So, they need to create multiple web pages to provide all the information and the work done by them. The first page or the landing page should be interactive, must have all the interactive pictures of the projects that they have completed till now. The landing page should explain everything about the business and the brand.

Once you are done with creating a website for your business.

The question is What’s next?

The main concern here is that there are a lot of similar websites on the internet just like yours. Nowadays everything is done on the internet, and the majority of the population uses the internet for searching properties online and this is where the word SEO comes into the picture. What SEO does is, it helps the website to organically rank it above all the other websites, whenever someone searches. It helps to improve the ranking, increases traffic as compared to other websites.  It is easier said than done, there is a lot of planning to be done to get it right.

Engaging the potential customer with the help of a creative blog. Blogs and SEO work in parallel lines.

What are the blogs and how they will help will be your question?

Blogs are the creative way of telling information about the upcoming projects, completed projects, awards, information about buying and selling of the property, related to investments, various ways of financing, loans, property information, surroundings and many such topic related to real estate which helps the buyer and anyone who is interested in real estate projects. SEO helps in ranking these blog above others when someone searches anything related to real estate business or buying of a property.

Engaging the potential customer with the help of a creative blog is important. Nowadays, everyone is on social media. It is a great platform to widen your reach. There are a number of social media platforms which can be used such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. In terms of number, India has the most number of Facebook users.

Social Media platforms

Facebook is a great platform to advertise the project. It is one of the cheapest ways to communicate and reach a wider audience. Instagram works in the same way but more through images. A creative way to reach the audience via pictures. Pictures of projects with some information engaging and gaining more audience. With changing times, the traditional blog types are getting lesser views as compared to new microblogs. Twitter is a perfect example where microblogs are used to engage the audience. These microblogs are short and contain small information which is easy to go through and easy to read. Also, it takes less time as compared to traditional blogs.

Advertisements

With all these marketing techniques, you still have to advertise your project. They need to inform their customers, about the ongoing projects or even finished ones.

Facebook is one of the cheapest means to advertise your projects. It helps to target a specific audience. It gives you all the detailed information about the advertisement. It helps you to know where to target and what will you seek from the advertisement.

Google Ads is a paid advertising campaign. If your budget allows and you are ready to be effectively seen whenever someone searches for the property. With the help of Google adds you can increase the reach to a wide range of audience.

Emails are the oldest way of marketing but the most effective one. When you know who your target audience is email is a useful means of marketing. Personalized emails grab a lot of attention and allow you to connect on a personal level. The first thing one should keep in mind while using email is that they should have a strong database.

Following the current trends

Once you know your potential customers, the next step is to engage them through your website content and posts. Following the trend is one of the few things you can do for engaging potential customers. Following the current memes, making a similar post, conducting surveys, contests, sharing daily pieces of information, quizzes, and much of such engaging activities help in grabbing the eyeball of the customers.

The latest trend is creating content on YouTube, which is allowing the users to experience a real-time view of the property and the surrounding via videos. Video making is more useful in terms of engagement ratio as it helps the customer to know in and out of the property. Inspecting the property through video might save a lot of time and helps in faster decision making.

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