Paint an Image for your Marketing Activity

An image is worth a thousand words. Image-centric social networks are generally very popular and have an impressive retention rate. These sites focus on the posting and sharing of images and short videos. For a successful social media marketing campaign, it is important to stay up-to-date on trends, and image marketing is one of the biggest trends.

The consumer attention span is ever shrinking. In today’s information age, audiences are flooded with content available at a single touch. This abundance of content makes it harder for good content to cut through the clutter and get noticed, but images capture the attention of consumers. They must be presented with engaging content quickly, or viewers will quickly move on to the next item.

If a social media post has multiple paragraphs of text, there is a chance it will be ignored by people who feel they do not have time to read it. However, images stand a better chance of capturing people’s attention, and therefore, a post with an image has a much better chance of engaging readers just long enough to pique their interest. Once viewers have noticed the image ad, they may then want to learn more and consume the content in more detail.

Here are two examples of Image Marketing:

• Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, and Snapchat are some of the popular image centric social networks which focus on the posting and sharing of images and short videos. These image-centric networks have millions of users and a loyal user base.
• Facebook ads are a great example of image marketing and native marketing at the same time. The ads, or “Suggested Posts,” are seen by Facebook users within their news feed and are presented in a way that is woven in with their friends’ posts and shares. They provide a large image and brief line of text that is visually appealing and engaging, and hopefully well targeted to be of interest to viewers. The result is an ad that really does not look or feel like advertising, which is arguably the best kind of all.

[Original article can be found at https://www.smstudy.com/article/paint-an-image-for-your-marketing-activity]

Why is Formulating Social Media Strategy Important for Business?

“Social media” is an umbrella term that includes web-based software and services that bring users together online and allow them to exchange ideas, discuss issues, communicate with one another, and participate in many other forms of social interaction. With the proliferation of different forms of social media, such as blogs, forums, audio-visual sharing sites, personal networking sites, and professional networking sites, consumers are constantly bombarded with many marketing messages.

Social media refers to all channels where people and customers are able to interact with each other via digital media that are public or accessible to multiple users. There are a number of social media websites, each of which has created its own model for enabling people to communicate with each other. Social media sites use content in various forms to build digital communities in which ideas and content are shared and discussion and comments are encouraged.

It is important to keep in mind, when planning a Social Media Marketing Strategy, that consumers will not always react positively to a company’s updates and content on social platforms. Negative comments about a brand and its products are inevitable even on the company’s own social media platforms.

Some companies will choose to exert control over comments on their own platforms and delete those that they feel reflect poorly on the brand. Other companies may choose to allow the negative comments to remain and respond in an empathetic way by offering an apology and/or a solution to issues. Leaving negative comments online, along with the company’s responses shows that the company is open, honest, and transparent. This also provides an opportunity to turn disgruntled customers into a brand evangelist.

It is also important to understand the distinction between “earned” and “paid” opportunities for “sharing.” For example, building “followers” or “shares” through the development and posting of valuable content is “earned.” Alternatively, several social platforms provide “paid” opportunities for advertising and promoted posts in order to share information. Earned and paid strategies on social media are not mutually exclusive and often the most effective social media strategies employ a combination of both. 

[Original article can be found at https://www.smstudy.com/article/why-is-social-media-important-for-business]

Utilizing User Personas and Use Cases to Design and Develop a Mobile App

User personas depict typical customer profiles. A user persona may include age, gender, occupation, location, relationship status, type of mobile device owned, personality type, and any other features that are relevant for defining customers of mobile apps. It also helps to name user personas so that the team can think of a persona as a real person. Each persona should be based on market research that focuses on identifying specific types of customers who are most likely to use a company’s mobile app. The number of different user personas created and referenced should be manageable. For apps that appeal to a narrow segment of customers, three to five user personas are generally sufficient.

After user personas are defined, developers create user stories for each of the personas. These stories contain an indication of how the personas would use the app, what the personas might seek to do with the app, and the specific features that will enable the personas to effectively perform the tasks that they seek to perform. The objective is to eventually define user requirements by collating all of the user stories.

Mobile content developers use user stories to derive a use case, which is a list of steps that define the interactions between the user and the mobile device. After use cases for all personas are drawn, all use cases are combined in a single diagram to determine the key features that are required in the app.

This method does not determine all features that should be included in an app but only those key features that have been identified as part of the persona and use case development process. There will be a number of features that support the key features and that can be defined during a more detailed planning step undertaken later in the planning process. For example, sharing match results may need the app to be integrated with apps that enable sharing, such as e-mail apps or social media apps. This integration is a supporting feature that can be identified at a later stage.

Utilizing personas and use cases ensures that no key features that are required by the target markets are missed and that such features form the core of the design.

[Original article can be found at https://www.smstudy.com/article/utilizing-user-personas-and-use-cases-to-design-and-develop-a-mobile-app]