If you want to grow your business in 2021, you need to understand the relevant trends. This means keeping up with changes to marketing tools, design elements, and technology. Here are tips from the online small business community for keeping up with trends in 2021.
Follow These Packaging Design Trends in 2021
The packaging you use for your products can make a big impact on your branding and customer satisfaction. So what trends are making an impact on the industry in 2021? Katie Lundin explores a few in this Crowdspring post.
Prepare for a Chaotic Digital Media Landscape
The digital media landscape was turned on its head in 2021. And that’s unlikely to change magically in 2021. If you want to make the most of your digital marketing strategy this year, it’s time to embrace chaos. Learn more in this Search Engine Watch post by Adam Ortman.
Consider the Future of Online Visibility
Technology is constantly changing. And that means businesses need to change how they connect with customers online. VR, AR, and other new trends are likely to impact businesses in 2021. Read this UpCity post by David J. Brin for more on these trends.
Grow Your Audience with Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is likely to continue its popularity in 2021. So if you want to expand your reach, you need to consider the best strategies for your brand. This Biz Penguin post by Ivan Widjaya features tips for doing just that. And BizSugar members offered thoughts on the post here.
Learn the Art and Science of Emotional Engagement
No matter how trends change through the years, emotions continue to play a role in marketing. If you want to make your content more impactful in 2021, emotional engagement is a must. Ashley Taylor Anderson elaborates in this Content Marketing Institute post.
Make Innovation Happen in a Time of Need
This year was certainly a time of need for many businesses and consumers. However, difficult situations can sometimes lead to extraordinary innovation. If you’re trying to spur innovation in your company, check out this Startup Professionals Musings post by Martin Zwilling.
Maximize Your Digital Advertising ROI
Digital advertising is likely to continue to play a major role in the business world in 2021. But the trends are likely to change a bit. If you want to maximize your ROI this year, learn the tips in this Small Biz Daily post by Joy Corkery.
Follow This 2021 Marketing Calendar
Your marketing strategy is likely to change throughout the year based on consumer trends and holidays. So you need a calendar to stay on track. In this Social Media Today post, Andrew Hutchinson shares an infographic and insights for small businesses.
Adjust to Social Media Newsfeed Changes
The newsfeed features of many popular social media channels are in a state of flux. And this may dramatically impact business users. But there are ways to adjust. Get tips in this Inspire to Thrive post by Lisa Sicard. Then head over to BizSugar to see what members are saying.
Use These Software Programs for Marketing
New software programs are constantly changing the marketing landscape. If you want to make the most of these tools, you need to stay updated with the new trends and programs. This Pixel Productions post by Hailey Anne includes the top software programs for marketing in 2021.
If you’d like to suggest your favorite small business content to be considered for an upcoming community roundup, please send your news tips to: sbtips@gmail.com.
Social media is a great way to reach your customers. It allows you to build relationships using methods that were simply not available 20 years ago. However, you need the right social media tools to really make the most of the marketing opportunities these platforms provide.
Here, we take a look at some of the most powerful and popular software out there. Keep reading to learn about how to use these social media tools to rise to the top, connect with your customers, and turn engagement into revenue.
Analytics tools
Analytics tools form the foundation of your social media arsenal. They provide the insights you need in order to tailor your campaigns to reach your audience, engage on their terms, and get them to convert on your terms. Of all the social media tools available today, analytics tools provide the most bang for your buck.
1. SocialFox
SocialFox focuses on the platform with the most engaged audiences on the internet: Instagram. With more than a billion monthly active users, your Instagram account is key to your social media marketing strategy, and SocialFox tracks all the metrics you need to succeed.
This user-friendly Instagram analytics tool helps you uncover insights that get results, like the best time of day to post, your followers’ favorite content and even what’s working (and what isn’t) for your competitors.
As one of the leading Instagram analytics tools, it covers all the important metrics in one place, tracks everything in real time and puts your data together into clean, visual reports that make it easy to understand your progress.
2. Keyhole
When you want to expand your social media marketing beyond Instagram, try Keyhole, which also covers analytics for Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
In addition, this software provides a social listening component that tracks your social media mentions so you can stay on top of the consumer sentiment surrounding your company.
It also offers influencer management tools that help you track your campaigns and understand their impact. It monitors hashtag and keyword performance, notifying you of trends in real time, so you can keep perfecting your strategy as you go.
Pricing is à la carte, so you don’t have to purchase any features you aren’t going to use.
All-in-one social media tools
If you are struggling to manage your social media presence on your own, it can be a real challenge to put out daily content that’s always fresh and engaging. And managing growth is a whole race of its own.
It can be difficult to find social media tools that cover all your needs on all your platforms, but the ones listed here are a good start.
3. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is designed to help you get the job done, whether it’s just you managing your social media marketing, or you have a whole team working behind the screens.
Sprout Social helps you with post scheduling so you can just create all your content for the week ahead of time, load it into your calendar, and let the software take care of the rest.
You can also create chatbots for Facebook and Twitter with just a few clicks, filter your messages to zero in on the most important engagement opportunities and create social listening settings so you never have to miss a conversation.
If you’re concerned about all that action with no data, don’t worry. Sprout Social has the analytics tools that support your inquisition no matter how you want to look at the numbers. Analyze how your company is doing as a whole on social media, or break it down by platform, marketing team, audience, and even individual posts.
4. Later
Self-proclaimed to be “the world’s favorite Instagram marketing platform,” Later gives you everything you need for a deep dive into your Instagram analytics, allowing you to schedule your posts and engagement, and find out exactly what’s driving conversion and visits to your site, all from one simple platform.
One of the best things about Later is the fact that it offers tons of resources to help you get your Instagram up and running, build your audience quickly, and start creating the kind of content that helps you reach your goals.
Additionally, the makers of this software are so confident in their ability to help you grow to the point where you’ll inevitably need help managing everything that it offers more free features than any other social media management tool out there.
Hashtag tracking and generation
Trending and branded hashtags are an important element in your social media marketing strategy. It takes special skills to find the right ones, use them properly, and keep up with the rapid changes. Or you can just use a special tool that will help you get the job done without the headache.
5. Hashtagify
Hashtagify has one simple purpose: to help you build a winning hashtag strategy that gets you found. Hashtags are one of the primary ways Instagram users find accounts they are interested in, but it’s more complicated than simply adding #shoes to a post featuring your latest footwear.
Hashtagify will help you find the trending hashtags that are unique enough to avoid getting buried, but common enough that someone is likely to use them in a search. It tracks your hashtags, lets you know how they are performing, and makes recommendations to help you refine your strategy to get discovered.
Ecommerce
If you aren’t selling your products on social media, are you even selling? According to recent research, 90 million Instagram users will click on a shoppable post this month. Some companies are seeing a 20% increase in their revenue because of Instagram shoppable posts. Hop on the social media ecommerce explosion and make use of these social media tools to increase visibility and turn clicks into sales.
6. Curalate
Running an ecommerce business keeps you busy, and social media may be one of the last things on your mind. Curalate concentrates on automation for your ecommerce strategy that saves you time while increasing your bottom line.
Curalate lets you create your posts and publishes them at the time you designate, but it also lets you make the most of two features that are especially important to ecommerce accounts: Stories and carousel posts.
Curalate is also the maker of the first tool that made Instagram posts shoppable, Like2Buy. The team is constantly making improvements to this tool, and its powerful features make it easy for your followers to make that purchase the moment they see something they like.
7. Pixlee
Pixlee helps you find user-generated content and integrate it into your posting library, keeping followers engaged and feeling noticed.
This software helps you cross-publish your content to your website, email, and social media platforms so you have all your bases covered. And its dynamic display feature optimizes what people see based on performance of the post.
Pixlee’s analytics tools keep you up to date on what’s working and what isn’t, and you can customize all your reports to see the metrics that are most important to your business.
8. Squarelovin
If you are working to build real relationships with your customers, Squarelovin is where it’s at. This software lets your followers do the work for you when they create authentic content using your products.
You can use the software to find the content, reach out to thank your fans and get permission to use their posts. You can even make user-generated content shoppable. When your followers show their friends how much they love your products, everyone enjoys greater visibility.
9. Buffer
While Buffer isn’t specifically focused on ecommerce, it offers insights into your business’s performance on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and your Shopify Store, so you always know what your followers are excited about. It offers suggestions for ways to increase your reach, and it’s made with sales teams in mind.
Choose between the Analyze package for the metrics you need in order to boost sales and the Publish package for planning tools that help you stay on top of your posting schedule, or select both tools for a discounted price.
Influencer management
To use an influencer or not to use an influencer? That really is the question for many businesses trying to boost their brand recognition these days. It makes sense, because even though you likely wouldn’t recognize an influencer’s face if you’re over 35, this is the path to stardom among many younger Millennials and those in the Gen Z age range.
The following social media tools can help you master the influencer arm of your social media strategy in no time.
10. HypeAuditor
Choosing the right influencer for your campaign is not just about finding the person with the most followers. You want someone who has enough of an audience overlap with your own brand to make it beneficial. You also want to make sure you use someone who is engaged with their followers.
HypeAuditor is one of the top tools to help you find the right influencers and manage winning campaigns. This tool gives you the important data about your potential partners and helps you evaluate the authenticity of their followers.
You can also use HypeAuditor to track posting and engagement so you always have control over your brand’s image, even when it’s in someone else’s hands.
11. Klear
Klear is geared toward being the bridge between businesses and influencers. It’s a social media tool that influencers can use to track their own performance, but it also enables advertisers to keep tabs on the campaign.
You can use Klear to keep all your communications with your influencer in one place, monitor their posts and engagement, and understand how their activity is affecting your bottom line.
I hope you found today’s post resourceful and will help you tackle your social marketing efforts.
The future doesn’t belong to the smartest person in the room. Nor does it belong to the strongest or the fastest.
The future belongs to the people who focus on what’s in front of them instead of being distracted by everything around them.
This includes not only the work we do, but also the people in our lives. After all, no matter our title, we all have the same job: to be good to the people around us — and this becomes seriously difficult if you’re head is on a swivel.
As someone with ADHD who has a tendency to jump at every ding, ping, and ring, I’ve tried just about every trick in the book. Much has been said of late about binaural beats. I think we also all know by now we need to take more breaks and I can’t stress enough the importance of getting a consistent good night’s sleep.
But if you’re looking to make the switch from easily distracted to highly focused, below are 7 unconventional, yet extremely practical tips that can help you to do just that.
1. Make it hard to not work
Whenever Tim Urban, creator of Wait but Why, needs to get work done, he stands on a step stool, places his phone on a high shelf, and then puts the stool in another room. He does the same with his router if the task he’s working on doesn’t require the internet. His reasoning: The effort it takes to access these distractions is just as unappealing as working — so he works.
According to a study performed by Microsoft in 2015, the average person’s attention span is 8 seconds. The odds are high in 2021 this number will be even lower considering in 2000 it was 12 seconds. If you want to improve your focus, set up an environment that makes not working hard. Putting your biggest distraction of all, in a place that demands effort to retrieve it, is a smart place to start.
Quick but important aside: If your goal is to be more present with your friends and family, follow the same logic, and hide your computer when you’re done working. Lock it up in the trunk of your car or put it under your bed. Out of sight doesn’t automatically mean out of mind — but it helps.
2. Stop doing your to-do list at night
Many people I know do their to-do list before going to bed or first thing in the morning. Then they complain about always working. Don’t make things harder than they need to be. Get clear on what you need to do the next day before you finish your work. It will free up a ton of headspace so you can truly disconnect at night while allowing you to jump straight into your work the next day without wasting your valuable morning brain space.
“I want to get in the zone today!” “I gotta find my flow!” We say these things when we talk about work. But imagine how much your life would improve if you brought that objective into your relationships as well. Planning your next day of work — while you’re still at work — is a simple yet highly underrated way to help you connect with the people that matter most to you.
3. Bring a 5-minute mindset into everything you do
“They say think big, have a compelling vision. I say think small and do something super cool by the end of the day. Most people see excellence as some grand aspiration. Wrong. Dead wrong. Excellence is the next five minutes or nothing at all. It’s the quality of your next five-minute conversation. It’s the quality of your next email. Forget the long-term. Make the next five minutes rock!”
I love this thought from management legend, Tom Peters. It’s one of 3 quotes I have hanging up on my wall in my office. It serves as a constant reminder that focus is indeed life’s true currency.
Make a commitment to write the best email you can in the next 5 minutes.
Make a commitment to listen as hard as you can in the next 5 minutes.
Killian Jornet, a guy who has literally run up the tallest mountains in the world, accredits the 5-minute mindset to part of his success. After all, no matter how much we may not want to do something or continue, we can usually always do it for 5 more minutes.
4. Write out your (short) to-do list on individual notecards
If you want to improve your focus, steal a line from legendary business coach Dan Sullivan and cap your to-do list at 3 tasks each day. It will help you gain clarity on the tasks that truly move your needle forward while weeding out the ones that don’t.
But don’t write them in a notebook or in your phone. Instead, take your time to physically write them out on individual note cards and leave only the one you are working on visible to serve as a reminder to zone in on it.
When you’re done with a task, move the task from your “to-do” pile to your new “done” pile. You’ll feel accomplished at the end of the day. Plus, after a month your large stack of “done” cards will prove that you’re indeed moving forward so you stop beating yourself up for not doing more.
5. Save the worst work task till last
Your ability to step away from work determines the quality of the work you do when you start your day. To make things easier, make sure the last thing you need to do each day prior to winding down is painful. This may sound odd. But if you want to spend more quality time with the people you care about, it seriously helps if you’re dying to finish your work.
Then, to make sure your head isn’t still in the work clouds when you’re supposed to be in family mode, do something outside of your office doors to either shock or soothe your soul. Sitting down to either meditate or do nothing at all is never a bad idea. The same goes for going for a walk in the grass or taking a shower. Everywhere we turn we’re encouraged to have a morning routine to prime ourselves for the work day ahead. It only makes sense to do the same after work to get in the right mindset to play.
6. Put your worries down on paper
Breaking out a gratitude journal is a healthy practice. After all, you’ll never make room for more in your life if you don’t appreciate what you already have. But there’s also value in flipping this practice on its head and starting a worry journal.
Get whatever is distracting you or stressing you out onto a piece of paper. Then steal a line from Melody Wilding, LMSW, and reserve time each day to worry on purpose.
You may find that when it’s time to get back to work you focus better on what’s in front of you instead of getting hung up on the stressful things around you.
7. Imagine it’s the last time you’ll do something
My father-in-law came home from a hike and said something that made the whole room tear up: “Today I had to say goodbye to my favorite mountain.” But instead of seeing this as a sad thing, this realization brought this experience into sharp focus. Five years later, if you were to ask him about that day, he’d be able to tell you about every single detail.
The next time you find yourself procrastinating on something, imagine it’s the last time you’ll have to do it. Pretend it’s the last time you’ll speak to your boss or send an email to an annoying client. Whenever I have to change my son’s diaper, this simple thought not only snaps me back to the present moment. But it helps to turn a mundane task into something memorable as we laugh and play instead of rush and complain.
If we’ve learned anything over the last year, it’s that life can change on a dime — and many of these changes are out of our control. Whether we fight to focus on what’s in front of us instead of worrying about what’s around us, however, is a choice.
It’s not easy to do all the time. But there’s a lot of value in embracing exercises that make it less hard.
Like my friend Rafael Sarandeses said, “Time isn’t our greatest asset, it’s our presence.”
