The Found Gen

Marketing That Works.

Strategy

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Is Instagram a Good Sales Tool?

Humans use all sorts of tools to help them accomplish tasks more efficiently and effectively. For example, we use hammers to pound nails and screwdrivers to turn screws. Tools are indeed useful when used correctly and for the right purpose. But using a tool without the right strategy or use case is going to make it awfully difficult to accomplish your goal. Case in point? Using a screwdriver to pound a nail isn’t going to work very well (though who here hasn’t tried?). 

When it comes to sales and marketing, we have numerous tools at our disposal, including social media platforms like Instagram. Depending on your goals, the type of business you have and your proficiency using the tool, Instagram can be a highly effective sales tool. Here are some compelling reasons why IG is a good sales tool for many small businesses.

3 Reasons Why Instagram is a Good Sales Tool

  • Reach – Instagram has more than 2 billion monthly active users. That’s a lot of people to potentially see and engage with your content. If you’re looking to expand your reach, grow your customer base and boost sales, IG may have the audience to make it happen.
  • Trust – People buy from brands they trust. Instagram enables direct engagement with your audience and an opportunity to showcase content, testimonials and interactive stories that helps you create a genuine connection with your customers. 
  • Discovery – Instagram is a visual experience. Compelling, eye-catching visuals can help more people discover your brand. If your business benefits from visual storytelling, IG is the place to be.

When IG may not be for You

Instagram works well for many businesses, but will it work for yours? Before diving into the platform, you need to take a moment to assess your goals and commitment to using the platform consistently and correctly. 

Often people run into trouble with Instagram in a few situations. For one, they post so infrequently that it may be better for them not to have an account at all. Here’s what we mean: Imagine a user showing up on your IG page only to find a handful of posts and even fewer followers? That’s likely not going to leave a positive impression. 

Another area that can cause problems is when the business doesn’t take the time to learn how to use the tool effectively. You need to commit to learning the ins and outs of Instagram and focus on creating visually appealing images if you’re going to be successful with the platform. 

Need Help with Your IG Account? Call us at The Found Gen.

If you think Instagram would be the right sales tool for your business but want to learn more about how to effectively add it to your marketing repertoire, or if you need help managing your account so you get the most out of the tool, call us at The Found Gen today. We’re here to help you maximize your marketing efforts so you can grow your business. 

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AI Can’t Build Relationships: Why Content Professionals Are Key to Connecting with Your Audience

We buy from people, not machines. This adage is as true today as it was a hundred years ago, but with artificial intelligence creeping ever more presently into our lives, it can feel challenging to maintain a personal touch as you market your business. Fortunately, there is a solution to this, and, you guessed it, it’s a person.

The Importance of Human-Generated Content in Building Relationships

The rise of AI-generated content has created a buzz among marketing professionals, and like any new technology, there’s a mix of fear, curiosity and hesitation to jump on the bandwagon. 

Despite any potential reservations, however, AI is a bandwagon many business owners are keen to ride. The tool is fast, cost-effective and can deliver a power-up to marketing efforts. 

But it also comes with limitations. A big one is that it lacks empathy, emotion and understanding of human behavior and relationships.

As potential clients go online to search for solutions, they’re looking for authority, expertise and trustworthiness. Google gets this. In fact, it uses these exact criteria as it evaluates its search ranking systems.Recently it added another E: experience. 

Only humans are experienced authorities, and only humans can produce authentic content that resonates with readers. 

Bridging the Divide

The emergence of any new technology has a way of rattling people. Generative AI is no different. As we wade through these waters and learn to coexist in this new environment, we should never lose sight of what marketing is all about – relationship building. As much as we want to lean on technology, it’s not human and never will be. 

To close the deal on your marketing efforts and build lasting relationships that will pay dividends for years to come, turn to professionals who have been doing this for their entire careers (yep, that’s us). 

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The Role of Hashtags in Increasing Engagement on Social Media

Hashtags are an essential aspect of any successful social media strategy. Designed to categorize and track social media content, a hashtag is a set of words, phrases, or numbers following the # symbol. Hashtags can be injected into your social posts, bios, and comments to most major social networks, including LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, and even YouTube. 

When you click on a hashtag, it pulls together all the other social media posts with the same hashtag, generating more content centered around a similar topic. In this sense, a hashtag is like a shortcut to more content that suits your audience’s interests. 

Through this primary function, a hashtag can be used to increase engagement in a number of ways: 

Participate in Larger Conversations 

Hashtags can be used to participate in larger conversations about a trending topic. Let’s say you’re a sporting goods company and you want your posts about the FIFA World Cup to be seen by more people. If you use relevant hashtags like #WorldCup and #FIFAWorldCup and your content is highly relevant to the topic in itself, your posts about the FIFA World Cop will appear in searches and feeds when someone searches or clicks on these hashtags. This is a massive increase in visibility to users who are clearly interested in this topic, and that makes them more likely to engage with your content. 

Make Your Brand Easier to Find

Hashtags make your content much easier to find for anyone interested in that particular topic. Think about the kind of words or phrases someone might use to search for products or services like yours on social media. 

For example, someone who is interested in a healthy new moisturizer might use hashtags like #skincare and #moisturizer to search for a relevant product. If you use these hashtags in your posts about your company’s latest moisturizer, users who are interested in a product just like yours can discover your brand. On that note, you might also consider using branded hashtags so that people who have already heard of your brand can easily find posts about specific topics. 

Distinguish Your Content 

Hashtags allow you to distinguish your social media content by specific topics and themes. After all, a successful social media strategy involves content that stands out. Your posts don’t just cover the same topics and themes as your competitors, right? 

With hashtags, you can narrow down exactly what makes your content different and make it easier for people to discover your content by pursuing related topics and themes. Your competitors’ content might not be accessible through these hashtags, but yours is. And when people see how unique and tasteful your content is, they’re more likely to engage with it. 

To maximize the visibility of each individual social media post, don’t use the same hashtags every time. You want your audience to see that you are putting thought into your content and tailoring your hashtags specifically to each post, so they feel fresh and relevant. 

For more advice on how to use hashtags to boost engagement on social media, contact the team at The Found Gen today. 

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How to Optimize Your Website Content for SEO Without Hiring an Expert

All successful businesses share at least one thing in common: it’s easy to find them on Google. If you want your business to show up when someone in your area searches for products or services like yours, you’re going to have to make your website SEO-friendly. 

There are the basics of SEO, like creating a Google Business Profile and listing your business on relevant directories. To fully maximize your website’s accessibility, you have to show Google that your website is relevant, trustworthy, and user-friendly. 

Here are some fairly easy ways to optimize your small business’s website for SEO:

Leverage User-Generated Content

Your customers probably place a lot of value on reviews and testimonials. Well, so does Google. An SEO-friendly website is rich with reviews and testimonials. If you consistently encourage your customers to leave either form of social proof after making a purchase, you are consistently generating fresh and relevant content for your website. Reviews, testimonials, and frankly any user-generated content significantly enhances your website’s credibility. And when customers trust you, search engines will follow suit. 

Increase Inbound Links

Another great way to gain the trust of searching engines is inbound links. When another website links to yours, it shows Google that this website trusts your website enough to send its own visitors to your site. Each inbound link is like a vote of confidence.

So, how do you get other businesses to link to your website? One popular strategy is forging a partnership with a credible business that offers a complementary product or service to yours. When your partner posts content that relates to your business, they link to your website, and vice versa. Other ways to get credible websites to link to yours include attending and sponsoring local events, applying for local awards, and conducting research that’s highly valuable to your industry. 

Optimize Category Pages

People tend to search for specific products or services, not specific businesses. They might know what they need (e.g. “kitchen remodel”) but they might not know what kind of company can give it to them. Google often responds to these queries with links to product pages, as opposed to the homepages of these businesses. 

For this reason, you should make sure your product pages are SEO-friendly in themselves. Are you using the most important keywords in the product name in description? Are your product pages easy to navigate, with high quality images? 

If you offer products from many different categories, you should definitely optimize your category pages for SEO as well. In addition to relevant headings, make sure your category pages feature a clear product hierarchy, since this simplifies the customer experience and makes your website seem more legitimate. 

Update Content Regularly

Updating existing blog content takes much less time than developing new topics and composing new content. For instance, if you have content that revolves around important statistics, see if those statistics are still up to date. You could potentially add another paragraph to the post to clarify the update. 

Content can also be updated with quotes, additional statistics, and new developments in your industry. This is how countless successful companies continue to rank highly on relevant searches for years and years: They update high-volume content like listicles to account for new technology, new products, etc. 

At this point, it’s probably clear that a cornerstone of an SEO-friendly website is fresh, relevant content. If your website is informative, easy to navigate, and constantly adding fresh and relevant content, then you’ve checked the main boxes for effective SEO. For further guidance about SEO for small businesses, contact the team at The Found Gen today.

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Should You Use AI to Generate Social Media Posts – Including Graphics + Imagery?

Don’t. Just don’t. Here’s why.

If you want to build trust with your audience, you must be authentic and true to your brand. Using artificial intelligence to plug and play content and images on your social media accounts is neither. Audiences will take note. And that’s before we even get into a conversation about copyright issues.

The Double-Edged Sword

AI-generated content including text, graphics and imagery sounds like a dream, and in many ways it is! These tools deliver “creative” work in seconds, which means you don’t have to wait for your coffee buzz to kick in before your brain really amps up. Moreover, experimenting with AI can be fun. There’s a thrill in anticipating what will color your screen after you hit enter on the keyboard.

But fun and games aside, some of the biggest problems with using AI-generated content to market your business have to do with copyright protections and ensuring brand consistency and professionalism. 

In terms of content ownership and copyright protection, U.S. Copyright Laws only protect against human-made creative endeavors. So, if AI creates a sweet logo for your business, no one’s going to be able to stop an up-and-coming competitor from stealing it. Worse yet, who’s to know if AI didn’t steal that logo from someone else? Then, suddenly you will find yourself with a very big problem because, in case you haven’t heard, lawsuits are expensive. 

Quality Control Concerns

Another issue with using AI to generate social media marketing materials is that you run the risk of breaching brand standards. AI tools are machines. They can’t achieve the same level of creativity as your design team or marketing agency, and they can severely miss the mark on nuances required in human interactions. Moreover, they may deliver inconsistent, inaccurate or poor-quality posts. In many ways, generative AI feels too good to be true, and, well, that means it probably is. The best way to balance technology with personality is by adding the human element to your marketing endeavors. We’re here to help. Call us at The Found Gen today.

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Why Your Social Media Strategy Isn’t Working (And How to Fix it For More Engagement)

The success of a social media account is measured through engagement. This represents how frequently people interact with your content through different actions like sharing, commenting, liking, clicking a link, or watching a video. When people engage with your content, it’s usually because it resonates with them in some way. People are more likely to become paid customers when they feel that a brand truly understands them as individuals. 

If people aren’t interacting with your posts, it’s probably because your social media strategy is falling short in at least two areas. One, you aren’t communicating a clear understanding of your audience’s interests, and two, you aren’t taking enough action to solicit engagement. 

With this in mind, here are a few ways to correct these shortcomings and create a social media strategy that works:

Be Social!

People don’t visit social networks to see what they should buy next. They want to see content that makes them laugh, think, or feel validated. If most of your posts are thinly-veiled sales pitches, people are going to be turned off and scroll past them. 

Fostering engagement is more about socializing than selling. Let’s say you’ve just been introduced to a potential customer. Would you immediately launch into a sales pitch? No, because you want them to like you. So, instead of trying to sell something, you’d try to make them laugh, or tell them something they’d find interesting. 

The same concept applies to social media. To be engaging, focus on creating posts that educate and entertain. This will make your brand seem more human, and that’s the kind of brand people want to interact with. 

Engage with Your Followers

A successful social media account is a two-way street. The brand is an active part of the conversation, constantly responding to comments and questions from their audience. When you see the amount of effort the brand devotes to initiating and maintaining meaningful conversations, the high engagement rate makes sense. 

The point is, you can’t expect your audience to engage with your account if you don’t put yourself out there. People like to speak to the human beings behind their favorite brands. Replying to incoming mentions, comments, and direct messages also gives your account more reach. Why? Because people like seeing brands interacting with their audiences. Social networks know this, and their job is giving people what they like to see. 

Create Interactive Content

Another popular tactic for facilitating engagement is through interactive content like polls, quizzes, or trivia. Think about what kind of questions you could ask your audience that would really spark their curiosity and make them want to participate in the conversation. 

To that end, many brands also encourage engagement through contests and giveaways. People have to fill out an entry form to participate in either activity, and that counts as engagement! Besides, people love free stuff. Hosting a contest or a giveaway is a great way to create buzz around your products or services. Just make sure to clearly explain how to enter the contest so customers can easily engage. 

Use Hashtags

Hashtags make it easier for your audience to find social media content containing a specific topic. When you use relevant hashtags in your content, your posts are more likely to seen by social media users who have displayed interested in this topic, making them more likely to engage with your content. 

Generally speaking, hashtags should be short, specific, and reflective of the content of your post. They shouldn’t be generic or broad because that won’t make your content stand out. You may also consider researching trending topics to ensure your hashtags align with your audience’s current interests and concerns. 

All in all, the key to turning your social media strategy around isn’t necessarily being aggressive and posting lots of content. It’s more about presenting yourself as a good-natured human being who genuinely wants to start a conversation with some new friends. 

For more advice on how to boost engagement on social media, contact the team at The Found Gen today.