Boosting a post on social media entails enlisting the services of the concerned platforms to promote your posts to a target audience. With active social media users touching 3.5 billion, it is a crucial part of any business’s online marketing strategy.

The proliferation of content across social media sites has resulted in a decrease in the number of opportunities for brands to interact organically with clients and followers. Paid social media marketing has become necessary.  

1. on Facebook

The largest social media network is used by over 70 million businesses, so it makes sense to harness its reach for your business. Just click on the ‘Boost Post’ towards the right on the bottom of your post. Now, you can choose two kinds of audiences; (a) an audience Facebook will curate for you and (b) an audience created by you based on a range of targeting options like age, gender, location and interests. Next, you will need to decide on a budget, which is based on the time your post will stay boosted.

2. on Twitter

After you have composed your tweet, click on the ‘View Tweet Activity’ and then the ‘Promote Your Tweet’ section of the body. Following this, choose the targeting option and choose your budget, which will decide the amount of engagement and impressions your boosted post will accumulate. However, since Twitter only allows targeting based on location, you may not want to pay to boost your tweet. In that case, you can hire an SEO expert for better engagement.

3. on LinkedIn

An effective marketing platform for B2B companies, LinkedIn presents a range of options to boost a post. For instance, you can opt for its sophisticated sponsored content feature. LinkedIn allows you to keep a track on when users are most active during the day (6 am, 12 pm and 7 pm). You can time your updates accordingly. Another tried-and-tested way is to write posts in the form of questions, drawing answers and responses.

Stiffer competition in the digital marketing space means that you need to be more strategic about your content creation and distribution. For instance, as a small business owner, you now need to know what type of content your audience wants and where they usually consume that content. Ask your SEO consultant to map every piece of content towards a specific goal. We discussed some content distribution ideas for SMBs in an earlier article. Here are some more ideas.

1. Blogging

Blogging continues to be a great tool for lead acquisition. It also helps strengthen your domain authority and makes your website rank higher in organic search results. Depending on the nature of business, different types of blog posts are suitable for different types of businesses. You may want to focus more on how-to articles or comparison articles. Another crucial factor for blogging success is keyword research. You want to target the right keywords for the right audience.

2. Whitepapers

Creating high-value marketing whitepapers is a time-consuming task, but the results are worth the effort. If you can create original research-papers or conduct surveys among your target audience, your content is likely to get immediate attention from your industry peers. More and more websites will use and accredit your content, resulting in a steady flow of relevant traffic to your website for a long period of time.

3. Webinars

If you want to generate leads for your online business fast, webinars is the way to go. Your webinar could be an interview with an industry expert. Or it could be a guide/demonstration on how to use a certain tool. Whatever topic you choose for your webinar, make sure it offers real value to your audience. In order to inform your potential participants or create a buzz around the webinar, consider using email marketing. Have all interested participants register for the webinar and collect their contact information in the process. You can later use those details to run another digital marketing campaign among your potential customers.

Past few years have seen SMBs come a long way in their online marketing endeavors. From not having a website to frequent creation and distribution of content on their own blog and social channels, small business owners seem to have changed the way they used to perceive the power of online marketing.

However, just creating tons of content may not suffice in 2019. To stand out in the crowd of digital marketers, you need a proper plan for content creation and distribution. Every piece of content you create should have a goal. Your SEO expert should help you plan what type of content you should create and where you should distribute them for maximum exposure. Here are two powerful content distribution ideas for SMBs in 2019.

1. Guest posting

As unexciting as it may sound, guest posting is still one of the most cost-effective yet powerful content marketing strategies in 2019. You don’t have to pay them for publishing your content. All you need is to find a popular website in your niche and create high-value content that appeals to their audience. Popular websites get hundreds of guest posting requests, so they might have strict policies for selecting content from third party marketers like you. So study their content and pitch them a topic idea that they’d never want to ignore. Make sure your content has a link to your website. That’s the whole purpose of guest posting – driving highly relevant traffic to your website from a popular website in your niche.

2. Sponsored content

Guest posting is a powerful strategy, but it takes time and effort to secure a guest post in popular sites. If you don’t have the time, use the power of money. You can publish paid posts to popular sites with much less time and effort. When creating a sponsored post, make sure it doesn’t sound overly promotional. Readers will already know they are reading a paid post. They may still like the content and visit your website through your backlink, if your offer enough value in your content.

Without a constant flow of high-quality leads, your business will not survive for long, let alone growing bigger. But even if you know lead generation is important, creating high quality leads for your business is not easy.

Along with professional help from an experience SEO consultant, you’ll need to do digital marketing for effective lead generation. Here are some more tips on how to generate leads for your business.

1. Use A/B testing

In this process, you’ll use software to compare two variants of your web page. The idea is to find out which of the two is more effective in achieving your desired goal. For instance, if you want to collect visitor emails on your home page, you may want to A/B test two versions of your home page to see which one is getting you more leads. That way, you can eliminate any guesswork and employ the most effective version of your home page for your lead generation.

2. Create viral content

One way expedite your lead generation process is by creating viral content. But how will you create viral content? What is the recipe of viral content? Although there is no set formula for it, a recent study conducted by Jonah Berger and Katy Milkman found that viral content usually have three ingredients, a positive message, lots of practical advice and tips and a little dose of emotion. If you can stir all three in the right proportion, creating viral content shouldn’t be too difficult. Not to mention, a piece of viral content can get you lots of high-quality leads.

3. Use social media marketing

It is also possible to generate leads through Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. All you need is to use the right strategy on the right platform. In order to make this strategy work, you should focus on audience interaction rather than simply posting more content pieces. Ask questions to your audience and respond to their queries or feedback as quickly as possible. Keeps the conversation going and before you know it you’ll generate lots of leads from your social marketing efforts.

No matter how good your products or services, they don’t get you real results until people know about your business. Lead generation is a great way to make your business visible to the right prospects.

There are several lead generation strategies and different business need to use a combination of different tactics to successfully generate sales leads. What works for your friend’s business might not work for you. That’s why it’s always a good idea to hire an SEO expert or online marketing consultant for the job. If you are looking for some effective ways to generate leads, here are some ideas.

1. Blogging

What problem does your business solve? You can create a blog post and write how to solve that problem. Your blog posts don’t necessarily need to promote your products or services. In fact, it is always a good idea to offer value to your readers before you start pushing your products to them. So write generic blog posts, offering tips and advice to your target audience. Once you win their trust, you can ask them to submit their name and contact details.

2. Email marketing

Once you’ve collected emails from your blog or website visitors, now you can start an email marketing campaign. The idea is to send them valuable content via email, without asking anything in return. Do this for some time; and your readers will start recognizing your business as a value provider. Later, you can subtly promote your products to them. This will lower their guard and finally they may start buying from you.

3. Landing page optimization

Every page of your website plays a major role in improving your web ranking. But if you don’t have enough time and budget to optimize every page at the moment, start with your landing page. You can hire an SEO expert for the job. Make sure your landing page has an effective CTA button for lead generation.