When I’m not slinging code for WordPress here at WebDevStudios (WDS) and Maintainn, my wife and I run a small online store where we sell our handmade leather goods. We’ve been at if for just over three years now, and social media drives 70%-80% of our sales. We rank pretty well for some key search terms in our niche, but even with Google’s domination of the search market, it doesn’t send us anywhere near the sales that social media does. That’s not to say you should ignore trying to rank well in search engines, just that you should definitely put some energy into social media, as well.

I’m going to share some of what works well for our shop and hope it can help you get more sales from social media. A lot of this is going to seem obvious once you read it. Most good advice is, but sometimes you just need to hear someone else say it. It’s just like when you ask someone how they lost weight. You already know the answer is that they ate better and exercised. There is no magic method to losing weight. It’s like that with social media, too. The things you need to do are simple, and you probably already have a pretty good idea of what you should be doing. The biggest challenge is sticking with it. Don’t get discouraged if a social media post doesn’t do well. Just keep at it and put in the work. That’s what will set you apart from everyone else.

Be visual.

Social media is a very visual medium. You are competing with not only people in your niche but with every other social media post in your potential customer’s feed. They are seeing memes, family photos, videos, ads, and more. Having great images or video to share will give you an instant advantage over someone else in your niche who’s not taking the time to get great content to share. Everything you do to market your shop starts here. Not only does it help you stand out in your customers’ feeds, it also tells them a lot about what you have to offer with just a quick glance of the product. Modern smart phones can take great pictures; you don’t need an expensive camera. Instead, take time to plan out your shots, develop a style to suit your brand, and make sure you have great lighting. Tell a story with your pictures. Your customers will engage with you more, and you’ll increase your sales.

Be seen.

Even with the great products and photos you still need to make sure your posts get seen. There’s no simple algorithm to this. Sometimes a post will be popular, and other times people won’t notice it at all. Some of this is just random luck.

You have more control over being seen than you might think. You need to consider when you post. Most people are online during the day throughout the week. On nights and weekends, people get away from their computers more. You also need to know your customers and what works for them. Start with posting during the day, Mondays through Fridays. But experiment with posting during other times, too.

For our site, I do most of our stuff during the day, but I like post a couple at night and on weekends, too. With our customers, we pick up a lot of extra sales and engagement this way because not all of our competitors post after normal business hours. You also need to go where your customers are. For us, that’s Instagram and Pinterest, with a little bit of Facebook. Look at where your potential customers spend their time and be active on those social media websites.

Use hashtags.

You also have to hashtag your posts on most social media services, especially Instagram and Twitter. Think of hashtags as adding keywords that your customers might use in a search. Users click on these hashtags and browse similar posts. When they do, this click may lead to your posts on the “Discover” or “Trending” pages related to these hashtags. I can’t stress how important adding those hashtags are. Hashtags let your social media posts be seen by people who aren’t on your feed and increases your potential reach.

Here is an example of what an Instagram page for the hashtag #leatherwork looks like. Using a hashtag like this can land my Instagram post on this page, which is then seen by potential customers.

Pro Tip: Keep a note of hashtags on your phone so that you can just copy and paste them. This will save you tons of time. I have several sets of hashtags for each of our products. Copying and pasting streamlines my efforts. Work smarter, not harder.

Be efficient.

Running a business means that you have lots to get done. While marketing through social media should be a high priority, it does take time. Here are two tips that help me:

Recycle images and content.

When you take photos, create a batch of photos in a single session so you can use them over the next couple of weeks or even months. Reuse and re-purpose images or content you’ve created in the past in new ways.

Schedule in advance.

Take advantage of scheduling social media whenever possible. For example, Twitter and Instagram both allow you to save drafts so you could create several posts, save them, and publish later. But I like to go a step further and queue up posts with a tool like HootSuite. It’s a paid service, but it saves you a lot of time sharing your work on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. At WDS, we currently use Buffer but also recommend Social Web Suite.

If you are a little more tech savvy you could save some money and use a service like IFTTT (If This Then That), which has applets to auto share your posts from one social media service to all the others. I use this personally and for our shop.

Make a plan.

Even if you end up scheduling your posts in advance, you need to also consider how often you post. Like most suggestions, this is going to depend on your customers and the niche you are in. For ours, I post one to two times a day when we are at our most active. Eventually, I’m planning on posting a little bit more frequently. Our audience is hungry for this kind of content and the more we post the more sales we make, but you can’t just spam the feed all day long. It’s a big turn off for me, personally, as a consumer. I want to avoid doing that to our customers.

I suggest picking a social media schedule that you can maintain. Repetition is also key. Your customers will learn your social media schedule, and they’ll be on the lookout for your next post. If you want to test out posting more often, just start with a slight increase and add more posts slowly and test the reaction. If you keep getting positive results, then keep it up. If not, slow down a bit. It’s pretty simple.

You can’t automate engagement. That’s a good thing.

One of the hardest parts about marketing your brand with social media is engaging with your customers, even though it’s very rewarding. There’s no easy way to automate engagement; and even if you could, I wouldn’t recommend it.

We’ve gotten tremendous benefit from talking to our customers through our social media channels. It’s a great way to provide customer support and generate sales leads. People love that they can reach out to us and they’ll get a real person to interact with.

I’ve had chats with our customers about the most random topics. This helps build customers for life. You’ll only get out of social media what you put into it. Don’t be afraid to share your personal side. Our customers love seeing behind-the-scenes stuff, such as our day-to-day life and other non-product related photos.

In our case, we, ourselves, are our brand, but even if you are a big eCommerce brand, make sure to show off the human side of your business. Customers connect with people and stories. Making those personal connections can build life-long fans. You can’t buy that with marketing dollars. You have to earn that. And anyone who’s run a any kind of business for long knows that it’s easier to keep customers than it is to get new ones. Sharing your brand’s journey through social media lets you connect with them on a personal level and grow that relationship over the course of months or even years.

Email marketing still works!

Email marketing has been around forever. It doesn’t seem as sexy as social media. However, it’s still around because it works!

While it’s not social media, I wanted to include it in this article because email marketing drives a lot of sales for us, and we use it to drive our customers to our social media profiles. So if you are on the fence, make sure you have an email list for your shop. Just don’t abuse it. We only send out mailings six-eight times per year. You should do what makes sense for your business, but don’t ignore email marketing or you’ll be missing out on sales.

You don’t have to just sell products with your list. We use it to promote giveaways, social media accounts, highlight work we’ve done, and share content that we put out there on social media or our site. Try it out and see what works for your customers.

I hope this gives you a good starting point for using social media in your digital marketing efforts. If you have any questions or suggestions of things you’ve tried, feel free to leave them in the comments below.

The post Using Social Media Marketing for eCommerce appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Led by an amazing group of organizers, their passion for WordPress runs very deep and it comes out in the way in which their event was presented. I’m extremely proud of every single person on the WordCamp Phoenix organizing team, but especially Raquel Landefeld from a fellow agency, Mode Effect, who held the lead organizer position.  

This was my fourth time attending WordCamp Phoenix, but my first time speaking at it. I was invited to give my talk on “Eat, Blog, Love: How I Stopped Waiting and Started Doing.” I’ve spoken at over 12 camps in my tenure within the WordPress community, but this was only the second time I’ve given this particular talk (my first if you consider that I lost my original slides and had to create new ones for WCPHX).

The talk is centered around how I built my food blog, Dine With Shayda, on the WordPress platform, and how I use simple life tricks I’ve picked up along the way to create compelling content, market myself, and create a consistent flow of motivation to get things done. It’s part marketing, part strategy, part self-help.

For me, this was one of my most well-received presentations, which ended with a group of people hanging around for well after my talk picking my brain. One of the most popular questions asked of me was:

“When you’re starting out, should you focus on a content calendar or schedule for publishing content?”

To be honest, for my blog, I don’t have a content calendar per se. My rule is to focus on consistency, not necessarily quality. In other words, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

My single goal is to create as much content as possible, whether it’s my blog or social media channels, etc. Of course, you want a plan for how to distribute that content once it’s created, but don’t get hung up in trying to write X amount of posts with X amount of words. The minimum content requirement for SEO is 300-500 words. Focus on doing that type of post as many times as you can! Another great question:

“What tools should bloggers use to create and edit content?”

A lot of people assume that you need to invest a lot of money upfront to start anything, that you need the best equipment, like a fancy camera or editing software. Of course, those tools are extremely helpful and once you’ve proven that your content can convert, absolutely make the investment.

But fun fact: I use my iPhone to edit all my photos still, and I’ve upgraded to a Nikon DSLR, but nothing beats my iPhone. My tip is to invest in learning how to create compelling content over buying new toys. Figure out your aesthetic and become an expert at executing that through your content.

This was also a special WordCamp for me because, as a new hire at WebDevStudios and because we work remotely and we don’t always get to meet each other right away upon joining the company, I had the pleasure of meeting Shannon MacMillan and Aubrey Portwood, who are both Arizona residents and involved in the local WordPress community. They’re both two of our amazing developers and it was fun being able to meet some of my team members to help put faces to names, which I will say, is extremely important working in a distributed company!

With over 500 attendees, WordCamp Phoenix was one of the larger camps I have attended, but it never felt that big or overwhelming. The speakers were a nice mix of technical and business. They had workshops which covered plugin development, starting a WooCommerce store, and discovering your unique brand voice.

And if it’s fair to say, my favorite things about the camps are the people. I’ve become quite spoiled because I know how awesome WordCamps are. But if you’ve never attended or have only attended locally, I encourage you to go to more! The people that show up are friends old and new, business partners, vendors, potential hires, and some of the most genuine people you’ll ever meet. Being able to connect digitally through WordPress is amazing, but making time for in-person relationships is key. I like to remind myself that people like to do business with people, so any chance you get to connect with others in your industry on a human level, do it.

Big thanks again to the WordCamp Phoenix team for having us, we really appreciated it. Thank you to Raquel Landefeld, Carol Stambaugh, Betsey Cohen, Matthew Clancy, Justin Tucker, Andrea Self, David Ryan, Leslie Pico, and Corey Jenkins. Thank you to the volunteers who helped run registration, check in speakers, introduce speakers, support the happiness bar, and all the other ways in which you helped make WCPHX flawless. And to the sponsors, without your support, WordCamps wouldn’t be possible and for that, we thank you.

Keep up with where WDS will be next. Visit the Events section of our WDS Gives Back page.

The post Post Event Report: WordCamp Phoenix 2018 appeared first on WebDevStudios.

In creative writing, that means presenting the story in a way that lets the reader infer what the characters are feeling or thinking based on context clues. Rather than simply saying, “Roland never respected Sandra,” a writer might create scenes that include pieces of information like:

• Roland never remembered how to spell Sandra’s name
• Roland always showed up late to their meetings, or outright blew them off
• Roland was distracted while Sandra spoke, checking his phone, not making eye contact, being dismissive of her concerns, or outright ignoring her requests and questions

It allows the reader to fill in the gaps using their own experiences and imagination, which makes for a far more compelling read. It engages the mind and makes the reader an active–albeit invisible–participant in the story.

The way you market yourself, including your site copy, is much the same. You can tell your customers that you’re reliable, that you’re an expert, that you’re the best in the business at whatever it is that you can do…or you can prove it.

So how do you go about using “show; don’t tell,” in your marketing strategy?

Figure out your values.

Make a list of brands and/or individuals you admire.

Break down the qualities that you like most about them (and heck, you can even break down the qualities you don’t like too!).

For me, that list would look something like:

Eat24

What are they? A food delivery company
What I like: Irreverent, funny, engaging, takes customer complaints seriously, responds quickly

CaptainAwkward

What are they? An advice column, started and primarily created by Jennifer Peepas (along with some of her amazing cohorts!)
What I like: Writing tone is often no-nonsense, but extremely compassionate and with bits of humor mixed in, often backed with research and/or will pull in useful supporting information, actionable advice that can apply to a broad series of situations, even if one isn’t specifically in the letter writer’s situation

Helpscout

What are they? An online help desk/support ticket system that also has an amazing blog
What I like: Informative, covers a broad range of subject matter, visually appealing, feels friendly and informal but professional

Takeaways

These share a few qualities:

• A sense of humor: Simply put, they make me laugh–even when covering serious subject matter. There’s a lightness to the delivery, and some levity mixed in that makes reading their content pleasant and engaging.
• Usefulness: All three of these offer either a useful service and/or useful information integrated into their content. There are actionable items that I can apply to my life mixed into their brand.
• Reader oriented: Each of these clearly takes into consideration the needs of their audience, and engages their audience extensively. It’s clear that their audience is at the forefront of their mind when creating content and they place a high priority on taking feedback seriously.

In summary, they all possess shared values: high levels of creativity and entertainment, serving as an actively functional resource to their audience, and taking a collaborative, flexible approach in how they engage with their audience and receive feedback.

If I were to start my own business, I’d integrate those three things into the work I produce; they are qualities I highly value and that I, as a consumer, appreciate.

There are two crucial elements to demonstrating your values.

Your tone

Your brand’s tone says a lot about your values. For example, humor is all about tone–and understanding how your audience will receive that tone in their particular context.

Let’s say that you have two values that could potentially clash and/or create an inconsistency, like wanting to keep your tone lighthearted and humorous and wanting your clients to know you take their feedback seriously. Knowing when to tonally switch from one to the next is crucial to demonstrating those values in a consistent way, without making it seem hypocritical or unclear.

Eat24 does this brilliantly: They use humor consistently in their copy, but they do break from that tone when responding to serious customer concerns/complaints. It demonstrates that their brand operates on the belief that, in certain situations, the value of being customer-oriented takes precedence over humor. Overall, this keeps their brand humorous while also not coming across as dismissive of their customer concerns or complaints. They effectively communicate two values by keeping the tonality flexible for different situations.

Do you want to focus on being highly corporate? Perhaps a more structured, less irreverent tone is a good fit for you. Nurturing? A soft, light touch that invites your audience in, and takes a comforting, gentle tack toward information delivery. Empowering? A tone that encourages your audience to take action, with lots of resources and options for them to make their own decisions.

Your behavior

A key element in demonstrating your brand’s values is taking action to substantiate them.

If your company value is passion–that you’re passionate about what you do–then how do you show that?

Recently, Brad was on a webinar hosted by WP Engine, sharing his advice on how digital agencies can make competitive pitches for new business. He brought up how WebDevStudios demonstrates this value through action with our extensive involvement in the WordPress community. We give a large portion of time back to supporting and contributing to the WordPress community, from what we do with Five for the Future, as well as the meetups our staff have started, spoken at, organized, and our staff wide involvement in WordCamps across the world.

Brad pointed out that by giving our time for free, we actually demonstrate just how invested we are in this work and that it isn’t merely just a paycheck for us. We’re committed to open source ideology and give back to the community that gives so much to us–which is an extremely effective way of demonstrating that value.

If you’re passionate about your business, what are ways for you to demonstrate that (outside of saying, “I’m really excited to take your money!!”)?

If one of your company values is consistency, demonstration is easy (and obvious): Answer emails and phone calls in a timely manner; keep your social media active; do what you say you are going to do.

If one of your company values is transparency, demonstration can look like: Releasing announcements when big changes happen in your company, detailing the how and why for those changes; releasing financial reports and salary information; sharing how (and why) you do specific things inside your business.

If one of your company values is about supporting your local community, demonstration involves: Getting involved with local non-profits; showing your support at local events; utilizing your services to benefit the greater needs of your city or state.

Think about the actions that are associated with the values that you want your business to embody, and then do them. Not only will this drive the message home about what your company is about, but it will build credibility and trust with your clients (and potential clients, too).

Buffer recently did this as well by publicly announcing that they decided to take a break from Snapchat after it was repeatedly taken to task for creating racist, questionable filters. They talk about how “doing the right thing” is one of their core values, and expand in the thoughtful, nuanced post why this choice makes the most sense to them:

But diversity and inclusion are not optional for us—they’re imperative. We want to align ourselves with people and companies working toward the positive change we envision social media making in our world.

We understand fully why users might delete Snapchat, and we support their decision. For those those who wish to stay, we respect your decision as well. At Buffer, we’ll be taking a leave of absence to reflect and determine the right path forward. As always, our decision is not the “right” one—our values are a guide for us but aren’t intended to be prescriptive for others.

This is an excellent example of behavior backing up the values they’ve identified as central to their brand and operation. Buffer has followed through on their proposed values with a proactive move, allowing their business and approach to maintain its integrity and remain flexible in the face of controversy.

The way you speak and what you actually do are just as important as what you say. These are the things that show what your brand’s values are–in action and delivery, not merely in vacuous content. Creating a substantial backing in your strategy and online content (from site copy to social media to content marketing) is the best way to reel your customers in and keep them coming back for more. Let them know who you are through demonstration, and reap rewards.

The post Make Your Company Values Count: Show; Don’t Tell. appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Every business owner knows that cutting costs where you can is a brutal necessity, and while they may want to hire someone to handle it for them, they may not have the funds to do so (or they haven’t made just enough disastrous marketing decisions themselves to find the funds to do so).

Getting started isn’t too difficult, though–this, I promise. I don’t want to discourage you from seeking to hire someone when the time is right; having someone experienced to take this off of your hands is worth the money, entirely (think of how, in the developer community, folks talk about how the costs of development and design are an investment–this is the same thing). That said, if you aren’t ready to hand over the face of your company to a new person, either financially or emotionally (the stress of giving up control!), I’m here to give you a few tips to get started–with what not to do.

Be Too Broad

Yes, of course you want everyone in the world to buy your product, but targeting everyone is going to water down your message. Even if you think everyone would benefit from your product or service, figure out who is going to benefit the most. This is where scenario-izing–and statistics–become extremely useful.

If you’ve done a little bit of research on how to get your marketing going, you’ve probably already heard the term “buyer persona,” which is just a fancy term for a profile of the kind of customer you want. Use the demographic information you already have (Who are your current clients? Who is already interested in your product? Who comes to your website? Who follows through?) to create one buyer persona, and use your aspirational demographic (Who would benefit from your product/service, but hasn’t seemed to catch on yet? Who do you want to snag, but haven’t grasped yet?) to create another.

Here are a couple of resources that can help you jumpstart creating buyer personas for your company:

• The Complete Guide to Developing and Using Buyer Personas
• How to Create Detailed Buyer Personas for Your Business (This one includes a free persona template!)

You’ve heard that cliche about how you can’t please everybody–and it’s true. In fact, by being a little polarizing, creating a niche, and focusing on the people who are your ideal candidates, you’ll guarantee yourself more steady business. If you’re trying to serve everyone, you’ll end up serving no one–and your business will fall to pieces in the process.

…And Too Narrow

That said, there’s probably not only one kind of person in the world who would benefit from your product. Some business owners can get too focused on the primary function of their service. Chris came up with a great analogy for this: If the iPhone was only for making calls (and marketed as such), it never would have been so wildly successful. Instead, it has revolutionized the way we communicate, interact, absorb information, and more.

If you insist that your product is only for one very specific kind of person and purpose, you’re going to miss out on crucial business.

Be Inconsistent

Developing trust is a crucial aspect of marketing and sales. When you are marketing, you’re developing a relationship with your audience, and like any relationship, trust is going to be the foundation on which you build.

Whether it comes to building trust as an individual or building trust as a brand, consistency is vital. Being inconsistent tells your clients that you cannot be relied upon to follow through; your marketing needs to reflect what an upstanding company you are! That means not only in terms of the actual work produced, but in terms of your outward activity and messaging. By having a cohesive approach to your branding and a schedule for whatever updates you send out (be them ads, blog posts, or social media updates), you establish that you are present, engaged, and dependable. Your

Tear Down the Competition

If you want to look for the dark side of marketing, it’s not hard to find; some people like to rely on redefining common industry terminology and set themselves apart by diminishing its value, tearing down their competitors’ legitimacy, or outrightly claiming that their competitors are garbage.

The inclination is easy to fall into–when you work within any industry, you know the players, and you know the kind of work that they do. Every community comes with its own melodramas and gossip, and it can be easy to think, “Why should this person have what I want?” Whether the statements being made are true or not, you have to consider what function they serve–and whether or not they’ll actually get you the business you believe you deserve.

Our relatively small community that thrives on mutual support and admiration, and as a result, these tactics are unquestionably frowned upon–for good reason. This approach is a trespass of one of the well-acknowledged and cherished tenets of the WordPress community–which is that we aim to prop people up, rather than tearing them down.

Competition makes all of us better at our work; our competitors are our motivators, our teachers, and our colleagues. This community is small enough that there are many friendships and collaborations across company lines, and while you may not work together now, you certainly may be in the future. By tearing down your competitor, you’re merely destroying relationships that may aid you–individually or as a company–in the future.

From a customer perspective, this strategy is still a failure; it’s a whole lot like watching a car crash in slow motion–horrifying entertainment that you just can’t turn away from. While sure, your site hits may benefit from the rubbernecking, the primary feeling you’ll be inspiring in your customers is one of mistrust. Many of us have learned that if someone is saying something nasty about someone else to you, they are likely saying the same thing about you to someone else.

Don’t torpedo trust by integrating that into your marketing strategy; let your wonderful work stand on its own merit, and be confident enough to back that up. The race for clients isn’t presidential, and smear campaigns do more harm than good.

These are just a few common mistakes made when people set out to create their strategy (or when they don’t have a strategy at all), and there are certainly more. Creating a strategy for how you present your business to the world doesn’t have to be complicated; all you have to do is use a little bit of empathy and apply the qualities and communication you would use in a one-on-one to a larger scale.

Think about the things that you look for in a brand (reliability, high quality products/service, competence, friendliness, usefulness, excellent communication, etc.). Think about the ways that people connect to you authentically and effectively. Take those things and apply them to your own marketing strategy to, in turn, connect to your customers–and potential customers–in an undeniably powerful way.

The post Simple Marketing Strategy Don’ts appeared first on WebDevStudios.