Category: Marketing & Sales

Against the background of the corona pandemic, revolutionary technologies are gaining new relevance: It has never been more important for companies to create digital experiences and to shift the effect of a physical product demonstration to the digital. This is what makes augmented reality possible – be it via an app, with special glasses, or via a browser. The mechanism behind it: AR software enriches the real world with virtual images and thus increases the user’s scope for action – with great potential for saving time, resources, and costs. In the following, you will find out how you can integrate AR in marketing without high costs.

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As with a private one, the commercial Instagram account of a company or a sole proprietor also needs an attractive Instagram bio. This is not just a small text, but an interplay of different elements.

Continue reading How to Create an Engaging Instagram Bio

Around 500 million people use the story function on Instagram every day. With so many users and content, it’s hard to stand out from the crowd. Even spectacular and carefully planned content does not always turn out to be an eye-catcher. Still, giving up is not a solution – Instagram Stories are too powerful a marketing tool to neglect. To get more attention, marketers, bloggers, and story producers often use stickers. Instagram makes this available free of charge. Alternatively, they can be found and imported from other sources – free of charge or for a small fee.

But it shouldn’t just be about choosing particularly unusual, colorful, or eye-catching stickers. At best, they form a coherent entity with your brand’s aesthetic. You can find out here how to proceed when looking for the right stickers.

Continue reading How to Find the Best Instagram Stickers for your Marketing

A successful marketing report consists of a whole bundle of measures that ideally complement each other perfectly and are optimally coordinated. But which measure brought which result in the end? This question becomes all the more important for a company if it fails to succeed.

So it is not just a matter of putting together a bundle of measures, but also measuring the effect of the whole package. And to determine how much each element ultimately contributed to the overall success. So that you can adjust the screws of your marketing concept in such a way that the greatest possible benefit is achieved with adequate expenditure.

So you always have to keep an eye on your numbers. This is sometimes not that easy if you simply collect the data you receive. Then followers, visitors, leads, and buyers quickly become an opaque jungle of numbers. To have your ROI permanently under control, you have to prepare data and relate them to each other. Here you get the information on how it works.

Continue reading How to Create a Marketing Report

Instagram offers great advertising opportunities for companies – it has become one of the most popular social media channels ever. In 2020, Instagram had 15.6 million daily users in Germany. Experts predict a significant increase in the coming years. Reason enough to take a closer look at the topic is because more and more companies are active on Instagram and advertise their products there. For this to work profitably, the range is crucial. In this article, you can read how you to increase reach on your Instagram with effective measures.

Continue reading How to Increase Your Instagram Reach

If you want to interact with your customers online in the long term, you have to come up with something special. And again and again. Because virtual competition never sleeps. Especially not the ones on social media. People post, comment, and like as much as they can. And that’s what these platforms are for. Don’t miss this activity and use it cleverly for your marketing. One possibility for positive interaction with users is social media sweepstakes. Because if something is available for free, it still attracts participants in the digital age just as it used to with the discount stamps in corner shops.

That’s why many online marketers take advantage of the appeal of sweepstakes. The offers are widespread, but of course not all meet the same quality standards. So that you don’t go to the trouble in vain and your customers aren’t disappointed in the end, we present promising strategies with the competition here.

Continue reading How to Design and Legally Compliant Social Media Sweepstakes

Instagram Stories have become a real hit for the platform since they were first implemented in 2016. As of January 2019, the global daily user count was 500 million.

This is not a wonder. After all, it’s a quick way to engage with users in creative ways. Viewers, on the other hand, don’t need a large attention span; an Insta Story only lasts a few seconds.

In the following text, we explain why you should use Instagram Stories for your online marketing strategy. Also, we suggest you some Insta Story ideas to make your brand more interesting, exciting, and fun for your audience.

Continue reading 10 Ways to Make Your Instagram Stories Stand Out from the Crowd

Give your target planning in sales management a new character. With Objectives and Key Results, or OKR for short, you can overcome what is sometimes the biggest hurdle in a company’s branches – the successful flow of information and coordination between the specialist departments, working groups, and project teams. With OKRs you act flexibly in the constantly changing structures of a modern working world. The Objectives and Key Results method enables companies to concentrate fully on their objectives. Each team member is included in the processes to achieve the goals. Each individual is motivated to contribute. In this blog, we share how to plan your goals with the OKR technique.

Continue reading OKR: How to Plan your Goals Using the OKR Technique

If you want to get even more out of your Instagram presence, the Swipe Up in the stories is a good addition to your marketing strategy on Instagram. With this feature, you can make your stories more thoughtful, which in the next step will lead to more clicks, traffic to your website, and/or sales.

In this post you will find answers to the following questions:

• What is Instagram Swipe Up?
• How do you get the feature and who can use it?
• How to add a link to the Instagram Stories with the swipe-up?
• What alternative options are there for accounts that don’t have 10,000 followers?

What is Instagram Swipe Up?

Instagram’s core concern is to keep users on the platform for as long as possible. As a result, there are few ways to include links to external posts within the app. Most users only have the text box available to share a link. However, some accounts and users can use other options in the form of the swipe-up function.

When a swipe-up link is added to an Insta Story, viewers can tap an arrow at the bottom of their screen or swipe up on the story to view the link. This is marked with a button that says “Swipe Up”. In German, swipe up means “show more”. The corresponding pages open directly in the app.

Who can use Instagram Swipe Up?

To be able to use Swipe Up, however, certain requirements must be met. Not all Instagram users have access to the link feature for their Stories. To use Swipe Up, you have to

• have set up a profile as a business account and
• have over 10,000 followers

or have a verified account. An account with verification enabled can be recognized by the blue tick next to a profile. It means that Instagram has verified that an account is the authentic presence of the public figure, celebrity, or global brand it represents.

Compared to the total number of Instagram users, only a very small proportion have a verified account. However, there are also some ways to implement the link function in the stories without verification. How exactly, we explain below.

How to add a link to Instagram Stories with Swipe Up?

Once you’ve met the criteria that give you access to the Instagram swipe-up feature, the link icon will automatically appear in your stories editor. This is the chain symbol.

Tapping the chain icon will open a window where you can add a link to your story. To do this, click on the “+ Web link” section and paste the URL.

It is important at this point to enter information about brand partnerships, for example when sponsored content is shared. Tagging the business partner adds the flag “Paid partnership with” to the story.

Once all the markings have been correctly made, all that remains is to complete the process by clicking on “Done” or the green tick. Editing or changing the link is only possible as long as the story has not yet been published. After that, no more modifications can be made without deleting the entire story.

There are many different ways to add links to Instagram Stories, including:

• Link Sharing: Sharing insightful articles or promoting a new blog post
• View product: Direct forwarding to products in the app
• Show shop: Possibility to promote the entire range of products

The last two options require Instagram Shopping to be enabled.

What alternatives to Swipe Up are there for accounts that don’t have 10,000 followers or don’t have a verification tick?

In an interview, Instagram representatives confirmed that tests are already being carried out with a new story sticker, which will eventually also be available to smaller accounts or accounts without a tick.

Even if an account is not verified, does not yet have 10,000 followers and does not belong to the test group of story link stickers, a small workaround can be used to insert a link into the Instagram story or elsewhere within the app.

The following options are available:

Story links via IGTV videos

It is possible to insert a clickable link in the IGTV area. If you then share the IGTV video in your story, your followers will get to the link and then to the corresponding page. This isn’t quite as flexible as the swipe-up, but still helpful.

Swipe-Up-Links in Instagram Shop

Another way to generate traffic from Instagram Stories without having 10,000 followers is to add a swipe-up link to an Instagram Shop. To do this, Instagram Shopping must be activated for the relevant account. This is time-consuming at first, but as soon as everything is in place, the shop and individual products can be linked in every Instagram story – regardless of the number of followers.

Poll Stickers in Instagram Stories

This little gadget in the stories does not generate a direct link, but it does allow you to get to know your own followers better and motivate them to interact. The poll sticker can also be used to engage with users who have responded to something. Within the 24 hours that a story is viewable, the paper airplane icon next to the person can be clicked to send them a link to a topic related to the poll.

Links via chat stickers

The Join Chat sticker is a relatively new feature in Instagram Stories. He invites followers to join a group chat for up to 32 people. In contrast to contact via the survey sticker, in this case, participation in the conversation is at the initiative of the user. The disadvantage is that the conversations in the group chat also take place among the users and the conversation has to be moderated.

Sending links via direct messages

This measure to increase the range should only be used in exceptional cases and carefully. A personal relationship must be established with the user before any link is shared. However, once the link is in place, direct messaging is one of the best opportunities for lead generation.

Conclusion

The Instagram Stories swipe-up feature is a powerful tool with many capabilities, helping to increase reach and promote leads and products. You simply add a swipe up via the chain icon in the story editor.

Although Swipe Up is currently only available to high-reach accounts, there are good alternatives for smaller accounts to share links. Based on communications from Instagram, it is expected that a similar tool will be available for all accounts in the not-too-distant future.

Many marketers see being able to empathize well with their target group and/or the mindset of potential customers as the key to sales success. After all, you can only offer user-centricity and tailor-made problem solutions if your company understands its customers.

What really drives your customers, what problems do they have and how can you solve them better? The Empathy Map answers these questions for you. With their help, you illuminate what a customer perceives, what he thinks, and what emotions drive him. In this way, you can make your offer even more valuable for them.

Continue reading How to Use an Empathy Map for Your Marketing