// BLOG
Meet Babbit’s Sandwich & Grill!
September 15, 2022
We love getting the chance to introduce you to new clients, so say hello to Babbit’s Sandwich & Grill!
Established in 2021, this gourmet sandwich shop is located in Pine Brook and creates delicious, savory sandwiches from always fresh and locally sourced ingredients. Each sandwich is made with flair, with Babbit’s having a rotating weekly specials menu that always veers towards the unique and interesting. This is one menu any adventurous eater will enjoy!
But if you’d rather stick to the classic sandwich style, Babbit’s has you covered there as well with a menu of classics that are always available. Breakfast, lunch, or dinner, Babbit’s guarantees you’ll always be satisfied.
Take a look at some of their sandwiches on Instagram!
If you’re ready to find out more about Babbit’s and all the insanely terrific and delicious food they make, check out their Facebook and Instagram for all the latest!
Say Hello To Our Newest Clients!
May 26, 2022
Whenever we begin working with new clients, we love getting the chance to introduce them to all of you! Below you’ll find our two newest—Woodland Pharmacy and Claudia Patterson. We’re so pleased to have you both on board with us!
Woodland Pharmacy
Located in Woodland, California, Woodland Pharmacy is an independent pharmacy that provides a wide range of services from free home delivery, immunizations, medication disposal bin, and much more. They ensure a stress-free experience and smooth process when filling prescriptions while remaining affordable and quick. And you don’t even have to drive to their location to pick up prescriptions, as they do delivery! They also offer vaccinations and have several health resources on their website. Best of all, they have Spanish and Punjabi speakers to serve a broader range of patients.
Visit their Facebook today to learn even more!
Claudia Patterson
Claudia is a real estate agent located in the hub of Morris County and brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise about buying and selling real estate there. She stays on top of things with up-to-date information and can help you with the following:
- Selling your home
- Finding your next home
- Consulting on home staging and home selling tactics
She will offer expert staging advice; provide the latest appraisal data to competitively price your home; broad, robust marketing of your home on all available mediums; and negotiate all milestones so you can move into your next home quickly. She will also find the home that meets your specific requirements if you are a buyer. And when it comes to staging and selling tactics, Claudia can give you a boost by making your home more attractive to any prospective buyer.
Visit her today on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram to learn more!
And if you’d like a helping hand with your business’s social media profiles, reach out to us today for your free consultation!
Reasons You Should be Blogging
January 24, 2022
For years, you’ve heard that your business should have a blog, but you just haven’t had the energy or time to devote to starting one. Now, more than ever, it’s time to take the leap and start blogging. It may seem like a marketing tactic that’s less important than ads or social media, but the truth is that blogging offers several benefits to your business. Here’s why you should be blogging.
Why You Need to Blog
- Blogging increases visitors to your website, draws in new customers, and creates leads. Just take a look at these stats:
- Businesses that blog convert leads 70% more often than businesses without blogs.
- Businesses with blogs have approximately 55% more visitors to their websites. They also have 434% more indexed pages and 97% more inbound links.
- Out of businesses that blog, 43% have landed a customer because of blogging.
- Blogging improves SEO, and SEO is vital in today’s digital marketing world. SEO is what gets you ranked in Google searches and leads people to your website, so if you aren’t taking advantage, you aren’t reaching your website’s full potential. Blogging is fabulous for SEO purposes because you can constantly use new keywords that your potential customers are searching for, including long-tail keywords.
- Blogging equals constant content. Having consistent content coming from your business is how you can get seen and noticed out there in the wild, wild world of digital marketing. Posting blogs on a consistent basis means you have new content to engage your customers on your website and new content you can use for social media marketing. You can turn blogs into everything from posts on Facebook to videos on YouTube, so it’s a win-win all around!
- Blogging builds your reputation as an expert in your industry. Blogging gives you a voice that you can use to let people know that you know exactly what you’re talking about when it comes to your business’s industry. You can use your blog to share tutorials on products, promote items, share how your business works behind the scenes, and more.
- Blogging is one of the cheapest marketing tools available to you. Because your blog goes on your website, which you already have, you aren’t paying anything to have a blog (unless you outsource your blogging to a company like Social Marketing Solutions to save time, and even then, it’s incredibly inexpensive!). Doing it yourself, though, will merely cost you the time it takes to write and post your blogs, and considering the many benefits of blogging, that time you spend on it will be worth it.
Final Thoughts
These are only a handful of the benefits you’ll get from starting a blog for your business; there’s so much more you’ll gain from spending just a bit of time writing once a week or once a month. So, what are you waiting for? If you need help getting started, Social Marketing Solutions is always happy to lend a helping hand. We write and post blogs for a variety of businesses on a range of topics and can incorporate your company’s keywords to boost your SEO. Reach out today with any questions, and we’ll get you started on the blogging path!
It’s That Time of Year Again!
September 28, 2021
Fall is finally here! It’s time for fuzzy sweaters, pumpkin lattes, and, starting next month, holiday marketing! October begins the year-end blitz of holidays that doesn’t end till after January 1st, and once again, we’ll be experiencing the holidays under the lifestyle changes wrought by the pandemic. The question that has followed us from 2020 is how do we factor these changes into our holiday marketing? We’ve gathered a few ideas to get you started!
- Start early. The e-commerce season will begin even earlier this year, so make sure your website is up to par before it does. Last year’s holiday shopping began in October – and usually in place of actual Black Friday in-store sales. And since there are still production and supply chain issues in several areas, it’s advisable to start as early as possible in reaching out to customers old and new.
- Embrace the possibilities of online. Since a lot of holiday shopping will be online again, you might want to consider doing a webroom for products. Essentially, it’s a showroom that’s online where people can look at products from all angles. You may also want to consider incorporating how-to videos, fashion shows, product demonstrations, and more across your website and social media to provide a fully immersive experience.
- Remember email marketing is your friend. Pretty much everyone checks their email routinely and during the holidays people are always seeking the best deals, so sliding into their emails with discounts and special offers will make your business more enticing.
- Social media marketing is more important than ever. Grandview Research estimated that buying from social media brought in around $474 billion in revenue last year. More and more, people are turning to places like Facebook and Instagram for curated recommendations, to find reviews from other customers and more. If you aren’t using social media marketing this holiday season, you’re missing out.
- Take advantage of retargeting. Did you know approximately 96% of people who visit a website leave without purchasing? That’s a lot of people! But if you’re retargeting you can up the number of people who buy from you. For example, if someone leaves their cart abandoned but you have their email you can send a follow-up email reminding them about their cart. Or you can retarget customers by having ads for the products they were looking at show up on their social media. One good way to go about this is with the Facebook pixel.
- Use what you can on Facebook. If your business is one Facebook, you should check out their 2021 holiday marketing guide and find out all the many ways you can take advantage of the platform this holiday season.
- Video is still king. We’ve said it before, but we’ll say it again. If you aren’t using video in your marketing, you’re missing out on opportunities. 90% of online users said video helped them to make purchasing decisions.
The ways people shop continue to change, but there’s plenty you can do to embrace these changes and make your holiday marketing better than ever. From video to creative demonstrations of your product and more, you can be sure you’re getting the most out of your holiday marketing.
Need a helping hand? Reach out to Social Marketing Solutions today and see how we can help!
What’s the Deal with Social Audio?
March 23, 2021
You’ve probably seen or heard news lately about the growing world of social audio – spaces such as Clubhouse or Twitter Spaces or Fireside. But what’s the deal with social audio? How does it work? Is it better than traditional social media? Most of all, should your business be taking advantage? Here’s what you need to know about the new frontier of social media.
What is Social Audio?
For years social media has consisted of text, images, emojis and video. Now audio is being added into the mix. Unlike podcasts which work as a one way street, social audio offers real-time audio that allows listeners to participate in the conversation going on. Since social audio is voice-only there’s also no need to worry about how you look or what’s in the background of wherever you are, making it less stressful for many.
In a recent article, Jeremiah Owyang called it “the “Goldilocks” medium….Text is not enough, and video is too much; social audio is just right. It represents the opportunity for social connection and empathy without the downsides of video. Why is this use case taking off? – humans, stuck at home during quarantine; readily available smartphones and apps; cloud-based technology and easy integration platforms like Agora; the desire for human connection beyond text; and fatigue from too many video conference calls.”
Not to mention, the intimacy of voice makes audio social that much more appealing in our current climate of social distancing and isolation. It makes sense that people would be drawn to it.
Businesses and Social Audio
How can your business take advantage of social audio? One of the easiest ways to start is with podcasting. It may be a one-way street where you talk to your audience, but take a look at some numbers below:
- 37% of people in the U.S. listened to a podcast in the past month
- 63% of people bought something a podcast host promoted on their show
- By 2022, it’s estimated that podcast listening will grow to 132 million people in the U.S. alone
If you aren’t taking advantage of podcasting, you’re missing out on opportunity! How can you get started?
- Choose a topic you’re an expert on, one you know you can deliver.
- Get a good microphone. Simply using the mic on your computer or phone won’t deliver the best sound quality.
- Get editing software such as Audacity and learn how to use it.
- Decide where your podcast will be uploaded. There are several options for this – from Spotify to iTunes and more. Plus, if you video your podcast you can also upload it to Youtube, Facebook, etc.
You can get more info on starting your podcast HERE.
How can you take advantage of social audio that works as a two-way street such as Clubhouse? You can start by exploring the audio rooms available. Visit different conversations to find the ones that are relevant to you and your business interests and participate. Seek to add value with your questions and comments. Next, host your own conversation. Invite others on the app that you may know who would be interested in speaking or being interviewed.
You can also experiment with:
- Branded clubs
- Promoted rooms
- Ads: banners, text, audio
- Sponsored audio influencers
As the future of social audio grows there are other uses to look forward to such as: 1) the addition of text-based features and emoticons; 2) the ability to record selected social audio conversations and publish them like a podcast; 3) conversations being embedded on your website; and more.
Social Audio Sites
While Clubhouse is likely the most known of social audio sites, there are plenty of others out there to experiment with. In fact, Jeremiah Owyang created this list of 34 sites.
- JoinClubhouse
- Twitter Spaces
- Facebook (reportedly)
- Fireside Chat (Mark Cuban)
- Sonar
- Chalk
- Discord
- Locker Room
- Space
- Roadtrip
- Capiche.fm
- Cappuccino
- Stereo
- Soapbox
- Quilt
- Yalla
- Anchor.FM
- GetRiff
- Seventh Ave
- Yac
- Dialup
- Saga
- Swell
- Lizhiinc
- High Fidelity
- Angle
- Tin Can
- Soundn
- MyWave
- TooDeep
- JoinVocal
- FishBowl
- Listen to Blast
- Eternal
The Downsides
Like all social media sites, there are downsides to social audio – the biggest of which is currently a lack of content moderation. Content moderation in audio is far more difficult than it is in text. Clubhouse, in particular, has been used to spread misinformation and racist and misogynistic content. Discord, another popular site, was used to help plan the recent insurrection in DC.
Privacy is another concern. Clubhouse records all conversations in case an investigation of a reported problem is needed. However, they don’t say how long they keep conversations or who is allowed to listen to them. Also on Clubhouse, you can’t delete information other people share about you. When one signs up for Clubhouse, they are required to upload their entire contact database in order to send invites to others. So, even if you haven’t been invited if someone you know who has your contact info has joined Clubhouse and invited others, Clubhouse has your contact info as well.
In Conclusion
It looks like the future is audio and you’ll want to jump on board at some point. Start with something easy like podcasting, then move up to two-way social audio. Just be aware of potential concerns and as always, use social media responsibly!
