When it comes to marketing on social media and other online platforms, attention is the name of the game. Arguably, due to the fast-paced nature of social media and content creation, it is hard to make people look where you want them to be. An advertisement or post that stops people from scrolling is a great one. This is the job of a skilled copywriter.
Like the other types of writers, a copywriter’s most powerful weapon is words. However, copywriting is in a different league from other writing fields. While novelists and bloggers can describe something using a thousand words, a copywriter’s job is to use words effectively, even if that means writing an ad using just three words.
Copywriters write materials that persuade their audience to take action–from advertisements to social media posts, to landing pages, and to sales pages. All of these fall within the scope of responsibilities of a copywriter.
A copy is useless if it doesn’t appeal to any human emotion. The core of marketing is to make people understand that there is a need within them to fulfill using a product or a service. Effective copywriting makes people recognize this need (or even manufacture it) through the effective use of words to touch human emotions.
A good diaper advertisement will touch a mother’s desire to give only the best of the best to her child. An advertisement for an online course should appeal to the need for a worker to upskill in an economy where the job market is tight.
When someone logs in to Facebook, a newsfeed filled with funny memes, intriguing news, amazing dance performances, and heartwarming videos is waiting. All of these contents are a competition for the attention of the target audience. The job of a copywriter is to write copy that will make a Facebook user stop scrolling.
Once someone is hooked, it is then the copywriter’s job to make sure they keep reading until the part where the call to action is written. Whether a copy is long or short, it must be attention-grabbing enough to make people show interest.
Targeted ads are a great innovation, but they won’t stand in a sea of inattentive potential customers. This is just one example of why great copy must go hand in hand with the technical side of marketing.
Companies could be paying a fortune for email marketing services but without intriguing and attractive subject lines, customers will never open them. Open rates, click-through rates, and conversion need a persuasive and engaging copy.
Companies no longer have to rely on printing flyers and handing them out on busy streets for marketing. A lot has changed in marketing because of technological advancements, but what didn’t change is the industry’s need for the power of words to engage and persuade. Flyers or emails, they both need some great copy.
Social listening is the process of monitoring and analyzing social media and other online platforms for mentions of your brand, competitors, industry, and other relevant topics. It involves tracking keywords, hashtags, and other indicators to gain insights into what people are saying about your brand and the broader industry.
Social listening goes beyond just monitoring social media channels. It also involves analyzing other online platforms such as blogs, forums, news sites, and review sites to gain a comprehensive understanding of what your audience is saying about your brand and your competitors.
Social listening is essential in digital marketing because it provides brands with valuable insights into their audience's needs, wants, and pain points. By monitoring social media and other online platforms, brands can identify trends, track sentiment, and discover opportunities to engage with their audience.
Social listening helps you understand your audience better by analyzing their conversations, opinions, and behaviors. By understanding what your audience is saying about your brand and your industry, you can create content and marketing campaigns that resonate with them and meet their needs.
Social listening allows you to monitor your brand's online reputation and address any negative feedback or comments. By addressing negative feedback promptly, you can mitigate the damage to your brand and maintain a positive image among your audience.
Social listening helps you identify opportunities to engage with your audience and expand your reach. By monitoring social media and other online platforms, you can discover trends, topics, and conversations that are relevant to your brand and create content and marketing campaigns that align with them.
Social listening allows you to keep tabs on your competitors and gain insights into their marketing strategies. By monitoring their social media channels and online platforms, you can identify their strengths and weaknesses and adjust your marketing strategy accordingly.
First, the right tools must be in your arsenal. Choose the right one based on your budget and the features you need. Next, you have to define keywords and topics relevant to your brand. Include your brand name, industry, competitors, and relevant hashtags. This will help you track the conversations that are most relevant to your brand. Finally, once you start monitoring social media and other online platforms, it's important to analyze your data and extract insights. Use data visualization tools and dashboards to make it easier to understand and act on your data.
In conclusion, social listening is an essential tool for brands looking to connect with their audience and achieve success in digital marketing. With the right tools and strategies, social listening can help you build a stronger brand and engage with your audience on a deeper level.
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Contrary to what most people outside of the marketing bubble think, emails work in selling, informing, and catching the attention of customers. In a world completely enamored by social media, emails still work. How? Well, it takes a bunch of solid practices to end up in people's primary email inboxes and not be tagged as spam. Wanna know how? Read on.
Most of the time, emails appear in the notifications tab of people’s phones, and it’s so easy to wipe them out with a tap. Plus, people get hundreds of emails per day, and they don’t bother to open them thinking it’s just another sales ad.
Only the subject lines of your emails will appear in notification bubbles, so you have one goal: make it controversial or eye-catching enough that people want to open the message. A great copywriter knows just how to do this.
The ideal length of a subject line is only 5 words, otherwise, the excess words get cut off in the notification display. A good practice is to use brackets and parentheses to get the point across better. For example, instead of saying “Get 50% off on our items this Black Friday,” say “[50% OFF] Black Friday Offer.” Both say the same thing but the latter does it more effectively in fewer words.
Ride trends. Make controversial statements. Use reverse psychology. Intrigue people.
The goal of email marketing is to pique people’s attention and sell them something. It’s rare for the objective to be informative, hence, you don’t need to write lengthy blog-post-like emails in the body.
Make use of spaces, don’t be afraid of them. Huge blocks of text turn people off and there is a high chance they will exit upon seeing how much they have to read. Spaces create an illusion that the text is more readable.
Use emojis to convey your ideas and italics and bold to emphasize.
Email marketing software solutions abound, it’s your choice of what features are important in your campaigns. However, if you’re going to focus on just one, focus on the feature that lets you closely monitor your campaigns' performance.
Email campaign metrics will tell you what to stop doing, what to repeat, and what to improve. This feature lets you see the percentage of people in your email list that actually open the message as well as the percentage that opens the links contained within the message.
Finally, good email content is worthless if it ends up in the spam folder or in the promotions tab. Your target is to end up in the primary inboxes of your receivers. To do so, it is important to avoid what email providers consider spam words. It differs based on the provider (e.g. Gmail, Outlook) and the list is updated every year.
A killer copy and fool-proof strategy are what make email campaigns successful. Finally, lots of practice with the help of email campaign metrics.
The cloud is an interesting virtual entity that technology has given birth to. You may not be aware of the workings of cloud technology, but you have surely used it before and you continue to use it now. If you have used Gmail, Dropbox, and streaming services like Netflix, congratulations, you are surrounded by cloud technology.
Simply put, the cloud is a network of remote servers (powerful computers that store, process, and manage data and devices). This network offers various services using the internet. A server could be anywhere in the world, and through the internet, you can access these servers using devices like your phone.
The biggest freedom that cloud technology affords its users is the accessibility of files or services anytime anywhere.
Take a look at Google Drive, an example of a cloud service provider. You can upload a file to Google Drive and access it from whatever device anywhere in the world as long as you log into your Google account. This is possible because Google Drive stores your files on a remote server in a data center which could be anywhere in the world.
Netflix is a cloud-based service, too. You can watch, pause, and continue any movie anywhere any time thanks to the power of the cloud.
One of the biggest uses of the cloud is running applications. If you want to blog, the old way of doing it is to download the WordPress application on your computer, set the configuration on your own, and then publish. Thanks to cloud technology, you can simply visit the site, register, and publish immediately. This is because hosts a pre-configured version available over the internet.
Software as a Service, simply known as SaaS, is a cloud-based software delivery model. SaaS allows apps to be hosted and run by a cloud service provider. Examples of SaaS are Microsoft Office 365 and Google Workspace.
PaaS, or Platform as a Service, on the other hand, is a cloud-based computing platform. PaaS provides a framework for applications to be developed, tested, and deployed. An example is Google App Engine. Developers can create and test applications without having to worry about infrastructure. Startups that don’t have access to resources and are not capable of managing their own It infrastructure can develop their software applications using PaaS.
Finally, backup and disaster recovery benefit greatly from the powers of the cloud. Physical backups can be destroyed or damaged, so it’s a good move for businesses and institutions to store all their data on the cloud. In the vent of natural disasters, data stored on the cloud can easily be recovered and restored.
These are just some of the biggest benefits of mankind, particularly businesses and developers, from cloud technology. It has reshaped the way the world accesses and stores data and applications. At the same time, cloud technology lowered the costs of IT infrastructure.
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It’s amazing to live in a world where a tap on your smartphone can show you the status of your charging electric car or your air conditioning unit and TV even when you are outside running errands. The Internet of Things (IoT) makes this possible.
For a long time, only devices like phones and computers had access to the Internet. However, connectivity eventually became available in regular home appliances and gadgets. Simply speaking, IoT is a network of devices connected to the Internet. Smart homes best illustrate the powers of IoT.
The goal of IoT is to create a seamless system where normal functions that used to need human intervention to happen are made automatic. To make this possible, there are components that the system needs. Take smart homes as an example. IoT devices are classified into two: the general devices and the sensing devices.
The air conditioning unit, water heater, smoke detector, light bulbs, and other appliances in a smart home are general devices. These devices are the main components in data collection and information exchange. These gadgets and appliances are interconnected using wired or wireless connections.
Sensing devices, on the other hand, are responsible for measuring parameters like temperature and humidity (and pretty much every measurable thing you can think of).
The sensing devices and general devices are all connected to one network using a gateway. The information from the sensing devices is sent to the cloud by the gateway through a connection like WiFi. The data sent to the cloud is then analyzed and studied. And according to the data collected, action will be performed by the general devices.
In other industries, there are IoT devices capable of sensing and collecting data and acting on it all on their own. An example is automatic water systems used in farming. When a low moisture level is detected, the irrigation turns on automatically.
IoT has amazing automation powers and industries have been developing a system of their own to cut down working times and improve productivity.
There is smart farming in agriculture, wearable health monitors and telehealth in healthcare, self-driving cars in automotive, traffic management in huge cities, and smart retail. The list goes on.
Despite its amazing range of capabilities, IoT is still in its rudimentary stages. A lot can still be improved on. Self-driving cars used to be a thing of the imagination in the years that preceded the era of the Internet but look at the recent development in smart cars. Imagine what can happen in ten years’ time.
Look back at the recent health crisis brought on by the pandemic. While telehealth had its limits prior to the pandemic, the healthcare industry depended on it to provide health services to immuno-compromised patients, and it was a huge help.
Researchers and developers forecast that soon, IoT will be more widely adapted, accessible, and affordable.
Everyone who had to sit through hours of a foreign language class or did self-study knows how difficult it is to learn a new language. It involves a lot of processes and even unique methods of memorization to learn the basics of a new tongue. The same goes for computers. Yes, computers can understand and generate human language now. Thanks to the technology that is natural language processing (NLP), it is now possible to make a sensible conversation with a computer.
Natural language processing is a technology and a subfield in computer science and AI that focuses on training computers to interpret, understand and generate human language. The goal is to make computers smart so they can carry on conversations as humans do.
Natural language processing is a complex system that can be understood by breaking it down into smaller processes and components. In order to make a computer smart and understand human language, it has to process (this means to learn and understand) text.
One of the ways computers learn a language is through tokenization. This is the process of breaking down a long piece of text (e.g. a sentence or a paragraph) into smaller parts called tokens. Tokens could be phrases, words, and even symbols.
A common method to split text into tokens is by separating them using white space. “I love you,” for example could be broken down into three tokens: “I,” “love,” and “you.”
Another method that plays a huge part in making computers understand how a language works are part-of-speech tagging. In this process, tokens are categorized according to the role they play in a sentence. In the above example, “I” is a pronoun, “love” is a verb, and “you” is another pronoun.
Named entity recognition is the process of identifying entities in a sentence. In the sentence, “South Korea is a cool country,” “South Korea” is recognized as a country.
Sentiment analysis is a bit more complicated than the other tagging processes. This method incorporates an understanding of emotions to analyze the sentiment expressed in a string of text. “This cat is cute,” is tagged as a positive text, or even one that expresses adoration.
These are just some of the methods used to “teach” computers a language, but what is even more amazing is the range of practical uses where NLP is employed.
You have been interacting with a lot of NLP products and you may not be aware. When you type an unfinished query into a Google search bar, Google will finish it for you and offer some suggestions. When you try to overcome language barriers. Google Translate comes in handy. And when you babble about an incoherent command, Alexa or Siri tries to make sense of the command and help you with it. All of these are just some of the cool applications of NLP.
Tech has come this far, and while nothing is sure yet about the future of computers and the Internet, given the rate everything is progressing, everybody is in for an amazing adventure in the coming years.
In the age of advanced communications where immediate response is the norm, one might wonder why businesses still use emails. The rise of social media opened big doors in marketing and it’s been doing pretty well.
Still, email, even though it’s a communication channel that seemingly only the corporate remains to use, proves to be an effective marketing strategy even in 2023. It is responsible for a huge percentage of reach, traffic, and conversions for many businesses.
According to marketing experts, the click-through rate for email marketing channels averages 3.57%. Facebook, on the other hand, has a click-through rate of 0.07%, while Twitter makes 0.03%. The return on investment for every $1 a business spends on email marketing is $42.
These numbers are not here to pit email marketing against other marketing channels like social media. There are different reasons why customers subscribe to an email list and follow brands on Facebook and Instagram. If anything, email marketing, and social media marketing complement each other and boost overall marketing efforts.
Through the help of digital tools, you can divide your audiences into different segments and use this to create personalized and targeted messaging. You cannot do a generic email blast and expect that everybody would be converted. After all, an email list of thousands of names would surely not be concentrated on one interest only. And therefore, it doesn’t make sense to use the same content or strategy to hook them.
With email marketing, you can effectively do A/B testing on multiple personalization strategies to know what works for a particular segment of your audience. Say, you want to split test what has a better click-through rate between subject lines that bear the recipient’s name and ones that don’t, it is possible.
It doesn’t cost much to run an effective email marketing blast. Design-wise, there are cheap email marketing subscriptions with thousands of templates. Production-wise, you just need effective copy from a good copywriter.
Email automation solutions abound which is why it is pretty easy these days to schedule emails and be more efficient in the process. You don’t want to be sending an email to a customer when they are sleeping and run the risk of having them delete their notifications in the morning. This can happen if you have thousands of customers across the globe. Automation can help you segment your audiences according to time zones. The same technology is behind welcome emails that get sent seconds after an audience clicks on the submit button.
With email marketing, you can immediately see if the campaign is effective or not. This helps you in scratching ineffective campaigns and repeating effective practices.
The effectiveness of email marketing is thanks to its more personal nature and at the same time to the hundreds of tech solutions available to businesses. With the rate it’s going, email marketing is here to stay and will likely be even better in the years to come.
This used to be a fun mental exercise, thinking about what you wanted to do and who you wanted to be if you were to be inside a video game. That was the case in the 90s until augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) started making it somewhat possible.
Virtual reality is a technology that allows you to see or be immersed in a virtual world through the use of a headset. The headset is equipped with a head-tracking feature that allows you to see a 360-view of said world. Basically, you are transported to a different world once you wear the headset.
Now, augmented reality works a little differently. Some AR devices use a headset, but instead of playing a different world, it layers digital images in the real world that you see. AR can also be used on devices like smartphones.
If you have used your camera to translate a text written in a different language, you used AR. The same goes for apps that identify logos, constellations, or try-on features on fashion websites. Some industries use AR for training and designing products.
For VR, some of its practical uses heavily relate to its ability to transport people into a world where they could practice something virtually. VR is used in training medical students to decide quickly in tough medical situations.
Technically, VR and AR have practical uses that slash the cost of physically experiencing a situation or handling real equipment.
And of course, one of their most popular uses is in gaming! Think Pokemon Go and all other immersive video games you have gotten your hands on.
Multiple accounts trace the history of Ar and VR to as early as 1838. That was so long ago. It was when Charles Wheatstone invented the stereoscope, a device that uses different images for each eye to form a 3D vision.
This device was further developed and more technologies such as a flight simulator and a wearable device that allowed head-tracking followed it. It was in 1987 that the term virtual reality was first coined. Three years later, augmented reality followed. And in 1991, these technologies were first used in gaming.
With the hundreds of things you’re now capable of doing thanks to these technologies, you might wonder where all of this is headed. The consensus on the forecasts is that these technologies, like others that preceded them, will eventually become more affordable and widely used in normal human activities.
The goal is to strengthen training possibilities and other practical uses of AR and VR. Eventually, it might even be capable of creating a different virtual world based on a series of actions of the user.
All in all, a bright future awaits AR and VR technologies and the world will greatly benefit from further development that is for sure
