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Amanda Strouse

Amanda Strouse

Amanda breathes and bleeds writing and social media. While in college at San Diego State University, she decided to turn her leisurely love affair into a multi-faceted career and, ever since, has been helping business owners increase leads by using a variety of inbound and outbound marketing. She has used several social media platforms since their conception and has ten years of professional writing experience, including three years of experience as an editor.

She is proud to be one of Bloominari’s social media marketing associates and enjoys helping the clients build brand awareness, engaging with the client’s target audience and enhancing the client’s image as an industry expert. Her recipe for effective social media is one part fun, two parts hard work and one part persistence.

In her spare time, Amanda enjoys creative writing, volunteering, going to the beach, visiting new places, watching movies and relaxing with her dogs.

Find Amanda on LinkedIn

Here’s a (sarcastically) bold statement: People love to communicate. 

Here’s another one: People need to communicate with businesses.

Those statements shouldn’t be surprising. So, why do so many businesses make communication difficult and time-consuming?
It’s almost as if these businesses don’t want consumers to reach out to them. 

By 2016, more people were using messaging apps than social media. Every year, fewer and fewer consumers are using a phone to contact a business’s customer service and are instead opting for digital customer service avenues. Companies not following this powerful digital shift are getting left behind.

Remember the Staples® Easy Button™ commercials?

One click of the Easy Button and all the work is magically done!

Yep, we all wish that business tasks were easy. But sometimes we have to roll up our sleeves and do the hard work required. Fortunately, when you hire a marketing agency like Bloominari, we do almost all of the work for you.

Whether you’re currently shopping for a marketing agency or not – the rest of this blog post will help you understand what you need to know and understand about your business and its customers before you hire a marketing team to enhance your efforts.

Why would your company need to hire a marketing agency?

The Industrial Revolution, which began in the 1700s, was a critical turning point for mankind because it allowed businesses to manufacture and produce items faster, cheaper and more efficiently by use of machines.

After reading this, you should find yourself seeking out automation technologies for an “Industrial Revolution” within your own business.

However, instead of helping you find technologies that will increase production of your merchandise, I’m going to educate you on one type of modern computer technology that will improve sales and efficiency while reducing costs and human error.

Your business has a new, fresh website that you love. And that’s great.

(If you’re not in agreement with that last sentence, click here.)

But your business needs more than just a website. Potential customers have to find your website, feel a need for what you’re selling and ultimately trust your business enough to spend their hard-earned money.

However, the first step, getting people to the website, is perhaps the most critical.

Google first announced back in 2015 that mobile searches in 10 countries, including the U.S., officially out-numbered traditional Google searches on desktops. As a result, mobile commerce (called m-commerce) has been a growing force. And businesses, large and small, followed suit.

Now, in the year 2017, having a website that isn’t mobile-friendly means kissing leads and customers goodbye. In order to stay competitive in the current market, businesses need to create user-friendly purchasing journeys and tailor user engagement based on what device is being used. If a certain company doesn’t follow this golden rule, then its competitor will, while taking customers with it.

Not only are people using their smartphones and tablets to browse the Internet, but they’re commonly on apps. In 2015, Yahoo developers put out a report showing that 90 percent of people’s time spent on their mobile device is spent utilizing apps.

While it’s necessary to make sure your company’s website is mobile-friendly, it’s equally important to ask your team if your business could benefit from a mobile app.

Storytelling is marketing

Think about a commercial that you really enjoy or that sticks out in your memory. This brief advertisement told a story, struck an emotional chord within you and captured your interest with such effectiveness that you still remember it. Yes, that’s the goal of advertisements, but it should also be the goal of your marketing content.

Crafting and distributing concise, engaging, convincing and conversational marketing content is a necessary inbound marketing strategy that can boost your business tenfold. This content, whether it’s a case study or a landing page, should make your targeted audience trust that your business understands their needs and will help solve their problems efficiently, leading them to convert. Your audience will read the content, feel understood, click on links and become a lead or customer. That’s the ideal process.

However, this is easier said than done. Professional content marketers, like myself, use various formulas to maximize the likelihood that the content is noticed, digested and utilized to the company’s advantage. Here is a summarized list of some of the most important features to include when writing excellent content that convinces and converts.

You may have heard the term “landing page” from a marketing agency or an employee or maybe even from reading the headline of this blog post.

You know what a website is. But what is a landing page? How does it differ from a website? How is a landing page used?

Definition of a Landing Page:

A landing page is a single web page that is most popularly built to acquire leads through a short online form. In general, a landing page directs the visitor to its single purpose, which is for them to click the main (or only) call-to-action button (CTA), such as “Buy now” or “Signup”. 

Whereas websites are a multitude of pages with various information, media, lead capture forms and call to actions (Learn what a Call-to-Action is), an efficient landing page should just focus on one informational subject and have one call to action (CTA). The goal of a landing page is to get conversions, and landing pages can be stand-alone pages (without navigation to your website) or can be located on your website.

Social media’s focus has been slowly morphing from images to video for a while now, with the uprising of video sharing sites like Vine (RIP) and Snapchat, the decade-long dominance of YouTube and recently, the development of Instagram Stories and Facebook Live.

Not only are video sharing platforms being used, they’re flourishing.

Consumers view videos as a convenient, easy and quick way to get useful information about a product, service, organization or idea.

Therefore, businesses need to understand that videos provide a special type of easily-consumed, detailed content that potential customers increasingly engage with, enjoy, share and use as an educational step in the buying cycle. It is now up to businesses to create captivating videos to help spread their messages and maximize their customer base. Viewers are standing by.

Instagram stories were launched in the beginning of August and have propelled the social media giant to another level: 600 million monthly active users, thanks mostly to its new Instagram Stories feature. Instagram is currently the second-most used social media site in the U.S. and Instagram Stories now have at least 100 million daily users.

Instagram users who never used Snapchat were probably immediately smitten with this new feature. (However, if you use Snapchat, you know that Instagram stole the Stories idea from it.) Either way, Instagram stories are awesome, engaging and it looks like they’re going to stick around.

What are Instagram Stories?

This San Diego marketing agency, Bloominari, is full of die-hard fans of marketing automation software. Always reading about new technology, always researching new tactics, always tinkering with new tools. We use various technologies for (internal and external) business communication and organization because we know and believe in the benefits.

In case you don’t know what I’m talking about: Think back to the last time you filled out a contact form on a website or emailed a business and then immediately got an email confirmation about your inquiry. (Usually the email reads something like, “Thank you for contacting us. Someone will respond to your inquiry shortly.”) That instantaneous email was sent to you via automation software.

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