Interesting Reading: Influencers and Homepage Assets

March has flown by for marketing managers. If you didn't get a chance to see the educational, interesting content we shared over this month, here's your easy catch-up piece! From social media to successful site design, XEN Systems has got you covered for this month's most interesting marketing reading.

Social Growth

Snapchat is a relatively new marketing avenue on the social media spectrum. We've seen businesses take centre stage on Instagram over the past couple of years, but now they need to target one of the most popular and fastest growing apps available today. HubSpot provides a guide on how to grow your Snapchat audience. They point out that most Snapchat followers will find a brand on Snapchat through other social mediums or content like blog posts and video. But don't forget about Snapcodes - QR codes users can scan to follow accounts. Once you've got the followers it's about creating good, engaging content they will want to view. The HubSpot post goes into a lot more detail on this, so if you're just starting a Snapchat campaign or yours isn't working out, check out their tips.

Content Marketing Institute highlights that social shares are not enough to drive engagement this year. Steve Rayson asks these questions about content, which you can use to figure out if you are doing enough to support your content once it's published:

• How many shares did the content get?
• How many people viewed the content?
• How many sites linked to the content?

Most marketing managers would answer zero for the last question. Social sharing is a big part of content marketing, but most people read the headline and don't click on shared content on Facebook, for instance. Marketing managers cannot base the success of a piece of content on how many shares it has, and they will see this in their analytics.

Influencers

HubSpot describes influencer marketing as "developing relationships with influential personalities to promote your brand to the influencer’s audience". Now they are talking about something much smaller: micro-influencer marketing. It's exactly what you're probably thinking; brands partnering with active social media individuals with a relatively smaller following. The focus is on authenticity and visual posts, instead of sponsored ads. As HubSpot explains, Micro-influencers have hyper-engaged audiences. So even though you are marketing to a smaller amount of people than you might be with a traditional influencer, this audience is more likely to respond and become interested. Do this a few times with a few micro-influencers, and you might see a jump in your lead and customer numbers.

Homepage Assets

Neil Patel from Quicksprout has some simple ideas to bump up homepage revenue value. He describes the homepage of a website as the "first impression" (of your brand, service or product) which makes perfect sense. You may have a responsive, visually appealing homepage that draws visitors in, but check out some of these tips to keep those visitors on your site and increase revenue:

• Fast load time is a must (reduce the risk of abandonment)
• Value propositions give a clear definition of what you're offering
• Including a picture of a human being (this is especially great if you're a blogger or entertainer)
• Contact information clear and accessible on the homepage

If these all sound obvious to you, there are a few more tips in Patel's article.

Chatbots

This interview with Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot reveals trends and the importance of new technologies for marketing. In particular, Shah is interested in the way chatbots may be the most important technology over the last few decades. He says, "...the underlying trend that’s the biggest thing we’ve seen in two decades is conversational interfaces. That’s what a chatbot essentially is. It’s allowing you to get around the software using either text or voice." The interview is about 13 minutes (the article contains a youtube embed and a soundlcoud embed, so you can watch/listen however you like) but it is also transcribed. This is a great listen from HubSpot CTO and cofounder Shah. If you were at the 2016 Inbound Conference, you might have heard his keynote.

Inbound Spotlight

All of the articles and sources mentioned in this post were featured on our Facebook, Twitter or Google+ feeds this month, so make sure to check those out for more interesting and helpful marketing posts. Watch out for a new Interesting Reading from XEN Systems at the end of each month.