Not one, not two, but eight (!) benefits to working with ZDS

Posted On: March  24, 2016 by  ZDS

Trying to develop a strong social campaign can be difficult, even for a company with a strong grasp of the rest of online marketing. By working with ZDS to develop your campaign, however, you can skip the awkward phase where you bleed funds for no gain, sidestep the disastrous posts gone viral and the damage to your brand, and move straight into building your audience, your brand, your bottom line.

benefits to working with zerodownsocial

Here are 8 benefits you stand to gain by working with ZDS on your social marketing campaign:

1) A platform for brand building

Very few approaches give a business quite the potential for brand building as a social marketing campaign in the right hands. Of course, in the wrong hands, social media can spell disaster for your branding; it doesn’t take much to put yourself on the wrong side of certain web communities. That’s why it’s so important to work with an expert team, such as ZDS, to make the most of your social marketing and empower your brand with minimal risk.

ZDS can research your prospects; who they are, what they’re into, what they expect and what they do not from a company offering your products or services. From there, they can develop a social campaign that strengthens your brand and your reach without sacrificing authenticity—threading that needle makes the difference between amazing successes and unmitigated disasters.

2) Market research

Social media isn’t well-organized or neat, but in the right hands it can be a potent tool for market research. Once your presence gets people talking about your brand, your products, your competitors on social media, you can dig deep into those people and see what else they talk about, what else they care about, what communities they participate in and overlap with. It doesn’t take long at all to begin identifying market segments you’d never spot from other angles. PPC and SEO have their role in your online marketing, and they can provide their own unique insights, but they can’t offer everything a ZDS campaign can.

3) Increased traffic

A simple advantage of any well-made social marketing campaign is, of course, increased traffic to your website or store. It can be quite tricky to turn the non-commital, ephemeral contact of social media into hard action, but when you get the knack down and apply the right pressure, the benefits are quite impressive. A ZDS campaign can figure out the right moves, the right content, the right phrasing to get your target audience to take notice and take action.

4) Better traffic

More traffic isn’t enough, especially when it’s coming from social media. Cheap tricks such as vapid clickbait only goes so far towards improving your bottom line and making the ROI of social marketing worthwhile. What you really need, and what really separates and expert campaign from an amateurish one, is the quality of that traffic.

A ZDS campaign is tailored to bring in primed and ready prospects, pre-qualified leads most likely to take action once they reach your site. A million page views and a single purchase isn’t worth your time or money—you need experts that know how to cull that million page views down to 1000, all taking action.

5) Agility for response

Once you’re established thoroughly on social media with your target audience, you’re in position to react with amazing agility to anything that arises in your industry. A bad review goes out? You can respond. A new opportunity arises? You can capitalize.

This isn’t something you can do without laying the proper groundwork; the only way to make social media work quickly for you, is to take your time on the front end. This is something a ZDS campaign can do for you, handing you a powerful tool for the future.

6) Word-of-mouth

When you reach out on social media and make some noise, you’re going to get people thinking about you while they’re on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. And when that happens, they’re going to talk about you with their friends, followers, groups. You can immensely increase the amount of talking about you going on in the world with a good social campaign

Of course, whether this is a good thing or a bad thing depends on what everyone has to say. If you’ve cultivated a positive reputation and a strong brand, it’s going to be an excellent thing. If no one has anything nice to say about you, it might be better to lay low and depend on low-information prospects—that’s hardly a strategy with an eye to the future, however.

7) Insulation from errors

When you leave your social accounts to amateurs, really terrible things can happen in the blink of an eye. You don’t want some passionate intern dragging your brand into a red-button issue because they posted something inflammatory on the company Facebook page. Even if you leave matters in the hands of experienced professionals, mistakes can be made in the heat of the moment—just look at the myriad brands that have accidentally attempted promotion on hashtags for national tragedies, and other social media disasters.

Getting experts to handle your social media on your behalf keeps all of this far, far less likely to occur. They know the mistakes, the slip ups, the disasters in waiting. And if by chance something does go wrong, plausible deniability certainly has value in and of itself.

8) Improved SEO

Social media is where sharebait thrives best. That means that if you leverage it properly, it can become an incredibly potent engine generating natural backlink profiles in perpetuity—no tricks, no deception, no Google updates destroying your search rankings. Just pure, efficient backlinks. Who doesn’t want more and better SEO for their site?

Final thoughts

This is only the tip of the iceberg for what a good social campaign can do for your company; utilized properly, a social campaign can redefine a brand and drive a middling company into the upper echelon of their industry. If you’ve ever wanted to be a kingmaker, a leading authority within your industry, social media is a route to that goal. It’s all a matter of how well you do it.




7 Ways a ZDS Campaign Will Improve Your Bottom Line

Posted On: February 24, 2016 by  ZDS

When you look at your options for developing your marketing game, social media probably sits at the top of many modern lists. Few avenues offer the unique blend of branding opportunity, communication opportunity, research opportunity, and more that you can achieve with a good social campaign. That’s why it’s important, if you’re considering a campaign with ZDS, to fully understand all those potential benefits. Here are just seven of the ways your bottom line can improve under the influence of a ZDS campaign:

 7 Ways a ZDS Campaign Will Improve Your Bottom Line

More traffic

The simplest benefit of any marketing campaign is, of course, the increased traffic any worthwhile campaign will generate. With a savvy approach to social marketing, you’ll see quite a few visits coming in from followers, friends of followers clicking through retweets and likes, etc., etc. On LinkedIn or Facebook, cultivating a presence in groups can also generate traffic, just from curiosity. Of course, this all assumes a professional quality social campaign from ZDS—amateurish campaigning can and will result in zero traffic and a bunch of wasted effort. It’s also important to understand that more traffic isn’t necessarily worth your time, if it’s bad traffic clogging up your sales team with bad leads. Which leads us to…

Better traffic

A ZDS campaign can not only improve the total traffic your site sees, it can generate better traffic than you’ve previously seen inbound. That means buyers who are prepped and ready to act, or who are in the right mindset to be caught in an inbound marketing funnel and taken through the process necessary to turn them into qualified leads. When you improve your traffic in this way, you’re naturally going to make more money; each minute a member of your sales time spends trying to close deals, each page with a sales pitch, is going to result in more and better sales. That’s value any business can benefit from.

Improved branding

A good social campaign offers nearly unparalleled potential to develop your brand. Of course, for the same reasons, a poorly managed social campaign can just as easily muddle your brand with inappropriate messaging and incoherent imagery, or damage it with out-of-touch comments, obnoxious shilling, etc. The potential to cultivate your brand to the highest level of customer appreciation can’t be underestimated, nor can the risk—a strong argument for leaving social media to experts, however simple it may seem on the surface. You don’t want to become another company widely derided for jumping in on tragedy-related hashtags, or that allowed interns to make bigoted, sexual, or otherwise offensive comments on the official company account.

Agile response to breaking news

No press release can move quite as fast as word-of-mouth surging along the major social networks. For this reason, a strong social media presence gives you a powerful tool for reacting agilely to developments in your company, your industry, your competition, or the world at large. If a bad rumor about your company goes viral, do you have the means to get your side of the story out where it belongs in a timely manner? If an opportunity arises due to a breaking news story, do you have the tools necessary to turn that opportunity into profit before your competitors do? With the help of ZDS, companies can position themselves for the agile responses that let top-notch businesses thrive.

Spur word-of-mouth

When you get involved in a community, that community starts to talk about you where they otherwise wouldn’t. So long as you’ve taken the steps necessary to make sure people have a positive impression of your brand, spurring more conversation is a great thing for your marketing. You don’t even have to shill your products or services directly to reap the benefits on your bottom line; just offering value and convincing people you’re worth talking about can do much of the hard work for you. And of course, once people start talking, you can start listening, leading to…

Market research

The opportunity to learn about your prospects and customers through social media arises only when people are talking about what you’re offering. While you might gain some slight insights into general purchasing habits around your industry otherwise, to get real in-depth information, you need to start a conversation you can listen to. Once that happens, you can identify market segments you never knew existed, refine your marketing materials to better appeal to the interests of your key customer demographics, fix perceived problems with your image or products, etc., etc. The possibilities are endless, if you have the tools in place to take advantage.

SEO synergy

Good social marketing spreads itself wide and far, well beyond the boundaries of your pool of followers and ‘likes’. That means that a good piece of content shared over Twitter might go viral, showing up in countless locations across the internet—and many, if not all, will be linking back to your site, generating the wholly natural backlink profile every business craves. Even if you’re more focused on the SEO side of marketing, even if social media is only ever an afterthought, this synergy with other marketing approaches gives a social campaign with ZDS massive value to any business interested in thriving on the internet.

Parting thoughts

These are hardly the only benefits of a ZDS campaign—especially if you’re savvy in your interactions and think outside of the box in your social dealings. Forward-thinking companies have leveraged a social presence to offer customer support, build long-term relationships with other businesses, etc., etc. It all depends on how far you want to go…but you have to get started without stepping in any pitfalls, first.



9 Social Media Mistakes You Can’t Afford To Make

[Posted on January 24th, 2015 by Carly Bevins]

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9 Social Media Mistakes You Can’t Afford To Make

Social media offers countless opportunities for the savvy business, whether they operate primarily online or off, with consumers or other businesses—but there are just as many traps as there are chances to succeed in the world of social networking. To make sure your business doesn’t put itself in a world of PR hurt, be absolutely certain to avoid these nine social media mistakes no business can afford to make:

1. Jumping into a trend blind

Few mistakes can become viral PR disasters quite as damaging as an ill-timed tweet or inappropriate like at a bad time. If you’re operating on Twitter, you don’t want to be jumping onto trending hashtags until you’re certain you know what they’re for—a failure to do a bare minimum of research has landed countless big-name brands in hot water, associating themselves with tragedies, political extremists, and worse. Don’t assume anything from the words in a trend or from a surge in interest that seems related to what your company does—investigate, and see why it’s getting so much attention, and whether you want to be associated.

2. Letting an intern shape your brand

Leaving your social media accounts to amateurs is a serious mistake—whether those amateurs are interns or just marketers uninitiated in social media, the traps remain the same. Social media has a tendency to provoke poorly thought-out, gut-reaction messages from even the savviest of individuals, which your non-experts most certainly are not. You don’t have to look far to see examples of major corporate Facebook and Twitter accounts being hijacked for political, religious, etc. messages not endorsed by the company. Maybe your image includes voicing your opinion on important matters, but it should be a decision by the company, not an intern’s momentary impulse.

3. Blatant shilling

When your social media accounts are blatantly for the purpose of making you money and not much else, no one is going to care. In fact, they might just form a more negative opinion of your company, for invading the social space with even more unwanted, unwarranted noise. No one cares what a company has to say, if all its doing is repeating its marketing messages in social form.

4. Muddying your branding

It’s easy to get too relaxed on social media and accidentally muddy your brand, introducing elements that clash with the image you intend to present. If you’re going for serious and professional, you don’t want to be dropping in funny cat pictures, even if they grab attention. If you’re going for casual and entertaining, you probably don’t want to be linking over to super dry white papers. Think about your brand, as you’ve developed it, and stay on message.

5. Damaging your authority

When you say something really stupid on social media, everyone is going to notice—much more so than if you say something wise and savvy. There’s more for audiences to gnaw on when a company gets something very wrong, so it’s quite easy for authority-damaging misquotes and mistakes to go viral. Control your message, and never say anything you’re not certain to be true and accurate over social media.

6. Engaging without knowing the lingo

Before you get to involved in social media, take the time to learn what terminology people are using, in the social network at large and in the relevant communities within that network. Sometimes specialized language shows up on Twitter or Facebook that you won’t see elsewhere, and acting without a firm knowledge of that language puts a barrier between interested users and your company—a barrier you can’t afford to build.

7. Moving too fast

When you act too quickly in social media, you make more mistakes, you may annoy your audience, and you lose the ‘organic’ appeal most companies prefer to leverage on social networks. Take your time and pace your output, even if you have a huge backlog of content—it’s not going anywhere, and posting it all as fast as you can won’t help you in the long run.

8. Making too much noise

Related to going to fast, you want to avoid saying a bunch of nonsense just to be active. A poor signal-to-noise ratio hurts the value of your social media accounts, as customers and prospects learn to tune out everything you say. When you post to social media, your posts should have something worth reading—all you do by shouting ‘Hey, we’re here!’ once per day is devalue your own social presence.

9. Offering too little value

The ultimate secret of using social media to your company’s advantage lay in displaying the value you can offer customers. When your posts don’t offer anything, people don’t expect your company’s products and services to be valuable either. Make sure to stuff your content full of real value, however, and people will begin to wonder—if they’re giving this much away on Twitter and Facebook, just how valuable are the things they expect us to pay for? That curiosity sells your company better than anything else, without any need for more straightforward sales approaches.

Any one or combination of these mistakes can spell dire results for your company, damaging your image with customers, prospects, and business partners. For this reason, it’s best to either take your time learning the waters of social media before acting, or engaging the services of an experienced social media/social marketing team like ZDS—you’ll get better results with far less risk of your social outings backfiring. Regardless of which route you choose, the most important point is taking social media seriously and putting as much control and effort into it as you would any other marketing channel.



8 Ways a ZDS Campaign Can Improve Your Bottom Line

Posted on December 24 , 2015 by  Carly Bevins

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Looking to improve your marketing return on investment, drive traffic, enhance the way customers view your brand, or otherwise enhance your bottom line? A Zero Down Social campaign can do all this more, given the right time and tools.

8 Ways a ZDS Campaign Can Improve Your Bottom Line

If you’re curious about what you stand to gain from a social marketing campaign by Zero Down Social, sit back and read on, as we cover eight ways we can cut your costs, improve your leads, and refine your marketing.

#1  Lead generation

A solid social marketing campaign, above all else, generates more and better leads for your company to capitalize upon. It’s not enough to make noise on social media and get attention to your website—you need attention you can profit from, attention from market segments which can be turned into paying customers with relative ease. A well-built social marketing campaign from ZDS will help you achieve this, producing qualified leads in substantial numbers. Why inundate your sales team with useless traffic, when you could send them the best, most profitable prospects possible instead?

#2  Driving buzz

Want people talking about your brand, your product, your big announcement on social media? Then you need to remind them that you’re there. All the positive thoughts and goodwill from customers you’ve no doubt developed with your products, customer service, and relationship management does you no good if those customers aren’t telling their friends, family, and acquaintances about you. Develop a social media campaign, remind those customers that you exist, give them a reason to talk about you—set off the word-of-mouth marketing bomb!

#3  Research tool

When you make noise on social media, you get people talking about your company, which is useful in and of itself, but you gain another benefit as well—insight into who cares about your product. Insight into how they use it, what they complain about, who they tell about it. This is information which a savvy company can leverage to develop better marketing materials, better products, and ultimately, derive better profits.

Very few avenues allow you to explore market segmentation to a better degree than a complete social campaign paired with data collection tools—you’ll spot groupings in your consumer base you’d never have imagined even existed, and from there, learn new ways to sell.

#4  Cost-effective marketing

A witty Pay-Per-Click ad doesn’t propagate itself. SEO takes constant hard work, potentially reset by the whim of Google every so often. But a strong social marketing campaign can take off out of control, multiplying your ROI many times over—you just need to strike the right chord at the right time. No other marketing method offers this level of potential return, and nothing endures quite so well as a reputation painstakingly developed across social media.

#5  Branding

How you communicate on social media tells a certain segment of your potential consumer base a lot about you. That’s why it’s imperative that you get it right—that every graphic, article, video, tweet, like, favorite, and follow fits your brand, communicating the image you want to communicate. A less controlled, constructed brand doesn’t offer the same benefits; at worst, you might end up creating a contradictory, incoherent brand, driving away potential customers who feel you’re not right for their needs, goals, or simple preferences. Social media is an excellent way to shape your branding, so make sure you’re doing it right, and talk with some experts.

#6  Authority

You don’t have to know everything about everything to establish authority relevant to your product and reap the benefits; you need to know a lot about one thing in particular, and display that value again and again to the people paying attention. In doing so, you establish firmly in the minds of your prospects that when you offer value, it’s value worth having—which means that when you try to sell something, it’s probably worth buying. That sort of authority is hard to come by, and its potential to build authority makes a social campaign extremely valuable to any company.

#7  SEO

Pen some good content with a link back to your site, share it as part of your social media campaign, and you might just rake in the backlinks. The sort of natural backlink profile Google and other search engines absolutely adore comes from exactly this sort of sharing process, this non-scripted propagation of your link by interested people. You don’t just want backlinks painstakingly sculpted, from a carefully cultivated farm of sites—you want real people sharing real links back to you. Social marketing can get you exactly that.

#8  Agile responses

When something goes wrong, and people start talking about it, having a public venue to make your statement in goes a long way in mitigating problems. You also gain the ability to capitalize quickly on opportunities, hopping on relevant trends and riding them for traffic and attention. Just be careful to never react blindly to a situation—that’s how you end up with major brands tweeting on hashtags related to tragedies and inviting PR nightmares down upon their brand. Take the time to do your research—a few extra minutes is all it takes to avoid the worst disasters.

So there you have it—eight ways a Zero Down Social campaign can drive your marketing to the next level and push your bottom line to impressive new heights. You’ll struggle to find many marketing venues as flexible, universally applicable, and easy to integrate into your ongoing efforts as a social marketing campaign. So take fullest advantage, and contact ZDS today to find out what your first step should be.




10 benefits you’re likely to see from a well-executed social marketing campaign

[Posted on November 23rd, 2015 by Carly Bevins]

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Interested in how Zero Down Social will enhance your marketing efforts and improve your bottom line? It’s one thing to understand that social marketing can work wonders for your business, and seek to harness the power of social media for yourself; it’s another to understand what specific benefits you can anticipate, so you can make an informed decision to work with the best.

Today we’ll explain 10 benefits you’re likely to see from a well-executed social marketing campaign. We’ll talk what will happen, why, how it will benefit you, and what other boons you might indirectly obtain as a result of each benefit.

#1 Lead generation

The simplest, most straightforward benefit of a Zero Down Social campaign is, of course, effective lead generation. Not just traffic generation—traffic generation alone doesn’t produce a worthwhile ROI, even if you have the greatest sales funnel in the world. No, with a well-tailored social marketing campaign, you can be sure that you’ll get your content in front of eyes that care about it, tailored in a way that appeals to the demographics, lifestyles, and other segments which matter for peak marketing efficacy. You’ll get leads you can close, instead of a flood of unqualified, uninterested window shoppers.

#2 Branding

A thorough social marketing campaign can work wonders for presenting the world with the a consistent, explicit image of your company. How you interact with the public via social media will greatly inform how you company is perceived—if you want to establish your company as a sophisticated provider of premium products or a casual, friendly business with a sense of humor, as a company which takes guarantees very seriously or as a company which is always willing to engage the public, social marketing is the way to do it. You can easily associate a tone, a logo, key phrases, and other materials with your brand, your company, the way you do business.

#3 Research

Once you get a buzz going about your company on social media, you have an excellent new opportunity—the opportunity to learn about the people buzzing. Once you get the conversation started, you can quite easily ‘listen in’ on the discussions people have about your business, to find out what exactly they’re saying about you when they talk to their friends and family. You can also investigate individuals to develop a better portrait of what your buyers look like, what your detractors look like, and what fence-sitters look like—and from there, you’re ready to really punch your overall marketing strategy up a notch.

#4 Agile communications

When you need to communicate with the public about some issue or product this week, you issue a press release. When you need to get the word out now, a strong social marketing campaign gives you the tools you need to do so. Agility in your reaction to industry news, bad press, and other events can make or break a company—especially in those situations where your reputation might be on the line. Develop a network of people primed to listen to you on social media, and you can spread messages far faster than you otherwise would.

#5 Happier customers

Customers like a company they can talk to. They like a company that pops in when they complain about something to a friend and offer a solution, or who answers their weird questions when they get a tweet or a Facebook message. Think of a strong social media campaign as a form of low-level customer support—you probably don’t want to drill down into serious issues over Facebook, but you can put out a lot of fires before they start if you’re active enough. And customers will appreciate it.

#6 Platform for building partnerships

A solid social presence looks promising to other businesses—it gives them a way to see how you communicate, how you market, who you market to, and what customers think about your business. That makes a strong presence in the social realm a potent tool for developing valuable relationships with other companies. You, in turn, can find worthwhile partnerships in the same way; by seeing what other companies overlap with your customer base, without being positioned in conflict with your own business.

#7 Potential for viral returns

It’s not really something any business can control, but sometimes, social media interactions blow up in a big way. You can’t really make it happen on purpose, of course, but a solid social ground game is crucial if you want it to even be a possibility—and given the potential ROI on a piece of marketing material going viral in a good way, it’s something worth investing in.

#8 Improved conversion rates

Companies that engage in social marketing campaigns note improved conversion rates across the board; it seems that even when customers don’t buy directly due to social marketing, making your company available and personable leaves a lingering impact on how people perceive your company. It can also be something as simple as making enough noise in enough places that people remember you—brand recognition still counts for a lot, even in 2015.

#9 Established authority

The right approach to social marketing can give your company a degree of industrial authority its difficult to achieve otherwise. Even if you just specialize in becoming authoritative on a particular niche of your industry, that authority lends itself to success for your company in all areas.

#10 Strengthened SEO

When you share content and talk to people on social media networks, you create new potential backlinks, new sources of incoming ‘link juice’ to really power up your SEO. This makes social marketing a potent tool even if you’re primarily focused on inbound marketing tactics.

These are far from the only benefits your business might see in working with Zero Down Social—whatever your marketing strategy, whatever your long or short-term goals for your business, a savvy social marketing strategy paired with savvy social marketing tactics will almost always generate a worthwhile ROI, in terms of pure profitability and lead generation, and less easily quantified benefits such as public perception and customer satisfaction. Try Zero Down Social, and find out what your marketing is missing.


10 Ways ZDS Boosts Your Online Marketing Results

[Posted on October 27, 2015 by Carly Bevins]

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10 Ways ZDS Boosts Your Online Marketing Results

Wondering how Zero Down Social boosts your online marketing results? When we apply our unique approach to social marketing, your business benefits in myriad ways, from traffic and lead generation to customer satisfaction and industry buzz. Other Internet marketing tactics have their place, of course, but none can show identical strengths to the social media marketing strategies we offer at Zero Down Social. Here are just 10 of the ways our services will improve your business’s outlook, short-term and long-term:

1. Improves exposure

Getting the right content in front of the right eyes is key to any marketing strategy; working together with ZDS will boost your marketing results starting from this most basic of building blocks–exposure. We’ll put your name out there, with the right image, in front of the right demographics to grow your company. Even before traffic begins to flow in earnest from your social efforts, a custom Facebook page and a bit of noise on the social networks will lead to more exposure than you might expect.

2. Strengthens your brand

The strength of your brand is wholly dependent upon how it’s perceived in the wild—ZDS generates stronger brands by developing your image directly within social networks, instead of through the filter of second-hand commentary. Why allow your brand’s image within social media to be dictated by others, when you can utilize our social marketing to achieve more consistent, focused branding directly to your audience? Strong brands derive from strong marketing, and no other form of marketing makes a more direct impact on what people are saying.

3. Generates more and better traffic

When people start talking about your brand, when they can interact with you on Facebook, read your posts, see others liking your page and sharing your content, traffic naturally flows to your business. But that’s not the best part—after all, traffic that doesn’t close isn’t worth anything; in fact, traffic that doesn’t close costs money. That’s why the careful social strategy behind ZDS’ efforts is worth so much to your business: by targeting the right groups with your content and sharing just the right message, we ensure that the people paying attention to your business on social media are the same people who will buy from your company—not just browsers and heel-draggers.

4. Improves networking

When you have a slick, professional appearance on social media, potential business partners take note. When you produce high quality, targeted content aimed at key demographics, they start wanting to work with you. If you want to secure the strength of professional networking for your business, start by making a good impression on the public; no one wants to go into a partnership with the corporate equivalent of a shiftless slob. Clean up your social media, show you have the kind of outreach that makes money, and opportunities will flock to you.

5. Helps you see what the public thinks of your business

Social media serves as a window into the consumer mind; publicly shared personal conversations about what brands impress, which ones disappoint, what people want to buy, what they’re getting tired of, and what you might do to really get their interest. When you make noise in the social network sphere, you encourage more and more people to talk about your business, which in turn gives you more insight. You can’t get that kind of data any other way.

6. Improves customer relationships

When you reach out directly to customers, when you appeal to them with content they care about and put yourself alongside them on search engines, they’re naturally going to feel closer to your company. A sound social marketing campaign builds customer relationships no other marketing endeavor can compete with. If you understand the value of returning customers, word-of-mouth, and minimal returns and complaints, then you understand why building relationships like this is a fundamental goal for any savvy marketing effort.

7. Strengthens your position in search engines

A well-managed social marketing campaign pulls double-duty, positioning your company for better search engine results. You can use clever content to secure backlinks, push your Facebook page up through the rankings, and strengthen your authority by becoming a trusted public voice. Onsite SEO has its place, but a good social campaign is a complement you shouldn’t skip.

8. Cheaper than alternative marketing methods

In the long term, you’re going to spend less money developing a solid social media campaign than you would maintaining your content marketing, PPC, or other online marketing campaigns. That means you can secure a superior ROI with a savvy social marketing campaign, or you can leverage social media in combination with these other techniques to really pump your business up. Whichever route you take, ZDS offers a superior return on your investment.

9. Integrates well with other marketing techniques

Social media meshes incredibly well with other popular methods of Internet marketing; utilize PPC ads in combination with your freely posted content on Facebook, drive traffic from your social media account into your inbound marketing funnels, improve your SEO by securing backlinks from countless fresh sources. Why settle for a single successful marketing campaign when you can build a massive, self-supporting network combining the strengths of several—and eliminating the weaknesses of each.

10. Gives insight into valuable customer segments

Getting deep into social media gives companies a unique degree of insight into who buys their products and services. You can learn the demographics, lifestyles, and behavior types that add up to profitable customers by reaching out and monitoring the response. Hashtags, favorite pages, and other social content all give you an easy way to observe your customers in the wild and see what they truly care about—and once you know that, you know how to market to that group with incredible efficacy.

There you have it—10 ways ZDS boosts online marketing results naturally and effectively. Few online marketing strategies will engender the same degree of long-term customer loyalty, so take advantage of the opportunity to develop a lasting impression the demographics that matter most to your business’s success.



Managing Social Media Without Losing Your Mind

[Posted on October 24, 2015 by Carly Bevins]

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Managing Social Media Without Losing Your Mind

Stress is inherent in almost everything you do during these hectic times we live in. One major stressor marketers face is managing their social media presence online. You have to make sure your logo and banner stay fresh, answer comments and questions, and keep your content updated daily, among other things.

Add in the fact that most marketers have a list of several social media platforms in which they engage, and the stress levels can become beyond manageable. This doesn’t have to be the case. By implementing a few extra strategies now, you can help alleviate much of the social media stress later.

Social Media Management Systems

Systems such as Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Jetpack and others can be a marketer’s best friend when it comes to managing your social media brand. Think of them as a virtual Swiss Army Knife.    These systems are great when you only involve yourself in one social media site. If you are regularly involved in three or more, having a combined social media dashboard is almost a necessity. Otherwise, you could end up spending all your time on social media management and have no time left for anything else.

Social media management systems also work wonders when there is a team involved in working on social media. You can set up accounts for multiple people and each can have its own permissions. This allows for easy management. It also makes it clear, in one place:

*Who updates

*When updates are made

*Which social media was updated

*Provide reminders when updates are needed

Consider an organization that has five or six people who regularly contribute to the social media management. It can be distressful reminding everyone when it is their turn to post and what platform they need to focus on. In addition, you risk having several updates on one network and none on another unless you can keep track of who posted where, and when. Having all this information in one place makes it possible for everyone involved in social media management to stay on the same page.

Content Curation

With all the information available on the Internet, it can become overwhelming. Information overload has a way of plaguing anyone who spends time looking for the latest information to share on social media.  What is new? Where is the best information? How can you find it all, organize it and share it–and still have time to do all the other tasks required to run your business? Content curation answers all these questions for you.

With a good content curation system such as Storify, Scoopit or others like them, you have at your hands what amounts to a whole staff of researchers. They scan the web for new and relevant content based on your keywords. They then help you organize this content quickly and make it easy to share with your readers. You will need to try a few different ones in order to decide which one provides the best fit, but once you settle on one, you will be able to save yourself hours.

Summing it up, content curation programs:

*Save hours of time in research

*Help eliminate information overload

*Deliver relevant content without you having to create it from scratch

*Provide your audience with regular, updated industry information

Content curation programs come with a variety of bells and whistles. That is why it may be necessary to try several before settling on one. It makes no sense to settle for something that doesn’t do everything you would like, but on the other hand, a program that has tons of unused elements is a waste of space and increases the learning curve. Pick the one that best fits your needs and it will be one of your greatest tools.


With certain tasks that don’t require a lot of thought, but do take a lot of time, automation programs such as IfThisThenThat (IFTTT) can help out. Automation can be used for things such as banner and logo updating, a quick post and other regularly performed tasks. The problem with automation, however, is it makes things so easy that some people rely on it too much, never making their own posts and basically forgetting that social media management also includes regular interaction with your followers. Some of the advantages of automation include:

*Automatic update of logo and header

*Ability to update on weekends and holidays and still be with family

*Saves time

*Can make it easier to update more often

It is essential, however, that you take the time to make regular updates yourself. This will help you post breaking news and will allow you the opportunity to interact with followers. Even with automatic posts, schedule time to peruse them and make sure they are effective in creating comments and being noticed. Answer questions and acknowledge comments regularly so that followers know there is a human at the other end of the posts.


While social media platforms normally have their own analytics built right in, there are often limits to what you can find out. Using a program such as SocialMetrics Pro can go beyond the basics. You need to know if your posts are actually getting noticed and you need to be able to see things like what times are most active and the kinds of posts that produce the best results. This enables you to tweak your content to meet the needs of your followers.

Why do you need to know what days and times are most active or what types of content get more attention? Those and many other supposedly minor details can make all the difference in successful social media management. In essence, you want to know if all the time and effort you are putting into this is worth it. If the results aren’t what you hoped for, the analytics will enable you to step back and regroup so you can get on a more productive track.

Need help with your social media management? Zero Down Social can help develop your social media strategy and improve your online social presence, freeing up your time to take care of business.



Fire up Potential Buyers with Strategies by Zero Down Social

[Posted on September 29th, 2015 by Carly Bevins]

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Zero Down Social offers a high-quality social strategy designed to fire up potential buyers, strengthen your bonds with existing customers, and position your company to develop strong relationships with key demographics. Like so many forms of marketing, the true strength of ZDS shows itself fully when businesses leverage segmentation to precisely target high-value prospects with the kind of content they’ll care about. This is near the core of the social marketing approach Zero Down Social utilizes.

Understanding Segmentation

So, what sort of segments should you be looking at? Broadly speaking, they fall into these categories:

  • Demographics. Segmentation based on basic vital statistics such as age, gender, etc.
  • Geographics. Segmentation based on location.
  • Psychographics. Segmentation based on lifestyle, hobbies, etc.
  • Behavioral. Segmentation based on usage habits and how individuals buy.
  • Business. Segmentation as it applies to business-to-business endeavors.

Let’s talk about each, when it might matter, and what you might gain:


Demographic segmentation may be the most familiar form of market segmentation—even companies that don’t put much effort into divvying up their market probably consider demographics. Categories one might consider for demographic segmentation include age, gender, race, marital status, job, income level, or education level. This is an important one to pay attention to with your social marketing, as demographics are relatively easy to take note of and very important in shaping the content you want to put out.

A 70-year-old widower on disability will respond very differently from a 17-year-old working at McDonald’s, even if you’re selling a product you know should appeal to both. This becomes especially important with the sort of content you want to develop for social marketing, as your goal is to get close to prospects and build a strong relationship; the language, the imagery, the promises they care about will all look very different.


Another key segment to pay attention to with your social marketing efforts; if you’re doing really well in specific geographic locations, it might benefit you to target content specifically at those local or regional markets. You don’t want to use area-specific references or slang in a national campaign, but if you break your marketing down you can develop a much closer, cozier network of regional prospects.

Depending on how your business operates and what you’re aiming to do, you might want to limit efforts to a bigger or smaller region—pay attention to the ROI you get on different levels of granularity. Not every company can be profitable in every region, and some companies will find they’re wasting money expending the effort on targeting regions, such as those which thrive on smaller niches and require a national or global audience to support them.


This can be trickier to get data for, but when you can segment by psychographics your social marketing will work wonders. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, psychographic segmentation is also known as lifestyle segmentation; dividing your markets according to interest and activities instead of demographics or location.

For example, many hobbies see almost no consistency between their participants aside from that hobby and related activities—that segment may be highly valuable to approach via social marketing, if you know it exists to be targeted. You might also segment by less obvious traits such as closely-held beliefs, values, attitudes, and other lifestyle traits; your product might appeal more to the politically active, or the strongly religious, or unusually honest people. This works even when you’re not entirely sure why the segment exists or is relevant to your company (although you should endeavor to figure that out as soon as possible).


Getting into the most psychological end of social marketing, we have behavioral segmentation. You need an observant team with useful tools behind them to get the most out of this form of segmentation, but it can be incredible for building community goodwill and strengthening your relationship with your customers. Behavioral segmentation is built on user behaviors such as patterns of use, brand loyalty, the benefits they’re looking for, price sensitivity, etc. With the right behavioral segmentation, you can generate extremely high value

This sort of data can come from observing social interactions and acting to target groups, or by observing how customers interact with your business specifically, if you have the right analytical systems in place. Consider how you might generate social content for a customer group you know only cares about one particular feature, or another group that’s highly sensitive to price changes.


Segmentation works a little differently for business-to-business marketing, but it still holds up; you’ll see permutations of many of the traits we already mentions, such as geographic, behavior, customer type, but can also see segments based on purely unique traits, such as logistical realities, public image, and other aspects. For social marketing, business segmentation can be a distraction; ultimately, even if you’re in B2B markets, your social approach should be a personal one.

Figure out what the demographics, behaviors, regional affects, etc. are of the decision makers, and produce suitable content for drawing their interest and engendering good will. People interact with social networks as people, even when they represent businesses.

Final Thoughts

Understand segmentation a little better now? The best content for a market is rarely the best content for all markets, but with a little savvy that understanding can lead to extremely profitable returns on your social marketing investment. Learn which segments really matter to your business, and keep an open mind. It’s not just who pays attention to your content, or even who buys—sometimes, it can pay to be popular with a trendsetter who buys nothing from you directly.

Understand how social popularity flows to profits, and get the most out of it with the help of Zero Down Social and our social marketing experts. Not only can we make the best possible appeal for you, the information we collect will help you recognize new groups, then appeal to those groups just as potently.


10 Best Practices for Social Media Marketing


[Posted on July 6th, 2015 by Carly Bevins]

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At the heart of any marketing plan, there has to be an aspect of social media outreach. If you are a marketer, you know how important it is to use various platforms in your work. If you want to harness the power of your audience, you have to engage with them online. It might sound straightforward, but if you get it wrong, you can do more harm than good.

It is crucial for both you and your enterprise that you educate yourself. You ought to know the best practices before you start. That way, you will use the platforms to their full potential. Here are the ten best practices for social media marketing.

#1 Practice makes perfect

The first thing that you have to realize is that you can’t get everything right the first time you try. There is a certain level of trial and error in any marketing plan, and so you ought to prepare yourself for that. What works for one audience won’t necessarily work for another, and that is something you need to understand. Keep at it, though, and you will soon learn what engages your particular demographic.

#2 Online ambassadors can be a huge help

You need to figure out who, out of your followers, has the power to reach out to people. Online ambassadors can be a massive help, especially if you hope to expand your reach quickly. You might want to work with people who already have a large following online or independent bloggers. If these people can influence others, they can start to spread your message. This type of organic promotion is the best way to reach out to new people.

#3 Add value to your posts

Each time you post something, you ought to ask yourself what the audience gains from it. Sometimes, people fail to think about their demographic. Each post should offer people something new. For example, when you post a blog, it might offer people advice on a certain subject. If you share a competition, it gives people a chance to win something. No matter what you share, make sure that it is valuable to your audience.

#4 Never ignore your followers

If you are lucky enough to have people comment on your posts, you need to make sure that you engage with them. It is not enough to post something and then log off. Instead, you need to make sure that you are active online. If people see that you never reply to them, they will think that you are cold or, worse, a robot. Everybody knows that you can automate posts, and so people will assume that is what you have done. For the best results, communicate with your demographic on a daily basis.

#5 Share other people’s content

If you want people to promote your business online, you have to help them out first. Everyone wants attention online, and so you can benefit by sharing other people’s posts. Once you start promoting other people or groups, they will reciprocate. That means that you can broaden your reach in no time at all. Find companies or people who share the same audience as you do. They will have content online that you can share.

#6 Join in with online discussions

When there is a debate happening online, you need to involve yourself. Sometimes, people fear controversy. They think that, when they represent a company, they need to stay neutral at all times. While you don’t want to annoy anyone online, you should take part in a variety of discussions. Social media marketing is not just about posting things; it is about being part of a wider community.

#7 Choose a tone (and stick with it)

The way in which you talk to your audience matters. You need to show people that you have a solid tone or they will find your posts confusing. Choose a manner and stick with it. That way, people will always know what to expect from you. For example, if you are promoting a kids’ show, you will want your tone to be fun and engaging. If you are promoting life insurance, your tone might be serious.

#8 Always check your grammar

There is nothing worse than getting a spelling wrong or making a grammatical error online. There are people out there who will jump on you faster than you can edit this mistake. Before you post anything, you need to check that it is grammatically sound. You can put your posts through a word processor before you publish them. That way, you will never make any silly little mistakes. If people notice errors in your work, they will think that you are not legitimate.

#9 Specialize in a niche market

There is no point attempting to cover all bases. When you communicate with people online, you have to have a core message at the heart of all your discussions. Decide what you want people to gain from you and don’t ever differ from that subject. It is always better to be an authority on a certain subject than a novice in a variety of things. If you are a fashion boutique, people come to you for style advice, not love advice. So long as you remember that, you should have no issues.

#10 Be consistent

Above all else, you have to remember to be consistent online. Once you launch a campaign, you have to stick with it and see it through. You should keep track of how many times you post each day. For example, if you post seven times on Monday but just once on Tuesday, this is bad practice. You need to show people that you are an entity they can trust. That means being consistent with everything from your tone to the amount of times you post per day.

Social media marketing can do wonders for your business. When you embark on a new campaign, you should keep these ten points in mind. So long as you stick to them, you will find that you enhance your online presence and expand your reach. Perfect. 

10 Tips to Make Your Marketing Campaign More Successful Including ZDS

[Posted on June 10th, 2015 by Carly Bevins]

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10 Tips to Make Your Marketing Campaign More Successful Including ZDS

Many business owners find themselves struggling. They often know they need to market their business to improve profits, but at the same time, they do not have the funds to create a successful marketing campaign on a big scale. Or, that is the misconception. The fact is, you do not have to spend a lot of money to achieve your goals of marketing your business. All you need to know is how to effectively market your business affordably using the wide range of tools that are available to you already. This is easier to do than you may realize and these tips can help you.

#1: Create an effective website

One of the first and most important components to any business owner’s marketing plan today is the use of a website. No matter if your business is online or fully offline, most businesses need a website. This is where the customers are going to go to learn more about what you have to offer. Keep in mind that websites do not have to be high tech or graphic-filled. They need to provide information that a customer needs to make a decision to visit and buy from the company or not. Set up your business as a first step.

#2: Aim any ads you create at your customer’s heart, not his head

It is very easy for business owners to focus on themselves. You want to show your customers that your products and services provide exceptional services. But, they want to know what you are going to do for them. To do that, you need to play to their heart. Use emotion in your advertisements in any way. You’ll achieve far more with a plan like this than with creating a long list of features and details about your business.

#3: Set up social media

Beyond a doubt, you need to have social media in place. It is the single most important tool that you can have in terms of marketing your business online and in today’s ultra-connected world. It does not have to be hard to do. Consider these easy steps.

  • Establish a Facebook page. Use ZDS to create a professional-looking page that gets attention.
  • Create a Twitter page that provides short messages to your customers.
  • Create other accounts, such as those on Pinterest,, LinkedIn, and photo sharing sites.

Once in place, you can use social media to interact with your customers. That’s important. You need to interact. In a few minutes, we’ll explore more steps to interacting in this way. For now, create professional social media sites that you know communicate your personal message.

#4: Establish your brand

Building your brand is more than creating a logo. You also need to define what your brand is. For example, define what your brand stands for. Again, play at the heart of your clients and customers. When they need a product that you have to offer, you want them to remember your brand. Building a brand takes time, but using your website and blog in a straightforward manner with the same language and message over and over again allows you to create this.

#5: Create a fun promotion

Everyone loves to get something for a discount or for free. With your social media accounts, you can easily create a sharing contest of some type. You will need to choose a promotion that works for your company. You do not need to give away a car or any other lavish prize. But, you should create interest. Use social media to market your plan. You will also want to consider creating something very unique. The more unique and interesting it is, the more likely you will be able to get the attention you need. Why do you need a promotion like this? It’s simple. You want to gain more followers to your website and social media. These are people you’ll market your services and products to, turning them into profits.

#6: Interact with your customers

How can interacting really make a difference in terms of marketing your business? It’s easy. Today’s customers want to feel valued by the companies they work with and buy from and to do that, you need to show you care. By interacting with them, such as communicating with them over social media and answering their questions, you’ll easily make sure they know you care about them. This also helps to build your brand.

#7: Use a PPC program

Another way for you to create interest in an inexpensive way for your business is to use pay per click advertising. You will want to work with a trusted, experienced team to do that. ZDPPC is one of the most effective tools you have for creating an affordable, but highly effective marketing plan using pay per click advertising.

#8: Build your blog

A blog is another tool you need to have in place and it is different from your website. A blog will need provide you with an effective way to market your business. You can use it to sell your promotions, answer your customer’s questions, or educate them about your products. In short, it is also effective for marketing your business online because it aids in SEO. This helps your business to rank well in the search engines.

#9: Use photos

The next step you need to take is to give them something to look at when you are posting online. Take photos of your products, team, and the services you provide. Use before and after photos. Create shots of your location. Photos get attention.

#10: Keep working at it

This type of marketing is highly effective but it only works if you are able to be consistent at it. To do that, you need to post to social media daily. Aim to add articles and content to your blog and website every few days. You also need to keep your brand message clear throughout these interactions. And, be sure you do interact with your customers.

When you pull all of these marketing methods together, you will quickly find yourself growing your business brand, building your traffic online, and increasing sales. What’s more, none of these marketing methods are expensive, hard to do, or too time consuming for you to put into place. They are all, however, very effective at helping you to succeed.