This article will change your mind. What is digital marketing? What does marketing mean to you and your business? Do you think it is a way to put your brand in front of as many people as possible or as a strategy to get more sales and money for your company? Well, it is, but that is the outcome of a long journey, and not the process itself. Social media and digital marketing are different from traditional marketing strategies. Through digital marketing you can tailor the content to reach a specific audience or create it so it reaches as many people as possible. Digital marketing is also interactive, meaning you can engage and have direct contact with your audience and build a rapport with them. Your customer’s social media profiles are like small windows into their personal lives; Facebook aimed to bring friends and families together, and you can do the same with digital marketing. Social media is a platform to use to get closer to your client, not a market to sell to them on. Why not traditional marketing? Traditional marketing strategies are effective to a certain point. Printing an advertisement in a local newspaper is only going to reach an audience locally, whereas if that advert was sold to an online magazine the amount of people that advert could reach is now drastically different. An advert on TV is similarly only going to reach a certain audience. With more people using streaming services such as Netflix every day, the amount of people and potential customers you could reach by choosing to market digitally is much larger, and can be tailored to your specific clientele. It’s about them, not you.  Social media is not the place to be focusing solely on your business. Interacting with your customers and focusing on your audience - which social media allows you

Instagram TV (IGTV) was released in June this year, and is still a pretty new platform to everyone. But interestingly, it can be used for a business as part of their social media strategy. Many companies are still trying to figure out exactly how to use it effectively and incorporate it into their marketing plan, to boost their brand awareness, but don’t you worry. We’re here to provide you with a list of 5 ways in which you can use IGTV effectively within your social media strategy.   1 – Give Your Audience an Inside Look at Your Brand Buzzfeed is insanely popular across the globe and have many different sub-channels, one of which is dedicated to all things food; Tasty. They release short videos that are often compiled together that show step-by-step instructions on how to create a dish. They’re often cheap, quick, easy, and student friendly. But on top of this they also release episodes of “Behind Tasty” which show the whole process of how they make a Tasty video. This is especially clever as a marketing plan for two main reasons. One being that they can get two videos out of one shoot, which is handy and a time saver, but it also gives its audience an inside look into the brand. It gives the channel a personality and makes it easier for their audience to engage with them and know the brand inside and out. #PROTIP – Don’t be afraid to show off every angle of your brand. More and more people are enjoying the transparency of “behind the scenes” footage. It gives the audience a chance to form a deeper relationship with your brand, and after all that’s what you want to be doing. Creating a relationship between your brand and your audience.   2 – Create a Branded Backdrop For IGTV Videos Something

Systematic Listening can help you create your next breakthrough copy. From the outside, writers can seem like magical creatures, and I encourage this belief! Because we can create images, emotional states, even money and freedom, seemingly out of nothing. But we don't really conjure great copy and content like a Patronus from the tip of a magic wand, even if we want to. Effective writing takes time, and comes from a specific kind of “homework”. Empathetic listening to be exact, from spending time with the kinds of folk who make up the audience you’re aiming towards, and striving to see the world through their eyes. I don't mind copywriting formulas at all. They're wonderfully handy cheat-sheets, so we can remember to include important persuasive elements. But formulas are just the beginning. We can't bring them to life until we understand the person we're communicating with. So, with that in mind, here are some ways to learn much more about the audience you're serving with your work. 1: Why do you care about their problem? Good content and copy needs to solve an audience’s problems, but sometimes we forget to ask, “what is it about this problem that really touches me?" The world is full of people that have their own problems and concerns, but knowing what pulls you towards this one will help you to immerse yourself and get into the mindset of your audience. You might have experienced the problem yourself. Someone you love might have wrestled with it, or maybe you've spent years working with clients, and have felt the pain of their initial starting place, and the triumph of resolving the problem. It's hard to create an emotionally resonant piece of work if you can't get to a place where you can feel the weight of the audience’s problem. 2: Ever heard of an Empathy Map?  The well-known empathy mapping exercise challenges us to understand what our audiences are seeing, thinking, doing, and feeling. And that is always a great place to start. Text is a wonderful thing, it's

Facebook is one of the most useful and powerful contact books, but long ago it opted against building a phone, and for good reasons. One being that the risk of it being a complete failure was quite high with the Windows Phone and the iOS/Android duopoly looking impenetrable. Another being it would have put Facebook in direct competition with Google and Apple, which would have risked an ugly conflict between them and the two biggest platforms on which the company depends. But, as every company wants to grow, so did Facebook. The company came back around to the idea of developing its own hardware, and in a way came back to the idea of a phone. The start of this journey began with the acquisition of the Oculus, which turned Facebook into a manufacturer of virtual-reality gaming gear (VR). And now comes the Portal and Portal+, a video phone that runs on Facebook Messenger. Jake Kastrenakes from The Verge has a breakdown of the gadget: “The Portal is designed to simplify video chatting by having a wide-angle camera capable of identifying your body, then tracking you as you move around the room. It makes for more comfortable chatting than holding a phone up to your face for extended periods of time. Facebook says the Portal is designed to create the sense that you’re sharing one big room with the people you’re talking to, and considers the chats you have on the device an augmented reality experience.” With the Portal, you don’t have to hold, aim, or direct anything. Once a chat starts up, the device’s camera will automatically find people in the room and keep them in frame. If multiple people are in a room, the camera will use a wide angle to fit them all in. If there’s only one person, the camera will zoom

In March this year Facebook hosted its first global summit spotlighting a growing social network platform for businesses launched two years ago called Workplace platform. While Facebook would not disclose exact figures, it said Workplace – a rival to collaboration services such as Slack, Salesforce, and Microsoft – has been a hit, and that ranks of users have doubled in the past eight to 10 months. The list of companies using Workplace included Walmart, Starbucks, Spotify, Delta, and Virgin Atlantic. "It is growing very fast," Julien Codorniou said, Workplace vice president. "We started with big companies, because that is where we found traction. It is a very good niche." Workplace is a separate operation from Facebook's main social network and is intended as a platform to connect everyone in a company, from counter or warehouse workers to chief executives, according to Codorniou.   Why Use Workplace? Workplace claimed that a differentiator from its competitors is that it connects all employees in businesses no matter their roles, even if their only computing device is a smartphone. "That really resonates with a new generation," Codorniou said of Workplace's ‘democratic’ nature. "Millennials want to know who they work for and understand the culture of the company." He cited cases of top company executives using Workplace to get feedback from workers at all levels, bringing a small company feel to much larger operations. Workplace is rolled out to everyone in companies, which then pay $3 monthly for each active user. The software-as-a-service business began as an internal collaboration platform used at Facebook and was launched as its own business in 2016. Workplace is currently used by 30,000 companies and has its main office in London, according to Codorniou. Interaction with the platform plays off how people use Facebook, and Workplace adopts innovations from the leading social network. But, it is billed as a completely separate