Tag: Social media marketing

The End of Another Year Filled with Christmas Cheer at KCBT

With Christmas only days away, all the staff and students at KCBT have been counting down to holidays, celebrations and good cheer. Early December, the students and trainers all came together to spread the spirit of Christmas in a variety of ways around the College.

Deck the Class with Boughs of Holly

Over the past few weeks, trainers and their students had the task of decorating their classrooms to create an atmosphere of Christmas. As you enter each classroom there is a different feel to Christmas, helium balloons and gigantic red bows, Santa, baubles, tinsel and Christmas trees can be found. It sure made studying in the last few weeks a lot more fun.

KCBT “Grateful” Christmas Tree

What is Christmas without a tree?  Well, the KCBT Christmas tree this year was put up in reception and has been covered not only in lights, but also in paper baubles with hand-written messages written by staff and students. The messages reflect something each person is grateful for this Christmas. Friends and family, love and friendship seemed to top the list. We had a lot of fun reading and guessing who wrote what.

Food Drive

Christmas is a time for giving, and yet again KCBT organised a food drive to encourage our students and staff to make some contribution to society and help those in need this Christmas. Under the KCBT tree is a basket hamper which is full to the brim. These non-perishable items will be delivered to food bank so they can be distributed before Christmas Day.

Christmas Buffet

Ending the year with a celebration or two, after many months of lesson planning and assessments was well-earned. It was time to come together and share a meal for Christmas. KCBT put on 2 lunches for the students of their VET programs and a dinner for the English evening students. There was a banquet of food and desserts, Christmas decorations, gifts, lights and carols. The students were so grateful to have the opportunity to share a Christmas meal with their KCBT family. There were some Santa bellies after eating and lots of smiles.

Staff Christmas Dinner

This year KCBT treated its staff to a delicious 3 course meal of amazing Indian Food from 2 Fat Indians Restaurant in Beaufort Street Mt Lawley. There was laughter, Secret Santa and lots of photos to cherish the memories of an eventful year in 2019. 

Potluck

It seems that food is always a common theme at KCBT. The last business day of the year was celebrated with a staff lunch here on campus. Staff contributed bringing a variety our food from their different cultural backgrounds. The last day was filled with joy as it should be.

Farewell to 2019

As we clean our desks and close the doors to our offices behind us, let’s reflect back on our year, the friendships we made along the way, the challenges and how we made it through knowing that there was always someone there to offer a smile on rainy days. Let’s cherish every day and be grateful.

Here’s to a peaceful and happy Christmas to you all. May it be filled with love and most of all kindness for a bigger and brighter 2020.

Many Blessings.

 

Top six blogging techniques to use in 2020

Content Marketing first became popular in 2008 when Marcus Sheridan of Riverpool & Spas used it to save his pool company from going bankrupt. The company used a new approach during that time to increase its reach, and today its website gets more traffic than any other pool company in the world.

With over 409 million readers viewing more than 22.2 billion blogs per month around the world, you’ll find that most brands do have a blog section on their website. Blogging is an essential part of any content marketing strategy of a business but, before getting into blogging techniques, why is it necessary for any business to blog.

  1. Blogging helps improve SEO of the website (obviously!)
  2. It is the most inbound way to talk about your products and services
  3. Showcase your company as thought leader in your domain
  4. The most affordable marketing activity that can reach wider audience
  5. It encourages inbound links

Using appropriate post length for blog posts

Google considers blog posts that have less than 500 words as thin, which is not a good sign for SEO. Most bloggers see strong results with posts that are information dense, typically over 2000 words get the best results. However, anything above 500 words will help you reap the benefits of the efforts that you put into a post.

Blogging word count

Source: https://devrix.com/tutorial/8-blogging-trends-2019/

Video and live streaming for the new generation

With the growing access of internet and decreasing attention span, marketeers have started to realise the need of video content in their blog posts. According to a statistics report by Orbit Media, while only 26% of a blog content contains video, 41% of bloggers that report strong response use videos. Contributor posts, statistics, audio and images are some of the other form of content that helps bloggers get a better response.

Blog Post elements

Source: https://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/blogging-statistics/

Frequency of posting a blog post

The frequency is very much dependent on how many resources you have with you. The more often you post a blog, the more likely you are to get more traffic on your website. But if you don’t update it then it gives people no reason to visit your site on the assumption that there’s nothing new.

This does not mean that you should be levying on the post quality just to keep the frequency flowing.

Source: https://marketinginsidergroup.com/content-marketing/how-often-should-you-blog-blog-post-frequency-research/

According to Marketing Insider group, companies get three times more traffic when they post eleven or more posts than posting just once a month.

Using the right number of images

One reason using images on blog posts helps, is having them can reduce the bounce rate and increase the time spent on the website. In fact, articles using images get 94% more views than without images.

Source: https://www.jeffbullas.com/6-powerful-reasons-why-you-should-include-images-in-your-marketing-infographic/

The average online views increase when including elements like photos, videos and others together with text. It also makes your blogs more appealing making it more likely to be shared.

Use catchy headlines that work

Your headline is your selling point for your blog posts. It’s the first thing that the person sees before deciding whether to read your blog post or not. Hence, it becomes important to understand the need of your target market while writing the headline for your post.

Examples:

  • Bad Headline: How to write a blog.
  • Good Headline: 10 ways to write a blog post that gets more clicks
  • Bad Headline: What are the ways to get more clicks on your blog posts?
  • Good Headline: Follow these 5 tricks to get more clicks on your blog posts

Source: https://bloggingwizard.com/write-better-blog-headlines/

Add CTA’s to your content

You have a quirky headline which gets users to open your post and the content that is good enough to keep them hanging on until the end, but they didn’t take any further action. Do you think it was worth it? Putting effort in getting users to your site is as important as them acting after it. This action needs to be predetermined by a marketeer while creating the post. This is when “Call to Actions” comes into picture and it doesn’t always have to be about “buying” or “selling”.  It can either be as explicit as this or it could be more implicit like inserting a simple link in certain sections to prompt them to browse other pages of your website. But the CTA must be consistent to the objective of your blogging strategy.

Examples of good call to action:

    1. Social Shares
    2. Subscription Pop Ups
    3. Internal Link to navigate users around the website

Content marketing is an essential element of any marketing or digital marketing strategy. One of our social media units (SMMBCM501A) specifically deals with planning, implementing and managing blogs for business. As the online world is always changing, we make sure to teach our students the most updated concepts they would need in order to become a digital marketeer.

How to do a social media audit?

With around 3.5 Billion social media users in the current world, most businesses want to reach out to them. Having that in mind, businesses are making a presence on these platforms, but social media marketing is not just about being present.

In this modern world, audits are not only relevant for accountants but also for digital marketing managers, and hence a social media audit comes into picture.

But, wait, what is a social media audit?

A social media audit is just a simple health check of your brand’s social media efforts. Just like any other business audit, it is will help you understand what is working and where you need improvement. It will further help you develop a social media strategy or modify your current strategy based on your findings.

It might sound harsh, as the word “audit” itself sounds, but as you reach the end of this blog, you’ll realise that it’s not that difficult.

Let’s look at how you need to go about it!

Step 1: Create a file. It’s as easy as that.

Depending on what you are comfortable with, either create a word document or an excel file to record all your finding before you start the process. If you’re using a word document, create a table otherwise you can just simply use excel. The things that you would want to put in the sheet are:The channels your brand is present on.

-Links to those profiles.

-Login details for all the profiles.

-Current social media owners/admins/managers of those pages.

-Contributor/person responsible for handling the page.

Step 2: Appearance matters.

After collecting all the information mentioned in step one, you would want to look at the qualitative and quantitative aspects of your brand’s profiles. It is quite like how a doctor first examines your physical symptoms of illness before running any tests on your body. Physical symptoms… for social media what could they be? This would be qualitative aspects of your pages, anything and everything other than the numbers.

-Profile and cover images:

Make sure that all your images are in alignment with your logo and brand guidelines.

-Profile Bio:

The “About Us” section or the profile should be updated according to the current brand positioning or strategy.

-Social Media Handles:

Are your handles consistent across all the different platforms? 

-Noting down the best and worst performing posts.

-Posts with the most engagement.

Some of the above-mentioned things might sound like it’s common sense but identifying them at the right time can be very beneficial. A few months ago, during an audit we realised that we have two twitter handles, which otherwise we may never have identified.

Step 3: Measure your performance.

This is the part where all the quantitative data crunching is going to happen. You don’t have to start worrying straightaway just by reading “data crunching” because you are going to realise that it is quite simple. However, before we get into that, you need to make a list of your major competitors and industry leaders to set a benchmark. When you measure your performance, compare it against your competitors.  

What metrics should you be measuring? Well, the answer to this question lies in your objective, and most often your objective is dependent on what stage your organisation is on the digital engagement cycle.


Source: http://dmresourcecenter.com/unit-2/digital-involvement-cycle/

It might also be important to keep in mind that your competitors might be at different stages of this cycle or they might be targeting a completely different segment. This could explain some of the differences.

You can measure these insights by either looking at the insights of your social media handles, or if you are using tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, HubSpot you can analyse your performance using those platforms.

Step 4: Set new objectives.

The last step for any audit would be to understand the reasons behind what’s working and what’s not, because the information that you are going to collect will help lay a roadmap to understand what you need to be doing in order to best connect with your target audience.

Based on this, create and update new social media objectives for your brand.

And Voila, you’re done!

Why Study Social Media?

Why study social media - blog post - 10118NAT Diploma of Social Media MarketingYou may be asking yourself why you should attend to college to study social media.

Over the years, social media has grown from what was initially called “New Media” to being a phenomenon all in itself.  As the internet has grown since its inception, no longer is it enough to just have a website – much more needs to be done if a business is to effectively reach a customer and make a sale among all their competitors and other online interests that the customer has.

Social Media Marketing is a specialised aspect that falls within the overall Marketing industry.  While many small companies feel that social media marketing is enough – just posting a few times on Facebook will not earn long term customers, or foster brand loyalty.

This is where learning social media marketing in a formal course will benefit any individual who chooses to pursue this path.  With frequent changes on all the social media platforms, regarding rules, platform layout, and more, social media marketing is becoming a specialised skill that one can no longer claim to be an expert on based simply on being self taught.  Previously, it was easy enough to attain a social media job by keeping an updated personal blog and owning a personal Facebook profile.  But not anymore, nowadays prospective clients want a portfolio or case studies of social media accounts that you have managed before.  While the question of ethics and client privacy comes into that topic, the basic premise is that clients want proof that you have specialist knowledge in the subject and are capable of what you plan to do.

It’s a common misconception by people who enjoy using social media and post multiple times a day, that they are social media experts.  Often these people will post in online groups asking about how they can get started as a social media manager.  Evidently they need direction, but without proper training, they may find themselves falling short when it comes to sustainable long term marketing for their clients.  This is where formal training can help fill in the gaps.

At KCBT, we offer the only nationally accredited social media qualification – 10118NAT Diploma of Social Media Marketing.  This classroom based course runs for 36 weeks, in which time the student will learn transferable skills such as market research, audience profiling, project planning, project management, results analysis and reporting.  At the end of the course, the student emerges with a qualification that opens doors for them.

Contact the team at KCBT if you wish to find out more about the course, how you can join and when our next intake is.

What Can You Get Out of a Diploma of Social Media Marketing

What Can You Get Out of a Diploma of Social Media Marketing

Are you on the fence about the merits of pursuing a diploma of social media marketing? The Keystone College of Business and Technology aims to equip you with the information that you need to be able to come to the right decision. In this article, we will show you some of the rewards that you can look forward to from enrolling in such a course.

An Open Door to a Promising World

Every career professional who hopes to make a dent in his or her industry knows that adapting to developments and trends is part of the process. In today’s increasingly digital world, social media marketing has turned into one of the greatest forces that continually shape not only the way we do business, but also the way we live.

If you decide to enroll in a course that is designed to educate you about this specific industry, you will be granted access to a world of great possibilities. And seeing as it looks like that it is here to stay, you can only expect more growth and room for advancement, in the future.

A Commitment to Continuous Learning

If you like a challenge, studying social media marketing will be right up your alley. This is because once you dip your foot in its water, you will find that it will only get deeper and deeper – and you will develop the skills that you need to be able to stay afloat.

Social media marketing encompasses many disciplines, and getting learned in one is not enough. You do not have to be an expert on all of them, but knowing your way around them is important to making the entire process work for you. Additionally, the industry is continually changing, so you will learn to keep up with everything and, by the by, grow your skills.

Finally, if you intend to run a business of your own, having the right set of tools that are necessary to bringing your offerings to your target market online is going to be beneficial. In fact, it can be said that every new business now has more potential for making it big more than ever, thanks to the power of social media. When you can harness it to suit your requirements, you will be able to surpass your own goals.

Ready to make that change? The Keystone College of Business and Technology is your partner towards making your dreams happen. Talk to us today!