Robots are taking over Instagram: Everything you need to know

Maintaining a strong, sincere online presence is an effective tool for small kiwi businesses, but it can present its challenges. The ‘bot’ invasion is one such challenge; one we’ve become all too familiar with in our years of social media service. Everyone who wants to grow their ‘gram understands the importance of engagement. A healthy following and flow of interaction from your audience (comments and likes) is the goal, but the means by which you achieve it matters.

It matters to your audience, and it matters to Instagram.

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Getting the best out of your Web Design Brief (Part 2)

Presenting your preferred examples

So you’ve found a glorious website that works in a way you would like for your own brand. Nice! We’ll certainly do our best to create your brand a website with similar style and functionality, but a few things are going to affect how well this works: your product/service, your budget, and your deadline.

The team at Tailgunner are problem solvers. We’ll do our best for your brand on the budget and timeframe you give us.

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Getting the best out of your Web Design Brief (Part 1)

During a web design project, our team will go out of its way to please our clients – be this through endless edits, additional features (perhaps not included in the brief), and a good deal of trial and error upon request. It’s no secret that some projects can tend to go more smoothly than others. While we can promise that we’ll do our best to inform and educate you about all things web design and project-related, there are a few tips we can offer our clients to ensure a seamless transaction is made between us.

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Under the influence: using customers to collect customers

No matter how fantastic your product or service might be, getting the attention of your target audience can be a tremulous task – especially for small kiwi businesses. In a world where we tend to roll our eyes at obvious advertisements, it can be hard to target the trustworthy marketing zone wherein a potential customer can feel comfortable and eventually keen to try your product.

Times are changing. Just as the internet morphed into the user-bolstered 2.0, companies are looking to the customers themselves for brand-boosting opportunities. With a little social media smarts… you might just see your customers magically transform into successful sponsors before your eyes.

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Three reasons why a rebrand is going to be the best bet for your business

Do I really need a new logo? Is it worth it? The old one has worked fine for us these past few decades…why should I bother rebranding?

You wouldn’t show up to work in a garish pastel pantsuit, so why should your logo stay stuck in the 80’s-90’s? Even a few early 2000 logos are lacking that modern, timeless factor that many 2010-7 logos are strongly sporting these days. A relevant rebrand is every bit as important as updated technology for your business, so what’s stopping you from investing in that redesign?

If it’s going to take a little persuasion to see you settle on a new logo, then we’ll just let the benefits do the talking…

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How to handle hate: keeping your profile professional

The ‘single star review’ is never a welcome notification for small businesses currently utilising social media for marketing. The lonely 1 star out of 5 will generally be followed by a client’s (often expletive-laced) narrative regarding an unsatisfactory experience they’ve had with your business. Sometimes the single star won’t be accompanied by any comments at all, and the ‘reviewer’ will just be seeking to bring down your overall rating – an issue we’ve faced ourselves at Tailgunner.

Then there’s blatant negativity. A comment will come out of nowhere on one of your posts – cold and uncalled for. How are we to react professionally in such circumstances? It’s time to put on your most positive and professional customer service face, because today’s blog is going to show you how to flawlessly handle any future flouts of negativity across all your social networks:

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Instagram is bettering itself for business: here’s how!

If you’ve been scrolling through Instagram lately then chances are you’ve probably noticed a line of little blue dots situated under folk’s photos and videos. Taking a moment to investigate this new feature, you’ll discover that a swipe will turn one post into a multi-pictured slideshow. Gimmick or golden marketing tool, today we do a brand-focused breakdown and see how your business might benefit from this new feature!

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The benefits of video for business: websites

Soaring sales and increased conversions

If you’ve got products to sell then video marketing is your new best friend. Studies show that by merely featuring a product video on your site’s landing page, you can increase conversions by more than 80%!

Why?

Well, sight is the most dominant of our senses so it therefore makes sense that videos would captivate and influence us more than a paragraph of text or a catchy theme song. If pictures tell a thousand words then continuous moving pictures will be able to simultaneously stimulate and inform your potential customers in a matter of seconds.

Most importantly, videos inspire a sense of trust in your viewers. It’s all well and good to see pictures of a product, but watching it in action and seeing it explained will direct sales.

 

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Continued: Choosing the right social network (Pinterest and Instagram)

Instagram

This crisp, clean, visually-focussed social network is perfect for clients with eye-catching imagery to share. Instagram sells the concept of an experience, which is why brands often employ popular Instagrammers to share images of themselves using the product: faithful audience members – in an effort to mimic the Instagrammer’s lifestyle – will shop for the same products that they see featured in the photos.

While Facebook draws attention to and offers information about your brand, Instagram aims to do this visually by instilling a desire within your audience to acquire the items or places promoted in your eye-catching images. For this reason, Instagram would be suitable to a brand who are selling a product that can be displayed and – if possible – styled (such as shoes, headphones or skincare). Neat places such as restaurants and tourist attractions do very well in Instagram, too.

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Choosing the right social network for your business

browsing social media

So you’ve decided it’s time to bring your brand to social media. Or, perhaps, you’ve already accumulated several accounts for your brand, and you’re finding it challenging to figure out which ones are successfully networking your business and which are wasting your time and energy.

We know that you’ve got an audience of potential clients out there who are eager to learn about your product or service. The tricky part can be finding which social network this audience are currently active on, and that’s where we come in.

Working with a myriad of clients ranging from tradesmen to pharmaceutical companies means Tailgunner can effectively assign brands to specific social networks – networks that will work for you.

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