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  Right platform & audience Choose the right platform depending on what kind of audience you serve – whether you are B2B or B2C, what goals you want to achieve through your social media efforts – like to increase brand awareness, sell products online or to increase video views. Here’s a list of hot social media platforms and their audience type. Content Plan Post relevant & high-quality images. Make a definitive content plan and strict to it. Keep your content valuable to the audience, make sure they derive some value out of the post. Your ideal content plan should consist of 70% non-promotional posts and 30% promotional posts. There is nothing wrong in promoting your product but it has to be done in a non-spammy way, by keeping the direct marketing posts to a bare minimum. Design posts in advance and schedule them accordingly. Analyse what’s performing well and what’s not and make changes to the content plan accordingly. Do more of what’s working out well. Establishing authenticity It’s easy to get lost in the sea of other similar brands trying to do the same. But you can always stand-out if you take some extra efforts. This can be done by following specific design guidelines and brand voice for all your brand posts such that audience can instantly recognise your brand from the way your posts have been designed and from the tone of the language used in the caption. This will help you a long way in establishing a strong brand identity in the crowded online place. Promotions Social media is one of the most cost-effective and ROI trackable sources of ad medium in the current scenario. But promoting a poorly designed or not well-targeted ad is like throwing money down the drain, you’ll get nothing fruitful out of it. Decide your desired outcome out of the promotion and choose the promotion plan accordingly, like brand awareness, link click or reach. Make use of audience segmentation, demographics or geo-location targeting. When you combine a certain type of these filters, you will be able to reach to get the most relevant audience or potential customers which will, in turn, increase your Return On Ad Spend (ROAS). Being active Engage with the audience, reply to their comments. Be active and social. We have seen many brands after putting in all the efforts and garnering comments, do the dire mistake of not engaging back with the community. This will make the audience lose interest in page over time and your brand may have lost a lifetime loyal customer. Just simple things like replying back can leave a huge impact on your audience.

  5 Must Follow Social Media Marketing Tips That Works For Every Brand

  

  Right platform & audience

  Choose the right platform depending on what kind of audience you serve – whether you are B2B or B2C, what goals you want to achieve through your social media efforts – like to increase brand awareness, sell products online or to increase video views.

  Here’s a list of hot social media platforms and their audience type.

  • Facebook – Almost everyone has a Facebook account. Particularly good for news/entertainment related content.
  • LinkedIn – A professional network that is perfect for B2B audiences. Great for establishing contacts, recruiting, content publishing and distributing.
  • Instagram – If you have millennials as your target segment then Instagram is an incredibly valuable social platform. Also, a perfect platform if your content is highly visual. Images and short videos work incredibly well on this platform.
  • Twitter – From the latest news or the latest meme you can find anything on twitter. It’s a great platform to engage in real time with your audience and has a high chance of making your content going viral than other platforms.

  Content Plan

  Post relevant & high-quality images. Make a definitive content plan and strict to it. Keep your content valuable to the audience, make sure they derive some value out of the post.

  Your ideal content plan should consist of 70% non-promotional posts and 30% promotional posts. There is nothing wrong in promoting your product but it has to be done in a non-spammy way, by keeping the direct marketing posts to a bare minimum. Design posts in advance and schedule them accordingly. Analyse what’s performing well and what’s not and make changes to the content plan accordingly. Do more of what’s working out well.

  

  Establishing authenticity

  It’s easy to get lost in the sea of other similar brands trying to do the same. But you can always stand-out if you take some extra efforts. This can be done by following specific design guidelines and brand voice for all your brand posts such that audience can instantly recognise your brand from the way your posts have been designed and from the tone of the language used in the caption. This will help you a long way in establishing a strong brand identity in the crowded online place.

  

  Promotions

  Social media is one of the most cost-effective and ROI trackable sources of ad medium in the current scenario. But promoting a poorly designed or not well-targeted ad is like throwing money down the drain, you’ll get nothing fruitful out of it. Decide your desired outcome out of the promotion and choose the promotion plan accordingly, like brand awareness, link click or reach. Make use of audience segmentation, demographics or geo-location targeting. When you combine a certain type of these filters, you will be able to reach to get the most relevant audience or potential customers which will, in turn, increase your Return On Ad Spend (ROAS).

  

  Being active

  Engage with the audience, reply to their comments. Be active and social. We have seen many brands after putting in all the efforts and garnering comments, do the dire mistake of not engaging back with the community. This will make the audience lose interest in page over time and your brand may have lost a lifetime loyal customer. Just simple things like replying back can leave a huge impact on your audience.

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  If the main objective of your website is to make your visitors get in touch with you, then, Keep contact option easy to find, so a visitor can quickly get in touch should they need it while going through your website. Give people what they want - Instead of having the form as the only mode of option for contacting you, Include an email and phone number, so visitors can quickly get in touch with you if they wish. Give them the fastest and easiest way to connect to you. Link to active social media accounts like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn to give visitors a way to get to know you better and to engage with your business. Keep your contact us page short, sweet and to the point. Avoid unnecessary fields and words so your page remains as straightforward and simple as possible.Many businesses while copywriting their contact page - mistake being crispier for being too professional. Sounding too professional would make you bit boring unless you deliberately try to be one. The more friendly you make your page’s copy, the better you’ll make your visitors feel and better chances of them turning into a prospect.

  How To Design A Contact Page That Converts

  If the main objective of your website is to make your visitors get in touch with you, then, Keep contact option easy to find, so a visitor can quickly get in touch should they need it while going through your website.

  

  Give people what they want - Instead of having the form as the only mode of option for contacting you, Include an email and phone number, so visitors can quickly get in touch with you if they wish. Give them the fastest and easiest way to connect to you.

  Link to active social media accounts like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn to give visitors a way to get to know you better and to engage with your business.

  Keep your contact us page short, sweet and to the point. Avoid unnecessary fields and words so your page remains as straightforward and simple as possible.Many businesses while copywriting their contact page - mistake being crispier for being too professional. Sounding too professional would make you bit boring unless you deliberately try to be one. The more friendly you make your page’s copy, the better you’ll make your visitors feel and better chances of them turning into a prospect.

  

  • If you are a big organization or a company providing various services under one banner, chances are that a lot of different types of people are visiting your website - and what these people want to contact about can vary widely. You can segment/filter the audience at the very initial stage by providing them with different contact options/types to choose from – instead of having all under the same roof.

  

  • Having some fields like the ones that ask for mobile number would prevent users from filling up the form out of privacy concerns. While asking for such information that are not mandatory but would be an added advantage - make them as an optional field and distinguish them, common and widely known way of doing it is to use asterisk mark (*) to mark mandatory fields or to write down ‘optional’ near the label of the fields that are optional.

  • Use proper placeholder texts to guide users while they fill up the form. In an attempt to shorten the length of a form or reduce visual noise, designers use placeholder text as an input label. This practice places the burden on short-term memory of the user. The label disappears as soon as the user clicks or types. The entry must be deleted to expose the label again.For best results, avoid using placeholder texts as input label. Create clear hints that are placed outside form fields. For better user-friendliness, move the placeholder content above the input field, but below the label.

  

  • Make sure your forms are mobile friendly. If your mobile visitors cannot easily read, complete and submit your form, you may lose their business. Make sure you minimize the number of form fields, use a single column layout and to have a clear action button. Also, avoid crowded drop-downs (example - country/state selection), instead use the auto-complete feature that completes the text as users input the initial letters.If you want to take mobile form design a step further and ensure your entire website is functional on all types of devices, you can implement a responsive website design. Responsive web design takes the user’s screen size, platform, orientation, and environment into consideration. This is a simple and effective way to create a great user experience irrespective of kind of device being used.

  • If you have a form, you’ll get spam. That’s the bitter truth. So you need a way to block spammers from flooding your form submissions. For a considerable period of time, the accepted anti-bot measure was CAPTCHA - a program designed to protect against spam bots by generating tests that only humans could pass. Up until recently, Google announced CAPTCHA’s death. The best alternative is to use reCAPTCHA. Instead of going through the cumbersome process of identifying bizarre texts, users had only to click a button to identify themselves as human. In terms of security and user experience, reCAPTCHA is a significant augmented form of its previous version.

  

  • Once users click the Send/Submit button, redirect them to a thank you page that explains what to expect next as in when and how you’ll be contacting them back and links to helpful content and resources. This page can also be used as a checkpoint to measure a number of conversions i.e the number of people who have successfully submitted your contact form, by using page view feature in google analytics, in case you have integrated google analytics with your website.
  • So what if an error has occurred and users couldn’t submit the form. You have to put up an error message text not just saying an error has occurred instead of a proper indication of why and where the error has occurred so that it would be easier for the user to rectify it. Read more about form validation and errors.

  

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  User Experience is all about how we perceive it, how we use it, and how we remember it.This “it” can be anything, here in our case it’s gonna be websites. UX has evolved from being a noun to become a verb. We often hear our clients say “We need you to UX our website…How much you charge for UXing… Come up with a better UX…How long to UX it? UX this…UX that.” In this blog, we will see what are things you should add/change on your website to make its user experience, a delight. In other words, How to UX your website. Note: This blog post is written with non-e-commerce websites in mind, yet some ideas can also be applied for the same. 1. The On-boarding / landing page experience By any means don’t have a dead screen on landing. By dead screen, we mean a landing page loaded with hefty content and nothing in particular, to emphasize on or to capture the attention of the audience. Once a website has made a negative first impression on us, chances are we will not enjoy our visit much or look forward to coming back. The chances are they had already visited dozens of website before landing on your page, so the point here is to give them a great first impression, all the while staying relevant to their expectation. It may be as simple as having a bright background image, minimalist design with rich white space, background video/GIF, mouse over animations or any interactive elements. Few ideas: Making people spend a little more time on your landing section may have a huge impact on your Google search ranking. It’s a win-win. Read More. Note: Some people confuse being dead with being minimal in design. Minimalism in web design means simplifying the interface by removing unnecessary elements. Being minimal is great but being uninteresting is entirely a different thing. Let’s be clear, You can always be minimal & interesting at the same time. 2. Limit the content. Refine the words. “Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.” — Steve Krug Having a load of contents will seriously affect the user experience. As people get bored quickly and skip the sections without even reading what’s written. Be super stingy about the number of words you put out there. Use precise words and sentences. Quality is important over quantity — Hit the bull’s eye. Don’t restrict yourselves to the mundane choice of words under the tag of professionalism. Use a happy or natural tone of speech or come-up with your own brand voice. Use high-quality catchy visuals where ever you find it relevant & possible.For most sections 70% Visual & 30% Content Rule holds good. Visual appeal plays a large part in establishing brand affinity with your website visitors. As they say ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ — and it’s especially relevant when it comes to communicating on a more emotional level. Use only high-quality images/illustrations. In 2018, it feels like custom artworks/illustrations are taking the center stage of visual content. Through pictures and other visual elements, you can convey feelings that aren’t possible to express by words or otherwise would have taken a paragraph. In text-heavy sections (like testimonials/pricing details/forms etc.,), give even more importance to White Spaces & Text Hierarchy. It will give a clean & clutter-free look. Notes: White Space — White space or negative space is any type of blank space on the page. White spaces don’t necessarily mean to be white; the blank space may be filled with any colour as long as it is free of any elements like text or images. Text Hierarchy — is a system for organizing type that establishes an order of importance within the data, allowing the reader to easily find what they are looking for and navigate the content. Brand Voice — is the purposeful, consistent expression of a brand through words and prose styles, that engage and motivate. The personality of your brand is often determined by the words you use and the sentences you write. 3. Live chat. It’s a must-have. The reasons are quite self-explanatory. The main reason being addressing the people’s concern then & there. It also has a high lead capture rate compared to the age-old contact us forms.It also acts as a magic portal, u can expect all sort of wild things coming out of it like user feedback, lead generation, project enquiry, job opportunities, even out of the blue ones like you are being called as a chief guest to judge an app building hackathon in your region, which actually happened in our case. People now are looking to make their chatting and support process over the internet, more interactive and intelligent. For this, leverage the advantage of having a chat bot which makes make your website more lively and interactive and also they return results faster comparatively.There is good number of chat plugins out there — Fresh chat, Crisp, Landbot and more. Choose the one that suits your business. 4. Delicate things that matter — Micro Animations Micro-animations are small, preferably functional animations that support the user by giving visual feedback and displaying changes more clearly. With micro-animations, it’s possible to explain a lot without using a word. These micro animations make interactions more pleasant & visually pleasing. If there is anything that gonna differentiate your website from most of the websites out there, trust us, this is gonna be it. These tiny tiny detailing add up to give a profound influence on the user experience aspect of your website. 5. Finding the sweet spot between uniformity & variation If you have a multi-page website, you would never want all your pages to be monotonous. Don’t have the same layout on every page and keep changing the content alone. This makes the experience a very very boring one. The same applies to different sections of the page.Come-up with variations in layouts.

  How to UX your website in 6 steps

  User Experience is all about how we perceive it, how we use it, and how we remember it.This “it” can be anything, here in our case it’s gonna be websites.

  UX has evolved from being a noun to become a verb. We often hear our clients say “We need you to UX our website…How much you charge for UXing… Come up with a better UX…How long to UX it? UX this…UX that.”

  

  In this blog, we will see what are things you should add/change on your website to make its user experience, a delight. In other words, How to UX your website.

  Note: This blog post is written with non-e-commerce websites in mind, yet some ideas can also be applied for the same.

  1. The On-boarding / landing page experience

  By any means don’t have a dead screen on landing. By dead screen, we mean a landing page loaded with hefty content and nothing in particular, to emphasize on or to capture the attention of the audience. Once a website has made a negative first impression on us, chances are we will not enjoy our visit much or look forward to coming back. The chances are they had already visited dozens of website before landing on your page, so the point here is to give them a great first impression, all the while staying relevant to their expectation.

  It may be as simple as having a bright background image, minimalist design with rich white space, background video/GIF, mouse over animations or any interactive elements.

  Few ideas:

  

  

  Making people spend a little more time on your landing section may have a huge impact on your Google search ranking. It’s a win-win. Read More.

  Note:

  
  Some people confuse being dead with being minimal in design. Minimalism in web design means simplifying the interface by removing unnecessary elements. Being minimal is great but being uninteresting is entirely a different thing. Let’s be clear, You can always be minimal & interesting at the same time.

  2. Limit the content. Refine the words.

  “Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.” — Steve Krug

  Having a load of contents will seriously affect the user experience. As people get bored quickly and skip the sections without even reading what’s written. Be super stingy about the number of words you put out there. Use precise words and sentences. Quality is important over quantity — Hit the bull’s eye. Don’t restrict yourselves to the mundane choice of words under the tag of professionalism. Use a happy or natural tone of speech or come-up with your own brand voice.

  Use high-quality catchy visuals where ever you find it relevant & possible.
  For most sections 70% Visual & 30% Content Rule holds good. Visual appeal plays a large part in establishing brand affinity with your website visitors.

  

  As they say ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ — and it’s especially relevant when it comes to communicating on a more emotional level. Use only high-quality images/illustrations. In 2018, it feels like custom artworks/illustrations are taking the center stage of visual content. Through pictures and other visual elements, you can convey feelings that aren’t possible to express by words or otherwise would have taken a paragraph.

  In text-heavy sections (like testimonials/pricing details/forms etc.,), give even more importance to White Spaces & Text Hierarchy. It will give a clean & clutter-free look.

  Notes:

  White Space — White space or negative space is any type of blank space on the page. White spaces don’t necessarily mean to be white; the blank space may be filled with any colour as long as it is free of any elements like text or images.

  Text Hierarchy — is a system for organizing type that establishes an order of importance within the data, allowing the reader to easily find what they are looking for and navigate the content.

  Brand Voice — is the purposeful, consistent expression of a brand through words and prose styles, that engage and motivate. The personality of your brand is often determined by the words you use and the sentences you write.

  3. Live chat. It’s a must-have.

  The reasons are quite self-explanatory. The main reason being addressing the people’s concern then & there. It also has a high lead capture rate compared to the age-old contact us forms.
  It also acts as a magic portal, u can expect all sort of wild things coming out of it like user feedback, lead generation, project enquiry, job opportunities, even out of the blue ones like you are being called as a chief guest to judge an app building hackathon in your region, which actually happened in our case.

  People now are looking to make their chatting and support process over the internet, more interactive and intelligent. For this, leverage the advantage of having a chat bot which makes make your website more lively and interactive and also they return results faster comparatively.
  There is good number of chat plugins out there — Fresh chat, Crisp, Landbot and more. Choose the one that suits your business.

  4. Delicate things that matter — Micro Animations

  Micro-animations are small, preferably functional animations that support the user by giving visual feedback and displaying changes more clearly. With micro-animations, it’s possible to explain a lot without using a word. These micro animations make interactions more pleasant & visually pleasing.

  If there is anything that gonna differentiate your website from most of the websites out there, trust us, this is gonna be it. These tiny tiny detailing add up to give a profound influence on the user experience aspect of your website.

  5. Finding the sweet spot between uniformity & variation

  If you have a multi-page website, you would never want all your pages to be monotonous. Don’t have the same layout on every page and keep changing the content alone. This makes the experience a very very boring one. The same applies to different sections of the page.
  Come-up with variations in layouts. There is a whole lot of layouts for web pages out there. Choose the one that best suits your content. But at the same time be cautious to not overdo it to the extent it feels like each page belongs to a different website, which will eventually leave the user confused & frustrated. It’s all about finding the sweet spot between uniformity & variation. You can retain the uniformity by maintaining — sustained color usage, font & button styling and other visual cues. Sticking with same menu bar/header and footer design will also make the multi-page websites more visually composed.

  Related read:
  Examples of content stream layout

  6. And those annoying pop-ups — the workaround

  Don’t use pop-up forms unless & until it is really really relevant and you are out of any other options. Pop-up forms are becoming highly outdated technique and anything inside the popup is considered as a bait nowadays. Most poorly designed popup forms, only serves the purpose of obstructing the user flow.

  According to Hubspot, A good popup form should be designed with following aspects in mind:

  1.Offer something relevant and valuable.

  
  2.Think about the way people engage with your pages.

  
  3.Use language that’s specific, actionable, and human.

  
  4.Don’t ruin the mobile experience.

  Read: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/pop-up-forms-analysis

  But still, we don’t recommend using pop-up forms instead we insist you to blend the form as effectively as possible with your content and context (interaction and timing). By doing so, In most of the use cases, the necessity of pop-up can be eliminated — for example, Consider placement of blog subscription forms/check list/e-book download links in Medium.

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• 

  Too Small too Big: Smaller card can go unnoticed at the same time a bigger card might not fit in the wallet so both could go unnoticed! So choose your size carefully – prefer standard size. The standard dimensions of a printed business card are 3.5 x 2 inches. That’s the finished card size. In the metric system, the standard business card size is 8.9 x 5.1 cm (centimeters) or 88.9 x 50.8 mm (millimeters). Color/Font: Your overall colour and design of the business card should align with your brand elements and style. Read more on branding. Some people have very small font for the important details like phone number/email – no use of the card then because more than half of the people you hand-out your card will probably be aged and will struggle to read smaller texts, also card with no contrast color for background against the text will worsen the readability further. Content is the king: If the card doesn’t convey what you do? Plz dontwaste your money printing it. Have the services u do in a simple term that everyone can understand, keep contact info prominent. Make sure we are not stuffing too much content in the card. Proofreading: Most people don’t give importance to proof read the card before printing, this is the very important step and should not be skipped, a typo or misalignment, missing of important info will ruin the card totally. Material is the queen: All good things can go in vain if the customer feels a cheap stupid card in their hand, choose the print material wisely glossy/mate etc. Choose the one that align with your design theme. Downloading from the free sources: Printing directly from press or downloading from the internet is on raise now, so most people have very similar card. There is a chance that a customer will end up with 2 cards of different companies with the same design. So spend time deciding your card and come up with a unique card. For example, in our Webchirpy business card, we explained how we designed our logo, this makes our card unique and at the same time explain the workflow of our business which is designing. webchirpy business card Print quantity: Printing more card seems beneficial but it is generally a wrong assumption, how frequent we are going to give card -1 card per day, that way we can give only 365 cards. So how long it will take for you to give your 5000 cards ? 16 years. By that time not only your design but your business will be outdated. Numbers matter. So, Choose wisely. Print the right quantity and update your card regularly. Reach us to get your card updated. Social media: Social media is nowadays a key medium to build brand awareness, credibility and for marketing. People have also started contacting businesses through social media, you can respond to your client queries and concerns right then & there and win back their trust & loyalty. It is now a must to add social media links. Get updated – Use QR: With almost all people having smartphones – QR scanning is what that can instantly connect your physical business material to your digital world. It can be used to take the audience instantly your website, specially designed landing page, social media profile etc., Whatsapp Business: With arrival of Whatsapp for Business, now it’s such an ease to be in touch with your audience and share the content or marketing materials directly with them. It’s unconventional approach and quick response time make it the most preferred choice for the users. So, don’t forget to include your business whatsapp number in your business card.

  10 Things To Keep In Mind For Your Business Card Design

  Too Small too Big:

  Smaller card can go unnoticed at the same time a bigger card might not fit in the wallet so both could go unnoticed! So choose your size carefully – prefer standard size. The standard dimensions of a printed business card are 3.5 x 2 inches. That’s the finished card size. In the metric system, the standard business card size is 8.9 x 5.1 cm (centimeters) or 88.9 x 50.8 mm (millimeters).

  Color/Font:

  Your overall colour and design of the business card should align with your brand elements and style. Read more on branding. Some people have very small font for the important details like phone number/email – no use of the card then because more than half of the people you hand-out your card will probably be aged and will struggle to read smaller texts, also card with no contrast color for background against the text will worsen the readability further.

  Content is the king:

  If the card doesn’t convey what you do? Plz dontwaste your money printing it. Have the services u do in a simple term that everyone can understand, keep contact info prominent. Make sure we are not stuffing too much content in the card.

  Proofreading:

  Most people don’t give importance to proof read the card before printing, this is the very important step and should not be skipped, a typo or misalignment, missing of important info will ruin the card totally.

  Material is the queen:

  All good things can go in vain if the customer feels a cheap stupid card in their hand, choose the print material wisely glossy/mate etc. Choose the one that align with your design theme.

  Downloading from the free sources:

  Printing directly from press or downloading from the internet is on raise now, so most people have very similar card. There is a chance that a customer will end up with 2 cards of different companies with the same design. So spend time deciding your card and come up with a unique card.

  For example, in our Webchirpy business card, we explained how we designed our logo, this makes our card unique and at the same time explain the workflow of our business which is designing.

  webchirpy business card

  Print quantity:

  Printing more card seems beneficial but it is generally a wrong assumption, how frequent we are going to give card -1 card per day, that way we can give only 365 cards. So how long it will take for you to give your 5000 cards ? 16 years. By that time not only your design but your business will be outdated. Numbers matter. So, Choose wisely. Print the right quantity and update your card regularly. Reach us to get your card updated.

  Social media:

  Social media is nowadays a key medium to build brand awareness, credibility and for marketing. People have also started contacting businesses through social media, you can respond to your client queries and concerns right then & there and win back their trust & loyalty. It is now a must to add social media links.

  Get updated – Use QR:

  With almost all people having smartphones – QR scanning is what that can instantly connect your physical business material to your digital world. It can be used to take the audience instantly your website, specially designed landing page, social media profile etc.,

  Whatsapp Business:

  With arrival of Whatsapp for Business, now it’s such an ease to be in touch with your audience and share the content or marketing materials directly with them. It’s unconventional approach and quick response time make it the most preferred choice for the users. So, don’t forget to include your business whatsapp number in your business card.

  Know More