10 Marketing Tips for New Entrepreneurs in China

China is a huge market full of opportunities. Success in this market can be difficult if you don’t understand the complexity of the Chinese market.

Here are 10 marketing tips to develop your startup in China.

It will not be easy, but everything is possible. (I like this quote.)

     

China is probably the most digitalized Country in the World, so think online before offline.

I guess most entrepreneurs do not have millions to invest in TV advertising etc., So I will focus on smart marketing, with minimum investment.

1. Digital Marketing: an Innovative Content Can Make the Difference 

In China, more than any other country in the world, consumers want interesting content. Due to all the scandals and the growing fake market, Chinese consumers are suspicious. In a country where everything goes fast, you need to provide a lot of information to your consumers.

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3 Easy-to-Use Motion Graphics Tools for Marketers

Want to use more animated visuals in your marketing? Looking for affordable tools to create your own animated graphics? In this article, you’ll find three tools that create animated motion graphics for social media ads and posts. #1: Turn Images Into Animated GIFs With GIFMaker.me GIFMaker.me is an excellent free tool that lets you turn

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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle

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6 New Rules for Landing Page Success

It’s no secret small businesses often have limited marketing budgets, which means their funds—as well as their time and other resources—have to be allocated judiciously. Email marketing campaigns and paid ads are often two of the most commonly used marketing initiatives by this group, since they tend to yield great returns.

But if you’ve invested in either of these approaches and haven’t seen the type of response you hoped for, you might be missing something of great importance: effective landing pages. Read on for a look at how one company drastically changed its campaign conversion rates once they revamped their landing pages, and how you can borrow some of their tactics to do the same.

Is Something Better Than Nothing?

Few companies are as strapped for time as small businesses, so it makes sense that seemingly minor moving parts can slip through the cracks. This begs the question: Is it better to have no landing page for your marketing campaign than a poorly constructed one? Or is it best to still put up a landing page, even if you don’t have a lot of time to devote to building it?

Well, given that landing pages are crucial to the success of your marketing campaigns, it’s better to have one. But you no longer have to sacrifice quality due to time and budgetary constraints, thankfully. There are new methods of creating high-quality landing pages that won’t eat up all your time while allowing you to treat them as a high priority.

A great landing page shouldn't mean sacrificing quality due to time and budgetary constraints.
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Out with the Old

Master Oil Painting is a small business that needed a better way to capture more leads and increase conversions. They had tried landing pages for various campaigns in the past, but their average conversion rate was stuck at 4.4 percent. They found the setup process to be tedious, and they weren’t confident that their effort was generating any ROI.

The folks at Master Oil Painting knew they needed a solution that could help them create more professional-looking landing pages in minutes, with features that could enhance their customer experience and provide better results. Master Oil Painting began searching for a way to gain more leads, better capture their data, and ultimately enjoy higher conversion rates. They knew they needed to move on from their prior approach to landing pages.

The Proof Is in the Numbers

Once Master Oil Painting implemented Infusionsoft’s new Landing Pages feature, the company quickly and effectively learned the important components of a landing page—which they had largely been missing before. They put into practice what they had learned within the seamless system and immediately saw their conversion rates leap to 11.5 percent (more than doubling from their previous rate). Not only that, but their email click rates nearly doubled, and they saw their monthly sales figures rise to the highest numbers they’d seen since launching the business two years prior. Master Oil Painting had hit upon a discovery of what works within landing pages, and what tends to fall flat.

The Nuts and Bolts of Landing Page Success

Whether you use Infusionsoft’s new Landing Pages or another system to create your landing pages, there are six key aspects to keep in mind to get the most conversions.

1. Ease and Time

As mentioned above, you can’t spend inordinate amounts of time agonizing over what verbiage or designs to use in your landing pages. Look for templates that already include placeholders for the information your customers expect to find and allow you to move things around in a drag-and-drop fashion. This will save you a good deal of time, and keep the whole page looking polished and professional.

2. Aesthetics and Experience

Along the same lines, your landing pages need to be eye-catching in order to keep a prospect’s attention. Make sure you’re using responsive landing pages, so visitors can have a smooth experience no matter what device they use. Include royalty free images and test your landing pages to be sure they have fast load times. After all, your prospects are likely to have their attention drawn elsewhere if they have to wait for a page to load.

3. Compelling Call-to-Action

Your landing page needs to have a call-to-action button that draws your visitor in. For example, invite your visitor to request a free consultation or download a useful ebook. They’ll need to receive something valuable in exchange for handing over their information, so you want to make this part of the deal as enticing as possible.

4. Form Fields and Data Collection

The main point of putting together landing pages is to capture important customer data and have a way to follow up with hot leads. Double check that your landing pages include web forms that ask for first and last names, email addresses, phone numbers, or other information that you want to use. These insights can help you with relationship building later, as well as serving customers’ needs when they need it most.

5. Integration and Support

If you’re using a landing page builder, make sure it synchronizes with your CRM or marketing software. Master Oil Painting, for example, used Infusionsoft for its sales and marketing software, so it was a breeze for them to have their Infusionsoft Landing Pages sync with Infusionsoft’s custom fields. This makes follow-up and data consolidation a whole lot easier.

6. Customization

Finally, consider the possibilities you have with custom domains and messaging. Tailor-made domains can help boost your SEO rankings, and personalized messaging can make all the difference in whether you convert prospects or not. Your landing page should have both.

“I couldn’t be more thrilled with the results I’ve seen since switching to Infusionsoft landing pages. Every conversion rate I track has improved since the switch, some more than doubling what they were previous,” said Bill Inman, owner of Master Oil Painting.  “And even more important is the time it’s saved me, which has left hours more each month for me to focus on site improvement, marketing expansion, and increased time availability with our customers. Infusionsoft Landing Pages integrated with other Infusionsoft tools has saved us time, money, and made the overall experience better for my team—and even more importantly, our customers.”

If you’re already spending your hard-earned revenue (and time) on email marketing campaigns or paid media, make sure you’re spending equal attention on designing an effective landing page too. You can get a boost in conversions (and ease of use) just like Master Oil Painting did if you focus on the points above. Here’s to flawless landing pages and excited prospects who convert into customers in short order.

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How to Create Successful Content Using Seasonality

Looking back on the years it is incredible to see how far my life – and work – have come. I couldn’t have conceived of the hardships I would face, the struggles I would go through, the triumphs and successes, the moves and changes. The industry I have dedicated myself to have shifted so dramatically over the past decade that it has become a whole new living, breathing force.

But looking at then versus now, do you know what has not changed a bit? The importance of content in any marketing strategy. Think about it, is content any less important today than it was ten years ago? Fifteen? If anything, it has become a more critical issue with the expansion of what constitutes as content on the web.

What was once a term reserved for email lists and gaudy, glittering web pages has opened to a broad array of videos, podcasts, slideshows, social media posts, infographics, comics… pretty much anything you can imagine now has its place in content marketing.

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How to Use Live Video in a Product Launch: 7 Ways

Do you use live video to sell products or services? Wondering how to grow an audience that will show up for your launch? In this article, you’ll discover seven live video tactics that will create a warm and engaged audience for your next launch. How Live Video Helps You Build Your Audience For these live

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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle

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Declining Organic Traffic? How to Tell if it’s a Tracking or Optimization Issue

Posted by andrewchoco

Picture this scenario. You’re a new employee that has just been brought in to a struggling marketing department (or an agency brought on to help recover lost numbers). You get access to Google Analytics, and see something like this:

(Actual screenshot of the client I audited)

This can generate two types of emotional response: excitement or fear (or both). The steady decline in organic traffic excites you because you have so many tactics and ideas that you think can save this company from spiraling downward out of control. But there’s also the fear that these tactics wont be enough to correct the course.

Regardless of whether these new tactics would work or not, it’s important to understand the history of the account and determine not only what is happening, but why.

The company may have an idea of why the traffic is declining (i.e. competitors have come in and made ranking for keywords much harder, or they did a website redesign and have never recovered).

Essentially, this boils down to two things: 1) either you’re struggling with organic optimization, or 2) something was off with your tracking in Google Analytics, has since been corrected, and hasn’t been caught.

In this article, I’ll go over an audit I did for one of my clients to help determine if the decline we saw in organic traffic was due to actual poor SEO performance, an influx in competitors, tracking issues, or a combination of these things.

I’ll be breaking it down into five different areas of investigation:

1. Keyword ranking differences from 2015–2017
   1. Did the keywords we were ranking for in 2015 change drastically in 2017? Did we lose rankings and therefore lose organic traffic?
2. Top organic landing pages from 2015–2017
   1. Are the top ranking organic landing pages the same currently as they were in 2015? Are we missing any pages due to a website redesign?
3. On-page metric
   1. Did something happen to the site speed / bounce rate / page views etc.
4. SEMrush/Moz keyword, traffic, and domain authority data
   1. Looking at the SEMrush organic traffic cost metric as well as Moz metrics like Domain Authority and competitors.
5. Goal completions
   
   1. Did our conversion numbers stay consistent throughout the traffic drop? Or did the conversions drop in correlation with the traffic drop?

By the end of this post, my goal is that you’ll be able to replicate this audit to determine exactly what’s causing your organic traffic decline and how to get back on the right track.

Let’s dive in!

Keyword ranking differences from 2015–2017

This was my initial starting point for my audit. I started with this specifically because the most obvious answer, for a decline in traffic is a decline in keyword rankings.

I wanted to look at what keywords we were ranking for in 2015 to see if we significantly dropped in the rankings or if the search volume had dropped. If the company you’re auditing has had a long-running Moz account, start by looking at the keyword rankings from the initial start of the decline, compared to current keyword rankings.

I exported keyword data from both SEMrush and Moz, and looked specifically at the ranking changes of core keywords.

March was a particularly strong month across the board, so I narrowed it down and exported the keyword rankings in:

• March 2015
• March 2016
• March 2017
• December 2017 (so I could get the most current rankings)

Once the keywords were exported, I went in and highlighted in red the keywords that we were ranking for in 2015 (and driving traffic from) that we were no longer ranking for in 2017. I also highlighted in yellow the keywords we were ranking for in 2015 that were still ranking in 2017.

2015 keywords:

2017 keywords:

(Brand-related queries and URLs are blurred out for anonymity)

One thing that immediately stood out: in 2015, this company was ranking for five keywords, including the word “free.” They have since changed their offering, so it made sense that in 2017, we weren’t ranking for those keywords.

After removing the free queries, we pulled the “core” keywords to look at their differences.

March 2015 core keywords:

• Appointment scheduling software: position 9
• Online appointment scheduling: position 11
• Online appointment scheduling: position 9
• Online scheduling software: position 9
• Online scheduler: position 9
• Online scheduling: position 13

December 2017 core keywords:

• Appointment scheduler: position 11
• Appointment scheduling software: position 10
• Online schedule: position 6
• Online appointment scheduler: position 11
• Online appointment scheduling: position 12
• Online scheduling software: position 12
• Online scheduling tool: position 10
• Online scheduling: position 15
• SaaS appointment scheduling: position 2

There were no particular red flags here. While some of the keywords have moved down 1–2 spots, we had new ones jump up. These small changes in movement didn’t explain the nearly 30–40% drop in organic traffic. I checked this off my list and moved on to organic landing pages.

Top organic landing page changes

Since the dive into keyword rankings didn’t provide the answer for the decline in traffic, the next thing I looked at were the organic landing pages. I knew this client had switched over CMS systems in early 2017, and had done a few small redesign projects the past three years.

After exporting our organic landing pages for 2015, 2016, and 2017, we compared the top ten (by organic sessions) and got the following results.

2015 top organic landing pages:

2016 top organic landing pages:

2017 top organic landing pages:

Because of their redesign, you can see that the subfolders changed between 2015/2016 to 2017. What really got my attention, however, is the /get-started page. In 2015/2016, the Get Started page accounted for nearly 16% of all organic traffic. In 2017, the Get Started page was nowhere to be found.

If you run into this problem and notice there are pages missing from your current top organic pages, a great way to uncover why is to use the Wayback Machine. It's a great tool that allows you to see what a web page looked like in the past.

When we looked at the /get-started URL in the Wayback Machine, we noticed something pretty interesting:

In 2015, their /get-started page also acted as their login page. When people were searching on Google for “[Company Name] login,” this page was ranking, bringing in a significant amount of organic traffic.

Their current setup sends logins to a subdomain that doesn’t have a GA code (as it’s strictly used as a portal to the actual application).

That helped explain some of the organic traffic loss, but knowing that this client had gone through a few website redesigns, I wanted to make sure that all redirects were done properly. Regardless of whether or not your traffic has changed, if you’ve recently done a website redesign where you’re changing URLs, it’s smart to look at your top organic landing pages from before the redesign and double check to make sure they’re redirecting to the correct pages.

While this helped explain some of the traffic loss, the next thing we looked at was the on-page metrics to see if we could spot any obvious tracking issues.

Comparing on-page engagement metrics

Looking at the keyword rankings and organic landing pages provided a little bit of insight into the organic traffic loss, but it was nothing definitive. Because of this, I moved to the on-page metrics for further clarity. As a disclaimer, when I talk about on-page metrics, I’m talking about bounce rate, page views, average page views per session, and time on site.

Looking at the same top organic pages, I compared the on-page engagement metrics.

2015 on-page metrics:

2016 on-page metrics:

2017 on-page metrics:

While the overall engagement metrics changed slightly, the biggest and most interesting discrepancy I saw was in the bounce rates for the home page and Get Started page.

According to a number of different studies (like this one, this one, or even this one), the average bounce rate for a B2B site is around 40–60%. Seeing the home page with a bounce rate under 20% was definitely a red flag.

This led me to look into some other metrics as well. I compared key metrics between 2015 and 2017, and was utterly confused by the findings:

Looking at the organic sessions (overall), we saw a decrease of around 80,000 sessions, or 27.93%.

Looking at the organic users (overall) we saw a similar number, with a decrease of around 38,000 users, or 25%.

When we looked at page views, however, we saw a much more drastic drop:

For the entire site, we saw a 50% decrease in pageviews, or a decrease of nearly 400,000 page views.

This didn’t make much sense, because even if we had those extra 38,000 users, and each user averaged roughly 2.49 pages per session (looking above), that would only account for, at most, 100,000 more page views. This left 300,000 page views unaccounted for.

This led me to believe that there was definitely some sort of tracking issue. The high number of page views and low bounce rate made me suspect that some users were being double counted.

However, to confirm these assumptions, I took a look at some external data sources.

Using SEMrush and Moz data to exclude user error

If you have a feeling that your tracking was messed up in previous years, a good way to confirm or deny this hypothesis is to check external sources like Moz and SEMrush.

Unfortunately, this particular client was fairly new, so as a result, their Moz campaign data wasn’t around during the high organic traffic times in 2015. However, if it was, a good place to start would be looking at the search visibility metric (as long as the primary keywords have stayed the same). If this metric has changed drastically over the years, it’s a good indicator that your organic rankings have slipped quite a bit.

Another good thing to look at is domain authority and core page authority. If your site has had a few redesigns, moved URLs, or anything like that, it’s important to make sure that the domain authority has carried over. It’s also important to look at the page authorities of your core pages. If these are much lower than when they were before the organic traffic slide, there’s a good chance your redirects weren’t done properly, and the page authority isn’t being carried over through those new domains.

If, like me, you don’t have Moz data that dates back far enough, a good thing to check is the organic traffic cost in SEMrush.

Organic traffic cost can change because of a few reasons:

1. Your site is ranking for more valuable keywords, making the organic traffic cost rise.
2. More competitors have entered the space, making the keywords you were ranking for more expensive to bid on.

Usually it’s a combination of both of these.

If our organic traffic really was steadily decreasing for the past 2 years, we’d likely see a similar trendline looking at our organic traffic cost. However, that’s not what we saw.

In March of 2015, the organic traffic cost of my client’s site was $14,300.

In March of 2016, the organic traffic cost was $22,200

In December of 2017, the organic traffic cost spiked all the way up to $69,200. According to SEMrush, we also saw increases in keywords and traffic.

Looking at all of this external data re-affirmed the assumption that something must have been off with our tracking.

However, as a final check, I went back to internal metrics to see if the conversion data had decreased at a similar rate as the organic traffic.

Analyzing and comparing conversion metrics

This seemed like a natural final step into uncovering the mystery in this traffic drop. After all, it’s not organic traffic that's going to profit your business (although it’s a key component). The big revenue driver is goal completions and form fills.

This was a fairly simple procedure. I went into Google Analytics to compare goal completion numbers and goal completion conversion rates over the past three years.

If your company is like my client’s, there’s a good chance you’re taking advantage of the maximum 20 goal completions that can be simultaneously tracked in Analytics. However, to make things easier and more consistent (since goal completions can change), I looked at only buyer intent conversions. In this case it was Enterprise, Business, and Personal edition form fills, as well as Contact Us form fills.

If you’re doing this on your own site, I would recommend doing the same thing. Gated content goal completions usually have a natural shelf life, and this natural slowdown in goal completions can skew the data. I’d look at the most important conversion on your site (usually a contact us or a demo form) and go strictly off those numbers.

For my client, you can see those goal completion numbers below:

Goal completion name	2015	2016	2017
Contact Us	579	525	478
Individual Edition	3,372	2,621	3,420
Business Edition	1,147	1,437	1,473
Enterprise Edition	1,178	1,053	502
Total	6,276	5,636	5,873

Conversion rates:

Goal completion name	2015	2016	2017
Contact Us	0.22%	0.22%	0.23%
Individual Edition	1.30%	1.09%	1.83%
Business Edition	0.46%	0.60%	0.76%
Enterprise Edition	0.46%	0.44%	0.29%
Average	0.61%	0.58%	0.77%

This was pretty interesting. Although there was clearly fluctuation in the goal completions and conversion rates, there were no differences that made sense with our nearly 40,000 user drop from 2015 to 2016 to 2017.

All of these findings further confirmed that we were chasing an inaccurate goal. In fact, we spent the first three months working together to try and get back a 40% loss that, quite frankly, was never even there in the first place.

Tying everything together and final thoughts

For this particular case, we had to go down all five of these roads in order to reach the conclusion that we did: Our tracking was off in the past.

However, this may not be the case for your company or your clients. You may start by looking at keyword rankings, and realize that you’re no longer ranking on the first page for ten of your core keywords. If that’s the case, you quickly discovered your issue, and your game plan should be investing in your core pages to help get them ranking again for these core keywords.

If your goal completions are way down (by a similar percentage as your traffic), that’s also a good clue that your declining traffic numbers are correct.

If you’ve looked at all of these metrics and still can’t seem to figure out the reasoning for the decrease and you’re blindly trying tactics and struggling to crawl your way back up, this is a great checklist to go through to confirm the ominous question of tracking issue or optimization issue.

If you’re having a similar issue as me, I’m hoping this post helps you get to the root of the problem quickly, and gets you one step closer to create realistic organic traffic goals for the future!

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13 Ingredients in the Perfect Social Media Contest

With the competition for attention online at an all-time high, the struggle to keep followers engaged with your company’s social channels is real, and ongoing. In addition to the smart use of visuals, businesses often turn to social media contests and promotions to stir excitement and drive activity from their audience.

It’s not as easy as tweeting “Who wants to win an iPad!?”, even though we’ve all clicked on that at one time or another. Excellent social media contests require substantial planning and nimble execution. They have many moving parts and potential points of failure.

Here’s a checklist of 13 ingredients you’ll need before launching the perfect social media contest:

1. Venue

Where will this contest take place? Facebook? Instagram? Twitter? Or will it be present in multiple venues, like a photo contest where participants can enter on Facebook or Instagram? Remember that each time you add a venue for participation, your oversight responsibilities grow geometrically.

2. Entry Mechanism

How do people qualify to enter your social media contest? There are hundreds of variations, but there are six main categories of participation mechanism. They are: Sweepstakes (nothing required—most common on Twitter); Connect (like/follow the company’s social account to enter); Like (like a particular piece of content to enter); Share (share a piece of content to enter); Vote (state preference from among multiple pieces of content to enter); Create (develop user-generated content and upload to enter).

Remember: The more you ask your audience to do, the fewer will do it. Remember too that the younger your audience, the more comfortable they will be creating content for your contest.

The more you ask your audience to do in a social media contest, the fewer will do it.
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3. Theme and Name

Is this contest seasonal? Does it tie into a particular product or service? Remember, the theme/name will guide the rest of the creative. Take some time to come up with something that resonates. Try to keep your contest name short, as long names eat up valuable characters in tweets and ad headlines.

4. Timeline

This is where you coordinate the major elements of the social media contest. The best approach here is to work backward from the date that you want to announce winners. From there, figure out when judging starts/ends (if applicable), when entries close, when entries open, when promotion starts, and other key milestones. Be sure to account for time to develop the creative, get approval for the contest rules, and any other internal hurdles that you need to cover before launch.

5. Visual Identity

In today’s social media landscape of visual billboards, you’ll need strong graphics and video to support your contest. Graphic needs may include cover and profile images, logos, headers, landing pages, emails, promoted posts, carousel images, or ad images (to name a few). Videos explaining and promoting the contest should be in both vertical (Snapchat, Instagram) and horizontal (YouTube, Facebook) formats, and likely various other lengths to maximize impact across different social channels. To make sure your design team doesn’t mutiny, use your timeline from step four and give them a single list of everything you need, including specific pixel dimensions and required language or copy. For Facebook, remember the 20 percent rule when creating graphics for promoted posts and ad images.

6. Prizes

What will winners receive? This is a place for you to be creative, and most social media contests are far too obvious here. (See “win an iPad” above.)

Remember, the prize itself can be the theme for the contest, as with the legendary “best job in the world” campaign from Tourism Queensland. The best contests have prizes that tie directly back to the company itself. This becomes particularly important when you consider the downstream results of this effort. You want to activate and attract people who are genuinely interested in your business, not just “contest hunters” who enter everything they can find. If you sell fishing gear, give away fishing gear as a prize, not an iPad.

7. Editorial Calendar

Here’s where you map out (via Excel, a custom Google calendar, and/or your social media management software) all the social media posts, email messages, advertising support, and other communications about your promotion. You don’t necessarily have to write all of the messages in advance—although it’s not a bad idea, and your legal team may require it. Remember that your social media contest (and corresponding communications) has five phases: pre-launch, launch, last chance, completion, and winners. You need to plan multiple messages across multiple platforms for each phase.

8. Seeding Strategy

This applies to the pre-launch and launch phases of your social media contest. This is where you figure out how to give your promotion the best chance of lift-off in the critical early days of the promotion. What you’re trying to do here is make sure that the people who already love you, and the people who have a disproportionate number of social connections, are fully aware of the contest and are ready to participate and spread the word the minute the promotion begins. This could include special “Shh, Coming Soon” emails to key customers and social influencers, making sure all employees are aware of the event and other opportunities.

Remember: You do not want to “soft launch” a contest. This is especially true on Facebook, where the algorithm dictates that slow starters get buried.

9. Amplification Strategy

With the exception of simple Twitter contests and basic Facebook contests that are managed within your timeline, you will probably need some sort of amplification to ensure that your contest has the reach (and garners the attention) you desire. This may include Facebook and Instagram ads (think about custom audiences ads shown only to your email subscribers), Facebook promoted posts, Twitter promoted tweets, ad opportunities on Pinterest, amplification networks like Outbrain, Taboola, and Stumble, and other options. Remember that even if your contest takes place on one platform, you can use multiple platforms to amplify it.

10. Rules

I purposefully put rules and legal advice tenth on this list because I have found it is much easier to have legal weigh in on the entirety of the program (including seeding, editorial, amplification) all at once, instead of having them look at the mechanism and prizes first, and then going back to them later with a second round of inquiries about the other elements. As with the design team, make legal’s job easier by giving them the total picture up-front. Be proactive by doing your research first on what each venue allows for contests, and have the links ready to share with legal. (Here’s Facebook’s Pages Terms.) It’ll make them happy, and you absolutely want to keep them on your side.

11. Community Management

Participants and prospective entrants will have questions and comments about your contest. Some will be easy to address. Others may not be so simple. It is absolutely critical (even for simple contests) that you have a defined plan for who is moderating and overseeing your social outposts. This doesn’t just mean the channels where the contest is located and normal business hours. What is your plan for coverage on nights and weekends? Your day-to-day community management realities will likely be modest compared to what you need to accomplish during a contest. Plan for this.

12. Crisis Plan

You should already have a social media crisis plan. If you’ve never created one, the launch of your new contest provides excellent leverage for getting it finished. Will something go massively awry with your contest, causing you to activate your crisis plan? Probably not. But if it does, and you don’t have that crisis plan to turn to in that critical moment, the chances you’ll ever get to do another contest are just about zero. Consider this to be the “I’m not about to get fired because of a contest” ingredient of this recipe. (See my popular “8 steps to manage a social media crisis” post and slides here.)

13. Software (Sometimes)

As with amplification, you may not need software if your social media contest is very straightforward. But for any sort of contest that requires data collection as part of the entry mechanism, you’ll need software to help build and manage the affair. There are literally dozens of software packages that help you do this, either as their sole function or as part of a larger suite of social media management capabilities. Here at Convince & Convert, we’re familiar with most of them but haven’t used them all first-hand.

Software I can personally recommend (please feel free to nominate others in the comments) includes:

• Wyng: For mid-sized companies on Facebook and beyond, this software packs tons of campaign and content templates and ideas.
• Shortstack: For small businesses up to large agencies, this is one of the legacy providers for contests on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
• Strutta: For medium/large companies hosting contests on Facebook, Instagram, or their own microsite, their DIY and custom packages make this software accessible for most.
• Woobox: This software is designed for mid-sized companies and large brands that make Facebook a top priority.
• Wishpond: This tool works best for medium/large companies connecting contests to lead generation.
• Rafflecopter: This is one of the best options for bloggers and solopreneurs looking to run a simple giveaway with multiple entry points.

Those are the 13 ingredients of the perfect social media contest. What did I miss?

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