Digital Marketing Mystery #2 – Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing for Small Businesses?
We all know what social media is, and likely have a Facebook and a LinkedIn account. We know there is a business play to make for our small business on social media, but without a general understanding of how it can benefit you, it may not feel as if it is costing you anything to ignore it. But it is. It’s easy to ignore things you don’t know effect your bottom line. If you sell a product online or otherwise, and depend on traffic to your web site for sales and brand awareness, I am here to convince you it’s important.
The single most important reason to not ignore social media and creating a presence for your company there is Google and other search engines will ignore you if you don’t. Though you need a solid Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy for your sites and structure, technology and keywords still play a role in ranking on search engines, you can no longer artificially stuff your site with links or keyword dense content in hope the search engines will look your way. Google’s rules and bots demand authentic content that is thorough regularly updated and if yours is not and your competitor’s is, they will get the traffic. When someone types in your product category search terms you want them to land with you – or you at least want to be on the front page of the search results, right? Well this used to be accomplished with solid SEO and some artificial SEO tactics. It is now accomplished by solid SEO and you establishing relationships with many consumers or business owners across at least a few social media channels.
Where you establish a presence on social media is determined by who you are marketing to. Research is clear that Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are necessities and YouTube, Google +, Snapchat and Instagram follow. Instead of managing one property, your main web site, you have to manage your main web site(s) and multiple landing pages, with traffic arriving from your active presence on a portfolio of sites and social media property accounts. Social media can be used as a selling vehicle itself, but that is for another post.
For example:
Are you targeting Millennials? You better have a presence on Snap Chat, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube
Are you targeting Gen Xers? Linked In, Facebook and YouTube will get you started!
You get the picture.
Where direct access (a consumer typing in the name of your company on a search engine), paid search engine ads and writing content with just the right keyword density used to do the trick, now you must create all of those links to your site by your authentic presence across the social media sphere. It takes a strategy, a variety of content and an ongoing effort to update and replace content. If search engines are the new phone book, you want to be showing up. So getting a start on social media is not a fun, side job anymore. It’s a necessity.
If you want to see real live examples of social media done well by some major brands, here is some inspiration from some major brands:
For social media advertising: Air BnB, The American Red Cross
For Facebook Strategy: Coca Cola, Walmart
Google+ Strategy: Charmin, Oreo
Instagram Strategy: Hershel Supply Co., General Electric
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Digital Marketing Mystery #1: What is SEO anyway?
What is SEO?
We all know it matters but some wonder what SEO even stands for. Mystery solved! Read on.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization or the optimizing of site content to satisfy the demands of search engine ranking criteria. SEO is a combination of technical and non-technical aspects of a site. Examples of technical SEO would be the sites use of code language, the back end code details and the download speed of the site onto a mobile device. An example of a non-technical or content item is the quality of the content and the frequency at which it is updated or kept fresh. Search engines want fresh, dynamic content that is naturally relevant to you consumer.
Search Engines like Google and Yahoo! will serve your pages up to consumers looking for you on their search engines when your content is relevant (full of keywords that your consumers search on) and when the content is kept fresh – the solution for most sites is a blog that is posted to weekly or even more frequently.
What is Site Success?
Successful sites have a clear brand look and feel and attract a high volume of visitors from the locations and populations you are targeting. The visitors return frequently and devour the types of content being offered. The contact us forms are filled out and sales are closed as a result of the site – often right now the site. Successful sites have low bounce rates (people stay for a while) and high page session averages. (They look at lots of pages) The content is brand, product and sales oriented. Article length is long (at least 700 words) and is relevant to your audience – their challenges and needs.
Why is SEO a challenge?
SEO is tricky in that it requires a constant feed of relevant, timely content – your content can go stale quickly. Also, the search engines change their appetites from time to time. For example, Google recently has been measuring not just the keyword density of your articles but their true relevance to your audience and they even have ways to measure how deeply you cover your topic. A team of writers, interns, product managers, PR representatives can all contribute to your content library. Be careful not to duplicate content as that is a no go for search engines. If your company owns multiple domains the content must all be unique and frequently refreshed.
Where do you start?
Getting started is the tough part. Start by discovering what your readers want to hear about, by studying your clicks and site statistics. Create a blog on your site and start posting articles that your site visitors are interested in. If you need some fresh ideas on the types of keywords that will work for your site, and your content, WordTracker is helpful and offers a free trial. You can also survey your email recipients to see what they are interested in learning about, what their key challenges are.
Assign content development to specific team members, and develop a content schedule in tandem with your sales and marketing goals and promotions. If you start to generate content on a regular basis, your search engine ranking and site interaction will grow. It takes time but it’s worth it to gain true traffic that supports your sales and marketing goals.
Good luck and stay at it! With SEO, slow and steady wins the race!
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Add Email Marketing to Your Holiday Marketing Menu
Holiday email marketing is a great solution to decreased return on marketing dollars due to the slumping economy. This holiday is a perfect time to give email marketing a test drive. You can add email now to your holiday promotional planning and reap the benefits way into the new year with new email subscriptions, increased revenue and a completed test of an additional revenue stream. Increase your return on traditional efforts by 10% and 20% by adding email to the mix and landing pages to close the business online. This new means of generating sales takes strategy and planning but can be launched in a relatively short amount of time. Here are some of the steps to get your started:
- Decide if you will hire an agency or keep the work in house.
- Brainstorm how your direct mail, direct TV and other direct response efforts can be repurposed for email. If you chose to keep the effort in house, do some research first on sites like www.marketingsherpa.com and www.mediapost.com to read case studies of successful email campaigns.
- Assess the size of your current customer list and what lists you might want to purchase especially for the holiday. Can you assume at least a 1% sale rate on that list? Don’t you want that revenue in December? If you don’t want to buy a list brainstorm ideas to grow your list organically by incentivizing sign ups online or within your current advertising efforts.
- Create new designs and promos or leverage existing of the same of your hottest products and services.
- Decide what “success” is for this first holiday email marketing test and review the reports carefully to see if you have met your goals. Email marketing is measured in delivered emails, opens, clicks and sales.
25 Online Holiday Offers to Try Now
If you are like most bustling e-commerce sites, you are always looking for fresh holiday offers to entice your customers. The holidays provide a great opportunity to promote a new product or discount your customer’s favorite product. Here’s a simple list of holiday offer to test with your audience.
Remember to test text, imagery, the actual offer and other media elements. A/B test tag lines, subject lines, button placements and use the winners to gain the best traffic to lead and lead to sale conversion rates. I hope you find a few you have never tried before! Happy Holidays!
- Coupons – Be sure to test the percentage off amount, list the offer limitations and expiration dates!
- Discounted offers – discounts of 10 or 20%, half off specials
- Volume discount offers – “Buy three get 30% off!”
- Buy one get one free offers- go BOGO crazy!
- Refer a friend,(to the site, to the product) gain a 20% discount
- “Feature us on your blog and get product for free” Bloggers will post your offer for free or for a fee, sometimes they will take a free sample as payment.
- Reward first time buyers with “January” coupons
- Free shipping – is still a highly desired shopping feature, but be careful to count the cost of this offer.
- Free shipping on select items
- “Women’s gifts day” offer that links to the women’s gifts area of your site
- “Men’s gifts day” offer that links to the men’s gifts area of your site
- “Shop for Kids” day on your site
- Offer a free trial of your product or service
- Free gift wrapping
- Review a product, receive special sale access
- Create a “romantic gifts” section on your site
- Add a page to your site that lists ideas for the “hard to buy for” and promote it with banners, email marketing and a blog post
- “One day only” sales
- Final days of shopping, “blow out” sales
- Discounted discontinued items sale
- Offer bundled packages of your best selling items at a special price
- Offer priority access to special parts of your site, to customers who purchase certain items
- 12 days of Christmas email offers – one email offer a day, for the last 12 shopping days!
- Buy one get 2nd item for $1.99
- Free Milk and Cookies package with purchase
These are just a short list of the many possibilities – be as creative as you can offering your loyal customers a reason to become even more loyal to your brand and products. Consider posting a new special offer daily from now until December 24th to motivate your visitors to return daily! Have fun with it and enjoy the new visitors, clicks and sales!
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How to Get Started in Social Media
If you still don’t have a major presence in social media channels, you are late to the party. But you still need a starting point and this article gives you one It gets started in answering these questions: Where do you start amidst existing marketing spends? Do you replace things you are already doing with social media efforts incrementally? Rearrange your mix completely? Add the effort to existing teams? Create a new team? And how the heck is it all measured?
At Least Augment
One approach is to augment existing efforts with social outreach. So what do I mean by that?
Well, for each successful digital marketing effort you currently deploy, add a social component: add the ability to share socially each email you send, add social icons to your web site so visitors can quickly and easily share your content, socially promote contests and sweepstakes. You get the picture.
At Least One Happy Social Soul
Social Media consumer trends are aggressive and suggest that you add at least one full time staff member to your marketing team that focuses solely on the addition of social efforts to your marketing efforts. A solid social marketer will understand both the awareness and traditional ROI value of social media and understand how to test with each effort what the best use of Social Media hours and dollars is. If your opportunities are obvious and you decide to build a team, supply that team with representatives that understand each of your target markets to ensure messaging, reach, platform choices are made based on solid knowledge of the customer.
So What‘s the Bottom Line?
Socialize existing efforts well – and then begin the process of adding projects that are specific to the social medium itself. In other words, the low hanging fruit opportunity is to make sure you are advertising your existing past successful offers using social media. The next step is to do on social media what it does very well which is build relationships with your customers online and grow awareness. (Even create leads if you set it up right) You can also use social tools to learn your audience by deploying web monitoring tools. Use your social media expert to identify the largest and most likely to succeed social efforts to launch.
Measuring the Spend
Like any marketing spend, measure the effort in hours and dollars invested, against return. Like most other digital efforts, social efforts are spent building content (strategy, calendars, and actual content) and then taking that content to market – across the social platforms most likely to succeed for your brand. Measure the number of impressions, level of interaction, likes, comments, growth over days, weeks, etc. For starters, Facebook and YouTube are a fit for most B2C brands, LinkedIn and other industry specific sites for B2B outreach. There are many others, do your research first before attaching your brand to a major platform – be strategic in placement and messaging just like you would any other media type.
So from my view, the way to get started is to augment existing digital marketing efforts with social initiatives, get some help from a social media expert, and even consider adding one or two to your team, add social specific projects based on it’s inherent strengths (get help figuring out where the biggest opportunities lie), measure like you would any other campaign.
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