Search engine marketing: September 2016

Saturday, 24 September 2016

Advantages of Social Network Sites

With the advent of social networking, social scientists and media experts have wondered about the benefits social networking brings to communication. While some of these are obvious, some others have only become apparent as users have become familiar with social networking. The ability to increase our networking potential or work with others regardless of distance presents new ways for us to do business. Furthermore, the ability to stay in contact with friends and family allows us to maintain closer ties to our loved ones across long distances.

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Guaranteed Meeting Places

When attempting to plan meetings with colleagues or friends, having access to social networking sites expands the available times and places in which meetings can occur. Individuals can meet each other and chat over Facebook, or open a video chat through Google+. Rather than having to travel to specific locations, or try to work times out in which everyone is near a central location, people can plan to meet at times that work for all of their schedules.

Keep in Touch with Family

Keeping in contact with family through the phone or even over email presents a challenge. Instead, social networking sites allow the individual to share their day to day life in a secure but public forum, which family can watch and experience. Facebook, for example, allows people to share events, images, and thoughts in real time, during the course of any day. Family and friends can then experience all the things that someone does, and comment on them. Then, they share in the experience, rather than just being "informed" about them during weekly phone calls.

Professional Networking

For professionals and academics, social networking sites allow users to create networks of like-minded people. Academics find other scholars to share research or ideas, or simply to talk to and "get their name out there." Professionals find mutual friends and possible clients, employers, or business partners. Social networking expands the horizons of what sort of contacts people can make in their professional lives.

Staying Informed About the World

People on social networking sites share what interests them, such as news on current events. People who share those interests, or who just want to stay informed, can read these stories and share them as well. Eventually, these stories make their to users who may have never read them. Since stories are shared through "word of mouth," smaller news outlets such as blogs can get exposure, and social network users are overall connected to a larger pool of new information and opinion.

Benefits of Social Media - webigg

Social media can give you the opportunity to improve your brand identity, reach new customers, and communicate with potential customers. Using these platforms in the right way, however, takes experience. You won’t get good results by using a business’s Facebook profile to create a few posts.

A Quick Return on Investment

Many marketing strategies require big budgets that small and medium businesses simply cannot afford. If you want to air a commercial on television, prepare to reach deep into your pockets.

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Social media, however, has an extremely low cost of entry that makes it easy for you to get a quick return on your investment. It’s completely free to set up accounts with Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and most other sites. Once you have your profiles established, you will need to spend some money making your posts more visible to people who might want to follow your business. The expense, however, is remarkably low, even compared to the amount you would spend on a radio ad.

Of course, there’s a lot more to social media marketing than just setting up an account. You also need someone to manage your accounts so you can interact with potential customers, update your business’s information, and take advantage of marketing tools.

Targeted Content for Better Results

If you’ve never used a social media business account, then you may not know about all of the tools sites use to help members target their advertisements and content. These tools are becoming more sophisticated by the day. It’s possible to target audiences on Facebook by:

• Geographic location

• Age

• Gender

• Education

• Interests

• Relationship status

Targeted ads get the best results when they use carefully crafted messages. These messages can include quick posts, infographics, and images. They can also include links to articles on your company blog.

Detailed Analytics Help Campaign Management

To take full advantage of social media networking, you need someone who can analyze online behavior and use that information to shape marketing campaigns.

Social media analytics analyze the behaviors of your followers, fans, and customers so you know what marketing concepts work well and which do not. Crafting messages and targeting audiences often works well, but you need objective information to grade effectiveness. Without precise analytics, you’re shooting in the dark.

Further Benefits of Social Media Marketing for Small Business

As social media platforms evolve, small businesses will have more ways to connect with customers. In the end, it pays to hire a professional who researches the latest trends. As the technology changes, our clients can expect to benefit from:

• Image and brand management that develops a likeable personality and addresses unexpected crises

• Customer feedback that offers insights into how your business can improve its products and services

• New connections with other businesses that can help you succeed

Social media marketing can help small businesses achieve great results, but you’ll need to know how to use it effectively. That’s where The Social Savior comes in. Our social marketing experts know how to help your business take the steps that lead to greater success.

Blog Definition

A blog (also called a weblog or web log) is a website consisting of entries (also called posts) appearing in reverse chronological order with the most recent entry appearing first (similar in format to a daily journal). Blogs typically include features such as comments and links to increase user interactivity.

Starting your own blog doesn’t have to be complicated or difficult. In fact, more and more people are starting blogs every day. It seems that just about every person or business has a blog these days. But if you’re like most people, you may not know where to get started. Starting a blog can be intimidating if you don’t have the required technological skills. Not to mention that the number of options available for starting a blog can be just plain confusing.

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The World Before Blogging:

There was a time when the Internet was just an informational tool. In the early life of the World Wide Web some 20 years ago, websites were simple and provided a one-sided conversation. As time went on, the Internet became more interactive with the introduction of transaction-based websites and online shopping, but the online world remained one-sided.

That all changed with the evolution of Web 2.0 (the social web) wherein user-generated content became an integral part of the online world.

The Birth of Blogs:

The earliest blogs started in the late 1990s as online diaries. Individuals posted information on a daily basis about their lives and opinions. The daily posts were listed in reverse date order, so readers viewed the most recent post first and scrolled through previous posts. The format provided an ongoing inner monologue from the writer.

As blogs evolved, interactive features were added to create a two-way conversation. Readers took advantage of features that allowed them to leave comments on blog posts or link to posts on other blogs and websites to further the dialogue.

Blogs Today:

As the Internet has become more social, blogs have gained in popularity. Today, there are over 100 million blogs with more entering the blogosphere every day. Blogs have become more than online diaries. In fact, blogging has become an important part of the online and offline worlds with popular bloggers impacting the worlds of politics, business and society with their words.

The Future of Blogs:

It seems inevitable that blogging will become even more powerful in the future with more people and businesses recognizing the power of bloggers as online influencers. Anyone can start a blog thanks to the simple (and often free) tools readily available online. The question will likely become not, "Why should I start a blog?" but rather, "Why shouldn't I start a blog?"

Sunday, 18 September 2016

Creating your social media strategy – Part 3

Building the strategy

First you need to understand what a strategy is, and isn’t it. A strategy should define the main aim of your social media presence and set the parameters for what it will deliver and how it will be delivered. It will be supported by a tactical plan that defines how the strategy will be delivered, including the channels, resource and budgets to achieve it.

Integration with other marketing

Note down how social will align with other marketing channels, so that the people doing the work understand the wider picture. For example, for email marketing explain:

• How you’ll use social networks to promote newsletter content

• How you’ll use apps/widgets to drive email sign-up

• How you’ll use social engagement data to inform the email team what content is working well and for whom.

Don’t forget, it’s a two-way street, so also define how you need other marketing channels to support social. Again, taking email as the example:

• Our social network links will be included in the email footer

• Emails will include social sharing option which posts the browser version of the email

• We will work with the email team to explore how we feature popular social content in relevant emails.

Timelines

This is the ‘T’ in the SMART objectives – ensuring each activity has a timeframe stamped on it, so you can track progress.

Timelines are critical because they give you a yardstick against which to measure your ability to implement the strategy. Activities without deadlines tend to drift, and are often seen by others as less important (if you don’t know when you need it by, it can’t be important can it!).

Note that some activities are recurring, such as posting the weekly newsletter to Facebook. For these simply state the frequency and target day of week.

Measurement

Start by defining the KPIs for your social strategy, which should break down into macro KPIs (for the whole strategy e.g. increase traffic from social media) and micro KPIs (channel specific e.g. increase RT rate on Twitter).

You should align your KPI expectations with the metrics that you can track for each social network, so that they can easily measured. Then sense check that your web analytics tools are configured correctly to capture all relevant data.

I recommend using campaign tracking parameters in all URLs you share via social. Using Google Analytics as the example, this means adding UTM parameters for at least medium, source and campaign.

Why?

You’ll be able to drill down into traffic from social and isolate specific elements of activity, such as individual links. I’ve used this for differentiating between different content formats, such as text vs. image vs. video updates for the same campaign. You can overlay ecommerce goals and conversion data to see what is adding the most value, and use the learning to fine tune your social marketing.

Include details of the reporting you’ll do to measure performance, and where these reports can be accessed.

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Creating your social media strategy – Part 2

Building the strategy

Target audience

This frames who you want to reach via social networks. For this you need to understand your core audience (personas, profiles, demographics etc.) and identify any new customer types that you want to attract based on your products/services. It can help to split this into three types of social follower:

Loyal

Regular customers who are already connected to you via social media. You want to retain them and increase their purchases and engagement with your social profiles.

Existing

Customer who have shopped with you before but aren’t regular shoppers and haven’t connected on social media. You want to nurture them, bringing them closer to you online and therefore increasing purchase rates.

Potential

People who have never visited the website or purchased from you but who are regular online shoppers, and users of social media. You want to use social media to bring them into contact with the brand, and ultimately move them to purchase

Review

Your strategy shouldn’t be set in stone; it needs to be flexible to respond to changing market conditions.

Include an explanation of the review process:

• Who will lead the review (business sponsor)?

• How often will the review take place?

• What data/insights will be used to inform the review?

• What will the outputs be?

• How will outputs be measured/monitored?

Some people include social media guidelines in the strategy but we don’t think this is the best approach. Guidelines are part of the tactical execution, providing a set of rules for the business to adhere to. It’s not a strategic activity, so this content sits best within the tactical plan, or as a separate document referenced by the plan.

Creating your social media plan

Deliverables

This provides a summary of all activities that need to take place to support the implementation of the plan. For example:

1. Social Media Audit (Word doc) - to be completed by <name>, including summaries of the following:

a. Benchmarking of social media integration

b. Benchmarking of Facebook profile

c. Benchmarking of Twitter profile

d. Review of suitability of other platforms e.g. Pinterest, Youtube

e. Recommendations of next steps for each platform / area

2. Social media content calendar (Excel document) to be created, with stand-alone thematic moments, and full integration with wider marketing plans

3. Measurement framework to be devised (Excel document)

4. End of phase evaluation report to be completed (PPT plus full data in Excel).

Creating your social media strategy

Building the strategy

Strategy statement

A short, concise summary of what the strategy is aiming to achieve, broken down into bullet points. Below is an example from a homewares retailer I worked with:

• We will undertake a full social media audit, benchmarking current positions, implement key improvements identified and develop content plans and styles to deliver consistent communications ongoing.

• We will increase engagement from existing customers and connections, and draw in new audiences - ultimately driving purchase through organic & paid activity.

• We will test and learn about the community and the brand in a social space, in order to shape future growth of social media audiences and social driven purchase.

Context analysis

Set-out where you are in your social journey and where the business needs to be, and the reasons for this.

For example, are you a global organisation seeking to consolidate a fragmented approach to social media, or a startup looking to build a social presence from the ground up?

Goals & Objectives

Goals define your high-level aims and objectives use SMART criteria to ensure each goal has a measurable set of criteria against which to evaluate progress.

I still use SMART criteria for objectives because they encourage you to think about the practicality of achieving each goal, rather than focusing on things that sound good but might not be feasible.

S = Specific in terms of what needs to be achieved

M = Measurable so that progress can be tracked and evaluated

A = Achievable so that your team has a realistic chance of success

R = Relevant to your business so it’s aligned with overall business goals

T = Timeframe within which the objective must be satisfied

Below are examples of high-level goals for your social media plan:

1. Complete social media audit and implement actions arising from it

2. Create and maintain a social media content calendar

3. Begin regular social media activity, in line with strategy and calendar

4. Create and work within a measurement framework

5. Demonstrate the impact and ROI of social media to the wider business.

An example of a smart objective for goal #5 is:

We want to increase our followers on Twitter (Specific) to drive more organic social traffic to the website (Achievable/Relevant). We want to gain 1,000 new followers (Measurable) from our marketing by 31st January (Time based).