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How are you measuring the ROI of social media? Do you measure up against your peers? Does the ROI of social media meet your expectations? Do your metrics help make better business decisions? ROI of social media ROI means return on investment and when we talk about the ROI of social media we’re looking at metrics to evaluate your increased sales as a function of expenses to drive those sales. But, that’s really hard to do since there really isn’t a direct link between social media and sales. In the infographic below, see some of the surrogates for return firms use to evaluate their social media marketing campaigns....
...Yes, there is a lot more to content marketing than just one campaign, but the lesson from this very simple idea is as solid as they come – it doesn’t have to be complicated, it just has to relate to your clients and give them some value. Next time you are racking your brain struggling to think about what you can write about, take a moment, look around ask the people on the front lines of your business what they think. Take the pressure off – a little creativity and fun might just solve all your problems and win the hearts of some new fans. Giving that little extra...
We hear that Pinterest is a really only used by younger females – so let me introduce you to Dan Ashbach, who is a retired airline pilot, just to provide a different perspective. You might have read my article about how many boards should we have on Pinterest where I comment that Dan has just 38 boards (I wonder if that is a coincidence that he has been married for 38 years) that versus many accounts I see with well over 100 Pinterest boards. Dan recently participated in a Google Plus Hangout with PinLeague and this is a recap of some of his ideas and perspectives about Pinterest as a super user with over 1.5 million followers. Yes I know you usually expect me to share tips about content marketing and social media for business, but I think you will find the ideas Dan shares provides an interesting insight into what a Pinterest super user thinks. Dan started to see his Pinterest boards grow at a fast rate in 2012, building from a few thousand followers to over a million followers....
Google Plus Tools help you to become more efficient and effective with Google plus. If you are using Google plus for business check out this article.... Google + is an extremely important platform for anyone that wants to market their business online. It is much more than a social network and within the next 2 years you will have a Google + account whether you like or not as it is the foundation layer for all Google products including search. A couple of months back we covered an article on Google plus tools but we’ve discovered some more useful tools and plugins we want to share. So here are 3 killer tools if you are using Google Plus for Business....
How does a company that sells blenders attract over 220 million views on YouTube? How does Zappos drive over 250,000 visits a year to its website from YouTube? ... With over 72 hours of footage being uploaded to YouTube every minute, how do you successfully market your business on the world’s largest video site and #2 search engine? This guide will provide answers to those questions and much more. Whether you are a YouTube beginner or a seasoned pro, this post will serve as an in-depth guide for marketing on YouTube....
Small businesses prefer to conduct their marketing efforts on social networking sites over location-based marketing, according to a May 8 article by Fox News. Given the word-of-mouth nature and sharing features of sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Pinterest, 97 percent of business owners said that they use these platforms to promote their businesses. Only 17 percent of businesses say they utilize location-based ads, such as Foursquare, in promoting their products and services. Additionally, 66 percent of small business owners are optimizing their website for mobile platforms, reflecting an evolving use of the web and social sites. Just 34 percent of business owners say they have no desire to use social media in the future. Many believe that they don’t have a demand from customers to utilize such platforms.... Most important, 61 percent of small business got no return on investment...
... If you’ve got Google +, you simply need to log in to your account and click “Start a Hangout”. From there, you get a series of prompts that take you through the steps you need to get schedule and start your Hangout. Be sure to check out Hangouts on Air, a feature that gives you the opportunity to broadcast your Hangout to others on your YouTube channel, on Google + or on your website. And while it has got a lot of pros, Google + does have its cons. One of which, is that you’ve got to have a Google ID to use it. That also means that for people to join your Hangout, they’ve got to have one too. And the more apps you add to your Hangout, the slower your connection speed, resulting in lag time. So how you use Google Hangouts to market your small business? Here are seven ways to help you get started....
At first tweet, Twitter can look like a jumble of irrelevant thoughts and an overwhelming flood of industry news. Businesses usually start using it by joining the crowd. They share content that can drive some traffic to their sites, but rarely maximize the potential of the micro-blogging platform. A lot of companies tweet in something of a vacuum: they scramble to get an interesting link or promote a new blog post, share it on Twitter and call it a day. Sure, that’s tweeting. But it’s also really, really boring. To actually build a strong, active following on Twitter, you need to establish a unique voice among your industry peers, prospects and customers. In short – stop being boring. Here are five ways to do that...
Google+ isn’t only a social network. It’s the very backbone (and future) of Google itself. As Brian Clark wrote yesterday, authorship and the possible effects on the Google algorithm have the potential to be extremely beneficial to savvy content creators. If you’re a writer, this is either going to be very good for your career, or you’ll risk becoming relatively invisible online. If you’d like to land solidly in the former camp of writers, the question becomes one of how to use Google+ to further your own goals. With that in mind, I’ve put together an infographic for you that outlines 64 strategies that every writer and content producer can put into action, and start reaping the rewards of intelligently engaging with Google+....
If you’re attempting to make your website findable on search engines, the keywords you use are critical to your success. Let’s say you are a dentist in Los Angeles practicing general dentistry, Invisalign teeth straightening, and dental implants. For those three services, the amount of keywords that searchers use to find you are many. Because of that, you have to carefully think through what’s good to use and what is not. Say a consumer has a cavity and he believes it may take a crown to cover the tooth. Knowing that, what would the consumer type in the search engines to find a dentist for this? Before you look at the list of possible keywords, first think of one or two keywords you would type in. Then compare to the list below and you’ll see how many possibilities there are....
YouTube newbies should check out The Small Business Guide to YouTube, a helpful microsite that shows a step-by-step guide for getting started with YouTube marketing. Created by Simply Business, this one-page destination covers everything from creating good content to preventing legal issues. With so many instructions to read through on YouTube’s help board, this site speeds up the process by briefly summarizing all the FAQs on one page and then making detailed answers easy to find. The page is designed as a flow chart that takes you through a series of “yes” or “no” questions that lead to the answers, which are outlined in a slide show presentation. It starts with the basics — “Do you know how to create a YouTube account?” — and moves into more complicated territory, like the various monetization options and how to measure your success in YouTube analytics. Every time you answer “no,” you’ll see a new slide that’s filled with checklists, videos, and links to articles to fill you in on what you don’t already know. (And who doesn’t love saying no?)...
Twitter is a brilliant tool for communicating with consumers and when used effectively can be a great way of building customer loyalty. In recent weeks I’ve come across a number of brands that have excellent Twitter strategies and several that I thought were less impressive. This could be because they were dull, unimaginative or simply weren’t living up to their potential. So to shine some light on the differences between those brands getting it right and those that perhaps aren’t, here are five good and four bad examples of brands using Twitter....
Social media as a primary marketing strategy is tempting, but it doesn't work well for everyone. Learn some of the pros and cons here....and the solution... It is no secret that social media is turning into quite the process. It’s becoming more and more important, so many different tools and advice columns keep popping up to help businesses and individuals stay organized and successful when it comes to this newer marketing effort. This has caused many companies to create a full-time social media position for experts to help manage the many social accounts, follow analytics, get creative with engagement, etc. It takes a lot of time and effort, but the payoff is only increasing as social involvement increase, so it’s easy to ask yourself: Can I get away with making my social media strategy my primary marketing strategy?...
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Location, location, location, the real estate cliché, has additional meaning in terms of devices, computers, smartphones and tablets. Like place, one of the 4Ps of marketing, your business’s findability influences the prospects and buyers you can reach. When it comes to small business, your target audience must be able to find you regardless of the device(s) they use. You must think mobile and local! 5 Mobile marketing research insights for small business...
Data from Unruly shows that five Vine clips are shared every second on Twitter and branded Vines are four times more likely to be shared than branded online videos. It’s also interesting to note that weekends are the most popular time to share Vines and in most cases they are more popular than all the previous weekdays combined. We’ve previously looked at fashion brands and football teams that have begun using Vine, as well as highlighting both good and bad uses of the platform. As with any new technology it’s good to keep experimenting and work out how it can benefit your brand, but there are a few guiding principles that it’s worth considering....
In the past year, there has been a major growth of content marketing tools available to content marketers. While many of these tools have existed for years prior to the advent of content marketing and would normally be deemed as simply internet marketing tools, many of them are rechristening themselves as content marketing tools. Yet many of these tools are quite different from each other and serve vastly different purposes within content marketing. Some technologies may help create content, others like our own Curata help create content, some may help distribute your content, yet others may help you simply measure the effectiveness of your content marketing. Based on attending dozens of content marketing conferences over the years, I have seen most marketers, and even analysts, not know where to start or how to make sense of the universe of content marketing tools.... This is a great place to start exploring content marketing tools.
How to grow your business with Facebook: Here are five simple yet effective methods that can be used to grow your business on Facebook.... Last month, Dan Levy, Director of small business at Facebook shared some statistics about the small businesses from the United States that are on Facebook: - There are more than 2 billion connections between local businesses and people. - In an average week, there are over 645 million views of, and 13 million comments on, local business Facebook Pages. - Approximately 70% of monthly active users in the U.S. and Canada are connected to a local business on Facebook. While Facebook needs no introduction, I do hope that these stats will convince you of the potential of using it as a tool of business growth. If you’re trying to figure out how to do so, here are some tips....
It's time for Facebook fundamentals. Remember: The purpose of your Facebook page is not to sell stuff to people, it’s to engage them. There’s a digital divide in the small-business world—between those companies that know how to use social networks like Facebook FB +0.52% and those that don’t have a clue. If you’re on the clueless side, it’s not too late. You can learn. First, before you even begin a Facebook presence for your business, you need three things, says Ramon Ray, founder of SmallBizTechnology.com and author of The Facebook Guide to Small Business Marketing. You need an appealing website, you need fresh content on your site regularly, and you need email marketing or some other mechanism to capture customer email addresses....
Are you trying to figure out how to use mobile marketing to grow your sales and revenues? Here are five mobile ad campaigns you can use for inspiration. 1. Heineken Hits the Back of the Net with Dual Screen Game In 2011, UEFA Champion’s League sponsor Heineken introduced an innovative ‘dual screen’ app that let fans interact via their smartphones as games were taking place....
...First of all, I don't know any small business owners who have the time to do that (learn everything ). Second, it isn't necessary. Instead, jump in! Start now... You'll learn plenty along the way. An important note: your online marketing efforts will reflect either positively or negatively on your business. Any business owner can start marketing online now, but do take care to put out content and messages that have quality and authenticity. So, let's get down to it. Here are seven online marketing activities you can start today....
Marketing your business on Facebook is something that should be well planned and requires that you understand the platform to insure the success of your Business Page. Here are 10 tips you can use to run a successful Facebook Business Page...
With 105 million blogs and 49 billion posts, Tumblr, the free blog hosting and social networking site, is the 32ndmost popular site in the world. So if you’re not using Tumblr as part of your marketing efforts, you’re missing a very large boat. “Tumblr isn’t a blog platform like WordPress; it’s a social network that has a blogging platform.” says Neil Patel, co-founder of the Web analytics firm KISSmetrics. “The beautiful thing about Tumblr is that it makes it really easy to share your content with millions of Tumblr users… so you can get a big audience without spending a ton of money on marketing.” Here are Neil’s tips for marketing your business on Tumblr....
Do you want to become known as an industry expert, attract traffic to your website and boost sales? Blogging just once a month can deliver all that—and more. More than half of companies that blog at least once a month have acquired customers through their blog, according to HubSpot’s The 2012 State of Inbound Marketing. (Sixty-six percent of those who blog weekly, and 78 percent of those who blog daily, have gained new customers.) However much time you choose to invest, here are 10 tips for successful blogging....
Online analytics can be fascinating. They can provide insight into the quality of your online content, let you know just how engaged your Twitter followers are or simply provide a timely ego boost. However, in amongst all the good news, bad news and insight, there are certain analytics that rarely change. Wherever you go, from B2B service providers to fashion retailers, the most visited web pages are usually the same. The most visited page on almost every website is the “About” page. No matter what you sell, your website visitors, social media followers and online prospects all want to know about you. More than want to know, they actually expect to get information about you. There are common questions every prospect expects to have answered by your online presence....
In my previous post, “Using Video Content to Drive Brand Awareness, Leads, and Sales,” I took you through the first four steps of the definitive B2B video marketing strategy. In this second post, we focus on executing your video content strategy, maximizing impact, measuring results, and ensuring that you create sustainable campaigns that add long-term value to your organization....
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This is a great example of an infographic that tells a story effectively. it's also critical SEO information for any PR, marketing or social marketing pro trying to measure the success of social media programs.