Do you feel like your business isn’t meeting your goals for social media marketing? Perhaps you’re overlooking a few things that could boost your viral opportunities and overall exposure. That’s the point of a recent post by Heather Smith on PR Daily.
“Social media (participation) is the most popular online activity, so it makes perfect sense for businesses to want to tap into social media marketing to increase sales,” she writes. Simply opening an account or sending out some posts or tweets is not enough to make social media platforms a viable and profitable part of your marketing strategy. By avoiding some missteps, businesses have the ability to increase their return on investment (ROI) for social media marketing and create more awareness and leads from social media accounts.”
If you read industry news and trends online to stay up to date on happenings in your market, you have a headstart on helping your customers. By identifying articles or content of value to them, you become a curator of content.
Adding a comment about these articles and content is one way to let your customers know you pay attention to their needs and remind them of your expertise.
Curating content also adds breadth and depth to your website when you post your comments on your blog, and it can even perk up the SEO robots if you work in your keywords and use the right category designations and tags.
Video gets attention – big time — for SEO and website designers and users because it makes the website design more engaging. According to a video post by Scott Wiliford, CEO of vLink Solutions, YouTube is the third most-visited social media channel, trailing only Facebook and Google+ and ahead of Twitter. More than one billion unique visitors each month watch six billion hours of video. That’s according to figures from the Content Marketing Institute.
Much of the reason that Content Marketers are uploading 100 hours of video every minute to help their SEO or website design is because video has become easy and inexpensive. Willford’s company has packages starting at $200 per finished minute of production, with website welcome videos and video blogs typically 1to 3 minutes long.
Testimonials are the lifeblood of referral marketing. Many customers and clients are happy to give them when you do a great job or provide outstanding service on a project or over the long term. Sadly, few companies then put them in the right places to capitalize on them.
Building a good testimonial requires more than just doing good work. A blog post by Cairril Mills, owner of a design and marketing firm in Bloomington, IN, goes beyond the obvious. She advises approaching the clients who are like those you really want to work with and make sure they have a compelling story to tell. Then, interview people most likely to impress the prospects you want to impress. Get them to describe the problem or need they had, how your business helped them solve that problem or fill that need and the benefits gained from their relationship with you.
Here’s a competitive intelligence tool that’s credible and free.
Google Alerts can help you stay up to date on developments in your business by tracking industry news and trends and your competitors’ activities automatically. And this information has a wide variety of uses beyond tracking your competitors, such as gathering material for email marketing and social media campaigns.
We always think of Google searches as a way for customers and prospects to find out about us. As one of the world’s largest aggregators of information, Google is well-positioned to pull in news articles, blog posts, even website changes and anything else that hits the Internet. Google Alerts is a free service, all of it delivered to your email box whenever and as often as you want. Google Alerts recently launched a redesign of its format for better aesthetics and management.
Michael Gerber’s then-groundbreaking work, The E-Myth: Why Most Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, put forth the belief that most businesses are started by ambitious entrepreneurs who are technicians who know and enjoy the hands-on work of their organization. However, he said that having tangible business skills is far more important than being able to personally do the technical work required for a business
In the nearly 30 years since the book’s publication, a lot of evidence backs that belief. At some point, an innovator’s great idea grows into a huge business that requires a new level of managerial skills. More than a few business coaches have counseled their clients to either broaden their management team or sell their company and move on to their next big thing. Otherwise, they say, entrepreneurs may never reap their biggest financial rewards.
There’s trouble in the General Mills community – even as the company had a weekend change of heart. As reported in many, many media outlets late last week, downloading a 50-cent coupon for a box of cereal may have precluded a consumer from suing the food-product giant – which sells a lot more than Cheerios and Fruit Loops.
The Minneapolis/St. Paul (MN) Business Journal, a sister publication of the Atlanta Business Chronicle, reported the company abandoned a controversial new privacy policy that sought to bar consumers from suing the company if they engaged with General Mills online. The reversal came after their new rules sparked a backlash on social media.
Facebook has been making technology news over the past few weeks with Virtual Reality (VR) which could have many exciting applications for marketing. Today, it’s another reason to assess your use social media because you it takes time to create an impact via Social.
Facebook has developed a new capability, called Deep Face, and is reportedly acquiring Oculus VR, a virtual reality company. Deep Face is both fascinating and fearful at the same time.
As reported in a blog by marketing executive Chad Pollitt, news coverage, termed “earned media,” is 80% more effective than branded content, or owned media, at the consideration and affinity stages of the purchase process. At the familiarity stage, which is closer to the actual purchase, news coverage is 38% more effective.
The study presented 900 consumers with three different types of content: expert content from credible sources (earned media), branded content (owned media), and user-generated content (such as reviews on Amazon).
For Company Pages, LinkedIn is removing the Products & Services tab, on April 14. If you have a Company Page and use that tab to tell followers about your offerings, you’ll need to move that info to your Company Update or Showcase Pages, which some companies are already doing.
If you don’t have a Company Page, or never used the Products & Services tab, don’t blow off this blog post. Instead, look at how much information is being shared in LinkedIn groups and how often your biz dev folks’ profiles are being viewed each month.