If you haven’t been putting the power of Pinterest to use for your business, now’s the time to do so. This isn’t the first time we’ve talked about it, but Pinterest is worth writing about again since it has broken into the top 50 sites. According to ComScore, Pinterest was the 50th most visited site in the U.S. in September, with about 25 million visits.
Not that this should be much of a surprise. The growth of Pinterest over the past year or two has been enormous. Image sharing is definitely in, which explains why Instagram and Tumblr took spots on the list, too.
So the question is: Are you taking advantage of it? If your site or business is of interest to women and you aren’t on Pinterest, you are definitely missing out. Big time. Almost 20% of all the females on the Internet are using Pinterest.
Pinterest is a hybrid social bookmarking site where users can post (“pin”) photos and videos of just about anything to a “pin board.” Anything pinned to these Pinterest boards becomes publicly or privately viewable, depending on settings. It gives users a simple, clean way of sharing anything that people find visually interesting.
Users are finding lots of ways to make Pinterest useful, from planning a wedding to saving a favorite recipe, to redecorating a home.
From an SEO standpoint, Pinterest is a great tool for link building; every image pinned can be hyperlinked to any destination URL.
Even though Pinterest is still in its infancy, it already has lots going on:
If you are running a business, it’s time to register a Pinterest business account. You probably don’t need a tutorial on how to create one, as signing up for one is very simple.
Learn as much as you can about how to use Pinterest, its best practices, and learn from others about how best to use the site to share interesting things.
While it’s obvious by now that Pinterest is here to stay, businesses should use the site with caution. As with any website, Pinterest was created for real people with interesting things to share. It’s fine to promote things and make online sales but make a point of providing real value that other people will appreciate.
If you’re running a small business, it’s crucial to gain access to the benefits of a Pinterest business account. With over 400 million weekly users, your Pinterest profile can effectively showcase your products or services through engaging visual content and DIY ideas that resonate with your audience.
You might think that keeping your Facebook page up to date would be a higher priority than getting involved in a newer site like Pinterest.
But we strongly urge you to reconsider your social media marketing plan. To stay competitive, you have to evolve and stay on top of emerging trends. Take a look at the graph below (courtesy of BizRate Insights) and you’ll see that Pinterest users are much more plugged into buying mode than Facebook users.
Yes, there are many more bodies on Facebook and you should continue to interact with users there. However, the number of Pinterest users and people who know what Pinterest is continues to climb steadily. In January of this year, Shareaholic announced that Pinterest was driving more traffic than YouTube, Google Plus, and LinkedIn COMBINED. See that report here.
Because Pinterest has become such an important site for brands and businesses to be involved with, there have been some interesting tools and sites developed to help you get the most from it. Here are just a few that can boost your Pinterest marketing strategy.
You can view all the pins anyone has done from your site by entering http://pinterest.com/source/ and adding your domain to the end of that.
It can be tedious, though. PinAlerts makes it easy to know when someone pins something from your site. It’s still in beta, but it looks like a nifty little tool.
Not only can you use it to find out who’s pinning your stuff (helpful to see what’s being pinned, and to go and comment or thank them), but you can monitor multiple domains. So you could also use this to see what kind of content your competitors are using successfully and getting pins for.
Want to know what kind of value you have on Pinterest? PinPuff gives you a reach score (what kind of reach you have on Pinterest), activity score (how active you are), and virality score (the likelihood of something you pin going viral). You can use this to monitor your own Pinterest account, but you could also use it to identify influential people in your industry so you can follow them or invite them to contribute to your board.
When someone becomes a contributor to your board, he or she can obviously post pins (contribute) to the board. But what’s awesome about this is that now your board will also show up on that person’s page of boards. If you can get several authorities in your industry to contribute and they happen to have a large number of followers, this can quickly expand the number of targeted followers on your board.
When a user receives a request to become a contributor, the request appears at the top of his or her board page (visible only to the page owner) like this:
Here’s an example of a board with several contributors. Notice there isn’t a ton of pins (fewer than 100), but more than 4,000 followers have linked to this board:
Pinerly gives you access to powerful analytics information for your Pinterest ads marketing campaigns. You can identify popular pins, schedule and follow your pins to see how much attention they get, find people to follow, or unfollow people.
Pinterest can be a powerful marketing tool if used correctly. The chance of something going viral is very high, since according to RJMetrics more than 80% of all pins are repins.
As a concept, content marketing is a relatively straightforward strategy. You write content that people want to read, publish, and syndicate it often, and eventually, you’ll build a loyal audience who likes your content, loves your brand, and buys more products and services from you. Unfortunately, the mechanics behind this process aren’t always as simple as they seem on paper. It’s not uncommon for content marketers to hit major obstacles along the way, disrupting their workflows and leaving them with inexplicable gaps in their results analysis.
These are seven of the most common roadblocks I see in the content marketing world:
The first pain point usually comes before you’ve even written an article. A great article must start with a great topic, so if you can’t think of any great topic ideas, you can find yourself in a difficult position. The same can be said if the topics you do come up with fail to have an impact on your target audience—you can measure this based on how many clicks your headlines are getting. In either scenario, the solution is to look in new places for topic inspiration. Start with industry news sources to stay up-to-date and discover new information about your niche, then move on to the blogs and websites of your competitors. Learn from what they’re doing—what do their customers like to read about?—just don’t copy their strategy exactly.
Many content marketers underestimate the importance of brand voice consistency. Your entire company’s identity is represented by its brand, and it’s up to you to showcase that brand accurately. If you deviate from the characteristics that define your brand or publish blogs with inconsistent tones, your audience can quickly become alienated. However, diagnosing these problems can be difficult even for experienced content marketers. Address the problem by gathering all your writers together and doing collective exercises that highlight what is and what is not appropriate for the brand. Make sure everyone is on the same page by the end of the meeting, and use one focal editor to do a final review of all subsequent articles before they’re published.
Too many business owners and marketers think that content marketing is about writing articles whenever you have time and publishing them whenever you think about it. This approach almost instantly vanquishes the possibility of building a loyal audience. If you want people to keep coming back to you for more, you have to have a reliable, predictable schedule. Create an editorial calendar with clear and consistent publication dates—if you’re just getting started, one post a week may be enough for your purposes—then assign responsible parties to ensure that those deadlines are always met, no matter what. In today’s fast-paced digital world, a well-organized content schedule is essential to thriving in a digital marketing transformation. Beyond just posting regularly, maintaining quality control over each blog post ensures that your content remains relevant and delivers a superior customer experience, even as you adopt new technologies to stay ahead of the competition.
One of the most important stages of quality content marketing is distributing your material so the greatest number of new people can see it. Typically, that means shopping your content around to different offsite publishers and syndicating your content through various social media channels. If you’re having trouble getting your work published offsite, do an audit of the types of sources you’re pursuing. Start off with local and industry-specific sources to build your reputation, and make sure your topics fit in with their respective niches. Then, work your way up to more authoritative sources. If you’re having trouble syndicating your content consistently, try scheduling your posts in advance, and use the time you save to engage with your audience in one-on-one interactions. Communities can only develop through engagement.
Content marketing is a demanding strategy. Two posts a week doesn’t sound like a lot until you’re in the thick of things, scrambling to get your posts published while juggling all your other responsibilities. Hiring a staff writer is one option, and hiring a freelancer is another, but one of the most valuable solutions is hiring a content agency to handle the work for you. Because content agencies are specialists, they’ll be able to do the work faster, quicker, and more reliably than someone off the street—even if they have an impressive resume. Content agencies not only enhance your company's ability to manage competing priorities, but they also bring new ideas and technologies to the table, elevating your overall content creation process. By working with a team of strong leaders, you can ensure your content aligns with your marketing strategy and style guide, allowing for different formats and a seamless integration with your existing content, all without requiring more budget than hiring a full-time writer.
At its foundation, marketing efforts are all about gathering, analyzing, and applying data in meaningful ways. When that data shows major hiccups or other anomalies, with no apparent explanation, it can be worrisome. Let’s say each of your posts gets 100 shares, then one day, your posts start getting around 20 shares. These anomalies could be the result of any number of factors, from your search engine rankings to topics to random seasonal changes that are simply unpredictable. Instead of trying to figure out what the problem is, adjust your line of thinking and start figuring out what the problem isn’t. Eliminate possibilities one by one until you’ve exhausted your resources or have found the problem.
Stagnation is another problem that most content marketers face at one point or another. Obviously, you want your audience and your traffic to grow steadily, for months and years after your initial digital marketing strategy development. Unfortunately, you’ll likely hit a plateau at some point, generating interest but little further growth. When this happens, inject your campaign with new life by adding an additional content channel, seeking new types of publishers to host your content, or simply stepping up the quantity and quality of the articles you produce.
When you hit one of these roadblocks as a content marketer, as you invariably will, don’t panic. It’s a normal part of the ebb and flow of the strategy. All you can do is analyze the situation, respond accordingly, and continue to make adjustments to perfect your approach.
In the wake of recent Google updates, there have been varying opinions on how you can try to recover if your site was hit.
One thing has stayed solid — something we’ve been saying for a very long time: Using social media is vital to your site’s success. Social signals are a very strong Google ranking factor.
In the past, links pointing to your site were one of the main things that would tell Google your website was important and should rank higher.
But Search Engine Optimization (SEO) seems to have been turned on its head with the release of Google’s animal farm – pandas, penguins, and such.
Sites that had enjoyed top search rankings before were now getting hammered down so far in the search engines results that no one would ever find them. Some of these sites had spent a lot of time (not to mention money) on backlinks. It made sense. That’s what had worked forever.
But times have changed and undoubtedly will continue to do so. The one thing that has remained constant is that your site should continually get mentioned in social media by other users. The SEO world calls these “social signals,” and social signals may become even more important as time goes on.
So you may think: “Well, that’s easy enough. I have seen lots of places where I can buy thousands of Facebook Likes and retweets!” Whoa, slow down. Yes, there are plenty of places where you can buy mass Facebook Likes, retweets, repins, etc., … but you should steer clear of this kind of thing.
Sometimes these services will deliver what they promise; but a few weeks later, the accounts they used to do it with are gone. They mass-produce accounts and create nothing but spam links for their clients. This often results in those accounts being banned. Even if those clients take the trouble to enact measures necessary to avoid getting banned, it isn’t worth it.
You want to get likes, retweets, and such from real users with a real interest in your product or service. It’s even better if they themselves are viewed as some sort of authority in your industry and have their own collection of followers.
The mass services might have accounts with thousands of followers, but do you think those followers are real? Do you think they ever pay attention to the spam they’re sending out on an hourly basis? No.
So to get the most out of social media, you should be dedicating time each day to reach1) others in your industry, and) your target audience doesn’t mean you have to spend three hours every day on social. Often, setting aside 30 minutes or an hour will be just fine.
The trick is to stick to it. Share your high quality content (we know you’re creating awesome, helpful and relevant content that others will WANT to share, right?), but share other content and relevant news as well. Ask questions, answer questions. The nitty gritty on the “how” would be an entire post in itself, but that should get you started.
If you truly cannot find the time to do this, assign someone in your company to do it. Just make sure they get a little training for it. You can also hire it out to a professional. Just like traditional SEO isn’t a one-time thing, social media strategy should also be long-term for the best results.
I’m sure you know about Facebook. You know about Twitter. You probably know about Google+. But the world of social media certainly doesn’t end there, and the type of business or site you run plays a big role in determining which social media platforms are the best for you to use.
If you have something that would appeal to women, then one of the hottest social media channels you should look into is Pinterest. In October of 2011, the site had about three million visitors per month. In just one year that number has skyrocketed. It now receives an average of 25 million visitors (according to Compete.com).
When it took off, social media users were mostly made up of women in their 20s and 30s. Although men have joined in, it’s still mostly women. Half of them have kids. Check out this infographic from SearchEngineJournal:
Susan, the owner of SueBdo, owns a seasonal boutique that sells accessories, jewelry, signs, and babywear. She says she has racked up more sales in a single month after she started using Pinterest than she did in an entire year. She describes her products as preppy, timeless, and classic. After having a look at her site, I can see why she does exceptionally well on Pinterest. SueBdo and Pinterest are a perfect fit!
But the possibilities are wide open here. Photographer? Showcase some of your best work and categorize it into boards for the different types of photography you do weddings, high school portraits, babies, etc.
Do you own a restaurant? Pinterest users love all things food. Take some great shots (or get a food photographer) and get to posting. Blogger? Here are a few ways you too can use Pinterest.
There’s a lot of speculation about just how Google uses social signals for your site, but everyone agrees that they DO use it. In the midst of such drastic changes in SEO, this is one of the best and safest ways to protect your business. But don’t try to game it and take shortcuts. Not only will a well-planned social media marketing strategy help you rank better, but it is also a valuable source of targeted traffic to your site.
A robust digital marketing strategy that prioritizes social media engagement can significantly boost social media visibility and increase brand awareness across social platforms. By optimizing your social media pages, you enhance your social media signals, leading to more website traffic and potential conversions on your own websites.
Original research is one of the most valuable foundational pillars you can have in a content marketing program. Because it’s original, it’s automatically unique, and it sets you apart from competitors who might only be recycling secondhand information. Because it’s rare, it imbues your content with an extra layer of value and appeal. And because it often contains new insights or valuable information, it makes your content easier to share, which leads to more brand exposure, and more links, and ranks higher in search engines.
Here’s the only problem: original research is highly valuable, yes, but that high value comes with a high cost. If you want to execute some high-level original research, it could cost you thousands of dollars to work with an outside firm or tie up your company resources trying to do it in-house. It can be a messy, complicated, and expensive process, making the benefits only marginally worth it.
Not all original research has to be this way. Just like every article you write doesn’t have to be a revolutionary game-changer, not every round of original research needs to make a landmark discovery or take you months of effort. There are cost-efficient ways to perform light original research and still reap some of the most important benefits.
Your first option is to forgo the usual route of researching something that must be hunted down, as this is usually where the cost factor comes into play. If, instead of drilling down to find tiny nuggets of data, you can simply skim off the surface and collect as much data as you want, you can end up with a similar amount of information at a much lower cost and a much lower degree of difficulty.
I’m going to use marketing research as an example. If I want to write an article about which website design trends are currently popular, I have two ways to get this information. First, I could contact webmasters of various popular websites, ask them all about their design motivations, and then spend hours agonizing over their analytics data to form a final conclusion. Second, I could collect a large number of recognizable modern websites, see what they have in common, and quantify my own results.
That second route serves as the path of least resistance. It counts as original research
since I did take an effort to find these results and turn them into something meaningful, and while it isn’t quite as detailed as the former route, it will give me a similar return for a much smaller investment.
Qualitative research is still research, and people care about what other people think. If you can figure out a way to create meaning from a series of user responses, this is your golden ticket. It only takes about an hour to design a survey, especially if you’re using a tool like Survey Monkey, and from there, the only initial effort you have to make is to offer the survey link to the masses. At that point, your survey participants will be the ones doing the work.
You can collect, quantify, and analyze the results you get from your survey in relatively short order. For more complex surveys, or for surveys that rely on particularly busy or specific demographics, you may have to offer an incentive—for example, you may offer a $5 gas gift card to survey participants in order to get a better turnout. But even then, your investment in this strategy is minimal, and your results are both new and significant. You can’t ask for much more in the world of original research.
You don’t even have to rely on others in order to get your research (though it can help in many cases). In my first two options, I try to mitigate the expenses of seeking outside sources of complex information. In this option, we’ll forgo the outside sources altogether and focus on collecting information that you can create yourself.
I’m going to use another marketing example here. Let’s say I’m researching the effects of different types of copy on a user’s response to a call to action. In this case, all I have to do is set up a series of landing pages, each with a different variant of copy, and start funneling traffic to each of them. At the end of the experiment, I’ll collect the data and make a firm determination about which one was the most effective and why. It might cost a bit of money to get that initial traffic, but if I use landing page styles I would have used in my advertising campaign anyway, I’m essentially using a marketing expense to cover my original research costs.
These types of individual experiments are great because they take advantage of resources and expenditures that are already available to you. You don’t invest anything extra, but you do take additional rewards.
Just because you have a tight budget doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy some of the benefits of original research as content fuel. Take your findings and present them in your articles, infographics, or standalone research-based whitepapers. If you end up selling your research to others with paid content, you may even turn a decent profit. In any case, you’ll wind up with better, more authoritative content, greater networks of offsite links, and more visibility for your brand.
Agile software development methodologies have been used for decades.
It's only in more recent years that agile frameworks have been used as a means to enhance digital marketing processes and campaigns.
In today's ever-changing marketing environment, it is essential to have marketing strategies that can quickly adapt to changing market conditions.
Enter agile marketing.
Agile marketing has become a popular approach for businesses looking to become more efficient, diversify their marketing mix and ultimately increase their marketing return on investment (ROI).
This article will discuss what enterprise agile marketing transformations are and why it’s important, as well as provide tips and advice on how you can use agile marketing solutions in your own business.
We'll also discuss the "how" and "why" pivoting to an agile approach can help enhance, increase and improve the return on investment (ROI) for your business.
Let's dive in!
Agile frameworks allow for rapid response to changes in the marketplace and ensure that a company’s marketing strategy is always up-to-date.
This approach focuses on using data to measure, analyze, and adjust quickly based on ever-evolving customer needs.
It's essentially using data to react quickly to changes and feedback to ensure you're doing the things you should do to get ROI and avoid the pitfalls of insanity:
In addition, agile marketing encourages collaboration between agile marketers within the agile marketing department, with each team having different roles and responsibilities.
This should, in theory, allow for quicker decisions and solutions that work best for the organization as a whole.
Agile marketing teams thrive on the ability to pivot strategies based on the data-driven insights provided in an agile marketing report, allowing them to make informed decisions that maximize ROI.
Through streamlining agile marketing implementation across agile teams, organizations can ensure that their marketing programs remain aligned with core values and customer needs. This fosters a responsive and collaborative environment that adapts to the dynamic market landscape.
The traditional approach to marketing can be slow to respond to changes in the market, which can lead to outdated strategies and decreased ROI.
Agile methods allow companies to respond quickly and effectively to customer needs.
This means that businesses are able to stay ahead of the competition by better understanding their target audience and adapting their strategies accordingly.
Additionally, agile solutions make it easier for the agile team members within the organization to collaborate more effectively which can lead to improved efficiency overall.
In short, agile marketing is closely tied to lean, startup marketing.
It's nimble and allows for quick pivots, but true success requires discipline.
Agile marketing starts with a strong foundation in agile principles, transforming marketing teams from traditional marketing silos into dynamic, collaborative groups driven by core values and continuous improvement.
This shift from traditional to modern marketing enables agile marketing work to be more adaptable and customer-focused, which is essential for achieving agile success in today’s fast-paced market.
Agile marketing solutions are quickly becoming an essential part of many businesses' marketing strategies.
Implementing these solutions can help you better understand your customer needs, stay ahead of the competition, and increase your ROI.
Here are some tips for implementing agile marketing solutions into your business
1. Establish Goals & Objectives: Before you start planning your marketing strategy, it is important to set goals and objectives for your team. This will ensure that everyone is on the same page about what needs to be accomplished and how best to achieve those goals.
2. Create A Flexible Plan: Agile requires a flexible plan that can easily adapt to changing conditions in the market. This will help you stay up-to-date with your strategies and ensure that your team is always prepared.
3. Automate Processes: Automating processes like content creation, social media management, and email marketing can help save time and effort when implementing agile marketing solutions into your business. With automation, you can focus on the more pressing tasks while the automated systems take care of the rest. But, keep in mind, that automation can only take you so far. What you can't automate often requires the frontal cortex of some wicked-smart people on your team.
4. Hire Right: Hire the right people to handle agile marketing team requirements. Make sure you have someone on staff who understands the agile marketing process and can provide guidance and direction to other members of the team. This is one of the more critical aspects of going agile. Getting a driver who can get the whole marketing team on board, ensuring the maintenance discipline in how the team functions, and staying focused on the end goal is an essential element of success
5. Experiment & Optimize: Agile marketing encourages experimentation and iteration. Don’t be afraid to try new strategies and tactics as you learn how to best optimize your campaigns for success. As a team, we are constantly experimenting internally before we go external and share our successful findings with our clients outwardly. Be sure to make risky experiments in your journey in silos or on projects that don't matter as much to the revenue of your core business operations.
6. Leverage Technology: Utilize the latest marketing technology in order to stay up-to-date with the changing market trends and customer behaviors. In fact, technology is one of the best ways to automate and make your team as efficient as possible. This can help you quickly pivot when needed and ensure that you are always on the cutting edge. We use the latest project and task management tools and have daily and weekly in-person and virtual SCRUM team meetings, ensuring everyone is on-task and optimized.
7. Measure & Analyze: Measuring and analyzing performance data is essential to making sure your digital marketing is actually delivering results. With the right analytics tools, you can track ROI and make necessary adjustments in order to optimize your campaigns for success.
8. Report With Case Studies: You can use case studies to share your successes and failures with other teams and departments within the organization. This will help everyone understand how agile digital marketing solutions are benefiting the business as a whole.
Case studies are also great cannon fodder for selling new potential clients on why an Agile approach might be best. Case studies have proven to be one of our best marketing tools for winning marketing RFPs and telling a great story.
Implementing an agile marketing framework to your business is not likely to be all sunshine and roses.You can expect a few bumps in the road.Here we outline a few potential issues and hopefully some solutions so you can preemptively look at your plan to go agile and be properly prepared when your strategy falls a bit off the rails.
Initially, there may be a lack of alignment between different teams within the organization in terms of goals, objectives, and strategies.
Without stakeholder buy-in, including senior marketing leaders, it can be difficult to get everyone on the same page with an agile marketing approach.
One of the biggest issues we find in executing an agile approach is the nimbleness agile marketing tactics foster relative to the clunky, traditional framework to which larger organizations adhere. Agile works great and is more easily implemented in a startup marketing environment but is vastly more difficult to execute and implement for larger enterprises with an entrenched culture. And it may not be a lack of stakeholder buy-in on the part of the organization.
You may have all stakeholders and every level on board with agile marketing, but moving the Titanic is easier said than done. A full marketing implementation of agile marketing solutions will require discipline, focus, and perseverance. You may encounter some difficulties throughout the process but with the right resources and support, your business can reap the inevitable ROI rewards of an agile marketing approach.
Another potential roadblock to implementing agile marketing frameworks is the lack of resources available.
Companies may not have enough personnel to devote to developing and managing agile marketing campaigns, or they may not have the budget or technology needed to successfully implement these strategies.
And remember, resources may not all be monetary. Time and labor constraints may prove an issue. The most committed organizations will hire agile marketing mavens that can be available to provide the support and drive needed to truly execute an agile approach.
Measuring the return on investment (ROI) of agile marketing can be challenging, but with the right tools and strategies in place, it is possible to track and measure the success of your efforts. The key is to identify which metrics are most meaningful when it comes to measuring ROI and then use those metrics as a benchmark for success.
One of the most important aspects of agile marketing is measuring its return on investment (ROI). This helps organizations to understand how well their efforts are paying off and determine whether they should continue with the strategy or adjust it as needed.
A few of the ways that ROI can be measured in an agile marketing approach include:
By tracking your metric(s) of choice, you can gain insight into which campaigns are most successful and determine where adjustments need to be made in order to maximize your return on investment (ROI).
Keep in mind that the ROI of agile marketing is not always immediate, as it can take time (even years) to see the results of your efforts. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t immediately see a return on investment.
Instead, focus on understanding and tracking key metrics in order to measure success over time.
A case study can be a means of convincing internal management and external clients and customers of the benefits of using agile for the implementation of marketing best practices and customer focused collaboration.
Creating an internal case study for a successful agile project can be a great way to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of agile methodologies.
A case study allows you to go into detail about the project, detailing the methodology and results, making it easier to share with other internal marketing teams or organizations.
When creating an internal case study for a successful agile project, it’s important to focus on both the process and results.
This will help demonstrate how effective agile methodologies can be when applied correctly.
We worked with a major e-commerce brand in creating a siloed approach toward agile, implementing agile digital marketing team frameworks into their paid and social campaigns.
In doing so, we created a proof-is-in-the-pudding case study to showcase the value of implementing agile on a broader scale across the entirety of their marketing organization.
Similar results were had across all their paid and organic SEO campaigns after full implementation with the help of marketing and agile software development teams.
Upper management wanted proof and we delivered.
Sometimes agile consulting is used to drive awareness to internal management (which is something we can assist with), but most often it's used to help drive better results for client campaigns.
External case studies are extremely valuable for businesses as they provide proof that their agile practices are working, attracting new customers, and creating a positive ROI.
External case studies should focus on the real-world application of agile methodologies and how they helped increase ROI for a business.
They can also highlight other important aspects of the process, such as collaboration, customer engagement, and innovation.
In nearly every client campaign where we achieve an outsized return on investment (ROI) using agile digital marketing techniques, we create a beautiful case study to showcase the work.
These case studies then become downloadable assets that we can use on new clients and potential customers.
Just like this one, from the keyword rankings for a client in the digital reviews niche:
Agile marketing is a great way to stay ahead of the competition and increase your return on investment (ROI).
By implementing agile marketing solutions and measuring results, you can ensure that your business is always adapting to changing conditions in both your business and the overall market.
In other words, learn to market adaptively like a startup (by finding the right digital marketing agency for your business).
Agile will help you see the results just as rapidly.
Tracking social media has become extremely useful, especially for those who want to build brand reputation and ROI from their social media marketing initiative. Social channels directly link to traffic, following, and engagement, so measuring them can assist your business in a variety of ways.
Social media is an important part of the equation that brings traffic and target audience following, resulting in the growth of brands. From the largest brands to the smallest startups, social media has been used and continues to be used strategically for a variety of purposes. Though I haven’t found a great social media analytics software yet, brands and startups that do social media marketing have a clear need and desire to measure their ROI meticulously.
A social media infographic that surfaced about a year ago reveals what marketers look for in social media analytic tools:
All that data comes from people who measure social media metrics. Clearly, they regard social media analytics as important. But why?
I’ll try to answer that and explain ways in which social media analytics can be simplified so it’s highly effective.
About a year ago, social media was used for marketing and ad campaigns, but it wasn’t very easy to determine ROI. One reason was that social campaigns were unlike traditional online campaigns, such as banner ads or squeeze page promotions.
In the latter, you would track every click, total the conversions, and calculate the ROI; but with the former, this isn’t possible. A user might look at your social ad/campaign and not click at all — but make a purchase directly some weeks later. Your social campaign might get shared and retweeted but it may not convert into something tangible.
Furthermore, there was no way to measure these metrics to figure out whether your social media marketing was doing any good. This was one of the reasons General Motors pulled its Facebook campaign before plunging back into conventional fan pages and traditional media engagement.
If it’s a link, you measure the clicks. If it’s an ad, you measure the impressions. If it’s a video, you measure the views. If it’s a blog post, you measure comments and traffic.
But if it’s social media, what do you measure? Likes, shares, favorites, retweets, comments, replies, mentions, subscriptions, Diggs, upvotes… perhaps the length and variety of this list stumps the average marketer or business owner who’s trying to figure out ROI from their social media platforms marketing efforts.
Let’s go back to the infographic again:
Traffic numbers, growth of followers, quantity of interaction, quality of interaction — let’s assume these are the four basic things to track (although there are many more, like demography, gender, age group, time of day, etc.).In order to get the best out of every social campaign, you need to know what to measure. To determine this, you need to understand the purpose of running the social media marketing campaign. As is the case, the end goals dictate the measurement metric.
Some brands need to measure more metrics. A brand like Dove would want to measure the number of women who have clicked through a socially shared link. A brand like Apple might want to measure the peak time of shares and the traffic it generates say, during a product launch.
It all boils down to intention: the ultimate goal you want to achieve corresponds to the metric to be measured.
It should be evident that likes, retweets, and shares don’t occupy an important metric goal because they are not of direct consequence here. For a small business, measuring the number of likes, shares, or retweets is pointless if none of it generates traffic/following/interaction/revenue or any other goal you have set for your social campaigns.
Furthermore, social is not just Facebook and Twitter; intensely passionate social media marketers know that an enormous source of traffic lies beyond these important social hubs. These include Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Delicious, and more.
Every effort you put in, especially toward marketing, should be planned and calculated.
Let’s say you take up guest blogging as a strategy to drive traffic to your website. As you go along with your guest blogging strategy, how do you identify the publishers that drive good traffic? How do you focus only on the ones that are effective?
All of that comes from analytics: you set up tools like Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools to figure out which ones are really good traffic sources and realign your marketing efforts to focus on those websites.
It’s the same with social media strategy, too.
At a time when social media marketing has become enormously important, it’s even more critical to measure the social media performance you run.
Put differently, that which we measure can be improved because we know what we are looking at!
Even if something is difficult to measure (e.g. SEO ROI), it's still worth the time and effort to try to apply a baseline measurement against it.
This is the big question: how do you measure the ROI of social media campaigns? Tracking social metrics was hard in the past, but with some really amazing tools these days, it has become easy while retaining sophistication, with a ton of features.
For instance, here’s a list of tools that help in a complete and thorough social media analytics:
Google Analytics Social (http://www.google.com/analytics/features/social.html)In most campaigns, this should be more than enough. Most of us measure traffic through multiple social media channels. Google identifies and tracks over 400 social channels, so this tool gets most of the social media data for you. With specific funnels/filters, you can track advanced metrics like conversions and the corresponding value of the traffic that funnels in through social websites.
Brandify (http://brandify.com/) This tool focuses on brand management through social channels. It’s used by some of the industry’s bigwigs. It’s all about social media analytics reports; Brandify monitors the social media activity around your brand (website) and helps you manage and enhance through recommendations. And it’s free.Awe.sm (http://totally.awe.sm/) Arguably the best tool designed to collect complete data about shares. Comes with a free trial.
RowFeeder (https://rowfeeder.com/) is Powerful social analytics that’s built for advanced users and brands that want to track a lot of things.
Engagor (http://engagor.com/) is Yet another powerful social media metric tool that brings complete control over your social media campaigns.
Crowdbooster (http://crowdbooster.com/) A more focused metric tool designed to provide recommendations based on successful social media strategies, with HootSuite-like multiple-social media management features.
Resources As usual, the web is often inundated with tons of resources.
Although I’ve not been much of a fan of Facebook Insights, it does offer some good information on the growth and reach of your Facebook fan page. Tracy Sestili’s post gives a good sense of the various metrics that can be useful.
This post is a must-read if you’re looking to make the best out of Google’s Social Analytics as it has evolved over the months. And this one takes it a step further to help you measure ROI generated by your social media campaigns.
Minilytics helps you understand the demographics of Facebook by letting you know which type of posts generate engagement, what time is optimal for posting, and how many fans you reach.
Social media campaigns are much more powerful than the usual ads run on websites. For starters, most campaigns are cost-effective, when the only costs involved are the human resource and time. Social campaigns are often more personal because they occur on a platform that’s trusted. And with metrics in hand, social campaigns can be enormously fruitful.
You’ve already got a content marketing program in place. You may have been at it for a week, a year, or even longer, but you’re not sure whether or not your content is performing effectively. You may not even be sure how to tell whether your content is performing effectively.
That’s where this article will come in handy. There are actually several ways to define the “effectiveness” of content, depending on your goals—including whether the content is effective at getting people’s attention, at building your authority, or at increasing your page ranks—and all these types of effectiveness can be objectively measured using a handful of data-based insights.
You can start by using Google Search Console to track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as keyword rankings and traffic. Additionally, analyzing content marketing metrics like engagement and conversions will help determine if your blog post resonates with your target audience and contributes to content marketing success. These insights can reveal how well your content is performing in search engine results.
The easiest line of insight you can get into the effectiveness of your content is how your followers react to it on social media. If you aren’t currently syndicating your content through social media, your first step is to get started with it.
There are several signals to look for, and each is important. Look for user comments on your pieces, user “likes” or “favorites,” and perhaps most importantly—the number of times users have shared your content. Shared content is the highest compliment you can receive, so if you aren’t receiving any shares, you may have to reevaluate your content strategy. Also take some time to look at your “social” visits in Google Analytics—how many people are visiting your site after clicking the link to your content? If the number is high, you’re doing great. If not, you’ll have to take a look at your content marketing efforts.
Onsite comments can give you fantastic clues into the effectiveness of your content. At a glance, the number of comments you receive on your blog posts can illustrate how impactful your content is. Is it stirring up conversation or sitting stagnant on your page?
The type of comments you get is also important. Do you notice other industry influencers getting involved, asking critical questions about your work? If so, you’ve managed to make yourself an authority. Are several different people engaging in conversation over your work? If so, you’ve managed to get significant attention through your choice of topic. If you have few comments or if your comments don’t show that your visitors are engaged in your material, it could be a symptom of weak or uninteresting content.
Repeat visits are a great indication of the strength of your content. If your content can attract lots of new visitors to your brand, that’s a good sign that your work is immediately appealing, but if those visitors come back for more, it means you’ve truly delivered some great work. If that recurring traffic is retained, that means you’re continuously doing a great job of satisfying your users’ needs and expectations.
Generally, your direct visitors (the ones who click directly into your site rather than searching for it) are already familiar with your brand, needing no external prompts to stumble upon your content. You can also measure your recurring traffic more accurately by counting the number of people who have subscribed to your blog or signed up for your newsletter.
To determine your content’s effectiveness in its onsite context, take a look at the Behavior section of Google Analytics. Here, you’ll be able to analyze the actions of your inbound traffic and track to see how they act after reading your material.
For example, you may find that once a visitor finds his/her way to your blog, the bounce rate goes up. If that’s the case, it means your content is ineffective at keeping users venturing deeper into your site. However, if you find that your content leads people to other blog posts and other pages of your site, you can consider your content effective at getting people to stay.
From an SEO standpoint, you can track your progress relatively easily. In Google Analytics, take a look at the Acquisition tab and look at your Organic traffic. This number reflects the total number of people who found your site through search engines, and if you’re publishing content regularly, you should see this number steadily increasing, month over month.
If you notice little to no growth in your Organic visits, it could be an indication that your content is underperforming as an element of your SEO campaign. This could be due to low or inconsistent posting frequency, poor relevance to your niche, or low quality writing.
Also, analyzing engagement metrics such as bounce rate or time spent on a particular page can give you more insight into how well your content aligns with user search intent. If one blog post or piece of content is performing poorly, content marketers might consider adjusting their marketing tactics or even creating content for other websites as part of a guest post strategy to boost website traffic and meet their business goals.
Finally, you can take a look at how well your content is at getting people to convert. If you have a conversion field on your blog pages, you can easily extract this information and determine your conversion ratio for blog traffic.
Otherwise, you can map out your users’ behavior flows and determine whether your blog readers eventually find your conversion page and convert. If you find your conversion ratios are low or nonexistent, you’ll have to tailor your content to enable more conversions.
Just because your content is underperforming doesn’t mean it’s useless. In fact, the data you gathered to determine your content’s performance is the perfect ammunition to use in remolding it. Take this information, along with your user feedback, and use it to make up for your content’s core weaknesses. Reiterate this process several times, making improvements each time, and eventually you’ll perfect your content marketing approach.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be confusing. With dozens of acronyms, technical jargon, tools, programs, statistics, techniques, and all the talk about pandas and penguins, it’s pretty intimidating.
Let alone the fact that SEO is a field that is in constant flux! In spite of the confusion, there’s a simple way to think about SEO campaigns today and beyond: as a set of three core elements that support each other to support an SEO campaign. Leveraging a strong social media presence and social media link building, you can improve your online visibility and reach a broader audience. You can also utilize Google Analytics, if you want to track the performance of both your website and other social media pages. It ensures that your target audience is effectively engaged on every social media platform.
Let’s take a look at each of these elements, as well as how to implement each of them to increase traffic, conversions, and ROI.
Discussed in detail below, but provided here in survey form, the three core elements are as follows:
I call these the three core elements because they are necessary for any modern SEO campaign to succeed. Without each of these three core elements, your SEO campaign won’t be properly supported and will likely fail. Before launching into an explanation of the three core elements, there are a few things to understand about how they work together.
The first core element comes first logically because it involves your own website — the hub where everything happens. This element can also be called “onsite SEO” to distinguish from SEO practices that happen off your site, such as external content that garners inbound links (such as guest blog posts) and social media involvement. Here are the essentials:
Organic link building tactics include guest blogging, press release distribution, and other tactics.
How do search engines decide to bring your website up to the top of the search rankings? Top-notch onsite SEO is only the beginning. Search engines recognize that your site is important based on who is linking to it.
Take this example. Let’s say you’re a yoga instructor. You have a website, and you start publishing some sweet articles about yoga. Somehow, Whole Living picks up on your content and asks you to do a guest post on yoga. You write a piece for Whole Living, and link back to your website.
Whole Living has a domain authority of 80, which is way higher than your site. Bingo. As soon as they link to you, your website gains credibility and authority. Then, you interview a health instructor in a local private college and post the interview on your website. The yoga instructor, in turn, writes about the interview on her college blog and links to your site. Boom. You just got a link from an .edu website.
Because you’re now a recognized authority on yoga, you publish an article in Lifehacker about the positive impact of yoga on work productivity. This article, of course, links back to your website. Another power move.
All of these links to your site are driving up your website's authority. Your site has proven to the search engines its authority and recognition. Your rankings go up.
No site will succeed in SEO unless other sites are linking to it. It’s just that simple.
Here are the best ways to gain quality backlinks:
Links are crucial. Ensure you have a solid strategy in place for building links.
More than ever before, social media is an integral part of SEO. Search engines can quantify the amount of social presence that your site possesses. Merely getting a few dozen tweets can ramp up a page’s authority, and therefore its rankings, resulting in more website traffic to it. The increasing market share of Google+ is a major ranking factor in social ranking, including the power of Google authorship. Social signals matter for SEO.
Keep these two points in mind.
The power of social for SEO strategy can be subtle, but is nonetheless important. Provide sharing opportunities on every piece of content that you publish. The greater the social signals, the better your SEO.
This is the state of SEO in 2013. Online marketing success is possible, but not without each of these core elements present and properly being engaged. It’s no longer easy to game the system and jump up the search engine rankings in Google with a few slick tricks. You’ve got your work cut out for you.
But you do have a game plan — understand and design your digital marketing strategy around the three core elements of SEO. As long as you 1) ensure that your onsite SEO is rolling smoothly, 2) you possess a robust and effective link building strategy, and 3) you’re staying active and engaging within social media platforms, you’re going to succeed.
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