On the 30th April 2013 the WWW was officially twenty years old. We certainly owe a debt of gratitude to Sir Tim Berner’s Lee, not only for the invention, but also his dedication to keeping it open through his work with the The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and other non-commercial organisations.

He talked animatedly at TED about his experiences and what he hopes the web will bring in the future.

Strategy and planning

• The evolving skills of the modern marketer – one of most popular posts this month shows in a visual way what success on today’s WWW requires, particularly with integrating with other channels of course.
• The visual below shows how marketers need to be both creative and scientific in their approach to the web, something Target Internet has been talking extensively about over the past few years and we have a training module covering our approach to content marketing.

• In fact all web creation is becoming more an art form than a simple set of rules and terms such as ‘responsive’ and ‘user centred design’ are now everywhere when looking at how we build platforms and share information. Mashable have heralded 2013 as the year of responsive web design.
• The latest inbound content marketing research Marked by the Fifth annual Hubspot report, Smart Insights have provided a useful summary of this 175 page report to see the tactics which are working and the challenges to be managed.
• Benchmarking content marketing – in this post from Smart Insights Dave summarises the state of managing content marketing from their informal poll and Lee Odden’s content marketing webcast.
• If you missed it, Target Internet recently posted a useful template and instructions for managing content creation and publication.

Social media marketing

• Twitter ad targeting was launched – Twitter becomes more Google Adwords-like with the ability to target by keyword, but it’s still not open to all businesses.

• Get your videos to stand out with our top tips for optimising video content.
• Facebook Promoted Pages – This tutorial from Marie Page covers the new feature which is gradually being rolled out to more marketers.
• If you’re still struggling to get to grips with G+, this great free tutorial from Daniel Rowles shows you how to get started.

Search marketing

• This post from Target Internet gives you a chance to see the slides presented during a recent webinar for the CIM on Pay Per Click Advertising. 
• 5 approaches to improve Google+ Smart Insight’s new commentator on the intersection of search and social marketing, Rhian Simms, shared examples of 5 approaches based on her learnings from Brighton SEO. If you’re involved in SEO, don’t miss the round-up of presentations at the end of this post if you couldn’t attend.
• A briefing on Rel=“me” – A tutorial on using Google+ to protect your brand using this new Google authorship technique.

User experience, analytics and conversion optimisation

• 3 new features in Google’s Realtime analytics – Dan Barker’s post reminds us when it useful to use real time reporting for site tracking and what these features add.
• If you’re new to Realtime, Google’s support area gives you the help you need to make the most of it. While it’s not yet available to all customers it will be soon.

• 2 new tools in Google Analytics Social Report – this alert is about a minor update, but reminds us of the insights available in Google’s Social Reports.
• Universal Analytics vs Google Analytics – This is a question every business should be asking in 2013 if they’re serious about actionable business insights. Read our summary post for the Pros and Cons and check out what others are doing.

Email marketing and CRM

• Proving the ROI of Email marketing – Mark Brownlow’s summary shows that email marketing is second only to organic SEO for ROI. This is the approximate £ return for every £ spent according to the UK DMA.

• Email campaign tracking with Google Analytics – not a new technique, but it seemed popular as a refresher since this doesn’t happen by default so is often missed on many sites I review.

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Post tags: Analytics, best practice, Google, marketing, planning, Social Media

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This year it seems that Omnichannel is the new term for managing multichannel marketing to emphasise the growing importance of social media marketing. If it’s new to you or you’re looking for examples, read more in our Introduction to Omnichannel marketing and these examples of Omnichannel retail.

One of Smart Insight’s most popular posts on planning this month is the Digital media introduction infographic courtesy of Hallam Internet Marketing.

We think this is a great visual way of introducing the digital media channels to non-digital specialists. I’m not sure whether SEO should be at the centre though?

Social media marketing

The main developments on the social media platforms this month were these developments on Facebook and Pinterest.

• Facebook Lookalike Targeting launches – advertisers can now upload customer emails or phone numbers and then Facebook will automagically find audiences sharing similar profile characteristics. Marie Page will be writing more about her experiences of using Lookalike targeting in April in a tutorial – watch out for that if you’re considering this option.
• New Pinterest Analytics – a free tool within Pinterest for reviewing the popularity and reach of your Boards and Pins.
• We have a new podcast published in the past few weeks; Social Media Disasters and How to Avoid Them as well as a 2 minute interactive learning tool, Why Use Google +
• For advice on social media and content marketing I recommend this post on a common marketing challenge for all companies: How do you persuade others in your organisation to create content for you? Thanks to all the marketers who contributed ideas for this.
• If content creation strokes fear into the hearts of your team then take a listen to our poadcast 15 Ways To Cure Blogger’s Block which gives some hints and tips for creating quick content that doesn’t have to take hours to write.

Search marketing

The main SEO change to watch for in March was the latest in a long line of Google Panda updates – #25 penalising low quality content. It is thought that this will be the last of the major notified Panda updates. Meanwhile in the SEO Zoo, this analysis suggests that Google’s Penguin update penalising low-quality links is getting stricter.

Of course social signals are becoming more important within SEO and it’s worth planning for how you can increase the ranking of your site on this basis. We had a popular guest post on the importance of engagement in Social SEO this month.

Another more strategic post on SEO that provoked a lot of comments this month was Gavin Llewellyn’s post on Forecasting the benefits of SEO for investment.

At a less advanced level, providing advice on SEO for non-specialists, you may be interested in Google’s latest guides and videos on how Search works and SEO – we’ve added them to end of the SmartInsights SEO hub page.

If you work in SEO then you’ve probably come across the Brighton SEO event run yearly by SiteVisibility. Daniel caught up with Kelvin, the man behind this hugely popular event to talk about how he approached organising what is now recognised as a world class SEO conference.

Image credit: Panda and Penguin

User experience, analytics and conversion optimisation

What is an average conversion rate? is a FAQ whether it’s for Ecommerce sites or other types of site. I updated our compilation of conversion rates

I’ve also included a compilation of rates for non-ecommerce sectors.

In March James Gurd updated our guide for landing page optimisation and to support this I recommended this formula for landing page optimisation to help guide CRO planning. How well do you think this works?

Email marketing and CRM

If you work in Email marketing check out this infographic on Email design best practices – it’s a neat summary.

We also covered What Email marketers need to learn from retailers in this post from Ed Hallen suggesting 3 phases of Behaviour email marketing.

I hope you found this compilation of latest alerts and advice is useful. Please get in touch if you’re interested in sharing your experiences, views or examples on best practice through a guest post. Alternatively, ideas on what you’d like us to cover or questions on Best Practice – see our Marketing Answers forum.

Massive thank you to Dave Chaffey of Marketing planning advice site SmartInsights.com his contributions towards this latest update.

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Post tags: Google, Google Plus, inte, marketing, planning, Social Media

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It’s not every month a new currency is launched. In February Amazon announced a new virtual currency called Amazon Coins (a genius moniker) and an interesting promotion where customers will be given money (virtual). Watch out from May onwards. Some are calling it the Bank of Jeff…

Image credit: Mashable

Strategy and planning

• Did you notice the emergence of the term “growth hacking” for describing a “new” marketing approach in 2012 and continuing into the start of 2013? I initially dismissed it as a fad most relevant for SaaS (Software as a Service) / single product startup businesses. But recently, I’ve noticed some new job descriptions in this area which prompted me to take another look. In particular, I noticed that The Guardian is currently advertising for a Head of Growth Hacking – read more in my briefing on what traditional businesses can learn from growth hacking. If you’re looking for more traditional advice to create a marketing plan check out our new 7 Steps Guide to creating a marketing plan. This blog post also links through to free webcast from Annmarie Hanlon introducing her guide.
• Digital marketing is now bigger than Internet marketing – Does it matter what you call Digital Marketing. Well yes, and no…
• New year often gets us thinking about a new job so here are some resources to get your started. Smart Insights have produced a great infographic looking at the split in digital marketing roles and there are even some samples job descriptions available.

Social media marketing

• Google + introduces Social Sign-In and a new way of sharing Social Sign-In has been available for Facebook and Twitter for several years now, so this was a big gap in the Google+ offering.
• Establishing your brand’s social media voice – Daniel Rowles explains a technique for developing the right tone for social media communications.
• Latest podcast episode – Social media disasters and how to avoid them. The team discuss risk mitigation, social media policy and setting guidelines for your internal teams.

Search marketing

• Google Clarifies its Assessment of which Links are Valid – A big story in the UK with worldwide implications as Google removes Interflora from its index and penalises numerous media sites.
• Google introduces Product Listings Ads. This only impacts retailers, but it’s a big impact. From February 13, Google will phase out free listings in UK Shopping searches. As Google Shopping changes, marketers will need to budget for clicks they previously got for free and get to grips with the Merchant Center, product feeds and product listing ads.
• In case you missed it, don’t forget to check out the slides from the CIM’s SEO webinar which Daniel hosted. It was as popular as ever and apparently broke a record for audience numbers!

Of value to a wider range of companies, in February Google also improved support for local targeting of mobile users with the new Adwords Enhanced campaigns.

User experience, analytics and conversion optimisation

• Writing a website design brief that gets results – This post from agency marketing specialist Mark Kelly shows how to get your web redesign project off to a positive start. It supports two new templates to help companies and agencies plan and manage website redesign projects.
• Google Analytics Change history – a simple change, but useful in large companies and in agencies where multiple people are working to update

Email marketing and CRM

• Boosting revenue from Email marketing Richard Austin talks us through a new spreadsheet for modelling Email campaigns.
• Proving the value of Email ROI in organisations Mark Brownlow explains the value in Email marketing using the latest research from the DMA.
• The role of social in CRM (SCRM) - We’re looking at how social supports customer relationship management and customer service.

Produced in partnership with Dr Dave Chaffey; a Digital marketing author, consultant and trainer and CEO of Smart Insights.

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Post tags: best practice, Google, marketing, online reputation management, Social Media

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Most brands understand the concept of promotion using social media but few understand how to attribute value in the same way as traditional broadcast media.

Customers no longer decide to buy a product or service based solely on adverts and brand promotion in the same way they did 5 years ago. With the rise of the internet, customers have more choice and have access to more information.  Not only are customers far more media savvy and less likely to buy into brand marketing, but they are making more and more purchase decisions based on their value set rather than need alone.

This works the same way for B2B brands, whether it be a product or service, we like to buy from a brand based on need fit but also our experience of the organisation. Factors such as personal recommendations, customer service experience and how well the brand values match our own are now key triggers for deciding on a brand’s worth.

The purchase process

The way customers became aware of our products and decided to buy has historically been a fairly linear process often referred to as the purchase funnel. Customers would be filtered out at each stage until the product matched the customer’s desire and a purchase was made.

The stages were fairly clear cut and brands could allocate their marketing resources effectively to each stage. The focus was on the sale and it was relatively easy to understand how specific promotional activities could be attributed to the purchase process.

With the rise of social and the way customers now research and decide on a purchase, the ‘funnel’ has changed significantly and instead of it being a staged linear process, we find consumers take a far more considered approach, seeking information from a wider variety of places.

We now refer to the purchase process as a cycle and customers can move forward or backwards throughout this cycle. Social now allows the consumer to remain within the cycle long after the purchase has been made. Customer retention and loyalty are now as much of a focus as the sale itself.

What social media has allowed customers to have is a voice and a chance to make that voice heard. If we look at the different purchase stages we can consider how social can support customers and help you as a brand to promote your product or service at each stage.

Awareness

Getting your brand noticed is the first step and this means promotion. While traditionally this would have meant advertising of some description, social offers us the opportunity to move beyond clever (and expensive) marketing to activities which actively engage with our customers. Make your brand visible on social media, create a brand page on Facebook and set up a Twitter feed. Go beyond sharing marketing messages and just talk to your customers about things you think they would be interested in. It doesn’t have to be your products specifically, it could be anything that you can relate back in some way.

Interest

At this stage your customer has an interest in your product or service. This is the point when consumers will begin to search for something specific, probably online, and begin their research. Depending on the value of the item this research could be significant and will include looking at customer ratings, personal recommendations, availability and location etc. Research has shown that when consumers are faced with a brand website and their Facebook page in search results a significant proportion will go to a social media site first. The reason for this is the idea that the content will be more relevant and more truthful. Facebook is where customers compliment or complain about a brand, where questions are answered and where the brand is seen to interact without the assumed agenda of just hard selling. It’s a trusted source for new customers and helps to either give confidence to a prospective customer or put them off.

Desire

This is where you move beyond the practical pairing of product and need to make the emotional connection between the consumer and your brand or product. Whether this be the product or service itself or your brand as the provider of choice, connect with your customers on a level that goes deeper than just being informative. Solve your customer’s problems, answer their questions, invest in them pre-sale and you will reap the rewards in the long term. This isn’t about manipulating your customers, they can spot a faker a mile away. In order to connect with your customers you need to offer genuine enthusiasm and interest which gives your brand the personality needed to inspire consumers. All of this support needs to be instant and far more subtle than your corporate website will allow. Hosting these conversations on social media can make your customer feel like they are on neutral ground, you’re in their space rather than the other way around.

Purchase

Research shows that the greatest influence on customer purchase is recommendations from family and friends. This works both ways with a single negative opinion causing the opposite effect. Managing your customers through the purchase process to ensure they have a positive experience will bring you far greater rewards in the future. Turning customers into loyal advocates is the holy grail for any consumer or B2B brand, getting your customers to say good things about you and recommend you to a friend is probably easier than you think. And this doesn’t mean you can always prevent negative opinion being expressed about your brand, in fact nobody would believe it if you didn’t have a single complaint about a product or service. But how you respond to those comments (and respond you must) will say more about your company than  any self promotion can do. Social media is where conversations are happening, where customers are sharing their experiences, making recommendations and discussing their personal experiences of your brand. Not engaging on these platforms doesn’t mean the conversations aren’t happening, it just means you’re not a part of them.

Retention

Creating opportunities for long term mutually beneficial relationships is what social media was made for. Customer care post purchase is just as important as the support you offer during the selling process. Once a customer has selected to as a supplier, don’t let them just walk away. Build on the connection that now exists, provide opportunities for feedback, follow up support, issue management and reviews. Every time a customer interacts with your social network profile it send a ripple of notifications throughout that individual’s network, telling everyone they know that they’ve spent some of their precious time talking to you. A vote of confidence can be all it takes to bring in new customers to your brand rather than somebody else’s.

Social media can be your best asset when it comes to customer service and support. It offers a mix of real time responses, an open forum which engenders trust and the ability for uncensored voices to be heard. It feels far more like an area owned by the customer than your branded website could ever achieve.

Written by Felice Ayling

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Post tags: best practice, conversion, Social Media

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We often enjoy highlighting the brands that fail in their quest for social media glory, however most of what we see could have been prevented if the proper handling procedures were in place.

Plan for it

The first step to avoiding disaster is to prepare for it in your planning. This can actually be quite fun as it’s the opposite to what a lot of us are used to. Understanding how a campaign can be twisted, hijacked or just timed wrong can make the difference between success and failure. Look at the worst case scenario and plan in your response in advance, that way you are in a position to nip any nonsense in the bud before it escalates. 

If you are too close or so in love with your brand that you are blind to its faults, take your ideas to the customer service team, they’ll probably be able to offer some great insight into how the customers talk about your brand. Don’t be afraid to hear negatives, it doesn’t mean the campaign is a bad idea, it just means you’ll need to have a plan in place if things start to go awry.

Also make sure you’re using the right platform, high risk campaigns that can easily be hijacked probably don’t belong on Twitter, in this instance use Facebook where you have more control over the responses you receive.

Listen carefully

One of the best ways to avert disaster is to act fast, this means you need to know as soon as possible when your brand has attracted some negative attention. There are many tools that can help you to keep track of online conversations and they can alert you to any negative comments. The sooner you can spot and respond to negative comments, the less likely they are to develop into a situation that could damage your online reputation.

One of the biggest social media disasters we highlighted last year was the VW fb campaign which started off as a fairly innocuous invite to customers to suggest ways the brand could improve their products. An early comment raised issue with the environmental impact of the brand and asked how they planned to address it. Not exactly what VW had hoped for i’m sure but it gave them a great opportunity to engage with those less supportive. What actually happened was VW remained silent as more and more comments began piling up, comments which soon started to berate the company for their lack of response. The disaster was picked up by bloggers and news sites all over the world and to date the post is still attracting comments.

I wonder what would have happened if VW had responded quickly to the first few comments? Could they have changed the outcome and engaged positively with their critics? Could they have utilised the insight they gained from those who felt strongly enough to ask the question?

Even the most engaging brand will have its critics and you should never be afraid of hearing from them. Handled properly, early and positive intervention can turn your biggest critic into a loyal advocate.

Don’t work in isolation

Most brands still view social media as a marketing function but customers look to online profiles for more than just perky promotional messages. Understanding what is happening across the organisation can help to strengthen your offering and provide much needed communication during difficult problems. Without this you run the risk of being isolated from the rest of the company and alienating your customers when they are looking for support.

There have been many instances of brands continuing to push marketing messages through social profiles profiles which the company is experience a significant loss of service or disruption. Telling the world how wonderful you are in the face of disgruntled customers is a sure fire way to get negative feedback. Keep in touch with those outside of your immediate team, check in on any major issues and work out how you can support them by answering questions, giving real time updates and apologising for the inconvenience. Your customer service team will thank you for not riling up the customers even more.

Know when to escalate

While most negative comments can be handled on the spot by whoever is managing your social media, there will be instances when you’ll need to bring in other team members to help you. Plan in advance what the triggers may be and identify who you need to contact and when. Having this back-up gives you a safety net to work with and means that, if the worst happens, you can act fast rather than running round trying to find someone to help.

Identify and task specific individuals and make sure they know what their role is, determine how you will keep key people informed so you avoid having to deal with updating management while you’re trying to resolve a crisis. Having a plan in place will save knee-jerk reactions and give you the confidence to deal with problems swiftly and positively.

Say sorry when you mess up

Making mistakes is how we learn and your customers don’t expect you to be perfect. In fact, it’s when a crisis occurs that you can really show your customers what you’re made of and demonstrate customer service that is second to none. Most complaints occur when people feel they are not being heard, embed great customer relations principles into your social media plan and if you make a mistake just say sorry and fix it. Most customers will forget in time what the problem was, but they will remember how they felt about your response.

You won’t be able to avoid attracting negative comments, not everyone will love what you do. But by having a plan for dealing with them you can avoid turning a low grumble into a full on attack and often develop new advocates for your brand.

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Post tags: best practice, planning, Social Media

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January planning with Smart Insights

January is the time of year when many look again at their priorities for the year ahead. To help with this, Smart Insights ran a series of 8 free webinars on January 9th. If you would like to take a look, you can still view the #MarketingPriorities2013 Webcasts and Slideshares. Continuing the theme, expert commentator Annmarie Hanlon will be speaking in February in a webcast on how to create the Perfect Marketing Plan.

The brand new online brand of note in January was Vine. From the people who brought us 140 character tweets, so that we could say more with less, come 6 second videos. It’s based on technology Twitter purchased in 2012. It’s good to see some brands have been agile enough to trial the format, but I’m sure others will have larger, more strategic “fish to fry”. Revolution has some examples of which this caught my eye:

View:

A trip down #Gap advertising memory lane for our #firstpost on Vine. vine.co/v/b5PeYQOLuLj

— Gap (@Gap) January 25, 2013

Of course, Facebook Graph Search which we cover in our social media section will have a much bigger impact eventually. Or will it?

Strategy and planning

• Perhaps the biggest news in January was actually just before Christmas and may have been missed as companies wound down for the break. The news was Oracle’s $871million acquisition of Eloqua and the implications for development of a new series of marketing cloud type solutions. In this post, Paul Fennemore takes a look at the implications of marketing clouds and the main options available: The Growth in Combined Marketing Cloud Solutions
• In January 2013 we updated our free digital marketing healthcheck. In this post, Dan Bosomworth explains how to set priorities for 2013 using it and our other tools in our toolkit. We’ve updated it line with member feedback to enable you to save and review your scores and recommendations.
• Daniel turns introspective and gives us his advice to improving your personal productivity - Automating self discipline.
• Ecommerce Trends 2013 – Jill Rob and I compiled this post of trends in Ecommerce covering the latest mobile commerce adoption figures and continued growth in Ecommerce according to the IMRG:

In a separate post I showed how to use Cause-and-effect or Ishikawa fishbone diagrams for Ecommerce analysis.

Social media marketing

• How will Facebook’s new Graph Search affect marketers? Thanks to Cartlon Jefferis for his in-depth briefing.
• LinkedIn passes 200 million member milestone – with new users being added at an average rate of two per second (or 172,800 per day) but closes two core services which was a surprise to many.
• 5 Steps to Delivering a Successful Social Media Strategy - This post talks you through the all important steps to getting the most out of your social media.

Expert commentators Jon Paget and Marie Page also had good practical posts on community management tools and Reviewing Social Media Effectiveness.

Content marketing

• We’re just getting to grips with Content Marketing and along comes ‘Context Marketing’ - Interesting post looking st the difference between the two and the future of Context Marketing. Plus 50 top SEO terms.
• We’re publishing a series of posts on Content Marketing – Content marketing for 2013 looks at how creating good content should be your number one priority. And it has some great videos that are a must see if you’ve missed them.

Search marketing

• A 10 step AdWord Audit. Without proper management, AdWords can get very expensive and, over time, lose its effect. AdWords specialist Paul Coulter explains that’s why you need to do periodic audits of your AdWords program. For a more in-depth look at getting the most from AdWords, see our 7 Steps Guide to AdWords Success Ebook which we have just updated for 2013.
• Ranking Tools recommendations. With discussion on our LinkedIn Group about the latest Google Panda update, these Smart Insights Answers Discussion Forum responds to covered tools for reviewing ranking impact.
• We’ve updated our SEO Tools Comparison report – Still the most popular piece of content on our site, we’ve included updates, changes so even if you’ve seen it’s worth checking out again.

User experience, analytics and conversion optimisation

• New Google Analytics Solutions Gallery – This is a handy new set of tools to help customise reports to a business.
• The latest podcast from Target internet looks at the recent changes to Google Analytics - This episode looks at improvements to in page analytics, AB tests in analytics and Daniels favourite hangout in GA- Multi Channel Funnels.
• Are you a Datavore?. A post arguing for more data-driven decisions. This infographic based on research from Nesta from their useful report, ‘Rise of the Datavores’, shows that many rely on intuition alone when making marketing decisions. I wondered how this compared to Smart Insights readers, see the poll results to find out whether our readers are more balanced.
• Mobile use statistics – One of our most popular posts in January showing the interest in managing mobile use.

Email marketing and CRM

• 7 Key issues in CRM to include in your plans for 2013
• Growth of marketing cloud services
• Seven not-so-sexy email marketing tasks for 2013

I hope you find this summary useful. It was compiled in partnership with Dave Chaffey, author of Emarketing Excellence and editor of the Smart Insights blog.

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Post tags: best practice, planning, Social Media

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The answer depends very much on your view of SEO but essentially SEO was about creating content that worked for search engines, Content Marketing is about creating content that works for people.

However, that doesn’t mean that SEO is no longer important, but content creators need to understand how to utilise SEO alongside other factors to get the best results.

Search 5 years ago

Traditionally promoting online content used to look like this:

Good content has always been important but SEO could improve search results without the need for providing high quality experiences for the user.

While a combination of both saw the best return, this was time consuming and resource intensive and utilising SEO alone saw results quicker and was more predictable.

There are many professionals (and I use this term very loosely) who still offer this type of service, but those of us who value the user experience above all else have always tried to occupy that space in the middle.

Search now

Jump forward to 2013 and we now see a greater emphasis being put on quality content and social signals.

Search engines still take notice of how you label your content, page titles, headings and descriptions play a part. But they no longer just take your word for it and bring in a whole range of other ‘signals’ that allude to the quality of each piece of content. Essentially SEO helps Google to understand what your content is about, and everything else demonstrates how relevant your content is.

These markers were easily manipulated in the early days, keyword loaded content and paid-for backlinking could deceive search engines into pushing low quality content to the top of the search results. They got wise to this though and now most of these ‘black hat’ techniques are filtered out during the search process, and some sites have been penalised for employing these kind of tactics. Search engines demand authenticity and while it’s important to understand which signals affect your results, these must be balanced alongside the drive to just create really interesting and useful content that illicit response from visitors.

While Content Marketing has overtaken SEO, it is so much more than another set of rules to follow. It encompasses technical knowhow with an understanding of how to create content that captures audience attention, predicting audience behaviour, social media activation, traditional PR and media relations tactics and brings it together in a strategic approach aimed at building long term meaningful relationships between brands and their customers.

It sounds complex but it really boils down to creating content that people want to see, share and positively influences how they feel about the creator. Whereas SEO and Content Marketing used to occupy two different spaces, we now view all tactics under the umbrella of Content Marketng and one of these tools is SEO.

Written by Felice Ayling

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Post tags: content marketing, google, marketing, Social Media

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While traditional advertising and marketing tactics are far from dead, the growth of social media, mobile and the web in general means that your customers want more than just a clever ad campaign to convince them they need your product above all others.

Having a great website just won’t cut it anymore and brands are focusing more and more on good quality, highly engaging optimised content that draws consumers back to their owned sites and social media profiles. It’s no longer sufficient just to tell people what you do, you have to demonstrate it by becoming ‘publishers’ of content that embodies your values and captures the attention of your audience.

One of the best examples of this was the Red Bull campaign which saw Felix Baumgartner parachute back to Earth from the edge of space. Watched by 8 million people live and with over 32 million views to date it was a turning point for content marketing in 2012. According to one ad exec, the stunt could be worth around £10m in ad spend in the UK and around £100m worldwide and captured Red Bull’s value set perfectly.

If you missed it here it is.

Consumers are looking for more than just information and are now far more likely to go to a brand’s Twitter or Facebook profile than their website when deciding on a purchase. According to a recent survey, 51% of respondents said they would be more likely to make a purchase after ‘Liking’ a brand on Facebook, and 64% after ‘Following’ it on Twitter.

As brands try to capitalise on this they are cautiously dipping their toes in the world of social media, writing blogs, producing white papers and sharing video content about their organisation. But brands need to go beyond just having profiles and sharing content and develop a much more strategic approach to embedding content marketing into their consumer engagement activity.

You need to be committed to make it work, and this means getting to know your customers and delivering content which is designed to reach your target audience and keep them coming back for more. You’ll need to think creatively about the opportunities within your organisation and begin building enough resource to manage it properly.

One of my all time favourite examples of taking a creative approach to customer engagement is BlendTec’s Will It Blend campaign which has shown that with the right approach, a small budget can take you very far. In 2007 the company’s Marketing Director was charged with increasing sales of its product and while following the production process he witnessed the research team blending all kinds of different objects to test the product’s blades. Obviously this process was designed to allow them to make statements as to the toughness of the blades as a selling point. But what was spotted straight away was the interest this process might generate from consumers if they could see it happening.

And so, armed with a video camera and a blender, the company CEO Tom Dickson made a short film blending various food and non food items and uploaded it onto YouTube. The video went viral instantly with over 6m views in the first 5 days. Customers went nuts about the videos and began suggesting other items that could be blended which then drove the next set of videos. And so this has continued with videos still being made now.

The first video cost around $100 and each one is low cost with just a blender and whatever item is up for destruction. The campaign however saw sales increase by over 700% and brand awareness go through the roof. The YouTube channel currently has over 500k subscribers and over 220m views and there appears to be an endless supply of items for blending.

The success of the campaign was built upon the understanding that blending stuff is fun to watch and the stranger the better, the video of the iPhone is a personal favourite and the campaign appeals to so many people. But the silliness of the content doesn’t take anything away from the brand itself, in fact seeing what the blender can reduce to mush is a fantastic endorsement for its quality and strength (key selling points for any blender owner)

Here is the iPhone video which is just great fun to watch.

BlendTec shows how important it is to take a creative approach to content creation, considering opportunities outside of the marketing team’s office and showcasing the parts of your industry that will resonate with your audience.

Over the next few weeks we will be publishing a series of posts looking at the different aspects of developing a strategic content marketing plan from generating ideas, managing risk to delivery and evaluating success.

We would love to know what you’re already doing or if you have specific questions we can answer so please leave your comments in the box or contact us on Facebook or Twitter.

Written by Felice Ayling

© Target Internet for Target Internet, 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: best practice, content marketing, marketing, planning

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Identifying your values

If you don’t already have a clear set of brand values this is a good place to start as it will give you a basis from which to design everything else.

I use the grid below when I’m establishing values with a brand and we go through and circle every value we think reflects the brand.

The next step is to place them in order of importance and draw a line somewhere between 5 and 7 values, any more and the voice becomes too diluted.

Most brands select values such as honesty, integrity and trust within their choices. Take these out. These are not values, they are fundamental to any business and so should be integral to everything you do. The values you end up with should clearly reflect your brand and what you stand for that sets you apart.

Making your values meaningful

Once you have your values, consider how they are demonstrated by your policies, products, processes and people. What do they look like in practice and are you consistently fulfilling them.

If customer satisfaction is a core value, are you delivering the best to your customers and how can your social media activity support this? Will you set a time limit for responding to queries, how openly will you deal with complaints posted on your profiles?

Once your values have been identified, you should be able to link all of your communication back to one of them. Keep focused, you can’t be all things to all people.

Identifying your target demographic

You should be able to access information about your target demographic from your sales department, but if not then consider who your brand is speaking to. What is the age bracket? Mainly men or women? If you’re a B2B company, who specifically do you target in prospective companies?

Getting as much detail down about your target group will give you insight into what will interest them, and you can match your content to maximise on the level of engagement you hope to see.

Developing your personality

The best way to do this is to think of your brand as a person. Who would you be? If you’ve identified your target audience as 30 -45 yr old females, it may be worth making your brand personality the same.

Having a defined personality allows you to speak to your audience with a clear and distinct voice and demonstrates values and interests that match your target group. Consider their interests, what makes them laugh, what do they spend their free time doing. All of this insight will give your brand personality depth and character that you will need to engage well using social media.

Create a brand bible

Once you have your brand personality identified, make sure you share it with anyone involved in engaging online. There are usually several people involved in writing content for your social media profiles and other marketing channels so making sure these are aligned is key.

Without guidance, you can end up with several voices talking at once and this will dilute your brand and confuse your audience. You can get creative with this and a one-pager is all that may be needed outlining the main elements of your brand personality.

Having a clearly defined personality and giving it a voice creates a strong steer for all communications and allows you to easily identify which of your planned activities do and don’t fit. It can also help you to avoid missing the mark or annoying your audience with posts that aren’t relevant.

You might also be interested in 5 steps to delivering a successful social media strategy.

Written by Felice Ayling

© Target Internet for Target Internet, 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: brand, marketing, Social Media

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I often hear brands declare they want to create a Facebook account or get their brand on Twitter, but very few can say why and what they hope to achieve with it. Inevitably many attempts result in failure or very low level rewards and it’s the platforms that are written off as a waste of time for the brand.

For most brands, social media is something they can chose to engage with or chose to abstain from. But the truth is your brand is already being talked about, you’re just not yet part of the conversation.

Understanding how social platforms work and how to get the best out of them is crucial to deciding if it’s worthwhile investing your time and resources. But what is also key is understanding the difference between them and have separate strategies for each one. Facebook and Twitter in particular tend to end up lumped together and are used in similar ways, you’ll often hear Twitter being referred to as Facebook Lite when in fact the two offer very different opportunities for engagement and insight for your brand.

While social media is supported by technology, thinking about them as technologies may mean brands end up missing the point. Social media is about people, a collection of individuals and as in ‘real life’ you need to be mindful of what those individuals want from you. Even brand pages are managed by individuals and they will engage with you if they like what you have to say.

Motivations for engagement

How individuals connect on Facebook is very different to Twitter. Facebook is all about relationships, I share with my family and friends and they share with me. It’s all about connections on Facebook and interconnecting behaviours. We share our lives, or how we’d like others to see them, within our social circle.

Twitter is about shared interests, I share my interests with my followers and I follow people who share things that interest me. Twitter provides a tool for amplification, one tweet can reach many people absent of any social connection as long as the post is of interest.

Immediate vs long term reach

With sharing tools such as TweetDeck, it’s tempting to share your posts with many profiles at once, believing that your Facebook fans will be just as interested as your Twitter followers. But as we have already identified the motivations for engagement are distinct, so will be the level of interest between the two groups.

Facebook followers engage with your brand on an emotional level. They can find your content fun, interesting, it can solve a problem, answer a question or just provide some light relief. When I consider my own social media profiles, there are very few brands or individuals whom cut across both networks. And, those that do, share very different information across the two platforms. When I visit a Facebook profile I’m much more likely to be browsing for good content, it could be videos of my favourite band, a lit of tour dates, a campaign that inspires me or links to articles I’m keen to read.

The images below shows the amount of time spent on social media platforms per user per month with Facebook taking up 4 times as much user time as Twitter.

While some of this exists on Twitter, it’s easy to miss a lot of what’s said because it’s so fast paced. What Twitter is great for is its ability to share and amplify ideas, you never know who is going interact with you and what their response is going to be. And the conversation moves far quicker than most of us can keep up with.

When you post something on Facebook it can remain a fixture for quite a while and can be reposted and promoted at key points. The comments remain fixed and it all works to build a resource of long term engaging content that you can continue to draw on.

When you post to Twitter, the response can be immediate and then can vanish just as quickly. But on the flip side, you can find success even if you haven’t developed a huge fan base yet. Your reach can be small while the effects can be significant.

Quality vs quantity

While all of your content should be of a good quality, your Facebook users will demand more of you than your Twitter followers. As most Facebook users don’t like to clutter up their news feeds with uninteresting content, you have to put in more effort to gain new Likes either on your page or your content. Users will very quickly unlike your page if they are being bombarded with content that doesn’t match their interests to a good level. For users to share your content, their interest in each piece of content needs to be significant.

With Twitter, much of what is shared or retweeted only needs to be of reasonable interest and can cover both personal and professional life. As much of what we share goes by so fast, we feel more comfortable sharing large quantities of information with our followers and so the relevance doesn’t need to be as high.

Twitter users are information seekers and is the platform most used by the press for breaking news. Facebook users want to be engaged, entertained or inspired not broadcast to.

Conversation vs Interaction

Building conversations on Facebook is one of its key selling points. Once you have engaged fans with your content you can continue to talk to them, gaining invaluable insight into their expectations from your brand. You can use Facebook to support your customer service performance, answering queries or complaints about your brand which otherwise might have gone unresolved. You can also add value to your product or service development process by getting feedback from your customers directly before you launch. For the most part you know who your audience is, while you hope many will share your content, as your fan base grows you can talk to them directly and build loyalty and advocacy for your brand.

Twitter on the other is more about interactions. With the limited characters it’s often difficult to hold a conversation with your followers so the number of interactions you have with your followers is the main indicator. How often your posts are retweeted, your brand is mentioned or follow ups are made is how your interactions are measured. It’s also a great tool for listening to how your brand is discussed online as you can find any mentions that go beyond your followers and fans, this gives you the ability to respond to comments where a user hasn’t directly contacted you.

This infographic gives some really good statistics about how Twitter is used and why people share content.

Cross platform marketing

While I don’t advocate sharing the same updates across both platforms, you can utilise Facebook and Twitter for cross platform marketing by directing customers to alternative profiles. Tweeting a link to a Facebook post is more than ok and is a great way to offer your followers more detailed information about your brand as well as a richer experience.

Facebook engagement is at its highest when fans can interact with rich media; videos and images gain a far better response rate than text only updates. Twitter often requires you to send the user away from the platform to view this type of content, so make sure it’s to another of your profiles if you can. And in the same way, Twitter is great for making announcements so suggest your Facebook fans also follow you on Twitter for specific campaign activity.

Understanding how your customers use these different tools and the types of content that suit the technology gives you a great starting point to build a tactical plan to engage with your audiences.

Each platform has its strengths and weaknesses so understanding how to make them work for your objectives will give your communications activity a much higher chance of success.

Written by Felice Ayling

© Target Internet for Target Internet, 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: best practice, facebook, Social Media, twitter

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