Social Media Outreach

Pick two or three social media platforms and concentrate on mastering those. If resources are limited, concentrate on Facebook and Twitter first. Determine which serves your brand or service better.

First things first. Establish Trust. People naturally look to other people as a guide for their own behavior. Don’t get spammy with your posts or tweets. Post and Tweet compelling and quality content. Encourage free exchange. Be open to change and continuous learning. Social proof (trust) typically rises exponentially, and it will become a self-perpetuating force.

Remember to establish reasonable goals once you start gaining momentum. Listen to your customers or fans. Always gain feedback and adjust accordingly. Figure out what to measure when putting together goals. Example: do you measure “followers” or “likes” or “retention”or “sales” ?

Your goals (and plan) should be distinct, in that you have a specific, defensible reason for participating in each platform. Take a look at your outreach strategy and review the reasons your business is implementing a social media marketing outreach plan. What do you want out of your social activities? Are you trying to drive people to your website, your blog, via Twitter or your Facebook page? Focusing on your ultimate goal will guide your next steps: what you do (what other channels you will use going forward), when you do it (what schedule you will aim for? Night or Daytime according to your demographic), and what content you’ll share. Be vigilant and always participate every day (even if you have to schedule and automate it). Social Media marketing is a slow process that will pay off dividends when done correctly!

A/B Website Testing Basics

You have two versions of a website landing page (A & B) and you want to test each one to determine which is the best and produce the most conversions. BTW, A/B testing can also tests different elements like logos, colors, call to actions (buy now!), placement, headline, layout of website, images, amount of text on pages, etc. Think of A/B testing (or split testing) as a methodology that enables marketers to compare a variety of test samples against a baseline control sample (the existing element) to identify and measure which element is most effective in achieving desired outcomes. A/B testing begins with a core baseline (A) and a variation (B) or alternative version. A & B are tested simultaneously to measure which version is more successful.

After you decided what to test, grab a good tool for the project. Google Analytics has a new A/B testing feature called Content Experiments. You can access Content Experiments by logging into your Google Analytics account, opening the profile you want to run an experiment in and click the Standard Reporting tab. In the left menu click Content, then Experiments, then start experimenting.

Tips: When doing A/B testing, never ever wait to test the variation until after you’ve tested the control. Always test both versions simultaneously. Don’t let your gut feeling overrule test results. The winners in A/B tests are often surprising or unintuitive. Know how long to run a test before giving up. Giving up too early can cost you because you may have gotten meaningful results had you waited a little longer. Make your A/B test consistent across the whole website. If you are testing a sign-up button that appears in multiple locations, then a visitor should see the same variation everywhere. Do many A/B tests! An A/B test can have only three outcomes: no result, a negative result or a positive result. The key to optimizing conversion rates is to do a ton of A/B tests, so that all positive results add up to a huge boost in traffic and conversions.

Website Optimization - Heat Maps

The use of “heat maps” is a great tool when optimizing your website for maximum success. Heat maps are just one of the many tools (Google Analytics, A/B testing, conversion funnel) in your arsenal to help identify and fix certain sections of your company’s website. Heat maps are a way to visualize different types of data, including where people’s eyeballs first land on your site and how likely your visitors are to click on different areas of your pages.This type of information can be especially useful in showing you where to place your most important links, as well as which elements on your site should be linked.

Another good tool is the “mouse” movement heat map. This type of information can be especially useful in showing you where to place your most important links, as well as which elements on your site should be linked. This type of heat map can be extremely useful to internet marketers, as they help to determine the ideal placement for any promotional information. Most heat map tools are not free. The free tools are really low quality. Personally, I like Crazy Egg. Its a reasonable, paid tool with quality heat mapping options. The use of heat maps is crucial in making content creation and website design decisions!

Pinterest Your Company

Pinterest has seen a huge growth of users as well as helping certain brands increase their referral traffic from the visually rich content which gets published on the site. WIth the launch of Pinterest for Business Pages, brands must take advantage of this new feature. Pinterest for Business Pages is essentially its version of Facebook Pages for business.

The good news is that Pinterest is offering the option to either create a new business profile, or convert your existing personal one. This is done through the Pinterest Business Center, where you simply create a new account or click to convert your existing one.

Pinning strategies include “Repinning”, which is a great way of building up new followers, but to be truly influential, you need to pin your own content regularly and before everyone else. Pinterest is a very visual site, but there’s nothing to say that you can’t pin videos on your boards. It’s good to mix up your content a little and provide these links, just to see how exactly your followers react to it.

While your descriptions can go up to 500 characters, the chances of people reading the entire description (unless it’s a competition) is slim. This is especially true when you consider that only a small portion of that description will be visible when you’re browsing boards. It’s best to keep descriptions short and sweet so that both the image and text is easily visible.

Why is Pinterest getting so popular amongst brands and SEO?

According to new data released by Shareaholic, Pinterest has beaten out Yahoo organic traffic, making Pinterest the fourth largest traffic driver worldwide. In addition, the company found that Google, Yahoo, and Bing organic traffic decreased by 15.63% on average since January, which the firm speculates may indicate more people are discovering content through social sites like Pinterest.
 
Finally, and very important! Make sure to verify your website with Pinterest which enables you to become visible in search results (SERPs). To do this, simply add a Meta tag from Pinterest to the header of your website. Simple.

Why is Content Marketing So Crucial?

Besides driving traffic to your corporate website, good content marketing reinforces your brand - your brand becomes a more famous name online as people notice your content and start remarking on it, retweeting it, helping to build you into a household name. These effects “gel” over time and you will see the traffic benefit and the conversions.

Content creation success is measured many ways including:

- Spike in visitor traffic and page views on the specific content.
- The number of Shares, Likes, Pins, Tweets, Forwards.
- Major media mentions and stories covering your business.
- Website ranking (SERPs) increase.
- Conversions or Sales.

Mobile Apps

Does your company or business have a mobile strategy? If not, look into building a mobile app! Both for Apple and Android. There are numerous tools out there to build these apps as well as fantastic freelancers that can help. Depending on your product or service, a mobile app is value-add.

Content Creation Strategy

Keep it simple but make sure its thorough!

  1. Understand your company and how it works. Its customers, products, sales, brand considerations.
  2. Collect data. Competitive analysis, Keywords, Customer research.
  3. Audit your website. Google Analytics. Traffic data. Conversion and bounce rates, etc. SEO metrics.
  4. Prospect company’s key influencers and where your customers live online.
  5. Create useful, exceptional content according to steps 1-4. Ensure that editorial standards are being followed. Pictures should be hi-res. 
  6. Measure content performance. Google Analytics. A/B testing, etc.

Are SmartPhone Specs Peaking?

With the new Samsung S4 coming out tomorrow? Is it just a notch upgrade spec-wise? Sure, there will be the quad-core CPU, upgraded camera, more RAM, etc., but its at the point where do you need all that power? I can see upgrading for the camera but that’s about it. I’m fine with my S3 specs and it never runs out of horsepower. Apple has the same situation with the iPhone 5. The specs are insane at this point. Do you really need all that power now? Do people run 4 apps at a time to take advantage of the multi-cores? Are phone apps even multi-threaded? Do consumers care at this point? Right now and into the future, its not about horsepower anymore. Its about the SOFTWARE.