Ask a marketing team what they struggle with the most and chances are good they'll say content creation. There's also good reason why creating content remains a major hurdle for marketing teams: it is always easier said than done. At […]
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5 Instant Content Creation Tips
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Written by Liz Farquhar, Mindmarker
The post 5 Instant Content Creation Tips appeared first on Search Engine People Blog.
The Clear-Cut Guide to Social Media Engagement written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing
photo credit: Pixabay
As of 2016, there's estimated to be 2.3 billion active social media users - nearly 1/3 of the global population.
While this eye-popping statistic presents obvious marketing potential, determining how your business can capitalize on it is decidedly less clear.
What every small business owner and marketing professional should know is that engagement is the engine that runs every successful social media campaign.
Do you want to improve your engagement and glean more benefits from social? This guide will point you in the right direction.
Before we consider what quality social engagement looks like, there are a few essential rules to keep in mind …
Making these principles standard practice ensures you have a strong foundation in place for your social media marketing efforts going forward.
Why is it so difficult to captivate social audiences? The likely answer is you can't fake it - static, uninspired, or one-dimensional postings are just adding noise.
Savvy social media marketers understand they need to provide their target audience with value - and consistently deliver it - in order to separate themselves from the crowd.
The rule of thumb: if people find it useful they will share it.
For example, a web developer might create a comprehensive list of sites that offer free tools if they believe it will resonate strongly with their audience.
photo credit: Zion & Zion
Browse forums like Reddit and social channels and see what real people are asking - provide an instructional guide that provides a detailed response and demonstrates your company's expertise.
RELATED: High-value social media content
Targeting Influencers
The people and companies that matter most in your industry are known as influencers and making them advocates of your brand can attract social users in droves.
The most powerful social proof in social media, influencers function like high-level testimonials. People are much more likely to engage with your brand when a third-party they implicitly trust is pointing them your direction.
RELATED: Finding and targeting influencers in your field
Although engagement requires different levels of finesse across each social channel, one thing remains fundamentally the same: emphasizing quality over quantity. It's not the volume of your posts that counts, it's whether you're connecting with your target audience.
Here's a clear-cut profile on each of the major social channels and how to drive more engagement across the board …
Classification: Top social sharing site specializing in all forms of content
Audience: Broad, all ages
Peak Engagement: 12-3 PM Weekday
Key Considerations: Facebook remains the top social media site in the world, a melting pot of opportunity with over 2 billion pieces of content shared daily. Given its active user base, it remains the focal point for social media engagement for many businesses.
Facebook users primarily visit the site to consume content, not to receive blatant advertisements. The businesses that succeed in this channel find ways to integrate dynamic, easily shareable content into their target audience's newsfeeds that resonate with their interests and core values.
Tasty, a division of BuzzFeed, has recently mastered this technique - utilizing quick-cut recipe videos that dynamically play in a user's newsfeed when shared. This type of content resonates because it disrupts a typical newsfeed, provides clear value, and encourages engagement.
RELATED: Tips on increasing Facebook engagement
Classification: Microblogging site limited to 140 characters; real-time engagements
Audience: Broad, younger generations & older working professionals
Peak Engagement: 12-2 PM Weekday
Key Considerations: Twitter enjoys the second largest base, with over 500 million active users. The size of its user base presents some awesome engagement opportunities, making a channel impossible to ignore.
While Twitter has plans to eventually extend their character count, business owners are currently restricted to shorter blurbs of text. Here, the balance in terms of quality over quantity is essential to success.
Businesses that receive engagement here involve themselves in the real-time conversation - they observe trending topics or start a dialogue. You don't need to be an influencer with thousands of followers to turn heads - involve yourself in their conversations as you build your own base.
Classification: Business-oriented social network
Audience: Niche, working professionals ranging from Millennials to older generations
Peak Engagement: 7-9 AM Weekday
Key Considerations: LinkedIn gives an opportunity for your audience to make a direct connection to your business. Highlighting your services is fair game as the majority of users who connect with you are considering your business in a professional capacity. Don't forget to provide value - businesses that succeed on this platform provide great resources.
RELATED: Tips on increasing LinkedIn engagement
Classification: Dormant but growing network consisting of users and brands
Audience: Google users, predominantly older in age
Peak Engagement: 8-10 AM Weekday
Key Considerations: Due to its lower user base - hovering near 400 million - Google+ isn't the first place you'd look for social engagement, but it does pack some benefits for businesses willing to go the extra mile. Brands that succeed in this channel understand the nuanced differences of Google+ audiences and supply a constant stream of value tailored to their needs.
RELATED: Tips on increasing Google+ engagement
Instead of looking it at engagement as a numbers game, prioritize the quality of the connections you're making with your target audience - the shares, retweets and everything else will soon follow.
Social listening isn't just a strategy for enterprise-level organizations. There isn't a business, organization, or individual who couldn't benefit from opening their ears up to feedback and recognizing its value. If you work with small businesses or are part of […]
Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog
Listen Up! Establishing A Small Business Listening Strategy
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Written by Mandy Boyle, Mandy Boyle
The post Listen Up! Establishing A Small Business Listening Strategy appeared first on Search Engine People Blog.
Building your email list is a common goal of virtually all websites, whether an ecommerce store, an industry blog or a brick and mortar store. Email consistently provides one of the highest ROI channels for online marketing, contributing an average […]
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How To Use Facebook & Twitter PPC To Build Your Email List
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Written by Robert Brady, Righteous Marketing
The post How To Use Facebook & Twitter PPC To Build Your Email List appeared first on Search Engine People Blog.
A sales funnel is the process through which a lead is acquired, nurtured, and converted into a customer. In the shape of an inverted pyramid, leads are filtered as they progress through the funnel, en route to being turned into […]
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How To Create Content That Matches Your Sales Funnel
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Written by Michael Georgiou, Imaginovation
The post How To Create Content That Matches Your Sales Funnel appeared first on Search Engine People Blog.
The one thing you can say for sure about Google is that that they have an insatiable appetite for change. Google is testing an increase of the width of its primary search listings from 500 to 600 pixels, in order […]
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Google's SERP Width Test Can Change Organic Space Forever
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The post Google's SERP Width Test Can Change Organic Space Forever appeared first on Search Engine People Blog.
What's a marketer to do? We heard that influencer marketing was the next big thing. We heard about companies getting amazing results with it. But it seems you can't go anywhere online recently without seeing headlines like this:
And this:
Note the social shares on those two articles: 242,000 for the first one and nearly 50,000 for the second one. If influencer marketing is burning down, that's a lot of people standing by with marshmallows to roast.
But don't panic. These two articles, and many more like them, refer to a specific kind of influencer marketing. Generally speaking: the bad kind. Specifically, the practice of writing massive checks to teenagers with a lot of followers on Instagram or Vine in exchange for product promotion. That particular economy, which converted cash to “influence” or “awareness,” was pretty much doomed from the start. You're in trouble any time you convert real money to something fundamentally unmeasurable.
But it's not fair to say that influencer marketing is dead, or in trouble, or collapsing because bad influencer marketing isn't working out. That's like declaring “Movies are dead!” because Gods of Egypt flopped at the box office. Influencer marketing works when it's done well. At TopRank Marketing, we have achieved amazing results for our clients with the practice.
The only thing better than learning from your mistakes is learning from other people's mistakes. So let's take a moment to mourn the passing of bad influencer marketing-and then let's perform an autopsy to see how we can avoid their fate. Here are four ways to make sure your influencer marketing stays alive and well:
#1 – Build Relationships
In a way, the Instagram and Snapchat “influencers” are just billboards. You stand here and hold this beverage/face wash/protein powder, we give you $500. You deliver the commodity of X number of eyeballs for the money. If a rival beverage/face wash/protein powder company comes along and offers you $550, you move on.
Good influencer marketing is more than advertising using someone's social media presence as the billboard. It's about cultivating an ongoing relationship that continually generates value for everyone involved. Influencer relationships should be built with care, personal attention, and respect. Yes, sometimes you may pay an influencer for their involvement, but that transaction takes place in the larger context of the relationship.
#2 – Produce Something of Value
Bad influencer marketing can be, at its worst, just a celebrity endorsement with a different kind of celebrity. The celebrity gets paid, and the audience gets… what? The vicarious thrill of seeing that they drink the same brand of face wash as that guy on Vine?
Good influencer marketing goes beyond endorsement to create something of value for the audience as well as the influencer and the brand. That's why it works. For example, our Content Marketing World eBook series from last year rounded up advice from dozens of highly-skilled marketers. The eBooks promoted the event, and they highlighted our influencers, but they were also useful and entertaining for the audience. It's an unbeatable combination.
#3 – Recruit More than Brandividuals
One big problem with bad influencer marketing is it focuses entirely on “brandividuals.” According to our CEO Lee Odden, a brandividual is someone who is in the business of being popular. They have a huge social media presence, sure. But they may not be able to call that audience to action. A true influencer, by contrast, may be less popular by the numbers, but is credible, authoritative, and able to affect change.
You definitely can use brandividuals to help attract a crowd, and to lure in the true influencers-but a campaign that's all brandividuals may generate more buzz than results.
#4 – Make It Measurable
Step 1: Have influencer post about our combination face wash/protein powder on Snapchat. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit. It's not the most sustainable business model, right? But for a lot of bad influencer marketing, that's a pretty accurate assessment. These campaigns trade entirely on “awareness” or, god forbid, “brand lift.” Without any way to track ROI from the influencer activity, it was only a matter of time before the C-suite decided to spend their budget elsewhere.
Don't let anyone tell you that you can't measure the ROI of influencer marketing. It's not only possible; it's crucial. Start by having a specific goal for your campaign-an action that you want your audience to take as a direct result of experiencing the content. Then make sure you can track that action and attribute it to the influencer. Give them trackable URLs to share. Give them their own landing page to send traffic to. Either way you go about it, you should be able to demonstrate exactly what your influencer brought to the campaign.
If you're a teenager with a huge Snapchat following, the death of bad influencer marketing is bad news. If you're a marketer looking to partner with influencers to create cool stuff and expand your reach, there's no need to mourn. Take these four lessons to heart, go forth, and be awesome.
Need help with your influencer marketing, we can help!
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Influencer Marketing Is (not) Dead: How to Breathe New Life into Your Program | http://www.toprankblog.com
The post Influencer Marketing Is (not) Dead: How to Breathe New Life into Your Program appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.
