Making a Google Analytics account is a necessary step towards tracking data in your business, website, or marketing campaign. Google Analytics is also an incredible tool for obtaining priceless information on your website’s visitors or account holders. Because of its user-friendly design, finding the most useful data for your company becomes simple when using Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is often used to track predetermined successes through the use of data point targets. You can find numbers associated with events, traffic attribution, time on the website or webpage, and pages viewed. Google Analytics will automatically gather information based on your business goals, so you know immediately if your efforts have been fruitful.
With only a few minutes of work now, you can expect unmatched rewards in the future. Google Analytics is totally free and provides easy-to-read information at your fingertips. With our Google Analytics Cheat Sheet, receiving tangible and useful data on your website couldn’t be easier.
The Internet is a wonderful world full of potential, as it allows anyone to create and consult a multitude of content on any topic. The truth is that search engines are our best friends in daily routines and living without them is something that no longer belongs to our imagination. We shall define what is SEO and its benefits.
What is SEO.
Whether to answer a quick question or simply to consult recipes, they are always there. In this way, SEO is something fundamental to learn, as it will bring greater visibility to your business, and consequently more customers.
The acronym SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, that is, optimization of search engines, and refers to the practice of optimizing a web page through various techniques, allowing it to achieve the best results possible! So, it’s the system that chooses which sites appear first on the search engine results pages.
Do you want to know more about these techniques and how to use them in your favor? You’re in the right place!
Link Building Campaigns
When you are creating content related to your business, it is very interesting and appealing to use authority links to bring more relevance and attention to your post. What are these links? These are links that send readers and consumers more information about a certain topic or word, preferably among the best search engine results! The truth is that it is essential to work towards making your content an authoritative link, highly shared by other pages and creators.
As it is not something that happens immediately and involves several strategies, one that you can use related to this information is link building campaigns.
What is this? Just one of the most effective SEO activities, which consists of acquiring backlinks (links pointing to your website from others) – a lot of times you’ll have to buy backlinks. A hyperlink (usually just called a link) is a way for users to navigate between pages on the Internet. Search engines use links to crawl the web.
They will crawl the links between the individual pages on your website, and they will crawl the links between the entire website. Combining this strategy with quality content, visibility is almost certain to make significant progress!
Keywords: Trusted Allies
One of the main ways to position your page at the top is to know how to work intelligently with keywords. When someone searches for the keywords you conveniently used in your article, the page will appear at the top of Google results. To strengthen SEO, you must integrate them in the text in a fluid way, without seeming to be a mere obligation.
Therefore, it is intended that the text is always coherent and cohesive, allowing for pleasant reading. As a content creator, you can also choose to use different variations of words, to increase the spectrum of searches which also increases page views.
Regardless of the quality of your article (which must always be complied with), without a good placement and choice of these words, the positioning will never go up! Focus on putting them always present in the title and introduction, and investigate which words are most appropriate and searched by your target audience! Research work is essential to achieve a successful campaign!
Content Presentation and Connection to The Public
You must make your page appealing to increase the number of views and shares!
One of the best strategies for doing this will have to do with writing the titles. You can choose a set of formulas for the headings for your posts, which according to experts, work best on SEO Google. For example, titles that contain numbers or are presented in the form of a question, show that they are some of the formats that achieve the best results in terms of views.
On the other hand, the better you know your target audience and the community you want to reach, the better you can tailor your content, allowing for more sharing and greater engagement between your audience and your product. Don’t forget to make a difference! If clicking on a page does not arouse interest, the shares and interactions will decrease, damaging your business.
So, never forget – in order to make a good campaign, research all your variables thoroughly. Analyze everything you can use to your advantage and define different strategies and ways to create your content.
The more creative and flashier you are, the more sharing you will get! Above all, ensure that your target audience feels welcomed by your business and your page.
Never Forget…
All successful pages have already appeared in the latest results! Gradually, your content will also reach the podium. Good luck and much success!
Instagram is right now the most popular social media platform in the world. It has come up as the most famous and valuable photo and visual content-sharing site. Instagram provides every user with many opportunities to engage with collaborators, influencers, brands, and other profiles to build their career. You must buy Instagram views.
Keep in mind that Instagram is available across all platforms and gadgets, which means it provides you with the ultimate foundation to build followers, new friends, and even among your family members. Creating a truly unique profile will get you the necessary traction and popularity to showcase your graphic design skills.
Direct messages or DMs make the Instagram experience more enjoyable. This feature is the best when it comes to one-on-one conversations. All you have to do is leave a direct message at the profile you want to connect with, and the person handling the profile will be able to read, reply accordingly.
However, that is not all; with the direct messaging feature, you can now send letters, pictures, videos, links, sites, and pages along with locations to other users on the platform. You can also get involved in group video calling to share information.
Use Instagram stories
The story feature is another helpful feature provided by Instagram that allows you to use pictures, screenshots, messages, and anything you want to share. Keep in mind that each story remains visible on your profile for a limited period of 24 hours.
The story is the best option for graphic designers as you do not have to remove the post if you are worried about plagiarism.
IGTV
IGTV or Instagram Television provides tough competition to all other spaces on the internet regarding video content. If you have a verified account (the one with the blue tick), you can shoot a longer video than average users. Using the IGTV feature is extremely easy, from videotaping to posting.
Instagram questions
Followers may hesitate to text you privately, which might lead to a communication gap. Keep in mind that Instagram knows that DMs might go unnoticed, which is why there is the question feature. Activate the feature and when the questions come pouring in, repost the answer in a story as a response.
How to use Instagram for graphic designers
Instagram is a vast platform, and it allows you to demonstrate your graphic artwork in multiple ways. It is profitable not only for interaction with potential followers but also share thoughts and ideas.
Additional features to use
Now that you understand that sticking out of the crowd is the ultimate goal, you need to employ all the means necessary to get it done. Keep in mind that graphic designing is a very competitive field and chances are there will be several competitors in and around your area.
Remember that it is a great idea to consistently showcase your authentic self and maintain the air of authenticity all through your profile.
Also, keep in mind that it is impossible to achieve gains every day, so keep your expectations within limits. If you are looking for overall interactivity, you can share posts from your daily life to keep your followers interested.
Carousel feature
You can use the carousel feature to post more than one photo in a single post. The carousel allows you to post around ten pictures or videos in a slide feature. Also, it is vital to understand that there is a timing factor associated with Instagram posts.
During the weekdays, the best time to post is from 12-2 pm, and if you are looking to target the late hours, then the golden period is after 9.
You can also target the weekends because it is the time of the week when most Instagram users are at home. Always keep tabs on your profile when it comes to analytics, insights, and general happenings.
When it comes to building the perfect Instagram profile, remember that you need to put in the required hours, dedication, and 100% of your effort. Graphic designing is a fashionable profession but is laced with stiff competition and difficulties. Instagram is a massive platform with millions of users all around the world. It makes sense to put in your best efforts to stand out.
Remember that an invisible profile is okay if you are a private person. But if you are looking to make it big in your profession, then you need to showcase your skills and talents on the platform.
Upload constantly, use Instagram analytics, buy Instagram views and take care of your followers. The more you upload, the more you grow. Grab all the eyeballs today.
When choosing to learn from others, it is always helpful to choose first-movers like Whole Foods social media. They have been successfully executing a social media campaign for over 5 years, and their strategy has played a significant role in their growth.
Whole Foods.
If you’re not familiar with Whole Foods, it’s a leading natural and organic food store with nearly 300 locations in North America and the United Kingdom.
Their social media strategy is built around their company web site and 6 additional social platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, their blog, and recent additions of Foursquare and Pinterest.
Their Twitter accounts are used primarily as a customer service tool … responding to individual customer questions and requests. They have several niches Twitter accounts for such special topics as wine and cheese, as well as accounts for most of the local stores.
Their Facebook and blog platforms allow them to promote more of their product information, health, recipes, and cooking tip content … engaging as well as educating their customers.
They also use both platforms to build their brand image. An example of this is an upcoming special film series “Do Something Reel Film Festival”. This extensive 6-month series, to start April 22, is a celebration of people who understand that small ideas can create big change.
The festival’s objectives are to connect the brand with food and environmental issues and to inspire people to make a difference.
There are six key reasons Whole Foods social media strategy is a successful difference-maker for their marketing campaign:
Whole Foods, while a large, international company, puts a priority on the local component of its strategy. There is a community manager assigned at every store, who manages their customer engagement through multiple platform accounts. They focus on being where the customers are.
They maintain very loose control from corporate headquarters. They assist and collaborate, but the local stores maintain lots of freedom of initiative.
All of the efforts are continually focused on improving the relevancy of customer engagement. They are not afraid to experiment to see what works and what doesn’t.
Each social media platform has its primary objectives – with some flexibility and adaptability maintained.
The strategy sets a goal of linking and loose integration of all the platform efforts.
They believe in letting customer engagement and conversation occur as naturally as possible. They listen, observe, and apply new ideas from what they learn.
There are many ideas that you can take away from Whole Foods Social Media Strategy.
Another example of how businesses are using social media to engage and solicit feedback from customers and extend this engagement to crowdsourcing product and services.
Titled ‘The Crowd Craft Project’, Sam Adams’ consumers will be able to give feedback on the company’s latest offering, commenting on a number of categories used to describe the drink such as color and body.
The most popular categories as selected by Facebook fans will then be used by the company’s brewers to develop the new drink which will be brewed in February.
Crowdsource
The beer will début in March during what Sam Adams describe as “a well-known interactive annual festival in Austin, TX” – which most likely means SXSW. It will then go on to be served in a number of Austin bars and at the company’s brewery, before experiencing a wider release.
Essentially, the crowdsourcing engagement campaign amounts to free market research for the company, bypassing an agency and going straight to the consumer, and then giving them exactly what they say they want.
The drawback? In my opinion, there are two: first, it is difficult to collect inputs on a tasting product from simply on-line feedback, and second, there is no guarantee of the number of responses. With over 100,000 likes and the perennial popularity of beer itself, it’s likely enough that they’ll get a good response.
You must try.
Hats off to Sam Adams for this type of customer engagement and product development experimentation! As one of their good customers, I can only hope a great product is a result.
When choosing to learn from others’ social media marketing campaign strategies, it is always helpful to choose the best of the best. Those that are most innovative and very eager to try lots of new and different ideas. And not afraid of a failure or two. KLM Airlines marketing certainly deserves to be in this camp. Real social media marketing innovators. They frequently come up when marketers are discussing the best in social media marketing.
They have been successfully executing their social media marketing plan for over 4 years, and their strategies have played a key role in their marketing and customer engagement.
If you’re not familiar with KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, known by its initials KLM, is the flag carrier airline of the Netherlands. With headquarters is in Amsterdam, KLM operates scheduled passenger and cargo services to more than 90 destinations worldwide. It is the oldest airline in the world, still operating under its original name (Founded in 1919).
Their social media strategy is built around their company web site and 6 additional social platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, Google+, their blog, and recent additions of Foursquare and Pinterest.
Over the past four years, they have launched a number of social campaigns – some big, some small. They had a few failures along with great successes. Let’s examine some of their more noteworthy campaigns.
KLM Surprise
Remember how great it felt the first time you got a social response from a brand you love or business you deal with? All the goodwill generated by their speedy response? Well, KLM decided to run an experiment with its social community, for people who check-in via foursquare for flights or tweet about waiting to board the next KLM service, and they called it “KLM Surprise”. The aim of this campaign was to bring random surprises and happiness to the boring wait for flights.
Here is a video KLM made on this campaign:
KLM’s social campaign involved a team of people identifying KLM passengers currently waiting for flights (and hanging out on Twitter), before researching each person’s social profile to find out a little more about their personality and destination. Given that information, they matched passengers to a surprise gift that they’d give before each person boarded their flight. The aim was to add a little surprise to create happy customers who have plenty of time on their hands to tweet their network about a great KLM experience at the airport. That’s a very cool social experiment.
Meet and Seat
The meet and seat campaign objective was to offer passengers a choice of seat-mates by accessing each other’s Facebook and LinkedIn profiles. If passengers so chose to participate, their Facebook and LinkedIn profiles were linked to their check-in information which was shared with other passengers also choosing the service.
Of course, passengers don’t have to link up their profiles if they’re not interested but what if they play along and end up with someone who just wants to make a sales pitch? The answer is you could have ended up with a worse result by taking your random seating chance. What would be your choice?
Listening to customers
In another act of social media genius, KLM used Twitter to add a flight to its roster.
It all started when a Dutch filmmaker tweeted his disappointment about the lack of a direct flight from Amsterdam to Miami. Specifically, he was looking for a hangover-reducing direct flight to/from the Ultra Music Festival taking place in Miami on March 21st, 2011. A KLM rep rapidly responded with a wager – if the filmmaker could book an entire flight (351 seats) before December 6th, KLM would add the non-stop flight to its schedule.
Beyond all expectations, the resulting campaign Fly2Miami sold out the entire flight within 5 hours.
“We can rightly call it a first – the first time KLM deployed an aircraft following a request on Twitter,” replied Martijn van der Zee, VP of e-commerce at KLM. “Social media are becoming more and more important to KLM to offer information and service to our customers.
I’ll say it again. Talk about the GREAT ability to listening to customers, yes?
KLM Must See Maps
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines is ramping up its digital engagement with KLM Must See Map, a friend-sourced destination map that combines social and print.
Users create a map for a destination and ask friends for travel tips via Facebook, Twitter, and email. Facebook check-ins show which friends have already visited the destination, their tips on favorite places, and their locations. You can add your own tips, then order a copy of the map in print and receive it for free.
Up and running in 24 countries, the application comes from the Dutch agency Code d’Azur.
In this case, KLM’s goal is to enlarge its global e-mail database. “The KLM Must See Map campaign perfectly fits KLM’s ‘little act of kindness’ social media strategy,” says Viktor van der Wijk, Director Digital Marketing, KLM. Participants get a free personalized city map delivered at home and we receive their e-mail addresses in return. That makes a great win-win and that’s what KLM was looking for.
Tile and inspire
The KLM Tile and Inspire campaign sought to engage customers by soliciting tile image designs from them. The winning designs would be put on one KLM aircraft. The Boeing 777 with over 4,000 Delft blue images from Facebook fans is still flying around the globe! Let’s see … 4000 winners telling 20 of their closest friends about the experience, and then they each tell ten more friends. That is a great way to spread your message, isn’t it? Here is a great little KLM video on this campaign:
Twitter Social Care
Have you checked out KLM’s Twitter account lately? If not, go take a look at their banner ((https://twitter.com/KLM). You will find something really neat: the average expected response time for customer care. And it is updated every 5 minutes!
The company has rocked the customer service area for almost three years because it understands that there is no business without customers. The social media team gets the job done 24/7 on Twitter and Facebook, and fully embraces monitoring and improving their response time to customers.
KLM is considered by many to be the role model for social customer care. As a sign of just how truly devoted they are, they’ve added a live graphic on their Twitter page, updated every 5 minutes, which lets you know how long, on average, you should expect to wait for a reply from their Twitter team.
One of the largest airlines in the world, KLM Airlines, is also considered one of the best in converting “Likes” into paying customers. Part of their marketing success is their willingness to take bold yet calculated risks. They are able to do this because they understand the customer buying journey. The touchpoints along the journey a lead or existing customer takes as they experience the KLM brand and then, how KLM works to improve each touchpoint along the path.
What do you think of KLM’s airline marketing strategy? Winning social engagement with customers? We think so. Have any comments or questions to add below?
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you. But believe in the effectiveness of social media and word of mouth marketing. And put it to good use.
It’s up to you to keep improving your social media marketing efforts.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
More reading on marketing and advertising from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
The secret to the iphone5 TV ads … Effective Apple Marketing Strategy?
Another Effective Marketing Strategy for the Samsung Galaxy S4?
Do You Know the 9 Keys to Creating Effective Advertisements?
Are social media design mistakes holding back your internet marketing? Are you sure? We define the Google social media design as the process of gaining website traffic or attention through social media sites.
The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.
– Edwin Schlosberg
Social media design centers on creating content that attracts attention and encourages readers to share it with their social networks.
Company messages, stories, and helpful information spread from user to user. It resonates because it provides relevant, interesting and/or useful information.
Hence, this form of marketing is driven by word-of-mouth. A key to remember.
Related post: 10 Social Media and Business Marketing Killers
We think of social media as just another marketing channel when we need to instead think of it as the influencer of all channels.
To improve your social media design, you must avoid these all too common mistakes:
Google Social Media Design … selecting topics where you have knowledge
On topics you must know as much or more than your audience … readers expect to learn something from you.
Google Social Media Design … relying on quality
It is all about quality … quality is much more valuable than quantity. It is much better to post 1 quality post per week versus 5 weak posts.
Valuable content is essential.
Google social media design … ignoring focus on engagement
Social media is about building relationships … meaning conversation is required. Don’t add to the noise. Put the focus on being social and making friends.
Let me give you an example from the Nordstrom department store
American fashion retailer Nordstrom began collecting examples of great customer service from its employees.
They called them Nordy stories.
For example, a customer comes into the store, laden with items already purchased from rival store Macy’s. The customer shops in Nordstrom, comes to the till and takes advantage of Nordtrom’s free giftwrap service.
The Nordstrom employee obliges and then, to the surprise and delight of the customer, offers to wrap the Macy’s gifts too for no extra charge.
In another example a customer comes into Nordstrom wishing to return a $17 tyre iron.
They don’t have a receipt. Nordstrom doesn’t sell tyre irons. The employee gives the customer a full refund.
That employee knows full well that the Nordstrom customer has an average lifetime spend of $8,000. What’s $17 compared to that?
By publishing these stories, Nordstrom not only gives concrete examples of how great their service is to customers, but also to new employees as well.
Your employee handbook might say ‘give great customer service’ but to the average employee that basically just says ‘smile, make eye contact and tuck in your shirt’.
Nordy stories give concrete examples to the employees to show them exactly how good customer engagement and service is given.
Social media design tips.
Google social media design … not using visuals
Remember, a picture or image … is worth 1000 words. Visual marketing is growing rapidly and you need to rely on it, particularly short videos.
Here is a great example from GE. GE took off all the text-heavy mission statements from its website and replaced them with videos of examples of the company’s work instead.
These videos achieved 2m views. It’s a simple application of persuasive web design at work. The human brain processes visuals 50 times faster than text.
Google social media design … complex writing
Keep you writing as short and simple as possible. Edit, edit, and edit some more.
Ignore irrelevant subjects.
Google social media design … irrelevant subjects
Ensure you know who your target audience is and write relevant subjects of interest to them.
Here is an example to illustrate.
Significant Objects is an incredibly successful example of telling stories to give once worthless products a value.
This was an experiment devised by Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn, where they bought hundreds of thrift-store items, purchased for an average price of $1.25 each, asked 200 writers including Meg Cabot, Jonathan Lethem and William Gibson to contribute fictional narratives to the items and auctioned them off on ebay.
These stories led to an extraordinary profit of over 2000%
Not paying attention to results
Measure your accomplishments … against your objectives. Learn and apply learning if you want to get consistently better.
Social media design inspiration … employing shortcuts
There are NO shortcuts … it requires time and energy, and lots of persistence and patience. Don’t expect good results in a few short weeks. Don’t give up.
We are finding more and more businesses are defining meaningful social media design implementations.
“Web merchants view social media more as a medium to build up brand awareness and customer loyalty than as a way to drive immediate sales,” says Internet Retailer reporting on its survey of 175 companies that sell online.
Survey participants included 85 web-only merchants, 40 consumer brand manufacturers, 34 retail chains, and 16 catalog companies.
Here’s a rundown of the findings:
96 percent say social media campaigns are important to the future of their Internet business; 53 percent label it very important.
90 percent have a Facebook page, 75 percent are active on Twitter and 54 percent use Pinterest
51 percent post videos on YouTube, 9 percent use Google+ and 15 percent leverage Instagram.
The more success you have with customer engagement via your social media design, either on-line or off, the better your understanding of their needs and priorities.
Having the best customer insights makes it much easier for you to define your next moves and improve your odds of success.
Please share a social media design experience with this community.
Need some help in capturing more customers from your social media marketing or advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Do you have a lesson about making your advertising better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on social media mistakes from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
I love finding brilliant social advertising creative that makes me wish I thought of it. And I especially love it, when it’s for a client that’s trying to make the world a better place.
That’s what social marketing is all about. And because it’s only “sell” is to try to get us to change our behaviors or attitudes about something, it can be powerful when done well.
What is social marketing?
Social marketing seeks to develop and integrate marketing concepts with other approaches to influence behaviors that benefit individuals and communities for the greater social good.
Although “social marketing” is sometimes seen only as using standard commercial marketing practices to achieve non-commercial goals, this is an oversimplification. The primary aim of social marketing is “social good”, while in “commercial marketing” the aim is primarily “financial”.
Increasingly, social marketing is being described as having “two parents”—a “social parent”, including social science and social policy approaches, and a “marketing parent”, including commercial and public sector marketing approaches.
So what, exactly, is social marketing? In Social Marketing Report, it’s defined as, “the application of commercial marketing techniques to social problems.” It means to take the same principles used in selling goods–such as shoes, television shows, or pizza–to convince people to change their behavior
Acknowledge that I am there
You should do this as soon as you possibly can. Don’t make your customers frustrated by making them wait. If you are busy with another customer, inform them you will be with them shortly.
Be friendly
Smile and introduce yourself. Wear a nametag and personalize it to help create meaningful conversation.
Don’t sell
Use your knowledge and experience to help customers decide. Help them in their search. Pushy sales pitches turn customers off. But personally relevant and interactive conversations switch them on.
Listen well
Make sure you understand their question(s). Then answer their questions as simply as possible.
Help them save time
Time is the customers most valued passion. Help them save it. Avoid seeking other help, or ‘handing them off’.
Be easy to work with
Exceed expectations whenever you can. If your business doesn’t have what the customer wants, offer alternatives, including other businesses.
Be honest
If you don’t know, say so. But use that question to research so as to be prepared next time. You don’t want to be saying you don’t know often.
Alwaysdo what you say
Do what you say and keep your promises. It is not an option to ignore follow up.
Stages of social campaigns
What is involved in the stages of social marketing? In a nutshell, when conducting a social marketing campaign, consider the following:
Identify your customers
Whose behavior do you want to change? It may be that you want to change the behavior of several different groups; in that case, you may want to influence them in different ways to bring them closer to the desired behavior. Such groups are often separated, or segmented, by age, gender, level of education, or race.
Identify what behavior you want to change
For example, increase prenatal counseling among expectant mothers.
Identify the barriers
This is donethrough interviews, surveys, focus groups or other methods; you’ll want to find out what makes it difficult or unattractive for people to make these changes. Do pregnant women feel uncomfortable at the area clinic, or are they made to feel stupid when they talk to the doctor? Is the clinic too far away? Can they not take the time away from their jobs?
Pretest your ideas
You then need to apply what you have learned according to your results.
You have to show customers what you have changed and why. This will help customers see the benefits in a way that will draw them to take advantage of your efforts. Let people know what you’re doing to help them–the best program in the world won’t be used if people don’t know about it.
And of course, people need to understand the benefits of the behavior change. A pregnant woman will probably want to do what’s best for her child, but may not know that she needs extra iron during her pregnancy. It’s up to your organization to tell her.
And, although it’s not technically a part of social marketing, you’ll probably want to…
Assess your results and see if you have created the change you wanted.
How are these beliefs shaped and decisions made? Well, generally speaking, the following activities need to occur:
Create awareness and interest
Change attitudes and conditions
Motivate people to want to change their behavior
Empower people to act
Prevent backsliding
Conducting a social campaign
So how do we propose conducting a social marketing campaign? Here are ten tips to a campaign I recommend to our clients:
It starts with great employees
Employees are your service. Hire for their friendly, caring attitude and train for skills and knowledge. Empower them to be customer advocates.
Share all great service stories
Share them as soon as possible with all of your team and celebrate even the smallest of successes.
Show common courtesy
Show courtesies all the time. This leads to customer respect, which leads to conversation and the building of relationships and mutual trust.
Analyze when things go right.
When a company receives a complaint people usually have discussions to find out what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again. Next time you receive a letter of praise, meet to find out what went right and how it can be repeated.This action is equal as needed for learning.
All the time
Amazing companies don’t always deliver ‘Wow!’ type experiences, they are just a better than average all of the time. All of the time is the secret sauce.
Improving the social in social marketing
In truth, social marketing [G2] can achieve it, right? Not that new, but good refreshers. There are recommendations on how to beef up social marketing everywhere you turn.
How many times have you seen companies requesting people to friend them on Facebook? Like farming, followers was the name of the game. Sad but true. The truth is that [G3] social marketing tactics are really about cultivating relationships with potential customers. Fan ‘skins’, by themselves, are of very little value.
What is the importance of social marketing to your business? Dialog with customers for sure. What about reading your content and remembering? Appreciating your help? Building relationships? We believe it is all of these things, but the bottom line end state is relationship building.
In the ever changing landscape of social networking, you might be wondering if you are getting the most out of your business’s social marketing tactics. Here we define social community engagement as the process of gaining customer website traffic, attention, interaction, and ultimately relationships through any and all internet sites.
In part it is true, but things get complicated by all the misinformation circulating about social marketing. From leveraging tactics to tracking issues, you are bombarded with conflicting messages, including whether social marketing is worth using at all.
Here are ten ideas we use most often to help improve social marketing with our clients. We believe they are the ones most critical to its success:
Listen and engage
Listening comes first and foremost to understand what customers are saying about their needs and perhaps about you. Once you have heard, then engage in as near real time as you can.
Your personality and voice
This one is pretty simple, but takes lots of practice in the beginning. Be YOU and be consistent. Remember customers deal with people and not businesses.
Don’t be a robot
As we said previously, social marketing takes a lot of time and energy. There many good tools in existence that will help in the workload. But keep this in mind, customers take note when it seems they are dealing with a robot. Don’t be that robot.
Be part of the community
Remember you are dealing with consumers that are part of a community not part of the audience. Pay special attention to adding value in that vein.
Commit to a plan
If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there, as the saying goes. Know your objectives and establish the best plan to get them accomplished. Remember this plan needs constant attention, iteration, and adaptation.
Emphasize friendly
One of your key business objectives is to build relationships with customers. That end game results in customer advocates and trust. This process takes constant attention to being friendly on a very consistent basis.
Measure results
This entire social marketing process is a constant iteration. Establish a few key measurements and pay attention to how well you are doing.
Analyze, correct, iterate and learn
Analyze your measurement results, and continuously make corrections, iterate, learn, and most importantly, adapt.
There are a lot of misconceptions about social marketing. Just because you read something in a blog post or hear something from a credible source doesn’t mean it is true or true for you and your business.
Always do your research, and continually try to improve. Social marketing is here to stay, and it can drive a lot of business for you, assuming you are leveraging it correctly.
Paying attention to your listening.
Focused listening is the lynchpin
These days more and more companies are turning their attention to focused listening for social commerce business. Meaning ? The simple meaning is they believe that they need more attention to building customer relationships.
From customer relationships comes trust, the most important factor in a customer selecting a company with whom to do business. The secret to building customer relationships is customer engagement, and there are many ways you’ll need to engage customers.
What is focused listening?
Focused listening is the art of discovering valuable customer insights. Remember that the real value is what we hear, not what we say. A very important concept for marketers that is often difficult to learn.
Strategic listening action
Starts with showing appreciation … for customers.
Who and how
With whom and howdo you engage? Carefully select your targets for the community you want to build.
What are the barriers
Barriers that have a way ofpreventing optimal consumer engagement need to be defined.
Interactive customer engagement
Customer engagement is a high priority for any brand, and they continually look for new ways to collect inputs from customers. A good current example is the Ben and Jerry’s ‘Scoop Truck’, which travels around the country giving out free samples of new products and soliciting customer inputs.
Look beyond
Look beyond how customers have interacted with you in the past. Constantly test new ideas.
Use customer collaboration
Solicit customer collaborationto obtain customer ideas. Fans inspire lots of new ideas if you just ask them their opinions.
Use the insights
These insights will continually update your ideal customer persona.
The bottom line
In this article, we’ve explored a multitude of creative ways to use social marketing to increase engagement and build customer relationships. The key is to know your audience and what they’re most likely to respond to. Give them more of that.
It’s OK to promote your company and products, but do it in a way that capitalizes on your audience’s deepest interests and connects with them on a personal level. Avoid selling.
Here’s the thing, social isn’t just a new way of marketing, it’s a new way of running a business. Social companies certainly have figured this out and are using social marketing to grow their business rapidly.
No, you are right; Steve Jobs did not write content for social media web sites. But he was absolutely brilliant with his media presentations on Apple’s new product announcements. He was very engaging with social media.
… communicate with simple words and messages for a broad audience
Rely on visual messages
Think simple.
… use images to convey your messages and re-enforce with words
Create Twitter-friendly key points and messages
… more on the simple theme with rich keywords
Focus on dreams, not products
… it is the end state customer utility that counts most
The bottom line
Social media gives us a great opportunity to listen in on what people are saying. We’ve long known that word of mouth is incredibly powerful, now we can actually track it. Social listening tools are still somewhat primitive, but they are improving quickly and are already being deployed to help monitor conventional marketing efforts in real-time.
Lots that we can apply from these lessons, isn’t there?
Can I make a confession? When I started writing, I was no Shakespeare. I wasn’t even a Hemingway. In fact, I was downright awful. I could have used this blogger writing tips.
Like many of you, I didn’t get any kind of degree in writing. I didn’t shine in high school English. I never entertained dreams of being a best-selling author.
As Vladimir Nabokov put it, “writing is rewriting.” The greatness comes not from the initial spark of inspiration, but from the long hours spent honing it down to reveal its core. But before you do that, you need to dare to be crap and produce the first draft.
In other words, writing is work. As in most things, talent is overrated. You produce good work not from having a knack for a clever turn of phrase, but by putting in the effort to express your ideas clearly.
And my first posts online proved it.
But over time, I started realizing how important writing is in business. (Spoiler alert: it’s super important.)
So I studied, practiced a lot, and got better. I’m still no Shakespeare, but I’ve learned a lot about writing. Writing isn’t a talent—it’s a skill. A skill you can develop, refine, and improve.
Becoming a great copywriter isn’t easy, but if you consistently work on your writing, your writing will get better and better.
Here are 19 writing tweaks that will propel you to copywriting mastery.
Focus on your headings
Legendary marketer David Ogilvy is famous for saying,
On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.
Take a lesson from the master, and create the best titles and headings possible. Whether you’re writing the main headline on a landing page or an email subject line, put some serious thought into it.
Write shorter sentences
Short sentences are powerful.
While you shouldn’t try to make every sentence short, you should use them to break up the text. No one wants to read a sentence that’s two paragraphs long.
Short sentences catch your readers’ attention. They’re easier to digest, and they help readers move through the content easily.
Employ single sentence paragraphs
A single sentence paragraph can do a lot.
When you use a single sentence paragraph on its own, you draw attention to it. Your readers will know that’s an important point to remember.
If you want your readers to listen up and remember something, make that sentence into its own one-line paragraph.
Bold or italicize important statements
If there’s something you want your readers to remember, make it bold.
A personal story can turn a good article into a great one. If you’re writing about SEO and you tell readers how it helped you, they’ll be more likely to try it themselves.
Personal stories help build personal connections with your readers. They’ll see that you’re just like them, and they’ll be willing to listen to you.
Use unique CTAs
To be blunt, a “Buy now” button is boring. So is “Join.” And don’t even get me started on “Click here.”
Use your call to action to give your readers something different. A great CTA lets readers know what they’re getting, and it gives them a great reason to click on it.
Treehouse has a great CTA on its homepage:
Use other people’s stories
I love using real-life examples in my writing. When I include stories about how influencers have benefited from something, my readers understand how powerful it is.
Using others’ success stories lets your readers know you’re not full of hot air. If you know that something works, use stories to prove it.
When it comes to writing articles or blog posts, you absolutely have to start with a strong statement. Tell your readers why they should keep reading.
I’m a big fan of using the first few sentences to relate to readers by addressing their concerns.
But you can also say directly what the post is about. Brian Dean from Backlinko does this a lot:
Doesn’t that make you want to read more? You immediately know why the article is going to be superb.
No matter what you do with the beginning of a post, make sure you connect with the reader right off the bat.
Speak your readers’ language
Take a look at past comments from readers. How do they write? Do you see any common phrases popping up?
Use this information to improve your writing. By literally using your readers’ language, you’ll make it easy for them to relate.
Stay actionable
There’s nothing wrong with theory—in theory, that is.
When you write an article without giving one actionable tip within it, it’s hard to take that article seriously. Your readers have no way of knowing whether you’re sharing good information.
In each post, aim to include several actionable tips your readers can use today. Sprinkle them throughout the text so readers get new advice with each section.
Employ a thesaurus
Ever notice you tend to use the same words over and over again? Or have you found yourself looking for the perfect word to use? You need a thesaurus.
Having a thesaurus is ideal for finding new words to introduce into your writing.
Now please, don’t use a thesaurus to try to find big, sophisticated-sounding words.
Simpler words are almost always better. But if you can’t think of a simpler word, maybe the thesaurus will help.
Bookend important points
You were probably taught that you should start a paragraph by introducing the main idea (a.k.a. a topic sentence). I’ll go a step further and say you should talk about your main idea in the first and last sentences of a paragraph.
People will remember information better if they see it more than once. By talking about your main point both at the beginning and at the end of a paragraph or section, you’re making that idea stick in your readers’ heads.
Be brutal when editing
Rough drafts aren’t called rough drafts for nothing. You may have a great idea, but without editing, you won’t make your writing the best it can be.
There’s a saying in writing: “Kill your darlings.”
The point is not to become too emotionally attached to your writing. Don’t keep something because you think it sounds nice.
Be honest and unbiased. Cut out filler words, remove lazy phrases, and shorten any novel-length sentences.
Use you vs we or us
Guess what? Your copy shouldn’t be about you. It should be about the customer.
Don’t fall victim to the “all about us” copywriting trap. Show your readers how they’ll benefit.
Use transitions
Transitions wi;ll help.
No one likes to be hit over the head with something.
If you’re going from one topic to another, use a transitional phrase or sentence to make the shift smooth.
One great method is to connect the current section with the next one. Ramit Sethi uses this approach often:
Leverage lists
Lists are fantastic. They break down information into smaller chunks, and the format makes it a breeze to read.
If you’re packing a ton of information within a paragraph, consider making it into a list. Numbered lists work well for processes, and bullet points are ideal for everything else.
Eliminate buzzwords
It’s tempting to use jargon because it’s so widespread. But the truth? Most of the time, it comes across as vague filler text.
You might want to write a post called:
“Creating a Streamlined Process for Creating a Dynamic Funnel,”
but it’s more direct to title it:
“How to Get More Customers Fast.”
There’s a time and place for buzzwords, but don’t go over the top with them.
Keep it focused
Writing about sales? You could go into all sorts of topics, from marketing to public speaking.
But it’s important to narrow that scope so you don’t lose readers by going on tangents.
Keep everything on topic. Don’t talk about another subject unless it’s relevant. If you do talk about something else, keep it short.
End with a bang
My absolute favorite way to end an article is to include a question that engages my readers.
I like interacting with my readers and getting them involved. Asking an open-ended question is a great method of doing that.
End your articles with questions that start a conversation, and respond to comments. You’ll create a strong community, and your readers will appreciate it.
The bottom line
You don’t need years of study to become a master copywriter.
But you do need to practice.
And you need to practice a lot.
Your writing will only get better if you take the time to refine it. Every day, make it your goal to write something, even if it’s not much. You might be surprised to see how quickly your wordsmithing improves.
