This short video walks you through how social media and original content can boost search engine optimization — and why that benefits your business. Enjoy!
Lynn Christiansen Esquer is a principal at SocialProse Media. Email her at lesquer@socialprosemedia.com
When marketing, it’s better to be a magnet than a scattershot shotgun.
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Yes, shotgun analogies enjoy the benefit of getting to use language like “target” and “aim.” It sounds good — doesn’t it? — to say that your marketing targets certain segments or shoots for specific outcomes.
But stay with me here. Once upon a time it may have been good to be a shotgun marketer, stalking your unsuspecting customers while they went about their business of reading magazines or watching TV. You targeted them with cold calls and email blasts. You knew when the herds congregated at trade shows, and laid your traps. Your shotgun may have been loaded with scattershot, but you were bound to hit somebody.
Today? You’ll get better results being a magnet.
When you’re a magnet marketer, you’re attracting people who are already interested in what you’re selling by providing them with the information they need to make a decision.
Magnet marketing — what’s actually called inbound marketing — offers potential customers webinars, SEO, video, blogs, whitepapers and ebooks. Being a magnet means your website is a hub of information that customers can browse as a resource. And you bring all those customers in through your blog, SEO, social media marketing and other online marketing techniques.
As a consumer, isn’t it better to find expertise and then purchase it, rather than be interrupted by someone giving you a hard sell? As a company, isn’t it better to receive self-selected leads rather than hunt down the proverbial needle in a haystack?
Isn’t it better to be a magnet?
Lynn Christiansen Esquer is a principal at SocialProse Media. Email her at lesquer@socialprosemedia.com
Are you listening?
Are you?
Let me rephrase that. Are you listening… socially?
Are you “listening” to what people are saying about your company, your products or services, your market space, and your competitors? Are you using that intel to understand your customers, who they are and what they want? Are you leveraging it to help you make genuine connections with them, and to give them what they need?
There’s really no longer a huge need to convince businesses of the value of having a blog. As you probably already know, blogs help you communicate with customers and advocates, build a community, and give you an opportunity to show, not tell, your expertise.
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Blogs extend reach and if you post regularly, your chances of customers finding you through SEO (search engine optimization) will greatly increase.
But like anything else in business development, blog posts take time to write. There’s no lack of stories to tell, so how do you get them all told? Continue reading
Although it’s a common misconception, PR does not stand for “press release.”
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I say that a bit tongue-in-cheek, but as PR professionals know, there is a significant number of people who question the value of hiring an agency (or in-house PR practitioner) because “I can write a press release myself.” I can almost hear the PR people out there nodding their heads in agreement.
PR is, in fact, public relations — a component of which is media relations, but it’s not by any means synonymous. If an activity has anything to do with actively relating with your audience, the public, investors, customers or anyone else: It’s PR. Customer service? Part of it is definitely PR. Social media? PR. Working with analysts? PR. I could go on.
But for the purpose of this article, let’s actually go there and talk about press releases… because even those who know a bit more about marketing and PR — enough to be dangerous, one could say — often believe that all news should be heralded by press release. And these same people will be disappointed when each release is not met with widespread coverage and a splashy above-the-fold article in the WSJ. Continue reading
The first thing we do when we pitch or land a new client is an online audit of their organization.
We examine their social media presence of course. But what always surprises people is when we start talking about how their website fares in the search engines, and how they are not factoring mobile into their marketing.
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You see — social media, content, search and mobile — they all work together. They’re not independent silos to pick and choose from when putting together an online strategy. Here at SocialProse, we talk often about how effective social media marketing essentially serves as the delivery system for relevant, high-quality content. But it’s just as true that websites require both content and social media in order to perform with the search engines; and all three types of marketing need to have a strong mobile strategy in our increasingly mobile-connected world. Continue reading
Any week that inspires the trending Twitter hashtag of #WorstWeekEver has got to be a doozy. From marathon bombings and manhunts, to letters poisoned with ricin, to earthquakes in Iran and Japan, to a massive explosion in Texas, this week’s news has been dominated by fear, tragedy and horror.
But I’ve been impressed for the most part about how social media has been used for good during this time. In a very real way, it has brought our American community, and indeed the world, together. It has been the town square where we have congregated to keep informed, exchange information, and express our anger and despair.
And it has been shown to be a valuable tool during times of crisis. Terror suspects were identified, smoked out and learned about through social media. Social media was used to find missing loved ones. It was used to help local people open their homes to stranded runners and their families. It has been (and is still being) used by police, schools and news organizations to communicate with and give instructions to millions of people in a major urban area. So many of us, in fact, learned about this week’s news — every depressing bit of it — through social media. Continue reading
Last week we turned a corner: from Mobile Friendly Street onto Mobile First Avenue.
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Last week was when Facebook’s Zuckerberg announced “Facebook Home,” a mobile software system designed to take over smartphones by pushing Facebook to the forefront of the mobile experience. And while increasingly people have been shown to be moving from their PCs to mobile devices in their online browsing habits, Facebook’s move has cemented what marketers have been muttering about for the past few years: The age of “Mobile First” is really here. Continue reading
I came across an article today: “CEOs say marketers are disconnected from financial reality.”
Not only was it timely, coming as it did on the day I was sitting down to write about ROI, but it’s also true. I’ve talked before about how marketers tend to gravitate toward soft measurements, particularly in the area of social media marketing. This CEO article goes into detail about the level of mistrust the C-suite has for marketing’s worth and has some revealing statistics to back it up — such as the fact that 74 percent of CEOs want marketers to become 100 percent ROI-focused.
Unrealistic? Not completely. The strong message here is that marketers need to do a better job connecting the dots between their organization’s budget and resource investment, and substantive results: Cost-per-lead, cost-per-conversion. They need to apply social media marketing to the sales funnel, along with any other marketing activities. And they need to demonstrate how social marketing contributes to retention and the lifetime value of customers.
So, how to get started calculating ROI? Continue reading
In the past week, we’ve talked about ROI being the only metric business decision makers are really interested in when it comes to social media marketing. We’ve also talked about the opposite of ROI, when opportunity and market edge is lost by not utilizing social marketing effectively.
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So building the business case for social marketing is the natural next step to our ongoing series on social ROI.
Social media measurement admittedly can be difficult to calculate. As an organic, trust-building activity best suited for influence and soft lead generation, drawing a direct cause-and-effect between social marketing and ROI is a challenge. But it can be done effectively. And if your online program can be shown to be beneficial to your business, it will be one that justifies a budget. Continue reading
