3 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2014

Here are three cutting-edge trends that will be at the core of the most successful social media marketing campaigns in 2014.

 

Despite having nearly a decade of experience with social networks, many marketers still find social media a tough nut to crack. But other marketers are transforming how they use social networks in ways that increase brand reach with relevant audiences and drive real ROI.

Here are three cutting-edge trends that will be at the core of the most successful social media marketing campaigns in 2014. These trends aren't magic bullets or industry secrets that will give brands an edge overnight. They're organic strategies that can drive real rewards for organizations with the patience and diligence to implement them.

Increase Employee Advocacy With Social Media Governance

Designating employee advocates is one of the most cost-effective ways to extend brand reach on social media. It can also be a risky endeavor, however, if employees don't have clear guidance on the common do's and don'ts of interacting with the brand on social media.

Brands with a strong base of employee advocates typically have a well-written social media governance policy that serves as the anchor of the employee advocacy strategy. Developing a policy sounds like nails on a chalkboard to most digital marketers, but it really isn't that difficult. 
Developing the policy is just the beginning; your team must implement the policy across business units and keep the policy up to date. A governance policy can mitigate the risk of costly social media disasters and help your employee base work as a cohesive unit. Employee advocacy on social networks will stretch your team's digital marketing dollars when it comes to increasing brand reach.

Enhance Content Distribution Efforts

A recent article by Forrester analyst Ryan Skinner revealed how distribution, and specifically earned media, is a core component to successful content marketing.

Skinner's article quotes a VP of marketing saying, "Marketers always ask me how to make more or better content, and it's almost always the wrong question. The right question is: "How do I get my content in front of the right people?""

As organizations continue to focus on using paid, owned and earned media to increase branded content distribution, social media can be used as a support mechanism to enhance distribution to relevant audiences on social media. Brands that enhance paid and earned media campaigns by distributing this content to relevant audiences on social networks can develop an edge in their respective industries.

Lead With Education, Not Conversation

Research shows that targeted educational content distribution is a much more effective strategy for building audiences than social media conversations. A recent HubSpot study found that all of the top-100 non-celebrity Twitter accounts used targeted content to build these giant audiences.

Conversations on social media are best left to bottom-of-funnel sales cycles and customer service. When building relevant audiences and extending brand reach, it's better to focus on delivering targeted educational content on a regular basis.

These Strategies Aren't Silver Bullets

The strategies mentioned above won't deliver returns immediately, but they also won't take multiple quarters to implement. A bit of smart hard work over the next couple of months can point your organization in the right direction and provide lasting brand reach on social networks. Get started on these strategies today, and explode out of the gates in 2014!

Article curated from Inc. Magazine

Harnessing the Power of Online Reviews This Christmas

It’s holiday season and that means one thing, Christmas presents. With the retail industry set to be caught in a whirlwind over the next month it is clear that this is an opportunity to really make your business stand out from the crowd. And one way of doing this is by harnessing the power of online reviews.

Whatever you might think of them, the power of online reviews cannot be ignored. Whether you’re a small e-tailer, an online giant, or a global blue-chip – online reviews have an impact.

Research from Nielsen revealed that recommendations from acquaintances or opinions posted by consumers online are the most trusted forms of ‘advertising.’ A recent blog post from eConsultancy shows that:

    61% of customers read online reviews before making a purchase decision

    Reviews produce an average 18% uplift in sales

    47% of Britons have reviewed products online

With the explosion of online shopping – latest figures show that UK shoppers spent £586.9m a week online, on average, in June 2013 (that’s 18.3% up on the same month in 2012) – reviews have taken on a whole new significance. By not allowing customers to rate and comment on your company, you run the risk of online shoppers taking their business straight to competitors that do.

Research from a recent TripAdvisor study also revealed that:

53% of travelers won’t book a hotel if it doesn’t have any reviews. Some 78% say reviews help them to feel more confident in making a booking decision. Whatever way you look at it, if you sell online, then not having online review options is going to have a serious impact on your profits.

5 reasons why you need online reviews

Online reviews are basically a word-of-mouth marketing strategy, which has long been known as the most powerful endorsement a brand can have. Here are 5 reasons you should include reviews on your website:

    Reason #1 – They help you build consumer confidence and trust.

You’re obviously going to be providing the best products and services that you possibly can, so the vast majority of your reviews will reflect this. This builds confidence and trust in customers who haven’t used you before as the more 3-5 star ratings you have, the more likely they are to believe all those people can’t be wrong.

    Reason #2 – They increase your click-through rates (CTRs).

Featuring reviews from your happy customers in search results when consumers search for your product gets you more click-throughs and, in turn, more conversions. Find a platform that feeds your reviews straight into your Google Seller Ratings: on average, ads with Seller Ratings get a 17% higher CTR than the same ads without ratings.

    Reason #3 – They can help improve conversion rates

Businesses that have been using online review solutions show that their online sales have increased anywhere from 7.5% to 60% due to increased trust from skeptical buyers.

    Reason #4 – They give you great content to share on social media

With 92% of people trusting recommendations from people they know, an online review system that lets you share your reviews easily on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ will enable your customers to spread trust among their peers, increasing your customer base.

    Reason #5 – They keep your customers engaged

By letting your customers comment on your company and taking the time to respond to them you make them feel valued and wanted. They are more likely to want to become part of the company – PROsumers, not just CONsumers. This goes for negative as well as positive reviews – even if someone is unhappy, by responding quickly and positively you can turn things around.

According to Forbes, where online reviews matter most is in the home electronics market (77% say consumer reviews influence purchase decisions compared to just 23% for editorial reviews) and automotive industries. But they also point out that any business that operates a significant portion of its retail platform online, apart from the FMCG sector, has a lot to lose or gain when it comes to online reviews of products and services.

What next? 5 steps to getting started with reviews

So now that you know why online reviews are a must-have for your business, and how to use them to win more customers and more repeat business, what do you do next?

You need to:

• Embrace the new world of online reviews and learn how to make them work for your business to increase conversions.
• Review your online review platform options and choose the one that best suits your needs. Can you respond to reviews? Will it push your reviews to Google and feed them into your Google Seller Ratings? Can it share them easily to social media platforms?
• Get your platform up and running and start collecting reviews from your existing customers before your competition does.
• Respond to your reviews, good and bad, and share them across all of your marketing channels.
• Sit back and watch as your glowing reviews generate more business.

Has this post got you thinking about the power of online reviews? 

Article curated from Business 2 Community

Email Marketing: How to Write Subject Lines That Get Clicks

If you don't grab customers with your subject line, you've lost them. Check out these pointers for crafting one that makes people click.

Think you know email marketing backwards and forwards? Able to dash off a contact email or sales pitch without a second thought? Check that impulse, because you may get only a fraction of the responses you could receive with some thought and experimentation.

That may not seem surprising if your professional life has been steeped in direct response. Some of the old tested rules of thumb in print would have been startling the first time you heard them, like use the word "you" in copy and write headlines longer than seven or so words. Such fundamentals came from experts who had done extensive testing that pitted one variation against another, time and time again, from many marketers, to learn what patterns tended to hold true.

When it comes to email marketing, mass email vendor MailChimp has just added to what marketers know with a big comparison of subject lines to response rates. The company looked at 24 billion emails sent and 22,000 words in emails sent in the U.S. with tracking. Each email had to go to at least 500 people and the client must have sent at least 10 previous campaigns. In other words, no complete novices and stick to one national demographic for a more reasonable analysis. Even though it was somewhat self-selecting, as only MailChimp clients could wind up in the data pool, the results are still worth considering. Here's what they found.

Personal Works, Chumminess Doesn't

Put the first and last names of recipients into the subject line and you're doing a third of a standard deviation better in open rates than average. That's almost double as effective as using a last name only and close to four times as effective as using a first name only.

And while talking about first names, the effect depends heavily on the industry. Government gets the biggest email open bang for the buck when using a first name only. Creative services and agencies get maybe half that amount. Politics, less. At the bottom is the legal industry, where using someone's first name in the subject line will actually drive many people away from opening the message.

Don't Use the Word 'Free' So Freely

"Free" is supposed to be one of the magic words that make people open messages. When it comes to email subject lines, however, adding free often does nothing. According to MailChimp, on average it helped 0.02 standard deviations. Compare that to the term "freebie," which resulted in a 0.26 standard deviation. In other words, freebie rules. Furthermore, the use of free varies widely in effectiveness, with recruitment and staffing, restaurant, and beauty and personal care enjoying the most benefit. The industries where it did badly, actually lowering response, were surprising--travel and transportation, real estate, and retail saw drops in their response rates.

Keep Things Positive

Creating the perception of time sensitivity is an old direct marketing trick. "Urgent," "breaking," and "important" all performed relatively well. But go too negative, like using the word "cancellation," and you could see a drop in response.

There is more that you should read for yourself. The big point is that the need to test and refine language, images, concepts, and every other aspect of marketing has only become more critical.
 

Article curated from Inc. Magazine

For the Holidays: Your Digital Marketing Checklist

Here's a guide to digital marketing throughout the holidays, in four channels

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas--at least online.

With Cyber Monday, Black Friday, and the abundance of shopping in between, businesses around the world are already unleashing their of holiday marketing campaigns. These digital recommendations will help you get the most out of your holiday marketing dollars.

Paid Search
Stand out from the competition by focusing on the details. You can do this by putting together seasonal paid search campaigns using the season's highest searched keywords.
For example, the query volume for '"sale" keywords consistently increases during the holidays. Take advantage of this trend by using sale terminology in your ad copy. Leverage incremental search queries, rotate holiday ads that are closely derived from the ads that have worked the best for you, and use day-parting to massively scale up and down during short time periods.

It's also important to pay special attention to the unusually short stretch between Black Friday and Christmas this year. Because Thanksgiving falls on November 28, the shopping period between the two shopping holidays is shortened to a mere 25 days.

With less time for consumers to tackle their holiday shopping, researchers are expecting consumers to start earlier. You can encourage early shoppers to become early buyers through pre-Black Friday and pre-Cyber Monday promotions and perks. Make sure to keep your analytics and retargeting up-to-date so that you can see which of your products get the most views, which reviews are the most read, and which items get added to wish lists. Use this data to figure out which products are likely to be in the highest demand. That'll help focus your digital efforts later in the holiday season.

Social Media
During last year's holiday season, traffic to social media sites converted at a rate 77% higher than it did during the rest of the year. Social media campaigns for the holiday season are starting earlier each year, which means you need to gear up earlier too if you want to take advantage of relatively low costs.

Display
Display ads allow marketers to target individuals who have previously interacted with their brand on social networks and other websites, making this second touch point more likely to convert. Display ads also allow marketers to target individuals based on the particular device that they use to interact with their brand.

In addition to targeting capabilities, display advertising is ideal for updating your creative with relevant offers. While you should be doing this anyway, the holiday season provides a unique opportunity to target users on a granular level because of the increases in individuals' online activities. The more data you have to work with, the better you can target your best consumers or qualified leads. The prices of available inventory skyrocket during the holiday season, so it's important to target only the most relevant customers.

Out of sight is out of mind, so don't allow your brand to slip from your customer's minds. Stay in front of them with display advertising.

Email
Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways for marketers to reach consumers at the last minute and on modest budgets. That said, customers will receive hundreds of emails a day during the holiday season. The majority of online shoppers will use an email during their path to purchase, so make your email marketing campaign count with dynamic content that is relevant and tailored to users.

Customize your holiday email content with gift specifics such as pricing, who will be receiving the gift, unique gift categories, product type and best sellers. Consumers will appreciate the unique content, and your email campaign will have a better chance of increasing ROI.

Article curated from Inc. Magazine

SEO Is Dead. Here's What Is Taking Its Place

Thanks to recent Google changes, search engine optimization isn't nearly as powerful as it used to be. But that's OK--there's a better way.

BY Erik Sherman

If you've ever tried to deal with search engine optimization, you most likely have, at some point or another, wanted to bundle your whole site up and toss it into the nearest virtual trash can. Particularly if you felt compelled to focus on keywords, or any other technique calculated to artificially pique someone's mouse clicks.

You should be delighted to hear then, if you haven't heard yet, that the old-fashioned concept of SEO is deader than last week's sandwich. Google pretty much pounded the crap out of keyword stuffing and other absurdities with the search algorithm changes it's made over the last couple of years. And then Google made search secure, which means you can't even see what keywords someone used to get to your site.

It's about time, because all the minutiae blinded entrepreneurs to what is really important: making a connection with an audience. The term--not exactly new--that seems to be displacing SEO is OAO, online audience optimization. Before getting too squirrelly about another Three Letter Acronym, let's get grounded and think about what's important.

Really Know Your Audience
Over on the Marketingland blog, Brian Clark quoted great old-time advertising copyrighter Eugene Schwartz:

One hour a day, read. Read everything in the world except your business. Read junk. Very much junk. Read so that anything that interests you will stick in your memory. Just read, just read, just read... There is your audience. There is the language. There are the words that they use.

Clark takes this to mean that you have to understand the language and words people use so you know how to talk to them. I'll take it a step further. Not only do you need to know how they talk, which lets you better guess how they might specifically look for what you offer, but you also need to understand what they find funny. What scares them. What is important to them. How they think. Until you do, they're only marks and you do nothing more than run calculated cons. After you do understand them, they're real people and you might find yourself caring a bit about them. Good--care more.

Translate Caring Into Specific Actions
Do you care about your significant other, family members, or friends? If so, then there are plenty of times that you'll do specific things that you know make them happy. Emotion isn't an abstract concept, but something that drives behavior. Let the same thing happen in your marketing after you start to care about the audience. For example, Linda Ruth lists nine steps for OAO, including be consistent and clear about strategy and purpose, encourage audience participation, and employ engagement metrics and gamification techniques. 

Maybe you'll find that your list is the same. Maybe it will be somewhat different. Just make sure it comes with a focus on customers and how you can provide what they need.

It's like going into a shop you like where the people recognize you and get your interests and tastes. That's all you're trying to do. When the technology, any technology, gets in the way, drop it out back and return to the basics.

 Article curated from Inc. Magazine

How to Master the 4 Big Social-Media Platforms

Most people think of social media as distribution and use the same messaging on every platform. That's not fully exploiting the tools.

Think of how you act with your friends versus how you act with your clients. You behave differently based on your environment. Social media is the same thing. Every platform is like a different meeting, a different room, and you have to be cool or quality depending where you are. Most people think of social media as distribution and use the same messaging on every platform. That's not fully exploiting the tools. Instead, it's important to figure out how to natively tell stories on each platform and which visuals and copy will enhance the likelihood of a given post's going viral.

Twitter

I included #business, because it was a trending topic at the time of this tweet. When you use a hashtag that's trending, you have a substantially better chance of getting engagement from people who aren't your followers. The couple hundred people who click that hashtag every hour around the world might also see it, and I might get some traction I might not otherwise have gotten.I also made my tweet a question, because it makes your brain think about the answer. If I can get someone to stop for half a second to ponder, I've got him in my ecosystem. Also, line breaks allow your tweet to take up a larger portion of the phone screen and attract attention.

Facebook
It all starts with the image. Notice, this image isn't just the label of the bottle. It's an original piece. When you're developing images for Facebook, think about print and magazine advertising. I want people to know what wine it is (hence the crop in on the label) and how good it is (hence the Wine Enthusiast score). Keep your copy short. Include the important information that people will care about. In this case, it's the rating, the price, and the right hook: Click here to buy now. And don't be afraid to go in for the sale. If you want someone to do something, you have to ask him or her to do it. I made sure to include the word buy before the link.

Instagram
Instagram is all about real images. Where are you? What are you looking at? What are you doing now? Unlike the polished images you'll see for Facebook and Pinterest, this is a simple shot taken on a phone. It's native to the platform. That doesn't mean you can't include information or text in your photo. I wrote some of the tasting notes directly onto the tablecloth. The only place where links are clickable in the Instagram app is in your bio. Rather than including a link in the post copy for people to copy and paste in a browser (because, honestly, who would ever do that?), I put the link in my bio. Remember, the more you act human, the more you win. Instagram is personal. It's for those real-life moments.

Pinterest
Pinterest is all about aspiration or utility. Here, I'm not just selling wine; I'm giving knowledge. This infographic gives context and tells you everything you could want to know about this bottle. This is just too much text for any other platform, but it feels right at home on Pinterest. People are shopping on Pinterest, so they're spending more time on the content and looking at it with a critical eye. I used a much longer image on Pinterest than on any other platform. The platform dimensions are different and allow for it, but more important--similar to what I did on Twitter--longer pins take up more real estate.



Article curated from Inc. Magazine

To learn more about how social media can help your business, click here to contact IES Marketing.

6 Ways to Get Sales Email Opened

Practical rules to ensure customer and potential customers actually read what you've written for them.

 

I recently received an email from a reader that contained an excellent question: "Do you have any Subject Line templates/best practices for prospecting emails?"  Here are some guidelines, based partly on my own experience and partly from published research:

1. Make the subject line simple. There are several reasons why this is true.  First, busy people get a LOT of emails and usually decide which ones to open based upon a quick scan of the list of messages that have recently arrived.

Since they're not actually reading the Subject Lines, a Subject Line that requires the recipient to consciously think about its meaning is unlikely to be opened.  Here are some examples from emails I've received over the past couple of days:

Wrong:
Subject: Ernesto Zedillo to Chair 21st Century Council of Berggruen Institute on Governance

Right:
Subject: The "Call Me Back After the Holidays" Stall

2. Make the subject line short. A short Subject Line makes it more likely that the entire Subject Line will appear on the list and not be cut off mid sentence.  The two examples below are exactly as they appeared in my inbox:

Wrong:
Subject: Webinar: Register Now to Learn How...

Right:
Subject: You've Been Promoted, Now What?

According to the email vendor MailChimp (which I do not use but which has good information), emails are more likely to be opened if the Subject Line is less than 50 characters. I never use subject lines more than 40 characters.

3. Use a pre-tested subject line. The Internet in general and your own website in particular are excellent test beds for what interests people enough to click on it.  Using the title of a popular blog post (yours or somebody else's) as your Subject Line almost guarantees a high open rate.

As many of you know, I write and send a free weekly newsletter by email.  I have never gotten less than a 25% open rate and sometimes achieve more than 33% (anyone in the business will tell you that's really good.)

I credit this to the fact that my Subject Lines are almost always based on the most popular blog post of the past week.  For example, here are the five newsletter titles that got my highest open rate with a link to the original post:

• 10 Dumb Sales Tactics to Avoid
• 6 Tips for Persuasive Sales Messages
• Eliminate Stress and Have Fun at Work
• 9 Easy Habits That Make You Happier
• 12 Great Motivational Quotes for 2013

If you click on the links, you'll notice that all of these posts received a large amount of "Shares" which is why I used them in the Subject Line of my newsletter.

4. Avoid words that recipients hate. Your email won't get read if it's caught by a SPAM filter.  Most people know some of the words that trigger filters, like "FREE" and "CIALIS," but few people realize that there are actually about 100 of these words.  Here's a comprehensive list.

In addition to the above, MailChimp has identified three words that generally get through SPAM filters but which for some reason, people don't like when it comes to opening emails: Help, Percent off (% off), and Reminder.

With this in mind, here are two subject lines from MailChimp's research.  The first received open rate of less than 1%, the second an open rate of over 90%:

Wrong:
Subject: Final reminder for complimentary entry to attend the West Freelands BCI Cluster Conference 2006

Right:
Subject: Your April Website Stats

5. Localize but don't personalize. According to MailChimp again, people tend to open emails that have a Subject Line that refers to the city or town in which the recipient lives.  However, they tend to ignore Subject Lines that contain the prospect's name.

It's not hard to see why.  Everybody knows that your emailing programs will insert the recipient's name anywhere you like.  However, inserting the location is less common and implies that that the source of the email is local.

Wrong:
Subject: John, are you ready for the new year?

Right:
Subject: Reach decision-makers in St. Louis.

6. Have content that delivers the goods. Recipients tend to ignore emails from people they don't know and read emails from they know (or know of).  That's why you'll get a much higher open rate if you're emailing current customers, former customers or people who've "signed up" to get emails from you.

This is not to say that generating email lists from online sources (like LinkedIn) doesn't work, but only that your emails will have a much lower open rate.

However, regardless of how you found the email address, once the recipient has gotten an email from you and opened it, the recipient will decide whether or not it's worthwhile to open any future emails you send.

If you've got a fantastic Subject Line but the contents stink, you're just going to irritate the recipient.  It's like unwrapping a package with a beautiful bow that turns out to contain a box of crap. People remember that.

On the other hand, if your email contains got great content, there's a good chance that the recipient will open future sales emails, even if the Subject Line isn't fabulous.

To learn more about how email marketing can help your business, click here.

Article curated from Inc. Magazine