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

Email Still Trumps Social Media for Online Marketing [INFOGRAPHIC]

Email marketing wins more online customers than Facebook and Twitter, but it lags behind organic search.

The customer acquisition landscape is constantly in flux. The introduction of disruptive technologies and tools over the last few years has spawned enormous changes in online marketing. But a recent report from Custora, maker of a predictive analytics platform, reveals that online retailers are winning new customers via traditional email marketing at quadruple the rate they did four years ago. The good old-fashioned marketing method still provides the biggest bang for the buck when it comes to reaching and retaining high-value customers online.

The study analyzed data from 72 million customers from 86 U.S. retailers across 14 industries and tracked the channels from which customers were clicking to e-commerce sites. While email proved to be a strong channel for growing a customer base, organic search was found to be the most popular driver. Facebook drove very few sales and Twitter drove none. Email was also shown to carry a higher customer lifetime value (the profit a company expects to earn from their entire future relationship with a customer) than social media channels.

The report also revealed that the lifetime value of customers acquired through Twitter is 23% lower than average, and that the most valuable online shoppers tend to come from more rural states. Here is some more detailed information from the study:

Channels

Customer acquisition via email has quadrupled over the last 4 years.

Email marketing has been a growing trend in e-commerce, with an increasing number of retailers building communities and collecting email addresses, then converting those contacts into customers. Organic search continues to grow as a reliable channel, accounting for nearly 16% of customers acquired. The latter finding reinforces the use of content marketing along with investing in search engine marketing.

Customer lifetime value

The CLV of customers acquired through Twitter is 23% lower than average.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) refers to the future profit a company expects to earn from a customer throughout their relationship with the business. The highest-value customers arrive through organic searches (54% higher than average). Customers acquired through Twitter tend to be worth about 23% less than average. This may be attributed to the frequency of discounts offered within tweets.

Geography

The most valuable online shoppers overall tend to come from more rural states.

Shoppers in rural areas tend to have fewer options for buying specialty goods locally and make more purchases online.




Article curated from Social Media Today

To learn more about how email marketing can help your business, call us at 855-IES-MARK or click here.

4 More Ways to Boost Your Twitter Followers

Social media experts weigh in on the best ways to attract loyal followers.

I'm so close I can feel it.

Over the past months, I've been experimenting more and more with social media, trying to find out how to gain more followers. It's not just for fun. If you only have a few hundred followers, you're speaking to a small audience.

For me, Twitter helps spread the word about new articles and keeps me connected with readers. It's also one of the primary tools I use for connecting with public relations folks. Sometimes, I even send out a mass tweet and let people know I'm leaving for the day or that I'm focusing on answering emails for the next hour or so. It's invaluable.

Back in 2011, I wrote a fairly seminal piece (at least, it was seminal for me) about gaining more Twitter followers. My goal back then was to hit 800 followers in a few weeks. I used a tool called Sprout Social. (In fact, I'm still using this app on my HTC One smartphone, on the Web, and on my iPad after two years.) It's best feature is the ability to post one tweet to multiple accounts at once and then track your success in how many people retweet what you say. And, I love the simple interface.

After two years, I am now approaching about 5,000 followers. It's great. I know my social media efforts have paid off and that there's a wider audience that reads what I post. What I've heard from a few experts is that my audience for social media is more "organic" than most. People seem to follow because they really want to read my posts. They say it's better to have fewer "real" followers than thousands of fake ones who may or may not care about what you have to say--and never click on your links.

That said, I'm still open to ideas. So I put out a call with a few social media experts who looked at my Twitter activity and they came up with a few more ideas. These tips seem to be working so far, although I have not quite hit the 5,000 mark yet. I'm close!

1. Post the same links multiple times
Rebecca Caroe is a social media expert at Creative Agency Secrets in New Zealand. She helped me quite a bit because I was making a big mistake. I usually only posted a link once or twice, but people tend to make "drive-bys" on a Twitter stream and only check for recent activity. There's a reason why the show Million Second Quiz on NBC posts a dozen tweets an hour. They are hoping casual followers at least see a few interesting links.

Caroe told me to post my own links at least three times in a day hitting a few different time zones. I've started doing this lately. Over the past month, I've added about 130 followers which seems to be tied to this change in how I post my links. I may even start posting the same link more times per day and see if that helps.

These links increase your followers when people visit your Twitter page and see what you've been up to and what you do. People follow active posters.

2. Follow your followers on other social channels
This one seems obvious but it's easy to overlook. The fact is, the followers you have on Facebook, Google Plus, and LinkedIn might not be following you on Twitter.

Maybe they don't even know you are on Twitter--or they don't know your handle. Caroe also told me to ping my followers on other nets and ask them if they want to follow me on Twitter. This is a manual process, unfortunately. (There's a good start-up idea right there--a tool to automate this.)

Of course, the trick is to follow people in your same field and who have similar interests. You should also look for "influencers" who have a lot of followers. By following these folks, you are making an introduction to state your intent and, in many cases, they will follow you back. In general, following the influencers is a strategy every social media expert told me about. 

By spending a few minutes looking for the gurus and following them, you can find a bastion of new followers for yourself.

3. Interact with your followers like crazy
Harry Hawk, the social media strategist for Leske's Bakery in Brooklyn, told me he increased his followers to 5,000 in just two months, mostly by following key influencers. He says the key is to go beyond just a follow, though. He told me he's interacted with high-profile companies like @KlondikeBars and @Toyota by posting questions and interacting with them. Eventually, after a relationship develops, the influencers will feel compelled to follow you back. This is also a great way to keep the followers you do have--letting them know you are alive and active on Twitter, not comatose.

4. Show your personality
I keep hearing this advice from most social media experts like Phil Laboon, the CEO of marketing agency EyeFlow, so I've been trying to live this one out. The idea is to be yourself--to show your character. Too many Twitter streams have a banal list of links and nothing else. You get the feeling there's a bot generating them. New followers will find you eventually, but they will decide whether they want to stick around when they see you are a real person talking about a real company. I've been inserting a few jokes here and there, adding quips and quotes, and always (always!) answering direct messages. When someone gives me a mention on Twitter, I try to thank them and post a follow-up response. This tells new followers they will get the same kind of attentive response.

"Don't just build followers. You really need to stay active and continually engage with your audience, not just build useless followers you never engage with. You need to share engaging, valuable, or educational content. You really have to establish yourself as an resource for something whether tips, articles, news, opinions, or humor," says Laboon.

After two years of working hard, my goal is on the horizon. When I finally do hit 5,000, I'll post again with the tips that worked the best.

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

Article curated from Inc. Magazine

4 Key Elements of Your Facebook Marketing

With all the ongoing changes happening with Facebook, it’s sometimes tough to keep up and sort out what’s important and what may or may not impact your everyday efforts to engage with a vibrant community, reach a wider audience and ultimately communicate more efficiently. Below are the four key components to consider in order for brands to succeed on Facebook:

1. ORGANIC EFFORTS

Folks familiar with Facebook’s infamous EdgeRank algorithm will know that brands posting on Facebook will only reach, on average, 16% of their fans. Depending on size of page, type of industry and audience and, more importantly, how the page is managed, this percentage can vary anywhere between 7% to 33%, and sometimes as high as 50%. To reach such levels of penetration within your Facebook fan base usually requires dynamic community management, with tactics such as:

• Posting aspirational, humorous or emotional pictures
• Asking questions, not always directly linked to the brand, but coherent with its identity and community interests
• Contests and special offers – after all, number one reason why people “like” a brand is in order to get deals, discounts or access to exclusive offers or events
• Sharing relevant articles, photos and videos
• Asking people to complete a sentence, fill in the blank, insert a caption, etc.

As part of its recent major changes, Facebook announced two features – Story Bump and Last Actor – allowing engaging posts you haven’t seen to be bumped up to the top of News Feed later in the day, thus increasing the odds of you seeing it and interacting with its content: like, comment or share.

2. PAID COMPONENTS

The truth, however, is that no matter how dynamic their community management may be, brands now need to plan for investments on Facebook in order to reach more people, get more likes, shares and comments, and to enhance the overall page performance. And while Facebook ads are still part of the equation, there are now a variety of options to consider:

1. Classic Facebook Ads, appearing in the right side – desktop only. These can be purchased directly within the Facebook ad platform, or through more sophisticated techniques using retargeting, through Facebook Exchange (FBX).
   
    
    
    
    

   
   

   
   

   
   

   Boosting a Post on Facebook

   
   
2. Promoted Posts, also known as “boost” posts. For a given amount, you can ensure that a given post will reach a wider audience, with the range varying according to the set amount you invest in.
3. Page Post Ads are similar to promoted posts, in that they serve to highlight a given post. However, its mechanism resembles more of classic media buy, with CPM  or CPC targets, and more precise audience demographics and targeting capabilities.
4. Sponsored Stories are ads appearing in your Newsfeed, including on mobile devices. This is important since 60% of active users access their account through a mobile device! Brands highlight a given user’s activity, so there is less creativity and control, but these ads tend to perform better given their authentic nature, since user’s friends are exposed to a “genuine”message from someone in their network.
5. Facebook Offers. Facebook used to offer the option to send out online offers to fans, but this ceased on July 3rd, 2013. There is still the possibility to extend in-store offers, using the “offers” feature. Facebook Offers are free to create, but you will need to spend some money to promote them to your selected audience.

As you can see, there are plenty of ways to spend money to spark your fan base, and savvy community managers now juggle between some of these initiatives in order to follow up with organic, more natural techniques to keep the interest alive and conversation going.

3. CROSSING PLATFORMS

The biggest mistake brands make, and most organizations in general, is to look at Facebook as its own entity. Facebook is a great platform, but it ought to be inserted in an over-arching online vision and strategy, aligning with email marketing initiatives, i.e. newsletters, automated emails, etc. as well as other social media, such as Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube or TripAdvisor. There also needs to be a content marketing approach, identifying what role for the corporate blog, what role for social media, what role for user-review sites, and so on… within an editorial and tactic calendar.

Brands who achieve optimal results with Facebook are those who cross-promote their various channels, including moving beyond online with offline (in-store) offers, for examples. Such initiatives also help providing tangible results, which in turn tend to contribute to ROI calculations that are often an issue to demonstrate, specially for brands who rely solely on engagement indicators.

4. ANALYTICS

Speaking of indicators, Facebook greatly enhanced its Insights module in the administrative panel. Among other improvements, we can now clearly see the distinction between paid and organic reach, with simpler metrics and easier to download, for those wo wish to export or extract data for further analysis. In case you missed them, here are some of the salient improvements:

• Each post now has its own scorecard, which helps to determine which type of post works better for your specific audience.
• The “Virality” indicator has been replaced by “Engagement”, in which post clicks are now included.
• There are now six tabs to choose from and where one can dig for lots of useful data about the page performance: Overview, Likes, Reach, Visits, Posts and People.

BONUS: A REVIEW SITE?

A lesser known feature was also unveiled recently that could prove to be a boon or a bombshell with the travel & hospitality vertical: the “Review” button that now appears on Facebook pages.

The new “Review” button on Facebook Pages

Most people don’t necessarily rely on Facebook for other users’ reviews and comments, with sites such as TripAdvisor or Yelp that have a strong leadership and awareness for this purpose alone. Nevertheless, Facebook positioned itself strategically earlier this year within the search field, launching its Graph Search functionality, so it would only make sense to now add this layer of user reviews. For an upcoming trip to Las Vegas, Chicago, Paris or Rome, users may want to use their Facebook search capabilities, now combined with these reviews that add context, in particular if comments come from folks within our network. Is that really Facebook’s intention? Hard to tell at this point, but travel marketers should take note of these developments. One never knows…

Sample of user reviews for Fairmont Chateau Frontenac hotel, in Quebec City

Are there other new features within Facebook you think are true game-changers or should have been mentioned in this post? 

To learn more about Facebook's recent changes or how Facebook marketing can help your business, click here for a free quote from IES Marketing.

Article curated from Social Media Today

Five Easy Ways to Expand Your Clientele Using LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a versatile platform for businesses to expand in many different ways. If you know how to use the networking site to your advantage, you can take your company to greater levels using it. Here are five simple tactics by which you can bring in more clients and more value to your business.

Use company status updates






If your gutter guard manufacturing company has a LinkedIn page, then make sure that you use the facility where certain employees and managers under you can update news and other relevant information on the page directly. By doing this, you are effectively cutting down your own work regarding developing and updating the page, and at the same time keeping your followers engaged. These updates can then be shared, commented on and liked by viewers, which helps keep them thinking about your company at all times. This way, clients will think of your company first because of the repetition and frequent renewal of interest.

Focus on specialization and find an exact target group



LinkedIn is different from other networking sites because it is targeted at working professionals and people who wish to expand their network of like-minded people in their areas of expertise. Since the target group is already specialized, you can grab the attention of a very specific group of individuals. These people are already prospective clients, making it easier for you to communicate with them.

Head hunting and LinkedIn



Search for skilled labor through this networking platform. LinkedIn makes things easier for you because information is freely available. Background checks can be done and you will be able to hire
 competent and efficient workers. If your staff is good, it is an automatic indicator that your company will deliver positive results. Many clients look at the employees of a company before working with the company itself.

Differentiate yourself and stand out among the crowd



There are many opportunities for you to expand your clientele using LinkedIn. However, it is important to remember that there are a large number of organizations participating in similar activities as you, each one trying to best the other. If you do not have anything special to catch people’s attention, it will be difficult for you to be found, even to your target audience.

Use LinkedIn as a place to promote even offline activities



If your company conducts seminars or other such sources of information regularly, it is advisable to promote this through LinkedIn. Send out invitations to such events online, and you will find that you have an additional number of interested people attending them. This will give you a better opportunity to pitch your business strategy and acquire more clients. Offline methods are excellent for sealing deals.

LinkedIn can only help you get the attention of potential clients. Offline advertising has more of a personal touch and is directed only at the select viewers at that moment. The Internet simply provides you with opportunities to eliminate a large number of people so that you know who to pitch to. 

Article curated from Social Media Today