Big Book of Digital Marketing PDF

THE big book of digital marketing A Publication from Digital Firefly Marketing digital firefly marketing what it is, how it works, and why you’re crazy if you’re not using it. Digital Firefly Marketing Digital Firefly Marketing was founded to help organizations significantly increase and protect the...

THE big book of digital marketing A Publication from Digital Firefly Marketing digital firefly marketing what it is, how it works, and why you’re crazy if you’re not using it. Digital Firefly Marketing Digital Firefly Marketing was founded to help organizations significantly increase and protect their online marketing presence by focusing on three key areas: Expertise: We are the authority to help your organization maximize its online marketing presence. Resources: We provide extensive capabilities utilizing the industry’s best software and practices that provide cost effective and required results. Speed: We create and implement solutions in a timely manner At the end of the day we are people powered, because as technology makes things possible, people make things happen. What’s Inside Search Engine Optimization Understanding the Basics of Search Engine Optimization Content Marketing The Hows and Whys of Content Management Website Redesign The Art and Science of Website Design Social Media Marketing Harnessing the Power and making an impact Pinterest What it is, how it works and why you’re crazy to not use it SEO Understanding the Basics of Search Engine Optimization a publication of digital firefly marketing understanding the basics of search engine optimization Introduction to SEO What is search engine optimization? It’s a question that is asked repeatedly by people with a website. It sounds REALLY important, but most people find themselves flummoxed because they don’t know really where to start in getting their website optimized for search. Search engine optimization consists of two processes. The first is getting a website configured so a search engine like Google can index it correctly and the second is making sure your website is in the top search results when someone Googles your products or brand names. Your Website site b e rw e u o Y b d l u co 1 # To understand how to optimize a website, the best place to start is understanding how Google and Bing work so you understand where to start optimizing your site. Feel Free to Share 2 understanding the basics of search engine optimization Understanding Search Search is still a relatively new phenomenon, after all Google is only a teenager in terms of how long it’s been around. The best way to think about search is to think of Google and Bing as Internet librarians. They take in ridiculous amounts of data from websites all over the world, put it in an index and when someone comes to their website with a query like “Who won best picture in 1948?” they search their index to find an appropriate reference and then serve up those answers to the user on their webpage. But how did they actually get that data won best picture in 1948? “ “ and how did Google know that Hamlet How does Google know who won best picture in 1948? Well it all starts with one website which leads to another and another... Feel Free to Share 3 understanding the basics of search engine optimization What Google and Bing do all day long, 365 days a year is crawl the Internet and they do that with a program called Spiders. Spiders start on websites they deem as highly valued, like CNN.com or the New York Times and they click on every link on both CNN and the New York Times which leads them to other websites where they again click on every link that leads them to more websites so after awhilethey start to map out most of the webpages on the Internet. When the Google spiders come across something new, they put that web page into its index for future reference and there it sits in the Google data warehouse until someone comes to Google.com and starts a search. Feel Free to Share 4 understanding the basics of search engine optimization One basic tenet of SEO is to try and understand how people search on Google and Bing so you can craft strategies on those search patterns. The first thing to understand about how people search is that people search with intent. They are looking for something. The intent people search with can be categorized into the following: ? Solve Buy Learn Find Each of these intents leads to different kinds of search categories. People will typically fall into the following kinds of searches: Feel Free to Share 5 understanding the basics of search engine optimization Navigational Searches They are looking for a specific website but they don’t re- member the exact URL. Informational Searches This is Google’s bread and butter. Stuff like What is the weather in Charlotte NC? and Who won best actor in 1964? People will usually tend to form these searches in the form of a question and the goal is finding the information itself. Commercial Investigation People working at businesses will be given tasks by their supervisors. Things like, hey we need a website built or can you find a good landscaper in San Diego. These are the modern day equivalents of looking in the Yellow Pages. Rather than turning to the yellow pages, they turn to Google to find reputable businesses to contact. These may or may not lead to commerce or leads, but presents an opportunity for both, same as someone seeing your ad in the Yellow Pages. Looking for a Purchase People will search the Internet when they are ready to buy. This will typically spike around specific holidays as people look for very specific gifts for ideas for gifts. Things like best father’s day gifts. Green Thing Landscaping Don’s Lawn Care Feel Free to Share SoCal Landscape & Design 6 understanding the basics of search engine optimization When someone Googles, who won best picture in 1948, Google goes into it’s index and pulls out every webpage that mentions best picture in 1948. It then applies its secret sauce, the Google algorithm, and ranks those pages from 1 - infinity and serves them up to the user and it does this very quickly. My search took 0.28 seconds. The algorithm that Google applies is a very complicated mathematical formula and asks over 200 questions to make sure it’s giving users the right responses. One of the most important questions it asks is “what’s on this page that’s relevant to this query?” and that leads us to keywords. le Goo g ithm Alg or Feel Free to Share 7 understanding the basics of search engine optimization What is a Keyword First off, a keyword is not just a word, it can also be a phrase. This keyword or combination of keywords are what people enter into Google, Bing, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn or other sites to find stuff. They can exist in the form of a question such as what is a keyword? They can be simple phrases such as john cashman princeton nj or they can be very long phrases looking for specific information such as address digital firefly marketing princeton nj. “ There aren’t good or bad keywords “ All of these phrases are considered keywords. But what separates one keyword from another? Are there good keywords and bad keywords? The answer is there aren’t good and bad keywords, but there are competitive and non-competitive keywords that will help you start to understand the best way to get Google to get traffic to your website. Feel Free to Share 8 understanding the basics of search engine optimization Long Tail Keywords Competitive and non competitive words and phrases. Google estimates that over 20% of its searches are brand new, meaning no one has ever searched for that phrase before. This leads us into what’s called the long tail of keywords and its a graph that looks like this.  Competition Long Tail Search Frequency On the high end are very competitive keywords like “coffee” or “jewelry” these keywords are going to be ranked by very large companies and websites. The words receive billions of searches every month. As phrases become more pointed, the competition, on average, decreases as does the amount of search traffic, so it becomes easier for smaller websites to begin to show up in Google results for either search traffic that does not exist yet or for some very pointed search results. Therefore, over time if you have lots of web pages with unique and highly targeted keywords, that will end up being worth more in traffic than ranking for just one highly competitive keyword. Feel Free to Share 9 understanding the basics of search engine optimization Defining a Keyword Strategy Once people understand what a keyword is, it’s natural to want to start to use that knowledge across your website properties. This is commonly referred to as keyword strategy.The first step in figuring out a keyword strategy to to list your services, industry and products. You can do this on a piece of paper or word doc. Let’s take an example of a coffee roaster in Princeton, NJ What do you sell? Coffee, coffee drinks and coffee beans. Where do you sell it? My stores are in Princeton, NJ but I ship coffee beans anywhere in the U.S. How do you sell it? People can buy in store or I can ship it to them. We accept cash, checks and credit cards. People can buy in bulk every month or one at a time. Why is your product better? We hand roast all of our coffee beans in small batches. Once you start getting those questions answers you will start to see some patterns emerge. In this example the word coffee and coffee beans appears often along with Princeton NJ. A keyword phrase that would work in this example would be coffee princeton nj. Feel Free to Share 10 understanding the basics of search engine optimization When we are very clear on what we are selling and the keywords associated with those products we move onto the next step which is trying to understand how people search for those products so we can use those searches as a basis to develop our keyword strategy. The best tool for this is Google’s keyword tool. Using Google’s keyword tool, we enter each keyword and Google will report back on the number of searches and how competitive each keyword is. They will also supply a list of keywords that are similar to the search phrase you just entered. You will get a report that looks like this: Feel Free to Share 11 understanding the basics of search engine optimization Once we have that information we need to look at the following: 1 Take a look at how many searches and how competitive each word is. The more competitive a keyword the harder it will be to rank in Google for that keyword. Conversely the more searches there are, the more likely it will be that someone will find you by Googling you. I’m burried on the 157th page of Google’s search for my keyword! I’m already at the top of Google’s search for my keyword! competitive 2 non-competitive Look at the keyword ideas. Sort by competitiveness. Those words that are not competitive should be used in your website first as individual pages or blog articles. Once you come up with a list of keywords, it’s time to look at the best way to implement them and that starts to get into the heart of SEO where the rubber meats the road and that is the website structure itself Feel Free to Share 12 understanding the basics of search engine optimization Putting Keywords in Place The good news is most websites today will run off what’s called a content management system like Drupal, WordPress and Joomla. These systems are very compliant in how they work to maximize your chances of Google indexing your keywords. Websites built in Dreamweaver or in other content management systems may or may not have the right framework in place to have Google index your site, but you can check fairly easily. “ Dreamweaver might not have the right framework for indexing in Google “ Feel Free to Share 13 understanding the basics of search engine optimization There are four key areas where Google will search for keywords: Page Titles These normally appear in the tab of your browser and are used by Google to understand what the web page is about. You can see an example below, or click here. H1 Tags This is something only a coder could love. H1 Tags are headings on a website page. Paired with the Page Title, it gives the search engines more context to what your page is about. So if your page title says chocolate and your H1 Tags says “white chocolate” the search engines know that white chocolate is part of your site. H1 tags are important for SEO. chocolate website cocoa mocha white hot chocolate keywords Feel Free to Share 14 understanding the basics of search engine optimization Clean URL’s Some of you maybe wondering why URLs would be anything but clean? This refers to the url structure. On some websites you will see a lot of gobbledy-gook like www. digitalfireflymarketing.com/#hlhldkhjglkahjd;dkjgf. Not only do you have no idea what the URL means, neither does a search engine. You need URLs that have keywords in them so Google can understand not only what the page is, but how important you think it is. The farther away the the page from the front means the less important it is. Alt Tags The old expression of a picture is worth a thousand words is the best one to describe what an alt tag is and why we can’t show you a picture. Every time an image is displayed on a website, there is an option to put an alt tag behind it so people who are visually impaired are able to get text describing the image when they are looking at a web page. Google now uses Alt Tags as a way to index images since Google can only read text and does not (yet) recognize images. Feel Free to Share 15 understanding the basics of search engine optimization What Keywords describe You? What keywords describe your business? This is known as keyword research or 18 strategy. For example a golf academy would use keywords like golf lessons or “ “ golf lessons golf academy “ “ “ “ golf instruction. golf instruction Does your website contain the appropriate keywords in the right places? You can look at the URLs of your website and the titles. If your website contains these phrases then they will probably be OK.. While H1 Tags, Page Titles, Alt Tags and Clean URLs provide a frame to build SEO compliance, it’s keywords that provide everything else. They are the drywall, the drapes, the furniture, and even the flooring that will either make your website shine or leave it in obscurity. Look at each web page on your site in those four areas and see if you can see any of the keywords in your list in those areas. If you can’t see them, neither can Google. Feel Free to Share 16 understanding the basics of search engine optimization If you can’t see those keywords or see keywords that are really obscure, the next step is to start to change them out. Each content management system is different so you will need to do a bit of research on how your content management system works. However, there are some similarities that can provide some immediate benefit. Titling Your Pages most systems will use the title of your page as the URL, Heading and Page Title. Consider changing the title of the page. Google will pick up the change the next time it visits your site. Images look at each image in your system, does it have something called Alt Tag. Is it blank? If it is, then put in a quick keyword description for accurate taging. This photo is clearly identified by an Alt Tag. May easily be misconstrued as Times Square or Las Vegas Tokyo Night life Feel Free to Share 17 understanding the basics of search engine optimization Links and SEO Now that we have an understanding about keywords, their strategies and how to make sure they are on the website correctly, it’s time to understand how to separate the great websites from the good and that has to do with links. Google uses links to find websites. In order to rank websites, one of the big drivers is the number of websites and pages that link to your website. Not only do the number of websites make a difference, but the quality or “authority” a website has makes a difference as well. For example, a link from CNN.com will be worth more in Google’s algorithm or eyes than a link from joe’s site on fishing that doesn’t have anyone linking to it. SEO is all about increasing the probability that Google will put your site within the top ten when people search on a phrase. Here are some general strategies to increase the number of links and help with SEO. Feel Free to Share 18 understanding the basics of search engine optimization Press Release news company blogger news company Consider issuing a press release. You can use PR Newswire to easily set up and distribute a press release for a couple hundred bucks. When that press release is distributed it will be picked up by a number of news companies and bloggers around the subject of your website for example fashion. Those bloggers will either repost your press release or use it for original content. One thing to always ensure in the press release is to always have a linked domain name. We have seen too many press releases that don’t link to their own website and lose the opportunity for links. Feel Free to Share 19 understanding the basics of search engine optimization Submit your site to directories. Some are free and some require a payment to get listed. One that should always be used is DMOZ.org, which is free and is used by all the search engines as a reference for websites. There are directories on just about everything from crafts to technology to politics. If you want to get your site some links and found, submitting to directories is a great place to start. To get started, try Googling “your industry directories” where your industry is where your company does business, like retail or technology. Comment on pertinent blogs. One strategy that can work if done day in and day out is commenting on blogs and websites that are in your industry. Typically most blogs will allow you to post a URL as a commenter as well as a URL within the comment field. Every blog will have different rules on comment submissions so use your common sense on when to comment and being respectful of the audience. This strategy is typically low value, but can have an impact if write pertinent content done over many months as the amount of links builds up. Feel Free to Share 20 understanding the basics of search engine optimization The first three strategies are active strategies to create links to your website. Creating content is a passive strategy but one that can really start to pay off fairly quickly. Currently 20% of all Google searches are brand new, meaning no one has ever made that search before. By creating content, you have the possibility to capture this traffic before anyone else because you have content around that query. Secondly, creating content, especially good content, allows people to link to you as a reference. The blog content can be text or images or video but should be original. Once that content is created, use social media channels to get the word out. The larger the audience the more likely it is you will get a link to your website and original piece of content. Even a couple of links can make the difference between Google’s page one and the second page. Getting on page one will drastically improve your traffic via organic search and is what links and SEO is all about. Feel Free to Share 21 understanding the basics of search engine optimization Google Panda The latest update to Google’s algorithm is called Panda. The update is designed to give websites who create original content all of the search engine credit. This is Google’s attempt to look at search results from a quality point of view, much the way a human might look at a website result. Some things that the new algorithm takes into account that will increase or decrease your search rankgings: Outbound Links Don’t just be inward fo- Article structure cus, link out to other websites for references. clean, have a headline and be linked to Engagement It needs to be other places on your website The Longer someone is on your site the better. Google interprets this result as people finding your content interesting. Bounce Rate This measurement is how many people quickly leave your site without viewing more than one page. The higher the bounce rate, the lower quality your web page is perceived to be. Social Media Are people liking the page, rettweeting, pinning it or using +1? The higher the numbers in social media the more Google will believe people are finding your webpage interesting. Feel Free to Share 22 understanding the basics of search engine optimization At the end of the day, what this means for most folks out there is that if you are already playing by the rules, you aren’t going to be effected by Panda. There are some things to avoid in order to keep Panda from keeping your website from ranking successfully: Don’t copy and paste content from other websites like articles that have been written about you. Provide the link. Don’t be shallow. A couple sentence paragraph with a link is not going to be relevant. Use pictures and video to create content. Ask the question: would you find this interesting or helpful? Does it answer your search? no shallow content Feel Free to Share 23 understanding the basics of search engine optimization International SEO As companies grow, one of the things they start to consider is going international. Understanding how SEO works outside the U.S. can help smooth the transition and save a lot of money. Thankfully if you know how domestic SEO works then you are probably 90% of the way to getting your site found outside the U.S. To get found by local search engines, the best thing to do is like you did in the U.S., start out with a plan like the one following: Feel Free to Share 24 understanding the basics of search engine optimization Know your market. While Google owns 65% of the U.S. market, they own a lot more in some other countries and a lot less in others. For example, if you are going into the Chinese market you will need to have your website optimized for Baidu. If you are looking at Russia then you need to consider Yandex. Know the language. Like you did in the U.S. you need to know your local language, even U.S. English and U.K. English can have some difference in keywords. If you are going with a non-English site, you will need someone with local knowledge to let you know how people search for your product and what those keywords and phrases are. The best person in this situation is typically the salesperson you are hiring in country. Know your website system - Some content management systems like Drupal can support multilingual sites, while others can’t. You need to make sure that stuff published in the U.S. can be pushed to other countries after a translation. You also need to know if you site can do languages that are very different than in the U.S. like Arabic that’s read media sosial medios de comunicacion cocial “ “ srustveni mediji “ Feel Free to Share “ socíalní média social medier “ “ “ meâin shoisialta 25 “ “ “ “ “ “ social media “ “ panlipunan media “ “ les médias sociaux “ right to left. understanding the basics of search engine optimization Location location location - Just like the real estate market, location matters. Search engines will give more preference to a site hosted within a country rather than one outside of a country. Using a content system like Drupal can provide a master website and database in the U.S. hosting that allows a site hosted in Spain to pull information. Thankfully, the rest of the SEO evaluation is the same. You still need headings (h1 tags) Page Titles, clean URLs and Alt Tags. The only difference is these will need to be filled with language unique to the territory. Feel Free to Share 26 understanding the basics of search engine optimization Doing your own SEO Audit So now that we know enough about SEO to be dangerous how can someone do their own SEO audit? Let’s start with a keyword list. What is the name of your company? What do you sell? Come up with a list of 50 keywords so you can see how many of them are on your website. Run Screaming Frog, you enter your URL at the top and the frog does the rest. You will get an output of all your webpages and how it looks to Google. Feel Free to Share 27 understanding the basics of search engine optimization “404” Sort by response code. Look for 404. These are links that are broken. They need to be fixed so you can make sure Google and your potential customers can find the information you want them to find. You can fix them by either correcting the broken link to where you want it go. Start with Internal and then click on External to make sure any outbound links like say your Facebook Page is not broken Click on Page Titles How many are Steps 1-5 will give you a pretty good idea blank? How many contain just your com- in a short amount of time on how much pany name? How many are unique? Google can see of your site and index it. How many are on your keyword list? If your site has lots of blanks or it uses your company name only, very little is going Click on H1 - Same questions - How to be indexed. many are blank? How many are unique? How many of them are on your keyword However, if your site contain lots of key- list? words, it might be simply that you need to swap out keywords for less competitive Click on URL How many of the URLs words so you can rank higher. Now that contain gobbly gook like numbers or % we are done with the internal audit we signs or #s? This means your URLs aren’t can look at moving to an external audit clean and if you can’t see words, neither to see how we may be able to improve can Google. How many of your URLs rankings simply by getting links submitted contain some of your keywords? Click to Google and fixing any errors. on Images an then click on Image Info. This will check the Alt Tags How many of these have blanks? How many contain your keywords. Feel Free to Share 28 understanding the basics of search engine optimization Go to your website and enter your website in two ways the first one with www and the second without www. Did one site change to the other or did it stay as www or without www? If it didn’t change, according to Google you have two different sites and the links to your www site don’t count towards your non-www site. You can fix this by redirecting one site to the other. This one fix can have huge implications on search. Logon to Google Webmaster and choose your website. If you don’t have access, you can associate your account with Google Analytics. = Redirect If you have a webmaster account set up, you will land 2xre Mo s t i s i V on the Dashboard. In the right hand corner you will see errors. Click on Crawl errors. These URLs will be bad redirects from other sites or in your own site. You will see the source of the error. By fixing these errors you can get the link credit and improve your web pages search result. Go back to the dashboard and go down to site map. If you have a site map, submit it to Google. This will tell Google where all your pages are so they can index them all. Feel Free to Share 29 understanding the basics of search engine optimization The last step in an external audit is to see how you rank againist other sites and get a baseline on how many people link to your site. One of the best sites for this is open site explorer. Enter your website URL. You will get a report and it will give you a pretty good idea of how many people link to you Page Authority This measures how the search engines view your page based on the amount of links to the page and the quality of those links Domain Authority Your overall domain and how search engines view it as having relevance. The higher you get to 100 the better. Linking root domains Here are the websites that link to you. Total links The total number links to your website. These numbers are updated once a month and they give website owners a very good baseline on where their website stands in the view of the search engines. Feel Free to Share 30 understanding the basics of search engine optimization Conclusion Search Engine Optimization can be a difficult subject to understand. We have only scratched the surface in this eBook but we hope it gives you an idea of how SEO works and how you can figure out some of the mysteries of SEO on your own. Feel Free to Share 31 The Hows and Whys of Content Management a publication of digital firefly marketing Introduction to Content Marketing the hows and whys of content management and production What is Content Marketing? Content marketing is the process of creating video, articles, ebooks, how-to guides, social media updates, picture galleries, infographs, webinars, or other forms of media about your business or brand. Creating content, posting it on your website, then promoting it via social media, Google search and payper-click brings traffic to your website. The more people who come to your website, the more likely they are to buy from you, give you their email as a lead, or follow your business on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest. Your Site Feel Free to Share 3 the hows and whys of content management and production The real beauty of content marketing is that it can create a snowball effect for your website. For example, let’s say your website sells plates, cups, etc., so you write a blog called “How to set a table.” Once the blog is published and pushed out via email marketing and social media, amazing things start to happen. First, people begin to visit your site. They may not come in droves immediately, but you will start to see an increase in traffic as social media does its early magic. Then, Google indexes your page, so when people search “How to set a table” you may appear on the first or second page of results, and continue to get visits even after the social media buzz of the post has died down. Content marketing at its core is about creating assets for your website that people can use over and over again. What makes it effective is that the increased traffic of potential buyers will continue as it lives on forever thanks to Google searches. Feel Free to Share 4 the hows and whys of content management and production The Beauty of it All The beauty of content marketing comes down to its cost. It’s pretty cheap. The cost can usually be borne in one of two ways—either existing employees are charged with writing blogs or creating videos, making the additional costs minimal. Another option is to hire out to a firm specializing in content marketing, either on a project basis or on a monthly retainer. If you decide to hire one of these companies, you will usually end up spending anywhere from $1,500 per month up to $12,000, depending on the amount of content that needs to be produced. December 2010 wrote it then October 2012 still getting visits While that may sound expensive, it can be quite efficient in comparison to other forms of marketing. For example, hiring a PR firm can cost $10,000 a month, Google AdWords can easily be in the thousands of dollars, and direct mail, TV and newspaper ads are all also relatively expensive. One entrepreneur recently featured in the Sunday business section of the New York Times reports spending $290,000 on newspaper ads. Lastly, while you pay for every mailing and every TV spot, you don’t pay for every visit to your site via Google search. A blog you wrote a year ago can still bring you a great deal of traffic; and that traffic is free! Feel Free to Share 5 the hows and whys of content management and production Not only is content marketing relatively inexpensive, but it can also create a much better user experience. Traditional advertising is based on distraction. Advertisers want a user to become aware of the ad by distracting them. For example, creating a TV ad during a show, or sending a piece of direct mail among their other bills and letters, or creating a pop-up ad on a site are all ways to distract someone from their ry e v e rit w s y s. wa g l o a l b y ul f The t h g insi heir t e s du l u o sh I e b es! c i v r May se current activity Content marketing, on the other hand, is based on intent and is similar to advertising in the Yellow Pages. You start by creating pertinent content that people are looking for and want to read. In this manner you end up having their complete and undivided attention—and aren’t distracting them from their day-to-day routine. Feel Free to Share 6 Know Your Brand the hows and whys of content management and production How should you start a content marketing strategy? Like any marketing strategy, two factors need to be considered: What are you selling? Who is your audience? Knowing what you sell is the easiest to answer if you are a retailer, but can be a little bit trickier if you are selling business-to-business. If you are a retailer you should look at your store and ask what’s your inventory? Are you selling things that are niche or more general items? Consider Blogging About This You Sell This If you sell golf clubs and lessons, what you are really selling is golf services, so the Fair Trade Coffee Benefits of a French Press Why Itallians like their Espresso Your Local Coffee Shop Coffee Shop Horror Stories How to make the perfect Mocha content you create should be centered around golf. If you are selling espresso coffee equipment, then you need to think about creating content around the proper use of coffee equipment to make the perfect espresso. You need to make sure the content is useful and informative to your consumers. Feel Free to Share 8 the hows and whys of content management and production While retailers have a straightforward approach to creating content, business-to-business services can be a bit confusing and hard to pin down. However, the best thing to do here is to discuss your industry. For example, Hubspot is a company that provides software for business to create and manage digital marketing. So in order to promote their company via content marketing, they create a great deal of content around the digital marketing industry. They write blogs about Facebook and email marketing, have webinars about blogging for business, and do infographs about all things digital. If you are business-to-business and choose to create your own content, the same kind of rules apply to you as they would business to consumer; create content around your industry, focusing on your expertise. Here are some easy to follow steps to give your content creation a boost. Feel Free to Share 9 1 the hows and whys of content management and production Understand how people buy your product Once you have figured out what you are selling and who you are selling to, it’s time to start creating a funnel. The reason we create a funnel is to develop pieces of content that map to each part of the sales cycle, making sure we are providing useful content to each of our buyer types. The typical funnel we see looks something like this: What they Ask Buyer Type How to Target Them Unaware Buyers Blog Articles, Ads, Web Banners, PR, Customer Content, Likes, Tweets, Pins AWARENESS What is it? Who are you? Who needs it and why? How would it be useful to me Interested Buyers What are the consequences of NOT having it? What are my options? Why should I choose you? Ready To Buy Buy and Upsell EDUCATIONAL OFFERS “How To” books, Videos, Nurturing Emails VALIDATION OFFERS Coupons and Special Offers, Targeted Emails based on Lead’s Data SALES OFFERS Offer more while in line, Additional Products Feel Free to Share 10 the hows and whys of content management and production At the top of the funnel are people who have no idea about you or your business, Because they are totally unaware of what you do, we want to use marketing to introduce your service to these people. Once consumers become aware of your business, they will try and figure out if they need it and why. Why do I need to pay you for golf lessons? Why is your coffee better than someone else’s? Here you want to educate people on why your brand or business is something they need. After you have convinced a person that they can’t live without your service, you need to get them over the finish line—and to the cash register. At this point, you can offer them content like coupons, sweepstakes, etc., to give them extra incentive to buy. Finally, once a person has committed to purchase, make sure to continually engage them and encourage them to buy more of your product. As a lead or prospect moves through the sales cycle, content marketing uses different forms of content to drive them farther and farther down the funnel. In order to map where the content goes in the funnel, it’s important to first know what content you have and what content you need to create. Feel Free to Share 11 2 the hows and whys of content management and production Start with what you already have. No business starts out empty handed in the way of content. Every business has someYour Website HEADING thing that they use to help sell their product or service. It could be an advertisement in a newspaper, a flyer, or pictures from an event. Anything that can be digitized or is already in digital format such as pictures, can be used as a piece of content marketing. One of the first things to do is a content audit. What have you or your employees created that has been successful? Does anyone have an awesome PowerPoint presentation or video from his or her presentation? Are their pictures from a company event? Once there is a list of the content you own, you need to start mapping it back to your sales process. Feel Free to Share 12 3 the hows and whys of content management and production Map your content to the buying cycle. Now that you have created the funnel and a list of all your content, it’s time to map each piece of content back to the funnel. This way, no matter where a lead is in the sales process, you can give them a piece of content that moves them along. The first stage of the funnel is when customers are un- Status Update: Shout out to @whoisstudio for earning their first #communicator aware of your company so they need to discover and understand your brand. This is known as brand aware- Congratulations! 6 new pins were added this week Status Update: We’ve made it into the top 100! ness. Content that helps raise brand awareness are blogs that can be found via search engines, social media market- Why Digital Marketing Agencies can save your Start-Up Business. Status Update: In a day & age when even your grandmother is updating her facebook status, the audience your business is targeting is ever growing...[Read More] We’re launching our newest ebook in 7 days! Be ready! ing shared through likes, pins and tweets, and paid advertisement such as AdWords or banner ads. You want to ensure you have a blog on your website along with social media pages on Facebook and Twitter that you update at least 20 times a month to keep your brand within the Content Here! newsfeeds and to provide useful content for users who stumble upon your site. You may consider buying ads at this point as well to keep people aware of what services you are providing. Feel Free to Share 13 the hows and whys of content management and production The second stage of the funnel is your chance to show your expertise to the prospect. In this stage you will want to share case studies, perform webinars, share customer testimonials, as well as share your pricing. Some of this content may live behind an email form. For example, you may not want to send out case studies without getting an email address (aka: a lead) from someone. It’s up to you to decide whether or not the content needs to live behind a form or if it’s valuable enough for someone to give you his or her email address. Typically we see ebooks, webinars, and demos live behind forms, while blogs and other content are available to the public. However, the other content that is available should have forms leading to the next phase in the funnel. For example if they are looking at pricing they probably are more interested in buying than someone just reading your blog. A form asking you for a quote would be something to put in this stage of the funnel. Feel Free to Share 14 the hows and whys of content management and production Now you’ve reached the third stage. Once people are ready to purchase, you need to make it easy for them to do so! Creating a cart or a detailed product suite where people can pick and choose is a great way to get product out the door. You could also use mega sites like Amazon that can sell it as a third party. Lastly, now that they have purchased something, how can you get them to buy more? Sending out emails showing usage and how you might be bumping up against the limit along with new products that are similar to what they just bought are great ways to use content to have people buy again. Feel Free to Share 15 4 the hows and whys of content management and production Create an Editorial Calendar Now that you have all of your content inventoried and you have a funnel that is mapped out, you will have a better understanding of what content still needs to be created. The best thing to do is to start with a goal, usually 3 months out. For example, maybe you want to have a huge Holiday Season or Father’s day. Maybe you are a business that wants to reach a certain amount of subscribers online. Starting with a goal lets you work backwards in terms of planning and theme. Next, create a calendar and use a project management system, such as Basecamp. If you know that you need to blog twice a week to get “x” number of sales on Christmas, then you need to put each of those blogs on your calendar so you know when they need to be written. December Blogs Feel Free to Share 16 the hows and whys of content management and production Now you have to do what most people dread…actually create content. It’s not as arduous as people think. It’s OK to be flexible about your subject material. Read blogs and news in your category and industry for inspiration on what blogs to write, what offers may make sense, and what webinars to perform. But be sure to always create original and useful content. Secondly, don’t make it the responsibility of just one person. This is a case of many hands making the workload lighter, so encourage employees to contribute to the blog and to the social media account. Use one person as a gatekeeper to keep the content in the same voice and provide some editing help, but having more employees writing blogs is a great way to build a lot of content very quickly. Social Media December Blo gs Updates by Sean Infographs by Marissa Blogs by John Press Releases by Tim Feel Free to Share Videos by Rony the hows and whys of content management and production Kill two birds with one stone—if you are doing a presentation or webinar, record it! There are a lot of programs available for both Macs and PCs which allow you to record from the screen. Once you have the file, you can upload it to YouTube and embed the YouTube player onto your website. Voilà! Don’t feel like you always need to be serious or on brand. Show your workplace culture by showing dogs in the office, big employee news, company BBQs and any other fun event that will show people more of your company than just your products. You Tube Use software such as Basecamp as a repository of ideas so that if you are stuck for a blog article, you can turn to the idea repository to get a quick blog out the door. Feel Free to Share 18 the hows and whys of content management and production Take content and use it in another form. If you have a great presentation about your industry, it’s pretty easy to turn it into a blog. Or if you wrote a great how-to blog, create a quick YouTube video that you can embed on your site to show the actual process in action. Recycling your content is a great way to reach a broader audience. Lastly, a tried and true way of creating content is to do a survey using services like Survey Monkey, then turning the content and results into a blog. For example, maybe you do a survey on top 5 gift ideas for Mom on Mother’s day. Once you get the results you write a blog called, Top 5 gifts for Mom on Mother’s day (which is a highly searched term right before Mother’s day) simply by providing the results of your survey. Getting that information on your website can attract people looking for a specific gift. Feel Free to Share 19 5 the hows and whys of content management and production Push out your Content Once you create this content you need to make sure people become aware of it. This is when you use different channels for different points in the funnel and on the website to make people start to sit up and take notice. Don’t be upset if the content only brings in a trickle of traffic at first— it’s out in the world wide web and will often keep on giving. The content will need keywords so that Google can index it properly. Use the Google keywords tool and insight tool to research what keywords people are searching for and whether or not that word is competitive. You want to choose keywords that are low to medium in competition, but still have a lot of searches. This is a passive strategy as it will depend on people searching for those keywords and arriving at your website, but avoids getting buried on Google Search. Feel Free to Share 20 the hows and whys of content management and production Use your social media to share YouTube videos, new offers, news, blogs, etc. Always make sure you include a link back to the site so people can arrive on your site rather than staying on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest. Email is a great channel to use in all phases of marketing. Setting up an email form on your blog allows visitors to receive new content automatically when its published. Using lead nurturing can ensure you deliver offers to people in the right cycle. For example, if a lead looked at your pricing page, it might be beneficial to send them a special offer or some customer testimonials. If you have some budget left over, using Pay-Per-Click and press releases are great options to drive content traffic to your site. Feel Free to Share 21 Keeping Content Fresh the hows and whys of content management and production Write Two Blogs and call Google in the Morning. In June of 2010, Google released Google Caffeine, which can be argued has had more of an effect on websites than either Google Panda or Penguin. Google Caffeine was an update to the way Google indexes sites, because when you actually search Google you don’t search the web, you search Google’s index, while Panda and Penguin are updates to how Google ranks your website. Prior to the change, Google had layers of indexes that were updated at different rates, with the main index being updated every few weeks. So if you ranked highly in the main index, you didn’t have to do anything to keep your new ranking because the index didn’t change very often. This is why SEO was actually pretty important, you changed a few things and added some links and then BAM you were in the top ten for a good long time. Caffeine upended that SEO strategy, because now the Google index is updated in real time. As content becomes available, it can be indexed quite quickly by Google and appear in the Google search index, pushing people out of the top ten sooner rather than later as the index updates very quickly. Feel Free to Share 23 the hows and whys of content management and production Why Digital Marketing Agencies can save your Start-Up Business. In a day & age when even your grandmother is updating her facebook status, the audience your business is targeting is ever growing...[Read More] The second change Google made is called Google Freshness. This change is related to the page ranking Google uses to rank websites for each search from one to infinity. The change to algorithm looks for the freshest content on a subject, so if someone Googles “NFL scores” the most recent update on NFL scores is shown. This means that a site that may not have the highest page rank but the freshest content on a subject, may be ranked higher in the results for a small amount of time. Due to these changes, its imperative that site owners keep updating their sites to maintain their rankings within Google. This content must be original in nature and not a simple pull of aggregated content; using strategies like blogging, picture galleries, social media updates, comments and customer reviews will keep your site fresh. Websites that don’t stay fresh will slowly lose search rankings over time. Feel Free to Share 24 the hows and whys of content management and production Conclusion Content marketing is a not only an inexpensive and easy way to get traffic to your website, it is also an effective tactic. Like exercise, or taking vitamins, you have to do a little bit every day to get the desired effect. However, unlike exercise you can hire someone to do the job for you. Like any forms of marketing, whether you do it yourself or hire an agency, being aligned with sales is of utmost importance. If your content doesn’t point people in the direction of sales, then the likelihood the content will result in sales will be minimal. Content marketing in lockstep with a sales process becomes a powerful tool to market your brand and website and drive leads and sales. Feel Free to Share 25 Contact If you are looking for help for your business’s content marketing, please contact us for your free evaluation @digitalfirefly1 www.facebook.com/digital.firefly.marketing [email protected] (609) 472-0750 The Science and Art of Website Design a publication of digital firefly marketing get the most out of your website redesign Getting the Most out of Your Redesign Websites have changed over the last ten years. Not long ago, you were safe with static websites that were little more than brochure sites and could simply sit and make sales, take information etc. In today’s 24/7, always able to Google, social media world, you need a website that is easy to update, even for a user of limited technical skillls and will be easy to customize for two important reasons: 1. It’s easy for Google to find and index your site 2. It’s easy for people to convert into leads so you can sell them services or products in the futures A new website design isn’t just about look and feel. It’s about the guts of the system, how easy it is to use and how much functionality it has. A website redesign can start with the branding but it should always contain and use functionality that lets it thrive in today’s Google/Facebook world. Feel Free to Share 2 Step 1: Determine Whether a Redesign is Right for You get the most out of your website redesign The first step to determine if a website redesign is something you and your organization should undertake is to look at your current website and ask yourself if it’s really meeting your needs. Here are five questions you can ask to determine whether or not you need a new website: Should I redesign? Are you able to track data on your website using a data package like Google Analytics? Is your website easy to update or do you have to “call” someone? Does your website provide your company with leads? Do you know why people are coming to your website? Can people find your website easily? If the answer to any of the above is “no” then you really need to consider getting a new website. Feel Free to Share 4 get the most out of your website redesign Not only should you ask yourself questions…you should also avoid some wrong reasons for redesigning the site. Wrong Reasons Right Reasons “We have a new corporate look “We want to get found by more and feel.” prospects.” “It’s been 12 monthys since our “We want to convert more pros- last redesign.” pects into leads and eventually, into customers.” “Our CEO wants to do it.” “We want to update the site ourselves” Takeaways Misguided reasons for redesigning your website are driven by the thought that the freshness and “wow factor” of a new website will increase excitement over your brand. The main motivations behind website renovations should be to improve the performance of your website. A beautiful website, although intriguing and aesthetically pleasing, is secondary to a functional traffic and lead generating website. Feel Free to Share 5 Step 2: Make Sure You Proctect Your Website’s Assets get the most out of your website redesign Website design and development can be complicated even for the technically minded among us. Configuring a website can be easy which can make mistakes and omissions even easier. So before you start developing and designing a new website presence you need to take stock of your current website’s assets and you may be surprised how many it has. Asset Check List Determine how many pages you have. Figure out which pages are most popular/powerful. Determine how many inbound links you have. Establish where these links are coming from. Look up what interior pages have inbound links. Find which inbound links are most popular/powerful. Determine what keywords you rank for before the move. Figure out which keywords are most effective. Feel Free to Share 7 get the most out of your website redesign Takeaways Like our questions above, if you are not able to determine the asset checklist then you are most likely in need of a new website. Google Analytics and Google webmaster tools are free tools to go through the asset checklist. If you do not fully understand the importance and practice of proper SEO, doing a web design can be more damaging than helpful. If you do not feel comfortable around SEO work, it may be best to hire a specialist to perform an SEO audit and the redesign so all the hard work you have put into making a web presence does not disappear. It may also be time to contact a professional to set you up with a system that can track these metrics if you don’t already have a system in place. Feel Free to Share 8 Step 3: Choose a Content Management System Wisely get the most out of your website redesign One mistake people and companies often make is choosing the wrong content management system. First off, a content management system is software that will run your website. There are a number of content management systems to choose from each with their pros and cons. We typically recommend using the following depending on a customer’s needs: Drupal Create simple to robust websites that are SEO compliant out of the box and has a ton of functionality that can be installed. Drupal also integrates with a lot of other 3rd party providers like MailChimp for email that can really increase your functionality. Drupal is free software that can either be configured by you or can be configured by a developer so you can use it to keep your website up to date. Hubspot Hubspot is a great one stop shop for inbound marketing and it a great solution for small businesses that don’t want to configure multiple systems but want something to work. You can create all of your webpages and blogs as well as manage your email, manage social media marketing--measuring everything from one place. You Tube Feel Free to Share 10 get the most out of your website redesign No matter what system you choose you should ask yourself the following quesitions: 1 2 3 4 Can I update the website myself without calling anyone? If I update it in one place, does it update everywhere on the website? Is there a mobile version of the site? Is it being indexed by Google? If the answer is no to any of these, you should not consider that system. Takeaways Your website is going to be a living breathing extension of your person and company. You need to make sure you can keep it under your control and not waste endless ammounts of money on updates and calls to the developer. It also needs to be with the times, meaning it needs to be easy to create a mobile version of the site and very search engine friendly. Feel Free to Share 11 Step 4: Keep Your Homepage Simple, Stuipd! get the most out of your website redesign One key concept that can be used to describe effective website design is don’t make me think. You don’t want people to spend any amount of time looking for content then is necessary. Keep the home page simple and uncluttered so people can have an easy to time find what they want. The Most Important Factors of Website Design 10% The website 5% Some Other Reason has a beautiful appearence 76% The website makes it easy for me to do what I want 9% The website offers a cutting edge interface experience Feel Free to Share 13 get the most out of your website redesign While simple design rules, so people can find what they want there are 5 core rules to follow for any home page: Decide if you want to be http://www.yourdomain.com or `http://yourdomain.com and set up a 301 redirect from the one you didn’t choose. This way if someone links to the other homepage, you will get SEO credit for it. If you have more than 5 services, put each service under 4 overarching themes that people can drill into, more than 5 services will clutter the page. Hightlight Recent News and Blogs on the home page so people Unless you are a multimedia site, keep the use of sound to a minimium. Nothing drives people away like sudden music coming out of a website when it’s unexpected. Put links to your social media page on the home page and make the boxes BIG and above the fold so can see that your website is being updated people can find them. Don’t put microscopic Facebook icons in the gutter of the webpage where no one can see them and hence no one can follow you on Facebookl Feel Free to Share 14 get the most out of your website redesign Takeaways Your homepage is the face of your services or products. You only get one chance to impress that visitor, so make sure you carefully place the essentials you want them to know on your homepage. It should also act as a launching platform to places where they can contact you in the future (i.e. blog, social media, etc.) My Name is: 15 Step 5: Focus on Continuous Original Content that Attracts and Converts get the most out of your website redesign Most websites start out very small, usually around 10-20 pages. How can you grow the size of your website if you don’t offer any more products and services? The best way to grow your website is to blog and to blog about the industry that you are in. If you sell coffee, blog about coffee, if you sell dresses, blog about women’s fashion, if you sell financial management, blog about finance. If you started with 10-20 pages and blogged once a week for a year you would have quadrupled the size of you site. Not only does blogging increase the size of your website, but you also end up getting a snowball effect. vs Blogging results in a 55% increase in web- Companies that blog have 2x as many site visitors. twitter followers than those that don’t. 3 4 3% Search engines like fresh content, Companies that blog have 97% more which will increase your number of inbound links than those that don’t. and indexed pages and chances for more getting more links to your website is one traffic of the keys to reaching number one in 4 Google search results. get the most out of your website redesign Now, one thing people tend to draw a blank on is what content do I put on my blog? Do they all have to be opinion pieces and the answer is decidedly NO! Here is content that you can use on your blog that you may already have. Original Content Vehicles: e-books blog Video (Youtube) Photo (Fliker) Podcast News Release Presentation (Slideshare) A blog can be anything, but most of all it should be original and informative. It’s also important, if you don’t have time, hire someone to do it for you or use an employee to create content. The new work force today has more experience than ever on producing multi media content and sharing it on the Internet. Takeaways Original content is your website’s messenger; it will inform your prospects on what you do, and how passionately you do it. With a vast array of formats to create content on, you should always be continuously contributing original content to keep your prospects engaged and constantly interacting with your website. Step 6: Format Your Landing Pages Properly get the most out of your website redesign Now that you have a pretty new webiste that actually works in terms of form and function and you are blogging, you need to start to capture some of those people who are on your website and capturing those people is all about creating landing pages and leads. Landing pages are areas on a website that offer something like a book, a how to guide, or email sign-up with a corresponding form. Leads are people who have expressed some kind of interest in your service and provided you with information such as an email address. They may not be ready to buy, but they have shown interest. visitors landing page leads Feel Free to Share 20 get the most out of your website redesign Landing pages are areas on a website that offer a offer and a form. Those forms generate leads. There are three kinds of landing pages people can create to get leads. General Information Offering a how-to ebook or general product catalog is a great way to get someone’s interest about your service. They aren’t ready to buy something specific but they have shown they want more information Specific Information Offering a specific evaluation or assessment to get someone more interested. For example, offering to send someone specials for any clothing sizes they prefer or performing a free evaluation on their house would be an example of this kind of lead Contact Us/Buy People are really interested in your service and want to talk to you, make an appointment, or discuss an opportunity or they buy from your e-commerce store. Feel Free to Share 21 get the most out of your website redesign Best Practices Designing landing pages still holds to the credo of keep it simple so there are some best practices to follow to make sure your landing pages generate a lot of leads. 1 Make sure the form is “above the fold” don’t make people 2 Keep the offer simple, clear and concise. Here is what you pan down to get it are going to get and here is how we are going to deliver it. 3 Experiment with your Site. Your website should be able to use Google website optimizer. Google’s website optimizer will show people your original landing page and your experiment page so you can see if people convert more with different language, colors or placement of buttons. Takeaways Landing pages are where the magic happens; they are the gateway to your conversion offers that create engaged and interested leads. Make sure you can grab their attention with an interesting offer, but also coherently explain what you are offering through the landing page! Not only should you create one landing page but multiples so you can try new things. Don’t be overly reliant on what everyone “thinks” is the right answer, test it out on real live visitors and KNOW which webpage performs best. Feel Free to Share 22 Step 7: Review Your Metrics on Visitors and Leads get the most out of your website redesign Once your website is live you need to be able to see what your website is doing. Metrics are the heartbeat of any website and will tell us if the website is healthy or about to have a heart attack. Metrics will also tells us some very important information and they need to be reviewed on a monthly basis. Analytics Rd. 3 rules of the road for analytics 1 Concern yourself with the following statistics which are your bread and butter Visitors. How many people are coming to my website? Where are they coming from? Google? Facebook? Leads. How many visitors converted to leads? What did they convert on? Which offers worked, which didn’t? Sales. How many leads converted to sales? Feel Free to Share 24 get the most out of your website redesign 2 Trending Now that you know where your traffic is coming from, now you need to see if it’s improving. For each of the three statistics, are the stats going up or down com pared to last month or last year? 3 Technical stats to consider: Bounce Rate If your bounce rate is above 40% people are coming to your site and leaving immediately at too high a rate, meaning your site is either slow or uninteresting. Look at this stat by page to zero in on exactly what content people don’t like or is having technical difficulties. Time on site Make sure the time on site is north of two minutes so people are actually READING your content Demographics Getting a lot of mobile? A lot of international? Maybe it’s time to make your site mobile or international with multi-Lingual. Takeaways Metrics are pivotal for pinpointing the exact pain points of your website. By doing small, but constant adjustments to your website, you will be able to maximize the utility of your website so it becomes a platform for generating visitors, leads, and ultimately, sales. They are the eyes, ears and hearbeat or your website that will keep you in the know on what is happening with your marketing and your sales. Feel Free to Share 25 Now What? Avoid Common Pitfalls and Redesign Mistakes get the most out of your website redesign The biggest mistake a lot of companies make is doing a website design simply on looks alone. Looks and clean design are important, but nothing will waste time and money more quickly than a website that doesn’t have the right tools in place. For example, if you spend a ton of money on a TV ad or a Google AdWords campaign and you can’t see where the traffic came from or how many leads you generated, how will you know if you were successful? Trash Always start off with an audit of your websites assests so you can make sure the new website contains all your assets once it is moved and your previous presence is not diminished. Feel Free to Share 27 get the most out of your website redesign Choose a system that meets your needs and doesn’t keep you awake at night because its too costly or too creaky. 1 When you start to design your 2 homepage, make it simple and easy to use not only for the user but 3 4 5 for you and your staff so you can keep the website updated. Once your homepage is designed, let it dictate the design of the rest of your site. 6 7 Now that your site is up, you need to start making it convert and that 8 starts with landing pages. 9 When the landing pages are converting, try testing them out, which 10 ones work, which ones don’t Never stop measuring so you know what’s working and what’s broken. This will keep your website healthy and most importantly, it will give you more opportunities to make money. Feel Free to Share 28 get the most out of your website redesign Wrap Up Redesign projects can be laborious. While design can be beautiful most companies are better suited at trying to get more out of what they already have which means more functionality. Marketing tactics such as SEO, blogging, and social media are easy to include in your existing site, and are twice as effective as traditional web redesign elements. You should strive to make small, but constant and continuous improvements to each element of your current website so your website becomes a powerful traffic-generating machine. Feel Free to Share 29 If you’d like to discuss how we can help redesign your website and kickstart your digital marketing... Contact Us Digital Firefly Marketing [email protected] (609) 630-0764 @digitalfirefly1 www.facebook.com/digital.firefly.marketing Sources Unless Cited 1 MARKETSHARE.HITSLINK.COM, October 2011 2 Hubspot, The Science of Website Redesign, June 2011 3 Hubspot, 2010 4 Hubspot, State of Inbound Marketing Lead Generation Report, 2010 5 hubspot, Webinar-Redesign Strategy, 2010 Content Written by John Cashman, Digital Firefly Marketing LLC Design by Marissa Treece, Digital FIrefly Marketing LLC harnessing the power and making an impact a publication of digital firefly marketing harnessing the power of social media Why Do I Need Social Media? We are often asked, why do I need to put my business on Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest? Or if clients already have their business on social media, we will hear they don’t have the time to keep their accounts up to date. Lastly, we see a lot of people misuse both Twitter and Facebook--simply blasting out messages without any reason and wonder why people don’t follow or visit their website. In today’s world, not having a social media presence is a kin to not having a Yellow Pages ad twenty years ago. And not having time for social media is pretty much like saying, “I don’t have time to look at sales receipts.” The bottom line is customers have moved online and they increasingly spend most of their day in front of a computer. Social media has become the water cooler hang out on the Internet where 1 in 8 minutes spent on the Internet is spent on Facebook. Feel Free to Share 2 harnessing the power of social media How93% big is Social Media? US Internet users spend 3x more minutes on blogs and social networks than on email.1 v. 93% of US adult Internet users are on Facebook.2 93% More than ½ of active Twitter users follow companies, brands or products on social networks.5 1 out of every 8 minutes online is spent on Facebook.3 v. 79% of US Twitter users are more likely to recommend brands they follow and 67% of US Twitter users are more likely to buy brands they follow.5 49% of people use Facebook to share content.4 49% Feel Free to Share 3 harnessing the power of social media Social media marketing for business is simply about fishing where the fish are. You build an audience on Facebook through likes and on Twitter though followers. When you produce content like blogs, new products, new videos, events or new pictures of your store you use social media channels to share your product with your audience. Take Aways Social media amplifies your product, your website and your brand. It allows for you to establish and foster a more personal relationship with your potential customers, and when done correctly, can generate website traffic, inbound links, leads and sales for you. Feel Free to Share 4 harnessing the power of social media Setting up Your Facebook Page If you had to pick only one social network to be on IT SHOULD BE Facebook. Facebook is the largest referring of traffic on the Internet and getting people from Facebook to your website is what social media is all about. Think of your Facebook as a mini website. It should require the same care and detail you put in your traditional website. You should also make sure you think about ways to generate LIKES. Think outside the box: “how do I get people to LIKE my page so they continue to see my brand in their newsfeeds”. The people who like you are likely to hit on one of your links and end up on your site to either buy or give you a call. Feel Free to Share 5 harnessing the power of social media The first thing to realize is people on Facebook have profiles while businesses have pages. Both currently work with Facebook’s timeline so a business can show it’s history over the years. Step 1: Cover Photo When you think about how you want your business page to look, think about what your business is about. What do you sell? These should be your considerations when you decide on a cover photos. Some examples of pages that have GREAT cover photos that quickly explain what these business do: visit Starbucks’ page visit Harley Davidson’s page Feel Free to Share 6 harnessing the power of social media Step 2: Tabs Before Facebook timeline, many brands would put up a big welcome page that asked you to LIKE them before seeing any content or give you a special offer. With Timeline, that is no longer the case, but what you can have is Tabs that either require someone to like your page or are available to the general public. No matter what, one tab is always present and that tab is Photos. All the other tabs can be deleted or situated as you see fit. Some examples of Tabs you may want to make available Coupons Premium Content such as webinars Sweepstakes Feel Free to Share harnessing the power of social media Videos You can link your YouTube channel or upload videos to you Facebook account You Tube Presentations One of the best things to do is to link your slideshare account if you are a B2B and share presentations with your social media audience. Places Tell people where you are located! Currently each business page can only have one “place” so if you have multiple locations then you need multiple Facebook pages. Having a place allows people to check in and show you they were there. Feel Free to Share 8 harnessing the power of social media Step 4: Milestones Present Do you remember the day your business started? Or the day you sold your first good? Or opened your second store? Or went pub- Jan 2012 lic? Or reached 100 employees? Valued at $100 Million Those are milestones and they tell the story of your business. Some businesses show some real creativity when it comes to mile- Feb 2011 stones—like Coca-Cola going all Voted Best Place to Work the way back to 1886! Adding milestones gives depth Aug 2010 to your Facebook page and City’s Best Award Winner shows people how long your business has been booming! Creating a history behind your business gives followers a sense of security and familiarity, and makes them more comfortable developing a relationship with a Sept 2009 2nd Employee company or brand. May 2009 Founded Feel Free to Share 9 harnessing the power of social media Takeaway Make sure your Facebook page is as inviting as possible. The format of your page should first be focused on creating an engaging environment for your fans, which when executed properly, will result in generating and collecting more information about your leads. Be as creative as pos- open sible, and determine which activities or apps would best supplement your company’s brand. And remember…keep the message simple. If you sell coffee…keep your page about coffee! Feel Free to Share 10 harnessing the power of social media Using and Growing your Page OK. So you have set up the Facebook page…now what? Now you have to start adding content--and this is where most people run into trouble. People are often time constrained or they don’t know the best way to start working Facebook as a business v. Facebook as themselves. The best advice on how to manage Facebook as a business is to think about using Facebook like you already use Facebook as a person. 1 2 3 4 Don’t be overly salesy. Be personable and share knowledge about your industry. If you sell golf clubs, do some blogging about why a club fitting is important Videos are a great medium. Use an iPhone to record something quick and some simple video editing like iMovie or Final Cut to edit your video and put it on YouTube. People watch a lot of videos on Facebook. Don’t use buzzwords, arconyms or jargon. People get turned off by these terms. Companies that do this show an average of only 100 fans v. the average Facebook page that has 624 fans. Use common English. Lists using words like “top” make tremendously successful Facebook posts. So things like Top Ten reasons to get on Facebook, Top 7 Twitter Tricks, and Top 5 Facebook Pages of All Time are great posts. Feel Free to Share 11 harnessing the power of social media 5 6 7 8 Post on average about 20 times a month so that’s one post every 1.5 days. This keeps your business top of mind in people’s news feeds so they remember you. Don’t be afraid to use Ads. Facebook Ads is an excellent way to gain followers. You can essentially market to friends of friends using a Facebook sponsored story. Put Like Buttons on every page of your website. This allows individual products and articles to be seen by friends of the people who like them. Post in the morning, at night and on the weekends….51% of American companies ban Facebook at work so get people when they aren’t at work, but when they are at home surfing the Internet and hanging out on Facebook. Takeaway For your customers and prospects to find your Facebook page engaging, they will need enticing materials and regular posts. Your Facebook page should be the launching point to your home website, blog, and other offers. Feel Free to Share 12 harnessing the power of social media Monitoring your Facebook Page Now that people are starting to use your Facebook page they will interact with it by posting comments, sending you messages and posting on your wall. This can be somewhat daunting because Facebook is a public forum where people can say very blunt things about your business. The best way to monitor your Facebook page is through email. In today’s world of iPhone and iPads, make sure your Facebook account is set so Facebook emails you when someone comments or posts on your page. Once you start receiving emails when people post or comment, you can respond back via email. As with everything Facebook, there are some rules you should follow: You don’t need to respond to every comment. Feel free to let other members add to the conversation. When you do respond, be short and to the point. Say please and thank you If you get a bad review, wall post or comment, respond quickly! Encourage people to message you off Facebook so you don’t get into a very public conversation If you do get a bad review, leave it up. People will start to distrust your brand if you start taking stuff down. Respond appropriately and If it’s untrue, delete it. You will get spammers on your wall. Feel free to delete their posts and report them. If you don’t, you will get more spammers. Feel Free to Share 13 harnessing the power of social media Setting Up Your Twitter Page Did you read the article about website development? The first thing to understand about Twitter, is that it’s not Facebook. Facebook is really about sharing your brand with your customers and followers, while Twitter is much more about conversation about what’s happening now in your industry. While Facebook may be the water cooler of the Internet, Twitter is the public square. What do you think about their latest brand launch? Twitter also tends to attract a more diverse mix of active consumers wanting to learn about the newest products and latest trends. Twitter can help your brand by allowing you to engage directly with experts, journalists and potentially other folks who may consider you an expert after not too long. The first thing to do when you get a Twitter account is to decide on your handle. Always choose a handle that either is your brand name or very close to your brand name. Experts Advocates Feel Free to Share 14 harnessing the power of social media Once you have chosen a brand name handle, complete your bio. Twitter users who fill out their bio have over 6x times as many followers than those that do not.9 While filling out your bio, let people know what your brand or company does and feel free to use adjectives like expert, guru or leading to show your expertise on a particular subject. Now that you have a Twitter account set up, you will need to make sure your website can help spread the word by installing a 6x the foll owers Tweet button on your blog and other premium pages. Those who put links to their blog, company website, and other social networks on their twitter have 6x more followers than those that don’t. 9 Takeaway It is important for you to establish a relatively casual atmosphere on your Twitter account; it will create a more informal, yet personable and comfortable relationship with potential customers that encourage them to engage with you often. Twitter is all about a global conversation so you want people to feel free to ask you questions and send you feedback. Too many people use Twitter as a megaphone when it’s really more about conversation then shouting. 15 harnessing the power of social media Gaining Exposure and Awareness Folks on Twitter follow influencers and key experts in the industries they are in. This is similar to people subscribing to updates from companies on Facebook. In order to make your Twitter account successful, it is vital to establish relationships with industry leaders so that those industry leaders’ followers can learn about your brand through a resource they trust. When you tweet at someone you, use the “@” symbol, which is seen not only by the Industry leader but also all of their followers. It’s an excellent way to start to become part of the global Twitter community and find people who are interested in the same things you are. OK. So where to start? 1 2 3 4 Like Facebook start with your friends or people who are connected with your personal Twitter account. Connect with journalists and bloggers who cover your industry. Use technorati to identify and start following influencers. Start engaging with the people you follow. Comment on the articles they write, offer your opinion in a clear and concise manner and if they wrote something you also have blog articles on, feel free to share those as well. Engage influencers conversationally so you become part of their conversation and they begin to follow you. Keep a ratio of 1:1 on followers and people you follow. An overbalance will look like you aren’t authoritative and an underbalance looks like you aren’t willing to listen to anyone else. For example, Barrack Obama may have over 15 million followers but also follows 678,000 people. 9 Feel Free to Share 16 harnessing the power of social media Here are some other tools that can help you find influencers in your industry and measure how well you are doing. There is a free version and pro version. The free version will let you do some basic research on journalists to follow and potentially converse with. The pro version gives you a lot more options with search and alerts. Getting press coverage is one of the best ways to get eyeballs and links to your site so it can pay serious dividends if a journalist starts to use you as a source. This tools will show you how much influence you have and on what subjects. The Klout score is like Page Rank in Google. The higher you get the harder it is for you to get up the Klout score. People on Twitter tend to be early adopters. So getting some positive feedback from Twitter folk on your product can help a lot of their followers make a decision to go with you and your company. Takeaway Following these thought leaders will help you find the inspiration for your own content creation, while also providing you with the chance to get in touch with active consumers in your industry. Feel Free to Share 17 harnessing the power of social media Monitoring and Using Twitter One thing Twitter is very good at is spreading news and when it spreads news, it does so very quickly. In 2011, when the East Coast had an earthquake near Washington D.C. The Twitter news traveled faster than the actual earthquake. It’s therefore really important that you monitor your Twitter account for both positive and negative reviews. Your followers will share whatever thoughts they have about you and your product through Twitter. It is your job to highlight good behavior and address problems and complaints up front. However, first things first, Twitter has its own language that people use, so if you want to speak with people it helps to know the language. Feel Free to Share 18 @ RT DM # harnessing the power of social media The @ sign is a public mention. Think of it as saying something to someone speaking publicly--what you say as a member of the audience is just as public to that speaker. RT stands for retweet. This is how content goes viral quickly on Twitter. By retweeting content, you essentially tell the originator of that content, that it was valuable. DM is for Direct Message and is a private message to a person or company. The # is a hashtag and is for tagging a tweet to a specific topic. The topic may someday become trending, meaning more people in Twitter are talking about it. Now that you have a bit of the lingo, you need to decide how you are going to monitor your Twitter account. Similar to Facebook, you can configure Twitter to send you an email every time someone mentions you, or RTs you. Another popular monitoring tool is Tweet Deck which allows you to follow multiple Twitter accounts and can show you a column where you can search for your brand name. You can also schedule Tweets. Scheduled Tweets can be good for time sensitive information, but simply blasting out Tweets is not good mojo in Twitter. Another great tool is Twitter on the iPhone that will notify you every time you are mentioned or RTed. It’s a great way to monitor on the go. When you are prompted by one of your customers with a question, you will get notified by whatever monitoring tool you are using. Answer promptly and directly. By answering their questions, they are 59% more likely to follow you.10 Feel Free to Share 19 harnessing the power of social media As you get used to life in the Twitter universe and begin to build a following, you will need to follow some rules of the road to make sure your influence continues to grow: 1. Try to maintain a 50/50 balance of conversation to simply Tweeting out stuff. 2. In order to help your customers find things that may help them find solutions to their problems or give them more information about what you do, you can favorite certain tweets. This is done by clicking on the star right 50% 50% under the tweet and it will appear in your favorite tab on Twitter. 3. Don’t be afraid to ask people to RT something: You can generate 4x more retweets simply by requesting it.9 Feel Free to Share 20 harnessing the power of social media if-you-arent-using-pinterest?hsCtaTracking=47d61055-e9f8-4668-8c16c67a00e7f874%7Cbc18d12d-ab77-4ae5-adc7-10a0226344e4 4. If you have an event you are promoting or moderating use a #hashtag so people can ask questions or comment on the event or subject. 5. Don’t just Tweet words. Tweet links especially ones that go back to your pages where they can either be converted as a lead or they buy something! 6. Get a unique short URL to extend your brand. You can go to Domain.r and find out and then use it via bit.ly. http://bit.ly/MABvjw Takeaway Your twitter presence should be all about transparency and convenience. Your followers should be able to easily share whatever reactions they have about your blog posts, offers, and company news so more hype and traffic start to buzz around these materials. Feel Free to Share 21 harnessing the power of social media Your Brand Social Media Conclusion By creating an interactive and entertaining social media presence, your business can begin to engage not only with your current customers but prospects as well. Social media gives your business the ability to amplify your voice to hundreds and potentially thousands of people and when Twitter and Facebook are configured and used correctly, they become very important parts of your digital marketing. However, while social media is a powerful tool, it cannot stand alone as an internet marketing solution. In fact, social media comes last when you are deploying a digital marketing strategy. First you need to build a website that is SEO friendly and has many opportunities for people to convert into a lead by providing email addresses. Secondly, you need to discover your voice through blogging and use a key word strategy to maximize the chance those blogs end up at the top of a Google search. Social media assumes you have content to share or something to say, so consider your overall inbound marketing process before you focus in on your social media marketing strategy. Start with a good foundation and then build using social media. Feel Free to Share 22 If you’d like to discuss how we can help set up your social media and kickstart your digital marketing... Contact Us Digital Firefly Marketing [email protected] (609) 630-0764 @digitalfirefly1 www.facebook.com/digital.firefly.marketing harnessing the power of social media Sources 1 The Nielsen Company, November 2010 2 Blogher, April 2011 3 Comscore, February 2011 4 Chadwick Martin Bailey, September 2010 5 Edison Research, 2010 6 Eric Qualman, Social Media Statistics 2011, 2011 7 HubSpot, The Science of Facebook, 2011 8 eMarketer, Online Content Format Shared Most Often by US Internet Users, Feb 2011 9 HubSpot, The Science of Twitter, 2011 10 InboxQ, Social Media’s Loaded Questions, 2010 Written by John Cashman Designed by Marissa Treece Feel Free to Share 24 what it is, how it works, and why you’re crazy if you’re not using it a publication of digital firefly marketing what it is, how it works, and why you’re crazy if you’re not using it. What is Pinterest? Pinterest is a social network that allows people to share collect and share web pages. It’s a little bit different because it does so with visual images rather than links. Simply put pinterest is an online pinboard. You create an account and while you surf the Internet you pin things you find interesting to your board. You can create an infinite number of boards and those boards can be around any subject like humor or gardening. Feel Free to Share 2 what it is, how it works, and why you’re crazy if you’re not using it. Likes = Tweets = = Pins Like Facebook with “Likes” and Twitter with “Tweets”, Pinterest has it’s own language but one that is not very difficult to understand A Pin: An image added to a Pinterest board A Pin board: A set of pins around a common theme that the user decides. Common themes are recipes or places I want to go or outfits I want to buy Pinning: When you put a pin onto a Pinterest board it is called “pinning” Followers/Following: Each account and each board has people that follow it and you the Pinterest user can follow their accounts or individual boards Repin: When someone finds an interesting pin on someone’s board they can repin the pin to their own board. When someone repins a pin to their board, their followers will see it. Feel Free to Share 3 what it is, how it works, and why you’re crazy if you’re not using it. Sharing is caring... and Pinning is Winning Where the idea of Pinterest gets really interesting is in how people are able to share. Like Facebook, people are able to follow different people and brands’ pin boards and they can repin stuff they like to their own board. This is how Pinterest can create a viral traffic push to websites. People keep repinning content they like and every time they repin a piece of content, their followers see it. This has been huge for retailers as many people have pinned clothes, shoes, and related accessories to their boards. By adding this content, people are able to virtually window shop the Internet based on what their friends have pinned. Feel Free to Share 4 what it is, how it works, and why you’re crazy if you’re not using it. Pinterest v. “other networks” One thing we always look at it isn’t whether a network is important but whether or not You Tube it is worthwhile compared to other online social networks like Google plus. This has to do simply with the amount of time a business can dedicate to making a concerted effort to manage and keep that social network page relevant. Pinterest now drives more traffic to retailer websites than Google +, YouTube and LinkedIn combined. The only websites that have more traffic referrals are Facebook and Twitter. The second stat to look at is usage. How often and for how long is a network being used? This simple stat should give you an idea of the probability your board will be seen and shared, because if no one is using it, the likelihood of someone actually coming across your page with all of your hard work is pretty much nil. Recent data from comscore is suggesting what a lot of people already suspected, while there are a lot of users on Google plus, there doesn’t appear to be any real activity. Users spent over 89 min on Pinterest in the month of January but each user on Google plus spent Pinterest 89 3 Google + an average of only three minutes per visit on Google plus. Feel Free to Share 5 what it is, how it works, and why you’re crazy if you’re not using it. Pinterest Setup Currently Pinterest is still in beta, which means you need to get invited to be a member. There are two ways to become a Pinterest member. You’re Invited 1. Go to Pinterest.com and register for an invite. You will be told when you have been given access to Pinterest and can create an account 2. Using Facebook or Twitter, find a friend who is already on Pinterest and have them invite you. Each Pinterest user is given a number of invites to use. For a personal account, you can use your own email address or connect via Facebook. For a business account, we recommend using a Twitter account and using the same email address that is tied to that Twitter account. This makes it much easier for multiple people to pin items to company pinboard. Pinned by Alex Pinned by Beth Feel Free to Share Pinned by Kevin 6 what it is, how it works, and why you’re crazy if you’re not using it. During the activation process, you will begin to set up your profile which is similar to profiles you have set up in Facebook and on Twitter. There are some tricks to optimizing your profile. User Name Your user name on Pinterest is also your URL so you should use your company or product name Profile Picture Your picture should be your logo or product About Us About us should be similar to what you have on Facebook and Twitter and describe what your company or product does. Links Once your profile is approved you can click on the right hand corner and choose settings. By linking to Twitter and providing your website, links to both will show up in your profile. Feel Free to Share 7 what it is, how it works, and why you’re crazy if you’re not using it. Once you have your Pinterest account approved, you will be given five boards to set up. Pinterest will suggest 5 subjects, but they can be anything you want. We recommend using one board that is your company and three boards about your company’s industry. This is where you need to sit back and start thinking about your company and the industry you work in so you can construct a great looking Pinterest profile. “ “ Sit back and start thinking Feel Free to Share 8 what it is, how it works, and why you’re crazy if you’re not using it. Let’s Start with your Company What does it sell? If it sells shoes, you should pin some of your top ten shoes onto the pinboard. If it sells services like Social Media Marketing, it’s beneficial to pin items like blogs you have written about social media or inforgraphs. Another tactic is to pin a client list as well so people can see who you work with. What Industry are you in? If you sell cameras, wouldn’t it make sense to have a board dedicated to photography. If you are a travel agent, why not a board on places you always wanted to go. For a B2B company, you can put up boards like office life or some people that you follow that influence your work. These items should be about the industry you are in, so if you sell shoes, a board on traveling places may not make a lot of sense unless it’s about walking and of course sells shoes. What is your brand’s lifestyle? Are you funny? Stylish? Green? Organic? Some boards around those subjects can help show people what you are all about. Feel Free to Share 9 what it is, how it works, and why you’re crazy if you’re not using it. Once you’re set up... Start Pinning! Start by cruising Pinterest itself to find content that you find interesting. You can filter it by a number of subjects like Photography or gardens and start pinning those items to your various boards. After you have some pins on your boards, you can venture outside Pinterest and into the Internet. The easiest way to start pinning while you cruise the Internet is to install the pin it button in your tool bar of your web browser. Once you find something you find interesting or reflects your brand or industry, you click on the Pin it button and then choose the image and the board you want to pin the image to. That’s it. Once you pin something to the board, all your followers will see it on your page. Feel Free to Share 10 what it is, how it works, and why you’re crazy if you’re not using it. Best Practices for Pinterest Now that you have these boards up, what are some of the best ways to maintain them, and not have people think you are just marketing to them. One of our rules of thumb in digital marketing is market like you are at a cocktail party. “ market yourself like you’re at a cocktail party “ Don’t just start selling. Introduce yourself. Tell people who you are and yes what you may be selling, but hey if you just want to talk about travel, then let’s just talk about travel. Feel Free to Share 11 what it is, how it works, and why you’re crazy if you’re not using it. Rules of the Pinterest Road Pin equally to all boards. Try to update your pinboards about once a week. Repin some items from you followers if it accurately reflects one of your boards. Use the icons! Use follow icons on your website so people can follow your brand. You can also install a “pin it” button similar to the Facebook like button. Use engaging visuals. If it caught your eye, it’s probably going to catch someone else’s eye as well. Use other social media networks to announce your presence. Pinterest wouldn’t be up to 11 million people without Facebook, so leverage your Facebook and Twitter followers to let them know you are on Pinterest. Feel Free to Share 12 what it is, how it works, and why you’re crazy if you’re not using it. The holy grail in social media is going viral. You will read about stay at home moms you now have over 1 million subscribers because their content went viral on the Internet. Pinterest has all the right components for your content to go viral, meaning it’s shared with lots and lots of people very quickly. It’s not easy to go viral and there are different degrees of going viral. In fact, it’s probably going to take you and your company a long time to get to a point where you are able to go viral #1 Mom Here is what you need in order to go viral Feel Free to Share 13 what it is, how it works, and why you’re crazy if you’re not using it. You will need an audience. Pinterest has over 11 million members right now who are highly engaged, but you will need followers. If you don’t have a lot of followers the likelihood of your content going viral is very small. You content and images need to be interesting and original. If you make great content and a great image it’s more likely people will repin a great visual then a sub par pixel. If you don’t have time to create a great visual, hire someone who can do work in Photoshop. There are plenty of young college kids out there who can turn this work out without breaking a sweat. You don’t need 1,000 repins to go viral. If you get 20 repins, you vastly increased your audi- Less [might be] More ence and reach. This might not be the biggest viral campaign in history, but it’s a start. Feel Free to Share 14 Every brand needs to be social. Facebook is still far and away the leading social network and the one that directs the most traffic to other websites. If you are business to business you should also be on LinkedIn. However, if you are business to consumer or if you are business to business and especially if you have an eCommerce instance, you should have a Pinterest profile. The simple reason is in the traffic referrals Pinterest is generating are too large to be ignored and gett