Are you looking for advanced ways to build Facebook audiences for retargeting? Do you know you can combine Google Tag Manager with Facebook Pixel Events? To explore the value of using these tools together, I interview Chris Mercer. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Posted by randfish
Getting readers on board with your ideas isn't the only way to achieve content success. Sometimes, stirring up a little controversy and earning a few rivals can work incredibly well — but there's certainly a right and a wrong way to do it. Rand details how to use the power of making enemies work to your advantage in today's Whiteboard Friday.
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Video TranscriptionHowdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today, we're going to chat about something a little interesting — how content can succeed by making enemies. I know you're thinking to yourself, "Wait a minute, I thought my job was to make friends with my content." Yes, and one of the best ways to make close friends is to make enemies too.
So, in my opinion, I think that companies and businesses, programs, organizations of all kinds, efforts of all kinds tend to do really well when they get people on their side. So if I'm trying to create a movement or I'm trying to get people to believe in what I'm doing, I need to have positions, data, stories, and content that can bring people to my site. One of the best ways to do that is actually to think about it in opposition to something else, basically try and figure out how you can earn some enemies.
A few examples of content that makes enemies & alliesI'll give you a few examples, because I think that will help add some context here. I did a little bit of research. My share data is from BuzzSumo, and my link data here is from Ahrefs. But for example, this piece called "There Are Now Twice as Many Solar Jobs as Coal Jobs in the US," this is essentially just data-driven content, but it clearly makes friends and enemies. It makes enemies with sort of this classic, old-school Americana belief set around how important coal jobs are, and it creates, through the enemy that it builds around that, simply by sharing data, it also creates allies, people who are on the side of this story, who want to share it and amplify it and have it reach its potential and reach more people.
Same is true here. So this is a story called "Yoga Is a Good Alternative to Physical Therapy." Clearly, it did extremely well, tens of thousands of shares and thousands of links, lots of ranking keywords for it. But it creates some enemies. Physical therapists are not going to be thrilled that this is the case. Despite the research behind it, this is frustrating for many of those folks. So you've created friends, allies, people who are yoga practitioners and yoga instructors. You've also created enemies, potentially those folks who don't believe that this might be the case despite what the research might show.
Third one, "The 50 Most Powerful Public Relations Firms in America," I think this was actually from The Observer. So they're writing in the UK, but they managed to rank for lots and lots of keywords around "best PR firms" and all those sorts of things. They have thousands of shares, thousands of links. I mean 11,000 links, that's darn impressive for a story of this nature. And they've created enemies. They've created enemies of all the people who are not in the 50 most powerful, who feel that they should be, and they've created allies of the people who are in there. They've also created some allies and enemies deeper inside the story, which you can check out.
"Replace Your Lawn with These Superior Alternatives," well, guess what? You have now created some enemies in the lawn care world and in the lawn supply world and in the passionate communities, very passionate communities, especially here in the United States, around people who sort of believe that homes should have lawns and nothing else, grass lawns in this case. This piece didn't do that well in terms of shares, but did phenomenally well in terms of links. This was on Lifehacker, and it ranks for all sorts of things, 11,000+ links.
Before you create, ask yourself: Who will help amplify this, and why?So you can see that these might not be things that you naturally think of as earning enemies. But when you're creating content, if you can go through this exercise, I have this rule, that I've talked about many times over the years, for content success, especially content amplification success. That is before you ever create something, before you brainstorm the idea, come up with the title, come up with the content, before you do that, ask yourself: Who will help amplify this and why? Why will they help?
One of the great things about framing things in terms of who are my allies, the people on my side, and who are the enemies I'm going to create is that the "who" becomes much more clear. The people who support your ideas, your ethics, or your position, your logic, your data and want to help amplify that, those are people who are potential amplifiers. The people, the detractors, the enemies that you're going to build help you often to identify that group.
The "why" becomes much more clear too. The existence of that common enemy, the chance to show that you have support and beliefs in people, that's a powerful catalyst for that amplification, for the behavior you're attempting to drive in your community and your content consumers. I've found that thinking about it this way often gets content creators and SEOs in the right frame of mind to build stuff that can do really well.
Some dos and don'tsDo... backup content with dataA few dos and don'ts if you're pursuing this path of content generation and ideation. Do back up as much as you can with facts and data, not just opinion. That should be relatively obvious, but it can be dangerous in this kind of world, as you go down this path, to not do that.
Do... convey a world viewI do suggest that you try and convey a world view, not necessarily if you're thinking on the political spectrum of like from all the way left to all the way right or those kinds of things. I think it's okay to convey a world view around it, but I would urge you to provide multiple angles of appeal.
So if you're saying, "Hey, you should replace your lawn with these superior alternatives," don't make it purely that it's about conservation and ecological health. You can also make it about financial responsibility. You can also make it about the ease with which you can care for these lawns versus other ones. So now it becomes something that appeals across a broader range of the spectrum.
Same thing with something like solar jobs versus coal jobs. If you can get it to be economically focused and you can give it a capitalist bent, you can potentially appeal to multiple ends of the ideological spectrum with that world view.
Do... collect input from notable partiesThird, I would urge you to get inputs from notable folks before you create and publish this content, especially if the issue that you're talking about is going to be culturally or socially or politically charged. Some of these fit into that. Yoga probably not so much, but potentially the solar jobs/coal jobs one, that might be something to run the actual content that you've created by some folks who are in the energy space so that they can help you along those lines, potentially the energy and the political space if you can.
Don't... be provocative just to be provocativeSome don'ts. I do not urge you and I'm not suggesting that you should create provocative content purely to be provocative. Instead, I'm urging you to think about the content that you create and how you angle it using this framing of mind rather than saying, "Okay, what could we say that would really piss people off?" That's not what I'm urging you to do. I'm urging you to say, "How can we take things that we already have, beliefs and positions, data, stories, whatever content and how do we angle them in such a way that we think about who are the enemies, who are the allies, how do we get that buy-in, how do we get that amplification?"
Don't... choose indefensible positionsSecond, I would not choose enemies or positions that you can't defend against. So, for example, if you were considering a path that you think might get you into a world of litigious danger, you should probably stay away from that. Likewise, if your positions are relatively indefensible and you've talked to some folks in the field and done the dues and they're like, "I don't know about that," you might not want to pursue it.
Don't... give up on the first tryThird, do not give up if your first attempts in this sort of framing don't work. You should expect that you will have to, just like any other form of content, practice, iterate, and do this multiple times before you have success.
Don't... be unprofessionalDon't be unprofessional when you do this type of content. It can be a little bit tempting when you're framing things in terms of, "How do I make enemies out of this?" to get on the attack. That is not necessary. I think that actually content that builds enemies does so even better when it does it from a non-attack vector mode.
Don't... sweat the HateradeDon't forget that if you're getting some Haterade for the content you create, a lot of people when they start drinking the Haterade online, they run. They think, "Okay, we've done something wrong." That's actually not the case. In my experience, that means you're doing something right. You're building something special. People don't tend to fight against and argue against ideas and people and organizations for no reason. They do so because they're a threat.
If you've created a threat to your enemies, you have also generally created something special for your allies and the people on your side. That means you're doing something right. In Moz's early days, I can tell you, back when we were called SEOmoz, for years and years and years we got all sorts of hate, and it was actually a pretty good sign that we were doing something right, that we were building something special.
So I look forward to your comments. I'd love to see any examples of stuff that you have as well, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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http://ift.tt/2snuz9YYour content team shouldn’t the only ones managing your company’s social media accounts.
Takeaways
Lauren: Your content team shouldn’t be the only ones managing your business’s social media accounts.
Hi, I’m Lauren Teague, and I’m a strategist on the Convince & Convert consulting team. And it irritates me, frankly, that social media engagement has been boiled down to just retweets and likes on our posts or how many screenshots are taken of our snaps. Slowly, though, I see the pendulum is swinging back to social media’s origins as a community platform and a place to build real relationships—a place where engagement also means how many people are talking to your brand in social media, and how often they’re actually being helped, or at least they receive a response. And I don’t think there’s any better way to build relationships and brand advocacy than by including customer service in your social media strategy.
You see, on New Year’s Eve every year, my husband and I, we always go see the Dallas Stars play a hockey game. It’s one our favorite traditions in annual date nights. This year I must have tweeted, snapped, and Instagram-ed about a dozen times before and after the game, and only once did I actually get a response from anyone associated with the team. But do you know what caught their attention? It was finally when I mentioned their Stars game announcer, @JeffK, in a tweet about the warm-up music, and Jeff responded quickly and tagged the game night DJ, who then tweeted me a Dropbox link to download the pregame mix. How cool was that?
I was totally blown away by the speed and the friendly responses from these two team employees—who were, by the way, also working their real jobs during the game at the very same time. And yet I saw nothing from the actual team account whose jobs it was to post content throughout the night. But then the disconnect between content and service really hit home when I saw a ticket servicing manager stop two rows in front of me, and from the aisle, he waved down the row to get his client’s attention, and he apologized for not getting closer because there was a full row of people there. And so he did a wave-by and left, probably to go find another customer on his list.
Now, here’s an employee whose job centers around service to the ticket holders who buy tickets to the game, and for him, a stop-by-and-wave was good enough. But, dude, if I’m buying tickets from you, I don’t want your wave-by. I want you to be following my tweets through the game and responding if I need you to. Or better yet, give me a place in social media where we can communicate together during the game if I have a question or I actually need assistance.
You know, one in three people now prefer customer service in social media compared to traditional channels like the telephone and email, and we know from research through Hug Your Haters that responding to customer complaints or concerns increases advocacy by 60 percent. A study earlier this year by Russell Scibetti found that only 16 of 146 professional sports teams actually even allow anyone to direct message them on Twitter without the team following them first. So sports is just one of the industries that hasn’t awoken to this opportunity for customer service in social.
But every day, we’re working with consulting clients who are struggling with how to bring their customer service teams up to speed, and then get them to a place where these social teams feel comfortable turning over the keys to their established accounts. That’s not an easy transition for any organization, but now is the time to expand social media beyond your content team.
So tell me how you’re doing this or why you haven’t yet in the comments below, or find us @convince on Twitter. See you next time.
http://ift.tt/2un3S1RThe booming growth of social media has led to the rise of the influencer marketing industry, which is projected to take up a $5 to 10 billion share in advertising by 2020. Instagram specifically is slated to play an important role. At 700 million monthly active users and a daily active user base of 200 million users on Instagram Stories alone, Instagram has a far-reaching audience that contributes a massive amount of content everyday.
New Research Reveals Staggering Growth for Instagram Influencer MarketingDue to lack of transparency inherent within the influencer marketing industry, advertisers have been unable to assess the role that Instagram is playing in the market. However, based on our research, we found that influencer marketing on Instagram alone will generate over $1 billion by the end of 2017 and significant annual growth thereafter.
Influencer marketing agency Mediakix projects this figure by studying the number of sponsored posts on Instagram tagged by FTC required hashtags, #ad and #sponsored, as well as often used hashtags #sp and #spon. In 2016, the number of tracked hashtags totaled 9.7 million (Chart 2 below). Using current growth rates, we predict that the number of sponsored posts tagged with a sponsored hashtag will total 14.5 million in 2017 and 32.3 million in 2019. Just in the past year, the number of sponsored posts has increased by 4.8 million.
Influencer marketing on Instagram alone will generate over $1 billion by the end of 2017.
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Next, we found that on average, influencers were compensated $10 per 1,000 followers, and each account has an average of 32,000 followers. Thus, an average payment for a sponsored post will reach $320, leading to a monthly spend of nearly $90 million for the entire industry. Annually, in 2017, the spend on influencer marketing would be $1.07 billion. In 2018, the spend per month would be $130 million and in 2019, spend per month would be $200 million.
It is clear that Instagram represents an immense share of the influencer marketing industry. So long as Instagram continues to shape its platform so influencers can publish content on a discoverable channel, Instagram will remain a leader in the influencer marketing industry.
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Do you want to improve the search rank of your blog? Wondering how to get influential people to link to your cornerstone blog content? Having multiple high-quality websites link to your blog content demonstrates to search engines that your blog offers valuable information. In this article, you’ll discover how to get high-quality, authoritative links back
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
There are many ways e-commerce marketers can promote their goods online. They often begin with AdWords campaigns before branching in to Facebook Ads. Their search marketing campaigns may have had very high ROI, while their Facebook campaigns completely tank.
Here are some things you need to know before launching your first Facebook e-commerce campaign.
User mindset is totally different
There’s a reason that e-commerce ads on Google tend to work much better than the same ads on Facebook. People that search for goods and services on Google usually have a clear intent to purchase. If you target the right keywords, you can get visitors to purchase high ticket items. Many e-commerce marketers have used Google to sell products that cost $100 or more.
Unfortunately, Facebook users don’t always have the same intent to purchase. They are simply looking to engage with their friends, browse pictures and view their social newsfeed.
http://ift.tt/2spHOCkPosted by ronell-smith
MozCon 2013 (left to right): Greg Gifford, Nathan Bylof, Nathan Hammer, Susan Wenograd, and myself
I remember my first MozCon like it was yesterday.
It’s the place where I would hear the quote that would forever change the arc of my career.
“The world is freaking complicated, so let me start with everything I don’t know,” said Google’s Avinash Kaushik, during the Q&A, after speaking at MozCon 2013. “Nine hundred years from now, I will fix what’s broken today. …Get good at what you do.”
Though I didn’t know it at the the time, those were words I needed to hear, and that would lead me to make some career decisions I desperately needed to make. Decisions I never would have made if I hadn’t chosen to attend MozCon, the Super Bowl of marketing events (in my opinion).
Walking into the large (gigantic) room for the first time felt like being on the Space Mountain ride at Disneyland. I hurriedly raced to the front to find a seat so I could take in all of the action.
Once settled in, I sat back and enjoyed the music as lights danced along the walls.
Who wouldn’t want to be here? I thought.
Once the show started and Rand walked out, I was immediately sold: The decision to attend MozCon was the right one. By the end of the show, I would be saying it was one of the best career decisions I could have made.
But I almost missed it.
How and why MozCon?I discovered MozCon like most of you: while reading the Moz blog, which I had been perusing since 2010, when I started building a website for an online, members-only newsletter.
One of my friends, an executive at a large company, had recently shared with me that online marketing was blistering hot.
“If you’re focusing your energy anywhere else, Ronell, you’re making a mistake,” he said. “We just hired a digital marketing manager, and we’re paying her more than $90,000.”
Those words served as an imprimatur for me to eagerly study and read SEO blogs and set up Twitter lists to follow prominent SEO authors.
Learning SEO was far less fun than applying it to the website I was in the process of helping to build.
In the years that followed, I continued reading the blog while making steps to meet members of the community, both locally and online.
One of the first people I met in the Moz SEO community was Greg Gifford, who agreed to meet me for lunch after I reached out to him via DM on Twitter.
He mentioned MozCon, which at the time wasn’t on my radar. (As a bonus, he said if I attended, he’d introduce me to Ruth Burr, who I’d been following on Twitter, and was a hyooge fan of.)
I started doing some investigating, wondering if it was an event I should invest in.
Also, during this same period, I was getting my content strategy sea legs and had reached out to Jon Colman, who was nice enough to mentor me. He also recommended that I attend MozCon, not the least because content strategy and UX superstar Karen McGrane was speaking.
I was officially sold.
That night, I put a plan into action:
Then I used to following weeks to devise a plan to help me get everything I could out of the show.
The conference of all conferencesHonestly, I didn’t expect to be blow away by MozCon.
For seven of the 10 previous years, I edited a magazine that helped finance a trade show that hosted tens of thousands of people, from all over the world.
Nothing could top that, I thought. I was wrong.
The show, the lights, the people — and the single-track focus — blew me away. Right away.
I remember Richard Baxter was the first speaker up that first morning.
By the time he was done sharing strategies for effective outreach, I was thinking, “I’ve already recouped my expense. I don’t plan to ever miss this show again.”
And I haven’t.
So important did MozCon become to me after that first show, that I began to plan summer travel around it.
How could one event become that important?
Five key reasons:
I’ll explore each in detail since I think they each help make my point about the value of MozCon. (Also, if you haven’t read it already, check out Rand’s post, The Case For & Against Attending Marketing Conferences, which also touches on the value of these events.)
#1 - ContentYou expect me to say the content you’ll be privy to at MozCon is the best you’ll hear anywhere.
Yeah, but…
The show hand-picks only the best speakers. But these same speakers present elsewhere, too, right?
What I mean by "content" is that the information you glean holistically from the show can help marketers from all areas of the business better do their work.
For example, when I came to my first MozCon, I had a handful of clients who’d reached out to me for PR, media relations, branding, and content work.
But I was starting to get calls and emails for this thing called “content marketing,” of which I was only vaguely familiar.
The information I learned from the speakers (and the informal conversations between speakers and after the show), made it possible for me to take on content marketing clients and, six months later, head content marketing for one of the most successful digital strategy agencies in Dallas/Fort Worth.
There really is something for everyone at MozCon.
#2 - People & relationshipsMost of the folks I talk to on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis are folks I met at one of the last four MozCons.
For example, I met Susan E. Wenograd at MozCon 2013, where we shared a seat next to one another for the entire event. She’s been one of my closest friends ever since.
MozCon 2015: I'm chastising Damon Gochneaur for trying to sell me some links — I'm kidding, Google.
The folks seated beside you or roaming the halls during the event are some of the sharpest and most accomplished you’ll meet anywhere.
They are also some of the most helpful and genuine.
I felt this during my first event; I learned the truth of this sentiment in the weeks, months, and years that have followed.
Whether you’re as green as I was, or an advanced T-shaped marketer with a decade of experience behind you, the event will be fun, exciting, and full of new tips, tactics, and strategies you can immediately put to use.
#3 - Personal & career developmentI know most people make decisions about attending events based on the cost and the known value — that is, based on previous similar events, how much they are likely to earn, either in a new job, new work, or additional responsibilities.
That’s the wrong way to look at MozCon, or any event.
Let’s keep it real for a moment: No matter who you are, where you work, what you do, or how much you enjoy your work, you’re are ALWAYS in the process of getting fired or (hopefully) changing jobs.
You should (must) be attending events to keep yourself relevant, visible, and on top of your game, whether that’s in paid media, content, social media, SEO, email marketing, etc.
That’s why the “Is it worth it?” argument is not beneficial at all.
I cannot tell you how many times, over the last four years, when I’ve been stuck on a content strategy, SEO or web design issue and been able to reach out to someone I would never have met were it not for MozCon.
For example, every time I share the benefits of Paid Social with a local business owner, I feel I should cut Kane Jamison (met at MozCon 2014) a check.
So, go to MozCon, not because you can see the tangible benefits (you cannot know those); go to MozCon because your career and your personal development will be nourished by it far beyond any financial reward.
Now you know how I feel and what I’ve gleaned from MozCon, you’re probably saying, “Yeah, but how can I be certain to get the most out of the event?”
I’m glad you asked.
How you can get the most out of MozConFirst, start following and interacting with Twitter and Facebook groups to find folks attending MozCon.
Dive in and ask questions, answer questions, or set up a get-together during the event.
Next, during the event, follow the #mozcon Twitter hashtag, making note of folks who are tweeting info from the event. Pay close attention to not simply the info, but also what they are gleaning and how they plan to use the event for their work.
If you find a few folks sharing info germane to your work or experiences, it wouldn’t hurt to retweet them and, maybe later during the show, send a group text asking to get together during the pub crawl or maybe join up for breakfast.
Then, once the show is over, continue to follow folks on social media, in addition to reading (and leaving comments on) their blogs, sending them “Great meeting you. Let’s stay in touch” emails, and looking for other opportunities to stay in their orbit, including meeting up at future events.
Many of the folks I initially met at MozCon have become friends I see throughout the year at other events.
But, wait!
I mentioned nothing about how to get the most out of the event itself.
Well, I have a different philosophy than most folks: Instead of writing copious notes and trying to capture every word from each speaker, I think of and jot down a theme for each talk while the speaker is still presenting. Along with that theme, I’ll include some notes that encapsulate the main nuggets of the talk and that will help me remember it later.
For example, Dr. Pete’s 2016 talk, You Can't Type a Concept: Why Keywords Still Matter, spurred me to redouble my focus (and my learning with regard to content and SEO) on search intent, on-page SEO, and knowing the audience’s needs as well as possible.
Then, once the show is over, I create a theme to encapsulate the entire event by asking myself three questions:
For the 2013 show, my answers were…
After hearing Avinash’s quote, I had the theme in my head, for me and for the handful of brands I was consulting at the time: “You won’t win by running the competition’s race; make them chase you.”
MozCon 2013: Avinash Kaushik of Google
This meant I helped them think beyond content, social media, and SEO, and instead had them focus on creating the best content experience possible, which would help them more easily accomplish their goals.
I’ve repeated the process each year since, including in 2016, when I doubled-down on Featured Snippets after seeing Taking the Top Spot: How to Earn More Featured Snippets, by Rob Bucci.
You can do the same.
It all begins with attending the show and being willing to step outside your comfort zone.
What say you?
Are you MozCon bound?
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http://ift.tt/2s3laQwSeth Godin has famously said that “content marketing is the only marketing left.”
That’s certainly music to the ears of content marketers, who engage in ever more complex initiatives to garner attention and entice consumer behavior.
But as the content marketing industry matures and evolves, I fear that sometimes we’re all guilty at times of overthinking it. When you strip away the analysis and the targeting, the funnels and the automation, the calendars and the syndication, you’re left with a simple truth:
People crave useful information; find a way to give it to them, and they will reward you eventually.
My dentist, Dr. Mark Sutor, recently launched a new content marketing initiative that is based on this principle.
Every week or so, Mark does a Facebook Live video that addresses a common dental issue. His most popular episodes so far are about dental insurance, wisdom teeth, and his masterwork: a video about what to do when you have a massive toothache, featuring full makeup and role play!
These videos include no fancy graphics, no editing, and no budget. He tells people when to expect the next video. He turns on his phone. He makes a video. He shares it between his personal page and his business page. He answers comments. That’s it.
And it works.
His video on toothaches is over 6,000 views now, and his other episodes are approaching 700. Not a viral sensation, of course, but remember that Mark services my town of Bloomington, Indiana and the surrounding region. Plus, he’s a specialized oral surgeon and Periodontist. His entire potential customer base is probably 5,000 people at the very most.
His engagement rate on these videos is also pretty strong, with no paid support.
The strategy is simple, according to Mark: “What I like me about this communication tool is that I can provide the average person with accurate and honest dental information, because I have found so many people who have told me, ‘This is what it said on the internet,’ and some of that ‘wisdom’ is simply not supported by dental literature and facts. I’m trying to give people good information about their dental health questions and issues.”
This is the core of why content marketing is so popular: It capitalizes on human nature, ANY company can do it, and (done correctly) it is something akin to the Golden Rule of promotion.
You cannot live on content marketing alone, because at some point you need to connect the call-to-action dots for your potential customers. However, a layer of content frosting on top of your traditional marketing cake continues to be an effective combination, despite the protestations of naysayers who predict that content is doomed to fail as a tactic due to increasing competition and consumer inattention.
The reality is that relevancy is the only killer app. Content that is less relevant is ineffective, and is likely doomed to fail—as it should be. Content that is more relevant is typically effective, and will likely succeed—and it should. This is the informational version of shops putting out a rack of umbrellas in the rain.
And what could be simpler than that? “It’s raining. I bet we could sell a bunch of umbrellas right now.” Or in this case, “I bet a bunch of people don’t really understand dental insurance. Or know what to do when they have a massive toothache. I bet if we told them, we could introduce our practice to a lot of potential new patients. And even for the people who aren’t going to become patients, at least we’re doing them some good along the way.”
You already know what questions your customers have, and you probably know how to help them with your answers. Worry less about complex content playbooks, and just start there. Mark says, in fact, that most of the topics he’s covering are actually coming from comments or patients in the office, who ask him to do a video on a specific question or concern.
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Are you looking for new ways to make LinkedIn work for your business? Wondering what other businesses are doing with LinkedIn? In this article, you’ll discover how four different companies sustain a successful LinkedIn presence and find tips for building a presence to engage your own audience. #1: Focus on Employee Experiences and Job Opportunities
This post 4 LinkedIn Mini Case Studies first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Much like the golden age of Hollywood, new advances in technology have cleared the path for today’s golden age of online video, empowering brands and small businesses alike to create video content like never before. However, unlike the 1930s, when new audio and filming improvements ushered us out of the silent film era, today the reverse is true. New improvements in mobile hardware and data plans have led to a video-first world that is largely mobile too, which means that your customer is quite literally not listening anymore.
The good news, however, is that they’re willing to watch your content instead, and a new Animoto survey shows that marketers are largely ahead of the curve on this behavior.
How Marketers and Consumers Use Social VideoOf the 500 marketers surveyed who work at companies that have created at least two videos in the last year, 81 percent of marketers are optimizing their social videos for mobile viewership, including 39 percent that are creating square and/or vertical videos.
Moreover, 67 percent of marketers use text over imagery, and 51 percent of marketers use closed captioning most of the time or always when making videos. On the consumer side, 39 percent of the 1,000 consumers surveyed say they are more likely to finish videos with subtitles.
Why? Because an overwhelming 85 percent of consumers report watching videos from their mobile devices, which means that they can bring their screens with them wherever they go. For example, you can personally find me watching videos on my phone while waiting in line for coffee, on the subway, and/or scrolling through my news feed in bed before I go to sleep.
And it appears that I’m not the only one. 33 percent of consumers say they watch videos during their lunch hour, 43 percent in the afternoon, 56 percent in the evening, 38 percent before bed, and 16 percent in the middle of the night. All of this video viewership represents an exciting new opportunity for marketers because they can now reach an audience any time of day.
85% of consumers report watching videos from their mobile devices.
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Social Video on Mobile Means More Opportunities for Marketers
Never before have brands had this much access to get marketing videos and ads in front of consumers. For example, 60 percent of the consumers surveyed say they watch branded videos on Facebook every day. In fact, Facebook is the top spot where consumers are watching videos daily. Additionally, they’re spending time on new platforms such as Instagram Stories and Snapchat too, which took the second and third spots respectively.
Interestingly, when it comes to live content, slightly less than half (48 percent) of consumers prefer live video to edited video (52 percent).
To illustrate how video is making an impact in today’s golden age of online video, Animoto has published an infographic that you can find below.
Are you and your team staying ahead of the curve and already creating videos that are optimized for mobile viewing? Share your tips in the comments below.
This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Animoto and Convince & Convert.
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Every business needs new customers. Print and pay per click ads can be expensive and offer mediocre results. How can a small business get new customers fairly quickly and inexpensively?
In this article, I outline 9 tips to find new customers using social media and email techniques.
How to Find New Customers with Social Media
Referral Traffic
Invites from current page fans can dramatically boost social media referrals. People who have already liked your page are likely to refer relatives and friends who will become your customers. The key here is to give your current fans something valuable, an article or download, that they want to share with their friends.
LinkedIn Discussion Groups
LinkedIn is my preferred social media network. I get frequent inquiries about my services, and most importantly I get new customers from LinkedIn.
LinkedIn groups are gold.
http://ift.tt/2sMyNXpWhen it comes to creating content, most companies leave it entirely to a small team to manage everything. What those companies may not realize, though, is that there’s a two-in-one benefit that accompanies engaging your entire organization in the content creation process: Your content quality skyrockets, and so does employee satisfaction.
At PowerPost, each employee is tasked with writing upward of four content pieces a month. The content must be relevant, accurate, and offer a distinct point of view. And it’s this third point that has become an unintended (yet pleasant) surprise.
We’ve found that, through content creation, many of our employees have unleashed untapped potential and found what they’re passionate about. Some of our more reserved employees discovered an outlet to express their viewpoints, and that helped drive their confidence and career acceleration. And the employees who were already known for their strong opinions were able to build their online reputations with our platform.
Organization-wide content creation is so important to us, we even created a program for it called Novice to Master. Each employee starts at the “novice” level, and as she improves her skills, she’s rewarded with a higher ranking and other benefits related to title and compensation. Once an employee reaches the level of “master,” she’s been published nationally or has received industry accolades for her work.
A Win-Win ScenarioWhen employees actively participate in the content creation process, it benefits the employees and the company.
For the company, the process tackles the most common content marketing challenges. Among business-to-business content marketers, about 60 percent cite trouble producing consistent, engaging content. Drumming up a variety of content plagues another 35 percent. And with 75 percent of marketers increasing their spending on content marketing, we can see that content is an increasingly valued tool for gathering leads and revenue.
For employees, it sends them a “we’re all in this together” vibe, assuring them that their ideas are being heard and that everyone is rooting for one another’s success. It also creates an atmosphere of mutual respect and admiration, and friendly competition is born as team members work to outperform one another with the content that receives the most attention.
We’ve also seen team members who were not at all excited to begin their writing journeys, but they blossomed into prolific writers with authentic and powerful perspectives. These instances have been life-changing for employees, and they’ve proven to everyone else that we have a culture built on making sure everyone’s voice is heard.
When employees actively participate in content creation, both employees and the company benefit.
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Creating a Plan of Action
While the importance of getting everyone involved in creating content can’t be emphasized enough, that doesn’t mean you should simply jump right in without giving it a second thought.
To ensure you and your employees are getting the most out of the process, it should be implemented properly, and awards should be attached to it. For starters, compensation and annual reviews should be linked to content quality, but there are other steps to keep in mind before integrating a program like this into your organization.
1. Start on day one.Make sure employees know what’s expected of them from the very start by introducing the concept of content creation on day one. Encourage them to experiment with different forms of content—including social media, video, blogging, short- and long-form writing, etc.—so they can get their feet wet and decide which types are most appealing.
The key in this stage is to reward effort over quantity. Creating minimum requirements will lead to a “content farm” feeling, which is a great way to suck the passion out of content creation. A mission statement and editorial guidelines will also help ensure integrity and efficiency, as well as give new writers a place to start if they feel stuck.
2. Leverage your calendar.One of the trickier aspects of getting your entire organization involved in creating content is scheduling all of it. You’ll want a steady flow of content across all of your channels, including your company blog and social platforms.
To do this in the most efficient way, establish an editorial calendar. At PowerPost, we use software as a service, in calendar form, to track all of our content. The tool also has built-in editorial and grammar safeguards to prevent anything unprofessional from slipping through the cracks.
Your calendar doesn’t have to just track your scheduled posts; you can use it to brainstorm content ideas, plan themes, and organize content across all of your different platforms, too. When you have everything together in one place, it’s far easier to manage content created by dozens of writers.
3. Build confidence.Appreciation and acknowledgment go a long way in boosting confidence and improving employee morale, and creating content is a great way to show off your team members’ writing skills and unique points of view.
As our novice employees grow as writers, they eventually increase both the quantity and depth of their content output, which, in turn, maximizes their growth. Then, once they become masters, they’re recognized both internally and within their industry as legitimate thought leaders with sought-after opinions.
Regardless of a writer’s skill level, this approach helps build a community out of an organization. Employees feel their contributions really do matter and that they’ll be recognized for their hard work and growth.
The Key to DistributionAs all content marketers know, content creation is only half the battle; distribution is an entirely different beast that requires a different set of skills. A sophisticated distribution strategy must be thoughtfully implemented and executed, and various platforms are built specifically to help tackle these tasks.
PowerPost does just that, and this type of software allows content professionals to automate content curation, distribution, and analytics with minimal effort. Social media use is growing, and it’s more important than ever to reach customers on these social platforms. With the help of automation software, you can plan and schedule posts across each of your channels, so your main focus remains creating quality content and becoming a power publisher.
Content creation isn’t easy—even for the professionals—so it makes sense that many companies choose to leave it to the experts. But by getting your entire team involved, you’re positioning your brand as a leader in your industry while simultaneously helping employees learn, grow, and feel like valuable members of the team.
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Want to start editing your own videos but aren’t sure how? Looking for a powerful tool to keep video production costs down? Whether you’re publishing video to your vlog, blog, or social media, editing your footage helps you present a consistent experience to your viewers. In this article, you’ll discover how to edit your video
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Posted by lkolowich
You just ran what you thought was a really promising conversion test. In an effort to raise the number of visitors that convert into demo requests on your product pages, you test an attractive new redesign on one of your pages using a good ol’ A/B test. Half of the people who visit that page see the original product page design, and half see the new, attractive design.
You run the test for an entire month, and as you expected, conversions are up — from 2% to 10%. Boy, do you feel great! You take these results to your boss and advise that, based on your findings, all product pages should be moved over to your redesign. She gives you the go-ahead.
But when you roll out the new design, you notice the number of demo requests goes down. You wonder if it’s seasonality, so you wait a few more months. That’s when you start to notice MRR is decreasing, too. What gives?
Turns out, you didn’t test that page long enough for results to be statistically significant. Because that product page only saw 50 views per day, you would’ve needed to wait until over 150,000 people viewed the page before you could achieve a 95% confidence level — which would take over eight years to accomplish. Because you failed to calculate those numbers correctly, your company is losing business.
A risky businessMiscalculating sample size is just one of the many CRO mistakes marketers make in the CRO space. It’s easy for marketers to trick themselves into thinking they’re improving their marketing, when in fact, they’re leading their business down a dangerous path by basing tests on incomplete research, small sample sizes, and so on.
But remember: The primary goal of CRO is to find the truth. Basing a critical decision on faulty assumptions and tests lacking statistical significance won’t get you there.
To help save you time and overcome that steep learning curve, here are some of the most common mistakes marketers make with conversion rate optimization. As you test and tweak and fine-tune your marketing, keep these mistakes in mind, and keep learning.
6 CRO mistakes you might be making1) You think of CRO as mostly A/B testing.Equating A/B testing with CRO is like calling a square a rectangle. While A/B testing is a type of CRO, it’s just one tool of many. A/B testing only covers testing a single variable against another to see which performs better, while CRO includes all manner of testing methodologies, all with the goal of leading your website visitors to take a desired action.
If you think you’re "doing CRO" just by A/B testing everything, you’re not being very smart about your testing. There are plenty of occasions where A/B testing isn’t helpful at all — for example, if your sample size isn’t large enough to collect the proper amount of data. Does the webpage you want to test get only a few hundred visits per month? Then it could take months to round up enough traffic to achieve statistical significance.
If you A/B test a page with low traffic and then decide six weeks down the line that you want to stop the test, then that’s your prerogative — but your test results won’t be based on anything scientific.
A/B testing is a great place to start with your CRO education, but it’s important to educate yourself on many different testing methodologies so you aren’t restricting yourself. For example, if you want to see a major lift in conversions on a webpage in only a few weeks, try making multiple, radical changes instead of testing one variable at a time. Take Weather.com, for example: They changed many different variables on one of their landing pages all at once, including the page design, headline, navigation, and more. The result? A whopping 225% increase in conversions.
2) You don’t provide context for your conversion rates.When you read that line about the 225% lift in conversions on Weather.com, did you wonder what I meant by "conversions?"
If you did, then you’re thinking like a CRO.
Conversion rates can measure any number of things: purchases, leads, prospects, subscribers, users — it all depends on the goal of the page. Just saying “we saw a huge increase in conversions” doesn’t mean much if you don’t provide people with what the conversion means. In the case of Weather.com, I was referring specifically to trial subscriptions: Weather.com saw a 225% increase in trial subscriptions on that page. Now the meaning of that conversion rate increase is a lot more clear.
But even stating the metric isn’t telling the whole story. When exactly was that test run? Different days of the week and of the month can yield very different conversion rates.
For that reason, even if your test achieves 98% significance after three days, you still need to run that test for the rest of the full week because of how different conversion rate can be on different days. Same goes for months: Don’t run a test during the holiday-heavy month of December and expect the results to be the same as if you’d run it for the month of March. Seasonality will affect your conversion rate.
Other things that can have a major impact on conversion rate? Device type is one. Visitors might be willing to fill out that longer form on desktop, but are mobile visitors converting at the same rate? Better investigate. Channel is another: Be wary of reporting “average” conversion rates. If some channels have much higher conversion rates than others, you should consider treating the channels differently.
Finally, remember that conversion rate isn’t the most important metric for your business. It’s important that your conversions are leading to revenue for the company. If you made your product free, I’ll bet your conversion rates would skyrocket — but you wouldn’t be making any money, would you? Conversion rate doesn’t always tell you whether your business is doing better than it was. Be careful that you aren’t thinking of conversions in a vacuum so you don’t steer off-course.
3) You don’t really understand the statistics.One of the biggest mistakes I made when I first started learning CRO was thinking I could rely on what I remembered from my college statistics courses to run conversion tests. Just because you’re running experiments does not make you a scientist.
Statistics is the backbone of CRO, and if you don’t understand it inside and out, then you won’t be able to run proper tests and could seriously derail your marketing efforts.
What if you stop your test too early because you didn’t wait to achieve 98% statistical significance? After all, isn’t 90% good enough?
No, and here’s why: Think of statistical significance like placing a bet. Are you really willing to bet on 90% odds on your test results? Running a test to 90% significance and then declaring a winner is like saying, "I'm 90% sure this is the right design and I'm willing to bet everything on it.” It’s just not good enough.
If you’re in need of a statistics refresh, don’t panic. It’ll take discipline and practice, but it’ll make you into a much better marketer — and it’ll make your testing methodology much, much tighter. Start by reading this Moz post by Craig Bradford, which covers sample size, statistical significance, confidence intervals, and percentage change.
4) You don’t experiment on pages or campaigns that are already doing well.Just because something is doing well doesn’t mean you should just leave it be. Often, it’s these marketing assets that have the highest potential to perform even better when optimized. Some of our biggest CRO wins here at HubSpot have come from assets that were already performing well.
I’ll give you two examples.
The first comes from a project run by Pam Vaughan on HubSpot’s web strategy team, called “historical optimization.” The project involved updating and republishing old blog posts to generate more traffic and leads.
But this didn’t mean updating just any old blog posts; it meant updating the blog posts that were already the most influential in generating traffic and leads. In her attribution analysis, Pam made two surprising discoveries:
Why? Because these were the blog posts that had slowly built up search authority and were ranking on search engines like Google. They were generating a ton of organic traffic month after month after month.
The goal of the project, then, was to figure out: a) how to get more leads from our high-traffic but low-converting blog posts; and b) how to get more traffic to our high-converting posts. By optimizing these already high-performing posts for traffic and conversions, we more than doubled the number of monthly leads generated by the old posts we've optimized.
Another example? In the last few weeks, Nick Barrasso from our marketing acquisition team did a leads audit of our blog. He discovered that some of our best-performing blog posts for traffic were actually leading readers to some of our worst-performing offers.
To give a lead conversion lift to 50 of these high-traffic, low-converting posts, Nick conducted a test in which he replaced each post’s primary call-to-action with a call-to-action leading visitors to an offer that was most tightly aligned with the post’s topic and had the highest submission rate. After one week, these posts generated 100% more leads than average.
The bottom line is this: Don’t focus solely on optimizing marketing assets that need the most work. Many times, you’ll find that the lowest-hanging fruit are pages that are already performing well for traffic and/or leads and, when optimized even further, can result in much bigger lifts.
5) You base your CRO tests on tactics instead of research.When it comes to CRO, process is everything. Remove your ego and assumptions from the equation, stop relying on individual tactics to optimize your marketing, and instead take a systematic approach to CRO.
Your CRO process should always start with research. In fact, conducting research should be the step you spend the most time on. Why? Because the research and analysis you do in this step will lead you to the problems — and it’s only when you know where the problems lie that you can come up with a hypothesis for overcoming them.
Remember that test I just talked about that doubled leads for 50 top HubSpot blog posts in a week? Nick didn’t just wake up one day and realize our high-traffic blog posts might be leading to low-performing offers. He discovered this only by doing hours and hours of research into our lead gen strategy from the blog.
Paddy Moogan wrote a great post on Moz on where to look for data in the research stage. What does your sales process look like, for example? Have you ever reviewed the full funnel? “Try to find where the most common drop-off points are and take a deeper dive into why,” he suggests.
Here’s an (oversimplified) overview of what a CRO process should look like:
As you go through these steps, be sure you’re recording your hypothesis, test methodology, success criteria, and analysis in a replicable way. My team at HubSpot uses the template below, which was inspired by content from Brian Balfour’s online Reforge Growth programs. We’ve created an editable version in Google Sheets here that you can copy and customize yourself.
Don’t forget the last step in the process: Conduct a follow-up experiment. What can you refine for your next test? How can you make improvements?
6) You give up after a "failed" test.One of the most important pieces of advice I’ve ever gotten around CRO is this: “A test doesn’t ‘fail’ unless something breaks. You either get the result you want, or you learned something.”
It came from Sam Woods, a growth marketer, CRO, and copywriter at HubSpot, after I used the word “fail” a few too many times after months of unsuccessful tests on a single landing page.
What he taught me was a major part of the CRO mindset: Don’t give up after the first test. (Or the second, or the third.) Instead, approach every test systematically and objectively, putting aside your previous assumptions and any hope that the results would swing one way or the other.
As Peep Laja said, “Genuine CROs are always willing to change their minds.” Learn from tests that didn’t go the way you expected, use them to tweak your hypothesis, and then iterate, iterate, iterate.
I hope this list has inspired you to double down on your CRO skills and take a more systematic approach to your experiments. Mastering conversion rate optimization comes with a steep learning curve — and there’s really no cutting corners. You can save a whole lot of time (and money) by avoiding the mistakes I outlined above.
Have you ever made any of these CRO mistakes? Do you have any CRO mistakes to add to the list? Tell us about your experiences and ideas in the comments.
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Employee advocacy has become a buzzword in today’s digital world. The industry reports highlight that consumers only trust employees above all other marketing activities. As you aware, employees are the most untapped marketing assets of any organization. In a recent study, 64% of marketing executives consider word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective marketing channel and only 6% of them say they have mastered it (Source: Forbes).
The businesses face a lot of challenges in adopting employee advocacy tool due to few misconceptions. Here are five common myths of employee advocacy enlisted below:
Myth-1: CXO’s have little presence and less active on social media
The success of employee advocacy programs depends on active participation and encouragement from business leaders of any organization. A new initiative such as employee advocacy program should be guided from top-bottom to start with. However, the reality is many business leaders have their presence on social media but don’t find time to participate.
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Do you want to sell on Facebook? Wondering how to increase product sales without investing in Facebook ads? In this article, you’ll discover how to organically optimize your Facebook page for more sales. #1: Choose the Right Facebook Page Type and Category Every business is different, and how you optimize your Facebook page for sales
This post How to Optimize Your Facebook Page for Product Sales first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Posted by rjonesx.
It's not every day that I write about content. To be honest, it's probably a once-a-year kind of thing. I will readily admit that I'm a "links are king" kind of SEO, and have been since starting in this industry more than a decade ago. However, I do look over the fence from time to time to see if the grass is greener and, on occasion, I actually like what I see. Prior to joining Moz, I was a consultant at an agency like many of you reading this blog post. More often than not, one of the key concerns of my clients was what to write about. It seems that webmasters and business owners alike can easily acquire writer's block after trudging through the uninspiring task of turning a list of keywords into website copy. So where do you look when you have run out of words
Numbers.
Alright, stick with me here. I imagine for some of you the idea of poring over numbers to remedy writer's block would be like trying to stop a headache with a brick. It's adding insult to injury. What I hope to show you in the next couple of paragraphs is how data can be an incredible source of inspiration in writing, especially if you can hit a few key principles: expose, relate, surprise, and share.
ExposeChances are your business or website generates some amount of unique, first party data that you can expose to the world. It might be from analytics, your rank tracker like Moz, or from raw user data if you operate a forum. I'll give you examples of how you might tap into these resources (especially when they don't seem obvious or plenteous) but let's start with a canonical example of one great use of first-party data in an industry that seems directly at odds with — dating.
The thought of quantifying and analyzing our love lives seems like an oxymoron of sorts. However, one of the most successful uses of data for content has been produced by the team at OK Cupid, whose "data"-tagged blog posts have earned thousands of solid backlinks and enviable traffic. The team at OK Cupid accomplishes this by tapping their huge resource for unique data, generated by their user base. Let's look at one quick example: Congrats Graduates: No One Gives a Sh*t.
The blog post is fairly straightforward (and not particularly long) but it used unique data that isn't really available to the average person. Because OK Cupid is in a privileged position, they can provide this kind of insight to their audience at large.
But maybe you don't have a million customers with profiles on your site; where can you look for first party data? Well, here are a couple of ideas of the types of data your company or organization might have which can easily be turned into interesting content:
There are probably tons more sources of unique, first-party data that you or your business have generated over the years which can be turned into great content. If you dig through the data long enough, you'll hit pay dirt.
RelateData is foreign. It's a language almost no one speaks in their day-to-day conversations, a notation meant for machines. This consideration requires that we make data immediately relatable to our readers. We shouldn't just ask "What does the data say?", but instead "What does the data say to me?" How we make data relatable is simple — organize your data by how people identify themselves. This can be geographic, economic, biological, social, or cultural distinctions with which we regularly categorize ourselves.
Many of the best examples of this kind of strategy involve geography (perhaps because everyone lives somewhere, and it's pretty non-controversial to make generic claims about one location or another). Take a look at a map of your country and try not to look first towards where you live. I'm a North Carolinian, and I almost immediately find myself interested in anything that compares my state to others.
So maybe you aren't OK Cupid with millions of users and you can't find unique data to share — don't worry, there's still hope. The example below is a rather ingenious method of using Google Adwords data to build a geographical story that's relatable to any potential customer in the United States. The webmasters at Opulent used state-level Keyword Planner to visualize popularity across the country in a piece they call the "State of Style."
When I found this on Reddit's DataIsBeautiful (where most of these examples come from), I immediately checked to see what performed best in North Carolina. I honestly couldn't care less about popular fashion or jewelry brands, but my interest in North Carolina eclipsed that lack of interest. Geography-based data visualization has produced successful content related to in sports, politics, beer, and even knitting.
If you walk away with any practical ideas from this post, I think this example has got to be it. Fire up an Adwords campaign and find out how consumer demand breaks down in your industry at a state-by-state level. Are you a marketer and want to attract clients in a particular sector? Here's your chance to write a whitepaper on national demand. If you're a local business, you can target Google Keyword Planner to your city and compare it to other cities around the country.
SurprisePerhaps the greatest opportunity with data-focused content is the chance to truly surprise your reader. There's something exciting about learning an interesting fact (who hasn't seen one of these lying around and didn't pick it up?). So, how do you make your data "pop?" How do you make numbers fascinating?
Perspective.
Let's start with a simple statistic:
The cost of ending polio between 2013 and 2018 is
$5.5 Billion Dollars.
How does that number feel to you? Does it feel big or little? Is it interesting on its own? Probably not, let's try and spice it up a bit.
$5.5 billion dollars doesn't seem that much when you realize people spend that amount on iPhones every 2 weeks. We could rid the world of polio for that much! Or, what if we present it like this...
In this light, it seems almost insane to spend that much money preventing just a couple more polio cases relative to the huge gains we could make on malaria. Of course, the statistics don't tell the full story. Polio is in the end-stages of eradication where the cost-per-case is much higher, and as malaria is attacked, it too will see cost-per-case increase. But the point remains the same: by giving the polio numbers some sort of context, some sort of forced perspective, we make the data far more intriguing and appealing.
So how would this work with content for your own site? Let's look at an example from BestPlay.co, which wrote a piece on Board Games are Getting Worse. Board games aren't a data-centric industry, but that doesn't keep them from producing awesome content with data. Here's a generic graph they provide in the piece which shows off average board game ratings.
There really isn't much to see here. There's nothing intrinsically shocking about the data as we look at it. So how do they add perspective to make their point and give the user intrigue? Simple — apply a historical perspective.
With this historical perspective, we can see board game scores getting better and better up until 2012, when they began to take a dive — the first multi-year dive in their recorded history. To draw users in, you use comparison to provide surprising perspectives.
ShareThis final method is the one that I think is most overlooked. Once you've created your fancy piece of content, let your audience do some leg work for you by releasing the data set. There's an entire community of the Internet just looking for great data sets which could take advantage of your data and cite your content in their own publications. You can find everything from All of Donald Trump's Tweets to Everything Lost at TSA to Hand-drawn Pictures of Pineapples. While there is a good chance your data set won't ever be used, it can pick up a couple of extra links in the event that it does.
Putting it all togetherWhat happens when a webmaster combines these types of methods — exposing unique data, making it relatable and surprising, even for a topic that seems averse to data? You get something like this: Jeans vs. Leggings.
This piece played the geography card for relatability:
They compared user interest in jeans to give perspective to the growth of demand for leggings:
Slice.com reveals their first-party data to make interesting, data-driven content that ultimately scores them links from sites like In Style Magazine, Shape.com, and the NY Post. Looking at fashion through the lens of data meant great traffic and great shares.
How do I get started?Get down and dirty with the data. Don't wait until you end up with a nice report in your hand, but start slicing and dicing things looking for interesting patterns or results. You can start with the data you already have: Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Adwords, and, if you're a Moz customer, even your rank tracking data or keyword research data. If none of these avenues work, dig through the amazing data resources found on Reddit or WebHose. Look for a story in the numbers by relating the data to your audience and making comparisons to provide perspective. It isn't a foolproof formula, but it is pretty close. The right slice of data will cut straight through writer's block.
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Welcome to this week’s edition of the Social Media Marketing Talk Show, a news show for marketers who want to stay on the leading edge of social media. On this week’s Social Media Marketing Talk Show with Erik Fisher and Kim Reynolds, we explore Instagram live replays with Jeff Sieh, Periscope super hearts with Luria
This post Instagram Live Replays, Periscope Super Hearts, Snap Map, and Pinterest Lens Camera Updates first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Interested in broadcasting live video? Have you considered starting a live video show? To explore how to create a successful live video show, I interview Luria Petrucci. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It’s designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works
This post Live Video Strategy: How to Create a Show That Engages first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Posted by randfish
Most SEO campaigns need three kinds of links to be successful; targeting your content to influencers can get you 2/3 of the way there. In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers the tactics that will help your content get seen and shared by those with a wide and relevant audience.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video TranscriptionHowdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about how to create content that is specifically influencer-targeted in order to earn the links and attention and amplification that you often need.
So it's the case that most SEO campaigns, as they're trying to earn the rankings that they're seeking, are trying to do a few things. You're trying to grow your overall Domain Authority. You're trying to get some specific keyword terms and phrases ranking on your site for those terms and phrases.
So you need kind of three kinds of links. This is most campaigns.
1. Links from broad, high-Domain Authority sites that are pointing — you kind of don't care — anywhere on your site, the home page, internal pages, to your blog, to your news section. It's totally fine. So a common one that we use here would be like the New York Times. I want the New York Times to link to me so that I have the authority and influence of a link from that domain and, hopefully, lots of domains like them, very high-Domain Authority domains.
2. Links to specific high-value keyword-targeted pages, hopefully, hopefully with specific anchor text, and that's going to help me boost those individual URLs' rankings. So I want this page over here to link to me and say "hairdryers," to my page that is keyword targeted for the word "hairdryers." Fingers crossed.
3. Links to my domain from other sites, in my sector or niche, that provide some of that topical authority and influence to help tell Google and the other search engines that this is what my site is about, that I belong in this sphere of influence, that I'm semantically and topically related to words and phrases like this. So I want appliancegal.com to link to my site if I'm trying to rank in the world of hairdryers and other kinds of appliances.
So of these, for one and three, we won't talk about two today, but for one and three, much of the time the people that you're trying to target are what we call in the industry influencers, and these influencers are going to be lots of people. I've illustrated them all here — mostly looking sideways at each other, not exactly sure why that is — but bloggers, and journalists, and authors, and conference organizers, and content marketers, and event speakers, and researchers, and editors, and podcasters, and influencers of a wide, wide variety. We could fill up the whole board with the types of people who are in the influencer world or have that title specifically, but they tend to share a few things in common. They are trying to produce content of one kind or another. They're not dissimilar from us. They're trying to produce things on the web, and when they do, they need certain elements to help fill in the gap. When they're looking for those gap-filling elements, that is your opportunity to earn these kinds of links.
Content tacticsSo a few tactics for that. First off, one of the most powerful ones, and we've talked about this a little bit here on Whiteboard Friday, but probably not in depth, is...
A. Statistics and data. The reason that this is such a powerful tool is because when you create data, especially if it's either uniquely gathered by you, unique because you have it, because you can collect it and no one else can, or unique because you've put it together from many disparate sources, you're the editorial curator of that data and statistics, everyone like this needs those types of statistics and data to support or challenge their arguments or their assertions or their coverage of the industry, whatever it is.
It's tough because you will not see many of those in your keyword research, because there's a relatively few number of these people searching in any given month for this type of gap-filling data, so you have to intuit often what you should title those things. Put yourself in these people's shoes and start Googling around for "What would I need if I had to write some industry coverage around this?" Then you'll come up with these types of things, and you can try modifying your keyword research queries or doing some Google Suggest stuff with these words and phrases.
B. Visual content. Visual content is exceptionally valuable in this case because, again, it fills a gap that many of these folks have. When you are a content marketer, or when you're a speaker at an event, or when you're an author or a blogger, you need visual content that will help catch the eye, that will break up the writing that you've done, and it's often much easier to get someone else's visual content and simply cite your source and link to it than it is to create visual content of your own. These people often don't have the resources to create their own visual content.
C. Contrarian/counter-opinions. The last one I'll cover here is contrarian or counter-opinions to the prevailing wisdom. So you might have an opinion like, "In the next three years, hairdryers will be completely obsolete because of X."
So using these tactics, I hope that you can go reach out and fill some gaps for these influencers and, as a result, earning two of the three exact kind of links that you need in order to rank well in the search results.
And we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
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http://ift.tt/2t20Zq6Mark Twain had it right about content marketing metrics. No matter how objective your analysis seems to be, cognitive bias affects how every marketer interprets metrics.
Takeaways
Anna: Mark Twain once said there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics. Now it’s been more than a hundred years since he last said that, but it still rings true today, especially when we’re talking about content marketing metrics.
Hey everyone, my name is Anna Hrach, and I am a Strategist at Convince & Convert, and today I wanna talk to you about content marketing metrics. Measuring content is consistently cited as a top challenge for marketers today, but the problem isn’t access to data—it’s actually how we misinterpret it, thanks to our cognitive biases.
Everyone has cognitive biases. It’s not something we can escape. Cognitive biases are when we take data and overlay subjective information or thoughts on top of it, and we unintentionally skew data, most likely in our favor. A good example of this is when we’re looking at two different data points, say in Google Analytics, they happen to be going the same direction, so we automatically assume that they have a relationship, and that they correspond, when in some cases, that’s not always true.
Now, as I mentioned, everybody has cognitive biases. There’s no escaping it. But I do have three quick tips for you today. The first tip is to just assume that you’re putting analytics together incorrectly. I know that sounds really negative, but it’s really gonna help you in the long run. Be critical. Put your data together, and then tear it apart. Make sure you’re looking at it from every way possible.
The second is to use data as more way-finding than hard and fast rules. We have this tendency in marketing to look at data as the end-all, be-all, when really we should be using them as guideposts for the direction we should go, rather than the only way to go.
Finally, have someone else look at your data if you can. Sometimes it just really helps having someone who’s not connected to the outcome of the data just take a look and tell you what they think is going on. It can really help change your perspective.
Now, for more information and tips and tricks on content marketing metrics, be sure to check out the Convince & Convert blog, or leave me a comment below and we can chat. Until then, see you next time.
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