When you are engaged in social media conversation than this can be very beneficial for your business.
Real time engagement can help you to facilitate your customer service, improve your public relation and your brand.
Participating in social media can have a number of beneficial business applications such as facilitating customer service and boosting public relations.
Your engagement in social media should also reflect results for your revenue. Revenue this is your main goal to take all the efforts and investments.
How about your social media marketing? Do you get revenue out from your social media marketing and how do you measure this. What are your most important social media marketing channels and how many leads they generate and how do those leads convert. What’s your social media ROI?
Here are the Top 5 social media ROI metrics you can track easily:
1. Your Social Media Reach: Measure your Facebook fans, Twitter followers and LinkedIn Connections. The more people you have in your network the wider your message will spread. Track how your reach is increasing and also try to indentify influencers in your friend’s network and connect to them as well. Expand your reach. The more qualified people the more your reach will increase.
2. Your Website Traffic: The main reason why you do social media marketing ist to increase your website or blog traffic. Measure how many visitors come from social media websites. The more your social media reach increases the more your website and blog traffic will increase as well.
3. Your Business Leads: The lead amount and quality are your most important measures of your social media marketing ROI. Track how many leads come from each social media source and improve your doings on those social media sites to get the most out.
4. Your New Customers: Research how many of your social media business leads are converting to paying customers and from which sources the come. This gives you another important measure to tweak your social media marketing.
5. The Conversion Rate: What’s your website visitor to business lead conversion rate? What share of your traffic from social media websites becomes lead on your website or blog? This is an indicator which of your activities or website converts better and which one you could improve to increase the channel ROI.
Marketing Takeaway Tip: To track and to measure is an important part of social media marketing success. With these metrics above you are able to track and to measure your social media marketing. You are able to show clear numbers and ROI. This helps you to improve your doings and your revenue!
How about your social media marketing ROI? I am looking forward to your comments here below in the comments field.
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A recent Jive Social Business Survey where 902 executives have been interviewed about their opinion of use of social media in internet marketing shows that social has made it from personnel to mission critical for business.
The personal use growth has accompanied with the professional use. 73% of the 902 interviewed executives agree that social media in internet marketing will change how business gets done.
But for now 17% of the 902 interviewed executives think their business is position right or ahead of the trend to profit from social media for business.
There are still concerns about the RISKS of social media which hold many executives back from doing effective social media in internet marketing.
Watch this video and listen what a lawyer has to say about the professional use of social media:
Jive Infographic
Marketing Takeaway Tip: The use of social media in internet marketing is only effective when it is done right. To improve the actual doings is very important to stay ahead of the trend to get profit out from professional social media in internet marketing.
How do you use social media in internet marketing for your business? I am looking forward to your comments below.
Location based marketing integrates mobile advertising with different mobile technologies.
Location based marketing is used to pinpoint consumer’s location and provide location specific information, to attract customers to products and services, on their mobile devices. Location based marketing is going to out beat other types of traditional advertising as the mode of delivering the advertisements is a mobile device which is ubiquitous.
As location based services use mobile devices to share location and your doing with your network, they get more info and improve your experiences.
Studies show that people who use location based services are:
— 80% male
— 70% 19-35 yrs. Old
— 70% college grads
— 38% considered influential
— 20% more likely to do mobile research
The motivation to use location based services are to find friends, play games, get coupons and share their activity and increase loyalty. Further motivations are to find hidden offers, discover points of interest, get new experiences and find new products and services.
Two profitable reasons why you as a marketer should use location based marketing for your business:
— Location based services users will increase from today’s 96 million users by 2012 to 526 million users.
— Of all Smart Phone users about 10% are on location based services. About 63% of all IPhone users are on location based services minimum once a week.
Here are five location based services which you should utilize for your marketing:
Gowalla
Goby
The Dealmap
Yelp
Foursquare
Is your business location based services and marketing ready?
— Is your website optimized for mobile? — Do you have planned to do a mobile app which complements your business with location based services?
On the end the products seek us based on our activities and location. The question is will it be your products or the products of your competitor which will find the new customer?
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One of the biggest challenges for businesses is the generation of qualified business leads.
Today businesses have great opportunities to attract business leads to their website. The quickest to get traffic and leads is PayPer Click marketing through Google, LinkedIn, Business.com and Facebook.
With PPC you only pay for clicks made. When you lead your clicks to landing pages and you offer a bonus for your prospects to encourage them to register as a leads.
PPC is definitely no low cost lead generation!
To generate sustain traffic and leads you should take further strategies like inbound marketing into account to make you independent of paid marketing in the long term.
Inbound marketing is the marketing strategy that focuses on getting found by customers when they research online for products and services your business also has to offer.
With inbound marketing businesses earn their way to the customer, by publishing helpful information on a blog, in social media and forums.
Brain vs. Budget = Inbound Marketing
Inbound Marketing can help you to:
A. Save up to 62% of your marketing budget. B. Stand out of your competition. C. Generate a massive amount of leads. D. Get up to 55% higher lead conversion rates. E. Increase your customers and sales.
As Inbound marketing saves you up to 62% it is in deed low cost lead generation strategy.
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A strategy is a great way to have some kind of roadmap which can guide you through the opportunities and pitfalls of internet marketing.
To achieve your marketing and revenue goals you need to know which way to go and what exactly to do when you establish an internet marketing strategy.
In today times when things are changing in real-time, even not over night anymore you also should keep a certain level of flexibility to adjust your marketing tasks and correct your course if necessary to reach your internet marketing and revenue generation goals.
As social media and content creation are important parts of inbound marketing you need to keep the flexibility to react on your customers demand. To simply stay on a previous decided way without taking into account that things can change or have changed could lead your marketing efforts in the wrong direction!
How to have a flexible strategy?
Set an editorial Kalender, where you write your content ideas down, where you plan your events and press release distribution. But do not obsess about it.
As content creation is the backbone of inbound marketing you maybe should establish your marketing as some kind of content marketing! Why content marketing?
Go through your social media channels and listen to the conversation. Listen what kind of questions your audience have and what kind of problems they are looking to get solved. Here you will get your content inspiration in real-time. When you carefully listen you can be helpful and contribute in real-time to your audience and make them aware of you.
Also you can use this Q&A as resources to write a blog post, eBook, whitepaper or a simple how-to, to solve the problems of your audience in real-time!
When you produce interesting, helpful and remarkable content you should market this content through appropriate social media channels to get it noticed by your audience, in real-time.
Marketing takeaway tip: Solve the problems that bother your audience in real-time as they appear. This will set you apart from your competition, make you outstanding and will attract more curious potential new clients to your offers.
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When you want to grow your business you need to treat your audience with a certain level of respect. You need to show them that you care about them and not only about their cash they maybe could spent with your business.
Engage with your actual customers and potential new customers and listen to them and their suggestions and complaints or questions.
You need to treat your customers like they are your air to breath, but when it comes to your business and your revenue they are for sure!
To know what you customers are saying about you, you should monitor social media and blogs and respond to their comments in a professional, kind and problem solving manor!
You can set alerts with Google Alertsand stay informed as soon your search terms are mentioned anywhere on the web. This helps you to monitor social media the smart way without obsession.
When customers discuss about you anywhere, in social media, blogs, forums and other sites you need to respond quickly and to follow up with their comments. Ensure that their questions are answered and their problems are solved.
Credibility can be earned only. It can be gained by the way what you are doing and how you do it and the level of excellence you give to your audience to let them know that you care about them!
Utilize the science of inbound marketing and get back trust, credibility and more revenue in exchange.
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Trust and respect are important in real life and much more important in today’s anonymous times of internet and internet business.
Trust and respect comes before the sale.
When people trust and respect you they are more willing to listen what you have to say. This makes it easier to publish remarkable content to them which leads them to optimized landing pages where they can register as a lead to later follow up and to business with them!
Remarkable, helpful, interesting and problem solving content is also the magnet to attract your buyer personas to achieve those above goals, trust and respect!
Here are some points you should take care and to cultivate and to improve to gain trust and respect from your audience:
Be communicative – Don’t pitch your audience and be more communicative. Be helpful and try to assist where ever you can.
This does not mean you should give away your services for free, but you could do a corporate blog where you can publish tips and tricks with helpful insights for your audience. Ask for comments and encourage your buyer personas to give you their honest opinion. So you start a two way conversation and you get the attention of the right prospects.
Respect your buyer personas – If your buyer personas do not know so much about the topics you cover, this does not mean they are dump!
More over it means you have the chance to educate them and to show the possible solutions for their problems. To get popularity as a problem solver is half the way to gain more business. So don’t be arrogant and push away people who might have silly questions. Because there are no silly questions at all, but there are dump answers. Take the chance to show you self fro you best side and be resource not a critic!
When you are open minded, helpful and show respect to your audience you will get this back from the people you deal with. You will gain a valuable position as a trustworthy and competent source within your industry.
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Social media is two way communications. When you get the luck that your audience wants to communicate with you, you can expect their feedback.
Do you listen to the feedback you get and how do you follow up with their feedback?
When you miss the chance to follow up and eventually to dig deeper you miss great opportunities to learn more about your customer and the visibility you have with your target audience.
A great way to keep the water cooking is to ask open ended questions.
This keeps the discussion alive and encourages others to do their statement and engage in the conversation.
– You could ask your fans, friends and followers when the first time was they have heard from your products and in which context? This gives you a better picture how they become aware of you. – You could ask your audience what and how to improve your products. This helps you to improve your products and custom tailor them for your customers. – You could do a suggestion contest and let your audience rate the best suggestions. This results in a ton of ideas for products and improvement. – Your audience tells you what and how they want to buy! Listen to them and you will improve your revenue guaranteed!
Please also read these articles about social media marketing:
It is no secret that companies who publish valuable content on the web get more attention from their existing and potential customers.
Companies that utilize the opportunities of publishing valuable content get more attention, traffic and generate more leads.
As attention of the target audience is important to gain trust and credibility, the best way to do this is to show expertise and to be helpful.
Companies that publish content online in their corporate blog and social media make them self more visible to their target audience.
Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing are indexing the content which is distributed online through social media and increase the chances for a company to get found when potential customers looking for products and services they also have to offer.
A HubSpot study made of data of 4,000 companies shows: The more content you have the more traffic you get. This evaluation shows that companies who blog daily (20x a month), with 400+ indexed pages and 31+ landing pages get the most traffic and leads online.
Here are some tips how you can produce content and landing pages to increase, traffic and leads
Look out for content sources and ideas in your company.
Useful sources to get content ideas are:
— FAQS
— HOW-TO’S
— WHITPAPERS
— E-BOOKS
— VIDEOS
— BLOG!
— SUPPORT REQUESTS FROM CUSTOMERS
With these valuable sources you can do 300 word blog articles or write How-to papers or do videos which you put behind landing pages to generate business leads to help your customers to solve their problems and to show your products in action.
Engage all employees to produce helpful content with your target customer in mind. The more employees are engaged the more content your company has to offer.
The more helpful content you produce the more your chances will increase to position on the web to get found when people are looking on the search engines for products and services which you also have to offer.
You simply increase your visibility and get you better found from your target audience!
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What’s the biggest mistake that most small businesses make when it comes to SEO? Personally, I would suggest that a common problem is being unrealistic about what can be achieved.
Does this mean that it’s not possible for a small business to gain considerable rewards from search engine optimization? On the contrary, I would suggest that there are massive benefits associated with SEO that’s done in the right way. But you need to think carefully about your strategy if you want to achieve cost effective results.
Ignore massive corporations!
It’s easy to look at the search results for the most competitive keywords and to assume that you need to be ranked for these phrases in order to succeed. There’s a good chance that you’ll find that these search terms tend to be dominated by the big brands and corporations.
This is not a coincidence. The reason why big companies are able to control the search space is because they have significant online marketing budgets. You can be sure that they are hiring top SEO professionals and spending considerable sums of money to achieve those positions.
Typically, it’s also the case that large organizations tend to have a large amount of data available to them. Although this should give them some advantages, you may be amazed to find that many big companies fail to act on the information. That’s often because they simply have too much data to analyze.
What does this mean for small business owners? It means that big corporations are missing out on some key signals.
Target cost effective search terms
Those big organizations often spend so much time, effort and money targeting high profile search terms, they don’t realise that the search terms that convert well may be less competitive. That’s pretty ironic!
But it also reveals an opportunity for small business owners. It means that you can target those areas that larger rivals are ignoring. This won’t just mean that you’re not having to compete with the massive corporations (with their massive advertising budgets) – it also means that you’ll be targeting keywords and phrases that will actually generate income for your business.
This is the cost effective approach to small business SEO that you should be striving for. Sure, it won’t allow you to boast at dinner parties about how you’re top of Google for a high profile search term. But how much does that really matter? Most business professionals would rather have money in their bank accounts, than being able to boast about such trivialities!
Put your strategy into action
Once you realize that SEO isn’t about high profile, competitive, poor converting search terms, you’ll find that you’re in a much stronger position.
You’ll be able to move your online marketing efforts forwards, without wasting money on SEO that’s simply never going to produce the returns that you’re looking for.
Effective SEO should be seen as a business investment. Once you’ve grasped that, you can stop making the mistake of seeing it as a cost.
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As one of the leading search engine experts in the UK, Keith Barrett has used his considerable online marketing experience to help numerous businesses over the course of the past decade.
LinkedIn has more than 100 million registered users in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide.
ROI Research Inc. has survey of 2,997 active social networkers and 59 percent of respondents said: “It is important to have a LinkedIn account”
Some of the most important findings are that people recommend companies and buy products they follow and 58 percent are more likely to buy a product from a company they follow.
About 50% take advice about products and services they plan to buy. 60 percent of them state that they are ready to take action if a friend recommends something about a product or service.
More than 50 percent of the surveyed use social networks to provide feedback to companies.
About 52% of the surveyed agreed that people can influence business decisions made by companies, brands and retailers by voicing opinions on social networking sites
LinkedIn also offers PPC (Pay per Click) advertising. Here you can reach your audience laser target and generate business leads instantly.
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When you produce and publish content for your buyer personas than you want your content to get seen and to be shared with their network of friends and followers to maximize your reach on the web.
People in social network love to share remarkable, creative, helpful and interesting content.
Are you on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook?
A study put together from ShareThis found out that facebook accounts for 38% of sharing traffic on the web. The number two is Twitter with about 17%.
This data show how important it is to get seen on social media sites to spread the reach for a company.
Here are some Tipps how you can improve your social media sharing ratio:
- Ask your audience on Twitter and Facebook to share your information. Simply tell them to “Tweet this” or “Share this”. - Use only one specific category for your information. This increases the chances for your content to get shared. - Write the info which you want to be shared in classic Classified Ad Style and include a call to action. Make an irresistible offer for only one target audience at a time. - Ask for your networks opinion about the information you have shared.
When you do these tactics above than you improve your chances to get your info tweeted and shared. This could result in an increase of traffic and leads for your business.
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When you are doing social media and public relations you will come to the question how to measure your results, moreover how to identify any ROI of your PR activities?
To track your PR results, your reach and mentions is essential for the improvement of your strategy.
The more information you get the better you can improve and optimize your tasks to increase your results.
There is no exact way to calculate the ROI of social media and PR.
Here are some points you can utilize to come very close to facts and data to calculate your ROI:
Google Alerts: You can track mentions of your company in media. You can set alerts for your brand, your name and your products. Google alerts can immediately inform you as soon your brand, your name and your products is mentioned online. You can also track what your competition is doing this way.
Track Your Press Releases: You can do this very well on Google Search “News”, “Blogs”, “Real-time” and Discussions. Here you can also set Google Alerts.
Your Website’s Sources: When you learn more if your traffic is coming from your press releases and from social media like Facebook and Twitter you get clear info how people find you.
Ask Your Customers How They Found You: A great way to measure your reach is to ask your customers how they found you. You can do this in a very simple way by adding an extra form field to your landing pages.
This above are only some ways to measure and to bring great data together, there is much more. But start with the above and evolve your doings to measure the ROI of your PR.
How do you measure your PR reach? I am looking forward to your comments below.
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Studies show that personalized campaigns bring better results. This is not new but most companies still ignore this fact.
Sure it is more effective to speak to a buyer persona more personally than to fire a “one size fits all marketing message” in the hope one bullet will hit the target.
When you talk to your leads than you have to talk to them personally if you want to make a deal, right? You do your conversation in a friendly personal way. So why not start with this kind of friendly and personal way when doing your lead generation campaigns?
EMarketer and EPISERVER studies shows that campaigns done personal have the best results.
Also this Studie show that most of the asked marketers are planning to increase their campaign personalization efforts to increase their visitor to lead and the lead to customer ratio.
Some great ways to personalize your marketing efforts are the use of personalization features in your email management system. Also you can include in your set of share buttons on your blog an option to ‘email this article’, only to name some of them.
As those studies also show what marketer are already doing and what they plan to do in the future, you should also set your plan for campaign personalization to increase your lead generation and conversion quote.
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Social networking is only for young people. This was a long believed myth which is untrue!
A 2011 Study of Edison Research has discovered that use of social networks is growing extremely in the 35-44 age demographic.
What does this means for your social media marketing?
This 35-44 age demographic belongs to higher management levels as well. So when you are in B2B business and want to reach your target audience you have to be visible in social media too.
You need to be there where your prospects are. You need to be there before the sale! You should publish remarkable content online and in social media and build friendly relationships.
This helps you and your business to be recognized as a trusted and credible source and increases your chances to get found by the right people on Google, get leads and more revenue.
The inBlurbs Inbound Internet Marketing blog covers all of
inbound marketing - SEO, Blogging, Social Media, Landing
Pages, Lead Generation and Analytics.
