Social Media marketing has influenced the marketing strategies of business organizations online in recent years.
Almost all of the niches are now using social media marketing for their business promotion online. There is heavy competition in these social media sites as well on grabbing advertisers to market through these sites.
Newly emerged social media sites Google+ and Pinterest have been the major social media sites to watch in recent days. Many say Google+ is ideal for business where as there are experts describing Pinterest as one of the major social media competitors for business online. This article gives a glimpse of using these two social media marketing sites for business.
Identifying the right Social Media Sites for business
Everyone in the marketing world online knows about the advantages of social media marketing and how it can cut your marketing budgets if identified correctly. Previously there were very few promising social media sites such as facebook and twitter which are used by businesses for social media promotion.
But as days went by, top Internet organizations such as Google came up with Google+ with wide range of features for business organizations. Companies are now trying to cap their market share from these fast emerging social media statistics. Inbound marketing experts are now planning to use these social media sites for business lead generation.
Not only recent statistics suggest that Pinterest has also been used largely by organizations for their business promotions. All these social media marketing promotions for lead generations are only started after indepth analysis by marketing experts online. But what are these analytics which led to these decisions? Well an overview of the next paragraph will let you know why Google+ and Pinterest are valuable for business online.
Generating business leads with Google+ and Pinterest
Google+ has brought interest of millions of people online with the type of launch that they have made. Google has taken some of the best steps to create interest in users while launching Google+. Likely within the first 3 weeks of the launch 20 million users started using Google+.
Moreover Google+ profiles and stats have been remarkable and Google started indexing Google+ content. Another interesting stat is that 63% of Google+ users are male and sites that use Google+ started getting 3.5 times more traffic than the sites that haven’t used Google+ for their sites.
Google+ has been prominently used by software developers and college students which brings into the fact that Google+ has a wide range of influence on students and working software professionals.
One important stat that is very much useful for businesses is that 40% of marketers suggest Google+ as prominent tool to promote their business as it is expected to reach 400 million users by the end of this year.
Another prominent social media site Pinterest also managed to gather 10.5 million users as on February 2012. This made businesses eye on Pinterest to promote their business.
Not only for the number of users, Pinterest has prominence for re-use as 80% of pins which are done in Pinterest are re-pins. This means if you are successful in bringing interest to a small group of people using Pinterest , your business many go viral.
Also Pinterest has the power of retaining users similar to facebook and twitter which can be observed from the stat that users have increased by 145% from the month of January.
Another stat that is surprising is that 80% of Pinterest users are female and this is one of the successful social media sites that have brought female interest. If your business is a trending topic, then your business is likely to generate quality leads.
Another important stat that will generate interest in advertisers for business lead generation is lead conversion rate. Lead generation conversation rate in Pinterest is 15% compared to 9% from Google+.
Infographic: Pinterest
Infographic: Google Plus
So putting altogether you should be strategic and take expert opinion while promoting your business through Google+ and Pinterest. Take the expert opinion while make social media promotion through these social media sites. Generate quality business leads from these emerging social media sites and stay ahead of your competitors.
A MarketingSherpa research found out that creating content is one of the most effective tactics for improving a website’s SEO.
User-Generated Content encountered for Organic search up to 10%, and lead conversion up 125%.
Companies who create content, operate a corporate blog and update it frequently have 55% more website visitors.
57% of companies which operate a corporate blog report to have acquired new customers through their blog.
Corporate Blogging
Blogging gets companies 55% more Traffic and up to 97% more Inbound Links. Companies who blog get 434% more indexed pages in search engines and up to 25x times more business leads.
Video Content Creation
Business who utilize video content creation, encounter up to 300% more monthly unique visitors, and 100% longer average time-on-site per visitor. The average time spent on pages with videos is 3-minutes. Generating video content increases search engine traffic by 157% and page views by 63% unique visitors by 100%.
User generated reviews on ecommerce sites
Content marketing ways like product ratings and reviews are proven to increase conversion rates on product pages.
Visitors of ecommerce pages should be able to include pictures and videos with their reviews. The way like sited as eBay and Amazon do to provide an overall rating are additional ways to increase website interaction.
The value of reviews increases as they are moderated within a short time period of about 24 hrs.
Also sharing these reviews to social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and other is a great way to distribute this user generated content.
Infographic: The Rise Of Conten Marketing
All above activities are visible to search engines and can lead to a massive growth in traffic.
Creating content takes time, money and expertise. When you need inspiration on which content your audience is interested in, just ask them and they will tell you.
An eMarketer study found out that 79% of US marketing professionals said they plan to increase spending on social media marketing and 24% of them said that social media will be the most-used tactic in the ad industry this year.
As the number of areas and activities increase marketers are confronted with various platforms and various ways to use and measure those platforms. Marketing tools and automation are the most seen challenges.
“In the Marketing Tools Study 2012 from digital marketing technology and services company PointRoll and Kelton Research, US marketing professionals reported using multiple tools in each campaign they execute. More than half of respondents used more than five tools in a single advertising and marketing campaign, with 33% saying they averaged five to six, 15% saying seven to nine and 13% saying they used an average of 10 or more.”
This results show that marketers come closer to paralysis through analysis! The more tools have been used the more time is spend on them.
Instead of to improving their marketing marketers are bound in tools mess!
Marketers should focus one tool which helps them to get found online and in social media by more qualified visitors, helps them to convert more visitors into leads, to close those leads efficiently and which provides analytics to help make smart marketing investments.
All successful businesses have one thing in common, they have great marketing and they care about their customers and restaurants are no exemption.
For a restaurant to get new guests the audience needs to know that you exist and what you have to offer. So you need to get found!
When you operate or just start a restaurant it can make sense to use Groupon for the first six months to help boost your reach so more people learn about your restaurant. But when the first six month are over you need to have a holistic strategy prepared to attract new guests to your restaurant and keep the actual coming back.
But what if you do not have the time and the experience in house to do so? And which strategy should you use, which one brings the big bang for your marketing buck?
Inbound marketing has been the most successful Internet marketing strategies in recent years.
Many businesses from different industries are using inbound marketing since about ten years as it is highly productive for their business. This article will give you a few examples why restaurant businesses should outsource their marketing and advantages in doing so.
Inbound marketing has been the successful and cheapest marketing trends in online world now. Inbound marketing generated leads have a proven 62% lesser Cost per Lead (CPL) and an up to 55% higher conversion rate! It simply outperforms any other way of marketing like TV, Radio, Print Media, Mass mail, Trade shows, Pay per click, Cold calling, etc.
All major brands and thousands of small and mid size businesses have switched to these powerful marketing strategies. Inbound marketing needs expertise, dedication and commitment and companies can benefit by hiring a professional inbound marketing agency. It is beneficial for companies to outsource their marketing in order to concentrate more on their business and leave their marketing strategies for the experts in the field.
Infographic: Dining and Restaurant Reservation Trends
Advantages of Outsourcing Marketing for Restaurant
Restaurant business is popular though its wide opprotunites it offers. Hundreds of success stories show and prove how money can be made by operating a good restaurant. Chains like Burger Kind, KFC prove this. Also celebrities have discovered the restaurant business as a profitable way to make extra revenue.
With increasing competition, regular restaurants have also started their business online and taking reservations and orders. With many competitors creeping up, it is very much important for the restaurant owners to get themselves updated with the latest marketing trends online to stay out of the crowd.
1. Get found online through inbound marketing
Main requirement of restaurant industry is the word of mouth marketing and getting new customers. So it is important for the businesses in restaurant industry to concentrate on their competence and outsource the marketing it for the inbound marketing experts to lead new guests to their restaurant.
Main advantage of inbound marketing is to get found online at the start to the customers. By hiring marketing experts who use the latest social media marketing and analytical tools for analysis, companies need not worry about the fast changing marketing trends and strategies.
2. Marketing Experts help you in Social Media and Content Marketing
Social Media and content marketing through blogging have increased in popularity as consumers are increasingly looking online for reputable sources to spend their money. Content marketing is increasingly used by companies to get new customers to their business.
If we take an example, companies that blog get 55% more visitors to their business website. So it is very much important to use these types of marketing strategies to gain new customers for your restaurant as well.
Another important strategy that has been successful is the social media branding for business and being active in social media. It is very much important to update your social media profiles regularly as search engines have started indexing your business social media content. This brings more prominence for your business in search engine marketing.
Not only search engines, your customers are also very much interested with the latest news, promotions and deals that are updated in your blog and social media.
To get potential leads and increase their prominence in market place, it is therefore useful to hire the marketing experts to do this job for restaurant industry.
3. Less Marketing Budgets and risk free business marketing strategy
Inbound marketing is the cheapest marketing strategy in the long term. It is easy to outsource your marketing by hiring an inbound marketing agency and build prominence on the web for your restaurant business.
By using various effective and creative marketing, inbound marketing agencies help to stay ahead of your competitors and get found online easily to potential customers.
Not only do the inbound marketing agencies help to do your marketing, they also help you to minimize your budgets on the long term.
Summary of what you get by executing a professional marketing strategy?
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
These are some of examples on how you can benefit by outsourcing your restaurants marketing to a professional inbound marketing agency. Start your inbound marketing today and stay ahead of your competitors
Facebook has about 830 million users worldwide which means it reaches one fifth of the global population.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicted there will be 1.43 billion social network users in 2012, 63.2% of internet users will visit a social network at least once a month, rising to 67.6% in 2013 and 70.7% in 2014.
The top ten largest countries are:
1. United States 155,886,800
2. India 45,018,540
3. Indonesia 43,521,320
4. Brazil 42,199,700
5. Mexico 33,599,040
6. Turkey 31,526,380
7. United Kingdom 30,484,380
8. Philippines 27,718,720
9. France 24,100,240
10. Germany 23,251,880
The search volume on Facebook has overtaken Google. And there are not only consumers who research there. B2B is also using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and other social networks to research for products, services, industry related information and new business partners.
Social media is a great way to showcase a business and to offer a more personal insight view. A company has great opportunities to show personality to attract the right buyer persona and to get in touch with the right new future customer when this one is looking out for products and services.
Social media has proved in the past years that it can bring positive ROI when it’s done right.
As businesses understand that social media is no short term sprint than more something like a marathon they engage with more diligence to plan their steps to reach a long term ROI.
A study from Wildfire Interactive shows that social media helps grow brand awareness, increase sales and partnerships and helped to reduce marketing costs.
Infographic: Small Business + Social Media Use
Engaging in dialogue with customers via social media has become an important part of successful companies.
Smart marketers measure the value of social media channels as well. They want to know which one has the best results for their business. One of the most popular channels is Facebook. About 44% of surveyed marketers say that “Facebook is valuable because they help with new customer recruitment”.
A proven working strategy is to add lead capture pages to your in social published articles and to track the traffic, leads, lead to customer rate and revenue per generated lead. So you get a good picture of your cost per lead and adjust activities to increase your profits.
Studies show that companies which relying on online lead generation is two times more profitable than those who do not. Those companies achieve up to 62% lower costs per lead.
Get active and establish your outpost in social media today!
Seven steps to establish your brands social media outpost:
1. Start a social media presence. Complete your profile there.
2. Research for industry related B2B groups and people. Become a member and invite those people to your network.
3. Listen to their discussions. If you have something valuable to contribute than do it, otherwise go on listening.
4. Start a corporate blog. Write about topics your B2B audience is interested in. Share your blog articles in social media and ask for feedback for your publication.
5. Build landing pages and offer exclusive and valuable content for download. So you generate laser target high quality industry related B2B leads.
Strategic content marketing has proven as one of the best ways to create brand awareness. Content marketing has proven to be the best and most cost effective way to drive traffic to a company website and convert this traffic to leads and customers.
Companies utilizing content marketing strategy report n up to 2,000% lift in blog traffic and 40% boost in revenue.
The most popular ways of content marketing are blogging, social media and video.
Publish buyer persona oriented remarkable content. This can be achieved with a corporate blog very quick.
Here are some facts about the power of blogging:
1. Blogging companies get up to 55% more Traffic
2. Blogging companies get up to 97% more Inbound Links
3. Blogging companies get up to 434% more indexed pages in search engines
4. Blogging companies get up to 25x times more business leads
In the next stages you should craft buyer persona oriented…
Press releases
Pictures
Whitepapers
EBooks
Video
These pieces of content you can distribute on sites like Prweb.com, Flickr.com, Pinterest.com, Slideshare.net and YouTube.com.
Like market leading airlines, private air charter is in a very competitive business.
Private air charter companies need to be in front of their audience when they are looking if they want to increase business and revenue.
Private air charter companies need their audience to talk about them to spread the word about their brand.
As long their recent and future clients are talking about them, they have realistic chances to get seen, visited and to increase their business.
The challenge:
When a Google search is carried out for the search term “Private air charter” there is about 2,740,000 results.
Under these circumstances it is difficult for a private air charter company to get seen and noticed from their future customer amid of this massive amount of search results.
The solution is that a private air charter company has to stand out of their competition to attract clients like a magnet.
With the proven inbound marketing strategy a private air charter company can place them self in an unrivaled position against their competition!
When interested audience is looking for private air charter services and they go on the internet to Google, Yahoo and Bing for research. Customers also rely on recommendations from friends and business partners when they choose private air charter services. Customers go to their favorite social networks as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to do their research there as well.
Three important questions you should ask yourself:
• Can your private air charter business be found on Google from potential customer when they are looking?
• Do you know what’s been talked about you or your competition online?
• Why should a customer fly with your private air charter company?
• Is your private air charter website an asset or a liability?
Marketing has changed and Private air charter business’ need to be where their audience is on the internet. The market leading airlines are!
Private air charter business’ need to utilize the Inbound Marketing strategy for their business to get found, to get leads and to increase their customers and revenue!
Inbound marketing strategy that focuses on getting found by customers when they research online for products and services a business offers.
With inbound marketing businesses earn their way to the customer, by publishing helpful and remarkable information on a blog, in social media and forums.
Inbound marketing includes Content Creation like Blogging, Social Media Communication, Lead Generation, Nurturing, Conversion and Closed-Loop Analysis.
Content creation
Content marketing has become a significant part of online marketing strategy. Content marketing has proven to be the best and most cost effective way to drive traffic to a company website and convert this traffic to leads and customers.
The most popular ways of content marketing are blogging, social media and video. Studies show that 57% of companies which operate a corporate blog get customers through their blogging effort.
We suggest to publish buyer persona oriented remarkable content. This can be achieved with a corporate blog.
• Studies show that companies who blog receives up to 55% more target traffic than companies who do not blog.
• Studies also show, the higher the volume of published blog posts the more the traffic increases.
Social Media Marketing
A company should also be active in social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and hand picked niche networks Social media marketing has become a powerful tool to spread remarkable content to reach a wide audience.
For companies who engage in social media and show presence in these channels get in the position to open wide opportunities to get in touch with their audience. This leads to an increase of credibility and unfiltered feedback of the target audience and can lead to an improvement of products and services.
New studies show that up to 65 percent of today’s customers expect a brand to listen and to respond on questions, comments and complaints in social media. Studies also show that companies which use social media actively to communicate with their audience are more successful than companies who do not.
Infographic: How Airlines Have Taken Flight With Social Media
Lead Generation
Inbound marketing has a 62% lower cost per lead than traditional marketing strategies. Inbound marketing way generated leads have a 55% higher lead conversion rate than lead generated through traditional marketing strategies.
• Studies show that companies with 17+ landing pages increase their lead count disproportionately.
Lead Nurturing – Lead Conversion
Effective lead nurturing increases lead conversion by up to 55%. Which does not mean that lead nurturing consist of sales pitches. Moreover effective lead nurturing is also a communication process with the future customer in which the lead receives helpful and valuable information too.
This grows the trust and increases the chances that a customer flies with your private air charter when he is ready to do so, because he knows the source as a trusted and reputable one.
Closed-Loop Analysis
All marketing tasks need to be measured to ensure you are walking the right way. During this closed loop analysis you increase successful tasks measure, improve and repeat. This ensures a step by step quality increase and a gradually decrease of marketing costs up to 62%.
In a nutshell, inbound marketing:
A. saves your business up to 62% of the marketing budget
B. makes your private air charter business stand out of the competition
C. increase brand value and recognition
D. generate a massive amount of leads
E. gets you up to 55% higher lead conversion rates
F. increase customers and sales
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Free report: Get found and get leads the smart way.
“Worldwide social network ad revenues are still going strong and set to grow nearly 50% this year, according to eMarketer estimates.” by Emarketer.com
The revenue spending on social networks are increasing this is a fact. More and more businesses discover that social networks are a great communication tool to get in touch with their audience.
B2C and B2B have realized that the business decision makes are active in the social web and try to reach them by paid advertising.
It is a good approach to be visible where your audience is around. But the way how you are visible is more important than a big ad budget.
Moreover a big ad budget does not mean you will be successful with your lead generation campaign. The opposite is more likely the result.
Smart marketers use PPC only for short campaigns, and not as a substitute of a holistic strategy.
Why? Because PPC has no log term value for marketing, when you stop your PPC your lead flow also stops. Another point is that you do not earn any trust in the market with PPC. Anybody can bid for the highest keywords. You can’t buy trust and reputation by bidding the highest price per click!
When it comes to led generation than “nothing beats the inbound marketing strategy”!
Studies from the past five years revealed that a seriously executed inbound marketing strategy results in up to 62% lower cost per lead an in an up to 55% higher lead conversion rate.
Inbound marketing consists of content creation, content distribution, content marketing, Social Media communication, Lead generation, Lead Nurturing, Lead Conversion, and Closed-Loop Analysis to refine and improve the activities.
Furthermore companies who execute an inbound marketing seriously build trust, their brand and are recognized as a reputable source on the web. They get found on the web when future customers are looking, instead of pushing them with dump old fashioned sales pitches.
Infographic: Inbound Marketing on the rise
Companies who utilize inbound marketing simply leave their competition behind them in the dust. Inbound marketing is brain versus budget, and in the long term the brain always wins!
Generation Y, young, digital-savvy consumers, are the 18- to 34-year-old age group which has grown up with internet and social media. They communicate about product and services with their friends on social networks. They read and write online reviews and are more likely to recommend products.
They have higher wages and are more likely to spend their money on luxury goods as well.
A survey done by American Express Business Insights find out that Generation Y increased their spending 31% in 2011 over 2010.
Famous brands have discovered this trend and are more active their where Generation Y is around on the web. This is about B2C.
But how about B2B and what can they use this information for?
As Gen. Y goes older they will get more influential jobs and positions in companies and this is what makes them interesting for a B2B approach.
For you if you are in B2B, you should follow the examples of the big consumer and luxury brands and establish your outposts on the web and in social media.
As those Gen. Y users actually do not have influential positions they are an interesting community for you and your human resources to get new talent for now. This also gives you the opportunity to play
You should build a strong network all over the coming years, establish your business as a trusted and reputable source and grow awareness for your B2B activities.
This will let you enough time to learn their interests and to learn their way life, so you can speak their language when it comes to do business with them. This knowledge and the existing connections will make you business much easier within the next twenty years.
Your today’s activities will be your investment in your businesses future. In the first step you improve your human resources and get in touch with talent where they are around on the web and in social media. And for second you learn a lot about their interests and what they appreciate and what they do not like.
Infographic: WHO ARE THE MILLENNIALS?
Marketing takeaway tip: Improve you online presence by become active in social media. Start publishing valuable target content through a blog, video, eBooks, and whitepapers. Improve your website and make it a great marketing hub to communicate with your audience and to attract Gen. Y job seekers for your business.
Or How Mobile Devices will Make 90% of Your SEO Efforts Obsolete in the Future
In the past it has been important for a business to have good SEO in place to get found on the search engines through their target audience. Businesses optimized their websites and published content with keywords on a frequent basis.
In the last years content marketing has emerged and a new era began on how to manage it to get found from customers who research on search engines and than in social media. At this time buyer persona content creation is a must for businesses to increase their chances to get found on the web.
Companies need to spend enough diligence to identify their buyer personas because of to reach their lead generation goals. Smart content marketing is a critical factor to attract the right buyer personas to a company website and convert them to leads and during a lead nurturing process to revenue!
But a new way of search has emerged where some of these tactics above does not fit anymore. Mobile devices have spread around the world and statistics show that about 260 million devices are in use actually and this number will grow by 2014 to more than one billion.
When people are on their mobile device they do not go to the web browser to research for a restaurant or retail store.
They rely on their mobile apps from Foursquare, Yelp, Gowalla, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other which give them information instantly and also location based information where how to hit a great location. Also in the B2B sector more CEOs are researching for products and services on their IPads, IPhone; Blackberry and Android. This trend is increasingly growing.
Search traffic will decrease and companies who are active on location based services will get an increase of traffic as people use them preferable.
Consumer Trend in Mobile Purchases
2009-2010, % of consumers making 1 or more m-purchase
Source: Oracle / ATG
What does it mean for businesses?
For a business this means to get engaged on those social networks and services which already are very popular and have mobile apps active. This is the way to get and most important to stay in front of the future customers.
Infographic: Mobile Warming
Marketing takeaway to profit from this increasing mobile trend:
1. Optimize your website to be accessible from mobile devices
2. Sart to collect mobile phone numbers to enable your mobile marketing through personalized SMS
3. Adjust your email marketing and the email messages to be easy readable from mobile devices
4. Build your digital outposts and get engaged in social media, in location based services and rating sites
5. Develop your own mobile app to stay in touch with your audience directly
With this above activities you can significantly improve your visibility on mobile devices and attract more future customers to your business.
What do you think? Are you actually active to reach your target audience on their mobile devices?
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.
Inbound marketing includes Blogging, Social Media, Lead Conversion, Lead Nurturing and Closed-Loop Analysis.
Most business has not the resources and the knowledge to execute a powerful and result driven inbound marketing strategy.
They have not good writers on their staff to produce buyer persona oriented remarkable content like blog articles, whitepapers, how-to’s and eBooks on a regular basis.
Also they do not have in-house SEO experts to help them to choose the most relevant keywords to better get found in the search engines.
Moreover the knowledge about social media communication and an effective community management is not in place as well.
But the most important fact is the time to get all the required things done.
Studies show that business who try to do inbound marketing without professional help fail within three months.
What did they win when the do not hire a professional inbound marketing agency? Simply nothing! They waste time resources and money for no revenue results.
If you want to profit from inbound marketing than you should think about to hire professionals who can do the job.
What do you get by executing a professional inbound marketing strategy?
A. S ave 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.
How much does it cost to hire a professional inbound marketing agency?
This is a god question. The same one like how much is a car? What kind of car do you want? Do you want an old car or a brand new Ferrari?
Inbound marketing hourly rates start with $100 per hour, depends what to do.
You can calculate to spend between $2,000/m – $3,000/m for about minimum of six months, depending on the services delivered. Because any serious inbound marketing agency will need this time frame to set your marketing on the right track to help you to reach your revenue goals.
On the end of the day is inbound marketing the most efficient and the most cost effective marketing you can get for your buck.
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Free report: Get found and get leads the smart way.
Social media has become a significant part of serious marketers lead generation strategy.
Companies who engage in social media increase their reach massively. And there is no matter if they are B2C or B2B.
Social media is public communications channel where companies can get great unfiltered feedback.
Companies need to understand that social media is not for “pushing your messages out “.
To be successful and to reach a positive ROI with social media, companies need to communicate and to listen to their audience.
It is simply untrue when someone claims that his customers are not active in social media. They are active in B2C and B2B and they research online for products and services.
The only question is: What will they find when they research for products and services you also have to offer, will they find you or your competitor?
Studies prove that B2C and B2B profit likewise from social media engagement.
A study from Wildfire Interactive shows that social media helps grow brand awareness, increase sales and partnerships and helped to reduce marketing costs.
Engaging in dialogue with customers via social media has become an important part of successful companies.
Smart marketers measure the value of social media channels as well. They want to know which one has the best results for their business. One of the most popular channels is Facebook. About 44% of surveyed marketers say that “Facebook is valuable because they help with new customer recruitment”.
Moreover they have stated that Facebook fans have higher conversion rates and they make more frequent purchases.
How can you measure the ROI of your social media marketing?
• At first you can do this by increase of your revenue
• As a second way you can measure are “Likes”
• You can measure social media mentions of your brand
A great way is to add lead capture pages to your in social published articles and to track the traffic, leads, lead to customer rate and revenue per generated lead. So you get a good picture of your cost per lead and adjust activities to increase your profits.
Studies show that companies which relying on online lead generation are two times more profitable than those who do not. Those companies achieve an up to 62% lower cost per lead.
LinkedIn is now permitted to use your name and picture in any of their advertisements. So they can use this throughout their whole network for their marketing purposes!
First - You can forbid it by change your privacy settings this way:
1. Place the cursor on your name at the top right corner of the screen. From the small
pull down menu that appears, select “settings”
2. Then click “Account” on the left/bottom
3. In the column next to Account, select the option “Manage Social Advertising”
4. Finally un-tick the box “LinkedIn may use my name and photo in social advertising”
5. and Save
Or, the Second possibility –You can use this as an opportunity to let market LinkedIn your business throughout their whole network for FREE! Simply let them do the branding job for your business and paying not a dime for this!
How does this sound for you?
Here is how it works:
You simply change your photo to a branding tool! Use your photo by inserting your brand LOGO how I have done here with my LinkedIn photo. That’s it.
Now LinkedIn is very welcome to use my photo throughout their whole network as long as they want.
I only can say THANK YOU LINKEDIN for this tremendous FREE marketing opportunity and God bless you!
By the way, you can do this on Twitter, Facebook and other networks as well.
— Let me know what you think and how your results are.
The Social Media marketing return on investment is a major factor why businesses choose to step into social media marketing and the two communications here.
Social media has proved in the past years that it can bring positive ROI when done right. Some successful examples are Intrepid Travel, Easy Lunch Boxes,SnapRetail just only to name some of them.
As businesses understand that social media is no short term sprint than more something like a marathon they engage with more diligence to plan their steps to reach a long term ROI.
Successful brands look at social media engagement as a plant which needs to be cultivated over the time to grow to an unlimited range.
BzzAgent has discovered that about 61% of brand advocates would buy products up to one year after social media campaign has expired. This proves that social media marketing and two way communication lasts longer than ordinary one marketing blasts from yesteryear.
This does not mean that social media has become a “push the button cash machine”. Not every campaign will be successful. But like everything on the planet the volume of activities and their step by step improvement ensures a growing success.
This does not mean that brands should fire one campaign behind another. This means that a brand should carefully listen to its audience. When they listen carefully their audience will tell them which campaign could be appreciated to become a possible success story.
In the mean time a human and authentic communication should be the priority.
A good way to start a smart dialogue is to ask open questions. To ask the audience about their opinion about services and products will open discussions where a brand get the opportunity to respond in a professional, authentic and human way.
No matter if there are critics or praise. Every feedback is a chance to showcase the brands standpoint and get in touch with the recent or future customer.
Brands that listen to their audience and improve products and services to fit their audience’s needs are one step from that to be the long term winners. The growing trend for custom products proves this. The one size fits all strategy does not work anymore this is for sure!
Any business can use social media as a source of unfiltered information and as powerful business intelligence tool to predict trends, for support and product development.
The others who do not will be left behind, and they deserve to vanish because they do not care a shi* about their audience and never have. Social media also points this out and separates the good from the bad once.
In this new world the customer B2C and B2B wins and the brands who care. And that’s good!
Google, Yahoo and Bing increasingly include results from social media discussions in their search results. Especially Google+ results are likely more visible on Google results pages. Bing favors Facebook and also search results on Facebook are also from Bing too.
But how to get into those results the smartest way?
The easiest way to get better found on search engines is content marketing. As content marketing has become the most powerful marketing strategy to increase brand awareness, trust and credibility with the audience.
As content is only a part of an integral marketing strategy there is more part of the marketing puzzle important to be used.
The most powerful internet marketing strategy which also has proven to be successful and to bring guaranteed results for businesses is Inbound Marketing.
Inbound marketing consist of content creation like Blogging, Social Media Marketing, Lead Conversion, Lead Nurturing and Closed-Loop Analysis.
Inbound Marketing has proven to:
• Save up to 62% of a businesses marketing budget.
• Make a business stand out of their competition.
• Help to generate a massive amount of leads with up to 55% higher lead conversion rates
• Increase customers, sales and revenue.
Content creation
Content Marketing has become a significant part of online marketing strategy. Content marketing has proven to be the best and most cost effective way to drive traffic to a company website and convert this traffic to leads and customers.
The most popular ways of content marketing are blogging, social media and video. Studies show that 57% of companies which operate a corporate blog get customers through their blogging effort!
Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing has become a powerful tool to spread remarkable content to reach a wide audience.
For companies who engage in social media and show presence in these channels can open wide opportunities to get in touch with their audience. This leads to an increase of credibility and unfiltered feedback of the target audience and can lead to an improvement of products and services.
New studies show that up to 65 percent of today’s consumers expect a brand to listen and to respond on questions, comments and complaints in social media. Studies also show that companies which use social media actively to communicate with their audience are more successful than companies who do not.
Lead Generation
Inbound marketing has a 62% lower cost per lead than traditional marketing strategies. Inbound marketing way generated leads have a 55% higher lead conversion rate than lead generated through traditional marketing strategies.
Lead Nurturing – Lead Conversion
Effective lead nurturing increases lead conversion by up to 55%. Which does not mean that lead nurturing consist of sales pitches. Moreover effective lead nurturing is also a communication process with the future client in which the lead receives helpful and valuable information too. This grows the trust and increases the chances that a lead buys when he is ready to do so, because he knows the source as a trusted and reputable one.
Closed-Loop Analysis
All marketing tasks need to be measured to ensure you are walking the right way. During this closed loop analysis you increase successful tasks measure, improve and repeat. This ensures a step by step quality increase and a gradually decrease of marketing costs up to 62%.
Infographic: Content creation
Keep your inbound marketing flexible to react on real-time news! Always keep the news in focus. As news appears they can offer a tremendous opportunity for you to jump on this bandwagon to use it as your own marketing push the piggy pack way! But you must react quickly, in real-time!
Simply be the first who tweets, shares or likes the story and also take into account to write a blog article from your point of view ASAP! This can help to increase your brand awareness.
The inBlurbs Inbound Internet Marketing blog covers all of
inbound marketing - SEO, Blogging, Social Media, Landing
Pages, Lead Generation and Analytics.
Social Media marketing has influenced the marketing strategies of business organizations online in recent years.
