Marketers Look Beyond Social Media Experimentation

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Suwandhi Taswin

As budgets increase, marketers hope to understand more about social media

Marketers are becoming more mature when it comes to their social media marketing, and many in the US say they hope to move beyond the experimentation phase in the coming years.

In October 2011, at the second annual Pivot Conference, a survey found that 37.1% of marketers said their company will move beyond experimentation in social media marketing in 2012. An additional 14.6% expect to do so in 2014 and 5.6% by 2015. Nearly 8% said it would be later than 2015 and more than a third (34.8%) said they did not know when they would move past the experimentation phase.

There were many factors that marketers cited as influential in their drive for more mature social media marketing. Among the respondents who said their company would move beyond social media experimentation in 2012, 68.5% said an increased understanding on the benefits of social media was a factor that encouraged this maturation. Additionally, 60.9% cited a development of clear social strategy, 54.3% pointed to clearly defined outcomes and 51.1% mentioned metrics as having an influence.

While only 26.1% of respondents said budget increases would influence the move beyond experimentation, marketers also told the Pivot Conference that social media marketing would make up a higher percentage of their marketing budget in 2012 and beyond. While 37% of respondents said social media would be less than 5% of the marketing budget in 2011, only 27.1% expected that same low percentage in 2012 and just 18.8% predicted it would remain that low in 2013.

The combination of bigger budgets and increased sophistication will likely spur companies to go further toward reaching maturity in their social media marketing efforts and foster new examples of successful social media campaigns in the coming years.

Using Google+ to build your business

Posted on November 11, 2011 by Rionald Soerjanto

Google+ is the new player in the block. It has quickly become the place to be in social media.

The last thing entrepreneurs need is another social network to join, right? Weren’t you just getting the hang of Twitter? Didn’t you just start putting that Facebook business page together? So why is this important to get into Google+ now?

What I’ve seen so far is that the new social network from Google has a lot of advantages that are worth thinking about, and entrepreneurial types should take a look-see.

THE NEXT BIG THING
Google+ is a social networking platform, but you can look at it a lot of different ways. You can say it’s like Facebook, only cleaner. It’s like Twitter, only more engaging. It has the potential to be a great collaboration and communication platform (you can isolate who sees information by sharing it with specific Circles, or groupings of people).

Also, realize that Google+ is indexed by the biggest search engine in the world, also known as Google. Other search engines like it, too. And it has a lot of integration points, such as Google Places (which shows you location information), and an incredible potential for integrating even more of Google’s services over time.

HOW IT WILL HELP YOUR BUSINESS
Social networks are built to try and emulate real-world connectivity and information-sharing. On one hand, they’re like a more interesting telephone. On the other hand, they’re built to augment (not replace) cocktail parties, chamber of commerce meetings and other places where people get to know each other (or at least used to). Google+ does this surprisingly well, for a few reasons.
Google+ lets you share photos, videos, links and location data with everyone, or with your select Circles. Thus, when you find the good stuff that applies to your real estate friends, if you’ve grouped them into a Circle, you can send that information only to them. Other times, you can share with the general public to try and grow your audience.

WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT
First (and important) Facebook is not indexed by Google for search results, meaning that everything you do inside there stays inside there. Second, Facebook and LinkedIn both are set up for more of an “exclusive” model, which means that you have to know someone to know something. That’s why you see companies pushing so hard for “likes,” and why you see people spam the LinkedIn Groups.
Google+ is slowly rolling out their “for business” parts of the platform.

GET IN EARLY
Simply put, it’s important to take action on Google+ right now. I saw the benefits of this when I joined Twitter a while ago. If you get in, get familiar, start growing connections and learn how to curate and share, you’ll be ahead of the game.

How Do You Use Your Email List Effectively?

Posted on November 4, 2011 by Rionald Soerjanto

Do you remember the sweet anticipation of receiving new email messages? If you are like most people today, you hardly think of your inbox fondly.

Here are the two things you need to consider when using your email for marketing. It is great to see people opening and enjoying your emails. Here is how you can achieve more of this:
Don’t Use Email to Only Sell
“The biggest problem that I see is that companies use them [emails] exclusively to try to sell things,” says David Meerman Scott in his book “Real-Time Marketing.”

The messages they send revolve around product offers, discounts and free shipping. Emails from B2B companies, on the other hand, are always trying to push the recipients toward engaging with sales people. While this approach is okay every now and then, it should occur only after a company has earned the attention of its email subscribers.

Earn the Attention of Email Subscribers
Every email you send to people needs to lead with something valuable. You might want to share a link to a video, a new webinar or some type of industry report or an infographic. In this way, your recipients will be excited to open your messages because they will expect to see real value there. So, before sending your next email, ask yourself: “Why is this going to be valuable to the person I am sending it?”

Images on a web page

Posted on June 21, 2011 by Rionald Soerjanto

Images on a web page can certainly enhance user experience. However, when inserting images into your website, you should keep in mind the following:

Don‟t use images excessively. More pictures means your page will take longer to load. This has a negative impact both on user experience and search engine optimization.
Associate text with pictures. Search engines do not „read‟ images; they read only text. ALT text is an HTML attribute you can add to your picture so search engines replace the image with some associated text.
Include keywords in your image file name. This will help you draw in relevant traffic from image searches. Separate different keywords in the file name with a dash (-).

Key Components of a Great Blog Post

Posted on June 20, 2011 by Rionald Soerjanto

A well-constructed blog post should include several key components:

An Attention-Grabbing Article Title: Because your blog article’s title is the first thing people will see, it’s important to make sure it clearly indicates what the article is about, is concise, keyword-rich (because the header tag is the most important for SEO), and attention grabbing.
Well Written & Formatted Text: The body of your article should be well-written and formatted in a way that makes it easy to read. Consider using header tags and bullet-lists to break up the content into sections.
Images/Videos: Relevant multimedia content can make a blog article more memorable and fun to read. It also helps to break up text to make it more pleasing to the eye.
Links: Include in-text links to relevant content. These can also point to landing pages to help you generate more leads for your content.
Call-to-Action: Each and every blog article you publish should include a relevant call-to-action at the bottom of the article to help boost lead generation.

Principles of Good URL Structure

Posted on June 18, 2011 by Rionald Soerjanto

The URL of a web page is its web address. The URL structure of a website is about how the different URLs connect with each other.

Unfortunately, improving your URL structure is one of the more difficult aspects of on-page website optimization. The methods of fixing these issues depend entirely on the back-end parts of your website, such as your content management system or programming framework. Nevertheless, if you have a competent developer by your side, having him or her tackle these issues can significantly improve your SEO. Your best approach might be to hand your developer the following list.

Here are the Principles of Good URL Structure:

Apply a 301 redirect where required. A 301 redirect forwards an old URL to a new one after it changes. Make sure you do this if you change the URL of a page on your site. A common mistake is not applying a 301 redirect between yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com. This can be quite a problem from an SEO standpoint, because search engines will give separate credit to both versions of your site.
Avoid pages with deeply nested URLs. Here is an example of what a deeply nested URL would look like: http://yoursite.com/about/management/contact/phone. Deeply nested pages will get less SEO credit. You can fix this problem by improving your overall site design.
Include keywords in your URLs. If you’ve already purchased your main URL, then don’t worry about buying a new one just for this sake. But you can clean the URLs of your interior pages to include keywords and not look like gibberish.
For your internal page URLs, separate individual keywords with dashes (- or _). For example: http://www.skysoftconsulting.com/website_design/ is a good URL that captures ‘website design’ and ‘website consulting’ as keywords.

Create static URLs, not dynamic ones. This means that the URL for one of your pages should be the same, no matter what. Check if you see different URLs for the same page in your website. If there are, you can look into how to create static URLs with your web server software. Do a Google search on “create static URL” + (name of your server software)

Effectiveness of using dedicated landing pages

Posted on June 16, 2011 by Rionald Soerjanto

Overall, dedicated landing pages are clearly effective. Depending on the scale of the campaign, their effectiveness can appear lesser or greater. At the same time, as with many other tactics presented in this report, the reader should keep in mind that benchmark survey respondents are likely on average more experienced and successful Landing Page Optimization practitioners, and therefore their results are above average.

The key takeaway from this simple chart is that close to half of the marketers that used Dedicated Landing Pages found them to be very effective – definitively showing that the opportunity does exist.

How to Create a Keyword Strategy

Posted on June 15, 2011 by Rionald Soerjanto

More and more consumers are finding businesses online through search engines. How do they find them? By using keywords!

Fortunately, you can take advantage of this consumer habit by optimizing your website around the keywords that are relevant to your business and which keywords consumers are using to find you online. This will increase your chances of getting found by people searching with those keywords, which will drive more and better quality traffic to your business’ website.

1. Create a list of 3-5 keywords relevant to your business.
Think like you‟re using the brain of someone searching for your product with a search engine. For small- and medium-sized businesses, your keywords are not your brand name. Instead, think of words and short phrases that get to the core of what your product or service is about.

2. Choose keywords based on difficulty and relevance.
The keywords you choose should be based on difficulty and relevance.

Some very general words such as “marketing” or “business” are very competitive, making it harder to rank well for them in search engine results. If you are a small- or medium-sized business, you probably want to choose less competitive keywords, more specifically related to your business (these are commonly referred to as long tail keywords). The greater the volume of searches on a keyword, the more competitive it is. There are a number of different tools you can use to determine the competitiveness of a specific keyword as well as suggest and help you brainstorm new keyword ideas. These tools include the Google Keyword Tool.

Another important factor for picking keywords is their relevance to your business. While some obscure terms might be easy to rank for, they might not be relevant to your business.
You should find a balance between relevance and difficulty. Choose about 5 keywords that match your business well.

3. Design and optimize your website around your keywords.
Now that you’ve chosen your keywords, you should incorporate them into your website.

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