Well, here’s the thing: your customers probably are on social media. Can any B2B company make the case that its target audience isn’t on LinkedIn? Are there B2C companies without potential customers on Facebook? I guess it’s possible, but it certainly won’t stay that way for long. 79% of US adults use social media (if you were tuning into our webinar with Facebook today, you would have heard that very stat)! And eMarketer predicts there will be 1.43 billion worldwide social media users in 2012. Wow.
But this blog post isn’t an attempt to convince you that your future customers are using social media. It’s an attempt to convince you that there are many other reasons why social media is a crucial component of a well-rounded inbound marketing strategy — and they have nothing to do with “engaging” with your target audience.
So let’s pretend that your customers aren’t on social media, or that you work for someone who thinks they aren’t and, as such, doesn’t see the point in investing in a social media marketing program. We all know how hard it is to convince non-believers of the importance of social media, so this post will serve as your guide for having that conversation. Here’s how you can make the case for social media marketing to your boss — even if he or she doesn’t believe your target audience is using social media!
1) Social Media Activity Impacts Your Organic Search Presence
If you’re investing in content creation, it would be a shame not to get it any visibility in organic search. Social media plays a bigger role in the visibility of web pages in search engines every day. In fact, Google even started to incorporate Google+ status updates into its search engine results; we’ve even written an entire blog post about how to use Google+ to gain better visibility in search engines! – Why You Need Social Media, Even if Your Customers Don’t by Corey Eridon
Why You Need Social Media, Even if Your Customers Don’t
Affiliate Marketing Tips part 3 – Future of Publishing
Sazbean is proud to bring you the final part in the Future of Publishing series on affiliate marketing (next week’s episode will be on a different topic). In this episode, Oliver Roup focuses on an advanced topic that challenges the advertising side of affiliate marketing: Affiliate fraud. Oliver and the panel explore how to identify fraud, how to extinguish it, and how to mitigate damages. Watch more below:
Highlights:
- Counterfeit data sticks out like a sore thumb…
- If you pay attention to detail …
- Even with very little background in statistics!
Future of Publishing is sponsored by VigLink. If you enjoyed the show, be sure to Like Future of Publishing on Facebook!
A Marketer’s Guide to Optimizing Images for Google Search
There’s no doubt about it: the visual content revolution is upon us, as is evident by the infographic craze, the popularity of websites like Pinterest, and the success of visual content on social media sites like Facebook and Google+.
It’s no surprise then that today on the Official Google Webmaster blog, Google shared some helpful tips on how to effectively optimize your website’s visual content and images to get found in Google’s Image Search. We thought these tips, in addition to the Image Publishing Guidelines Google encourages, were definitely worthy of sharing with you, especially if you’re experimenting with ways to make your marketing content more visual so you can take advantage of the increased popularity of visual content.
Do you know how to properly optimize that fabulous pink paper unicorn image seen at top right? You will after you read this simple tutorial!
How Google Identifies and Indexes Images
So what exactly does Google look at when indexing images? Let’s check out a quick overview before we explain how to optimize your images.
First, it checks out image type. The image types Google can index include BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, and SVG. To learn more about a particular image when Google’s algorithms index an image, Google looks at the written copy on the page where the image was found as well as the page’s title and body. Google also considers anchor text pointing to the image, the image’s filename, and its alt text. In addition, Google may use other methods like computer vision (methods for acquiring, processing, analyzing, and understanding images) and the caption from the Image Sitemap (a Sitemap incorporating image-specific tags, which we’ll elaborate on later in this post), if available, to learn more about the images it finds. – A Marketer’s Guide to Optimizing Images for Google Search by Pamela Vaughan
Earth Day 2012 – Future of Engagement
Earth Day is celebrated every year in April as a way to spread awareness about the growing plight of the environment and encourage people and governments to care for it better. As a result, many corporations us it as a branding opportunity to show that they care about the environment too. In this Future of Engagement episode, Murray Newlands looks at how brands like National Geographic and even American Airlines helped promote Earth Day on social media:
Graph by Alerti social media monitoring tool:
The Semantics of Branding
I may be dim, but have you ever thought about how people talk about brands? The brand stands for something. The brand does this or that. The brand value is whatever. The brand has a conversation with people. The brand tells stories.
Guess what? There’s no such thing as “the brand.” It has no consciousness or personality. It can’t do things. It simply isn’t.
There are businesses run by people who make decisions and take actions. Awareness, opinions, and feelings among people are driven by those actions.
Brands are the aggregation of those perceptions and emotions. They’re fluid because the aggregation changes moment-to-moment. A due host of inputs affect those moments, most of which are environmental, circumstantial, and quite often unpredictable.
Consumers don’t “own” brands any more than companies do. Brands are mirrors. Narratives with many authors. Topics that people talk about. Mental constructions that reveal themselves through description, however imperfectly, and through purchase and other experiences, more directly. – The Semantics of Branding by Jonathan
7 Lead Gen Opportunities PR Pros Should Seize
Most people don’t think of PR professionals and brand marketers as lead generators. After all, it’s hard to measure the effect a placement or a graphic has on leads. But brand marketers actually have a lot of opportunity to help their marketing team generate and reconvert leads. It’s simply a matter of thinking outside the box, considering how a person becomes a lead, and leveraging the tools brand marketers have at their disposal. If you work in PR and branding and really want to contribute to your marketing team’s lead generation efforts, here are 7 opportunities to get you started!
Case Studies & Testimonials
Case studies and testimonials are an important part of marketing to your audience. Including current customers’ opinions of your product and service is a tried and true way of encouraging prospects to use your business. And what’s great about case studies and testimonials is that those reading them are often already leads — and likely near the bottom of the buying funnel — so a few more reconversions will help your sales team prioritize them as likely future customers in their sales funnel. Turning this content into a lead generator will be a huge win for lead reconversions and a better lead-to-customer conversion rate. – 7 Lead Gen Opportunities PR Pros Should Seize by Rachel Sprung
The Ultimate Digital Customer Service Guide
In our recent Customer Experience Series, Mashabledove deep into the mysterious alchemy of customer service. Those who own their own business will tell you: Getting (and keeping) customers is not easy. There are so many different factors that must work together perfectly within a company to ensure that fans of your brand stay happy.
Whether its making sure that your ecommerce platform doesn’t drive your users crazy or organizing your social media to build your community, forethought is key to a premium customer experience. These articles will give you comprehensive knowledge of many facets of digital customer service, with expert advice from community managers, CEOs and web designers.
Here’s a roundup of all of our articles, brought together into this handy guide. – The Ultimate Digital Customer Service Guide by Lauren Hockinson
Top Internet strategy, marketing and technology links for the week of April 21, 2012
Here are the top Internet strategy, marketing and technology links for the week of April 21, 2012…
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Affiliate Marketing Tips part 2 – Future of Publishing
Affiliate marketing tips on Future of Publishing: Part 2. Last week, we aired an episode of Future of Engagement about affiliate marketing tips that was intended to give publishers some tips on how to make money off their publications. This week goes into more depth, focusing on specific technological methods of optimizing affiliate campaigns, among other topics. Find out what VigLink’s Oliver Roup and guests have to say!
Highlights
- Redirecting within your domain can increase your conversion rate…
- Which means you make more sales…
- And make more money!
Future of Publishing is sponsored by VigLink. If you enjoyed the show, be sure to Like Future of Publishing on Facebook!
Can social media accelerate the buying cycle?
The number of companies not doing anything with social media gets smaller and smaller by the day, but that doesn’t mean that business has social media figured out.
Despite the increasing comfort that many companies and marketers have with social media, questions still linger about efficacy and ROI.
Andrea Fishman, VP of global strategy and partner at interactive agency BGT Partners, however, believes that some of the challenges companies face in using social media is based on the fact that they’re applying the AIDA (attention-interest-desire-action) model. According to Fishman, “The problem is that the AIDA model tends to be linear in fashion.”
Instead, she suggests, companies can use social media to shorten the buying cycle by defocusing on this linear process and applying social media in more thoughtful ways:
…stop thinking of how to apply social media to your current channels. Instead, take a step back and assess all they ways your audience may be impacted by social media – and develop new content, offers, and experiences that take advantage of the disruption. Use the two-way nature of social media to engage in conversations that accelerate the buying cycle. Create “social only” offers that take advantage of the immediacy of the Internet. Use sentiment and activity data to spot trends sooner – and apply that knowledge to your product pricing and promotional strategies.
These are all good suggestions, and many companies are increasingly realizing that social media works best when it’s not kept in a silo. As the second screen phenomenon shows us, consumers are increasingly interacting with brands and content across multiple channels, often at the same time. So to get the most out of each channel, it pays to look at how the channels can work together.
But can social media, properly applied, really accelerate the buying cycle? Perhaps. But this, in my opinion, is a red herring. The challenge with social media, as with most channels, is not creating attractive new content, offers and experiences that can entice consumers to take some action. That’s often quite easy if you’re willing to bend over backwards. Instead, the challenge is to drive meaningful action in a way that’s profitable and sensible over the long haul. – Can social media accelerate the buying cycle? by Patricio Robles
Digital Marketing & Strategy
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