7 Tips for Successful Social Media Marketing

A successful social media marketing is exactly what you need for your business to grow. Social media marketing can be a dynamic powerhouse that solidifies branding, creates quality leads, and drives sales. Or, it can be a big time-wasting, task-oriented dud. The key is to know how to strategically create, carry out, and measure the overall plan.

1. Identify Your Goals

It’s a smart business practice to start with goal setting before all new plans, and social media marketing’s no different. After all, you can be the best bicycle salesperson in the state, but still fail if you are supposed to be selling ice cream.

Use the SMART goal setting strategy to create the foundation for successful social media marketing.

• Specific. Vague goals like “get more business” doesn’t help companies pinpoint their objective and create measures of success. Goals must nail down exactly what is expected of the initiative.
• Measurable. Being able to definitively answer “yes, we hit the goal” or “we missed the goal by 20%” is a good goal standard.
• Attainable. Out of reach goals are demoralizing and frustrating. Having to stretch to hit a goal is productive, but don’t go overboard with expectations.
• Relevant. A social media marketing goal needs to tie in to marketing’s overall goal. Is it to build an audience? Increase website traffic? Strengthen branding? Make sure the goal relates to the bigger picture.
• Timely. Dates and times keep companies accountable to their goals. Stay on track by breaking up a large project like this into mini-goals that each have their own deadline.

2. Identify Your Audience

Your message won’t be effective unless it’s specifically designed for who you are trying to target. Developing a relevant buyer persona is essential for successful social media marketing. Three pieces of information offer insight into pinpointing your audience.

• Review happy clients. Clients that have been pleased by a company’s product or service are prime starting points when building a buyer persona. Study their industries, demographics, and their goals closely to understand who you should be targeting.
• Nail down pain points. What question does your product answer? How does it make your buyer’s job easier? Only by thoroughly understanding this can an organization show their value.
• Survey customer support. Talk to the people who are on the front lines. What are the questions they hear most often? Knowing this shows you the direction to take in the content that will most likely engage and interest your targets.

Now let’s answer “where”.

3. Select the Best Platforms

It’s usually a mistake to try to cultivate followers on half a dozen or more social media channels. The person managing the social media efforts gets overwhelmed, off track, and the results end up being puny.

Facebook is the social media giant, of course. LinkedIn is also great for businesses to have a presence. But neither may be the one companies should focus on.

• Who needs the product or service? The offering is key to the platforms you should choose. Selling directly to consumers? Facebook is your best bet. Targeting a younger audience? Snapchat or Instagram might perform the best. Marketing to other companies? LinkedIn could be your golden ticket.
• Where are the competitors? Put your investigative hat on and figure out which channels your competitors are using. Study their presence, and look at their followers. It’s not required that you be on every channel they are on. But, seeing a competitor with tons of followers and engagement should prompt you to move that particular social media channel to the top of the list.

Successful social media marketing takes chunks of time to manage. It’s far better to choose one or two channels and really invest in them than five or six channels and spread the message to thin.

4. Deliver Consistently

An outstanding social media initiative is one that is nurtured constantly. Throwing up a blog here and a picture there won’t build a prosperous marketing strategy.

• Write content. Always keep the targeted buyer in mind when sharing content. Blogs, new white papers, and webinar invitations are smart choices.
• Curate content. Posting relevant industry information and articles written by others are additional ways to fill the social media calendar. Avoid always posting something sales-y. This turns audiences off.
• Listen. Tools that let companies listen to what competitors and the target audience are interested in and talking about guides them toward what they should be sharing.

5. Grow Your Audience

The more eyes that see your message, the more results you enjoy. The social media manager needs to work on increasing followers across all the social media channels deemed relevant for the product or service.

• Current customers. Make sure current happy customers follow your social media. Product updates, new content, and industry information are all valuable to customers. Do it well, and the message could prompt them to buy again.
• Content fans. People who run across and digest your content are primed to follow you. It’s vital to encourage them to subscribe to your blog, and make it easy for them to follow you for future updates. Contests are great ways to increase followers.
• Paid ads. Organic is awesome, but some companies also opt for paid advertising to grow their volume of followers. Ads are great ways to reach your buyers that would otherwise never come into contact with your message..

6. Engage Your Audience

For social media marketing to be successful, companies need to find ways to increase engagement in the followers they have and the ones they want.

• Respond. Social media management is not a one-way street. Respond personally to new followers, answer questions and address issues fast, and comment and like other posts.
• Tag. If there are followers you know are interested in a particular piece of information, tag them when you post about it. Showing personal touches like this helps drive the quality of your social media efforts.
• Link. Depending on your goals, include links in your posts. Otherwise, followers don’t know what you want them to do next. Link to blogs, your website, or other calls-to-action (CTA). Encouraging consumers to take action is key in developing successful social media marketing.
• Use hashtags. Help the audience cut through the enormous amount of noise with valuable hashtags. Decide in advance on a list of hashtags that the business will use. These are neon signs of the internet that help your message be more discoverable.

7. Measure Your Results

Close the loop by holding the results up to the goals you set and see how they compare. Otherwise, you won’t have any idea which strategies are paying off and which ones crashed.

• Followers. Total up the number of new followers each social media platform received, and compare this number to the goal. Interesting social media platforms always consistently add new followers.
• Likes/shares/comments. Measure the amount of engagement the audience has with the posts. It’s positive if you are receiving retweets, shares, comments, and likes. Note which type of content gets the biggest responses.
• Clicks. This is where the metrics start to show how social media efforts did, or didn’t, start moving the sales needle. Were there many clicks to your blog post or website? Did followers take that next step? The success of social media marketing depends on the ability to draw more visitors into the sales funnel.
• Downloads. If your audience responded to your posts by going to landing pages and downloading high-value content like eBooks and white papers chalk this up as a success!
• Leads. It all comes down to this. Ultimately, successful social media marketing increases the number of qualified leads for the company. This is the metric that tells you the most about your efforts. Be patient. It takes time to nurture strangers into leads, even with fantastic content and consistent posting. But they will trickle in eventually if it’s done right.

Successful social media marketing poses a variety of challenges to businesses, and it’s easy to take the wrong turn and end up with less-than-thrilling results. It’s also common to start out excited, and get burned out and lose commitment in the middle of your efforts.

Must Know Digital Marketing Terms

Digital marketing is chock full of jargon and acronyms. Plus, rapid changes in technology cause new terms to show up almost constantly. Even if you’re immersed in the industry, it can be hard to keep up with the latest marketing terms.

1. Impressions

Basically, an “impression” is a set of eyeballs on your ad. In digital marketing terms, this means the number of times a user loads a page with your ad on it. It could also mean the number of people who open an email or see a social media post.

2. CPM

CPM stands for cost per thousand. So, wait, M stands for “thousand” now? M stands for mille, the Latin for 1,000, or you can think of it as the Roman numeral M. This is an advertising model in which you pay a certain amount for every 1,000 impressions.

3. CPC

CPC, on the other hand, is cost per click. With this model, you pay a certain amount for each user who actually clicks on your ad. Which model is cheaper depends on your goals.

4. CTR

Your click through rate (CTR) is the percentage of people who see your ad and click on it. A low click through rate means that your ad may need to be reworked. You calculate it by dividing the number of people who click by the number of people who viewed.

5. Conversion rate

Your conversion rate is the percentage of people who see your ad, then go on to buy your product or take the action you classify as a “conversion.” (This could also be something like filling out a form to request a demo or consultation.)

A high conversion rate is one of the biggest goals of any advertising campaign, and if you have a low conversion rate, it may mean your copy or image needs work.

6. A/B testing

In marketing terms, A/B testing is when you take two potential ads and run them in tandem to see which one gives you the best results.

It’s a key element of any digital marketing campaign, and you should try to change only one part of the ad at a time, such as the photo or CTA (more on that term below). Think about when the eye doctor switches in different lenses to work out what prescription you need.

7. Back link

A back link is any link to your site that originates on another website. These are also called inbound links. Having plenty of quality back links helps your search engine ranking and encourages people to check out your site.

You should avoid having a lot of low quality backlinks, as this can lower your ranking and quality score.

8. Direct traffic

Direct traffic refers to people who went to your website without being referred by a different site. Meaning, they typed in your URL directly or clicked on a bookmark.

An increase in direct traffic may indicate that an offline advertising project such as handing out flyers at a trade show has been a success. The majority of traffic is not

9. CTA

CTA stands for call to action. Everything from your landing page to your ads should have a clear call to action, or a short instruction telling viewers what next action you want them to take. This can also up your CTR.

10. Bounce rate

Bounce rate is the rate at which visitors leave your website after finding their way there. A high bounce rate indicates that a page on your website isn’t as described or isn’t enticing potential customers to stick around or continue to other pages.

7 Benefits of Google Ads to Grow Your Business Online

You can run ads to generate more leads and revenue. You can sell more products online. You can bring more traffic to your website. While the prospect of investing money on Ads might seem like a daunting task, the results that come in are almost instantaneous and transparent. Which is why it is worth every penny that you spend on it.

Benefits of Google Ads

1) Ads works faster than SEO

The topmost benefit of Google Ads is that it works faster than SEO. Both SEO and Google Ads are search engine marketing strategies to generate more traffic and leads. But, a well optimized Ads campaign can work much faster for a business to get the much coveted first spot in search.

Here are some reasons why it’s faster and more effective

·        You can focus on multiple keywords at a time.

·        You can turn the campaign on or off whenever you want to.

·        Ads which appears on the top of the page get immediate visibility.

Of course, this does not mean that you should ignore organic sources, as they have more long-term benefits. But with Ads, there is a better chance of driving more traffic and leads instantly. Additionally, the platform is more transparent, and you know exactly what is happening with the ads.

On the other hand, search engine optimization, though very beneficial, is a long-term process. To rank for any keyword, it requires a lot of perseverance and a lot of well-written articles, and back links. And even then, it takes a while for them to gain the necessary authority.

2) Increase brand awareness

Google Ads, in addition to boosting traffic, clicks, and conversions, is also an efficient way to tell people about your brand.

When it comes to SEO, your rank also depends on the number of your brand name searches and its variations. That’s another reason you should aim to increase brand awareness through search, as well as display ads.

3) Reach more customers through their Gmail Inbox 

One of the most used marketing strategies in every business is email marketing, which is why Gmail ads can be helpful as well. Usually, Gmail ads appear on the promotion tab, but sometimes you can see it on the social tab too. These ads run on both desktops and mobiles. Since Gmail ads generally cost much less than search ads, if you have a small budget, then you can try Gmail ads as well.

4) Reconnect with visitors of your website

One of the coolest benefits of Google Ads is reconnecting with your website visitors. You might have window shoppers on your website. These are people who have visited all the pages on your website but haven’t taken any action. How do you remind them of you and what you could do for them? Enter Display Remarketing and RLSA campaigns.

a) Remarketing on display network:

This helps advertisers target visitors on different advertising-supported websites using banner images. Assume you run a travel business and a visitor is looking for Thailand packages. But for some reason, he decides to leave without purchasing. You can just create a remarketing list like the one below to target him.

Similar to remarketing lists, you can create suppression lists as well (as shown above). These suppression lists ensure that you target new leads and not run ads for those who have already converted.

b) Remarketing on search network:

RLSA stands for Remarketing Lists for Search Ads. As the name indicates, it runs remarketing campaigns on the search network, much like display remarketing. Additionally, the advertiser needs to add keywords in this campaign. By doing so, Google ads can match the user’s search query with the keyword and remarketing list. This will help Google to show relevant ads for each search query.

Since visitors have already visited your website, there are more chances of converting them to leads when they see your remarketing ads also.

5) Measure your performance consistently

It is very difficult to measure the outcome of traditional advertisements like newspapers, radio, broadcast television, cable television, outdoor billboards, brochures etc. Also, they are much more expensive than Google Ads. You can’t control your own budget and spend. Additionally, you wouldn’t know the source of the leads coming from these media, unless your customer chooses to divulge it. As a result, it would be very difficult to calculate ROI from traditional media.

But, Ads, on the other hand, would tell you exactly what happened with the campaign. You would know:

·        Who clicked on your ad?

·        How many leads have been generated

·        How much traffic you have got from Ads to your website?

·        Which keyword generated the most traffic and leads?

·        How much does it cost you per lead?

This would help marketers understand what worked and what didn’t. Using this information, you can then tweak your campaigns until you achieve optimal results.

6) Explore more using your ads

There is a lot more to explore when you link your Google Ads account with your Google Analytics account. Ads is a great platform but it won’t let you know what people do after clicking the ads. But, Google analytics would help you understand,

·        How long a visitor stayed on a page

·        How many pages have been visited

·        Bounce rate of your landing page

·        Details about new visitors and returning visitors and much more.

By linking them together, you will have a lot more data in your hand.  An advertiser can measure the complete performance of the Google ads. He/she can pause the non-performing keywords/campaigns/ads and try different variations to boost your results. This data would also help in writing more articles/posts using keywords that performed best for your business. Using those keywords you can rank better for organic search as well.

7) Tackle your competition better

When someone searches for something related to your product/services online, and you aren’t running ads, but your competitors are, then that means trouble for you. You’ll lose business almost instantly.

You need to keep an eye on them to see how they are promoting their business, what kinds of ads they run etc. The transparent system of Google Ads helps you do this. Grab the opportunities that come your way and make yourself stand out from your competition.

Top Must Know Terms Related to Google Analytics

Page views

This is the number of times users view a page that has the Google Analytics tracking code inserted. This covers all page views; so if a user refreshes the page, or navigates away from the page and returns, these are all counted as additional page views.

Visits

Visits are the individual periods of time (also known as “sessions”) that visitors spend on your site. A visit is ended either after 30 minutes of inactivity or if the user leaves your site for more than 30 minutes (if a user leaves your site and returns within 30 minutes, this is counted as part of the original visit).

Unique Page views

The unique page view number counts all the times the page was viewed in an individual session as a single event; so whether a visitor viewed the page once in their visit or five times, the number of unique page views will be recorded as just one.

Unique Visitors

When a user visits your site for the first time, a new visit and unique visitor are both recorded. If the same user returns to the site after their initial visit, only a new visit is added. Google Analytics is able to recognize whether a user has been to the site before through the use of cookies. This means that if a user deletes their cookies, or accesses the site through a different browser or machine, then they may be mistakenly added as a new unique visitor; for this reason Google Analytics tends to place more prominence on the visits data.

New vs. Returning Visitors

New visitors are those users that have not visited your site before the time period specified, while returning visitors will have made at least one visit to at least one page on your site previously. This is again determined by whether Google Analytics can detect cookies, which indicate previous visits. If Google cannot detect a cookie one will be set for future recording, unless the user has disabled cookies in their personal browser preferences.

Segments

Segments enable you to analyse your data in more detail, by filtering the results to show only information for certain kinds of traffic. You can also use segments to compare results between groups of visitors; for example new vs. returning, or paid vs. organic search traffic. Google also allows you to set up custom segments to for even more granular analysis.

Landing Page

The page your user begins their visit to your site on; quite simply, how they ‘land’ on your site.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is given as a percentage, and represents the number of visits when users leave your site after just one page; regardless of how they got to your site or how long they stayed on that page.

Visitors Flow

The visitors flow report shows how users moved through your site, from landing page to exit page. Visitors flow reports can be customized to show additional detail, such as the geographic location of users or the traffic source, and also shows how many people exited at each stage of interaction.

Traffic Sources: Direct vs. Referral

Traffic sources show you how users got to your site, and in Google Analytics are split into direct and referral traffic.

Direct traffic is made up of visitors that type a URL directly into the address bar, select an auto-complete option when typing the URL, or click on a bookmark to get to your site (however, instances when Google Analytics cannot determine a source also get automatically assigned as direct).

Referral traffic is when a user has landed on your site by clicking on a link from somewhere else; this could be another site, a social media profile, or a search engine.

Search Traffic: Organic vs. Paid

Google Analytics also lets you see what percentage of your traffic came from search engines, and this is further broken down into organic and paid search.

Organic search shows the users who came to your site by clicking on the organic links on the search engine results page (SERP); these results appear below that adverts and are determined by how well the page is optimized for search engines.

The paid search results show users who clicked on one of your paid search engine adverts; these typically appear at the top and side of the SERPs and are managed via an advertising account such as Google AdWords or Bing Ads.

 Keyword

For both organic and paid search channels, Google Analytics records the keyword: the word or phrase a user entered into the search box that led them to click on one of your links.

Events

Events can be set up within Google Analytics to help you measure activity that may not otherwise be recorded by the tracking code; these may include when a user plays a video, downloads a fact sheet, uses an embedded tool, or other on-site interactions.

Goals

For critical site objectives, such as getting users to fill in a contact form, complete an online transaction or spend a certain amount of time engaging with your site, goals can be set up to monitor the conversion rate of these activities. There are four types of goals available in Google Analytics: URL Destination, Visit Duration, Pages (or Screens)/Visit and goals tied to existing events. You can also assign a monetary value to each goal completion, to help determine the return on investment from your website or application.