If your job has anything to do with social media and if you only woke up today, you’ve already heard about the new Facebook Pages roll out which may be better known as Brand Timeline. The redesign has had the business world all a-twitter already, but what we really need to know is how this new iteration is changing the way we use Facebook as a brand. Here are seven characteristics which should be highlighted when putting together your new Facebook campaign:

1. The Cover Photo.This is your chance to express your brand’s identity. The phrase a picture is worth a thousand words may be cliché at times, however, in this situation it rings true. The visual power of this 850px x 315px space allows you to creatively showcase your product, service or even brand culture.
2. The Profile Picture.This was once the area on the old Facebook Pages where we were able to show our creativity. We would, at times, use this image as an area to keep people interested and engaged with our “fans”—changing the visual with each sub-campaign. Now this is the suggested area for the logo. This is because this image is the one that will be shared across Facebook when it comes to Offers, Reach Generator and Premium services all of which have to do with the new way Facebook will serve their Stories and ads.
3. Views and Apps.Nobody panic, your tabs have not completely gone away. They’ve changed the way users view them in this area of the new Facebook Pages. You have four (4) boxes that act as the first four tabs on your old page. From what we understand thus far, you can order the boxes and also create customized images to draw more attention to your Facebook App.
4. The Mystical Floating Bar.While that may not be the actual name of it, when scrolling down the page, this bar will give the user the ability to have a handle on Views and Apps through the Timeline dropdown menu, shuffle through content by month and year with the Now dropdown and view Highlights without scrolling back up to the top.
5. Friend Activity.Not only can users see how their friends are engaging with your brand page, they have a better idea of who likes your brand page lending more trust and more potential engagement on Facebook. People trust friends.
6. Bigger Stories.The ability to have larger format pictures simply looks better. Users will appreciate this fact. Additionally, you can use the edit function in the upper right-hand corner of the post to Pin your post which anchors important stories to the top of a Page for seven days, or Star your story which gives your post in even larger exposure—doubling the width of said image.
7. Milestones.Here’s your chance to identify key moments of time in your brand. If your brand has something nostalgic that you do not yet have on Facebook, simply go ahead and backdate it so it makes sense. If you have milestones already on Facebook that are not highlighted, go ahead and highlight it. Simply go ahead and use the Composer Bar when adding a post and right before posting it, select Milestone.

There’s one take away from all of this well-deserved hullabaloo. The new Facebook Pages is in no way a substitute for prudent strategy. Content still matters. Context still matters. The tool has changed and has added more visualization making it easier on the eye. Designers rejoice you have more room for creativity. Marketers take heed – you’re still needed just as you were before, your tool has been upgraded.

Ninjas, gurus and other authorities in the arena of social media have been preaching about community and engagement since its inception, and rather than go into a discussion of Leonardo Di Caprio’s career or what the number 528491 means, I thought that, due to some news from a certain company based in Oregon, it would be apropos to give an example that any business can review, borrow or flat out use to its advantage.

The company being referenced is NIKE, Inc. – a company which has only recently adopted the technique of communicating with customers using the full suite of popular social media channels company-wide. While their lack of official presence in the social media world may have baffled some for a while, the one major understanding NIKE had (and has) is of the importance of community. Many of NIKE’s footwear have become must-have items in pop culture. Air Jordans, Dunks, Air Force Ones and the like have huge followings and when news of a new release is dropped, throngs of brand advocates show up to the nearest shoe store to become customers once again. Recent history has shown that the broadcast of such news has been through social media outlets by influencers, insiders and fans and now NIKE is positioned to distribute this knowledge directly.

To show off their newest digital presence in the U.S., NIKE has introduced Twitter RSVP to assist in the management of their product launches at physical, brick-and-mortar Nike Stores. Sneaker enthusiasts simply:

• follow their nearest Nike (owned) Store on Twitter;
• watch for the store to send an RSVP tweet on the designated RSVP day; and
• respond via direct message with the product specific hashtag, last four digits of their ID number and shoe size.

Those who respond within sixty minutes of said tweet are eligible and the footwear is awarded on a “first respond, first serve” basis. Confirmed recipients, then pick up their kicks on the day of the store launch at the specified timeframe in person and with proof of ID.

Do you see what they did there?

They’ve engaged their community using a particular social media channel, added a contest/goal-oriented atmosphere in order to gather response from the audience ultimately concluding with a sale. No, that was not a random amalgam of business related buzz terms—this is the purpose of social media marketing.

While it is true that many companies may not be able to see the ROI of their social media campaign as immediately as a company such as Nike, what we must look at is the process and how it works. The strength of this community is what made this campaign possible and social media is a great way to build a group like this. Through social media you can be empathetic with your community; you can listen to the good and the bad to make your product and experience better; you can further engage with insiders, enthusiasts and advocates. All of these activities help build trust in your brand and that is the most effective way for the sales process to begin. Additionally, these digital activities, along with your direct mail, advertising, face-to-face and other forms of communication bring something even more important to the table when done correctly: lifetime customer value—and isn’t that what we ultimately want?

I know I do.

The Nike Swoosh is a registered trademark of, owned by and the property of NIKE, Inc.

There is plenty of chatter about brand journalism these days. If this is the first time you’re hearing the term, listen up because you’re about to hear it a whole lot more. Big names are already capitalizing and practicing this new style of content marketing, often so effectively you may not have even noticed.

Done well brand journalism leverages social media to build influence, improve search results and spread ideas and excitement about a particular industry. At its most basic level, brand journalism involves storytelling that invites audiences to participate through digital and social media channels.

Essentially brand journalism is the practice of covering your business and your industry like a reporter. It also means transforming your marketing department (even if that’s only you!) into a publishing team that can produce content for readers and reporters.

The future belongs to businesses that become media. The key to your success is producing and hosting unique content designed to engage and attract a new audience. And how you leverage social media to drive this new style of journalism can mean the difference between success and failure.

Below are five tips on how to get started.

#1 This Isn’t Your Boss’ PR Program
For decades consumers have been bombarded with very “me” oriented messaging: My product, my service, my company, my plan. In order to thrive in the evolving digital landscape, you must get out of the “me” business so popular and common in public relations efforts. Instead, become a storyteller to attract, engage, entertain and inform your targeted audience.

Produce great content – articles, videos, infographics – and they’ll come to you.

This storytelling process is a fantastic inbound public relations approach that will pull consumers, competitors and media towards your business’s content hubs – company website, blog and important social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

For example, wireless telecom-giant Qualcomm is leading the charge in brand journalism and its efforts are often followed with savvy social media strategies designed to pull in a larger audience.

They understand it’s not all about the “me” approach.

The company’s publication, QualcommSpark, often focuses on cool and interesting gadgets and games which their products “touch”, and it rarely speaks directly about any chipsets or processors they may have created for use in these platforms (see below). It’s about creating interest around subjects they are involved in.
While there aren’t many of us with the financial resources of Qualcomm, remember many people once also thought blogging was the prevue of the big players. If you follow Qualcomm’s storytelling lead and learn how to talk about your company without actually talking about it (or at least not talking about it too much), you’ll attract an audience you’d never reach with old-style press releases.

• Start small with one or two posts a week about things that interest people in your industry.
• Hone your storytelling efforts by requesting feedback (put a comment section at the bottom).
• Share your story using social media channels (Twitter, Pinterest, Google+) to pull your audience toward you. Add social buttons on each content page to make it easier for readers to share.
• Develop interesting content that will encourage readers to make an effort to learn more about you and your business.

#2 You Are the Media Now – Start Acting Like it!
Now that you’ve decided to become a storyteller in your space, you’re better off thinking like a newsperson.

“You are now the editor of an online publication dedicated to following news and trends in your industry.”

The first step in this phase involves listening: learn the questions and concerns of your target audience. Instead of relying on “push” communications, such as e-mail marketing, direct mail and advertising, content is moving toward “pull” – pulling people to your business as opposed to pushing out information – which is a better long-term strategy.

“Our goal is to lead the conversation, to spark engagement, to identify trends relevant to our business and the industry,” Karen Snell, social media communications manager at Cisco, wrote on her blog recently.

Cisco Systems recently launched The Network, a technology news website tied very closely with its social media engagement program.

Social media remains a hot button issue, even hotter over the past couple of weeks with Facebook’s valuation and subsequent reactions to its IPO. Add to the mix an evolving public perception of Google+ and Foursquare’s very public push to be a large prescense at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, and you’ve got a lot of attention focused on one space.

In the midst of all of this media activity, Twitter took time out during Internet Week New York recently to showcase ways that partnerships with them can not only help brands build community but also provide avenues for that community to purchase goods and services. The theme of the event was The Conversation is the Canvas which further illustrates that, especially in social media, effective campaigns begin best with regular dialogue.

Here are a few highlights.

Social Media is as American as American Express

The highlight of the #Twitter4Brands presentation was provided by Leslie Berland, senior vice president of Digital Partnerships and Development at American Express. The credit card company famous for digital initiatives with Foursquare and Small Business Saturday has fully embraced the digital nature of their community which has been reinforced by their new partnership with Twitter.

The idea itself was obviously born in the old marketing and general life adage of K.I.S.S. and illustrated with the launch of this program at SXSW:

1. Securely sync your credit card with Twitter.

• Awareness of the program and launch was done in conjunction withGoGo Inflight Internet – a very smart move to connect with all of the people traveling into Austin for the tech part of SXSW.

2. Tweet specialized hashtags from merchants to load the offer directly to your credit card.

• Create tweets with#JayZSyncShow.

3. You receive a tweet back from the American Express Sync Twitter account informing you that your discount has been loaded to your credit card;

• Which is clear; and
• Redeem your offer. The savings are already there.

American Express did not stop there. They also provided the hashtag #AmexAustin10 for use with any Austin-area merchant during the conference.

What AMEX did was very straightforward:

• They pinpointed the merchant’s need – creating an easy, seamless service for a customer; and
• Created a bridge between the merchant and customer so that an easy, seamless purchase can be made through an action the customer was very likely to already take.

By engaging in these two planning actions, they gave consumers no excuse or exit strategy to leave the offer. The consumer is (1) already active on Twitter; (2) engaged with the brand(s); and (3) doesn’t have to perform any “work” in saving. There’s no print coupon or print confirmation. There’s not even a coupon code which incidentally work pretty well. In this case, the consumer sees something they want to purchase, says they want to purchase the item(s) (which they would probably do due to FOMO) and makes the purchase: a truly organic user experience.

Allowing simple conversation—one of the most important aspects of social media—a brand is able to show their consumer that they are part of the process and, in turn, these consumers are more willing to naturally jump on the soapbox for the brand.

Please note:Twitter does not view community building with the help of hashtags and creating points of purchase as exclusive actions—there is a natural progression and purchasing is not forced. My colleagues in social media will appreciate that little disclaimer and you as a brand should surely appreciate and embrace this concept as well.

What do you think? Can you incorporate this type of community building in any of your campaigns? Let us know in the box below, we’d love to hear from you.

With 900 million users and counting, Facebook is a hotbed of opportunity for marketing. Most businesses can benefit from having a presence on this widely-used social network, but as with any other marketing channel, it’s important to go into it with realistic objectives.

• Build a brand. Facebook offers an excellent outlet to build a brand that consumers can connect with beyond the often static nature of traditional marketing. On Facebook, customers can participate in brand activities and interact with your brand on a personal level.
• Increase loyalty. By “Liking” a Facebook brand page, consumers are essentially opting in to receive your brand messaging. This is a powerful opportunity to connect with them and turn them into brand ambassadors and lifetime customers.
• Communicate. Facebook marketing is not just pushing out brand messages. It has become common for customers to use a brand page to bring up inquiries or offer feedback. Handled correctly, this can be a fantastic way to communicate with customers and offer them exceptional customer service.

Once you’ve determined the goals your brand is looking to achieve through Facebook marketing, it’s time to set up your page.

Basic Steps
1. Use an existing Facebook account or create a new one.
2. Navigate to Pages and “Create a Page.”
3. Select a category.
4. Enter your brand name.
5. Agree to terms and “Get Started.”
6. Upload a profile picture (at least 180px).
7. Add basic info.
8. Select a URL – you will not be able to change this, so make sure you get it right the first time.
9. Add a cover image (850×315px).

Claim a Dedicated URL
The dedicated URL is referred to by Facebook as a username, although it is not a username in the traditional sense.
Admin Panel Manage Edit Page Basic Information Username
Choose a professional name that accurately reflects your brand. Capitalization is factored in, so use capital letters if it makes sense, for example check out this page.

Create Admins

• If you’d like to have more than one person manage the page, you will need to give them administrative access.
• Any team member who would like to be an admin should “like” the page.
• Then go into Admin Panel Manage Edit Page Admin Roles and begin typing in the name of the person you’d like to add.
• Select if you’d prefer to add them as a Manager, Content Creator, Moderator, Advertiser or Insights Analyst. See more information about Page admin roles.

Design Your Page
Design your Facebook page using strong branding that is well integrated with your other marketing channels. Often the Cover Image will mimic the design of a company’s website or current ad campaign and the Profile Pic will be the company logo. If you’re not sure what direction to take, these are solid practices to follow. The Facebook page design elements are outlined below, along with their recommended sizes:

• Cover Image: 850×315px
• Profile Pic: At least 180x180px
• App Icons: 111x74px

Company Information Best Practices
As you’re filling out the informational content on your Facebook page, keep these best practices in mind:

• Be specific and honest when you’re entering your profile information. Facebook is rumored to be hard at work improving their search functionality and when it (finally) does, you will want your brand profiles to be well-optimized.
• Local pages can choose up to 3 subcategories. If your brand is local, do this!
• The “start date” you choose will be the beginning of your Facebook timeline. If the brand is well-established or has a rich history, you may want to select the date the company was founded and then fill in company milestones.

That’s it! You’re now the proud owner of a Facebook Brand Page. Now that your page is set up, you’ll want to develop a smart content strategy and start a regular posting schedule. Stay tuned for tips on creating a killer Facebook content strategy…

A little over a week ago Zynga’s stock price dropped below $5 for the first time. Now we are seeing Facebook ads and sponsored content popping up on Zynga.com, marking the first time these ads have appeared outside of the Facebook ecosystem.

So what you say? The move to utilize an existing partnership with the popular gaming company, Zynga, probably has many people thinking “Who cares if I see some ads for tractors while I’m trying to Farm my Ville?”

Don’t be fooled. It goes much deeper than that.

For starters, this is the first time Facebook Ads have been on another site, which likely means the start of a big advertisement push and expanding reach across the Web while answering critics’ questions about Facebook’s ability to generate actual revenue. This could mean a new round of challenges to Google and their online advertising business.

An interesting infographic  from Wordstream compares the two companies and examines their reach, revenue and performance.

A few interesting numbers to consider:

• According to ComScore Data Mine: Google reached a billion unique visitors worldwide in May, while Facebook saw 713.6 million.
• Facebook  generated $1.86 billion in ad revenue last year and sis expected to top $4 billion this year. Google reported $29.3 billion in overall revenues last year.
• eMarketer estimates that Google had 38.5% of the online advertising market last year, compared to 4.6% for Facebook. The research firm also estimates that Facebook’s share will grow to 7% this year compared with 40.8% for Google.

Bottom line: Google is clearly the leader today in online advertising. Their ad creation tool is based on the keywords and match type that you select. As experts in knowing what users are searching, location and browsing history, Google takes advantage of this information by showing the most relevant ads to a user’s search query. But is your search query more important than who you are?

Facebook Ads focus in on the user. They have an endless supply of information from their users. Facebook’s ad creation tool asks for personal details about their users making it easy for marketers to target them through advertisements.

Of course, information like this may seem private and in-depth, but most of us have already forked over most of these details to them. For example, if I want to visit the Huffington Post website through their Facebook application just to read an article titled “Snooki’s Baby Bump,” I will have to give up valuable parts of my identity such such as my profile info, description, birthday, interests, likes…and my soul just for reading something about “Snooki.”

As marketers, it’s our job to figure out a strategy to create relevant ads for our clients and their products and services whether it’s using an advertising platform based on user intent or one based on user information.

Of course, ads are only going to generate money if they are relevant. And that is where Google thrives. It’s how we search for anything online, so its only logical Google’s definition of relevance matters.

However, on the flip side of things, ads are only relevant if they generate money. Confused?

Let’s put it this way, if marketers find Facebook ads more effective, they will not hesitate to use that over Google Adwords. Most businesses will try anything new and are not married to a particular method or strategy if they can find a better way to increase revenue and conversions while reducing costs.

A different approach to online advertising could be on the horizon with Facebook leading the way, if it can generate more ROI for businesses. If Facebook used this latest move with Zynga as a stepping stone into launching an off-site advertising network, would they be able to overcome Google’s hold in online advertising? For now, Google Adwords will maintain their dominance in the online advertising world but this could be the start of something big as Facebook extends its reach.

Social media marketing is a highly valued element of any decent marketing strategy. The benefits of using social media marketing are so great, that anyone not implementing the cost-effective marketing resource is missing out on a phenomenal marketing opportunity.

According to Hubspot, 92% of all marketers claim that social media marketing is important for their business, with another 80% stating that their efforts increased traffic to their websites. It’s easy to see that social media marketing is definitely making waves in the marketing field and many marketers report realizing the potential for business growth, however they are unsure of the best method.

Social Media Examiner states that 97% of marketers are currently participating in social media, but 85% of participants aren’t sure what social media tools are the best to use. There seems to be some uncertainty when it comes to social media marketing. With our help, we will diminish the confusion by thoroughly explaining the best ways to use social media to market your business.

There are an immense amount of benefits of using social media to market your business. We’ve chosen 10 to highlight:

1. Increased Brand Recognition

Social media marketing is one of the most cost-efficient digital marketing methods to syndicate your content and increase your business visibility. Implementing a social media strategy will greatly increase your brand recognition because your business will be reaching such a broad audience of consumers. To get started, create social media profiles for your business and begin networking. Have employees, partner businesses, sponsors, your mother, anyone “like” and “share” your business content on social media. Simply having content “liked” and “shared” makes your business more visible to new consumers which will lead to retaining customers. The more people who know about your business, the better – and social media is a fantastic outlet for showing people what your business is about. Social media marketing increases any businesses’ ROI (return on investment).

2. Improved Brand Loyalty

According to a report by Texas Tech University, brands who engage on social media channels enjoy higher loyalty from their customers. Social media creates the perfect environment for brands to communicate with their consumers and create a bond of brand loyalty. The report proves that brands who communicate with their customers on social media obtain higher levels of customer loyalty.

The millennial consumer generation is known for being the most brand loyal generation of all. The millennial generation is the largest generation in US history – born between the early 1980’s and the early 2000’s – and will soon completely consume the market. Studies show that the millennial consumer generation is 80% more likely to use a brand again if they are pleased with their first purchase. With these technology natives requiring communication between themselves and their brands, businesses must implement social media marketing to catch the eye of the most influential consumer.

3. More Opportunities for Conversion

The more visibility your business has, the better. Every blog post, image, video, or comment may lead viewers to your company website, providing the opportunity for traffic conversion. Social media marketing allows your business to give a positive impression. If a viewer comes across your content and has no need for your products or services, the consumer is more likely to think of your business when the need arises.

4. Higher Conversion Rates

There are several ways social media marketing results in higher conversion rates, the most prominent is its humanization factor. When brands are interactive by sharing content, commenting, and posting statuses on social media, it personifies a brand. People prefer to do business with other people, rather than companies.

Studies have also shown that social media has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing. When a brand is interactive on social media, consumers who follow your brand’s social media accounts often gain more trust for your brand and view your business as more credible. People use social media platforms to stay connected to their friends, family, and communities. Since people are already talking, why not throw your brand into the mix? More likely than not, they’ll mention your brand to a friend when your products or services are needed, overall providing your business with social proof of its quality. Putting your brand in an atmosphere where people are sharing, liking, and talking, can only improve the conversion rates on your existing traffic.

5. More Brand Authority

When consumers see your business posting on social media – a marketing strategy that only top businesses use – it makes your business appear more credible. Interacting with your customers frequently demonstrates that your business cares about customer satisfaction, and is available to answer any questions that customers might pose. When a satisfied customer wants to spread the word about a great product or service they received from your business, they often turn to social media (especially if social media is the platform where they heard about your business in the first place). Having authentic customers mentioning your business on social media will advertise your business to an even broader audience. The average person has over 300 friends on Facebook, that’s 300 more people that will hear about your business if they scroll through their news feed.

6. Increased Inbound Traffic

Without marketing your business on social media, your inbound traffic is limited to your usual customers. The people familiar with your brand are likely searching for the same keywords you already rank for. You’ll have much more difficulty reaching anyone outside of your loyal customer circle (if you have loyal customers) without social media marketing. Every social media profile you add to your marketing mix (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Vine, etc.) is a gateway to your website, and every piece of content you post is another opportunity to acquire a new customer. Social media is a melting pot of different types of people from different cultures and backgrounds, and no two people have the same profile. With different people come different needs and different ways of thinking. Perhaps someone in an older demographic of consumers will search your website for the same keywords, however a millennial generation consumer could think totally differently. By marketing on social media, you are opening your business to versatile consumers all over the world.

7. Cost-Effective

Social media marketing is the most cost-efficient advertising strategy. Once you obtain a few satisfied customers who are vocal about their positive purchase experience, you can sit back and let the advertising be done for you by actual customers who enjoyed your product or service.

According to Hubspot, 84% of marketers found that as little as 6 hours a week spent on social media marketing efforts saw a benefit of reduced marketing expenses. Even paid advertising through Facebook and Twitter is the cheapest form of marketing compared to other methods. If paid advertising on social media is the way you decide to go, you can always start small and watch your conversion rates rise, which will pay off the money you initially put in.

8. Better Search Engine Rankings (SEO)

Search engine ranking is very important for obtaining traffic to your business website. More than 58% of marketers who have been using social media for one year or longer improved search engine rankings. Ranking in the top positions in SEO for your keywords will revolutionize your traffic. Let’s face it, everyone uses Google to find information, and they likely won’t click “Next Page” because they don’t have to, they’ll find the answer within the first URLs they click on. If your business website isn’t ranked high in search engine results, you should probably adjust your marketing strategy.

Although posting on social media might get your business some site traffic, more is required to succeed at social media marketing. First, you must create high quality content. Content such as blogs, infographics, facts, advertising your products or services, employee photos and events, and much more will make your business’s social media profile intriguing and credible. Once you begin posting quality content, you’ll begin to build a social media community. Your followers will “like” and “share” your content, which will give your business more visibility, however it is about quality over quantity. An engaged community is more likely to link to you, which will make your website rank higher in search engine results. Social media can be used to publish your content in order to obtain more links to your webpages, which will rank you higher in search engine results.

9. Overall Better Customer Experience

Social media is a networking and communication platform. Every customer interaction with your business on social media is an opportunity to publicly demonstrate your compassion for your customers. Whether a customer has a complaint you can address, or a compliment to give, social media allows you to address the matter in an interpersonal dialogue. A brand devoted to customer satisfaction that takes the time to compose personal messages will inherently be viewed in a positive light, even if responding to a customer complaint.

10. Improved Customer Insights

Hubspot reported that 69% of marketers found social platforms provided market place insights. Social media also gives you an opportunity to gain valuable information about what your customers are interested in. By monitoring comments, you can see customers’ blunt opinions of your business that you might not be aware of if your business didn’t have social media presence.

Another insightful aspect of social media marketing is the ability to segment your content syndication lists based on topic and identify what types of content generate the most interest and then produce more of that type of content. With social media marketing you have the ability to measure conversions based on different posts on various social media platforms to find the perfect combination to generate revenue.

Now Get Started

Still don’t know where to start? First, create your business’s social media profiles, next, post engaging content, gain some links to your webpages (which will improve your keyword search engine optimization), and boom: you’ve got yourself a functioning social media marketing strategy.

There are virtually no reasons not to implement social media marketing into your marketing strategy. Your competition is most likely already on social media. Don’t let your competitors hog the playing field. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll see growth in your business. There is no reason not to market on social media when the potential losses are statistically insignificant.

has gone from hardly known location-based deal service just over five years ago to widely used, but little understood international high riser.

While Groupon now operates in 18 countries – the Chicago-based business offers a daily deal service with deep discounts to shoppers on everything from travel to restaurants to spa treatments – it’s an online channel that many seem to have trouble figuring out how to use effectively.

However, before you abandon the idea altogether consider these stats:

• Between 55% and 61% of businesses running daily deals make money on the promotions
• 50% of U.S. consumers are aware of Groupon, and 20% regularly receive emails from the site
• 15% of U.S. mobile phone owners are registered users of daily deals services such as Groupon and Living Social
• There are more than 9 million users of Groupon’s mobile app80.2% of social media users who follow brands use Groupon

Ok, you get the idea. But just because there is plenty of activity on Groupon, doesn’t automatically mean you’ll find success. Groupon’s not for everyone and if you don’t create and then execute a strategy tailored for your business, you might wind up losing.

Here are three tips and four tools for Groupon success.

Tips:

1. Stay connected. Don’t think of Groupon’s Daily Deal as just that: a daily deal. Effectively using Groupon means incorporating it as part of a long-term strategy.  Ask for feedback, encourage participants to connect via your social media channels – Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc. – and follow up with them after the sale. Once they’re in your web, you need to keep their attention.
2. Estimate costs ratios.Not every business is ripe for Groupon. For example, if most of your items or services cost $5 a reduced offer might not make such a big ripple. Determine your costs and decide what percentage reduction you can live with. If you sell widgets and have 100 in stock, make sure you can live with ALL of them being sold at a discounted rate. It happens.

There is such a thing as using Groupon as a loss leader, but before you set out to lose money on the deal in order to raise awareness about your business, do some serious thinking, as well as calculations.

3. Expect success.Sometimes too much success can be a bad thing. Be prepared for a large turnout. Make sure there are stipulations on Groupon deals. Try including an expiration date and put a limit on times of use.  Also, make sure you have enough people on the job to handle the increased traffic.

Tools:

1. Merchant Center.Earlier this year Groupon launched an overhauled dashboard that provides businesses insights based on performance. This tool – Merchant Center – condenses information and simplifies features that provide merchants with a “snapshot” of their featured deals’ performance.

It also offers valuable data from of deals including age, sex, zip codes, as well as customer feedback. Use this information to stay connected and understand your clients.

2. Groupon Scheduler.Thisonline scheduling application will help any business that requires appointments to accept online bookings through Groupon. Even if you don’t have your own online booking website, Groupon’s system will handle the process for you.
3. Groupon Rewards.The rewards program is an ideal tool to help with that all-important repeat business. Use it and your customers  automatically earnRewards when making purchases with  major credit cards. The information is  saved in their Groupon profile and is then processed through merchants’ existing payment systems. This Groupon program saves smaller businesses the very high costs of a technology most cannot afford.
4. Groupon Now!  Through the personalized dashboard merhcants can manage the customer stream coming into their businesses in real-time. This will allow you to analyze theROIof these efforts and help make future promotional decisions. In addition, customers can immediately redeem  offers sent to their mobile devices and computers, while merchants gain the flexibility to start and stop Groupon Now! deals.

Back in May 2014 Twitter officially switched everyone over to the new profile page. While the most visible changes are how the new Twitter looks like the Facebook Timeline page, there are some other notable adjustments that you can use to tell the world and your followers more about yourself or your business/brand:

• Larger profile picture (400 x 400 pi)
• Wide background photo (1500 x 500 pi)
• Pinned Tweets
• Popular tweets have enlarged text
• Filtering tweets by “Tweets” and “Tweets & replies”
• Favorites Tab

Profile and Background Photos

Twitter has enlarged its profile photo to 400 x 400  pi, but what really has caught people’s attention is how the background photo has been enlarged and stretched out to 1500 x 500 pi. The similarities to Facebook’s Timeline page are very obvious, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

If there could be one possible downside of using Twitter as a business, brand, or even as an individual, it’s that it’s hard to display who or what you are through 160 character tweets. The new profile and background photos make up for that because your brand can be visually represented. Think of it as picking images for your homepage or landing page except simpler. What images are you going to put on your Twitter profile page to convey what your brand is, the products/services you provide, or to influence people to follow or tweet at you?

Here are some good examples of brands and celebrities who have effectively used the new photo layout of Twitter to promote or create awareness:

@FloydMayweather

• The background photo of Floyd Mayweather is not just stating the date of his next fight. It includes a face shot of him and his opponent, along with details of WHEN and WHERE it will happen. A casual follower of Mayweather or someone who visits his page might pay to watch the fight.

@wbpictures

• By presenting what is essentially a movie poster, Warner Bros. Pictures is engaging in a simple form of advertising for their upcoming films. Also, by switching out the background photo, Warner Bros. Pictures is routinely showing their followers and visitors new visual content that could help sway them towards watching the film.

@BFMweb

• With 4 images (and accompanying text) Web designer vip is able to communicate exactly what they service and specialize in. By laying that out visually in their background photo, Web designer vip  could potentially get customers from Twitter. This is a great model professional businesses could employ on their own Twitter profiles.

Organizing and Emphasizing Tweets

Let’s say you are making a big announcement but want to continue your constant stream of tweets throughout the day. Or you really like this one tweet that encapsulates your brand, and when people visit your Twitter it’s imperative that they see this particular set of 160 characters. Introduce pinned tweets! By ‘pinning’ a tweet, it will remain at the top of your tweets feed until you unpin it or put another tweet in its place. The one negative of pinning is that you can only pin a single tweet at a time. However, it is still useful in ensuring that the most important tweet gets seen by those that visit your profile.

The tweets that gather the most engagement (retweets, favorites, etc.) will actually have enlarged texts in your tweet feed. This will let visitors know, as well as you, of your most popular tweets. For visitors, it will visually garner attention to what your best content is while you will get to see what content is working at getting engagement.

Twitter is also now segmenting your tweets between the ones that you tweet out to everyone and conversations you have with individuals. If you start out a tweet with someone’s handle, only you and the account you tweeted at will be able to see it. That particular tweet will not be included in the feed of your followers, and they can only view it if they click on your “Tweets & replies” tab. This is useful because it provides you with some discretion when you want it. However, say you are having a conversation and you want all your followers to see it. The customary practice, then, is to put a period before the handle of the other individual’s account. By putting a  period or any other text before their handle when starting off a tweet, it will show up in all your followers’ feeds.

In the Twitter of old, favoriting a tweet was a spur-of-the-moment, carefree click. With the new update, however, a “Favorites” tab is available so that visitors are able to see each and every tweet you have ever favorited. You can cultivate your brand/business by only favoriting certain tweets, especially if you are an industry leader in your field and looked upon by your followers as a source of knowledge and inspiration.

Optimizing your images and tweeting for different categories (in lieu of the new profile) is only the first step in building and maintaining your Twitter presence. Twitter has recently announced a new tool to track organic analytics. Besides doing research behind what tweets are getting engagement, it’s also useful to tweet content that is relevant to your target audience and offers a unique and different angle from your other social mediums and website.

As a digital marketer, once in a while it’s wise to just take a break, sit back, and listen in on the advice of the top digital marketing leaders for a refreshing perspective. That’s exactly what I did last week (October 21, 2014) when I attended the Marketing Nation’s event at the Westin Times Square, which highlighted the importance of engagement marketing in today’s digital landscape. After enjoying snacks from Starbucks, we sat down to hear from Robin Bordoli, GM of Consumer Marketing at Marketo, an engagement marketing software company.

Bordoli began the presentation by outlining the best ways for marketers to engage with their audience, and highlighted Michael Pollan’s “In Defense of Food”, where Pollan dissects the food industry and summarizes it into 7 simple words: Eat food, mostly plants, not too much. He then applied this genius concept of simplistic thinking to the digital marketing world, and translated our world of fast-paced innovation into the following: Build long-term personalized relationships with your customers.

It is often difficult to think of relationships when working on such a large scale, but when looking at the relationships in your own life, you may realize the intensity and power associated with a relationship. So, how can we translate and incorporate the strength of a relationship into our digital marketing efforts?

Bordoli moved on to mention the famous quote from Albert Einstein who said, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”, and then asked the crowd what they needed to do differently to elicit a change in their marketing efforts. This stress on growing a relationship with each individual user is the key to winning with engagement marketing.

The 7 principles of engagement marketing, according to Bordoli, were highlighted and extrapolated upon in the next portion of his presentation. They are as follows:

1. As individuals: The frequency, time frame, devices used, and other factors may change in importance for each individual user. It is the responsibility of us as marketers to reach each user as an individual.
2. Based on what they do: Find the relevance between what you want to say and what a user is interested in, also known as behavior-based marketing. Market to them based on what they do rather than who they are.
3. Continuously over time: Compare a relationship with a current or potential customer to the strong relationships in your own life, and realize that you are not marketing a single campaign, but a long-term relationship.
4. Wherever they are: Learn and understand the concept of omni-channel marketing. Customers are now engaging on 3 or more channels, and it is your job to engage with themwhenever they are, and understand the importance of each individual channel in the process.
5. Always directed towards a goal: Measurability and accountability are key. Whatever the goal may be, whether to buy, advocate, renew, or any other conversion goal, make sure that you are explicit about your goal and the journey you are taking your audience through.
6. With measurable impact: Demonstrate if you have met your goal. If you are unable to measure your marketing efforts, you are unsure if they are successful or not.
7. At the speed of digital: How do you as a marketing team move at the speed of digital and keep up with the innovations to give your customer or audience what they want?

The Marketing Nation Roadshow event incorporated the experience of various industry professionals, including Tara-Nicholle Nelson, VP of Marketing at MyFitnessPal, and Julie Cottineau, Founder & CEO of BrandTwist and Brand School Online. Each speaker stressed the importance of engagement marketing in the industry today, and shared ways that a strong engagement marketing strategy will help you meet the demands of the dynamic marketplace.

Search engine optimization is a great addition to any business’ digital marketing presence when done correctly. Taking the time to set it up properly can provide tons of high quality traffic to businesses with a relatively small financial outlay. While the time investment can be extensive, it can lead to massive ROI for any business looking to establish themselves as a force in their vertical online. This is particularly true for websites that have a lot of unique pages that feature different types of products.

In that spirit of websites that have lots of unique pages that feature different types of products or services, I’m proud to bring you our 1 Hour SEO Audit Challenge of this month, featuring high-performance audio product retailer, RBH Sound. Founded in 1976, RBH Sound is a manufacturer of high performance audio products for residential and commercial applications. The company offers products that include in-wall and in-ceiling speakers, on-wall speakers, freestanding speakers, and any other kind of audio solution that an individual or business would ever need.

We’ve made a slight change to how we calculate our speed grades – adding website optimization tool Dareboost to the mix to provide clearer insights on more precise steps businesses can take to improve their website from a speed standpoint. Otherwise, just like we’ve done for every “1 Hour SEO Audit Challenge”, we’ve based the grades given on the following categories:

• Content
• Schema
• Backlinks
• Site Speed
• Meta Tag Issues
• Title Tag Issues

Tools Used

• Ragepank
• Screaming Frog
• Mozbar
• Open Site Explorer
• Copyscape
• Microsoft IIS
• SEMRush
• GTMetrix
• Dareboost

Content

When it comes to the ideal website for search engine optimization purposes, content is one of the first and most important elements to look at. Not only does creating top-quality content help keep users on your website longer and help facilitate a higher conversion rate, it also allows your website to rank for relevant keywords if they are added to header text, body text, and a myriad of other places on a page of a website. With the recent uptick over the last few years when it comes to focusing on content marketing, it is more important than ever that businesses not only feature good written, image, and video content on their website, but that it is truly top-notch. Simply having content on a website is not enough – in order for it to make any sort of meaningful difference to your SEO it needs to be something that users love and naturally link to on their own websites or blogs.

From a technical standpoint RBH Sound actually does a seemingly okay job with their content marketing initiatives. Only .88% of the pages we crawled were considered “low content pages”, which is to say they had 300 words or less on them. That being said, the only section we found that could be considered a content section on their website was an events section that really only showed some pictures of their booths at the events they had attended. There was no blog, and no video section. In order for their content marketing efforts to get to the next level, these sections need to be added to the website – in the process they should be able to create a lot of great content that ranks for longtail keywords to generate traffic by talking about their products, how they work, and what people can do with them. There is so much cool stuff in the audio space that could be discussed, but in order for that conversation to begin the site needs the proper sections added.

Grade: D-

Schema

If there’s one section of these audits that has become increasingly depressing as we’ve looked at more and more websites it’s schema markup. As we’ve discussed in previous audits, as of April 2014, a measly 0.3% of websites featured any sort of schema markup on them – and the consistency with which websites we’ve audited are missing schema certainly supports those figures. This is particularly disturbing because schema can add so much to a website’s SEO – whether it’s getting images in the search engine results or providing business information like logos and location to search engines, having the correct schema can significantly increase the amounts of organic traffic a website receives when done correctly.

RBH Sound is another online presence that is right in line with 99.7% of the websites across the internet that have no schema at all. I’ve let this slide and pointed out other elements in the branded search that companies have done correctly in the past, but RBH really only has Sitelinks set up. A Google My Business page would be a nice addition, as would open graph tags for Facebook and Twitter – which are also missing from the site altogether. There is a lot of room for improvement here, and schema is a relatively straightforward add, so it should be done in the near future for as many variables as possible.

Grade: F

Backlinks

I’ve discussed at length the value of a properly constructed backlink profile – and when it comes to important aspects that will add to overall SEO success, having one that is built correctly is key. Having many equity-passing links and no-follow links that come from a variety of different relevant sources is one of the best ways to build a website’s domain authority while helping you to rank for new keywords on a page by page basis in the process. Having a number of different anchor texts is also key – something our previous audit, Breather, did quite well.

RBH Sound’s backlink profile has a platform from which to build off of – but needs a lot of work to get to the next level. With a domain authority of 42, and only 10 root domains providing 339 links to their website, there is a lot that can be done to take the site’s backlink profile to the next level. The most troubling thing is that there are only 10 root domains linking to the site – this means that if any of these websites were to be removed or suddenly decide to remove pages linking to RBH that roughly 10% of the site’s backlink profile would disappear overnight. RBH needs to focus on getting new links from new authoritative root domains as soon as possible to remedy this issue.

RBH Sound has a lot of branded anchor text in their inbound links at the moment. While there are a few terms scattered in there like “ep2 noise isolating earphones” which is great to see – there needs to be more product specific anchor text if the company wants to rank for more of their product offerings. There is also a lot of links that have no anchor text at all – this needs to be fixed immediately if possible as it is a lost opportunity to have descriptive anchor text.

Grade: B-

Site Speed

While some elements of SEO are extremely technical and don’t seem to directly offer much value to the average user as they scroll through a page, site speed is certainly an exception to this general rule. Particularly with recent Google algorithm updates to try and give more value to mobile-friendly sites, site speed is a very helpful factor to do correctly for both SEO and for users. While it might not play a huge role in overall SEO ranking right now, it’s increasingly important for business to take it seriously in order to get fast load times to keep users and search engine rankings happy.

RBH Sound Does a very good job with site speed – scoring an A rank PageSpeed Score and a B YSlow score. Their homepage has an average page load time of only 2 seconds, making their site one of the best ranked and fastest sites we’ve done so far in this series. While the homepage is a bit busy and dated in how it is presented, the speed is certainly helped by the fact that there aren’t any extremely fancy elements that need to load and imagery is kept to a relative minimum.

That being said, Dareboost found a couple of issues with the website that need to be addressed in order to increase site speed further. The first is that one of the few images that is actually being used by the homepage is a massive 1.24 MBs. This image needs to be optimized or compressed in some fashion so that users don’t have to wait for the image to load. The second problem that Dareboost identified is that the site is using some form of flash. We haven’t really covered this issue yet in our audits but this is a huge issue in terms of compatability (iPhones and iPads don’t support flash, for example), and should be transitioned over to HTML5 as soon as possible.

Grade: A-

Meta Tag Issues

A lot of businesses that are wary of all SEO practices purposefully ignore some of the elements that we look at on this audit. I totally understand the logic – you want to make sure the content you have is helpful for users first, and focusing on SEO elements can often lead to spammy content that is written for search engine crawlbots instead of for users. While I don’t agree with this logic, there is one element that this thought process can’t really rationally be applied to – meta descriptions.

Optimizing meta descriptions is an important step for both SEO-centric and user-centric thinkers, as it makes sure that users understand what the page is about so that proper expectations are set, while also increasing click through rate on meta descriptions that are optimized with relevant keywords. There is really no excuse for having meta descriptions that lack a call to action and/or some description about the page – you’ll get more traffic when it’s done correctly and it isn’t an element that you can keyword stuff or otherwise game to directly influence ranking (the clickthrough bonuses a good meta description provide is where ranking increases come from – so it’s an indirect relationship between meta description and rank increase).

RBH Sound falls really, really flat when it comes to meta descriptions. Out of the 32306 pages we crawled, only 92 had any meta description at all, and most were shorter than the recommended length of 150-160 characters. While the homepage had a meta description, there were some very important landing pages on the site that were missing them – including reviews, awards, inwall product pages, signature series product pages, and visage series product pages. These are pages that could potentially be showing up in a user’s search and should have meta descriptions that make people interested on clicking on the result. This should be rectified immediately, as adding a meta description for important pages should increase click-through rate and overall traffic (as well as search rankings as a result).

Grade: F

Title Tag Issues

There have been lots of Google algorithm changes over the last few years, but the fact of the matter is that on an individual page level the title tag continues to be one of the most important factors for good SEO and SERP rankings. Making sure to include a title tag that is optimized for relevant keywords at a range of 55-60 characters can often be the difference between a website generating very little organic traffic or attracting tons of qualified organic traffic to help a business generate lots of conversions online.

RBH Sounds does a significantly better job with their titles tags than they do with their meta descriptions. Our of the 32306 pages we crawled, 98.74% of pages had a page title of some sort. Only a little more than 1% of pages had character counts that had issues with the amount of characters included. The only real problem was the amount of user manual pages they have on the site – all of which feature the title tag “RBH Product Support Instruction/User Manuals”. These pages should either be gated, marked as nofollow, or have their title tags changed to reflect specific user manuals so that they rank appropriately in search engine results. This problem aside though, RBH Sound does a pretty decent job.

Grade: B+

General Suggestions

RBH Sound is one of the largest (if not the largest) site we’ve done on this series. They have tons and tons of pages, and so a lot of the SEO elements we look at in this series are going to be very difficult to implement. That being said, schema is a relatively straightforward sitewide addition that should be an easy add to the entire site as long as there is a CMS that the addition can be made on.

That being said, some of these edits are going to take a lot of time. Particularly with meta descriptions, it would definitely make a lot of sense to try and identify and address issues on key pages first and then go from there. Particularly on important product pages and other pages that are right off the main navigation, time needs to be spent to make sure that each page has a correct title tag, meta descriptions, and other on page elements like header 1 and header 2 tags.

You’ve just launched a new page on your website – great! Whether a revamped “About Us” page, a new services page, or even a fresh blog post, your next step should be focused around building your brand credibility and influence, ultimately resulting in high-quality, relevant links back to the new pages. In order to positively affect search engine visibility and increase the traffic to that page, you need to obtain links from authoritative websites. Rather than waiting to amass natural links or press mentions, employing a strategic digital public relations plan can help your new page achieve both positive search results and increased traffic flow.

While digital public relations outreach is traditionally known to garner links back to a website’s home page, there are a number of initiatives you can use to maximize visibility of these deeper pages.

1. Tailor Your Media Pitches with Relevant Keywords

While this may seem like a given, any media pitches you create should be as unique and well thought-out as each page and piece of content on your site. Be sure to have a solid understanding of the goal and purpose of the page before researching blogs, news outlets, and social influencers for your target audience. This audience may be vastly different than the audience of your website as a whole – don’t be afraid to capitalize on niche markets to maximize potential media exposure.

When it comes to crafting the pitch itself, utilize keywords found on the page you are trying to increase traffic to. Although these keywords are not guaranteed to appear in the final article or placement, including these buzzwords may influence your media contact’s writing focus to better reflect terms that are relevant to your page.

2. Position New Pages as Resources

Ideally, any specific pages you pitch out should include content that is both enriching and interesting. A new page featuring content that contributes to a greater dialogue is more likely to receive media traction than one that doesn’t, so focus your efforts on publicizing new pages that are rich in information and will establish your site and brand as a credible source.
In addition to conducting outreach with unique pitches, look for stories and blog posts on the page’s topic that already exist online. Identifying articles already written on the topic presents opportunities for your page to then be included in that story as a resource for additional information.

3. Leverage Social Media Influencers

A successful public relations campaign should include some form of a strategic social media component. When working on media research prior to pitching, a solid list of social influencers in the space your specific page or business covers should also be created. Building a relationship with important industry-relevant social tastemakers is key to increasing recognition, and while cultivating these relationships can be very time intensive, these influencers have the potential of becoming an ambassador for your site and brand.
Tapping social influencers with high follower counts not only increases visibility of your site and potentially increases traffic flow to the intended page. Use a tool such as Followerwonk to identify relevant influencers, and determine the social outreach plan for this initiative. Followerwonk allows you to search for keywords through Twitter bios, enabling you to discover which contacts are going to be most interested in what you’re trying to share with them.

4. Guest Posts

Whatever industry your business is part of, there’s a good chance you or your employees are experts within that field. Leverage your expertise to present yourself as a thought leader in your industry, and collaborate with various media outlets to contribute articles on topics that you can speak to. If you can offer readers value and have unique insights on a topic within your industry, reporters or editors will be eager to have you work with them. This presents many opportunities for you to promote your new page if you shape your article around content that is on that particular page.

In order to provide value to readers, you can’t arbitrarily insert a link to your new page if it isn’t relevant, and more likely than not, editors won’t allow that. Instead, take time to craft an outline of your article that is related to both your expertise, as well as your new page. With every guest post you contribute, you’ll be able to include a link, and encourage users to visit.

5. Get Creative

Is there anything about your page that makes it stand out? Maybe you have a new design feature that you want to bring attention to? Take the opportunity to pitch to design-specific resources. Don’t be afraid to think creatively and see if you can tap into a niche market rather than the usual broader ones. Branching out can give you a chance to grain traction from unexpected places.

Also, take the time to seek out organizations with a more targeted audience. Having links from reputable blogs and media outlets are wonderful, but sometimes their readers may not be seeking the information, products, and services that your site provides. Organizations that cater to a smaller industry demographic can lead to more relevant traffic, and hopefully, more conversions. The internet is full of websites that provide specific resources to users seeking references on specific subject matter. So don’t undervalue the potential benefit from taking the extra time to pitch to these outlets as well.

Using Digital PR to Increase Web Traffic To A New Page

When it comes to launching a new page on an existing website, you want to approach it with the same level of enthusiasm that you would with any other project. Analyze techniques that have worked for you in the past, and tap into some new ventures as well. Take advantage of the opportunity to utilize some unconventional ideas to draw in traffic! By brainstorming and putting in the effort to effectively draw attention to the new page, you will undoubtedly see noticable results.

There’s no question that producing a well strategized and maintained content stream is crucial for the success of any digital business. The benefits are numerous and include everything from an increase in visitor engagement onsite, improved search engine rankings through SEO, and if your content marketing initiatives are done correctly, the establishment of a “sticky” factor that keeps people coming back to your site.

The copywriting portion of content marketing is the fun part, but in order to truly get the most out the content you produce it’s vital that you begin thinking about how effective your content is analytically. A truly effective content marketer combines both the creative and analytical aspects of proper content marketing to produce engaging, hard-hitting copy that is backed by significant amounts of quantitative research to inform what is being discussed. The following are some of the most important elements of proper data driven content marketing to keep in mind to help give your content marketing program a substantial edge over your competition.

Before Posting:

Surf a Little
The key to ensuring that what you’re writing is engaging is making sure that you’re staying on top of trends in your industry, and being aware of what your audience finds valuable. A fairly simple way to do this is to monitor social media conversations on Twitter and Facebook to stay abreast of news and developments. Regularly check industry news outlets and the social profiles of industry influencers to see what “hot topics” are circulating amongst your audience. The content you create should offer some fresh perspective or an appropriate response/reaction to the particular topic.

Leverage Google Trends as a tool for your research efforts to see what terms and trends are significant in searches and just how many people are expressing interest in these terms. The tool also allows you to see a forecast for any given term and topic allowing you to gauge the projected amount of interest users will have in this subject as time progresses. Build this data into your planning phase so that you can identify which topics and subjects users are seeking to learn the most about, and ultimately allow it to help you define what your content should be related to and how effective it will be in providing value to readers.
The content you create should always be substantiated by correlating data so that you know your efforts aren’t going to be useless. To highlight the benefits of utilizing Google Trends, consider the idea of a relatively new subject within your space and perhaps there isn’t a lot of existing content on it. Take a look at Google Trends to see if this subject may gain traction within the next few months, allowing you and your organization to get an edge over competition, and be one of the first to provide insights on the topic of interest.

Keyword Research
Once you have a relevant topic, you’ll want to do your site a favor by ensuring that the final product benefits your search engine rankings and is easily accessible to users. To do this, create content that contains keywords appropriate to the article topic as well as your business’ products or service offerings. A great tool for this is Google Keyword Planner.
The goal here is to find keywords that have a high monthly search volume mixed with low competition, which greatly improves the chances of your content appearing prominently on the search results page when a user searches for the particular set of terms or keywords that you’ve identified. These keywords cannot simply be plugged into your content in any way possible, but instead should be naturally occurring in a way that provides an excellent and relevant user experience while simultaneously giving you as much SEO value as possible.

After Posting

Hopefully you’re using a tool like Google Analytics on your website to help you monitor your site’s performance. If so, allow a week or so to pass after posting your content to allow data about how users are interacting with your content to aggregate. Once you do, dig through the following metrics to analyze the performance of your content and it’s effectiveness in reaching the goal of the content. Identify what types of content is repeatedly producing the best results, and what content could use some improvements, is one of the best ways you can enhance your SEO by using data to drive your content marketing initiatives.

Key Metrics:

• Page Views:While it shouldn’t be the only metric that informs whether or not your content marketing initiatives are successful, page views are a solid metric that can be extremely helpful when it comes to comparing different pieces of content. It will inform you about what your audience is interested in and also help you identify what pieces of content are the most important on your site for generating traffic.
• Page Bounce Rate:You’ll want this as low as possible, as it indicates the content was engaging enough to send people elsewhere through the site. Remember that if you’re posting content on a blog a bounce rate at or just slightly below 90% is perfectly normal.
• Time on Page:These metrics are tied to bounce rate, and reiterates a visitor’s engagement with the content. The longer the average time is that users are interacting with your content the more likely they are to be finding that content helpful.
• Session Duration/Page Depth:Looking at these two metrics for the overall site will give you a good idea of how effective the content you’re producing is to the overall user experience, and how extensively users are engaging with your website as a whole as a result.
• Social Engagement:If you share your content on social media, monitor the traffic that comes through that source and how it behaves by utilizing UTM parameters that are linked to your analytics account. Keep track of how people are responding to your content by paying attention to audience follower growth and the amount of likes, shares, comments, and retweets on each of your pieces of content.

Data Driven Content Marketing Informs Success

With data backing what you produce, you can work on continual topic optimization and mold your content program into a tool that cannot only increase your business’ success in terms of online traffic and sales, but also position you and your team as thought leaders in your respective industries. By utilizing tools and programs that allow you to optimize your content, and then examining what’s working and what’s not, you can proactively develop a content program that is tailored to most closely fulfill the needs of your audience, and significantly improve rate that your business grows.

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Even though inbound marketing is not a relatively new concept, it is certainly being executed in a number of new ways. People often associate content marketing with blog posts and social outreach. However, restricting content to those parameters can lead to many overlooked opportunities. You want to make sure that your business doesn’t miss out on a chance to generate creative and engaging content throughout alternative sections of your website.

It is important to consider the marketing potential that lies within the content of your website’s “About Us” page. As one of the most visited locations on any given company’s site, the “About Us” page plays a large role in the first impression that you leave on a potential customer. This is where they come to learn more about your company and the people behind the brand. A customer looks here before they start to take your business (or the idea of collaborating with it) seriously.

Clearly “About Us” pages are important! That’s why, as we’ve mentioned in previous content marketing articles, you need to make sure the information on this page tells a compelling story.

But how do you that?

To make it easier, we’ve narrowed down 5 creative elements you must have for designing an inspiring “About Us” page:

• Company Vision & Philosophy

• Company Timeline

• Team Member Profiles

• Business Concept Visuals

• Multimedia Content

Now that we know what our page needs, how do we go about implementing these new ideas? Let’s take a look at some examples and see how different businesses are leading visitors to learn more about who they are and what they do.

1. Your Company’s Vision & Philosophy

You’re not like everyone else — so tell the world what makes you unique! Why should people choose you over your competitors?

Stand out with an “About Us” page that shows off who your company is and strongly conveys your brand’s voice. What brought your company together? What do you see as its future? Offer your visitors information that will make them interested in your business and the work that you do.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that an “About Us” page has to be very long. For example, Whoa Nelly gets the point across with a short and sweet presentation that communicates how they came to be, and what they offer.

By keeping their content concise and targeted, Whoa Nelly is able to captivate their audiences through the stunning visuals and engaging copy provided throughout their page.

Here are some other great Vision & Philosophy page examples:

• Harry’s
• Marmoset Music
• Frank & Oak

2. A Timeline of Your Company’s History

Over the last decade, Facebook has made the use of timelines a popular way to present information about yourself. So why not apply the same concept to your “About Us” page? Take visitors on a trip through your company’s history. You can show them where you started, how far you have come, and everything your business has accomplished along the way.

You can present visitors with relevant milestones and details about the business in a visually engaging way for your viewers to take in. Timelines allow you to display a large amount of information and detail in a format other than just text. The variety is something that potential customers will appreciate.

Take a look at Moz’s beautifully designed “About Us” page – a vertical timeline that pairs key moments, like the site’s launch in 2003, with fun company images and accomplishments.

Other great Timeline “About Us” page examples:

• Balzac & Brothers
• Spyder
• UGALLERY

3. Team Member Profiles

The “About Us” or “Our Story” page should be about the passion driving your vision and the people that make it happen. Contrary to popular belief, this page’s content doesn’t have to sound formal in order to gain credibility. Most people find it easier to connect with real human beings, so let the personality of your employees and the environment of your workplace shine through!

Nerdery does a great job of showcasing the people behind the company and making them seem approachable to audiences, giving a more human-like quality to the brand.

Note: Including a company dog automatically DOUBLES your website’s conversion rates (just kidding!).

You can even include Social Media profiles for each team member in order to make your business look approachable and engaging. If you are a company in the B2B sector, you can include LinkedIn badges with links to the individual profile of every member in the leadership team to help each member of your team have added credibility.

Other great Team Member Profiles page examples:

• Aldeiaco
• Giphy
• The Secret Handshake

4. An Infographic Visual to Present Your Business Concept

Sometimes well-designed graphics can help visitors understand your business concept better than a wordy explanation. After all, if people can’t figure out what you do, how will they know if they need your product or service?

So you can skip the industry jargon and use infographic visuals, like Ogilvy One Worldwide does on its Big Data page. This can be a great way to paint a clearer picture so that audiences can understand exactly what you do.

Other great Infographic -like “About Us” page examples:

• Rent the Runway
• Ipolecat
• Bellroy

5. Multimedia Content

Do you have a cool story about how your business was created? The classic saying “Show, Don’t Tell” can be beneficial and applicable to your website design. Why not make a video that tells your story and allow it to speak for itself?

Today’s web design technology allows for easy integration of video & multimedia elements to create a compelling visual story. By providing a mental picture to your visitors, it increases the chances of people seeing it, connecting with it, and sharing it.

Take a cue from Bench, an accounting service provider who needed to convey the benefits of their online product while stressing their personal experience. By using visuals and multimedia, Bench is able to create an effective “About Us” page that shows who they are and what they do instead of simply stating it to audiences through dull copy.

Other great multimedia content “About Us” page examples:

• GetFlyWheel
• Marmoset Music
• Grove Labs

There are many different and inspiring approaches that can be taken when designing your website’s “About Us” page. From very formal, to the fun and creative, it’s important to include content & design elements that fit the personality of your company.

For even more inspiring “About Us” pages I highly recommend that you check out this amazing website.

Online community management is not easy. With a laundry list of client feeds to monitor on a daily basis, having the right tools for the job is essential to prevent what we like to call, “social media meltdowns.”

social media meltdown

Pronounced: /kayy-(oss)/

noun/verb

1. a state of being in whence any marketing official can find their community manager sobbing uncontrollably in the fetal position on the conference room floor.

Fortunately, there are a plethora of resources to help. If you’re a community manager or actively involved in social media marketing, check out any of the following resources that are sure to help make your job a little bit easier:

Google Drive
Useful for any business? Of course, but when your job requires you to be plugged in to the social conversation 24/7, Google Drive is the perfect resource to keep all of your client documents, agreements, and schedules in one place, accessible from any device at any time. From spreadsheets and documents, to presentations, Google Drive allows you to compile everything in one organized location. You also have the option to let multiple people have access to editing these pages, allowing for easier collaboration and communication amongst team members. Need we say more?

Sprout Social

Without question, Sprout Social is one of our favorite monitoring and reporting tools. Not only is the platform easy to maneuver, (a plus for both community managers and clients alike) but its design is clean and pleasing to the eye. It gives you the opportunity to manage your social messages easily through a number of publishing and targeting options. You can schedule content across multiple platforms and analyze engagement through detailed reports, all while maintaining positive relationships with your clients through Sprout’s organized customer profiling system. Overall, it is an excellent one-stop resource for engagement, publishing, and analytics.

Hootsuite

While Sprout Social wins the award for well-designed user interface, we couldn’t live without Hootsuite. It is my platform of choice for scheduling multiple feeds. Hootsuite provides analytics for a detailed look at how well your social media efforts are performing, as well as an engagement breakdown of your network’s activity. It compiles all of your profiles onto one dashboard for a concise layout. However, an organized mind helps with this tool, as the lists and tabs can get quite extensive and jumbled if not cared for properly. Allowing multiple team members to collaborate can help alleviate this and balance the workload for you or your client.

Google Analytics

Using Google Analytics to measure the online traffic for our clients’ websites is absolutely essential to understanding how qualified the traffic we are driving from social is, and dedicating resources according to the levels of ROI each social outlet provides. These in-depth metrics provide valuable information that can help you make the most of your online efforts. You can have a solidified view of the journey your viewers take while on your website, and use the metrics provided to make changes to your marketing techniques as necessary. This tool is one of the most helpful for gathering data to make further improvements in all of your various advertising campaigns.

Flipboard
This app should definitely make it to the home screen of any community manager’s phone or tablet. It’s an excellent tool for collecting the news relevant to not only clients, but also what’s developing in the social realm of their industry. Flipboard curates your chosen news into customized magazines on any topic imaginable, making it the perfect all-in-one-place tool. Pick and choose the stories that you want to follow, and get a tailored look into the industries that matter the most to you. Through Flipboard’s curation and sharing capabilities, it serves as a great resource that can keep you informed and involved in the developments going on in your field.

Tweetdeck

Without Tweetdeck, I’d be lost. It is our go-to tool for monitoring the social conversation surrounding a brand. Tweetdeck, like Hootsuite, allows the user to create multiple tabs for channels, keywords, and news. It helps you manage your online communities by giving you complete control over more than one account. This includes features such as the scheduling of tweets, and real-time streams of emerging news or information surrounding your brand. You can track individual topics or hashtags with ease, and monitor multiple timelines all at once. Its simplicity allows for an easy introduction for new users, while appealing to seasoned professionals through its advanced monitoring capabilities.

Tweepi

Tweepi is the perfect tool for avoiding said “social media meltdowns” as mentioned above. It is great for cleaning up your Twitter feed, with my most favorite aspect of the tool being that you can force spammers to unfollow your account. It also makes finding and targeting influencers much easier with its fantastic search capabilities. These features allow you to search for, and target individuals who are interested in your services or industry, while connecting you with like-minded people along the way. Tweepi has a number of organizational options, like geolocation, to help you get a better look at specific activity within your audience based on region. It will be you Twitter account’s new best friend.

Bitly

Simple, but helpful, Bitly allows users to not only shorten links, but to see when the links were most popular and how often they’ve been clicked once posted. The upgrade is particularly useful to online community managers for creating customized keywords in short URLs for reporting, analytics, and SEO purposes. Being able to link to your work on Twitter makes Bitly a great resource, but getting to see how those links perform makes it even better.

Demographics Pro

Looking for an opportunity to “nerd out”? Demographics Pro is for you. It gives an amazing overview with deep insights into the consumers who follow your Twitter and Instagram accounts, allowing for an easy way to choose the proper message and campaigns for your social calendars. They are true to their name, providing detailed demographics and psychographics to see the behaviors of your audience in order to analyze, influence, and target online communities.

SimilarWeb
To get a better look at your competitor’s activity, and analysis of your audience’s behavior, SimilarWeb is a great tool. You can see the traffic statistics of other businesses in your industry to understand how your company measures up in comparison. As of July 2015, content discovery platform Swayy has joined SimilarWeb. Swayy was a metrics tool that helped businesses target content to their online communities based on behavioral analysis across millions of websites and apps. SimilarWeb has acquired Swayy’s talent and expertise as an effort to improve their existing content recognition programs. The acquisition allows these two channels to combine forces, providing deeper analysis of individual audience members, and improving the overall management of online communities.

When it comes to email marketing, there’s more than one way to measure success. A multitude of metrics can indicate overall performance and present areas for improvement after the launch of a campaign. Taking a look at click-through-rates or open rates, how conversion rate was impacted by a certain email, or how much website traffic is being generated can identify the effectiveness of this kind of marketing initiative. To be successful with email marketing, strategies should be focused on fostering brand engagement and minimizing unsubscribers, all while maintaining strong branding.

Accomplishing all of the above is definitely feasible if the right strategy is created. You need extensive research, sometimes a bit of trial and error, and a thorough understanding of the audience you’re delivering messaging to. However most importantly, you need to implement a series of best practices in order to develop a strategic approach that enables you to achieve your core objectives. Here are 5 elements of email marketing that will help you make sure you’re getting the results you want:

Timing and Frequency

The timing with which you’re sending your email campaigns is one of the most important elements to focus on in an email marketing strategy. You may be located in New York, but perhaps a large portion of your target demographic is in a different time zone. The time of day when users receive emails can directly contribute to performance indicators like open-rate and click-through-rate. You can’t send the same message at the same hour to a global or national audience and expect to reach everyone. Segment your email lists based on the time zone recipients live in so that they’re receiving your emails at an hour that is convenient and appropriate for them.

If you’re looking to maximize user engagement with your emails, but aren’t sure when to send, a good place to start is by considering three core time slots—during the morning once your users are commuting or arriving at work, during the early afternoon on their lunch break, or in the evening late night once they are back in their homes. From there, think about your specific audience’s lifestyle habits and when they would be most likely to give some attention to your email. If you’ve launched email campaigns in the past take a look at the statistics provided by your email platform. For example, in MailChimp, you can see the metrics from previous campaigns and identify what time the most users were reached.

Aside from just the timing of your email, the frequency at which you disseminate your messages plays a major role in performance. The age of email blasting is over. Users have increasing email fatigue these days and won’t even open your emails if they are inundated with a plethora of emails. As a result, it is often the case that the more messages you send the less effective they will be. While your emails may have a short “shelf life” this doesn’t mean you should be sending a new one each and every day—that’s how you’ll get a surge in unsubscribers. Instead, keep your emails at two per week at most to ensure that you’re still reaching users and cutting through the clutter of their inbox. Depending on industry, sometimes two per month is even more fitting.

Subject Lines

The importance of a terrific subject line cannot be stressed enough—it’s literally the first thing the user is reading and their first “personal” impression of your brand. An effective subject line sparks user interest and builds anticipation of what the email contains. You need just enough to get the user intrigued, while still staying true to your brand in under 60 characters. It’s okay to think a little outside the box and let some creativity flow with subject lines, but keep in mind that more often than not, simplicity works best. The best subject lines find a happy medium between oozing creativity and being straight to the point of why you’re emailing a user, and make sure that it also fits your company’s branding.

The goal of a subject line is to entice recipients to open the message, but to also click through the email. For that reason, consistency as you go from the subject line to the actual content of the email is crucial. You can’t say something “clickbaity” just so that users open the message, only to disappoint them upon finding no relevancy to what they originally saw in their inbox. This instills a poor sense of trust with your brand and almost guarantees that users won’t take a desired action.

If you have an idea for a subject line but are unsure if it’s fitting with your brand, never be afraid to ask others around you for feedback. Sometimes, an outsider’s perspective can shed some much needed light onto your ideas. Similarly, segmenting your lists into two groups and testing out different subject lines provides you with hard data about what which subject lines resonate best with users. Discovering what works best with the people whose opinions you value most (your users’) is incredibly important.

Content: Visuals and Copy

Images speak louder than words, and this holds true with any successful email marketing strategy. In general there should always be more visuals than copy in an email. Users don’t want too much to read, they want to be able to quickly skim easy-to-digest content and have a full understanding of the central messaging. If you have a lot of content to offer your audience surrounding a particular subject addressed in your email, direct users to a landing page on your website where they can read the rest or review the full article. Don’t contain it all in the message.

A good portion of the copy used in your emails should be in the CTA. In every email, there is an action that you want recipients to take. Whether it’s “Buy Now,” “Request A Quote,” “Download Now,” or “Read More,” if the messaging is too wordy, the CTA will get lost. Instead, make sure these buttons are vibrant and prominent in comparison to the rest of the message, while still fitting with the design theme. Any CTA is a major component of your core-messaging, so if you aren’t concise with the rest of your wording, it may go overlooked.

Since images are vital to the success of an email marketing campaign, you want to make sure they are loading appropriately and quickly for users. Use a file optimizing tool to ensure images load efficiently. If users are waiting for an image to load, they’ll likely skip to the next email or delete the message. That being said, sometimes technology is faulty or an email service provider requires users to choose to see images and as a result images may not load. If you include relevant image alt tags on the visuals you include, users will have at least some context as to what the visuals are intended to be if they aren’t appearing right away. This little effort can go a long way with providing a good user-experience for recipients.

Recently, more and more companies are experimenting with the inclusion of GIFs in their email campaigns. Sometimes, this can be a challenging feat because not all email platforms will load them correctly, or they will load only the frame of the GIF instead of providing users with the full effect. If you’re considering utilizing this type of visual in your emails, thoroughly test it on a variety of platforms, and if it’s going to be frozen on one particular frame, make sure it’s an image that’s able to stand alone and still give users a complete understanding of what the content is about.

Photo Credit: Jason Rodriguez

Optimization for All Devices

Long gone are the days where all users accessed their inbox from the same email platform on their desktops. Today users are connected to email through smartphones, tablets, desktops, with a wide range of devices to choose from within those general categories. The way one person views an email isn’t the same way another person does, so to ensure that accessibility isn’t jeopardized for any users, a responsive design email is typically the best solution. This way all recipients on nearly every device and platform imaginable have a user-friendly experience with your email and are able to view it as intended. If you aren’t using a responsive design, investigate what devices the majority of your users are on, and ensure that the email is tailored to those functionalities and set up for that platform.

In today’s era of being constantly connected to the internet, the majority of users are on mobile – regardless of vertical. This actively growing audience is on-the-go and expects the brands they engage with to understand that. Clickable items on a mobile device should be optimized for a touch screen thumb—not a mouse—and shouldn’t require the user to do any extra work (zooming in or zooming out) to view the images in the message.

While you can focus on a certain group of users, ideally, you should be optimizing your email campaigns for your entire audience—which means whatever device they are checking their mail on. Litmus is a tool that allows you to see how your email would render on multiple devices and platforms before you send it. Give it a look through before you launch any email campaign.

Personalization

Content you provide users with through email initiatives should be relevant and provide significant value. Marketing to the user as an individual and using personalization no longer needs to be exemplified by addressing them with first and last name. Similar to a conversion funnel, an email funnel allows you to target users with more specific content as they show signs of progressive interest and come closer to becoming a customer.

If a user is in your email database after signing up for your newsletter on a specific blog post, you can segment your lists based on relevant content that they have demonstrated interest in. By personalizing emails in a step-by-step process based on relevance, the effectiveness of your messages will be much greater as the content is related to what initially caused them to interact with your brand.

Perhaps you have a newsletter sign up on your blog, and after reading an article on email marketing the user provides you with their contact information. Sending them a follow up email that addresses logo design will not fulfill their needs, and will seem arbitrary given their reason for signing up. Instead, set up a specific email funnel for users within that group. Send them a whitepaper that goes into further detail about email marketing, and if they open email they move further down the funnel, where they’ll receive another email providing them with content that makes sense given their latest read.

Writing engaging content for a blog is great. But writing that content with a purpose is even better. You want your posts to be discovered, and in turn, lead that traffic to your company’s website. However, this doesn’t just happen – active steps need to be taken while writing your blog content to increase your chances of being ranked highly on search engines, in order to naturally bring visitors to your page.

We’ve compiled a list of 8 essential steps to take into consideration when trying to increase your blog content’s search rankings that often get overlooked during the process of writing posts. Each of these items can play a large role in the growth of your blog, and when done correctly, your business as well.

Check Title and h1 Tags

One of the big things to note when trying to increase search rankings is whether or not your title and h1 tags are targeting the keyword you’re trying to rank for. Whether it’s an exact match of a long tail keyword or a close variation, these tags should be keyword-rich. When possible, have titles and h1s that are slightly different, but still related to the overall content of the page. You want to make sure that when someone clicks on your result, you are not giving them a title that is entirely different from what they were searching. Don’t set an expectation, and then deliver something completely different. People will leave the page if they are not finding what they are looking for. You do want something in the h1 to be a little more user friendly, but for it to still have keywords.

Sometimes it is difficult to include your keyword, other secondary keywords, and other relevant information in your title tag while still having it make sense. The titles often end up relatively plain. The h1 gives you can opportunity to expand on the information your title already provides and engage your audience a little more, especially if they are coming from outlets other than search engines. Whether it’s from social, or referral sources, you want to make the h1 as enticing as possible for those visitors as well. Overall, these two tags are not that different from one another, but the h1 gives you slightly more leeway. You want to make sure they both have keywords when possible, and that they are both user friendly. When used strategically, they can have a positive impact on your rank.

Check h2 Tags

These are not as big of an indicator as title tags, but having keywords or relevant terms in h2 tags can be very helpful. We even have a few posts that rank for words within our h2’s, as well as the terms in the title itself. It’s really important that if you have sub headers, you’re marking them as h2s and h3s because they are a much powerful SEO indicator than simply larger or bolded text. It gives you an opportunity to rank for more of those longer tail keywords that are relevant to your topic, while giving your primary keyword a little boost. On the other hand, these should certainly not be keyword-stuffed, or presented in a way that would be frustrating for users to read through. Google recognizes these things, and frankly, it just doesn’t look good. Find a good balance, but definitely take advantage of these tags when you can.

Social Sharing

You want to give people the ability to share blog posts quickly and conveniently across many different platforms. For us, that means Google Plus, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Having social sharing signals for each can show how many individuals have already shared the post, giving other readers an indication of how authoritative the piece of content may be. Not only is the page ranking, but people are taking the time to share it as well. From a content standpoint, I don’t think there is any better trust indicator than social shares, so it is very important to make that opportunity available to your audience.

A lot of people overlook the small details, such as the pre-generated tweet that comes up when people choose to share a post. We have seen a boost in our social shares after we made the change to predefine our tweets with better copy than just a direct variation of our title tag. This may take a little extra work, but it gives you much more control and customization over what other people will share. The investment certainly pays off with the links back to your content through increased visibility from these social platforms.

Unique Images (When Possible)

This can be difficult for smaller businesses as you may not have a design team dedicated to creating original images for your website. However, if you have the means, it is something to think about quite seriously. Having a unique image on each post is a phenomenal advantage. Not only does it allow you to gain traffic through Google image search, but it also gives you the opportunity to have something that is sharable.

The greatest potential for this comes from infographics. Make sure that if you create one for a post that you give the option for the reader to share or download it. Not only do unique images serve as a good branding tool, but people tend to share content more often when there is an image that goes along with it. Also, when other people use images in their content, it provides the opportunity to get a link back to the original page that the image was published on. You want to encourage those who share the image to always link back to the source from which they found it, as this can be an incredible opportunity when your image is being found on authoritative sites. Like a domino effect, your images will lead to more links, and more links will lead to a better ranking.

Page Speed

When it comes to a blog, site speed can often be forgotten. Usually it’s the home page and landing pages that are the main focus for optimizing this feature because of their importance. However, if the same concern is used when creating a blog, it can have a tremendous impact on your rank. Little things like optimizing the file sizes of your images and videos can make a huge difference to the speed with which your page loads, and the overall user experience for your visitor.

When it comes to ranking first or second on Google’s front page, such a seemingly small change can sometimes be the determining factor. If it takes a short time for your page to load, it is more likely that people will stick around and check out more content – and as a result your bounce rate will decrease. It is good for your blog, and great for your brand.

Meta Description

There has been a lot of talk about how meta descriptions are not a direct factor when it comes to ranking. While that is true, they shouldn’t be overlooked or ignored. Meta descriptions play a large role in click through rate, and this is one of the indicators used by Google when determining where you should rank. A call to action and any keywords that you are trying to target should be included, as they will be bolded when they match the keyword searched.

You want to create meta descriptions that are engaging and will cause people to want to learn more. The copy needs to be 160 characters or less, which may not seem like much, but at least this give you more freedom for creativity than the title tag limit of 60 characters. Meta descriptions present an opportunity to elaborate on the title of the page itself, and give the reader a better indication of what they will find on your page. If you do not define a meta description yourself, Google will do it for you – which is not always ideal.

Internal Links

You have a lot of great content and that’s awesome, but if you do not link it to appropriate pages that are deeper in your site, you run the risk of those other pages not ranking well, as well as lowered conversions for your business because the potential customers were not led through your site’s conversion funnel properly. When possible, it is important to link to other relevant blog posts or pages. It will help funnel whatever link equity you may have for the page that is linking out, and will keep the audience reading relevant content throughout your site. You’re also able to define your own anchor text when doing internal linking, which is a great opportunity to take advantage of when looking for places to include keywords. Just make sure any words you decide to use as anchor text don’t disrupt a user’s reading experience and that they are relevant and fit in with the natural flow of your post.

Rewriting Old Content

A lot of general business websites that may have a blog don’t take advantage of their old content. It is important to rewrite your old work once in a while in order to update content that may still be bringing in traffic, but happens to be a little dated. This “evergreen” content is made of pages that may have been written 5 years ago, but still have useful and relevant information to someone who might be reading it today. “How To” guides, and annual lists are great contenders to be rewritten, while things like breaking news pieces are not. In order for this strategy to be effective you need to hit a threshold of 250-300 new characters for Google to consider your page rewritten – so keep that in mind. Also, make use of Google Webmaster Tools to re-index the page whenever it is updated. If you have a post that has done well, make sure you are adding technical SEO elements like header tags or image alt text when appropriate, but don’t get too carried away with it as you do not want to risk damaging the quality of the content for a better rank.

If you take the time to apply all of these things to your blog, you will most likely see an increase in rank, but certainly an increase in traffic. As always, it is important to think about the user first, but make sure that your page is structured in a way that makes sense for your overall SEO.

Many marketers including myself face tough questions about how their efforts are bringing ROI to a company. For some marketing channels like search engine marketing, email marketing, or SEO, this can be a relatively straightforward process. Simply go through Google Analytics, figure out what channel was responsible for an individual clicking on an RAQ or “buy now” button, and report that as a win for said channel. However, there is something fundamentally wrong with this – particularly in the B2B space. What if someone has come to your site 6 times – once from social media, once from search engine marketing, once from a display ad, twice from SEO, and once directly. What about the other five visits in this example – should they not get credit?

In my mind, the answer is unequivocally that all sources should get some sort of credit for the leads they are involved in regardless of where that is within a conversion funnel, and the reasoning is simple: just because a channel wasn’t responsible for the final visit that led to a conversion, doesn’t mean it isn’t providing any value to the company or not helping to close the lead. If we go back to the example above for instance, if I no longer spend marketing budget on social media because it was only the first touch point in a lead, who is to say whether or not that the lead ultimately even converts from a direct search 5 visits later?

While it might seem very difficult to solve this issue with multi-channel attribution, there is something you can do to make the value you assign to each of your marketing channels a bit more reflective of the role they actually played in generating a conversion – set up a multi-channel attribution model. Multi-channel attribution modeling is the process of understanding or assigning credit to each channel that played a role in helping a lead eventually generate a conversion for your business. Using an attribution model that reflects the various touch points a visitor makes when interacting with your business is a great way for a marketing team to allocate credit to the channels that preceded the final conversion during a customer’s buyer journey.

By looking not only at the last touchpoint before a conversion but at the entire sequence of events, it’s possible to better allocate credit between every channel and campaign. While taking the time to set up an attribution model obviously doesn’t increase the value of each of your marketing channels and touchpoints, it does allow you to spend your budget more effectively by ascertaining what each channel’s actual value is to every sale your business makes. The success of digital marketing to generate a lead is often attributed to one channel, when in reality there are many assists from other channels that need to be taken into account as well.

The purpose of attribution modeling should be to better understand the buying behavior of your website visitors. Any efficient attribution model you set up should be able to tell you why people buy from your website, what happens before they make a purchase, what prompted them to make the purchase in the first place, and what your most effective acquisition channels are so that you can properly invest in them moving forward.

Why Do You Need An Attribution Model?

Chances are that your business does currently have an attribution model. The problem is that your attribution model is most likely a first or last touch modeling, which is to say you’re only considering the first or last source that brings a user to your website before they make a sale. What most businesses need in order to take themselves to the next level is a multi-touch attribution model. While they aren’t perfect, multi-touch attribution models are infinitely more useful for a business than a simple last or first touch model. In fact, almost any type of multi-touch attribution model is preferable to a first or last-touch model in terms of getting your business one step closer to understanding marketing’s true impact on your bottom line.

Multi-touch is how actionable marketing impact modeling should be for any business moving forward. It is the only real way to gain visibility into a short time frame so that your business can make agile decisions around where to spend a marketing budget with the greatest ROI. With more and more budget moving into the digital landscape and tracking of real-time marketing getting more efficient, the need to for a model that is immediately actionable for a company is more important than ever before.

Challenges

While attribution modeling can be extremely helpful when set up correctly, there are a few challenges that marketers and business owners need to solve before they are ready to get a working attribution model in place. The first is to form a very simple understanding of the fact that consumer interest is influenced by your marketing efforts as a whole. This means that things like paid search and display impressions, social media engagement, and PR placements play a direct role in the success or failure of your business. While it is almost impossible to untangle the tangible value of these efforts from marketing efforts that create direct leads like email or search engine optimization, understanding that the role they play is paramount to creating an attribution model that accurately reflects how each marketing channel is bringing value to your business.

In addition to problems tracking impressions and engagement, companies also need to consider the existing brand equity that influences customer decisions, as well as offline marketing efforts that are difficult, if not impossible, to correctly track. While it is particularly challenging to factor these elements into an attribution model, marketers need to understand that while they might not see direct ROI elements like customer loyalty, offline efforts are certainly playing a role within their attribution funnel and should be included if possible.

Aside from elements of your marketing efforts that can’t be tracked or measured perfectly, marketers need to make sure that the attribution they currently have for their various marketing channels is correct. For most digital marketers this translates into making sure that your analytics are giving proper attribution and not attributing a visit or a lead to an incorrect channel. The best example of this is not correctly categorizing when traffic is coming from an email or a search engine and attributing it to direct marketing instead. This can cause serious issues for any business or marketing team because ROI is not correctly understood and mistakes are often made when trying to consider which marketing channels need more or less budget.

Attribution Models to Consider

There are many different attribution models to consider. When trying to figure out which one would make the most sense for your business it is important to think about how your sales process works – specifically which steps in the buyer process are the most important for generating actual sales. Each step in the buyer journey should be assigned credit for the work it did to close a lead – and the percentage assigned should be reflected of how much of a role they are playing in the conversion process.

Here are some the traditional models that you might consider as a baseline for starting to set up the attribution model for your business:

Last Interaction
As we discussed earlier, last interaction is the default model for most companies who have attribution modeling set up. This model gives all of the credit for a conversion to the last touch point or traffic source of a lead and totally ignores any previous visits or touch points that a lead might have had with your business. The shortcoming of this channel is fairly obvious – other channels that are involved with your lead should be getting some of the credit for their work as well, not just the last source a lead came from. Another issue is that standard last interaction modeling can’t take into account things like offline behavior or disconnected devices like mobile phones or tablets where behavior may continue before or after a lead has been created.

First Interaction
Although not as common as the last interaction attribution model, first interaction is a close second. This model gives all of the credit for a conversion to the first touch point or channel that brought a visitor to your site. This kind is best used if you suspect that a channel is undervalued because it is bringing a lot of visitors to your website, but few conversions. The obvious shortcomings of this model is that there is no consideration given to what channel is doing the work to actually close a lead and make it into a conversion and there is no way to measure how the channels between the first and last interaction are working to make sure that users are staying within the conversion funnel.

Linear
The linear attribution model takes an egalitarian approach to how each channel that was involved in a conversion receive credit, and gives equal value to each. So if you have a lead that came to your website 5 different times from 5 different sources, each source would receive 20% of the credit for closing the lead. While this model is a great way to evaluate the overall contribution of each of your channels, it doesn’t take into account their position within the conversion funnel. First and last interactions are weighed exactly the same as all other touchpoints.

Time Decay
The time decay attribution model takes into account how close to a conversion each interaction occurs and rewards appropriately. This means that the last interaction will get the largest percentage of credit, followed by the second to last interaction, etc. This might be helpful if you’re running a promotional giveaway or if you know that each interaction closer to a conversion is more important to get in the grand scheme of generating conversion for your business. This only drawback of this model is that it may undervalue earlier touchpoints if your business needs to play a large emphasis on generating an initial touchpoint with audiences.

Position-Based
The position-based attribution model is a variation we use at Web Designer Vip. This is because the model gives more credit to the first and last interactions with a business while equally distributing the rest of the credit to middle interactions. For us, this is the most accurate default marketing attribution model to start with, as getting the initial interest in our service and expertise and closing our leads are the most difficult and important things for us. The middle touchpoints are more or less equally important for us because we want to make sure that people are moving down our conversion funnel and not losing interest, but they aren’t as difficult or as important for us to get than the first and last touchpoints. The drawback to this model is if your business really needs a second or third touchpoint to close a sale for whatever reason – maybe you find that it is on second visits that people generally tend to so something important for you to turn that lead into a conversion further down the road, such as downloading a whitepaper or signing up for a newsletter.

Customize
While selecting the attribution model that most accurately reflects what your business looks for within your sales cycle is a good start, there should be customization around what kind of attribution each channel gets. Chances are, none of these attribution models really correctly or exactly capture what your brand needs from an attribution model, and they should be tweaked accordingly. For example, our position based model is slightly customized to reflect a sort of “W” attribution model that gives the most value to our first, middle, and last touch points. It is important for us that people come back in the middle of the conversion funnel so that we don’t lose the lead’s attention, and we make sure to result that step in the conversion process accordingly.

Attribution Isn’t Perfect

When thinking about adding marketing attribution for your business it is important to remember that no matter what attribution model you pick, it won’t give you perfect data. However, position-based, time delay and other customized variations that more accurately reflect the value that each touchpoint a customer has with your business will provide more actionable insights for your business than a simple last-click attribution. None of these models will give you an exact picture so understanding what model is as good as it will possible get is the sweet spot you’re looking to achieve. Your model should provide you with more insights than you would have otherwise and allow you the confidence to spend your marketing channel in line with what your attribution model tells you. That being said, remember to not sideline attribution models after picking one – continuously test as you’re able and go with the model that you find gives you the most actionable data.