PREPARING FOR 2016: DIGITAL STRATEGY IN THE NEW YEAR
It may not seem like it, but 2016 is right around the corner, and with a new year comes a whole new batch of digital considerations.
Traditional advertising continues to morph into the digital realm with social media juggernauts at the reins.
It’ll be important to stay organized in the coming months. With that in mind, here are a few tips to keep your digital strategy fresh in 2016.
Keep it Social
Many of our clients use Pinterest as a tool to stay connected with their customers and share dynamic, creative content. Going into 2016, keeping up to date on Pinterest and other important social media entities means a greater ROI for your brand. Shopping a brand with promoted Pinterest pins can generate hundreds of thousands of views for hundreds of dollars or less.
On more unexplored territory, Instagram has been working with marketing affiliates on a phased rollout of its advertising platform, which should become available to the public by the end of this year. Instagram says its ad recall for sponsored posts is over two times the norm for online advertising.
We have the opportunity to leap into this unprecedented area feet forward and establish innovative ways to increase brand exposure.
New Year, New Rules
What else to keep in mind as we barrel into a new year? Mobile. Data. Ease of Access. Now that you’re tidying up and preparing new budgets, take mobile into account if you haven’t already and consider a mobile-friendly website. If users on mobile devices can access your site, that means more traffic and a boost in your search engine rankings.
We’re seeing mobile develop into a new digital frontier, and sometimes even a battlefield. In late August, T-Mobile CEO John Legere declared open battle against what he calls data “thieves” who swallow thousands of gigabytes of data.
Why is this important? More and more, it’s becoming evident that the way we interact with data online (and now through mobile devices) can have a real world impact on the bottom line of a thriving business.
Clean Up
Okay, it’s been months since spring cleaning. You enjoyed the summer, but now the dust is starting to pile up again and you might be worried about clearing your mental space to tackle 2016. Here’s a couple useful tools to keep data in check:
Infogr.am – Take client reports and mounds of data and turn them into easy to navigate, colorful infographics. You can share these internally to better understand your business or distribute externally to increase brand exposure with something more elegant than hard data.
AdWords enthusiast? Check out Google’s new Report Editor they’ve started to tease on their blog. Google’s new tool will allow you to explore, sort, segment and visualize account data so you can take control of any frazzle over the next few months.
Finally, if you haven’t already, connect with a time tracking service like Everhour to hold yourself accountable and get a better understanding of when and where to allocate resources.
SOCIAL MEDIA PRO: WHAT ARE THE KARDASHIANS DOING RIGHT?
We’ve all seen one episode or a snippet or two in our attempts to keep up with the Kardashians, and based on what we’ve seen, we know they’re doing a whole lot of wrong.
With that in mind, what are they doing right? They’ve shot to stardom and their magic lies in their ability to make their way into your phones, tablets and computers via social media. The Kardashians have mastered the art of utilizing social media to grow their brand and the good news is: you can too, without putting on layers of makeup and fake eyelashes.
Know Your Platforms
Deborah Sweeney, CEO of MyCorporation Business Services explains the difference between networks, “The goal of every social platform is to engage followers; keep them clicking on links, discovering new things, and socializing with new and familiar people. The way in which they engage their users differs with every platform. Instagram engages purely with pictures, Twitter with short bursts of words, and Facebook with a combination of the two — with an added emphasis on lengthier posts, creating room for in-depth discussion.”
You also need to take into consideration the audience for each of the popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat and others. Understanding your audience will also help you connect with them on which ever platform(s) you decide to try. The Pew Research Social Media 2013 reported that:
- Facebook is used by more women (76%) than men (66%), and more 18 to 29 year olds (84%) than any other age range.
- Twitter is used by more black, non-hispanic internet users (29%) than white or Hispanic (16%), and more high-income earners (19%) than low (17%).
- Instagram is used by more urban internet users (22%) than suburban (18%), and more 18 to 29 year olds (37%).
- Pinterest is predominantly used by women (33% vs 8% of internet users who are men), and entertains a greater percentage of college graduates (25%) than any other network besides LinkedIn.
- LinkedIn is the only network used by more men (24%) than women (19%), and more 30 to 49-year-olds (27%) than 50 to 64-year-olds (24%).
Define Success
The first step to maximizing your presence on any social channel is defining success, and developing a content strategy that speaks to your audience in the language of the platform. If you think it’s not working, don’t just abandon ship. Try and figure out what not’s working—post different things and use analytics to see what people are responding to.
Create a Social Media Plan that Drives Results
The Kardashians have a marketing team that helps them acquire business and tout it on social media. They post pics that show off their “fabulosity” and are consistent. They have pretty consistent messaging in that nearly all of their posts are ads or selfies. When it comes to your own social media plan, you need to start with your own content and brand voice and develop a presence.
Unlike the sisters though, instead of touting your own company, use and build your online presence to develop depth within the industry. The content you create for your social networks should not sound like sales pitches. You can promote your brand on social by associating your brand with a lifestyle, and promoting and discussing that lifestyle. Start and participate in conversations about the industry, the aesthetic, the lifestyle.
Original content should be complemented by shareable and actionable content as well. It’s like having an in-person conversation…you wouldn’t talk about yourself more than half the time, would you? You talk about things you learned and share your experiences so that maybe the listener can feel inclined to participate and share your story with others.
Start with a strategy, implement, test and build. If the Kardashians can do it, so can you!
TAG MANAGEMENT 101: MAKE YOUR POSTS SHINE
Finishing your blogpost or article is a feat deserving of a night out or that pumpkin spice latte you’ve been craving. But before you finish, you realize you have to tag the post to high heavens and back; how do you determine which tags to choose and are the tags becoming overwhelming? The simple practice of cleaning and managing your tags can keep you sane and help organize your blog and posts to best maximize your SEO.
What is Tag Management?
Tags are snippets of code that are usually placed in the <head> of a page which enable 3rd-party tracking, analysis, and reporting. Google Analytics and other analytics platforms are an obvious tag, but remarketing, conversion tracking, affiliates, and advanced customer insight services utilize tags as well.
Tag management involves the use of code in the backend of your platform. These codes, or tag managers, allow marketing to have control over their own little space on a web page. The 6 or 7 tags on any given page are replaced by a single container. That container holds code that listens to rules dictated in the tag manager’s backend about when to fire which tags.
Tips on Successful Tag Management
First of all, why even consider taking extra time out of your day to manage tags? For two important reasons: management and data governance. Data governance provides directional focus. No data governance and you have a mess of useless information. Tags provide insight for you and the consumer—the consumer is able to better explore your blog and lead them to believe that you are an industry expert helping them to understand why your product or service is a necessity in their lives. They are also important for your content strategy and digital marketing efforts; tags gain traction on Google as they help readers find the posts with the specific information they’re looking for.
Tags, unlike categories, serve as an index for your site or blog. They can help you understand how your content strategy is changing or needs to be changed. When you pull reports in your search for insights, you want data lined up so it is easier to read and digest and this is where management comes in. We’re not talking about simply managing which tags you use; we’re talking back-end metadata. For example, set a product ID to something that makes sense for anyone who looks at the code (myproductatthiscompany.productID). You can then tailor your analytics code to pull information about that data object and compare it to its content value for a specific piece of content or throughout your whole content library.
Google’s Tag Manager is a free tool for managing marketing and tracking tags on your site. If you need a more in-depth look at your content and digital marketing strategy in addition to something provided to you via a free tool like Google’s Tag Manager, contact Globe Runner today!
EMAIL SEGMENTATION: A QUICK GUIDE
Delivery is the foundation of good story-telling. Any comedian will tell you that if you deliver a bad joke the right way, you can make it funny. The same goes for email marketing. How you currently break up and deliver your email communications and segment your audience based on what they do (in addition to what they say) is what determines its efficacy.
Segmentation Based on Action
You may already be segmenting your emails based on groups i.e. business groups, demographic types and membership (paid, free, lapsed). Even if this has proven to be effective, it can be even more helpful to segment according to action; segment based on the behavior or action that your audience takes relative to the service you’re offering.
Why is action louder than words? Instead of connecting with people based just on their membership type or whether they’re male or female, connect with them based on what they do—helping to foster a more personal connection. For example, say someone downloaded a whitepaper or opened an article on your website. Instead of getting caught up on getting their personal information, focus on communicating with them based on what they did by offering them a next step or a subtle call-to-action.
Segment Your Segments
If the customer who downloaded a whitepaper or article identifies themselves as someone familiar in your trade of business, you can create narrowly focused segmentations based on this information. Use this information to develop engaging and relative content.
Although it may seem cumbersome, and far from the foundation of automated email marketing, you’re more likely to get results with email segmentation.
MailChimp scanned their users who use segmentation tools and compared the list of segmented campaigns to the results of the same customers’ non-segmented campaigns. “When we measured stats ‘across all segmented campaigns,’ segmented campaigns performed markedly better than their non-segmented counterparts.”
What your customers do may be more telling than what they say which can help your email communications be more relevant and successful.
Do you use email segmentation? How much do you depend on user information over their actions?
Let us know via Twitter.
CAMPAIGN MANAGEMENT IN 3 SIMPLE STEPS
Executing a successful campaign is as detail-oriented and time-intensive as preparing for battle. Knowing the breakdown of successful campaign management can really take the daunting factor out of the equation so that you aren’t afraid to take the first step.
COURTESY ANDY DOLMAN – WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
With the many analytics tools and software available to us, it can be hard to know where to start. The best way to start is by focusing on one element at a time instead of being overwhelmed by the bigger picture. The three main elements involved in successful campaign management include:
1. Data for campaign management
Start with acquiring a clear understanding of your customer:
- Who are you talking to?
- How can you effectively market to them?
- What are their needs?
- How is your product or service the solution?
Other customer data includes age, gender, ethnicity, family and marital status, employment status and income level. Also, knowing which customers are your most valuable buyers is important because it helps you further focus your efforts.
The more data you acquire, the better because it paints a greater picture of your customers. Use this data to understand their needs and answer the questions that build the basic buying process:
- What do you do?
- So what about what you do? (build awareness)
- Why are you better than…
- Do I need your product/service?
- How do I get your product/service?
- I got it, I’m on it.
To get these answers, you can look at particular marketing communications to understand where potential customers are in the process and take them from one stage to the next until they become your loyal customers.
2. Content
No campaign is complete without implementing content. Now that you know who your customers are, you need to focus on what messaging to send them and how to relay that message to your customer base.
How do content and customers come together? If you know that your customer favors a certain organic product and likes discounts, you can share information in that realm that touts you as the industry thought leader. How about a blog post about when to buy organic to get the best deals? You can also share information about sales during peak season for a certain vegetable or fruit.
3. Execution
You now have an idea of what to send to whom and a better sense of your story. Although your messaging is clear, the next step is to determine how to share it in the most effective way possible. Will a push notification be more effective than a direct mail piece?
Communicating your information through effective storytelling is the way to acquire and retain customers. Reach out the wrong way and you risk turning potential customers away.
Taking the right steps toward successful campaign management means making sure you get each step right before taking the next one. Globe Runner can help you turn your campaign ideas into action by walking you through these steps so you better understand your root customers and messaging. Contact us today!
3 QUICK TIPS TO IMPROVE YOUR DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY
by Samantha Arigapudi
Digital marketing has become the norm, replacing the term marketing altogether. As an evolved form of traditional marketing, digital marketing uses the web and digital channels to connect consumers with brands and brands with partners to help each other grow in this dynamic digital age. Digital touch points such as tablets, smartphones and wearable devices are becoming more ubiquitous around the world.
As the digital world changes with every new invention, app and upgrade, it can become a challenge to keep up with today’s digital marketing needs and outlets. Digital marketing however is a practice essential to modern marketing and here are some easy ways to help you improve your digital marketing.
#1 Focus on Customer Acquisition
“Content is king,” is a saying that’s foundational to digital marketing. Use content creatively to define your company and what you offer to acquire your target audience so they too can spread your creative word.
Before you start, set up acquisition goals for your digital marketing and create a timeline with goals working backwards from your end-goal. What steps do you need to take? Where can you improve your content? Have you identified your keywords and attractive links?
A must of digital marketing is to have web traffic and to gain traffic to your website, blog and e-commerce store. To do so, it’s important to share your content in a smart way. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Vine are all effective ways to draw a new crowd to your website, and other methods such as search and display may also help you optimize your media plan.
#2 Examine Your SEO
In 2014 until now, SEO’s impact has grown 29% for B2C brands. It is now just as important as email for a more positive ROI. Hiring an outside company to evaluate your SEO is a great way to see where you fall on the map in your industry and get a step-by-step list of how to improve your digital presence. Get a report that allows you to understand the quality of each of your website’s pages and how they compare with the quality of your competitors’ pages.
A good starting point for any SEO strategy is to first determine who you have to beat! Look at your competitors and do a thorough competitor analysis—what niches and keywords do they seem to be targeting? Do what your competitors are doing right to get in front of them on the search results page.
#3 Focus on Retention Rates
Customer retention has unique challenges of its own and to keep up, you need to react to your messaging. Where have your customers gone? Are competitors stealing your base? Is your customer turned off by bland communications that are no longer personalized and engaging? Concentrate on the customers that are more likely to convert based on their positions in the buying cycle, which will improve your company’s digital-marketing efficiency.
Deliver the excellent experience customers expect by interacting with them through multiple digital outlets with engaging and more importantly, genuine content. Constantly reevaluating your overall digital marketing strategy is one of the best ways to stay ahead of your competition, acquire new customers, retain your brand ambassadors and produce more personalized experiences.
What is your digital marketing tip?
PUSH YOUR DIGITAL MARKETING WITH PUSH NOTIFICATIONS
by Samantha Arigapudi
A cheap way to spice up your digital marketing efforts is by pushing your way into people’s phones. Push notifications get you front and center of a valuable space — the mobile phone in the hands of your target audience.
Push notifications are the perfect addition to your digital marketing campaign. They literally get your message on a phone’s home screen in basically real-time. Having a sale tonight? Let your customers know about it by sending them a push notification through your app. Push notifications, not to be confused with texts, can do so much for your digital marketing efforts.
How Push Notifications Work
Push notifications help you communicate and constantly re-engage users. They can be sent based on a consumer’s location or even time zone through your app—they are a great way to prompt a mobile user at the right place, at the right time. For example, the Target Cartwheel app will show up on a phone’s home screen reminding them to use their Cartwheel App because the app picks up your location and realizes you are near a Target.
Simply put: Push notifications are simple messages from apps installed on a device that wake up the handset and alert the user with a message displayed on the home or lock screen.
Why Use Them
The best push notifications tend to be personalized, contextual, timely and relevant. And in fact, your app doesn’t even need to be open for a notification to be sent. Also, notifications have similar guidelines as Twitter — they are limited to 140 or less characters. Some guidelines to keep in mind:
- Keep Consumers in the Know. Push notifications are a great way to reach consumers on the go at any time of day — which makes it all the more important to have a mobile-friendly site.
- Be courteous. Don’t be a spammer. When planning your communications, organize your messaging so that you are only sending when it’s really worth it. Start with two pushes per week and work your way from there based on user feedback and analytics.
- Keep it short, stupid (KISS). No offense, but users have an attention span shorter than goldfish. Make a big impact with few words because all you need is a swipe. As soon as they react to your notification, your app or site will launch anyway.
- Always have a CTA. With that short notification, always include a call-to-action (CTA) that is as straight-forward and as obvious as possible.
- Bring something to the table. Add value with your messaging, just as you would with all other channels. Use their purchase history, previous interactions through other channels and CRM information to create a personal journey for each customer.
With the Great Power of Push Notifications…
…comes great responsibility. Don’t abuse the system … this only leads the consumer into disregarding your notifications. Don’t replace them for email — don’t send company or weekly updates via push notifications.
Push notifications are easy to implement and when best practices are followed, can be a great way to interact with users. Don’t overstep your boundaries and cross the line into harassment. Back up your action plan and only enable push notifications when they are worthy.
404 ERRORS WON’T CAUSE A GOOGLE PENALTY
In an interesting conversation on Twitter, Google’s Gary Illyes has confirmed that 404 errors will not lead to Google penalties for your website. 404 errors occur when a web page has been removed from your website or does not exist. Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Roundtable explained that there is a rumor out there that “having a site with some 404ed pages will lead to a Google Penalty.”. Google has now confirmed this.https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=629672123359887361&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fgloberunner.com%2F404-errors-wont-cause-a-google-penalty%2F&theme=light&widgetsVersion=219d021%3A1598982042171&width=550px
Google’s @methode said 404s do not lead to Google Penalties https://t.co/WQMmZ4zEA4 pic.twitter.com/MS6sPcUPpW
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) August 7, 2015
I agree that just the existence of 404 errors on your website is not going to lead to a penalty or manual action from Google. There are perfectly legitimate reasons to have 404 errors on your website. For example, if someone is linking to a page on your website with a lot of bad links, then you can move the location of that page to another URL and serve up a 404 error. That will essentially ‘get rid of’ those bad links and not pass them onto the rest of your website. But, that’s all great if those bad links are linking to an internal page on your site: most negative SEO and low quality links I’ve seen tend to be pointed towards a site’s home page.
404s won’t lead to a penalty, but it’s not good for your site overall.
Technically speaking, 404 errors on your website won’t get you a penalty from Google. But, let’s look at it another way: if your internal linking structure is messed up and your site is linking internally to pages that don’t exist, then you’re shooting yourself in the foot. Your 404 errors are causing problems, and you’re also going to cause crawl issues.
So while 404s are not technically going to get you a penalty, you’re just shooting yourself in the foot by not fixing them.
The goes for duplicate content on your website, as well. Unless you have so much of it you’re spamming the search engines, you’re just not going to typically get a penalty from Google just because you have duplicate content on your website.
HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE’S USER EXPERIENCE
by Samantha Arigapudi
Would you stay on a site that’s hard to navigate? How in the world do you get to your cart? Where are the product reviews?
Failure to find what you need means the company lost your business, business that could have led them to more customers and brand ambassadors. User experience is key not only to building your brand but building your sales. If you don’t have the resources to do a complete redevelopment, you can adopt these simple and affordable steps to improve your website’s user experience on the path towards effective digital marketing.
Lead the Way: Easy-to-Use Navigation
Your website should reflect your business plan and vision for your company, meaning it should be clear and organized. Your navigation bar and menus are the landmarks of your site. Instead of burying important information and calls-to-action, provide the tools consumers need to get to where they need to go.
If you’re unsure of where customers are clicking out, run some research and follow the purchase process. Where are customers getting hung up? Maybe a friendly CTA (call-to-action) or redirect is the best way to get them back on track.
Short Attention Spans: Measure Load Speed
Vine, a six-second video feed, is the perfect example of the short attention span we’ve developed in recent years. With a world of information at our fingertips, we’re anxious to access every tidbit right away. Which means, if your page takes more than three seconds to load, you’re in trouble.
Some of the ways to fix your load speed include:
- Indexing your content database (organize content into relevant categories)
- Eliminate unnecessary tracking codes (stick to the important analytics)
- Use Google Search Console’s PageSpeed Insights Tool (get a specific look at what’s slowing down your site)
Google knows how impatient web surfers are and takes page load speed into consideration, especially when it comes to SEO rankings, so use their tools to your advantage.
Keep It Consistent
A consistent layout is reflective of your brand. Is it hodge podge with inconsistent messaging throughout? A consumer might think your brand and customer service is the same way.
Bring credibility to your company by using consistent brand images throughout and using a similar page-to-page layout. Be sure to place attention on your calls-to-action by placing them on the same area on every page.
These are just a few ways you can improve your website’s UX. Still not getting the attention you deserve? Contact us at Globe Runner for a quick, free website audit.
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