No public Twitter messages.
Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category
Pinterest: Why it’s worth the investment, and how to get your ROI
Thursday, April 26, 2012
If you’re the person in charge of social media at your company, Pinterest may cause you to groan and look for excuses to opt out of maintaining yet another communication channel. Unfortunately Pinterest is increasingly looking like a medium marketers shouldn’t ignore; fortunately, it also looks like a medium that delivers significant ROI, and might not require the level of investment required by Facebook or a blog.
A Medium Marketers Can’t Ignore: In 3 Charts
1) Pinterest is a $7.7 Billion Company, and “appeals to college-educated females between the ages of 25 to 44. A sweet demographic known for its spending decisions and habits.”
2) From Q2 2011 to now, Pinterest has grown from representing 1.2% of social media revenue for e-commerce sites to 17.4%, and it generates greater revenue per click than Facebook or Twitter.
3) Pinterest drives more referral traffic than YouTube, LinkedIn and Google+, and its share of total social media referrals is growing.
OK. So I can’t ignore it. What’s it going to cost me?
TIME 91% of marketers report using social media, and over half of these are spending 6+ hours a week doing it. A good blog post requires a lot of research because it contains a lot of content, and both Facebook and Twitter involve conversations with consumers that need to be monitored. Pinterest, however, is sometimes described as the next phase in social media – content is not (time consumingly) generated, but curated – “Pinterest offers a new level of fun and interaction for our customers as they work with us to create and curate content.” Because you are using content you already have, content created by others, and your followers are adding to and refining your content, Pinterest lessens the burden of time investment required by other social media platforms.
MONEY The chart below is one I created by compiling statistics from several sources, and averaging over the ranges given by various sources. For example, one company is selling Repins for $0.75, one blogger devised an algorithm to calculate the value of a repin, and Twitter and Facebook statistics were found elsewhere. Any of these stats are highly contested, industry-specific, and involve huge ranges, but the take home is that Pinterest is relatively cheap and appears to generate a healthy return on the investment.
So how do I do it?
It’s profitable and efficient, so how can you optimize your Pinterest board to increase brand/ product awareness and traffic to your site? Neocloudmarketing reiterates the standard adage for all content creation: show your consumer the “whole package” – how your product is used, the lifestyle and how it intersects with other brands and products on the market – ie, give content that goes beyond your product and is useful to your consumers. Social Media Examiner recommends researching how your followers are interacting with your board – which pins are they re-pinning, what information can you get about your followers’ interests by looking at what they pin on their own boards? There are also resources for creating the images that will entice users.
The great thing about Pinterest is that you don’t need several paragraphs – just a picture.
HOWTO: Handle Negative Online Business Reviews Like a Pro
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Let’s face it, online reviews can make you or break you. People rely more than ever on online review sites before making purchases or doing business with a company. If you’re not already monitoring reviews of your company then it’s time to start.
Claim Any Listings Floating Around the Web
The first thing you should do as a business owner is be sure to “claim” your local listings so you can have full control over the details and this also enables you to respond to reviews as a business owner. Popular review sites you should search for your business listing on include Google Places, Yelp, Bing Local, Yahoo Local, Smile Reminder (doctor reviews), Angie’s List, Kudzu and MerchantCircle.
Chances are you already have a listing on one of the above sites just waiting to be claimed.
Respond Online and Take it Offline
Once your listings are claimed they are ready to be monitored. And this is where the main point of this blog entry begins! You must respond to reviews, good and bad. The one thing our clients seem to be most confused about is how to address the bad reviews. Well, here are some tips to follow:
1. Do not respond “in the moment.” You may feel heated when you first read a negative review so step back and think about your response before you respond angrily. This is the time to take in some constructive criticism (assuming it’s a legit review).
2. Once you’re ready to respond, start off positive. Here’s an example of how to positively start your response, “We are open to all feedback from clients, as we believe it helps us adjust to better serve our clients.”
3. You should also discuss how you tried to resolve the issue (if you did) or how you plan on resolving the issue.
4. End the response by giving your contact information.
Be Known For Your Excellent Customer Service and Responsiveness
One of the companies I most admire for their customer service is ModCloth. They encourage customer feedback and will respond to any negative product reviews in a very personable way. They refer to the reviewer by name and make it known that they appreciate the feedback. Here are some screen shots of the great customer service I’ve witnessed on ModCloth:
HOWTO: Use the Dimensions Tab to Improve Your PPC Campaigns
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Guest Blogger: Laura Rodnitzky is the Director of Production for PPC Associates, a search engine marketing agency with offices in San Mateo and Chicago.
If you’re running paid search campaigns in Google AdWords, and you don’t already use the Dimensions tab, you’re missing out on a ton of useful data. Rolled out in mid-2010, the Dimensions tab is one of the most important components of the AdWords UI. It allows you to view data for an entire account or specific campaign(s) that can be used to better target your customers, decrease wasteful spend, and improve conversions. At PPC Associates, our Production team relies heavily on the Dimensions tab to pull detailed reports on campaign behavior across different time periods or geos, and to better understand how and where our ads are being shown on both the search and content networks.
The Dimensions tab is located on the right-hand side of the tabs list in the AdWords UI. If you can’t already see it, click on the drop-down arrow at the end of the row to bring up the menu of available tabs.
Once you’re in the Dimensions tab, go to the “View” drop-down menu to see the types of data available. The screenshot below shows the main menu; for Time, Conversions, and Reach and frequency you have additional options, such as Day of the week, Day (date in time), Week, Month, Quarter, Year, or Hour of day.
So now that you know where to find this, how are you going to use it? There’s a ton of good stuff here, and obviously not all of it will be relevant to every campaign. If you’re not using track-able phone numbers in your ads, for example, the “Call details” option is not going to have any data for you. If your campaigns are only running on the search network, you won’t have any automatic placements to review. But take advantage of what you can. Here are a couple of examples of how we use the Dimensions tab at PPC Associates:
1) Day parting. We usually run two types of day parting reports: day of the week and hour of day. You can pull the data separately, or you can use the advanced segmentation feature in AdWords to break it down by hour of day for each day of the week. Once you have the data in Excel, use conditional formatting to easily spot trends in campaign performance. This can then be used to optimize the campaigns; for example, you may choose to increase bids during time periods with high conversion rate and low CPA, or decrease bids when the opposite is true. If there’s a clear drop in performance during specific days or hours of day, you may even want to turn campaigns off during these low-performing time periods. In the sample data below, it’s clear that the hours of 5 am – 8 am do not perform well, whereas the hours of 4 pm to 8 pm have high conversion rates and low CPAs.
2) Search query review. Being able to see the actual queries that cause your ads to show is powerful, both for finding terms you don’t want to show up on and getting new ideas for keywords. We all know that running keywords on broad match – or even modified broad match or phrase match – opens up a campaign to a wide range of search queries, many of which might not be relevant to what we’re advertising. The “Search terms” option in the Dimensions tab will let you see the queries triggering your ads. Use this data to promote high-performing queries by turning them into keywords with targeted ads, and also to scrub out unwanted terms. This is especially important when your campaigns include a lot of general keywords. Just imagine how many irrelevant queries you can get matched to when bidding on “will” (as in last will and testament) keywords. The screenshot below shows just a few out of thousands.
Clearly this is a very broad overview of the Dimensions tab and the ways you can use it to optimize your campaigns. There are a lot of different ways to use the data, and the “Customize columns” and advanced segmentation options let you slice and dice the data in innumerable ways. No time like the present to get in, start some tests, and figure out how to improve your campaigns with the options on hand.
- Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily of Schipul – The Web Marketing Company.
HOW TO: Optimize Your Google Plus Page
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
With Google’s recent Search Plus Your World update, it is now more important than ever to have a highly optimized Google+ page. Since Google now shows social results mixed in with organic results, your Google+ page is extremely crucial in helping you appear in Google.
With the release of Google’s Search Plus Your World update, Google now recommends Google+ pages for specific search queries. When I do a search for the term “web design,” I get these recommended Google+ people and pages:
As you can see, Google now recommends Google+ People and Pages related to a specific search term e.g. “web design.” So, how can you appear as a related person or page for search queries? Well, the first thing you need to do is fill out your Google+ page and optimize it.
Below are some tips to help you optimize your Google+ page.
Tips on How To Optimize Your Google Plus Page
Be Sure to Select an Optimized Title
The name of your brand or business should be the title of the page but be sure to choose wisely and if relevant include keywords in your title. For example, the SMX Conference Google+ page, includes “Search Engine Marketing” in their title. See the screenshot below.
Fill Out Your Meta Description
Google also let’s you provide a meta description that appears directly below your page title. This is a great place to provide an accurate description of your services. Also, be sure to include keywords in your description so that you can rank better for these terms in Google’s new update, Search Plus Your World.
So for example, SEO Hacker uses “SEO Hacker is an SEO Services Company in the Philippines that aims to help you learn SEO in Simple. . .” as their description. Instead of using their tag line, “Be Visible. Get Searched. Let’s Make This Happen,” they decided to use a more keyword rich meta description which will help them better rank in Google+ for SEO and SEO services.
Fill Out the About Section
This section is just as important as filling out your meta description and choosing the right title and it’s a great opportunity to include links to specific pages to your site like a services page or a contact form.
In this section, you should include information that searchers will want to know about your company. Also, Google allows you to use bulleted formatting which is a great way to list your services and products in an easy to read format.
So, be sure to include as much information as possible when filling out this section. A good example of this is from Schipul’s Google+ page:
Upload Photos
In the photo section, you have the opportunity to upload photos with keywords. Also, by uploading photos it will help your profile reach completion. Use photos that best feature your company, company culture or services. You can also use images for your photos like the Search Engine Land example below:
Also, the photos you add to your Google+ page will appear the new Search Plus Your World’s search results pages (SERPs)
Fill out Your Recommended Links
This section is another great chance to link your services pages, contact forms, etc. We recommend inserting links that are only relevant to your Google+ page including keywords. Also, be sure to include links to your other social networks, blog, website, contact forms, etc.
Here’s an example from SMX’s Google Plus page:
Be Active and Update Frequetnly
Finally, you need to become more active and update frequently on your Google+ page. You don’t have to over do it but posting something valuable and relevant to your customers, followers and friends can help you rank better in Search Plus Your World. Try posting at least twice throughout the week. By posting regularly, Google will notice your activity and reward you for being active and providing new and fresh content.
Be sure to follow Schipul – The Web Marketing Company on Google+, Facebook and on Twitter for more tips on Search Engine Optimization and web marketing.
