Nothing Beats Having a Great Community!

When it comes to search and social media marketing, your community should be the center of your focus. Your community can act as brand advocates and ultimately help increase your brand awareness. Without that community, it is very difficult to devise a strong, working social media marketing campaign. Come up with a plan and create steps that will help you reach your goal. In this case, your goal is to get a community.

How do you Get a Great Community?

Building a great community takes time, dedication and patience. Manual outreach, marketing (paid and/or organic), content sharing, networking (face to face helps) and simply seeking out individuals with similar interests are just a few of the many community building actions you should implement. Building a great community isn’t something that happens overnight so if you aren’t committed to the long-haul, you are better off working with a marketing agency to alleviate some of the work.

Once you Have the Community, Engage With Them

After setting your community based social media goals and reaching them, by no means is this quitting time. You worked hard to get where you are at so after a quick pat on the back, it is time to start engaging with your community. Engage with your community on individual and group levels and be personable. Too many times, when building social media communities, the human factor is overlooked. Your audience wants to interact with humans and they will easily spot automated responses and other automatically generated communications. Be human!

Use Your Community to Promote Your Brand

Whether it’s giving away something for free or holding an interactive contest for your audience to participate in, generate some sort of buzz around your product or service. At a recent social media conference I attended in Buffalo, NY, Ramon DeLeon of Dominos Pizza shared with the audience that while he cannot make profit selling pizzas for a dollar (which he does) he will make profit with the buzz it generates socially. Word of mouth marketing is still the best form of marketing and when you treat your social audiences right, they will share their positive experiences. No matter what type of business you operate, techniques such as Ramon’s can be easily applied. Treat your customers and community so well with these freebies and contests that they feel guilty not using your brand. This is what a strong community is and why you took the time to build it.

What’s Next?

Social media marketing and everything that goes into it will never come to rest. It will take ongoing efforts, maintenance, listening and reacting to keep you moving full steam ahead. After building a strong social community and engaging with them to the point where it gets them talking to their social circles, you can more easily measure ROI and put a value on each of your followers, likes, etc. Use social media as a tool to create buzz, share great content and as a way to spark that all so mighty word of mouth marketing.

So in conclusion, don’t think of social media as a means of direct revenue. Build a strong community, engage with them, use them as brand advocates and the revenue will follow if you are doing things correctly. Start by figuring out the lifetime value of a customer, create a social media goal and then steps that are going to get you to your end goal.

I encourage you to share your thoughts and questions in the comments section below!

Post by Craig Kilgore - SEO @mainstreethost

Twitter: @ckilgs

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17 R’s of Mobile Marketing Infographic

People Still Care Too Much About Keyword Rankings

Ranking under your desired key phrases is still important and deserves attention, just not as much attention as it once was given. Sure, owning the SERPs under your key phrases is awesome, but how much business is it bringing you? This is often overlooked but has been in the spotlight much more as of late.

Having experience in both the agency end of things and as an in-house SEO with Mainstreethost has taught me quite a bit about the importance of keyword rankings. On the agency end of things, a large number of my clients cared about nothing more than ranking number one under a key phrase and rightfully so because that is what many business owners (in my opinion) perceive SEO to be. It wasn’t until I was in my in-house marketing role that I realized how important conversion rate optimization was. My company already ranked awesome under a large number of highly competitive phrases, we wanted more business (higher conversion rate). While I don’t consider myself an expert in CRO, I have picked up a LOT over the past year or so and have successfully increased my company’s conversion rate (web inquiries).

Getting Started With Conversion Rate Optimization

Are you currently tracking conversions? If you aren’t tracking conversions, check out this article here by Google which talks about conversion tracking and Google Analytics. Depending on what analytics software you use, the process may vary but you won’t be able to accurately track your conversions without some sort of conversion tracking in place.

Before doing any conversion rate optimization, what are your conversion rates at? Now that you have your conversion tracking setup and functioning properly, I recommend creating yourself a baseline report with your conversion rates prior to any CRO. You will be able to give yourself a bigger pat on the back after increasing conversions if you know where they were at prior to your CRO efforts.

Know what your goals are before doing any physical work to your website. Don’t go into a project such as conversion rate optimization blindly. Know what your company’s goals are before diving in. If you don’t know which types of actions you are trying to increase or what your company’s end goals are, you are going to make a lot more work for yourself in the long run. Develop as strategized of a plan as possible before any website modifications.

Start testing. Now that you have conversion tracking in place, have a baseline report, developed a strategized plan and know what your goals are, you are ready to begin testing. Conduct A/B testing of your website’s landing pages and its calls to action and other elements to see which variation resulted in the most conversions. There are a number of tools and companies out there that can assist with A/B split testing but is also something you can easily achieve in house if you have the right resources.

Measure the results. Which variation of your landing page or specific components drove the highest increase in form completions or purchases? Which landing page resulted in the most positive feedback? Which landing page had higher than usual bounce rates? These are just a few of the questions you should be looking for answers to after you’ve gotten your A/B testing underway.

Don’t get complacent. In the digital marketing field much like any other field, it isn’t hard to get complacent. The thing with digital marketing is that pointing out the negative results of complacency is much easier in my opinion. Be willing to continue making changes and testing new ideas to further improve on your conversion rates and overall user experience.

Summary

Conversion rate optimization should be at the forefront or as close to the forefront of your digital marketing campaign as possible. The constant changes and upgrades in technology, analytics, calls to action, etc. are making it easier to develop and track how successful your efforts are and how well your time is being spent. If you are already involved in conversion rate optimization, do you have any go-to tools or resources that help with the process?

Who’s Using Pinterest

According to a TechCrunch post and data they received from comScore, Pinterest has just hit 11.7 million unique monthly U.S., crossing the 10 million mark faster than any other standalone website in history. Furthermore, the average Pinterest user spends an average of 98 minutes per month on the website.

With all of that being said, I would like to share with you 3 Pinterest boards worth following if you are a website design professional looking for some inspiration. I am not going to get into the ins and outs of Pinterest but rather share with you some boards that I have found in my Pinterest journeys and that have inspired me in one way or another.

3 of My Favorite Pinterest Boards for Design Inspiration

1. Number one on the list is Brandon Lesley’s Graphic Design and Typography board. Brandon has racked up 389,868 followers and has posted to this board over 2,000 times. There are a number of gems within this Pinterest board.

2. Number two on the list is Junia Isabel’s Graphic Design board. This board has 815 followers and has been pinned to 157 times.

3. Third on my list is siriah’s illustration + graphic art board. This is one of my favorite boards and contains a lot of VERY unique artwork and is very inspirational in my opinion. This board has 1057 followers and 831 pins, enjoy! I highly recommend taking a look at some of her other 58 boards when you have some time.

What do you think about Pinterest and these Boards?

So there you have it, 3 go to Pinterest boards when you need a little bit of inspiration. Are you currently a member of Pinterest? If so, what are some of your favorite boards? Still waiting on an invite (I have a couple of invites)?

Follow me on Pinterest here!

Where do you turn for inspiration when it comes to website design? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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Post by Craig Kilgore - SEO @mainstreethost

Twitter: @ckilgs

Infographic by ExactTarget

In a previous blog post featured on Business 2 Community blog post, I wrote about seeing success in 2012 through the utilization of a content marketing strategy and social media. In this follow-up post, I am going to share with you some tools you can use to help with social media outreach. For the purpose of this post, social media outreach is defined as manual outreach to your audience via social media channels (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc.).

Why is it important to interact with your audience?

How many times have you reached out to a business or brand via Twitter, Facebook or Google+ only to find that your questions or comments are going unnoticed and unanswered? When this is the case, I can guarantee that you will think twice about using that company again in the future. From a simple “thank you” to a detailed response to an inquiry, showing your audience that you value their opinion(s) will go a long way and will positively influence customer retention rates. If you have ever read any of my Business 2 Community posts and have took the time to share them via Twitter, there is a good chance that you got a “thank you” Tweet back from me personally. I do this because I understand the value of engaging with your audience and more simply put, I appreciate the fact that you find my writing share-worthy.

What are some tools to help you with social media outreach?

TweetDeck – if you have read any of my previous posts or follow me elsewhere on the web, you are probably aware that I stand strongly behind TweetDeck. When it comes to social media outreach, I don’t know if there is a tool better than TweetDeck. From social listening across multiple social networks to actual outreach and interaction, TweetDeck is an “all inclusive” application in my opinion. What’s cool about TweetDeck is that it lets you monitor multiple Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Foursquare and Myspace accounts (I have a feeling Google+ will be coming soon). This eliminates time spent manually visiting each of these websites and seeking out your desired information. In addition to syncing TweetDeck with your social network accounts, you can setup custom searches. This is primarily what I use to see who is sharing my blog posts via Twitter.

As you can see with the screenshot below, I can setup a custom search column with the title of my blog post or the URL being shared:

What I will get in return is something like this (each column represents a different post):

From here, it is easy to see who is sharing my posts via Twitter which makes it easy to reach out to these individuals thanking them or to further engage with them.

SocialBro – I am a new SocialBro user and will not claim to know all the ins and outs of their application but will share with you what I have found useful thus far. Back in the beginning of January, I wrote an informal review of their Google Chrome application — you can see that here. When it comes to social media outreach, SocialBro has a couple of really useful features:

Real Time Analytics: The first is their real time analytics. The below screenshot will show me my Twitter followers and those that I follow who have Tweeted within the last 5 minutes followed by their followers who have also Tweeted within the last 5 minutes:

Something like this would come in handy right after publishing a blog post or other piece of content and am looking for influential Twitter users to share my work. By knowing who is currently active on Twitter, there is a better chance that my content is shared directly after being published.

Monitor a Hashtag: The next SocialBro tool that can help with social media outreach is their monitor a hashtag search tool. Simply enter a search query and SocialBro will find you members who have Tweeted that query. This will come in handy when you are looking to reach out to Twitter users who are Tweeting about specific topics.

Example: let’s say you are preparing to launch an infographic that shows the importance of social media outreach. You can use SocialBro’s hashtag search to find users that have recently Tweeted about social media and outreach and then interact with them personally with your content. Below is a screenshot of the hashtag search “social media”:

In the above screenshot, I am provided with Twitter users that have recently Tweeted about social media, which of those users follow me and which of those that I follow.

These are just two of SocialBro’s features that can help you with your social media outreach. If you are a SocialBro user, what are some of your favorite features?

Follwerwonk – the last tool I am going to share with you is Follwerwonk. Followerwonk allows you to search Twitter bios, compare Twitter users, analyze your followers and track your followers. In my opinion, their Twitter bio search is their most useful tool to assist you with social media outreach.

If I want to find Twitter users who show interest in social media outreach, I can do a Twitter bio search for the term “social media” or “social media outreach” and I will be presented with the following:

These are all Twitters users that I can reach out to for engagement and for content sharing purposes. Remember, you don’t want to jump right into “hey, I see you are interested in social media, share my content!” Start a genuine conversation and get the user’s attention. Explain to them how you feel your content will interest them and then share.

Conclusion

Social media outreach is an important element to any digital marketing campaign. The more involved you are in building relationships via the various social networks, the more likely these users are to share your content and promote your brand. I encourage you to experiment with the tools and applications I discussed above and to also share some tools that you use to help with your own social media outreach!

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Why do you need to join and become active on Twitter?

The simple answer to this question — it’s where your customers are and it’s where they’re talking. It’s where your past customers are and it’s where your potential customers are. What are they talking about? They are talking about positive experiences and more importantly, less than positive experiences encountered through your products, services, customer service and basically every other step along the way.

In today’s age of consumers turning to the internet and to their social circles for recommendations on businesses, products and/or services, it is more important than ever to be managing your online reputation.

Take a look at the following screenshot from a Time Warner Cable (@TWCable) search on Twitter:

While Time Warner Cable might have a much larger client base than others, it is very evident that their customers are turning to Twitter as a means of communicating / complaining about products and services being offered. I can tell you first hand that Time Warner Cable is pretty good at responding to Tweets and rectifying situations that arise on Twitter.

I am not even close to being as big as Time Warner Cable, why should I be on Twitter?

If the fact that Twitter will soon be surpassing 500 million users isn’t enough to convince you, keep in mind that their end goal, as announced in December of 2011, is to reach 7 billion users worldwide (yes, the entire world’s population).

Conclusion

If you aren’t a Twitter user (personal or business), I hope this post encouraged you to consider joining the quickly growing social network. Regarding online reputation management, Twitter is just one of the many networks that consumers turn to for information sharing and consumption. While you can’t keep your customers from sharing their experiences, you can monitor what they are saying about your business, reply to their comments and ultimately show others that you are aware of what people are saying and that you do care.

Stay tuned for my follow up post on this topic: Tools to Help Monitor and Manage Your Online Reputation on Twitter

Post by Craig Kilgore - SEO @mainstreethost

Twitter: @ckilgs

(View Original Post Here)

Take a look at the below screenshot of a search query heavily influenced by SPYW:

Content marketing is now at the forefront of any successful digital marketing campaign.

The example above shows the growing importance of creating [great] content and sharing it via Google+. In my opinion, it is only a matter of time before content marketing is at the forefront of every digital marketing campaign. Small to medium sized business will begin following in the footsteps of the larger corporations that have already deployed successful content marketing strategies.

Coca-Cola is a great example of a large corporation that has continued to successfully execute new and innovative content marketing strategies. Just take a look at one of their “Content 2020” videos and you will see what I mean. It is this type of content that is going to be the centerpiece of every digital marketing campaign in the very near future.

How can you implement a successful content marketing strategy?

When it comes to content marketing, it all starts with an idea. After that, be willing to test different variations of your idea and most importantly, brace yourself for failure. Not often will you brainstorm and execute a successful content marketing campaign on the first shot. Be willing to put time into creating great content.

In addition to testing and creating different variations of your idea(s), don’t be afraid to utilize the many forms of content. Too many times, marketers rely solely on written content and fail to utilize video content, image based content, instructional / tutorial content and presentations which are just a few of the many content delivery methods available.

This is content:

Where does social media come in to play?

The answer to this question will vary from industry to industry but one thing always remains constant – social media gives you the opportunity to share your content and engage with your audience.

For the most part, gone are the days of sitting back and letting your website do the talking. To be successful, you have to engage with your audience on a regular basis. Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are just a few of the many social networks where your audience is engaging with their social circles. They are looking for recommendations, reading reviews and making decisions based off of what their friends are saying. If you don’t know what people are saying, how can you adapt?

Example: If you are Sinatra’s Restaurant in Buffalo, NY and aren’t on Twitter (which in this case they aren’t), how can you interact and respond to the following?

i don’t care what anyone says, sinatras is the best italian restaurant in #buffalo #delicious

— Victoria Mez (@VICKY_VIKTORYA) January 16, 2012

As the owner or employee of this restaurant, this is a perfect opportunity to reach out to this individual and thank them for their praise while further encourage them to speak their mind via Google Places reviews, Yelp reviews, Urban Spoon reviews, etc. While this is just a simple example, there are much larger opportunities that will be missed if you aren’t engaging with your audience where they are talking.

In addition to the engagement possibilities, social media serves as a source for sharing and promoting your content.

Summary

Combining creative content with strategized social media efforts will lead you towards success in 2012 and beyond. Be willing to adapt to these digital marketing changes while still devoting time to the basics and you will find yourself dominating more and more real estate on the web.

Stay tuned for my follow up post on this topic: “Tools to Help Businesses with Social Media Outreach”

Post by Craig Kilgore - SEO @mainstreethost

Twitter: @ckilgs

(Original Post Here)