In Laurie Beasley’s previous post about content marketing, she mentioned that that sharing original content is important. The whole purpose of content marketing is predicated on having original content, because it is intended to demonstrate expertise, insight and knowledge in your particular field to customers and potential customers. “Curating” other people’s content does not accomplish this objective. Publishing someone else’s content occasionally is fine as long as it underscores your own messaging, but the bulk of your content should be original and unique.
Why Does My Content Have To Be Original?
“Author authority” is a concept Google developed to assign value to sites and social media streams that feature original content, content that is developed by you and is unique to your site, blog, etc. Author authority is more valued by Google and other search engines than content that you share from another source. So you get SEO brownie points for original content.
The more SEO brownie points you have (not a Google term; blame it on Beasley Direct Marketing), the greater your visibility on the Internet. Visibility combined with demonstration of your expertise leads to several very good things:
- Increased traffic to your site from sites on which your content is posted
- Increased reputation on the Web for your person-to-person communications (sales team, marcom team, etc.)
- Increased visibility within search engines, resulting in higher ranking and more search traffic
- Increased visibility and authority within social media
- Increased trust
- Increased revenue
Above all, your content must be targeted to your audience, relevant to their needs, and accessible. Here are 7 key elements of great content.
1. Provide quality, helpful information with unique insights
Can you tell your audience something that no one else is telling them? Good content is quality information with unique insights—which is not quite as easy as it sounds. It means you need to know what other people in the field are saying, and avoid merely repeating it. It means you need to know what your customers are thinking and feeling; what problems are they trying to solve? What issues have they faced trying to solve those problems—can you tell them how to avoid these issues? In particular, do you know what difficulties or issues people face when dealing with your competitors? Can you show them that you are different? Can you “make it stop hurting”? RELATED CLASS: Developing Content for Each Stage in the Buying Process
2. Keep it timely
Timeliness is also important. Are there changes in your industry that customers need to know about? Keep abreast of industry news and news in general. Is there something going on in the world that directly affects your business and its customers? For example, let’s say you sell automotive parts used by long-haul trucking firms. A strike by Malaysian port workers will adversely affect deliveries of palm oil, which is used to make biodiesel. A shortage of palm oil will lead to decreased production of biodiesel, followed by an increase in the price of conventional diesel fuel. You are not affected by the palm oil shortage, but your customers certainly will be, and they will be grateful to you for calling their attention to the issue. If you happen to sell a fuel system that increases miles per gallon, so much the better!
3. Use language that resonates
Use language with which your intended audience will resonate. If you are selling cosmetics, language such as “fresh and flirty!” works. This would not be as well received by an audience seeking financial advisory services. Know when to use informal language and when to stick to more sedate prose.
4. Write smart, catchy headlines
The importance of good headlines cannot be over-emphasized. Headlines must serve two purposes: SEO and getting your audience to read the content. For SEO purposes, you must have at least one keyword in the title, and more is better. More is better, that is, unless it forces you to write a boring headline. If the headline is uninteresting, your audience will go on to the next thing, assuming that the content will be as stultifying as the headline. Let’s say you have written a blog piece on the cost of biodiesel in the U.S. You might have written a headline such as “An Analysis of the Cost of Biodiesel in the United States.” This has the right keywords, but it also could be used to aid someone coping with insomnia. How about “10 Reasons Biodiesel Costs Too Much”? It still has good keywords for SEO purposes, but sounds like a more interesting read.
5. Keep content short and sweet
For the purpose of content marketing, content should be short and sweet. Some experts advocate 300 words or fewer. Some topics (this one, for example) require more than 300 words, but it’s a rule of thumb. RELATED CLASS: How to Leverage Business Blogging for More Traffic, Leads, and Sales
6. Make it easy to share
Content must be easy to share. Make sure you have social media buttons on all your social media feeds that allow people to instantly post the location of your content to their own followers. If you are promoting a longer piece such as a white paper, use short-form urls to make it easy for people to click and share. Short-form urls can be generated at no cost at https://bitly.com/. Hootsuite users can use Hootsuite’s built-in url shrinker when posting.
7. Link all content to the author’s name
Ensure that every piece you publish is identified with the author or the organization to establish author authority. Have the author’s name and bio with links to the website and other social media streams. Anything and everything that points back to the author/authority will add to your luster as an expert and authority in your field.
The top 100 retailers on Facebook measured by the number of fans each have an average 1.2 million “likes,” according to ExactTarget findings. Clearly Facebook alone generates massive volumes of data. Add to that billions more data points created as people tweet, “like,” chat and otherwise connect with brands and with each other on social platforms, and you find yourself drowning in the rapidly rising tide of social activity. So how does all that activity actually translate into business impact? Sure, you want your investments in social platforms and campaigns to convert likes into leads and conversations into customers. But the titanic volume of data generated in the social arena doesn’t give up insights that easily.
One thing is clear − more data is not the answer.
Top-line metrics like total number of Facebook “likes” in isolation give you a one-dimensional, current-state view of your social platforms. But that information provides no insight into what you can do as a marketing team to improve effectiveness. The top 100 retailers tracked in the ExactTarget study noted above had more than a million “likes” on average, but the engagement rate was only two percent. That suggests businesses don’t know how to interact and motivate fans on the social network.
What you need to do is make sense of all this data. You need to evaluate your marketing effectiveness holistically to assess social media impact on paid- and earned-media results. You need to determine if any of this social activity is actually translating into desired conversions on your website, or whether it is impacting paid-campaign performance.
“How do I do all that,” you say? By conducting some much-needed analytics across all the disparate channels of consumer engagement. By applying analytics, you can answer key questions such as:
- What does it take to motivate someone who just “liked” your Facebook page to visit your website and make a purchase?
- Do your Twitter campaigns generate any viral impact to change the cost per acquisition (CPA) of your SEM campaigns?
- Do you observe different conversion patterns for consumers who initiate engagement with your brand due to social efforts versus paid campaigns or branded search?
- And, perhaps most fundamentally, what’s the true return on investment (ROI) of your social marketing?
Three Steps To Moving “Likes” to Leads and Data to Dollars in Real Time
Let’s sum up the steps required to better understand the business impact of social media and how to improve its role in target audience reach, engagement and conversion – the metrics that make up our traditional marketing funnel. Think of this as a blueprint for transforming social-media investments into true business value:
1. Unify data for all social channels in one view.
You need to view performance of each social channel in a unified interface, a single go-to destination to assess impact of these investments in your marketing program. Start by collecting and bringing together the data generated by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest and any other social-media channels. Your goal should be crystal-clear visibility in real time into what people are saying about your business, brand and the competition, and how they are responding to your marketing campaigns and promotions in these channels.
2. Compare performance of your social platforms in terms of reach and engagement.
Social analytics enables you to compare reach and engagement metrics across multiple social media changes. For example, compare the number of Twitter followers with Facebook fans in various geographic locations. Likewise, analytics will reveal engagement patterns such as volume and demographics by social channel, including Facebook “likes,” YouTube views and Twitter followers. You gain a window into what is trending on social reach and engagement by channel. Plus you can drill down into metrics by demographic or sociographic segments. Move beyond likes, retweets, shares, favorites and comments to analyze engagement patterns and who goes on to buy your products or services.
3. Analyze earned media’s impact on owned media.
To assess true business value, however, you need to go the extra mile. It’s essential to identify what your social media efforts contribute to owned- and paid-marketing channels. Do you know, for example, the quality of traffic driven by social media to your website? How do visitors from different social media channels interact with your website in response to varied campaigns and promotions? How do their engagement patterns compare to those visitors who come from banner ads or organic search? Do specific social campaigns impact the CPA of specific paid campaigns? Are there any geographical differences in target audience behavior? How do changes in social sentiment about your brand affect reach and engagement on your website and who becomes a buyer? Likewise, how do changes in social sentiment for your competitors affect these same website metrics?
Social analytics gives you the ability to conduct drill-down assessments of social media impact on website performance and paid-media campaigns, as the four reports shown here reveal. For example, one compares social conversion rates – customers buying as a result of visits to social sites – with average conversions, while another shows website conversions as a result of visitors coming from social channels. This is highly relevant to the marketing team – and these metrics are actionable.
So back to the question we started with at the beginning. How can B2C companies find out whether social media investments are truly paying off? We all know that question has defied easy analysis. But now the data speaks.
Now the Data Speaks
Social analytics give marketers and social-media teams a way to finally identify the value of social media efforts in the broader marketing mix and what they contribute to the top and bottom line. You can even monitor what works and doesn’t by applying analytics to real time data, giving you the ability to optimize campaigns and promotions much earlier in marketing cycles to achieve even greater ROI benefits. Given such capabilities, how could we ever settle for less?
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According to independent research by Compete, there is no faster, more efficient way to improve your return on digital advertising spend than by improving your landing pages. In fact, it is possible that your competitors could be generating five times the ROI as you are with comparable messaging and spending. The only difference? The post-click experience.
Okay, so I sold you, right? Landing page optimization is important. Once you have the right tactics and strategy down (take our Conversion Optimization Crash Course with Brian Massey for that), consider adding these great tools for landing page optimization to your marketing arsenal. Are there any other ones you would include? Leave a comment below.
1. CrazyEgg
Landing Page Analytics
We use CrazyEgg here at OMI, and I love geeking out over the eye tracking reports. I can easily see which parts of our website visitors are engaging with, and which parts just fall flat. We’ve used this data to improve our navigation, layout, copy, and more. Sure, a lot of this data is also in Google Analytics, but the visual format really changes the way we look at and interpret the data. Instead of simply presenting numbers or graphs, the eye tracking reports clearly tie metrics back to content and design, so you can better see and understand what is happening on your website, and hopefully figure out why. Because remember—it’s not the size of the data, it’s how you use (and interpret) it.
2. PPC Advisor: Landing Pages and Leads by Wordstream
Landing Page Creation
The brilliant team over at Wordstream just released their new tool for landing page creation. It’s a smart move, as your landing pages can make or break your PPC results. While I haven’t had a chance to test drive it yet, I have used Wordstream’s keyword tools before, and they’re very intuitive and smart. As far as I can tell, it’s the only platform that enables you to manage your PPC efforts and create landing pages, all in one complete solution. Definitely add this tool to your list to check out.
3. the ion landing page platform
Landing Page Creation, Analytics, Testing
I was lucky enough to be an ion customer when I was Online Marketing Manager in a previous role. We used the ion platform (also known as LiveBall, for those in the know) to create and test landing pages across different business units and teams, including paid membership, sponsorships (lead generation), and in-person events. The platform enabled us to quickly create effective AND beautiful landing pages in just minutes, with some converting at over 50%, depending on the stream of traffic (read the case study here). Since analytics, creation, and testing are all part of the interface, you can quickly launch campaigns in the morning and monitor your results throughout the day. Now, if you’re like me and always strive to knock each campaign out of the park, definitely check out the ion platform. It makes achieving big wins a daily occurrence. And really, there’s no better feeling as a marketer than achieving something great… every single day.
4. Unbounce
Landing Page Creation and Testing
So if you like to achieve big wins but your budget is small, Unbounce might be the perfect solution for you. It comes ready-baked with dozens of pre-designed landing page templates. (And yes, I inquired—you can create your own templates, too.) Plus, it integrates with popular tools like HubSpot and MailChimp, so you can create a page, launch a test, and push all the new leads you captured right into your email marketing solution.
5. Google Analytics and Content Experiments
Landing Page Analytics and Testing
I love Google Analytics. I can easily spend hours creating custom reports and segments, slicing and dicing data, until I know exactly how many days it took transaction 5234 to finally convert after she typed in “email marketing best practices” into Google from her iPhone in Washington state, landed on a course topics page, navigated to a class page on “Email Marketing Copy”, followed us on Twitter, clicked a link from our Twitter account, and came back to our website (again).
Okay, so that’s getting a bit into the minutia. But if you haven’t already set up conversion tracking and goals for your landing pages, get on that, ASAP. We all know that you can’t improve what you don’t measure, and even if you have a specialized tool for landing page analytics, you should still set up conversion tracking in Google Analytics to get a holistic view of your marketing performance.
As far as their testing solution, I like how Google integrated Website Optimizer (now Content Experiments) into Google Analytics, but it still requires development resources to launch tests, and you have to create separate URLs for the pages you want to test against each other. Given the time and resources required to launch a landing page test with Content Experiments, I’d recommend one of the paid testing solutions, instead.
6. Visual Website Optimizer
Landing Page Testing
Unlike Google Content Experiments, Visual Website Optimizer enables you to launch A/B tests on your landing pages and website without any coding or development resources (awesome!). It starts at about $49 a month, so if you save even 10 minutes a month on your landing page testing (vs. using Google Content Experiments), the solution pays for itself—and that’s not even taking into account conversion lift!
7. Optimizely
Landing Page Testing
Optimizely was co-founded by Dan Siroker, who was Director of Analytics for the 2008 Obama campaign. Testing was a big part of the Obama Campaign’s digital strategy—they continuously tested emails, landing pages, etc. to find out which ones drove the highest donations and open rates. Remember all those emails from Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama with the subject line, “hey.”? We have Dan to thank.
Anyways, I haven’t used the tool myself, but it’s similar to Visual Website Optimizer, with plans starting at $17 a month. Both Visual Website Optimizer and Optimizely have free trials, so I’ll let you decide which testing platform makes the most sense for you.
- See more at: http://www.onlinemarketinginstitute.org/blog/2013/09/7-awesome-landing-page-optimization-tools/#sthash.YS2NbkER.dpuf
Are your email response rates dropping? Are your open rates getting worrisome? If you’re feeling discouraged, don’t be. The good news is there are steps you can take to improve your open rates. Here are ten tips to try:
1. Set the Right Expectations
Nothing will harm your email marketing open rates faster than failing to deliver what you promised. If you tell your blog readers that your email newsletter will provide behind-the-scenes info, then behind-the-scenes info better be what you give. This is what they’ll be expecting, and this is why they agreed to subscribe in the first place. Use your site’s Subscribe page to clearly explain what your newsletters offer. This way, the people who sign up will be interested in what you provide, and thus they’ll be more likely to click through to the emails that come.
example of a subscriber preference center
2. Make Your Subject Line Short
Ideally, your email subject line should be short—easy enough to be read at a glance. Different email providers will display different lengths of text, so longer subject lines have a higher chance of being cut off. To ensure the greatest number of readers see your subject, aim to keep it under 50 characters or so.
3. Make Your Subject Line Intriguing
Assuming you have an engaged audience that is interested in what you have to say, the next best step to achieving better response rates is good subject lines. The subject line is what appears in a recipient’s inbox, inviting him or her to click. It gets a few seconds of attention before being opened or deleted. So that’s why the best subject lines offer something of value, for minimum risk. They give the recipient a sense that clicking through to the actual email newsletter will deliver something worthwhile. What are some examples of intriguing newsletter titles? To put it simply, readers like subject lines that identify your brand, hint at the content inside, and have something to offer them. For readers who want to stay updated with your company, for example, consider the following examples, written for the (fictional) company Good Deals:
- October Update on Good Deals
- Good Deals October 2013 Newsletter
- Good Deals Newsletter #15: October 2013 Edition
- Good Deals Invites You to Our Grand Opening!
- Upcoming Events at Good Deals
- Good Deals Fall Updates
- 20% Off Good Deals Merchandise Now
In every example, the subject line tells the reader what the email is about, identifies the content as from Good Deals, and gives a reason to click.
4. Don’t Be Overly Promotional
According to Ginny Soskey at Hubspot, it’s a good idea to balance your newsletter content to be 90% educational and 10% promotional. This means that, sure, you want to tell your audience about your new product or feature, but don’t let that be all you do. Your newsletter should be more than a sales brochure—it should be an interesting resource. Ask yourself what you can give your readers beyond a catalog, and work that into your content. RELATED CLASS: How to Writer Killer Email Copy
5. Send It at the Best Time
You know what they say: “Timing is everything.” The timing of when you send your newsletter may affect how readers respond to it. Test different schedules to see how your audience responds—while this may differ for various industries, according to the Whole Whale blog, there is evidence that “weekdays outperform weekends, with Tuesday-Thursdays performing the best.”
6. Be Honest about Email Content
Just like your Subscribe page should accurately describe your email content, so should your newsletter subject line. If a reader clicks the “Big Company News October 2013” email only to find a story from last month, he or she might not click through the next month’s letter. Or worse, he or she might unsubscribe.
7. Avoid Spam Signals Like ALL CAPS and Exclamation Marks!!!
Everybody’s got spam radar these days. Who hasn’t received an email from an overseas prince asking for money? Because of this, readers are more cynical—and this means they’re looking at your email newsletter with caution, at least the first time they see it. To help build credibility and keep yourself from looking like a spammer, avoid spam giveaways like writing in all capital letters or using multiple exclamation marks.
8. Avoid Salesy Language
Words like “exciting,” “leading,” and “ultimate” tend to sound salesy. Readers see them and think advertising. So to keep from getting deleted, make your subject lines benefit-driven rather than sales-focused.
9. Consider a Negative Subject Line
“People will always work harder to keep something they have rather than try to gain something that they want,” says Sean Platt at Copyblogger. That’s why negative headlines can be so powerful—they alert your readers to potential problems they could protect themselves against. Here are a few examples:
- Five Reasons You Won’t Want to Miss This Weekend Sale
- Good Deals Update: Are You Making These Shopping Mistakes?
- 4 Things You Might Be Missing on Our New Blog
10. Optimize for Mobile Devices
A large percentage of your readers will receive your email newsletter while they’re on their mobile devices. Consider how your email newsletter will appear on a mobile device. Before sending it out to your entire list, send a test version to your own email. Check for display problems, broken links, and so on.
- See more at: http://www.onlinemarketinginstitute.org/blog/2013/10/10-tips-increasing-email-open-rate/#sthash.tdtiNce3.dpuf
One of the most critical components of an effective demand generation strategy is lead nurturing, and most of the buzz surrounding lead nurturing today focuses on the marketing automation tools (Marketo, Eloqua, Genoo etc.) that help us make it happen.
However, you can’t automate strategy or smart tactics, and tools can only take you so far. In her new Demand Generation Certification Program, B2B marketing expert Kim Albee dives deep into the “how” of lead nurturing, including how to implement a nurturing sequence with small, digestible steps that easily pass leads on to the next step in the process.
If you still need more convincing on the “why”, here are 10 compelling lead nurturing statistics that will help you prioritize it within your organization—ASAP.
Why You Need a Lead Nurturing Strategy
1. On average, organizations that nurture their leads experience a 45% lift in lead generation ROI over those organizations that do not. (Source: MarketingSherpa)
2. 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. Lack of lead nurturing is the common cause of this poor performance. (Source: MarketingSherpa)
3. Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads. (Source: DemandGen Report)
4. Companies with mature lead generation and management practices have a 9.3% higher sales quota achievement rate. (Source: CSO Insights)
5. Lead nurturing emails get 4-10x the response rate compared to standalone email blasts. (Source: SilverPop/DemandGen Report)
6. Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads. (Source: The Annuitas Group)
7. Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% lower cost. (Source: Forrester Research)
8. 61% of B2B marketers send all leads directly to sales; however, only 27% of those leads will be qualified. (Source: MarketingSherpa)
Why Marketing Automation Should Be Part of Your Lead Nurturing Strategy
9. Businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads. (Source: The Annuitas Group)
10. About 56 percent of marketing automation users rated their demand generation performance as in line, above or far above expectations. This compares with just 41 percent of non-marketing automation users. (Source: Software Advice 2012 B2B Demand Generation Benchmark Survey)
- See more at: http://www.onlinemarketinginstitute.org/blog/2013/10/amazing-lead-nurturing-statistics/#sthash.pmXhhj14.dpuf
Landing pages. Maybe you’ve designed one…or maybe you’ve designed hundreds. And whether you are a newbie or well-versed in mobile, you know that over the years user needs have changed dramatically. Gone are the days when mobile devices were the exception within digital marketing campaigns. Now they’re the norm — their usage impacts results and marketers need to satisfy those users.The spectrum of screen sizes and resolutions is broadening every day.
Did you know that 71% of media-using population is multi-screen? Seems pretty “normal” as I write this post in front of my laptop, 27-inch Thunderbolt display and (of course) my cell phone within arm’s reach. Advertising and marketing success is dependent on delivering usable and satisfying experiences on all devices—smartphones, tablets and computers.
The need for responsive landing pages is becoming more and more obvious as we are bombarded with mobile growth stats:
“Smartphone sales reached 1 billion in 2012…”
“…expected to double by 2015!”
“Tablet ownership up 282% from Q1 2011 to Q1 2013!”
“Phablets now selling more than tablets, research says!”
Mashable declared 2013 “The Year of Responsive Web Design.”
And then there’s Google Enhanced Campaigns, which was mandated across all AdWords campaigns back in July. If you weren’t ready for mobile, well, it didn’t matter, because it happened.
So what does it all mean? Now is the time for all marketers and advertisers to accept that succeeding in digital means making your campaigns responsive. Not tomorrow. Today. RELATED CLASS: The Mobile Web & Responsive Design
The good news?
The promise of responsive design is that one page can satisfy everyone, on every device—large and small. Responsive templates can decrease the time it takes to build and publish your landing pages. There are platforms that allow marketers to create app-like responsive experiences that look and behave like they were custom-crafted by a team of expert designers and developers. (Shameless plug: ion’s own platform has responsive templates.)
Below are 10 of my favorite best practices for responsive landing page design. Use these to ensure you are building landing pages that not only respond, but convert!
1. Design in your landscape smartphone viewport
Start small & wide. Landscape smartphone viewport can have the widest possible image use cases. Start designing and previewing in this viewport.
2. Spin often
Continuously check your smartphone landscape viewport against your portrait viewport. Portrait is the most narrow and will require the most thoughtful & concise headline lengths.
3. Scroll frequently
Preview, preview, preview. Scrolling all the way down to the bottom of your pages will help you maintain the integrity of the entire page, across all viewports.
4. Create finger-friendly forms
Focus on how your forms scale, fit, scroll, their field types, how buttons behave & how hints and errors are surfaced.
5. Leverage interactive content
Mimic the mobile app. More content in less space with more elegance. Minimize long-page scrolling with tabbed content accordions and other app-like interactive elements.
6. Use highly communicative images
As your images change positions or size, notice how they are perceived at various viewports.
7. Make smart navigation choices
Decide how many navigation tabs responsive design can support. This depends, based on length of words.
8. Respond well to touch
Avoid on-states that create two-touch requirements for actuation.
9. Require everyone be responsive
Ensure video and other third-party media is responsive as well.
10. Design “mobile first”
Lastly, to expand upon designing in the mobile viewports, I recommend designing ”mobile first.” Mobile-first design is an approach that lends itself to a responsive world. It simply means that you create first and foremost for mobile — making the desktop your secondary focus. Mobile first forces the tough decisions — more concise content, more communicative imagery, and more thoughtful choices around conversion. When you make those tough choices for the small screen, the bigger screen benefits.
Right content, in the right place, for every user.
Done right, responsive pages put the right content in the right place on the page for every user. It significantly increases the probability that your campaign will convert visitors into leads, calls & sales. If that isn’t reason enough to embrace responsive — staggering growth statistics and Google’s Enhanced Campaigns certainly should be!
- See more at: http://www.onlinemarketinginstitute.org/blog/2013/10/responsive-landing-page-design/#sthash.ftP8Z9yh.dpuf
Digi Marketing specializes in providing comprehensive Internet Research Services, business and internet presence analytics and reporting consulting services to businesses to work towards achieving the corporate business development team’s desired reports. Our comprehensive Analytics services experts will work with your team strategically to define goals, understand site visitors’ behaviour, and improve usability of the site and over all generating and presenting reports as per business needs using technology tools Google Analytics and Google Urchin combining our expertise of business analysts and business managers to achieve custom reports for your stake holders.
