Why Your Social Media Marketing Isn't Working

When it comes to Social Media, many companies know enough to realize that nearly everyone is connected to at least one social network. And if they’ve done their homework, they’ll realize that a great deal of benefits can come from interacting and advertising in the Social space. Thinking they’re already behind the rest of the pack, they hurriedly create social media accounts and, after a fury of liking, friending, re-tweeting, pinning, and posting, not much happens. How is this possible? Isn’t Social Media one of the easiest ways to create visibility and improve customer service? It is, but only if it’s done right from the start.

Problem 1: Timing is Everything

If you gathered anything from the example above, it’s probably that that particular company rushed into marketing with Social Media without any sort of preparation or plan in place. As with anything related to a business, performing research, weighing the options, and planning accordingly are vital to success. Once your business decides that entering the Social Networking realm is viable, have a detailed plan of action. Define goals and objectives, determine which social networks would be most effective for your industry and audience, and implement with a Social Media Management tool (if applicable).

How does this help me?

Not only having a plan, but sticking to it, keeps your company’s Social Media activity consistent, fresh, and (for the most part) automated, saving you time and resources. Also, clearly outlined goals give you a better idea of what future direction your campaign should take to reach its desired outcome.

Problem 2: Finding the Time

Usually a direct result of the first problem above is failing to allocate the appropriate amount of time, resources, & personnel to a new Social Media Marketing plan. Many newcomers to the digital marketing frontier often misinterpret the amount of work that goes into a smoothly running, revenue-generating digital marketing machine. A Social Media strategy cannot be implemented, maintained, and managed by a small handful of people, especially for larger companies. During the initial planning stages, it is essential to take the amount of time and work into consideration and allocate the necessary resources to the project.

How does this help me?

Having the foresight to designate specific tasks to the right individuals eliminates the risk of unexpected budget concerns and scheduling problems that can arise with workers’ other projects.

Problem 3: Where's the Data?

When all is said and done, a marketing campaign of any kind is nothing without analytical proof of its effectiveness at achieving its goal (See Image Below). Without the necessary data to track a campaign’s impact on revenue, leads, or sales, all of the effort put into it will be wasted. Thus, adding social media into a standalone analytics tool (such as Google Analytics) or one that is integrated into a prior solution (such as Hootsuite Analytics) is the best way to make the best decisions regarding your Social campaign.

How does this help me?

Having analytics data at your fingertips allows your business’s Social Media Marketing plan to remain flexible, offers the advanced ability to evaluate whether your goals and objectives are being achieved, and acts as proof of what’s working, what isn’t, and which campaign areas need improvement.

Is your Social Media Marketing campaign guilty in any of the areas above? Is there something you’ve experienced that you’d like to add? Let us know in the comments section!

Picture This—An Infographic’s Role in Content Marketing

What are Infographics?

In short, an infographic is any visual representation of information. These large, creative images (see below for an example) can be found in a variety of places around the web, like on blogs, through some social networks like Pinterest, and on bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon. For the purposes of Internet Marketing, an infographic is normally used to present a large amount or complicated data in an appealing and engaging way. And that’s the key to your business getting the most out of this kind of content—engagement with your target audience. The assumption always seems to be that web users are impatient—they won’t bother with a site if it doesn’t load after a few seconds, and they won’t take the time to read every word on a text-rich web page. To market in this environment, where users want information in (faster than) an instant, visual content like infographics just might be a way to slow people down and get your message across effectively.

How can I use Infographics for Marketing?

Just like any other visual-based piece of content, the marketing value of infographics lies in their portability, opportunities for sharing via social networks, and linking back to your business’s web site.

Portability: Once designed and completed, an infographic can be easily uploaded to an aggregator, repurposed in a presentation, highlighted in an email promotion, or discussed in an article, blog post, press release, or social media post.

Sharing: Your business’s online presence, reach, and credibility can all receive a substantial boost when users share your visual content. Because of their relatively small size and wide range of applications, infographics make for an inexpensive chance for your business’s content to “go viral.”

Backlinking: Just because any text content within an infographic can’t be crawled or indexed by a search engine doesn’t mean that these images don’t have distinct SEO advantages. Anyone that shares and/or publishes an infographic somewhere else typically links back to your business’s website; this link bait results in greater traffic and a higher search ranking.

Conclusion

It’s easy to see the benefits that can come not only from infographics, but from the integration of any visual content into your business’s digital marketing plan. The key is that the content has to be well designed. The best images are appealing and easy to understand, as well as informative and engaging. They can show your business’s expertise on a particular subject as well as increase your reach and web traffic. Finally, infographics are easily repurposed, shared by users, and serve as effective link bait for SEO purposes. For a business owner, it seems a picture can be worth much more than a thousand words.

Good Ol’ YouTube

With Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest hogging the social media limelight, it’s easy to forget about Youtube as a valuable tool to promote your business. YouTube allows viewers to get acquainted with your business, employees, products, and services. This tool provides viewers with an authentic experience as they can gain a broader understanding of your business.

All businesses should take advantage of the benefits YouTube provides. Videos are free to post and will create greater visibility for your business on YouTube and the general Internet. YouTube may also assist in SEO and link building for your website, when videos are correctly tagged and linked to your business’s website. All it takes to make and post a YouTube video is a decent camera and time.

YouTube can be used in a variety of ways to inform, educate, and entertain your target audience. Companies selling complicated products may choose to provide tutorials on how to use their products. Companies may also gain publicity by showcasing their usually boring product in an interesting way. For example, one company, Blendtec, has achieved a lot of attention by producing entertaining videos about their blenders. In their videos Blentec’s CEO portrays a quirky host who blends anything from fruit to iPhones, thereby showcasing the blender’s strength and durability. Here is a link to one of their videos: http://www.willitblend.com/videos/view/129.

Incorporating Youtube videos in your company’s social media plan is a great way to interact with the public. Utilizing video enables a company to engage the viewer’s senses in at least two ways: visually and audibly. So don’t forget about YouTube when devising a social media plan for your company.

Social Media Tips for Real Estate Agents

DaBrian Marketing Group's CEO Daniel Laws recently gave a presentation on Social Media for the Real Estate industry and provided tips on how Real Estate Agents can more effectively connect with potential home buyers. Here's the full 30 minute presentation:

Be sure to Follow DaBrian Marketing Group on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook to get the latest news & tips on Social Media Marketing!

Why Social Media is a Must for Businesses

Social Media is one of the best ways for businesses to connect and communicate with their target markets. The benefits of Social Media include:

Maximize exposure for minimal cost

When compared to other forms of marketing, participation in Social Media offers a great opportunity to expose your company to the public at a much lower cost than other forms of marketing.

Monitor your brand and image

It is important to be aware of what is being said online about your company. Companies may take immediate action to capitalize on positive feedback and build on the momentum. Likewise, any concerns that are raised can be handled quickly before a problem escalates.

Generate leads

Social Media offers an inexpensive way to attract new customers and promote interest in your company. A network of “friends” can help generate leads by spreading the word about a company’s products or services.

Increase traffic to website

It is easy to direct Social Media users to a company’s website where they can learn more about the business and become engaged in the website.

Engage with customers

The casual environment of Social Media promotes conversation between customers with mutual interests. Also, discussions between representatives and current or prospective customers may easily take place.

Social Media: Monitoring, Marketing, Measuring, Testing, for Optimum Result.

A while back I posted a blog with a helpful list for those who were wondering how to find out if their social media was actually helping them or not. Well, I decided to add to the list and here are a few more items to keep an eye on.

1. Brand mentions in online media. So, you have a highly active social network and members are talking about your company, the company’s brands, your service/product names and maybe even your company url. Measure and track both positive, negative, and neutral mentions, and their quantities for all of them. This is also something that can be done even if you do not have an active social network. Because you are not active does not mean they will not talk about you through online mainstream media, forums, blogs, comments, posts, update, tweets, and reviews. Just remember “Stick and stones may break your bones, but, online, words can last forever.” If you don’t find the negative mentions and rectify them, others will stumble upon and judge for themselves.
2. Measure & Monitor Competitors. Know what your competitors are doing from a social media marketing standpoint, measure and Monitor their mentions, and know their share of voice compared to yours
3. Virality. Social members might be sharing Twitter tweets and Facebook updates relevant to your company, but is this info being reshared by their networks? How soon afterwards are they resharing? How many FoaFs (Friends of a Friend) are re-sharing your links and content?
4. Blog interaction. This is actually more than one metric lumped together. Blogs are part of a SMM (Social Media Marketing) toolkit, but only if you allow comments and interaction with readers by responding. If you’re doing this, encourage responses either directly in the comments section of blog posts, or via Twitter. (Use a blog widget that allows this.) If your blog’s content is suitable for social voting (Digg, Propeller, Mixx, etc.) or social bookmarking (Delicious, Stumbleupon) sites, install a blog plugin that displays the necessary sharing “buttons”, then track referrals back from those sites

As I said before, if you’re doing social media on your own or if an agency is doing it for you make sure that while they’re Marketing, they are Measuring and Testing for optimum Results.

From SEM to Results

It seems like businesses are trying to justify SEO, whether it’s the tactics itself or the assumptions that Social Media has made SEO irrelevant. In order to effectively justify SEO for the business, you need to understand their purpose for hiring an SEO agency or an SEO consultant. In most cases, you want more relevant traffic that should generate leads or sales. There’s a process as to how agencies go about implementing a campaign. In addition to improved site traffic, a good consultant or agency should be able to provide you with the following items:
1. SEO Audit – this should identify strength, weakness, opportunities, and threat for competitor in relation to your business goals and objectives.
2. Competitive Data – this information should be used to identify or create a competitive advantage.
3. Web Design issues – they should be able to identify indexing, crawling, load time issues, etc.
4. Improvement!

Social Media: Measuring Gets Result.

We are at the point where almost everyone is doing something social. The question is, are their social media marketing efforts effective. So for those who are wondering how to find out if your social media is actually helping you here are a few items to keep an eye on.

1. Social media leads. Track web traffic breakdowns from all social media sources, and chart the top few sources over time. If members of your social media networks are sending referrals, consider measuring this data as well.
2. Membership increase and active network size. This is the portion of your company’s social networks (e.g., Twitter, Facebook) that actively engages with your social media content (e.g., Twitter, Facebook Pages, etc.). Are your collective members, followers, fans network growing, and is there interaction with your content?
3. Activity ratio. How active is your company’s collective social network? Compare the ratio of active members versus total members, and chart this over time. There’ll always be some social network members who are inactive, but if you initiate a campaign to increase interaction, you should also measure the resulting data. Activity can be measured in a variety of ways, including usage of social applications.
4. Conversions. You want social network members to convert: into subscriptions, sales (direct or through affiliates), Facebook application use, or whatever other offerings you have in your overall sales funnel and that can somehow be directly or indirectly monetized. (E.g., subscription to a weekly e-newsletter can be monetized by giving other companies access to your list in the form of advertising.) Measure all types of conversions and chart them over time

So if you’re doing social media on your own or if an agency is doing it for you make sure that while they’re Marketing, they are Measuring and Testing for optimum Results.

5 Social Media Tips for Small & Medium-Sized Businesses (SMB)

When stepping into the realm of social media as a small business you should have a plan. I suggest that you take your time and generate clear goals and objectives for your social media marketing strategy before you do anything. Once you have done this; check out our social media optimization and marketing tips for SMB’s.

1. Take Advantage of the Big 3: Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin.
2. Blog: Create and Participate
3. Make Sharing and Bookmarking Easy
4. Mobile Social Networks and Local Networks
5. Track and Monitor

Social Media is a great marketing tool for small and medium businesses to use and I hope our tips will help you when implementing social media to your business.

Social Media Marketing is Not Free!

I have heard many businesses say that “social media marketing is free”, but that’s not true! There is this little elephant in the room called “opportunity cost”. Opportunity cost is the cost of an alternative that must be forgone in order to pursue a certain action. In other words, these are the benefits you could have received by taking an alternative action.

This concept is not exclusively applied to social media marketing. It also applies to businesses that allocate resources to Pay Per Click advertising, Search Engine Optimization, or even Web Analytical reporting.

Are You Using Social Media to Increase Your Business Exposure?

Social media marketing is being used to increase awareness for organizations within their target market. According to eMarketer.com, businesses have been accomplishing their goals regarding social media marketing tactics. For the most part, social media is a useful tool for increasing awareness, attracting new customers, and engaging with current customers.

The most important part is whether or not the tactics are aligned with the business goals and objectives. Businesses have achieved their objectives, but are you seeing the value in generating leads, sales, and revenue for the business? What is the ROI for your social media marketing campaign? Doing the social networking and getting a customer to become a fan of your business on Facebook is great, but are you seeing the benefits in your wallet?

Tracking Social Media with Google Analytics

Earlier this month, we had a presentation on tracking and social media marketing for the Greater Reading Chamber of Commerce Rev Up Your Marketing 2010. At the event, we discussed a method for tracking Bit.ly links within communications. One of the attendees asked if it would work for TinyURL; theoretically, we did not see any reason why it would not work. So, we tested this theory and wanted to provide our readers with the information to track with TinyURL.

Step 1: Identify the page you want to send traffic to (www.dabrianmarketing.com).
Step 2: Go to Google URL Builder



Step 3: Add the Source, Medium, and Campaign Name.
Step 4: Document URL for Future Reference.
Step 5: Place the Generated URL into Make TinyURL Tool.


Step 6: Test the URL prior to distribution.
Step 7: Verify in Google Analytics




Step 8: Start Implementing into Tweets, Linkedin, and Facebook initiatives.

Web Analytics Trends for 2010

It is becoming increasingly important for companies to employ web analytics in their online marketing strategies. Web analytics is a continuously growing industry despite the recent tough times that many businesses are currently facing. This has made it obvious that web analytics is here to stay and can help companies to reinvent their brand in a changing business environment.

As analytical metrics become more advanced, the basic numbers behind web usage begin to say less than advanced information on the consumers that represent these numbers. A common trend in web analytics is an overall increasingly personalized content of the measurements. Through this approach, companies can have a useful idea of their target and actual audiences and this information is useful in that it can be incorporated into new and improved marketing campaigns!

Social media will play a growing role in the future of marketing, as well. Web analytics will track how successful different social networking sites are at sending buyers to a site; also, mobile devices are being used more and more to access the web, so the necessary web content formatting is critical. Web analytics has a growing impact on the way everyday business is done and the current trends show that it is a necessary component to successful business on the web!

What’s all the Buzz about Social Media?

With the way the Public Relations industry is headed, social media is sure to be a key player. As new technological advances are being made constantly, it is not surprising that individuals look to the internet for a quick and easy way to access information. Although social media is not exclusively an online outlet to spread information through messages, it is becoming increasingly popular. Social media may only be one form of PR; however, it is most definitely a trend that shows a great deal of impact on how individuals gather and learn about messages.

Simply put, social media is also known as user generated content that is usually found online or through some form of an electronic source. As opposed to traditional broadcast media in which messages are distributed directly to an audience from one source, social media allows for messages to be passed to and from many individuals, allowing anyone to utilize it without requiring any special skills. A perk of social media compared to industrial or broadcast media is that there is usually little or no cost associated with it. Social media is also very efficient in that it is usually available just as soon as, or in most cases sooner than traditional media, and it can generate responses almost instantaneously. Social media is also very flexible in that it can be altered by being edited or added to, and it is great for allowing other individuals to comment or respond as a way to increase the buzz on a certain issue or topic of interest.

It is evident that social media is expanding PR in this new wave of increased reliance and confidence in technology, and is an excellent way to create buzz or generate popularity on any subject matter. As traditional media is being put on the back burner, social media is a trend that does not appear to be going out of style any time soon! Could it be that social media is more of a revolution rather than a trend after all?

Social Media Marketing Tools

We wanted to follow-up our previous posting with a few tools to help our colleagues. Below are a few resources that we use periodically to monitor social media. In addition, we use this information to gain insight as to how other are using social media. As marketers and businesses owners, do not forget the fundamental concepts of marketing. Most of these fundamental concepts are still relevant in social media.

Let us know what tools you are using and what you think of these. Good Luck!

http://www.socialmediatoday.com/

http://www.addthis.com/

http://friendfeed.com/

http://secondbrain.com/

http://www.shoutlet.com/

http://www.pitchengine.com/

http://www.twhirl.org/

Changes in Social Media Marketing for Customers & Businesses?

In recent white papers on Social Media, many professionals are predicting a shift in the way customers & businesses use social media tools. There are several factors that will drive this predicted trend. The number of potential customers involved in social media will continue to grow with additional advances in technology and easier access to these technologies. In today’s difficult economic environment, it is a challenge to find and interact with customers. Thus, social media will become an increasing priority in the marketing mix as well as a cost effective channel for marketers. In addition, social media will gain acceptance across all demographic and socioeconomic groups.

As marketers, we will continue to be challenged to use social media by clients or management. We must be careful to develop guidelines around these practices and to ensure that we are implementing social media for the “right reasons,” not just because the competition is doing it! If we do not practice using social media properly, the customers will no longer see social media as their space but as a way for businesses to interrupt their conversation.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics provides businesses & marketers of all skill levels with the necessary information to track, measure, record, and react to various marketing environments. Google Analytics also offers training videos to help all users better understand how Google Analytics operates. There is even a Google Analytics IQ test that users can take after viewing the free training videos. There are a number of “Seminars for Success” that Google offers to help users improve their skills. Check out www.google.com/analytics for the tools, tips, education, support and the latest information on web analytics trends.

Next Generation of Web Analytics & Conversion Tracking

Within organizations, many of the departments work in silos to achieve a business goal and one department is credited with the success or failure. Unfortunately this silo mentality leaks over into the marketing channel distribution or communication that all Internet marketing tactics are separate interactions with prospects or customers. Generally, the last tactics prior to a purchase or lead is often associated with a conversion with no value associated with any other tactic to the prospects or customers. In reality, all the prospects or customers see is “ABC Company” marketing communications (i.e. email, banner ads, PPC, etc.). All Internet marketing tactics to prospects and customers have value and a cost. If you value your time and money, you should be measuring your interactions/marketing channel communications in a holistic fashion. This will lead to a collective understanding of your Internet marketing efforts and effective way to evaluate your online marketing campaign performance across multiple channels (Attribution Model).

Social Media-“Brandjacking”

As a form of proactive reputation management and protection, we recommend that clients claim their company name on the most critical social media properties. Similar to buying domains related to their company, claiming the company name on these digital outposts will ensure that you control the brand and reduce the risk the competition or an unhappy customer from “brandjacking” your identity. We recommend this step first in the social networking environment.

Just search the internet for complaints and customer feedback. A few of these unhappy customer have become dedicated to expressing their feeling about numerous brands. Don’t waste anytime, go protect the brand!

An example of unhappy customers (http://www.ihatestarbucks.com/).

Blogging Can Help Your Business!

Search engines have put high emphasis on blogs that tend to stay on a specific topic or subject matter. We recommend that our clients leverage all of their news worthy information onto their blog. It may establish a pattern of posting and help keep the search engines coming back on a regular basis. It’s also a good idea to take the time to optimize the blog. Most blogs do not have many pages so it would take as much work as the website. The blog postings should grab the reader’s attention, but are easy to identify in the archives. Remember blogs are a tool to drive traffic and build your brand in order to communicate to customers and prospects, and to get their feedback on products, services, and company information. Most importantly, leverage the information that your organization obtains via the blog and communicate the comments to sales, R&D, and marketing. Your organization may discover some useful information. Listen to what your customers and prospects are saying. Then take action!