Social Media Marketing | SEO | Marketing Strategy

Four Ways To Use Social Media To Your SEO Advantage

Think SEO and social aren’t related? Think again.

Good social media marketing leads consumers to a website; good SEO practices help consumers to find that website and to stay engaged with it.

Want your own results? Here are four ways to leverage social media for SEO:

1. Get the right followers.

Followers on social media are a lot like links in the SEO world. It’s not so much about the number as it is the quality. To get these followers, don't buy them. Consistently building your social media presence, encouraging users to follow your page for special discounts or VIP offers, and generally offering good content will result in an increased following.

We’ve seen firsthand how a large, good-quality social following can lead to increased website traffic and higher quality traffic with a greater ROI.

2. Use social media for external link-building.

To piggyback off the last point, the greater number of followers you have, the greater the potential for shares you have online as well. And the more shares on social media you have, the more opportunities people have to see your content and link to it.

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SEO: Search Engine Marketing Tips

SEO: How to Rank against the Heavyweights

Merchants want to rank number one in Google for search terms that are seemingly important to their business, such as “dog food.” Or “office supplies.” Or whatever popular term describes their products.

The problem, however, is that not every company can rank for high-demand keywords. The workaround is to be realistic about ranking potential and develop search engine optimization strategies accordingly.

Relevance and Authority

Ranking well in any search engine takes a strong combination of relevance and authority. Relevance is determined by the pairing of the search phrase with the context and authority of your site. Authority is based on the quality and quantity of links from other sites to yours, as well as mentions within relevant content communities.

Say you want to rank for “auto parts.” Is your brand known for auto parts, or does it only sell replacement wheels and hubcaps? If you don’t all types of auto parts and focus instead on a few subtypes, your site will almost certainly not be considered relevant for a broader search for “auto parts.” Don’t fight it. Work with your strength.

Conversely, assume you sell all manner of auto parts. Your site could, therefore, be considered relevant for a broader search. Evaluate the content on your site. Do you have critical text content anywhere besides the navigational structure of your header and footer?

Descriptive, plain text content is essential to relevance. And it must be unique, high-quality content that shoppers want to read. It’s not easy, but it’s necessary.

Which brings us to authority. You can’t buy authority without risking penalties. You can’t manufacture it, either. You have to earn it. That’s why authority is so valuable. It’s difficult to accumulate and requires the agreement of others in the topical community.

Links and mentions from any (reputable) source will have some value, such as from the chamber of commerce in your hometown, or a random blog with a single car restoration post linking to your wheels and hubcaps. The most valuable links, however, will come from sites with a large amount of authority in a topically relevant area.

How much relevance and authority you need is based on your competitors. If their sites are highly relevant to high-demand keyword phrases, you’ll need more than they have. And if their backlink portfolios number in the five- or six-figure range, yours will need more, as well.

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Small Business Marketing Tips | Social Media. Blogging

3 affordable, effective marketing tips for your small business

ACHIEVING marketing success requires a constant awareness of upcoming trends and emerging platforms. And for small businesses who may have a small marketing team and an even smaller budget, choosing how best to grow their brand may be a tough task. 

Here are three simple marketing tips to help get you started.

Blogging: Put your story in words

Company blogs have become a trend that many businesses have adopted. Though maintaining a blog may seem like a big investment of your time, it can reap many benefits.

Blogging is an easy and cheap way to drive traffic to your site and attract potential customers.

Research has shown that 57 percent of companies who have a blog reported acquiring a customer as a result of it. In the same study, a survey of marketers revealed that 81 percent of businesses say that their business blog is critical for their business.

By keeping a business blog you can boost search engine rankings, develop relationships with potential and existing customers, establish your company as an industry leader, and create opportunities for sharing.

Social media marketing: Give it a personal touch

Social media marketing has become a critical part of effective brand strategy in the past few years, and your small business simply cannot afford to become complacent in their efforts.

Personalized marketing techniques are becoming increasingly popular, and can help boost sales quickly. It involves tracking customer behaviors and buying patterns, and targeting them based on their interests.

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B2B Marketing Strategy

The Key To Your B2B Marketing Strategy: Own It

The fragmentation of media has led to the rise of owned media. Marketing plans once revolved around paid and earned media, but their influence has waned over the years, offering diminishing returns at higher price points. That’s not to say that earned and paid media can no longer be effective, but it does mean that to get the most out of them, you must have a robust owned strategy.

What does that mean? In short, for B2B companies, nothing is more important than your website, email, videos, webinars, proprietary research reports, expert commentary and other assets that your marketing department fully controls. You can count social media platforms on that list provided that you understand that to have an effective social media campaign there needs to be a supporting paid strategy. Third-party validation remains instrumental in establishing credibility in the marketplace and among prospects, but earned media reaches its potential when owned media is utilized to provide the context necessary to make an impact with your constituency.

It used to be that earned media was wholly effective on its own. If a national publication that reaches your core prospects wrote a feature on your company, for example, it meant that your prospects were likely reading the story. But with the advent of the internet and the 24-hour news cycle, individual stories were less likely to single-handedly drive prospects to your business. Today, stories are archived quickly, which means your prospect either needs to be searching for your business specifically, or they need to be on the website in that small window of time during which your story remains “above the fold.”

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Social Media Marketing 2018 | Tips and Trends

5 Best Practices for Effective Social Media Marketing in 2018

Think for a moment; can you ignore social media in today’s marketing? Of course not. Nobody can afford to lose a borderless market that is bigger than China and India combined.

Owing to the same, companies are enthusiastically investing resources in social media marketing. In fact, social media is no more about branding or reputation only, the number of companies using it for business development has increased significantly. In 2015, 63% of the US companies were using social networks for lead generation and the percentage is expected to cross 90 percent by 2018.

However, there is another side of the story as well. Not every business is happy with the ROI offered by social networks.

According to a digital media survey, the brand’s (average) engagement rate on different social networks is very disturbing. It’s 0.007% on Facebook, 0.003% on Twitter, and 4.21% on Instagram.

Since ‘engagement’ is the prime objective of social media marketing, such lackluster response should be a big concern for marketers. However, changes to the algorithms and soaring usage of big data for social media marketing essentially means that marketers will have found out new and innovative ways to market their business as the organic reach of their posts will shrink with every passing day.

This article is aimed at helping you set the right tone for your social media marketing in 2018, and help you be more effective at engagement.

1. Set SMART Goals:

The starting point of any campaign should be your goals. Most of the digital marketers fail to determine their channel-specific goals and the vast majority wants to achieve “a set of goals” by single investments, which leads to failure. You should not plan to achieve leads, traffic, engagement, likes, shares, and follows from a single campaign; otherwise, the metrics will be too annoying.

If you set SMART goals, and clearly run a campaign against a particular one, success is a sure result. 92% of marketers believe that their social media efforts have generated more exposure for their businesses whereas 84% think it has directly impacted their web traffic. Therefore, you should set a clear goal of your campaign – say clicks or leads – and calculate results for the same.

2. Avoid Verbosity

They say: brevity is the soul of wit. Twitter’s popularity lies in its brevity and 140 character’s limitation. A study suggests that Facebook posts with less than 250 characters get 60 percent more engagement than the longer ones. Similarly, Tweets with 110 or fewer characters get 17% more engagement.

What does that mean?

In 2018, the scarcest of all resources is ‘time’. People do not have time to read your articles; they want brief, to-the-point, and striking content. If you have an idea for longer posts, don’t put in status; instead, go for a blog or LinkedIn Pulse.

3. Invest in Creative Contents

One key success principle for social media success is to have a good content mix. A balanced content mix ensures that people do not get bored of your similar posts. In this regards, it is a very good idea to make a content calendar with a focus on designing a decent content mix.

Never ignore the power of visual content. According to Social Media Examiner Study, 61% of marketers plan to increase their usage of live video, and 69 percent of them are eager to explore videos and creative contents. In 2017, the number of marketing professionals including live video into their marketing strategy increased by 14 percent – and the trend is expected growth further.

Also, never ignore the power of decent and branded images as tweets with images receive 150% more retweets. Brand’s engagement rate on Instagram is highest: 4.21 percent and the reason is visual content.

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SEO For Beginners | SEO Tips 2018 - Neil Patel

Social Media Marketing | Social Media Metrics

How to Master Social Media Marketing Metrics - Easy Lessons for 2018

As a digital marketer, you already know the important role of social media for your business.

Social Media marketing can take your brand to great heights, streamline the conversion and retention process, and facilitate the promotion of your brand promotion through user-generated content.

To use social media optimally without wasting precious marketing dollars, you must master metrics, even if numbers and graphs make you go “ugh” instead of “aah!”.

Mastering social media metrics help to improve your ROI (return on investment) by showing you where to adjust your campaigns for more targeted content and proactive customer care.

Metrics are just numbers.

Metrics are numbers (number of likes, number of newsletter signups, number of sales…).

Recorded over a specified time-period, they chart the up (or down) graphs of your Key Performance Indicators (KPI).

If you produce 36,000 screen-printed T-shirts annually and your goal is to clear the inventory each year, then your KPI might be ‘sell at least 3000 pieces per month’.

The metric to watch would be ‘number of sales’.

Sales might spike on weekends, and drop on Mondays, but come month-end, they should add up to 3000 pieces, and match or exceed your KPI.

A standalone metric rarely gives the full picture.

Metrics on their own are quite useless. KPIs are best seen as a correlation between metrics.

Along with ‘number of sales’ you should also be watching out for helper metrics such as number of likes, shares, backlinks, conversions to newsletter subscriptions, unique visitors to your landing page, or bounce rates (how many left the page immediately?).

For instance, a high ‘number of sales’ on your page from ‘Facebook ad clicks’ sounds great, until you notice that the ‘number of unique visitors’ is even higher - and so is the ‘bounce rate’.

It means you got a large number of click-throughs (ad is working), but many visitors simply left quickly, without buying anything (something is wrong on the page itself).

If the metrics show most purchases were via desktops, yet half the visitors were on mobiles, maybe the page needs to be mobile-optimized. If metrics identify a clear demographic group in the bounced visitors, maybe target them again, but this time with a 10% off coupon code?

Marketing ultimately has one purpose: convert, then retain customers. Metrics data gives an unambiguous picture of what needs to be improved, without relying only on intuitive guesswork.

By correlating metrics, you can identify failure points and adjust your social media marketing strategy accordingly.

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