Social Media Archives - Brand Digital

5 Stages to Unlocking Social Media’s Full Potential

March 15, 2014 by scott Leave a Comment

I recently wrote an article that was posted at IMediaConnect.com – here – that walks through the five major stages of social media program development. Re-posted below. Let me know what you think!

Are you using social media to persuade your target audience to buy? If so, this is a colossal mistake. When using social media, most people are in conversations with others and are NOT in a research/learn/buy mode. In reality, they’re much further up the sales funnel.

Instead of focusing on sales, marketers should maximize the true value of social media: gather large amounts of valuable customer preference data, using the advanced targeting to connect with specific people and augment other direct sales campaigns. This is marketing’s Holy Grail – getting in the buyer’s head to serve them even more relevant messaging and ultimately, influence their behavior.

So how can marketers unlock the full potential of social media? The following model steps through how a business can evolve its social media strategy from nascent to awesome.

The 5 Stages: Listening, Experimental, Operational, Productive and Fully Engaged

Stage	Activities
Listening	Set up alerts for brand terms (yours and competitors) in twitter and Google Watch your competitors’ social activities Reserve brand-centric profiles on Facebook, twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest (the big five)
Experimental	Create/update profiles with pictures, timeline posts, company description, products and services Start posting new content from website, i.e. project photos, blog posts and company events as the occur Research and join relevant groups within LinkedIn and Facebook
Operational	Set up social dashboard for basic KPIs; assign and measure metrics Add a line item for social to marketing budget & add headcount Include social in marketing planning to grow network Begin officially responding to social conversations about topics and issues
Productive	Try third party apps and solutions to improve team efficiency Give business results goal to social and measure against goals Integrate social data into planning for other channels like strategy (building personas) and search Create a cross functional team which includes customer service, marketing, PR and web development
Fully Engaged	Create company-wide governance, policy and procedures Expand social software capabilities and data integrations Improve organizational effectiveness and efficiencies

Stage One – Listening

Start with listening to understand. In the five main social media networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter & Google+) look up the following and begin a list of the profile names, URLs, likes, followers, # of tweets and content. Get a feeling for how active they are in the networks, how popular and what type of conversations they are having.

– Competitors

– Potential Partners

– Influencers – people who are active posters in your business category

What topics are generating responses, comments, likes and re-tweets? Where do you think you can add to the conversation or create some controversy?

Stage Two – Experimental

Once you’ve done your basic research, it’s time to dig deeper. Here are two important tactics for getting off on the right foot when you create your company profiles:

1) Find someone (maybe you?) who wants to be on point. This person can post content, receive feedback, and generally be engaged with the audience.

2) Take full advantage of the different fields and options each network gives you. The company description, images, products, etc. all set the foundation for how people will see you.

This stage is more about refining your online persona and finding someone in the organization who has an interest in social media who can help streamline these processes.

Stage Three – Operationalize Your Efforts

It’s time to start putting some metrics and resources against your efforts. The operationalization stage moves your social program from someone’s side project to something that is included in planning, has basic metrics that are reviewed regularly and have a primary focus of growing a series of conversations or networks.

Remember, sales is not the objective of social media – leads and connections are. With that in mind, here is a list of basic metrics that we track at this level:

– Basic network size metrics such as likes, follows, people in circles, etc.

– Engagement metrics such as how many re-tweets, people talking about, replies, etc.

– Activity metrics such as number of tweets, number of posts, etc.

– Business impact metrics – what portion of your traffic and leads are coming from social media?

– Third party metrics. Track Klout for company authority and use MOZ to track domain authority.

Stage Four – Productive

The big shift at this stage is broadening the social media efforts outside of the marketing and PR teams – or if you are an organization of one, getting additional help. Setting specific goals for content publishing, social media activity, network engagement, leads, site traffic and yes – sales – is part of this stage.

Some of the key strategies for this stage to drive the program forward include:

1) Cross-team planning and program ownership. Seek engagement from as many departments as possible.

2) Create guidelines on how to post to social media for more tentative users.

3) Try different third party solutions to improve efficiency

Stage Five – Fully Engaged

Very few companies get to this stage. Big brands are investing in social teams, integrating across departments and developing large scale governance, but many times social is in its own bubble. Social media can and does touch all aspects of a business including customer service, PR, brand, content, product, marketing, operations and analytics. In this stage, everyone in your company is tuned in to and participating in your social media efforts.

Social media has dramatically changed customer expectations, ways to connect with prospects, and how companies promote themselves. Social media is an opportunity to have authentic conversations with a wide range of people who care about your company and your products/services. As stated by Simon Sinek, an author and public speaker, “People don’t buy what you do, people buy why you do it.” Social media gives you an opportunity to expose your “why.” Now…what are you waiting for?

Better SEO Through Targeted Content Marketing

September 23, 2012 by scott Leave a Comment

I wrote this article for Website Magazine which was posted earlier this month here. Here is the full article for Brand Digital reader enjoyment.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Content Marketing are two critical components of inbound marketing and have moved beyond silo’d visibility tactics to an integrated strategy to drive high quality visitors and prospects to your website. They are critical components to your core messaging on your website and dramatically affect how you talk about yourself to bring the right visitors that have the highest chance of becoming a customer.

Your content marketing strategy will provide the biggest boost to your organic search visibility if you follow these four rules:

1) Know your key personas – intimately

2) Write to all stages of the buy cycle

3) Talk outside-in vs. inside-out

4) Write in the same direction

Know Your Key Personas – Intimately

We all know how important it is to know your customers, core audience and key personas. This insight influences product development, customer service, sales close rates and marketing. This applies directly to the content you create – especially for B2B companies – who usually have a limited content creation budget (time or dollars). The clearer the picture of your personas are, the more targeted your content creation will be resulting in higher quality visitors that are closer to your ideal prospect.

In order to make the persona work actionable for your keyword and content strategy, we answer the following questions for each persona:

What are the main types of business problems the persona typically needs to solve?
How does your product or service provide solutions to these problems?
What are some specific tasks the searcher wants to accomplish?
What are some sample search queries the persona might use?
What can the site provide that will cause the searcher to accomplish this task
What is your business goal for the visitor? Lead gen? Newsletter sign-up? Demo?
How will the searcher be motivated to complete this business goal? i.e., what’s the offer or incentive? What is the call-to-action?

With this intimate knowledge of your audience in hand, you can craft more relevant keyword and content topics. The following is an example of the matrix we build for each key persona to helpdevelop keyword and content strategies:

Write to All Stages of the Buy Cycle

A lot of B2B websites build content around their brand and products/services. Obviously, this is super important when people discover your brand to move prospects towards a lead and sale. However, this focus leaves out the much larger potential audience (your Key Personas) of those who don’t know your brand and are looking to solve a problem, looking for companies that are in a category or are comparing other brands for consideration.

Here are the four main stages of the buy cycle to build content for and the appropriate types of format for each:

Today’s B2B websites must get out of the role of simply a glorified brochure for the company’s products and into the role as the authority in your industry. This is the best way to achieve organic visibility success. Writing to all stages of the buy cycle helps you achieve this.

Talk Outside-In vs. Inside-Out

How you talk about yourself and market yourself, dramatically impacts how well you are found via organic channels – especially SEO. If your website is driven by a brand perspective that creates new phrases to describe what you do that is unique to your communication, you are not creating a true differentiation in your product, but new words to describe something that prospects don’t understand. If you have a large marketing budget to create searches for these new words, great. But most companies – especially smaller companies – don’t have this luxury.

We see examples of this tension between what the brand marketers tend to want – unique concepts to describe their positioning – versus what the direct marketers tend to want – clear language the speaks to the category and specific solutions that are high traffic search terms – at all types and sizes of companies. Here are two examples:

A major marketing automation company has positioned themselves as a provider of “Revenue Performance Management” software. This term could mean many different things to different functional perspectives, but the core term for this category of service is marketing automation. “Revenue performance management” has about 590 searches in Google in North America per month while “marketing automation” has 14,800. This tells us that marketing automation is a better known term and more people are looking for this type of solution than “revenue performance management.”

Another recent example is an agency that describes their custom content management system as a “publishing strategy” capability. They rank very well for the phrase “publishing strategy” but have had zero visits from the phrase because very few people are searching for it whereas content marketing is a very hot topic right now, has a much higher number of searches and fits the agencies core capabilities very well..

The lesson here it to review your current and future messaging from the point of view of a persona that does not know about your brand, focus on true differentiation/value proposition and create content that they will understand without needing an explanation. Finding that balance between pushing new concepts and terms vs. serving the market where it exists today is an important input into your content marketing planning.

Write in the Same Direction

Content creation and SEO is no longer limited to the marketing department and copywriters. Blogs, social media, press releases, video, podcasting, etc. has created a plethora of ways to easily publish content to your company and other industry related sites. Profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, SlideShare, Pinterest, Google + mean that there are MORE places to fill with content. All of this communication impacts your brand and visibility – positively or negatively.

One of the most important things you can do to amplify your content strategy is to get as many people in your organization to understand how their work can impact the SEO program and what they should to contribute. By giving them the education and the game plan for what key messaging and keywords are reinforces the central promise of your business.

Here is the approach we have foundsuccessful:

Get executive sponsorship to back your SEO/Content initiative. Without a strong top-level executive supporting this process, you will run into major barriers. Assign someone in marketing as the leader of the effort.
Assemble a tiger team of people from different parts of the organization including: Marketing, Editors, Web Development, Social, PR, Sales and Executive. Include them in the persona development, keyword recommendations and content strategy development process.
Build a list of blog, article, whitepaper and webinar topics that align with the keyword strategy. Create an editorial calendar that aligns the proposed topics with keywords. The team leader should manage this list.
Open up the opportunity to become an official company blogger to the greater company. There are many people in your organization who are currently writing or would like to write and boost their own profile. Each one of these individuals also has their own social network that they can publish to when they write.
Baseline metrics around organic visits, engagement, leads/business goals by source, size of social networks, track individual story syndication, etc. This topic alone is an entire whitepaper!
Meet with the greater blog team monthly, review results and celebrate those who have seen the most engagement and syndication (we give out Amazon gift certificates).
Rinse, lather and repeat. Organic visibility through content and SEO must become part of your company DNA to be successful – it is NOT a one and done project.

It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint

Changing the core messaging and approach to content creation is not easy. The larger the organization, the more challenging it is to get approval and buy-in to build a sustainable content marketing program that will significantly move the needle in SEO. However, once the process is defined and rolling and you start to see the results, this type of marketing will be the foundation for sustaining and growing your business for years to come

Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing – Differences and Characteristics

July 30, 2012 by scott Leave a Comment

This post originally appeared on the Optify Lead Generation Blog – but I wanted to share here as well.

I can be challenged by definitions. The logical side of my brain thinks the definition of words should be black and white like math, but the creative side of me thinks there is room for expression and variance in everything.

The distinction between inbound and out bound marketing has caused similar challenges. We used to refer to inbound marketing as organic traffic or organic visibility. It has since morphed into a more complete way of thinking about driving new visitors and leads that relies primarily on content and connections. We have social media and the extended network to thank for this.

The easiest way to think about Inbound Marketing is to label anything that is not a paid media campaign to Inbound. Here’s a graph I liked from one of Rand Fishkins’ presentations on the topic.

Inbound Marketing Channels and Tactics — Inbound Marketing Channels – source Rand Fishkin

While this covers a lot of channels, it leaves out two important concepts:

1) Brand – all of this activity, content creation, social media engagement, etc. is building your brand. Your brand name is the most powerful driver of qualified leads and all of these channels help define, build and expose your brand to the world.

2) Interaction – each one of these channels has a direct interaction with some other number of channels. This interaction is one of the defining elements of inbound marketing. In the paid media world – there are very limited interactions and each channel can be managed independently. I’ll be diving into the interactions of inbound channels with tactics in a future post.

Here is a framework that I find helpful in thinking about major marketing categories. It separates inbound from outbound from retention marketing and provides some defining characteristics plus resources required.

Inbound vs Outbound vs Retention Marketing – characteristics, channels and required resources. — Inbound vs Outbound vs Retention Marketing Channels Comparison

While inbound marketing is free of media costs, there are very real organizational and human resource costs to execute successfully. Content creation, publishing, content syndication, design, development, editor/press relationships, etc. are all part of the human capital it takes to build a successful inbound marketing program.

Another distinction between inbound marketing vs outbound marketing is the timeline of execution and return on investment:

Inbound Marketing needs to become part of you website and organization DNA. It takes time to build content, grow your social networks, increase website authority, acquire high quality links, perform interesting research and speak to your audience. However, this foundation of expertise and authority that you create is much longer lasting and continues to provide visitors, leads and links long after the piece is written.

A great example of this is the Organic Search Click Through Rate Curve we created last year. It was a unique data analysis that SEO professionals found very helpful. We still get mentions, links, visitors and leads from this piece of content.

Outbound Marketing, since it is based on paid media, can be spun up much more quickly, you have a lot more control over the messaging and impressions, have a greater ability to test and tweak. But, when the media dollars stop, so does the traffic, leads and sales.

The final distinction that it is important to point out is that the cost and quality of leads from inbound marketing tends to be lower cost and much higher quality than outbound marketing. We track the source of visitors and leads very closely and consistently see better performance from sources like organic search, social media (yes, we are seeing a significant number of leads from social), PR and content syndication.

Inbound vs Outbound Marketing Pro’s and Con’s by Sales Cycle

Here is one more way to visualize the differences between Inbound and Outbound marketing by generalized sales cycle.

I hope this discussion has helped to define the differences between inbound and outbound marketing. We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below and if you like the post – feel free to share! (it’s good for our inbound marketing J)

Here are some additional resources to help your research.