Social Media allows you to listen like never before & respond appropriately

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Social Media has made it easier than ever for consumers and business people to get their opinions heard and get them into circulation faster than ever before. It also creates challenges – like should you listen? or what should you respond or how do you get quality responses and exposure?

You have all heard the phrase that the “squeakiest wheel gets the grease”. These are the people who will be everywhere just posting about their experience – especially if it was not a good one. Does that make them less credible? If they are an active poster and only have “complaining” on their mind, they are already less credible and you cannot be worried about everything they say. You should also look to see if they have people agreeing, “liking”, or responding to their posts. If they do, then you have to take action.

If something positive happens, respond and ask for more by more people. If something negative happens, address it and find a way to take care of it – then ask them to post (or update the previous post) after you fix the problem about how you took care of it. Actually have your customer service people ask if you can share their experience with they solve or problem or get a rave from an interaction – it will go a long way to helping you have an unlimited supply of content to use for your blog, Facebook, or social media channels.

Build your brand around building your community of followers and dialogs – the ones utilizing social media are most likely to share experiences and they will be most likely to share – giving you further reach through their network and you definitely want them on your side.

Seven Steps for Social Media Strategy Integration for your Company

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I love this article from last summer about the 52 questions to ask when hiring a social media company. This article is spot on if you are serious about Social Media. It goes way in depth in some cases, especially for Small-to-Medium enterprises, but it does a good job in helping you determine what you should be asking a potential partner.

After talking to, working with and pitching dozens of companies and organizations on the principles of social media and why it works for more than just Business-to-Consumer Brands, I have realized that it is a much bigger commitment than just “another marketing or advertising campaign” of sorts.

Here is what you need to do to make sure your social media efforts get the Return-On-Investment (ROI) they could and also why playing around doesn’t really drive effective social media. All of these things really depend on who has what responsibilities within your organization and how it is structured but most are applicable in the larger, national and even global size companies. Even smaller organizations can take away some value as well.

First - Your various business units or divisions and partners should be all be looped in and asked if they participate in social media and how. They should all be informed somehow of what you are doing and why even potentially consulted on how they could improve their social media initiatives so you can have some Brand continuity across all of your channels.

Second - You need to look at your audience structure. Don’t be thinking that a “catch all” corporate Facebook page or blog is enough. People are smarter than that. Speak specifically to them, with content that is what they want – be specific in touching all your audience with content and experiences they can relate to. Don’t make it a “news” page. If you are updating them with content they don’t care about half of the time, they will start to ignore it ALL of the time and that is bad. If you have the resources and a large enough market share, you could consider “several” Blogs(or add filters when they follow so they can select what information they want) and multiple Facebook pages for segments that are big enough to warrant them and truly create a dialog/interaction with a specific customer base.

Third - You have to have some buy-in at the C-level. They should be involved in whats going on and even use them to help aggregate industry news, company news, white papers, blog postings, etc. It is important to help them buy into goals that established and measurement of success – in effect the ROI you want. This might also help you navigate any potential objections from “legal”. Speaking of legal, if you do use a third party source, make sure they can work with someone like Bevelwise to ensure no proverbial “lines” get crossed and they feel like you could get into any “trouble” resulting in ligitgation.

Fourth - offer out incentives of some sort to employees to touch customers (sales, customer service, customer care/support, etc) to help feed you good stories, testimonials, content, and things that make good social media posts. Anyone who touches a client could help generate content and drive the initiatives further – A customer service person that asks “are you following us on Facebook yet – we have specials we run for those fans on occasion” can go a long way to helping build your presence. These people can also get you content for posting MUCH faster and more often than most.

Fifth - all of your web resources, teams, should know what is going on and why. They don’t have to “agree” with it always, but aligning what is happening with the website (SEO/Content) resources, all of your marketing/advertising campaigns (email, online, offline, direct mail, etc) and initiatives and your PR team will help feed you more content and help the “big picture” work together. After all, if you are putting effort in, you want to maximize each effort.

Sixth - If you are big enough, try to find a champion from each internal department, especially those that touch customers, so they can farm for content, feedback and other things you can share through your social media channels. They can work with your social media agency or potentially be trained on making posts – You want to make sure you are feeding the content to touch all of your vertical markets, products, services, audiences etc-especially if you have the resources or need for content specific social media. Internal folks live and breathe your strategy 24/7 – they can be VERY beneficial to an outside resource because of that.

Finally - if you are choosing a partner to help, choose a partner that has understanding across all marketing mediums, but with a specialty in the online channels like Search Engine Optimization (SEO), website usability, online marketing – (banners/PPC, e-mail marketing, and especially analytics. That should mean they know how to set up goals and measure results across the many different channels and mediums that are being used for your overall advertising strategy.

We welcome your social media strategy questions.

What are your company’s value propositions and differentiators?

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Just re-reading a great article from Jeffrey Gitomer in the local business journal. It resonated with me because we preach this to all of our clients when talking strategy for their marketing and sales efforts. Everyone needs to know their value propositions & differentiators because if you don’t then you are just another product or service that you will market as a “commodity”. A better question is do you know what your value proposition is?

Everybody has their set of products and/or services. Most have spent some time coming up with “differentiators” so they can tell why they are different. But true value combines what the client or prospect perceives to be in favor of them combined with what you perceive is in favor of them – hence the value proposition.

Are your Brand and marketing strategy reaching beyond the product or service itself to a relationship with your clients? Where are the areas where the most value you provide is perceived by your clients? Whether you consult Fortune 500 clients or sell shoes, you need to craft, create, and control the perception of value your product or service. Social media is exploding because it helps create this value and gives businesses more access to each customer relationship and therefore the ability add more value and integrate themselves with a client. In the case of services, your presence out in the web channels can add to building trust, in the case of shoes – how many people they can see are talking about them will add “perceived value” to your shoe or Brand of shoes.

Perceived value can also far outweigh the actual price paid. That value can actually help justify the price in a client’s mind. Everything you do needs to drive the prospect/customer to perceive value and the value you give provide to them. Price objections are typically more about them not perceiving enough value – it also you just need to change their perception and your content, messaging, and social media strategy can all help you change that perception.

Work on developing these propositions and you will see your revenue grow. Here are some helpful marketing toolsto help you craft your marketing and web strategies.

Extra parked or redirect domains don’t show up in search engines

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Extra or redirect domains that redirect to a different “primary” domain do not help you by showing up in search engine results.  For example, if Bevelwise were to own the domain websitemarketinggrandrapids.com which is full of keywords and redirect that domain’s traffic to bevelwise.com it would not help us in search engine rankings at all.  If someone were to look for the domain websitemarketinggrandrapids.com in Google, it wouldn’t be found.

If search engines were to see this extra domain and try to index it, they would see that there is not any content on this domain, it just redirects to a different website.  Therefore, it has no search engine value and the search engines will completely ignore it.

Back in the earlier days of the internet, people used to type in the address bar a keyword and add “.com” to try to find something.  For example, someone who wanted to buy office furniture might type in “officefurniture.com” and hope they are taken to a legitimate website.  People who wanted to capture this traffic would purchase these domain names and put up websites or redirect this traffic to a different site. This is sometimes called “blind” searching and it is very rare to find people doing this today.  Search engines have  removed the need to do blind searching.

There are a few reasons to have and keep these extra domains.  The primary reason is to ensure that no one else (like your competitor) buys the domain.  That is a very good reason why you would want to buy the “.net” and “.org” version of your primary domain, you wouldn’t want your competitors to have those domains.

The other reason to have extra redirect domains is to capture the traffic of common misspellings of your primary domain name.  For example, Google owns the domain gogle.com and if you go to that address it redirects people to the primary domain of google.com.

Outside of the two above reasons, we do not recommend to purchase additional or extra domain names unless you intend to create unique websites for those domains.

Google Adwords Extends Ad Titles To Test And Improve CTR

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Google is always making changes and testing the way they display results and ads. We all know about the change from a while back when they stopped calling ads “Sponsored Results” and starting call them “Ads”. This made a big impact, even though it was just a simple change. Well they’re at it again and this time they are testing extending the Ad Title’s of text ads. What they are doing is taking the first line of the ad copy and appending it to the title. This has a variety of things to take into account with this change:

  • Ad Titles are the clickable area of an ad, and extending it gives users a larger area to click and make the text appear as a hyperlink.
  • It will increase CTR and drive more traffic through paid search.
  • As PPC managers we will need to alter the way we write ad copy taking into account the mix of ad titles and ad copy.

To see Google’s post about this topic you can visit the Google Adwords Blog where they describe how they rolled this out and how your ad needs to be formatted to receive this change. You’ll need to end your line 1 ad copy with a form of punctuation. A period or question mark will need to be used to imply your ad has actual sentence structure. The example that the Adwords blog used to illustrate the difference in ads can be seen here.

The implication of this could be huge from a CTR stand point and the volume of traffic that can be driven to your site through paid search. We like when changes like this are made because when you know how to manage and optimize campaigns we can maximize results for our clients. If you’re not actively managing your Adwords campaign then you’ll miss the boat when big changes like this can affect results on a large scale. This is a good reason to have a professional manager of your campaigns that will stay up to date for you. The scarier thing may be that your competitors could be using this to their advantage, which will give them the better CTR and overtake your ads position with a higher quality score. You may be left in the dust.If you have seen this in your own campaigns and have noticed the differences in performance leave a comment and tell us how this has affected your results and strategy. If you haven’t made adjustments that take this into account… go make them now and measure the results for yourself.

Top Search Terms and Visited sites for 2010

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Experian does an annual study on the top search terms for each year and the top ten visited URLs for each year. Below you will find a graphic for 2010 versus 2009. Facebook found itself at the top of both lists – showing you the power that brand and property has become. There is a reason why Mark Zuckerberg was Time Magazine’s Person of the Year and there was a movie made about the Facebook story. As you will see, FOUR of the top ten search terms were all facebook.

Analysis of the search terms revealed that social networking-related terms dominated the results, accounting for 4.18 percent of the top 50 searches so you social media doubters needs to stop doubting.

New terms that entered into the top 50 search terms for 2010 included – netflix, verizon wireless, espn, chase, pogo, tagged, wells fargo, yellow pages, poptropica, games and hulu.

The combination of Google properties accounted for 9.85 percent of all U.S. site visits. Facebook properties accounted for 8.93 percent, and Yahoo! properties accounted for 8.12 percent. The top 10 Websites accounted for 33 percent of all U.S. visits between January and November 2010, an increase of 12 percent versus 2009.

One of the next questions becomes, will Facebook be able to be knocked off it’s perch from either list? You would think at some point there would be something else that needs to get searched for more than Facebook just because “everyone” will already be a user right? But when does that happen? 2011? 2012? When the next great social media invention comes along? It will be interesting to watch this over the next couple of years.

Some other fun facts and top searched items :
Athlete: Still Tiger Woods – Dallas Cowboys were the team
Destination: Disney World and Disneyland was #2
Movie Title: Star Wars
Company: Bevelwise (just making sure you are paying attention, lol)
Music Artist/Band: Justin Bieber mania was BEAT by Lady Gaga
TV Show: Dancing with the Stars beat Amercian Idol…
Personality: Kim Kardashian has passed Oprah and Rush was third…

We just thought it was very interesting how powerful Facebook as become. Let us know if you think any of these numbers/spots will change for 2011 and why. We’d love to hear your opinion.

As we begin 2011, thanks to everyone…

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There are several things when you run a small services company that come into play. Good staff, good clients, and always a little luck. As a marketing firm, with heavy emphasis in the web marketing, search optimization, and online media fields that are highly competitive, you have to always be on the top of your game. For example, there is typically more than change per day (550+ in 2009) to how Google ranks sites, not to mention Bing and other factors. This “whole Internet thing” takes a lot more attention by the qualified people to do it and it will help maximize results because web is open 24/7. You also need to make sure you are not taking short cuts and you are building for long term as much as short term because long term will get you further for the money over time.

You also need to be able to create and implement marketing and web strategy you can measure and helps people establish and get to their goals. If you are not doing these and marketing effectively, then you are not maximizing your budget and return on investment. It isn’t about showing some results and saying “look at what we’ve done”. We find it extremely easy (with about 80% of our prospects) to have the ability to increase their marketing response by 10% or web hits by 33% just through implementing best practices and optimization of all media, but you have to look deeper than that. It’s more about using what we learned making those initial improvements and what we are going to do to get you to the next level of results. At some point, you will reach diminishing returns, but knowing when you shouldn’t spend the money to try for it is crucial to maximizing each and every piece of your marketing matrix and that is where we shine.

If you look at all the pieces of marketing as illustrated by these two graphics, one will see that the interactive or digital marketing picture alone has the same amount of moving parts as an entire strategy used to just 12-15 years ago. That in itself makes once have to pay attention to it to keep your business moving forward.

What we do is help get and keep businesses moving forward through building communities with their audiences and making sure their interactions with their customers and prospects gives them the best chance for success. I wanted to take a moment as we begin a new year to thank my wonderful staff for all their hard work and dedication, all of our great clients for believing in what we were telling them and trusting in our execution (even when they didn’t fully understand it) and just say that Bevelwise is nothing without both of you. Here’s to a great 2010 and hopefully an even better 2011.

Seach Engine Strategies 2010 In Chicago

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This is Steve Wellman @ Bevelwise coming to you just after Search Engine Strategies 2010 in Chicago. What a great event this has been. There are tons of industry experts in town for the event speaking and sitting on panels for seminars. I have had the privilege of attending as many of these seminars as possible and am just soaking up as much as I can. The conference has offered a ton of information on a range of topics. Anything from local search optimization tips all the way to organic and PPC search marketing tips. I really enjoyed Eli Goodman’s take on Competitive Research for SEO. He gave a number of good strategies to utilize all of your competitors information on the web, and how we as SEOs can leverage that to our advantage.

We have even gotten to hear some viewpoints straight from Google, and had a keynote from Maile Ohye, a Senior Developer Programs Engineer at Google. Maile went over a lot of new updates and functionality they are building into the Webmaster Tools. She even let us know that internally their team has a “Webmaster Happiness Rating” they monitor with the forum support team to let them know generally how happy webmasters are with them around the net. I’m surely going to remember that next time I’m going back and forth on their Webmaster’s Forum.

We here at Bevelwise tried to attend as much as possible and wanted to get as much information as we could to help serve all our clients better. Here is a list of the seminars that we thought would help our clients the best and would provide us with the highest level of material.

  • Advanced Keywords Research – Looking at the latest and best techniques and tools used in advanced keyword research and helping discover the best possibilities for our marketing and optimization efforts.
  • Ads In A Quality Score World – When we look at pay per click marketing we are always looking to improve, optimize and expand our campaigns. Knowing how quality score works and writing unique, relevant and great ad copy will help us improve campaigns and get lower cost per clicks than our competitors.
  • Advanced Paid Search Tactics – This seminar shed light into techniques that the best of the best in the industry use to optimize their pay per click campaigns.
  • B2B Search Marketing Tips – We all know that depending on the type of marketing tactics we use depends on the audience we are trying to attract. In this B2B series SES looked at the differences and challenges specifically associated with B2B markets.
  • Local 2.0: The Evolution of Local Search – Depending on your business we are always trying to leverage local opportunities where applicable, and search is no exception. We looked at where local search has come from, and where it will be heading in the future.
  • Competitive Research – It doesn’t matter who you are or what type of website you have. You probably at least have a competitor or 2, and knowing that everyone wants to gain some insight into their competitors and what works for them. Dissecting a competitors SEO strategy can be a very tactful way to figure out what has worked for them, and to also find possible holes in their strategy.
  • Making The Jump From Search to Display – Yep… all of you thought that display advertising was a dying breed, but there are some revolutionary things that display advertisers are doing to get a new fresh perspective on their advertising channel. Well you can guess who they are trying to attract… the search marketers.
  • Stretching Your Marketing Dollars: The Upside of Search – Ok well you don’t have to convince me that when your marketing dollars are tight that the best avenue to pursue is search. What I am concerned with is learning new and revolutionary ways to further stretch things as people continue coming to me looking for ways to improve their sales and leads, while at the same time lowering their budgets.
If you have any questions or want more in-depth information about these subjects you can email me at swellman@bevelwise.com and I will answer any questions.
I plan on trying to write more in-depth posts about these subjects to a further extent in the near future.

Using Your Web Analytics To Make Actual Business Decisions

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I have spoken with a number of people who have websites, and some who even have Analytics. (usually Google Analytics, because it costs $0.00) One of my favorite questions to ask is “what do you most enjoy looking at in your analytics that helps you?” and usually the response to this unfortunately is “how many people are coming to my website.” That’s all and well and good, but lets take a minute to look at the concept of “Segmenting Your Data”.

I doubt that you are looking at an overview dashboard and are actually going to figure out anything you’re ready to make a decision on. So what should we as internet marketers be looking at that will actually help us make decisions.
I often speak with people who are spending a gob of money on various online marketing opportunities, and I want to to see if what they are getting for their hard earned money is actually worth something. Lets take this a step deeper. One example is to look at conversions rates and/or goals (if you’re using Google Analytics) and segment by either the traffic sources and/or the campaigns associated with those traffic sources. If you’re not passing in variables for traffic source, medium, and campaign with your various advertisers(for example, a banner ad) I would recommend starting to do that right now. The variables below apply to Google Analytics, and are very useful when passed into your destination URL’s:
  • utm_source=
  • utm_medium=
  • utm_term=
  • utm_content=
  • utm_campaign=
And this would be an example of using these variables to establish where some traffic actually came from using our website. bevelwise.com/?utm_source=ourblog&utm;_medium=textlink&utm;_campaign=using-your-web-analytics. What this will do for measurement, is assign the following variables when you click as such:
  • source=ourblog
  • medium=textlink
  • campaign=using-your-web-analytics
You could then reference all the clicks that came in through any campaign online/email campaign to goals that you have pre-determined and set up for your website and use them to further drive your marketing objectives and strategies.
Getting back to the concept of segmenting you would always want to be drilling down into your data and breaking out specific variables and sections of that data that mean something to your business. Having someone who is experienced with reading your web analytics is just as important as having a CFO that knows how to read a balance sheet and it can help produce better financial results. I’ve heard someone say before, “oh we know what our website is doing, because we put analytics on our website.” Interpreting those analytics and helping to make actionable decisions for your organization involves much more than knowing the basics of what analytics tells you. Do you know what areas of your website’s content is delivering the best results? Do you know where your advertising $$ are being best spent?
Bevelwise does seo from grand rapids, MI which includes Google Analytics measurement and will put our skills up against anyone out there in the Midwest. Would be happy to help you with your search engine optimization, web strategy, web analytics and all marketing from a measurement perspective. You will get insight to drive all your marketing initiatives if your website done and measured correctly.

Video SEO Benefits your Overall SEO Strategy

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Optimizing video has always posed great opportunities in the SEO world, and all companies should find ways to leverage this medium. The internet has become more diverse and more visual over time, and that’s not going to slow down. It’s easy to start with the basics of where you host the video, what titles, descriptions, and content you load into the video. The harder step most of the time is distributing the video and getting press and rankings from it. Often time this means instead of saying where are we hosting, or publishing the video it means saying, how many places are we going to post the video to. YouTube, Hulu, MySpace are just a couple of examples. How are you leveraging your social media channels to get visitors to see your video, and hopefully make it go viral? Do you even have social media channels? You should and this is content that those channels will find enegaing if you do it right.

One thing to be aware of with Google’s most recent change to their results page (if you haven’t seen it, it’s on the left sidebar) is where you can refine searches based on a variety of factors. For example, you can scope your search for just news, shopping, images, videos, books, blogs, updates, and discussions just to name a few. The thing I want to point out here is the more people are going to scope by video. Then when you get into those results you can further refine the videos by duration, posted date, relevance, quality, and even source. This expands on the options that we have to optimize video. Now businesses can take into account when they are making videos are they going to be short, medium, or long, and at what quality are we publishing. This also plays into the question of where are we posting our videos? All of these factors are going to continue to play a role in the evolution of video SEO and interactive media.

A short video or “webmerical” can go a long way with helping your web strategy and online exposure. If you are looking for a company to assist with a video or your online marketing or web strategy, contact us @ Bevelwise.