Tag Archives: Bevelwise

Social Media Strategy – trigger interaction & response

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You do not have to be consumer oriented company to be able to use social media to advance your Brand, thoughts, products, and engagement with your audience. There are plenty of people professionally that look for helpful information for their jobs and will share valuable information with their peers when they find it. It some cases, it is even “cool” to be the first to find a great deal or share relevant information for others.

In the B2B world, you can also help aggregate content for your customers, clients, and prospects, by being a filter for them. You can share relevant information with them that has already “passed” your approval or relevance rating. This becomes almost like a value added service for them. They turn to you, a trusted resource first, before they go hunting on the Internet. You want them to say – “if they haven’t said anything about it yet, then I probably don’t need to pay attention to it yet.” And any savvy Internet person can tell you that just because it comes up “first” on Google, doesn’t make it accurate or right.

If you can get your people to interact with you, you can get valuable information about their habits, wants, desires, and interests. If you can get them to follow you or be involved, you can help your message get in front of thousands with a single click or post because it will not only reach your direct followers, but also post to their network of people because they are following you.

You can choose to have different message via each social medium (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, etc), or choose to broadcast your message, which will allow your audience to follow you via the medium they like to use the most and you still get your message out to the masses without requiring them to visitor you website. That is power and potentially all from a single article or click.

If you don’t know where to start or what you should be doing we have several tools on our website to help and we have created an great tool for measuring social media success and value of social media efforts to your organization. This will help you determine which social media efforts should be continued by your organization and give you some ways to help measure return-on-investment.

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.

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.

Is it Social Media or should it really be Public Media

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The term Social Media is not really accurate any more. Why? Because we have moved well beyond “social” into doing business. You want information to get into the marketplace, just turn to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Digg, Delicious, etc – and you can get it out to the masses more quickly than ever. Another reason, all of the a four mentioned have more value that being social if you use them right.

Also, one does not really have any control over what can be said/posted about them or your company or organization. It is really “public” media. Word can spread at warp speed to the public, especially if people deem it to be interesting. Several companies, public figures, and celebrities have “social media” site about them that they don’t have anything to do with – but all go into controlling public opinion of them. Some have to spend significant time to control their brand out there. The bigger your “Brand”, the more time you have to spend in this space to control your Brand.

I could also see the term “community media” being a potential moniker as well. All of these tools we mentioned above really go into creating a “community” of people who are interested in similar topics, products, information – and they feed off each other. That is an effective strategy to utilize all of these mediums. Add value to your clients and prospects, filter information for them, be a resource and partner to them as much as a supplier or vendor.

Creating an effective social media strategy is all about the execution of it and understanding how each piece plugs into the overall picture. You should hire someone to guide your strategy, but the information and content really has to come from someone internal while the expert will tweak that content for maximum effectiveness through “public” media channels. That guide for most companies that would mean outsourcing as would not be near a full time position – the right partner should have some understanding of your business and industry in order to be most helpful.

Have you locked up your Brand Identity for Social Media?

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There are several sites out there that people use for sharing information and more social media aspects that you should consider registering your name. Even if you don’t plan to use Facebook or Twitter, we would advise you at least lock up your name so someone else cannot steal it – which is known as “squatting”. Besides, just because you don’t plan to use either of them does not mean there isn’t the next hottest one around the corner that you should lock up.

This happened with domain names in the mid 90′s as websites were coming into popularity. Several Fortune 500 companies ended up in court trying to get their trademarked names back. There has not been any precedence set for Social Media and if and how companies can get control of their Brand once it has been registered by someone else who is not them. As reference, here is an article from Adage that shows you some of the big Brands that don’t own their Twitter identity.

You can see if anyone has squatted you out and potentially avoid that by visiting UserNameCheck.com. There are 68 different sites that someone could “squat” you on. Some of them you have never heard of, several are familiar and you can find all the different sites people could squat your identity on. You never know what might be the next big fad or emerge so it is best to lock them up and as new “fads” come out, register those as well, even if you don’t ever use them – you can at least know you are protecting your Brand when it comes to Internet & Web Marketing and Social Media.

Social Media Optimization: Business Marketing Mix

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Social media optimization is a set of methods for generating publicity & conversations through social media and online communities. Social media optimization is related to search engine marketing, but differs in several ways, primarily the focus on driving traffic from sources other than search engines, though improved search ranking is also a benefit. Search Engines also “love” this type of content because it is updated often, and seen as new and fresh.

A social media campaign means developing a great message and then reaching out to people, while giving them an incentive/reason to pass it on to other people. Social media optimization is a kind of viral marketing, where word of mouth is created through the businesses and people connecting and having 2-way conversations online.

For Business Social Media to work well, you need constant updates and make them interesting!! Also, you need fans who care enough about your message to pass it on to their friends. This is how something (good or bad) can get spread extremely quickly. If people like something and find it useful, they will link to it and tell their friends. Like anything else online – understanding the motivations and culture of the audience is key to making social media work.

Social media software applications include:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Social media should be in your marketing mix, but it needs to be done right! Make it work for your specific target audience. Develop a great message and reach out to people…then hope they pass it on! Social Media is about connections, so make it a 2-way conversation.

Please contact Bevelwise if you would like to add Social Media to your company’s marketing mix and need some help.

Many other sources have assembled lists of social media sites. Relevant Social Media helpful spots:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media
http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/top-list-of-social-media-sites
http://nextmark.typepad.com/blog/2009/07/top-100-b2b-social-media-cheat-sheet.html
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/my-best-advice-about-social-media/

http://www.mintblogger.com/2008/02/definitive-list-of-30-popular-social.html

Should I put my marketing dollars into Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising, or a blended online media strategy?

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How do you know if you should use Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? Can I get better results from Pay-Per-Click (PPC)? These are the main two strategies in use today, especially for the small to medium enterprise. Both strategies are entirely different and it can be difficult to decide which one is best for you or how to combine both strategies for maximum effectiveness.

You have to determine what you are trying to accomplish via the web and your website. That will drive everything else. If you don’t have the right objectives for what you want to accomplish, then you can wind up wasting a lot of money trying to figure it out and feeling like all you did was “spin your wheels”. SEO and PPC are the best sources to drive you targeted traffic and only pay for targeted traffic, but you have to be intentional about them and what you expect from each.

SEO and PPC continue to grow as more and more people are using the Internet and become more web savvy. It is the best source for people worldwide to find information they want on a 24 hour basis. That will keep these two industries growing. Let’s back up a second and define these a bit closer for some of those people who might know much about these subjects. SEO takes place on your own website site. There are pieces and parts to a website that the Internet search engines, crawlers, and indexes look for to determine if your site is a good match for particular keywords and search terms. Most experts will tell you that parity has been reached in search, so now it comes down to the user experience and how fast a search engine gets you to the results and relevant content you were looking for.

PPC refers to advertising on a search engine that charges on a per click basis whenever a visitor clicks on one of your ads. The order of ads is an algorithm and Google (62% of all searches), Yahoo (20% of all searches), and Bing (formerly MSN and 10% of all searches) all use different ones to determine the best match. This will continue to change now that Yahoo and MSN/Bing have announced their partnership for search – so we are sure a new algorithm for these sites will emerge soon and cause another adjustment. The newest factor in the game for Google is what is known as quality score. It has always used this to rank your site and pages organically, but now it is a factor in how well your PPC campaign will perform. Yes, how well your landing page and it’s URL are optimized will effect what you pay per click, who shows up on the top of the list, and if you bid the most, you are not guaranteed the #1 spot. This is directly related to that “user experience” criteria.

SEO tries to change your overall search engine ranking by looking at your URL and analyzing all of the content on your pages and meta data (behind the scenes) to see how good of a match that page and your website is for a particular keyword or search phrase. This also needs to happen page by page – having the same information on every page or in every page’s meta data, will actually discount your URL to the search engines. It needs to be specific to what they will find on that page. Also, putting too many different items on a page will not allow you to optimize it to its full extent to produce maximum results. It will also not allow you to effectively optimize for each item because what you can do and the “space” available for optimization, do not allow for the words and phrases you need (for example, a title tag really needs to be less that 70 characters in length). SEO is also considered a long term solution. You cannot do it just once and let it go for 6-12 months. You should pay some attention to it monthly after your initial optimization takes hold (like 120 days after their first pass on your site). Consider this just like changing some of the content on your website, this will help the engines pay attention to you. Ultimately you would want your optimization to allow for you to not have to pay for clicks on your brand name and your top 5-10 keywords and phrases because you already have page one ranking for them. Be prepared for this to take 120-180 days to really start to show some results but that is based on where your starting point is.

Bottom Line of what you can expect

PPC:

  • Instant Traffic and results if it is done right
  • Pay for what you get – no residual effects
  • This is extremely intentional – to an industry, geographic market, product or service
  • Optimize for performance, negative keywords, etc
  • Can pause at any time so little risk
  • Typically done with lower budgets
  • Can control what it says, when and where it runs and to what audiences
  • Is now tied to how well your landing page and website are optimized with Quality Score
  • Once you reach your daily budget it shuts down
  • Easier to target a specific market or industry

SEO:

  • This is a marathon, not a sprint solution
  • If you are optimized, you will always rank for the keywords and phrases you want – it will never shut down or reach a budget
  • Results are harder to measure – because of all the ways to drive traffic
  • Need to set metrics and goals prior to starting it
  • Start with an amount to get started and have someone spend some time monthly continuing these principles if possible
  • Will need to update and change as strategies and search engines change their algorithms and competitors change their websites, PPC and SEO strategies
  • Allows you to rank for higher priority keywords and broaden your exposure through PPC
  • Delivers the most qualified traffic – this comes from people who are actively seeking out products and services that you offer and not just browsing the web.

So what should you choose?
Well, it depends on how much money you are willing to spend, what your time line is, your goals and how you want to measure results. It is easy to blow through money with PPC unless you test, optimize and pay some attention every month. Typically it will produce results in the first 30 days but you will always have to pay for them. If you want to position yourself for long term results and establish your presence to your target audience and market, then spending some time in SEO will help be your solution. SEO is more permanent depending on your strategy and will build long term equity for your website, PPC will drive results and help you be specific to a particular industry, geography, or time period. If someone finds you through organic/natural results, you typically have more credibility because that is harder to accomplish and anyone can “pay” for advertising. If you can do it, we would recommend balancing both of them. Set your goals and then allocate X hours a month optimizing your site and equivalent dollars to PPC, but always be evolving and optimizing.

Using Twitter in your Marketing Mix for Businesses

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Twitter is a good idea for your business if you believe in Social Media as a way for humans to connect and engage in conversation. Twitter can bring great minds together, and gives you daily opportunities to learn and grow as a company. Twitter is like blogging except you only have 140 short characters to communicate your message. It is like instant messaging except it is public and can attract traffic to your website. A Tweet is not directed to just one person because it is visible to anyone.

Twitter is a way to drive real traffic to your site. The way to use it is to build a network of “followers” and people/companies you are “following.” Following people shows that you are not just talking about yourself but also listening to what your potential customers and industry leaders are saying. By interacting with others you are giving people reason to listen to you as well. Think of Twitter as an intercom, not a megaphone.

When setting up your company’s Twitter profile, create your company image that lets your brand stand out. Put up a picture… make it your company logo. Make sure you fill out your profile bio/info. This authenticates your Twitter profile.

Follow your brand and industry in Twitter conversations. Use Twitter Search to look for conversations about topics that are of interest to your company. Look for conversations about your brand, competitors, and words about your industry. This is a great way to build and improve your network. Engage with your potential customers. Try talking about their interest too, not just yourself… you need to show that you are a human. If you are going to bother Tweeting, it means that you want humans to connect.

When sharing content, it is very important to only share information that is useful/fun/interesting. Otherwise, you might sound like you are “preaching” a sales pitch about your company or products to people and they might tune you out. Twitter is not a one-way conversation.

Share content that spreads rapidly such as:

  • New Content/data
  • Links to cool/relevant sites
  • Industry articles
  • Interesting blog posts
  • Videos (funny ones get spread the most)
  • Slides and presentations
  • News releases
  • Podcasts

Information that rarely gets shared:

  • Product info
  • Free trials

After you have wrote some “tweets,” added profiles to follow, and gained followers, you can check out how your profile ranks. Here is a cool free tool to grade your Twitter account: www.twitter.grader.com.

Tips to make Tweeting easier:

  • Use tools like “TwitterFox,” “TweetDeck,” or “Twhirl” to make managing Twitter easier and faster
  • Use services like Twitter Search to make sure you see if someone’s talking about your company. Try to participate where it makes sense.
  • Use tools like TinyURL http://www.tiny.cc/ or http://bit.ly/ to shorten long URLs (because you only get 140 characters)

Twitter can be a great way to attract customers, network, and interact with your current customers, but you have to understand the Twitter culture or you could actually turn these people away. Time to Tweet! Feel free to contact us at Bevelwise if you have questions or need some help.

References:

http://www.hubspot.com/marketing-webinars
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/50-ideas-on-using-twitter-for-business/

http://mashable.com/2009/01/21/best-twitter-brands/

Improve Adwords Pay-per-Click (PPC) Quality Score to Lower your Cost-per-Click

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It can be very confusing to understand a keyword’s quality score. How does Google concoct my score? What’s a good quality score to receive? Why bother improving quality scores?

Bevelwise complied a bunch of information from the AdWords blog and help center to help clear this up.

Quality Score ensures that Google only shows relevant ads to its users. Searchers want to find the information they are looking for quickly and easily and Quality Score helps Google show more relevant ads. To make sure that your potential customers see your ad, you need to pay attention to Quality Score. It also influences your ads’ position, and it partially determines your keyword’s minimum bids, which can help reduce your budgets.

Quality Score is used in several different ways, including influencing your keywords’ actual cost-per-clicks (CPCs) and estimating the first page bids that you see in your account. In general, the higher your Quality Score, the lower your costs and the better your ad position.

Quality Scores 1-10

  • 1-4: The keyword isn’t very relevant to users, and as a result may have a very high first page bid. This means that the keyword is not performing very well for your website, or even for your competitors sites. Try experimenting with variations of this keyword by using plural/singulars or grammatical tweaks. If you’d like to keep advertising with this keyword, you can optimize instead. To do this, try lowering the first page bid, writing a more targeted, relevant ad, or improving your landing page content.
  • 5-7: This keyword is performing well, and there isn’t a need to worry too much. On a grading scale, our AdWords Specialist at Google, said “a 6 or 7 is equivalent to an A-.” It may have a mid-range first page bid, and the keyword may not be very costly. Optimization can lower your overall costs, draw more clicks to your ads, and result in a better return on your investment (ROI). If you want to further optimize, try using more targeted ad text and keywords or improving your landing page content.
  • 8-10: The keyword is extremely relevant and may have a high click through rate (CTR), relevant ad text, and a unique, relevant landing page. The first page bid for this keyword may be low. This keyword is very relevant and effective for your ad campaign. Our AdWords Specialist at Google, said that it is very rare to get this high of a quality score from Google.

Quality Score Formula:

  • The historical click-through rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on Google
  • Landing page quality
  • The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
  • The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
  • Relevance of ad text (especially the title)
  • Historical account performance (CTR)

How Quality Score Impacts Your PPC Campaign:

  • Cost-Per-Click – A keyword’s Quality Score influences its CPC – that is, how much you’re charged for a click on your ad when it’s triggered by that keyword. The higher a keyword’s Quality Score, the lower its CPC, and vice versa.
  • First Page CPC Bid Estimates – On your Keyword Analysis page, you’ll see a metric labeled ‘Estimated bid to show on the first page.’ This metric, also called the ‘first page bid estimate,’ approximates the cost-per-click (CPC) bid needed for your ad to reach the first page of Google search results when the search query exactly matches your keyword. The estimate is based on the Quality Score and current advertiser competition for that keyword. Ad placement will still be dependent on Quality Score, your cost-per-click (CPC) bid, your budget and account settings, and user and advertiser behavior.
  • Eligibility to Show Up when Searched for – Every time one of your keywords matches a search query, our system evaluates its combined Quality Score and cost-per-click (CPC) bid to see if it’s eligible to enter the ad auction. Keywords with a higher Quality Score will be eligible to enter the auction more easily and at a lower cost. Our goal is to encourage relevant ads for our users, so our pricing system is designed to favor more specifically targeted ads and keywords.
  • Ad Position – Ads are positioned on search and content pages based on their Ad Rank. The ad with the highest Ad Rank appears in the first position, and so on down the page.

Monitoring Your Quality Score

Search advertising is a dynamic, evolving marketplace, and the Quality Score of your keywords can fluctuate. Google continually monitors the performance of all ads, keywords, and landing pages to reward high quality ads and encourage advertisers to improve low quality ads. The best way to maintain a high-quality, cost-effective campaign is to frequently optimize your account to help ensure your ads have a high Quality Score.

Improving a Keyword’s Quality Score

Optimization is the best way to increase your keyword’s performance (Quality Score, CTR, conversion rate) without raising costs. If your Quality Score is very low (below a 5), you may be using keywords, ads, or landing pages that aren’t as targeted or relevant as they could be. This can mean higher cost-per-clicks and a potentially poor ROI. Remember: The higher the Quality Score, the lower the price you’ll pay when someone clicks on your ad.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) focuses on keywords and relevance of pages to popular keywords. Looking at quality score, if your landing page isn’t viewed by Google as relevant to the search query, you can work improving landing page content, meta tags, image tags, etc to make the page more relevant and possibly improve your Quality Score.

While a high quality score may seem like the most important part of your PPC campaign, the conversion rate is a best indicator. A high CTR or Quality Score doesn’t necessarily mean a high ROI or that people are buying your product or service. The conversion rate tells if your keyword is driving sales, sign-ups, or whatever else your company is trying to achieve.

For more information please contact us or read our whitepaper.

 

References

http://adwords.google.com/support/
http://adwords.blogspot.com/

http://www.google.com/adwords/learningcenter/