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Secrets to millennial marketing success? ... Fromm recommends small businesses constantly make “little bets,” taking small risks on novel products and services that might hit big. “If you’re going to win with millennials, you have to temporarily suspend your notion of ROI and EBITDA,” he says. “You have to make little bets and see if they win or lose in the real world. Test things that are way beyond your definition of normal and see if they work. Technology allows you to do that every day.” Social channels will tell you quickly if your wagers are effective or not. “The little-bets theory is based on the fact that millennials are willing to experiment because it’s part of their adventurous DNA,” Fromm says. “And if it’s a hit with millennials, others will follow.”...
At this point, online marketing and SEO are part of almost every business’s marketing budget. However, in order to make your online marketing efforts truly successful, you need to make sure you don’t limit how many customers you can reach. If you’re still holding back because you don’t know what to do, there are some basic tips that can get you in the game.....
While putting together our recent series of posts looking at how major brands use the four main social networks I’ve somehow managed to overlook Coca-Cola, so today I have rectified that startling omission. Coca-Cola is one of those instantly recognisable brands that would rake in fans and followers without even trying, so it’s to its credit that it has active account across the social web. So, here’s a quick look at how it uses Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+....
While social media appears to be ideally made for budget conscious marketing small business, the reality is that social media can be a resource hog. During 2012, small businesses stepped up their social media activity across a variety of social media platforms. With the exception of Facebook, where small businesses, like their larger counterparts, had followed the masses, these firms had limited participation on social media. More than four out of five small businesses had staked out their turf on Facebook as of December 2012, up seven percentage points from May 2012. While Facebook can be effective for consumer-oriented businesses and not-for-profits seeking to engage a mass audience, it’s not ideal for every business. Without time to examine the options available, many small businesses aren’t necessarily selecting the optimal social media platforms for their firm. While about 30% use LinkedIn, the top professional social platform, it’s mainly for their ability to reduce hiring costs, not marketing. The omission of blogs is surprising and may be attributable to the fact that many companies consider it content marketing, not social media. Blogs should be at the center of your social media strategy since they provide information that answers customers questions and shows them how to use their products. Further, beyond creating the posts and distributing them, blogs don’t require constant engagement like other social media venues. As a bonus, they support search optimization!...
As a company, if you can learn to use social media for more than just marketing, you'll benefit more from your social efforts. This infographic explains. Consider this…instead of using social media for primarily marketing; why not integrate it into your entire company culture? Why not use it so you and your customers benefit more throughout the entire customer life cycle? Businesses on the cutting edge of technology are already doing this effectively and experiencing the results. In this infographic called How A Social Business Can Benefit From A Single Social Signal by Rignite, you will see how you can benefit more from your business social media efforts. According to their website, the ways you can benefit more are (but not limited to): Increasing brand awareness, getting more customers, increasing the lifetime value of customers, keeping customers happy, finding new marketing opportunities, getting your pricing strategies right, increasing operational efficiencies, attracting and retaining talented employees and getting industry insights to make better informed business decisions....
Social media is arguably one of the most transformational aspects of our personal and professional lives. It has become people’s microphone, personal advisor, and source of entertainment. So it’s only right that businesses adopt smart approaches to doing business on the social landscape. There are numerous resources out there showing you how to play “small ball” with social media. If you’re going to have a massive impact with your customers, you’re going to need to adopt a clever and effective strategy that goes beyond just asking questions and posting memes. Here are some of the different approaches I’ve found to be successful for businesses of all sizes on the social web...
Social media and content marketing are must haves for any business. This need is more important among small and mid-size businesses where additional marketing requires a trade-off for other scare resources. ... Due to this time crunch, small businesses tend to move from one business fire to another without fully thinking through a longer-term marketing plan to support business growth. UMass Dartmouth’s research, "2012 Inc 500 Social Media Settles In", supports this point in terms of social media. The research found that about three out five small and medium size businesses couldn’t track financial results for their social media efforts. As a small or medium-sized businesses person you know that it can be difficult to find the time to brainstorm marketing initiatives – specifically social media, content and search marketing initiatives that you can track. Here are seven questions you can ask about your small business marketing efforts. By answering these questions, you can direct your time and resources to where they’ll yield the best results....
Content - Just what the title says... along with an infographic and a host of examples, illustrations, and explanations.
How do the top U.S. retail brands stack up on social media? Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and YouTube have revolutionised retail marketing. The top brands can easily attract millions of fans and customers – tens of millions on Facebook – and, engaged appropriately, these huge, attentive audiences can dramatically raise product and service awareness, boost website footfall and drive sales. This infographic takes a closer look at the top brands in the social media retail space.
Via Pekka Puhakka
Efforts to promote social profiles, pages, sharing and engagement are meaningless unless they support a path to conversion and help the bottom line. Here’s how Google Analytics Social Reports can help easily quantify your social media endeavors.
Via Pekka Puhakka
...You craft the perfect press release and send it to 1,000 of your contacts. Twenty of these people think this is such great news, they each send it to 500 of their friends, relatives and business contacts. Five of those people pass the news on to 250 of their contacts. Of course, these people are all fascinated, as you’ve been able to include pictures, a video, and they all received the message within hours!
Sorry, this type of viral messaging just doesn’t happen in real life… outside of Facebook, that is.
Facebook is fast becoming one of the most powerful PR tools on the web. Using Facebook as an online PR tool allows companies to increase their reach exponentially, getting in front of interested people with engaging content when and where they are receptive to the message.
The rise of Big Data provides marketers with an unprecedented level of insight. But too often, it's easy to get buried in the data. Using billions of transactional data points from thousands of Eloqua customers, 40 Must-See Charts for Modern Marketers contains ready-to-use benchmarking data that you can compare your own results to.
Download your free copy of these key insights gathered from real marketing performance data across several disciplines, including:
Email marketing;
Lead management;
Social media;
Events management....
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Think you need a large budget and a whole army to maintain a marketing campaign on Facebook? Think again. Here are a few time-saving tricks.... Whether your brand is fully established or just starting out, launching a marketing campaign can seem overwhelming. But, it doesn’t have to be a timely or expensive process. There are several small and simple things you can do for your brand on Facebook. In fact, some of these marketing tactics are used by the biggest brands in the world. Ready for your brand to get in front of the 845 million? Majestic Media, a global Facebook marketing agency, has come up with nine time-saving tips for marketing on Facebook....
A recent study conducted by the online marketing firm Vertical Response and reported on in Forbes concludes that small businesses are spending more time on social media but struggling with the added workload it represents. Perhaps as a consequence, most are doing social media marketing in a vacuum because they’re not tracking results, which means they have no way of quantifying if their time and effort are paying off. “Our survey confirms that small businesses are understanding the value of social media,” says Vertical Response CEO and founder Janine Popick. “They’re spending more time doing it, and investing more money into it at a faster rate. But the extra work will likely lead to time management issues, especially for the small business owner who’s handling social media on top of all the other responsibilities of running a company. This implies that small businesses are in need of tactics and tools now to help them save time.”...
If you’re like most marketers, you have a host of tools you use to help you get through the work-day. Everything from project management tools to email marketing tools, you rely heavily on multiple resources to help you get your job done. The team at Genia Stevens & Associates has developed this Quick Glance guide to help you with your social media marketing needs. This guide provides reminders and tips that will help you successfully implement your social media strategy....
...Adobe’s 2013 Video Benchmark Report, released today, showed how incorporating video content in social media campaigns can help brands and media companies get better results. In 2012, video social engagement rose from 42 percent to 70 percent compared to 2011, the study found. But “for marketers and advertisers wanting to know how to unlock the potential on social,” Gaffney said, “it becomes very clear that one of the biggest levers that they’re not pulling as hard as they could is video.” Getting the content can be a challenge for marketers — videos don’t produce themselves — but Gaffney said the increase in engagement and reach will be worth the effort.
According to the report, social media users are more than twice as likely to engage in video content than non-video content, meaning that videos get more likes, comments, and shares than photos, links, and text. Viral reach for video, which is measured by the number of people who see a post in their feeds through friends or a brand page, accounts for 77 percent of all reach on social media sites....
Excerpted from article on HubSpot:
"Marketing Pilgrim published a great blog post by Michael Lieberman called "10 Ways Inbound Marketing Drives Results This Month."
The best inbound marketers do, indeed, play a good long game, but you can use inbound marketing tactics and strategies to move the needle immediately, too. So to add to Lieberman's already stellar list, here are ten more ways you can borrow from inbound marketing to see immediate positive changes in your marketing.
Michael Lieberman's 10 Ways for Inbound Marketing to Drive Results This Month [http://bit.ly/10cQwj9 ]
To catch you up to speed, here's an abbreviated version of Lieberman's recommendations.
- Make sure your website has the right messaging to help visitors pass the blink test.
- Add visual calls-to-action to your site.
- Add offers to your website that appeal to visitors and leads in all stages of the funnel.
- Start blogging, and strive for a frequency of three to four times a week.
- Share your blog content with social media followers.
- Share educational content with relevant LinkedIn Groups.
- Create dedicated, conversion-optimized landing pages.
- Nurture leads with campaigns that bring them further down the funnel.
- Share educational content on sites your target audience frequents.
- Track and test all of your activities so you can get a more accurate gauge of what's working.
10 More Ways Inbound Marketing Drives Results This Month (by Hubspot)
1) A/B Test Elements of Your Email Marketing Campaigns;
2) Implement a List Re-Engagement Campaign;
3) Identify a Long-Tail Keyword Phrase With High Search Volume;
4) Newsjack;
5) Invest in a Social Media Ad Campaign;
6) Build a Free Tool;
7) Respond to HARO;
8) Start Using Tracking Tokens;
9) Create a Blog Subscription Landing Page;
10) Create Social Media Visual Content."
Each way mentioned by Hubspot is analyzed with more information. Read full article here: http://blog.hubspot.com/get-instant-results-with-inbound-marketing
In addition, check out also full article on Marketing Pilgrims: http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2013/03/10-ways-inbound-marketing-drives-results-this-month.html
Via Giuseppe Mauriello
Still, the role of the agency remains fairly simplistic (in philosophical terms): help a brand increase their sales and loyalty. Noting more. Nothing less. And that has not changed since agencies were first invented. So, now what? How do agencies ensure their future by being able to help brands sell more and build stronger loyalty in such a disrupted and disintermediated world, where every individual is consuming so much media from so many different channels? How does an agency stay ahead of the curve? For over twenty years, I have had a front row seat to this revolution in marketing. Watching businesses like Kodak crumble in the same month that Instagram gets acquired by Facebook for a billion dollars. Watching an unknown search engine with a cute name become one of the most powerful brands in the world. It is clear that agencies are still holding on to their sacred cows, but it is crystal clear that the dogma of the industry is being rewritten. Here are five new attributes that I think marketing agencies will need to develop to survive...
A collection of the best free resources for social media managers on how to build a community, keep them engaged and the day-to-day toolkit such as a social media content calendar template and a social media sizing cheat sheet.
...Instead, a marketer's best friend is a theory by the name "disruptive hustle." By painstakingly forging one-to-one relationships, a brand can effectively separate themselves from competition.
Social users love lodging complaints. According to a recent study, 47% of social media users now actively seek customer service through social media. Furthermore, 83% of Twitter users and 71% of Facebook users expect a response within a day, and 50% expect that response within two hours. Those numbers mean one thing - customers take social media very, very seriously. Purchasing decisions are heavily influenced and discussed on social networks. Buying and discussing products has always been a personal activity. If customers aren't happy with your performance, they'll be more than happy to tell you. Your customers take to social media to address problems. Therefore, so should you....
Ikea UK pops on Pinterest and provides some great examples of boards showing other brands how it should be done. Pinterest saw massive growth in 2012 and this is set to continue in 2013 as people continue to engage with photos and videos. Pinterest is a great platform for businesses and brands to raise awareness and to literally show off their products. Here are 5 reasons to join Pinterest today.
A great example of how to use Pinterest comes from Ikea UK...
As we wave goodbye to 2012 and say hello to 2013, there’s a good chance, you, like many other people, have been working to put together a content marketing strategy for the new year. No doubt you’ll have the objectives in place, created a well thought out strategy and work plan as long as your arm. It’s that last element I want to help you with in this blog post, by sharing a clutch of tools and services which will save you time, improve your results and give you the freedom to work on the creative aspects of your campaign....
Via Stefano Principato, massimo facchinetti
Effective content doesn’t depend on SEO friendliness or quality of editing, say B2B marketers responding to an Optify survey [download page] released this month. Instead, it’s all about engaging and compelling storytelling. Asked the 3 most important elements of successful content, survey respondents resoundingly chose this element (81.5%), far ahead of others such as originality (52.6%) and custom content (49.2%).
This focus on storytelling may be why these marketers tend to see longer content formats and personal contact as more effective. Almost 8 in 10 consider case studies to be effective in engaging prospects and delivering message, with white papers (73%) and in-person events (72%) following. By contrast, formats such as advertorials (18%) and community threading (20%) are seen as effective by only a minority of respondents, presumably as they don’t allow for the same level of engagement....
This week, Australian research agency Truth Serum published results of a poll detailing the most hated social media marketing practices for users. The results read like a best practice list from any other site. What is illustrative about this study is that it reinforces that users don’t use social media to see marketing content, anymore than people watch TV to see commercials. In a perpetually contentious relationship like that, insights like “social media turnoffs” aren’t necessarily informative of what businesses should be doing, but they must be understood nonetheless. ...
Via Chana Andler
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![Making Content Marketing Work in a Social/Mobile World [Infographic] | Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/xOPL8ugJ7AbfN5rTExTZJDl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
here's a great reminder that social marketing sometimes takes different timeouts and certainly doesn't follow the usual quarter by quarter earnings, life or death measurements of Wall Street.