Web Marketing Strategy Update

Facebook is the king of social media platforms. Sure, there are many great contenders trying to knock the king of his throne, but Facebook is still king. If you’re not already doing so, those of you employed in marketing jobs today need to engage people on Facebook in order to succeed in the game. Here are 5 solid reasons to engage customers on Facebook.

Social Media Has Changed The Way We Do Business

The old adage is still true: customers buy from people they know, like, and trust. And one of the most significant ways that people get to know, like, and trust businesses in their communities and on the Internet is through Facebook. If you want your customers to get to know you, like you, and trust you, then you need to be engaging them in conversations on Facebook.

New Generations Of Consumers Eat, Sleep, And Breathe Facebook

What’s the first thing most Americans do when they first wake up? Do they brush their teeth? Do they take a shower? Do they use the toilet? Do they eat breakfast?
You already know the answer: they check their Facebook notifications. And they continue to check them all day long – even while lying in bed trying to fall asleep.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) And Website Traffic

All other things being equal, the websites that are liked, shared, and linked to from Facebook are going to receive larger numbers of traffic that those that are not. Engaging your customers on Facebook will tend to increase the number of “likes” for your Facebook account and for the company website to which it is attached. These likes, links, and shares are seen by search engines as votes in favor of your website, and when the search engines see a lot of votes for your site, they send more search traffic your way.

Facebook Can Give You An Edge On Your Competition

In spite of Facebook’s massive popularity, there are still many businesses and marketing specialists – your competitors – who shy away from marketing through that platform, especially B2B marketers. They think that their advertisements just won’t find traction there, because they assume that their customers don’t log into Facebook to look at ads.
There is certainly some merit to that way of thinking, but consider this:

Do people go for a drive on the freeway to look at ads? They do not, yet there are billboards every 50 feet pitching some product or service or movie.

Do people turn on the television to watch commercials? They do not, yet there are commercials every 10 minutes of the day.

Do people listen to the radio to hear advertisements? They do not, yet you cannot go through a single hour of music without hearing an advertisement of some kind.

Sales Is Still A Numbers Game

While it’s true that social interaction is more important today than ever before, it all still comes down to numbers. The more people you can reach, the more sales you – or your clients – will make. There are hundreds of millions of active users on Facebook, and half of them use smartphones and other mobile devices to remain connect 24 hours per day.

Any marketer who ignores Facebook is leaving (a lot of) money on the table.

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SEO tends to be the main focus for many businesses when it comes to online marketing. Although natural search engine traffic is considered the holy grail of traffic, it is not the ‘be all and end all’ of online marketing. In fact, there are many other forms of online marketing that you should be investing in.

Not only are these other avenues of online marketing effective, but most contribute to your organic visibility and should any of the major search engines decide to “pull the rug out from underneath you” you’ll still have some revenue and traffic from your backup channels.

Here is a quick rundown of a few of the most important alternative forms of online marketing.

Social Media Marketing

Even those who are not fans of social media have to admit that the web has been heading down the social route for a while now. It was easy enough to bury your head in the sand a few years ago, but now with the advent of AuthorRank and increased social visibility within the SERPs you’d be a fool not to be active on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ as a minimum. Once you have worked these out, start to look at other social networks like Pinterest and LinkedIn. There are also numerous social bookmarking sites like Reddit and Delicious, as well as other niche-specific sites that you can promote your brand via.

Be warned however, social is not about selling: it is about engaging and communicating. You can use your social profiles to demonstrate the human side of your business and to provide help, assistance and advice. It can be an excellent customer service tool and a superb trust builder, which can naturally lead to more customers without the need to sell yourself.

On top of that, it can also lead to more links. As you share your content and make more connections, as long as the content you produce is high quality, you will start to gain social links, which are becoming increasingly important for SEO.

Businesses that abuse social channels are frequently met with backlash and PR blunders that have ruined businesses usually start on social networks, so be careful!

PPC

PPC or Pay Per Click, is a great way for new business that have no organic profile to achieve a predominant position within the SERPs in a single day. The downside? It’s going to cost you!

As well as PPC being a great way to get instant traffic to your website, you’ll have a greater insight on ROI, see which keywords that are converting and you’ll have the ability to really drill down into what’s working for your business. This can then feed your organic keyword target list.

Email Marketing

If you’ve got a loyal client base, then email marketing is a great way to keep in touch with your list.

The secret to keeping your clients happy is to consistently provide them with valuable content that they want to receive and are happy to read. This could be the latest list of discount codes that you have for your site, a competition or just a general update. It may take a few days to make a conversion, or it may take months, but the fact that you are constantly reminding the people on your list that you exist and providing them with valuable content will mean that they grow to recognise your brand and trust you even more.

Brand Promotion Exercises

There are other ways to increase your brand visibility that include guest blogging, social engagement, blog commenting, forum involvement, press releases and more.

All of these techniques can be thought of as online PR, and if you manage to get mentions in top industry websites and even the national press, these citations can be as effective as a backlink to your site.

Take A Step Back

SEO should not be dismissed, but there’s more to online and digital marketing than organic visibility. A lot of companies have succeeded online without an SEO strategy and ultimately it’s these companies that you’ll find dominating the SERPs. They offered something different, grew naturally and now take SEO in as a consideration.

Try to build your product or brand first and once you’ve got a product or service you think people will want, then you can factor in an SEO strategy.

Sebastian Cowie is the Managing Director of SC Digital LTD – They provide SEO, Link Building and Reputation Protection Services to companies and businesses of all sizes.

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It’s one thing to make a mistake because you didn’t know was a mistake – it is something else entirely to make a mistake, when you should have known you were making it. And unfortunately, it appears that this is often the case with social media.

Social media evolved so quickly that many Internet marketers learned the basics and immediately lost sight of them as their strategies became more complex. Here is a quick review of 7 essential social media tips that you already know but don’t act on.

1. Social, Social, Social

It is amazing how many Internet marketers tried to take the social out of social media. Managing multiple social networking sites is difficult to say the least which is why leveraging automation is commonplace. While certain tasks can easily and effectively be automated, you can’t automate being social. There are certain things which will always have to be done manually.

2. Your Primary Presence Should Always Be in Your Control

Facebook Fan Pages, Pinterest Boards, and similar social media assets have become key pieces in a variety of online marketing strategies. While they are important assets to leverage, it is important to ensure your primary online presence is always 100% in your control. This is the only way to protect your long-term future. For example, starting a private membership area on Facebook is a “neat” idea, but there is no guarantee Facebook won’t change their rules and leave you out in the cold.

3. Create a Social Media Policy

To minimize the risk of you or your staff from making a mistake on your businesses social media account, it is important to create an official social media policy. This minimizes the risk of inappropriate information accidentally being shared with the public. The three areas of emphasis should be security/proprietary information, public relations, and human resource issues.

4. Create a Detailed, Repeatable Process

The fundamentals of a successful social networking campaign rarely change. To truly leverage social media it is important to create and document a detailed, repeatable process. Not only does this allow you to test different strategies to determine what is most effective, but also allows you to identify any tasks which can be automated.

5. Develop Clear Goals

As with all online marketing strategies, it is impossible to gauge your results without clear goals. A common problem is deciding what metrics are most important to track. The most important metrics vary from one type of campaign to the next. Only by developing clear goals can you determine which metrics are the most valuable to your efforts.

6. Your Strategy Must Continually Evolve

The way people engage on social networks is continually evolving. To keep up, your social media strategy must evolve as well. The biggest mistake you can make is assuming that anything online will remain stagnant – especially social media.

7. Stay in Context of the Current Conversation

To ensure your social media message is accepted by your potential audience is important to stay in context of the current conversation. For example, you don’t want to start promoting a health product in the middle of a conversation about Harry Potter. Best case scenario, you get labeled as a spammer – worst-case scenario your profile gets banned from the site.

Developing and implementing an effective social media strategy is only as difficult as you make it. Simply following the basic tips and guidelines will create a solid foundation for your social media strategy to grow. The key is not only knowing the basics, but also making a conscientious effort not to forget them.

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Numbers alone can rarely explain a socio-cultural phenomenon, but in the digital age they do paint a clear picture of the exceptional development of social media. An explosion which overshadows that of any other communications medium, even the Internet itself, cutting through boundaries of country, race, sex, age and education. It’s a phenomenon which is changing social behaviour and expression modes almost as rapidly as the birth of the world wide web itself in the 90s.

To draw the perimeter around social media, and to get a glimpse of its magnitude, consider the following:

• Social networking now accounts for 22% of all time spent online in the USA; granted the USA are not anymore the world’s largest community of web users (the title belongs to China), they are the first to signal leading trends.

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