4 Benefits of Social Media Beyond Marketing

The most recent Pew Research study of social media usage shows that 65 percent of adults now use social media sites—up from only 7 percent just ten years ago! And, social media isn’t just for digital natives these days. Pew’s research shows that while those ages 18-29 are still the most prolific users (at 90 percent), those 65 and older are jumping on board as well—in 2015, 35 percent of those 65+ reported that they use social media sites, compared to only 2 percent in 2005.

This is all good news for marketers, of course, and if you spend any time at all on social media sites you can readily see that companies, large and small, are using the sites to market their wares to both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) markets.

But social media has applications that extend beyond marketing.

Recruitment

LinkedIn is probably the social media channel most thought of as a recruitment tool. The site, in fact, started out as a means for job seekers to connect with potential employers and recruiters. Today, employers both post job openings and also “troll” profiles looking for “passive” candidates that might meet their needs. Passive candidates are those who are not actively looking for a job. Recruiters have also extended their reach beyond LinkedIn to use other social media sites—like Facebook, Twitter and even Pinterest—to find job candidates.

Customer Service

If you’ve ever posted a somewhat negative comment or complaint about a company online and received an almost immediate follow-up response from a representative from the company, you’ve experienced how social media can be used as a customer service tool. Savvy companies set up processes that allow them to monitor and curate online comments so that they can quickly intervene and address any issues consumers may have.

Employee Communication and Collaboration

Many social media sites offer the opportunity to create closed, or proprietary, groups that only pre-selected members can join. LinkedIn and Facebook are two examples of this. This can provide big benefits for organizations that want to provide employees who may be geographically dispersed with an opportunity to engage and connect. Setting up such groups can also be an important part of a crisis communication plan—providing an opportunity to get messages out to employees, and other key audiences, in the event of an emergency.

Market Research

There’s a lot of data to be found through social media and a lot of insights to be gleaned about consumers’ interests and preferences. While companies need to be cautious about drawing too many conclusions from what is qualitative information, these insights can serve as the basis for further quantitative research and can also provide early indications of key trends that may be impacting your markets.

Source : http://bit.ly/1TqJvdS

Marketing on the move: The 6 principles of engaging mobile consumers

It makes sense when you think about it: Customers are on the move, and in order to reach them, marketers need to be on the move too.

Settling down into a staid, predictable routine seems to be the death knell for any mobile marketing strategy. That was the takeaway from a panel I was part of at VB’s Marketing.FWD summit earlier this week, entitled “How to structure your technology, and your marketing strategy, to win in a mobile world.”

Joined by Kim Feil from Bizhive, Erica Seidal from The Connective Good, and Rishi Dave from Dun & Bradstreet, we discussed challenges and opportunities in mobile marketing — and how marketers can get the most out of their campaigns by being agile, adaptable, and creative. For me, it boiled down to these six essential principles if you’re going to succeed in our mobile-dominant world.

1. Adopt a ‘live for change’ motto

In order to acquire and engage as many quality users as possible, mobile marketers need to be nimble and proficient with a wide variety of sources and formats, to optimize and revise, to respond to changes in inventory and user habits — and, above all, to refine their approach and stay on the move.

One important point we discussed was how creating a marketing campaign is not — and cannot be — a “once and done” proposition. The key to successful mobile marketing is to stay agile and versatile and not become too reliant on one format of ads, or invest too heavily in a single traffic source.

2. Diversify your traffic sources

Regardless of what you may have read, there is no “one” ideal way to source traffic. Social media, programmatic and non-programmatic advertising, and real-time bidding all have their respective advantages and drawbacks. Diversifying your traffic sources is crucial, as is constantly engaging with users you’ve acquired, and measuring engagement is key to discovering what works for you.

Likewise, while it can be tempting to rely entirely on video and display ads, since those are tried-and-true and are chiefly the formats that marketers use, there’s a vast field of other tactics — such as native, playable, and text-based — that provide untapped opportunities for marketers willing to roll up their sleeves and get creative.

3. Monitor, optimize, and monitor again

With all these possibilities available, it is essential to constantly monitor performance and optimize your campaigns. Even in optimization, though, too many companies can get locked into the routines of using familiar creatives and traffic sources without diving deep and taking advantage of a myriad of other ways to improve performance on mobile.

As the mobile marketing landscape evolves, other effective optimization methods will become more useful including whitelisting and blacklisting sub-publishers based on who delivers the best traffic; optimizing to ROI by looking at in-app purchases to calculate ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) and identify the most profitable users; and utilizing real-time optimization to automatically update campaigns based on their performance.

4. Personalize or die

When it comes to engaging users, there can be no one-size-fits-all model. Personalization with laser precision is the name of the game. Mobile usage unlocks untold reams of data about the customer’s habits, preferences, likes, and dislikes. It is incumbent upon marketers to leverage this glut of information to deliver ads at the right times, through the right channels, in the right formats, and at the right frequencies.

5. Know that automation is your friend

Placing such a high emphasis on optimization does not mean that mobile marketing has to become a labor drain. There are several automation tools available to help marketers and app-makers streamline their campaign creation and optimization process, so that they can focus on what counts — and not be bogged down by the distractions of minute-by-minute operations.

Embracing automation allows you to redirect human energy where it needs to be: on constantly learning about the changing marketplaces and applying those lessons to creating new and better strategies. A successful strategist is never satisfied. Marketers must be committed to testing, experimenting, and reiterating elements of their campaign; it’s not a matter of achieving the perfect method, but of finding that frictionless alignment between your marketing practices and your business goals as the two develop in tandem.

6. Hire those with mobile brains

As to that human energy I mentioned, what steps can you take when building your team to make sure that it is prepared to meet the challenges of marketing to consumers on the move? In practice, this might mean keeping an open mind for potential team-members who lack the management experience of more seasoned candidates but have grown up in a mobile environment and are more attuned to its nuances and more open-minded to embracing new ideas and taking things in new directions. It’s far more important that you find that crucial balance between — and combination of — old experience and new savvy, rather than relying on traditional hierarchy structures.

The field is ever changing, and branching out in new creative directions — in other words, it’s pretty mobile.

Source : http://bit.ly/1QGMlEO

What Is a Content Marketing Strategy?

According to Google Trends, interest in content marketing has been on the rise since January 2011.

But this should not surprise anyone. We all seem to be awash in content marketing.

What’s surprising is that many content marketers don’t have a documented strategy.

First we need to clear up a little confusion about content marketing strategy.

Content marketing strategy defined

Some people like to make a distinction between the terms content strategy and content marketing strategy. The distinction, they suggest, is best explained with a Russian doll: a smaller strategy is inside a larger one.

In this case, content marketing strategy is the smaller strategy inside the larger one,content strategy.

There is some truth to this.

Content strategy, according to Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach, involves the planning, creation, governance, and maintenance of content, whereas content marketing strategy focuses on the narrow discipline of marketing content.

Fair enough, but I think this distinction is confusing and needless because we can also talk about content marketing strategy as the planning, creation, governance, and maintenance of content … and not lose any sleep.

I’d like to proceed with a clear definition of a content marketing strategy.

So, if strategy means “a plan, method, or series of maneuvers or stratagems for obtaining a specific goal or result,” the specific goal or result for content marketing would be “building an audience that builds a business.”

For our purposes, then, let’s define content marketing strategy like this:

A content marketing strategy is a plan for building an audience by publishing, maintaining, and spreading frequent and consistent content that educates, entertains, or inspires to turn strangers into fans and fans into customers.

Which brings us to the next important question.

Do you need a content marketing strategy?

If you are a small business with a few employees or a one-man or one-woman shop, you may be thinking that your content marketing is so simple that you don’t need a plan.

Won’t a list of things that need to happen written on the back of an envelope get the job done?

Yes, that’s one way to begin, especially if you are typically a perfectionist and just need to start your content marketing rather than waiting until you have the perfect plan.

But at some point you will need to develop a more comprehensive plan — and then document it.

• Content marketers with a documented strategy feel more confident in their work.
• Content marketing challenges don’t seem as overwhelming when you have a strategy in place.
• A documented strategy makes it easier to get buy-in from stakeholders.
• It’s easier to chart your success when you have a documented strategy.

Crafting a simple content marketing strategy

Let’s be honest: Unless you are a content marketer for a big company, you don’t need much. Just a plan to help focus your time, money, and energy.

In fact, you can document your content marketing strategy in the time it takes you to answer the following 13 questions:

1. Who are your users?
2. Who are your competitors?
3. What do you bring to the table?
4. What do you hear?
5. What content do you already have?
6. What is the purpose of your content?
7. How often should you publish content?
8. How will you distribute your content?
9. Who is in charge of your content?
10. Who will produce your content?
11. Who is going to maintain the content?
12. Who is responsible for the results?
13. What’s your destination (core strategy)?

Your content marketing strategy begins with this person

The person I’m talking about is your customer.

Your customer is the focal point of your content marketing strategy. You need a substantial, deep, and comprehensive understanding of who she is.

When you do, the strategy will write itself. You won’t have to guess or wonder. But a weak, flimsy, or flat-out wrong understanding of who your customer is will sink your strategy every time.

Check out these five resources to help you understand who your customer is:

• Research checklist: Don’t Create Your Content Strategy Until You Research These 6 Things
• Empathy map: A Complete Guide to Crawling Inside Your Customer’s Head
• Worldview: Tap into This Psychological Driver to Create the Ultimate Message
• Customer experience map: How to Use Customer Experience Maps to Develop a Winning Content Marketing Strategy
• Personas: How Creating an Imaginary Friend Can Make You a Better Writer

Understanding your content

Once you thoroughly understand who your customer is, evaluate the content you already have.

This exercise will not only help you spot the gaps in your content that you need to fill, but it will also help you see that old content can become outdated and cost you top positions in search engines, cause user-experience failure, and more.

So, here are four resources to help you review your current content:

• A Brief Guide to Fixing Your Old, Neglected, and Broken Content
• How to Conduct a Content Audit for Quality and Audience Experience
• How to Plug the Holes in Your Content Funnel that Are Costing You Money
• The Single Best Way to Create Hit Content in Record Time

Measuring your content marketing efforts (conversion)

Ultimately, it comes down to this: how do you know if your content marketing strategy is working?

You’ll know if your content marketing strategy is working if you measure it.

This is why question 13 on the content marketing strategy worksheet (What’s your core strategy?) is so important.

That core strategy should:

• Give you room to stretch, fail, get back up, and grow
• Allow you to adjust as your environment changes around you, without having to make a drastic change
• Align with your values, so you’ll be able to sustain it and endure challenges over time

But how do you measure that? If you are like me and the words “analytics” and “measuring” make you uncomfortable, check out Mike King’s article:

• A Quick-Start Guide to Measuring Your Content Marketing Efforts

That should keep you busy for a while.

In this hour-long session, our Chief Operations Officer, Tony Clark, and Chief Content Officer, Sonia Simone, talk about:

• Why content creators should have a basic understanding of web analytics
• What tools you must use (forget about the rest and focus on these)
• The essential metrics you should measure to get the best performance out of your content
• What to do with the information once you have it

Source : http://bit.ly/1KPMXvO

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3 Social Media Metrics You Need to Monitor Right Now.

Success on social media is relative, but knowing what metrics to measure is critical for uncovering weaknesses and improving your strategy where others fall short. Here’s a look at three important social media metrics you should be monitoring right now.

Social media is a constantly changing landscape, and as it matures, the way social media success is defined and measured evolves with it. Remember the race for acquiring as many fans as possible? Today, merely having a social presence is not enough, and building communities needs to be just one aspect of a brand’s social strategy.

Now social media managers have data at their fingertips to measure a wide range of performance metrics from engagement and reach to customer care and deep advertising demographics across countries and regions. The challenge lies in focusing on those metrics that truly matter – some of which aren’t the first ones that come to mind, and require a little bit of digging to uncover.

By now social marketers are very familiar with engagement – in Socialbakers Analytics, we use the Interactions per 1,000 Fans metric to track engagement, which enables marketers to compare the engagement on their Pages’ posts against one another, and broadly paint a picture of performance across fan bases. It gives a more accurate depiction of how brands compare to competitors that have a much larger Page size by way of more fans.

Here are three less-familiar metrics that nonetheless provide an interesting perspective into how you’re performing on social.

3 Important Social Media Metrics to Measure 

Frequency

Engagement has been an important metric for understanding if your audience is interacting with your brand. However, if you’re stuck on only analyzing the numbers of those who have taken an action on your content (like, comment, share, click) then you’re not seeing the complete picture. Reach and frequency are arguably just as important as engagement. When it comes to brand marketing, it’s all about striking that balance of reaching the appropriate number of people at the right amount of frequency.

Repetition is key, and reaching larger audiences and exposing them to your brand messaging is what strengthens brand awareness and grows revenue. Frequency is calculated by dividing Total Reach(the number of times your content appeared in Facebook users’ News Feeds) by Unique Reach(unique Facebook IDs to which your content was displayed, not counting multiple views by the same Facebook user).

It shows you the average number of times your post (or ad) was shown to each person. It’s important to monitor your volume of posts because a high frequency can result in negative feedback, which can hurt reach and lead to ineffective spend. Looking at this will put you on the path to finding the ideal amount of posts for publishing based on your content quality. The better the content, the more Facebook will show your ad to a given user, thus giving you more value for your budget and allowing you to publish more in a given period.

Negative Feedback

This metric measures how many people are hiding your content from their News Feed. This clearly affects your reach since it tags your content as uninteresting or spammy, and it will become shown less frequently. No matter if you put money behind your post or not (paid or organic), this number shows whether your content is resonating with your audience. **If this number is quite high, take it as a sign that you are likely targeting the wrong audience. **

Deep Demographics in Paid

This metric segments other top-line metrics such as CTR (Click Through Rate), CPC (Cost Per Click), reach and so on by demographic. This enables you to measure your ad performance by region, so that you can benchmark and identify where your ads were the most effective and ineffective.

Source : http://bit.ly/1XUs70z

Daily Social Media and Marketing updates.

iPhone 6s: The 9 best new features

Apple fans, the wait is finally over: Apple’s next-generation iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus are finally a reality. Months of leaks and rumors didn’t leave many surprises for Apple during its big press conference on Wednesday, but the event was still packed full of action and now it’s time to step back and take a deeper dive into Apple’s new iPhones.

DON’T MISS: The 5 worst things about the iPhone 6s

2015 is an “S” year, of course, so we know we were in store for next-generation iPhones that looked almost exactly like their predecessors. We also knew that inside, the new iPhones would feature some huge upgrades in order to put Apple in its best possible position to continue growing its iPhone sales each year.

What’s new in Apple’s just-announced iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus? Here are the best new features you can look forward to:

3D Touch

As we were all expecting, the star of the show this year is Force Touch, though it has been rebranded on the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. Using a combination of new display hardware and some smart software, Apple’s new iPhones are able to recognize three levels of touch pressure. This allows the user to perform different actions based on the amount of pressure applied with a tap.

The new peek and pop gestures are two examples. Press lightly on a tap target in an app and you’ll get a peek at whatever it leads to. Press harder and the app will pop open a new screen. Firmer touches and swipes also trigger various gestures — for example, a firm swipe in from the left edge of the screen will swipe the current app away and switch back to the previous app.

Alongside the new screen, the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus will also include Apple’s taptic engine for more precise vibration feedback, just like the Apple Watch.

Is 3D Touch enough to sell you on Apple’s new iPhones? If not, don’t worry… there’s plenty more for you to lust after.

Motion Wallpapers

Last but not least where the display is concerned, Apple’s new iPhones will support Motion Wallpapers. Animated wallpapers are hardly something new on smartphones, but Apple’s are far more complex than anything we’ve seen on other platforms.

Bye-bye Bendgate

What will this year’s scandal be for the iPhone 6s launch? There’s always at least one, but only time will tell. What we do know though, is that it won’t be a repeat of last year’s “Bendgate.”

Apple’s new iPhone 6s and 6s Plus are constructed from the same harder 7000 Series aluminum as the Apple Watch, and they’re much harder to bend than last year’s models. Of course, that won’t stop idiots from trying, so get ready for a flurry of “will the iPhone 6s bend?!” videos.

A new color

Some Apple fans were skeptical of Apple’s decision to introduce a gold color option last year, but now you see gold iPhones everywhere. This year, Apple is keeping the same gold tone from the iPhone 6, but also adding a new rose gold color for the iPhone 6s.

Better cameras

The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus focused on improving photo quality rather than bumping up the megapixel count. In 2016, Apple is doing both.

Apple’s new rear camera on the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus is a 12-megapixel unit that Apple says is a big improvement over last year’s model. The new unit features better optics and it can record 4K video as well.

The front-facing camera has been upped to 5 megapixels, and it supports full HD video as well as selfie panoramas.

Both new cameras include a new software-based flash feature that should improve low-light photography.

Live Photos

When the iPhone 6s captures a standard photo, it also records a brief video automatically in the background. Simply force touch on any photo in your camera roll and you’ll see the brief animation play. Pretty awesome…

Performance improvements

Last year’s iPhones “only” had a dual-core A8 processor, and they “only” had 1GB of RAM. Of course, they still managed to crush the competition in most key performance tests.

This year, Apple’s new A9 processor is based on a newer process and it features unique tri-core architecture that’s 70% faster than the A8, with a 90% faster GPU. Beyond that, the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus will get 2GB of RAM, giving performance an even bigger boost.

New Touch ID

Apple’s new iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus include a brand new Touch ID sensor that Apple says is twice as fast as the scanner in the iPhone 6. Apple’s first-generation fingerprint scanner is already leaps and bounds better than any other sensors out there, so we can’t wait to see how fast the second-generation version is.

Hey Siri

Falling squarely in the “new to iOS but not really new” category is the iPhone 6s’ new Hey Siri feature. With a new setting enabled, Siri will always be listening for the “hey Siri” trigger, even when the iPhone’s display is off. Earlier iPhone models have a similar feature, but the phone needs to be plugged in for Siri to listen while the screen is off.

Anytime the user wants to ask a question, open an app, set a reminder or do anything else Siri is capable of on the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, all he or she needs to do is say “hey Siri” and then speak the command, and Siri will abide.

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Apple’s new iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus will launch on Friday, September 18th. They will start at $199 and $299 on contract, respectively


Source : http://bit.ly/1Mc3gCP