Archive for category Social Media Marketing
What Seattle Social Media Can Learn from Ello and Anti-Marketing
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing, Social Networking on October 14, 2014
Ello? What is it? It’s the thing that suddenly everyone seems to be talking about. Despite a March launch amid nearly zero fanfare, Ello has suddenly skyrocketed into fame and is currently one of the most talked about social platforms on the web. As something where most people do not yet have a profile and therefore no friends if you do have a profile, it’s not something that most people would expect. The truth is that Ello skyrocketed into a hot topic because of anti-marketing in the wake of Facebook’s many flagrant privacy and personal violations. Ello’s promise of no ads, no tracking personal data, and no selling personal data to big companies appeals to the many disgruntled social users who are, quite frankly, sick of having their personal data used for ads. The result is a clamor for invites, even though very few people seem to have one.
What is Anti Marketing
To better understand the concept of why Ello is currently so popular, let’s talk about anti-marketing. This is the concept of using a companies current policy, branding, or advertisement against them. GreenPeace does it almost constantly when they attempt to show the world how uneconomically friendly a company does. Usually they use logos and convert them into something a little less brand friendly. Essentially, anti-marketing is a form of brand-sabotaging, by using their policies or advertisements to point out flaws in the company, or to prove that your company is better. In Ello’s case, that’s the promise to not sell data or display ads in opposition to Facebook’s very ad-heavy platform. But anti-marketing isn’t the only reason Ello is currently so popular.
Ad-Free and Service Culture
One really major thing about users is that they like service, they enjoy clean, user-friendly environments, and they often find ads annoying. In fact, the click-through rate on banner ads and popup ads is depressingly low for advertisers. Ad-free is something that users see as a luxury, and more and more apps and now websites are beginning to integrate it into their business plan. Why ad free? How do you make money selling ads if you’re not charging for your product? For example, if you have an ap and you offer it for free or nearly free, you might think that you stand little chance of making an income without ads. However, apps and games like Whatsapp have long proven this theory wrong. Whatsapp had over 45 million downloads for free the first year, and 99 cents per year following. They did not display ads, but instead made money off of extras and additional sales. Many other web services, especially online games use this same business module to make considerably more than they would with ads, and without annoying their customers. So is Ello. They intend to sell additional site services to users who want to do more with their page. These services are wildly popular because they offer a solid service that is valuable and not annoying. In addition, Whatsapp has not spent a single penny on ads.
What you, and other Seattle social media managers can learn from it is that you don’t necessarily have to use a multi-thousand dollar marketing program to succeed, especially on the web. What you need is a great campaign that recognizes your target audience and your competition and then uses every bit of information you have to create a website, social media page, and brand that appeals to that demographic. Most consumers respond better to strong branding, value, and honest practices then they do to any amount of mass media marketing, although you shouldn’t abandon the latter.
Seattle Social Media Tips – Creating Content To Post
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing on September 23, 2014
Running a social media account is never easy, especially if you aren’t a professional social media manager, but the hardest part about it is content. And the longer you run your social pages, the more difficult content gets. The truth is that followers are unlikely to follow you if you don’t post, and not posting regular content means that you loose ranking on systems like Facebook’s EdgeRank. The result is that you have to continue posting frequently and regularly, or fall under the metaphorical social bus. If you don’t have the money for a professional social media manager, you have to come up with long term plans for curating your own content. Here are a couple of tips from local Seattle social media experts.
Watch the News
If you want your posts to be relevant, interesting, and on topic then your best bet is to watch the news. Make notes about interesting things that relate to you or your business, and then try to integrate that into your page. For example, if you run a roofing company and there are storms coming, it’s quite easy to figure out that you can post about them to try to boost sales. If you sell shoes, you might talk about events or local happenings instead.
Follow Hashtags
Hashtags are another great way to keep up with what’s hot in the Seattle area, and you can actually boost your own visibility by using them yourself. A bit of quick research should find you a lot of local hashtags, which you can then use for inspiration, and integrate into your posts.
Plan Posts One Day At A Time
Unfortunately, while planning and posting content months in advance may be convenient, it’s not interactive, and very little of it will be relevant unless you plan for your sales, problems, and any local events. You can plan and pre-schedule some content using Facebook or an external event like HootSuite, but try to post at least one live comment each day for authenticity.
Listen To Your Customers
You can always use customer questions as inspiration for tips and answers. For example, if someone comes in and asks you a question, answer them in person, but then also add a “Customer Question” or “Question of the Week” to your social media and answer it. This isn’t always possible on pages like Twitter, but works well on both Google + and Facebook. You can also share items from your FAQ, or random questions that you think customers might be interested in when you don’t have any questions.
Write a Blog
A blog offers you great content to share on your social media, directs traffic back to your website, and allows you to answer questions or get creative with your products. While you should make sure that it is professional, or hire someone to do it for you, it can greatly benefit your social media and your website.
Mix It Up
While every post should be on topic, don’t be afraid to mix things up by adding jokes, humor, or memes into your social. You do want to avoid having the majority of your posts being memes though because this may look like you’re not a business. You can also share relatable quotes and other information. Just keep it on topic.
If curating content is too much work for you, hiring a professional Seattle social media manager could be the way to go, just talk with them first to make sure it is in your budget, and that you will get a return off of it.
Seattle Social Media Experts Discuss: Internet Marketing Teams
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing, Social Networking on August 19, 2014
Whether your business is small, large, or somewhere in between, you need marketing. And if your business can make sales online, then you definitely want to focus a large percentage of that marketing on the internet, where you have the potential for a great deal of return with very little investment. Unfortunately, while social media might sound deceptively simple to those who are not familiar with marketing, it is often a task that requires expert advice in order to pull off correctly. But while you could hire just one person to manage all of your digital marketing, there are multiple advantages to having a team to do everything for you.
Collaborative Planning
If you’ve ever worked with part of a team then you know that there is a major difference between working with one person and working as a team. Collaborating on ideas and trends, creating strategies together, and creating marketing plans together allows for more dynamic marketing because more people submit ideas to create strategies and plans with more ideas and more perspective, which usually results in a better plan.
Better Content and Strategies
Another great thing about working with a social media or online marketing team is content and proofreading. Mistakes happen. In fact, even major publications like the Washington Post sometimes publish mistakes. But with a team handling your social planning, you are less likely to have problems with posts, marketing, and quality because each item goes through several hands before it ever reaches the internet. It also means that most of what you put online will be chosen from a selection of ideas rather than the only idea, because more people were working with the idea. This is highly beneficial to all forms of social and online marketing, especially when catering to a specific area like Seattle, where different people will be more knowledgeable about different demographics than an individual.
Specialized Team Members
When you hire just one person you’re getting someone who has a rough knowledge of a great deal of different social media tactics, and while that works for the most part, it’s hard to beat having multiple people who specialize in one area, such as affiliate marketing or blogging or social media posts. The result is that the people you bring into your company have more combined knowledge, and can make more informed decisions regarding the direction and content of your online marketing.
Unfortunately, unless you happen to be a much larger business with a considerable marketing budget, you won’t be able to hire a team full time. While you might think that you’re stuck with hiring one expert, that isn’t quite true and you do have an alternative. Hiring a local Seattle social media marketing company to do your social and online marketing for your means that not only do you only pay for the actual work that you need, but also that you have a marketing team rather than an individual for much less than the price of a full-time hire. Of course, if you need full time, some social media teams can do that too.
Seattle Social Media Talk: Facebooks New Content Like Ban & Your Page
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing on August 12, 2014
Facebook’s newest platform update introduced a ban to content incentives to likes, which essentially means that you can no longer offer anything in order for someone to become a fan. While some forms of content link enticement are still available to pages (for example through apps), there are a lot of currently common content incentives that are no longer available for pages. Let’s talk about what that means for your page, and what you can do about it.
No More Likes for Content
Gated or incentive content is any sort of content that requires the user to like your page in order to take advantage of it. Because like to win, and like to access content or contest pages have been active on Facebook for the last five years or so, this will mean a big change for the way some pages market their business. However, it’s not all bad. One very common trend seen in incentivized likes is that they are not extremely active, and many of them have no real interest in the page, other than that they wanted to win something. The result is low quality likes that do nothing for you as a business. While the numbers look good, they aren’t precisely driving any sales. Some examples of no more content for likes include:
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No more gated content
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No more ‘25% discount if you like our page’
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No more ‘Access this content if you like our page’
Essentially, you can’t offer anyone a reward for liking your page anymore. Facebook has not listed the specific details, but failure to comply with other guidelines usually results in a page being banned.
Alternative Marketing Strategies
While you might be upset that you can’t use gated content or likes for coupons anymore, you shouldn’t be. There are plenty of other marketing techniques you can use to build your fan pages, and do so in a Facebook friendly way.
Facebook Share Campaigns – Share incentives are still a great way to boost exposure for your page, and you can continue to offer prices for photo post likes, shares, and comments. You can also stipulate that the giveaway is only open to fans of the page so long as you do not ask people to like the page in order to enter the competition.
Hashtags – Hashtags are another great way to increase exposure, although it is important to research active hashtags for your area first.
Optimize Your Facebook for Local SEO – If properly optimized, your social page will come up in searches for local businesses that provide your services. Optimizing your page properly ensures that you get maximum local exposure to people looking for your business.
Encourage Feedback – When one of your fans posts feedback on your wall, it also posts on their wall, which not only shows that you have fans (if they leave a good review), but also improves your reach and potentially converts their friends. Good feedback also improves your local SEO reach.
The new policy will take effect in November of 2014, so you have a couple of months to phase these sort of like incentives out of your marketing strategy before you start to get in trouble for them.
What’s Wrong With Your Seattle Social Media Marketing?
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing on August 5, 2014
With more than 25 small businesses now on Facebook, and almost half that on Google Plus, it’s hard to ignore social as something that businesses need. Unfortunately, there is a fair bit of difference between having a social site, and making it work for your business. Whether you have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat, you might be spending a dozen hours a week on the site and not actually making any money off of it. So what are you doing wrong? Consider these tips from local Seattle social media experts about what Seattle business owners get wrong, and how you can fix it.
Expecting Customers To Follow Your Page
The first mistake that many business owners make is actually just in building likes. Whether you have 100 or 10,000 followers on your fan page, you might have done it yourself. Do you have “Like us on Facebook”, or “Add us on Google Plus”, or “Follow us on Twitter”, anywhere? If you aren’t offering an incentive in return for people following your page, then you likely aren’t converting very well. Instead, try, “Like us on Facebook for Discounts and Deals”, or “Give us a Google Plus Review for a 15% Discount Coupon!”. Offering an incentive increases the follow-through, which sets you up to make more future sales through advertisement and future incentives.
Expecting Results from Promotional Content
Do your social pages consist of you sharing links to your products or only talking about your specific products? If so, you might loose interest simply because you are boring your followers. Try mixing up your posts with various relevant content, using photos, asking questions, and, of course, talking about your customers. You can mix in the odd promotional content as appropriate, but keep in mind that sharing a link to a product will very rarely produce any results. Great tips include sharing incentives to buy such as limited time offers, sharing reviews, or sharing products when they get new reviews.
Sharing Irrelevant Content
While sharing only promotional content is bad, you can also turn your followers off by sharing completely irrelevant content. Chances are that most of them came to your page for whatever it is your business does or sells, so try to keep your posts in that ballpark. Otherwise you risk loosing followers and dropping edge rank because your followers simply aren’t interested.
Not Spending Enough Time on Social
Social media is a full time job for many people so make sure you’re not ignoring yours. A good average is about thirty minutes a day for creating new posts and responding to customers, unless you get enough feedback and comments that you cannot handle it in that time. To save time, consider programming four or five posts throughout the day at the start of the day, and then taking ten minutes in the morning and ten minutes at night to respond to social messages and comments.
Unfortunately any good social media program is going to require a great deal of time and dedication, and a good business might not be able to handle that. The better your business is, the less time you have for spending on social, so you might want to upgrade to a professional social media manager to make sure that you’re getting the most from your online marketing. Want to know more? Contact Rory Martin to discuss your needs.
Seattle Social Media Marketing: How Do Incentive Campaigns Work?
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing on July 22, 2014
Getting started with social media can be tricky, especially if you’re not entirely sure how a bunch of clicks or ‘likes’ can turn into a profit. That aside, it’s still one of the most popular forms of marketing, so you probably want to use it, or at least understand how it works. Social incentive campaigns can actually drive revenue, and in fact, are a long-standing favorite of Seattle social media marketing teams.
What is an Incentive Campaign
You probably already guessed that an incentive campaign offers the user a reward of some kind, and if so, you would be correct. Incentive programs are schemes that offer users a reward for a specific behavior, and in search, that is virtually invaluable because you can use it to influence a great deal of people, even if you are only targeting a local network.
So How Does it Work?
There are several ways to run an incentive program and not all of them are about direct revenue. So, for example, if you wanted to boost the likes on your Facebook page, you could create an incentive program and offer a 10% discount coupon to each person who shared the status and liked your page. The result is that anyone with access to your business, and interest in your business, might be interested in sharing the post and liking your page. You get new likes, and you get targeted likes from people in your area, interested in your products, meaning that you might be able to convert more of them into a sale with a 10% coupon.
Another form of incentive marketing is purely by inducing sales. So, if you want to boost sales you could offer a “Buy One Get One Half Off” coupon to everyone on your page. Your fans don’t have to ‘do’ anything but go in and make a purchase. And because you aren’t paying for an advertisement, just broadcasting it on social, you don’t necessarily have to invest in your coupon.
How it Benefits You
Even if you are not making a huge profit off of discounted items, you are still helping your business. By boosting sales you are creating hype, reminding people that they need your products, and hopefully getting them to leave a review on your page. The result is that you create customers from a fan-base that might not have previously bought anything. Of course, ideally, you want to make money off of every sale, even if it is discounted, so try not to go too crazy with the coupons.
There are hundreds of ways to use incentive marketing on social media, and it works on nearly every platform. However, you do have to plan carefully, market properly, and make sure that you have the right social fan-base to make something happen with your coupons. Want to know more about how incentive programs can help boost your sales and business? Contact us to talk about your business, and your localized Seattle social media marketing program.
Beyond the Facebook Page: What Seattle Social Media Experts Are Saying
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing on July 3, 2014
As a business owner you know that social media promotion is invaluable for driving traffic, increasing hype, and basically promoting your business on a low budget. Unfortunately, the majority of business owners are either sticking with Facebook only, or creating accounts on every social media account they can get their hands on. While both ways are common, neither of them really allow a business to best utilize the platform because having too many accounts spreads you too thin, and too few means that you don’t get enough exposure. So which social media accounts should you be on? Seattle social media experts suggest that it depends on your business.
Google +
Google + is probably the most important social media platform for local businesses right now, mainly because of their efforts to promote and grow small businesses through integration with Google Maps, Google Local, and location based searches. Signing up for a Google Local page allows you to put your business on the Google map, and then get reviews through your page, which actually show up in search. Google then ranks the highest reviewed businesses first in search, which is a huge credit for small local business with great quality services. Google Plus is also easy to use, allows up to ten managers per page, and allows you to integrate YouTube for videos and Google Hangouts for live streaming video. It’s also the best place for tech and food related businesses to be.
Pinterest is one of the most popular image websites out there, and with newer integrations like “Buy It” buttons, they are also becoming incredibly business friendly. While not right for every business, Pinterest allows for viral image promotion, which is great for a range of businesses including flower shops, crafts stores, restaurants, and more. While Pinterest won’t drive a huge amount of local sales, it can and will drive online interest, which is perfect if you have an online shop.
Instagram is more of a mobile social app than a social platform, but it’s hard to ignore that it is one of the most popular social platforms on the planet. The site runs off of image sharing, and while it does not allow links, it can generate a great deal of interest in your products. Instagram is especially good for fashion and accessory related industries but also good for sports stores, gyms, and studios.
Twitter was the highest revenue driving site from 2010 until 2012, and while that is no longer true, Twitter is still quite important. Twitter’s millions of active users mostly share and reshare short quotes and images, but what the site is really good for is instant communication with customers, increasing hype, and answering questions in short form. The best strategy is to get involved with local hashtags and share content that is relevant to your community, otherwise you’re just broadcasting to the world at large.
Seattle Social Media Management in Small Business: What You Need to Know
Posted by Rory Martin in Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing on June 6, 2014
Social media managers are becoming increasingly necessary for businesses who want to profit from Seattle’s busy social industry, but while big business corporations are already jumping on the bandwagon (and have already been profiting from social for years), the majority of small and medium sized businesses typically are not. In fact, many think that they do not have the budget, the time, or the need for a professional social team or manager. If you’re one of these smaller business owners, here are a few reasons you might be wrong.
Benefits of Social Media Management for Small Business
If you’re running a small or medium size business in the Seattle area, then a local Seattle social media management team or manager can do wonders for your revenue. Any good social media strategy can and will improve sales, increase hype, and help with your customer satisfaction. With the right training, you might be able to do all of that yourself, if you have the time for training and for the social media itself, but the thrush is that it is a lot of work, and it is easy to steer your pages in the wrong direction if you are not familiar with the market.
What a social media manager really brings to the table includes the following, and more:
Proven Results – You won’t waste time or money pursuing things that don’t work. Professionals know what and what doesn’t make money.
Consistency – Inconsistent social branding is one of the most common problems on small business social media, but when you bring in a professional manager, you can make sure that yours stays consistent so that you convert and keep more leads.
Save Time – Managing a good social media campaign can take hours per day, especially if you are not familiar with local social trends like hashtags, popular groups, or marketing trends. Professional social media managers are aware of, and stay on top of, all of these issues, so that you can save time, and still get the best results.
Outsourcing
While it might be beneficial for your company to bring in an in-house social media manager, the truth is that unless your social media is turning over at least twice what they are making per year, it’s not really worth it for you. Instead, consider what some of the top companies in the U.S. are doing, which is outsourcing. If you need a single social media strategy but don’t have the budget for a full-time employee, then an outsourced team has several advantages, starting with affordability. You get every advantage of a social media team, while paying less than you would with hiring a single person. You also get to work with a company that has guaranteed professionalism, and a history of working with other clients.
Creating a Plan
The most important part of hiring any social media manager, in or out of Seattle, is to sit down and create an outline of what you want to achieve with your social media. While you could just go to a social marketer and tell them to increase your traffic and sales, you are much better off sitting down, discussing expectations, and discussing what you can achieve within your budget. This is a great time to discuss other items that tie into planning, such as expected ROI, an expected timeline, and any other specific details that you, or the marketer, think are relevant to your situation.
Hiring a Seattle social media manager can and will make you money, even if you aren’t quite a Fortune 500 company.
Build Your Web Presence With These Localized Seattle Marketing Tips
Posted by Rory Martin in Search Engine Marketing, Social Media Marketing on May 23, 2014
Whether you’re a startup, or a tried and true business growing your roots and expanding to the web, getting out there can be tough. The process of building a website, establishing a web presence, and building followers across social sites can not only be intimidating, it can be near impossible if you don’t know what you’re doing. In fact, you can waste hours of your valuable time pursuing outdated and irrelevant strategies that are often still quoted as the ‘best thing’, on various websites. While your specific strategies should vary depending on your business type and budget, here are a few quick tips to get you started developing your web presence in Seattle.
Get a Website
A website is the best way to establish yourself as a professional online. Even if you don’t know what to do with a website, you should have one. Websites inspire trust, allow consumers to learn more about you on the web, and might even allow you to make sales directly from the internet depending on your business module. While you can use a free theme or a professional custom CMS design, your site should load in 3 seconds or less, offer users easy access to everything on the site, and be mobile friendly.
Utilize SEO
Once you have a website, it’s important to utilize localized SEO so that you come up in search to people in the Seattle area. You can choose to pay for a Seattle SEO campaign, or do it yourself. The process involves optimizing your website for search engines with sitemaps, create a healthy link structure inside of the site, and then research the keywords, and search terms for your site. Make sure you familiarize yourself with current SEO standards, as they change frequently, before attempting to do this on your own. Keep in mind that if you want your generated traffic to stick around, the content has to be awesome for readers as well as search
Pick Three Social Platforms and Stick to Them
If you’re doing social media on your own, then it is a mistake to try to tackle too many platforms at once. Instead, try outlining the three social platforms that offer the most value to your business, establishing a presence on them, and sticking to them. You should be posting at minimum twice daily on any social platform you use.
Create a Strategy
A marketing strategy is an essential part of business success, and this is also true with the web. Unfortunately, you don’t and cannot outline exactly how you will reach your goals because social media is constantly changing. Instead, outline goals, assign amounts of time per day to get there, and then strategize how to get there.
Hire Professionals
Finally, many business owners should stick with what they do best, running their business, and leave the web marketing to the professionals. If you have a budget for marketing, then web marketing can and will produce a return on investment for you if it is being handled by professionals.
What Can a Local Seattle Social Media Marketing Team Do For You?
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing, Social Networking on May 9, 2014
Social media is so common these days that you might brush it off as a trend, but, unfortunately for the non-social savvy, it’s quickly becoming an integral part of marketing. With the ability to generate nearly limitless revenue for the right kinds of companies, the capability to connect and bring businesses closer to their customers, and the easiest way to regulate and control brand web presence, social media is hard to ignore. If you live in the Puget Sound area, then a local Seattle social media marketing team is the only way to go, and here’s why.
Utilize Local Knowledge of Seattle Customers
The first and best thing that you get when you choose a localized Social Media team is local knowledge. Each area has its own social media trends and attitudes, and tapping into that helps with your social campaigns. For example, someone from New York would have no real way of knowing what hashtags local consumers use, what products or pages are currently doing well on the Seattle market, or which stories and content have gone viral on Seattle’s social media scene in the past. By hiring a localized marketing team, you tap into all of that, and take advantage of local knowledge for your company. From hyper-localized marketing trends, to a knowledge of competitors, to a knowledge of hashtags and hot content, localized means in-the-know about what’s happening in Seattle.
Easy to Get in Touch
Another great thing about working with a local marketing team right here in Seattle is that you won’t have to worry about not being able to get in touch whenever you want. Many businesses can and do outsource their social media management to the cheapest marketing team, often overseas, but this means complicated business hours, and probably emailing rather than visiting an office or picking up the phone.
Integrated Marketing
What’s better than a social media plan that works around localized trends and media? A social media plan that works around your localized marketing as well. By working with a local team, you ensure that they have access to your other marketing team (or if you’re hiring Rory Martin we also do SEO, and other promotion), to offer you integrated marketing strategies that plan in traffic, sales, and social trends based on your marketing, promotion, and even include your offers to clients.
The best thing about hiring a local marketing team is that they understand the local market, so you can benefit from their knowledge, rather than having to tell them what you need. In our opinion, that’s what a marketing team should do. Best of all, if you have any questions, it’s easy to pick up the phone and make a call,
Want to know more about our localized Seattle social media marketing services? Contact Rory Martin today to talk to us about your marketing needs.
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