Posts Tagged Seattle social media
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.
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.
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 Marketing – Google Plus
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing on April 11, 2014
If you’re like the majority of business owners then you have a Facebook and probably a Twitter, and if you’re on top of things, then you might even have an Instagram. Despite that, only around 5 million businesses worldwide use Google Plus. That may sound like a lot but statistics show that there are over 23 million small businesses in the U.S. alone. That means that less than 1/4 of the United States small businesses are using Google Plus, without even considering big businesses and corporations. Unfortunately, that could be a mistake on their part. Google Plus can be a huge part of your Seattle social media marketing, and you don’t want to miss out.
Google Local
Google Local is a powerful tool that Google offers to Google Plus businesses with a Page. Google Local essentially puts your business on the map in Google Search when you verify your address, sign up for Google Places, and make your page public. So, if you had a coffee shop in downtown Seattle, you would show up as a dot on the map whenever someone searched for coffee shops in the area.
Reviews
Google Pages allow users to review the pages, and these reviews show up in search. If you’re running a quality establishment and you encourage happy customers to go and leave you a review, you could build your potential new customers by increasing user based trust. Reviews show up in the form of stars next to search pages with Google Plus Pages, and you can be sure that this does increase click-through rates.
Hangouts
If you have any sort of product reviews, interviews, chats with customers, or similar that you would like to share on the web, the Google Hangouts give you the opportunity to do so. Hangouts on Air are live video chats that can include up to ten people with a single host, and then afterwards, they are saved onto the host’s page. They also show up in search, so you can continue to benefit long after the Hangout is over. Google Plus also integrates YouTube videos uploaded with the same account onto the same page.
Local Communities
On Google Plus, you can join and build local Communities by joining Communities, Groups, and Events. You can also create any of these that you choose and allow local people to join. Creating events allows you to promote specific items and have them show up on Google Calendar. Creating a community allows you to follow and track discussions, start conversations, and build hype around your business. Creating or joining groups gives you a place to share and promote your content with like minded people
There are dozens of reasons to join Google Plus and best of all, most of your competitors wont’ be on it. However, you can’t expect to join and get hundreds of followers. You’ll have to interact with your fan base, use hashtags, and promote it to your in-store customers if you want it to take off and truly benefit your business. If that sounds like too much work, consider hiring a professional Seattle social media manager to get the job done for you.
Seattle Social Media Tips – What You Can Learn From Analytics
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing on March 7, 2014
Social media is a part of life for millions of business owners worldwide but few of them use analytics like they should. Whether they don’t have the time to sit down and monitor results, don’t know how to do so, or don’t understand the data, many businesses are missing out on the powerful information that social analytics can provide. With that in mind, if you don’t understand your data, then you may want to hire a professional Seattle social media manager like Rory Martin to help you out. Otherwise, here are a few important things you can learn from your social analytics programs.
Engagement
Engagement is more important than the number of fans, followers, or likes on your social page. This is because 50 fans who interact with your page are more likely to make purchases than 2,000 people who don’t even see your posts. By measuring engagement, you’re measuring how successful your page is. For example, if you’re on Facebook and you have 15,000 fans but only 200 people talking about you, you’re only really making an impact on those 200 people. You can take steps to raise your engagement to raise awareness, raise page success, and of course, increase consumer interest.
Demographics
While you may already have a good idea of what demographic your content appeals to, using social media to analyze your demographics will tell you a lot more. By looking at the age, location, and if possible, number of purchases from each fan, you can get a better idea of where you have to target future ads, campaigns, and even products. For example, if you’ve been targeting towards an 18-25 year old consumer base but your analytics show you that just as many 30-35 year olds are following your pages, you can redirect your content to include items and promotion aimed specifically at them.
Popular Content
Another great thing about any social analytics is that it shows you which posts are popular, which aren’t, and which types of posts get the most engagement over time. If you watch your analytics then you will eventually see a pattern and can start to tailor more of your posts towards what people want to see. By recognizing popular content, you are giving yourself the tools to duplicate it.
Traffic Sources & Conversion
For this final form of tracking your social media, you will need Google Analytics or another similar analytics program. Once you tell it what your social pages are, you can get to work tracking your conversion to see how successful your social campaigns are in terms of pushing sales and visits. This allows you to directly track the profitability of your social media in terms of web visits and sales. If that’s what your social pages are about, then it’s important to track this data.
Don’t know how to use any of these social analytics? Talk to Rory Martin, your local Seattle social media management company and we’ll help you out with creating a social marketing plan that works, and follow up with all of the analytics you need.
Seattle Social Media Tips – Social Customer Service
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing on February 18, 2014
Social Media is one of the dominating forms of marketing, and has been for some time, but many businesses are just now beginning to utilize it effectively. However, with at least 80% of businesses saying that they are active on social media, and a recent survey of over 600 small business owners showed that more than 42% get a larger percentage of new customers from their social media pages. Those that do are using their pages for more than just promotion, they’re actively engaging, talking with, and helping their potential customers. Keep reading to find out how to integrate customer service into your Seattle social media strategy.
What is Social Customer Service
Social customer service is quite simply, the process of responding to, helping with, and solving queries and issues presented on a page via social. Unfortunately, studies show that approximately 80% of these queries currently go unanswered, which often looses a sale or a customer. Reasons people post on social media include questions about a product (answering could lead to a sale), problems with an order (answering could lead to a happier customer), and issues with a product (answering could help prevent a bad review). Because the majority of problems presented on social media are easily fixable, not answering them can actually hurt your business, while taking the time to answer them can and does make sales happen.
So How Do I Improve Customer Service?
Just like with ‘real’ customer service, social customer service requires work. You have to respond to and actively answer questions. While you obviously cannot do this 24/7, you should set aside a few minutes a day to check to make sure there are no questions, comments, or messages on your social that you should answer. In some cases, like with Twitter, these can be harder to find. In other cases, like with Google + and Facebook, finding questions and answering them is relatively easy. Remember to be polite, and to research the answer before you send a reply. Just answering is the first step to improving your customer service but you also have to make sure that you give the right answers.
If your consumers have issues, remember that they are no less important because they are using social. If you would normally offer a solution or a discount or partial refund to make up for the trouble, then do so on the page. Importantly, because this is public, it shows your other fans that you are willing to take steps to make sure that buyers are happy with your business.
Following Up
Customer service is an important part of any businesses success, and you have to make sure that yours is everywhere that you are. This means making sure that your customers are happy after they ask questions by following up within a week to ask if they are happy, (this also increases engagement), sharing customer questions and your answers as status posts, and staying on your toes when it comes to actually answering questions. If you’re getting too busy to handle this sort of thing, then your best bet may be to hire a professional Seattle social media management company to do it for you, because your online reputation and customer service does drive sales.
Seattle SEO Tips – Calculating Your SEO Budget Using Anticipated ROI
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing, Social Networking on February 11, 2014
If you’re planning on starting an SEO campaign, or hiring a Seattle SEO company to do it for you, then you need to know how much you can afford to spend on it. Your anticipated ROI (return on investment) is the easiest way to make that decision because it shows you how much you can expect to make in return. Unfortunately, you cannot estimate exactly how much you can earn, but you can find your anticipated ROI, which is how much you should make.
Finding your Average ROI
To find your anticipated ROI, you have to know a few things about your website.
- How Much Traffic Do You Get Each Month?
- How Many Sales Do You Make Each Month
- How Much Does Each Sale Generate in Profit Revenue
These questions are a little more complex than they seem at first, especially because sales and value do vary depending on the item. For example, if you have 200 items varying between $1 and $200 each, then your value per sale can fluctuate a great deal. However, if you make 500 sales per month and earn $17,500 then your average value per sale is a median of $35. While this might vary per month, you can also do it per year. If you made $210,000 in sales in 2013, and roughly 6,000 sales, then your average sale value is still $35. For traffic, try using Google Analytics, or your analytics program of choice.
Profit Revenue is important because it suggests how much you actually make rather than perceived profit. If you’re only raising the price of your items 40% up from what you’re spending to make them then your profit off of $210,000 in sales is only $84,000.
Finally, you have to calculate your average conversion rate. If you have an average of 7,000 visitors per month and make 500 sales per month, then you have a 7.14 percent conversion rate.
How to Use Your Anticipated ROI
If you use the numbers listed above:
7,000 visitors = 500 sales = $17,500 = $35 per sale with a $14 profit off of each sale
Then you could estimate that if you drive 100,000 visitors to your website with a 7.14 percent conversion rate, then you could theoretically drive 7,139 sales. At the same profit margin rates listed above, that would make for $249,865 in generated sales or $9946 in actual profit. So, your SEO budget would have to be $9,900 or less in order to break even.
Because you want ‘ROI’, return on investment, rather than breaking even, your SEO budget should be around $5,000, which is where most good SEO campaign managers start their prices. Of course, you can scale up or down depending on your budget, your goals, and your ROI. Plus, if your sales generate around $100 in profit, you have to push far fewer sales in order to get a positive ROI.
Variables
One important thing to remember about SEO is that it can drive a great deal more traffic than estimated. You don’t always ‘get what you pay for’, because while 100,000 people might click on your website, the same could be said of 500,000 people. In addition, sometimes SEO depends on other factors, such as Google updates, competitors, and current ranking. If you want a real estimate of what your Seattle SEO manager can do with your budget, make sure that you talk to them first.
Quick Tips for Improving Your Seattle Social Media Campaigns for 2014
Posted by Rory Martin in Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, Social Networking on January 28, 2014
With an estimated 90% of small businesses on social media, it is becoming more important than ever to get yours going. Unfortunately, while more than three quarters of businesses do have social accounts, most have no idea how to utilize them to make sales and create customers. In fact, some 58% of social users claim to have difficulty driving engagement, let alone sales. So what are you doing wrong?
Localized Targeting
If you live and work in Seattle, then you would want to find local businesses that can offer local services. For example, there is probably a coffee shop near you. Chances are that if you go to their Facebook, they aren’t doing anything to target their specific audience, and if they are, they’re probably targeting Seattle, rather than their neighborhood. For example, a bakery located on Pike Place might advertise themselves as a ‘Seattle Bakery’ on their website. Unfortunately, this isn’t going to drive too much traffic because while ‘local’, Seattle is really big. Instead, that same bakery should focus on ‘Pike Place’ as their local domain, and use targeted keywords, hashtags, and interact with neighborhood pages and groups.
Don’t Over Promote
Promoting on any social is a fine balance of offering value alongside company promotions because no one wants to see post after post of “You’ll love our stuff – go buy it!”. Most Facebook and Twitter managers already have a pretty good handle on this sort of management, but most of the non-pros still have to catch on. Try interspersing your coupons and sales, and direct links with useful information like customer reviews, questions and answers, funny photos, and even contests. You’ll get a lot more interaction, and as a result, more business.
Demographics
Another increasingly common problem is that many businesses just want fans and don’t care where or how they get them. Unfortunately, if your likes and +1s aren’t in your demographic, you won’t be making any sales. Why not? Because if you’re primarily selling ballet shoes for toddlers then you won’t be making very many sales to single men aged 18-25. The point is that almost every type of business has a demographic, and that demographic is what you should focus on for your social. Finding and targeting your demographic is a huge part of a professional social media campaign because it increases sales, interaction, and ROI.
Non-Goal Oriented Posts
One of the biggest mistakes that you see in any social media campaign is that the majority aren’t goal oriented. While most of us realize that being on social is a good thing, and that it can make sales, we don’t understand the process quite enough. That’s where an established Seattle social media company like Rory Martin can help you, we can create and realize goals based on the capabilities of your business. Goal oriented posts are those that strive to get to a certain amount of sales, likes, or shares, so that you get a certain amount of ROI in return.
Do you want to know more about starting a localized Seattle social media campaign? Contact the experts at Rory Martin today to find out more, or to talk to one of our professional social media managers.
Why Content Marketing is Set to Dominate Your Seattle SEO
Posted by Rory Martin in Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing on November 26, 2013
SEO has grown a lot in the pat few years, with most notable changes including that ‘search’ marketing is now more ‘integrated’ marketing than simple ‘SEO’. Anyone who does their own optimization can easily see that tactics, techniques, and algorithms are quickly changing and in big ways. But while content is no longer the only star of your search optimization, new data shows that content marketing should be. If you want to keep your localized Seattle SEO campaign up to date with Google, then content marketing is definitely for you.
Image-Centric Content is On the Rise
Do you like pictures? Studies show that your fan-base most likely loves pictures. Image-centric content is on the rise and popular across every form of advertising including your localized SEO. The most successful blog posts and websites now all have the same thing in common, which is that they use beautiful imagery throughout the post. You want to make sure your photos look professional, that they are shareable, and relevant to your topic. For restaurants and anyone selling a product, this means you can showcase your business for nothing more than the cost of a photographer and then use sites like your blog, Pinterest, Instagram, and even Facebook to share with the world. Because images, and content with more shares and links both come up in search, you can’t loose.
Off-Site Content is On the Rise Again
Off-Sit content marketing has had it’s ups and downs for the past few years but right now it’s back on the rise, providing you follow a few specific rules. Every post that you put out must be high quality, and every blog or site that you post on must be highly relevant to your site. Just a link doesn’t benefit your pages very much, but a targeted link, especially one that appeals to readers without directly ‘selling’ your content, will do a lot for you. Plus, new research shows that Google’s Hummingbird is actually picking the first four posts by the number of inbound links, so off-site content marketing is definitely something to keep in mind.
One Ring to Rule Them All
While content marketing has nothing to do with Lord of the Rings (unless you happen to be in the movie business) it does offer a one size fits all way to dominate your integrated marketing. Content is popular in SEO, SMM, and PPC (Search, Social, & Advertisement), essentially giving you a catch-all form of marketing that you can invest in to turn out really great results. Of course, you might be able to just throw up a random image or boring article and hope it succeeds, but ‘real content marketing’ involves creating a strategy that targets your Seattle audience, and then hitting them with planned, imagery and writing.
Content marketing is hugely important no matter where you happen to be marketing. With Google’s new Hummingbird algorithm, it is becoming more important than ever for a number of different reasons. If you haven’t integrated content marketing into your Seattle SEO campaign, consider starting right away.
Seattle Social Media Tips – Integrating Earned Media To Increase Revenue
Posted by Rory Martin in Search Engine Marketing, Social Media Marketing on October 15, 2013
Social media is already recognized as a driving force behind ecommerce and brick and mortar sales, but some areas are more efficient than others. While advertised media has been the driving force behind social for some time, experts are now pointing to the growing field of earned media, which earns more revenue and offers more social interaction than any amount of paid media. So what is earned media and how can you get it to work for you?
Earned Media
Earned media is quite simply media that is earned through promotional effort rather than advertising. The concept is nothing more than idea that earned traffic is earned rather than paid for, and is usually gotten through promotions such as giveaways and incentives. For example, a restaurant offering a discount coupon code to Facebook fans is more likely to get actual sales from their Facebook, and an ecommerce store offering a free $50 coupon to a random fan who attends their tweet party gains exposure, and fans.
As an example, eBay frequently promotes their ‘Green’ section on Twitter by holding a Twitter party to talk about green products. Fans have to tag the eBay Green Team and hashtag them and follow them, and then each person who tweets at them is automatically entered into an hourly drawing for a gift certificate for as long as the event lasts. The result is usually around ten thousand generated tweets that all mention and tag the Twitter, and many of which link specific products. While it doesn’t always generate direct sales, it does generate a great deal of new content, interaction, and more exposure.
In another example, the popular fashion brand White House Black Market holds competitions on Instagram for posting photos of women wearing their clothes, tagging them, and sharing on Facebook and Twitter. The result is a huge library of women wearing their clothes, which ups promotion, increases interaction, and helps make sales because consumer photos are similar to consumer recommendations in that they drive sales, and all for the cost of a $2,500 gift certificate to the store. While a little too much of an investment for smaller businesses, it generated thousands in revenue for White House Black Market as well as numerous followers on Instragam and Facebook.
Integrating Earned Media Into Your Social Strategies
Integrating earned media into your strategy can be intimidating at first, especially if you don’t have a huge fan base. Offering smaller giveaways, deals, or incentives to customers such as $5 credit on your fifth visit, coupons, or discounts, can help to build your customer base by increasing awareness. Offering free samples and even gift certificates to influential bloggers such as through Klout Perks can help you to increase awareness and get good reviews and more buzz about your business.
Essentially earned media isn’t free, but it does net you more interested and engaged consumers who are more likely to make sales. The most common strategy is to offer an incentive in exchange for a like or follow, which you can then use to make a sale.
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