الأحد، 13 يناير 2013

Your Business Marketing Strategy: A Closer Look at Pinterest

Pinterest has slowly been staking a solid spot in the social media world. Although it’s best suited for personal use, a business may benefit from it as well.

Remember your locker in high school or the bulletin board in your dorm room? It had pictures, ticket stubs and other neat tidbits you hoped others would see – and comment on. Take that idea and spin it in a web-friendly way – and you have Pinterest.
See a photo on the web you like? “Pin it”. Comment on other interesting “pins”. The important part is to get involved in the Pinterest community.  Like all social media, Pinterest’s main goal is sharing, making it mostly a personal, social experience. However, just by thinking a little outside the box, we can see how easily it would be to fit this into a digital marketing plan with great success.
Here is a beginner’s look at Pinterest possibilities for your business:
About.
Warning: Not every business should add Pinterest to their list. By the visual nature of the site, it works best for services that may benefit from others seeing pictures of what you have to offer. Think restaurants, home decor, general retail, the wedding industry and travel.
Benefits.
There are a few benefits of Pinterest. Number one is that each image is automatically imbedded with a link back to the source. If that source is you, your site will see an increase in traffic as more people click on the image. Another benefit is that Pinterest images are easily shared, so the potential reach could be quite high if the picture is interesting.
Go the Extra Step.
Once you get the hang of Pinterest and start to get comfortable with it, try experimenting and thinking outside of the box. Try getting creative with contest ideas that get people to pin your images or consider adding a “Pin It” button to your blog.
Have you tried Pinterest yet? What are your thoughts?

Written by: Maribel Guiste
WSI Consultant 


الأربعاء، 2 يناير 2013

Incredible Digital Marketing, Powered by Data


The three most important aspects of internet marketing:

  • Influence: One thing I always talk about is how influence is changing all the time. You need to find the right people who will mean something to your clients. In the past, if you wanted to influence people you would buy an ad in a newspaper – the internet has changed this.
  • Experience: You need to create an amazing experience. How do you deliver such great joy to people that they come to you to give you money?
  • Value: Many times, you obsess so much about data that you forget about creating value.
Understanding your website’s challenges
The first question you need to ask yourself about your website is “why are the website visitors here?”. You need to have a good sense of why people are coming to your website and what they want to achieve. Also ask “were you able to complete your task?” and “if not, why not”?
Surveys are also a really great way to grasp the problems that are below the surface. These surveys need to be hyper-targeted and agile.You need to get this type of feedback to find out how you can improve things. Fivesecondtest.com and Conceptfeedback.com will get an online community to give you feedback about your website.
Say no to data puking!
Some digital marketers use the following train of thought when it comes to using data and website analytics: “Let’s just take all this information and puke it out!”, so they basically let someone else go and figure out what to do with it. This strategy never works.
When you give your clients data, it needs to be very focused. There are three things you need on every single report
  • Acquisition metrics – what are you doing to get people to your website?
  • Behavior metrics – you need to measure what people are doing once they come to your website
  • Outcomes – you need to show your client how much money they’re making with their visits
You need to understand which traffic sources you should be investing in. Look at the entire acquisition portfolio (all the traffic sources) and determine which traffic is good.
Once you’ve got all the data, you need to create quick views, which may give you some surprises (such as that your paid sources are giving you the highest bounce rates).
In the past, marketers needed to shout louder and longer to make themselves heard. With internet marketing, you need to influence people. Our ability to shout at people is diminishing. People are obsessed with getting people to follow them, but what happens after the follow? Or they obsess about “the best times to tweet”.
Some things to measure on social media:
  • Conversation Rate: The number of audience comments or replies per post
  • Amplification Rate: The number of retweets per tweet, the number of shares per Facebook or Google+ Post and forwards per social contribution
  • Applause Rate: Favourites, Likes, positive clicks
  • Economic value: You can’t use social media to make a lot of money, you will only make money as a side-effect of what you’re doing on these platforms
Use Truesocialmetrics.com to show your clients exactly how well they are doing and how much they are making from their social media efforts.
If a CEO asks you what your business objectives are, the answer to this question is “Why do we exist? Honestly, why?”. Goals are specific strategies you’ll leverage to accomplish your business objectives. A KPI is a metric that helps you understand how you are doing against your objectives. Focus on hyper relevant data to add value.

Written by: Francois Muscat

WSI Consultant