So it’s a little late in the game for me to start telling what you should do (or could’ve done) to get the most out of your ecommerce strategy for the holidays. Thanksgivukkah is a distant memory, and there’s only a dozen or so shopping days left before the presents under the tree day, so you don’t have that much time to start tweaking and optimizing campaigns in any meaningful matter.
Come 2014, though, you’re going to be looking at your ecommerce conversions and starting to think forward to how you’re going to sustain or maximize your their growth in the new year. Well, here’s a few tips and tactics you might’ve not employed over the last year that can give you that extra ecommerce edge in 2014.
This past weekend, I gave a presentation at Wordcamp Montreal called “SEO for WordPress”. In it, I explored:
how to use WordPress to maximize your chances of ranking for the terms that are most relevant to your content. Specifically, we’ll look at:
- Building a Keyword Targeted Category Taxonomy
- Key SEO Plugins
- Addressing Duplicate Content
The goal of this session was to give audience members (1) a firm grasp on the fundamentals of onsite SEO, and (2) an introduction to what themes and plugins can help them implement the SEO best practices I discussed. Based on the reaction from the audience and on Twitter, I like to think that I achieved just that.
But I also promised to share my slide deck with everyone. So here it is, along with some additional reading that some audience members (or current readers) might find interesting.
This is a live blog post from the Acquisio User Summit 2012. Everything that follows is a representation of what the speakers said and not a direct quote. I have tried to remain as accurate as possible, but if you feel like any point has been misrepresented, please feel free to leave a comment below.
Moderator: Diarmid Thomson (DT),
Speakers: Simon Rivard (SR) and Jean-François Deschênes (JFD)
So you’re a social media marketing rockstar. You manage your Facebook Page with style and grace. You have your fingers in all kinds of social media ad formats and you’re really good at optimizing your Page Post Ads on Facebook. And, of course, you know how to measure every social media action out there — from Tweets to Likes to Pins.
But what about your company blog? You know, that thing you used to update regularly before there were Facebook Pages. That section of your site that’s been relegated to sporadic updates of company news.
Where does your blog figure into all of this? Because it should figure front-and-center in your social media strategy, and if it’s doesn’t, it’s time to bring it back into the marketing fold and use it to generate both leads and customer engagement.
So social media has gone mainstream. No seriously: MAINSTREAM.
How do I know? Well, aside from the fact that every second piece of print or outdoor advertising seems to have a “Like” icon somewhere on it, Google has fully incorporated social tracking into Google Analytics. And that means that social media is so much more closer to being fully trackable and attributable as a source of traffic in the sales funnel.
So what does this mean for your business (or your clients’)? Well, it means that you can now understand how social is affecting is affecting your bottom line online.
And there are two ways it’s doing that: search rankings and actual conversion rankings.
So you’ve done it. You’ve hired a super duper community manager, they’ve grown and optimized your Facebook presence, have started using Pinterest to drive traffic and brand awareness, and have even brought your content strategy inline with your SEO efforts.
You’re doing everything you can to push your content out there, you’ve seen how it can support your business goals, and now you’re wondering how can reach new audiences. Well, fortunately for you, most major social sites offer ways for your to reach new users with your content — if you’re willing to invest some media spend, that is. But depending on your goals, each of them is worth considering and experimenting with in their own right.
There’s a lot to be said for how a kick-ass content strategy can support your social media strategy. But if done right, it can also support your rankings. Not only does producing content on a regular basis mean updating your site (which search engines like), but good content naturally attracts back links and social signals (such as Tweets and Likes) that tell search engines that your content is popular with actual human beings.
But how do you produce content that’s popular with social media users and helps you rank for on targeted keywords related to your products and services? In other words, how do you produce content that doesn’t just rank in and of itself but helps your product pages rank?
So you’ve decided that you want to be the coolest community manager on the block. You know you have to start posting and interacting, but how do you actually go about it? What do you post? How often to you post? How do you get people interacting with your posts?
Well, a lot of that is going to depend on your industry and the kind of people you have and want to have following your brand on Facebook. But here’s an overview of all the different ingredients that you can mix together to create a compelling brand story.
So maybe you have an online budget and it’s time to build a strategy. Or maybe you have to build a strategy so that you can lobby the purse-holder for a budget to work with. How do you determine what channels are best suited for your goals?
Well, each online channel offers a distinct form of user targeting, and how you target someone is going to affect how they react, respond, and/or convert. So it’s helpful to first understand each of these major targeting methods, and from there decide which online marketing channels are most compatible with your goals.
