What You Need to Know About Measuring Social Media

Credit: Social On Main

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.

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5 Pay-to-Play Social Content Promotion Tactics

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.

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How Your Social Content Strategy Can Support SEO

Social Content Strategy

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?

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Managing Your Brand’s Facebook Page

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.

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Targeting Options Across Different Online Channels

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.

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How & Why to Use Pinterest in Your Marketing

A Pin-Up (Business) Model

So if you work in digital marketing (which you probably do if you’re reading this blog) and you don’t live under a rock, you’ve probably heard some noise around the latest social media darling Pinterest. I like to think of it as Tumblr for adults (much fewer hipsters and boobie pics), but that’s probably a cynical over-simplification considering that Pinterest:

Of course, growth doesn’t always entail being usefulness. So what exactly is the real marketing value of Pinterest?

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SEO Supercharging Your Inbound Marketing Campaigns

Magnetic Marketing

We spend a lot more time on this blog talking about “outbound marketing” rather than “inbound marketing”. Sure, we sometimes touch on how to sync the two, such as using PPC to find SEO opportunities and support SEO efforts, but even then we’re focusing on using “outbound marketing” to support or enhance “inbound marketing”. The focus is still on the outbound side of things.

Well, what about planning a comprehensive and self-contained “inbound marketing” campaign from the get-go? In this post, we’re going to look at how to do just that, as well as how to infuse it with SEO every step of the way.

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Mobile PPC Strategies – Interview with Laura Garrido

Laura Garrido

With such high expectations for mobile advertising this year, marketers have a lot to consider — from high-level mobile ad strategy and deployment to working out a mobile budget. Well, with Google as the #1 mobile site destination, one thing is clear enough: mobile PPC will likely be part of any mobile advertising strategy.

Recently, I got to ask Laura Garrido about her experience with mobile PPC. Laura leads the PPC team at NVI, a search marketing and social media agency in Montreal. So she’s overseen strategy and deployment for all their clients’ mobile search campaigns. During our chat, Laura touches on:

  • Why to invest in mobile PPC
  • How to budget for mobile PPC
  • Which verticals perform best in mobile search
  • and how mobile PPC strategies can differ from desktop ones

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Tech Media Predictions for 2012

For those of you that aren’t aware, I co-host a show called HipMojo that’s all about digital media and technology. This is show #22 (released last week) in which Ash and I make some predictions for 2012. I throw out a couple whimsical predictions about Amazon, Google and Facebook — but even I have trouble taking these completely seriously.

After that, Ash runs through a list of “anti-predictions”. What he’s doing with these “anti-predictions” poking fun at some very common digital media predictions that we hear year after year after year. Some of them include:

  • this/next year being “the year of mobile”
  • television finally declining
  • and whole bunch more…

If anything, our combined cynicism is food for thought in the sense of a reminder that it’s a little too easy to drink the kool-aid, pee out some snake-oil, and get carried away with just how much short-term promise some medium or technology has. Which isn’t to say that these media and technologies don’t have promise, but just that change, no matter how quick and disruptive as a force it can be, rarely happens over night. In any case, I hope you enjoy this episode…