Monetizing Social Media – Set your targets and expectations!

Today’s article on eMarketer predicted social media ad spending on Facebook to grow around $3 billion, essentially reiterating the social giant’s firming grip on the digital advertising share. According to them, the ad spending on the world’s top social network will reach $2.19 billion this year in the US and just over $4 billion worldwide – both more than double last year’s figure.

For a business or brand owner, this could trigger incremental investment in social media efforts, especially on Facebook. But regardless of whether you a Fortune500 brand or a sole proprietor, the basic rules of the game never change. So, make sure you have a good grip of the following big five once you decide to embark on monetizing your social media.

Goals – Social media is cool, useful & free. But when it comes to monetizing, the rule of the game changes. With Facebook’s current estimated reach of 134 million adult (Over 18) users living in the United States, how can you not “Like” it? Any campaign on Facebook should revolve around these 3 goals:

• Awareness or Branding – High volume of impressions lends a hand to brand building.
  

• Clicks – CTR( click through rates) tends to range between 0.04% (something similar to display ads) and 0.2% (somewhat closer to a low search performance). But given the huge volume of impressions , even small CTRs can go a long way in generating desired level of clicks against any call to action.
  

• Actions –Facebook “Like” is just one of the many possible call to actions. In fact, when it comes to actions, I have never treated Facebook any differently than how I treat search, display or even mobile. Your options are unlimited! A “Fan Like” is just one of them. We get the most out of client campaigns when we “split actions”.

The first version is a direct response call to action.

The second version is a  call to action towards a Facebook asset ( In this case, “Fan Like”).

Targeting –  A lot of us, tend to get caught up in ad, creative and sometimes neglect the demographics. This does not hurt too much for search but when it comes to Facebook ads, you want to keep a razor sharp focus in terms of targeting.

The biggest strength of Facebook ad platform is their estimating tool. The more granular your targeting is, the better yield you leverage out of your campaigns in terms of customer and prospect engagement. The challenge however lies in how best you can narrow down your audience from those 135 million Americans and 500 million worldwide.

So..Investigate and be innovative beyond age, gender, birthdays, language & education. The biggest opportunity lies with “Interests”. Here’s a campaign that we ran for an university’s sustainability program. Given the extremely niche audience, no age limit or professional restriction, no defined levels ( it’s both a credit and a non-credit course), we knew that the key to our success will depend on how well defined we are with capturing the interests.

• The campaign has been able to draw more than 0.1% Click Through Rate( considered a runaway success from a Facebook benchmark standpoint) with less than 30% bounce rate( relevant and right on target audience) and a 3.04% goal conversion ( this is the key!). The average goal conversion from other channels for this program varied between 2-4%.
  

 

Landing page experience – Landing pages ultimately drive all online campaign goals. The more relevant and aligned the landing pages are to the ad copy, the more successful your campaign is.

Facebook is no different.

Recently, we tested 5 different ad copies and used 2 different landing pages for a travel industry campaign. The first 3 were directed to the website. We put a special offer on the landing page that reflected the offer on the ad.

 

 

The next 2 ads landed on a custom fan special tab on Facebook, which had a similar offer but additionally drove the “Like” metric. All other parameters, including targeting, remained consistent.

After a  month, the click through and goal conversion rates for campaigns directed to the website were higher than those directed to the Facebook tab. Now.. this is not typical, even within the industry. We have seen contrasting results for different clients. Hence, the need for testing landing pages in order to establish audience behavior and preferences for your particular brand.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Drive your game plan with numbers – Please measure, measure and measure your social media investments. Facebook has a strong reporting portal. But you should be ready to go beyond and derive ROI from your Facebook ads, just the same way you do for your other paid digital channels. With some exceptions, we mostly run  multi channel marketing for our clients. In this case, we ran a Facebook ad campaign and a Google Adwords campaign, all at the same time, with the same set of goals, for an energy company. Once again using custom URLs for all of our Facebook campaigns that enable us to track beyond clicks, impressions and click through, we tracked total visits to the site and goal conversion rates for both the campaigns. Here are some of the results:

• There were 39 Goal-1 conversions from Facebook (Social) compared to 64 from Google Adwords (Search).
  
• Cost per conversion for Facebook worked out much lower than Search for Goal-1.
  
• However for Goal-2 – A higher value goal and directly related to sales – conversions were higher for Google than for Facebook.
  
• Conclusion – It was easier to pull conversions for higher value goals when people are actually in an advanced state of search for similar product or services (search).
  
• Social works well for branding or small value goal conversions (catalog request, email signups etc).
  

Think about it. How in the world we could have possibly known this if we did not measure our efforts?

 

 

Finally , get into the right mindset –

1. Just because a Facebook ad is cheaper doesn’t necessarily mean it’s easy. You are, in fact, targeting an audience who’s in no frame of mind to buy from you right now, unlike search, where you are serving relevant ads to folks already looking for similar service/product. This actually makes Facebook a more difficult channel to yield results.
   
2. The above often leads to a situation when you risk mindless spending. Seeking professional help might make sense.
   
3. From a consumer standpoint, social & search marketing are aimed at two different strata of mental state for brand engagement and needs to be distinct in order to derive effective results.
   
4. From a marketer’s standpoint , due to it’s nascent nature, the investment risks for a social media channel, especially Facebook are still lot higher than any other forms of online advertising.
   

Here’s my wish list of things that I would like Facebook to change:

• Clarity on ad position and ranking parameters – How’s my ad rank determined or what parameter(s) determines the impression? What drives the rank position, now that there are 5 ads that can be served on a page? Is it just the bid ? If so, then Facebook is falling prey to the hands of the wealthy brands at the risk of losing smaller but more powerful and relevant advertisers – something Google has strategically avoided.
  
• Ad variations – How come I am just allowed a combination of only an image & text? What about mobile? How does my ad render on Facebook smart phone apps? Will video ads be ever allowed?
  
• Bidding process , quality score – We search marketers live & breadth by Quality Score. It helps us to outperform the bigger and the stronger brands with all the money power but weak ad creative, irrelevant landing pages and/or keywords. There are no set quality scores on Facebook to guide me during hours of need.
  
• What happened to keywords ? Any plans on bringing them back, now that Google ( despite all the denials) is reflecting social results on search pages?
  

I hope all of my fellow digi-marketers out there are trying or willing to try this powerful marketing platform. As always, we are here to help. Please “Like Us” on Facebook and be entered to win one free Facebook or AdWords campaign- building, monitoring and reporting using a custom URL for your brand. The offer includes all creative work for the ads in the campaign.

Share your thoughts , bring your comments and let’s get the conversation started here at Curve Trends Marketing.

Best,

Bibi

Strategic offline marketing might be the key to success in 2011

It’s been an accepted fact that the growth & brand success metrics in 2011 will be redefined. A significant portion will be determined by how effectively companies dovetail their offline marketing with the burgeoning online presence. By offline, I am not referring merely to just print, tv or radio advertising.

No matter how much we web marketers and social media strategists kill ourselves with memos of obliterating offline existence, we still prefer to go to tweetups , engage in conversations over coffee ,  make a point to attend conferences and additionally make sure those conferences have a plethora of “networking” sessions. All of these and more are part of offline marketing efforts, especially for B2B ventures, consultants and startups.

For majority of retailers, financial institutions and/or other B2C entities, any customer facing brick and morter store or a customer service division ( I hate the term call center) are part of their offline marketing mix.

In his recent blog post, Joe Pulizzi of Junta 42 made a pretty strong case of intertwining the two channels.

From a customer standpoint, offline media still holds a significant comforting appeal that can’t be neglected. Reading the morning newspaper, picking up magazines before boarding a flight or a train, watching tv at the gym or after dinner, are hard to give up habits. It’s still easier and more assuring to engage online with someone only after that first coffee meeting or a drink at the networking session, wherever it was.

Another reason to have thousands of offline or physical “web related conferences” all over the country & the world.

From a marketer’s standpoint, offline is still by & large an easier medium to get attention from the most relevant audience.

A recent article on the Business Insider reported that a comfortable 18% businesses stated they will increase their spending on print in 2011. The article does not cover how many additionally will maintain their current spending.

So for those who are thinking of completely moving out of offline presence and placing their brands at the mercy of virtual world, it might actually make more sense to start weaving a strategic offline plan into this year’s marketing mix .

I have always been a strong proponent of multi-channel marketing. But this time, I am even more determined to act.  Hence, this  opening blog topic for the new year from a hardcore “web marketer” like me.

What do you think? What else do you do other than your online efforts to get your brand name out there?

Please let us know.

Here’s wishing you a successful, multi-channel happiness filled year ahead!

A Social Mindset – Revamped!

I was fortunate enough to hear Mitch Joel of twist image and the author of Six Pixels of Separation, speak at a lunch session in Burlington, Vermont this afternoon. The intriguing hour & a half opened up a lot more questions in my mind than I had anticipated. Here’s what my search marketer brain is trying to process currently:

1. Segmentation – Rich Nadworny of Digalicious raised a timely & relevant question – “ should all brands do social media”?  According to Mitch- ” All brands should share”. What remained unanswered was – What channels & audiences should these brands engage with? Should all brands share on every digital channel that they can lay their hands on while engaging their entire audience during all times?

If not , then how do the brands segregate the audience or the channel? How to determine if the Facebook audience for a brand  is tolerant of  higher interaction frequency  or more forgiving than perhaps the twitter audience? Somewhat similar to how we deal with direct traffic vs. search traffic in search marketing world. Or is there no such norm?  Will segmenting social media channels cannibalize any other medium? How does YouTube, which adds another layer of interactivity, fit into this engagement strategy? How do you draw the line between sharing too much vs. too little?

2. HIPPO factor– Discussions revolved around what should be the sharing “guidelines” vs. “policy” for employees at workplace. But who decides on those guidelines? What is the HIPPO’s role here? Unfortunately, still today, a lot of them have rigid unidirectional mental model.  How does the fluid social strategy accommodate a HIPPO?

3. Metrics and benchmark – Justin Cutroni, the author of Analytics Talk pointed out the need for establishing benchmarks and metrics in the social media arena. Sadly, a bulk of the brands and their digitized social strategy, still does not involve metrics or measurements. One might argue that there is an overload of data available for social media tracking but how about identifying and establishing key performance indicators? Is there any action on that front? Not much from what I hear.

4. Chris Brogran’s Math– In a post earlier today, Chris Brogan predicts “Social Crash”. According to him 100 small Twitter conversations+120 emails a day+10 phone calls=13 hours of work per day. It’s true that most of us are not as connected as Chris Brogan and have less than an average of 150 connections to engage with. I somehow tend to agree on his hyper-connectivity theory. Regardless of our volume of connection, some of us are seriously hyper-connected. Is that a problem? Are we heading towards a social crash?

I hope this post doesn’t exude any cynicism because that’s exactly what it’s not supposed to do. Some of my digital beliefs and thought process were overhauled during the lunch session this afternoon. Kudos to the #btvsmb team , Rich Nadworny and Mitch Joel . Mission Accomplished!

Strategy of a Circle Campaign

Often times we tend to run single focus campaigns. It could be just an email blast or a blog or a facebook post or just a print mailing. To me, it’s an incomplete attempt to engage your audience. I am a huge believer of what I call “campaigns in tandem”.

Let’s say you are thinking about a campaign where either you are promoting an event or sending out an offer or just talking about your business in general.

The first step is of course getting your messaging nailed. In other words, we start by attempting to answer the who, what, when, & why :

• Who’s my audience?
• Why should they be interested in this particular offer/ event/news?
• What message worked with them in the past?
• What channels should I be focusing on?
• What time line am I thinking of?
• What are my goals?
• How do I drive the above audience towards these goals?
• What’s my call to action?

Next we turn to the “ how”  . With the call to action in place  , we need to drive a multi-channel or as I like to call it, multi-touch-point campaign. Here’s  just a sample of channels we could use.

Now as I mentioned this is definitely not an exhaustive list of channels. You could additionally rope in videos , word of mouth and then there is of course the press. But not all campaigns and events are press worthy. So you might need to pitch selectively.

Whatever you do, how small or big your campaign is , always think about multi-touch-points and the impact of the collective reach of these channels.

Also, always.. always.. intertwine them !

Post your blog on your facebook and tweet your facebook link. That way you take care of 3 touch points at the same time. Do the same with any LinkedIn group you are part of .

Specific campaign email blasts should include your social media links, be tagged correctly for conversion attribution and be directed to a special landing page on your web site. The web site absolutely must have a full or a partial page dedicated for the campaign.

The print piece of the campaign should tie in seamlessly with your online marketing in terms of messaging and having the social media sites listed. However, due to the higher cost involvement with print, target it to your best performing list and leave the rest of the audience in the hands of web. Trust me, they’ll be well taken care of .

If you are running a paid campaign, make sure to include an adgroup with ads reflecting the campaign message. Have it land on the campaign page of your website. I wouldn’t worry too much about SEO at this point. All the cross links coming in from different channels and the rich quality of your content is taking care of your organic ranking in the background.

Running multi-touch campaigns of course has its own challenges. The  biggest one is the amount of logistics involved. It’s critical & imperative to tie them in a timely fashion. The other big one is the conversion attribution by channel for ROI purposes. But that’s a different discussion altogether.

At the end of the day , the ROI justifies all labor.

Now it’s your turn.. How much of this are you doing? What are the challenges? Are you going beyond? Tell us all about it.

We’ll also be talking about all of this and more at the 1^st Annual Vermont Web Marketing Summit , right here in beautiful Burlington, amidst the dazzling fall colors in September.

Hope to see you all there.

Best,

Bibi



SEO For Non-Experts

There is an overflow of “to dos” and “how tos” on SEO these days. Somehow, I always feel that these posts from the experts or the gurus are primarily addressed to either a web designer or  a search marketing expert. They are great posts – no doubts about it, but somehow doesn’t address the common folks- the business owner or that custom jewelry designer or even the painter/artist/ financial expert or even the lawyer who  has a great website or so they think but just don’t know how to best get themselves found by their target audience without spending tons of dollars.

Here’s something I always share with my clients prior to kicking off a discussion on SEO. Think of Search Engines as non-intelligent ( read stupid) middle men . You have to keep them happy and at the same time provide a very simple version of your products & services to have them take it to your users. Any false move or complicated offerings and you fall out of favor.

Also, the sole purpose of your website’s SEO is to have your target audience find you and once they do, to provide them with relevant information. Please never tie in SEO with attaining the no. 1 rank in Google. That is one big wrong assumption you’ll ever make. During the process of SEO, if you manage to get to the top, that’ll be sweet . But if you follow the basic SEO principles, there is no reason for you to not get into the first page for any relevant search.

So here’s a few simple ways to serve your offering to your middlemen ( read Search Engines) in order to have them take your website to your target audience.

1. PAGE TITLES– A page title tells the user but more importantly the Search Engine, in a few words what the website is all about. Here’s an example of how a title is served for a website ( www.pinkribbon.com) for a search against “pink ribbon”. Ideally, one should always create a unique title for each page on their site. Also titles should be brief & very relevant to the business.

Here’s how  your designer will build your title code:

<title>Pink Ribbon (Official Website) International Breast Cancer Awareness and Funding</title>

Now, notice how the page title is served. Very long page titles tend to get cropped off. It’s always optimal to use between 7-9 words for page titles.

2.URLs –  An URL is your web address. www.mycompany.com is your home page url  and then for different pages you have an extension of your home page url . For example www.mycompany.com/product1.htm is the url for your first product and www.mycompany.com/aboutus.htm is the url for the about us page.

• My golden rule – keep your url simple & logical, something which the users can memorize after looking at it once.

• Use words in your url instead of number or in other words instead of www.mycompany.com/ page1.htm , use www. mycompany.com/seo-basics.htm and make it relevant to the information provided on the page.

• Use dash instead of underscore to connect any words in your url . So instead of www.mycompany.com/ lifestyle_products_for_women .htm use www.mycompany.com/lifestyle-products-for-women.htm. According to Matt Cutts , the head of Google’s Webspam team , search engines just like it better. Let’s keep it at that.

• Use one version of an url to reach any page. If you find users are using different urls to reach the same page on your website, have your web designer set up a what is called 301 redirect to your preferred url. That way all urls pointing to the same content get redirected to just 1 master url that you think is the most relevant to that page.

3. WRITE UNIQUE DESCRIPTIONS FOR EACH PAGE ON YOUR WEBSITE

Let’s first look at how page descriptions appear to your audience when they search for you. The text under the title , known in the  technical world as “snippet” is basically the description of the page of your website that is served against a query. In this case the query was “ Spain Vacation”.

And here’s the code for it that you’ll have your web designer build. Note, how too long a description tends to get cropped off. Once more, keep your descriptions simple, short & relevant to the page.

<meta name="description" content="Spain holiday rentals.
Villas, apartments and country homes for rent in Spain
.Spain holiday lettings in Spanish holiday homes in
Spanish villas in Spain holiday Accommodation
for rent in Malaga,Alicante,Barcelona,Costa del
Sol,Costa Blanca,Costa Brava and mallorca" />

4. EASY NAVIGATION –

• Have a text based navigation for your users. Avoid creating complex navigation links like linking every page to every other page on the website.

• It’ s a good idea to control navigation from page to page using text links instead of images. Avoid website navigation through images, animations or drop down menus. Sometimes search engines do not handle flash or javascript very well. A simple sitemap page with links to all of the pages on your site is very useful.

• Have your website designers create “an XML Sitemap File” for your site. The XML sitemap file will help to ensure that search engines discover the pages on your site. Please make sure there are no broken links on your sitemap. Create a breadcrumb navigation.

• A breadcrumb navigation is a row of internal links at the top or bottom of the page that allows visitors to see the path of navigation and quickly navigate back to a previous section or the home page. Here’s how a bread crumb navigation looks like

• Customized error page – Users will occasionally come to a page that doesn’t exist on your site, either by following a broken link or typing in the wrong URL. It’s called a “ 404 error “.Having a custom 404 page that directs users back to a working page on your site can greatly improve a user’s experience. Try & use humor for the 404 error page. Somehow humor helps to heal any bruised feelings. Here are 100 ideas on funny & unusual 404 error pages.

5. PROMOTE YOUR WEBSITE

• Paid search is the SEO marketing option over which you have the most control. Though by no means it’s a requirement for good SEO , it’s an attractive option to have available to you. The vast majority of businesses do best when they use a holistic approach to SEO, combining elements of organic and paid search with a healthy dose of good writing & usability.

• Do not forget your offline promotions – your print collaterals, business cards , any other printed mailings should always have your web URL printed.

• Social media – utilize the social media engagement opportunities. Get into twitter, facebook and blogs. A few words of caution though :

i.      Do not publicize everything & anything that’s happening at your end. Feed quality updates on these forums. It’s easy to get lost.
ii.      Do not do it for the sake of  doing it. Jump in only if you can sustain the inertia. It’s nothing worse than a twitter page with no updates in 6 months or a blog with no entries in the last year maybe. I see that happening with a lot of companies and it makes me very nervous.

6. CONTENT IS KING – The entire process of web search is text based. The search engines care for how much text you have on your site, how it’s formatted & of course how relevant it is to your business goals and the product on that page. Your site’s text needs to be compelling, clear, focused and directed to your users. It also needs to be formatted so that the search engines can read it. Designing your site around your visitors’ needs while making sure your site is easily accessible to search engines usually produces positive results.

7. KEYWORD SELECTION & PLACEMENT IS CRITICAL. It works when used for usability purpose over the entire site rather than stuffing it in your title or page description. There are multitude of free keyword tools available to help you select the relevant keywords for your target audience. Keep them in mind when creating or revising your content. I am a huge fan of Google’s Search Based Keyword Tool.

8. LINKS PLAY A CRUCIAL ROLE – Search Engines are hugely fond of links. Links that exist on your website can be broken down as Internal links –are how you connect different sections of your web site. External links – where you connect to contents in other websites.For both cases, use quality anchor text to link the content. An anchor text should provide some information on what the link is all about. Avoid using texts like “ click here” , “click this page” or “click this article”.
Here’s how anchor text is built by your designers . Please note, how a good anchor text has a phrase related to the content it’s linking to.
<a href=”http://mycompany.com/seo-basics.htm”&gt; Here are the SEO basics </a>

9. OPTIMIZE THE IMAGES ON YOUR WEB SITE :

Images like text needs to be optimized for Search Engines & better user experience. Here’s a check list for the right image usage in your website:

• • Make sure all images on your website have not only a distinct name but an alt tag . The “alt” tag allows you to specify alternative text for the image if it cannot be displayed for some reason. If a user is viewing your site on a browser that doesn’t support images, the contents of the alt attribute provide information about the picture.

• Make sure your web designer use brief, but descriptive filenames and alt text. Avoid using file names like pic1.jpg or image1.gif. Describe them wherever possible. Same with alt tags. Use short & descriptive tags. Do not stuff keywords in your tags or image file names.

10. MEASURE YOUR EFFORTS– I am a big fan of measurement. Try to get insights into how users reach and behave on your site. Use a free tool like Google Analytics to
• Discover the most popular content on your site
• Measure the impact of optimizations you make to your site
Here’s a post I wrote on my blog on how your business goals should be aligned with insights drawn from your web analytics.

Search engines deal with every page individually. So each landing page will need to be optimized for overall optimization of your site. However, just make sure you don’t go too crazy with this strategy, or it will have the reverse effect and get flagged as spam.  Keep in mind that moderation is always good when it comes to SEO!
Does this help you to get started? Do you monitor your results? How has your optimization affected your business goals? Please share it with us.
Till then,
Happy Optimizing!
-Bibi