Using social media as a marketing tool is one thing that a lot of business owners don’t look at. Do not be one of these businesses! Use social media to help your business grow. Your business can seriously improve its customer base if you use social media marketing properly. This article contains some essential tips to help you to get your social media marketing campaign started.

You need to add entertaining content in order to get people to interact regularly on your Facebook page. Just check out some YouTube videos, some funny articles, links to joke sites, and other potential pieces of content. Maintain a professional demeanor while increasing the communication between your company and your customers.

It’s important that you respond to questions and comments promptly if you want to use social media marketing successfully. Take the time to look for these each time you visit your site.

To get good results from marketing through social media, create useful links that bind all your sites together. Include links if you have a blog where your consumers can see you on Twitter, YouTube and also if they want to like you at Facebook. Include links to your FB page and your blog in your Twitter profile. Link your marketing across different social media platforms for increased customer traffic.

Here are some steps to help you make the most of your campaigns in social media marketing. Focus your energy on the big sites, such as Google Plus, Facebook and Twitter. By directing all resources, you are able to develop a better marketing campaign which can lead to a more successful business.

Using social media marketing means being able to tackle each website’s specific functions. One good way might be to click on the postage time of a particular tweet. This will put the tweet on its own permalink. This is the perfect way to set up a linkage web that goes from one specific tweet, rather than the entire stream or profile.

To motivate people to share the information you post, make it easy to get even for those that are not in your target demographic. Use humor and avoid technical terms in your posts. Although your target audience may understand technical terms, your followers may not share the information with their friends if they think the information is too difficult to understand.

Look for opportunities to combine print ads with social media. Whether your print ads consist of publications, posters or flyers, you should always include a link to your social media profiles. You can also upload images of your print ad campaigns to online photo albums. Show your print campaigns online to finish the cross-promotion!

The frequency with which you update your social media status should change with the situation. If you have a new campaign or product, frequent updates will be expected by your visitors. If you find yourself struggling to find new content to post, you may want to think about decreasing how often you update your status.

If you use these tips from this article you can find a way to market your business so you can crush the opponents. Keep your content fresh, current and updated, and continue to develop your marketing strategy over time.

Do you need a new way to stay in touch with your audience? Many options for reaching potential customers exist, though they all have specific costs and negative aspects. Social media allows businesses to reach many people at once. This article will help you establish some of the important ideas and routines needed to accomplish that goal.

Regularly review the sites in your niche that get the most visitors. Study them to get ideas for your own social media pages. What kind of updates do they share? What sort of page layout do they use? Do they have apps? These pages can serve as a base for designing a page that uses the most successful strategies for your niche, but still differentiates your brand from everything else out there.

To entice consumers into reading what you have to say, come up with a catchy headline. You should ask a question they may be interested in. Choose words that grab readers’ attention and make strong statements. For example, why say your products are “good” when you know that they’re “fantastic”? The more curious people are, the more likely they are to read what you’ve shared instead of passing it over.

Educate yourself on social networking itself. Maybe you are already familiar with Facebook, but it is best to know that marketing through a social media site is a lot different than just chatting up your friends. Take the time to learn what has worked for other professionals.

You can also add a review area to your site and post it to your Facebook profile. That will let visitors write reviews to share. You will be able to edit these reviews and remove the ones you do not like. You might even organize an event, such as a contest, to increase your number of reviews.

To attract lots of visitors to your social media page, make sure your content is always fresh and interesting. Write instructions on how to complete a task that many people frequently struggle with. Write honest reviews of other company’s products. Quality content will be shared across social media, so make sure yours is top notch!

Do not begin marketing on social networking sites until you come up with a plan. What kind of layout do you want? Who is going to manage your page? Like other marketing campaign, create a timeline to accomplish any goals. If you adhere as closely as possible to your plan, your social media marketing efforts will be successful.

If you own a small business always represent yourself with social media. Auto-responders can frustrate your clients and harm your social media presence. They can send messages which look like spam, irritating followers and hurting your company.

Start using social media marketing methods to promote your business. You can use social media to reach a whole new audience and improve your bottom line. The business owner is still responsible when it comes to supplying quality products and services, but the tips provided can help you create a great company.

connections

Many potential customers log in and spend many hours each day on social networking websites. People rarely spend a day without logging onto favorite social media websites. How is it that you can make use of the potential audience there? The advice from this article will help you learn what to do.

By using their cell phones, Facebook Places lets the users check in to the places they go. Offer your customers a discount or freebie for mentioning your social media profile to the cashier. Foursquare is another popular networking site that can help you to promote your business.

Devise a plan before attacking social media marketing. Figure out who will manage the pages, what type of layout you want, and how much time you would like to invest into it. Give yourself a timeline as you would with any other campaign. Always follow the plan as closely as possible and you will win with SMM.

Your social media marketing efforts will be more successful with judicious use of advertisements. Position the ads and images in a place that is readily visible to site visitors. If the ad isn’t in a good location, most users will pass it over, and you will not get much of a boost in sales as a result.

Read up on social networking so you become knowledgeable about the topic. Perhaps you already have a Facebook profile, but you should always remember that using social media professionally is different than using these sites to talk to your friends. You can locate many helpful tools all over the Internet, as well as many people that are happy to help out.

Social media is a great way to draw in new customers. Inform them of any new discounts, sales, or locations you have coming up. Put printable coupons on your Facebook page to lure your Facebook friends into your stores. Give people a reason to believe that becoming your friend on Facebook will be a good thing for them.

Always choose your words wisely and be careful what you say on any of your social media pages. All the things that you say can have an impact on your business. Therefore, never speak ill of other people or businesses because this could come back to bite you.

In order to get the most out of marketing through social media sites, a good grasp of the functions and operations of each website is vital. A good example is clicking on a tweet’s postage time, which thus isolates that tweet into an individual permalink. This is useful if you want to direct users to a specific content item, rather than your social media profile in general.

Merge the world of email marketing and social media. Add social media buttons to your emails. Say that customers should contact you there if they have questions they want you to answer personally. You could also encourage people to join your newsletter by posting a link to the registration page for instance.

Daily users of social media may become daily visitors to your sites as well. These suggestions will help you to get the most from your social media marketing efforts. Your traffic will increase, and your content will be seen when you use social media as a marketing tool.

WebDevMarketers in 2015 will have a record-high number of technologies, channels, and tactics to choose from. The first step toward a solid strategy is finding focus amid the noise and increasing chatter, whether that noise is coming from a social network claiming to own the most valuable audience or a declaration that the one executive is now the chief officer of something new.  There is an ever-increasing number of responsibilities and strategies based on the new technologies and platforms.   Marketers must keep a strict focus on the metrics that matter to their business.  Revenue growth was the number-one metric for surveyed marketers.

Revenue growth will continue be the primary metric that marketers use in 2015 to qunatify success, while customer satisfaction is a close second: 30% of marketers say that customer satisfaction is one of their top metrics. The third most important metric was a tie between ROI, customer retention
rates, and customer acquisition, demonstrating that 2015 focus will largely center on attracting customers and engaging them long-term.

With so many technologies demanding substantial time and effort, marketers must evaluate which tools will be most effective for their unique business goals. There is a long list of potential channels and strategies to invest in and a longer list of marketers who currently use them. .

There’s about to be a mad rush among e-commerce merchants to remove social sharing icons from product pages.

A new study from website conversion and testing platform Visual Website Optimizer (VWO) on Finnish e-commerce retailer Taloon.com found that by removing social sharing buttons from its product pages, the retailer experienced an 11.9 percent higher conversion rate over pages that contained them. That got your attention, didn’t it?

Taloon’s Jani Uusi-Pantti ran an A/B test for one week to answer whether the presence of social sharing icons had any impact on the main call to action before implementing the change on the website. The answer seems to be a resounding “definitely.”

This really flies in the face of most of the social media research available today. For example, most marketers believe social sharing is effective in fostering and supporting conversations with consumers, and nearly everyone is on these social media sites, right? So what was the problem? Why did Taloon’s social sharing buttons provide such a poor result?

VWO and Taloon proffered a few possible reasons the sharing buttons might have had a negative impact, including a general distraction from the main goal as well as negative social proof (most of the product pages had no shares).

Does this convince you to remove the social sharing buttons on your website?

 

WebDevSetting up a website is the very first step of an Internet marketing campaign, and the success or failure of your site depends greatly on how specifically you have defined your website goals. If you don’t know what you want your site to accomplish, it will most likely fail to accomplish anything. Without goals to guide you in developing and monitoring your website, all your site will be is an online announcement that you are in business.

If you expect your site to stimulate some form of action, whether it is visitors filling out a form so arepresentative can contact them, or purchasing a product, there are steps you can take to insure that your website is functioning at peak efficiency. One of the first indicators of how well your site is working for you is finding out the number of visitors in a given period of time. A good baseline measurement is a month in which you haven’t been doing any unusual offline promotional activities.

However, just because hoards of people have passed through your gates does not mean your site is successful. Usually, you want those visitors to actually do something there. It is equally important to monitor the number of visitors to your site who made a purchase. This figure is called the site conversion rate, and it is an essential element of the efficacy of your website.

To find the site conversion rate, take the number of visitors per month and figure out the percentage of them that actually performed the action your site is set up for. For example, if you had 2,000 hits to your site, but only 25 of them purchased your product, your site conversion rate equals 1.25%. To get this figure, take your number of visitors and divide that figure by the number of visitors who made a purchase. Then divide that result by 100 (25 ?00 X 100). If your website is set-up to get visitors to fill out a form, make sure to then figure out what the difference is between your site conversion rate and your sales conversion rate. This is because not everyone who fills out your form will actually become your customer. However, whether your site is set-up to sell a service or product, or to get the visitor to fill out a form, the site conversion rate will measure the success or failure of your website whenever you make changes to the site.

You may find that you need to implement some additional marketing strategies if you find that traffic to your site is extremely low. There are several effective methods to improve the flow of traffic to your website, particularly launching a search engine optimization campaign. This campaign is targeted at increasing your position in search engine results so that consumers can find your pages faster and easier. You can either research the steps you need to take to improve your search engine rankings, or employ a search engine optimization company to do the work for you. In either case, after your have improved your search engine positions, make sure you keep on top of them by regular monitoring and adjusting of your efforts to maintain high positions.

Another factor to examine is how easy it is for a visitor to your website to accomplish the action the site is set-up for. For example, if your goal is for the visitor to fill out a form, is this form easily accessible, or does the visitor have to go through four levels to get to it? If it’s too difficult to get to, the customer may just throw in the towel and move on to another site. Make sure your buttons are highly visible, and the path to your form or ordering page quickly accessible.

Finally, have a professional evaluate the copy on your website. The goal is, of course, to get your visitor to make a purchase or fill out your form. Website copy must be specifically geared to your online campaign and not just a cut and paste job from your company brochure. The right copy can make the difference between profit and loss in your online campaign.

 

493799459Since search engines are the first stop for people on the Internet looking for goods or services, the position your website appears in search results is an important factor. If your URL shows up far down the results list, the chances of the consumer never finding you increase incrementally.

Once you achieve a high search engine position, it is essential that you make sure you maintain the high ranking you have worked so hard to achieve. This means you must come up with a strategy to monitor your search engines positions. This strategy is crucial to the success of any marketing campaign. Think of your search engine positions as your online portfolio. Would you let your stock portfolio be ruled by chance and market fluctuations, or would you keep close tabs on your stocks so you could buy and sell when the time is right? This is the way you must consider your search engines positions.

Be aware that at first, after you have launched your search engine campaign and done all the right things to increase your rankings, you will most likely see a continual upward climb. What you need to be on the lookout for is the moment that upward climb reaches a plateau. When this happens,
your search engine position campaign moves into stage two, the monitoring and protecting stage.

In stage two, do not be concerned about the short-term fluctuations in your positions. These are similar to the subtle rising and falling of stocks in a portfolio. Short-term movement is an integral part of the whole process. It’s the long-term changes that you must watch for and prepare to act on immediately. Analyzing the long-term trends of search engines positions is imperative. The way in which search engines rank websites may change at the drop of hat. If you are unaware of these changes – many of which are subtle yet can be deadly to your ranking – your position may drop to the bottom of the list before you can get your bearings. To prevent this kind of precipitous drop, you must create a system to monitor your positions on a monthly basis. Devise a chart to keep tabs on your top ranking positions or your top pages, and make sure to watch “the market” closely.

Each search engine uses a formula to compute website rankings. When a search engine changes this formula in any way, it may raise or lower your ranking. Some search engines use a number of different formulas, rotating them so that a formula doesn’t become overused or outdated. Depending on which formula is being applied, your search engine position may suddenly drop or rise in rank significantly. Therefore, you must check your positions frequently in order to catch when a search engine changes formulas and what effect it has on your positions.

You must also deal with your competition – a crucial factor you must always be vigilant about. Your competitor’s position may suddenly rise, automatically lowering your position. Or their position may drop, pushing your position higher. Each month, expect position changes due to the
continual changes that are occurring in your competitor’s position, and be prepared to adjust your marketing strategy to compensate for decreased rankings. Monitoring these fluctuations will also give you vital information about how to improve your website to increase your position in search
results.

Of course, you must discern what the most popular search engines are in order for your monitoring efforts to be effective. Right now, there are ten popular search engines that direct most of Internet traffic to your sites. The challenge you face is that these top ten may change from
month to month. This means that your must not only monitor your search engine positions, but you must also keep track of the ranking popularity of the search engines you are monitoring. Find out which search engines people use most frequently every month and be sure to live in the present!

People are fickle about their favorite search engines, and it takes constant vigilance to follow their dalliances. The earch engines they loved when you first launched your campaign may be old news in the next few months. You must adjust your list of engines according to the whims of the Internet users. Check out http://www.searchenginewatch.com/reports/netratings.html for a current list of website favorites.

Another factor to monitor carefully is a sudden drop of your positions in all search engines. This is not the same as monthly fluctuations – this is a neon red warning sign!

It could mean a number of different things. It all your search engine positions have plummeted, it may indicate that search engines spiders – those sneaky programs that seek out your site and rank their positions – have found some type of problem with your website. If you have recently changed the code, for instance, the spider may become utterly confused and consequently drop your positions disastrously. If a spider creeps up on your website when it is down for adjustments or changes, you may actually disappear from a search engine index entirely. Or a search engine may drastically change its formula, and suddenly all of your website come up as irrelevant. If that search engine is a current favorite, it may create a domino effect, causing all of your position to drop in all search engines.

Some search engines rely on the results from other search engines, and it is vital that you know which engines these are and keep track of all the engines they influence. The biggest problem here is that search engines will sometimes change affiliations, and this can create a major shift in the geography of the Internet. For example, recently Yahoo decided to display only results gleaned from Google. So you must not only monitor your own positions, but you must keep abreast of seismic shifts in the landscape of the Internet
as a whole.

Finally, pay attention to your keywords. Keywords are the foundation bricks of the entire search engine system, and they demand individual scrutiny in your monitoring efforts. If you have found that a number of your positions have plummeted, it may mean that a page of your website has become invisible or inaccessible to search engine spiders. Or the competition for that particular keyword or phrase has recently rocketed into outer space. In either case, you must act quickly and efficiently to regain lost ground.

Your search engine marketing campaign is an investment. If costs you time and money on a continual basis. Protect this investment as diligently as you would your financial portfolio. In the same way, track your positions from an objective perspective, and monitor your positions on a regular basis.

Make sure your time and effort reap rewards by keeping your eye on the big picture – your long-termmarketing campaign.

166150527Analyzing your web traffic statistics can be an invaluable tool for a number of different reasons. But before you can make full use of this tool, you need to understand how to interpret the data.

Most web hosting companies will provide you with basic web traffic information that you then have to interpret and make pertinent use of. However, the data you receive from your host company can be overwhelming if you don’t understand how to apply it to your particular business and website.

Let’s start by examining the most basic data – the average visitors to your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. These figures are the most accurate measure of your website’s activity. It would appear on the surface that the more traffic you see recorded, the better you can assume your website is doing, but this is an inaccurate perception. You must also look at the behavior of your visitors once they come to your website to accurately gauge the effectiveness of your site.

There is often a great misconception about what is commonly known as “hits” and what is really effective, quality traffic to your site. Hits simply means the number of information requests received by the server. If you think about the fact that a hit can simply equate to the number of graphics per page, you will get an idea of how overblown the concept of hits can be. For example, if your homepage has 15 graphics on it, the server records this as 15 hits, when in reality we are talking about a single visitor checking out a single page on your site. As you can see, hits are not useful in analyzing your website traffic.

The more visitors that come to your website, the more accurate your interpretation will become. The greater the traffic is to your website, the more precise your analysis will be of overall trends in visitor behavior. The smaller the number of visitors, the more a few anomalous visitors can distort the analysis. The aim is to use the web traffic statistics to figure out how well or how poorly your site is working for your visitors. One way to determine this is to find out how long on average your visitors spend on your site. If the time spent is relatively brief, it usually indicates an underlying problem. Then the challenge is to figure out what that problem is.

It could be that your keywords are directing the wrong type of visitors to your website, or that your graphics are confusing or intimidating, causing the visitor to exit rapidly. Use the knowledge of how much time visitors are spending on your site to pinpoint specific problems, and after you fix those problems, continue to use time spent as a gauge of how effective your fix has been.

Additionally, web traffic stats can help you determine effective and ineffective areas of your website. If you have a page that you believe is important, but visitors are exiting it rapidly, that page needs attention. You could, for example, consider improving the link to this page by making the link more noticeable and enticing, or you could improve the look of the page or the ease that your visitors can access the necessary information on that page.

If, on the other hand, you notice that visitors are spending a lot of time on pages that you think are less important, you might consider moving some of your sales copy and marketing focus to that particular page.

As you can see, these statistics will reveal vital information about the effectiveness of individual pages, and visitor habits and motivation. This is essential information to any successful Internet marketing campaign.

Your website undoubtedly has exit pages, such as a final order or contact form. This is a page you can expect your visitor to exit rapidly. However, not every visitor to your site is going to find exactly what he or she is looking for, so statistics may show you a number of different exit pages. This is normal unless you notice a exit trend on a particular page that is not intended as an exit page. In the case that a significant percentage of visitors are
exiting your website on a page not designed for that purpose, you must closely examine that particular page to discern what the problem is. Once you pinpoint potential weaknesses on that page, minor modifications in content or graphic may have a significant impact on the keeping
visitors moving through your site instead of exiting at the wrong page.

After you have analyzed your visitor statistics, it’s time to turn to your keywords and phrases. Notice if particular keywords are directing a specific type of visitor to your site. The more targeted the visitor – meaning that they find what they are looking for on your site, and even better, fill out your contact form or make a purchase – the more valuable that keyword is.

However, if you find a large number of visitors are being directed – or should I say misdirected – to your site by a particular keyword or phrase, that keyword demands adjustment. Keywords are vital to bringing quality visitors to your site who are ready to do business with you. Close analysis of the keywords your visitors are using to find your site will give you a vital understanding of your visitor’s needs and motivations.

Finally, if you notice that users are finding your website by typing in your company name, break open the champagne! It means you have achieved a significant level of brand recognition, and this is a sure sign of burgeoning success.