by Elizabeth Hines | Feb 15, 2016 | Blog, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
When you are posting on social media could be as important as what you’re posting.
Timing is everything, and that statement especially holds true when it comes to posting content to social media. If you are sending out your message and nobody is there to see it, you are that proverbial tree falling in the forest; you did not make a sound. Your post had little to no impact.
So, even if you are putting in the time and effort to craft informative blog posts, tweets with just the right message, or Facebook posts that inspire more than just page likes, you still are not getting the most exposure you can out of social media.
Data that delivers results
According to research by social media scientist Dan Zarrella, when you are posting your content can be almost as important as what you are posting. Luckily, there is an ample amount of analytical data out there regarding optimal times to post on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram.
For example, looking at broad-based Twitter engagement, research suggests that users go up by 30 percent on weekends, speculatively because more people are on their computers, smartphones, and tablets during their free time. On weekdays, this peaks at 4 p.m. EST, perhaps as people check into social media as the workday begins to wind down and they are seeking a diversion.
Some studies suggest that Twitter use often peaks slightly earlier, between 1 and 3 p.m. on weekdays, and this might be attributed to people who take an extended lunch break.
LinkedIn studies show that the optimum times to post content are Tuesday through to Thursday during normal work hours. Also noted: Tuesday 10 to 11 a.m. is known to get the most clicks and shares.
When it comes to Facebook, another marketing study suggests that there is quite a wide range of variables, and it is really based upon your audience. But, in general, the best time to post on Facebook is 3 p.m. on Wednesday. Other popular times include 1 to 4 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays, and lunchtime (12 to 1 p.m.) on weekends.
There are poor times to post on Facebook, too, such as weekends before 8 a.m. and after 8 p.m., according to SurePayroll’s research.
Research supports that B2B content generally performs 16% better during typical business hours, while B2C content performs 17% better on weekends.
Your (personal) optimal posting time
But, the problem with these suggestions is that they are just statistical generalizations of when might be the optimal time for posting content. What you need is analytics that are specific to your particular followers. Your audience maybe a different demographic than those represented in these studies, and when they are reading, sharing, or retweeting may actually surprise you.
You can access personalized data regarding the social media habits of your readers and followers through analytic programs like Google Analytics and sites like Tweriod. There are a wealth of available free tools, which provide valuable insight regarding your audience.
Here are a few to consider:
- Tweriod is a free Twitter tool that helps you know the best time to tweet. The free analysis will analyze up to 1000 of your followers. Tweriod is not part of Twitter but rather is something you may access to better understand your followers’ schedules and interests, like what they have retweeted.
- Followerwonk can help you to individuate your potential Twitter audience by learning not only who follows your competitors, but who commonly retweets their content. You can also look at your own personal audience and discover what content they like, share, and maybe even link to from other posts, as well as when they are most active on social media.
- Facebook Insights tells you the best times and days to post content by accessing your page’s insights in the posts sections. In the graph section for “When Your Fans Are Online,” you can see the days and times when your fans are using Facebook. This data is constantly updated.
- Google Analytics provides insights, analytics, and data regarding your website, and it lets you do more than measure sales and conversions. It also gives insights into how visitors find and use your site, what they are clicking on, and how to keep them coming back.
Many people still play a guessing game when it comes to deciding the best time to post their content for the most impact. But, studies suggest the average life of a tweet is only about 18 minutes. So, if you tweet something during an inactive period for your Twitter audience, you are probably wasting your time.
Posting the right content, at the right time, can make the difference between getting valuable comments, shares, and clicks on your links, and it can provide a myriad of valuable new leads.
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by Elizabeth Hines | Feb 10, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Strategy
A good call to action will help potential leads feel compelled to choose your offer over your competitors’ offers.
If you feel your marketing campaign falls short in generating quality leads, you are not alone. Typically one in 10 marketing professionals questions the effectiveness of their lead generation methods. While you may have some of the components of a strong campaign in place, it is possible that you are leaving out a very important ingredient for success: a call to action (CTA).
CTAs are vital in any tactical marketing campaign. This is where you actually ask for your potential customer or client to take some form of action that moves them one step closer to your objective: connecting them to your company.
Say that you offer potential customers a high-value offer — like an ebook, whitepaper, free consultation, or discount — as a lead nurturing tactic. If you do not include an actual call to action, the customers have no direction for obtaining the offer, and you are probably missing out on a myriad of quality leads.
What makes a good call to action?
Not all CTAs are created equal. You are competing with every other brand in a fight for the attention (and choice) of consumers, so it’s critical that prospects feel compelled to choose your offer over your competitors’.
- Calls to action are the secret sauce to driving people to your offers. If your CTAs aren’t effective at capturing people’s attention and persuading them to the click, then no matter how impressive your offer is, it is rendered useless.
- Typically, a good call to action can be used on product pages (non-landing pages), in display ads, email, social media, direct mail, and pretty much anywhere you can market your offer.
There are several tricks of the trade to creating a highly productive CTA:
Location, location, location
Just like with important news, the placement of your call to action should be “above the fold,” or, high enough on the page so the reader will not have to scroll to see it. It is also good to have a second CTA located further down within the offer.
Clarity is key
Do not try to be so clever with your words that your offer gets lost in translation. State the offer very clearly and be specific. Don’t just say “download now,” but rather, “Download you free e-book.”
Make the CTA stand out
Choose contrasting colors for your call to action so that it draws the attention of the eye and does not blend in on the page.
Link to a landing page
Send potential customers to a targeted landing page that is relevant to what they are looking for. Your call to action should send them to a page that will convert them into a lead. Landing pages are one of the most important elements of lead generation. In fact, according to MarketingSherpa’s research, landing pages are effective for 94% of B2B and B2C companies.
There are many innovative methods to increasing the number of quality leads a marketing plan generates. The trick is in knowing how. For more proven tips, download The 30 Greatest Tips & Tricks That Will Change The Way You Nurture Leads to learn the best ways to improve the productivity of your marketing strategies.
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by Elizabeth Hines | Feb 9, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Leadership, Marketing, Strategy
Identifying content spokespeople outside of executive management can improve the product and alleviate C-suite stress.
Often people think they’re the only ones who can do their job or, at the very least, that they’re the ones who have been doing it and know it best. And some C-suite executives forget the people working around them — when, in fact, those are the very employees who could help them do their jobs better.
Joe Fuld, president of political and advocacy advertising agency The Campaign Workshop in Washington, D.C., has wise words on the subject: “As a business owner, I like to think that the business has a lot to do with me, but I have realized it has just as much to do with the people who work with me.”
Months ago I asked an account manager to be on a call with me to discuss an editorial calendar with a client. She was new to the account, so I thought it would be beneficial for her to listen in. A half-hour into the call, I saw her notepad with at least 20 new ideas for articles, white papers, and blog posts. By the end of the meeting, the list had grown to 40, and they weren’t just simple ideas — they were complex, thoughtful, and fresh. This wasn’t her role, but she dove in and helped to create the strongest editorial calendar to date. The client was pleased; I was thrilled.
The same experience can be true for a management team Strategically identified content spokespeople assisting senior management could help alleviate some of the stress C-suite executives face — and add new ideas to the pot.
Senior management are often extremely busy and may not be hearing the breadth of information and news that some of the lower-level professionals are exposed to. It’s true that too many cooks in the kitchen can spoil the meal, but, if chosen strategically, employees acting as content spokespeople could make your life easier and make the product better. Their investment and loyalty could also grow immensely.
John Hall, CEO of Influence & Co, writes about the subject in the Harvard Business Review. Here are his two suggestions on how to find the right people to fill the role of content spokespeople.
Identify content spokespeople
Identify employees who are comfortable teaching and demonstrate natural leadership qualities. The account manager mentioned earlier is the perfect example: engaging, patient, knowledgeable, curious, professional, trustworthy, and tactful. Her efforts always appear to be helpful, instead of boastful or misplaced.
Assess knowledge base
Hall suggests gathering and documenting information from content spokespeople. He does this by a Q&A process and brain dump exercises. He suggests keeping this information in a central location — a knowledge bank — for future use. From the knowledge bank content can be gathered and synthesized into an article or blog.
Hall says that the risk is minimal, since the C-suite can always have final editing power, so even if a content spokesperson says something off-color, the information won’t get out to the customers.
The involvement and collaboration in this process is incredibly valuable for everyone involved. Hall claims, “By embracing the unique experiences of your employees outside the C-suite and showcasing their diversity through thought leadership content, you’re strengthening your brand’s authentic, human connection to your audience.”
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by Elizabeth Hines | Feb 8, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Strategy
Enticing potential customers with exclusive, high-value offers is an important component of lead nurturing and lead generation.
Your strategic marketing objectives boil down to one basic mission: to generate a high volume of quality leads. This will drive tomorrow’s revenue and an increase in sales and profits. Yet, only one in 10 marketing professionals feel they have an effective lead-generation strategy in place.
Since a productive lead-generation campaign consists of many interconnecting layers, it can be hard to pinpoint what is limiting your success. But, if you are seeking more leads for your business (and who isn’t?), consider these proven tactics for achieving successful lead generation.
First, for tactical reasons, your overall campaign must contain these components:
- Something To Offer. An offer is content that is perceived to be high in value. Offers include ebooks, whitepapers, free consultations, product demonstrations, or discounts.
- A Call to Action. This is either a small paragraph of text, an image, or a button that links the potential customer to a landing page to download what you have to offer.
- An Awesome Landing Page. This is a specific page designed to allow the potential client to download your offer.
- Forms to Gather the Lead Info. Essentially, they get the download; you get their contact information.
These four valuable components set the stage for capturing exponentially more lead information than ever before to grow your business.
Creating the Most Inspiring Offers
Just because you have identified leads does not mean they will convert to customers. Lead nurturing helps build a relationship with your potential customers, gain their trust, and raise their awareness about your business and products. The four steps above are critical to the lead nurturing process. But, unless you offer something that your potential customers want, you will not get past the first one.
So, what entices people to click “yes” to an offer?
The majority of us want anything that is considered exclusive, scarce, or in high demand. Suddenly, something becomes more desirable if it appears like we are getting the scoop on a special deal or valuable information.
The higher the perceived value of your offer, the more irresistible it becomes. So, whether your offer is whitepapers, downloads, free trials, memberships, or sales promotions, these irresistible elements can overcome a lead’s typical friction, doubt, or concern.
The elements to creating a feeling of exclusivity and special value in your offer include:
- Limited-time offers. This creates scarcity to your offer.
- Limited quantities. What you are offering is unique and has exclusive value, and procrastination may mean missing out.
- “X number of people have seized this offer.” Human nature is to follow what others do. State how many people have downloaded your offer or benefited from your information to encourage others to do the same.
- Content that matches current news trends. Content tailored to whatever is trending in the news (or to whatever is in high demand at the moment) is more relevant and relatable to potential customers, who are likely engaged with those trends in other ways as well.
- A title that hooks interest. People actually do judge a book by its cover and will not want to see more if you bore them.
- Several Call to Actions, offered at different stages. Pursue buyers at different levels of readiness with different CTAs. People often do their own research before even engaging with a sales rep, and every prospect is at a different stage of exploration. Develop different offers at different stages in the buying cycle, and include a primary and secondary CTA to these offers on various pages throughout your site.
- Avoid professional jargon. Terms and phrases that have been over-used and abused are meaningless and won’t hook potential buyers. They include: groundbreaking, cutting-edge, scalable, flexible, and robust, just to name a few.
To further ensure enticing more leads, your offer should provide something that is considered of high-value. Not all offers are created equal. Some “formats” perform better than others at converting leads. Here are a few of the top-ranked offers, in order of performance, when it comes to generating leads:
- E-books or guides
- Templates or presentations
- Research and reports (e.g., State of Inbound Marketing)
- Whitepapers
- Kits (multiple offers packaged together)
- Live webinars
- On-demand videos
- Blogs (including offers in the nav or sidebar)
- Blog posts (if there is a CTA in the post)
There are many more ways you can capture successful leads and fine-tune your marketing plans in a way that turns leads into customers. For more proven tips, download The 30 Greatest Tips & Tricks That Will Change The Way You Nurture Leads, which offers dozens of other techniques marketers should follow to increase leads and revenue.
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by Elizabeth Hines | Feb 3, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media
A blog post not only stays around longer than a print ad, it can better engage potential customers.
The 24-hour news cycle has evolved into the 24-second news cycle with the rise of online media outlets and social media. So, when it comes to advertising your business, generating leads, making sales, and being perceived as a thought leader, you must consider the lifespan of your print ad and its purpose, versus the lifespan of a well-orchestrated blog and its potential.
Though often confused, there is a distinct difference between advertising and marketing. With a print ad, you are obviously advertising your business concisely, with a limited number of words and images. But, this form of advertising has a limited lifespan (only as long as that piece of print media is in the hands of a reader). So, it should be only one small piece of your marketing puzzle.
In contrast, a blog bridges advertising with progressive marketing techniques. It reaches your target demographic in a different way by conveying knowledge and building trust. It works on improving your “image” as well as branding your company as a thought-leader. A blog makes a more personal connection with the reader, while an ad is very obviously trying to sell something — and consumers gravitate toward knowledge rather than a simple sales pitch.
Looking at Longevity
A blog can live on indefinitely. What you post today may still be relevant and a popular read several months from now. Because of this, your company can reach a larger number of consumers within its target demographic for a long period of time, surpassing a print ad’s capacity for results. A blog also reaches consumers in a more relevant, memorable way. Marketing experts would agree: Getting your clients or customers to remember you is half the battle.
Your company’s advertising can include the placement of an ad in print media like newspapers, magazines, or direct mail. Print ads through community newspapers or direct mail flyers are useful for specific purposes, like targeting customers in a localized area.
But, you will find that advertising of this kind comes with a sizable price tag and has limited benefits. According to a Marketing Profs digital report, print advertising ranks as the largest expense of most marketing plans, with public relations and marketing strategies rounding out the important trio.
So how long will a print ad live? According to a marketing study published by Fast Company, a newspaper ad has a maximum lifespan of 2-3 weeks, and an ad placed in a monthly magazine may live up to three months.
In contrast, when a blog post goes live, it may generate the most hits within the first week, but it will continue to serve as available content that consumers will access for months, or even years, down the road. If the blog is well constructed, you may find that a year later it is still ranking in the top five search results for certain targeted long-tailed keywords.
So, it is important to consider the “quality of life” of your blogs and print ads. A blog feeds consumers’ need for more information before they commit. In fact, prior to contracting your services or buying your product, your potential customers will research the topic online and read blogs posts that present information in a vendor-neutral format.
Successful businesses react to this by creating a constant stream of this fresh content, organized into a library of posts (that stand the test of time), then use that content as bait to attract potential prospects. One study revealed that when it comes to blogs, the combination of proper timing and useful insight can result in a 33% higher lead conversion rate and a 38% increase in revenue over the prior year.
Blogs’ Benefits and Social Media
When you publish a print ad, you’ll never really know what your readers think about it. With a blog, you get feedback and you engage the reader, who is also a potential customer. It creates a more viable connection and provides greater insight that you can leverage to garner more customers through:
- Tracking and analytics: Feedback is a powerful tool. Google Analytics can tell you what types of articles are capturing your readers’ attention. You can learn how much time they spend on a page and how they share it. You can leverage this information to determine what sort of content you need to create to reach more customers and generate more leads.
- Shares and comments: Readers love to interact with online content, reading and commenting to express their opinion or thoughts. The comment section of your blog can become a community of readers. If a reader found your blog insightful or inspiring, they may also share it with their contacts or friends through social media. Your business becomes a part of a larger community that is connected through dialogue.
Advertising in any form, digital or print, is only a single component of any complete, multi-level marketing process. Innovative marketing today must include several different components, like well-articulated blog posts that utilize SEO, and connect potential customers to your company by offering information they can use. Blogs are a long-lasting porthole to your business, the product or the services you offer, and your professional insight or vision.
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by Elizabeth Hines | Jan 27, 2016 | Blog, Leadership, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
Should employers be monitoring or censoring employees’ social media?
Censorship is always a hot-button issue, and, when combined with social media, things can heat up even more. The topic is debated in law school classrooms, at dinner parties, and in courtrooms. What should be shared and written on social media? Should companies censor what their employees post?
The waters still seem murky. Many companies don’t have policies around social media, but, with over 70% of online adults using Facebook, and the Internet-crazed Millennial generation now outnumbering Baby Boomers, they should look into putting some guidelines and policies into place.
Who’s Digging?
Many companies, up to 60%, now research candidates according to Career Builder. Up to 48% of companies who have researched candidates have found reasons not to hire them. According to the site, reasons range from provocative photos, references to drug or alcohol use, badmouthing a former employer or colleague, poor communication skills, and discriminatory comments.
Source: Career Builder
A New Generation
Although the retiring workforce does use the Internet (46% of those 65+, and 65% of those between ages 50-64), their numbers cannot compare to users in the younger, upcoming workforce (90% of those between 18-29).
The Millennial generation was born and raised in the digital age. Many of them have never heard of the Dewey Decimal System or know a life before cell phones. Their digital devices, and the Internet, have been their best way to research and connect. They are accustomed to throwing political views, photos, and personal experiences — good or bad — out into the cyber world. Many have already had the experience of poster’s regret, which might have taught them a lesson, but may also have blunted the idea of permanent mistakes. If one can delete a post and apologize, why not post away and worry later?
To Monitor or Not Monitor, That is the Question
Thinking carefully about what your expectations are of employees, and addressing those expectations in writing, is an important step to consider.
We assume that most employees know they shouldn’t post anything that damages the reputation of the company, its products, and employees, but it may be best not to assume. A case study in a recent Harvard Business Review provides a perfect example of what can happen if policies aren’t put into place.
In his Time piece, “Why Monitoring Employees’ Social Media is a Bad Idea,” author S. Kumar argues that while monitoring candidates might make sense, monitoring current employees breeds a suffocating and intrusive atmosphere:
“By allowing workers to live their personal lives without intrusion, smart businesses can make a powerful statement; namely, that they accept them for who they are, treasure their professional contributions to the company, and want them to be happy and fulfilled outside as well as inside the office. This, in turn, would inspire loyalty and boost productivity in the workforce, and make those companies more profitable.”
However you feel about the topic of monitoring, and even censoring, it’s important to be clear with employees about expectations. A general statement about employee behavior and representation of the company might be enough to instill deeper forethought when employees post, comment, and like.
Do you monitor your employees’ social media accounts? Do you have a policy in place that covers personal social media activity?
