Business
10 Pitfalls To Avoid When Creating A Digital Strategy
This is an excerpt from a white paper widely circulated in the US this week. Click here to download the entire article.
There are all sorts of conflicting statistics about the failure rate of online marketing campaigns. The numbers don’t really matter. There are enough highly publicized train wrecks to safely conclude that a good percentage go wrong. The more interesting question is why?
One reason may be the ground is constantly shifting beneath our feet. Facebook today. Pinterest tomorrow. It can be difficult to know where to start when it comes to building a high impact web and mobile presence. Here are 10 pitfalls to avoid when designing a digital strategy for your client or brand.
PITFALL #1:
Rolling Out A Strategy Before Conducting An Assessment
If you take only one point away from this paper, please let it be this. Before even thinking about whether your business needs a Facebook page, a Twitter account or a new fangled iPhone app, do a rigorous assessment of your existing online and mobile presence and that of your competitors. Find your audience online and understand how they want to be engaged. Research the online advertising climate and see if any firm, anywhere, is establishing online and mobile marketing best practices. What has worked? What has crashed faster than a Kardashian wedding?
An assessment lays the groundwork for the strategy. You can’t figure out where you want to be until you know where you currently are, online.
Takeaway
- Analyze the company’s website for ease of navigation, broken links, see how it ranks in search results.
- Review your firm’s (or your client’s) social media channels, note the frequency of post, the level of active engagement from your target audience. Apply the same analysis to your competitors.
- Search forums, social media, and blogs to find your target audience. Understand where they are, how they like to engage, and take careful note of key influencers.
PITFALL #2:
Objectives. What Objectives?
Imagine jumping in the car and pressing the gas without knowing your destination. How would you decide which route to take? That’s what it’s like to design a roadmap for a digital strategy that does not have clear objectives. How can you know whether a pay-per-click advertising campaign is better than a frequently updated blog if you don’t know what either tactic is trying to achieve.
Clients often say their online objective is to grow revenue. That’s not sufficiently clear. A more valuable goal would be to increase revenue from online sales by 7% in a specific time period. The more specific the objective(s), the better.
Takeaway
- List your goals for the digital strategy as they apply to your larger business goals. Review and refine until they are crystal clear.
- Select and customize web and mobile tools, design timelines and structure content to meet those objectives.
Download the rest of this white paper here.
Tags: ALERT, digital strategy, pitfalls
5 Tips For Your Foursquare Explore Social Strategy
If you haven’t claimed your foursquare profile yet, you might want to get on that asap! If the fact that the site’s database has 1.5 billion check-ins logged into the system isn’t enough of a an incentive, then perhaps knowing that foursquare has gone “search” online with their newest feature Explore with the website garnering 1 million unique visitors per day already could entice you.
By claiming your foursquare profile you can personalize it to suit your business and take advantage of integrating this platform into your social media (geo-location) strategy. In addition to checking-in, claiming badges and mayorships, now users can search for locations, deals, and places on their desktop using the Explore feature. Some people don’t like having a Foursquare account on their mobile phones and “checking-in” all the time, but would like to use this feature to see where their friends are checking-in and what they recommend. Foursquare Explore allows you to go online and search without having to use the platform as a check-in tool. It is useful for the end user to go through the 15 million tips that are gathered on the site already when deciding on where to go and what to eat… or drink!
Here are five tips to include in your strategy in order to ensure increased visits from Foursquare Explore to your company’s profile page:
- Regularly monitor your foursquare account. Review check-ins, comments, and tips to see what users are saying.
- Use QR codes to encourage check-ins, tips, and submissions.
- Promote Foursquare ads to encourage check-ins.
- Include sentiments and adjectives in your foursquare ad strategy (i.e. romantic, Friday, sweet, summer, wine list, etc…)
- Use keywords when posting deals on your foursquare account to help with search queries.
Happy searching!
Maryam
@socialmaryam
Tags: badges, explore, foursquare, geo-location, SEO, social, strategy, tips, visitors
What the Heck is Pinterest and Why Should You Care?
Quick. Take a stab at naming the top ten social sites.
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn… these ones come easily to mind, but it may surprise you to learn that Pinterest also makes the cut. Coming in at #10, it’s clear that Pinterest is gaining traction fast. It may be time to sit up and notice it, if you haven’t already been lured by its slick and glossy look.
What the heck is it?
The name explains the essence of what it’s about: ‘Pin’ items of ‘interest’. It acts like a virtual pushpin board for things found around the web. Users can create multiple boards, each dedicated to something of interest to them. For example, a board for travel, a board for recipes, a board for home decor. You get the idea. It’s social bookmarking, revisited & refreshed.
Although still in invite-only mode, in just one week alone last December (2011) Pinterest is said to have attracted 11-million visits. It’s growing at an incredible rate, seeing a 4000% jump in traffic from just six months ago. Monthly visits are said to be averaging 3.2-million.
The website is most popular with women aged 25-44, accounting for 58% of the userbase in the past three months (Experian Hitwise). Here are some thoughts on why those who like it, like it a lot. Indeed it must be onto something when it starts spawning copycats.
So why should you care?
There is a business case for participating on Pinterest. It is reported that Real Simple magazine is getting more referral traffic from Pinterest, than from Facebook. From a business perspective, there are many opportunities for building a fan base, building awareness for products, and getting more traffic to your website, but you need to go about it the right way. Pinterest states very clearly there shall be no blatant promoting and marketing on the site. So what can you do? Some ideas are expanded on here, but I think one truth for gaining traction as a business on Pinterest is to have smoking hot photos of smoking hot products. This will inspire members to pin them on their boards, and thus increase the exposure of the business through the image. (Images link back to the original site)
So there you have it. Some pretty compelling reasons to consider Pinterest as a serious player in your ongoing online strategy.
Erin
Tags: facebook, pinterest, strategy
Making Sense of Google+
As all 62-million of us continue on our learning curves of Google+, here are a few “good-to-know” points that you may find useful or fun. We start with personalized search (the hot topic of the month), then talk hashtags and doctored photos. Let’s get started.
You’ve likely heard by now that Google has introduced personalized search for logged-in Google users, called “Search Plus Your World“. This means when you conduct a search on Google, the results you see will be based in part on what you’ve shared on Google+, what others in your circles have shared, and from your personal search history. Personalized search results on Google are not new, but the emphasis on G+ content and profiles is. This places a lot more importance for brands to establish and build a business page on G+. If Google is going to rank G+ content over everything else in search results, businesses would be smart to invest some time there, and fast.
For the record, there is a way to turn personalized search off. Read all about that here.
If you’re like me, reluctantly placing more trust in Google than in Facebook, especially in light of this recent Facebook development, then you may have content of a private nature in your G+ profile that you’re only intending to share with a limited audience. Trouble is, if you use the same Gmail account to log into other Google accounts like Analytics, Webmaster Tools, or Adwords, you run the risk of others inadvertently tripping into your G+ account. There are ways to get around this, of course, by not sharing access to GA using your own Gmail login, but you would be surprised how many people do just that. Don’t. Here’s how to share access to GA without sharing your personal login.
On a completely separate note, G+ now includes auto-complete for common #hashtags. Watch it in action here. Hashtags are useful for grouping content and making related content more discoverable.
And to wrap up on a fun note, search #funwithphotos on G+ to see how you can now add text on top of photos. Here are a few for inspiration.
If you’re still feeling a little in the dark about Google+, especially with regard to its relevance into the foreseeable future, I encourage you to read this comprehensive FAQ article by Marketingland. It links to multiple articles on G+.
Erin
Tags: google, Google Analytics
Talk about taking engagement up a notch!
Are you sick of hearing about another new Facebook feature? Well, either adapt or get off because this won’t be the last of it I promise you. The social media landscape is all about staying ahead of the curve, and that is exactly why Facebook is constantly experimenting with new features, widgets, and plug-ins that will ultimately increase online user engagement. The last few additions to Pages have done exactly just that!
Whether you “Like” a Page or not doesn’t count towards engagement anymore like it used to. You could have millions of “likes” on your page but what really counts is whether people are “talking about this.” This feature measures activity that is initiated by the user, not the administrator, including a wall post, “liking,” commenting, or sharing a Page post, answering fan questions, mentioning a Page, and “liking” or sharing a deal. Media strategists love this new feature because it illustrates actual activity generated by the user, which gives you a pretty good picture of who is really talking about your brand. This doesn’t mean “Likes” are completely irrelevant, but it just goes to show that just because someone “Likes” or identifies with your brand, it doesn’t mean that they will engage or care about it. Or not care about it for that matter, since “talking about this” also counts trash talking.
Additional metrics that have been added to Pages Insight that would be of interest to media strategists are “Friends of Fans” and “Weekly Total Reach.” Friends of Fans calculates the total number of friends your fans have, giving you an idea of how far your reach could be if all your fans engaged by sharing your content. Weekly Total Reach gives you an assessment of how many total people have posted something about your Page, including news organizations, references, and shares, giving you a clear picture of your Pages’ viral distribution.
Facebook also rolled out a location feature “were here” on Pages that represents how many check-ins a brand has compiled. This is similar to the former Facebook Places that was killed off earlier this year. We knew location based social media activity wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon; it just needed a bit of a facelift apparently. It does make one wonder what Facebook will do with Gowalla’s technology since its acquisition and what location-based changes will come out in 2012. To be able to use the “were here” feature you need to provide an address on your Pages to use this feature. Restaurants, retailers, and other businesses with a physical location for their customers to go to can benefit from this by being able to gauge foot traffic. I don’t really see a huge benefit for business owners with no physical space, artists, or online stores. Also, another downfall to this feature is that if you are a big brand such a Burger King that has multiple locations but one fan Page you can only enter one location and the stats of how many people “were here” will only include that one store. Big brands like McDonalds have figured out a way around this, by contacting Facebook and having their own Facebook rep group all their locations. Obviously, not everyone is McDonalds and can just pick up the phone call Facebook and drop the dough – it will be interesting to see how long this feature will last and what Facebook will do to make it more adaptable for the smaller players.
Lastly, if you haven’t seen the “write a recommendation” feature on Pages you can check it out on the side bar of any Page. Or if you’ve “Liked” a new Page recently you might have received a pop-up widget asking you to write a recommendation to help your friends learn more about this Page. Again this is Facebook testing, and retesting various methods that will stick and work in increasing online engagement! But don’t get too comfortable, as with the launch of Timeline this last week, I’m sure Pages will get a huge makeover any time soon!
