Marketing Strategy

What If…Only 100 People Can Visit Your E-Commerce Website Per Day?

Here’s the scenario. You own an online sports equipment store and you are able to sell products online. However, from now on, your website can only allow 100 visitors per day to enter the website. Your company’s revenue will depend solely on these 100 visitors per day so you better make sure the people who visit your website are people who are ready to purchase something.

How would this affect how you do business?

Scarcity is something all businesses have to deal with. This scenario is actually not far from reality depending on how you look at it. For example:

• Your PPC budget is exhausted after 100 website visits per day (or click-throughs)
• You only have enough time to reach out to 100 people on Twitter and Facebook
• The QR code campaign budget can only print 100 posters

When creating a digital strategy, it is important to allocate resources where there is highest potential for achieving the strategy’s objectives.

In the scenario above, the objective is to maximize revenue.

• If you are bidding on a PPC campaign, you’d likely want to bid on more targeted keywords which suggest users are further down the sales funnel. For example, you would rather bid for “buy hockey equipment” over just “hockey”.
• If you are investing time on Twitter and Facebook, you’d likely want to reach out to 100 sport related key influencers rather than 100 spam bot accounts.
• If you are distributing QR codes, you’d likely want to place posters around athletic facilities rather than general locations like a coffee shop or bus stop.

Scarcity > Decisions > Strategy

Victor
Digital Strategist

Photo Credit: albertogp123

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What If …. Series.

What If…Your Twitter and Facebook Posts Were Deleted After 24 Hours?

What If…There Was a 2-Tweet Per Day Limit?

Tags: choice, decisions, digital strategy, scarcity, strategy, what if

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:

1. Regularly monitor your foursquare account. Review check-ins, comments, and tips to see what users are saying.
2. Use QR codes to encourage check-ins, tips, and submissions.
3. Promote Foursquare ads to encourage check-ins.
4. Include sentiments and adjectives in your foursquare ad strategy (i.e. romantic, Friday, sweet, summer, wine list, etc…)
5. 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 If…Your Twitter and Facebook Posts Were Deleted After 24 Hours?

What if …  a new feature was introduced where Facebook Wall posts and Twitter tweets were automatically removed after 24 hours?

If you did not post anything new in a 24-hour period, your Facebook Wall and Twitter profile would be empty, showing just a blank page. If you’re managing a Facebook Page or a Twitter account for your company or client this would be a big deal. It’s equivalent to having a company website with no content.

Would this give you more incentive to publish content more frequently?

This hypothetical scenario isn’t very far from reality, considering the effective lifespan of the average Facebook post is 22 hours and the lifespan of the average Twitter tweet is 1 hour.

It’s a balancing act. Publish too infrequently and you’ll gain minimal benefit from your social media profile. Publish too frequently and you risk annoying your followers.

Keep this in mind the next time you are developing a digital strategy. Is your publishing frequency maximizing your impact online?

Victor
Digital Strategist

Photo Credit: JanetR3

Tags: facebook, lifespan, strategy, Twitter

5 Tips On How to Filter Through The Fluff!

Marketers are constantly inundated with information on the #digitalmediasphere – felt like a hashtag was appropriate for this post! The amount of information our brains have to consume on a daily basis is mind blowing, literally. According to Mail Online, each person is drowned with “174 newspapers’ worth of information every day.” FastCompany also published an infographic in September 2010 based on the book The 24-Hour Customer, indicating that we will generate more data in the next 4 years than in the history of the world, adding that the average person is connected 12 hours a day to some form of digital media which translates to 34 billion bits of information per day (an equivalent of two books).

The biggest concern for marketers is the ability to sort through all the fluff and not get bogged down. Recent studies are showing that the level of information we are being asked to break down can cause increased stress levels. So how do we keep on top of the abundance of information and still keep our sanity? Learn how to filter through the fluff and manage your time. Here are 5 tips that can get you started:

TIP #1. BE SELECTIVE. Don’t follow every single person on Twitter who follows you, or subscribe to every blog with the word “digital marketing” in it. Be selective to what you subscribe to and who you follow. Similarly, don’t feel the need to subscribe to every single news outlet, most likely they all end up publishing the same stories within 24 hours of each other anyway. By being selective you can start filtering through the noise and choosing what you really want to focus your brain cells on.

TIP #2. TAKE TIME OFF. Set aside certain time periods when you are active on social media, reading the news, updating your blog, and so on and so forth. We spend most of our waking hours connected to some form of digital media. Sometimes it’s nice to tune out. Take a break and set rules and regulations. For example, when you are at the gym don’t be the person on the treadmill who is replying to emails and tweets. It’s okay to not reply back right away. Let your body relax and do something else. You can set time limits for yourself of when you are on and off, even computers need down time.

TIP #3. UTILIZE DASHBOARDS. Dashboards help aggregate various accounts and create search tabs to sort through specific content. Hootsuite is a great dashboard that allows you to do both. You can add all your social media accounts to this one dashboard so that you don’t have to keep switching between tabs or windows to get up-to-date on all the new content. You can also create search tabs with specific keywords such as “online marketing” or “search engine optimization” and Hootsuite will then aggregate content based on that filter. That way you can sort through the fluff without actually having to do it yourself, the dashboard does it for you.

TIP #4. ACTIVATE GOOGLE ALERTS. There are a ton of free tools available online that help you filter through the data, Google Alerts is one of them. Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results based on your queries. You get the most up-to-date information sent directly to your mail box.

TIP #5. CREATE YOUR OWN READER. Setup a RSS Feed Reader or News Aggregator by adding your favorite blogs, and websites to it so you can keep on top of the latest content without actually having to visit the site. Feed Reader or News Aggregator software allow you to grab the RSS feeds from various sites and display them for you to read and use.

Hopefully these tips will help you stay on top of your content, and help save you a little time and stress!

Maryam Mehrtash @socialmaryam

Tags: data, digital, facebook, information, marketing, Social Media, stress, Twitter