Most social media advice out there is about “more, more, more.”

More followers, more likes, more re-tweets, more click throughs, more ads.

So on and so forth.

And I don’t know about you, but I’ve about had enough of it.

I mean, I know social media is a great thing and is an incredible opportunity for business owners, but at the same time…. I don’t feel like it, okay?!

I don’t feel like dedicating half a day every day to my Twitter feed. I don’t feel like mapping out a Facebook strategy and then hiring a part-time virtual assistant to implement it for me. And I sure as heck don’t feel like using Pinterest for anything more than collecting delicious vegan recipes and Harry Potter jokes.

And honestly?

I really don’t think I’m the only one.

Sure, we’re all highly ambitious entrepreneurs that get a high from working hard and seeing our efforts pay off.

But we’re human, too. As much as we might like to, we can’t do everything.

We need to relax sometimes and give ourselves permission not to do things.

So, in this post, I’m not going to chastise you for using social media too much or not enough.

I’ll trust that you can find the right balance for you and your business. You’re smart enough to do that and don’t need me policing and micro-managing you about it.

Instead, I’m going to talk about the social media metrics that actually matter, so that when you do sit down to go through your Twitter feed or have a Facebook planning session, you get the most ROI for your time invested.

Because honestly?

You work too hard not to have every minute you spend working count.

Why Number of Followers & Likes Really Doesn’t Matter

If you want followers on Instagram, you can pay a software to do it for you.

I get a spam follow or comment from someone hoping this will work magic for them every single day, and I don’t even have a popular Instagram account.

I can feel flattered that they liked three of my posts, left a “nice photo!” comment, and followed me…. or I can just ignore them, because I know a week from now the software they’re using will automatically unfollow me and this “relationship” they tried to establish with their modern-day spam will be entirely one-sided.

Basically, if you want more followers, you can buy them. If you want more likes, you can post a motivational quote imposed on the top of a gorgeous stock image.

And those things might feel exciting and play into our natural human urges that want us to feel liked and be desired… but those things aren’t playing a part in your overall funnel or doing much (if anything) to increase your bottom line.

Instead, a social media like should only be the very first part of your funnel… and not even a necessary one at that.

It’s where people should start becoming familiar with your brand and your message… so they’ll eventually sign up for your lead magnet and enter your sales funnel “for real.”

(And, hint: you can have a wildly successful online sales funnel without social media. Really. Social media is honestly just icing on the cake.)

So let’s get into the eight metrics that actually matter, shall we?

Note: not all of these metrics will matter for every single business, either. Proceed with caution and try to take notes on only the metrics that feel like they’ve got a high level of resonance with your business.

1. Engaged Commenters & Number of Average Comments

Spamming aside, comments are a sign that people are actually reading what you’re posting and engaging with it on a high level.

Personally, I “like” a lot of pages that show up in my newsfeed, but that I never actually engage with besides that.

Their content is good, but for the most part, I’m not a paying customer.

There are a few brands and bloggers, though, that I follow and answer every question they ask me that shows up in my news feed.

And most of the time, I’m a proud and happy customer of these people… or probably will be in the very near future.

Because here’s the thing: just because people “like” your page or follow you doesn’t mean they’re sold-out loyal fans of whatever it is you offer or teach.

Instead, it’s usually the people who actively engage and comment on your stuff that actually matter the most to your business.

So instead of trying to grow your likes or your follower count so that maybe some of them will be the kind of people who engage via comments, strategize ways to prompt the fans you’ve already got to be actively engaged.

This way you know you’re making the most of the work you’ve already done to collect those followers, and I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how having an active “community” in your comments will really draw in others.

2. Bounce Rate

When your analytics dashboard calculates bounce rate, it’s the number of people who come to your website and leave it after only viewing that one page.

So if you’re leading traffic to a landing page with no menu—even if it has a high conversion rate—it’ll have a high bounce rate because people are only looking at that one page.

So if that’s the scenario for your social media posts and ads that lead back to your site, bounce rate is something you can disregard.

But, if you’re using social media to drive traffic to a cornerstone, evergreen blog post, for example, bounce rate is a really important metric to pay attention to.

And basically, it answers this question: Do visitors find your content exciting enough to stick around?

If not, they bounce.

If yes, they click around to check out a few more pages before leaving your site.

So if you’ve got a navigation menu present on the page you’re sending social media traffic to, the goal is to have a really low bounce rate.

By paying attention to this metric, you can see what types of content your social media followings are most interested in, what topics they don’t care about, and which topic generates the most interest overall.

With this information, you can better attune your social media strategy to what those audiences are after, increasing loyalty via those channels and getting the most bang for your buck as far as more bottom-line metrics like email subscribers, clients, and sales.

3. Visits vs. Unique Visitors

Time for some definitions:

• Number of visits: each time a person visits your website, it counts as a visit.
• Unique visitors: counts each person only once.

So yes, getting more and more unique visitors is important… especially for those times when you’re hell-bent on growing and scaling your business.

But if you’re only after unique visits, you’re missing out on the real potential of having a social media strategy in the first place.

(Don’t get me wrong. This metric is important because it validates your marketing efforts.)

So in addition to lusting after more unique visitors… also lust after getting them to come back, again and again.

So, for example, if you have 1,000 unique visitors and 1,000 visits every month, that means that every person is coming to your page once and not coming back.

But if you’ve got 1,000 unique visitors and 3,000 visits every month, that means that on average, each visitor is coming back to your site two more times every month, which is incredible.

Social is about driving more and new traffic to your site, but in my opinion, the real power of it lies in “staying in touch” with your target audience on the days and weeks they aren’t on your site. You stay top-of-mind so they remember you even when there’s not one of your unopened emails sitting in their inbox or they’re not going through one of your free email courses.

Because beyond using social to drive more visitors to your site, when you use it to drive previous visitors back to your site, you drive them deeper and deeper into your loyalty and engagement efforts.

They dig deeper into your content every single time they come back, and over time, become “sold” on what you do—which either means they become a newsletter subscriber or they buy something. (And we all want all of our visitors to buy something, don’t we?)

It’s probably lighter and more fun than the seriousness that you get into on your site, but it’s still really beneficial to make sure you’ve got a high-touch strategy going on.

And honestly, the more touches the better.

According to the Online Marketing Institute, it takes 7-13 (or more!) touches to turn someone from a cold visitor into a viable sales lead.

4. Time on Site

Imagine these two scenarios of someone who “bounced” from your site:

• A person who scrolled down the page and five seconds later closed your tab.
• A person who spent time reading your blog post until the very end and opted in for your lead magnet at the end of it.

Obviously, there’s an entire spectrum of options and user behaviors between these two points, but I think every single one of us would favor behavior more closely resembling the second option than the first one, right?

Even if they left without visiting another page and gave us a “bounce.”

So, in conjunction with your bounce rate for traffic that comes back to your site from social media, time on site can give you a big hint about how well you’re doing.

Oh, and remember how you can’t really measure bounce rate if you’re using social media to lead traffic to a leading page with no menu?

This metric… along with actual conversions, of course… is perfect for measuring the success of those campaigns.

By asking your friends and family to read through your site for different periods of time to see how far they get, you’ll get an idea of how far your social traffic is getting down your page. (Or, you know, you could just use a heat map software to tell you this exactly.)

5. User-Created Funnels

Most of the time, when the word “funnel” is thrown around in internet marketing conversations, it represents the steps we design and the emails we send out so our leads and prospects consume the content we want them to consume at the moment we want them to consume it.

Usually, this helps us build ourselves up in their minds, and if we do it correctly, leads to more conversions than if we just let our site visitors take a jab at our site and our content for themselves.

And while you should absolutely construct these funnels to lead visitors through, it’s equally important to pay attention to the funnels visitors create for themselves.

Which means that when they follow a link you share on social media to an evergreen blog post, they might click on the links and call to action buttons you’ve placed within the post…. Or they might instead read the post, click on your About page, look at your pricing, and then read your team profiles before they close your tab.

Of course, plenty of people will follow the funnels you’ve set up for them.

But knowing which funnels most social visitors create for themselves tells you a handful of really helpful things:

• How familiar the already are with your brand
• Whether they came for just the blog post or they’re looking for more
• What pages you need to optimize for funnel conversions if you haven’t already

These funnels are super easy to see within Google Analytics.

All you have to do is log into Google Analytics, scroll down to click on “Behavior” in the right-hand menu, and click on “Site Content” under “Behavior Flow.”

There, you can choose to filter through landing pages, all content, exit pages, or specific content pieces. In my opinion, all content is a great place to start for generic data. But if your social media campaigns are all about landing pages, check those out.

For an overview, just click on “Behavior Flow.” (I LOVE this visual and find it so helpful!)

6. Organic Mentions

Obviously, you want other people to share your content for you.

It’s a big reason why we so compulsively put social share buttons on our websites and actively ask for shares at the bottom of our posts.

So when people share are content via these buttons, it’s great. It means our efforts have paid off.

But what’s even better than this is when readers become so engrossed in everything you’re saying that they give you an online shout out without being prompted to do so just because one article’s social media teaser text was pre-written with your Twitter handle in it.

Particularly if you have a large audience—or dream of having a large audience—a mention tracking tool like Mention is a great way to get notified when people are talking about you without taking any of your active brain power to search for those mentions.

When you’re getting mentioned on social media—that is, in a good way—you know you’re doing something right.

And tracking these mentions is a wonderful way to engage with the people who mention you, join in on conversations about you, and grow loyalty and interest via your social media channels even more.

For example, Ecosia, a company that’s a charitable search engine focused on planting trees, uses Mention to track articles that mention their business model and to make sure that all the information that’s published about them is correct.

It’s an incredible way for them to build brand awareness, and to engage in spots across the internet where interest is building.

7. Subscribers, Leads & Sales

Baseline metrics, in other words.

Or in another, more explicit set of words: your bottom line.

Or, in my “humble” opinion, the only metrics that really matter.

Unfortunately, a lot of social media marketers and well-meaning business owners stop measuring before they get to these metrics because they measure click-through rates.

And actually, (again, in my opinion), measuring the click through rates doesn’t really matter for much.

So what if very few people click through on one of your ads? If you have a small exclusive audience, it only matters that the people who do click through are converting in some way, right?

I think so.

But I think the reason so many people get caught up on clickthrough rate before they ever even consider these bottom line metrics is because the companies who offer their platforms for running ads emphasize click through rates a lot.

But you know why they emphasize them?

Because they charge per click.

So, the more clicks you get, the more money they make.

(Side note: focusing too much on click through rate was how all that annoying click bait was born.)

Click through rates aren’t unimportant… after all, you do want traffic from your advertising efforts. But what’s more important is to not place the importance of a clickthrough rate over the importance of a conversion rate.

Unless you’re getting absolutely zero traffic (or close to it) from your ad campaigns, as long as you’re getting decent conversions from the traffic you do get, click through rate shouldn’t be a top-of-mind thing that you’re constantly concerned about improving.

8. Amplification Rate

Again, this metric is more about measuring engagement than it is about numbers for their own sake.

Basically, what your amplification rate shows you is your opportunity to “amplify” your message from the number of followers you’ve already got.

It measure shares and number of followers, yes, but it puts both of those metrics into a more meaningful context.

The way you calculate it is this:

Take a piece of content and total up the number of times it was shared during a certain period of time. The number of shares can be overall or exclusive to one social platform.

Then, divide that number by how many followers you have on the channels you counted the shares for.

So if you had an article that was shared 300 times on Facebook and you have 5,000 fans there, the equation looks like this:

300 / 5,000 = 0.06

Then, multiply that number by 100 to see your amplification rate as a percentage. So in this example:

0.06 x 100 = 6%

With this number, you know how much you can expect your message to spread just based on your followers.

If you realize it’s a number you’re not happy with, you can find ways to increase it.

But if you realize it’s much higher than you expected, you can pay more attention to that particular social platform to get your message spread even more.

Conclusion: Track What Matters

Alright, now with a show of hands, how many of you who were tracking Facebook likes and Twitter shares are still going to track only those things?

None of you?

Yeah, didn’t think so.

To be fair, you were probably smart enough to not only track those kinds of things in the first place, but I hope I’ve helped you re-focus on the social media-related metrics that are actually important to your business’s growth.

Right now, the most important social media-based metric for my business is what kind of website path the people are taking. What I want to know is what they (my audience) wants to know from me after they come to my site, so I check out the paths they forge after they click through from a LinkedIn or Twitter post.

From there, I know what content they’re most interested in, so I can grow my business with more of that content.

What were the best ideas on social media metrics that came up for you while reading this post?

Do you really need to be told that search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial to beat out your competitors? Probably not, but it pays to be sure. If there is one thing you have probably learned as a website owner it is not to assume anything until you’ve proven it.

Take your SEO, for example. You have probably read every how-to article and tutorials out there on how to build your brand recognition and make your site searchable to your target market. You may also have implemented everything you could, and sat back with satisfaction, waiting for the horde of customers to come knocking at your virtual door. Here you are assuming again. How do you know whatever trick or strategy you implemented is going to work?

You don’t. Not until you have done your due diligence by doing an SEO audit.

An SEO audit is like pouring water into a plastic bag and checking for leaks. You want to make sure that your SEO is going to work for your particular bag, and that means plugging up the holes. You need to check quite a few things for your website to make sure your SEO strategy is going to deliver the results you expect. To make it easy for you, we came up with an SEO checklist so you can buckle up and start auditing!

Google Analytics

Why do you need helpful tools like Google Analytics? It’s simple. The first indication that your SEO is working is when people actually start coming to your website.

Google Analytics can tell you how many people are visiting your site along with stats on where your traffic is coming from, what pages and how long users are visiting, and tons of other insights like that. Knowing these things can help you laser-target your audience and make them stay longer on the important pages on your site (hint: it’s where you make your money.)

Installing Google Analytics on your website is easy enough even for beginners, and the tool is free, so what do you have to lose? When you want to actually use the tool to find out what’s what with your SEO, you can select the type of report you want and download it.

Google Search Console

While Google Analytics can help you learn about how users interact with your website, Google Search Console allows you to glean insights on how your site is interacting with search engine and its spiders.

To have access to this information, go to the Search Console after you’ve signed into your Google account, and click on Add a Property.

Follow these steps to verify ownership of the site. Once your site is verified, Google may have some messages for you, or tell you about some critical issues that need your attention. Check every few days, just to make sure your site is nice and healthy. Here are some benefits of adding your site to the Search Console:

• Decide what content you want crawled and remove
• Minimize search performance disruptions
• Keep your site clean by identifying spam or malware issues
• Identify the keywords that triggered your site’s appearance in search results, and which ones brought the most number of site visitors
• Discover if your site information comes out in rich search results i.e. contact information
• Identify inbound links
• Assess mobile-friendliness

Bing Webmaster tools

Why Bing? Most people look to Google to get their SEO boogie shoes on, but Bing actually has some kickass tools to help with SEO. These include:

• SEO Reports – monitors on page optimization and compliance with SEO best practices, and identifies problem areas
• Link Explorer – identifies backlinks for a particular URL, i.e. your competitor’s site (this is a good way to find out what kind of link juice they’re getting, and how)
• Keyword Research – provides information on the number of organic search queries for a particular keyword or phrase, and suggestions for related keywords and phrases
• Disavow Links feature – enables you to automate the rejection of links to sites with which you don’t want to be associated

These free Bing Webmaster tools are just some of the best ones for your SEO audit, but explore the other tools as well for other benefits. In order to do that, you need to open an account and verify your ownership of the site. Follow these steps to help you get started with Bing Webmaster Tools.

XML Sitemaps

If you have no idea what this is, well, you do have a problem.

A sitemap is what search engines look for when they visit a site. It indexes your content so the search engine can identify your content, much like a table of contents in a textbook. An Extensible Markup Language or XML sitemap helps it find any changed or new content on the site, and establish your site as the original publisher.

Huh?

It is not uncommon to find duplication of content on the Internet without a formal arrangement between the original publisher and other websites, as long as it is properly attributed. However, Google doesn’t see it that way. One of the things the Panda algorithm looks into is duplicated content. If you don’t have a XML sitemap, and another site uses your content, you risk having your content removed even if you are the original publisher.

If you want make your brand new kickass content discoverable, and keep it, you need to identify your site as the original publisher. You should create and upload XML sitemaps for your site, pronto.

An XML sitemap is really just a text file with precise codes that describe non-HTML content on your site, such as videos, images, mobile, and flash-encoded files. You can use a sitemap generator or you can create it manually. Make sure you test it before adding it on the Search Console. You also need to add this line {Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap_location.xml} anywhere in the robots.txt file

Speaking of which…

Robots.txt File

You probably know that search engines send out bots to crawl your site and report back the information they get so the search engine knows when to include you in a search result. These bots or robots (also spiders) will go anywhere on your site they want, except when the robots.txt file tells them not to crawl a particular page using the “disallow” command.

Why would you want to do that?

Well, you may have something to hide. It could be a duplicate page (which if indexed could affect your SEO), a page that users should only be able access after taking a certain action, e.g. thank you page, or pages that contain private files, e.g. cgi-bin where you store your image files.

At any rate, if you want to control where the robots go on your site, you have to specify it in your robots.txt file. To create your robot.txt file, you can use a generator, or do it manually by following these steps.

SSL Certificate

One of the things that may affect your SEO is a lack of security. Google, at any rate, puts a small premium on sites that has a secure socket layer or SSL certificate, usually signaled by an “https” in the URL. An SSL certificate secures your site by encrypting all the data that passes between your site and your visitor.

While the ranking boost may be small, that can change in the future. You also need to remember that many Internet users are becoming more wary about security, so giving them some assurance that their information is safe on your site with that additional “s” in your URL may give your site an even bigger boost. If you are concerned about how changing your site address from “http” to “https” will affect your SEO, check out these moving tips.

You usually have to buy an SSL certificate (about $16 a year for a single domain), but if you are willing to wait, you might luck out on getting a free one. At any rate, once you get your SSL certificate in your email, you need to install it. The instructions will vary depending on your web server, so if you don’t know that, find out from your web host.

Social Media Identity

Whether you plan to launch social media marketing for your business or not (you should), you need to claim it on social networks to make sure no one else does. Not only is it confusing to your (would-be) customers when they see your brand or company name using obscene language on Twitter or Facebook, it can ruin your online reputation immeasurably.

You need to remember that your (brand/company) name is one of the most important things of your business, so you need to protect it. It also helps that websites tied with social media accounts usually rank much better than those with none.

Claiming your name on social networks is fairly easy (as long as no one has claimed it before you!). Choose one that is as close as possible to your brand or company name, and take the trouble to do it for all the more popular networks, just to be on the safe side. Even if you don’t have the time, or some networks are simply not where your target audience is, claiming your name means no one else can.

Now that you know where the big guns are, and what to do with them, you can tackle the nitty gritty of SEO. Here are some things you need to look into.

Meta Data

Site owners typically obsess over their content, and so they should.

Edugeeksclub writer Michael Hutton says, “High quality organic content is a key factor in SEO, which is what we do. Many of our clients come to us regularly to provide them with well-researched articles.”

However, for SEO purposes, you should know that the stuff you see on a page is not the same thing a bot sees. They check out the meta data to do their indexing, which are bits of text in the code describing the page contents. You need to make sure that you fill up those tags as well as attributes of the page when you publish your content for on-page optimization. You can check your meta data by right-clicking on the page and clicking on “View Page Source.”

Title Tag

It is not enough to have all the important stuff in your meta data, however. You still have to put it in a certain order for SEO. Best practice puts the <title> first, followed by <description>, and then <keywords>. Don’t worry if there are tags in between, as long as these three tags follow this sequence.

Character count

Search engines such as Google typically limit how many characters they crawl before indexing the page. This is called the Search Engine Results Page or SERP cut-off. You want to make sure you make the most use of these characters to compel the searcher to click on your page.

For title tags, this is from 55 to 65 characters, depending on the search engine. Description tags get cut off at 156 characters. Make sure anything important you want to say fit within those limits.

Keywords

For your keyword tags, make sure you put in as many as you can in the page attributes. Google doesn’t index them anymore, but it can’t hurt to put them in. You should also try to put keywords in the URL, the title, the first paragraph, one heading, and the ending paragraph.

Content

For SEO purposes, your article should have a minimum of 700 words, and they should be original. This should allow you to write something substantial and value-laden while allowing enough words for the spiders to crawl and index your content in the right category based on the words found in your content.

Apart from articles, you should also add other types of content such as images, videos infographics, and slides, because they can help with your ranking. However, when you upload images, make sure they are not pixelated, and rename them so they are descriptive of your content or brand.

Finally, make sure your content is easy to share by including social media buttons.

LSI keywords

Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI keywords are terms related to, but not the same as your main keywords. You should include LSI keywords in your content to help you rank better. You can find applicable LSI keywords using a plugin such as SEOPressor or online tools such as the Keyword Planner.

Segregated Codes

Your site may use two or more types of code, such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It is important that you keep them in separate files to make it easier for the bots to index it. Have your web administrator look into it as soon as possible.

Site Performance

Your site is your place of business, so you want to make sure it works well. Search engines typically rank sites that do so higher than those that don’t. You can check this out easily enough by going to your site as a visitor and giving it a look-see.

• Speed
• Mobile-friendliness
• 404 errors and 301 redirects
• Broken links
• Inbound and outbound links
• Navigation problems
• Social bookmarks
• Sitemaps

Search engine optimization is a top consideration for most business site owners because they know how important it is for brand building and online success. However, you need to know if you are going about it the right way, which is the purpose of this SEO audit checklist. You might be surprised at what you discover if you go through all of it.

Leads. Customer. Sales.

These are the 3 most important goals of every business.

If you want to build a thriving business, you need to take care of your biggest assets – Customers.

Sadly, most businesses are obsessed with lead generation – but careless when it comes to customer retention. How sad?

Of course, acquiring new leads is great, but retaining existing customers should be your primary focus. Because, several studies found that 68% of sales comes from existing customers?

Don’t rely on customers who stumble on your website, places an order, and leaves immediately – without the thought of ever coming back.

You can’t underestimate the power of a loyal customer base. According to Brandongaille, 12 – 15% of consumers who are loyal to a single retailer, but they represent 55 – 70% of sales.

Trust me, retaining your customers is a key aspect of your business. Without a doubt, converting leads to customers is a hard process – but your efforts can pay off if you focus on the ultimate goal – retention.

Considering that loyal customers will always come back for your products and services, obviously, they’re your best business asset.

When GrooveHQ increased customer retention by 5%, this led to a 95% increase in profits.

If you’re unable to retain your customers; in other words, you churn and burn – you’ll be losing a lot of money.

Data from Marketing Wizdom found that about 20% of customers are lost by an average business annually, due to lack of cordial relationship.

If you lose a customer, you’ve wasted 7x the resources used in converting them. You shouldn’t allow that happen to your business.

To help curtail this problem of losing customers, I want to show you the 17 customer retention strategies that work.

Let’s get started with a “surprise.”

1. Offer customer service “surprises”

I always look forward to great surprises at my birthday.

But I’m not alone. We all love surprises.

When it comes to nurturing your customers, think of a valuable offer that you can offer them – without their knowledge.

Surprises come suddenly. They’re not planned. Surprise packages or offers don’t have to cost you a fortune.

In fact, Jawbone sends a handwritten note to its customers. Customers love it, because it shows how much the brand values them, since they could take out time to write to every customer manually. To me, that’s a big sacrifice.

If you want your customers to stay put and trust your brand, then you should get beyond the normal service or product that you offer.

Surprises motivate customers. It can come in the form of appreciation. And appreciation is a strong motivating factor for hard work. In other words, when you appreciate people, they feel excited about their work.

Psychologically, scientists say that surprise is good for the brain. It also brings pleasure. It’s the spice of life. Don’t wait until your customers make a request. Step out and surprise them.

Reciprocate good gestures. Surprising your customers will inspire them to leave honest feedback about your product, and brand. Trust me, this is priceless.

Surprising offers make your customers feel like they’re part of something bigger.

Offer your customers free gifts and discounts when they aren’t expecting it. This will definitely change the lens through which they see your business.

If you need more ideas, Gregory Ciotti recently published a post on the 6 Creative Ways to Surprise and Delight your Customers.

2. Set customer expectations

Give your customers something to look forward to.

Customer service has gone beyond attending to inquiries and complaints, you also need to meet their expectations – even when you didn’t get their feedback.

But, it’s hard to satisfy someone you barely know. So, get to know your customers intimately. Understand what they desire most, and use these pointers to set expectations.

As you set and meet customer expectations, you’re empowering them. According to the Harvard Business Review, “customers want to be empowered, not controlled. You have to act with empathy.”

One of the ways to set and meet customer expectations is to be honest when making a promise.

This is where most SEO agencies fail flat. Majority of them make unrealistic promises to website owners. They promise to rank their websites in Google #1 fast.

If you’re into search engine optimization and you work with clients, don’t ever guarantee any first page result.

If you don’t achieve top rankings within the stipulated time you promised your client, do you know what just happened?

You’ve failed as a brand.

Here’s what I advise my clients: “Don’t over promise if you know that you can’t deliver.”

As marketing consultant, Roy Hollister Williams puts it, “the first step in exceeding your customers’ expectations is to know those expectations.”

For instance, be conscious of what you promise in your response time and keep to it. If you promise to deliver product 30 minutes after order, just do that.

Better yet, you can deliver in 25 minutes time. You must not go below expectations.

Promise what you can do. Set expectations that you can meet. In the event that you’re not able to meet expectations, apologize and compensate your customers. Compensation is not enough.

If a customer is expecting a high quality product and service, but gets a crappy product – regret will follow. They’ll begin to regret purchasing the product in the first place with their hard earned money.

Realising that your customer’s satisfaction is key to sustaining them will help you build a sustainable business.

Once customers are badly treated, they live with it for ages. And they’ll find it difficult to forget negative experiences and undelivered promises.

3. Build trust through relationships

Successful businesses are built on trust. When two people are involved in a business, if there is no trust, the business dies.

And there are only two persons in your business:

You and the customer.

Seeing how important trust is to your business, you’ve to consciously make attempts to promote trust. As you initiate relationship with new and existing customers, you give them the opportunity to trust you.

Ideally, when you’re looking to build trust, use the customer behavior data to deliver enormous value in your product. That way, they will continually nod and accept your recommendations.

According to a new report by EY and Forbes Insights, “marketers should use data to build trust with customers.”

The moment customers discover that you’re not trustworthy, they will switch to your competitors. Nothing scares customers away like bad experience. Worse, they’ll spread the negative news with others.

The commitment of your customers will be firm when trust increases.

A survey conducted by Concerto Marketing Group stated that 83% of customers will recommend your brand to others if they trust the brand. While 82% will stick to your brand if they trust it.

This means that when you build and grow trust, your customers will gladly advertise your brand – without asking for any compensation.

Lexus Sweden builds trust through customer conversations. “We communicate with reviews instead of just using traditional marketing because authentic customer commentary is more trustworthy,” explains Drakenberg.

In 2011, Lexus Sweden found that people who visited the company’s website engaged with reviews, which led to 35% more pageviews than those who did not – and spent 122% more time on the website.

4. Use automation to re-engage customers

Automation is allowing some of your routines to be handled automatically be a software. The most popular is “marketing automation.”

Monitoring and keeping your customers abreast manually is time consuming.

Because there are so many processes to be repeated daily, in order to keep your brand fresh in the customer’s mind.

Truth be told, there are still challenges of marketing automation. The most obvious is the data quality and integration. Poor marketing process is also a big factor.

Automation will set you on a faster pace more than your competitors. See proof below:

The idea here is to use automation to re-engage your customers. Sure, you’ll see a boost in conversion rate as you engage customers manually, however, you can communicate stronger and faster through automation.

Do you promise to send useful email newsletters to your customers twice a week, as well as SMS to new customers, tell me: how can you handle all the task without automation?

You can select from the 15 best marketing automation software, if you’re ready to take your customer relationship management to a new level.

When your processes are standardized, it will give you the opportunity to deliver on the promises that you made to customers.

Through automation, you can manage your customer contacts, drip feed education emails, schedule promotional emails, text messages, and event notifications.

5. Improve KPIs around customer service

KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator.

Klipfolio defines it as a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company is achieving key business objectives. Organizations use KPIs to evaluate their success at reaching targets.

KPIs are equally regarded as a roadmap. Because they help you visualize what the future holds for your business, and what direction you should be taking.

By carefully studying your key performance indicators, you can tell what gets your customers excited or unhappy.

At a glance, you’ll agree with me that delivering a great customer service and making it easy for customers to access vital information and support is critical.

And this is one of the core reasons why you need to automate marketing processes. For example, Help Desk software can help you map your customer persona, set up a campaign, and collect vital customer behavior data.

At the end of the day, whether you’re in charge of customer service or administration, you can easily tell how your customer support treats your customers. The KPIs will reveal everything.

But the essence of all these is to render good services, and meet customer’s goal at the end.

Here are the 5 essential KPIs for effective customer engagement:

i).   Response Time: When customers indicate interest in your offer, response time is a metric that measures how quickly you contact customers and interested parties with an email, live chat, or a sales call.

Time is critical here. If you delay, your conversions will be low. In the same vein, responding too quickly may not be right for your brand. You’ve got to find a balance.

Real estate experts believe that your response time should fall in between 10 – 20 minutes. That way, you’ll get optimum result, without leaving any footprint.

ii).   Conversion Rate: This measures the relative response that you get when you put the call across, send a quick email, or have a live chat with either a new or existing customer.

As you send outreach emails, how many of them were opened? Out of the opened emails, what percentage of these led to sales?

Conversion rate is a key performance indicator that’s critical to every business, irrespective of the industry. You can also measure conversion rate within your funnel – to determine how you’re attending to customer’s specific needs at every stage.

iii).  Funnel Drop Rate: Getting new subscribers to your list is awesome, but you equally want to measure how often people unsubscribe from your list. That’s what this KPI is all about.

iv).  Actions per engagement: The moment you begin to measure your customer’s response to calls, outreach emails, you’ll be amazed by the result – because, patterns in their behavior will start to emerge.

With this new behavioral pattern, it’s easier to determine how many times you need to engage (e.g., call, send email) with your customers before they take the necessary action (e.g., purchase a product).

v).  Communication freshness: When was the last time you sent email, made a call, or had a conversation with your existing customers? What was the outcome of the last conversation?

Until you’re passionate your customers and dedicating time to engage with them, your business will likely suffer.

6. Leverage customer feedback surveys

Surveys are powerful tools for building customer engagement. Surveys may look boring, but people like it.

According to Fluid  Survey University, “The Average Response Rate for email surveys is 24.8%.” And there are several benefits associated with email surveys. Take a look:

Truly, hearing from customers directly to know how they feel about your products and services is a great way to cement the bond that already exist. In essence, it can help you develop engaging custom content for customer retention.

When customers are given the chance to express themselves, they reveal their minds and feelings about your brand.

In their complaints, be sensitive enough to catch the pain points. Get to know the areas they’re not satisfied about and why. Adjusting in those areas will turn things around.

Warning: Don’t frown when your customers complain. Be patient enough to hear them out. Their feedback is all you need to scale from being a mediocre or average business to a respected brand.

Remember that through feedback, you can re-engage a customer that’s about giving up on your brand.

No matter how you look at it, automation can help your business in so many ways. Most striking is the fact that it can help you engage and retain your customers.

7. Develop a frequent communication calendar

A communication calendar is what you use to keep in touch with your customers at regular intervals.

Just the same way an editorial content calendar helps you keep track of your content strategy, content creation, publishing, and promotion in check, you can’t fail with a communication calendar.

The calendar is basically a programmed sequence of events, phone calls, special offers, handwritten notes, and so on, which you send to your customers using an automation software.

The programmed sequence of events is essential for pre-sales, sales, and post-sales processes.

Brands that keep a communication calendar usually find it easy to engage with their customers. Because, the frequent communication eliminates post-purchase doubts, improves trust level, and persuades the customer to come back again.

There are several communication calendar tools online, which allows you to send sends cards, letters on events, phone calls, special offers, and appreciation messages to customers periodically.

With this calendar, you can automate periodic communications with your customers easily. A lot of organizations are already using this marketing automation tool to communicate with their customers.

Frequent communication makes the customer feel valued and important, since you’re keeping them informed of your processes.

A recent statistics showed that organizations that relate with their customers more than 10x a year have 300% profit more than those that lost contact with their customers.

Side note: Customers’ interests could be neglected, but with frequent communication calendar tool, the processes are programmed and automated to send messages.

8. Overdeliver on your promise

Because a promise is a debt.

It’s dangerous promising what you can’t deliver.

According to statistics from Business.com, when a customer is dissatisfied, he will likely tell 20 more persons about her negative experience with the brand.

To avoid hurting your customers, the rule of business hasn’t changed: “Under promise and over deliver.”

When you follow this formula, you’re exceeding customer expectation. After all, you’re going beyond what you promised.

That’s a great opportunity for you, too.

Only a fraction of people have succeeded in exceeding expectations. Sadly, 25% of businesses don’t even meet the expectations as shown in the chart below:

You know that promises raise expectations. When customers are expectant, they’re at a delicate stage – because a step could make or mar your brand. Become sensitive to your promises – and dare to exceed them.

A recent study by Manuela Vieth revealed that unkept promises provoke revenge against the organization that failed to honor them.

As the saying goes, “Don’t wake the lions in customers.”

Customers can be aggressive when disappointed. If you  promise to deliver a product in 20 minutes, be there at 15 minutes or 5 minutes before the time. As simple as this is, you’ll have succeeded in satisfying your customer.

9. Measure customer lifetime value

Do you see your customers as one of your biggest assets? Well, if you don’t know, they’re your biggest asset.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is one of such important key performance indicators that show you the worth of your customers over a period of time.

For example, if you sell online courses and charge a monthly fee, you’re not really concerned about new customers, but the lifetime value of each customers who purchases from you today.

It takes a lot of resources to get a customer. As a business person, you’ll like to know the value each of your customers is bringing to your business. It’s called customer’s equity.

Some of your customers have added more value than others. Some will always come around to buy. This repeated buyers are your VIP customers.

These are the same group of customers who will refer others to your business through word of mouth.

The value you place on your customers help you predict revenue and determine your budget for providing engaging content at all times.

You can use the Customerlifetimevalue.co to estimate how much a customer is worth to your business.

For more information on Customer Lifetime Value, see the resources below:

• How To Calculate Lifetime Value
• How To Calculate & Increase Customer Lifetime Value

10. Learn from customer complaints

Hey, you need to run away from customers who complain, right?

Wrong.

On the contrary, you should run to them. This group of customers who complain (to you or to others) are your greatest marketing asset.

It’s through complaints that you get to know the defects in your products and services. Complaints reveal what you should improve in your business and what to ignore.

It’s in the place of customer complaints that you know what your customers care about, and what they expect from your products and services.

Here’s what you need to know:

A customer who complains is willing to stay. Some customers disappear without leaving a comment. This is not good for your business.

If you resolve the complaints in their favor, 70% of complaining customers will do business with you again.

Therefore, give attention to your complaining customers. They’re still interested in your business.

11. Train your customers with educational emails

Sending email newsletters is still the #1 customer retention strategy that works.

With the right application, email newsletter can help you train your customers – especially when you’re 85% focused on educating them with branded content.

According to Nielsen Norman Group, “Newsletters are great for growing or maintaining relationships, even during times when people aren’t actively making purchasing decisions.

Attending to new customers and email subscribers after the initial contact is vital. With an educational newsletter that you send out periodically, they’ll trust you more – and feel excited purchasing from you.

After all, “teaching sells,” says Brian Clark

Email marketing has over the years been a major way of increasing customer conversion. But the question still remains: “what type of emails are you sending to them?”

Sending educational email is a smart method of educating your customers – and giving them good reasons to consider buying from you – and not your competitors.

If they can get valuable content from you at the earlier stages, they probably will like to remain with you.

Dare to train your new customers with educational emails. Show them step-by-step, how to use your product, the benefits, and behind-the-scenes video or pictures. And nurture existing customers with loyalty programs.

Just the same way you nurture your new employees to understand the company’s goal & culture, you must train your customers via email newsletters, too.

Using customer’s personal experience at some point in the pre-sales, sales and even post sales stages can be very effective.

Because, it gives them the feeling that they are part of your business, as they are always informed about any change or promos associated with your business. This is a strong motivating factor when they’re making purchase decisions.

12. Use live webinars to educate and inspire customers

GoToMeeting.com and several other software have grown to become strong brands in the digital marketing space, because of the key roles they play.

They help you host your webinar from start to finish.

Webinars are powerful lead generation and customer retention strategy. It’s the best strategy to revive a dying business online.

“Based on a survey we conducted with our clients, between 20% and 40% of webinar attendees turned into qualified leads.” (source)

Webinars create impact. Successful brands online started out with webinars.

In fact, authority sites such as KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg, HubSpot, LeadPages, Unbounce, Copybloggers and so on grew into multi-million dollar digital marketing businesses through webinars.

A webinar can help a business achieve all the organizational goals of content marketing. Yes, webinars are that powerful!

Engaging your customers in a webinar gives them the avenue to learn more about your products/services.

And not just that, they’re also allowed to ask questions and present their challenges for every attendee to see.

In the course of discussion, they can make suggestions that will definitely redirect your focus – in the right direction.

Use webinars in your business to build trust with customers.

You can actually host an event for your customers, with a bid to answer their questions in a personal manner.

It also shows that you really know what you’re talking about, when you can give a voice to your answers.

Sometimes, blog posts, articles, ebooks, and other written content limits the customer from getting to know you at a personal level. That’s why you need to consider hosting a webinar.

After the live webinar, you can further take advantage of video sharing sites, by posting the recorded webinar on YouTube, Vimeo, on your blog – in order to reach more potential customers.

13. Consistently add valuable content to your funnel

As a marketer you might have come across the word “funnel.”

Well, it’s an integral part of every content marketing strategy. Before a business can talk about conversion rate, there must be a funnel in place.

The goal is to guide the visitors and engage with them, until they’re ready to purchase your product.

When people first visit your website, they need to be properly nurtured and engaged with relevant content and persuasion techniques – until they’re ready to buy.

Don’t try to sell to strangers.

It’s just like making a purchase on Ebay. The customer starts by logging in, searching for the product, then add to cart, before paying for the item.

HubSpot simplified this process into 3 vital stages: Awareness, Evaluation, and Purchase.

The Top Of The Funnel (TOFU) is usually crowded. But as people go down the funnel, the number of leads reduce, and only a tiny percentage of these leads will eventually purchase the product.

To a large extent, the more people you’ve at the TOFU and MOFU (middle of the funnel), the more customers you’ll eventually convert.

In each of these stages you should add valuable contents that will encourage the visitor to move to the next level. This image shows examples of what you can offer at each stage.

14. Create a community and customer advocacy program

One quick way to encourage advocacy and community is by creating a discussion board or forum in your website.

It can help retain customers – because they’ll feel appreciated being in the midst of other customers. This is a form of social proof.

A community will give your customers the opportunity to discuss important topics and ask questions about your products and services.

An example is Shopify’s discussion board. It’s very active and shopify store owners use it to engage with other users.

Challenges, questions, and new ideas are raised – and with everyone being actively involved, solutions are just an arm’s length away.

This medium can further be engaged with news about new product features, promos, and acquisitions.

You can even add fun to the discussion by rewarding your most active members, and giving away access to your premium coaching courses or programs at half the price or even free.

This would inspire more active participation, and in turn build your customer’s confidence to trust in your brand.

Since building a community around your brand is an essential tool for communicating with your customers frequently, and educating them, it’s important that you moderate the threads – to avoid irrelevant discussions that would dent your brand.

You’ll definitely read negative comments or complaints. Whenever you find one, don’t ignore it or feel reluctant about it. Go ahead and address it openly. That way, users will learn, appreciate, and build confidence in your brand.

All of these discussions are working together to help your customers become brand ambassadors.

Look around and you’ll notice that successful digital companies got to where they’re, not only because the founder was smart and influential, rather, it’s because the customers participated.

Word of mouth can spread faster than speeding bullet, if you orchestrate it from the onset.

Digital marketing influencers have found that consumer word of mouth is a powerful tool in growing sales, it generated 2x the sales gotten from paid advertising.

It’s highly credible for generating new customers and retaining existing ones.

Consumer advocacy is designed to nudge the customers from the inside – letting them know the need to spread the good news.

In a recent study, about 36% of US executives testified to the great increase in customer acquisition through consumer advocacy.

It’ll interest you to know that word of mouth is more effective on customers, especially when buying a product for the first time or an expensive item.

A case study by Nielsen further shows that  92% of consumers responded positively to recommendations from friends, than they do to TV ads.

More so, referred customers have a 37% possibility of sticking to your brand and 50% chance of making a purchase.

15. Personalize your communications

When it comes to customer service, you can’t afford to be lukewarm. You’re either all out to help you customer, or your business will suck.

According to Eitan Fogel in an interview with BusinessInsider.com, “I don’t know of a single person who doesn’t like the sound of their own name. Personalization has long been a critical component of customer relationship management and customer service.”

Truly, personalization is the key that you need to trounce the competition.

It doesn’t matter how sophisticated the tools that your competitors are using, if you can get personal with your customers, you’ll be able to communicate clearly to and meet their needs.

For example, Banks and other financial institutions are currently using this technique.

The value of personalization is enormous. Banks want to know their customers well – that’s the reason for the endless forms you’ll have to fill whenever you need to get things done at the Bank.

Personalization can be done at different levels. Yes, you can personalize your emails. That’s obvious.

You can also personalize your communications, by creating custom content that engages your customer in each stage down the funnel.

But personalization shouldn’t be done on emails alone. Even in live chat, customer service emails, or FAQ pages, you can tour the personality route – just to make your customer happy.

Take a look at the Customer Intelligence Engine, at the right side of the chart, you’ll see various channels through which you engage with your customers. Make sure that personalization is an integral part of it.

It feels good to be seated in a restaurant, a waiter comes by and calls you by your name, plus “what can we offer you,” with a smile.

I’m sure you’ll reply, “my usual.”

Few minutes after, he serves your “usual.”

That’s how customer relationship should be done. Did you know that by looking at your customer’s purchase history, you can actually personalize their experience better?

Absolutely.

According to Capgemini, more than 60% of customers finds it interesting when they are presented with their purchase history. This lets them know that the merchant or brand is trustworthy.

Unfortunately, most marketers are aware of the benefits of personalization in customer retention, but just a few of them practice it.

Learn to personalize without borders. Doing it online is pretty easy and common, but you should take it offline, especially if you’ve a local business.

Here’s a case study excerpt from Everengage:

“One example of this is when a Zappos customer had traveled to Las Vegas and forgotten to pack the shoes she had bought from Zappos. She went back on the site to buy them again but couldn’t find the same ones because they no longer had it. So the customer support team actually found the shoes at a local mall, purchased them, and personally delivered it to her at her hotel room, for free. Guess which company she recommends when her friends ask her where they can buy shoes.”

16. Address customer’s complaints on time

In this era where brands are busy chasing after new leads, the last thing they need is a complaint. Truth be told, attending to customer complaints would waste your time.

Nevertheless, complaints still remain a vital tool in enhancing the growth of a business. You’ve got to give a listening ear. Start today.

It gives you the opportunity to see things you overlooked, or probably didn’t see.

Most firms that have recorded great success all have what we call customer care departments.

Overall, 69% of customer service are rated good if customer’s problems or complaints are resolved quickly.

Effective customer service rely heavily on how fast the problem is resolved.

Your customer care department should be trained, flexible, welcoming, and have an open policy.

Complaints should be a priority that needs urgent attention in your business. Don’t defer or postpone giving attention to it. Answer the question now.

Your firm should be able to resolve complaints from all sources (email, offline, social media, phone calls, etc.).

17. Use unbiased customer reviews and testimonials

Use the resources that you already have to retain your customers. Period.

Customer reviews. Testimonials. Star ratings.

These are important metrics that you MUST integrate into your customer retention strategy.

Do people trust you enough to buy from you?

In a survey by Brandify, 88% of respondents said that negative reviews influence their purchase decisions.

The truth is, there are no credible company or brand that customers will purchase from without reading reviews.

Even Apple, Amazon, Ebay, Wal-Mart. Online shoppers still read reviews about the iPhone 6, Amazon Kindle, and so on.

Generally, consumers are always cautious and curious about online products, especially digital products, like software, online courses, ebooks, plugins, etc.

This brings us to an all-important question: What do people say about your brand?

Giving an answer to that question is as important as turning profits in your business.

When it comes to purchasing products online, about 92% of consumers regularly or occasionally read customers’ reviews first.

Both customer reviews and testimonials are powerful tools to retain your customers. If you’ve not been using them, start today.

When new customers read real testimonials, they’ll quickly come to terms with the product, and see themselves using it. The testimonial doesn’t have to be 100% positive either to inspire new customers.

Why should you use customer reviews and testimonials?

Let’s look at a few of the benefits:

• They help to build trust with your customers.
• They help ring the benefits of your products in the customer’s ear.
• They speaks for you so you won’t sound salesy, since they aren’t your own words, but customers’.

Conclusion

From small startups to huge Fortune 500 companies, these 17 customer retention strategies have been implemented – and the results intrigued even the pros.

As you’d expect, none of these strategies is guaranteed to yield overnight results. You’ll need to be patient as you implement them.

There is nothing more frustrating than giving a strategy a shot, and giving up simply because you didn’t see quick results. Stay put. Don’t give in.

By the way, which of these customer retention strategies have you implemented, and how did it work for you?

Maintaining a successful marketing strategy for your business requires a consistent stream of fresh content that offers value to your visitors. To some business owners, content creation sounds like an easy job, but many companies lack the time and motivation to do it. If you don’t have a dedicated writer in your team and your employees aren’t willing to contribute, you can profit from hiring a team of remote writers.

By hiring remote workers, you will have access to a wide talent pool of writers from all over the world. On top of that, your business will save on overhead costs and your remote writers will enjoy a better work-life balance while working from the comfort of their home.

Despite all of the benefits remote work brings for you and your employees, you might experience challenges with finding the right writers and managing your remote team. Take a look at the following advice to help you make the process of assembling a remote writing team easier.

Develop a Content Strategy

Before you start looking for writers, you need to create an effective content strategy that will help you decide on the type and number of writers you need to hire. The strategy will also help you stay focused on your long-term goals and not just on producing content.

You first need to decide what exactly you want to achieve with your strategy and set goals that are in line with your business plan. Spend some time researching your target audience and analyzing their needs and interests. This research will help you decide on the type of content that you’ll produce. Any type of content you decide to create should have a clearly defined purpose.

Define the style and the length of the content and estimate the number of posts you are going to publish each week. Spend some time evaluating the goals of your content marketing strategy as this will help you find the right writers for your company.

Determine How Many Content Writers You Need

Once you know what kind of content you are going to create and how often you are going to publish it, you will need to decide how many writers to hire. Dedicate a week of your time to creating the content you need by yourself. This will help you evaluate the time required to do the job.

Knowing how much time it takes to create a certain amount of content will help you determine how many writers you need. Being able to judge the number of writers you need is important because, by hiring an inadequate number of employees, you’ll risk burdening them with too much work.

On the other hand, assembling a team composed of too many workers can create a lot of idle time, and your writers might look elsewhere to find work when they learn that you can’t keep them busy. By hiring the right number of writers, you will ensure you always have fresh content on your blog.

Understand the Skillset Required for the Job

The type of writers you need to hire will predominantly depend on the kind of content that needs to be created for your target audience. Different content types require different writing skills, so keeping this in mind will help you pinpoint the right writers for your company.

You should focus on finding writers who have the ability to write for different audiences and strategies. Writers with experience in long-form journalism can help present the compelling story of your company. Those with experience working at a copy desk or for a marketing agency can deliver sharp and witty content.

It goes without saying that the main skill you are looking for is the ability to write. However, industry knowledge and a basic understanding of SEO are also important prerequisites you should look for in your writers.

Other important features you should look for include basic planning and organizational skills. Since your remote writers will be working without your immediate supervision, they should be self-disciplined and self-motivated to meet deadlines. In general, remote workers produce 13 percent more than their in-office coworkers, so you shouldn’t be too concerned about them not producing content on a regular basis.

Find Experienced Writers

Finding the right writers might not be easy and may take some time. However, patience and persistence in this part of the process can definitely pay out. Taking the time to find skilled writers will help you develop your content marketing strategy to its full potential. This, in turn, will drive traffic to your site, raise brand awareness and develop your authority.

Since you are hiring remote workers you will have an extremely wide talent pool to choose from. Try not to rely too much on low-quality freelance sites as this can leave you disappointed. At first, the pricing might seem attractive, but the quality of the writing might not suit you. Putting the word out to your network of contacts will help you find experienced writers who can deliver the high-quality content you need. You can also try finding writers by asking recommendations from your business colleagues.

Experienced writers often have their own websites, which can simplify your search. This allows you to review examples of their work and see whether their style suits your company. Look for writers who have the experience and background you need and ask to see various samples before making them an official part of your team.

You can also give potential employees an assignment to test their writing skills. Give them a topic and basic guidelines, and let them write an article. Try testing their proofreading and editing skills as well by giving them an article that needs to be checked. These simple assignments will help you decide whether the candidate is a good fit for your company.

Managing the Team

Once you’ve found the right team of writers, you will quickly realize that managing a remote team differs from your previous experiences overseeing traditional workers. For example, you can’t always instantly respond to questions and concerns, and it can take a long time to give and receive feedback. Also, keeping track of your remote writers’ status and progress is one of the hardest parts of managing a remote team.

You will need to compensate for the different communication requirements by using tools that can improve your team’s efficiency. Defining the writing guidelines will also help keep your content strategy on course. The following tips will help you manage your remote workers efficiently.

Set Up a Centralized Communication System

Focusing on regular and effective communication with your remote writers should be your top priority. Remote workers can’t stop by your office every time they need to ask you a question. That is why you need to decide on a centralized communication system every employee will use.

Using team chat apps such as Slack or Google Hangouts will enable you to limit the use of email for correspondence. This will allow your remote employees to quickly and easily communicate and share information with you and each other. It will also give you a chance to communicate your expectations, give instructions and establish deadlines and goals.

Consider using project management apps to organize your tasks and track projects. Apps such as Trello or Asana can help your team manage resources and responsibilities, and finish projects on time.

Collaborative systems such as Google Docs can enable you to work on projects in real time. Working this way removes the tedious exchange of latest document versions via email. It also allows you to check on the status of work being done by each writer.

Using video conferencing software for virtual meetings with your remote employees is a great way to brainstorm ideas and discuss projects. Solving problems and making decisions this way can also be much easier than relying on chat.

Define the Style Guide

It is important that all of your writers produce content that is consistent in style, tone, and voice. Establishing rules and guidelines early in your relationship with remote writers will help you avoid misunderstandings and run a smooth operation.

Create a style guide that will help your writers in creating content that is structured, organized and professional. This guide should document the preferred spelling, punctuation, grammar, terminology, formatting, and design. A style guide will help all of your writers stay on the same page by establishing the basic rules to follow.

Every member of the team should have access to the guide at all times and it should always have the latest information with recent updates highlighted so your team will easily notice them. This way, your team can refer to the guide whenever they need to and you can make sure that all of their writing is uniform.

Refine the Process

As work progresses, routinely ask your writers for feedback, so you can improve your processes and enjoy better outcomes. Don’t be discouraged by setbacks and failures because creating the right framework for managing remote writers takes time and effort. If you focus on consistent improvements, you’ll reap returns in the form of a team that works well together while achieving your goals.

Final Word

Hiring remote writers give you the ability to orchestrate complicated marketing efforts without the need for traditional in-office workers. Finding the right writers for your remote team and managing them will require a lot of effort on your part. However, with continuous work towards improvements, you will have an efficient production process that consistently hands you the content you need to build success.

Use your blog to its full potential, and you’ll find your website getting more traffic, your customers interacting with you more, and your business getting more sales.

But if you blog the wrong way, you won’t only miss out on all those benefits – you could actually hurt your brand and repel your ideal customers!

That’s because a blog is a huge part of your brand. It gives your company an opportunity to establish a unique voice that helps you stand out from your competitors.

But with that opportunity comes risk, because if you don’t establish a unique voice and put effort into creating content that is relevant and helpful to your audience, you might as well not blog at all.

That being said, don’t give up on your blog just because you aren’t seeing the results you want from it yet. It takes a lot of effort and time to nail down and implement an effective blogging strategy.

Check out the following mistakes, see which ones you’re making, and use what you learn from the advice here to improve your business blog.

1. Using your blog to share company news

Lots of businesses – especially in the B2B world – use their blog to share company news. To put it bluntly, that strategy doesn’t make sense at all, and it doesn’t help them build a following.

Why?

Because potential customers don’t care about company news. They care about reading content that will help them solve their problems. And company news doesn’t do that.

So, stop sharing company news and start giving your audience more of what they want – actionable, insightful content that will help them achieve their business goals quicker.

2. Stuffing blog posts with SEO key words

Over-optimizing blog posts by stuffing them with key words used to be an effective SEO strategy, but not anymore. Google now penalizes content that is stuffed with key words.

That’s why you need to focus more on content marketing as a whole – not just SEO. You should still use key words in your blog post content, titles, and URLs, but never add so many that it’s obvious you stuffed your content with key words.

If you do, both Google and your target audience will disapprove of your content.

3. Being overly corporate and formal

Let’s be honest – lots of business blogs read like they were written by a pretentious technical writing professor.

This is a major problem because people don’t enjoy reading bland content. They want to learn something useful while feeling connected to the writer, and you won’t connect to anyone using unnecessarily complex language that confuses more than it communicates.

In fact, studies have shown that online content should be written at a middle school reading level for maximum effectiveness.

So, keep it simple by writing your posts in your own blogging voice. And show some personality too! You want people to actually like you after reading something you’ve written – if they like you, there’s a good chance they’ll be more willing to buy from you.

4. Publishing content that is clearly self-serving

When people come to your blog, they’re going to leave immediately if your posts read like a sales pitch. That’s because people don’t want to be sold to – they want to be informed.

So, if you’re putting “contact us today!” in every post (or a similar call to action) and not getting the loyal following you’re after, it’s probably because you’re pitching too hard.

If you really want to use your blog to sell the smart way, you won’t randomly pitch your services within the posts all the time. Instead, you’ll offer free downloadable content that a customer can get by giving you their email address. Then, you can use email marketing to sell to that customer.

While it’s not an instant way to sell, it is an effective way to sell, and that’s what matters the most.

5. Neglecting to add images to your posts

Did you know that articles with images get 94% more total views?

It’s true. Plus, you can use images to improve your SEO if you optimize them correctly. So, if you’re not using images within your blog posts right now, just think about all of the engagement and sales you could be missing out on!

But maybe you’ve thought about using images before and just haven’t done it yet because you don’t know where to find them or how to make your own. If that’s the case, try one of these tools:

• Shutterstock – Pay a monthly fee, and you’ll be able to download a specified number of images to use for your business. They have tons of images, and lots of them are high-quality.
• Pixabay – You’ll find free downloadable images here, but they don’t have nearly as wide of a selection as Shutterstock. However, if you’re short on cash and just need some basic pictures, this is probably your best bet.
• Canva – This free graphic design app is awesome, and you don’t even need design skills to use it. You can drag and drop different elements to create social media images, branded cover photos for social media profiles, and – of course – blog post images.

Also, you can add screenshots to explain the points you’re making in your blog posts to make them extra effective. You may also consider using charts, graphs, and infographics (as long as you have permission from the graphic’s creator). The visual learners among your readers will love you for it!

6. Failing to promote your blog

Don’t create content if you aren’t willing to promote it. You can’t expect to gain lots of readers just because you published a blog post – you’ve got to get active online where your audience hangs out and share your posts there!

Derek Halpern of Social Triggers even says that you should spend 20% of your time writing a piece of content and 80% of your time promoting it. So, if you aren’t prioritizing post promotion right now, make changes to your content strategy that will allow you to do so.

7. Failing to break up the content in your posts

Most newbie bloggers’ posts look like gigantic walls of text. And when a reader lands on a post like that, they’ll be too intimidated by all of the content to read it.

To combat this issue, write content that people can easily scan for important points by:

• Using bulleted lists (like this one!)
• Including images and white space
• Keeping paragraphs and sentences short and easy to digest

Doing so will greatly improve your blog post’s readability, and you’ll be much more likely to get positive results.

8. Ignoring reader comments

When someone takes the time to make a positive comment on your blog post, you need to take the time to respond.

Why?

Because it’s a chance to talk to your potential customers directly and start building relationships with them. And when you build relationships with your target audience, it’s a lot easier to sell to them.

The more in-depth you can go in your responses to comments, the better.

In other words, don’t just say “Thanks!” and leave it at that. Instead, be insightful and continue the conversation. It might be a bit time-consuming and tedious, but it’s completely worth connecting to your audience. Plus, it’ll help you establish yourself as an expert in the eyes of your readers.

9. Outsourcing your blog content creation to a sub-par writer

I get it – you might be too busy to write all of your blog content. And it’s completely okay to hire a ghostwriter or bylined contributor to handle it for you.

But what’s not okay is hiring a writer who can’t produce high-quality content that turns your readers into loyal customers.

So, don’t get on Upwork and hire the first writer you see for a penny per word. Instead, do a quick Google search to find the type of writer you’re looking for. If a writer has a professional-looking website full of testimonials and solid samples, you can feel confident knowing that you’ll get a good return on your investment.

But make no mistake – it will be an investment. The best writers often charge hundreds of dollars per blog posts because of how much time they spend writing them.

As with many other things, you get what you pay for, so set aside a chunk of your marketing budget to devote to an expert writer. Don’t sacrifice your brand and your content marketing just to save a couple hundred dollars a month, or you might as well not produce any content at all.

And make sure you don’t give up on your business blog just because you don’t see results quickly. Even if you’ve got amazing content and a solid promotion strategy, it’ll likely still take several months for you to start winning new customers with your blog. But if you’re willing to work hard at blogging, your efforts will pay off in the form of new leads for your business!

Have you made any of these mistakes with your business blog? Share in the comments section!

What’d you see the last time you scrolled through your Instagram feed?

If you’re like me, you were bombarded with selfies, pictures of delicious-looking food, videos of people’s pets, and inspirational quotes.

And probably not too many interesting posts from small businesses.

The sad fact is that lots of small businesses aren’t even on Instagram. Often, they either don’t want to learn how to use it or they don’t think it’ll help them improve their business.

But they’re wrong. Instagram can help your small business succeed.

And that especially applies if your ideal customers are anywhere from 12 to 25 years old. Just take a look at how popular the app is with that audience:

But even if you’re marketing to an older demographic, Instagram is worth your time. After all, at 4.21%, brand engagement rates highest on Instagram. That’s right – it beats both Twitter and Facebook.

So, let’s talk about several ways you can use Instagram for your small business to effectively to engage with your audience and get better results from your social media marketing efforts.

1. Find, follow, and interact with your ideal customers

Finding your ideal customers on Instagram isn’t too difficult. The first thing you should do is look at the accounts who are following businesses similar to yours – if they’re following them, then they’re probably going to be interested in what your business has to offer too.

For example, if you’re a fitness guru who sells online weight loss courses, you’d want to follow some of the people who follow popular fitness gurus. If you’re a marketing agency, you’d want to follow some of the people who follow popular marketing agencies.

You get the picture.

Now, don’t get me wrong – not all of the people you follow will follow you back. But some of them will, and there’s a good chance they’ll engage with you if you’re posting the right content.

Then, you can start interacting with those people by commenting on their photos, liking their photos, and even sending them direct messages.

But keep this in mind:

If you spam people or write generic comments that aren’t tailored to fit the photo/account you’re commenting on, you’ll just hurt your brand and annoy people. Take the time to really form a genuine connection with your audience, and your efforts will eventually pay off.

2. Create content that appeals to your target audience

You know your target audience, but do you know what kind of content will make them engage with your brand on Instagram?

If not, it’s time to start researching. Take a look at your competitors’ accounts, and figure out which kinds of photos get the most engagement there. Of course, you don’t want to steal those photos, but you can certainly use them as inspiration when you’re creating your own posts.

If you’re not sure what kind of content to post on Instagram, here are a few ideas:

• Behind-the-scenes videos
• Inspirational quotes
• Employee selfies
• Blog post images
• Product sneak peeks
• Product arrangements

Try several (or all) of these, and see what gets the most engagement. Then, you can change your posting strategy based on what your audience likes best.

3. Fill out your bio strategically

Instagram isn’t LinkedIn – it’s much more casual. That means there’s no need for you to write a stuffy, boring bio full of business jargon.

Instead, opt for a more lighthearted feel to humanize your brand. Think about your ideal customer, and write your bio in a way that appeals to them.

As far as formatting, you can use emojis, vertical spacing, and other tricks to help your bio stand out from the crowd. Just take a look at this bio:

See how Lime Crime uses vertical spacing and emojis? Their bio formatting looks much more interesting that it would if it were just a boring sentence about their company.

I’m not saying you absolutely need to use emojis or vertical formatting. Think about your target audience and what they might like to see in your bio, and take a look at what you most successful competitors are doing. From there, you can make an informed decision about how to format your bio.

Tip: While it’s good to be creative in your bio, you shouldn’t sacrifice clarity for the sake of creativity. Make sure your bio states what your company does in a way that allows the people who view your profile to immediately understand it.

4. Post high-quality photos

Don’t worry – you don’t need professional photography skills or even a good camera to pull this off. All you need is your iPhone camera.

Here are a few DIY photography tips you can use to improve your photo quality:

• Use natural light to your advantage. If you’re shooting outdoors, try to take the photos in the late afternoon when the lighting is best. If you’re indoors, just open up a window (or your blinds) and you’ll be good to go!
• Don’t use the front facing camera if you can help it. Using the back camera on your smart phone will often result in higher-resolution photos.
• Edit your photos. Do not (I repeat, do NOT) use the default filters included in the Instagram app! Instead, download a photo editing app and make a few adjustments until your photo looks like it was taken by a professional.

If you’ve got an iPhone and would like to learn how to use it to take amazing photos, check out the iPhone photography school blog. It’s full of tips that’ll help you boost the quality of your photos!

5. Use hashtags

When you’re using hashtags, think about what words your target market might be searching for that also apply to your photo. For example, if you’re running an entrepreneurship blog and posting inspirational quotes to your Instagram account, you might try using hashtags like #entrepreneur and #mondaymotivation.

Whatever industry you’re in, use the Hashtagify tool to research and determine the best hashtags to use for your business and target audience. When you type in a tag, you’ll get other tag suggestions, like this:

Experiment with different hashtag combinations and see which work the best. As long as your hashtags are relevant to the photo you’re posting and your target audience, they should be fine.

A word of warning:

Don’t overdo it with your hashtags. If you include 15+ hashtags every time you post a photo, you’ll look spammy and desperate, which will hurt your brand. Trust me – that’s not worth any amount of likes.

So, how many hashtags should you use?

Try sticking with 3 to 5 hashtags per post. That way, you can include enough hashtags to drive engagement but not so many that your account looks ridiculous.

6. Offer discounts

If your small business is an eCommerce store, you can get new followers and keep existing followers around by offering exclusive discounts on your Instagram account.

All you need to do is create a graphic that shows the discount percentage and discount code (you can easily do this using Canva), then explain how to use the code in your caption.

But you don’t have to be an eCommerce store owner to use this tip. Get creative, and figure out a way to offer exclusive discount for the products and/or services you offer.

7. Make sure your feed is cohesive

To create a strong brand on Instagram, you need a cohesive feed. Ideally, your pictures should stick to a similar color scheme (if you have a brand style guide, use it), and you should use the same filter and/or editing process for each photo you post.

Let’s take a look at a good example of a cohesive Instagram feed. It belongs to YouTuber Anastasjia Louise:

You can see that she sticks to a dark theme, and her pictures are mostly black and white. As a result, her feed is visually appealing and you immediately get a strong sense of her personal brand when you look at it.

But you don’t necessarily need to stick to a dark theme like her. Think about your audience and what types of photos are most likely to appeal to them. Then, create a cohesive feed by using a photo editing app like Afterlight or VSCOcam to create a custom editing process.

When you use one of these apps and edit a photo the way you like, edit all of your other photos that way too. This is one of the most important steps when you’re trying to create a cohesive feed.

You’ll also want to share the same kind of content consistently – that way, your audience knows what to expect (and they know it’ll be something they like!). Just make sure you monitor your results when you post and adjust your strategy based on which types of photos are getting the most engagement.

8. Craft some killer copy

Don’t underestimate the power of your copy when you’re writing captions for your Instagram posts. Those captions can be the difference between 1 like and 1,000 likes, so take your time while writing and make sure whatever you put there is good.

Also, keep in mind that Instagram captions can help you build your brand. If your brand is edgy, write something edgy. If your brand is positive and uplifting, write something positive and uplifting.

Whatever you decide to write for your captions, tailor the messaging based on your brand and target audience, and you’ll see better overall results from your Instagram marketing efforts.

In Conclusion

Just like anything else, the results you get from your small business Instagram account will depend on how much effort you put into it.

Follow the tips outlined here consistently, and you can feel confident knowing that you’ll soon see your following begin to grow. Keep it up, and who knows – Instagram marketing might just become one of your most powerful methods of connecting with new customers!

Which of these tips will you use to start improving your Instagram marketing efforts? Share in the comments section!

Depending on where you are in your marketing journey, digital marketing is either a voodoo-like superstition or a teachable science anyone can master. If you’re in the former camp, you’re probably struggling to master your metrics; measuring results is the difference between wishful thinking and actual return on your marketing investment.

To be sure, there are literally hundreds of numbers, statistics, and analytical combinations you could track to give you insight into your marketing efforts and customer behasvior, and not every metric is relevant to your marketing plan. That said, there are a few key metrics in three broad categories (traffic, conversions, and revenue) that are universally applicable to judging your digital marketing success.  Here are 18 important digital marketing metrics to watch.

Traffic Metrics

Image via Flickr by BlueFountainMedia

1. Total Site Visits

This is the big-picture number you should monitor and track over time to give you a rough idea of how effective your campaigns are at driving traffic. This number should grow steadily over time; if it drops month to month, it’s time to take a hard look at your marketing channels to identify the problem.

2. Traffic by Sources or Channels

This is useful for segmenting your traffic sources to pinpoint which ones are over and underperforming in your overall marketing campaigns. In general, you should break these down into the following four channels/sources:

1. Direct Visitors – These are the ones who come to your website by typing your URL into their browser.
2. Organic/Search – These are visitors who arrive at your site based on a search query.
3. Referrals – These visitors arrived at your side from a link on another website or blog.
4. Social Media – If you have a social media presence (and who doesn’t?), you’ll want to measure the visitors who arrive at your site from your social media platforms. Social traffic also gives you some general insight into the overall effectiveness of your content marketing and other digital campaigns, as well, since social traffic is a good indicator of engagement and awareness.

3. Number of New Visitors versus Number of Return Visitors

This is an important distinction to track; return visitors give you an indication of the usefulness and quality of your content—whether it’s “sticky” enough to attract multiple visits. Tracking this ratio week over week and month over month shows you how your new content is performing. For example, if you have a high ratio of new visitors to return visitors compared to a previous month, it’s an indication that new content is doing its job driving traffic, but the rest of your website doesn’t meet the needs of these new visitors.

4. Interactions Per Visit

This is a more detailed analysis of your website traffic, but it yields actionable insight if you know how to interpret it. You’ll want to look at variables such as how many pages a user visits, how long they stay on individual pages, and what they do on each page (leave a review, for example).

Don’t confuse interactions with conversions, although the ultimate goal is to have your interactions lead to more conversions such as downloads, subscriptions, purchases, etc. An analysis of your interactions per visit gives you the opportunity to discover which activities and behaviors are keeping visitors on your site and what you can do to encourage more of them.

4a. Time on Site

This is a corollary to interactions per visit and gives you insight into the level of interest and engagement of your website visitors. This is a good all-purpose indicator of how well your site is performing, since visitors who spend a lot of time on your site are finding useful content. Visitors who spend a lot of time on your site are also most likely to be your most committed customers; knowing where these visitors spend their time interacting with your site helps you optimize content for these customers to increase their lifetime value.

5. Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is the number of people who visit your site and leave right away without performing any meaningful action. A high bounce rate can point to several flaws in your digital marketing: Poor campaign targeting, irrelevant traffic sources, weak landing pages, etc.

If you have an e-commerce site, your bounce rate is synonymous with the abandonment rate and this usually indicates problems with your checkout process. Is pricing transparent? Do you load people up with last-minute offers? Spend some time evaluating how to improve the checkout experience.

6. Exit Rate

This is a helpful metric, especially for websites that have a multi-page conversion process. The exit rate differs from the bounce rate in that the exit rate measures the number of people who left the site from a particular page as a percentage of all people who viewed that particular page. This helps you identify drop-off points in your conversion process so you can optimize accordingly.

7. Mobile Traffic

Mobile Share of Organic Search Traffic

With the rise of mobile dominance in content consumption, it’s almost negligent not to track your mobile visitor metrics so you can understand your mobile customers and increase your conversions. Here’s what you need to know:

1. What percent of your traffic is mobile?
2. What devices and browsers do they use?
3. Where are they coming from (direct, organic, referral, social, etc.)
4. What content are they consuming?

Finally, you should take a look at your site speed because slow load times actually affects pretty much every one of your mobile marketing metrics, from SEO to conversions.

8. Cost Per Visitor (CPV) and Revenue Per Visitor (RPV)

These broad measurements give you a simple formula for the profitability of each marketing channel: If your RPV exceeds your CPV, you’re on your way. These numbers also help shape your budgets for certain types of paid campaigns.

Take AdWords, for example. Imagine that for a particular month, you attributed 10 sales with a value of $15,000 to your AdWords campaign. During that same period, AdWords generated 1,000 visitors to your site. This means that your RPV for your AdWords campaign last month was $15 ($15,000/1,000=$15). This gives you a hard ceiling ($15 per visitor or less) for your marketing budget in this channel before you start losing money.

Your CPV is calculated by dividing your total investment in a particular channel by the total number of visitors it generated. You should run these numbers for each of your traffic sources (search, social, email, etc.) to give you a rough basis to measure success for each channel.

Conversion Metrics

Image via Flickr by SEOplanter

9. Total Conversions

One way to define conversions is the number of anonymous site visitors who become digital records in your CRM or marketing database, whether by making a purchase, downloading an asset, or subscribing to a mailing list. This is the number your financial department will be most interested in, the ultimate measure of success for a marketer. Low conversion rates are indicative of any number of problems, from poorly designed websites to unattractive offers.

10. “Micro” Conversion Rates

Pretty much all marketers track overall, or “macro” conversions, but to really drill deep into your mobile marketing metrics, it’s a good idea to track conversions at the campaign level, or “micro” conversions, to ensure that these smaller KPIs are contributing to your overall marketing strategy.

For example, if you have very high conversion rates pushing a new lead magnet such as an e-book, but an extremely small number of leads move to the next stage of the funnel, you’ve got a problem. Even though this campaign is posting good metrics, it’s really not advancing your overall marketing goals, and tracking these micro conversions can help you identify the source of the problem.

11. Conversion Funnel Rates

Rand Fishkin, the “wizard of Moz,” considers these metrics one of the three most important overall for digital marketers. He defines them as “knowing the percent of potential customers that make it through each step of a given conversion process, and which channels or behaviors predict that they’ll make it further.” Inherent in this is a deeper understanding of how each stage of the funnel affects your ultimate ROI and where to direct your resources.

12. Click Through Rates

Measuring click-through rates (CTR) is essential for email marketing and paid ad campaigns. For PPC campaigns, a higher than average CTR can dramatically decrease your cost per click (up to 50 percent on AdWords, for example), while a lower than average score can drive costs through the roof (up to 400 percent higher on AdWords).

13. New/Unique Visitor Conversions versus Return Visitor Conversions

The way a new visitor interacts with your website is very different from the way a regular visitor behaves. For many marketers, tracking these numbers yields useful information for reducing your bounce rate and increasing your return visitor rates, conversions, and customer lifetime value through upselling and marketing automation, for example.

14. Cost Per Conversion

Depending on how you define conversion, this can be called cost per lead, cost per referral, etc., but the overall metric is extremely important, because it ultimately determines your margins. Why? A high cost per conversion can turn a high conversion rate into a negative if the costs are so high they drop your net income too much.

15. Lead to Close Ratio

This is a simple metric to compute: Divide your total number of leads by your total number of sales/closes. Although this is more a measurement of your sales efficiency—and you’ll want to investigate a low close rate—you’ll also need it for your marketing ROI projections.

Revenue Metrics

16. Value Per Visit

This isn’t necessarily simply a revenue metric; it’s actually tied to your interactions numbers. It’s also a difficult value to quantify, because your visitors add value every time they come to your site or read your blog (think page views and traffic for cpm advertising). Obviously, in e-commerce, tangible value is added when dollars are spent on a purchase, but intangible value is also created if a customer leaves a review or shares a product on social media.

Many marketers assign an arbitrary value to these customer actions and then calculate a total value, including purchases, for a set period of time. They then divide that number by the total number of visits to arrive at a VPV metric.

Tracking this metric over time gives you insight into how successful you are at getting customers to perform a certain value-added action, such as writing a review, leaving a comment, socially sharing, or otherwise interacting with your site.

17. Cost Per Acquisition

Cost per acquisition (CPA) differs from cost per conversion because CPA is all about revenue; this metric kicks in once someone becomes a paying customer, the Holy Grail of marketing. CPA tells you exactly how many marketing dollars you have to spend to get someone to open his wallet.

Sometimes it’s tempting to focus on metrics like cost per click, which you must track in paid campaigns, but it’s a short-sighted metric. Imagine you’ve developed a new PPC campaign and it seems to be performing well—CTRs are up from previous campaigns and your CPC is lower.

But then you track revenue and discover you’ve only acquired three or four paying customers, meaning your entire marketing spend on that channel added virtually nothing to your bottom line. In this case, your campaign metrics look great, but your CPA is astronomical. Your CPA keeps the big picture always in focus.

18. Return on Investment (Real and Projected)

This is the ultimate measure of your marketing success: Are your marketing technologies and efforts profitable and delivering results to your bottom line? Here’s where your lead-to-close ratio comes into play to help keep you on track. If you’re spending $25 per lead and your closing rate is 25 percent, it costs you $100 to acquire a new customer. If your average customer value exceeds that amount, you’re in the black on projected marketing ROI.

Depending where you are on the digital marketing spectrum, you may or may not want to formally track each of these metrics, but doing so will give you a pretty accurate view of how you’re doing, what channels are effective, and where your efforts need improvement. Ideally, you’ll get into a rhythm that lets you easily identify trends and variances—and make rapid adjustments to ensure a steady stream of leads and paying customers.

“Content is king” is a mantra that marketers have invoked for the past few years—and for good reason. Content marketing is a new breed of marketing designed to work around the inherent flaws in conventional advertising; it’s the driving force behind digital marketing channels such as SEO and social media. It’s not a stretch to say content marketing is the key to a successful digital marketing strategy.

If you’re new to content marketing, or not sure where to start, take heart. You need to have fresh ideas. This primer will walk you through content marketing in 2021 and give you concrete steps to implement a new content strategy or improve the one you already have—no matter your budget or the size of your marketing team. Ready to begin?

What Is Content Marketing?

The Content Marketing Institute gives this rather formal definition:

“Content marketing is the marketing and business process for creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”

More simply, content marketing provides prospects and customers with interesting and useful information that answers questions, addresses needs, or engages emotions to help your business meet its marketing goals. Content marketing is a non-pushy, authentic way to establish relationships and share your brand’s story.

The concept has been with us for decades, actually. In the old days, a brand like Nestle might print a recipe or two on the back of a package of chocolate chips or put an ad in a magazine featuring fool-proof fudge. Today, they’ll publish an interview with a chocolatier on their blog, use a Pinterest board to share recipes and tips, put cooking demonstrations and how-to videos on their YouTube channel, and run a holiday cookie photo contest on Instagram. The concept is the same, it’s the tactics that evolve.

Here are some eye-popping content marketing stats:

• 92% of businesses engage in content marketing.
• 70% of marketers plan to increase their content creation this year.
• The average company spends 28% of its overall marketing budget on content marketing; the most effective marketers spend 37% on content.
• 55% of businesses plan to increase their content marketing budget this year.

No matter what business you’re in, you need content marketing in order to compete.

Defining Your Objectives

What do you want your content to accomplish for your business? Defining your objectives helps you align your content strategy to help you achieve them. Here are just a few examples:

• Establish thought leadership to build credibility, respect, and influence in your industry
• Generate new leads and prospects for sales and marketing
• Create awareness of, and interest in, your products or services
• Build and/or improve public opinion about your business and products
• Develop a large following of friends and fans who engage with your brand on social media

From here, you’ll decide on how content marketing will fit into your overall marketing scheme. A sample strategy for building paid memberships might be:

Newsletter → Blog Post→ Social Media⇒ Paid Membership Site

A strategy to drive B2B product sales might look more like this:

Journal Article→ White Paper→ Case Studies→ Product Demo⇒ Sales/Estimate/Quote

An effective strategy usually combines several content tactics:

• blog posts
• video demos
• podcasts
• articles
• newsletters
• white papers
• case studies
• infographics
• ebooks
• webinars
• interviews

As you craft your strategy, keep in mind the difficulty factor in creating each type of content, how it fits with your overall objectives, and if your target audience is receptive to information in that format.

Set SMART Content Marketing Goals

Every piece of content you publish should be aligned to a particular marketing goal, and those goals should be SMART:

S – Specific (It’s attached to a particular need or objective.)

M – Measurable (You have objective, not subjective, metrics.)

A – Attainable (You can realistically expect to achieve it or at least come pretty close.)

R – Relevant (It furthers an overall business objective.)

T – Time-bound (You have a predetermined deadline or end-date.)

Avoid vanity metrics such as “likes” and retweets; in themselves, they aren’t aligned with your marketing goals. Think in concrete terms like traffic, leads, conversions, sales—objectives shared across multiple teams throughout the organization.

Develop a Plan for Content Creation and Execution

Once you know the type of content you want to publish, you need to develop a plan to create it. It’s not enough to jot down a rough outline and some notes; the most effective content marketers report having a documented content plan that is shared across the organization and for which they are accountable. Take the time to complete a step-by-step roadmap that enables you to monitor your efforts and track each piece of content throughout its lifecycle.

Your plan should answer the following questions:

➤How often will you publish content? For some businesses, this may mean daily blog posts, twice daily social media updates, a weekly podcast, and a monthly video tutorial. Others might need a steady stream of lead magnets (e-books, white papers, etc.) and a couple of fairly evergreen product demos.

When you’ve hammered out your content needs, plug them into a content calendar you can share with your marketing team. That way, everyone is on the same page, deadlines don’t get missed, and you avoid duplication of effort.

➤Who is responsible for content ideas? If you’re pushing out a steady stream of content, you’ll need an equally steady stream of content ideas. In most cases, the marketing department does all the brainstorming, but this excludes some excellent sources of content ideas.

Your customer service manager, for example, could give you some useful ideas for a Q&A to address the most common questions the department handles, or a how-to video to solve a persistent challenge. Maybe your tech guru could write a monthly rant or product review. The point is not to limit ideation to a small team of marketers, but to cultivate ideas throughout the organization. Just be sure that someone has final editorial control so that your content ideas align with your marketing goals.

One thing to consider: In many cases, it’s helpful to write a creative brief for each piece of content, especially if you’re using multiple creatives or freelancers along the way. The brief should include an outline of the project and its intended purpose, the target audience, the name and role of each person involved (writer, photographer, editor, etc.), and deadlines for each part of the process.

➤Who is responsible for actually creating the content? Once you have your content ideas and content calendar, you need to assign responsibility for actually creating the content. Each person involved in a particular piece should know where he fits into the overall project and who is ultimately responsible for delivering the finished product.

➤What has ultimate editorial authority? For many, if not most, of your pieces of content, final approval rests with the marketing department itself—blog posts, social media updates, newsletters, and landing pages are usually the province of the marketing staff.

However, once you move into high-value assets such as white papers, case studies, and product demos, input and approval from other departments is essential. For these complex assets, write up a chain of command and get sign-off from relevant department heads. Have a process in place to resolve the inevitable differences of opinion and establish a single person as the final authority for the finished piece.

Identifying Your Audience

One of the reasons content marketing is effective is because it speaks to readers as individuals—if you’re writing content to address a group of people, you’re doing it wrong. To write really effective content, you need to identify exactly who it is you’re writing to, at a very granular, nitty-gritty level. At this point, it’s helpful to develop an avatar, or persona, who represents your target audience; this is the person you’ll write your content for. Start with demographics:

• age
• gender
• educational level
• income
• occupation
• family status and/or size
• geographic location

Then add in intangibles:

• values
• personality traits
• lifestyle choices
• hobbies and interests

Once you’ve identified an ideal representative of your target audience, your avatar, give it a name and address all your content to him or her. Your avatar is not the same as your buyer persona; your avatar will help you write more focused, engaging content that advances your marketing goals.

Next, you’ll need to find out where your target audience lives online. Here’s a handy infographic with key demographics for the popular social media sites; you can also use paid services like Forrester to help you track the social behaviors of your own customers so you know exactly where they go for content online. This will shape your content creation choices. 

Matching Content to Your Marketing Funnel

Image via Flickr

Most marketers have some version of the digital marketing funnel that covers the four basics: Awareness/discovery, consideration/acquisition, conversion/transaction, relationship/retention. The beauty of content marketing is that it works at every level, from top to bottom.

Awareness/Discovery

Goals: Educating people, generating interest, indirect customer acquisition.

At this stage, content marketing is about understanding what customers are interested in and want to know, and delivering that information in a manner that delights them or piques their curiosity. It’s less about you (and your brand) and more about them. Educational content, viral content, shareable content—big wins at this stage of content marketing.

Content tactics:

• blog posts
• quizzes, games, tools, calculators
• infographics
• videos
• newsletters
• how-tos and in-depth guides
• podcasts and webinars
• ebooks

Real-world example:

A pet supply shop specializing in premium organic pet foods and supplements publishes a quiz about common ingredients in commercial pet food on its blog and promotes it on its Facebook page, posts photos and a recipe for homemade dog treats on Pinterest, and records an interview with a local vet about optimal nutrition for older dogs for its monthly podcast.

Consideration/Acquisition

Goals: Building trust, offering solutions, direct customer acquisition.

At this point, you are highlighting problems your prospects and customers might have and offer your products and services as trustworthy solutions. At this stage, you want to offer information that helps differentiate you from your competitors and answers questions about how you can solve their problems. You’re not really selling at this point, but you are positioning your brand.

Content tactics:

• case studies
• product descriptions and data sheets
• how-to guides featuring your product or service
• product demos and videos
• white papers
• ROI calculators

Real-world example:

A residential heating and air conditioning company creates an in-depth guide showing homeowners how to save money on energy costs. One section details the importance of having air ducts professionally sealed, a service the company offers. They offer the guide on their company website and promote it in their newsletter, blog, and on social media.

Conversion/Transaction

Goals: Communicating your unique value proposition, getting prospects/customers to take a desired action.

Leads at this point in the funnel are ready to pull the trigger, they just need a little nudge—something that justifies and rationalizes the decision in their mind. Now is the time to pull out the stops in your sales pitch with clear copy that emphasizes your USP.

Content tactics:

• testimonials
• product reviews
• product comparisons
• estimates/quotes
• ROI calculators
• detailed product descriptions

Real-world example:

A software company creates a matrix comparing the features of competing products in its particular market niche. It also produces a series of video testimonials from companies of varying sizes currently using their product. Finally, it designs a pricing calculator that gives clear, straightforward information about initial and ongoing monthly costs.

Relationship/Retention

Goals: Building customer loyalty, creating brand ambassadors, increasing customer lifetime value.

All marketers know it’s cheaper to keep existing customers than to find new ones, and this stage of the funnel is all about relationship-building and retention. It’s about creating loyal customers who tell others about your brand.

Content tactics:

• onboarding emails
• troubleshooting tips
• customer help and support materials
• loyalty programs
• special offers
• insider tips and how-tos

Real-world example:

An online cosmetics retailer invites customers to join their loyalty program in their purchase confirmation emails. It sends customers an email when their orders ship and sends delivery confirmation notifications via SMS text or mobile app. They use marketing automation to email customers a special birthday discount or free gift, and to alert customers when a favorite product goes on sale.

Creating the Right Content

There are three main elements in formulating a good content marketing strategy:

1. Ideation—coming up with right ideas for compelling content.
2. Format—matching your ideas to the appropriate channels.
3. Creative—identifying actual content creators.

These three pieces are the same whether you’re a small business owner handling marketing on your own or a large company with a 10-person marketing team—it’s just a matter of scale.

Ideation

The first step is coming up with topics that your target customer is interested in and wants to read about. In some cases, identifying good topics is as simple as brainstorming with a co-worker or a friend or reading questions and comments from your customers to see what’s on their mind; some niches are much easier than others. For other businesses, however, a little market research is in order.

• What topics are your competitors writing about?
• What content is getting buzz on social media? There are free tools like Sumo to help you identify popular content.
• What’s trending in your industry right now?

Keep this checklist in mind as you consider topics for content creation:

Format

The best content ideas can be repurposed and cross-promoted across multiple marketing channels, but it’s still important to match your content ideas to the unique characteristics of each platform. Want to write about gluten-free baking alternatives to wheat flour? A long-form article is great for a newsletter or blog post, a recipe for gluten-free hazelnut torte is a natural for Pinterest, and an infographic is an eye-catching option to tempt your Facebook and Twitter followers.

Don’t forget that some consumers prefer visual content; Google+ hangouts, Slideshare presentations, screencasting are all interesting alternatives to written pieces.

Creative

Identifying who will be responsible for actually creating your content can be one of the most challenging decisions you’ll make as a content marketer. In many cases, you have the talent in-house to create interesting content—think of an interview with your resident tech geek or an in-depth look at pending legislation by your internal subject matter expert, for example.

Most marketers will have to outsource at least some of their creative work at some point or other, however. Outsourcing offers you an opportunity to tap deeper expertise and, in the case of many guest authors, a broad social following that amplifies the impact of your posts. In the next section, we’ll look at budgeting and asset allocation for content development and when outsourcing makes sense.

5 Smart Ways to Find Content Marketing Ideas

As much as you want to put out stellar content on a regular basis, it can be tiring. Sometimes, you just run out of ideas to write about and create anything with.

Especially when you’re a small team or alone, the idea will can dry up pretty quick. But most of the time, it’s just a matter of having something trigger your brain into creativity again. Taking and sharing ideas aren’t all bad. They aren’t bad at all.

1. Use questions to spur new ideas

I think the biggest reason we run out of ideas is because we always go about the same process of creating and finding them. A great way to shake things up a bit is to ask questions to yourself. If you’re part of a team, collectively answer these questions.

This collection of questions help you to see things in a different perspective, think of your industry in ways you’ve never before, find information gaps in your content strategy and overall kick your content ideation to high gear.

� What do prospect always ask about?

� What’s a question you always prepare for but never gets asked?

� What are some unfounded beliefs in your industry?

� What are the last points of doubt of someone who’s already willing to buy?

� What isn’t being asked around here?

� What’s something we’ve always believed that isn’t really true?

� What are the common complaints in your industry?

� What’s something that can be improved in your niche, culture-wise?

2. Social media: Facebook Groups

Facebook groups are wildly popular across all industries.

Doesn’t matter if you’re from “serious” niches like executive coaching or physical therapy, there is a Facebook group that caters to your area of business.

In these groups, engagement is quite high—people are commenting, asking questions, sharing experiences and overall just being a good online community.

Now how do use Facebook groups to get new content ideas? On Facebook, type your industry or field in the search bar and click Groups. 

For example, you’re running a woodworking shop or supply store. Let’s search for woodworking.

Join the top groups. Look at the number of people in them. I think if it’s less than 500 people, there’s not much to get from the group. That’s not a hard rule though. If it’s a Public group, you can snoop around before deciding to join. If the engagement is low, better skip the group for now. Remember, we are talking about idea generation and not community building for this post.

If there are Public groups, you can immediately get in and start scanning conversations, shared posts and links. From there, you can get an idea of mundane and common concerns on the ground level.

Let’s see what woodworkers like to talk about.

After a quick scan, it’s apparent that woodworkers love showing off their work.

Why not create a post for your audience teach them how to showcase their work online? Or photography suggestions for woodworking pieces?

Of course, joining the conversation is the strategic approach. Post questions, share your ideas—it will pay off when you gain the trust of this highly targeted group.

3. Online tool: Google News

Who knew? Google News isn’t just a bland Google feature. If you’ve had the chance to use it, you’ll know what I mean.

Google News is a nifty Google product that shows you the latest news. Now, when we think of news, it’s either politics, economics, or any of the more traditional topics that scream news. 

Google News is a bit forward thinking. First, it covers ALL searchable topics and will show you the latest news piece and even blog posts. Second, not all posts make it to Google news. They only show high-quality and reputable websites.

You probably know where I’m going with this: Use Google News to find out what the best of the best are talking about. From there, you’ll surely get a topic you can build on using your own perspective.

Of course, if your niche is politics or sports, you might get good ideas from the frontpage of Google News. If you’re from a very targeted niche though, you need to utilize Google News’ robust search algorithm.

Say you are a home care facility and you’ve run out of ideas to write about in your blog. Go to news.google.com and just type a random word that’s related to your niche. In this case, let’s use homecare. 

The search will return news from your niche—latest technology, new practices, good blog posts. It’s never a bad idea to keep yourself sped up to the top tier. Synthesize the ideas and come up with something from your perspective!

4. Social Listening Tool: BuzzSumo

I love BuzzSumo.

Ok, so now that we have the bias out of the way, let me show you how awesome BuzzSumo is for coming up with content ideas.

Here’s what Noah Kagan of AppSumo said about BuzzSumo:

Buzzsumo is also a great place to see which topics related to your business get the most attention. Do more of what works.

BuzzSumo is a social listening-content marketing swiss knife. You can find out the best people to reach out to in terms of expertise and audience size, you get data as to what’s trending at the moment, and for the purposes of this post, BuzzSumo shows you which pieces of content works in your industry and around the topics you create content for.

They don’t stop at topics, they include information on the content type (articles, inforgraphics, video, etc.) that works best in your niche. They have various filters like location, language and dates so you can adjust according to what you’re looking for.

For example, we’re searching for popular posts around the coffee niche. I typed in coffee in the BuzzSumo search bar and the results page looked like this:

Right smack in the results, you’ll get the most shared content in the last year (default filter). Just by looking at what’s popular, you can get an idea what you can create for your own business. Looks like for coffee, the newer and more sustainable practices are widely-shared. Of course, the top post is viral-worthy and quirky.

Take what you can from these top posts and transform it into your own content that fits your context.

5. Read industry blogs: Leaders, competitors, new players

With the boom of content marketing, it’s tough to differentiate yourself from your peers. Now, that has to have you wondering.

If I have to differentiate myself from my peers, why would I turn to competition to get content ideas?

Well, frankly, a lot of the content out there flat-out sucks. If there’s one business who would make improving content its advocacy, that business would make a killing.

So, here’s what you can do.

Subscribe to newsletters

Carefully choose who you subscribe to. Emails today are full of noise so make sure to vet blogs before signing up. You don’t want to waste precious minutes going over emails that just don’t add anything to your life. Blogs that send one email digest a week are generally better in my experience. They take time to curate the content they share to your personal space (inbox) and these people are carrying out elaborate email marketing funnels so you’re sure that they’re providing your value because they want you to buy-in.

Create Twitter lists

Remember, not everyone with more than 10,000 subscribers is an influencer. With so many tools out there meant to grow your Twitter following, a lot of the profile followers are just vanity, meaning they don’t bring value at all. So, what you can do is take the handful of people you already follow and whose content you trust and go over their profiles to see who they follow. Follow those people. Group them into lists based on niche/industry/specialization. When you’re running out of ideas, check the feed of the list. You’re sure to get a topic or two that can feed your imagination.

Set aside an hour a day for industry-related reading

Even when you’re not in ideation mode, knowing what’s up in your industry is a MUST. Keeping your idea funnel full is the best way to escape running out of ideas ever. Make it a practice to internal brainstorm as part of this reading time. In today’s world, it’s easy for our minds to go numb because of the info bombardment. Don’t let that be you.

Are you aware of the trending and growing mobile device usage by your target audience? What are your next plan of action?

In the absence or a cursor, you’re faced with the challenge of getting people to read your content on their mobile devices.

You can’t possibly ignore mobile users, considering that 77% of mobile searches are performed at work or home – and majority of these searches are likely from your ideal customers.

Mobile apps are handy for consumers, too. With the click of a button, people can access any website and learn on the go.

GateGuru reported that their mobile apps have reached a staggering 82 million users. More so, the mobile usage in the US since 2009 has experienced a steady growth.

All these statistics are pointing to one truth: “create content that will engage your audience when and where they are.”

Trust me, what you need to increase targeted traffic to your site, acquire leads and be at the top of your game is an ‘epic’ mobile marketing strategy.

So let’s get started…

A case with epic content

The word epic is overused. It’s become a cliché, because most content marketers throw it about without a deep understanding of its essence.

Obviously, the first rule of content marketing is:

“Create epic content.”

But just how do you do it?

Several articles, videos, podcasts, and ebooks on mobile marketing aren’t epic. Sure, they may offer some value (which every piece of content ought to do), but epic is a level above the basic as we know it.

According to the Dictionary, epic means:

monumental, heroic, grand, long, etc.

Follow me here: content that isn’t grand in today’s competitive era will be drowned. Most digital entrepreneurs are creating content on a daily basis. According to MarketingProfs, 2 million blog posts are written and published every day.

More important, you need to spend just as much time promoting your content as you do creating it, if you ever want to reach a good number of people whose attention span is insignificant (8 seconds).

Without a doubt, knowing how to create and optimize your content for mobile is critical to any campaign – be it PPC, SEO, social media, email, etc.

Interestingly, creating useful and in-depth content from a mobile-first approach will give you an unfair advantage over the competitors.

Mobile content consumption is high. A study by Outbrain found that in Singapore, people consume 52% of their content on a mobile device: that’s more than half of US and Australia consumes via mobile.

So the entirety of epic mobile marketing content is that it should be long-form, truly useful, evergreen, practical, heroic, and better than what others have created.

You don’t have to be in a haste about this – because your prospects are tired of good-enough content. They want to read content that will challenge the status quo, dazzle their minds, invoke emotions, and give them a reason to do business with you rather than the next door business.

Can you do that? What if I walk you through the process, step-by-step, would you gladly embrace and put it work?

I know you will. So without much ado, let’s be strategic.

1.    Develop a mobile-first content strategy

If you care about users, then you have to be where they are. You have no option. And the more you delay, the riskier it gets.

First, mobile-first content strategy refers to planning, development, and management of content so that it can influence consumers’ buying decisions as they consume the content on mobile devices, and bring complete satisfaction that helps you (the content creator) meet your organizational goals.

Your content has to be relevant to a specific group of people. Trying to appeal to everyone is a shortcut to failure. Focus on your market, and your mobile-first content strategy will build your business.

A strategy beams light on your path. You don’t stumble or find yourself doing a guess work.

Certainty will become your second nature. Because you have learned from your users what their utmost desire is, and how they want it satisfied through your content.

Though human’s attention span is less than that of a goldfish, but the good news is that they spend more time on the internet.

This means that if you could capture their attention, you can retain them – especially with a heroic and long-form content – like the one you’re reading now.

Mary Meeker released the 2015 Internet Trends Report recently and found that “The Average American Adult spends 5.6 Hours A Day On The Internet” of which 3 hours are spent on mobile.” And each time we use the Smartphone, we spend ½ hour, time spent on Tablets is even higher.

This shift in content consumption via mobile devices has a dramatic impact on user behavior, and results that you see if your strategy is borne out of your desire to help people.

In summary, your mobile-first content strategy should:

i).    Leverage existing content channels: Currently, social media networks, newsletters, RSS feeds, etc., are the proven channels that you can leverage to distribute your content.

If you want to access tens of thousands, if not millions of people, you’ll need to step out of your house (your own site), and build networks with like-minded people.

Apart from free channels, if you truly believe in the value of your content, you should launch a PPC campaign and target mobile audience.

Free content distribution will only take you far, but when you integrate paid advertising – your results will be great.

ii).   Leverage tools to simplify content distribution: Tools make life easier. Imagine how hectic, and the amount of time it would take to find important sites/information online without Google. Just think about it.

Google is a tool, certainly not for content distribution per se, but it can become a means to an end for your content goals.

Do you still tweet your posts manually? You must have been living under the rock.

Live the digital lifestyle, you can schedule your posts using Buffer, Hootsuite or Sprout Social?

Other tools such as Paper.li, Roojoom, etc., allows you to find, publish and share useful content on the web, and social media.

iii).  Streamline your marketing goals: A mobile-first documented content marketing strategy plays an important role in both B2B and B2C companies, because it helps to streamline their goals – their content reach.

The biggest mobile marketing challenge is measuring ROI. Although both small businesses and top brands reach mobile users – but they’re not strategic in measurement.

You need to measure the impact of your content. Using Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) such as page views, mobile views, leads generated, number of links generated, social shares, etc, you can evaluate your marketing programs.

Having a strategy is good, but it’s not enough. You need to document your processes, achievements, and put your goals in front of you all the time. Don’t be like the 48% of B2B marketers who don’t document their content marketing strategy.

So when you creating epic content to target mobile audience, it’s necessary to set milestones, and develop a ‘Plan B’ in case one content type doesn’t deliver the expected result.

Use your findings, user insights, and engagement metrics to streamline your goals. That’s how to scale and thrive in a competitive digital world.

iv).  Be dynamic: You need this in your mobile-first content marketing strategy. Who would have thought that mobile consumers will exceed desktop users. As the saying goes, “change is constant.”

Truly, the content that worked last month may not be what your prospects and customers are seeking for right now.

Stay abreast of trends, and adjust accordingly. Be dynamic, because concepts, ideas, tools, and people can change.

When you see a change, do you complain and give up, or you embrace it? Smart marketer adjust, learn new skills and thrive. Why not follow suit?

v).   Be consistent: In order to avoid confusion among consumers, you have to be consistent. You don’t see dramatic results when you’re inconsistent at content creation, distribution, networking, etc.

Popular brands such as Coca-Cola, Nike, Amazon, Ebay, and the like have built a solid credibility, not because they’ve the perfect products, but because they are consistent.

Consistency will bring you to a place of rest; a position where people trust you enough to work with you.

If you’re a freelancer, software developer, information marketer, or whatever business model you have chosen, stay at it.

You started out strong. Consumers are beginning to like you. The question is, will you still be relevant in the next 5 years? Are you after the quick bucks?

Content marketing isn’t a shortcut to living the dot com lifestyle. It’s hard work, and you have to be about your business. Stay consistent. That’s the formula.

vi).  Rely heavily on content: 95% of B2B companies use content marketing to drive leads, engagement, and sales.

Your prospects search the web because they want solid information. If the web is powered by content, so will your business.

Per dollar invested, content marketing produces 3 times more leads than PPC. Once you’ve a high-converting funnel, it becomes easier to capture attention, build interest, and nurture a relationship with leads. This ultimately leads to increased sales. 

Before InsideOut, a corporate training company embraced content marketing in 2012, they had a challenge at converting site visitors into leads.

I’m sure you know that feeling when your site generates traffic, but none of them is responding to your offer.

What could be the cause?

InsideOut figured this out. They started creating useful, and user-centered content in-house, in order to stay true to the brand values.

They promoted the content via email, social, PR and through their website. Good news: they saw a 20% higher clickthrough rate, and improved lead generation by 388%.

Relying heavily on content will boost your organic traffic. You know that search users are the most targeted leads you should drive to your business.

Brands that invest into content creation, while targeting the right keywords drive long-term organic search results.

For example, Rental History, a B2B company implemented a content strategy after launching a new consumer service, while putting mobile consumers in mind.

They set out to increase organic visitors, spend less on PPC and establish trust with new audience.

The truth is that the right epic content can meet all these goals. And that was exactly what Rental History did – and saw a 400% increase in organic traffic, reduced PPC spends, and the company generates more than half of their sales from organic traffic.

Focus on localized content

Not all content is created equal. Content that converts are created using the right ingredients based on the user behavior.

One of the reasons why you need to create a localized content is because of mobile search intent.

According to Google/Nielsen study we reviewed earlier, 40% of all mobile searches have local intent, and this number continues to grow. And 73% of mobile searches trigger additional action & conversions.

A localized content simply refers to content you create with the aim of appealing to local prospects and customers.

When people use their mobile devices to search online, they’re more likely to respond to a localized content. It begins with your keyword selection.

Here’s how to find some geographic keywords that will enable you create content that are most suitable for people around a specific geographical location:

i).  First step: Go to Google AdWords keyword planner. Input your main keyword (e.g. web design) into the suggestion box. Then click on the “Get ideas” button.

ii). Second step: Select/copy one of the keywords (e.g. web design) and plug into the suggestion box. We’re looking for keywords that contains a district, city, country or geo-specific qualifier.

So let’s add “Los Angeles” to the keyword (web design) and see the results:

Now that you’ve got the localized keyword phrases, it’s time to create compelling titles for your content. Here are blog post title examples that you can model:

Los Angeles Website Design: 17 Web Design Strategies That Work

The Top 10 Web Development Company: Los Angeles Agencies

As you can see, the two titles above are localized. The accompanying article, blog post, podcast, video or ebook should be relevant to local consumers as well.

Since you’re talking about Los Angeles or any other city, focus on delivering immense value so that local consumers will refer others to your site the moment they find your useful content.

In like manner, you can use Google Trends to determine the popularity of your target keyword in a given geographical area.

For example, input “mobile marketing” into Google Trend search box. Make sure to select United States as your region of interest. Hit the ‘enter’ button from your keyboard.

In the Google Trend results above, the data shows that if your target market is Utah, including “online marketing” in your title will help you reach more users in that state than in Arizona.

On the other hand, targeting “mobile marketing” will help you reach more people in Alabama, than prospects in Colorado.

One important point, though, is that you also need to find localized social media groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, and on discussion boards.

Any platform where you can target a particular group of people who share similar interest is important when creating localized content.

A perfect example of a localized content is found at USNews.com. The target audience is quite broad (Europeans or people interested in European tour destinations).

Follow your audience reading habits:

The explosion in mobile audiences has created a need in the hearts of marketers, who strongly desire to know their audience’s reading habits.

Whether you have plans to distribute content via social media, blog communities, or email – creating content based on how passionate your audience are will go a long way.

According to Email Monday, “45% of email opens occurred on mobile, 36% on desktop and 19% in a webmail client. – Adestra “Top 10 email clients” (March 2015).”

In fact, Android users spent the most time reading emails.

It’s easy to get carried away, and start to create low-quality content just to fill your content editorial calendar – but that should never be the case for you.

Because you want to make impact with every piece of content that you create.

Of course, there is a ready market for your content on mobile devices, but to hit a homerun, your content has to be epic (e.g., long-form, heroic, invaluable).

Convey your message with personality

Achieving success with your content all boils down to the context, not content. This may sound simple, but your writing tone makes all the difference. It creates the mood that’s required in decision making.

Mobile devices were invented to help people connect, communicate and share relevant information.

It doesn’t matter the content type, as long as you’re targeting iPhone, iPad, Tablet and smartphone users, you’ve to convey such message with personality.

Needless to say, if your content is all about you it may not work. Mobile marketing has evolved in the past 3 years.

In the past, you could get away with promotional content, but these mobile consumers are smarter now. Never underestimate what they can do.

Ideally, create your own custom content, and curate relevant and epic content that will help users. Promotional content should be done only when necessary.

Mobile audience want solid information. And they can tell from a distant your intentions.

Sure, the right content can get you qualified leads, improve your brand, and generate dramatic sales. To achieve that, use a personal tone in your content.

Don’t speak as you write, instead “write as you speak.”

Use the word “you” when creating a blog post, article, video, podcast, ebook, etc. Steer clear of the word “I,” and only use it where necessary.

Maybe when you’re sharing a case study. Aside that, it’s irrelevant to talk about yourself. Talk to them.

A personal tone is important, because it will trigger an emotional note in prospects’ minds, and nudges them to share your content willingly.

Conclusion

There you have it. The proven steps on how to create epic mobile marketing content that works. It’s worked for several businesses, both small and big. Your business will not be an exception.

People are consuming content via mobile everyday. You can’t afford to ignore this trend, because it’s not going away. A survey by Yesware Interactive reported that almost half of all email opens happen on a mobile device.

That alone is good news. But if I were in your shoes, I’ll not neglect desktop users, because no matter how trending mobile content consumption is, and will become in the future, people will continue to search the web from their PCs.

Target both desktop and mobile users who are motivated consumers. Don’t struggle to crack the mobile marketing code. Businesses who do probably don’t know their audience enough.

So the formula is to understand your target audience. Adopt a mobile responsive design, and create content specifically for mobile users.

As usual, we’re looking forward to your contribution. What’s your take on creating content from a mobile-first approach? Do you face any mobile marketing challenge currently?

Amidst all the hype about social media marketing, all the noise and chatter about followers, likes and content, it can sometimes be a little bit too much. While there’s no shortage of information available online, sorting the good from the bad is becoming more complex. Finding tips that are actually actionable and relate to your business can be hard, as you’re scanning through the millions of blog posts trying to find that one nugget of golden info.

To save you time, we’ve put together a list of some of the top social media tips and tactics to help maximize your social strategy and take it to the next level.

1. Use Demographics Data to Determine Key Platforms

You likely already know the age and basic demographic make-up of your ideal target audience – one way of utilizing this info is to cross-match your existing audience data with demographic info on which age groups are using which platforms. You can use research tools like Pew Research or eConsultancy, both of which regularly publish reports on social media audiences, or you can use the advertising options for each site, most of which have ‘Potential Reach’ calculators built into the ads process (which you can see without having to actually pay for ads). These will show you which platforms, in a wider sense, your target audience is present on.

2. Examine Which Networks the Social Shares From Your Website Are Heading

Understanding which networks people are using to share your existing content – or even your home page – can inform your strategy, as it shows which social networks are popular amongst your existing audience. To do this, you can use Social Crawlytics, a free app that examines your site and produces a report showing which social channels your content is shared on, for example, if 95% of your social shares are on Facebook, that’s where you need to be looking first.

3. Check Which Social Networks Are Most Popular Amongst Users Discussing Your Focus Keywords

If you know where people are discussing your key terms, chances are those are the networks where you’re going to get the most traction, as discussions around your industry are already happening. You can use BuzzSumo to do this – just enter in your focus terms and BuzzSumo will give you a listing of the most popular articles, along with social share counts for each across the major networks. You can filter the list by time, region, and even content type to get a better idea of what’s resonated and where.

4. Locate Key Influencers in Your Niche

Another function of BuzzSumo is the ability to search for influencers by topic (and by region). Just enter a key term in the Influencers tab and BuzzSumo will return a list of all the key influencers for that topic. From there, you can view the specific links they’ve shared as well as lists of other people who’ve shared that same content, again filterable by region. This is a great way to locate the key voices, and the people they influence, amongst your target groups.

5. Analyze Your Competition

What’s more, with both Social Crawlytics and BuzzSumo you can examine other users, including your competitors. Crawlytics will show you the most popular content from their website and where they’re generating the most shares, while BuzzSumo will highlight their most popular content and enable you to view who, specifically, is sharing it.

6. Find The Most Popular Content For Your Focus Terms

Staying with BuzzSumo, if you enter in your keywords, BuzzSumo shows a list of the most popular content, and content types, related to those topics. These are the posts that are getting the most traction amongst your audience and the questions your audience is seeking answers to.

7. Find Relevant Hashtags Related to Your Business

Using Hashtagify, you can enter in your business key terms and get an idea of the hashtags being used around those topics. Hashtagify will also produce a graph of all the hashtags most commonly associated with those terms, giving you a wider reference set to use when looking into hashtag conversations around your areas of interest.

8. Find Out What People Are Asking About Your Products

Question sites like Quora can help when trying to establish what the most common questions are around your key topics or products. You can also use Google Suggest for this – when you enter terms into Google, the search engine will suggest various, commonly used search phrases based on the terms you’ve entered. These suggestions can be a good insight into the questions being most commonly asked around your industry.

9. Use In-House Experts for FAQs

There’re no better resources on commonly asked questions than the people who are answering them every day. This is an often overlooked resource, but getting your key people to write down a list of FAQs helps give you an understanding of what your audience is asking about.

10. Discover Trending Content in Your Industry

Apps like PopURLs, Nuzzel, and even BuzzSumo have trending content functions that highlight the most popular articles within your industry or niche. Knowing what’s trending is a great way to inform your strategy and stay in-tune with what’s happening in real-time – and tools like this streamline the discovery process, freeing you from scanning through pages of blog posts.

11. Allocate Time To Social Media Efforts

Obviously, this will be largely dictated by other happenings and ROI, but it’s worth taking a moment to figure out how much time you can spend on refining your social media presence. The truth is it does take time, and without planning you can easily spend lengthy periods going through each nuance and setting and post, and lose hours as a result. Allocating a set amount of time will help you focus and frame your efforts in a more meaningful way.

12. Select Networks Carefully

You need to determine which networks are worth your time. There’s no point having a presence of every channel if your target audience is only on one or two, and there’s no point focussing on platforms if your target market isn’t active there. Especially when starting out, it’s more important to select your key platforms and focus on doing them right then it is to create a presence on every platform and do all of them poorly. You can’t be everywhere – and the reality is, you probably don’t need to be.

13. Create a Content Calendar

Your content will be a key element of your social presence, and it’s important to have a content schedule set out in order to build a consistent dialogue with your audience. If people expect you to send out a new weekly newsletter or post, they can build that into their reading plans – that sort of consistency builds an expectation of reliability, and will strengthen your brand as a result.

14. Understand Your Mission

Another crucial element is to understand what you’re using social media for. For most, your efforts will focus on one of three areas – sales, loyalty or awareness. Focus on which of these goals you’re seeking to achieve with each process, then align your content and social efforts with that goal. There’s no point building followers and likes if you have no further goal in mind – having a set focus and plan will help you remain consistent in your efforts and build towards the target.

15. Establish Your Voice

Understanding how you want to communicate is almost as important as what you communicate. What tone do you want your social presence to have? How do you want your brand representatives to approach each interaction? What’s the core mission behind every response and post? Answering these questions, again, builds consistency and reliability, as well as scalability, as you can ensure all members of your team are delivering an on-brand response.

16. Track Brand Mentions and Key Terms

By using tools like Hootsuite, Mention or Sprout Social, you can set up streams and alerts to monitor key terms, helping you stay on track of relevant mentions without having to be always online. You can allocate searches to specific geographic regions, ensuring you remain aware of key local mentions and trends, further filtering the process to save you time. You can also set up push notifications to keep you up to date while you’re away from your desk.

17. Schedule Content to be Sent Out Via Your Social Profiles

One of the biggest time savers, and the easiest ways to maintain a consistent social presence is to schedule your social media posts ahead of time. When you create a new blog post, you can schedule it to be shared on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram and LinkedIn. You can share links to related content to go out at different times across the day. You can schedule your posts months in advance to ensure you’re active even when you’re not in the office. Tools like Buffer and Hootsuite are perfect for this purpose.

18. Check Analytics Via On-Platform Options

One of the greatest strengths of social media is that it’s all measurable and traceable. If there’s anything you want to track, it’s pretty likely you’ll be able to. It’s just a matter of working out what data is most valuable, then working out how you might go about it. The major platforms like Twitter and Facebook have their own inbuilt analytics tools that provide great oversight into overall page activities – ignore such data at your own peril.

19. Use Tools to Get a Better Understanding of Your Performance

There’s a wide range of social analytics tools available. Hootsuite has a range of data tools inbuilt. BuzzSumo can help you track performance by providing info on social shares and sharers. Twitonomy will analyze your Twitter account and provide in-depth data on performance while Fanpage Karma does the same for Facebook. Simply Measured has a range of free and paid tools to help rationalize and harmonize your on-platform activities. Using any, or all, of these tools, will greatly inform your strategy and you’ll move forward.

20. Use Snapchat Stories and GeoFilters

Snapchat is a huge potential market. In fact, over 100 million users watch about 10 billion snaps a day. By creating your own Snap stories and geofilters, you can tap into that massive audience.

Geofilters allow Snapchat users to add a brand’s logo or other design to their snap photos. You can create your own Geofilter for your business or event for as little as $5. Not only are they relatively cheap, but Geofilters are a great interactive advertising tool as well.

Snap Stories, on the other hand, allow you to show videos and photos to people who follow you on the social platform. This can be a great way to show off your company culture or even new product launches. For example, Pixar recently had a Snap Story where they took followers on a virtual tour of the Pixar campus in Emeryville. They also shared short interviews with some of their interns about why they became animators and what they love about Pixar.

21. Get Specific with Target Audiences on Facebook

The beauty of Facebook’s Ad Manager tool is that it allows you to create an audience based on very specific criteria. One of the more useful of which is the ability to target by Life Events.

Facebook’s Life Events feature allows people to let their friends know about a new change in their life by adding it to their timeline. For example, say you own a bridal shop. When someone changes their relationship status on Facebook to engaged, it’s added as a Life Event. You can now have Facebook display your ads to these people directly. Obviously newly engaged people are very likely to be looking for the types of products and services you provide, which makes them leads.

You can also target people based on interests, recent behavior (such as going to church), estimated income, relationship status, education level, and more. Using these types of filters can help you narrow down your audience to only those who are most likely to be interested in your brand.

22. Make it Look Good

When advertising on social media, visuals are very important and so is the messaging. You must remember that most users are scrolling past an incredible amount of content–your ad must stand out in order to gain their attention.

Be sure that your ad is aesthetically pleasing and feels compelling enough for the viewer to click on it. In other words, you want them to be enticed but relaxed enough to click through to your landing page.

Take a look at the ad above from Slack, a cloud-based communication service for the workplace. Not only is the ad visually striking, but it also does an excellent job of explaining their product in a fun and meaningful way. Slack’s marketing department knows that most people in the workforce detest sitting through pointless meetings. Keeping this in mind, they crafted clever copy that would greatly interest their demographic: less meetings and time saved. And who doesn’t love a unicorn?

23. Rework and Recycle Your Best Copy

If you’ve ever created an ad in AdWords, you know that quality score has a big impact on where your ads are displayed. Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have similar metrics for their ads: Relevance Score and Quality Adjusted Bids, respectively. These scores are important because they can either decrease or increase your cost-per-click.

If you’ve already seen success with the ads you’ve created in AdWords, try using the same or similar language in your ads on social media sites. In addition to saving you some time and effort, it’s likely that you’ll see similarly positive engagement rates.

24. Pay Attention to the Data

Once you put up a new ad on social media, you’ll need to regularly monitor its performance. For one, your ad may not perform as well as you thought it would and you may need to make some adjustments to your copy or your target audience. Secondly, sometimes even ads that were once performing very well can start to slump. This is due to “audience fatigue.”

25. Take Advantage of Remarketing

Remarketing allows you to target people who have already shown interest in your product or service. For example, say someone shops around on your site and abandons the items in their cart. By using remarketing ads on social media, you can display these items to that user and encourage them to come back to your site and complete their purchase. This technique is a great way to get a second chance at conversions you may have missed.

26. Monitor Engagement for Your LinkedIn Posts

LinkedIn Publisher allows you to monitor the people who are engaging with your content, and it’s a great way to establish professional relationships and foster conversation surrounding your brand. Simply go to the analytics page of your last post and click on “Who’s Viewed Your Posts.” This will display a selection of viewers and stats for the last week. You can also see who has liked, commented, or shared your posts. This helps ensure that you’re responding to comments and targeting people who show interest in your brand. You can even reach out to people who have shared your post.

27. Make an Impression with Facebook and Instagram Carousel Ads

While Facebook and Instagram are a great places to advertise your products and services, there’s also a lot of competition. Make your ad stand out in the crowd of other advertisers with captivating images and ad copy. There is also a relatively new feature that allows you to display a carousel or slideshow of images within a single ad. You can even add transitions, music, or narration. These types of advertisements are a great way to increase the quality and potential engagement of your content.

28. Use Live Video Broadcasting

Live video has become incredibly popular across various social media platforms, including Facebook,Twitter, and YouTube. Live video on social media allows brands to reach consumers directly and create an interactive experience. For instance, you could host a live question and answer session. Because it is live, there is a sense of urgency that encourages people to log on and view.

Companies that use live platforms to market their products and services have seen much success. For example, Benefit Cosmetics began producing a weekly live show called “Tipsy Tricks with Benefit!” which they air each Thursday. On the show, the hosts drink wine and try on products while they answer questions from viewers. Their first broadcast gathered 42,000 live viewers, and they have continued to see success in later videos.

29. Embrace Virtual Reality

While it’s still evolving in many ways, virtual reality (VR) has begun popping up all over social media. In June of 2016, Facebook started supporting 360 videos and photos. Since then, many companies and organizations have used the feature to release an amazing and entirely unique online experience. Snapchat filters are also an example of augmented or virtual reality, and they can be a great way to reach people and generate excitement around your brand.

As far as marketing is concerned, you could use these VR features to produce interactive ads for your audience. With the right content, virtual reality ads may just sell themselves.

Check out this awesome 360 video from Coachella:

No doubt they’ll be selling a few more tickets next year.

30. Assess, Refine, Repeat

The key to social media success is outlined in these three words. Individual results will vary, what works for others may not work for you. Because of this, the only way to truly maximize your social media success is to test, to see what works and what doesn’t, then learn for the next stage. While there are many guidelines and suggested processes available, the only true rule of social is ‘your audience rules’ – your individual followers and fans, they’re the ones who’ll dictate your ultimate level of success.

So there you are 30 key strategy tips that will help you better utilize social networks for your marketing efforts. Follow these steps and you’ll get a better understanding of how social works, how your competitors and partners are utilizing the platforms, and what your audience expects from your brand via tweets and posts. The only other truly critical step is to listen, to hear what’s being said, and to respond according to what your data and insights are telling you. The rest is up to you.

E-mail marketing is one of the most effective ways to connect with your audience and build awareness of what your brand offers. To achieve this you need to have a good idea of what they want and how you’re going to provide it. For this reason, a well thought-out e-mail marketing strategy is a must. Sending out an e-mail for every new blog post or offer is one thing, but having a clear strategy with goals and targets in mind, is the ultimate way to maximise your e-mail marketing success.

So where do you start? What should you focus on? Here are a few tips on e-mail marketing planning to get you moving on the path towards success for your business.

Strategic Priorities

The first thing you need to do is define what you’re planning to use your e-mail marketing for. What does your audience want from you and what do they expect? The best way to look at this is to consider things from your customers’ perspective. What would make you more likely to open an e-mail?

There are various ways to ascertain what information your audience wants. One way is to note down the most commonly asked questions your business receives and use each with structured content  around addressing each one in your content calendar. This way each of your e-mails answers a specific question. Another method is to utilize social media to find commonly asked questions in your industry or niche. Using helpful tools like Twitter’s advanced search page you can tick the box for questions when searching. This will return all the tweets which contain questions related to your terms.

However you go about it, working out what you plan to use your e-mail marketing outreach for is a crucial first step and will often define your content calendar and strategy. Alerting subscribers to sales and new content is one thing, but building an engaging e-mail marketing plan calls for more structure than blast sends alone.

Message Relevance

So, you know what you want to say, now you need to focus on how you’re going to say it. Start by determining the language and then the delivery of your message. Remember, there’s no definitive guidelines on the best language style to use for your business – that’s largely dependent on your specific target audience but there is data on subject lines and ways in which to maximise e-mail open rates through line length.

In a study by Adestra, tracking more than 900 million e-mails, researchers found that subject lines with more than 70 characters provided the highest levels of engagement regarding click-throughs. Subject lines with fewer than 50 characters still had a positive effect on open rates and mid-length subject lines (50-60 characters) should be avoided as they add no improvement to open rates.

One other element to consider in message relevance is the value of personalisation. I don’t just mean auto-inserting a recipients’ name into the opening of the e-mail – getting a message that says ‘Hey [insert name]’. That’s neither personal nor engaging. Instead, consider personalisation as how you frame the content around the interests of that individual user. Amazon does this well with their ‘Recommended for you…’ suggestions; personalisation without trying to be your best friend, but by utilising your history and data to focus the content more directly to you. Such an approach is significantly boosted by audience segmentation, which is a big part of the next element; building engagement.

Building Engagement

The key aim of any e-mail marketing plan is to build engagement, to get subscribers in for the long haul by delivering content that remains continually relevant to them. In this sense, it’s important to understand, segment and categorise your audience to ensure you’re delivering the most relevant messaging to each group. For example, a prospective car buyer is going to be far more interested in what you have on sale this week than an established customer, who’s more likely to respond to special deals on servicing and future trade-ins. Segmentation is a powerful element of e-mail list building and can significantly boost open rates by delivering more relevant and focussed messages.

You can create groupings within your e-mail lists based on a number of different data points – location, gender, past purchases, etc. The goal is to provide each group with deals and updates most likely to resonate with them – the better you can do this, the more likely you’ll maximise your e-mail marketing success. Ensure you use segmentation and update the data regularly in order to keep the right recipients in the right categories.

Content Balance

The thing about engaging content is it can’t be all ‘sell, sell, sell’. Of course, as a business your goal is to sell as much as you can, but constantly pitching is not a foundation on which relationships are built. That’s what your e-mail marketing program is. It’s a relationship between you and your customers. When thinking of it in those terms, you can see the need to balance your information and ensure you’re offering value, not just through your great deals, but also through the content you’re providing in your e-mail send.

Hubspot suggests keeping newsletter content 90% educational and 10% promotional. Yes, that relates specifically to newsletters and not e-mail marketing as a whole, but it’s a good yardstick for what’s likely to keep readers engaged in regular brand communication. The thinking on this is that by only sending out your deals and looking for the next sale, your e-mails become too pushy and people will eventually scan over them as a result. By trying to provide insight and fresh angles, you’re working to build more than just a sales relationship, but a real bond with your target audience.

Another popular example approach along the same lines is the ‘2:1:1 Rule’, or the ‘4:1:1 Rule’, depending on who tells you. The rule is that for every one hard promotional message you send, you should also include one soft promotion and two/four educational or entertaining messages. It’s similar in approach to the 90/10 approach, though obviously balanced more generously to better fit with regular e-mail sends as opposed to newsletters. The same principle still applies – you can’t just flood people with sales messages, you need to balance them out with engaging content, in order to avoid being tuned-out.

However you approach content balance, it’s important to consider what value your e-mail content provides to your subscribers – what do you offer that will ensure they open your emails and keep you front of mind in all related purchase decisions? E-mail marketing aims to maintain a combination of sales, loyalty and awareness. Focussing on any one in isolation, won’t deliver the best results.

Amidst all the hype around social media, one element that many advocates overlook is time. More specifically, how little time most businesses have to spend ‘doing social media’. This is particularly relevant in the case of small to medium businesses, where the responsibility for managing their social accounts is often allocated to a team member who already has an assigned workload. And there’s no way around it, social media does take time – you have to post regularly, you have to monitor platforms and you have to respond in a timely manner.

It all takes time, a resource which for many is already in short supply. So how can you manage this? How can you ensure you’re ticking all the social media boxes and still able to fit in everything else required in your work day? Here’s a few tips on managing your social time commitment.

Listening

One of the most important elements of social is listening. With an increasing amount of people going online to share their thoughts, the growing consumer assumption is that brands will be listening to what they’re saying, and when they say it. Studies have shown that people who pose a question to a brand on Twitter anticipate a response within 60 minutes, and as more brands work to meet social needs, that expectation continues to grow and become the norm.

It’s clear that ‘hearing’ your audience is a necessary element – this element is built into the title, ‘social’ media. If you don’t have time to be social, then you’re not utilising the medium to best effect.

As a first step in your daily social media management, you should be checking all posts in which your brand is mentioned. There may only be a few mentions at first but as you become more active, mentions will increase, so it will progressively take more time, though the more time it takes, the better you’re doing at social outreach. But if you do nothing else, you have to do take a moment to respond and interact to maximise your opportunities.

• Check your direct mentions on all social properties – you can set up e-mail notifications to ensure you’re aware of any such occurrences, but also worth checking each platform individually to ensure nothing gets lost in the notification shuffle (which happens, regularly). Log onto all your social platforms, check through your mentions, respond as required. This should take no longer than 7-10 minutes.
• Set up keyword monitoring using a tool like Hootsuite or Mention, the more specific your keywords, the less time is required to sift through the mentions. You can set up streams to search for mentions within certain geographic regions and for any keyword, or a combination of keywords. Refining them will take some trial and error, but once you have a solid list of critical search terms, this should take no longer than 5 minutes per day to scan through.

Scheduling

Once you have your monitoring/responding element out of the way, the next priority is ensuring you remain active and in regular contact with your audience.

Having a content creation strategy is a separate element, so I won’t go into that here, but what you need is to ensure that you have content either scheduled to go out from your social media accounts, or you have a plan on what you’ll be posting and when, this may or may not be a daily requirement.

Take advantage of tools. The best way to save time on scheduling is to use an application like Buffer, through which you can schedule content ahead of time. For instance, I use Hootsuite for this, and what I’ll do is at the start of each month, I’ll schedule my best performing older posts to be shared at optimal times each day. I don’t overshare, as you risk spamming your communities and I only aim to share a couple of my own posts each day. By scheduling them at the start of the month, I know that no matter what, I have content going out every day.

Of course, the risk with automation like this is that you may not be present to engage when those posts go out – as noted in the previous point, being ‘social’ is a key element.

The best way to ensure you’re on top of this is to enable push notifications so you’re alerted to any interactions related to your content. You can then log-on and respond as soon as any such occurrences happen.

Scheduling content at the start of each month should save you a heap of time it should take you less than 7 mins per day, dependent on the frequency at which you’re posting new content.

Curating

Another important element of your social media and content efforts is curating great content from within your industry. This shows your audience that you’re at the forefront of the latest happenings, whilst also helping you build connections with leaders in your field by sharing their content. It’s easier to come up with ideas.

You don’t want to spend all day looking through content – what you need is the most relevant content, and you need to be able to locate it quickly. There’s a few ways to do this:

• Create a Twitter list of only the most influential people in your industry, or people you want to connect with. Use Twitter lists to ensure you only see tweets from the sources you choose, so even though you might be following 1, 000 people, you may only need to read tweets from twenty or so influential and/or important people, relative to your brand. If you can narrow this list down to a small group of essential sources, you’ll be able to scan through that list very quickly each day, helping you locate the most relevant content in your field.
• You can use an app like Nuzzel to locate the content that’s being most widely discussed amongst your followers. Nuzzel analyses your follower lists on Twitter and Facebook and highlights the content that’s been shared the most amongst your community. You can filter this down to the last 2 hours or the last week. You can also check what’s most popular in the communities of other users – so if you know the most important influencers in your field, you could quickly look at what content is generating discussion amongst their followers, highlighting what’s likely to also be of interest and relevance in your niche.
• PopURLs is another source you can use to find relevant content – PopURLs shows the most popular content from several major outlets, which you can narrow down to your own personal selections by topic or sites of interest. This enables you to stay on top of trending content in your sector, which you can then share, knowing that it’s likely to be of relevance to your community.

Applications like Hootsuite, Klout and Buffer all have their own ‘content discovery’ elements and, processes that will search through what’s being highly shared in your industry and among your communities.

This can be hit-and-miss, but these tools will often discover content gems that are both highly relevant and highly informative, for you and for your audience. One big proviso on content discovery tools – always read what you’re sharing before sharing it out.

Using these tools, curation and scheduling should only take around 7-10 minutes each day, dependent on how active you want to be and how much content you’re pushing through each of your social channels.

These three processes are critical to maintaining an active and relevant social media presence. Your aim is to become a trusted resource, and the only way to do that is to post content regularly – how much you need to post, is up to you and dependent on how much time you have to create and curate.

The only way to work out the right balance is to start doing it – by following these basic social activity steps, you’ll soon work out what’s working best, both for what you’re able to provide and what your audience wants. This will help you turn a profit.