The most powerful place on the web to market an Internet video is on social media platforms. Whether you are using Internet video to generate wider brand awareness, or as a tool to increase traffic to your website, the ‘word of mouth’ engagement social media websites provide is a truly unmatchable marketing resource.
So, how do you effectively market your Internet videos on social media platforms? The following article looks at the most effective approaches businesses, brands and bloggers should take to marketing their Internet videos on the top 5 social media websites.
YouTube
YouTube is not only a great video platform to host your content, but it’s status as a video ‘sharing’ site makes it one of the most popular platforms for online users to engage with video content.
Socialising on YouTube is always a win-win situation. Commenting, Video Responding, Messaging and Liking/Disliking other users content encourages those other users to interact with you, your YouTube Channel and your YouTube video content. By doing this you can start to enjoy an increased viewership for your Internet videos, and a raised social profile on this particular social media platform.
For those of you with a few pennies in your back pocket you can make use of YouTube’s Promoted Videos feature, which works on a very similar basis to Google Ad Words. This particular tool allows your videos to appear more frequently in certain search results, helping to grow your contents viewership even further.
It’s always worth remembering, YouTube has been a very social platform from the outset. As a website it has always made it possible for users to Friend one another and Subscribe to each other’s content. YouTube is not a ‘dying’ social media, but it is certainly an underused asset online, making it an incredibly viable and untapped social media marketing resource for any brand, business or blogger.
Facebook
Facebook really is the talk of the town lately. Zuckerburg and his gang have been churning out updates and changes that have resulted in more ups and downs in Facebook’s popularity than the entire global economy.
For those of you Facebook buffs you’ll immediately be aware that you can of course upload your video to Facebook, (much like on YouTube) tag users in it and encourage likes and comments, but that is a very ineffective and laid back approach to marketing your video on Facebook.
You should aim to make YouTube your videos only upload point. This means you can use other social media websites like Facebook to rack up more likes and more YouTube activity. The issue with making multiple destinations for your video on different social media sites is that it could begin to start splitting up and fragmenting your audience.
So how should you use your video on Facebook?
Your essential plan of attack should be to post your video in your status, share it with Friends interested in the same niche as you (never spam uninterested users with your content, that’s a big no-no), post it in relevant Groups and Pages and try to encourage users to Subscribe to your content. The new Subscribe function Facebook has introduced is a great way to keep Friends, thought leaders and interested users up to date with your video content.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn has and always will be business as usual. Sometimes it’s a place to engage in that slightly social after work mentality, but more often than not it’s a place for B2B social media buffs to interact with one an another, and chat about their work.
With that in mind, you wouldn’t think LinkedIn is really the place to try and market a video right? Well you’d be surprised. LinkedIn is full of Groups and Discussions that could be relevant to your videos topic or subject area. You’ll never be able to throw out a sales pitch on LinkedIn, but you can try to evoke feedback, thoughts and discussions around your video content. Just like on Facebook, only try and share your content with individuals and Groups relevant to your video, spamming is never the answer.
It’s worth bearing in mind that LinkedIn allows you to post status updates for a reason. There’s no reason why you can’t attach your video to a status update once in a while to try and stir up some interaction with your Connections. Statuses are perhaps the most socially interactive part of LinkedIn, where users operate in more of a ‘Facebook’ mindset. Your Connections are far more inclined to dish out ‘Likes’ and ‘Comments’ on your status than any other post, as it will appear in their news feed without them having to put in any effort to track your post down.
Twitter
Twitter to many online users is the home of automated posts, blanket re-posts and of course ridiculously lazy ReTweeting. I’m not going to be the one that says “don’t do it”, but when you see a user post the same personality deprived Tweet (complete with link) 4 times in succession, it doesn’t quite show your Followers that you’ve actually put much effort into making a connection with them.
I will admit Twitter is a hard social media to crack. That pesky bird doesn’t allow much in the way of thumbnails and no matter how much you try to shorten a link on Bit.ly or Hoot Suite it still looks vastly uninteresting to the Following masses. The difficult nature of cracking Twitter is why so often many Internet marketers throw automated posts (typically sent from more ‘prosperous’ social media platforms) at their disinterested Followers.
The key to marketing a video on Twitter is to become an engaging user. Just like on every other social media you need to put the effort in. Build relationships through personalized @’s and Direct Messages to your Followers, become a Follower of interest in their Twitter feed and maybe even make the occasional thought provoking ReTweet of their work for good measure.
The secret with Twiter is it doesn’t matter if you post a link, a joke, a topical piece of news or even photo, if you’re not a user your Followers know about or care about, they’ll never read what you have to say. Become an active and engaging Tweeter to your Followers, and they will Follow what you have to say. Like the old saying goes “if you build it, they will come”.
*Lazy Tweeter’s Tip: If you really don’t have the time to create a Twitter community and build a following, you can always try to make your Tweets as curious, persuasive and as inviting as possible. Doing so will help to improve your click through rate and increase engagement with your Profile, but there really isn’t a substitute for good old fashioned hard work.
Google+
Google+ is the new kid on the block. Well actually Google+ is like that rich kid at school that practically has everything imaginable yet they still go out and buy a hover-board with matching jet pack just because they can. In terms of social media features Google+ realistically offers the same marketing approaches as Facebook, but with a slight twist.
You’ve got your standard social media marketing abilities such as status updates, messages, likes (+1), friend-ing, sharing etc, but with one very powerful addition – sector specific marketing opportunities.
Okay, you might call them ‘Circles’, but let’s face it, if you take an Internet marketing perspective what Google has effectively created is the ability to create sector specific marketing opportunities for you to cater towards. This basically means that you can steer the marketing of your video towards that specific group. If it’s users interested in your niche you ask their thoughts, if it’s potential clients you can send them a bit of sales spiel or if its business contacts you can aim to encourage discussion in and around your videos subject area.
Google+ is certainly still getting sussed out by marketers and the general online masses alike, but there are fantastic marketing opportunities popping up with each and every new development. If you want to be the first to make the most of such new marketing additions to Google+ you’re definitely going to need to keep your eyes glued to those forums.
Summary
Social media platforms give video and Internet marketers the opportunity to reap the staggering power of universal ‘word of mouth’ promotion. Obtaining this in any capacity is utterly priceless, yet fantastically prosperous. By dominating social media marketing for your Internet video content you could not only start enjoying increased conversion rates, higher website traffic and increased brand awareness, but you could also achieve that prized viral status for your video that every marketer dreams of.
Launching a full blown content marketing program without a strong content development strategy is like trying to eat an elephant with a spork…while it’s charging straight at you. It’s too big, too fast, and your little piece of plastic won’t make a dent.
Too much focus is often initially put into how we’ll reach our audience, the fun stuff like Twitter and Like buttons, without first having an abundance of relevant content to publish. Facebook pages, Youtube channels and SlideShare accounts do little good if all they push out is generic, self-serving company “news” and sales pitches disguised as articles.
Think of your content foundation as your primary tool for taking down that elephant. By starting with the following basic model and rolling it out in manageable steps, your wimpy plastic spoon/fork can quickly morph into a bulldozer.
Step 1: Your Content Strategy
At the beginning, it’s best to keep all the moving parts as simple as possible. Creating pages of diagrams and complicated buying cycle charts will only lead to overwhelm and inaction. Instead, focus first on what B2B marketer Eric Wittlake calls Stage Zero Content.
“Stage zero content is intended to establish your brand, your expertise or your perspective in the mind of your target market, when they are not researching or considering solutions. This content is valuable to a far broader audience than even early stage buying cycle content.”
Stage Zero Content deals with the same problems as your products and services, targeting the very people who are most likely to also be your best prospects. A solid core strategy is made up of answers to the following five questions:
What are all of the problems our products and services solve? Think high level problems, low level problems and everything in between.
Who specifically do we solve them for? How sophisticated and experienced is your target market with the solutions available? A CRM software company may serve both enterprise-level sales departments as well as small business owners. Content that’s valuable to one, however, may be useless for another.
What’s our content’s style and personality? The fatal flaw of most B2B marketing is the incorrect assumption that all business purchasing decisions are made purely by logic. This often leads to some pretty boring, bloated stuff. The best B2B content is written for human consumption and connects with us both emotionally and logically.
Who will create our content? Everyone in your company is a potential contributor of ideas and articles. Your sales, customer service and account management teams have the most day-to-day contact with your customers as well as intimate knowledge of the challenges they face. Your executive team understands big picture trends, opportunities and insights. By incorporating a broad range of perspectives, you’ll have a deeper understanding of the problems your readers face and the type of content they’ll find most useful.
What topics should we write about? Close your eyes and pretend that you’re a fly on the wall, inside the offices of your ideal customer. What do you see and hear? How do they define the problems you solve? What type of information are they looking for?
Step 2: Your Blog
Your blog is the primary hub through which to share your content and begin attracting readers. Start by committing to at least one post every week, increasing that output as your editorial process evolves. The more quality content you publish, the sooner you’ll build an audience.
Your blog should be easy to find from every page on your site, preferably with a dedicated link on the main menu. Don’t make visitors search for your content. Most won’t.
Step 3: Your First Level Follow-Up Offer
Picture a B2B content marketing campaign as an ultra high-end retail store. If the internet is the idewalk traffic, your blog is the window display that gets people to stop and look, and your first level follow-up offer entices them to walk into your store.
End each blog post with a soft offer for more detailed content like a white paper, guide or e-book. There are two basic strategies for this step, and both have the same goal of creating opportunities for further engagement. You can offer additional resources in exchange for joining your email list or as an instant download with no sign up requirement, instead ending each piece with another strong call-to-action (Step 4).
Step 4: Your Second Level Follow-Up Offer
Now that you’ve engaged readers and earned some trust, your next call-to-action (through emails or at the end of your first offer) delivers even more value but in a more personalized, interactive way. By moving from highly convenient but static information to interactive, real-time content like webinars and seminars, you’ll begin conversations that help you learn more about each potential customer’s needs and how to best serve them.
Step 5: Add More Channels
Once you’ve set up your foundation of blog content and follow-up offers, you can begin to expand your reach by linking posts and offers to your company’s LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter pages.
Different readers have their own preferences for how they consume content. Some may like blogs, others Tweet or stick with Facebook. Many like a little of each.
Each type of social media has its own quirks, processes and best practices and require consistent daily attention. While blog post comments make it possible to begin interacting with your audience, other social media platforms take it a step further and are best used as a conversational medium, not just a one-way syndication portal.
The need for multi-channel marketing continues to be the next opportunity for many marketers. Having a presence, voice and communicating to your target audience in one channel alone became ‘old school’ as many companies began connecting marketing efforts across mobile, social media, websites and email initiatives.
As marketers move toward creating and promoting messages across channels, which consumers are demanding, each should be aware of the following 5 Mandates for Survival in the Digital World.
Digital marketing will continue to evolve. According to Forrester Research, digital marketing budgets are expected to surpass $20 billion for the first time. What this means to marketers, other than perhaps an increased presence at the revenue table, is identifying where marketing needs to expand. What channels are effective and should continue? Which weren’t?And maybe more importantly, where do you think competitors might break through in upcoming months? Scoping out competitors websites’, networks and advertising placement is a great way to stay up-to-speed with what they are investing in more frequently.
Mobile marketing. As more people stay plugged in everywhere they go, the more marketers will try to reach them via mobile devices. An important sub-category is location-based marketing. Most mobile devices are equipped with GPS, so if your business serves a local market, make sure it’s listed in all the local directories and peer review sites like Yelp.If you are already exploring location-based marketing via FourSquare or a similar service, try taking it to the next level by offering discounts/coupons to someone who is currently at a nearby retail store/restaurant.
Social Media Conversations. The move from talking at your customer to engaging them in conversation is fast becoming the norm. If your company hasn’t had a chance to invest time and resources into the channels that make it easy to build relationships, such as Twitter, Facebook or blogging, it’s likely time.
Cohesive content strategy. “Content is king” is still the reigning slogan out there, but “unify your content” is becoming an equally important rally cry. The ability to stay “on message” across a website, Facebook, Twitter, blog, email, press releases, and live chat can be difficult.Help your team stay on message by creating a content matrix which aligns messages and indicates the timeframe for particular messages, discounts or promotions. This allows all team members to be aware of current content marketing campaigns and if hosted in a shareable space, can alert teams of updates in real-time. Expect to see more “content czars” as companies strive to consistently brand themselves across the multi-faceted digital world.
Video. Increased processing power and bandwidth make downloading and watching videos easy, so people are coming to expect (for example) a 3-minute product demo accompanying a web page, white paper or press release.Written content will always be important, and adding video to your content strategy will most certainly give your company the competitive advantage it needs in today’s digital marketing landscape
Some other mandates to consider include:
Development of tools to analyze communications across digital channels.
Increased pay-per-order advertising.
More personalized advertising (following on the heels of increased consumer tracking).
Find more information on digital integration, including press release tips, by checking out the PRWeb blog.
I think the bigger problem is B2B brands moving too fast into social media without having a plan or anything interesting to say.
Getting someone to accept your messages in social media is purely opt-in. They can easily shut you off or pay attention to something else. Without a consistent plan for compelling storytelling/content marketing, social media is pretty much useless. Focus on the pain points of your customers and answer those questions with compelling content through the channels where your customers are hanging out (print, online, in-person, mobile, social).
So brands should be thinking first “What’s my content strategy that will help me attract and retain customers?” Then they can figure out what social media channels to leverage to create that engagement and capture that attention.
Move fast, but don’t move at all without a content marketing strategy.
Trey Pennington – Marketing Pro, Business Connector, and Storyteller
Longer answer: it depends. Business-to-business firms have a reputation for conservative adoption of emerging technology (okay, some say B2B firms only cross the chasm once it’s been completely filled in and paved). Because B2B companies typically have long-standing, person-to-person relationships with real people, they probably have more time to adopt new technology than B2C firms (Imagine if Coca-Cola were to adopt and implement at the pace of Dow Chemical or Boeing, for instance). Expectations for B2B consumers are comfortably lower.
On the other hand, B2B firms who move too slowly may stumble away a “competitive advantage” to a faster moving competitor, especially if that competitor uses technology to help it’s customers nurture closer relationships with their customers (remember Tom Peters’s wonderful story of Milliken and the shop towels). There is something to be said for helping customers leverage technology throughout each level of each channel. Just a thought.
Jody S. Canavan – President, Launch International, Inc.
Whenever I think about social media and the challenges associated with integrating it into everything we do, I’m reminded of the YouTube video clip with Katie Couric and Bryant Gumble trying to figure out the Internet. Today, we can’t imagine a world with no Internet.
Five years from now, we’ll laugh again. We’ll figure it out because we have to in order to successfully compete. That’s because social media is changing how we interact with customers, prospects and other key targets. Done well, its impact on a company’s sales process is significant because it means that, for the first time, there is a technology-based (marketing-based) equivalent to a trusted advisor conversation traditionally reserved for salespeople.
The result is a more efficient and more tightly integrated marketing and sales effort — a major goal for every company. Bottom line? The cost of moving too slow is competitive disadvantage, which is something most companies can’t afford.
There is a compounding cost to being slow. Status is transferrable from one social platform to the next, so waiting to “jump on the next one” early is a fail-certain approach. (After all, did you notice who had the most Quora followers when the Q&A community launched? The same people with the largest Twitter following.)
Aside from the obvious drawbacks to today’s marketing efforts, the later a company begins experimenting with new social technologies, the less influential they will be when the next one takes off.
Speed is a marketer’s most valuable weapon.
Billy Mitchell – President and Creative Director, MLT Creative
If your company has a pulse, it’s not too late to start using social media for marketing as long as you’re willing to commit the time and resources required to stay the course.
Start as an aggressive listener. Seek out others in your industry using social media including customers, prospects and your competition. Search for blogs and reports being shared by trade journalists, consultants and industry influencers.
If you’re reading this, you must be interested in social media, and hopefully well on your way. But If you’re still standing still, you’re conceding valuable ground to your competition.
The B2B Bloggers site you’re on now is a great starting place. Subscribe today. I enjoy it with my coffee and learn something new everyday.
Get started and never quit. You’ll learn fast and you can pick up your pace as you go.
Erin Eschen – Social Media Marketing Manager at Perficient, Inc
Organizations have a choice–act now or fall behind the competition. To a marketer, delaying can be both an opportunity cost to the organization and a career set-back. Rarely are we presented such a clear opportunity to get ahead. Social media is an opportunity that is unparalleled as an open and two-way dialogue.
I’ve noticed three common pitfalls that can set you back even if intentions are strong:
1) Setting sights too high, such as building a hosted community site before leveraging thriving and popular networks. 2) Investing resources in the wrong places. Research from Forrester and Gartner can tell you where your target audience is. 3) Simply pushing marketing messages and press releases to social networks. “Engagement” is key. Be sure your social media strategy addresses how you will engage in a way that drives desired results.
This is dependent on your company’s competitive position. If you are a market leader, you can probably afford to be a “fast follower” and let others make mistakes on technology. If you are a newcomer, it probably makes sense to take more risk with technology.
You’ll never know what opportunities you missed by not engaging in the right social media circles.
An invitation to guest blog? Contacts with potential new business or partner opportunities? A great idea you didn’t have because you missed the tweet that would have inspired it?
These things aren’t measurable, but that doesn’t make them any less real.
Social media engages you with a community of like-minded peers. Foregoing it won’t make the roof fall down but it won’t blow it off either.
The opportunity cost from a B2B marketing perspective is not in moving too slow, but in moving too fast. Companies that jump in without a clear understanding of the time/resource commitment and a clear policy and strategy in place risk a failed social media program. Listen first. Find out what, if any conversations are going on around your brand, product or service categories.
Then take an internal assessment to understand what time and resources are available and if not available, determine the extent of your social media program and how you will support it. Know your limits, assess what’s available, start small, plan, set metrics, measure, re-assess. You may find that the extent of your social media effort is a good blog with relevant content and regular updates.
This begs the question: how do you know if you’re too slow in adopting new social technologies? It probably varies depending on the specific market and customer preferences. I would suggest one year as a rule of thumb. If your company’s competitors have been using new social tools for a year that you view as applicable to your business, and you’re not using them yet, that’s too slow.
This is lost opportunity cost. Chances are you’ll miss opportunities with prospective customers who would have preferred this new tool. With B2B customers controlling their buying cycles, you might find you’re off the short list simply by lagging behind. Why give your competition a head start with new social technology? Whether the sales hit is 5% or 50% it can and should be avoided, by staying current and understanding customer preferences.
Now it’s your turn, tell us what’s the cost of moving too slow?
This post is part of the B2B Expert roundtable series: B2B Marketing – In 140 Words Or Less.
I’ve been catching up this weekend on some of the SXSW coverage. In this interview of Valeria Maltoni by Simon Mainwaring, he captures what I think is a gem of insight from Valeria.
After watching the video ask yourself, “Do you have buyers or customers?”
Don’t have five minutes to invest in the video, here is the gem from Valeria:
Let me take a step back and define what I mean by transforming buyers into customers. Most organizations think of customers as all the people who buy from them. I would like you to think about the transactions, the number of transactions. If you have have a lot of people who buy just once, what you have really is “buyers” you don’t have “customers”.
To me commerce begins, when you have those buyers who come back and buy a second time, and a third time. And then with social, you have those customers who not only come back and buy something, but also bring back their friends. You know, it’s kinda the word of mouth on steriods in social media. And now they are helping other people come to your business and make transactions.
So you see the multiplying effect of designing a conversation that allows people who are attracted to your business and solution to come back with other people like them and generate more business.
Today, LinkedIn announced a rather significant milestone: 100 million members. To quote the blog post announcing it, “We’re now growing at roughly one million new LinkedIn members every week, the equivalent of a professional joining the site at faster than one member per second.”
At 100 million members, as a social network, LinkedIn is simply too big not include in your B2B social media marketing strategy.
Whether it be growing your connections, participating in groups, starting a group, responding to Questions, or going a step further and extending your website to use their API, LinkedIn should have a place in your B2B social media strategy.
A few weeks ago, friends of mine who own a small business in downtown San Antonio’s Riverwalk area, casually asked me, “Jake, can you help us with our social media?”
So on a Monday night, I agreed to come over and help them. My pay: a steak dinner.
They own a small shop, En Fuego Sauce & Salsa, which they started last year. Granted, these two guys are already very tech savvy, and so they had already figured out that they needed to create a Facebook page and Twitter account – and then link the two to facilitate messaging.
We did, however, discuss the traditional marketing problem – and new media headache – of content: what to say, how to say it, and when?
But the best way to find content, of course, is to have your customers provide it for you. Having customers post positive feedback and comments can be the lifeblood of any business and so our discussion extended to how to convert foot traffic in the store into mass bloggers and Twitterers.
As such, I threw it out there, “Are you on Foursquare?”
Foursquare, Facebook Places, and other geolocation check-in mobile apps offer virtual rewards and real-world discounts for checking in at local businesses and sharing their activities with their network – though all the while, the merchant is keeping tabs on who is interacting with their site and how.
Foursquare’s popularity grows unabated. According to TechCrunch, the service crossed 7 million user IDs this week, and continues to partner with large brands and celebrities, including chef and restaurateur Mario Batali.
Unfortunately, the numbers don’t check in at all: subscribers using the services are relatively few and far between. A Pew Internet & American Life Project survey published last year reported that only 4 percent of online adults use “geosocial” location-based services to check in at merchants, and only 1 percent of users check in on any given day. For all of the media buzz and venture capital attention surrounding the space, this is pitiful.
But I digress. I do think geolocation is going to sophisticate itself in the next year, extending itself to the business audience by encouraging check-ins at conferences and meetings, and use its growing database to provide even more value for merchants (varying the coupon amounts by location, for example).
Getting back to my friends and their store: I am happy to help them and share my knowledge, because it helps both ways. They get free advice, and I can see if my advice holds true. They can provide me with valuable feedback, which I can use with paying clients (or in blogposts). Maybe I’ll ask for some salsa next time.
Have you discussed Foursquare or other LBS applications with your clients? If your company or client is not a brand or a merchant with physical locations, have you discussed ways in which LBS and such apps will affect the business? Share them with us if you would.
Over at {grow} this week, Mark published an article, Six ideas to get your blog out of the fog, that served as a case study. Thanks to Christina Pappas, a blogger with Zmags.com, she graciously offered up her blog for review. Check it out as there is a lot of very practical advice and guidance in both Mark’s article and the comments.
The company, Zmags.com hired an outside consultant to help to try to advise her on ideas to drive more readership and comments. One suggestion:
“Create specific industry-specific customer “personas” and tailor posts to each persona over a period of time.”
I think wisely, based on all the current advice and ideas, Mark suggested at this point that “personas” suggestion wasn’t necessary. But it did lead me to leave the following comment on the post that I thought I would share here with you.
You don’t need buyer personas for your blog! You need buyer personas and the process of developing them to understand the following:
The buying process (buying lifecycle) of your products itself.
Who are all the people involved in the process of purchasing your products and services. The decision makers, the influencers, the users, and the evangelist/champion.
What the people identified in two above go through in the buying process.
Where (and if) the people identified in two interact on the social web.
The challenges these people face in the jobs that your products address.
The types of things these people are interested in. What makes them tick? What keeps the up at night?
How and where these people consume content and their preferences for doing so.
Once you have these answers, you’re able to begin the process of developing an integrated marketing strategy that includes content marketing and social media – of which one tactic is a blog. Sure the information above will feed your editorial approach for the blog, but that is just one small piece of how buyer personas help.
By far the largest benefit to your business of creating buyer personas is understanding how to develop content for all channels – print, web, social, email, events (webinars, live, and virtual), that moves each person involved in the buying process through each stage of its lifecycle and to the ultimate outcome for you – a new, lifelong customer.
So now you are armed. If a consultant tells you need buyer personas just for your blog, simply ask them, “What else are they good for?”
If they don’t respond with something like the above, you may just be talking to the wrong consultant.
Here are a couple additional posts I’ve written on Buyer Personas:
The internet is evolving, and online marketing strategies are evolving with it. In the past year we’ve seen some major changes in the ways visitors find websites; traditional advertising is no longer as much of a mainstay as it once was; social media campaigns are growing in influence while organic search results remain the foundation of most strong online marketing operations.
Here is what a survey of over 4,000 internet users by Forrester Research in 2010 reveals about how users find websites:
61% of adults say they still find websites using natural search results; 39% of those users say they trust these results. 57% of consumers under the age of 18 say they trust search engine results – and the majority of all of these users say they trust search engine results more than they trust social networking results or even major media advertising like television. Search engine results remain the number 1 traffic driver online – as they have since this survey began in 2003.
The next biggest traffic driver is referrals. Word of mouth is so effective that 1 out of every 3 consumers surveyed say they visit websites their friends and family tell them about via email.
Paid advertising is now the least effective method of driving traffic to a website. Paid advertising will still get you impressions, but it’s harder than ever to translate those impressions into views – or conversions. A mere 3% of surveyed adults say they visit websites from paid advertisements. The effectiveness of paid search advertising has dropped by 10% since only two years ago.
Social media marketing has been holding steady as a major traffic driver. 16% of adult internet users find websites through social media profiles and links. This is the same percentage as follow television ads to websites – and a lot less expensive for internet marketers!
Reiteration is good. 20% of users who view a paid advertisement online choose to search for that website’s organic results before visiting the website. These organic results add validity to your site; users trust them more than they trust your paid advertisement. Be sure to market yourself in more than one way.
How does Age Impact Surfing Habits?
Social media has been gathering ground for consumers of all ages but has a particularly powerful influence over surfers age 30 and below. Even though organic results are still the primary way younger consumers find websites, social media is a close second – above even personal recommendations and word of mouth.
Surfers age 55 and up are significantly less interested in social media (only 7% use social media to find websites). They are far more likely to rely on referrals from friends and family to find websites. They also are influenced by print media and interested in content.
In Conclusion: Additional Tips for Success
Your paid ads aren’t worthless just because other forms of marketing are taking center stage. Consider that your paid ads can offer you real-time analytic information along with their functionality as ads. This analytic data is useful for improving all aspects of your campaign.
Impressions matter. Just because your ads don’t seem to be driving clicks directly doesn’t mean they aren’t adding to the overall awareness of your brand. Remember that many users now view search results after viewing an ad and then navigate to a website – focusing on multiple aspects of your campaign can help target these users.
Mobile marketing is of growing importance. 1 in 3 internet users under the age of 18 browse the internet at least once a week on their mobile phones. Target these users to increase your success.
The best approach to marketing your website in 2011 is not to utilize any one form of online marketing by itself – but to combine all of these tools into an all-encompassing, fully integrated campaign.
As products become more commoditized and companies try to outperform their competitors, a better customer experience is becoming an increasingly important way to differentiate. Customer engagement plays a large role in the overall customer experience. There has yet to be a standard definition of customer engagement, but Ron Shevlin, an analyst at Aite Group, LLC defines engagement as:
“Repeated interactions that strengthen the emotional, psychological or physical investment a customer has in a brand.”
Essentially customer engagement is a measure of relationship strength.
Most organizations’ already accept the fact that active customer engagement correlates with growing income and profit because of the way it makes customers more loyal, generates positive word-of-mouth, and reduces the probability that a customer will switch suppliers. It is now commonly believed an organization that can positively affect engagement is more likely to see these engaged prospects consider the company’s products making prospects, convert to customers, and purchase more regularly. Organizations developing customer engagement strategies focus on creating a positive and consistent online and offline customer experience.
As engagement becomes a key behavioral indicator, organizations will need to be able to link points of customer engagement with bottom-line improvements. Therefore it is becoming increasingly important to monitor and measure customer engagement.
There is yet no universal formula for measuring customer experience. One approach is to take the quantity, quality, breadth and depth of interactions between the company and the customer into consideration when measuring customer engagement and then measuring the correlation between the pattern of engagement and known stages of the purchasing process.
The advent of social media has raised the question of whether we can apply the same approach to measuring engagement to online interactions. As marketers look for ways to measure of engagement of social media, research suggests many marketers are using time spent on a site as the most important performance metric, followed by unique page views. Since most social sites are not transactional, increased interaction does not necessarily indicate a more engaged or more loyal relationship. While the number of postings, completed profiles, participation in polls or forums indicate interaction they may not indicate loyalty.
The question then is, “Do the behaviors such as purchase frequency, loyalty program participation, etc. used to determine engagement in the traditional brick-and-mortar, email and e-commerce channels apply when trying to measure engagement of customer who are participating in blogs, social networks, private communities, and forums? The answer is probably not. So what should we use? Some of the latest thinking is to measure sentiment as an indication of engagement.
Sentiment analysis similar to text mining involves parsing and analyzing the comments and suggestions customers post on social media. It concentrates on looking at the context, tone, emotion, polarity and objectivity of the comments rather than solely the words. Twitter and Facebook have built-in applications that perform keyword-based sentiment analysis and Google is experimenting with its Google Trends service.
Sentiment analysis is still in its infancy but proponents believe it will enable organizations to recognize which social media participants are loyal and engaged and which are not. It’s only a matter of time before we’ll have better ways to measure the engagement of the social media customer. In the meantime, this is one approach gaining traction.
Hi, I'm @jeremyvictor, the founder of Make Good Media and Editor In Chief of B2Bbloggers.com.
B2Bbloggers.com is an online magazine for B2B marketers. Our goal is to engage, educate, and make it easier for B2B marketers to find the information they care about to do their jobs successfully.
As a publisher and new media marketing agency, Make Good Media advises businesses how to integrate social media and content marketing with traditional marketing tactics to attract, nurture, engage, and convert customers in the brave new B2B world of the social, mobile web. How can we help you Make Good Media?
The most powerful place on the web to market an Internet video is on social media platforms. Whether you are using Internet video to generate wider brand awareness, or as a tool to increase traffic to your website, the ‘word of mouth’ engagement social media websites provide is a truly unmatchable marketing resource.
