Why influencer marketing in Asia is more successful than anywhere else

March 15, 2018 by Akshata Chandrasekhar Leave a Comment

In 2017, social media ranked above store visits and TV advertising as a source of information for purchases in Asia, according to research from WARC. The micro influencers marketing campaigns became a staple thing for most marketing strategies in the APAC region. The outstanding engagement rates of the opinion leaders attract brands, while regional peculiarities make Asia the best ground for implementing the influencer marketing.

Companies are waking up to the influencer marketing trends and are on the lookout for skilled professionals who can lead influencer marketing campaigns for their brands. This demand has led to a dearth of social media marketing professionals. In situations like this, a social media course could take you a long way. With the right social media course, you’ll learn all there is to learn about how to find and outreach influencers and how to use them to raise your website’s brand and ratings.

Why is Influencer Marketing in Asia so special?

Influencer marketing is the most cost-effective customer acquisition channel today. On average, businesses in Asia generate $6.50 for every $1 invested in micro-influencers. There are some specific factors that drive this outstanding number.

Highest levels of mobile penetration

Asia is extremely saturated with mobile technologies. The smartphone penetration throughout the generations is way over 50%. The mobiles are everywhere, and they’re much more common than the desktop computers.

The number of active social media users in East and Southeast Asia is four times bigger than in North America. This makes the region number one in the world with over 1.5 billion active users. Thailand, for instance, is the country with the ninth largest number of Facebook users. Impressive by its own, but even more impressive when you figure out that this means 70% of Thailand’s population using Facebook.

As the mobile web is number one medium around the country, people rarely look for the goods from the browser search. Mostly, they will collect the info from the reviews and posts published throughout their social networks. It makes a perfect soil for creating the demand and using influencer marketing to promote brands through influencers with an audience even as little as one thousand followers.

Extremely customized messaging

The audience in Asia craves for the extremely personal, intimate relationship with influencers. They fancy the communication, personal details, very often updates, excessive emotions and abundant sharing. And the KOLs here mastered the art of keeping their followers engaged every second. They are sharing the most private tidbits of their lives and keeping next to no distance.

Besides, as they’re well aware of the technical peculiarities of their audience (bad bandwidth internet and only the smartphones to enter the web), they make perfect content: short, personalized, and tailored for every channel in particular. As a result, their reach brings higher quality engagement.

Case study: Disney is heavily engaging the micro-influencers around Asia. Namely, promoting the Star Wars franchise in the region is tricky because people have very little knowledge of the subject. In Vietnam, for example, they don’t know the Star Wars at all, which makes billboards and paid ads useless. Only real people can bring the awe to their audience directly and stimulate people to buy a ticket by showing an example. Like mymmu, a fitness blogger from Thailand, who now appears in her feed geared in SW merchandise from head to toes to promote the Last Jedi.

Priority strategies for benefitting your brand with micro-influencers

Attendance at sponsored events and partnerships
Building hype around product launches and store openings
Creating product reviews to increase trust with the audience
Having an always-on strategy to increase brand love
Creating opportunities for conversion through offers and promotions

Who are these cool kids rocking the market?

Different types of influencers bring different sets of benefits. Lots of brands are simply using the actors and pop stars who have millions of followers. For instance, Chi Pu, a Vietnamese singer/actress, can bring you 30K likes per post out of her 8.5 million following. Yet, that doesn’t mean you get a quality audience interested in your product.

The very word “micro-influencer” covers the range from 1K to 100K followers, with some wiggle space on top. Seemingly small, they beat celebs engagements rates in a breeze. In the example above, the 30K from 8.5 mln makes less than 0.3% engagement. Compare it with the case study below, featuring mom bloggers working for about 50 times smaller fees.

Case study: to introduce a new product on market and test the e-seller platform, a sanitizer brand encouraged Instagrammers to share the post and redirect followers to the e-shop link. Out of the 112,000 total audience reach, they got 2500 likes and comments, which equals 2.2% engagement rate. What’s more, 138 clicks to the product made over 0.12% direct sales conversion.

If only the above-mentioned celebrity was any closer to these numbers, her post could bring over ten thousand sales. But that doesn’t happen.

So, take a closer look at these mommies with two kids and four thousand followers. Or, check out other categories:

Beauty

The girls and sometimes boys making the reviews of the beauty products and promoting various brands are very, very often to see in the Asian social networks. While the top players in this niche would make good money and often collaborate with the specific brands as ambassadors, there is a legion of smaller and aspiring influencers, and the best part is that you can often get them to promote your product for a modest reimbursement of sending out the free samples.

Artists

We’re not speaking the PSY here, of course. Rather, think of the category of “Asia’s got talent” participants. Each of them has a social profile with some devoted followers. As people in Asia adore the singing, dancing, and musicians (Bollywood and karaoke are the proofs), they would listen closely to the stars even that small, and often follow the recommendations. A poll in Vietnam showed that 60% of the teenagers would follow the fashion style from their favorite artists, and 50% would be influenced by their lifestyle advice.

Case Study: A Korean snack brand, for instance, gained attention by using home-grown talent in the form of pop stars and actresses. They did extremely smart move by adding a twist of urgency to the content angle. Influencers described the difficulty of getting their hands on the coveted snacks. No wonder the brand repeatedly sold out, reinforcing an aura of desire around it.

Fit / Healthy

The ones who probably started all this fever. It’s really hard not to buy the named protein power or slimming tea when you see the daily updates with the perfect bodies and shredded six-packs. Especially, when it comes from a girl next door. Nowadays, this category gets engaged in promoting all kinds of products, not only the fitness goods. Insurance companies, for instance, would engage them to bring the life insurance products to people who care about their health – pretty logical. Yet, the majority of case studies would still involve the foods, drinks, and supplements.

Case study: Ayam Brand aimed to run a long-term influencer marketing campaign to promote its products. They invited a pool of engaged influencers and tracked their post-performance. Good performing ones were selected as Ayam Brand’s social ambassadors and engaged in a long-term community building plan.

Pets

Worldwide phenomena, pet blogs can get a multimillion following easily. The most popular social account in Japan, for example, is the Instagram of the Maru Taro, Shiba inu dog with over 2.5 mln followers. Recently the couples started to invite Maru Taro to their weddings as a guest celebrity. There is a mass of smaller cat and dog accounts, and you couldn’t find a better audience for your pet-related brand.

Lifestyle

The lifestyle influencers cover it all from wellness to traveling, and their hobbies vary widely. Veganism, minimalism or entrepreneurship are just to name few. The lifestyle influencers carve their niche in the audience that relates to them on certain parameters. As blogs emerge on something as little as one hashtag, the marketers get a chance to target campaign in a very certain niche.

Downsides

Micro influence works well with the bright and catchy products: sports apparel, bright snacks packages or cars. It’s harder to promote software, tech solutions or other less tangible services.

Another bottleneck for handling the micro influencers campaign is, actually, handling it. It’s a lot of work to find the right people, outreach to them, develop the content plan, get it rolling and track the numbers. Yet, the tools are here already to answer the demand. The web is generously sprinkled with the platforms that connect brands and influencers. You can create your campaign in few clicks on one of these sites:

Takeaway

The rise of “become the influencer” platforms made the social web of today home to a millennial digital entrepreneurial camaraderie. Brands make a good use of it by handpicking ripe ambassadors, ready to promote their values, from the army of new social influencers.

A proof of micro-influencers efficiency would be the fact that most agencies doubled their budget for the influencer campaigns this year. Hundreds of new influencer agencies appear in Asia every day while the bigger Western players like Maker Studios, StyleHaul and adMingle are also entering the market. The trend is booming the digital marketing as much as Asia is booming the global market – and both are not giving up their positions to anyone.

Disclaimer:
This article was written by one of our guest writers. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not be indicative of the views of Market Motive.

After a decade of successful marketing career, Samantha Engman switched to her all-time passion – content creation for aspiring businesses. Don’t miss out her articles at Bid4papers and Twitter for more useful tips on building your success online.

10 Fantastic Things You Can Learn from These Instagram Business Accounts

March 7, 2018 by Akshata Chandrasekhar Leave a Comment

It is now a well-known fact that Instagram is no longer limited to celebrities showing off their swanky cars and lavish lifestyles. It now has a subset called Instagram Business that has now become a goldmine for brands worldwide, be it a new startup or a well-established brand. This field of digital marketing is new and brands of all sizes have jumped on board.

The statistics mentioned below are a testament to the reach that Instagram has globally.

There are 800 million Instagram users worldwide
80 % users of Instagram are not from the US
More than half of American Instagram users are under 30
4.2 billion posts are liked each day
There are 25 million businesses on Instagram
80% of all users follow a company

[Source]

In today’s world, it has become important to present content visually. While Instagram is the way to go here, not everyone gets their Instagram Business strategy right. A social media course goes a long way in helping you get your Instagram marketing strategy right, but for those who just don’t have the time, there is always this article.

In this post, we will speak about a few brands who own and flaunt their Instagram Business accounts.

Sabyasachi

At Sabyasachi, they don’t sell products; they sell an experience. With exclusive designs and photoshoot done around them, SS follows a vintage theme for their Instagram account, which has more than 2 million followers. And boy, do they know their magic filters! Don’t worry you don’t need a designer to own an Instagram page like Sabyasachi. All these graphics and more listed in this post can easily be created with free graphic design tools like Canva.

Takeaways:

Make Use of your Happy Customers. Sabyasachi features their customers on the official Instagram profile. This helps them in creating more engagement among their audiences.
Share stories: They share not only well-shot pictures but also the complete story which revolves around the collection. This is storytelling at its best and helps customers relate to the thought behind the product.
Get Influencers on Board: Sabyasachi recently got Deepika Padukone on board. Getting influencers to engage with you helps get exposure as these influencers have their very own huge follower base

Reputation Management: Social media is not just about the selling. It is also about connecting with your audience at a personal level. This social media characteristic means that you could come off as cold and thoughtless if you don’t post personal content. However, on the upside, it could also mean that social media accounts are a great way to manage your brand’s reputation. If controversy surrounds you, using your brand’s account to dispel untrue information (or apologize for true ones) are a great way to handle unpleasantness. In this regard, Sabyasachi knows more than just elaborate embroidery.

IKEA

IKEA is one the most popular home furnishing brand since 2008. Ikea’s Instagram Business account is popular with millions of fans across the globe. Their “solve it in a snap” video series is a beautiful example of an engaging Instagram post. You can pick a leaf or two from IKEA’s Instagram account and learn to engage your audience in new innovating ways.

Takeaways:

Engaging with creative posts or campaigns: IKEA PS 2014 campaign on Instagram Business is a whole new level of creativity. They created an entire website on Instagram with the help of tags. Once you tap on a photo, you can see a bunch of tags, and when you click on them, it takes you to the Instagram LP of that category. Try it yourself!

Captivating Ad that sells: IKEA doesn’t feature a direct sales ad. Instead, they choose to follow a blended approach. Its key to success is the perfect mix of product & non-promotional images. Its elegantly curated Instagram Business content is bound to inspire followers to buy a new piece of furniture.

CocaCola

Coca-Cola is a name not unknown to anyone – from a 10-year-old kid to a 60-year-old man. Its clever marketing strategy combined with the cheerful motto of “Sharing happiness” has made Coca-Cola a global brand. Where there is the talk of creative marketing strategy, there is Coca-Cola. The marketing team in Coca-Cola firmly believe in the phrase “creativity has no limits,” and this attitude is easily visible in their campaigns.

Takeaways:

Diversify your strategy but stick to your tagline: Coca-Cola keeps coming up with new ad series but retains an air of youth, happiness & thirst in all their campaigns. These ads embed themselves in your subconscious, tug at your emotions and ensure that you associate their brand with pizza, fun and hot summer days.
Influencer marketing: Apart from their regular posts, Coca-Cola is known for planning viral campaigns like the “Share a Coke” campaign. To boost these campaigns, Coke makes use of Instagram influencers. These influencers are carefully chosen on the basis of their followers’ demographics and reach. Once set, they encourage these influencers to post about a campaign with relevant hashtags, videos, and images. This helps spread the word, create a buzz and raise the engagement level of their posts.

Paperboat

Perhaps the youngest in the list, Paperboat has managed to create a completely new segment of social media engagement with their heartwarming stories that make you reminisce your childhood days. Studying their social media profile could help you connect your brand with people’s emotions.

Takeaways:

Tailored Content: The Paperboat social media team uses unique content for their Instagram profile. Having content that customized to each social media platform helps in creating new audiences and a diverse content strategy. When brands can customize their content, then users who follow them one platform will not hesitate to follow them on another. Moreover, it’s boring to see the same thing over and over again. Diversifying your posts can help avoid the rut.
Emotional Connect: Bringing back those memories is what Paperboat does best. As a user, you can relate to almost all the post they publish on their social media pages.
Interact with your audience: Paperboat is quick to reply to comments left by their followers. This habit could go a long way in encouraging users to interact more with them.

The Ustraa

Ustraa is a brand of its own. Targeted towards the young, Indian male, Ustraa has managed to create a thick layer of curiosity around the brand. What can you learn from them? No niche is too small to target if you’ve got the spunk for it.

Takeaways:

Don’t push: Ustraa does not believe in shoving their products on uninterested audiences. Rather, they are all about the charm. Instead of talking directly about their products, they focus on creating macho and witty content that the modern, metro man (aka their target audience) relates to.
Make it content-oriented: Their target audiences are modern, well-traveled and urbane youth. Little is known about this demographic and almost no brand has targeted this audience and lived to tell the tale. Except for Ustraa. They know their audience. They know what makes them tick and what gets them excited. This strategy is a sure-shot way to make people love your brand.

Chumbak

Chumbak means magnet. Chumbak works to produce souvenirs and curios that combine traditional Indian designs with contemporary patterns and colors. These products are vibrant, colorful and Bohemian.

Takeaways:

User-Generated Content: Users maketh greatness. No social media account is worth anything without its followers, and Chumbak recognizes this. Chumbak recently launched a campaign where they asked their users to design a cup based on a theme. The post went viral with more than 8000 views, which is a lot more than their other posts.
Well-Crafted Product Shoot: The photographers at Chumbak manage to capture the essence of the products. They are highlighted, interesting and make people want to own them! These skills are not used enough if you ask us!

RAW Pressery

Fruits are naturally photogenic, and RAW Pressery knows that! This brand is one of its kind in India and provides users with cold-pressed fruits and vegetable juices. Health is their main motto, and they seem to stick to it. We picked this brand because they are a perfect example of sticking to your key message consistently in every post.

Takeaways:

RAW Pressery leverages the power of hashtags by mixing popular hashtags with their own ones. This piggybacking on hashtags gets them additional traffic without much effort.

They make their consumers love them by featuring them on their official Instagram Business handle. This is a win-win situation for the brand and the users. Being featured on RAW Pressery’s official account can help users raise their cool factor, while also raising the brand’s popularity on Instagram.

Kingfisher

Kingfisher deserves the credit for making beer the common man’s drink in India. Thanks to its branding efforts, the drink that was once considered taboo is now being served everywhere. It’s no wonder that Kingfisher has the largest market share in India.

Takeaways:

Kingfisher is not just all bark and no bite. Their Instagram Business account is truly about being “The king of good times” (their slogan). They keep it casual and share pictures of people having fun, which, like Coca-Cola, helps audiences associate their products with good times.
Re-post user’s post: Again, there is no better content than user-generated content. Kingfisher leverages that very well by reposting photos from their fans with hashtag #Goodtime & #Repost.

Vogue

Vogue is a globally accredited synonym for fashion. Their global Instagram Business profile is indicative of this with 17.5 million followers. However, they have a completely different approach when it comes to India. Vogue India is more than just fashion; it is also about raising social issues related to women. That isn’t to say they shy away from beautiful and elegant photo shoots. On the contrary, they continue to master their avant-garde fashion shoots with a panache that only they are capable of.

Takeaways:

Make Noise Where it Matters: By talking about issues like women empowerment and domestic violence, they give back to society while encouraging a much-needed dialogue about these issues.
Go all the Way: Vogue India also create videos related to these causes. They use popular celebrities to endorse these causes and help spread the word about the causes. Their #StartWithTheBoys video starring Madhuri Dixit is one such campaign, which was an instant hit and still gets them traffic.

Zomato

Zomato doesn’t have a lot of followers due to the niche they are working in. But that doesn’t stop them from being awesome on Instagram Business.

Takeaways:

Witty Content: Funny posts keeps the unfollow button away. With posts like the one given above, it is easy to see why Zomato keep on winning hearts. Such posts tend to get viral as they are liked and shared by many. Who doesn’t want to share fun content on social media after all?
No fixed posting schedule: Quality trumps quantity. Always. If you cannot post great content every day, that’s okay. Just don’t post several mediocre posts. You’ll lose followers, and it’ll do you more harm than good.

There you have it, these brands have done great at their Instagram game. You can use these tidbits to up your Instagram game as well. After all, as Karl Marx says, it isn’t about the brands if it isn’t about the people (We’re kidding, he didn’t say that).

If you can think of more examples, then reach out to us, say hi, and tell us what we’ve missed.

Disclaimer:
This article was written by one of our guest writers. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not be indicative of the views of Market Motive.

Author Bio

Prince Kapoor is Freelance Marketing Analyst and Blogger. While not working, you can find him in the gym or be giving random health advises to his colleagues which no one agrees on :D. If you too want some of his advise (on health or on marketing), reach him out at @imprincekapur

A Complete Guide for Optimizing your Videos for YouTube SEO

March 7, 2018 by Akshata Chandrasekhar Leave a Comment

Youtube is an important social media tool today. Brands and websites that aren’t on Youtube find that they fall behind. For this reason, companies are on the lookout for professionals who know their way around social media platforms; like ones who have taken a social media course or ones who have years of experience. Either way, social media is the way to go. The right video marketing strategy can take you a long way.

With more than 12 years online, YouTube has grown to become not only the leading online video platform but also the second most significant search engine after Google – its owner.

But how can you stand out beside 300 hours of video that are being uploaded every minute? By paying attention to Youtube’s SEO guidelines and ensuring your video’s title, tags, description, and thumbnail make your videos SEO relevant; you can quickly step up in the battle of YouTube’s video SEO.

That’s why in this article, you’ll learn how to generate YouTube traffic your channel’s way and how to make the best possible use of the YouTube search engine.

What is Video SEO?

Video SEO or YouTube SEO refers to the search engine ecosystem that Youtube has borrowed from Google. All search engines, YouTube included, have primary search results based on what the platform considers more relevant for its users. The term SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and refers to a series of steps to improve your position in the search rankings. The goal is to master Youtube SEO tactics and use them to appear in the first search pages organically with specific Youtube keywords that target any marketing videos you may have produced (whether they are product videos, tutorials, animated explainer videos, testimonials or any other type).

YouTube SEO Tips that you can use to Optimize your videos

Now that we know what Video SEO is (or YouTube SEO, depending on what you prefer), it is time for us to give you some Youtube SEO tips that you can use to improve the Youtube ranking of your videos.

1. Quality

A high-quality video should be your starting point for every video campaign, no matter if you are paying for ads or planning a YouTube SEO strategy. All your efforts will be in vain if you have a terrible quality video. If people enjoy your video and watch it all the way through, you will step up your position. “Watch time” is among the most critical metrics to get a higher YouTube ranking, so make sure your video is high quality, entertaining and relevant.

2. YouTube Keywords

Before you even upload your video, you must know what your Youtube keywords should be. These are the words or phrases that potential customers might search for to find your product or service. If you have an Adwords account, you can use Google’s Keyword Planner to find keywords and check their performance. This tool can tell you how many people search for a specific keyword during a particular range of time. Other SEO tools can help you with this task, choose the one that best suits you.

You can also aim for long tail keywords, which are lengthier sentences containing your main keyword. They might not be the highest in the keyword rankings, but as they are more specific and fewer marketers are fighting for them, they can be more useful to reach particular audiences. Take your time looking for the right keywords; this information will be essential later on to plan your title, tags, and description.

3. Title

Now that you know your keywords, you can start thinking about a title. Remember to use long tail keywords that contain your main keyword in the title. Keep it simple, clear and concise. If your title is longer than 60 characters, it will get cut off in the search results. A good tip is to update the title so that it remains relevant over time.

4. Thumbnail

The thumbnail pic is the first image that a user will see while searching for a video. It gives a glimpse of your video content, so it’s essential that you choose a still that’s accurate and appealing. Don’t let YouTube pick the thumbnail for you, select the best image to show your video because the right thumbnail will increase the number of clicks on your content. Also, make sure you have a verified YouTube account so you can upload a custom image. The recommended resolution is 1280×720 pixels; you should also check that your image looks good on mobile devices as well.

5. Description

Descriptions are critical to optimizing your video. A well-written text with the right keywords can increase the number of views and improve your position in the search rankings. Describe your video accurately, using a simple language and include keywords in the first few lines. Despite the limit being 1000 characters, try to write short descriptions. YouTube only shows the first three lines, and then you have to click on “Show more.” You can include there a link to your website and social media accounts. If you want to check how your description is performing, Analytics can tell you which keywords your audience is using to find your video. So if your primary keywords or topics don’t show up, maybe your description is wrong, and you have a few keywords missing. Try to think what you would search for to find your video and include those words in the description.

6. Tags

Tags are helpful not only to let viewers know what type of video it is and what the video is about but also to inform YouTube and help to identify your content. Use primary keywords and long-tail ones as well, again you can think about what would a person search for to get to your video.

With tags, the platform can understand your content and put your video in related searches, increasing your views and clicks. Just as with titles and descriptions, don’t try to mislead users with fake tags just to get more clicks. You can get penalized, and that can minimize all your efforts. You can also add more information about your video by categorizing it. Just go to “Advanced settings” and explore the categories, choose one that fits your content wisely.

7. Subtitles

Subtitles and closed captions are a good way to expand your content all around the world. Besides, it’s also an excellent strategy to enhance your important primary keywords. Just follow this quick guide to upload files or captions.

8. Engage with YouTube Cards and End Screens

Cards are call-to-action buttons that show up on the video to encourage your audience to visit other videos, playlists or websites. When the card appears, users will see a small icon with an “i” in the corner of the video. It’s essential to include cards in your video to draw your viewers to take action.

Besides cards, End Screens are another type of tool to engage with your audience and invite them to keep watching your videos. This can broaden your channel’s watch time, making your videos more relevant in search positions. You can add up to four elements at the last 5 to 20 seconds of the video.

Summary

Such as Google, YouTube’s Search algorithm is a complex universe and several factors come into play. It might sound tricky at first, but it’s worth it to take some time to analyze your content to get discovered on this huge platform. Think thoroughly what you would search for to find that video, those keywords will be the starting point for your entire SEO strategy.

Because if you’ve already invested in a high-quality video, you want every potential customer to watch it. By following these guidelines, you’ll see your videos start to rise in no time.

Do you have any doubts or want to share your experience? Comment below!

Disclaimer:
This article was written by one of our guest writers. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not be indicative of the views of Market Motive.

Author’s Bio:

Víctor Blasco is the founder and CEO of the explainer video company Yum Yum Videos. He is also an audiovisual designer and video marketing expert.

Aside from running the business, he loves studying Chinese philosophy and is a real geek for science fiction films and comics! The force is strong with this one.

Why Page Speed Matters for your Website’s SEO

February 28, 2018 by Akshata Chandrasekhar Leave a Comment

The-importance-of-page-speed-for-seo

The Importance of Page Speed for SEO

Page speed has always been about user experience. Slow loading pages hinder a site’s ability to capture and keep visitors on a page, but does this affect a website’s ranking?

For years there has been a debate on whether or not page speed contributes to Google’s ranking process, but Google has laid this debate to rest. Officially announcing that page speed will be a ranking factor in the months to come, Google has made it clear that this will be a top priority for optimization.

With the mobile-first search index rolling out this year, page speed will be a crucial component of the algorithm. The time to start optimizing for speed is now. If you haven’t already begun, rolling up your sleeves now and diving in will position you ahead of your competition. An SEO course could help you here. A course like this would help you understand where each SEO element fits in and how to optimize your whole site so you can shine brightly in Google’s books.

Staying in front of your competition is what solid SEO is all about. In fact, a study by a Colorado Springs SEO Agency suggests that the first page of results gets 95% of all traffic and the first spot gets 30% of that same search traffic. By addressing page speed, you have an advantage over many of your competitors who ignore this statistic.

What the Data Already Says…

According to Google’s research, the average mobile page load speed is about 22 seconds, and with that, a typical visitor takes roughly 3 seconds to decide if they would like to stay on the site. Grabbing the attention of your visitors is key to landing conversions.

If all a visitor sees is a website loading in those first three seconds your bounce rates will soar and they will likely move onto a competitor. When a consumer decides they need a product or service they want it immediately. Yes, page speed is essential for SEO, but the user experience (UX) is what gets conversions. The longer your load times, the more money you are losing. It’s as simple as that.

Figuring Out How Fast a Page Loads

There are a variety of free tools out there that can help determine how fast your page speed. Google has launched the mobile scorecard tool to help firms test the mobile responsiveness of their websites.

My go-to is using Google’s Page Speed Insights to determine just how fast a page is loading.

Simply copy and paste the URL which you want to examine and click “analyze.”

the-importance-of-page-speed-for-seo-tool

After a few seconds, the page will be crawled and analyzed. The results not only give you a score but will also offer suggestions that are highly actionable to help speed up the page. It might look something like this:

the-importance-of-page-speed-for-seo-tool

This tool not only gives you your score but offers up suggestions on how to improve site speed further down the page.

the-importance-of-page-speed-for-seo-tool-3

Some of the optimization suggestion is relatively straightforward, but others might seem a bit technical and can be the source of many headaches. So what does all this mean?

A Guide to Site Speed Optimization Suggestions

Optimizing your website helps you streamline your marketing funnel and bring more customers to transact on your site. Here are some tips to help make your site more SEO-friendly.

Image Size and Compression – Typically the biggest offender on site speed are large image files that slow down a page. The nice thing about Page Speed Insights is at the end of the scan Google will present you with a file containing the offending images, doing some of the work for you. If you are running on WordPress, there are some excellent plugins that handle this fairly well for free and even better if you purchase the premium versions. One of my favorites is the Smush plugin which does a great job of compressing image files among other nifty tools.

Make Use of Browser Caching – Another example of slowing down a web page is the browser caching not being utilized. This simply means that a browser can load resources from a local disk rather than call on the server, saving time and upping the speed of the page. There are many ways to implement this feature by adding a maximum expiration date into a page’s header. If you use a CMS such as WordPress, some decent plugins like Leverage Browser Caching can handle this for you.

Server Issues – Some issues that help with speeding up a webpage come from the server level. Items such as reducing server response time can be solved in general by upping your hosting resources to increase page speed. Another typical issue is Gzip compression which can also be addressed at the server level or utilizing specific plugins within CMS’s such as WordPress.

Minifying CSS, HTML, and JavaScript – Another thing that annoys Google is code that is bloated and not streamlined. Again, with a simple search, you can find some plugins that handle this, but the story here is by shrinking code down to the bare minimum it has the potential to make a page load much quicker. Often coders will leave comments within their code or add extra spacing within that creates more extensive than required server calls.

Avoid Landing Page Redirects – Sometimes having redirects from a page is necessary, but this can also cause extra time on page loads. Avoiding redirects towards these pages is a good idea, but be careful. Redirects can play an important part in SEO so weigh your options and keep tabs on what happens if you remove an important redirect. The redirects you want to watch out for are, for example, a redirect from a desktop page to a mobile version. If your site is not responsive and needs this type of redirect, it is time for a website redesign to something more mobile friendly.

Speeding Up a Web Page Beyond Page Speed Insights

There are also a number of ways to improve site speed that Page Speed Insights just don’t give you. Below are some tips that can help better your UX and make Google happy:

5 Other Ways to Improve Page Speed

Consider creating an AMP page for mobile – AMP can give a page a massive boost in speed and is fairly easy to implement. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages and is basically a static cached version of a page on your website that loads in an instance. Read more about implementation here
Consider using a Content Delivery Network – Also known as a CDN. This can dramatically lower server response times by using servers closer to where a person might be searching for among other things. CDN’s such as Cloudflare have numerous options to help speed up your websites and their internal pages. They can also protect your websites from malicious attacks.
Buy Better Hosting– I know everyone wants to save money, but saving using a budget web host can cost you in the long run. Remember, slow load times equals fewer profits. By investing in a robust hosting plan that can handle traffic you are ultimately creating happy customers through the user experience. This means more conversions and less bounce.

What Does This All Mean?

By improving site speed, you are not only helping with the website rankings you are making the web a more user-friendly environment. Google’s goal is to make the World’s information easily accessible, and the end game of any SEO campaign is to please Google.

In other words, if you improve your users’ experience, you are making Google happy, and Google will reward you with better placement in the search results.

Disclaimer:
This article was written by one of our guest writers. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not be indicative of the views of Market Motive.

Author Bio

Mike Tortorice is the SEO and Digital Marketing Manager at Infront Webworks in Colorado
Springs, CO. Mike has been in the digital marketing space for over 10 years developing sound
marketing strategies for thousands of clients in the process. An avid skier and hiker who
loves all things digital. Mike’s passion is a result of being able to help businesses succeed in
the digital landscape.

8 Digital Marketing strategies for Small Businesses to Follow

February 21, 2018 by Akshata Chandrasekhar Leave a Comment

8-digital-marketing-strategies-for-small-businesses-to-follow
It’s a new year and the upcoming trends in digital marketing will change the way small businesses reach target audiences. Digital marketing resonates with consumers when real-life stories, shared CEO moments and technology are used differently when compared to your competitors. Content marketing is all about the customer and what he or she needs. Thanks to this, it is here to stay and will continue to be king in the industry despite whether you sell food, clothing, real estate or pet food. Corporate and personal branding will continue to be a significant part of the customer experience. Digital marketing is important to help corporates build their brand (small or big). It is for this reason that professionals with a digital marketing certification are valued everywhere.

Here are some great digital marketing strategies for small businesses to follow. You can use them the next time you schedule a meeting with your marketing team.

Online TV Advertising Marketing

The first step to implementing a strong marketing strategy is communication. It is vital to get your team together and understand what the essence of a campaign is. Fortunately, there are several cloud software to help you and your team plan these projects without much hassle. Once, you’ve got the communication down pat, then you determine what kind of marketing strategy you should opt for.

Where do you want to invest – video or print? Once you’ve decided in which direction you are headed, then you must set the budget for marketing. YouTube is a fraction of online TV although it is the second most used search engine on the internet. Amazon, Apple TV, Netflix, and Hulu will be in the comfort of people’s homes, and if you have the budget to buy product placement on these platforms, it is worth the investment, provided you research the demographics of viewers.

The Year of Apps

Most consumers survive in life with the help of an app. There is an app on the market for meditation, weather, a restaurant finder and more. How does it benefit you? Advertising your products or services on a popular app is the gateway to reaching consumers through innovation.

Before you get started, pay attention to Google’s new strategy to remove mobile advertisements from favorite apps. To ensure your ad remains, ask your marketing team to provide high-quality graphics and content that will not be flagged for posting a ‘shady ad’.

When you think about advertising on mobile, make sure you advertise in the right apps. Think about who your audiences are, their likes and dislikes. If your app is about fashion, will advertising in gaming app help? Probably, but chances are, you’ll be spending more than you get.

Virtual Bots: The New Employee

Automated technology opens an opportunity for a team to focus on time-sensitive responsibilities as a bot communicates with customers on a web chat platform in the form of an app. It can offer products and services to solve customers problems. The bot works for you while you sleep. In turn, it can prevent loyal customers turning to competitors to meet their needs. Of course, many smaller businesses may shy away from this option because they think it’ll cost them money, but a small investment in this direction could just increase your profits in the (not so) long run.

Unique Device ID Tracking

The cookies in internet browsers on smartphones are about to help businesses advertisements pop up at convenient times. It is called Unique Device ID tracking that posts ads based on where a smartphone user is located. For example, a person that is in a shoe store might notice an advertisement for a favorite shoe brand while browsing the internet.

Imagine the time a marketing team can spend developing strategies and reviewing analytics as a Unique Device ID does the hard work.

5. Photography in Moving Images

louboutin-shoes-sparkle-gif

Image Source: https://blog.hubspot.com/agency/cinemagraph-facebook-ad-format

Graphic design and photography can capture a still picture with a touch of moving element innovatively using a series of images. The technology is called cinemagraphs if you haven’t noticed it in Starbucks or Coca-Cola marketing. It brings life to a photo and is rarely seen on the internet; an opportunity for you to hone in on an image that can be shared by customers on social media.

Artificial Intelligence through Machine Learning

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will do the job of the market analyst to scan software and the internet helping businesses discover what the next customer need is in their niche. As a result, content marketers will be prepared with real data to craft content that piques the interest of potential clients searching the internet for products. It is essential for you to provide training to employees on SEO content to write the keywords that rank high on Google to help it turn into closed opportunities.

360 Degree Video Footage

The days of a Realtor showing a 360 video of a new house on the market is forecasted to inspire organizations to use it as a marketing platform to attract top talent by showcasing company events to help people understand a company culture.

Imagine a short video of a product being developed at your manufacturing facility. An inside scoop to show your customers products are made of the most excellent material and most importantly, with care by employees on-site. Some brands might be hesitant about this strategy, but transparency is the key to winning the confidence of consumers.

Employees as Brand Influencers

Who are the cool people on the team? The go-getters with a bright personality to show customers and job applicants your organization is genuine. Digital marketing starts from within the organization. Word of mouth is powerful and encouraging employees to post a product launch at your retail store, a non-for-profit live donation event or employee’s given a free product that has not been released to the public is an efficient way for them to post the experience on social media.

It is important for brands to construct their marketing tactics strategically. This is more important if you are a small brand. With limited resources, you’d have to make every penny count. The tips given above may include some investment that could put you off, but don’t ignore them; they could just be the game changer for your brand.

Disclaimer:
This article was written by one of our guest writers. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not be indicative of the views of Market Motive.

Author Bio

Makeda Waterman is a professional writer with clips from CNBC Make It., Huffington Post, Glassdoor.com, Elite Daily, Fast Company, among others. She is passionate about helping people excel in business or their career.

A Complete Guide to Email Marketing

January 16, 2018 by Akshata Chandrasekhar Leave a Comment

email-marketing-overview
80% of all retail professionals signify that email marketing is one of the greatest tools in customer retention. A 2016 DMA survey indicates that email marketing has a median ROI of 122% when compared to other marketing formats. While these statistics are promising, most people are unaware of what email marketing is and what it entails.

Email marketing is a risky marketing format. It is risky, not because it’s a gamble, but because it is easy to overdo it. Do it right and you could reap the benefits of high returns; do it wrong and you could just get blacklisted. Of course, the tricks of the trade can be learned easily through a good email marketing course. With this course, marketing professionals could learn to reach their customers’ inboxes without seeming spammy.

What is email marketing?

Fundamentally, email marketing is the use of electronic mail (email) to promote and sell products and services. Through email marketing, the goal is to build a relationship with a potential customer by paving the path with useful information to aide a transactional process.

More specifically, email marketing is one arm of digital marketing that involves directly marketing to customers or potential customers. When done properly, it can yield amazing results that can lead to long-lasting relationships. When done poorly, it can result in annoyances in people’s email inboxes more popularly known as ‘spamming’

Email marketing usually involves the following actions:

Sending an email to a customer or potential customer to convince or convert them to take immediate action and purchase or buy into something on offer.
Sending an email to a customer or potential customer to enhance a relationship or encourage customer loyalty and repeat business.
Sending additional email advertising by other companies to current customers

What are the benefits of email marketing?

Now that you know what email marketing is, you are probably wondering, ‘aren’t there more sophisticated methods to market today?’ Answer. Probably. But… the numbers don’t lie.

According to HubSpot, 86% of professionals prefer to use email for business communications and 75% of companies agree that email offers ‘excellent’ to ‘good’ ROI.

Also, WBR Digital, a demand generation and content services provider, carried out a survey of retail professionals in the US and found that 80% of them said that email drives their customer acquisition and retention.

Basically, Email marketing is very successful and is still very widely used as a marketing channel even today. Some of the reasons for this are as follows:

Inexpensive. Compared to other marketing channels, email is very cheap especially when marketing to large numbers of targeted audiences.
Great ROI. Low cost coupled with targeted campaigns often means that email marketing has great ROI over other direct marketing strategies.
Great Analytics. Email responses can easily be tracked and measured which means that email marketing campaigns can be adjusted and modified for better results.

What are some of the benefits that you can expect from a well-organized email marketing strategy?

If you use the right approach to email marketing, you can benefit in several diverse ways. However, according to marketer ratings of the top benefits of email marketing 2017, the top benefits of email marketing according to priority are as follows:

More Leads

Email marketing done right is direct targeted marketing, this means that it allows you to reach the right person at the right time with the right offer. As such, it often translates into a higher ROI since email marketing is inexpensive while at the same time allows you to talk to individuals on a more personal level.

There are several ways you can target interested individuals including through email list sign-ups, or through requesting or encouraging email subscribers to forward emails or share emails on social media.

Boost sales

The right email campaign directed at the right people means that you have an audience that is interested in receiving information and offers. This will, therefore, mean that it is much easier to boost your sales through email marketing.

The secret sauce to such a targeted email campaign is email list segmentation, which allows you to nurture your email list subscribers with the right message at the right time and therefore move them through your sales/marketing funnel towards becoming a customer.

Better conversion

To convert visitors into eventual customers, you need to nurture individuals to trust you and help them to realize that what you have to offer is in their best interest. The cornerstone of this nurturing process is providing useful information or content that will allow your audiences to make informed decisions. As such, choosing the right content at the right time is vital. To choose the right content at the right time, email list segmentation can again be very important in this process.

Low cost

Not only is email marketing inexpensive when compared to other digital marketing strategies but you can even find high-quality tools for free. This can allow you time and access to explore the best tools for your specific needs and upgrade as and when you need to.

Better quality leads

Your email list is sometimes going to capture bad leads. The great thing about email marketing is that it is in itself a lead qualifying system and can be used as a tool in your sales qualification system as well. Through email, you can weed out bad leads by demonstrating a prospect’s interest based on the following facts:

That a prospect signed up to your list
That a prospect opened your email. And,
That a prospect clicked on a link in your email

Integrated marketing

Through integrating different forms of marketing and specifically content marketing, social media marketing, and email marketing, you can incredibly boost response to your marketing campaigns. Email marketing can boost or drive social engagement which can lead to more awareness and therefore higher effectiveness as a marketing medium.

Some ways to integrate email marketing with other media to boost response include; using shareable content, announcing contests and winners, making exclusive offers that users can share and creating feedback loops.

Expedient sale cycle

Through several of the techniques mentioned in the benefits above including; targeted email campaigns, better segmentation, integrated email marketing and so on, you have the ingredients to convince a prospective buyer, in the shortest time possible and by providing convincing information that you are the right match for them.

How to get started with Email marketing

If you want to experience and appreciate the benefits of email marketing, it cannot be understated that you must use the right approach or else you risk annoying your audience instead of engaging them. So, with that said, how do you choose the right approach?

Before highlighting the best way to get started with email marketing, it is important to consider some ‘critical’ success factors. Dave Chaffey, of Smartinsights.com fame, appropriately highlights the success factors of email marketing in an easy to remember mnemonic, ‘CRITICAL’.

Conversation: Create emails that prompt dialogue and encourage social sharing.
Relevance: The email should meet the needs of the recipient from the perspective of both the offer and creative/copy used. Separate your email from SPAM by making it tailored and personalized to the recipient’s needs.
Incentive: The email recipient should have a compelling reason to open an email and thereafter click on a link or call to action. In short, consider the ‘What’s in it for me’ (WIFM) factor for the recipient.
Timing: Time, day, week, month and even year when an email is received can make a dramatic difference.
Integration: Other aspects of your marketing mix should reflect in your email campaigns as well to reinforce communications.
Copy: When considering the copywriting for your email, consider using language, structure, style, Call-To-Action, hyperlinks and so on that will capture the attention of the recipient right away.
Attributes: Consider email attributes including; From address, subject line, e-mail headers, and email format (HTML or text) etc.
Landing page: Design a landing page that is easy to complete after the email recipient clicks on a link in the email.

Considering the above success factors for email marketing will allow you to optimize to your specific needs the following step-by-step approach to getting started with email marketing:

Choose the right tools to use

There are several tools that you can use to aide your email campaign ranging from tools for harvesting emails to automating the process of sending targeted emails. There are also tools that cater to distinct aspects of the email marketing process including; monitoring, analysis, and management of email marketing campaigns.

Start harvesting email addresses

Of course, the emails that you harvest should be relevant to your campaign so that you can only target those that are most likely to take up your offer. Furthermore, the people that you target should preferably already have a predisposition towards your offer to become worthy leads for your email marketing campaign, your specific SEO niche and for your sales/marketing funnel.

Choose an appropriate template

There are several highly optimized email templates that have been proved to be extremely effective in their purpose of attracting attention and appropriate action. Instead of reinventing the wheel, start off by choosing an appropriate template that closely meets your needs and then optimizes from that point after gathering data.

Plan your email content/copy and schedule

The last thing that you want to do is to send random emails simply based on your gut feeling. Instead, plan and schedule topics that you wish to discuss and inform the email recipient about, with key milestones in mind. Consider the specific section of the sales/marketing funnel that your email recipient is in as well as the time or season you are sending the email, holiday season, product promotion, shopping season etc.

Send emails and monitor/measure results

Send emails according to your plan and schedule. Thereafter, track and monitor your emails to appropriately adjust future emails/copy/content according to the recipient’s needs and according to the effect that you require. The top email metrics to monitor the progress of your campaigns include: Click Through Rate (CTR), Conversion rate, Open rate, and ROI.

Email marketing tools

Email marketing tools make it a lot easier for you to manage and succeed with your email campaign. Fundamentally, you want to look for an email service or tool that will ensure that your emails do not end up as spam in your recipient’s folder.

When looking for such a service, you want to optimize the features you need and the features you get vis-a-vis the cost of the service. Certainly, in some cases, the features you get for some services can be free of charge.

Some of the more popular email marketing tools that you will find today include the following:

Constant Contact

This is a user-friendly email marketing service that is mainly used to start with an email template, customize it, manage contacts, automatically send the email at the right time and analyze email responses. They are one of the largest and fastest growing email marketing services.

Constant Contact has a 60-day free trial and thereafter costs as low as $20.

Drip

Some of the features that Drip boasts include; Automating up to 18 triggers and 16 actions, a best in class visual workflow builder, intelligent Facebook ads, tagging your email list based on actions, identifying best leads, sending targeted emails, tracking performance, integration with other apps.

You can try Drip for free for the first 100 subscribers and thereafter plans start from $41 per month.

ConvertKit

This email marketing tool is tailored for authors, professional bloggers, and marketers. It is easy to use and yet very powerful. Some of the features that Convertkit boasts include: integration (with landing pages, membership site providers etc.), growing your audience through simple but powerful automation and tracking of data, increasing conversions through well-timed and targeted content, a better understanding of your subscribers through segmentation and sending the right content to the right person based on location, interest, and other data.

Pricing starts at $29 per month with a 30-day refund policy.

There are several other useful email marketing tools that are widely discussed and used on the internet including:

MailChimp
GetResponse
ActiveCampaign
Litmus
Mad Mimi
Target Hero
FlashIssue
Mailjet
LeadPages etc.

Email marketing campaign examples

There is plenty of inspiration online for businesses that have successfully used email marketing for their marketing campaigns. You can find 15 of the best Email Marketing campaign examples in HubSpot’s 13-minute read.

Here are three more examples that highlight how to effectively use email marketing.

Bonobos email campaign provoking a ‘YES’

Essentially, this email marketing campaign asks questions that most people will answer Yes to. The idea is that after answering Yes several times, you will most likely accept the call-to-action (CTA).

Overstock email campaign motivating recipient to add more information

The email campaign sought to motivate email recipients to provide more information, specifically their birth date, by offering them a gift or special coupon on their birthday.

Topshop email campaign to remind customer to complete their unfinished order

This email campaign reminded customers that had abandoned their shopping carts to go back and complete the purchase.
email_marketing_topshop_screenshot

Conclusion: The ball is in your court…

Through direct email marketing, you can not only closely target your customers/potential customers and lead them rapidly through your sales/marketing funnel, but you can also find ways to have your target customers share your email campaigns and become your ambassadors as well. Now that you know where to start with your email marketing, the ball is in your court.

Inbound Marketing – Connecting Content Strategy and the Marketing Funnel

January 9, 2018 by Akshata Chandrasekhar Leave a Comment

inbound-marketing-connecting-content-strategy-with-your-marketing-funnel

Inbound is one of the first things you will come across when you do your research into digital marketing. Despite its apparent popularity, very little is known about inbound marketing. While this is a topic usually covered in a good DMCA course, not all digital marketing specialists can explain how inbound marketing can help you.

So, what exactly is inbound marketing?

Is it just a marketing gimmick? Will it help your brand or business?

These are some of the questions we aim to answer in this article.

What is Inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is a practice and methodology that focuses on nurturing strangers into visitors, visitors into leads, leads into customers and finally customers into promoters of products and services. Inbound marketing does so through content marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization, and branding.

Essentially, inbound marketing seeks to deliver the right content in the right context, in order to aid a prospects decision-making process. The emphasis is on sending a message (CONTENT) that is targeted to an individual in a specific stage of the marketing/sales funnel and sending the message everywhere that the target or prospects can be found.

How do you link your marketing funnel to your content strategy?

The marketing funnel

If you have had any experience with marketing or sales for that matter, then you will be aware that quite rarely will a visitor actually come to your website and then immediately purchase a product or sign up for a service.

Ordinarily, a visitor will need some convincing before they are ready to take the necessary action to ‘buy-in’ to what you have on offer. In marketing jargon, this is what ‘converting’ visitors is all about. A potential customer starts their journey with you as a stranger and slowly but surely finds out more about you by engaging with your content as they decide whether they are going to ‘buy-in’ to what you have on offer.

The main stages of the funnel are:

Awareness: The potential buyer seeks information or a solution
Consideration: the potential buyer evaluates what you have to offer
Action: When they decide to ‘buy-in’ or not

In reality, the marketing funnel is not always standard or clear-cut. Basically, depending on certain factors including; your target audience, conversion goals, industry/business etc., you will have to adapt your marketing funnel accordingly. For example, ‘buy-in’ on one hand could mean signing up for a subscription while on the other hand, it could mean purchasing a physical item. Your funnel may be different in either case.

With that said, essentially, your job as a marketer is to align a ‘buyer’s’ journey through the marketing funnel by providing the right content, to the right person and at the right time, when they are looking for it. The content should definitely be relevant and captivating and should be served in the most user-friendly manner or else you risk losing your visitors attention and motivation to take your desired action.

Content strategy

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 82% of B2B marketers use content marketing as part of their overall inbound marketing strategy. There is, therefore, no doubt that creating engaging content is the fuel behind inbound marketing techniques whether it is SEO, Email marketing, Social Media Marketing(SMM), Paid Search marketing or Conversion Rate Optimization(CRO).

The benefit of a content strategy is that unlike SEO, SMM, CRO, email marketing etc., the focus in on unifying all digital marketing communications to support gaining customers, growing the customer base, while retaining customers as well. With SEO, CRO email marketing etc., the focus is generally to improve each channel in isolation.

With this in mind, what does a content marketing strategy entail? Well, it basically boils down to taking 7 key steps:

Running a content marketing capability audit and setting goals.
Defining personas and audiences
Creating your content marketing strategy.
Editorial management.
Create compelling content
Distributing content
Evaluating and measuring ROI.

Just in case you are wondering, a content strategy and content marketing are used interchangeably when in actual fact they are not exactly the same thing.

With a content strategy, the focus is on the vision or the ‘how’ and ‘why’ content is created, managed, updated or archived. Content Strategy, therefore, focuses on governance and internal guidelines. Content Marketing, on the other hand, focuses on tactics and execution or actions of creating, curating, promoting, iterating and editing content meant for marketing purposes. They are different but they most certainly complement each other.

With that said, for argument’s sake, when we talk about the content strategy you can assume that we are discussing content marketing strategies, or where content strategies and content marketing overlaps.

Linking the marketing funnel to an appropriate content strategy

Awareness

The top of the funnel is the where you begin to build a connection between the topic and your brand. Your audience has a challenge or issue they are trying to resolve and they are looking for answers. You want to provide the answers by gently nudging them towards your solutions. The answers can be in the form of opinions, research data, education, insights and other resources.

The types of content that you would use at the awareness or top of the marketing funnel would include:

Using keywords and key phrases in blogs to draw people to your content hub.
Using longer content including e-books, white papers, and reports
Using social content to share the above content

At this stage, the content should be visually engaging and shareworthy. This can be done by integrating a psychological appeal to the content. Also, remember that content should be specific to your different audiences. If your audience finds the content useful, then they will continue their journey to the middle of the funnel or the consideration stage.

Consideration

Once you capture the person’s attention from the Awareness stage, this stage is where you can actually educate and engage them. At this stage, you are already building followers and subscribers. Essentially, your audience is more aware of the problem or challenge that they have, they are aware that there are some solutions and they are trying to look for the best solution.

Content that is often suitable for the middle of the marketing funnel includes:

Create detailed content to demonstrate your proficiency and capabilities but leave your audience wanting more. Webinars, live interactions, and Guides are great at this stage.
Partner and collaborate with influencers or people that your audience trusts.
Respond to comments or queries from your audience and make sure that you have a strong brand voice.

Your job here is to engage your audience, nurture them and build a relationship based on trust. As such, if your solution is not the right one for them, then you should let them know this. If it is the right one for them, then they can confidently move to the next phase of the funnel.

Action

At this stage, your audience will often make a purchase decision so that they can become your customer or not. You should still provide the right content at this stage in order to cement trust and therefore greatly impact the conversion rate.

The type of content at this stage should include:

Compelling content to seal the deal including; demos, downloads, trial offers, etc.
Additionally, content to prove your brand values and the value of your products and/or services will also be very appropriate at this stage, for example, testimonials, product literature
At this stage, your website should be guiding visitors to pages that lead them further down the sales funnel. For example, call-to-action content,

Step-by-step guide to starting an Inbound Marketing strategy

In as much as content marketing is the fuel behind inbound marketing, there is definitely a lot more that needs to be addressed for success in inbound marketing. Having a step-by-step plan that integrates all the important components of an inbound marketing strategy is critical.

As such, below are the most important steps that you should have in your inbound marketing strategy:

Understand and absorb inbound marketing

Since your inbound marketing strategy will be specific to your needs you need to have a thorough understanding of what inbound marketing is all about. This will allow you to take a more intuitive approach that is tailored to your needs.

Resources that could be used here include;

Getting a digital marketing certification to help understand concepts covered in inbound marketing
Subscribing to and reading blogs on inbound marketing

Build a team

It is unlikely that you will do all that is required by your inbound strategy by yourself. You will, therefore, need a team to help you plan and execute. Tea members may include; content copywriter, marketing strategist, web developer, designer.

Audit your current marketing strategy

Assessing your current marketing strategy will help you to understand and acknowledge current and future; budgets, tasks and activities, resources and assets.

Outline your marketing goals

Your inbound marketing strategy should at this stage have goals that are defined by two main criteria:

First, they should be SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely).
Secondly, the goals should be aligned with your overall business objectives.

Target audience and buyer journeys

At this stage, you need to define your target audience by developing a buyer persona of your ideal customer. It should describe important aspects like; demographics, role, desired outcomes, problem, pain or challenges, the rest of their story or background.

You then need to document the buyer’s journey describing their process from when they found you to when they decided to buy or not buy and why they chose to do so.

Develop your marketing plan

Essentially, this will involve bringing together your tools and resources required to have a complete inbound marketing strategy. Some of the tools and/or resources will include;

Putting your content plan in place
Defining conversion paths; e.g. specifically describing how to generate leads
Technology required including; marketing automation, CRM, CMS

Build a website around your marketing plan

AT this stage you should build a Launchpad website that reflects your inbound marketing strategy and lead generation efforts. The website should also reflect your goals.

Some important website features include; intuitive navigation, appeal to persona, responsive web design, optimized lead generation (landing pages, CTAs, forms etc.)

Put your content strategy into action

Essentially, at this stage, you need to publish your content. The content that you publish may include; blogs, social media content and engaging in conversations, offering premium content (calculators, eBooks, videos, and toolkits), webinars and other guest appearances.

Promote and support your content

Once you publish your content you need ensure people are consuming it. You can promote your content or landing pages for your content in the following ways; social media, emails, make use of influencers, paid advertising, distribute your content in relevant forums and online communities.

Monitor, evaluate, report, test and improve!

Track different marketing metrics to gauge your performance. Generate insightful reports and seek to improve based on your findings.

Tools that’ll help with your inbound marketing strategy

If you have the right tool to back the right inbound content strategy, the sky’s the limit for what you can achieve.

There are many different inbound and content marketing tools available for free and for a price. In order make sense of the many tools, here are some of the more useful tools grouped into six main groups:

Social media and community management

If you have several different social media or community accounts or profiles managing all of them individually can be an overwhelming task. Tools in this category address tasks like; scheduling posts, creating content, repurposing content, engaging followers and interlocutors.

Some tools in this category include:

HootSuite: A paid tool for content marketing tool used to launch marketing campaigns and manage social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and WordPress. The tool costs $19 and upwards per month for different packages.
Inbound.org: This content tool helps marketers create their personalized content feed according to certain predefined tags like; keywords, location, category and so on.

Other tools in this category include Quora, BuzzSumo, and Trapit among several others.

Content collaboration and creation

Creating captivating content on a regular basis can be a full-time job. This is why it is important to have content collaboration and creation tools to help you to create and manage the content easier.

Some tools in this category include:

SnapApp: This is a content creation and marketing tool that allows that allows users to build dynamic and interactive experiences in order to improve the quantity and quality of the content they produce. The tool is offered at different monthly packages starting from $1,650
CoSchedule: With this content management tool, you plan and queue social posts and other content months ahead so that is intelligently sent out at the best time for each network. The tool is offered at different cost levels from $9 a month to thousands of dollars a month.

Other tools in this category include: Copify, ClearVoice and Hemingway Editor

Paid promotion

If you are struggling to get discovered or if you are a new business trying to gain traffic as you continue to build your inbound strategy, then paid promotion and paid promotion tools can be of great help. The tools mostly help to better target audiences and to quickly grow an audience base. Some tools insert content into relevant social media conversations while others promote sponsored content.

Some tools here include:

Taboola: This promotion tool helps build brand awareness, build audiences and boost sales. Pricing for this tool is upon request.
Outbrain: An advertising tool that helps publishers find interesting content. This content discovery tool also helps publisher’s carter to their mobile audience and monetizes their mobile assets. Pricing for this tool is upon request assessment.

Marketing automation

This is a tool that basically automates repetitive tasks. Repetitive tasks can include; website tasks (e.g. publishing), emailing, and social media activities among others.

Some tools in this category include:

MailChimp: An email marketing tool that easily integrates a lot of other popular services and apps including SurveyMonkey, Eventbrite, SalesForce, Twitter, Google Shopify, Facebook etc. The cost of this tool starts with a free package and increases to $10 per month and as much as $200 for comprehensive packages
HubSpot: This is an all in one inbound marketing tool that integrates a content management system, email marketing, blogging, marketing automation, publishing and analytics, social analytics and so on. It’s offered for free but offers starter packages for as low as €46 per month and as high as €2,200 per month.

Conversion optimization

These tools analyze and compare the performance of web pages and measure how audiences respond or behave towards content. Some other tools in this category provide solutions for Call-To-Action (CTA).

Some tools in this category include:

BrightInfo: A content personalization tool that uses algorithms to learn individual behavior, measures it against crowd behavior and then presents the individual with relevant content in real time. Pricing for this tool is on request.
Optimizely: This visual editing tool allows the user to edit content by clicking instead of coding. It also allows the user to generate variations of a web page and then tracks how customers respond to those variations. Pricing for this tool is on request.
Sniply: This content tool adds a call-to-action (CTA) on any page then monitors how audiences engage with the CTA. Cost of this tool varies from $29 to $299 per month

SEO analytics

One of the most important categories of tools is the SEO analytics tools. SEO analytics is important for defining a good content strategy since it manages the demand while the actual content fulfills the demand. Tools here include tools that define keywords for blog posts.

Some tools in this category include:

Yoast SEO: This SEO tool is considered to be the most popular SEO tool for the large WordPress community. It is a very useful tool for internal linking among other useful features. The tool costs $79 per website it is used in.
Google Keyword Planner: This PPC tool combines what used to be two different tools offered by Google; AdWords Traffic Estimator and Google Keyword Tool. The tool helps users find relevant keywords for pay per click campaigns as well as find keyword trends, retrieve historical data, bid for keywords and so on.

Other tools in this category include Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, SEMrush, Moz, Majestic, SEranking.

Conclusion

There you have it, a simplified consolidation of inbound marketing. This form of marketing is extremely successful owing to just one basic principle – Give customers what they want. The focal point of inbound marketing is to focus your strategy and content on the needs of the customers and not the other way around. Keeping this mind will take your brand far. Reach out to us in the comment section in case we forgot something or just to say hi.

A Complete Overview of the Google Adwords Certification: The What, Why, and How

January 5, 2018 by Akshata Chandrasekhar Leave a Comment

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Virtually everyone in the digital marketing field has heard of Adwords. However, there is a vast disconnect between knowing the term and truly understanding it. While learning how the Google Adwords platform works is vital for every paid marketing specialist to know, there are few people trained in this. Of course, this is simple enough to fix; plenty of Google Adwords certification courses are available out there in the market for people to learn.

Want to learn how to use the Google Adwords platform? Take our Complete Google AdWords Professional Certification Training today.

What does Adwords do? Who is it intended for? Do you need it?

These are some of the questions we will try to answer in this article.

What is Google Adwords?

Adwords is the advertising service that Google provides to users who want to promote their website or brand. In this system, smaller websites can pay Google to give them visibility. People can ‘bid’ for selected keywords and based on their quality score (we’ll get to that later), win the bid and feature at the top of the page. Given that less than 25% of all people go beyond the first page of the search engine, it is no wonder that people pay big money to stay at the top.

Let’s say you own a travel website that allows people to book tickets and leave reviews on your site. This is a great site, with excellent content and an interface that gives users a great experience. However, you face a hurdle. You’re a new player in the field and you will have to compete with industry giants who have been around for years. Google loves well-established websites and Google takes time to trust you. However, you can’t get Google to trust you if you don’t get people to visit your site. A vicious cycle that requires inhuman effort to break – we get it. This is where Adwords comes in. Sure, you might be a brand new player in the field, but if your content is great and your site is optimized, you could actually pay Google to feature your site on the first search engine results page.
Think of it as ‘leveling the field’. Google Adwords can help small brands compete with the more prominent names.

How is Google Adwords different from Adsense?

Google Adwords is primarily for people who want to advertise their sites, while Adsense is for people who want to use their website to run advertisements.

Adwords is for site owners that want to direct traffic their way, while Adsense is for people who want to monetize their site.

Another way to differentiate these two is – Adwords refers to ads that pop on the Google SERP, while Adsense refers to ads that turn up on a website.

Types of Ads on Google Adwords

Google lets you choose between various advertising options when creating a campaign.

Search Ads – These are ads that turn up in one Google search pages when you look for a particular keyword. These are the most common ad format and are text-based. Search ads are relatively inexpensive when compared to other ad formats.

Display Ads – These are ads that usually occur on web pages; they could be in the form of text, banners or rich media ads.

The types of advertisement formats that feature in this campaign are:

Image Ads – These ads refer to banners or graphics that display your product on various websites and blogs.
Rich Media Ads – These ad formats allow users to interact with them by running your mouse over them. Most of us have seen ads on blogs which say “roll your mouse over the ad for more information.” These ads tend to have a high engagement rate, given their format.

YouTube Ads – As the name suggests, these are ads that turn up on Google’s partner site, Youtube. This is well-suited for players who deal with products that benefit from viewership like clothing or food.
Universal App Ads – These are ads that have been adapted to suit all of Google’s properties. This includes Google search, Google Play, YouTube and Google Display Network.

What is Google Adwords Express?

Google Adwords Express is the newest offering from Google. In this section, users only have to set their ads, business category, and a monthly budget and Google takes care of the rest. In this mode, Google identifies search phrases for a business based on its type and adjusts the budget to target keywords automatically. This is an excellent option for small business owners who don’t have the time or the knowledge to set up and monitor a manual Adwords account.

Benefits of Using Google Adwords

Gives you faster results than SEO

It is common knowledge that the older the indexed age of a website, the higher its chances are to rank on the top of the SERP. This often spells bad news for the young guns, who have great things to offer their audiences but no way to reach them. SEO is essential (and shall remain so) in the long run. However, Google Adwords helps new business owners put their names on the front row and gives them a fighting chance.

Returns are measurable

You can monitor precisely which campaigns work and which aren’t. In this way, you won’t have to waste money on campaigns that aren’t working for you. You can even connect your Adwords account to your google analytics account and see how well your leads are converting. If an operation is doing well, you can transfer budgets from another failing campaign.

Allows you reach customers in their inboxes

Most marketers know that email marketing is a hugely successful marketing strategy. Unfortunately, getting people to subscribe to your email list when you aren’t a well-established player is a heartache. With Google Adwords, however, you don’t have to worry about getting people to subscribe. Text-based ads from Google Adwords allow you to reach out to customers who have subscribed to related websites so that you can entice them with your products or content.

Retargeting and remarketing are possible

One of the best features of Google Adwords is its capability to retarget your audiences. If someone came to your site and signed off without converting, then you could use Adwords to remarket to them.

How?

Adwords lets you create a remarketing list in which you could advertise banner ads to people who have interacted with your content earlier. The targeting is extremely precise and you can even promote the exact product they were looking for.

Machine Learning and Adwords

In May 2017, Google unveiled its latest innovations at Google Marketing Next, an annual event hosted exclusively for Marketers. The primary topics in this affair were better methods of measurement and an increased role of machine learning in the Google Adwords platform.

So, what does this mean for marketers?

It means that with the new rollouts, marketers will be able to:

a). Identify the real success of a paid campaign.

b). Target in-market audiences better

More Accurate Campaign Measurements

Let’s start with measurement. One of the biggest problem marketers using Adwords face is to identify the actual value of their ad campaigns. What does this mean?

Up until recently, marketers were only able to measure the success of their Adwords campaign based on a customer’s last-click, i.e., the link that the customer used to arrive at a website and make a transaction. However, marketers can now use data-driven attribution models to correctly credit each link a customer clicks in a conversion path.

With the new data-driven attribution model, the journey a customer makes to land on your converting keyword is what Google aims to map. Thanks to the use of machine learning, Google can now analyze the actual contribution of each keyword in the path of conversion.

Say you own Vegan by ROSS, a restaurant in New York that serves vegan food. You run 3 ad campaigns to attract more people to your restaurant. These ad campaigns are for the keywords “vegan restaurant in NY”, “vegan by ROSS”, and “Vegan by ROSS Restaurant in NY.” If a customer booked a table on your website by using the “Vegan by ROSS Restaurant in NY” ad campaign, then in the last-click attribution model, the success of your ad campaign would be attributed to those who clicked this ad to arrive at your website.

However, the data-driven attribution model aims to give you a deeper understanding of your customers and how they arrived at your site. In this model, Google will use machine learning algorithms to determine how much credit should be given to each of your Adword campaigns.

So in this model, you can see exactly how much each keyword contributed to converting your customers.

Data-driven attribution is nothing less than divine intervention for marketers. With this tool, you will be able to see what your customers did to get to your site (thereby determining what you did right), how they think and how to adapt your campaign to your customers. Of course, data-driven attribution is only available for those sites that have approximately 15,000 clicks and about 600 conversions in over 30 days. If this data is not present, then you will not be able to see the option to use data-driven attribution in your Adwords campaign.

Target In-Market Audiences

For years now, Google has offered in-market audience targeting on Youtube and the Display Network. Now, it is making the same feature available for the search network. In this feature, Google uses a person’s browser history and identifies those who are ready to make a purchase. You can use this data to target your ads at these customers.

Say, you own a plant nursery in New York, for example. With this feature, you can increase your reach among people who search for terms like “How to grow Basil in NY?” and “Can I grow orchids in NY?”

Step-by-Step Guide to set up an Adwords Account

Step 1: Sign into your Google Account! This goes without saying, you cannot operate an Adwords account if you don’t have an account with Google. In this page, you will be required to login with your email address and your company website.
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Step 2: Fill in your account details. This includes your email, time zone, country, and currency. Please note that this cannot be changed later, so fill it with care.

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Step 3: Once you fill the necessary details, you will be automatically directed to the page that will help you create your first campaign. This is the Google’s guided version and isn’t as scary as it sounds, we promise you.

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Step 4: Fix your Budget: How much do you want to spend in one day on this particular campaign? This is what you’ll be choosing here. Remember, start small until you get the hang of things. Your budget could be as little as $1.
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Step 5: Decide who can see your advertisement. In this tab, you can include or exclude specific countries or go global. You can even target local customers by specifying regions.

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Step 6: Choose where your ads get displayed. Depending on your site, you can choose between search, search and display or shopping ads.

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Step 7: Decide which keywords you want your ads to target. Remember, don’t make it too broad, your ad will turn up for unrelated sites. This could negatively impact your budget and may just decrease the SEO value of your site (A high bounce rate is never appreciated).

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Step 8: How much are you willing to pay for your ad. Now, this is important. This determines the position in which your ad will be placed. The highest bidder with positive quality scores will be placed on the top of the first SERP. The lower your bid, the later your ad will show up. Often, it is better to place a higher (and fewer) bid on your ads than place lower (and more frequent) bids.

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Step 9: Create an ad copy. This is what shows up on the SERP when people look for your keyword.
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Step 10: Choose your payment method. This could be manual or automatic. In the automated process, you will be charged every 30 days by default. In the manual mode, your payment account gets deducted each time a cost is incurred. If this account does not have any funds, then the campaign stops (this makes this an automatic favorite for us).
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Google Adwords Certification – What is it?

The Google Adwords certification is given to you by Google when you clear the requirements set by them. To become an Adwords certified professional, you need to clear 2 of the Adwords certification exam; the Adwords Fundamentals exam, which covers the basics and the intermediate concepts of online advertising and Adwords.

Why should I get certified?

A Google Adwords certification is a seal of approval given to you by Google. By getting certified, Google ratifies your abilities in dealing with the Adwords architecture. What this means for you is that your employers can gauge (to an extent) how well you know the Adwords platform. Keep in mind that gaining knowledge in Adwords is not the same thing as knowing PPC.

A Google Adwords certificate is also great to earn yourself some ‘credibility’; no other certificate can match the validity of a Google certificate (given that, you know, they created Adwords).

A certificate from Google is like hearing from the horse’s’ mouth that you do know what you are talking about.

Comprehensive guide to getting certified

So, how do you get certified?

Well, first sign up for a Google Partners (soon to be moved to Academy for Ads) account.

Then, you’ll have to take a couple of exams. Google allows you to take the certification exam multiple times if you fail. However, if the thought of not clearing your papers rattles you or if you don’t have the time to take the exam multiple times, you could take our Complete Google AdWords Professional Certification Training that is designed to all but guarantee your Google certification.

Now, getting to the Google exam format.

The first one is mandatory, and everyone must take this exam to get certified.

Google Adwords Fundamental Exam, which covers:

The primary and intermediate concepts of Adwords and online marketing
How to set up, manage and optimize a Google Adwords campaign

One of the following topics needs to be taken to get certified. Take care when choosing which subject you want to study for; not all topics are equally suited for all industries.

Search Advertising

Covers the basics and advanced search network concepts
Includes creating, managing and optimizing search ad campaigns
Great for people whose website or company operates on a small Adwords budget and wants people to learn about them when they search for a particular keyword

Display Advertising

Covers the advanced display campaign topics
Tests you on the best practices to be followed when developing ads for the display network
Well-suited for anyone practically anyone who works with companies that have significant Adwords budgets.

Mobile Advertising

Covers the basic and advanced aspects of Mobile advertising
This topic is more technical than others and tests you on the concepts of bidding and targeting, campaign measurement, and optimization
Great for people who work with apps and other mobile-optimized platforms

Video Advertising

Basic and advanced concepts of video advertising, which includes ads featured in video format on Youtube and other video platforms
Tests your ability to manage and optimize video ad campaigns
For people who would benefit from displaying their ads on Youtube

Shopping Advertising

The exam is intended for beginners and experienced professionals.
For people who work with e-commerce sites and need to advertise their products using the merchant center, this certificate is for them
The exam tests you on the concepts of inputting information into the product feed and how to create and run a merchant account.

There you have it. This is all you need to know about Google Adwords and its certification. It is extremely easy to get certified in Google Adwords and there are no reasons for you to not get certified. Reach out to us in the comments section below and let us know if we have forgotten anything or just say hi!

Sentiment Analysis – All You Need To Know About It

December 12, 2017 by Akshata Chandrasekhar 2 Comments

As the adage goes, ‘it takes 20 years to build trust, but a day to destroy it’.

Brands have to care about what people think about them to stay on the top of their field. This is where the overly technical field of sentiment analysis connects to social media.

A ton of companies and brands now use sentiment analysis to find out what people are saying about them on social media. A bad review on social media can destroy a brand’s reputation if ignored or poorly handled.

Take United Airlines for example. After they dragged a man out of their overbooked flight, the airlines then proceeded to dismiss the event as nothing but an issue of overbooking. It was not just an issue of a brand’s reputation that takes a hit in situations like this. United’s stocks plummeted, and the company lost 250 million dollars in one day.

There are plenty of descriptions out there of what sentiment analysis is all about. Most definitions agree on one thing. Sentiment analysis includes opinion mining. While, sentiment analysis cannot be over-simplified to mean just opinion mining, this aspect plays a large part in the analysis process.

What is Sentiment Analysis?

Sentiment analysis seeks to understand a subject’s attitude or emotional reaction toward a specific topic (or brand). Sentiment analysis uses particular tools, techniques, and methods to understand what people say about a matter.

Sentiment analysis does not have to be complicated and technical. It could be something as simple as getting a person in your team to find what is being said about your brand on social media and identify how much of it is good and how much of isn’t. There is no need for a big budget and investment into complicated software (it’s great if you can afford it, but if you can’t, that’s fine too).

You can apply the principles of sentiment analysis to:

Product reviews, surveys, and responses
Individuals and organizations
Issues, topics, events, training
Online and social media content including Facebook posts, podcasts, Tweets, blog comments, forum posts, videos, graphics, and images.

Tools, techniques or methods used in sentiment analysis vary widely and may include social media monitoring, keyword/text processing tools, biometric tools, computational linguistics, Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools, or a simple assessment by another person.

How does Sentiment Analysis Work?

Sentiment analysis has evolved quite a lot over time. From the birth of verbal communication, people were always interested in other people’s opinions. The opinions were used by leaders to help prepare for opposition or increase popularity.

For example, in democratic politics as far back as ancient Greece, voting was used as a measure of public opinion about policy. More recently, in the first decades of the 20th century, questionnaires were used to capture, measure and quantify public opinion.

Sentiment analysis is continually evolving from being mostly one dimensional in its perspective (good, bad or neutral) to being more involved in its assessment of the nuances in emotions and the differentiation of those feelings (for example distinguishing anger and grief).

When we speak of computer-based sentiment analysis, data is at the core of all topics. The data can include social media feeds, music, images, videos, email, microblogging, chat and so on.

Sentiment analysis consists of 5 broad steps to analyze sentiment data and convert it from unstructured data into meaningful information. These measures include:

Data collection: Involves collection of data from user-generated content on social media networks, blogs, and forums. Such data is often disorganized, expressed in different ways using different; slang, vocabularies, languages, and contexts, etc.
Preparation: involves cleaning the collected data by identifying and eliminating irrelevant content before it is analyzed.

For example, text analysis and text mining can be conducted on Twitter.

These are examples of tweets that would be counted, if McDonald’s conducted Sentiment Analysis.

Sentiment detection: Subjective expressions including beliefs, opinions, and views are retained, and objective information including facts are discarded.

Sentiment classification: subjective expressions are classified. For example, likes, dislikes; good, bad; positive, negative or neutral; joy, sadness, fear, anger, disgust surprise, etc. Classification can also be made using multiple points including:

At the document/topical level, e.g. considers a product review as an information unit
At the sentence level, e.g. classifies a particular aspect of a product review as positive or negative
At the aspect level where different opinions on the different aspects of the same product are considered. At the aspect level, the focus is directly on the opinion and not on the language structure.

Presentation of output: The analyzed information is then displayed in a visually impactful way including through; graphs, charts, sparklines and such. Additionally, time and sentiment can be analyzed to construct a sentiment timeline with chosen values like percentages, frequency, and averages.

In the sentiment classification step (c), subjective expressions can be distinguished or classified according to sentiment classification approaches based on techniques used and according to the tools used for different approaches.

Sentiment classification based on approaches include:

Machine learning approach; used to predict the polarity of sentiments based on trained and test datasets.
Lexicon based approach; uses predefined lists of words that are already associated with specific sentiments. This approach mines data without prior training.
Hybrid approach; uses a combination of both machine learning and lexicon approaches to improve sentiment classification performance.

Further types of classification include:

Manual processing; where human interpretation is used.
Keyword processing: where algorithms are used to determine polarity (negative or positive) and the degree of polarity
Natural Language processing/text analytics/data mining/computational linguistics: where computer systems are used to process human language meaning.

Where do Semantic analysis and Sentiment analysis meet?

Sentiment analysis and semantic analysis have similarities and differences. Semantic analysis basically studies the meaning of language and how the language can be understood. It can be used to extract relevant and useful information from large amounts of text and thereafter analyze the information. Sentiment analysis basically measures emotions behind the information studied.

Why is Sentiment Analysis Important

According to a research conducted by the Social Media Examiner in 2015,

“96% of small business owners/marketers use social media marketing, and 92% of those agree or strongly agree with the phrase, ‘Social media marketing is important for my business.’”

Sentiment analysis can be very useful because it can help businesses to differentiate themselves in certain ways and therefore stand out from the crowd of competitors to vie for the attention of customers.

Different applications of sentiment analysis in business include: determining consumer voice, e-commerce, brand reputation, online advertising.

Sentiment analysis could also be used in politics and public actions for example in voting applications, the clarification of political positions, real-time event monitoring, policy proposals and so on.

What are the Benefits of Sentiment Analysis?

The utility of sentiment analysis in different fields comes to fruition when large amounts of data can be analyzed and drilled into to provide a macro view and a micro view of sentiment. Results of the analysis can then be prioritized according to relative importance.

In a business environment accurate sentiment analysis can be beneficial in the following ways:

Optimize product quality

Companies have been trying to use consumer feedback to improve their products for decades now. For the first time, they don’t have to chase customers for feedback; thanks to social media, feedback now comes to them. They can use this data to understand what their customers want from them and adapt themselves accordingly.

If your company is one that makes cookies and you can see people tweeting that they don’t like the new flavors or packaging, you can immediately fix the issue before you lose any customers.

Products are not only analyzed according to functionality but also according to other factors such as packaging, colors, build quality and so on. By paying attention to sentiment analysis product quality can be refined in several ways beyond functionality by paying attention to opinions or reviews about different aspects of a product.

Optimize marketing strategies

Through social media, customers can talk about how they perceive brands they like or don’t like. By listening to what customers say through the lens of sentiment analysis, marketing strategies can be optimized or adjusted to meet target customer’s needs.

Take Expedia Canada for example. They realized that people hated the music in one of their ads and it impacted their approval ratings. They not only removed the ad quickly, they also replaced it with another one which mocked the annoying ad. In this way, they redeemed themselves in the eyes of their audiences.

Marketing campaign effectiveness can be measured

Through sentiment analysis, the effectiveness of marketing campaigns can be measured qualitatively and quantitatively. Not only can the number of likes, dislike be measured, but also the quality of the negative and positive discussions can be measured as well. All this easily translates into accurately measuring the ROI of a marketing campaign.

Sentiment analysis is extremely valuable for measuring campaign effectiveness. It adds depth and an additional layer of understanding your metrics. Sometimes, it gives you answers to why your metrics look the way they do.

For example, say you have an online store for people to buy clothes. You’ve started new marketing tactics to help increase sales. You’ve introduced a pleasant video playing in the background while they shop and have started using augmented reality to help them choose their outfits better.

There is a sudden jump in the number of people who signed off without interacting with your products. You have no idea why this happened. You’ve run all the tests on your pages and they seem fine.

You go on Twitter and see that people are tweeting about your brand. They love the augmented reality feature but are annoyed by the video that keeps playing in the background, a problem you didn’t anticipate, but one which can be fixed with ease.

Most people go on social media to bring attention to a problem they face. And why not, these platforms give their problems visibility and bring accountability to companies. In cases like this, it would be foolhardy to ignore the importance of social media in tracking campaigns.

Crisis management

Real-time monitoring of conversations among interlocutors can help to mitigate damage caused by negative communication. Brands that do not handle social media crises well usually pay a high price for it. On the flip side, brands that do handle these crises well, develop new loyal customers.

British Airways are notorious for their incompetent use of social media. Whether it involves lost baggage or grounded flights, British Airways is almost always the last one to react. This has cost them a fair bunch of loyal customers.

On the other hand, the Royal Dutch Airlines has had a ton of happy customers thanks to their quick social media use. When they are faced with crises, they respond quickly to their customers and try and fix the problem.

Why is crisis management important?

Crisis management is important because it tells your customers that you care. More importantly, active crisis management indicates to your clients that you as a brand are committed to staying accountable for the problems they face.

Companies that hide are deemed less trustworthy than companies that go out there and face the crisis head-on.

Sentiment Analysis Tools

There is a wide variety of tools that are used in sentiment analysis. These tools can be classified in several different ways. One way to classify the tools is through the different techniques that are used for sentiment analysis.

Some of the commercial tools and services used include:

Brandwatch: It provides tool or service based on machine learning. 500 classifiers are used across different languages to ensure accurate automation of the sentiment categorization process.

Laxalytics: It provides several different tools and services for sentiment analysis mostly focusing on NLP and text analysis tools.

Sentdex: It uses a bot to pull data or news from the internet through NLP. The data is analyzed and sentiment is derived from the text.

Clickworker: It uses a mix of human and machine learning for a variety of tasks related to sentiment analysis including; web research, keyword assignment, and categorization, product data management etc.

Other open source sentiment analysis tools based on the technique used by the tool are as shown in the table below:

TOOLS FOR SENTIMENT ANALYSIS	TECHNIQUES USED BY TOOLS
EMOTICONS	Emoticons contained in the text
LIWC	Dictionary and sentiment classified categories
SentiStrengh	LIEC dictionary with new features to strength and weak sentiments
Senti WordNet	Lexical dictionary and scores obtained by semi-machine learning approaches
SenticNet	Natural language processing approach for inferring the polarity at semantic level
Happiness Index	Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) and scores for evaluating happiness in the text
AFINN	Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) but more focused on the language used in microblogging platforms.
PANAS-t	Eleven-sentiment psychometric scale
Sentiment140	API that allows classifying tweets to polarity classes positive, negative and neutral.
NRC	Large set of human-provided words with their emotional tags.
EWGA	Entropy-weighted genetic algorithm
FRN	Feature relation network considering syntactic n-gram relations

SOURCE: Researchgate Tools for sentiment analysis

Sentiment Analysis and Influencers

One of the big benefits of sentiment analysis in understanding customer feedback. This feedback is understood by closely observing social media monitoring tools, to then bridge the gap between insight and action/engagement.

Since social media produces a lot of data, social media analysis tools used to analyze and prioritize this data continue to be very useful.

Additionally, the right influencers can draw attention to your different relevant topics or products. Essentially, having the right influencer can not only help bring attention to your topics or products but it can also pave the way for your audience or target market to take action.

In order to get the best response through influencer marketing, it is critical that you choose the right influencers. Sentiment analysis can be used to vet an influencer and ensure that they are the right one for your promotions.

Furthermore, the social media reputation profiles of influences can be created using sentiment analysis to create a sentiment index that can be used to prioritize or determine the usefulness of an influencer towards a particular cause.

Essentially, you can find out more about an influencers reputation by how much their reputation crosses over from one social media channel to the other.

Additionally, the intensity of emotion or opinion that an influencer draws should also be an important data point of interest that can be informed by sentiment analysis.

Case Study

In a case study of the automotive industry, Twitter sentiment analysis was used to determine preference, emotion, polarity and opinions about three key luxury vehicle brand; BMW, Mercedes, and Audi.

Data in the form of 3000 Tweets were collected through the Automatic sentiment analysis of Twitter feeds collected using R. 1000 tweets for each of the three vehicle brands was collected and filtered to all be in English.

Text mining preprocessing techniques including Tokenization, Filtering, Stemming, Lemmatization were then used to clean up the tweets and to get rid of unnecessary retweets, hashtags, numbers white spaces, HTML links and so on.

A machine learning approach to sentiment analysis, Naïve Bayes (NB), was used to classify the polarity of emotions. Additionally, a polarity lexicon approach and an emotions lexicon were also used in the sentiment analysis classification step.

The polarity classification was found to be as follows:

BMW: 72% positive, 8% negative and 20% neutral.
Mercedes: 79% positive, 18% negative and 3% neutral.
Audi: 83% positive, 16% negative and 1% neutral.

The conclusions drawn from the sentiment analysis study were that, Audi’s positive polarity was higher than for the other cars and the negative polarity was also a lot less. The insights drawn were that offers on the Audi page would ‘circulate to a higher number of satisfied people than in BMW and Mercedes.’

Conclusion

It needs to be mentioned that sentiment analysis should of course not be used in isolation because it is just one metric that should be used in tandem with others. Additionally, using it in the right context is critically important as well.

When monitoring feedback, going through just a few data points including Tweets, comments, reviews and so on, can be most effectively done through simply reading the comments. However, if you have thousands and sometimes even hundreds of thousands of data points on a consistent basis, reading all the feedback can be difficult if not impossible. This is where sentiment analysis can be of great help in providing directional insight and for paving the way for further analysis, insight and appropriate action.

4 Free Social Media Tools To Streamline Your Posting Schedule

November 28, 2017 by Market Motive Leave a Comment

When it comes to boosting your brand’s online reach, social media is critical. It’s one of the most direct ways to engage with potential customers. Appearing in your followers’ news feeds (and the news feeds of their friends) on a consistent basis is very important in building brand awareness. 95% of adults aged 18-34 are likely to follow brands on social media—that’s a statistic you can’t ignore.

The importance of social media marketing continues to grow, even within B2B industries. Social media is now a legitimate source for potential customers to find information about your business. In fact, 55% of B2B marketers claim to search for a product or vendor on social media before making a purchasing decision.

A mere presence on social media isn’t enough—you need to be utilizing it regularly.

But setting a chunk of time aside each day to post to social media can be a challenge, especially when the best time to publish varies between platforms. While weekends may be great for Facebook, Tweets thrive during the middle of the weekday. Figuring out what content to post is enough of a challenge without worrying about when to post it.

Enroll in our Content Marketing course and learn how to create compelling social media content

Luckily, there are plenty of free social media tools to help content marketing managers simplify their social media strategies. The right tool can help you plan posts ahead of time, so you never have to worry about missing prime publishing hours.

Given below are four social media tools that content managers must take advantage of.

Buffer

Buffer is one of the simplest social media management tools out there. It lets you set your publishing schedule across each of your channels, and it will post only according to the schedule you’ve established. Just select the days and times you want to publish to each of your accounts, and you’ll be set. And if you’re not sure when to publish—don’t worry. Buffer has an optimal timing tool that shows you when your audience is most likely to view your posts.

Buffer lets you build up a queue of posts to share as scheduled. It even comes with an optional browser extension, so that you can add content to your list as you come across it while browsing the web. The free version of Buffer works with one account per platform, and it lets you store up to 10 scheduled posts at a time. If you’re managing multiple accounts for your business, or want to schedule more posts at a time, you’ll want to upgrade to a premium version.

HootSuite

HootSuite is a must for marketing managers, thanks to its simple platform that allows publishing across all social media platforms. HootSuite lets you set specific parameters around your posting schedule (such as three per day between 12 and 5 PM on Wednesdays) and will auto-schedule the posts you’ve saved in your queue.

Whereas Buffer limits the number of scheduled posts you can queue up even in its paid versions (though those limits are pretty high), all paid versions of HootSuite come with unlimited scheduling. The free version limits you to three linked social accounts and 30 scheduled posts at a time—which is probably plenty of bandwidth for smaller businesses or those new to social media scheduling. If you’re looking for one platform to simplify your multi-platform social media strategy in one place, definitely check this social media tool out.

Tweetdeck

The best thing about Tweetdeck is that it is entirely free and is automatically set up for all Twitter users. To access Tweetdeck, simply make sure you’re logged into Twitter and then go to tweetdeck.twitter.com. You’ll be able to schedule as many tweets as you want on the user-friendly platform. You can even edit scheduled tweets before they are posted. Also, Tweetdeck provides in-depth analytics of your tweets and Twitter audience.

You can also link up more than one Twitter account at a time. If you’re managing multiple Twitter profiles, Tweetdeck is a simple way to keep them all in one place. The only downside of Tweetdeck is that it only works with Twitter—but since that’s what it was made for, who could blame it? If your brand is extensively active on Twitter, it’s well worth your time to utilize Tweetdeck, and perhaps use one of the other scheduling tools for your other platforms.

MavSocial

MavSocial is an excellent social media tool for brands that are more image-focused (which should be many of them—for example, Facebook posts get 2.3X more engagement when they include images). Not only does it allow you to schedule posts across multiple platforms, but it also allows you to store pictures and other assets directly on the platform for you to re-use in the future. MavSocial also features a stock photo library of over 129 million high-res images, many of which are free. Thanks to this feature, it is very easy to make your content visually without having to leave your scheduling application.

The free version of MavSocial lets you link up a Facebook and Twitter profile with a limit of 10 scheduled posts per network per day—you have to upgrade if you want more than that. MavSocial may not be as widely known a name as Buffer or HootSuite, but it’s certainly well worth checking out.

Of course, the paid versions of each of these social media tools (minus Tweetdeck) will offer more in-depth analytics and greater scheduling capabilities, but start off with a free version. You’ll quickly be able to tell whether a premium version is worth the investment. Regardless, you’re sure to find that scheduling social media posts ahead of time can give you peace of mind that you’ll never miss an optimal posting time.

And, once you’ve started incorporating social media into your overall marketing strategy, you’ll quickly see how valuable it is—and that there’s so much more to utilize.

Be sure to check out this Advanced Social Media Certification Training to learn tips and tricks for the most popular social media tools on the web.

Disclaimer:
This article was written by one of our guest writers. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not be indicative of the views of Market Motive.

About the Author:
Ryan Gould is the VP of strategy and marketing for Elevation Marketing. His articles are featured on websites like CrazyEgg, KunoCreative and Mailigen.

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