Thursday, May 28, 2015
Video: The Contender Takes the Marketing Title
Producing video is a pain. You're busy. Really busy. How can you cram a difficult, time-consuming, and expensive process like video production into your daily grind? Read the full article at MarketingProfs
4 Steps to Go Above and Beyond in Social Media Customer Service
Did you know that 25% of consumers who complain to brands on Facebook or Twitter expect a response within an hour, according to HubSpot? This seems a bit unrealistic, right? Shockingly enough, it might not be. You’ll likely lose respect and loyalty from a client if their questions and complaints aren’t dealt with in a short window of time.
Photo by Toshihiro Gamo via Flickr
Nowadays, customers even expect a response when complimenting a company. A few months back, I received a free salad from the organic fast-food restaurant SweetGreen due to a longer wait for chicken on my guacamole greens. I was so ecstatic by the phenomenal customer service that I tweeted at their corporate handle praising their response to a slightly extended wait time for my Friday night meal.
In return to my testimonial? Radio silence. I kept refreshing my Twitter feed assuming they’d respond in some manner, perhaps “favorite” my tweet, retweet it, or reply saying “Anytime!” but… nothing. I was left feeling discouraged (although I won’t lie, I’m still a regular salad-eating customer).
Luckily, this was a positive scenario, so I didn’t lose faith in the business, but imagine if my tweet was about a negative experience. Let’s say they ran out of chicken altogether and did nothing to ease my frustration. If a response was not made on Twitter to a negative review, then my faith and loyalty to the business would be lost.
Morton’s Steakhouse knows what I’m talking about. A while back, the upscale steak chain delivered a joking customer a free steak at an airport. The tweeter wrote, “Hey @Mortons – can you meet me at Newark airport with a porterhouse when I land in two hours? K, thanks.” And, to the customer’s surprise, Morton’s did just that!
The result? An explosion of PR coverage and positive press for the steak chain. The fact that this occurred in 2011 and I’m still gushing over it just shows how momentous positive social customer service can be for a business’ reputation.
Follow these steps to build loyal customers through social media:
Step #1: Assign a Social Media First-Responder
I understand that you might not have the budget to hire a new employee for this role, but you do need a socially active employee who is capable of responding and monitoring each one of your brand’s social channels.
As I explained above, customers (and leads) expect answers in real-time. A long lag between a tweet at your handle and your response will lead to high levels of frustration from your previously happy customer. Your social media first-responder should have notifications coming into their phone, and the ability to check in on each channel several times per day.
Step #2: Create a Troubleshooting Library
Common issues are going to occur no matter what industry you’re in, whether it be a bug in your software or a complaint about the delivery time for an e-commerce purchase. Make a detailed library of common occurrences with notes on how to handle each scenario. If the issue can’t be resolved overnight, let the user know this. Keep the lines of communication active, and send a private message with details on next steps (perhaps getting them in touch with support or scheduling a phone call to resolve the problem).
Step #3: Turn Your Customers into Brand Ambassadors Through Creative Tactics
You also need to think about the customers that aren’t likely to engage with your brand unless they have an issue. The last thing you want is people to only contact you under tense circumstances. How do you combat this? Turn on those creative juices and run intriguing contests and giveaways. Start a hashtag movement, ask engaging questions, and use humor through your social copy, images, and videos.
If you can spur your followers to positively interact with your brand, they’ll graduate from happy customers to brand promoters. Check out the adorable contest Delta Faucet is running below:
Step #4: Create a List of Your Customers & Engage with them Regularly
Keep track of who engages with your brand, who actively follows you, and the customers that spend lots of time on social media (which is likely the majority of them). Create lists of these customers, and return the love to them by retweeting or sharing their content, liking their posts, and commenting from time to time to show them how awesome they are. Making your customers feel loved goes a long way, although tread lightly with less happy customers; overdoing it with regular engagement might push them over the edge (nobody likes a suck-up!).
The most important takeaway? NEVER ignore any comment posted to one of your social accounts. Whether it be praising your brand or critiquing it, there’s no need to create brand detractors!
This post was originally published on socialmediatoday.com
About the Author:
Margot is a Content Marketing Specialist at WordStream with a background in PPC, SEM, content and digital marketing. Margot is passionate about writing and is also a regular contributor to socialmediatoday.com. She enjoys running and eating ice cream during her free time (not simultaneous although that would be impressive). Follow her on:
Twitter: @ChappyMargot
Google+: +Margot da Cunha
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/margotdacunha
How to Learn A New Skill
Dr. Morgan mentions it in this post. For instance, “The good news for you conference organizers, then, is that if you hire Chris you’ll get something largely new each time. In spite of my best efforts.”. (emphasis mine)
The post How to Learn A New Skill appeared first on chrisbrogan.com.
Website Analytics: How to use data to determine where to test
At MarketingExperiments, we use patented heuristics to evaluate websites, emails and other digital mediums.
Often people think that a heuristic evaluation is a purely qualitative approach to a problem. This can be true, but when you combine quantitative analytics with the qualitative knowledge you increase the power to make meaningful change.
This post will show relevant metrics for three of these elements that any marketer — from beginner to advanced — can use to discover opportunities for improvement.
Step #1. Look at the qualitative elements of your website
Often people just ask for data dumps. To make matters worse, they want it in a very short time. On top of that, most data scientists use purely what they are comfortable with: numbers.
To add context and save time, you must evaluate the site to see where you should focus your data analysis.
Put yourself in the customer’s mindset and go to your site. If you own creative or design, try to remove those biases as best as possible. What makes sense to you or feels like the right amount of information may be completely overwhelming to a customer who isn’t familiar with your product or industry.
Look for things that are broken, functions that are clunky, images that don’t make sense or add value and difficulty in completing the conversion. You must objectively look at all the pages in the conversion path and be familiar enough with them to make sense of the data that you pull.
Pull data to illuminate the points you saw to give validity to the theory. Key heuristic elements and data help prove the problem.
Step #2. Understand motivation
Motivation cannot be affected, but it can be matched. Use the traffic reports below to determine who is coming, how they are coming and why they are coming.
Sources and mediums
The source is the specific place where the traffic originated and the medium is the type of traffic. Google is an example of a source, and the medium would segment this traffic by direct, organic, paid, email, etc.
Knowing where the traffic is coming from tells us about:
- The types of users — For example: young, old or tech savvy
- User brand awareness — Having more organic than paid traffic can mean users already know you and your products.
- Email — Users are on a list and have engaged with you before.
Keywords
Match the motivation of search traffic by looking at what keywords were used to find the link to your site.
If the majority are branded, then you can spend less real estate on your site telling people who you are with primary level value proposition. If the majority is nonbranded, then you know you must put value proposition about your company and products directly in the customer’s eye-path.
Next level
Look at the landing pages people visit most often, and look at the bounce and exit rates. If these are high, you haven’t aligned with the motivation of the visitors.
Step #3. Insert value proposition
There are four main levels of value proposition:
- Primary — about your company
- Product — about your available offerings
- Process — what steps need to be taken to convert or what happens post conversion
- Prospect — telling potential customers why they should be doing business with you
It is important to use value proposition in the right place to increase the perceived value of the offer as you increase the perceived cost — which could be taking action or giving personal information.
Previous page
Look at pages such as “About Us,” “Contact Us” and “FAQ” and run a previous page report. This will show you where visitors need more value proposition to keep them in the funnel.
You can take it a step further and see where visitors went next by running a Next Page Report, which shows the areas customers needed more information on.
Exit Page Report
Find your top exit pages and then look at them to see if there is value proposition on those pages. If there isn’t, then add the appropriate value proposition. If there is, maybe the value proposition needs updating. This update could be as simple changing as where it is and what it says.
To understand what goes into a proper value proposition, review these five questions from a MarketingExperiments interview with Michael Lanning, the inventor of the term.
Scroll metrics
Often I see websites where the value proposition is on the page, but it is too low on the page or too outside the eye-path to ever be seen.
See how far people are scrolling on your pages to determine the placement of your value proposition.
Next level
Look at responses of customers to determine the best and worst aspects of your product(s) so that you can highlight the best and message against the worst. Also, look at your competitors and compare products so that you can highlight why your product is the best for the potential customer.
Step #4. Address friction
Friction is the amount of effort someone has to give to complete a conversion. Look at the key funnel steps and run these reports.
Every website has many friction possibilities, so focus on those specific to you. Look at form fields, product pages, carts, calls-to-action and other places that may be difficult to navigate.
“Previous” and “Next Page” reports are a great way to isolate friction. If you see that a high rate of visitors are bouncing between steps or between the cart and shopping, then some element of friction is most likely causing them to not want to complete the step. If people are going to the “Contact Us” page at the same point repeatedly, then they most likely have had enough with trying to complete the purchase online.
Form tracking
Set up events or click-tracking to help identify friction (especially for places where people enter information). If you see a high drop off rate at a particular part of the checkout, then the friction has overwhelmed the visitor. You can test shortening or removing information or explaining why the information is necessary.
Internal search traffic can also be used to help identify friction in the purchase process. If common search terms are product related, it is too difficult for the user to get the relevant information they are seeking. If it is mostly related to process, then you can address those elements in the purchase path.
You can follow Benjamin Filip, Manager of Data Sciences, MECLABS on Twitter @benjamin_filip.
You might also like
Beginner’s Guide to Web Data Analysis: Ten Steps to Love & Success [From Occam’s Razor]
Digital Analytics: How to use data to tell your marketing story [More from the MarketingExperiments blog]
Value Proposition: 4 key questions to help you slice through hype [More from the MarketingExperiments blog]
Value Proposition Development: 5 insights to help you discover your value prop [More from the MarketingExperiments blog]
Wednesday, May 27, 2015
What YouTube Creators Know That Brands Don’t
Advertising revenue appears to form the backbone of YouTube. The company continues to invest in various ad programs, and revenues keep growing year over year. However, what also keeps growing is engagement. This goes a long way to explaining why YouTube creators are better at building and maintaining brands than actual brands are on the site.
According to Brendan Gahan, contributor to the Observer‘s Innovation blog, not a single brand channel is in the top 100 more subscribed YouTube channels. Gahan notes that this is because YouTube’s native talent — those who populate the top 100 — are so good at building audiences and managing their personal brand. John Green, author and Vlogbrother, is a prime example of YouTube’s native talent doing it so much better than advertisers.
Green shares his life and work with his audience through YouTube videos and has managed to cultivate an almost rabid fanbase that will follow him anywhere. Whether it’s raising money for charity, or pushing his book to the top of the New York Times Bestseller list, Green’s fans are with him.
The rapport YouTube creators generate with their audiences is surely the major mark of their success, and viewers are more than willing to support creators across different projects.
This is engagement and loyalty that brands and advertisers could only dream of. And the problem with marketers’ current approach to YouTube is that they try to get between audiences and creators, rather than cultivating audiences of their own. Advertising only accounts for 20 percent of Vlogbrothers revenue, according to Gahan.
How much time is left for advertisers to help brands make a meaningful connection with their customers before creators have become totally self-reliant?
Advertisers are in danger of being left behind on YouTube, and elsewhere on the internet as creators refine their ability to generate revenue and grow their personal brands. Independent creators have figured out better ways to promote their projects, products, and themselves than marketers have. Personalization is key.
Gahan writes:
Advertisers need to learn from the creators: the way they test ideas, follow audience reactions daily, tweak their actions based on feedback from audiences while maintaining the core of their brand. We, in advertising, need to do the same, because this is what works today.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
Why is Local Search So Important?
Why is Local Search So Important? written by John Jantsch read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
Marketing podcast with David Mihm
In answer to the question in the title of this post, chew on a few of these stats:
- 82% of local searchers follow up offline via an in-store visit, phone call or purchase (TMP/comScore)
- 74% of internet users perform local searches (Kelsey Group)
- 61% of local searches result in a purchase (Search Engine Watch)
- 59% of consumers use Google every month to find a reputable, local business (Search Engine Watch)
- 37% of all searches are done on mobile (ClickZ)
David Mihm
If you own a business that thrives on doing business locally, you must understand how businesses in local markets are found today.
Sure, a lot of people find local businesses by asking a friend for a recommendation and if you are lucky enough to have made a positive impression on said friend there’s a chance your business will benefit. But, as the stats above reveal, today you must show up strong when people inevitably turn to a search engine – even after a recommendation from a friend – to find local goods and services.
My guest for this week’s episode is one of the world’s foremost local SEO experts and Director of Local Search Strategy for Moz.com, David Mihm.
Questions I ask David:
- What is the difference between local SEO and traditional SEO?
- What changes do you foresee in local SEO in the future?
- How has content marketing affected local search?
What you’ll learn if you give a listen:
- How location changes your search results on Google
- How reviews, even industry specific reviews, are affecting search results
- What is a knowledge card, and why it matters now and in the future
Check out Moz.com’s local search learning center at https://moz.com/learn/local
If this topic seems appealing join me for a live webinar – How to Win With Local Search – Thursday, May 28th – Noon CDT (GMT-5) – Enroll here
This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Hostgator, where you’ll get 24 hour live support via chat, phone or email, 1-click WordPress installs, easy-to-use website builder, design services, marketing services like SEO and PPC, and for my listeners: a 30% Discount. Go to www.Hostgator.com/promo/ducttape
Using Emojis in Ad Text Boosts CTR!
Emojis have become ubiquitous in text messages, private online messaging, and even blog posts and other written communications. But did you ever think Google would allow them in AdWords ads?
We recently discovered that AdWords is, in fact, allowing emojis in some ads. Our data scientist Mark Irvine ran some tests this week using (willing) client accounts and we have some early - and promising - results to share.
Mark noticed that there was no real rhyme or reason as to which emojis were accepted and which were rejected by Google as “punctuation errors.” He did get this one through for testing and as you can see, it was served about 10% more than the non-emoji ad. It also received 4 clicks to the other ad’s 0!
It’s not just smiley faces, either. What better way to sneak imagery into a text ad for a donut shop than with a donut emoji?
Advertisers have a lot more emoji options than smiley faces that they may be able to incorporate into their ad text. Check out this sampling of some of the more popular emojis below:
As you can see, you've got your standard smileys, as well as some representations of various types of people (and professions). Look a little closer, though - notice the sheer variety of emojis you could put into your ad text? We've got body parts, hand gestures, clothing, animals (LOTS of animals), plants, technology, weather symbols, the phases of the moon, and a whole bunch of chart, graph and app icons.
You may notice that the ubiquitous "smiley face poop" emoji isn't in this list. (I'm not sure you'd have much luck getting that one past Google in an ad anyway.)
Have you seen any emojis in PPC ads? Would you consider using them yourself?
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