Using Social Media To Create Hot Leads From Your Content Marketing
May 21, 2016
10 min read
There is more to inbound marketing than creating compelling content. Even the best writing and visuals are no good if it doesn’t attract readers and entice people to visit your site. If you don’t feel like you have the skills to create or market your own content, you can always decide to use outsourced inbound marketing. Be sure to hire a reputable agency, though, because, since you can’t see or monitor them, you want to make sure they are honest and not acting in ways that reflect badly on your company.
In what ways can you market your brand?
You can and should use all the traditional methods of getting people to respond to your content and check out your product: forum posting and commenting on blogs are great ways to link back to your site. But there is one way to get noticed that trumps even that. Social Media.
Social sites are one super way to build leads and get your brand out there and noticed. It is a terrific way to post content that will lead readers back to your website. Here are 4 popular social media outlets and how you can use them to market your product:
Pinterest is a photo-sharing site and is one of the most popular ways that people share content on the internet today. Users create ‘boards’ which are basically collections of ‘pins’-or images-related to particular topics. When someone likes your content, they can re-pin it to share it. The best way to get people to visit your boards is to use eye-catching images with your content. You can re-pin other content you find to fill up your boards with interesting materials and entice others to visit.
YouTube
YouTube videos tend to rank high in Google search results and can be a great way to boost your popularity. You can create and upload a video of anything related to your product; how-to, instructions, demonstrations, before and after, etc. Videos keep the reader engaged and can really show off your product’s benefits. Add a link at the end of each video to encourage people to visit your website. After all, every visit is a potential sale. Encourage members to visit your YouTube channel by commenting on other videos and interacting with the community.
Google+
Google Plus content is highly favored on search results. Posting SEO-friendly articles will improve your chances of getting views and clicks. Google Plus has a couple of really unique features that come in handy. One is it’s ‘circles’ which allow you to group followers together into specific categories based on their interests. This allows you to target the proper audiences for your content. Another great feature is the Hangouts. Hangouts are video and audio recording that you create and share with your followers. Hangouts are automatically uploaded to YouTube and shared on your Google Plus page to attract even more viewers.
It may seem like an easy way to promote your brand, especially if you have a lot of followers. However, what you need are followers who are interested in what you have to offer. Blog posts, images and videos tend to do very well on facebook. You can encourage visits by placing a link to your facebook page on your other social sites, so interested parties can click on it and follow you. Two great tools Facebook offers is their Pages Insights-a graph that shows how well your content is performing and Audience Highlights-which gives you the demographics of your visitors. This way you can see if you are reaching your target audience and adapt your content accordingly. All in all, social media is a marketing tool you don’t want to skip. You can grow by connecting accounts, getting shares and building followers. Engage with all the social media sites at first. Once you’ve established where most of your traffic is coming from, you can start to concentrate on utilizing those media platforms more.
7 Questions That Your Content Strategy Must Answer
To protect your business site from changes like Google Penguin, Content Marketers need to have clear insight so that they can design an accurate content strategy. Your content strategy needs to work well with the search engine crawlers so that your website remains optimized and ranks high in SERPs. But we do that, isn’t it? Lots of long-tail and short-tail keywords, generating backlinks and getting the contents published on sites having high Domain Authority is what we have been doing all through. What’s missing? Maybe the idea to have good content is not understood fully. The customer’s perspective is often missed while developing a content strategy. And as you can expect, with only 44% of B2B marketers having a documented content strategy, the industry is lagging behind in providing the users with the most accurate information. This approach may have worked in past, but with search engines moving towards delivering the most accurate results, your content should best answer the questions that your users have. To find a key to this problem, let's ask ourselves if our content strategy addresses these concerns: “What” Is Your Content Going To Be? What kind of content is going to create? From web blogs to podcasts, the expectations of customers and the limitation of the content publication platform are different. Is your content strategy consistent with the type of content and the place where the content is going to be published? “Why” Is Content Essential For Your Site? Understand the goal before you begin. Why are you serious about the content part? Is it to increase the traffic to your website and improve the conversion rates, or to create large followership by building trust? Is your content strategy aiming towards higher visibility on SERPs, or promoting your products and services? In any case, you need to check if your existing content strategy is answering your customers' questions and addressing their pain points. “How” To Get Where You Want To Go? Once the objective is decided, it is also important for all the team members to stay on the same page. In case, you have outsourced the content to another firm, you need to make sure the content developers know what exactly you are aiming at. “When” Do You Begin? Now! And... Making realistic plans is crucial to its success. How much time do you allot for the content strategy? What are the barriers that need to be overcome? Analyze your previous content strategies and based on that, you can settle in for a time frame for the execution of your strategy. “Where” Is The Content Distributed? Your content strategists need to understand that content distribution determines how much amplification your content is going to get. For greater amplification and larger popularity among your audience, you can use social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. Sharing on these sites can take your content to a larger domain, also capture the attention of your passive audience. “How Often” Should I Produce Content? How often should you blog? Monthly? Weekly? Daily? Before committing to any frequency, ask yourself whether you have enough resources to meet the deadline? Staying more active is a good thing as the users get more content to read but unless you are consistent in posting content, the effect is diluted. “For Whom” Is The Content? Who is going to read your content? If your content is for everybody, then it is for nobody, right? Your content strategy should keep in mind the audience segment that you are targeting? Make the buyer personas and ensure that your content strategy is consistent with the buyer journey. In particular, your content should be developed to take the audience to these three buyer's journey steps: Awareness Phase Is your content informing the audience about the opportunities they can have? Is your content suitably placed to explain the key issues, risks? Apart from informing the audience, ideal content should also provide precise solutions to optimize and improve the user's life situations. Consideration Phase How is your content providing the available approaches and methods that can solve the reader's problems? Through expertly written guides, troubleshooting tips, whitepapers, your content can help your audience, hence building trust and engagement simultaneously. Decision-Making phase Most of the existing content on the web is informative and provides useful solutions to the readers. But where they lack is that they do not clearly tell the audience what to do next. How is your content helping in defining a specific call to action? Create comparative studies, product literature, and the pros and cons of various approaches and methods to encourage the users to make a purchasing decision so that their decisions remain more informed and intelligent. This is one aspect that content strategy can never ignore. By getting content published on good sites, and on your own website, you can attract the attention of your targeted audience. But that’s not the end of your content strategy. Go back to your goals, see how are you motivating your audience towards the goal. You wanted to increase the conversion rates, how is your content encouraging the visitors towards sales? You want to build trust with your audience, check for the email subscribers’ behavior to derive actionable insight. ...
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The Art of Client Retention for an Inbound Marketing Agency
Let’s talk of one industry that is not competitive, Can think of one? No, right. Let’s face it, your customers have a lot of choices these days, and thanks to inbound marketing by your competitors, your customers know about them. In such challenging times how can you retain those clients?Will putting some FAQ’s and how-to’s on your website help? No, you need to do a lot more than that, and it starts from day 1 when the sale is made. It is the Inbound marketing that can help you retain your customers. What Are The Reasons That Make Your Customers Stay With You? They are happy with your product or service. Issues are quickly getting resolved and customer service is polite and helpful. They feel connected and supported. Everything revolves around the products and services. Products are constantly improving or the service is showing sustained and positive results. Customers feel that you are the industry expert and are ahead of the competition. Your product or service is unbeatable, and the customers don’t see the added value in switching to your competitor. How to Retain Your Customers Using Inbound Marketing in Few Simple Steps Step #1. Put Forward the right tools in place- you need a close integration of a good CRM system and your Inbound Marketing lead generation tools. This is termed as Closed Loop Marketing. This type of marketing will empower your sales and marketing team to work together and monitor customer communications, progress, support issues and milestones, such as trial expirations, subscription renewals ,etc. Step #2. Stay connected with your clients by reaching out early and often- to gather knowledge of any malfunction of a product or error in service, schedule regular review meetings to answer questions and provide best practices to improve performance. Send Monthly newsletters with product/service update and new content. Let your client know that you genuinely care and are growing bigger and better by the time. Step #3. Be available online and offline- make sure that you are available across all the channels where your clients can reach you out. Make sure that all your lines are open and people can submit a service/support request or reach out to a human being to get their issues resolved. You don’t need to be present 24/7, but it also depends on your business type whether your client can be in need at odd hours and you are needed to be available, but be transparent in telling the client or new customers at what time they can reach you. Step #4. Use Social Media as a PR Tool- your support team should have a Twitter account that is monitored in the business hours or preferably more. Use attractive hash tags for your different product or service lines, and publish them on your support channels. Your ORM team must be able to respond to all inquiries, even if it means referring them to a support page. Do follow the same instructions for Facebook and Google+. Step #5. Grab Attention- to stay ahead of your competitors. This means constantly publishing good content often. It means creating content that not only solves the problem of your existing clients but also attracts new customers. Participate in chats, forums, and regularly comment on your blog posts. Invite people to write guest posts on your blog and seek guest posting opportunities on influencer blogs. By doing all of this “you stay on top of mind” with your own clients while you attract new ones. Step #6. Measure your retention rates- Track your customers through their interaction with your website, blog and content marketing efforts. Use Advanced Marketing Analytics tools to track your client behaviour and reach out to them via behavior driven communications. Identify problems early and fix them- you should look for negative comments posted on social media or blogs. You can track such comments using advanced social media analytics tools. Reach out to the complainant directly, but privately, to address their issues. By making customer retention as important as customer acquisition, you benefit from enhanced customer lifetime value, increased referrals and reduced customer complaints. By using Inbound Marketing for both new sales and retained sales, your business benefits from using one set of resources for two important goals. You can beat the competition just by establishing yourself as the leader in the industry, by being most responsive, and by being most genuine to clients. ...
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How is Voice Search revolutionizing SEO once and for all?
The digital platform keeps on evolving, and every aspect of this evolution affects how your website will rank in the search result. Even a small introduction like a featured snippet affects your SEO strategy, and this is why keeping tabs on the latest changes on the online platform is essential. You will be surprised to know that the Google algorithm changes at least once or twice every day. And even voice search is a result of such evolution of the digital platform and the changes in Google algorithm. People made a paradigm shift from qwerty keypads to touch screens, and now they are shifting from touchscreen typing to voice search. There is no surprise in this type of shift since we always speak three times faster than we type. Well, if you haven’t noticed the rise of voice search in the past couple of years then you should look at the below-mentioned stats:- By the end of 2020, more than 50% of the searches will be voice searches, and this number will keep on increasing. By 2022, around 55%of the homes in the U.S will have smart speakers, and this will further fuel the growth of voice search. Till January 2018, the number of voice searches made every month increased to around 1 billion. During the holiday shopping of 2017, 1 in 4 customers used voice search assistants to ease the process of shopping. More than 41% of the people using smart speakers feel like they are talking with a friend or family member. All these stats might have made you realize the influx of voice search but do you know which type of effect it will have on your SEO and what you will need to do for voice search optimization? Let’s find out through this blog post. The difference between voice search and text in terms of SEO You might be surprised to know that there is not any difference between text and voice search, especially when you are talking about results. The audio received from the internet users forwarded to the voice recognition API, and then this voice is converted into text. This simply means that when you type ‘best mobile phones of 2020’ and use voice for searching ‘best mobile phones of 2020’, you will get the exact same results. But when you talk about the difference between voice search and text in terms of the person’s interaction with the search, then there is a big difference, and this is what will affect your SEO. Everyone using the internet will interact with voice search in a completely different way than search boxes. You should know that users mostly have more of a conversational tone while using voice search. Five ways in which voice search will change SEO The importance of semantic search will increase Google is not only dependent upon keywords as it uses many different kinds of factors like the search history of the user or different patterns of searches to show the best result. Well, this is what we call semantic search, and it is basically a word used for describing that Google is improving its ability to know what people are looking for on the internet. It is because of semantic search that when you type ‘Movies New York’, Google will understand that you are interested in watching movies in New York not movies about New York. And since voice searches are more about conversational tone, you will need to optimize your content accordingly. Start incorporating long-tail keywords to rank better for voice searches. Content will need to be optimized for customers Because of the proliferation of voice search, you will have to make sure that your content is not only optimized for search engines but for the customers as well. You will need to start understanding how customers are talking about your firm on social media and other platforms. You will also need to ask your sales team and customer support team about the most common question asked by the customers and the most common words used in those questions. In addition to this, you will also need to take advantage of your FAQ page and answer some of the most common questions in a detailed way. Don’t make the mistake of using marketing jargon since a customer will never use such words during voice search. You can’t miss a mobile first site Google has already made it clear that there is no way you can skip mobile-first sites, and if your website does not play along, then your survival on the digital platform will become problematic. If your website will take time to load on mobile phones or if it will not fit the screen, then no one will be interested in staying on your website. But even when you consider optimizing your website for voice search, the mobile-first index will come to top the list. Mobile phones acted as a springboard for voice search, and more than 50% of the people use voice search while driving. So, it’s high time that you should start optimizing your website according to the mobile-first index or you will be kicked to the bottom of the search result. The role of featured snippets and ranking zero A wide array of voice searches are answered through rich answer boxes that are now being called as ranking zero in the world of digital marketing. There are many of these boxes that will show you public domain information like how many cms in a meter and these types of answers are given by Google directly. But when you talk about featured snippets, then it is a whole different story. Featured snippets are pulled off from information available on the websites, and Google will give credit to those brands that will regularly come on voice searches and featured snippets. And since you will only need to appear on the first page instead of the first position, featured snippets are a more practical solution for businesses of every kind. If your website is already ranking on the first page, then you will just need to make a few changes in your content and your SEO optimization strategy. The need to pass the radio test When it comes to featured snippets, then Google shows the website aligns with the information, and thus the user can click on the website to get more information. This brings more organic traffic to the website. But when it comes to voice search, then Google presents the answer by saying According to’ or ‘We find this information for you’. This simply means all the brands can gain more from brand awareness. Here, the radio test means that people can hear your brand name just like in the case of a radio broadcast and then remember it for a longer period of time. So this means that all the new brands out there will need to have a band name that can be easily pronounced by Google Assistant. We are living in an era that is being driven by different kinds and phases of evolution and to stay relevant and grow in such an age, you will need to make the right adjustments to your strategy. Well, the same thing can be said about the change in SEO strategy because of voice searches. You can’t deny the influx of voice search, and you will never wish to be left behind when voice search will become a new normal for everyone. This is why, instead of waiting for others to make changes according to the rise of voice search, you should start working out on your SEO strategy and allow your website to grow even when people are searching for you through voice searches. ...
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