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"Brand" will always be a nebulous term. Arguments rage about its true value, especially on social media...
Although recent research shows that it can be responsible for nearly 15% of your total worth (Or much, much more, if you’re J.K.Rowling), it’s still seen by many as the ultimate wooly metric. There’s no doubt that being a household name will improve your chances of success in social, but just how far will it take you?
I’ve taken a look at the world’s top ten brands, and matched up their profiles across the biggest social media platforms.Let’s see what’s in a name...
Instagram is becoming a core platform for brands to engage with consumers since it registers consumer engagement 18 times that of Facebook and 48 times that of Twitter, according to the latest report from L2 Think Tank.
The "Intelligence Report: Social Platforms" found that the visual component of Instagram has helped the platform grow to 100 million users with the average luxury brand having 100,000 followers. Other visual platforms such as Vine, Pinterest and YouTube have grown significantly and continue to be platforms for brands to deeply engage with consumers.
"For all the mindshare that it occupies, social media ultimately drives very little ecommerce, less than 0.25 percent, and site traffic, less than 3 percent, for prestige brands," said Danielle Bailey, research lead L2 Think Tank, New York....
Even business-to-business brands seem to be getting a grip on the mobile world. Intel this week is launching a month-long campaign on News360, a mobile news aggregation app. The tech company is using the app to promote its new IT Business Report mobile app.
The fact that a B-to-B marketer like Intel—mobile is often depicted as a consumer space—is buying News360's ads underscores how major companies are increasingly giving relatively obscure smartphone apps a shot at their business. In a saturated apps market, News360 needs to prove itself, as brands have countless options to choose from. To that end, the 3-year-old mobile developer, which claims roughly four million users, is now jumping on the buzzy native trend in its pitches to advertisers....
Use key performance indicators (KPIs) to effectively manage Inbound Marketing activities....One of the things I love most about Inbound Marketing is that it lends itself to creation of an Inbound scorecard of KPIs that tie directly back to business goals, and give the ability to quickly evaluate performance and make instant adjustments to strategies and tactics.
Just as important is how your scorecard can contribute to a virtuous cycle: improved results lead to strengthened commitment and participation, which leads to more support, continued resource commitment…and even better results!Inbound Marketing allows businesses access to more marketing metrics than most businesses have ever had the luxury of enjoying. Here’s a list of what we consider our top five Inbound KPIs...
With so many individuals and companies competing for attention on social media, it can seem nearly impossible to make your voice heard above the crowd. However, compelling social media content is a quick way to earn attention and brand loyalty. So what can you do to take your social media strategy from “blah” to viral? Here are some tips...
Suffering from underperforming marketing KPIs? Read this post and learn how to fix those guys! After that, you’ve got to grab your marketing by the bootstraps and make the necessary adjustments in order to provide your CEO with the ROI they’re looking for. Below I’ve detailed six metrics highlighted by CMO Mike Volpe on this very blog, how to identify when they’re underperforming, and how to make the necessary adjustments to save your bacon. Here’s how. How to Fix 6 Critical Marketing KPIs When They're Underperforming....
Ever wondered how using social media can boost your search rankings? Rachel Murray from Hydrant web design reveals all in this week's top five tips... By considering the following five tips of these Social Networking techniques you can enhance the content that you are socially sharing for SEO purposes, and create effective ranking results on Google....
At this point, online marketing and SEO are part of almost every business’s marketing budget. However, in order to make your online marketing efforts truly successful, you need to make sure you don’t limit how many customers you can reach. If you’re still holding back because you don’t know what to do, there are some basic tips that can get you in the game.....
While putting together our recent series of posts looking at how major brands use the four main social networks I’ve somehow managed to overlook Coca-Cola, so today I have rectified that startling omission. Coca-Cola is one of those instantly recognisable brands that would rake in fans and followers without even trying, so it’s to its credit that it has active account across the social web. So, here’s a quick look at how it uses Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+....
Discover how social marketing tools like Commun.it, BlogDash and Traackr can help you identify, connect with and engage industry influencers.... This month, we learned that although 65% of brands participate in influencer marketing, just 10% of total digital marketing spend goes to social, which includes influencer marketing. Some have cried, don’t people see the opportunity? Why aren’t they spending on influencers! Technorati Media’s 2013 Digital Influence Report shared the above insight, as well as the fact that a mere 6% of social spend is allotted to marketing to influencers. This doesn’t signal a problem to me at all. In fact, it’s an indication that while influencer marketing is recognized as a valuable piece of the online marketing puzzle and many practice it, it doesn’t require a great deal of budget to accomplish. That, friends, is what we call an opportunity. That’s not to say influencer outreach is easy, but that an array of low-cost tools are available to help marketers better identify, understand and connect with industry influencers. These social tools enable us to automate much of the research, to weed through a mass of data and identify trends or common characteristics among the people who can positively impact our business with a tweet, a blog post, or a thoughtful comment. Check out these social tools for brand marketers looking to more easily and inexpensively measure and act on influence in their industry....
...That’s why I’m writing this post. I’ve compiled a list of websites that produce great content, each of which has its own unique qualities. I’ll break them down and explain why they’re good and what you can take away. So whether you’re new to content marketing or have been involved in it for years, my goal for this blog post is that it will give you some ideas and inspiration. Now, let’s examine the best content sites and what we can all learn from them...
... To become an empowered social business is to inject the advantages of social media directly into the heart of your corporate DNA. That means recognizing it’s not only about having a fantastic Facebook page or a high profile Twitter account (though that might be part of the plan!). It’s about implementing the benefits social technology offers through the fabric of your business- not just the consumer facing ones. What social networking tools provide is a way to break the divides that separate your employees and their expertise from customers and one another, fostering a climate of knowledge sharing and collaboration. Instead of isolated knowledge hives, you build engaged communities who relate and share with one another naturally. It’s about building a social corporate culture where innovative solutions naturally arise by a foundation built on trust and a love of sharing, a business of conversation and mass participation....
Plenty of people have said it before, but Coca-Cola had invested hard dollars to prove it. Online buzz is not enough to have a measurable impact on short-term sales. Online display advertising works better. While the concept seems to contradict what social media enthusiasts tend to tout, it's one of several studies that not only raise questions about the growing interest in online influence but also refute it. After all, if buzz doesn't drive short-term sales where display advertisements might, then what about influence? Smart companies don't make decisions based on single studies. Of course, according to the Adweek article, Coca-Cola isn't ready to toss out the baby with the bath water. Its digital media team points out that the findings were based on one study with one segment of one company that appeals to a particular customer. In this case, one with 61.5 million Facebook fans. Instead, Coca-Cola will continue to look for ways to measure online buzz and other popular social media counts such as video views and social sharing. The company, one of the early entrants into digital media, wants to find a predictive measure that can pinpoint financial outcomes — at least so marketers may better understand the tradeoffs among media types....
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Simple metrics like "followers" and "likes" are usually dismissed by the gurus but actually play an important part in your company's progress...
.Most social media “gurus” will be quick to point out that activity-based metrics such as number of posts, followers, or re-tweets are meaningless because they don’t measure real business value. I’m going to take a contrarian viewpoint today and explain that in the real world, these simple measurements are not only useful, they may be critical.
A few years ago, I was working as a consultant on a new marketing initiative for an extremely conservative, slow-moving company. As we were getting to know each other, I asked the people around the table “If we gathered here a year from now and you told me that our initiative had been wildly successful, what would have been achieved?”
One of the veterans of the team spoke up: “I would like to see that something … anything … actually HAPPENED!”...
Setting up any sort of Ecommerce store isn’t easy because there are so many things to consider.Filters versus categories isn’t usually the first thing on a company or Webmasters mind, but eventually this dilemma is going to hit him/her in the face and leave a lot of questions.
Although many don’t realize it, it’s incredibly important to understand the difference between the two for SEO reasons. If you’re starting an ecommerce store, you have to ask yourself: Would this page be better filed as a category or in a filter if I want the best SEO results?...
Many online marketers get too wrapped up in measuring data that, though useful, is not the most important for understanding how your website is performing as a marketing channel.I say that because each investment of your time, money, and people should have a very solid ROI expectation attached to it. Without ROI, there's no pot at the end of rainbow, so you have to focus on those activities/metrics that provide the largest gains.Therefore, here are five online marketing metrics you should be looking at every day....
Overall usage on social media platforms is exploding. Millions and millions of consumers are expressing likes on Facebook, tweeting about products on Twitter, and pinning on Pinterest every single day. Retailers and brands are therefore increasingly focusing their attention on social commerce. But, many struggle with the question: how do you convert a "like," a "tweet," or "pin" into a sale? In a new report from BI Intelligence, we look at successful examples of businesses and business models for generating commerce via social media-based strategies, analyze Pinterest's success as a social commerce platform, look at Facebook's potential as a social commerce contender, and examine the e-commerce conversion and order value gap. Here's an overview of the converging trends that promise to transform social media into a viable commerce platform....
How are you measuring the ROI of social media? Do you measure up against your peers? Does the ROI of social media meet your expectations? Do your metrics help make better business decisions? ROI of social media ROI means return on investment and when we talk about the ROI of social media we’re looking at metrics to evaluate your increased sales as a function of expenses to drive those sales. But, that’s really hard to do since there really isn’t a direct link between social media and sales. In the infographic below, see some of the surrogates for return firms use to evaluate their social media marketing campaigns....
Secrets to millennial marketing success? ... Fromm recommends small businesses constantly make “little bets,” taking small risks on novel products and services that might hit big. “If you’re going to win with millennials, you have to temporarily suspend your notion of ROI and EBITDA,” he says. “You have to make little bets and see if they win or lose in the real world. Test things that are way beyond your definition of normal and see if they work. Technology allows you to do that every day.” Social channels will tell you quickly if your wagers are effective or not. “The little-bets theory is based on the fact that millennials are willing to experiment because it’s part of their adventurous DNA,” Fromm says. “And if it’s a hit with millennials, others will follow.”...
If you work in digital, you're probably getting a bit tired of the ROI question by now. We are all tasked with justifying our pitches and projects with proving where the ROI lies directly. ...Since it’s physically possible to buy from the place that you’re running your digital campaign, we’ve assumed that this is how we judge success. That’s where we’ve gone wrong, and where we will keep going wrong. We’ve thought that because you can just be a click away from buying a product or converting on a website, if users don’t do that straight away, it’s a failure. So the ‘trust’ remains in costly methods such as TV, which will never be expected to prove this because they can’t. Buying Behaviour To understand this, we need to think about the process of how we buy something versus what we engage with online. A recent study released by Invodo found that consumers are 174% more likely to buy something after watching a video about it online. While this is a wildly encouraging figure that will probably need to be toned down a bit, this finding in itself is significant. The fact that we’re more inclined to buy something from a brand after engaging with it online is what’s important. An increased likelihood to buy is all that should ever be asked of an online campaign, particularly one that is content led. To force a transaction at that point, or to judge that as an indicator of success is detrimental....
A recent study conducted by the online marketing firm Vertical Response and reported on in Forbes concludes that small businesses are spending more time on social media but struggling with the added workload it represents. Perhaps as a consequence, most are doing social media marketing in a vacuum because they’re not tracking results, which means they have no way of quantifying if their time and effort are paying off. “Our survey confirms that small businesses are understanding the value of social media,” says Vertical Response CEO and founder Janine Popick. “They’re spending more time doing it, and investing more money into it at a faster rate. But the extra work will likely lead to time management issues, especially for the small business owner who’s handling social media on top of all the other responsibilities of running a company. This implies that small businesses are in need of tactics and tools now to help them save time.”...
Unfortunately, like other marketing channels out there, social media, is still not without its own set of growing pains. Most businesses today commit critical and costly mistakes when setting up their social media marketing campaign. So to help you, I’d like to discuss the top 3 mistakes in social media marketing and ways you can avoid them so you can get the biggest return for your marketing investment....
Many marketers today are looking to increase their Facebook fans, LinkedIn memberships and/or Twitter followers. Social media marketing is a new buzz-word in both b2b and b2c domains. But, when it comes to engagement, how easy is it to measure the engagement-level of your Facebook fans or LinkedIn Group Members? How easy is it to interact with them and nurture them? How easy is it to get usage and engagement metrics out of Facebook, LinkedIn et al? Is it even possible? Can you act on the metrics? External social sites are good for brand-building (or reach) but not for interaction or engagement. A recent Gartner report cited that a mere six percent of marketers claim that marketing on social networking sites is their top priority. What is even more powerful is that 45 percent of those surveyed said corporate websites were key contributors to marketing success. And from the customer perspective, four out of five customers claim to visit a website for product information and only a mere 19 percent would visit a Facebook page, according to Incyte Group....
Think you’ve got the social media thing down at your business? Think you’re squeezing every last bit of benefit by utilizing online marketing across a variety of social platforms? Think again. Because there’s no way you’re getting the most bang for your social media buck if you’re only using it for marketing. Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes tells Fast Company that according to a McKinsey report, social technologies have an untapped business value of $1.3 trillion. “And most of that comes from improved office productivity,” says Holmes. “In the year ahead, expect enterprises to embrace social media tools – including internal networks, real-time chats and wikis – for uses that go way beyond the familiar applications for marketing and community building.” How can you tap into some of that value? Here are a few of the departments besides marketing that could be making good use of social networks...
Here's the thing. Search works, but only if, as a brand, you know what it's worth to you. Too often brands allow outside influences (competitors, corporate vanity of presence, top-line revenue) to shape their buying strategy. Just as damaging is taking what eBay has published as anything more than one unique company taking a curious public position around corporate buying choices. It's not dissimilar from GM's declaration of Facebook failing it. Brands need to understand what search is worth to them. Accepting this study as gospel is no more palatable than accepting the long-standing Google view that if it's delivering, you should just keep writing checks. There's a proper brand point of investment in search for any company, just like any other media channel....
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Lots of social media insight from this post which looks in detail at how leading global trends perform in various social media. I found a lot of valuable insight and actionable marketing ideas.