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Archive for month: June, 2016

Getting the best from Facebook updates for business

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before

Before starting – cramped text and hyperlink not embedded

A quick tutorial showing good practice to encourage click throughs.

We start with a quick look at the “before” scenario.  The text is continuous and the url (hidden in the image) is not embedding correctly.  The post gets no clicks or click throughs to the website.

  1. Before starting – cramped text and hyperlink not embedded
  2. Type the URL first and then Facebook allows you to select the image you want
  3. Inserting blank lines in the text spaces it out and forces the “See More” link to appear
  4. Corrected hyperlinks to See more and Hyperlink to your website or blog.

 

correct image upload

Type the URL first and then Facebook allows you to select the image you want.

Separate lines

Inserting blank lines in the text spaces it out & forces the See More link to appear

Moving forward to some of the resolutions – each one is explained in the caption.

Facebook business post errors

Corrected hyperlinks to See More and site link.

 

 

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BC Prime Stack Digital Marketing

Fresh ideas for your digital marketing

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Self-education is important in life and particularly in digital marketing.  So many people tell us they “don’t know where to start” or “am I getting good advice?”.  And so we always say, go and research the topic.  Find out as much information as you can and become informed.

One way to shortcut this research process is to buy training or coaching from an expert and today we’re giving you the opportunity to buy a stack of tutorials in our best value online marketing education offer.

Our friends at Blogging Concentrated, Dan Morris and Rachel Martin have pulled together the BC Stack.  It’s a one-off promotion for 7 days with a large number of products all for sale together for a single price of US$27 (approx NZ$37).  We have contributed the Proactive B2B New Biz Toolkit to the stack.

Conrado has reviewed the full product list and summarised them into categories so you can appraise the area of most interest to yourself.  All the names in bold are personally known to the CAS team.

#Content Marketing

  • Write Nonfiction Like A Pro – Tom Corson-Knowles
  • 101 Viral Titles – Rachel Miller
  • Podcasters Secret Weapon – Launch Guide – Luis Congdon
  • Really Simple Content Marketing – Connie Ragen Green

#Social Media

  • Stop Guessing: Your Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Social Media Strategy – Jenn Herman
  • How to Shoot Multi Camera Facebook Live Videos – Holly Homer
  • Ultimate Evergreen Facebook Ad Formula – Maria Gudelis
  • Social Imageries – Jam Mayer

#Affiliate Marketing

  • Affiliate Marketing Masterclass – Robin Cockrell & Lesley Stevens
  • Introduction to Affiliate Marketing – Gavin Male
  • Bloggers Guide to Affiliate Marketing – Katie Hornor

#Entrepreneurship

  • Branding from the Inside Out – Isabelle Mercier-Turcotte
  • Write Kindle Books Ridiculously Fast: 1 Book Every Month! – Marc Guberti
  • Simple Platform Building 101 – Joe Pardo
  • Small Blog, Big Income – Carol Tice

#Growth Hacking

  • 31 Days to Get More Customers, Increase Traffic, and Boost Sales – Prerna Malik
  • The Growth Hacker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Mark Hayes
  • Leveraging Systems and Automation for Massive Profits – Johann Noguiera
  • 30 Day List Building Funnel – Jo Barnes

#Leading Edge Tools

  • Facebook Live Quickstart – Chris Lockwood
  • Podcast Prospect Machine: next level strategies – Vernon Foster II
  • Podcasters Launch Guide – Luis Congdon
  • Google Analytics Dashboards – Clare Swindlehurst
  • Why brands should be social listening – Jason Falls

#Business To Business

  • How to research your competition – Sharyn Sheldon
  • Done for your marketing templates – Alice Seba and Ron Douglas

#Productivity

  • How to Hire Help – Lisa Kelly Woodruff
  • 25 Incredible Internet Marketing Checklists and Worksheets – Brian Basilico
  • 50 ways to increase productivity a guide for the self-employed – Cyn Gagen
  • The Ultimate social media productivity system for entrepreneurs – Yolanda Spinks

#New Zealand Authors

  • Introduction to Affiliate Marketing – Gavin Male
  • Proactive B2B New Biz Toolkit – Rebecca Caroe
  • Social Imageries – Jam Mayer
  • Blog Writers Bootcamp – Mary Jaksch
  • The Growth Hackers Guide to the Universe – Mark Hayes
  • The Go To Girl – Natalie Cutler-Welsh

The BC Stack offer runs from 28th June NZT until 2nd July NZT

[button_3 text=”order-now.png” align=”center” href=”http://bloggingconcentrated.com/members/aff/go/rcaroe/?i=34″ new_window=”Y”/]

 

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local marketing strategies for your business

10 marketing strategies for a local business

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What are some breakthrough marketing strategies to grow and scale a local business?

Local teeth whitening business, already doing FB ads, Instagram ads, Adwords, little bit of content marketing on YouTube and will be “scaling” those channels over the coming weeks/months, but wanted to know about offline strategies or where else online I can get the best value for my marketing spend.

Great question – local marketing is absolutely essential nowadays.  Especially as few people are navigating social media looking for tooth whitening services, these will become more profitable than online over time.

Here’s a quick list of tools I suggest using to bolster your current work. 

  1. Set up a Google My Business account and get it address-verified (they mail you a code)
  2. Keywords – ensure city/ town / suburb / state or county are all included in metadata
  3. Directory listings – Get yourself listed on free and paid sites.  If you can afford a small spend www.brightlocal.com is worthwhile
  4. Use Facebook local targeting for advertising / brand building
  5. Set up Google Alerts for key phrases in the news that could allow you to comment / contact / build a mailing list
  6. Join the local Business Associations and contact all the relevant local business members
  7. Go to Networking events (BNI, Chamber of Commerce, Meetup.com, Eventbrite)
  8. Get happy customers to write Testimonials on Google My Business.  Also, reproduce them on your website
  9. Use media relations to get articles in local newspaper, local radio, local newsletters, (check out Yahoo Groups for local lists)
  10. Ask for Referrals – by sending two business cards with your invoice
  11. Make specific requests for social sharing via your accounts
  12. Surprise and delight the customer – e.g. pay it forward – you pay to have your teeth whitened, and I give a free treatment each month to a deserving individual and use that for publicity.

I hope that gives you a load of great ideas to be getting on with. 

But if you’d like specific coaching on what to do for this client – get in touch.  

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Freelancer Vs In house

In-House Vs. Freelance Writers: The Pros and Cons

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Marketers rely heavily on high-quality content to drive traffic to sites and landing pages and forge a strong relationship with their target market. And while lots of content is visual and auditory, like videos, infographics, photographs and podcasts, writers are still essential. Content writers don’t just work on blog posts and website content; they’re also needed to write compelling descriptions or explanations of the other content that you are sharing, like videos, and any other written copy that’s essential to encouraging interest in a product, like landing page sales pitches. Whether to hire an in-house writer or a freelancer is a bit of a debate between content marketers, so we’ve discussed some of the pros and cons.

Freelancer Vs In house

Freelancer Vs In house

Pros of In-House – You’ve Always Got a Writer

Well, unless they hand in their notice, one of the most obvious pros of hiring an in-house writer is that you have a writer on your payroll. You can go to them in the office at any time of the working day and ask them to write something for you and since they’re right there, explaining to them what you want in person can be a lot easier than trying to make it make sense over an email. On the other hand, freelance writers often work for a variety of different clients so you might not always get an answer from them immediately and it might be necessary to wait a little longer to get your content.

Cons of In-House – It Can Get Expensive

Depending on the amount of writing that you need doing, hiring an in-house writer on a salary can get expensive compared to working with a freelancer, who’ll usually charge you only for the work he or she does. Unless you are churning out tons of written content on a day-to-day basis, hiring an in-house writer might be a totally unnecessary expense for your business.

Pros of Freelancers – You’ll Get More Choice

Contrary to hiring in-house, where you need to hope that there’s a talented writer looking for work in your local area, working with a freelancer means that you can choose from talented individuals across the country or even abroad. It’s not uncommon for freelancer writers to work with clients overseas, so your top writers could be a thousand miles away.

Cons of Freelancers – Communication Might Not Be as Easy

Tools like Slack, Zoom, Google Hangouts and even Skype have made it easier than ever to communicate with freelancers, so don’t think that communicating with your freelance writer is going to be hard – it probably won’t be. But bear in mind that if you’re working with a writer who sets their own hours, or is in a different time zone to yourself, they might not always be available at the times you want them to be, compared to an in-house writer. Of course, this can be made as easy as possible to deal with from the start by making your needs clear and working with a writer who can fill them.

So, there you have it – the pros and cons of hiring in-house and freelance writers. Which is the best option for your business?

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Digital Day Out #ddo16 conference notes

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Dan Waugh, Comvita

Marketing is about creating emotive experiences with a product or service.  Dan Waugh works for Comvita as a ICT / futurist.

Virtual reality enables you to create an emotive experience that’s better than video.  Dan showed us a real video they shot in 360 video of Manuka bee hives to get experience as a test.  They had 6 Go-Pro cameras on a helicopter.  The test shoot showed it was possible.

Mark Pascall, 3Months

The more we transact with global databases the more vulnerable we all are to hacking.  Local walled gardens of unique logins / byelaws and reputation management are challenges.

Blockchain allows a transfer of value to happen without a trusted middleman in a distributed ledger.  Rooted in Bit Torrent peer to peer distribution,   Everyone can become a node on the network.  The genius of blockchain is to associate the P2P with a ledger.  Its immutability is its strength.  The ‘experiment’ worked – it’s unstoppable too.

The insight was to store non-transaction information.  Anything that has importance to humankind e.g. birth and deaths.  You want an un-hackable record.  Insurance claims, house ownership, medical procedures, voting – are all projects going onto the blockchain now.

Ethereum is a new blockchain platform for smart business contracts that are set into the blockchain timeline.  Ether is the currency that pays for contracts to go onto the Ethereum and they execute – nobody can block them.

DAO distributed autonomous organisation the first one is TheDAO who raised $150m from the crowd. The money started being siphoned out last weekend and everyone is watching…. the contracts are being executed but nobody knows where it’s going.

IOT (internet of things) that talk to the Ethereum network enables the disintermediation of merchants e.g. AirBnB.  Users having control of their medical records could be a good blockchain application. Also cross-brand rewards loyalty cards bypassing the loyalty organisation.

A marketplace using smart contracts and enabled by bots buying and selling. IT could allow power / wealth / control to be more evenly distributed.

Richard Thompson, Kpex

New business 2015- a premium advertising exchange group owned by NZMe, Fairfax, Mediaworks and TVNZ with other inventory too. Kpex’s goal to protect premium advertising sites through programmatic.  From Mad Men to Math Men

The new competitive set is social use (100% of the room) versus print newspaper readership (5%).

He sees his path to “wrestle control back” to enable publishers to compete credibly for the advertising dollar.  Continuity plus change in media – high trust in old brands, TV is important news source and print employs most and generates the stories. Change in the old financial models not working, cultural change plus understanding the new audience habits.

He estimates that 90% of all advertising will flow programmatically within a decade of which the spend will grow 40% this year over 2015 to $21.5 Bn globally.  The shift is from buying mass audiences to buying individuals and their actions.  More focus on the “scalable audience of one” as the objective changing the message to match the audience.

It’s growing fast because buyers can buy efficiently, data and audience targeting plus avoidance of advert fraud from low quality websites.

  1. Good creative is as important as ever  Many targeting points don’t mean you need lots of different creative variants.  Seek the human truth across your brand – scale and effectiveness.  Bring your agencies on the journey with you. Media agencies may lead but must bring creative agencies along.  The creative is the single biggest factor on performance.  (targeting is second)
  2. Environment still matters – surround yourself with quality content to aide view-ability
  3. Be smart with data and target at scale.  Many small niche audiences with low $$ wastage is good but will not scale.
  4. Choose your partners wisely (self-referential!).  Technology understanding is important, how does the agency set up their trading desk; how to structure your account.
  5. Know the market – it ebbs and flows and buying can be efficiently optimised to lower costs of sale.  Start of month some people are resetting their budgets – towards the end of the quarter it can get expensive as budgets get spent.

Cassie Roma, Social Media for Air NZ

Air NZ is the country’s most-loved brand and so success is engagement, reach, community size.  Goal is to be top 10 airline in social in the world (now 11th).

Show, Don’t Tell is the mantra.

Audiences growing Instagram is part of her brief.  Images are crew, influences, causes they support.  Facebook drives conversion and sales, Instagram is an oasis of brand.   Audiences love plane porn!

Facebook focus is in the story we are telling – people first and the social side of social media.   They joined Tinder as a brand for Valentine’s Day “Swipe Right, Take the Flight”.  Video push with partner from movie Hunt for the Wilder People – we support kiwi artists – they spent $250 boosting the Facebook video.

The Safety Videos now are uploaded direct to Facebook (embedded player) before they used YouTube.  Gee in the team is the Air New Zealand Fairy!

Twitter is very productive for brand, conversion and interaction – the cost per view in Twitter for video is sometimes is better than Facebook.  It’s the first touchpoint for customer service.  8 team work 24/7 in customer support on Twitter.

Use #AirNZShareMe hashtag when you fly and the team re-shares customers’ pictures.

Snapchat is the place where it’s about a real true form of communication – quick and genuine. AirNZ use MishGuru to share Snapchat but it’s quick and fast and allows deep engagement – most engaged channel.  Lots of User Generated Content UGC.   Destination features on Snapchat quickly – can post a lot and not overwhelm.

Used social media influencers – Logan – his Kiwi OE on Snapchat – managed locally.  Selfies are big and engaged stories are strong performers.

They give a big destination picture for #AirNZ/BrainTrust We know one thing about (Santa Monica) what do you know? Very successful content streams across channel.  We go where people recommend and then mention them again.

Millennials – be relevant and genuine, know what you stand for, concentrate on the experience, make digital easy, influencers, make the journey one of self-actuation and self-discovery.

#AirlineWager agreed times of day when the teams would communicate online (not what we’d say).  Ran for 2 weeks.  and #projectblackout against the Quantas Instagram feed – use black emojis to comment or like their images.

Air NZ Social Team uses these tools

  • SocialBakers for benchmarking against competitors, especially advertising and dashboards
  • NetBase for Social Media Analytics, sentiment and mentions
  • Conversocial to manage workflow between brand and social team
  • Hootsuite to monitor live mentions

Monica Bloom, Getty Images USA

Zig when others Zag.

  • Know your audience – pinpoint who will help you tell a new story in another way. What are their motivations?
  • What are they doing that I’m not doing?
  • Is this scary? (if it’s not you aren’t zigging!)
  • Can we get this done without a committee?

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How to get testimonials for your business

How to get testimonials for your business

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 Firstly get a page set up on your domain where you can drop in all the quotes we get from clients.

Recommendations:

  1. Lay out the page so the most recent testimonial is at the top and the reader scrolls down to see others.
  2. Take all testimonials and make a long and a short “sound bite” version.  Put the short version on the Testimonials page.
  3. Copy the long version of each testimonial to a blog post – and link to it from the short version on the testimonials page.
  4. Link to the client website (like we do on the Creative Agency Secrets Testimonials page).  It’s nice to give back some strong SEO link juice.
  5. Have a plan about how you are going to set up the business process to get new testimonials regularly from clients and customers.
  6. Also ask for testimonials on your Google My Business page.  Note, you have to have a gmail address in order to upload these so it can be a big ‘ask’ for some clients for whom that’d be a challenge to set up.

Here’s a case study of a cute campaign we ran to get testimonials and support a good cause.

Now, where else can you get testimonials….. Linked In, Facebook, Neighbourly (NZ local media), Yelp, Finda….. over to you to share yours.

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Joint Venture Case Study

Case Study: feel good joint venture for sporting website

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Recently Creative Agency Secrets oversaw a joint venture campaign between our client, Rowperfect UK, the premier rowing education website, and manufacturer Crew Stop. The goal of the campaign was threefold:

  1. Raise awareness for National Learn To Row Day (4th June), a popular annual event in the USA but a concept that hadn’t yet carried over to other anglo-speaking countries that Rowperfect reaches;
  2. Encourage the use of rowing gloves and reduce the stigma amongst “hard” rowers of hand protection;
  3. Drive sales of the Crew Stop gloves stocked in Rowperfect’s online store.

Planning & Execution

Planning began in early May, when Rowperfect reached out to Crew Stop and proposed a partnership. As part of the joint venture, Crew Stop would provide gloves to give away to Rowperfect’s readership and art and assets to promote the awareness campaign, whilst Rowperfect staged a global social media campaign, tapping their 6,000+ twitter followers and 4,000+ Facebook fans.

The partnership between Rowperfect and Crew Stop made perfect sense. It allowed Rowperfect to continue to serve as a source of rowing advice and education whilst reaching the wide audience of watersports enthusiasts who had need for the Crew Stop gloves: Rowers, Scullers, Kayakers, Crossfitters, Dragon Boaters, and Waka Ama canoers.

As well as the competition to win gloves in the week that lead up to the weekend of the 4th of June, Rowperfect offered a discount code to new rowers and Creative Agency Secrets helped the client curate a new section on their website specifically targeted at learning to row for the first time. This new niche will be of value to Rowperfect readers into the future and allows the client to recruit new organic readers and clients. This approach aligned with ongoing project of creating new portals for the client’s key readerships: athletes, coxswains and coaches.

On the blog, Rowperfect published a series of articles about the purpose and uses of rowing gloves and advice around reducing the stigma of glove-wearing. On social media, Creative Agency Secrets coordinated the publication of posts advertising the three goals and the use of the hastag #NLTRD (national learn to row day). Rowers around the world adopted the use of the tag to share their rowing experiences.

Results

By strategically targeting followers of English-speaking rowing clubs with Facebook boosted posts, Rowperfect more than doubled their social media reach in the course of the campaign, increased awareness and engagement with their brand by adding over two hundred and fifty followers to their regular network, and hit internal sales targets.

For advice on arranging running joint ventures in your industry, or launching digital awareness campaigns, give us a call.

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Step 5: Relationship Development

Step 5: Relationship development

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This fifth step is where the hard work, diligence and persistence pay off in your search for success in new business development.

People buy from people they know, like and trust and so having an active relationship with prospects who remember your name when they want to and can get in touch with you easily when they want to is very important.

How memorable is your business?

People are forgetful. What are the ways that prospects use to remember your business?

I know people save the newsletters that I mail out. I find people write replies to Newsletters that I sent months ago and the reason is that they keep them “just in case” they need to get in touch again. Many businesses do not use a business database and this is a shortcoming.

There are many ways to stay in touch with people and it’s beneficial, as your mailing list grows, for you to have some that are semi-automated and do not require a lot of your time in order to fulfil.

Good examples of these are autoresponders and newsletters. We also use social media as a way of staying in front of people we have a set-and-forget process of feeding RSS feeds through to our social media profiles so that we can appear to stay ahead of the news and on top of new developments even though we are not actually watching social media every hour of the day!

Staying memorable

Every business owner should have some form of regular networking in their diary. This could be as simple as a trade professional membership group, your chamber of commerce, or some specialist group for your area of expertise. Meeting people regularly is a very good way of staying front of mind. But beware, these people must be your prospects, not your competitors!

One way to find out if you are doing well in your relationship development is to track the number of new people we put into the business database. I collect business cards from as many people as I can who I think maybe of potential future interest to the business. This includes suppliers as well as prospective clients.

How and where do you get business cards? And what do you do with them?

It is important to have a careful plan to stay in touch with new people you meet. Some of them you want to spend time with and have a slowly developing individual relationship, others you can use mass communication. When planning your marketing, you need to think through these processes and organise all the communications necessary.

I have two special face-to-face relationship development techniques which I use. One is my circle of influence. The other is unhurried conversations.

A circle of influence is a small group of people who regularly feed new work through to us. These are people in parallel businesses whose services precede ours in the business service cycle. I meet with them on a quarterly basis or speak to them on the phone and they send us new enquiries and we are also able to reciprocate work back to them.

Unhurried conversations work on a slightly different format. It is a social event in the evening where I gather a group of interesting people around our board table for some afterwork drinks and nibbles. We use a format whereby only one person may speak any time. This forces everyone to listen carefully to what is being said. There is no agenda. The conversation takes whatever direction it wants to go. Learn more about the unhurried conversations format at this website. It is interesting that in this busy age of connected people and individuals so many people value a slower pace of talk, chat and interaction. Working at the slower pace allows my guests to take their time in thinking and considering whether they might work with us.

In summary – formalise all methods of building relationships between the business staff and prospective customers.

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Guest article

Should I accept Guest Articles on our website?

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Do you get emails from content marketers offering to give you articles to publish on your website?

Guest Bloggers Welcome image by Trafficado.com

Guest Bloggers Welcome image by Trafficado.com

Sometimes these can seem suspicious because they come from an unfamiliar email.  And so I thought this was a good time to review the opportunity that guest articles offer to business websites.

Is it on-topic?

A client of ours just got approached to see if they’d run a guest post on their blog. The article offered is on a relevant topic to their area of expertise.  So that’s an easy first step. 

Why Guest Posts can be good

There are two sides to guest articles – one is to be the writer and the other is to invite others to write for you.

I see any invitation to guest post as a very positive step for a business website. 

Firstly, the writer recognises your brand is an expert on this topic.  And they also see that you have an audience for these things (that’s the power of marketing and social media).  Our client got their approach after using the hashtag #growthhack on some social media updates – this brought them to the attention of the writer. 

Here’s what I wrote to my client who had been approached

“My view is that if a guest can submit an article that’s ready to publish on this topic we can give him a platform, while introducing the topic appropriately as being a “guest writer” or similar.”

The bigger picture on guest articles

As a professional business you need to be cautious about accepting articles because of brand value alignment and the potential for the unscrupulous to use your respected website for inappropriate means.

But if you are a business seeking to grow your audience, finding an aligned partner who accepts your articles in a reciprocal arrangement and who is not a media outlet (newspaper or social media site) this is a very good idea.

When their audience sees and reads your opinion, they may be enticed to get in touch and buy your services.

What if their views don’t match your own?

Any topic has more than one point of view.  The mature, business approach is to be balanced.  If your website is seen as a trusted resource, it can also be a platform to amplify the public discussion on these matters. These do not have to be the opinion of you or your staff.

If you choose, you can write a response to the guest article putting the opposing point of view.  This could start a public discussion on the matter.

Things to ask the guest writer

You need reassurance about the quality of the writer and their authority and expertise. 

  • How many people have they got on Linked In following?
  • Would they mail a link to the article when it’s published on our site to their contacts?
  • If we get any comments, will they make themselves available to answer them?

Be prepared to check

  • Audience alignment
  • Brand profile compared to yours
  • Web traffic on their site compared to yours is sizeable and suitable
  • Link-backs are allowed (this builds SEO)
  • Discuss if payment is to be made
  • Discuss attribution and whether they will be identified as a guest writer

Your marketing or PR agency can help you find suitable partners for joint marketing promotions – we ran these for Hushamok who sell baby crib hammocks using Facebook online contests and very successfully gained brand awareness, direct sales and also grew their newsletter subscriber audience.

In summary, I see this as a very positive, independent verification of your marketing positioning and wide reach into the global audience for your area of expertise.

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