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Just How Digitally Literate Are Your Salespeople?

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By  Colleen McKenna 

During a recent interview with a potential salesperson, they asked how many cold calls they would be expected to make every day. Several thoughts raced through my head at that moment.

Do you actually understand what we do at Intero?

Do you realize that cold calling is one slice of a much larger sales process?
How many cold calls do I make in a given week, month, year? (The answer is none.)
Why is this the first question asked?

That’s a lot of questions in the milliseconds before I answered, “I have no idea since cold calls wouldn’t be how we would initiate a conversation with another person.”

To create the proper context, this salesperson’s experience of sales was cold calling day after day. In the end, they had no sales experience; they only had experience phoning people they had never met or talked to previously. Big difference. I had to recalibrate my thinking.

They were initiating potential opportunities for others to pick up, further qualify, engage, sign and work alongside. In today’s world that’s not unusual. Developing “pipelines” or sales development reps is smart. Breaking down assignments within the sales process is now pretty common within larger organizations.

However, if you are a small organization with a small sales team and are trying to hire a salesperson, there are questions you should ask that may not seem obvious.

A CEO asked me about this just the other day. He said he recently realized that he needed to ask different questions when interviewing sales professionals. He needed to understand their digital skills and literacy.

So, we tossed around some questions and here’s what we landed.

  • Ask them to explain their sales process.
  • In what part of the sales process have they seen the most success?
  • In what part of the sales process do they get the most jazzed about?
  • What are their digital sales skills? Ask them to share the top five apps, Chrome extensions, and websites that help them with their sales process.
  • What digital tools do they use to gather information, monitor and engage? If they say LinkedIn, that’s NOT a sufficient answer. It’s a no-brainer, duh kind of response. The better question is, “Tell me ten ways you use LinkedIn within your sales process.” If they can’t think of ten ways they use LinkedIn, they aren’t using LinkedIn with any level of proficiency. End of the conversation.
  • How do they build their personal/professional brand?
  • How do they network? Stop Networking and Actually Get to Know People
  • What differentiates them as a sales professional (notice, I did not mention the word salesperson.)
  • How do they incorporate marketing strategies and techniques into their sales process?
  • Are they comfortable leading all aspects of the sales process/cycle?
  • Provide examples where said process has been successfully implemented.
  • How will they remain focused on sales and not fall into an account management role?
  • What are the KPIs they think are critical for measuring their performance (You might not agree, remember you’re gathering their insight at this point. Revenue may not be the answer, either.)
  • What do they know about your industry and company?
  • How would they start a conversation today if they had to?
  • If they are coming from a larger company that had a marketing department creating and providing content, inbound marketing, and a full martech stack, how will they manage in a smaller company like yours that may not have that in place? (I’d be looking for ways they will be incorporate what they learned from their previous company on a smaller scale.)

The person I talked with missed that we work with clients who want to incorporate new methods to initiate and engage with a potential customer or candidate. If we started with circa 1979 cold-calling what would that dialing for dollars approach say about our business model and us? By the way, we begin in LinkedIn; however, we encourage email, phone calls, events, etc. as we start to test and see where someone responds.

It’s critical to align your sales process with your business philosophy, mindset, and model. Hmmm…that may call to mind another question or two for you to ask when you interview sales professionals.

Test these questions out on your next round of candidate interviews and by the way; it’s not too late to ask them of your current sales team. It may point out that you have some re-aligning to do.
Let us know if these questions uncover new insight into your sales team or process.

Feature Image Credit: QuinceMedia / Pixabay

By  Colleen McKenna 

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Sourced from Business 2 Community

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Brand monitoring – What are the benefits and what can I monitor?

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By Tom Bracher

Brand monitoring is the strategic and proactive monitoring and analysis of a brand’s growth, reputation and associated brand content. It’s carried out through the investigation of media and online sources, to unearth, report on and respond to different conversations and awareness around brands or a specific brand and their competitors.

Brand monitoring tools or platforms monitor content from the web, whether that’s news articles, blogs, web pages or social networks. They provide in-depth data analysis on what, how and when there are discussions taking place surrounding a brand, a competitor or a client.

What are the benefits of monitoring my brand or my competitors?

  • Tells you how people are receiving your brand on various forms of media and how it’s being discussed
  • Pinpoints any negative sentiment related to your brand that needs to be addressed
  • Provides a detailed overview of brand perception that supports and impacts any future product or marketing strategies
  • Highlights the consumer reaction to your brand or competitor’s brand upon the release of a new product or campaign
  • Understand the audience discussing both your brand and category to plan marketing and communication strategies

Brand monitoring is also hugely beneficial for market research – as you can put together information and insights that are relevant to specific topics and keywords surrounding your brand. This provides a platform toward new and improved campaign strategies informed by reliable market research. With social listening platforms you are able to monitor your own brands and gather advanced insights based on the performance of your own social channels. Thanks to advance technologies of today – AI and data visualization provide a clearer, deeper understanding of how the content associated with your brand has reached its dedicated audience.

What is there to monitor?

Branded Keywords

Before you delve too deep into the industry you’re operating in, the first step is to monitor your own brand. You should look to track your brand name first – but make sure you also include variations of how your brand may be perceived online – such as acronyms, misspellings and common phrases.

If there’s a word associated with your brand name that can be used in a similar context – these are just as important. It also helps to track phrases that include your brand name – perhaps a short description afterwards, such as ‘Coca-Cola soft drink’

Topics and industry trends

Here you should be monitoring the big picture view of the topic you’re looking to cover. Start searching for key topics associated with your brand.

This provides you with insights surrounding phrases your audience use to talk about key topics in your industry. You can then start to pinpoint certain trends that can benefit your content and marketing campaigns.

To get an even better view of topic and industry trends, you can start to focus on web search data and the analytics behind your website. With brand monitoring platforms you can take the same keywords relevant to specific topics and industry trends and see how often they are searched for using search engines.

Influencers and industry micro-influencers

There are so many influencers taking to social media these days that the world of social is becoming somewhat saturated. However, with the help of micro-influencers – individuals with between 1000 and 10,000 followers on a social media platform – there’s still the opportunity to benefit your individual brand strategies.

The reason micro-influencers are so vital to understanding your audience – as well as a key component of brand monitoring – is that they both exemplify and influence your overall audience as well as the individual segments within that audience.

If you can come up with a group of micro-influencers using brand monitoring tools, you can use them for testing out new content strategies or marketing campaigns.

The best way to find micro-influencers is – you guessed it – brand monitoring. You can delve into conversations surrounding topics relevant to your brand to identify social accounts engaging with these the most who have a significant number of followers. These are your micro-influencers.

Brand monitoring is now becoming an essential asset to the success of a business – not only because it gives you a better understanding of your audience. It also influences much of what your brand represents, as well as how your brand is represented.

With brand monitoring you can significantly improve your understanding of what makes a successful marketing and communication strategy – and stay ahead of the competition as you continuously learn what’s working – and what isn’t – in real time.

By Tom Bracher

Sourced from Digital Doughnut

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Facebook Ad Guidelines Cheat Sheet

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By Marc Schenker 

Facebook ads are one of the most cost-effective ways to get attention on your brand these days. Not only are they affordable, but the potential reach is huge.

Unfortunately, though, not many small businesses are getting the most from their Facebook ads! A survey released by website builder Weebly indicated that 62% of small business owners feel their paid ads on Facebook are missing their target. That’s not a very comforting statistic when you consider how many small businesses currently use and advertise on the platform.

The potential is there, however, for small business owners to harness the power of these ads to reach billions of people across the world – and, more importantly, the specific segments of people who would be most likely to become your next customer. While it can be challenging, at first, to get the hang of things, once you do it’s more than worth it.

This cheat sheet is meant to help you get the most from Facebook ads in an easy-to-understand format. It will cover basic Facebook advertising guidelines including:

  • Facebook ad types
  • Facebook ad costs
  • Facebook ad targeting
  • Facebook ad copy and creative
  • Staying competitive on Facebook
  • Analyzing your Facebook ad results

Types of Facebook Ads

It’s vital to have an understanding of what you’re working with when getting started with Facebook ads. To that end, let’s start with the different ad types available to you.

According to Facebook, there are 11 basic kinds of ads available on the platform. These include:

  • Video – Video ads that feature sound and motion (more on Facebook video ads here)
  • Image – High-quality but simple visual ads (more here)
  • Collection – Ads that showcase products from your store’s catalog
  • Carousel – Display up to 10 videos or images in the same ad, each with its very own link (more on Carousel ads here)
  • Slideshow – Ads that use sound, copy and motion to tell brand stories
  • Canvas – Mobile-optimized and full-screen experiences for your customers, directly from ads (more on Canvas ads here)

  • Lead Generation – Carousel, image or video ads that present your leads with a form, after they engage with your ads (more on Lead Ads here)
  • Offers – Ads offering discounts
  • Post Engagement – Ads meant to boost page posts to obtain more engagement
  • Event Responses – Video or image ads designed to drive awareness and responses for events
  • Page Likes – Ads intended to drive page likes and engagement

Which ad type you choose will, naturally, depend on your business type and what your marketing goals are, so be sure to establish your goals first.

Facebook Ad Costs

Facebook is outrageously popular for businesses, even in the wake of bad press about how it handles your data. Much like the auction for Google ads, there’s a bidding process to determine where your Facebook ad appears and how much you pay per click. You’ll indicate how much you want to hand over for precise actions on any given ad, such as views, conversions, clicks, etc. You can manually adjust it or have Facebook automatically make calculations for you, based on your specifications.

Various factors can affect your Facebook ad costs, including the following:

  • When your ad campaigns run (time, date, during peak hours when competition is fiercest)
  • Your specific audience
  • Your Relevance Score
  • Ad placement
  • Your bidding method (set a bid limit on every unique bid or just set your average bid)

As you can probably guess, ad costs therefore can vary quite a bit.

Still, if we look at the averages, we can see some interesting information.

WordStream analyzed hundreds of client accounts to calculate the average cost per click (CPC) and cost per action (CPA) on Facebook for eighteen different industries. They found that the average across all business types was $1.72 per click and $18.68 per conversion.

These are averages, so yours, based on your unique campaigns, could well be different.

What if you’re outside the US? AdEspresso performed a study where it looked at 2017 data to gauge average ad costs in the U.S. and other areas. Here are the findings, in US dollars:

  • CPC average for all countries – $0.97
  • CPC average targeting those 65 and up – more than (Q1) $0.70
  • CPC average targeting those between 13 and 17 (Q1) = $0.11
  • CPC average of Instagram ad placement (Q4) – $1.15
  • CPC average of Facebook ad placement (Q4) – $0.50
  • CPC monthly average – $0.40
  • CPC average on Sundays – $0.40
  • CPC average on Tuesdays and Thursdays – $0.50
  • CPC average of targeting women (Q4) – $0.64
  • CPC average of targeting men (Q4) – $0.50
  • CPC average of optimizing for link clicks (Q4) – $0.44
  • CPC average of optimizing for impressions (Q4) – $3.79
  • CPL (cost per like) average for page like campaigns – $1.08
  • CPL average targeting those 55 and up (Q4) – $0.33
  • CPL average targeting those between 13 and 17 (Q4) – $0.04
  • CPL average per month – $0.12
  • CPL average per week (Q4) – $0.14
  • CPL average cost for women – $0.16
  • CPL average cost for men – $0.11

Looking at ad costs on the platform helps you get a sense of how much of your budget Facebook marketing will eat up. There are, of course, always ways to adjust your targeting and other strategies to lower your Facebook ad costs.

Facebook Ad Targeting

Now it’s time to delve into ad targeting. Here’s where you identify your audience and ensure that the ad content you serve up to them actually appeals to them.

How well you’re able to identify your audience will have a meaningful impact on how much you spend on ads, your ROI, and their overall effectiveness. It pays to spend extra time to accurately define whom you’re targeting.

Facebook lets you go pretty deeply into the traits that define your audience. The extensive targeting options include (but are by no means limited to):

  • Gender
  • Age
  • Location
  • Language
  • Interests
  • Behaviors
  • Life events (such as “recently married”)
  • Education
  • Job title
  • Income
  • Political affiliation

These demographic qualities help you narrow down who will see your ads.

For example, if you’re trying to market to teens on the west coast who speak different languages and are interested in entertainment products, your ad-targeting breakdown might look something like this:

  • Male/female
  • 13 to 19
  • Washington/Oregon/California
  • English/Spanish
  • Entertainment > Live events > concerts

Naturally, narrowing down your audience to those more likely to be in market for your offerings gives you better results than just showing your ads to anyone.

Facebook Ad Copy & Creative

Facebook advertising is just like any form of advertising: the quality of your ad copy and creative goes a long way toward determining your ROI.

One of the most important skills you can master in advertising is the art of persuasion. Famous psychologist Robert Cialdini’s 1984 book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, laid out six unique principles to help marketers convince and convert with greater success. They are:

  • Reciprocation
  • Social proof
  • Commitment and consistency
  • Scarcity
  • Authority
  • Liking

It’s a good idea to infuse your Facebook ads with some of these timeless persuasion principles. For that, you have to consider how you can grab your audience’s attention and persuade them to click using various elements of your ads, such as:

How can you use the principles of persuasion in your Facebook ads? For example, reciprocation can be as straightforward as telling people they can get a free report or ebook if they complete your lead form, while social proof can be something as simple as the number of reactions, shares and comments your ad racks up over the course of its run. More creative, engaging ads tend to get more likes and shares.

Here are some more tips on writing great Facebook ads.

Outdoing the Competition on Facebook

It’s always fair game to see what your competitors are doing—and try to best them. After all, if you can deliver better content to your customers, then you attract their attention and more.

Your competition’s Facebook ads are a goldmine of inspiration for what you can do better in your ads. Simply analyze what their ads are doing right and where there’s room for improvement. Then, implement that in your own ads, especially if you’re competing for the same audience.

Case in point: Skillshare and Udemy are both online learning platforms where courses and how-to videos are available.

Whereas Udemy has an ad touting lifetime access to one course with a 100% money-back guarantee, Skillshare touts unlimited access to all of its courses, all for the price of just $0.99 for two months.

Checking out your competitors’ ads might give you ideas for new value props, CTA’s, or emotional angles to test in your own Facebook ads.

Learn more strategies for competitive advertising on Facebook here.

Facebook Ad Reporting

After you’ve gone through all this trouble to familiarize yourself with how Facebook ads work and hopefully implemented some campaigns, you can’t just expect them to do all the work for you while you sit back. You have to take an active role in your campaigns even when they’re underway, so that you can ensure that you’re getting a good ROI from your ad spend and efforts.

Start monitoring results as soon as you’ve launched one of your ad campaigns. Don’t wait until the campaign has run its course to determine if it was hitting all the right targets or not.

Just head to your Facebook Ads Manager to look at your ads’ performance in real-time. The beauty of monitoring in real-time is you can also respond in real-time by adjusting underperforming ads. Within the Ads Manager, you can easily edit your ads to tweak them to reach better performance.

For example:

  • If an ad’s engagement level is disappointing, try improving the copy or the visuals used in the ad to make it more stimulating and persuasive
  • If an ad’s reach is lower than you expected, try to expand the audience in your targeting parameters
  • If an ad’s conversions aren’t where you want them to be, try improving your call to action by using a more action-oriented verb, or working to improve your Facebook ad landing pages

A final note on tracking Facebook performance: Instead of putting an emphasis on vanity metrics like engagement and the like, you should be focused on tracking the metrics that really matter: sales and ROI or return on ad spend (ROAS). If your ad campaign gets you a lot of reach, clicks and conversions, but you’re actually losing money per sale when you figure in all your expenses, then the campaign’s no good.

That’s why you need to track ad performance and sales first and foremost during the course of your campaigns.

You Can Make Facebook Ads Work for You

Facebook ads have a proven track record of success for small businesses. The fact that they’re cost-effective makes them business-friendly and is just another reason to use these ads. However, not many business owners are using these ads to their full potential—not even close!If you decide to jump headfirst into Facebook ads, you have to have a solid grasp of how the entire platform works, how much you’ll likely spend, the different ad types, optimization strategies, and the need to monitor your ads closely.

Only then will your business get the most from this great platform.

By Marc Schenker 

Sourced from Business 2 Community

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5 Tips for Brands on How to Use Facebook’s New ‘Brand Collabs Manager’ Tool

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Influencer marketing has emerged as one of the more effective ways for brands to spark engagement, drive brand awareness and reach audiences via digital platforms. And with the option growing in popularity, social media giants like Facebook are now looking to better facilitate such connection, enabling improved, transparent brand campaigns which deliver better advertiser results.

Facebook’s latest initiative to foster influencer marketing is its new Brand Collabs Manager tool, which helps to connect brands with relevant content creators for such purpose.

Through the platform, brands have the option of finding influencers who have similar audiences based on various factors (age, gender, interests). These influencers – who have follower counts ranging from 25,000 to 8 million people – also have access to insights and data, making it easier for brands to assess their actual reach and capacity, helping to find the right match.

So how will this impact the world of influencer marketing? In this post, we’ll take a look at how brands can leverage the new platform to fuel up their influencer marketing strategies, and get the most out of their efforts.

Identify the Right Influencer

Brand Collabs Manager enables businesses to establish improved connection with influencers who align with their brand values, vision, and purpose.

Influencers can set up a portfolio that’s connected to their Facebook Page, and present campaigns where they’ve collaborated with brands and incorporated messages and products into their content.

The top relevant creators will also have a percentage match on their profile thumbnail, depending on your listed requirements, while you can also be able to see their audience reach, and set an audience match to see how it compares to yours. From there, you can choose any influencer or group of influencers.

Identifying the right person to represent your brand is vital – influencers with a massive following aren’t always the right fit for your audience. Always remember that quality trumps quantity when determining the right creators to partner with.

Great Content Wins Over All

The pillar of any effective marketing strategy is exceptional content – and that’s no different for influencer marketing.

Influencers are content creators who have become exceptionally successful with their craft – brands should not only focus on the influencers they’re looking to partner with, but even more so, the content they publish, and how that might work in representing their brand. Effective content is authentic, resonates with the target audience and represents both sides well.

With the influx of brands and influencers, you need to get creative to break through the noise and stand out. Think of compelling ways to reach your audience by leveraging various channels and formats.

Authenticity Is Key

Facebook is constantly working to filter out fake content and accounts, in order to ensure users only see transparent and authentic content. This is because consumers want authenticity from brands more than ever.

If you think of influencer marketing as a quick way to amp up sales, you’ll quickly fail. Every influencer should be a true brand ambassador, not just a paid spokesperson.

Instead of partnering with big-name influencers for temporary projects, invest in establishing genuine, long-term relationships with those who truly align with your brand’s vision. Create an authentic relationship with your creator – they’ll feel that you’re more invested in the partnership, and in return, they may also become more invested and be more loyal to your brand.

This kind of relationship will help both sides create content that genuinely resonates with your target audience and which doesn’t come off super salesy.

Personalized Messaging

Personalized marketing efforts have never been more important, and with Facebook’s access to a wealth of data on individual consumers, brands have the opportunity to ramp up their personalization efforts.

Brand Collabs Manager opens up the door for even better-targeted experiences – by serving more engaging ads and individualized content, the audience you’re reaching through influencers will likely be impressed and intrigued to discover more about your brand.

Track Your Performance

In order to gauge your success with influencer marketing and Brand Collabs Manager, you need to consistently measure your data and analytics in order to evaluate how users are reacting to your campaigns.

By using Facebook to track your performance, you’ll be able to better understand the type of content that works, which doesn’t, and what CTAs drive conversion. This will, in turn, help you focus on driving measurable results which boost ROI.

Conclusion

The launch of Facebook’s Brand Collabs Manager emphasizes just how significant influencer marketing has become – and really, the option is growing to form a crucial part of any successful digital marketing strategy.

Brand Collabs Manager is only open to a few brands creators at this stage, but it will soon be available to all. We predict that it will become a major disruption to the state of influencer marketing – and if used properly, it’ll maximize the quality of partnerships between the two parties and drive better ROI.

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Sourced from Social Media Today

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3 Steps to Create an Achievable Project Timeline

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By Larry Alton

Imagine how your next client will react when you maintain your original project timeline or close to it.

Achieving project milestones on time is essential to keep from falling behind. Missing one deadline often results in a series of missed deadlines, and before you know it, you’re buried in incompletions.

Struggling to meet a few deadlines is normal, but perpetually struggling isn’t. Despite project management methodology, if you’re regularly playing catch-up, postponing tasks, and pushing out your timelines, your deadlines probably are unrealistic.

To pull yourself and your team out of perpetual struggle, here’s how to plan a more achievable timeline for your projects:

Work backward from your goal

People have a tendency to overestimate what they can accomplish in a period of time because they haven’t accounted for dependencies. Many make the mistake of basing their estimates solely on the time it takes to perform the task. The worst thing you can do is estimate time for isolated tasks.

By anchoring all tasks to your final goal, your time estimates will be more accurate. You’re also less likely to forget to assign minor tasks. Working backward keeps your eye on the end result and forces you to consider how all goals are related.

To get a complete picture of what’s needed to reach your goal, ask yourself what needs to happen to achieve the end result and move backward. For example, to send out a direct mail piece, you need addresses. You also need someone to write the copy. To hire a copywriter, you need to know who to hire and have the money to pay them. Without working backward, you might miss the fact that you also need someone to stuff, stamp, and mail the envelopes. Miss that and you’ll be scrambling at the last minute to find someone willing to do the job quickly.

Dependencies are seen best by working backward

Working backward also allows you to see the relationship between tasks and adjust the amount of time allotted for each one. Clarizen points out that determining dependencies is the most difficult part of meeting a timeline. As projects gain complexity, tasks become intertwined with dependencies that aren’t always apparent.

For example, it might take someone five minutes to update the company website, but if the admin account is being used by someone else, it could take hours to complete. Or, if nobody knows the admin account’s password, it could take weeks to get in, putting the project far behind.

Login issues are a significant problem for many businesses. Trying to meet deadlines and not being able to log into administrative accounts is a common reason for postponed projects.

Be specific when defining your ultimate goal

Say you’re a website developer and your ultimate goal is to complete a website for a client. Although you have an idea of what a finished website looks like, you need to get specific. “A finished website” isn’t specific. How you define a finished website is with the material you’ll use to construct goals, milestones, and tasks placed along your project’s timeline.

Define your goal in terms of specific, quantifiable elements. For example, the website might be finished when the discussion forum has been launched, a minimum of 10 blog posts are published, and your e-commerce shop is ready. Defining these specific elements allows you to turn them into milestones and develop tasks that will lead to their completion.

Allow time for breakdowns

No project is immune from breakdowns. No matter how carefully you plan and organize, an aspect of the project is bound to go in an unplanned direction. While planning time for each task or milestone, pad that time for potential breakdowns. For example, if you have a milestone due January 4, push it out by another week. If that milestone is dependent on another task that usually ends up with breakdowns, push that milestone out further.

Clients know timelines aren’t accurate and expect projects to take longer than planned, but imagine how your next client will react when you maintain your original timeline, or close to it. Unheard of, but not impossible. Part of managing client expectations is planning for breakdowns so shifting the original timeline doesn’t double or triple completion time.

By Larry Alton

Larry Alton is an independent business consultant specializing in tech, social media trends, business, and entrepreneurship. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Sourced from InformationWeek

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7 Ways to Use Google Trends for SEO & Content Marketing

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By Roger Montti  

Google Trends is one of the best tools for SEO research.

With these seven tips you’ll be able to extract hidden insights that no other tool offers.

These tips affect keyword choice to content marketing to how to best promote your website.

Google Trends & SEO Strategy

1. Learn Amount of Keyword Traffic

Google Trends is an official Google tool that offers a visual comparison of traffic levels. It does not tell you the exact amount of traffic. But it does show a relative amount.

This is especially helpful if you know the amount of traffic from a related keyword phrase.

Tip#1 How to Obtain More Accurate Traffic Data

If you want to unlock the traffic data of a keyword, compare that keyword with a keyword you already rank for and are familiar with the traffic levels.

Although Google Trends won’t show you the exact amounts, as long as you know the amounts for one keyword, the traffic levels of the other keyword will become more understandable.

2. Gain Insights for Content Marketing

There are two ways to look at the keyword data, stretched across over a long period of time and a short period of time.

Long Period Trends

You can set Google Trends to show you the traffic trends stretching back five years. This is valuable for showing you audience trends.

Upward Trending Long Range Trends

If a trend is going up this means to focus energy on creating content for this trend.

Downward Long Range Trends

If the trend line is moving down, then it may be a signal that audience content consumption is changing.

For example, review this five year trend for WordPress the search term, WordPress the software and WordPress the website:

An image of Google Trends tool showing a five year trend

There’s a clear downward trend for WordPress in all it’s variations. The downward trend extends to phrases such as WordPress themes, WordPress plugin, and WordPress hosting.

Tip #2 Plan Future Content

The long view helps you make decisions about future directions. The long view helps you understand where to put the focus for content. If a product is trending downward, then maybe it’s time to think about shifting content resources to another topic or product or even change the content model altogether.

3. Short View Insights

Viewing keyword trends in the short view, such as the 90 day or even 30 day view can reveal valuable insights for maximizing your content marketing.

For example, two of the top trending keyword trends are How To and and Near Me searches. When you scale down to the 90 day view you can see what days of the weeks those searches are popular.

Tip #3 Plan Publishing Schedule

This takes the guess work out of creating a publishing schedule. Searches related to How to trend upward on Sundays and Mondays. Searches related to Near Me trend on Fridays and Saturdays.

If you have a site or a podcast focused on how to do things or a hobby related site, then publishing on a Sunday, Monday, or Wednesday and sending out an email to subscribers may be the best approach.

If your business is a restaurant, then you know that it is important to have specials, special pricing and so on published by Thursday so that it’s ready for site traffic on Friday and Saturday.

Tip #4 Keywords by Category

Google Trends has the capability to narrow down your keywords according to categories in order to give more accurate data on your keywords.

Image of Google Trends showing trends for the phrase "How To" within the category of "autos"

Tip #5 Keyword by Geography

Google Trends provides keyword information by geographic location. This information can be used for determining what areas are the best to outreach to or for tailoring the content to specific regions.

Keyword popularity information by region is valuable for link building, content creation, content promotion and pay per click.

For example, if a topic is popular in a particular region you can narrow your content promotion to identifying regional magazines, groups and clubs that are related to the niche you’re publishing or marketing to.

Tip #6 Geography Data May Enhance Ranking

Geographic information can also be used to enhance your content so that it is relevant to the most people. Google ranks pages according to who it’s most relevant for, so incorporating geographic nuance into your content can help it rank for the most people, especially if those people begin to promote your content in social media, blogs and podcasts.

Tip #7 Rising Queries

The ability to gain insight into keyword phrases that are rising is quite possibly the most useful feature of Google Trends.

Image of Google Trends showing how rising trends can be discovered

All you do is type in a keyword phrase and this section will give you twenty five related search queries that are trending upwards. This data helps keep you on target with how consumers are changing. It allows you to react to new opportunities.

Takeaway: Google Trends is Useful

Google Trends is an incredibly useful tool. A little creativity yields important search marketing insights. Spend some time with Google Trends, I’m certain you’ll discover insights that will improve how content is created and promoted online.

Visit Google Trends and explore.

 

Feature Image Credit: Shutterstock,

By Roger Montti  

Sourced from Search Engine Journal

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RIP Snapchat: Marketing Experts Reveal What Works in Social Media — And What Doesn’t

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By Jennie Bell

Snapchat is over. Influencers are oversaturated. And content is everything.

Those were some of the takeaways from a panel discussion about social media marketing held Tuesday at the FN Platform trade show in Las Vegas.

The participants included Rollie founder and CEO Vince Lebon, Sam Edelman marketing director Lizzi Bickford, Chinese Laundry marketing manager Alle King and Karen Bueno, Blowfish Malibu’s VP of marketing. FN’s women’s editor, Nikara Johns, moderated the conversation.

FN Platform Social Media Panel
(L-R): Karen Bueno, Alle King, Nikara Johns, Vince Lebon and Lizzi Bickford.
CREDIT: Jim K. Decker

All four executives agreed that the strongest social platforms for brand marketing right now are Facebook and Instagram — particularly Instagram, thanks to its highly visual format.

“With Instagram, we focus on brand awareness and engagement, and there we’re able to build a visual around who the brand is,” said Bueno. “With Facebook, it’s more of a VIP feel, and with those people, they give us their true feelings about [Blowfish Malibu]. That’s been helpful for us in finding out what customers like about the brand and what they don’t.”

Bickford added that gauging the effectiveness of the programs is twofold: “We measure success through engagement, and conversion is also optimal. We’re seeing a rise year over year of about 170 percent on a swipe or click-to-shop [tool]. Those features have definitely enhanced the platforms for us from a brand side.”

As for platforms that don’t work, the executives said they have all abandoned Snapchat completely and use Twitter sparingly. “The biggest result we’ve had with Twitter is if a celebrity or influencer is wearing our shoes and tweeting about it,” said King. “For me as a consumer, I only pay attention to big people and what they’re saying.”

When it comes to working with online influencers, the marketing experts recommended a careful and strategic approach. “Go in with a plan and make sure you’re aligning with the right people. Influencers are great, but the market has become really saturated,” said Bickford, who noted that she likes to meet — or at least speak with — every influencer who works with the Sam Edelman brand. “I want make sure that we vibe and they understand our messaging.”

King noted that microinfluencers have proved to be highly effective at driving online buzz for Chinese Laundry.

But Blowfish’s Bueno advised always checking the numbers before signing a partner. “Look at the engagement of their followers. They may have 2,000 likes on an Instagram photo but no comments,” she said.

For Rollie, while the label does work with social influencers, Lebon and his wife have become increasingly visible in its marketing. “When I first launched the brand, I tried to keep myself separate. But a brand is not what you say it is; it’s what they say it is,” said Lebon. “We found that people connected with our story. So now we’re putting up more photos of me and my wife, and we’re starting to document us living our bucket list. Because we want to empower our community, and the only way is by living what you say. We’ve become the face of it — not by choice, but it feels honest.”

Overall, the executives stressed that in today’s environment, it’s challenging to keep up with changing technologies and to stand out in a noisy digital landscape. But what is essential is having a strong identity.

“Make sure you have a voice, your tone is consistent, and make sure you have a story to tell,” said Bickford. “People want authenticity and content that they can learn from.”

And in the end, brands also need to be realistic about expectations, explained Lebon. “There’s no quick fix,” he said. “We would look at these big influencers and think, ‘If only we could work with them.’ And then you’d get them, and it wasn’t massive. Accept that and stop chasing. Just work on great content and add value to people’s lives. Instead of looking for that one influencer, create something where everyone you touch is inspired and they retell it and then become your brand advocators.”

FN Platform Social Media Panel
(L-R): Alle King, Karen Bueno, Nikara John, Vince Lebon and Lizzi Bickford.
CREDIT: Jim K. Decker

Sourced from FN

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How Ireland Is Fast Becoming The AI Island

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By Alison Coleman

Ireland is brimming with tech talent, which is evident in the quality of the many tech startups that continue to emerge from the Emerald Isle, particularly in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).

Its capital Dublin is also home to the European headquarters of tech giants that include Facebook, Google and Microsoft, while Brexit could be the catalyst for even more international brands to relocate their European HQ from London to Dublin, providing an additional boost for Ireland’s Irish thriving tech startup ecosystem.

Here are five of the most exciting and potentially influential Irish AI startups.

Opening

Founded in 2015 by Romanian entrepreneurs Andreea Wade and Adrian Mihai, Opening is an AI-powered engine that is disrupting the talent acquisition space by enabling recruiters and HR professionals to ensure that the vital CVs are not overlooked.

Opening creates shortlists of suitable candidates for each job, ranking the most relevant, predicting salaries, and providing other valuable insights and data. The technology can analyse thousands of pieces of content about potential candidates, matching them to their ideal jobs, and it can do it in mere seconds. According to Opening’s website, the hiring time for candidates is reduced by as much as 40%, a bonus for time-pressed recruiters who need to fill positions with top talent as quickly as possible. The technology is particularly helpful to large organisations that receive thousands of CVs for a single job vacancy.

Last year the company secured an investment of €30,000 from the National Digital Research Centre (NDRC).

LogoGrab

Exponential growth in the use of images on social media is behind the growing demand for image recognition technology, including that offered by LogoGrab. Technically a Swiss import founded by Italian entrepreneurs, Luca Boschin and Alessandro Prest, the Dublin-based company’s product has been designed to scan millions of images and videos on social media and identify the specific brand logo images that users want to find.

Companies are notified when their image appears somewhere and provided with additional information on how well their digital marketing strategies are working.

LogoGrab, which took first prize in the 2017 Google Adopt a Startup Spring programme, has worked with major brands such as McDonald’s, Heineken, eBay and Nestlé.

Soapbox Labs

One of Ireland’s leading AI companies Soapbox Lab is using smart voice recognition technologies to help children learn to read. Its technology can spot any mistakes they make as they work their way through the pages of a book. As children read out loud, devices and apps that are enabled by the SoapBox technology provide real-time feedback that helps to improve reading skills while tracking overall progress.

Founded in 2013 by former IBM and Bell Labs expert Dr Patricia Scanlon, who has 20 years’ experience in the area of speech recognition technologies, Soapbox Labs can also assess young readers’ fluency with the help of training from more than 600,000 audio samples from 15,000 kids in over 100 countries.

The company secured a €1.5 million EU grant, in addition to  €600,000 from existing backers, bringing its total investment just over €3 million. The cash injection is helping the latest SoapBox platform to developing French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, and Italian recognition capabilities.

Nuritas

Founded in 2014 by Dr Nora Khaldi, Nuritas uses AI, machine learning and DNA analysis to quickly predict, and then provide access to, some of the potentially beneficial components hidden within food called peptides.

Since its launch, Nuritas has carried out research into ways of preventing diabetes through nutrition and made a major breakthrough when it discovered a peptide that has the capacity to destroy MRSA, a type of bacteria  resistant to several widely used antibiotics. The results could lead to the discovery of new food components to help prevent, manage and even cure deadly diseases.

Last December the Dublin-based biotech company secured a €16 million Series A funding led by Chicago-based investment firm Cultivian Sandbox Ventures, bringing its total investment to date to approximately €25 million. This has included funding from a number of familiar, household names including Bono, The Edge from U2, while Salesforce’s billionaire founder Marc Benioff has also backed the company.

Earlier this year collaboration on AI-based discovery of food-derived bioactive peptides was announced between Nuritas and Swiss food and beverage giant Nestlé.

Popertee

Popertee is an AI platform that connects brands with vacant spaces for short-term retail and marketing campaigns.

The business was founded in 2016 by entrepreneur Lucinda Kelly after she had spotted a gap in the short-term rentals market and come up with the idea of creating spaces where brands could launch pop-ups and connect more effectively with their target audience.

The software combines behavioural and social media data to enable companies to identify the best location for their pop-ups or marketing campaigns. Locations scores range from zero to 100 based on the success of the match to the demographics and interests of companies’ target markets. Brands that have used Popertee include Virgin Media Volvo and Coca Cola. The platform also has the capability to measure the impact of campaigns for brands looking for deeper insights on performance, event planning, agencies and venues.

In June 2017 Popertee raised its €500,000 seed round with Growing Capital, European Investment Fund and Enterprise Ireland.

Feature Image Credit: Shutterstock

By Alison Coleman

Follow Alison on Twitter @alisonbcoleman and https://plus.google.com/+AlisonColeman/posts

I’m a freelance journalist, founder of Coleman Media. For the last 20 years I’ve covered business stories for national and international online and print publications, with a special interest in entrepreneurs and their startups. Away from business, I’m an accomplished…. MORE

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How Sentiment Analysis is Changing SEO and Improving User Experience

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We’ve all been recipients of text messages that force us to try and interpret the sender’s intentions. Are they happy? Mad? Does the decision to use a period and not an exclamation mark mean they aren’t excited? Are they trying to be sarcastic? Was that supposed to be a joke?

If we could run those texts through an algorithm that gave us the answer, life would be a lot easier. Unfortunately, we’re not quite there yet. But we do have the next-best thing. Scientists and researchers have developed algorithmic tools that can conduct a process known as sentiment analysis, which contextualizes writing and other communications to determine the general sentiments of the content.

In a short span of time, these tools have become very sophisticated, displaying the ability to go far beyond the positive-negative binary. Thanks to a sentiment algorithm developed at MIT, it’s even possible to interpret sarcasm implied through the use of emojis, according to MIT Technology Review. That’s invaluable when crawling the web in search of brand sentiments from sources where consumers are spouting their opinions on your company.

Considering all the digital channels where consumers put their feelings into words, this is a huge asset for businesses. Emails, social media, blog post comments, reviews websites, customer service exchanges, and a number of other text-based channels can all serve as outlets for analyzing sentiments and better understanding the customer experience—including what shifts in marketing strategy might better respond to this audience’s needs.

There’s simply too much content out there for most brands to dedicate man-power to reading through all of the available feedback. Reading reviews, scrolling through Twitter mentions, and reading through transcripts of customer service conversations wouldn’t just be tedious—it would also be expensive. Employing a tool for analyzing sentiment, by contrast, is much more cost-effective, and it can drive tangible changes to a company’s marketing strategy. Forward-thinking brands are already taking advantage. Here’s a look at some of the ways sentiment analysis has changed everyday marketing activities.

Image attribution: Mac

Great Content Will Reap Bigger Rewards

The process of analysing sentiment has already made its way into search engine algorithms, and its role figures to increase in the future. Bing added this function to its search platform earlier this year, according to Search Engine Journal, and Google has dropped numerous hints about deploying similar services to its search engine in the near future.

One of the biggest changes to search marketing will be the way SEO backlinks are understood by search engines. Currently, any backlink is considered a good one: Links to your content and brand website are used to validate your reputation and authority, which elevates your SEO profile. But if you’ve spent any time on the internet, you know that not every mention of a brand or website is made in a positive way. Where review websites are concerned, for example, numerous studies have indicated that unhappy customers are far more likely to make a post than satisfied ones.

Negative SEO backlinks shouldn’t support your SEO efforts. Eventually, they won’t: These analyses will be able to read the context around these backlinks to identify negative sentiments, and lower your SEO score accordingly. Again, Bing is already giving this a try, but the biggest change will occur when Google makes this analysis a part of its own algorithm.

In the meantime, marketers have a simple blueprint to make sentiment analysis work in their favour. If you create quality content that is relevant to its keyword strategy, offers a strong user experience on the site, and consistently gives users what they’re looking for, then you’re inevitably going to create positive sentiments and backlinks that improve your SEO.

To put it in simpler terms: If traffic that finds your content through search is happy with what they find, it will open the door to even more traffic in the future.

Assessing Product Feedback

 

 

Image attribution: frankie cordoba

Brands need to understand how products are being received by their consumer base. Solicited surveys don’t get the job done: You need to hear the conversations happening among consumers to really get a sense of what’s working, and what needs to be improved.

The study of consumer sentiments can provide this service, creating a comprehensive picture of the user experience offered by your brand’s products, services, and solutions. This analysis goes beyond star ratings to reading into the full context of anecdotal reviews. This is good news for marketers wanting the most comprehensive overview possible because as ConsumerAffairs reports, the influence of written reviews far exceeds the influence of star-rating systems. Not only are they more accurate and nuanced in presenting consumer sentiments, but they also have greater influence on other consumers. Machine-learning tools can comb through online reviews as well as support tickets, chatbot exchanges, support tickets, and other content to gauge overall attitudes toward these products.

The resulting insights could help shape not only the products themselves, but how they’re presented and marketed to consumers. Since the expectations set by marketing content can affect the reception of products by consumers, paying close attention to these sentiments is a valuable exercise.

Upgrading Customer Service

Customer service is the backbone of any successful business, and therefore should always be a driving concern of your brand marketing strategy. Analysis of transcripts, support tickets, and other customer service content—including even private messages sent to branded social media accounts—can power a number of beneficial changes to how brands handle customer service. According to Level, these changes can include better methods of prioritizing support tickets, as well as identifying trends in customer sentiment at various points in a customer service exchange. Brands can then use these insights to adjust their handling of certain scenarios or problems faced by the customer.

Ultimately, these insights can enable proactive customer service and outreach, as well as faster resolution of problems and increased customer satisfaction. This upgrade of the customer experience will, in turn, increase the positive sentiments floating around the internet, which might ultimately improve your SEO and raise the profile of the entire company.

When used to identify and address customer pain points, sentiment analysis can function as a holistic approach to upgrading the customer experience. Its most transformative applications are yet-to-be-seen, but the tools already available to businesses offer plenty of value in gathering feedback, understanding customers, and refining your marketing strategy to better serve the needs of your audience.

For more stories like this, subscribe to the Content Standard newsletter.

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Jonathan Crowl specializes in digital marketing and content creation for both B2B and B2C brands, with an emphasis on start-ups and technology. His past and current clients include B2B brands IBM, LinkedIn, Mad Mobile, Oktopost, BrightSpot, and Waze, as well as B2C brands Porsche, Epson, and PayPal. He lives in Minneapolis.

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The Best Kept Content Marketing Secrets Exposed

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By Danielle Winski 

As we come to the end of summer, consumers are looking ahead to the holiday season, but the upcoming months are more than just pumpkins and holiday decorations. For brands, it’s a time to reflect on what has worked for their business’ content marketing strategy and determine what they need to change for the new year ahead.

As you begin creating your new content marketing plan, it’s the perfect time to expose some of the top industry secrets for successful email, blogging and social media strategies. Keep reading to find out what they are.

5 Email Content Marketing Secrets Exposed

It’s hard to believe that email marketing is frequently overlooked as a valuable content marketing tool for businesses with statistics like:

Sending out an e-newsletter on a regular basis is very important for your company’s overall strategy. In fact, e-newsletters have a return on investment (ROI) of 122 percent. That’s huge! Ready to use email as part of your business’ content marketing strategy? Here are my top-secret insights to create a winning email marketing campaign.

  1. Make the Subject Line a Priority. This is probably one of the most important writing tips! A subject line can make or break your email’s success; in fact, almost a third of recipients open an e-newsletter based on just the subject line. Take the time to really think about the topic of your letter, what would make you want to open an email and incorporate words that boost open and click-through rates like:
  • Alert
  • News
  • Bulletin
  • Daily
  • Weekly
  • Sale
  • New
  • Video

Once you think you have a strong subject line, run it through a headline analyzer, like CoSchedule, to see how it scores. Make adjustments until you get the best possible subject line you can think of.

  1. Include Your Mobile Readers. Is your primary target ages 18-44? Email is the most common activity for smartphone users in this demographic, and the majority of decision-makers check their email from their mobile devices. It’s vital that your e-newsletters are easy to read and are pleasing to the eye on smartphones, tablets and computers.
  2. Keep it Easy to Digest. Speaking of keeping your e-newsletters easy to read, think about their length (this is one of those writing tips that applies to every area of marketing). Remember to keep each e-newsletter easy to digest. Instead of including 7 paragraphs about your latest product, put the details on your website so you can share the most exciting highlights and link to it from your newsletter.
  3. Stick to a Schedule. How often do you send your e-newsletter out? Although a daily distribution is probably too often, you don’t want subscribers to forget about you completely either. Create a schedule and stick to it. I recommend sending at least two distributions a month, making sure to send them approximately the same time every month.
  4. Analytics Are Your Friend. By actually taking the time to look at your open rates and click-throughs, you can determine the best day of the week to send your e-newsletter, in addition to what type of content readers are most interested in.

6 Blogging Content Marketing Secrets Exposed

Follow these six blogging content marketing secrets to take your blog to the next level.

A well-rounded content marketing strategy should also include blogging. As we’ve shared before, updating your business’ blog on a regular basis is incredibly valuable for making your organization visible online (see the statistics in this blog post). While blogging regularly is key, there are a few secrets that will take your blog to the next level; here are six of them.

  1. Quality and Consistency is More Important than Quantity. Even with a staff that can help you write blog posts, updating your website seven days a week requires a LOT of content creation. It’s better to only upload one post per week if you’re consistent – down to the same day of the week and time of day.
  2. Write for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) AND the Reader. SEO is important! But it’s also vital that you write your blog posts with people in mind, not Google’s algorithms.
  3. Share the Love. You’ve uploaded a post to your blog. Great! Now what? You can’t let your post sit there and hope that people will find it. You need to take an active approach to gain readers. Share the post on your social media pages, too. Depending on which networks you use, add a few relevant hashtags to make it more visible as well.
  4. Success Takes Time. Don’t be discouraged if your blog isn’t an instant success. It takes time to build a strong following. It can take 18 months to a year to build momentum and start seeing a noticeable return on investment, but if you are patient and diligent you will reap the rewards!
  5. Take Advantage of Your Email Lists. Yes, social media is a great way to share your blog posts, but so is your email newsletter! Your email lists are made up of readers that have opted-in to hear from you, so use it to your advantage. There are many ways you can use your blog posts on your newsletters including teasing an already published post on your site or giving recipients access to an article before it’s live on your main website. Test out different ways to share your blog posts over a few newsletters and see what resonates the best with your audience.
  6. Images and Formatting are Important, Too. As important as words are, the overall appearance of your website and the blog posts on it make a difference. Use high-res images, think about formatting and consider how your site appears to new visitors. This blogging secret should also include the length of your posts. Keep your blog interesting by including a mix of long (1,200-1,500 words) and short (500-800 word) posts which are easy to read and informative.

4 Social Media Content Marketing Secrets Exposed

With these social media content marketing secrets, you’ll make your audience fall in love with your business.

Social media can be a powerful, cost-efficient tool. When developing a social media content marketing strategy it is natural that some mistakes will be made. However, using it the wrong way could have a big negative impact on your business. Here are four social media marketing secrets that will help you avoid making destructive mistakes.

  1. Learn about Your Customer Base. An important social media marketing strategy that some businesses miss is learning about who their customer base is. You can add people to your contact list and get Facebook fans and Twitter followers ‘till you’re blue in the face. However, if you don’t know who they are, those Facebook fans or Twitter followers are useless to your business. You need to make sure you’re engaging with your customer base. Find out who they are and what they’re interested in to convert those fans and followers into solid sales leads.
  2. Each Social Media Platform is Unique. One big mistake many businesses make in their social media content marketing strategy is treating all their social media networks the same. Each social media network is different, has its own language, customers and audience. It’s important to learn how people are communicating and sharing on each site.

Many businesses blast the same exact message at the same time across all their social media networks not realizing that this can come across as fake, impersonal or even spam-like. To avoid this, you need to be strategic when writing and posting. Make sure you are writing different status updates for each social media network. Also, make sure to learn a bit about how your fans and followers are responding to posts on your social media networks. What are people engaging with more? What times are you seeing the most activity? Once you learn these two things, you can better plan your social media updates so your business is getting the most out of every post.

  1. Make Sure Your Social Media Profiles Are Complete. One of the first things new users go to when they check out your social media network is your company’s bio. If you have nothing written in your “about” section or it’s missing your businesses’ location or website, you’re also missing out on a huge social media marketing opportunity. If visitors don’t know what your company does then why should they follow your social media network? Don’t assume people know who you are and what you do. Even big brand names make sure to have their about sections filled out in detail.

Bonus tip: Be creative! Try to make your “about” section intriguing, fun and engaging. If you’re writing your bio and it seems boring, then it is most likely boring to your Facebook fans too. Check out these two company bio sections for some inspiration: bareMinerals and Wendy’s.

  1. Focus on Quality, Not Quantity. Like newsletters and blogging, quality will always be more important than quantity. Many businesses are far too worried about the number of followers and fans they have, but that number doesn’t necessarily translate to sales. The truth is, your business needs to be more worried about the quality of your audience. It’s more valuable for your business to have a hundred highly engaged brand advocates than a thousand followers or fans that never engage with your brand. The goal is to build a strong community of loyal, lifelong consumers who will boast about your company to their friends and family.

With these email, blogging and social media secrets now at your fingertips, you’re ready to take to your content marketing strategy to the next level.

By Danielle Winski 

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