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Which Brands Have The Best Social Media Marketing?

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By Mike Gingerich

We have always witnessed and admired huge marketing campaigns from global top-most brands like Apple, Pepsi, Adidas and Coca Cola among others. These market leaders invest millions of dollars on viral commercials, and influencer marketing that never goes unnoticed. Unfortunately, not every brand has the financial muscles to compete with the giants. But, no need to worry!

In the last couple of years, social media has leveled the ground for marketers. It is no longer about the company size or the budget. Today, any business can use social networks such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and many others to run effective marketing campaigns without spending millions. Additionally, there are several helpful tools such as rank tracking software by serpbook to enhance your digital marketing strategy.

Effective Social Media Marketing (SMM)

In today’s digital world, SMM is undoubtedly one of the most marketing tools for small to large brands in the world. However, some companies have succeeded in social media, while others are still struggling. It all runs down to the strategy.  For effective social media marketing strategy, you need creativity and unique online marketing ideas which involves:

  • Choosing the ideal social media platform(s) for your business – You may target multiple networks with large and active audience.
  • Understanding your audience – Learn their challenges and what solutions they are looking for.
  • Excellent Communication – Deliver your brand message in simple and precise manner.
  • Great content – Generating regular, interesting and readable content for your audience.
  • Evaluating the SMM strategy – A good example is the use of serpbook rank tracker to assess the progress of your strategy.
  • Improving existing campaigns – Use the analytic tools to identify mistakes and new opportunities in the market and make the right adjustments.

For most brands, the main challenge has always been coming up with creative ideas to execute the right strategy. Below are a few top brands with the best social media marketing campaigns.

Top Brands with the Best Social Media Marketing Strategy

  • Reebok – LinkedIn Masters

The brand is known for its quality shoes and sportswear. Reebok SMM strategy focus on multi-platform digital marketing across a range of social networks. On Instagram and Facebook the brand uses colorful fitness and latest Reebok products photos. It also generates informative visual content for the YouTube Channel.

Surprisingly, Reebok stands out for its successful LinkedIn marketing. Their secret is not only regular update posts, it also creates valuable content for its audience as well as shares links to their blog. Reebok understand its audience and uses videos, simple formatting and photos to attract audience and encourage them to read through.

  • Pop-Tart – Twitter Marketing

A legend in production of toaster pastries, the brand’s Twitter account does it all. Pop-Tart maintains a sarcastic voice on Twitter with a target on young and Twitter-biased demographic. The brand mimics popular accounts and are quick to create their version of any viral or trending content. The brand has over 164, 000 followers on Twitter and more brands in the sector have started to copy their style because it pays off.

Pop-Tart SMM success comes from actively interacting with their audience in a funny way. It works because they have identified the right audience and defined a SMM tone that suits them.

  • Peel – Facebook Ads

Peel has become a powerful brand that deals with stylish phone cases. Its strength comes from its massive social support, especially on Facebook. Peel marketers use Facebook ads to showcase the different features of their products. The Facebook strategy has increased its revenue by over 100%. It also runs a visually impressive Instagram feed.  Peel focuses on differentiating themselves from competitor and telling their story through SMM.

In summary, the common thing across the above brand is simple. A successful SMM starts with understanding your audience and choosing a channel that they use most. It is also evident that choosing a style and tone for your marketing strategy is vital and can win you the right followership. Additionally, it helps to try various strategies, measure their effectiveness and focus on one or two that works best for you.

Sourced from Mike Gingerich

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Influencer Marketing Tips Going Into 2019

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Sourced from onalytica

Recently we hosted our fourth Influencer Marketing Huddle event, gathering senior marketing and PR professionals from B2C, B2B and Not-for-profit brands to bounce ideas and experiences off each other, listen to brand & influencer panels, presentations & case studies and participate in practical workshop sessions where they can effectively create their strategies and outline next practical steps. Attendees left the room with an abundance of excitement, feeling inspired and full of knowledge and ideas.

Of course, nothing beats being in the room in and amongst the atmosphere, but Onalytica are all about educating and helping the industry to not just do influencer marketing, but to do it well. So as we begin to round up 2018 and start planning for 2019, we want to let you in to a few of the top tips shared with the group from the influencer marketing experts, brand experiences and the influencers themselves, around influencer best practice. From identifying influencers and engaging with them, through to measuring the success of the program.

1. Have a clear direction

Our first presentation of the day was from Teri Donovan, EMEAR Audience Expert & Head of Campaigns at Cisco, who shared a case study on how Cisco created their influencer marketing program. She kicked off her presentation with a personal story about her and her husband spontaneously buying a boat. They didn’t know where they wanted to go, or how to do it, but they did it. When they set off on their first journey, they had no real plan or strategy in place, so consequently came across lots of hurdles, such as running out of food and having to trek for miles to find a pub to eat.

This is a great analogy of how lots of brands first approach influencer marketing. Influencer marketing is a huge buzzword at the moment, so lots of brands are starting to do it, simply because they think they should. But they’re starting it blindly without a real plan, strategy or set of objectives in place. So consequently, they hit hurdles and do not reap the full potential.

2. Dream big, start small, learn fast

Again from Teri, she recommended to dream big, start small and learn fast. Create long term objectives and give yourself a vision to work towards – be optimistic, but also be realistic about what you can achieve and in what time frame. In addition to your long term vision, set short term goals to give you focus and get you started. Learn what’s working and what’s not working quickly and use this to accelerate your program growth to hit your long term goals.

Petya, Global Influencer Marketing Manager at NetApp drove this point home in the context of building a business case internally, too: “start small, get the results and then present that as a business case. If you get results, nobody will tell you no”.

3. Writing down your influencer strategy increases your chances of success

Tim Williams, CEO at Onalytica highlighted that simply writing down your strategy will significantly increase your chances of success. Writing it down makes you more accountable, focused and gives you something to reference regularly when measuring program success. This is something that is so simple, yet neglected by most. So make this something you do before entering 2019!

4. Tap into your goldmine of internal influencers

We were very lucky to be joined by Sarah Goodall, employee advocacy expert and Founder of Tribal Impact, who presented our co-authored Employee Advocacy 2.0 Guide.

When we talk about influencer marketing, we immediately think of influencers with big audiences that are external to our brand, when in reality, we are all influencers. Brands have a whole network of influencers right at their fingertips: their employees. Your employees know your brand inside and out and have networks that trust and value their opinion. Shift your focus on helping your employees become influencers and subject matter experts by giving them quality content to share with their audiences, and training them and giving them the tools to create their own content.

5. Integrate influencers into your whole marketing mix

Owain Williams, Founder of Make it Manna highlighted that influencer marketing is often looked at as a totally new and different marketing division. While it is important to have individuals and teams leading on influencer marketing, it is most successful when integrated across all other areas of marketing. Why re-invent the wheel when you can integrate influencers into existing stuff that’s already going on across the business?

For example, communicate and work with your content marketing team to co-create content with influencers, your events marketing team to invite relevant influencers to events and your product team on new product releases.

6. Be transparent with your influencers about your business outcomes

Olly Lynch, Director of Digital Marketing at Travelport, expressed that he wouldn’t invest in any other type of marketing without a breakdown of the numbers & what can be achieved and influencer marketing should be no different. However, when asking the influencer panel if they had ever been set KPIs or objectives by brands, they said they hadn’t, but, they strongly believe that they can indeed help brands achieve business outcomes and so would be willing to have open discussions about this.

While influencer marketing is all about building relationships, brands shouldn’t be afraid to have open and transparent conversations with influencers about their business outcomes. Influencers that can actualyl help you drive these outcomes will be open to discussing and bringing ideas to the table as to how they can help you achieve this. After all, being an influencer is a business – they get it!

7. Do you want top of funnel awareness, or to drive outcomes?

Influencer Marketing and Influencer Advertising tend to be interchanged as terms, despite them being inherently different. Influencer Marketing is all about organically building partnerships with influencers that are aligned with your brand to gain your target audience’s trust, while influencer advertising tends to revolve around paying influencers to bring awareness to your products through their audiences. Both influencer marketing and influencer advertising are effective and have a place in their own right.

If you’re looking to drive top of funnel awareness then influencer advertising can be a great way to get quick wins. If you’re looking to drive consideration and action then organically working with subject matter experts to win your audience’s trust is more appropriate.

8. Marketers are undervaluing early or exclusive access to products and research

Alistair Wheate, Head of Product and Dominik Nosalik, Director of Client Services presented Onalytica’s recent research study into the alignment between influencer and brand partnerships, where we surveyed 267 influencers and 233 brand marketers. What was really interesting, was that 15% of influencers surveyed stated that their main outcome when working with brands is to gain industry insights, while only 2% of brands stated that their main outcome from working with influencers is to carry out research and drive innovation. This highlights a huge untapped for both brands and influencers to collaborate on industry research.

Reiterating this point further, 34% of influencers stated that early or exclusive access to research and products was attractive to them when working with a brand, while only 18% of brands offer this to their influencers.

 

9.  Marketers are overvaluing free tickets to events

On the flip side of marketers undervaluing early or exclusive access to products and research, they’re overvaluing free tickets to events. What this ultimately says, is that influencers feel that they have more value to give brands, than they can gain from attending these events.

Now this doesn’t mean that brands should stop giving influencers free tickets to events, but brands must rethink their complete offer around events to provide maximum value to influencers. Influencer budgets can in many cases be difficult to work with so free tickets to events are an attractive offer for brands, but instead of just offering free tickets, explore if you’re able to offer VIP access and tours, introduce them to another influencers of interest, or include them in a panel/give them a speaking slot – use the event as a facilitator to help them achieve the outcomes that are important to them. If attending the event will help them gain industry insights, expand their network or help them be more influential in a certain topic, they’ll go for it.

10. Don’t underestimate the time needed to build genuine relationships, but also the value

Marie Faulkner, Senior Social Media Manager from Marie Curie emphasised that the biggest learning curve for their team has been learning that the time and effort needed to build genuine relationships and partnerships with influencers is time consuming, but the value that can be gained from doing so is unparalleled. As Theodore Roosevelt so famously put it: “nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain and difficulty”.

11. We’re in a trust economy

Throughout Sarah Goodall’s presentation, she really focused on in the concept that we’re in an economy of trust. What this ultimately means, is that as marketers, we’re constantly competing to earn our target audience’s trust. Consumers are trusting brands less and people more, and so in order for us to gain their trust we need to leverage people more – be it our internal influencers (employees) and external influencers.

12. Influencers want to work with brands that they align themselves with

The key takeaway message from our influencer panel was that it is important for them to stay true to their personal brand values and beliefs when choosing which brands to work with. Jane Frankland, Managing Director of Cyber Security Capital said: “I only align with brands who believe the same thing as me…I want to understand the mission statement before I want to work with that brand”.

13. It is possible to reach your C-Suite through influencer marketing

There’s a common misconception that influencer marketing isn’t suitable if you’re intending to reach C-Level professionals, as they’re not often on social media. While the latter part of this is often true, the C-Suite have internal influencers within their organisation that heavily impact their decisions. These mid-level managers are on social media and reading and engaging with influencer content that is floating around their network, and then sharing this through ‘dark social’ (Whatsapp, email, direct messenger and face-to-face) with the C-Suite.

14. Listen to the influencer community to feed your content strategy

When it comes to integrating content marketing with influencer marketing, it is usually approached in a way that involves influencers in the latter stages to amplify content, by collaborating on content or getting influencers to share the content. Brands should look to the influencers much earlier than this, by listening to the influencer community and paying attention to what they’re talking about and the kind of content they’re sharing, to feed into their content strategy and content creation. Collaborating on content and amplifying your content through influencers will be much easier to do if you’re creating content that interests and is aligned with the influencers in the first place.

15. Influencer fraud is a good thing for the industry

Now when Scott Guthrie, Strategic Advisor at CampaignDeus first started talking about influencer fraud being a good thing, there were lots of shocked faces across the room. But the more he elaborated, the more those shocked faces turned into nodding heads: “Influencer marketing should get back to its roots, focusing on advocacy and authenticity. Fraud issues are forcing marketers to focus away from vanity metrics, which is a good thing”. 

Onalytica’s Employee Advocacy 2.0 guide and research study into influencer and brand partnerships were huge talking points throughout our event. If you would like to receive a copies, get in touch here.

Sourced from onalytica

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3 Social Media Tools to Jumpstart Your Influencer Marketing

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Are you interested in working with influential social media personalities? Not sure where to start?

In this article, you’ll find three tools to help you manage influencer relationships and campaigns.

#1: Partner With Legitimate Influencers Using HYPR

One of the biggest risk factors in influencer marketing is fraud, where fake influencers buy followers in order to appear influential. That’s also one of the reasons brands don’t see positive results from their influencer marketing campaigns. Once an isolated issue, influencer fraud has become a real concern in recent years.

To empower your influencer marketing efforts in the coming year, you need new metrics and tools to discover real influencers to work with.

HYPR is an advanced influencer search engine that helps you find real social influencers across major platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube. HYPR organizes social media information to match brands with niche influencers within targeted audience demographics.

When you sign up, HYPR lets you explore the platform with a free trial. After that, you’ll need to upgrade to one of the three subscription plans, depending on your business’s needs.

Click HERE to read the remainder of the article

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Sourced from Social Media Examiner

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5 Tips to Make Your Marketing Automation Less Robotic

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By Richard Agu

If you’re like most people, then you probably hate when you receive communication that’s clearly automated. This is even more frustrating when automated content isn’t informative, or doesn’t apply to you at all.

To be clear, marketing automation is a great thing for businesses of all sizes — but only if executed correctly.

The reason your marketing automation may not be yielding much right now might be because it’s too robotic and feels impersonal, with little to no human touch. Some forward-thinking brands have discovered the essence of human side of management.

The fact is, in the future, you can expect brands to get more personal with their consumers.

For instance, IBM, Cisco and Intel all do great jobs at meshing business with social media marketing. And in the next few months, WordPress will make it easier for brands to communicate visually with their target market through significant design improvements via the Gutenberg project.

There are many ways marketing automation can be done effectively and still be more human than robotic.

Here are five marketing automation tips to help steer you in the right direction:

1. Personalize Marketing Automation Emails

This tops the list because this is where some businesses are getting it wrong. You should have segmented lists that allow your emails to feel more relevant to the people you send them to. Consumers expect more information on the things they’ve purchased or made inquiries about. That’s what personalized marketing automation is about.

Doing otherwise makes current and potential customers feel as if you have no personal connection with them. You can achieve this by collecting data on orders placed and searches made by your customers and categorizing them. Trying to catch everyone at the same time will only make you lose those you’ve already gotten. Don’t make people lose interest in your emails.

2. Content Still King

When it comes to marketing, content is still king. Roughly 84% of people expect content from the brands they do business with. There is also a correlation between the quality of your content and your search engine ranking. So, if you want higher search rankings, content should be part of your overall marketing strategy. Hubspot revealed that 20 percent of all mobile search queries are now done with voice.

Creating content around trigger words like “how”, “what,” and “best” can get you some quick wins. Also keep in mind that your content is a representation of you and your business. Make your content informative and well written; avoid grammatical errors and blunders. In a bid to achieve this, make sure your content isn’t long, and add relevant links.

3. Look Beyond Email

Email is a great way to get people’s attention, but it’s important to think outside the box. Marketing automation isn’t limited to just email alone. It involves other marketing platforms, which social media is a big part of.

Considering how stiff the competition is, you’ll agree that Twitter and Instagram are gaining ground by the second. That’s why businesses are making more use of Instagram and Twitter. Post informative pictures and videos on Instagram and Twitter about your products and services and people will gain more interest.

You don’t necessarily need to be online all the time to make it work. Enlist some social media influencers to help you out, if it’s in your budget. And don’t just post content—create a dialogue with your followers, and engage your audience. People don’t like being left hanging. That’s why businesses with strong presences on these platforms are winning social media. This is also a great way to learn more about your customers and what they want from you.

4. Follow Up on Interested Lists

You don’t necessarily have to limit marketing automation to just interested people. However, leave the uninterested out of your lists and pay more attention to the interested. The purpose of marketing automation should be geared towards sustaining the interested and informing the uninformed.

I don’t think anyone hates getting messages from sites and businesses I’ve unsubscribed to than I do. Instead of making your messages look like spams, why not focus on those that are interested?

5. Stay on Same Page

When it comes to marketing automation, sales and marketing teams need to be working together towards the same plan. You don’t need the confusion, since they carry out different duties but have similar goals. And once they’re not in unison, then your marketing automation becomes more robotic than human. Cooperation of these two units can be achieved by constant communication. They should have regular meetings to make sure they’re working towards those set goals.

Feature Image Credit: (Linda Bucklin/Dreamstime)

By Richard Agu

Richard Agu is a researcher, entrepreneur and freelancer, passionate about entrepreneurship and self-development. Currently, Richard writes for Entrepreneur.com, Goodmenproject.com, among others. Follow him on Linkedin.com by clicking here now.

Sourced from NEWSMAX FINANCE

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For D2C companies, marketing looks more like sales

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By Jesse Horwitz

Big brands are wrestling with how to build direct relationships with consumers, and how to do so in spite of data ownership and data privacy challenges. It’s true there’s simply no better way to learn about consumers’ preferences and how to most efficiently serve them than by selling products or services directly.

Collecting first party data about sales is the distinct benefit of selling to consumers without a middleman, and that’s why big businesses see so much promise in the startups dedicated to the model.

So far this year, investors have spent $1.2bn on young, little-known direct-to-consumer businesses, that’s up from $810m in all of 2017, according to CB Insights. These startups are also ripe for acquisition. In recent years, Unilever bought Dollar Shave Club for $1bn, Walmart purchased Bonobos for $310m, and Kellogg bought RXBar for $600m.

My company, Hubble, sells contact lenses direct to consumers via subscription. Neither I nor my partner have a background in optical, sales or marketing. Rather, we’re numbers folks with backgrounds in finance, consulting, and programming. Within a year, we logged $20m in revenues.

I credit a lot of our success, and the success of other D2Cs, with knowing how to access data and build relationships using this data (plus knowing how to help the customers gain from the data, because otherwise they won’t share it – consumers are whip smart).

For D2C companies, marketing looks more like sales. D2C businesses don’t launch one message at every consumer, but rather vary their approach and their offers to each individual, using data analysis to optimize it, and technology to ramp it up to a mass scale. This individualized direct marketing interaction allows the business to hone its sales pitch to a razor’s edge.

To achieve this, it’s imperative to prioritize the right data – and that’s often not the traditional marketing metrics you might be thinking of. Focus on the data that allows you to sync up consumer behavior and your operations. For example, when it comes to measuring costs, forget the ones that pervade e-commerce, such as cost per click. What really matters is cost per acquisition.

Another important figure is your customer’s lifetime value, because that will tell you how much you can spend acquiring them. You also can’t run your business without understanding how much your customers are ordering, and what profits those orders deliver. That, in turn, means understanding your margins inside and out.

With these metrics available, D2Cs can learn the right message to send, at the right cost, to the right person—information that brands working through retailers can only approximate. This is the holy grail of marketing, and just moving brand spend to digital doesn’t get you there.

All this said, there is a competing reality. While a D2C-style sales strategy have obvious benefits, it can’t take away all the pain. On the manufacturing side, scale effects still hold and manufacturing more product leads to lower cost. And, nothing is more efficient (sorry, Amazon) than driving product in trucks to Big Box stores for sale to the consumer.

D2Cs, in consumer-packaged goods especially, don’t enjoy these advantages.

I like to imagine what business would be like if you could bring the strengths of these two worlds together: large scale manufacturing, big box stores, and digital direct marketing. It would be revolutionary, and even better it would benefit all parties: retailers, brands, and most of all consumers.

So far, however, the conversation has been framed as either/or, as David vs Goliath. The next step is finding the “and.”

The IAB’s Randall Rothenberg spoke to this when the bureau released a direct brands study earlier in the year. To brand marketers, he said: “You must watch [D2C brands]. You must know them. You must partner with them.”

It’s time we learn from each other and create solutions that we can all stand behind.

By Jesse Horwitz

Jesse Horwitz is the co-chief executive and co-founder of Hubble Contacts.

Sourced from The Drum

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What Is The Difference Between Marketing, Advertising, and Branding? A Simple Analogy To Help Explain

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Sourced from Lyndax

To understand the difference between these concepts, simply apply them to you

In my work with entrepreneurs and business students, I often hear marketing strategies explained as “having social media,” “having an online brand,” or “advertising a lot.”

These explanations make me cringe because while they might be part of a plan, they grossly oversimplify the deeper and more complex concepts behind a truly effective marketing strategy.

In order to explain and help others understand marketing — namely the difference between marketing, advertising, and branding — I ask them to apply each of these concepts to themselves personally. When you do, this is what it would look like.

Marketing is how you see yourself.

Marketing is the image that you are trying to present to others. It starts with how you dress, the colors and patterns you choose, and how you groom. We all have a strategy for this — yes, everyone, including your unkept second cousin who rarely showers and wears the same Star Wars shirt he’s worn since college.

Even not having a strategy for your personal appearance is a strategy itself.

You choose your image to portray yourself as a business professional, a punk rocker, a tech nerd, etc, and by doing so, you are expressing to others through your appearance your character, lovable attributes and in the end the value you offer to others.

It isn’t fun to admit that appearances are as important as they are, but let’s be honest, first impressions are driven by appearance. Impressions can evolve and be molded later, but as we all know, they require time and effort to change, so we do our best to get it right up front.

For a business, a marketing strategy considers how you want others to perceive your company. It should convey the vision and values of the business and express these in a way that the public will recognize and associate with your company.

How you “dress” your company will determine how effectively your message and image will be accepted by consumers.

Advertising is how you act in public.

If marketing is how you see yourself, advertising describes your actions.

How you carry yourself, where you hang out, and what you say are just as important as how you look. All of this should be considered with your marketing strategy to assure that you have consistency between your image and your actions.

For instance, imagine that you wear a New England Patriots jersey and get a “I Heart Tom Brady” tattoo, but during the Super Bowl, you cheer for the Philadelphia Eagles and celebrate their victory. You will confound — and probably infuriate — all of your friends and likely be exiled from future Sunday game days.

Your business advertising strategy is the same. If you execute it in the wrong places, with the wrong message and tone, at the wrong times, or to the wrong audience, it will ultimately confuse consumers and could turn them away.

Branding is how others see you.

While marketing is how you want others to see you, branding is how they actually do.

Your marketing strategy should assess and consider your personal brand. If you have a strong brand, you can spend more time building on it. If you have reputation problems, however, you need to focus on rebuilding or changing perceptions.

As an example, if your professional network believes you to be fraud or slacker, then it will require more than just dressing professionally and mastering your LinkedIn profile to change this perception.

Similarly from a business standpoint, understanding how consumers perceive your business is crucial for how you decide to execute a marketing and advertising strategy.

Now, I understand I just over-simplified complex marketing concepts — exactly what I critiqued at the beginning. I find, however, that applying these concepts to ourselves creates an effective and simple way to explain how each concept can and should be applied to your business.

Sourced from Lyndax

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Every Marketing Tool You Need to Know in 2018

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By Larry Kim

Every marketer needs the right tools in order to succeed in running marketing campaigns.

Here’s a list of every marketing tool you need updated for 2018.

100+ Must-Have Marketing Tools

This mega list of marketing tools is categorized.

Check out tools for automation, email, ads, SEO, SMM, research, analysis and a ton more.

Most of these tools are either free or affordable.

Each tool alone has the power to energize your marketing successes. Together, these tools could add up to your winning formula for making marketing unicorns.

1. Digital Analytics Tools

  • Google Analytics
  • Google Analytics Premium
  • Adobe Analytics

2. Facebook Messenger & Chatbot Tools

3. Social Media Publishing Tools

  • HootSuite
  • Buffer
  • SproutSocial
  • Viralheat
  • FalconSocial

4. Online Customer Service Tools

  • MobileMonkey
  • Zendesk
  • Help Scout
  • Get Satisfaction
  • Freshdesk
  • Groove

5. Social Media Listening Tools

  • SocialMention
  • Talkwalker Alerts
  • BuzzSumo
  • Social Crawlytics
  • Sysomos

6. Social Media Campaign Tools

  • Shortstack
  • Spredfast
  • Woobox
  • Pagemodo
  • Tabfoundry

7. Site Audience Comparison

  • SimilarWeb
  • Alexa
  • Google Analytics
  • Experian

8. SEO Keyword Analysis

  • Google AdWords Keyword Planner
  • Google Trends
  • SEMRush
  • Bing Ads
  • Übersuggest

9. SEO Rank Checking

  • Google Search Console
  • SEMRush
  • Searchmetrics
  • Moz
  • Ryte

10. SEO Site Crawling

  • Google Search Console
  • Ryte
  • Screaming Frog

11. SEO Backlink Analysis

  • Google Search Console
  • SEMRush
  • Ahrefs
  • Majestic
  • LinkResearchTools

12. AdWords Paid Search Analysis

  • WordStream
  • SEMRush
  • SpyFu
  • Optmyzr

13. Influencer Outreach and Management

  • Buzzsumo
  • BuzzStream
  • Traackr
  • Onalytica
  • Lithium

14. Data Management Platforms and Audience Targeting

  • Cxense
  • Criteo
  • Krux
  • Neustar
  • Oracle
  • Adobe Audience Manager

15. Page Engagement Tools

  • Clicktale
  • Crazy Egg
  • Tealeaf

16. Content Management Systems

  • Sitecore
  • Adobe Experience Manager
  • Acquia
  • Oracle WebCenter

17. Blogging Tools

  • WordPress
  • HubSpot
  • Movable Type
  • ExpressionEngine
  • Drupal

18. Content Curation and Authoring Tools

  • Evernote
  • IFTTT
  • Feedly
  • Scoop.it
  • Cronycle

19. Landing Page Creation and Testing Tools

  • Unbounce
  • LeadPages
  • Instapage
  • Optimizely

20. Digital Asset Management

  • Adobe Experience Manager
  • Wistia
  • Vimeo
  • Uberflip
  • Placeit

21. On-site Push Notifications

  • Hello Bar
  • BrightInfo
  • Sumo
  • Evergage
  • Bounce Exchange
  • SaleCycle

22. Personalization for Ecommerce

  • Evergage
  • Barilliance
  • Marketizator
  • SaleCycle
  • Monetate

23. Ecommerce Cart Recovery

  • Cloud.IQ
  • SaleCycle
  • Optilead
  • Fresh Relevance
  • Pure360

24. A/B and Multivariate Testing Tools

  • Convert
  • Visual Website Optimizer
  • Optimizely
  • Oracle Maxymiser
  • SiteSpect

25. Ecommerce Management

  • Magento
  • Woo Themes
  • Shopify
  • PrestaShop
  • Actinic

26. Product and Customer Review Tools

  • Trustpilot
  • Feefo
  • Yotpo
  • Bazaarvoice
  • Reevoo

27. Call Tracking

  • Infinity
  • Convirza
  • ResponseTap
  • CallTrackingMetrics
  • CallRail
  • Nextiva

28. Marketing Cloud, CRM and Campaign Management Tools

  • ThriveHive
  • HubSpot
  • Marketo
  • Hatchbuck
  • SalesForce
  • Oracle Marketing Cloud
  • Adobe Marketing Cloud

29. Email Service Providers and Marketing Automation Services

  • Aweber
  • iContact
  • MailChimp
  • Constant Contact
  • Get Response
  • Infusionsoft
  • Act-On

30. Email Marketing Optimization Tools

  • SurveyMonkey
  • Polldaddy
  • Typeform

Take your marketing strategies to the next level using the tools above.

Over to you; what marketing tools do you swear by?

What other tools that are not in this list have you found most helpful? Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments!

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By Larry Kim

Larry Kim is the CEO of MobileMonkey — provider of the World’s Best Facebook Messenger Marketing Platform. He’s also the founder of WordStream.

You can connect with him on Facebook Messenger, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram.

Sourced from Medium

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Back to Basics: Email Marketing For B2B

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By Tobin Lehman

In the B2B space, we can sometimes get lost looking for the newest shiny objects and forget about the basics of digital marketing. Don’t let that happen to email. There’s a reason it’s tried and true – it still holds the highest ROI.

It’s time to go back to the basics.

The Basics of Email Marketing

For most B2B organizations, email is used in every aspect of their business. Your sales guys send emails. Your marketing team sends emails. Your customer service team sends emails. For most organizations, email is the number one touchpoint for communicating with customers. Your customers likely receive more email from you than they ever receive phone calls or in-person visits. So, the content and context of your email marketing should never be taken lightly.

That said: why do we think about email so little in our organization? We’re going to dive into three areas of our business to determine how to best use email to reach our goals.

Sales Team Emails

As I mentioned, your sales team should be sending a lot of email. The reason they do this is because with the advent of email marketing and CRM integration, you should be able to send a lot of emails that cut down a lot of time and increase productivity. But we still get asked this question often: “What kind of emails to our sales team be sending?”

Well, it’s a good question. The reality is that email offers more of a challenge for sales guys than it does for any other department. (If you’re a sales guy, you can quote me on that.)

The reason why it’s much more difficult is that you’re expected to be both personal and automated at the same time. In other words, you need to get a lot of emails out, but it can’t be willy-nilly, because your potential customer is looking for personal attention and customization. They want to feel that you’re paying attention to them – and so does everyone else. The problem is that you’ve only got so much attention to give.

Marketing helps with this a bit, but it can’t totally fill the role of “personal attention” for the customer. Yet, without that, the prospect can feel funneled, or herded, which would detract from the impact you are trying to have.

This means that from a sales perspective, an intelligent CRM-based email marketing with high customization is an absolute requirement. If you’re sending out templated emails but you are not using a system like HubSpot or Infusionsoft, you’re probably spending a lot of time doing it. Or, if you’re not, you’re definitely not doing it well.

If you’re just getting started, the key is to start slow and find the biggest bottleneck. Then, work to find the areas where email automation can have the biggest impact – places where it can really help you save time and increase your productivity. Create those templates first, and find easy ways to automate them. If you’re not using HubSpot Sequences, for example, this could be a real leverage point for you in the organization.

Marketing Emails

Marketing is the act of positioning your product or service within the marketplace. Advertising is the expression of that position to the targeted customer. So your goal, in a marketing context, is to continually position your firm or service within the mind of your potential customer.

When you think of a channel such as email, this could include such tactics as an email newsletters and drip campaigns, but on a bigger level, you should push thought leadership. The marketing message should focus on the unique differentiators of your firm or service within the market. This means you need to drive the value of your firm’s service every time you send an email.

So if you are a professional services firm, this positioning should include your expertise, which is really the summation of all your experiences being applied to a customer problem. Don’t just send your latest project; send some of the thinking that made your latest project successful.

The success of your communication will directly correlate to how well it helps customers solve their problems. If you’re constantly talking about yourself or your products and services without a correlation to your customer, or if you never tie in how your product or service will solve their problems, you’re just creating noise.

There are too many product and service emails that simply talk about what’s being offered without ever considering the benefits that the end customers actually care about.

For example, you may have the highest-rated service on Yelp, yet that means nothing to me if you don’t address my pain points specifically.

This is a high-level review of marketing email, but hopefully it provides direction toward where you should push.

Customer Service Emails

The communications you have with your customers over requests, service calls, or even the day-to-day management of an account are sometimes just viewed as inconsequential. But how could we leave these major touch points to chance?

What’s most important is that every email that’s sent out of your firm is thought through in terms of how it affects the customer experience.

Have you reviewed your customer service rep’s email sent box recently? Think about what kind of information you could find in there. If they’re being polite, if they address the customer concerns, if there’s terseness – frankly, there could be a whole array of challenges or wonders inside of that email box in terms of who is winning and losing accounts when it comes to customer service.

Since every firm and company is different, let’s talk about this from a conceptual standpoint. You should determine your email communication standards from a customer service perspective on day one. This could include response times, response context, and other technical standards, all the way down to the signatures and closing remarks of emails.

A good email customer service strategy may need to be broad to encompass all situations; it could also be very narrow in terms of an escalation or communication policy around particular issues. If you’re setting up a meeting, for example (which seems minor), you could have templates for emails that are sent out to make sure all the details are covered. The alternative is to just ad hoc it, sending an email saying, “Hey we got a meeting tomorrow here’s the agenda see you then..”

Yikes.A properly thought-through strategy could include some reminders on directions and the more formalized greeting, for example.

Don’t Take Email For Granted

All this to be said, every email from your firm or your company is a piece of communication to your customer. Don’t leave it to chance.

Email should be thoughtful, purposeful, and measurable to make sure it’s having the best impact. The emails you send will be a large part of the communication experience your customer has with your firm.

ByTobin Lehman

Sourced from Business 2 Community

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What’s all the fuss about FOMO?

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By Sophie Katsali

When was the last time you saw a queue outside of what you would call a fairly ‘ordinary’ restaurant? Or an ‘exclusive’ concert? Perhaps a pop-up that gives away gluten-free bread outside of a tube station? Quite recently, I suppose.

People love queues, don’t they? That uncomfortable feeling of standing on your feet for ages while thoroughly investigating someone’s back just to get access to something…special. Well, not really. This is not something people particularly enjoying doing. But the fear of missing out (or ‘FOMO’) is so frantically embedded in our DNA that it is a far greater ‘discomfort’ for us to miss out than to waste some time in a queue.

How does this tie into social media marketing? Social media is nothing more than our world under a microscope. Sometimes marketers are too close to their own profession and don’t quite remember that it is as simple as that. They treat “social media users” as a different group of people altogether. This doesn’t particularly help since they sometimes fail to tap into human psychology 101.

Take your average Facebook ad. How often do you see a call to action that truly lures you in? In 2018, 69.95% of ads have included a CTA – a great jump from 2016’s 51.54% – but what do the rest of the ads (the 30.05%) include? They probably have some nice imagery. However, even if a picture is worth a thousand words, words (or in our world, “copy”) can elevate your ad to drive conversions. How? Enter FOMO.

The power of FOMO

How do you incorporate FOMO in your marketing efforts? Essentially, it’s about coming up with a “FOMO” proposition around your brand/product/service that’s too strong to pass.

There is a reason why ‘limited offers’ work. It’s all about framing what you offer in a timeframe. AdEspresso recently conducted a Facebook ad experiment to test three of the most popular CTAs; “Sign Up”, “Download Now” and “Learn More”. The “Download Now” CTA outperformed the other two by more than 40% in terms of cost per lead. Time-sensitive words like “now” and “today” work successfully because of the urgency they call out. You also want to make sure you call out your customer. You want to make it personal. According to Hubspot, personalised CTAs perform 202% better than basic CTAs. Words like “you”, “your”, “yours” make your copy instantly more approachable. All of a sudden, the ad is about them! They stop and listen.

What are people going to miss if they don’t join/download/buy/sign up to what you offer? This is a question that you can only answer after going deep into your social data and understanding who your audience is and where it lives on social. It could be a case where you discover that your main audience is more outgoing and sociable than the average social group. This comes with the assumption that they probably have a lot of friends they care about (and subsequently, care about their opinions) so you make it about their friends. You run a Facebook ad that is targeting people whose friends have joined YOUR Page and you go in with the hard sell: “Your friend is already part of [enter brand/product/service here]. Isn’t it time for you to join today?” This is one way to take advantage of our hardwired urge to not miss out on anything.

Common-sense marketing tells us we need to exaggerate about whatever we are selling. As a result, we focus too much on the specifications of the end-product and how well our brand compares to others. We make the sale about us. However, if you change the narrative and flip the mirror, a more persuasive argument is helping people see that if they don’t join you they will miss out on an opportunity that hasn’t been presented to them before.

By Sophie Katsali

Sophie Katsali is lead strategist at Wilderness

Sourced from The Drum

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8 Ways to Justify Your Social Media Marketing Program

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Demonstrating value and ROI from social media marketing campaigns has been challenging since marketers first began using the platform to target prospects and customers. But should ROI even be a major social media justifier? Some say social media marketing success means looking beyond ROI, while others adhere to the age-old advice that says your company’s business objectives prove social media worth. “Social media actually goes beyond ROI,” said Hariraj Rathod, social media analyst at Numbertank. “It helps in achieving good branding effect on audience and also helps to showcase products and services by segmenting and targeting the correct audience. Social media marketing also helps a brand understand how well their products are being consumed or liked by certain demographics.”

Is social media even worth it for your organization? If it is, where should your focus be as a marketer? To answer these questions, we caught up with digital marketing pros who offered a number of social media marketing tips that can help you make the most of your social programs.

Understand Younger Generations and Their Growing Mistrust

Deciding which metrics matter isn’t the lone challenge for marketers using social media. Some say it’s deciding whether to invest energy and resources into it in the first place. After all, marketers face a growing mistrust of social media platforms in light of data breach scandals like Facebook-Cambridge-Analytica and shrinking social media audiences.

Shama Hyder, CEO of Zen Media, a marketing and new media consultancy, noted in a Forbes article last month that Millennials and Gen Z are annoyed with brands taking up space in their social media feeds, and a third of them have deleted their Facebook account.

Know Social Media’s Place in Your Digital Ecosystem

Using social media is a thing of the past, according to Hyder. Companies should shift from a mindset of “using social media, to a mindset of adapting and thriving in an ecosystem where a highly connected, social, empowered consumer is now the norm, and traditional econometrics and data are no longer adequate to measure and track the success of content and campaigns,” Hyder wrote.

ROI is not the be-all and end-all for measuring success, she added. It’s more effective that metrics match the “complexity, ambiguity and dynamism” of a customer’s journey, she said. Integrate social data and metrics with other KPIs from web analytics, CRM, etc. and view social media platforms beyond just a “marketing channel, and leverage it instead as one prong of a larger strategy and source of customer insight.”

Support Engagement and Education, Not ROI

Belinda Alban agrees. Alban, the founder of Your Virtual Assistant Service, said the focus of social media should not be on ROI but on growing your following to increase brand awareness, engaging with your customers to create raving fans and educating your potential customers about the benefits of your product. “The bigger your platforms are the more opportunities you have to do this,” Alban said.

Social media may or may not lead to an increase in sales, but it will give you the opportunity to build relationships with your audience and deliver “amazing” customer service. “On the back of the relationships and trust and confidence your brand has built with social media you should see an increase in the reputation of your brand,” Alban said. “And it is your reputation that can make or break a company.”

Know Thyself, Know Thy Company

As long as your brand matches its social media playbook to its company objectives, you’re on the right track, according to Maria Burpee, a B2B marketing consultant for MB Consulting. “The ROI — and the metrics — comes from the board and company objectives,” Burpee said. Do you want to be the most well known or favorite brand or build a community or movement? Social media, even if it doesn’t lead to sales, is key. Are you looking to generate leads? Social media listening is key. Are you trying to create high loyalty and referrals? Cultivating social media “love” and responsiveness is important. Do you want to have the best customer service and hang your hat on that as a differentiator? Social media can be part of the mix. Social media metrics wouldn’t be found in a high-level executive dashboard, Burpee added, but rather the metrics are important to support a broader KPI dashboard.

Consider Using Unique URLs

One way to capture and track ROI on social media is using unique URLs. “Any time we post content that includes a link, we use a unique URL so we can track where the traffic is coming from and not for social media in general, but each channel specifically,” said Tiffany McEachern, social media specialist for PSCU, which provides solutions for credit unions. “Each social channel has a unique URL so you can see where your clicks are coming from and spend your time and efforts on those social media platforms,” McEachern said. “Even if social media isn’t giving your company a strong ROI, it builds brand awareness and in today’s day and age, companies are expected to be on social media.”

Assign Specific KPIs, A/B Tests

James Bray is a social media marketer who works for the Equal Opportunity Community Initiative (EOCI), a nonprofit that relies on donations received from fundraising activities. Bray said his Board takes spending decisions more seriously than most, whether the costs are incurred by outright paid advertising or through the staff’s efforts to create and manage social media content. “The return on our social media marketing investment is therefore calculated in terms of engagement: profile views, click-throughs to the website, email subscriptions and volunteer recruitment,” Bray said. “These measures are a great deal more important than, for example, simply counting the number of Instagram followers, because they reflect the degree to which someone is interested in partnering with us.”

To ensure the nonprofit receives a return on its social media investments, Bray said the team needs to be clear about its objectives and how much time it can afford to devote to each. It then attaches KPIs to those goals to ensure they are met. “The EOCI’s communications team is constantly A/B testing its social media strategies, using a combination of each platform’s own insights along with Google Analytics to determine what sources constitute the best outreach and result in the most beneficial conversions,” Bray said. “Based on these results, the EOCI Board feels that our social media engagement strategy has a positive effect on our ability to connect with our target audience and reach our objectives.”

Listen on Social, Execute in Customer Service Channels

Clair Jones, chief strategy officer and co-founder of Witty Kitty Digital Marketing, said monitoring how your audience is talking about your brand through social listening is vital. You can use the data to inform your customer service programs. “You can learn so much about how to improve customer service and experience, tap into audiences you didn’t know you had, and hone your branding and messaging,” she said.

Balance Between Organic and Paid Social Efforts Matters

If your organization is going to invest in social, consider the aforementioned tips and also strike a balance between paid and organic social media marketing. “Advocate for smart social that communicates the organization’s mission and engages the audience,” said Maria Mora, content director at Big Sea Design. “And layer a strategic paid social plan over that for a stronger return and more targeted presence on social platforms.”

Feature Image Credit: Shutterstock

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