3 Reasons Why We Invest In Social Media & You Should Too

I'll admit, when social media sprinted on to the digital marketing scene, I was extremely skeptical.  Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and all the other social media sites reminded me of MySpace and my first instinct was to wait until they all followed the same path to destruction.  I was very cautious to avoid investing time and money into a marketing fad.

But I was wrong.  Social media marketing is not going anywhere.  In fact, all signs are pointing to social media being an integral component in the future of digital marketing. That's because every day the lines get more and more blurry between social media and other core digital marketing tactics like SEO, advertising, and email marketing.  The days of focusing on just one isolated tactic are over.  To have long-term success with digital marketing, we need to take a more holistic approach.


In case you're like me and you're skeptical about the value of investing in social media marketing, I'm going to walk through 3 reasons that may change your mindset. 

Reason 1: Boost Your Other Channels

Chances are good you're already investing in other channels like SEO and digital advertising.  But as I mentioned above, the lines are getting blurry between those tactics and social media marketing.  That's because social media now impacts those channels either positively or negatively.

Let's take SEO as an example.  A successful SEO campaign relies on content marketing (for example. publishing high-quality articles and then sharing them online).  What do you think is one of the best ways to share content online?  That's right, social media!  Sites like Facebook and Twitter are perfect for maximizing the exposure of your content and, in turn, increasing the number of links from other websites.

On the advertising side, the social media giant, Facebook, should not be ignored.  As the Facebook ad platform continues to mature, it's now possible for businesses to laser-target their ideal customers to drive more leads and sales.  Plus, social media (such as the number of Likes you have) can be great social proof on your advertising landing pages to increase your conversion rates.

Reason 2: Control Your Reputation

What is likely the first thing a prospective customer will do when she first learns about your business? I'll do this before or sometimes after I've already contacted the business and it always impacts my decision to purchase.

The answer is that prospective customers will "Google" your business name as a way to run a quick background check.  It takes just a few minutes to search and see what pops up about the company.  In some cases there won't be much info, which can be concerning because it indicates the business may not be legit.  In other cases, there will be lots of info that is either positive or negative.

Here's a quick tip to help you with your search engine reputation management: If you set up social media profiles for your business name, then those pages are highly likely to rank at the top of Google for brand searches.  In other words, you can use your social media profiles as a way to control what prospective customers will see when they search for your business.

And don't forget about how this could impact your hiring process.  Potential employees will certainly "Google" your business name to do their homework as well.

Finally, in addition to setting up social profiles, it's important to stay engaged in order to establish and protect your reputation. Specifically, I'm talking about cultivating positive reviews and responding to any comments or complaints you may receive.

Reason 3: Keep Your Audience Engaged

The final reason to invest in social media is to keep your audience engaged.  This may not sound like much, but I would argue that engaging your audience is one of the most important jobs of your digital marketing.  Think about that for a minute.  In order to make a sale you must first have an engaged prospect.  Then, in order to generated repeat purchases and encourage more referrals you must keep your customers engaged.  If you lose mindshare and attention, then you lose sales.

The key to engagement is to actually reach your audience. Businesses that rely solely on direct mail, phone and/or email marketing are missing out on a segment of their market that could be reached via social media.  I'm not suggesting one tactic is better than the other.  I'm simply highlighting the fact that social media allows businesses to get in front of more of their audience to engage and maximize sales, repeat purchases, and referrals.  

7 Ideas to Generate More Leads From Your Website

If you’re looking for ideas to generate more leads from your website, then you’ve come to the right place.  In this article, I’ll walk through 7 tactics that nearly every business can use that will convert your website from a passive brochure into a 24/7 lead generating machine.

Before we get into the tactics, it’s important to understand there are two very different types of website visitors:

    Buyers – Buyers are visiting your website to learn more about your product or service in order to make a buying decision in the near future.  They know what they’re looking for and are are ready to pull the trigger as long as your product or service fits their criteria.

    Browsers – Browsers are visiting your website to learn more about your product or service, but they aren’t ready to buy.  They are interested, but don’t know if they really need what you’re offering.

Of course we all want more buyers, but the reality at any given time is that the vast majority of your website visitors are browsers.  This is a key insight that leads us to one of the most important jobs of your website, which is to capture contact information from as many visitors as possible.  That way you can follow up with both buyers and browsers until they are finally ready to buy.

With this in mind, let’s dive into the tactics to capture more of your visitors’ contact information.  We’ll start with the basic tactics and move our way to the more advanced tactics at the end.

1. Add a General Contact Form

This may come as a surprise, but I still see websites that don’t have a general contact form.  I guarantee these websites are missing out on potential sales from visitors that would have submitted the contact form with basic buying questions.

For example, many people do research during non-business hours when calling is not an option.  In this case, it’s easier to complete a website contact form to get an answer to a question that could ultimately lead to a purchase.

If you do not have a general contact form, then this is one of the easiest ways to start generating more leads from your website.


2. Add Product or Service Specific Forms

The next step once you have your general contact form set up is to create product or service specific forms.  For example, on your product or service description page, add a “request a quote” or “request a demo” or “schedule an appointment” form to capture the contact information from buyers interested in that particular product or service.

The leads from these more specific forms will tend to be higher quality and further along the buying process compared to leads from your general contact form.


3. Add a Lead Magnet

Once you have the first two types of forms installed on your website, then it’s time to switch gears and focus on capturing contact information from all of those browsers.  Again, browsers aren’t ready to buy right now so they are not likely going to request a quote or ask a buying question on your general contact form.

Therefore, we need to take a different approach by using what’s called a “lead magnet.”  A lead magnet is something valuable (information, coupons, access to a tool) that you can offer on your website for free, in exchange for contact information.  For example, our homepage lead magnet is the Internet Marketing Survival Guide.  Plus, we offer other free tools like an SEO checklist and an AdWords checklist.

As you can see in these examples, the key is to offer something relevant and valuable to your target market in exchange for at least an email address so you can follow up.


4. Use a 2-Step Checkout Process

If you have an e-commerce website, then this is a great way to start generating more leads immediately.

As you probably know, every e-commerce website suffers from shopping cart abandonment, which is when buyers go through the process of adding products to their shopping cart, but don’t end up completing the order.  On many e-commerce websites, the order form is the last step and it’s also the only form that collects the customer’s contact information.  Therefore, when shoppers abandon their carts, you have no contact information to follow up. That is the case, unless you use a 2-step checkout process.

Simply add a step right before the final checkout page to collect a little information like name and email address.  Then after the 1st step is complete, the customer is redirected to the final checkout page to complete the order.  If the customer does not complete the final form, then you can use the contact information you collected on the 1st step to follow up and close the sale.


5. Add Online Chat

I’m sure everyone is familiar with online chat.  There are two types of chat that you can use: Live and Automated.  Live chat is obviously when a live person is chatting with the website visitor.  Automated chat is pre-programmed to answer frequently asked questions from visitors, which can save you time and money (but also can frustrate visitors that have more unique questions).

Generally, I recommend businesses test out live chat during regular business hours as yet another way to capture contact information from leads.


6. Add an Exit Popup

Have you ever tried to leave a website and you were quickly presented with a popup window explaining a special offer?  That’s an exit popup.

Exit popups are a last ditch effort to capture contact information from a visitor about to leave your website (possibly forever).  For example, you can use a lead magnet exit popup to present a free offer or a special coupon, you can offer live chat to get the visitor’s questions answered, or you can offer a free quote or demo.


7. Add a Lightbox

The final tactic is to use what’s called a “lightbox.”  A lightbox is the more user friendly version of the old pop-up window.  With a lightbox, the form is presented on top of the webpage the visitor was reading.  This is a more advanced tactic because you need to be careful about where you use the lightbox and how frequently the lightbox appears for visitors.  Obviously it’s important to balance the pros of capturing contact information versus the cons of annoying potential buyers.

5 Reasons to Ignore SEO

SEO used to be the central pillar in any online marketing campaign. Your website’s search visibility was the sole indicator of online success. Though search visibility is obviously still very important to most businesses, things aren’t as simple or "clear cut" as they used to be.

Online visibility is now about so much more than search. With the dramatic growth of the social Web, and the new ways we can now analyze our traffic and results, should we still be focusing on SEO as a primary marketing avenue? Or is our obsession with search visibility blinding us to other, more useful channels?

This article is about playing devil’s advocate. Of course, I’m not suggesting that you should stop all SEO activity. Rather, I want to highlight the other opportunities that you may be missing that have nothing to do with SEO. Here are my top five:

1. Content

Most marketers approach content creation from a firm SEO standpoint. Each piece of content must have a clear and direct SEO benefit.

Though I do agree that if you are going to create great content you might as well spend some time making sure it’s created in line with SEO best practices, I don’t think SEO should be your primary motivation for creating great content.

One of the most important shifts over the last few years has been from the SEO-centric approach to content to the "user-centric" approach that Google now richly rewards. The brief is simple: create great content. Decide on your topics based on what your readers and customers want to read or watch, not what will help your SEO the most.

If you can always make sure that the first 90 percent of the content creation process is informed solely by your desire to create high-value content for your audience, then at the last minute, implement a few SEO best practices, you’re going to be much better placed than if the content was driven by SEO from the outset.

The main advantage of this approach is that it ensures that you are creating content that will see a high success rate through all your other marketing channels, whether that’s social, email, or paid advertising. Every day the search engines improve their ability to identify the content that their users love. The recent announcement that tweets are going to be appearing in our SERPs (again) shows that this trend is only going to continue. For marketers, the message is clear: create content that your visitors love, and your search visibility will take care of itself.

2. User Behavior

If you’re reading this it’s likely that you already have at least some traffic to your website. Sure, you want more visitors, but is that the most effective way to increase your sales, engagement, and conversions?

More traffic is the sole aim of most online businesses. After all, if you double your traffic, you’ll double your sales, right? Well, maybe. But that doesn’t mean it’s the best use of your time.

In almost all cases, increasing traffic is often more expensive and resource hungry than simply increasing your conversion rate. Let’s say you have 1,000 visitors to your e-commerce site each month through search. Your conversion rate is around 2 percent so you make around 20 sales each month. If you were to heavily invest in SEO and, as a result, increase your search visibility by 100 percent, six to 12 months later you would get 2,000 visitors. Your conversion rate stays the same and you make 40 sales. Though it’s difficult to argue that these results are anything less than a great achievement, there are other ways to increase your sales.

There are so many ways to directly and indirectly increase your conversion rates. Everything from increasing your site speed, improving your Web copy, and improving your site’s mobile user experience to something as simple as the color scheme can have a noticeable and direct impact on your conversion rate. Changing a single word or switching the color of your CTA button can increase the conversion rate on a page by more than 100 percent!

By split testing each of your landing pages you can reliably and consistently increase your conversion rate. If this isn’t something you already do on a regular basis, it’s very likely that there are lots of easy wins that you’ve been ignoring. If you do it right, you can probably increase your conversion rate by as much as 300 percent.

Let’s go back to our example. Rather than using all your resources on SEO and increasing your traffic, let’s say you focus on increasing your on-site conversion rates. By increasing site speed, improving your sales copy, and split testing your CTAs, you manage to increase your conversion rate on your main sales page to 6 percent. Your traffic stays the same (1,000 visitors per month), but you see 60 sales. Now that’s a real result.

3. The Social Web

This is probably the most obvious example of how you can increase your traffic without SEO. The social Web has opened up literally thousands of possible traffic sources. One well-targeted, well-timed post, tweet, or pin can result in traffic spikes that most servers will struggle with.

With developments like the integration of tweets in the SERPs and the traffic opportunities offered by LinkedIn Pulse, social media is clearly going to continue rivalling SEO as the most important traffic source.

4. Paid Advertising

The effectiveness and relevance of paid advertising is largely dependent on what sector you’re in. However, most marketers and SEOs don’t give it the credit it deserves.

Paid advertising allows you to go out and get the specific traffic you want. The data, targeting, and immediacy that paid advertising gives you make it an important weapon in any marketer’s arsenal.
Most marketers dismiss paid advertising due to the CPC costs of their primary keywords. Instead, they pour all their resources into ranking organically for these terms. While this is a good long-term strategy, ignoring PPC will deny you many key benefits.

While you are building your organic rankings, paid advertising offers a unique testing opportunity. By running a paid campaign, in just a few days you have the ability to gather more data than you might see in months of organic traffic. This means that, by the time you begin to rank organically, your landing pages can be fully optimized and the quality of your search traffic will be full validated.
Another advantage of paid advertising working alongside organic SEO is the "reinforcement effect." If you are ranking organically, above the fold, and you also have an ad in the top positions in the SERPs, your click-through rate on both these listings are likely to be much higher than if you just had one. The reason for this is that, by having two listings above the fold, you reinforce the trust that Google’s users will associate with your site. Trust me, it works!

5. Traditional PR

Press releases have long been a reliable link-building channel for many SEOs. Obviously, the direct SEO benefits of links from press releases, especially if they are low-quality, are limited at best. However, that doesn’t mean that press releases and outreach don’t have value.

Traditional PR can have many positive crossovers for SEO and online marketing in general. For example, by using a press release as it is intended – to get your news out to the wider world – marketers can see huge spikes in traffic, engagement, and opportunities. If you can get your story picked up by journalists, whether they work for a print or online publication, and if people are writing about your business, it is going to result in traffic, links, and strong social signals.

If you can rethink the way you approach the press and traditional PR, they can bring great results.

Summary

The increasingly integrated nature of the Web means that things are never going to be as simple and clear-cut as they used to be. We’re all going to have to explore new marketing channels and continue to measure different metrics as the Web and user behavior evolves.

I hope this article has given you a few ideas to start exploring ways to increase your results without even thinking about SEO. Have you got other channels that you use? Have you found some "easy wins" that you’re happy to share? Let me know in the comments below.