You are on page 1of 19

Marketing Software

\ guide

15 Ideas to Grow with  Digital Marketing


Take your business to the next level with these online marketing tactics and tools.

Social | Search | Email | Publicity

Visit us at www.vocus.com

Marketing Software

15 Ideas to Grow with Digital Marketing

Welcome to Digital Marketing


Until recently, most small and medium-sized businesses could surviveand, in some circumstances, thrivewithout i nvesting much time or money into marketing. A typical small business owner might place a few newspaper ads, attend some trade shows, or send direct mail with coupons or discounts to incentivize new business. Tactics like email marketing, social networking, search engine optimization, and large-scale public relations, however, were left to the big boys with the big budgets.
Today, thanks to the Internet, social media, and marketing software, the marketing game has changed for businesses of all sizes. Smaller businesses need to go beyond a singlechannel marketing strategy. With 1 billion Facebook users worldwide and social networks like Twitter continually gaining traction, customers and prospects of almost any business can be cost-eectively accessed and engaged online. According to Nielsens recent State of the Media Report,1 social networks and blogs reach nearly 80 percent of active U.S. Internet users today, a population that exceeds 245 million people.2 Your customers, prospects, and inuencers are more accessible than ever. If youre not doing anything to interact with and inuence them, youre missing a huge opportunity to grow your business. There is no need to abandon tried-and-true marketing tactics like word-of-mouth, referral marketing, and couponing. In fact, you now have modern channels like social networks, inuencer engagement, online PR, and email marketing to drive them and multiply their eectiveness. Growing your business with online marketing doesnt have to be dicult. As this guide will show, the right technology and a little knowhow can transform you into a marketing pro, without killing your budget or hurting your other dayto-day business goals. This guide will help you apply 15 modern m arketing and PR tactics to engage your key customers and the people who inuence them. Each tactic will include the best practices, tips, and knowhow you need to create positive buzz in your marketplace and drive new business to your front door.

Build Online Inuence Through Creative Social Marketing

The power of social media is undeniable. Just ask Denver-based hamburger chain Smashburger and its senior vice president of m arketing, Jeremy Morgan. He told USA Today that the company largely credits its incredible growth over the last ve yearsfrom three restaurants in 2007 to more than 150 locations todayto its social media outreach.3 Specically, Morgan says the companys social strategy has helped it create valuable inuence over engaged communities who express an interest in its product. That inuence has manifested itself into tangible value. With a Facebook following of close to 90,000 fans, Smashburger can inexpensively deliver special oers and incentives that are more likely to convert into direct sales at its restaurants. Of course, inuence isnt simply a byproduct of being on social media. To create it, you need to rst develop a following thats large and engaged enough to receive and respond to your messages. Even then, true inuence only happens when you do things on social media that resonate with and provide value to your target audience.

1 Nielsen, State of the Media: Social Media Report, 2011; http://bit.ly/nIBdRv 2 Internet World Stats, June 2012; http://bit.ly/WkAo 3 USA Today, Small Businesses Using Social Media to Grow; http://usat.ly/xvPJOi

Marketing Software

15 Ideas to Grow with Digital Marketing

Growth Tactic: Hold a Twitter Chat to Drive Engagement and Inuence


A Twitter chat is an interactive conversation held at a specic time on the social network by using a pre-determined hashtag (you might know it as the # sign). Twitter chats can cover just about any topic and are a great way to network with c ustomers, increase inuence, and share key knowledge, including information about new product features or big industry news. Best of all, you dont need a fancy venue and trendy drinks to spark a lively discussion. Dont have a Twitter account yet? Signing up for one is simple and, conveniently, its about all you need to host a chat. That being said, youand your customerswill get the most out of your Twitter chats if you keep these ve things in mind: 1. Choose the right Twitter account: If you have personal and business Twitter accounts, make sure you choose the one that makes the most sense for the chat. Generally speaking, a company account is the most logical, but there are meritslike creating authenticity and thought leadershipto hosting a chat from your personal Twitter account. 2. Know your theme: Like a great party, your Twitter chat should maintain a specic focus. And it doesnt have to be all business, either. If youre a small online wine retailer, you could host a chat about your followers favorite vineyards, or the best places to visit for wannabe sommeliers. 3. Create a suitable hashtag: No idea what a hashtag is? You might know it as the pound mark (#), but its now used by T witter to identify specic keywords or t opics.

Hashtags make it much easier to host Twitter conversations because they allow chat participants to follow the conversation via Twitter search by simply typing # and the keyword you gave them. As a best practice, keep your chat hashtags short and catchy. 4. Invite followers to the party: Regardless of how compelling your chat topic is, no one will participate if they dont know that its happening. Promote the chat on your blog, Facebook page, website, and, of course, Twitter account. And dont forget to include the chat name, hashtag, time, and date in every post. 5. Pick a chat style and timeframe: You can choose one topic, pose a specic question, and ask people to answer that question only for a specic period of time. Or you can simply identify a broad topic and encourage everyone to engage in a free-owing conversation. Ultimately, the best style depends on your company, the chats p articipants, and the topic youve chosen. Its also i mportant to set an ocial ending point for the conversation so that participants can set aside time to engage with you. The bottom line is that Tweets drive buzz and engagement. Additionally, hosting a chat can help you appear more accessible and authentic, while also allowing you to build valuable thought leadership.

Vocus @Vocus
Have you registered yet? Join us Wednesday to learn how to read customers minds w/ search data.

Vocus @Vocus
How #PRWeb news releases kicked off the Harvard Rugland #YouTube

#TweetChat
3

Marketing Software

15 Ideas to Grow with Digital Marketing

ASK THE EXPERT: What should companies do when a Twitter chat ends?

click Like is to gain access to special oers, promotions, and exclusive contests. That shouldnt be shocking to small business owners, who have used similar direct mail or in-store contests for years to drive new customers through their doors. A Facebook contest is very similar to those types of oine incentives, contests, or sweepstakes; its just executed through a social network. Now, that doesnt mean you should head over to your Facebook page and start an exclusive contest right now. Facebook has specic contest terms and policies that companies must adhere to, and breaking any of those rules might result in your page being shut down. To run a contest with the hope of growing your fan count and fueling new customer acquisition, its important to keep a few dos and donts in mind:

Vernica Maria Jarski, Senior Editor and Writer, MarketingProfs

Attract More Customers Through Facebook

Today, almost every company with a sliver of social savvy is on Facebook. In fact, according to a recently released social media study from Vocus and Duct Tape Marketing, Facebook is now the most commonly used social network among SMBs, with 73 percent reporting they currently use it.4 That said, simply using Facebook as a branding or customer engagement tool is very dierent from using it to extract real bottom-line value. This social network can be a valuable customer acquisition tool for small businesses.

Growth Tactic: Fuel Customer Acquisition with a Facebook Contest


While a companys Facebook fans will often visit its page to view pictures and read up on new product releases, studies have shown that one of the primary reasons customers

4 Vocus and Duct Tape Marketing, Dierent Paths to Social Media Inuence, 2012; http://bit.ly/SbJcPe

Companies can do a lot after a chat to continue engaging with their audience, but one of the best tactics is to move the conversation to a different platform. For example, invite your chat participants to join you on your Facebook page, or pin images that relate to the chat on their Pinterest account. It doesnt really matter where you go (it could be in your store), the goal is simply to keep customers talking if they have more to say.

DONT use Facebooks platform directly to host

the contest. Using the social networks like, share, or comment button as a voting mechanism is a direct violation of Facebooks promotion rules.

DO use a third-party application to administer


contests, promotions, and sweepstakes. As long as that third-party application is collecting votes, comments, and entrant information, you can host a contest on your Facebook page.

Marketing Software

15 Ideas to Grow with Digital Marketing

ASK THE EXPERT: Whats the secret to running a successful Facebook sweepstakes?

them. As long as you do your homework and partner with a quality third-party Facebook contest app, you should have nothing to worry about.

To be effective, your Facebook sweepstakes must be timely, relevant to your target audience, and unique to your business. If your sweepstakes is lacking in any of these three areas, you wont see the desired results. Plain and simple.
Corey OLoughlin, Marketing Manager, MarketingProfs

Need help?
Whether you need a sweepstakes or a way to make direct sales from your Facebook page, the Vocus Marketing Suites set of 18 Facebook apps can help. Easy and intuitive to use, the suites apps help you tell your story, capture new leads, and spread the word about your business. You provide the content; Vocus does the rest. Its the only tool you need to harness the marketing power of Facebook.

DONT contact contest winners through Face-

book. Direct messaging, chatting, posting on the winners wall, or posting contest winner information on your wall are all violations of Facebooks promotion rules.

DO include a complete Facebook contest release.


For a contest to be legal, it must acknowledge that your companys promotion is not sponsored, endorsed, administered by, or associated with Facebook.

DONT select a fan at random for a sweepstakes

prize. Again, that would qualify as using Facebook to collect entrant information and would be a violation of its rules.

DO follow-up with entrants after the contest is

over. While Facebooks contest rules dont allow you to do that through its platform, a third-party app can help you collect valuable lead information. After the contest is over, use that info to contact non-winners and oer them incentives that might encourage them to become new (or better) customers. Remember, while a Facebook promotion, contest, or sweepstakes can be a highly eective lead generation and customer acquisition tool, there are rules that limit how you can execute

Learn More About Your Market with Monitoring

While digital marketing requires you to nd new and unique ways to converse with your customers, its also important to stop talking long enough to listen. No conversation can be truly engaging if one party is doing all the talking. Gathering critical customer feedback and intelligence is now easier than ever, thanks to the range of online monitoring tools available to you. The issue for many small and medium-sized businesses, however, is how to best collect that consumer feedback and data, and turn it into something meaningful and useful.

Growth Tactic: Capture Customer Sentiment with Social Media Monitoring


Monitoring customer sentiment and market trends isnt new, but with social media, its now easier to do. Twitter and Facebook allow you to legally and ethically eavesdrop on whats b eing said about you online, and to gather a more personal portrait of your primary audience without having to execute costly market research.

Marketing Software

15 Ideas to Grow with Digital Marketing

Social media monitoringusing software to observe, listen to and analyze what social u sers are saying about youis one of the most eective ways to do it. If youre just getting started with social media and the thought of a full-blown monitoring campaign scares you, give these four beginner tips a try: 1. Develop a keyword list: Think about the words, phrases, and terms that your customers might use to talk about your brand, business, products, or industry as a whole. 2. Choose a social media monitoring tool: You dont need to immediately invest in software, but it is smart to use an online tool to monitor social sentiment. Many service providers oer a free trial or demo of their product. 3. Establish monitoring objectives: In other words, what do you want to discover? Some goals might include tracking public sentiment about your brand, responding to customer feedback, or following key industry trends. 4. Start listening and analyze the data: Ideally, the social media monitoring tool you choose will be able to analyze and aggregate data for you and nd points of commonality. In the end, that will help you understand trends and themes without having to read every social comment or mention. By now, most companies understand the importance of social media. But if your business is simply using social media as a bullhorn for updates, news, and self-serving announcements, and ignoring the listening aspect, youre missing a huge opportunity.

bigger and better is the way to go. With more fans and followers, you can build more inuence online (see tactic #1) and access a deep reservoir of potential and current customers to drive your growth. Do not engage in the practice of buying fans and followers simply to appear more inuential. While it might be tempting to buy 5,000 new Facebook fans from some unscrupulous online company, your investment will be worthless if those fans dont care about your business. Take the following route instead.

Growth Tactic: Grow Your Twitter Following Quickly and Organically


According to market research rm Chadwick Martin Bailey, high quality Twitter followers are 50 percent more likely to buy products from the brands they follow than their non-follower counterparts.5 Furthermore, 60 percent of a companys followers are more likely than non-followers to recommend the business to their own friends. Translation: Acquiring more Twitter followersprovided theyre real people and not fake accountsmeans more referrals and more sales. So how can you turn your companys Twitter prole into a must-follow account? Here are ve simple steps: 1. Dene your audience: Whether you tweet about a specic industry or a personal interest like running or cooking, your audience will dene the people you follow and the types of messages you tweet. 2. Create a compelling prole: When Twitter users are deciding whether or not to follow you, theyll look at your bio, prole picture, and background. Make sure that all three are an accurate reection of you and your business. 3. Start tweeting: Potential followers will also quickly examine your tweet history and the types of content you share. Make sure to be personal and real, without being self-promotional.

Grow Your Fans and Followers to Create Brand Loyalty

As many small businesses know, bigger isnt always better but when it comes to social media followings, however,

5 Chadwick Martin Bailey, 2012; http://bit.ly/PF9biI

Marketing Software

15 Ideas to Grow with Digital Marketing

4. Find relevant people to follow: Perform a simple Twitter search with keywords or hashtags that are relevant to your business, and follow people that are talking about those things. 5. Reply, retweet, and engage: Ultimately, if you want to build a loyal following, you must make sure youre participating in a two-way conversation. That means replying to or retweeting your followers tweets, or thanking your followers for sharing your content. As a general rule of thumb, make sure you tweet at least once a week. Once a day is more ideal, but dont go overboard. If youre tweeting every minute of every day, your messages will be less impactful. Your end goal should be to balance quantity and quality to acquire relevant followers that may ultimately become loyal customers.

Growth Tactic: Monitor Customers Buying Signals with Social Media


If someone walked through your business door, spent an hour looking at a product, asked you to tell them more about it, and nally asked you how much it cost, youd feel good about your chances of closing a sale. Those buying signals would allow you to provide more information to this potential customer and help them along the sales process. While those in-person buying signals can be tougher to detect online, they exist. You just need to know how, when, and where to look for them. Using software designed to pick up on those signals is the easiest option, but here are two buying signals you can watch for manually on your social networks:

Need Help?
Building your social media presence can be time-consuming. The Vocus Marketing Suites Recommendation Engine makes it easy for you. It identies infuencers to engage with, content to share, and conversations to joindelivering you a stream of easy, step-by-step recommendations that result in social media success.

Engagement frequency: If a particular fan or follower


repeatedly comments onor retweetsyour posts, or they engage with every post about a specic product, thats an indication of serious buying interest. If you see this buying signal, dont go crazy trying to oversell yourself on social media. Treat the customer online like you would if he or she walked into your store. Continue to provide more information and invite them to email or call you directly if theyd like to chat.

Find Your Most Likely Customers Online

So far, weve looked at why building a big online following can benet your business. However, for that following to be truly valuable, your company must be able to convert that loyalty and interest into revenue. To do that, you need to actually be able to nd the fans, followers, and blog readers who are your most likely customers, and identify the buying signals that indicate an interest in purchasing your products or services.

Question or comment specicity: Its one thing if a


fan or follower simply likes a funny photo or retweets an interesting post that has nothing to do with your business. Its another thing if a fan or follower comments on a post about one of your products and asks specic questions about colors, sizes, or features. Specicity is a clear signal that youve got a buyers attention and they want to learn more. Similar to the previous signal, you dont want to go overboard selling yourself right away. Instead, simply engage that fan or follower and continue to monitor their interest.

Marketing Software

15 Ideas to Grow with Digital Marketing

Remember, while having a big following is great, it wont do your bottom line much good if that following isnt actually comprised of paying customers. So, just as you would in your store or in a business meeting with a potential client, recognize potential social buying signals and ask yourself one key question: What do your fans and followers really want from you?

Attract Search Customers with Market Expertise

CASE STUDY: How Vocus Recommendation Engine Helped Purple Trout Widen its Social Net
When search engine optimization rm Purple Trout signed up for Vocus Marketing Suite in March of 2012, the companys president and founder, Steve Phillips, wasnt sure how quickly he should realistically expect the software to produce results. Within a month, he had his answer. After a few days of using Vocus Recommendation Enginethe softwares built-in social media consultant that helps users nd and engage new customers on social mediaPhillips found a user on Twitter who was struggling with Googles recent update and needed SEO help. Through Vocus, Phillips was able to identify that buying signal, follow the user, answer their question publicly, and start a private conversation via Twitter. Less than a month later, that person and their company became a client of ours, Phillips says. It was unbelievable. We didnt have to do a face-to-face with them. I didnt go y to see them somewhere. We connected through the Vocus Marketing Suite, and from there it took o. Now, going on Vocus is the rst thing Phillips does every morning. I make coee and I go to the Marketing Suite, explains Phillips. In 5 to 10 minutes, Im able to look for opportunities to engage potential customers and identify people that are interested in our industry, and I start having conversations with them.

In the not-so-distant past, if a potential customer had a question about your products or wanted to learn more about your services, they had to either walk through your front door or call your customer service line to get answers or advice. Today, that same customer can simply perform a Google search, read a few Yelp reviews, or poll their social networks to achieve the same results. According to an August 2012 study by Forrester Research, 82 percent of U.S. consumers now research products online before actually buying them. Yet, interestingly enough, 54 percent of those buyers still prefer to purchase products in-store after researching them on the Web.6 For small and medium-sized business owners who used to (or in some cases, still do) rely on foot trac or phone calls to interact with customers during their research process, those are critically important statistics that point to the importance of standing out in search results. So, how should you take advantage of your customers pre-purchase research?

Growth Tactic: Plan and Execute a Company Blog


Business blogging used to be a painstaking activity best executed by larger corporations with the time and people to produce regular, relevant blog posts. However, thanks to free blogging platforms like WordPress, Blogger, and Tumblr, businesses of all shapes and sizes can blog with ease. Blogging isnt just about composing a couple of rambling posts each week and publishing them randomly. To succeed, you need to be focused, dedicated, and committed to a specic blogging game plan. Here are ve tips to help you do that:

Set clear goals: Its not enough to just have a blog.


You need to know what you want it to accomplish. Do you want to boost website trac? Do you want to build

6 Forrester Research, August 2012; http://bit.ly/SIH0CC

Marketing Software

15 Ideas to Grow with Digital Marketing

your reputation as a thought leader? Regardless of your goal, dont start writing until you know what you want the blog to produce.

Identify your audience: Knowing


who youre writing for will help you develop a theme for your blog and the posts you write. If your customers identify with certain subjects or topics, or if they seem highly interested in the photos and videos you share on your Facebook page, make sure you consider those things as you create your blogging strategy.

Multiple studies have shown that companies that blog attract more organic Web visitors than those that dont, while frequently updated blogs have the most SEO success. In other words, if you want customers to nd your business while theyre researching similar products online, start blogging.

Attract New Customers in Social Outposts

Most businesses are now active on the major social networks. To stand out online, try getting creative and building a presence on outpost sites. The Web landscape is full of outposts that attract a wide range of specic buyers. Some ock to photo-sharing websites like Flickr and Instagram, while others congregate at niche blogs, community websites, industry forums, and lesser-known social networks. The challenge for business owners is identifying which outposts their target customers visit most often, and formulating a strategy for communicating with them where they are.

Choose your blogging platform: Whether youre


considering blogging platforms like Wordpress, Blogger, or Tumblr, or simply making the blog a separate page on your website, make sure to evaluate the merits of each option and choose the one that makes the most sense for your business. Consider your blogging style, the goals youve set for the blog, and the customers that will be reading it.

Start slowly: While its important to post to your blog


regularly, you should start with a reasonable posting schedule and build your stamina from there. If you start o by posting too often, youll quickly exhaust your queue of blog ideas and you might experience blogging burnout.

Growth Tactic: Collect Fresh Leads with a SlideShare Guide


SlideShare, acquired by professional networking site LinkedIn in 2012, is the worlds largest online community for uploading and sharing PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, and webinars. As of February 2012, it had more than 60 million users and continues to be one of the fastest growing social networks on the Web. Best of all, its incredibly easy to use. In about an hour, your business can craft inexpensive visual contentlike a guide to buying a new bike or tips on keeping your lawn green, for instancethat engages current and potential customers in a very unique way. To get started, just follow this ve-step process: 1. Revise your slides: If youre uploading an older PowerPoint presentation, chances are that it centers on high-level talking points that you would expound on in a person-to-person meeting. You dont have that

Research, listen, and participate: Take a few hours


to read prominent blogs and forums in your industry. Browse their post topics, read comments to gauge how customers respond to each post, and, if its not a direct competitor, join the conversation in a non-promotional way to begin establishing credibility. Doing that will teach you how to interact with customers on your blog and provide fodder for future blog post ideas. The business benets of blogging are numerous, but theres one thats particularly relevant for this section: Search engines love blogs, and they reward companies that regularly maintain them.

Marketing Software

15 Ideas to Grow with Digital Marketing

luxury on SlideShare, so make sure to amend, build on, or delete any slides that seem vague or confusing. 2. Create a catchy title: Think about the keywords that might lead a potential customer to your presentation and include them in your slideshow title and cover slide. Also, make sure your title slide is eye-catching, and that it gives users a compelling reason to click through. 3. Upload and tag presentations: After you sign up for a SlideShare account, you can begin uploading presentations in a variety of document formats. For each upload, be sure to select an appropriate category and assign the document multiple relevant keywords to increase its chances of appearing in search results. 4. Include images: Some of the most viewed and shared presentations on SlideShare go beyond bullet points and extensive copy. They are highly visual, using a mix of photos, infographics, charts, and screenshots to illustrate a point. If possible, liven up your presentations with the same types of visual content. 5. Share your presentation: Look for the various share features alongside each of your uploaded documents and share them with your Twitter followers, Facebook fans, and personal network. Its also easy to e mbed presentations on your blog or another website, upping the likelihood that your customers will get a chance to view it. At the end of your presentation, dont hesitate to include your contact information and encourage users to reach out to you directly if they have questions. At rst glance, SlideShare might seem like a PowerPoint presentation archive, but its much more than that. If used correctly, it can help you boost your messaging, help you engage with a very targeted audience, and increase your new leads.

ASK THE EXPERT: Why should SMBs use SlideShare?

Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs

Make Headlines with a News Release

Some modern marketers will tell you that traditional public relations is no more. Old school PR rms that were simply press release factories are falling by the wayside, while some reporters and editors view corporate news releases as overproduced content unworthy of coverage. We assure you that PR is not deadits evolving. The new digital buying cycle has changed the rules and made PR more accessible. Today, any business can create an online press release to attract customers. Millions of consumers now read press releases directly on websites like Google News and Yahoo! News. If a story is well written and strategically distributed, it can reach your audience without a journalist or news organization distributing it for you.

10

One study has shown that visuals are processed 60,000-times faster by the brain than plain text. For that reason alone, Im a huge fan of SlideShare. Its a visually-driven content channel and, as that number shows, visual content can be the gateway to improved customer interaction and content digestion. At MarketingProfs, SlideShare has been a great source of new leads for us.

Marketing Software

15 Ideas to Grow with Digital Marketing

Growth Tactic: Newsjack a Big Story to Get Seen


First dened by marketing and PR expert David Meerman Scott in a 2011 book by the same name,7 newsjacking is a process by which a business can inject its own ideas or angles into breaking news. You do this by publishing an online press release or blog post commenting on the story; this content then shows up in Google searches alongside news coverage. As well as getting you seen by customers on search engines, newsjacking can generate media coverage or online buzz that attracts even more customers to nd your business through your content. Never heard of newsjacking, or maybe youre not sure how to get started doing it? Its not as complicated as you might think it is. Here are three steps for creating big-time PR buzz through newsjacking: 1. Find the right news to jack: Not every piece of big breaking news is jackable. Its critical to make sure that the topic is relevant to your business and customers in some tangible way, and that you can comment on it without sounding fake or spammy. So, how do you nd those topics? Monitor keywords or phrases in Google News, follow certain Twitter hashtags, and track popular media outlets that cover your industry. If you see something that might apply to your business, go to step 2. 2. Act with a sense of urgency: In order to get your news release or blog post noticed when big news events occur, youve got to be one of the rst businesses to pull the trigger. That doesnt mean you should hastily rush to create a poorly composed blog post. It does mean that you cant aord to be hesitant. To successfully newsjack a story, speed is vital. 3. Include the right keywords: If the news youre trying to hijack involves a specic company, organization, or keyword, make sure to creatively reference them in your blog post or news release headline, and several times in the rst few paragraphs. You want journalists or customers who are looking for more information on a specic piece of news to easily nd your content.
7 David Meerman Scott, 2011; http://bit.ly/wHjLrx

Newsjacking is a perfect example of modern PR. It incorporates some basic tenets of traditional public relations, but is more eective because of the speed and agility of digital media. If youre able to successfully attach your business to a breaking news story, you can quickly create buzz, climb search rankings, and connect with new customers.

CASE STUDY: Making News in Search Rankings With a Seasoned PR Partner


In early 2006, leading national rental management company ResortQuest recognized that it had a signicant marketing problem. In an industry where prospective customers conducted much of their research for potential resort destinations by performing Google searches, ResortQuest lacked the search results it needed to be seen by those customers. Thankfully, John Ellis, ResortQuests online marketing manager, had a plan. The company began to use PRWeb, the Vocus online news release service that helps businesses create, distribute, and track online news releases to gain publicity and exposure on the Web. After some early testing and experimentation with the software, Ellis began creating and distributing link-rich press releases using PRWebs system. Before long, Ellis began seeing increased trac to ResortQuests home page, while several of the companys other landing pages were bubbling to the top of search results. Within six months, the company had several pages consistently listing in the top 10 of search engine results pages. Today, ResortQuests prospective customers have no trouble nding the companys Web pages in search results. Today, we are in the top ve rankings with hundreds of quality keywords, Ellis explains. And its largely because of ResortQuests relationship with PRWeb and the quality of the press releases were able to create and distribute.
11

Marketing Software

15 Ideas to Grow with Digital Marketing

Score Local Publicity by Working with Inuencers

Make yourself accessible: Journalists work on tight


deadlines. They cant wait weeks, days, or, in some circumstances, hours for you to respond if theyre interested in your story. When you send your pitch, make sure you encourage them to contact you at their convenience and be ready to respond when they do whether thats minutes or months later.

While direct-to-consumer tactics and more social engagement helps you converse more personally with your customers, the benet of good, old-fashioned local publicity is still important. After all, in our conversation-fueled world, what you say about yourself on your website and social networks is not always what counts. Sometimes, its what other key inuencers saythe journalists, bloggers, or community members who have the ear of your prospectsthat really matters.

Dont be a pest: Most reporters dont mind if you


send them a follow-up tweet or two after youve pitched them. But if they dont respond, assume that theyre not interested in your idea for now. If you continue to badger them about your news on Twitter, youll risk spoiling the relationship. Knowing how to pitch your story idea to journalists can make the dierence between them pursuing it and using you as a source in their stories, and them rejecting it or ignoring you altogether. Ultimately, if you treat reporters with professionalism and respect, theyll probably return the favor to you. It might not yield publicity after your rst pitch, but it will pay dividends at some point in the future.

Growth Tactic: Pitch a Local Reporter on Twitter


Inuencer marketing is the targeting of people who inuence your customers opinions in order to amplify your message. Pre-Internet, this task was mostly executed through traditional PR tactics. Today, however, you can engage inuencers through a range of channels including social media. One of the best channels for doing that is Twitter. Its an ideal observation and conversation platform, and all you need is the account information of your local media inuencers (news anchors, business reporters, food critics, etc.) to build relationships with them. As you begin to build those relationships, the next step is to pitch your most inuential local reporters on your companys latest big news. To do that, keep these three tips in mind:

Top of Mind (Without 10 Stay Annoying Your Customers)


Customer attention is eeting in the digital marketing environment. Brand loyalty still exists, of course, but customers are constantly bombarded by marketing messages and distractions. You need to refresh your customers loyalty and awareness constantly. Staying top of mind can be a ne line to walk. Contact customers too frequently and you run the risk of annoying them and driving them away. Dont contact them enough and you risk losing their loyalty.

Demonstrate your knowledge of their audience:


If you know that a reporters following is particularly responsive to a specic topic, draft a pitch thats relevant to that topic. For example, if you run a nancial services consultancy and the reporters tweet history is heavy on saving for college, customize your Twitter pitch to include a college savings message.

12

Marketing Software

15 Ideas to Grow with Digital Marketing

Need help?
When you need to connect and stay connected with customers and prospects, email delivers results. The Vocus Marketing Suites helps you create exceptional email campaigns with a huge range of professionally designed templates, easy segmentation, social media sharing, and real-time analytics to measure your results.

newsletters have high deliverability and open rates, you need to build a positive record of sending solicited, relevant emails that opt-in customers and prospects want to read.

Establish a reasonable rhythm: While you dont


want to bombard your email newsletter subscribers with multiple emails per day, you should also avoid the opposite extreme of sending just one or two a month. If your email newsletters are too infrequent, your customers may forget why they signed up for your newsletter in the rst place and immediately delete your message or mark it as spam. Email remains an extremely eective and popular marketing tactic. According to a Forrester Research study released in 2011, 88 percent of direct-to-consumer companies used or planned to use email marketing last year, while 71 percent of business-to-business companies did the same.8 Those numbers wont decrease anytime soon, especially as inexpensive email marketing software continues to make the practice simple and cost-eective for smaller businesses.

Growth Tactic: Create and Send a Regular Email Newsletter


One of the most eective email marketing tactics for smaller businessesboth in cost and reachis an email newsletter. Similar to the print newsletters of yesteryear that businesses used to send out, an email newsletter is simply a daily, weekly, or monthly update sent to a list of subscribers. It might contain company news, helpful tips, exclusive information, customer testimonials, and event information. If its managed eectively, an email newsletter can be a great way to consistently engage your customers and prospects, and regularly provide unique value to them without wearing out your welcome. Here are three simple tips that should set you up for email newsletter success:

ASK THE EXPERT: Why should SMBs be using email marketing?

Provide incentives for customers and prospects to

opt-in: One of the easiest ways to drive your customers away is to send email updates that they dont want to receive. Make sure you only send your email newsletter to customers and prospects who have voluntarily opted in to receive it. How can you encourage customers to opt in? Oer them a special gift for subscribing. It doesnt have to be anything major. A little something like a discount on merchandise or a subscribers-only coupon can go a long way.

Guard your reputation: Email providers like Gmail


and Yahoo rate you as an email sender based on the reputation of your domain (your companys website name) and your Internet protocol (IP) address. If your email newsletters are sent too often and go frequently unopened by recipients, you may be blocked by Gmail or Yahoo. To ensure that your email
8 Forrester Research, How US Marketers Use E-Mail, 2011; http://bit.ly/TY905N

DJ Waldow, Founder and CEO, Waldow Social

13

Its simple: Email has a proven return on investment (ROI) that, according to the Direct Marketers Association, was $40.56 for every $1 spent in 2011. Theres no more tangible way to illustrate its value to SMBs with tight marketing budgets than that. Email marketing is really the original social channel and people still use it every day more than any other social network. It offers the kind of reach and intimate engagement that a lot of other mediums still struggle to provide.

Marketing Software

15 Ideas to Grow with Digital Marketing

11

Be Inuential in an Inbox

Still not convinced by the case for email marketing? Here are a few more email marketing statistics from a recent Direct Marketing Association study:9

simple: people scan their inboxes quickly. If your subject line is long, it will exhaust your customers attention span and prompt a quick press of the delete button. 2. Avoid words that trigger spam lters: While some words will obviously alert the spam police (use your imagination), many seemingly innocuous words like free, video, and sample seem to be the arch-enemy of email spam lters. Its also a good idea to avoid any punctuation or symbols. 3. Dont be afraid to mention your companys name: This is especially true for smaller businesses; it reminds customers of who you are and why youre emailing them. Also, it helps create much-needed brand awareness. 4. Create a sense of urgency: Action-oriented words are highly eective subject line fodder. Theyre far more successful (and less spammy) than words like free in inspiring subscribers to open the email. Use words like today and now that convey urgency and prompt immediate action. 5. Test dierent subject lines and analyze which ones resonate: Dont use the same subject lines all the time, even if they are proving moderately successful. Experiment with a few dierent subject lines and test which ones yield the most click-throughs. Think about which words or phrases prompt you to open emails and try using those in your subject lines, as well. Great subject lines arent rocket science, but they arent accidental either. The best way to create subject lines that truly resonate with your subscribers is to put yourself in their place and think about the things that matter most to them. If you can address those issues, in a compelling way and in 3040 characters, youll stand a far better chance of having your email read.

Compared to other forms of online marketing, email marketings return on investment$40.56 for every dollar spentis nearly double its nearest competitor ($22.24 for Internet display advertising).

Commercial email drove an estimated $63.1 billion in sales in 2011, compared to $57.8 billion in 2010. Email marketing is projected to directly inuence $67.8 billion in sales in 2012, while the Direct Marketing Association predicts that number will be $82.2 billion in 2016.

In other words, email canand willinuence your customers buying decisions if your messages are compelling, timely, value-driven, and relevant. Of course, if no one opens them, youre wasting your time.

Growth Tactic: Grab Attention with Better Email Subject Lines


The subject line is the only part of your email that you can guarantee a customer will see. It is the gateway to the oers, news, tips, coupons and incentives in your email. It will often determine whether your email is read or discarded. Even experienced email marketers agonize over subject lines, where one right (or wrong) word can be the dierence between an open or the trash bin. Here are ve simple subject line rules to ensure that you get the click-through: 1. Keep subject lines short and sweet: Depending on who you ask, a subject line should be no less than 20 characters and no more than 60. As a general rule of thumb, somewhere between 38 and 47 characters is a nice median. The argument for short and sweet is
9 Direct Marketing Association, The Power of Direct, 2011: http://bit.ly/qXjgok

12 Measuring Results

Improve Your Eectiveness by

For many small and medium-sized businesses, executing a multi-channel marketing strategy can be so taxing that when it

14

Marketing Software

15 Ideas to Grow with Digital Marketing

comes time to measure a campaigns results, the analysis is often executed ad-hoc or ignored entirely in favor of gut feeling. Thats a big mistake. While instinct and common sense can occasionally be eective, the only way to truly know whether your marketing activities are hitting their mark is to use objective measurements that validate your assumptions.

marketing activity, you need to acquire enough data to fairly represent your target audience. For instance, if youre trying to analyze the messaging on dierent website landing pages and those pages end up getting very little trac, its going to be very dicult to glean anything signicant from the data you collect. 3. Remember that theres no such thing as an unsuccessful test: Even if your test is inconclusive, its still valuable. Ultimately, that test showed that the element you were testing is not as important or impactful as you suspected. That will allow you to refocus your attention or energy on something else. Metrics and analytics are part of our everyday lives, tracking everything from our heart rates to our bank balances. Keeping tabs on those numbers allows us to better plan for the present and the future, and your business should view its marketing metrics and results the same way. If you dont, then you wont be able to detect problems when they arise and youll decrease the eectiveness of your marketing eorts.

Growth Tactic: Use Simple Analytics to Perform an A/B Split Test


Retail and direct-to-consumer companies have used A/B testing for decades to analyze dierent direct mail campaigns or oers. At its core, A/B testing compares a control sample to other samples to measure the one that performs best with a target audience.

A B

65%

90%

One type of A/B testingalso known as split testingincludes sending out the same email oers with dierent subject lines and measuring the open and click-through rates of each. A/B testing does come with one warning, however: For the inexperienced, it can get complicated pretty quickly. So, if youre just getting started with A/B testing, dont go overboard. Stick to these three tips to perform a straightforwardbut highly informativeA/B test: 1. Dene your theory and your success metrics before you start: If youre testing three possible callto-action buttons on your website, it can be easy to assume which one will work more eectively before the test begins (see: Gut feeling). To avoid that, develop hypotheses that address those assumptions and establish success metrics that will ultimately validate them. Success metrics could include specic actions (clicks, downloads, or purchases) or numbers (time spent on the website or bounce rate), but they should always align with your companys goals. 2. Acquire enough data to establish signicance: In order to make a truly objective assessment of a particular

Need help?
To understand which elements of your marketing campaigns are making people click, share and buy, you need analytics. The Vocus Marketing Suite tracks and measures how prospects react to your marketing giving you a quick overview of which tactics are working best, making it easy to improve your results every time.

13

Attract Customers with Content Marketing

Though its just now becoming a best practice, the basic concept of content marketingcreating and distributing relevant content to engage your audiencehas been around for years. According to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketings roots trail at least as far back as 1895, when John

15

Marketing Software

15 Ideas to Grow with Digital Marketing

Deere published its rst branded magazine for an audience of outdoor enthusiasts and farmers. That spawned an era of custom corporate publishing in the 20th century, which carried over to the new millennium when Microsoft launched the rst major corporate blog, Channel 9, in 2004.10 Today, any company can be a content marketing champion, and you dont need a small army of writers and editors to do it. You simply need to examine the types of contentthat could be a video, a tweet, or a blog postthat help your customers with the information they need.

2. Summarize: Dont be a plagiarist. By taking a few minutes to quickly summarize the content youre curating and add your take on it, youll boost your credibility as a trusted source and increase your position as a thought leader. You dont need to reinvent the wheel and write a 10-paragraph post, but you should do more than simply copy and paste someone elses content. Give credit where credit is due. 3. Organize: As you build a rich library of relevant content, youll need to organize it in a way thats easy to nd and digest. You might categorize curated content by topics or specic customer questions, and make it simple to search for or click on. Dont lose track of your archived contentsome of it will be useful for years to come. Give that content a home on your blog or a specic section of your website, and it will pay search engine dividends long after you originally curated it. 4. Share: This is the easiest step. To be truly eective, you should commit to sharing your curated content regularlyeither through an email newsletter, your social networks, or your blog. If you fail to do that, your chances of becoming a reliable source of information for your customers will go down, causing them to look elsewhere for that content. With so many companies publishing and sharing content, many users feel swamped with information. Content curation presents an opportunity for you to provide respite for your prospects and customers, giving them one trusted source for all of the information they need.

Growth Tactic: Content Curationan Easy Entry to Content Marketing


For smaller businesses that dont have the time to compete with larger companies producing libraries of fresh, custom content in-house, content curation is the answer. To understand this tactic, imagine being the owner of a high-end art gallery. Rather than forcing your customers to chase down the worlds best new art, you sift through the art landscape for them, curating the best pieces and centralizing them in one place. Bringing it back to marketing, you can do something similar with your blog, collecting and sharing third-party content that your customers are interested in. As well as driving trac to your blog, curation is a cost-eective way to build thought leadership and brand awareness. Before you go o simply hijacking other experts content, however, be sure to understand these four steps to perfect curation: 1. Identify: Be sure the content you curate is relevant to your audience and helpful in some way. Research shows that people are more apt to click on an article that they agree with than one they disagree with, so consider curating content that will conrm your customers opinions or feelings about a specic topic. Also, only curate content from high-quality sources that you and your customers can trust.

10 Content Marketing Institute, 2012; http://bit.ly/ArF0JO

16

Marketing Software

15 Ideas to Grow with Digital Marketing

14 Help Customers Find Your Content


Content is the lifeblood of modern online marketing. It boosts brand interaction, brand awareness, thought leadership, and your chances of inuencing customers. Of course, thats assuming that your customers nd it. Optimizing your content for search engines and social media is the easiest way to guarantee this will be the case. To do it, the rst step is to consider how and why your customers search for content, and which terms or keywords are most relevant to them. The basic idea is to monitor specic keywords that are relevant to your business and use them in your content headlines, social media posts, and website copy. By doing that, youll greatly improve your contents reach and its chances of getting found and shared.

Any optimization eort begins with crafting a concise, informative script that will produce a video your customers will want to watch and share. 2. Add a caption track: Currently, search engines cannot decipher the audio in your video. They can, however, read uploaded transcripts that cover the videos main talking points and include your important keywords. Be sure to do that before you publish your video. 3. Give the video a search and social friendly title: Truly optimized headlines are concise, compelling, and keyword-rich. Identify the keywords that are most relevant to your audience and the video itself and use thosealong with your company namein the video title. 4. Write a compelling description for your video: Your video description is your sales pitch. It will convince your audience to watch it, while also making the video more visible in search results. As with any piece of content, be sure to avoid keyword stung the practice of jamming every i maginable k eyword into a paragraph and calling it search optimized. Keyword stung fails to accurately describe the video and also sends a red ag to spam-policing search algorithms. 5. Apply relevant tags: This is where you can insert keywords that might attract your target customers. Choose the most relevant keywords for your video and make sure you place quotes around multiple words that you want treated as a single phrase. Whether your video has the production value of a Hollywood blockbuster or a home movie, if you dont optimize it, it wont have the reach and impact that you desire. The same goes for any content format, so be sure to take the tips above and customize them for all of the content you produce.

Growth Tactic: Optimize a YouTube Video for Search and Social


According to YouTube, more than 72 hours of video are uploaded to its network every minute and over 4 billion hours of video are watched each month (yes, you read that right).11 Its a crowded environment that can be hard to stand out in. Sure, you occasionally see a random cat ghts dog or girl runs into tree video go viral. But for every one of those, there are thousands of videos that go completely unnoticed. If youre not optimizing your video for search and social, the likelihood is your video will go unnoticed, too. Here are ve steps of basic optimization to make sure that doesnt happen: 1. Write a strong script: One of the worst things you can do is simply turn on your camera, press record, and tape ve minutes of improvised, incoherent rambling.

11 YouTube, 2012; http://bit.ly/gzYBVx

17

Marketing Software

15 Ideas to Grow with Digital Marketing

15

Turn Your Customers Into Customer Evangelists


For all of the amazing new online methods that marketers can use to reach, engage, and inuence customers, nothing seems to drive sales like a customer professing their love for your business to their friends, families, and networks.

Its known as crowdsourcing, and its the practice of asking your customer evangelists to generate new ideas, spread your message, or directly participate in a specic marketing initiative. Crowdsourcing takes advantage of your most loyal customers evangelism and converts it into a living extension of your business. Here are four simple steps to develop a high-powered crowdsourced marketing campaign: 1. Select the appropriate platform to engage your crowd: There are numerous crowdsourcing tools that can help you acquire the feedback and word-of-mouth power you need. To start, you might survey opinions on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, or write a blog post asking readers to submit ideas for a new company slogan or logo, for example. 2. Prompt participation: If youre using social media to engage your customers, try drawing participants into the campaign by oering incentives. Maybe you let them get in on the ground oor by sampling a new product and asking for feedback. Or maybe you create a reward system for every like on Facebook or retweet on Twitter. Your goal should simply be to craft a callto-action that encourages participants to spread the word and get involved. 3. Discern the gems from the junk: Not every customer evangelist is going to be the type of customer you want trumpeting your brand on their social networks. You may even have competitors who pose as customers in an attempt to derail you. Beware of shortsighted or non-representative input, and keep an eye out for customers who mightin an eort to support youtotally misrepresent your business and its values. 4. Stake your claim: If youre leveraging crowdsourcing to acquire new logo ideas or website designs, make sure to protect your rights against royalty claims by drafting a legal disclosure that says all submissions will automatically become your companys intellectual property.
18

Its known as customer evangelism, a term that Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba popularized with their 2002 book, Creating Customer Evangelists: How Loyal Customers Become a Volunteer Sales Force, and its marketing gold. While you cant buy or pay for customer evangelists, you can create more of them by providing great customer service, engaging in authentic conversations, and selling fantastic products and services. The more customers you convert to customer evangelists, the more outspoken lobbyists your company will have. You cant overestimate the organic impact those folks can have on your bottom line. The question is how to best leverage your evangelists loyalty once you have itwithout overstepping your bounds?

The Solution: Crowdsource a Marketing Campaign


Twenty years ago, businesses were in charge of the messages their customers received. They either interacted with them directly or used one-way marketing to deliver the message they wanted their customers to hear. Today, your customers are piloting the plane. They choose when to interact with you and when to absorb your messages. There is, however, a way to collaborate with your customers in a way that harnesses their insight, power, and inuence to execute authentic, cost-eective marketing campaigns.

Marketing Software

15 Ideas to Grow with Digital Marketing

If used eectively, your customers can be the most eective form of marketing your business can invest in. Additionally, by displaying trust in your most loyal customers to help your business make key marketing decisions, you can foster a deeper relationship with them and increase the likelihood that theyll refer and recommend your business going forward.

About MarketingProfs
MarketingProfs is a rich and trusted resource that oers actionable information and guidance designed to make you a smarter marketerfrom social media and content marketing to lead generation and online conversions. More than 405,000 members rely on our free daily publications, podcasts, virtual conferences, and more to stay up-to-date on the most important trends in marketing, and how to apply them to their businesses. Plus, MarketingProfs delivers enhanced professional development training through online seminars and short webcasts, in-depth how-to reports, research, interactive planning tools, online courses, and in-person events. MarketingProfs helps the smartest marketers worldwide turn even the toughest marketing challenges into success stories. Basic membership is free register now.

Next Steps for Marketers


Marketing has changed. In todays digital buying cycle, customers engage with businesses rst. Their decisions are shaped by recommendations on Facebook and Twitter, the information they nd on Google, and the news and reviews they read onlineall before a business engages with them. Reaching them with the right message, in the right place at the right time can be time consuming and expensive. However, there are tools that help you do digital marketing. Better. The Vocus Marketing Suite was developed to help small and medium-sized businesses grow with technology by combining search marketing, social media and publicity in one integrated solution. Reach more customers, engage with inuencers and grow your business fast with Vocus. Sign up for a demo at www.vocus.com/marketing today. Connet with us:

19

You might also like