Archive for Marketing Tools
How To Incorporate Your Restaurant Reviews With Your Social Media Strategy
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As a restaurant, you know how important it is that you not only earn reviews on these sites to help you generate business, but that you use these reviews to improve your business.
One of the best ways to increase your online review activity is to incorporate your review sites with your social media strategy, and here’s how.
Use social to let the world know.
Even though review sites are popular, it’s likely that some of your customers may not know that they can leave an online review about your business. Use the power of social media to help promote the online review sites your company regularly uses. For example, put a post on Facebook with a link to Yelp (or whichever other site of your choice) and direct your followers to leave a review about your business. This way, your dedicated following will be able to see where to go to leave reviews.
Highlight great reviews.
If a customer recently left a wonderful review about your business, use it as a promotional tool on your social media platforms. For example, you can link directly to the great review on your Twitter or Facebook page, allowing your customers to not only learn about the review sites, but to also see all the wonderful reviews your company has earned. This just may entice them to leave a glowing review of their own.
Promote consistently.
If you use social media to highlight weekly or daily specials or discuss popular promotions for your restaurant, make sure that you do the same on your online review sites. These sites allow you to update your content regularly, and you can even pay for ad space on the site too. By keeping your information consistent among all of your channels, you’re ensuring that your visitors are finding the right information about your company no matter where they locate you.
Use online review sites to highlight social media.
Your online review sites allow you to add links to your website and social media platforms, so make sure that you do this. Adding these links will serve as backlinks for these sites, which will help to boost your SEO, but it also provides your visitors with different platforms they can use to find you.
Use it for case studies.
No matter how hard you try, you will come across a time when a customer (or two) leaves a negative review about your restaurant on your review site. It’s extremely important that you respond to this negative review in a timely fashion and that you apologize sincerely and make the situation right. This will help the customer feel better and may even entice them to give you a second chance (and if they enjoy your restaurant the next time, they may write a good review). Use these success stories from negative reviews and highlight them as case studies on your social platforms. For example, show your customers how you took a customer’s unhappy situation and made it better, or how you listened to a variety of similar complaints and made the necessary changes. This shows your customers that you listen to what they have to say and that you are willing to put in the effort to combat the negative reviews.
Images By: Sheffield Tiger – CC BY 2.0
5 Tips On Generating Better Sales Leads Through Social Media
Posted by: | CommentsAs companies learn how to use social media sites in the most beneficial ways possible, some are still struggling to turn social media activity into sales. Here are some smart tips for companies to start cashing in on social media activities.
1. Goals Are Vital
Any time you are engaging in any type of social media campaign (or any type of action on the web) you should list out some goals for your activity. What are you trying to achieve? Make sure you have a clear idea of how many leads you want to generate and what action you want users to take as a result of your social media efforts.
Having clear goals is an important first step in generating leads on social media sites. This will help you monitor your progress and create better content in the future.
2. Content Should Be Shareable
As you work on content creation, make it a goal to produce content that is highly shareable. Social media is all about conversation, so your objective should be to get followers to start talking about the material you post online.
With that in mind, it is important to consider what types of content your followers would find valuable. Just like in all business, your goal should be to satisfy the customer. Think about what content gets shared the most, and try to match those formats to your brand’s style. It also helps to create evergreen content that can be shared lots of times, along with time-sensitive material that your followers will want to share immediately.
3. You Don’t Always Need to Mention Your Brand
As you develop your content, it is important to remember that customers do not want to focus solely on your company’s products. In providing valuable content to prospective customers, you should try to utilize your company’s expertise rather than pushing the company’s products too much.
For example, “How To” articles can be really helpful because they turn your website into more of a service site rather than a sales site. Readers will begin to view your company’s site as a good resource for information, and that reputation of reliability will translate into better business.
4. Industry News Can Fill the Gaps
Developing strong leads means attracting the right kinds of people to your content and social media materials. In order to do that, as stated, you should work on including more than just your own company’s material on your social media feeds.
The ratio of company content to third-party content will vary by business, but, in general, you can utilize industry news sources in building a strong following for your social media feeds. Think about how your company’s feeds can be most beneficial to your target audience. In doing this, you can provide potential customers will valuable information from other sources, encouraging them to come to your feeds not just for information about your product but also for information about the industry. Eventually, that engagement has a good chance of turning into a sale.
5. Don’t Forget to Nurture Leads
Your job doesn’t end when a customer engages with your content on a social media site. If you do nothing to nurture your leads, they are far less likely to engage in the future, whether through participation or through sales.
Thus, it is important to build in some method for retaining leads over time. When customers consume your content, try to get them to access a higher level of communication, such as an email list. Enlisting customers for a subscription newsletter is one of the best ways for maintaining a relationship with them moving forward.
Leverage Your SEO With Search Retargeting
Posted by: | CommentsToday we are going to discuss how you can leverage your SEO efforts and maximize the return on the work you put into SEO.
What is Search Re-targeting?
Re-targeting is a form of marketing in which you “retarget” users that have previously visited your website. Let’s say a visitor comes to your webpage via a Google Organic search term, you’ll want to keep hitting them with follow up ads as they surf the web. Don’t worry; I’m not sure there is anything currently illegal about stalking online. Basically you pay for impressions on other website to display your ads with visitors who have previously showed interest or at least visited your website within a set amount of time.
So what is Search Retargeting?
The difference between re-targeting and search retargeting is this: the visitor does not actually have to visit your website to be targeted. You can now target lost visitors by going after them in a categorically, industry, or service specific searches in the search engines.
What is the True Value of Search Re-targeting?
Statistics show that you have a ~70% better chance at converting your visitors into paying customers by retargeting customers as opposed to not re-targeting customers. Not only do you have a greater chance at closing your clients, but you also have a higher likelihood that customers that do convert from retargeting spend on average ~50% more than those who have not been retargeted.
How Do I Maximize My Efforts From My SEO Work With Retargeting?
#1: Share your rankings data
You want to share your rankings data with your PPC team in order to maximize both your efforts. You know the keywords that you aren’t quite ranked for yet? Those are the ones you are going to want to build highly targeted ads for. Supplement what you have not done with SEO, and push over to PPC.
Let’s say you are ranking for “Free Christian Music” but are not ranking well for “Free Christian MP3’s”, “Christian MP3’s”, “Christian Music” etc. with ads that are specific to that audience looking for Christian Music! You will be directly speaking to the intent of the search which is for “Christian Music”.
#2: Compile your complete keyword list
Love it or hate it we all know that keyword research is a huge obstacle we all must cross when deciding and analyzing our keywords to target. This leaves us with thousands of keyword phrases we can use for retargeting.
Your action item is this: send over your complete keyword list to your paid marketing expert, and have them retarget those customers for your company. Target the topics, website categories, etc. Hammer them with search marketing ads until they scream uncle! You can do this until you have more time and resources to allocate a proper SEO campaign build out per keyterm.
#3: Research the competition and use the data
Simple yet most are not taking advantage of this. You must see what your competitors are ranking for and (if profitable) go after those same keywords as well. Not just for SEO or PPC, but taking all the data you can get into account. This includes the old school meta keyword tags if they are still utilizing them.
One way to maximize our efforts is to utilize brand and descriptive intent to buy terms to our benefit. For example: “Christian Music Videos” or “Christian Music Chris Tomlin”, etc.
There are 2 bottom lines to this story:
- If you are not utilizing retargeting campaigns for your potential website visitors you are losing out on 70% more business and an increased spend of about 50%.
- Work independently of other channels in marketing but share the data.
Now (if you have the budget) get out there and create highly effective search retargeting campaigns!
What Marketing Trends Can I Start This Spring?
Posted by: | CommentsAs we enter spring, why not consider new ways to market your website? By implementing new marketing techniques now you have a better chance of a successful summer. We all know that if you want to sell products you have to put in the work early, so why not use the new season as an excuse to get started?
Some of these methods you might already be using, in which case why not use this as an excuse to refresh your methods & give it an extra boost!
Content
You should already be using decent content on your website – but that doesn’t mean that you can’t look at ways to refresh this a little bit.
Why not spend a little time researching the type of content that your competitors are writing? No one is saying that you should copy this, but seeing what is popular on other websites can really help!
Also – why not take steps to make sure you have perfect content? Do you have a process whereby articles are checked for errors? If not, implement this now!
Have you considered guest writer slots on your blog or website? This is a great way of putting a different perspective on your content with minimal hard work and effort on your part.
Be Smart About Smartphones
Not only do most people now own a mobile phone, but a smartphone is fast becoming the must have accessory. Have you thought about how your website loads on a smartphone? If not, now is the time to do it! Having a website that loads well on a mobile phone and a tablet is now essential. This doesn’t always mean massive changes to your actual website, but it is something that you need to consider. Lots of your websites traffic (and even search engine traffic via the likes of Google) will come from a smartphone, by not having a website that loads well for them you are turning away many potential customers.
Be Aware Of Googles Knowledge Graph
During the past few months you might be aware that Google are trying to answer more queries direct on their search engine. If you search for celebrities you’ll see a knowledge graph at the top of the page, with facts about this celebrity. Of course it isn’t just celebrities with this knowledge graph on their page.
You might not be able to do anything about this, but being aware of Google’s trends and changes is the best way to make sure you are ahead of the competition when it comes to marketing your website. This spring why not make it your mission to be more aware of Google’s goings on, and spend a little time reading up about up and coming changes, so you know what to expect.
195 SEO are on of the UK’s top inbound marketing agencies ensuring each client receives a high return on investment.
Images By: Melanie Edwards – CC BY 2.0
Using A Domain With An Unusual Extension For Your Business
Posted by: | CommentsIn your search for a business domain name, you never want to get too cute or artsy that your domain ends up being associated with a geographic region you do not reside in. While .co used to be associated with Columbia, it is now so widely registered that Google is treating it as a generic domain extension. Your .co website now has a good chance of competing with the .com. But, there are other domain extensions which come across as geo-specific.
Domain Scarcity
Don’t let good domain scarcity drive you to seemingly good alternatives that are not well thought out. In the event you come up short within your budget, the niche specific keyword domain extensions are going to make more sense for your business domain than domain extensions that are being used to complete a word (ignoring the dot in between the letters) such as mortga.ge, in which case the .ge extension represents the state of Georgia. If your business is in Georgia, great. If not, you’ve got a problem. If you want your website to rank well in a particular region or country, it’s wise to set the geo-targeting from within Google webmaster tools. But, if your domain extension reflects the extension of a particular country that is not your own, your website will have a more difficult time ranking and you won’t be able to set your geographic region.
Local Search
Geo-specific domain extensions do work well for local search and you will have a much easier time finding an available domain if searching for one with your geographic domain extension. Is it the best choice for a domain? That depends. If your business service area does not extend past your region, you should be fine. If you plan to do business in other states, you will have a much more difficult time showing up in search results for those areas unless there is no provider in that area and your location is closest.
Other Options
If your budget is your biggest barrier, as it is for many small businesses, you might still be able to lease a premium domain and afford monthly payments. This option opens up domains your company might never be able to afford and you might be able to work out a deal with the domain owner to apply payments towards an eventual purchase.
Don’t let the lack of obvious domain names drive you to poor decisions. Before choosing a domain with an unusual extension, do your homework and keep an eye out for domains that become available. Domains expire every day and in a bad economy, people who don’t want to sell may be forced to do so.
Image By: Widjaya Ivan – CC BY 2.0
5 Minute Guide To SEO For Lawyers
Posted by: | CommentsMost lawyers are familiar with acronyms like DEA, DOJ and EEOC, but one important acronym they might not know is SEO. SEO (short for search engine optimization) is the practice of crafting web content and pages in a manner that helps the site grab higher positions on search results pages. (After all, the first couple listings on Google search get the lion’s share of traffic.)
Whether they’re writing their blog posts or hiring it out to freelance writers, attorneys who implement good SEO practices into their overall web strategy will definitely see an increase in billable hours. If you’re an attorney that’s just ramping up your web marketing efforts, here’s a few thing you’ll need to know.
SEO for Attorneys
In many ways, SEO is a lot like the law. The whole process is built on a few fundamental concepts but the day-to-day best practices are constantly changing.
Google is, for all intents and purposes, the only search engine most practicing attorneys really need to concern themselves with. After all, the giant company commands almost 70% of the search market.
The Google philosophy is that high quality websites will be rewarded with higher page rankings. In theory, this means that attorneyswho write up interesting blog posts that provide value to readers will come in above low quality sites.
In practice, there’s a lot more to SEO than just good quality articles, though that’s a big part of the process.
Social Media is SEO, Too
Attorneys who are already active on social media sites like Twitter are already a step or two ahead in the SEO game. Highly active Twitter users (the ones who interact with other users and whose content is re-Tweeted and shared by other users) will enjoy a big boost in page rankings. Google puts a high value on these types of organic social shares, so the more active you are the better off you’ll be.
It is, however, absolutely critical that you don’t lose sight of your professional demeanor when interacting on social media. Attorneys who are lured into petty back-and-forth arguments with anonymous social media users won’t be impressing potential clients.
Hiring an SEO Consultant
If implementing SEO best practices sounds appealing, but time-consuming, you might want to hire an SEO consultant to run your entire web operation. Good SEO professionals don’t come cheap but, like good attorneys, they provide demonstrable results.
SEO, like the law, can be deceptively simple so don’t get in over your head. Hiring a well-qualified SEO consultant is an expense that should offer a significant return on investment.
Finally
Attorneys who are willing step into the wilds of the Internet with good blog content and a solid social media presence will find themselves flooded with new clients. It’s not an overnight process, but it’s rapidly becoming as necessary a part of your overall marketing strategy as a Yellow Pages ad, or television commercial.
How To Fuse Your SEO & Social Media Activities
Posted by: | CommentsAny business or organisation that relies on a website for their survival will be all too aware of the importance of high page rankings and high visitor numbers.
In the olden days it was enough to highlight a few keywords, pop in some metadata and let the search engines do their bit. But with social media fast becoming one of the most powerful marketing tools available, it’s crucial now to take it into account when developing a website.
Fusing your SEO and social media activities can give your business or organisation a huge boost, and get your click counter going through the roof, so here are some ideas to get you started.
What is SEO?
SEO simply stands for Search Engine Optimisation. Most people have a general understanding of SEO, but in the last few years knowing all of the ins and outs has become even more important.
Websites that are search engine optimised will have a good percentage of key words, well-written text and plenty of links to other sites. This helps search engines know that the site is trustworthy and informative for the person making the query.
What are social media activities?
Social media activities encompass everything on the internet that involves interacting with other users. Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Google+ are just a few examples of this internet phenomenon.
Whole communities are built around swapping shared interests, providing a unique marketing tool for anyone looking to increase their brand awareness.
Why is it important?
Fusing your SEO and social media activities is important as it can increase the profile of your business or website and bring more visitors to your site.
It also gives search engines another factor with which to assess the usefulness of your site. For example a pages with lots of ‘likes’ or recommendations will rank more highly than those with none.
It can also help you keep track of your target market. Following who shares your link and why can provide useful information, allowing you to focus on a specific area or even rebrand to target a new audience.
For anyone who is self employed, social media optimisation is even more important as most individuals are employed on their reputation. The increase exposure should help to get more work pouring in.
Installing social sharing buttons onto your website
An easy way to begin fusing your SEO and social media is to install social sharing buttons in your website.
These can now be found at the bottom of a lot of webpages and allow visitors to share the contents of the page with a single click.
This will then appear on their profile, where other users will see it. If they have similar interests to the original visitor, there’s a good chance that they’ll have a look at your site too.
By using a tracking service, you’ll be able to collect and analyse data from these buttons to see what impact they are really having on visitor numbers.
Creating a social media page for your website
Another way of increasing your social media profile is to create a page for your business or organisation.
You can use this space to advertise upcoming events, promote your current work and connect with users and prospective clients.
However you can’t just create a page and expect it to work its magic. One of the most important aspects of social media is being active and continuously engaging with visitors.
The social media is the human face of your company. So by continually updating your page, sharing associated information from other pages and becoming involved in online communities, you can make your business appear friendly and approachable.
Social media may not give you instant results, and your visitor numbers are unlikely to shoot up over night. But with online communities growing and spending on social media sites set to increase, this is an aspect of business that simply can’t be ignored.
Featured images:
- License: Creative Commons image source
- License: Creative Commons image source
Infographics Popular on Social Media
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If you’re one of the millions of people who enjoys the infographics that circulate on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest these days, then you’re not alone. You’re also in quite good company if you’ve wondered whether or not infographics could help you make a success of your product or company in the same way! Infographics make terrific marketing tools because of the way they combine all the goodies that are necessary to catch people’s eye – color, information, design, and wit. Regardless of your target audience or subject of choice, you can definitely make them work for you.
Check out the following graphic for some key information on how you can put the infographic trend to work for you. Learn what ten elements are present in every successful infographic on the web. Learn the numbers in regards to how infographics have risen over the past few years. Even learn which sites will present the best marketing platforms for your graphics!
The Review of Reviews
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Have you ever tried a new product or service, and loved it so much, that you just wanted to tell everyone you know about it? And even everyone that you don’t know? If so, you are not alone. 75 percent of reviews posted on review websites are positive, and 82 percent of people find user-generated reviews to be valuable or extremely valuable. What does this tell us? That people like to hear about the things that they buy, before they buy them. That people trust other people when it comes to trying out products. So then it goes without saying, that when a review is bad, people are likely to listen. Most businesses are nothing without their consumers, so never be afraid to make your voice heard when you have an experience with a new product or service; whether it is a good review or a bad review, the important thing is that it matters.
How can SEO services pump up web traffic?
Posted by: | CommentsHow can SEO services pump up web traffic?
The goal to bring in organic traffic is the dream of every web manager. Given the changing algorithms engineered by search engine biggies, the need to be one up in the game has become more than a need; it is the question of survival today. While you cannot single handedly take on the job of generating traffic, SEO companies that you choose can help you.
Here is how:
Building a link pyramid
One of the top priorities of every SEO company is to give its clients the exposure they need to get their business running. The company unmasks the client’s potential to help prospective customers see what they can get from the company marketing the product/service.
However, there is a fine line between excessive marketing and marketing with a purpose. Link building can help the company in question build a strong network of supplier/partners and also tap into their markets for new customers.
Ad placement
An approach that more often than not brings results is AD placement. The SEO Company you hire must be capable enough to launch an ad campaign by carefully considering potential platforms with exposure in mind. For instance, ad placement on a popular social networking site is far more rewarding than the same in a related market niche. Placement is more about finding audience and making sure exposure is built. This in turn generates organic traffic.
Campaign management
Every SEO Company that exists boasts of providing the best campaign management services but, what you should understand is that for the company you run to progress, proper campaign follow up is the key. It is not always about launching the campaign, it is more about assessing if the milestones are reached as per target or not.
When you sit down with your team to go through the services of an SEO company, don’t buy into deals which promise a huge range of services. Some of these services may be of no use to you in getting organic traffic. What matters is how each of the service can translate effort to traffic.
