So you want to be a social media manager? Find out what it really takes
The Social media industry is still rapidly growing and as a result, over the last couple of years there has been an explosion in demand. Now widely accepted as a highly effective communications tool, the growth trend shows no signs of stopping any time soon.
Get paid to post on Facebook – what could be easier right?
Whilst awareness is at an all time high, many businesses wrongly regard social media as ‘easy’ to do, after all, what skill does it take to make a status update? When businesses try and fail to execute social media activities effectively however, they begin to appreciate the fact that there is actually much more to it.
The ‘anyone can do it’ approach is being perpetuated by a slew of get-rich-quick websites, reporting social media management as being the easy way ordinary people with no related training or experience can get rich doing.
This positive can-do approach is something i’m all for – whilst I have an academic background in Management and Marketing, everything I know relating to social media is self taught or has been learned over many years of working with a vast number of different clients. This ‘anyone can do it’ ethos is meant to empower people, encouraging them to get into social media management, usually after they part with sums of money for a webinair claiming to teach them all the secrets they need in just half an hour. This approach however devalues the social media industry and leads to unskilled individuals being put in charge of marketing activities they are ill equipped to carry out.
Whilst no one is infallible and we all make mistakes, doing a job you don’t fully understand and have no past experience of can be a recipe for disaster. Any mistakes a social media manager makes are highly public and often can’t be ignored or swept under the carpet. In this industry where an individuals name is their reputation; make costly mistakes early on and you may find it hard to distance yourself from them. Don’t kid yourself that just because you have a Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr account that you have the skills necessary to run activities for a business.
Businesses also need to understand that they get what they pay for. If they are only offering intern money, that’s what they will get and the results are very likely to reflect that. Chasing Likes and community growth is all well and good but if you are considering social media management as a career choice you really shouldn’t be pitching your services until you understand that Likes don’t mean squat.
Managing and growing a community is senseless if it’s done interdependently of other marketing activity and isn’t strategically driven
Clients consistently underestimate just what it takes to deliver social media activities successfully. Once educated or once they try it for themselves and fail, most soon realise that they simply don’t have the time or expertise to handle activities in-house and look to outsource instead. There is no denying there is a market for social media managers and whilst i’m always happy to knowledge share, discuss best practice, techniques and encourage those wanting to work in this area, I am increasingly unnerved by the gung-ho ‘anyone can do it it’ mentality which stands to devalue this incredibly important, diverse and often misunderstood role.
I don’t agree that ‘anyone’ can be a social media manager, I think it is a complex role that demands a lot of different skills and experience to carry out.
If you aren’t already a prolific user of social media, how can you hope to use a social network effectively for a business? Without a strong grounding in marketing communications, how can you effectively engage people and fulfill business objectives that are more diverse and challenging than simply growing fans or followers? If you don’t know your CTR from ROI how can you analyse and understand the data that is critical in gauging the effectiveness of your activities? If you don’t have customer facing skills or don’t have the ability to resolve problems, how will you deal with irate customers posting on a clients Facebook wall? If you’re written communications aren’t great, how will you create compelling content and great headlines? I’m sure you get my point.
Just some of the skills a social media manager needs to have
Strong interpersonal and networking skills
A good understanding of planning and strategy
Customer-centric approach
Clear understanding of Google Analytics (or similar) and the ability to set up effective campaign tracking
The ability to interpret data and gain insights
Lots of creativity and personality (even the stuffiest brand needs to show some personality to succeed on social media)
Up to date knowledge of guidelines for all the platforms you are active on
Excellent copy writing skills, in particularly the ability to write good headlines
A good understanding of business objectives and the ability to craft effective calls to action
The ability to create custom graphics to accompany posts
Excellent time management skills and high level of focus
If you don’t have all of the above, of course there are things that you can pick up or learn along the way, but personally, I wouldn’t trust something as important as my businesses social media activity to an inexperienced trainee.
The fact remains that social media is the current, hip thing to be involved in and for very obvious reasons, has massive appeal as a career. Get paid to surf the net and post on Facebook all day? What could be easier! My advice however is not to be blinded by all of the companies making money off your naivety, offering training that will turn you pretty much over-night, into a wealthy social media professional. If you don’t have the experience to back up your claims, knowing a bit of marketing theory isn’t enough and before you’ve even got properly started, you may find your reputation damaged.
Theory means nothing, you’ll build a repuation based on the results you get and the knowledge and insights that you share
Spend all of your time and efforts into branding yourself as a social media expert now and what happens in a few years time when social media has come of age? Demand won’t always remain as high as it currently is – how appealing will your CV look in a few years time when all you can boast is social media management when it is no longer quite so shiny and new a skill to have?
To survive and prosper in this industry you will need many more strings to your bow than simply being able to use any given social network. Social media is just one part of the marketing mix and just one of the communication methods open to businesses. Invent yourself as a specialist in social media and in a very short time you might find that as the industry matures and moves on, you get left behind with narrowly defined, outdated skills.
An individual who can grow a Facebook community is valuable right now and yes, many people are making careers out of doing just that. Keep in mind though that it won’t be long before businesses realise they need to turn not to social media managers, but to marketing strategists who understand the bigger picture and will be the real driving force behind successful, sustainable social media activities. Don’t risk staking your career on social media alone, which when taken in isolation will become obsolete faster than you can say “Friendster”.
Beware of bad marketing advice from self proclaimed ‘experts’
I read an article the other day called “How to manipulate people for fun and profit”. I’m not going to link to it because in my opinion, the advice it provided was utter garbage, highlighting the ease with which one can tout themselves as an ‘expert’ but in reality, prove they are anything but by giving not just poor, but potentially damaging advice.
The article states that action occurs as a result of inducing a high arousal state – a well known concept in Psychology and absolutely correct. My issue however is with how the author recommended you induce a high state of arousal – by outraging people. The author stated that marketing strategy should focus on writing content that is purposely divisive and intentionally controversial. So lets get this straight, to go viral you have to become a troll?
According to the author, viral marketing rests
on your ability to become an Internet troll
The article went on to highlight instances of when highly controversial or outrageous content had been spread and gone viral. I am not disputing the fact that controversy spreads, my issue however is that if your marketing activities purposely manipulate people into feeling angry or outraged, both of these are negative emotions. For the majority of businesses, i guarantee you, that negative sentiment does not convert customers (unless you are a charity or ethical company wanting to highlight injustices or galvanise action for example). On the whole though, it’s a fundamental fact that negative sentiment doesnt win customers, something any sales or marketing professional would be fully aware of.
The really scary thing, is the massive number of positive comments the author received from other, so-called marketing professionals, who agreed and thought the advice was great! I also found it strange that my very concise and polite response to the article didn’t get published. Whilst i’m at it, the fact that no dates are included on the blog also rings alarm bells – best practice changes as social media and content marketing evolves. A lot of advice provided a year ago could now be massively out of date and of little value to a reader – avoiding transparency by hiding publish dates in this way just isn’t the sort of tactic a reputable professional would need to use.
Does manipulating potential customers into feeling strong negative
emotions sound like good business sense to you?
If I am outraged by the comments or tactics of a company, yes, I might go and read about them, I might talk about (as I currently am doing), but I sure as hell won’t shop with them or spread positive word of mouth, in which case, the activity has successfully turned a potential customer into someone who would never, ever be a customer. Which is, of course, is the polar opposite of what any marketing activity would hope to achieve.
In advising people to be purposely antagonistic and controversial in their marketing efforts, this author is essentially telling you how to loose customers. High share rates of such an article might make it go viral, but if that virality spreads and inspires nothing but negative sentiment and drives customers away, how is that effective marketing?
Does any business really want controversy instead
of customer conversions? Of course not!
I’m assuming that the sole purpose of this article was to spew utter rubbish to get people talking. Yep, it’s got me talking, even telling my readers about the article, but it’s also put the author and the website on my negative radar, meaning all future content I’m exposed to from them will be aggressively filtered out and ignored. Is that really what any company would want to happen as a direct result of their marketing activities? Of course not.
No one is infallible, and whilst reputable writers will endeavour to fact check and identify multiple sources before publishing information, we don’t always get it right. In relation to social media marketing and theory, there often isn’t a right or wrong way to do things, only best practice.
As social media proliferates and it becomes ever easier for people to self-publish, so the threat of misinformation increases. Don’t believe all of the advice that you read just because it is published on a popular blog or is written by someone calling themselves an expert. At worst some articles are based on nothing more than opinion, at best, on tried and tested techniques which have been proven to work, but that doesn’t mean it will work for your particular customer base or business sector.
Never lose your objectivity and question the authors
professional credentials if necessary
Remain objective, if you aren’t convinced then ask the author a question by leaving a comment on their blog and if you really have your suspicions, see if you can find other sources providing the same advice or do a bit of snooping to uncover the real credentials of the author.
By doing this you will avoid the charlatans out there and won’t end up alienating or loosing customers as a result of executing misguided marketing activities.
Shell Robshaw-Bryan is a marketing consultant at Surefire Media, the Cheshire based web design, eCommerce and marketing company. Shell specialises in organic search, content strategy and social media engagement for both B2C and B2B companies.
If you’d like to find out how Surefire Media can help your business, get in touch!
Understanding the business benefits of Pinterest
An introduction to Pinterest
If you are familiar with mood boards, then Pinterest won’t be too difficult to get your head around. It’s essentially a digital pin board, a place where you can collate and categorise anything visually appealing that you come across online.
You can take a look at my own Pinterest here as an example – you’ll see a wide range of different board topics. Whilst most of them are related to web design and my profession, I also have a number of other boards that are more personal. As with all social networks, one of the benefits of using Pinterest is that it gives you the ability to define not only a brand, but to expose the person or people behind that brand. This makes it much easier for people to relate to your brand and showcasing your passion, interests and areas of expertise is a great way of connecting with potential customers.
There is more to Pinterest than cupcakes, craft and cats
Whilst Pinterest is very well suited to visual imagery, it is increasingly being used as a way of collecting primarily text based content, such as recipes and blog articles. A decent blog article will have at least one picture, so posting this picture along with the blog article title and pinning it on a relevant board, can be great way of utilising Pinterest to promote non graphical content; in particular for service based businesses who don’t have products to promote or attractive lifestyle shots to pin.
Some Pinteresting stats
- Pinterest is now either the 2nd or 3rd biggest social network, depending on which statistics you read, and is currently showing the fastest rate of growth
- There is no vertical size limit on pins, providing a great deal of scope for creativity
- Approximately 58% of Pinterest users are females
- Product pictures pinned with a price are more effective (that is to say they will generate a better CTR) than product pins with no price shown
- Click through and sales conversion rates are better on Pinterest than on either Twitter or Facebook
- Pinterest users tend to have a higher than average disposable income
- Some of the most popular Pinterest topics are interiors, DIY, cookery, fashion, hobbies and crafts
- Shoppers referred to a website via Pinterest spend 10% more than those referred by other sources
Example of a fully optimised Pinterest board
What’s the point of Pinterest?
Pinterest provides the opportunity for businesses to demonstrate expertise and credibility in any given area. For example, when an interior design brand puts together a board featuring a large number of inspirational room themes, potential customers will often be inspired by such a board and will not only trust that brand, but will also look to it for ideas – you can effectively use Pinterest to add value, which is a great way of attracting new customers and increasing your appeal to existing customers.
Pinterest will not only provide you with more backlinks to your website, a crucial SEO ranking signal, but it will also increase your visibility. Instead of people finding your website, being visible on Pinterest gives you additional potential touch points.
Pinterest lets you source and post appealing content that others will find interesting and will want to like and share
Pinterest is an excellent way of showcasing your products and of demonstrating your passion and expertise in a particular area, and when your content engages people, they will like and share (repin) it, helping your content spread virally. This ensures that your brand reaches additional would-be customers, who might not otherwise have been exposed to your existing or usual marketing channels.
Pinterest tips
- Make sure you write an interesting profile, make it informative and try to give it a bit of personality
- Research your competition before you set up your own boards, see what topics your competitors cover so you can create boards that will be popular and interesting
- Add your main website address and be sure to follow the Pinterest verification process
- Give each board an informative name and make sure you include a compelling, keyword focused board description
- Optimise all the images that you upload – make sure the file names contain descriptive keywords. Once uploaded, edit your pin to include a link back to the original source or related content on your website.
- Keep the width of Pinterest images to around 540px and make the most of the fact there is no vertical size constraint. Narrow, long pins are much more eye catching than short images
- Write a number of ‘how to’ guides that deal with common problems your customers encounter, providing them with real value
- Create a board to showcase your latest, best selling or favourite products
- Don’t forget to include calls to action on your boards and in pin descriptions
- Make sure you add the Pinterest share button to all of your product and content pages on your website and blog
- Comment on, like, share and follow other relevant boards
To find out more about Pinterest and how it can help your business, take a look at this great article from Econsultancy Pinterest: nine best practice tips for brands.
Shell Robshaw-Bryan is a marketing consultant at Surefire Media, the Cheshire based web design, eCommerce and marketing company. Shell specialises in organic search, content strategy and social media engagement for both B2C and B2B companies.
If you’d like to find out how Surefire Media can help your business, get in touch!
How to write great website content
In previous posts I’ve looked at why paying attention to your content makes sense, so this time i’m going to discuss all of the basics you will need to be aware of in order to write effective website content.
Don’t just write, lay your foundations and plan
Before you can write your content you need to plan it. Start by thinking about each of the individual content pages you want to have on your website and list them all, a basic bullet pointed list is generally sufficient for this if you don’t already have a fancy site map. If you are re-writing content for an existing website you just need to make a list of the pages you already have.
Plan key messaging and write around that
Next, you need to think about the information that people will need to enable them to make an informed decision about buying your services or products. As well as deciding what key information you need to get across, you’ll need to start thinking about the best way to present this information.
Nothing is quite as dull or off-putting as paragraph after paragraph of text
Hard facts and technical data are often entirely necessary but to present your service or products in a compelling way, it takes more than dry facts and text and this can be a tough one to get right. Too informal and familiar and you risk sounding unprofessional, too formal and factual and you risk boring your readers and losing potential leads.
Ooh pictures, we love a good picture!
Pictures are good, use them frequently to break up text and add interest, but keep them relevant. The pictures that you use need to add and not detract from your core messaging. Read more about the importance of images in web design here.
Quotes are a great way of highlighting key information and breaking up text; tables and graphs are a good way to display complex or comparison data and headlines are essential to the structure of your page. Using a mixture of content will ensure your content is fresh meaning that website visitors stay engaged, buying you more time to win them over.
Be clever, be intriguing and invite curiosity
Not only do headlines break up vast blocks of text, but they offer readers a quick, at-a-glance clue to what the following content is all about. A good headline is informative, relevant and entices a website visitor to continue reading, so it is critical to get this part right as strong headlines will help to elevate your copy, impacting on everything from your websites search engine ranking through to your conversion rates.
Information and facts are all well and good, but great copy needs to be engaging
The art of website copy writing rests upon the ability to present important information in a way that is interesting and engaging. Personality counts for a lot but that doesn’t mean you need to lapse into informal speech or become a hipster. You can still be entirely human, likeable and interesting whilst maintaining professional credibility.
Copy writing tips you can take away
- Highlight all of the benefits and/or problems your service or products can solve
- Include information on how to use your service or products
- Be sure to highlight your USPs, this will help give people a reason to choose you over your competitors
- Mix up your content so that you use pictures, graphics, text, quotes and headlines
- Include strong calls to action e.g. ‘contact us now for a free quote’
- Include detailed service and/or delivery information
- The point of all your copy is to inform, persuade and convert so keep those goals in mind
- Use attractive, high quality pictures wherever possible or video content which is even better
For more information on content marketing and how to produce strong content, see the blog post 10 crucial content marketing questions.
Shell Robshaw-Bryan is a marketing consultant at Surefire Media, the Cheshire based web design, eCommerce and marketing company. Shell specialises in organic search, content strategy and social media engagement for both B2C and B2B companies.
If you’d like to find out how Surefire Media can help your business, get in touch!
Who should handle your social media?
Social media is important, through it you present an image of your company or brand, with the goal of positively influencing brand perception in order to attract and convert. The image you present in social media should therefore be just as well thought out as the image you present in any of your other marketing activities.
Would you invest resources into a major trade show and turn up with a trestle table and some flyers? Would you place a press advert without including a call to action, your web address or your company logo?
It might sound crazy, but an awful lot of businesses get on the social bandwagon simply because their competitors are doing it or because they think they should, with little or no regard at all to what they want to achieve from it, let alone anything resembling a clear strategy.
When it comes to social media you can’t afford to get it wrong and increasingly, you can’t afford to simply choose not do it at all. As with any job, if you plan to appoint someone internally, you need to find the person or people with the relevant skills and experience. Don’t trust your social media activities to a junior member of staff simply because they have time on their hands and don’t choose the employee who declares an interest because they use Facebook a lot.
An employee using social media for personal purposes is entirely different to that same employee speaking for your brand and using social for business purposes. Having more than a passing familiarity with social doesn’t mean they are the right person for the job.
The most capable candidate to handle your social media will often come from within the marketing department. If you have an existing community manager then they are also a good bet. My advice is to steer away from allocating social to members of the sales team and whoever you do choose, make sure they understand your goals, have good people skills (being friendly and approachable is a must in social media as is having a passion for customer service) and make sure that they have creativity with regards to coming up with ideas on how to engage followers.
Effective social media takes creativity, great interpersonal skills plus a strong grasp of business objectives.
It’s common, especially in SMEs, for social media to be handled by a number of different employees. Whilst this can help spread the load and can help to keep content fresh, it can also mean that your communications suffer from a lack of coherence. My personal preference is to give responsibility to no more than a couple of individuals, though it will depend on the number of social media platforms you are active on and the scope of activities you plan to carry out.
For many SMEs, handling social media activity internally isn’t an option as they don’t have either the time or expertise to do it themselves, in which case calling in the services of an experienced agency or freelancer is the way to go. The following list details all of the main considerations you will need to make before deciding on who to appoint to look after your social media activities.
Who should handle your social media? key insights to take away…
1. Handling social media in-house is still an investment
If you appoint someone internally, ensure that you are realistic in both what you expect them to achieve and in how long it will take; monitoring social daily takes time and even more time to do it effectively. If you are only investing an hour or two a week into social, then the results you get will reflect that.
2. Don’t be afraid to outsource social
Good digital agencies will have extensive experience of working with clients across multiple sectors and will be able to use tried and tested techniques that will work for you. Arm them with additional insight into who your target audience is and what it is you want to achieve and outsourcing social to the experts will pay off.
3. Limit potential social fallout
Limit access to the corporate social media accounts and ensure that login information is centrally held by a senior manager, as in the case of the recent HMV rogue Tweeter, you need a fail safe.
4. It’s social media, not a sales channel
Don’t make your activities all about selling, of course people love a great sales promotion or competition and will equally be keen to hear news from you, but don’t bombard them. Do not use social like a sales channel because if you do you’ll turn people off and lose them.
5. Be flexible to aid creativity
Maintain flexibility, don’t be too regimented in tone and frequency; this stifles creativity and will do exactly the opposite of what you want it to achieve.
6. Set social guidelines
Consider implementing a social policy or provide guidelines for employees to follow so they understand all communications need to fit your brand and work to achieve business objectives.
7. Keep it consistent
If you use Bitly to shorten your URLs then use it all the time, using different tools and styles of communication leads to your activities appearing haphazard and should be avoided.
8. Be realistic
Carrying out even small-scale social marketing activities takes a considerable time investment; don’t leap into it until you understand the extent of the investment you’ll need to make.
Shell Robshaw-Bryan is a marketing consultant at Surefire Media, the Cheshire based web design, eCommerce and marketing company. Shell specialises in organic search, content strategy and social media engagement for both B2C and B2B companies.
If you’d like to find out how Surefire Media can help your business, get in touch!
The freelance and home workers guide to productivity
When you talk to friends or acquaintances about working freelance or being home based, you invariably get the same responses. Envy, shortly followed by incredulity that you don’t simply stay in bed and sleep all day/watch TV/play golf.
“I find the ability to work from home whilst wearing my ridiculous giraffe onesie, a particularly liberating experience.”
After working from home for more than 8 year, I rarely get the chance to work from home these days so when I do, I know exactly how to make the most of my time to ensure I am super-productive. My alarm still goes off at roughly the same time, I get up and get dressed and am ready for a full working day well before i’d normally arrive at the office, so straight away i’m off to a head start.
To be honest, it’s now such a rarity that the novelty of working from home these days means I want to make the most of it, and it’s not uncommon for me to be dealing with clients in a highly professional manner (of course) whilst wearing my ridiculous giraffe onesie. By doing this, I have proven my working hypothesis; that liberating your clothing choices helps to spark creativity; I’m not advocating spending all day in your pajamas or fancy dress, but the relaxed dress code afforded by working at home, does in my experience have a very positive effect on my creativity.
No naughty sofa man! Stop smiling and go and get dressed!
Get up and get dressed
Discipline is critical when you are working from home, as is the ability to manage your own time. A lie in is tempting, and of course, one of the benefits of freelance work is that you can do things at a time that works for you, but don’t forget your clients will be up and working, largely between the hours of 9am and 6pm and will expect you to be around then too.
If you work collaboratively, your co-workers who are perhaps office based, will expect you to be accessible during normal working hours too. It might feel like you are on holiday, but you are not. Set the alarm at a decent time, get up, get dressed, grab a coffee and make sure you are ready to go by 9am.
Stay on task and stay focused
Unlike being at the office, when you nip into the kitchen for a coffee, you’ll also notice the washing machine light blinking at you to say its cycle is complete. You’ll notice the crumbs on the work counter, the bin that needs emptying, the rug that need vacuuming. Strike them from your mind (unless you are having a lunch break) and try to ignore them. They are not a priority right now. In general, I will happily do any minor chores in the time it takes for the kettle to boil – anything house related that would take longer simply waits until after 5.30pm.
Minimise distractions
I read an article recently that suggested having the TV on as company/background noise was a good idea. Not so! TV is designed to grab your attention – don’t do it! If you don’t end up slumped and slack-jawed in front of it, you’ll end up getting drawn in to what is going on, meaning your attention won’t be on your work. The last thing you want is for the quality of work you produce at home to differ from the usual quality of your work.
Build a strong work ethic
Let’s face it, we all have days when we aren’t as productive as we could be. Perhaps we are distracted, creativity is not flowing or we have a problem we need to find a solution to. Don’t beat yourself up over down time. I find I get more done when I work from home and that’s because I do what I want to do, when I want to do it. I don’t have colleagues distracting me and I don’t have (as many) clients on the phone demanding my attention and taking my mind off whatever I was in the middle of doing. That said, having worked freelance for so long, I knew that if I wasn’t working, I wasn’t earning – simple as that, and knowing that was always more than sufficient motivation for me to maintain a strong work ethic.
Enjoy the freedom
I’ll often find I’ve done everything I wanted to do well before of 5.30pm or sometimes i’ll take a long lunch and use the time to recharge my brain and get a bit of creative fizz back. If my mind is continually wandering, it generally means I need to take a break and whilst at work you can feel guilty and it is frowned upon to simply take a break when you feel like it, working from home gives you that freedom and is probably what I love most about it.
Oh hai little guy. Mr squashy face needs a cuddle, yes he does!
Even when you do finish at 5.30pm, you get the added benefit of no ghastly commute. There’s an extra hour (or however long your usual commute is) right there that is all yours! It’s amazing what a difference the extra time can have and really helps to influence your work/life balance in a positive way.
Working from home? Watch out for these sneaky productivity zappers!
- Loveable pets are dastardly at thwarting attempts to work and will do all manner of cute and endearing things to drag your attention away from work. A quick few minutes of fussing is fine and a great way to give your brain a quick rest or relieve stress; just don’t let that few minutes of petting turn into playing in the garden or going for a walk – wait until lunch time or after work for that.
- Friends and family are often just the worst at demanding time and attention when you’re working from home. Be strict, don’t let chatty phone-calls distract you and when there is a knock at the door and a friend turns up for coffee make sure you are very clear in letting them know you work from home. Just because you are at home it doesn’t mean you don’t still have to be working.
- TV. Do not turn the tv on, for anything, ever, during work hours.
- Wearing your PJs might be tempting, but isn’t conducive to a professional mindset. Get up, take a shower as usual and get dressed and your head with be in the right place for work. Stay in your PJs and you’ll feel like you have the day off.
- Don’t sign in to any instant chat services. If you use them for work, that’s fine, but make your status ‘busy’ or similar to stop friends popping up wanting to chat.
- Stay away from social media. Again, if you use this for work fine, but don’t even look at your Facebook wall or Twitter stream because you WILL see several things you just have to read and comment on.
- The cup of tea or mid morning 5 minute break can be a real killer of productivity – if you must venture into the kitchen, either ignore the carnage from last nights dinner or set aside time during your usual lunch break to deal with it. Don’t let it draw you in and break your work flow.
Do you work from home regularly? Do you have any tips to share?
Shell Robshaw-Bryan is a marketing consultant at Surefire Media, the Cheshire based web design, eCommerce and marketing company. Shell specialises in organic search, content strategy and social media engagement for both B2C and B2B companies.
If you’d like to find out how Surefire Media can help your business, get in touch!
Crucial Content Marketing Checklist – 10 questions to ask yourself before you publish new content
With strategic content creation, (the creation of content with a specific business goal in mind), it is critical that you take a systematic approach to ensure the quality and clarity of your content. As a result, I’ve put together this list of 10 questions to help ensure that the quality of all content you produce and publish is consistently high. I’m often guilty myself of only having a cursory read over articles before I hit the ‘publish’ button. The excitement of new content always leaves me eager to get it live and share it with people, but haste is not conducive to great quality content.
Rushing to share new content is tempting, but it won’t do you any favours
Even with good attention to detail, proof reading can be difficult, especially when you are the author and as such are highly familiar with the content. When reading the brain makes a number of inferences and educated guesses; instead of reading entire words the brain often picks up a few letter cues and based on those cues will fill in the blanks. This means that when we read, without realising it, we often skip individual letters which makes it difficult to spot the odd typo.
Once you start writing about a subject it’s easy to veer off topic or end up with content that is unbalanced or even a bit waffly. To make sure that your content is as good as it can be, considering the following questions will help. This list serves me well and I now have a quick run through it before I post any new content; I hope you will find it useful too.
10 questions to ask yourself before you publish new content
1. How clear is your messaging?
What is the point of your article? Do you say everything you need to say in a clear and easy to follow way? Do you waffle on and become irrelevant anywhere down the line? Content can often be edited down to improve the focus and clarity of the piece, but don’t strip it down ruthlessly. Bare can be just as unappealing as long waffly content is.
2. Are you using relevant keywords?
Does your content contain useful keywords that reinforce the subject matter of your article? For SEO purposes, ensuring that the keywords people will use to search for your content, are included in the headline and body is important in determining how well your content will rank.
Don’t forget that many commercial blogging platforms also allow you to choose keyword tags and categories for your content to be published under; making effective use of keyword tagging can be an effective way to reach new readers.
3. Have you looked at your content with fresh eyes?
Get a colleague, friend our family member to proof read your content before you post, just to be absolutely certain. Failing that, leave your content for 24 hours before goming back to it gor a final read through. You are much more likely to spot any errors you might have missed whilst writing and during your first few read-throughs.
4. Have you included calls to action?
Do you provide clear, useful calls to action in your content? Actions range from asking people to register for a seminar, picking up the phone and calling your company to find out more or leaving their own comments on the article.
5. Is your headline winning?
A good headline can make or break your content and will seriously determine the levels of engagement you are able to achieve. A good headline needs to be attention grabbing and should clearly summarise the nature of the content.
6. Does your content pop?
It’s a fact that people respond better to posts that are visual. Have you broken up your text by using sub headings, lists, quotes and images? This will ensure you achieve maximum engagement levels.
7. Have you included an Author link?
Link all of your content to you by using the Google+ rel=”author” link. This will ensure that your content stands out in search results and helps increase your credibility and exposure. It’s super easy to implement too so is definitely worth doing.
8. Do your links work?
Have you included useful links in your content? If so, make sure they all work and pay attention to how they open. Taking a reader away from your page might not be a great idea, in which case you might want to open a new window with your link.
Likewise, deep linking through to relevant content on your website, news or blog page plays an important role in SEO. Finally, make sure all pictures included in your post are showing correctly and don’t have broken paths or links.
9. When are you going to publish?
The time of day and actual day of the week that you choose to post content on will help to determine how well it is received.
There are universally accepted best times and days to post content. For example, currently, content posted on a Monday morning is reported to achieve the highest levels of engagement but find what works for your audience.
Try posting on various different days at different times and track what happens to find out which day and time work best for you.
Remember though, you can publish your content at pretty much any time you want and simply hold off promoting until an optimal time/day.
10. How are you going to promote your content?
Once you’ve published your new content you need to tell people about it. It can take Google anything from a few hours to many days before it will pick up and list your new content, so search engines alone should not be relied upon for sending you traffic.
Use all the channels available to you from your clients or companies news page through to social media. Social is the ideal way to promote your article so make sure you use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc to publicise your new content. Digg, Reddit and Stumble Upon can also generate traffic to your blog but in my experience traffic from these sources is prone to suffer from high bounce rates.
I hope these 10 questions prove useful to you and as always, i’d love to hear your thoughts on this post!
Shell Robshaw-Bryan is a marketing consultant at Surefire Media, the Cheshire based web design, eCommerce and marketing company. Shell specialises in organic search, content strategy and social media engagement for both B2C and B2B companies.
If you’d like to find out how Surefire Media can help your business, get in touch!
Are they insane?! Companies step away from providing customer service via social
I’ve just read an article from marketingpilgrim.com that you can see in full here, The article discusses the fact that some US companies are moving away from providing customer service via social media. An excerpt from the article is reads:
The biggest problem with social media for customer service is that there’s really only one response to a problem – “we’ll look into it.”
Companies can’t do much more than that in public. They can’t solve your outage, refund your money or track a missing package unless the consumer forwards more information through a private channel.
Isn’t a direct response from a company saying “we’ll look into it” better than no response at all? Why do companies have to limit themselves to such a bland platitude? Even if you have very clearly defined customer service channels, customers will still contact you via social media! That’s the beauty of social, you can hold real-time conversations with your customers, obtaining real-time insights into what is working and what isn’t working. Ignoring a customer who Tweets about a missed delivery, service outage or order discrepancy, or a post on Facebook asking for pre-sales advice, just doesn’t make sense.
Always respond to customers no matter what, even if it’s just to apologise and explain you can’t deal with the issue and give them further advice on what to do or how to get the information they need to resolve whatever issue they might have – being helpful, understanding and courteous really isn’t difficult to do.
Simply responding positively to a customer and pointing them in the direction of your official support forum or whatever you might have, is often all it takes to nurture a good customer experience.
It’s true, it may not be possible to resolve Issues there and then, but the difference between good customer service and bad, is that you allow your customers to contact you in a way that suits them. If you aren’t equipped to deal directly with customer service issues via social, it doesn’t matter! Simply responding positively to a customer and pointing them in the direction of your official support forum or whatever you might have, is often all it takes to nurture a good customer experience.
As i’ve previously stated in the article Keep track to avoid social media fail, the key lies in monitoring your social media channels. Get into the habit of checking once in the morning, at lunch time, in the afternoon and in the evening. It takes just a few seconds to check your Facebook wall or you Twitter feed and can mean the difference between a happy customer and an unhappy customer.
Many businesses are scared that customers contacting them to resolve issues via social is a bad reflection of their brand – rubbish! Resolving customer service problems publicly is a very smart move indeed and something I explore in detail in my article Real-time responses via social media are worth the investment!.
Not only do you have the chance to turn a negative experience around for the individual concerned, but you are actively demonstrating to all of your followers/fans that you provide high levels of customer service, which will amplify and drive trust in a way that far exceeds the narrow reach of your usual customer service channels.
Don’t make the mistake of turning your back on providing customer service via social, if anything it’s an area you should be investing in and when putting your social team together, don’t just have someone from marketing do it all, you need someone trained in customer service as part of the team too.
6 Great infographics looking at email and content marketing
I’ve stated before that I love inforgraphics, but that doesn’t mean I think all infographics are great! The key to producing something great is hard facts and data, presented in an attractive and interesting way. Great infographics provide at-a-glance insight and I keep track of all of the best ones I come across over on Pinterest here, but I wanted to put a post together to highlight a few of the best examples that i’ve found useful, I hope you do too!
All infographics link through to their original source.
What is the best time of day to send out email campaigns?
Why content for seo?
How important is email marketing over the Christmas period?
What types of content marketing are you using?
12 Things to do after you’ve written a new blog post
The Anatomy of Content Marketing
Do you have a great marketing or social infographic you’d like to share? Feel free to post your link in the comments section!
In 2013 content is king, but just how good is your content?
In case you hadn’t already noticed, 2013 is all about content. Google’s ever evolving ranking algorithm has finally come of age and is sophisticated enough to be able to rank sites based on the quality and relevance of their content like never before. No longer is content generation a matter of writing for SEO purposes OR for human visitors (or finding a balance of the 2 which was the case for many years). Finally, we have reached a point where the content that search engines like is largely the same as content that your human visitors will like.
The lines between writing good SEO copy for search engines and engaging copy for humans have all but disappeared
The days of keyword stuffing, or writing meaningless content that would only impress search engines are thankfully, a distant memory. Producing great content that engages your visitors is well and truly in. Yup, content is king!
If SEO is at the top of your list of priorities (and lets face it for any business, SEO has got to be up there) then focusing on improving your content should be right at the top of your to-do list, because good content is more important than ever in determining how a website is ranked by Google.
What exactly is content marketing?
Put simply, content marketing is the ability of a business to communicate effectively with existing and potential customers in a meaningful way. Content marketing drives trust in a brand and creates a connection. Having trust and feeling connected to a brand makes a customer more receptive to any subsequent marketing messages, making them more likely to react positively.
A traditional customer encounter might go something like this:
We sell boxes > They are brilliant boxes > Come and buy them from us!
An alternative, more content-focused encounter may go more like this:
Here is a lot of helpful information on boxes > We know a lot about boxes > We understand why you want to buy boxes > We sell brilliant boxes that fit your needs > Come and buy from us!
The second content-focused approach will ultimately convert more customers and builds trust more successfully. This content-focus will prove more successful in the long-run, making it an effective strategic approach to use.
“The single most significant trend is the continued emergence of content marketing as a standalone discipline. Content, in all its shapes and forms, is core to everything we do as marketers.” Econsultancy, Digital Trends for 2013.
Many consumer focused businesses, in particular retailers, will find it relatively easy to strengthen existing content, or to create new content. For others, in particular B2B companies who may not have particularly sexy or interesting products or services, this can be more difficult. As in the example above, just how do you make content interesting for a company who makes boxes?
If you are just getting started, my advice is to start by going over what you currently have. There is no point writing brilliant new content if it will join a whole bunch of mediocre or mis-matched content. Look at what you already have and optimise this before you go any further.
Just how good is your content? Ask yourself the following questions.
- How useful is your existing content – are you giving your customers the information they are looking for?
- Does your content tell a potential new customer everything they need to know in order to make an informed decision?
- Is your content all sales focused and full of blatant marketing?
- Are benefits clearly laid out and are they compelling enough?
- Is the content interesting enough to warrant return visits, bookmarking or sharing?
- Is your content sticky enough to capture and hold peoples attention, increasing their dwell time?
- Is all of your content professionally written?
- Is your content on-brand?
The bottom line is, focusing on the quality of your content will help to ensure that you are able to maintain your online visibility throughout 2013 and It will have a big influence on your ability to gain the competitive edge, especially in terms of keeping existing customers engaged and in reaching new ones.
I’d love to hear from others on this subject; do you agree that the focus should be so heavily on content? Perhaps you are a business owner who can’t see the value and would prefer to invest in other areas instead? How do you approach your content strategy?
Shell Robshaw-Bryan on Google+
ubershell
