Hubspot, as usual, conducted a great webinar called 5 Steps for Awesome Social Media Lead Generation (Video and Slides). The main speaker was Kipp Bodnar,  Inbound Marketing Manager at HubSpot and co-author of the B2B Social Media Book.

Kipp opened the webinar with a yell that jolted me a little (he was really excited .  He confessed that he is a giant marketing dork (his words, not mine), and that while normally, experts paint a fluffy picture of social media, he wanted to do something different.

He started by pointing out a problem – a study that angered him:  73% of CEOs say that they don’t believe marketers drive revenue or demand to their business!  “They thinks were just arts and crafts!”  He argued the good news here is the only way to go is up.

Bottom line is, as marketers, the measurement of success in social media should be it’s ability to generate leads.   When we can demonstrate that Social Media does generate leads, we can prove that 73% wrong.

Here are some summary notes:

• This is the best time EVER to be a marketer.
• Leads is the metric to rely on.  Its a proxy for sales.
• Social Marketing that doesnt drive sales wont last.

Examples of how social lead happens:

• Tweet > Landing Page > Form > Lead
• Friend “Likes” a Facebook post > You read the Blog Post > There’s a Call-To-Action > Landing Page.
• +1 on Google > Brings you to a product page > Call-To-Action > Landing Page

 

Best way to generate leads with Social Media?

Kipp spent 2011 doing in depth research on what works.

1) Get the “basics” right

• Build your reach! This is a HUGE step.  If no one is there, it doesn’t matter what you share.
• Follow, Friend, and CONNECT.  This is the simplest step, but at the same time hardest -  a lot of marketers think reactions are just going to happen by themselves.  NOPE.  You need to search and seek out the conversation.  For example, follow industry people on Twitter, then they’ll follow you back.   That’s how you start.  Get out there, talk, connect, friend.
• Share lots of links!  People are looking to news and info more than ever before.  Dan Zarrella found a correlation that those who share links have more followers.
• Post often and consistently! Bit.ly (the link shortener website) released data on their clicks- the shelf life of a social media link is only 3 hrs!!!!!  That means you need to post something engaging and post often cause chances are after awhile, that link will disappear.
• Automatic Sharing.  Use some automatic sharing applications to minimize your admin time.  Set up connections between twitter feed, blog posts feed, etc.  There are plenty of services like tweetdeck, hootsuite, etc, that will do this for you.
• Leverage your existing base of contacts to join your social networks.  They can start as early members.  They may also be advocates that share your info, thus building your reach.  Email marketing is a huge opportunity to build social network.  Include social links in your emails, explicitly ask existing subscribers to join.
• If you have a Facebook page, USE A “LIKE GATE”!!!!  These are landing tabs that force visitors to “like” the page to see hidden content, which is usually a promo or something free your company can offer to entice them to join.  “Like this page to get….”  IT WORKS.

2) Maximize Content Discovery

• We need to get people excited to read and share content.
• First, you need to create or have fresh regular content.  So people will know to come to you for information.
• Second, you need to share that content.
• Next, we have to do dedicated monitoring.  Who’s talking and responding to your posts?  Who’s sharing?  Of those people, who do we engage with so they can continue to support you and advocate for you?
• COMMIT to a CONTENT CALENDAR.  A lot of companies wing it, and you will find yourself struggling to come up with content everyday.  Take the time to sit down and build this calendar so you just put the time in once a week/month, then everything else is like clockwork.
• BUILD Social thank you pages.  This was a great piece of advice I hadnt heard before.  Put links on thank you pages to share.  When a visitor likes your page thank them and explicitly ask them to share your page.  To make it easier for them, provide a “share” link (many plugins or widgets are provided by facebook/twitter themselves).
  
• Time-box  – too many people spend too much time monitoring their social networks (or they dont spend enough time).  Start out with 15 minutes a day, post and respond.  Scale up as needed.

3) Create Conversion Ubiquity – Calls to action all over the web

• Place Calls-To-Actions everywhere!!!!  If you’re not catching them, your missing opportunity.  It doesn’t have to be in everyone’s face, but make it available.

4) Test and Fail fast.

• FAILURE SUCKS!!!!  But, invaluable part of marketing.  Allow us to improve and iterate.
• Set qualitative objectives.  If you can’t measure your progress, then you cant know if you failed and how to improve.
• Set a methodology how to gather data.  You need to figure out how you will measure everything.  There are plenty of built in insight tools as well as 3rd party tools to measure social media.
• Finally, conduct and experiment.  Set action items following up experiment.
•  If something works, you double down, if it doesn’t, change.

5) Optimize for Maximum leads

• Social media converts best vs. most other traffic.  The rapport from word of mouth or that is just built from interacting with your brand is invaluable.
• Keep in mind though, not all platforms are right for all businesses.  If your “Visits” to “Leads” are low for x platform, change your strategy and try a platform that works.
• Conduct RADICAL tests.  Landing page, web design, social media campaign.  Test 2 radically different ideas, and most likely, you will end up with a hybrid of working parts from both tests.

written by Farid Alhadi

Second webinar in a series of marketing tips from Facebook.  There’s some great information here, not only great practices to follow, but we’re listening to the “horses mouth”, so they could answer any questions about the interface.   If you are a Facebook Fan Page admin/owner looking to beef up the activity on your page,  I strongly recommend attending them – click here for more info on the Facebook Marketing Bootcamp .
This particular one was on Facebook Ad’s.    As Facebook’s bread and butter, sure – this is where they make their money from you, but the system works – getting you large groups of laser targeted audiences due to their ability to segment their 800 million users by interest!

Here are some notes on how to use Facebook Ads to effectively market your business or Facebook Fan pages:

Use Facebook ads to drive fans to your page and even more than that, use them to reach friends of those fans.

-800 Million active users on Facebook – scale of TV, precision of direct marketing, as well as ability to harness power of connections between friends.

-There are 4 ad formats:

• Standard Ads
• Application Ads (app)
• Like Ads (FB Pages)
• Event Ads

-The last 3 include a powerful tool – social context (meaning they can display “[Your Friend] likes this”, which is more likely to inspire “trust” and thus, better chances at click-through).

Important Steps:

1) Make sure you’re targeting efficiently.

Understand your audience. Ex. Are you a brick-and-mortar store? Then a good question would be “Where is my audience located?”

Other things to consider: Demographic targeting?  Does a specific gender come to my store?  What’s their education?

More precise targeting: Likes and interest?  Ex. Are you a restaurant?  Then try touch people who like a certain type of food.

 

2) Design an engaging ad.

Make sure to get the “creative” right!  This could be the difference between someone clicking on your ad, or not.

Succinct copy!  Be short and clear, but compelling.

Use an image that is eye-popping.

Make sure to have engaging content – Promos (“Free Download!”).  Questions (“Do you like pizza?”)

Your ad should be action-oriented – explicitly tell them what you want them to do.  ” ‘LIKE’ our page!”

 

3) Setting correct budget and bid – you can only reach certain people with a certain budget.

Lower bids get lower chances of ad’s being run.  Bid a good number and if your ad is doing well, bid on the high end.

 

4) Analyzing and Optimizing

Test multiple versions. Multiple text, headers, images, etc.  Choose the most optimized.

“Page Post Ads” – if you have a good post with good comments – you can create ads out of those to reach people it normally wouldnt.   Links, events, questions, photos, videos, etc.   Target posts.

Define strategy.  Do you want to drive sales? Or get more fans?

More best practices to drive traffic to your page:

Select to run a “Page Post Ad” – sometimes you have a great post on your page and you want more than just your fans to see it.   Facebook Ads allows you to run this.

Choose a image that’s engaging – human interactions are usually more successful.

Ad copy needs to be engaging – asking a question, promoting a discount

Create a sense of URGENCY – let them know when promo is ending.

 

Questions from the Audience:

I set up campaign, but I have very few impressions?  What do I do?

Make sure to set bid high so it’s competitive.

 

Can I give access to someone else to manage my ads without giving them access to my profile?

Go to Ads manager and you can add verified users to see ads.

 

How often should you check the results of your ads?

Every couple days.  Make changes based on results of engagement.

A good indicator that your ad is working is if you hit your budget everyday.  If not, you may have to up your bid.

 

What does “Targeting by broad category” mean?

Broad category are common categories.  Ex.  Broad category are “pets”.  Precise interest are “dogs”.

 

Is it better to have broad or precise targeting? 

Depends on your own goals.  If you want people with likes or interest similar, go with broad targeting.  But if you’re advertising a product that is specific, then go with precise interest.  You may want to add several price interests.

 

If I don’t bid high enough, possible my ad wont show?

Yes.  You need to bid high enough.

 

How long would you run an ad before adjusting it?

Every couple days.  At least every 10 to 12 days to make sure your ad isn’t going stale.

 

Technorati Tags: channel segmentation, facebook, pay per click, social marketing, social media, social networking

written by Farid Alhadi \\ tags: channel segmentation, facebook, pay per click, social marketing, social media, social networking

We usually look to different industry experts for their experience and insights on Facebook Marketing, so it’s nice to finally get best practices directly from Facebook.  Since it’s their product, they can validate what practices really do work and what are meant to be used with their system (though, of course, we can’t forget there’s a definite “sales” element involved in them trying to get us to try their Facebook Ads ).  The Facebook Marketing Bootcamp is providing free webinars over the next coming weeks.   Register and you get a free $25 coupon for Facebook Ads, so you might want to register here.Today’s webinar was the first in the series and it was titled “How Your Business Will Be Better In A Connected World”.  It gave a general overview on how Facebook can benefit your business and what technology Facebook has to offer.

Here are some summary notes:

Our lives our made of connections to things we care about: people, songs, hobbies, sports, places – this makes us who we are.

Technology (such as Facebook) brings us closer – transforms how we connect and share our lives – on an ongoing basis.

Benefits to businesses?  They can connect to friends’ friends – through word of mouth.

Stats:

• Word of mouth is twice as likely to cause engagement, 4 times as likely to cause purchase.
• 800 Million on Facebook
• 350 use mobile
• 2 billion posts/day
• 500 million log in
• 250 million photos uploaded

Conversations and sharing are happening in a way never done before

It’s up to you to build essential connections – not just count clicks.  Our job to spark conversations, inspire sharing.

How to Grow Your Business

Pages

• Upload photos and info to express your business
• Engage – this is how you let people know and communicate with your audience – ask questions, exclusive offers.
• FB recommends to connecting to at least 10% of your base – statistically, these are your influencers.
• Updates, photos, events, etc – posts go to their newsfeeds

Ads

• Simple to reach your fans and their friends per ads.
• Utilize Facebook Ads, sponsored stories.  Granular targeting – by interests, local reach.

Sponsored Stories – shows your target audience how their friends interact with businesses.

• Take actions already happening with your page and make it visible by friends’ friends.
• Ads manager – you can turn on sponsored stories
• You want them to always be running – you can boost your reach

Social Plug-ins

• Simple line of code and you can integrate your site with Facebook and its social capabilities
• Have to ask yourself though, “Is it good for my kind of site”
• American Eagle added a “like” button so people can share with their friends.

1-800-Flowers – make sure everything they do is social.  Contests, promos, etc.  Starts every campaign with the question “Is it Social?”

It allows you to communicate with customers on a consistent basis.  Facebook page allows you to blast message to fans already interested.

Increase Facebook fan base by “marrying” offline and online together – in store signs, receipts, etc.  Add “Facebook” info to your offline literature.

Success Stories

How consistent should we post?  There’s no exact science, it’s on a page by page basis.    But there are a couple rules of thumb:

• Post at least once a week
• Set up a post calendar – post certain types of content on certain days to keep users engaged.
• Most effective? It will vary between business to business, but mix it up.
• Put questions in your posts to get feedback.
• Utilize photo/video to grab attention.
• Over time, you will see what kinds of posts gets you the most amount of feedback.

Technorati Tags: channel segmentation, facebook, pay per click, social marketing, social media, social networking

written by Farid Alhadi \\ tags: channel segmentation, facebook, pay per click, social marketing, social media, social networking

I “liked” the Facebook Marketing Solutions fan page.  Awesome page that gives great training on marketing on Facebook (directly from them)! I am viewing Sheryl Sandberg’s live talk “Sandberg’s Quietly Audacious Pitch to Marketers: Put a Little Facebook in Everything You Do”.   Here are some notes.

• 68% more likely to remember an ad with social context. 2x more likely to remember ads messages. 4x more likely to purchaseYour establishing connections to your customers, multiple times, and their friends, but its your job to keep them engaged
• Strike balance – not too much bad content, good content
• Talk “with” not “at” – just like your profile, put things up you think your friends will like.
• It’s iterative – we can see what works. Put it out, see what works, then evolve
• Drive convos with ads – connect ads back to Facebook page
• Sponsored stories – make sure more people can see what your fans say about you
• This is how you light your brand up
• People tell friends about products, thats what sells products – WORD OF MOUTH
• Dont go in set from the beginning – Monitor, Adapt, Leverage
• Social needs to be the fundamental ingredient from the beginning- can’t just “sprinkle” social
• Dont get rid of other ads – TV, print – create a cohesive campaign that connect.
• Reach customers AND THEIR FRIENDS!
• Link to social graphs – make everything the basis for on-going connection
• Engage customer, write back to them so they keep coming back. This is how you get messages to go viral.
• Inspire. Be creative. Put out experiences.  Get them to put their experiences, their childrens.  Great messages, videos, pics – these things get twice as much engagement.
• The web has gone social, marketing can go social too.
• Ex. Barista put out an ad with curse words.  Outcry on Facebook page.  They apologized, put up a new cut, and they got a great response for taking responsibility and listening to their audience.
• First time you can have a comprehensive conversation with brands themselves.  Go iterate, get started.

written by Farid Alhadi

Google Analytics just announced a new group of reports that they are calling "Flow Visualization". This is different than the term all of us are more familiar with, which is "Path Analysis." The reporting tools and reports that most of us use today are very difficult to gain insight from. "Flow Visualization" has just raised the bar, it may have even replaced the bar entirely. "Flow Visualization" is a new way to understand how visitors flow through your website, and uses intuitive imagery combined with powerful segmentation abilities to aid insightful analysis. Google Analytics is in the process of rolling out these reports to all users, and I can’t wait for you to get them!

Terminology

Before we begin looking at these reports it is important to understand what we are looking at.  Each flow page will have nodes.  The node is simply a segment of visitors.  These nodes represent some feature of the visitors, such as traffic sources, new visitors, browsers, etc. The connections represent the number of visitors that went from one node to another. Red connections are those who left the site.  The size of the nodes and the connections are proportional mean smaller numbers will have smaller numbers and larger numbers will appear larger. This makes it extremely easy to see these flows. The image in the next section illustrates the nodes and the connections.

Goal Flow and Control Panel Overview

The first new flow report, the "Goal Flow" report will be a welcome addition to the Conversion section in Google Analytics. The image below shows this report, I highlighted the connections, nodes and segmentation capabilities.  The first dropdown in the purple box, will allow you to select which goal you would like to be presented.  The "Select a segment" works just like the "Advanced Segments" feature. You can pick any of the pre-existing segments, such as returning visitors, or you can create your own segment such as branded keywords. The flow reports by default only show significant sources of connections, but you can show more by dragging the connections slider, which is in the purple box. You can also change "source" which is the default view, to a variety of other dimensions, including city, keyword, browser, and more.

For this "Goal Flow" report, I have shown a purchase funnel.  We can see the sources on the left side and each step in the funnel following on the right.  For each dimension, the report will show the top five and then group the rest in a sixth entry. The steps in the "Goal Flow" all come from the goal funnel you define in the profile settings. Only URL destination goals are supported at this time, not event goals. The table at the bottom of the graph shows the numbers of visitors that make it to each step. This is extremely useful as you can use this to address issues. For example if you use the browser dimension, you might see a huge decrease in mobile users that reach the purchase page.  This would suggest that your site might need some mobile optimization. The best part is if you don’t have a goal or goal funnel setup, you can create one and it will use your data to populate the report as if it had been there all along.

Visits Flow

Next up is the new "Visits Flow" report. This looks very similar to the "Goals Flow" report. The image below shows this report with purple boxes calling out important information. This report can be accessed by clicking the home button icon in the main toolbar from any area in Google Analytics. Below is the default view for this report.

When you first open this up it may appear to be a bit overwhelming. It is quite easy to start digging for insights. You can click on any of the nodes under the dimensions ("Source" is show in the image above) and show only connections from that node. You could do analysis coming from any of the dimensions. You can also click on any of the pages nodes and select either traffic from or through the node. The image below shows traffic through one of our blog pages. You can see the pages they came from and went to and add steps to previous or next pages that most of your visitors came from or went to.

The “Navigation Flow” report lets you group pages by regular expression.  You could group all pages that contain a common word as an example, which is extremely useful for websites that are promoting different products.  Let’s say you sell Apple and PC products, you could group them separately and compare common dimensions that bring them to the site or group them together and also understand how they view your site as a group.

Final Thoughts

Path Analysis has not been easy to do and gaining insights can be a painful process. Google Analytics has clearly spent a lot of time on these reports and it has shown. Flow Visualization makes seeing common trends and gaining insights significantly easier. The “Goal Flow” report is my favorite, and the segmentation combined with the running table at the bottom makes it painless to see what is going on with a variety of metrics. This is what differentiates it from all other competitor’s offerings.  Google is truly making it easier to visualize visitor data, which gives us a whole new view called Flow Visualization.

written by Charles Farina