Mobile Should Be a Part of Your Marketing Mix Now

We’ve all heard the now-famous stat that more than 75 percent of us admit to taking the smartphone into the bathroom with us. I suspect that is a low number. Mobile has thoroughly wound its way into the very fabric of our lives, to the point where our daily lives usually begin and end with it.

There have been predictions of mobile coming for years now, but we maintain that the train is not only here, it’s leaving the station. Let’s look at the evidence, as well as how you can benefit from this paradigm shift.

 

5 Pieces of evidence that mobile marketing has arrived

• Google – Google has made it abundantly clear that it is mobile first as far as they’re concerned. And they have excellent reasons to believe this. All of us are tied to our phones, and it is very often the first device we reach for in our day. Not just that, studies show that 65 percent of all searches begin on a mobile platform.

• Smartphones and other mobile devices – The average person owns 3.1 mobile devices. This is broken down as 85 percent carry a smartphone, 65 percent a laptop, 48 percent a tablet and 40 percent an mp3 player. To say mobile is ubiquitous is a bit of an understatement.

• Nobody knows how to market on mobile – While two-thirds of businesses are trying to use mobile, few understand how to measure, implement or otherwise utilize the immense reach mobile affords. To illustrate further, a full one-third of businesses that say they use mobile spend less than an hour a week working it. Hmmm…

• Responsive design – As email marketing remains by far the most valuable as far as ROI is concerned, having a responsive design in your emails is a must.

• Mobile converts – The top reason we’re sure that mobile is a dominant force now is that it converts better than any other medium. 70 Percent of mobile queries lead to an action within the hour, evidence that users who are out and about aren’t afraid to look you up and stop on by.

What to Do When Your Awesome Content Falls Flat

Given all the effort you’ve most likely put into your content, it’s utterly heartbreaking when what you’ve slaved over falls flat when it’s published.

Of course there are no guarantees that everything we write is going to hit it big, many times we feel as though we’ve actually created terrific content that for whatever reason isn’t able to catch the fancy of our audience.

No one hits it big every single time, but if this looks like it’s a pattern with your content, let’s consider some of the reasons your content might not be hitting on all cylinders.

3 Reasons why your content isn’t going viral:

No emotional connection –

This is the first area to check. If you aren’t connecting with your audience on a gut level, striking them where they live, there is no way they’ll feel compelled to share this “meh” work any further than the delete key. Addressing people’s pain points and showing that you not just care enough to help, but also have some experience in this area yourself is a great first step.

 

Lousy distribution of your content –

 

This is where a lot of us miss the boat. There are many more places than ever to share your content, and the ease of doing this is surpassed only by the time and effort it requires to do so, but hey, you wanted for it to reach far and wide, right? Make sure you announce your content on social media channels, via your email list, and anywhere else you have your voice. Work on making connections larger than yours, and exploiting your social media contacts. Consider using paid traffic to boost your content, as in a Facebook or Twitter ad.

 

It’s not worth sharing –

 

If your content is not positive, or lacks elements that others would find valuable, you’ll discover that most people won’t want to share it. Humor and a great story will always end up getting shared. Creating emotional content that addresses practical concerns in a useful way is a recipe for getting your content shared far and wide.

Learn Why PPC is Great for Local Business

There is a very common notion that pay per click (PPC) ads aren’t really for local business. We’d like to dispel that right now. PPC can do a great deal of good for a small business, particularly a new one.

Let’s look the various pros and a few cons for PPC ads, and provide you with a framework for deciding if they are right for you.

The Pros of PPC for local business

• Can be less expensive than SEO – Because there are various budget controls built into the PPC platforms, you are able to manage your costs very carefully. This isn’t doable with an SEO campaign, for which you typically are shelling out a large sum up front.

• You can get near instant results – While an SEO campaign could take months or years to bear fruit, (during which time the Google search algorithm will have changed necessitating you needing to do it all again!) with PPC you will know how your campaign is performing within hours after it starts.

• Can get you multiple first page listings – Even if you’re ranked on the first page, you may still want to run PPC ads to take a larger share of the virtual real estate there, bringing you more visitors and more profits.

• Far simpler to target a precise audience – Using targeted keywords and interests, you’ll be able to laser target your ideal audience.

• You can easily track and measure results – The back offices of all of the major PPC platforms provide you with all the stats you could ask for in regards to tracking and measuring your success.

• Can aid your SEO campaign – Built deep into Google’s secret search algorithm, traffic and social interaction play a significant role. Your PPC ads can help with this.

 

The cons to using PPC for a local business are basically three:

• Learning Curve – Each of the major PPC platforms, Google, Facebook and Bing, all have their quirks, and you need to learn this information to run successful campaigns.

• Costs – You’ll need a budget, and your efforts and revenues will be determined by the size of it. Also, you’ll need discipline to not spend through your ad budget on an unprofitable campaign, and know when to end it.

• Keywords research – A necessary part of PPC. You’ll either need to do this yourself or outsource it to someone that knows how.

PPC can be quite a terrific plus for a local business. Just take care to watch costs and give time for learning.

Need More Conversions? Look to Your Content!

A lot of the time content marketing and conversion optimization don’t even show up in the same paragraph, much less sentence, in terms of how we think about making it all work together.

In reality, you need to both consider CRO (conversion rate optimization) as it applies to your content, and your content as to how it works with conversions. For best results we need to meld the two into one when putting our content out there.

5 Ways to use content for better conversion rates

 

Make your site navigation easy to use –

On the list of worst stumbling blocks to more conversions is the inability for your potential customers to get where they want to go. Solve this by using simple and obvious site navigation, and also a liberal use of text links within your content to show where they need to go!

 

Use visuals! –

The more images and videos you use in your content, the more often it’ll be read, shared and acted upon. That’s not opinion, but a fact. We like to look and watch, read…not so much.

 

Optimize for mobile –

With well over half of all web access and search now coming through a mobile device of some type, if you’re not optimized for mobile you are unquestionably losing out.

 

Create unique, valuable content –

The very best way to help your conversions is by creating content that is valuable, sharable and leads logically (and one would hope with some urgency!) to the next step, conversion.

 

Nail your calls to action –

Take time to carefully think about and test the various elements of your calls to action. Colors, headlines, link text, buttons are a few things you need to optimize to help make it seem an outgrowth of your content, yet still shine.

Making these pieces all play nice together is your challenge. Creating a conversion mindset in your customer is tricky, and you want to do all you can so it’s easy for them to step into the buy zone!

5 Things You Need to Know About Social Media

Keeping up with all that is evolving on a really daily basis is a full time job by any measure. Moreover, many of us have just now embraced the fact that we indeed need to be not merely involved with social media, but actively marketing on it. But how in the world are we supposed to stay on top of best practices for all of this? Allow us to aid you with that. Here are several of the many things you may not know about social media.

What you might not know about social media

It’s the best opportunity in years –

There has never been so excellent an opportunity as exists now with social media. The tremendous reach and breadth of your voice can make possible in minutes what used to take years. And this not only means social ad platforms, but viral posts and shares. This is the reason you see large brands diving in with both feet.

Creating visual content with value is the key –

This is not to say you can throw anything up and be deluged with people knocking down your virtual doors. Quality is the order of the day, and if you have visual content, even better! No one likes to read anymore…(sob).

Engage your audience –

One key to making sure your audience becomes more than visitors passing through is through the use of engagement. Strive to engage frequently, answering people when they’ve got concerns or questions, as well as speaking directly to them online through your pages or social media. It will pay off!

Post often –

If you choose to post once a week, or when Jupiter is in some sort of phase, you’ll be rather lonely when it comes to social interaction. Put your company out there on a regular basis. You’ll know quickly what number that is for you.

Quality matters –

Posting content that your people find interesting, useful and engaging is a big part of your task here. It’s not just about hooking up your Facebook account with a slew of quotes from dead white guys!

See Why Mobile Matters Even more Now to Local Search

These days the question isn’t “Do you have a mobile strategy?”, but “How is mobile doing for you?”

Mobile presence is a must for local search for the future, and if you’re late to the party, we would like to share a couple of things you should keep in mind if you want to get your fair share (and more!) of the local search market.

Why you need to be mobilized

If you happen to need any more convincing, here are a few of the latest statistics illustrating the current state of affairs with mobile search.

• 97 percent of consumers go online in search of services or products in their local area.

• 73 percent of mobile searches result in store visits and/or conversions.

• They’re quick: 70 percent of those consumers search who locally on their mobile device act upon it within one hour.

• 15 percent of consumers will actively use their smartphone to check prices once they’re in your store!

So how best to take advantage of mobile for local search?

There are several things you can do to ensure that your business is ready and available for mobile visitors and customers.

 

Get your site mobile ready 

There is some adjustment needed with regards to ensuring your site renders well on mobile devices. Don’t leave this to chance, thinking it will show up “good enough”. You’ve got precious little time to make a great impression, by some accounts less than ten seconds, and if they spent all of that just loading your page, the result is going to be that most people will leave before even seeing your page.

 

Watch sizes and content 

Obviously small screens are harder to read and act upon. Don’t load you mobile pages with a ton of textual content that no one will take the time to read with their phone. Use brief, bulleted text chunks, along with optimized images and call to action buttons large enough to click on easily!

 

Initiate an engagement strategy

Don’t leave them hanging: respond promptly to comments and concerns, and especially complaints. Also, make regular connections with those who want to engage your brand.

 

Claim your directory listings 

You’ll want to be sure to claim any listing you find on local directories, and create them where you don’t. Be consistent in the information you put on each site, so visitors and search engines can easily find you.

What is Triberr and How Can It Help Your Business?

The first question a lot of you may have is, what the heck is Triberr? Sensible enough, as it’s a relative newcomer.

Triberr is a somewhat new social network for bloggers, whose primary goal is to help you share your great content and that of others in your “Tribes”. Tribes are simply groups of bloggers that are actively producing content in the same market or niche and have joined together. When you create new content, it is shared with other Tribe members via the Triberr feed, and they have the ability to comment and share it to their readers and social networks, which include Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

What else can Triberr do for you?

Are you constantly searching out great content to share? Triberr makes this easy, as you can with one click reblog content directly onto your blog. Likely the easiest form of content curation out there. This will also work in the opposite direction, as well, where you’re in effect getting a guest post on someone else’s popular blog!

Also, there’s the matter of a nice inflow of traffic to your blog. If you’re a small business blogger, this would mean more visitors and due to the nature of this traffic, more engagement also.

Starting with Triberr

First, start by joining Triberr here. It is free. After you have your account set up, you’ll need to start joining tribes, sharing other people’s content, creating great content of your own for others to share. This can happen rather quickly, but the first step is getting there and to begin looking for tribes you would like to join.

You might also monetize Triberr through what they call the “Influencer Marketing Platform”. This is where you can be an online spokesman for a brand and get paid for it.

Triberr touts itself as a “Blog Amplification Platform” and currently has more than 50,000 tribes and over 2,000,000 visits a month dispatched to member blogs.

If you’ve got a business blog and you are looking to start seeing more traffic and social engagement from it, you would be wise to look into joining and using Triberr.

Five Tips to Energize Small Business Content Marketing

Content marketing is where it’s at lately, and for good reason. Done properly, it can deliver large amounts of links, traffic and the resulting authority and rankings that go along with those. Even so many small businesses find themselves in the tough position of having an abundance of great ways to market, and not nearly enough time or resources to make them happen.

In order to avoid that prospect, let’s take a look at five ways you can make your content marketing deliver exactly what you need.

Five ways to ramp up your content marketing

Here are five essential aspects for making your content marketing deliver on all of the promises it holds for your small business.

 

Develop a strategy 

Content marketing can happen in many forms over many platforms. It’s extremely important to have a plan set up that maps this out, along with the goals and results you want to achieve. Remember, content can include blog posts, articles, ebooks, videos, images, podcasts and more, and lots of of these can be repurposed to other platforms also.

Create a budget 

You will have to spend a couple of dollars here, in people hours and other costs, and you should know what you’re prepared to commit and budget it beforehand.

Assign talent 

If you are not fortunate enough to have writers on staff, (as well as videographers and image designers) you will have to find them. This is often a time consuming task when starting out, so be aware of this.

Set up tracking 

It’s very important to make sure to set up tracking so you really know what is working and what is not. Most of the time, Google Analytics is fine for this purpose, though there are better paid resources available as well.

Rinse and repeat 

Once you have a handle on the type of content that your audience is responding to, be sure you do it again, but with different twists and slants, based on the feedback you’re getting as you go along. This, by the way, is what’s known as Agile Marketing.

Can Your Business Profit with Twitter?

Perhaps like a great many other small business people you’ve been either confused or undecided about the comparable value of using Twitter in your marketing efforts. That is understandable, since at first glance it appears to be nothing more than a great way to kill some time, with minimal return on investment of your time and money. The truth always lies a lttle bit further under the surface though, and in reality Twitter does offer value for small business, if you are able to develop and consistently execute your marketing strategy. Let’s consider what’s important in that strategy, and how it can pay off for your small business.

See these 7 ways Twitter can help your small business!

1. Use your Twitter profile to help brand your business – Your Twitter profile is a terrific place to show off your company in the best possible light, with appropriate links to your pages.

2. Find the influencers in your market – One of your goals should be to connect with as many of the primary influencers in your market as possible. This won’t happen instantaneously, and some won’t answer you, but be persistent and eventually you’ll connect. This can have huge benefits later on.

3. Post images and videos – It’s been shown that images and videos are driving three to four more times more clicks on Twitter.

4. Use Promoted Tweets – You can directly target your audience with Promoted Tweets. Your ads should offer great value, be transparent, and not run endlessly.

5. Engage your followers – This should go without having to say, but take the opportunity here to engage and provide value.

6. Retweet and employ hashtags – Remember to retweet relevant and important content you find, as this will help

   establish your connection with authority. Same goes with hashtags, only don’t overdo this one.

7. Establish yourself before promoting – While it can be incredibly tempting, resist the impulse to promote yourself with each tweet. Get into the habit of giving 80 percent, and promoting 20 percent. You’ll reap good results if you do!

Several Reasons Why You Should Investigate PPC for Your Small Business

Many people are under the assumption that pay per click is a total waste of time for local markets, and they couldn’t be further from the truth. There are a number of good uses for PPC for local that can not only get you new customers or prospects, but also enhanced search engine results.

We’re going to take a moment to look at why PPC for local business is a great idea, and check out why you should begin embracing it if you haven’t already.

Four terrific reasons why PPC works well in local marketing

You’ll get near instant traffic –

While it can take years and much effort to obtain a top organic search engine result, with PPC it can be fairly instantaneous. Set up your campaign properly and you can have targeted visitors in minutes. In addition to that, you also benefit from the considerable amount of data that this generates, items such as keyword effectiveness, which ads are working and much more.

 

Own more search engine real estate –

While you might be doing well on the organic side, with a page one listing for at least one page, wouldn’t it be nice to own a top PPC listing on that same page also. Not just that, it didn’t take years to acquire either. This can help in several ways, particularly pushing competitors down or off the page, and helps to solidify your brand in the minds of consumers.

Target prospects more carefully –

Since you are able to target demographically, you can easily target what you consider to be your best audience. Factors like locations, sex, age and more can be built into the ads serving so as to only show to the people you are interested in.

Employ remarketing –

A relative newcomer to online ads is remarketing. These are the sorta creepy, (yet highly effective) ads that seem to follow along with you wherever you go online. Like it or not, ad networks are tracking what your interests are, and are using that information. The great news is, you can now use this to your advantage as well.