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6 Email Marketing Traps to Avoid [Infographic]

March 9, 2015/by Corey Padveen

It’s no secret: cold calling is a thing of the past.

For a long time, email marketing has been replacing the once-dominant form of reaching prospects, and, when used properly, email is still a hugely viable means of developing new (and maintaining existing) business.

Though it is more or less commonplace in the world of marketing, many of us still fall victims to some of the most detrimental traps when it comes to email. So if you hope to see success from your efforts, I can’t stress enough how important it is to avoid these six email marketing traps.

This very informative and creative infographic from Mailify goes into detail on how to avoid sinking your email campaigns. Number 6, ‘No Personalization’, is by far the easiest trap to avoid. It only takes a small effort to make an email personal. And the fact that personalized emails have, on average, a 20% higher open rate than those without personalization, is more than enough reason to make that effort.

So take a look, and keep these six email marketing traps in the back of your noggin when putting together your next email campaign!

How to Win Friends and Influence People (On Social Media)

March 2, 2015/by Corey Padveen

This article was originally shared to CoreyPadveen.com.

Almost 80 years after its first run, the tenets from Dale Carnegie hold true. (With a few notable differences.)

From the greatest businesspeople in the world (Warren Buffett still has his certificate from Carnegie’s course) to the not-so-impressive (Charles Manson reportedly used these techniques to influence his followers) people have found value in Carnegie’s lessons in How to Win Friends and Influence People. Today, on social media, a lot of this still applies. But some adaptation is needed for the modern era of communication.

How to Handle Your Fans and Followers

In order to properly handle members of your community, it is important that you not criticize, condemn or complain about them. You should also regularly show your appreciation for those members. That is especially true on social media.

Letting your fans and followers know that you appreciate their involvement in your community goes a very long way. One brand in particular that does this well is Cadbury. Here is one of the gestures they made to show their appreciation:

Making People ‘Like’ You

Now, the term ‘Like’ means something somewhat different on a social network like Facebook than what Carnegie had in mind, but the concept still holds up.

Of the six core traits that will lead to people liking you, there are a few that are particularly important on social media. First, developing a genuine interest in your fans and listening to what they have to say will improve the personal connection they have to your brand. What’s more, sending personalized messages using users’ names will be an important component of your communications strategy on social as well.

The idea of making people feel important when you talk to them is paramount when it comes to improving the customer experience. I don’t want to feel like ‘just another customer’ when I reach out to a brand. Even if that might be the case, I, the customer, should feel like the only person that matters when engaged with a brand online.

Winning People with the Way You Think (Your Brand’s Message)

“The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.” Truer words have seldom been spoken.

As a brand, the moment your start to argue with a customer on social media, you’re wrong. It doesn’t matter how right you are, you’re wrong. It is important to know when you’ve been beaten, and when to walk away. Getting into a debate is not worth the harm it will almost certainly cause.

Often times, when a customer is upset, they simply want to be acknowledged and heard. Social media can be that platform. Simply letting a customer voice their displeasure and responding in a respectful way can be a major factor in turning them into a brand advocate, rather than a detractor.

Turning a complaint into a constructive conversation about how your products or services can be improved is beneficial for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that your business can improve its operations as a result.

Conclusion

If you haven’t read through Carnegie’s book, and you or your brand spend time talking to people (which you almost certainly do) it is worth a read. While there is some content that is dated, there is clearly a lot of information that can help you better communicate with your community on social media (and other forms of communication).

This article was originally shared to CoreyPadveen.com.

3 FREE Social Media Measurement Tools

February 23, 2015/by Corey Padveen

Free social media measurement tools are always a hot commodity for marketers.

If you’re like a lot of social media marketers, then you are often faced with significant hurdles when it comes to both measuring your results and receiving any sort of significant budget to make it easier. Luckily, there are options that exist to make your life much easier!

While there is a whole host of tools that exist on the paid side of the spectrum (some very affordable and others quite the opposite) it is always useful to start your endeavor into the world of social media measurement with some free tools. These are a few that can be particularly useful and provide quite a bit of insight.

Google Analytics

It might seem like Google Analytics does little more than track website traffic, but when you are using it properly, it can be one of your most valuable resources for measuring the success (and even revenue) of your social media strategy.

Between the social dashboard (under Acquisition) and the ability to set Goals and Filters from social networks, there is no shortage of what can be measured on Google Analytics. Use the system to better understand your social audience, identify which pieces of content are driving the most engagement (segmented by network) and even see which networks are driving the most revenue (either through direct sales or some sort of quantifiable action) in order to optimize your budget allocation.

Google Analytics does a whole lot more than simply track your visitors.

Simply Measured

Granted, there is a paid version of Simply Measured and it is certainly not the least expensive option on the market. But, the free reports offered by the service are amongst the most comprehensive and valuable of any free service on the web.

Perhaps one of the benefits of these free reports is the fact that they are not limited to only the most basic of networks. In addition to Facebook and Twitter, you can also generate reports for networks like Instagram, Vine, Google+ and even link to your Google Analytics reports and better understand your audience.

If ever there was a way to entice users to upgrade to a paid version, Simply Measured has figured it out by offering such detailed free reports that you almost need to see what more they could provide.

Social Mention

Though not a brand-specific analytics tool for social media, per se, Social Mention does provide detailed analytics around keywords (branded or otherwise) that can serve as valuable guidelines on creating content and participating in the social conversation.

Understanding what is being said about your brand, your competitors and your industry as a whole, and examining the audience discussing these topics is important to the practice of strategy optimization. As a free tool, Social Mention is one of the more valuable ones and one of the easiest to use. Simply jump in and start analyzing the conversation, then take the data you’ve pulled and apply what you have learned about content, trends and the audience to your strategies.

It should be noted that there are several niche tools that focus specifically on one network. For example, there is Tailwind for Pinterest, which offers a fairly extensive free trial, and Iconosquare for Instagram, but the three listed here will help you measure your social presence in its entirety as opposed to a network-by-network basis.

Are there any other tools – free or paid – that you like using? Tell us about them in the comments below or on Twitter!

How Brands Use Instagram [INFOGRAPHIC]

February 16, 2015/by Corey Padveen

Instagram is a popular platform for brands, and marketers often want to know how the most successful brands are using it.

How brands use Instagram is of interest to a lot of marketers. The visual nature of the network makes it a treasure trove for engagement, but so often, brands miss the mark.

For example, how long should a post be, and should brands be mentioning others or not? This brief but informative infographic from Simply Measured showcases how some of the top brands in the world are using Instagram. Take a look at some of these interesting stats and determine whether or not your brand is using the network like the most successful brands in the world.

How Web Directory Listings Will Boost Your Business

February 2, 2015/by Corey Padveen

Modern entrepreneurs understand various strategies of their business in depth. They are also aware of various marketing strategies to create a good brand name. Hence, the need for web directories is there in recent times.

There are many web directories that are available today. For example, Google+ has around 250 million users that are reaching great heights in their businesses. This number is ever increasing as Google has made it mandatory for marketers to create a Gmail account. One of the most important factors for successful business is the ability to create business networks.

Thus, one of the most important business networking tools is online business listings. The best and the easiest way to do this by listing in web directories. Free website directories offer the easiest way to get high ranks in Google search engine results. This in turn will boost your business.

Role of Web Directories

In order to make your business a huge success, it is necessary to create a unique identity for it. Web directories enable your website to get indexed by major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Your website and its content play a major role in page rank on Google. Thus, article marketing comes into the picture.

Article marketing is the process in which you generate interesting articles and then submit them to popular directories. Directories are specially designed to provide visitors with easy access to the best websites available in the specific category. Webmasters are the most common visitors of the directories. However, directories can be accessed and used by anyone on the internet.

The best thing about the article submission on web directory is that it generates targeted traffic. Article marketing has become extremely popular in recent times. Many articles are being submitted everyday to well known directories. However, most articles are of low quality with many grammatical errors, selling mistakes and inadequate knowledge. To succeed in increasing page rank in Google, the quality of content plays an important role.

In order to maintain high standards in the online world, there are a few points that must be kept in mind:

Web directories have various categories listed in which you can place your website. Your website must be relevant to the category where you wish to enter. For example, if your website is about medical information, you should list it in the health and fitness category on the web directory. If it is E-business & E-marketing website, then it should be submitted under E-business & E-marketing category.
Link building is an important factor in page ranking. Thus, websites with incomplete links or broken links will not be accepted by web directories during submission. Same goes for incomplete graphics, images or cluttered content. Websites that redirects to another address will not be accepted.
Duplicate content is strictly banned during submission to web directories. Two websites having the same content, but different domains will not be accepted.
Websites having objectionable and illegal content or images will not be accepted. For example, pornographic websites, content and images will not be included in web directories.
Websites should not contain too many links or pop ups. Such websites will not be accepted for web directory submission.

So before submitting your website to web directories, ensure that your website has these features:

Suitable category
Domain authority
Directory design
Fresh and relevant links
Listing quality
Quality, relevant and unique content

Hence, web directories are a great asset to increase your page rank and boost your business. Now, you can easily expand the web traffic and increase the chances that your website gets easily noticed online.

How Often Should You Post to Social Media [INFOGRAPHIC]

January 26, 2015/by Corey Padveen

How much is too much? How little is not enough? This infographic does a pretty good job of answering those questions.

One of the more popular questions marketers tend to ask relates to how often to post to social media. The truth of the matter is simple: the frequency with which you post will differ based on both the industry in which you find your business and the qualities of your audience. That said, there are some basic guidelines that serve as a starting point when considering where to begin.

This great inforgraphic from Spokal does a great job of analyzing current trends, aggregating that data and providing us with a guideline which can easily be followed when deciding how often to post to social media. Though you might find that, with time, your strategy might change, this will help get you off on the right foot.

Things to Remember when Creating Goals in Google Analytics

January 19, 2015/by Corey Padveen

When creating goals in Google Analytics, there are a few things that we need to keep in mind.

Goals in Google Analytics can be extremely valuable. They allow us to identify where we are finding success, and when we dig down a little further, we learn a lot about our audience’s behavior. But when we create our goals in Google Analytics, there are a few things we need to remember.

Give Your Goal a Proper Name

This seems trivial, but it is an issue that so many marketers deal with on a regular basis. When you create a goal, give it a clear name that you can recognize at first glance, instead of something generic like ‘Goal 1’.

This might not seem like a major issue at first, but as you begin creating new goals and your list grows, you will notice that it becomes much more difficult to track which goals are which. Eventually, when trying to edit your goals, you will have to sift through them one by one in order to find the goal you are trying to change, and the time this takes is simply not worth skipping this small detail.

Set Up a New View

The last thing you want to do is learn the hard way that Google does not back up your data. Contrary to what you might think, there is no secret archive of information should you make a mistake and lose some of your data. It is simply gone. So, when making changes and creating goals, do so in a new View.

Creating a View is simple. Go to your Admin dashboard, scroll to the absolute right, open the dropdown menu and create a new view. It’s there that you should do all of your goal testing. Figure out what goal composition you would like to work with, and once you have found it, apply it to your primary dashboard.

Consider Assigning Monetary Value

Just because your goal is not related to a purchase, and you may not even have an ecommerce website, it does not mean that you shouldn’t be assigning monetary values to certain conversions.

Consider this simple example: you create a goal that registers a conversion every time someone signs up for your newsletter. If the lifetime value of a customer is a nice, round $1000, and you know that you can convert exactly 10% of your newsletter subscribers, then you can assign a value to each conversion of $100. Of course, this makes life fairly easy, but this is an example of how you should start thinking about your goals in monetary terms.

Avoid Generic Goals

Creating a very broad goal will not necessarily help you improve your online operations. Of course, if you are trying to track for purchases, then you’ll create goals with those parameters. But if you are trying to leverage goals in an effort to learn more about your audience, get granular.

Instead of simply creating a goal that tracks a certain number of pages visited, include funnels and filters, and separate your goal in a new view in order to truly dig into the data you are seeing. You have the potential to create up to 25 views with basic Google Analytics, that means you can segment your data significantly and really learn about your audience in great detail.

Verify Your Goals

When creating a goal, you will notice that there is a small option at the bottom of the screen to verify your goal. This is a great practice and one that you should be familiar with when creating your goals.

By verifying your goal, you are able to see how many conversions there have been in the past seven days. If you were to create a goal that simply didn’t have any conversions, you would think that there was something wrong with your website or your marketing. The reality might be that you made a mistake when creating your goal (e.g. typing in 30 pages visited instead of 3) or your goal simply didn’t reflect your audience’s activity. All that can be avoided by verifying the goal before you get started.

Useful Social Media Advertising Tips for Beginners

January 12, 2015/by Corey Padveen

When it comes to social media, there are few areas that can be more powerful than social media advertising, and these social media advertising tips will help you get the most out of a campaign.

It is no secret that the social media space is increasingly favoring the pay-to-play model for brands and businesses. That being the case, we are starting to see a move by many users towards social media advertising. Whether you are building your social presence, launching a new product, or driving conversions from untapped audiences, social media advertising can be a powerful tool. But it is important that you are using it properly.

These social media advertising tips are really presented as thought points that should be considered when deciding to venture into the space. Though social ads are cost-effective, you still want to make certain that you are not wasting any money by simply throwing it at a network and hoping it works.

Know Thy Target Audience

Target audiences are extremely important on social media, and that is particularly true for social ads. With so much noise online, we need to ensure that we know exactly who we are talking to. When developing your social advertising campaigns, have a particular audience in mind for the message as opposed to a generic one – it will lead to significantly greater conversions.

Use Relevant Content

Once you know your audience, you’ll want to make sure that the content you plan on promoting is relevant to their tastes and preferences. One of the greatest benefits of involving one’s brand on social media is the amount of information that is available about your audience. Determine what type and tone of messaging will work and create that ad.

Don’t Boost Your Account

It might seem enticing, but one of the most futile ad types are the promoted account ads. While these ad formats might generate positive results in terms of audience growth, we have moved away from the days where a larger audience means a more valuable social presence. With a targeted message and a clearly defined audience type in mind, you will find that your ads not only garner engagement, but acquire new fans and followers as well.

Take Advantage of Additional Features

Simply boosting a post to your friends and fans can be somewhat useful, but to really get the value out of social advertising, take full advantage of its capabilities! In Facebook’s Power Editor or in the advertising backend of Twitter, you will find several additional capabilities, like Custom Audiences and Twitter Cards. Learn all you can about these features and then incorporate them into your campaigns.

And on that note…

Study the Social Advertising Landscapes

Social advertising is much more than “boosting” your content. If you have decided to begin taking advantage of the social advertising landscape, you should be taking the time to learn everything there is to know about the platforms. As noted above, there are a lot of valuable features that can be exploited in the backends of these programs. Figure out what they are!

Pay Attention to Your Ads

Throwing a budget behind some content will yield average results, but you want your results to be above average! Keep a close eye on the activity of your social ads and make adjustments where you see opportunities. Real-time ad optimization is a great practice, and one that will keep your operation profitable.

Avoid Optimized CPC

Bid for yourself. Optimized cost-per-click does not yield the best results. It is significantly more convenient, and the results are not bad. But again, you don’t want your campaigns to simply be average! Once you understand how these ad platforms work, start bidding for yourself in order to extrapolate all the potential that you can out of every penny you invest.

Keep some of these tips in mind when you decide to begin your journey into the world of social media advertising!

What other practices have you found valuable? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Social Media Trends to Watch in 2015

January 5, 2015/by Corey Padveen

These are a few of the more exciting social media trends to watch for in 2015.

Each year, industries are shifted dramatically as multiple use cases are made for social media and new technologies emerge to disrupt business as usual. This was true in 2014, and there are several social media trends to watch for in 2015 as well.

Malleable Data

Both Facebook and Twitter have made drastic changes to their analytics platforms for business, and Pinterest has been working to offer some of the best analytics businesses can get when it comes to how their websites and social profiles work together. Moving forward, we can surely expect to see the use of social data become a little more robust.

It is no secret that social data can offer huge amounts of value to a business, and it is a primary reason why businesses are willing to accept the pay-to-play model that is being pushed. Moving into 2015, we can expect the major networks to begin working on ways to monetize their own data by offering more comprehensive uses for it to businesses. Right now, brands tend to look elsewhere to mine and leverage these data. Expect these networks to try and change that this year.

And speaking of pay-to-play…

Get Ready to Invest

It might have started off as small (or rather significant, in some cases) declines in organic reach on Facebook, but we are now seeing that if we want our content to make waves, we’ll need to give it a little push.

The great news for brands and marketers is that we are living in a golden age for social advertising. We recently ran an internal test in order to measure the effectiveness of new ad media compared to traditional PPC ads on networks like Google and Google Display, and we found that for some of the most competitive search terms, your dollar can be up to ten times more effective on social media. If ever there was a time to invest heavily in social advertising, it’s now.

Remember, these networks are still companies (several of them public) trying to prove their oft-ballooned valuations. They need to make it appealing for marketers to invest.

You’ll Hear Less of the Term ‘Social Media’

For the longest time, we’ve been hearing things like, “…do social media.” In 2015, one thing we will start to see a little less of is the use of the term “social media”, at least as we see it now.

We have started to pigeonhole ourselves into thinking of social media as a concept, and not as the term it is. The reality of the situation is that virtually any medium in which two or more parties are put in contact with one another is inherently social. So, “social media” can be anything from big networks like Facebook to the comment section on a food blog. Once people start to see that (and they have already) we will see a move away from this overuse of a term that doesn’t quite make sense as its currently used.

A More Targeted Message

One thing that brands have struggled with considerably is the messaging and rhetoric used on social networks and the clear lack of audience content differentiation necessary to effectively leverage what each network can offer. For example, your Twitter audience doesn’t necessarily care about the same issues and isn’t necessarily made up of the same people as your audience on LinkedIn. What’s more, your overall social audience (or, social client persona) might be interested in only one type of messaging in particular, and this message might apply to all networks.

In 2015, there will be a clear move away from the attempt by brands to please everyone and a move towards an attempt to zero in on a particular audience – your social client persona.