Cool tools for marketing automation

There are lots of great tools that you can spend your time and money on, for our purposes here I’m going to focus on three areas that can be gigantic time sucks and possess the most potential for return on investment.

Email autoresponders – Possibly the most important thing to automate, as without using this type of tool you have basically no hope of building a customer email list. Loading up your autoresponder with marketing messages helps you give both new customers and prospects alike the feeling that they are being well taken care of. There are a number of great email companies available that will handle this seamlessly for you, such as AWeber, GetResponse, iContact, MailChimp and others.

Managing social media – Keeping your finger on the pulse of several social media accounts daily is not only a full time gig, but a difficult one as well. You need to use some kind of tool, and there are several good ones out there which allow you to keep track of mentions, shares, Tweets and even enable you to post to your social platforms. Look into HootSuite, TweetDeck and Buffer.

Automate all of the tasks you can! – The advent of tools like IFTTT and Zapier are making many marketers lives much easier! These tools, while similar in design, each concentrate on automating tasks between two or more different services that you currently use. A true virtual assistant!

Make sure to not let customer and prospects slip through the cracks with all your automation. Being there for effective customer service is a vital piece of business too!

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So in the spirit of prevention, here are 5 ways for you to make a positive change in terms of how your sites appear, operate and prosper.

1. How fast do your pages load? – You have under 10 seconds to load your page or most people will exit and go elsewhere. Some causes of slow loading pages are too many images, pages built mostly with Flash, and errors in your site code. This is something you want to check into, as Google will penalize your site in the search rankings if your pages take too much time to load.
2. Defunct products, programs, and links – Make sure and remove old products, programs and particularly links that are no longer pertinent. Nothing frustrates a user more than heading someplace and finding they can’t get there or the item is unavailable. Dead links and 404 pages will also affect your search rankings, as well.
3. Old content and images – Likewise cull out stale, no longer topical content and images. Your old pictures from the company picnic in 2007 may not be what we might term fresh content, which is what folks and search engines both want!
4. Social media – Make sure that your social media buttons not only link to your current social media sites, but that you are up-to-date with them. Pinterest and Instagram are later entries that might not be represented in your social buttons.
5. More fresh content that rocks – There’s nothing you can do to help in this respect more than to inject a fresh dose of new, relevant to 2013 content! If you’ve got content on the first page of your blog that is more than a month old, you definitely should be more proactive with your content strategy.

It’s spring, and time to get about cleaning. You’ll be glad you did!

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Your e-newsletter doesn’t need to be boring!

Don’t be buffaloed into believing that your e-newsletter needs to be as bland and un-sexy as those you’ve made the mistake of opting in for. Here are some eye-catching examples of e-newsletters that rock! Also, ensuring that you’re not just selling, but engaging your audience with useful, compelling content. Kayak, for example, isn’t just about telling you about the latest travel deals, but rather getting you salivating over the thought of travel and fun. They also go out of the way to engage their readers.

Five tips for creating an E-newsletter

Here are some tips for writing an E-newsletter that will get opened and acted upon!

• Talk as if you’re talking to a friend – Customers are affected by a friendly tone, and are far more likely to engage.
• You need to encourage communication – Be sure you give your readers every chance to reply and use specific calls to action to ask for it!
• Be specific and don’t ramble – Keep on topic, and don’t be boring!
• Create extremely useful content – Provide fresh and unique content that’s useful and is precisely what is resonating with your list. (Be sure you know this!)
• Don’t be afraid to use emotion – Writing with emotion is powerful and is very likely to stir others as well, promoting more engagement.

Don’t settle for simply autoresponder messages! Create a meaningful and useful e-newsletter today!

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You have to take negative reviews seriously and take measures to counter the damaging effects!

Let’s have a look at five proven methods to do that.

1. Look at your brand’s search results on a regular basis – Look at your company’s name in Google at least once a month. Google Alerts can be helpful to let you know when there is any conversation regarding you, your company name or your important keywords. Be sure to look beyond page one, as damaging entries may be lurking there on their way higher.
2. Deal with negative content ASAP – Do your best to make contact with the individual that posted the content in question as quickly as possible, especially if they are an unsatisfied customer. Do your very best to take care of their concerns in a positive manner. Don’t enter into a public tussle with them! You won’t like the outcome.
3. Optimize your pages with the company name – Ensure that your company’s name is prominent in your optimization, specifically in keywords, tags, and titles. The more of your site’s pages that bear your name, the greater number of chances Google will see your site as being the authority for this keyword (your company name) and rank you higher, particularly because most negative content won’t have done any SEO.
4. Create more content channels with your brand – You can use free blogs like WordPress.com, Blogger.com or even subdomains of your own site for this, along with your social channels such as YouTube, Facebook, and Google , will help keep the company name prominent. Post fresh content to these channels also, so they maintain their search positions.
5. Ask your customers for reviews – The most obvious and by far the most useful tool for effective online reputation management is to ask your satisfied customers for a review. Stimulate and even reward reviews. This is also your very best source of social proof!

Follow these tips and safeguard your good name! It’s the right thing to do.

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5 Great Image Tips for Facebook Ads

Creating an ad that makes a real impact and statement for your product or services is a matter of standing out from the rest. Here are five ways to do exactly that!

1. Use very high quality stock images – Since your images will end up very small, be sure you’re buying from a reputable resource. Fotolia and iStockPhoto are two of our most favorite. The XS size of available images will undoubtedly be fine, as even these are cut down to the size of a postage stamp (110×80 pixels).
2. Crop your photos to produce maximum impact – Crop your photos closely to focus on the most important aspect of your ad. Cropping faces from the eyes to mouth is the most impactful technique for riveting people images. Also, make sure that your model’s eyes have life. When using product images, get close!
3. Employ eye-catching colors – Using bright, visually arresting pics can do wonders for your clickthrough rates. A lot of people opt to blend in with the pervasive Facebook blue, and thus consign their ads to a form of “banner blindness”.
4. Choose the most attractive images you can find! – Unless you are going for a certain statement, pick the most attractive photos you can get. People are attracted to beauty. Period. This is not to say that sometimes beauty can’t be trumped by cute, funny or outrageous.
5. Employ humor if you can – Everyone enjoys a good laugh. If you have the chance to inject a giggle into your ad, don’t pass it up! It will definitely result in a higher clickthrough rate!

For some good illustrations of these ad-image principles in action, check out this great article at Search Engine Watch.

The Pros and Cons of creating a mobile app for your business

Pros:

• More than 50 percent of adult Americans use smartphone technology
• Keeps your brand visible in the marketplace
• A great tool for increasing customer loyalty and retention
• Users spend more time on apps
• Usually load faster than mobile sites
• Mobile apps are available offline, though users will need to login to perform any actions, such as purchases

Cons:

• Mobile apps need to be made for each different mobile platform
• Mobile apps require ongoing care, both as regard fresh content in addition to technology updates
• Mobile apps are not as easy to optimize as a mobile website
• Mobile ads may well serve the purpose
• Can be wildly expensive! While there are some Do It Yourself solutions, they are minimal in functionality and difficult to update.

We all know that there are as many uses for an app than you could ever imagine, however some are better than others. Here is an example of how apps were created in the health care market. Ensuring your app is useful and not a mere novelty will go a long way toward helping you make your choice. While it’s pretty much a given that you require a mobile version of your website, the question of whether or not you should shell out what could be big bucks for an app is one you need to examine thoroughly. Take the time to weigh the pros and cons for your business before you decide to leap into developing a mobile app!

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Ahh, the good ‘ol days.

Google, in their pursuit to develop a more relevant, social selection of search results, made the game somewhat more complex. Along with making sure we are still performing most if not all of the aforementioned tasks, social signals now are playing a vital part in the Google search results algorithm, the formula designed to determine where our pages rank in the search stratosphere.

What in the name of Twitter are we supposed to do?

So how can we do this without tearing out all of our hair? Here are three easy methods for you to quickly increase customer engagement, expand your audience, and boost word of mouth concerning your business.

1. Utilize visual media – However you slice it, most people now would prefer to watch than read. Whether we are pushed to this by a lack of time or the fact that it’s simply easier, that is the state of our society nowadays. Backing that up, Facebook reports that photos and videos attract 53 percent more likes than text alone.
2. Make sure to post later in the day – Engagement by means of liking, sharing and following, is far more likely to happen later in the day or early evening, based on research from social media expert Dan Zarrella. Even if you post early in the day, as you’re getting going, make sure you check back later. It will pay off!
3. Be quick on the draw – Don’t leave people hanging! They’re trying to engage with you, so make it a normal practice to respond to comments, tweets and status updates as early as you can.

Don’t be like Freddie!

Professional golfer Freddie Couples was asked once why he never answers the phone. His reply was, “there might be someone on the other end.” Don’t be like Freddie! Engage with your readers!

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Content marketing is getting more and more popular

According to BusinessBolts.com, 74 percent of businesses expect to do more content marketing in 2013. A mere 4 percent are choosing not to. These companies have discovered content marketing’s distinct advantages, some of which are cost-effectiveness, nearly instant results, and near full control over the process. An article or blog post may be written, for example, and then posted not just on your own site, but also mentioned in your social networks, repurposed into a video or audio (or both!) and otherwise disseminated  across the internet. This can multiply your reach significantly, and your entire content marketing campaign can bear fruit before you know it.

Want an example of how content marketing made a difference?

The New York Times recently profiled a Northern Virginia company, River Pools and Spas, that was watching as their sales tanked due to the housing recession of 2008. Orders shrank from six per month ($50,000 a pop) to less than two. What had been a $250,000 yearly spend on radio, TV and pay per click advertising, was now out of the question. Instead, owner Marcus Sheridan set out on an ambitious content marketing campaign consisting of blog posts and videos, and within a short time had not only recovered but exceeded pre-recession levels. In fact, Sheridan attributes nearly $2 million in sales to a SINGLE article he wrote on how much a fiberglass pool should cost!

There’s no doubt that content marketing can provide results, and that it should have a place in your online marketing strategy for 2013.

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Mobile email open rates are on fire!

Mobile email is now the most opened email, exceeding desktop with a robust 36 percent, according to Knotice.com. Combine that with the fact that email is the preferred online communication mode of 74 percent of all adults, and you begin to see why it’s so important. And it’s not simply phones either. Tablets are starting to take a major share also, as ReturnPath reports that iPhones make up 59 percent, iPads 26 percent, Androids 14 percent and Windows phones bringing up the rear at less than 1 percent.

Here are some tips for optimizing your emails for mobile

So not to leave you without a plan for optimizing your marketing emails, here are some actionable tips that will help make sure your marketing messages show up how you want them to!

• Keep your messages short. People, especially on mobile devices, have a short attention span. Make punchy, enticing subject lines and content that keeps people engaged.
• Keep your image files small, as large files take far longer to load, and this can be a disaster as many won’t wait, and simply move on, before they’ve even looked at what you’ve got for them.
• Keep your font sizes in your main content no less than 14, and headlines around 30. Anything under 13 will get automatically changed by the iPhone, and can mess up your formatting.
• Make your calls to action large enough for easy tapping. A typical adult finger covers about 45 pixels, so keep that in mind.
• Test your emails on different platforms before sending them out. Better safe than sorry!

Optimizing your emails isn’t an option if you’re hoping to win with email. You need to get on this today, as you can be sure your competitors will!

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1. No clear objective – According to DinkumInteractive.com you’ve got about 4 seconds to share what your website is all about before they bail.
2. Not making the content scannable – We read in chunks, and if you can’t scan your web page and get the gist of it in a few seconds, you might turn off a substantial percentage of your visitors!
3. Not being mobile ready – Mobile is no longer an extra, as according to Google half of all website traffic is already mobile.
4. Not making use of video on your site – Videos rule, but whatever you decide to do, avoid autoplaying music without exception!
5. No updated, quality content – If your content articles are from Bush’s first term, it’s no surprise they’re fleeing! Also no fancy fonts or ridiculously long pages.
6. Hard-to-find contact information – Make sure we can contact you if we want to!
7. Not collecting emails or newsletter signups – You do plan to be in business for the long haul, right?
8. Not utilizing title and description Meta tags on your website – These can help you to get indexed and ranked on the web.
9. No social sharing buttons – Social media is a large part of search engine optimization now, and you should make your content shareable.
10. Missing calls-to-action – You want an action from your visitors; ask for it!
11. Poor site navigation – Avoid using drop down menus, and make sure that all pages on your website include links back to your home page.
12. Not optimizing your images – Make sure to use the ALT and TITLE tags for any images or videos you use.
13. Overuse of Flash – Besides being a pain for the GoogleBot to read, it may be very annoying to your visitors.
14. No method to measure your progress – Do you have some form of web metrics measuring your stats? If not, you’re flying blind.
15. “Intro” pages – These are only an obstacle to your content. You really want to go there? (I’m looking at you, fancy restaurants.)

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