Sociatic

Posts Tagged ‘online marketing’

Posted on July 27, 2011 - by Kwame

Cinemagraphs; The Ultimate Invention for Future Online Branding and Marketing

Recently, there has been some buzz surrounding cinemagraphs; still photos with some animated areas. Many people may see cinemagraphs as just works of art/creativity but I see a future where they are used by businesses to introduce their products or employees online.

Below are some examples of cinemagraphs. Click on the images to visit their sources:

1) Could wine and beverage companies be using cinemagraphs to make their products look more appealing on their websites? I bet they can!

2) Can’t grocery shops be using cinemagraphs on their websites to show the freshness of their groceries? I bet they can!

3) Can’t fashion houses be using cinematics to reveal their latest designs? I bet they can!

4) What about phone companies? Can they use a cinemagraph like the one below and say something like, “You just can’t stop using it”? I bet they can!

5) And I bet make-up artists and/ cosmetic sellers can have a cinematic similar to the one below and have a thought bubble over the woman’s head, saying something like, “The new Sociatic lip-stick is fantastic! Henry will love this!” and then there’ll be a link to that exact lip-stick?

Okay, maybe I was a little biased with the “Sociatic lip-stick” thing but I guess you got my point.

I don’t believe there is an easier way to use cinemagraphs all over a site that carries thousands of products. Just one cinemagraph on the homepage or one in each product category might work well.

If it is used to introduce every new product a manufacturer makes,

1) Will it be more sharable across social media? Yes!

2) Will it appeal to people more than just using regular photos? Yes!

3) Will it increase sales? Maybe! Just like video, I don’t see it being a miracle invention! You need to be creative with it in order to get the best out of it but I trust that it will be a better tool than regular (still) images.

So, I have got some work for you to do. Share this post across the social web and let’s see your friends reactions. Do you believe cinemagraphs will be used in future online marketing? Do you think it should? I will like to know what you also think.

If you enjoyed reading this post, subscribe to the RSS feed so that you don’t miss future articles. In my next post, I will be sharing a free landing page template with you. Don’t miss it!

Post thumbnail image source

Posted on August 5, 2010 - by Kwame

11 Easy Tips For Better Content Marketing

Do you use content to drive traffic and generate leads? Content marketing has become the preferred means of marketing for many businesses. It’s a great strategy for attracting leads to your business. Blogs, whitepapers, online videos, podcasts and other content forms are there to show us the truth behind content marketing.

If your content is not getting you the results you want or even if you are new to content marketing, there is good news. It’s possible to change.

With that setting the stage, here are 11 tips to help you in your content marketing.

1. Have a goal: When you’re planning your content, set a goal for it. What do you want to achieve with your content? Perhaps, you want it to get you more newsletter signups or more sales for your products. The best way to set goals for your content is to categorize them. For example, you can categorize your content like this: drive traffic, generate leads, generate sales, etc. Delving further:

List posts: Drive traffic. Traffic may convert to leads
Downloadable Documents: Increase traffic conversions to leads
Customer reviews/ testimonials/ case studies: Convert traffic and leads to sales

Categorizing and setting goals like this helps you choose the right words to use to achieve your content marketing goals.

2. Produce enlightening content frequently: The two keywords here are “enlightening” and “frequently”. When you produce great content, people will want to share it and subscribe to your RSS feed or newsletter. Teach people in your industry new ways to do things. If you disagree with an accepted norm in your industry, produce content to debunk it and share it with top players in your industry.

When you produce great content, people talk about you on their blogs. When you produce great content, your business grows. When you produce great content… the goodies goes on and on and on.

3. Analyze and Proofread: After planning and producing your content, take your time and double check for errors. If you’re unsure of any mistakes, work with someone who is better at spelling and grammar to help you out. Also make sure your content is easy to understand and is convincing enough especially when you are using it as a sales tool or to debunk a theory.

4. Stack up content ideas: Plan your content ahead of time. This reduces the probability of not having any content to share when you want to produce content. I keep a word document with many content ideas so I’m not often faced with writers block. Stacking up content ideas also helps you write great content because you have a mental picture of what you’ll be writing about.

5. Use different content formats: Don’t only rely on text to promote your business. Use graphics, PDFs, audio, and video. People want to be spoiled with choice when it comes to giving them content. They want to watch screen casts of what you are talking about. They want to listen to your content on their mp3 players. They also want your content on their desktops in document format.

6. Stay informed: Be attentive online. Subscribe to blogs in your niche. Set up alerts on Social Mention and Google to track news and articles with keywords you’ll be interested in. Learn about new marketing opportunities. Learn about new trends. Use the information you collect to keep your content and strategies up to date.

7. Manage your time: Having a time-table or to-do list is a great way to manage your time as a content marketer. Producing great content can take some time so you need to give yourself enough time when you are producing content. Learn how to manage your time so that you’re ready when you feel the urge to create content.

8. Network Effectively: Do you want influential bloggers to link to you or talk about your product? Then don’t just follow and friend them on social networking sites. Most of them won’t follow or friend you back anyway. You’ll have to prove yourself worthy to be talked about by networking properly with them.

Start by commenting on their blogs and joining in their conversations on social media and networking sites. Leave insightful comments on their status updates. If you don’t have anything to say, don’t say anything. You can also contribute an article to their blog.

Another great way to network is to use interviews. Interview opinion leaders about the latest industry trends or get yourself interviewed by bloggers.

Networking gets you noticed. When you get noticed, you’ll be talked about on these blogs and their readers will also notice you and talk about you on their blogs.

9. Do your research: When you’re not sure of something, do some research online. Never add statements and quotes to your content without finding out whether they’re right or not. If you make a mistake with this, people will question the credibility of the rest of the information you’re giving them.

10. Identify and use content aggregators: Some websites are programmed to aggregate and show content from various sources. I call these sites content outlets. These sites will help you reach a larger audience with your content. Some examples are Social Media Today, The Daily Brainstorm, The Customer Collective, Alltop, etc.

11. Think SEO: If you publish text, audios and videos, you have to always think S.E.O. when producing your content. You’ll have to optimize your titles and use the right key words in your descriptions. It’s the only way you’ll reach more people.

Conclusion:

What strategies do you use in your content marketing? Share them with me.

Next week, I’ll start a series of articles that will show you how to reuse your blog and newsletter ideas to generate more leads. You’ll learn new things including video and audio SEO. Subscribe to the RSS feed in order not to miss this.

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Posted on May 27, 2010 - by Kwame

Understanding Social Media Using Honey Bees As A Standard Model

The honey bee is a social insect. By studying honey bees, humans have been able to solve problems in electronics and science in general. I know it is unbelievable but it is actually a fact. Some people have even asked us (humans) to use honey bees as a standard model for our social lives. Read this wiki if you need confirmation: Bee Colony Optimization.

What can the honey bee teach us when it comes to social media? Well, they can teach us a lot. In fact, a honey bee’s social life could be likened to that of a good social media marketer.

Before we delve into this topic more, let’s look at the picture below: It explains how honey bees communicate: Now let’s explain the picture.

There are certain worker bees whose primary work is to forage for food. They focus on gathering nectar and pollen.

If a foraging honey bee finds a source of high quality nectar and pollen, it returns to the hive to communicate it to other worker bees in the hive.

They perform a dance to communicate the location of the food to other worker bees. After performing the dance, a swarm of bees fly to the food source.

Honey bees are master communicators and they are very good at bringing a “buzz” to an orchard or source of food for them.

Now, let’s replace the honey bee’s story with our own human story in terms of bringing buzz to our business. Do you already see where this is going?

So let’s think of the honey bee as a regular internet surfer who has a social profile on Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media site. Regular internet surfers visit many websites and blogs a day looking for different kinds of information.

They normally like to share websites with their friends but one thing is that, they normally share websites that offer a lot of quality information or has a lot of goodies.

So in order for you to grab a web surfer’s attention, first you will need a good website design (flower petals?).

Now they land on your page and start ‘foraging’ for information. Now, your content will be the pollen and the offer or value your website promises will be the nectar.

If the web surfer finds your design to be cool, your content (or pollen) to be awesome and your offer (or nectar) to be excellent, they will be tempted to share your sweet stuff with their friends in the hive (ie, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, et cetera) so that they too can come and enjoy the value you provide.

When their friends also land on your site and find it useful, they might also share it with their friends and that may lead to a lot of buzz (if they were honey bees, you’ll here a “buzzzzzzz” from their wings ) for your business and it will also lead to pollination (profits). This graphic below makes it easier to understand:

The differences between our social web lives and a bee’s social web life are:

Everyone of us forage for information on the web and then we share it. With bees, there are specific workers who do the foraging.
When we are in the position of people in stage number 4, we may do what’s stated in stage 2 or choose to share our own findings starting at stage 1.

I know some of you are saying, “ point number 3, we are humans and they are insects.” Well, that’s not the point we want to make .

Clarifications:

Your products need to be worthy to be shared to other members of the ‘hive’. You can establish a presence in the hive yourself and let the ‘worker bees’ do all the talking and recruiting for you.

You don’t need to hard sell to them inside the hive because if they become your fan or follower, they already know your value and are going to do the selling for you. Remember that they may have seen many other fine petals but came to you because your pollen and nectar (content and offer) was more valuable.

Inside the hive, you need to continue to produce blooming petals and provide nectar and pollen regularly.

When you dull out, there will be no use for you inside the hive and the people who follow you will start unfollowing you.

So how do you continue to bloom? Just make it easy for people to spread the word about your business by interacting with them.

When it is Christmas, wish them a Merry Christmas,
When there is a discount sale on your website, tell them there is a sale on your website.
Create a Facebook fans only or Twitter followers only offer and let them have it.
Give them ideas on how to use your product.
Don’t spam. Spam is annoying and it makes you look desperate.
Share your business’ life or activities with them like “we are removing ginger from our ingredients, do you think this is cool?”, “we made a donation to Oxfam. Buying from us made this possible”, “Which of our products do you want to see more of?”

Again, interact, don’t sell. Get their ideas, use it and they will feel attached to your business.

Coca Cola does an excellent job with their Facebook fan page. They once shared a status showing fans the best temperature to drink a coke.

How do you interact with your customers inside and outside the hives?

If you loved this article, share it with your friends, family and work colleagues. Thanks.

Posted on May 21, 2010 - by Kwame

Five Reasons Why Paid Reviews are Great for Internet Business Start-ups

A paid review is a promotional method used by many online businesses to spread the word about their products or service. It is a promotional technique used by both big and small business to get new business for new products and services. We are going to delve into its importance more but let’s start by defining what a paid review is.

What is a paid review?

A paid review is a review whereby one is paid to write about his or her evaluation or appraisal of a product or service. The reviews are based on personal knowledge or experience with the item being reviewed. It is a cheap way of getting news of products and services out.

If you don’t have enough cash to spend or if you have the cash but don’t want to take a lot of risk, you can pay someone who has a big follower base to tell their followers about your product.

Five reasons why paid reviews are great for start-ups:

Your brand gets some recognition: Your brand will be put in front of an audience who may be having problems that your products can solve. If you find the right audience for your products, pay the leaders of your audience to tell their followers about your products or services.

You will get traffic to your website: The readers of the blog on which your review is published will flock your website to find out more or take a free trial (if you have one available). Some readers might tweet about it on Twitter and some will share it on Facebook, Linkedin, et cetera.

Other people will start reviewing your product or service for free: Whether you pay them or not, people will start reviewing your products on their blogs. I have seen this happen on a lot of blogs.

You save a lot of money: You will save money since paid reviews generate free word of mouth marketing (the best form of marketing in world if you ask me).

You get back links: This will help increase your website’s page rank and your search engine rankings. If your product or service is reviewed on an authority blog with high PR (page rank), your own page rank will get some credit and if other bloggers review your products for free, their page ranks add up to help increase your own.

You don’t need to spend a lot of money on reviews. You can have a small budget and still get it to work.

Before you pay someone to review your product or service, you need to do your due diligence. You want to get lots of traffic to your site right?

Three tips you can use to help with you get great results:

Make sure the blog has a lot of RSS subscribers: This will help you get more eyeballs to read the review, thus, increase the effectiveness.

Make sure the blog’s readers are targeted or suitable for your product’s market: For example, if you are selling an eBook about internet marketing, make sure the blog is about internet marketing or internet business.

Make sure you are paying a reasonable price for the review: Some bloggers charge higher than others but provide little value in terms of all the points I have made above.

If you are lucky, some bloggers will share the review article with their email list. Most bloggers have thousands of newsletter subscribers and it will be your lucky day if they decide to share it with their email list too at no extra cost.

You can ‘manipulate’ readers and bloggers a little bit if you also offer an affiliate program. That will even spice things up more since people will get a commission just by telling other people about your product on their blogs, on Twitter, and all over the internet.

You can also spice things up a little more if your review includes a promo code or discount code with an expiry date. This will create some sort of urgency for people to buy your product before the price is regularized.

You can also try and add a competition to your review where you give out prizes to people who visit your website or who also write a review of your product on their website. Just play with ideas.

What do you think about marketing with paid reviews? Any experiences, thoughts or ideas questions? Let me know in the comments box.

Posted on May 20, 2010 - by Kwame

Facebook Traffic: Analyzing What’s Useful and What’s Not

There is a constant struggle for online traffic and as such, many sites and blogs have implemented social sharing buttons on their sites to enable their visitors share relevant information found on the site with their friends on the social web. One of the most common buttons you will find is the “share on Facebook” button or “like” button.

How useful is Facebook Traffic?

To answer this question, we’ll need to consider the most important characteristic peculiar to many Facebook user profiles which is:

The typical Facebook user’s friends list is made up of mostly family, school mates and colleagues. My sure bet is that, most of these friends have un-similar interests and hobbies.

This makes sharing stuff on Facebook boring. Yes it is. Considering the fact that most visitors on your site share or “like” stuff that their Facebook friends don’t have any interest in. The end result for you is untargeted traffic.

There are exceptions where you can get some targeted traffic from Facebook and I am going to share these exceptions with you but first, let’s look into the negative traffic effects first.

Let’s both imagine this scenario:

You have a website about web design and have Facebook sharing buttons on it.
You write a couple of articles on web design.
You get a visitor to your site who is into web design.
Your visitor happens to be a Facebook user.
Your visitor shares some of your articles with his friends by clicking on the “share on Facebook” button.
70%+ of your visitor’s over 200 friends happen to be his or her close relatives, school mates and colleagues who happen no to fancy web design articles.

Now with this scenario, what do you think the end result will be? Untargeted traffic! Yes, you got that right.

Untargeted traffic = Useless traffic:

That’s the formula for untargeted traffic . Traffic is supposed to be useful but if information on your website is shared with untargeted people, you not only receive no value, you also give your sponsors or advertisers low value if you have any.

This is because the clicks to your site (if there is any at all) do not convert because the visitors mostly have little or zero interest in your site’s stuff.

As I said before, there are exceptions.

Instances where Facebook traffic is useful:

Before I go on with this, I have to point out that even with these exceptions, getting high volumes of traffic from Facebook by depending only on the “like” or “share on Facebook button” is nothing but a dream. You need to pinch yourself to wake up and face reality. I will share the best way to promote your website on Facebook with you shortly but first,:

If your website is about different topics, you are likely to get useful traffic. Obviously, it is because people who click on your link on Facebook and get to your site have many other interests to choose from even if they just clicked on your link out of curiosity.

I found some really interesting sites and blogs out of curiosity by clicking on links my friends shared. Mostly, the articles that some of my friends share are not articles I will read but sometimes, I click on the link and find out that the site on which the shared article is posted has other articles that I find useful.

So the lesson here is that, if you write about many topics, you are sure to get converting traffic to your site because you serve a lot of interests.

The Best Way Forward with Facebook Marketing:

The best way to market your website on Facebook is to create a fan page for your business. You probably have read lots of articles about Facebook fan pages already so I will not say “me too” on that topic. If you need more information about Facebook fan pages, read the following articles:

Now, after you get your fan page, you will have to flaunt it on your website so as to entice interested visitors to join your Facebook fan page.

Your website is not the only place you can flaunt your fan page at. You can create some videos about your niche and then leave a link to your Facebook fan page inside the video. What you need to do after creating your video is to go to Tubemogul and then distribute your video across all the major video sharing websites.

People who become your fan or “like” you on Facebook are interested in your product or service. After all, clicking on “Like” is a conversion.

Once you get conversions on your Facebook fan page, it will be easier to get newsletter subscription conversions. I won’t mention sales conversions because Facebook marketing is not about hard selling.

Fan page subscribers are more targeted towards your business. This means that updating your fan page’s status with links to your website will receive far more targeted visits than just a random click from a shared link to untargeted friends.

What is your Facebook marketing strategy? What do you think social media marketing lacks? Share your thoughts with me in the comments box below.

Posted on May 19, 2010 - by Kwame

Is Social Media for Your Business?

There has been a lot of debate as to whether social media is for any and every business on the face of the planet. You hear people say, “social media is helping businesses everywhere”. Yet you hear other people say it’s not working for their business.

I asked Tamar Weinberg and Scott Monty, both social media experts to help me answer the big question: “Is social media for every business” and this is what they had to say:

Tamar Weinberg: “Business as a rule is “social” — so social media is for all businesses. Granted, it will be easier for some businesses to succeed versus others, but everyone can make their mark.”

Scott Monty: “Any business that has customers that want to communicate that way.” By “that way”, Scott means, “by social media”.

I agree with both experts.

You see, business has always been “social” in some way even way before social media sites popped up. Business has always involved people interaction.

Think about the days (way before the social media web) when people had to make a sales presentation, collect suggestions from customers using a suggestion box, promote competitions through TV, radio, the print media, et cetera, all without the help of the internet.

These activities all involved some “social” interaction. Businesses had some sort of society around their brands.

So what has social media marketing changed? I think it hasn’t changed anything. In fact, it has added something to the already “social” business. Social media has added the “personal” interaction that brands and their “societies” were lacking.

Social media is about personal interactions with your business’ old society and likely new ones who may be recruited by your old society through referrals. Social media is a way of having fun, sharing useful product tips and building friendships with your business’ society or audience.

Some businesses make the mistake of hard selling their products to their social media audience. This is a wrong move because social media is not about hard selling. Your audience is already being bombarded with banner ads, TV ads, radio ads and print ads from you and other businesses so using your Facebook fan page or company Twitter account to run more ads will be boring and less effective.

I guess you may be asking what the worth of social media is for you. Well, what I can say is that, social media is a means of increasing your society’s population through referrals from fans and followers. Your existing clients and customers do all the selling for you. Besides, their friends trust them more than they trust you so you need not force anyone.

Some people say social media is a waste of time and resources. I don’t really think so. It will be a waste of time if all you are trying to do is to get more followers and fans on your own. What you should do is to allow your existing audience to do all the ‘reproduction’ for you without you interfering.

You can entice them with coupons. You can say something like this, “Many people out there want to join our fan page. Let’s make it happen. 30% discount on all orders for a week if we are able to reach 500 fans in the next 2 weeks.”

Send it as a message to your newsletter subscribers, post it on your business blog and post it as a status update on both Facebook and Twitter and watch the fans roll in. You can use other ‘baits’ instead of coupons. Get creative with it. Play with ideas.

As Scott said, you will have to make sure you want to communicate or interact with your customers on the social web. However, since it’s a two-way affair, you will also need to make sure that your customers qualify for social interactions.

For example, if you have a law firm, social media will not benefit you that much. Just think about it. There are some businesses that just can’t produce massive results on the social web. If your customers or better, your business don’t qualify to interact with its customers online, it will only be a waste of time and resources to try and get something massive from social media.

People who own these types of businesses often benefit by creating and maintaining a regular profile or as a single expert instead of creating a fan page for their business.

Do you think social media for business is worth it? I will love to know your thoughts and experiences in the comments box below.