Free Webinar: The Marketing Essentials All Businesses Need to Grow Sales

Sales Renewal is pleased to present a free, live webinar on Tuesday, June 30, at 1pm ET during which attendees learn about the Marketing Essentials – the powerful mix of the marketing strategies, programs and tactics and sales-enabling technology that every business needs to grow its leads and sales. You can register for the webinar here.

The Small Business Revenue Challenge

It can be hard to determine the essential marketing programs and skills you need to cost effectively grow your leads and sales. With so many possibilities, how can you intelligently choose, let alone manage and benchmark them, and still do your regular job?

Worse, you’re bombarded by messages about the latest bandwagon you must jump on and absolute must-dos for marketing your business. And every vendor you ask will try to convince you that their product or service is your salvation.

Cutting through the Clutter

This seminar cuts through the noise and offers an unbiased approach every business can use to quickly start growing their leads. Participants are introduced to the essential marketing programs all businesses need and will learn how to create and deploy a big-picture plan that pulls these different programs together. Smaller firms might find these marketing essentials sufficient for their business, while larger firms will be able to use these essentials as a solid foundation upon which to build or as a checklist to see if they’ve missed something essential.

Learn more about the Webinar or register here. We hope to see you on the 30th!

How to Grow, and NOT, Grow Sales: SalesMemes 55 – Turkey Bosses

11 Content Marketing and Social Media Tools to Try

I have to admit – I’m sort of addicted to jumping in and trying all things “new” and “improved” when it comes to online marketing.

In my role as Content Manager for Sales Renewal, I spend an immense amount of time researching, blogging, writing status updates and posting to a variety of social sites – Facebook, Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn to name the obvious. I also spend way too much time exploring the latest and greatest tools to manage all this content and to get our clients’ messages out to the right audience. (In my defense, I’ve found that it’s the only way to stay on top of this ever-changing industry.)

Most I quickly abandon, but some become an essential part of my day. Here then, are some of the sites and tools I’ve used this week alone – a mix of new finds and the tried and true.

Our Take on 11 Social Media and Content Marketing Tools

Content Creation

Scoop.it: This Google-alerts type of information gathering site allows for Pinterest-style presentation of relevant information. While we’re still just exploring the site, we believe it holds enormous potential.

The scoop.it folks (who, by the way, offer excellent customer service) talk about the rationale behind the site:

We created Scoop.it because we believe algorithms alone are not enough at organizing the web’s content in a smart, meaningful way and that humans could do a much better job at it if we made it easier and rewarding… By combining a big data semantic technology that helps them quickly find relevant content with an easy-to-use social publishing platform, we help them show their expertise, develop their online visibility, enrich their blogs or web sites, save time managing their social media channels and build their communities of interests.

Our rating: Ease of use: Business potential:

Content Distribution

HootSuite.com: Yes, I know I’m late to the game here, but with so many accounts to manage, I finally broke down and invested time and (relatively minimal) money into this social media management system that allow for posting across multiple social networks from one dashboard. It doesn’t take the place of hand-crafting messages for each social account, it just allows me to do it in one place.

Our rating: Ease of use: Business potential:

Friends+Me: I just discovered this site yesterday. Friends+Me takes your Google+ public posts and allows you to share the messages to other networks.

Our rating: Ease of use: Business potential: Still exploring

Clip Better: allows you to email link previews vs raw URLs. It creates a rich snippet that includes an image, title, summary, and link. There are four ways to install the feature.

Our rating: Ease of use: Business potential: Still exploring

Graphics and Design

Piktochart.com: An easy-to-use site for anyone interested in making an Infographic for their blog or website that I’ve been using for nearly a year. Great, responsive customer service and open to suggestions.

Our rating: Ease of use: Business potential:

Canva.com: I just discovered Canva.com, an onl
ine design platform that allows the user to create designs for the web or print: blog graphics, presentations, flyers, posters, Facebook covers.

Our rating: Ease of use: Business potential:

PicMonkey.com: My go-to graphics site, great for making Facebook covers, collages, editing photos.

Our rating: Ease of use: Business potential:

WebResizer.com: Another go-to site for optimizing images for using online. It’s simple, no frills, and you don’t have to create an account to use!

Our rating: Ease of use: Business potential:

New Finds on the Social Sites

Pinterest Secret Boards: No, secret boards aren’t new, but I love this idea of using them for a business-client purpose. Our florist client mentioned how she wanted to use Pinterest to exchange pictures with brides-to-be so she could help them with their wedding flowers. Since the idea was for the two of them to collaborate and they weren’t interested in other people pinning and sharing, we set up a Secret Pinterest Board for each bride.

Our rating: Ease of use: Business potential:

LinkedIn Showcase Pages: Showcase Pages are like micro-sites – they’re extensions of a Company page to spotlight a brand, business unit, or initiative directly on LinkedIn.

Our rating: Ease of use: Business potential: Large businesses with multiple business units or brands can probably benefit from this; verdict is still out for the smaller businesses as to whether this will detract from or enhance a strong Company page.

Facebook Business Account: An exercise in total frustration. We have been emailing back and forth with Facebook Advertising about advertising (!) for over a month now, and we still haven’t been able to spend our money. No phone support, and each email response is a duplicate of the last one. Just about ready to give up and spend our money somewhere else…

Our rating: Ease of use: Business potential: Still exploring

All Work and No Play?

Try as I might to stay focused on “just” work, not a day goes by that I don’t find some distraction in terms of a new tool I’d like to try personally, a video to watch, article to read, or photos to look at. Today’s major distraction? This Super Bowl commercial.

Now, back to work. For this post alone, I used scoop.it (post idea came about by browsing several topics); PicMonkey.com and Canva.com (the graphic); and HootSuite.com (to distribute and share the post).

What tools do you use and love? Whether you’re a social media professional or a business owner trying to make it in the digital space, let us know your finds in the Comments section – I’d love to test it out!

And jus
t in case you didn’t click through to the commercial but really need a distraction:

A Successful Content Marketing Program Begins with Your Employees

Do you know how many of your employees subscribe to your business blog? Follow you on Facebook and Twitter? Even know that you have a Google+ Page? If the answer is “very few” or “none”, you’re not alone.

When starting any type of content marketing or social media program, getting buy-in from your employees is an important first step.

1. Be sure your employees know that you have a company blog.

When you introduce your company blog to the public (via email or some other announcement), be sure your employees get the message, too. Give them an overview of the blog, including what they can expect to read and how often you plan to update it.

2. Make sure they know that they can sign up to receive new posts via email – and ask them to subscribe.

It’s a sure way to know they’re aware of any new post that’s written. If your mail service allows you to add addresses yourself, you may consider subscribing them all directly.

3. Give your employees a role in the blog’s success.

A few ways to involve employees:

• Ask for their content ideas and input. Some may even welcome the opportunity to be a guest blogger.
• Set up an in-house “Name that Blog” contest. Ask employees for their ideas, and may the best name win!
• Feature your employees in your blog. Whether in a regular (monthly) column, in a welcome post for new employees, or in coverage of a special accomplishment, just about everyone likes to see their name in print.

4. Let your employees become your company’s social advocates.

Invite them to follow your company’s Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter page. Depending on your company’s culture, you may encourage them to share, retweet, or comment on your posts.

Of course, before you ask for this level of engagement, your company should establish some guidelines that define what it considers appropriate behavior on social media sites. A written policy that is shared company-wide can go a long way to maintaining a positive online reputation. It’s also a good idea to be sure employees understand the etiquette of different social media sites. Read our post Putting the Social in Social Media for more tips on how to put together a team of employees for your content marketing program. And subscribe to our Growth Spurts blog for an upcoming how-to on creating a company social media policy.

Quick Tip Tuesday: September Digital Marketing Advice

Each month we start our Quick Tip Tuesday series with a roundup of useful, hands-on digital marketing advice from experts in their fields. We’ve collected information on a wide range of topics, from website design to SEO, social media to how to write better blog posts. We’ve highlighted the key points of these articles and also provided a link to the full articles in case you’d like to learn more.

If you’re looking for more information like this, check out our Advice from Across the Web page. Here’ Sales Renewal selects the best, actionable marketing and technology advice and, importantly, adds our perspective. Think of it as a Marketing Clipping Service for the modern world.

Here, then, are our favorite tips for the month:

Google Authorship is Defunct. This news overshadows just about everything else we’ve read this month. Read Eric Enge’s It’s Over post for more information, and look for more about changes Sales Renewal will be making in its content marketing program to address this news.

Marketing, not Website Analytics. Sales Renewal is on the cusp of introducing our proprietary analytics and reporting program (more on that in a future post!), but to understand why we’ve put so many resources behind this program, read HubSpot’s article about measuring marketing effectiveness.

Pinterest Tips. As with any social media post, it’s all about making that little bit of extra effort to make it work. Here are 12 easy things you may not have thought of while pinning away, including: Re-pinning without verifying that the weblink is legit; and Forgetting to update the pin description when you re-pin. Read the full article.

Bringing Traffic to Your Blog. Amazing list of ways to bring traffic to your blog, from the basic to ideas you may never have thought of. We’re particularly focused on email (still), Facebook sponsored posts, and scoop.it. And interesting 80/20 rule (no, not the one we frequently quote!). Read all the tips here.

Adding Mobile to Direct Mail. Mobile’s increasing importance means that direct mail campaigns also need mobile landing pages. Read the full article.

Quick Tip Tuesday: 8 Tips for the DIY Search Advertiser, Part 1

TIP LEVEL: Intermediate

Running your own PPC campaign is hard. Even if you have a clear understanding of how keywords, ad groups, campaigns and landing pages all work together, finding the best campaign structure, keywords, ad groups and landing pages can be a full time job. But, it’s not impossible. Google AdWords and Bing Ad Center are set up to be self-serve and intended for the layperson, so if you are tempted by the apparent simplicity of PPC, here are some tips to help you take your campaign to the next level.

How’s your campaign doing?

Review your campaign regularly. We don’t mean several times a day (although that couldn’t hurt!), but at least once a week.

Monitor your website traffic. If your ads bring relevant, converting traffic to your website, then you know your campaign is doing well. But depending on your budget or the volume of traffic for your business, it may take a while to start seeing that traffic and feedback.

Monitor QS and CTR. In the meantime, there are two numbers you’ll want to keep your eye on.

• Quality score (QS) is a fairly complicated, keyword-centered measurement of how well your ads, keywords and landing pages work together. “Having a high Quality Score means that [Google’s] systems think your ad and landing page are relevant and useful to someone looking at your ad.”* Google provides individual keyword QS in the Keyword tab. On a scale of 1 – 10, with 1 being low. (If you don’t see the keyword Qual. score column, in the Keyword data table, go to Columns, Customize columns, Attributes, Qual. score to add it.) Raising individual keyword quality scores takes time and constant attention, as until you have enough impressions in your own campaign, QS is based on the word’s historic performance on Google.com.
• Clickthrough rate (CTR) is a simpler indication of how your campaign is doing. You can look at this for Campaigns, Ad Groups and Ads. If you see a CTR over 1%-3%, then you’re on the right track. Anything below that means you’ve got some work to do (see “manage your keywords” below).

Manage your keywords for better performing campaigns.

Pause non-performing keywords. Keywords with no clicks, or low clicks (check the CTR) should first be paused so they don’t affect your campaign. Once you’ve paused them, you can try to research why they are not performing and then take action. Among the many reasons are the fact that they’re in the wrong ad group (create a new ad group for that keyword and its associated words) or not relevant to your landing page (update your landing page or direct that keyword to a more relevant page).

EXTRA: What about keywords with low search volume? You do not have to pause keywords with a “low search volume” status. It turns out that low search volume keywords won’t have any impact on your quality scores – they’re really just an indication that at the time, your ad may see a very low number of impressions. But having “low search volume” keywords won’t have any other negative impact on your account.

Use Keyword Match types. It’s fine to use broad match, but including exact and phrase match for just about every keyword ensures a balanced mix of traffic from the highly targeted to very broad.

Always include Negative keywords. By choosing negative search terms that are similar to your keywords but that indicate that people are looking for a different product or service, you’ll reduce your costs by eliminating irrelevant clicks and also help maintain that all-important Quality Score. For example, if your business sells signs, adding “sign in” as a Negative keyword will prevent your ad from showing to people looking for “how to sign in to Facebook” or some other website.

Use the Keyword Details feature regularly. Find out exactly which terms triggered your ads. Go to Keywords > Details > Search Terms > All. See some that are generating clicks? Use the “Add as a Keyword” option to include these words in your campaign. Conversely, if you find terms that are generating clicks but that are not relevant to your business, use the “Add as a Negative Keyword” option.

Create ads that people will click on.

Write ads that set your business apart on landing pages. Relevance is PPC 101 – keywords organized by relevant ad groups with those keywords appearing in ads and need to consider the human part of the equation, and make your ads stand out from all the others.

Take a quick review of your competitors’ ads – do they mention a price, sale or discount? A delivery method? While you might want to consider including similar information, be sure to write text that sets your ads apart. Here’s a great place to use your competitive differentiator (your guarantee, your free shipping, etc.). Also be sure to have a strong call to action – what do you want the visitors to do once they see your ad?

EXTRAS:

• Always create a mobile version of each ad. Create a copy of your ad and on the edit screen select Mobile. You’ll even see a preview of how it will look on a Smartphone.
• Save a space for a period. For a nicer looking Top ad, put a period at the end of the first line of text. This trick combines the ad title and first line of text with a hyphen when your ad is displayed in the Top. For example:
  

This post is the first of several in which we share what we’ve learned from years of managing AdWords accounts. Stay tuned for Site extensions, A/B testing, Low-performing keywords, Conversion tracking, Manual bidding and more.