May 31 / 2013
0

Make Money Using Social Media, Part II

Howdy folks! Welcome to Make Money Using Social Media, Part II! This week we are featuring an article by Rosalia Cefalu, 22% of Salespeople Don’t Want to Make Money.

Our last post explained why social media value is on the upswing. Today we are going to talk about why you should adopt a social media strategy (like that cool kid to the left adopted a strategy for getting his candy). Check it out!

Why Should Sales Adopt a Social Media Strategy?

Because your future customers are on social media!

Remember back when businesses would advertise in the Yellow Pages? Someone might look up “Law Firm,” call for a quote for their services, and the firm would answer when people called. In the digital age, it’s not so different. People “call” us in a lot of different ways — on the phone, via our website, on email, even in search engines. And when they do, we do our best to “call” them back, whether through nurturing materials, an email, or an actual phone call.

Now answer me this. If you got a “call” through social media … would you return it?

If your answer is anything other than of course, you might be in the 22%. For some time now, social media has been the voicemail box we just haven’t been checking. With growing adoption of social media, there are more and more messages being sent over social that you should be doing your darndest to pick up on. And if you’re not checking the messages, someone else will.72.6% of salespeople using social media actually outperformed their colleagues not on social media. Don’t let the salesperson outperforming you be from your competitor.

(Tip: The value of social media in the sales process extends beyond just being present where leads are communicating. It has to do with the soft skills many sales professionals have already honed in-person and on the phone. Any sales professional knows it’s extremely important to develop a sense of comfort and trust early on in a relationship. Social media can be the perfect medium for engaging in those conversations that will help you better understand your lead’s pain points, interests, and personality. In a world where we text before we call, the domain of sales conversations is expanding from the headset into the Twitter stream.)”

Stay tuned tomorrow to learn what you could be doing to increase your business! Contact us if you’d like to start a social media strategy today…don’t be the 22%!

“If you got a “call” through social media … would you return it?”Tweet This

May 29 / 2013
0

Articles, Social Media

Make Money Using Social Media, Part I

Greetings NSquared readers. Do you want your business to make money? That may sound like a ridiculous question, but if you are part of the 22% of salespeople that don’t use social media for your business…then the question isn’t so ridiculous. This week we will have a three part series on using social media to make money. Hubspot (one of our favorite websites here at NSquared) featured an awesome article, 22% of Salespeople Don’t Want to Make Money, by Rosalia Cefalu.

Let Part I begin!

“22% of Salespeople Don’t Want to Make Money

“Two roads diverged in the social media wood, and I, I took the one less traveled,” said 21.7% of salespeople.

In a recent survey of 511 predominantly B2B sales reps and executives published on A Sales Guy Consulting, approximately 22% of salespeople claimed they didn’t use social media to close deals, while an overwhelming78.3% said they had used social media to sell.

Are you, or someone you know, part of the 22%? If so, it could be impacting your career, your business, and your paycheck. But there’s good news — there’s still time to join the 78%! Allow me to try to make the case for you (and feel free to co-opt any of this if you’d like to make this case for a 22%-er yourself.)

Why Social Media’s Value Is on the Upswing

We live in a world where open communication and transparency are not just options, but near addictions. When it comes to social media, many people have fallen victim to digital exhibitionism. We post how we feel about our meals, our friends, the services we use, and our views on just about anything. With this kind of unfiltered, raw personal insight flowing constantly through the arteries of social media, now is the time for salespeople to keep their fingers, quite literally, on the pulse of the marketplace through social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

It wasn’t always like this. In the beginning of the social media era, this kind of personal data simply wasn’t around. There were less people talking, sharing, and establishing relationships over social media. It’s taken some time for the B2B market to join the social media conversation, but there’s no denying that the data overwhelmingly suggests that industries have evolved and adopted these practices. In 2013, 43% of surveyed marketers said they had found a customer through LinkedIn. Similarly, 56% of B2B marketers plan to increase their social media spend in 2013.

Now that adoption has ramped up, it’s time to respond. Not just in Marketing, but in Sales, too.”

Stay tuned to learn why the social media upswing has become such a valuable sales tool and why your business needs a social media strategy. Contact us and we’ll do just that!

May 24 / 2013
0

Analytics, Articles

Tips for Online Marketing Analysis, Part II

Hello there! Welcome to Part II of Tips for Online Marketing Analysis! Wednesday we gave the first few tips of online market analysis. Keep reading for the rest!

“Tips for Online Marketing Analysis

…continued…

Modifying your keywords

After you have analyzed a decent amount of data, you can then begin to modify your keywords. Identify the keywords that are not converting well (those browsers are not initially searching for).

This will save you time in attempting to optimize words that are not making you money, and will augment your overall sales by identifying words that are worth your efforts.

How long are they on the site?

Online marketing is also concerned with how long a user stays on a site. If a high number of users leave your site within the first minute, then you know you must work on the look and feel of your site.

If users are staying but are not making conversions, then you know you must improve your ad copy or conversion forms.

Catalog conversions

As previously stated, online marketing employs both search engine optimization and pay per click activities. It is important to track times and region of origin of conversions more so for PPC purposes than SEO.

For instance, if you know most of your conversions take place during the work week as in the business-to-business industry, then it would be beneficial to lower the amount spent on PPC during the weekend hours.

In addition, you may see trends according to season. You could then alter your PPC or SEO practices depending on the traffic particular to that season.

Where are they coming from?

It is easy to know what pages are leading the browser to your site in regards to a pay per click campaign. It is much more difficult to determine this outcome when it comes to search engine optimization.

The search engines will place your pages in the results depending on a browsers search query; so, for SEO purposes, it is very important to know what page inspired the browser to enter the site. If they are landing on the page and leaving quickly thereafter, you know you must improve the copy and design of that particular page. In addition, if certain pages are never leading browsers to your site, then you know it is in need of some intense optimization.

Thanks for sticking with us! Hopefully you enjoyed our May series on Inbound Marketing. Contact us if this sounds like the kind of stuff your business could use (which it totally could…just saying…)

May 22 / 2013
0

Analytics, Articles

Tips for Online Marketing Analysis, Part I

Greetings readers! Our last post introduced what online marketing analysis was and explained some of the basics and the tools you can use. For the rest of this week we are going to have a 2 part “tip” session. Trust us here at NSquared, you don’t want to miss these tips.

“Tips for Online Marketing Analysis

How well are you analyzing your Web site’s efforts? Analysis is important in order to gauge current efforts and to modify for future success. Read the following article for suggestions in measuring search engine optimization and pay per click campaigns.

How much work do you devote towards your Web site? Online marketing is a continuous process. It is not enough to build the site, create content, and hope for conversions; but, you must also analyze your data.

What are you doing to garner more conversions? You have to study your current conversions to incur more of them. It is necessary to analyze your site’s data. Online marketing is contingent on analysis.

The following article is structured to help you get a better sense of structuring your methods of analysis. Consider the following information.

Know what it is and what it is not

Online marketing is associated with search engine optimization and pay per click advertising. These two methods are not mutually exclusive, yet are not one in the same. It is important for an online marketer to make a distinction between the two.

Workers heading the PPC campaigns are interested in analyzing keywords, behaviors of visitors coming from affiliate sites, search engines hosting their ads, etc. Those interested in SEO attempt to leverage organic rankings. These workers are concerned primarily with content, building links, and other methods associated with achieving high, organic rankings on search engines.

Look for as much as possible

As aforementioned, a worker analyzing pay per click is interested in visitor behavior. What behaviors should you track? You need to track as many behaviors as possible. Look at the search engine, the particular campaign, the ad, keywords searched, how long visitors were on the page, if a visitor is a unique or returning browser, etc. Collecting all this information will make it much easier to make decisions later.

Make it more specific

Online marketing is interested in general and specific behaviors of browsers. It is just as important to track individual users as it is to track the general behaviors listed above.

Use cookies or other means to trail the activity of individual browsers on your site. This will be easier to do with your own site rather than an affiliate site.”

…to be continued…

Stay tuned for Tips for Online Marketing Analysis, Part II. Give us an email or holler if you’re interested in inbound marketing for your business. We’ll make it happen, seriously…

May 20 / 2013
0

Analytics, Articles

Online Market Analysis

Know Your Stats

This week we are wrapping up our inbound marketing series. We covered everything from blogs and newsletters to social media. Now it’s time to discuss the final topic: market analysis. Blogs, newsletters, and social media are all things that can boost your business…but in order to take advantage of the best benefits possible, it’s important to tailor your strategy to what works. How do you know what works? Market Analysis…and in this case, online market analysis tools.

Analysis of Online Marketing Campaigns has a great, short snippet to get you started.

“Establishment of a Web Analytics System

The establishment of a web analytics system is the next step in the effective marketing analysis construction. We recommend using Google Analytics because it is free and easy to operate. It features great functionality to receive almost all necessary data.

The installationof this system consists of two simple steps:

Installation of Google Analytics code (simply adding several code lines to all pages of a site)
Setting of goals tracking. You need to follow your KPI here. For example, if you need to get data about the amount of new buyers and the quantity of goods in one purchase, you should set two goals: “New customer” and “Successful sale”.

Also you should define other reliable data sources (for example, Twitter, keyword research in Wordtracker, call-center software etc.). And it is better not to change ways of data gathering, because it can influence data reliability.

Some tricks that can help to organize tracking of the most common goals:

1) Calls tracking:

You may set up phone numbers depending on traffic sources
Your employee may ask users to perform certain action on a site (to press «Thanks for your call» button, to press «CTRL+Enter») which will be defined as the purpose «Successful call»
A combined method (If the client names, for example, the product code during the call, a special script is executed automatically on his computer)

2) Tracking files downloads (price list, case studies, company profile …). The simplest way is adding “onclick” parameter to links with these files, which allows performing a virtual page view for Google Analytics.

3) Tracking registered users. If you want to monitor behavior of registered users you may assign users to “custom variables” in Google Analytics while registering on a site, and then segment these users depending on values of these variables.

May 17 / 2013
0

Articles, Social Media

12 Tips for Social Media Success

Use Social Media Like a Boss

Hey there folks! This week we have been covering social media, what it is, and how it can do wonders for your business.

Not only is it important to know how social media can help your business, but you need to be able to utilize it properly.

Check out this nifty article by Emily A. Hay, 12 Social Media Quick Tips for Your Business, for a fast, easy read that will keep your social media skills up to par!

“12 Social Media Quick Tips for Your Business

Facebook – Are you a page admin? While the insights reports can be confusing and the weekly page update emails can make you see red, a metric to explore is “reach.” Per Facebook, “Reach measures the number of people who received impressions of a page post.”

Twitter – stumped on what to tweet but want to be sure your business is interacting on twitter? Get some “R&R!” Retweet and be sure to reply to people’s tweets.

Pinterest – No product? No problem! Service based businesses can also leverage Pinterest with some out-of-the-box thinking. Push your creativity when naming pinboards, think about how you can tell a story visually and remember, it shouldn’t only be about your business.

YouTube – A vlog (video blog) for your small business can be as easy to create as writing a blog post. Grab your handheld video camera or iPhone and say “action!”

LinkedIn – your company page is as important as your personal profile. Update your followers with helpful information by sharing content for your business on this professional social network.

Google+ – Since this network is by…well, Google, it certainly plays a role in search engine optimization. Be sure all elements of your page are leveraged to help your search. Quick tip: the “About” page allows you to embed hyperlinks back to your company website.

Yelp – Does your business have a brick and mortar location? Have you claimed your page? Be sure to…this is the first step towards learning when reviews are posted.

Instagram – don’t think a social media campaign stops with Facebook posts and tweets. Engage your audience via fun filtered photos! PS Don’t fret if your instagram photos no longer appear in actual tweets; you must now click the instagram photo link to view (as of 12/10/12).

Email Marketing – Let’s face it, we all experience inbox overload. Limit your Mailchimp/GetResponse/Constant Contact emails and make them worthwhile!

Blog – Think of your business’ blog as a powerful platform to share your expertise. You can give away really valuable info without compromising your potential to gain paying clients…we promise!

Website – simplify and declutter! Make your site easy on the eyes and quick to navigate to the info people need.

Myspace – keep an eye out for this one…they are revamping their image!

There you have it, our social media week. Hopefully you learned a bit more about how social media can seriously help your business!

May 15 / 2013
0

Articles, Social Media

How to Use Social Media for Your Business

Tap Into Your Online Marketing Resources

Hello there NSquared readers! Our last post, What the Heck is Social Media?, explained the basics of social media. Today we are going to talk about how you can use social media to boost your business!

If you look up social media marketing on the internet, it’s very clear that it isn’t really just another marketing option out there…it’s a necessity. Most people are on the computer at some point in the day, and many are on social media sites throughout the day. Having an understanding of social media and how to use it for inbound marketing is an extremely valuable tool to business success.

WordStream’s article, Guide to Using Social Media for Marketing, has many great tips to get you started.

“Guide to Using Social Media for Marketing

Using social media for marketing can enable small business looking to further their reach to more customers. Your customers are interacting with brands through social media, therefore, having a strong social media presence on the web is the key to tap into their interest. If implemented correctly, marketing with social media can bring remarkable success to your business.

What Is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing, or SMM, is a form of internet marketing that implements various social media networks in order to achieve marketing communication and branding goals. Social media marketing primarily covers activities involving social sharing of content, videos, and images for marketing purposes.

…Best Social Media Marketing Tips: Learn Marketing With Social Media

Here are some social media marketing tips to keep you on the right track across all your social media campaigns.

Planning – As discussed previously, building a social media marketing plan is essential. Consider keyword research and brainstorm content ideas that will interest your target audience.
Content is King — Consistent with other areas of online marketing, content reigns king when it comes to social media marketing. Make sure you are offering valuable information that your ideal customers will find interesting. Create a variety of content by implementing images, videos, and infographics in addition to classic text-based content.
Consistent Brand Image — Using social media for marketing enables your business to project your brand image across a variety of different social media platforms. While each platform has its own unique environment and voice, your business’ core identity should stay consistent.
Blog — Blogging is a great social media marketing tool that lets you share a wide array of information and content with readers. Your company blog can also serve as your social media marketing blog, in which you blog about your recent social media efforts, contests, and events.
Links — While using social media for marketing relies primarily on your business sharing its own unique, original content to gain followers, fans, and devotees, it’s also great to link to outside articles as well. If other sources provide great, valuable information you think your target audience will enjoy, don’t be shy about linking to them. Linking to outside sources improves trust and reliability, and you may even get some links in return.
Track Competitors — It’s always important to keep an eye on competitors—they can provide valuable data for keyword research, where to get industry-related links, and other social media marketing insight. If your competitors are using a certain social media marketing technique that seems to be working for them, do the same thing, but do it better!
Measure Success with Analytics —You can’t determine the success of your social media marketing strategies without tracking data. Google Analytics can be used as a great social media marketing tool that will help you measure your triumphant social media marketing techniques, as well as determine which strategies are better off abandoned. Attach tracking tags to your social media marketing campaigns so that you can properly monitor them.”

As you can see, social media marketing is extremely useful, but it is time consuming. Contact us if you’d like to start saving time and reaping benefits!

May 13 / 2013
0

Articles, Social Media

What the Heck is Social Media?

Social Media…the New Communication Method

Howdy folks! Welcome to week 3 of our May series on inbound marketing. This week we will be talking about social media, what it is, what it does, and how you can utilize it to boost your business.

So, what is social media? Chances are, if you’re reading this blog you know what it is. However, I found this awesome graphic from the New Zealand Teaching Council called What is Social Media, and I couldn’t help but share it for two reasons. 1.) New Zealand is awesome, and 2.) it’s a really nice graphic that sums up the different types of social media into categories with pretty colors (we love pretty colors here at NSquared).

“What is Social Media

Social media embraces web-based and mobile-based technologies to facilitate interactive communication between organisations, communities and individuals. The social media map provides a visual summary of some of the most common types of social media platforms, and their purposes. We’ve also identified the characteristics that are a feature of all social media platforms.

Characteristics of social media

Online platforms that enable users to:

create, share, adapt and reuse content engage in digital dialogue and collaboration
create linkages, groups and communities
have peer-to-peer contact
have social interactions with other users
create and maintain their own user
profiles and IDs

Online platforms:

are largely public, but walled gardens exist within some platforms
are accessible 24/7 from a range of devices and locations
generally expose users to an unknown audience

Content on a social media platform is:

discoverable
community moderated
persistent
subject to conditions of use”

There you have it. A super basic idea of what social media is. Nowadays, it’s mega important for business owners to understand social media. As much as some of us still like to talk to people rather than their profile (I am one of those people), there’s no doubting that social media has an amazing capacity for being a wonderful marketing tool. Our next post will explain how to use social media to your advantage. You don’t want to miss it!

May 10 / 2013
0

Articles, Newsletters

How to Utilize Newsletters

The Final Step: Utilization!

Hello there! So, this week we covered why your business needs a newsletter, the bangin’ benefits of newsletters, and today we will talk about the final step: utilization.

We can talk all day about the perks of newsletters and how they maximize business, but if you aren’t actually utilizing newsletters, none of that can happen. Email Newsletters and How to Use Them from Growing Business is a simple and concise article explaining the utilization of our inbound marketing topic of the week. Take a peek:

“Email Newsletters and How to Use Them

Electronic newsletters provide a chance for you to communicate directly with your customers (or even internally with your staff if your business is large and has offices in a number of locations).

E-commerce sites can use newsletters to link directly to their storefronts, but they can also be used by almost all businesses to:

• keep a business at the front of customers’ minds
• let people know about new offers, launches and news
• build a relationship with the customer. For example, providing helpful or entertaining content is likely to increase brand loyalty.

Need to know

The information to include in your newsletter should be carefully chosen and be of special interest to your readership. A newsletter doesn’t need to be long – in fact the best newsletters keep the information short and to the point.

Content will depend on its purpose – a newsletter for shareholders, for example, will be very different to a newsletter for customers who have bought your product or service in the past.

People will open your newsletter based on your subject line, which should be a tantalising glimpse into the content within the email. Keep it short and relevant.

Legal issues

Your e-newsletter can only be sent out to a list of engaged consumers who have opted, where their IP address, datestamp and unique code are recorded, to receive them. However, it is important to remember that legally you must allow your subscribers to unsubscribe easily and quickly. In each correspondence an unsubscribe function must be clearly visible.

It is also illegal to spam your subscribers with emails. The Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, a set of technology-neutral rules designed to protect the confidentiality of communications, launched in 2003, have had a major effect on the way firms conduct email and SMS marketing campaigns. A new version of the Regulations is due to come into force in May 2011.

Other legal issues involve data protection; you must not pass on an individual’s personal details to a third party unless they agree for you to share their details with a nominated third party which offers a service or product that may interest them.

Pros and cons

A newsletter can be an excellent way to reach a large group in one hit. It can help drum up new business, and is a valuable marketing tool.

But a poorly put together newsletter will make your business look unprofessional – at best it won’t be read and at worst it will put people off your company.

What next

In order to make the most out of your newsletter you need to do the following

• Set a time to send the newsletter. This time should be consistent – is it going to be weekly, monthly, or quarterly? The newsletter should be sent at the same time of day on the same day of the week where possible, as you want your readers to form the habit of opening and reading it.

• Set objectives: what is the purpose of the newsletter and what are you trying to achieve? These questions will help determine what content it should include.

• Create a template: many companies offer newsletter template services, either free or for a reasonable price. Keep your design simple and clean as this will make it easier for readers and won’t distract from your message.”

Contact us if you’re interested in newsletters for your business. And check with us next week when we’ll be discussing the trendiest inbound marketing tactic yet: social media. See ya next week!

May 08 / 2013
0

Articles, Newsletters

The Bangin’ Benefits of Newsletters

Email Newsletters-Your Website’s BFF

Hello business savvy readers! Today is all about the specific benefits of a newsletter. As it says above, newsletters can be your business website’s bff (best. friend. FOREVER). Newsletters can tremendously promote your website, and in turn promote more customers and more business! Completely the opposite of a vicious cycle…more like a viciously awesome cycle.

Check out Martin Jones article, The Benefits of Building Business Through Email Newsletters, below:

“Email newsletters are not often considered one of the strongest marketing strategies for small business. However, recent industry research has suggested that email newsletters are not only tremendously effective in terms of building business, but are also cost-effective and provide a high return on investment. According to Evok Advertising, email newsletters require approximately one-third the cost of producing a traditional printed newsletter, allowing your small business to leverage the savings for other marketing or operational expenses. Here are some of the best benefits of using email newsletters to build and grow your business.

Email newsletters complement your website
An unavoidable aspect of doing business in today’s digital and interconnected world is the having a well-maintained, user-friendly and optimized website. After all, the vast majority of shopping decisions are made after first consulting information online, on a company’s specific website or on a third-party educational site. Additionally, many purchasing transactions are themselves completed online. Featuring your website prominently on an email newsletter is likely to drive traffic significantly, according to the news source.

The key is to give readers an added value that they can’t gain on the website. For instance, include exclusive information behind the history of a new product and talk about its unique features and appeal to customers. Then, share a link to your website where the reader can purchase the product that he or she just read about. The idea is that your website and email newsletter can work together to complement and drive traffic to each other.

Email newsletters help maintain relationships
Oftentimes, a consumer might buy something from your company and then not visit your website or store again for months on end. The best relationships between customers and retailers are ones that are maintained over a sustained period of time, while featuring regular two-way engagement. Email newsletters provide a sterling opportunity for maintaining relationships, according to WiredImpact. With tremendously fierce competition in all industries today, it is essential to not lose customers to your competitors. Regular value-added email newsletters can help you stay on the customer’s radar for a prolonged period of time. However, be careful not to send email newsletters out too regularly to your customer base – nobody likes being spammed and if email newsletters arrive too often, most of them will likely end up in the trash folder.

Email newsletters contribute toward an exclusive community
Amid the increased competition among businesses, customers enjoy having their loyalty competed for. Many consumers choose to be loyal to companies and brands that treat them the best. Email newsletters can contribute significantly in this department. Use the email newsletters as a gateway to an exclusive community of the most valued subscribers. Make the readers feel like they’re staying well ahead of the curve or gaining some kind of competitive advantage over other consumers and companies.

The email newsletter should serve as the voice or spokesperson for your company. All exclusive information should be delivered through that medium, reinforced with notions of exclusivity. Additionally, don’t be afraid to share special offers with this specific group of customers. Let it be known to them that they, the readers of your email newsletters, are the only ones receiving these special deals or coupons. This will serve not only to increase readership of these newsletters, but also eventually the subscriber pool, once word of the exclusive offers gets out.”

As you can see, newsletters are a detrimental part of your inbound marketing. Contact us if you’d like to start keeping your clients in the loop!

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