Get Your Message Across

I always suggest not to start implementing a social media marketing strategy if you haven't thought through the following points.

 

1. What your goal is:

 

What do you expect to gain from social media? If it is only sales, prepare to be disappointed.

Not because you can’t improve sales with social media’s help, but because sales will only be a result of achieving one or more of the marketing goals below.

The basis of a clear and successful marketing plan is determining which of them is your goal - which one do you want to be? After that, it is much easier to create a successful marketing strategy plan.

Some of the main goals you can work towards which will result in a considerable ROI for your Social Media marketing will be:

• Leader in your Industry
• Innovator
• Customer Service Leader
• Content Leader
• Educational Leader
• Non-Profit Leader
•  

You'll only see an increase in sales once you have achieved one or more of these goals.

2. Who your target market is:

 

If you are a B2B company, the key question is whether your clients are B2B or B2C?

• If your clients are a B2B company then you need to understand that you are not talking to a company, but to the people that manage or work for that company.
• If your clients are a B2C company, the best approach is to be an educational or content leader, educating your client’s clients to increase their sales and by default your sales.

Whether you are a B2C or B2B business, make sure you understand your target market's interests, location, gender, age range,etc.

 

 

3. What your message is:

 

We always recommend our clients write ten clear messages on, for example:

• What problem does your product or service solve?
• What is its value?
• What difference will it make to your clients?
• What is unique about your business in comparison with your competition?

Once you have these ideas written and clear, make about 10 messages as if you were talking to your audience in front of you. These messages will be the foundations of your strategy and how you communicate with your audience online.

4. What are the right social media platforms for you:

 

Twitter and Facebook are not necessarily the ones you need.

 

Make sure you do enough research; have a look at which social networks your competition is using, look at their followers and see if they are within your target market. This will show you if they are on that social network, and whether they are active or passive in their account. The age and gender can also be a good indicator of where they might be.

In my last workshop here in Cambridge someone said to me, "My clients are not on Facebook because they told me that they only use Facebook to have a look at their family and friends' updates".

Be careful with your judgement. Most people will use Facebook to look at their family and friends' updates - but why does that detract their value as an audience for Facebook marketing?

People don't go on Facebook to buy or look for a solution to a problem, but that doesn't mean they won't consider it. At the end, we go back to point number 1: what is your goal? Sales can't be your main goal.

Remember that sales will be only a result to achieving one or more of the goals above.

 http://www.socialmediafrontiers.com/2014/10/how-to-have-clear-social-media.html#.VFO0E8k6_6h

 

 

 

Learn Do and Teach – The Formula For Success Online

If you’re an online marketer and you’re involved in some kind of network marketing company, you probably are looking for “The Secret”.

You want to make a lot of money but it seems like you are missing something, “The Secret”.

Well I’m sorry to disappoint you but there is no secret. Success online is dependent on your skill set and your ability to take massive action.

Yes there is a formula to making money online. It’s called the L.D.T formula. (Learn Do and Teach)

It’s a simple formula but yet people seem to complicate it.

Let’s do an example of how to put this formula to use.

Let’s say that you join company X. You are super excited and ready to get rolling!

You jump into the training where they tell you to blog, and to make videos.

Now what do you do?

Well you go ahead and learn how to blog correctly and how to make nice videos or how to rank your blogs and videos. This is the “Learn Part”

The next step is to take action on what you’ve just learned. Apply the training. If you do it correctly you should get some results even if they are small. This was the “Do” part.

And the last step is to teach it.

What you would do is create a blog post or a video teaching people exactly how to do what you just did.

Yeah! It’s that simple!

This is the formula that most top earners use to build their business online.

Like they always say: “do what successful people do and you will have what they have.”

Now let’s talk about why this formula works so well.

Well, the first thing is it actually forces you to learn some skills then it gets you to apply them which is where most people get stuck. They don’t take any action!

The last step which is teaching it to others is what makes you look like an authority. And guess what people will join people that know what they are talking about. If you’re teaching real strategies that work then people will join you because you know what you are talking about.

That’s it guys!

This is how simple this formula is. Learn Do and Teach!

http://mischalominy.com/learn-teach-formula-success-online/

How to Research Your Competition on Facebook

Are your competitors getting massive reach and engagement on Facebook?

Would you like to learn the secret of their Facebook success?

While we’d never advocate copying your competitor’s posts exactly, it’s helpful to monitor and study the posts of your competition.

You may get ideas on how to tweak your own posting strategy to build on what’s working for someone else.

In this article I’ll show you how to research what your competition is doing on Facebook so you can study what works and model it on your own page.

Find tools to research your competition on Facebook.

#1: Set Up Facebook Pages to Watch

 

Facebook Pages to Watch is a great way to start sleuthing. It’s also a very underutilized area in Facebook Insights. You don’t have to worry that page owners will know that you have put them on your list; they’ll just get a notification that “someone” has put their page on a Pages to Watch list.

Go to the Overview section of Insights on your Facebook page and scroll down to Pages to Watch. Click Add Pages. There will probably be some suggestions, but you can also search for and select pages to watch.

Add competitors’ pages, as well as pages that get a lot of engagement in other industries. You can add up to 100 Pages to Watch, so don’t worry about running out of space.

You can add up to 100 Pages to Watch on Facebook. Keep an eye on Posts This Week and Engagement this Week.

Check Pages to Watch regularly, and take note of how many times they post and what type of engagement they get. If you click on each page, you’ll see their top posts of the last week, starting with one that received the highest engagement.

Go to Pages to Watch and click on each page name to see their top posts for the week.

Next, go to the Posts section of your Insights, and click on the Top Posts from Pages You Watch. This will only show the top five posts across all of the pages you watch, so you may want to adjust your selections, depending on what you want to monitor easily from this page.

Go to Insights, Posts and the Top Posts from Pages to Watch to see at a glance what types of posts are getting the most engagement.

Dig a little deeper into the type of engagement these posts are getting. Click on the post itself for likes, shares and comments. When you know which posts are getting what kind of engagement, you can discover ways to adapt the strategy for your own page.

#2: Create Facebook Interest Lists

 

Another way to easily monitor pages without letting them know you are watching is to put competitor pages on a Facebook interest list. You can even add a page to a list without liking it (thus keeping you in stealth monitoring mode).

Click on Interests on the left sidebar of your personal Facebook home page or just go there directly: https://www.facebook.com/bookmarks/interests. Now click the Add Interests button.

Click Add Interests to start your list.

Next, click Create List. Then search for the pages you want to add to that list. Click on each page you want to add.

Search by page name to find the pages you want to add.

After you add several pages, click Next and name your list.

If this is a list of competitors that you want to monitor, select Only Me under the “Who can see this list” option. That way it’s private.

If you decide to make a public list to curate as a resource, make sure the name’s descriptive.

To keep your list of competitors private, choose Only Me under who can see the list.

Once you name your list and select privacy, click Done.

Now you can click on this list name on under your Facebook Interests, and watch and review all of the recent posts on that list.

Click on the interest list page name and see only posts by the pages on that list.

Creating an interest list is an easy way to check on what types of things competitors are posting daily without navigating to their pages individually.

#3: Use Viral Photos From Post Planner

 

While the Pages to Watch feature in Facebook Insights is a great way to review your competition’s recent posts, you may want to go back a little farther in time. Post Planner has a great tool to help you discover what photo has had the best engagement of all-time on any page.

Viral Photos is part of the Guru package of Post Planner, which is currently $29/month. When you go into the app, you can access Viral Photos to see photos from a variety of pages. Also, to watch specific pages, add a fan page URL.

Use Viral Photos to find the most viral photo on a page recently or all-time.

If a photo got a lot of engagement, you may even want to share that photo to your own page. However, I only recommend doing this if it’s not from a direct competitor’s page.

Use Viral Photos to gather examples of what photos inspire engagement on other pages.

Remember, you can’t download images from other pages and upload them to your own (yes, we know it’s done all the time), because of copyright infringements.

Think of ways to model the types of posts that are getting a lot of engagement on other people’s pages.

#4: Monitor With AgoraPulse

 

AgoraPulse is a low-cost tool to help you see what’s working on other pages. Monitor several competitors and see at a glance how they’re doing with their engagement. The different colors indicate their performance compared to other pages of their size.

Use AgoraPulse to see how your competitors are doing at a glance.

Use AgoraPulse to keep an eye on your competitors’ growth and engagement and to see which ones merit closer analysis.

#5: Use Simply Measured Free Reports

Get a host of free reports to analyze your competition on several different social media sites on Simply Measured. In addition to Facebook, there are reports for Instagram, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter and Vine.

Use Simply Measured’s Free Facebook Competitive Analysis tool, as well as their other reports.

Access the free reports here. Select Free Facebook Competitive Analysis and choose up to 10 pages with a total number of fans of 250,000 or fewer. (They’ll ask you to post about them on Facebook in exchange for the free report.) They’ll email the report to you or you can click a link.

Use Simply Measured’s free tool to compare your page to your competition.

The free tool will compare the last 2 weeks of data between you and your competitors. If you want to see a wider range, sign up for their service.

Be Aware of Boosts From Facebook Ads. Keep in mind that certain posts may be boosted or promoted through Facebook ads, so the reach and engagement will be higher. If you see a large spike of engagement on one of your competitor’s posts, it may be due to advertising. The only way to tell is if you see the sponsored tag when the post goes through the news feed.

Some posts will show high engagement, but you can’t tell if they’ve been unless they’re in your news feed.

Compare the high-engagement post to the typical posts on the competitor’s timeline to see if high engagement is organic or due to advertising.

Typical posts on this page have lower engagement than the one that was promoted. This is important information to have when doing research and comparisons.

Watch which posts competitor pages promote and make sure you aren’t copying a technique that’s artificially inflated by using Facebook ads.

Competitor analysis can be done on a regular basis and/or whenever your strategy could use a lift.

Conclusion

Keep an eye on your competition to discover effective techniques and content types to use to improve your Facebook marketing strategy.

Just remember to stay true to your own brand and message. If your competition on Facebook posts nothing but cat videos, that technique may work for better engagement, but it isn’t going to help you with your overall marketing efforts.

Use a variety of tools to watch and analyze. Then choose the right techniques to modify for your company.

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/research-competition-on-facebook/?utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=twitterfeed

7 Myths of Email Marketing

Dispelling some email marketing ‘best practices’

In our email marketing campaigns, we are always looking to boost our open and clickthrough rates and the business outcomes we’re looking to achieve. Following best practices can help here to avoid dumb mistakes like not having compelling headlines or clear calls-to-action. However, this contrarian infographic from Alchemyworx suggests many rules-of-thumb for email marketing are really just myths have developed and could be damaging our campaigns.

For example, it questions whether we should we send our emails every Thursday, Should we stop contacting inactive subscribers after six months or if we send too many emails then they are ignored?

‘Actually, sending 4 emails per month rather than one doubles the likelihood of one email being opened”

‘Though we know, it has to be targeted and personalised etc.

We like this classic infographic since it helps us to question so-called “Email marketing best practices” such as the success factors given on our email marketing hub page and develop our email strategy, to improve our email marketing capabilities. The best best practice is the one that applies to your own email marketing activities: “Test, Learn, Refine”!

http://www.smartinsights.com/email-marketing/email-communications-strategy/7-email-marketing-myths-infographic/

Perfecting The Social Profile: An Illustrated Guide (Infographic)

Source: tollfreeforwarding.com

http://www.socialmediafrontiers.com/2014/10/perfecting-social-profile-illustrated.html#.VEE4jMlBFfE

How To Turn A $27 Ebook Into A $4,000 Product

10 Expert Tips On Creating An Information Product

1. In order to create an information product that sells you need to identify a niche market to focus on.

 Using Google, Amazon and eBay, look for products linked to your niche market and ensure there are plenty of books, information products, items and affiliates which demonstrates a market for the niche.

2. Register with forums and visit other blogs to see what people are talking about. Most people want information products for certain reasons. To relieve pain, to solve a problem and provide a solution.

3. Answer questions - by providing the answers and ensuring easy to follow instructions, your product will sell. Make sure you explain the benefits the reader cannot live without and offer a full, money-back guarantee and the option to keep the product even after refund. This way, the reader has nothing to lose.

4. Ensure you are knowledgeable about the niche and answer every question you can think of. Offer after-sales service and remain contactable, responding to buyers questions or concerns as soon as possible. Stay human even if your system is automated.

5. List the order and sections your information product will take such as: contents; history; information and solution solving; review and recap; referral to other products or your website. Continue to add further bullet points within each section to help pad out the information and again, repeat this process within each further created bullet point. This will continue to add content to your document.

6. Insert page breaks between each section and make sure spacing is at least one and a half or double to create plenty of white space and allow for clearer reading. Always use Arial as your font as this is more easily recognisable for document format converters when you convert from a word processed document to a PDF document. PDF documents are easier to upload and download as well as ensuring your information cannot be altered and amended when providing it in a common word processed format.

7. Provide your product in various formats including PDF, doc and if you can, audio and visual formats (YouTube). This ensures you reach a larger audience opening up your market potential and therefore increasing sales.

8. Create a landing page for your product and make sure this is clear, easy to follow and provides all details of the benefits of the product several times to further drum home to the reader the reason they cannot pass up such a good opportunity.

9. Include further information products as bonuses to add to the value for money from buying your product.

10. Offer different formats of payment including PayPal, credit card, instalments to suit all pockets and customer budgets.

By following these ten steps you will create a high quality, easily accessed information product and by ensuring you promote and quote you website and other products as part of the document, you remain a known constant presence throughout the ownership of the document.

http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Shirley_Brown Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/8749040