David Scott’s weekly wrap up of all things Social Media with David’s insightful commentary.

1. Need some work done?

Why not hire your next employee from social media

We all know that stat – up to 70% of jobs are never advertised, with many coming from personal connections or word of mouth.  Enter social media.  A highly connected network of professionals on the look out for the next big thing?  Check.  An easy way of interacting both formally and informally with potential recruits? Why not. Better than scouring job ads in the paper? Probably!
For the job hunters, here’s five top tips for scoring your dream gig on social media

Social Media Job Search >> Read More

And if you want to actually get a job in social media, check out this list of hints

5 Minute Job Search >> Read More

2. Got a company blog? Why not make it an e-book

I was first put onto the idea of e-books as real, viable ways to market a company by a guy called David Meerman Scott (no, not my doppleganger, evil twin etc).  Prior to that I thought them quite nerdy, niche and, well, unnecessary.  But D Scott turned my head around with this short post (which he later presented in person which was just as effective). Essentially, he says, that marketing your web content should be an integral part of your online presence, and the humble e-book helps capitalise on that.

Read on here

The always on-point team at Copyblogger break down how easy it is to turn your greatest strength – the knowledge and expertise of the business – into a published form.

Copyblogger >> Read More

And as a bonus, check out this discussion about whether sponsored posts on blogs are good or evil…

 Blogs Good or Evil >> Read More

3. Using Facebook to market your brand.

We all love infographics and even the odd sales funnel, so here’s something that includes both of those in a neat way to talk up the anatomy of a fan on Facebook, and how you can use that to market your brand better.

How to market your Business with Facebook

One way you can tailor rewards for your fans is geotargeting. Heard of it? Simple concept really; use the data you have on your online audiences to market to specific areas of the world.  Still not on board? Here, read this little case study featuring some Jamaican musicians and a whole stack of rice and goats, and then think about this: when you’re doing your next campaign through Facebook etc, are you targeting the right people with the right things?

Geotargeting with Facebook >> Read More

However if it all goes horribly wrong, here’s how to handle upset Facebook fans.

7 tips for saving upset customers on Facebook >> Read More

4. Daily Deals = Daily Death?

The daily deals phenomenon has claimed it’s first victim, and what a victim it was: just weeks after rollout here in Australia, Facebook Deals is dead, gone and buried.

Facebook daily deals dies >> Read More

It’s been a wild ride, but the question is: are we over it already?

5. Website of the Week: FastCoDesign.com

Design + the web + social media + pretty pictures = winning combination.
From the editor(s) themselves: “…we believe that a company’s most important employees aren’t its bankers or management gurus, but rather the graphic, industrial, and interface designers who design the things a company actually makes.”  And given that those designs, those graphics, those ideas are going to be the public image of your company, it’s a great spot to get some inspiration.

fastcodesign.com

I hope you enjoy this week’s Listening Post,

Cheers, David.

Let’s be clear, there is no ‘secret’ to writing copy that drives great website engagement plus high levels of traffic with Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

There are literally millions of websites and SEO Guru’s that suggest they have the ‘secret recipe’ and that by engaging these so called Guru’s your site or a page in your site will hit pay dirt by being at the top of a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) .

Google has over 200 ‘Signals’ which they use to rank content. The only way to write content that will work for your site is by writing content first and foremost for your audience and write about things that are helpful, easy to understand and most importantly helpful!

That is some of the best SEO content writing advice you can get for you and your business or employer.

Oh, and writing in Plain English aimed at high school level will help too!

Honestly!

Whilst we now know and remember, we should write for our audience first, we can also use some concepts and tools to also help us potentially improve our content further.

But, importantly this is not to degrade the article by ‘stuffing’ in Keywords or Terms.

This example of web content was written by using several free online SEO and Google tools as well as a new marketing cloud service called Inbound Writer.

Let’s get into a fight!

The first thing we checked before we started this article was “who we are picking a fight with“. That sounds pretty terrible doesn’t it.

Believe me it actually is not a bad idea.

Recently I read Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson which in the chapter titled Pick a fight advises you should choose a competitor that you want to target as you believe your have a better product or service etc.

If you think a competitor sucks say so… Taking a stand always stands out

But I added a wee twist to this.

I have been targeting some top ranked Australian Marketing sites since I started Integrati Marketing.

I don’t necessarily think that everything they do is bad but I think there integrated marketing strategies and their website executions suck.

And with Jason and Davids advice on board plus my twist, I targeted three Australian Marketing sites that all suggest they have great content writing, creative writing, organic SEO skill, that will help your business get ranked and outperform the competition blah blah!

Do these top Australian Marketing sites really help you?

But they really don’t provide any practical marketing help or insight on the doing!

And marketing is all about the doing otherwise it is all hot air… or paid for consultancy hot air!

Marketing help – We’re here to help you!

So as we promise to hep you here is some expansion on a service we reviewed a few months back here on our blog known as WooRank and combining this with Inbound Writer to help you with your content.

With a couple of clicks and a WooRank of the competition site by “Site Reviewing” the competition we had 3 target websites to benchmark our SEO content for this articles optimised content.

Let’s show you guys how you can use these tools to help your site and content work harder for you!

Now we have a target list of websites and their competition which we can then compare the content writing on their sites to the article we are writing.

Inbound Writer let’s us add 3 websites to the new document we are dynamically creating in Inbound Writer which helps us as SEO Copywriters.

Next we add in Focus Terms of what we will be writing about in our article.

I have used very generic terms as this article is for learning outcomes not to boost our SEO… we’re actually more interested in sharing this new marketing cloud service with you!

Then we add in the 3 target websites just so…

So that is our methodology to start with, but the first rule always still applies write for your audience.

Next, Inbound Writer heads off to the web and starts analysing over 35 different sites and also your target sites for either target content or who you have defined as competition for the article your writing.

When Inbound Writer has finished, you will be presented with what looks and is an online editing tool that you can start to write your articles content into.

The team at Inbound Writer allow you to write up to 8 articles a month which we also think is pretty cool. Then you can go to work on your article and start writing.

As we have done with our ‘live article’ here, which is a creative writing process in itself, for this blog post about content writing with Inbound Writer.

Write and learn

Now you can write a document prior starting the Inbound Writer process or you can write one in the editor as you go which I have done here to show you some tips and I guess “How to’s”.

When we first started the article Inbound Writer presented us with this information about our document as we had no content.

But it does have all the information we have aggregated from our Focus Terms and the Sites we added in.

So with this information I can now target Keywords and Focus Terms.

Here comes the dynamic Content Writing assistance

The “Document Tips” and “Relevant Terms” is the information which has been assessed by Inbound Writer and presented to us in the editor.

So as we write we can now start to weave into the copy to improve our SEO content with helpful keywords and for our organic SEO in our web content strategy.

As we build up the content Inbound Writer let’s us know how we are going and gives us Document Tips and also an overall Document Score.

So, after we had been writing for a while we started to get document advice and assistance from Inbound Writer which is really helpful.

This helps us check we are on track, you can also highlight your Focus Terms and Keywords in the document and see the changes real-time.

Even better as the content builds out you get even more helpful advice from Inbound Writer to improve the new document with Document Tips.

More than one SEO Content Strategy?

Also we can choose different strategies which we can employ with the Inbound Writer content writer.

The SEO Content, Keyword and optimised content can be targeted with different weightings by selecting a distinct strategy such as; Balanced Strategy, Maximizing Search Strategy and Minimize Search Competition.

There are 2 more strategies of Maximise Social Strategy and Custom Strategy but the team at Inbound Writer are still working on these.

As you write you can keep highlighting the Relevant Terms and Focus Terms which your have decided your document should be targeting.

But this does not change the rules of writing to the audience and making sure your writing in Plain English!

Does this help you?

Hopefully you will find this article of interest and maybe you will even give Inbound Writer a go and try our strategy or even better your own.

By the way we have no association with Inbound Writer or Referral Tracking on our site to them, we just thought that you might like to try it for yourself.

If you do need any help with your site and would likes my assistance with SEO or rather Search Engine Optimization without the marketing puffery we are happy to help.

We love to talk marketing, but we love making it real even more!

I have written about advertising and the importance of advertising to become accountable since the inception of Integrati Marketing. Marketing accountability is really core to marketing effectiveness today and will in the near future be considered a ‘hygiene factor’.

This is not because I believe that advertising does not work, it means that we know that mass media advertising has become less effective in the 15 years I have worked in Marketing and now as an Integrated Marketing practitioner.

Back in 2006 McKinsey and Co published a report that provided a clear measure that advertising via mass media was not only losing audience numbers but even more worryingly there was little engagement which means reduced effectiveness.

In fact they predicted by 2010 that TV Advertising would be 1/3 less effective than it was in 1990.

What is Customer Engagement?

Customer Engagement (CE) is not a unique term invented with the creation of the Internet. The notion of customer engagement was present in retail and customer service businesses marketing prior to the Internet and web metrics.

Our take on Customer engagement is the connection of both on and offline marketing information which lets us understand how into our content they are.

A definition presented by Eric Peterson’s work on Customer Engagement provides what is an excellent working definition:

Engagement is an estimate of the degree and depth of visitor interaction against clearly defined set of goals.

The key points here are that an agreed way to measure the engagement exists and that the visitor interactions can be many and varied with our marketing communications.

So what?

OK, so we have a clear understanding of what Customer Engagement is how does that help my business and support our objectives and marketing practices.

Customer Engagement is important.

Customer Engagement measures when agreed by your team and in your business enable you to define targets and measure the effectiveness of your marketing communications (digital marketing and Offline Marketing) or rather conversations with your Clients, Customers and Followers.

There are many options available to measure engagement, but one of the best channels is your website.

Tracking engagement measures such as; bounces, time on page, number of visits, bookmarking, tweets, Likes, are all different levels of engagement.

With Google Analytics or other web analytics services you can set up simple dashboards that enable reporting of your website and tracked advertising links to campaign pages or your sites content pages.

This is important as you may want to answer questions like; “Which keyword in my Search Engine Marketing provides the best conversion and longer term engagement”.

Looking at Ghuniem’s degrees of engagement we can look at a framework that can be created in Google Analytics to measure web site and advertising in the stages of the Degrees of Engagement.

So, with this criteria we can now look at Google Analytics for instance and build out segmentation that allows us to monitor customer engagement with Ghuniem’s criteria from the Customer degrees of Engagement continuum.

We can do this via the Google Analytics Advanced Segmentation section.

If you would like help understanding your web site and customer engagement metrics then feel free to contact us to talk to you about your business. We’d love to talk Marketing with you!

Why your business should be Tagging or Tracking you online and offline advertising with Google Analytics

When you spend your money or your companies money on advertising to create demand by changing Consumer or Businesses Buyer behaviour you want to know what half of your marketing is working.

As John Wanamaker said “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

Well this is not necessarily the case any longer.  Marketing and Advertising used to be the realm of big business, big budgets, big brands and simple communications channels. Creating and maintaining brand awareness through high frequency advertising was the Holy Grail and having the biggest brand was supposed to equate to the biggest sales.

That is no longer the case branding is now quite simply a marketing hygiene factor these days. Reason being, brands can be created with good designers and the concept is now business 101. Fulfilling a brand promise though is another story which advertising creates an expectation but the business must deliver.

Which brings me to my next point. We are now in The Age of the Customer (TAC) and relationships driven by understanding and knowing the customer.

And the way we get to know the customer is by using one of the most important direct marketing and advertising tools ever invented. The Internet.

With the advent of the Internet in the late 1990′s and the World Wide Web (WWW) a lot had been promised with new business models, disintermediation and tracking all your advertising digitally. All interactions would be synchronised with single customer

We have seen new business Models like Google for anything involving search and cataloguing massive data sets, we have also seem impressive failures like pets.com. Disintermediation has and is still happening when look at the Record Labels and the music industry for instance.

But the one that Marketing and Advertising people should care about the most is the scientific website analytics which allows for any correctly ‘tagged’ link to be tracked either online or offline.

Science that sounds serious!

Wow, analytics, gee that sounds like you will need to be a statistician to understand all of this stuff.

Well it would certainly help but with simple tools like Google Analytics, Google Webmaster we can now make decisions based on simple measures that most importantly let us act!

Why is changing our Advertising behaviour and measurement important?

“If we don’t know we don’t know.”

As much as I do not like that quote from Donald Rumsfeld  I think it does tie in nicely with John Wanamaker’s point.

If we know which bits of our advertising are not working we will spend them somewhere else or even better save that revenue!

So how do you start to measure the effectiveness of your offline and online advertising.

Simple we track all of our Paid and Un-Paid marketing activities Off and Online

With the Internet, billions of PC’s with web browsers and millions of ‘unique people’ using the Internet we can now measure these interactions through files that store information on your PC, Laptop, iPad, Mobile etc. files known as cookies. Google analytics and other web analytics software tools use these to track information about ‘clicks and click streams’.

A bit about cookies and web analytics

Cookies store small lines of code that are capture from your ‘click stream’ in a site or within tracked sites by a web analytics package.

This helps the site owners and marketing consultants to understand the following;

1.    Where you came from
2.    Did you stay and what your did
3.    Have you been here before etc.

This is interesting stuff and even these 3 basic points gives you insight about your businesses website that you may not have considered before.

The one we are really interested in is “Where you came from?” which is readily answerable in your analytics now or in Google Analytics.

In Google Analytics we can see different types of traffic to your site like Direct Traffic, Search Engine Traffic, Referral Traffic and Campaign Traffic (Other) and more.

We can now be using simple online tools set up campaigns for our Advertising that enable tracking of offline and online ads (test ads, banner ads, paid content etc.) to our site.

How do we make this happen, we will go through the steps of how to track an online campaign in Google Analytics with Google URL Builder and also we will be sharing with you an industry expert site in Australia for Google Analytics which has just launched.

Have a question about marketing campaign tracking ask us here.

Top 5 things to look for with a Marketing Consultant for your business

Hiring a marketing consultant for your business is an important step in the maintenance of continued growth of your business.

Here are a top 5 list of what your business should look for when hiring an integrated marketing consultant.

1. Got LinkedIn? in other words; Research, Research, Research

When you have made the decision to hire a marketing consultant we know that you already have a set of business and marketing objectives which you will brief your chosen marketing agency to discuss and present a proposal on.

Before you move to this stage it is wise too spend some time researching the new marketing agency for your business is looking to invest in.

Today unlike ever before there are a myriad of ways to research a new outsourced marketing suppliers, including marketing consultants.

A great tool is to use LinkedIn and review the companies profile on LinkedIn and also see their talent roster.

In other words you can do due diligence of the marketing skills they say they have by looking at who works for them, how long they have been there and what previous companies they have worked for.

Of course this does require that the company has a LinkedIn company profile and that their employees are listed. But you will find businesses that are working to be open and customer relationship driven will be on LinkedIn and let you see all about them.

Why would they not it is an opportunity to build their brand and relationships as well.

2. Marketing expertise and proof

Show me the marketing skill.

Writing copy, blogs and web page production has been a great equaliser for small medium business.

Marketing and Marketing consultants are no exception to being able to use the ubiquitous tools on the world wide web like web pages, social media and email.

In fact, there is now so much content now and websites out there, that it is getting harder and harder ‘to be found’ being found is key.

So there are very few barriers to entry for anyone wanting to tell there world they are an ‘expert’ it just takes a website!

Therefore, research about the company you will work with is critical.

Just because a marketing consultant has a website does not mean that they are;

1. expert web masters
2. expert designers
3. brilliant SEO experts
4. or even amazing marketers

So, by having a good look at their marketing site, reading the copy and searching on Search Engines will help you get to know more about how effective they are as online marketers or through their marketing portfolio of off-line work (hopefully) on their marketing consulting site.

Not everyone can be found in the top 10 results page of Google.

So remember, you have to be fair, everyone wants to be on the number one Google search results page, but there will be hundreds of thousands of businesses working to achieve this.

Also, the most obvious way to review their skills is to look at the businesses professional marketing associations and the marketing and advertising skills of their staff.

You can check with the Marketing Associations they say they are connected to by doing a search in their ‘marketing member directory’ which you can do for us here with the Australian Marketing Institute or you can review their personal profile on LinkedIn.

Remember also, that your business may be too large for a small marketing agency and some business may not want or can afford to work with a large marketing agency you need to find a marketing agency which is a match for your business marketing objectives.

So, before you send that ‘contact us’ request be clear in your mind exactly what you want and need from your marketing budget – and make sure that the marketing consultant and marketing agency can deliver it!

3. Client references

OK, so you have found a couple of marketing agency’s who you think will hopefully help you get your marketing sorted and meeting your marketing objectives.

Great, so now let’s have a look at who they have worked with before.

But be careful, Client References can be out of date, can be misleading and at worst can be a thin association.

You will need like any buyer of a professional services have a ‘grain of salt‘ with each company you are reviewing to remain objective.

It is not all about working with large corporations and brands, look at what they actually did. Did it work?

Was it a marketing strategy, direct  mail campaign, was the creative effective? Did the campaign make sense to you when you looked at the portfolio of marketing work?

You have to ask all these questions as you go.

The best way to move forward is to ask your prospective agency for a ‘referral call’, a contact at a company which is a marketing client of theirs.

You can then talk to the representative about the work they do with your prospective marketing agency.

This can be good and bad, as you will find out wins and losses so to speak. But speaking with existing customers is really a ‘moment of truth’ for any business. No marketing agency should object to this.

4. Commitment ~ Are they after a quick sale or a relationship to help you grow your business?

This title is a bit misleading, as we are assuming that you want a relationship with your new marketing agency.

The reason we assume this is that it takes time for a marketing consultant to get to know the business they are working for and their drivers.

Or, you may not actually want a long-term relationship you may just want to send an SMS campaign next week to your customers about you late Winter Sale!

Either way, the marketing consultant and the marketing agency should offer you an opportunity to build rapport and work with you in the future.

We believe that if your with a transactional marketing agency, looking for quick sales, they may meet a tactical need now, but you won’t truly be helping the long-term health of your business if they don’t take the long-term view. It is about mutual success of both businesses.

5. What is the cost and their rates?

Show me the invoice!

No, I don’t want to see the quote. In other words, you do not want any surprises on the invoice compared to what you have been quoted for. This is very very important.

You should be very clear about what you are being charged for either by project, by time and materials, by the hour or fixed fee. Quality marketing agency’s will make sure you have no surprises with you invoices!

OK, these are a few simple rules which you can apply, and remember even if they are easy to find. You should never sign any contract until you are happy with exactly what your are buying.

Never, be forced by a pushy consultant to rush into a deal, they may not really be delivering for you, rather they may be looking to meet their revenue target.

Also, a quality marketing consultant will happily work with you with marketing help and marketing advice that helps you see and understand the benefit.

Hopefully this blog post will help prospective buyers of marketing consulting services to ‘buy right’!

All the best, happy marketing, team Integrati Marketing.