Marketing lessons from the #IceBucketChallenge

Have you heard the great news today about the #IceBucketChallenge that went viral in 2014?

The campaign raised $115m (£87.7m) from people pouring cold water over themselves and posting the video on social media. This has funded an important scientific gene discovery in the progressive neurodegenerative disease ALS.

Here's a quick look at the lessons marketers can learn from the success of this viral campaign...

How to keep your digital estate on-track

Digital Marketing Managers are tasked with looking after an ever increasing number of online assets. 

Here are my tips for the key functions to monitor - keeping performance on track and ensuring a seamless online journey for customers.

Website Content

Content is still king, and runs through the centre of digital marketing planning. Make sure you monitor:

Titles -  optimise titles for the keywords or phrases your target audience is searching for. Remember to carry out competitor analysis as part of your keyword strategy.

H1, H2, H3 - tags should be used for page headings and sub-headings to increase on-page Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) efforts. It's a simple rule that is often overlooked. This rule should also be applied to any PDFs that will end up published to your website. Check out these tips for structuring website content before you start to write.

Font size - should be large enough to comply with accessibility guidance, and avoid the need for pinch and zoom on mobile devices. 

Credibility - frequently updated content will prove to external search engines that your site is actively managed. It will also demonstrate to visitors that content is current and therefore more likely to be credible.

Your credibility on Google grows improves SEO faster if you constantly update your website with fresh content #fact #SEO

— Francois Karstel (@SoundIdeaDMA) April 16, 2015

Blogs - what better way is there to maintain a stream of current content that will prove a long-term source of incoming traffic than through blogging? The more engagement your blog posts receive, the better your SEO results!

Lead capture - embedded into your content should be both micro- and macro- conversion opportunities (link follows, form completion, call-to-click, newsletter subscription, purchases, and so on).

Analytics - ensure you establish a baseline for your content before you implement changes, so you can see how effective they have genuinely been.

PDFs - content that doesn't need to be in PDF shouldn't be as it can disadvantage your SEO efforts in a number of ways. I talk more about this in an article I published in June 2014.

User Experience

Conducting both qualitative and quantitative analysis of how users interact with your online estate will provide you with a wealth of insight that can be used to inform continuous improvements to your digital assets. Make sure your plans include some or all of the following (depending on your size and capacity):

• user experience testing workshops
• content rating and review software
• online surveys
• mouse tracking studies.

Tests and mouse tracking: the absolute weapons to optimize your #userexperience http://t.co/me5RdGvv1y

— Content Square (@ContentSquare) June 9, 2015

Domain management

Effective domain management still pulls a lot of punches with search engines. It is also an important part of your branding, so deserves special consideration:

Age - domain authority demonstrates to external search engines that your website belongs to a credible organisation with longevity. Secure domain names as soon as possible, and retain them after retirement as part of brand guardianship.

Ignoring #social media means someone else can stake their claim on your behalf.Read more: http://t.co/3ZOCJNlbA4 pic.twitter.com/u8CByVFf0j

— Social Media School (@TSMTSchool) May 28, 2014

Sub-domains - an effective way to maximise marketing efforts across a number of channels is via the use of sub-domains: http://subdomain.domain.com. This way, traffic generating activity benefits one central digital space, and both can benefit from the SEO advantages this brings.

File structure - remember that the file structure following your domain extension provides search engines with important information about your websites content. The closer your keywords are to the root of your domain name, the better - for example:

...com/ladies-shoes.html

is much stronger than

...com/our products/shoes/ladies-shoes.html

All too often file structures focus on generic functional keywords (about us, contact us) instead of product and service offering (ladies shoes, ladies sandals, and so on).

Social media

Social signals are very important off-site search engine optimisation factors. The more engaging your content (that is, the more it is shared, bookmarked, liked, and commented upon), the more credibility it gains. Greater levels of engagement also contribute to a high landing-page quality score which will lower your Google pay-per-click costs!

Brand guardianship - not every social media platform will suit your requirements - this depends very much on your product, service, and industry. But even if you don't plan on using a particular social media you should claim the vanity URL (before somebody does it for you). If you do this, it is a good idea to populate at least the landing-page with basic information which points back to your website.

Integration - be sure to automate posts where it is sensible to do so. For example, you can configure Blogger to automatically post content to Google+, or post tweets to your Facebook Page. The important factor to monitor here is that you post content in a format appropriate to the platform - you will need to re-tweak your content in order to do this effectively.

Cross-refer - most people use more than one social media platform, so remember to provide clear links to other ways that people can follow you, such as Twitter and Facebook.

Conversation calendar - creating a conversation calendar will help to keep your content flowing and will ensure that you don't miss opportunities to capitalise on the buzz around planned events in your industry.

Remember, there are a host of free tools out there that allow you to schedule your posts in advance (such as Hootsuite and SocialOomph).

Compliance

Meeting statutory and best practice guidelines demonstrates to search engines, as well as your target audience that you mean business, and are safe to do business with!

Schedule in time to review your governance policies to make sure they remain up-to-date.

In the UK and Europe, you may want to include compliance with:

• Cookie consent (EU law)
• Royal National Institute for Blind guidelines on accessibility
• Advertising Standards Authority
• W3C 

About the author

Claire Cresswell-Lane is a UK based, CIM Chartered Marketer specialising in digital marketing strategy and communications. You can contact her via LinkedIn or Twitter.

Mobile optimisation - make it easy for visitors to do business with you

Updates to Google's algorithm in April 2015 mean that optimising for mobile is no longer an option, but a necessity:

"Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices. "

What to consider when optimising for mobile

One key element to mobile optimisation is surfacing the transactional elements of your website - the features that enable users to do business with you. Let's look at an example from courier company TNT.

TNT's recently optimised design allows visitors to conduct 5 actions straight from the homepage (get a quote, track a package, search, log-in, and browse the site structure via a drop-down menu), and a further two within a single click (register, and leave feedback):

Even on mobile devices where space is at a premium, 3 main actions can be carried out via the optimised site:

This is a vast improvement on the previous TNT design - although this desktop design renders correctly on mobile devices, calls to action for the end user are not immediately obvious:

Deciding which actions to optimise

Decisions you make about changes to your online presence should always be based on solid evidence. This can be obtained from a number of primary and secondary sources such as Google Analytics; user experience testing; online ratings and reviews; social media analysis; current best practice guidelines, and so on.

6.8bn people in the world and 4bn of them use a mobile phone. Are you up to date on your mobile optimisation: http://t.co/X3rT6sPqxJ #webdev

— QA Ltd (@QAtraining) June 17, 2015

Search is key

Search is a key feature for mobile users - they are much less likely to try to navigate your site because text is harder to read and buttons harder to select on limited screen space. Ensure that your search results are optimised to return the best results for your top transactional features.

Google Mobile Search Overtakes Desktop Search In UK http://t.co/Shdiy8Fd3N There was a time when a mobile website, or responsive design, …

— Searchbloom (@searchbloom) June 20, 2015

About the author

Claire Cresswell-Lane is a UK based, CIM Chartered Marketer specialising in digital marketing strategy and communications. You can contact her via LinkedIn or Twitter.

8 low or no-cost changes that reduce frustration for mobile users

Mobile users are concerned with completing tasks, and completing goal as efficiently as possible.
Mobile websites must therefore be designed with task completion in mind - without compromising quality of content.

Here are 8 low or no-cost changes you can make today to reduce frustration for mobile users.

1. Calls to action on prime real estate

Calls to action should be in the main body of landing pages not behind additional menu items. This could be a form field, a search function, or a location based lookup.

2. Stay in one browser window 

Keep users in a single browser window as switching between windows on mobile causes frustration.

3. Make navigating home easy

Make navigating back to the homepage possible from all sub-pages. According to Google’s
usability research, a clickable logo at the top of the page is expected by most users.

4. Click-to-call

Make click-to-call buttons prominent and remove any dialling code parenthesis to enable one-touch dialling.

5. Be finger friendly 

Ensure tap targets are large and finger friendly.

6. Real time error checking

Validate form fields in real time, as opposed to waiting for users to hit submit!

7.  Descriptive form labels

Place clear and descriptive labels above form fields, rather than within them. This way, guidance notes don’t disappear as soon as users attempts to enter text.

8. High resolution images

Provide high resolution close-ups of images – users expect to be able to tap for close-ups, especially on e-commerce sites.

About the author

Claire Cresswell-Lane is a UK based, CIM Chartered Marketer specialising in digital marketing strategy and communications. You can contact her via LinkedIn or Twitter.

Tips for structuring website content

When reading information from a screen, people do not start in the top left of the page and read every word. So what do they read and how can you make sure you get your key messages across?

Place keywords on the left

Special equipment can be used to detect exactly where people's eyes are focused when they look at a computer screen. This form of usability research makes it easier to understand what part of website design users are attracted to, and which parts they tend to overlook. 

A study involving 232 people found that website users spend 69% of their time viewing the left half of the page (regardless of the layout). Their eyes scan the page in an F pattern.

Follow the F pattern

If you focus on the red areas of the pictures below, you will see what is known as the F shape - this is where users tend to focus their attention when scanning a website. 

Source www.useit.com

·        The first two paragraphs must state the most important information. This is the most likely to be read.

·      Start subheads, paragraphs, and bullet points with information-carrying words that users will notice when scanning down the left side of your content in the final stem of their F-behaviour.

In summary

 Users won't read your text thoroughly in a word-by-word manner - especially when conducting initial research. People are scanning content headings, sub headings and opening paragraphs for keywords to decide if the webpage they have opened is what they are looking for. If it isn’t, they will hit the back button in their browser and open the next search result listing!

Do you think these rules apply to websites optimised for mobile? Please add your comments.

Developing an effective SEO strategy

With so many online channels for the modern marketer to manage (websites, blog, social media channels, and so on) it can be difficult to know where to focus efforts in order to create an efficient SEO strategy. Here are 10 tactics that contribute to effective digital growth.

 Organic website traffic

 

1.  Increase organic traffic. Organic traffic proves that your content is relevant and current to your users’ needs, adding credibility to your website when it come to search engine rankings. To increase organic traffic, write content that is: 

·         easy for search engines to index

·         relevant to search queries of your target audience(s)

·         engaging and original

·         easy to share.

#TwitterTip: Tweet original content, and keep tabs on what types of content gets more shares and RTs.

— Jason Houck (@MJasonHouck) June 19, 2015

Return visitors

2.   Increased visitor loyalty. In order to realise the lifetime value of customers, you need to facilitate repeat visits to your digital channels. Visitor loyalty will stem from a good initial online experience where: 

·      relevant information is easy to find

·      queries are resolved first time: through FAQs, online support, or via user forums

·      content is personalised to the individual (via links to CRM, cookies, or account preferences)

·      service is above and beyond that expected.

10 tips to attract return visitors http://t.co/hGWyJcfe2R #seo #traffic

— The Backlink PROS (@Seotactics15) June 14, 2015

Resolve queries online

3. By resolve queries online you can reduce: 

·     costs to the organisation (cheaper than handling calls via a contact centre)

·     customer frustration (faster than waiting in a telephone queue).

U.S. brands ignore 80% of consumer queries asked via Twitter - http://t.co/AWZsB4WZgL via @BizReport

— Brandwatch (@Brandwatch) June 15, 2015

Reinforce your brand off-line

4.   You can reinforce your brand when customers are offline by providing downloadable content. Remember to:  

·     add genuine value – provide free information and special offers

·     provide easy routes back to your online channels (via tagged URLS).

Data capture

5.       Form completion. 

Whether it’s subscribing to a newsletter, providing feedback, or signing up to an online forum – capturing information via form completion can: 

·         inform your CRM strategy

·         help you to segment and target audiences

·         gain valuable customer insight about your services

·         encourage future touch points with your brand.

Be social

6.       Encourage social shares.

Word of mouth is a powerful and trusted channel. People are more likely to interact with a brand that is recommended by a friend or family member.  Make your content easy to share (via Twitter, Facebook, and so on) and comment on. Amplify compliments via your contacts networks. Minimise reputation damage in the same way. 

Offer incentives

7.       Competition time! 

Competitions are a great way to increase BUZZ, raise brand awareness, and engage customers old and new – which all boosts your SEO efforts.  If you are running a competition via Twitter, here are some simple rules to help you.

Online sales

8.     Sell your products and services online. Increasing revenue is the bottom line! Make it easy for your visitors to buy online by: 

·         providing clear calls to action

·         remember personal preferences

·         offering one-click ordering

·         allowing order tracking

·         reassuring that transactions are secure!

Cross-channel promotion

9.       Promote new channels.

Promote channels that your existing customers may not have tried before, to increase the touch points they have with your brand:

·         Follow us, like us, poke us, +1 us, and so on.

·         Encourage sign-up for off-line promotions.

·         Run targeted ad campaigns.

Accessibility is key

10.   Make content accessible. 

You can have the best content, the fanciest CRM system, and the most engaging graphics out there, but if your customers can’t access your channels, they will not serve you well: 

·         Invest in mobile optimisation.

·         Comply with W3C standards for accessibility.

·         Have a business continuity strategy so if one channel fails, others can step in!

About the author

Claire Cresswell-Lane is a UK based, CIM Chartered Marketer specialising in digital marketing strategy and communications. You can contact her via LinkedIn or Twitter.

How to win the social media debate

Sometimes, the most challenging part of setting-up social media accounts is convincing your senior colleagues that it is a good idea! Here are some tactics to help you out...

The conversation is already happening

People are already talking about your brand and or activities online – but if you're not actively monitoring social media, you just don't know it, or if it is correct. There are lots of tools, both free and paid for, to help you monitor your reputation online. See what is being said, and make sure decision makers are aware of the frequency and tone of these conversations. Demonstrate the opportunities being missed.

Inform future communications efforts

By monitoring conversations that others are having online, you can understand how effective your communications have been to date – how well your key messages have been delivered and understood; where you need to correct or reinforce information, and so on.

Stakeholder database analysis

Analysing stakeholder databases can be a very powerful tool for convincing colleagues that social media is a must-do. Make a list of your top stakeholders, then simply list their social media presence and level of activity. Once you have identified where your stakeholders are present online, see how they are already interacting with each other. Mentionmapp.com is a free tool, that quickly provides you with a visual representation of who your stakeholders are talking to, and about which topics (you need to sign in with a Twitter account).

Make your content shareable

Making your website content easy for your audiences to share can help to demonstrate how actively they are participating in social media. There are lots of free tools around, such as addthis.com which you can include on website pages, in email footers, newsletters and press releases. These tools have reporting systems that let you see how many times content has been shared, and accessed as a result of those shares.

This will demonstrate two points: 1) your current audience is actively using social media and 2) social media can be a powerful way of amplifying your messages and extending audience reach.

Adding statistics like this to your monthly reports will serve as a passive reminder that social media should be on the agenda.

Ask your audience

Asking your target audience(s) about their social media use can be a powerful tool to convince colleagues that social media is no longer a nice-to-do. This could be something simple, like an online poll, or a questionnaire created in Survey Monkey, which is free to use.

Referrals from social media channels

Free tools such as Google Analytics can tell you all sorts of useful information to help with your arguments for developing social media channels, such as: number of referrals to your website via social media channels and the number of visitors accessing your site via a smart device.

Brand identity

Social media accounts are an important part of brand identity. If you do not claim your accounts, somebody else may do it for you in order to capitalise on your brand, or even to try to sell it to you at a later date (this is known as cyber-squatting).

Search Engine rankings

Having your website appear on the first page of Google is no longer simply about keyword placement, or how much you are willing to pay for an ad-placement. Google look at over 200 factors to determine whether they should return your website content to users who search for given phrases. Social media activity now plays an important role in determining your credibility as a trusted online source – social accounts linked to your domain; frequency of new content posted; number of quality followers/subscribers, click-through-rate, and so on.

Managing the risks

Resistance to using social media can stem from the perceived or actual risk associated with doing so:

• Creating a demand for services that there is not capacity to manage.
• Negative comments online about the brand, organisation, or individuals.
• Passwords being lost, shared, or accounts being hacked.
• Employees making defamatory remarks online – accidentally or intentionally.
• Security and governance concerns over data being held by third parties such as Twitter, or Facebook.
• Retaining ownership of online collateral, and so on.....

These risks are all real, and it is important to address them in order to provide reassurance about how they will be managed. Your social media policy should outline known risks to the organisation, and the methods you will use to mitigate them. It is important that the written policy is well communicated and understood by individual employees before any social media activity takes place. Here are some pointers to get you started with developing a social media policy.

Pilot projects

Rather than go for a big-bang approach to social media, you may want to start with one account and make sure you manage it as well as possible. Ensuring its success will be the best way to convince colleagues of the value of future social media use.

It can be useful to identify a specific project with a clear start and end date, and trial the use of social media as a communications channel for this. This is helpful because it legitimately allows the organisation to close the account after a fixed period of time. This means that if some of the risks identified above are realised, the social media account can be taken off-line after a short period of time without further risk to reputation.

Pilot projects also allow social media managers to gain all important hands-on experience, both in terms of dealing with the platform, and the types of responses received.

Need help with social media?

If you have any questions, post them in the comments below and I will do my best to help you out.

If you have found this article useful, please show thanks with a share, follow, or like.

Getting started with social media - an essential guide for beginners

Identify your existing audience

Social media enables you to reach out to new audiences, grow your markets, and network in new circles. Why then, do you need to identify where existing customers and contacts hang out? There are two good reasons for this: 

1.  Growing a social media channel can be hard work. People are less likely to follow, like, or share content from a name or brand they are unfamiliar with, or have not interacted with before. Connecting with an existing audience will give you that all important head start when trying to get a social media channel off the ground. Having them like, follow, or share your information will allow you to harness their contacts – amplify your messages, and growing your audience organically.

2.  You need to look after your existing customers in order to realise their lifetime value – it is more costly to acquire a new customer than it is to retain an existing one. Social media is an added ‘touch point’ through which contacts interact with your brand – it will remind them that you exist, reinforce your key messages through a drip, drip, drip of information, and persuade them to follow your calls to action.

Finding your existing contacts

It is well known that different demographic groups hang out on different social networking platforms. Pew Research Center provide some informative and insightful statistics on this topic.

Therefore, you need to decide which segments of your audience to seek out.  To help you decide on this, you may want to examine your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, or stakeholder database, to find out what information you hold on existing contacts.

Tools like Socialeyezer allow you to identify which social networks your target demographic audience hang out on.

Next, examine whether the platforms you are considering are increasing or decreasing in popularity for your target audience. Do you remember articles like this - highlighting the number of young people movingaway from Facebook (11 million since 2011)?

Of course, these methods will help you identify the demographics of people that are already engaged, to some extent, with your brand. Your objectives probably include growing your audiences and extending your reach in one or more of the following ways: 

1.  Retain existing customers, and continue to sell them the same products or services (market penetration).

2. Identify and engage new customers, and continue to sell products and services from your current range (market development).

3.  Promote a new product or service to existing customers (product development).

4.  Promote new products and services to new customers (diversification).

Define your social media objectives

It is really important for you to stop and think about what you want to achieve by having social media channels. What does success look like? Knowing what you are trying to achieve should determine the methods and tactics you use to get there. For example, if your objective is to increase website traffic, you may measure the cost per click of advertising campaigns; if your objective is to have people sign-up to a newsletter, you may measure cost per acquisition instead.

Having clear objectives will also help you to identify key messages, decide on tone of voice, timings and frequency of postings, channels to use, levels of engagement required, and so on.

Objectives can be wide ranging and may include: 

• raising awareness of your brand
• selling a product or service
• encouraging visitors to subscribe, make a donation, or try new things
• improving SEO by generating user comments and increasing engagement
• gaining customer feedback and insight.

Listen to existing social media conversations

If you follow the steps above, you will now know:

1. who you want to engage with
2. where to find your target audience
3. what your objectives for opening social media channels targeting these audiences are.

You are now almost ready to join conversations in the virtual world. Joining a conversation on social media is the same as joining a conversation in the real world. Before you begin to speak you make a mental assessment to: 

• understanding who is already talking
• note the tone, pitch, and sentiment of the conversation
• think about how you can add value to what is already being said.

You do not: 

• speak without introducing yourself
• interrupt the speaker to take the conversation off on a new tangent
• talk without listening and responding to the comments directed towards you.

The same rules apply to your interactions on social media.

                                                                                                                                                            

Listening will enable you to assess sentiment around your brand and decide how to amplify or manage these feelings when you open your own social media channels.

By listening to existing conversations, you will quickly be able to identify who your greatest ambassadors and critics are online. You can then evaluate how influential these people are to inform how much effort you should spend in engaging with them.

Social Media Monitoring Tools

There are a number of tools, both free and paid-for, that enable you to listen to existing conversations .

Social media monitoring tools such as Sprout Social, Brandwatch, Gorkana, or Meltwater Buzz are paid-for services that will do the segmentation for you.

Tools such as Social Mention, Addictomatic, and IceRocket  are freely available online and will require manual analysis on your part.

Once you have identified who the key opinion formers and influencers are for your particular niche, you can monitor who they are engaging with, and on what topics, by using a great, free online tool called Mention map.

Keeping social media conversations flowing

Just as in real life, your contributions to conversation should be guided by what is already being said, the tone with which it is delivered, it’s value to taking relationships forward, and so on. As your experience with social media develops, you will also initiate conversations of your own. A tool that can help you to manage your online dialogue is a conversation calendar. Simply put, this is a roadmap of planned conversations that you will participate in throughout the year. Of course, you will take part in unplanned discussions too, as you react to unknown events related to your sector. Here are some ideas of what your conversation calendar might include: 

• events that you will be taking part in, or attending
• annual holidays or sporting events that may #trend – wishing your customers good luck in Olympic events, for example
• known dates of publications or product launches – of course you will want to plan for their build up in your planned conversations too
• inspirational quotes specific to your niche – likely to be reposted and add to your online credibility
• did you know...posts to remind customers of your offering and reinforce your brand and key messages
• the birthday of your organisation, a product, or service.

Assess your capacity to manage different platforms

Fully engaging on social media can become a time consuming business. Failure to fully engage or respond to contacts can be damaging to your reputation. You will need to be realistic about how much resource the channels you are considering will cost you on a day-to-day basis and whether you can manage this on your own or need help from an independent third party. Issues to consider include: 

•  How often do you intent to publish information?
• How many responses do you anticipate receiving?
• Who will manage the responses?
• How will responses be managed out of working hours?

Questions?
If you have any questions, post them in the comments below and I will do my best to help you out.

If you have found this article useful, please show thanks with a share, follow, or like.