Social Media Marketing Tips for the Fall and Holiday Season

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October begins the holiday season for businesses and marketers. You should embrace the new seasons and holidays as part of your social media marketing strategy. The seasons are a perfect time to produce relevant content that revolves around current situations all your customers and prospects are currently in. Holiday shopping begins before Halloween for 20 to 40% of all consumers. The fall season is a very busy time for people to be searching the internet and browsing social media for Halloween costume ideas, fall recipes, fall decorating ideas and crafts, the list is almost endless. It’s important your business has a strong online presence during this pivotal time to take advantage of a large audience. Below are some marketing tips for your business to implement this holiday season:

1. Profile background to match the season
Consider customizing your social media profiles for the holidays. Your online presence should reflect the current season your business is experiencing. Showing an updated and current online presence will build up the credibility for your business in the eyes of the consumers. An idea could be to promote a specific product or service your business offers that would interest viewers the most during the specific holiday or season your currently in. Include an image of this on your social media background along with a theme to match the holiday or season. For instance, a jewelry store could highlight a couple seasonal jewelry pieces they sell on their social media background along with any seasonal specials.

2. Search for relevant hashtags to use during the season and implement them into your content strategy and editorial calendar
See what holiday or seasonal hashtags are being commonly used and see if your business can relate to it or if it caters to your customer’s lifestyle. Craft social media posts with the relevant hashtags a couple times a week to increase the reach of your messages. You could also make a special hashtag for your business that’s relevant each year the holiday season approaches. It will help keep the conversation going. For instance you could use your brand name followed by gift idea, like this #BrandnameHolidayGiftIdeas to showcase your products and services. Some other relevant hashtags could be #HolidaySavings and #HolidayDeals.

3. Write a blog posts that relevant to the season and your business
Look for opportunities to use seasonal topics and traditions to engage your audience in a timely and relevant way. This can humanize your business and help customers connect with you in a whole new way. For example, Napoleon Perdis, a popular makeup brand, created a series of “How To” tutorials demonstrating how a customer could apply Napoleon Perdis makeup to create classic Halloween looks.

4. Share social media posts relevant to the season
Showcasing what you have in common with your audience is a great way for your brand to humanize it’s image and strengthened your relationship with your current and future clients. Share tips relevant to the season like Gibson Air did with this tweet “Fall Energy Saving Tip: turn fans clockwise in the fall to force warm air down, improving the energy efficiency of your home” During the fall season HVAC companies should provide tips that relate to heating and preparing for the winter season. A jewelry store could highlight seasonal jewelry fashion trends in their social posts. Always keeping up with the trends will allow customers to see you as a credible information provider that’s always up-to-date and cares about delivering the freshest content to viewers. This will encourage customers to engage and search out information from your business.

5. Create a Pinterest board revolving around the holiday
Pinterest is a great source of traffic and a great way to increase the reach of your messages. During the holiday season people are searching Pinterest for specific holiday or seasonal ideas, tips and gifts. This is a great opportunity for you to develop a special holiday Pinterest board to increase your reach and visibility online. If you are an HVAC company you could create a Pinterest board titled “Fall Décor Ideas” where you would share fall décor ideas for homes. You would be providing content that’s relevant to your customer’s lifestyle, your business and the current season which is always a win-win situation.

6. Create a social contest revolving around the holiday or season
Giveaways are a great way to create exposure and a buzz around your product, service or brand. A contest that matched the season would be a strategic way to capitalize on a trending topic. For example, TomTom launched a holiday-themed sweepstakes giveaway and called it “TomTom’s 12 Days of Giveaways”. Create a special Facebook tab for your contest to further capture data to further analyze to develop social media strategy. Make a contest that requires users to enter an email, to help build up your email list so you can update subscribers on future contests, promotions and announcements. In fact 55% of brands use email as their number one holiday marketing channel (Accenture)

7. Create a special YouTube playlist revolving around a seasonal or holiday topic
You can create your specific playlists on your YouTube channel to feature videos that has information your customers may be searching online during a particular season or holiday. For example Travel Channel is featuring a “Fall in Finger Lakes” playlist on their YouTube channel during October and features the best attractions to experience during the fall in New York’s Finger Lakes region.

fall season social media marketing tips for YouTube

8. Implement event marketing and host a holiday themed event, that’s promoted on social media
Events are a great way to interact with your customers and to increase your exposure. Social media can further the experience of your events in many ways. You could create a special hashtag to create a conversation around your event and promote it on your social profiles. You should also develop photo albums on your social networks to share photos of the event. A holiday or seasonal themed event shows your customers and your community your fun and creative side.

9. Create seasonal specials and coupons
If you’re looking to boost engagement, offering coupons and discounts are one of your best options. Try developing a seasonal special that you can offer each year to keep customers coming back. Share these specials in social media posts to increase your reach.

Use these marketing tips and ideas to make the most of the spike in holiday traffic and spending, and create a positive impression of your small business that will last long into next year.

H/T: Toni Corsini

9 Compelling and Fun Digital Marketing Stats From the Past Week

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With summer largely in the rearview mirror, marketers are attending conferences and generally revealing more media- and brand-related data. Here are nine of such stats that caught our eye last week.

1. During a Re/code podcast, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti said that more than 75 percent of his digital publisher’s views for all content come from non-BuzzFeed networks. More specifically, he shared that Facebook video produces 27 percent of the views and Snapchat brings in 21 percent.

2. PubMatic CEO Rajeev Goel told an audience at Dmexco that about 40 percent of Germans use ad blockers, a significant spike from the estimated 10 percent of Americans who block ads. Publishers are rightfully scared of the phenomenon, especially since Apple’s IOS9 system became available last week. It allows developers to sell ad-blocking apps on it for iPhones.

3. Also speaking at Dmexco, Amy Cole, head of brand development for Instagram EMEA, made the case for brands to buy ads on Instagram, citing data from 400 Nielsen studies covering two years of campaigns. Per Cole, 97 percent of ads have generated “significant” ad recall, with the average campaign boosting recall by 17 points.

4. JD.com, China’s largest business-to-consumer site, has more than 600 million users and 373 million people who purchase straight from the site.

5. Anonymity app Whisper touts more than 10 million users, 10 billion page views a month and a whopping 1 million app users every minute.

6. Remember Lauren Conrad from MTV’s Laguna Beach and The Hills? A decade after the shows, she’s a bona fide media mogul, with multiple clothing lines, bestselling books and her own lifestyle brand. What’s more, she’s a social-media star, with about 4.4 million followers on Instagram, 3.5 million on Twitter and 1.9 million on Facebook.

7. Monetate, which has access to more than 7 billion shopping experiences from its customer base, found that during the second quarter, traffic to e-commerce sites also increased 30 percent year over year. The digital marketing company also said that sales conversion rates jumped 46 percent over the same time period—largely driven by mobile shoppers.

8. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders live-tweeted last Wednesday night’s Republican debate. As Digiday reported, analytics company Socialbakers found that Sanders received 452,000 interactions—entailing retweets, replies and favorites—on his tweets that day alone. Compared to his average interactions of 36,700 per day over the previous month, according to Socialbakers, that’s a huge uptick.

9. Speaking of h-u-u-u-uge, on the other side of the political aisle, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump accrued more than 7.5 million Vine loops (the mobile app’s views metric) on his account, but he hasn’t used the video platform since 2013.

And a bonus stat that’s really not about digital marketing: Hampton Creek is a packaged-goods startup that focuses on data to create new foods, which are intended to be more profitable, environmentally friendly and healthy. Last week, Hampton Creek CEO Josh Tetrick told an audience at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference that his team taps into data from more than 400,000 species of plants.

H/T: Ad Week

4 Keys to Digital Marketing Maturity

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In early 2015, Adobe surveyed nearly 1,000 digital marketers in the United States and Canada to learn priorities and tactics to be deployed in 2015. Industries included in the survey spanned everything from financial services to entertainment and retail.

The conclusion? Digital marketing is moving into a new era. First came the era of innovation. Search put consumers in control. Mobile devices set them free. Social networks connected them. And with each revolution, technology was invented to create, measure and control methods to reach consumers.

But Adobe says digital marketing has “grown up.” We’re at a stage where knowledge, process and a customer-focus drive strategy — not tools and tactics. After years of toying with various new capabilities, marketers can finally stitch everything together to achieve real, meaningful business objectives.

Adobe’s data shows that organizations that have consciously invested in holistic improvements to their digital marketing program are seeing bigger payoffs. A large minority (36%) see elements of their strategic plan as moving them to greater maturity, but these elements are not necessarily linked, where digital maturity is a byproduct, not an overarching goal. Most, however, take an organic approach, with no formal plan for maturing their digital marketing capability. They respond to new conditions but don’t plan ahead for them. Only the elite — one in five — say they have made specific plans and investments with digital maturity specifically in mind.

The Elements of Digital Maturity

Adobe says organizations can evaluate their future digital maturity across four broad categories.

  1. Structure — How are divisions, departments and teams organized to best reflect market conditions?
  2. People — What is the company’s approach to building skills? How are people hired, trained and retained?
  3. Process — How do things get done? How are they resourced, managed and supported by technology?
  4. Technology — What platforms, systems and tools are available, and how they have they been integrated?

While Adobe says each area has its own importance, their research suggests that organizations realize the most gains when these four elements work in tandem. Often organizations will find that they are further along in some dimensions than others. The challenge is to build in areas of weakness without losing momentum in areas of strength.

You can take the same survey Adobe fielded to other financial institutions and test your organization’s digital maturity. To take the test, click here.

1. Digitally Mature Organizations Invest In People, Process and Tools

Many companies think of new capabilities narrowly, in the context of technology. But those with a planned approach to digitally maturity understand that it also means integration into existing processes, sufficient staffing and alignment with strategy. Mature organizations are strong at adopting and nurturing new capabilities and picking up the responsibilities that come with them.

Mature digital marketers recognize that optimization is achieved in small ways on many fronts. This is true for every tactic, channel and customer initiative. For example, huge returns on paid search in the middle part of the last decade gave way to incremental gains based on repetition, analytics and testing.

An organization embracing a “Culture of Optimization” continually leverages data to identify areas of digital improvement. They test, and make frequent and iterative changes. Quite simply, they figure out what works and what doesn’t.

For an organization to establish a true “Culture of Optimization,” this work is on-going, and is instituted across all digital properties. According to Adobe, part of creating your “optimization toolbox” involves significant cultural shifts — a new mindset, with new processes and maybe even new roles. The challenge, Adobe says, is not to just deploy an assortment of techniques and practices, but to be effective and efficient in how they are used.

2. Mature Organizations Adapt to the Consumer

Companies of all sizes, in every sector, like to think of themselves as “customer-centric” — particularly financial institutions. The reality is that many don’t have the processes in place to really listen to consumers, nor the capacity to meet them where, when and how they want.

This disparity is prone to exist almost everywhere brands and consumers interact, but it’s most evident in the mobile channel.
The rise of mobile is the biggest catalyst of change
in marketing today. However, many banks and credit unions have been slow to adopt comprehensive mobile strategies — and thus slow to create the sites and applications their mobile customers need.

Mature digital marketers recognize the strategic advantages of mobile and are reaping the rewards. They far outperform their peers, achieving a mobile conversion rate 12% better than average. And the reasons for this success tie back to fundamentals; how companies approach mobile is a reflection of their broader pursuit of maturity.

Mobile isn’t just a channel. In fact, Adobe says mobile should be woven into the very fabric of your marketing strategy. Every process should at least include the question, “How is mobile relevant here?” Companies should strive for a more strategic approach with experiments and initiatives contributing to greater mobile maturity in every area. Mobile is a new frontier of measurement, customer experience and technology — all of which require training and ongoing education.

Adobe says mobile optimization and personalization are keys to ensuring the experience meets consumer expectations. And yet only 23% of digital marketers plan to optimize their mobile experiences with A/B testing, multivariate testing or segmentation.

Customizing mobile content is another leading indicator of a company’s digital maturity, which can yield an average 66% increase in mobile conversion rate. But even among the most sophisticated digital marketers, only a handful optimize content at the user level.

3. Planned Maturity Builds an Advantage Through Learning

Adobe says there’s no finish line when it comes to digital marketing. Smart marketing organizations recognize that they’ll never achieve technical perfection or mastery over every corner of digital. Instead, they try to put the systems in place to learn from many sources of information and act on those lessons.

Knowledge is never more powerful than in areas where it is scarce. Emerging digital capabilities give the companies that master them early an advantage. For instance, automation of the testing process alone was shown to increase conversion by 15% in Adobe’s study. That kind of advantage is one of the principle goals for those with a planned approach to achieving digital maturity.

In the short-term, organizations with a deliberate, strategic approach see even greater improvements in conversion rates. For example, digitally mature respondents report mobile
app conversion rates nearly 50% higher than those
with an organic approach.

But the most important impact of their investment
in knowledge may well benefit planned-maturity organizations in the long term. By staking their claim to emerging opportunities like mobile customer experience, real-time and location marketing, brands are ensuring growth. Usage and budgets in these areas are still in their infancy, making this the time to learn, make mistakes and build expertise. As they come into their own, mature brands will be ready to profit.

4. Mature Organizations Think Ahead

Strategic initiatives without funding are little more than good intentions. Most organizations want to build their digital marketing capabilities, but Adobe says they’re not willing to extend their budgets to do so effectively.

Digital marketing has embraced a number of inbound marketing techniques to complement (and in some cases replace) paid channels. But Adobe cautions companies focusing on
this side of their capabilities, saying they have to look farther out to evaluate success and justify the investment. Building content and optimizing its delivery is not merely a campaign-to-campaign practice. This approach works in tandem with an investment in areas like analytics, social and marketing optimization.

For those financial institutions responding to change instead of leading it, Adobe says “push advertising” plays an inflated role in their digital programs. It is a thread to the past, one area where they understand what they’re buying, how to buy it and roughly what they might get in return.

For companies pursuing digital maturity, advertising is only one part of the story — a piece of a larger and more diverse mix that better reflects the complexity of how people behave and how digital marketing is evolving.

You can download the entire PDF report, “Four Advantages of a Planned Approach to Digital Maturity,” instantly from Adobe by clicking here (no registration required).

adobe

HT: The Financial Brand

Helping Users Fill Out Online Forms

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A lot of websites rely on forms for important goals completion, such as completing a transaction on a shopping site or registering on a news site. For many users, online forms mean repeatedly typing common information like their names, emails, phone numbers or addresses, on different sites across the web. In addition to being tedious, this task is also error-prone, which can lead many users to abandon the flow entirely. In a world where users browse the internet using their mobile devices more than their laptops or desktops, having forms that are easy and quick to fill out is crucial! Three years ago, we announced the support for a new “autocomplete” attribute in Chrome, to make form-filling faster, easier and smarter. Now, Chrome fully supports the “autocomplete” attribute for form fields according to the current WHATWG HTML Standard. This allows webmasters and web developers to label input element fields with common data types, such as ‘name’ or ‘street-address’, without changing the user interface or the backend. Numerous webmasters have increased the rate of form completions on their sites by marking up their forms for auto-completion.

For example, marking up an email address field on a form to allow auto-completion would look like this (with a full sample form available):

<input type="email" name="customerEmail" autocomplete="email"/>

Making websites friendly and easy to browse for users on mobile devices is very important. We hope to see many forms marked up with the “autocomplete” attribute in the future. For more information, you can check out our specifications about Label and name inputs in Web Fundamentals. And as usual, if you have any questions, please post in our Webmasters Help Forums.

H/T: Google Webmaster.

#NoHacked: Identifying and Diagnosing Injected Gibberish URL Hacking

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Hackers can turn your nondescript website into a malicious spy bot in a matter of minutes, sending sensitive user data to hackers without your even realizing it. Worse, they can hack into your website databases and destroy or manipulate important information, injecting your content with malicious links and even hijack the hosting server to be used in botnet DDoS attacks.

But enough of this scare fest. It’s not all doom and gloom out there on the Web. There are things that you can do to secure your website from hackers and becoming a target for online vandals.

How do you identify and diagnose a trending hack? Even if your site is not infected with a specific trending hack, many of the below steps can be helpful for other types of hacks. Read more

8 Intriguing and Surprising Digital Marketing Stats From the Past Week

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It’s midsummer, when much of the media and marketing world slows way down. But in this day and age, digital marketing statistics never really stop.

Here are the eight most interesting numbers we saw in the last week:

1. Beats by Dre has done a fantastic job creating social buzz around Straight Outta Compton, the biopic about the late ’80s- to early ’90s-era gangsta rap group N.W.A. that opens this weekend. Dr. Dre, co-founder of Beats by Dre parent Beats Electronics, was a member of N.W.A. At the center of the effort, the brand created a meme generator that’s led to tons of people sharing images adorned with the big copy: “Straight Outta [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][insert hometown or joke].” In fact, nearly 150,000 Instagram pics—some heartfelt, some comedic—have been posted in the last few days with the #straightoutta hashtag.

2. Media giant Meredith surveyed more than 2,600 adult women at the end of last year, finding that 90 percent of millennial females visited Facebook once a week, while 77 percent accessed YouTube every seven days.

3. While Facebook and YouTube were the most popular social-media platforms among Meredith’s millennial survey participants, Snapchat, surprisingly, was the least-favored option. In terms of weekly usage, here are the other numbers from its research: 57 percent visited Instagram; 56 percent used Pinterest; 47 percent employed Twitter; and just 28 percent utilized Snapchat.

4. Ad blocking will cost publishers nearly $22 billion in 2015, according to a new Adobe report. Yikes.

5. Genesis Media, which surveyed more than 11,500 U.S. adults in late May and early June, found that while 24 percent of respondents installed ad blockers on either their home or work computers, just 3 percent did so on their smartphones or tablets.

6. It’s that time of year when brands like Elmer’s, Mead, Staples and Target are gearing up for a sales boost thanks to back-to-school shoppers. According to a new Retale study, they should put a healthy focus on mobile. The digital-deals company said it surveyed 1,000 adults with kids in grades K-12 and found that 78 percent of parents will use a smartphone for back-to-school shopping.

7. Last Wednesday night, Arby’s thanked Daily Show host Jon Stewart for all the mockery at its expense over the years with a 60-second spot during his penultimate episode as host of the show. The savvy, self-deprecating move worked wonders for the brand. Amobee Brand Intelligence reported that the spot boosted tweets about the roast-beef slinger by 564 percent—from 130 to 1,130—in a before-versus-after comparison.

8. Thirty percent of all Tinder users—who are supposed to be single—are married, per a new report from GlobalWebIndex. Seventy-five percent of those married folks consider themselves “risk takers,” the research company found. So, if marketers want to target compulsive-minded consumers, the ultra-popular dating app may be worth exploring. After all, Tinder ads worked pretty well last spring for the movie Ex Machina. GlobalWebIndex also found that 80 percent of Tinder users were more inclined to take a selfie than the average person. OK, file that one under “Interesting, But Not a Huge Surprise.”

Ref: (H/T) Adweek, Adobe, Meredith.

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Four Ways to Integrate Direct Mail Into Your Digital Marketing Landscape

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As the media landscape continues to shift, it is increasingly vital for marketers to adapt their brands’ marketing mix and strategies accordingly. With an ever-growing number of platforms and mediums used to circulate information, savvy brands must evolve or suffer. Read more

Our Top 8 Digital Marketing Stats From the Last Week

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Big digital players released second-quarter earnings numbers last week, and many other enticing interactive statistics came to the forefront. Here are the eight most interesting, data-driven developments we came across:

1. Researcher eMarketer predicted Monday that Instagram advertising will be worth $2.8 billion in sales by 2017, but that estimate could be low if the Facebook-owned platform would start running desktop ads. Per comScore, 22.8 million people logged onto Instagram in June via desktop computer compared with 81.8 million on mobile devices. But since Instagram ads only run on smartphones and tablets, it would seem the digital entity could grow revenue even more than eMarketer’s projections, as the social giant still sits on a big audience that hasn’t been monetized.

2. For the past several months, brands like Land Rover have tested Pandora’s Sponsored Listening ads, which offer consumers an hour or free music in exchange for watching a video promo. Per Pandora, those pilot ads boosted purchase intent by 30 percent and brand awareness by 12 percent. The Oakland, Calif.-based digital company opened sponsored listening to all brands today.

3. On Thursday, Marchex will release a study based on 24 million consumer-to-business mobile phone calls. The tech vendor, working with local business researcher BIA/Kelsey, will estimate that mobile click-to-call actions—in which Web-connected consumers call up shops, bars and restaurants on their smartphones—will enable $1 trillion in commerce this year.

4. Microsoft’s devices-and-consumer category for revenues during the second quarter were down 13 percent year-over-year, underscoring a tech giant in flux. But there’s good news, too: The Redmond, Wash.-based company’s commercial cloud business grew 88 percent to $8 billion in sales in Q2.

5. Yahoo’s Q2 earnings last week also was a mix of good news and bad. Its mobile, video, native and social ad revenue was up 60 percent over last year to $400 million, helping CEO Marissa Mayer offer her investors the company’s best revenue growth in nearly a decade. But, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based player is spending a lot of money and actually took a loss, overall.

6. During June and July, Mondelez tested interactive, e-commerce video promos and got a 220 percent boost in awareness, and engagement went up 88 percent. Let’s look at an example from the company’s Women’s World Cup campaign. An image of U.S. player Alex Morgan popped up in the bottom left corner of the ads. Hovering over Morgan for a few seconds opened an overlay on the video letting people watch other clips, shoot a virtual soccer ball, follow a Twitter hashtag or clickthrough to buy snacks at Walmart, Target and Amazon.

7. Chubbies, the men’s shorts brand, posted an LOL-minded video on Facebook on July 19 featuring dudes walking around in summer attire that’s way too small. With little paid advertising, the e-commerce startup’s clip has been viewed 903,000 times on the platform.

8. The 20th Century Fox movie The Revenant, a western thriller that doesn’t premiere until Christmas Day, already is garnering huge buzz online. A teaser for the film, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio and is directed by Oscar winner Alejandro González Iñárritu, is closing in on 20 million YouTube and Facebook views after 10 days. Check out the clip below:

H/T Adweek

Understanding the Real Meaning of “Community” for B2B Digital Marketing

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B2B businesses often approach social media marketing with an attitude that “bigger is better.” They eagerly believe that the more followers, the better. The more likes, the better. The more tweets at more times in the day, the better.

However, effective B2B digital marketing is not a clear-cut numbers game. In fact, smaller numbers are sometimes better because that means you’re targeting the right attention for your blog and social media. Why? The reason that smaller is better comes down to a hot digital marketing topic for social 2015: community.

What Is Community?

The standard definition of a community is a group of people with similar backgrounds and goals. In digital marketing, however, community refers to the small but potent group of fans and peers that make up your client base and B2B business network. Infamous marketing thinker Seth Godin refers to this kind of community as a tribe, or a group of people who connect with each other because they share an idea and a leader.

Successful B2B digital marketing doesn’t strive to add zeroes to your follower counts. Instead, its goal is to attract and engage your tribe — the people who are actually paying attention and actively seeking information. And if you do it right, you might find yourself adding zeroes to your follower counts anyway… except this time these followers will represent targeted prospective customers rather than empty seats.

The Social Media Marketing Podcast recently interviewed Jared Easley, co-founder of the industry-leading podcasting conference Podcast Movement, about creating a community. In the interview, Jared talked about how he used Facebook to build a community of followers who eventually funded his $11,000 Kickstarter campaign. This may not be the best way to raise money for your B2B business, but it does go to show the power of uniting your tribe to achieve a specific goal.

How to Identify Your Community

Building your community starts with understanding who makes up your community. Take a look at your customers and the customers of your competitors. Where do they spend their time online? When you’ve identified these demographics, it’s a simple matter of researching their social usage by income, age and gender, or medium preference. Armed with the knowledge of where people spend time online, you can target people who are most likely to be a good fit for your community.

Another great way to build your community is to use your personal network and your established customers. When you speak to them in person or by phone, ask them where they spend time online. Carefully monitor which links they share on their LinkedIn profiles. Keep a list of brands, publications, and sites they mention to paint a comprehensive picture of how your tribe prefers to spend time online.

How to Connect With Your Community

As the members of your community start to become more obvious, connect with them strategically. Some of these strategies may entail a large initial time investment, but building your community will pay off in the long term.

Then consider your customer’s day-to-day life and technology usage. How many tweets or LinkedIn posts will they see and engage with in a meaningful way? How much content do they want from you? How much content is too much for them? Make note of the best times to post and plan your B2B digital marketing strategy accordingly.

In B2B digital marketing, quality trumps quantity. Even a modest social media following can help you reach your sales goals if they represent a dedicated, engaged population. Find your community first, then guide your digital marketing efforts according to what they need.

For more up to date industry news, follow our blog posts on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Linkedin.

H/T: Business2Community.

3 Digital Marketing Blunders Small Businesses Make Right off the Bat

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You’re busy supporting your customers and running your business. Taking even 10 minutes out of your day to devote to a blog post or social media updates is a challenge.  The new, holistic approaches to internet marketing–thanks to changes by Google and other search engines in the last 12 months–are enough to make anyone’s head spin, let alone a small business owner or manager who wears many different “business” hats everyday.  No matter your goals for your website and social media profiles, avoid these common pitfalls when repositioning or establishing your company’s digital presence.

1. Overpaying for a Website

A problem plaguing so many companies in the early 2000s has seen a resurgence as more and more small to medium-sized businesses have upped their online game, web designers are taking advantage of a business owners’ lack of know-how to cash in big for a minimal amount of work. Business and networking are breeding grounds for this practice and it’s taking a toll on business’ search engine visibility and the basic functionality of their websites. With so many easy-to-use, cost-effective methods of creating beautiful, functional websites, there’s no reason for nail salons and painting companies to drop $3,000-$10,000 on a website in 2015. Don’t fall for a sales pitch and a smile.

2. Quitting Early on Social

Everyone who’s tried to create a social media profile has experienced the frustration that comes with a stunted or non-existent following. As with many endeavors, people tend to approach a new project with enthusiasm and then give up when they don’t get the feedback they want. Try searching YouTube for “My First Video” and you’ll see what I mean. However, for better or worse, Facebook is becoming a major player in small business marketing and even if people aren’t finding you via the social network, your potential customers will certainly check to see if you’re keeping up with your profile. There’s no magic formula to success on social media, but there are a few Facebook tips and tricks for small business owners to gain traction and establish themselves without dedicating too many resources to your efforts.

3. Demanding Instant Gratification

The “give it to me now!” mentality of the online world does not apply when marketing a small business – sorry. As with any marketing effort, the work takes time and results aren’t immediate. Instead of focusing on “going viral” or getting 100,000 viewers to your website, redirecting your digital marketing team to establish your authority on search results in your industry and generating viable leads will show dividends in the long run. It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen if you have the right team.

One thing about digital marketing is that it’s always changing and developing as technology and consumer behavior changes. This can be an advantage or a disadvantage to any business owner. An advantage because everyone needs to constantly educate themselves on new marketing trends. When something new arises, everyone starts at the same level. On the opposite end, it can be a disadvantage to those who don’t care to learn. Business owners who are content with their existing methods and plan to steadily run things will end up falling far behind. Sticking to what you always do, will get you what you’ve always gotten.

For expert advice on how to increase your online reach, strengthen your brand equity, help achieve stronger business results and generate greater profitability, contact Onimod Global today.