HOW TO: Integrate Paid Search and Social Media for Better Marketing Results

Paid search and social media are both extremely important marketing channels. But how can brands combine the two distinctly different tactics –- the bid-based, conversion-obsessed, ROI-driven world of paid search and the experimental, brand-building, hard-to-measure world of social –- to drive an overall increase in ROI? Marketers large and small are grappling with the challenge of how to integrate their paid search advertising programs with social media programs on networks like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and viral video sites.

Social and Search Should Work Together

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The most important thing to remember when starting a search-and-social integration program is that search and social each provide different benefits to your business, so you should leverage their strengths instead of trying to get them to deliver results that aren’t suited to the medium.

Marketers usually participate in social media to create an active dialogue with consumers around their products and services, with the main goal of building brand value, and a secondary goal of driving sales. On the other hand, marketers use paid search primarily to drive sales, leads, and conversion, and don’t expect the short text of their paid search ads to do much for branding.

But together, the two disciplines can increase the value that each program delivers. By creating social content that attracts an engaged audience, marketers can then craft targeted paid search campaigns to “capture” this audience and turn them into buyers.

As an example of how this works, consider these findings from an October 2009 study conducted by GroupM Search, M80, and ComScore. The report found that consumers exposed to a brand’s social media content are 2.8 times more likely to search on that brand’s terms. What’s more, consumers exposed to social media are more likely to perform deeper searches, going further down the purchase funnel and completing more purchases. Consumers exposed to a brand’s social media are 1.7 times more likely to search with the intention of making a purchase, and, overall, brands reported a 50% lift in click-through rates from consumers exposed to both social media and paid search, according to the study.

What these statistics show is that stronger brand awareness through social media helps drive paid search effectiveness in three ways:

§  Target audiences are more likely to search (more impressions on your ads)

§  Target audiences are more likely to click (more clicks on those impressions)

§  Because of higher clickthrough rates, ads are placed higher on page (higher quality score)

Smart Strategies

There is no silver bullet for integrating search and social, but there are several concrete strategies every marketer can use to start bringing the two disciplines together. Here are a few tips to help you optimize social and paid search programs to work in a complimentary way to boost overall ROI.

§  Make your social campaigns search-friendly. Make sure your social media programs (Facebook, Twitter, viral video, etc.) are appropriately tagged and indexed, and that metadata for pages includes your top keywords. This will allow people searching for your brand content to not only find your paid search ads and natural search results, but to find your social media content as well. The first step to building brand engagement through social activities is to enable consumers to easily find your content.

§  Experiment with keyword advertising on social media sites. Facebook and YouTube both allow for keyword targeted advertising, but the way that these ads work is vastly different from how advertising works on Google or the Content Network. Facebook ads allow you to target users based on preferences they list on their profile. For example, a retailer selling DVDs would create ads that target interests such as “action movies,” “horror,” or “funny movies.” YouTube’s advertising system allows you to target specific user queries. However, remember the queries that occur on YouTube are different than those on Google, because users on YouTube are searching for content, not products. For example, people may be trying to find “Avatar trailer” or “car scene from Modern Family,” rather than searching for a particular DVD, so make sure to target your ads to these more specific types of search queries.

§  Create social media-influenced paid search campaigns. Closely analyze the topics and discussions taking place around your social media campaigns, and then mine these discussions for new keywords you can use in paid search campaigns on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Whatever people are talking about, bid on keywords that reflect these conversations. As always, you should measure the performance of these campaigns to prune non-performing ads and increase investment on terms that are more likely to capture downstream conversions. In addition, consider running controlled experiments with social media advertising turned off and on, so you can measure the impact these campaigns have on your paid search programs by observing changes in your paid search click-through and conversion rates.

By quantifying the uplift that social media delivers to your paid search programs, you can gain insights into your marketing programs that search marketers who limit their view to just one channel do not –- and improve the performance of both your paid search and social programs.

Souce: http://mashable.com/2010/04/01/paid-search-social-media/

How Social Media Will Look In 2011? Some Predicted Trends

Social media is no more a new word because it has been utilized by businesses for reaching global customers and also to have an effective communication with them. Not a single business at present can think of ignoring the significance of social media. 2011 sees more advancement toward using social media platform for promoting online businesses.
It is said that Twitter has grown 1,382% in just one year and has got unique visitors of over 7 millions in one month. What trends and techniques will be followed in 2011 regarding social media optimization? Here are some predictions based on facts and figures.

1)More concerns about privacy: Because of increasing shift toward joining social networks, privacy concerns will become serious for registered users of different social platforms. As social networks are efficient in helping people to share personal things with their contacts and with global users, so customized experience will become the preference of users.

2)Social networks will prefer to decentralize: Facebook Connect, Google’s Friend Connect are one effort toward having a control over personal information and established relationships.

3)Search engines will need a different treatment: Google will give prominent place to social media activities. More personalized search will become easy as you wish to see the results from personal networks.

4)Content management will be the big business: As content is king in the web world and it is growing at a speedy rate. More concern would be there for sorting out and managing the content.

5)Social media will improve everyday experiences: Before going to call your contact you can get an idea what he/she is doing or feeling. Better relationship management through social media- isn’t it amazing?

6)More high ratings would mean recommendation: A website that gets higher rating by its users will remain successful in attracting more targeted customers.

7)More tools to optimize social media experience: Users want immediate responses of their queries so there would be natural replies to questions like “my service is down”.

8)Google Wave will impress marketers: As Google Wave is currently limited to developers but in 2011, it will help marketers as well and will enhance the consumers’ experience of communicating with each other.

9)Search results will give a new direction to internet marketing: Semantic web world will enhance the experience of searching. The search results will be based on the way your public profiles are known by them. So it will open a new gate for internet marketing approaches.

10)Integration of social media into digital experiences: Social media will become part of every digital experience. So in future talking about digital media would not mean just digital one but the social one as well.

11)Social media has to go through filtered processes: Because of unnecessary clutters being created by updaters at social networks, people will tend to be less social and prefer to go for filtered options.

12)Cost effective customer care- corporations after social media: Social media though has been serving as an effective tool to communicate with global clients but in future various networks will be used by large corporations to save cost while listening their customers and giving them feedback in a better way.

13)Social networks- not just for entertainment or social activities but for more business: It would not be just a trend to become social at social networks as these plate forms will be used for more business activities. So seriousness will surround the term ‘social media’ and a professional support will be the need of any business to have effective social media presence.

14)Social media strategy would become integral part of marketing campaign: Because of positive contribution toward web marketing, in future social media will have to become part of overall marketing campaign. It needs to be incorporated into company policy.

15)Social media would be on mobiles: With growing use of cell phones, it would become necessary to give social media updates at mobile devices. So telecom companies will think of introducing new socially active mobiles in future.

16)Sharing content would not depend on just an email: Because people are becoming more conscious about sharing their thoughts in the form of articles or blogs so they want to remain connected with their networks anywhere. Cellular phones will be more active in distributing the content of users’ choice at their favorite networks.

17)Group buying- sharing with friends support speedy growth: Group buying services like Groupon have given a new direction to buying experiences and the way an industry can experience speedy growth. Businesses will have to think about offering wide ranging deals.

18)Spreading collective knowledge- social media will take the lead: Though question answer sites are not new but social media has been giving popularity to these sites. The main purpose is to spread the collective knowledge that would benefit users.

19)Buy online- Facebook credits will become a great offer: Though Facebook is offering credit system for micro payments for the last 6 months but in future if the offer exists it will capture the attention of people as they would prefer to make online purchases through reliable platforms.

20)Tailored content- social media can be made effective tool: Social media would not just be the source of entertainment or to throw marketing messages but quality content would be the weapon to attract users and fetch their thirst for knowledge.

21)Tweets promotion- twitter should focus growth: Twitter is trying some monetization features but instead it should focus growth in coming year before shifting to revenue aspects.

22)Hard time for Google to compete with social networks: Though Google is struggling hard to be the lead by introducing various applications like Wave, Buzz, and now the Google Me but still social media will give a tough time. Social media is not in genes of Google but still they can succeed in social games. So coming year will bring more hopelessness for Google in its efforts of becoming more social.

It can be predicted that 2011 will be the year of social media. Those using it effectively will be benefitted, those avoiding it will be at loss while those fighting against it will need brave hearts.

source:

http://www.usainternetmarketing.com/blog/social-media-marketing/how-social-media-will-look-in-2011-some-predicted-trends/

7 Useful Twitter Tools for business

Are you a Twitter fan? Twitter is everywhere in the news, it seems. It’s great for keeping in touch with friends, and even addictive, but a lot of people have been using it for more than just idle updates. Twitter’s concept is quite simple, but given the right tools, it can be harnessed into an instrument to help your business, like blogs have become. There are many apps out there, and I encourage you to continually search for the best out there. To get you started, I’ve compiled some tools you can try out.

1. Livetwitting. During the last Worldwide Developer Conference where Steve Jobs delivered his eagerly anticipated keynote to launch the next iPhone, the top tech blogs used Twitter to give almost real-time update to their readers. The speed at which you can broadcast information to a great number of people makes Twitter ideal for live events. Livetwitting extends this capability a little further by giving you the means to format and edit your tweets.

2. Twitter Groups. Ordinarily, your published tweets are sent to all your followers. However, there are times when we want only certain people to read certain updates. For example, random musings only to close friends, while work-related stuff to clients. Twitter Groups makes this possible by allowing you to organize your followers to certain categories, and send targeted tweets to each.

3. Tweet Volume. It’s a great and simple way to measure the popularity of a brand, a person, or a certain product on Twitter. TweetVolume counts the number of times a word or a phrase has appeared in tweets. Right now the data covers everything from the time Twitter started, but the site has plans to include an option for daily, weekly, monthly and yearly counts in the future.

4. Tweet Scan. Going a step further than Tweet Volume, Tweet Scan is a search engine for Twitter. It’s useful to see what people are saying about you or anything else of interest (like your competitors). You can search by keyword, author, and date with results available via email, RSS, and Twhirl.

5. Twitter PollDaddy. Want to know whether people prefer the iPhone over Blackberries? Omelets over pancakes? The possibilities are endless. PollDaddy enables you to easily conduct surveys through Twitter. All you need is a short question and a list of potential answers. This allows you to get a feel for the people’s pulse, and can be an invaluable tool for your business.

6. Twitter Feed. As tweets are really just another way to publish updates, Twitter Feed is a handy way to incorporate Twitter posts to blogs. It gets content from any site that supports RSS feeds and automatically places the link in your twitter account. A lot of people are already doing this manually anyway to get traffic, so Twitter Feed should make things easier.

7. Twit Response. If you have any time-sensitive announcements, TwitResponse will let you write them and publish them later. The means to hold this information until they’re ready is very important in some businesses where timing is everything, especially in dealing with events, holidays, and product launchings.

source: developertutorials

5 Ways to Win More Business with Google Places

With the rise of smart phone use in the US,it’s  important to have your Google places listing up to speed because when people use voice search on  Android phones, the first results they see are from Google local.Google Places now have a map with local business, which appears above the ads on the right side. One more thing to note is that local listings are appearing above all organic search results and have taken up more space, pushing the organic listings further down the page.

Marketing on Google Places has gotten even more competitive. It used to be you could simply fill out your business listing on Google and see it in the 7 pack a few weeks later.  These days, if your listing doesn’t have a 100% score, you can forget about being listed in the first 7 local businesses that Google displays for local results.  That said, here are 5 things you can do to get more business from local search:

 (1)  Make sure your Google listing has a 100% score – There are more than 20 different fields in your Google Places listing and surprisingly most businesses don’t bother to fill them all in.  At the end of the day, the difference between showing up on the first page of Google Places or not can boil down to not having a video as part of your listing.


(2) Include product or service keywords in your listing description –As with any content on the internet, be sure not to over use your keywords.  Your description should be written for people with an eye for SEO.

(3)Encourage your clients to write a review on your Google places listing – Think about it, if you and 10 local competitors all have 100% scores on your listing, which is fast becoming the case, what will Google use to rank order these businesses? The one component of the profile that is open ended is the review section so in many cases, the business with the most reviews can win the day.

(4) Make sure you are listed in your local phone book –Google looks to established sources of data to both build their database and check for local business information.  If you’re not listed here, it may affect your ability to rank on the first page.

(5)  Get listed in the other top local directories like:

• Yelp
• Bing
• Yahoo
• Best of the Web
• Hotfrog, and
• Foursquare

Source: http://www.toprankblog.com/2010/11/5-ways-local-search/

12 Tips on Live Blogging & Content Marketing

Here are a few tips that will not only give you a tested and proven guideline but should improve your efficiency and quality of output.

• Create a schedule. Whether you’re blogging on your own or with a team, pick which sessions and related topics you plan on covering before the event. SXSWi has almost too many concurrent sessions and with such a large event, not planning will lead to getting to sessions late. That means a crappy seat in back and likely not anywhere near an outlet.
  It’s very easy to get distracted while at the conference and with live blogging, there’s no time to waste. If you know which sessions you’ll be covering, it can help to create draft blog posts ahead of time and include as much information in the draft as you can. This will make it easier to finish off the post as close to the session time as possible.

• Plan ahead. When planning out which sessions, interviews or events you’ll cover, put together a grid showing session names, times and who should be covering (if you’re part of a blogging team). Coordinate sessions coverage avoids duplication and ensures the topical mix of content you plan on covering is properly represented. The My SXSW tool makes it pretty easy to research sessions.

• Write the posts offline in an application like notepad, then transfer the post to the blog. Many session rooms have poor if any internet connection at all. Last year, ATT pulled out a big fail for anyone using iPhones or their wireless cards. Make posts in an offline document and transfer them over to your blog software when you’re ready to publish and have a good internet connection.

• Take photos. Photos of the panel or an individual speaker are great and can add a lot to what otherwise would be a text heavy post. Photos of the PowerPoint slides can be particularly useful if the presentation goes fast or doesn’t follow a logical order. You can reference the photos of PowerPoint slides later when finishing the blog post after the session ends. We tend to publish photos on a TopRank Blog account at Flickr just for conferences as well as to Facebook. On Flickr, we typically create a “set” for each conference event and are sure to link to those collections of photos from within the blog posts.

• Promotion tips for conference photos on Flickr: Be sure to add titles and descriptions to each photo. Include an anchor text link from the description back to the blog post it’s used with. With your Flickr account, be sure to network with other Flickr members that would be interested in conference photos. When we set up an account just for one conference, we exported our hundreds of network contacts from LinkedIn and used the feature in Flickr that allows you to invite 100 people at a time to our Flickr network. The more relevant people in your Flickr network, the more people that “see” what photos you’re posting. Images taken through out the day and eve should be uploaded, titled, tagged and commented/linked before the next morning.

• Take videos. Just about every digital camera can take web quality video. We added 16gb memory cards so each camera can take several hours of video. Interviews with attendees, speakers and exhibitors are particularly popular. You must keep in mind that with large companies, employees can rarely do a video interview without approval from their Legal and/or PR departments, so you need to schedule those ahead of time. You also need to be aware of the video taping policy of the conference. Most events do not want you to take videos of the sessions themselves. If you have an iPhone, you might consider using the UStream application to capture and post live streaming video.  UStream will save the video to YouTube and also announce it to your network on Twitter and Facebook.

• Add some flavor to your videos. You don’t necessarily need a pro level of post-video production to get good promotion value out of conference videos. You should however, be sure to use software like Windows Movie Maker (free) to add text to the video indicating the topic and your blog URL. Also, set up a channel on YouTubeas a way to organize and promote your posts along with accounts at other video sharing sites.

• Sit close to the panel AND the screen. Also, if there is just one large screen in the room, sit between that and the panel. That way you can get clear photos of both the panel and PPT slides. If you have one of the most common digital cameras, don’t bother with a flash if you’re not close to your subject.

• Network with other bloggers. When in the sessions or in the press room (if your blogging on a press pass) be sure to connect with other bloggers. You have something in common – the formidable task of taking a mix of presentations, some great and some psychotically unorganized, and turning them into a story that makes sense to a savvy search marketing audience – all in real time. Connecting with other bloggers both offline and online can facilitate information sharing as well as links.

• Promote your posts. Once your posts go live, then be sure to make an effort to promote the posts to your network on Twitter, Facebook and other social communities. For example, promote screen shots of your videos to Flickr with a link to the video post. Let interview subjects and other bloggers know when you’ve posted. Leverage your social community networks (StumbleUpon, delicious.com, Facebook and niche/vertical specific sites) to draw attention to particularly “promotable” content.

• Tag your posts and media. For some conferences, the organizer will advise the attendees to use a specific tag to make it easy for readers to find posts specific to that event. The easiest example would be the #sxsw and #sxswi tags being used on Twitter for this event.  Keyword specific tags are also useful. Use these tags not only with your blog posts and Twitter, but also with photos, video and social bookmark/news submissions.

• Establish a few basic blogging guidelines or simple processes. Here are a few that we start with:
  • Create drafts of posts BEFORE the conference with notes.
  • After sessions posts are saved in draft form.
  • All posts must have images, ideally of the session panel.
  • All posts are associated with relevant categories and tags.
  • Alternate title tags with keywords are written.
  • Post titles start with a consistent naming convention along with a short description.
  • Once posts are edited, editor makes them live.
  • Better quality posts are vetted for promotion within blogger networks.
  • Round up posts are published at the end of each day or at the end of the conference.

The biggest takeaway for better liveblogging is to plan ahead and follow through with promoting your content once it’s live. What liveblogging tips have you found to be effective for content marketing? Any tips or tricks on being more efficient?

Courtesy : http://www.toprankblog.com/2010/03/live-blogging-tips-sxswi/