#2015 planning

New Post has been published on http://www.projecteve.com/social-media-is-no-longer-free/

Social Media Is No Longer Free

  For years, one of the greatest draws of social media was a “free” way for brands to promote their products and services. With Facebook leading the way to a pay-to-pay model and the fact that every social platform has advertising options, the days of free social media are long over.

Surprisingly, that may not be a bad thing for many brands. While a large majority of brands are using social media at this point, that doesn’t mean that social media has been fully integrated into the brand strategy. Less than 50% of companies have someone dedicated to content marketing and 5 out 6 customer inquiries are going unanswered.

Perhaps if companies are forced to put a little skin in the game with social advertising, it will give execs a wakeup call and force them to readdress their willy nilly approach to social media.

Social media has never been free

Let’s be frank. Even if you go back five years before all the ads and apps were available, social media has never been free. Sure it’s never cost anything to post a status on Facebook or pin a photo on Pinterest, but how much did it cost to produce that content?

No matter how simple your social media efforts are, it takes time and money to support social media campaigns. Depending how sophisticated your campaigns are, your expenses could include:

Community Management

Content Development – employee’s time or outside agency

Monitoring & Engagement Tools

CRM Integration

Contests – prizes, apps to manage, legal input on rules

Branding & visual design expenses

Custom apps

Video development

Ads may bring social media out of its silo

So despite that fact that your social media efforts have likely claimed some space in the budget, chances are it’s not fully integrated into your company. I’ve seen a number of companies that struggle to:

Maintain a consistent social media presence.

Make the regular promotion/marketing schedule sync with the social media calendar.

Respond to comments, thus losing the chance to connect with brand advocates or resolve client issues.

Bring the community feedback to company decision makers in order to improve products or services.

Utilize metrics, thus it’s anyone’s guess what is working and what isn’t.

If you’re wondering how paying for social media ads change anything, let me explain.

Making the decision to invest in social advertising is making a commitment. If your company dedicates a good hunk of money that is a statement that social media is important.

Since it would be silly to throw money at a random post, the decision to invest in social advertising should come with a new level of commitment to your overall social efforts. This means keeping people engaged once you’ve attracted them through ads AND being prepared to manage the response (both on social media and on things like order fulfillment).

In short making social media an integrated, important part of the company.

And despite the emphasis on the new term “return on engagement,” social advertising will also come with the expectation of ROI.

Enter big data

Though you can gain quite a bit of information about your community though your basic social insights, the amount of data out there for social advertisers is truly staggering.

  While Twitter’s ad platform has been focused on re-marketing options this year, we’re now seeing Google work on “pre-targeting.” The idea of using data to predict a trend before it happens, and then having your content marketing ready and waiting.

  Social media advertising is getting more sophisticated every day, and so too are the insights that can be gleaned from it. Whether you choose to have a complex plan or keep things simple, one thing is for certain: social media has grown own up and it can’t sit in isolation any more.

Nicole Krug is a marketing strategy consultant specializing in digital brand management, social media, web development and email marketing. Since founding Social Light in 2009, she has helped clients hone their digital marketing strategies to bring more exposure to their brands and boost their bottom lines.

Share small business news, blogs and social media tips with Project Eve’s community of small business owners and entrepreneurs today. Our contributors come from a wide range of backgrounds; so whether you are a small business owner, social media strategist, financial adviser, serial entrepreneur, or write an amateur blog we urge you to contribute a blog to our 500,000+ community today. For more information, please refer to our Content Submissions Guidelines.

There have been certain things that I wanted to do with this blog since I joined tumblr. Now that I finally know the rough layout of the site after nearly two years of being on this site, I think I'm finally ready to start.

One of the things I really want to do is post some of my stories that I'm actually proud of. The ones I can re-read and think: this is the type of story I'd enjoy reading. Who knows, if I actually feel confident enough, I might actually post a really old story of mine or a rough draft of one of the ones I'm currently working on.

Another thing is that I think I'm going to start posting some of the things that I find interesting, instead of mostly just text posts. I miss mainly reblogging stuff from the fandoms I'm in. This will include stuff like Pokémon, Rune Factory, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Avatar: The Legend Of Korra, Rise of the Guardians, How to Train Your Dragon, Class of the Titans, etc. 

New Post has been published on http://www.projecteve.com/2014-metrics-why-a-year-end-review-matters/

2014 Metrics: Why a Year-End Review Matters

    I don’t want to scare you, but 2015 is right around the corner.

  If you haven’t yet done your 2015 planning taking the time to review your 2014 metrics is a good place to start. You likely have good idea of who your top customers are and what your best sellers are, but do you know what motivates someone to buy from you?

  As you look forward to 2015 it’s a good idea to take the time to do a deep dive into your metrics in order to figure out what worked for you in 2014 and what didn’t. Here’s a list of some of the things that you can review and learn from:

  What’s driving traffic to your website?

  There are usually four-six main sources of traffic to your website:

  Direct traffic: Someone typed your website into their browser and navigated directly to your site. This is often a sign of repeat customers, or may come from people typing in your website after receiving a business card.

  Organic Search: People found your site through a search on Google or Bing.

  Referral: Visitors came to your website through a link from another website.

  Social: Traffic driven to your website by social networks.

  Email: Visitors clicked on links in email messages (if your company does not have email marketing campaigns this will not be applicable).

  Paid Search: Traffic driven to your site through PPC campaigns (applicable only if you have paid search engine advertising).

    Use your 2014 metrics to explore how people are finding your website and what that information means to you. For instance is there a particular website that is sending a high amount of traffic your way? If so, can you leverage that relationship? Can you also think about how get a placement on similar websites to bring even more traffic to you?

  On the flip side if you are not getting very much traffic from search engines you may want to investigate your SEO strategy in order to bring more visitors to your site.

  Is your social media effective?

  We just covered that social media can drive people to your website, so be aware of which social media sites are sending people your way and take this into consideration when planning for 2015.

  For instance if you spent a bunch of money on Facebook ads, but it only brought 20 people to your website and created one sale, that may not be a strategy you want to repeat.

  With that said, you also need to take a look at your 2014 metrics from your social media platforms to get the whole picture. Social media is great for exposure and engagement, but does not always drive direct sales. For example, Pinterest is the top social site for driving sales, but takes an average of two and a half months to convert a customer.

  If your social platforms have a growing fan base that is interacting with your content, you are exposing people to your brand and sales will come; even if they never directly convert from the social platform. However, if a certain social platform has limited engagement and drives very little traffic to your site, that may be a sign your need to concentrate on other places.

  Are there trends to your sales?

  Take a look at your transactions and see if there are any trends you can spot that will help you sell more in 2015. For example:

  Are people buying from you at a certain time of the month or year? If you have certain products that had seasonal spikes, make sure that you leverage that in 2015 by planning promotional campaigns around those spikes.

  Do people buy certain products or services together? If five out of 10 customers are buying two products together than you’ve discovered a great upsell to leverage. You may even want to consider creating a package to group your common products/services together for an easy sale.

  Is there a product or service that gives you a greater profit margin? If devise a promotional campaign to sell more!

    Taking time to look at your 2014 metrics can help uncover a wealth of information that will make your 2015 numbers even stronger.

      Nicole Krug is a marketing strategy consultant specializing in digital brand management, social media, web development and email marketing. Since founding Social Light in 2009, she has helped clients hone their digital marketing strategies to bring more exposure to their brands and boost their bottom lines.

Share small business news, blogs and social media tips with Project Eve’s community of small business owners and entrepreneurs today. Our contributors come from a wide range of backgrounds; so whether you are a small business owner, social media strategist, financial adviser, serial entrepreneur, or write an amateur blog we urge you to contribute a blog to our 500,000+ community today. For more information, please refer to our Content Submissions Guidelines.