What I can do for you as your digital marketer

From the start of this blog up to this point I have focused on 13 topics, all of them relating to Digital Marketing. They are topics that I have been learning throughout the past few months. However they are more than just topics, they are valuable tools that I have been trying to put into practice and develop in order to develop essential skills and knowledge than give me a foot up in the job market. Over the course of this blog I have written 6,434 words and had 87 views, with the most popular being my Inbound Marketing blog. As a student graduating in a few months a question inevitably comes up that I believe should be answered: “What can I do for you as your digital marketer?” –It’s hard to talk about yourself sometimes but that is what you have to do in an interview.

The first and most important foundational aspect in being a digital marketer is understanding the numerous facets of digital marketing.

Though the past few months I have developed a valuable understanding of these facets and been able to talk with industry leaders in each of these areas. Even though I may not be the most eloquent writer, or the most in depth expert on a certain topic, I can create and implement a digital marketing plan that covers every area of the digital realm. The tools that I have learned to help me with this are:

• Google Analytics Certification
• Hootsuite Certification
• Google AdWords Certification

I believe that these certifications show a drive and a passion in learning and cultivating ones intellect. They are not hard certifications to get, it just takes the time and patience to sit down and do them. After you have done them I see them as proof of a solid foundation. I don’t feel comfortable in all those software platforms but I know that I have some knowledge of how they function and it is a matter of using them for a little while in the real world- then I will become an expert. Commitment and curiosity are personality traits that I want people to recognize in me. People with these two traits will succeed in anything that they do.

Secondly, as a business, you want traffic to your website, conversions on your product and engagement with your content. (I can do that!)

All of these culminate to creating a community of customers that want to keep coming back. There are many technical aspects of digital marketing that can generate figures on effectiveness and engagement but there is a lot of psychology behind people’s decisions and what resonates with them. I believe that I am skilled in an area that some people forget about: a rounded skillset that goes beyond what is learned in a business program or an industry related internship. It incorporates hobbies and art and past work experience outside of the industry. Some people tend to focus on the current information that is being funneled to them without stepping back and making the connections to past experiences that may seem unrelated.

I have found this marketing class to be immensely impactful on my learning and preparedness for a career. Mark Staton has constructed it in a way that gives his students the resources and insight to develop their skills and retain what they have learned on a very high level. Something that he said multiple times was that his desire for the class was to develop students who could leave the class at the end of the quarter and start their own digital marketing company. His students have done this, and I feel as if I could also.

Aside from the skills that I developed throughout the course of this class, I have been able to implement some of them in my own semi-professional photography business and graphic design work. I see my knowledge and skills in graphic design and photography as being a valuable resource for any one that is hiring me. Working at creating a website and creating beautiful infographics in order to engage people are all things that I have done this quarter that went beyond what I learned throughout the digital marketing course. However, the drive and principles behind them were principles that were foundational to the course.

Mobile is here, is your business ready?

Mobile cannot be considered a small percentage of the internet any more. With smartphones as the norm in 1^st world countries, and a quickly rising user group in emerging markets such as India, a companies mobile presence isn’t something to be considered lightly. The graph below show the percentage of global internet traffic that is now mobile.

ComScore published an e-book titled Digital Future in Focus 2014. In it they pointed out four shifts:

Platform Shifts: Consumers are engaging with digital media across an increasing number of platforms, with mobile being the single most significant change in this landscape since the invention of the internet. As digital platforms continue to emerge, media fragmentation will only accelerate, creating the defining marketing challenge of this era

Content Shifts: People are rapidly changing the way they consume content as they shift from traditional media to digital media, requiring media companies to rethink the content experience and which formats – from both a media and advertising perspective – are best for engaging with consumers.

Demographic Shifts: Young people and Millennials play a critical role in leading shifts in consumer technology adoption and usage habits, in areas such as social media, mobile and video. Their behaviors today offer important insight into the future of digital media and an opportunity for marketers to get ahead of the curve.

Marketing Shifts: Marketing dollars are gradually following eyeballs to mobile platforms as mobile measurement and monetization emerge as important challenges to media industry economics. At the same time, new ad and campaign measurement capabilities are reducing waste, improving optimization, and ultimately driving better marketing ROI.

The question many companies are asking is “How do I make mobile conversions?” The wonderful folks at MOZ pointed out three things about mobile

1. It’s new, so customers haven’t adjusted to how they’re going to use their new mobile devices yet
2. It’s new, so companies haven’t built sites that visitors want to buy from yet
3. New companies who are putting a lot of emphasis are getting amazing results, like Gilt and Fab, but larger online retailers, like Amazon, aren’t selling much on mobile, even if they have great mobile sites.

Companies that don’t sell their product on line must realize that people consume vast amounts of information through their mobile screens. People are always reading articles and doing research on things before they buy on their mobile device. Creating a good mobile site or mobile friendly site will keep people coming back and consuming more information, potentially turning into qualified leads and conversions. Some companied will want a separate mobile site that may have different content. To determine this you should look at your analytics and see what content or areas of your website mobile users are already frequenting.

As a result of more mobile usage there has been a rise in device overlap and transitioning from one display type to another many times throughout the day. The rise of the mobile device has resulted in internet usage almost doubling from 2010 to 2013.

While this usage fragmentation is a challenge for marketers to reach their target market in the right ways at the right time it also presents an opportunity for businesses to stand out. In the ComScore e-book they said,

“It’s imperative that companies understand the multi-platform environment, develop the right tailored marketing strategies, implement the tools to execute on those strategies, and finally measure accordingly if they want to achieve successful results on their digital marketing investments.”

A big part of understanding the multi-platform environment is realizing that apps account for 85% of internet usage on smartphones. Many companied have seized this opportunity and created beautiful, easy-to-use, apps that present their content more effectively than they could on the web. Some examples of this are news sites like USA Today who fully embraced the mobile screen buy creating a quick and easy app that presents news stories in a simplistic and enjoyable way.

The key step for a company is to determine how mobile will benefit their customers and make it easier for them to interact with the company and its products. Amazon has created an app for shopping that allows people to easily navigate through products that might have taken longer in a mobile site. An added benefit to making an app it that you have access to more of the phones hardware. The Amazon app, for instance, uses the camera on the devise to read barcodes and compare prices with what they have on the site.

In a market that is only moving more towards mobile, companies must create a mobile marketing strategy that will help convert people even if they are using mobile sites or apps.

A Few Web Skills Any Marketer Should Have

In the digital age people consume vast amounts of information through digital mediums. The average person spends 6.75 hrs. on Facebook alone each month. Because of the internet marketers need to learn and develop digital marketing strategies to get in front of consumers on the internet. Sure, print may have its place still but everyone knows that if you as a company has a weak online marketing strategy then you will not grow your business to its fullest potential.

Learn Some Coding!

As a marketer it is invaluable to know at least some code. Many college grads from Ivy League school are going to coding boot camps and finding that they are much more hirable if they have some understanding of coding. In a Bloomberg Business Week article they talked to Dartmouth grad Katy Feng who said “’I thought, they’ll see Dartmouth, and they’ll hire me, that’s not really how it works, I found.’ She figures programming is the best way to get the job she wants. Hence the basement, where she’s paying $11,500 for a three-month crash course in coding.” This is not to say that you have to go out and spend $11,000 to get the experience you need, you can actually sit at your home desk and make a Codecademy account and start gaining the skills that will make you more hirable.

Codecademy is a free online teaching aid for people you wasn’t to learn some code like HTML and CSS. The interface is very simple and easy to use. There is a panel of instructions and explanation o the right. In the middle is where you enter the code based on the instructions you receive. On the left is the visual interpretation of the code that you write. The nice part about it is that you can go at your own pace and there are helpful hints as you go along in case you get stuck. The other nice part about it is that you can see the results of the code in the window right away. I am a visual person, I really like to see what I am doing and learn from the combination of visuals and formulaic code that I am writing.

The negatives to Codecademy is that repetition and speed are a key component to learning code well and I feel that Codecademy isn’t the best at facilitating that. However, I have not used it to its fullest so I may be wrong.

Squarespace

Another interesting online tool that can be valuable is Squarespace. It is a one-stop website builder and hosting site that is all about simplifying web development into something that people can use and understand without needing knowledge of HTML or CSS. This is the main benefit of Squarespace – being able to create a beautiful website in minutes without writing any code. There are a lot of templates that you can chose from which are laid out in different styles. There are quite a few to choose from however, if you have a clear vision of what you want your site to look like then you might have some trouble with the limiting templates. The nice this is that you can always go to the CSS view and put in code to help get to the look that you want.

I have messed around on square space and created a website for my photography at JachanDeVol.com. I found it easy to use and easy to create a good looking website that showcased my photos well. It has made me think about a lot of aspects of marketing and ways incorporate new things I am learning. It has been an essential part of creating a brand for myself and learning how to make a good first impression. There have been some things that I have ran into that frustrate me but I have overcome some of them as a result of Squarespace’s great customer service. I just tried my hand a creating a shopping page and it was extremely easy and intuitive. Here’s a link to it, Shop.

In the end there are many resources out there where coding can be learned. It can be a very valuable skill to have in your tool belt, allowing you to edit some code without bothering the web design team which creates a better workflow and faster turnaround times on projects. Having just a basic knowledge of coding and what makes good web design might just get you that next job.

Programmatic and Native Advertising: The Future of Relevancy

What is Programmatic Ad Buying?

Programmatic might sound like a word to describe some sort of robotic intelligence and when coupled with ad buying things get interesting. In reading AdWeek’s article, Programmatic for Dummies: Everyone says it’s exploding, but what is it? I found it to be very helpful, and it gave many perspectives from many different people in the industry (which I will be quoting a loot from). The whole idea of programmatic ad buying can be understood, to a degree, with the Amazon metaphor. “I like the Amazon analogy,” he says. “You have two choices in buying baby diapers. There’s the grocery store, where you drive, get a cart, walk through the aisles, wait at the cashier, etc.—it’s a pretty manual process. Or, you can pull up Amazon, navigate the site and with one click, it ends up on your doorstep. That’s a lot more efficient. Programmatic aims to do the same for media, with a touch of eBay added for the auctioning of impressions as in RTB.” In the past, you’d let a campaign run for a while, spend some money and then optimize after a month or something. With programmatic, this can happen in real time.” “I like the Amazon analogy,” he says. “You have two choices in buying baby diapers. There’s the grocery store, where you drive, get a cart, walk through the aisles, wait at the cashier, etc.—it’s a pretty manual process. Or, you can pull up Amazon, navigate the site and with one click, it ends up on your doorstep. That’s a lot more efficient. Programmatic aims to do the same for media, with a touch of eBay added for the auctioning of impressions as in RTB.”“I like the Amazon analogy,” he says. “You have two choices in buying baby diapers. There’s the grocery store, where you drive, get a cart, walk through the aisles, wait at the cashier, etc.—it’s a pretty manual process. Or, you can pull up Amazon, navigate the site and with one click, it ends up on your doorstep. That’s a lot more efficient. Programmatic aims to do the same for media, with a touch of eBay added for the auctioning of impressions as in RTB.”

A point of contention

However there are some people that do not like the use of this metaphor. Eric Bader, a former media executive who is now CMO at RadiumOne said, “Some of these metaphors are taken too literally. I’m not buying the Amazon analogy. This is about activating advertising, electronically brokering deals, software-mediating transactions and doing real-time optimizations. In the past, you’d let a campaign run for a while, spend some money and then optimize after a month or something. With programmatic, this can happen in real time.” “Some of these metaphors are taken too literally,” he says. “I’m not buying the Amazon analogy. This is about activating advertising, electronically brokering deals, software-mediating transactions and doing real-time optimizations. In the past, you’d let a campaign run for a while, spend some money and then optimize after a month or something. With programmatic, this can happen in real time.”

Different

Programmatic is not the same as Real Time Bidding (at least for now). In RTB there are just bidding and exchanges, in contrast to Programmatic which takes much more data into account. Programmatic is using data, tech and software to get the most out of every dollar spent. In a world where companies are dropping hundreds of thousands or millions on advertising – this, I believe is a good trend. There is some consensus that RTB and Programmatic are the same or at least they will be merged and be synonyms.

Problems

A challenge facing the total implementation of Programmatic is the multi-device world that we live in. People are constantly moving from device to device throughout the day. Some devices are easier to push ads too and some are not. For some devices and operating systems it can still be hard to collect data on who is using that device and how you can target ads to them.

The Big Idea

Programmatic is about using software that is efficient and complex to be more productive than humans could ever be. The media buying process can’t and shouldn’t be done by humans anymore. There is a complex system of programming that takes customer data and crunches it and when someone wants to show an ad for dog food to dog owners they just have to tell the program that and it will put the ads in the right places.

Andrew Pancer, of the ad firm Dstillery, stated that, “Historically, marketers turned to a handful of publishers with whom they would contract to run campaigns, these contracts were typically for a fixed budget amount over a fixed period of time.” With programmatic the budget and the campaign can be constantly tailored buy the software resulting in more value for the money spent. The benefit to the consumer is that the ads they see will become more and more relevant. The act of advertising had gotten a bad rap for the blanket ads that end up annoying people. Concepts like Programmatic and Inbound Marketing are creating a less annoying, and more pleasant media world to walk in by providing relevant information and ads.

Native Advertising

Native Advertising is the concept where a brand integrates their messages directly into content and uses that content as an ad. I see this, if done well, as another way to present relevant information to consumers. If done poorly it comes across and tricking people into advertising. A company want to be seen as helpful, if consumers have that opinion of them then they have done an excellent job at marketing and advertising themselves. Native ads can engage customers more and inform them with relevant content that they are already looking for. Even though it is in its infancy, I believe that the combination of Programmatic and Native advertising will improve the connection between consumers and brands.

AdWords: A Key Componet to Small Business Sucess

Google AdWords is a powerful tool for small and large companies. I especially think that small companies can drastically improve their lead generation and brand awareness through developing campaigns with ad groups and displaying them on search pages. The great thing about AdWords is that if you are a small company is having a hard time with SEO and moving up in the search rankings AdWords can but your site and brand on the first page or even at the top of the page before the first organic result.

Business News Daily wrote an article titled, Google AdWords Secrets: What Works for Small Business. In it they said,

“Launching an AdWords campaign is one of the most effective ways to grow a small business. Whether you are trying to get the word out about your business or have a special event or sale to promote, launching ads on Google can mean big business in little time.”

If you are just getting started and you want the least amount of setup the Search and Display Ads campaign type is the best option. With this option you will be able to reach the larges variety of people with ads displaying on search page results and on partner websites. If you need more flexibility in your campaigns strait search or display campaigns might be a better option. If you move from the “standard” feature set to the “all features” you gain the ability to tailor your campaign a little more. For instance, a service company or business that has hours of operation directly related to the product or service being sold might want to only show their ads during their business hours. You can also use the “all features” option to gain access to tools that allow for specific targeting to certain groups or demographics.

One can’t forget that negative keywords can be a very useful tool to focus in on your target market. Instead of having a large keyword group you can just add a few negative key words in order to narrow the target market down.

Quick tip: You will want to look at your Ad rank and make sure that your ranks are between 1 and 8. The reason for this is that if your rank is greater 8 it will be displayed on the second page, which doesn’t get nearly the amount of traffic compared to the first page. One way to improve this rank is to bid more for your keywords.

When creating a search ad campaign you want to make sure that your business’ ads are organized into ad groups and campaigns. This will allow your business’ ads to be displayed during the correct searches and be specific to the searches that are being made. For example, if you are a video production firm and someone searches for digital cameras you won’t want to display an ad on their search page because that person is not your market. You are offering services and they are looking for a digital camera which is a specific physical product. Having focused ad groups puts your ads in front of the people that you want seeing them – people that are looking for the production services.

If you are thinking that being so specific means lots and lots of campaigns and ad groups then you are correct. Google AdWords does have limits for these groups but they are so high that we aren’t going to worry about them at this point in time.

Keyword matching is a tool that is very useful for targeting your ads to specific searches. There a few options that you can choose from for how the keywords are matched. It would be very valuable to run a search terms report to determine what terms people are already searching for and finding your site. If we use the video production firm example, then the different matching tools would allow you to put in video production and a keyword term and tailor how AdWords handles it. It could use it for an exact match or it could use a broad match. The broad match would widen the search terms to similar ones and display your ad on pages containing words similar. The exact match would do just that, display you ad on pages where people search exactly “video production.”

Some companies end up getting almost all their new customers from their AdWords ads on Google search pages one company in particular is Balloons Over Asheville. They market exclusively on AdWords with campaigns constructed around keywords relating to recreational activities in Asheville, North Carolina, and the surrounding area.

As a company the goal is for you to generate recognition and leads that could turn into customers in the future. Search ads can put your name in a visible spot event if people are searching for your competitor. For a small company this can be very powerful and useful in developing an image and brand awareness.

Organic and Paid Search: Structuring ads to reach the masses

There are two way that people can reach your website; the first is through organic search and the second is through paid search. The difference between them is that organic means that people find you strictly though the term that they search for and the results that come up. Paid on the other hand is when you pay for an ad and it shows up on a search page or display network, because that is where you paid for it to show up, and the person reaches you that way. According to HubSpot data, most searchers click on the organic results – in fact, over 70% of people click on the organic search results, while only 30% are likely to click on the paid links. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use paid ads – paid ads are great if your search engine rankings are band and you need exposure.

Moving on to ads. There are different forms of ads and ways that they can be distributed. Google has outlined a few for us.

• Text ads: The simplest and most common kind of search ad, text ads are made up of a headline, a display URL that shows the address of your website, and a description.
• Ads with extensions: Ad extensions are visual enhancements to search ads that more prominently display information about your business, such as a phone number, location, or links to other pieces of relevant content from deeper within your sitemap. You can add these enhancements, which often appear in ads above search results, manually or they can be added by our automated formatting systems.

Ads with extensions might use:

• Image ads
• Rich media ads
• Video ads

When using text ads key words are very important. Each keyword gets a Quality Score on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 is the lowest score and 10 is the highest. This will determine the quality of your ad.

Why does your ad quality matter? The more relevant your ads are to the user, the more likely it is that you’ll have a higher Quality Score and benefit from having higher quality components of your Ad Rank, such as a higher ad position or lower cost-per-click.

Google lays out a few different bidding strategies for your ads.

• Cost-per-click (CPC): If you want to focus on clicks on your ads and drive traffic to your website, you’ll want to use CPC bidding.
• Cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM): If you want to focus on impressions — the number of times your ad shows — and increase awareness of your brand, you’ll want to use CPM bidding. Note that CPM bidding is available for Display Network campaigns only.
• Cost-per-acquisition (CPA): If you want to focus on conversions — which is when people take a specific action on your website after clicking one of your ads — you’ll want to use CPA bidding.

You can choose the networks you want your ads to show up on. One option it to only display ads on the search network. The benefit of this option is that you’re connecting with potential customers at the beginning of the process when they are searching and gathering data. I think this is valuable because they haven’t formed all their opinions and haven’t been persuaded a certain way yet. This opens the door and provides you with a great opportunity to solve their problem. This method allows you to target people that might have looked at other websites related to you and your product. Once they have visited a website in the network and with the same keywords and products and you they will show ads related to your site. The second is to show your ads on display networks. Thirdly, you can chose to display your ads on a combination of the two.

You can get more specific by using location, language and device when targeting your ads. This ensures that you can reach your target market in the most effective way whether it is a mobile ad that is displayed on a mobile device or a location ad that pops up when people are searching near to you.

An important aspect of online ads and getting clicks is organizing everything. In Google AdWords training they suggest that under your account you have your campaigns, and within each campaign it contains one or more ad groups. Ad groups allow you to organize your campaign into sets of ads and keywords these directly relate to your campaigns, which can improve your Quality Score and help boost your ROI.

Benefiting your Business through SEO and Link Building

SEO and Link building are essential to growing your business and driving revenue. SEO, which stands for search engine optimization, is the practice of making your content and webpages easily “indexable” and “crawlable” resulting in higher ranking for your webpages. Search engine companies like Google and Microsoft have algorithms and programs that “crawl” the web and index individual pages. Indexing is when a specific pages get their own spot and the content is analyzed by the crawlers and stored in datafarms. The concept of SEO and link building is making you pages easy to crawl and index. When a website is constructed well this will improve its position on search engine results because Google will recognize it as a valuable and credible site.

There are many SEO companies that have sprung up throughout the age of Google and search engines. Moz used to be a company called SEO Moz who specifically dealt in improving search rankings until they determined that the SEO in their name made people think that they were a company that exclusively did SEO. The problem was that people thought of SEO as a one and done service. The reality of SEO is that  in order for it to work effectively you need to have good content to improve your search rankings. Many SEO companies have expanded to offering more inbound and content marking services because they compliment SEO so well.

To get a little more specific Moz’s Definition of link building “is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own.”

There are many techniques for building links, and while they vary in difficulty, people in charge of SEO at companies tend to consider it very hard. This is because Google has developed many types of algorithms to make sure that they rank the best pages the highest. Links are one of the main tools that improve search engine rankings.

There are two fundamental ways that the search engines use links:

1. To discover new web pages
2. To help determine how well a page should rank in their results

After search engines have crawled pages on the web, they can then pull the content of those pages and add it to their indexes, allowing the content to be searchable buy their engine. People want answers fast and accurate so search companies have to be able to pull pages and information quickly and accurately and in order to please their users.

The trick to SEO and link building is Google’s algorithms which have become very good at determining good links and weeding out websites that over-optimize and try to fill their pages with keywords and links. This is a practice that Google actively combats because they genuinely want the best pages ranked the highest not pages that have sub-par content and that are there just to get hits.There are two main algorithms that help determine page rank. The first is called Panda; it’s job is to scourer the content and determinist quality. The second is Penguin; it’s job it to look at the links that are in the page and what links are pointing to the page. With these Google can determine the value of the page for people using the search engine.

There are time in which you don’t want your links to me sent back to Google for SEO rankings and indexing because they might hurt their SRO results. This is called a “nofollow” link and that is because that phrase is inserted into the link telling Google not to count it and connect it with the site. Usually this practice is applied to areas of websites where they don’t have control over the links posted. Example of this would be:

• Blog comments
• Forum posts
• Guest book comments
• Editable Wiki pages (e.g. Wikipedia)
• Yahoo! Answers
• Guest post signatures

Links should be thought of as signals. When Larry Page first started using links to rank pages in Google he was essentially using links as signaling a “vote” for a page. The idea behind this was that if someone linked to a page then that was a vote of confidence for that page and most likely it had content that was valuable. These two concepts and practices should be understood if you want to build you company’s visibility and drive traffic to your site. Search engine are a powerful lead generation tool that should not be ignored.

Inbound sales: Out with the old, in with the new (but we are going to keep email)

Everyone has a stereotype around sales people. They think that they are manipulative, impersonal, dishonest and only in it to get your money. The result of this is that consumers are changing the way that they buy things and the way that they interact with sales people and the sales process.

Enter Inbound Sales. In an earlier blog post I talks about the importance of inbound marketing and the principles behind it; now I would like to talk to you about it with regards to sales.

The sales world is shifting. Salespeople are focusing on value, and the buying experience is actually enjoyable and this is a result of the shift to inbound sales. Inbound sales take a potential buyer that has already engaged in inbound marketing, by going out and seeking some information. The consumer who is reaching out and looking for information is called a marketing qualified lead, and they will start to be scored on their interactions with a site. Some companies might give them points for providing an email address and maybe a larger number of points for downloading an e-book. This will add up for each customer and push them up a scale, let’s say 0-100, where once they reach 75 they will be considered a sales qualified lead and be handed off to a sales person.

This strategy is not cold calling people and bothering them with unsolicited offers. Instead, this method sees people that are genuinely interested and reaches out to further aid then and answer questions that could solve a problem that they had.

An e-book called, THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO INBOUND SALES, points out that “It is all about understanding their interests, being able to identify their pain points and finding a solution that will add value to their lives.” The whole process becomes much more personal.

Another concept that might seem old school is e-mail. Many people believe that email is dead and that social media is the only way to go, especially when you are a new company. However, e-mail is not dead and it is still one of the best ways to connect with you personas and generate authentic leads. An e-book by constant contact titled Email Marketing Essentials Reach Your Customers, Increase Loyalty, and Do More Business with Email Marketing talks about some statistics that should be considered before you dismiss e-mail as an archaic form of communication.

• 66 percent of online consumers have made a purchase as a result of an email marketing message. (Direct Marketing Association, 2013)
• Email outperforms direct mail with more than 4 times the return on investment. (Direct Marketing Association, 2013)
• Email is almost 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined in helping your business acquire new customers. (McKinsey, 2014)

Email is a form of communication that can easily be tailored to individual customers. This allows inbound marketing to be more effective and allows constant contact. But you have to be careful when pushing email marketing because you don’t want to make people feel like they are being spammed.

7 Tips to keep customers and help them find value

1. Only sent e-mails to people you know or have opted-in
2. Treat your contacts like people not just e-mail addresses
3. Send content that they will find value in
4. Set expectations and don’t leave people hanging by not producing content
5. Communicate professionally

REI does a good job with their email newsletters and promotions. They create personalized content based on buying history and past engagement. The promotions add value buy informing the consumer on deals and coupons. The blog posts and articles add value by informing and teaching about best practices in the wilderness and exciting new hikes.

Many companies still will buy email lists and spam people and that is a practice that should never be condoned and should never be considered. At the end of the day you should be providing real value to your contacts and moving them down the marketing funnel in a gentile, authentic way.

Graphics are from the e-books mentioned

UI & UX: Efficient engagement leads to customer conversions

UI and UX are terms that I am sure you have heard thrown around a lot in the digital marketing realm. But what is the difference between them and what do they mean for a business that is trying to bring people in and engage them? Well, that is exactly where they come into play. UX stands for user experience, which thinking about how your customers, or people that found you product, interact and experience your product. The goal of UX is to design an experience that is,

1. Easy and intuitive to use
2. Leaves a lasting impression

UX is not limited to physical products, nor is it limited to digital interfaces, it is an all-encompassing method that can be applied to anything that a customer or potential customer may interact with that is related to your business or products. UX thinking could be applied to the chair that your firm just designed or the mobile app that you just released. The thing about UX and UI is that if you are the one creating these things or you are the person telling someone what to create, you have already been thinking about UX and UI. The key is to break down what you want and implement it in the most efficient and impactful way possible.

This is where UI comes into play. UI stands for user interface, which is the actual interface that people are engaging with whether it be a website, email, landing page or app. If you are working on UI that means that there is more of a focusing on the buttons, menus and the flow of interaction with those elements. The whole flow and look then make up the UX. A Fast Company article put it this way:

“UX designers are primarily concerned with how the product feels….Unlike UX designers who are concerned with the overall feel of the product, user interface designers are particular about how the product is laid out.”

You want to think about the vision that you want to communicate and then you design a UI and UX that communicates it. A helpful way to develop and create good UX and UI is to study those around you and see how they interact with things or even talk with them about what they like interacting with and why. UX Magazine produced and article titled, 4 Techniques of Successful UX Executives. In it the said,

“Paolo Malabuyo, Director of Design at Netflix explained that studying those around him is always the first step before implementing process.”

If you understand the mind of the people interacting with your product and you know where they are coming from and what they are looking for than you will be able to effectively create a UX that is of value and will seamlessly encourage people to move through your product and leave with a lasting impression.

Many companied have ads all around the internet and an ironic thing is that many of them are disrupting the UX of the site that they are on. However with either an ad or an email there should be a landing page that the user runs into that is thoughtfully designed, with UX in mind, to create conversions. There are many ways to go wrong with the design of a landing page. But I would like to share some tips that I found in a Copyblogger e-book titled, Landing Pages:

How to Turn Traffic into Money.

1. Create one choice: don’t present the user with many choices that will just confuse them and make them choose none and leave. You want to present one specific action that leads to a conversion.
2. Keep is simple: the landing page should be simple and elegant without distracting menus and links that will distract from the main content that is there to create the conversion.
3. Uniformity: You want the title of your landing page to refer back to the ad or content that got them here. The Colors should be the same, the language should be the same, all to ensure that the visitor stays oriented and engaged.
4. Call to action: The most important aspect it the call to action which should be mad e at least two times. It should tell the visitor what they need to do to make your conversion happen. It is best if the message feels like it’s specific to that person, tailor it as much as you can.

To wrap up I would like to show some good examples of good UX and UI. First off is Tesla Motors website.

The front page is a simple full screen photo that has no scrolling showcasing the Model S driving down a Californian road. There is a clear call to action in the middle above the car which is the second place you look after the car. The menu bar at the top is small this white words that are visible but not distracting. The order button is solid red drawing even more attention to it. This is a perfect example of a company that has a physical product that they are trying to sell and raise a desire for.

The second example is Gear Patrols website which has been nominated for Best Lifestyle Website. This is a content company that writes guides and reviews so their information must be presented in a way that makes people want to consume a lot of it and flow easily through the website.

The front page always has a large photo with text on it showcasing their latest, most interesting article. You then scroll down and see more article and guides arranged with the bigger stories filling up more space on the page compared to one that are maybe less interesting or older. There is a lot of bold text used to draw the eye in and make you click on stories.

At The end of the day you product, whether it is a gadget or a website, must be understandable, actionable, engaging and efficient.

If you would like to give some feedback on UI and UX for a website I just made check out jachandevol.com and comment!

Social Media: Content is King, Distribution is Queen

Content is nothing if you cannot get it in front of people. It is true, content must be constructed well and tailored to your audience. The content is the aspect that inform and engages your customers and potential customers. The key to great content is not just the content itself, it is the effective distribution of it. No matter how good your content is it must be distributed, and the best way to do this is Social Media. MOZ created The Beginner’s Guide to Social Media which is an eBook that takes you through the aspects of social media in general and they give specific tips and tools to implement for specific services. Social Media is the way that people interact and communicate online, it is a community ready to consume and share content. As a business, you must have a developing presence online because that’s where your customers are, and those customers are already interacting with many other brands. A key goal of your social media presence it to develop customer advocacy. MOZ puts it this way:

“Advocacy is not something that you can stumble upon or buy. Advocacy is earned over time through continuous and positive engagement with your customer base. It is earned through experiences that delight, and through the delivery of the highest class of customer service.”

The effort that a company puts into cultivating advocated will just continue to benefit them in the long run. Think about it, would someone be more likely to listen to the positive experience of their trusted friend, interacting and vouching for your product, or a TV/Internet ad that pushes your product? This leads to another key benefit of social media; a company can start to develop authority and trust with their personal interactions on social media. This will allow the company to have some of that authority and influence that the advocate friend might have.

The concept of the web as being interactive as opposed to passive is the essence of social media and a business’s presence. Interaction has allowed businesses to get closer to customers than ever before. An important thing to remember is, Facebook, Twitter, your blog or any other social media should take your existing brand and solidify it, stimulate it, and reinforce it. Your social media should be an extension of your brand voice that you have already developed. There are three aspects that should be focused on,

• Relationships
• Feedback
• Integration

Relationships is what you build with social media. Feedback is the information that is shared in the conversations that social media facilitates. Integration is the proliferation of social media throughout your marketing mix, not as a tack-on. An example that I have been thinking a lot about recently is REI. Throughout their social media they connect and develop personal relationships with their customers, creating a community around the brand. The have hiking guides, special events, classes, and event get playful with their zombie survival resources. When they do these things it solidifies customers, creates brand loyalty, and produces advocates that then continue to share on social media. REI is moving their customers through the stages of “like”, then “love”, and finally “defend”.

Social media is always being pushed further and changing. But people’s opinions are not gospel. Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company, said something that goes, “If I had asked the people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” People may think they know what they need/want, but it isn’t until someone makes something radicle, and out of the box, that they realize they don’t always know.

I would like to wrap things up with a few basic tips on how to earn trust and likeability in your online communities.

1. Show up. Continue to engage with people and post blog posts. There is nothing worse than going to a company’s blog and seeing that it has been months since they have posted.
2. Be off-topic. People like rabbit trails every once in a while that is off topic, they are entertaining and it connects at a personal level.
3. Be human. Be kind, funny, and empathetic. These are things that people expect wen interacting with a person.
4. Add value. Make people want to interact with you and learn. Make them feel as if they have been helped and have solved a problem when they leave.
5. Don’t be exclusionary. Treating a select few special turns people off.
6. Practice etiquette. Don’t bombard people with spam, or come across disrespectful.
7. Be aware of current events. When tragedy strikes turn off your marketing message and empathize with the community because you care about tragedy and loss and you don’t want to come across as insensitive.

Hopefully you can put this information into practice and grow your communities around you. Remember, if you treat them well they will treat you well and your business will grow.