5 Interesting New Social Media Features

The digital world is fast pace and always changing.  Below are a few key updates that everyone should be up to speed on.  The biggest news is focused on the verified badges on Facebook.  Make sure to go in and claim yours.

1. Twitter Polls
   • A new way to engage fans on your Twitter account
   • Read more on their blog.
2. Twitter Hearts
   • Followers will now heart (like) the content they are engaging with...not a big deal but something to be up to speed on so you are in the know.
3. Facebook Verified Badges
   • ***This one is important to local businesses***
   • Businesses can verify the authenticity and credibility of their page.
   • This can also help local ranking of your page
   • Go here to see how to verify your listing.
4. Facebook Reactions
   • Soon you'll be able to do more than just LIKE a post.  New reactions will enable you to love, laugh or cry at a post.
   • Watch this video if you are interested to see the future.
5. Pinterest Place Pins
   • This is good news for restaurants, bars, hotels and other like business.
   • This feature allows you to build a location based Pinterest board.

Final thought...make sure you verify your local business on Facebook!

Win Back Your Site Visitors

Small businesses spend a lot of resources to get new traffic to their site.  They also typically spend a good amount on updating the website to convert that new traffic.

Here is a surprise to most business owners, your site only converts 3% of that first time traffic.

Now we know the stat...time to look at your site.  You should have some tracking of the site traffic so log into your analytics and see how much new traffic you are getting.  In the case below, one of my clients in the HVAC world, they got

435 new sessions in the last 30 days.  This would mean that 421 people left the website without interacting with the client.

What can be done to get more people to come back to the site?  Below are three steps to increase latent conversions:

1. Retargeting / Remarketing
   • We've all seen banner ads online and we know that some follow us around.  This is an important steps to re-engage people with your brand as they surf online.
   • Retargeting finds users that have been to your site and gives them a reason to come back.  As we talked about last week, you need acompelling offer to get them to come back.
   • Need Help:  Solution - ReachRetargeting
2. Online Reviews
   • Reviews can keep, or kill, a relationship with a potential customer
   • Search your business on Google and see what reviews people are seeing now.
   • Need Help: Solution - ReachCast
3. Social Media Presence
• Are you set up to interact with new customers on social media?
• Social media has many benefits and one of the main ones is to engage new customers with info and offers.  Active social media helps show new potential customers that you are engaged with your clients.
• Need Help: Solution - ReachSEO

Each of these areas are critical to helping get back the lost traffic.  Don't just rely on a new website or fancy splash page to convert because even the best sites only convert 15% of new traffic.  If you do not currently have a strategy to target this lost audience, reach out to Eric Laylon.  You can also visit the website below for more information.

Create an offer that works:

Call To Action - Promo - Offer - Special - Coupon - Sale 

These are all words to describe what we, in the marketing world, love to tell clients to push in their advertising to get interactions.  Where we fail our clients is to help them understand what makes a good offer that drives more leads and sales.

Below are three bullet points to help get the creative juices flowing

Solution for a pain/problem:

• Every company starts with an idea to provide a solution that fills a need.  You then have to find people that have that pain or need, i.e. customers.  Once you've found them...you need them to find you.
• You must point out, in your marketing, that you fulfill that pain for them as well as why they should pick you over the competition in the marketplace.
• Ideas:
• Go to your competitors reviews pages (Yelp/Google Reviews) and see what people are complaining about..then offer a solution to fix that issue.
• Set up Google Alerts to have industry articles sent to you.
• Get out behind the desk and talk with your clients as they come into the store or go out and meet directly with customers.

Hit their deepest desire

• Get to know your audience by drilling down into what drives them emotionally.  Emotions sell and people purchase from this base level reaction.
• Your marketing should pull emotional reactions from your potential client base.  Those reactions can be fear or desire...fear of lose is a potent motivator.
• Ideas:
• Monitor social media.  Make sure your social media is hooked up to your customers so you can see what gets them interested
• Meet with long term clients to see why they use your service or buy your product.
• Look at your features and benefits of your products and introduce that to your new clients.

Provide a guarantee

• Everyone believes in their product or service so put that to the test.  Provide a guarantee that will highlight your confidence.
• Look at what your competitors are doing and take it to the next level.  EVERYONE does a free estimate...so what!!  You want to stand out and be different.
• Ideas:
• Free month
• Free delivery
• Waive installation fee

In conclusion, change it up.  Look for new ways to drive your message home.  If you do not currently have a strategy to target your audience, reach out to Eric Laylon.  You can also visit the website below for more information.

How Does Social Affect Your SEO Efforts?

Many local businesses know that Social is important to managing your online brand but few know how it helps/hurts your website's organic placement.  Google has been tight lipped about the direct correlation between your efforts on social media and your ranking.  What we do know is that Facebook/Twitter/YouTube are great ways to drive traffic to your main website and Google loves seeing that your site is being "talked" about.

ReachLocal has been helping clients with SEO for some time now.  During that time, we've come to see the below areas are key reasons why you should be active in your social properties:

Link Building

•  Google wants links pointing at your site so having your social media pages directing traffic to your site is going to be an important step to speaking Google's language.

Website Authority

• Authority is how valuable Google sees your site.  The more people visiting and staying on your website, the higher the authority and better the ranking.
• Social traffic tends to have high time on site so this helps in building good authority in Google's eyes.

Social Chatter

• What better way to show the search engines that you matter then to have a lot of people talking about you.  Social chatter is when people are talking about you on Facebook or sharing your infographics or Tweeting your info out to their followers.

Are you curious how healthy your social media and website are?  Feel free to have your check up done by visiting Digital Marketing Health Check.  This tool will enable you see where your brand stands.

Improving Your Social Brand

We've talked to many local Philadelphia businesses about the importance of Social on your organic SEO.  Many small local businesses need assistance with digital marketing here in Philly and I want to outline some key areas to focus on when developing your Social Media. 

• Platform
• There are many choices to engage your customers on Social Media.  You have Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube and much more coming out each month.
• Make sure you know your demographics and marry your brand to the right one(s).  That might include not going into the medium, as a whole, but I would guess this is rare.  Most everyone is tied into Social Media at some point so it is important to be where your clients are surfing.  You must pick the right one(s) and get to work.
• Engage
• Once you've determined the path, it's important to connect with your customers...and do so regularly.
• Offer help
• Give advice
• Join conversations
• Thank people for joining
• All of these things will show that you are here for your clients
• Creativity
• There are numerous examples of creativity on Social Media.  Here are a few examples to get your creative juices flowing:
• Nikon
• BWM
• Budweiser
• Balance
• You should never use Social Media as a way to sell, sell, sell and sell some more.  It's all about having balance in your approach.  You should lean more on offering free advice and then sprinkle in your paid services.  I like using the good ol' 80/20 rule. 

Have you been struggling in these areas?  Do you need help to drive a better brand?  That is where we help take your efforts to the next level.  ReachLocal's Social Media program, called ReachCast, is designed for small to medium sized businesses to launch off on what they are currently doing to achieve their next goal.  See more by visiting the image below...

ReachCast

3 Tips To Spring Forward In 2015

As we get into the spring season, it is important to make sure that your digital marketing plans are set up to help you convert more business.  Below are three important tips for any small business to be successful here in 2015.  Spring time in Philadelphia is a wonderful time for business to engage with their clients and to ramp up their marketing efforts.

TIP #1 - Mobile or Responsive Design Website:

•     Google announced that on April 21st, that their ranking algorithm is going to factor mobile design.   This means that on mobile searches, if your website is not mobile friendly or responsive design, it will get punished.  Most small to medium sized businesses know that they need a mobile site but may not have moved to update their existing design.  Below is an example of one of my clients that we moved to responsive design.  You can see the before and after in the screen shot.

• From the outside in, there might not look to be much of a change, but look at how the site responds to mobile visits.  You can see below the before and after of mobile visits. For those that visited the old site on their mobile phone, they were having a terrible user experience.  Now that they have updated the site, it is seen better by users and Google will not penalize the site in mobile rankings.

Tip #2 - Localized Mobile Marketing

• Once you have a site that is updated for mobile users, the next step is to make sure that you are getting traffic to it.  It is important to understand that the search engines want small to medium sized local businesses here in Philadelphia to invest in mobile marketing.  The site is not going to show up for every term and ads on the search engines will enable your site to target local users.
• Below is an example of a mobile search ad.  Ad placement is bid on and the highest bidder wins.  Bids on mobile searches are much more aggressive due to the limited space.  There are only two spots so make sure to allocate higher maximum bids on mobile searches.  If you are not sure how to do this, higher someone that knows.

TIP #3 - Track Return On Mobile Investment

• Now that you've spent the money to update the site and allocated resources to the search engines, it is vital that you monitor how well you are converting these marketing dollars into revenue.  
• Tracking conversions is something that websites, like the one above, can help you with.  When we develop sites, at ReachLocal, we incorporate a tracking software that shows us the calls that are generated from the site.  We can track it down to how the person got to the site.  If someone searches on Google, we can see if that person clicked on an ad and called the business.  We can also see if the lead came from a social site, a directory site or from the organic position.
• Below is a sample of what the tracking looks like.  As the business user monitors the leads, they are able to push those leads into contact, to a lead and finally into a new clients.  As they move them through the decision making process we can see how much revenue is generated.

To learn more about digital and mobile marketing, feel free to call Eric at 610-664-4595 or email him at elaylon@reachlocal.com

3 Reasons For/Against Using Software For Your SEM

If you are reading this article it means that, most likely, you are manning your own Google search engine marketing or you want to step into this world. You've wondered if you are getting everything you expected.  You've questioned the ROI of the wonderful world of Google Adwords.  There are many moving pieces to Google marketing and that's not even taking into account Yahoo and Bing.

Below are three reasons for outsourcing to a software platform.  We'll also look at three reasons to not go with a consultant to manage your digital marketing.

Three Reasons For:

• Time
•  This is a business persons most valuable resource.  Time management is paramount when running a business, department or your marketing.  Everyone needs to be able to budget their time in a way that they get the most out of their day.  The goal is to get as much done is as little time possible so you can go home and spend the rest of your valuable time with your family.
• 1 hour
• This is the amount of time you should allow each day to manage your online search engine marketing.
• There are lots of moving pieces to check.
• Bids
• Ads
• Landing pages
• Conversions
• Competition
• Click Thru Rates
• Etc.
• How much is your time worth?
• If you are a local Philadelphia small business person that makes $100k a year, then on average that hour is worth $48.
• With that in mind, you should be checking it each day and once on the weekend.  Search engine campaigns can run 24/7.
• Each month, that adds up to almost $1,200 of time.  This is on top of what you are spending for the marketing.
• Using software, like ReachLocal, will enable you to use that time to build your company and give you back 24 hours each month.
• Expertise
• Most small to medium sized businesses in the Philadelphia area are experts in their line of service and they dabble in finance, marketing, HR and legal.
• For instance, I am an expert in search engine marketing but not in 401ks and business law.  This is why I outsource to the experts in those areas.
• Software can help streamline and manage the components of Google Adwords so you can look at the big picture.
• Software will track and monitor what keyword, at what price, is driving the right type of conversion.
• Then when you work with a digital marketing consultant, they can game plan with you to determine the areas of success and areas of weakness in the campaigns.
• Scope
• When running digital and mobile marketing, there are a number of platforms that you need to be active on.
• Google
• Yahoo 
• Bing
• Each platform has a desk top and mobile program that needs to be managed and tracked.
• With a software program like ReachLocal, you can seamlessly run you ads on each area and make sure that you are moving budget to the areas that are successful.
• One of the biggest mistakes I see local Philly businesses make is not taking advantage of traffic from Yahoo and Bing.
• Google accounts for  67%, and this number is falling as Yahoo and Bing make strategic partnerships to increase their market share.
• Can you afford to not go after 33% of your potential new customers?  Your competition is most likely hoping you do not.

Three Reasons Against:

• Budget
• If you are a small one person operation and/or have annual revenues under $250k a year, I typically recommend that you run a Google only campaign yourself.
• Typically we recommend that you plan for 5% of your revenue to go toward your marketing budget.  With a monthly budget of $12,500 for all marketing, this means that $6250 toward digital marketing.  We always suggest that you have half of your marketing in traditional forms of advertising and half in online marketing.
• If you are investing $500 a month toward digital marketing a month, you need all of those funds to compete against the big boys.  One of the main reasons small businesses fail at search engine marketing is that they don't invest enough and they don't monitor that investment.
• Keywords
• If you are a locksmith, there are only so many ways to say that you are a locksmith.
• Most of the clients, that we work with, have many profit centers and many ways to have potential clients look for them.
• Example:
• Retirement Community
• I work with a number of retirement and assisted living facilities.  Each has a number of profit centers and we have keywords and text ads for all of them.
• Retirement living
• Assisted Living
• Personal Care
• Dementia Assistance
• In Home Care
• Etc.
• It would be near impossible for a local retirement community to manage each of these ad groups and text ads.
• Hands On
• If you are someone that loves technology and has a passion for numbers, then outsourcing PPC to a consultant doesn't make sense.  Running Google Adwords can be a lot of fun, if you have the time to crunch numbers and monitor it every day.
• I've worked with some clients that want to be able to manage the minutia.  When it comes to software running PPC campaigns, this is typically not how software works.  The software is doing that for you so you can achieve maximum return.

In conclusion, it's important to weigh each side of the equation. Always balance the pluses and minuses so that you can make an informed decision.

Feel free to email me with any additional questions.

Eric Laylon
Senior Internet Marketing Consultant
610-667-4595