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6 Principles That Must Be Applied to Social Media Marketing

In their book No B.S. Guide to Direct Response Social Media Marketing, business coach and consultant Dan S. Kennedy and marketing strategist Kim Walsh-Phillips show you how to use direct response marketing principles on a variety of social media platforms to drive real results and profit. In this edited excerpt, the authors offer some on-point advice about how to best use social media to create effective marketing campaigns.

Many direct response marketers think social media is complete fluff — and for a lot companies, it is. That’s because most marketers do not apply any direct marketing tactics to their strategic approach (if they are even strategic at all).

Anyone who either doesn’t know if their marketing is working and/or thinks the focus should be awareness building and not revenue generation could make some small but significant tweaks to their efforts and drive huge results.

Let’s cover a few key business principles as applied to social media:

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7 SEO Elements to Boost Your B2B Campaign

In spite of ongoing search engine algorithm changes, few marketing experts would argue that the need for a keen understanding of SEO best practices has diminished over the years. If anything, the value of SEO knowledge and capabilities has increased.

At the same time, many non-experts mistakenly assume that there’s a one-size-fits-all approach to SEO. In fact, the practice varies in accordance with numerous factors, not all of which are obvious or intuitive.

Here’s the hard truth: B2B SEO campaigns are very different from B2C SEO campaigns.

If your company markets primarily to other businesses and their decision-makers, you need to follow a very different set of SEO best practices than companies marketing primarily to individual end-users.

These seven elements are critical to any B2B SEO campaign.

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The 4 Easiest Ways to Supercharge Your Social-Media Marketing

When two out of three Internet users across the world is active on social media, you don’t need much of an introduction to how all pervasive this medium has become in the last decade. The average American spends 2.7 hours every day on social media. Need I go on?

Most businesses today have wised up to the power that social media has to influence and build one on one relationships with users. Which means most businesses have a presence on the social media networks that matter to their users. However, in spite of all the ballyhooing about the medium, social media marketing is still limited to posting an update or two every day and replying to customer comments as they roll in.

The fact is there’s so much more that you can do with this versatile medium with so little effort. Here’s a look at some of the things that you can accomplish through social media that you never could otherwise.

Read more: The 4 Easiest Ways to Supercharge Your Social-Media Marketing

4 Ways to Incorporate Mobile Marketing into a Social Media Strategy

With approximately 7 billion mobile users at the end of 2014, mobile marketing presents a unique opportunity for small businesses to deliver unique brand experiences tailored to consumers on-the-go. As mobile usage continues to rise, companies need to recognize the importance of delivering social media messaging that caters to and targets mobile device users.

In her debut article posted to PR Newswire’s Small Business PR Toolkit, Kristen Gramigna, chief marketing officer for BluePay, provides three ways you can incorporate mobile marketing tactics into your current social media strategy. To reach new customers or to deepen the engagement with current customers:

Customize. Gramigna suggests that it’s critical to review how your social profiles look on all platforms (e.g., desktop, iPhone and Android devices). This research will allow you to customize your social profiles to ensure the best user experience possible.
Optimize. With mobile users checking social media to find suggestions for nearby businesses, it is key that your prospects and returning customers can quickly find you on social media. Optimize your social profiles so users can find you and confirm that all profiles include your correct business location, hours of service, price range and contact information.
Tailor. Gramigna recommends you tailor your social media posts to a mobile user’s day. With the majority of mobile search activity taking place from 3 p.m. until midnight, tailor your social activity to involve mobile users during these hours based on their search activity and location.

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4 Key Things Entrepreneurs Should Know Before Planning a SEO Budget

SEO is no magic bullet. You need to understand its key elements before entering into an SEO campaign.

The marketing industry is all about ideas and strategies. The options to promote brands are so diverse it can often overwhelm entrepreneurs. Moreover, each of these marketing platforms has its own advantages when it comes to helping your company to grow. That said, most startups can’t invest time and energy into all these marketing efforts due to budget constraints.

Businesses, large and small, should always plan and budget their marketing activities in advance to keep things under control. Yet, as a local search specialist, one area I continually see out-of-control expenses is SEO. One reason is that many find planning a marketing budget an elusive task. But this doesn’t need to be the case. All you need is a simple plan and budget that is easy to stick to.

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3 Steps To Integrate Video With Email Marketing Automation

Many marketers have found that adding video to their email programs drives increased engagement and customer loyalty. People love watching videos online (4 billion video views on Facebook alone in 2014), and they aren’t all cat videos and sport bloopers.

Emails with “video” in the subject line have a 65% higher click-through rate on average, according to Vidcaster. When video is a central part of your email campaign, the CTR can be 200% higher than a similar campaign without video.

Email Video Strategies: Two B2C Examples

Video can help you cut costs and increase customer satisfaction as well as identify prospects and move them closer to a purchase decision when you integrate your email video strategy with your marketing automation and ecommerce platforms.

Read more: 3 Steps To Integrate Video With Email Marketing Automation

It’s time to take social media marketing out of the silo

When retailers and other marketers talk about social media marketing, they’re really just talking about marketing, says Nate Elliott, a Forrester vice president and analyst. “Social networks’ ads aren’t social,” he says. “They’re just ads.”

What he means is that social networks like Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter are increasingly focused on delivering ads that seek to drive direct actions via remarketing or other advanced targeting options. rather than focused on building relationships or driving engagement with shoppers.

Despite the social networks’ strategic shift, most companies let the team responsible for producing and overseeing their social content handle their advertising on social networks. And that doesn’t make sense, says Elliott, who recently wrote a report that suggests marketers instead let their media buyers handle their social ad budgets.

“Social marketers might be great at social, but that doesn’t have anything to do with the advertising they’re running,” he says.

Advertising is where marketers are devoting the majority—83%, according to Forrester—of their social spending. That spending is on the rise; more than two-thirds of avid social marketers say they’ve increased their social ad budgets this year, including 29% who say they have added significantly more money to the channel. That’s because the ads are enticing; social media offers advertisers a ton of inventory—Facebook alone is expected to account for at least 25% of all U.S. display ad impressions this year, according to eMarketer Inc.—and those ads are far less expensive than ads on other platforms, Elliott says.

Read more: It’s time to take social media marketing out of the silo

5 rules for the new era of email marketing

Even amid the explosion of digital marketing technologies over the past few years, marketers keep returning to email. The reason is clear — for the 10th consecutive year, email is the highest ROI-generating channel for marketers. For every $1 invested, email marketing returns $38. It’s 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter combined.

That said, email marketing today is far different than it was in 1995 when everyone was using AOL and Gmail was just a sparkle in two young engineers’ eyes. Modern marketers looking to engage customers, differentiate their brand, and grow their businesses need to live and breathe these five new rules of email marketing.

Long live the DIY marketer
The rule goes something like this: first technology makes things possible, then it makes things easy. We’ve hit that point in the marketing technology continuum. Sophisticated technology processes that were once left to the IT professionals are now possible for every marketer in any business or industry. Companies like Optimizely, Squarespace, Unbounce, and Shopify are leading the DIY marketing revolution. Complex tasks that used to take weeks (or even months) and an entire IT staff to accomplish can now be done in minutes. Marketers now own their destiny — and that means there’s no excuse for any marketing communications, including email, to be off-brand or off-message.

Read more: 5 rules for the new era of email marketing

5 Myths of Social Media Marketing

Have you tied your social media efforts to a positive ROI?

Or, have you heard claims that social media marketing just isn’t worth the effort for B2B companies?

B2B social media has gotten a bad rap in the marketing community, with many marketers claiming a low ROI and seeing a lack of interest from prospects. A 2014 report from Forrester found that 26 out of 30 B2B companies failed to create compelling content that engaged their audiences, losing sales and buyers to competitors in the process. With such dismal numbers, it’s clear that B2B companies need to rethink their content and the way they interest potential customers via social media.

With an increasing number of B2B companies adopting social media marketing, a number of myths about it have spread as well. These misconceptions can be laughable at best – but also damaging to your marketing and sales efforts at worst. In this article, I’ll dispel five myths about B2B social media marketing once and for all, and show you why a robust social media strategy is vital to increasing sales, expanding networks, and growing revenue.

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5 Fast Fixes to Jumpstart Your Email Marketing Strategy

Sending out an email newsletter may seem like an easy task, but if you think that all you have to do is make a template, add in new content and hit send, you’re not likely to see the results you want.

Email marketing requires a lot of careful planning and work to be effective, but when it’s done right, it can drive traffic to your website, increase your customer base and boost sales. So how can you make the most of your email marketing campaigns? It’s all about getting to know what your subscribers want, creating quality content and taking advantage of all the great email marketing tools at your disposal.

Ready to improve your email campaigns? Here are five great email marketing tips from entrepreneurs and digital marketing experts.

Read more: 5 Fast Fixes to Jumpstart Your Email Marketing Strategy