by Francois Muscat | Apr 10, 2012 | Articles
Social media marketing should always work hand in hand with other traditional marketing campaigns and strategies. By combining both social media marketing and traditional marketing methods you can increase the rate of targeted visitors to your online profiles, help with your search engine optimization efforts, lower your overall marketing costs, and strengthen your brand.
Social media marketing is still a new buzz word to many, but the reality is that it has been around far longer than you might think. People like to engage and socialize with other people, and with social media, that is possible online. Find below a couple of benefits that you can enjoy with social media.
Social media benefits
Target visitors: In my opinion, blogging can be the heart and social of any social media marketing strategy. If the content on your blog is engaging and interesting, you can develop a strong readership. By regular posting about your brand, services, products and any other related keywords you are targeting, you will start increasing the rate of targeted visitors to your blog.
SEO: One very natural result you can enjoy with social media is that if people are engaged with your content, they will share it with their own network. This can lead to conversations starting out all over the web. The links generated this way can also increase targeted visitors to your website and blog. By using targeted keywords from your SEO campaign in your social media discussion, there is a chance that you can increase the rankings to your website.
Branding efforts:Social media is especially strong with brand building. As an example, advertising on popular social media channels can build brand recognition and exposure. Posting a catchy video on video sharing sites has the ability to spread virally over the web. In marketing, the more you see a product and brand name, the more you can be influenced by it, even if you decide to ignore it.
Save money: Using social media marketing is much cheaper than traditional marketing and stretches the overall budget of your campaign while improving the overall reach of the campaign. Combining social media with all of your other marketing initiatives, it can have a multiplying effect of delivering your content across the globe.
For more infomration contact WSI OMS.
by Francois Muscat | Mar 26, 2012 | Articles
Social media marketing (SMM) is a very effective way to drive targeted visitor traffic to your website or blog. The traditional methods such as search engine optimization (SEO) is still effective, but Web 2.0 opened new doors and traffic generated from these channels cannot be ignored anymore.
Social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, and YouTube are not only used in the business arena, but also in political campaigns. There are many strategies being applied on social media channels and generating thousands of leads that converts. Building followers on Web 2.0 channels can form long patterns of interested referrals all pointing back to you. Friends, family and your network are in constant interaction referring back to you because you are the expert in your niche. This is a form of “word of mouth” marketing.
Search engines
The digital landscape keeps on changing everyday and over the last few years, there is a strong indication that the search engines loves social media. Many of the top search engines are paying significant amounts of attention to social media because it equals real-time data. When one of your social media profiles such as your blog gets the number one spot on Google, it can push more traffic to you. Social media can generate high quality incoming links back to you just because trusted social media channels tend to get fast listings.
Credibility
All the traffic generated from social media channels can improve the consumer perception of your company. People trust company more when they are getting “referrals” from people in their own network and that they know. It is all about building trust with social media. With social media you can get traffic straight from the content you publish on your social media profiles and from the people who are talking about you online.
by Francois Muscat | Mar 23, 2012 | Articles, Business Opportunity
Client retention – Helping your clients keep their customers
Steve has provided all WSI ICS a copy of their software so that we can use this and get information on how we can find out more from our customers.
We all have got those customers that will promote you and understanding why they promote you is key to your success
Our customers are going to be asking us about ZMOT and we must be ready to help them improve
Replacing an old customer with a new one is not the same – you just don’t make the same profit as you have incurred more sales and marketing cost
Once you understand why, you can turn your customers into a digital sales force for you customers
by Francois Muscat | Mar 15, 2012 | Articles
At WSI, many of our clients are new start-ups. We love working with entrepreneurs who see the value of digital marketing and online community building (which has become one of our most popular services over the past six months).
Resources are usually scarce and not every new start-up can afford to hire a dedicated community manager, so I’ve set up some tips on how to create an online community for your small business:
- Don’t be all over the place
Unless you’ve got the time to regularly post on each and every social media website, we suggest limiting your presence to one or two sites to start off with. Take stock of who is already talking about your product or industry – if people are chatting on Twitter, set up a Twitter account.
You’ll quickly notice that some users are much more vocal (or involved in) an industry than others. Follow these people and start a conversation with them. Don’t only try to punt your products or brand – be an interested, conversational figure on your social media platforms of choice and get to know the people who can help you build your online community.
- Use your existing platforms and friends
Your friends can help give momentum to your online community. Ask them to Like your Facebook page and re-tweet a Twitter update – this will immediately get your content shared to all of their followers, friends and acquaintances.
If you send out a newsletter, ask your existing contacts to follow you on Twitter. Also make sure your content is easy to share and pass along to friends.
- You need brand advocates – not just “fans and followers”
While it’s important to spend a bit of time following the right people and making sure all your contacts know you’re networking on social media platforms, you need to think in terms of brand advocates and not just numbers. This Nielson study shows that people trust peer recommendations much more than online ads, so you need to focus on the quality of followers (not just the number of people you can convince to follow your brand online).
- Rome wasn’t built in a day
Don’t expect to build your online community within a month – it takes time. In the beginning, it will feel like you’re forcing conversations and getting nowhere, but this will pass. The key to building a sustainable online community (where people share content and engage with one another) is being consistent and involved in the community. Create relevant content and take the time to re-tweet interesting content every day to help your community gain momentum.
Need help with your online community? Contact WSI to find out how we can help you.
by Francois Muscat | Mar 13, 2012 | Articles
SMO better know as Social Media Optimization is a form of word of mouth marketing through the use of various social media channels such as blogs, social networks, and media sharing sites. The main focus with SMO is about trust and relationship building and about increasing targeted traffic to your social media profiles.
SMO focuses on getting traffic from social media sources. When your content is published on your website or blog, traffic will increase to your content if you shared the content to your social media profiles. SMO gives people a good reason to visit your website or social media profile because of all the great and original content you publish. The links from these channels back to your blog or website is very important for SEO because they are sending “social signals” to the search engines. Improved search engine rankings are often a benefit with social media optimization.
Traditional marketing is different
Traditional marketing is very different from social media marketing (SMM). SMM is about publishing and sharing interesting and original content. It is also about creating trust, relationships and engaging with your network of followers. SMM should never be directly be about selling. Build your social media relationships first because people prefer to buy from people that they know and trust.
You can use social media to build your reputation and brand, not to sell services or products. Brand yourself as the leader in your niche.Your brand is what you represent, what you care about, and your personal connection with others. Always be the persuasive and unique voice in your target market. Your goal is to build a natural following of people who are interested in what you have to say.
Members of your network can interact with you and learn about your services and products in this process. SMM focuses on sharing content on your profile through the use of social bookmarking, RSS feeds, news, polls and user rating services. Sharing is made easy by adding social bookmarking features alongside your content to help your content travel.
Combine social media optimization with your search engine optimization efforts. You can use it to bring in targeted traffic to your website and blog through links and gain better search engine placements.
by Francois Muscat | Mar 5, 2012 | Articles
Is your blog content marketing strategy unfocused or focused? If you have a blog for your business, should it have a purpose? The truth is, if you want good results from blogging, it should always reflect your business goals and work hand in hand with your social media and internet marketing strategy.
Business blog marketing is not the same as personal blogging. In many instances personal blogs are a form of an online diary. Business blogs is a bit different and should be focused toward a specific purpose. This could be for building relationships, branding and engaging directly with your targeted audience. Find below a couple of reasons why unfocused blogging is not the way to go.
Unfocused blogging
Your visitors will be confused: Mixing various subjects will be hard to read and get a grip on what you are saying. A blog about weddings should not give advice on swimming pools. Readers will be less likely to return to a blog that discusses a variety of different topics.
Brand building: Rambling and not getting to the point with your blog posts will show disorganization and a lack of focus. Readers will interpret this as someone who cannot stay on the topic. If branding yourself as the expert in your niche is important, then a focused and on topic blog is crucial.
Search rankings: Aimlessly wandering blog posts confuses the search engines and they are not able to identify the topic and message of your business blog. An unfocused blog with unfocused content is unlikely to appear on the first page for the keywords you are after.
If you are interested in creating a focused business blog, here’s a couple of benefits you can enjoy with one.
- Build up a loyal reader base
- Bring in targeted traffic
- Get regular returning visitors that are interested in what you have to say
- Connect with your target audience
- Become an industry expert
- Positive brand building
- Generate quality sales leads
- Get better organic search engine rankings
The idea is simple, if you want good results with your business blog, plan and follow a focused plan for your blog.
