For ages, social media and other marketing tools are used for driving traffic to websites. It is because of the fact that pay per click advertising has become so costly and SEO has become so complex. Marketers are looking for driving traffic to their website with less cost and at the same time looking for targeted traffic. The beauty of social media is getting together target people and allowing them to discuss and decide together. It allows people to research and topic and makes them eligible to make a purchase. Researchers predict that social media is the best tool for product research.

Now having said that what would you as a website admin or a marketer would like to do to drive quality traffic to your website? As you know there are multiple ways of doing this. One such good approach is discussed here.

1. 1.      Presence is every place:

One big thing that any one has to do in social media is be in every place. There are many benefits to this. People of wide range of geo, nature are available in multiple social media websites. Few people only like Facebook, few on Twitter and few specialize in websites like Yahoo Answers and Quora. Hence having a unified presence in every place is an added advantage for any brand to reach out to wide range of customers. It is for the fact that being in lot of social media websites; you can meet lot of customers. But a marketer has to hand pick few locations like popular social sites like Facebook and be an active member of that network.

1. 2.      Build a Strong Profile:

Face in the external world is the part of your body that people see. In the internet world it is your profile that gets the first face. There is a proverb that says that first impression is the best impression. In a similar way, visitors to your profile has less than 3 seconds to realize your potential to read the content of your website or just to ignore it. People are so impatient as a matter of fact.

1. 3.      User Experience is the key:

When it comes to profiling in social media user experience is the key part that is often missing in many profiles. There are unnecessary tabs, direct landing into wall etc., on Facebook. On twitter there is no proper bio, no twitter background and no URL in the description field. These are some small things that will make or break your relationship in terms of driving traffic. Consider that you get 1000 views on Twitter daily and you do not have your URL updated. What will happen? No traffic right.

1. 4.      Engage with customers:

In social media traffic generation happens at a different level. It is the engagement that matters. First people want to discuss their problems with the page owner and then come visiting the website or any call to action. So, it is the duty of the web admin to keep the engagement and then trigger traffic through that.

Few people say that social media and SEO are the two pillars of online marketing. Now there are various speculations on where this industry is heading and what marketers will do with these two aspects of marketing. Before jumping into the concept it would be nice if we have a look at the history of how these marketing tools have evolved over a period of time.

The History:

SEO has a long standing history. It has started when the first search engine came into existence and people started to build website and optimize them to get visitors. It is been around for more than one and a half decade. However SEO is totally changed after Google capitalizing this arena. Google and SEO are today seen as one. It is because of the fact that search is 90% of any informative website’s traffic and Google accounts for close to 80% of the overall search traffic. It is important for web masters to analyze and build an optimized website that is capable of handling search engines.

The birth of Social media started a decade back when MySpace and Friendster started popularizing this. However the world of social media changed when Facebook, a company started by a college student took hit and turned out to be the next big thing in social media marketing. Now, Facebook and Twitter controls the entire arena of social media while Google is trying to find their share of pie by rolling out Google+.

The Future:

The future of social media and SEO looks very promising. Both Google and Facebook are coming up with great algorithms that can help webmasters and marketers to better use the tools and get in touch with their target customers. Now, here is the new concept that brewed in that last 2 years. This is Social media in Search and Search in Social Media. This is the key topics that is being talked in every conference and meet ups in digital marketing niche. How these two pillars of online marketing are can complement each other and at the same time rival each other?

This is the biggest debate and marketers and webmasters are puzzled to deal with this situation. Google for instance is giving more and more importance to social signals. This is very much obvious from the way they have acquired companies in the last 3 years. And it is also very evident that they include social factors like friends share graph and other details on the search results.

Now, will Google or any next search engine will incorporate social signals to the extent where their entire search results can be controlled by end users? Will social signals be the next anchor text in the search arena? Will Facebook get into search? Will Facebook refine their search medium for the users to get viable information?

Like this there are many unanswered questions that keep coming up. The only way to find out answers for them is to wait and see!

Do you think that your social media are creating an offline buzz? There are two sets of people, one supporting and other not supporting this concept. But in our opinion social media is a tool for the people and by the people. So hence anything done on this medium will certainly affect people’s everyday life and it can create offline buzz. We have seen this through number of case studies and number of brands has done amazing things in social media.

Why to create offline Buzz?

There might be very obvious reasons for this. A brand or a marketer is heavily investing in social media marketing. There are various levels of costs involved at various stages of social media implementation. Right from planning the cost starts. It’s incredibly high to hire a social media consultant to strategies your ideas. Then comes building the team for doing the campaign. And then marketing the campaign. So this level of cost has to be laid down before even knowing what could be the level of impact. Sometimes the brand gets the value for money and sometime not. Hence after investing this level of money, isn’t it good for the brand to look for some associated offline buzz to this? And is this offline buzz going to help improve offline sales. Certainly yes.

How to create offline buzz?

Now many people do not touch this subject, because most of them do not know what works and what doesn’t work. Sometimes an offline buzz attempt can backfire a brand name and lead into a night mare of negative impact. So this is the least discussed topic and people are not comfortable in talking that. So, when you want to create offline buzz that is associated to social media campaign how to do that? What are the elements that need to be considered? Let’s discuss this in detail.

Integration is the key:

People reacting for social media campaigns are folks who live in the offline world. Hence a tight integration of social media or the internet marketing activity with the offline world has to happen. This integration may take place at various levels. One from a technology standpoint, there should be tight integration that can swivel right from the social media world to the offline world.

Measuring is often missed:

Most of the time brands make a mistake on how this has to be done. People think they can do a small reporting on top of their daily offline sales and can live with that. Will this give the essential analytics that can be sliced and diced to know the impact? Definitely not. Measuring milestones has to be set and measuring criteria has to be clearly defined.

Track back and association:

Now once you build a good reporting system that is capable of tracking every little buzz that has happened in the offline world, associating with the social media trigger is necessary. One has to dig through the cause and find out what exactly done in social media has this effect on offline medium. It is sad to see that most of us are happy seeing the results, but not willing to research the result and repeat it for next time.

Internet marketing and driving offline sales

 There are traditional marketers who strongly believe that internet marketing has nothing to do with offline buzz or offline sales. Consider yourself browsing internet and you see a unique ad that impresses you. It might be a new product line from Wal-Mart. Now your mom calls you to accompany her to Wal-Mart for her weekly shopping. And there while you were shopping with her, you see the newly launched product you saw in internet. Will you try to buy or will you move out? Well the answer depends on who you are and what you want. But it is for the fact that there will be few percentages of people who will be attracted to get that product.

With a simple use case like above we are able to say that internet marketing can work and can drive offline sales. Let’s look into a practical example. Starbucks is a company that is known for its digital initiatives. They have a good social profile and have always tried to impress their customers. Now Starbucks launched a digital campaign on Facebook. Basically it is an event named as ‘Free Pastry’ day. In this day with any purchase, you would get a free pastry. This campaign was completely done on Facebook and no offline marketing was done. After analyzing the result the company said they were able to get close to 1 million users to their stores that are across US. And they credit the campaign that they did on Facebook. This is another practical example.

Having said that, now what is the method to do this? How can any company be it small scale or large scale can use internet marketing as a tool to drive offline sales. Here are some pre-set of rules that could help you in driving traffic to your offline brick and motor store through internet marketing.

Integrated campaign:

A sale is a sale. It may be an offline sale or an online sale. So packaging both the online and offline campaign together will complement each other. For example any advertisement in Television or magazine is backed up by publishing Facebook URL or the website itself. This is one good example where the offline marketing complements the online world. Now having said that how can an online campaign help offline world? This can be done in multiple ways. For example, people love to research a product online, because information is available very easy for them. Then people try to move to a store to purchase it because they can touch and feel the product. They can interact with the associate and get help with them on whatever information they need.

So, any advertisement in online world, if it has offline message such as store only discount, store only vouchers that can complement the offline sale, we got it right. Both go hand in hand in such a way that people tend to believe in the brand as a friendly partner and not just like a sales person.

How to generate leads from social media?

One of the worth thing that could happen to businesses in social media is no transaction situation. Engagement and conversation are good and indeed necessary. But what if they are the only conversation, talks and no one is ready to buy the product? But on the other hand, we see number of marketers trying to push their products to the customers. Customers get frustrated because they are being pushed with product demo, purchase discount etc., Lead generation should be a part of your marketing mix and that is not the only thing that has to be done is social media.

Now the biggest challenging question is how to create leads from social media? There are many researches that say social media is a place for conversation and engagement but not leads. And there are statistical profs that says that social media is not the right tool for lead generation. However one has to understand that there are way to generate leads from social media. People have proved it and are proving it every day.

But the process of lead generation is different from the regular lead generation process. This is where marketers fail. They try push marketing in social media and apparently this will fail. Because social media is a place of fun and it can never work on the push marketing. Social media is more like pull marketing. It is a place where people come and discuss their problems and questions. Hence a marketer has to understand this point very well before trying to generate social media leads.

Now to get started a brand has to bend itself to understand people’s usage of their social media asset. This is where generic information or advice won’t work. People’s usage of social media differs from industry to industry and company to company. Hence having a generic rule of thumb will never work. First understand the customer and why they are using your social tools. If people are coming over to your social profiles with a problem, which is the most of the case, try to solve them. If they want support via social media tools try to provide support.

After creating a situation where people are trusting the brand and are trying to go with the brand is the time to market. And this marketing cannot be direct marketing or push type of marketing. You will have to co-sell your products along with the way you are interacting with your customer.

Try to be gentle. If the customer has a problem, solve it and write a gentle email stating that you are willing to offer a 20% discount on the product because of the problem he has faced etc., this can be one good business cases, but there are hundreds of iterations that can be brought to the table. Hence lead generation is possible but the marketers have to be patient and follow a different path when compared to the traditional marketing.

How to create viral social media campaigns

Today people are very much interested in viral social media campaigns because they are viral! It gives the maximum exposure to the brand irrespective of budget spent. Now, what is the secret behind viral social media campaigns? How small companies with limited budget are are able to create a great buzz in the market. How individuals with literally no budget are are able to create viral apps and videos and name them in the internet space? These are some basic questions that brew in our mind. This article will focus on best practices and methodologies are followed universally to create viral campaigns with limited budget.

Planning:

First of all to create a viral campaign effective planning is necessary. Planning should be taken as a phase within the project and has to be costed individually. There has to be planning phase where the project leader and other people who are stakeholders who will be involved in the campaign should plan together and estimate many things. This includes the time frame of the project, cost involved, resource allocation etc., Once planning is done, milestone has to be set up to verify the check point.

Asset creation:

Now, having done the planning the next level of work is asset creation. When we say asset, these refer to any material that will be used in the campaign. It may be piece of text, logo, video, media kit or anything that is basically used in the campaign. Remember asset can be as small as creation of a small animation piece or creation of a big video that involves famous artist who act. The most key part is one have to include the brand message very clearly inside the asset.

Initial Marketing:

Now, it is not the asset creation that is going to help. Whenever there is a product launch, see how corporate and companies spend millions of dollars in advertising them. Same wise one has to remember that a social media campaign will be a hit or miss based on the initial fund that is being spent. Sometimes there can be an exemption based on how the message is being taken by the market. May be a small PR company can hit and it will take it to next level of publishing.

Partner:

Now this is one of the key elements of success. Big names in the industry try to partner with media companies and let the campaign burst out to the public. While this may be possible by large companies with extra ordinary budget, small companies will never get to this point. While small companies can adopt a different level of activity by providing quality free content that will be interested by the community.

After-math:

Now the campaign does not end with the launch. It should have a follow-up or a post period. Likewise if you see many viral campaigns they are mostly series. Hence they continue to engage and interact with people from time to time.

How to become a successful social media veteran?

In today’s world, everyone wants themselves to call them as social media veteran or social media expert. There is enough number of self proclaiming articles written in internet that talks about how they are intelligent, how they have transformed their own destiny etc., but in our opinion most of them are hypes just as to get some business. Most of the articles end up in critic by the public and are often being hidden out.

This article will talk about whom is the real social media expert and how one person can get himself called as social media expert.

An expert will not call him an expert:

There are two ways of looking at this – Firstly; do you really think a real social media expert will keep shouting on how expert he is, how great he is, how generous he is? In most of the cases the answer is no. Experts are people who do their job without expecting anything from any one. Most of these experts are hidden in the wind or they just get exposure due to some other means. But certainly not by saying that they are experts. So when someone calls themselves as an expert, please cross check it twice.

Someone who can help:

In today’s busy life, people do not have time to help or smile at each other. There are people who will do this only for exchange of something. But I will name a social media expert as a person who helps his fellow marketer. While you may now know, there are many people who love to help other folks in marketing and other techniques.

So, having said that, how can one become a successful social media veteran? Here are some tips:

1)     Try to learn by self learning – There is nothing great than self learning in social media. Materials are available in internet and any one with motive and passion can become an expert by learning all free materials in internet.

2)     Put into practice – The biggest mistake many people do is when they stop doing what they have learnt. Social media is a place to practice what you have learnt. You get instant result and that is the magic of this community. People respect and honor you if you are real and honest with them.

3)     Try to help – As said earlier, social media experts are people who are really willing to help others. Having said that, try to meet other fellow people and share knowledge to help each other. Have a win win strategy and try to grow together.

4)     Create something from scratch – Most of the experts have a stabilized business or blog that they are really passionate and really love the same. So try creating something that is really helpful for people and love it.

5)     Carve a place for you – As there are many people calling themselves as guru in this field, one must carve his own space. The best way to do this is being unique in your approach.

Effective Facebook Optimization Tips

Now Facebook may have 600 or 700 million users in its database, but what is in it for you if you are not able to capitalize that market and build your brand around that? What happens if no one else hears your message and tries to interact with you? What if your Facebook account does not have enough followers to initiate conversations? This is a big problem to the online reputation of any company may be the small start up to large corporations. Small companies though wouldn’t get big hit, but this is collateral damage for large corporation.

Here are some tips to get started with Facebook.

1)     Profile

Profile is the face of online identity. Hence having profile is the first step to start. Good profile is something that people would respect over a period of time. Something that people will love to visit again and again. Typical entities of profile that will help identify you in the online market are:

(i)              Profile picture

(ii)             Profile background

(iii)            Profile URL

(iv)            Number of fans / followers

(v)              Interaction

(vi)            Respect to your words etc.,

2)     Interaction

Social media is a place to discuss things with your friends and family. Isn’t bad to have a social media profile that lacks discussion and that lacks interaction. This is definitely an area large companies should work on. People tend to quit early saying that social media or Facebook doesn’t work for them. Don’t do that and instead focus on how to get interaction going. There is lot of ways to create or initiate interactions. Possible ways are asking questions, sharing interesting information, raising red flags, giving away free gifts etc.,

3)     Take away:

Now why would anyone come to your Facebook page and interact with you or discuss with people who have similar thought process? There should be some kind of take away for the customers to take home, practice, analyze and implement in their everyday life. This is calling giving out a value for the customer in Facebook. Some small things like tips, videos, podcast or anything that would help them will attract them.

4)     Help:

Helping your customer can bring a lot of fan base. Not many companies do help their customers on Facebook. How about setting up your customer service on Facebook? Think differently and ahead of your customers so that you get the competitive edge to attract masses. Now the key factor is how much useful and how much uniqueness you can bring to the table. If your competition brings more value, obviously your community is going to be attracted in that area.

5)     Giving back to the society:

Not many companies do this. After growing to a certain limit, it is the duty of any brand that has potential to change the market should ideally get in help the community or the society in fixing the common problems. For example, companies should target problems like job, food, water, hospitality and much more.

This not will give visibility among people, but also will carve a name in the industry.

Community marketing and brand building

Community marketing and brand building are one of the old topic that has been discussed from time to time. Now given the web 2.0 and web 3.0 nature of the industry, how this old traditional topic has changed over this time? There could be wide range of answers for this question. But given the narrow focus of the topic, we would concentrate on how community marketing and brand building can be done through internet, SEO and social media. These three are popularly criticized as a big internet marketing tool.

Customers have changed:

When we say customers have changed, they have changed it lot of ways. Not only with the way they talk to each other has changed, but the way they interact with a brand has changed. This has changed very drastically after the internet age. Communication tools have grown a lot that people are least bothered to come out of home but rather would sit inside and be in touch with the entire crowd. This is how customers think in the virtual world where there is no physical communication, but communication in terms of information sharing has grown.

Brands have to listen:

A decade back, brands were in a superior position where they had the ability to command their market. A brand can command their market, their customer and their products. However in today’s works this has changed drastically that people are king and brands are just there to listen and react. People have matured in such a way that communities decide the next product or next logo. For an instance when Gap, the retaining company came up with a new logo, peoples started to protest. They were not willing to let the brand change the logo. A twitter account was opened and people started to follow it like anything. Finally the buzz in the internet made the big retailer to stop the redesigning process. This is huge. Now people can command anything – The tools available today has made it possible.

Build a Community for yourself:

This is a brewing topic where companies are trying to build something for themselves. People try to create a community around their niche and try to build a community on that. Now there can be various perceptions going on there. But the main motto of the company has to create a community to basically solve a problem. Solve a problem that people are facing with respect to the community on a day to day basis. If people need support in social media create a community for that hand have your customer care executive sit on social media sites and offer solutions.

Brand grows when the community grows:

As we saw number of times, today the community in a brand by itself. When a community created grows beyond certain limit, it controls the flow of information and most importantly the branding. For this very reason, a company that has large number of community members will not worry about branding because community members are brand ambassadors who help the brand to take it to next level.

Good SEO starts with proper keyword research. This crucial task will determine if your site succeeds orfails. No amount of linkbuilding and other SEO tasks will help a site that is built on the wrong keywordssucceed. For proper keyword research you need to have the right tools in order to research and analyzeyour selected keywords and key phrases.
If you ask around you will discover that there are numerous keyword research tools to choose from.Some are paid and some are free tools which are just as effective as some of the paid ones. Google itselfoffer a number of tools which webmasters can use to select the appropriate keywords. Below you willfind details of four of those tools provided by Google.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool

The Adwords keyword tool is probably the most respected and trusted keyword research tool available.This tool was designed to help PPC advertisers choose keywords to bid on however it works just aswell for SEO research. It works by presenting keyword suggestions based upon the keywords that yousubmit. The results displayed include the amount of people searching for those keywords on a monthlybasis and the amount of people competing for these search terms in Adwords. If you have not beenusing this tool you should certainly give it a try.

Related Search Tool

Although this cannot really be classified as a tool the advanced search function is very useful. With it youwill be able to uncover related keywords that you may not have considered. These new keywords can beadded to your arsenal to expand the reach of your website. Every time you do a search on Google youwill see a list of related terms at the bottom of the search results. Select keywords from this list and goback to the Google Adwords keyword tool to determine their validity.

Google Search Based Keyword Tool (SBKT)

Very much like the Adwords keyword tool the SBKT provides keyword suggestions which are arrangedinto various categories. This comes in very handy when you are trying to manage your keyword lists. Thesearch volumes for each keyword are included in the list.

Google Suggest

The Google suggest tool will present alternative search terms that internet users are searching for.When you begin typing in a search term in the Google search box you will notice that Google willpresent a list of suggestions of what they believe you are looking for.

This is what is known as Googlesuggest.

This information can be used to discover new keywords and search terms to build your SEO campaignupon. Just type in the keyword that you have in mind and see what appears. Make a list of them andthen go back to the Google Adwords keyword tool to check the search volumes. This tool is really invaluable since it presents suggestions that are made by real people searching online.