Archives for April 2017
Marketing Trends Series: Influencers a Crucial Component of Many Companies’ Marketing Strategies in 2017
In the digital-first era, marketing has evolved into a considerably different beast than it was even just four to six years ago. Trends change rapidly, and entrepreneurs and CMOs must be prepared to change with them.
Today we kick off a new article series about current marketing trends dominating the industry in 2017, focusing on one trend per week.
This week we focus on the importance and use of influencers in a company’s marketing strategies.
What exactly is influencer marketing?
On the most basic level, influencer marketing refers to a more non promotional approach to marketing, in which companies seek to get “thought leaders” outside of their company to become advocates for their brand, rather than directly marketing to their target audience. The hope is that by marketing through influential people, companies will not only be able to reach more people, but reach them in a more organic-feeling manner.
One could break influencer marketing down into two categories: earned and paid. Earned influencer marketing comes from either preexisting or naturally built relationships with influencers, who become advocates for your brand because you have earned it in some way. Paid influencer marketing, meanwhile, involves paying known influencers to advocate for a product. Celebrity endorsements are the most common example here.
How do I build an influencer marketing campaign?
Here are a few of the most effective steps to help you develop an influencer marketing campaign for your business:
- Identify influencers you want to reach: First and foremost, you need to determine who has influence with your target audience. These don’t have to be celebrities. Scour social media (especially Facebook and Twitter) to see who often partakes in conversations related to your industry, and who gets a lot of followers, shares, retweets or likes. There will be plenty of options available to you, as long as you are not focusing on too small of a niche.
- Build up your influence: It’s going to be difficult to build any sort of relationship with other influencers if you do not have a certain level of influence yourself. If you already have established some level of familiarity, it will feel far more natural when influencers advocate for your brand, whether it’s through social media, talks or other environments.
- Make contact: In some situations, you might be lucky enough where the influencers you want to target begin mentioning your brand or participating in your discussions of their own accord. However, most of the time, you are going to need to be the first one to make contact. For an earned, unpaid influencer relationship, you should build the relationship as organically as possible. Start by simply being a regular participant in the discussions they begin on social media and on their blogs. This will make you a familiar face to their regular followers. From there, you can actually make direct contact with the influencer to introduce yourself.
- Offer guest spots in your blog: One great way to connect with influencers is to offer them a chance to write a guest blog or article for your website. If you have already successfully built up some influence of your own, they will be much more likely to take you up on this offer. They may even offer to return the favor and give you a guest spot on their site. But by having someone who is influential in your field appear on your site, it both lends you some extra authority and also acts as a sort of tacit endorsement of your brand on the part of the influencer.
- Maintain the relationship: Whenever you have made connections with influencers, you should make it a priority to maintain those relationships through regular social media and blog contact. That will help you each to continue benefitting from the relationship you have formed.
Influencer marketing in the digital age has become a crucial way for brands to get ahead of their competition. Contact Viral Solutions for more information about how to proceed.
Content and Commentary: Copyright Viral Solutions 2017
Thomas von Ahn
Chief Elephant Slayer for Viral Solutions LLC
“Achievement seems to be connected with action. Successful
men and women keep moving. They make mistakes but they
don’t quit.” — Conrad Hilton
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Common eCommerce Mistakes | Not using a multichannel marketing approach – Part #9
Businesses with an ecommerce focus often downplay the effectiveness of multichannel marketing by only using digital marketing channels. MultiChannel marketing allows the ecommerce business to reach its prospective or current customer in a channel of their liking. This supports the brand by showing the prospective customer that the brand is everywhere which in turn shows the company as being trustworthy, broad in scope and loaded with people they can relate to.
Multichannel marketing enables the customer to choose the method of engagement rather than the marketer. Consumer choice is a beautiful thing!
Companies that sell branded products and services through local businesses, utilize both online and offline marketing channels. Online tactics are things like on page SEO, social media and digital broadcasts. Offline marketing channels consist of things like outbound calls, direct mail, live events, printed media and more. A proportion of companies use their online marketing efforts to inform their offline advertising (i.e. they test keywords online to understand if they fit with customer intent before printing them in offline ads).
In order to realize the full value of multichannel marketing strategy, ecommerce businesses must use and understand several variables.
- Optimization of channel pricing and differentiation. Each marketing channel has its cost. Each marketing channel has a unique reach and methodology. Example, email and SMS (text messaging) has a nearly free or very low cost of delivery. However, they tend to show themselves to an audience and poof they are out of sight and out of mind. Digital retargeting can be expensive but continually follows your prospective customer from one site partner to another. Understanding how to optimize the cost and track the overall effectiveness of each channel in the funnel is critical.
- Value of consolidated data. It's both difficult and expensive to consolidate data from different media channels and platforms. Â Thankfully, many platforms exist that enable the ecommerce business platform to manage and measure both offline and online marketing channels. Having the data and knowing what the data says and does not say is an art and once understood can and will support optimization efforts.
- Delivering targeted media based upon user behavior. Your data should show you which contacts are using a mobile device. Your sales data should track who purchases via bulk mail. Your customer service department should know which customers prefer personal service over the phone. All of this data can feed a multichannel marketing process so that your business knows who to reach when and where. All of which can be used to drive traffic to your ecommerce platform or support the need for tablets at a live event that enable purchases when in-person.
This chart from SmartInsights supports the theory that the customer lifecycle has many touch points and the importance of the types of online and offline touch points along the customer journey.
Ecommerce businesses will benefit from multichannel customer marketing by understanding that certain channels are used for different reasons. SMS text messages work best for short messages that have a sense of urgency. While email works best for nurturing with longer text. And Facebook works best when a social community is desired as a rally cry or social proof. Determining which avatar prefers which method is very powerful!
What businesses quickly learn from multichannel marketing is that the combination of methods is what optimizes and maximizes results. The whole is definitely more valuable that any one part. However, attributing the marketing touch point that closed the deal is increasingly difficult. What may appear as a Facebook lead may have actually been a customer word-of-mouth referral.
In this age of modern devices, which one customer may use several of, multichannel marketing is a fact of life. Tailoring the message to both the device and the buyer persona is a fundamental marketing strategy for any business with an ecommerce presence.
Copyright 2017 Viral Solutions LLC
We help overwhelmed small business owners duplicate themselves – so business can be fun again.
Viral Solutions LLC is a Digital Marketer Certified Partner, an Infusionsoft Certified Consultant and a Google Partner – Certified in AdWords.
Common eCommerce Mistakes | Not using a multichannel marketing approach – Part #9
Businesses with an ecommerce focus often downplay the effectiveness of multichannel marketing by only using digital marketing channels. MultiChannel marketing allows the ecommerce business to reach its prospective or current customer in a channel of their liking. This supports the brand by showing the prospective customer that the brand is everywhere which in turn shows the company as being trustworthy, broad in scope and loaded with people they can relate to.
Multichannel marketing enables the customer to choose the method of engagement rather than the marketer. Consumer choice is a beautiful thing!
Companies that sell branded products and services through local businesses, utilize both online and offline marketing channels. Online tactics are things like on page SEO, social media and digital broadcasts. Offline marketing channels consist of things like outbound calls, direct mail, live events, printed media and more. A proportion of companies use their online marketing efforts to inform their offline advertising (i.e. they test keywords online to understand if they fit with customer intent before printing them in offline ads).
In order to realize the full value of multichannel marketing strategy, ecommerce businesses must use and understand several variables.
- Optimization of channel pricing and differentiation. Each marketing channel has its cost. Each marketing channel has a unique reach and methodology. Example, email and SMS (text messaging) has a nearly free or very low cost of delivery. However, they tend to show themselves to an audience and poof they are out of sight and out of mind. Digital retargeting can be expensive but continually follows your prospective customer from one site partner to another. Understanding how to optimize the cost and track the overall effectiveness of each channel in the funnel is critical.
- Value of consolidated data. It's both difficult and expensive to consolidate data from different media channels and platforms. Â Thankfully, many platforms exist that enable the ecommerce business platform to manage and measure both offline and online marketing channels. Having the data and knowing what the data says and does not say is an art and once understood can and will support optimization efforts.
- Delivering targeted media based upon user behavior. Your data should show you which contacts are using a mobile device. Your sales data should track who purchases via bulk mail. Your customer service department should know which customers prefer personal service over the phone. All of this data can feed a multichannel marketing process so that your business knows who to reach when and where. All of which can be used to drive traffic to your ecommerce platform or support the need for tablets at a live event that enable purchases when in-person.
This chart from SmartInsights supports the theory that the customer lifecycle has many touch points and the importance of the types of online and offline touch points along the customer journey.
Ecommerce businesses will benefit from multichannel customer marketing by understanding that certain channels are used for different reasons. SMS text messages work best for short messages that have a sense of urgency. While email works best for nurturing with longer text. And Facebook works best when a social community is desired as a rally cry or social proof. Determining which avatar prefers which method is very powerful!
What businesses quickly learn from multichannel marketing is that the combination of methods is what optimizes and maximizes results. The whole is definitely more valuable that any one part. However, attributing the marketing touch point that closed the deal is increasingly difficult. What may appear as a Facebook lead may have actually been a customer word-of-mouth referral.
In this age of modern devices, which one customer may use several of, multichannel marketing is a fact of life. Tailoring the message to both the device and the buyer persona is a fundamental marketing strategy for any business with an ecommerce presence.
Copyright 2017 Viral Solutions LLC
We help overwhelmed small business owners duplicate themselves – so business can be fun again.
Viral Solutions LLC is a Digital Marketer Certified Partner, an Infusionsoft Certified Consultant and a Google Partner – Certified in AdWords.
7 Email Marketing Metrics that Matter
Gone are the days where being a “safe” sender was enough to save your message from landing in the spam folder. Now mailbox providers rate each sender on a number of criteria to determine whether your message lands in a potential customer’s inbox — or in the spam folder. They have increasingly sophisticated ways to limit marketing messages from landing in inboxes.
Many of the metrics we will discuss here are not reportable to most marketing automation systems. However, it is is important to understand how your sending domain is ranked and analyzed by the recipient and that is the point of this information.
Here are 7 email marketing metrics you need to pay attention to according to a report from RP Metrics.
- Deleted before reading rate:Â This is the rate at which receivers trash your message without opening it. These people are not interested in your message for whatever reason. Using interesting subject lines and reaching a demographic that lines up well with your business is key to keeping this rate low. Social and dating sites tend to do poorly in this category, whereas office supplies and flowers/gifts do well.
- Read rate: This simply measures the rate at which people read the messages you send. It’s the easiest way to measure how engaged recipients are. If they’re not reading your messages, you may need to tinker with the timing or how the subject line is phrased. Industries with customer accounts such as banking typically have a high rate over 30 percent whereas other sectors like media marketing and nonprofits have rates below 20 percent.
- Reply rate: When recipients reply to a message, that’s a good sign that the sender is another person and not a spam bot. However, for businesses, a high reply rate might mean more people are unsubscribing from your list. There’s no goal to hit for this, but having an inbox that isn’t called “noreply” is a good start.
- Spam replacement rate: This is the number of emails sent that end up in spam folders as a percentage of all emails sent. Certain content triggers (like having too many images) could mean your message lands in a spam folder. Banking and finance have excellent replacement rates compared to automotive, education, nonprofit, and government, which have some of the lowest rates.
- Complaint rate: Even if your message reaches a recipient, they still may mark it as spam. Although these rates are typically under 0.5%, it’s still important to notice how often people are actively marking your messages as spam.
- Forward rate: This is how often recipients pass your message on to other users. Having a high forward rate is a good thing, but is difficult to obtain. Utilities and telecommunications—businesses that issue invoices that need to be shared with others—had the highest rates in this category.
- Not marked as spam rate: This counts the number of times a recipient specifically marks your message as “not spam.” For that to happen, the message has to initially land in the spam folder. Therefore, a low rate may not be a bad thing—your messages may just initially be going to inboxes. However, some industries—like education and health & beauty—saw a positive change in this category over the last year.
The bottom line is that email marketing is becoming more sophisticated. Companies need to develop flexible strategies and respond to customer feedback faster than ever before. By keeping track of critical metrics and adjusting their messages, digital marketers can better engage customers and keep out of the dreaded spam folder. Especially if you regularly clean your data, only use an opt-in list and most importantly only send content that nurtures, educates and is expected by the recipient.
Copyright 2017 Viral Solutions
Queen of the Machine for Viral Solutions LLC
“If a brand genuinely wants to make a social contribution, it should start with who they are, not what they do. For only when a brand has defined itself and its core values can it identify causes or social responsibility initiatives that are in alignment with its authentic brand story.” ~ Simon Mainwaring
Branding Series: Building Your Own Personal Brand
Throughout our branding series so far, we have spent the bulk of our time focusing on how small businesses can build up a brand on a company-wide level. But what happens if you are an independent contractor, a sole proprietor or an individual entrepreneur?
You still need to develop your brand, but there are a few differences between personal branding and branding a company.
Here are some tips to help you create and develop your own personal brand:
- Be as genuine as possible: This is important in all of the interactions you have with other people, whether they’re online, over the phone or in person. On your social media platforms, for example, you should focus on showing people the real you, and your real personality. People who seem unauthentic or overly self-promotional will only drive other people away. Because you are your own brand, and you are not representing a larger company, you have more leeway to let people into your personal life. Your followers want to see what makes you human, so show them that, and occasionally promote your business.
- Be a trusted source of information: You should know your industry as good as or better than anyone, and display your knowledge when you get the chance. In addition to creating your own blogs and articles, take part in conversations online, write guest blogs for other sites, and become the person media outlets want to contact when news breaks. Interact with other influencers in your industry—the more they share or respond to what you have to say, the more legitimacy it gives you in the eyes of your followers.
- Keep a strong list of contacts: The more you build up your brand, the larger your contacts list will get. You should keep track of who each person on your list is, how you met or connected, potential opportunities they could provide and ways in which you can help them should they need assistance with anything. You should capitalize on every opportunity you get to strengthen every relationship you have.
- Develop a clear, strong value proposition: Every company needs a value proposition to help customers understand why they should do business with them. The same is true of individuals building a personal brand. What makes you particularly attractive to potential customers or clients? What are your individual strengths, skills and values? Why should someone choose to work with you? This is extremely important to spend some time thinking about. Once you have determined your value proposition, it is important your potential customers know what it is.
- Get out and be seen: In today’s business environment, it’s easy for entrepreneurs to focus so much on their digital marketing that they let other areas of their branding slip. But when you are your own brand, you must make even greater efforts to get out and be as visible and accessible as possible to other people. Staying behind your computer screen will only help you so much when it comes to building a personal brand. You have to get out and network, attend industry conferences, hold Q&A sessions and just interact with as many people as possible.
- Be persistent: Building your personal brand takes a lot of time and effort, but it is well worth it. No one can take your personal brand away from you. It will affect you throughout the rest of your career. It’s worth spending time on to make sure you do it well.
There are many elements of personal branding that are the same as branding for a company. The difference is, you are constantly living the brand yourself. Take the time you need to think through your personal branding strategy so you can position yourself as an influencer in your industry.
Copyright 2017 Viral Solutions LLC
Prior to joining Viral Solutions, Christine held executive leadership roles at some of the largest small business consulting firms in the USA. Her experience includes leading direct reports of over 130 remote sales agents who generated $38mm in annual revenue. She obtained her Marketing degree from British Columbia Institute of Technology. Bring her C-Suite experience to your small business. Although our company is virtual, and we can work with you wherever you are located, she is located in Denver, Colorado and owns a second home in Vancouver, BC Canada.
Viral Solutions LLC is a Digital Marketer Certified Partner and an Infusionsoft Certified Consultant.
We help overwhelmed small business owners duplicate themselves, so business can be fun again.