Author: sharky

Facebook is one of the biggest social media platforms in the world, with 2.27 billion monthly active followers:

 

While it’s not generally easy to get results from the platform, it can deliver fantastic benefits for your brand and business. But to gain more visibility on the platform, you must know Facebook’s most important features in order to market your brand and business effectively.

Your Facebook marketing strategy works best if you’re optimizing your Facebook profile, groups, and pages to connect with potential customers and to reach a broader audience.

In this article, we’ll talk more in depth about the twelve crucial Facebook features that you should be taking advantage of today to attract more leads, and ultimately boost your sales.

Free Bonus Download: Use this handy Facebook Lead Ads Quick Start Guide to get you up and running in no time! Click here to download it for free right now!

1) Spy on Your Competitors with Facebook Insights

Do you have any idea how your competitors are doing or measuring up against you on Facebook? If not, you must certainly take advantage of the Page to Watch feature. By comparing your results side by side with how the rest of your competition is doing, you can gain useful insights:

In Facebook Insights, the Pages to Watch feature allows you to keep an eye on your competitor’s pages so that you can compare engagement, activity and your audience growth.

It’s especially useful if you want to see what is and is not working for your competitors: How often do they post and what particular content is working well for them? What drives the most engagement? Armed with that knowledge and insight, you can tailor your content and game plan accordingly.

Learn More:

• 30 Winning Facebook Ads and Why They’re so Effective
• Beginner’s Guide to Facebook Marketing
• How to Use Live Video (Facebook & Instagram) to Grow Your Business
• 6 Tactics to Show Up in a Facebook Feed without PPC

2) Export Your Facebook Page Insights Data for Business Analytics

If you’re looking for information on how your audience responds to your marketing tactics, you can export your Facebook Insights files so that you can improve your content strategy and drive engagement. Think about how Facebook provides a great depth of data and analytics in your business page. You should familiarize yourself with these vital data and statistics that are helpful in improving your business goals.

To download your Insights data, go under the Insights tab. There you will see the “Export Data” link; click it. A pop-up window will appear (like the image above). Select the “Page data” among the three choices to download the engagement metrics of your Facebook page.

You may want to opt to download your data once a month and save a copy of that file. That way, you’ll have access to it anytime.

3) Target the Perfect Audience for Each Type of Content

If you want to boost your news feed exposure, then you can improve organic visibility through the platform’s Audience Optimization feature. As Facebook caters to an increasingly massive audience worldwide, it’s also becoming saturated by other brands, so it’s a challenge to increase visibility in your feed and come up with engaging content for your target audience.

To target your preferred specific audience, locate the News Feed Targeting setting on the Write Something field (if you do not see this, that is because it isn’t activated yet):

To activate this feature, go to the Settings tab, then click on General, and the look for the Audience Optimization for Posts section. Tick the checkbox to allow this. Save the changes you’ve made, and the targeting feature will now appear.

By using the organic post targeting tool, you can specifically target your audience based on their interests. Doing so creates a massive opportunity to optimize your content and your page for engagement. Audience optimization improves your outreach efforts, so you can target the people who are most interested in it.

Free Bonus Download: Use this handy Facebook Lead Ads Quick Start Guide to get you up and running in no time! Click here to download it for free right now!

4) Be Mindful of Your Relevance Score on Facebook

Facebook’s relevance score metric measures the effectiveness of your ads. This score is an essential ad quality signal as it directly affects the ad delivery, as well as the total costs on those ad campaigns.

Here’s how it works. There’s usually a negative and positive feedback factor in the overall relevance score equation. Positive interactions are conversions and video views, while negative interactions are when people hide your ads from their dashboard. The moment people report or hide your ads, then your overall relevance score tends to suffer.

Over time, as people interact and view your ads, that score will be updated on a regular basis. The higher your relevance score, the lower the cost your ad delivery will be. So the more ads you produce that are both relevant and timely for your audience, the more Facebook will reward you for it.

Learn More:

• How to Build a Facebook Chatbot Marketing Funnel
• Creating a Social Media Contest Strategy to Boost Engagement
• How to Create a Facebook Video Ad that Gets Attention
• How Small Businesses Can Take Advantage of Facebook Audience Insights to Get More Leads

5) Make Use of Facebook’s Free Stock Images for Your Ads

A good advertising campaign includes using stunning, high-quality images that have the capacity to wow your audience. This means that you always have to find incredible photography to market your business and brand.

But did you know that you can use Facebook’s free stock images? Currently, there are over 25 million Shutterstock images that you can choose from to find the perfect photo that goes well with your brand!

6) Install Facebook Pixel for Retargeting

It’s every marketer’s dream to create highly engaging ads, useful integrations, and a laser-focused targeting campaign. However, the most compelling of all is the powerful targeting ability of Facebook Pixel:

In its most basic form, Facebook Pixel is a snippet code that can be inserted in the backend of your site. It’s an analytics tool that helps brands and businesses establish and improve their ROI by effectively measuring your ads. You can use pixel data to:

• Make sure your ads are being shown to the right people
• Build advertising audiences
• Unlock additional Facebook advertising tools

So instead of building your network on Facebook’s self-serve ad tool, the feature does this for you. As a result, it makes the entire process easier and faster. More than that, it also improves the effectiveness of your ad campaigns.

7) Save Exciting Posts to Share on Your Page

While scrolling through your News Feed, you often come across posts that have interesting content. The problem is, sometimes you don’t have the time to click on them immediately.

Facebook has feature wherein you can save specific items on your list to read later when you have the time. It allows you to keep different items that range from places, movies, music, and TV. You’re also the only one who can see your saved posts, yet you have the option to share them with friends.

You can go back to these items later on by hitting the “More” tab on mobile or the “See More…” link found on the left-hand corner on Facebook.

Learn More:

• Search vs. Social: Why Social Media Still Matters in the SEO Landscape
• Loads of New Facebook Retargeting Features Are Coming Soon
• How to Easily Set Up a High-Conversion Facebook Retargeting Campaign
• How to Increase Your SaaS Trials with a Facebook Ads Funnel

8) Convert Your Post Likes into Page Likes

Did you know that it’s pretty simple (and free!) to gain additional likes on your Facebook page after you finish with a specific campaign? Simply scroll down your Facebook page and look at the posts that you’ve promoted in your recent marketing campaign. Then click through the blue-thumbed icon found underneath your post. That will show you the people who liked your specific post.

You can then see who liked your page and who didn’t. If they haven’t “liked” your page yet, you can invite them to do so by hitting the “Invite” button.

Free Bonus Download: Use this handy Facebook Lead Ads Quick Start Guide to get you up and running in no time! Click here to download it for free right now!

9) Know the Best Time to Post Your Content

If you want to know what the best times are to post on your page, then it’s time to gather useful data on Facebook Insights. This tool is essential if you want to improve your content marketing efforts.

From your Facebook page, click on “Insights” on the top menu and then “Posts” on the left column:

It shows you when your fans are mostly online by day of week and time of day so that you can choose the best times to post. Also, by viewing the reach and the engagement of your posts, you’ll have a better idea of the best type of content to post.

By knowing the engagement rate, you’ll see the success of an individual post. Regularly reviewing these metrics helps you better understand the type of material your audience is most responsive to. That way, you can create more compelling, high-quality content in the future.

10) A/B Test Multiple Target Audiences

Facebook’s Create Multiple New Ad Sets feature allows you to make more than one ad at a time – meaning that you can create multiple ad sets in age segments, location, and custom audience in just one campaign. When you’re targeting ads, it’s quite hard to identify your target audience.

To create multiple ad sets, go to Ads Manager and click Create. Select your objective, name the campaign, and then hit Continue. Then click Create Multiple New Ad Sets:

Try testing different target audiences to figure out which one delivers the best results. One effective way to create a split-test campaign on the platform is through the “Create Multiple New Ad Sets” feature.

Learn More:

• 10 Ways to Measure Social Media Engagement (Plus 7 Tools to Track It!)
• How to Build a List of Messenger Subscribers with Facebook Comment-to-Messenger Ads
• How to Run A/B Tests that Actually Increase Conversions
• How to Use Social Media for B2B Lead Generation

11) Customize the Look of Your Page

As Facebook continues to be one of the biggest platforms on social media to date, more and more marketers and business owners realize that they must create an up-to-date and informative Facebook page.

While Facebook Pages are not as useful as your website, they do tend to rank high. As more people come to Facebook looking for vital information about your business, one of your main goals should be keeping your page in top shape. Although Facebook pages aren’t customizable, you are provided with options on organizing different parts of your page.

Click on “Settings” on the top menu of your Facebook page (not the “settings” from the drop-down menu on the very upper right corner), and you’ll come across the “Templates and Tabs” tab on the left-hand side. From there, you can choose a particular Facebook layout that you like:

You can select from the several layouts Facebook has, like Standard, N0n-profit, Business, Restaurants and Cafes, etc.:

So plan accordingly. What are your goals? If you have a lot of loyal customers visiting your page, then you might want want to display the “Reviews” section on the front and center to show potential customers what others like most about your business or brand. Other essential elements also include your profile image, cover photo, and about page.

The bottom line is that you need to optimize your layout for success. See to it that it makes a good impression on anyone who visits your page and remember to keep it consistent (in terms of color theme, logo, info) with your website.

Learn More:

• What Facebook’s Algorithm Update Means for Brands & How to Take Advantage of the Shift
• How to Get 1,000 True Fans with Facebook Video Retargeting
• How To Optimize Your Facebook Page For Local Searches
• How to Use Facebook Audience Insights to Get More Marketing Ideas
• How to Produce Paid Facebook Video Ads for Mobile Like a Pro

12) Pin Important Posts at the Top of Your Page for Visibility

Did you have a Facebook post that received high levels of engagement (likes, reactions, shares), and you want that to be visible to your audience, not just for several days but for weeks?

One of the most effective ways you can do this is through pinning, which will make it the first post that they see when they arrive on your Facebook page:

Here’s how you can pin a post:

• Find a particular post that you want to pin on your timeline.
• Click the “More” icon (the three dots) on the upper right side of your post.
• Choose “Pin to Top of Page.”

And voila! A thumbtack icon will usually appear on the post and will move to the top of your page. Choose to unpin it anytime by clicking “Unpin From Top of Page.”

You can also pin posts to any Facebook group that you manage through group announcements. The only limitation is that these are posts can only be pinned one at a time. Also, you can opt to set an expiration date on these posts. That way, they will automatically disappear, so you don’t have to worry about forgetting to remove them when they aren’t relevant anymore.

Here’s how you can make the most out of pinned posts:

• Pin your latest or best-performing blog post to boost your traffic.
• Make announcements in groups about upcoming events.
• Utilize announcements to make other members aware of the group rules and to maintain peace and order.
• Rotate pinned posts every once in a while.
• Boost your Facebook Audience Insights.

Free Bonus Download: Use this handy Facebook Lead Ads Quick Start Guide to get you up and running in no time! Click here to download it for free right now!

In Summary

Billions of people use Facebook every single day, and this massive platform has succeeded in making people more connected all over the globe. However, if you’re a business owner or a marketer, you might be missing out on some of the most vital Facebook features that have the most potential. Although Facebook has been around for over a decade, some marketers are only using its basic features!

By using these handy Facebook features to your advantage, you’ll save more time and effort, boost your likes and improve your ROI.

The post 12 Important Facebook Features Every Marketer Needs To Take Advantage Of appeared first on Single Grain.

Whenever most of us think about chatbots, we usually view them as a helpful tool for managing customer support.

However, in the past year, we’ve been witnessing the evolution of the humble chatbot from merely being a customer support tool to being touted as the next big thing in business.

The reason for this is quite simple: chatbots, and the artificial intelligence that powers them, are getting smarter and smarter. Huge innovations in the industry have given businesses the ability to use chatbots in more exciting and strategic ways, chief among them as a tool for sales and marketing.

Alex Attinger, CEO and Founder of Squarespace, says:

“Companies will begin to see the actual potential of automated conversations at scale, not only for customer support and retention but also acquisition…bots are not meant to replace humans, but they will bridge the gap between brands and consumers in ways that no other marketing platform has been able to do before.”

When used correctly, businesses are finding that chatbots can actually help reduce bounce rates, increase sales conversions, and even improve the overall customer experience.

But in order to ride the wave that is the chatbot revolution, you need to know what messages your chatbots need to be saying.

Free Bonus Download: Get our free marketing guide to learn tactics that have actually generated millions of dollars for our clients! Click here to download it for free right now!

What Are Chatbots?

Back in the practically prehistoric year of 1997, Microsoft introduced the world to Clippy, a bouncing, sentient paperclip who seemed to be built with the dual purpose of interrupting you at every moment with the most unhelpful advice possible, and burrowing deep into your psyche only to appear in your most frightening nightmares.

No.

Thankfully, Clippy no longer exists as of 2002, but if our current relationship with chatbots is any indication, it looks like Microsoft might have had the right idea all along.

As a society, we are demonstrating a greater reliance and trust of automated artificial intelligence to help us solve problems, and nowhere can that be seen more clearly than with chatbots.

Chatbots are a conversational tool powered by AI whose sole purpose is to automatically engage with any received message with a scripted response.
Click To Tweet

This is achieved by a complex process involving algorithms, machine learning, keywords and what I assume to be black magic.

As evidenced by Clippy, the concept of brands using automated AI to communicate with their customers is not new. But it has only been in the past few years that we’ve seen huge leaps and bounds of innovation in the industry.

Perhaps the most significant evolution we’ve seen with chatbots is their use in helping brands nurture leads and drive conversions. According to Instabot, companies that utilize chatbots generate 33% more leads in comparison to those that use traditional contact forms:

For many forward-thinking businesses, chatbots represent an inexpensive opportunity to automate and drastically scale their customer communications.

Learn More:

• Why Chatbots Are a Must-Have for Businesses (and How to Build One!)
• The Benefits and Dangers of Having AI Chatbots Interacting With Your Customers
• How E-commerce Companies Can Drive Sales with Facebook Messenger Chatbots
• How to Build a Facebook Chatbot Marketing Funnel

Chatbots and Sales Funnels

To understand how chatbots can help you increase conversions and land more sales, you have to first understand what the basic sales funnel looks like.

As with creating content or lead magnets, you want to be highly strategic when it comes to your chatbots. While you can theoretically add a chatbot to your website and call it a day, you’ll be missing out on loads of potential leads and prospects.

To really take advantage of chatbots, you need them to engage at whatever stage of the sales funnel each your prospects is at.

One of the biggest benefits of chatbots is that they’re smart enough to know where in the customer journey a prospect is based on the actions they’ve taken in the past, like visiting your website or downloading a lead magnet.
Click To Tweet

Here are 13 of the best messages that your chatbots should be saying to streamline and reduce friction in your sales process.

Awareness/Interest

As we all know, the first stage of the sales funnel is generating awareness and interest in your brand. At this stage, your lead might not even know who you are, what your brand is all about, or even be aware that they’re experiencing a problem.

At this point, the goal of your chatbot is to introduce these leads to top of funnel (TOFU) content such as an article called “What is digital marketing?” or “What is a marketing funnel?”, answer simple questions, and present a friendly brand personality.

1) Thanks so much for reaching out! What brings you to [website] today?

According to the Nielsen Norman Group, you have less than one minute to capture a visitor’s attention before they bounce. On the chatbot platform Bottr, they found that businesses who added a chatbot to their site saw a 40% increase in the time spent by visitors.

While there are a variety of tactics you can use to reduce your website’s bounce rate, such as using pop-up ads, optimizing your site’s readability or creating calls-to-action, all of these require that the lead make the first move. On the other hand, with a chatbot you can immediately engage a lead with a friendly greeting and a question.

You can see how Evernote’s chatbot does this by welcoming a new visitor, quickly making them feel valued, and then presenting a number of options for the lead to choose from. This saves the new visitor the time and effort of navigating your site to find the answer they’re looking for.

2) Hi there, how can we help you today?

This is perhaps the most standard welcome phrase for any chatbot, and just like a retail worker, it’s main goal is to engage with a lead as quickly as possible by extending an offer to help.

To have your chatbot stand out a bit more though, consider including lead magnets and content to your chatbot’s welcoming phrase. As you can see in our very own chatbot, we include links to our most popular content, so that we can take a lead directly to the kind of content that they’re interested in.

Free Bonus Download: Get our free marketing guide to learn tactics that have actually generated millions of dollars for our clients! Click here to download it for free right now!

3) Hey! I’ve got a free _____. Can I give it to you?

Instead of directing people to your most popular content, capture their details immediately. Do this by ensuring that the first thing your visitors see is a lead magnet. Everyone loves free stuff and, especially compared to pop-up ads, chatbots are far less intrusive.

Offering a lead magnet early on is a great way to establish that sense of authority and trust in your brand’s relationship with a prospect.

Learn More:

• How to Guide Your Customers Through the Marketing Funnel with Interactive Content
• The Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Marketing Funnel That Drives More Sales
• How to Implement Retargeting in Your Marketing Funnel
• How to Create a Marketing Funnel that Generates Sales (Templates Included)

4) Hi, I’m _____ and I help _____.

Keeping in mind that a lead who’s still in the awareness/interest stage of the sales funnel might not know what your brand is all about, it can be very helpful to make the welcoming phrase of your chatbot give a very quick explanation of what your business is all about.

Take Visabot, for example. Their chatbot succinctly explains what they do and the solution they provide in just one sentence. Then, to top it all off, they also include a strong CTA so that it’s immediately clear which steps the lead can take next.

Also, take note of how Visabot includes a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor in their phrase as well, giving the brand some more personality.

Here’s another variation of this type of message by marketing consultant Miranda Nahmias.

She includes a picture of herself in the chatbot and uses informal language so it feels like you’re talking to a real person and, once again in just one sentence, she also lays out for the visitor the solutions she provides.

5) Want to win a ______?

Source

Nothing generates leads quite like a fun contest. Any time you’re running a competition or giveaway, take advantage of your chatbot by having it promote it for you.

With your chatbot’s functionality you can make it so that your prospect can input all their contact details within the chatbot itself instead of directing them to a dedicated landing page. By being able to engage with prospects in real-time, this makes your contest far more engaging than promoting it over social media.

Evaluation/Commitment

Once your lead has reached this stage of the sales funnel, they’re in the process of trying to figure out whether or not to do business with you. While they’re aware of the problems they have and the solutions you present, at this point you need your chatbot to be able to provide a prospect with all the relevant information they’re looking for.

You can program your chatbot so that it recognizes when a prospect has returned and is in the middle of the funnel, allowing you to create those customized messages.

6) What brought you to check out ______?

Source

A large part of how a chatbot can help you nurture leads is its ability to gauge the intent of the prospect itself. In order to be able to show you the information and content a prospect is looking for, it must first understand what the prospect’s needs are.

Part of how this works is by creating a conversation tree where the chatbot will give options for answers and have prepared responses to those options.

Source

In the Salsify example above, you can see how the chatbot directly asks the prospect why they’re here and, depending on what the prospect says, will respond accordingly. Notice how the follow-up questions are all designed so that the chatbot can acquire the relevant information to adjust its marketing approach, as well as further qualify the lead.

7) Is our pricing clear?

Source

Any time anyone visits your pricing page, chances are they either have a high intent to purchase or are very much considering it. No matter how in-depth your pricing page may be, there are just some questions that can only be answered by a human.

These days, 51% of customers expect to be able to interact with a business at any time of the day, but unless you have the resources to have a round-the-clock support team, chances are you won’t be able to.

This is where chatbots come in.

You can create a chatbot designed specifically for capturing the leads who visit your pricing page. In the above example you can see how the chatbot gives the prospect a variety of options, from scheduling a call with a salesperson to providing answers to their most frequently asked questions.

Learn More:

• How to Implement User Intent to Build an Audience for Your Content
• 5 Ways You Can Use Your Thank You Pages to Boost Conversions
• How to Build a Social Media Marketing Conversion Funnel
• How to Set Up Marketing Funnels (TOFU, MOFU & BOFU)

8) What’s the best email address I can send this _____ to?

Source

Another page that would benefit greatly from a chatbot are dedicated landing pages.

As with placing a chatbot on a pricing page, most leads who visit a dedicated landing page of yours already have a high intent to take action. In the above example by ConvoPanda, you can see how they take advantage of this by having their chatbot immediately appear to capture the details of every lead.

This little bit of engagement by your chatbot can be the nudge a lead needs in order to follow through with your desired action. The modern customer want a seamless experience, so by allowing them to input their details into the chatbot directly, as opposed to switching over to a new page, it provides a much more streamlined user experience.

9) Nice to see you again _____!

Source

Wouldn’t it be great if we could all go to a bar where everybody knew our name?

Cheers references aside, there is something to be said about personalization in marketing. According to Accenture, 75% of consumers stated that they’re more likely to purchase if the business can remember their name, recommend options based on past preferences, or know their purchase history.

With a chatbot you can achieve that kind of personalization whenever someone revisits your site or re-engages with your brand. The simple act of remembering a lead’s name goes far in continuing to build that relationship of trust between a brand and its customer. This is far easier for a chatbot to do, who can then direct a prospect to relevant content or sell to them.

Free Bonus Download: Get our free marketing guide to learn tactics that have actually generated millions of dollars for our clients! Click here to download it for free right now!

10) This or That?

Besides using chatbots on your site, you can also take a page out of the book from Aerie, a lingerie and apparel retailer, who uses chatbots through the messaging platform Kik:

In order to nail the personalization aspect of their marketing, Aerie uses chatbots to gather relevant information from their leads. They do this by presenting leads with a number of product images and asking the prospect to choose the one that most suits their body type and style.

By spending a few rounds asking “this or that” from their prospects, Aerie is able to gather the information it needs to make personalized product recommendations based on the prospects’ earlier answers.

Selling

Now we get to the end of the funnel, the sell.

By the time a prospect has reached this stage of the sales funnel, they should have a good relationship with the brand and be ready to take action, namely in the form of purchasing something. At this point you can directly sell products or make personalized recommendations to the prospect through a chatbot.

11) This was made specifically for ____.

Source

According to Loyalty360, over 78% of customers will only engage with offers that have been personalized to their previous interactions with the brand.

Whether through using a chatbot or gathering customer information another way, you should have enough data to start making personalized product recommendations to your prospect.

By using the phrase “This was made specifically for ____” and making reference to the prospect’s interest, you immediately elicit their interest and attention. From there you can create a process where the buyer can purchase the product within the chatbot or send them a link to a dedicated landing page.

12) I am here to help you _____.

As many sales experts know, being too aggressive on a sale can easily turn prospects off. However, by phrasing your pitch as a gesture of help, it’s more likely that the prospect will be interested in what you have to offer.

In the above example by SnapTravel, you can see how they use their Facebook messenger chatbot to gently offer their services to the prospect. From there the chatbot helps find the best hotel deals for the prospect, and even allows the customer to make a booking through messenger.

Learn More:

• The Complete Guide to Getting Started With Website Personalization
• How AI Is Shaping the Future of Content Marketing and Personalization
• 3 Ways to Personalize the Customer Journey Experience
• How AI Helps Add Personalization to Your Email Campaigns

13) [Holiday/event] is almost here, you might like ______ to get you ready.

While retailers have long known about the advantages of tying products to certain seasons and holidays, you can also take advantage of this tactic by programming your chatbot to make mention of upcoming events. This is a very simple phrase that encourages them to make a purchase by giving them a reason to buy in the first place.

Free Bonus Download: Get our free marketing guide to learn tactics that have actually generated millions of dollars for our clients! Click here to download it for free right now!

Conclusion

If chatbots and artificial intelligence represent the future, then the future is right here, right now.

The world of chatbot marketing is still in its infancy, but already it promises to provide exciting new avenues of engaging with and selling to customers. By using chatbots, businesses now have a way to improve not just their customer support, but to efficiently support and scale all customer communications with customers.

So what are you waiting for? Get selling with chatbots today!

The post 13 Messages Your Chatbot Should Be Saying to Prospects appeared first on Single Grain.

SEO has changed over the years. In the beginning, search engines crawled links between sites and even before Google, linking from one site to another was virtually the only way you could get anywhere.

Eventually, keywords came into play and search engines could attach common keyword phrases to links found on the Internet. But as humans learned to game the system, the bots came in to combat keyword stuffing.

Source

Over the years, SEO has changed to combat “spammy” behavior or black-hat SEO in order to continue showing quality and relevant results that we expect as searchers.

Today, the evolution of search engine algorithms have long surpassed this primitive ranking system of keyword stuffing, which means that publishers need to think more about quality than quantity when it comes to their content.

Free Bonus Download: Get our free SEO guide to learn how you can skyrocket your rankings, even in a competitive niche! Click here to download it for free right now!

Search Engines Are Smarter than You Think

Today’s leading search engines are programmed differently, with Google being unequivocally in the lead as it continues to excel in the development of smarter algorithms.

The way search engines are programmed now means that they are more interested in a site’s “personality” than its looks. In other words, they dig deeper into the core of the content to make sure it meets the expectations of its users. Google prefers to rank sites today based on their content quality so new algorithms place well-written content above content that lacks the following:

• Concise and clear writing
• Proper sentence and paragraph structure
• Proper headers to break down content
• Links that are connected correctly
• A complete sitemap (a file of all the URLs on your website)

Without these basic inclusions, keyword usage will not be enough to improve ranking.

Search Engines Are Now Designed with End-Users in Mind

The satisfaction of the end-user is now the primary concern for search engine development. You can think of this as a self-preservation rule – in order to provide a sustainable Internet information market, the sites that users are driven to must be of quality and, most importantly, of use to them.

How can you tell if your content is useful to potential readers? By following these golden rules:

• Does the content answer specific questions?
• Is the content informative? Will the reader learn something new?
• Have I answered questions simply and in a way that makes it easy for readers to digest the information?
• Do my keywords appear naturally?

If you can answer yes to these questions, then you’re on your way to making sure the content is being produced with the end-user in mind. The process goes hand-in-hand with ranking on Google.

Google’s Latest Algorithm Updates

In July of 2018, Google released an algorithm update that focused on the need to improve user experience in order to rank higher. These improvements included page speed, user interface, and quality content:

“The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal, so a slow page may still rank highly if it has great, relevant content.”

While we are talking about SEO, it’s important to note that Google is moving toward a more user-friendly experience for its customers. Google emphasizes the development of responsive, fast pages in order to optimize a site and make keyword placement worth the time. The four parts of their RAIL performance model are response, animation, idle and load – and all need to work together seamlessly.

To keep it simple: User-experience and SEO are no longer two different battles in today’s world. These two important elements of digital marketing work together for the ultimate organic results.

Search engines are constantly competing for users and advertisers. When users deem a site to be keyword-rich but lacking in quality information, it reflects on the search engine that brought them there, creating a potential defector. So, search engines have had to adapt from sheer search page result volume to a more tailored Q&A experience for users.

Dive Deeper:

• Build Backlinks – and Website Traffic – with Blogger Outreach
• How to Understand Searcher Intent and Use It to Boost SEO Rankings
• 10 Ways to Generate Topics and Write High-Ranking Blog Posts
• 7 Tips to Creating Killer Blog Posts that No One Else Is Writing

Late 2018 Announcements Made by Google

In September 2018, as part of their 20th anniversary, Google announced their plans to roll out a user-inspired, Facebook-like news feed – which includes activity cards, smart videos, and Google Lens – on their search engine page:

The idea is to capitalize on what users came there to find and provide relevant answers to questions they haven’t yet asked but may be interested in knowing about.

The feasibility of this new design is heavily reliant on a publisher’s ability to write quality content that is both keyword-rich and answers users’ questions that they can interact with as they venture into their search queries.

The content that is most likely to be featured on Google search cards is that which answers queries directly, has supporting questions with answers, has interesting writing and contains keywords that are directly relevant to the topic.

Free Bonus Download: Get our free SEO guide to learn how you can skyrocket your rankings, even in a competitive niche! Click here to download it for free right now!

Quality Is Time-Consuming but Worth It

Now that we’ve gotten the truth about the future of search engine optimization out of the way, we can focus on your responsibilities from here on out.

The fact remains that building a quality website with excellent content is very time-consuming. It would be easier to just push out low-quality content that is jam-packed with keywords (the way it used to be done), but that just isn’t going to get you where you need to be in the ranking.

Today, the process of optimization has everything to do with backlinks and avoiding low-quality ones. With this concept, even though you are spending a massive amount of time and effort writing all-encompassing pieces for your website, backlinks are now rejected by the thousands.

Ideally, you’d reject 1,000 mediocre backlinks for ten really good ones. The time you spent on that content directly increases your chances of being among those ten and vice versa.

What Is Quality in Terms of SEO?

Quality simply refers to focusing on what your users want. No fluff, no filler and no random amounts of information that are semi-relevant to the topic and are general knowledge. You can’t write an entire article in response to a question and then fill it with useless information.

Instead, research what your users want and what they want to know. Then, provide this to them in-depth and make the page a one-stop-shop for that topic; don’t give them a reason to have to go anywhere else.

Google offers a complete beginner’s guide to proper SEO practices that includes:

• Organizing your content properly
• Avoiding spelling and grammatical errors
• Eliminating duplicate content
• Avoid “stuffing unneeded keywords in your title tags”
• Create unique, accurate page titles and snippets
• Add structured data markup
• Organize your site hierarchy (because navigation is important for search engines)

This will increase your views per visitor, which translates to search engine referrals and traffic.

Dive Deeper:

• The Content Marketer’s Guide to Keyword Research
• 5 Steps to Becoming an Expert Content Creator (According to Google’s Phantom Update)
• 9 Effective SEO Techniques to Drive Organic Traffic in 2019
• What Are the Biggest Website Mistakes that Are Lowering My SEO Ranking?

Focus on Unique Content

It doesn’t matter how many keywords you place in your article – if the content is a carbon copy of someone else’s, yours won’t see the light of page-one search results. Search engines absolutely hate copied or very similar content that is useless to users.

Search engines want the results pages to be as unique as possible so as to provide users with different angles of a topic, not hundreds of results about the same exact thing.

You may have seen at the bottom of a search page where Google places this phrase: “we have removed one or more pieces of content because they are duplicates.” This is in reference to duplicated content on the same website, as well as content from other websites that are carbon copies.

Google will take the one that has the best overall site quality and show it in the results and hide the others. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it won’t get you anywhere near the original article’s rankings.

When creating unique content, you should:

• Research other sites for similar content and make sure your articles cover different angles of the same topic. This ensures that the content you provide is unique enough for Google and Bing to prefer over others.
• Create a list of five to six questions you want your content to answer.
• Make a list of closely related concepts to what you’re writing about and include them in your content as supporting text. Users are more likely to keep reading if they see that you know what you’re talking about.
• Focus more on long-form content. This is a psychological method of making sure your readers know they’ve come to a resource they can count on.

As a small business owner, you rely on the usefulness of your service to draw in customers versus large, enterprise companies which may not be able to tailor their services the way a small business can. Their success comes from their popularity. So as a SMB owner, focus your content on your usefulness, uniqueness and answer your customers’ questions directly.

Keyword Relevance Is a Must

Search engines also don’t want to provide users with content that is only semi-relevant to the topic.

This is what Microsoft’s Bing banked on when it first launched in 2009. Their catchphrase was “find a cure,” which referenced the concept of search engine overload, which is a massive problem Google faced.

During this time, search engine results were made up of thousands of slightly relevant facts to questions being asked by users that were never getting answered. Google responded to this by focusing on quality content. This content was anchored by keywords.

One major rule in keyword optimization is to only use keywords in your content that are directly about the topic at hand. An easy way to remember how to do this is to think of keywords as tags. You wouldn’t put a tag on an article that is only semi-related, so don’t do that in your optimization.

For example, if you’re writing an article about content management services that you provide, you’re not going to tag it with “social media management” or “branding” just because both are processes of content management that are mentioned maybe once or twice in your article.

In this case, do not overuse keywords referencing these topics, because you’ll be throwing off the core of your content, effectively stretching it in so many directions that the search engine no longer finds it relevant to any of the three topics you optimized for, including the main one, “content management.”

Your article should be about “content management” in all aspects, including your keyword usage.

Free Bonus Download: Get our free SEO guide to learn how you can skyrocket your rankings, even in a competitive niche! Click here to download it for free right now!

Quantity Does Not Equal Quality

When you’re working on an SEO campaign, remember this: search engines often view high quantities of keywords as spam. This was the kind of content that was ranking a decade ago.

Massive amounts of keywords were used to make it easier for search engines to understand the content. The problem with this is that many of the keywords used were written in the way that people naturally search, which lacks the use of complete sentences and correct structure.

Here’s an example. If you want to know how tall Lady Gaga is, you’re not going to spend time typing in “How tall is Lady Gaga?” Instead, you may just write “height Lady Gaga.”

Most search engines will return an answer regardless of how you write it. But, publishers who use the keyword “height Lady Gaga” will get flagged because this is not proper grammar and thus not quality content. Readers don’t want to go to a site and have every other phrase read as a search query.

Varying the Placement of Your Keywords

Keywords are also not very reader-friendly and should be used sparingly only when they make sense.

If you’re writing about a 4×6 blue picture frame, it’s okay to use this phrase as your keyword. Just don’t overdo it: “I bought a 4×6 blue picture frame. This 4×6 blue picture frame was perfect for my graduation photos. Next time, I’m going to get another 4×6 blue picture frame.”

In the above example, the keyword is severely overused, because humans do not naturally speak this way. Using it once in this paragraph would have been enough. That’s exactly what search engines don’t want to see.

You can also optimize your content by making sure you place your keyword in your:

• Meta description
• Title
• Headers
• Image alt text
• Image descriptions

Dive Deeper:

• 7 SEO Copywriting Tips to Increase Your Rankings in 2018
• The Skyscraper Technique: How to Build High-Quality Backlinks to Your Content
• How to Implement a Cost-Effective SEO Strategy in 4 Steps
• How to Fix 15 Common On-Site Technical SEO Issues
• How to Sustainably Build Quality Links by Building Relationships

Tailoring Your Content to New Search Engine Algorithms

We’ve established that quality rules over quantity when it comes to SEO. Now what you have to worry about is how to take this concept and apply it.

If you’re writing quality content, half the battle is already won because you’re streamlining your SEO practices to meet the needs of the search engines. Ideally, you’ll focus on the changes that top search engines are making to ensure that their results are useful to their users.

Write Quality Content

Going forward, make sure your content is written with quality in mind. Use proper grammar, structure, include headers for easier reading and don’t veer off-topic.

Always:

• Make sure your articles cover different angles of the same topic
• Create a list of five to six questions you want your content to answer
• Make a list of closely related concepts to what you’re writing about and include them in your content as supporting text
• Focus more on long-form content
• Use concise and clear writing, proper sentence and paragraph structure
• Use proper headers to break down content
• Use high-quality links that are connected correctly
• Create a complete sitemap

Reduce Keyword Quantity

Make sure your keywords are placed mindfully and avoid jam-packing your content with keywords aimed at helping the search engine understand your content better. Remember, search engines have evolved so they no longer need this kind of primitive help from you.

You can also rank better by researching other related keywords that your content can also rank for and include them in your text.

Optimize Your URL

Your URL should not be a default page address like “page1.html”. Nor should it include stop words like “to,” “the” or “you.” Only include the necessary words (generally nouns and verbs).

Google also mentions keyword placement in URLs: In their SEO guide they note that you should avoid the usage of “excessive keywords like ‘baseball-cards-baseball-cards-baseballcards.htm’.”

Anchor Keywords Based on Relevance

When using keywords, make sure they are relevant to your topic. Do not add in keywords about things that are similar but not quite on-topic. This will only stretch your content in different directions, lowering its value regarding the core topic, which most of the content and keywords should be about.

Tailor Backlinks to Quality and Relevance

Do away with backlinks that don’t offer quality content. Only link to top-quality, reputable pages so that search engines can offer this same quality to their users. When building your links to build your site, try the following:

• Network with authority sites to provide your links on their pages and vice versa.
• Make a list of top authority sites in your field that aren’t directly competing with you, and note them as preferred links to use.
• Be sure to include inbound links on every article you write and throughout your pages.

Free Bonus Download: Get our free SEO guide to learn how you can skyrocket your rankings, even in a competitive niche! Click here to download it for free right now!

Give Your Readers What They Want

Your readers are coming to your site for a specific purpose, so make sure you give them what they’re looking for without making them work for it through filler text and irrelevant information. This will increase your views per visitors and loyalty visits, which search engines rely on when determining the quality of your site.

There is no magic number when it comes to the quantity of keyword dispersal. It all comes down to the quality of the content, the placement of the keywords and your ability to link back to other relevant pages. Always keep in mind that the quality of your content is more important than your keyword strategy. Master quality, then you can focus on strategy.

The post Quality Over Quantity: The Balance of Keyword Usage appeared first on Single Grain.

With 2019 freshly arrived, it is a good idea to look at the business strategies that you are planning to implement this year to ensure that it’s a good year for your e-commerce business.

Among the many battle plans that you should formulate, one of the most important is your social media strategy. Time and time again, social media marketing has proven to be an indispensable tool in a modern-day business’ marketing arsenal. And because of this reality, it is vital for you to come up with a foolproof social media strategy that can help you push your business towards your goals.

Among the significant reasons why you should fully tap social media for your marketing needs is that it has proven to be a result-bearing platform because of the many ways that you can execute your marketing campaigns there, as well as the many tools that can aid you in the process.

There are many reasons why you should fully tap social media for your marketing needs, such as:

• It helps drive targeted traffic
• It helps you connect and understand your audience better
• It helps in building brand loyalty. Studies have shown that as much as 40% of Internet users follow the social media accounts of their favorite brands.

Furthermore, social media marketing has proven itself to be a result-oriented platform because of the many ways that you can execute your marketing campaigns there, as well as the many tools that aid you in the process of doing so.

Here is a comprehensive guide for the beginner to help you come up with an effective social media marketing strategy that you will implement in 2019.

Free Bonus Download: Use this checklist to make sure you’re doing everything you can to get more conversions! Click here to download it for free right now!

Set Your Goals for the Year

The first step that you should take in coming up with your social media strategy is to set your goals. It is essential to have a strong understanding of what you seek to achieve because your goals will define what kind of strategy you need to formulate. Without a clear understanding of your objectives, your efforts will be misguided, leading you to places you cannot control. But by setting specific goals, you can formulate milestones that you can use to check whether or not you are being led to your ultimate objective.

Always remember that when you set goals, they have to be guided by the SMART principle, which means that your goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound:

These attributes make for great goals that can be understood and tracked with ease. For example, most social media marketing goals are purposeful and usually aim to achieve any of the following:

• Increased Brand Awareness – Your social media strategy can be used to spread the word of your brand, making sure that you are seen “out there.” While brand awareness can help improve sales, this goal isn’t about sales, but rather about improving how much people recognize your brand and what you are all about.
• Improved Traffic Generation – Some social media strategies are focused on driving traffic to your e-commerce sites. While this may consequently improve your leads and your conversion rates, this strategy is more about being able to refine your social media channels’ ability to push your fans and followers to your site regardless of whether or not they become leads.
• Fortified Customer Relationship – A great way to make use of social media is to strengthen your relationship with your customers. Relationship marketing is an essential modern-day marketing strategy that can be done in many different ways, and social media is one of the effective avenues to do so.
• Expanded Leads – Some strategies are geared towards improving the leads that you have, and while not all leads become actual customers, this goal can certainly help you achieve that. The idea is to ensure that you have made a first move on potential customers, and when it’s time for you to close the deal, you won’t find it as difficult if you have expertly nurtured your leads.

• Boosted Sales – Of course, a lot of social media goals include boosting your sales. In the end, you hope that all of your efforts ultimately improve your sales, as this is what your business is about. With the right strategies, you can definitely achieve greater sales.

Each of the above general goals will lead you to different specific strategies, so it is vital, therefore, that you determine your goals with the utmost conviction.

Learn More:

• The Contrarian Way to Use Social Media to Attract Higher-End Customers (No Bots or Funnels Required)
• 10 Ways to Measure Social Media Engagement (Plus 7 Tools to Track It!)
• 30 Winning Facebook Ads and Why They’re so Effective
• Creating Google Analytics Funnels and Goals: A Step-by-Step Guide
• How to Actually Track Your Content Marketing Success

Review Your 2018 Social Metrics

Another essential step in your attempt to come up with your 2019 social media strategy is to evaluate your performance in 2018. It is important that you take a look back to see what you have done, what worked well, and what didn’t work so well so that you will be better able to hone this year’s strategies to bring about better results.

Source

You should check the performance of each of your social media channels to evaluate the overall effectiveness of your social media campaigns last year.

Because social media marketing is not an activity designed to solely improve your conversion rates, there are other key indicators that you should look into:

Learn More:

• How to Build a Social Media Marketing Conversion Funnel

• Search vs. Social: Why Social Media Still Matters in the SEO Landscape

• Creating a Social Media Contest Strategy to Boost Engagement

• 30 Social Media Prompts to Get the Conversation Started

• How to Use Social Media for B2B Lead Generation

Significant social metrics include the following:

• Comments from Users – One of the many social media metrics that you should check is the comments that your fans and followers leave. Comments are seen by a lot of people and can make or break your business. It is great if your users are leaving positive comments, but if you are getting a lot of negative feedback, then you might be in a lot of trouble. When a customer leaves a negative comment, never ignore it.

Take the opportunity to respond with an acknowledgement, explanation, and/or apology and retribution. Every business makes mistakes, and owning up to them will counter any negative result that may have come otherwise. People will appreciate your transparency and humanness.

• Hashtags – A hashtag is a very important element of social media, and its use can show the relative awareness of your brand and your mission or vision. When your customers use your hashtags, this shows how engaged they are with your brand and your message, so it’s a good idea to look into how well your hashtags are performing to help you track your performance.

Here’s Coca-Cola’s hashtag: #REFRESHTHEFEED

And Butterfinger’s hashtag: #PullMyFinger

As with any other marketing strategy, do your best to track the performance of your hashtags by using tools such as Twitter Search, Keyhole.co, and AgoraPulse. These tools help you follow your hashtags to see how effective they have been.

• Click Through and Bounce Rates – Instead of just looking into the number of clicks that your links get, it is essential that you dig deeper into whether or not these clicks are useful. If your customers do click but then bounce soon after, then these clicks are meaningless. It is important that your clicks are purposeful, and strategies that can earn these types of clicks are essential.
• Impressions – Of course, there is an abundance of impressions available on social media, so you need to look into your campaigns’ impressions. An impression is “the number of times a post from your page is displayed. For example, if someone sees a page update in their Facebook newsfeed and then sees that same update when a friend shares it, that would count as 2 impressions.”

Check to see how many likes, loves, shares, retweets, reposts, and other impressions your campaigns get and measure them against your past campaigns to see whether you’ve improved. It is essential for you to understand how your audience is reacting to your posts, both positively and negatively, to help you assess whether your posts are worthy enough to be shared by your audience.

Free Bonus Download: Use this checklist to make sure you’re doing everything you can to get more conversions! Click here to download it for free right now!

Redefine Your Social Media Strategy

With clear goals and a good look at last year’s performance, you are now ready to come up with your new social media strategy. While specific plans won’t be discussed here, as all businesses have different needs and equally different approaches that can fulfill these needs, we can help you revolutionize the way you craft your social media strategies.

Some of the essential things you should do to refine your social media strategy are:

Assign Your Goals to the Proper Social Media Channel

You might not be on a lot of social media sites because you want to focus on just one or two, but it is advisable to be on as many as you can. While all social platforms have the potential to help you achieve your social media marketing goals, some of them are more aligned for specific campaigns.

For example, there are many different types of Facebook ads – like Domain Ads, Carousel Ads, Video Ads, Lead Ads, Dynamic Ads – so you should assign certain goals for Facebook, other goals for Instagram, others for Twitter, and so on.

As a basic rule, the following platforms are best used for:

• Facebook: Photos, videos, live events, text posts
• Instagram: Photos, videos, in-photo texts
• LinkedIn: Job postings, professional updates, corporate press releases
• Pinterest: Infographics, instructions, photos
• Twitter: Short texts, links to blogs, polls

Post Content at the Optimal Time

Make use of available tools that can help you identify the best time to post your social media campaigns. Doing this can boost your strategies’ ability to achieve your desired results.

Studies suggest the best times and days to post on the following social media sites for optimum engagement (check out HubSpot’s full infographic):

While these days and times do not always apply for everyone, you can check your own best times to post through the use of helpful tools such as Hootsuite, Tweriod, Google Analytics, and SproutSocial. These tools can help analyze the activity of your followers so you know your idea days and times to post to your own audience.

Learn More:

• How To Measure Your Content Marketing ROI With Google Analytics

• How Small Businesses Can Take Advantage of Facebook Audience Insights to Get More Leads

• Copywriting Hacks: How to Build Trust With Your Audience

• Everything You Need to Know About B2B Performance Metrics
• 9 Mission-Critical Lead Generation Metrics You Need To Track

Keep Your Target Audience in Mind

When you are crafting your social media marketing strategy, always keep your target audience in mind.

Source

Avoid forcing your campaigns onto the general public because chances are, your campaigns won’t generate outstanding results. Instead, what you should do is target your campaigns to a specific audience for the same reason that your products are not applicable for all. Would you target men for your makeup line? Would you target Millennials for hearing aids?

Creating buyer personas for your different target audiences will help you know exactly who you are marketing to:

These four reasons why many new products fail can be avoided with proper target audience segmentation:

• Failure to understand consumer needs and wants
• Fixing a non-existent problem
• Targeting the wrong market
• Incorrect pricing

Check out this article on segmenting your audience: 7 Segmentation Mistakes that Will Cost Your Business Money

Learn from Your Competitors

Always keep your eyes on the competition. Many brands don’t bother doing this, but what they do not realize is that this is a constructive activity that can teach you a lot.

It is smart to have intelligence on what your competitors are doing so that you can improve your own social media campaigns. Check out what they’re doing well and try to implement the same logic to your own campaigns. But don’t copy – just get inspired and come up with a unique strategy of your own.

Also, see what they’re doing poorly so you can learn from their mistakes. This way, you avoid experiencing many of their negative results yourself. You can dig deeper into any competitor’s profile by analyzing their keywords with a tool like Ahrefs:

As you do competitor analysis, make sure to check on the following:

• How they manage their social media channels. How often do they post? What kinds of posts do they make? What kind of engagement are their best and worst posts getting?
• What hashtags they are using and how these are working for them. Are their hashtags being used by people? How do they announce these hashtags?
• Comments left by their audience. Are they getting a lot of positive comments? How are they handling negative comments?

Some great tools that can help you conduct social media competitor analysis include Ahrefs, CompeteShark, Mozbar, Social Blade, and Wapplyzer. These tools offer various social media analytics such as backlinks, referring domains, organic versus paid keywords, and more.

Learn More:

• Attract the Right Prospects With Buyer Personas (Includes Step-by-Step Templates!)

• How to Implement User Intent to Build an Audience for Your Content

• Turning a Lead into a Prospect with MOFU Content

• How to Build a High-Performance Content Marketing Strategy
• 27 Quick Content Marketing Tips to Drive More Traffic [Infographic]

Quality Content Is King

For any modern-day digital marketing campaign, excellent and relevant content is critical. You need to come up with winning content that contains your desired message and has the ability to entice your audience to your desired action. Different types of content include:

• Blogging, which can happen on your own site or involve guest blogging for other publications, and can include text, images, infographics, and videos
• Ebooks or white papers, which are often used as lead magnets to capture information like a user’s email address
• Email newsletters, which can build relationships with readers and encourage them to head back to your site
• Webinars and other video content, which can help you convey your brand personality and increase user engagement

But quality content is quite a vague concept. And for you to ensure that you are within the bounds of what makes winning content, you should take into consideration the following:

• Your content should be searchable, contain the right keywords, and include enough visual elements (images, graphs, infographics, video, interactive content) to be noticeable.
• Your content should be readable, which means long enough to be informative but not too long to be a dreadful read.
• Your content should be understandable, with the use of simple language that does not confuse your readers but easily conveys your message.
• Your content should be actionable, and geared towards your desired goal.
• Your content should be shareable, maximizing the powers of social media marketing.

With these qualities, your content can make your social media marketing campaign easier, helping you achieve the goals you have set.

Source

Free Bonus Download: Use this checklist to make sure you’re doing everything you can to get more conversions! Click here to download it for free right now!

Your Success Starts Today

It is undeniable that social media marketing is a tool that businesses today cannot take for granted. And it is not enough that you have a social media presence; you should use it as a full-fledged marketing channel. If you haven’t already, make sure that you start planning your 2019 social media strategy today.

The post The Beginner’s Guide to Crafting a Highly Effective Social Media Strategy in 2019 appeared first on Single Grain.