Inbound Marketing with Facebook Ad improve your Market

Inbound Marketing with Facebook Ad improve your Market

   October 16, 2014       prabhakardalvi

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Inbound Marketing with Facebook Ad improve your Market

Retargeting Helps Accelerate Exposure - Facebook 

In the world of online marketing, exposure is everything. If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around, did it actually happen? If you write a blog post and get zero traffic to that page, what’s the point?

Retargeting allows you to speak directly to the people who have already had a touch point with your brand – this is powerful stuff!

Whether it’s through Facebook’s retargeting platform, or through a third-party retargeting source like AdRoll, making a move to get started here after you have some relevant traffic flowing to your site is a great idea.

Another wonderful option is Facebook’s Custom Audience targeting. Let’s pretend you have a list of users subscribed to your blog, or perhaps a list of people who have downloaded a piece of gated content from your website. You are missing a HUGE opportunity if you don’t use upload those emails into a Custom Audience list on Facebook. They’ve already indicated interest in your content by downloading or subscribing, and if you’re bidding on a CPC basis for these ads, it should be a no-brainer.

The omni-present ‘they’ say that it take approximately seven touch points to make a sale; why not automate a few?

Provide Value to the Right People at the Right Time

The first thing we have to do here is define the right people. For the most part, every business in every industry will be targeting different personas. When all is said and done, sending the right message to the right person at the right time is the key to a successful marketing campaign.

You can take the deep dive into Facebook analytics reporting, or even Google Analytics, to help identify with whom your message is resonating.

This is huge because it allows you to not only craft and optimize the messaging in your Facebook campaigns, but the messaging in your marketing campaign across all mediums.

I wrote a post a while back about getting more out of conferences with Facebook ads, and I feel like that approach is definitely a product of the findings you generate through data you collect running these campaigns. You will be able to better define who your consumer is and put that information into play during your outreach at conferences.

Headline Testing and Audience Data Extraction

The value of data is going to be different for each person. If you make a lot of data-driven decisions in your company, the value can be tremendous. Regardless of how often you reference your web data, it is undeniably helpful to the growth of your company and execution of future initiatives.

In the world of content marketing, bad headlines are any contributor’s kryptonite. Fortunately, setting up headline tests with Facebook ads is super-easy to do. Simply make two ads that run at the same time, with the only variable at play being the headline, and voila – data!

This is incredibly important if you are planning on launching a new gated piece that will be responsible for a number of future downloads. A solid headline can make or break the success of your published content, so use Facebook ads as a great way to test the waters. You can collect a ton of valuable data with a budget of less than $20.

You can also use ad data to determine which content is getting picked up the most by your target audience. If a certain topic is generating a higher click-through rate, or a higher download rate in some cases, make more! With any A/B testing, it’s important to keep as many variables constant as possible, so in this case you would simply be testing different offerings among the same audience.

If you really want to take it to the next level, combine your Facebook data with Google Analytics data to gain awesome insight on geographic location, browsing patterns, and even device preferences to make informed decisions with your content moving forward.

For instance, if you notice that most of your content is being picked up on mobile devices, optimize your content to look amazing for those devices, and reap the benefits of increased readership, subscriptions, and leads.

There has been a great divide between paid advertising and inbound marketing, when in reality you are only shooting yourself in the foot by not leveraging both sides to make your overall digital marketing strategy more effective.

Facebook ads are a great tool for enhanced reach and research, and finding ways to make your inbound campaigns work harmoniously with your Facebook ad strategy should be a top priority.

What other ways are you using Facebook ads to leverage your inbound strategy?

{{ The Guest Post Blogger organization was not involved in the creation of this content. - Dalvi Prabhakar B, Founder & Digital Manager (SEO,SEM,SMO) }}

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Metrics for E-commerce Retailer with Content Marketing

Metrics for E-commerce Retailer with Content Marketing

   July 03, 2014       prabhakardalvi

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Online retail marketers spend a significant amount of time and money attracting visitors to their stores, converting these visitors to customers and retaining them as customers over time. Content marketing helps at each stage of the marketing funnel.

Right at the top of the funnel, content marketing in the form of blogging, visuals, videos, guides, articles and media engagement all work to drive relevant traffic through to a store as well as kick off brand awareness. When visitors start to browse through products in your store, content marketing in the form of product videos, quality reviews (user generated content), FAQs, product description and images come to play with converting traffic to sales. Finally, customer loyalty efforts geared to generating more repeat customers are largely fueled by an email marketing strategy that imperatively connects with your brands overarching content marketing strategy.

It is vital to measure the effectiveness of these measures as a guide to future efforts. 

The word “metrics” is on everyone’s lips in the content marketing world, as metrics are a gauge on the effectiveness of marketing spend. There is, however, a slew of different metrics available to marketers. Which ones merit scrutiny?

1. Returning visitors

This is an important metric from a content marketing viewpoint because visitors who return to your site directly — who aren’t funnelled there by other marketing channels — are a guide to how useful people found content from your site the last time they came.  In other words, it’s a measure of how good your content is!

The quality of your content matters because it increases the “stickiness” of your site, and because it increases the likelihood of turning visitors into customers. Furthermore, high quality content that delivers return visitors is one of the means by which you can build relationships with your “top 1 percent” customers.

Ideally, what you want is your top 1 percent customers returning often, rather than many “bottom 90 percent” customers returning once or twice. That’s about targeted content and fragmented phased-out content that stimulates audience suspense similar to TV sitcoms.

2. Pages per visit

The average number of pages a visitor looks at during a browsing session. This figure provides some indication of site engagement in broad terms. If visitors read only one page, it indicates they aren’t finding the site very useful. If they stay and read 10 pages, they’re obviously seeing value in what your site has to offer. In e-commerce, this is a vital metric because visitors are most likely “window-shopping” on your site. The longer a visitor spends on your site, the more engaged they are and more likely they are to buying.

A vital part of this is bounce rate – how many visitors simply bounce right off the site after viewing only one page? Factors known to increase bounce rate include page load times, as well as a poor connection between content marketing and site content. If your content marketing attracts visitors who are basically uninterested in what you do, they’ll bounce. This is worth looking at in isolation as well as part of the whole picture provided by pages per visit metrics.

3. Time on site

Time on site indicates the amount of time a visitor spent doing anything at all on your site. As such, it indicates interest, engagement and likely purchase. As a general indicator of site performance, this is key. It’s also important because more engaged customers are usually better customers. Comparatively high time on site is an indicator of commitment to your brand – a feature of the “top 1 percent” customer. You can break down the time on site figures to see which people are spending more time with you, allowing you to optimize your content for the customers who make the biggest difference to your company.

4. Increased traffic

Increased traffic is the basic aim of content marketers. From social media to your blog to your sales pages, good content marketing should increase your traffic.

For e-commerce, more people coming in through the door means more sales and more revenue. Again though, it’s wise to differentiate between more traffic and more useful traffic. More visitors who display lower secondary conversion, lower pages per visit and so on, are not necessarily what you should be looking for. Boosting traffic should be seen as a way to increase the number of potential top 1 percent and top 10 percent customers coming to your e-commerce store. That’s about targeted content.

Engagement Metrics

5. Sharing content

How much of your content gets shared across social networks? That’s a key metric for content marketers in any sphere: it’s a measurement of how many people think your material is good enough to show their friends or pass on to professional contacts. It also feeds into your social marketing strategy: knowing which channels your content is shared on lets you know which channels to concentrate on, and which to optimize your content for.

From an e-commerce standpoint, sharing content is another indicator of the engagement of your top 1 percent customers. Higher engagement from this group is disproportionately rewarding in terms of sales and per-sale revenue. called “comments per post,” and it measures the number of times visitors post responses, feedback, reviews or any other form of commentary. This is a key metric for content marketing because it’s a measurement of engagement. This can provide insight into the topics that customers want to engage with.

Specifically for e-commerce, a reviews section provides an important guide for future customers. Customers and prospective customers take reviews extremely seriously, and they make a major difference to sales. From personal experience buying running shoes online, I value reviews from customers in specialist running online stores against reviews from behemoths such as Amazon or eBay because my inclination is that specialist store customers would be more discerning and knowledgeable. Online retailers should create a stimulating experience that encourages reviews and user-generated content in general — there is so much value to be had here.

7. Time

Most social media management tools offer metrics that let you find out what time of day and which days your posts see the most engagement. Obviously, you’d expect different demographics to have different engagement profiles – if you sell products aimed at middle-aged fishermen you’d expect to see a lot less action at 2 a.m. than if you sold concert tickets to youth-oriented events, for instance. Checking out when your audience is active lets you build your posting schedule around those times. You can take that information and measure it against your conversions at your store.

Suppose you get the most social media engagement at 9 a.m. on Thursdays, and most of your sales are at 9:30 on Thursdays. A link that fast seems unlikely to be causal. But what about secondary conversions? A spike in social engagement, followed by a spike in traffic, followed by a spike in sign-ups, all suggests that your social and other content marketing is working extremely effectively.

Business Metrics

8. Conversion rate

In online retail, sales are primary conversion metrics. Drawing a direct link between content that you create at each stage of the marketing funnel and your sales can be tricky, but multi-attribution modeling helps establish a link to sales conversions more easily. Also consider measuring “secondary conversions” such as email list subscriptions, buyer guide downloads and any form of engagement that requires commitment on the part of the visitor. Growing an email list is a vital conversion metric to measure.

It is a vital metric because it indicates a wider spread of visitors who might not be buying yet, but they’re interested enough to download material, to sign up or to otherwise indicate their interest. Additionally, higher engagement is a characteristic of the top 1 percent of your customers – the ones who actually contribute the most to your success.

9. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer lifetime value is a measure of how much a customer is worth to your company overall, across the time of their association with your company. The average customer is going to make around two purchases throughout their association with you. The top 1 percent of your customers will, measured across their CLV, be worth around 30 times more than the average – reason enough to concentrate on these high-value customers.

Analyzing customer lifetime value lets you see whether you’re getting the customers you want. It’s actually more efficient to appeal strongly to a smaller number of customers than to appeal weakly to a larger number of less engaged, less interested customers who will, ultimately, spend far less with you. If you’re appealing to high value customers, your content marketing strategy is working!

10. Revenue

Finally, what it’s all about. Revenue is the most important metric, for obvious reasons: you can’t pay your employees with click-through, or make a house payment with secondary conversions. But how do we look at revenue from a content marketing perspective?

One way is to track purchases through the whole process, and see what content they viewed prior to the purchase decision. If a visitor viewed three pieces of content on your website and then made a €90 purchase, each piece of content is worth €30, right? Sort of. But that’s too simplistic for such a complex picture. It doesn’t take into account social marketing, or repeat customers – in their case, you’d need to factor in the content they looked at last time too. Use purchase value/pieces of content viewed as a rule of thumb, but remember how vague it is. It will give you an average at best.

Another way of looking at revenue is to measure conversion value. It’s a broader approach that looks at all the costs involved against the sales value and it usually means looking at the mass of sales.

Conclusion

The most useful metric for tracking success overall is customer lifetime value measured against the aggregate cost of customer acquisition. Customer acquisition costs include all marketing costs, not just content marketing. But content marketing costs will be significantly reduced per customer if those customers have high lifetime value, because high lifetime value customers are interested in more of your content, so less of it “misses.”

{{ The Guest Post Blogger organization was not involved in the creation of this content. - Dalvi Prabhakar B., Founder & Digital Manager (SEO,SEM,SMO) }}

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Social Customer Service Metrics improve your business

Social Customer Service Metrics improve your business

   July 01, 2014       prabhakardalvi

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What I love most about getting to focus the majority of my work on social customer service is that there are actually ways to measure that you're making a difference to the bottom line. First let's distinguish between two type of numbers.social customer service

Vanity metrics. Numbers that look good on a chart when they're trending upward but really don't prove a lot on their own (followers, likes, members, comments,  retweets, etc.)

Value metrics. Numbers that may use vanity metrics as part of larger formula and produce a measure that shows you're moving the needle on something your VP cares about. Think decreasing transaction costs,  increasing agent efficiency or increasing NPS.

I know all of you who are currently only reporting on vanity metrics are now are now standing up and yelling, "Damn straight, we want value metrics!" Here are a few ideas:

Transaction costs. This is a pretty straightforward formula. What you're really figuring out is the cost of servicing a customer viaTwitter vs. telephone.

Determine the cost of a call.

Determine the cost of a tweet.

Determine what % of Twitter transactions would have been painful enough to warrant the customer actually calling? (I wouldn't presume every tweet would have been a call).

Derive your "estimated" cost savings per month.

Then do the same for Facebook, and generate the average transaction of servicing over social media.

Finally, get someone credible in the organization to reality-check your calculation.

Agent efficiency. This formula can range from simple to complex, depending on how air-tight you want to make your story. Some standard call centre metrics are fine to start off with. Time to Respond (TTR) and mean time to resolve (MTTR) will work. Take a look at what these metrics look like for you traditional channels  vs. social over a period of time and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. Social is designed to be the fastest service channel on the planet. Oh right, if you aren't piping your serviceable issues from social media into a case management tool that can report on these metrics, it will be much harder to do this.

 Customer satisfaction. So now you've proved that you can service customers faster AND cheaper, but are customers happy with the service? Let's find out. Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a pretty standard CSAT metric these days. My experience tells me that when you start to measure this you'll be hated by the rest of the call centre managers because your score for social will be so much higher. The way I'll describe it is just for Twitter and is a little manual but I think it's a good place to start and get a bit of a baseline. Here's how it works.

Each week, grab a certain number of Twitter handles from customers that you serviced within the last week. The more the better; not everyone will respond.

DM them and ask the NPS question in a fun way. "How did we do? On a scale of 1-10 would you recommend our service to your pals?"

Throw all the responses into a spreadsheet and calculate your Twitter NPS. Do the Snoopy dance.

Book a meeting with the VP to let him or her know how much higher the call centre NPS is now that you've averaged your score into it.

Some of the more robust listening tools try to calculate NPS using their sentiment engine but it never hurts to ask people directly too.

So there you have it, a few ways to measure the actual value of your social customer service in a way in which your VP will take you seriously instead of staring at your report and asking, "What's a retweet?" -  3 Social Customer Service Metrics that will Make You a Rock Star

{{ The Guest Post Blogger organization was not involved in the creation of this content. - Dalvi Prabhakar B., Founder & Digital Manager (SEO,SEM,SMO) }}

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