If You Own a Business, Social Media is Crucial to Its Success

Social media is more important than ever to your business. However, knowing what specific aspects of social media to concentrate on can be difficult. After all, social media is a broad term that encompasses many different things.

In order to make sure that your social media strategy is as effective as possible, it is important that you concentrate on what is hot right now in the world of social media. So what is hot? The following list outlines it for you:

Social Signals: When people share your content, it sends more traffic to your website. More traffic, means a higher SEO ranking. So while social media doesn’t directly affect your SEO, without it your SEO can certainly suffer. The takeaway? Organic, high-quality content is more important than ever.

Mobile Traffic: Last year, mobile traffic overtook desktop traffic in the United States and its usage shows no signs of slowing. Therefore, if it isn’t already, mobile needs to be your number one focus.

Data-Driven Targeting: With all of the valuable insights that can be gained through social media analytics and other reporting tools, there is simply no excuse for not personalizing your marketing messages to every one of your sales leads—including those on social media. Make no mistake, your competition is approaching your customers and prospects with a personalized message so you better be doing the same thing!

Response Times: Surveys show that consumers who reach out to companies via their social media sites do not like to be kept waiting. And unhappy customers demand the quickest response—less than an hour. If you are keeping your customers waiting you can be sure they won’t be your customers for long.

Engagement Matters: Research shows that social media influences customers’ buying decisions even more than retail websites. Further, the more engaged your customers are on your social media sites, the greater your sales numbers. That’s why it is so important that you work to make your social media sites commerce-driven. While buying over social media is still in its infancy, the day will come when you will need to implement such strategies. Until then, engaging customers via social media about your products and services will make the inevitable transition much smoother.

Live Streaming: Live streaming video is believed by many social media specialists to be the next big thing. Live streaming personalizes your brand on a whole new level because it is unedited and much more authentic.

Social media has endless potential but it requires a great deal of time and attention to do it right. This is time well spent, however, as the potential payoff is huge.

 

 

 

Why B2B Marketers Need to Take a New Look at Facebook

If you are marketing a B2B business but have yet to implement Facebook as part of your overall marketing strategy, you are not alone. Unfortunately, you also are missing out on a critical platform that can help with lead generation and establishing yourself as a thought leader in your industry.

In his article, Why Facebook is Essential to Your B2B Marketing, Gene Hammett explains how Facebook offers a unique opportunity for B2B marketers to connect with, engage, and provide added value to their clients. He also explains why if it has been a while since you have explored Facebook, you should take another look at this popular social media platform and some of its many new offerings.

Valerie Shoopman is an expert on Facebook Marketing. In his article, Hammett quotes Shoopman on the topic of Facebook ads. According to Shoopman:

The newest thing on the Facebook platform that has people talking is the new Lead Gen ads. It is lowering the cost to acquire new leads and works extremely well with mobile.

So what else does Facebook have to offer B2B marketers that they can’t afford to miss out on? Advertising intelligence and brand and reputation management. Advertising intelligence allows businesses to create customized messaging to a highly targeted audience. Brand and reputation management allows a business to participate in the world’s largest social-media conversation thanks to Facebook’s 1.55 billion users. Other new Facebook offerings include live video, video posts, and advertisements.

We Know Search Engine Optimization Has Changed. The Question is: Have You?

If you are still utilizing old search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, or worse, your SEO vendor who you are paying continues to implement old SEO techniques, you may (and probably will) wake up one day and find your website is nowhere to be found within the search engines. That’s because the game of SEO and online visibility has changed dramatically. It’s not about the links. It’s about the content. Put bluntly, it’s about the value you bring to visitors when they are searching for your product.

The new rules of online visibility is about content, blogging, social media, mobile friendliness, videos, etc. Don’t be left behind. If you have positioning, don’t lose it. If you don’t have good visibility within the search engines, don’t fret. Believe it or not, it’s easier to get on Page 1 than you may think. That’s because so few companies are following the new SEO rules. Start looking at content more closely for your website, and you will be amazed at the increase of visibility you will see. And what does more visibility mean to you? More customers.

If you want to learn more about this, contact GoLeads, and we’ll be happy to speak with you about this. We work with numerous companies, managing their website and social media platforms, and helping them grow their business. We can do the same for you.

 

How Content Marketing Will Continue to Evolve in 2016

The one thing that will never change about content marketing is the fact that it will always be changing. Now that 2016 is here, it’s time to take a look at what many experts believe will be the biggest trends in content marketing over the next 12 months.

  1. Mobile first. While there has been an ongoing shift toward mobile marketing, if you are in the marketing game, there is no longer any way to avoid going mobile. Touchscreen technology will be of particular importance. From making purchases to posting reviews, if people are doing it, chances are they are doing it on their mobile device.
  2. Marketers need to focus on SEO and social media. Consumers are looking to social media when performing searches. They like the visual nature of social content, as well as the reviews and comments. So if you can’t be found on social media, you will be missing out on a large market segment.
  3. Facebook isn’t going anywhere but new sites are cropping up everywhere. Facebook continues to add functionality and tighten security and anyone who says it is becoming less relevant is mistaken. However, marketers would be wrong to not pay attention to other sites like Snapchat and Instagram when it comes to getting noticed and obtaining sales leads. While these newer sites have a younger demographic and were originally used only for personal communication that is changing—quickly.
  4. Options for publishing online content will increase. In 2015, Facebook launched Instant Articles. This new technology allows publishers to stream content directly to Facebook. When it launched, only nine major publishers could use Instant Articles, but it appears it will soon be more accessible. Other social media platforms trying to keep up with Facebook are likely to begin offering this type of service, as well, and this will benefit smaller businesses.
  5. An increase in demand for quality content. The savviest content creators will take note of user preferences for video and images. They also will steer clear of blatant sales content.

By year’s end there may be other content marketing trends that no one saw coming. But one thing is for sure, to remain competitive in the world of content marketing, you must always stay on top of the latest trends—whether expected or not!

 

Now More than Ever Local Businesses Need to Concentrate on SEO

Many small businesses believe they do not need to be concerned with SEO but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, recent changes to SEO practices have shifted a great deal of focus to local SEO, making it more important than ever to small and local businesses.

Local businesses that aren’t maximizing their SEO results are likely to lose potential customers to their competitors who are easier to find online. It is essential, therefore, that businesses keep up with changes in SEO in order to achieve a higher local SEO ranking. After all, if you are a small, local business most of your sales leads will be local.

If you still believe SEO isn’t something you need to invest in, you might change your mind after considering the following:

  1. Local SEO improves your visibility because it gives you a better spot on a search engine result pages that show only local businesses.
  2. Local SEO attracts a very specific target audience. If are a painting company and someone types in house painters in your area, it is likely they really want someone to paint their house. This leads to much better conversion rates.
  3. Local SEO results in less competition. If your customers are looking for an interior designer, they likely want one in their area. In most cases, they don’t want to do business with someone four states away. If there are only a handful of interior designers in your area, your pool of competitors just got a whole lot smaller and your chance of landing a new customer a whole lot greater.
  4. Local SEO is an important element when it comes to mobile apps. Research shows that more than half of all internet searches take place on mobile phones. If you aren’t visible through SEO on mobile devices, people will not be able to find you. What’s more, Google reports that if an individual looks for a business on his or her phone, they are likely to visit that business the same

While small businesses may think that SEO is something they need not concern themselves with, this is absolutely false. In fact, SEO is critical to the success of all businesses, no matter how big or how small.