Job Title: Email Marketing Consultant
Location: Bristol (BS1 5HL)
Salary: Competitive
Job Type: Full Time, Permanent
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Our Client is the UK’s number 1 ‘investment supermarket’ for private investors. For more than 30 years, they have helped investors save time, tax and money on their investments….. click apply for full job details
Six years ago, Facebook created fan pages that allowed businesses to promote themselves to customers and friends who “liked” them. It was a move that lowered the cost of marketing and allowed businesses to reach potential customers who were already connected to their existing customers. Even before then, Mari Smith, a Canadian marketing consultant, had recognized Facebook’s potential for marketing and started teaching companies about it. This year, Facebook itself hired her to be a presenter in a four-city roadshow to reach out to small businesses. That event came to Minneapolis in July. Smith was back in town this past week for the Converted conference hosted by LeadPages, the firm that offers online sales tools.
Q: How did you first get on Facebook?
A: In early 2000s, I was doing e-mail marketing, relationship marketing, teaching and talking about the power of networking, participating in both online and offline events and very active in my local community before social media began to grow in popularity. In 2007, I first got on Facebook. I was on a beta test team for a game app. And I just fell in love with the platform. I thought, “Wow, there’s something profound and powerful about this.” Within about three weeks, I was asking everyone I met, “Are you on Facebook?” When Facebook fell in my lap, I just knew it was my next career.
Q: Why was Facebook different from other social networks?
A: I had an account on LinkedIn and one on Ryze. I could never get into MySpace. When you looked at MySpace, it was all of these animated GIFs and videos and colors and no two profiles looked the same. When I saw Facebook, I loved the white space and the uniformity of the profile. You know exactly where to find where a person lives, what they did, interests, mutual friends.
Q: How has marketing on Facebook changed?
A: In 2008, Facebook first introduced the fan page, or the business page, where you could gather up an audience and post content to them for free. The company went public in 2012, and it’s been a changed game plan ever since then. It’s a diminishing organic reach, which has been very frustrating for a lot of businesses that have been there for a while. The good news is that Facebook is the most targeted traffic that your advertising dollars can buy. You can get so granular with your targeting because of the inordinate amount of data that Facebook has gathered from user activity and because they have partnered up with different data companies that provide information from surveys.
Q: Are you saying it was easier to market on Facebook a few years ago?
A: Absolutely. Eighty percent of Facebook users are looking on their mobile device and they’re checking 14 times a day. It’s an eye-popping stat for business owners. But if hundreds of millions of people are looking at that little screen, that’s coveted real estate. You’ve now got an excess of content, an excess of posts. Every time someone logs into Facebook, they can see thousands of stories or posts from friends. Facebook uses a complex algorithm to knock that down to around 150. It’s very, very filtered. Back in the day, a business could get 50 or 60 percent reach. Say you have 10,000 fans on your page and you make a post and it goes viral, meaning people share it, and you go beyond your 10,000. Now, it’s trickier to do that because of these tightened-up algorithms. Facebook would much rather that businesses pay for placement vs. getting that organic, viral reach. You’re much more effective and likely to create success by having a solid ad strategy including getting your content in that coveted news feed in front of the right target market.
Q: What can a small business do?
A: I’ve used a three-part formula for years, and it pretty much works for all social networks. It’s basically content, engagement and conversion. Facebook actually hired me earlier this year doing these live events called “Boost Your Business” for small-business owners. The common thread in the businesses that Facebook is featuring at these events is they’re very good at telling their story. The second thing is, you’ve got to have that engagement. So responding to fans, liking comments, excellent customer care. And the third part is converting. That’s where the paid component comes in, making special offers, drive people to a landing page, collect e-mail addresses, integrate a direct e-mail campaign. LeadPages plays a role because they make really excellent landing pages.
Q: Do small-business owners really understand all of this?
A: The vast majority of small and medium-sized businesses are struggling to keep up and struggling to know where to focus. They get overwhelmed when another social network comes on the scene, like Periscope with its live video. And then, Facebook is always changing its features. The ad tools are not that easy to understand so they delegate. Facebook did a similar tour last year, and they heard that people wanted custom help. So they asked me to sit down and talk one on one to audience members at their events. I thought I was going to hear, “What’s a pixel?” and things about using Facebook. Instead, I heard, “I’ve got a restaurant, how do I get more people in my restaurant?” Invariably, businesses just need more help with marketing.
Q: Does Facebook provide help to businesses that want to market using Facebook?
A: Right now, what Facebook has is a couple of things. They have some online self-study modules called Blueprint. You can find them at facebook.com/blueprint. And if a business is spending a certain amount per month on their ads, they will have access to one of Facebook’s ad managers. There really is this big gap that the “Boost Your Business” tour is designed to fill. I think what we’re finding on this tour is people need a lot more help than Facebook even realizes.
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If your company is considering hiring an SEO consultant, either to assist your in-house SEO team or completely take over the entire search engine optimization effort, there are several mistakes you need to avoid.
Hiring the wrong consultant to take the helm of your search marketing effort can result in a huge mess that is not only difficult to clean up, but expensive as well. A simple Google search will bring up a bunch of consultant options, ranging greatly in skill level, experience and price. Here are five mistakes you need to avoid when hiring an SEO consultant for your company.
1. Hiring a consultant based on keyword ranking promises.
Many SEOs will try to sell you on keyword rankings. They will send you a fancy report every month that shows the position of the keywords, but how important are those rankings if they aren’t resulting in leads, sales and revenue for your business?
Image if you were ranking for two keywords, and one was ranking in the top position and the other was ranking at the bottom of page one. The keyword ranking number one only has 320 monthly searches and it was responsible for converting $1,000 in revenue the past month. The other keyword that’s at the bottom of page one has a monthly search volume of 12,200 and it was responsible for driving $7,000 in revenue the past month.
Would you rather a ranking report that highlights a number one ranking or do you want to know how much revenue your SEO campaign is generating and what your ROI is every month? Keyword rankings don’t matter. Revenue and ROI do. It’s important to work with an SEO consultant that understands what numbers truly matter.
2. Going into the relationship with unrealistic expectations.
SEO takes time. Anyone that is telling you he or she will have your website ranking in a matter of days is telling you what you want to hear in order to get you to sign the contract. An experienced SEO consultant will be able to give you an educated guess as to how soon you should expect to see increased traffic. This varies depending on your industry, competition, goals and strategy.
There are SEO services that promise results in a matter of days and some even guarantee number one rankings. Stay far away from these as they will greatly disappoint you, waste your time and money, as well as put your website in danger.
3. Hiring an SEO consultant based on lowest price.
While a $499/month SEO service might sound good to your accounting department, it’s going to end up costing you much more money in the long-run. When you really dive into what SEO entails you will understand that search engine optimization for a few hundred dollars a month is a pipe dream.
An experienced SEO consultant can charge thousands of dollars a month, depending on the campaign goals and competition. If you can’t afford an experience consultant it would be better to move slowly and attempt to do some of the ground work yourself, rather to hire a cheaper option. Low quality SEO can do severe damage to your website, requiring an extensive clean up effort, costing you more money in the long run than hiring the right SEO consultant from the start would have.
4. Hire an SEO consultant that sells pre-made packages.
There is absolutely no reason why you should be purchasing an SEO package. An effective SEO campaign is 100 percent custom and designed specifically for your website, your competition, your keywords and your campaign objectives. When you begin to search for a consultant you will often find that many will offer different package options, and these cookie-cutter packages are sold to every business.
Do you really think the same SEO strategy that is being applied to a hair salon in Boca Raton is going to be what a car dealership in Miami is going to need? Pre-packaged SEO is dangerous as well as ineffective.
5. Rely only on organic search traffic.
The worst thing you could do is put all of your eggs into one basket and have your company relying 100 percent on organic search traffic. Your traffic numbers could vanish overnight, for a number of reasons. A competitor could outrank you or Google could roll out an algorithm update that impacts your website. No SEO consultant, no matter how good he or she is, can predict what the search engines will do next.
It’s important to diversify your online marketing to include several forms of traffic, including paid search, social media, content marketing and display advertising, just to name a few. When you have several streams of traffic you can make an adjustment to increase the traffic from another outlet if a particular traffic source dries up.
Jonathan Long is the Founder & CEO of Market Domination Media®, an online marketing agency that provides Twitter.
HENDERSON, Ky. – Don’t tell Dana M. Nelson that email is extinct.
“A lot of times you hear email is dead,” the Evansville marketing and social media consultant said.
Nelson disagrees. “At the core of the relationship you’re building with your customers or your donors or your volunteers is email,” she told Kyndle Brown Bag audience recently. “It still has the highest delivery response.”
Email, she noted, can be used to deliver newsletters, announcements, special offers, product and event promotions, surveys, event registrations and for gaining feedback.
Nelson is a Constant Contact Authorized Local Expert. Constant Contact is an online marketing service used by organizations such as Kyndle, the Downtown Henderson Project, Henderson Community College and the United Way of Henderson County.
Others use services such as Mail Chimp or Boomerang, among others. What they have in common is that they make it easy to send colorful messages with logos, photos and other graphics — a sort of portable Web page as opposed to plain-text email.
But that’s just the tool. What’s key to online marketing, she said, is strategy,
“At its core, marketing is about eliciting a physical and measurable response,” Nelson said.
In email marketing, she recommends asking the customer or recipient to take some kind of action that can be measured — to click on a link, download a document, call or come into the office, schedule an appointment or donate.
“Don’t just push information: ‘25 percent off,’ ” she advised. “Say, ‘25 percent off, come in today!’ “
The key, Nelson said, is to provide “information and offers relevant to those customers,” Nelson said. “If you do it right, they will bring their friends with them.”
“Your new best friends are ‘forward’ and ‘share,"” she said. “If you use an email marketing service, you’re going to have a ‘share’ button or a ‘like on Facebook’ ” link that can be part of every message.
Getting customers, donors or volunteers to interact with your organization on social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest can increase their level of engagement.
“Word-of-mouth is now (happening) on those social media platforms,” she said.
“You need to make it easy to share your content” by incorporating links to such platforms in email messages.
“You want to be sure to give an opportunity (for people) to share with others,” such as after an event: “It was awesome, you should go to the next one!”
Nelson believes online marketing can be at its best when it reflects the personality of the business owner or the mission of the organization.
“You can be your authentic self,” she said. “You could have someone else do it, but they don’t have your passion.”
“You want it to seem like a genuine relationship, not a gimmick,” Nelson said.
A marketing campaign should have goals.
It can have general goals, such as to reach new customers or donors; drive repeat business; nurture leads and relationships; and engage members or volunteers.
But Nelson said it’s valuable to set specific goals, such as to drive donations up a certain amount this month or fill 90 percent of the seats in your church this Sunday.
“Put a specific measure on it,” she said.
Business Editor Chuck Stinnett can be reached at 270-831-8343 or cstinnett@thegleaner.com.
