Four Pitfalls Retailers to Avoid During the Coming Holidays
This year’s big holiday season is approaching and as usual brands irrespective of size are planning already and are currently just fine-tuning their strategies for success. Brands especially from the retail industry are trying their best to woo customers to come into their stores. According to the National Retail Federation (NRF), US retail industry will witness a 4.1 percent growth, which is the largest since the year 2011. NRF’s digital retail division Shop.org is forecasting 8-11 percent growth in e-retailing and popularity of mobile devices will play a significant role in this year’s holiday shopping season. For retailers, holiday seasons are considered as a massive opportunity, but many industry experts say that there are a few pitfalls that seem to occur every year and here are solutions to overcome these dangers.
Planning Your Advertising Budget
You must know that there is a limit to the spending in advertising and once the advertising budget is set, retail brands need to understand how spend will be allocated. It is important that ads of a retail brand are displayed during peak shopping and purchasing times. When it comes to showing important dates during holiday shopping seasons, you can visit Google’s blogspot which displays a very helpful calendar. Too often the retail industry sees many brands have their ad campaigns hit budget caps and that during the regular part of the year. They would never come close to hitting, but during holiday those bets are off.
When you set your advertising budget for this year’s shopping season, first you need to review your spending to make sure that the budget is matched to consumer demand. If there is a huge spike in volume that was all part of a retail brand’s ad campaign, Google will flag it as a fraudulent activity and your Google Ads account will be deactivated for hours or for the whole day. So, if you are planning for really big spending plans, it is recommended that you approach your online advertising agency ahead of time to let the firm know your plans.
Advertising Your Products via Mobile Platform
Even as mobile advertising is gaining more trust every year, many retailers still struggle with the true value of mobile to their business. According to many surveys, currently retailers’ mobile traffic is between 10-20 percent and during this holiday season, you can expect the shopping behavior will be based on mobile, as show-rooming and fast transactions happen. To understand how customers interact with the mobile platform to make purchase decisions, you can use Google’s consumer barometer tool. For getting results as per your desired expectations, it is advised to include mobile in your overall advertising campaign planned for this holiday season.
No Change in Promotions
You may be thinking that you know what will sell and what people want, but in truth, it is really hard to predict as the day goes on. For instance, if it is running out of a size, or a promotion requires to change, how this data be managed? What search queries or campaigns need to be waited to stop spending on these things? What ad copy requires to be changed to reflect only current affairs? Many advertising experts find mapping the campaign structure to category or naming particular offers is significant in making this process much more responsive as things change.
Issuing an Escalation Strategy
You may probably hear shocking stories from others, even if it is your first holiday shopping experience. The retail website goes down, the wireless connection at your home goes down, or any other number of crazy things will occur. When this problem occurs, what will you do? What is the phone tree to escalate problems? How will the team interact throughout the day? When a problem occurs, who is “on call” at 3 a.m.? Planning ahead is the crucial strategy when you and the team face potential issues. You can learn from brands which found success through proper planning which prevented them from performing poorly.
There are many reliable online marketing service providers which have a team of experts who are ready to help you with advertising and marketing packages that are customized as per your marketing and budget specifications.
How can You Increase Social Media Shares of Your Content
We know that only through social media sites we can get considerable targeted traffic to a particular site and for attracting users, we need to create quality and informative content. For getting more social media shares, developing quality and fresh content and uploading it isn’t enough. With over one billion active users on Facebook and another five hundred million spread across, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+, you cannot simply ignore the importance of social media in digital marketing.
Many surveys have pointed out that only a very small percentage of websites and brands are actually implementing social media marketing strategies and customer engagement in the right way. In this post, you can look into four different ways of getting your audience to share more site content in social media. You can utilize the right tools for creating a content strategy to make sure that thousands of visitors will be ready to share your content among their social media friends and followers.
Infographic Creation is Time Consuming, But it Has Lots of Benefits
When it comes to content creation, you cannot ignore infographics as it is very eye-catchy and visual content tactic that can attract lots of social shares. It is true that infographic creation is a time consuming process but once it is nicely put you will get results as expected. If you are a designer, you make use of various applications and tools on the web that make the process of creating an infographic simply a matter of plugging in data and suing different templates and images. Or, you can seek help from a professional who is well-versed in different content creation techniques and well aware of the latest web based applications and tools that make the job easier. When creating a colorful and attractive infograhic make sure that you include a good amount of text which will rank your site in search engine results as well.
Reach Out Top Experts in Your Industry
Another great strategy to attract more social shares to your website is by creating link bait posts by interviewing some of the top industry experts. Even though this process is lengthy and time consuming, you can get a slew of quality backlinks and traffic to your content. Always posting content that is related to your services/products and your branding are somewhat, but posting content based on views of notable people within your industry is at the same time highly informative and useful to your audience. Try to reach out as many experts in your niche market and create a detailed collection of their responses. After posting content on your site, contact all the experts you interviewed and they all begin to share your post through their own social media accounts.
Social Activity on a Weekly Basis
If you want your social media world to be active on a weekly basis, then the great way of doing this would be through the use of a weekly/monthly blog series featuring interviews of top industry experts. Even though requesting notable people to be interviewed is not easy as they are busy or short on time, but you can offer them value in the process. It will be beneficial for both sides since the expert you are interviewing gets better online exposure and your blog gets to introduce a notable personality and may get retweeted by them as well. For example, bloggingtips.com has done a similar thing with their Meet the Bloggers interview series. Every weekend the website post blogs based on the interviews of two different bloggers and tell their story of how they got started with their blog, along with where it is getting them to today.
Give Something in Return for Social Share
Nowadays, almost all websites have social button plugins placed on top of blogs so that people will share it if they like it. But there are more effective ways to get social shares as well and one such is the use of a plugin called One Press Social Locker. If you use One Press plugin in your blog site in the right way, it will double your existing networking traffic for your site. Throughout the content on your site, you can place the One Press Social plugin below which will allow site visitors to download a PDF of the individual blogpost. All it takes is a simple click of one your social buttons and after the update is sent out to the visitor’s social network, the free PDF will be sent to the person as a downloadable file.
If you are facing trouble in coming with enough content for your website, there are many professional content developers who are ready to help you in any way they can. Or, you can consult with a online marketing firm that has a team of content developers who can come with cost-effective solutions based your requirements.
It’s Official! Google Penguin 3.0 Update has been Rolled Out
It seems that another Penguin update has been rolled out by Google on 17th October, 2014 which is aimed at websites that violate Google’s webmaster guidelines, especially those sites that manipulate the number of links pointing to their web page. Penguin 3.0 update’s imminent arrival was announced by Google engineer Pierre Far in his Google+ post. According to Far, the new algorithm update is not a fully fledged update, but a refresh that will websites to clean up their web spam penalties incurred in previous iterations of Penguin. He also points out that one of the objectives of this Penguin refresh is to have websites with newly-discovered spam gets stripped of their search result rankings.
In addition, the new Penguin algorithm will affect less than 1% of US English queries in the first phase. For those who do not the difference between an ‘update’ and a ‘refresh’ is that an update adds new ranking signals to the algorithm but a refresh doesn’t. With a refresh, Google will run the algorithm again in order to downgrade the websites that use black-hat SEO techniques since the last algorithm refresh, as well as help websites that have rectified their spam issues since the last Penguin refresh.
Slow Global Roll Out of Penguin 3.0
According to his Google+ post, Pierre Far describes the rolling out strategy as a “slow worldwide rollout” which is said in the last few weeks after its initial launch. This means that webmasters won’t get the necessary information about the full impact of the refresh for a quite a while yet. If your site is affected by the previous Penguin update or refresh, and you have been working hard to remove all the spammy links, then you will have to wait for a few weeks of seeing the signs of recovery due to the new Penguin refresh. Also, those websites which evaded this refresh will not be breathing a sigh of relief as this roll-out is happening over few weeks there will be plenty of time for these sites to get demoted.
What this Roll Out Means to You
This new algorithm roll out can be viewed as your opportunity to see if you have been keeping a clean link profile. If you see any changes in your rankings (good or bad) or in your PR, chances are that you have some SEO analysis to do. You need to take time to fully understand what happened and then make the necessary improvements to rectify the errors. There are many articles that fully describe Penguin penalty removal or you can consult with specialists who are experts in this field. It is also worth noting that if you do see a drop in your website rankings, it doesn’t necessarily mean you were directly hit with Penguin refresh. Because the Penguin 3.0 update will make changes to links that count and that don’t, you could simply be seeing the effects of a few links that no longer count in the same way they once did.
If your site is demoted by Google due to the after effect of Penguin roll out, it is recommended that you seek help from experts who are qualified and experienced in offering Penguin penalty recovery solutions in a highly competitive budget.
Google Putting More Restrictions on Piracy Websites in its Search Network
Even though Google penalizes spammy websites which try to manipulate its ranking algorithms but the internet giant do not gave much focus piracy websites especially torrent sites. But now, things have changed as Google updated its search engine algorithms in an attempt to suppress or restrict piracy sites appearing in the top positions in its search result pages. The decision to roll out these changes was announced in Google’s How Google Fights Piracy report which is refined version of its original report which was first published in September 2013. Google’s new stance against piracy websites was due to immense criticism it received from the US entertainment industry which has argued that these websites should be “demoted” or “downgraded” in Google’s search results because they encourage people to download media content illegally.
Google in its official blog site has mentioned that it updating its search algorithms with the aim of restricting the search visibility of piracy websites when people search for films, music and other copyrighted content. According to the blog, the new algorithm updates have included new major features such as:
- Ad Formats – Google has been testing new ad formats in their search results on queries related to movies and music that help people to find legitimate websites that provide copyrighted media content. For example, for relatively small number of search queries for movies that consists of terms such as “free”, “download” or “watch”, Google has replaced piracy sites with legal services such as Netflix and Spotify in a box at the top of the search results. They are testing other ways of pointing users to genuine sources of movies and music, including in the right hand panel on the search result pages
- Based on DMCA Removal Notices – Google is now removing more terms from its auto-complete feature as per Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) removal notices. Google search has rolled out as part of the refresh which down-ranks websites for which the search engine has received a large number of valid DMCA notices. According to Google’s representative, “We have refined the DMCA signal in ways Google expect to visibly affect the search result rankings of some of the most notorious websites”. Initially, Google is implementing this new search update in the US and it will roll out this update globally in the coming weeks.
According to the official blogpost, Google is trying to strengthen its partnership with the entertainment industry as the latter has been lobbying Google for years in taking necessary steps to curb the threat posed by the piracy websites. In October 2014, Google launched collaboration with the popular Hollywood film production company Paramount Pictures for promoting their upcoming movie “Interstellar” with an interactive website. The film company utilized Google’s Content ID feature for easily identifying and managing their content on Youtube channel. In addition to strengthening ties with film industry bigwigs, Google says that it will continue to invest in combating piracy across all of their services.
Getting More Online Recognition by Using Google+ Hashtags
Google’s own social media site Google+ has started leveraging the ‘hashtag’ phenomenon that is now a big success in Facebook and Twitter. As you know that a hashtag helps people to find and join conversations about a specific topic, it can be used by business owners and marketers to maximize their presence in Google. Google+ hashtags will make it simple for people to discover your content, even if they are outside your Google+ circles. Actually, they are an efficient way to bring more visibility and more presence to your Google+ profile and your business, but these hashtags work a bit differently than you are used to.
Twitter and Facebook use hashtags to curate content by filtering updates that consist of a particular hashtag. For example, if you search #newsmartphones, your results only display updates that include that hashtag. But Google+ uses hashtags not to curate topics but to explore them. For instance, if you search a Google+ hashtag, the search network automatically chooses relevant hashtags and trending topics and returns those along with the hashtag you typed in. So, with the help of Google+ hashtags, you implement content strategies and thus gaining more SEO benefits. Here are few ways to take advantage of Google+ hashtags.
Google+ Will Assign Hashtags for You
Twitter and other social media sites depend on users to tag their own updates, but Google+ will assign hashtags for you. For example, if you included just single hashtag or used a not-so-popular hashtag, Google+ will add more hashtags automatically and that provides you additional reach. If you want adding hashtags on your own rather Google+ doing it, you can opt for that. For adding hashtags on your own, first you need to disable Google+’s automatic hashtag feature by going into your settings and un-checking the box.
Find the Most Relevant Ones
When you assign your own hashtags or let Google+ do it for you, the next thing you need to do is to find the most relevant hashtags. You can utilize the Explore section and sort through related hashtags. When you search for a hashtag on Google’s social media site, your results consists of separate box with the most popular and recently used hashtags. Then you look through those and choose those hashtags that are most likely to increase your online presence. Also, you can use the auto-suggestion feature in Google+. You need to just type anything after # and you will see some extra suggested hashtags. In your Google+ updates, don’t forget to use hashtags bearing your brand name. If you have enough followers who are hashtaggging your brand name in the relevant context, those Google+ updates are very likely to be suggested to additional followers as relevant whenever they are exploring Google’s social media site.
Make Most Out of Relevant Hashtags
To identify which all updates make it into your Google+ homepage, the social media site uses a complex algorithm. Also, you can see those updates from people outside of your Google+ circles. This complex algorithm that Google+ uses is said to include hashtag relevance. For instance, your updates may show as “hot” for Google+ users who have known to have related interests. Also, most of these users might not be connected to you or may be outside your Google+ circles. You can benefit from shared interests by searching for a hashtag and observing the search results. Find out the topics that may seem relevant and those which people talk about, and which related hashtags they are using. You can use both of these in your future Google+ updates. You will be more likely to show up in other Google+ users’ feeds and have better chance of appealing to a wider audience.
Google+ Marketing Helps You a lot
When it comes to reaching wider audience, use of Google+ hashtags is an important strategy. And of course, selecting the right hashtag can make or break this social strategy, so take your time to tag your own updates instead of depending on Google+ to assign it for you. You can use the Explorer section to find the most trending related hashtags and learn more about your niche and how to utilize it for targeting audience on Google+.
Businesses depend on the use of social media channels to build links, enhance main website performance and keep their audience engaged. The new trends consist of specialized strategies for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Linkedin, Google+ marketing, although ROI for social media optimization (SMO) remains elusive.
With social media outlets, companies build brand awareness and generate publicity for their products and services. The purpose of most marketing campaigns targeting social platforms is to generate more traffic for the main website and sales, on the long run.
Relevance for search engine indexation
Marketing campaigns conducted on social media as part of SMO efforts do not remain outside the scope of search engines. Quite the contrary!
- Search engines utilize users’ recommendations on social networks like Google+, Twitter and Facebook to evaluate and rank pages.
- When a page is liked or shared by a user, the SE interprets it as a vote for the quality of the web page.
- Websites that have more likes will occupy a more favorable (i.e. visible) position in search engine result pages.
Viral web promotion
We have all seen photos, videos, comments or news going viral around the web. Effective Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Linkedin, Google+ marketing strategies can harness the power of viral marketing and channel it for business goals. It suffices to say that 80% of the activity on Pinterest results from ‘repinning’.
Social Bookmarking – the use of several social networks in parallel enables businesses to maintain their existing audience while attracting new followers too. For instance, a lot of traffic can be generated from social bookmarking. The system enables users to save links to certain pages and share them.
Targeting the blogosphere further increases clients’ or followers’ engagement. Content is shared by means of RSS both in special blog search engines and in the blogosphere.
Although social media marketing has grown in lots of directions, clearly measuring ROI of social bookmarking and other SMO campaigns remains a daunting task. Specialists clearly encourage the careful definition of goals for every campaign in order to be able to use metrics to track performance and monitor ROI.
Further business applications for social media
Brand building and product/service promotion do not represent the only goals of social media marketing. Companies now use social networks for lots of other purposes:
- Employee engagement – companies want their employees to be enthusiastic about their work and make efforts for the best interest of the company.
- Public relations and customer satisfaction – to keep in contact with customers, manage feedback and limit the consequences of negative reviews;
- Recruiting – a growing number of companies use social recruiting applications to select or screen job applicants. LinkedIn serves great for HR purposes, although it’s just one among many other resources.
All in all, social media channels have pushed the limits of communication and business interaction to a whole new level, forcing business owners to rethink their strategies and come up with new marketing tactics that can deal with the new web trends. Even if ROI is still difficult to determine for social media marketing campaigns, companies continue to invest time, effort and loads of money in this direction for development.
Using Instagram as Your Social Marketing Platform
Popular online mobile photo-sharing and video-sharing site Instagram is now going through the same path as its counterparts such as Pinterest and YouTube in helping marketers and advertisers to carrying out their promotional campaigns. Now, the social networking site is allowing marketers to target customers from its 200 million registered users by introducing 3 new tools. Instagram has finally adhered to the demand made by businesses and marketers as they want more insight into how users engage with and respond to their photos and videos. The social media site’s new tools will help marketers in three important areas:
- Account Insights – Account Insights allow marketers and businesses to see how they are increasing brand awareness on Instagram through impressions, reach and engagement.
- Ad Insights – This tool displays the performance of your paid campaigns by analyzing factors such as reach, impressions and frequency for each individual ad delivered to the target users.
- Ad Staging – Ad Staging tool allows advertisers and marketers to preview, save and collaborate on ad creative for upcoming promotional campaigns.
According to Instagram, these new tools will help businesses to monitor their posts and ad campaigns by providing info on reach, impressions and engagement. For example, a marketer will now have access to real-time ad campaign summary and information showing how their target audience is responding to each of their sponsored photos. Also, marketers and advertisers will be able to understand the best time of day to post a photo or video.
Few Instagram Marketing Tips
You may have a better social media presence in Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, but you can also invest your time in promoting your brand via Instagram. As visual content creates more user attention, you can post images and videos in Instagram which can attract more quality clicks for your business. With the help of the tools mentioned above, you can create a strategy with Instagram as your online marketing platform. Here are some tips that can get you started:
- A Thorough Research – You need to perform a thorough research before creating a marketing strategy. What your business can offer people who are on Instagram? Why should they follow you on Instagram, when they are already following you on Twitter and Facebook? When using Instagram, you need to think of personal engagement and the genuine interest of your audience instead of posting content that speaks only sales and promotions.
- Create a Posting Schedule – You need to create a posting schedule so that you can post content when your followers are most active on Instagram. This can be after business hours or during weekends or in the night. Also, check out which content gets the most likes and comments and start sharing similar content. You must add some variety in the content before posting it on the social media site.
- Utilizing Hashtags – Even though hashtags are popular in the social media network, there are those who didn’t really know how to use them. But you can use it as a marketing tactic in which hashtags allows your posts to be visible to people who search for certain hashtags. You can use 4-7 hashtags and ensure that you make use of popular trending ones.
- Try to experiment with Creating Images that features Your Products/Services- Products or services in new or interesting locations can attract the attention of your Instagram followers. Think of it as including creative photography to your product or service shots. There are many ways you can do this with regular products/services.
So, you can use Instagram for marketing your products or creating brand awareness by posting interesting images or videos. Just like its counterparts, Instagram is working closely with its marketing partners to perfect their business-centric services and to make sure that they meet the needs of marketers and advertisers.
