A Conversation Is Always The Marketing Goal
A conversation is not often spoken about, but at the end of the day, it is crucial to the overall goal of every campaign.
Internet marketing campaign goals require thorough planning. Be specific when you decide on your marketing goals, objectives and strategies to build a winning marketing campaign.
A Conversation Equals An Engagement Moment
It’s not enough to reach people, you have to engage them with high-quality, informative, interesting, and most importantly, emotionally-engaging content. Many try to get views, and views are good, however, engagement is a way to tell how good your content is at answering your target audiences’ most important questions. Or it can show you how well you are distracting your target audience from their biggest headaches (by entertaining them.)
“Traditional corporate communication must give way to a process that is more dynamic and more sophisticated. Most important, that process must be conversational.” ~ Boris Groysberg & Michael Slind in Leadership Is A Conversation
Some common engagement measures:
- Pages per visit
- Average time spent per visit
- Bounce rate
- Social actions (likes, shares, comments)
A Conversation Equals A Touch-Point Conversion
I reject any notion that content marketing shouldn’t demonstrate a return on investment. As such, conversion has to be an important goal for any content marketing program. The only reason to execute a content marketing program is to drive business outcomes. And those outcomes come in the form of actions taken by the readers you are attracting. And while they may not be direct sales conversion, they should be conversions from one stage of the buying process to another.
Some common conversion metrics:
- Newsletter Subscriptions
- Registrations to gated content
- Clicks to your “Buy Now” button (or “chat now” or “call now”)
- Leads from your track-able 1-800 number
- Visits and conversions on other landing pages
A Conversation Is The Key To Success in Online Marketing
Lastly, I wanted to point out that many confuse their online-messaging with online-postulation. In other words, many try to tell their social-media/advert/website/email reader gobs of info believing that they are passing along the important information; forgetting that a conversation should be a natural two-way engagement.
Unfortunately, you can only provide so much info before people will tune out, so, make your conversations “emotionally-meaty”, speaking to the potential benefits and not the features. You will find that your conversion (and engagement) rate will dramatically increase when you do!
10 Reasons Why Social Media Should Be Important To You
10 Reasons Why Social Media Is Important to Your Company… according to SearchEngineJournal.com.
For companies not already on – or forced by prospects and customers to be on – the leading edge of social media, there’s often a prevalent question about what value social media has.
From the range of being seen as an untapped opportunity to one of frustration with it being seen as something of a burden, it can be tough to find the right justification for why it is important.
Regardless of industry and organization size, there are 10 reasons why social media is important to your company regardless of any preconceived answers to the potential questions or to previous commitments and efforts. ~ Corry Morris
- Reputation Management
- PR
- SEO
- Local Search
- Funnel Development
- Agile Marketing
- Prospecting
- Thought Leadership
- Gaining Industry Insight
- Recruitment
If any of these “10 Reasons Why” resonated with you, you should read this post by Corry Morris. I highly recommend you follow that up by reading my post about how Marketing Is Like Farming.
The Secret To Understanding Why People Buy
The secret to “knowing why” is powerful. In fact, for the most part, sales and engagement are strongly driven by knowing the “why”.
The Secret To Scientific Marketing
We’re creatures of habit and studies of human nature strongly suggests that some people still replace unknowns with what they “feel” sounds right to them, rather than accept that it is just unknown. The anxiety of the unknown drives our feelings-centre in our brains and this is why some people say, “I feel [whatever].” when looking to make a decision about what the choose to believe. It is well-known amongst the scientific community that in human nature, we replace info, logic and reason (a.k.a. research and facts) with the info that may not be correct.
I mention all this as this is not psychological, but biological. Our brain has regions that do certain & specific things. One region, the NeoCortex, only understands info, logic and reason; it has zero emotional capacity. Another region, the AlloCortex (a part of the brain’s limbic system) has zero capacity for info, logic and reason and only understand emotions; this is why we use the verbiage “feel” when describing why we did something. “…I felt it was right…”, “…this purchase feels right…”, “…no thanks, that does not feel right…”, etc.
And while our NeoCortex can influence our actions, 100% of all decisions are from the limbic system or predominantly, the AlloCortex region.
I have covered this before but in this post-factual world — whether you are dealing with the politics of a debate on social media or a marketing campaign — it is important to know the secret of what will influence and eventually convert a person to engage you.
The Secret Of Target-Awareness In Marketing
A place to start (always) is understanding the awareness of your target audience. Awareness is key to producing the right message at the right time, as without your target knowing that they have a problem, your solution holds zero value. This holds true for every stage of the awareness funnel.
In that awareness-funnel, there are five stages, the last being that your target is ready to buy from you. Those stages are:
- Not Aware
- Problem-Aware
- Solution-Aware
- Provider Aware
- Fully Aware
If you want to learn more about how to create conversion-driven copy for your marketing collateral or website, sign up for my limited-time complimentary one-on-one “Start Your 2019 Marketing Off Right Master Class”. This offering is only being offered in January this year, so hurry as there is less than 30-days to go! Reserve your time slot here!
The Top 7 Things I’ve Learned About SEO This Year
2018 has been an eventful year for the SEO industry.
by Steven van Vessum at Search Engine Journal
1. This Year’s Google Updates Were Unparalleled (And No One Really Knows What Changed)
Search engines have been rolling out updates since the early days of the industry— nothing new there.
We’ve seen big updates such as the Panda and Penguin updates, which had a massive impact.
And yet still, the frequency and complexity of the Google algorithm updates we’ve seen this year are unparalleled.
2. It’s Google’s World – We Just Live in It
Everyday Google dictates the kind of SERP we see, and what it contains.
And we have to deal with that.
We’re all just test subjects in Google’s massive, continuously updating tests.
This article was borrowed from Search Engine Journal. To read the full article, click here!
3. Google’s Mobile-First Index Hasn’t Had Much of an Impact (Yet)
Over the course of the year [while content was the ruler of the land], the mobile-first index rolled out, and… actually nothing much happened.
Back in November 2016, Google said they’d roll out the mobile-first index slowly and monitor its impact closely —and that has turned out to be the case.
Even though the mobile-first index shift only changed how they gather their data, not how they rank sites, I still expected to see a lot more fluctuations.
4. SEO Pros Are Creatures of Habit & Dislike Change
Even though we’re part of a fast-moving industry, many SEO professionals are creatures of habit who dislike change.
They don’t like to change how they audit websites, the way they report, the tools they use, and so on.
I know, SEO pros are human, too — and humans generally don’t like change.
But if you want to stay ahead of the curve, you need to innovate.
This article was borrowed from Search Engine Journal. To read the full article, click here!
5. DuckDuckGo’s Growth Has Picked Up, by a Lot
While they’re still a small player in the world of search engines, DuckDuckGo’s growth has surprisingly picked up by a lot.
As of November 26, they’re processing 33.6 million direct queries per day, compared to 19.1 million a year before.
6. Search Intent Is Extremely Important
I think a lot of the Google updates we’ve seen recently help Google serve the right results for the right search intent.
Google has loads of user data, and they’re continuously testing whether searchers are happy with the results that they’re shown.
Never before has search intent been as important as it is now.
7. Google’s Far from Perfect
Google employs the smartest engineers and they’re using the most advanced algorithms to determine:
- What your content is about.
- What their users’ search intent is.
- What results satisfy people’s complicated search queries.
- And much more.
So, What Does 2019 Have in Store for Us?
Obviously, for the foreseeable future, Google will keep on dominating the lives of us SEOs. They’ll try to become even more dominant, possibly by leveraging AMPand the WordPress partnership.
This article was borrowed from Search Engine Journal. To read the full article, click here!