Social Selling, Hashtags, Google Analytics

What is Social Selling?

It is using social media channels to market the potential sale. Your company must use analytical data to create the content that will target the correct audience. Therefore, the marketing and sales departments must plan strategically and communicate the end goals properly. This relationship between the departments will result in a more effective marketing approach, reach the target audience, and have a greatly likelihood of obtaining the sale. I strongly advise you to watch the following video to understand social selling from different perspectives. This should help you start using the data you have and apply it more effectively through social media.

 

Hashtags

Hashtagging has become an extremely vital part of connecting to customers, gaining social media awareness, and creating trends. Creating a hashtag specific to your company will help you build your brand, promote a campaign, or create a trend. Hootsuite has a great post explaining the history and effectiveness of the “hashtag.” As you may already know, hashtagging has gone beyond Twitter. It is now used with Google+, Facebook, Instagram, blogging websites such as WordPress and Tumblr, and on commercials.

Photo Credit: http://blog.hootsuite.com/hashtag-infographic/
Photo Credit: http://blog.hootsuite.com/hashtag-infographic/

 

Combine Social Media to Google Analytics

I highly recommend you link your social media websites to your Google Analytics account. This will allow you to track the effectiveness of your current social media marketing strategies. Without actually asking the purchaser of your product, you will not know for certain that your social media marketing tactics resulted in a sale. What you need to focus on is the amount of reach you have attainted. You want to reach a vast amount of people, yes, but more importantly, you want to reach people that are within your target audience. This is because you have tailored your messages to attract their attention and persuade them into the purchase. In addition, you want your social media marketing to keep attracting them. You want to remind them constantly why they purchased from you in the first place and maintain their loyalty as a customer by remaining a positive brand. This can be done through your marketing, public relations, and advertising teams’ creativity, innovation, or sparking a feeling or idea such as a good time or happiness. The following video will help you set up or update your Google Analytics account to sync with your social media accounts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sIBrBga0fw

Happy hashtagging y’all!

 

Please comment with questions or if the post helped you. 🙂

Creating Hyperlinks: Internal vs. External

Photo credit: www.thesavvysocialista.com
Photo credit: www.thesavvysocialista.com
 
Get an overview of SEO basics here if you need to understand where I am coming from on this blog post. 

Internal Linking

When people search throughout your website and go to different pages, they are using an internal link system. This is important for your SEO (Search Engine Optimization). You want people to stay on your website as long as possible. It is important to work on linking pages to other pages on your website. This will increase your page rank through the clicks per link on each page. Through this process, your website’s page rank will increase. By this, I mean your website will go up in rank on search engine sites’ results. When people search for a topic and your website is one of the top sites to come up on Google, Bing, Yahoo, or any other search engine, this is great for your brand. This increases your brand’s awareness because more people are likely to go to your site for information. In addition, it is important to increase your SEO because it improves your brand image. What I mean by this is that the overall image will increase because if your rank goes up, more people use your site for information, and your website receives more credibility or authenticity organically. Because the website is associated with your brand, your brand’s credibility and authenticity increases as well.

Efficient navigation

Is key to keep people on your website. If they cannot search through archives, an internal search engine, or find helpful links, they will probably get annoyed, frustrated, and simply leave your website. This is the LAST thing you want in terms of increasing your SEO. Be sure that there are helpful hyperlinks within your internal network to increase navigation efficiency.

External Linking

This is another way to increase your brand’s image. External hyperlinks establish and reinforce credibility for your website and brand.  Having these external links will not only increase your legitimacy but increase your page rank (traffic). This is where your networking skills need to be utilized. Stay connected and use your brand’s credibility, once established, to have other websites link to your website. This will pump up your page rank.   Amanda explains in her article that a company will allow an outside writer to write articles on their company’s website in exchange for a hyperlink to that company’s page.

Any more questions? Leave a comment. I recommend you check out these SEO blogs too.

Happy Linking! 😉

 

Keyword Advertising: AdWords

Keyword Advertising. . .

is method that is useful in today’s real-time cyberworld. We are constantly tweeting, hastaging, instagraming, pinning, and so much more that bidding on keywords is a great way to gain money for your business. Staying up-to-date with the latest trends and topics of discussion online will help your business transcend in today’s global, cyber market. Consumers want what is convenient, so you as the business owners and managers have to figure out what it is that they want or what they should want based on their demographics and purchasing habits. Starting to research the lastest trends online is a great way to get started!

 

. . .Now that you’ve done some research

you can bid on highly relevant keywords. Keyword advertising allows you to make money based on how many hits or searchers that word gets in the cyberworld. So for example, every time someone “googles” the word you bid on and purchased you get money. This is also known as PPC (pay-per-click) advertising. To gather this information, a system is used called Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Now, you do have to spend money on the bidding of the keywords, BUT it is an. . .

. . . INVESTMENT.

Typically and ideally, the money you gain from the hits will make the keyword advertising an investment worth the money spent bidding.

Make it worth your while

One of the best ways to figure out what keywords to use is through the use of keyword analytics. This data analysis will give you a break down of keywords that are relevant, irrelevant, and performable. Word Stream explains the difference between these and provides sample charts for you too see what this is all about. Also, a great overview of the information I have stated thus far can be found here.

To make it simple

This blogger, Travis, gives a straight forward approach to the process of researching keywords. Modifying your keywords will probably be likely when starting out. Here are  some tips on finding where to buy keywords: Home Gauge.

Getting started

As a college student and from the research I have found, the most common place that has come up in my readings of blogs and articles has been Google AdWords. I am partial to Google BUT if you are someone new to keyword advertising and possibly analytics in general, Google is user friendly and has good demos and diagrams to walk you through the start up process.

 

Good luck!

 

 

 

Data Analytics: How can it help?

What is it?

Google Analytics shows you the full spectrum of customers you have and what mediums they are using. With this information, you can serve your customers better and in ways convenient to them. It also provides a credible measurement to gage what advertisements trigger sales.

How is it convenient to you?

Google Analytics has a mobile app that allows you to see what customers are clicking, reading, sharing, watching, and listening to…ALL at the convenience of on the go. This is great since space of time decreases with the release of information in ‘real time.’ With an abundance of information at people’s disposal allows you to keep up. Mobile App Analytics even lets you see when users are using your company’s app while they are using it. As technology constantly changes, it’s an advantage knowing your customer traffic. This way you can stay current with the technology advances and stay relevant to your customers.

If you are new to Google Analytics…

Their YouTube page has helpful videos to get started and understand how to use it to benefit you best. You can see how to measure multi-media channelslink AdWords and Analytics, and use content grouping. There are over 100 videos currently.

 

Can I use Google Analytics as a blogger?

Yes! Here are some great links:

Click here for Tumblr and here for WordPress

Measuring ecommerce

Practical Ecommerce recently posted 10 key ecommerce metrics and recommends Google Analytics. As mentioned earlier, Google Analytics is the best way to track metrics for your company. This way you can ensure you are producing the sales you want. These 10 metrics will help you start or “clean up” your Google Analytics configurations to better suit your company. Understanding your customer traffic is key. Search Engine Watch explains the different reports you receive from Google Analytics Acquisition Reports.

Company use

Google Analytics Premium allows your company members to access the data. In addition,  you have Google experts there to guide you through queries and see how to use the “numbers that really matter.”

Learning how to use Google Analytics is a key step for all company members. The help center gives a free means of learning the ‘in and outs’ and Analytics Academy is a free online training service to help your company get started on the right track.  Also, be sure to check the latest videos on the YouTube Channel.

Marketing Made Easy

Linking Google Tag Manager and Data-Driven Attribution to Google Analytics allows you to focus on marketing rather than getting caught up with marketing technology. Precise measurements of when and what people are buying will increase the return on your investments.

 

Good luck! 😉