Which social media channels do you use for professional purposes? [#ChartoftheDay]

LinkedIn is not as far ahead of the rest as you might think.

HubSpot has launched their yearly State of Inbound 2016 report, providing us with some great insights into the latest trends and growth of inbound marketing.

This year their report is looking to showcase not just the current state of - but also the future of - Inbound Marketing.

One of the charts that caught my eye is the one below. It can be found on page 115 of the report if you're interested. It highlights the preferred channels of communication marketers and business owners like to use for both personal and professional purposes.

It is somewhat unsurprising to see LinkedIn as the preferred choice of professional communications. After all, it is a social network intended to help you build and engage with your professional network. Interestingly it appears a lot of us are having personal conversations across it too. Are we trying to disguise our lack of work with the LinkedIn badge? I think so...

In another unsurprising discovery, Facebook is by far the preferred channel of discussion by the majority of us and is used for 92% of personal communications. It also comes in at second for professional discussions at 73%. I think we are starting to see the line between social networking and professional networking is blurring.

Emerging social networks such as Instagram, Snapchat and Vine are still mostly seen as a personal channel, which is hardly surprising given the younger demographic using these.

The biggest surprise in this data is Twitter. It's more often used for professional purposes rather than personal, which came as somewhat of a shock to me.

Do any of these results come as a surprise for you?

• Source: HubSpot - State of Inbound 2016
• Date: May 2016

source http://www.smartinsights.com/customer-relationship-management/social-media-channels-use-professional-purposes-chartoftheday/

Google’s new messenger app ‘Allo’ introduces personal assistent with big implications for brands [@SmartInsights Alert]

Allo, Allo, Allo, what marketing implications do we have here then?

Importance:
Recommended Source: Allo.Google.com

Google announcement this week of the launch of its new messenger app has got marketers excited. And no, it's not because of the new emojis. It's because it follows the industry-wide trend for integrating AI-powered digital assistants into messaging apps. The announcement comes hot of the heels of Facebook's announcement earlier this month which hailed the introduction of 'Messanger version 1.2', which would include facilities to let chatbots handle payments within the app.

The chat app has lots of nifty little features to tempt users, which aren't all that important to marketers. These are things like being able to enlarge or shrink text, send auto-generated responses, doodle on images or send an impressive range of stupid emojis.

The key feature from a marketing perspective is the fact the app contains a personal assistant that utilises 'Google Now', which uses a natural language interface to answer users questions. This feature can be brought into your chats with anyone using '@Google' or you can talk to the assistant directly in a separate chat.

Above is an example of how you can bring in the smart assistant to a chat by using '@Google'. The way they've built the feature by using '@' rather than just having a button to bring in the bot suggests they may well do what Facebook has done and start to open up the platform to let others develop chatbots that work within the app. Below you can see an example of the way users can also talk directly with the assistant in a separate chat:

What does this mean for marketers?

The Allo app is a big move from Google. They'll probably look to make it the default android messenger app to give it a huge user base. Given Andriod has 1.4 billion users it could quickly grow to have a user base of a similar scale to Facebook Messager- putting it squarely in the top 3 global messaging apps.

Given that the AI assistant will be using Google search rankings to decide on what content to answer people's questions with- For example if they ask 'What is lifecycle marketing' to the chat they'll be likely to be shown the top ranking page for that search - then it means the important of SEO is reinforced by the app. Crucially it means ranking top of 'natural language keywords'- something Google have termed 'conversational search' is now extremely important.

What is it? Natural Language Keywords / Conversational Search

Confusingly this is sometimes called Natural Language Keywords, sometimes referred to as Conversational Search. The essence of it is using search functions in the way you would usually speak, rather than how they are currently used. This comes from either voice search or interacting with chat bots. A good example would be the usual typed search might be: 'Cheap Plane Tickets Dublin' but a 'conversational search' would be 'Show me plane tickets to Dublin under for less than forty pounds'.

The trend towards personal assistants and voice search means ranking on 'natural language keywords' is more important than ever. You should look at adapting your SEO strategy to take account of this as the trend becomes more pronounced. Identifying what natural language keywords are likely to be search related to your product/ brand is a great place to start, and then you can planning how to rank for them.

source http://www.smartinsights.com/search-engine-optimisation-seo/seo-strategy/googles-new-messenger-app-allo-introduces-personal-assistent-big-implications-brands-smartinsights-alert/

Tracking campaigns in Google Analytics

A how-to guide for campaign reporting with examples

One of the most important (but often overlooked) aspects of digital marketing is setting up your analytics properly. It’s a little bit technical, but easy to do once you understand a few simple steps and see why it’s so important.

Being able to track where your visitors are coming from is a valuable opportunity to improve your engagement and your ROI during the campaign. Additionally, when you benchmark your campaign performance you will be able to improve your campaigns in the future, and budget more effectively. It’s worth investing a little time in analytics!

In this post, we’ll show you how to use Google Analytics to track visits to your website or landing page. This is the critical first step in being able to understand how your campaign is performing.

10 Steps to Actionable Analytics for Digital Marketing from Smart Insights

Once you can accurately see where your visitors are coming from, you’ll be able to build more useful reports such as “goal completions by conversion source” (e.g. how many leads or sales are coming from Bing versus Facebook), or “sales by source/medium” (using Google Analytics’ e-commerce reporting features).

Why track your marketing campaigns?

Marketers at the top of their game always want more data. When you know where your visitors are coming from and how each traffic source is converting on your site, you can make on-the-fly optimizations to your campaign and achieve better overall results.

With this campaign tracking data in hand you’ll be able to benchmark against it when designing and budgeting for future campaigns, making your future campaigns even better. This is one form of data benchmarking, and it’s a powerful tool for any marketer.

Download Expert Member resource – 7 Steps to using Google Analytics To Improve Online Marketing

Our guide steps you through the setup stages, but focuses on how you use Google Analytics to get better business results - the missing link in most books and the Google documentation.

Access the Using Google Analytics To Improve Online Marketing

What if you not thinking this way when setting up your promotions? For example, suppose you are running a contest and you’ve promoted it through print, email, Facebook Ads, Facebook Sponsored Posts, and Google Adwords. Visitors from these sources will appear in Google Analytics as follows:

* These can show up as various sources such as m.facebook.com (Facebook’s mobile web page) and l.facebook.com (Facebook’s laptop/desktop version), depending which devices they use and if they are using http or https status.

In this example, you wouldn’t be able to distinguish visitors from print versus email. Your Facebook traffic will all show up as one stat, regardless of whether they clicked your post or an ad. Traffic from Google will all display as organic traffic, not paid traffic (cost per click).

The trouble here is that you can’t tell what the money spent on Facebook Ads or Google Adwords actually translated to in terms of leads, sales, sign-ups, etc. Did the Google Adwords spend pay off? Did anyone actually find your website through print advertising? You just won’t know. And the next time you plan a campaign, you’ll be just as blind.

But if you had known that mid-way through the campaign your Facebook Ads were converting at half the cost of visitors from Adwords, you could have applied the remainder of your Adwords budget toward Facebook Ads and boosted the overall ROI of your campaign. Or, suppose your analytics could have shown that all of your direct traffic was coming from print, and your email marketing wasn’t working - you could adjust your email messaging to get a better click-through rate there. Perhaps you are emailing to multiple lists (you should be segmenting!). Wouldn’t it be great if you could see your conversion rates for each email list separately?

You can get all of this data, and it’s easier to do than you think.

How to track your campaigns?

We’re using Google Analytics here as it’s so popular, but other analytics tools will have similar features.

When a visitor lands on your website, Google Analytics records that pageview along with the source and medium that the visitor originated from. The “source” is the domain that the visitor came from, and the “medium” is a classification for different kinds of traffic. There is also a “campaign” parameter that can be used to further segment your traffic.

Many tools like MailChimp, Hootsuite, Oktopost and Hubspot have features that let you create tracking URLs, but anyone can use Google’s own Tracking URL Builder.  You can automatically apply tracking parameters to all Adwords traffic by enabling Auto-tagging in Adwords (read instructions about how it works.).

A simple URL looks like this: http://qoints.com

A Tracking URL looks like this: http://qoints.com/?utm_source=smartinsights.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=guestpost

These UTM parameters (everything after the “?”) force Google Analytics to record this data into the visitor’s pageview. In your Analytics Reporting view, under Acquisition > All Traffic, you will see traffic from the above Tracking URL as:

source / medium = newsletter / email

and in the Acquisition > Campaigns report you’ll see this traffic under Campaign = agency-newsletter

Using Tracking URLs for the campaign promotion example above, we’d get this:

* using a simple URL when posting links to Facebook will report people who click the link as facebook / referral by default, but you can use UTM parameters to distinguish different campaigns if you want

The URLs below all go to the same fictitious landing page (http://example.com/), but they have different tracking parameters appended to them:

• http://example.com/?utm_source=mailer&utm_medium=print&utm_campaign=agencies
• http://example.com/?utm_source=contest-promo&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=agencies
• http://example.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=agencies
• http://example.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=agencies
• http://example.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=agencies

So, for each channel that you are promoting through, you should be using a unique tracking URL. This will automatically allow you to report on each channel, as well as reporting on each source, medium or campaign as an aggregate.

Important tips for measurement

•  1. Plan and organize your parameters

Google Analytics simply records whatever it’s told, so organize your parameters ahead of time. It’s best to use a standard set of parameters company-wide. If your company uses a different set of parameters each time an email goes out, you won’t be able to easily report on things like overall traffic from email monthly or year-over-year. Analytics is case-sensitive too, so “Email”, “email”, “e-mail” and “E-mail” will report as four separate mediums.

• 2. Keep it simple

It may be tempting to create unique parameters for all of the variables for each source, but this is not necessary, nor is it ideal. Each channel only needs its own unique combination of parameters in order to be reported on separately.

For example:

These parameters will allow for reporting on all paid traffic, or all email traffic, or all traffic from the whole “summer” campaign as well as reporting on each channel separately by using combinations of the above in a segment or filter.

• 3.  Start now

Any data is better than none. Start simple and grow from there. Optimizing your campaign strategy in response to real-time data is a powerful way to achieve better ROI for your campaigns. Benchmarking your digital marketing data over time is a sure-fire way to improve your future campaigns, too.
Watch our video

Thanks to Cory Rosenfield for sharing his advice and opinions in this post. Cory Rosenfield. Cory is the co-founder and CEO of Qoints, an adaptive digital marketing intelligence (DMI) and performance benchmarking tool for enterprise marketers. Previously, he held the role of Technical Director for multiple small-to-medium sized marketing agencies in Toronto as CSO of InfiniteSM, a social marketing consultancy and technical development firm. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn

source http://www.smartinsights.com/google-analytics/google-analytics-campaign-tracking/campaign-tracking-aa09/

8 Pitfalls of Digital Transformation

Avoid these mistakes to prevent digital transformation failure

There's no doubt that Digital Transformation initiatives have been a major trend in 2016 which look set to continue into 2017. This chart from 2016 research by Smart Insights shows the popularity of digital transformation initiatives.

You can see that over one-quarter (30%) of businesses already have a transformation programme in place, with many businesses looking to launch their digital transformation programme imminently.

Yet shockingly, according to Forbes, 84% of digital transformations fail.  For each one of you reading this from an organisation about to embark on the process, only one in eight of you will succeed. But perhaps the high failure rate is unavoidable. 86% of leaders think digital transformation is necessary within their organisation yet only half feel that they fully understand it.

In my experience through the work we do helping organisations with digital transformation, there are plenty of things you can do to make sure your organisation excels in this area, rather than falling flat on its face. Below are the 8 things which I’ve seen go wrong and how you can prevent them.

Not facing your fears

Chances are that when something inevitably goes wrong during the project, it will have crossed someone’s mind as a red flag some time ago. Yet they probably felt too worried about looking stupid to share their concerns. My top tip: run a stand alone session on risk with key internal stakeholders before you start digital transformation. Have a frank exchange about all the things that could go wrong (also known as a ‘premortem). Get everyone to visualise themselves a year down the line, in a situation where the project has failed. This will get all the issues people are nervous about out in the open. Then you need to agree how you will anticipate and manage these risks. If you’re struggling to get this conversation started, you could use the points below as a checklist. I guarantee that everyone will leave the room feeling more confident and excited about digital transformation.

Not knowing what it is

 There are millions of article about digital transformation but not many definitions. Half of all business leaders are confused by it. And how can they lead it if they don’t know what it is? Here’s my definition: “Integrating digital across our organisation to deliver our vision, create value, give our audience great experience and services and develop our competitive advantage.” Your organisation could use this as a basis for creating a bespoke definition of digital transformation. Ultimately you need to develop this into a vision of where digital can take you, which demonstrates the benefits to your staff and, of course, your audience.

Not having a strategy

 If I had a pound for every time I’ve spoken to an organisation who say that they have already started on digital transformation ‘because we’re getting a new website’ I would have a yacht. I have seen huge amounts of money- often hundreds of thousands- wasted where organisations embarked on the development of a fancy new site/CRM/other expensive tool, with no thought given to where they want to go and how they will get there. The result? Inevitably, the website/CRM goes massively over budget as, without a strategy, there is no way to hold the process to account. The whole project is pulled and the organisation is back to square one. So, get your strategy in place from the get go.

Not putting your audience first

 Every good digital transformation starts with understanding what your audience wants. How are they using digital channels? Where are the gaps? Are their opportunities to reach new audience segments using digital? Creating personas and mapping out detailed user journeys will help you understand your organisation from the perspective of the people who matter most.

Not having the right leadership

Someone needs to head up your digital transformation who has the right mandate for change and the influencing skills to make it happen. Things I’ve seen go wrong here include: the board and executive team outsourcing the transformation entirely to the digital team, when digital should be a significant part in any organisational strategy; a CDO or Head of Digital leading the transformation who is technically brilliant but lacks the soft skills to take people with them. And finally, leadership teams are not always sufficiently bold about where digital could take them. Which is because there is relatively little support out there to help leaders develop digital skills. So, get help and advice e.g. by talking to a peer who has been where you are, or hiring in some expertise.

Having the wrong people

See above. Who should be using digital in their jobs, outside of the digital team? Answer: probably a lot of people. Do you have the right people in the right roles to deliver digital transformation? Have you assessed their digital skills via an audit? Are managers able to support staff in making the transition? This conversation needs to happen at executive and board level.

Not investing in culture change

Imagine that your organisation has flown through digital transformation and, a year from now, you’re a fly on the wall in your office. How are people behaving differently? How are they working together? What is their attitude like? That’s where you need to get to. As the saying goes, culture eats strategy for breakfast. Focus on this as much as developing a great digital strategy and set out practical steps for change and milestones. You’ll want to work closely with influential staff (who does everyone gravitate towards in the work kitchen?) and encourage them to champion digital.

Rubbish internal comms

Digital transformation will inevitably involve hardcore change management and taking people with you is essential. Your internal comms team need to work hard on campaigns to motivate people, celebrating success and cheering them on when going digital feels uncomfortable or difficult.

If you follow these tips, you’ll be on the path to digital transformation success. What other risks have you noticed in this area and how would you manage them?

Thanks to Zoe for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Zoe Amar is widely regarded as one of the charity sector’s leading experts in digital communications and marketing. She founded Zoe Amar Communications in 2013. Zoe writes for The Guardian Voluntary Sector Network about charities and digital issues. She also co-founded the Social CEOs awards. Zoe is a trustee for The Foundation for Training and Education in Care and sits on the Board Audit and Risk Sub-Committee at the Samaritans as their digital expert. She tweets @zoeamar

source http://www.smartinsights.com/manage-digital-transformation/8-pitfalls-digital-transformation/

How to review your customer vs visitor demographic profiles in Google Analytics

Did you know this data is available? Many don't!

In a couple of recent consulting workshops with our members, I've recommended this report Google Analytics report (shown below), but the marketing managers I was working with were unaware of it and, more to the point, they thought they were really useful. I find similar in training workshops too.

What is this data and why is it useful?

The chart shows that you can see the Male / Female breakdown for your site visitors and you can also see the age breakdown too. It's useful for both B2B and B2C.

It becomes more interesting when you compare it to the profile of traditional customers acquired by other channels - this prompts questions as to whether you are reaching new audiences online or similar audiences.

The data becomes even more interesting if you compare it to the most important segments in Google Analytics. For example, how does your audience vary for mobile visitors, visitors using search, visitors arriving on different landing pages, visitors browsing different product categories, converting visitors or returning visitors?

Where to find the Gender and Age breakdown in Google Analytics?

You can find this data within the Audience reports of Google Analytics, but only if have you enabled it. The chart above shows that it's under the Audience, Demographics section in the left nav. This GA Help page explains how to enable Demographic reporting including:

• Enable Advertising Reporting Features for your property
• Enable the Demographics and Interests reports for the view

What is the source of this Demographic data?

Good question! If we're going to present this data to colleagues or clients we need to be confident in it...

The source is based on Google owning Ad network Doubleclick from which they're able to share profile information collected by publishers. The data is linked by cookies or browsers who use Google Accounts.

When explaining this you can show that Google Analytics shares the percentage of people who Google can positively identify.

So, I hope you find this interesting and more to the point, useful! Let us know how if and how you use it!

source http://www.smartinsights.com/google-analytics/optimisation-google-analytics/review-customer-vs-visitor-demographic-profiles-google-analytics/

Comparison of Google clickthrough rates by position [#ChartoftheDay]

Clickthrough research data reveals the importance of 1st, 2nd or 3rd position in Google

You often hear company owners saying “I want to rank top” for their target keywords. Although this may be an unrealistic hope, they’re right to say this since they realise that the proportion of clicks driven by top positions is much higher.

Research showing average clickthrough rates by position in the SERPs (Google's search results pages) are useful since they can help make the business case for more investment in SEO since you can estimate uplift in visits with improved rankings when performing a gap analysis for which keywords to improve in SEO, using search query data from Google Search console, for example.

The best open source for this data today is the Advanced Web Ranking organic CTR research which we share here, so you can check out the different CTR analysis it gives. This data is from July 2016 - the most recent update of the research. We will look at 3 examples of how CTR varies by position depending on different searcher intent.

 1. Organic SERPs CTRs for Brand vs non-branded keyword intent

It's well known that clickthrough rates for branded or navigational keywords are higher - the blue curve shows this well.

The red curve is of most interest from an SEO point-of-view. This shows the value of being in the top 3 clearly with CTRs from 30% in first position to 12% in third position. In the lower positions of 9 to 10, CTR has fallen to a paltry sub 2%.

Here branded CTRs are selected by AWR when part of the string in the domain name appears in the search.

 2. Organic SERPs CTRs for generic vs long-tail terms

Generic searches for products are typically 1 or 2 words. Long tail terms are 4 or more. This chart shows a  similar pattern of decline to above, but a higher level of CTR for the long-tail SEO technique by 3 to 5% by position. Typically this will because long-tail searches have fewer ads and competition may be lower. It shows the benefit of an approach targeting long-tail keywords.

3. Organic SERPs CTRs variation based on intent type

We see a similar decline here, but with lowest figures for commerical and location-based intent where there is typically more competition from AdWords clicks and other SERPS features such as maps for location searches.

Here the different search intent types are defined by these keywords in the search query :

• Commercial intent -  buy, purchase, cheap, pricing, etc.
• Informational intent - what, when, where, how, restaurant, hotel, flight, news, etc.
• Location intent - near, nearby, from, directions, airport, route, maps, etc.
• Specific intent - sums up the keywords with all three intents described above.

Previous research on organic CTR by position in SERPS

This post updates on previous research, summarised by Chris Soames, an analysis of natural search clickthrough rates (CTRs) from Optify showed the importance of Page 1 and, in particular the top 3 positions. The AWR data has the advantage that is updated regularly based on reports across their clients, so samples thousands of sites. It also has some category breakdown and also takes screen resolution for smartphone into account.

Chris also showed how you can use this curve to model the search volume you will get for different positions - this can be used to make the case for more investment in SEO.

The Optify data wasn’t across all industries and also limited in that it didn’t isolate the impact of brand terms (which account for a high proportion of search and tend to have a higher percentage of clicks on the top position).

Given these limitations of the Optify data, it was good to see a cross-industry comparison of CTRs published by MEC Manchester. Their infographic showing Google clickthrough rates by position certainly makes for interesting reading.

Brand vs non-brand clickthrough rates

You can clearly see the higher clickthrough rates for brand terms here and how they impact the overall rates.

Sector-specific clickthrough rates

The industry reports are interesting too - showing a surprising amount of variation between sectors, but there is a common pattern of the first three positions accounting for over 50% of clicks...

Paid vs natural share of search clicks

Another insight in this research shows that despite Google’s changes to the SERPs over the years, which have been roundly derided by SEOs, the vast majority of clicks are still on the natural listings. This research suggests 94% on the natural listings. A much higher proportion than previous data from the likes of iProspect from several years ago.

Methodology

Although published in Summer 2012, this research dates back to June 2011, so doesn’t reflect the latest changes to the SERPs results. The research is based on 28 million people in the UK, making a total 1.4 billion search queries during June 2011. It’s based on research from GroupM UK carried out with Nielsen.

Here is the full infographic.

source http://www.smartinsights.com/search-engine-optimisation-seo/seo-analytics/comparison-of-google-clickthrough-rates-by-position/

The unexpected benefits of removing your affiliate links

Let your content do the talking

Affiliate marketing has been seen for a long time as one of the most effective ways of generating income on the Internet. Basically it is a way for a website to generate income by attracting people to visit other businesses and purchase their goods and services. If someone does purchase something through an active affiliate link, then the owner of the link receives a percentage of the profit.

For example, if you have a website about building and fixing cars, you may include an affiliate link for a company selling car parts or something else related to cars. When the visitor on the website clicks on the affiliate link, they will be taken to the website that is selling the car parts, and if they make a purchase, the car part company will recognize that it was because of the affiliate link, and share the profits as a way to say thank you. So if you have a lot of traffic to your website, affiliate advertising can be a real money maker. Affiliate links can be embedded in text, or can be more like an advertisement banner on the side or top of a web page.

Is It All It’s Cracked Up to Be?

Like any marketing strategy, affiliate marketing and the use of affiliate links is not without its pros and cons. If they were really that simple, then everyone would be raking it in and no one would be working the 9-5 (and let’s face it, those workers are still important). In fact, I would go as far as to say that sometimes removing all traces of affiliate marketing can be a better financial move then putting them up in the first place.

Pros of Affiliate Marketing

• No sizable investment required - just need an active website with traffic.
• Commissions are automatic and instant.
• Income is generated 24/7, not only when online.

Cons of Affiliate Marketing

• Merchants may close down or cancel the affiliation without warning and without paying outstanding commissions.
• Link hijackers can effectively steal the commissions.
• Potential for legal issues - false advertising and unlawful use of logo's and brands.

What the Experts Say About Affiliate Marketing

Having a look at the different articles about affiliate marketing, the expert opinions are really mixed. Some clearly love the idea, however there is a definite negative vibe among many. At the end of the day, proper management is most important when it comes to affiliate marketing, and really, any sort of monetization scheme online. If you are unsure whether it is a good or a bad idea, then I would suggest staying away and letting your content do the speaking.

Some of the sources that offer some interesting insights include CopyBlogger, and this Adam Riemer Marketing article about the relationship between affiliate programs and SEO success.

Removing Affiliate Links to Assist SEO

One issue that many people don't consider when diving into the affiliate marketing pool, is how it will affect a website's Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Anyone even vaguely familiar with the workings of a blog or website will appreciate how important SEO is to the success of an online presence, especially if the overall goal is to monetize. Affiliate links if used incorrectly have the potential to kill SEO. Or to be more specific, having too many affiliate links on the one page can cause Google to penalize the website, which is effectively killing the SEO.

When Google penalizes you they basically cause your website to move from one of the first few hits on Google when your key words are searched, to way down (so suddenly you move from being hit number 5 to hit number 250). Removing the offending affiliate links is the only way to remove the penalty and fix the SEO. For more in-depth information as to how affiliate links can hurt SEO, read this article on Niche Pursuits.

Let Your Content Do the Talking.

As for whether you should remove your affiliate links, it’s really a matter of opinion and personal preference - there are so many different types of websites that it is impossible to categorize them together and give advice that will suit everyone. However, many web pages can become lost in a sea of affiliate links and promotional images. It can really put visitors off if they feel that the website owner just wants them to spend money - especially if the affiliate links are obtrusive, arrogant or irrelevant. Going onto a camping website you would expect to see one or two advertisements or promotions of camping gear. But when reading an article about something like ‘cruising the Mediterranean’ you do not want to feel pressured to purchase goods and services. Let your content do the talking, and leave the unnecessary links out of it.

Real Life – Pinterest

Pinterest are a real-life example of a website that made the decision to remove all affiliate links in 2015, and this was not a decision that was taken lightly. A lot of bloggers use Pinterest as a source of income (through the addition of these affiliate links), and by removing them, they risked losing a large percentage of their visitors to the site. However, because the links were not being managed properly (as they were simply added by bloggers), they were ending up as spam and ruining the reputation of the Pinterest brand. Pinterest had always been about displaying great and innovative pictures, tutorials and ideas, and the influx of affiliate links meant that it was becoming more about the revenue marketing then it was about the content.

Final Word

Affiliate marketing and the use of affiliate links is by no means a negative thing, but like anything there is a time and a place for it. Unfortunately, they are turning up on every website they can, even if they are not appreciated by visitors or even relevant to the page. So rather than make the visitors to your site feel like they are talking to a sales person, let your content do the talking, and build your online presence and brand the reputable and respected way – by simply offering great content.

 

Thanks to Stacey Marone for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Stacey Marone is a freelance writer for Essay ScholarAdvisor and a social media marketer working part-time on contract for a large consultancy firm in the US. She creates magnetic content optimized for search. In her free time she also does volunteer work and organizes some activities for children. You can follow her on twitter.

 

 

source http://www.smartinsights.com/affiliate-marketing/unexpected-benefits-removing-affiliate-links/

10 effective tactics to grow your YouTube channel

Looking to use video marketing as a tool to grow your business? Use these 10 tips and strategies

By 2017, video will account for 69% of all consumer internet traffic, according to a study done by Cisco.

Video is the future of content marketing. That is, if it's not the here and now. YouTube currently receives more than 1 Billion unique visitors a month and is the second largest search engine after Google. Video can give you access to a huge audience but video marketing is frequently an afterthought while it's value demands top priority in your content marketing plan.

Online video is quickly becoming a key means for people to satisfy their information and entertainment needs, businesses that fail to include it in their online marketing strategy will do so at their peril.

In this article we'll dive into 10 actionable tips to increase your YouTube presence so you can get more views, subscribers, leads and or customers from online video marketing.

Optimizing your YouTube channel

By optimizing your YouTube profile your channel will be easier to find, will represent your brand better and make it easier for viewers to browse and watch your content.

1. Complete your profile

The first step may seem obvious but if you haven't done so already, make sure you have completed your profile on YouTube. Make sure all your social media accounts are added. Write an engaging channel description and add a way for viewers to contact you so they can learn more about your business and contact you if they want to.

2. Brand your channel

Once you have added all the information, links and other 'boring' stuff you can move on to the branding and appearance of your channel. The branding of your channel is very important since it visually represents your company and provides a great opportunity to add some personality to your channel and stand out from other YouTube channels.

There are a couple of graphics you can personalize:

• Channel Thumbnail
• Channel Banner (also referred to as channel art)
• Watermarks in your videos
• Intro and outro of your videos
• Custom thumbnail of your videos

3. Sort and optimize your content

When a new viewer lands on your channel it should be easy for them to understand what kind of videos you produce and find the videos they may want to watch. You can make this easier for new viewers by categorizing your videos, making playlists and giving them good titles. You can also choose to display the most watched categories on your channel's homepage by setting up channel sections. If you don't know how to set-up these channel sections you can use this YouTube Help guide.

If you have completed the previous steps you need to check if everything is set up correctly and organized like you want it. Go to your channel by browsing to my channel in the sidebar.

Preview it as a visitor by clicking View as public at the top of your channel banner

Creating interesting content

A YouTube channel without fun or interesting content to watch is like a car without gasoline. It won't go anywhere. To help you create better content you can use these tips:

4. Create unique and interesting content

This should be obvious but you should always produce high quality, interesting, entertaining or informative videos. If your videos are nothing more than sales pitches your YouTube channel will never grow because people don't want to watch advertisements. If you sell physical products: show viewers how to use it, how to maintain it, clean it, the advantage of having or using it or do a unboxing or review video. If you sell services: explain the benefits of the service, show case studies or give away free advice.

The cost of camera and microphone equipment has gone down while the image and sound quality has drastically improved so any business can start producing high quality videos with only a budget of a couple of hundred dollars. Start with a simple camera that is able to record in Full HD and upgrade as you go.

5. Make sure your video benefits your business

Just because your videos aren't sales pitches doesn't mean they shouldn't benefit your business. Quite the opposite, you can use your videos to direct potential customers to your funnel. End your videos with a call to action, this can be a call to action on YouTube such as subscribe, like the video or comment on the video but you can also ask viewers to visit your website or download an e-book.

6. Optimize your video listing

To get the most clicks on your videos you should optimize all the different aspects of your videos.

• Write an interesting title with your main keyword but keep it under 50 characters since that is the maximum amount that is displayed.
• Create a unique custom thumbnail for your video. People are very visual and scan images first when they land on a page. By creating an interesting thumbnail Youtube users are much more likely to click on your video instead of the video of a competitor. Both of the thumbnails on the right are of iPhone review videos. One has branding, shows you the type of video (review), the product both visually and in text. The other just displays the product. You don't know who created the video, what type of video it is or why you should watch it. Which thumbnail is a potential viewer more likely to click on?
• Write a 300-500 word description keyword rich description so YouTube better understands what your video is about and can rank it accordingly in search.

Promoting your YouTube channel

Once you have content on your channel you will still need to promote your videos.

7. Share your content with customers

The easiest way to promote your channel and your videos if you are new to YouTube is by sharing it with people that already know about your products or services. Since they know you they know you or your company their are much more likely to share your videos with others so you can get some momentum.

Once YouTube notices you are getting views and interaction (comments or likes) on your videos they will rank it higher in their own search tool and suggest it as a related video. Once this happens your channel will start to grow organically.

8. Social media and other platforms

Another popular way of promoting your videos is on social media. You can promote your videos in Facebook groups, on twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn and many more social media networks. Conduct research to establish where your target audience is and select the social networks you use accordingly.

9. Collaborate with other YouTubers or businesses

A good way of growing your channel is by collaborating with others. By collaborating with another YouTuber you can create one or multiple special videos together and you can both promote the other YouTuber to your own audience.

But don't limit yourself to collaborating only with other YouTubers. There are a lot of different people, local businesses, events or communities you can collaborate with. For example if you collaborate with an event the organizers are very likely to promote your collaboration video to all the events' attendees.

10. Interact with your audience

Of course, you shouldn't just dump some videos on YouTube, blast them on social media and walk away from them expecting they will automatically generate more business for you. Viewers will leave comments, ask questions or provide feedback in the comments of your YouTube videos. Help your audience, listen to their feedback to improve your videos and show them you value their opinion.

Some potential customers will have just one question they want answered before they order your product or service, pull them across the line.

Hopefully you've found these tips helpful. If you want more tips and strategies or want to read more in-depth tips and tricks you can check out VloggingPro's guide on getting more subscribers and viewers on YouTube.

 

Thanks to Jennifer Smith for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Jennifer Smith is Industry expert of VloggingPro. You can follow her on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn..

source http://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-platforms/video-marketing/10-effective-tactics-grow-youtube-channel/

Understanding online reputation monitoring and management

The essentials of social listening and brand management

Thanks to today’s technology, it is now easier than ever to project your opinion online and use the opinions of others in your buying processes. In less than a few minutes, you can learn what people believe about a product or service, why they hate or love it, and what their experience with it was like.

As a consumer, this is great news – there’s a world full of opinions and reviews opening in front of your eyes before you even consider making a purchase.

As a business owner, though, this may not be so great if you don’t handle your online reputation properly.

But what is online reputation management anyway–and, more importantly, how do you make sure you correctly apply it to your particular business?

The Construction and De-Construction of Online Reputation

To understand how online reputation works, imagine a house being built, brick by brick. What would happen if you included a cracked brick in the foundation of the house? Would your house stay standing– or would it start to crumble with time?

Online reputation works the same: one crack is enough to generate total social destruction for your business. This is why it is absolutely crucial to always ensure your online presence is not only clean, but that it corresponds with the values your business hopes to project.

Online reputation is built with attention to detail and patience. But it can very easily be broken, so it is important to constantly monitor and manage everything that happens in the online world and might affect your brand’s reputation.

Online Reputation Monitoring: The Devil Is In the Details

To understand how to handle your online reputation, you first have to learn the difference between online reputation monitoring and online reputation management. At their very cores, both of these tactics have the same main purpose: to ensure a brand’s reputation is impeccable in the online world.

However, there are some differences that make these two techniques distinct. Think of online reputation monitoring as the law enforcement agents on the street, while online reputation management is the court room where the decisions are made and solutions are found.

Online reputation monitoring is there to help you keep your eyes open. Everything brand-related on the Internet should be carefully watched out for – from the company social media accounts to the news published online. A reputation monitoring expert will need to know how to spot potential pitfalls when they are still fresh and he will have to keep tabs on all the issues that may affect your business.

Online Reputation Management: The Basics

In general, it is highly advisable that you hire someone to handle your online reputation. It’s not that you may not be able to do this on your own, but the absolute truth is that it can take a lot of time and effort away from other aspects of your business.

Online reputation management is all about finding suitable solutions for the issues that might appear along the way, as well as about devising strategies that help you stay away from those issues. An Online Reputation Manager needs to know how to draw conclusions from the data and information gathered by the reputation monitoring expert, apply the most suitable solutions, and create a plan that helps the company avoid similar situations in the future.

However, even if you do hire someone, you should make sure they follow some basic principles of good ethics and efficiency when managing your brand’s online reputation:

1. Use tools. I will always recommend using automated tools that help with online reputation monitoring and management. Some of the best include:

• Brandseye. A very complex tool with many features, Brandseye is in the more expensive range of brand management tools. Although it might not be suitable for small businesses or companies on a tighter budget, the multitude of benefits it comes with makes it more than worth it.
• Social Mention. Social Mention is free, and it does a great job of scouting the Internet for social mentions of any type, including for a business’ competitors. What’s more, the tool will show you where these mentions are coming from.
• Google Alerts. Google Alerts may sound very basic, but they can be extremely helpful. While Social Mention and Brandseye will offer you a clear view of what’s happening on the social media and might be related to your brand, Google Alerts will help you learn about the blog posts and news articles where your company is mentioned.

2. Be transparent. In a day and age when everyone puts everything about themselves on the table, your business needs to do the same. Being transparent will make you more relatable and more trustworthy in the eyes of your potential clients – so it is highly important that you adopt transparency as your base rule.
3. Be careful with your reactions. Regardless of how legit your customer complaints may be, your reactions should be prompt and truly polite. However, if someone is claiming something completely untrue about your business, remember that this is illegal and you can take action in court against the rumors perpetrators.

Of course, these are just the absolute basics to remember when it comes to online reputation management and monitoring. However, they are quintessential to developing a good attitude towards what happens online and might affect your business. Remember them at all times, on all Internet media, and your brand will surely see the benefits.

 

Thanks to Alexander Grosu for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Alexander Grosu is an SEO manager at InSegement You can connect with him on on LinkedIn.

source http://www.smartinsights.com/online-pr/reputation-management-online-pr/understanding-online-reputation-monitoring-management/

10 ways NOT to use Google Analytics

Don't fall foul of these common Google Analytics mistakes

Google Analytics is a fantastically useful tool for businesses of all sizes. Rather helpfully for all the SMEs and SMBs out there, it's also free. That means anyone can start using Google analytics to study their web traffic in an attempt to tease out insights, to use to improve their sites.

This openness and low barriers to entry means it's easy to launch yourself into Google analytics before you actually have a handle on exactly what you are using for and how you should use it for your business. There's nothing wrong with getting stuck in and learning on the fly, but it can leave you vulnerable to making mistakes that could affect your bottom line. This post will introduce you to some of the basic mistakes people often make when setting up and using their Google Analytics. If you want to know the key ways of avoiding these mistakes, you can download our Google Analytics Fast Start guide, which is free for all members.

Mistake 1. Not upgrading to Universal Analytics and not using Google Tag Manager

Google Analytics is a wonderful tool – it allows you to see how visitors arrive to your website and what those users go on to do. However, its ‘Achilles’ heel’ is poor customisation when setting up tagging. Missing code from pages, duplicate code, incorrect code configuration on pages when, for example, the user’s journey spans different domains or sub-domains can and does cause the Google Analytics data you collect to be corrupted. Attempting to make decisions on such poor data will obviously lead to poor decisions. So, we recommend that all businesses check they are using the latest versions of these tools.

Download Free resource – Google Analytics Fast Start - 10 common mistakes to avoid

The guide is designed as a checklist to help members optimise their use of Google analytics quickly. It gives 10 mistakes to avoid, so serves as a checklist for those just starting out with the platform. It also gives detailed advice for how to avoid each of the mistakes

Access the Google Analytics Fast Start – 10 mistakes to avoid

Mistake 2. Not having control of your Google Analytics Account

Audit who has access to your Google Analytics account now! Your Google Analytics Account contains commercially sensitive information about your website and you need to make sure past employees and past-contracted agencies no longer have access.

Mistake 3 - Not having duplicate, cleansed views.

Because of the way Google Analytics collects processes and reports on data, it’s impossible to get your data reprocessed. This means it’s important to have a number of views created when you sent up Google Analytics. This allows you to change the appearance of different views through the process of creating data processing filters. A good example would be a filter to remove all traffic from the office – that is staff visits. Because you are filtering and filters act on hits, it’s also a very good idea to ensure you have some unfiltered views – so called raw views.

Mistake 4 - Not enabling demographic data or remarketing.

Google Analytics identifies through its DoubleClick integration a high percentage of your audience’s demographic qualities such as age, sex, interests and what they are shopping for. I don’t think I’ve every met a marketer who hasn’t simply dribbled when seeing this data about their own site for the fist time. So make sure you switch this on for your site and study you own audience demographics.

Mistake 5 - Not using or misusing campaign tracking.

Google Analytics does a really good job of tracking inbound traffic to your site generally by identifying direct, organic, cpc and referral traffic out of the box. If you want more detail you need to use campaign tracking or more specifically the URL builder.

Mistake 6 - Not measuring conversions.

Google Analytics is built upon the concept of conversions. Its menu system and core reports are ordered around the ABC model  - Acquisition, Behaviour, Conversion.  The theory goes, you must acquire your audience, they behave ideally to the point of conversion where they have completed a task but more importantly (from the website’s perspective) an objective has been achieved that has benefited the organisation.

Mistake 7 - Not abiding by Google’s Terms of Service.

Let’s face it, Google Analytics is an amazing bit of kit, and it’s free – wow. So lets at least pay some respect to Google’s Terms of Service.  First of all, Google wants you (or your organisation) to have a privacy policy and comply with it

“You will have and abide by an appropriate Privacy Policy and will comply with all applicable laws, policies, and regulations relating to the collection of information from Visitors. You must post a Privacy Policy and that Privacy Policy must provide notice of Your use of cookies that are used to collect data. You must disclose the use of Google Analytics, and how it collects and processes data.”

Mistake 8 - Not using event tracking, custom dimensions & metrics or the user ID.

Google Analytics has two features for understanding how users interact with content or objects on a page  - event tracking and enhanced e-commerce internal promotions. If you are an online retailer you should seriously consider using enhanced e-commerce deployed via Google Tag Manager, but be warned deployment needs careful planning and strong, experienced development resources. Amongst the many really useful analysis reports enhanced e-commerce provide, there are a number that focus on how internal pieces of content impact sales. You can find out more about internal promotions in our free guide to the top 10 Google Analytics mistakes.

Mistake 9 - Not understanding the Google Analytics data model.

You need to understand how Google Analytics collects data, processes it and reports it. Understanding hits, sessions and users is fundamental to interpreting Google Analytics reports properly and then enabling you to create more meaningful custom reports and applying more useful unified advanced segments.

Mistake 10 - Not acting on data.

So good for you, if you have upgraded to Universal Analytics and deployed Google Analytics using Google Tag Manager. You’ve cleansed your data and duplicated a number of views, filtering out noise and your using event tracking and a number of customer dimensions which allow you to really segment your data. Now begin to define your key performance indicators (KPIs). Begin in a dark room and ask yourself  “What’s the purpose of this website?”, “What are its objectives?”, “What key metrics would  indicate whether I’m achieving these objectives?”. By asking yourself these questions, you should begin to gain a clear picture of the key performance indicators you should be monitoring on a weekly or daily basis to ensure you meet your now clearly defined objectives.

Matt Trimmer is Principal Consultant & Managing Director of ivantage - a specialist training company for digital professionals. Matt enjoys training in Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and Search Engine Optimisation very much because of the 'wonderful and interesting' people he meets and technologies he comes across. Matt is one of the world's leading experts in Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Search Engine Optimisation and Digital Marketing and travels all over the world educating and enlightening digital professionals. Matt Trimmer became a Google Seminar leader in 2009, listed on Google.com with only 14 others authorised to train exclusively for Google's Seminars Success programme. You can connect with Matt via LinkedIn and follow on Twitter

source http://www.smartinsights.com/google-analytics/google-analytics-setup/10-ways-not-use-google-analytics/

6 tips to improve the mobile experience for your shoppers

Nosto European Fashion Report shows UK fashion buyers still prefer to buy on desktop

With London Fashion Week having just revealed what is hot and what is not on the catwalk it seems that UK fashion shoppers, while having their fingers on the pulse of the latest clothing trends, are less in tune with the newest technology than previously thought.

In our recent report, European Online Fashion in 2016, we analyzed data from over 700 online fashion merchants, constituting over 241 million consumer visits. The results show that UK online fashion shoppers prefer to make their purchases on desktop, rather than mobile - with 19% of online revenue in the UK fashion sector coming from mobile, compared to 58% for desktop.

Previous research has shown that for UK ecommerce generally smartphones account for 51% of purchases made, which means fashion buyers are behind the general curve when it comes to the uptake of mobile.

Shoppers who do buy via smartphones are also spending less, with the average mobile order for fashion purchases sitting at £89, compared to £116 for desktop.

However, while mobile hasn’t reached the dizzying heights we might have expected in the hands of UK fashionistas, it has shown itself to be an area of substantial growth - with mobile traffic now accounting for nearly a third (29%) of all fashion-related web activity in the UK, an increase of 22% from 2015. And mobile revenue, despite being behind desktop, increased by 92% in just one year, overtaking tablet as the second highest channel.

The implications of this is that, with enough nurturing and streamlining of online mobile shopping processes, mobile could soon be the channel in vogue with British fashion-minded shoppers.

Those wishing to improve the mobile experience should do the following:

Rethink the positioning of key elements:

One of the reasons that mobile sites in general, are unique from their desktop counterparts is the way the tools we use to explore them. By which, I am referring (normally) to the thumb. The biggest difference here is a matter of reach - a mouse can be lead to wherever in the screen we need it to go. The dexterity of our thumb however, effectively splits an already-small screen into three areas; “easy to reach”, “must stretch to reach” and “can’t reach”.

This is of course important to think of throughout your site, but on pivotal pages such as cart-page and checkout, becomes even more important. Make sure all key buttons are within easy reach of the user (that is, generally the lower half of the page) and use dead-space for elements that are not important at this time i.e. your company logo and text which is informative but not clickable.

Make sure your text, images and navigation adjust accordingly for use on smaller screens:

Actively and extensively testing your site on smartphones could reveal much about the stumbling blocks your mobile shoppers face. If you find that your site is difficult to use on small screens, then you are going to need to make changes. Responsive design revolves around elements that expand and contract to fit on different devices.

This is particularly relevant to the fashion vertical, where it is often difficult to make intuitive purchases (something that is easier for products that are not bought on an aesthetic basis). Fashion buyers are, more often than not, relying on visual cues to reassure them that the buying decision they are making is the right one. This means that images particularly must be easy to see and of a high enough quality to prevent them becoming a barrier to purchase.

Normally your existing website code can be adapted in order to become responsive, so speak to your development team as soon as possible. Occasionally, however, you might find that your store has been built in a way that prevents this - in which case you should look into setting up a mobile sub-domain that is out-of-the-box mobile ready. The benefits of this are that you have a fully customizable mobile experience, which means your (mobile) developers can concentrate specifically on what works for smartphones instead of trying to please everyone. It is however pricey to maintain two so distinctly different sites and can be detrimental to SEO efforts because of duplicate content, so that should be factored into the decision.

Make the most of a smaller screen by bringing relevant products to the front:

Shoppers browsing on mobile have been shown to spend less time on-site, which means the window you have to impress them becomes even smaller. And with less screen real estate to play with, the challenge is two-fold. The solution is to give relevant products priority. How? With dynamic personalized product recommendations based on an individual’s previous browsing and buying behavior. Effectively, you capture data on your site to provide them with a personalized journey through it, becoming more intelligent and relevant with every interaction. These relevant product signposts can be used on the homepage and category page to encourage conversion and on the product page to increase average mobile order size, by suggesting complimentary small-ticket items.

Consider creating an app:

On average British people have been shown to check their phones 85 times a day, totaling over five hours of device usage. Which, it would seem, is a huge opportunity for brands. Unfortunately for them, a disproportionate amount of this time is spent within apps - 85% in fact. This seems to imply that the creation of an own-brand app could be a viable mobile strategy. However, while apps undoubtedly offer a better user experience (which has a direct effect on conversion), it should be noted that the high amount of time spent on app is split predominantly amongst just a small few of the huge amount out there, and that these are not normally ecommerce focused. This means that, generally, a brand has to be well-established, as well as having deep-rooted customer loyalty for an app to offset the substantial initial financial investment and expensive maintenance that is often needed. To decide whether a branded app is the right decision for your company, consider how much return traffic you receive and just how often those customers are buying from you, as well as digging deeper into your own mobile metrics.

Enable social login:

75% of people who are forced to register first, fail to complete their purchase. Primarily because it is a process that often requires time-consuming forms to be filled in. But, as we stated in the previous point, many mobile users spend their time on in-phone applications. And the number one app in the UK? Facebook. A fact that ecommerce companies should look to leverage by enabling social logins. This helps time-poor shoppers to use the information they have already stored on their phone to create an account with your site in just one click. Their ability to do this will greatly reduce the chance of them refusing to do so, therefore reducing the number of abandoned mobile carts on your store.

Checkout:

Ah checkout, crunch time and an area of your site that arguably deserves the most thought. Yet it is here that we often see the most criticism for the mobile shopping experience. This also means, however, that it is the area ripest to inspire a positive mobile metric change - particularly in terms of conversion.

Basic best practices start with large input boxes, making them easier to select even on small screens. And with typing on a phone taking more time than it does on a desktop keyboard, it is important not to ask for more information than is strictly necessary. With this in mind, even more so than usual, the number of fields should be kept to a minimum.

If your checkout process is split across a number of pages make sure that the “next” button that carries customers through the process is clear and well positioned, as well as supporting the journey with a progress indicator - mobile users are likely to be making purchases on the go, showing them that there is light at the end of the tunnel reassures them that this is possible.

In terms of how the boxes are filled in, make sure the keyboards that are triggered reflect the type of information input needed. For example, automatically presenting a numerical keyboard for card numbers or contact numbers. It a small change, but one that makes the UX feel much slicker.

There is some debate about auto-fill as, when successful, it can help to reduce the time at checkout substantially. If it is for any reason erroneous however, the deleting of incorrect information will make the process longer than it would have been originally, increasing frustration. Consider these alternatives - firstly, allowing people to save their information with the creation of an account so that they needn’t re-enter details when they buy again. Or, for the address section specifically, using a postcode tool to allow users to lookup their address themselves. Add to this with a box that they can tick to use the same address for billing and delivery should they so want.

So, there we have it - mobile, while still lagging behind desktop, poses a huge opportunity for the UK fashion market but that opportunity, like our smartphones, lies in our hands. Make the most of it.

 

Thanks to Lottie for sharing her advice and opinions in this post.

Lottie Coltman is the Content Marketing Manager for Nosto, a complete personalisation solution. She runs the Nosto blog and is responsible for their wider thought leadership stream, as well as being the author the Nosto weekly ecommerce round-up.

 

 

source http://www.smartinsights.com/mobile-marketing/mobile-design/6-tips-improve-mobile-experience-shoppers/