Archive for category Social Media
A manager’s guide to Digital Marketing
Posted by Michael White in Content, Email Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Marketing, Pay-per-click, Public Relations, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media on February 15th, 2010
This is a presentation I gave recently on Digital Marketing, aimed at business managers. The presentation lists the online tools you can use before describing each digital marketing technique in a little more detail. Topics covered include web-site design and landing pages, Google pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimization, email marketing, online PR and various forms of social media. You can find this and other more detailed guides on the main DohertyWhite website too.
10 Trends for Social Media in 2010
Posted by Michael White in Email Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Pay-per-click, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media on January 28th, 2010
A great presentation on 10 Trends for Social media this year from C. Edward Brice, brought to my attention by the B2BMarketingZone newsletter. There are a lot of stand-out slides highlighting the move of budget to social marketing, the convergence in mobile internet access with the growth of social media and touching on topics like augmented reality and social gaming. As mentioned in my last post, there are lots of implications for B2B marketers. For example, if people begin moving most of their personal communications to Facebook and Twitter, what happens to email marketing as a way of reaching them? If more people learn about products and services from social networks how does this effect search engine optimization and pay-per-click? With the prediction that more people will access the internet from their mobile device than from laptops or PCs by 2013, how does this effect social media usage and general online habits?
Global time spent on social networks rises 82%
Posted by Michael White in Inbound Marketing, Lead Generation, Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media on January 27th, 2010
A news item from MarketingCharts today reports an 82% rise in time spent on social networks, based on research from the Nielsen Company comparing December 2009 with December 2008. Global consumers spent an average of 5 hours 35 minutes in December 2009, compared with 3 hours 3 minutes a year previously, and unique audience figures rose 27% from 242 million in December 08 to 307.4 million in December 09.
Facebook had an almost 100% increase in unique visitors from December to December, while Twitter recorded 579% growth from 2.7 million visitors to 18.1 million.
The MarketingChart piece also cites a recent survey by Prompt Communications of 300 consumers in Boston. This showed that 96% of them used Facebook to communicate with friends and family on a regular basis, which trails the phone (at 99%) but beats text messaging (93%) and email (91%). We saw something similar during a recent client engagement. As part of the assignment we helped create some ‘buyer personas’ for digital music consumers and validated some of these personas on a college campus in Ireland. The 10 students we interviewed rarely used email, and stayed ‘within’ Facebook for the majority of the time they were online each day, using it almost exclusively to interact with classmates, friends and family, partly driven by their wish to keep their mobile phone bills as low as possible.
I’m note sure what the takeaways for B2B marketers and sales teams are just yet – this will depend on the social media usage of decision makers and influencers at your target customer organisations. But based on this research you can assume a lot if not all of your target buyers are active on the social networks. Combined with a predicted surge in smart phone sales (which means more people accessing Facebook and Twitter using these devices while on the road) there are obviously implications for your 2010 promotional plans if you want to be noticed by your prospective customers. One big long term impact could be on email marketing strategy – will email begin to decline in importance as a promotional tool over the next 5 years, replaced by intra-social network messaging?
Using photos to boost press coverage
Posted by Michael White in Inbound Marketing, Marketing, Public Relations, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media on September 27th, 2009
Good photographic images boost press coverage. If you’re preparing news relases for online distribution you can use images that aren’t too highly polished, and they’re fine for your blog and social network pages (check out our free guide to PR and online PR to learn more about online news releases). However, when you’re submitting PR to traditional media you need to use professional, well composed images. Here’s a great post by Adrian Weckler of the Sunday Business Post on what constitutes a good photograph from a features journalist point of view.
Photography can have a huge impact on the amount of coverage you get. Our advice would be to aim to have good photographs for at least half of your news releases. It may not always be possible to organize a high-quality photograph for some releases (e.g. where you need to obtain a photograph at short notice of a customer who is unavailable), but you should commit to generating good images on a regular basis. And make sure you have up-to-date photos of your senior staff and your company’s offices on hand, taking note of Adrian Weckler’s advice on avoiding the most clichéd poses.
Business blogging tips
Posted by Michael White in Inbound Marketing, Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media on September 1st, 2009
A good post at Self Publishing Helper on Business Blogging Tips. It provides great advice on setting out a schedule for writing posts, identifying potential topics and generating content. The post also provides some tips on how to set up your blog on WordPress to increase your visibility. We’ll have more on this later, but I think that in the near future company blogs will replace corporate web-sites as the main online presence for most organizations. The reason is that blogs facilitate more immediate interaction with your prospective customers and you can maintain this conversation without needing technical skills or special systems. You don’t have to wait for a web-master or an IT department to take your content and publish it, you can now do that yourself in realtime. It’s also easy to copy and paste rich content from across the web into your blog, to accept and respond to comments, to register new blog subscribers. What business benefit does this provide? Well, it lets your prospective customers get a sense of what you’re like and what you know before they decide to do business with you. And that can play a big part in having them choose you over someone they’re not so familiar with. But to develop an audience of potential clients you have to provide interesting, valuable content on your blog on a regular basis to keep them coming back.