Hints and tutorials

,

Digital Marketing and Your Online Reputation

digital marketing

Yes, ladies and gentlemen – the shift from analogue to digital is here to stay. Aside from having rapidly crept in and unquestionably overtaken our day-to-day life, digital has likewise managed to find and seal its place amongst modern marketing’s biggest weapons and effectuate the shift to none other than – yes, you’ve guessed it – digital marketing. Seeing a lot of this lately? Well, get ready to see more, as digital marketing takes the world by storm.

So how exactly has digital marketing become the buzzword it is today? Well – aside from the fact it’s pretty much set out to become the future of marketing – digital marketing allegedly holds several benefits that are valuable to both companies and marketers alike.

Digital MarketingApart from being in times more affordable than traditional forms of marketing, digital marketing also allows for a much wider audience to be reached, thus improving company efficiency and concurrently increasing consumer span. Perhaps the biggest advantage of digital marketing, however, has got to be its revolutionizing ease of tracking and monitoring results, allowing not only for much more effective data attainment and analysis, but also for better planning in terms of future projects and endeavors. How? Let’s take a quick look at digital marketing’s eight partners-in-crime:

  • Online Reputation Management – considered digital marketing’s right-hand (with perfectly good reason), online reputation management allows for such wondrous options as market searches, competitor analysis, social media content measurement, trend spotting and many, many others.
  • Metrics Analysis – far from just analyzing volume, metrics analysis identifies trends and makes estimates.
  • Relationship Analysis – love woes aside, relationship analysis processes data about customers and their relationship with a given establishment with the purpose of increasing sales, improving service, and lowering cost of that establishment.
  • Strategy Development – vital for running every successfully functioning business, strategy development sets specific goals and objectives based on the varying market dynamics through the aid of compliance measurement, maintenance and audit, and team training.
  • Technology Testing – provides quality assurance in the area of research and development through the aid of website analytics, influencer identification, and engagement solutions.
  • Crisis Management – helping overcome the drama of handling tweets and blogs, contemporary crisis management helps keep things under control through such options as crisis organization charts and comment response charts.
  • Team Collaboration – often the unsung hero of many a successful project, team collaboration – even in the high-tech world of digital marketing – holds the foundations to any successful undertaking through the use of integrated collaborative solutions, document sharing, project management, and others.
  • Communication –a two-way street concept, communication is vital for procedure definition and process analysis that will secure synergy all throughout projects and undertakings.

Aspiring marketer? Newly formed company? Better get acquainted with the above essentials A.S.A.P., as they are the fundamental basics of digital marketing and – mildly speaking – your guide to keeping in line with the way of the future.

,

Social Media Listening: Learn how to build effective saved searches

saved search

It’s a well known fact that social media monitoring is not an easy task. There are millions of blogs, news sites and Social Media channels (like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, …) that have billions of posts daily. Most brands are mentioned every day. The problem is that interesting mentions are not visible. Irrelevant mentions do not bring any benefit to businesses.

Building an excellent saved search (or a query) could help you get rid of this problem and reduce stress. Using Boolean expressions will make interesting mentions more visible.

 Reasons why you need to build a good saved search

Simple queries offer thousands of results. The problem is that they do not offer relevant results. Google’s ranking algorithm draws attention to the top ten results.

Now let’s suppose that you want to find reviews of the best headphones. Run a short search on Google for the best headphones and you will notice that this search engine finds over 100m web pages and shows you the links to the most relevant ones. Only a few of the ten most relevant websites are interesting.

The question is: what happens with the other 100m web pages? Is their content related to the best headphones? For starters, “100m web pages” sounds a little bit weird. If we were to look more closely at some of the results (those that are not included among the top ten), we’d find that Google included pages of whose content is only related to “headphones” and other results that are not relevant. It’s obvious that these results do not appear on the first page. Google is intelligent enough to rank those pages that include the terms “best headphones” before any pages that include only one term.

Social media monitoring is all about looking and analyzing all the relevant and important pages about a brand or а topic. This is the reason why if you want to succeed you need to be more precise and write a good but more complex search. It usually contains Boolean operators like “AND”, “OR”, “NOT” and more.

Do you know what Boolean operators are?

For starters, understanding the role of these operators can be a little bit tricky. We’ll try to explain what Boolean operators are and how they can help.

First, it’s important for you to know that Boolean operators provide your computer with certain criteria to use when searching web pages. “Not”, “and”, “or” and others are all Boolean operators.

Why is it so important to use Boolean operators in Social Media Marketing and Social Media Monitoring?

Rankur social media monitoring tools allow users to use the following operators:

1) “” double quotes – exact phrase search

It’s important for you to know that this operator finds texts where the words in the quotation marks appear in the right order. Let’s suppose that you use Google to search for “apple pie”. The result consists in web pages that say “I love apple pie”. Automatically this means that all those websites that mention just “apple” or “pie” are eliminated.

2) AND or +

Using AND when running a search like apple AND pie will find texts that mention both words. For example the following text will well pass the requirement: „I love apple and plum pie”. Keep in mind that if you want to use this Boolean operator you need to use capital letters. Otherwise Rankur considers it to be the just the word “and”.

3) OR

OR is another operator that can help you improve your search. It requires web pages to contain either of two terms. For example, if you use Rankur to search for “apple OR pie” the result will consist in web pages that mention either Apple or Pie. Keep in mind that if you want to use this Boolean operator you need to use CAPITAL letters.

4) NOT or –

Using NOT requires web pages to not include a certain keyword. For example, “apple pie” NOT candy will provide you access to those pages that mention the phrase “apple pie” and do not mention “candy”. As with the other operators, NOT has to be capitalised.

5) Brackets

Brackets can be used by those who want to group terms together, so that Boolean operators like AND/+ and NOT/- can be applied to all the terms. For example, “apple pie” NOT (candy OR cake) will help you find those sites that mention Apple pie but exclude those that contain candy or cake.

6) ~

The „~” symbol is also known as the proximity operator in the Boolean language. This symbol can be used by those who want to find web sites where two (or even more) words appear within a few words of each other. It’s important for you to keep in mind that this operator can only be used in conjunction with „” (quotation marks) and with a number (this number indicates the maximum number of words apart they must be). Here’s a short example to help you understand the role of this symptom: “Apple pie”~3. This search will find all those web sites that mention both, Apple and Pie within 3 words of each other.

7. site:

Using this Boolean operator will allow you to restrict a search to one (or more) web sites or to exclude them from a query. For example, “Apple Pie” AND site:allrecipes.com will provide all the mentions of Apple Pie on this website. This gives you the possibility to monitor particular websites for a given set of keywords and phrases and react accordingly.

8. raw:

Most of the times, when we search web sites we ignore the punctuation. „raw:” is an operator that reinserts the needs for special characters. For example, if you use Google to search for „apple pie!” the engine will only look for „apple pie”. If you want to include the exclamation mark then you need to use raw:”apple pie!”. You may equally search for mentions of stock signs like raw:”$GOOG”

Advice on building effective saved searches

Remember, simple is always better. As long as your brand has a unique and powerful name there’s no need to use these operators. If you need a complex search you may always create few simple ones and group them in a folder. The folder will provide you with consolidated view to all results.

And finally – do not hesitate to contact our support service at support@rankur.com – we are always glad to help.

,

How to Plan Social Media Marketing Campaign

Define Goals and Objectives

 

Quite often the solution of a problem is hidden in its definition, so think well before hurrying to start the action. A good strategy for social media marketing is a must for an effective, measurable social media endeavour. To plan and execute effective marketing campaign is a big challenge, especially for small businesses.

An example of goals for social media campaigns are:

  • Brand awareness
  • Conversion ratio
  • Inbound links
  • Market development
  • Increase the traffic

Before starting you should well define the timelines and the milestones for each goal of the campaign. And last but not least – choose a social media monitoring tool to measure the actual state of the business and then observe and analyse the outcomes of your efforts.

Social Media Monitoring

Research the Market

 

  • Find your target audience

Find out where your customers share information, interact and make recommendations.

  • Explore the target market trends

Stay tuned and contribute to the online community of your customers. Share news about tendencies and developments in their domain of competence.

  • Discover the needs of your audience

Contribute to relevant discussions and find out what are the needs of your customers.

Campaign Foundation

The choice of tools for benchmarking the success and seeding your content on the various social media websites, the content creation and visual design are the corner stones in your implementation plan. Any changes to these elements would cost you a lot during the campaign.

Campaign Rollout

Follow these tips on during your marketing campaign on social media.

  • Listen and assist

Social media platform is not about you, it’s about “them”. It is important to be a good listener and try to help others. Listen to your prospective customers and try to assist them by providing for example useful resources and knowledge. Do not talk about yourself, at least in the beginning. Your mission is to help others.

  • Engage

Share other people’s posts. It is important to demonstrate that you value the others’ content. Provide authentic feedback to their work, talk, post and share content that provides value to your audience. Try to socialize just like in real life.

  • Mention and #tag

Be proactive in conversations and assure yourself that your message will be heard by mentioning users in twitter using @ before the username.  Use popular tags in your messages so that your message appears in trendy searches.

  • Effective retweets

While sharing interesting content make sure to not just retweet the message, but add the user’s name in front like RT @joe85 … Respectively while posting a message on twitter, leave enough space for comments and mentions after retweet. Knowing the limit of 140 characters it is wise to limit your message to 100-110 characters and let any future mentions and tags appear.

  • Contribute

The authentic content has been and will always be the King in Social Media. Make sure you offer quality content which is engaging and interesting to your audience. The goal of your efforts should be the value creation. Once you start creating valuable content you’ll be amazed by the payback that Social Media Marketing offers to your niche.

Campaign management & support

 

Once your campaign is well planned and initiated, keep following your plan and it will pay off. Choose tools and methodologies for monitoring and measuring your campaign, analyse the results and take proactive actions to drive your efforts to a successful end.