Marketing Trend: Demographic Segmentation

To effectively market your product or service, you need to create content that truly speaks to your defined target market.

However, your target market may be so diverse that your marketing doesn’t hit home to anybody in it. There’s one way to change that, and this technique is called “Demographic Segmentation”

Demographic segmentation groups your target market into specific groups of people based on attributes like location, age, education, occupation, and income bracket. By using information from demographic segmentation, you can create personalized marketing campaigns for each part of your target market.

These more personalized approaches can lead to a better distribution of resources and more conversions because the specific messages resonate more than a non-direct generic message to your whole audience might.

There are 5 main demographics most businesses segment their audience with. This is how to leverage each one. 

Age

Harkening back to Generational Profiling, segmenting by age allows you to change a campaign so it resonates with who you need it to. The thing about generational segmentation is that each age group, from Baby Boomers to Gen Z, have unique experiences and references that tie them together. Music, celebrities, movies and other pop culture references can help campaigns with the nostalgia factor for each generation.

Education

Segmenting by education lets you divide your target market by school, area of study, and degree. Successful campaigns that have done this generally play into the loyalty many have for their alma mater.

Occupation

Certain types of professionals have more value to certain marketing campaigns and occupations segmentation can separate your target market by job function, job title, and job seniority. This is particularly useful for B2B brands, as occupation segmentation makes it easy to target individuals with buying power at a company.

Location/Geography

Geographic location is an easy way to split your target market based on what they need and what they’re interested in. Landscape, distance from locations and climate can impact the messages you send. Advertising shorts or sandals in the middle of a Minnesota winter just doesn’t work for us here.

Income Bracket

Income segmentation divides your target market by income. Knowing how much discretionary income your base has, allows you to market to those that can afford your product or service, help you to set or your prices in accordance to how much is realistic to expect your target market to spend, and may inspire pricing levels for each segment of your target market.

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Why Email Marketing Shouldn’t Be Forgotten

Since the beginning of the internet, email has been one of the top ways we communicate. Regardless of the inception of chat apps, texting, and social media, email usage consistently grows each year. Despite these statistics, email marketing isn’t the main focus of many businesses, which is a shame for many reasons. With email marketing you can grow your business easily. Not convinced? Check out these reasons why email marketing should be a part of your marketing and sales strategies.

Mobile

Email can be accessed in a number of ways, and with at least half of US cellphone users accessing their email on their phones along with the ability for email to be accessed on tablets and other mobile devices, email can reach customers on a much larger scale that incurs less cost than SMS marketing.

Coupons and Bargain Hunters

Sending special offers and coupons to customers through email can cause a hesitant buyer to go through with a purchase. Driving engagement with customers is one of the most effective ways that email drives sales. Free shipping, and “buy one, get one” offers are shown to be the most attractive to customers, and with these offers you can increase conversion even within time constraints.

Versatility

Because email marketing is such a customizable marketing tool, it is extremely easy to not only use it for multiple purposes but also to combine it with the rest of your marketing tactics. Creating an integrated marketing strategy with email is one of the easiest ways to maintain the strength of your marketing efforts.

Investment

A recent study found that 85% of US retailers consider email marketing one of the most effective ways to reach customers. With the ability to reach gigantic numbers of customers for a very low price, matched with the effectiveness of this tactic, it’s no wonder that businesses feel that email marketing is worth so much. If doing email blitzes on your own sounds daunting, there are many tools that you can use to develop a highly effective email campaign. These are some of the top resources on the market.

1. MailChimp
2. Constant Contact
3. HubSpot

How have you used email marketing to grow your business? Do you have tools to make it easier? Let me know in comments!

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Influencer Marketing: Finding the Best Influencer for Your Brand

You know what influencer marketing is and you’ve seen some great campaigns, but how do you get started? And how do you choose the right influencer not only for a campaign but for your brand as a whole? It’s not an easy task, but it certainly can be done using these tactics:

Influencer Demographic

Influencers can fall into different categories just like businesses do. Mavrck says there are four basic types of influencers: celebrities and YouTube stars, business executives and journalists, semi-professional bloggers, and everyday consumers. Each influencer demographic brings a different benefit to the table, whether it’s impressions, engagement, or conversions. Understand what each demographic brings to the table and define your goals. This will help you choose the type of influencer that will help you achieve those goals.

Set Goals For The Campaign

What do you want your influencer marketing to achieve? Are you looking to increase brand awareness? Or to reach a certain number of post views and other more qualitative benchmarks? Keep in mind that an influencer is going to be creating the content, so the qualitative measurements are going to be your goals, not theirs. Their goal is to create engaging content for their audience that is on brand and will bring them return as well.  

Relevance

Choose your influencer by how relevant their content is to the message or product you want to promote. Find influencers that match your brand and the products or services you provide. Form a relationship that is built to be mutually beneficial.

Check Post Frequency/Engagement

Once you’ve chosen some candidates, start seriously vetting them. Look at their follower counts, likes on posts, engagement from followers and engagement with their audience, as well as post frequency. Even if a page has a large amount of followers, if they only post once a month or less, they are not engaging their followers effectively, which will decrease your return. An influencer by definition should be posting frequently to prove their expertise. Generally across the board there are ideal frequencies to follow for peak social media success. Find an influencer that best fits your brand and is taking the right steps for success.

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Insider Secrets For Great SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most used tools for anyone in marketing, but how many marketers actually understand it? Or go back and learn how to adapt to changes made in search behavior? The last few years have brought up some major changes to the way SEO works, and how to use it to its full potential. The changes made to Google’s algorithm, more use of anchor text within posts and increased security measures are all things that need to be taken into consideration for anyone looking to up their searchability, increase organic traffic, or even just have a better ranking on Google.  Here’s what you need to know to become an SEO expert.

Just Starting Out

If you are just beginning your journey into the world of SEO the task at hand can seem daunting.  Building a sitemap? Submitting a sitemap to Google? Where do you even begin? First things first, the sitemap is important to the general start of good SEO. You don’t necessarily have to update and resubmit your sitemap every time you publish new content, but it is a good measure if you ever put out any important updates or major changes.

The next change to think about is Mobile-First Indexing. In a mobile facing world, the importance of having a mobile friendly site is something you can’t ignore. Google prefers mobile responsive designs, so if you’re building out or re-designing your site, take that knowledge into consideration, especially due to the change that Google announced in November:  the search results index will be prioritizing mobile results first. This change is still being tested, but the update is likely to happen.  Another important thing to keep in mind is that AMP-enabled pages are treated as mobile pages as well, which will get them indexed first.

Once your site itself is optimized and submitted, you can start creating your content on the site. Anchor text, Some people argue that keywords are becoming less and less important, as in the very first days of SEO you could put as many keywords as you could possibly fit into a title or a post and still make it onto the front page of Google with that as your only SEO technique. That is a strategy unlikely to work today, as the technology has advanced far beyond where it once was. Now it is likely you will see top ranked pages all without targeted keywords anywhere in the content.

This is not to say that keywords are not important! Whether they are in a custom URL, in anchor text links, in a title of a post, or just located in your content anywhere, keywords can get your content to show up on a page that may or may not even be an exact match. Using a keyword research tool can help you find and utilize the most effective and relevant keywords for your content. But remember: top search terms only make up for about 30% of web searches, while unique searches that usually don’t contain popular keywords make up that remaining 70% of search traffic. Because of that large differential, it’s important that you use keywords from both ends of the spectrum, regardless of the diminished value of “Exact Match Domains” (EDMs). Branded keywords (keywords in the brand names of companies) can still be highly ranked even with the 2012 Google update against EMDs.

Sound Familiar?

If you’re already well versed in SEO you probably already know that keywords, backlinks, submitting your site to a search engine, and having a fully mobile responsive site are the first steps to higher ranking and increased traffic. What else can you do to keep ranking higher to a bigger audience? With every year and with every update to the parameters of the search, what can marketers do to continue the process of establishing great SEO? As of 2017, what will make a difference is going to be increased security measures, post content and user experience optimization.

Security and SEO

In a world full of online fraud and theft, Google gives a slightly better standing to those who use higher security settings on their pages, for example: using HTTPS versus HTTP links. When you obtain a certificate to verify the extra security of an HTTPS page, you become a “trusted third party”. Essentially, with this verification you get three types of security: encryption, data integrity and authentication. The process to switching from an HTTP address to an HTTPS address can be tricky for someone without an IT background, but this Ahrefs blog gives a great and simple explanation of how to get started, covers more SEO benefits and explains how to avoid any SEO concerns that may arise during a transition.

Post Content

The ideal content length used to be a short and sweet 500 words, but today, posts that are longer (around 2,000 to 2,500 words), and contain in-depth, comprehensive information are getting ranked higher and seeing increased traffic. The SEO trend Forbes says to watch for this year is dense content or posts that don’t have a specific optimized length, giving the most information in the smallest space needed, packing in the knowledge into a piece completely different than the small snippets or the huge novels of information we are familiar with. Remember also, as we shift into a mobile focused world that mobile content is usually shorter, and to be an authority on a topic does not always mean the need for long-form content. Consider using video and audio along with a transcript as a means to great SEO and mobile optimization.

User Experience

The amount of time a user spends on your site is a vital sign of your site’s engagement rate and can indicate to a search engine as to how highly the site should rank. Important factors in getting visitors to stay on and interact with your site are loading speed, appealing content, and, once again, mobile optimization. If there is no traffic to your site it may not matter how good the rest of your SEO is, so make sure to keep your audience in mind as you move forward.

Ideas of what the future of SEO will hold will continue to change as the world we live in changes. Be sure to keep checking in to learn about what you can do to ensure your business’ success.

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Get Ready for the Future of SEO

Recently, I ran across a blog titled, “Why You Won’t Recognize SEO in Five Years,” and it grabbed my attention. As an Internet Marketing guru, I know that SEO is a big piece of the content marketing puzzle. It is always good to stay on top of changing techniques.

Let’s take a look at some statistics around SEO:

According to Impact Branding & Design: “81% of B2B purchase cycles start with web search and 90% of buyers say when they are ready to buy, ‘they’ll find you.’”

According to NewsCred: “57% of B2B marketers say SEO has the biggest impact on lead generation.”

According to NewsCred: “53% of marketers rank content creation as the single most effective SEO tactic.”

So, what do these statistics tell us? First, if you’re not paying attention to SEO as part of your inbound content marketing plan, then you may be missing out on potential customers. Secondly, if you aren’t using current SEO techniques and strategy, then you’re already behind in the game for lead generation. It will only be more difficult to catch up.

Based on “Why You Won’t Recognize SEO in Five Years,” SEO is going to change in big ways over the next five years. Below are three areas where SEO will have the biggest impact.

1. SEO for Mobile Apps 

We all know how popular smart phones are and that people are constantly on them, so why wouldn’t mobile search become a big part of your SEO inbound marketing plan? Here’s the catch though: 85% of the time people spend on their mobile is spent in just a handful of apps. Therefore, search engine optimization for apps and the content within them is going to take on a new role within the inbound content marketing plan.

2. SEO for Social Search

We know that a lot of people rely on social media platforms when doing search on products and companies, so being present on these sites is important for your brand. They drive traffic to your site and create new leads. However, if you’ve noticed many times you never even leave Facebook when you click on a link that someone shared. Now, Twitter and Snapchat have also released features to keep viewers on their sites and apps rather than redirecting them to your website. What does this mean? Content may become more decentralized away from your website, so we will have to adapt to the new ways of optimizing our content for social.

3. SEO for Voice Search & Personal Assistants

The use of voice-activated personal assistants has been increasing over time. There are so many different ways to use these voice-activated personal assistants (computer, phone, tablet, watch, etc.). Most of us have some kind of voice-activated assistant at our fingertips. My niece attends a magnet school where they all get iPads and do a lot of work on the tablet. She uses the voice-activated assistant to search for things online regularly for school. So, why wouldn’t SEO start to take shape around voice-activated searches when a whole generation of future customers are getting acclimated to using them for search?

The newer generations are changing the way SEO will be done in the next five years. Most devices are connected to the Internet and each other. This also plays a part in the whole SEO process because search history and the way we search on each device may be taken into consideration in the overall search engine algorithm. If you’re not SEO conscience with your inbound content marketing plan, then it’s time to take another look and start preparing for what the future holds for your lead generation.

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How to Increase Your Facebook Ad’s Conversion Rate

Have you ever a created a landing page for your Facebook ads or promoted social media posts to capture leads, drive resource downloads, or get sign-ups for your service? If so, you’d probably like to improve the conversion rates of those landing pages?

The primary goal of any landing page is to collect valuable information that allows you to market to, and communicate with, potential leads. That said, after someone clicks on your Facebook ad (or promoted tweet), the copy and design of the landing page you direct them to are instrumental in the process of collecting leads. In this article, you’ll learn five key copy and design elements for a high-converting landing page.

1. Goal-Driven Copy Length

From your Facebook ad to your landing page, you have less than 10 seconds to grab their attention. So, the first element you’ll need to decide is the length of your copy on your landing page.

When a user is directed to your landing page from your Facebook ad or tweet, you have less than 10 seconds to grab your visitor’s attention and get them to convert. “Convert” could mean a purchase of your product/service, a download of your resource, or to register for your webinar, or to make an appointment, etc.

Shorter copy is typically best when you need to meet an immediate goal. For example, if you want to capture email addresses so you can email subscribers access to an exclusive, limited time only sale, or you want to get sign ups for a free webinar you’re having soon or downloads of an eBook you created, you’ll want to keep your copy short and sweet. The idea is that when people arrive at your landing page, they’ll know exactly what action you want them to take.

Landing pages with more detailed, scrollable copy are best reserved for times you have long-terms goals. Let’s say you want to create awareness for a new product or to educate your audience about a problem or a solution your brand provides. In these cases, long-copy landing pages can help your brand establish trust and credibility with those who click on your ad. 

Landing Page for Facebook Ads

Short-copy landing pages are best used when the purpose of your Facebook ad is to promote resources, newsletters and online events.

Long Form Landing Page

Long-copy landing pages are best used when the purpose of your Facebook ad is to educate your audience and/or create awareness for a solution your brand provides. But, when it comes to longer landing pages, don’t expect to see too many hard conversions immediately. When you’re focusing on a long-term goal, your conversions often come in later. Instead, look at time on page as a success metric. If people are arriving at your Facebook ads’ landing page and not immediately leaving, this is a good sign your landing page is performing well.

2) Limited Form Fields on Landing Page

Keep your form fields to a minimum for a higher conversion rate. The amount of data you want to collect from your ads’ landing page visitors can affect your conversion rate. Ask for too much information and you could turn people away. Especially if your incentive, i.e., what you’re giving away in return, does not feel worthy of the information you’re asking your visitors to share.

You should also keep your landing page’s form fields to a minimum. Your conversion rate goes down as your number of entry fields required increases, according to an infographic published by QuickSprout. When a form has only three fields, its conversion rate is 25 percent. Double the number of form fields and the conversion rate drops to 15 percent.

3) Key Visuals

Visuals deliver emotional cues to your landing page visitors, without the additional copy. The use of visuals on your ads and promoted posts’ landing pages can help quickly communicate messages more effectively than text-only landing pages. Here are three reasons this may be:

• Our brains process images and their meanings more quickly than they do plain text. This makes sense, as 50 percent of the brain is involved in visual processing and 65 percent of people are visual learners.

• Visual elements allow you to design a landing page that flows nicely. People have a limited time to spend on your landing page, and they are all easily distracted. Just look at how many tabs are open on your smartphone or desktop right now. All of those pages competing for attention. To help get the point across quickly, use graphics and images to break up the page to make its content easily digestible. The last thing you want is for your visitors to be faced with unappealing, dense blocks of texts, which lead to high bounce rates and low conversions.

• Visuals have the power to deliver emotional cues and messages to your landing page visitors, without the use of additional copy. For example, if you a have bold red call to action button, this sends a strong signal to visitors that they should take action quickly. Whereas, if your key visuals are primarily blue, the subconscious message is friendlier, more soothing.

People respond positively to well-designed landing pages. Use images and graphics wisely to make sure your landing page is visually appealing. This should reduce your bounce rate, improve visitor retention and help increase conversions.

4) Responsive, i.e., “Mobile-ready,” Design

Consider Facebook’s mobile users (40%) when you design your Facebook ads’ landing page. Every quarter, Facebook’s mobile usage increases. What’s more, of Facebook’s 1.59 billion monthly active users (up 14 percent year-over-year), 1.44 billion are monthly mobile users. Simple mobile usage all around is higher, so it’s important that you design your landing pages with mobile in mind.

To create mobile-ready landing pages for your ads and promoted posts, you can learn HTML and CSS to create your own responsive web pages. Or, you can use a landing page builder tool like ShortStack.com. This will allow you to design landing pages, from templates or scratch, which are automatically optimized for all mobile devices. No fancy coding skills are required.

Remember, how your Facebook ads’ landing page looks and functions on desktop is equally as important as how it looks and functions on a mobile device. Be sure to test your landing page on multiple platforms.

5) A Single Call-to-Action

It’s easier to get a person to do one thing, versus asking them to do two or three things. If you include more than one call-to-action on your promoted posts’ or Facebook ads’ landing page, you risk confusing your visitors. To stay clear of this potential “danger zone”, eliminate all clickable items on your landing page that might distract visitors from accomplishing the primary task.

Don’t include multiple social icons, unnecessary links and tabs, drop-down menus, etc., because having too many “features” on a landing page will only confuse your visitors. The last thing you want to do is distract your visitors and give them reasons to bounce back to Facebook, without visiting the rest of your site or making a purchase.

You will have better luck getting a person to do one thing, versus asking them to do two or three things. Stick to one goal, or action item, per landing page you build.

Conclusion

This list is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many other things to consider when creating high-converting Facebook ads’ landing pages. These five tips should, however, get you started off on the right foot.

What do you do to help maximize the conversions of your promoted posts’ and Facebook ads’ landing pages? Do you focus more on perfecting your landing page’s copy or design?

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Why Your Business Needs an Animated Explainer Video

Animated explainer videos are a perfect tool for attracting visitors to your site and telling them about the key benefits and features of your product. According to Nielsen Research, Training and Consulting Group, the average user spends about 10-20 seconds on a site if there is no compelling reason to stay longer. And the first ten seconds are critical for giving the user this reason to stay by clearly setting out your value proposition. Having such a short period of time, you cannot rely only on text and graphic ways to attract their attention.

If you do differ from your competitors, have a distinct advantage, or offer a unique service/product, you have to show this to the users, who often have neither time, nor desire to investigate why they should take your offer.

Why Does Video Work Better?

Let’s delve into the realm of psychology. Only 20% of people remember the information they read and only 10% remember what they heard. At the same time, 80% of people remember what they saw and what they did, and for another thing, visual information is processed 60,000 times faster than text. Based on these stats, we should accept that text and audio is less effective compared to non-verbal communication, and can influence a rather small percentage of your audience.

Animated explainer videos are able to clearly articulate your service or product in less than a minute or two. And since video allows people to acquire more information in less time compared to reading, you get a great chance to win these critical 10 seconds and capture the users’ attention.

Plus, animated explainer videos involve both visual communication and audio that significantly enhance the perception.Do these little psychological theories work when applied to online marketing? Recent facts show that they really do.

The Latest Video Trends

Cisco in its VNI Global IP Traffic and Service Adoption Forecasts for 2016-2019, states that by 2019 video will make up to 80% of all traffic compared to 67% in 2016.

So, according to “The Top 7 SEO Trends That Will Dominate 2016” by Forbes, it’s time to stop taking video and multimedia as an additional tool of online marketing, which only supplements textual information. Forbes predicts that B2C companies will try and use more video due to its higher reach, engagement, effectiveness and overall ROI compared to text content. It looks like B2B brands will follow the trend in the near future.

These predictions are based on statistics proving that both customers and businesses love video. Let’s turn to figures collected in an Invodo report on the results of 2015-2016:

• Video viewers are 1.6x more likely to buy
• 96% of customers believe that video helps them make purchase decisions
• 73% of shoppers are more likely to buy a product after watching an explainer video about it
• 58% of consumers are ready to trust the companies providing videos about their products
• 74% of B2C marketers and 92% of B2B marketers use video in their marketing strategies
• 52% of marketing experts chose video among other types of content as having the best ROI
• Social videos are shared more often than text and images combined by 1200%

But Why Animation?

Yes, animated explainer videos are just one way of visualization, and there is no one big reason for you to choose exactly this type of video content for every occasion. In some cases, staged video with real actors and props is more effective and reasonable. Still, there are a few important advantages animated explainer video has over other visuals:

Animation explainer video is perfect for those areas of business where it is difficult to present and to sell a product through other types of video or promotional methods. For example, you develop websites or you’re engaged in contextual advertising. Your explainer video should include information on target customers’ problems, benefits of the company and its workflow, several cases with figures and so on. You have to admit that it’s rather difficult to show traffic growth in video unless it’s animated. Virtually any information can be visualized with the help of animated explainer videos and this is its main advantage over real video.

Lively animated characters along with eye-catching cartoons, trigger strong emotions and create a very special atmosphere that engages an audience and captures their attention. This adds an emotional component to rational arguments, enhancing the desired effect. It’s easier and more interesting for the audience to keep up with a story line, when positive feelings are involved and the information presented in the video is more likely to stick in the memory. Plus, animated explainer videos are associated to a marketing tool in a less degree than staged video and that’s why it doesn’t come off as irritating or obtrusive advertising.

Animated explainer video is not limited to scripts. The characters can fly, dance, sing and wear any costumes, while the action may take place at any historical period and in any geographical location. This makes it possible to create an inventive storyline for better presentation of a product.

Summing up, by using animated explainer video it’s easy to communicate about complicated things, create memorable images and appeal to an audiences emotions. However, animated explainer videos can successfully solve real-world problems, improve search engines results and provide an increase in leads, conversions and sales.

Tried-and-True

One of the most striking case stories illustrating rapid success made by a startup using animated explainer video is Dropbox. Founded in 2010, Dropbox grew from zero to 100 million users in 5 years, using an effective viral campaign and the simplest web design, their landing page had only an animated explainer video and a download button.

The video campaign had its affect, increasing conversions by 10%. Considering the fact that it was viewed about 750,000 times in a month, it converted nearly 1 million of the visitors into registered users yearly.

So, what goals can you reach using an animated video?

• Increased conversions
• More sales
• Increased click-through
• Higher rankings in search engines
• Easy-to-remember marketing messages
• Customers’ engagement
• Reducing the number of consultations

An animated explainer video makes complex things simple by both explaining your product features to customers, and boosting your business in multiple ways. At Acesse we help clients boost their business in creative ways with animated explainer videos.

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The Importance of Becoming an SEO Expert

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization for the uninitiated, has changed quite a bit in the last few years, thanks to the growing complexity of Google’s algorithms. The crux of Google’s algorithms is that if your site helps users achieve their goals, it should rank higher. It gives emphasis on offering a great user experience. A modern SEO expert, thus cannot restrict himself to the backend; he has to be proactive in ensuring that he offers a combination of methods to make the site rank well on Google. Today’s SEO expert needs a combination of technical, creative and strategic skills to be effective. Here are a few key components an expert SEO accomplishes:

Offers a Great Site Experience

An SEO expert really needs to put herself in the shoes of the user. What do users expect from a site?

• It needs to load fast and on any device of their choosing.

• It should be easily navigable

• And it should help achieve their goals.

Mobile has already surpassed desktop as the most favored device. Google made it very clear that mobile-friendly sites will have better rankings. Thus, it is important to have a responsive design that makes it easy for users to visit and experience the site on their mobiles.

If the site can do all this and be aesthetically pleasing at the same time, your job is done. The SEO expert needs to work closely with the visualizer, programmer and UI/UX expert to achieve this objective.

Creates Different Content Formats

Content development should be strategically linked to content marketing. A QuickSprout post gives you different ways to achieve this. Some of them include:

• Create content that which Wikipedia can link

• Create content based on keyword data.

• Ask customers questions and discover why they aren’t converting

• Focus on indirect conversions.

• Cross-link.

Leverages Content Marketing

Content development has come a long way from keyword and key phrase stuffing. Today, it is more about writing about interesting topics that entertain and inform. The content on websites needs to be unique, error-free and relevant. It should be interlinked within the site in such a way so as to offer comprehensiveness of information to the user. If the user can achieve his informational goal on a single website, Google will rank it higher. Also, emphasis needs to be given on creating different content formats like visual (videos, graphics) as well as audio (podcasts) content, apart from written content.

Targets Customers Locally

Targeting local customers is a simple way you can use SEO. If you are a local business, you can target local customers by using highly targeted keywords that denote geographical intent.

Target Customers Locally

When a user searches for a product or a service on Google, local listings are the ones that will always appear on top. Trends show that customers are more likely to click on these listings.

Get acknowledged as an authority.

Linking to other websites is no longer enough to make Google believe that you are an authority. Today, an SEO expert needs to build relationships with other bloggers and site owners to get a chance to publish on their sites. This can happen with the right mix of high quality content and PR. If your content is valuable, it will naturally attract more inbound links. This is seen by Google as a sign of credibility and trust.

Rich Snippets

A documented case study has shown that structured markup using Schema Microdata, GoodRelations and Google Rich Snippetsincreases CTR by as much as 30%. By being creative with the format, you can use Rich Snippets for a variety of web pages. You have to do testing to see how successful your Rich Snippets are in increasing your CTR and how you can adjust them to perform better. 

Use Rich Snippets to Increase CTR

From a SEO standpoint, Rich Snippets aren’t important, but they sure are effective in increasing click-through ratio. You can use Rich Snippets to show helpful information like ratings, reviews, pricing, etc. in the search results pages to attract customers.

Understands How the Importance of Technical Skills

Many experts will have you believe that since all Google wants you to do is give users the best experience and it will rank your site higher. But this is not entirely true. The modern SEO expert will definitely need skills beyond his usual technical repertoire as noted above but at the same time, needs more technical skills than what he needed a few years ago.

It is simply not enough to write quality content and reduce bounce rates to rank well on Google. It is an oversimplification of the SEO expert’s job. A short list of the technical skills that are required by the modern SEO has been put up by Rand Fishkin here.

Conclusion

SEO is a rapidly evolving phenomenon. As an expert, you have to stay abreast of the latest developments. Apart from emerging and traditional technical skills, you also need creative and strategic skills to make your site rank better. Also, it will help you avoid penalizations if you stick to the same old strategies that Google might one day deem as illegal. The margin for error is shorter than ever. Stay informed as you wear multiple hats.

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Five Questions Every Internet Marketer Should Know

One of the best things to come out of a social marketing quiz is insights into a being a successful marketer. The ability to actually find out what you’re doing right, wrong, what works and what doesn’t. If you haven’t taken one yet, here is a link to a favorite of mine:http://www.marketergizmo.com/1799-2/.

If you’re ready to get right to the issue, below are a few questions every marketer should know:

1. A former employee reveals sensitive data on your Facebook page, acting as a whistle blower. The post starts a small crisis on your end. What do you do?

• Treat the post like one of a regular community member. The fact that he’s been an employee doesn’t change your duties of professionally representing the brand and you need to remain fair and transparent.
• Delete the comment since this is a special case and the data has unlawfully been posted. Directly contact the employee and alert the legal department immediately.
• Try to downplay the incident by posting other updates according to your regular content calendar and try to avoid bringing too much attention to the issue.
• Get a senior person involved, this is above your pay grade.

What did you pick?

This is definitely a special case. The employee was under contract, and after leaving if they start leaking secrets, the company is well within their right to remove this sensitive information that it doesn’t want leaked through such a channel.

In spite of that, close to most marketers thought it would be okay to treat this post like a regular community post. What I found a little interesting was that about very few marketers would go to a senior staff member and ask what the right way to handle this would be.

2. How do you handle a lack of interesting content on your page when not a lot is happening in the industry?

• Post simple text updates and keep the flow going.
• Stop posting until worthy content appears, you don’t want to give your fans trash.
• Don’t post mediocre updates, but devote more time to craft original stories and content.
• Ask your fans what they’d like to see since there’s not a lot happening, they can tell you what kind of content would be good.

What did you pick?

This question speaks volumes about the attitude that marketers have today. So there’s a little rut in the industry. Not a lot of news, interesting ideas or opinions are surfacing for your brand to talk about. And this happens very often. Every company and manager hit this a couple of times every quarter. Do you turn to your fans every single time to ask what they’d like to see?

The right way to deal with this would be to focus on crafting better content, posting better stories, creating more original content and ideas. If it’s smart and speaks to your target audience, they’ll like it. Do a couple of re-caps on what’s happened lately, perhaps make a couple of predictions for the future, highlight some of the best work your company has done. But the second you go down the route of asking your fans what they want to see, you go down the route of letting them decide what content you should post.

3. What’s the CTR of 400 Clicks with 40,000 Impressions?

Just over half of all marketers usually get this right, but it’s still a crazy low percentage. CTRs are something that marketers are always obsessing over. Most marketers are a little too quick to rely on tools and aren’t able to calculate social metrics themselves.

Perhaps marketers are just used to saying incredibly low CTRs for their ads, which is why they don’t automatically gravitated towards 1%, which is the correct answer.

4. Google Analytics tells you that 1,000 people came to a particular page on your website, and 250 of them went on to view another page from that page. What’s the bounce rate of the page?

Bounce rates are another metric that marketers should obsess over. How many people are coming to my landing page and just running away? You want that number to be as low as possible, therefore my obsession with low bounce rates.

There are marketers who truly believe that a bounce rate of 250% or 750% is possible. The calculation of bounce rate isn’t hard. The problem here isn’t about the calculation itself, but the concept of bounce rate itself.

Perhaps this is another argument for marketers relying too heavily on tools and not knowing how the metrics work?

5. A moderator of a Facebook page cannot do the following:

How well acquainted are you with the various Facebook admin roles? Are you aware of what an Analyst can’t do on a Facebook page and what the Editor can do?

For companies and brands that have more than one person managing a Facebook page, knowing the roles and their capabilities becomes incredibly important.

So, what can a moderator of a Facebook Page do?

• Send messages as the page.
• Create ads.
• Create and delete posts on the page.
• See who posted as the page.

What did you pick?

Very few marketers usually get this question right. Most marketers thought that Moderators can’t create ads, which is a fairly rational decision to make since you’d expect a moderator to be a person who essentially responds to comments and tries to keep order on the page. Perhaps Facebook’s roles and their capabilities are to blame for this one.

Regardless, it’s important to know who can do what, and most marketers aren’t clear about Facebook’s various roles for page managers.

That was a real eye-opener, no? If you got most of these right, congratulations! Got most of them wrong? Perhaps a night of studying up on how to be a successful marketer could do you some good. It’s back to the drawing board for you!

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