online marketing solutions

May 24, 2017 By Maria Florio

Taking a closer look at social media ad spending

There are a number of reasons why some professionals and businesses shouldn’t spend a lot of money on social media ads; starting with limited budget and the ROI behind social media ads, which may not meet your needs or help you stay in business.

Social media’s number one value, year after year (just check out Social Media Examiner’s 2017 Social Media Marketing Industry Report) is helping professionals and businesses to increase visibility. Since visibility doesn’t necessarily mean monetary return, businesses on a limited budget must thoroughly evaluate their ad spending on any of the social media platforms they are using. This counts for public figures, authors, and any type of professional or person using social media.

No matter what you do or the type of business you run, here are some things to keep in mind and help you make a decision on whether or not you should invest in social media advertisement.

Facebook is decreasing organic reach, which means less of the people that follow your Facebook page are seeing your posts.

This seems to be getting worse year after year. In fact in this year’s Social Media Examiner’s 2017 Social Media Marketing Industry Report finds that 95% of marketers either don’t know or have seen a decline in Facebook News Feed exposure over the last 12 months. If you are counting on Facebook for your exposure, then you will want to look into advertisement spending, however keep in mind that spending those dollars doesn’t mean monetary return.

If your biggest objective for using Facebook is to increase sales, you want to keep in mind what type of service and/or product you are selling. How accessible is it to your clients, meaning budget friendly or a big investment, and the time your specific target audience’s buyer journey lasts. This information can help you create more realistic expectations of what you will see following ad spending.

Twitter and/or LinkedIn ad spending also have their considerations.

While LinkedIn is known for successful B2B lead generation and client acquisition, it is quite expensive. If you plan on spending with LinkedIn it’s advisable that you calculate how many clients you want or need to close in order to make up for your investment and see a return. If you are a business with budget that will allow this type of investment then you can test it out and see how it works out for you.

The same thought process goes for Twitter, the only difference being that Twitter is not as expensive as LinkedIn, is also great for B2C, and is one of the social networks that hasn’t reduced organic reach to try and push businesses to spend on ads (Twitter has tweaked their algorithm, but for now, unlike what Facebook is doing, the changes seem to be based on showing Twitter users more of what they’re interacting with and not limiting what they see from the Twitter accounts they choose to follow).

These are only some of the considerations you should keep in mind when you’re considering using social media beyond an organic strategy. If you’re a business that has money to invest then making this decision will be a no brainer; and at the end of the year, you can evaluate how your social media ad spending went. If you’re limited in the budget you have however, then consider the above before investing and ensure your goals can be met by the social media platform you choose to advertise on.

Are you having trouble deciding whether or not to invest in social media ads? What are you exploring to make your decision?

May 7, 2017 By Maria Florio

Key considerations when choosing online marketing automation tools

Knowing when to use online marketing automation and what mistakes to avoid are not the only things to get you going with the process, without overwhelming you. You also want to make sure you don’t get lost in the array of online marketing automation tools out there. Depending on who you talk to and where you’re getting your online marketing information, you will see one of two things:

Either the same tools over and over again -or- an arsenal of different tools that will keep you wondering which tool is the best for you.

As an online marketer, I use a set of tools for different marketing tasks and activities (as mentioned in Online marketing automation for your email and social media activities post, Hootsuite is one of them and Zoho is another). Some online marketing automation tools I use because they were presented to me by trusted colleagues, others because of clients who want them or have them in their toolkit, and still others I found on my own and decided based on my needs.

When deciding on my own what online marketing automation tools I wanted to use I considered three things:

The ease of use in using the tool
Long-term goals and how the tool plays a role in helping to succeed in reaching those goal
The reliability of the tool

These three things are important because they will help you use these tools in a way that is helpful to you and not in a way that makes online marketing more difficult or tedious.

The first key, ease of use, is of the utmost importance since you’ll be using the tool. You want to make sure you’re comfortable with the platform you’re using and that it doesn’t keep you super busy in trying to learn how to use it.

Some tools are a bit harder to navigate depending on your thought process and what makes sense to you in how you move around on the backend dashboard of a program. You want to look for tools that are user-friendly. From experience though, some tools that are presented as user-friendly aren’t as intuitive as they make it seem.

An example is Mailchimp when you set up recurring campaigns. Before understanding fully how it worked, I felt somewhat confused and had to run a couple test runs before figuring out their system. Another tool is Thrive Themes, particularly their Content Builder tool. Even though it is supposed to easily integrate opt-in forms from an email platform such as Mailchimp, before it became clear to me how to do this, I set up an opt-in form with HTML code. Only after talking to colleagues was I able to understand that before setting up my opt-in form I needed to connect my Mailchimp account with an API. Once that was done, then the process went much smoother.

The slight confusion I experienced is based on what my brain finds intuitive and how I navigate a dashboard of course; for others, the same process with the same tools might be quite simple and straightforward. It is because of our unique traits that you want to test run the backend of a tool before deciding to use it or not. Product reviews are helpful, but you should still test an online marketing automation tool or at least get a demo to see how it works in practice and what the backend looks like. This will give you a clear idea of how easy or not it will be for you to personally use the tool.

For long-term goals, this is important because you don’t want to end up with a high number of tools that you have to switch around to get things done. Having a ton of online marketing automation tools is time consuming and thanks to the available tools out there, it’s unnecessary to get overwhelmed by online marketing options.

A perfect example is if you plan on having multiple email marketing campaigns in the future that go out for a diverse clientele from multiple industries. In this case, it’s ideal to build your list in a platform that allows you to keep track of your lists in an easy and organized way. Usually, you’ll be looking for a CRM (customer relationship management) to organize your contacts so whatever email marketing platform you pick, make sure it can integrate seamlessly with your CRM or pick an email marketing platform that has a CRM that meets your needs.

When it comes to the reliability of the tool, it means you want to pick tools that won’t disappear on you or that are trending at the moment, but may not be as good as other pre-existing tools. Some ways you can identify reliability is the years the company has been in business, the number of other online marketing applications they’re compatible with (for example email marketing tools with a CRM tool or a landing page tool), and the continuous updates to improve the tool that the company has been applying in time.

Even though the years the company has been in business might not be indicative of reliability as much as one could hope, it is at least indicative of a company doing their best to stay in business. This is important because if you start building your online marketing automation activities with a tool that ceases to exist all of a sudden, you’ll find yourself frantically looking for a substitute or you’ll find yourself without that content and system you put so much effort in organizing. This has happened to a client of mine before. They built a series of landing pages, great landing pages, with a tool that after a couple years shut down and we could no longer use those landing pages.

There are no guarantees of course, but with a little in-depth research you can get a pretty good idea of the lifespan of the tool and if it a good fit for what you need.

No matter what online marketing automation tools you choose to use, there will probably be a learning curve, especially if you’re not a tech savvy person; but if you use these three considerations in the decision making process, you’ll be able to find what works for you and avoid online marketing mistakes that could slow you down in a significant way.

April 11, 2017 By Maria Florio

Don’t turn your back on these online marketing automation mistakes

When it comes to online marketing automation, there’s at least one reason why everyone looks to do it; and this reason is time. Our most precious gift is time and it is one that business owners or even someone passionately pursuing their dream, never have enough of, like ever! Sound familiar? So, a choice has to be made and that’s where online marketing automation comes into play.

Before we get to the mistakes with online marketing automation, first a brief intro to the online marketing areas automation helps businesses with:

Online marketing content, so posting and scheduling your content to send without you having to post live (I use Hootsuite for example).
Network and engagement responses like those Twitter follow thank you tweets or DMs or Facebook messenger chatbots.
Email marketing campaigns and lead generation.

*Note: we will talk about these separately, but for now let’s get back to the mistakes you want to avoid.

The first mistake that comes from automation was mentioned in last week’s overview of online marketing automation and that is the personalized aspect. The need to free up time isn’t something any of us control, but if your community is important to you this means you will set something up so that you can follow up with them on a personal note.

From the lack of personalization we have mistake number two: not having eyes on your social media accounts, in your emails, on your website, and your overall online community interaction. If you’re not paying attention to what is going on online, how will you know who you’re talking to and what they’ve been talking about, as well as what their needs are? You won’t and that will make the person feel somewhat unimportant to you or even if they don’t feel unimportant, they won’t notice you either. Think about it, how many Twitter DMs or emails do you tune out, maybe you save them, but you don’t open them.

The only way you will stand out as business or person who cares about the people you’re trying to help is if you always have personal touch and truly caring in mind. This means, yes, setting up your online marketing automation so that you may run your business or pursue your projects; but including in your automation a way that you will have eyes online and you will add something personal when your community reaches out.

A perfect example is the response or lack of response that I got from reaching out to two public figures (authors, researchers, and a bunch more titles): Gregg Braden (brings science and spirituality together) and Daniel Goleman (known for Emotional Intelligence).

I don’t want to bore you with the details, but a little background of my connection with them is needed first. With Daniel Goleman I am connected on LinkedIn (we are 1^st connections, it’s like being friends with someone on Facebook). This means he or his social media manager accepted a connection request that I sent. Gregg Braden I am not connected to in any other way than me following his page, buying some of his books and getting his newsletters.

So, the story is that I wrote both for research I am conducting on my own book, and because I truly admire what they are doing and sharing with the world. While Daniel Goleman never got back to me, Gregg Branden’s assistant did. Now, you might say, how does an assistant’s response show Gregg Braden cares. It shows he cares because he has someone replying to his fans. Even if that message may be a template response, the person who sent it to me was very real and they addressed my query. On the other hand, me getting excited that Daniel Goleman accepted to connect on LinkedIn, but then totally ignored my message makes me much less of a fan. I know busy, but even a response a year from the time I wrote or some acknowledgment would have been showing he cared.

At the end of the day, it all depends on what matters to you most and what you prioritize. If your community is important to you, you will always find ways to include those personal touches and have eyes on those you’re helping; while also taking advantage of online marketing automation solutions so that you can free up your time.