Yes, they may grow to know and like you better, for a time. But ultimately they’ll understand that you are offering very little of value. And you’ll find your audience has very little to offer you.

Here’s much more sound advice from two experts. The first is  Nick Shin, via SocialMediaExaminer. The Second is from Kate Buck (via WorkingMomsOnly.com). Kate developed a career in social media from scratch using the methods she advocates. You’ll see both recommend research and targeting. I prefer Kate’s strategy of driving your audience from social media to your list where you can encourage them to take specific actions.

#1: Determine Your Goals and Objectives

Keep it Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic/Relevant, and Timely (aka be SMART!).

#2: Research, Research, and Research Some More

Listen to what’s out there, identify, and understand your target audience.

#3: Create a Digital Rolodex of Contacts and Content

Make a list of influencers who are relevant to your business.

#4: Join the Conversation to Develop Relationships

Begin developing relationships by following and friending influencers and those in your industry.

#5: Strengthen Relationships

#6: Measure Results

Remember, what you measure will  tie into the goals and objectives of your social media strategy.

#7: Analyze, Adapt, and Improve

Analyze your social media campaigns, adapt any new findings into your current processes, and improve your efforts.

via How to Create a Social Media Strategy for Your Business | Social Media Examiner.

Here’s Kate’s strategy outline:

The formula for building a successful and profitable business in social mediais:

1.  FIND & LISTEN

2.  CONNECT

3.  ORGANIZE

4.  SHARE & ENGAGE

5.  INVITE

via Building Big Buzz for your Brand using Social Media Marketing

The key step I find valuable is the invitation stage. You invite people to:

-Read, comment or subscribe to your blog. (When you do this, ensure your blog has compelling links to your products and services prominently displayed for readers to see and click on.)

-Subscribe to your Email Newsletter or SMS list for exclusive content and discounts you don’t share in social media marketing.

-Free information on teleseminars, webinars, e-books, etc

-Speaking Events, meet ups, and offline events like community or social
events

-Links to connect with you on other social media marketing platforms

-Enter a contest or sweepstakes

-Links to product reviews or affiliate product offers

-And, gasp! Links to new products and services that you think would be of interest and benefit to them.

And remember that there are a variety of ways people shoot their own feet. The first not inviting people to take action. The second is inviting them too soon, before you’ve added any value or formed any relationship. That just looks
like spamming.

But an end-to-end process that includes finding and engaging the right people and then inviting them to take action with you, that’s the foundation of an effective social media strategy.

She gives two tips for increasing your conversion rates (the number of readers who take the action you want them to).

1. First, simply write more often. This advice is echoed by others I follow. Kim suggests you write three times a week if you want to develop a real relationship.

You should be emailing your subscribers AT LEAST three times per week. Each of these emails should be value packed, entertaining, and infused with your own personality.

2. Also, if you’re sending an article, include the entire article in the email.

This flies in the face of most advice you get. Most people tell you to give your readers reason to go back to your website and spend time on your site. I think this is a mistake for two reasons – both having to do with conversions. First. making people click multiple times reduces your conversions (not always but often). Second, time-on-site is overrated. I don’t want people to spend more time on my site. I want them to encounter good advice and take valuable action.

If you’ve been following me for any period of time, you know that I don’t consider your website a destination, it’s a point in a conversation. If your audience benefits most by spending time there, then that’s the goal of the article. If your audience benefits most by encountering an article and clicking to something else, taking some action, then I want that to happen effectively.

Give your audience what they can use.

Here’s much more sound advice from two experts. The first is  Nick Shin, via SocialMediaExaminer. The Second is from Kate Buck (via WorkingMomsOnly.com). Kate developed a career in social media from scratch using the methods she advocates. You’ll see both recommend research and targeting. I prefer Kate’s strategy of driving your audience from social media to your list where you can encourage them to take specific actions.

#1: Determine Your Goals and Objectives

Keep it Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic/Relevant, and Timely (aka be SMART!).

#2: Research, Research, and Research Some More

Listen to what’s out there, identify, and understand your target audience.

#3: Create a Digital Rolodex of Contacts and Content

making a list of influencers who are relevant to your business.

#4: Join the Conversation to Develop Relationships

Begin developing relationships by following and friending influencers and those in your industry.

#5: Strengthen Relationships

#6: Measure Results

Remember, what you measure will tie into the goals and objectives of your social media strategy.

#7: Analyze, Adapt, and Improve

Analyze your social media campaigns, adapt any new findings into your current processes, and improve your efforts.

via How to Create a Social Media Strategy for Your Business | Social Media Examiner.

Here’s Kate’s strategy outline:

The formula for building a successful and profitable business in social media is:

1.  FIND & LISTEN

2.  CONNECT

3.  ORGANIZE

4.  SHARE & ENGAGE

5.  INVITE

via Building Big Buzz for your Brand using Social Media Marketing

The key step I find valuable is the invitation stage. You invite people to:

-Read, comment or subscribe to your blog. (When you do this, ensure your blog has compelling   links to your products and services   prominently displayed for readers to see and click on.)

-Subscribe to your Email Newsletter or SMS list for exclusive content and discounts you don’t share in social media marketing.

-Free information on teleseminars, webinars, e-books, etc

-Speaking Events, meet ups, and offline events like community or social events

-Links to connect with you on other social media marketing platforms

-Enter a contest or sweepstakes

-Links to product reviews or affiliate product offers

-And, gasp! Links to new products and services that you think would be of interest and benefit to them.

And remember that there are a variety of ways people shoot their own feet. The first not inviting people to take action. The second is inviting them too soon, before you’ve added any value or formed any relationship. That just looks like spamming.

But an end-to-end process that includes finding and engaging the right people and then inviting them to take action with you, that’s the foundation of an effective social media strategy.

The major finding gives more support to a trend we’ve been point to:

• Enhanced Involvement in Prospect Discovery — While marketing teams strive with every effort to harvest opportunities across a wide variety of tactical measurements, industry experts suggest that B2B organizations can cultivate a greater role in the research and discovery process.

Mike Volpe, CMO, HubSpot, puts it this way:

“The goal here is to have customers know who you are before they select a list of vendors to contact, and to make it easy to find you at the point of need.”

You’ll recognize this strategy in what we’ve called targeting the prospect while they are identifying possible solutions sets. If you’re not familiar with that, grab our free web marketing tutorial and watch video 2. We lay that all out for you.

You’ll also find tips for integrating social media which can increase your traffic exponentially.

Finally, we’re seeing an increase in B2C (business to consumer) techniques (that translates roughly as personalization) in the B2B space.

• Bringing B2C tactics into B2B— Who says B2C has more fun? While industry research indicated that the vast majority of B2B traffic is typically coming from new visitors, it’s a reality for every marketer is challenged with — lesser opportunity to leverage any sort of stored history to personalize the experience for the browser.

“BtoB sells to accounts, not individuals, and yet most of the widely practiced personalization techniques are geared towards individual behaviors or browsing histories,” wrote Jason Stewart, Director of Marketing at Demandbase.

In the report, Stewart offers five steps B2B companies can take to implement an account-based personalization model on their web sites to drive conversions.

See State of Demand Generation 2012 Report.

Here’s the net, and it’s what we’ve known for quite some time: Product Videos convert. In other words, if someone wants to see your product before they buy or try it, and it’s tough for them to do that on the internet, a product video will increase the likelihood they will take action.

The stats you’ll see below from the article are valuable proof. And they’ve been enormously abused. This doesn’t mean that any video will increase conversions for any action.

Think about what you want your visitors to do, and use video that brings proof/evidence to bear to help them move forward.

Kissmetrics gathered a number of studies to document that…

well-done product videos almost inevitably lead to increased sales.

It points to housewares e-tailer StacksAndStacks.com, which has said that visitors were 144% more likely to make a purchase after seeing a product video than those who did not. Also, Advance Auto Parts has found that including instructional and how-to videos both on its site and Facebook leads visitors to stay on the site twice as long and visit twice as many pages versus those who don’t see video.

Online Video Drives Retailers’ Success

Sub-30 second videos demonstrated the highest conversion rates, with 4.54% of viewers making a purchase immediately after watching. Following this group, videos between 30 seconds and 2 minutes in length recorded an average conversion rate of 3.58%. Videos longer than 2 minutes achieved an average conversion rate of 2.91%.

via ]]> http://effectivewebmarketing.net/video-marketing-product-videos-convert-2/feed/ 35 http://effectivewebmarketing.net/video-marketing-product-videos-convert/ http://effectivewebmarketing.net/video-marketing-product-videos-convert/#comments Wed, 18 Jan 2012 09:06:14 +0000 admin http://effectivewebmarketing.net/?p=1839

Read the rest of this entry