Tuesday 2 December 2014
Thursday 6 November 2014
Thursday 23 October 2014
Sunday 19 October 2014
Friday 17 October 2014
How to Design a Social Media Campaign to get results
How to set up a social media campaign…..here is a 5 step
process of how to deliver?
#1: Assemble a Capable Team of Social Media Experts
Attend a team of Social media marketers who have the specific
skills required to achieve your goals such as content generation, writing and
editing, photo editing, a little tech know-how, graphic design and being able to respond in real time.
#2: Plan Your Campaign
Use a plan to establish your campaign’s short-term
objectives for each of the social channels you’re using, team assignments, general
content ideas you can build on and how you’ll use features of specific
platforms (e.g., lists on Twitter or hangouts on Google+).
#3: Choose the Most Effective Platforms
No matter what you hear from different sources, there is
no one perfect social media platform to use. What works well for one business
may not work well for another.
To choose your primary and secondary networks, think
about where your target audience is more likely to spend time online and look
at industry benchmarks. Take the time to discover where your target audience
hangs out online. When you have the right mix of platforms, your campaign has a
better chance at success.
#4: Establish an Editorial Calendar
The main element of social media is content therefore
ensure that you have a calendar of engaging content to achieve streamlines resources, drive
internal teamwork and stay focused on the needs of your audience.
#5: Be True to Your Company Voice
When your audience reads and listens to the content you
produce, they’re not only hearing your message, they’re hearing the voice of
your company—your tone, language and delivery. Each time they hear your brand
voice, it’s a good bet they’re subconsciously sizing you up. They’re deciding
whether you’re a company they can rely on, and more importantly, do business
with.
Thursday 11 September 2014
Friday 1 August 2014
How do I use social media to market my business?
If you are struggling to work out how you can use social media to increase brand awareness, grow sales, develop online traffic, build relationships with stakeholders and ultimately boost profits then this course can help!!!
Our bespoke Social Media training course teaches you everything you need to know about social media for business: http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/social-media-for-business-training-tickets-12482681035
What you will learn.......
- Best practice for promoting your offers and increasing sale
- How to easily use tools for success such as Facebook Apps, Facebook Ads etc
- Using Social Media as a research tool to shape your business plans
- Integrating social media into your overall marketing activity
- Generating content easily and developing great content plans
- How to develop, execute and measure a campaign
- Introduce evaluation methods to measure and monitor effectiveness
- Developing a plan for managing and growing a social media presence
- Strategies on how to make the most from social media
- Steps to being successful on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin
- Building effective and optimised profiles on Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook
- Applying techniques to build a voice, “listen” and engage various audiences
- Selecting and using the appropriate social media tools to support objectives
- Utilise online tools to manage multiple social media accounts and schedule content
- Developing and extending your social media community of followers and fans
- Creating sales leads through social media
- Tips for building visibility of your social networking profiles
Who is the social media course for?
- Company owner/manager
- Business leaders
- Marketing personnel
- Entrepreneurs
- Sales and PR professionals
You don't need any prior knowledge of social media but an idea of why you or your company wants to use social media would be useful as the training focuses on how you might best achieve these goals/targets useful as the training focuses on how you might best achieve these goals/targets.
Click here now for more information and to book a place: http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/social-media-for-business-training-tickets-12482681035
Monday 19 May 2014
NEW AGENCY OFFERS FREE SOCIAL MEDIA PROGRAMME TO BOOST LOCAL BUSINESSES
NEW AGENCY OFFERS FREE SOCIAL MEDIA PROGRAMME TO BOOST LOCAL BUSINESSES
A new Cheshire based Marketing Agency has
announced a free programme to offer support to local companies to give them the
knowledge of how to boost their business through using social media. The bespoke
training course set up by Hoopla Marketing is being made available to eight
businesses in the Cheshire area for free to give them the ability to leverage their companies presence on
social media to increase brand awareness, grow sales, develop online traffic, build
relationships with stakeholders and ultimately boost profits.
Danny Cleaton, Account
Director at Hoopla Marketing said: “The advent of social media has
provided businesses with another set of marketing tools which can be used to
build brand awareness, create engagement and generate sales.
“However in order to use social
media effectively it is important to understand which social media tools will
support your marketing objectives, how to use them, when to use them and most
importantly how to evaluate the success of them.”
Hoopla Marketing
which is a new integrated marketing agency are
looking to help small and large companies increase sales and brand awareness
through various tactics such as Branding,
Marketing, PR, Campaign Development, Design, Digital, Training and Event
Management and feel this is a major step in doing so.
Paul Strong, Strategic Account Director at Hoopla Marketing
added “As a Cheshire based
company, its better for our business in the long term if local companies are
successful.”
“Knowing how to use social media to generate more business is
an important skill to have now in this digital age and we feel by offering this
service we can help local businesses thrive.”
“The training
course is perfect for marketing personnel, entrepreneurs, sales and PR
professionals who want to learn how to integrate Facebook, Twitter &
LinkedIn into their marketing communications plans and the best thing is that you
don't need any prior knowledge.”
To apply for one of the eight free places on the course in
May then visit http://www.hoopla-marketing.com/#!social-media-training/c1nb3
and fill out your details. Companies that
have been successful in getting a place on the course will be notified on June
13th.
Ends
Notes to Editors
For
more information about Hoopla Marketing contact Danny Cleaton or Paul Strong on
07940419190 or email info@hoopla-marketing.com.
About Hoopla Marketing
Hoopla Marketing is a new Cheshire
based integrated marketing agency that combines creativity and strategy with
commercial common sense to help small and large companies increase sales and
brand awareness. We are a close
team that provide a breadth and depth of expertise in strategic, creative and
technical disciplines across Branding, Marketing, PR, Campaign Development,
Design, Digital, Training and Event Management.
Working on briefs of every nature and scale, Hoopla Marketing’s approach is based on innovative thinking, intelligent strategy and engaging creativity that gives their clients marketing campaigns clear vision. Through their friendly and talented team, they are a marketing partner to a wide range of companies, providing support, training, solutions and inspiration.
Channels
Website: www.hoopla-marketing.com
Twitter: @hoopla_uk
Facebook: www.facebook.com/hooplamarkekting
Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/hooplamarketing
Tuesday 13 May 2014
1. Offline & online marketing are co-dependent
The world is becoming flat. Boundaries between various digital marketing disciplines — such as SEO, paid search, content marketing and social media marketing — are disappearing. Even offline and online marketing are no longer so disconnected.What people say about you offline can influence your visibility online — and what people learn about you online impacts offline sales. Your offline and online presence need to be unified to create a consistent brand experience for your customers, so ensure that these marketing teams are working hand in hand for maximum impact.
2. You don’t own your search rankings
Having your site ranked on Google is not your right or due. It’s a privilege. Google owes you nothing. Don’t expect special treatment, regardless of how important or successful your business is.
Some clients consulting me only want to focus on getting new traffic. They believe their current search rankings will remain forever. That’s wrong. Placements can shift in an instant, without any warning. You’re constantly playing defense.Search engines are important in the buying cycle. Losing your search engine rank could make a dent in your finances. Sticking your head in the sand and ignoring this reality can prove a costly mistake for your business.
3. Even small, careless changes can damage your SEO
Sometimes a business will lose its dominant search presence because of a minor change made to their website: a tweak to the navigation bar, a change to a page header or title tag, a new block of text added to the home page, a link included in a site-wide sidebar, etc.Modifications like these are often suggested by a non-specialist, and the impact can be serious. You could lose your search rankings — then sales and growth stall, too.
4. Be careful when changing to a new CMS
Moving your website to a new CMS (a better one) is good, right? Not necessarily! Without a proper migration strategy in place to ensure that SEO is preserved, switching to a new CMS can basically kill your traffic and sales.While switching to a newer CMS can often provide many benefits in terms of productivity and functionality, many things can go wrong from an SEO perspective:
- Site architecture may be damaged
- URL structure and page hierarchy can be altered
- On-page optimization may suffer
- Duplicate content issues might arise
In most cases, “search-engine-friendly” or “SEO-friendly” just mean that your CMS has built-in capabilities that allow your team to implement crucial on-site SEO elements without the aid of a developer. This might include the ability to adjust title tags, add meta elements, define page URLs, create XML sitemaps, etc.
In other words, a search-engine-friendly CMS gives you the tools, but you’ll still need an experienced SEO to make proper use of them.
Trusting your CMS vendor or programmer to get this right is dangerous. You wouldn’t let a plumber fix your electrical wiring just because he’s working on the same wall, would you?
Programmers, designers and SEO consultants are three distinct specialists. Getting them to work together while planning your site re-design can help you avoid the situation European airline Ryanair recently faced, dropping out of Google’s search results after a website overhaul.
5. Mobile SEO is not just “Responsive Design”
Many website owners and marketing managers think they are the same thing. Yes, getting your website to display nicely on a tablet or smartphone is important. But mobile SEO involves much more, including optimization for:- Higher ranking on geo-targeted local search
- Easy user navigation on a mobile device
- Timely access to relevant information
- Customizing user experience based on location
- Quick and easy share-ability
6. SEO isn’t an act — It’s the whole play
Many clients start off thinking about SEO as a snapshot instead of a slideshow. SEO needs constant focus and ongoing work. Everything you do is inter-connected. One change will create ripples elsewhere.SEO isn’t just a one-time implementation of website changes. It’s a strategic initiative with many moving parts. Fixing things locally isn’t enough. Google looks at things like social signals, authority back links and user trust to rank websites. These can’t be easily manipulated or fixed through shortcuts.
7. Change is the only constant
Everything about online marketing and business keeps evolving continuously. New technology emerges, and it influences the way people research and buy. Every business leader in 2014 and beyond must understand these changes. Being unaware of (or ignoring) them places your business at risk.For more information on SEO techniques visit www.hoopla-marketing.com
Tuesday 29 April 2014
How do you get traffic to your website?
How to Get Traffic
To get traffic to your website then you need to start blogging. Blogging brings people who are interested in your industry to your website. Each article you write is a chance for search engines to index your site and for readers to share your content.
Think about any time you have a question. What's the first thing you do? You Google it. If there is an article with the exact answer to the question you're looking for, that's the article you click to. If you reverse-engineer this process for your business, you can produce highly targeted traffic and leads.
For example, when anyone types in the phrase "what is marketing automation" into Google, HubSpot are the first result that comes up. A large percentage of people who search will click on the first result they find. And since we've written an article with this exact title and about this topic, we're able to generate a lot of traffic and leads from this page.
Just ask yourself: what are the most common questions I get from prospective customers? That question will be the title of your blog post. The answer to that question? That's the body of your blog article.
Now repeat this process for all of the most common questions you get and you'll get better and better at producing this educational content. If the answer to these questions are what your current and future customers are looking for, you'll start building long-term, sustainable traffic to your website -- which is exactly what you need to do to start building your email list.
Let's say that you ran an explainer video production company and the number one question asked is "how much does an explainer video cost?" If you were to write an article answering that question and begin to rank high for that search term, over time you could expect to see an increase in traffic to your website.
Monday 31 March 2014
3 Strategies for Improving Your Facebook Advertisements
"Before last year, Facebook was all about what happened on Facebook," said Bob Buch, CEO of social advertising firm SocialWire. "Ad campaigns were about buying likes. In 2013, there was a major shift, and Facebook began tapping into direct-response advertisers [and marketing] products to custom audiences. This transformed their ability to drive traffic off-site."
Paid Facebook ads can be a huge source of traffic that ultimately leads to sales, but only when they're properly planned and executed. Such advised social marketers to keep these three things in mind when planning Facebook ad campaigns:
Think of Facebook campaigns as search campaigns
Buch said companies should plan a Facebook campaign the same way they do SEO keyword campaigns. For example, a shoe company might purchase the keywords "riding boots" to have their ads appear to individuals searching for that term, rather than wasting money on untargeted ads that are unlikely to convert to sales. The same concept should apply to Facebook ads. When creating campaigns, you can work with a third-party partner to create a custom audience of people who have made purchases that are similar to your product or service.
Keep your ads fresh
Running the same campaigns for your products and services over and over again will quickly get old to your Facebook audience, and that could make them hide your ads from their newsfeed. Keep customers interested by updating pictures and copy for your ads.
Remember that customers don't come to Facebook to buy
When people Google a specific product or service, it's generally because they intend to purchase that item. But when people log on to Facebook, they're not there for the ads; they want to connect with their friends. The goal of any successful Facebook ad campaign is to grab potential customers' attention enough that they will either go back and Google your product later or, better yet, click through to your website right from Facebook.
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This article originally published at BusinessNewsDaily here
7 Essential LinkedIn Marketing Stats: When to Post, What to Post and How to Improve
A quick glance at a chart of the Internet’s fastest-growing social networks reveals what you likely already knew (Instagram is growing like mad) and what might be a surprise: LinkedIn is the third-fastest-growing social network.
We at the Buffer blog can vouch for LinkedIn’s growth as our blog has experienced a swell in LinkedIn referral traffic over the past year, up 4,000 percent from last year at this time. Part of that has to do with our emphasis on updates and sharing at LinkedIn, another part has to do with the popularity of LinkedIn contributing a larger audience and more eyes to our content. Together, these factors have made LinkedIn a great source of visitors for our blog, and I’d imagine you might see a similar impact on your own site.
So the question becomes: How best to take advantage of this expanding interest in LinkedIn? Though the network isn’t analyzed in quite the same detail as Facebook and Twitter, there still exist several stats and tidbits that can help you improve your LinkedIn marketing and engage with your followers.
1. LinkedIn sends nearly four times more people to your homepage than Twitter and Facebook
Twitter and Facebook may reign when it comes to social sharing of stories, blog posts, and visual media, but when it comes to direct traffic to your main site, LinkedIn is far and away the No. 1 social referral source.
Econsultancy reported this gap based on a two-year research study involving 2 million monthly visits to 60 corporate websites. LinkedIn’s referrals, which accounted for nearly two-thirds of all social referrals to corporate homepages, nearly quadrupled the second-place Facebook.
- LinkedIn: 64% of social referrals to corporate homepage
- Facebook: 17%
- Twitter: 14%
What this means:
All sorts of different leads can come from social networks, so data like this is hugely helpful in understanding where these leads are headed. LinkedIn traffic is more likely to head straight for your homepage rather than a satellite page like a blog post or a resource page. With this in mind, you can optimize your profile with consistent messaging that makes sense for a user who clicks from LinkedIn to your corporate homepage.
For example, see below for how Adobe carries its messaging for its Creative Cloud from its LinkedIn profile (pictured first) to its homepage.
2. The most in-demand content is industry insights
According to numbers from LinkedIn , 6 out of every 10 LinkedIn users are interested in industry insights—the most-demanded type of content among LinkedIn members. Insights, in general, are quite popular among users. Second to industry insight, company news appeals to 53 percent of LinkedIn members. (New products and services are the third most popular content, with 43 percent interested in this kind of update.)
What this means:
Share your expertise. Be helpful and transparent when you share on LinkedIn, and you will appeal to the majority of your audience. Industry and company insights should compose a fair majority of your posted content, and the overall content plan should feel relevant and actionable to your followers. As LinkedIn advises:
Your followers are active on LinkedIn because they want to be more productive and successful professionals. Informative, useful updates receive the highest engagement rates because that’s the information members expect from companies they follow on LinkedIn.
3. Avoid evenings, late afternoons, and weekends
If you want to reach the largest number of users with your content, it makes sense to publish when people are around. LinkedIn has found their busiest times to be morning and midday, Monday through Friday. Business hours, in general, have the largest maximum reach, so you don’t have to be too particular about specific times. Test what performs best for you.
What this means:
Be sure your posting schedule matches up with the rhythms of the LinkedIn audience. If you happen to curate your content in the evenings, you can use Buffer to schedule your posts to go live the following day at the time you choose.
4. Post at least 20 times per month
Once you know when to post, the other big question of social sharing is how often to post. LinkedIn has found that 20 posts per month can help you reach 60 percent of your unique audience.
More posts will naturally lead to a larger percentage of reach, but there will come a point of diminishing returns. A certain percentage of your audience will always be impossible to reach—because they never log on—so you’re really looking to hit those who log on and scroll their top updates. Twenty updates a month will get you in front of 60 percent of your audience, and there’s no guarantee beyond that.
Of course, there are those who have the time, resources, and content to post more than 20 times.LinkedIn’s best-in-class marketers post 3-4 updates per day, which could mean up to 80 posts per month.
Ultimately, the best guideline for posting is going to be this:
Post as many status updates as your content supports.
What this means:
Start with 20 quality posts per month and scale up if you see that a fuller schedule comes with more benefits. As it turns out, 20 posts per month fits well with the suggested times of day to post. If you post once a day for four weeks and skip the weekends, you’ll hit 20 posts on the dot.
5. A single status update reaches 20 percent of your followers
If you want to know who might see what you post, know this: You typically reach 20 percent of your followers with a single post.
What this means:
Does 20 percent sound like a lot to you? I guess it depends on the size of your follower list as to how big an impact a 20 percent reach will get. Regardless, you’ll likely want to make a bigger imprint than 1/5, which is why a regular posting schedule can be so valuable.
You will reach more of your audience and extend your reach as you post more often.
6. Help your employees help you (they’re the most engaged)
Engagement on your profile can be a big help to those who happen to stop by, and it turns out that your own employees could be the greatest asset to building this engagement.
Employees are 70 percent more likely to click, share, and comment on an update than a typical LinkedIn user.
What this means:
Employers can take advantage of this by making it easy for employees to engage with the content. Send notifications and links every time you post or when particularly important updates go live. Asking for engagement is sometimes all it takes to get your colleagues involved.
7. Learn and optimize from your engagement percentage
All the stats I’ve listed so far give great advice in general terms for how to market effectively on LinkedIn. Now for some personal advice: Study the engagement percentage in your LinkedIn Analytics, a feature that all company page admins can access. Logged-in admins can find the analytics by clicking the dropdown menu from the blue Edit button in the top right of your company profile.
From the main insights page, you can view general information about the visits to your profile, including helpful demographic info that can show you the locations of visitors (helpful for determining which time zones to sync with your updates during business hours), seniority, industry, and even how many visits came from your own employees.
To dig deeper, click on the analytics link at the top of the page, and you can view the complete stats for the updates you share.
Engagement percentage measures the total number of interactions, clicks, and followers acquired for each update you post to your account. In other words, engagement percentage can tell you how many people, of those who saw your update, truly engaged with it.
What this means:
Engagement will show you where to improve, grow, and change the way you update to your LinkedIn profile. During your review, note the category of content you posted, who was targeted, and the day of the week and time of day that you posted. This can be helpful for sending an even more optimized post the next time you update.
How might these stats impact the way you use LinkedIn? Which of the above stats have you seen to be true from your experience? I’d love to hear what you’ve observed with LinkedIn; please feel free to share in the comments.
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