By Patrick Reilly
Everyone is on social media. That part is obvious. And, it’s important to use social media to achieve your business objectives, and put time, energy, and dollars where consumers are. The bottom-line profits achieved from social media require hustle, heart, sincerity, constant engagement, long-term commitment, and artful, strategic storytelling.
Bestselling author and social media expert Gary Vaynerchuk outlines this elegantly and in simplified, digestible terms in his book, “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World.” He argues that social media marketers are throwing the best right hooks or knockout punches – and how most of the time they are still failing to land killer blows. The book is an update on what Vaynerchuk and his team have learned about successful social media campaigns through their work with thousands of startups, Fortune 500s, small businesses, entrepreneurs, and celebrities.
Social media is immediately gratifying and hugely addictive (look at TikTok). People using their smartphones are often using them to stay updated and entertained through social media. Most companies are still not getting the message. They may have Twitter and a Facebook page, but Vaynerchuk says that most of the content isn’t resonating. Social media has its own language and businesses need to learn it. People may be seeing brands’ social media posts, but when the content isn’t compelling, they scroll away, sometimes forever.
Put up your Fists When Strategizing for Social Media
Vaynerchuk argues that there’s a reason why boxing is considered a sweet science – it’s often compared to chess – it requires strategic thinking. The right hook gets the credit for the win – but the series of jabs that come before set you up for success. For marketing, there is no sale without the story and no knockout without the setup. The jabs are lightweight pieces of content that benefit customers. These types of posts make users laugh, snicker, ponder, feel appreciated, and escape. The right hooks are calls to action that benefit your business.
Vaynerchuk believes social media marketers are not setting up jabs as well as they should – specifically by perfecting distinct, native content throughout multiple social media platforms. There is a science to creating memorable, effective social media content. Perfect hooks require three characteristics:
- A simple and easy-to-understand call to action
- Perfectly crafted for mobile and all digital devices
- The respected nuances of social networks for making content
The book includes guidelines for creating relevant, valuable content that consumers will pay attention to and want to share. This type of content creates the brand awareness that can be critical to your next sale. Marketers should approach social media with the same intensity as boxers – to create better content. Boxers are observant and self-aware – which are the same traits of good storytellers.
The Characteristics of Great Content and Compelling Stories
Only outstanding content can cut through the noisy world of social media. Vaynerchuk shares social media content rules in the book that are still applicable today. Below are the “6 Characteristics of Great Content and Compelling Stories” from the book:
- Native Content – Crafted to mimic what makes a platform attractive – Companies often don’t take the time to learn about social media platforms’ native ways. Social media posts should blend with the platform’s natural offerings and tell stories that engage consumers on an emotional level. Don’t shove marketing content down consumers’ throats. Try to enhance consumers’ interactions with the platform and do not distract from the experience.
- Doesn’t Interrupt – Ads and marketing are supposed to make consumers feel something and act on that feeling. They shouldn’t affect a consumer’s experience on the platform or intrude on that experience. Ads need to be part of the entertainment.
- Doesn’t Make Frequent Demands – Jabs are ads that are informative, generous, funny, inspiring, and written for your audience – not yourself. The company needs to interact with people and needs to be human. They tap into the conversation and find shared interests with consumers by responding and reacting to what they are saying. They are building an emotional connection with jabbing which paves the way for the right hook. If the content is great, you won’t annoy your consumer. Skillful native storytelling increases the likelihood that a person will share content.
- Leverages Pop Culture – Generations are defined by their pop culture and content has to compete with all of it. Create content that reveals your understanding of news and issues that matter to your audience. Integrate content into a stream where people can consume it with other pop culture candy.
- It’s Micro – Think of social media content as microcontent – a tiny, unique nugget of information, humor, commentary, or inspiration that you reimagine every day. Businesses can create deeper connections with consumers and their brands’ communities when they use social media effectively. Every year – a social media campaign should be as simple as: jab at people all the time, every day, talk about what they are talking about, when they start talking about something different, talk about that instead, repeat, repeat, repeat.
- It’s Consistent and Self-Aware – Every post, tweet, comment, like, and share will confirm your business identity. Your microcontent will vary, but it must reflect who your brand is. No matter how you tell your story, your personality, and brand identity must remain constant too. When you are self-aware, you know the message and it’s easy to keep consistent. Creating microcontent is a way for a brand to adapt to circumstances and to the whims of your audience and a brand’s best chance of being noticed in a busy, disjointed, distracted world. When you create stellar content native to the platform – you can make a person feel, which makes it more likely to be shared with others and amplifies your message at a fraction of the cost of other types of promotion.
Vaynerchuk believes that the social media equation requires quantity and quality, but content for the sake of content is pointless when posts are out of touch or unimaginative. If your social media posts come off as straight-up promotions, they will be largely ignored by the public. Following these six characteristics to create great content can help you cut through the noise and land that killer blow.
By Maria Singer
SEO. If you’ve used the internet at any point in the last ten years, there’s a good chance you’ve at least heard of it. SEO is one of those terms that is sometimes used as a catch-all when referring to anything related to online marketing but is actually much more specific than how the term is sometimes casually used. Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the different ways content creators, copywriters, and web developers can optimize web pages to make them easier for search engines to understand and recommend to users through search results.
“Why is that important?” you may ask – and with good reason. If you’ve built a content-rich site with loads of valuable information for your users about your products, services, or goals, shouldn’t your site be high up in search results when someone is seeking exactly what you offer?
The answer is not exactly.
For the purpose of this article, we’ll be focusing mainly on Google organic search results.
HOW DOES GOOGLE RETURN SEARCH RESULTS?
To understand how SEO works, it is important first to understand how search engines like Google work. Whether you’re troubleshooting the tapping noise coming from your 2009 Toyota RAV4, trying to find the highest-rated dog food for your senior schnauzer, or searching for a helpful beginner’s guide to SEO just like this one, Google displays search results for pages that have gone through the following 3 step process:
- Discovery: There are two main methods of discovery: bots and manual submission. If your site is brand new or has recently undergone a significant overhaul, you can submit it for indexing (below) through Google Search Console. In another method, bots (commonly called spiders) ‘crawl’ web pages and download information. There are also other methods for Google to discover your pages, but these are among the most common.
- Indexing: Once Google is aware of your page’s existence, it extracts what it thinks are the essential parts and adds them to its index.
- Ranking: Google’s algorithms define and rank your content’s quality in 200+ areas. Some of the key areas include:
- Relevance
- Location
- Page speed
- Freshness
- Authority on a topic
How Google personalizes your search results
The most commonly known and understood factors that come into play when personalizing your search results are your location, browser language, and past search history. Within a split second, Google identifies a list of top websites that fit your queried keywords. In that same timeframe, it compares those search results against what it knows about you to re-prioritize and even eliminates some of those results.
Understanding the basics of how Google delivers results to its end users is half the battle when it comes to deploying a better SEO strategy. The good news is that most other search engines, like Bing or Yahoo, work in much the same way that Google does. According to BrightEdge Research, 53.3% of all trackable web traffic comes from organic search results; this means that focusing on improving the overall quality and readability of your web pages could be the single most important thing you can do to increase your website’s long-term, completely free web traffic.
We Could Go On
Understanding the basics of search engine optimization is the crucial first step to improving your site’s ranking overall. Above all, it’s important to simply write good content – be the authority on your topic, and generate rich information that users actually want to read without too much (or too little!) fluff. When it comes to search engine results, each spot your website is closer to the top, the more likely it is to receive valuable traffic. If you have questions or want to learn more about how we help our clients at Zer0 to 5ive build or revamp their websites, let’s chat.
Today, websites have to do more than simply “exist.” With high levels of competition in the digital space, a website must be fully integrated to a company’s business objectives and goals. Investing in a website that integrates your sales and marketing messages into a compelling design can improve user experience and directly impact your business’ sales funnel.
Make a Lasting First Impression
You only have one chance to make a first impression, and in marketing, that first impression is your website. The Internet has become such an integral part of our lives that most people search online and make a judgment call about a business based on their company website before ever interacting with them or using their products. Having a website that looks like it’s from the “dot com era” tells site visitors that your business is outdated. Even if that isn’t the case, it’s difficult to overcome this perception if a customer has no other reference to your company or product.
Keep in mind that over 51 percent of users surf the web on their phone or tablet over a computer, making it vital that your site is also mobile friendly. Not convinced? A whopping 40 percent of people will choose another result if their first choice is not mobile friendly. Google’s search algorithms continue to heavily favor mobile-friendly sites, and a non-optimized site can leave you out of your prospects’ mobile search results.
Hone Your Message
As companies grow, expand and evolve, your message and value proposition needs to keep up. Your website is the best place to share the most important benefits of your company and product with customers and prospects. Your website copy needs reflect where your company and products are today, not what they were previously.
While crafting your message, be careful with the claims you put on your website. Overstating your business’ capabilities can lead to disappointed users who expect certain outcomes based on your site but have received a lesser version of the product they imagined. A proper marketing strategy should hone and focus on the best ways to highlight the strengths of your product without making outlandish or disputable claims.
One way to create an effective message is through Geoffrey Moore’s positioning framework. Moore’s framework helps to clearly define the target market and their main pain point, your product/business and its key value offering that solves your target market’s pain point, and how to best differentiate your product/business from the competition. With each of these points clearly defined, you can ensure your messaging draws in your target market and leaves them with everything they need to know about your product/business and why your solution is the best solution.
Integrate the Sales Pipeline
The best websites map out the user experience that eventually leads to a call to action (CTA) to either learn more, start a trial or buy the product. Proper placement of these CTAs will drive user engagement with your brand and have the potential to drive sales for your business. There are many tools available to track user behaviors on the site, (one such tool is CrazyEgg) so that your business can best optimize its CTAs and find the most user friendly design for them on your website.
Complete omission of CTAs and other sales-driven actions can result in lost revenue. Your website has the ability to drive sales leads from individuals who engage by requesting more info or a free trial of your product. From there, the sales team has a much greater ability to convert this lead, since search-driven leads have a 14.6 percent close rate compared to the 1.7 percent close rate for cold leads.
Among the long list of responsibilities for a business, its website must remain a top priority. While there’s no set rule regarding when a business should perform website updates, businesses should be updating their websites when they fail to incorporate modern user-interface elements and when they hinder a business’ sales funnel. But by making web maintenance more routine, a website becomes less burdensome to maintain, and with the proper messaging strategy and design execution, a business can create a modern, user-friendly site to reap the benefits a great website has to offer.
By: Jaimie Yakaboski
With all the recent zombie movies, television shows and related content, we’re all probably wondering what we would do in the case of a zombie attack – aren’t we?
No worries are necessary though, as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), aware of the growing concern of citizens, issued a blog post yesterday on how to handle a zombie apocalypse – “Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse.”
While in reality, this is probably not a major concern for most people, and it’s definitely not the type of content expected from the CDC, it’s proved to be a win for the organization. Social media channels are flooded with talk of the post, and the CDC’s blog has crashed from the amount of traffic flooded its way.
Why was this post such a hit for the CDC?
- Capitalizing on a trend. Zombies are at the forefront of pop culture these days, with the Resident Evil franchise, Zombieland movie and the popular AMC show, The Walking Dead.
- Monitoring the media. The plot of The Walking Dead, a show based on surviving in a zombie apocalypse, regularly includes talk of the CDC, leaving the door open for the CDC to chime in on how they really would handle such a situation. And thankfully, they took the chance and addressed it in an entertaining way.
- Personality. The post is full of personality and gives a major government organization some character, showing that they know how to have a little fun – something we all can appreciate.
- Engaging content. A lot of blog content is nothing new – it’s out there somewhere else in the blogosphere. It’s hard to stand out; but, when you provide a new take on an interesting topic, people will want to read it – and share it.
On an average day, would most people stop by the CDC’s blog? Probably not. However, this post illustrates the importance of timely, engaging information that capitalizes on a trend in an organic way. Even better? We are now all prepared to handle a zombie attack should the need arise. I know I feel safer.
Sarah Weddle
Zer0 to 5ive Strategist
Twitter: @SarahWeddle
Image courtesy of iStockPhoto/spxChrome