Marketing

Business / Marketing — No Comments
20
Oct 17

How To Use Facebook To Create Clients, Revenue and Profits In Your Business

At heart, I am a marketer. And as a marketer I have a bit of a problem with the majority of the social media management industry at the moment. The problem I have is that the goal of Social Media campaigns too often are goals that serve social media rather than goals that serve the business. I personally think anything in marketing, needs to clearly and objectively have a commercial intent, which is to say, serves the bottom line. So goals need to be lead generation, converting to sales, realised as revenue and profits. IE. Its not about engagement, likes, followers or anything else. Its about the money.

And you can do this in Social Media. If you are a social media agency who is not deploying strategy with financial objectives in mind, you really need to lift your game or leave the industry. You are actually stealing the money of your clients. Engagement isn’t a commercial objective, so stop selling it. You need to turn the money your clients are spending on Social Media, into paying clients for them. They need a return or they should spend their money in another form of marketing, where there is a return

With this in mind, I prepared this video to elaborate this point. The transcription is below. I hope it makes sense.

How To Run A Successful Facebook Marketing Campaign That Makes Profit For Your Business (Transcribed)

G’day everyone!

Over the last, probably two years, I’ve seen a lot of social media and in particular Facebook and Instagram, marketing campaigns that don’t work and basically they’re doomed to fail from the start as the strategy is wrong. So I wanted to make a video about how you can create a Facebook marketing campaign, not advertising, I’ll create a separate video about advertising and social media. This one’s specifically around the production of content and posting on business pages and that kind of stuff. But how to create a strategy that’s actually going to work.

And by work what I mean is that, you know social media in a marketing sense, is still about marketing, that’s one of the things that people really get wrong. It’s not necessarily, unless your strategy is about engaging clients that are already your clients and using social media to help with, dealing with client feedback and issues like that. If that’s your strategy that’s fine, that’s a different sort of video.

But this is particularly about using social media as a means of marketing your business. As you know, I see a lot of wastage of marketing budget, particularly in small medium-sized businesses which is terrible, because marketing budget for this level of business needs to be about client acquisition. It doesn’t matter if you’re doing search marketing or social media marketing or telemarketing or referral marketing or networking. You know it’s got to be about client acquisition. And this is the one thing or where one area where social media so often, I think has missed the point because it’s… you know, social media experts and agencies quite often say, “Well you know, it’s not you know…let’s get you your social voice, let’s get you your business voice in social media.” And they talk about engagement and they talk about reach and they talk about likes and that kind of stuff.

You know while those interesting concepts, they are vanity stats. You know, social media marketing needs to be about the return on investment you’re getting for your dollars invested in the marketing. So return on investment means that for every dollar you spend in social media, you should be getting $10 back in profit and that’s the focus that you need to be having with social media.

And look, I get it’s not perfect right because quite often people will find you in social media but then go and buy off your website or meet you personally whatever and you might not hundred percent get that actual lead came from social media originally. But you know that whole sort of process of understanding, that’s called attribution modelling and as you get more sophisticated or may already be a sophisticated enough to do that. But you can build that kind of modelling into your analysis of marketing results.

But this video is about your strategy and your concepts behind social media, doing the marketing and the content part if. So definitely a lot of it about it’s about,. So let’s get back to the basics, right.

What do you want to do? What do you want to do with marketing? No matter what the platform it is, you want to put your core benefits in front of your prospects or your defined target audience, in a way that makes them over time become familiar with what you’re offering, familiar with the benefits you’re offering them, start to trust you through a nurturing phase, and then hopefully at some stage when they’re ready to buy from you, because you’re top of mind, they’ll buy from you.

You’ll get the inquiry, or you’ll get one of the three inquiries so you’ll have a chance, so that’s what marketing is about.

The second thing you need to consider is “What’s this platform that I’m using? What are the core features of that platform and how that going to fit in?” And I think with any online marketing or digital marketing strategy, we can always go back to traditional marketing concepts.

Now the idea with social media is, that the traditional marketing parallel universe for social media as a marketing channel is networking. So what do we do in networking? What we do is we go into a room where we believe our prospects are going to be. We start a dialogue with them, we build some trust then we take the relationship out of the room and try to build the relationship externally to the networking event. And then through the development of relationship and partnership, that’s how we develop business. That’s how social media supposed to work.

So one thing you need to also consider is with social media, is what the actual platforms want and what’s really clear in social media is that the platforms, none of the platforms in any social media channel, really care about business pages. It’s something you really need to be aware of. You know, business pages interrupt conversation on social media so they never really get the exposure that pays for the investment in them. So that’s something you got to be aware of because that’s got to be a core part of your strategy on how you’re using your business page.

So yeah, so we’ve got that, so you need to understand that the business page isn’t really cared about by the social media platform. But the goal is to start generating those relationships and then take them away from the platform and further develop them and then make the sale elsewhere. So that part of the equation, what you can ask yourself is… to get the part of the equation right, it’s simple. What you need to ask yourself is “In my business today, where am I making my sales? Is it at the office? Is it in a shop? Is it on your website?” So once you answer that, once you understand what the, understand you’re going for return on investment which means client acquisition and profit, once you understand what you’re supposed to do on this platform and what that actual platform wants and how it works, then you create your strategy next.

The third party of the strategy is trying to send your prospects to where they’re most likely to buy. One thing that I hear a lot is “I don’t believe Facebook works because I never see any conversions on Facebook.”

Facebook isn’t supposed to convert for you, you know Instagram isn’t supposed to convert for you. What’s supposed to convert for you, is the place that’s converting for you today. Is it your website? Do you have an online shop? Is it someone ringing in your office? Is that how leads work? Is it someone filling out a form on your website and then you give them a call or you have an e-mail nurturing strategy.

So when you answer that question, the next step is, get the flow right in social media. So you put people, or you put your message on social media in front of the right people and you have some nurturing there, obviously it’s not all about sell, sell, sell, but you know, people talk about the 1, 2, 3, hook; or the jab, jab, jab, hook that kind of thing. So at some point in your content, you have to sell, you have to send people to where you make your best sales.

So if you’re making your best sales on your website because you’ve got an online shopping cart, you have to send people there. If you make, if you generate leads which you need to nurture and turn into sales, you need to create a landing page that’s a high conversion and use your social media to send people there.

And then track that in Google Analytics so you can see the performance on how many people are getting to that page from your social media and how many converting into leads and then try to track who they are. So that you know the quality of those leads over time and how they’re converting into real business and whether it’s profitable or not.

And the point I made before about, you know, that social media platforms not really caring about business pages, that’s really important too. And the most important thing about that is, don’t waste budget which is finite for us in small medium-sized business, trying to build an audience on a platform or on a structure that’s in a platform that’s not really supported by the platform. So don’t build a “like” audience on a business page in Facebook, you know, there’s no long term value of that and you have no control of that every time Facebook change the algorithm business page reach seems to drop, that’s historically what seems to happen.

So with that in mind, build the database external, use these as tools to help build a database external to this platform that you have control over and can nurture and you own. So a great example is an e-mail database. Use your Facebook marketing and platform to build an e-mail database so you can nurture and have control. You know with E-mail, MailChimp or Aweber, or Ontraport or whatever, at least when you’re sending your e-mails you know that they’re going to get to the e-mail account of your prospects, you’ve got a chance.

You know, with social media pages these days you do a post, it gets to what? 1% of your audience?  You don’t really have a chance here. So try to, I mean if  you spend money boosting posts have a real defined purpose. “I’m gonna boost this post because that’s working well.” Let’s boost it with the idea that would send people to a lead bait landing page, where they can leave me their e-mail address and their phone number so I can nurture them down the track. That’s how you do marketing using social media platforms.

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Marketing / SEO — No Comments
08
Oct 17

How to Future Proof Your SEO | How To Prepare For Voice Search

SEO and Search marketing are critical foundations to good marketing these days. We all know how often search marketing techniques can change over time. Too often though we look at the minutiae of campaign strategies, rather than the broader picture of where the world is moving. In this video, I take the broader picture approach, look at where thee world is going and from there, offer some tips regarding your content strategy, which should feed into future proofing your SEO strategy. I hope you find it useful.

Future Proofed SEO Strategy

Transcription:

Good morning everyone! Enjoying a beautiful spring morning, this morning at Burleigh Heads on Australia’s Gold Coast.

And the point of this video today is, I thought I’d share an experience that I had last week, where I attended a digital marketing conference in Sydney and just some of the insights that I got out of one of the presentations at this conference. Particularly around search marketing and the future of search marketing, where search marketing is going or seems to be going in the future. The point of this is to help you consider your strategy with your content, with your strategy with your SEO campaigns, and how to future proof them based on the way that technology is starting to impact our behavior online.

When we talk about technology, specifically we’re talking about technology in regard to search, specifically we’re talking about the rise of technology around artificial intelligence and chatbots. Good examples are Siri and Cortana how they’re changing the way that we actually, they’re changing the way computers and devices facilitate search.

One of the key points with this is, searches isn’t just search engines anymore, if you actually look at everything you do on your PC or on any device you’ll find that there’s basically a search box everywhere. So you know, this search boxes on obviously social media but there’s search boxes on your e-mails, there’s search boxes in the word processing facilities, and the office facilities and the spreadsheets that you use. You know there are search boxes everywhere. You know just on your PC, there’s a search box on your phone and quite often now that these search boxes are facilitated by some type of mechanised or artificial intelligence style of robot or bot that processes the search for you.

Looking at the history of search, one of the things that we see now is that, you know search for the last ten years or so has been based on keywords. Which is something that we’ve had to learn to do. It wasn’t a natural, it’s not a natural way for humans to search based on keywords. You know, we search rather on concepts or questions and so that’s a habit we’ve learned. But with the introduction of concepts and tools like Siri and Cortana and chatbots and so forth, now we’re actually being given the opportunity to go back to how we’re supposed to and how we’re wired to operate and you know, search based on questions.

So for example when we’re using Siri we don’t say “Gold Coast weather” as keywords and expect Siri to come up with an answer for us. We’ll ask Siri “Hey Siri, what’s the weather going to be like on the Gold Coast tomorrow morning?” and Siri will use that phrase to generate a list of search results for us.

Another example could be if we’re looking for a recipe tomorrow, previously, we might write a search phrase “Chicken rice stir-fry” and that would give us a bunch of different recipe websites that would give us potential options to cook dinner tomorrow night. Whereas, rather we’d ask Siri “Hey Siri, what’s a great recipe for a chicken stir-fry for a dinner party I’m having with four guests tomorrow night?” and we get search results for that and then we find a recipe that we like. Then we might ask Siri “Hi Siri, what’s a good accompanying wine for this specific meal that we found?” So we’re actually asking questions rather than keywords.

So what this actually means as far as the future of search is that, we’re moving away from this idea that search is based on keywords or search phrases and rather we’re going back to the way we used to originally search for things, by asking questions. Building this into your search strategy, particularly around SEO campaigns, start thinking about how you’re creating your content strategy. And how you’re structuring your blog posts and your articles, so you know obviously some elements of blog posts are super important for search results such as:  your title, your headings, you know your h1 h2 h3 headings, the URL, that kind of thing.

Start creating content based around answering the questions that your clients or your, if you’re a digital marketing agency, the clients of your clients are asking. So instead of writing content to optimize for keywords, write content that asks and answers questions. Because you know I’ve actually been saying this for a long time in my career in digital marketing is that, you know if your clients are asking new questions, it’s likely that they’re asking those same questions to Google. In the past they might have structured those questions around keywords but now going forward, the search questions are actually going to be structured around questions. So when you structure your blog posts, make the question your title and you’ll notice with this video that that’s how I’ve structured the title of this video, and write a really good piece of content based on answering that question.

If you’re stuck for content ideas, a great place to start looking (and this is a tip that I’ve offered for the last ten years) is in the sent folder or the sent box of your e-mail software. So go to your sent items because your sent items will be full of you answering questions that your prospects and clients have asked you. You’ll have all the content there so create your content out of stuff you’ve already answered. You can probably even just cut and paste a lot of it and then just you know, fine tune it up to make it more readable or make a video about it. But that’s a great place to find questions that you can create your content on, to facilitate a search strategy that will bulletproof your business going into the future with the rise of the new technologies around search.

I hope you find this kind of information helpful because business isn’t just about today, it’s about tomorrow also and this is sort of a like it’s a great insight into where search is going and how to create proper strategy around that for the future.

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Business / Damian Papworth TV / Marketing — No Comments
17
Aug 17

Digital Agencies and Business Owners – Overcoming the Communication Disconnect

I recently put together an Instagram Story, sharing my thoughts around why you as a business owner may be contributing to unsatisfactory results received from your digital marketing agency. I’m not pinging you with all the blame for an unsatisfactory engagement, as you, the digital agency bring challenges to the table too, all of which can be overcome. I put the story into the video as I think the content is very useful. BUT – its only useful if you, the business owner and digital marketing agency want to share long term, profitable marketing outcomes. If you have a short term get rich quick mentality, don’t watch the video as you won’t like the advice. If you are looking for a slave (Mr Business Owner) or a blind, compliant paycheck (Mr Digital Agency) this video probably isn’t for you.

Transcription: Long Term Profitable Marketing Engagements For Business Owners and Digital Agencies

So, I’m riding to work today and I thought I’d stop off for a quick coffee… because I just wanted a quick coffee. And so while I’m here I thought I would make a quick video about digital marketing in a general sense. So the reason I thought that I’d put this video together is and with my experience in the digital marketing industry, I’ve noticed that quite often there’s a real disconnect between a business owner and a digital marketing agency when it comes down to the service.

And if you’re a business owner, I kind of get it right, because the services you’re paying for AREN’T physical products; you probably won’t even see the consultant for most of the time he’s doing the service. You’re going need to trust at some stage and that can be a challenge because quite often it’s months and months of paying before you actually see a return on investment. And let’s face it the digital industry is quite shrouded in mystery I guess. It’s shrouded in, there’s a fair bit of secrecy and it’s technical.

And the flip side of the coin is obviously the digital agency. I mean if you’re an agency, you understand your products and you recognise how valuable and how much benefit they can produce for a client. And you just need the owner to give you a chance.

And in the middle we have these services. And these services just aren’t simply… they’re not simple to run and they’re not simple to understand. You know small elements of any service could bring the whole service down. So there really needs to be real partnership and delivery.

So as I make my way to work and during work today here’s some ideas that I’ve just been thinking about for a while, on how to bridge that disconnect between a digital marketing agency and an end client – a business owner – if you are either of those it might help.

Now I think to start with let’s just get to some concepts. Because if you’re the business owner, you have to understand there are a lot of elements to a digital marketing campaign, any of which don’t work the whole thing falls down. And sometimes it’s your fault and not the agency’s fault.

So random example, let’s say you’re doing Facebook advertising, you know, so the digital agency is really good at putting a Facebook advertising package together. But, if you’ve got a crap offer or you don’t let the agency copyright the ads it might not work. So that’s right hey, even though you’re paying the agency to do the work for you, if you don’t give them the right resources and you don’t give your clients the right offer, you know, it might be your fault that someone you’re paying isn’t generating a return on investment for you.

And on the flip side of the point if you’re a digital agency, let’s face it our industry hasn’t been great over the last 10-15 years right? There’s been a lot of dodgy stuff going on, a lot of people have been let down and ripped off so we have a mistrust that we have to overcome. And that’s our responsibility right? It’s not the business owner’s responsibility to over overcome an industry problem.

So we have to start by being a lot more transparent and you know a lot more focused on return on investment for businesses rather than more of the vanity stuff. So I think maybe the best place we can start is to as both the business owner and digital marketing agency, if we can understand where the other person is starting in the dialog maybe then we can create a dialogue that makes more harmonious partnership in the delivery and success of the campaign.

So I made it safely to work. It’s business casual Friday today, so a bit dressed down, but I’m continuing the discussion about bridging the communication gap between digital agencies and business owners. I think the next point is about your timeframe. So I think we need to understand that marketing isn’t immediate, you need a long term timeframe. So you’re looking at minimum of 12 months. So when you start the dialogue, if you’re a business owner with an agency or agency to business owner, look to 12 months plus.

And that’s because what you want to achieve is a long term improvement of the leads and sales generated from marketing. You don’t want to look for a three months or less because that instant glory story, it just doesn’t work. So, in context, as a business owner myself, even with my own team doing our own marketing, I never look less than 12 months to properly test and understand how flows work, and how offers work and that kind of stuff. No matter what the process or marketing strategy is we’re using. And to be honest, if I was a digital marketing agency still, I would not engage with a client who was looking at less than 12 months partnership with me. And the simple reason is, it’s really not enough time to actually understand an industry and understand how a service works in that industry.

Now I think the next step is to actually look at services and how they work. Obviously as a business owner you probably don’t understand and don’t need to understand the nitty-gritty of stuff, that’s why you get a consultant in. But you know to be honest, on the flip side of that I’ve seen some real doozy-doozy strategies that would just never work, presented as value-add, over the years. So that’s a real issue and I really acknowledge that issue, that there are dodgy strategies in marketing out there.

Now I think there’s a really clear answer. And it’s pretty simple, because in my years in marketing, which is you know over 15 now, I’ve never seen a value digital marketing strategy that can’t be explained by logic or traditional marketing. So as the digital marketing agency, why don’t you start by trying to explain things to the business owners that you’re pitching to, in terms they can understand using logic and maybe using some traditional marketing concepts.

And if you’re a business owner and you’re not getting that kind of explanation from digital marketing company, you know maybe there is something that’s hidden. I certainly wouldn’t engage with someone who couldn’t explain it in terms that I can understand and I’d certainly steer well clear of you know, secrets, or you know, those proprietary this and that. You know I would not engage if someone does that. The actual campaign should be able to be explained logically.

So to give some examples, you know the service of SEO. It’s basically the common day, or today’s version of the old Yellow Pages. You know, you’re searching for something you go where you know people are listed and you find the people that listed there. That’s SEO.

Social media marketing, you know that should be explained to in terms of networking. You know, going to a networking meeting so your mingling with the right group that you know is going to generate your business. That’s how social media should work. [AND BE EXPLAINED]

You know Google AdWords or pay-per-click advertising, you know that’s kind of like the old day billboard sort of an advertising strategy. You put the right message on the right street so the people that are driving past get the message and take the action. You know it’s explainable.

So there’s just some general concepts with marketing. Hopefully this this video will help engender better communication between digital agencies and business owners for more long term and high value partnerships.

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