#MIMASummit: 6 Tips for Developing a Best Practices Approach to Social Media Measurement

Posted on 12. Oct, 2011 by in B2B, Blog, Competitive Intelligence, conference, content marketing, MIMA Summit, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media, social media marketing, social media measurement

Chuck Hemann MIMA Summit 2011All marketers wish they knew how to better measure results, engage their audience, and measure ROI. Chuck Hemann opens up by warning that he won’t solve all of our problems but he will provide guidance on how to approach them.

Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance

There are 5 key steps that each marketer must take to create a successful social media campaign.  What does this include?

  • Listening to what is being said online
  • Assessing the marketplace
  • Engaging with current and prospective clients
  • Measuring is a way for us to optimize
  • Improving our strategy as we learn more

According to Hemann listening and measurement are the two most important ingredients for success.  You cannot successfully execute on one without the other.  Below are a few of the best practice approaches that Hemann shared with the audience at today’s session.

Understand What Simply Listening Can & Cannot Do

  • Optimize your content in real time
  • Create a better customer experience
  • Quickly learn about potential product issues
  • Marketing through conversation
  • Gain valuable business intelligence

Create A Solid Social Media Strategy

  • Planning and beginning and ending stages is essential
  • Internal resources for facilitating and executing is critical
  • You can’t listen to everything so fine tune your process
  • Don’t rely on just one tool for quantifying results

Tools & Reporting: Questions Every Company Should Ask Themselves

  • Has your internal team decided on the tools you want to use?
  • Is there a training and implementation schedule in place?
  • Has a process for reporting been scheduled?
  • Do you know what your competition is doing?

Myths & Misconceptions To Avoid

  • Social media cannot be measured: You collect dozens of data points each day that assist in measuring your social media efforts.
  • ROI stands for something other than return on investment: ROI does not refer to influence or engagement it is directly related to gaining or saving the company money.
  • Social media measurement is different than traditional media measurement: Social media is measured by utilizing a series of strategies and tactics just as you would with any other effort.
  • Social media is meant to be organic and we already have too much data: You can never have too much data!

Never Forget the Five W’s

  • What people are saying about your brand.
  • Where they are talking about your brand.
  • When people are talking about your brand.
  • Who is talking about your brand.
  • Why people are talking about your brand.

Common Measurement Questions You Should Always Keep In Mind

  • How many people did we reach?
  • Did the program create conversation?
  • How do I get ad equivalency so the brand can compare this to our advertising?
  • Were our fans/followers engaged?

What Is Our Take Away From This Afternoon’s Session?

  • No subject is unapproachable
  • This is a step-by-step process
  • Gaining access to quality data provides a huge competitive advantage

[Note from Lee: Chuck has published his presentation online so take a look below for the full presentation. Thanks Chuck!]

There are many ways to effectively track social media metrics for B2B sales.  What tools have you found to be effective for social media measurement?

Stay tuned for more posts from MIMA Summit 2011.  Follow the hashtag #MIMASummit on Twitter and watch for any posts on @toprank or @azeckman to see updates and photos from the conference.

 

 


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SES Toronto: Competitive SEO Analysis

Posted on 15. Jun, 2011 by in Blog, competitive analysis, Competitive Intelligence, Search Engine Strategies, ses toronto, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

Competitive Analysis Panel at SES TorontoReally, truly understanding the competitive landscape can help pave the way for a successful search engine marketing program.

Chris Boggs led a panel discussion at SES Toronto on Competitive Analysis – What tips and tools can get you the vital competitive information that every SEO needs. According to Boggs, “Competitive analysis is one of the most exciting and important tactics (SEOs) can do.

The session was segmented into 3 areas of focus: on site research,off site research and PPC research.

On Site Research

Marios Alexandrou, Rosetta

When conducting on site (i.e. within your competitor’s site) competitive analysis, start by:

1) Asking yourself, “what companies should I look at?”  Compete.com can come in handy here.  Enter a handful of competitors and look for companies with high traffic. These are the companies that will likely have characteristics that will help inform your SEO approach.

2) Assessing your competitors site.  Be sure to divide on site components into 3 categories: Content, Technical and Internal Links.  By segmenting, you can more easily identify their strengths, as well as their areas of weakness.

3) Crawling competitor sites by leveraging crawler tools like Xemu.  This will help determine:

  • size of site
  • links to internal pages
  • popular search term pages
  • Google Index

Once you have conducted your research, create a matrix to get a full picture of the competitive landscape. Do this by listing your competitors within excel on the y-axis and cross reference them against criteria (x-axis) like: Targets Long Tail, Optimized Title Tags, Internal Linking, Image Content, etc.

Off Site Research

Ross Dunn, StepForth Web Marketing

One of the most important elements to consider when performing off site research (i.e. looking at factors outside your competitor’s website) is quantity and quality of their external links.

Like on site research, off site analysis by identifying the competitors.  One way to determine your competition is to enter core phrases like “mountain bikes” as well as long tail phrases like “brand x mountain bike parts”. Survey the search engine results page (SERP) for top ranking businesses.  Be sure to weed out wikipedia and other non-competitive sites.

Now that you understand the different players, follow Ross’s tips for off site analysis.

1) Create Advanced Reports within Majestic SEO for each competitor and export the list to excel

2) Manually review top 50 links for each competitor and ask yourself:

  • is their anchor text relevant?
  • is their relevant on page content?
  • do they have quality on page content?

3) Find and highlight shared links among 3 competitors (hub links). These links are likely attainable and have value for your search results.

4) Look for biased links (i.e. hundreds of supposed different all linking to the same page with the exact same anchor text should raise some flags)

Don’t recreate the wheel.  Learn from your competition’s link efforts to elevate your online strategy.

PPC Research

Matt Van Wagner, FindMeFaster

Start your PPC research with the mindset that to succeed you need to go beyond obvious questions like “what keywords are my competitors buying?” to ask questions like “where is the biggest area of opportunity?” Both questions are important, but the latter will help you look past competitive data to focus on the opportunities that can be gleaned from your research.

Quality PPC research tools are plenty, but before you start your research, arm yourself with questions that will help you hone in on key aspects of PPC.

How many ads are they running? How many different messages/offers do they present? Are they using best practices (i.e. do relevant keywords appear in ad titles)? How often do they present new ads? Do they react to bid changes?

With these types of question in mind, here’s a list of some of Van Wagner’s favorite tools for competitive PPC research:

  • AdGooroo
  • Compete
  • iSpionage.com
  • Keyword Competitor
  • Keyword Spy
  • Comscore

Walking into this session, I have to admit that I was looking for the silver-bullet.  The one tool that does EVERYTHING.  The truth, as we all know, is that although there are powerful competitive research programs, your approach to competitive analysis is truly your most powerful tool. Learn from competitors by researching their efforts with a laser-like focus.

To borrow a line from Alexanderou, “copying your competitors doesn’t make you better than them.  It makes you the same.” Determine their strengths.  Determine their weaknesses.  Incorporate these lessons to take your program to another level.

You can learn more about different competitive intelligence tools by reading the “Competitive Intelligence – Search Insider Summit” post.

Stay tuned for more posts from SES Toronto. Follow @TopRank and #sesto on Twitter for real time updates.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. |
SES Toronto: Competitive SEO Analysis | http://www.toprankblog.com