Below find 21 helpful best practices and insights gained from the OMS (Online Marketing Summit 2010) which covered the topics of Social Media and Integrated Marketing.
21 Best Practices of Social Media Marketing Success include:
1. Overheard during every single session: “Forget inbound or outbound, it’s all about two-way dialogues that are Relevant and Compelling. Deliver marketing to the individual. All successful marketing is local, relevant, and compelling.” Dramatic Customer Results = Personally Engaging + Emotionally Intelligent + Highly Interactive. Read about emotionally intelligent marketing science here: Digital Instructors Engage Learners).
2. Leverage UGC (User Generated Content) by incenting contributors. If you are a small company or individual form a “content or blogging team” with your partners and peers. One of the best examples of UGC I heard told was the story about how Amazon leverages its users to write reviews on its books and products. When starting out it would have been impossible for Amazon to hire experts to review every book, CD, and product. Marketing genius!
3. To create sufficient and significant content create an editorial calendar.
Example Blog Editorial Calendar:
4. A/B testing is king. Go A/B test your top 2 web forms to generate 33% more throughput.
5. Hot Trend of 2011: Sentiment Analysis. As online opinion has turned into a kind of virtual currency for businesses the emotional analysis of words and comments is a must for businesses trying to understand and listen to online conversations.
6. Hot Trend for Christmas sales: Email barcodes (barcoding) for personalized and geolocal marketing offers.
7. Hot Trend for Christmas sales: Mobile Couponing. Redemption rates are 2 to 4x more productive via mobile couponing according to Exact Target.
8. Old Trend with a New Name: Geo Local Marketing.
9. Your website and landing page has 4 seconds to attract, interest, and engage your audience (aka your website visitors). Are your webforms, landing pages, website home page, and email campaigns designed to convert and capture visitors into leads in 4 seconds or less?
10. Customers are setting up residences online; how are you making them feel at home?
11. Web chat doesn’t work effectively today because it was polluted by call center mentality and over scripting ” according to Patrick Bultema.
12. Improving Conversion tip: add a site survey questionnaire to solicit feedback on the purpose and quality of visit.
13. Add a FaceBook type “Like” or “Thumbs up” to your top content pages: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/web.
14. There are a plethora of Free Online SEO Tools such as Tweetdeck, Google Reader (organizes your RSS feeds, but has the potential to be your top competitive intelligence tool), Facebook Insights, PostRank (delivers objective, real-time data and analysis on any topic, trend, or interest relevant to you or your business), Feedera (bundles your friends’ “most shared” Twitter content daily), Backtype (flags keywords in blog comments), Wordtracker (identifies “starting point” keywords without the cost of an SEO), Woopra (Real Time Web Analytics, Live Chat, and Web Statistics), for online promotion of your content use SlideShare.
15. Use Bit.ly to track link analytics. Allows users to view complete, real-time traffic and referrer data, as well as location and metadata.
16. Re-optimize any landing page including your home page if it has less than a 10% conversion rate.
17. PPC should be used to benchmark organic SEO CPL (cost-per-lead) and other key metrics.
18. Behavioral, persona and personalized targeting has repeatedly shown to generate at least 33% better returns according to Exact Target.
19. Identify your sales team’s “BPU expert” aka “Business Prevention User.” The person that negates the quality of lead, dismisses marketing, etc..
20. UserTesting.com charges $100 for usability testing which helps website owners discover why people leave their website.
21. @ the launch of your marketing campaign you are only 1/3 done with the work needed to generate effective results.
22. Create a culture that executes rapidly. Within two hours of Michael Jackson passing away Amazon.com had ads and special offers for commemorative box sets. Execution is a way of life.
23. Discard online tools relatively quickly if you aren’t finding value: There’s always an emerging tool to replace a dud.
24. If you want people to retweet make your tweet 100 characters not 140.
I give OMS a “FaceBook Like Thumbs Up” for best practices and education regarding Social Media Marketing, Email Demand Generation, Web Analytics, and Integrated Marketing. If you would like to discuss social media marketing best practices drop me a line at ephor at ephorgroup.com