Mobile social media experience 48 Understanding your social media approach 49 Social media monitoring and listening tools 52 Analysis 55. Understanding both the strategic impact and tactical issues surrounding digital branding will become increasingly important, especially as social media and mobile technologies become more and more impact.
WiTH THanks
The second part deals with the practicality of using all the digital channels and tools available to us. The book is accompanied by an online resource of related materials, including case studies, templates and tools.
Digital branding in perspective
We need to understand how search, social media, and mobile affect our target audience's perception of us and how that affects their likelihood to buy our products.
Brand awareness as an excuse
There is a piece of research called the Social Media Benchmark, a series of studies conducted by the Chartered Institute of Marketing that looks at how organizations of all types use and are affected by social media. However, what is abundantly clear from each phase of this research is that the majority of organizations are not using social media effectively, but they are making more of it.
What digital
How digital has changed branding
I was originally introduced to the idea of brand democracy by my good friend and renowned inspirational speaker, Jonathan MacDonald. Brand Democracy is the idea that your brand is not what you say it is, but the sum of what everyone else says it is.
Global soapbox
That information may have been on a third-party website in the form of a review or comment from someone I've never met, but I can trust it over the voice of the brand itself. We will also learn, when we explore the idea of brand advocacy, how this kind of situation can be reversed and corrected.
Most social media disasters show a lack of knowledge of how to practically use a particular social media channel, or show a belief that the brand can somehow manipulate the channel and get away with this need for authenticity and transparency. The other common theme is not understanding the changed role of the brand in this two-way conversation.
Traditional brand metrics
All of these themes will be explored in Part Two when we look at social media.
This still includes things like visual identity, but now includes much more important and influential touchpoints like social media interactions and online reviews.
Clarifying touchpoints
The onus is on everyone in the marketing industry to embrace online channels and discover better ways to help consumers find, enjoy and share great content that supports your business goals.
Bridging the gap
Value proposition
Business to business service
Consumer packaged goods
As examples: Skittles engages users with fun and quirky humor via Facebook – this creates repeated exposure and brand loyalty;. Dove uses the theme of "real beauty" to engage audiences and spark conversation - this creates brand exposure while associating the brand with positive themes.
Complex consumer products
This is where digital brands can bridge the gap between what a consumer wants to engage with and what an organization wants to talk about. By broadening the conversation and understanding our value proposition, we can find topics that a user will engage with.
Charity funding
We need to measure the effectiveness of this social media engagement and understand what impact it has on driving sales.
This insight had a dramatic impact on how senior leadership wanted to build and position the school. 6 Built Content That Delivered 'Evidence Points' for Our Desired Brand Position With clear profiles of our target stakeholders and where to reach them, we worked to build a 'thought leadership' content hub to amplify the school's expertise.
Considering the user journey
Multichannel marketing
User journey examples
Business to business example
I also need to educate myself on the topic (which is very common in B2B buying decisions). Suppliers need to provide more content than just telling me how great their solution is, and I need education to build trust.
Business to consumer example
So a clear value proposition aligned with user needs at the heart of any strategy would be essential for any potential supplier. I can go through the entire flight booking process only to give up at the last step.
Content marketing
This point of it not leading to an instant booking is important and is at the heart of the mobile brand. I need to be able to understand this journey and attribute value to the original visit that didn't end in a sale.
Content marketing, value proposition and brand
All of these very simple ideas could be developed into something much more robust, interactively enhancing the brand's value proposition. However, using digital services and content marketing can help strengthen the value proposition and brand positioning in both cases.
The stages of the user journey
At each stage of the journey, I need to understand the goals and motivations of my target audience and determine what content and interactions will lead them to the next stage.
See, think, Do, Care
Content mapping
Value proposition and user journey
Mapping the user journey
TargetInternet.com positions themselves as providers of practical, up-to-date and easy-to-understand digital marketing training. A single section of the site focuses on the commercial service offered, with the majority of the site offering free content.
The brand in question even produced a case study that talked about how putting product in the hands of a celebrity was no longer a suitable approach for the brand – and now they've taken a new approach, one that on superficial inspection might seem that reflects the ethos of what we are trying to promote in this book.
Branding for differentiation
However, the approach used essentially did not drive sales, and we need to understand why this was the case. They said that the Pepsi Refresh project will give away the $20 million they will be spending on their Super Bowl ads to good causes.
There is a lot of analysis on this particular campaign, and by far the best in my opinion is Craig Bida's on MediaPost - it's definitely worth a read: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/186127/ . A brand cannot just tell us it represents something and then assume we will believe it.
The thing is, we all knew that while this was a great project, Pepsi wasn't suddenly some kind of social enterprise or charitable foundation (they do indeed have a charitable foundation and you can see the good work they're doing in the call outbox below). The brand must live up to its values and then have the opportunity to communicate this through digital branding.
PART TWO
The digital toolkit
We now have nearly 25,000 people who have liked the site, engaged with our content and driven traffic back to our website. This engagement drive signals back to Google, which in turn pushes us up the search rankings.
Pragmatic curiosity
I know of at least one very large project that we won because of the awareness it created and it gives us a place for two-way dialogue with our audience.
User journey and value proposition
Content and engagement
Mobile social media experience
It means we have to think in terms of accessing our content through the restrictions of these apps. We need to make sure we've considered this in all of our social posts.
With over 80 percent of Twitter users accessing the service via mobile devices (Twitter, 2017), we need to consider the mobile experience of the links we direct people to. We have to assume that users will be on a mobile device at some point and therefore make sure that everything works in this format.
Using search to inform content themes
Relative volume will show a word with a score of 100 at the highest number of searches, and the rest of the score is relative to this. One of the limitations of the Google Trends tool is its inability to show trends for niche search terms.
Social listening
You will find in many cases that a niche search term shows that it does not have enough data to draw a graph.
It's more of a social search than a true monitoring tool, but it can give you some great insights.
Social analysis tools
The list could go on and on, so we have compiled and are constantly updating a large list on the website to accompany this book: http://www. For a great resource on social media in China, and the entire Asia region, check out: http://www.techinasia.com.
If you are targeting the huge potential of the Chinese market, or working within China, you should be aware (or probably already are) that social media in China can at first glance look very different from elsewhere in the world. In most countries worldwide, the social media platforms are quite universal (with a few exceptions such as Mixi in Japan or UK in Russia), but in China there is no Twitter, Facebook or YouTube.
So many of us are searching for how to deal with a social crisis, but it also seems that many of us are searching for ways to prevent these things from happening in the first place.
Culture and process
How to avoid a social media disaster
Panel sign off
If the questions are not satisfactorily answered, the proposal is not accepted and must be revised and resubmitted. If they are answered satisfactorily, the proposal is accepted and the team can go ahead and implement their plan, provided they do so within the confines of the social media policy.
Social policy
This may sound strenuous, but it has an advantage for those who want to realize their social plans. Once they opt out, and as long as they adhere to the social policy, they don't have to opt out for every post, tweet or reply in the future.
Disaster prediction
You then vote anonymously on the entire list so that people can comment on whether the risks identified are possible (or just plain ridiculous) and how likely they are to occur. You can also look at what your competitors are up to and set some expectations about the level of engagement you want to achieve.
Staff training
You have to let people be completely free to come up with beautiful ideas. In either case you need a planned mechanism to fix or contain the problem (more on this in the crisis management section).
Ongoing monitoring
Clear responsibilities
Escalation process
Crisis management team
Speed of response
Always be cautious if the solution can be seen as insufficient for the problem that has arisen. The crisis team should have immediate access to and prioritization of their requests by the person who is able to sign the response.
Monitoring reaction
Holding patterns
Post crisis debrief and social policy update
Social crisis management conclusions
Judging influence
In the screenshot in Figure 5.9, I currently have a score of 63 and according to Klout I am influential on digital marketing, social media and marketing (yikes!). We'll look at search in more detail in the next chapter, but the effectiveness of your social media activity will create 'social signals' that affect your search rankings (essential to the quantity and quality of conversation around your topics in social media from significance).
Social measurement
Part three looks at analytics and measurement in much more detail, but we can use analytics in a number of ways to see the success of our social media effects. We can start with the basics and see how much traffic we get from social media sites to our websites.
Sentiment analysis
This is especially important when looking at "sound separation" (a measure we look at in detail in Part Three). During a really bad social media crisis, when everyone is talking about you and saying negative things, your voice will be loud.
Social media advertising
Organic reach' is a consequence of this algorithm, and your organic reach is the percentage of people who have liked your Facebook page who actually see your content. The average organic reach for a wide range of organizations I work with is currently 2 percent.
Social media is at the heart of what makes digital branding so special – and it brings risks as well as opportunities. A well-planned and strategic approach to social media not only makes the most of the available tools and channels, but also looks at how it is part of the wider user journey.
However, Figure 6.2 shows that people actually searched. cadburys', meaning that the brand experience will be heavily influenced by search. This shows that we need to anticipate the target audience's response to each channel we use and realize that our digital branding has a strong impact on traditional broadcast channels as well.
Discover your link and query traffic: You can view and download data about internal and external links to your site with the link reporting tools, find out which Google keywords/phrases are driving traffic to your site, and see exactly how users get there. Share information about your site: Lets you tell Google about your pages with Sitemaps, which pages are most important to you, and how often they change.
Get Google's view of your site and diagnose problems: you can see how Google crawls and indexes your site and learn about the specific problems they're having accessing it – perhaps the most important feature we've talked about. It also has several features that allow you to see how fast your pages load compared to other sites.
Keyword challenges
Keyword variations
We get the number of searches per month and a selection of other related search terms. It doesn't show an actual number of searches, but rather the trend (the keyword planner tells us actual numbers).
SEO, local search and google My Business
Google My Business allows you to enter your map location and other attributes such as opening hours.
Each of these different parts of our web pages gives us the opportunity to show the search engines what our web pages are about (see Figure 6.5).
Page title
The page title is actually something that appears on the top bar or tab of your browser window, and it's something that most users don't even notice. In other cases, people repeat the same page title over and over, or use their company name.
Headings
The logic behind just one H1 is so that you clearly indicate the core theme of your page. Multiple H1s will water down this core theme and make it harder for the search engines to understand the real focus of your page.
Web page names
However, it is important to understand that you should only have one H1, but you can have multiple H2s. Remember that the actual part of your page used as H1, H2, etc. will be determined by either the person who originally coded your page or the CMS you are using.
Copy
Because of this, your pages' code may need to be modified to use the appropriate part of the page as title tags. Fortunately, in systems like WordPress, all of this is taken care of in a very reasonable way.
File names
When this reader comes to an image, he doesn't understand it, so he reads the alternative text. For this reason they read the alt text to better understand the image.
On-page optimization in perspective
For example, if I'm a blind user, I use something called a screen reader to access the Internet, a piece of software that reads web pages aloud with a simulated voice. You should also be aware that effective use of alt text is very important and is a legal requirement within the European Union under the Disability Discrimination Act.
Link building
People only link to content they find useful or interesting, so links are critical to your search optimization efforts. Neither on-page optimization nor link building can work in isolation, as both are necessary to understand the subject matter and authority of your site and its content.
All of this content drives links from other sites where people find that content useful or interesting and in turn pushes my site up in the search rankings. By sharing your latest content on relevant social platforms, you can not only generate social signals but also encourage further links to your content.
Measuring link authority
Open Site Explorer
The paid version will also show some data about social signals from a limited number of social sites.
Paid search
PPC fundamentals
PPC keyword research
Create ad copy
Set targeting criteria
Set budgets and bids
Because PPC systems generally work on an auction basis, the more you are willing to pay per click, the higher up the page your ad appears and the more visibility it gets. You may find that being further down the page means you're paying less per click and getting clicks more slowly, but overall you're getting better value for your budget.
PPC considerations
That visibility should lead to clicks, assuming your ad content is appealing to the searcher. However, you should not assume that it is always better to be in the top positions on the page.
Ongoing management and optimization
This is one of the many reasons you need to constantly test and adjust your campaigns to get the most value from your budget. This means that in addition to considering the cost of your PPC budgets, you also need to consider the time or cost of effectively managing your campaigns (we'll discuss using PPC management agencies below).
Quality scoring and ad rank
Conversion tracking
After all, all the traffic in the world is useless if your site's visitors all leave immediately upon arrival.
Working with PPC agencies
For this reason, instead of a monthly invoice that just reads 'Campaign Management', you need a summary of what work has actually been done. It's a valuable activity, but you need to understand what keyword research was done and what the result was.
The Google Adwords system can keep track of all the changes made to a campaign over a period of time, which can help you figure out what work has been done.
This way you will be able to put together manageable tasks that will help you achieve the overall goal. They are essential to an effective SEO job because they make combining tasks in a complex business much more manageable.
Mobile
Technology for the sake of technology
From my experience, the majority of business Instagram and Facebook accounts are created with little or no idea why it is being done. That doesn't mean it's necessarily the wrong channel or a bad idea, but anything done without goals or a business case is generally doomed to failure.
User journey and context
It happens because someone old decided it was a good idea without realizing it, someone new did it without asking anyone, or someone in the business saw competitors doing it and so thought an opportunity was being missed. It doesn't necessarily mean it's the wrong channel or a bad idea, but anything done without objectives or a business case is generally doomed to failure.. with a brand when it's in store, for example), but these stages can start. to lay a foundation for us as we think about where mobile fits in the user journey.
Local intent
The technology distraction
Mobile compatible is not mobile optimized
Technology challenges
The real problem is that there are so many options and we're not asking the right questions.
Mobile sites and responsive design
Focus on the user journey
All of our digital marketing content is easy to follow, highly interactive, fast paced and allows you to test. All our digital marketing content is easy to follow, highly interactive, fast paced and allows you to test your knowledge at every stage.
Mobile apps
This means that a page is sent to your browser and your browser then does the work of displaying the correct elements of the page. The type of device being used is discovered and then the correct version of the site is delivered.
Mobile sites first
Bolstering value proposition
Mobile conclusions
On both iOS and Android, you can integrate ads from a wide variety of different ad networks (more on this later). All of these solutions generally work by automatically placing ads within your apps (in the locations you've developed in the app) and then giving you a share of the revenue made from the ads.
If you want to advertise within apps, there are a number of different ad networks you can turn to (more on that later) or you can approach an app owner directly to negotiate a deal. A media owner is someone who owns a site or app (or even an email list) that you might want to advertise on.
Targeting options
The downside is that you're often targeting one site or app at a time, and they don't have the targeting technologies available through ad networks. Category: one of the simplest forms of targeting, based on the category of content within the site or app.
Creative options
Matched content: the content of the page on which the ad is placed is read and ads are matched based on the content. Mobile: The IAB's "Rising Star Ad Units" highlights some of the new and highly interactive mobile ad formats and generally provides videos to show how they work in action.
Take a good look at all of your top-of-funnel campaigns that help grow your brand name and awareness. Armed with this, you can consolidate more of your online and offline activities, which can be a real help.
Most of us are interested in what's new and what's changing, and many of the core principles of email marketing have been the same for some time. The point is, not many of us are following these principles, and we'd rather try something new than improve what we're already doing.
However, if we talk about some element of email marketing, it just won't get the same level of response.
Many of my clients work by an 80/20 rule – that is, 80 percent non-commercially useful content and 20 percent about things they want to sell you. I would suggest going even further and aiming for 90/10 or 100 percent non-commercial content.
There should be a balance between commercial and non-commercial content in your emails, by which I mean really providing value with your email content. Providing useful content is the single best way to get your email noticed and remembered, increase the likelihood of future email opens, and drive traffic to your website.
Going beyond last click
As we can see at the top of Figure 9-3, I might receive an email, some time later perform a search based on something I experienced in that email, and then perform some form of online conversion. Alternatively, as we can see at the bottom of Figure 9-3, I may have just done a search and converted right away.
So in order to get the most out of analytics when thinking about email marketing, we need to have tracking code in place and make sure we're looking beyond the last click.
Gaining opt-ins and building a list
That is, allowing someone to fill out a signup form (more on this in a moment) and then sending them an email that they have to click on to confirm their subscription. Also, the fact that the user filled out a form and bothered to click on a link accomplishes two things: first, they've qualified themselves by showing that they're actively interested in what you've got to offer based on the fact that they actually did. a little trouble logging in; secondly, this sign up process gives you real proof that they have signed up, otherwise anyone can take your email address and sign you up for any email list.
Sign-up forms
The two main things people worry about when they sign up for email lists are what you're going to do with their data and how often you're going to email them. You can also have a link through to your privacy policy that clearly describes what you do with data, but in my experience very few people read these.
List segmentation
So if we're talking about inserting your name into an e-mail to personalize it, what impact does that have? Therefore, only do this form of customization if you are 100 percent confident in the quality of your data.
So CTR is a useful measure, but then we need to look at the behavior of our site visitors to really understand the true impact of our email campaigns. We will also need to understand how these goals affect our business results (and this is what the third part of this book is about).
Call-to-action placement and size: Think about where on the page your call-to-action will appear in different email clients and try to keep it visible above the fold (before a user has to scroll down to see the content ). For call-to-action buttons, Apple recommends 44px squared and Google recommends 48px squared for mobile users, so go for the higher of the two, 48px.
For example, you can take two segments of your list, each consisting of 15 percent of the total list, and run a test (which is 30 percent of your list overall). Then learn from this list and send the best variation to the remaining 70 percent of your list.
Open rate or click-through rate
The basic principle is to take two segments of your lists and send each a version of your email, testing a specific feature of the email (this could be subject line, length of copy, etc.). Then learn from those tests, figure out which one had the best results, and then apply that knowledge to the rest of your list.
Dynamic content generation and rules
There really isn't a 100% ideal solution to this problem, but you should understand which days of the week work best for you and how the days of the week compare. You can then decide to send a test and follow-up email on days of the week when your audience responds in a similar way.
CrM and marketing
Definitions and practicalities
Customer relationship management
Marketing automation
This means you can be more relevant and it improves every touch point you have with your audience, thus improving your digital brand. So, for example, I can send you the right information by e-mail based on your previous e-mail clicks, what you have done on my website and what you have said on social media.
Essential and very difficult
You may wonder why trying to achieve a single view of the customer is all about IT, and that's mainly because we're trying to unify systems and databases. However, if you already have existing systems, you may find that they are not compatible and need customization – and the whole thing is a headache.
Smart marketing and agility
If you are a small organization with few existing systems or starting from scratch, this is not a big problem. My general advice on this, however, is that you should persevere because I truly believe that achieving this integrated view will be the difference between business success and failure for many organizations in the future.
CrM and esP integration
The risk is that when you start sending emails, someone thinks you're spamming and blocks your IP address. If you are blacklisted, you can contact the organization that is blocking you and they will have a process you will need to go through to get you unblocked.
Data synching
The alternative and far less ideal solution used by many organizations (because their systems are not integrated) involves importing data from a CRM system and using ESP to extract this data. ESP then detects which email addresses being imported are new, which are duplicates, and which have already been unsubscribed.
If our systems are integrated, we may collect information through our ESP in the form of questionnaires and surveys and use it elsewhere in our marketing efforts through our CRM and in our future email campaigns.
The lead nurturing process
Explicit scores
Weighting
More advanced automation options
Testing, learning and adjusting
First, most of the systems involved are quite expensive and the setup process is something you will most likely need help with. Once these are overcome - and you shouldn't underestimate how difficult it can be to achieve - you need to set your own rules.
CrM and automation conclusions
It can be time consuming and complicated, can involve many people and will need continuous refinement. Both the positive and negative sides of this are possible due to the systems we use and the way we implement them.
Multichannel marketing is dead
Understanding this omni-channel approach is key to truly understanding how different elements of your marketing efforts contribute to your digital brand. The approach to digital branding outlined in this section embraces omni-channel marketing with its focus on user journey and final outcomes.
Transmedia storytelling
This means they have visited my site again and again, obviously finding something useful each time, before finally deciding to inquire about the service we offer. Without knowing it, I may have been throwing away the traffic that was being sent to my site from various channels, as it never seemed to convert into business.
What we've discussed so far has suggested a new way of thinking about branding, plus examples of how to implement your digital branding. We've created some templates and guidelines to help you implement your digital brand measurement.
Measuring
Defining brand value and valuation
Understand the value of every marketing activity
This is because even using surveying techniques, when you ask someone questions about why they did something, they are often clueless, or remember things wrong. For example, if you ask someone why they buy a particular detergent, they probably have no idea.
Digital shot itself in the foot
If you're spending a few million pounds on a TV campaign, you're probably going to spend some money finding out what it's done for you. To be fair, if you're spending £2 million on a campaign, £10,000 doesn't seem like a lot to spend on a value calculation.
However, if you're spending £500 on a digital campaign, you won't spend the same again to find out if you got ROI, because even if you did, you won't when you pay to sort it out. . So we need to develop a culture to start with the concept that all digital activity will be measured – and that we can do this relatively easily and in a cost-effective way.
And in fact, many agencies that work in TV will factor into the calculation of the effectiveness of your campaign in your overall costs. These are not so much a measure of success or failure, but rather indicate factors that may lead to our actual desired results.
Benchmarked social measures
The other great thing about this metric is that you can calculate it for your competitors. Audience engagement is another percentage that you can easily measure and compare with your competitors.
Benchmarking and business results
This may be too low, but you can continue your social media efforts and then measure on a regular basis (normally monthly is sufficient). On a platform like Facebook, there are multiple ways to engage such as liking, sharing and commenting on a post.
Measurement comes in many forms
These bots are really just algorithms that are used in conjunction with social media profiles to create engagements with other people's content. Where other public parts of the web have enjoyed recent victories in their battles with spam content, social media remains a playground for spammers.
Primaries and indicators
Beyond the last click
I define these online goals – they may not be our actual business goal, but are as close as we can measure online – as 'primaries'. Primary are the key things we can monitor online that are as close as possible to our business goals.
Digital branding dashboards
To help with this, we've created a digital branding dashboard that can help you figure out what to measure and what's important. It will also help you determine what is primarily important and what is just an indicator.
The role of analytics
The marvels of Google analytics
Core reports
Although data is fascinating and it is very interesting to see who is using your site in real time, it is not easy to do anything useful with data. It's great to see an immediate response to an email or social media campaign, but it's hard to take any action.
The great thing about this report is that it's easy to change the way the audience is initially segmented. However, it is easy to change the initial segmentation from country to traffic source (search, social, etc.).
By doing this, you can explore how visitors from different traffic sources travel through your site and see how their behavior differs from one another. Under 'Acquisition' you can also examine any traffic you get from pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns you may be running.
Behaviour
Conversions
