Social media marketing is the latest buzzword in online marketing as these tools hold significant solutions for brand building. As social media is maturing, it has become very difficult to assess effectiveness of the social media activities worldwide. Are you worried over your social media marketing campaigns? Well, don’t worry! You are not the only one. Hundreds of marketers around the world are struggling with social media marketing. In fact, for most business owners, problem starts with how to use and tackle social media campaigns for benefit of their business.

Here are few commonly faced problems by social media marketers –

• Effectiveness of social media efforts – Though businesses are constantly experimenting with their social media campaigns, it is very difficult to measure how effective particular campaign or activity on social media.
• Content creation that targets audience and compliments SEO efforts – Influence of social media is being seen on SEO too. So, marketers need to create content that not only engages audience but also helps SEO efforts. Optimizing social media content for search engines and audience is turning out to be difficult.
• Audience outreach – With almost every business trying to create their space and mark their social presence, getting message to the target audience base has become difficult. Most businesses are making the mistake of not understanding the social media behavior of their target audience before executing their efforts. This results in ineffective audience outreach.
• Approach – Social media marketing cannot be executed with a standard approach for all platforms or networks. There is a need to craft-channel specific experience while maintaining brand identity and marketers need to develop specific personality for each channel.
• Analyzing data gathered through social media channels – Social media channels generate lot of data relevant to user behavior and habits. But, marketers are still clueless on how to analyze user generated data and utilize it to make their campaigns more effective and rewarding.

Marketers need to address these concerns to get a better visibility to their social media marketing campaigns and generate better outcomes. 

One of the major objectives of digital marketing is connecting with audience and expanding reach of marketing campaigns. But, does content only indicate text? Well, of course not, it is an umbrella term as there are different forms and types of content. For any successful content marketing campaign, you need to strike balance between different forms of content. Also, you need to create and update content regularly and be creative in your approach. Create the same form and tone of content over and over again won’t stimulate prospects of success and make the entire campaign boring.

To make sure your content marketing campaign stands out from competitors, you need to integrate other content forms with blogging. Here are different forms of content you must try –

·         Videos – With content efforts going social and popularity of videos among online audience, content marketers are slowing releasing potential held by videos. From tutorials to how-to topics, videos are great way of providing valuable and informative content.

·         Infographics – One of the best ways to present information in precise way, infographics presents information or data in a visually appealing manner. One of the prime benefits of infographics is that it can be shared hence their social value is high.

·         Memes – Easy to make, hilarious and power to go viral, memes is a great way of capturing attention of your audience. Memes need to be witty and strike a chord with your audience. As they are adaptable, you can develop memes across different niche and topics.

·         Presentations – When you wish to describe an idea in detail, you can create presentations. As presentations allow integrating text with images and other media, you can be creative, innovative and think out-of-the-box to explain your ideas.

For content marketing, you need to keep experimenting with different forms of content instead of following a standard format. Remember, the key is to develop connect with your audience.

Analytic tools provide an insight into the technical performance of a website and help in bringing improvements to the website. But merely setting up analytics on the website does not guarantee success as you should be able to make proper interpretations from the available data. It has been seen that businesses set up analytics but fail to dig and utilize information provided by the tool. Also, analytics tools like Google Analytics provide insight into technical performance of the website, but to measure effectiveness of the marketing campaigns, marketers need to analyze the metrics properly.

Here are few key metric provided that by Google Analytics that every business must watch out for –

• Content – This metric allows you to analyze which content on your website is popular with the visitors. Once you get an idea of what content your visitors like to read, you can develop more effective content strategy and improve content on other pages of the website. Content has the power of developing strong user engagement hence this metrics should not be overlooked.
• Organic Search Traffic – In the Traffic Sources section of Google Analytics dashboard, you get an insight into whether your traffic is from organic search, paid campaign or direct type in. You should focus on Organic Search traffic as it will give you an idea of the keyword phrases that brought visitors to your website. Increasing organic visitors is a great way of increasing traffic to a website without increasing your paid advertising.
• Bounce Rate – Businesses should focus on retaining visitors to their website, and keeping them engaged. Hence, Bounce Rate metric is very important. Bounce rate of a web page gives percentage of users who left immediately after landing on that particular web page. If the bounce rate of a page is high, it indicates that the web page does not offer what visitors are looking for. So, you need to optimize content for that web page.
• Exit Pages – Just like the landing pages of visitors are important to know from where visitors are entering your website, you also need to know the pages from where visitors are leaving the website. So, you should watch out for the Exit Pages metric. If the visitors are exiting from the Thank You or Order completion pages, it means those visitors were converted to customers. If visitors exit from any other page, it indicates that you need to optimize those pages.

Google Analytics metrics and reports are very important for businesses. So, they should have sound understanding of these metrics and how they can be improved. 

There are several aspects to online marketing, and content marketing is one of the primary ones. Content marketing can be defined in different ways; basically, it involves creation, sharing and publishing content to acquire and retain customers. Content is a powerful tool, and if used correctly, it has potential of striking a chord with audience. While developing content strategy, online marketing experts need to focus on SEO services as these two disciplines work together. An ideal content marketing strategy strikes the right balance between user-friendly and search engine friendly content.

Developing a content marketing strategy is really tricky. So before you start planning your strategy get clarity of your business objective. Here are few tips for developing successful content marketing strategy –

• Aim to develop content that will help to create connection with your visitors. Content has the power of developing engagement, and engagement is essential to drive online traffic.
• Do not focus on just developing ‘shareable’ content. No doubt content should be shareable, but it should also be able to initiate conversation. Content be able to trigger discussions, comments and feedback.
• Ensure that you include different forms of content delivery to make content unique and creative. Along with text blogs, utilize images, audio, video, infographics and advanced guides.
• Remember, you are marketing your content so make sure your content provides insight. Content that educates users and adds value to their knowledge is always appreciated, and your visitors will always come back for more.
• Invest in good content marketing tools for creating content and helping collaboration between teams.

Remember, don’t expect immediate results or get discouraged and give up within few attempts. Use content strategy to gain customers and build loyalty. 

Keywords! One of the most heard and most sought after terms in Search Engine Optimization. While choosing right keywords can make your campaign successful, wrong choice of keywords can completely ruin marketing campaigns. Wrong set of keywords or unplanned keywords can bring unqualified traffic to the website. 

What are Keywords?

Keywords are phrases or words that a user types in a Search Engine to find information he is seeking. Not just for search term, keywords also play an important role in indexing, cataloging and ranking of websites by bots. So, keywords are an integral part of SEO campaigns and need to be used with other on page optimization factors.

Search engines use robots or bots to analyze blogs, web pages and any other form of content available online. Then, these web pages are organized, using complex algorithms, according to their relevance to particular search terms. 

What does Keyword Research Involve?

Keyword research involves understanding different phrases that users might type into search engines. While doing keyword research, you must be able to peer into mind of the searcher and figure out their intention behind the search. So, every title you choose or content you write needs to have relevant keywords so it can be ranked for those keywords. Thus, with keyword research you can ensure that the website gets maximum exposure on search engines and maximize audience reach.

Keyword research basically consists of –

• Finding search terms
• Understanding how these search terms influence competition and traffic.

It is important to know different types of their keywords like long tail keywords, broad keywords, phrase match and exact match keywords.

Benefits of Keyword Research

Keyword research helps in understanding demand for keywords and keyword referrals. Some keyword tools also predict cost involved in running paid campaigns for those keywords. 

There are several benefits of keyword research –

• Bring qualified traffic to the website
• Lowers bounce rate of website
• Optimize website for keywords
• Increase search engine ranking
• Improve traffic to website
• Understand search behavior
• Develop effective marketing campaigns

Thus, keyword research is basically market research and getting better understanding of the customers. It is not possible to optimize a web page or lead traffic to a website unless you know which words and phrases are important to the website.