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Looking to step up your affiliate marketing strategy in 2016? Columnist Melissa Feemster outlines some best practices to get you off on the right foot.
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All content marketers know that to create content that converts, we have to know what has worked in the past and what hasn’t.
But the way most content marketers use that knowledge to plan is still pretty broad-stroke. We scan a few data sets and think, “That post did really well. Let’s do another one like it and cross our fingers.”
What if we could predict the performance of our future content more precisely? What if we could forecast if articles from last Wednesday’s brainstorm are worth writing – and how well they’ll perform?
I think we can.
I propose that with a few key metrics and some simple (enough) math in Microsoft Excel, we can predict the success of a given content idea.
Intrigued? Let’s get started.
There are about a million ways to slice and dice historical data, so it can be hard to identify which stats are relevant and which stats aren’t. There are two main types of data I recommend gathering for ROI Math: content dimensions and success metrics.
To be able to observe useful trends over time, you can’t look at just one piece of content. You have to group your content into meaningful categories.
The best way to group your past content is by the variables that you experiment with during the content planning stage. Think about the decisions you usually make when planning content – what the content should be about, how long it should be, who should write it, etc. I call these variables “content dimensions.”
For your first attempt at ROI Math, I recommend sticking to these four content dimensions:
Word counts vary wildly per piece of content, so you’ll need to translate these into ranges to gauge performance more easily and give your writers more practical targets to hit.
If you have multiple in-house writers, manage a large pool of freelancers, or frequently publish work by guest writers, author performance will be an important metric to track.
Common format types include reviews, infographics, videos, slideshows, long-form articles, and numbered lists.
Common topic types include the vertical, the category, or the service being discussed.
To measure success, you have to define and quantify it. What do you want above every other goal? When you get what you want, how will you know?
The answer to the first question is up to you. The answer to the second question is success metrics, which you and I are about to define.
For your first time doing ROI Math, I recommend defining success using three main types of measurements: traffic metrics, e-commerce metrics, and any proprietary metrics that are unique to your business.
Traffic Metrics
Traffic metrics are an excellent indicator of success because they represent the customers who are already engaging in your conversion process. Here are a few examples of traffic metrics:
I recommend analyzing just the UPVs for your first attempt at predicting ROI, since it represents your site’s overall success rather than the success of specific campaigns.
If you do select multiple traffic metrics, make sure they’re consistent with each other or your predictions will be muddled.
E-commerce Metrics
I recommend looking at net revenue if possible for your first run at ROI Math since revenue is a very broad indicator and like UPVs, will give you a good idea of your content’s overall success. As you gain more experience, you can add more e-commerce metrics like these:
Proprietary Metrics
To get a more customized view of how your content is doing, think about your main goal again and the metrics you already monitor to gauge your progress toward that goal. Then, single out the one or two metrics that best determine success.
At CLEARLINK, we use answered phone calls as one of our core proprietary success metrics because it is the strongest indicator of a marketing campaign’s success and correlates heavily with revenue.
If your main goal is to become a national brand, you may measure success by how many cities you’re shipping to. If your main goal is to serve more homeless in the community, your key proprietary metric may be the number of clients served. Even if your goal is only to drive your net worth as high as possible, you’ll need a metric more specific than cold, hard cash to be strategic in your content planning.
When you collect these metrics from your reports you’ll want to choose a period that will represent your content well, but doesn’t provide so much data that it overwhelms you. I recommend one of the following time frames: year-to-date, the most recent 6–12 months, or a customized period that you’re particularly curious about (e.g., last holiday season, first 90 days after new hires, etc.).
Now it’s time to set up your Excel sheet, where you’ll gather your historical data.
The fastest, easiest way to start your spreadsheet is by using a program like Xenu or Screaming Frog to run a crawl of your site. Once the crawl is complete, export the results and save them as an XLSX file.
The site crawl automatically gathers every single web address on your domain, which you need for Excel to be able to properly pull data from your analytics reports.
However, the site crawl also gathers data you don’t need, so you’ll have to clean up the sheet before pulling in any analytics.
Here’s how:
And finally, create a new column for each metric you selected. To review, these are the metrics I recommend adding:
Once you’re done creating these new columns, your spreadsheet will look something like this:
Now that you’ve set up your spreadsheet, you’re going to use a combination of brain power, Google Analytics, and Excel’s VLOOKUP function to fill in the data.
Fill in the author, topic, format, and word count for each URL. Unless you know your content in your sleep, this step will likely require that you visit each page.
Get your music on – this is probably the most monotonous step in content marketing ROI Math. But I really encourage you to stick it out. The sheer volume of data that Excel interprets automatically, not to mention the precision of your results, will make this task worth the extra time and effort. I promise.
Fill the remaining cells in your spreadsheet by pulling data sets from your reporting accounts. I recommend starting with Google Analytics.
If you don’t dive into analytics on a regular basis or aren’t familiar with Excel, I recommend tutoring yourself in the VLOOKUP function until you get the hang of it. It’s a fast and extremely reliable tool for cross-referencing.
At this point, you’ve gathered all the data you need. Now you’re ready to crunch the numbers.
To predict future conversion, you’ll need to compare every single content dimension against every success metric and quantify how well each content type has performed in the past. Excel’s sophisticated PivotTable feature can do these comparisons quickly and easily.
Here’s how to create your PivotTable:
The PivotTable is another Excel feature that takes practice to understand. If you’ve never used it before, either tinker patiently until you get the hang of it or study some tutorials first.
Your goal with these Pivots is to calculate two new metrics – the average performance and variance to average of all content dimensions. These two meta-metrics hold the key to predicting how well similar content will perform in the future.
To systematically calculate the averages and variances, complete the following steps for each content dimension and success metric.
Here I’ve used author and UPV as examples:
Each Pivot should look like the below screenshot, with the content dimensions appearing in the ROWS field and the averages and variances of each success metric appearing in the VALUES field.
As you complete each pivot, copy and paste the data to a third sheet formatted with the columns below. Complete all the pivots until you have recorded the averages and variances of each success metric.
This tab should look similar to the below screenshot:
If you’ve gotten this far in the process, congratulations! You have completed an impressive feat of auditing, pivoting, and formula-writing – and now comes the fun part.
Everything to this point has been about analyzing past performance. Now it’s time to look forward.
Start a fourth tab to house your ideas for future content. You’ll want to start off with a column for content ideas, followed by columns for author, topic, format, word count range, and average variance of each of these dimensions.
Populate each variance column by using a VLOOKUP function to pull the corresponding values from your PivotTable results. To check if the function is working correctly, type one of your authors into the appropriate column and check your third sheet to verify that the VLOOKUP has returned the same average variance you see in your pivot results.
As you brainstorm new content ideas, add them to your fourth sheet and propose an author, word count range, topic, and format for each one. You can either do this yourself or have the individual idea contributors add them in.
As you add these details to each row, the VLOOKUP will automatically populate the variance columns and you’ll slowly see trends emerging. It’s like magic, except nerdier.
Now get ready for your hard work to really pay off.
Create one last column and label it “Result.” This column is your golden number. This column is the reason ROI Math exists.
To find the values for this column, use the =AVERAGE formula to average all the variances across each row and then subtract 1 from that average.
Here’s what the golden number should tell you:
Based on the historical performance of the proposed author, format type, topic, and word count, the content idea “ROI Math” should convert 8.75 percent better than the average piece of content on JeffBullas.com.*
*Disclaimer: This example is purely aspirational. I have no historical data to back it up.
There you have it. From now on, you can confidently predict the likelihood of conversion for every content idea you have.
ROI calculations are very flexible. If at any point while brainstorming you get a low or negative percentage, you can immediately tweak the content dimensions (e.g., increase the word count, change the format from slideshow to long-form, etc.) to try and improve the chances of success.
Once you’re comfortable with ROI Math and you’re feeling adventurous, you can even go back to the beginning and add additional success metrics (e.g., promotional metrics like links, shares, etc.) and content dimensions (e.g., time of publication, day of the week, etc.). You can even compound the dimensions if you like – for example, you can find the word count range that works best by format vs. the word count range that works best across the board.
The more layers you add to your calculations, the more precise the predictions become. Keep at it until you get a model that works for you and your site.
Content marketing ROI Math has helped me sharpen my content planning process dramatically:
But let’s get real for a moment.
Ideas are surprisingly fickle. Some of our best ideas (according to us) end up producing mediocre results, while run-of-the-mill ideas can be off-the-charts successful. Some of the most successful pieces we’ve published at CLEARLINK started out as high-risk ideas.
I encourage you to use ROI Math for inspiration. Use it as a sanity check, but when decision time comes around, go with your gut, your common sense, or some combination of both. No spreadsheet can replace human intuition.
Treat ROI Math like the living, breathing process that it is. Take chances, make mistakes, get messy, and then learn from it.
Let’s improve ROI Math together. If you have any ideas on alternate use cases or on how ROI Math can be improved, please hit me up on Twitter @daveydemille.
Guest Author: With over 6 years of digital marketing experience, David DeMille has brought a real passion for marketing to his current position as marketing director at CLEARLINK. He focuses on creating data driven strategy, consumer driven content, and a community worth engaging in.
The post A New Formula For Content Marketing That Converts [Step-by-Step] appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.
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Getting your blog post images right is crucially important.
Studies have found that 93% of the most engaging content shared on Facebook contains images, and that images have an 80% memory retention rate (compared with just 20% for text).
What’s more, recent eye-tracking studies have shown that internet users are less drawn to stock photos than they are to original visual content, meaning that the wrong type of image can greatly damage your blog’s engagement.
Thankfully, it’s easier than ever before to create custom blog images that’ll really stand out.
There are plenty of programs and resources available to the discerning blogger who wants to improve their blog imagery.
Here are twenty tools that you can use to make sure your blog is as visually appealing as possible:
There are plenty of image editing programs available, but Canva is one of the most widely used – and with good reason.
It’s free, it’s easy to use, and there are plenty of options to make sure that you’re able to manipulate and edit your images without a lot of hassle or effort.
If you find that Canva doesn’t quite suit you, PicMonkey is a great alternative.
It’s got a lot of the same tools as Canva, but it’s slightly easier to get your head around, and it offers more font options, which means you’ll find it better for adding text to images.
BeFunky works a lot like both Canva and PicMonkey in the way it lets you edit image files. It also comes with a variety of templates and resources to help you get the most out of your images.
There are plenty of tools in BeFunky to help image manipulation newbies to get started instantly, but the program also has a lot of depth, and can be a great tool for more experienced image editors as well.
For those who’d like a level of image editing on par with Photoshop, but who aren’t comfortable with the high Adobe price tag, GIMP is often recommended as the best alternative.
The program is a free download and offers just as many options as Photoshop. That said, it can be a difficult tool to come to grips with, and many of its more advanced features may be wasted on you if you’re just after quick and simple edits.
Those who are familiar with Microsoft Paint (who isn’t?) but who want something a little more advanced will get along great with Paint.net.
It’s a free download program that makes quick and simple photo editing easy, but it packs a lot of user friendly features that mean you can get more advanced with your edits if you feel the need. If your first instinct is to reach for MS Paint, you’ll probably be better off with this.
Infographics can be a big attention grabber for a blog, but it’s not always easy to create them.
Easel.ly lets you work from existing templates to throw together well designed infographics in a matter of minutes, taking a lot of the hassle out of developing a good layout.
If Ease.ly’s not quite your cup of tea, you might like to try this program instead – it’s incredibly similar, but boasts a different variety of customizable templates.
Infogr.am is simple to use and gives creators a fair amount of control over their finished infographic, and its drag-and-drop interface makes infographic creation as quick and painless as possible.
Sometimes all you need to do is crop or change the size of an image.
For uses like this, the Social Image Resizer Tool is invaluable for speeding up the process, meaning you don’t have to fire up an image manipulation program every time you need to trim the bottom off a photo.
The program’s handy list of common social media image sizes is a great resource as well.
Sometimes, all it takes to make your blog post stand out is a few pretty quotes to grab reader interest.
Tools like Recite let you enter text and instantly create a pretty image file, with customizable fonts and colors, to give your article some variety while drawing readers to the important passages within a text.
Similar to Recite, Over lets you use text to create images. Its main selling point, though, is that it’ll let you overlay text on top of an image of your choice.
This means that your picture can feature a killer quote from your article, but also can draw in visitor attention through a compelling visual.
Similar to both Recite and Over, Quotes Cover lets you turn text into images. It’s specifically designed to help with social media cover photos, but its tools can be put to use for any image project.
It boasts a wide variety of options to make sure that your quote stands out as much as possible, so if you didn’t find an appropriate style on the other two sites, this might be the option for you.
Not everybody naturally has an eye for colors.
When designing images, it’s often helpful to know which colors will perfectly complement the photo that you’ll include at the heart of your blog post.
Pictaculous lets you upload an image, from which it’ll generate a color palette based on the picture that you can use to make sure your blog post has a consistent color theme.
Collages are a fun way to draw in a user’s attention and make use of several key images at the same time.
Ribbet takes the hassle out of the process of building a collage by letting you upload photos to various templates, meaning that putting together a neat collage won’t slow you down too much.
High quality images are important, but it’s also crucial that you keep your page loading times as low as possible.
For that reason, you might find this web-based program a real lifesaver – it lets you upload and compress a file to make it as small as possible, which will help both your SEO score and your visitor retention.
If you’re looking to include screenshots in your blog post, you might want to check out Jing.
Jing is a downloadable program that lets you take screenshots, then quickly and conveniently crop and edit them so that you can show the part of the screen that matters most.
This means that you can get crucial materials for your blog together as quickly as possible, saving time and effort.
Much like Jing, Skitch lets you easily take screenshots and quickly edit them to the perfect size.
It also lets you add annotations, so you can make sure your images are well targeted and clear of purpose.
Fotor is a pretty amazing catch-all alternative to many of the other tools on this list. It’s an all-in-one program that lets you edit, crop, and alter images, but it also boasts collage abilities and special tools for creating custom social media cover photos and profile pictures.
This is a great program to save time and to avoid having to run images through several different tools before they’re ready to be uploaded.
If you’re looking to create a quick gif to add some simple animation to your site, you might want to check out Imgflip. The website allows users to easily upload videos or still images and use them to create unique gifs, without a lot of the hassle usually associated with creating animation.
Pixlr allows you to add a wide variety of filters and overlays to your images.
If you’re looking for a particular style or look for your photos, you’ll probably find Pixlr to be a useful tool.
To give digital products a little bit of extra authority, you’ll want to take a look at Placeit.
The site allows users to upload images, which then appear within everyday scenario photos, such as people browsing the web or using computers or tablets.
This site makes it much easier to get great photos of your digital products being used in the real world, without having to hire a photographer to take custom photos.
What other tools do you use for your image manipulation? Share your thoughts and recommendations by leaving a comment below:
Guest Author: Aaron Agius is an online marketer, web strategist and entrepreneur and you can check him out at AaronAgius.com
The post 20 Killer Blogging Tools for Customizing Your Content appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.
Posted by Dr-Pete
Earlier this year, Google rolled out the Related Questions feature (AKA “People Also Ask”). If you haven’t seen them yet, related questions appear in an expandable box, mixed in with organic results. Here’s an example from a search for “Samsung Galaxy S6”:
If you click on any question, it expands into something that looks like a Featured Snippet:
Currently, Related Questions can occur in packs of between 1–4 questions and answers. Here’s an example of a box with only one question, on a search for “lederhosen”:
Once expanded, a typical answer contains a machine-generated snippet, a link to the source website, and a link to the Google search for the question.
We started tracking Related Questions in late July on the MozCast 10K, where they originally appeared on roughly 1.3% of queries. Keep in mind that the MozCast set tends toward commercial queries, and the absolute percentage may not represent the entire web. What’s interesting, though, is what happened after that. Here’s a graph of Related Questions prevalence since the end of July:
You can clearly see two spikes in the graph — one measured on October 27th, and one on December 1st. As of this writing (December 10th), Related Questions appeared on about 8.1% of the queries we track. In less than 5 months, Related Questions have increased 501%. This is a much faster adoption rate than other Knowledge Graph features.
When you expand a question, the answer looks a lot like another recent Knowledge Graph addition — Featured Snippets. Digging deeper, though, it appears that the connection is indirect at best. For example, here’s an expanded question on a search for “monopoly”:
If you click on that search, though, you get a SERP with the following Featured Snippet:
It’s interesting to note that both answers come from Investopedia, but Google is taking completely different text from two different URLs on the same site. With Featured Snippets, we know that the answer currently has to come from a site already ranking on page one, but with Related Questions, there’s no clear connection to organic results. These answers don’t seem tied to their respective SERPs.
It’s clear that both the answers in Related Questions and the snippets in Featured Snippets are machine-generated. Google is expanding the capabilities of the Knowledge Graph by extracting answers directly from the index. What may not be as clear, at first glance, is that machines are also generating the questions themselves. Look at the following example, from a search for “grammar check”:
Out of context, the question doesn’t even make sense. Expanded, you can see that it relates to a very specific grammar question posted on Quora. While the topic is relevant, no human would attach this question, as worded, to this search. Consider another example, for “cover letter examples”:
The first and last question are obviously, to a human, redundant. To a machine, though, they would look unique. To be fair, Google has come a long way in a short time — even a couple of months ago, some of these questions were riddled with grammar and spelling errors. As of this writing, I can’t find a single example of either.
Finally, there are the questions that no human would ever ask:
No rational human would ever want to know what kind of meat is in a gyro. It’s better that way.
It’s clear that Google is rapidly expanding their capability to generate questions and answers from the index. Both Featured Snippets and Related Questions have evolved considerably since their respective launches, and Google’s ability to understand natural language queries and semantic data is growing daily. It may be months before we fully understand if and how these results cannibalize organic clicks, but it seems very clear that Google no longer considers these features to be experimental and will be aggressively pushing forward question-and-answer style SERPs in the near future.
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Content marketing has exploded in the last couple of years. The platforms to create new content, curate existing content, and publish all of it to the right channels have grown and matured. However, in spite of the exponentially higher volume of content that is being churned out by businesses today, the fact remains that the majority of these activities still cannot be directly tied to company bottom lines.
Accountability and revenue attribution are the twin gaping holes in this mega-bucket of content that most businesses are racing to build.
A report by Marketing Score showed that 6 out of the 10 lowest ranked marketing tools from an accountability perspective happened to be key elements of content marketing.
So what gives? Where’s the gap, which once plugged, will show the impact that every content marketing effort has on business metrics? How will you start to more effectively measure content marketing ROI?
Revenue attribution is the final mile in the process of making content more accountable. With revenue attribution in place, you can clearly see and judge how each content asset performs. You can identify the best performing campaigns from a conversion perspective. You can even single out which sale came from which particular white paper or blog post.
This attribution works for nearly every piece of content you create. Landing pages, emails, video content – whatever your poison, it can be tracked and measured to the last cent with revenue attribution.
Content attribution is an integral part of enterprise CRM platforms like Salesforce. By syncing your CRM platform with your campaigns on web analytics (Google Analytics), email (MailChimp or Aweber), social media management (Hootsuite) or marketing automation tools, you can pinpoint the direct revenue driven by each campaign and each individual piece of content.
Attribution can primarily be of three kinds:
First-touch Attribution: Where 100% of the credit for a closed sale is given to the first content asset the customer interacted with.
Last Touch Attribution: Where 100% of the credit for a closed sale is given to the last content asset the customer interacted with.
Multi-touch Attribution: Where credit for an acquired sale is distributed evenly among all content assets the customer interacted with.
Given a choice, I usually recommend a multi-touch attribution model, as no piece of content is shortchanged and the impact of each one comes out clearly. Instead of the equal credit for each asset as described in the image above, I would in fact place custom weights for each content asset. This process allows you to tweak the amount of importance you place on each content asset from a lead acquisition perspective.
Further reading: 12 Steps to Setting up Your Marketing Attribution in Marketo
So you’ve set up your content tracking systems. You know what conversion goals your content needs to hit. You know which channels to prioritize and so on. The challenge now is to develop content that meets these parameters and delivers on the lofty goals you’ve set for it.
Create content that people enjoy. Content that they come back to. Content that they seek out and share with others. Easier said than done.
One way of doing this is by digging into your analytics tool and checking the number of visits to each piece of content, time spent per piece, social shares and so on. Keep a track of the topics that set the conversation going among your audience. Once you know what topics interest them, you can go ahead and create more content along similar lines.
Many marketers would be happy with just measuring and showcasing the number of subscribers they got from their content marketing campaigns. However just measuring vanity metrics like subscriber numbers or shares is missing the ROI point altogether. Need inspiration? Use these two as your primary conversion metrics for judging the efficacy of each content asset:
This investigation into how your content performs will also equip you with insights about which platforms work best for your business.
Research shows that on an average 5 pieces of content account for 50% of visitor traffic. This means, like in the case of search marketing, content marketing has a significant long tail too. The bulk of your visits and conversions will come from star content assets. It’s your job to identify which ones these are and promote them aggressively.
Each content asset you create is the penultimate location leading up to an inquiry, lead or conversion. Thus, it follows that setting up your content assets to meet your conversion goals is of paramount importance. Even the most brilliant content marketing programs fall flat when the asset itself that assists conversions is not optimized.
Let’s look at an example to illustrate what I mean.
Above you see a Shopify “landing page” that hits nearly all the CRO factors out of the park.
All in all, I’d give this landing/lead gen page at least a 9 or 10 from a content marketing perspective.
If you quiz any marketer about it, they’ll tell you how they wish they could measure the impact of every step they take to promote their business. However, data from a recent survey by CMI and MarketingProfs shows that just 21% of B2B marketers are actually successful in measuring their content marketing success.
It’s time to step away from the majority and join that little group of successful content marketers who know what they’re doing and how they’re getting it right.
Guest Author: Rohan Ayyar is a creative content strategist and CRO specialist at E2M, digital marketing firm par excellence. He doubles up as the resident UX authority at Moveo Apps, a premium app dev agency. Rohan is also an avid business and tech writer, with articles featured on The Next Web, Fast Company, and Adweek.
The post How To Prove Content Marketing ROI For Your Business appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.
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Over the last 2 months, I’ve driven well over 6,000 organic Facebook visits to my site.
It’s not coming from a Facebook Page; it’s coming from a Facebook Group.
Several months ago I started my own Group, Digital Marketing Questions — this week we hit 3,000 active, engaged, spam-free members.
In this post, I’m going to retrace my steps and tell you exactly how to build your own Facebook Group.
Before I tell you how to build one, I quickly need to talk about why you should build one.
All the kids left Facebook years ago for Instagram (now Snapchat) and a number of businesses gave up on Facebook marketing efforts when “organic reach” plummeted.
Despite this, there are still hundreds of millions of users still on Facebook.
In fact, Mark Zuckerberg posted a status a couple of months ago stating that for the first time in the network’s history, Facebook had over 1 billion active users in a single day.
Let that marinate for a second.
Facebook is a powerhouse that isn’t going anywhere anytime soon — it’s time to re-invest back into the network.
Facebook pages and personal posts rely completely on the Newsfeed algorithm for organic exposure. Facebook Groups send users a notification whenever someone posts to the Group, thus driving traffic to each post.
On mobile as well:
Facebook gives users the option to silence these notifications. However, if your Group consistently adds value, they won’t.
A while back I ran a test:
Let’s piggyback off the previous point for a second.
With the ability to drive quality traffic with a single post, you’ve got a powerful value proposition. I do a ton of link outreach for clients — including the Group in my pitch has skyrocketed success rate.
I mean, which outreach email would you respond to?
Outreach email 1:
Hey [Editor’s name],
I came across your post [insert URL] and really enjoyed it. I noticed you’re linking out to some posts about [insert topic] and wanted to pitch you on my latest guide that fits in perfectly.
If interested, let me know and I can send you the URL to check out for yourself.
Outreach email 2:
Hey [Editor’s name],
I came across your post [insert URL] and really enjoyed it. I noticed you’re linking out to some posts about [insert topic] and wanted to pitch you on my latest guide that fits in perfectly.
If included, I’d be happy to share it with my active Facebook Group [insert link] that regularly drives over 600 visits every time I post.
Link building (and marketing, really) is about the exchange of value. When you’ve got a solid value proposition in exchange for the link, your acceptance rate goes through the roof.
Despite the lack of organic reach, Facebook Pages are still a tremendous marketing resource. However, you need invest time into creating content to be successful. This is a full-time job in itself which requires you (or someone else) to spend time managing it.
When properly managed, Facebook Groups run themselves because the content is crowd sourced from members.
All you need to do is stay active on threads and make sure you’re keeping a close eye on spam.
Hopefully I’ve convinced you about the benefits of building a quality Group. Now, let’s talk about the how…
I’m not going to go into detail on how to create your Group because it’s easier than setting up a Facebook Page.
I do want to talk about creating the context of your Group. In other words, what should your Group be about?
Unless you’re a brand, don’t make it about you.
Shopify has a number of helpful Groups geared towards customer support, marketing, general tips, etc. They’re able to build communities based on their brand.
For those of us who aren’t brands, we don’t have that luxury.
In the grand scheme of things, I’m a nobody. If I would’ve made my Group “Ryan Stewart’s Digital Mastermind”, I wouldn’t be writing this article right now because nobody would’ve joined.
Focus the context of your Group on the value it provides to members. I like to approach it like I would content strategy:
Facebook Groups shouldn’t be approached with a conversion or direct marketing mindset. They work best when approached as a branding tool.
If you can create a valuable resource, your brand will grow with the Group by association.
Remember, Groups are communities—they need to be focused on what engages members. That means hold off on promoting yourself, your business, and links until you’ve earned the Group’s trust.
How do you build trust? By delivering value.
Some Facebook groups are just a feed of links to the admin’s blog articles.
Don’t do that.
Instead, create native content specifically for the group. Keep ALL the content and engagement within the Group, instead of trying to drive them to your latest post.
In fact, I went a full month without posting a link directly to my site.
Things to try:
Make it obvious you’re there to help them.
Do this well and when you do post a link to blog/promotion, people will trust you enough to click it.
A Facebook Group can grow much faster than a Facebook Page (my Group grows 20x times faster than my Page). However, they don’t grow on autopilot. They need a significant investment of time, energy, and resources to drive members.
The key to growing a Group (or anything, really) is making it a priority. If you foresee value in owning a Group, take it seriously by investing the necessary resources into growth.
First, let me say this…
DO NOT add people to the Group without their permission.
2 reasons:
Instead, target influencers in their space and share their content.
Tag them in the post so they know you shared it.
They’ll most likely join the Group on their own. This is a huge bonus for Group members and incentive for more to join.
You’ve got your Facebook Page on your website, right? Why not add (or replace) this with a link to your Facebook Group?
If your website does significant traffic, this is a great way to grow your Group.
Data shows the standard logos in the header attract little to no attention. Instead, I added a link to my Group in the bottom right-hand corner of my footer and tagged the link with a tracking CID.
Over 3 months, it drove 346 clicks. Not a massive amount, but every little bit helps.
It’s not uncommon to create a great piece of content to entice email opt ins (aka “gated content”). Instead of asking for emails, you can drive people to your Facebook group.
For example, I wrote a post about how to create an SEO proposal. I also took the time to create a free proposal template for visitors to download for their own use.
I hosted the proposal template within the “Files” section of the Group.
To download it, they had to join the Group. Of course, just creating content isn’t enough, we’ve got to promote it as well.
I chose to use organic channels like Inbound.org, GrowthHackers, Warrior Forum, and a few others.
This was by far the most effective method I used, not only to gain members, but quality ones as well. Try and focus your promotion efforts in places where your target users are spending their time.
We want to focus more on building a quality, engaged member base as opposed to a massive, inactive one.
It took me some tinkering to figure out how to promote the Group with Facebook Ads.
You can’t promote a Facebook Group the way you can with a Page.
Here’s how to get around it:
I started by targeting by remarketing list and then expanding to lookalike audiences after that was exhausted.
In honor of full transparency, exact results from the ads are difficult to track.
“Results” are calculated by post engagements, i.e. Page likes, comments, shares, etc. Not included in “results” are people who clicked through and joined the Group.
From my own calculations, the Group grew 300 members during the 1 week we were boosting the post — that’s three times the organic growth rate.
Even though you can’t directly track new members with analytics, Facebook ads are no doubt a valuable promotion tool.
I write a lot of guest posts. Within my posts I often link to my personal website.
That site has a big ol’ call to action to join the Facebook Group:
This helps to strategically reach new audiences without directly promoting the group within the post.
You can also use guest posts to drive traffic to your post with “gated” content. Both tactics work well, but this one is slightly more direct.
If you’re consistently adding new members, you can pitch other Group admins to exchange cross promotion posts. I’ve had good success using Facebook’s internal search to find similar groups.
It takes a while to find spam-free Groups, but once you do it’s just a matter of tracking down admins, adding them as friends, and sending them a quick pitch.
If you’ve got a different audience base, you can add tremendous value to each other by exposing your Groups to new audiences.
The biggest knock against Facebook Groups is spam. A Group can turn into a discount Ray Ban marketplace overnight if not carefully watched by the admins.
It’s your job to set and enforce the rules.
Leave no room for guessing. If someone joins the Group and immediately promotes a link, they’re banned, no questions asked. It’s entirely too much work to give individual warnings to people.
Encourage Group members to flag spam if they see it — stand firm on your no spam rule.
Some people are in a lot of Facebook groups. They don’t always remember what they can or can’t do in each group.
If you get an uptick in spam in your group, post a reminder about the rules. This has the added benefit of pulling the group together, since the members genuinely want a spam-free place for questions and discussion.
I got tired of repeatedly posted warnings so I created a video and pinned it to the top of the Group. Since doing that, we’ve seen a significant drop in spam posts.
Even established members of the group will occasionally break the rules. Usually it’s because they forgot or weren’t sure if something was okay to promote.
In those cases, delete the post, but also PM the offending member and let them know what happened.
Often the person will apologize and that’s all you’ll need to do. If they argue with you, just remember it’s your group, not theirs. You get to decide who stays and who goes.
When you ban someone from the Group, it’s an opportunity to reinforce the pride people feel at being part of the “inner circle.”
They get to stay, because they followed the rules. The other people broke the rules, so they got banned.
This also reminds people to report spam or rules infractions when they see them.
Sometimes a passionate discussion devolves into an ugly argument. When that happens, PM to the parties involved and let them know it’s not okay to have a big public fight in the Group.
Usually that will calm things down. If things got really nasty, you also have the option to just delete the entire thread.
Finally, when your group gets big and active, you might not have time to properly moderate it.
That’s the time to hire a moderator. Often you can find someone who’s already active in the group, knows the rules and is willing to do it for free.
Bottom line — a Facebook Group can turn to spam quickly. Make sure you’re prepared to invest some resources to make sure it stays clean over time.
The numbers don’t lie — my Facebook Group is the strongest brand asset I have.
If you’re looking to build an active, engaged community around the problems your business solves, I strongly suggest you look into creating one of your own.
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