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The Argyll Partners affiliate programme is now live, offering a number of … needed to make it a market leader,“ Argyll Entertainment marketing director Craig … Income Access, whose reputation in the affiliate space is second to none, …
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If you aren’t a multinational with a big consulting budget, you are at the mercy of biased blog posts chasing affiliate marketing fees. On the other hand, …
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Also joining the new Affiliate Partnerships team is another NCM veteran, … With the formation of the new Affiliate Partnerships group, Bob Brouillette, … extending in-theater campaigns into online and mobile marketing programs to …
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Posted by JoyHawkins
Previously, I wrote an article unveiling some of the most common myths I see in the Local SEO space. I thought I’d do a follow-up that specifically talked about the myths pertaining to citations that I commonly hear from both small business owners and SEOs alike.
Truth: Google doesn’t even recognize suite numbers for a whopping majority of Google business listings. Even though you enter a suite number in Google My Business, it doesn’t translate into the “Suite #” field in Google MapMaker — it simply gets eliminated. Google also pays more attention to the location (pin) marker of the business when it comes to determining the actual location and less to the actual words people enter in as the address, as there can be multiple ways to name a street address. Google’s Possum update recently introduced a filter for search queries that is based on location. We’ve seen this has to do with the address itself and how close other businesses in the same industry are to your location. Whether or not you have a suite number in Google My Business has nothing to do with it.
Darren Shaw from Whitespark, an expert on everything related to citations, says:
“You often can’t control the suite number on your citations. Some sites force the suite number to appear before the address, some after the address, some with a # symbol, some with “Ste,” and others with “Suite.” If minor discrepancies like these in your citations affected your citation consistency or negatively impacted your rankings, then everyone would have a problem.”
In summary, if your citations look great but are missing the suite number, move along. There are most likely more important things you could be spending time on that would actually impact your ranking.
Truth: Say your business name is “State Farm: Bob Smith,” yet one citation lists you as “Bob Smith Insurance” and another as “Bob Smith State Farm.” As Mike Blumenthal states: “Put a little trust in the algorithm.” If Google was incapable of realizing that those 3 names are really the same business (especially when their address & phone number are identical), we’d have a big problem on our hands. There would be so many duplicate listings on Google we wouldn’t even begin to be able to keep track. Currently, I only generally see a lot of duplicates if there are major discrepancies in the address and phone number.
Darren Shaw also agrees on this:
“I see this all the time with law firms. Every time a new partner joins the firm or leaves the firm, they change their name. A firm can change from “Fletcher, McDonald, & Jones” to “Fletcher, Jones, & Smith” to “Fletcher Family Law” over the course of 3 years, and as long as the phone number and address stay the same, it will have no negative impact on their rankings. Google triangulates the data it finds on the web by three data points: name, address, and phone number. If two of these are a match, and then the name is a partial match, Google will have no problem associating those citations with the correct listing in GMB.”
Truth: SEO companies use this as a scare tactic, and it works very well. They have a small business pay them for citation cleanup. They’ll do a scan of your incorrect data and send you a list of hundreds of directories that have your information wrong. This causes you to gasp and panic and instantly realize you must hire them to spend hours cleaning all this up, as it must be causing the ranking of your listing on Google to tank.
Let’s dive into an example that I’ve seen. Local.com is a site that feeds to hundreds of smaller directories on newspaper sites. If you have a listing wrong on Local.com, it might appear that your listing is incorrect on hundreds of directories. For example, these three listings are on different domains, but if you look at the pages they’re identical and they all say “Local.com” at the top:
Should this cause you to panic? No. Fixing it on Local.com itself should fix all the hundreds of other places. Even if it didn’t, Google hasn’t even indexed any of these URLs. (Note: they might index my examples since I just linked to them in this Moz article, so I’m including some screenshots from while I was writing this):
If Google hasn’t even indexed the content, it’s a good sign that the content doesn’t mean much and it’s nothing you should stress about. Google would have no incentive or reason to index all these different URLs due to the fact that the content on them is literally the same. Additionally, no one links to them (aside from me in this article, of course).
As Darren Shaw puts it,
“This one really irks me. There are WAY more important things for you to spend your time/money on than trying to fix a listing on a site like scranton.myyellowpageclassifieds.biz. Chances are, any attempt to update this listing would be futile anyway, because small sites like these are basically unmanaged. They’re collecting their $200/m in Adsense revenue and don’t have any interest in dealing with or responding to any listing update requests. In our Citation Audit and Cleanup service we offer two packages. One covers the top 30 sites + 5 industry/city-specific sites, and the other covers the top 50 sites + 5 industry/city-specific sites. These are sites that are actually important and valuable to local search. Audit and cleanup on sites beyond these is generally a waste of time and money.”
People often wonder what might happen to their NAP issues if they cancel their subscription with a company like Yext or Moz Local. Although these companies don’t do anything to intentionally cause old data to come back, there have been some recent interesting findings around what actually happens when you cancel.
Truth: In one case, Phil Rozek did a little case study for a business that had to cancel Moz Local recently. The good news is that although staying with them is generally a good decision, this business didn’t seem to have any major issues after cancelling.
Yext claims on their site that they don’t do anything to push the old data back that was previously wrong. They explain that when you cancel, “the lock that was put in place to protect the business listing is no longer present. Once this occurs, the business listing is subject to the normal compilation process at the search engine, online directory, mobile app, or social network. In fact, because Yext no longer has this lock in place, Yext has no control over the listing directly at all, and the business listing data will now act as it normally would occur without Yext.”
Nyagoslav Zhekov just recently published a study on cancelling Yext and concluded that most of the listings either disappear or revert back to their previous incorrect state after cancelling. It seems that Yext acts as a sort of cover on top of the listing, and once Yext is cancelled, that cover is removed. So, there does seem to be some risk with cancelling Yext.
In summary, there is definitely a risk when you decide to cancel an ongoing automated service that was previously in place to correct your citations. It’s important for people to realize that if they decide to do this, they might want to budget for some manual citation building/cleanup in case any issues arise.
Many Local SEO companies have the impression that citation building is the only type of backlinking strategy needed for small businesses to rank well in the 3-pack. According to this survey that Bright Local did, 72% of Local SEOs use citation building as a way of building links.
Truth: Local SEO Guide found in their Local Search Ranking Factors study that although citations are important, if that’s the only backlinking strategy you’re using, you’re most likely not going to rank well in competitive markets. They found also found that links are the key competitive differentiator even when it comes to Google My Business Rankings. So if you’re in a competitive industry or market and want to dominate the 3-pack, you need to look into additional backlinking strategies over and above citations.
Darren adds more clarity to the survey’s results by stating,
“They’re saying that citations are still very important, but they are a foundational tactic. You absolutely need a core base of citations to gain trust at Google, and if you don’t have them you don’t have a chance in hell at ranking, but they are no longer a competitive difference maker. Once you have the core 50 or so citations squared away, building more and more citations probably isn’t what your local SEO campaign needs to move the needle further.”
This was a question that has come up a number of times with our team. If you have a restaurant that once had a phone number but then closes its doors, and a new law firm opens up down the street and gets assigned that phone number, should the lawyer worry about all the listings that exist for the restaurant (since they’re in different industries)?
Truth: I reached out to Nyagoslav Zhekov, the Director of Local Search at Whitespark, to get the truth on this one. His response was:
“As Google tries to mimic real-life experiences, sooner or later this negative experience will result in some sort of algorithmic downgrading of the information by Google. If Google manages to figure out that a lot of customers look for and call a phone number that they think belongs to another business, it is logical that it will result in negative user experience. Thus, Google will assign a lower trust score to a Google Maps business record that offers information that does not clearly and unquestionably belong to the business for which the record is. Keeping in mind that the phone number is, by design and by default, the most unique and the most standardized information for a business (everything else is less standardize-able than the phone number), this is, as far as I am concerned, the most important information bit and the most significant identifier Google uses when determining how trustworthy particular information for a business is.”
He also pointed out that users finding the phone number for the restaurant and calling it continually would be a negative experience for both the customer and the law firm (who would have to continually confirm they’re not a restaurant) so there would be added benefit in getting these listings for the restaurant marked closed or removed.
Since Darren Shaw gave me so much input for this article, he also wanted to add a seventh myth that he comes across regularly:
“This one is maybe more of a mis-labelling problem than a myth, but your listing at Google isn’t really a citation. At Whitespark we refer to Google, Bing, and Apple Maps as ‘Core Search Engines’ (yes, Yahoo has been demoted to just a citation). The word 'citation’ comes from the concept of 'citing’ your sources in an academic paper. Using this conceptual framework, you can think of your Google listing as the academic paper, and all of your listings out on the web as the sources that cite the business. Your Google listing is like the queen bee and all the citations out there are the workers contributing to keep the queen bee alive and healthy.”
Hopefully that lays some of the fears and myths around citations to rest. If you have questions or ideas of other myths on this topic, we’d love to hear about it in the comments!
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Social media takes time, and finding the head space to consistently do it well over and over again is challenging.
That’s why social media automation is so important.
The thing to remember with any type of social media automation is that you will still have to spend some time on social media.
Whether you are replying to a customer or commenting on another person’s post, the human factor still has to be there.
With the social media world going mobile, interaction is always important.
But for those things you can automate, let’s have a look at some of the best social media automation tools available. These tools will help save you time and can do a few other things to make your life easier too.
Hootsuite is a dream for all of us social media lovers. There are so many actions that Hootsuite can help with that if you have not learned the full scope of this social media automation tool, then I recommend you start looking it over. If you are serious about social media… then Hootsuite it is.
Hootsuite gives you the ability to keep track of many social media channels at once. This is perfect for those who work in the social media world, because it truly does make life a lot easier. Not only does it allow you to have multiple channels, it also lets you know if your brand has been mentioned.
Knowing when your brand is mentioned allows you to know what consumers are saying in real time. If it is great news that is being mentioned, the information can be used to let your company know what is working for the consumer. If the news is not so great, the problem can be addressed swiftly.
Hootsuite works across many different platforms and allows scheduled posts. It will also help to determine the best times to be posting in order to garner the most attention.
Using Hootsuite Advanced Search
Another wonderful thing about Hootsuite is the fact that it allows you to search for many different things.
One of the little used tools in the advanced tools is searching by sentiment. People can find out what is being said about a company and brand, by clicking the Advanced Search and ticking the box that will show both positive and negative mentions.
Sure, we all like to read the good stuff, but the negative can also be a good thing. If there is a negative Tweet it gives the company time to address it quickly. Knowing what your customers are looking for and dislike can be a great advantage.
Buffer makes posting to social media a whizz. All you have to do is add your post to the queue and it will be posted for you. No need to even schedule a time that the post will be posted because Buffer will take care of that too.
Buffer is also known for providing great analytics. If you want to know what is working and not working, these analytics will let you know. Buffer is always adding more to the analytics so keep an eye on this application.
Want to keep track of acampaign link? Buffer now makes this available by making sure that each and every link is unique to each update or post. Be sure to use the web app and click on the settings, then go to “Campaign Tracking”. Yes, this makes all of us social media mavens happy because we are able to see the analytics and study them.
Crowdfire works with both Twitter and Instagram. Want to know who unfollowed you? Crowdfire is the source to go to have your questions answered.
In both business and personal life, we want to know about those who are following us and those who have decided they do not like the posts we are putting put up. Crowdfire also allows you to find those Twitter users who are inactive and delete them if you want to.
This platform helps the user find others that are relevant with the “Copy Followers” feature. Checking the relationship between any two Instagram or Twitter accounts is possible with the Crowdfire platform.
With Instagram, Crowdfire has the ability to schedule posts, use viral hashtags and even suggest images. The clean, engage and grow technique cuts out a lot of the time that would be used to get the tasks completed without this application. A great way to keep Twitter and Instagram accounts under control and up-to-date.
CoSchedule is a writer’s dream. This management tool allows for articles to be scheduled, blog post management, scheduling for marketing projects and social media management.
CoSchedule allows for the organization that many writers and social media marketers yearn for. If you have given up on complex spreadsheets like some of us have, CoSchedule is a gift of organization.
CoSchedule allows for the scheduling of posts and will suggest the best time to send out your posts. Over 60 messages can be scheduled at a time. This number of post allowance frees up time in order to answer customers or to interact with others. You can also collaborate with your team.
Socialert automates your hashtag search and allows a user to analyze what is happening on Twitter for your twitter campaigns in realtime.
From digital marketers to established brands and media agencies, everyone can make the most out of their twitter campaigns with this hashtag tracking tool.
You can also use socialert to track event hashtags and monitor your brand as well.
If you are really interested in how your twitter marketing works for you than this is the application to be using.
BuzzSumo allows for many different tasks to be accomplished.
Here is a short list of just a few of the things that BuzzSumo helps with:
Finding great quality content along with all of the statistics will allow you to be able to know what is working with the consumer and what is not.
Searching for viral content and the analytics to go with it has never been easier. Reaching out to a list of authors and establishing relationships with them is also worthwhile while using BuzzSumo.
Remember, influencers already have a following built up, so if you are able to gather information and share it with their audience it will amplify its reach. Building relationships with influencers always pays off in the end.
Scoop.it allows for content publishing in less time than any other social media automation application.
With Scoop.it content can be curated from other sources and shared with your opinion or angle. It also allows posts to be shared across social media platforms with the push of a button. Searching for content is easy with the use of the search bar for a particular topic.
Scoop.it is great for when you want to share something on a certain niche or topic. It also allows for freedom from writing all of your own content.
Looking for ideas on topics and what is getting traffic? Head over to Scoop.it and I bet you will be mildly surprised.
Post Planner is a helper when it comes to finding, planning and posting content that helps to increase followers and visibility on Twitter and Facebook. Finding content that works and will draw customers to your website is what post planner does best.
With Post Planner the user can actively choose photos, articles and even statuses to share.
Having issues with content creation? Post Planner will certainly fill the void when needed. Hit that writing block or just need something intelligent to share? Try Post Planner!
SocialPilot is a marketing tool with social media scheduling for marketers and social media management teams. SocialPilot allows you to collaborate with your team by sharing their social media calendar.
Over 500 posts can be shared to 200 social media accounts. Bulk scheduling of posts and updates is easy with SocialPilot. To use bulk scheduling all the user has to do is upload a file in CSV format or text. The bulk text will then go out as scheduled.
Looking for article topics to write about? SocialPilot takes care of that too so that you do not have to wrack your brain trying to think of something when in a pinch. Separate account groups and calendars for each of your clients keeps things organized and helps with team communication.
Sprout Social has some great analytic tools for those interested in growing their following on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and more. That being stated, here are a few other things that Sprout Social will help with.
Sprout Social has many valuable tools that can both increase business revenue and help social media managers remain organized and save time.
Zapier allows you to link your web apps together to streamline your information and make things a whole lot easier.
Once the apps are connected it is then possible to pass the information between them creating workflows which are named zaps. Zapier will automatically finish routine tasks so that you are able to complete other tasks that need your attention. Having the ability to plan and build workflows results in more work being completed and staying organized.
Zapier is great for those who want to integrate process and automation into a business. The next wonderful gift is that building process and automation does not include having to know how to code because this application will handle it for you. Can’t put out a bit of code? Do not get discouraged because Zapier will keep things stress free.
Data entry getting to be too much? This is another task that Zapier handles like a pro. Data entry can be so time consuming and who wants to spend a few hours with data entry? Most users would agree that cutting down on the time it takes to do data entry is something to be happy about.
The above social media automation tools are designed to be helpful and save you time.
Whether you are a small business owner or a social media manager in a large corporation, these tools will prove to be more than helpful.
Learning what each automation tool can accomplish will surprise even the most social media savvy folks around.
Guest Author: Along with social media marketing Pankaj Narang is determined to shape his ideas into perfect products. CoFounder of Socialert, he believes in coming up with engaging tools to redefine the face of social media marketing. You can check his blog here.
The post The 11 Best Social Media Automation Tools For Smart Content Marketers appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.
There comes a time in every savvy business owner’s life when they know they must step up their social media presence.
It should already be a given that you are utilizing, at least one social media platform.
However, even those who are actively engaged in social media may begin to feel that their current promotional efforts just aren’t producing the results that they would like.
If this is you, then it may be time for you to start working with a digital influencer.
A digital influencer is anyone with authority in your brand’s niche. However, they can’t just be knowledgeable, they must also have the ability to reach a large audience.
Practically anyone can be a digital influencer. Examples include celebrities, journalists, social media sensations, bloggers and micro-influencers.
Your network determines your net worth. This is an old adage that many successful entrepreneurs swear by.
When you align yourself with a digital influencer, you’re giving yourself major cool points. People love to associate with people or things that are popular.
Think back to your high school days. Who didn’t want to be associated with the cool kids?
But I’m sure you’re not so much concerned with cool points, as you are with your financial bottom line.
The reality is that no matter how many times you toot your own horn, it won’t have the same effect as someone else doing the bragging for you.
According to Nielson’s Global Trust and Advertising Report, 92% of consumers trust the recommendation of products from friends and family over the actual brand itself.
But if this isn’t convincing enough, here are some other reasons why you should consider working with an influencer.
A simple Google search or social media search will put you in contact with a plethora of influencers.
For example, if you’re looking for fashion bloggers, you can enter the keyword “top fashion blogs”, or search for #fashionblogger on social media. Alternatively, you can use influencer marketing tools such as Traackr, Buzzsumo, TapInfluence, or BlogDash.
Make sure you are selective about who you work with. You don’t want to use someone just because they have a huge following, especially if their following is not relevant to your brand, or their users aren’t engaged.
Be smart and strategic. You should thoroughly research them beforehand.
You may ask the following questions before choosing an influencer:
You need to take all of these things into consideration before choosing your influencer.
You may already have a few people in mind that you’d like to collaborate with. If so, now is the fun part where you and the influencer can get creative with advertising.
Here’s 5 ideas to get you started.
Purchasing an advertisement from your influencer is quick, easy and effective.
You can find examples of this in the fitness world, when fitness influencers promote brands of fitness clothing and protein powders. These posts are usually accompanied with some sort of brand discount.
Check out this recent instagram post from hugely successful fitness trainer Massy Arias.
See how this post seems natural? She is showing enthusiasm, but also lists why she loves this product.
To her, it’s not just another protein powder. It’s organic and healthy for expectant mothers, which also is right now. She’s reaching multiple demographics. Finally, she ends her post with a discount, providing even more incentive for her followers to try the Tru supplements.
Blog posts are an excellent way to market your product.
There are many advantages to utilizing blog posting as a marketing option, but perhaps the biggest one is that it increases your visibility as a brand.
If you team up with a credible influencer who has a large audience, chances are your search rankings could go up and may show at the top search results using certain keywords. It’s an SEO dream.
The influencer can cut right to the chase, and create a blog post review about your product. Or they can do a full on tutorial, demonstrating step-by-step instructions of how your product or service works.
According to Inc.com, posts with visual content garner 650% more engagement than posts without.
This is demonstrated beautifully by bloggers at The Crafting Chicks. Their post about Disneyland is effective because not only are they plugging the brand, but they’re also giving tips that will help the consumer save time and money.
It’s not enough to simply talk about a product. A reader must come away from your blog feeling more informed than when they initially arrived.
Social media takeovers are becoming increasingly more and more popular, especially with the addition of Facebook Live and Snapchat.
It’s also a great way to promote engagement with both loyal customers and new followers.
Have an influencer take over your account, posting pics and answering questions from your followers.
A great takeover experience is fun and will leave a lasting impression on your followers.
One brand that has done this well is Capital One. They teamed up with popular influencers and had them post their favorite meaningful memories. Each post was accompanied with their created hashtag #walletstories.
Now if you look at #walletstories, you see plenty of other posters joining in on the fun. Users feel inspired, and Capital One gets more engagement. It’s a win-win for everyone.
Who doesn’t like to receive free stuff? Giveaways are always a fan favorite!
If you want to maximize your exposure, team up with multiple influencers on the same day.
Choose a product you’d like to generate some interest for, and have them mention that they’ll be giving away the product for free to one lucky person.
To be considered, users must use your branded hashtag or post about your brand. This is a cool way to introduce a new product, while generating social media buzz.
Tech influencer Andru Edwards recently teamed up with Xbox One S to do a giveaway. In fact, Andru is constantly doing giveaways to his 43,000 followers.
Twitter is a great place to do a giveaway for multiple reasons. Whenever people search for the hashtag #giveaway, they’ll see yours and instantly be directed to your page.
Also, followers can like, respond and repost any tweet they see that interests them, providing even more of an opportunity for brand visibility.
Everywhere you look, you see vloggers and bloggers giving their opinion on products and services in a variety of industries. Throw your name in the ring by teaming up with an influencer, who specializes in your industry.You pay them to review their product, and in return, they should give you a glowing review.
Be sure to work with people who are genuine, and not just out looking to make a buck. You want influencers to speak naturally, and not sound like they’re reading from a script.
They can only do this, however, if they are genuinely excited to use your product.
Beauty vlogging YouTube sensation Jeffrey Star demonstrated this with Kylielip kits.
Not only does Jeffrey speak passionately about the product, but he’s just plain entertaining to watch. He gives specifics about why Kylie lip kits rock, and also provides a clear demonstration.
In just a few short days, his product review video produced over 1 million views. Do you think Kylie is happy about that? You bet!
If you’re looking for exposure, you could always gift a product to an influencer in your niche.
It’s important to note that since you aren’t paying this influencer, then you should have zero expectations about them mentioning your brand.
This is why it makes sense to target influencers who have actually used your product, or something similar, and posted about it before.
If they really love your product, the likelihood that they’ll be raving about their free gift is ultra high.
Beauty blogger @teamlouise_ is a huge fan of Kylie Jenner. We know this because she posts about her many times on her IG feed. She recently mentioned that she was enjoying her new lip liner from Kylie Cosmetics. She hashtags the product, and also directs people to her blog.
Do we know that this product was gifted to her? No. But that’s exactly how it should be. An advertisement shouldn’t scream gift because, let’s face it, that’s a bit tacky.
A well-promoted product should seem effortless. Regardless of if it is a gift or not, Kylie Cosmetics is gaining mass exposure. Louise will likely be receiving a free product any day now, if she hasn’t already!
There’s one last point that needs to be addressed.
While it’s imperative that you educate influencers about the product, you should take the time to build a genuine relationship with them, and allow influencers the space to be creative.
They bring a tremendous amount of value, and may have interesting ideas about how to advertise your product.
Like any other relationship, they should be treated with respect. You want the experience to be mutually beneficial for all.
Have you used a social media influencer before? If so, comment about your experience below.
Guest Author: Pauline Cabrera is a digital strategist based in Toronto, Ontario. She help bloggers & businesses get noticed online using effective internet marketing strategies combined with web design, SEO + email marketing.
The post 6 Ways to Significantly Boost Your Sales With Digital Influencers appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.
Posted by lkolowich
It’s been years since the power’s shifted away from marketers and advertisers and in favor of Internet consumers. Now more than ever, people are empowered to choose their own experiences online. They’re actively avoiding ad content — and instead of living by advertisers’ rule books, they’re deciding what to click on, what to read, what to download, and what to buy … and what not to.
And they have a lot of choices.
When inbound marketers like us are looking to generate more leads from our website, we need to think not just about how to capture people’s attention, but how to capture it in a way that makes people want to learn more from us. A smart lead generation strategy includes creating valuable offers and experiences that fit seamlessly into the context of what people already like and want to do online. It’s the consumer’s world; us marketers are just living in it.
People read calls-to-action that say things like “Sign up here!” as basically synonymous with “We’re gonna spam you.” If you’re recycling these same old lead generation tactics over and over again, it’s quickly going to become white noise. But calls-to-action that fit into the context of what a person’s doing already? That’s smart marketing.
If you want to increase the conversion rate on your website, you need to get smart and creative with your lead generation tactics. Asking for blog subscriptions and gating high-quality content like comprehensive guides, ebooks, and whitepapers behind landing pages still works, but you have to be smart about where you’re offering them on your website. And they shouldn’t be your only lead generation plays.
There are many ways to get creative with lead generation to make sure you’re reaping the benefits of the traffic you’re working so hard to get. Here are some lead generation ideas for B2B and B2C marketers to try. Test them out, tweak them according to your audience’s preferences, and share your own ideas you have in the comments.
CTA placement can have a profound effect on the number of leads you’re generating from your site. And yet, not many marketers are spending a whole lot of time thinking about, testing, and tweaking CTA placement to optimize their conversions. Many claim that as long as they place their primary CTA above the fold, they’re good to go. (Side note: Even though putting primary CTAs above the fold is often considered a best practice, even that is still up for debate.)
Start your CTA placement tests by putting them where people’s eyes naturally go on a webpage. An eyetracking study found that when people read a webpage, we naturally start by looking in the upper lefthand corner of the page, and then move our eyes in an F-shaped pattern.
[Image credit: Nielsen Norman Group]
Here’s what that looks like:
[Image credit: Envato Studio]
You can capitalize on this natural eye path by placing important information in these key spots. Here’s an example of what that might look like on a website:
[Image credit: Envato Studio]
Notice how the business name is placed in the top left, which is where a person would look first. The navigation bar takes over the #2 spot, followed by the value proposition at #3 and the primary CTA at #4.
Does this order look familiar to you? When you’re browsing the web, you might have noticed that many of them put the primary CTA in the top right corner — in that #2 spot. Here are a few real-life examples:
In the last example from BarkBox, you’ll notice that the secondary CTAs still follow that F-pattern.
Keep this in mind when you’re placing your CTAs, especially on your homepage and your other popular webpages — and don’t be afraid to experiment based on how it makes sense for your own marketing story should be told.
Pop-ups have been vilified in the last few years — and quite understandably, too. Far too many marketers use them in a way that disrupts people’s experience on their website instead of enhancing it.
But pop-ups do work — and, more importantly, when they’re used in a way that’s helpful and not disruptive, they can be a healthy part of your inbound strategy. So if you’re wondering whether you should be using pop-up forms, the short answer is yes — as long as you use them in an inbound-y way. First and foremost, that means offering something valuable and relevant to the people visiting that site page.
When you’re considering what type of pop-up to use and what action should trigger them, think about how people are engaging with your pages. When someone reads a blog post, for instance, they’re typically going to scroll down the page to read the content. In that case, you might consider using a slide-in box that appears when someone’s scrolled a certain percentage of the way down the page.
Here’s a great example from a post on OfficeVibe’s blog about how managers gain respect. While I was scrolling, a banner appeared at the bottom of the screen offering me a live report of employee engagement — an offer that was perfectly relevant, given the post was aimed at managers.
It felt helpful, not disruptive. In other words, it was a responsible use of a pop-up.
Similarly, someone who’s spending time reading through a product page might find value in a time-based pop-up that appears when a visitor’s been on the page for a certain number of seconds, like this one from Ugmonk:
The most important takeaway here is to align what you offer on a pop-up with the webpage you’re adding it to, and make sure it’s actually adding substantial value.
If you’re looking for a good free tool to get started with inbound-y pop-up forms, I’d recommend you try HubSpot Marketing Free. We built the Lead Flows feature within this free tool to help marketers generate more leads across their entire website without sacrificing user experience.
It’s common for business bloggers to add an end-of-post banner CTA at the end of every one of their blog posts, like this one:
In fact, you might already be including CTAs like this on your own business blog posts. At HubSpot, we include an end-of-post banner CTA on every single one of our posts, and we also add slide-in CTAs to blog posts that prove themselves to convert visitors into leads at a high rate via organic traffic.
But let’s admit it: At first glance, these types of CTAs look a little bit like ads, which can result in banner blindness from our readers. That’s why it’s thanks to a recent study conducted by my colleague Pam Vaughan that our blogging team has added one more, highly effective lead generation tactic to their arsenal: anchor text CTAs.
In Vaughan’s study, she found that anchor text CTAs are responsible for most of our blog leads. On blog posts that included both an anchor text CTA and an end-of-post banner CTA, she found that 47–93% of a blog post’s leads came from the anchor text CTA alone, whereas just 6% of the post’s leads came from the end-of-post banner CTA.
What’s an anchor text CTA, you might be wondering? It’s a standalone line text in a blog post linked to a landing page that’s styled as an H3 or an H4 to make it stand out from the rest of the post’s body copy. On HubSpot’s blog, we’ll typically put an anchor text CTA between two paragraphs in the introduction, like this:
What makes anchor text CTAs so effective? Let’s say you search for “press release template” in Google, and you click on the first organic search result — which is currently our blog post about how to write a press release, which I’ve screenshotted above.
As a searcher, the next thing you’d probably do is quickly scan the post to see if it satisfies your search. One of the first things that’ll catch your eye is an anchor text that reads, “Download our free press release template here” — which happens to be exactly what you were looking for when you searched “press release template.” There’s a pretty good chance you’re going to click on it.
This is where relevancy becomes critical. The anchor text CTA works really well in this case because it satisfies the visitor’s need right away, within the first few paragraphs of the blog post. The more relevant the anchor text CTA is to what the visitor is looking for, the better it’ll perform. Simply adding an anchor text CTA near the top of every blog post won’t necessarily mean it’ll generate a ton more leads — and frankly, you’ll risk pissing off your loyal subscribers.
If you decide you’d like to experiment with anchor text CTAs, be selective about the posts you add them to. At HubSpot, we typically add them to old posts that rank well in search. We purposely limit our use of anchor text CTAs on brand new posts — because most of the traffic we get to those posts are already leads and some of the biggest fans of our content, whom we want to have the best possible user experience. (You can read more about anchor text CTAs here.)
Every time you launch a new marketing campaign, posting the good news on your blog should be a key part of your launch plan. It’s a great way to let your existing subscribers know what new content, products, and features you’re putting out there, and it also helps introduce these launches to brand-new audiences.
At HubSpot, we’ve found the best strategy for promoting campaigns on the blog is to write one official launch post, followed by a handful of follow-up posts that are relevant to the campaign but are written in the style of a normal blog post. We typically scatter these follow-up posts over the weeks and months following that initial launch.
When done correctly, launch posts and their supporting blog posts have very different formulas:
Let me show you an example. Earlier this year, HubSpot partnered with Iconosquare to write an ebook on how to use Instagram for business. A few days after we launched the offer online, we published a launch post on HubSpot’s Marketing Blog specifically promoting it to our own audience. Here’s what that launch post looked like:
Notice it has a brief introduction of the topic, an introduction of the ebook as a helpful resource, a bulleted list of what’s inside the ebook, two in-line text CTAs pointing toward the ebook, and an end-of-post banner CTA.
Once we published that initial post, we published a series of follow-up blog posts about the same topic — in this case, Instagram for business — that supported the launch, but promoted it much more subtly. These posts covered topics like:
In each of these cases, we used keyword research to find long-tail keyword phrases related to our offer topic, and then wrote blog posts related to those highly searched terms and included CTAs to our offer.
The goal here? Both to expose our own audience to more content related to the offer and to expose our offer to a new audience: specifically, people who were searching for related topics on search engines, as we’ve found visitors who find our posts through organic search tend to convert at higher rates.
When you’re planning out your next campaign, be sure to include both a launch post and supportive, follow-up blog posts like these — and plan them all out using a blog editorial calendar like the simple one HubSpot’s blogging team uses with Google Calendar.
Top-of-the-funnel marketing metrics like traffic and brand awareness isn’t all social media is good for. It can still be a helpful — not to mention low-cost — source for lead generation.
In addition to promoting new blog posts and content to your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social sites, be sure to regularly post links to blog posts and even directly to the landing pages of offers that have historically performed well for lead generation. You’ll need to do a lead generation analysis of your blog to figure out which posts perform best for lead generation.
When you link directly to landing pages, be sure the copy in your social posts sets the expectation that clicking the link will send people to a landing page, like Canva did in this Facebook post:
Contests are another way to generate leads from social. Not only are they fun for your followers, but they can also teach you a whole lot about your audience while simultaneously engaging them, growing your reach, and driving traffic to your website.
In addition to posting links to lead generation forms, you’ll also want to make sure you’re using the real estate for lead generation that’s available to you on the social networks that you’re using. On Facebook for example, use the feature available for Pages that lets you put a simple call-to-action button at the top of your Facebook Page. It can help drive more traffic from your Facebook Page to lead generation forms like landing pages and contact sheets.
Here are more lead generation tips for Facebook, and for Twitter.
In addition to optimizing your webpages and social presence for leads, always be looking for opportunities to increase the traffic of your highest-converting pages by optimizing these pages for the keywords they’re already ranking for, and linking to these pages internally and externally.
I hope this list has helped spark some ideas for lead generation tactics to test for your own audience. If you’ve tried any of the tactics I’ve listed above, tell us about your experiences in the comments — and feel free to add more ideas to the list.
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Financial security can be paid for two ways. Get a job or become an entrepreneur.
Starting a business is often seen as a big bang approach. High risk and a big financial commitment. Find a bricks and mortar premises, commit to an expensive lease, hire staff and start marketing and selling your products and services.
Today all you need is a laptop, an Internet connection and just one idea.
Which one do I prefer?
I have done both. One trapped me and the other gave me the financial and mental freedom I had been seeking for decades.
It came out of one habit that I committed to every day.
Finding “that” job often provides a false sense of security.
“That” craved for career can be destroyed by a corporate takeover or the cruel game of office politics. A job for life is being replaced by a 12 month contract or the freelancer.
But in a world that is in the majority a knowledge economy, the opportunities to reach the world that is thirsting for your experience and expertise and get paid for it is now needed. Becoming a freelancer or entrepreneur is becoming a solution.
Now I can hear you saying……“I have a day job and don’t have the time”. A day job is just 8 hours…..the raw reality? There are another sixteen hours available.
Arnold Bennett highlighted this in a small 33-page book “How to Live on 24 Hours a Day” (written over a hundred years ago). He encouraged us to live a day within a day that can take us from ordinary to extraordinary.
Many of us go to work and come home and engage in trivial activities. This includes television, reading a glossy magazine, sending text messages or even playing with Snapchat.
Investing in your own creation, production and distribution of your experience, expertise and passion while holding down a day job can transform your life.
How do I know?
That is what happened to me when I stumbled into a social web that offered a promise of freedom to create and reach the world one word at a time.
In his book “Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World”, Cal Newport dives into the difference between deep work and shallow work. Any of us that are trapped in the never-ending cycles of responding to emails and attending meetings know the feeling.
At the end of the day you are asking “that” question.
“What have I done or created today that is of any consequence.”
But there is a solution to that nagging question. It doesn’t matter if you are a knowledge worker within the corporate machine, an entrepreneur or a creative.
According to Cal Newport there are several options to doing “Deep Work”. It is not one size fits all. It depends on how you like working and living and also depends on your particular life circumstance.
Monastic Approach: Cutting yourself off from the world to focus and remove distraction.
Bi-Modal Approach: This is where you may work and perform the day-to-day work in one location and do your deep work at another. You then dive in and out of each space.
Journalist Approach: This is an approach where you seize the opportunity to perform “Deep Work” at random as time and your schedule allows.
Rhythmic Approach: This where you set apart a certain time of day to create and block it out every day and commit to that ritual.
These are not the only approaches but they provide some ideas for a habit that could change your life.
In 2009 I started my blog and my approach was more like a journalist. I often created late at night but also on weekends. But as the journey continued the ritual changed to a rhythmic habit.
I rose early at 4.30am for 5 days a week and turned off all email, social networks and other distractions. The ritual included making a coffee, a mug of lemon and ginger tea and sitting down and strapping myself in.
I researched, wrote and published. The last step was pushing that content out to the waiting world.
When you do that one day at a time for years then things start to happen. A passion project became a serious business. Done part time before most people are awake.
That habit was an investment in me. But when I started I didn’t understand its far reaching consequences.
In 1998 a journalist David Isay decided to capture the stories of ordinary people. He visited the flop houses of New York and sat down with men that had been living and surviving for decades in run down buildings.
After publishing their interviews he went back and showed them their one page stories in print. One man on seeing his name in black and white, seized the book out of David’s hand and ran down the corridor and shouted “I exist…..I exist……I exist!”
These men had to wait for someone else to discover them……to share their story with the world. The visibility had also provided a validation. It is something we as humans crave.
To be acknowledged is a powerful thing.
But on today’s social and mobile web we don’t have to wait for discovery or for permission.
We can create, publish and showcase our own existence without waiting for permission or to be “discovered”
We can choose to start something of consequence. We can choose to create. When you start sharing that with the planet, the magic of that distillation of your thoughts and genius is a place to grow and to be validated.
The social web with its platforms and networks is a feedback loop that will give you the feedback you need to evolve and grow.
I pose a new mantra. “I create, I publish, I exist”
So plan your day for making sure you have focused creative space. Block out time for “deep work”. Don’t make success an accident. Design your life, share your expertise, experience and passion.
We all have the opportunity to be craftsmen. To be creators and producers of content and media that belongs to you and not the corporation.
The habit of doing the “deep work” is not just about productivity. It goes much deeper than that.
It is a place where your learning goes to a new level one day at a time. Blocking out some hours for you. For your work. But……don’t keep your creation hidden from the world. Share it. That is where the magic happens.
It will fill the hole that gnaws at you every day if that opportunity to create in concentration is ignored.
You will feel a sense of accomplishment as a work that started as raw and rough becomes a piece of art that is yours. It will feed your soul.
That’s your life, your work and your creation.
You will look back in a year and wonder why you didn’t start the habit earlier.
But you must commit to making it happen and to investing in yourself. Responding to other people’s emails and attending meetings is not investing in your work.
It is just busyness.
One of the biggest challenges in life can be the habits that trap us in mediocrity or stop us growing and moving forward.
It’s your choice.
The post This One Habit Transformed My Life appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.
Posted by randfish
When it comes to certain kinds of backlinks, avoiding penalties can be a real gray area. How can you earn the benefits without gaining the scrutiny of Google? In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand will teach you which rules to follow to keep you safe and on the up-and-up, all while improving your link profile.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, we’re going to chat about a question we see a lot here at Moz, around what you should do with websites that you maybe design or build or do work for, your clients’ websites if you’re an agency or consultant, or a web designer or builder, sites that you own but are not your primary website, and widgets and embeds, blogrolls, all these kinds of things where you control the link infrastructure, or could control it, and should you.
I think one of the challenges here is to understand that many folks have recognized that, over the years, widgets, embeds, links from client websites have gotten other sites penalized, potentially even your sites penalized over the years, because you had all these links that you control pointing back to places, and to Google that can look really sketchy. So I want to talk through some best practices about how you can get link benefit and value from these places without getting yourself into trouble.
All right. The challenge here is let’s say that I own sneakerobsessed.com, but it is not my primary website, or maybe it’s a client’s website. But I do own sneakysneakers.com, and I’m thinking to myself, “Gosh, you know the fact that I control, I have the login for the admin here, the site owner, or me, would be fine with linking from these pages to these pages. What should I do there? I don’t want to get into trouble. But I would love to get some benefit, and I think that these links could help me. Should I:
A. Add a link from every page here to a bunch of pages here or to my homepage?
B. Should I link to a variety of my pages, like take a few of these and link them to my homepage, take a few others and link to some internal pages?
C. Should I use a single page on this website to link back to maybe my homepage?
The answer is kind of, it depends. It depends.
Anytime you’re referencing other content you’ve created or things that you’ve done, or recognition that you have, or someone else from your organization, you would naturally link over here. That’s the way you should play it, not with some specific process and checklist. Anything that matches a very standard pattern is going to be easily recognized by Google, and that can get you into trouble.
The only time you get into real trouble is if that blogroll is essentially just a paid manipulation. It’s technically a blog network. It’s not that you’re being editorially endorsed by someone else. They’re only linking to you because you’re linking to them. You get into that reciprocity challenge. That’s not to say you should never link to anyone who has you in their blogroll either. It’s just that this has to look natural and editorial to Google, or you can get in trouble.
Syndicators, by the way, it’s okay to link from every syndicated piece of content back to the original piece of content. In fact, that’s the way it should be. If you do your own syndication, like I do sometimes on Medium, where I put up my blog posts that I’ve already put on moz.com/rand on medium.com/randfish, then you should have each of those link back to their original pieces, and that’s just fine.
So the idea here is that you have this piece of content here that’s being embedded from your site. So Sneaker Obsessed, maybe the guys there went to Sneaky Sneakers. They saw a data graph of Nike shoes versus Adidas shoes sales over the last 12 months, and they were like, “Oh, man. I really want to show that. That’s awesome.” In fact, there’s a little “embed this graph onto your own website.” So they took that, and they put it on there.
You get into more dangerous territory with this type of thing when in the link between here there’s:
You’re much less likely to have problems if you:
That will keep you safe.
Hopefully, you will not encounter these problems. I think if you follow these rules, you’ll be in the safe zone, and you’ll also be benefiting from the link value that these can provide. I look forward to your comments. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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What is the best social media marketing tool on the market?
This is a question that has sparked many heated debates among marketers. With so many different social media management tools available and their importance to any social media marketer, it can be very difficult to find the right tool for you.
Ian Anderson Gray of the Seriously Social blog has partnered up with G2Crowd to find out which tool amongst the top 5 rated social media management tools on the market is the best.
The resulting infographic provides some very interesting results:
Infographic brought to you by Seriously Social and G2 Crowd
In this post, I will be looking at all of these tools and five others to find out which one is the best.
First, let’s look at what makes social media management tools so important to those who use social media for promotional purposes, as well as what features and results most of us need to get out of them.
The main things to look for in a social media management tool is if it makes you more productive and efficient.
Does it take you less time to manage all of your social accounts? Are you creating better social media campaigns and generally getting better results by using the tool? Is it making the process of managing multiple accounts easier?
With those end goals in mind, you’ll want to examine the following features in social media management dashboards:
The infographic also looks at some interesting criteria for rating each of the tools:
Now, let’s look into each individual tool to see how they fare against each other.
According to the infographic’s results, Agorapulse is the best social media marketing tool on the market. I’ve been using it myself for a few years now and I have to say, I agree with the reviews that made up the results from the infographic. So let’s examine this tool first.
The Agorapulse dashboard is very straightforward. Switching through all your accounts is easy, as they are all clearly listed on the left hand side of the dashboard. All of its features, such as the social media inbox, monitoring and publishing, are all at the top of the dashboard and easily accessible.
One of Agorapulse’s best features in my opinion is the social media inbox, because it makes it very easy to check all of the social media updates that require your attention. It works very much like an email account would – as you go through your inbox and read your notifications and respond to them, the queue grows smaller. You can create automated moderation rules, meaning that Agorapulse will then tag, flag, hide or assign content so that you get all the most relevant messages in your inbox.
If you find an update or comment as you go along that you want to save for later review, you can easily add custom tags and categorize them.
Another big feature is publishing and scheduling. You can publish posts to any of your networks, as well as schedule them, but the best part is the editorial calendar. Basically, you can schedule all of the updates that you want and see them in a beautiful calendar that makes it so much easier to stay organized and plan your social media updates.
Next comes the monitoring tool. You can use it to monitor all of your shares and mentions on social media, find out when someone mentions your Facebook Page, create searches for certain keywords on Twitter and monitor hashtags and places on Instagram.
When it comes to reporting, Agorapulse has created some of the most beautiful and detailed analytics reports among social media marketing tools. The reports focus on your audience, engagement and brand awareness – some of the most important metrics, especially to clients. Another really cool thing is that you can see how many posts and comments you’ve reviewed and what your response time and rate are.
I think that the feature that sets Agorapulse apart from most other dashboards is the CRM function. This feature makes it very easy to keep track of all of your followers and friends and find out whom your most engaged users are. You can also use Agorapulse to find out who your influencers and brand ambassadors are and who among your followers has the most followers themselves.
The more followers and friends you have, the more difficult it is to keep track of them, but with Agorapulse you can add custom tags so that you know who is a prospect, who is an influencer and so on. You also can see exactly what you’ve talked about with each user so that you’re never out of the loop.
Something else that’s worth mentioning is that the guys and gals of Agorapulse are very quick to respond to new features and changes coming out on various social networks.
Conclusion: Overall, Agorapulse is a truly great dashboard and I honestly can’t think of anything that I don’t like about it. The interface is easy to use and all of the features that we’re all usually looking for in a social media marketing tool are all there.
Postplanner used to be the tool for scheduling Facebook updates. Now, this is a much more widespread feature, so Postplanner has evolved quite a lot to include more cool features. Its main focus is now on helping marketers increase their engagement on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.
With Postplanner, you can easily identify the top performing content for any hashtag, topic or social media account, ranked by their virality. With this information, you can more easily come up with updates that will increase your engagement, reach and ultimately your traffic.
It’s also a pretty good content curation tool; all you need to do is add your favourite social accounts, blogs, hashtags and keywords to have a list of awesome content that you can easily share, as well as use for inspiration for your future posts.
Postplanner helps you decide what the best content is with their star rating, so that whenever you see a post with 4 or 5 stars, you’ll know it stands a better chance of getting you more engagement. The content is also categorized by Photos, Articles and Statuses so you can easily diversify your updates and keep your audience more interested and engaged.
In fact, PostPlanner claim that their features have helped marketers and other users get 650% more engagement than any other of the top social media marketing tools.
Scheduling content is also very easy. Their Plan feature lets you quickly schedule posts for Facebook and Twitter and arranges them in an easy to use calendar. You can also schedule reoccurring updates and use their cool Re-Cycle feature to revive all of your top updates so that you can make the most out of them.
Conclusion: PostPlanner is the perfect tool for those who want to increase their engagement and publish more targeted, engaging content, all from one place. That said, those who want more monitoring and reporting, might have to look elsewhere.
Hootsuite is probably the best-known social media marketing tool on the market, but also one of the most criticized. In the beginning, Hootsuite was the answer to all marketers’ prayers; now, though, more and more are sharing their grievances with the popular dashboard, from its add-on analytics to the price of its Pro and business plans as you add more team members.
Personally, my least favourite thing about Hootsuite is its interface. Although it’s not complicated per se, it is at times confusing and since there are so many other tools that are much easier to use out there, this is a real problem for me.
Another thing that I’m not a big fan of is the Hootsuite Ow.ly link shortener, which you can only track from within Hoosuite.
When it comes to some of its features though, Hootsuite are definitely back at the top of the list. You can connect your account to over 35 different social networks, which is definitely not something you’ll see with many other dashboards.
Another good feature is monitoring, as you can easily set up streams for monitoring keywords, hashtags, mentions, etc. That said, I’ve sometimes found that it doesn’t get all of the results you’d get if you searched directly on the social network.
When it comes to scheduling updates, you can set the date and time yourself or use the AutoSchedule feature that publishes your post at the best time for increased impact.
Its reporting feature works with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google and Ow.ly. The reports aren’t always that great and you could probably get more information by simply going to your Facebook Insights or Twitter analytics.
With the Contacts feature, you can see who is following you and whom you are following. From there, you can follow and unfollow, as well as organize everyone in customizable lists.
The Hootsuite Campaigns feature, which is now in Beta, allows you to create contests, sweepstakes and Instagram and Twitter galleries easily.
Conclusion: While Hootsuite is still definitely one of the top social media marketing tools, its high prices and its bland, sometimes confusing interface are definitely worth considering before deciding on the perfect tool for you.
Sendible is a full feature social media marketing tool that allows you to engage with your audience, schedule updates, monitor social activity and measure your results. It works with Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and blogs/publishing websites.
You can post updates to any network or multiple networks from the same ‘compose message’ box, similar to Hootsuite’s. Another similar feature to Hootsuite is how you can select to have your updates published automatically at the times they consider best for boosting engagement and reach.
Sendible also has a RSS Auto Posting feature that posts relevant content at regular intervals throughout the day so you’re always providing awesome content for your audience to engage with. If you have a blog, Sendible will automatically share any new posts to your social networks.
There is also a cool calendar where you can oversee all of your team’s publishing activity on social media that you can also easily re-arrange by dragging and dropping updates.
Its monitoring feature allows you to keep track of any mentions of your brand, while also creating an automatic sentiment analysis that highlights any messages that need your attention immediately. What’s cool about this is that Sendible doesn’t just find Twitter mentions, but mentions from all around the social web, so that you know everything being said about you online, and the overall sentiment behind it.
When it comes to CRM, Sendible strives to find you prospects and opportunities. In fact, if you want it to, it can look for prospects and leads constantly and even start conversations for you with the Twitter welcome messages and Twitter auto replies.
Another cool feature (just like Agorapulse) is that you can see all past conversations you’ve had with different users that is great for finding new leads and improving connections. You can even import your email lists or create new ones so that you can reach the prospect you’ve found via more traditional marketing channels like e-mail and SMS.
Sendible also provide pretty good analytics that you can customize. It also integrates with Google Analytics so that you can easily see how your social media and email campaigns are helping you improve your website traffic.
Conclusion: Sendible is a pretty good tool that has all the main features you can look for in a social media management tool. The interface is easy to use and it has some cool extra features such as the email and SMS marketing integration.
SproutSocial has a very clean, easy-to-use interface. It connects with all of the major social networks: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook and Google+.
When it comes to engagement, SproutSocial has a feature very similar to one of Agorapulse’s: the Smart Inbox. Just like with the aforementioned tool, SproutSocial’s Smart Inbox gathers all of your social messages in one place that’s easy to manage and make sure you’ve responded to everything that needs your attention.
You can schedule posts for all of your accounts from one box (similar to several other tools), which are then placed in a shared content calendar where you and your team can review and edit all of the upcoming updates.
You can also get pretty good analytics reports for Twitter, Facebook and Instagram but one of the features that makes it stand out is that you can also review each of your team member’s activity and engagement.
Conclusion: SproutSocial is definitely worth a try; the interface is beautiful and intuitive and it has good tools for engaging and scheduling updates.
Buffer is a social media management tool designed to help you post more easily to your social networks. It works for both individuals as well as teams that want to collaborate.
Buffer is first and foremost a publishing tool that aims to help you increase engagement, reach, clicks and ultimately traffic to your website. It works with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+ and LinkedIn.
You can use Buffer to publish and schedule content, curate your favourite websites and blogs to easily share new content with your followers, see quick analytics for each of your posts and get more detailed analysis with the Business plan.
One of Buffer’s best features in my opinion is its integration with Pablo by Buffer. With Pablo, you can more easily create images to share with your audience. This is really useful, as images help increase engagement and traffic.
Conclusion: Buffer is a great tool, but mostly for those who are looking to increase their engagement, as it doesn’t have the full suite of features other tools like Agorapulse, Hootsuite or Sendible. As you upgrade to Business or Enterprise plans there are more features, but the prices are also much higher.
MavSocial is a social media management tool that allows you to connect your Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Youtube and LinkedIn accounts into one central dashboard.
On the main dashboard, you can monitor all of your social networks and the engagement and brand mentions so that you can quickly respond. You can also use it to create and manage social media campaigns and publish and schedule social media posts.
MavSocial has its own social inbox where you get all of your mentions, comments and replies from all connected social networks.
Similar to Buffer in a way, MavSocial aims to help you post better visual content to your social networks. MavSocial allows you access to a library of over 70 million royalty-free images from sources like Getty Images, Pixabay and more, and you can even edit your photos from within the tool.
Conclusion: MavSocial has everything you need from a social media management tool with the added feature of finding and adding images to your posts directly from within the tool.
Oktopost stand among all of the other social media marketing tools as it’s dedicated to B2B marketing. That said, its features are similar to most other dashboards.
With the menu on the left hand side of the screen and its different streams, Oktopost looks quite similar to the popular Hootsuite. The design is a bit cleaner and sleeker than Hootsuite in my opinion, making for a better browsing experience.
You can use Oktopost to easily monitor keywords, mentions of your brand, company pages and more, in a similar way to Hootsuite. It also has a Social Inbox where you can see every comment from all of your social accounts in one place.
Oktopost helps you post better content to your audiences with their content curation feature.
Social Amplification is probably my favourite feature from Oktopost. You can basically make use of your employees in an entirely new way, by helping them become thought leaders and brand advocates for your business.
Oktopost also provides detailed analytics and beautiful reports, and helps you track any conversions you make on social media.
Conclusion: Overall, Oktopost is a great tool for B2B companies and marketers, as it has most, if not all of the features you need for a complete social media strategy.
Tailwind is a social media marketing tool for the visual marketer who uses Instagram and Pinterest.
If you’re an avid Pinterest user, this is definitely the perfect tool for you. You can use it to pin content to multiple boards, monitor mentions and conversations, easily drag and drop content in your calendar and create multiple pins from any website with their browser extension.
Tailwind also helps post pins better, by automatically optimizing your pinning schedule based on your audience. You also get detailed analytics so you know which content works best and which doesn’t.
The Instagram features will be coming soon and Tailwind promise similar features to the Pinterest ones – remains to be seen how well it will work.
Conclusion: Tailwind is perfect for Pinterest marketers. However, if you’re using more social networks and your Pinterest strategy isn’t too complex, you can probably do just as well with one of the more full-featured social media marketing tools.
Twitter is arguably the best “universal” platform for social media marketing, customer service, increased reach and visibility and for getting more traffic to your website. Social Quant aims to help you get better results from Twitter: more engagement, more targeted followers and increased brand awareness.
The way it works is it finds more targeted followers based on the keywords you set so that your following grows with users that are interested in your business and what you have to say. This in turn leads to more engagement, increased brand awareness and more traffic.
Conclusion: Social Quant is the perfect tool for those who want more out of their Twitter. It’s especially useful to those who are struggling to get followers or not getting enough engagement, as well as for beginners who want to grow their audience quickly, yet still make sure they are followed by the right people.
The G2Crowd and Ian Anderson Gray’s infographic on the top social media marketing tools has found, through detailed customer reviews, that Agorapulse is the best dashboard of 2016.
I have to say that I agree, because while there might be other similar tools with the same features, Agorapulse is incredibly intuitive and easy to use and it has a beautiful interface.
That said, marketers have different needs and each tool has its pros and cons, so it’s up to you to figure out which one suits your needs best.
What do you think is the best social media marketing tool?
Guest Author: Highly regarded on the world speaker circuit, Lilach Bullock has graced Forbes and Number 10 Downing Street with her presence! She’s a hugely connected and highly influential serial entrepreneur.
Listed in Forbes as one of the top 20 women social media power influencers and likewise as one of the top social media power influencers, she is one of the most dynamic personalities in the social media market and was crowned the Social Influencer of Europe by Oracle. A recipient for a Global Women Champions Award (by the Global Connections for Women Foundation) for her outstanding contribution and leadership in business.
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