When evaluating your content marketing efforts, there is a good chance that you have been gathering metrics all along from your social media activities. However, it is very important to evaluate your content marketing efforts from the big picture perspective.

Asking appropriate questions

Not to overstate the obvious but if you want answers, you need to ask questions. In fact, if you want the right answers,  you need to ask the right questions. It is very important for you to do your homework before you approach anyone about anything. Your obtaining answers will help you to hone in on the areas of your content marketing strategy that are strong and the areas that are weaker. It will be beneficial if you concentrate on the following areas.

• Consistency: You need to take a hard look at your marketing strategy and figure out if you have been appropriately consistent and persistent. If your content marketing strategy is strong and successful, it will project an image of professionalism, familiarity and security. One of the factors that you should be examining is your consistency with sharing content in order to bring in new prospects as well as retaining already-existing clients. The tools of consistency are and editorial calendar and your effort in keeping your calendar current.

• Style: Are you able to engage your target audience? It all depends on your success at providing useful, appropriate and relevant information in an educational manner. It is essential that you present a compelling story to your target audience. It is not always easy to establish a style in the beginning. Sometimes, it happens later on.

• Relevance: Is your content marketing communicating the right message to your audience? You may want to evaluate your content’s power to solve other people’s problems and accomplish its most important goals. A good way to determine this is by looking at the personas that you have created and comparing them to your metrics categories (retweets, comments, “likes,” referrals, etc).

• Efficiency: Do you have an efficient process for gathering ideas for your content? If you are efficient, you won’t get frustrated, tense or burn out. If you are efficient, you will successfully choose topics, produce, edit and delegate responsibility. Indications that you are not efficient are issues with meeting deadlines, many iterations of content and bad reactions to what you are doing from other people.

• Your level of influence: Are you a person of influence? It is easy enough to gather metrics of your individual projects but sometimes it is more difficult to measure the overall impact of influence. If you are influential, you will see increased success in your business from month to month.

• Your business’s ultimate goals: Does your content marketing strategy lead to successful long-term goals? Your marketing strategy needs to support both short- and long-term goals. If you concentrate too much on deadlines for individual projects, you may not realize your long-term goals. Both are extremely important.

• Challenging content: It is critical to keep your content fresh and exciting at all times. There is nothing worse than stale, boring content. If you are predictable when it comes to your content, people will not want to read what you are sharing and will walk away and go to someone else.

It is easy to gather the information discussed here.  Once you have gathered the information, you need analyze it and put it to work. You should consider the next phase the one where you request feedback. This will help you tremendously to improve upon what you have.

Conclusion

It is critical to your success that you look closely at your content marketing and determine if it is working for your business. A checklist is an excellent and very effective tool of which you should take full advantage. Offer great content and optimize it properly. The more information you have at your fingertips, the more effective your offerings will be to other people and the more successful you and your business will become. You can gather wonderful ideas for content from many different places. All you need to do is to find them.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

The perception of Twitter

You may still believe that Twitter is a fun, little social media channel that enables you to tell people about what you had for breakfast or which movie you saw over the weekend. However, it is so much more valuable than that for your business. It is a really good idea for you to take a look at how you are using Twitter as well as examining the people on Twitter who follow you and whom you follow. When it comes to your Twitter relationships, it is important to examine the quality of your list of people. Your Twitter relationships may be very lucrative but may possibly take some scrutiny. Not only should you eliminate relationships that no longer work for you but you should also connect with people with whom you feel you can share a mutually beneficial relationship.

The many wonderful benefits of Twitter

Twitter is an extremely effective social media channel for being educated, listening and sharing information. It is also a wonderful way to have real-time discussions that can turn into more. Comments back and forth can turn into relationships that turn your Twitter followers into clients eventually. However, it is advisable to choose quality over quantity when it comes to collecting followers. It all really depends on how you intend to use Twitter and what you wish to get out of it. You will hopefully find that the Twitter followers with whom you connect will be professionally beneficial to you and your business. The reason that Twitter is so successful is because you and other people take the time to use it. Interaction is key to your business’s success in all of its forms among all of the different social media channels. Many of the social media channels work differently but there is one objective that they all have in common. They all thrive on interaction and communication. As is always the case, you will get out of Twitter whatever you put into it.

You have it so use it

Creating relationships with Twitter followers is, in many ways, the same as creating relationships face to face. Many people created their profile on Twitter because they heard that it was a good thing to do. However, after they established the profile, they didn’t really do much with it after that. Many people don’t understand how useful it is when it comes to getting your message out there and really building something valuable with other people. When it comes to letting the world in on your offerings, Twitter is a great way to do it. It is not only important for you to get to know other people online but it is also very important for them to get to know you.

Your approach

You may be asking yourself at this point how you can go about strengthening your Twitter relationships. There are several tips for this. First of all, make sure that your tweets are consistent, regular, and frequent. Timeliness is also critical. If someone asks you a question or leaves an important comment that deserves a response, you have a responsibility to give one and to do it relatively quickly. In the beginning of becoming heavily involved with Twitter, you may want things to happen more quickly than they are happening. Patience is definitely a virtue in this situation. You should also make sure that your tweets are going to the most appropriate people and that your communications are always polite and respectful. Make sure to tweet in the most effective manner possible and if you share compelling information, you will be sure to get positive responses.

Conclusion

People share relationships on many different social media channels; however, the relationships that they share on Twitter are unique and must be handled and nurtured in a way that respects that uniqueness. Twitter is still an extremely important social media channel for business. You have an obligation to treat it as seriously as you can and to make sure that you get everything out of it that you want.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

There is a tremendous amount of relevancy in business today and there are parts of a branding strategy that can be enhanced tremendously by connecting the social aspect to the communication strategy. For businesses that make the most use out of both the social media and Email communications, the end result and the measure of what they will be able to accomplish can potentially be astronomical. It is critical to think in terms of providing social capability to communication strategies.

Taking a look at a business’s Email strategy

You need to examine your Email strategy so that you can identify issues, if there are any, such as inconsistencies in the social aspect of your campaign and whether it is being used effectively. Your objective should not be to make sure that the social aspect connects with the communication aspect. That should already be a given. Your goal should be to ensure that effective sharing of your content and strong communication are actually successfully happening.

There are several different ways in which the social and the communicative can come together.

Engagement with the audience is key: It is important to look at your brand and identify if your pages provide a button at the bottom to allow the audience to connect with social media. If your connection offerings are done in this manner, the potential for your audience to engage with you and your brand will be quite limited.

Using a call-to-action: The call-to-action is an effective way to get your audience to communicate with you through social media. If they are at the point of reaching out to you after you have provided them with compelling and valuable information and then have given them a great way to connect with you, you will be on your way to building a relationship with them. The call-to-action is effective because you are very specific about what you want your audience to do in order to connect with you and your business. You are most likely going to achieve better results than you would if you gave them too many broad choices with which to connect with you.

Providing content that has immediate social capabilities: There are ways that you can share your content directly and then, in turn, receive instantaneous responses from your audience. You can also share the content of your Email, which can then be shared by your audience members.

Communications that focus on the social aspect: Some businesses have set up their communications capabilities so that they have a strong connection to their social media connections. In such a case, the business owner should make sure to communicate what the audience can gain by engaging directly with the business on the social channel(s). One of the very positive results of this is that the audience can absorb many different types of information through the various social media channels. This will give them much more exposure and acquaintanceship with the brand and the company. A positive, effective aspect for the business owner is that he or she can actually gather statistics that will tell which brands and which social media channels are drawing the attention of the particular audience member.

Social relevance: The brand’s social relevance is a critical factor for the business owner. Once you have gotten your audience to opt-in to whatever you want them to choose, you will start to notice the benefits of that connection. It is a way to communicate deeply with your audience and it will really strengthen your relationship and bring you to the next level.

Conclusion

Email marketing campaigns are extremely important to the success of your business. When they are linked to social media strategies, you have a winning combination that is unbeatable. It is important that you do everything possible to build lasting, meaningful, relevant relationships that will stand the test of time and that will be of mutual benefit for a very long time. An Email campaign and a social media marketing strategy are both effective on their own; however, they are much more powerful when they join forces. The two together will allow you to gather information that is valuable to your business in the most effective way possible.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

What content marketing is and why it works

Content marketing uses online content for promotional purposes. The objective of this is to get clients to buy what you are selling eventually. Of course, that will only happen after you have had the chance to build a strong, mutually beneficial relationship with your customers.  Effective content marketing is appealing on many different levels. The writing must be of top quality and it must strike an emotional cord with your readers. Without the emotional (or human) factor, you won’t be able to build a relationship with your readers.  Content marketing is a very effective way to increase your business’s success and to strengthen your relationships with your online connections.

The value of being online

There is a small possibility that you don’t really understand the importance of connecting with other people online. If you aren’t sure why online interactions and connections are so important, there is much to discuss here. On the other hand, if you do understand why online interactions are so important, you probably also get why it is important to reach the largest amount of people possible. The reality is that your existing customers and prospective customers are already online, waiting to interact with you. When it comes to getting your word out there, your website may not be enough to reach everyone you want to reach. It is important for you to understand the impact that your online content, such as a blog will make compared with your website. The reach results will come out differently, depending how you work the content. In fact, using content marketing is an excellent way to improve your ability to reach a large number of people. The way that it accomplishes this is through white papers, eBooks, blogs and case studies. In that respect, online content marketing differs from traditional marketing.

When it comes to content marketing, you are subscribing to the marketing principle of WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?). In other words, your professional purpose is to solve the other person’s problem(s). In traditional marketing, your purpose is to let the other person know how wonderful you and your business are. In actuality, the other person doesn’t really care how wonderful you and your business are. The only thing the person cares about is how you are going to solve their problem(s). With people connecting online, their goal is to gather information and to gain an education. The last thing that they want is to get a hard sell from anyone.

If you share valuable content with your online connections and it is of value to them, not only will they like what they are reading but they will share it with other people who they value and they will want to read more from you. That is exactly how you build a loyal client base. The more you interact with your online connections, they more they will begin to trust you and to find you credible, not to mention considering you a subject matter expert in your field.

Conclusion

It is important for you to understand that when you market your content online, you are using it as an educational, informative tool. You are not using it to directly sell your products and services to anyone. Marketing your content will help you to build and grow relationships with your online connections. You will find that those relationships will be mutually beneficial and extremely solid. When it comes to sharing your content online, your online connections will definitely appreciate receiving content that they can read and digest rather than receiving advertisements from you about your business. Remember, it is critical to the success of your business that you consider the needs and wants of your online connections before your own. If you can do that, they will do the same for you.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

When I met with my client last week in NYC, I was so pleased to hear that the President of the company was blogging.  This was their first foray into blogging and, unfortunately, their efforts were met with disappointment.  The VP of Marketing said to me, “We set up the blog, he’s been blogging for well over two weeks and no one is commenting.  There is not one comment since he started.”  I wasn’t surprised by the results of the initial effort because, from past experience, this has been the case for many of my clients who start an internal blogging program.  Sometimes, culture plays a part in the lack of employee comments or employees are simply not used to collaborating through social media.

When I spoke with the President about the situation, he said, “I know that people read the blog.  They make a point of saying to me, “Hey I read your blog post…”  It was clear that employees were reviewing the posts, but no one wanted to be the first one to have a conversation.

My immediate suggestions were to:

• Double check the nature of the blog content.  The President of the company may be discussing topics such as earnings calls and company policy, which don’t necessarily warrant employee comments.
  
  
• Ask questions and seek answers from members of the company.  Blogging is about a two-way conversation.  If you select topics of interest and ask for opinions or for people to share information, employees are more apt to participate.
  
  
• If you think employees feel uncomfortable commenting on an executive blog, seed the blog with guest blog posts from different members of the company. Perhaps, employees don’t want to engage first with the President’s blog but would feel differently about commenting on a directors or a senior manager’s blog.
  
  
• Keep blogging and don’t get discouraged.  If you keep up with the pace and continue to offer interesting information and invite comments, eventually the culture will shift.
  
  
• Ask a few people to join the conversation in a non-threatening way.  Let them know that their contribution will help the company to maintain constant communication with employees and upper management.
  
  
• Send reminders to employees to let them know that the blog is active and that they are invited to join in the conversation.
  
  
• Add in photos, video, podcasts and other interesting materials.  Let’s face it, employees are busy all day and may not have the time to review and comment on the blog during the workday.  If they’re reading the blog at home (early morning or at night), make it a little fun or humorous, so that they enjoy what they’re reading and want to join in on the conversation.
  
  

Conclusion

These are just a few helpful suggestions, especially if you are experiencing a similar situation.  I know there must be many other helpful tips, so if you have any, please feel free to share and discuss them.  We can all learn together.

I don’t wish this on anyone but sadly, it happens, and I’m confident this is not the only case.

The best way to be Google-safe and to build a thriving online business is to simply ignore Google. Yes, that’s right. This might sound a bit strange, especially coming from someone who makes a living selling SEO services. However, I am also a business owner and the more I learn about business management, the more I realize that if a business finds itself in that situation, it’s because it is too dependent on search engines.

The underlying cause of this reliance on organic search results might be attributed in part to the fact that business owners tend to think of this traffic as “unpaid.” Once they start a website and get organic visits (mistakenly considered “free” visits), they realize the power of SEO and start educating themselves about it and demanding more of it. But this traffic is not free at all, and in competitive niches, it is even more expensive than PPC advertising. Soon, they end up with SEO budgets and an increased reliance on Google search results.

I challenge you to stop obsessing about organic visibility and start thinking of organic traffic from any search engine as a gift that may come or not, and which could go with any new search algorithm update.

In this article I am not going to share any SEO “secrets” with you – I apologize if that’s what you were looking for – but rather, I will discuss different traffic sources upon which you should split your online marketing efforts on. After all, no one likes to check his or her organic rankings and traffic constantly.

Of course, I am not saying that organic traffic from search engines is bad, rather, I am suggesting that an online business will be safer if its revenue is coming from a variety of sources. This is not SEO best practice; it is “business 101,” as some would say.
This is the divide and conquer concept applied to business planning. In plain words, it means not putting all your eggs in one basket. Here are several traffic sources to diversify to:

• Paid search
• eMail
• Direct
• Referral
• Feed
• Social

Paid Search

The most common paid search traffic source is pay -per-click platforms like AdWords, but there are others you can try too, such as Yahoo! and Bing or second-tier search engines. Banner advertising is also something to consider for branding purposes and re-marketing.

Email Marketing

Ask the online marketing veterans and they will all say the same thing: The secret is in the list. True, and enough said. If you don’t have a plan to collect email addresses from visitors, go ahead and implement one, or several.

Direct

Direct, or type-in, traffic is actually an indication of how successful you are at building a brand. Direct traffic usually has high conversion rates and good profits. While existing customers often drive a large portion of a company’s revenue, they are not easily gained. Good products and services are requirements, leading to word-of-mouth and direct traffic. So make sure that you do a good job.

Referral traffic

These are people clicking on links found on other websites and landing on your website. Aim at getting your expertise in front of your audience. This can be accomplished by publishing research and white papers, important news and press releases, or sharing documents on third party websites. You should also experiment with engaging in relevant forum discussions, Q&A sites, and comment marketing.

Feed

This is your blog-driving traffic. Of course, this means you have a blog, and that you publish great content to which people subscribe. Publish as often as you can to educate and impress your target audience. Keep doing it for a couple of years to reap the full benefits of blogging. This continual content publishing won’t be easy. In fact, it will be one of the most difficult parts of your so-called “content marketing,” but after about 20 months (according to some research), it will start paying off.

Social

Some swear by it, others say it’s a waste of time. Don’t believe anyone until you test it for yourself. Be prepared to spend a good amount of time to connect with your target market properly. Social media success is not something you can achieve overnight (unless you’re a Bieber or Kardashian) and is quite demanding.

Some personal advice – never try to sell your services on professional social networks like LinkedIn. Instead, sell your expertise.

How do you allocate time and resources for each source?

This can be figured out based on conversion rates for each source. That means you have to drive sufficient traffic from each source first to draw statistically significant conclusions. Each industry and niche will have its own figures.

Conclusion

As a business owner, you do everything possible to achieve success and to continue to make sure that your business becomes more and more successful. The last thing that you need is to have anyone or anything get in the way of that. If you see that an entity such as Google is hurting rather than helping your business, you must figure out a way to succeed in spite of it.

The appeal of your business blog

You definitely understand by now that you need to write content that engages your readers and, at the same time, you have a responsibility to provide new, fresh content on a regular and frequent basis. If you can’t commit to doing that, don’t even bother because you won’t get anywhere. Your readers have a certain expectation by now and the bar has been set very high. It is very important to keep in mind that blogging is more than just writing and publishing content. Blogging is also about building relationships with your existing clients as well as your prospective clients. You may feel that blogging comes relatively easily to you but you still may encounter a writing block, at least once in a while. As you examine your blogging strategy, you may find that what worked for you originally, doesn’t work anymore. If you feel that your target audience is not as extensive as it once was or that you would like it to be, there are ways of improving that situation.

• Focus on your target audience: It is very important for you to always write with your target audience in mind. Whichever topic you happen to be writing about, you have to try to consider it from your audience’s perspective. You should consider which questions your audience may be inclined to ask. If you can identify those questions, you will succeed at creating content that is valuable to your audience and clear and concise. The reason that your audience has reached out to you in the first place is because they believe that you have something to offer that they need. Speak to them at their level and make sure that they understand that you are in this to try to help them solve their problems.

 

• Use valuable tips from experts to your advantage: Most people love to learn new things all of the time. It is up to you to provide them with new and exciting information that they can take with them and, in turn, share with other people. If you are not sure about any given topic but you feel that they would benefit by learning about that particular topic, enlist people who happen to be experts in that particular area and get them to share. Your audience will be grateful to you and will pay you back in some positive manner. You can invite your experts to guest blog or you can take the information that they share with you and share it with your target audience in some other, creative way.

 

• Expand your horizons: Your knowledge base is very important but, just like your target audience, you should be learning new things on a very regular basis. You may start your blog with a few topics and then branch out to other topics. A great way to guide your topics is by asking your target audience what they wish to read about. When it comes to writing blog articles, sometime the most difficult thing of all is coming up with a topic. Another good way to gather ideas is by looking at other people’s blogs. Remember, you should never, ever use someone else’s words and take credit for them. However, you can use their concepts and make the words your own.

 

• Use images creatively: Many people are visual and they relate to content more effectively if you show them graphic images. In fact, if your blog only contains words, it may be a big turn off for some people. The graphic images will make the content interesting and will break up the monotony of so many words. One of your main goals is to attract audience members and to keep them interested over the long term. Graphic images will help you a great deal with this.

 

• Don’t ever give them the hard sell: Nobody wants to be “sold.” The reason that people visit your blog is because they want to learn new and interesting things and so that you solve their problems, whatever they may be. If your audience thinks that you are only interested in selling your products and/or services and that you are not interested in them on a human level, you won’t have a prayer with them. Never go that route.

Conclusion

Getting people to read your business blog with enthusiasm, excitement and passion is not always easy but it is far from impossible. If you focus your content in the smartest way and you remember to put your target audience’s needs before your own, you will succeed at winning them over and in keeping them for a very long time. Make sure that you show your audience how flexible and open-minded you are when it comes to sharing information. Never make them feel as though your opinion is the only one that matters. Their opinions weigh very heavily as well. The key to your success is building your following and continuing to fulfill your audience’s needs.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

Putting a strategic plan in place

It is critical that you are as organized as you can possibly be when planning (or revising) your strategy to work in the future. When considering how you want do approach your online activities, you first need to reflect on what you did in the past so that you can identify what worked and what didn’t work. After you have established those concepts, you can devise your strategic plan so that  it will really yield amazing results that catapults you to the next level in your business.

Looking at your list of clients and prospective clients

An important part of your examining what you were able to accomplish in the past and how you can improve upon that, you will need to take a good, hard look at your clients and prospective clients. Just as you examined your online business strategy, you also need to examine your clients (who they are, what they do professionally, the quality of your relationship with them, whether your relationship is still mutually beneficial) and figure out if they are still worthy of being your clients. If any of them don’t “make the grade,” you should eliminate them as clients so that you are in a position of taking on new clients. Otherwise, you are wasting your valuable time and theirs. If you feel, for any reason, that you can no longer help your clients, you should cut them loose.

Identify the mistakes that you made in the past

It is critical to your business that you identify mistakes that you have made in the past so that you avoid making the same mistakes over again. You certainly want to avoid spinning your wheels. A good approach to this has to do with the way that you decide to take on specific clients. You should have a specific qualification process in place before you go after any new business. An effective starting point for you a list of questions that you customize to each prospective client. This will also work with existing clients who you feel you want to retain. Life and business is never stagnant. Something is always changing.  Your approach to your clients needs to keep up with the evolution. It is important to have a clear idea of everything that you wish to communicate to your clients and prospective clients, including pricing structure and your payment expectations of your clients, what you can offer, level of customer service, etc.

Establish your criteria for either continuing with existing clients or accepting new ones

It is very important for you to communicate clearly what you will and will not accept from your clients. This is very important before you start the year off. Everyone should have a solid idea of how your business dealings are going to go. Surprises are not a good thing in a business situation.

Make the most of your social media activities for your business

As sophisticated as you thought online technologies were in the past, they are going to be even more sophisticated now and in the future. It is critical to the success of your business that you make the most out of what is available to you and your business. Social media is a very powerful tool for business. Make sure that you educate yourself about all that it has to offer and use it appropriately and effectively. If you expect to rise above your competition, you will have to get very involved with social media for your business. If you are concerned about the cost, you needn’t be. Social media activities don’t necessarily have to cost must. Of course, you will need to commit to spending a certain amount of time and effort on your social media activities but you will see that the payback is well worth it. If you find that you are spending too much of your time on your social media activities and you really need to concentrate on other things, you can get someone else to manage the social media portion of your business. Please remember that the worst thing that you can do is to ignore social media entirely.

Build a content strategy

Content truly is king. If you don’t have top-quality, exciting, compelling and valuable content to share online, you won’t get anywhere. You have a responsibility to share fresh content on a regular basis. At least, if you have a desire to achieve greater and greater business success you do. Having old, static content just won’t do it for you. People are definitely going to pay attention to your online presence. You need to make sure that they are not disappointed by what they find. You strategy should include:

• Frequent blogging
• Frequent article publication and syndication
• Larger publication offerings (white paper, Ebook, newsletter)
• Strong marketing strategy
• Consistent and frequent updates to your website
• Content curation
• Content recycling
• Search engine optimization
• Social sharing  of your content
• Multimedia content

Conclusion

With the future right around the corner, it is very important for you to have everything aligned and in order before you do anything. You certainly have all of the tools to make your business a raging success. Now, all you have to do is follow your business plan and your online marketing strategy. It will serve your business well and you will enjoy tremendous success. Think about all that you want to accomplish and go after it.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

It used to be that marketers only had to write content when there was a necessity at that particular moment. Now, not only is it imperative for new content to be written regularly and frequently but it has to be of the top quality and it has to attract the audience very quickly. If the content doesn’t grab the readers quickly, they will go to someone else and you may never hear from them again. Knowing the wants and needs of the target audience is critical to the success of your business in the day and age of social media. The big question is how do you make all of that happen successfully? Building effective buyer personas, which define the ideal profile of your prospective buyers, will really make your work a lot easier.

Divide demographically

It is critical for you to have a deep understanding of who your target audience is and exactly what makes up your perfect client. What are the needs, wants and concerns of your clients and prospective clients? Where do you need to go in order to reach your target audience and exactly what types of content should you be writing for them? What you need to do is to create a persona (a representation) of your ideal client.

Creating personas

The personas that you create are based on real information. You gather information based on demographic information and your target audience’s online behavior, personal histories, motivating factors and what keeps them up at night. The way that you begin to develop the personas is by studying the customer base that you already have. You need to pinpoint the qualities of the people who buy from you the most. You will find that you have several different types of buyers and each one deserves a lot of attention and a great deal of thinking. You will need to attach a large amount of details to each person, such as a description of the person, name, professional role (including title, if you have it), the niche or industry with which they associate and demographic information.

Understand your target audience’s needs

When creating personas, you will need to ask yourself several questions:

• Which problems are the members of your target audience trying to solve?
• What does your target audience need the most?
• How can you help them to succeed?
• What specific information are they seeking?

If you truly understand your target audience, it is not a huge leap that you will need to take to understand the wants, needs and challenges of your target audience. If they have gotten to the point of connecting with you and your business, the chances are very good that they didn’t arrive at your doorstep by accident. The more detailed information you add to the persona that you are building, the simpler it will be for you to write the content that will benefit your target audience the most. The better your content, the more your target audience will relate to you. If you can do this, you are on your way to really creating fantastic content that will make your audience reach out and touch you.

Conclusion

Creating buyer personas is not as difficult as you might think it is. If you can do that, it is actually going to help your overall online marketing strategy and it will help you to create content that is exactly what your target audience needs. If you can succeed at that, it will convince your target audience that you are the person who they have been searching for and they will eventually be thrilled to buy what you are selling. If you are able to do all of the work ahead of time regarding building the personas, you will find the rest of your work to be much smoother.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.

Hopefully, you are making the most of social media for your business and leveraging all that you can from what social media has to offer. It doesn’t matter whether your business is large or small. It is absolutely critical that you monitor what is being said about your business by others. This applies to your clients, perspective clients and competition. You are definitely not in a silo and what other people think and feel about your business will make or break you.

People will always talk

Once you have decided to monitor what people are saying online, you need to translate that into how it will affect your business. It is very important for you to not only understand that people are speaking about you but also to know exactly what they are saying about you, your brand and your business. Being noticed for your professional accomplishments is extremely positive and extremely important. The reason that it is positive is that you can take what people are saying and use those words in your interactions and discussions online. Even if some of the feedback that you are receiving is conceivably negative, the fact remains that you and your business are being noticed by other people. The worst thing is if nobody is even aware of your existence. You can take the discussions about you and your business and use them to elevate your brand and your offerings. You will need to find out exactly who is talking about you and track what they are saying and where they are saying it.

What are people saying about you?

You have decided that you want to closely watch what others are saying about you and your business. You need to ask yourself exactly what you are trying to accomplish by capturing that information. Basically, you should be concerned with reading everything that is being said about your brand and your offerings. You must stay abreast of every social community with which you are connected. The possible ways that you and your business/brand may be mentioned are:

• Your content being shared on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn
• Tweets that discuss your brand
• Your brand being mentioned on other people’s blogs and/or websites
• People pinning your content on Pinterest
• Backlinks to your website on other people’s blogs

It is very important to understand that it is not sufficient to just have social media profiles on the various social media channels. You also need to monitor the various social networks and capture what is being said. If you are not certain of how to monitor the various social media channels, the following should help:

Receiving alerts

If you set up Google Alerts (or another comparable alert tool), you can easily watch your social media presence throughout cyberspace. You will receive updates on a regular basis either through your Email or through an RSS (Real Simple Search) feed. Depending on how you set it up, you will receive alerts in whichever frequency you have chosen. There are several different approaches that you can use regarding which types of information you want to receive.

Searches on specific social networks

When you go to each individual network, you can search for your brand and you can get a good idea about what people are saying. You can search on Twitter, which will let you set up criteria so that you receive exactly the information that you need. You can also search on LinkedIn. You may want to consider the Answers feature in LinkedIn (in Advanced mode). This will allow you to track down all mentions that relate to your niche or industry. Facebook, of course, is another valuable social media channel that will give you a great deal of mileage.

Designating the most important monitoring

Everyone has equal rights when it comes to social media. However, it is safe to say that not everyone has the same influence or the same effect on other people. The stronger and more prevalent your communication skills, the stronger your influence online. There are several ways to determine influence; you should ask the following questions.

• How many online connections do you have?
• How many times  have people retweeted your content?
• How many comments have people written about your content?
• How many backlinks lead back to your blog?
• How often do people interact with you?

You need to recognize the human side

It is critical that you realize that anyone with whom you connect online is a human being with human emotions. You need to engage other people and you will begin to build your relationship, which will hopefully eventually be an enduring one. There are several different ways to engage other people, such as asking a question, responding to one of their comments, offer a solution to one (or more) of their problems or give them some sort of incentive.

Conclusion

If you understand how to monitor your brand through social media and you understand why it is so important to do so on a consistent basis, you will be one step ahead of the game. You can’t make any positive changes to your business if you aren’t aware of any of the issues. Even if some of the  feedback that you receive is negative, it is important to face it honestly and do your best to make improvements based on that information, which will prove valuable to you in most or all cases. Social media monitoring will ultimately improve your bottom line. It will provide you with insights that you would not be able to acquire elsewhere.

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