Mediaboss Marketing

Digital marketerslike you!are all stars. You have your hands full with all the many ways to reach your audience. At any given time, you may need to be fluent inemail,contentandsocial mediabecause your audienceis cross-platform.

Few people makebuying decisions anymore based on information from a single medium. So when marketers focus all their energy on one channel, they could be missing out on other opportunities and the natural rhythms of the buying cycle.

So how can you keep on top of channelsas differentas social media and email? And how can you do so in the most efficient way possible?

Im excited to shareare a number of ways to integrate social media and email marketing to help save you time and let youreach your audiencewhere they are. In this post, Ill show you six of my favorite tactics to get more out of each channel.

There are a few key reasons you might want to do this:

Uploading your subscribers to social networks differs by platform. Heres how to do it on a few popular networks.

You can link your Twitter account to your Gmail or Yahoo! account to scan your personal contacts. This is a good place to start.

First, head to Twitter.com. On the leftsidebar, look for a link that saysFind people you know.

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6 Creative Ways to Integrate Social Media and Email Marketing

I was excited to interview John J Curtis, the SEO Manager at Walgreens about omni-channel marketing and why broad terms just arent working anymore. John is speaking at our next marketing conference, SEJ Summit Chicago, which is thisWednesday! If you can make it, westill have a few FREEtickets available for our Chicago event, courtesy of our partner, Searchmetrics.Request an invite!

#PROTIP: Because our content is enterprise-focused, if you are a consultant but work with big, enterprise brands, mention them in your job title/company when requesting an invite.

Without further adieu, heres my interview withJohn.

The important thing to remember is that your customer will be omni-channel.Ensuring your products and services are properly communicated and available across channels and platforms shouldnt be an initiative it needs to be the norm. Building omni-channel into everything has advantages. An omni-channel commitment builds customer retention and value, creates a competitive advantage for customer acquisition, and integrates customer communication into one message across channels.

I think you could say that SEO works together with almost anything: content, website features, in-store signage, etc. I like to think of SEO as a layer. SEO doesnt make things it makes things visible. The SEO layer applies particularly well to content because good content marketing is designed for your customer. That said, even content marketing has varying degrees of uses. Very topical, timely content may not have a long shelf life. For this, we want to have a program built in that ensures all pieces of content are visible, but we might get involved on a per-article basis as an SEO team. When it comes to resource-style content with a consistent customer interest, we want to make sure those pieces are fully addressing a customers needs and fully exploring the topic in language customers are using.

The biggest difference is volume. There is a critical mass for taking action in an enterprise setting because of the number of people who will touch a given code request, for example. Were unlikely to adjust elements on a single product page and more likely to create features and formulas that can apply to page templates, affecting thousands of pages at a time. There are a handful of high value pages we touch individually, and beyond that we try to do work that makes page types more visible on the whole.

Additionally, at an enterprise level, there will be things happening constantly that can impact our customers search experience. This is where creating the SEO layer throughout an organization can pay off. There is too much to keep track of for an SEO team in an enterprise environment.

By providing education and resources to other teams (such as product management, UX, social, etc.), you install the SEO layer in the organization and scale the practice of creating search visibility.

Its not that those phrases are inherently useless, but they also dont inherently mean anything. Often you will hear people say these things as if they are solutions. They are tools, though. And as with any tool, you have to use it properly for the job youre doing, and every tool isnt used for every job. In enterprise SEO, I find myself first needing to assess the issue at hand, identify the customer need, understand what I can affect within the parameters of the project, then decide what to grab from the toolbox.

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5 Answers on Omni-Channel Marketing With John J Curtis of Walgreens by @wonderwall7

Despite popular opinion,the death of SEOhas been greatly exaggerated. However, that doesnt mean that what was effective in 2006, 2010, or even last year still works today. SEO is a rapidly changing practice thanks in part to the hundreds of adjustments Google makesevery yearto its search engine algorithm.

Because of this, you need to stay on top of the latest industry news and take the advice of some of proven SEO professionals, like the following 25 tips.

Bruce Clay, who has been an industry leader with SEO since 1996, provides 100 helpful and useful100 SEO Tips, which includes:

A blog is primarily an awareness channel that will lead to micro-conversions, such as social sharing, page visiting, etc. These micro-conversions are important, because they keep you at the front of a customers mind when they need the product or service you offer.

Time Grice is the Director of Search at Branded3, which is a Search and Digital Agency based in the UK, who voiced his support of using social media to boost your SEO withSocialBro. According to Grice:

As link manipulation is being slowly killed by Google, there is a genuine need to reach out to real people, those who can influence in your industry. Publishers with a genuine audience are the type Google want, so reach out and engage with these real publishers. Email and telephone will always have their place, but social is great way to connect with these publishers.

The founder and CEO of Yoast shared some valuable insights on how to select theperfect focus keyword for your blog post or website page. He begins by reminding us that, Yourkeyword strategyshould have given you some idea what you want to write about. For blog posts, you will usually aim for along tail keyword(containing multiple words). After that you can use a tool, such as theWP SEO plugin, to gain a list of suggestions. You also want to test the search volume of your chosen focus keyword to make sure its high. You can do this through AdWords or Google Trends. Finally, you want to make sure that your keyword fits your audience.

Former Chief Marketing Officer of Clarizen, Inc. and current head of partnerships and marketing for BloomReach, informedCiothat while your content needs to be compelling, descriptive, and differentiated, you also need to look attechnical considerations, such as:

Youve probably heard of Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz. But, did you know he didnt spend a whole lot of money on marketing? He has stated (viaHubSpot) that to start his small business rolling he simply:

For the first 5 years of SEOmozs marketing efforts, I doubt I spent [$200] on anything just blogged, participated in communities, produced some interesting one-off content

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25 Tips From SEO Professionals

SEO seems like a solitary endeavor to many people. After all, most companies have one person or one small team dedicated to producing content, making onsite tweaks, and building external links, but the reality is that SEO actually relies on a vast network of relationships for success. Think about it; you rely on high-authority external publications to link to your website in order to pass authority. You rely on your social media followers to engage with your brand online and make your presence seem more valuable. You rely on your site visitors to stay on your pages for longer than a few seconds, and not click "back," resulting in a bounce.

Theres a fundamental piece of this network that most businesses often neglect: your competitors.

SEO is a competitive world. Your competitors are the reason you have to work so hard to build search engine visibility if they rank even one position higher than you, theyll likely get a greater share of traffic (assuming youre both on the first page). It seems crazy to think that you can use your competitors, and sometimes actively work with them to lead your SEO campaign to success, but this is the reality.

Following are just a few of the strategies you can use to gain SEO momentum from your biggest competitors:

One of the easiest ways to take advantage of your competitors is to learn how theyre building inbound links. These days, link-building is a tricky business Google is sharper than ever, and its search algorithm is constantly scouting for businesses trying to use deceptive or unnatural links to manipulate their rankings. Finding high-quality sources in your niche can be a daunting task which is why seeing what your high-ranking competitors are doing that has resulted in their high rankings.

There are plenty of free tools you can use to research the link profile of your competitors. With these youll be able to see where your competitors are building links and what type of links theyre building. Its not a good idea to copy your competitors link-building strategies directly, but you can use them as inspiration and borrow some of the same sources for your own efforts. For example, if they are guest blogging for a particular publisher, try reaching out to that publisher to establish a relationship of your own.

Similarly, you can look at your competitors content strategies and gain new insights about your audience and new avenues for your own content. On a weekly or monthly basis, review the types of posts you see on your competitors websites. What topics are they choosing? How well are people reacting to them? Are they attracting lots of comments and shares?

Use these questions to guide you in your own content marketing strategy. For example, if you see a post on summer project ideas on your competitors site getting hundreds of shares, considering writing an alternative and better version of your own. The key here is not to duplicate whats working well, but to gain broad insights about your audience and customize your strategy to appeal to that audience. With better topics and more direct writing, youll be able to rank higher for more relevant keywords.

One of the best ways to gain rankings quickly for long-tail keywordsis to write about your industry in your geographic location. With this strategy, youll have two major limiting factors your niche and your region which will give you a perfect competitive opportunity to rank high in Google. The key is to write objective, truly useful articles about the competitive landscape. For example, you could write a piece titled "The Most Trustworthy Law Firms in Dallas," writing briefly about your own law firm and some of your closest competitors. You might fear giving your competitors the additional exposure, but if your article is well-written, your site and your brand are what are going to come up in the search results.

Much in the same way that you can mirror a backlink profile, you can mirror a social following. Take a look at the demographics that follow your competitors Facebook and Twitter profiles, and reach out to them on an individual level. On Twitter this is quite simple; head to your competitors follower list and start following some of their followers. Since theyre already predisposed to following companies like yours, theyll be likely to follow you back, giving you greater visibility and a greater audience on your social platforms. Alternatively, you can take a look at the types of people who follow your competitors and gain insights about your key audiences.

Link:
5 Ways to Use Your Competitors to Gain SEO Momentum

Last year's The Lego Movie was a box-office hit. It was also a "100-minute toy commercial" and an "awesome piece of content marketing" for the privately held company that manufactures the colorful plastic bricks.

Content marketing, as The Lego Movie illustrates, is not "just about blogging," said Kevin Mullett, director of visibility and social media for MarketSnare. Content marketing today is everywherejust check out the products and services featured in HGTV programs, he added. And content marketing has been around for more than 100 years, harkening back to the magazine for farmers Deere & Co. began producing in 1895.

The Furrow, John Deere & Co.'s magazine for farmers, is one of the oldest examples of content marketing.

Mullett spoke at the March 2015 Search Marketing Expo West conference in San Jose, Calif. In a session entitled Content Marketing & Promotion to Drive Quality Links, he and other two other speakers offered tips for small and midsized businesses on how to use content to increase backlinks to their websites. Earned backlinks can help your site get more targeted traffic, increase conversions of prospects into customers, and drive up its ranking in search engine results.

Here are some of the other session highlights and key takeaways the three speakers offered.

Every website has two audiences: humans and search engine bots that index the content, Mullet said. Humans read your content to learn. Bots crawl the content to see if it's good, relevant, and if the website itself is structurally sound. "If you want to earn shares and citations and get backlinks, you have to impress both audiences," Mullett explained.

He said there are two things to remember for your content strategy.

1. Your content should solve problems. Answer your customers' questions, evoke emotion, and entertain with content. Chances are the content that answers your customers' questions or provides them a useful tool, such as a calculator, will earn backlinks. In turn, the links help your site "build relevancy and authority," Mullett said. Ask your front-line peopletelephone support staff or your sales forcewhich questions customers typically ask. Check to see whether your website clearly answers those questions.

2. Being useful helps make your site "algorithm-proof." Because useful content tends to attract backlinks, it helps makes your website less susceptible to future Google algorithm changes, according to Mullett. (Recent algorithm updates known as Panda and Penguin have penalized some sites with shady links or poor content by pushing them down in search result rankings.)

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Content Marketing Tips and Tactics for Small Business SEO