Mediaboss Marketing

Measurement is the key to business success. Unless you monitor your companys performance and key marketing metrics, theres no way to identify the components in your strategy that need to be replaced, removed, or optimized. Its also important to closely track the impact of new strategies to see if theyre worth keeping.

However, making data-driven decisions is easier said than done. First of all, you need to have robust and cost-effective measurement platforms that generate an ideal ROI. Secondly, you need to know what to do with the information you gather.

When it comes to digital marketing and online businesses, below are the top seven tools you should use for actionable analytics:

Lets start with the platform that everyone knows. For most online marketers and businesses, Google Analytics is the go-to platform for obtaining data on advertising and marketing. It lets you understand your audience, traffic acquisition channels, conversions, and the overall performance of your web content.

The best thing about Google Analytics is that you dont have to spend a dime to get all the core features. To set it up, you need to integrate it with your content management system, which can be done by generating a tracking ID and embedding it within your websites code.

Once your site is confirmed, you should be able to access real-time information through the Google Analytics dashboard. It breaks down information into four main categories:

Cyfe is a comprehensive analytics platform for businesses with big needs. It lets you study aggregate data across all areas of your business from social media marketing to your company revenue.

Webcast, March 2nd: The Psychology of Designing User Habits with Nir Eyal

The platform works through customizable dashboards that can contain multiple widgets. These cover virtually every aspect of business analytics, including but not limited to blogging, sales, social media, and advertising.

Despite the depth of information you can obtain from Cyfe, you can use the tool for as long as you need for free. You may, however, avail a premium plan that offers additional features, multiple users, and the ability to create an unlimited number of dashboards.

Marketing analytics and business growth are all about numbers. But with Crazy Egg, you can cut through the number crunching and analyze the performance of your website visually with the help of heat maps.

Simply put, heat maps allow you to identify the hot and cold zones of your website. These are page elements that draw or repel your visitors attention. It sounds simple, but it is a more efficient way of formulating data-driven experiences than piecing together information from different platforms.

Another benefit of Crazy Egg is ease-of-use. After signing up for an account, you can get everything ready in your sites end within minutes. The data, however, takes some time to deliver accurate tracking.

Although there are pure social media analytics platforms like Iconosquare, Tailwind, and Followerwonk, an all-in-one social marketing platform like Buffer can provide most businesses with sufficient engagement statistics to boost the experience of followers.

The obvious benefit of using Buffer is that you no longer have to rely on multiple platforms if you leverage different social media networks. Even with a free account, you can monitor up to five different social media pages on Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

In addition to analytics, Buffer allows brands to automate content distribution through a visual editorial calendar. However, the free account only allows you to schedule up to ten posts at a time, which should be enough as long as you know the best times to post content in each network.

All successful companies have adaptive leaders who never stop pursuing growth. With the analytics tools above, you can have a birds-eye view of the online branding, sales, and marketing aspects of your business.

Alan is an SEO specialist and professional marketer. She is working as Chief Content Marketer at an Infographic design agency Infobrandz.com that offers creative and premium visual content solutions to medium to large companies. With over 10 years of experience in marketing for small businesses, She also contributes in other Viewfullprofile

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Rounding Up the Top 4 Marketing Analytics Tools and How to Use Them - Business 2 Community

Content marketing and social media seem like they were made for each other. There are currently over 2 billion social media users worldwide. Quality content is what makes social media tick. Unfortunately, most brands have a social media voice that is mostly detached from their content marketing strategy.

If content marketing is a high priority for you, squeezing the last drop out of social media is critical. Ultimately, the goal is to get your content in front of as many eyes as possible, and for that, social media is perhaps the best way to expand your reach and generate more traffic.

That said, its much more than just a tool to help gain exposure. Along with a myriad of business benefits, it serves as a direct channel for your brand where you can incorporate offers, live updates and customer service.

The key to using social media to boost awareness for your website is by engaging viewers with useful, relevant material when they need it, as opposed to when you create it. This task is a lot harder than it seems.

Keep in mind, the stream of information on social media moves very, very quickly. The last thing you want is for your message to get buried and lost before anyone has had a chance to see it.

Lets take a look at how you can take your content marketing efforts to the next level.

The best social media marketers dont start by posting. They start by listening. Social monitoring (or listening) is a great way to gauge how your target audience feels about a particular subject or industry.

Did you know that Facebook users collectively generate around 3.2 billion likes and comments every day? Monitoring what people are liking and commenting on is crucial to finding out whats currently trending.

Sure, manually checking up on your industry across all the social media platforms can be tedious. Luckily, plenty of tools are out there that enable you to track what the masses are saying so that you can learn about their interests, perceptions and concerns.

Brandwatch is one that will give you data-driven insights as to what your customers and influencers in your industry are talking about including the competition. Identifying the most pressing questions or concerns can help gear your messaging to popular demand.

With that knowledge, you can create content that provides true value to your target audience. For instance, if you run an industry blog, you can use these social insights to determine relevant topics to write about and to create catchy headlines to draw in visitors.

BuzzFeed is the quintessential example of this. Their casual, yet informative platform is constantly producing high-quality content that touches on an array of relevant topics in the field of news, entertainment and general interest. As of this writing, theyve had over 550 million global visits in the last 30 days.

To use social monitoring to find topics to gear your content toward, youll want to brainstorm a list of key terms and phrases relevant to your brand and industry. This will work to pinpoint the interests of your target community so you can design content to fit their needs.

Content built around these terms can then go to multiple channels in multiple formats and eventually be routed back to social media for sharing.

While your usual social media management tools like Hootsuite and Twitters own TweetDeck offer good collaboration opportunities for the purpose of posting and scheduling, companies with cross-channel marketing departments can look toward objective-focused task management tools. WorkZone or Brightpod, for instance, can help you manage interdepartmental communications or track the effectiveness of integrated marketing campaigns.

The ultimate purpose of content creation is to get it in front of as many eyes as possible. The beauty of social media is that once your content is out there, there are few limits to where it can reach.

Encouraging users to share content can be done in many ways. First off, the overall look of a piece matters a lot. As a general rule of thumb, think visually with each post. Visual content gets more views, clicks, shares and likes than text-based material. For instance, on Facebook and Twitter, photos get 53 percent more likes, 104 percent more comments and 84 percent more click-throughs.

If you produce blog content, you need to go beyond just placing easy-to-find social share buttons all over your page. Try things like Click to Tweet in your next article. Choose the tweet the way youd choose a headline; embed things like interesting quotes, facts or images within your content in a compelling way so the reader is inclined to post it.

Content is meant to be shared. Social media is the perfect vehicle to get your material noticed with a chance to go viral.

Finding the perfect influencer on social media can be a game-changer that skyrockets your content marketing efforts. The right influencer can generate more than double the sales of paid advertising and increase client retention.

A simple retweet or share by an individual with a large social following can do wonders for your content as it is exposed to a vastly wider audience than usual. Why do you think companies pay celebrities tons of money to tweet about brands or products? The math goes beyond just how many followers they have. Its about the level of engagement they have with their fans.

One of my favorite influencer marketing campaigns was Adidass #MyNeoShoot, where they recruited Selena Gomez to promote their Neo line. Gomez invited users to take pictures of themselves and apply to be the next Adidas model. By the time the campaign ended, Adidas had gained 12,000 entries, 71,000 brand mentions and 41,000 new Instagram followers.

Locating influencers on social media can take a bit of digging. Look into your industry and identify the key figures. This could be anyone like a blogger, a journalist, a political figure, or even another business owner.

Tools like Klout allow you to measure influencer scores to determine the best ones to pursue in your field. While you shouldnt take such scores by their face value, they offer a good place to start your identification and outreach process.

Forming a relationship with a good influencer could be the best business move you ever make.

Social media should be a cornerstone of your content marketing strategy. Chances are, youre already spending hours of your time researching and crafting awesome content. All of your hard work deserves to get as much attention as possible.

Tweaking your social media presence with a purpose is the key to effectively distributing your content and increasing the reach of your brand messaging.

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

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Using social media to jump-start your content marketing strategy - Marketing Land

Forbes

The Social Potential Failure Threatening Companies Everywhere Forbes Agile Adoption of Tech & Trends. ROI Positive Social Marketing. Real-time responsiveness. According to a recent report by Altimeter Group, the most mature social businesses are both more profitable and have more loyal customers, each by a 77 ...

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The Social Potential Failure Threatening Companies Everywhere - Forbes

Columbia University is the oldest university in New York, and the fifth oldest institution for higher education in the United States. Its School of Professional Studies offers 14 master's degree programs across a range of disciplines, and social media is a big part of connecting with new students, nurturing the alumni network and keeping the various programs aligned in their communications strategy.

But how can you bring social media to the forefront of communications in an institution that was founded in 1754? And how do you help entire faculties get comfortable with using social media as part of their everyday routine? I caught up with Caroline Henley, social media specialist at Columbias School of Professional Studies, to find out how shes been using social to make waves in the academic world.

What are some of the biggest challenges youve experienced using social in a higher education setting?

If youre in a school with a wide variety of programs, things can quickly become chaotic on social if you dont find a way to manage things effectively. Maybe a school has 60 different channels, and you have several people trying to log in to every account to post suddenly youre on a constant hunt for passwords or for the right person to help you.

When I came on board at Columbia SPS, I immediately brought on a social media management platform. With Falcon.io, we have the chance to connect everything in one place, and to make the process of becoming active on social easy and accessible. It creates home for a school that might be delving into bioethics on one hand, actuarial science on the other, and it unifies a lot of programs that wouldnt be connected otherwise.

Connecting and unifying channels might sounds simple, but a lot of higher ed orgs are very traditional institutions, and they arent necessarily ahead in the digital curve. When youre on campus, sometimes you rely on running around into different buildings, and just knowing who people are. And so sometimes the marketing/digital team isn't quite as in the loop as they might be in a more digitally-driven company. Unifying people onto digital through a platform was just huge for us.

How was social managed before you used Falcon?

There was no social hire before me, no one person responsible for overseeing all social activity. There was one team member sort of handling social as a side task, but there wasnt sufficient investment for it to be a priority.

When I came on, I used the Falcon platform to inspire the different masters programs to include me more. I showed them what listening could do for their outreach. I showed them how they could schedule posts in Publish and how they could keep all their passwords in one place. For the first time this brought all the programs together for social, and this enabled me to get a level of control over the overall brand voice for the first time.

What objectives does SPS have for social?

My title is social media specialist. I was initially brought on to get the deans social and online presence going. But it was clear there was more of a need for the school brand as well. So the strategy has been to dive into both, using the dean as the mouthpiece for the leadership of the school, giving students access to his office and highlight the strategic initiatives the school is building.

Were now using social in more areas than ever. Its been a great tool for opening up the channels of communication for our students, prospective students, alumni, faculty and staff. These people could be living across the country, all over the world (Columbia is one of the most international schools in the US) so we need to unite our community across a worldwide stage.

Social is also a way for us to break down the walls of the Ivy League. We live-tweet and livestream guest lectures, all the interesting insights from the top scholars and practitioners speaking at our events, and our social community has access to it whereas they could not before. What I love about my job is that I get to make all of this accessible to a wider audience.

Our chief academic officer, Dr Sharyn OHalloran, recently launched a new fintech model to help implement new standards in finance, and we hosted a panel of speakers from across fintech and the finance industry to discuss it. This is an event that the Columbia community was invited to, but we could also broadcast it through social, which allows a greater access to our work, and offers a fascinating look into this intersection of university research and the needs of the market.

How do you use social to engage prospective students?

We host online info sessions where prospective students can can sign up to ask questions directly to the director of their chosen program. I promote these across our social channels.

Then theres also the brand awareness, content marketing side of things we promote our faculty when a program is mentioned in the press. We run alumni profiles to talk about how they're using their degrees in the real world. And we shine a light on the contents of our programs, so people researching can get an understanding of the student experience.

Suffice to say, theres a ton going on, with new innovations, initiatives and events happening all the time. Im just one social media person trying to unite it all, and this is where the Falcon platform is a huge help. With our various programs prioritizing what needs to be broadcast, having the platform at the center of everything makes it much easier and incredibly enjoyable to keep our schools various social efforts unified and on brand.

Manita Dosanjh is PR and communications executive at Falcon IO

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How Columbia University unified a fragmented social marketing setup - The Drum

Vancouver-based Hootsuite has announced that it has acquired New York-based LiftMetrix, which offers a tool to measure the return on investments on social media platforms. This marks Hootsuites second acquisition this month.

The addition of LiftMetrix will allow Hootsuites users to create more effective marketing campaigns as they will gain insights into the return on investment (ROI) of their paid, earned, and owned social media marketing campaigns. With access to LiftMetrixs tools, social media marketers will be able to monitor and drive the impact of their campaigns through social-to-web conversion tracking, content recommendations and insights, and social data-warehousing and integration with business intelligent tools.

Its critical for marketers today to prove the impact of social advertising on the companys bottom line, said Ryan Holmes, CEO of Hootsuite. LiftMetrix offers easy-to-use analytics solutions that helps our customers make sense of data to maximize social marketing results. LiftMetrix will be a fantastic complement to the Hootsuite platform.

This deal comes two weeks after Hootsuite announced the acquisition of AdEspresso, which allows small and medium-sized businesses to split test every aspect of their Facebook and Instagram campaigns.

By joining Hootsuite, we will be able to offer increased value to our existing enterprise customers around their paid, earned, and owned social initiatives, said Nik Pai, co-founder and CEO of LiftMetrix. Its exciting to be a part of a company with Hootsuites velocity and trajectory.

LiftMetrix and Hootsuite have previously worked together through Hootsuites ecosystem of partners and applications. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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Hootsuite acquires New York-based LiftMetrix to help customers measure social marketing ROI - BetaKit