A Dip in to Social Media Marketing

Today, let us dip our toes in to social media marketing for a bit.

When ever some one says social media what everyone thinks is that it is about advertising on Facebook. Or a youtube video. But social media refers to all the conversations people have online.

Social Media Marketing refers to the marketing effort in order to securing a place for your brand in the online conversations that are happening on social media web. The objective is to increase the likability of your brand.

Now as you can see social media marketing is not about publishing your Ad in some social networking site. Also it is not about controlling the content about your brand that is online. What I mean is the objective is not to delete all bad & negative comments & posts from the web. If you plan to control every single post about your brand you will have to be able to control every single person in the world who has access to internet.

So this is not a one way communication too. As I said earlier, it is about associating your brand in a conversation the public is having. So if your brand is really not doing too well, better think again about going in to social media marketing.

In carrying out social media marketing,

• 1st you have to listen to what the current conversations are about your brand,
• Then analyze your current position with respect to your competitors
• Identify where you need to improve
• & set plans to achieve those improvements.
• Finally you need to support this with paid advertising & promotions to amplify the effect.

Let's now see how to analyze your current social media standing with that of your main competitors. We can use a tool named Social Media Brand Health Check to carry out this analysis.

Below is an analysis I did as an example for the brand Mobitel Sri Lanka & I have taken Dialog Axiata as their competitor for it. You can take several competitors for this analysis.

The criteria used in this analysis are,

• Reach - The number of people you reach through your social media profiles.
• Quality of audience - How relevant is your reach is to your actual target group.
• Engagement - How deeply people engage with your brand.
• Share of voice - How often do people talk about your brand in social media.
• Sentiment - Is the conversation about your brand positive or negative.

The levels of satisfaction given to each criteria is as follows.

0 - Totally Dissatisfied

1 - Somewhat Dissatisfied

2 - Neutral

3 - Somewhat Satisfied

4 - Very Satisfied

And let's see how to interpret the score gained from the analysis.

• Below 25 - You are seriously lagging behind in social media. You need to put much more effort in to developing your brand's social media marketing.
• 26-50 - You have a few areas where you are strong on social media. Make them stronger. Specially find out your weak areas, & address the issues
• 51-80 -You are comparatively a successful brand on Social Media. But do try & improve on the few areas you are week.
• Above 81 - Your brand is doing great on social media. Try to maintain it & improve with time.

Overall, Mobitel brand seems to be doing well on social media marketing with an overall score of 77. But they do have several areas where they can improve.

 

Based on the example I have taken we can see that, Mobitel has almost double the number of fans in Facebook compared to Dialog. But only 50% of that are local fans. Since this is a local brand this suggests that their Facebook page is only half effective in tapping to the real target audience. Therefore Mobitel needs to put more effort in to attracting more local visitors to their fan page.

When we consider Twitter we can see that @MobitelSriLanka is very behind on this front. Almost below 1/3 of what @dialoglk has achieved. Also considering the percentage of genuine Twitters, Mobitel is above Dialog with a 18% margin. But this is relatively low considering the small number of followers in the 1st place. Mobitel needs to put much more effort in to Twitter and improve their presence.

If you consider the Youtube channel activities, both Mobitel Sri Lanka & Dialog Axiata are almost at an equal footing. But the number of views seems to be half of the number of fans in the Facebook page. And both of them do seem to have a presence on Google+ & LinkedIn. For a local brand to cover the main channels of social media effectively is a considerable achievement.

When we consider the number of people who are talking about Mobitel on Facebook, they are at a much higher level compared to Dialog. Almost 10 times more than Dialog.

KLOUT score measures a brands online influence and converts to a scale from 0 - 100. And Mobitel has gained a value of 55. But Dialog had a score of 78. This suggests Mobitel needs to work on this area. Best way is to develop links between the different sites they have presence on. For example, you may have seen that they have not mentioned their Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn or the Youtube channel on their Facebook page. It would be a good idea to add those information as well.

Both brands seem to have a high amount of relevant search results appearing with respect to the blogs related to the brand. And have a similar number of Twitter mentionings with in the last 48 hours. But as mentioned above Mobitel has to improve on Twitter by a greater amount still.

As for the negative posts & comments on online media Mobitel seems to attract marginally less negatives than Dialog and the percentage is acceptable since we can not completely prohibit negative sentiments & even if we can, it would defeat the objective of social media marketing.

As explained above you can carryout an analysis to identify where your brand stand with respect to your competitors in social media & take necessary action to develop where you lack.

Hope you found this useful & please do leave a comment.

Key Word Research - Benefits of PPC Advertising

This blog post will be about how to do a simple Key Word Research on Google & how to use that information to better advertise on search engines. Advertising here refers to PPC which was explained in my earlier blog post.

Search Engine Marketing in Sri Lanka is still at an early stage. So one may argue that its an excuse for Sri Lankan web sites & digital activities to perform low in a global scale. But in this blog you can see that these activities are much simpler than we think & one can do most of it by them selves even.

I have done an Ad word research for the product "Hybrid Cars" in Sri Lanka and the results are shown below. You can simply run a key word research using Google AdWords (https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool) which is a service provided free of charge. You can log in to AdWords using your Gmail Account. And for now you can skip the payment details page and go to Key Word Research Tool in the Tools and Analysis tab. You will get the following screen.

 

I have set my key word as Hybrid Cars in Sri Lanka - Sri Lanka & the language English as my audience. You can customize this to any product or country/ group of countries/ a specific city or even a specific radius from a location.

Now you can click on search and get the most common key words used in searches and the quantity. From this you can select a few key words to use in optimizing your advertisement. Just select the key words you like from the list and click download.

This is the list of key words I have selected for this example. And now you can create your advertising campaign and draft the advertisement.

You can preapare your campaign by clicking on the Campaigns tab & clicking on new campaign. Here you need to give a name for your campaign and the type of campaign we are now considering is "Search Networks Only". Either you can set your own bids for daily advertising and let Google do it automatically. And when you continue you come to the following screen. I Have selected the Toyota Sri Lanka company for this example.

Here you can draft your advertisement with in the given framework. I have designed a simple advertisement for Prius Cars as an example.

And at down below the example advertisement we can add all the key words we need to optimize this advertisement for. This is shown below.

You can try these basic steps and improve further. For example you can set the boundaries for your key words so that you can do more word specific advertising. Can use numbers, attentive words in the advertisement, etc.

Now Let's see why we need to carry out this process rather than just putting an advertisement or forgetting about PPC.

Considering the example this advertisement will be shown to any person who is searching for our selected key words or a phrase containing these key words. So it is a more targeted way of advertising to individuals who are actively searching for this information.

Also when you consider the cost, creating this is free. and you only pay for the number of clicks you get for the advertisement on search engines. And the Ad will not appear when the daily credit limit is exceeded. So the expenditure is automatically controlled.

Any Sri Lankan or global company can use this PPC advertising in such an easy manner and do more and more targeted advertising to improve the sales and ROI.

Try this out friends. Give me your feedback. Thank you.

What is Search Engine Marketing - SEM

Let us see how search engines are used in marketing today.

Digital Marketing is associated with the 3 stages of,

• Marketing Communication
• Product/ Service Delivery
• Post Conversion Activities

There are many different tools used in these 3 stages regarding digital marketing. Search engine marketing is a very important tool used in marketing communication.

Search Engine Marketing involves all the activities involved in improving the visibility of a web site within search engines to improve the chance of attracting visitors to the web site. Any company would want their corporate web site to come at the top results for a search done regarding the particular category.

If you take the above screen shot of a google search done for "land sales" you can see 2 different types of results. One is at the very top in a light pink background & on to the right hand side corner. This is known as Paid Search Marketing. Where companies pay and purchase space for advertisements on search engines. Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) is also a term used to identify this. This is where organizations will pay to bring their web sites to the top of the search results and will pay to google for each click they get.

The other search results are from organic growth. This falls under Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This means all the technical tasks that help search engines to read and index the web site information better & the marketing activities required enhance the authority & the relevance of the web site to make your website more highly placed in search engines.

Although many consider social media to be replacing search activities, the stats show that  the number of searches done per day on google is almost doubling every year.

Search has become a very important part of the buyer decision making process. Traditionally consumer get the exposure to the product at the market place and then buy and consume the product and give positive or negative feed back. This feed back has become the 1st impression for new customers even before coming to the market place. This is due to internet and telecommunication technologies. It is known as the Zero Moment of Truth. 

This refers to the online or offline searches a customer would do in today's environment before purchasing a product or a service. Looking at the stats we can see many people use different search sources. Friends, consumer groups, articles, etc. But among those, online search is at the very top. This is so important that many companies have taken steps to ensure that they pop up in the searches done by customers and the searches will show more positive content.

There are many ways to improve on search engine optimization. Most of these are based on how  search engines work. Let's look at a few general tips to improve your web site.

• Crawlability - Google has some system that crawls through your website and indexes the data in those pages. So in order to make your web site more relevant to the searches, you have to ensure that the crawlers have access to all the pages in your site. Also having simple meaningful URLs will help the crawlability further. You can find out how many pages the crawlers has access to by doing a search as "site:www.name of web site.com"

• Key Word Research - It is important to do a research to identify what are the key words actually used by customers in searching the products in your category. This will help you in making sure you optimize your page to the correct key words.

• Site Structure - It is important to have a proper site structure to make your web site more user friendly as well as to optimize the search quality. For example having a separate page for each category and brand and product will be more beneficial in terms of search engine optimization rather than having some drop down menus. Also it is important to have unique page names for each page in your web site.

• Content Building - It is very important to have a considerable amount of valued content in your web site because the content help build authority for your web site. This may include corporate info., blogs, customer reviews, integrated youtube channel, etc. You must use unique content rather than a copy from some where else, use the words found in the key word research more in your content to optimize the search more.

• Images & Videos - Having images & videos in the web site is believed to allow it to be included in search results more. But in including images and videos you have to ensure that the file names are appropriate to the content and that you provide alternate tags. Because search engines can not read images, the crawlers will view the image file name and include the web site on search results based on that image file name.

• Link Earning - Earning links is a very good way to optimize search. Here the quality of the links is what matters. Not the number of links. The best way to get good quality links is through developing the web site content. The links can be from blogs, related sites, articles, directories, social networks, etc.

These are just a few basics in search engine optimization and this content is based on the articles on digital marketing by Suranga Priyashantha, where you can visit www.SurangaPriyashantha.com for more information.

Do leave a comment...

Web Designing - The User Experience

Lets have a look at Web Designing. We will not be discussing the technical side of designing a web page. But more to the User Experience side. One may call it the creative side of the web design.

Today there are many organizations and individuals involved in designing web pages. They specialize in coding  the web page. And some also design the appearance of the page. As a marketer you should be able to tell the designers what you think the site should look like to give a better experience to your customers and to properly reflect your brand image. As we all know there are many colors, images, words we associate with different products and services. So we need to keep it in mind to incorporate those to our web site.

And when we say attractive, user friendly interface some may go overboard and load the site with bright colors and lots of pictures and advertisements. But this will just slow down the web page loading speed and clutter the users screen. We have to understand what the customer is looking for and improve that experience through support of attractive media.

There are some 25 commonly used aspects to see whether a web site is user friendly or not. In the Sri Lankan context I have selected the popular site, www.anything.lk for an example evaluation.

25‐point Website Usability Checklist

Accessibility

1. Site load‐time is reasonable - I found this to a little slow. Mainly due to the large number of images contained in this page.

2. Adequate text‐to‐background contrast - The site had a good (black & white) contrast between letters & background.

3. Font size/spacing is easy to read - It is clearly readable to an average person.

4. Flash & add‐ons are used sparingly - This aspect is also satisfactory in this web page. We can see there are several banner ads on this page at the top and on by the side.

5. Images have appropriate ALT tags - This is also satisfied. When moved over an image it gives a small description about the picture & its location.

6. Site has custom not‐found/404 page - The site does have this page. But the letters are almost the same color as the background making it hard to read.

Identity

7. Company logo is prominently placed - As you can see the anything.lk logo is places on top of every page clearly visible. 

8. Tagline makes company’s purpose clear - Although there is no tagline shown in the web site the wording that appear on the tab says "Best Deals | Best Online Shopping.." which gives a clear idea about the purpose of the company.

9. Home‐page is digestible in 5 seconds - It actually takes much longer than that to clearly understand the homepage. This is mainly due to the large number of offers shown in the home page.

10. Clear path to company information - We can see they have give links to their company details at the bottom of the home page.

11. Clear path to contact information - Same with the contact details. They have included the relevant link at the bottom of the home page along with tabs for Facebook and Twitter contacts.

Navigation

12. Main navigation is easily identifiable - As shown here the main tabs for navigation are very clear and precise.

13. Navigation labels are clear & concise - The labels on the navigation tabs give a very clear description about their links.

14. Number of buttons/links is reasonable - We can say that this site has a reasonably adequate number of buttons.

15. Company logo is linked to home‐page - By clicking the logo, surfers can go back to the home page at any given time.

16. Links are consistent & easy to identify - The navigation links are consistent over time and are easy to identify as to where they would lead to.

17. Site search is easy to access - We can see that this site doesn't have the site search option. This is a considerable draw back. Surfers should be allowed to search the site easily for any specific information the require.

 

Content

18. Major headings are clear & descriptive - We can see the Deals, Prices, Time Periods as the major headings in this site and they are very clear and contrasting to the background to be more readable.

19. Critical content is above the “fold” - The critical information such as the price, expiry dates of offers and such are clear and visible above the rest.

20. Styles & colors are consistent - The fonts, sizes, the colors used in the prices, discounts,  deadlines are consistent to make it more easy for the consumers.

21. Emphasis (bold, etc.) is used sparingly - Price, is the most important info. in a web site as this. And they have used bold lettering for price, various colors for the information they want to emphasise in a good manner.

22. Ads & pop‐ups are unobtrusive - As said at the beginning the banner ads are located seperately to the web page content and there are hardly any pop up ads. Therefore they do not obstruct the web page content.

23. Main copy is concise & explanatory - The site communicates its purpose and its content at a glance. We can understand that this is a web site that provides cash discounts and other deals with respect to any kind of product or service with in Sri Lanka.

24. URLs are meaningful & user‐friendly - The URL of www.anything.lk clearly gives the meaning of the site and is attractive to the users as one place to get a wide range of products and services.

25. HTML page titles are explanatory - The HTML you see by clicking the "Events" tab is anything.lk/events/ which explains what that page is all about.

This is just my opinion and comment on this site. You may have slightly different views. Do try these 25 points on your favorite web site as well  and try to evaluate if it really is user friendly.