CXL Institute Growth Marketing Review [Week 6]

This week, I continued learning about the different marketing channels.
I first started with social media and the myths that have been made. The first myth is that social media marketing ROI is difficult to track and it’s hard to put a real dollar amount value to the value of social media. However, Google Analytics now allows you to see where your traffic is coming from and what the users are doing on your site and including if visitors are coming from social media as well.You can track the response of different social campaigns and see which are more successful at moving users to and throughout your site as well as tracking specific conversions. You can track paid campaigns with the UTM tags.

Almost all major social media sites provide a platform to track analytics. Their analytics, for example Facebook’s, Twitter, and Pinterest will tell you how many users are clicking on your site and how many conversions your ads are generating.

Another myth is that social media is just fluffy impressions and branding and that it’s not actually used for sales or conversions or acquisition.This is not true as not only can it help you generate new leads, but it allows you to build and create and engage deeper relationships with your existing clients.
eCommerce businesses will use social media channels as one of their top drivers for growth, such as Facebook or Instagram, rather than the traditional channels because that’s where their users are.

In a maturing organization, social media marketing fits into the demand generation teams to bring in leads.There’s obviously for social media marketing there’s obviously the organic and the paid, but they both fall under demand gen. It’s less about building followers and impressions, which are the vanity metrics rather than the actual metrics.

On Facebook and Twitter likes and loves, shares, downloads, followers, those are not actual metrics that you can say let’s double down on a content piece like this.

A good social media marketing team is go focused, always trying to pursue what that true north metric goal is. So whether it’s finding what converts best on which channel rather than thinking about tracking how many social media posts that you’re doing that day or taking a look at how many likes and shares for each post. Social media marketing should be treated as any other channel in that you can still track from the first touchpoint to LTV and take a look at exactly what your users are doing throughout the journey.

Developing a Coherent Message Strategy on Social Media. It is important as a brand, to speak to your customers on Facebook, in an email, or writing a blog post, being an influencer in that space. it’s important to understand that this all ties together and social media marketing is essential.

If you’re creative, social media can be very fun — to think outside the box. The businesses that do well with social media are the ones meeting their customers on social. For example, when a customer is writing a tweet, when they’re sharing that post on Facebook, it is a good opportunity for the social media team to respond and engage. Even if the customer is writing a good or bad review on your business on social media, you should respond accordingly. But even if it’s a bad review and you respond, you’re doing the right thing by being present for your customers and this will go noticed.

It is best to not responding reactively. but instead to have a strategy. Another bad example for social media marketing is not taking advantage of the time that you’re given to create the hype or the virality when it becomes available to you. It is also bad if you’re slow to respond to your customers, this allows them to control the narrative.

Trending topics and hashtags are a great way for companies to leverage the hype and then build up of the conversation that’s going on.

How do you test different things on social media to determine what’s working and what’s not? The most popular test is test of the timing of the posts. Is it six o’clock in the morning, is it noon, is at 8:00PM when your audience’s are back home, or 5:00PM, when they’re on their commute, test the different times. You can also test the content. So whether it’s photos, texts, videos, gifs,Vine, SlideShare, any other different assets, test those out and see what converts best for you on your channel.

You can also test the length of the URL. So whether it’s a long form URL or a short bitly link, see what users are clicking on. When businesses perform these tests, you will see the short link and the long link, and this should let you know that someone’s testing.

Test your offer. Is it download an asset, a download a white paper, is it a free demo? Is it quick tips and tricks?Test out the offer and see what resonates with your audience.

Moving on to SEO. The first myth about SEO is that we shouldn’t focus on SEO because Google should be able to crawl a site and figure it out. Now knowing that SEO is one of the top driving factors for traffic and growth it’s best to optimize, instead of simply forgetting about it.

There’s a couple of things that Google looks at in your site: — The domain authority, which is how your site compares against the other sites in your industry,- Your page authority is how well your site is set up for success- For crawling, a content schedule, so how frequently do you post and frequently do you update and add pages to your website- Then popularity of your website, you know it’s a combination of site traffic, click through rate, time on site, looking at bounce rate and all of these contribute to a higher frequency of crawling for your site.

There’s a couple of things that you can do to help expedite Google to crawl your site:- There’s a fetch it function that you can do within Google webmaster tools- You can also create Google sitemaps within your website- Within Google Analytics you can also give them an edge as well
To get good traffic through Google, you’ll find that it is often found in longer tail keywords which has lower search volume with more focused content which is engaging. If your content and website is educational, you can become the influencer for your customers and they’re more likely to get the knowledge and you become the authority for that. MOZ has good SEO traffic, because they use words like, “quick answers” which attracts people to their site in order to receive the answer that they’re looking for faster.

It’s a huge advantage targeting the right keywords. This is more important than targeting the number one highest volume keyword. What you could do is look for what keywords are good for your business. For example, look at your competitors and what they’re doing, and often times the key phrases are there. Do some research on those keywords and then take a look at what are the longer tail keyword terms are.

As an example, if you are looking into Human Resources software, the right approach would be not just using “Human Resources” as your keywords, but targeting a longer tail keyword would be human resources software, human resources software solutions, etc… SEO is definitely not died. The average amount of Google algorithm updates per day is about four to six. Google and Bing are constantly making updates for the best optimizations, and for the best experience for their users.

Therefore, we should be focused on creating the best experience for our users. Whether it’s aspects from SEO keyword optimizations and on page optimization. I look forward to learning more!