“Most websites don't have a massive traffic problem; however, every website in the world has a conversion problem.” - Bryan Eisenberg These wise words convey a strong message -- all of us should care about conversion optimization. And there are […]
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13 WordPress Conversion Testing Plugins
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Written by Courtney Danyel, CourtneyDanyel.com
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Let's think back to the early days of social media for a moment, and how it impacted our marketing.
Not only did it bring the potential of massive free exposure, it radically increased transparency as well. Every good or bad customer experience suddenly became a potentially viral story. And thus the relation between business and consumer was changed, forever.
But social media isn't at the top of the digital food chain anymore. As of 2015, messaging apps have overtaken social networking apps in monthly active users.
This balance tip coincided with a few other developments: Facebook's launch of Messenger for Business, WhatsApp announcing a move into B2C communication, an increasing reliance by businesses on message-based communication tools like Slack, and advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) entering a critical phase. The last point was nicely illustrated by AlphaGo wiping the floor with our human champions in Go.
Chris Messina, the guy who brought us the #hashtag, noticed the interplay between these developments, and concluded in a post on Medium that we're at the brink of another revolution in B2C relationships.
Where before you would use your messaging apps for simple interactions with friends, the above developments allow them to be used for real-time conversations with businesses as well – whether that's with a service rep or an intelligent chatbot. He dubbed this new era of B2C relationships 'conversational commerce'.
So, how can you take advantage of this development? How can you integrate real-time communication into your existing marketing stack?
First, let's clarify why you'll want to jump aboard this trend in the first place. Then we'll share some ideas and company examples that will help you start off today.
For years, marketers have known the power of 'now'. Pay attention to the banners and billboards you'll run into throughout the rest of the day, and notice how often they're filled with maxims like 'instant access', 'same day delivery', and 'quick checkout'. Immediacy strongly impacts our buying behavior.
In The Art of Thinking Clearly, Rolf Dobelli shares an experiment into our weakness for 'right now' with two groups of participants.
Group A was asked whether they would rather receive $1,000 in 12 months, or $1,100 in 13 months. Most chose the 13-month option, because where else will you find an investment option with a 10% monthly interest rate?
Group B was offered a slightly different choice. They could choose to receive $1,000 today, or $1,100 in one month. Here, most people choose the $1,000 today option. This is remarkable. The choice is basically the same – except that the $1,000 today targets our weakness for wanting things right now. That's hyperbolic discounting, our irrational preference for what we can get now over what we can get in the future.
Real-time customer service has a similar effect on our preference for right now. According to a Forrester Research study, 57% of online customers leave a website if they don't receive a quick answer on their question.
This was confirmed in a case study with Intuit, the company behind the financial products QuickBooks and Mint. By placing live chat for real-time support during its checkout process, Intuit increased its average order value by 43%.
A major benefit of communication via messaging apps is that it results in a permanent and low-barrier connection with the customer.
Once a phone call with a customer is over, the connection is broken. That is not the case with email, but email has a high barrier to contact compared to writing a message on Facebook.
A permanent low barrier connection promises a major increase in customer interaction – keeping your business top of mind and always accessible.
Also, when a conversation picks up again, it happens within the context of a messaging thread. This makes it easier for support reps to understand the situation and provide a good answer. While emails and phone calls are mere snapshots, messaging threads represent long-term relationships.
As mentioned above, the existing messaging thread will prevent duplication. Things become more efficient when customers don't have to repeat their issue with every service handover – not to mention more pleasant.
At the same time, advancements in natural language processing fuel expectations of chatbots soon solving many support questions that humans are tackling at the moment. Not all, of course. But a modest 20% would already represent a huge gain in efficiency.
We're still some years away from scenes like in the movie Her, in which we're having natural conversations with smooth sounding chatbots that are indistinguishable from those with humans. What is closer and easier to picture, however, is a sort of 'chat cyborg' – a human service rep that uses AI to deliver a superior service.
When a question comes in, AI runs it through the database of customer interactions and offers answer suggestions to its human colleague. The human serves as the last check, and can choose to override the suggestions or adjust them. The AI learns from the answer that is given, as well as the response from the customer (was it the right response?). That way, the chat cyborg is continuously growing in smarts and efficiency.
Now let's look at how you can start with reaping the fruits of these developments today.
Web chat has been around for some years, but is developing fast together with the abovementioned trends. You implement a live chat window on your website, through which visitors can reach out and receive support.
Live chat offers many of the benefits described above, such as the power of instant support and minimizing duplication. What makes it especially powerful is that the chat is available at a critical moment in the buyer's journey – on the website.
A customer might be ready to buy, but has some small concerns or questions before doing so. With live chat there's no need to delay the purchase, since questions can be resolved on the spot.
A great example of how to do chat right is Apple's live chat service.
If you're an Apple user, I recommend you try it out next time you have a service question. You receive full and detailed answers in no time, which suggest they make use of an intelligent knowledge base in the backend.
Facebook's Messenger for Business allows live chat providers to connect to their platform, and tools like Telegram and WeChat are open for this as well. We can expect tighter integrations between website chat and messaging support in the future.
Messaging support is very promising, simply because it's so darn convenient for consumers. They send a question through their favorite messaging app, and receive an answer in their back pockets.
For this to work, you need to hook up your support team to your messaging channels – be it Facebook, WhatsApp, WeChat, Telegram, or a combination – and let your customers reach out to you.
One example of a business deploying large scale messaging support is Livecrowd, a Dutch company offering next-level customer service and experience for mass crowd events. Think festivals, football matches, or concerts (see Beyoncé's concert page below). Such events are major logistical challenges. A quick and easy way to advise visitors about transport or safety is invaluable.
Another messaging example from the Netherlands is KLM, Royal Dutch Airlines. Since a few weeks, they've added Facebook Messenger support to their booking process.
This makes it easy for flyers to check the status on their flights and ask support agents any questions:
When you're booking a flight and are logged into your Facebook account, you can select to stay updated about your flight through messenger. When you have a delay, for example, you receive an update on the app. You can also receive your boarding pass through Messenger, or ask questions to the KLM service team directly.
As you can see, part of KLM's messaging support is automated. Which brings us to the next application.
Chatbots are a hot and exciting area of the tech industry, mainly because they're fueled by advancements in machine learning.
Slack allows you to connect an existing chatbot to your team or build one with its own logic, while Facebook's Chatbot API allows you to build a bot for Messenger. There are also plenty of third party apps that allow you to set up a chatbot fairly easily, such as Motion AI.
One example of the extensive use of chatbots is Call of Duty. Players can connect with Lieutenant Reyes chatbot, and solve a not-so-easy-to-solve puzzle. This chatbot sent over six million messages to its gamers in total.
Chatbots will only become more interesting with the continuous advancements in machine learning. The more intelligent the chatbots become, the more customer interactions can be left to them.
Make a comprehensive communication plan.
To get started with real-time communication, you'll need to integrate it in a comprehensive communication plan. Ask yourself: What channels make sense for me and my customers?
Set up a dedicated service team.
The fact that conversational commerce is based on text means that compared to phone, more interactions could be done per service agent. But you'll also have a lower barrier for contact, so you can expect the number of customer interaction to rise. You'll need a dedicated real-time communication team to support this.
Empower frontline employees.
In real-time communication, speed is king. Zendesk stated that customer satisfaction in live chat dropped after 30 seconds of waiting. Since you'll be having so many customer inquiries requiring fast responses, it's essential to empower your frontline employees to resolve issues themselves. The number of cases that require involvement from higher up should be minimized.
Set up communication guidelines.
That doesn't mean your real-time communication should be a free-for-all. On the contrary, it takes directed effort to maintain a consistent voice across all channels. Like The Economist maintains a style guide for its articles, you should require a style guide for your real-time communication as well. On what level of familiarity will you communicate? If you'll speak in English, will it be British or American?
Play together with your other channels.
In the world of conversational commerce, one-on-one conversations will cover a much wider area of topics than before. That's why your frontend employees need to be well aware of all external communications. Whether it's social media, content, email, or performance marketing – your real-time communication channel needs to be in sync.
Track key metrics.
One key benefit of written communication is that it can easily be tracked. Most live chat solutions, for example, have standard integrations with analytics solutions like Google Analytics and Kissmetrics. With them, it's easy to measure key indicators of quality communication: first response time, handovers per issue, service ratings, etc.
We really do seem to be at the brink of another revolution in the relationship between businesses and customers.
You can start reaping the benefits of real-time communication today, by taking the first steps with website chat, messaging support, and chatbots. Happy chatting!
Did you know? With Kissmetrics, you can track the effectiveness of your online advertising. Optimize your marketing by knowing which campaigns perform and which don't. Check out our landing page to learn more.
About the Author: Pascal van Opzeeland is CMO of Userlike, software for website and messaging support. He and his team share tips about customer communication on the Userlike Blog.
Most marketers understand that their Twitter efforts need to go beyond consistent tweeting if they want to grow their following and boost engagement. It takes commitment, strategy and constant management.
But as social networks and audiences continue to evolve-and marketers find themselves juggling more social networks and content responsibilities each day-staying on top of it all can be daunting and even frustrating. In fact, B2B marketers use an average of 6 social media platforms to distribute content, according to the Content Marketing Institute and MarketProfs 2016 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends-North America report.
Sound like you?
Well, the good news is that there are a number of tools that can help you manage your Twitter account, as well as make it easy for you to share, interact and grow your following-and even mine for new content ideas and gain a better understand the impact of your content-so you can make all your effort count.
Whether you want to boost visual content, host a Twitter chat or find relevant followers, below we dive into some of the tools that are worth your consideration if you want to get the most out of your Twitter efforts.
Bit.ly has long been known as a tool for shortening links, but that's certainly not its only capability. By signing up for a free account, you can also use the tool to share links to multiple Twitter (and Facebook) accounts and individually track performance of those links-allowing you to quickly share content and get insight into how your audience interacts with that content. In addition, with an enterprise account you can create a branded short domain and get deeper audience analytics.
Hootsuite has been my go-to social media management tool since my journalism days for a few different reasons:
With a free account, you can also get access to some basic analytics, content suggestions and the ability to integrate two RSS feeds so you can easily share relevant content from your own blog or other trusted sources. Hootsuite also offers Professional, Team, Business and Enterprise plans that allow you to customize the tool for your own unique needs.
If you're looking to create better content, discover relevant influencers or both, BuzzSumo could be the tool for you. This little excerpt from their website sums the tool up up nicely:
“BuzzSumo gives you insight into what content is working, and the influencers amplifying it.”
When it comes to hot content, BuzzSumo allows you to instantly search and discover the most shared content within the last day, week, month, six months or year. In addition, you'll see data for the engagement and shares that content has received across social networks, and the number of linking domains.
To find relevant influencers, the tool allows you to search by username or topic. Some of the insights you'll find are page authority, domain authority, number of followers, retweet ratio, reply ratio and the average number of retweets.
With Keyhole you can track hashtags, mentions, keywords, URLs and Twitter accounts in real-time, which can be especially useful for keeping track of the conversation and engagement happening around your company or brand-or even your top competitors.
Below is a sample of the tracking information you'd see for #digitalmarketing. You can see that the data includes the top posts, related topics, recent users, the most influential users, and some analytics.
While Keyhole isn't free, it offers several different size plans from professional to enterprise-and there's a free trial option.
These days, it's pretty safe to say that all marketers understand that video is an increasingly important marketing tool for capturing audience attention, showing value and encouraging engagement across the digital universe. Using Twitter's Periscope app, you can natively share live video that is a little more raw and authentic, giving your audience something more visual and compelling to interact with.
Buffer is another fantastic social media management tool that allows you to consistently schedule tweets and other social posts. But one of the big advantages of this tool is that it shares your content at the best possible times throughout the day to maximize exposure.
In addition, Buffer recently added video sharing capabilities, as well as Pablo, which allows you to create beautiful and perfectly sized images.
Crowdfire was originally built to be the answer to the frequently asked question: “Who unfollowed me on Twitter?” But now the tool has “matured into a holistic friend management platform,” according to its website.
The “Copy Followers” is one of the most interesting Crowdfire features, allowing you to search similar users' followings and “copy them” to the list of people you're following. The idea here is that they'll want to follow you, too, since they're already following someone similar to you or your brand.
Crowdfire also gives you the ability to see who you're following that is inactive and makes it easy for your to unfollow them. You can also keep track of how the content and updates you share actually affects your follow and unfollow stats. This information can give you a good idea of what types of updates are turning people off and enticing them to follow.
Over the past couple years, Twitter chats have emerged as a marketing tactic that allows brands and marketers to connect with their audience, build awareness and showcase what they have to offer. Twubs is a tool that allows you to find and follow relevant Twitter chats, or even host your own.
Other tools that can help you manage a Twitter chat include: TweetChat.com, Tchat.io, Twitterfall and TwChat.
SocialRank is a tool that can help you better understand and analyze who your most engaged or most influential followers, helping you identify and track important people who you should be engaging with.
The basic account is totally free and gives you the ability to filter and sort your followers, view their full profiles and connect multiple social accounts. There are also Premium and Market Intel versions that offer a host of other features and benefits such as the ability to send a direct message to multiple recipients.
The native analytics dashboard within Twitter is a must-use. It's free, simple and already built into the platform-you just have to turn it on. The dashboard features detailed overview of all your activity for the past 28 days, including your top tweets, top mentions and top followers.
What is your favorite Twitter tool and why? Share it with us in the comments section below.
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10 Tools to Help Marketers Get More Out of Twitter | http://www.toprankblog.com
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Posted by sergeystefoglo
Content marketing has been discussed and researched more in the last 5 years than ever before.
Source: Google Trends
There are various kinds of content marketing strategies out there. Blog promotion, infographics, video strategies, and creative content are some. Depending on your goals, some are more effective than others.
At Distilled, we've been fortunate enough to work on many creative content pieces with some incredible clients. This article is going to focus on a piece of content that my team and I created for a client. We'll take a look at both the creation process and the tangible results of the piece we made.
Note: In general, you don't want to rely on one piece of content for link acquisition. It's recommended to focus on multiple pieces throughout the year to add link diversity and give your content pieces a good chance to succeed. The following is simply a case study of one piece of content that worked well for my client.
Our client is Ginny's (shoutout to Matt and Cailey). Ginny's is an ecommerce business based in the beautiful state of Wisconsin.
We knew that regardless of how much optimization was done on the site, their lack of incoming links would be a huge barrier to success. This quickly became a topic of discussion for us.
The general rule of thumb: the more linking root domains (LRDs) your site has, the stronger the domain authority should be. And the stronger the linking root domains are, the better it is for your DA. In other words, it's better to get 1 strong link (DA 80+) than 10 weak links (DA 20-). Kudos if the links are topically relevant to your website/brand.
So, my team and I sat down and started thinking of different ways we could accomplish the task of increasing LRDs and (hopefully) DA for my client.
Here are the steps my team and I went through for this particular client.
Note: For an extensive look at creating creative content, please see the following articles:
The first step in the creative process is ideation, because without great ideas you can't a have a great piece of content. It's important to give yourself enough time for ideation. Don't rush it, and be sure to include various team members with different backgrounds to get as many ideas as possible. Note: stock up on coffee/Red Bull and snacks for this.
Typically after an ideation session you'll have many potential ideas. It's important to go through and validate them. When I say "validate," I mean making sure others haven't already done something similar, or that creating the piece is actually possible (you have access to the right data, etc.)
Note: For more information on researching and validating your creative ideas, read this post titled “Researching Creative Ideas: 10 Dos and Don'ts.”
At this point you'll have a handful of ideas that are not only on-brand and interesting, but have great potential in being picked up by various sources. Put together a nice deck and pitch your ideas to the client. The goal is to get your client to pick one (or a few, depending on the budget).
Note: Here's an awesome write-up on a framework for pitching creative ideas to your clients.
Once your client signs off on a piece, it's time to dive into the data! Depending on the piece you're creating, this might look like scraping websites and doing a ton of research to get the right data you need. Take your time on this, as you want to make sure your data is accurate and relevant.
During this part of the process, it's a great idea to start mocking up some potential designs. If your piece is smaller, this might be a quick and simple task. If you have a data visualization, this will be longer. Typically, it's a good idea to create 2–3 mockups and give your client some options.
Once your client signs off on a particular design, it's time to dive into development.
The actual copy for the piece doesn't have to happen after the development, but it's usually a good idea to allow the copywriter to see how much space they have to work with. What you don't want is for your copywriter to write 500 words when the designer has made space for 100. Communication is key in this process.
Once the piece is built, it's important to test it out on various browsers and devices. Ask people to give it a run and try to fix as many errors/bugs as possible.
Depending on your timeline, you might want to start promotion sooner than this. The important thing to note is to consider pre-pitching and reaching out to contacts to gauge their interest in the piece as soon as possible. Keep your contacts updated and be sure to give them everything they need for their stories.
Note: For further reference on pitching journalists, please see this post titled, “Beyond the Media List: Pro-Active Prospecting for Pitching Creative Content.”
It's time to launch!
On the day the piece launches, be sure that you are reminding journalists, reaching out to contacts, sharing the piece on social media, and making your social campaigns live.
There are a lot of steps to building a creative piece, so don't underestimate the work that goes into it! After you launch the piece be sure to have a beer, give yourself a pat on the back, or do whatever it is you need to do to celebrate.
After the process outlined above, our team came up with 50 States of Bacon.
The idea was simple: Everyone likes bacon, but who likes it the most? Ginny's caters to a lot of people who love deep frying, so this was on-brand. We decided to use Instagram's (now difficult to access) API to extract 33,742 photos that were tagged with #bacon and located within the USA. To normalize for population distribution and Instagram usage, we also collected 64,640 photos with the tags #food, #breakfast, #lunch, and #dinner.
To make this data more visual, we made it interactive and included some fun facts for each state.
So, what happened after we launched the piece? Let's dive in.
Here are some of the larger websites 50 States of Bacon got picked up on.
Website | Domain Authority | Other |
|---|---|---|
US News | 94 | Tweeted from account (115K+) |
Mashable | 96 | Tweeted from account (6.95M+) |
AOL Lifestyle | 98 | Referred 1,200+ visitors |
Eater | 85 | N/A |
Daily Dot | 85 | Tweeted from account (274K+) |
Here is what the LRDs and DA looked like before we launched the piece, and then after 4 months of it being live:
Before Launch | 4 Months Later | |
|---|---|---|
Linking Root Domains | 450 | 600 |
Domain Authority | 29 | 36 |
Let's break this down by metric. Here's a graph of the LRDs over time (we launched the piece at about the start of the uplift).
The domain authority didn't budge until about 4 months after we launched the piece. We weren't actively pursuing any other link-based campaigns during this time, so it's safe to say the creative piece had a lot to do with this boost in DA.
Note: Since DA is refreshed with new pools of data, this observation wouldn't have been as valid if the DA only moved one or two positions. But, since it moved 7 positions so close to the launch of this piece, I feel like it's safe to assume the piece contributed greatly.
Does this mean if you do a similar piece that your DA will also increase? No. Does it give us a good example on what can happen? Absolutely.
Setting expectations with clients is hard. That's even more true when you both know that links may be even more important than user engagement with your campaign. To make sure expectations are reasonable, you may want to encourage them to see this campaign as one of many over a long period of time. Then there's less pressure on any individual piece.
So, it's important to set expectations upfront. I would never tell a client that we can guarantee a certain number of links, or that we guarantee an increase in domain authority.
Instead, we can guarantee a piece of content that is well-built, well-researched, and interesting to their target audience. You can go one step further and guarantee reaching out to X amount of contacts, and you can estimate how many of those contacts will respond with a "yes" or "no."
In fact, you should set goals. How much traffic would you like the piece to bring? What about social shares? What seems like a reasonable amount of LRD's you could gain from a piece like this? Benchmark where you currently are, and make some reasonable goals.
The point I'm trying to make is that you shouldn't promise your client a certain amount of links because, frankly, you'd be lying to them. Be upfront about what this looks like and show examples of work you've done before, but make sure to set their expectations correctly up front to avoid any conflicts down the road.
There's a lot to be learned from the results of creative campaigns. The goal of this article is to share one piece that I've worked on with a client while highlighting some things that I learned/observed along the way. If you'd like to see more campaigns we've worked on at Distilled, take a look at our creative roundup for last year.
To wrap things up, here are the key takeaways:
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In the age of Netflix and DVRs, it's weirdly ironic to watch the growing popularity of live video for social media marketing. Sure, most of it is recorded so you can access it later, but it has far more in common with the nightly news than with modern on-demand, personalized content.
It turns out, there's something about watching an event unfold live that's hard to replicate. To be there as it's happening, in the moment with a group of friends and strangers, sharing a singular experience. It's powerful. And it never really went out of style-it just took a while for technology to create a compelling modern version.
Facebook Live has realized the potential for live video combined with a social network. Not only are people watching in droves, they're more engaged: People spend three times longer watching live video than they watch recorded versions after-the-fact.
As with any new channel, it's always tempting to jump right in and start creating content. And, as always, it's a better idea to do some evaluating and strategizing first.
Here's the low-down on Facebook Live: What it is, what it's for, and how brands are using it.
A native live-streaming service embedded in Facebook. When you go Live, the stream will show in your follower's feeds and on your profile page. Viewers can leave likes and comments in real time. After the event is over, viewers can watch a recorded version with the option of seeing the comment stream as if it were live.
Everyone from the President to celebrities to athletes.
Right now, the easiest way to go Live is from a mobile device. On the Facebook app for iOS or Android, you'll see a “Live” button right at the top of the feed. Click that for a quick set up and your feed will begin! There is a version of Live for desktops which is slowly being rolled out-if you don't have it yet, the mobile version is the only game in town.
Facebook's best practices for Live are a good place to start:
Since it's so easy to go Live, a lot of Live streams right now look the same. They're talking heads, people holding up a phone and chatting informally with the viewer. If you're a celebrity with a quick wit, go for it-otherwise, don't go in without a plan.
It's an unpredictable platform-you may have to contend with technical issues and an unmoderated comment stream at the same time. It's a good idea to have at least one person off-camera who can handle the comment stream and work out any glitches.
Finally, don't expect your entire audience to tune in all at once. Generally viewers drop in and out of live streams-some will arrive late and some will leave early. So a complex narrative that builds on prior knowledge is not the best choice.
There's a vast array of content that works for Facebook Live. The most successful take advantage of the special connection the platform affords with an audience, addressing and interacting with them in real time. Here are a few good examples:
Granted, the one thing it lacked was an element of utility. But it was undeniably compelling. Add some value for your viewer while checking off the same boxes this video did, and you'll be unstoppable.
Livestreaming video is still in its infancy. Marketers are still experimenting with the form, with mixed results. One thing's for sure: As with any channel, it's all about relevancy, authenticity, and providing something of value to your audience. Put their needs first, and you can develop a strategy for success.
Does your brand plan to jump into livestreaming? Are you already enjoying success with the platform? Let me know in the comments.
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© Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®, 2016. |
What Social Media Marketers Need to Know About Facebook Live | http://www.toprankblog.com
The post What Social Media Marketers Need to Know About Facebook Live appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.
Should you add humor to your pay-per-click (PPC) ads, or are PPC ads best left as they traditionally are: concise, informative, and with a straightforward, non-humorous call to action? One side says yes, and another says, not really. Marketing professors […]
Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog
Funny: Humor Can Work In PPC Ads
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Written by Hazel Mae Pan,
The post Funny: Humor Can Work In PPC Ads appeared first on Search Engine People Blog.
