Nick Baggott's CRM and Digital Marketing Blog

Facebook algorithm update and how to beat it

I have just read 2 excellent articles from BuzzSumo on their excellent buffer blog:

- The New Facebook Algorithm: Secrets Behind How It Works and What You Can Do To Succeed

- We Analyzed 43 Million Facebook Posts From the Top 20,000 Brands (New Research)

 

The first one explains how the algorithm has been updated and gives advice on how to beat it. This diagram neatly summarises their advice:

The second blog post outlines their findings from their recent study of 43 million business posts. These are some of their findings:

• Top pages are posting more frequently
• Page engagement is still declining  (Engagement has fallen by between 49-70% depending on business sector. Images are getting more engagement than video and links get the lowest engagement rates

• The highest engagement is from brands who post 5 x per day
• Ad content is prioritised in news feeds

This diagram neatly demonstrates the challenges of falling engagement on Facebook:

 

If you have 15 minutes, I would advise you to read both articles in detail. 

 - The New Facebook Algorithm: Secrets Behind How It Works and What You Can Do To Succeed

- We Analyzed 43 Million Facebook Posts From the Top 20,000 Brands (New Research)

 

What you do need to remember, is that free engagement on Facebook is declining so rapidly, that posts need to be boosted (and paid for) to reach a wider audience, which is why it is more important than ever to make sure your posts are engaging and shareable. Getting followers to share your posts will have a positive impact on your engagement rates, but will also lead to greater exposure and shared posts are trusted by followers' friends and contacts so much more than paid for posts. So, focus on influencing the influencers and generating advocacy and sharing of posts.

If you'd like more advice on this, get in contact. I can provide training and consulting if you need support with this or other digital marketing or CRM issues. More info can be found here www.navigateconsulting.co.uk/training-courses

 

Practical SEO Advice

I have just read an excellent article on SEO by SEMrush 

It provides practical and detailed advice on SEO. It is simple to understand,technical where needed and clear. SEMrush have some excellent tools to help you to analyse how your web site (or a competitor's site) is performing. This can be really useful as Google Analytics will only work on your own site and you need your technical team to insert the GA codes on pages. 

I have cut and pasted the below infographic from SEMrush's excellent article. 

For me, I always start by getting my clients to think about Keyword Strategy first. Google Trends and the Google Adword Keyword tool are great free resources to get you started with planning a keyword strategy. Think about whether you are focusing on topical v evergreen content, as evergreen may work better over the long term, but topical content gets you media coverage and social media shares. This is an example of evergreen content (although SEO ranking factors do change from time to time). Also, have a think about whether a long tail strategy is best for you, focusing on those keywords that have lower search volumes, but convert more effectively (for example rather than a generic term like "Training courses", a long tail phrase could be "SEO training for pharmaceutical industry marketers".

I also advise clients to look closely at the internal links on your site (matching them to your keyword strategy, rather than using navigational phrases like "click here" or "download now". There is often a pay off between your SEO and User Experience strategy and the use of internal links is a great example of that. 

 

Strategic Marketing in Nigeria

I have just recently returned from delivery 2 x 2 day strategic marketing workshops in Nigeria. 

I have to admit, I was concerned before I went (if you look at the Foreign Office website before you travel, you probably wouldn't go!). However, I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. I met some inspirational people, some very talented marketers and learned a great deal. They welcomed me like a long lost friend and appreciated everything that I did for them.

I have often found that as I travel around the world (this was my 52nd country), the marketers that you meet in developing countries (Nigeria, Kenya, Colombia are great examples) tend to be more motivated, entrepreneurial and keen to learn than their western counter parts. My trip was split into 2 parts, both 2 day workshops. The first one was with marketing managers and the second one was with the marketing leadership team. The second workshop was run over the weekend and no-one seemed to mind giving up their precious family time to learn. Nigerians are very spiritual people, who attend church in great numbers on a Sunday, so I know that attending the session was a major commitment for many. 

I hope and expect this to be the start of a long and fruitful relationship with our client, Heirs Holdings. They are an impressive business with many interests around Africa in banking, healthcare and hotels. They have the inspirational Tony O. Elumelu as their leader and their work with the Tony Elumelu Foundation is helping small African entrepreneurs to grow and develop. Check out @TonyOElumelu on Twitter.

Here are a few photos of me with some of the delegates and Mr Elumelu

Instagram tips for Marketers

I spotted an interesting article from Simply Measured where they interview 3 prominent Instagram users, inviting them to give their best practice tips. Simply Measured are great to follow on Twitter @simply measured. All of the tips make good sense to me. Some of their key tips are:

• Use high quality images (in my experience, the quality of the image makes much more difference on Instagram than Facebook or Twitter)
• Develop a clear content strategy
• Showcase YOUR business (don't use stock photos)
• Be frequent

I'd like to add two of my own to this list:

• Influence the influencers. Instagram posts from celebrities get more likes than posts from news sites or brands. I believe that the reason why so many people love Insta, is that it allows people to get a view into the private or hidden lives of the people and brands that fascinate them. That leads me into my second tip:
• Show people what they normally wouldn't see. Show how your product is made, or show behind the scenes at your event. Maybe show the seating plan before guests arrive, or show the speakers preparing to get ready. Does your product have an interesting heritage, or is it sourced organically, or is it delivered from interesting places? Surprise people and give them a window into a world that they don't normally get to see. 

New website is now live

Thanks for your patience. My updated web site is now live, so I'll be updating the blog again from now.

Hope you like the new web site for Navigate Consulting Ltd

Setting objectives for Content Marketing and Social Media

I have recently been reading an excellent blog post from Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute. 

The article is entitled B2C Marketers need to give Content Marketing Time.

In the article, it outlines some of the key challenges of content marketing, in particular that it can take a year or so for a content strategy to bare fruit. You may not have the luxury of time in the constant pursuit of fast results and quarterly planning, but if you have the opportunity to plan longer term, then a content strategy is absolutely recommended by me. In B2B marketing we normally talk about the need to create thought leadership content and also to use content and social media to keep the potential customer informed and the lead warm throughout the often longer purchase process.

In B2C we may focus less on thought leadership and more on customer experience. Whether you are B2B or B2C it is crucial that you don't start to develop a plan until you have identified and segmented your target audience and of course set clear objectives for each group. I must have seen at least 5 different studies over the years where marketers have been asked to articulate what their key objectives are for social media, content marketing or digital comms and each one has been consistent. Those objectives can be broken down into 3 groups:

1) Sales related objectives

2) Customer engagement objectives

3) brand perception objectives (sometimes we combine these with the engagement objectives)

Here is a chart from the CMI article that shows from their research what the key objectives are for B2C content marketing:

You can see how this research fits into my 3 categories:

Lead generation and sales fit into the sales related objectives, brand awareness fits into brand and engagement and building an audience fit into engagement. Loyalty is a complex objective - is it about repeat purchase (sales) or advocacy (engagement)? 

I like to keep objectives simple and typically focus on these 3 groups of objectives.

To measure engagement, you need a model to track against. I use the 4 stages from my engagement model - acquire, participate, engage and share. Some models like RACE (Reach, act, convert, engage) include a sales element (convert in this case), but I prefer to keep the sales measurement separate, so that you can isolate campaigns or customers who are engaged but not buying or buying your product but not engaged with your marketing comms. 

So, to use my engagement model, you simply need to track the behaviours of your audience against the 4 steps:

Acquire their attention - effectively a measure of reach - how many people have seen the content

Participate - effectively how many people who saw it responded and visited your owned media e.g your web site

Engage - how many people have given you permission to engage e.g. opted in to receive your emails or chose to follow you on Twitter, as well as then measuring how many people went on to open the email or interact with your tweets.

Share - how many people shared your content with others e.g. how many retweets or emails forwarded on (and if you can what was the reach of this sharing. If your strategy is working, this act of sharing becomes part of the acquire process as new users are able to find your content through influential readers sharing your content with their networks.

So, what objectives do you set for content marketing, and how do you measure against them?

Dealing with Negative Social Media Comments and Posts

Reputation risk is a common barrier for brands who are considering building their social media plan. These are the questions that clients often ask me:

- Will engaging in social media encourage people to say negative things about me?

- How will I respond to negative comments?

- How long do I have to respond?

- What happens if I ignore them?

In this post, I'll summarize the advice I typically give to clients who are worried about their online reputation. Whilst I was planning this post, I also had a look around for external references and would recommend reading the excellent www.reputationmanagement.com if you want further advice. Useful articles include:

• How to remove content from Google
• SEO for Reputation Management

So, here are my top tips for dealing with comments in social media:

1) Make sure that you have a social media policy. Have a clear policy on use of social media by your staff and make sure that it is in your employment contracts. Typically, organisations state whether employees can use personal devices at work and whether they can look at social media sites when they are  working, but, your policy needs to go further than that. Clearly state what they can and cannot say about their work in their personal social accounts. Your confidentiality clauses will cover you against them giving away company secrets and they are also governed by laws on libel and slander. Make sure you make it clear if you have any other restrictions.

2) Allow your staff to use social media at work! It is hard to police anyway, but don't stop them using social media. You should encourage them. Only by regular use will they get used to the conventions and nuances of social media use. The best way to learn is to expose yourself to what others are doing. Encourage your team to follow industry experts, journalists, competitors and customers on social media (particularly Twitter) as there is no better way of them staying up to date with what is happening in your industry.

3) Build a social media response policy for your social media teams. Who is allowed to respond to what type of comment or post? When do they escalate up to more senior management? How quickly are they expected to respond? What happens when they see a tweet late at night and feel like they should respond? The answers to these questions make up my next tips!

4) Have a defined list of approved social media responders. They should be trained and briefed on your policies. The day to day management can be done by a social media executive in your comms team or a customer services manager, but make sure they know who they refer issues up to if they are more serious. You also need an approved list of social media creators / authors too, for your pro-active posts.

5) To help your social media team decide when to escalate an issue to more senior management, have a process for identifying different levels of incident. Here is an example of a 5 step incident level categorization. Your social media team can deal with levels 1 & 2, but they may need to refer incidents from level 3 up to a more senior member of the team.

6) If you do receive a negative comment, then here are some simple steps to help you to decide how to respond:

• Respond by acknowledging the incident straight away, but don't admit blame 
• Investigate whether their complaint is true and genuine
• Try to take all conversations off line. Do not have a debate in a public forum, use private messaging on Twitter or Facebook Messenger to discuss comments with individuals and / or encourage them to call or email you.
• Once the issue is resolved, then if you feel it is necessary, put a public response onto the comment, so others can see it has been dealt with e.g. "Thank you for your comment, I hope that you are satisfied now that we have spoken to you directly". Hopefully, they will reply and say thank you, which will make you look caring and professional to other followers.
• Don't be afraid to invite negative posters to make suggestions on how the problem could be solved or how service could be improved, but do this in a private channel and share their ideas if you think they are helpful to others.
• Respond as quickly as possible as waiting will invite further negative comments, but do not respond until you have a solution or can help. Most accounts are manned during office hours, so say on your user profile which hours comments will be responded to and don't try to respond late at night when you are away from work.
• Ignoring negative comments is not a good idea. It tends to make the poster more determined to get their point across and escalate it in other forums, so try to respond to everyone as quickly as you can within working hours. 

7) Invest in a social media sentiment tracking tool - there are some free tools like www.socialmention.com and some better premium services like Sysomos and Radian6. Reputation Management have their tools too. If you have the budget for the premium tools, you will get more accurate sentiment analysis, but beware, they are certainly not perfect at the sentiment analysis, so you'll need some manual checking too.

I hope this has been helpful. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts too. Or if you'd like me to talk to your business about developing your policy or training your staff, then i'd be delighted to help.

How to humanise your brand through content marketing

Last night, I did a one hour webinar for CIM's Practical insights series. I talked about why content marketing is so important and gave some tips on developing engaging content marketing programmes. 

I thought it would be useful, to summarise some of the key points here. So, here are my top tips for content marketing:

1) Content marketing can be curated or created. You don't have to produce all of the content yourselves - it is OK to share content from industry experts, influencers or your customers.

2) Focus on pull, not push. Most consumers will research before they buy and are typically 70% of the way through their buying journey before they speak to a possible vendor. So, make sure your content can be found in Google and social media.

3) Focus on earned, rather than paid media. Your campaign may need some paid media to boost awareness initially, but consider how and why your readers would share your content with their peers.

4) The best creative ideas tell stories. How do you humanise your proposition by telling engaging stories to bring your message to life. In B2B that could be case studies, in B2C it could be about the customer experience

5) You need to set objectives and measure customer engagement as well as revenue and sales. I use the 4 step model of Acquire, Participate, Engage and Share to measure engagement. Focus on acquiring their attention, then getting them to respond to your owned media (participate), where you get their permission to continue to engage through social media, mobile apps, blogs, events or email. Finally, consider how you will get engaged consumers to share your content with their peers, which should start the acquisition cycle again

6) How will you influence the influencers. Your content will reach a much wider audience if you can get celebrities, industry experts, bloggers or consumers sharing your content. What is in it for them? Why do people share? Normally, they do it to make themselves look good (smart, funny, caring, expert etc)

7) Treat different customers differently. Segment your customers using their behaviours and develop engaging propositions based on customer insights for each group. Behaviours are typically much more predictive and definitive than demographics (or business demographics)

8) Develop a content calendar, leaving space for evergreen, topical and event related content. Evergreen content will be searched for today and into the longer term. Topical content gets you noticed and gets your content shared. Event related content allows you to promote your launches, events and at key times of the year such as Christmas, Father's Day, Back to School or the key industry conference.

9) Make sure you use social listening tools to search and then reply to customer comments about your content. There are free tools like www.socialmention.com and more expensive tools like Sysomos and Radian6, that provide a more comprehensive service.

10) Treat different comments differently. Do you have a process for dealing with comments from simple positive comments to a lone complainer to a social media crisis? Make sure you are not making up your process when you are in a crisis!

I hope you found these tips useful. I'd be interested in your tips too, if you'd like to share them. Or if you are interested in learning more about Content marketing or need some consulting services, you can talk to me directly or book a course through CIM.

Using SEO tools to build a content strategy

I have just read a really insightful article on Search Engine Watch, looking at free SEO tools that can help you to understand your customers better, so that you can develop better content marketing plans.

I was aware (and regularly use) the Google Keyword tool and Google Trends. However, I was not aware of "Answer the Public". I have just had a play with it and found it really illuminating. Below is Search Engine Watch's description of the tool. I have been travelling around EMEA (Russia, South Africa, Spain and Turkey) over the last few weeks delivering digital marketing training for Avon. So, I thought I'd try out the toll with their core brand. 

Below, is the instant result. This is so useful for helping us to recommend content ideas. I am now going to do it for all of my other clients!

 

 

"Answer the Public: Typically SEO’s talk about keywords or keyphrases when we describe what people type into the search box, if we were being more accurate we should probably call them search queries. I try to encourage myself to call them queries more often. That’s because the person looking at the screen is ultimately asking a question. It might not always be phrased as a question but sometimes it is. And that’s why I’m a huge fan of Answer the Public, it’s a tool with one simple purpose, understanding the questions people have about a topic. When you start typing into Google it tries to guess what you were typing before you’ve even finished typing. These suggestions are triggered by two things, search volume and mention volume. Are people searching using those words and are websites using them as well? These suggestions are the datapoints which feed Answer the Public. You type in a seed concept and it spits out visualisations on questions people have around that topic. Proper genuine customer insight from a free tool. Here are just two screenshots from the tool – there’s a business plan, content strategy and social media programme right here in these screen shots" Search Engine watch

Why do we share in social media? What are our motivations?

Gerry Moran (@GerryMoran) shared this research from 12,000 adults in USA, UK, France, Japan and Australia where people were asked "When you share content, what are your motivations". There are many reasons listed, but I guess they can be grouped into some wider motivations:

• To entertain
• To inform
• To help
• To boost my reputation
• To get advice

This is of course, claimed data, which has its limitations. I would love to see a study analyzing what people have actually shared on say Facebook, Twitter and Linked In to see how it differs. If anyone has seen this type of research, please let me know!

From my perspective, I share to entertain, help others and build my personal reputation. I use Facebook for non-business personal interests, so are more likely to share content from charities or my sporting hobbies, whereas I use Linked In and especially Twitter for business, so tend to share helpful business content that will boost my reputation as an expert thought leader. I have however, realized that a little personal sharing on Twitter does help my personal business brand (e.g. sharing pictures of places I travel to through work or famous people I meet as i travel).

Do you have any rules or guidelines on what you share and in which channel?