Value/Importance: ★★★

Recommended link: Facebook UK Marketing page

We’ve found the global / US Facebook Marketing Page useful for ideas on Facebook Marketing – it seems others do too – there are nearly 900,000 Likes for this page – that’s a LOT of people following Facebook marketing.

Until recently, most posts and examples referenced, the US market, but similar sites have now been created in some European countries which we thought we’d alert you to – it could be worth putting them in your Feeds.

In the UK version, it’s good to see Facebook practicing Permission Marketing with a gated page to get access to their resources.

These are the other countries which now have a special marketing page – you can access them from the bottom of the UK page:

These service sound scarier than than the title suggests. I’m sure many consultants, agencies and companies are using services such as oDesk and 99Designs already. But I thought these were worth grouping and sharing for those not in the know or so that others can be shared.

The crowdsourcing approach where you put your tender out to anyone who wants to bid tends to be much more cost effective.  In this blog post I want to open your eyes to some of the potential with outsourcing, my experience of it and highlight some of the services you could utilise. The outsource / crowdsourcing industry is seeing huge growth as more business are willing to change their processes. Elance reported a doubling of the number of jobs posted in 2011 and now boast over 1.3 million “experts” in its ads!

Don’t fear it… Test it!

When we work under pressure and in the same company for any length of time it is easy to think, “this is how it works” and it is even more difficult to sit back and seriously question what are doing and how you are doing it. Outsourcing requires a different mindset, you have to want to challenge the norm, be striving for better work, open to different ideas and be looking for efficiencies (whether in process or budgets). My advice would be to use the information below to help create brief to test outsourcing some of your marketing.

Are you using agencies that are not proving valuable, do you have staff stretched over too many areas doing non-strategic tasks, are you lacking skills that would enable you to grow? If you answered yes to any of these questions, I’d say you should think about testing the outsourcing of work, it will help you scale and try new things.

Online Crowdsourcing Services

There are a wide range of online services to help you find and manage your outsourced jobs. The four sites listed below are some of the more popular services used by people online. They basically include an organised directory of freelancers. You would publish your brief / requirements, people can then apply for that job. At this point you can organise / sort through the applications in each sites interface. It is easy to filter by hours worked, rating etc.

1. oDesk www.odesk.com

oDesk is a very well established crowdsourcing platform. I have used this a number of times at First 10 to help scale in-particular with some SEO and PPC skills, where agencies haven’t cost-effective enough and the jobs are relatively straight forward.

The system looks quite dated once you login and some of the processes are a little clunky, however it does have a very large database of freelancers and I have yet to have a bad experience. I utilised this platform much more for project orientated work, rather than ongoing retainers though both are possible through the platform.

2. Elance www.elance.com

Elance is similar to oDesk, it is well established, and has a large database or workers. The key difference however is that Elance has a larger focus on programming, while it does have some marketing, finance and writing freelancers it is biased towards programming. Elance seems to attract businesses willing to pay a little more for time / projects but the overall consensus is that there isn’t much between oDesk and Elance.

3. Freelancer.com www.freelancer.com

Freelancer is a much more online marketing / tatic orientated platform, with over 3 million members it makes Elance look small. With projects ranging from simple link-building tasks through to website build and translation, it is very likely you will find a skilled freelancer for your project. The system, usability and design is much better than the previous two systems mentioned (in my humble opinion).

4. 99 Designs 99designs.com

99designs is an example of a niche outsourcing site, focussing purely on creative freelancers and therefore design / creative briefs. There other niche sites for virtual assistants for example, getfriday.com would be an example of this. I only have one experience of using 99designs and unfortunately it didn’t produce what I was after. However it did influence the final design in a round about way. I think for business on a tight budget early in existence 99designs.com is perfect for you. Established businesses are unlikely to get the kind of design / creativity they desire. I would imagine a lot of this also comes down to briefing though. The SmartInsights logo started out here to get a range of design options and we then used our own designer to tweak it.

Advantages to this form of outsourcing

Much cheaper than hiring

Taking on staff incurs a lot of costs for business, from wages, NI, desks, computers etc as well as a commitment from the management team for one to ones, personal development etc. This can make testing / trialing new ideas complex and expensive, utilising an online outsourcing service irradiates these concerns. You can always hire at a later date should you decide it would be better.

New / fresh ideas

Utilising online outsourcing services gives a team that are not tied to commercial pressures of running a business, but are instead focussed on delivering as best they can against your brief. This often means you get ideas that would never normally have come into the business, consider them a bonus prize!

Forces a considered brief

Internal teams can often create a level of laziness, a quick verbal brief to a handful of people will “keep them busy” and it is kind of the right thing. When you have to brief people through online outsourcing platforms you need to have considered the project / tasks from various angles as it is likely this freelancer has never worked in your industry before.

It is also a marketing cost which instantly means it comes with the requirement for an ROI. So considering you objectives, budgets, customer, idea and project is paramount if you are to get value from outsourcing work. This process and requirement means your projects are more likely to be successful and you may even find once the thinking is done that not all projects are worth progressing.

Easier to scale up and down

Utilising online outsourcing tools allows you to scale the number of people working on your project much easier and without anywhere as much risk as using local freelancers or hiring. This means your business can flex as the requirements to deliver do, all without adding additional risk (head count) or spending too much money.

Disadvantages to outsourcing

Briefing time increases

Using online outsourcing tools does increase the pressure on the management team to create briefs and run processes, though this is offset by having less staff to manage. It may mean some projects take a little longer to deliver as the brief has to be watertight first.

Requires a mindset shift internally (perceived as a risk)

There are a lot of negative things that come to mind when people consider online outsourcing, such as “how can I trust them”, “what if they don’t do a good job”. My opinion is that you get out what you put in, if you have a good brief and take your time to select your team you will get what you asked for, if you are lazy and treat it as if people were in the same room (a typical member of staff) then it will fail. You will need to work hard to prove the concept to staff internally, but by doing this though you will create new opportunities to help grow your business.

Outsourcing your first brief

When you first approach a website such as the four mentioned above, it is paramount in the early stages that your brief is well considered and you are crystal clear on what the deliverables are. I have outline some tips below from my experiences of using such services:

• Set a clear brief and expectations on process
• Be explicit with deliverables / output
• Have a budget in mind and don’t go too low (it will be cheaper but it should be fair too)
• Take your time to consider applications after an initial cull
• Utilise the filtering services such as hours worked, rating etc to help filter the lis
• Be open minded to new approaches, ideas and been questioned

Happy outsourcing… What are your recommendations?

Facebook is ‘the’ social media platform for communicating with consumers in 2012 and  looks set to continue well into the future. Many brands have moved away from microsites and instead have invested heavily in a page presence on Facebook.

There are so many options available – Facebook’s opengraph technology offering has not yet fully hit the mainstream.

Facebook webinars

One technology option I’ve seen in recent months and adopted for my own businesses is the use of Facebook events as a form of webinar- it impressed me so I thought I’d share it.

Here are two examples of the Facebook webinar; one for my own business, Musicademy, and the other for Vets Now, which I described in a previous post showing the awesome ways they encourage interaction on their pages.

Not another social media tool I’ve got to get my head around

One of the reasons companies don’t ever quite get round to using social media fully is they can never find the time to do it. There are plenty of other things that might take a little time but still get prioritised in business.

So what happens if we can present a social media idea where just one or two small pieces of effort result in a domino effect of content that can be used on multiple platforms? An activity that genuinely engages the customer in a one-to-one conversation  – and transparent so thousands of other customers can also see it – and produces a real buzz within the organisation and with other selected partners?

And what if that all takes place at no cost (to you or the customer) on the customer’s favourite platform – Facebook?

Enter the world of Facebook events

How about events such  as online Q&A sessions or ‘pseudo’ webinars?

Now when I first pitched this idea to the estimable Dave Chaffey I have to admit he was somewhat confused; “A webinar but without audio? I can’t see how that would work”.

Well it does work. And it’s particularly good in a B2C environment where customers may be put off by the technicalities of gotomeeting and much prefer to use an environment that they trust and they feel is familiar.

How do Facebook events work?

We’re all familiar with people using Facebook events to run a party and invite guests. The event wall is a great place to add comments to your RSVP and enter into a little banter before the event with other guests.

Well, that same device can be used to run a live webinar of sorts. You choose your date, give your webinar a name (we use “Ask the Expert – Live Session”) and send an invitation to all those you want to come.

The invitees use the event wall to ask questions of the expert panel (that’s you and your team) and, during the hour the event is live, your panel answers the questions.

You can see a sample question in the image below.

Advantages

• Your brand (and your panel members) are positioned as thought leaders on your topics.
• You can work with partners, suppliers and other industry gurus as members of your expert panel. We’ve showcased our panel here with links and photos. All are happy / flattered to be involved and no money changes hands. It’s good PR for everyone!
• It creates a lot of buzz and traction; attendees can even invite their Facebook friends to the event.
• It’s a great place to ask questions and do market research to learn more about your customers and their thoughts, insights, views and preferences.
• It’s very easy for people to dip in and out of. Unlike a webinar, where you need to get your headphones and head for a quiet room avoiding all other contact so as to focus on the audio feed, Facebook events allow people to dip in and out while they are doing other things.
• Skim reading Facebook wall content is a lot quicker than listening to all that audio content live. This will appeal to busy people; especially those who never find the time to listen-in live.
• You can re-purpose the content endlessly afterwards; blog posts, newsletter articles, tweets, internal reports showcasing customer insight, etc. Here’s an example of one of our Ask the Expert questions repurposed as a blog post.
• Everything is archived on Facebook in your ‘Past Events’ section.

Potential problems

• People will get so excited about the questions that they will start answering them themselves rather than leaving it to the expert panel. That’s fine. It’s all about involvement and engagement. Just make sure it is very clear (in the guidelines on the event wall) that the wall is ‘open’ and so anyone can give an opinion. We also allocate our professional panel an “Ask the Expert” profile with a brand logo which distinguishes them as an expert rather than simply another user.
• Time zone issues. Facebook will only allow you to set up an event in a single time zone. If you work internationally, as I do, you will need to make it very clear in the event description what the local time zones are. You can see ours here http://www.facebook.com/events/303277699698191/
• Flaming or abusive comments. Of course, you can always delete really abusive comments and ban the user but, if it’s just something critical, it can often be better to address the issue than attempt to bury it. Park Bench (Facebook Page for PetNet360) had this problem. An unqualified pet owner claiming to know all about animal behaviour aggressively questioned their vets’ qualifications to discuss animal behaviour questions. Hello? Rather than jump in, the Park Bench team left the post up and within no time other customers/fans had addressed the issue on their behalf.
• Unfortunately Facebook has recently removed the ability to email/message all your Page fans (although you can still do this with members of your Groups, which isn’t so handy for brands) so you will need to rely on other means to promote your event. Facebook is obviously keen to persuade you to pay to advertise and you can certainly do that, limiting your ads to be seen only by current fans (and / or friends of fans – a nice little Facebook option). We regularly promote the event on our wall and drip feed ideas as well as repurposing content from previous events. You can also email your normal mailing list with an invitation to the event, as well as promoting it on your website and via other channels
• No one shows up. This may well be a problem if your fanbase is very small or if they are unengaged. As you get going you may need to gently encourage some brand ambassadors (or maybe even your mum) to ask some questions. But, if you’ve promoted it well and you genuinely have something interesting to discuss, you should get some content – even if it is only a handful of questions.

Lessons learned – Tips for running ‘Febinars’

• Set your panel members up with new profiles – they don’t want to be using their personal Facebook accounts.
• Choose a distinctive image for each event so the event is branded and people know who the experts are.
• Use well known industry figures or ‘celebrities’ on your panel. Not only will they add credibility to the event in your publicity but they draw the crowds themselves by tweeting about it to their own followers.
• Do ask your panel members to spread the word about the event too. This has worked well for us in spreading the net and gaining us profile with a wider community.
• You can of course run Q&As on your main Facebook page without the bother of a separate event. It can get quite messy and difficult to manage, particularly if people start posting their questions before the event (which they will).
• Do get your panel to ‘pre-write’ their expert answers to any questions that have already been posted on the wall prior to the event. Drip feed these in when the starting whistle blows. You will be very busy keeping up with the new questions that come in during the hour.
• It doesn’t matter if two or more of your expert panel answer the same question twice. Often they will have complimentary views. Obviously do censor if panel members are likely to totally disagree to the point of making your brand look confused. Differences of opinion can work but do be careful.
• Do remind people during the event to ‘like’ your Facebook page. Just because they are posting on your wall doesn’t mean that they are automatically your fans.
• Do tweet good questions as they happen with a link back to the answer.
• Inevitably people will ask questions that you’ve answered elsewhere on your website, or you’ll have a blog post of real relevance to the question. Answer the question within the Facebook page but add in a link to the blog post too. It’s a nice way of showcasing some of the more obscure content on your site. You’ll probably already have seen something similar on Twitter – where an individual or a brand hosts an hours’ Q&A. Whilst this is great for those involved, it can end up with followers’ Twitter streams looking totally spammed as the questions and answers flow. By restricting the Q&A to the Facebook event wall your other fans will not have their own wall taken over by your new content frenzy.

What do you think? Have you tried this approach yourself and how has it worked?

What we think influences what we say, and what we say influences what we think.

Now what has that got to do with subject lines?

Well, it starts with our certainty that we pretty much know what works and what doesn’t. You see similar advice in many places: don’t use all capitals, keep it short…that sort of thing.

It’s dangerous to rely on intuition and experience all the time

Repeating subject line mantras doesn’t always make them right. The fact is, our intuition and experience are not always accurate guides to what works best.

And if you think otherwise, Which Test Won will quickly dispel any illusions.

Consider, for example, Tumbleweed Tiny House Company… when it tested a normal subject line against the all-capitals version, the latter got more opens – not what you’d expect at all.

All caps works for Overstock, too.

And keep it short? Well, sort of.

Alchemy Worx’s iconic study showed how longer subject lines can actually mean more clicks in the right circumstances.

Subject line role and length

So let’s at least agree we can have short and long subject lines. And that they’re important for getting attention, interest and an open in that magical place we call the inbox.

Seems reasonable.

That self-evident understanding of the role and length of the subject line can lead us astray too. Sometimes badly, sometimes trivially…and sometimes humorously.

For example, the subject line is about more than just inbox attention and opens. It’s an ad in itself, a brand impression, a reminder, potentially even a call to action that does not need an open to have a positive effect.

We’ve covered this before at SmartInsights. For example, here’s an apt quote from an interview we did with Claire Rollinson:

“If you think of each message as delivering a subtle yet powerful brand impression and that you have 12, 52 or more opportunities a year to put your message across you would start to realize that the unopened emails are as important if not more important than the ones that get opened!”

The (full) subject line can also display as a title or headline after the email is opened. As seen here in Hotmail, the impact is particularly strong in a plain text email:

…and Yahoo! Mail:

The perils of subject line truncation

‘Short’ and ‘long’ doesn’t really cover it, either.

Inboxes come in a myriad of configurations. The actual number of characters displayed in the subject line depends on the mix of email client, viewing device and user setting.

So, there’s a spectrum of display lengths, from very short to very long.

When I check Gmail on my smartphone, I get as few as two words and 11 characters displayed; on my PC, I’m seeing over 80 characters.

We need to be aware not just about how our subject line looks and communicates in full, but about various intermediate lengths too.

Why does this matter?

First, the advice to ensure your important words and message are as near the front as possible takes on extra weight when you see what happens to ‘good’ subject lines when they’re heavily truncated.

Truncated doesn’t just mean cut down to 50 characters, but potentially all the way down to one or two words, as in a smartphone.

Here’s a real airline subject line from my inbox:

Arrive in style – try Business Class to Cairo from only £269

That’s pretty short at 62 characters. Now chop it down to 15 characters:

Arrive in style

Even this relatively short, clear subject line now becomes vague and generic.

So truncation can remove clarity from the subject; it cuts out the important words needed to adjust expectations and address a target audience.

Another real-world example:

[LIVE Webinar] Social, Mobile and Local: Why They Matter for Email Marketers

Now truncate to 56 characters (or less) and the webinar becomes one for a generic non-specific audience:

[LIVE Webinar] Social, Mobile and Local: Why They Matter

Truncation can also completely change the meaning of a subject line:

Amazon.co.uk: Pre-order the latest TV hits on DVD and Blu-ray

Truncated to 37/38 characters:

Amazon.co.uk: Pre-order the latest TV

There’s even room for a little accidental humor:

“Valentine’s Day Sale, 10% Off On All Children’s Jewelry”

Chopped off at 45/46 characters:

Valentine’s Day Sale, 10% Off On All Children

…or worse…

Add these 7 FREE-WP Plugins to your money-making arsenal

Go ahead and truncate that to 53 characters to see what I mean.

Now, not all of this is a big deal. How many email clients are set to exactly 53 characters in the subject line? The occasional glitch might be a small price to pay for a winning word combination.

And who knows, maybe the truncated version actually lifts curiosity and drives more response! Which takes us back to the idea that only proper testing can tell us what really works.

Can you, though, write subject lines in a way that minimizes any loss of impact or meaning as it gets shorter and shorter? Might a different word or a change in order help?

And in the meantime, anyone else got any other funny examples of cutoff subject lines?

How do you feel when a pushy shop assistant approaches you the minute you enter a shop?

When an email consisting of nothing but a hard-sell call-to-action lands in your customer’s inbox, this probably makes them feel the same way.

“Register Now”

I recently received an email to promote an industry event out of the blue:

The “Register Now” link took me to a landing page that contained little information besides ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘when’ and ‘where’.

On the basis of this scant information I had a choice – register or leave the page. As I had never heard of the brand or event, I left.

Give email recipients compelling timely reasons to respond

Using “Learn More” instead of “Register Now” might have encouraged me to spend some time checking out the company, perhaps ending in a conversion after all.

A landing page featuring in-depth information, such as an article or press release, a list of people or companies planning to attend or recommendations from past attendees, might have been more persuasive.

However, this call-to-action arrived at an inopportune time in my buying cycle, so even a more persuasive call-to-action and a compelling landing page were unlikely to convert me. It’s vital to establish when your customer is ready to buy.

And, a complex sale, or a sale with a long consideration cycle, shouldn’t rely on a single email.

Four sources of insight to shape your email communication strategy

Combining and using all the customer knowledge and insight you have to shape your emails is the only reliable way to improve your email results.

Here are four valuable kinds of customer data; and you may already have identified others:

1. Email analytics. Find out who opens and/or clicks regularly and who’s apparently comatose on your email list.

2. Search keywords. The longer or more specific the keyword string, the closer people are to acting.

3. Customer and email subscriber surveys. A survey is the fastest way to find out where customers and prospects are in their buying cycle. Customer profiles will give you even more detailed information. It is vital to ask customers how close they are to a purchase decision – this classic business-to-business approach works equally well in business-to-consumer markets but it isn’t always used.

Perhaps only a fraction of your subscribers will fill out a survey or profile. But, if you keep them uncomplicated and easy to complete, you should still get enough data to draw some valuable conclusions.

4. Website browse data. Where do your customers land? How long do they stay? Do they burrow deep into product pages for product specs or do they bounce from page to page? This data can help you create relevant calls-to-action that move customers through the funnel.

Don’t underestimate the power of the right call-to-action!

Once you’ve established who’s mildly interested in your products and who’s ready to give you their credit card number, this data can be used to segment your database and create relevant messages and carefully targeted calls-to-action.

Then you’re ready to test which call-to-action works best for each segment.

Even if you don’t have the data to create segments, you can still conduct a simple A/B split test to show whether “Buy Now” generates more response than “Learn More”.

Another important point concerns which test metrics you should measure.

‘Call-to-action A’ might produce more landing page clickthroughs but ‘Call-to-action B’ might generate more actual conversions.

Ensure you create landing pages to support your call-to-action; provide more information for site visitors who aren’t ready to commit, such as links to product spec sheets or agendas.

Think about other value events besides conversion

An email can generate many valuable outcomes for a brand.

For example, promoting and providing links to your email newsletters gives people who aren’t ready to buy a chance to sign up and develop a relationship with your brand.

Last year Google released data revealing only 1 in 9 landing page visitors converted, so getting permission to email the remaining 8 is another potentially valuable outcome.

Perhaps of most long-term value to a brand, every email offers an opportunity for the brand to develop its relationship with customers.

Treat each email as a bridge to your customers rather than as a solitary promotion; a great opportunity to find out all kinds of information to increase the relevance of your communications.

Use customer information to shape email content and calls-to-action around customer needs and you create a virtuous circle of communication that should continue to grow in value to both the brand and its customers.

Every marketer knows that branding is incredibly important – it enables customers familiar with your brand to distinguish it amongst a sea of competitors.  The success of all these brands is about much more than the logo, it’s about forming an emotional connection with their customers.

Image credit: Top 100 brands in 2011 according to Interbrand

With this much emotion involved in decision making, it’s easy to see how creating an emotional bond with customers makes a direct contribution to building profitability.

Emotional branding clearly differentiates companies from their competitors and helps to create deep intrinsic relationships between brands and consumers. Relationships with an emotional dimension are more likely to resist the temptation to defect than comparatively superficial price or convenience-based ones.

Only an insight-based, personalized marketing approach can form a strong enough bond with a brand, that evokes a personal, emotional reaction in customers. And, brand marketing through social networks makes it  all the more important that brands strive to build connections with their customers on a personal level.

Creating an emotional bond with customers requires more than good marketing – a company engaged in emotional branding puts the needs of its customers ahead of the product it’s selling.

The emotional branding concept

“Customers define themselves through brands they use. The branded clothes they wear, the cars they drive, the drinks they consume, university they attended, favourite spots to hang out, and so on.”

Nyimpini Mabunda, Smirnoff Vodka Marketing Manager:
Emotional Branding In a Changing Marketplace

Marc Gobé created the concept of emotional branding over 15 years ago. His philosophy is based on the observation that connections can take place on an emotional level in relationships between brands and people.

Consumers associate with brands they feel reflect their identity and when a close emotional link to a brand is formed emotions can run high – people who like Pepsi usually despise Coke!

Successful practitioners of emotional branding

Pepsi, Oil of Olay and Mercedes are a few major brands requiring little introduction.

Their appeal ranges from youthfulness to status, but these brands share a deep emotional connection with their customers which translates into unwavering consumer loyalty.

Apple is another brand illustrating the effectiveness of emotional branding. Apple almost went under in the 1990’s but an amazing brand rejuvenation propelled it to 21^st century super-brand status.

Wired.com reported Gobé as saying Apple has succeeded in giving its product a humanized touch in an ever-evolving technical world. Responding to consumer anxiety about technology’s evolutionary speed, Apple managed to make its customers feel like part of its brand by making it clear the brand understands their needs.

Brands like Bing and Google are also adopting an emotional brand-driven approach. Recent Google commercials show people talking about average things and emotionally connecting through Gmail.  Bing Originals’ new campaign brings celebrities down to consumer level; winning, falling, healing. People can feel bonded with these brands when the brands demonstrate they understand their consumers’ needs and motivations.

Putting customers first

So, how do you demonstrate you’re putting your customers ahead of all other considerations?

• Decide which emotion you want to target in your audience. It could be the ‘American dream’, confidence or trust in the future. Discerning and defining your target audience’s core emotional need is the most important aspect of emotional branding. It is vital to communicate this insight through all your internal and external communications.
• Encourage customers to reach the desired emotionally bonded state; “I will only buy brand x”?  Start by considering your customers’ needs – what they want, need and aspire to.
• Create consistent communications centered on customers’ emotional needs. Every point of contact should reflect and reinforce the message that the brand is responding to its customers’ emotional needs; i.e. customer relations, online content and social media engagement. This is especially important at ‘moments of truth’.

When people form an emotional attachment to a brand the strength of that bond is not dissimilar to an attachment to another person. It becomes hard for that person to separate themselves from one brand and begin a new relationship with another. Emotional branding can only be achieved by putting what customers deem most important ahead of everything else.

If you can master the skill of establishing a relationship with your customers at this level, you can count them in for the long haul!.

Thanks to Jessica Sanders for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. She is an avid small business writer touching on topics from social media to telemarketing. She writes for an online resource that gives advice on topics including company background checks for lead generation resource,Resource Nation.

Nofollow tags are important in SEO, but I find many marketers I speak to haven’t heard of the approach.

That’s understandable since you would only expect SEO specialists to be aware of them. However, I think they are a useful concept to understand as a “hands-on” marketer, since they will effect conversations you have about buying media or understanding the way links in social media work.

Nofollow tags explained

A nofollow tag is a basic piece of HTML. Appended to a hyperlink, it allows webmasters to control whether search engines follow a link or not.

For example, the following URL on a page of another site allows search engines to visit Smart Insights’ website and credit the website with the link; each link is scored by the search engines, supporting SEO:

<a href=”http://www.smartinsights.com/” title=”Smart Insights”>Visit Smart Insights</a>

Here’s the same hyperlink, now including a nofollow tag (highlighted in red):

<a href=”http://www.smartinsights.com/” title=”Smart Insights” rel=”nofollow”>Visit Smart Insights</a>

The inclusion of a nofollow tag instructs the search engines NOT to visit the site or rather not to ascribe credit to boost the ranking of the destination site based on the link.

A summary of what Google has to say on nofollow links

“In general, we don’t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without usingnofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it’s important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.”

Three ways to use nofollow tags support SEO

1. Paying for adverts  and/or links to your website. While you would obviously never do this to boost your SEO , using a nofollow tag means you can pay for links on sites you believe will deliver quality traffic without running the risk of being penalised by search engines for buying links.
2. Link to competitors without supporting their SEO. Although you won’t want to link to direct competitors, you may sometimes have to link to SEO competitors.
3. Forcing indexing and crawl prioritisation of your own website. Nofollow tags can be used to ensure search engines prioritise links to your important content rather than to generic power pages, such as Sitemap, Contact Us and Registration. This use of nofollow tags, sometimes known as “page rank sculpting” is most  relevant to large websites.

See our internal linking post for more information and a reminder of the importance of editorial links.

Tactical SEO considerations from marketing campaigns

These are other implications of nofollow which may affect your campaigns.

• When an agency adds comments to blogs, forums or social media, these will generally be nofollowed, so there is no SEO benefit. This is true for most links on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
• Links in blog post articles are “dofollowed” so do support SEO and make guest posting a popular SEO activity.
• Links are not always about the ‘credit’. Wikipedia includes nofollow tags in all its eternal links but still receives a lot of traffic. Relevant links are still effective in traffic generation despite the inclusion of nofollow tags.

Nofollow tagged social network links are still of great SEO value

Despite the fact that popular social networks include nofollow tags in most of their external links, social networks still have an important role to play in SEO; as well their contribution to other key aspects of digital marketing strategy, such as consumer engagement.

Links from social networks help to establish your brand is active and well shared.

Links from social networks help to build your ‘Social score’ – a key to SEO success.

Checkout this video of Google’s Matt Cutts describing how links within Wikipedia and other social networks are of no SEO ranking value since they use nofollow tags.

Content marketing facts from the infographic

• 26% + of B2B marketing budgets are invested in content
• 79% of marketers use article publication as a tactic
• 52% use video
• 62% of companies outsource their content marketing
• Brand awareness and customer acquisition are the two main goals of content marketing

Blueglass Interactive’s new infographic combines tips on the type of content that works and features examples from brands who are making it work.

Today, many companies are working on conversion improvement, but without an overall strategy which joins the different approaches together as part of an overall conversion strategy. The tools available in our toolbox break down into three, often used individually, but increasingly used together:

• Classic site analytics – Uses web analytics tools, site feedback tools and analysis of behaviour to find problems and suggest fixes
• A/B and MV Testing – AB and multivariate testing which test multiple experiences including both pages and paths to see which is best
• Personalisation – Providing relevant recommendations through targeting rules or algorithms (overlaps with email sequences)

I see these three approaches as paths on the journey to site optimisation often intersect and are complementary.   Each can facilitate the more effective use of the others. But while these three paths to optimization should be complementary, they are mostly deployed in a siloed manner that keeps each discipline working sub-optimally.

For each of the three paths, I think it’s important to see how each discipline potentially fits into a larger Digital Optimization strategy and understand their strengths and weaknesses. You can see it’s not difficult to think of challenges with each of three approaches

Let’s take a look at each of the approaches in more detail:

1. Classic Site Optimization (Web analytics) is great for identifying site problems, finding and defining customer segments, and measuring “deep” metrics like Lifetime Value or Engagement. On the other hand, classic Web analytics has great difficulty in controlling for self-selection; this makes it rather poor at choosing between creative alternatives. It’s also pretty hard to do and takes significant expertise.

2. Site Testing, on the other hand, provides truly definitive answers between creative versions. It eliminates most self-selection and control issues (at least if done well), it’s pretty easy to do, and it generates consistent value. On the other hand, Site Testing methods have little or no ability to identify promising test areas, identify good customer segmentations or support “deep” success metrics. Site testing also can be difficult to scale. Every experiment needs new creative – making the use of micro-segmentation almost impossible.

You should be using Web analytics to figure out what to test and to generate your segmentation (as I’ve written before, all tests should be segmented). Classic Web Site analytics is also the best way to develop and sustain the “deep” metrics you may need to understand true lift in both Testing and Targeting.

3. Personalization is yet another, and very different, beast. Like Testing, it can eliminate most self-selection and control problems. Unlike Testing, it can scale and take advantage of micro-segmentation. It’s generally limited to problems that don’t require deep creative and, depending on the approach, it either lacks segmentation or provides a black-box solution to segmentation.

Here’s how I see the 3 paths working together:

It’s  apparent that the strengths of classic Web analytics are a perfect complement to Site Testing and Personalization. It should also be obvious that there is a much bigger role for Site Testing in the development of Personalization than is commonly realized.

You can get around the scale limitation of Testing by focusing on tests of personalization rules. This is a completely different way to think about Testing, but it makes it possible to develop powerful “white-box” approaches to targeting and have a truly logical, integrated path to Targeting and personalization.

This isn’t to say that every aspect of Web analytics, Testing or Personalization can or should be integrated.  Web analytics has many functions that are simply unrelated to testing. If you need to measure before and after site re-designs, measure the absolute performance of a tool (such as internal search), measure campaign performance, and much more, Web analytics on its own is fine.

Likewise, Testing of Landing Pages often has no necessary or even desirable path or integration to Targeting and Personalization. There are many creative tests that don’t lead directly to Personalization or micro-segmentation.

Towards an integrated approach to conversion strategy

Still, to really get full value from each of these components, you need the type of integrated approach I’ve outlined.

As we at Semphonic see it, Behavioral Use-Case Analysis provides the perfect bridge between classic Web analytics and testing. It creates a digital segmentation, a framework for testing, and a set of likely test targets. It’s the perfect way to answer the “where to test” and “how to segment” questions.

Functionalism then provides a more detailed drill-down into the individual performance of site components. This is an excellent method for answering the “what to test” question within the context of a Use-Case and Segment.

Our Two-Tiered Segmentation provides a ready-made integration of traditional visitor segmentation and digital visit types. This is just what’s needed to identify personalization options worth testing.

This post highlights part of the importance of Google+ for SEO purposes. It does so by contrasting 2 screengrabs of Google search results pages, illustrating how H&M have managed to use Google+ to radically affect results for their network of followers, or circlers if you prefer.

About the Images

Both images are from Google.com, where the feature which makes this important to SEO, ‘Search Plus Your World‘ have rolled out more fully than in other countries.

• The first image shows search results for ‘David Beckham’ when not logged into Google+
• The second image shows search results for ‘David Beckham’ when logged in. The important thing to note here is that H&M’s business page is circled by the account I’ve used to take the screengrabs.

Image 1: Not Logged In to Google+

Image 2: Logged In to Google+

In other words, simply due to the fact that I’ve circled H&M on Google+, I now see lots of extra content related to their brand, simply because they’ve posted that content to Google+ and it’s vaguely related to the search term I’ve used.

The Images Side By Side

To illustrate just how much Google have changed here, let’s take a look at the images side-by-side:

How Google+ can help you grow your community in Google+

There’s a further way in which Google+ can have an impact. This time, the example is a generic search where H&M get’s featured in the right sidebar of Google+ even when the user isn’t logged in. When discussing this post with Dave Chaffey, he said he had captured this image in the initial alert of the Google+ search announcement.

If you repeat the search today, you’ll see the figure in the top right for H&M shows their network has roughly doubled from 243,000 to 535,00 in two months. Of course, we don’t know the monetary value of having someone in a circle, but I hope I’ve showed through the screen captures that a large network helps increase visibility of a brand online.

Summary

Simply by doing 2 things, H&M have managed to hijack a large portion of the search engine results page for ‘David Beckham’. If you count up the individual items, there are more than ten individual links through to H&M’s Google+ content when logged in, zero when not logged in.

At the most basic level, the 2 things they’ve done are:

1. Grown a large Google+ following – big enough that they affect more than 500,000 peoples’ search results when they are logged into G+.
2. Shared a lot of content related to David Beckham on Google+.

And of course, if H&M’s followers reshare their Google+ content, and you’re following their sharers, the effect spreads much further.

This is just a single example among many ramifications of Google+ on SEO, but I hope it helps explain part of the importance. Do leave a comment if you have any other good examples, or any other notes on Google+ and SEO.