Combining broad categories with precise interests. Plus a clever alternative to the Boost Post button.

As you are probably aware by now, Facebook offers some really nicely drilled down advertising options for targeting possible customers. Using these could become more important in 2014 since Facebook are now admitting that they are further turning down organic reach and forcing brands to pay for exposure even to their fans. As well as selecting demographics such as location, age and gender you can also target people based on all sorts of other criteria. In a previous post, I described targeting using custom audiences, enabling you to find people with similar characteristics. In this post I'll explore a combined targeting approach. If you are familiar with the process of creating an ad you will know that you have the option of listing "Precise Interests" of individuals to target as well as some "Broad Categories" that Facebook has…

From social media marketing to Google Analytics

Feeling jolly at Christmas, I wanted to be useful . And thought, if you find a little time in-between now and the New Year, it’s a good opportunity to do a little social media housekeeping. Here are immediate future’s top 14 recommendations (seriously, we are doing our tidy up too!) that will improve your social footprint no end. Get them all done and you’ll hit the ground running in January!

Verify your Google profile – Google+ made huge advances this year but try some simple updates. If you haven’t already, customise your URL so your company page is legitimate and easier to find and share.

Prepare for a crisis – While it’s quiet, take a step back and look at the risks and vulnerabilities in social. Where could you improve? How will you go about making change? Who else in your company could you tempt…

An introduction to the benefits of CRM systems for small and medium businesses

Opportunities can be fleeting without the correct tools to serve your clients. Unfortunately, many smaller businesses are falling behind in their use of technology and missing out on potential sales opportunities. According to a recent survey, only 34% of small business owners use technology for customer relationship management, and only 18% have marketing data fully integrated with their CRM. To remain competitive, your business must be able to compile information, analyze data to create dependable leads, and actively build relationships with customers. A marketing-driven CRM has the power to simplify these time-consuming tasks and take your company’s sales strategy to the next level.

A marketing-driven CRM can help you:

 1. Analyze relevant data

To help qualify a lead, a CRM tool can track demographic and risk-related information for an agency. If you’ve…

Alert - new research shows popularity of sharing types for different content types and formats

Value: [rating=3] Recommended link: The Social Intelligence Report: Adobe Digital Index Q3, 2013 Interested in finding out how content is shared across Facebook and how to improve engagement, then Adobe Digital's regular consumer research report will provide some of these answers. Adobe Digital's quarterly report analyses consumer Facebook data, over two years, from retail, media, entertainment, travel and websites. Their survey analysed 131 billion Facebook ad impressions, 400 million unique visitors, 1.04 billion Facebook posts and over 4 billion Facebook comments, shares and likes. These are some highlights on Facebook engagement, though the full report shares information on ROI, click volume, geo-targeted posts, geographical and industry social sentiment.

Types of Facebook posts that engage?

Social engagement increases when posts include an image or video; posts with an image increase by 600% compared to a…

How to create a water-tight email marketing strategy for building customer loyalty

The traditional definition of customer loyalty is a financial one– your most loyal customers are clearly those who keep returning to do business with you. But loyalty in the digital world has much wider implications.  For some organizations it can be the bald metric of how frequently their customers do business with them. For others, such as online retailers, it is also a measure of how often customers share favourable reviews or feedback on the organization or brand. However you define and measure customer loyalty Customer satisfaction vs. loyalty At the heart of any loyalty-driving campaign lies the need to raise customer satisfaction levels.

Ten steps to building customer loyalty

Step 1. Gain senior management and cross-business commitment to raising customer satisfaction across the enterprise.

Focus on the channel that lets you build intimacy. One of the most effective…

The truth hurts: Why CRM is still growing but still gruelling

A cursory glance at the headline statistics for the CRM marketplace demonstrates a sector that is apparently in rude health. And in purely financial terms, this is undoubtedly the case. A multi-billion dollar industry forecasting robust growth in the coming years, CRM is creeping its way up the agenda of CEOs and CIOs. Even the global economic downturn couldn’t dent its progress, during which it was one of the few software markets that continued to thrive. But if you scratch beneath the surface of these statistics and forecasts, the CRM sector is not all sweetness and light. And while it has progressed far from its problematic early days of aborted implementations and expensive zombie systems, there are still challenges underpinning a large proportion of CRM projects. It’s time to shed some light on the world of CRM.

CRM gathering pace

Worldwide CRM software revenue…

Making your emails more relevant by appealing to different reader personalities

In Part 1 we introduced using Personas for Email marketing based upon motivation, in Part 2 I'm going to review the 4 main different personality traits that are common to everyone and show how to apply them to email creative. Aristotle was one of the first to identify them and named them: Melancholic, Phlegmatic, Choleric and Sanguine, however we will be using more descriptive names for these personalities in this post. By leveraging both personas and personalities, you not only know where to place content, images and set tasks but also know how to speak to them (TOV), what offers to deliver and help them to accomplish their task the way they feel comfortable doing so – thus enabling higher and potentially quicker, conversions. (Image courtesy of Henk Wijnholds) Based on the well-known…

The growth in popularity of hashtags 

Hashtags describing a topic or campaign offer prefaced by '#' are now a common feature across most social media platforms. So no longer just Twitter, but including Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and Google+... If used correctly, then they can improve reach and social sharing of content for brand awareness and lead generation.

There are many Twitter tools to find trending hashtags and to ensure you use relevant hashtags.

Offerpop's Infographic provides a timeline history for the use of the #Hashtag from its initial use on Twitter to later adoption on Facebook and Google+. Greater engagement with hashtags is suggested by research referenced in the infographic which shows that 'Tweets that contain hashtags are 55% more likely to be retweeted than those that do not, and more than 70 percent of people use hashtags'. We don't…

Google's Gmail change may change Open Tracking reports

Google notified Gmail users on the 12th December that they had implemented a change to the way that linked images are handled in Gmail webmail. They explained: "...thanks to new improvements in how Gmail handles images, you’ll soon see all images displayed in your messages automatically across desktop, iOS and Android. Instead of serving images directly from their original external host servers, Gmail will now serve all images through Google’s own secure proxy servers". So images will now be seen by default by Gmail users unless they proactively switch them off in settings (or have previously done so). I first alerted email marketers to this on my Zettasphere blog on 6th December since the change has been in place for a while - it appears that around the 3rd December Google implemented a change. Now it's official, we're alerting Smart Insights readers to the change so…

Triggered email campaigns vs traditional email

We regularly feature advice on behavioural email marketing on our hub page since we think they are often an under-used or under-developed technique to cost-efficiently engage prospects and customers. "Triggered emails" is an alternative way of described them which EmailMonks uses on this infographic on 'triggered email marketing campaigns'. It clearly shows the value of this technique and how, with access to the right CRM system or email service provider, campaigns can be set-up; whether it's based on an action, event, demographics or other criteria. Companies now have more information available to personally react in 'real time' or at timely relevant touchpoints, to engage/convert and at times 'save a sale'. Relevance helps lift open rates for trigger emails such that they can often be the most important emails you send, so ripe for optimisation: 'Autoresponder open rates are 4x higher than generic emails, and triggered emails have…