MarketingSherpa Blog

I’ve been digging through MarketingSherpa’s new 2011 Search Marketing Benchmark Report: SEO Edition and finding very interesting data describing social media’s impact on SEO performance.

The most interested stat I came across noted that marketers working in social media reported an average 27% conversion rate for organic search traffic. Those not working in social media reported 17%. That is a 58.8% difference — which is huge.

What could cause this disparity?

Possible explanations are found in a second chart. Marketers were asked whether social media or SEO were effective marketing tactics for achieving a list of objectives.

More marketers said SEO, rather than social media, was a “very effective” way to:
o Increase brand or product awareness (42% vs. 37%)
o Increase website traffic (57% vs. 33%)
o Increase lead generation (35% vs. 18%)
o Increase offline sales revenue (17% vs. 10%)
o Increase online sales revenue (26% vs. 9%)

On the flipside, more marketers said social media was a “very effective” way to:
o Improve brand or product reputation (37% vs. 29%)
o Improve public relations (36% vs. 27%)

Clearly, SEO is more effective at attracting attention and ultimately converting people. However, social media is more likely to increase positive thinking around a product and brand.

This leads me to a hypothesis: marketers who engage in SEO and social media have 58.8% higher conversion rates for organic traffic because their social media work has increased trust in their brands and products.

But that might not be the whole story.

As pointed out in the benchmark report’s analysis, working in social media provides additional benefits. Social profiles and content are indexed by search engines and added to results pages. These additional results can push down a brand’s competition, increasing its organic conversion rates. Also, the social results can broaden the variety of content on a SERP and help brands appeal to more people.

The data are very interesting. If your team has well established SEO and social media strategies, take a look at your stats and look for similar trends. It just might make you smile.

Today’s the publishing date for MarketingSherpa’s 2011 Search Marketing Benchmark Report – SEO Edition, and the report has shaped up to be a valuable tool for strategic planning.

One chart I found particularly interesting (out of the 160 in the book) compares the conversion rates for organic traffic between organizations that incorporate social media into their search campaigns and those that do not. You can see the chart in the free executive summary.

Marketers who mix social and search report a 27% conversion rate for organic search traffic, while those who do not report a 17% rate. This disparity is likely due to several factors:

– First, social media marketing is known to improve brands’ reputations online, and a brand with a stronger reputation is more likely to convert visitors.

– Second, a brand’s social media profiles often appear in searches for the brand, which adds to its number of search engine results and increases the brand’s perceived credibility.

– Finally, additional links on the SERPs push down relevant competitors, making the searcher more likely to engage with the brand.

The first point is further supported by additional data in the Benchmark Report. Marketers more often reported social media than SEO as being very effective at improving reputation and public relations.

SEO, however, was more often reported as being very effective at increasing:
o Awareness
o Website traffic
o Lead generation
o Offline revenue
o Online revenue

Reviewing all of these facts reveals SEO as a much stronger contributor than social media to the bottom line — but it also shows social media can dramatically improve SEO’s impact by boosting its conversion rates.

Is your company seeing similar trends? Or something different? We welcome your comments…

Just wanted to post a quick reminder that the deadline is fast approaching for entries to MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Viral and Social Marketing Hall of Fame.

You have until Friday, June 18, at 5:00 p.m. EST to enter your best-performing social media or viral marketing campaign for this year’s honors.

Enter your campaign details here

Here are a few pointers to help you with your entry:

– There is no entry fee for this program. You can submit as many campaigns as you like, as long as they used social media or audience participation to achieve strong results.

– Campaigns from 2009 or 2010 are accepted, as long as they were not entered for the 2009 Viral Hall of Fame last summer.

– Results are paramount. We’re looking for campaigns that achieved a significant business result, such as leads or revenue generated. Having millions of views isn’t too impressive in and of itself, unless you can prove that you reached the right people and encouraged them to take some action that achieved the business goal behind the campaign.

– Innovation gets attention. We’re looking for campaign tactics and creative approaches that the marketing community hasn’t seen before.

So gather up your results and creative samples and wow us with your tales of using of social media or viral marketing to record big marketing wins. The honorees will be featured in a special report later this summer that lays out all the details of the campaign approach, measurement tactics employed, results achieved and lessons learned.

Here’s the link again:

Viral and Social Marketing Hall of Fame Entry Form
(Deadline: June 18, 2010)

Thanks, and good luck!

People who follow your social media updates are likely fans of your brand. Their motivations may vary, but if they’re reading and responding to your content, then they know who you are and they like hearing from you.

“It’s not really surprising that, like search traffic, social media traffic tends to be very qualified,” says Maura Ginty, Senior Manager, Search and Social, Autodesk. “It can be small in volume, but it’s really qualified.”

Ginty’s team uncovered this insight by monitoring social media traffic to Autodesk’s website and analyzing the actions visitors took after arrival. Obtaining data around social media is not difficult, Ginty says. The hard part is using it.

“I think people end up feeling like the data is going to answer their question, but it’s the interpretation of all that data and the filtering of all that volume that really helps provide insight into what to do next,” she says. (Keep an eye on our Great Minds newsletter for an up-coming article on how to improve social media measurement).

Ginty’s team started synthesizing data to uncover the social impact of online marketing campaigns, in part, by using a tool created with Covario. For example, the team can calculate the velocity of a marketing message — the number of people a message reaches in a certain amount of time in social media — and combine it with a sentiment analysis. This information helps the team gauge how quickly messages spread, how people respond, and which efforts have strong social appeal.

“We’ve seen from different areas that a lot of the push of information will end up happening in the first 24 hours,” Ginty says.

Social media is a new channel with unique brand/customer interactions that can be tested and measured. I am excited to see how other industry leaders will start measuring and tweaking their social efforts to improve everything from brand image to conversion rates.

Are you doing any testing in social? Let us know in the comments…

I am in awe of the amount of online buzz generated by ABC’s recently completed television series, Lost. On its Facebook fan page alone, wall posts about the finale each captured 1,200 to 19,000 comments to date.

In fact, Lost generated the most social media engagement of any television show from February through April, the New York Times reports.

How did ABC’s team use Facebook to build such a gargantuan amount of chatter? Here are some tactics I can see from Lost’s fan page:

1. Build anticipation

As far back as three weeks before the show’s May 23 finale, the team posted reminders and teasers about the event. We’ve seen a similar tactic used in Twitter to tease a sales event.

During the final week, ABC posted at least one mention per day. It posted four times on the final day, capturing tens-of-thousands of comments.

2. Provide relevant content

Throughout the countdown, the team sent fans links to Lost-related content, such as:
o A Facebook event page
o A musical tribute
o Video clips

Providing relevant, high-quality content is important to keeping fans engaged. Otherwise they may decide to interact elsewhere.

3. Promote other channels

ABC set up a chat service on its website for fans to discuss the finale in real time as it aired, and posted about it on Lost’s Facebook page. The team also posted a link to a free archive on its website of previously aired episodes and asked fans to “revisit all their favorite moments.”

I am not naive enough to believe these tactics alone were enough to generate the level of buzz the team realized. Lost is a widely popular and well-promoted national television show — it’s going to generate some buzz. However, I do believe these tactics helped ABC bring more attention from its Facebook fans to Lost’s finale.

Facebook this week launched a free Guide to Facebook Ads to give advertisers more information on how to build successful campaigns on the social network.

The guide covers the basics, such as the types of ads Facebook offers, as well as detailed information on how to budget campaigns, target an audience and improve performance.

For example, the guide’s “Best Practices” section provides the following tips:

– Choose one goal for your campaign to better focus your efforts and set a budget

– Create ads with captivating titles, relevant images and a strong calls-to-action

– Use demographic and psychographic reports available in the Ads Manager to determine which audiences your ads best resonate with

– Closely relate landing pages to ads

– Test multiple ads to uncover the best approach for your audience

For marketers already advertising in Facebook, the guide is worth going through to round-out your knowledge and to fill in any gaps. For marketers who are just getting started, or who are considering a campaign on the network — it’s a vital resource.

Marketers wanting to be heard over the over the rabble in social media may soon have a new tool to capture more attention. On Tuesday, Twitter announced the launch of its first ever advertising program, Promoted Tweets.

The micro-blogging network will show promoted tweets at the top of some Twitter.com search results pages, essentially making the tweets a form of paid search advertising. The tweets look and act as normal tweets, but are clearly labeled as promoted by an advertiser.

This “first phase” of the ad platform is only open to a handful of advertisers, such as Best Buy and Starbucks, and is helping Twitter “get a better understanding of the resonance of Promoted Tweets, user experience and advertiser value,” according to the announcement’s blog post (linked above).

I personally assume a self-service, keyword-targeting ad platform will eventually be offered to a broad range of advertisers–but time will tell. For now, Twitter says they hope to later expand Promoted Tweets beyond their search tool, bring them to other partners’ spaces and into Twitter users’ tweet timelines.

This is yet another case of social media and search engine marketing finding common ground, this time in the area of paid search. Yesterday, we published part one of our two-part social media and SEO special report, which outlined five key trends in social and SEO marketing integration. Stay tuned for part two next week which will feature specific tactics.

Hopefully this announcement will be the first of many which help Twitter grow as a powerful marketing channel. My head is already spinning with different ways sponsored tweets can be tested to increase clickthrough rates and response.

What does this announcement mean to you? What else do you think is on the way?

As a reporter, I will contact a company through any means necessary. I prefer using a phone number or an email address for a specific person — but sometimes I’m stuck filling out a ‘contact us’ form.

I’ve filled out more contact forms than I’d like to admit. I really dislike them. About a quarter of them do not work, and I’m never sure if my messages reach my intended audience: the marketing department.

Some common problems I’ve seen:
o Errors after clicking ‘submit’
o Tiny message length limits (such as 200 characters)
o Bounced emails in response
o Claims of ‘improper formatting’

Even worse is after receiving an error, you can lose your entire message. I learned long ago to write messages in a separate program and to copy-and-paste them into forms, in case I need to resubmit.

I’m just a reporter trying to get a marketer on the phone — can you imagine if I was a dissatisfied customer? My frustration level would skyrocket. If I was a potential business lead, I’d likely leave and never return.

‘Contact us’ forms are similar to social media in that they provide a way to receive customer feedback — which is very valuable. Broken ‘contact us’ forms send a clear message: “we don’t care about your feedback. Don’t contact us.”

But I’m sure that’s not true. You must care about your customers’ feedback. Their satisfaction keeps you in business.

So if you have a minute, check your website’s contact forms. Make sure they’re flexible, easy to use, and most importantly, that they work. A small effort can go a long way in preventing customers from walking away for good.

Measuring your marketing is the only way to know which efforts are working and which are wasting money. Even if you can’t measure every impact, you should track as much as possible.

After looking at some data from MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report, I wonder how many campaigns are only half-measured, with half their impact open to anyone’s guess.

When asked ‘What is your organization monitoring and measuring to quantify social media impact?’ 50% or more respondents said they were tracking:
o Visitors and traffic sources
o Followers, fans and members numbers
o Commentary about brand or product
o Sentiment around brand or product.

Fewer than 50% of respondents said they were tracking:
o Search engine rank
o Lead generation
o Progress toward social media objectives
o Engagement with influential bloggers, journalists, Twitterers, etc.
o Sales conversion and other ROI metrics
o Competitive share of social media coverage
o Criteria to identify and profile audiences

Astoundingly, only 35% of respondents said they were tracking sales conversion and other ROI metrics related to social media.

Getting more website traffic, Facebook fans and comments is very good. But if you’re not sure whether that’s having an effect on lead generation or sales, many executives will ask: what’s the point?

Marketers across the globe are finding use with social media. But if you want the rest of your organization to take it seriously and to invest more in the channel, you should learn as much about its impact as possible. The data talks.

If social media is helping you learn more about your audience, get data on how that knowledge is improving your marketing. If it’s helping your brand’s image, find a way to quantify it. Hypothetical evidence is as solid as a wet paper towel compared to hard data.

Is your team measuring its social media impact? If not, what’s holding you back? Let us know in the comments…

A well-timed and well-crafted message always has a chance to generate buzz through social media. If people like your message enough, they’ll send it to their friends. But they have to see it first.

During a call with Gary Wohlfeill, Creative Director, Moosejaw Mountaineering, I realized that getting attention is easier through some channels than others. Wohlfeill and I discussed his team’s recent holiday promotion (keep an eye on our free newsletters for the article). They ran the effort mostly through Facebook and Twitter.

Leading up to launch, the team sent messages through the social channels to build anticipation. They got some attention through Facebook, but it was harder to gain traction in Twitter, Wohlfeill says.

“Twitter is much more like a river. You drop a pebble in the river and you have to be standing there to see it go by. So you have to drop a lot of pebbles to reach a lot of people.”

Wherever you send a message, it’s going to have to compete for attention. Whether it’s a billboard competing with highway traffic, or an email competing with an inbox, competition is there.

Twitter, it seems, thrives on limited attention. Being seen can be a challenge. And once you’re seen, you can only hold attention for 140 characters–unless you get a click.

Two good ways to increase your chances at capturing more attention:
1. Be interesting enough to entice people to share with friends
2. Link to relevant content