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Marketing: Top 15 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools

Updated August 2016: We have removed some tools that no longer exist and included some other free tools worth trying out – all aimed at helping monitor your social accounts effectively. The key to making the most of social media is listening to what your audience has to say about you, your competitors, and the market in general. Once you have the data you can undertake analysis, and finally, reach social business intelligence ; using all these insights to know your customers better and improve your marketing strategy. If you are a social media rookie, this list of the Top Free Social Media Monitoring Tools might come in handy. When looking for a tool, it’s a good idea to try a couple of them and choose the one that suits your needs best. However, bear in mind that these tools are not an alternative to Enterprise-level tools, such as Brandwatch , which brought social media monitoring to a new level, offering a much higher variety of services, functionality, and in-depth analysis. I...

5 Ways to Win More Customers with Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing generates 55% more leads than traditional and outgoing marketing and costs 62% less per lead. Inbound is even more effective for smaller businesses with limited marketing budgets—86% of small businesses focus primarily on inbound marketing. A Brief Introduction to Inbound Marketing: Inbound marketing is a technique of attracting customers towards the products and services via content marketing, search engine optimization, and social media marketing. Inbound Marketing Techniques Social media Search Engine Optimization Videos Blogs Infographics Powerpoint Presentations (PPT’s) Steps to Implement Effective Inbound Strategy # Investigate About Your Customers The central idea behind inbound marketing is to optimize your website in such a way that it will appeal to your potential customers. In order to do that, you need to know who your potential customers are. In our last post, we shared the step by step guide to know your customers to master...

WHY CONTENT MARKETING WORKS (AND ALWAYS WILL)

You may have heard the phrase “ content is king. ” It is often a phrase that gets thrown around, but not everyone utilizes the principle correctly. Coming up with content is easy, but coming up with quality, valuable content that web users (aka potential customers) are looking for, on the other hand, require some planning, thought and strategy. Why is Content Marketing Important? In today’s online, digital world, consumers are barraged by information. The instant access to all their answers has made consumers more powerful. When they search for something online, they want the exact information they’re looking for. They want immediate, specific and credible answers to their questions. This is where quality content marketing comes in. Marcus Sheridan, who spoke at the last SLC|SEM conference mentioned that every business is, in essence, like the car dealership. Car salesmen are not held in high esteem by most people. They are seen as unethical and only seem to care about getting ...

What Is PPC? Learn the Basics of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Marketing

Whether you’ve heard a little about PPC marketing and are curious to learn more, or you already know that you want to use PPC to market your business, but aren’t sure where to start, you’ve come to the right place! This is the first lesson in PPC University, a set of three guided courses that will teach you everything you need to know about PPC and how to make it work for you. First, we’ll need to define PPC and establish a basic understanding of how PPC advertising works. Let’s go! What is PPC? PPC stands for pay-per-click, a model of internet marketing in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. Essentially, it’s a way of buying visits to your site, rather than attempting to “earn” those visits organically. Search engine advertising is one of the most popular forms of PPC. It allows advertisers to bid for ad placement in a search engine's sponsored links when someone searches on a keyword that is related to their business offering. For example, i...

7 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO)

For years now, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for websites has been honed into a fine art with entire companies devoting considerable effort to defining best practices and touting the value of SEO for raising a site's performance on organic search listings. While I believe in the power of SEO, there is a new offering we have started providing to clients which we call Social Media Optimization (SMO). The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs. Here are 5 rules we use to help guide our thinking with conducting an SMO for a client's website: 1) Increase your linkability – This is the first and most important priority for websites. Many sites are "static" – meaning they are rarely updated and used simply for a storefront. To optimize ...

9 INGREDIENTS FOR A SUCCESSFUL SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY

The power of social media, with its ability to produce high brand exposure and ROI, has made it a dominant portion of many business’s marketing budgets and strategies. If you’ve never done any social media marketing it can be overwhelming, and many people simply don’t know where to start. To help you get started on your social media strategy, here are 9 vital components you can’t afford to neglect: 1. Clear, Realistic, Measurable Marketing Goals and Objectives Posting content on every social media platform out there may seem economical, but it won’t give you the results you’re looking for. In fact, without goals and objectives, you’ll never know the significance of the results, or whether your social media efforts helped your business or stayed stagnant. The value of a social media strategy, has no value if it was implemented without a goal or objective – no matter how many platforms you’re posting to. With goals and objectives, you can assess whether your social media plan and str...

HOW TO BUILD A SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGN FROM SCRATCH

Your company has decided to take the social media plunge and you’re tasked with creating a social media campaign. The only thing is that you’ve never formulated a social media strategy for your company before. Sure, your business has a Facebook and Twitter account that it occasionally posts on with an interesting industry article or to get the word out about a promotion, but that’s about the extent of it. You hear how your company needs to be present on social media, but you aren’t seeing the results that are everyone keeps claiming are yours for the taking. Effectively posting on social media requires a well-thought-out strategy that must be continually tweaked and re-implemented. The occasional posting about company news or promotions will no longer cut it. How do you start a social media strategy? There are so many social media channels out there, which ones should you post on? What kind of content should you post to get the most engagement? Should you pay to promote your posts? ...