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Mad Men: More lessons to mine for Social Media

Don Draper Mad Men

Don Draper Mad Men

 

Mad Men illustrates our evolution, but have we?

The Mad Men countdown clock is ticking down (too bad there’s no widget to post here), and I’m thrilled. Sadly, no time to use Betty’s party planner, but cheers to AMC for another season of lessons that can be applied to Social Media.

While the social media integration was widely commented on at South by Southwest Interactive 2012 (highlight posts forthcoming BTW), there’s so much more to contemplate.

Mad Men was also mentioned on a panel at the SES (Search Engine Strategies) New York conference yesterday. The panel discussed integrated marketing and mentioned the pitch Don Draper gives to Kodak when the slide “wheel” is introduced.

My Tweet about kicking off the Social Media Strategies course I teach with the Mad Men Carousel clip became a top tweet. Sorry there’s no embed, but click to watch: http://bit.ly/MadMenCarousel

Very evocative, no? This is how I want my students to think of the class: interesting, ever-evolving, which reflects where we are in this industry today.

The Sterling Cooper pitch provides a perfect frame for today’s students — and professionals: It illustrates how technology changes, but the desire for human connection pervades.

Meanwhile,  my 2012 conference circuit is echoing: We’ll soon be dropping all the prefixes: e-marketing, online marketing, search marketing new media. It’ll just be straight-up marketing. I read a recent OMMA post that Social Media staffs are being fully integrated into the marketing departments. This make sense, no? You wouldn’t have an email department all by itself and only thinking about getting into inboxes (then what?)?

In essence, we’re all here to align what the company has to offer with customer expectations.

I can’t help but wonder what’s really going through the minds of the Millennials who’ve signed up for Social Media Strategies when I show them a pitch for a product that took consumers by storm decades before they were born. It’s an ideal starter to a class the focuses on engagement and interaction, and we start practicing these fundamentals on Day 1.

I’m eager to see how Mad Men keeps the conversation going, both in my class and in my mind.

What other lessons have you learned as Mad Men shows us a reflection of ourselves in another time?

Timeless tips for Search Marketing, SEO, and Social Media

The survival of every business depends on sales, and in the modern climate, increasing sales requires having a strong digital presence. In 2017, E-commerce accounted for $2.3 trillion in global sales, and that number is expected to increase to $4.88 trillion by 2021. If you want your business to get a piece of those sales, then it’s critical to have a strong search engine optimization (SEO) strategy in place. If your business has any online components (such as a website), then the organic SEO is crucial to the ongoing success of your business. You may have the most expensive website in your industry, but without web traffic (visitors) to that website, it is essentially useless. It is not just traffic that you need, but targeted traffic, Discover More here.

It goes without saying that the world of E-commerce is cutthroat, and learning and implementing cutting-edge SEO techniques can give you the leg up you need to get noticed online, convert more prospects into loyal customers, and ultimately boost sales. But SEO is constantly evolving, and best practices change over time, so it can be difficult to know if you’re doing everything you can to increase sales with a SEO Reseller.

If this has you feeling overwhelmed, then don’t fret: there are plenty of time-honoured techniques you can implement, and today you’ll learn some great tips about the best ways to use SEO to increase sales.

1. Be Keyword Clever
Keywords in SEO aren’t used the way they once were, but they’re still a crucial part of the equation. Without keywords, prospects might never find you when they go looking, and this is why keywords are the cornerstone of your SEO strategy.

Let’s say, for instance, that your business sells handmade fly-fishing lures. An obvious keyword phrase that you’re going to want to rank for is, well, handmade fly-fishing lures. However, there are other keywords and phrases that customers are surely using to locate products just like yours, and it’s up to you to determine what they are and to start implementing them in your:

Content
Web pages
URLs
Headings
Image descriptions
Metadata
Page titles
Emails
Google AdWords is a great place to start with keyword research, but there are plenty of other keyword planning tools out there you can use. Don’t forget about longtail keywords as well, because half of all search queries are four-plus words in length, there’s less competition for these phrases, and they have higher conversion rates. When you have the right keywords in your toolbox, they’ll help connect you with prospects who are looking to buy what you’re selling.

2. Create Stellar Content
Create Stellar Content
Keywords, however, are nothing without great content: instead, they’re nothing but a word salad. But content is more than just a vehicle for keywords, and instead it is a tool you can use to convert prospects, is something valuable you can offer customers, and is a shareable resource you can use to reach new audiences.

Here’s how content can work to increase sales: when prospects search the internet for information about a product or service similar to what you offer, they’ll come across social media posts, blogs, web pages, and other content that was designed to answer their questions, provide information, and otherwise facilitate a purchasing decision. If you’re unfamiliar with how to do SEO on your own, one of the best ways to make sure that your page gets noticed is to hire great SEO companies that keep their promises, like Search Engine Optimization Singapore. When you work to have the best, most relevant, most engaging, and most authoritative content on the internet, prospects will find your brand before all others, and this gives you an opportunity to build relationships and convert leads into customers.

Great content comes in many forms, and your goal should be cultivating and creating content in a variety of them, including:

Blogs
Video (which can boost organic search results by 50 times more than text-based content)
Infographics
Podcasts
Animations
User-generated content
Guest blogs
Ebooks and whitepapers
How-to guides
Lists
Product reviews
Content is at the centre of inbound marketing, and when you have a robust inbound strategy in place and great content to drive it, then you’ll have customers knocking down your E-commerce door. However, it’s important to remember to optimize all your content with relevant keywords, and to ensure the keywords you use are pertinent to the piece and type of content you’re presenting.

3. Use Social to Grow Your Audience and Reach
Social media is one of the fastest growing elements of a comprehensive and modern SEO strategy, and this is because an increasing number of consumers are turning to these platforms to engage with brands. Nearly 80 percent of people turn to Facebook when they want to find interesting content, and this means there’s a huge opportunity there for you to reach new audiences, attract more prospects, and develop lasting relationships with customers.

Beyond that, social media is also a great way to show a more human side of your organization, it can be used as a direct marketing tool thanks to resources like Facebook Ads, and you can even use social sites to bolster your customer service efforts.

Increase leads and close more deals faster of social media by engaging with ClickMatix – Social Media.
4. Go Local and Go Mobile
Two of the most significant changes to SEO best practices that have arisen in recent years are the emphasis on mobile and local content, and the two go hand in hand. Local SEO is becoming increasingly important as more consumers use mobile devices to search for businesses because 30% of all mobile searches performed today have a local intent. Moreover, over 70% of people will visit a nearby business after conducting a local search, so if you want to drive business to your physical or E-commerce store, then you must focus on local content (including local keywords and landing pages), and you have to make sure your digital footprint is entirely mobile-friendly.

5. On-Page SEO
On-Page SEO
There are many reasons why on-page SEO is crucial to your success, so if you want to boost sales, then you must pay attention to on-page techniques. Here are a few of the reasons, briefly: on-page SEO makes your site more user-friendly, makes it easier for search engines to index your pages, will increase your search ranking, and will help you focus on optimizing essential elements like visuals. If you’re not familiar with on-page SEO, here are some of the most critical steps involved:

Creating unique and descriptive title tags
Increasing your page load speed to reduce bounce rates
Writing descriptive and keyword-optimized alternative text for the images on your site
Optimizing headings with keywords and relevant descriptions
Linking site content with internal links to improve navigation and indexing
Using sensible and easy-to-read URLs
Writing meta descriptions to improve visibility on a search engine results page and improve relevance
6. Manage Your Reputation Carefully
Reputation management isn’t always something people talk about when they discuss SEO, but it’s an important element that shouldn’t be ignored. Reputation management is all about controlling what people see when they look for your business online. For instance, say you were a restaurant that received several bad Yelp reviews in a row and got into an immature spat with a customer on Facebook. After that, any potential customer who uses the internet to decide whether or not to dine at your establishment is going to encounter the bad reviews and the social media argument before anything else, and that’s the reputation your restaurant will have from then on.

Reputation management, therefore, is all about making sure you put your best foot forward online when customers go looking for you, and you can do this by:

Always being professional when engaging with customers online
Regularly reviewing online reviews
Responding to negative reviews quickly, calmly, and professionally
Encouraging positive reviews and testimonials from satisfied customers
7. Develop an Integrated Strategy to Keep You on Track
When you want SEO to work for you, it can’t be something you do part-time or with minimal effort. To boost sales with SEO, you have to be intelligent with and dedicated to your efforts, and that means having a solid strategy that integrates all the components discussed here today. To accomplish this, you’ll need a team in place that’s familiar with SEO best practices and who can examine your company goals to create and implement a long-term strategy that will help you achieve them.

Key Takeaways to Remember

SEO is key to the success of any modern business, not only because it can increase your visibility and reach online, but also because it can help you boost sales by driving more traffic to your site, providing you with more opportunities to convert leads into customers, and giving you the tools you need to increase conversion rates. But SEO is a multifaceted creature, and the main points to focus on if you want to boost sales include:

Researching, selecting, and implementing relevant keywords
Using keywords strategically everywhere you can
Creating engaging and exciting content that will delight and inform
Making use of social media to grow your audience and develop relationships
Focusing on local SEO
Making sure your digital strategy is mobile-optimized
Working hard at on-page SEO that will make sure you have a site that will attract and retain prospects
Keeping your online reputation squeaky clean
Finally, remember that creating and maintaining a comprehensive strategy that prioritizes all of these elements is just as important as the elements themselves because that’s the best way to ensure you build a well-oiled SEO machine that will help you boost sales.