Articles and Blogs

On Facebook Pages or threads there are three kinds of traffic. One is organic traffic, second is inorganic traffic, and third is viral traffic. The quality and genre of content play a major role in creating traffic. Facebook encourages content creators to develop quality content that can drive high traffic to their pages. However the Facebook algorithm restricts the view of content to a certain set of people.

Inorganic traffic is traffic that is generated through paid promotion. Facebook Adverts highlight your content to a targeted audience of your choosing. The targeted audience are those who are likely to react to your post and in turn likely to generate sales for you. Facebook adverts are a relatively cost effective way to boost your reach. But Facebook boosting should be done in a smart way where the marketer should precisely define the target audience. The flip side is that you will end up spending for an audience that doesn’t connect to your product or service. The “reach” that you will see will be the number of views that your post received after Facebook promoted the post on your target audiences’ timeline. 

Organic traffic is generated when Facebook decides to show your content on your audience’s timeline. The algorithm of Facebook is such that say if you have 30,000 followers then not all 30,000 will be shown the content on their timelines but only a fraction of the original number can see the post. Organic traffic also includes instances when people search for the page and check the post. Organic traffic is customized for each user by Facebook and depends on content that you have viewed in the past. The Facebook algorithm works in such a way that the organic traffic that you receive is based on your previous clicks and activities on Facebook.

Viral, however, is a term that is used when the post appears on a user’s timeline because a friend or a page other than the source page has shared the content. When content is shared, based on the quality of content, it may be shared by users and the reach can improve significantly. This sort of content in popular terms is known as viral content.  So content that is displayed on your newsfeed is generally organic but if it comes to your timeline because it was shared multiple times by others then it can be termed as viral content.

What does this mean for your business? It has been observed that posts that are shared more reach more people. Such posts not only bring lot of new visitors to your page and website but also convert into sales. So marketers should focus on creating quality content that would be shared, so as to optimize for reach, and in the long term conversions as well.

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An image is worth a thousand words. Image-centric social networks are generally very popular and have an impressive retention rate. These sites focus on the posting and sharing of images and short videos. For a successful social media marketing campaign, it is important to stay up-to-date on trends, and image marketing is one of the biggest trends.

The consumer attention span is ever shrinking. In today’s information age, audiences are flooded with content available at a single touch. This abundance of content makes it harder for good content to cut through the clutter and get noticed, but images capture the attention of consumers. They must be presented with engaging content quickly, or viewers will quickly move on to the next item.

If a social media post has multiple paragraphs of text, there is a chance it will be ignored by people who feel they do not have time to read it. However, images stand a better chance of capturing people’s attention, and therefore, a post with an image has a much better chance of engaging readers just long enough to pique their interest. Once viewers have noticed the image ad, they may then want to learn more and consume the content in more detail.

Examples of Image Marketing:

• Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, and Snapchat are some of the popular image centric social networks which focus on the posting and sharing of images and short videos. These image-centric networks have millions of users and a loyal user base.
• Facebook ads are a great example of image marketing and native marketing at the same time. The ads, or “Suggested Posts,” are seen by Facebook users within their news feed and are presented in a way that is woven in with their friends’ posts and shares. They provide a large image and brief line of text that is visually appealing and engaging, and hopefully well targeted to be of interest to viewers. The result is an ad that really does not look or feel like advertising, which is arguably the best kind of all.

Guest blogging is a method used by companies to increase website traffic and support the brand and reputation of the business. Guest blogging involves the creation and posting of content to be published on related blogs.

Guest blogging can work in one of two ways:

• An industry expert can be invited to write a post to appear on the company’s blog— In this scenario, an expert in the industry is invited to post a blog on the company’s existing website. Guest bloggers with a strong reputation in the industry can add credibility and quality to the website content, supporting the brand and improving the reputation of the business. Such arrangements can in fact provide mutual support if the company brand is strong and the invited blogger is well known. Both parties in this instance enhance their reputation through their affiliation with other strong brands and leadership in the industry. For example, a pharmaceutical company may request a medical expert to post an entry to its blog providing an endorsement of a particular product or to describe his or her experience using the product with successful results.

• The company can write a post to appear on an external blog— Most companies use external blogs to achieve the following main goals:

• To position the company as a credible source of expertise
• To build name recognition within its industry
• To drive traffic to the company’s website
• To increase the number of backlinks to the company’s website

It is important to find credible and relevant websites that match a company’s objectives. If positioning the company as an industry leader or driving traffic to the company’s website is the primary goal, then blogs that have a good-sized and engaged audience need to be identified. If building backlinks is the main goal, then blogs with strong root domain authority must be identified. For example, a global cloud computing company can encourage its employees to write guest posts at TechCrunch, Google Code blog, and other sites.

In both cases it is important that the blog topic and content should be relevant, authentic, and interesting for the target audience. A guest blog simply promoting a product or brand is unlikely to be as successful as a blog that provides valuable information to customers. The content should also match a company’s niche or industry. For example, an interesting blog on current fashion trends from an established fashion designer will not be useful for an IT company. Guest blogging is an effective way of enhancing brand reputation if a company can find relevant websites/experts and content.

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Companies may wish to partner with entities—such as publishers that are individuals or other companies—that can be beneficial to the brand. This can be a productive way for a company to expand its reach and marketing efforts. 

There are two ways affiliate marketing is approached: companies offer affiliate programs directly to other companies/individuals, or they can sign up to be an affiliate through another organization. The company that is offering or controlling the affiliate program will pay a commission for every lead or sale the affiliate delivers to the company’s website.

Affiliate marketing is performance-based marketing where customers or partners are rewarded for designated actions that help market the brand. For example, a customer might mention in a Facebook post that he or she purchased a product and gain a certain number of reward points for their post.

The affiliate marketing program may be structured so that when more than ten friends like or comment on that post, the individual earns more points. The affiliate can then redeem these points against the company’s products or some partner brands.

Affiliate marketing helps widen a company’s reach exponentially using the most credible medium—existing customers. Websites offering price comparison services, coupons, shopping directories, and virtual currency platforms are the most popular affiliate marketing websites.

To look at affiliate marketing in a simple way, it is a cycle consisting of three key entities. These entities are the “merchant,” which is the brand whose product is being marketed, the “publisher” who is the affiliate, and finally the “customer.” In simple words, the advertiser pays a certain commission to the publisher for bringing new customers to the business.

Through affiliate marketing, merchants or companies gain a wider reach to sell their products or services, which is usually a key element to any marketing strategy. This approach can also allow the company to build a strong image or brand name.

One of the main advantages of affiliate marketing is that companies can gain more customers with limited dollars, since the approach is commission based or points based. However, there is the possibility that some merchants may incur high commission, maintenance, and initial setup costs, depending on the nature of the business.

Affiliate marketing is different from referral marketing in the way that it uses online marketing platforms—social media, search engine marketing, and more—to market the product while referral marketing is primarily based on word-of-mouth and relies heavily on trust and personal relationships between existing customers and prospects.

Affiliate marketing can be a powerful tool for a product brand because, in addition to helping grow the customer base, it can also aid brand presence in the market and create a buzz around the brand and its respective brand identities.

Attracting the right affiliates is very important for the affiliate program to be a success and in determining the volume that can be expected from the program. Updating content regularly and staying up-to-date with recent trends is equally important to help ensure that customers respond to the company’s offers.

A product or service does not have to cater to a niche market. Common-place brands, even fast moving consumer goods brands, can benefit greatly from affiliate marketing with the help of the right offers and efficient partners.

Getting products onto as many sites as possible is not necessarily the most important goal. Marketers must also consider the relevance, value, and traffic of the sites and platforms that one is able to reach.  

There are some common mistakes affiliates tend to make, and businesses need to be aware of them. The job of the affiliate is to “market” the product, not “sell” the product. Selling is the job of the advertiser itself. Trying too hard to push customers to buy the product may only push prospective customers away.

Partnering with too many affiliates can be another mistake that brands need to carefully consider. Being everywhere can serve to dilute the customer perception about the brand and undermine its credibility. A crucial component to help ensure success with affiliate programs is to have robust analytics capabilities in place and to use them regularly. This will enable the company to understand which affiliates bring in more business, the value of that business, and where they should increase or decrease their efforts and investments in affiliate marketing. 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves a number of activities and initiatives that businesses can implement to achieve high search engine rankings. Such activities address factors that can impact a website’s or web page’s search engine rankings for specific search terms, resulting in a high placement in a search engine’s organic (unpaid) search results. It is important to note that the position at which the company appears in search results is a result of both SEO activities and paid advertising.

Consumer perception is impacted by the position at which a company appears in the result of a search. A high rank in search results helps build trust in the minds of consumers as they generally associate a higher ranked website with being a strong, more established brand with greater reliability. This perception in turn leads to greater conversions on the company’s website and supports the fulfillment of the objectives for the product or brand. Most consumers will not click beyond the search results on the first or second page and the potential diminishes the further into the list that the company appears. A website that is search engine optimized will appear higher in search results resulting in a greater number of visits to the site.

Search Engine Optimization is an Internet marketing tactic that takes into consideration how search engines function and “rank” websites, how people search for keywords, the keywords that are most frequently searched, and the type of searches (text search, image search, video search) that consumers are likely to use to learn more about a product, service, or business as a whole. Keywords are typically defined as either short tail (also known as head keywords) (e.g., women’s clothing) or long tail (e.g., best store to buy women’s clothing). Short tail, or head, keywords usually consist of two words, while long tail keywords usually consist of three to five words. While short tail keywords are generally more popular, long tail keywords are more targeted to specific searches and come with less competition. Less competition is particularly important when developing a pay-per-click campaign as less competition generally means the company does not have to bid as much money for a particular keyword or phrase.

Typically when a business adds a page to its site, the various search engines send a spider, or web crawler, that stores the page on the search engine’s server and then indexes the page (i.e., gathers relevant information on the contents of the web page and the links that it contains) for fast and accurate information retrieval when an online consumer registers a search query on the engine.

Optimizing a website for online searches involves editing the site content and tagging or coding pages to increase the relevance of the website content relative to specific keywords that are key to the business. The objective is to ensure that the site appears in search engine results for the keywords that are most relevant to the business. SEO also involves removing any barriers that would prevent search engines from indexing the site, as well as promoting the site to increase the number of back-links, or inbound links.  

Online Press Release is broadly defined as using new technology to effectively communicate with stakeholders over the Internet. When a business is attempting to increase online reach through PR, a number of tools can be used. One of these is the company’s own website. It is the ideal place to host value-added content that supports broader off-site PR campaigns where people are encouraged to click back to a company’s site, and where user engagement can be tracked and measured.

Online Press Release typically encompasses the following:

• Raising the profile of a company or brand using online channels
• Developing online word-of-mouth buzz
• Fostering online advocates and minimizing the impact of critics
• Identifying online trends and issues

The objective of Online Press Release is to raise awareness of a company or its brand among the broader online community and to generate interest that takes advantage of the viral potential of online social media. It is a way of exhibiting prominent, newsworthy stories about a product, brand, or company to as many viewers as possible. It is similar to standard press releases submitted to offline print media channels, but has the added flexibility of enabling content creators to include multi-media content, such as videos, as well as links and supporting digital files.

To maximize the penetration and exposure from PR, it is essential to submit releases to one or more Online PR or news distribution services such as PR Web, Business Wire, PR.com, or Click Press. Many other similar services can be easily found online. Some of these services offer free basic distribution with paid upgrades, while others require an upfront payment or contract on either a yearly subscription or per-item basis. These services also tend to distribute releases via news feeds to online and offline journalists, media websites, and news aggregation services, such as Google News and Yahoo News, which can result in a great deal of exposure for a newsworthy story.

Search engine advertising is a method of placing online advertisements on web pages that show results from search engine queries. However, companies can expand their reach beyond search engines to advertise to niche audiences available on third-party websites such as popular blogs and news channels that can help drive relevant traffic to the company’s website.

Although advertising on search engines helps the companies advertise to audiences that are curious about a specific term and also help the business reach a wide audience range, advertising on third-party websites helps the business reach out to a more focused audience that is likely to be interested in purchasing their product. For example, a website selling fitness products can make use of third-party fitness blogs where it will be exposed to the relevant audience. In order to effectively utilize third-party websites, businesses should ensure that the websites where they advertise are relevant to their business and that the audiences coming through these sites are decision-makers. 

Since multiple vendors bid for keywords to advertise their products in the online space, it is important for businesses to ensure that their ads are appealing and effective, and that they drive traffic to the website. Besides increasing traffic to the website, an effective ad will be deemed of higher relevance by the search engine and will enable businesses to place the ad at a higher position than other ads at a relatively lower bid amount.

The practices used to improve effectiveness of search engine ads discussed previously are also valid for advertising on third-party websites. Besides using the best practices for advertising, businesses should also select appropriate ad types and remarketing techniques when advertising on third-party websites.

Search Marketing is the overall method of driving traffic to a company’s website through the use of search engines, and includes both organic search engine optimization and paid search strategies. Organic search is the free listing on search engine result pages (SERPs) and is governed by the algorithm of the particular search engine. A company’s effectiveness at being ranked high in an organic search can be optimized with various Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices. Search Engine Marketing (SEM), or paid search, is the way in which advertisers obtain a prominent listing for their company through the paid auction model, whereby the company bids for specific terms or phrases, called keywords.

Both paid and organic listings on SERPs show up when users search for a particular keyword. The users will then click to go to the websites or product pages of the company from the listing. There is no fee charged to the company if a user links to a company through the organic results. Organic search is therefore less expensive, but it can be difficult for a company to optimize its site adequately enough to be discovered by customers. SEM allows companies to create targeted advertisements, which are shown to users when they search for the keywords based on a predetermined bidding algorithm. Companies pay the publishers for clicks; this model is also known as pay-per-click (PPC).

There are two methods to determine the advertising cost for the PPC—Bid-based and Flat-rate.

• Bid-Based—This practice is the way in which most search engines price paid search. The ads that appear on the right side and on top of the SERP are purchased on a bid-based PPC model. In a bid-based PPC model, advertisers bid on the highest price they are willing to pay for a click on specific keywords. The actual PPC paid and the ad’s rank is then determined by the search algorithm, based on several factors, including the bid and ad quality, landing page quality, other advertisers bids, and other undisclosed factors.

• Flat Rate—In this model, companies and publishers decide on a set rate for each click. Publishers establish fixed rates for different keywords based on the level of competition or demand for the particular keyword. Thus, the higher the demand for the keyword, the higher the rate. Different publishers have different rates for the keywords, and companies can choose to pay more for increased visibility. This model is commonly used by comparison shopping websites. 

Here at SMstudy, we've always been amazed with how Sales and Marketing has evolved over time and never has this growth been more prominent than in the past couple of decades. Technological innovation has been the main driver for these changes and the job of the typical Marketing individual has also changed a lot as they continue to follow the technological adoption cycle. Earlier the marketing individuals used to focus on TV, Radio and Newspapers to reach out to their audience. This was till the internet arrived and changed Marketing forever. 

The internet brought with it new ways of marketing with Search Engine Marketing, Paid Adwords, Search Engine Optimization becoming the buzzwords to reach out to audiences. The modern day Marketing professional had to track customers interactions online and understand how to best optimize them. They started analyzing huge chunks of data to understand where customers were spending time on their site, where they were dropping off, what they were buying etc. to provide more focused advertising to them.

The amalgamation of technology and marketing has let to a new phrase “growth hacker” coined by Sean Ellis in 2010. A growth hacker is a personn who understands technology, marketing, data and product to find a strategy and create scalable growth models for an organization. Growth hacking’s goals are based on marketing but driven by helping improve product experience and hence a Growth hacker understands technology as well as marketing enabling him to implement any change he/she wants.  

A Growth Hacker can create online Google adwords, Facebook, Twitter campaigns, can make high quality landing pages that are going to have awesome CPC, and can also manage targeted email campaigns like a normal Marketing professional. However, at the same time, the Growth Hacker is equally adept at having conversations with the technology team, develop web pages, design mobile and web user experiences etc. 

We will follow this blog up with another entry on how Growth Hacking has helped companies achieve viral growth. A typical Growth Hacker will base each and every decision of his on a simple question ”What will be the impact on growth?”

Example of Growth Hacking:

Paypal’s friend referral: As a new payment mechanism primarily fighting with large banks, PayPal’s big challenge initially was to get new customers to adopt their product and get them started on using it. Traditional advertising was too expensive and also there was no assurance that people who they reach out to, would use them. Initially, the PayPal team thought of doing business development deals with big banks but that didn’t work out and they understood that they needed a direct to customer approach that would provide a organic, viral growth.

So they started a referral campaign wherein any customer of theirs would get $10 for each friend they refer that joins up and these new customers, upon joining get a $10 amount too. Although this cost PayPal a $20 customer acquisition cost, they were able to witness a 7 to 10% daily growth and acquired 100 million users in a very short span of time. Not only did they acquire these new users, but because the new users already had $10 in their PayPal account, they would end up using PayPal to use the amount.

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The contemporary concept of a value chain was first described and made popular by Michael Porter in his book Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance.

A value chain consists of a set of activities involved in delivering a final product or service to a companys customers. Value Chain Analysis is used to analyze the value created by a companys current activities. It explores where more value can be added and where value is not being added in the current chain of activities. It is a useful tool for internal analysis of strengths (activities that add value) and weaknesses (activities that do not add value).

Value Chain Analysis is a three-step process.

1. Analyze Activities: This step consists of identifying all key activities of a company that are involved in delivering the final product or service to its customers. A popular way to do this is to classify activities as either primary or support.

Michael Porter identified five primary company activities:

• Inbound Logistics
• Operations
• Outbound Logistics
• Marketing and Sales
• Service

Primary activities are reinforced by support activities such as procurement, human resource development, technological development, and infrastructure. The list of activities and each activity classification may be adjusted by the company, as necessary. For example, inbound and outbound logistics may not be relevant for purely online businesses.

After all activities are identified, the links between the activities need to be specified. For example, the service function, which supports customers, will have links to the operations function, which fulfills customer support requests, and the marketing and sales function, which analyzes customer feedback to improve offerings. The activities, together with the links between them, form the structure of the value chain.

2. Analyze Value Created by Those Activities: This step involves identifying where value is created throughout the chain, and in what form and magnitude. Value always needs to be explored from a customers point of view. A product feature or service component that does not benefit the customer does not add any value. Such an activity represents an opportunity for freeing up resources that could otherwise contribute to adding value through some other activity. For example, in a manufacturing environment, each manufacturing process that is involved in changing raw materials into finished product adds value by ensuring that the final product is functional. Quality assurance activities add value by ensuring that the products meet the standards required by customers. The sales teams efforts add value by encouraging more customers to purchase the products. The customer support activities add value by addressing customer questions and concerns and maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction.

3. Determine How to Create Additional Value: This step involves generating a number of ideas to add additional value to activities across the value chain and evaluating each of them to determine which are feasible and should be implemented. The various teams involved with the activities can hold brainstorming sessions to generate ideas for increasing the value of activities. Both improving an activity and lowering its costs can increase value. Thus, evaluating ideas for activity improvements should involve considering whether these actions represent a trade-off, or whether improving an activity and lowering its cost can be accomplished.