We Studied Our Top Social Media Posts of 2017. Here’s What We Learned.

Marketing for Plumbers

Running a successful plumbing business means bringing in positive cash flow from your investments. This holds true whether we are talking about employees or a marketing budget. Marketing for plumbers, having said that, is fairly simple and cost effective. But it doesn’t happen overnight.

Plumber Marketing Ideas To Grow Your Business

The plumbing industry, like most local business niches, can use the web to target customers in their market. A quality lead generation website, professional seo, an active social media network, and Google My Business (GMB) are a few of the big ways to do this. If you are the DIY type, just know that the plumbing niche is not the easiest to target and a professional may be needed to compete.

High Quality Lead Generation Website

It even sounds great right?

Your website can’t still be the same old 2013 cool site that you had made. Today’s web is so different and so are all the mobile devices.

Even if your website was made with great care, it still is too dated to be effective today when it comes to getting plumbing leads for plumbers.

So what makes a great lead gen site?

Today, the best pages have a contact form present above the fold, or before the user scrolls. You also want a couple key reasons why you are the best bet for the user. The final key is to put some social proof right there, in the form of a testimonial.

Gone are the days when a “fancy” slider introduces your company. When is the last time you actually waited to see all 5 slides on a homepage? Even worse, if you do wait, do you ever find what you came looking for?

Beyond that top section of each page, you need awesome content that tells your customers how you can help them. Also ensure that your navigation is simple and the site isn’t cluttered. Finally, use images that are of your business where possible, otherwise purchase quality stock images. Don’t just grab free ones from Google, it looks tacky.

Finally, make sure that your website loads fast for visitors. Nobody wants to wait 6 seconds for the fancy moving images on your page. Keep it simple and clean, a fast site is often the result. And lots of leads for your business.

Search Engine Optimization Gets Your Plumbing Website on Google

Perhaps you have heard the term by now. SEO. But what is it?

SEO, or search engine optimization is the act of attempting to make your web properties more visible in search engines for a given set of terms.

Take for instance, a great looking website in the plumbing niche. If it doesn’t even get seen on search, how many customers could it possibly attract?

Not many, so how do you fix it?

The answer is simple, you perform seo to get the website ranking higher for searches that your potential customers use when they search online.

White Hat vs Black Hat (or Gray)

SEO comes in many forms, but it is often classified between either white or black hat, and now gray hat has emerged as a term.

White hat seo is a term used by the “purists” that cling to every word that comes from the Google propoganda machine. They claim to strictyly adhere to every rule.

The truth is, nobody is abiding by every rule, or they aren’t performing seo.

Black hat seo means the gloves come off. Black hats do whatever is necessary to get the ranking. Often they are seen as lazy, since automation is one of their main weapons of choice.

Somewhere in between those 2 “factions” lies the gray hat seo scene. As you may have guessed, it’s a mix of the two. On the surface and when talking to clients, they claim to be clean (likely). In practice however, they only try to be. If a limit can’t be reached and a site won’t climb, they will stray to the dark side, thus the gray hat.

Whatever side of the color spectrum suits your plumbing business, some certain things need to be done. These are foundational seo tactics that every website should strive to perfect. Of course you know that everything you create needs to be centered around quality keyword research and planning.

• on page seo ~ optimize the title, description, headings, images, and text to make sure search engines understand the meaning of your content
• interlinking ~ to make your site more searchable, you want to link pages together where it makes sense
• citations/directories ~ there are still a few major data aggregators out there that send your data to websites across the world, get on those

One of the often overlooked pieces to seo, is the social media network. Having the popular social media channels locked down for your brand is important and powerful.

Branded Social Media Marketing Network for a Complete Plumber Marketing Package

Don’t make these just to get them online either. Make them being a solid representation of your brand. Your social channels can be a great way to instill trust in potential customers, don’t take that lightly.

I’m referring to the big ones like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+ and so on. Grab at least those 5 for the plumbing industry.

By now you have probably heard that having an active social media channel is important for business. I can surely tell you that blindly posting will not grow your brand.

However, properly building out these profiles, interlinking them all together and with your website, and syndicating your content is great for seo.

It provides backlinks from high quality websites, and they aren’t spammy links from fake fiverr gigs.

Aside from that, these profiles have the ability to rank. A well built, active and powerful Twitter or Facebook page can easily outrank a competitor’s poor website. You get 2 chances instead of one.

Then there is the obvious fact.

Social sites can generate traffic! Considering traffic is one of the main goals of seo, it just makes sense as a potential candidate in terms of marketing for plumbers.

Perhaps the easiest avenue for traffic in the plumbing industry would be from YouTube. Considering the number of DIY plumbing projects there are that you may not necessarily want a call from, your content options are big.

Fix a leaky faucet and make a step by step video. That could well drive thousands of visitors to your website over time. Will they all be in your local market? No, but the traffic builds the authority of your channel, and consequently the website it links to (yours). Since you do the work anyway, this is a smart marketing strategy.

That brings us to the final point of the plumbing marketing must haves. And it’s another Google product.

Get Your Plumbing Business on The Google Map

GMB is perhaps one of the best marketing channels for a business to generate inexpensive calls that are somewhat predictable and inexpensive.

One of the cool parts about the GMB platform is the Insights. This area tells you the number of calls, how many folks asked for driving directions to your shop, and the number of direct website visits generated by the map listing in the last 30-90 days.

Even Google is realizing the power of the map listing in local search. Consequently, they are testing paid service ads in that area of the search results around the country at times, and in certain niches.

The best part about Google My Business is that the listing itself is a free digital marketing opportunity!

The bad part is that getting your plumbing business listed is tough unless the searcher is in your driveway or you live in a small city.

I’m not trying to say the “average Joe Plumber” couldn’t rank in the map pack, but it’s unlikely. Unless you are a plumbing company in Tinytown, USA, it’s time for an seo specialist.

If you must go it alone, here is a guide that will help you add your business to Google Maps.

The Google Map Listing is one of the most powerful business profiles you can build online. For that reason, make sure you provide quality images and text, as well as completely building the profile.

Get Your Plumber Marketing Plan Together and Running

This is just a handful of plumber marketing tips you will likely need to run a successful campaign, but it is the foundation. Once you have these items together and in place, you are ready for your business to climb the ranks. And of course, if you need help, we perform awesome marketing for plumbers!

The post Marketing for Plumbers appeared first on Cloud Inspector Web Design.

Marketing for Plumbers published first on http://www.cloudinspectorwd.com/

7 Tips for Building a Career in Marketing (Advice and Insights From Top Founders and Investors)

“How did you get into marketing?”

At Buffer, members of our marketing team are often asked this question. And the truth is, the path looks different for each of us:

• Alfred was in the army
• Arielle was a health coach
• Kevan, our Marketing Director, was a sports reporter

But for those of you out there who want to start a career in marketing or maybe build from where you are in 2018, we’d love to help you figure out:

• How can you transition from your current role into marketing?
• What should you focus on learning?
• What skills do you need?

To help answer these questions (and more!), we’ve teamed up with Product Hunt, who recently published their first book on careers. The book highlights the best insights from top founders and investors on mentorship, overcoming challenges, and the best and worst career advice they’ve received.

In this post, we’ll share some of the insights from Product Hunt’s book — including lessons from Tim Ferriss and Reddit co-founder, Alexis Ohanian— as well as some advice on building a career in marketing from the Buffer marketing team.

Ready to jump in?

7 Tips for building a career in marketing

1. Form habits around your strengths

You are the average of the five people you associate with most. Also, you don’t need to get much right to be and feel successful. Just form habits around one or two strengths.

Tim Ferriss

In Product Hunt’s book, Tim Ferriss’ #1 piece of advice for anyone looking to kickstart their career is to “Form habits around a few strengths.”

And at Buffer, we’ve built our marketing team around our individual, core strengths. For example, as an Editor, I focus mainly on my strengths in content marketing and SEO:

As Kevan explains in our t-shaped marketer post:

Generally-speaking, everyone on the Buffer marketing team will have all the base knowledge and marketing foundation skills; plus, each teammate will have chosen at least one main channel in which they are an expert.

Try to form habits around whatever discipline of marketing you’re most excited about:

• If you’re into video, download some stock footage and start editing it
• If you want to become an SEO master, try reading as much content as possible from places like Moz, Ahrefs and Backlinko
• If writing is your thing, set aside time in your calendar each day to sit and write

It can be daunting to look at marketing and think you need to fully master: analytics, data, CRO, SEM, advertising, copywriting, SEO, community and more.

But in reality, to be a successful marketer, you don’t need to be an expert in every channel: one or two areas of expertise will be enough.

However, before diving right in and choosing an area or two to focus on, experiment with a bunch of different skills to see what’s the best fit for you.

2. “No” is just a starting point

The best piece of advice I ever received was that “No” is often just the starting point, and most careers worth having involve a fair amount of determination, grit, and just general “try, try again”-ing.

Kathryn Minshewf, Founder of The Muse

When it comes to kickstarting a career in marketing—or even climbing the ladder, you’ll likely hear “No” and a lot more than “Yes”.

From pitching editors content ideas to applying for various roles and freelance gigs, throughout my career, I’ve been told “No” plenty of times.

But what I learned along the way was that each “No” was bringing me a step closer to a “Yes”. For example, each article pitch I had rejected helped me to eventually land my first paid writing gig with Crew.

And When I landed my role at Buffer, it was actually the second time I applied — Kevan, who’s now our Marketing Director, was also unsuccessful in his first Buffer application: 

Kevan used the above note as motivation and failing to land his dream job helped him to realize where he could focus his energy to improve.

Treat each “No” as an opportunity to learn and refine your skills.

3. Focus on timeless skills

Write every day. Even if you’re not a writer, I find this practice to be clarifying for many things.

MG Siegler, Partner at Google Ventures

There are certain skills that will never become outdated in marketing. To name a few:

• Communication
• Writing
• Storytelling

These skills will always be valuable.

For example, whether it’s a blog post, copy for a landing page or captions for a video, writing will always be a key skill for marketers to have.

And before joining Buffer, Kevan used to write 2,000 words minimum every day to help improve his craft. Alfred also challenged himself to write every day before he worked at Buffer and again when he first transitioned into a content-focused role.

Try to find opportunities in everyday life where you can practice these timeless skills.

For instance:

• Treat every tweet or email you send as a chance to improve your writing skills
• Next time you’re speaking with a customer service agent, think about how you can make your communication really clear and easy to understand
• The next time you compose a Facebook status, think about how you can effectively tell the story you’re looking to share (these storytelling formulas may help)

4. Pursue side hustles

If you’ve got things you want to build, just build them for the sake of learning a new thing.

Alexis Ohanian, Co-founder of Reddit

At Buffer, we love side projects.

And when it comes to marketing, side projects can be a great way to learn new skills and embrace areas you’re passionate about.

For example, when our content crafter, Alfred, was keen to learn more about design and coding websites, he set out on a mission to redesign his personal site and code the changes himself.

Playing around with my personal blog design in Sketch again. Sharing a *very* early homepage design here. Thoughts are welcome! pic.twitter.com/oBJfDd05gn

— Alfred Lua (@alfred_lua) July 25, 2017

This side project enabled Alfred to level up his skills and now he can even commit changes to Buffer code:

Without taking on this side project, Alfred may not have had the opportunity to learn about design and development. But through a side project he’s picked up some skills that are invaluable to our team.

No matter what stage of your career you’re at, side projects are a great way to learn and level up your skills.

When it comes to thinking about a side project, I love the three rules for side projects that Hiut Denim Co shared on Medium:

1. They don’t have to provide you with a living. You can still eat if they fail.
2. They don’t have a deadline. And as there is no time pressure, you don’t revert to your usual formula. You try new things. You experiment. You take risks.
3. This is a Labour of Love. You provide the ‘Labour’. And you provide the ‘Love’. So when you spend time on it, it is because you really want to. That keeps you coming back and pushing it on. That’s important. This thing will require you to keep plugging away at it, maybe, for years.

And across the Buffer marketing team we still embrace side projects that help us to level up our skills in marketing and other areas:

• Kevan has a weekly newsletter on marketing and leadership
• Hailley has a future of work podcast
• Alfred has a fortnightly newsletter on marketing

5. Embrace the industry

I truly believe that to excel in a specific industry if you are a creative, you need to live and breathe the industry.

Helena Price, Photographer

Marketing is an ever-changing industry.

The platforms we use to reach our target audiences, like Facebook, Instagram and Google are constantly evolving and the tactics that deliver results one day, don’t the next.

Often, the most successful marketers succeed because they love what they do and always keep on top of the latest trends, news, and developments.

Marketers at all stages of their careers can benefit from following industry blogs, publishers and leaders.

Here’s a quick list of sources I’d recommend following:

Marketing industry blogs

• AdWeek: a leading source for news and insight for marketers
• AdAge: daily news and updates from the marketing and media landscape
• CMO: insights, expertise and inspiration for and by digital leaders

Individuals to follow

• Matt Navarra: for all things social media
• Rand Fishkin: for SEO, marketing and leadership
• Ali Mese: for a ton of great startup marketing and content advice

6. Help others

Figure out what you’re good at and start helping other people with it—give it away. Pay it forward.

Naval Ravikant, Co-founder of AngelList

One of the best ways to progress in your career is to help others.

When you take the time to help others solve problems and offer feedback, you get the chance to showcase your skills and build your network at the same time.

When it comes to finding people to help out, you could start with answering relevant questions on communities like Inbound, GrowthHackers and Quora.

For example, early in his career, Hubspot’s Director of Acquisition, Matthew Barby, searched the internet for marketing questions he could answer in order to help others:

I scoured through online forums and communities to find questions that I could answer, and when I did answer them, I’d go into great detail.

Keep your eyes peeled across social media for opportunities to help people in your niche, too. Often individuals will turn to Twitter and other online communities when they’re looking for some feedback or help.

Creating content is also a good way to help other marketers. For example, Kevan shares frequent insights about marketing at Buffer in his Medium publication, Crumbs:

And SEO consultant, Dan Shure, takes people behind the scenes of life in the SEO world with his vlog:

Always be on the lookout for opportunities to help others. 

7. Think like a journalist

The most important thing about being a good journalist is the ability to think critically. A good journalist asks the right questions, finds the truth in a story, and tells the reader what matters.

David Ewalt, Author of Of Dice and Men

With the above quote in mind, marketers and journalists are much alike.

In marketing, it’s important to always have a critical eye and question everything. For example, if traffic on your blog has increased, you might ask yourself:

• What’s caused the increase?
• Where is the traffic coming from?
• Why has this happened? And can we repeat this success?

It’s also important for marketers to find the truth in what we’re sharing. Often, marketing content will reference data or studies and it’s up to us as marketers to fact-check what we’re sharing and ensure we attribute the correct sources.

As Smooch. Editorial Director, Dan Levy, explains on Moz:

I once had a blog post queued up and ready to go live first thing the next morning until our eagle-eyed social strategist recognized one of the case studies cited in the post and noticed that the author had completely misinterpreted the results. In a small industry, examples and stats often get recycled from one blog to the next. The result is a case of broken telephone where the facts get muddled in transit. Proper attribution makes it easier to track where the breakdown occurred and to set the record straight.

In marketing, it’s a good practice to approach everything with a curious eye and look for the “why” and “how” behind every piece of data.

As Brian Balfour shares on his blog:

Real insights do not happen by scratching the surface. Real insights come from digging to the deeper layers.

Over to you

Thanks so much for checking out this post. If you’re interested in some more career advice from uber-successful founders and investors, you can check out Product Hunt’s book here.

I’d love to continue the conversation with you below, too.

What would your advice be for someone looking to build a career in marketing? Or if you’re trying to break into the marketing industry, feel free to ask any questions below in the comments.

Thank 7 Tips for Building a Career in Marketing (Advice and Insights From Top Founders and Investors) for first publishing this post.

10 Free Tools to Help You Understand Your Social Media Audience

We often recommend crafting your social media posts according to your audience.

But how you know who the individuals that make up your social media audience are? And how do you know what content they like?

Answering these two questions is essential if you’re looking to execute a successful social media strategy. And often, you’ll find the answers by turning to data and social media analytics.

In this post, I’ll share a few ways of using data to find out more about your social media audience across the major social media platforms — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

How to learn more about your social media audience on the major social media platforms

Here’s an overview of the tools that you can use to help you understand who your followers are. Feel free to click on any of the social media platforms to skip to its section.

Facebook: Audience Insights, Page Insights, and graph search

Instagram: Instagram Insights and SocialRank

Twitter: Twitter analytics, Followerwonk, and SocialRank

LinkedIn: Linkedin analytics

Pinterest: Pinterest analytics

Facebook

Audience Insights – Demographics, Page Likes, and more

The most powerful tool to help you understand your Facebook Page fans is hidden within the Facebook Ads Manager: Audience Insights.

Here’s how to access your Audience Insights:

1. Click on the dropdown menu in the upper-right corner of any Facebook page
2. Select “Manage Ads”
3. Click on the “Facebook Ads” menu
4. Select “Audience Insights” (you might have to hover over “All Tools”)

Or you could access it via this direct link: https://www.facebook.com/ads/audience-insights.

Once you’re at your Audience Insights, select “People connected to your Page and enter your Page name under Connections > Pages.

Facebook might have, by default, selected “All United States” under “Location”. If you want a global view of your Facebook Page fans, hover over “All United States” and click on the cross.

Now, let’s find out who your Facebook Pages fans are!

Under the “Demographics” tab, you can get the following information:

• Age and gender distribution
• Lifestyle
• Relationship status
• Education level
• Job title

Under the “Page Likes” tab, you can get the following information:

• Top categories that your fans might like
• Pages that your fans might like

Under the “Locations” tab, you can get the following information:

• Top cities
• Top countries
• Top languages

Here’s the other information you can dig into:

• Activity – as in Facebook activities and their device usage
• Household – as in household size, income, etc.
• Purchase – as in purchase behavior

Household and purchase information is only available for audiences in the US currently.

You can get a good understanding of your Facebook fans from all this information. For example, here’s what I found about Buffer’s Facebook Page fans:

• In terms of age, the biggest group (45 percent) is people between 25 to 34.
• We have slightly more male (57 percent) than female fans (43 percent).
• Most of them work in “Management”, “Sales”, “Arts, Entertainment, Sports, and Media”.
• They also like software and internet companies like Hootsuite, MailChimp, and Social Media Examiner.
• In terms of location, the biggest group is people in the US (31 percent), followed by people in the UK (9 percent).

What did you find about your Facebook fans?

Page Insights – When your fans are online

Besides knowing your Facebook fans’ demographics, interests, and locations, you can also find out when they are using Facebook in a typical week and day.

In your Page Insights, under the “Post” tab, you have a section called “When Your Fans Are Online”. (It should like the screenshot above.)

Under the section, “Days”, you’ll see how many of your fans are active on Facebook on a given day. Under the section, “Times”, you’ll see how many of your fans are active on Facebook during each hour on a typical day. This is a great way to find your best times to post.

Most of our fans seem to be on Facebook every day of the week. On a typical day, they tend to be most active between 12 pm and 9 pm EDT. How about your fans?

Graph Search – Other Pages that your fans Like

While Audience Insights tells you the Pages your fans might like, Facebook’s Graph Search can tell you the Pages they have Liked.

To do this, type “pages like by people who like (your Page name)” on the search bar at the top of any Facebook page.

In the results, there’ll be a section, “Pages liked by people who like (your Page name)”. As the section title suggests, those are the Pages like by your Facebook Page fans. One thing to note is that the results seem to prioritize your friends. So essentially, these are Pages liked by your friends who also Liked your Facebook Page.

So what do you know about your Facebook Page fans now?

<Back to menu>

Instagram

Instagram Insights – Demographics, location, and more

With a business profile on Instagram, the best way to learn about your followers is through Instagram Insights — Instagram’s free native analytics. (If you don’t have a business profile and want to convert, here’s how. If you don’t want to convert, read the next section.)

Here’s how to access your followers’ information in Instagram Insights:

1. Tap on your profile photo in the lower-right corner of the mobile app
2. Tap on the analytics button (the chart icon)
3. Scroll down to the “Followers” section and tap on “See more”

Here’s the information about your Instagram followers that you can get from your Instagram Insights:

• Gender distribution
• Age range distribution (men and women)
• Top locations (cities and countries)
• Times and days when your followers are most active

Tip: If you tap on the bar charts for age range and location, the percentages will be revealed.

Our Instagram followers are quite similar to our Facebook Page fans.

• We have slightly more male (52 percent) than female followers (48 percent).
• In terms of age, the biggest group (45 percent) is people between 25 to 34.
• In terms of location, the biggest group is people in the US (38 percent), followed by people in the UK (8 percent).
• They are most active on Tuesday and Wednesday on a typical week and between 9 am and 6 pm for most days.

How does this compare to your Instagram followers?

The follower information in Instagram Insights doesn’t tell you your followers’ interests. A way to figure this out is to look at your top posts. In the third step above, instead of tapping on “See more” in the “Followers” section, tap on “See more” in the “Posts” section.

Here, you’ll find your top posts by impressions – the total number of times that each post has been seen. I would recommend filtering your top posts by engagement, instead, to find out which types of posts your followers like to engage with. To change the filter, tap on “Impressions” at the top and select “Engagement”.

Sometimes, it might not be immediately obvious which type of posts your followers like. In such cases, you could make hypotheses, test a few types of posts, and see what works.

Social Rank – Interests, activity, and more

If you don’t have a business profile on Instagram or prefer not to convert, you could use free Instagram tools like Social Rank.

Once you have connected your Instagram account to Social Rank, click on “Show Summary” in the top-center of the page. Here, Social Rank will show you the many different information about your followers, such as the following:

• Gender distribution
• Top followers locations
• Popular bio words
• Popular hashtags
• Popular time to post
• Followers distribution (how many followers your audience has)

The information under “Popular bio words” and “Popular hashtags” might reveal the interests, job title, or industry of your Instagram followers. For example, our Instagram followers like to use words like “marketing”, “social”, and “media” in their bio, which is what our ideal audience does — social media marketing.

The “Popular time to post” section shows you the times your followers are posting, which is when they are online and when it might be best for you to post.

You could also make some inferences about your followers by looking at your most engaged followers. To do that, sort your followers by “Most Engaged”. Social Rank will show you the followers that have interacted with you the most in the past 45 days. Click on the top 20 to 30 profiles and check out their bio and websites. Are there any similarities?

<Back to menu>

Twitter

Twitter analytics – Interests, demographics, and more

The native Twitter analytics provides comprehensive information about your Twitter audiences — your followers, your organic audience, and your tailored audiences.

Here’s how to access this information:

1. Click on your profile photo in the upper-right corner of any Twitter page
2. Select “Analytics”
3. Click on “Audiences” in the top navigation bar

Here are some of the key information you can get from the various tabs (e.g. “Overview”, “Demographics”, etc.):

• Interests
• Gender and age distribution
• Country
• Occupation
• Household income categories
• Consumer buying styles

Here’s what I found about Buffer’s Twitter followers (again, they are quite similar to our Facebook fans and Instagram followers):

• We have slightly more male (56 percent) than female followers (44 percent).
• In terms of age, the biggest group (54 percent) is people between 25 to 34.
• In terms of location, the biggest group is people in the US (36 percent), followed by people in the UK (12 percent).
• They are mostly interested in “Business and news”, “Technology, and “Tech News”.

What about your Twitter followers?

Followerwonk – Job title, activity, and more

Followerwonk is a great Twitter tool that provides a bit more information than Twitter analytics. And it’s free for analysis of accounts with up to 25,000 followers.

To analyze your Twitter follower base, type in your Twitter handle and select “analyze their followers”.

Here are some of the useful information about your followers that you can get:

• Locations
• Most active hours
• Word cloud of their bios
• Gender

Tip: Followerwonk integrates with Buffer so that you can easily create a schedule based on when your Twitter followers are most active.

Social Rank – Interests, activity, and more

Social Rank can also be used for Twitter, and it provides similar information as it would for Instagram.

For example, here are the popular words and hashtags used in our Twitter followers’ bio and posts respectively (they are similar to those of our Instagram followers):

<Back to menu>

LinkedIn

LinkedIn analytics – Job titles, locations, and more

The LinkedIn Company Page analytics provides a good amount of information to help you define your LinkedIn followers (and visitors).

Here’s how to access your LinkedIn follower information:

1. Click on “Manage Page” on your Company Page
2. Click on “Analytics” on the top navigation bar
3. Select “Followers”

The LinkedIn analytics offers seven types of demographic data about your followers:

• Country
• Region
• Job function
• Seniority
• Industry
• Company size
• Employment status

I find it helpful to look at the job function and industry data to get a sense of who our followers are. From our data, it seems that most of our LinkedIn followers are marketers and founders in the digital space.

You can find similar information about your visitors — people who aren’t following your Company Page and have visited your Company Page. Instead of selecting “Followers” in the dropdown menu, select “Visitors”.

What does your data tell you about your LinkedIn followers and visitors?

<Back to menu>

Pinterest

Pinterest analytics – Demographics, interests, and more

If you have a business account on Pinterest, the best way to understand who your Pinterest followers are is to use Pinterest analytics. (You can set up your Pinterest business account here.)

Here’s how to access your follower information in Pinterest analytics:

1. Click on “Analytics” in the upper-left corner of any Pinterest page
2. Select “People you reach”
3. On the right side of the page, click on “All audiences”
4. Switch to “Your followers”

Or you could access it via this direct link: https://analytics.pinterest.com/audience/.

Here’s the various helpful information you can get:

• Audience size
• Country and metro
• Language
• Gender
• Interests
• Boards (Boards by your followers with many of your Pins)
• Brands (Businesses your followers follows and engage with)

Our Pinterest follower base is slightly different from our follower base on the other major social media platforms. Perhaps because of the demographics on Pinterest.

• We have more female (74 percent) than male fans (21 percent). 5 percent unspecified.
• In terms of location, the biggest group is people in the US, followed by people in India.
• They are mostly interested in “Technology”, “Design”, and “Travel”.

How does your Pinterest follower base look like?

<Back to menu>

What do you know about your social media audience?

Understanding who your social media audience is can help you craft the right content for them, boost your engagement, and increase your reach. And by using the amazing social media tools around, you can learn so much about your followers — for free.

Once you have analyzed your social media following, I would love to hear what you have found out. Who is your social media audience? What are their interests? What do they do?

Also, do you know of any other analytics tools for understanding one’s social media following? It’ll be great if you are up for sharing.

P.s. If you found this post helpful, you might like our guide to optimizing your social media content — helping you decide what to post on each social media platform.

Topic: Social media strategy

Image credit: Unsplash

Thank you, Natasza Libich, for asking this question in our Buffer Slack community. 

Thank 10 Free Tools to Help You Understand Your Social Media Audience for first publishing this post.

Conversion Rate Optimization

At its most basic understanding, conversion rate optimization is about improvement. If you run a website or a social media page, you want to know how your content is doing.

To get a good idea of how your site is performing, you’ll look at a series of metrics and analytics that tell you what works and what doesn’t.

You can use CRO to measure how active any part of your site is, but it’s mostly used to learn how to acquire new customers, how to obtain new downloads, which features do a great job at attracting attention, and so much more.

Return on Investment

At the end of the day, CRO is about looking at the numbers. You’re paying good money for ads to drive traffic to a specific website, blog, or page.  In turn, you hope that driving enough traffic will result in obtaining a new customer who buys from you.

The CRO numbers tell you if you’re losing money paying for ads that aren’t working, if you’re just breaking even and might need to make a few adjustments, or if you’re on fire and don’t need to change a thing.

For every dollar you spend on ads, what are you getting back?  In email marketing, for every dollar spent, the average person gets a return of $38.  That’s an impressive rate of return!

Not every campaign will see that number.  Some even lose money.

If things are moving a bit slow in your online marketing, you may be pulling out your hair and wondering exactly what you’re doing wrong.  It’s a natural question.  All you want is to create the perfect campaign and BOOM, you’ll be making big money.

The problem is, nothing ever works as planned.

Why You Need to Optimize

Online marketing is a fickle business.  Odds are, you’re not going to get it right the first time around.  A lot of the successful marketers have been around the block a few times, learned from their mistakes, and went back to the drawing board.  Don’t fret if you find yourself making these same mistakes.

The good news is, only a small change may be required to bring in the sales you want.  Or maybe you’ll need a completely new vision.  That’s the power of conversion rate optimization.

We all know that words can be extremely powerful.  Your ability to tell a story can make all the difference when it comes to copy that works and copy that fizzles.

Headlines and other facets of the process are equally as important.  Does your wording encourage subscriptions and buys?  Or discourage them?

So many marketers fail to properly engage regularly and follow-up with their customers.  Good business sense isn’t just getting the sell and being done with them.  You MUST foster a relationship with your customers.

Learn about them.  Grow with them.  Your product or service should evolve as their needs evolve to remain successful.

The attention span of an adult is about 2.8 seconds.  They want to read a quick headline and move on to the next one.  Therefore, it’s important to have a content strategy that matches the way people consume it: quick, easy, and visually biased.

Why Conversion Rates Are Important

All the issues pertaining to marketing go back to whether you could optimize your process.  You get to track what people do with your content.  If you don’t get the type of numbers you’d like to see, then you change the process with the hope that the numbers increase.

Let’s take a look at the different terminology you should know.

1) Total Conversions

If your campaign was successful, you should have a number of people who did exactly what you wanted them to do.  If you directed traffic from Facebook for them to sign up for your newsletter, the number of people who did that will be reflected.

Your success would then be measured by the percentage of people who saw your ad, those who clicked on it, and those who went through with the process.

2) Conversion Rate

Your goal is to get a certain percentage of people to act.  You can check the percentage of people who ‘bought in’ by dividing the number of conversions by the number of people who made it to your site.

3) Bounce Rate

The bounce is when people go to your site, but don’t act.  They show up and leave.  This is not a good metric to have!  If your bounce rate is high, that means people aren’t sticking around for whatever reason.

4) Exit Rate

This will show you what pages people are bouncing from.  Maybe they get through the first page, but then you lose them on the second.  So, the exit rate will reveal where people leave specifically on your site.

5) Engagement

If you have a high engagement or “time on site” rate, that’s a good thing.  It lets you know that people are lingering around on the site.  They’re browsing and not immediately leaving.  That means they’re considering their next move.  Sometimes they buy, other times they leave and come back later.

6) Average Page Views

This is another good indicator to see how long people are sticking around to view your site.  It averages how many pages visitors look at while they’re visiting.  The higher the percentage, the better, as it shows they aren’t leaving immediately, but hanging out awhile.

Improve Your Conversion Rates

If it’s one common thread a lot of online marketers and business people have in common, it’s that initial struggle trying to figure out how to convert leads into buyers. It’s this area in which a lot of marketers get stuck. Their mind keeps going back to the same thing: we need more traffic!

If we need to make more sales, we think of it as a traffic problem. But a lack of traffic is rarely the problem. You can throw $20 into a Facebook ad and instantly generate enough traffic to sell your product or service. Yet, a lot of these marketers are throwing thousands of dollars at their ads, but the focus is still on driving traffic.

If you truly desire to become successful, it is important for you to know what the real issue is behind you not making the sales that you want. You’re not having a traffic problem. You have plenty of traffic as it is and adding more traffic will not help you if you do not know how to convert that traffic.

For whatever reason, your content, your blog, your websites, sales page, your opt in, etc. is failing at taking the plentiful traffic you already have and making them want to open up their wallets for you. Here are five easy tactics you can employ to convert traffic.

Strategy #1: Follow Amazon

Amazon might not be a perfect website, but just digging around and taking a good look at things can give you ideas and inspire you in ways that will help you convert your traffic. The people at Amazon are experts at converting traffic.

They pull out all the stops because they do all the testing find out what works and what doesn’t. If it increases sales, you can bet Amazon is already doing it.

Let’s look at a quick example. Have you ever bought anything on Amazon and went to check out with your items and noticed how they took away navigation options at the checkout screen? If you take away navigation at the checkout screen, it will prevent abandonment and lead to more sales because there’s nothing to distract them. It forces you to buy.

Strategy #2: Create a Tool

Number one way to build authority in your niche is by providing value to the customer. If you can give them value and you’re not 100% focused on pitching, you will increase your leads and your conversions. People want content that helps them and your job is to give that to them.

Have you seen the Progressive insurance commercials? What do they regularly boast their website has? They have a tool that allows you to compare insurance rates between companies. You might be thinking it’s not a good idea for a company to share rates of their competitors because they might end up losing money that way.

That’s not necessarily true. Other companies have calculators that show how much money you’ll be saving or a way to compare spends. Just offer value and it will attract people to you if you don’t think it will.

Strategy #3: Embrace Reviews

You might think you’re the greatest marketer who has ever walked the face of the earth. You can sell a bag of ice to an Eskimo. One of the top reasons why people struggle in converting is a lack of trust and authority. We’ve discussed ways to improve your authority, but there is still one group of people who can sell better than you and it’s imperative that you tap into their power.

Customers. No matter how good you think you are at selling, your customers are better at it than you are. At least that’s the way you need to look at. Why? Because nothing will sell your product faster and better than with good reviews.

Nothing will sink your business faster than bad reviews. Listen to the people and embrace reviews. If you seek to improve bad reviews, good ones will always drown them out.

Strategy #4: Virtual Receptionist

You’re a very busy person. Constantly worried about posting new content, building relationships customers, playing out the future, and doing about 100 different things to make sure your business takes off. It can be time-consuming and complicated. But sometimes, you’re too busy to do work because you’re always on the phone chasing leads.

Converting isn’t an exact science. Someone can visit your site at 1 PM, yet not decide to buy until six that evening. It’s common for people that want to sit on it for a while and think the purchase through. But at 6 PM, you’re out of the office. Maybe your grabbing dinner, fighting traffic, or just unable to reach the phone. How many leads do you think you miss after business hours?

This is where the virtual receptionist can help you convert more leads and give you extra time to do your job. You might be thinking that virtual receptionist cost a lot of money, but compared to hiring someone new at the office, you can hire a virtual receptionist for peanuts. It usually cost between $200 and $300 per month. It’s worth the cost.

Strategy #5: Personalization

One of the newest strategies popping up these days is custom personalization. If you’ve ever done email marketing, and you know how important it is to speak directly to the person you’re sending the email to.

There are different types of emails to be sent to different consumers. You send one email to someone who just joined your list, and an entirely different email to someone who has been on your list long time.

You’re customizing your traffic in a way that makes it personal to the user. Some sites, like Product Hunt, have a bar over the top when you’re shopping it recognizes you as a person. It treats you like a person and greets you like person. This is a great way to build trust with your customers and the new visitors who come in.

Conclusion

The internet is an amazing tool you can use at your disposal to become successful.  No matter what niche market you’re in, you must pay attention to the numbers and adjust.  It might take you time to learn new strategies, but the only way to figure it out is by testing and knowing what the numbers mean.

The post Conversion Rate Optimization appeared first on Cloud Inspector Web Design.

Conversion Rate Optimization published first on http://www.cloudinspectorwd.com/