How to Use LinkedIn for Business

By kate | Published: May 8, 2012

LinkedIn can be a powerful tool for business. It has become one of the most popular social networking sites for personal profiles, alongside Facebook and Twitter, but LinkedIn is also a great marketing tool for businesses.

This is because it works like an online CV, offering key information about a person or company. When a business profile is created; all services, products and employee skills can be listed.

As a LinkedIn spokesperson recently explained, “It’s a centralised location where millions of LinkedIn members can go to stay in the loop on company news, products and services, business opportunities and job openings.”

There are several things you can do to optimise your LinkedIn business page. For instance pictures can be added to your page to create more interest. Your business page can list all your products and services, perhaps with images or logos to go alongside each offering.

With LinkedIn you can create a contemporary and interactive display of your services and client projects to promote your business. You can even add plug ins to your LinkedIn profile to enable you to post slides and video.

If anyone within an organisation has published any books or articles, you can also add publications to your LinkedIn business profile. This helps to promote your companies academic skills to the wider world and shows employees as experts in certain fields.

You can also use LinkedIn as a platform to offer expert consultancy advice. You can network with others and build up an online community by recommending others for their business acumen using LinkedIn, just as they might recommend you.

However it is not ideal to bulk recommend people or suggest people you don’t know, as LinkedIn should be a platform where you are selective and professional about who you interact with in the business arena.

The really great thing about Linked in terms of SEO is that it has a higher conversion rate than Facebook and Twitter, plus good backlinks, so it is really of benefit to business as a tool for internet marketing and customer conversions.

Posted in Social Marketing | Comments closed

Should Social be used for customer service?

By kate | Published: April 18, 2012

Many businesses set up social media pages in order to promote their company and communicate with customers. However, social networking has to be used in the right way if it is going to be a platform for good customer service.

In many retail businesses for instance, followers on Twitter or Facebook may comment on products, make inquiries or even complain if they feel they have got a bad service. This means the company has to be constantly vigilant with their Twitter or Facebook page, ensuring that they respond appropriately.

It is not very appropriate to delete or ignore a negative response, instead the company should respond in a positive way offering a reason for the issue or an incentive for the customer to stay loyal.

Posts on Twitter or Facebook from customers need to be responded to as rapidly as possible. This is not always easy if you have business to run but there should be a person or persons given the responsibility of regularly checking social media for comments from customers.

If a business has an issue come up that is getting a lot of response on Twitter, which may be too much to reply to individually, then they should put out a Tweet explaining the situation so that people can be clear what is going on. For instance, if a company’s website is running slow then they can tell people why and when it is going to be fixed on their social media page.

It is also a good idea to personalise your Twitter or Facebook pages. You can do this by adding names and photos of people within your company biography or as a profile picture instead of or perhaps incorporated with your logo (if company rules allow).

Your bio doesn’t just have to describe your company, it can contain names of employees who have individual Twitter profiles. This way there are lots of people to contact if the customer wants a rapid, tailored response.

Personalising social media pages also means the customer feels like it is more of a real company with names behind the corporate face! Posts can also be ended with names, especially if the message has come from a particular department or specialist within the company.

Social media is also a great way to maximise customer conversions. For instance if a person who is not yet a customer asks a question on your Twitter or Facebook page, if you respond helpfully and quickly they are more likely to then use you for future information and perhaps go on to be a loyal customer.

So social media can be used for customer service and there are many ways to make sure it is a tool to aid good customer relations. Because social networking is becoming ever more popular, many companies can’t afford to ignore it and so should turn this easy and direct way to communicate with customers to their advantage.

Posted in Internet Marketing | Comments closed

An acceptable approach in analysing multi-item Likert scales in business surveys” with an emphasis on the ‘business’.

By Rachel | Published: April 3, 2012

First for anyone not familiar with the language of statistics, a Likert scale is the posh name for the type of questionnaire with answers such as “Strongly Agree”, “Agree”, “Disagree” or “Strongly Disagree”.  So it is simply a survey with choices usually based on level of agreement. The key is that these options are not number values, but are words (or images) conveying a range of opinion.

Pitfalls to be wary of for any Likert scale analysis:

  • Means are dangerous, Modes are Better. What does this mean and Why? If we consider three responses of Disagree, Agree and Strongly Agree, then it can be tempting to give these a score of ‘1’,’2, and ‘3’. If an average is calculated between Disagree and Strongly Agree – this will end up an ‘Agree’, yet this may not be the case as the scale need not be linear. So ‘means’ or averages are not helpful. The mode (the most common value) is more useful and is a real bit of information.
  • Line charts are meaningless, Bar charts are Better. The data within a Likert scale is best shown using a form of bar chart. In tabular reporting the percent of responses giving any answer is another useful parameter.
  • T-tests are not appropriate. These are based on assumptions such as a normal distribution which are rarely application for any Likert scale analysis. Unfortunately many statistics packages are unaware of this fact and report meaningless data. Better tests to use here are the Kruskal Wallis test of variance, or the Mann Whitney U test.

See the post on statistics in business for more information on using statistics in a meaningful manner.

When using these in practise other factors must be considered, that in fact apply to any form of survey, Likert scale or not:

  • The influence of position in the ordered list when the survey is presented (either online, by print, phone or face to face) is important. For example it is highly likely you will get a different response if your questions have “Strongly Agree” at the top or left compared to if this is located at the bottom or right of the list of options.ExtraSearch experimented this using online forms with drop down select boxes, and there was a huge bias towards choosing the first option in any drop down box. When we changed the order in the drop down box the ‘responses’ changed.
  • The motivation behind completing the survey. The answers to any survey are a very good indication of how people wished to answer the survey, not necessarily the same as their own opinion. Answers can be influenced by leading questions, or respondents might feel unwise to give the real answers (if politically incorrect or rather radical), or they may simply wish to complete the survey as fast as possible to claim the free gift on offer. Wise respondents may intentionally alter answers to avoid or gain further offers and correspondence (Eg coupon codes).

So what is an acceptable approach to analysing multi-item Likert scales in business surveys?

The following points serve as useful guidelines:

1)      Devise the questions to reduce any impact of external factors

2)      Layout the questions to reduce bias from first/last options

3)      Report the data as total per answer, % of total per answer and the mode (most common answer)

4)      Use bar charts (not line charts) to show data graphically.

5)      Avoid any mention of the mean or average answer.

6)      To test variance or significance use an appropriate test (Kruskall-Wallis rather than t-test)

7)      Ensure before reporting you have considered the impact of external factors and dealt with any unusual data.

Posted in PPC, SEO, analytics | Comments closed

SEO and Small Business: a chequered past and a brighter future?

By kate | Published: March 23, 2012

A lot of small businesses have traditionally not seen the need for SEO or even an internet presence.

Businesses like carpet cleaners, roofers or plumbers have traditionally got business by word of mouth or advertising and some are only recently seeing the value of having a website and managing SEO.

Many small business owners have been in business a long time and are confused by the rapid advance of the internet and online marketing, they see SEO as overly technical and do not understand how it works.

For a long time if you had a business, you would perhaps put an advert in the paper or in yellow pages and maybe get business cards printed. This worked for decades for traditional small business owners and so they don’t understand or see the need for SEO.

This means that a big divide has developed between search engine optimisation and small business marketing, often with frustration and resentment expressed on the part of the small business owner because they can’t or don’t want to embrace online marketing.

This is a shame because small businesses often need and could really benefit from SEO. However where as big business can afford to experiment with SEO, small businesses really need to get it right because they don’t have big budgets.

It makes it harder for small business owners to understand SEO when the rules keep changing however. The Panda algorithm update last year sent some people into a spin because those who had keyword stuffed their website or posted industry articles that didn’t contain quality content were suddenly penalised by Google.

Another pitfall is that SEO often seems like a cheap internet marketing option, compared to PPC advertising. However, although natural search ostensibly involves no-cost tweaking of your website so that it appears higher on the internet, many small business owners do not understand how to do this.

Therefore they employ SEO agencies to do this for them and are then worried about quick results and return on investment for the money they’ve invested, often then complaining if it doesn’t bring as quick results as PPC.

It is not easy to measure ROI for SEO, as agencies can never promise to get a company to the top of Google, and so therefore many people distrust it. This often leads small businesses to claim SEO doesn’t work.

With all these negatives it can be hard to convince small businesses about the value of SEO. However, a reputable SEO agency can show small businesses that the basics don’t change and as long as their website has quality search engine optimised content and inbound links it can boost business.

Managing a small businesses search engine optimisation so that they begin to see results via more people visiting their website and converting into new customers is also a good way to convince them of SEO’s value.

So, SEO can work for small business and it is up to experienced SEO managers and agencies to convince their clients of its value through improved business results.

Posted in Internet Marketing | Comments closed

Statistics and decision making in business.

By Rachel | Published: March 13, 2012

Statistics and analysis tools are very useful in business; computers make data collection and analysis easy especially when large amounts of data are used.

But, and a very large ‘but’ is that they assume people know how to use them and when the data can be used.

Episodes of “The Apprentice” show how very silly decisions can be made based on asking too small a sample. Yet this happens very often in real life. There is very little statistical data to be found a set of just 5 items of data.

A useful guide to understanding most statistics is to understand the major assumptions of the commonly used tests. The ‘statistics’ provided in many reports assumes a large dataset and the ‘distribution is normal’ (and here normal is a technical words meaning there are more values nearer the centre). In everyday language this requires:

  • A large number of data points – above 30 is a good guide
  • Normal distribution – think heights of children, or weights of a product – the natural distribution you get centred on the ‘middle’ value.
  • An analysis of external factors (or one-offs) which might impact the results

So if you only have 5 bits of data more standard analysis will produce meaningless results.

And if you have ‘outliers’ in the data or data with a lot of answers right at the top or bottom of the scale, then many of the common analyses will produce silly results.

There are other statistical analyses that can be used for other types of distribution.

Weibull is often used for dealing with low probability statistics – dealing with risk scenarios where you want 99.99% or even 99.9999% reliability. With the area of search marketing any work on long tail keywords more naturally would use Weibull statistics.

The Kruskal Wallis test of variance can be used when the data is not normally distributed. Examples here are the common ‘what do you think’ (or Likert scale) tests. Other examples are sets of data with a fixed upper or lower bound. For example in PPC marketing the average position of the ad is not a normal distribution as it cannot be zero or less so an average is not really an accurate or useful figure.

The Mann Whitney U test can be used to test the difference between two set of data. This has useful applications when testing different elements on a website. Again many the commonly used t-tests are not applicable and are used incorrectly, which can lead to the wrong decisions being made. These types of tests can be formulated for quite complex problems. ExtraSearch have used the latter when deciding on PPC strategy for large complex campaigns, to determine exactly when the results of a test are significant and not chance. It is important to stop a large test at just the right time to prevent too much money being spent testing, but also knowing the results could not be down to chance.

Posted in Internet Marketing, PPC, SEO, analytics | Comments closed

Have you Tried Social Shopping?

By kate | Published: February 17, 2012

Social shopping is the latest social networking activity. Some of you might be wondering what exactly social shopping is! It is different to plain old online shopping because it doesn’t involve a solitary browse through a clothing website or placing the same old weekly online food order at the supermarket.

Social shopping is another form of social networking. It involves shopping online with a group of like minded friends. This means you never have to be left to choose that party dress or holiday on your own again, you can get your friends involved!

Online friends can comment, share and recommend purchases. One of the easiest ways to do this is through Facebook Likes. There is a function in Facebook where you can add a like button to specific items for sale on a website.

This is a great idea for a fashion website for instance. On each page with an individual item of clothing on it, there can be a Like button so that the shopper can share their favourite items with friends.

The persons Likes will then show up on their Facebook Wall and hence advertise their prospective purchases to friends, who can then comment or like the item too. This works well on fashion websites like Asos and Topshop.

If you own an online shop you too can add these Like buttons via Facebook. If you do not have a Facebook presence for your e-commerce site you can get an internet marketing manager to set this up for you, creating a Facebook Page and allowing you to publicize your products via Facebook.

If you are a consumer, there are other online stores that also offer other clever features to enhance your online shopping and make it more social. There are several websites now that let you browse items in categories and share your experience through Facebook and Twitter.

Shopsquad offers recommendations based upon your actions on the site. You can tick off items you already own and items you’d like, this stimulates recommendations and discounts from the site. You can also share your activity with friends on Facebook.

Svply is another website that works in a similar way. At Wanelo you can follow stores you like, plus post and organise your wanted products. Both of these have an option to connect with Facebook friends.

Daily Grommet has a very different USP, it lets you shop whilst supporting the causes that matter to you – for instance eco innovation. You can share and discuss your chosen item with friends on Facebook or Twitter.

Finally, Store Envy provides a marketplace for independent sellers to set up a store. You can browse this by category or market (topic). There is an option to log in through Facebook to connect with your friends.

So whether you want to visit your favourite online shop to browse and share items with friends, use one of these new type of social shopping websites, or perhaps set up social networking capabilities on your own online store – shopping online no longer means shopping alone!

Posted in Internet Marketing | Comments closed

Pinteresting Your Brand

By ruth | Published: February 7, 2012

Better Homes and Gardens on Pinterest (example brand)A good marketer is always on the lookout for new and interesting ways to engage with customers online, and while the pitfall-laden world of social media fads has claimed more than a few flailing victims over the last couple of years there is a new trend emerging which is probably worth some judicious attention.

Never one to jump headfirst into social media five minute wonders, we were all a bit wary here when it came to looking at the new online pinboard site Pinterest, but the idea of a shareable online scrapbook based around image sharing warrants some interest. It seems to carry many of the most popular features of the Twitter and Facebook giants – the ability to share “cool stuff” about yourself and things you like or find online – while stripping out the notoriously tedious junk status updates and tweets which gravely keep the world informed whenever someone stubs a toe, misses a bus or otherwise moves on with everyday life.

Although the site is technically still in beta it has started to rocket in popularity and many brands have now started establishing a presence on it in order to engage with their customers. Early adopters include Whole Foods, the Today Show and Better Homes & Gardens, amongst others.

Probably the biggest plus point that Pinterest has at the moment is its leading demographic: the site’s user base is mostly female (rumoured over 70%) and under the age of 45, which is a rather juicy audience to have sitting on a platter (or a pinboard). Some brands seem to struggle with making best use of an image sharing site – what if you sell something dull or are service-based rather than being able to showcase products – but with a bit of lateral thinking there are actually multiple different angles you can take on Pinterest to make best use of the platform.

Pinterest lends itself well to more lighthearted activities – how about an image-style treasure hunt (or a seasonal Easter egg hunt) through your pinboards? You could also use the site as a research tool to evaluate consumer reactions to new products or ideas, a kind of free focus group, or just start engaging your customers by showing off their contributions; for example ask people to post their visits to your venue or show them wearing/using your products, then pick the best to showcase on your own boards and run a “buyer of the month” pin to let your customers show off a bit.

You can even use Pinterest to sell products (add a $ or £ to the pin description and the platform automatically pops a price banner onto the image for you) which is fantastic for designers, art and craft types and even tourism and real estate agents. Even more esoteric style businesses like consultancies or logistics firms can make use of the pinboards to put a personable face to their services – have your consultants make a board each and share their top articles and tips, for example – which is a lot friendlier than the text-heavy encyclopaedic content which many consultancies and business services end up with even when using more “traditional” social media.

Pictures really do paint a thousand words, so why waste oodles of space describing a product or service when you can pop up some pictures, gain a pile of brilliant backlinks and let your business create an attractive and friendly image which speaks for itself?

Posted in Internet Marketing, Social Marketing, Technology | Tagged , , , , , | Comments closed

The Changing Face of SEO

By kate | Published: February 6, 2012

Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO for short) is an important way to maximise your website’s and therefore your businesses presence on the internet. Sometimes called natural or non-paid search, these days it involves a number of methods to ensure your website rises up the search engine rankings.

It used to mean using relevant keywords around your website and in third party articles. When people typed these keywords into Google, your website (or an article linking to your website) would appear in their list of searches. The higher up your website showed in the rankings due to targeted keywords, the more people would click on your site.

The SEO results were then measured by ranking reports and high performing keywords that resulted in many click throughs and conversions were used again, where as low performing keywords were paused or removed.

In 2012 however, gone are the days when SEO means using keywords and measuring results by ranking report alone. Now the success of a campaign can be boosted and analysed more successfully and in much more detail.

Ways to measure and improve SEO now include analysing link building, web analytics reports, using branded and non-branded keywords, social media, PR, measuring conversion rates and call tracking. Methods like these allow much more detailed and successful SEO management.

An SEO campaign can now even incorporate other non-internet marketing methods, so that measuring the true value of search engine optimisation – or where you website ranks in the search engines – includes both online and offline promotional tools.

For instance PR can be part of offline SEO, you can incorporate the number of mentions in the press into your results. Backlinks produced from PR efforts online can also be measured as part of optimisation.

Online, social media is now a very useful tool to boost your SEO. Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are important avenues for increasing your presence on the internet for free. Getting people to improve the search engine ranking of your website by visiting or ‘liking’ it via social media is increasingly important.

Internet marketing done via clever video content on video channels such as YouTube also draws attention to your website and can quickly spread your company name across the internet. Blog content that goes viral can also be taken into account when measuring the success of online search engine optimisation activity.

So remember that successful SEO these days isn’t just about choosing the right keywords and analysing them, there are many other ways to boost your company’s visibility online and measure how well your website is being optimised across the internet and beyond.

Posted in Internet Marketing | Comments closed

Life With Your SEO Agency

By ruth | Published: January 31, 2012

If you hear something that sounds to good to be true, the chances are that it…well, is. This never holds up better than when considering SEO companies (or “link building” companies masquerading as SEO outsourcers) who promise you the world on a Google-shaped platter. It seems to be a natural habit of many people who outsource SEO to recoil when told by their agency that they need to do some work, but get overexcited when the agency sits back and tells them not to worry. So if you are outsourcing your SEO and other online marketing, when should you listen to your agency and when should you start questioning their decisions?

Listen if they tell you to make more linkable content. While SEO agencies that also offer copywriting, web design or other content provision can seem like they are upselling their other services, in fact it is incredibly important to have good, high quality content in order to build up links. Remember Google now frowns on paid link building so that means you need to provide something useful which is worthy of being linked to. This doesn’t mean you have to produce oodles of videos and complicated infographics (although if you can make sure you do, because these are excellent!), just put up some well-written and thought provoking blog posts or articles. Tie in your social media and you’ve immediately got something linkable which will get other webmasters interested.

Ask questions when your agency starts talking about automatically generated content as a way to build up links. Auto-generation should always sound some alarm bells as what it usually means is “spun” articles – this is where a single decent article is put through a software tool which turns it into multiple articles of much lower quality, which are then submitted to article directories. First, remember that since the famous Google Panda Update many article directories have been drastically lowered in value, so if submitting en masse this often produces only low quality links which have a minimal (or even negative) effect on your site. Additionally, if a real user happens across one of these trashy articles which has your name on it they are probably going to end up with a negative perception of your company, as spun articles are almost never friendly to human readers.

Listen if your agency starts talking about giving you help with your onsite optimisation. This is just as important (arguably more so) than your external links. You can spend thousands of pounds having someone build keyword anchored links into your site but if the site itself isn’t properly optimised for those keywords it is entirely wasted effort. Get your site properly optimised before you think about external link building. Your agency will be able to advise you but at the very minimum make sure you keyword optimise your title tags, meta descriptions, header text and image alt text and titles.

Ask questions and if possible run a mile when your agency offers you a “guaranteed result” within a specific timeframe. The only thing that can absolutely guarantee a search engine ranking is something like Google Adwords or similar advertising. A good SEO will have sensible goals on how to optimise your website for sensible, relevant keywords to increase traffic and encourage search engines to consider your site favourably. If anyone starts talking about a “guaranteed number 1 rank in 30 days” or something similar, they are either going to spam you to the top with tricky tactics which will damage your site in the long run…or they’ll just take your money and vanish!

By contrast, listen carefully when your SEO agency says they can’t guarantee you a top result for anything. Honesty really is the best policy, and don’t blame your SEO for slipping rankings if you insist on focusing on ridiculous keywords or content which your site is not optimised for, especially if they have already suggested that you add additional linkworthy content or take onsite optimisation measures and you have ignored them.

Ask questions when your SEO tells you they will build links with blog comments and forum posting. If the term “bulk posting” is used then ask louder. This often means the work will be outsourced to cheap freelancers or overseas agencies which almost always results in poor quality which will damage your brand image. If the offer is for a small amount of high quality posting to promote your brand authority then you’re on the right track, but anything to do with posts made purely for link building is a bad idea.

Listen when they tell you to set up Google Analytics. This measure is not just an SEO agency benefit, contrary to popular belief. It is a totally free way for you to see how your online marketing investment is paying off. Is traffic going up for those principle keywords you selected, or do you need to put more effort in?

Remember working with an SEO agency should be a partnership! Be wary of any agency that takes your money and then goes quiet while claiming to be doing “ongoing work.” At the very least you should get regular updates on activity and progress, and if your SEO isn’t willing to have even a quick catchup phonecall with you to discuss their work then it is time to start asking the most important question of all: what exactly are they doing with your money?

Posted in SEO | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

QR Codes: Help or Hype?

By ruth | Published: January 17, 2012

QR codes are a bit of a craze at the moment, cropping up everywhere from billboards and flyers to magazines and coupons. We’ve had a few people making enquiries about getting QR codes implemented for their sites or just generally for their businesses, but in most cases we’ve talked them out of it for their own good, and the good of their ongoing marketing effort – QR codes appear to be a fad which is doomed to fall down as a mass marketing tool, sooner or later.

The biggest problem is that to utilise them a person has to get out a smart phone, load an app and then wait for the code to send them wherever – and many users don’t even have the capability to read the code as QR code reader applications are not native on the vast majority of smartphones, so have to be downloaded and installed in the first place.

It is actually quicker and more efficient to just give people a web address – plus a line for a web address on most print media takes up less space than a QR code, so having the code removes space which could be used for other promotional or informative content. We’ve even heard absurd suggestions from some people saying things like “but if I have the QR code I don’t need my website, email or phone number.” When you’re talking about cramming a QR code onto a very limited space such as a business card, rather than printing common sense information like your phone number, it is probably time to re-evaluate your priorities!

Consumer research into QR codes shows that a vast majority of people don’t even know what a QR code is – in fact only 36% know what they are and only a very meagre 11% of those surveyed had actually used one. Of the users, under half said they found QR codes useful and wanted to see them used more widely, and a third found them useful on selective occasions and “didn’t mind” using them. A full 20%, however, said they did not find QR codes useful, couldn’t see the advantages of them and didn’t expect to use them in the future.

Far more tellingly, 52% of respondents didn’t actually possess a mobile device that was capable of scanning in a QR code. For a general consumer audience, that means any B2C brand that relies heavily on QR codes for its marketing presence is potentially losing around half of its available customers. 15% of the surveyed consumers said that they’d never seen a QR code for a website they were interested in, and 11% were of the opinion that there are plenty of other simpler, quicker and more convenient ways to get to a website. Memorable vanity URLs, for example, are far easier, cheaper and more effective, and can also be used to convey additional marketing messages (anyone in the snack industry looking at itsdelicious.com or similar?) to draw in visitors.

All that said, however, if your main audience is the marketing-sensitive younger generation who love their gadgets and gizmos, you could probably do worse than pop a QR code discreetly onto some of your print advertising. Offer something unique to prompt a visit, like scanning the QR code to get to a money off voucher or giveaway offer, and you can build up a successful brand presence for the highly tech-savvy consumer. Above all, if you’re planning to experiment with QR codes, proceed with caution – try starting slowly, directing people to a specific page on your website which is hidden from search engines (for example) so you can easily track visits in your analytics and see just how much traffic the code is generating. As with any new marketing gimmick, don’t jump into the pool with both feet at once unless you’re willing to get very wet all of a sudden, as well as potentially breaking a leg if the premise turns out to be a little shallow for your needs.

Posted in Internet Marketing, Social Marketing, Technology | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed