Vocus 15 digital marketing ideas to grow your business

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guide

15 Ideas to Grow with
Digital Marketing
Take your business to the next level with these online marketing tactics and tools.

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15 Ideas to Grow with Digital Marketing

Marketing Software

Welcome to Digital Marketing
Until recently, most small and medium-sized businesses could survive—and, in some
circumstances, thrive—without investing much time or money into marketing. A typical

small business owner might place a few newspaper ads, attend some trade shows, or send
direct mail with coupons or discounts to incentivize new business. Tactics like email marketing, social networking, search engine optimization, and large-scale public relations,
however, were left to the big boys with the big budgets.
Today, thanks to the Internet, social media, and marketing
software, the marketing game has changed for businesses
of all sizes. Smaller businesses need to go beyond a singlechannel marketing strategy.
With 1 billion Facebook users worldwide and social networks
like Twitter continually gaining traction, customers and
prospects of almost any business can be cost-effectively
accessed and engaged online. According to Nielsen’s
recent State of the Media Report,1 social networks and
blogs reach nearly 80 percent of active U.S. Internet users
today, a population that exceeds 245 million people.2
Your customers, prospects, and influencers are more
accessible than ever.
If you’re not doing anything to interact with and influence
them, you’re missing a huge opportunity to grow your business.
There is no need to abandon tried-and-true marketing
tactics like word-of-mouth, referral marketing, and couponing. In fact, you now have modern channels like social
networks, influencer engagement, online PR, and email
marketing to drive them and multiply their effectiveness.
Growing your business with online marketing doesn’t have
to be difficult. As this guide will show, the right technology
and a little knowhow can transform you into a marketing
pro, without killing your budget or hurting your other dayto-day business goals.

1 Nielsen, State of the Media: Social Media Report, 2011; http://bit.ly/nIBdRv
2 Internet World Stats, June 2012; http://bit.ly/WkAo
3 USA Today, “Small Businesses Using Social Media to Grow”; http://usat.ly/xvPJOi

This guide will help you apply 15 modern marketing and PR

tactics to engage your key customers and the people who
influence them. Each tactic will include the best practices,
tips, and knowhow you need to create positive buzz in your
marketplace and drive new business to your front door.

1

Build Online Influence Through
Creative Social Marketing

The power of social media is undeniable. Just ask
Denver-based hamburger chain Smashburger and its
senior vice president of marketing, Jeremy Morgan. He told

USA Today that the company largely credits its incredible
growth over the last five years—from three restaurants
in 2007 to more than 150 locations today—to its social
media outreach.3
Specifically, Morgan says the company’s social strategy has
helped it create valuable influence over engaged communities who express an interest in its product. That influence
has anifested itself into tangible value. With a Facebook
m
following of close to 90,000 fans, Smashburger can inexpensively deliver special offers and incentives that are more
likely to convert into direct sales at its restaurants.
Of course, influence isn’t simply a byproduct of being
on social media. To create it, you need to first develop a
following that’s large and ngaged enough to receive and
e
respond to your messages. Even then, true influence only
happens when you do things on social media that resonate
with and provide value to your target audience.

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Marketing Software

Growth Tactic: Hold a Twitter Chat to Drive
Engagement and Influence
A Twitter chat is an interactive conversation
held at a specific time on the social network by using a pre-determined hashtag
(you might know it as the “#” sign).
Twitter chats can cover just about
any topic and are a great way to
network with customers,

increase
influence, and share key knowledge, including information about
new product
features or big industry
news. Best of all, you don’t need a
fancy venue and trendy drinks to spark
a lively discussion.
Don’t have a Twitter account yet? Signing up for one is simple and, conveniently, it’s about all you need to host a chat.
That being said, you—and your customers—will get the
most out of your Twitter chats if you keep these five things
in mind:
1. Choose the right Twitter account: If you have personal and business Twitter accounts, make sure you
choose the one that makes the most sense for the chat.
Generally speaking, a company account is the most
logical, but there are merits—like creating authenticity
and thought leadership—to hosting a chat from your
personal Twitter account.
2. Know your theme: Like a great party, your Twitter
chat should maintain a specific ocus. And it doesn’t
f
have to be all business, either. If you’re a small online
wine retailer, you could host a chat about your followers’ favorite vineyards, or the best places to visit for
wannabe sommeliers.
3. Create a suitable hashtag: No idea what a hashtag
is? You might know it as the pound mark (#), but it’s now
used by Twitter to identify specific keywords or topics.


Hashtags make it much easier to host Twitter conversations because they allow chat participants to follow the
c
onversation via Twitter search by simply typing # and
the keyword you gave them. As a best practice, keep
your chat hashtags short and catchy.
4. Invite followers to the party: Regardless of how
compelling your chat topic is, no one will participate if
they don’t know that it’s happening. Promote the chat
on your blog, Facebook page, website, and, of course,
Twitter account. And don’t forget to include the chat
name, hashtag, time, and date in every post.
5. Pick a chat style and timeframe: You can choose
one topic, pose a specific question, and ask people to
answer that question only for a specific period of time.
Or you can simply identify a broad topic and encourage
everyone to engage in a free-flowing conversation.
Ultimately, the best style depends on your company,
the chat’s participants, and the topic you’ve chosen.

It’s also important to set an official ending point for the

conversation so that participants can set aside time to
engage with you.
The bottom line is that Tweets drive buzz and engagement.
Additionally, hosting a chat can help you appear more
accessible and authentic, while also allowing you to build
valuable thought leadership.

Vocus @Vocus
Have you registered yet? Join us
Wednesday to learn how to read
customers’ minds w/ search data.

Vocus @Vocus
How #PRWeb news
releases kicked off
the Harvard Rugland
#YouTube

#TweetChat
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ASK THE EXPERT: What should companies
do when a Twitter chat ends?

That shouldn’t be shocking to small business owners, who
have used similar direct mail or n-store contests for years
i
to drive new customers through their doors. A Facebook
contest is very similar to those types of offline incentives,
contests, or sweepstakes; it’s just executed through a social
network.

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Companies can do a lot after a chat to
continue engaging with their audience, but one of the best tactics is to
move the conversation to a different
platform. For example, invite your
chat participants to join you on your
Facebook page, or pin images that
relate to the chat on their Pinterest
account. It doesn’t really matter
where you go (it could be in your
store), the goal is simply to keep
customers talking if they have more
to say.
Verónica Maria Jarski, Senior Editor and
Writer, MarketingProfs

2

click “Like” is to gain access to special offers, promotions,
and exclusive contests.

Attract More Customers
Through Facebook

Today, almost every company with a sliver of social savvy is
on Facebook. In fact, according to a recently released social
media study from Vocus and Duct Tape Marketing, Facebook
is now the most commonly used social network among SMBs,
with 73 percent reporting they currently use it.4

Now, that doesn’t mean you should head over to your
Facebook page and start an exclusive contest right now.
Facebook has specific contest terms and policies that companies must adhere to, and breaking any of those rules
might result in your page being shut down. To run a contest
with the hope of growing your fan count and fueling new
customer acquisition, it’s important to keep a few dos and
don’ts in mind:

°° DON’T use Facebook’s platform directly to host

the contest. Using the social etwork’s like, share,
n
or comment button as a voting mechanism is a direct
violation of Facebook’s promotion rules.

°° DO use a third-party application to administer
contests, promotions, and sweepstakes. As long as
that third-party application is collecting votes, comments, and entrant information, you can host a contest
on your Facebook page.

That said, simply using Facebook as a branding or customer
engagement tool is very different from using it to extract
real bottom-line value. This social network can be a valuable
customer acquisition tool for small businesses.

Growth Tactic: Fuel Customer Acquisition with
a Facebook Contest
While a company’s Facebook fans will often visit its page to
view pictures and read up on new product releases, studies
have shown that one of the primary reasons customers

4 Vocus and Duct Tape Marketing, “Different Paths to Social Media Influence,” 2012; http://bit.ly/SbJcPe

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ASK THE EXPERT: What’s the secret to running a successful Facebook sweepstakes?

To be effective, your Facebook
sweepstakes must be timely, relevant
to your target audience, and unique
to your business. If your sweepstakes
is lacking in any of these three areas,
you won’t see the desired results.
Plain and simple.

Need help?

“

“

them. As long as you do your homework and partner with a
quality third-party Facebook contest app, you should have
nothing to worry about.

Corey O’Loughlin, Marketing anager,
M
MarketingProfs

°° DON’T contact contest winners through Face-

book. Direct messaging, chatting, posting on
the winner’s wall, or posting contest winner information on your wall are all violations of Facebook’s promotion rules.

°° DO include a complete Facebook contest release.
For a contest to be legal, it must acknowledge that your
company’s promotion is not sponsored, endorsed,
administered by, or associated with Facebook.

°° DON’T select a fan at random for a sweepstakes

prize. Again, that would qualify as using Facebook to
collect entrant information and would be a violation of
its rules.

°° DO follow-up with entrants after the contest is

over. While Facebook’s contest rules don’t allow you
to do that through its platform, a third-party app can
help you collect valuable lead information. After the
contest is over, use that info to contact non-winners
and offer them incentives that might encourage them
to become new (or better) customers.
Remember, while a Facebook promotion, contest, or sweepstakes can be a highly effective lead generation and customer
acquisition tool, there are rules that limit how you can execute

Whether you need a sweepstakes or a way to make
direct sales from your Facebook page, the Vocus
Marketing Suite’s set of 18 Facebook apps can help.
Easy and intuitive to use, the suite’s apps help you tell
your story, capture new leads, and spread the word
about your business. You provide the content; Vocus
does the rest. It’s the only tool you need to harness the
marketing power of Facebook.

3

Learn More About Your Market
with Monitoring

While digital marketing requires you to
find new and unique ways to converse
with your customers, it’s also important
to stop talking long enough to listen. No
conversation can be truly engaging if one
party is doing all the talking.
Gathering critical customer feedback
and intelligence is now easier than ever,
thanks to the range of online monitoring
tools available to you. The issue for many small
and medium-sized businesses, however, is how to best
c
ollect that consumer feedback and data, and turn it into
something meaningful and useful.

Growth Tactic: Capture Customer Sentiment
with Social Media Monitoring
Monitoring customer sentiment and market trends isn’t
new, but with social media, it’s now easier to do. Twitter and
Facebook allow you to legally and ethically eavesdrop on
what’s being said about you online, and to gather a more

personal portrait of your primary audience without having
to execute costly market research.

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Social media monitoring—using software to observe, listen
to and analyze what social users are saying about you—is

one of the most effective ways to do it. If you’re just getting
started with social media and the thought of a full-blown
monitoring campaign scares you, give these four beginner
tips a try:
1. Develop a keyword list: Think about the words,
phrases, and terms that your customers might use to
talk about your brand, business, products, or industry
as a whole.
2. Choose a social media monitoring tool:
You don’t need to immediately invest in software, but it is smart to use an online tool to
monitor social sentiment. Many ervice
s
providers offer a free trial or demo
of their product.
3. Establish monitoring objectives:
In other words, what do you want to
discover? Some goals might include
tracking
public
sentiment about your
brand, responding to customer feedback, or
following key industry trends.
4. Start listening and analyze the data: Ideally, the
social media monitoring tool you choose will be able to
analyze and aggregate data for you and find points of
commonality. In the end, that will help you understand
trends and themes without having to read every social
comment or mention.
By now, most companies understand the importance of
social media. But if your business is simply using social media
as a bullhorn for updates, news, and self-serving announcements, and ignoring the listening aspect, you’re missing a
huge opportunity.

4

Grow Your Fans and Followers to
Create Brand Loyalty

As many small businesses know, bigger isn’t always better
—but when it comes to social media followings, however,

5 Chadwick Martin Bailey, 2012; http://bit.ly/PF9biI


bigger and better is the way to go. With more fans and
followers, you can build more influence online (see tactic
#1) and access a deep reservoir of potential and current
customers to drive your growth.
Do not engage in the practice of buying fans and followers
simply to appear more influential. While it might be tempting to buy 5,000 new Facebook fans from some unscrupulous online company, your investment will be worthless if
those fans don’t care about your business. Take the following route instead.

Growth Tactic: Grow Your Twitter Following
Quickly and Organically
According to market research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey,
high quality Twitter followers are 50 percent more likely
to buy products from the brands they follow than their
non-follower counterparts.5 Furthermore, 60 percent of a
company’s followers are more likely than non-followers to
recommend the business to their own friends.
Translation: Acquiring more Twitter followers—provided they’re real people and not fake accounts—means
more referrals and more sales. So how can you turn your
company’s Twitter profile into a must-follow account?
Here are five simple steps:
1. Define your audience: Whether you tweet about
a specific industry or a personal interest like running
or cooking, your audience will define the people you
follow and the types of messages you tweet.
2. Create a compelling profile: When Twitter users
are deciding whether or not to follow you, they’ll look
at your bio, profile picture, and background. Make
sure that all three are an accurate reflection of you and
your business.
3. Start tweeting: Potential followers will also quickly
examine your tweet history and the types of content
you share. Make sure to be personal and real, without
being self-promotional.

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4. Find relevant people to follow: Perform a simple
Twitter search with keywords or hashtags that are relevant to your business, and follow people that are talking
about those things.
5. Reply, retweet, and engage: Ultimately, if you want
to build a loyal following, you must make sure you’re
participating in a two-way conversation. That means
replying to or retweeting your followers’ tweets, or
thanking your followers for sharing your content.
As a general rule of thumb, make sure you tweet at least
once a week. Once a day is more ideal, but don’t go overboard. If you’re tweeting every minute of every day, your
messages will be less impactful. Your end goal should be to
balance quantity and quality to acquire relevant followers
that may ultimately become loyal customers.

Need Help?
Building your social media presence can be time-consuming. The Vocus Marketing Suite’s Recommendation
Engine makes it easy for you. It identifies infuencers to
engage with, content to share, and conversations to
join—delivering you a stream of easy, step-by-step
recommendations that result in social media success.

5

Find Your Most Likely Customers
Online

So far, we’ve looked at why building a big online following
can benefit your business. However, for that following to be
truly valuable, your company must be able to convert that
loyalty and interest into revenue.
To do that, you need to actually be able to find the fans,
followers, and blog readers who are your
most likely customers, and identify
the buying signals that indicate an
interest in purchasing your products or services.


Growth Tactic: Monitor Customers’ Buying
Signals with Social Media
If someone walked through your
business’ door, spent an hour
looking at a product, asked you
to tell them more about it, and
finally asked you how much
it cost, you’d feel good about
your chances of closing a sale.
Those buying signals would allow
you to provide more information to
this potential customer and help them
along the sales process.
While those in-person buying signals can be tougher to
detect online, they exist. You just need to know how, when,
and where to look for them. Using software designed to
pick up on those signals is the easiest option, but here are
two buying signals you can watch for manually on your
social networks:

°°Engagement frequency: If a particular fan or follower
repeatedly comments on—or retweets—your posts, or
they engage with every post about a specific product,
that’s an indication of serious buying interest. If you
see this buying signal, don’t go crazy trying to oversell
yourself on social media. Treat the customer online like
you would if he or she walked into your store. Continue
to provide more information and invite them to email
or call you directly if they’d like to chat.

°°Question or comment specificity: It’s one thing if a
fan or follower simply likes a funny photo or retweets an
interesting post that has nothing to do with your business. It’s another thing if a fan or follower comments
on a post about one of your products and asks specific
questions about colors, sizes, or features. Specificity is
a clear signal that you’ve got a buyer’s attention and
they want to learn more. Similar to the previous signal,
you don’t want to go overboard selling yourself right
away. Instead, simply engage that fan or follower and
continue to monitor their interest.

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Remember, while having a big following is great, it won’t do
your bottom line much good if that following isn’t actually
comprised of paying customers. So, just as you would in
your store or in a business meeting with a potential client,
recognize potential social buying signals and ask yourself
one key question: What do your fans and followers really
want from you?

CASE STUDY: How Vocus’ Recommendation Engine Helped Purple Trout
Widen its Social Net
When search engine optimization
firm Purple Trout signed up for
Vocus’ Marketing Suite in March
of 2012, the company’s president
and founder, Steve Phillips,
wasn’t sure how quickly he
should realistically expect the
software to produce results.

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Attract Search Customers with
Market Expertise

In the not-so-distant past, if a potential customer had a
question about your products or wanted to learn more
about your services, they had to either walk through your
front door or call your customer service line to get answers
or advice. Today, that same customer can simply perform a
Google search, read a few Yelp reviews, or poll their social
networks to achieve the same results.
According to an August 2012 study by Forrester Research,
82 percent of U.S. consumers now research products
online before actually buying them. Yet, interestingly
enough, 54 percent of those buyers still prefer to purchase
products in-store after researching them on the Web.6 For
small and medium-sized business owners who used to (or
in some cases, still do) rely on foot traffic or phone calls
to interact with customers during their research process,
those are critically important statistics that point to the
importance of standing out in search results.

Within a month, he had his answer.
After a few days of using Vocus’ Recommendation
Engine—the software’s built-in social media consultant that helps users find and engage new customers
on social media—Phillips found a user on Twitter
who was struggling with Google’s recent update and
needed SEO help. Through Vocus, Phillips was able to
identify that buying signal, follow the user, answer
their question publicly, and start a private conversation via Twitter.
“Less than a month later, that person and their company became a client of ours,” Phillips says. “It was
unbelievable. We didn’t have to do a face-to-face
with them. I didn’t go fly to see them somewhere. We
connected through the ocus Marketing Suite, and
V
from there it took off.”
Now, going on Vocus is the first thing Phillips does every
morning. “I make coffee and I go to the Marketing
Suite,” explains Phillips. “In 5 to 10 minutes, I’m able to
look for opportunities to engage potential customers
and identify people that are interested in our industry,
and I start having conversations with them.”

6 Forrester Research, August 2012; http://bit.ly/SIH0CC

So, how should you take advantage of your customers’
pre-purchase research?

Growth Tactic: Plan and Execute a
Company Blog
Business blogging used to be a painstaking activity best
executed by larger corporations with the time and people
to produce regular, relevant blog posts. However, thanks
to free blogging platforms like WordPress, Blogger,
and Tumblr, businesses of all shapes and sizes can blog
with ease.
Blogging isn’t just about composing a couple of rambling
posts each week and publishing them randomly. To succeed, you need to be focused, dedicated, and committed
to a specific blogging game plan. Here are five tips to help
you do that:

°° Set clear goals: It’s not enough to just have a blog.
You need to know what you want it to accomplish. Do
you want to boost website traffic? Do you want to build

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your reputation as a thought leader? Regardless
of your goal, don’t start writing until you
know what you want the blog to produce.

°° Identify your audience: Knowing
who you’re writing for will help you
develop a theme for your blog and
the posts you write. If your customers
identify with certain subjects or topics,
or if they seem highly interested in
the photos and videos you share on
your Facebook page, make sure you
consider those things as you create your
blogging strategy.

°° Choose your blogging platform: Whether you’re
considering blogging platforms like Wordpress,
Blogger, or Tumblr, or simply making the blog a separate
page on your website, make sure to evaluate the merits
of each option and choose the one that makes the most
sense for your business. Consider your blogging style,
the goals you’ve set for the blog, and the customers
that will be reading it.

°°Start slowly: While it’s important to post to your blog
regularly, you should start with a reasonable posting
schedule and build your stamina from there. If you start
off by posting too often, you’ll quickly exhaust your
queue of blog ideas and you might experience blogging burnout.

Multiple studies have shown that companies that blog
attract more organic Web visitors than those that don’t,
while frequently updated blogs have the most SEO
success. In other words, if you want customers to find your
business while they’re researching similar products online,
start blogging.

7

Attract New Customers in Social
Outposts

Most businesses are now active on the major social networks.
To stand out online, try getting creative and building a
presence on “outpost” sites.
The Web landscape is full of outposts that attract a wide range
of specific buyers. Some flock to photo-sharing websites like
Flickr and Instagram, while others congregate at niche blogs,
community websites, industry forums, and lesser-known
social networks. The challenge for business owners is identifying which outposts their target customers visit most often,
and formulating a strategy for communicating with them
where they are.

Growth Tactic: Collect Fresh Leads with a SlideShare Guide

°° Research, listen, and participate: Take a few hours

SlideShare, acquired by professional networking site
LinkedIn in 2012, is the world’s largest online community for
uploading and sharing PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, and
webinars. As of February 2012, it had more than 60 million
users and continues to be one of the fastest growing social
networks on the Web.

to read prominent blogs and forums in your industry.
Browse their post topics, read comments to gauge how
customers respond to each post, and, if it’s not a direct
competitor, join the conversation in a non-promotional
way to begin establishing credibility. Doing that will
teach you how to interact with customers on your blog
and provide fodder for future blog post ideas.

Best of all, it’s incredibly easy to use. In about an hour, your
business can craft inexpensive visual content—like a guide
to buying a new bike or tips on keeping your lawn green,
for instance—that engages current and potential customers
in a very unique way. To get started, just follow this
five-step process:

The business benefits of blogging are numerous, but there’s
one that’s particularly relevant for this section: Search
engines love blogs, and they reward companies that
regularly maintain them.

1. Revise your slides: If you’re uploading an older
PowerPoint presentation, chances are that it centers
on high-level talking points that you would expound
on in a person-to-person meeting. You don’t have that

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2. Create a catchy title: Think about the keywords that
might lead a potential customer to your presentation
and include them in your slideshow title and cover slide.
Also, make sure your title slide is eye-catching, and
that it gives users a compelling reason to click through.

ASK THE EXPERT: Why should SMBs use
SlideShare?

“

3. Upload and tag presentations: After you sign up
for a SlideShare account, you can begin uploading
presentations in a variety of document formats. For
each upload, be sure to select an appropriate category
and assign the document multiple relevant keywords
to increase its chances of appearing in search results.
4. Include images: Some of the most viewed and
shared presentations on SlideShare go beyond bullet
points and extensive copy. They are highly visual, using a
mix of photos, infographics, charts, and screenshots to
illustrate a point. If possible, liven up your presentations
with the same types of visual content.
5. Share your presentation: Look for the various share
features alongside each of your uploaded documents
and share them with your Twitter followers, Facebook
fans, and personal network. It’s also easy to embed

presentations on your
blog or another website,
upping the likelihood that
your customers will get a
chance to view it.
At the end of your presentation, don’t hesitate to include
your contact information and
encourage users to reach out
to you directly if they have questions. At first glance, SlideShare might
seem like a PowerPoint presentation archive, but it’s much
more than that. If used correctly, it can help you boost your
messaging, help you engage with a very targeted audience,
and increase your new leads.

One study has shown that visuals are
processed 60,000-times faster by the
brain than plain text. For that reason
alone, I’m a huge fan of SlideShare.
It’s a visually-driven content channel
and, as that number shows,
visual content can be the gateway to
improved customer interaction and
content digestion. At MarketingProfs,
SlideShare has been a great source of
new leads for us.
Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer,
MarketingProfs

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luxury on SlideShare, so make sure to amend, build on,
or delete any slides that seem vague or confusing.

Make Headlines with a
News Release

Some modern marketers will tell you that traditional public
relations is no more. Old school PR firms that were simply
press release factories are falling by the wayside, while
some reporters and editors view corporate news releases
as overproduced content unworthy of coverage.
We assure you that PR is not dead—it’s evolving. The new
digital buying cycle has changed the rules and made PR
more accessible. Today, any business can create an online
press release to attract customers. Millions of
consumers now read press releases directly on websites like
Google News and Yahoo! News.
If a story is well written and strategically distributed, it can reach
your audience without a journalist or news organization distributing it for you.

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Growth Tactic: “Newsjack” a Big Story to
Get Seen
First defined by marketing and PR expert David Meerman
Scott in a 2011 book by the same name,7 “newsjacking” is
a process by which a business can inject its own ideas or
angles into breaking news. You do this by publishing an
online press release or blog post commenting on the story;
this content then shows up in Google searches alongside
news coverage.
As well as getting you seen by customers on search
engines, newsjacking can generate media coverage or
online buzz that attracts even more customers to find your
business through your content.
Never heard of newsjacking, or maybe you’re not sure how
to get started doing it? It’s not as complicated as you might
think it is. Here are three steps for creating big-time PR buzz
through newsjacking:
1. Find the right news to jack: Not every piece of big
breaking news is “jackable.” It’s critical to make sure that
the topic is relevant to your business and customers
in some tangible way, and that you can comment on it
without sounding fake or spammy. So, how do you find
those topics? Monitor keywords or phrases in Google
News, follow certain Twitter hashtags, and track popular
media outlets that cover your industry. If you see something that might apply to your business, go to step 2.
2. Act with a sense of urgency: In order to get your
news release or blog post noticed when big news events
occur, you’ve got to be one of the first businesses
to pull the trigger. That doesn’t mean you should hastily
rush to create a poorly composed blog post. It does
mean that you can’t afford to be hesitant. To successfully newsjack a story, speed is vital.
3. Include the right keywords: If the news you’re trying
to hijack involves a specific company, organization, or
keyword, make sure to creatively reference them in
your blog post or news release headline, and several
times in the first few paragraphs. You want journalists
or customers who are looking for more information on
a specific piece of news to easily find your content.
7 David Meerman Scott, 2011; http://bit.ly/wHjLrx


Newsjacking is a perfect example of modern PR. It incorporates some basic tenets of traditional public relations,
but is more effective because of the speed and agility of
digital media. If you’re able to successfully attach your business to a breaking news story, you can quickly create buzz,
climb search rankings, and connect with new customers.

CASE STUDY: Making News in Search
Rankings With a Seasoned PR Partner
In early 2006, leading national rental
management company ResortQuest recognized that it had a
significant marketing problem.
In an industry where prospective
customers conducted much of
their research for potential resort
destinations by performing Google
searches, ResortQuest lacked the search results it
needed to be seen by those customers.
Thankfully, John Ellis, ResortQuest’s online marketing
manager, had a plan. The company began to use PRWeb,
the Vocus online news release service that helps businesses create, distribute, and track online news releases
to gain publicity and exposure on the Web.
After some early testing and experimentation with
the software, Ellis began creating and distributing
link-rich press releases using PRWeb’s system. Before
long, Ellis began seeing increased traffic to ResortQuest’s home page, while several of the company’s
other landing pages were bubbling to the top of
search results. Within six months, the company had
several pages consistently listing in the top 10 of
search engine results pages.
Today, ResortQuest’s prospective customers have no
trouble finding the company’s Web pages in search
results. “Today, we are in the top five rankings with
hundreds of quality keywords,” Ellis explains. “And
it’s largely because of ResortQuest’s relationship
with PRWeb and the quality of the press releases
we’re able to create and distribute.”
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Marketing Software

9

Score Local Publicity by Working
with Influencers

While direct-to-consumer tactics and more social engagement helps you converse more personally with your customers, the benefit of good, old-fashioned local publicity
is still important.
After all, in our conversation-fueled world, what you say
about yourself on your website and social networks is not
always what counts. Sometimes, it’s what other key influencers
say—the journalists, bloggers, or community members who
have the ear of your prospects—that really matters.


°°Make yourself accessible: Journalists work on tight
deadlines. They can’t wait weeks, days, or, in some
circumstances, hours for you to respond if they’re
interested in your story. When you send your pitch,
make sure you encourage them to contact you at their
convenience and be ready to respond when they do—
whether that’s minutes or months later.

°° Don’t be a pest: Most reporters don’t mind if you
send them a follow-up tweet or two after you’ve
pitched them. But if they don’t respond, assume that
they’re not interested in your idea for now. If you
continue to badger them about your news on Twitter,
you’ll risk spoiling the relationship.

Growth Tactic: Pitch a Local Reporter on Twitter
Influencer marketing is the targeting of
people who influence your customers’
opinions in order to amplify your message. Pre-Internet, this task was
mostly executed through traditional PR tactics. Today, however,
you can engage
influencers through
a range of channels
including
social media.

Knowing how to pitch your story idea to journalists can
make the difference between them pursuing it and using
you as a source in their stories, and them rejecting it or
ignoring you altogether. Ultimately, if you treat reporters
with professionalism and respect, they’ll probably return
the favor to you. It might not yield publicity after your first
pitch, but it will pay dividends at some point in the future.

10 Stay Top of Mind (Without
Annoying Your Customers)

One of the best channels for doing that is
Twitter. It’s an ideal observation and conversation platform, and all you need is the account information
of your local media influencers (news anchors, business reporters, food critics, etc.) to build relationships with them.

Customer attention is fleeting in the digital marketing
environment. Brand loyalty still exists, of course, but customers are constantly bombarded by marketing messages and
distractions. You need to refresh your customers’ loyalty
and awareness constantly.

As you begin to build those relationships, the next step is to
pitch your most influential local reporters on your company’s
latest big news. To do that, keep these three tips in mind:

Staying top of mind can be a fine line to walk. Contact
customers too frequently and you run the risk of annoying
them and driving them away. Don’t contact them enough
and you risk losing their loyalty.

°° Demonstrate your knowledge of their audience:
If you know that a reporter’s following is particularly
responsive to a specific topic, draft a pitch that’s
relevant to that topic. For example, if you run a financial
services consultancy and the reporter’s tweet history
is heavy on saving for college, customize your Twitter
pitch to include a college savings message.

12

Need help?
When you need to connect and stay connected with
customers and prospects, email delivers results. The
Vocus Marketing Suite’s helps you create exceptional
email campaigns with a huge range of professionally
designed templates, easy segmentation, social media
sharing, and real-time analytics to measure your results.

Growth Tactic: Create and Send a Regular Email
Newsletter
One of the most effective email marketing tactics for smaller
businesses—both in cost and reach—is an email newsletter.
Similar to the print newsletters of yesteryear that businesses
used to send out, an email newsletter is simply a daily,
weekly, or monthly update sent to a list of subscribers. It
might contain company news, helpful tips, exclusive information, customer testimonials, and event information.
If it’s managed effectively, an email newsletter can be a
great way to consistently engage your customers and prospects, and regularly provide unique value to them without
wearing out your welcome. Here are three simple tips that
should set you up for email newsletter success:

°° Provide incentives for customers and prospects to

opt-in: One of the easiest ways to drive your customers
away is to send email updates that they don’t want to
receive. Make sure you only send your email newsletter
to customers and prospects who have voluntarily opted
in to receive it. How can you encourage customers to
opt in? Offer them a special gift for subscribing. It doesn’t
have to be anything major. A little something like a
discount on merchandise or a subscribers-only coupon
can go a long way.

°° Guard your reputation: Email providers like Gmail
and Yahoo rate you as an email sender based on the
reputation of your domain (your company’s website name) and your Internet protocol (IP) address.
If your email newsletters are sent too often and go
frequently unopened by recipients, you may be
blocked by Gmail or Yahoo. To ensure that your email
8 Forrester Research, “How US Marketers Use E-Mail,” 2011; http://bit.ly/TY905N


newsletters have high deliverability and open rates,
you need to build a positive record of sending solicited,
relevant emails that opt-in customers and prospects want
to read.

°° Establish a reasonable rhythm: While you don’t
want to bombard your email newsletter subscribers
with multiple emails per day, you should also avoid the
opposite extreme of sending just one or two a month.
If your email newsletters are too infrequent, your customers may forget why they signed up for your newsletter in the first place and immediately delete your
message or mark it as spam.
Email remains an extremely effective and popular marketing
tactic. According to a Forrester Research study released in
2011, 88 percent of direct-to-consumer companies used or
planned to use email marketing last year, while 71 percent
of business-to-business companies did the same.8
Those numbers won’t decrease anytime soon, especially as
inexpensive email marketing software continues to make the
practice simple and cost-effective for smaller businesses.

ASK THE EXPERT: Why should
SMBs be using email marketing?

“
“

It’s simple: Email has a proven return
on investment (ROI) that, according
to the Direct Marketers Association,
was $40.56 for every $1 spent in 2011.
There’s no more tangible way to
illustrate its value to SMBs with tight
marketing budgets than that. Email
marketing is really the original social
channel and people still use it
every day more than any other
social network. It offers the kind of
reach and intimate engagement
that a lot of other mediums still
struggle to provide.

“

Marketing Software

DJ Waldow, Founder and CEO, Waldow Social

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Marketing Software

11

Be Influential in an Inbox

Still not convinced by the case for email marketing? Here are
a few more email marketing statistics from a recent
Direct Marketing Association study:9

°°

Compared to other forms of
online marketing, email marketing’s
return on investment—$40.56 for
every dollar spent—is nearly double
its nearest competitor ($22.24 for
Internet display advertising).

Commercial email drove an
°°
estimated $63.1 billion in sales in 2011,
compared to $57.8 billion in 2010.
Email marketing is projected to directly
influence $67.8 billion in sales in 2012, while the Direct
Marketing Association predicts that number will be $82.2
billion in 2016.

°°

In other words, email can—and will—influence your customers’ buying decisions if your messages are compelling,
timely, value-driven, and relevant. Of course, if no one
opens them, you’re wasting your time.

Growth Tactic: Grab Attention with Better
Email Subject Lines
The subject line is the only part of your email that you can
guarantee a customer will see. It is the gateway to the offers,
news, tips, coupons and incentives in your email. It will often
determine whether your email is read or discarded.
Even experienced email marketers agonize over subject
lines, where one right (or wrong) word can be the difference between an open or the trash bin. Here are five simple
subject line rules to ensure that you get the click-through:
1. Keep subject lines short and sweet: Depending
on who you ask, a subject line should be no less than
20 characters and no more than 60. As a general rule
of thumb, somewhere between 38 and 47 characters
is a nice median. The argument for short and sweet is
9 Direct Marketing Association, “The Power of Direct,” 2011: http://bit.ly/qXjgok


simple: people scan their inboxes quickly. If your subject
line is long, it will exhaust your customers’ attention span
and prompt a quick press of the delete button.
2. Avoid words that trigger spam filters: While some
words will obviously alert the spam police (use your
imagination), many seemingly innocuous words like
free, video, and sample seem to be the arch-enemy
of email spam filters. It’s also a good idea to avoid any
punctuation or symbols.
3. Don’t be afraid to mention your company’s name:
This is especially true for smaller businesses; it reminds
customers of who you are and why you’re emailing them.
Also, it helps create much-needed brand awareness.
4. Create a sense of urgency: Action-oriented words
are highly effective subject line fodder. They’re far
more successful (and less spammy) than words like
“free” in inspiring subscribers to open the email. Use
words like “today” and “now” that convey urgency and
prompt immediate action.
5. Test different subject lines and analyze which
ones resonate: Don’t use the same subject lines all the
time, even if they are proving moderately successful.
Experiment with a few different subject lines and test
which ones yield the most click-throughs. Think about
which words or phrases prompt you to open emails and
try using those in your subject lines, as well.
Great subject lines aren’t rocket science, but they aren’t
accidental either. The best way to create subject lines that
truly resonate with your subscribers is to put yourself in their
place and think about the things that matter most to them. If
you can address those issues, in a compelling way and in 3040 characters, you’ll stand a far better chance of having your
email read.

Improve Your Effectiveness by

12 Measuring Results

For many small and medium-sized businesses, executing a
multi-channel marketing strategy can be so taxing that when it

14

Marketing Software

comes time to measure a campaign’s results, the analysis is often executed ad-hoc or ignored entirely in favor of gut feeling.
That’s a big mistake. While instinct and common sense can
occasionally be effective, the only way to truly know whether
your marketing activities are hitting their mark is to use
objective measurements that validate your assumptions.

Growth Tactic: Use Simple Analytics to
Perform an A/B Split Test

A
B

65%

90%

Retail and direct-to-consumer companies
have used A/B testing for decades to analyze different direct mail campaigns or
offers. At its core, A/B testing compares
a control sample to other samples to
measure the one that performs best
with a target audience.

One type of A/B testing—also known
as split testing—includes sending out the
same email offers with different subject lines and measuring the open and click-through rates of each. A/B
testing does come with one warning, however: For the
inexperienced, it can get complicated pretty quickly.
So, if you’re just getting started with A/B testing, don’t go
overboard. Stick to these three tips to perform a straightforward—but highly informative—A/B test:
1. Define your theory and your success metrics
before you start: If you’re esting three possible callt
to-action buttons on your website, it can be easy to
assume which one will work more effectively before the
test begins (see: Gut feeling). To avoid that, develop
hypotheses that address those assumptions and establish success metrics that will ultimately validate them.
Success metrics could include specific actions (clicks,
downloads, or purchases) or numbers (time spent on
the website or bounce rate), but they should always
align with your company’s goals.
2. Acquire enough data to establish significance: In
order to make a truly objective assessment of a particular


marketing activity, you need to acquire enough data
to fairly represent your target audience. For instance,
if you’re trying to analyze the messaging on different
website landing pages and those pages end up getting
very little traffic, it’s going to be very difficult to glean
anything significant from the data you collect.
3. Remember that there’s no such thing as an unsuccessful test: Even if your test is inconclusive, it’s still
valuable. Ultimately, that test showed that the element
you were testing is not as important or impactful as you
suspected. That will allow you to refocus your attention
or energy on something else.
Metrics and analytics are part of our everyday lives, tracking
everything from our heart rates to our bank balances.
Keeping tabs on those numbers allows us to better plan for
the present and the future, and your business should view
its marketing metrics and results the same way. If you don’t,
then you won’t be able to detect problems when they arise
and you’ll decrease the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

Need help?
To understand which elements of your marketing campaigns are making people click, share and buy, you
need analytics. The Vocus Marketing Suite tracks and
measures how prospects react to your marketing giving
you a quick overview of which tactics are working best,
making it easy to improve your results every time.

13

Attract Customers with
Content Marketing

Though it’s just now becoming a best practice, the basic
concept of content marketing—creating and distributing
relevant content to engage your audience—has been around
for years.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, content
marketing’s roots trail at least as far back as 1895, when John

15

Marketing Software

Deere published its first branded magazine for an audience
of outdoor enthusiasts and farmers. That spawned an era of
custom corporate publishing in the 20th century, which carried over to the new millennium when Microsoft launched
the first major corporate blog, “Channel 9,” in 2004.10
Today, any company can be a content marketing champion,
and you don’t need a small army of writers and editors to do
it. You simply need to examine the types of content—that
could be a video, a tweet, or a blog post—that help your
customers with the information they need.

Growth Tactic: Content Curation—an Easy
Entry to Content Marketing
For smaller businesses that don’t have
the time to compete with larger companies producing libraries of fresh, custom
content in-house, ontent curation is
c
the answer.
To understand this tactic, imagine being
the owner of a high-end art gallery. Rather
than forcing your customers to chase down the world’s
best new art, you sift through the art landscape for them,
curating the best pieces and centralizing them in one place.
Bringing it back to marketing, you can do something similar
with your blog, collecting and sharing third-party content
that your customers are interested in. As well as driving
traffic to your blog, curation is a cost-effective way to build
thought leadership and brand awareness.


2. Summarize: Don’t be a plagiarist. By taking a few
minutes to quickly summarize the content you’re
curating and add your take on it, you’ll boost your
credibility as a trusted source and increase your position as a thought leader. You don’t need to reinvent the
wheel and write a 10-paragraph post, but you should
do more than simply copy and paste someone else’s
content. Give credit where credit is due.
3. Organize: As you build a rich library of relevant content, you’ll need to organize it in a way that’s easy to
find and digest. You might categorize curated content
by topics or specific customer questions, and make it
simple to search for or click on. Don’t lose track of your
archived content—some of it will be useful for years
to come. Give that content a home on your blog or a
specific section of your website, and it will pay search
engine dividends long after you originally curated it.
4. Share: This is the easiest step. To be truly effective,
you should commit to sharing your curated content
regularly—either through an email newsletter, your
social networks, or your blog. If you fail to do that, your
chances of becoming a reliable source of information
for your customers will go down, causing them to look
elsewhere for that content.
With so many companies publishing and sharing content,
many users feel swamped with information. Content curation presents an opportunity for you to provide respite for
your prospects and customers, giving them one trusted
source for all of the information they need.

Before you go off simply hijacking other experts’ content, however, be sure to understand these four steps to
perfect curation:
1. Identify: Be sure the content you curate is relevant to
your audience and helpful in some way. Research shows
that people are more apt to click on an article that they
agree with than one they disagree with, so consider
curating content that will confirm your customers’ opinions or feelings about a specific topic. Also, only curate
content from high-quality sources that you and your
customers can trust.

10 Content Marketing Institute, 2012; http://bit.ly/ArF0JO

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14 Help Customers Find Your Content
Content is the lifeblood of modern online marketing. It
boosts brand interaction, brand awareness, thought leadership, and your chances of influencing customers. Of
course, that’s assuming that your customers find it.
Optimizing your content for search engines and social media
is the easiest way to guarantee this will be the case. To do
it, the first step is to consider how and why your customers
search for content, and which terms or keywords are most
relevant to them.
The basic idea is to monitor specific keywords that are
relevant to your business and use them in your content
headlines, social media posts, and website copy. By doing
that, you’ll greatly improve your content’s reach and its
chances of getting found and shared.

Growth Tactic: Optimize a YouTube Video for
Search and Social
According to YouTube, more than
72 hours of video are uploaded to
its network every minute and over 4
billion hours of video are watched each
month (yes, you read that right).11 It’s
a crowded environment that can be
hard to stand out in.
Sure, you occasionally see a random “cat fights dog” or “girl
runs into tree” video go viral. But for every one of those,
there are thousands of videos that go completely unnoticed. If you’re not optimizing your video for search and
social, the likelihood is your video will go unnoticed, too.
Here are five steps of basic optimization to make sure that
doesn’t happen:
1. Write a strong script: One of the worst things you
can do is simply turn on your camera, press record, and
tape five minutes of improvised, incoherent rambling.

11 YouTube, 2012; http://bit.ly/gzYBVx


Any optimization effort begins with crafting a concise,
informative script that will produce a video your customers will want to watch and share.
2. Add a caption track: Currently, search engines
cannot decipher the audio in your
video. They can, however, read
uploaded transcripts that cover
the video’s main talking points
and include your important keywords. Be sure to do that before
you publish your video.
3. Give the video a search and social friendly title:
Truly optimized headlines are concise, compelling,
and keyword-rich. Identify the keywords that are most
relevant to your audience and the video itself and
use those—along with your company name—in the
video title.
4. Write a compelling description for your video:
Your video description is your sales pitch. It will
convince your audience to watch it, while also making
the video more visible in search results. As with any
piece of content, be sure to avoid keyword stuffing—
the practice of jamming every imaginable keyword into

a paragraph and calling it search optimized. Keyword
stuffing fails to accurately describe the video and also
sends a red flag to spam-policing search algorithms.
5. Apply relevant tags: This is where you can insert
keywords that might attract your target customers.
Choose the most relevant keywords for your video and
make sure you place quotes around multiple words
that you want treated as a single phrase.
Whether your video has the production value of a Hollywood blockbuster or a home movie, if you don’t optimize
it, it won’t have the reach and impact that you desire.
The same goes for any content format, so be sure to take
the tips above and customize them for all of the content
you produce.

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15

Turn Your Customers Into Customer
Evangelists
For all of the amazing new online methods that marketers can use to reach,
engage, and influence customers,
nothing seems to drive sales
like a customer professing
their love for your business
to their friends, families,
and networks.

It’s known as “customer
evangelism,” a term that Ben
McConnell and Jackie Huba
popularized with their 2002 book,
Creating Customer Evangelists: How
Loyal Customers Become a Volunteer Sales
Force, and it’s marketing gold. While you can’t buy or pay
for customer evangelists, you can create more of them by
providing great customer service, engaging in authentic
conversations, and selling fantastic products and services.
The more customers you convert to customer evangelists,
the more outspoken lobbyists your company will have. You
can’t overestimate the organic impact those folks can have
on your bottom line. The question is how to best leverage
your evangelists’ loyalty once you have it—without overstepping your bounds?

The Solution: Crowdsource a Marketing
Campaign
Twenty years ago, businesses were in charge of the
messages their customers received. They either interacted
with them directly or used one-way marketing to deliver
the message they wanted their customers to hear.
Today, your customers are piloting the plane. They choose
when to interact with you and when to absorb your
messages. There is, however, a way to collaborate with your
customers in a way that harnesses their insight, power,
and influence to execute authentic, cost-effective
marketing campaigns.


It’s known as “crowdsourcing,” and it’s the practice of asking
your customer evangelists to generate new ideas, spread
your message, or directly participate in a specific marketing initiative. Crowdsourcing takes advantage of your most
loyal customers’ evangelism and converts it into a living
extension of your business.
Here are four simple steps to develop a high-powered
crowdsourced marketing campaign:
1. Select the appropriate platform to engage your
crowd: There are numerous crowdsourcing tools that
can help you acquire the feedback and word-of-mouth
power you need. To start, you might survey opinions
on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, or write a blog
post asking readers to submit ideas for a new company
slogan or logo, for example.
2. Prompt participation: If you’re using social media
to engage your customers, try drawing participants
into the campaign by offering incentives. Maybe you
let them get in on the ground floor by sampling
a new product and asking for feedback. Or
maybe you create a reward system
for every “like” on Facebook or
“retweet” on Twitter. Your goal
should simply be to craft a callto-action that encourages participants to spread the word and
get involved.
3. Discern the gems from the junk: Not every customer evangelist is going to be the type of customer
you want trumpeting your brand on their social networks. You may even have competitors who pose as
customers in an attempt to derail you. Beware of shortsighted or non-representative input, and keep an eye
out for customers who might—in an effort to support
you—totally misrepresent your business and its values.
4. Stake your claim: If you’re leveraging crowdsourcing
to acquire new logo ideas or website designs,
make sure to protect your rights against royalty
claims by drafting a legal disclosure that says all
submissions will automatically become your company’s
intellectual property.
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Marketing Software

If used effectively, your customers can be the most effective form of marketing your business can invest in. Additionally, by displaying trust in your most loyal customers
to help your business make key marketing decisions, you
can foster a deeper relationship with them and increase the
likelihood that they’ll refer and recommend your business
going forward.

Next Steps
for Marketers
Marketing has changed.
In today’s digital buying cycle, customers engage with businesses first. Their decisions are shaped by recommendations on Facebook and Twitter, the information they find
on Google, and the news and reviews they read online—all
before a business engages with them.


About MarketingProfs
MarketingProfs is a rich and trusted resource that offers
actionable information and guidance designed to make
you a smarter marketer—from social media and content
marketing to lead generation and online conversions. More
than 405,000 members rely on our free daily publications,
podcasts, virtual conferences, and more to stay up-to-date
on the most important trends in marketing, and how to
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challenges into success stories. Basic membership is free—
register now.

Reaching them with the right message, in the right place
at the right time can be time consuming and expensive.
However, there are tools that help you do digital marketing. Better.
The Vocus Marketing Suite was developed to help small and
medium-sized businesses grow with technology by combining search marketing, social media and publicity in one
integrated solution. Reach more customers, engage with
influencers and grow your business fast with Vocus.
Sign up for a demo at www.vocus.com/marketing today.
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