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Cloudnames - A Guide to Social Media Marketing

This document provides an overview of social media marketing strategies. It discusses how social media marketing can help businesses by engaging customers, building brand awareness, converting leads, gaining customer feedback, developing products and services, and increasing revenue. The document recommends developing a social media strategy that uses a variety of channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest to effectively reach target audiences. It also discusses how Cloudnames can help businesses with social media marketing through services like managed web design packages and social media marketing management.

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cloudnames © COPYRIGHT 2015 CLOUDNAMES A Guide to Social Media Marketing Strategies for your business
cloudnames © COPYRIGHT 2015 CLOUDNAMES "Any comments or suggestions are most welcome! Please contact Leyla at leyla@cloudnames.com" Compiled Cloudnames research and writing by, Leyla Ok
INTRODUCTION What is Social Media Marketing? The general understanding of Social Media and Marketing is not entirely correct. After much practice, trial and errors, we think we know how to define SMM in terms of: how it should be utilised and for what purposes. We’ve decided to pass on some of our valuable knowledge and experience, to help you better understand what goes on in the “digital” world. Social Media Marketing is extremely complex yet a rapidly advancing environment. If Face- book were a country, it would be the most populated in the world. Isn’t that Remarkable? The Internet, Social Media and Networking Sites have shaken the media sector entirely. Challeng- ing newspapers, magazines, radio and TV-stations as a source of distributing news and enter- tainment in line with competing for advertising budgets.
The Gift of Social Media Now Google, Facebook, Twitter and many other social media channels have refined and developed advertising services that rock the media boat. The gift of Social Media Marketing for business owners is; • Engaging with brand loyal customers • Building brand awareness • Converting leads into opportunities • Gaining customer feedback • Developing products and services • Increasing your business revenue and so much more. The How The demographic of users can be segmented, which makes it possible for advertisers to target their audience more specifically and at a lower cost than traditional mass-media channels. Online custom- ers spend a lot of their time on social networking sites. Research shows that; while the average individ- ual might only spend 20-30 minutes per day, many others spend multiple hours every day. SMM combined with a good plan should include a variety of strategies, and methods that can effective- ly reach and target your desired audience. Email marketing, newsletters, campaigns along with social media networking sites are definitely worth the time and effort you invest. The Why The Internet has become the backbone of society in most countries. The numbers of “digitally native” people are growing. Therefore, the best way to market your products and services and expand your brand’s recognition, is via channels that web users love to network, share content and interact on. For instance, Facebook ranks highest for being the most popular social networking site. Unless you’ve been living on a different planet, you will know of or heard about some of the other trendy sites like Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and so forth. At Cloudnames, we’ve acquired a set of (new) tools, whereby we are able to reach millions of consum- ers across the world at the click of mouse (or tap of an icon) through social media marketing. Consider We consider a number of major segments before we begin to target new customers or audiences. You have many target options: location, gravitation, interest, age-group, gender, social communities and
interaction (etc), which are all great indications of how to shape or understand your demographic. Your objectives should be defined by these specific zones of activity. • We can help you make sense of how you can boost your business on social media. The marketing strategy that we use is effective and rewarding in targeting a specific segmented audience, and then being able to mirror that audience. Also, we know that interaction is key, and the easiest way to better your presence online is to expand your communication with customers. It’s important that you begin cultivating your brand by utilising tools with technological capabilities as well as mobility. You can find out more about how to do this in the following chapters. Transformation in Broadcasting We found out from our friends at Salesforce (CRM specialists) that over 90% of the content that exists online, has come about within the last 24 months of Internet history. This tells us a lot about the dramatic shift and activity taking place online. User dependence on the internet to search and find information that is contextual, video or audio related has become more intense. The demand is always there. If you look at it retrospectively, broad- casting has transformed extraordinarily. It took radio stations almost 40 years to reach 50 million listeners, it took Televised channels almost 15 years to reach 50 million viewers, but a Social Media platform like Facebook attained 100 million users, within the space of 9 months! If this is not incredible, then we don’t know what is. • Cloudnames can provide you with the right tools to make your Social Media Marketing experience pleasant. Our services can help you spark up great ideas to share with your audi- ences, whether it’s your customers or simply your fans that you want to reach out to. If you’re still not convinced that SMM is the way forward, then simply read on...
Things You Can Accomplish With SMM Customer Acquisition Costs Exposure Social Media strategy Practice Makes Perfect Dedication and Commitment Web Appeal You’ve got the Power Five Ways You Can Strategise Social Engagement With Customers Listen Be Genuine Coverage Sharing is Caring Business benefits Five Ways To Engage SMM Team Understanding Customer Needs Choosing Social Media Channels Start with Facebook Low Cost Personal Touches Increasing recognition Advertising with Facebook Target the right audience Twitter Followers How often you should post Promoting on Twitter Gaining insight Linkedin Connect Visibility Youtube The Audience Rank High Massive platform Make your own channel Grow your audience Promoting your content Mobile users Cloudnames can help Google+ Impact on Google search have high value Hangouts Circles and email notifications The Author Collections Analytics and reporting Other Google integrations Google+ for marketing 8 8 8 9 11 11 13 14 15 16 16 18 20 21 24
Instagram Creating a profile on Instagram Get more followers What to post on Instagram Pinterest WHEN, WHAT & HOW Management Tools Six Self Service Tools Four Enterprise Tools Prepare your website Developing your Brand Content Marketing Call To Action What is a landing page? Issues with low conversion Blog Pages Support Community Crisis Management Email Conversion Tracking Pixels Google Analytics Google AdWords Social Media Policies Policies to Minimise Risk Facebook Collect all data Connections Your devices George Orwell’s 1984 Twitter LinkedIn Limitations Criteria HOW CLOUDNAMES CAN HELP YOU CLOUDNAMES DOMAIN NAMES CLOUDNAMES APPS CLOUDNAMES MANAGED WEB DESIGN PACKAGES CLOUDNAMES SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION MANAGEMENT CLOUDNAMES SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING MANAGEMENT 27 28 30 31 34 35 35 36 37 38 39 39 41 42 43 45 46 48 49 49 49 49 50
8 Things You Can Accomplish With SMM At Cloudnames we lead by example because we have first hand knowledge on Social Media Marketing. Before we advise our clients on the best strategies to put in place, we carry-out some tests within our own platform. We promote content relating to our products and services, as well as other topical news and interests in the limelight. • And if you’ve heard about us... then we can safely assume that it must be working! Keep in mind that 93% of well established companies are reported to use social media as a marketing tool. Those numbers are impressively high and so will be, your business potential. The saying goes: if you can’t beat them [competitors], then why not join them! Customer Acquisition Costs Reducing Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) should be a key driver for your marketing effort. The lower the customer acquisition cost the more effectively your budget will be spent. And with the new oppor- tunities that come with Social Media Marketing, you can reduce CAC dramatically. You can achieve this by targeting your audience in a more specific way and by measuring all activities. With SMM, as mentioned before, you can reach out to a high volume of potential and existing custom- ers, simply by making your brand interactive. Why not increase website traffic? You can gain great conversions and develop your brand identity as well as build positive brand association. We advise our customers to establish social communities too, directing their focus on interactions with the customer (identifiable by their common interests and activities). • At Cloudnames we have found a two-way communication with our audiences through collabora- tion and sharing of content, which as a result gives us a promising networked relationship with the audience. Exposure Jumping on the phenomenal SMM wagon will mean that you can obtain great exposure for your business, which will generate leads and improve your sales in return. Social Media caters to any market and any budget; you can start marketing at prices lower than a cup of coffee! Did you know that an astonishing 56% of consumers, under the age of 35 interact with their favourite brands on Facebook? Skilled marketers can sometimes get their messages shared and distributed
9 organically without having to pay anything. The dream is being “the one” who had a campaign to go viral overnight. SMM is an extremely competitive platform, especially when trying to reach a higher volume of custom- ers. Having a strong SMM plan and a well established presence on the web is vital to build consumer interest. If carried out properly, SMM can transform your business immensely, bringing success straight to your storefront online. Social Media Strategy One thing that we can put on the table is our knowledge, keep in mind that your Social Media Market- ing strategy will depend on the line of business you are in. Plan well and act fast. Every company will have their own ambitions set in stone, which is good for organising and deciding what methods are ideal. ‘What’ we can accomplish with SMM for you is majorly to do with the how. Our team will use tools like Social Media, Search Engine Optimisation, Content and Email Marketing (and more) to make this happen. • Please refer to our free guide to Modern Web Design to see more information about these features. Practice Makes Perfect It is good practice to audit your current state before you develop your SMM plan. You can do this by going through all your social media activities and assessing how they are working for you. Make sure to look at which channels you are represented in, who your audiences are in these different channels, and how your presence is compared to competition. • We always advise our customers to check on Google search, to see if there are any channels they don’t own that claims to represent their company. Take control over your brand and your online existence. You should evaluate your strategy and mission for all your social media channels. Evaluate the profiles, understand the management of the profiles and know the team that is working on your social media activities. It’s also necessary that you look to centralising all profile ownership, usernames and passwords and make a clear process for establishing new channels. Simply, look into social media management tools that can offer you a solution. We cover SMM Tools in later chapters.
10 Dedication and Commitment It’s vital that you create a plan and prepare your content in advance. A neat number, 47% of marketers (who have more than 3 years of experience) spend at least 16 hours per week focused on social media marketing activities. • SMM takes a lot of commitment and our Cloudnames team is more than happy to deal with your business’ marketing needs. Luckily, new web technologies have made it simple for everyone to create content and distribute it too. A blog post, tweet, Instagram post or Youtube video can be easily produced by anyone and shared, which can then be viewed by millions for free. There are many popular social networking sites, you should research what purpose each of them serve (and how it can be useful to your business). Also, clarify and establish your voice depending greatly on the content you will decide to share. You must aim to stand out from the crowd. Web Appeal Roughly five billion posts are published daily on Facebook, so making sure your content is interesting and appealing for your target audience is key to your online success. By doing so, you will achieve more growth for your enterprise, have the opportunity to develop on aspects concerning mobile advertising, and improve digitisation of your business online. A staggering 63% of customers that decide to share content on a social networking site, state that it ‘matters to them which brand or organisation produces the content’. You should aim to be a brand or organisation that customers care about, so really think over ways you can sustain loyalty to your brand. You’ve got the Power Giving you data-driven insights, your SMM strategy will serve the purpose you set. We recommend that you develop a plan that aims to cover your overall company needs. Social Media Marketing is most powerful when you use it to tell stories; this ultimately creates a personal relationship between you and the customer. The idea is to inspire; so establish your objectives, identify your target audience, research the market and build an online community. • The goal is to stay relevant and updated, and establish a presence and voice that you can follow through with consistency. You can be different and vibrant, depending on what profile you create for your brand. Never underestimate how important your customers truly are. A customer should be the most import- ant person for any organisation. No matter what kind of business you are running or what your aims
11 are; the number one rule is to keep the customer satisfied. Technology changes almost always, but human nature is perpetual. There are many things in life and in business that we admire; and seeing one person taking care of another is surely admirable. • We learn; how to deal with different kinds of people and situations online. If you risk not develop- ing your efforts to build customer loyalty and happiness, you could lose more than just your custom- ers. Give the right service, and you will be climbing to the top of the food chain. 5 Ways You Can Strategise 1. Objectives: Define your goals and objectives aligned with your general marketing aims, so that your activity on social media networks are supporting your business ideas and targets. 2. Plan: Create a publishing or content plan describing what to post, when to post it and where. Distri- bution of your content is a vital part of your overall plan. It all depends on your business, what channels you want to network on and your target audience. 3. Competition: Check out what or who else is about. Sometimes the best information or lead will come from your competitors. By looking at what’s already existing, you can find new ideas to be origi- nal. Get inspired by your customers, competitors and industry leaders. 4. Community: Start building your online community and promote your brand. You can achieve an organic spread by having visitors to your page liking, following your social feeds and blog posts or any other content you wish to relay. This endorses sharing your content and the promotion of content, which you can carry-out at a fee and spread to a specific target audience. You can also make nifty ads to promote your content or prod- ucts/services. 5. Test: Tracking everything is vital, we believe that you should never stop testing your objectives. By using analytic tools you can draw data from your SMM that can help you make improvements and adjustments effectively that will get you closer to achieving your goals. Social Engagement With Customers It’s important to identify which channels to use to reach your desired audience. Here at Cloudnames we can safely say that, Facebook is one platform you need to proactively use for SMM. Don’t make the same mistake most businesses do, which is focusing on just the one or two major social channels. You should explore as many as possible.
12 At Cloudnames we have compiled research for the best social media channels. Also, we specify ways to target the right demographic as well as build communities for brand loyal customers. You can read more about it in the following chapters. Listen Start by listening. Understand what it is that your customers want to know about your business, and anything in relation to it. Build and relay content that opens up conversation, since this allows people to come to you with interest and with responses. Also, keep in mind that you stay human in the process. • The ability to really listen to your customers means that you are paying attention to their needs. Listen to the language and the terms they use to describe their problems. Also, the less automated your are with yes or no exchanges, and joining in on the conversation, means the better chance you will have of building a successful relationship. Be Genuine The less automated your are with yes or no dialogue and also joining in with the conversation, the better chance you will have of building successful online communities. Always be proactive in the process. At Cloudnames we treat our Social Media platform as if it were a real-life place of hang-out. We share photos, get interesting discussions going (about new trends), talk about events, we even have a ‘fun stuff’ section where we post videos, photos and other forms of content on a regular basis. • Keep in mind that; if customers or consumers are the most important factor of the selling process, then it is up to you as the business owner (or members of the sales team) to ensure that the relation- ship and bond between the customer and the business is established, existing and valuable in real terms, and online. Coverage Your targeted group and social media efforts will be a testing process at the very beginning. The aim is to find your presence online and secure an audience of loyal visitors (and customers). Competitors are bound to use similar platforms, so the more coverage you have on a number of chan- nels, the better your chance of exposure. Your aim is, to be known. We’ve discovered that business - consumer relationships are shifting online and consumer habits. Social Media is not just a contact centre its serves several business functions. This includes, sales, marketing, product development, PR and collaborative communication.
13 • There is a clear indication that customer support, on Social Media platforms is vital. There are thousands of people who love taking care of customers, and out of them, comes feel-good stories. You can never place too much importance on a single customer. Building communities around customer support/help, means that potential and existing customers are able to communicate about your products and services. This could be in relation to the goods and services they have already purchased or, even better, what they intend to buy. These peer-to-peer communications are sometimes happening before contact is made directly with your business, suggesting that the content you produce and relay should be sufficient and reliable. We believe that tapping into these forms of communication, held by customers on Social Media platforms, will help you learn and participate in discussions to leverage these social conversations for your business benefits. Sharing is Caring Let’s take Google for example, they have entered more businesses than we can think of because they have managed to influence and disrupt the way we search and refine content (which is in itself is just mind blowing). Engaging with your customers is one thing, but being able to share and re-share your content suggests that, you are able to manage being constructively responsive. A blog post or video that gains popularity quickly on any social media channel may receive a flood of traffic. However, Google Social Search optimises the way we can share this information, which ultimately aids online marketing due to their brilliant search engine capabilities. We can use fantastic tools like Google Social Search to keep control of your brand over social media channels and by sharing relevant resources frequently. Eventually, you will have the ability to monitor and extract customer data and intelligence from your Social Media customers via their activities and interactions. • You can then use this information to improve and develop your business and as a result increase your business revenue. Business benefits • Being able to provide better customer service. • Protect and enhance your brand, drive more sales, drive customer loyalty. • Use customer feedback to improve our products and services.
14 Being mindful and attentive to the feedback, and improving your services as a result can help you attract new customers in seriously competitive business environments. • Social Media has become an enterprise-wide movement. At Cloudnames we can confidently say that SMM can positively impact your sales, marketing efforts, customer service and product develop- ment which is key in meeting your business objectives. Develop your business personality, prepare your content and start engaging with your prospect or existing customers on various channels. Five Ways To Engage Engage by finding out where your customers hang-out, you can find out from using web analytics, and by looking at which social media sites have given you the most leads and customers. You should also pay attention to what the user is mentioning, providing commentary on and what questionings are being asked. Then, be ready to answer all queries. You must manage your social platforms well and prepare to respond to a high volume engagement. 1. Befriend customers to your network. Simply add friends or customers to your platform, search for people using their email addresses, or promote your social media profile and add links throughout your site. Run promotions or contests that will involve external interest too. 2. Post content, share images and text and company blog articles, it’s always useful to re-share content created by others. 3. Be active in your engagement with customers, converse in posts and feeds. Reach out and make a valuable impression. 4. Consistency is vital, you must engage regularly and effectively. Here at Cloudnames we update our profiles and posts daily. We can help you do the same. 5. Avoid self-promotion all the time, this will tire and bore people. Come with new ideas and interest- ing information that will keep the customer interested. Although, it is good to update them with services and products, it’s not always good to boast. • When you share your content throughout your community, be sure to take the opportunity to collect data from your users activity and interaction. Take into consideration the feedback and commentary to understand the direction you should be heading with your content. Remember to evaluate your strategy over, and continue to develop on your social media channels to increase more traffic to your website or page.
15 Care is about being able to adjust your personality to think like a customer and provide brilliant service before, during and after purchase. SMM Team You should involve all people from your business in your SMM Team. Different employees will most likely be suited for different stages in the relationship with your customers. Involving people outside of the marketing department also opens up for one to one engagement, to support your customers and prospective customers different needs. In setting up your social care and support team, include and establish; clear goals, customise social feeds to connect with right customers , engage by depending on the customer's phase in the buying cycle. Creating engaging content throughout the cycle will help you gain new customers, repeat purchase, loyalty and customer references. • There are many ways to offer good care and service online. Don’t forget to stay patient, be alert, communicate clearly, know your product, keep positive, be calm and learn from each customer in the process. Understanding Customer Needs To have success, SMM demands that you focus on your customers needs. It will vary customer to customer, depending on which step in the buying cycle they are currently in. Best practise is to focus on the customer’s need and then build the social media marketing, content and resources around the demands. • Customer happiness plays a significant role in how much revenue a customer will generate for your business, so every customer or opportunity is vital. Best practise is to focus on the customer’s need and build new ways of bettering your services. The point of having a social presence is to allow your brand to reach as many people (or potential customers) as possible, through networked experiences. Spending time on developing communities and good relationships adds immense value to your business. If there were no customers, sadly you would not have an existing business to begin with. As obvious as it sounds, the purpose of your business is to fulfil the needs of the customer. We believe that providing your visitors or customers with an experience they will never forget is the way forward. It’s not easy to achieve, but once you’ve started effectively networking, you will start mark- ing memory with your brand.
16 Choosing Social Media Channels There are an endless amount of Social media channels to choose from. The most popular being Face- book, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, Pinterest and Instagram. To understand which channels will work best for you, depend on your line of business and which Social Media channels your targeted customers prefer. The best way to find out is to conduct a test to identify your likely suspects. We recommend that you start with one channel at a time. You should ideally move onto the next chan- nel, only once you have mastered the channels you are currently using. Start with Facebook Facebook has become the best low-cost social media marketing platform. An individual or business can sign up for free, which is great news for start-ups. This is something we personally utilise too, which is why we can recommend it without hesitation. If you do not have an online presence yet, this might be a good place to start your SMM journey. Having a website is important, as you can redirect your post or blogs straight to your webpage. Your customers will demand that of you. We endorse Facebook for increasing your own website traffic. Marketing is critical for any business, while some of the benefits of Facebook is similar to having a website. The main difference is, it allows you to have access to millions of target audiences that can be converted to potential and prospective customers. Low Cost At a fraction of the cost, Facebook has a straightforward method, all you have to do is share informa- tion relating to your brand or business. You can create and set-up a page easily, what’s beneficial is the content and good insight. The idea is to have users interactively communicate with you on this platform, which will lead up to building your online community. • The point of having a social presence is to allow your brand to reach as many people (or potential customers) as possible through networked experiences. Spending time on developing communities and good relationships ass immense value to your business. You should consider sharing photos and videos and content that is relating to; what you are about or what you are offering. • Try not to self promote too often, as this is sometimes a deterrent. Remember, your existing and potential customers or fans will be using the platform to socialise on. Make your content interesting and fun.
17 Personal Touches It’s harder to personalise your website than your Facebook page, which is why we suggest you make the most of it. The personal touches you put in place will do you wanders. Plus, your customers will be able to contact you directly on your page, compared to receiving a shabby automated business email. Language is a very important part of selling, and customers create perceptions about you and your company based off of the language that you use. By using positive terminologies and applying a positive attitude with customers can really change how the persuasion will go. You can use this platform to provide customer support like most businesses do, it shows friendship in business rather than your typical merchant-buyer relationship, which is not all that exciting. Also, you will be able to respond to questions and messages faster and efficiently, allowing you to resolve any issues. Once you’ve come to the stage where you have successfully built an online commu- nity, you will find customers and page visitors interacting with one another. • This builds good brand association and brand loyalty, which endorses your business on a unique level. You leave a good impression with page visitors as well as achieve great customer satisfaction, helping you develop personal relationships with them. Increasing recognition Users or visitors to your page will have the ability to like, comment or share your content. Not only is this a brilliant multi-level marketing tool, but it means that once your content is liked, those individuals will help spread your message, which then extends onto their friends who can then see this too and be directed. Brands on Facebook frequently post content to avoid losing their organic reach. Adobe Digital Index analysed 450 billion Facebook post impressions; 525 billion ad impressions from search engines Google, Yahoo, and Bing; and two million mentions of social streaming applications between 2014-2015. This is a clear indication that Facebook is vital as a marketing tool, but we also recognise the impor- tance of being unique and offering something new. • You need to be willing to switch strategies if your initial objectives are not working for your brand. Advertising with Facebook You may have great content that you want to share with your followers or page visitors, but it becomes impossible to get the level of attention required in order to increase recognition. You should consider sparing a budget for advertising. You can start small and increase your budget as you go along.
18 Facebook will attempt to show the audience ads that are most suitable to the viewer. That's why the relevance score of your ads are interesting, it determines how much of the audience you will reach. Keep in mind that an ad with a high relevance score will be delivered to more people at a lower cost. You should also have a bidding strategy for every ad you create, if two ads have the same relevance score the one with the highest bid will be shown. A good plan is to test different pictures and remarket with different audiences and learn how to get a high relevance score before you make bigger invest- ments. This is what we call it the testing process. Target the right audience The brilliant aspects of advertising on Facebook is that you can monitor your ads relevancy scores while they are running and make adjustments on your audience segment or the creatives. Choosing the right audience is probably the best way to get a high relevancy score and hence a low cost for your ad. Targeting the right audience is paramount and remarketing can be extremely effective too. Remember, you can choose your audiences by location, age, gender, education, interests, etc. Within the testing process, you will be able to see clearly who your target audience is or potential audience. • While choosing an image that resonates with your audience and illustrates your message, be aware that you will be required to have ownership over the images (or the permission to use it). Make sure to limit the text on image, as Facebook does not accept ads with pictures that include more than 20% text. Twitter The benefits of using Twitter as a marketing tool is impressive when carried out correctly. Twitter is a social platform that allows you to potentially interact with customers on a personal level. Personal reach and interaction is useful as it promotes reliability, and targets customers individually making it one the best marketing method that can create long lasting relationships. Twitter started out as a simple messaging system limiting posts to 140 characters. Today, you can do much more, such as add pictures, videos and longer text that 140 characters (including the good old #hashtags). • Twitter is probably perfect for following trends, and comes in handy when following what competi- tors (or others) have said about your products and services. This is very useful if you need to make developments of some kind.
19 Followers This popular networking site works on a social structure that is based on followers. You will need to grow your followers first, in order to see the benefits of it as a social media marketing tool. Twitter can act as a free press release platform; you can post news and make public announcements about your business or brand, tweet special offers, encourage customers to find out more, share links and articles and provide recommendations at any given time. • Tweeting also allows you to answer questions as well as pose them, which provokes great interac- tion and consistent engagement with your audience. How often you should post We believe that you should stay active on twitter as much as possible. Our research shows that by keeping your campaigns, tweets and posts light and humorous, informative and intuitive, you have a better response rate. • Being consistent with your posts and offering content often means that twitter can be the ideal platform to display your brand’s personality. This will help build a positive brand association. Committing to your twitter account means you will not risk losing the interest of your audience or customer. Don’t let all your hard work go to waste by slacking with posts. Get your SMM plan going, and be ready ahead of time so that you’re never running out of material to publish. Twitter operates in real time, so your customer or audience will follow conversations that are happen- ing in that moment. That is why tweeting should be a consistent thing, ideally you should be ready with hot topics frequently. Or why not start a new topic, making room for discussions? • Do you remember Vice Magazines ‘What colour is this dress?’ debate. This post (#thedress) got millions fascinated, including well known celebs to politicians talking, commenting and interacting over this one simple question, on Twitter. Promoting on Twitter You can use this channel to promote your posts to your preferred audience. You can use promotional features to boost engagements on your tweets and target website clicks or conversions. Once you’ve composed your tweet, you can select your audience and budget. Over the last few months, twitter has enhanced the targeting options. You can target exactly the audience you want, without having to search through a list of ideal segments or groups.
20 Gaining insight Twitter offers analytics dashboard that is a great help in measuring performance and adjusts according to the results. You can measure your organic spread and get insights on your audience. You can also use conversion tracking pixels to acknowledge the effect of your promoted Tweets and campaigns. Linkedin As a platform to market your brand or business, LinkedIn is one of the popular tools to use. The features and functions of this channel is invaluable. This online network of well established people from across the world, is brilliant for gaining contacts. From powerful people to creating a link with your average joe, this channel allows you to reach out to those you would not expect to bump into in real-life. LinkedIn brings business people together in a useful way. You can engage with potential customers by taking part in discussions, and most importantly build valuable connections. Being active and posting often on your LinkedIn site means that you can effectively build your brand personality. This increases your likability and creates trust between you and the audience. Connect Regardless of your business objectives, you will be able to connect with all kinds of people. You can offer recruitment, access expert advice and information-sharing with a multitude of groups. We recommend that you use LinkedIn’s blog promotion tool, which is fantastic for regular updates of blogs, as well as promoting it. You can request recommendations from customers, which is the ultimate way to boost your busi- ness credibility and reputation and gain new customers. With LinkedIn, one major aspect that we really appreciate is the prospect of higher conversion rates. • Essentially, what you are doing is humanising your brand by interacting on social media channels as a person would in society. The only difference is connecting with other people, businesses and brands on a digital platform instead. Visibility A useful feature of LinkedIn is that it allows you to make your profile information available for search engine index. This means that when your brand or business is put into Google search, it will rank your LinkedIn business profile at the top, which is great for spreading brand awareness.
21 The more quality content you produce that will back your brand, the more effectively you will run your group, the more support you will get from the community you build. Advertising efforts is huge with LinkedIn as it has roughly 120 million users globally, this enables you to expand with your target segment and provide a richer customer experience. • In addition, with LinkedIn ads you can create tailor made ads by selecting job title, function, indus- try and company size, seniority, age, gender and other useful options. Youtube There are many benefits of using Youtube as part of your SMM. Youtube has viral marketing advantag- es whether it’s embedding videos or sharing them, you can really create a ripple effect. The effectiveness of video marketing cannot be denied. Youtube is not just a platform for viewing and sharing video content, it’s also a major social networking site. It’s also the most shared video content on the internet. • And remember, Social media channels work collaboratively, for instance, an impressive 400 tweets per minute contain a youtube video. Youtube is brilliant because it’s highly integratible to your social media strategy. By distributing your Youtube videos on other popular social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn your business exposure will grow immensely. The Audience At Cloudnames we’ve discovered that brands or businesses have the opportunity to go viral with younger audiences. For example, when companies include a discount code in their social media posts, an impressive 57% of 18-22 year olds will engage with the post. And 49% of 22-30 year olds will also engage. You also have the option of creating and customising your channel. This is fantastic because you can build your brand personality visually, choosing theme and colours, the modules you wish to display on your featured videos list. There is a comment section under these videos, which is where interaction comes alive. Everyone can automatically comment, respond or approve. There is always the issue of what com- ments to allow and what not to, this is up to your discretion, or simply be ready to respond quickly. An estimated one billion users are on Youtube, this gives you the opportunity to reach a huge audience (if you get the marketing process right).
22 • If you feel this is all too much for you to handle, Cloudnames offer great Social Media Market- ing services that can create and manage these channels for you. Youtube like all the other social media channels is cost-effective. It’s never really about the budget you spare for this kind of brand awareness, it's more to do with the time you invest and the content you provide that will determine whether or not you have a customer worthy platform. Rank High Youtube is a powerful tool because creating and posting videos in a worldwide, compatible format means; it is a perfect platform for staging your products and services. Google owns Youtube, if your video is searched directly from the site, it will rank high in its search engine. With its integration capabilities, Youtube has become the second largest search engine. Research show that an astonishing six billion hours of video is watched every month! Youtube is an online sensation worldwide, our research also tells us that half of access made to a Youtube page is via a handheld device, making sure your website is mobile friendly is key. • You can look at our Guide to Modern Web Design for more information about website features and functionalities. Massive platform YouTube is popular with younger viewers, but all age groups are represented by impressive user numbers. Teens and young grownups however often prefer watching YouTube rather than tradi- tional TV channels. As mentioned before, YouTube is owned by Google (or Alphabet which is the parent company) and is nicely integrated in the whole Google ecosystem. Including Google+ and AdWords which is help- ful when using YouTube for marketing. You have fantastic means of targeting your audience on YouTube and your ranking in Google searches will benefit from it as well. Make your own channel With YouTube you can create your own video channel for sharing useful content about your busi- ness and products, or other videos you want to share. You can easily embed your YouTube videos and distribute them on your own website, your Social media pages or in email. You have the option of customising your channel to build your brand personality visually, choosing theme and colours, the modules you wish to display on your featured videos list. There is a com- ment section under these videos, which is where interaction comes alive. Everyone can instantly comment, respond or approve.
23 Grow your audience If you share interesting videos with valuable content, you can grow your audience organically without much cost implications. Some marketers have had viral success where videos get millions of views at no cost, because users engage in the content, like it, make comments and share it with friends on YouTube or other Social networks. To make it easier for your target audience to find your content you need to tag your content properly. This is done by using keywords in the description field to optimise search. As mentioned YouTube is the second largest search engine, so Search Engine Optimisation(SEO) is key. Be aware that YouTube SEO is following different metrics than traditional SEO. Use YouTube's tag tool to create search-friendly tags for your video. Google Search also prioritise websites with embedded YouTube videos. Promoting your content You can also promote your channel and videos and hence make sure that it gets the audience you target. There are specific YouTube options like the video ad format TruView. But you can also use other Social media to promote your YouTube videos, or you can use Google AdWords to market your videos to an audience searching for your keywords. The purpose of all marketing is of course to increase revenue, and video is an extremely effective way to spread your message. You can put links on your video description to drive traffic to your websites landing pages, which has shown to deliver high conversion rates. While all marketing activities have a branding effect, video is effective to drive conversions and our research indicate as much as 96% increase in conversions when embedded videos are used in email marketing! With all your videos make sure you include a “Call to Action” like a link to a landing page or an invitation to connect or subscribe to your channel. Mobile users According to YouTube’s latest statistics, Mobile clients account for more than 50% of views. And mobile users now spend in average 40 minutes per session watching videos. This is an incredible 100% increase over last year!This of course underline the importance of having a website and landing pages that are made for mobile clients.
24 Cloudnames can help We know that many of our readers have a busy schedule and don't want to spend the time that is necessary to create your own website or manage your digital marketing. If you are among these you can safely let Cloudnames do the job. Cloudnames offer a set of web design packages that is matched to different needs and marketing ambitions. You will still have to provide the content of your webpage, but we will design your webpage to the highest standards, manage all updates and security, and we keep it updated for you. We can also help you with your SEO, Search engine marketing, email marketing and Social media marketing. We can handle all your technical challenges of maintaining all your online presence and digital marketing. Google+ Nobody seems to know the value of marketing on Google+, as this search engine giant keeps quiet about their many active users. All we know is that users are growing high in numbers and marketing with Google+ does seem to increase your search rankings (among other benefits). If you are serious about Social Media Marketing you can’t ignore the possibilities of Google+. There are more than 2.5 billion profiles on G+, made up of YouTube, Gmail and Android users having an assigned account to them. Less than 10% of the Google+ accounts have a public post, many of these being YouTube comments or profile picture changes. Google describes their services as a “social layer” across all its services rather than a social network. While some claim Google+ have more than 250 million active users, others indicate less than 10 million actively post on a regular basis. Impact on Google search have high value The number one reason to consider G+ for Social media marketing is the impact it has on Google organic Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). Actively using Google+ for marketing will place your compa- ny, products and content higher on Google's organic SERP that represents almost 75% of all global online search. Google's universal login is tied in to G+, which means that all searches can be traced by them and connected to the users G+ account. • Google’s main revenue stream comes from ads, so it is understandable that the detail of segmen- tation and data you can tap into as an advertiser on G+, is massive.
25 Hangouts Even though G+ have substantially fewer active users than Facebook and other larger networks, its Hangout feature allows you to connect closer with your audience and get to know your fans in more detail. You can also set up group chats and video conferences, or host a webinar. Circles and email notifications You can organise your connections in circles. For instance, you can group your circles with existing customers in one circle while potential customers can be grouped according to their different product interests. This way you enable targeting accordingly. Another unique feature with G+ is the close link between the social network and email. As all Gmail users also have a G+ account, the connection between the two is a great opportunity for marketing, as you can easily distribute your posts by email to your close circles. The Author On G+ you can link your personal profile and company page and claim Authorship when you post articles or other content. Authorship helps build authority and promote the author as an influencer. • In Search, your personal profile picture will be display you as the author, which of course is great for promoting yourself as an influencer in your field. Authorship results in higher SEO rankings and increased clicks from search. Collections Google+ earlier this year launched Collections, which is a Pinterest like feature designed to make it easier to find posts that you like. Google+ Collections makes it possible to categorise your posts by topics, so your followers easily can find updates they are interested in. Make sure you use hashtags as well to make your content easy to find. Analytics and reporting Google Analytics is nicely integrated and is one of the leading analytics and reporting tools available. In addition, there are specific tools like Google+ Ripple, which permits you to analyse your circles and investigate how your content is shared, or find potential profiles that is likely to help you share your content.
26 • Analytics is extremely important when considering social channels for marketing, because you should base your marketing efforts on facts and not assumptions. With Google+ you have access to details you need, to measure your success. Other Google integrations Google is the largest search engine, but did you know that YouTube is number two? G+ is closely integrated with YouTube, which is great for posting video and also all comments on YouTube automati- cally updates G+ as well. Also Google Maps and Google Drive are integrated, so you can easily share locations and documents from your drive with connections on G+. Even SoundCloud is integrated so you can share original recordings. The G+1 button can be placed on your blog or other pages on your website to make it easy for anyone to share your content on their G+ profile. The G+1 button also allow your visitors to leave comments outside of G+, which is useful. With applications like Post Ads, you have the option of turning posts into interactive web banner ads, which is valuable for customer interaction.These post ads are so popular that it results in more than 50% increase in engagement than normal advertising. Google ads alone accounts for a little over 64% of the clicks. Google+ is packed with apps and features and there are 3.rd party software integrations available as well. Google+ for marketing You need to choose channels depending on what line of business you are in and which Social media your customers and potential customers prefer. • At Cloudnames we recommend you make profiles and post content on a variety of Social networks and then test out which channels work better for promoting your content or advertising your prod- ucts or services. And don’t forget aggregators, Search engine marketing and email when you explore and make your choice. The real question of course, is which channel will give you the lowest Customer Acquisition cost (CAC), and that does not necessarily mean the network with a high number of active users. We have seen big differences in CAC between the different channels. Facebook and AdWords have very high volumes but also higher cost than some of the alternatives.
27 Instagram Instagram was first a mobile application before it became available on other devices, which literally made it a hit. Instagram is about photographs, so it’s a visually based marketing strategy. With around 400 million Instagram users, this channel is the perfect opportunity to post images and messages with speed. You can reach your target audience at no cost, unless you want to target on a wider scale less organically. Instagram announced that marketers are now able to promote their posts through Application Programming Interface. Getting little attention outside the tech world, this may well be the next billion dollar Social network channel. Instagram is an effective marketing tool because it’s a great way to reach specific and wider audiences. Back in 2013, Instagram started testing ads, but it is only just recently that this feature has become available widely. Until recently, you were expected to spend 200.000 USD to be able to promote your posts, needless to say something most companies could not afford. • With the new API’s however, promotion prices have quickly changed as Instagram ads are now available for anyone at a competitive cost. Creating a profile on Instagram One of our favourite things about Instagram is the simplicity. It’s very easy to use and when you design your company profile there are only four options you can customise; profile picture, username, bio and website URL. • As you have such limited options, it’s critical that you make the most of it. Your profile picture should be a close-up of you or your company logo. With this limited space you need to find an image that resonates with your target audience and reflect your brand. Your username should be your full business name, so users immediately recognise your title when they search for your company. Instagram allows you to change username, but that should be avoided unless you have made a mistake. This of course also go with your website URL. • Your bio needs a description of your company as well as products or services. Ideally this text should be short, informative and straightforward. Get more followers The best way to connect and build an audience for free on Instagram is by following other users. They will get a notification and the option to follow you back. Instagram’s search bar and discovery feature are great places to start.
28 Basically the same strategies that drive likes and engagement will also bring you more followers on Instagram. Here are a few options to consider: • Focus on quality rather than quantity. Post often, on Instagram the more often you post the better, but don’t post irrelevant content. And if response is low, it is better to remove posts that have low engagement. • Use popular and trending hashtags. Use hashtags frequently, on Instagram the more hashtags the better. Use tools to find trending hashtags and those relevant to your line of business. • Engage with other users, like content and make comments. Engaging with other users will often make them engage back. • Promote your Instagram account on your website and other Social accounts. • Use Call to Actions in your posts. Ask for feedback or offer a link for more information. What to post on Instagram If your business is about being visual, creative and involves a lot of photos, images and videos are a natural part of your business, then Instagram is highly valuable. Product shots are ideal if you have physical products. But there are many other ways to display them. You can use images of customers using your products, images from a presentation or product launch, or a product demo video. • Again, you risk losing followers if every post you share is about your own products and services. It’s a good idea to vary your posts, as self promotion can be overwhelming. You can use images of office environment or workshops held, employees and co-workers that care to share their moments. There is a human side to every business. The good thing about photos is that you can display images that can gain emotional responses which is useful in marketing. You can use images that probe and receive the reactions you desire and create meaningful relationships, it’s all a testing process to see what works and what doesn’t. • Take the time to make the right emotional connection through your posts, this will improve your engagement with potential and existing customers by a milestone. Consider language, colours and your message. This social channel has gathered photography lovers from across the globe and invited them to network onto one platform. This is why marketing your products and services on Instagram is useful
29 especially for competitions and giveaways. You can request your followers to like your posts to enter into a competition, or have them share their photos with a specific hashtag. • As the saying goes “...a picture speaks of a thousand words...” and every single post will appear in the feed, meaning everyone gets their time to shine. Your posts are there in the long term too, every- thing you’ve ever posted can be located in on your business profile, so there is no risk of it getting lost or buried so far down in your stream. Pinterest Pinterest is a digital Pin-board where you can collate images and visually categorise content that you like. Our research shows that 47 million users are posting content on Pinterest, and the numbers are expected to grow rapidly. This channel is ideal for marketing because you can build a following, develop your pinboards and measure the return of your activities. Like Facebook, and many other channels you can take advantage of paid promotion of your pins. If you have a certain product you wish to sell, whether it’s a customised T-Shirt or a pair of binoculars, you can reach out to Pinterest users instantly. Post a photo or image related to what you are retailing or a service you’re selling and add a price tag. It acts almost like an online shop full of likely customers. • However, you must be careful not to use this channel purely to push products and services. You must create a profile that is going to help build your community, you should look to post things that will inspire your audience, add valuable content and be informative. You can publish a blog post and pin a photo or image from your article onto your board, simply copy the URL of the Pin. You can carry this out in line with other social networking sites like Google+. Your audience will be able to bookmark the page, and read or share the content whenever they please. Pinterest is very successful in promoting your business. If you already have a personal account, you can change it to a business platform with no hassle. You can create a goodies page and place it on your website. Like your SMM plan, you’ll need to create a little list of things to consider and do, to make the most of Pinterest for your business. You can begin pinning instantly, and post your infographics and a checklist, both elements add lots of value to your page because it’s fun, humorous and it’s a grand opportunity to build your brand identity on this channel for others to see and appreciate. Evoking emotions and using visual imagery is perfect in terms of marketing, because you can make it shareable.
30 WHEN, WHAT & HOW What should you post? Simply, good content. When should you post? • Facebook and Twitter: (ideal post window)13:00pm - 17:00pm • LinkedIn and Instagram: 7:00am-9:00am and 16:00pm - 18:00pm • Google+: 9:00am - 11:00am in weekdays • Pinterest: (works better) 14:00pm - 16:00pm on the weekends Our research shows that social media updates of your status are not durable. When you tweet for example, your status or feed is probably good for 15-20 minutes at most. This does not imply that you should tweet or post something new that often, but acknowledge the idea that sending an update or tweet for example, does not mean it will be visible for the whole day. Users move on to more recent items in their newsfeed, so we recommend that you analyse how long customers or your audience’s engagement last and how much of your content they share. This will provide you with some insight on the quality of your content as well as the interests your audience. How often should you post? You need to test this but here is our general recommendation: • Facebook: 5-10 post a week • Twitter: Minimum 5 a day • LinkedIn: One per weekday • Google+ and Instagram: Up to 5 a day If you find that your audience is hungry for content, then you should be prepared to provide it. Aim to satisfy your audience or customers by being consistent. You’ll have to look at the flow of your content and the amount of interest it receives. The general guideline though is best when you test your content on your channels and understand what works best on each platform. Analytics and Reporting Analytics and reporting are great tools for understanding the behaviour of your website visitors, so being able to do the same with your social media channels is vital. With analytics and reporting you can see the pattern of user behaviour as a result of their online activity. You can then analyse how this data can impact your brand or business in terms of development. Also, discovering how effective your campaign, blog post or social feeds are can be achieved by monitoring the number of visitors that your page attracts, including what time and from which location. • You can draw more detailed data such as gender, interests, employment and so forth, helping you to understand what or who your target is.
31 Acknowledging the trends and behaviour of users on social media is the key. Collecting all this data is generally called “Big Data” and there are many tools available to analyse and understand them. • Here are some questions you should consider in the process: How are your marketing channels performing? What is the real cost of a conversion and what value do you get back from your invest- ment? How effective is remarketing to visitors, and how can you use visitors to your website or customer list and target similar user profiles? With the growth of your social media visitors, you will see that there is a lot of information that needs to be collected and made use of when trying to develop your brand or business. The high volume of likes, shares as well as commentary will mean that your data can be measurable by using measurement tools. The idea is having listening solutions to aid the huge flow of data and then distill the useful information. • You need to be able to monitor all of the conversations and take action. Analytic and measurement tools have great functionality enabling you to find what you need to take action. Do not limit yourself to analysing just your posts, look into all spectrums within all your social platforms. Management Tools Social Media Marketing is perfect for managing your reputation online. By building an active social profile on a number of networks and then using it to engage with customers, will empower your brand in many ways. You will, effectively remove any negative search results by churning and sharing new and worthy content (that can diminish all the other searches pre-existing). SMM management tools make it possible to reach your business objectives. Designed to help you manage your content, monitor and measure your social media activities. You need to first decide which tools would be best for you, and you need to make the choice of what kind of management you need for your business; will it be self-service tools or enterprise tools. • If you have small to medium sized business we recommend that you look into Self service tools. And if you have a very large company, than an enterprise social media management tools would be more ideal. Each segment serves different levels and uses of features. Six Self Service Tools 1. Sprout Social: Allows you to manage and monitor keyword searches in one stream. You can also draw from it reports that are beneficial to your business development, from your social media
32 accounts. The good thing about this tool is that it enables you to prepare and schedule your content for all your social media accounts with a brilliant publishing kit, allowing you to manage your tweets and posts via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus. • The impressive thing about Sprout Social is the fact that they offer users a mobile application, meaning you can manage your social accounts on the go! • One thing that is slightly disheartening, is the price, it is great value for money and definitely a fantastic tool to manage your social media. But, there are other cheaper options. 2. Hootsuite: comes in at first place. At a much more affordable price and no obligations, HootSuite offers everything that you need to manage your social accounts effectively. From monitoring your accounts, producing reports to being able to meet your publishing needs, you can have your social media accounts displayed on multiple streams. Although most users prefer the use of a single stream, like Sprout Social Offers. We believe that Hoot- Suite is most ideal. This tool also has a mobile application to manage your accounts wherever you are, which means you can always be on-top of your game. 3. AgoraPulse: is ideal for social media marketing management as well as customer relationship man- agement. Useful for channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest, AgoraPulse supports contest applications, monitoring and customised reports in a ‘one-click’ process. All data collected and information, is presented in an inbox feature similar what your emails would look like; syncing accounts in real-time and keeping record of past conversations and data from fans and followers. • AgoraPulse is cost-effective and offers its customers a simple and affordable solution to manage your social media. 4. Buffer: Covers all social media networks apart from Instagram. This powerful management tool is fantastic, as the pioneers of social media publishing, Buffer is known to be the best tool in scheduling content ahead of time. It’s the best publishing system out there, and offers a free version that is perhaps minimalistic for what you want to achieve for your social media accounts. We would suggest that it’s a good way to trial the product. Buffer is great for management and comes is cost-effective. If you are looking for simple and basic solution, we would recommend that you try it out! 5. Sendible: This tool supports roughly 30 or more social media sites, offering you an array of services that can really help with managing your networks. Sendible helps with managing your accounts, content, content discover, contacts, profile, customer engagement, blog content, promotion and campaigns, monitoring and analytics. Sendible is truly a super tool. Heavy on the price but worth every dime.
33 6. BuzzBundle: BuzzBundle is a tool we use and highly recommend. With BuzzBundle, you get the flawless social media management you’ve been dreaming of and, most importantly, more social buzz than you could ever produce by constantly logging in and out of a social account. Plus, BuzzBundle offers one centralised location to post, respond, and engage in conversation on any social platform. You can easily see your Twitter, Facebook, blogs, forums and Q&A streams from inside the tool. Four Enterprise Tools 1. Spredfast: An enterprise level social media management tool with lots of amazing features. It has your typical monitoring and measuring across multiple channels with lots of added extras with White label option for agencies, allowing you to use existing content from other companies and push it through your own platform. This means that you will always be able to update your channels with content (without fail). This tool is suitable for enterprises and large agencies. 2. Sprinklr: Is a highly developed management tool for social media marketing, providing a platform for consulting services for marketers and agencies for B2B and B2C markets. The most valuable feature for this tool is researching your audience, content promotion, and measurement tools that is suitable for enterprise level businesses. 3. Oracle Srm: Is an innovative way of management, offering Social Relationship Management and social marketing over cloud services. This tool offers you a complete and unified platform. Again, suitable for enterprises. Oracle is fantastic in connecting every interaction your customer has with your brand. Oracle will offer solutions to leverage the power of social media throughout your business. 4. Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Salesforce has come along way in providing CRM solutions that positively enhance your customer management. They offer features relating to email marketing, mobile marketing, web personalisation, advertising and of course social media marketing. With their Social Studio tool, you can build meaningful relationships with customers via social media channels. Social Studio is impressive because it encourages you to listen and analyse social media conversations, which is great for brand or business development. Planning ahead of time and publishing your social marketing campaigns have never been easier. • The advantage of using Salesforce Marketing Cloud, it does not just cover your social channels, but everything that is associated to it. You can collect data on customer behaviour and activity as well as track and send mobile messages across campaigns. This is an enterprise level Cloud service that will exceed your expectations.
34 Prepare your website Preparing your website for Social Media Marketing Management is literally about getting organised. Your content should be ready and available for your audience to view on demand. Your website should be constantly developing in line with your business goals. There are many factors you must consider when shaping your brand or business online, whether it’s about the design or functionality. It’s a promise you make to your customers in the process of building trust. Making an effort to fulfil their expectations, is key! • It’s important to keep your content updated. At Cloudnames we offer cloud technology that caters to businesses of any size including enterprise level services that can literally transform your business online. • Our web design packages are tailored to meet your requirements and we work closely with you to create the most ideal website that will display the culture that best represents your business. • • You will find that our packages are full of exciting features, and each bundle offers you something more unique with extra options of enhancing your website. We introduced the: basic, business, advanced and premium packages targeting different customer needs. All of these packages offer amazing looking web pages and when you upgrade to a higher service bundle, you will be investing more money into the development of your business. • Features include; security, SEO plugin, e-commerce, chat, social media marketing, blog pages, bookings/reservations, mobile ready and much more! Take a look at our free Modern Web Design Guide for more information. Developing your Brand Make the time to determine some guidelines to develop your brand on social media channels. You should start thinking about your brand personality or voice. If your brand were a person, what kind of attributes would you assign to it? Humanising your brand is what will help your SMM venture, and drive users to your platform. Consider the following: • The appearance of your company logo helping customers to identify you. • What theme you want to run with, from font style to colour attributes. • A detailed description of what your brand is about and what it stands for. • Your tone of voice and persona your brand will embody. • Other structural elements and presentational attributes.
35 • We recommend that you make a conscious effort to know your audience for you to be able to build positive brand association with your customers in mind. The goal is to stay relevant, and establish a tone of voice that you can follow through with consistency. • However, you do not have to maintain the same voice on all your social platforms. You can be different and vibrant on each one, depending on what profile you create for your brand. Human interaction is what you want to focus on, and developing your brand in this way will enable you to create a voice or demeanour that can build relationships with your customers or the audience. So, what comes next? Your content. Content Marketing The purpose of content marketing is about attracting visitors to your website by consistently putting content out there that is relevant to the consumer. It is a process that is ongoing which will enhance your marketing strategy as it will focus on retaining the flow of information and flood of customers wanting to know more. It is different from normal advertising. It is not a new discipline, it’s simply evolv- ing. CM today, is mainly about interesting content on webpages and company blogs, in essence the aim is to increase your revenue. About 8 out of 10 companies are allocating larger portions of their budget from advertising to content marketing this year. • Being able to communicate with customers without trying to sell them something is important too. You can drive desirable customer action by creating and sharing interesting, valuable, relevant and useful content. Our experience in content marketing tells us that; if someone is following you on your social media channels, then usually that means they’re interested in what you have to offer. Here at Cloudnames we would advise that content you share should, not only promote your products and services, but also involves the common interests of your audience. Call To Action A Call to Action will get your community to respond to your efforts, in transforming your social media marketing into results you’ve been longing for. Your CTA is a brilliant source of engagement with customers. By offering white paper downloads, email newsletters, promotions and so forth, you will be able to understand your customers and seeing how well they respond to your call to actions. • Usually, we love to offer something to the customer that they will find useful or hard to resist. Providing free information, guides or promotions is the best way to go about it.
36 Also, do not forget to use effective marketing hooks that will grab the attention of your visitors/custom- ers. You need to scream ‘look at me’ with your CTA’s. Call to actions should be highly visible so it’s not hard to miss. Using relevant text and graphics will display relevance and your customer will not assume that they are navigated somewhere other than where they want to be. The call to action should be your prime instigator to guide your customers toward the purchase process. • At Cloudnames we have learnt the importance of integrating your campaigns across all your social media channels. This can really impact your brand and bring you back some great conversions. • You can visually attract people to your site as well as collect contact details of those that are inter- ested in what you have to offer. Campaigns are useful in ingraining your message or promo across all your social profiles and drive visitors directly to your website. Campaign Landing Pages can truly be the holy grail of any marketing venture, if you do it correctly! What is a landing page? A landing page is a web page that allows your visitors to sign up for your offer. Often referred to as a “conversion form.” The landing page is a standalone web page distinct from your main website that has been designed for a single focused objective and directed towards a specific target audience. A landing page will have one or more of the following conversion purposes: • Register orders for a product or service • Capture lead information for remarketing or follow up by sales team • Give further information that can lead to sales or referrals • Any other desired call to action; liking your blog page, sharing etc. The key is to create effective landing pages and make it easy to find them through your various market- ing activities. Issues with low conversion There are a number of common issues in badly designed landing pages or no landing pages at all. Before you spend big money on your next campaign, we recommend that you develop three to five versions of your landing pages and test them with a limited audience. Social Media is ideal to drive highly segmented audience to your test landing pages. Often small design and message adjustments will make a huge impact on the conversion rate.
37 It is usually one or more of these reasons that lead to low conversion: • The visitor gets a bad user experience because of poor design • The message on the landing page is not in line with what the visitor expected • There is too much information and too many details to understand • There is too little information and the visitor can’t understand the value • The call to action is not clear to the visitor You should bear in mind that the best possible conversion you will get from a landing page that has a nice and clear design (that is consistent). • Do not waste the opportunity to focus completely on the traffic your campaign is generating. Also as landing pages are separate from the website they offer great possibilities with reporting and analytics. Make sure all your marketing activities have a landing page specifically designed for whatever your marketing purpose may be. With the right tools it is very easy to set up, and your success rate will increase. Blog Pages A blog page is literally a platform that you can utilise on your website where you can post items regular- ly. This is an effective way of feeding relevant and current content to your customers. This can be from sharing thoughts, information to events and updates. Often a blog is identified as an online journal, although this is true, you can make your blog page a place to share ideal content about your business demonstrating the passion you may share with your customers. The internet is a medium that reaches copious amount of people, this is your opportunity to build good relationships with your potential visitors on your website. • The purpose of blogging is to attract and retain customers by delivering valuable and relevant content that enhance their knowledge of your subject. This should be an ongoing process integrated with your overall marketing strategy, focusing on owning the content rather than renting it. Content marketing is an art of communication with customers and prospects without a sales pitch. Instead of pitching your products or services, you inform and educate through valuable high quality information. Ultimately your efforts will lead to loyal customers rewarding you with their business. The most valuable kind of content you could provide for your audience or customers is conversing and sharing information that will make their lives easier. Ideally, you should try and do this by avoiding too much brand promotion as this could backfire on your accomplishments.
38 • Try and contain as much information that is topical and current. Not every piece of content you share has to come directly from you; sourcing posts and sharing content from other sites can improve the traffic to your social media channel as well as your website. Remember to always keep a sense of humour (if you can), your work should not be too serious. Our ‘fun stuff’ blog page at Cloudnames is one of our successful blogs because it is lightweight content and fun! Your brand should have a personality, and usually the one that works best is your brand embody- ing a character that is outgoing as well as professional. This is also an ideal way of building your customer base and online community. Support Community Providing reliable services is vital when trying to maintain good customer relations. Your consumers will look to you for help, and in most cases they will want to reach out to you. We recommend that you tackle this by creating a support chat forum proven to be the most popular and effective way to improve customer services and experience. • Remember, customers are the best way to market your brand; we depend on reviews and feed- back to better our services here at Cloudnames we advise you do the same. To build your customer’s confidence implies many things. It shows reliability and our research indicates that over 50% of online customers say that, being able to ask real time questions is the most valuable thing a website or social media community could offer. Both loyal and potential new customers will want to learn more about your products and services. • If the customer finds it hard to source relevant information (as most people like to carry-out a product comparison), then your online business should be prepared to deliver support and informa- tion quickly. A typical business hears from 4% of its unhappy customers. Your business should be prepared to be able to change your customer’s experience. According Ruby Newell Legner in “Understanding Custom- ers”; it takes 12 positive experiences to make up for one unresolved negative experience. You can even develop a chat system that is an automated dialogue responding to trigger words presented by the engaging customer. Building a support community on a social media channel means being able to offer your service consistently; which will be so key to your business and customer satis- faction. Implementing chat support platform has never been easier. This simple and effective help service will exceed your customer’s’ expectation. This is a fantastic way to gain consumer trust and your customers will be able to reach you or make valuable comments at any given point, which could be outside of your normal working hours.
39 • A support community can boost customer satisfaction as well as better your products and services resulting in increased revenue. Crisis Management The one thing that you can’t control is what commentary or input comes from the visitors or custom- ers. The last thing that you want to be faced with is a crisis. On your social networks there will be many who will intentionally cast a dark cloud over your work, and the negatives of that is not being able to tackle it in time. • You should always be on the ball with incoming commentaries. Check who has posted what and when, and if there is any abuse directed towards your brand or just general trash that's often posted, be sure to be there to handle it in the best possible way. It’s important to judge the negativity on the basis of ‘usefulness’. As the saying goes, no publicity is bad publicity unless it’s offensive. You should be able to examine and handle incidents with professional- ism. Either remove and block the offender or reply to upset comments with lightness and understanding. You can try to turn the conversation around, and make a good example of your brand by always keep- ing spirits high. You have to be prepared to understand risk and know how to tackle it before it escalates. You can look into customer support training programmes if you feel you may need more help in this department, or simply leave it to Cloudnames. We have experience in identifying and preventing a crisis on social chan- nels. Email Conversion It’s better to build customer relations personally, rather than doing it online. But if your business requires you to engage and build trust with your customers without being able to physically provide a handshake with every single one of them, then we recommend that you consider the prospect of email being the king of all conversion; this is why you should capture and collect email addresses. Creating trust is paramount for bringing in sales. If your prospective customer thinks that your brand or business is unreliable, they will not spend a single penny (even if you have something they truly want or need). In traditional sales, trust and credibility is built by demonstrating professionalism and offering promotional offers face to face. But, if your business is online (and you cater to your customers globally) your strategy is most often to carry out online sales. Without a personal meet and greet, you are already at a disadvantage.
40 • By the use of Social Media, you can establish brand loyal customers and build a database of poten- tial customers and utilise their email contacts for your email marketing. Running an online business makes it pretty easy to find leads. If you have a good looking website and people pay a visit, you can capture email addresses easily by implementing Call to actions on your blog, pop up mail listings and landing pages for your ads. E-mail newsletters or personal mails sent to your leads are what we consider as the king of conver- sions. Make sure to include a Call to Action in your outgoing emails too. The best way to get people to leave their email address is to offer something interesting for free which is what we call ‘a lead magnet’. • At Cloudnames we offer and provide assessment reports and guides to our potential customers. We share our knowledge on topics surrounding Web Design, SEO and Social Media Marketing. Other options could be giving away e-books, reports, presentations, training courses etc. The important thing is to offer something your site visitors are interested in and relevant to your business. The idea is being able to obtain contact email addresses to be able to send more information about your products and services that may be of interest to them, not to spam your customers with needless stuff. We advise also that the content you share should not be limited; there is a right time and place for marketing and sending out promotional messages. However, you must take into consideration broad- ening your horizon and be creative in the process. Your aim and focus should always be about your marketing efforts of building trust, engagement and community. Tracking Pixels Pixel tracking is the method of implementing a 1x1 transparent gif to track a visit on your website or social media platform. You can utilise this process to track ad impressions or openings of an email. Pixel Tracking can be carried by a HTML code snippet requesting to follow user behaviours and activi- ties. When your page is visited, an image request is made by the user’s browser which communicates to the server in charge of the tracking. The various parameters are passed through a HTTP request and the server qualifies this action. The server will send a clear gif image and most often a cookie is dropped. With tracking your conversions for example, Facebook recognises site visitors from your ad campaigns. An offsite pixel is put in place to be able to carry this out. This type of pixel is referred to as offsite pixel, which is a snippet of code provided by Facebook that is placed in the <head> section of a particular page on your website. This will then send a notification to Facebook informing that a conversion is com- plete. Facebook is notified when someone has clicked on your ad, which results in being able to track that someone outside of Facebook as a result of you adding that snippet of code. You would add that offsite
41 pixel to a success page. So once a user purchases Widget 2.0, they will be directed to a success page that holds your offsite pixel. Facebook then knows that your ad resulted in a successful conversion. The brilliance of conversion tracking is the fact that Facebook makes use of Optimised CPM to deter- mine who sees your ads. Also referred to oCPM, permits advertisers to place importance to marketing aims, and deliver ads in line with those aims. Your ads or campaigns are optimised and served to those most likely to perform your aimed action. But what are you optimising? By setting up your offsite pixel, you are set to optimise checkouts, cart, leads, registrations and conver- sions and so forth. All you have to do is select the group you expect to send your ads to for positive conversion rate. There are many methods to follow with pixel tracking and a lot you can achieve. How- ever, we recommend you take the first step to follow your visitors activity before trying to tackle the more deep end stuff. Google Analytics Google Analytics is one of the best ways to get detailed knowledge about how your online marketing activities are meeting your performance goals, and giving you the information you need to decide if you should change direction or scale up your investment. The first step should be generating the best keywords for a specific target market. You should not use general terms and words that do not help to optimize the ad’s performance. Keywords can be decided based on exact match, phrase match, and broad match. If your selected keywords are very common and high-volume you will most probably end up far down on the search result list as the popular search terms will have very high bids. Focus rather on groups of 5-10 long tail keywords that you group in ad-sets. This will likely save your marketing budget and increase ROI. If you are new to Google Analytics and you don’t have an account, you should create one before proceeding further. When you have established your profile you can customise your dashboard. The dashboard give you the option to collect all the data you want to see at a glance every time you login. You can also define multiple dashboards with widgets that display charts, timelines, tables etc. to get a quick overview. With Google Analytics you can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines and social networks, direct visits and referring sites. It tracks display advertising, email marketing and pay-per-click networks. It also shows you the full customer picture across ads and videos, websites and social tools, tablets and smartphones. Information about which content keep your visitors longer on your website or which content have a high bounce rate is also key. This will allow you to produce more great content that resonates with your
42 visitors and less of the content that does not.The knowledge of where your users come from and what they do on your site will help you tailor your website and marketing to your current customers, and win new ones. Google AdWords Google AdWords is one of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your campaign. It gives you the possibility to identify the unique features of your products and services. However, if you are not man- aging your campaigns correctly, it can be a waste of valuable time and money. Another important point is to use filters. Filters are negative keywords that exclude searches including these words. Filters are also effective to analyze unsuccessful keywords that will not communicate the right messages in your campaign. If you don’t test the performance of the keywords you communicate, You risk wasting time and money on messages with low performance. • You should not underestimate the importance of the ads you are displaying on Google AdWords. These ads do not represent the image alone, they communicate effectively how the products are able to anticipate the customer needs. The consumers will click your ad only if the messages you relay will meet the their needs. Relevancy of Ads is also an important feature that plays an essential role in the PPC campaign. The ads displayed on Google AdWords are relevant only if these ads are able to reach the target market. Man- aging your ad groups correctly is vital for reaching the target market. When you create your campaigns you should avoid directing clicks to the homepage of your website. Don’t leave it to the visitor to find the information they are searching for. Sure, it will be extra work to create landing pages for every AdWords campaign, but the reward is huge. If this is done right the visitor have a clear call to action, being able to order directly or leaving their contact information on the landing page. Social Media Policies There are many aspects of social media that requires censorship. Terms of Use are typically put in place in order to prevent distribution of content that is unethical. We’ve looked into Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn policies, and here is what we found! There are many ways of expressing and displaying yourself on social media channels. Information, pictures and videos are shared by millions daily on a variety of platforms. However, the one question that comes to mind is: how safe, inoffensive or acceptable is the content that is being shared by so many?
43 Facebook offers users Terms of Service that detail their policy according to “principles”. They openly state: “We do our best to keep Facebook safe, but we cannot guarantee it. We need your [the user’s] help to keep Facebook safe…” Policies to Minimise Risk At Cloudnames we know the importance of social media when shaping public thinking, especially where building an image or brand is concerned. Minimising the risks of using social media in the wrong way is vital , as wrong content can really be dam- aging to your business and reputation. Also, there are a lot of false profiles being created and too much content being shared to monitor individually. Many local Governmental bodies and authorities have a say over what can be posted on social media channels like FaceBook and Twitter that ban users that repeat violation. They can deem content as unacceptable by reserving the right to delete submissions that contain; vulgar language, personal attacks of any kind, off topic disturbances, advocating illegal activity and so forth. If you would like to see 300 plus social media policies and templates, please click on this link: http://so- cialmediagovernance.com/policies/ It’s important that you also think about where your business stands with respect to your desired relationship with audiences. You need to determine how far you want to go in utilising social media for brand recognition, engaging with your customers and for driving sales without damaging your reputa- tion or allowing others to. Twitter for example, openly admit that they “...do not guarantee the completeness, truthfulness, accu- racy, or reliability of any Content or communications posted via the Services or endorse any opinions expressed via the Services.” So being extra careful on these kinds of social networking sites is ideal. You may be exposed to content that might be offensive, harmful, inaccurate or inappropriate, or in other cases, you may receive postings that are deceptive or misleading. So what exactly are the policies of these social media giants? Let’s take a look... Facebook “We need your help to keep Facebook safe, which includes the following commitments by you...” FaceBook requests users to; not post unauthorised commercial communications such as spam, not collect users' content or information. Users are not to upload viruses or other malicious code.
44 Facebook also asks account holders to refrain from bullying, intimidating, or harassing any user and so forth as "...users are not to facilitate or encourage any violations..." of their policies. Collect all data This social media giant has currently declared that for extra security measures they collect information about users in accordance with their Data Policy. Frankly the list of data collected includes about every- thing you do on Facebook. All the things you do are recorded as data, including when you sign up for an account, what content you create or share, messages you send or communicate with others. This can include information in or about the content you provide, such as the location of a photo or the date a file was created. Facebook also compiles data about how you use their Services, such as the types of content you view or engage with or the frequency and duration of your activities. Connections Facebook also collects data about your networks and connections, such as the people you communi- cate with the most or the groups you like to share with. They also collect contact information you provide if you upload, sync or import this information (such as an address book) from a device. Facebook also own your payment information like your credit or debit card number and other card information, and other account and authentication information, as well as billing, shipping and contact details. Your devices And in case you were not aware, Facebook also collects your device information. Attributes such as the operating system, hardware version, device settings, file and software names and types, battery and signal strength, and device identifiers. Device locations, including specific geographic locations, such as through GPS, Bluetooth, or WiFi signals. Connection information such as the name of your mobile operator or ISP, browser type, language and timezone, mobile phone number and IP address. Technically Facebook has clearly covered all activity zones of a user and in obtaining information detail- ing everything about your online presence and virtual space. So preventing wrong or hurtful content should not be very difficult we’d assume.
45 As the highest ranking social media channel in the world, the people at Facebook have really sharp- ened their pencils when it comes to aspects of data-collection and what is presumably meant to ensure the security of their users. George Orwell’s 1984 Here at Cloudnames we can’t but wonder if Mark Zuckerberg have read Orwell’s novel 1984, written in 1948. The futuristic novel describes a society where the government, referred to as “Big Brother” is monitoring every move and everything expressed. Orwell of course could not forsee Facebook or social networks, and the extreme detail they know about us all. Twitter You may use Twitter Services only if you can form a binding contract with Twitter and are not a person barred from receiving services under the laws of the United States or other applicable jurisdiction. If you accept these Terms and are using the Services on behalf of a business, organisation, govern- ment, or other legal entity, you are expected to represent and warrant the authorisation to do so. You may use the Services only in compliance with these Terms and all applicable local, state, national, and international laws, rules and regulations. All Content, whether publicly posted or privately transmitted, is the sole responsibility of the individual who created the Content. Twitter say that they “... may not monitor or control the Content posted via the Services and, we cannot take responsibility for such Content. Any use or reliance on any Content or materials posted via the Services or obtained by you through the Services is at your own risk.” You can understand that by using their Services, under no circumstances will Twitter be liable for any Content, including, but not limited to, any errors or omissions, or any loss or damage incurred as a result of the use of any Content posted, emailed, transmitted or otherwise made available via the Services. Unlike Facebook, Twitter hold rights only on title and interest to the Services excluding Content provid- ed by users. Twitter enforces rules stating “Our goal is to provide a service that allows you to discover and receive content from sources that interest you as well as to share your content with others. We respect the ownership of the content that users share and each user is responsible for the content he or she provides. Because of these principles, we do not actively monitor and will not censor user content, except in limited circumstances...”
46 LinkedIn By using LinkedIn Services, you may encounter content or information that might be inaccurate, incomplete, delayed, misleading, illegal, offensive or harmful. LinkedIn generally does not review content provided by their Members. If you have a LinkedIn account, you are essentially agreeing that LinkedIn are not responsible for infor- mation or for any damages as result of your use of or reliance on information. Limitations LinkedIn does however reserve the right to restrict, suspend, or terminate your account if they believe that you may be in breach of this Agreement or law or are misusing the Services. Their Users Agreement specifies that it reserves the right to limit your use of the Services, including the number of your connections and your ability to contact other Members. LinkedIn reserves the right to restrict, suspend, or terminate your account if LinkedIn believes that you may be in breach of this Agreement or law or are misusing the Services. Criteria LinkedIn also provides a list of ‘Do’s and Dont’s’, which we care to share with you because we believe these guidelines are perhaps appropriately put together which should apply to all social media chan- nels; Do’s- in compliance with the User Agreement and Privacy Policy, users must provide accurate informa- tion that is updated on a regular basis, use your real name and details to create a profile and to use their services in a professional manner. As for the Dont’s- the list is considerably long, so here are essential criterias that we think are worthy of mentioning. They start by alerting users not to “Act dishonestly or unprofessionally…” including posting inappropri- ate, false, or unacceptable content. Do not submit a telephone number in the “title” or any other field, or include email addresses, street addresses or any personally identifiable information for which there is not a field provided by LinkedIn. Dont’s: • Use an image that is not your likeness or a head-shot photo for your profile; • Create a false identity on LinkedIn; • Misrepresent your current or previous positions and qualifications; • Misrepresent your affiliations with a person or entity, past or present; • Misrepresent your identity, including but not limited to the use of a pseudonym; • Create a Member profile for anyone other than yourself (a real person);
47 • Invite people you do not know to join your network; • Use or attempt to use another's account; • Harass, abuse or harm another person; • Send spam or other unwelcomed communications to others; • Scrape or copy profiles and information of others through any means (including crawlers, browser plugins and add-ons, and any other technology or manual work); • Act in an unlawful, libelous, abusive, obscene, discriminatory or otherwise objectionable manner; Create profiles or provide content that promotes escort services or prostitution. And the list goes on. The one thing about LinkedIn compared to Facebook and Twitter is the serious- ness of their extensive compliance expectation of users, which puts users at ease.
48 HOW CLOUDNAMES CAN HELP YOU Cloudnames is a full service cloud solution provider. We offer a wide range of services from leading cloud companies like Amazon, Google, Zendesk, Salesforce and many others. Our focus is to integrate the market leading cloud solutions and deliver a managed service to our customers. We take care of the integration, design, provisioning, management, security and all other complicated stuff, so you can lean back and focus on operating your core business. We make sure your IT-services are working and delivered as a true integrated cloud service. We can make you look incredible online! HOW CLOUDNAMES CAN HELP YOU Cloudnames offers a virtual hosting environment that uses multiple servers at once, rather than one specific, physical centre. Its benefits are wide-ranging; not only is it secure, good value and quick, but it’s also extremely reliable. Because the technology harnesses multiple servers, if one goes down another will always carry the load. Its multi-server structure also means it’s scalable, which is a big plus if your website has the poten- tial for growth. Cloudnames solutions offer customers the highest standards of security, reliability and ease of use. We use only the best infrastructure, such as the amazingly fast and reliable cloud services from Google and Amazon. There are many ways to offer web-hosting services. The vast majority of hosting companies have one server room and one line to the Internet. That’s why their services are slow and unavailable from time to time. Now imagine if you could have access to the absolute best platform and at an affordable price. That is what we offer at Cloudnames, dreams can come true after all. We have built our services on the Amazon EC2 web services Cloud platform and according to Amazon, Cloudnames is “a first mover”, which we take pride in. We offer our services on the Amazon cloud platform, it’s well proven to offer top of the line speed, security, reliability and scalability. Amazon EC2 is proven to meet the highest industry security standards, protecting customers against malicious behaviour such as hacking and virus attacks. We also provide extensive, regular back up facilities, with the best rollback options to retrieve lost data. Our cloud technology makes it easy to scale up quickly and can handle traffic peaks or growing demand without customers experiencing poor loading time or access problems.
49 CLOUDNAMES DOMAIN NAMES It all starts with a domain name. You need an address for your online activity and Cloudnames offers more than 200 different top level domains. Go directly to order.cloudnames.com and find your perfect domain name. CLOUDNAMES APPS Our platform is integrated with Google’s web services so you can have seamless Google email and Google Apps accessible for your team at any time, anywhere and from any device. In addition we offer many other cloud apps to power your business, like newsletter management, security solutions, e-commerce and payment solutions. Also if you want to design your website we offer the market leading WordPress CMS solution as a managed cloud hosting service. CLOUDNAMES MANAGED WEB DESIGN PACKAGES Most hosting service providers offer traditional services. They leave it to customers to design their web pages or simply hire a web designer. That’s why many companies have static websites that have not been updated for a long time. At Cloudnames we offer well managed web design to ensure our customers always have modern looking web pages with high quality services for their own customers. Our subscriptions are affordable web design packages tailored to your needs, making sure that your web presence is updated on a regular basis. We consistently update the security measures and make sure your backend software, themes and plugins are updated to eliminate security risks and bugs. We use the latest technology, with modern responsive designs to develop your web pages and add the web services your customers deserve. Our web design products are continuously revamped and on a regular basis your website will be updated with new and better versions of design and the services you want to offer to your customers. CLOUDNAMES SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION MANAGEMENT Having a beautiful and functional website is beneficial for your business, but it is also only the first step in building a profitable online presence. The next step should be to make sure potential customers searching for your services online will find you.
50 Many regard search Engine Optimization (SEO) as an art form and hence it may be a good idea to work with experts on SEO to make sure you rank good in search engines. SEO is about making a great user experience, building authority through links, title tagging, great content and many other elements. We can take care of your SEO with our managed SEO service, where we offer different levels of SEO depending on your ambitions. For SEO Management you are required to have a Business web design management package. Custom- er must develop keywords, links and content, but we will advise on quality and give recommendations on improvements. CLOUDNAMES SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING MANAGEMENT When you finally have a good looking and functional website, we can help you tell the world. We offer a very flexible marketing management service; we use the most effective technologies, tools and media to spread awareness at very affordable prices. Cloudnames can help you manage communication with your existing customers and target new prospects in line with growing your business. Our Social Media experts will tailor your campaigns with every tiny detail in mind, and make sure that you get the best possible results from your marketing budget. And our tools will give you a descriptive report on the effect of your campaigns. The beauty of Social Media marketing is that you can start with a small budget and increase as your customer base grows. For SMM management you are required to have an advanced web design package. All products include tweaking, modifying and the progression of your messages to maximise the results of your campaign, using these set of tools to manage a campaign is roughly 50% of the cost of customer media coverage.
cloudnames © COPYRIGHT 2015 CLOUDNAMES Sørkedalsveien 32 N-0369 Oslo Norway - T.+47 23 89 68 11 E. info@cloudnames.com cloudnames.com

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Cloudnames - A Guide to Social Media Marketing

  • 1.
    cloudnames © COPYRIGHT 2015CLOUDNAMES A Guide to Social Media Marketing Strategies for your business
  • 2.
    cloudnames © COPYRIGHT 2015CLOUDNAMES "Any comments or suggestions are most welcome! Please contact Leyla at leyla@cloudnames.com" Compiled Cloudnames research and writing by, Leyla Ok
  • 3.
    INTRODUCTION What is SocialMedia Marketing? The general understanding of Social Media and Marketing is not entirely correct. After much practice, trial and errors, we think we know how to define SMM in terms of: how it should be utilised and for what purposes. We’ve decided to pass on some of our valuable knowledge and experience, to help you better understand what goes on in the “digital” world. Social Media Marketing is extremely complex yet a rapidly advancing environment. If Face- book were a country, it would be the most populated in the world. Isn’t that Remarkable? The Internet, Social Media and Networking Sites have shaken the media sector entirely. Challeng- ing newspapers, magazines, radio and TV-stations as a source of distributing news and enter- tainment in line with competing for advertising budgets.
  • 4.
    The Gift ofSocial Media Now Google, Facebook, Twitter and many other social media channels have refined and developed advertising services that rock the media boat. The gift of Social Media Marketing for business owners is; • Engaging with brand loyal customers • Building brand awareness • Converting leads into opportunities • Gaining customer feedback • Developing products and services • Increasing your business revenue and so much more. The How The demographic of users can be segmented, which makes it possible for advertisers to target their audience more specifically and at a lower cost than traditional mass-media channels. Online custom- ers spend a lot of their time on social networking sites. Research shows that; while the average individ- ual might only spend 20-30 minutes per day, many others spend multiple hours every day. SMM combined with a good plan should include a variety of strategies, and methods that can effective- ly reach and target your desired audience. Email marketing, newsletters, campaigns along with social media networking sites are definitely worth the time and effort you invest. The Why The Internet has become the backbone of society in most countries. The numbers of “digitally native” people are growing. Therefore, the best way to market your products and services and expand your brand’s recognition, is via channels that web users love to network, share content and interact on. For instance, Facebook ranks highest for being the most popular social networking site. Unless you’ve been living on a different planet, you will know of or heard about some of the other trendy sites like Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and so forth. At Cloudnames, we’ve acquired a set of (new) tools, whereby we are able to reach millions of consum- ers across the world at the click of mouse (or tap of an icon) through social media marketing. Consider We consider a number of major segments before we begin to target new customers or audiences. You have many target options: location, gravitation, interest, age-group, gender, social communities and
  • 5.
    interaction (etc), whichare all great indications of how to shape or understand your demographic. Your objectives should be defined by these specific zones of activity. • We can help you make sense of how you can boost your business on social media. The marketing strategy that we use is effective and rewarding in targeting a specific segmented audience, and then being able to mirror that audience. Also, we know that interaction is key, and the easiest way to better your presence online is to expand your communication with customers. It’s important that you begin cultivating your brand by utilising tools with technological capabilities as well as mobility. You can find out more about how to do this in the following chapters. Transformation in Broadcasting We found out from our friends at Salesforce (CRM specialists) that over 90% of the content that exists online, has come about within the last 24 months of Internet history. This tells us a lot about the dramatic shift and activity taking place online. User dependence on the internet to search and find information that is contextual, video or audio related has become more intense. The demand is always there. If you look at it retrospectively, broad- casting has transformed extraordinarily. It took radio stations almost 40 years to reach 50 million listeners, it took Televised channels almost 15 years to reach 50 million viewers, but a Social Media platform like Facebook attained 100 million users, within the space of 9 months! If this is not incredible, then we don’t know what is. • Cloudnames can provide you with the right tools to make your Social Media Marketing experience pleasant. Our services can help you spark up great ideas to share with your audi- ences, whether it’s your customers or simply your fans that you want to reach out to. If you’re still not convinced that SMM is the way forward, then simply read on...
  • 6.
    Things You CanAccomplish With SMM Customer Acquisition Costs Exposure Social Media strategy Practice Makes Perfect Dedication and Commitment Web Appeal You’ve got the Power Five Ways You Can Strategise Social Engagement With Customers Listen Be Genuine Coverage Sharing is Caring Business benefits Five Ways To Engage SMM Team Understanding Customer Needs Choosing Social Media Channels Start with Facebook Low Cost Personal Touches Increasing recognition Advertising with Facebook Target the right audience Twitter Followers How often you should post Promoting on Twitter Gaining insight Linkedin Connect Visibility Youtube The Audience Rank High Massive platform Make your own channel Grow your audience Promoting your content Mobile users Cloudnames can help Google+ Impact on Google search have high value Hangouts Circles and email notifications The Author Collections Analytics and reporting Other Google integrations Google+ for marketing 8 8 8 9 11 11 13 14 15 16 16 18 20 21 24
  • 7.
    Instagram Creating a profileon Instagram Get more followers What to post on Instagram Pinterest WHEN, WHAT & HOW Management Tools Six Self Service Tools Four Enterprise Tools Prepare your website Developing your Brand Content Marketing Call To Action What is a landing page? Issues with low conversion Blog Pages Support Community Crisis Management Email Conversion Tracking Pixels Google Analytics Google AdWords Social Media Policies Policies to Minimise Risk Facebook Collect all data Connections Your devices George Orwell’s 1984 Twitter LinkedIn Limitations Criteria HOW CLOUDNAMES CAN HELP YOU CLOUDNAMES DOMAIN NAMES CLOUDNAMES APPS CLOUDNAMES MANAGED WEB DESIGN PACKAGES CLOUDNAMES SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION MANAGEMENT CLOUDNAMES SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING MANAGEMENT 27 28 30 31 34 35 35 36 37 38 39 39 41 42 43 45 46 48 49 49 49 49 50
  • 8.
    8 Things You CanAccomplish With SMM At Cloudnames we lead by example because we have first hand knowledge on Social Media Marketing. Before we advise our clients on the best strategies to put in place, we carry-out some tests within our own platform. We promote content relating to our products and services, as well as other topical news and interests in the limelight. • And if you’ve heard about us... then we can safely assume that it must be working! Keep in mind that 93% of well established companies are reported to use social media as a marketing tool. Those numbers are impressively high and so will be, your business potential. The saying goes: if you can’t beat them [competitors], then why not join them! Customer Acquisition Costs Reducing Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) should be a key driver for your marketing effort. The lower the customer acquisition cost the more effectively your budget will be spent. And with the new oppor- tunities that come with Social Media Marketing, you can reduce CAC dramatically. You can achieve this by targeting your audience in a more specific way and by measuring all activities. With SMM, as mentioned before, you can reach out to a high volume of potential and existing custom- ers, simply by making your brand interactive. Why not increase website traffic? You can gain great conversions and develop your brand identity as well as build positive brand association. We advise our customers to establish social communities too, directing their focus on interactions with the customer (identifiable by their common interests and activities). • At Cloudnames we have found a two-way communication with our audiences through collabora- tion and sharing of content, which as a result gives us a promising networked relationship with the audience. Exposure Jumping on the phenomenal SMM wagon will mean that you can obtain great exposure for your business, which will generate leads and improve your sales in return. Social Media caters to any market and any budget; you can start marketing at prices lower than a cup of coffee! Did you know that an astonishing 56% of consumers, under the age of 35 interact with their favourite brands on Facebook? Skilled marketers can sometimes get their messages shared and distributed
  • 9.
    9 organically without havingto pay anything. The dream is being “the one” who had a campaign to go viral overnight. SMM is an extremely competitive platform, especially when trying to reach a higher volume of custom- ers. Having a strong SMM plan and a well established presence on the web is vital to build consumer interest. If carried out properly, SMM can transform your business immensely, bringing success straight to your storefront online. Social Media Strategy One thing that we can put on the table is our knowledge, keep in mind that your Social Media Market- ing strategy will depend on the line of business you are in. Plan well and act fast. Every company will have their own ambitions set in stone, which is good for organising and deciding what methods are ideal. ‘What’ we can accomplish with SMM for you is majorly to do with the how. Our team will use tools like Social Media, Search Engine Optimisation, Content and Email Marketing (and more) to make this happen. • Please refer to our free guide to Modern Web Design to see more information about these features. Practice Makes Perfect It is good practice to audit your current state before you develop your SMM plan. You can do this by going through all your social media activities and assessing how they are working for you. Make sure to look at which channels you are represented in, who your audiences are in these different channels, and how your presence is compared to competition. • We always advise our customers to check on Google search, to see if there are any channels they don’t own that claims to represent their company. Take control over your brand and your online existence. You should evaluate your strategy and mission for all your social media channels. Evaluate the profiles, understand the management of the profiles and know the team that is working on your social media activities. It’s also necessary that you look to centralising all profile ownership, usernames and passwords and make a clear process for establishing new channels. Simply, look into social media management tools that can offer you a solution. We cover SMM Tools in later chapters.
  • 10.
    10 Dedication and Commitment It’svital that you create a plan and prepare your content in advance. A neat number, 47% of marketers (who have more than 3 years of experience) spend at least 16 hours per week focused on social media marketing activities. • SMM takes a lot of commitment and our Cloudnames team is more than happy to deal with your business’ marketing needs. Luckily, new web technologies have made it simple for everyone to create content and distribute it too. A blog post, tweet, Instagram post or Youtube video can be easily produced by anyone and shared, which can then be viewed by millions for free. There are many popular social networking sites, you should research what purpose each of them serve (and how it can be useful to your business). Also, clarify and establish your voice depending greatly on the content you will decide to share. You must aim to stand out from the crowd. Web Appeal Roughly five billion posts are published daily on Facebook, so making sure your content is interesting and appealing for your target audience is key to your online success. By doing so, you will achieve more growth for your enterprise, have the opportunity to develop on aspects concerning mobile advertising, and improve digitisation of your business online. A staggering 63% of customers that decide to share content on a social networking site, state that it ‘matters to them which brand or organisation produces the content’. You should aim to be a brand or organisation that customers care about, so really think over ways you can sustain loyalty to your brand. You’ve got the Power Giving you data-driven insights, your SMM strategy will serve the purpose you set. We recommend that you develop a plan that aims to cover your overall company needs. Social Media Marketing is most powerful when you use it to tell stories; this ultimately creates a personal relationship between you and the customer. The idea is to inspire; so establish your objectives, identify your target audience, research the market and build an online community. • The goal is to stay relevant and updated, and establish a presence and voice that you can follow through with consistency. You can be different and vibrant, depending on what profile you create for your brand. Never underestimate how important your customers truly are. A customer should be the most import- ant person for any organisation. No matter what kind of business you are running or what your aims
  • 11.
    11 are; the numberone rule is to keep the customer satisfied. Technology changes almost always, but human nature is perpetual. There are many things in life and in business that we admire; and seeing one person taking care of another is surely admirable. • We learn; how to deal with different kinds of people and situations online. If you risk not develop- ing your efforts to build customer loyalty and happiness, you could lose more than just your custom- ers. Give the right service, and you will be climbing to the top of the food chain. 5 Ways You Can Strategise 1. Objectives: Define your goals and objectives aligned with your general marketing aims, so that your activity on social media networks are supporting your business ideas and targets. 2. Plan: Create a publishing or content plan describing what to post, when to post it and where. Distri- bution of your content is a vital part of your overall plan. It all depends on your business, what channels you want to network on and your target audience. 3. Competition: Check out what or who else is about. Sometimes the best information or lead will come from your competitors. By looking at what’s already existing, you can find new ideas to be origi- nal. Get inspired by your customers, competitors and industry leaders. 4. Community: Start building your online community and promote your brand. You can achieve an organic spread by having visitors to your page liking, following your social feeds and blog posts or any other content you wish to relay. This endorses sharing your content and the promotion of content, which you can carry-out at a fee and spread to a specific target audience. You can also make nifty ads to promote your content or prod- ucts/services. 5. Test: Tracking everything is vital, we believe that you should never stop testing your objectives. By using analytic tools you can draw data from your SMM that can help you make improvements and adjustments effectively that will get you closer to achieving your goals. Social Engagement With Customers It’s important to identify which channels to use to reach your desired audience. Here at Cloudnames we can safely say that, Facebook is one platform you need to proactively use for SMM. Don’t make the same mistake most businesses do, which is focusing on just the one or two major social channels. You should explore as many as possible.
  • 12.
    12 At Cloudnames wehave compiled research for the best social media channels. Also, we specify ways to target the right demographic as well as build communities for brand loyal customers. You can read more about it in the following chapters. Listen Start by listening. Understand what it is that your customers want to know about your business, and anything in relation to it. Build and relay content that opens up conversation, since this allows people to come to you with interest and with responses. Also, keep in mind that you stay human in the process. • The ability to really listen to your customers means that you are paying attention to their needs. Listen to the language and the terms they use to describe their problems. Also, the less automated your are with yes or no exchanges, and joining in on the conversation, means the better chance you will have of building a successful relationship. Be Genuine The less automated your are with yes or no dialogue and also joining in with the conversation, the better chance you will have of building successful online communities. Always be proactive in the process. At Cloudnames we treat our Social Media platform as if it were a real-life place of hang-out. We share photos, get interesting discussions going (about new trends), talk about events, we even have a ‘fun stuff’ section where we post videos, photos and other forms of content on a regular basis. • Keep in mind that; if customers or consumers are the most important factor of the selling process, then it is up to you as the business owner (or members of the sales team) to ensure that the relation- ship and bond between the customer and the business is established, existing and valuable in real terms, and online. Coverage Your targeted group and social media efforts will be a testing process at the very beginning. The aim is to find your presence online and secure an audience of loyal visitors (and customers). Competitors are bound to use similar platforms, so the more coverage you have on a number of chan- nels, the better your chance of exposure. Your aim is, to be known. We’ve discovered that business - consumer relationships are shifting online and consumer habits. Social Media is not just a contact centre its serves several business functions. This includes, sales, marketing, product development, PR and collaborative communication.
  • 13.
    13 • There isa clear indication that customer support, on Social Media platforms is vital. There are thousands of people who love taking care of customers, and out of them, comes feel-good stories. You can never place too much importance on a single customer. Building communities around customer support/help, means that potential and existing customers are able to communicate about your products and services. This could be in relation to the goods and services they have already purchased or, even better, what they intend to buy. These peer-to-peer communications are sometimes happening before contact is made directly with your business, suggesting that the content you produce and relay should be sufficient and reliable. We believe that tapping into these forms of communication, held by customers on Social Media platforms, will help you learn and participate in discussions to leverage these social conversations for your business benefits. Sharing is Caring Let’s take Google for example, they have entered more businesses than we can think of because they have managed to influence and disrupt the way we search and refine content (which is in itself is just mind blowing). Engaging with your customers is one thing, but being able to share and re-share your content suggests that, you are able to manage being constructively responsive. A blog post or video that gains popularity quickly on any social media channel may receive a flood of traffic. However, Google Social Search optimises the way we can share this information, which ultimately aids online marketing due to their brilliant search engine capabilities. We can use fantastic tools like Google Social Search to keep control of your brand over social media channels and by sharing relevant resources frequently. Eventually, you will have the ability to monitor and extract customer data and intelligence from your Social Media customers via their activities and interactions. • You can then use this information to improve and develop your business and as a result increase your business revenue. Business benefits • Being able to provide better customer service. • Protect and enhance your brand, drive more sales, drive customer loyalty. • Use customer feedback to improve our products and services.
  • 14.
    14 Being mindful andattentive to the feedback, and improving your services as a result can help you attract new customers in seriously competitive business environments. • Social Media has become an enterprise-wide movement. At Cloudnames we can confidently say that SMM can positively impact your sales, marketing efforts, customer service and product develop- ment which is key in meeting your business objectives. Develop your business personality, prepare your content and start engaging with your prospect or existing customers on various channels. Five Ways To Engage Engage by finding out where your customers hang-out, you can find out from using web analytics, and by looking at which social media sites have given you the most leads and customers. You should also pay attention to what the user is mentioning, providing commentary on and what questionings are being asked. Then, be ready to answer all queries. You must manage your social platforms well and prepare to respond to a high volume engagement. 1. Befriend customers to your network. Simply add friends or customers to your platform, search for people using their email addresses, or promote your social media profile and add links throughout your site. Run promotions or contests that will involve external interest too. 2. Post content, share images and text and company blog articles, it’s always useful to re-share content created by others. 3. Be active in your engagement with customers, converse in posts and feeds. Reach out and make a valuable impression. 4. Consistency is vital, you must engage regularly and effectively. Here at Cloudnames we update our profiles and posts daily. We can help you do the same. 5. Avoid self-promotion all the time, this will tire and bore people. Come with new ideas and interest- ing information that will keep the customer interested. Although, it is good to update them with services and products, it’s not always good to boast. • When you share your content throughout your community, be sure to take the opportunity to collect data from your users activity and interaction. Take into consideration the feedback and commentary to understand the direction you should be heading with your content. Remember to evaluate your strategy over, and continue to develop on your social media channels to increase more traffic to your website or page.
  • 15.
    15 Care is aboutbeing able to adjust your personality to think like a customer and provide brilliant service before, during and after purchase. SMM Team You should involve all people from your business in your SMM Team. Different employees will most likely be suited for different stages in the relationship with your customers. Involving people outside of the marketing department also opens up for one to one engagement, to support your customers and prospective customers different needs. In setting up your social care and support team, include and establish; clear goals, customise social feeds to connect with right customers , engage by depending on the customer's phase in the buying cycle. Creating engaging content throughout the cycle will help you gain new customers, repeat purchase, loyalty and customer references. • There are many ways to offer good care and service online. Don’t forget to stay patient, be alert, communicate clearly, know your product, keep positive, be calm and learn from each customer in the process. Understanding Customer Needs To have success, SMM demands that you focus on your customers needs. It will vary customer to customer, depending on which step in the buying cycle they are currently in. Best practise is to focus on the customer’s need and then build the social media marketing, content and resources around the demands. • Customer happiness plays a significant role in how much revenue a customer will generate for your business, so every customer or opportunity is vital. Best practise is to focus on the customer’s need and build new ways of bettering your services. The point of having a social presence is to allow your brand to reach as many people (or potential customers) as possible, through networked experiences. Spending time on developing communities and good relationships adds immense value to your business. If there were no customers, sadly you would not have an existing business to begin with. As obvious as it sounds, the purpose of your business is to fulfil the needs of the customer. We believe that providing your visitors or customers with an experience they will never forget is the way forward. It’s not easy to achieve, but once you’ve started effectively networking, you will start mark- ing memory with your brand.
  • 16.
    16 Choosing Social MediaChannels There are an endless amount of Social media channels to choose from. The most popular being Face- book, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, Pinterest and Instagram. To understand which channels will work best for you, depend on your line of business and which Social Media channels your targeted customers prefer. The best way to find out is to conduct a test to identify your likely suspects. We recommend that you start with one channel at a time. You should ideally move onto the next chan- nel, only once you have mastered the channels you are currently using. Start with Facebook Facebook has become the best low-cost social media marketing platform. An individual or business can sign up for free, which is great news for start-ups. This is something we personally utilise too, which is why we can recommend it without hesitation. If you do not have an online presence yet, this might be a good place to start your SMM journey. Having a website is important, as you can redirect your post or blogs straight to your webpage. Your customers will demand that of you. We endorse Facebook for increasing your own website traffic. Marketing is critical for any business, while some of the benefits of Facebook is similar to having a website. The main difference is, it allows you to have access to millions of target audiences that can be converted to potential and prospective customers. Low Cost At a fraction of the cost, Facebook has a straightforward method, all you have to do is share informa- tion relating to your brand or business. You can create and set-up a page easily, what’s beneficial is the content and good insight. The idea is to have users interactively communicate with you on this platform, which will lead up to building your online community. • The point of having a social presence is to allow your brand to reach as many people (or potential customers) as possible through networked experiences. Spending time on developing communities and good relationships ass immense value to your business. You should consider sharing photos and videos and content that is relating to; what you are about or what you are offering. • Try not to self promote too often, as this is sometimes a deterrent. Remember, your existing and potential customers or fans will be using the platform to socialise on. Make your content interesting and fun.
  • 17.
    17 Personal Touches It’s harderto personalise your website than your Facebook page, which is why we suggest you make the most of it. The personal touches you put in place will do you wanders. Plus, your customers will be able to contact you directly on your page, compared to receiving a shabby automated business email. Language is a very important part of selling, and customers create perceptions about you and your company based off of the language that you use. By using positive terminologies and applying a positive attitude with customers can really change how the persuasion will go. You can use this platform to provide customer support like most businesses do, it shows friendship in business rather than your typical merchant-buyer relationship, which is not all that exciting. Also, you will be able to respond to questions and messages faster and efficiently, allowing you to resolve any issues. Once you’ve come to the stage where you have successfully built an online commu- nity, you will find customers and page visitors interacting with one another. • This builds good brand association and brand loyalty, which endorses your business on a unique level. You leave a good impression with page visitors as well as achieve great customer satisfaction, helping you develop personal relationships with them. Increasing recognition Users or visitors to your page will have the ability to like, comment or share your content. Not only is this a brilliant multi-level marketing tool, but it means that once your content is liked, those individuals will help spread your message, which then extends onto their friends who can then see this too and be directed. Brands on Facebook frequently post content to avoid losing their organic reach. Adobe Digital Index analysed 450 billion Facebook post impressions; 525 billion ad impressions from search engines Google, Yahoo, and Bing; and two million mentions of social streaming applications between 2014-2015. This is a clear indication that Facebook is vital as a marketing tool, but we also recognise the impor- tance of being unique and offering something new. • You need to be willing to switch strategies if your initial objectives are not working for your brand. Advertising with Facebook You may have great content that you want to share with your followers or page visitors, but it becomes impossible to get the level of attention required in order to increase recognition. You should consider sparing a budget for advertising. You can start small and increase your budget as you go along.
  • 18.
    18 Facebook will attemptto show the audience ads that are most suitable to the viewer. That's why the relevance score of your ads are interesting, it determines how much of the audience you will reach. Keep in mind that an ad with a high relevance score will be delivered to more people at a lower cost. You should also have a bidding strategy for every ad you create, if two ads have the same relevance score the one with the highest bid will be shown. A good plan is to test different pictures and remarket with different audiences and learn how to get a high relevance score before you make bigger invest- ments. This is what we call it the testing process. Target the right audience The brilliant aspects of advertising on Facebook is that you can monitor your ads relevancy scores while they are running and make adjustments on your audience segment or the creatives. Choosing the right audience is probably the best way to get a high relevancy score and hence a low cost for your ad. Targeting the right audience is paramount and remarketing can be extremely effective too. Remember, you can choose your audiences by location, age, gender, education, interests, etc. Within the testing process, you will be able to see clearly who your target audience is or potential audience. • While choosing an image that resonates with your audience and illustrates your message, be aware that you will be required to have ownership over the images (or the permission to use it). Make sure to limit the text on image, as Facebook does not accept ads with pictures that include more than 20% text. Twitter The benefits of using Twitter as a marketing tool is impressive when carried out correctly. Twitter is a social platform that allows you to potentially interact with customers on a personal level. Personal reach and interaction is useful as it promotes reliability, and targets customers individually making it one the best marketing method that can create long lasting relationships. Twitter started out as a simple messaging system limiting posts to 140 characters. Today, you can do much more, such as add pictures, videos and longer text that 140 characters (including the good old #hashtags). • Twitter is probably perfect for following trends, and comes in handy when following what competi- tors (or others) have said about your products and services. This is very useful if you need to make developments of some kind.
  • 19.
    19 Followers This popular networkingsite works on a social structure that is based on followers. You will need to grow your followers first, in order to see the benefits of it as a social media marketing tool. Twitter can act as a free press release platform; you can post news and make public announcements about your business or brand, tweet special offers, encourage customers to find out more, share links and articles and provide recommendations at any given time. • Tweeting also allows you to answer questions as well as pose them, which provokes great interac- tion and consistent engagement with your audience. How often you should post We believe that you should stay active on twitter as much as possible. Our research shows that by keeping your campaigns, tweets and posts light and humorous, informative and intuitive, you have a better response rate. • Being consistent with your posts and offering content often means that twitter can be the ideal platform to display your brand’s personality. This will help build a positive brand association. Committing to your twitter account means you will not risk losing the interest of your audience or customer. Don’t let all your hard work go to waste by slacking with posts. Get your SMM plan going, and be ready ahead of time so that you’re never running out of material to publish. Twitter operates in real time, so your customer or audience will follow conversations that are happen- ing in that moment. That is why tweeting should be a consistent thing, ideally you should be ready with hot topics frequently. Or why not start a new topic, making room for discussions? • Do you remember Vice Magazines ‘What colour is this dress?’ debate. This post (#thedress) got millions fascinated, including well known celebs to politicians talking, commenting and interacting over this one simple question, on Twitter. Promoting on Twitter You can use this channel to promote your posts to your preferred audience. You can use promotional features to boost engagements on your tweets and target website clicks or conversions. Once you’ve composed your tweet, you can select your audience and budget. Over the last few months, twitter has enhanced the targeting options. You can target exactly the audience you want, without having to search through a list of ideal segments or groups.
  • 20.
    20 Gaining insight Twitter offersanalytics dashboard that is a great help in measuring performance and adjusts according to the results. You can measure your organic spread and get insights on your audience. You can also use conversion tracking pixels to acknowledge the effect of your promoted Tweets and campaigns. Linkedin As a platform to market your brand or business, LinkedIn is one of the popular tools to use. The features and functions of this channel is invaluable. This online network of well established people from across the world, is brilliant for gaining contacts. From powerful people to creating a link with your average joe, this channel allows you to reach out to those you would not expect to bump into in real-life. LinkedIn brings business people together in a useful way. You can engage with potential customers by taking part in discussions, and most importantly build valuable connections. Being active and posting often on your LinkedIn site means that you can effectively build your brand personality. This increases your likability and creates trust between you and the audience. Connect Regardless of your business objectives, you will be able to connect with all kinds of people. You can offer recruitment, access expert advice and information-sharing with a multitude of groups. We recommend that you use LinkedIn’s blog promotion tool, which is fantastic for regular updates of blogs, as well as promoting it. You can request recommendations from customers, which is the ultimate way to boost your busi- ness credibility and reputation and gain new customers. With LinkedIn, one major aspect that we really appreciate is the prospect of higher conversion rates. • Essentially, what you are doing is humanising your brand by interacting on social media channels as a person would in society. The only difference is connecting with other people, businesses and brands on a digital platform instead. Visibility A useful feature of LinkedIn is that it allows you to make your profile information available for search engine index. This means that when your brand or business is put into Google search, it will rank your LinkedIn business profile at the top, which is great for spreading brand awareness.
  • 21.
    21 The more qualitycontent you produce that will back your brand, the more effectively you will run your group, the more support you will get from the community you build. Advertising efforts is huge with LinkedIn as it has roughly 120 million users globally, this enables you to expand with your target segment and provide a richer customer experience. • In addition, with LinkedIn ads you can create tailor made ads by selecting job title, function, indus- try and company size, seniority, age, gender and other useful options. Youtube There are many benefits of using Youtube as part of your SMM. Youtube has viral marketing advantag- es whether it’s embedding videos or sharing them, you can really create a ripple effect. The effectiveness of video marketing cannot be denied. Youtube is not just a platform for viewing and sharing video content, it’s also a major social networking site. It’s also the most shared video content on the internet. • And remember, Social media channels work collaboratively, for instance, an impressive 400 tweets per minute contain a youtube video. Youtube is brilliant because it’s highly integratible to your social media strategy. By distributing your Youtube videos on other popular social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn your business exposure will grow immensely. The Audience At Cloudnames we’ve discovered that brands or businesses have the opportunity to go viral with younger audiences. For example, when companies include a discount code in their social media posts, an impressive 57% of 18-22 year olds will engage with the post. And 49% of 22-30 year olds will also engage. You also have the option of creating and customising your channel. This is fantastic because you can build your brand personality visually, choosing theme and colours, the modules you wish to display on your featured videos list. There is a comment section under these videos, which is where interaction comes alive. Everyone can automatically comment, respond or approve. There is always the issue of what com- ments to allow and what not to, this is up to your discretion, or simply be ready to respond quickly. An estimated one billion users are on Youtube, this gives you the opportunity to reach a huge audience (if you get the marketing process right).
  • 22.
    22 • If youfeel this is all too much for you to handle, Cloudnames offer great Social Media Market- ing services that can create and manage these channels for you. Youtube like all the other social media channels is cost-effective. It’s never really about the budget you spare for this kind of brand awareness, it's more to do with the time you invest and the content you provide that will determine whether or not you have a customer worthy platform. Rank High Youtube is a powerful tool because creating and posting videos in a worldwide, compatible format means; it is a perfect platform for staging your products and services. Google owns Youtube, if your video is searched directly from the site, it will rank high in its search engine. With its integration capabilities, Youtube has become the second largest search engine. Research show that an astonishing six billion hours of video is watched every month! Youtube is an online sensation worldwide, our research also tells us that half of access made to a Youtube page is via a handheld device, making sure your website is mobile friendly is key. • You can look at our Guide to Modern Web Design for more information about website features and functionalities. Massive platform YouTube is popular with younger viewers, but all age groups are represented by impressive user numbers. Teens and young grownups however often prefer watching YouTube rather than tradi- tional TV channels. As mentioned before, YouTube is owned by Google (or Alphabet which is the parent company) and is nicely integrated in the whole Google ecosystem. Including Google+ and AdWords which is help- ful when using YouTube for marketing. You have fantastic means of targeting your audience on YouTube and your ranking in Google searches will benefit from it as well. Make your own channel With YouTube you can create your own video channel for sharing useful content about your busi- ness and products, or other videos you want to share. You can easily embed your YouTube videos and distribute them on your own website, your Social media pages or in email. You have the option of customising your channel to build your brand personality visually, choosing theme and colours, the modules you wish to display on your featured videos list. There is a com- ment section under these videos, which is where interaction comes alive. Everyone can instantly comment, respond or approve.
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    23 Grow your audience Ifyou share interesting videos with valuable content, you can grow your audience organically without much cost implications. Some marketers have had viral success where videos get millions of views at no cost, because users engage in the content, like it, make comments and share it with friends on YouTube or other Social networks. To make it easier for your target audience to find your content you need to tag your content properly. This is done by using keywords in the description field to optimise search. As mentioned YouTube is the second largest search engine, so Search Engine Optimisation(SEO) is key. Be aware that YouTube SEO is following different metrics than traditional SEO. Use YouTube's tag tool to create search-friendly tags for your video. Google Search also prioritise websites with embedded YouTube videos. Promoting your content You can also promote your channel and videos and hence make sure that it gets the audience you target. There are specific YouTube options like the video ad format TruView. But you can also use other Social media to promote your YouTube videos, or you can use Google AdWords to market your videos to an audience searching for your keywords. The purpose of all marketing is of course to increase revenue, and video is an extremely effective way to spread your message. You can put links on your video description to drive traffic to your websites landing pages, which has shown to deliver high conversion rates. While all marketing activities have a branding effect, video is effective to drive conversions and our research indicate as much as 96% increase in conversions when embedded videos are used in email marketing! With all your videos make sure you include a “Call to Action” like a link to a landing page or an invitation to connect or subscribe to your channel. Mobile users According to YouTube’s latest statistics, Mobile clients account for more than 50% of views. And mobile users now spend in average 40 minutes per session watching videos. This is an incredible 100% increase over last year!This of course underline the importance of having a website and landing pages that are made for mobile clients.
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    24 Cloudnames can help Weknow that many of our readers have a busy schedule and don't want to spend the time that is necessary to create your own website or manage your digital marketing. If you are among these you can safely let Cloudnames do the job. Cloudnames offer a set of web design packages that is matched to different needs and marketing ambitions. You will still have to provide the content of your webpage, but we will design your webpage to the highest standards, manage all updates and security, and we keep it updated for you. We can also help you with your SEO, Search engine marketing, email marketing and Social media marketing. We can handle all your technical challenges of maintaining all your online presence and digital marketing. Google+ Nobody seems to know the value of marketing on Google+, as this search engine giant keeps quiet about their many active users. All we know is that users are growing high in numbers and marketing with Google+ does seem to increase your search rankings (among other benefits). If you are serious about Social Media Marketing you can’t ignore the possibilities of Google+. There are more than 2.5 billion profiles on G+, made up of YouTube, Gmail and Android users having an assigned account to them. Less than 10% of the Google+ accounts have a public post, many of these being YouTube comments or profile picture changes. Google describes their services as a “social layer” across all its services rather than a social network. While some claim Google+ have more than 250 million active users, others indicate less than 10 million actively post on a regular basis. Impact on Google search have high value The number one reason to consider G+ for Social media marketing is the impact it has on Google organic Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). Actively using Google+ for marketing will place your compa- ny, products and content higher on Google's organic SERP that represents almost 75% of all global online search. Google's universal login is tied in to G+, which means that all searches can be traced by them and connected to the users G+ account. • Google’s main revenue stream comes from ads, so it is understandable that the detail of segmen- tation and data you can tap into as an advertiser on G+, is massive.
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    25 Hangouts Even though G+have substantially fewer active users than Facebook and other larger networks, its Hangout feature allows you to connect closer with your audience and get to know your fans in more detail. You can also set up group chats and video conferences, or host a webinar. Circles and email notifications You can organise your connections in circles. For instance, you can group your circles with existing customers in one circle while potential customers can be grouped according to their different product interests. This way you enable targeting accordingly. Another unique feature with G+ is the close link between the social network and email. As all Gmail users also have a G+ account, the connection between the two is a great opportunity for marketing, as you can easily distribute your posts by email to your close circles. The Author On G+ you can link your personal profile and company page and claim Authorship when you post articles or other content. Authorship helps build authority and promote the author as an influencer. • In Search, your personal profile picture will be display you as the author, which of course is great for promoting yourself as an influencer in your field. Authorship results in higher SEO rankings and increased clicks from search. Collections Google+ earlier this year launched Collections, which is a Pinterest like feature designed to make it easier to find posts that you like. Google+ Collections makes it possible to categorise your posts by topics, so your followers easily can find updates they are interested in. Make sure you use hashtags as well to make your content easy to find. Analytics and reporting Google Analytics is nicely integrated and is one of the leading analytics and reporting tools available. In addition, there are specific tools like Google+ Ripple, which permits you to analyse your circles and investigate how your content is shared, or find potential profiles that is likely to help you share your content.
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    26 • Analytics isextremely important when considering social channels for marketing, because you should base your marketing efforts on facts and not assumptions. With Google+ you have access to details you need, to measure your success. Other Google integrations Google is the largest search engine, but did you know that YouTube is number two? G+ is closely integrated with YouTube, which is great for posting video and also all comments on YouTube automati- cally updates G+ as well. Also Google Maps and Google Drive are integrated, so you can easily share locations and documents from your drive with connections on G+. Even SoundCloud is integrated so you can share original recordings. The G+1 button can be placed on your blog or other pages on your website to make it easy for anyone to share your content on their G+ profile. The G+1 button also allow your visitors to leave comments outside of G+, which is useful. With applications like Post Ads, you have the option of turning posts into interactive web banner ads, which is valuable for customer interaction.These post ads are so popular that it results in more than 50% increase in engagement than normal advertising. Google ads alone accounts for a little over 64% of the clicks. Google+ is packed with apps and features and there are 3.rd party software integrations available as well. Google+ for marketing You need to choose channels depending on what line of business you are in and which Social media your customers and potential customers prefer. • At Cloudnames we recommend you make profiles and post content on a variety of Social networks and then test out which channels work better for promoting your content or advertising your prod- ucts or services. And don’t forget aggregators, Search engine marketing and email when you explore and make your choice. The real question of course, is which channel will give you the lowest Customer Acquisition cost (CAC), and that does not necessarily mean the network with a high number of active users. We have seen big differences in CAC between the different channels. Facebook and AdWords have very high volumes but also higher cost than some of the alternatives.
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    27 Instagram Instagram was firsta mobile application before it became available on other devices, which literally made it a hit. Instagram is about photographs, so it’s a visually based marketing strategy. With around 400 million Instagram users, this channel is the perfect opportunity to post images and messages with speed. You can reach your target audience at no cost, unless you want to target on a wider scale less organically. Instagram announced that marketers are now able to promote their posts through Application Programming Interface. Getting little attention outside the tech world, this may well be the next billion dollar Social network channel. Instagram is an effective marketing tool because it’s a great way to reach specific and wider audiences. Back in 2013, Instagram started testing ads, but it is only just recently that this feature has become available widely. Until recently, you were expected to spend 200.000 USD to be able to promote your posts, needless to say something most companies could not afford. • With the new API’s however, promotion prices have quickly changed as Instagram ads are now available for anyone at a competitive cost. Creating a profile on Instagram One of our favourite things about Instagram is the simplicity. It’s very easy to use and when you design your company profile there are only four options you can customise; profile picture, username, bio and website URL. • As you have such limited options, it’s critical that you make the most of it. Your profile picture should be a close-up of you or your company logo. With this limited space you need to find an image that resonates with your target audience and reflect your brand. Your username should be your full business name, so users immediately recognise your title when they search for your company. Instagram allows you to change username, but that should be avoided unless you have made a mistake. This of course also go with your website URL. • Your bio needs a description of your company as well as products or services. Ideally this text should be short, informative and straightforward. Get more followers The best way to connect and build an audience for free on Instagram is by following other users. They will get a notification and the option to follow you back. Instagram’s search bar and discovery feature are great places to start.
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    28 Basically the samestrategies that drive likes and engagement will also bring you more followers on Instagram. Here are a few options to consider: • Focus on quality rather than quantity. Post often, on Instagram the more often you post the better, but don’t post irrelevant content. And if response is low, it is better to remove posts that have low engagement. • Use popular and trending hashtags. Use hashtags frequently, on Instagram the more hashtags the better. Use tools to find trending hashtags and those relevant to your line of business. • Engage with other users, like content and make comments. Engaging with other users will often make them engage back. • Promote your Instagram account on your website and other Social accounts. • Use Call to Actions in your posts. Ask for feedback or offer a link for more information. What to post on Instagram If your business is about being visual, creative and involves a lot of photos, images and videos are a natural part of your business, then Instagram is highly valuable. Product shots are ideal if you have physical products. But there are many other ways to display them. You can use images of customers using your products, images from a presentation or product launch, or a product demo video. • Again, you risk losing followers if every post you share is about your own products and services. It’s a good idea to vary your posts, as self promotion can be overwhelming. You can use images of office environment or workshops held, employees and co-workers that care to share their moments. There is a human side to every business. The good thing about photos is that you can display images that can gain emotional responses which is useful in marketing. You can use images that probe and receive the reactions you desire and create meaningful relationships, it’s all a testing process to see what works and what doesn’t. • Take the time to make the right emotional connection through your posts, this will improve your engagement with potential and existing customers by a milestone. Consider language, colours and your message. This social channel has gathered photography lovers from across the globe and invited them to network onto one platform. This is why marketing your products and services on Instagram is useful
  • 29.
    29 especially for competitionsand giveaways. You can request your followers to like your posts to enter into a competition, or have them share their photos with a specific hashtag. • As the saying goes “...a picture speaks of a thousand words...” and every single post will appear in the feed, meaning everyone gets their time to shine. Your posts are there in the long term too, every- thing you’ve ever posted can be located in on your business profile, so there is no risk of it getting lost or buried so far down in your stream. Pinterest Pinterest is a digital Pin-board where you can collate images and visually categorise content that you like. Our research shows that 47 million users are posting content on Pinterest, and the numbers are expected to grow rapidly. This channel is ideal for marketing because you can build a following, develop your pinboards and measure the return of your activities. Like Facebook, and many other channels you can take advantage of paid promotion of your pins. If you have a certain product you wish to sell, whether it’s a customised T-Shirt or a pair of binoculars, you can reach out to Pinterest users instantly. Post a photo or image related to what you are retailing or a service you’re selling and add a price tag. It acts almost like an online shop full of likely customers. • However, you must be careful not to use this channel purely to push products and services. You must create a profile that is going to help build your community, you should look to post things that will inspire your audience, add valuable content and be informative. You can publish a blog post and pin a photo or image from your article onto your board, simply copy the URL of the Pin. You can carry this out in line with other social networking sites like Google+. Your audience will be able to bookmark the page, and read or share the content whenever they please. Pinterest is very successful in promoting your business. If you already have a personal account, you can change it to a business platform with no hassle. You can create a goodies page and place it on your website. Like your SMM plan, you’ll need to create a little list of things to consider and do, to make the most of Pinterest for your business. You can begin pinning instantly, and post your infographics and a checklist, both elements add lots of value to your page because it’s fun, humorous and it’s a grand opportunity to build your brand identity on this channel for others to see and appreciate. Evoking emotions and using visual imagery is perfect in terms of marketing, because you can make it shareable.
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    30 WHEN, WHAT &HOW What should you post? Simply, good content. When should you post? • Facebook and Twitter: (ideal post window)13:00pm - 17:00pm • LinkedIn and Instagram: 7:00am-9:00am and 16:00pm - 18:00pm • Google+: 9:00am - 11:00am in weekdays • Pinterest: (works better) 14:00pm - 16:00pm on the weekends Our research shows that social media updates of your status are not durable. When you tweet for example, your status or feed is probably good for 15-20 minutes at most. This does not imply that you should tweet or post something new that often, but acknowledge the idea that sending an update or tweet for example, does not mean it will be visible for the whole day. Users move on to more recent items in their newsfeed, so we recommend that you analyse how long customers or your audience’s engagement last and how much of your content they share. This will provide you with some insight on the quality of your content as well as the interests your audience. How often should you post? You need to test this but here is our general recommendation: • Facebook: 5-10 post a week • Twitter: Minimum 5 a day • LinkedIn: One per weekday • Google+ and Instagram: Up to 5 a day If you find that your audience is hungry for content, then you should be prepared to provide it. Aim to satisfy your audience or customers by being consistent. You’ll have to look at the flow of your content and the amount of interest it receives. The general guideline though is best when you test your content on your channels and understand what works best on each platform. Analytics and Reporting Analytics and reporting are great tools for understanding the behaviour of your website visitors, so being able to do the same with your social media channels is vital. With analytics and reporting you can see the pattern of user behaviour as a result of their online activity. You can then analyse how this data can impact your brand or business in terms of development. Also, discovering how effective your campaign, blog post or social feeds are can be achieved by monitoring the number of visitors that your page attracts, including what time and from which location. • You can draw more detailed data such as gender, interests, employment and so forth, helping you to understand what or who your target is.
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    31 Acknowledging the trendsand behaviour of users on social media is the key. Collecting all this data is generally called “Big Data” and there are many tools available to analyse and understand them. • Here are some questions you should consider in the process: How are your marketing channels performing? What is the real cost of a conversion and what value do you get back from your invest- ment? How effective is remarketing to visitors, and how can you use visitors to your website or customer list and target similar user profiles? With the growth of your social media visitors, you will see that there is a lot of information that needs to be collected and made use of when trying to develop your brand or business. The high volume of likes, shares as well as commentary will mean that your data can be measurable by using measurement tools. The idea is having listening solutions to aid the huge flow of data and then distill the useful information. • You need to be able to monitor all of the conversations and take action. Analytic and measurement tools have great functionality enabling you to find what you need to take action. Do not limit yourself to analysing just your posts, look into all spectrums within all your social platforms. Management Tools Social Media Marketing is perfect for managing your reputation online. By building an active social profile on a number of networks and then using it to engage with customers, will empower your brand in many ways. You will, effectively remove any negative search results by churning and sharing new and worthy content (that can diminish all the other searches pre-existing). SMM management tools make it possible to reach your business objectives. Designed to help you manage your content, monitor and measure your social media activities. You need to first decide which tools would be best for you, and you need to make the choice of what kind of management you need for your business; will it be self-service tools or enterprise tools. • If you have small to medium sized business we recommend that you look into Self service tools. And if you have a very large company, than an enterprise social media management tools would be more ideal. Each segment serves different levels and uses of features. Six Self Service Tools 1. Sprout Social: Allows you to manage and monitor keyword searches in one stream. You can also draw from it reports that are beneficial to your business development, from your social media
  • 32.
    32 accounts. The goodthing about this tool is that it enables you to prepare and schedule your content for all your social media accounts with a brilliant publishing kit, allowing you to manage your tweets and posts via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus. • The impressive thing about Sprout Social is the fact that they offer users a mobile application, meaning you can manage your social accounts on the go! • One thing that is slightly disheartening, is the price, it is great value for money and definitely a fantastic tool to manage your social media. But, there are other cheaper options. 2. Hootsuite: comes in at first place. At a much more affordable price and no obligations, HootSuite offers everything that you need to manage your social accounts effectively. From monitoring your accounts, producing reports to being able to meet your publishing needs, you can have your social media accounts displayed on multiple streams. Although most users prefer the use of a single stream, like Sprout Social Offers. We believe that Hoot- Suite is most ideal. This tool also has a mobile application to manage your accounts wherever you are, which means you can always be on-top of your game. 3. AgoraPulse: is ideal for social media marketing management as well as customer relationship man- agement. Useful for channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest, AgoraPulse supports contest applications, monitoring and customised reports in a ‘one-click’ process. All data collected and information, is presented in an inbox feature similar what your emails would look like; syncing accounts in real-time and keeping record of past conversations and data from fans and followers. • AgoraPulse is cost-effective and offers its customers a simple and affordable solution to manage your social media. 4. Buffer: Covers all social media networks apart from Instagram. This powerful management tool is fantastic, as the pioneers of social media publishing, Buffer is known to be the best tool in scheduling content ahead of time. It’s the best publishing system out there, and offers a free version that is perhaps minimalistic for what you want to achieve for your social media accounts. We would suggest that it’s a good way to trial the product. Buffer is great for management and comes is cost-effective. If you are looking for simple and basic solution, we would recommend that you try it out! 5. Sendible: This tool supports roughly 30 or more social media sites, offering you an array of services that can really help with managing your networks. Sendible helps with managing your accounts, content, content discover, contacts, profile, customer engagement, blog content, promotion and campaigns, monitoring and analytics. Sendible is truly a super tool. Heavy on the price but worth every dime.
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    33 6. BuzzBundle: BuzzBundleis a tool we use and highly recommend. With BuzzBundle, you get the flawless social media management you’ve been dreaming of and, most importantly, more social buzz than you could ever produce by constantly logging in and out of a social account. Plus, BuzzBundle offers one centralised location to post, respond, and engage in conversation on any social platform. You can easily see your Twitter, Facebook, blogs, forums and Q&A streams from inside the tool. Four Enterprise Tools 1. Spredfast: An enterprise level social media management tool with lots of amazing features. It has your typical monitoring and measuring across multiple channels with lots of added extras with White label option for agencies, allowing you to use existing content from other companies and push it through your own platform. This means that you will always be able to update your channels with content (without fail). This tool is suitable for enterprises and large agencies. 2. Sprinklr: Is a highly developed management tool for social media marketing, providing a platform for consulting services for marketers and agencies for B2B and B2C markets. The most valuable feature for this tool is researching your audience, content promotion, and measurement tools that is suitable for enterprise level businesses. 3. Oracle Srm: Is an innovative way of management, offering Social Relationship Management and social marketing over cloud services. This tool offers you a complete and unified platform. Again, suitable for enterprises. Oracle is fantastic in connecting every interaction your customer has with your brand. Oracle will offer solutions to leverage the power of social media throughout your business. 4. Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Salesforce has come along way in providing CRM solutions that positively enhance your customer management. They offer features relating to email marketing, mobile marketing, web personalisation, advertising and of course social media marketing. With their Social Studio tool, you can build meaningful relationships with customers via social media channels. Social Studio is impressive because it encourages you to listen and analyse social media conversations, which is great for brand or business development. Planning ahead of time and publishing your social marketing campaigns have never been easier. • The advantage of using Salesforce Marketing Cloud, it does not just cover your social channels, but everything that is associated to it. You can collect data on customer behaviour and activity as well as track and send mobile messages across campaigns. This is an enterprise level Cloud service that will exceed your expectations.
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    34 Prepare your website Preparingyour website for Social Media Marketing Management is literally about getting organised. Your content should be ready and available for your audience to view on demand. Your website should be constantly developing in line with your business goals. There are many factors you must consider when shaping your brand or business online, whether it’s about the design or functionality. It’s a promise you make to your customers in the process of building trust. Making an effort to fulfil their expectations, is key! • It’s important to keep your content updated. At Cloudnames we offer cloud technology that caters to businesses of any size including enterprise level services that can literally transform your business online. • Our web design packages are tailored to meet your requirements and we work closely with you to create the most ideal website that will display the culture that best represents your business. • • You will find that our packages are full of exciting features, and each bundle offers you something more unique with extra options of enhancing your website. We introduced the: basic, business, advanced and premium packages targeting different customer needs. All of these packages offer amazing looking web pages and when you upgrade to a higher service bundle, you will be investing more money into the development of your business. • Features include; security, SEO plugin, e-commerce, chat, social media marketing, blog pages, bookings/reservations, mobile ready and much more! Take a look at our free Modern Web Design Guide for more information. Developing your Brand Make the time to determine some guidelines to develop your brand on social media channels. You should start thinking about your brand personality or voice. If your brand were a person, what kind of attributes would you assign to it? Humanising your brand is what will help your SMM venture, and drive users to your platform. Consider the following: • The appearance of your company logo helping customers to identify you. • What theme you want to run with, from font style to colour attributes. • A detailed description of what your brand is about and what it stands for. • Your tone of voice and persona your brand will embody. • Other structural elements and presentational attributes.
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    35 • We recommendthat you make a conscious effort to know your audience for you to be able to build positive brand association with your customers in mind. The goal is to stay relevant, and establish a tone of voice that you can follow through with consistency. • However, you do not have to maintain the same voice on all your social platforms. You can be different and vibrant on each one, depending on what profile you create for your brand. Human interaction is what you want to focus on, and developing your brand in this way will enable you to create a voice or demeanour that can build relationships with your customers or the audience. So, what comes next? Your content. Content Marketing The purpose of content marketing is about attracting visitors to your website by consistently putting content out there that is relevant to the consumer. It is a process that is ongoing which will enhance your marketing strategy as it will focus on retaining the flow of information and flood of customers wanting to know more. It is different from normal advertising. It is not a new discipline, it’s simply evolv- ing. CM today, is mainly about interesting content on webpages and company blogs, in essence the aim is to increase your revenue. About 8 out of 10 companies are allocating larger portions of their budget from advertising to content marketing this year. • Being able to communicate with customers without trying to sell them something is important too. You can drive desirable customer action by creating and sharing interesting, valuable, relevant and useful content. Our experience in content marketing tells us that; if someone is following you on your social media channels, then usually that means they’re interested in what you have to offer. Here at Cloudnames we would advise that content you share should, not only promote your products and services, but also involves the common interests of your audience. Call To Action A Call to Action will get your community to respond to your efforts, in transforming your social media marketing into results you’ve been longing for. Your CTA is a brilliant source of engagement with customers. By offering white paper downloads, email newsletters, promotions and so forth, you will be able to understand your customers and seeing how well they respond to your call to actions. • Usually, we love to offer something to the customer that they will find useful or hard to resist. Providing free information, guides or promotions is the best way to go about it.
  • 36.
    36 Also, do notforget to use effective marketing hooks that will grab the attention of your visitors/custom- ers. You need to scream ‘look at me’ with your CTA’s. Call to actions should be highly visible so it’s not hard to miss. Using relevant text and graphics will display relevance and your customer will not assume that they are navigated somewhere other than where they want to be. The call to action should be your prime instigator to guide your customers toward the purchase process. • At Cloudnames we have learnt the importance of integrating your campaigns across all your social media channels. This can really impact your brand and bring you back some great conversions. • You can visually attract people to your site as well as collect contact details of those that are inter- ested in what you have to offer. Campaigns are useful in ingraining your message or promo across all your social profiles and drive visitors directly to your website. Campaign Landing Pages can truly be the holy grail of any marketing venture, if you do it correctly! What is a landing page? A landing page is a web page that allows your visitors to sign up for your offer. Often referred to as a “conversion form.” The landing page is a standalone web page distinct from your main website that has been designed for a single focused objective and directed towards a specific target audience. A landing page will have one or more of the following conversion purposes: • Register orders for a product or service • Capture lead information for remarketing or follow up by sales team • Give further information that can lead to sales or referrals • Any other desired call to action; liking your blog page, sharing etc. The key is to create effective landing pages and make it easy to find them through your various market- ing activities. Issues with low conversion There are a number of common issues in badly designed landing pages or no landing pages at all. Before you spend big money on your next campaign, we recommend that you develop three to five versions of your landing pages and test them with a limited audience. Social Media is ideal to drive highly segmented audience to your test landing pages. Often small design and message adjustments will make a huge impact on the conversion rate.
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    37 It is usuallyone or more of these reasons that lead to low conversion: • The visitor gets a bad user experience because of poor design • The message on the landing page is not in line with what the visitor expected • There is too much information and too many details to understand • There is too little information and the visitor can’t understand the value • The call to action is not clear to the visitor You should bear in mind that the best possible conversion you will get from a landing page that has a nice and clear design (that is consistent). • Do not waste the opportunity to focus completely on the traffic your campaign is generating. Also as landing pages are separate from the website they offer great possibilities with reporting and analytics. Make sure all your marketing activities have a landing page specifically designed for whatever your marketing purpose may be. With the right tools it is very easy to set up, and your success rate will increase. Blog Pages A blog page is literally a platform that you can utilise on your website where you can post items regular- ly. This is an effective way of feeding relevant and current content to your customers. This can be from sharing thoughts, information to events and updates. Often a blog is identified as an online journal, although this is true, you can make your blog page a place to share ideal content about your business demonstrating the passion you may share with your customers. The internet is a medium that reaches copious amount of people, this is your opportunity to build good relationships with your potential visitors on your website. • The purpose of blogging is to attract and retain customers by delivering valuable and relevant content that enhance their knowledge of your subject. This should be an ongoing process integrated with your overall marketing strategy, focusing on owning the content rather than renting it. Content marketing is an art of communication with customers and prospects without a sales pitch. Instead of pitching your products or services, you inform and educate through valuable high quality information. Ultimately your efforts will lead to loyal customers rewarding you with their business. The most valuable kind of content you could provide for your audience or customers is conversing and sharing information that will make their lives easier. Ideally, you should try and do this by avoiding too much brand promotion as this could backfire on your accomplishments.
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    38 • Try andcontain as much information that is topical and current. Not every piece of content you share has to come directly from you; sourcing posts and sharing content from other sites can improve the traffic to your social media channel as well as your website. Remember to always keep a sense of humour (if you can), your work should not be too serious. Our ‘fun stuff’ blog page at Cloudnames is one of our successful blogs because it is lightweight content and fun! Your brand should have a personality, and usually the one that works best is your brand embody- ing a character that is outgoing as well as professional. This is also an ideal way of building your customer base and online community. Support Community Providing reliable services is vital when trying to maintain good customer relations. Your consumers will look to you for help, and in most cases they will want to reach out to you. We recommend that you tackle this by creating a support chat forum proven to be the most popular and effective way to improve customer services and experience. • Remember, customers are the best way to market your brand; we depend on reviews and feed- back to better our services here at Cloudnames we advise you do the same. To build your customer’s confidence implies many things. It shows reliability and our research indicates that over 50% of online customers say that, being able to ask real time questions is the most valuable thing a website or social media community could offer. Both loyal and potential new customers will want to learn more about your products and services. • If the customer finds it hard to source relevant information (as most people like to carry-out a product comparison), then your online business should be prepared to deliver support and informa- tion quickly. A typical business hears from 4% of its unhappy customers. Your business should be prepared to be able to change your customer’s experience. According Ruby Newell Legner in “Understanding Custom- ers”; it takes 12 positive experiences to make up for one unresolved negative experience. You can even develop a chat system that is an automated dialogue responding to trigger words presented by the engaging customer. Building a support community on a social media channel means being able to offer your service consistently; which will be so key to your business and customer satis- faction. Implementing chat support platform has never been easier. This simple and effective help service will exceed your customer’s’ expectation. This is a fantastic way to gain consumer trust and your customers will be able to reach you or make valuable comments at any given point, which could be outside of your normal working hours.
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    39 • A supportcommunity can boost customer satisfaction as well as better your products and services resulting in increased revenue. Crisis Management The one thing that you can’t control is what commentary or input comes from the visitors or custom- ers. The last thing that you want to be faced with is a crisis. On your social networks there will be many who will intentionally cast a dark cloud over your work, and the negatives of that is not being able to tackle it in time. • You should always be on the ball with incoming commentaries. Check who has posted what and when, and if there is any abuse directed towards your brand or just general trash that's often posted, be sure to be there to handle it in the best possible way. It’s important to judge the negativity on the basis of ‘usefulness’. As the saying goes, no publicity is bad publicity unless it’s offensive. You should be able to examine and handle incidents with professional- ism. Either remove and block the offender or reply to upset comments with lightness and understanding. You can try to turn the conversation around, and make a good example of your brand by always keep- ing spirits high. You have to be prepared to understand risk and know how to tackle it before it escalates. You can look into customer support training programmes if you feel you may need more help in this department, or simply leave it to Cloudnames. We have experience in identifying and preventing a crisis on social chan- nels. Email Conversion It’s better to build customer relations personally, rather than doing it online. But if your business requires you to engage and build trust with your customers without being able to physically provide a handshake with every single one of them, then we recommend that you consider the prospect of email being the king of all conversion; this is why you should capture and collect email addresses. Creating trust is paramount for bringing in sales. If your prospective customer thinks that your brand or business is unreliable, they will not spend a single penny (even if you have something they truly want or need). In traditional sales, trust and credibility is built by demonstrating professionalism and offering promotional offers face to face. But, if your business is online (and you cater to your customers globally) your strategy is most often to carry out online sales. Without a personal meet and greet, you are already at a disadvantage.
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    40 • By theuse of Social Media, you can establish brand loyal customers and build a database of poten- tial customers and utilise their email contacts for your email marketing. Running an online business makes it pretty easy to find leads. If you have a good looking website and people pay a visit, you can capture email addresses easily by implementing Call to actions on your blog, pop up mail listings and landing pages for your ads. E-mail newsletters or personal mails sent to your leads are what we consider as the king of conver- sions. Make sure to include a Call to Action in your outgoing emails too. The best way to get people to leave their email address is to offer something interesting for free which is what we call ‘a lead magnet’. • At Cloudnames we offer and provide assessment reports and guides to our potential customers. We share our knowledge on topics surrounding Web Design, SEO and Social Media Marketing. Other options could be giving away e-books, reports, presentations, training courses etc. The important thing is to offer something your site visitors are interested in and relevant to your business. The idea is being able to obtain contact email addresses to be able to send more information about your products and services that may be of interest to them, not to spam your customers with needless stuff. We advise also that the content you share should not be limited; there is a right time and place for marketing and sending out promotional messages. However, you must take into consideration broad- ening your horizon and be creative in the process. Your aim and focus should always be about your marketing efforts of building trust, engagement and community. Tracking Pixels Pixel tracking is the method of implementing a 1x1 transparent gif to track a visit on your website or social media platform. You can utilise this process to track ad impressions or openings of an email. Pixel Tracking can be carried by a HTML code snippet requesting to follow user behaviours and activi- ties. When your page is visited, an image request is made by the user’s browser which communicates to the server in charge of the tracking. The various parameters are passed through a HTTP request and the server qualifies this action. The server will send a clear gif image and most often a cookie is dropped. With tracking your conversions for example, Facebook recognises site visitors from your ad campaigns. An offsite pixel is put in place to be able to carry this out. This type of pixel is referred to as offsite pixel, which is a snippet of code provided by Facebook that is placed in the <head> section of a particular page on your website. This will then send a notification to Facebook informing that a conversion is com- plete. Facebook is notified when someone has clicked on your ad, which results in being able to track that someone outside of Facebook as a result of you adding that snippet of code. You would add that offsite
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    41 pixel to asuccess page. So once a user purchases Widget 2.0, they will be directed to a success page that holds your offsite pixel. Facebook then knows that your ad resulted in a successful conversion. The brilliance of conversion tracking is the fact that Facebook makes use of Optimised CPM to deter- mine who sees your ads. Also referred to oCPM, permits advertisers to place importance to marketing aims, and deliver ads in line with those aims. Your ads or campaigns are optimised and served to those most likely to perform your aimed action. But what are you optimising? By setting up your offsite pixel, you are set to optimise checkouts, cart, leads, registrations and conver- sions and so forth. All you have to do is select the group you expect to send your ads to for positive conversion rate. There are many methods to follow with pixel tracking and a lot you can achieve. How- ever, we recommend you take the first step to follow your visitors activity before trying to tackle the more deep end stuff. Google Analytics Google Analytics is one of the best ways to get detailed knowledge about how your online marketing activities are meeting your performance goals, and giving you the information you need to decide if you should change direction or scale up your investment. The first step should be generating the best keywords for a specific target market. You should not use general terms and words that do not help to optimize the ad’s performance. Keywords can be decided based on exact match, phrase match, and broad match. If your selected keywords are very common and high-volume you will most probably end up far down on the search result list as the popular search terms will have very high bids. Focus rather on groups of 5-10 long tail keywords that you group in ad-sets. This will likely save your marketing budget and increase ROI. If you are new to Google Analytics and you don’t have an account, you should create one before proceeding further. When you have established your profile you can customise your dashboard. The dashboard give you the option to collect all the data you want to see at a glance every time you login. You can also define multiple dashboards with widgets that display charts, timelines, tables etc. to get a quick overview. With Google Analytics you can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines and social networks, direct visits and referring sites. It tracks display advertising, email marketing and pay-per-click networks. It also shows you the full customer picture across ads and videos, websites and social tools, tablets and smartphones. Information about which content keep your visitors longer on your website or which content have a high bounce rate is also key. This will allow you to produce more great content that resonates with your
  • 42.
    42 visitors and lessof the content that does not.The knowledge of where your users come from and what they do on your site will help you tailor your website and marketing to your current customers, and win new ones. Google AdWords Google AdWords is one of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your campaign. It gives you the possibility to identify the unique features of your products and services. However, if you are not man- aging your campaigns correctly, it can be a waste of valuable time and money. Another important point is to use filters. Filters are negative keywords that exclude searches including these words. Filters are also effective to analyze unsuccessful keywords that will not communicate the right messages in your campaign. If you don’t test the performance of the keywords you communicate, You risk wasting time and money on messages with low performance. • You should not underestimate the importance of the ads you are displaying on Google AdWords. These ads do not represent the image alone, they communicate effectively how the products are able to anticipate the customer needs. The consumers will click your ad only if the messages you relay will meet the their needs. Relevancy of Ads is also an important feature that plays an essential role in the PPC campaign. The ads displayed on Google AdWords are relevant only if these ads are able to reach the target market. Man- aging your ad groups correctly is vital for reaching the target market. When you create your campaigns you should avoid directing clicks to the homepage of your website. Don’t leave it to the visitor to find the information they are searching for. Sure, it will be extra work to create landing pages for every AdWords campaign, but the reward is huge. If this is done right the visitor have a clear call to action, being able to order directly or leaving their contact information on the landing page. Social Media Policies There are many aspects of social media that requires censorship. Terms of Use are typically put in place in order to prevent distribution of content that is unethical. We’ve looked into Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn policies, and here is what we found! There are many ways of expressing and displaying yourself on social media channels. Information, pictures and videos are shared by millions daily on a variety of platforms. However, the one question that comes to mind is: how safe, inoffensive or acceptable is the content that is being shared by so many?
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    43 Facebook offers usersTerms of Service that detail their policy according to “principles”. They openly state: “We do our best to keep Facebook safe, but we cannot guarantee it. We need your [the user’s] help to keep Facebook safe…” Policies to Minimise Risk At Cloudnames we know the importance of social media when shaping public thinking, especially where building an image or brand is concerned. Minimising the risks of using social media in the wrong way is vital , as wrong content can really be dam- aging to your business and reputation. Also, there are a lot of false profiles being created and too much content being shared to monitor individually. Many local Governmental bodies and authorities have a say over what can be posted on social media channels like FaceBook and Twitter that ban users that repeat violation. They can deem content as unacceptable by reserving the right to delete submissions that contain; vulgar language, personal attacks of any kind, off topic disturbances, advocating illegal activity and so forth. If you would like to see 300 plus social media policies and templates, please click on this link: http://so- cialmediagovernance.com/policies/ It’s important that you also think about where your business stands with respect to your desired relationship with audiences. You need to determine how far you want to go in utilising social media for brand recognition, engaging with your customers and for driving sales without damaging your reputa- tion or allowing others to. Twitter for example, openly admit that they “...do not guarantee the completeness, truthfulness, accu- racy, or reliability of any Content or communications posted via the Services or endorse any opinions expressed via the Services.” So being extra careful on these kinds of social networking sites is ideal. You may be exposed to content that might be offensive, harmful, inaccurate or inappropriate, or in other cases, you may receive postings that are deceptive or misleading. So what exactly are the policies of these social media giants? Let’s take a look... Facebook “We need your help to keep Facebook safe, which includes the following commitments by you...” FaceBook requests users to; not post unauthorised commercial communications such as spam, not collect users' content or information. Users are not to upload viruses or other malicious code.
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    44 Facebook also asksaccount holders to refrain from bullying, intimidating, or harassing any user and so forth as "...users are not to facilitate or encourage any violations..." of their policies. Collect all data This social media giant has currently declared that for extra security measures they collect information about users in accordance with their Data Policy. Frankly the list of data collected includes about every- thing you do on Facebook. All the things you do are recorded as data, including when you sign up for an account, what content you create or share, messages you send or communicate with others. This can include information in or about the content you provide, such as the location of a photo or the date a file was created. Facebook also compiles data about how you use their Services, such as the types of content you view or engage with or the frequency and duration of your activities. Connections Facebook also collects data about your networks and connections, such as the people you communi- cate with the most or the groups you like to share with. They also collect contact information you provide if you upload, sync or import this information (such as an address book) from a device. Facebook also own your payment information like your credit or debit card number and other card information, and other account and authentication information, as well as billing, shipping and contact details. Your devices And in case you were not aware, Facebook also collects your device information. Attributes such as the operating system, hardware version, device settings, file and software names and types, battery and signal strength, and device identifiers. Device locations, including specific geographic locations, such as through GPS, Bluetooth, or WiFi signals. Connection information such as the name of your mobile operator or ISP, browser type, language and timezone, mobile phone number and IP address. Technically Facebook has clearly covered all activity zones of a user and in obtaining information detail- ing everything about your online presence and virtual space. So preventing wrong or hurtful content should not be very difficult we’d assume.
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    45 As the highestranking social media channel in the world, the people at Facebook have really sharp- ened their pencils when it comes to aspects of data-collection and what is presumably meant to ensure the security of their users. George Orwell’s 1984 Here at Cloudnames we can’t but wonder if Mark Zuckerberg have read Orwell’s novel 1984, written in 1948. The futuristic novel describes a society where the government, referred to as “Big Brother” is monitoring every move and everything expressed. Orwell of course could not forsee Facebook or social networks, and the extreme detail they know about us all. Twitter You may use Twitter Services only if you can form a binding contract with Twitter and are not a person barred from receiving services under the laws of the United States or other applicable jurisdiction. If you accept these Terms and are using the Services on behalf of a business, organisation, govern- ment, or other legal entity, you are expected to represent and warrant the authorisation to do so. You may use the Services only in compliance with these Terms and all applicable local, state, national, and international laws, rules and regulations. All Content, whether publicly posted or privately transmitted, is the sole responsibility of the individual who created the Content. Twitter say that they “... may not monitor or control the Content posted via the Services and, we cannot take responsibility for such Content. Any use or reliance on any Content or materials posted via the Services or obtained by you through the Services is at your own risk.” You can understand that by using their Services, under no circumstances will Twitter be liable for any Content, including, but not limited to, any errors or omissions, or any loss or damage incurred as a result of the use of any Content posted, emailed, transmitted or otherwise made available via the Services. Unlike Facebook, Twitter hold rights only on title and interest to the Services excluding Content provid- ed by users. Twitter enforces rules stating “Our goal is to provide a service that allows you to discover and receive content from sources that interest you as well as to share your content with others. We respect the ownership of the content that users share and each user is responsible for the content he or she provides. Because of these principles, we do not actively monitor and will not censor user content, except in limited circumstances...”
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    46 LinkedIn By using LinkedInServices, you may encounter content or information that might be inaccurate, incomplete, delayed, misleading, illegal, offensive or harmful. LinkedIn generally does not review content provided by their Members. If you have a LinkedIn account, you are essentially agreeing that LinkedIn are not responsible for infor- mation or for any damages as result of your use of or reliance on information. Limitations LinkedIn does however reserve the right to restrict, suspend, or terminate your account if they believe that you may be in breach of this Agreement or law or are misusing the Services. Their Users Agreement specifies that it reserves the right to limit your use of the Services, including the number of your connections and your ability to contact other Members. LinkedIn reserves the right to restrict, suspend, or terminate your account if LinkedIn believes that you may be in breach of this Agreement or law or are misusing the Services. Criteria LinkedIn also provides a list of ‘Do’s and Dont’s’, which we care to share with you because we believe these guidelines are perhaps appropriately put together which should apply to all social media chan- nels; Do’s- in compliance with the User Agreement and Privacy Policy, users must provide accurate informa- tion that is updated on a regular basis, use your real name and details to create a profile and to use their services in a professional manner. As for the Dont’s- the list is considerably long, so here are essential criterias that we think are worthy of mentioning. They start by alerting users not to “Act dishonestly or unprofessionally…” including posting inappropri- ate, false, or unacceptable content. Do not submit a telephone number in the “title” or any other field, or include email addresses, street addresses or any personally identifiable information for which there is not a field provided by LinkedIn. Dont’s: • Use an image that is not your likeness or a head-shot photo for your profile; • Create a false identity on LinkedIn; • Misrepresent your current or previous positions and qualifications; • Misrepresent your affiliations with a person or entity, past or present; • Misrepresent your identity, including but not limited to the use of a pseudonym; • Create a Member profile for anyone other than yourself (a real person);
  • 47.
    47 • Invite peopleyou do not know to join your network; • Use or attempt to use another's account; • Harass, abuse or harm another person; • Send spam or other unwelcomed communications to others; • Scrape or copy profiles and information of others through any means (including crawlers, browser plugins and add-ons, and any other technology or manual work); • Act in an unlawful, libelous, abusive, obscene, discriminatory or otherwise objectionable manner; Create profiles or provide content that promotes escort services or prostitution. And the list goes on. The one thing about LinkedIn compared to Facebook and Twitter is the serious- ness of their extensive compliance expectation of users, which puts users at ease.
  • 48.
    48 HOW CLOUDNAMES CANHELP YOU Cloudnames is a full service cloud solution provider. We offer a wide range of services from leading cloud companies like Amazon, Google, Zendesk, Salesforce and many others. Our focus is to integrate the market leading cloud solutions and deliver a managed service to our customers. We take care of the integration, design, provisioning, management, security and all other complicated stuff, so you can lean back and focus on operating your core business. We make sure your IT-services are working and delivered as a true integrated cloud service. We can make you look incredible online! HOW CLOUDNAMES CAN HELP YOU Cloudnames offers a virtual hosting environment that uses multiple servers at once, rather than one specific, physical centre. Its benefits are wide-ranging; not only is it secure, good value and quick, but it’s also extremely reliable. Because the technology harnesses multiple servers, if one goes down another will always carry the load. Its multi-server structure also means it’s scalable, which is a big plus if your website has the poten- tial for growth. Cloudnames solutions offer customers the highest standards of security, reliability and ease of use. We use only the best infrastructure, such as the amazingly fast and reliable cloud services from Google and Amazon. There are many ways to offer web-hosting services. The vast majority of hosting companies have one server room and one line to the Internet. That’s why their services are slow and unavailable from time to time. Now imagine if you could have access to the absolute best platform and at an affordable price. That is what we offer at Cloudnames, dreams can come true after all. We have built our services on the Amazon EC2 web services Cloud platform and according to Amazon, Cloudnames is “a first mover”, which we take pride in. We offer our services on the Amazon cloud platform, it’s well proven to offer top of the line speed, security, reliability and scalability. Amazon EC2 is proven to meet the highest industry security standards, protecting customers against malicious behaviour such as hacking and virus attacks. We also provide extensive, regular back up facilities, with the best rollback options to retrieve lost data. Our cloud technology makes it easy to scale up quickly and can handle traffic peaks or growing demand without customers experiencing poor loading time or access problems.
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    49 CLOUDNAMES DOMAIN NAMES Itall starts with a domain name. You need an address for your online activity and Cloudnames offers more than 200 different top level domains. Go directly to order.cloudnames.com and find your perfect domain name. CLOUDNAMES APPS Our platform is integrated with Google’s web services so you can have seamless Google email and Google Apps accessible for your team at any time, anywhere and from any device. In addition we offer many other cloud apps to power your business, like newsletter management, security solutions, e-commerce and payment solutions. Also if you want to design your website we offer the market leading WordPress CMS solution as a managed cloud hosting service. CLOUDNAMES MANAGED WEB DESIGN PACKAGES Most hosting service providers offer traditional services. They leave it to customers to design their web pages or simply hire a web designer. That’s why many companies have static websites that have not been updated for a long time. At Cloudnames we offer well managed web design to ensure our customers always have modern looking web pages with high quality services for their own customers. Our subscriptions are affordable web design packages tailored to your needs, making sure that your web presence is updated on a regular basis. We consistently update the security measures and make sure your backend software, themes and plugins are updated to eliminate security risks and bugs. We use the latest technology, with modern responsive designs to develop your web pages and add the web services your customers deserve. Our web design products are continuously revamped and on a regular basis your website will be updated with new and better versions of design and the services you want to offer to your customers. CLOUDNAMES SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION MANAGEMENT Having a beautiful and functional website is beneficial for your business, but it is also only the first step in building a profitable online presence. The next step should be to make sure potential customers searching for your services online will find you.
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    50 Many regard searchEngine Optimization (SEO) as an art form and hence it may be a good idea to work with experts on SEO to make sure you rank good in search engines. SEO is about making a great user experience, building authority through links, title tagging, great content and many other elements. We can take care of your SEO with our managed SEO service, where we offer different levels of SEO depending on your ambitions. For SEO Management you are required to have a Business web design management package. Custom- er must develop keywords, links and content, but we will advise on quality and give recommendations on improvements. CLOUDNAMES SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING MANAGEMENT When you finally have a good looking and functional website, we can help you tell the world. We offer a very flexible marketing management service; we use the most effective technologies, tools and media to spread awareness at very affordable prices. Cloudnames can help you manage communication with your existing customers and target new prospects in line with growing your business. Our Social Media experts will tailor your campaigns with every tiny detail in mind, and make sure that you get the best possible results from your marketing budget. And our tools will give you a descriptive report on the effect of your campaigns. The beauty of Social Media marketing is that you can start with a small budget and increase as your customer base grows. For SMM management you are required to have an advanced web design package. All products include tweaking, modifying and the progression of your messages to maximise the results of your campaign, using these set of tools to manage a campaign is roughly 50% of the cost of customer media coverage.
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