DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGIES AND CHANNELS TO DRIVE DEMAND GENERATION AND ROI

DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGIES AND CHANNELS TO DRIVE DEMAND GENERATION AND ROI
July 2013 Microsoft Hosting Service Provider Marketing Resources
Brian Carter, Ted Eisele, Victoria Magaz

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Table of Contents
Executive Summary ....................................................................................................................................... 6
How to Get Digital Marketing Results ........................................................................................................... 6
Microsoft Offer Assets .............................................................................................................................. 7
Digital Marketing Channels: The Big Picture ............................................................................................. 7
Advertising Budgets .................................................................................................................................. 7
Table 1: How to Use the Microsoft Offer Assets in Each Channel ............................................................ 8
Create a Launch Page or Site for Your Offer ............................................................................................... 10
Launch Site vs. Launch Page ................................................................................................................... 11
SEO of a New Website ........................................................................................................................ 11
Takeaways ............................................................................................................................................... 11
Web Analytics ............................................................................................................................................. 11
Choosing Your Metrics ........................................................................................................................ 11
Real Time Analytics, Heat Maps and Phone Calls ................................................................................... 13
Bing Analytics .......................................................................................................................................... 13
Takeaways ............................................................................................................................................... 13
More Resources ...................................................................................................................................... 13
Email Marketing .......................................................................................................................................... 14
Return on Investment ............................................................................................................................. 14
Main Principles ........................................................................................................................................ 14
Grow Your Email List with Content Marketing ....................................................................................... 14
Mix Email Marketing With Other Digital Channels ................................................................................. 15
Takeaways ............................................................................................................................................... 15
More Resources ...................................................................................................................................... 15
Search Advertising ...................................................................................................................................... 15
Return on Investment ............................................................................................................................. 15
Main Principles ........................................................................................................................................ 15
Creating Ads ............................................................................................................................................ 16
Takeaways ............................................................................................................................................... 17
More resources ....................................................................................................................................... 17
Search Engine Optimization ........................................................................................................................ 17
Overview of SEO...................................................................................................................................... 17

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Search Engine Optimization Intro Videos ............................................................................................... 18
Main principles, Step by step processes ................................................................................................. 19
First Find the Most Relevant and Popular Keywords .......................................................................... 19
Takeaways ............................................................................................................................................... 20
More Resources ...................................................................................................................................... 21
Remarketing/Retargeting ........................................................................................................................... 21
Digital Marketing Mistake: Too Few Exposures ...................................................................................... 21
Main Principles ........................................................................................................................................ 21
How to Use Offer Marketing Assets with Retargeting ............................................................................ 22
Takeaways ............................................................................................................................................... 22
More Resources ...................................................................................................................................... 22
Social Media Overview ................................................................................................................................ 22
Success Stories & Return on Investment ................................................................................................ 22
Include Proactive Campaigns in Your Social Media Mix ......................................................................... 22
Additional Value Driven by Social Media ................................................................................................ 23
Use Social Channels That Fit Your Campaign .......................................................................................... 24
Competitive Intelligence Applies To Social Marketing, Too ................................................................... 27
Editorial Calendar for All Social Posts ..................................................................................................... 28
Best days for certain content types .................................................................................................... 29
Weekly Schedule, Monthly Schedule .................................................................................................. 29
Takeaways ............................................................................................................................................... 29
Content Marketing to Engage and Persuade .............................................................................................. 29
Old Spice’s Funny Commercials + YouTube = ROI ............................................................................... 29
Social Benefits of Content Marketing ................................................................................................. 29
SEO Benefits of Content Marketing .................................................................................................... 30
Main Principles ........................................................................................................................................ 30
Which Types of Content Are Most Effective? ......................................................................................... 31
Tweets and Facebook Posts .................................................................................................................... 32
Using Microsoft Assets ............................................................................................................................ 32
Memes .................................................................................................................................................... 32
Takeaways ............................................................................................................................................... 32
More Resources ...................................................................................................................................... 33

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Facebook Ads .............................................................................................................................................. 33
Success Stories ........................................................................................................................................ 33
Daddies Board Shop Achieves $$45,000 Revenue Annually At 1132% ROI........................................ 33
Samsung Maybe Gets 1200% ROI With Facebook Ads? ..................................................................... 33
Premium Drinks Business Achieves 500% ROI from Facebook ........................................................... 33
Canvas People’s Facebook Ads Yield 150% ROI .................................................................................. 34
A Broadway Musical Achieves 877% ROI with Facebook Page and Ads ............................................. 34
Test It: Digital Marketing Is a Customer Insight Laboratory ................................................................... 34
Get Granular: Detailed Tracking Leads to More Control ........................................................................ 34
Getting Fans ............................................................................................................................................ 35
Capturing the Wrong Audience .......................................................................................................... 35
Boosting the Reach of Your Posts ........................................................................................................... 35
Targeting your customers ....................................................................................................................... 35
Creating Effective Ads ............................................................................................................................. 35
Facebook Ad Example ............................................................................................................................. 36
Takeaways ............................................................................................................................................... 36
More Resources ...................................................................................................................................... 36
Facebook Posts ........................................................................................................................................... 36
Being Boring Makes You Invisible ........................................................................................................... 36
Getting Sales from Facebook Posting ..................................................................................................... 37
Why You Must Achieve Big Reach .......................................................................................................... 37
Takeaways ............................................................................................................................................... 39
More Resources ...................................................................................................................................... 39
LinkedIn Groups .......................................................................................................................................... 39
Success Stories & ROI .............................................................................................................................. 39
Main Principles ........................................................................................................................................ 40
Strategizing Your Group’s Purpose & Name ........................................................................................... 40
Grow Your Membership .......................................................................................................................... 40
Send a Weekly Announcement Email ..................................................................................................... 40
Takeaways ............................................................................................................................................... 41
More Resources ...................................................................................................................................... 41
LinkedIn Ads ................................................................................................................................................ 41

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Success Stories ........................................................................................................................................ 41
Limitations .............................................................................................................................................. 41
Targeting Your Customers ...................................................................................................................... 41
Creating Effective Ads ............................................................................................................................. 42
Takeaways ............................................................................................................................................... 43
More Resources ...................................................................................................................................... 43
LinkedIn Prospecting With Advanced Search ............................................................................................. 43
Success Stories ........................................................................................................................................ 43
Main Principles ........................................................................................................................................ 44
Advanced Search ..................................................................................................................................... 44
Mapping Out the Target Company ......................................................................................................... 46
Reaching Decision Makers & Other Stakeholders .................................................................................. 46
InMail ...................................................................................................................................................... 47
Takeaways ............................................................................................................................................... 47
More Resources ...................................................................................................................................... 47
Twitter ......................................................................................................................................................... 47
Success Stories ........................................................................................................................................ 47
Main principles for Twitter, Step by Step Processes .............................................................................. 48
Limitations and Best Uses ....................................................................................................................... 48
Marketing & Visibility .......................................................................................................................... 48
Customer Service ................................................................................................................................ 48
Targeting Your Customers ...................................................................................................................... 48
Creating Effective Tweets ....................................................................................................................... 48
Takeaways ............................................................................................................................................... 48
More Resources ...................................................................................................................................... 49
Webinars ..................................................................................................................................................... 49
Pros and Cons .......................................................................................................................................... 49
Webinar Topics People Will want to see ................................................................................................ 49
Promoting Webinars ............................................................................................................................... 49
Running Effective Webinars .................................................................................................................... 50
Takeaways ............................................................................................................................................... 50
More Resources ...................................................................................................................................... 50

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Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................... 50

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Executive Summary
Digital marketing has now been growing and evolving for more than a decade. The major components of digital marketing are search engine optimization and advertising, email marketing, content marketing, media placement (banner advertising), social media and advertising, affiliate marketing and mobile marketing. Each has strengths and weaknesses, and there’s no one recipe for all businesses. B2B marketers and B2C marketers use different strategies and channels. Hosting Service Providers who provide Microsoft based offers fall under the B2B marketing heading.
Most B2B marketers use a combination of strategies. We understand that email marketing can be a very high ROI strategy since the audience has already opted in and may already be a customer who is upgrading to more services. Many companies have been doing SEO and search advertising for 5-10 years. Search marketing is a high ROI activity when you focus on the right keywords. SEO is becoming more and more difficult, demanding high quality content and social promotion of that content. Social marketers are finding that organic activities only go so far and are using LinkedIn and Facebook ads to go further. In this eBook, we will walk you through the different strategies and tactics that will help to define the best digital marketing strategies for your business such as:
• How to improve your natural traffic with SEO
• Use your search ad spend effectively
• Increase your marketing ROI
• Get results with social media marketing
• Use our pre-chosen tweets and SEO keywords to promote MS offers
• Find out how other companies are succeeding
• Find new customers and stand out in the marketplace
At the end of the day, we are looking for digital marketing campaigns that we can track and show ROI.
How to Get Digital Marketing Results
To get digital marketing results, you need to treat each channel and strategy differently. Often there’s a learning curve for new opportunities. For example, Facebook ads are so different from search ads, that they initially confuse specialists who’ve done a great job with search ads. Take time to learn what’s different about each channel and adapt your tactics. Decide on a goal, choose a key performance indicator (KPI) to measure success, set a value to benchmark against, and then deploy tests within that new channel. You’ll test multiple ads, tweets, and content pieces. Measure each campaign with your KPI, learn what works and doesn’t, and adjust your approach accordingly.

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Microsoft Offer Assets
Microsoft provides you access through the Partner Marketing Center to many different campaigns. We have built a specific Hosted Services Provider campaign that has customizable assets for Hosting Service Provider offers based on Microsoft technology. Some offers have deeper assets than others. Table 1 below gives specifics of how to use each asset in each marketing channel. You will find some channels more demanding than others, and may want to hire outside consultants to help you strategize, execute, and track results.
Digital Marketing Channels: The Big Picture
You may not be able to use all channels initially, and you may already be engaged in some of these. How each company moves forward will differ. The following is a prioritized list of digital marketing channels we recommend for Hosting Service Providers:
1. Landing pages for offers
2. Web analytics
3. Email Marketing
4. Search Advertising
5. Search Engine Optimization
6. Remarketing/Retargeting
7. Social Media Overview
8. Content Marketing to Engage and Persuade
9. Facebook Ads and Posts
10. LinkedIn Ads and Group
11. Webinars
12. Twitter
Advertising Budgets
Your advertising budget is really important as it will dictate much you will need to allocate across main stream digital marketing channels as well as search engine and social media channels. How much should you budget for each channel? The following pie chart is our recommendation to start with on the newer digital marketing channels such as social search engine and social media - as we believe you can achieve a better ROI:

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LinkedIn is considered more B2B than Facebook, but fewer people go to LinkedIn, so you may have trouble spending a large percentage of your ad budget on it, because people spend less time there. On Facebook, you can actually target people by job title, age, and company they work at, and Facebook gets roughly eight times as much traffic as LinkedIn does.
Table 1: How to Use the Microsoft Offer Assets in Each Channel Channel Websites as a Service Windows Server Hosted SQL DB Hosted Business Continuity Database as a Service Hosted Desktop & Apps Business Apps Hosted Applications
Launch Site/ Page
Use template and adapt with conversation guide and sales reference cards
Use the included landing page and customize for your company
Use template and adapt with web copy and telesales guide
Use template and adapt with copy blocks, 1 pager, 2 pager and sales card
Use template and adapt with copy blocks 1 pager and sales ref card
Use template and adapt with content from the sales
Search Ads, 40%
Retargeting Ads, 5%
LinkedIn Ads, 15%
Facebook Ads, 40%
Allocating B2B Ad Spends

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reference cards
Email Marketing
Use template and adapt with conversation guide and sales reference cards
Use the included email template and customize to your company
Use template and adapt with web copy and telesales guide
Use template and adapt with copy blocks and sales card
Use template and adapt with content from the copy blocks, 1 pager and sales ref card
Use template and adapt with content from the sales reference cards
Search Ads
Write using the conversation guide and sales reference cards
Write using sales ref cards and conversation guide
Write using the web copy and telesales guide
Write using copy blocks
Write using the copy blocks, 1 pager and sales ref card
Write using the conversation guide and sales ref card
Write using the sales ref cards
Write using the Hosted Exchange 2013 Messaging Framework
SEO Keywords
When placing assets on webpages, use keywords from the SEO keywords document
Coming soon!
Remarketing
Create a remarketing audience for websites as a service webpages and show them different ads
Create a remarketing audience for windows server hosted webpages and show them different ads
Create a remarketing audience for SQL hosted webpages and show them different ads
Create a remarketing audience for business continuity webpages and show them different ads
Create a remarketing audience for DBaaS webpages and show them different ads
Create a remarketing audience for hosted desktop and apps webpages and show them different ads
Create a remarketing audience for business apps webpages and show them different ads
Create a remarketing audience for Hosted Application webapges and show them different ads
Twitter
Start with tweets in the packaged tweets document and write
Start with tweets in the packaged tweets document
Start with tweets in the packaged tweets docume
Start with tweets in the packaged tweets document
Coming soon!

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more from the
more from the
more from the
and write more from the copy blocks
more from the
nt and write more from the
and write more from the sales reference cards
Content Marketing
Write blog posts on the topics referred to in the assets
Facebook Ads
Use assets to inspire ad copy
Facebook Posts
Use assets to think about your audience and what they want to read about
Use assets to think about your audience and what they want to read about, also share the included infographic
LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn Groups
Use assets to think about what topics your group should cover
Use assets to think about what topics your group should cover, also share the included infographic
Create a Launch Page or Site for Your Offer
Each Microsoft hosting offer comes with either a landing page specific to that offer, or with a landing page template you can customize to fit your company. If you don’t see a custom one, use the generic

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template for example. Insert your logo, web address and other contact info, key benefits and other information to complete the landing page.
Be sure to read our SEO guidance and customize the landing page’s title tag, meta description, and header tags to include the most relevant keyword.
Launch Site vs. Launch Page
Note that if you have a choice between putting the landing page on a new website, new subdomain, or subfolder of your main site, the subfolder is the best choice, because then this page will benefit the most from your site’s accumulated age and authority, and your landing page will be much more likely to rank in the top 10 search results for important keywords. In order to make sure this happens, it’s best to put a link to your landing pages somewhere on your homepage, even if it’s near the bottom and out of the way. This will help the search engines find your landing page and pass your website’s authority on to it.
SEO of a New Website
If you decide for branding reasons to launch your offer on a separate site or subdomain, don’t count on SEO being easy- instead, you’ll need to allocate serious advertising budget to drive traffic to it. You may still want to link to the new site from your main website, for the reasons mentioned above. But ranking a completely new website well naturally will take time as well as links from other sites.
Takeaways
 Landing pages may be better than completely new websites
 Do basic keyword placement on your new landing pages
 Use advertising to drive new traffic quickly
Web Analytics
If you can't quantify the effects of what you're doing, how do you know if it's working? If you can't measure one technique versus another, how do you know which one works better? And most important, when the profits aren't there, how do you narrow down which part of your funnel is to blame?
Without web analytics, you can't see what visitors are doing and, just as importantly, what they're not doing on your website. You can't diagnose problems or determine your degree of success. You have no insight.
Without a clearly quantified picture of your business, all your ideas, the new inspirations or troubleshooting fixes alike, are shots in the dark. This is a good way to waste a lot of time and money and miss out on bigger successes and profits.
Choosing Your Metrics
With any new marketing or sales initiative, we begin with a goal, decide on a strategy to reach it. We select a key performance indicator (KPI) for the goal, and may measure success based on a certain value for that KPI. For the purposes of this ROI discussion, we’d prefer our KPI’s be near the bottom of the

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funnel, and revenue or profit-related. All of this is just part of the sales funnel, and what happens at the bottom of the funnel is dependent upon how earlier parts of the funnel are managed.
KPI’s For Each Part of the Sales Funnel
Let’s take a brief look at the sales funnel (above) and the most common digital marketing metrics:
Phase of Funnel
Strategies
Typical Metrics
1. Awareness
Branding, Advertising, Contests, TV ads, Magazine ads
Impressions, Reach, Frequency
2. Interest
Advertising, Content Marketing, Facebook Page
Clicks, Clickthrough Rate, Likes, Comments, Shares, Conversion Rate (Lead Gen)
3. Desire
Content Marketing, Advertising Retargeting, Facebook Page, Marketing Automation, Email Marketing
Lead Score, Remarketing Clickthrough Rate, Return Visits, Pages Viewed, Time on Site
4. Action
Conversion Optimization, Offer Testing & Price Optimization, Facebook Page, Email Marketing
Sales, Revenue, Conversion Rate, Cost Per Customer, ROI
5. Loyalty
Loyalty program, Facebook Page, LinkedIn Group
Customer Lifetime Value, True ROI
Your funnel and its strategies and metrics may differ somewhat from this table. The most important thing is that you have one KPI and at least one strategy per phase of the funnel. You can use more than one metric per phase, but prioritize one highest and call it the KPI. Set target values for these KPI’s, and improve the effectiveness of each strategy.
Awareness
Interest
Desire
Action
Loyalty

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We want to see increases in the metric in each phase. Often you don’t know what a good value is for a metric until you start. Let your first campaigns set your benchmarks. You can also look at the performance of other companies in your niche with content competitive intelligence tools like InfiniGraph to set interaction benchmarks. Then continually strive to improve all of your metrics.
Real Time Analytics, Heat Maps and Phone Calls
There’s the typical web traffic and unique visitor perspective on web analytics, and then there’s watching users interact with your site in real time, and analyzing where people click and where they don’t. No analytics package has every feature, and they all work differently, so consider having a second and third opinion about what’s going on your website.
Real-time analytics help you see what users are doing on your website right now. These solutions include Woopra, Clicky, and KissMetrics. Heat maps show you where people are and aren’t clicking on your website, and even can show you how users move their mouse across each page. Heat map providers include CrazyEgg and ClickTale.
Some businesses rely to a large extent on leads and sales that come via phone calls. These present an analytics challenge. If someone buys or contacts you online, it’s easier to track what marketing channel was responsible. But if someone calls you, how do you know something like what keyword they searched before that? Advanced phone call tracking solutions like Mongoose Metrics are the answer.
Bing Analytics
If your website doesn’t already have analytics, take a look at Bing’s Webmaster Tools. Once you’re up and running you’ll be able to run reports on traffic to your website and even check your website against 15 common SEO best practices. We recommend everyone install this deep and valuable tool.
Takeaways
 Decide on a key metric for each of your marketing goals
 Implement web analytics tools- and you may need consider more than one
 Change marketing strategies and tactics based on what the analytics tell you is working and is not
More Resources
 Bing Webmaster Tools
 Yahoo Web Analytics
 Piwik – Free Web Analytics Software
 Avinish Kaushik – One of the Best Known Thought Leaders In Web Analytics

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Email Marketing
Return on Investment
Email marketing is usually the highest ROI digital marketing channel. This is because the people who have opted into your email list are either already customers or are highly interested prospects. It’s not as difficult to get them to purchase.
Main Principles
Email marketing, for most companies, is about accumulating their most interested customers into an opt-in list that allows you to send news and announcements to them. Most companies send a monthly email, but some do so as often as every two weeks, or even weekly. Some companies don’t email regularly, and may only email when they have something special to say. The downside of this is that if people aren’t sent an email by you very often, they may forget they signed up and accuse you of spamming them.
Microsoft has created email templates you can modify to contact your database about hosting offers. For example, here’s a Hosted Desktop Email template:
Fill in the blanks, and send it out!
Grow Your Email List with Content Marketing
Most companies grow their email lists by giving people a reason to give them your email. The most basic way to do this is to allow people to sign up for news and offers, but this isn’t very interesting, so you won’t get as many of your website visitors as you could have.
The most powerful way to grow emails is to develop your own content, such as whitepapers, eBooks, videos, podcasts and free training. You can make this visible from your homepage, through social

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accounts and via advertising. For example, you might create a short eBook about how to select a Database as a Service offer, and how companies adapt to them and leverage the offers to be more efficient and cost-effective.
Before you develop and market this content, make sure you understand who your target market is and what their job title is. You will be able to promote this content via social media advertising, targeting job titles with LinkedIn and Facebook ads. On LinkedIn, you can also target by company size, industry, and other criteria.
Mix Email Marketing With Other Digital Channels
Most people don’t want sales emails more often than every two weeks. That means that emails are for special occasion announcements, not everyday topics. You can tweet smaller aspects of the benefits and features of your hosting offer in 140 characters. You can say a bit more than that on Facebook (most companies don’t post messages much longer than a few hundred words). So use email to say things that take longer than that to get across.
Takeaways
 Email marketing is essential and often the highest ROI digital marketing channel
 Don’t email too often (weekly) but don’t go more than a month without emailing either, or your list may forget about you
 Email using the offer email templates or modify the general offer template
More Resources
 Tips on Email Marketing
 Creating an Email Strategy
 How to Put Sizzle In Your Email Marketing
 10 Rules For Successful Permission Based Email Marketing
Search Advertising
Return on Investment
Search advertising is one of the most powerful online channels, because the traffic starts as soon as you’ve created your ads and ad groups- you don’t have to wait, the way you do with SEO. And search ads can be more powerful than social media in that by targeting keywords that signal you that the searcher is ready to buy, you can recoup your cost per click quickly. By comparison, sometimes social media fans and followers may engage with your brand but not be ready to buy. Search ads are the quickest way to create profits from online sales.
Main Principles
SEO and Search ads are similar in that both involve the keywords that searchers are entering into search engines. You begin with keyword research, choose the keywords most relevant to your business, group them into ad groups containing similar keywords, and then create ads that fit each ad group. These ads

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are personalized to fit the keyword searched for, so they are highly relevant to the searcher. You can test multiple ads against each ad group and discover which ad creates the best ROI or lowest cost per lead for you. By pausing ads that underperform and continuing to test more ads, you can significantly improve your profits and gain a competitive advantage.
Let’s look at an example.
Suppose you want to promote the Database as a Service offer.
1. In Bing Ads, go to campaigns and click on create campaign.
2. Scroll down to the keyword section and click on “research”
3. You can type in words to research or a URL- one clever way to do the latter is search Bing for “database as a service”, find a competitor in the ads or rankings, and then have Bing analyze that URL for keywords.
4. Try a keyword like “database as a service”. Again, the keywords were too general, so try “database hosting”. What comes back are keywords like “web hosting”, “database host” and “sql hosting”.
5. Put the most relevant keywords you’ve found into the keywords section, or check the boxes of the keywords you want and click on add. Add broad, phrase, exact and content, for now.
6. Create an ad (don’t worry about it being perfect, because you’re going to test several). The ad should make sense to the people who are searching for the keywords you’ve added. If the keywords aren’t as specific as you’d like, be specific in the ad about what you’re offering.
7. Enter your campaign settings
8. Save
Creating Ads
When you create ads, make sure they’re highly relevant to the keywords in your ad group. The most effective trick is to include the exact words and phrases from your keyword list in the ad. And then you have to make your ad more attractive than your competitors’ ads. Some of the offers include assets like “copy blocks” and you can use these ideas from which to write your ads.
For example, in the DBaaS assets, the copy blocks document includes ideas like scaling quickly and easily. When you read these copy blocks, look out for features and benefits, because benefits are more powerful, but you also need to tell people how they’ll get the benefits, and the features are the “how”. In this case, scalability is a feature, and the benefit is that you avoid time and budget wastes. You save time on planning your expansions. “Pay only for the resources you need” is a very powerful way to say that, already in the copy blocks asset. Use that.
Create two or three more ads this way. Ask yourself how the service helps your clients. Ask your coworkers. Turn these ideas into more ads.
Don’t create more than 4-5 ads, though, because you need each ad to get clicks so you can see which one works the best, and the more ads you create, the more this test costs over all. Once you know which ad is best and pause the underperformers, your account begins to operate at a higher profitability level.

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Takeaways
 Search ads get you traffic much faster than SEO
 Both search ads and SEO require good keyword research
 Test a lot of ads so you find the ones people respond to best
More resources
 What’s a Bing ad?
 Bing Ads Editorial Guidelines
 Best Practices To Avoid Ad Disapprovals
 Bing’s SlideShare Presentations
Search Engine Optimization
Overview of SEO
Search Engine Optimization includes many factors, some of which are beyond the scope of an introduction (see chart below). Consider having your site audited by a professional, especially if you’ve added keywords to your site, have links from many other sites, but still do not rank as well as your competition. Your site may have technical errors or programming that interferes with the normal processes of search engines. If you’ve had SEO done in the past and your results are not good, you should also have an audit to check whether the SEO company took shortcuts and broke rules that led to search engine penalties.

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Search Engine Optimization Intro Videos
Bing has provided a set of SEO tutorials taught by Duane Forrester, part of the Bing Webmaster Tools team:
 SEO Part 1: Paid vs. Organic Search
 SEO Part 2: Why SEO Matters
 SEO Part 3: Keyword Research
 SEO Part 4: On Page SEO
 SEO Part 5: User Experience
 SEO Part 6: Analytics

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Main principles, Step by step processes
Our first recommendations are to use Bing Webmaster Tools, and submit a Sitemap. The webmaster tools package provides you with great analytics and SEO insights for your site specifically. A sitemap helps Bing and other search engines find and rank all your webpages.
First Find the Most Relevant and Popular Keywords
Most of what you do in search is driven by keywords - the phrases web searchers type into search engines. You can research the best ones to use when creating your search advertising campaigns. You can do keyword research from within Bing Ads, or the Bing Webmaster Tools.
1. You take your topics and find keywords
2. Then narrow it down to relevant keywords
3. Then choose the most popular ones for your final list
For example, if we research Bing for keywords related to Windows Server Hosted, we get the following results (keyword, number of searches per month).
 dedicated server hosting 14,568
 windows hosting 11,269
 server hosting 5,950
 web server hosting 2,807
 managed server hosting 2,749
 windows web hosting 1,469
 windows vps hosting 1,346
 microsoft windows server 856
 windows server hosting 731
 dedicated windows server 629
 dedicated windows servers 593
 windows servers 581
 windows dedicated servers 579
 windows server web hosting 521
 windows server host 509
 teamspeak server hosting 307
 uk server hosting 269
 servers hosting 255
 hosted windows server 176
 counter strike server hosting 133
 remote server hosting 119
 best server hosting 50
 server hosting costs 14

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Some of these you might eliminate like UK Server Hosting if you offer hosting only in the U.S. Generally, the most popular keywords are the best ones to use. Also you may notice that some topics are missing from your list.
For our purposes, however, the simplest thing is to use our SEO Keywords Document for the best keywords for each offer.
Place the Keywords in Your Webpage
One of the main ways to rank better in search results for specific keywords is to use these keywords in your webpages.
Which webpages? You might place some of these keywords in your homepage or throughout your site, if they’re globally important to your whole site (e.g. “windows hosting”). Or you might place a keyword like “dedicated Windows Servers” in specific sections or landing pages that deal with that service. You can place both general and specific keywords in a landing page.
Where do you place the keywords?
Here are the most important place to put keywords in a page:
 The Title Tag: Write your title tag from specific to general so that the first thing is what this specific page is about, then perhaps a category keyword, then the company name last. Separate them with pipes. For example: Windows Server Hosting | Dedicated Server Hosting | CoolHostingCompany.Com
 H1 or H2: Header tags are an integral part of HTML, but not everyone uses them as they’re intended. They are meant to be used as a nested list- the H1 is usually the topic of this particular webpage, then H2’s are subtopics, H3’s are subtopics of the H2 subtopics, and so on. For example, if your page is about Windows Server Hosting, make that the H1.
 Internal Links: Links to this page from other pages on your website may contain the main keyword you are focusing on here.
 Image ALT attributes: Any image you have on the page can be explained or summarized with an ALT attribute. This is another good place to put your main keyword for the page. These are used by visually impaired people who have the computer read them the ALT text so they don’t miss out on what the images are, so make sure your ALT attribute is a good summary of the image, not just a keyword.
 Body text: This is any of the normal text you’ve written on your page. Keep in mind that it’s best if this is actual text, not just text in an image, because search engines read the HTML but cannot necessarily read text in images. Don’t overuse your keyword here. Use it at least once. Once per 300 words is about the most you’ll want to use it. Using keywords too much can results in ranking penalties. You will actually rank worse if you “over optimize”.
Takeaways
 SEO begins with keyword research
 If you’ve never done SEO, get an audit and at least do the fundamental on page SEO of placing the best keywords in the right places on your site

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 SEO can be extremely complicated and your website designers and previous SEO companies can sometimes create problems for you
 Make sure your SEO company is up to date, not using tactics from 2-3 years ago
 At a certain point, further SEO improvement requires exceptional content and promotion
More Resources
 What Every Leader Needs to Know About SEO
 Free SEO Beginner’s Guide from SEOmoz
 SEO Book
Remarketing/Retargeting
Digital Marketing Mistake: Too Few Exposures
In our experience doing social media for companies, almost no one gets trackable ROI from social advertising alone. Only when it’s combined with owned media strategies do we see sales.
You need to reach a lot of people, and you need to reach them more than once. The old marketing adage is that people need to see your ad seven times in order to buy. Actually, the number depends on who you talk to - and until we have perfect analytics and flying cars and hoverboards we won’t know what it is. But it makes sense - here’s how we often experience marketing as consumers:
1. You see a commercial and it barely registers.
2. You see it again and think, “I like this commercial.”
3. You see it a third time and think “Oh, maybe I should get that.”
4. A friend talks about it favorably and you think, “I should probably get that.”
5. You experience the downside of the problem it solves and decide to get it.
6. You have time to get it but forget to.
7. You see another ad and go out and get it then.
That’s just a rough example of the process, but it has verisimilitude, doesn’t it? This argues in favor of owned media like fans, groups, email lists, and retargeting audiences. The benefits of retargeting are:
1. Appear bigger and more important
2. Get people to return to your website
3. Remain top of mind in buyers’ minds
4. Get more sales from the advertising and marketing dollars you’ve already spent.
Main Principles
Remarketing can be conducted on Bing/Yahoo, Facebook and other search engines. Each requires a piece of JavaScript code to be placed on the website, and then an audience of visitors builds. Ads can be shown on each ad network’s properties (Bing and Yahoo, Facebook itself, and websites that show search engine ads). You can specify how many days each person remains in the audience, and you can cap the maximum number of impressions you want people to see per day, week or month. Each ad network varies in the type of ads you can show to previous website visitors.

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Facebook FBX can only be managed via an API partner. Several companies now offer FBX management, including Optim.al, AdRoll and Chango.
How to Use Offer Marketing Assets with Retargeting
In the same way that you would write Bing ads or Facebook ads from the offers, landing pages or copy blocks, create ads that drive people back to your offers landing pages. Your retargeting audience should already be familiar with your company, so branding is less of a concern. Focus on the offer and its benefits.
Takeaways
 These days, retargeting is a big advantage. Do it.
 Most people need to see your offer and company multiple times before they’ll buy.
 Do retargeting on multiple ad networks to increase your reach.
More Resources
 Microsoft Re-Messaging
 Facebook FBX Retargeting
 AdWords Remarketing
Social Media Overview
Success Stories & Return on Investment
The literature on positive ROI from social media is surprisingly diverse. There’s no pattern to these companies’ size, type, industry, or focus. Both B2B and B2C companies have achieved positive ROI with social media marketing.
For the benefit of the most skeptical, we focus on campaigns with ROI that is clearly calculated from marketing cost and revenue. Thus, the ability to track social media through a sale is a requirement for this kind of case study. There are many other case studies detailing social media’s ability to capture prospects for repeat marketing exposure and increase engagement and loyalty.
There have been many more positive ROI social campaigns in the last few years than non-disclosure agreements allow us to share. Often, the companies with the agility and ability to track, and the willingness to share the details of their success are the smaller ones. These ROI case studies are found in the Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn sections of this guide.
Include Proactive Campaigns in Your Social Media Mix
In the early days of social media, before Facebook was a viable marketing option, when Twitter dominated and people with all sorts of job titles entered the field, much of the focus was on customer service and sentiment analysis. Rarely, if ever, did you hear about a lean direct marketing campaign with measurable ROI. Now it’s clear that social media can serve many functions, including PR, customer service, market research, direct marketing, and branding.

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It’s time to look at how the PR and customer service fields have dominated social media and given it a predominantly “reactive” orientation. These are useful approaches, but don’t fit into an actionable goal- oriented marketing campaign. Many companies who’ve succeeded on Facebook are operating inside a more proactive social media paradigm. They control their conversation space by choosing to engage with a Facebook page, and they use their opportunity to post to those fans as a way to shape the conversation and persuade them to buy.
The following table illustrates the differences in the two approaches:
REACTIVE
PROACTIVE Monitor keywords and sentiment Lead conversations with your content
Consumers choose conversation space
You choose conversation space What are people saying? What are we influencing them to say?
What’s going on with my brand?
What does my target buyer already like and share? Put out fires Enhance brand perception
Additional Value Driven by Social Media
After the bad news that state of analytics in 2013 is not perfection. Without removing our focus in this paper on bottom-line ROI, we wanted to throw in a representative who could say something about the 360 degree value-add of social media. Ted Rubin, CMO of Collective Bias (and cofounder with John Andrews, former Head of Emerging Media at Wal-Mart), says, “In our world of coordinated creation of social media stories at Collective Bias, there are typically two kinds of success, or ROI, on social campaigns – Cost Mitigation, and Sales Increase. And we believe there is a Return on Relationship (ROR) fostered by all brand relevant content and communication… simply put the value that is accrued by a person or brand due to nurturing a relationship. ROI is simple $’s and cents, ROR is the value (both perceived and real) that will accrue over time through loyalty, recommendations and sharing.”iii
Social media has marketing impacts outside of direct sales and leads. How can we quantify some of the hard-to-measure impacts of social media? Look at the deltas on brand search volume, lead and sales conversion rates, and direct website traffic.
 The number of people searching for your brand’s name in search engines may increase when social media campaigns raise awareness, reach more people or make you top-of-mind with prospects. Use the AdWords Keyword Tool and Bing Keyword Research Tool to establish baseline monthly search numbers and check them monthly for changes. Note in seasonal businesses to account for normal deltas. Increased searches mean more people are moving into your sales funnel, and brand name usage may improve conversion rates.

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 The percentages of visitors who purchase goods or give their email (sales and lead conversion rates) may increase after social media campaigns increase prospect’s affinity for and trust in your company. Keep track of these conversion rates monthly, and separating out other factors that might change them, note months where social initiatives may have improved them. Increasing conversion rates lowers cost per sale and increases profit margin.
 The amount of direct (non-attributed) website traffic and sales may increase when social media is not well-tracked, or when personal and social awareness lead someone to type your website URL directly into the address bar of their browser. Increased unattributed traffic means more people are moving into your sales funnel, and may mean your brand and products are sticking in people’s minds longer.
Use Social Channels That Fit Your Campaign
The social websites you employ for each campaign should fit your target audience, your goals, and the strengths and weaknesses of each website. Social ROI will be improved by using the most effective channels. The major social sites are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
There are many difficulties in comparing the popularity and usage of social channels, but we want at least a broad sketch of these. Comparing these sites in terms of page views and time on site, we get an approximation of how much reach and interaction we can expect from them.
The most dramatic comparison is on popularity. Wikipedia has a good page now on number of registered and active accounts.iii Facebook has roughly five times as many active users (1 billion) than Twitter (200 million) according to its sources.
Alexa puts Facebook’s time on site at about 28 minutes per day versus 7 minutes a day on LinkedIn and 9 minutes a day on Twitter. However, a large portion of Twitter’s usage is not on the website, so this is difficult to quantify.
According to Alexa, Facebook is responsible for 8% of all pageviews on the Internet (other sources put it at 20%iv). LinkedIn and Twitter hover closer to 1% of all pageviews, and Pinterest around 0.5%. We can estimate then that we’ll get eight times as much action on Facebook compared to LinkedIn and Twitter.
In practice, Facebook dominates B2C social marketing, and LinkedIn and Twitter rule B2B social marketing. For B2B social marketing, it’s best to do a combination of search engine advertising, LinkedIn advertising, creating a LinkedIn group, Facebook ads and Facebook page posts. It works because each of these channels has strengths and weaknesses, and at this point in their evolution, none of them alone is sufficiently effective.
YouTube may be considered a social site, even though its commenting community isn’t usually useful. Regardless, YouTube makes sense for any use of video in Social campaigns, because it’s familiar to everyone (and familiarity doesn’t increase friction or compatibility problems), plus AdWords video ads can amplify your video’s exposure.

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Some networks have very limited or specific audiences, so they should be much lower on your priority list, unless they mainly hit your target demo. Pinterest may make sense if you’re targeting a 25-54 female demographic, but that’s unlikely in hosting marketing. StumbleUpon, Reddit and others may not play more than a minor role unless your campaign is centered on one of them. There are dozens of smaller social sites, but because corporate resources are always limited, we recommend using the 80-20 rule to focus on getting the best results from the most effective channels and working your way down the priority list. Most campaigns won’t have enough resources to dip into these smaller social media players.
The following table outlines the strengths and weaknesses of the major unpaid social marketing channels:
Comparing The Pro’s and Con’s of Social Channelsv Channel Pros Cons
Facebook Page
Standard channel for the biggest English-speaking social website (gets 20% of all pageviews on the Internet). Mainstream. Multi-media including video. Facebook ads produce affordable connections. Can reach huge audiences without additional costs if you create highly shareable posts.
Only usable on Facebook. Requires smart posting and iterative improvement on content. Backup fans by getting their emails. Doesn’t work well like a website (tabs) because Timeline is default. Only 12% of fans see a page’s posts without addition of promoted post ads, and only about 1% of fans return to the actual page monthly. Facebook Group Very interactive. Self-sustaining (requires less admin). Passionate members may be willing to moderate Annoying to all but the most interested members. Expensive to grow membership.
Twitter Profile
Public, can be keyword monitored. Quick and easy to digest. Huge number of celebrities available. Can collaborate with influencers. Can build relationships with journalists and bloggers to boost PR and SEO.
A fraction of the size of Facebook. Not as favored by the mainstream B2C user. Now has better image integration but not video. Tweets usually seen by 6% or less of your followers. Tweets scrolls off into oblivion after about 5 minutes. LinkedIn Group If you create it, you control what’s posted and who is in it. Can use LinkedIn ads to grow membership. Professional, suitable for B2B marketing and discussion. Acts like an email list because you can send a weekly announcement email, sent by LinkedIn itself. Overcomes LinkedIn’s biggest weakness which is lack of return visits and pageviews. Highly spammed by HR and Social Media professionals. If you let everyone and anyone in, moderating posts becomes unmanageable.

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LinkedIn Company Page
Presence on the primary B2B social site. Multiple views to convey your products and services.
Not very engaging. Expensive to get followers, and a small percentage of people view the company page. People have to be on LinkedIn to view this and there’s no way to leverage this toward followers who don’t return to it.
In the above table you can see the reasons we typically prioritize LinkedIn Company Pages and Twitter Profiles below Facebook Pages and LinkedIn Groups.
The next table compares the strengths and weaknesses of the major self-serve digital advertising opportunities (includes search networks):
2013 Comparison of Ad Network Metricsvi Ad Network Google AdWords Bing/Yahoo Ad Network Facebook Ads LinkedIn Ads
Size of Audience
174 million U.S.
153 million unique searchers on the Yahoo! Bing Network, 47.3 million of whom do not search on Google.vii
155 million U.S. and they spend 28 minutes per day on the site.
60 million U.S. and they spend 7 minutes per day on the site. B2B or B2C Either Either Mostly B2C Mostly B2B
Some of the Key Targeting Options
Search keywords, website placements, topics, interests.
Search keywords and placements on Microsoft and Yahoo! websites, as well as partner network sites.
Mainly interests, categories, demographics, job titles in interests, companies. Only 16% of profiles list workplace. Not clear how Facebook knows people’s job titles.
Mainly job title, company, industry, LI groups. Extremely accurate job title and workplace data. Clickthrough Rate 1.0% n/a 0.1% 0.05%

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Avg. Cost Per Impression
$2.75
$0.25
$0.75 Avg. Cost Per Click $2.50 $0.80 $3.00
Impressions Per Click
100
1,000
2,000
In the above table, you can see why we recommend all three channels for B2B social marketing. Facebook can reach a lot of people, but is its job title data reliable? From experience and other advertising expert’s anecdotal reports, we believe you can reach the job titles you want, but you reach others as well. LinkedIn is much more accurately targeted, but it’s hard to get many impressions or clicks since LinkedIn is visited so much less than Facebook. Search engine ads often reach people closer to a buying decision, so even if the number of relevant keywords to target is small, it’s worth doing.
Why is impressions per click important? It’s not a common metric, but it illustrates the difference in how much awareness your ads build while you’re running them. An impression is when your ad is shown once. Most of the people who see your ads don’t take action on them, so lots of impressions happen without a click (you don’t click on every ad you see, do you?), and you aren’t paying for those impressions. If you get a 1% CTR (clickthrough rate, which is clicks per impression) from ads that you place in search results, then you’re getting 100 impressions for each click- only on one of those impressions did you get a click. Because of that, 100 people learned about your company or offer in that set of impressions- the awareness you generated has a value. But with social and display ads, the average CTR is closer to 0.1%. That means that for each click, you got 1,000 impressions. Display ads deliver 10x that awareness generation that search results ads get you.
Take-away: Select a mix of channels and strategies that fit your niche, audience and goals.
Competitive Intelligence Applies To Social Marketing, Too
What are the costs and consequences of not being aware of your competition? There’s no less competition in social marketing. You’re competing for part of the limited pies of people’s awareness, attention, interest, time, and money. And as your competitors invest more and become more sophisticated, you have to raise your game as well.
Sometimes, your biggest competitors in social media aren’t those you normally think of. Just as many companies learned in the search niche, online companies can come out of nowhere to challenge traditional ones. Did Blockbuster fully respect Netflix as a competitor in the early days of ecommerce? Did anyone expect Zappos to become a billion dollar company? No matter what niche you’re in, competition for your customers’ time, attention and dollars can come from a variety of places. Competitive awareness may be the first warning sign of future profitability problems.
Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re the social media manager for Bing.

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According to InfiniGraph, the fans that interact with Bing not only interact with Internet Explorer, Windows and Windows Phone, they also interact with Dr Pepper, Food Network and Fast Company. Does Bing think Dr. Pepper is their competitor? Probably not, they’re not a competitor in the Internet browser space, but when Dr. Pepper posts an amazingly stimulating post, Bing’s fans are interacting with and sharing that post. Your competitors for your fans’ attention and engagement are not always the same competitors you have for sales.
Takeaways: Are you benchmarking your levels of reach, awareness and engagement against your social competitors? You need to know how many likes, comments and retweets those pages are getting compared to your company. And you need to know how many times better the best Facebook Page and Twitter Profiles are compared to the average. Finally, you need to analyze what the most engaging companies are doing, do likewise, and then begin to innovate successfully yourself.
Editorial Calendar for All Social Posts
Create a calendar for when you’re going to release all your content. Does you Facebook page have a monthly theme? What will you focus on for your weekly LinkedIn Group announcement?

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Best days for certain content types
If you look at how posts perform on each day of the week, you find that some days are better for posting photos and others for posting videos, and so on. This is different for every company, but here we’ll just look at generalities. For the most part, people are more serious and business-like on Mondays, and most frivolous on Fridays. Funny images on Fridays often work well. You’ll need to export your post, tweet and interaction data and analyze the days of the week manually, or use InfiniGraph competitive brand intelligence reports. There is also free data for a variety of industries here: http://smo.infinigraph.com/portal/industry/apparel.html?refid=HPindustryApparel&refid=mshg
Weekly Schedule, Monthly Schedule
Once you’ve figure out what days are best for which content, you can plan your posts, tweets, and other content ahead of time. Some brands work one month ahead, creating all the Facebook post ideas for the next month. Others work on inspiration every day. If you are extremely busy, you’ll want to plan and schedule your posts ahead of time so you don’t miss a chance to post.
Takeaways
 Be proactive, own spaces for your audience like Facebook pages and LinkedIn groups, and create compelling content that persuades your future customers.
 Indirect improvements in other marketing channels are another type of social media ROI. Try to find ways to detect such changes. List the things that might have caused these improvements, including social campaigns.
 Create a weekly, if not monthly schedule for your social content. Create many post ideas ahead of time, and schedule them ahead if you don’t have time every day to think of a post idea.
Content Marketing to Engage and Persuade
Old Spice’s Funny Commercials + YouTube = ROI
These Old Spice TV ads, so popular in 2010, may be forgotten in a few years. There’s no question that they’re popular; most people have seen at least one and almost everyone thinks they’re funny. The question is, did they increase sales of Old Spice products? Turns out that they did, to the tune of $3.5 million.viii It’s also now the number one body wash for men in the U.S. Old Spice made more in sales from this awareness and interest campaign than they spent on advertising, so it’s a positive ROI.
Social Benefits of Content Marketing
Content is the media part of social media. Social networking (without content) only goes so far, and doesn’t scale well. Does anyone in your organization really have time to have one-on-one chats with every website and social profile visitor? Unlike networking, the content you create for marketing can be distributed and shared on a massive scale. This increases your reach and how top-of-mind you are for prospects. The number of shares and likes and retweets is often displayed either on the social networks themselves or on your blog or website. A large amount of interaction impresses visitors and potential buyers.

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SEO Benefits of Content Marketing
After you’ve placed the right keywords in the right places on your website, your search rankings may peak. How do you get better rankings at that point? The other major factor in rankings is the authority other sites give you by linking to you. Is there a reason for people to link to your website? If you create amazing and useful videos, infographics, and other content, bloggers and journalists may link to you.
Main Principles
Content Marketing is on the rise in social media, one of the sole remaining ways to make big SEO improvements and one of the best ways to differentiate yourself from your competitors. Companies have used persuasive marketing materials for more than a century. B2B companies have been using white papers since the early 1990’s. Within the last decade, infographics grew as a marketing tactic. This document itself is an example of how companies are commissioning more and more eBooks. And as more and more companies begin to view themselves as, to some degree, publishers, pressure mounts on companies that don’t create content.
Content is the difference between pure social networking and social media. The “media” portion of social media refers to both social channels and social content. Facebook’s multimedia nature and popularity are driving B2C companies to also use images, cartoons and videos to break through all the noise to reach their customers.
Pundits study and opine on why certain types of content provoke more engagement and sharing. Brian Carter, Digital Marketing Consultant, recently authored a study of what makes Facebook posts more or less sharable. BuzzFeed, Digg and InfiniGraph are companies that surface the most read and engaged with content on the web today.
There are five steps to maximizing bottom line results with content marketing Review and improve your effectiveness in each area so you can profit from your content marketing investment.
Market Research
Strategy
Content Creation
Promotion
ROI

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Each phase of content marketing contains areas in which your marketing organization needs to excel. Use this both as a checklist for each content marketing campaign, and as a way of reviewing your overall content creation and marketing capabilities.
Which Types of Content Are Most Effective?
When it comes to B2B, marketers have rated which types of content are most and least effective. MarketingProfs and the Content Marketing Institute surveyed marketers in 2012. Here is the percentage of marketers who found each tactic effective:
 In Person Events: 71%
 Case Studies: 70%
 Research Reports: 69%
 Webinars/Webcasts: 65%
 White Papers: 63%
 Videos: 60%
 Branded Content Tools: 59%
 Microsites: 55%
 Licensed/Syndicated Content: 52%
 eNewsletters: 50%
Invest your money and time into live events, webinars, and reports or whitepapers. These can be used synergistically: Create reports or eBooks that get you leads. Create a webinar to introduce and explain the report. Tell attendees at live events about your papers and webinars.
Market Research
Focus on Customers
Find out what they need
What are their obstacles
What do they value?
Strategy
Audience
Goals
Measurement
Curate
Content Creation
Design & Format
Write Professionally
Persuade
Edit
Promotion
Social
Search
Email
Visibility
ROI
Download page
Close sales
Repurpose
Remarket

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Tweets and Facebook Posts
Facebook posts and tweets are also content, even if they’re smaller. If you post 250 times per year to your Facebook page, and at least as many times on your Twitter account, are you doing everything you can to make sure those posts are fascinating, amazing and useful, and that they garner enough engagement to get you the EdgeRank, visibility, mindshare and emotional loyal your brand needs? Watch your likes, comments, shares, replies and retweets, and learn what your prospects respond to or don’t. Do more of what works.
Using Microsoft Assets
Take a look at the infographics Microsoft has created for you to use to market the Database as a Service offer. You can not only post this to your fans and followers, and email it, but you can use it as inspiration to create your own infographics. Infographics should help people understand data quickly. Find the points you want to make and the data you need to make those points. Then either hire an infographic designer, or take a look at some of the free services that help you create infographics, including Visua.ly, Infogr.am and Piktochart.
Memes
Memes are hard to define. They’re basically a unit of culture that can be shared or evolved. For example, a picture of Dos Equis’s “The Most Interesting Man in the World” has been recaptioned by thousands of people. You can take his statement, “I don’t always drink beer, but when I do, I drink Dos Equis,” turn it into a mad lib “I don’t always <verb>, but when I do, I <same verb> <brand>.” For example, a Service Provider could create one that says, “I don’t always use websites as a service, but when I do, I use Hosting Service Provider A.” The only thing to watch out for with memes is you don’t want to violate anyone’s copyrights or trademarks, and you want to make sure the meme is as popular and recognizable as possible. It may be safer to go with famous people and their quotes than with commercial brands or works of art. In other words, you don’t want to get sued by George Lucas for doing a Star Wars meme.
Grumpy Cat is the biggest new meme this year, and it doesn’t appear that the owner of the grumpy cat cares if people use his images. When considering meme marketing, each company will have to decide what level of risk they’re comfortable with.
Takeaways
 Review your content marketing strategy and increase your commitment to it.
 Humor and engagement can strengthen a brand and drive sales.
 Re-use your content in other marketing channels.

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More Resources
 The Content Marketing Institute
 10 Tools for Creating Infographic Visualizations
 Meme Generator
 Image Captioner
Facebook Ads
Facebook ads reach as many people as TV, but with much better targeting. You can start for just a few dollars a day, so testing Facebook ads isn’t that expensive.
Success Stories
Facebook ads are a powerful way to grow awareness, are extremely affordable and have grown to become the most popular type of display advertising online. Many businesses have succeeded at using them to produce profits and other business value. The following is a selection of success stories.
Daddies Board Shop Achieves $$45,000 Revenue Annually At 1132% ROI
Daddies Board Shop is a fast growing skateboard shop based in Portland, Oregon. The company wanted to start driving more people to its online store and get more fans connected into its Facebook page. They ran more than 30 different Marketplace Ads that varied in text and images to fit the appropriate market and demographic. The company used keywords targeting when putting out its ads as well as age targeting. The ads linked directly to the company’s e-commerce site. Nearly 5% of Daddies Board Shop’s revenue came from Facebook. Facebook traffic is responsible for about $45,000 annually in new revenue for the company. Daddies has expanded its market into new territories based on the ad analytics. Norway showed to be very high on click-through rates, so the company started to target Norwegians. More than 4,300 people connected to the company’s Facebook page, increasing engagement levelsix
Take-away: Social advertising provides insights that can reveal profitable new strategies.
Samsung Maybe Gets 1200% ROI With Facebook Ads?
Hundreds of news sources picked up the story when Facebook reported that Samsung had achieved a 1200% through Facebook ads. As journalists picked through the details, it became clear that the company couldn’t distinguish which sales came from Facebook, and which came from other marketing channels.
Take-away: Find ways to track your social media sales separate from other channels.
Premium Drinks Business Achieves 500% ROI from Facebook
Diageo is a world-wide premium drinks business featuring brands like Johnnie Walker, Crown Royal, J&B Windsor, Smirnoff, Baileys, Captain Morgan, Jose Cuervo, and Guinness. The individual brands had many consumer-created pages, and Diageo looked at uniting all the fans under one page devoted to that brand. Diageo ran five campaigns for Smirnoff, Captain Morgan, Baileys, Jose Cuervo, and Crown Royal. The company placed Premium Ads targeted at people who had already liked a consumer-made page and

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of legal-drinking age. The five brand pages in the U.S. have reached 3.5 million fans, and Diageo saw a 20% rise in sales resulting in a fivefold ROIx
Take-away: Regulated goods can be compellingly marketed on Facebook.
Canvas People’s Facebook Ads Yield 150% ROI
Canvas People ran Facebook Ads that focused on memorable life moments, such as getting engaged or having a child. They targeted Facebook users interested in photographers, moms, dancers, and inspiration. The ads used question like “Love shoes?” and “Love Art?” to grab attention. They received close to 4,000 online orders as a result of the campaign, 180,000 Facebook likes, and a 1.5X return on investment.xi
Take-away: Social ads have many targeting options, and one may match your target customer.
A Broadway Musical Achieves 877% ROI with Facebook Page and Ads
Facebook Ads provided the musical the ability to target and reach niche audiences at an affordable rate. A Facebook Page was created for Fela! allowing them to include social actions in all of their ads which they found rapidly developed the durability of their brand with those who were unfamiliar with Fela!. They spent $4,414.40 and their total revenue from the social network tracking code was $43,130. The return on investment was 877%xii
Take-away: Social media sales can work for events. Granular tracking is required.
Test It: Digital Marketing Is a Customer Insight Laboratory
Because we can measure the impact of any advertising or marketing idea, we are freed from a hierarchy of opinions. Once the organization accepts that everything should be tested, and that the metrics will tell us what’s good and bad, we can put any marketing idea to the test, no matter where it comes from. In this new scientific marketing world, what we need more than anything are more new good ideas, and plenty of them. Social media chews its way through hundreds of ideas per year. Every Facebook post and advertising, every tweet, every blog post is a test, and tells us something about how our audience responds to our marketing. If you keep your scientist hat on and your mind open, you’ll learn more this year about your customers than in the last five.
Get Granular: Detailed Tracking Leads to More Control
If you want to optimize it, you have to track it. It’s a great achievement to be able to say how many people you reached on Facebook, or what percentage of your Twitter followers replied or retweeted you last month. But next, we have to find out which tweets, which ad images, and which Facebook posts get the best response. Do contests produce the results you want? What about lifestyle-oriented encouragement? Polls?
Ask your team if they can track which tweet or Facebook post created the most new sales and leads last month. There are often tracking obstacles, but demand that they prove those obstacles can’t be overcome. Get granular, and your social marketing gets more effective quicker.

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Getting Fans
Facebook ads are the best way to get the exact fans you want. You can target with 15 different criteria, including location, interests, demographics, email lists and consumer purchase data.
Capturing the Wrong Audience
If your fans aren’t like you’re paying customers, you can’t expect them to buy. Make sure your fan and follower acquisition strategy is aimed at people just like your best customers.
Boosting the Reach of Your Posts
When the average Facebook page posts, only 16% of its fans see those posts in the newsfeed, because of EdgeRank. The solution is to post things that get more likes and comments, but that only takes you so far. If you want to reach all your fans, you’ll need to create page post ads.
The best way to do this is in the Ad Manager, because if you promote from the page itself, you can’t control geography. If you do promote from the page, do not promote to the friends of fans, because if they have fans in less developed countries, you may find all your ads are shown to these people. If you want control over who sees your page post ads, use the Ad Manager.
Once you’ve run ads and taken a look at your reach statistics, you’ll see that you always can reach a lot more people with ads than you can with posts.
Targeting your customers
You can advertise to fans, and you can also advertise to people via their emails, if you have an email list. If you have more than one Facebook page, you can target fans of one page to get them to pay attention to another one.
Creating Effective Ads
The best ads contain an image and text that fits exactly who you targeted. If you target people who like soccer, use an image of soccer players or a soccer ball, and talk about soccer. When you use multiple interests to target people, make sure the interests are similar so that your image and text can fit them. If your interest targets are too different, your ad will have to be quite general and won’t inspire much of a response.
Images in Facebook ads are really small, just 120x90 pixels. That means you will need to crop and shrink most of the artwork you can find. Faces work well. Make sure once it’s cropped and shrunk, people can still tell what it is, or read the expression on the face of anyone in the image.
For each ad idea, create several more ads with different images, headlines, and text. And try targeting the same ads to different interests or categories to see which works best. Don’t put more than 10-15 ads in each campaign, or some will get hardly any impressions. Judge the best ad based on cost per click or cost per fan, depending on whether you’re looking for traffic or fans.

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Facebook Ad Example
Let’s look at creating a Facebook ad to promote the Hosted Desktop offer. We want to target IT Managers, and fortunately they’re a precise interest target.
What image should you use? Any stock photography of people using multiple devices or someone doing IT tasks would work. Unfortunately, a diagram of the whole system of different devices and applications probably would be too small when shrunk to 120x90, so stick with people.
The headline is easy. Either it’s who we’re targeting “IT Managers” or what we’re promoting “Hosted Desktop” or the main benefit “Save Time and Money in IT”. Then you can edit down one of the packaged tweets for some ad copy, and voila! Here it is:
Takeaways
 Facebook advertising is a powerful opportunity that businesses should test
 Facebook advertising is the best way to grow Facebook page fans
 Create multiple ads and use the Ad Manager as laboratory to find the ads that your fans and customers respond to best.
More Resources
 37 Facebook Ad Tips – free eBook
 The Like Economy – book by Brian Carter
 Killer Facebook Ads – book by Marty Weintraub
Facebook Posts
The main way that fan pages reach their fans is through posts. Most people are looking at their newsfeed, rather than going back to the pages they’ve liked in the past. That means that you must remain visible in their newsfeed.
Being Boring Makes You Invisible
The biggest sin in social media is being boring. There’s enough noise out there already- billions of posts and tweets and blog posts and videos. This is why Facebook has EdgeRank. If you can’t create interesting social media content, hire a consultant or a trainer or some creative. Don’t just keep posting if you’re not getting results. You’re actually hurting your Edge Rank faster that way. It’s not good to wait and do nothing, because time decay is also a negative factor.

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Get a move on and find a way to make your social content more stimulating. Brian Carter, Digital Marketing Consultant, recently wrote an eBook called Contagious Content about the six things that highly shared posts do,xiii and four obstacles that block sharing. You can find his 51 Elements of Highly Engaging Facebook Posts here.
Getting Sales from Facebook Posting
The biggest questions with sales in social media are where and how to do it. How much, if at all, do you push toward a sale on Twitter and Facebook? Do you offer discounts there? Or do you focus on engagement and leave the selling to your website and salespeople?
Consider what ratio of your social posts focus on engagement vs. sales. One e-commerce website, SuperHeroStuff.com, does four posts a day focused on engagement, and four promoting specific products. In 2012 they started their Facebook page, the only change they made from 2011 in their marketing, and their revenue increase 150%. They’re proof that there’s not one way to do social media. Sometimes companies that haven’t read any of the best practices break some of the supposed rules and create success.
Coming out of a Twitter-dominated social media world, a lot of people were concerned that too much selling would turn people off. Irrelevant sales pitches are never welcome. No one wants the conference vendor salesperson mingling with attendees after a session, speaking with them only about their products. You need to discuss the conference content and build a relationship. This is why content marketing (even when the content is just an image in a Facebook post) and engagement are so important.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t sell where it’s appropriate. A good consultative salesperson in the real world might soft-pitch their offerings 10% of the time, while discussing your activities and goals 90% of the time. With SuperHeroStuff.com, they’ve gathered fans that love a type of product, so it would be a disservice to them not to raise their awareness of cool products and great deals. That 50-50 ratio works for them. Test your own offerings, engagement and audience to find out what your ratio should be.
Why You Must Achieve Big Reach
The following is an example as to why you need to start with some really big numbers. From our experience, your prospect numbers shrink as you move through the funnel below. This is normal but it clearly illustrates why you need to start with a big number.

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If you have less than 5,000 fans on Facebook, for example, you don’t even have enough fans to drive leads. If you’re not getting many likes, comments, tweets or retweets, it may simply be because you don’t have enough fans or followers. It’s a numbers game. Start thinking bigger.
If you already have millions of fans, make sure you’ve looked at your level of visibility, because that’s often the area of social media where the numbers shrink the fastest. Look at the comparison below. While full shrink is unavoidable, funnel collapse is a rampant and serious problem:

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The same thing is true for Twitter, as mentioned in the earlier table. Rand Fishing, CEO of Samos presented some data from followerwonk in his recent keynote for Microsoft. He found that when the largest number of his Twitter followers were active online, it was only 6% of them. So, unless you’re tweeting the same content every hour, chances are that a small percentage of them will see each tweet. Visibility is a huge hurdle in social media.
Takeaways
 Some posts should be engagement oriented and some sales oriented.
 You must reach many people and focus on visibility first.
 Boring posts reduce your visibility and the value of your fan base. Focus on learning why your most interesting posts worked better and continually improving your ability to interest and engage fans.
More Resources
 5 Ways To Improve Your Facebook Newsfeed Exposure
 5 New Ways To Improve Your Facebook EdgeRank
 Facebook Strategy & Engagement Interview
 Contagious Content: What & Why People Share on Facebook (eBook)
LinkedIn Groups
LinkedIn Groups are one of the two most effective ways to get leads on LinkedIn (ads being the other), according to a study by LeadFormix. That’s mainly because people don’t spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, but being a group administrator gives you the opportunity to email your group members once per week. Even if they haven’t been back to LinkedIn for 6 months, they’ll get your email.
Success Stories & ROI
Bill Waterhouse is the Regional Director (Alabama Operations) for Technical Innovation, a company that provides B2B audiovisual and visual conference services. He was the first salesperson at his company to use LinkedIn for sales prospecting. Within the first few weeks he was on LinkedIn, one of his previous email contacts recommended he propose for an active RFP. Bill did so, and his company won a $450,000 contract. There was no hard cost, because he hadn’t even subscribed to a paid option yet, and it required just a few hours of his time. The ROI was at least 4000%.
Greg Blandford, also at Technical Innovation, says that LinkedIn has provided more leads and business than a more conventional lead-gen service they’d subscribed to (for $100 per month) for years.xiv LinkedIn’s most basic paid services cost $20 - $40 per month. The ROI on switching to LinkedIn as a lead- gen service for them is obvious: greater results and lower cost increase their profits.
Take-away: If you’re a B2B marketer or salesperson, you and your employees must be present and active on LinkedIn.

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Main Principles
Your group should not be all about your company. Your customers have problems you can help them with, right? So create a group on a topic related to that - something that they want to discuss. Please let them post their own ideas, questions and answers.
Strategizing Your Group’s Purpose & Name
Create a community focused on helping them do their job better. So rather than naming your group after your company, consider names like these real LinkedIn groups:
 B2B Lead Roundtable
 Facebook Marketing & Advertising
 Verticals such as Accounting, Healthcare Providers, and Legal Services
 The Project Manager Network
 Dentist Professionals
Check out the groups’ directory and see what groups already exist in your niche. Come up with an idea that hasn’t been done. You can always name it after the main job title of your prospects.
Grow Your Membership
Once you’ve created your group, you need to grow your membership. Before you start, let me warn you that you don’t want everybody and anybody to join your group. If you let too many of the wrong people in, you’ll find them constantly posting spam. Even if you moderate the group, you can receive too many posts to moderate. So focus on only allowing high quality members in. Make it a place that people will be excited to be a member.
Grow your group with these techniques:
 Send invitations to your connections
 Email your list about the new LinkedIn group
 Create LinkedIn ads that point people to the group
 Create Facebook ads that point people to your LinkedIn group
LinkedIn groups also grow passively. When people see your group in one of their connections’ profiles, they may check it out and request to join. Over time, you may have hundreds of members.
Send a Weekly Announcement Email
This is the heart of why LinkedIn groups are a good marketing technique. With company pages, you can’t do this. LinkedIn ads only reach people who are on LinkedIn. But once a week you can craft an email message that LinkedIn sends out for you. It has high a rate of deliverability because LinkedIn doesn’t spam. While you might only send a monthly email to your own list, you can contact people who use LinkedIn more often, because they don’t think of social media as such a rare activity. Even if all you do is let people know about discussions or posts in the Group, you stay in front of them. You can also add some kind of company-related promo to the bottom of this announcement.

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Takeaways
 Ads and Groups drive the best results of all LinkedIn tactics
 Grow a Group related to a topic with which your customers need help
 Send a weekly announcement to your group members
More Resources
 Getting Started with LinkedIn Groups
 The LinkedIn Groups Directory
 7 Ways To Prospect For New Customers With LinkedIn
 LinkedIn For Business (book)
LinkedIn Ads
Success Stories
Vestas manufactures wind power solutions. Their goal is to achieve wind power parity with gas & oil. Vestas already worked with wind farm operators and utility companies but wanted to begin to work directly with corporations who invest in and directly use energy solutions. Based on their research, corporations were eager to source more renewable energy.
How does a company like this reach decision-makers? Anyone who’s ever marketed to executives of Fortune 1000 companies knows how difficult this can be. Vestas partnered with LinkedIn to deliver dynamically generated LinkedIn banner ads with messaging customized to the viewer’s company and position. They directed click throughs to customized, company specific microsites with high-value content and used adaptive design to ensure an optimal experience for users receiving the campaign cross-devices including desktop, tablet and mobile.
Did it work? Yes, more than 10,000 of their targeted executives and opinion leaders visited the microsite, and spent an average of 8 minutes there. When you lower cost and improve results, you increase ROI.
Limitations
The biggest limitation of LinkedIn ads is that they’re only seen by people who come back to LinkedIn.com which is used much less than Facebook. Building a group with LinkedIn ads gives you a list of people you can reach weekly with an announcement, regardless of whether they’re on Linkedin.com or not.
Targeting Your Customers
You can target all of the following:
 Continents, countries, states and provinces
 Companies by their name or by category (includes industry and company size)
 People by specific job titles, or by job category (includes job function and seniority)
 LinkedIn groups people are members of

DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGIES AND CHANNELS TO DRIVE DEMAND GENERATION AND ROI

DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGIES AND CHANNELS TO DRIVE DEMAND GENERATION AND ROI

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