Social Media Marketing Plan

A few weeks ago, my friend Eric Smith from online retailer One Click Ventures asked me who “owns” conversion. At the time, I thought he wanted to know who I believed was responsible for establishing conversion rate objectives and measuring against them, so I replied, “Marketing.” Upon further thought, I think he was ultimately getting at who – in any given company – is “accountable” for conversion. And to that I have a very different answer.

I began my career in 1994 buying media for a large fast-food retailer we’ll call “Softee’s.” Mine was a five-state territory with a multimillion dollar...

As digital marketers, we tend to be laser-focused on generating more business and revenue for our company. But it's also important to have a content strategy in place, to ensure that you're providing your customers with truly relevant content and actively listening to what they are saying about your brand.

Social media is one important channel for businesses to interact with customers (and potential customers) in real-time.

Every compant is unique, and each company's messaging must be relevant and engaging to their unique audience. At the same time, it's important for social marketing efforts to...

Digital marketers know that it’s all about the numbers. Every quality social media tool will have a powerful analytics platform to show CMOs (and their teams) how effective their social media strategies are shaping up to be. Hopefully, most CMOs also know that social media is truly an area of marketing where the numbers can craft a narrative. Although numbers can’t capture all the nuances of a brand’s voice on social media, the numbers do help to show how well the brand’s messages are being received by customers, and that’s a direct reflection of the strategy and voice as a whole.

As a CMO,...

Each Thursday at 11am EST, marketers from around the world join the ExactTarget user community on Twitter for a conversation about trends and campaign ideas across the interactive marketing industry.  We call this virtual coffee chat the ExactTarget Café. 

Earlier today, salesforce.com announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire ExactTarget. This is exciting news for the entire ExactTarget family!

Since our founding, we’ve been laser focused on helping marketers leverage data to create more relevant and effective digital marketing, and today’s announcement creates even more opportunity to execute on that vision with our clients and partners around the world. The combination of ExactTarget’s industry-leading marketing automation and campaign management capabilities with salesforce.com’s leading social marketing...

With social media and mobile dominating the current digital marketing landscape, email marketing strategies can easily get left behind. Many marketers now consider email an outdated medium. Over.

But that’s simply not the case. While it’s important to continue (or begin!) your social media and mobile marketing efforts, these should work in conjunction with email marketing. The benefits are numerous – apart from significantly higher ROI than other marketing strategies like direct mail, email marketing provides an opportunity for you as a business to take your conversation with a consumer...

Have you heard about the Social Media Domination Road Tour? It begins on June 13 in Philadelphia and seats are filling up! Jason Falls and Nichole Kelley from Social Media Explorer will work with you to develop and leave with a fully executable:

1. Social Media strategy
2. Content marketing strategy
3. Measurement strategy

If you ever had to justify a trip, this one is easy. Prices are low and after one full day of this hands-on workshop, you'll leave with a plan you can execute and meaure the very next day.

If that's not enough, here's a letter you can customize to win your manager's approval.

Register...

Success in most digital marketing channels can be proven by the numbers. As much as some marketers and communicators don't like to spend their time drowning in math, any truly successful social media program will have the numbers to prove it.

In his new whitepaper The Mathematics of Social Marketing, Jason Falls says that many companies have turned social media marketing into a thriving source of web traffic and revenue, while others still don't fully understand how to leverage the world of social media and business.

According to the report, 45% of small business CEOs do not consider social...

Over the next several weeks, we will be sharing guest articles from experts in the realm of content marketing. This week, Josh Miles writes.

Josh Miles is principal and founder of Miles Design, a branding firm specializing in branding and website design for professional services and software firms. Josh is the author of the new Content Marketing Institute book Bold Brand: The New Rules for Differentiating, Branding, and Marketing Your Professional Services Firm.

“It will look like you guys are on everywhere, even if you’re not.”

Our media buyer always had a way of helping our clients make the...

Mastered the basics of marketing automation? If the answer is yes, I'm guessing you've already begun reaping the rewards of your initial automation efforts. I'm also surmising that your CRM system is busy collecting plenty of customer and prospect data, and you're actively engaged on multiple social channels. At this point, you might even have a little extra time in your schedule to dive into your RSS feed, or take a longer smoothie break.

You're off to a good start.

That being said, there's always more to learn about the complex clockwork of marketing automation. Take your knowledge to the...

ExactTarget partnered with Social Media Explorer's Jason Falls and Nichole Kelly to deliver a hands-on, full-day workshop that will leave you with a fully executable and measureable social media strategy by the end of the day! We couldn't be more excited about the content and format of the Social Media Domination Road Tour. You'll walk away with a strong foundation in the most important strategies to be successful in social media, including:

Social Media Strategy: You'll particiapte in hands-on exercises that guide you on the creation and evaluation of a successful social media strategy that is...

The first thing most aspiring marketers learn is the importance of identifying and subsequently engaging those beautiful people called “the audience” no matter where they live online. This lesson gains wholehearted acceptance from everyone in the marketing world. However, the execution becomes complicated, and soon we all learn that feeding something like a blog everyday just simply isn’t enough.

We must put ourselves on the customer's online path.

Think goals first, campaigns second and tactics third.

What’s the goal? Always start there. That’s what the university lecturer taught you a long time...

(Warning: Sarcasm ahead)

Sometimes it’s just too easy. The power to communicate through email, mobile and social is all right there waiting for someone to start flooding the world with information. So you strike out into the world with your content and expect great results.

Using email for monthly news, SMS for quick bites of information and social media for event announcements might seem like a good idea, but you can easily end up with a bunch of disconnected content aimed at way too many targets. At this point, you're just sitting and back hoping for results without a specific goal in mind.

Misu...

As I write this, 93% of UK online consumers are email subscribers and 40% of these subscribers are opening, reading and responding to email on their mobile phones or tablets. If you think these statistics suggest UK consumers prefer email above all channels for receiving offers and information from brands, you are absolutely correct!

A new report from eMarketer confirms why more marketing budget is flowing to permission-based email and why email has become “The Linchpin” of integrated digital marketing strategies.

Among the key findings in the report are these:

• Econsultancy and Adestra’s Email...

As brands become more social and customers become the social mouthpiece of brands, the intersection of advertising and word-of-mouth recommendations is now online. Traditional advertising methods fade into the background as customers are more wary of brand promises and, instead, turn to their friends and family when making a purchase.

Like any marketer curious about the numbers that back up such claims, I was interested to hear Jay Baer (of Convince and Convert) and Greg Shove (of SocialChorus) discuss the stats in their webinar The Influence Triangle: How to Leverage 3 Types of Brand Fans to...

As a marketer, it's your job to keep up with new technologies that can help drive your business forward. With social media, it can be a challenge to keep up with the changing landscape that includes Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, Tumblr, Reddit, Flickr, and more every day!

And what's worse, most social media teams are still very small. Even some of the largest brands in the world have surprisingly small and very busy teams. From our experience, the most successful brands focus on one or two networks that best suit their audience. Let's look at the 2012 Edison Survey Data and summary...

If you had eight hours a day to work on your brand’s social media, what could you accomplish?

… Are you done daydreaming?

The reality is, a marketer’s day is filled to the brim with responsibilities and projects that take a lot of time. One minute, you’re brainstorming strategy for a cross-channel marketing campaign, and the next, you’re reviewing the latest marketplace data on subscriber acquisition and list growth. What’s a time-savvy marketer to do?

This infographic by Pardot (an ExactTarget company) breaks down your daily social media must-dos into an actionable 30-minute plan. A winning...

Hashtags have been used in various social media channels for years. Many chat sites have used hashtags for years but Twitter was the first mainstream social network to use the hashtag in August 2007. Google+, Pinterest and Instagram have since followed suit, making the hastag ubiquitous with social media. Now, news of Facebook looking to introduce hashtags has surfaced.

This means that marketers will be able to use a common hashtag across social networks and plug into real-time events and conversations on Facebook, as they do with Twitter today. It will also make it much easier to categorise...