Guide to SEO, Social Media, and Email marketing

By Josh Hamit

2013

Written by Josh Hamit

Curve Interactive Limited

Guide to SEO, Social Media, and Email marketing

Digital Marketing How-To-Guide

Copyright 2013 Curve Interactive Ltd. - Tel.: 01892 549556 - Email: [email protected] P a g e | 1

Contents

1.0 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY .............................................................................................................................. 2

2.0 INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................................................... 3

3.0 SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION (SEO) ...................................................................................................... 4

WHAT IS SEO AND WHY IT IS IMPORTANT? ......................................................................................................................... 4

HOW SEO WORKS .......................................................................................................................................................... 5

SEO BASICS .................................................................................................................................................................. 7

SITE ARCHITECTURE – ON-PAGE SEO ............................................................................................................................... 10

OFF-PAGE SEO ........................................................................................................................................................... 13

LINK BUILDING STRATEGIES ............................................................................................................................................. 15

SEO HOUSE-KEEPING .................................................................................................................................................... 19

TRACKING THE EFFECTS OF YOUR SEO EFFORTS – GOOGLE ANALYTICS AND WEBMASTER TOOLS ................................................. 20

SEO SUMMARY ........................................................................................................................................................... 22

4.0 SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING (SEM) .......................................................................................................... 23

WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING? ............................................................................................................................. 23

FACEBOOK AND THE POWER OF LIKE ................................................................................................................................ 27

HOW SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING WORKS ........................................................................................................................ 28

INCREASING ENGAGEMENT AND PARTICIPATION .................................................................................................................. 31

FACEBOOK APPLICATIONS ............................................................................................................................................... 32

HOW TO RUN A BEST PRACTICE CAMPAIGN ........................................................................................................................ 33

CASE STUDY – AJ BOMBERS, USING SOCIAL MEDIA TO CREATE 1-2-1 RELATIONSHIPS WITH CUSTOMERS ........................................ 36

EXAMPLE SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY FOR A SMALL BUSINESS ................................................................................................... 38

SOCIAL MEDIA SUMMARY .............................................................................................................................................. 40

5.0 E-NEWSLETTER AND EMAIL MARKETING ................................................................................................. 41

HOW TO START YOUR EMAIL LIST ..................................................................................................................................... 42

EMAIL CONTENT ........................................................................................................................................................... 46

EMAIL BEST PRACTICES .................................................................................................................................................. 46

EMAIL DESIGN ............................................................................................................................................................. 48

EMAIL SUMMARY ......................................................................................................................................................... 55

6.0 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................................... 56


1.0 Executive summary Over the course of reading this book on digital marketing you will learn the theories and best practices

used by the world’s top digital marketing experts to generate untold amounts of sales for themselves

and their respective clients. Moreover, you will personally come to learn how to use these theories in

practice to transform the ability of your own business’s website to generate huge amounts of prospects

and leads.

The fundamental strategies included in this marketing system come from the three highly complex fields

of search engine optimisation (SEO), social media marketing and email marketing. Used together, in a

‘system of systems’ you will be able to build a fantastic web presence that will allow you to capture the

attention of consumers who are already eagerly seeking out products and services in your industry. Each

of the three digital marketing strategies will be broken down into simple steps and everyone from a

complete novice to seasoned pro can learn a few things by taking in and implementing the lessons in

this book.

Firstly, you will learn the fundamentals of SEO. You will come to understand how search engines make

their decisions and what factors play a role in ranking websites in search engine results pages. From

here you will learn how you can edit your website to give the search engines exactly what they need to

rank your website on the first page. This includes numerous tips on both on-page and off-page SEO,

from simple edits to your individual webpage titles to more complicated link building strategies.

Furthermore, SEO housekeeping will be discussed as well as how to track the effects of your work

through Google Analytics.

In part two of the guide you will learn what social media marketing is and how you can use it to

influence your target market. This section is laden with tips as to how you can leverage social media

effectively while spending less time on it in the long run. From this section you will ultimately learn what

drives a successful social media channel, how to increase engagement and participation from your fans

and how to run a best practise social media campaign. Through several case studies and strategies you

will see exactly how you can implement a strategy of your own.

Finally, in section three you will become accustom to the art of email marketing newsletters. Email

subject lines, how to build an email list, email content and email design will be the discussion of this

chapter, each of which is looked at individually. You will come to learn how you can leverage the power

of email marketing to generate huge amounts of leads and make sure your brand name is on the tip of

every one of your email subscribers’ tongue come the time they need your services.


2.0 Introduction It has long been believed that the best way to find new business is through using traditional advertising

methods such as cold calling, print and television marketing. These ‘interruption-based’ marketing

techniques have been proven to be extremely effective in the 1960s all the way through to the late

1990s.

Marketers had found that if they spent ‘x’ amount of money bombarding the public with television,

billboard, print and radio adverts enough people would get their message and they would eventually

return a profit. However, with every business left, right and centre coming to learn this fact, the

marketplace has now become inundated and overcrowded with advertisements and we as consumers

have learnt to ignore these attempts to capture our attention. This type of advertising is no longer cost

effective, and any return is hard to measure.

To add to the decline in effectiveness of interruption based marketing a monumental shift in consumer

behaviour has transformed the way we as marketers should promote our products and services; people

now have the power to be in control of what information they receive and how. This behavioural shift

can be attributed to the growth of the social media, email and the internet and its ever increasing

integration in our everyday lives.

Are interruption based methods of marketing dead and a waste of your time? We believe so -

Consumers do not value being force-fed information. Instead they prefer to find out the information

they need online, through mediums they can control. Staggeringly, 80% of all online transactions start

with a query in a search engine and 90% of those searchers never look past the first page of results.

However, the good news is the online fact finding mission consumers go on to search for what they

want, can be manipulated to your business’s advantage with the inbound marketing system highlighted

in this book.

This marketing system highlights and explains in great detail less intrusive methods of marketing which

are proving to be many times more effective in generating qualified leads when compared to more

traditional marketing and selling concepts.

These powerful marketing methods when used together will generate so many leads that before long

you will only have to accept the best, high paying jobs!


3.0 Search engine optimisation (SEO)

What is SEO and why it is important?

We start off our online lead generation system with Search Engine Optimisation.

SEO is the practice of improving the position of a website within search engines results pages. Its

ultimate aim is to get a website or webpage placed in position #1 for the keywords and keyword phrases

being targeted. For example, Nestle will want to appear in the #1 position for the search query

‘chocolate bar’.

The reasons for making sure your business’s website appear in position #1, or at least on the first page

of the search engine results are plentiful. First are foremost, as we discussed in the introduction, almost

all consumers surf the internet on fact finding missions before they make a purchase. Browsing paper

directories has become something of the past and we now make all enquiries for products and services

through search engines.

Looking at the habits of people using search engines it has been found that 90% of people will actually

never look past the first page of search results. Moreover, staggeringly 42% of people searching on

Google always click on the #1 ranking page. Figure 1 below shows how the rest of people click.

Can you afford to miss out on

consumers who are willingly

searching for your product or

service online?

If your business’s website does not

appear on the first page of the

search engine results pages (SERPs)

but your competitors are, then

imagine how many potential

consumers you could be missing out

on. You need to be ranking on page

1 to be making the most of the

demand in your industry.

You will notice that results that appear on the third page of Google do not even merit a single

percentage point. If your website is not present on at least the first two pages of Google, to some extent

your website is invisible. Liken it to your physical shop-front being down a back lane where no one goes!

Figure 1


A powerful SEO campaign will increase the amount of targeted traffic and potential customers to your

website dramatically. The ‘State of Digital Marketing’ 2012 survey showed that SEO is the #1 channel for

developing leads online with almost 60% of digital marketing companies surveyed saying that it makes

the biggest impact on their lead generation efforts. Imagine the sort of money you could be making if

you were ranked #1 on Google for your targeted keywords.

Having your business’s website appearing on the first page also creates a feeling in the consumers mind

that your business is a well-respected brand that is highly authoritative in its industry.

It is often thought that applying SEO best practices to a website is a highly technical skill that only a

trained expert can implement. Over the course of this chapter I will show you exactly how easy it is to

implement the most important SEO best practices to your own business’s website, dramatically

increasing its position in the search engine result pages in the process.

How SEO works

Before we delve into too much detail I will first explain how the position of a website is calculated in the

search engine results pages (SERPs). The performance a website has in the search results is dependent

on three main factors, or as Johnson and McGee like to describe it in their 2009 classic 50 Ways to Make

Google Love Your Website: “The Tripod of Love”. These are; Visibility, Relevance and Reputation.

Google uses these factors to determine the likely usefulness of your website.

Visibility

First and foremost let’s deal with visibility, for your website to be present on Google’s search results it

first must be visible to the “GoogleBots”. These bots “crawl” the worldwide web and add new pages and

their information to the “Google Index” alongside their corresponding URL. When a Google user makes a

search, the most relevant information related to it is retrieved from the index and the URL is pulled out

the database and shown to the user.

When designing your website it is important it is built in a specific way to make sure it is visible to the

GoogleBots. When these bots crawl across the web they do not experience the site in the same way we

Figure 2


do. Google will experience your site in what is referred to as the “source code” view of a webpage. It has

great significance as to how this source code is written and structured to how visible your site and its

content is to Google.

For example, if your website is designed in such a manner that images or JavaScript make up the

navigation buttons on your site the GoogleBots will be unable to ‘see’ them and therefore will not be

able to add the pages to its index. Considering this, make sure all links on your website are done in a

simple HTML fashion.

Always consider the visibility of your web pages to the search engine robots.

Relevance

You must make sure your website is relevant to people’s searches! The solution to making your site

relevant is simple, but not as easy to implement - unless you know what you are doing of course. It

comes through the concept of the “Wisdom of Crowds” and is connected with ‘links’. Basically the

premise of this concept is that the more links that exist from other webpages to one particular webpage

indicate that particular page’s quality, relevance and usefulness. It is also highly important that that

page has keyword and keyword phrases used throughout its site architecture (a term explained later on)

and other on-page best practice SEO principles are implemented.

“So if my website has loads of links to it and lots of keywords, it will rank highly on Google in terms of

relevance?… What I’ll do then is create hundreds of sites myself that all link to my main one and I’ll be

top of the rankings! Easy!”

Unfortunately no; Google knows you’ll think of doing this and therefore have added a few complexities

to the relevance formula! Each link to your site is scored on two scales of quality:

1. The relevance to the target of the link, and

2. Its authority within its particular pocket of relevance, known together as Reputation.

Reputation

Reputation is the third and final leg of “The Tripod of Love” and perhaps the most important. Faced with

millions of sources of apparently meaningful and useful information Google has to decide which of these

sites are most useful and trustworthy. Looking at the number and the quality of links connected to a

webpage allows Google to assess the reputation of it in relation to all the other webpages that include

similar information.

The position of your website in the results pages of search engines is therefore completely dependent

on building and continually supporting the three legs of the “Tripod of Love”. In short, if your website is

built soundly, has relevant information and is linked to from numerous other reputable sources then you

will rank well.


SEO basics

Now you understand the factors Search Engines take into consideration when ranking your website in

their results pages, we will show you how you can give the search engines exactly what they want.

Selecting Keywords

We start off with selecting the relevant keywords and keyword phrases. In other words you want to

identify exactly what people are typing in the search box for products or services that you sell. Google’s

keyword tool and traffic estimator (Search online for ‘Google Keyword tool’) is a free tool which allows

you to find out exactly what those words or phrases are. Simply type in a keyword or a phrase related to

your product or service and see how many times a month that term is searched for. I will work through

an example with you to show how it works.

Figure 3 below shows the Google AdWords Keyword Tool home page. You do not need an account.

However if you do have a Google account, then ‘sign in’ with the link in the top right hand corner – this

will bypass the annoying ‘Type the characters that appear in the picture below’ security barrier.

Figure 3


Start off by typing in one word related to your business and hit the search button. Make sure you are

viewing the ‘Keyword ideas’ tab and that you have selected the correct location. In this example I have

searched for ‘chocolate’.

As shown in figure 4 an estimated 30,400,000 global searches are made a month for ‘chocolate’, with

2,740,000 of those being made locally in the United Kingdom. You will notice that the results are

automatically sorted by relevance, and according to Google the most relevant keywords relating to

chocolate are ‘luxury chocolate’, ‘chocolate gifts’ and ‘homemade chocolate’.

From this search we have found out the most searched for words in relation to ‘chocolate’. If I was

running a website about chocolate the first thing I would do is edit or create new content in relation to

this data. I will explain how best to do this later.

By refining the search further we can find even more important data to help improve the relevance and

visibility of our site in Google.

Selecting the ‘Columns’ drop-down in the top right corner we can select ‘Local search trends’.

Figure 4


From here we can understand if specific keywords or phrases are searched for more at certain times of

the year. The graph displays the last 12 months of searches and shows as expected for ‘chocolate easter

eggs’ a two month period where the term is searched for a lot. Using this we can gear up our website for

certain times of the year by releasing content related to those searches.

The trends can also be used to spot up-and-coming niches within your industry. For example ‘wonka

chocolate bars’ seem to be having a steady increase in the amount of searches per month over the last

year. In preparation for the continued growth of this product it is important specific pages are set up to

accommodate this product, perhaps a product page and several blog articles should be written about it.

Using this tool find out exactly what people are searching for in your industry and compile a

comprehensive list of keywords you wish to target. You will need these for the next section! If you are a

business that can only serve the local community and surrounding areas add the name of your city in

your keyword search; e.g. ‘chocolate london’ or ‘chocolate in london’ etc., etc.

Figure 6

Figure 5


Site architecture – On-page SEO

Now you have your list of well researched keywords it is time to make them work for you. Here you will

have to access the back-end of your website or prepare some simple instructions for your web

developer to implement. Alternatively, if your site is built in WordPress you can use its built in features

plus a specific SEO plug-in to do most of the work for you. I would recommend the free plugin

WordPress SEO By Yoast.

First of all let’s define on-page SEO. On-page SEO relates to everything that can be done on the pages of

your website to maximize the potential performance it has in search engines for your selected

keywords. This includes all the text, pictures and code that make up your site.

To make sure search engine robots know exactly what your website is about and exactly what keywords

you are targeting it is important they are present in the ‘website architecture’. The information below

explains how you should edit your sites architecture according to SEO best practice.

1. Title structure

The title that appears in the browser bar should contain the keyword(s) you are targeting for that page.

This can be changed in the <title> tag in the HTML source code of each page, or more easily in

WordPress with the simple interface SEO Yoast give you. Each individual page should have an optimized

title tag showing the search engine robots what the main focus of that page is. For example, returning to

the chocolate website instance, the title structure for a particular product should be: ‘Product Name |

Any Keywords Relating To It | Company Name’. Notice that each word in the title should also start with

a capital letter.

2. URL structure

It is also a good idea to use the keywords in the actual URL address. For example

http://www.curve-interactive.com/inbound-marketing instead of something akin to www.curve-

interactive.com/Article3php12433. As well as looking a whole lot nicer and being easier to remember it

also adds SEO value to your page because the keywords are used. This also encourages people who link

to your pages to use the URL name as anchor text – and as we will find out later anchor text is of

extreme importance.

3. Internal anchor text

Instead of using “click here” or “read more” use keywords to link to your internal pages, it helps Google

better understand the content of the linking page.

4. Individual page metadata

In the <head> of your page make sure you have metadata and make sure for every page it is different

and of course relevant!

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-seo/

http://www.curve-interactive.com/inbound-marketing


The text written here isn’t actually used by search engines to rank your website, but it is very important

for the human reader. Let’s remember you should be building your website for people, not just for

search engine robots. Having a compelling description here which includes your targeted keywords will

really help with click-through rates.

5. Heading tags

When building each page ensure you use the html heading tags <h1>, <h2>, etc. By using these you are

making it easier for search engine robots to understand and determine what your page is about, what is

the main topic (<h1>) and what are sub-topics (<h2>). Include the targeted keywords and phrases within

the heading tags, with the most important keywords appearing in the h1 tag.

6. Alt text + file names

As search engine robots cannot ‘see’ images the alt text

html tag is used to tell them what the image is of. The alt

text for each image should contain the keyword that page is

trying to target and should be a maximum of one sentence.

To add to this further, when uploading images to your

website make sure they are named something relevant. For

example if you were uploading an image of a chocolate bar

to your website make sure the file is named ‘chocolate-

bar.jpg’ or something similar, rather than image1.jpeg.

Once again, doing this will help the search engine robots

understand exactly what content your website contains

which allows it to gauge its relevance.

7. Website navigation

Make sure the main navigation on your website is built in

simple HTML and doesn’t incorporate Flash or JavaScript.

Search engine robots have difficultly crawling these types of

content so it is best not to use them.

The “Perfectly” optimized page

This example of a perfectly optimized page is taken from

SEOmoz.com, a fantastic SEO resource which I recommend

you becoming a member of.

Figure 7


Other on-page optimisation tips

If you haven’t already, make sure you have signed up for Google Analytics and inserted the

tracking code on your website. Doing so will allow you to find out invaluable information about

your website visitors and how they use the site. This free software from Google allows you to

track exactly how many visitors you have and exactly what route these users take through your

website – highlighting the most popular pages and potential drop-out pages. It also provides

valuable data on where your site’s visits are coming from, whether that be from search engines,

referrals from other sites or direct traffic. There is a quick how to guide on Google Analytics

further on in this book, it also goes into detail as to how you can use it to track the effects of

your SEO activities.

Create a Site map and upload it to your domain. Type ‘create a site map’ into Google and use

one of the free site map builders. A sitemap is basically a list of files that give hints to the search

engines on how they can crawl your website. Sitemaps help search engines find and classify

content on your site that they may not have found on their own.

Most websites are missing a 301 redirect. To a search engine, “example.co.uk" and

"www.example.co.uk" are not the same thing. You need to set up a permanent redirect (also

known as a "301 redirect") so that you get full credit for what's on your site, no matter how it's

accessed. To do so search ‘301 redirect’ in Google. Note: this can be quite complex for a non-

technical expert! Make sure you research this thoroughly before you implement it. If you need

any help with this email me @ [email protected].

Include your business telephone number and address on every page. The footer of your site

would be the best position for this. Including this information on your site is important for local

SEO reasons - and also the First Company Law Amendment Directive states that Company

Registration number, Place of Registration and Registered Office address needs to be present on

your website as it does on your Company headed paper.

Do not use Flash on your website! Flash content is not readable by search engine robots and

therefore it provides no SEO value to your website. Although it may look good in some cases try

and find an alternative way to showcase your content, with simple text being the easiest thing

for search engine robots to read.

mailto:[email protected]


Off-Page SEO

Building best practice SEO principles into a website is arguably the most important facet of a website

build. Having a website that ranks highly for the keywords potential customers are searching for will give

your website a huge advantage over its competitors. According to Hubspot (2012), on-page SEO only

accounts for 30% of a website’s position in the search engine results pages. The other 70% is down to

off-page SEO, also called link building.

The basic premise of link building is as follows; every inbound link to your website can be classed as a

“vote” in the giant popularity contest that is the internet. The more sites that link to yours, the higher

yours will rank in search engine results pages.

However, not all links are equal. Having a link to your site from one high quality, authoritative website is

much more effective in driving your site up the SERPs compared to having a link from 20 random

websites with low authority.

Search online now for your selected keywords and click on the #1 listing on the first page of results.

Copy the URL address and go to www.opensiteexplorer.org and paste the address in.

Figure 8

Figure 9

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/


In this example you will notice that a BBC website has come top of the SERPs. This probably is not the

best example as this specific page has a very small amount of ‘total links’ and ‘linking root domains’. But,

it does perfectly point out that statement I made earlier about having a single link from an authoritative

site compared to having many from low quality sites.

After you have pasted in the address and clicked ‘Search’ you will see a page similar to Figure 10, it

shows the ‘link profile’ for that particular page. In this example you can see this page about ‘chocolate

cake’ only has 2 domains linking to it and 27 total links. 26 of these links are from other BBC webpages.

The BBC homepage has a domain authority of 100/100 and therefore whenever it links to another page

on the internet it passes on a huge amount of ‘SEO juice’. Having been linked to from such an

authoritative page has propelled this page up the SERPs dramatically.

Another key reason this particular page

is ranked #1 for ‘chocolate cake’ is due

to the anchor text linking to this page

from other pages on the internet.

Anchor text by definition is the words

that link one page to another. ‘Click

here’ is an example we see a lot.

Although ‘click here’ and ‘read more’ are

probably the most common anchor text

we see it is not SEO best practise to

utilise this HTML function in this way.

Figure 10

Figure 11


Instead, the words linking to your site/specific page should include the keywords that page is trying to

rank for. Using Open Site Explorer and clicking on the ‘Anchor Text’ tab we can see that in this example

the anchor text linking to this page are ‘chocolate’, ‘chocolate cake recipes’, ‘(img) chocolate cake (this is

the alt text we talked about in the previous section) and finally, ‘chocolate cake’.

You will notice as you research your industry that the websites ranked #1 tend to have a large amount of

sites linking to them (often 1,000s!), all with high quality page and domain authority plus anchor text

including the keywords they are seeking to rank for. It is now your job to make sure your website has a

better link profile! There are numerous strategies to build links and we will now go through several in

detail.

Link building strategies

Listing your website in relevant, highly authoritative directories.

Research online and find specific directories related to your industry and the keywords you are

trying to rank for. If your business is restricted to a small area where you sell your product or

service also look for local online business directories and get listed there too. It is important to

remember anchor text when you are putting your business’s information in these web

directories, often the ‘title’ or ‘name’ field ends up being the anchor text linking from their

website to yours.

I would not recommend buying links from online directories. You will notice as you start to

search online for directories that many will ask for a small amount of cash to get listed, do not

do this! Google is against this method of link building as it sees it as businesses trying to

manipulate its search results. Paid links are a no-no! Moreover, some directories ask for a

reciprocal link in return for listing your site on theirs. Do not take them up on this offer either as

we are looking for quality one-way links which are much more effective.

If you do chose to maximise the number of links to your website by buying some - make sure the

sites have a good Google Page Rank and a mozRank score of over 5 (research these terms online

for free tools that calculate a score for you). Doing so should lower the possibility of being

penalized by Google.

To start off with I recommend getting your website listed and a profile set up on; Google Maps

business directory, Bing/Nokia directory, Yahoo! business directory, DMoz, Foursquare, Yelp and

LinkedIN. For a list of 50 directories to start off you link building campaign go to;

http://www.curve-interactive.com/link-building-business-directories/.

http://www.curve-interactive.com/link-building-business-directories/


Create a company blog

Two-thirds of marketers say their company blog is ‘critical’ or ‘important’ to their business.

Each individual page on a website has the potential to rank well in search engines and draw

traffic from other sources, like social media sites and the blogosphere. Whether a page draws

traffic depends on whether it's optimised and how remarkable (useful, interesting, etc.) it is.

Blogging is a great way to add interesting content to your site so you can earn high quality links

doing so! When blogging it is ideal to include your selected keywords within the blog post copy.

Increasing the density of keywords on your site will make it slightly easier to find through search

engines as it helps the crawling robots understand what subject your pages are about.

Using the keywords you know people are searching for, create a blog that will be of interest to

those people. Doing so you will create a limitless supply of link opportunities! Post at least one

well thought-out and researched article a week, and if you can - try and post 6 or 7 articles a

month. An honest, insightful blog about your industry will be rare, so creating remarkable

content that will be useful will generate a large amount of quality links.

Turn your blog articles in to presentations and videos

An online resource that is currently being underused as a link building and lead generation

technique is the use of presentation sites such as Slideshare.net, AuthorStream, Powershow,

Brainshark and SlideBoom. Create a simple template with your branding in Powerpoint and then

convert your blog articles into short presentations. As well as the advantage of adding a backlink

back to your website, for each presentation you upload this idea will also create the impression

that you are an authority figure in your industry.

Once you have made your presentation record a short video of you presenting it. You could

either point a camera on you presenting it or use a screen capture program and a microphone

and just talk through the main points. Upload your new video to YouTube and also create

another blog post on your site with the new video. This content once again will help you be seen

as an authoritative person in your industry and increase the likelihood of people linking to your

useful content.

Make it easier for people to link to you

If you want people to link to your site, make it easy for them! At the end of each of your blog

articles you could include a simple HTML snippet that will show a link to your website when

posted on their site. Once again make sure the anchor text here is chosen correctly!

For example you could have something like this:

If you enjoyed the content in this article on chocolate cake recipes why not link to it from your

blog?


<a href="http://www.my-chocolate-website.com/chocolate-cake-

recipes">Chocolate cake recipes</a>

If you don’t ask you don’t get!

Also make sure you have social sharing buttons enabled at the end of each article. If your

website is built in WordPress there are several free plug-ins that allow you to quickly and easily

add these in.

Make sure people are seeing your content so they can link to it – use Social Media

If you have recently launched your website and you do not have much traffic coming in make

sure you are using social media to its full effect to bring in visitors. The Social Media chapter

goes into great detail as to how you can run a successful campaign, but as a start make sure

your business is set up on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIN. Write down 50 messages with a link

to a page on your website in less than 140 characters. Use a URL shortener such as bitly or

Google’s URL shortener to reduce character length of links. Use # hashtags to tag your keywords

in your messages.

Sign up to Hootsuite.com and spend an hour or two scheduling at least 7 messages a day for the

next month to be sent out automatically through your social profiles.

This very simple technique will bring you in hundreds of relevant, targeted viewers. The people

who have now seen your content can rate whether it is shareable or not.

Repeat this every month and until you feel your messages are becoming boring and repetitive.

When you do, come up with some more.

Find out where your competitors are getting links from

Using the Open Site Explorer website tool mentioned earlier research the ‘link profiles’ of the

top performing websites for your keywords. Write down a list of these sites and try securing

links from the same places. You will notice they may have numerous links from blogs and forums

which brings me on to my next point….

Participate in online forums and blogs related to your industry with Google Alerts

Research your selected keywords and find online forums, websites and blogs related to your

industry. Start participating and creating conversations with the other readers and where

applicable leave a link back to your website.

A fantastic way to find relevant sites is to use Google Alerts. Create an individual alert for each

of your keywords at http://www.google.com/alerts. Now, according to the preferences you

selected when creating your alert you will receive an email from Google showing the latest

pages on the web that include those keywords. These will often be new blog articles which will

http://www.google.com/alerts


allow you to comment and leave a link back to your website. Remember, each of these articles

you comment on should be relevant to your keywords.

Write articles for content aggregators and Social Bookmarking websites

You can submit the blog articles you have already written to article syndication sites such as

Ezinearticles, About.com and iSnare. Although they don't pass on much ‘SEO juice’, they're still

worth submitting to. In return, you'll get a link in your author bio back to your site.

Similarly, Social Bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious and Pinterest allow you

to build links to your website. The effect of these on your search engine ranking position is once

again minimal, but every little helps!

If the content you are bookmarking is somehow remarkable this particular link building

technique could also build a tremendous amount of traffic to your site from the social bookmark

(rather than the search engines). These sites in many cases have helped thousands and

thousands of pages go ‘viral’. This happens because people search for fantastic content on

these sites and then share what they find with the rest of the web.

Write guest blog posts

Find bloggers who have a high level of authority in your industry and pitch to them an

interesting blog idea which you will write for them. Professional bloggers always feel the need

to post regular, quality content so many times they will be willing to listen. The key here is in

actually building a relationship with the blog owner by commenting intelligently on their blog

posts for several months. After you have built rapport with the owner they may be more

inclined to allow you to write a guest post.

Create how-to guides, ebooks and videos

With your hopefully expert knowledge in your particular field create an in-depth tutorial or

guide in to a specific aspect of it. Offer good advice and you will find your website becoming a

hub of information that people will willingly link to. Be creative here! There must be something

of value you can offer your customers.

Aggregate useful/helpful content

Create a page or several pages on your website that bring together numerous useful resources.

Alternatively, if you found you couldn’t find a solution online to a certain problem you faced in

the past, create a page based on that issue and explain how you overcame it!

Ask business partners, family, friends and customers!

Finally (and most simply), just ask your business partners, friends and family if they would mind

sharing a link to your website on theirs somewhere. Many of their sites will have a ‘links’ page.

Once again, if you don’t ask you don’t get!


SEO house-keeping

After your website is fully optimised in terms of on-page SEO you should be spending a minimum of 5-8

hours a week on link building and its surrounding activities. Your blog should be the cornerstone of your

SEO campaign and by uploading remarkable content as often as possible soon you should build up a

permanent readership that will in turn start promoting your blog for you. Seeing the effects of your SEO

efforts often takes 3 or 4 months so checking your link profile everyday on Open Site Explorer will not be

beneficial! Keep a list of everywhere you have submitted your link to and check back in a couple months

to see if your link is still there.


Tracking the effects of your SEO efforts – Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools

To track the efforts of your SEO campaign ensure you install Google Analytics (GA) on your website as

soon as possible. To do so go to www.google.com/analytics and begin the signing up process. After

you’ve signed up it will ask you which website you want to track, add in your website URL and hit the

‘Get Tracking ID’ button. On the next page copy the tracking ID code and paste it into the code of every

page of your website. Most WordPress themes allow you to add this code once and it will replicate it

across the rest of the site for you.

Once you have successfully installed the tracking code on your website you will be able to track a variety

of statistics about your website and its users.

To determine the effectiveness of your SEO campaign click on the Traffic

Sources button on the left navigation bar of the GA, then Search Engine

Optimization and then Queries. You will then be presented with the

following page (as long as you haven’t installed Google Webmaster Tools

already).

Follow the on screen instructions to set up and link Google Webmaster Tools to Google Analytics. After

you have completed this, in Traffic Sources > Search Engine Optimization > Queries you will be able to

Figure 12 Figure 13

http://www.google.com/analytics


see exactly what queries people are searching in Google to find your website. Moreover, you will be able

to see the number of impressions your site is getting, its position in the SERPs for each of the keywords,

the number of clicks generated and the click-through rate amongst other things.

Using Google Analytics you will also be able to track the amount of traffic being brought in through

social media. This can be viewed via the Traffic Sources > Sources > and then Referral traffic.

Direct traffic is traffic to your website where a user has directly typed in your URL, e.g.

www.example.com, and came to your site without the need of social media, a search engine or another

website.

Figure 14 above shows the standard report you will see when you log in to you GA dashboard. I find it

very useful to compare the amount of traffic you are getting month on month compared to the effort

being put in trying to targeted increase traffic. In the above example, taken from a client of ours site in

April 2012, we have seen a tremendous increase in unique visitors since our best practise digital

marketing campaign was put in to action. Figure 15 below shows the stats for the same website 4

months later.

Figure 14

Figure 15


There are plenty of other fantastic statistics generated in GA which can be used to fine tune your digital

marketing campaign and track the progress of your SEO work. I recommend spending half an hour a day

getting to grips with the ins and outs of it.

SEO Summary

We have now come to the conclusion of our search engine optimisation section. You now understand

exactly how search engines operate and how they decide which websites appear in the search engine

results pages. We have learnt both how to implement best practice on-page SEO techniques and

numerous link building strategies. Using this knowledge you can now look at the link profile of the most

successful websites in your industry and formulate a plan to oust them from the #1 position.


4.0 Social Media Marketing (SEM)

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing can be referred to as the creation of traffic and attention through the use of

social media websites such as Twitter, Facebook, Google +, YouTube, etc.. The successful use of these

websites allow a business to receive highly targeted traffic in great numbers. Social media is also of

extreme importance in building profitable, long-term relationships with consumers and potential

consumers.

When consumers come across your social media channels and decide to become a ‘fan’ or ‘follower’

they are essentially opting-in for future updates from you. This is an example of permission marketing in

action. In contrast to traditional interruption marketing such as cold calling, through social media a

consumer will discover your business and then give you permission to market to them in the future. You

can see how this is more powerful than more traditional marketing methods!

The Web is changing

As you well know, the internet is evolving at a terrific pace. And no doubt the way it works and the way

we interact with it today will be very different to how it will be in a few years’ time. The internet is now

being rebuilt around people rather than documents and pages. Social media is the latest and most

important step in the development of the internet and is here for the long haul. The reason is simple;

humans are social animals. We have been social animals for hundreds of thousands of years; the

internet is simply catching up.

Consumers using the web are now using it differently. Less time is spent interacting with static content

and a larger percentage of time is spent interacting with people and brands.

Influencing the right people with social media

In order for a business to successfully sell a product or service it should look to structure its marketing

message in a way that will easily influence people and encourage them to share it with their closest

friends via word of mouth or ‘word of mouse’. A business should look to plant its message in easily

influenced, interconnected groups of friends. Successfully doing so will see a message reach a number of

people through people they trust. Receiving a message via a friend rather than a stranger on the end of

a cold call is far more convincing.

Figure 16


Using social media

Now we understand the importance of social media we can think about the strategies we can use to

increase the amount of attention our brand gets online.

First things first, if you haven’t already get your business set up on Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Google

Plus and Facebook. Make sure when you sign your business up on Facebook you create a ‘Page’ rather

than a new personal profile. To do this sign in to Facebook with your normal log in credentials. Then go

to this URL www.facebook.com/pages.

Click the green button ‘Create a Page’ in the top right hand corner and then follow the simple steps to

set your page up. Make sure you add your address, phone number, and website and accurately describe

the product/service you offer in the relevant fields.

Next set up your business’s profile on Twitter. Twitter does not differentiate between personal profiles

and business profiles so go right ahead to www.twitter.com and set up a new profile. You must use an

email address that is not associated with any other Twitter account.

Figure 17

http://www.facebook.com/pages

http://www.twitter.com/


When signing up make sure you your ‘name’ is

the name of your business and that your

‘username’ is as close to your brand name as

possible. I highly recommend setting up

Foursquare, LinkedIn, Google Plus accounts too,

and possibly YouTube/Vimeo should you have

any video content.

Google Plus is particularly useful for SEO

purposes as Google looks to integrate its social

channel and search together.

Using Hootsuite

Now you have set up each of your business profiles go to www.hootsuite.com and set up an account.

Hootsuite is a fantastic website that allows you to log in to all your social networks at the same time.

The Hootsuite dashboard allows you with one click to send a single message out once across each of

your social networks at the same time. The benefit here being that you do not have to log into each

individual site and then post the same message over and over again. However this is not the best part!

The main benefit comes in the ‘scheduling’ feature. This feature allows you to schedule future status

updates so that you don’t even need to be at your computer for your business to update its social

network channels. The amount of time this saves is monumental! I suggest that you create a document

full of messages less than 140 characters (so the whole message can be read on Twitter) that can be

sent out over and over again.

At Curve Interactive we have a 25 page Word document with 100s of different status updates. Once a

month 2 hours are spent on a Tuesday morning scheduling messages for the next 4 weeks. The results of

our social media efforts account for almost 35% of all our traffic this year.

We have found the most effective messages we send out via Hootsuite are usually between 90 and 130

characters long, have a link to a landing page on our website and also use a hashtag # linking the

message to a certain subject.

For example, here are a few messages we send out on a regular basis;

“How Kit Kat's latest marketing campaign has improved the brands reach online

http://ow.ly/f1k55 #InboundMarketing”

“4 of the greatest Twitter Hashtag campaigns of all time http://ow.ly/d5jZP #SocialMedia”

Figure 18

http://www.hootsuite.com/

http://ow.ly/f1k55

http://ow.ly/d5jZP


“Learn how one business used Social Media to double their revenue! http://ow.ly/cZuyG

#SocialMedia”

Each of the messages we send out are worded in a style that entices people into clicking a link to our

website. Through our social networks we send out messages that are useful for our customers and this

is where having a company blog can really come into its own. As well as helping your business’ SEO

campaign tremendously your individual blog posts can act as bait for social network users to click-

through on to your website. As per the examples above, write messages using snippets of text from your

blog articles or a short summary of a whole articles content, use a URL shortener (Hootsuite has one

inbuilt for you to use) to make the web address as few characters as possible and include a hashtag.

How many messages should I schedule a day and at what time?

I suggest that you send a maximum of 1 message every other hour via Twitter (12 a day) and limit

messages on Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus to a maximum of 3 a day. However, it is really

dependant on what is most effective for your business. Use Google Analytics judge when the best time

to send your messages out is. Pay attention to which messages are performing best in terms of click-

through. You can access this information by signing into your Google Analytics account, clicking Traffic

Sources then Referrals. For us here at Curve, I have found the optimum time to send out our messages is

between 2pm and 4pm during the working week. Early in the morning between 8am and 9.30am and in

the evenings between 6.30pm and 7.30pm also tend to get a good response.

Quick tips for increasing Twitter followers and click-through

When you first start off on Twitter use the advanced search function (search.twitter.com) to find

people and businesses related to your brand. Follow each of these people and also send them a

message. According to Mashable (2012) almost 35% of all the people you follow will follow you

back within 1 week (this is often called a ‘courtesy’ follow). Two thirds of everyone you follow

will at least click on your profile which then gives them the opportunity to click-through to your

website via one of your creatively worded tweets.

Perform keyword searches on Twitter for keywords related to what you do. Also start following

100 to 200 of those people each day.

Start tweeting about topics related to your industry (don't just tweet about things on your

website).

Start un-following the people who don't follow you back or if you don't have the time you can

use a service like Tweet Adder which can do this for you in an automated fashion.

Who.unfollowed.me is a free tool that allows you to see who you follow and if they follow you

back.

Start participating on Twitter by tweeting at people in your industry and re-tweeting some of

their tweets. If anyone tweets to you make sure you send them a friendly, helpful reply.

Make sure your messages are not trying to hard sell. Remember, you are using Twitter to give

potential customers useful information and hopefully starting new relationships.

http://ow.ly/cZuyG


With these quick tips you should dramatically increase the number of followers you have and in turn

increase the number of targeted traffic to your site.

The next two sections ‘Facebook and the Power of Like’ and ‘Increasing engagement and participation’

go in to great detail on the ins and outs of social media marketing. They are a bit more technical so if

you do have any questions feel free to email me at [email protected].

Facebook and the Power of Like

Now we have covered Twitter in some detail we will move onto Facebook. This part of the book is based

on the ‘Power of Like’ research series conducted by comScore and Facebook on the effectiveness of

social media marketing. This section will summarise the key findings from the research study, primarily

focusing on the impact of earned (organic) and paid media exposure.

The research focuses on how social marketing works and enables business to understand useful

frameworks for quantifying and evaluating their social marketing efforts. The key findings of the

research are listed below:

Businesses can maximise the impact of their social media marketing efforts on Facebook by

moving beyond the idea of just trying to increase the number of fans ‘liking’ their pages. Instead

metrics such as reach, impact, sharing and engagement should be what’s looked at.

Some brands on Facebook achieve a monthly increase in ‘Reach Ratio’ of between 0.5 and 2.0.

Meaning a brand can increase the number of people it reaches through promoting content to

‘friends of current fans’ through both earned and paid means increasing exposure by 50 to

200%.

Facebook represents a unique marketing platform that enables a business to leverage Paid,

Earned and Owned Media to maximise brand reach, awareness and resonance. Brands can use

Display Ads, Promoted Page Posts and Sponsored Stories (Paid) to attract fans to a Brand Page

(Owned) and then leverage that channel to market communications that then reach ‘fans’ and

‘friends of current fans’ (Earned).

Starbucks noticed that through the effects of increased earned media exposure through

Facebook a significant lift in in-store purchases for the four weeks they ran a special social

media campaign.

With the birth of social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook businesses now have a new way

to reach and connect with their brand ‘fans’ and the friends of those fans. Paul Adams book ‘Grouped:

How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web’ explains how reaching ‘fans’ and

then them influencing their friends is the key to getting a marketing message across to the critical mass

of people to make an idea spread. Sociological and psychological studies have proven that word of

mouth, reaching individual interlinked groups of friends and social proofing are all essential for

mailto:[email protected]


marketing campaigns to work to their full potential. With the birth of the social web this has all become

possible through the internet.

Social Media as a Marketing Channel

The emergence of branded social media channels and pages has revolutionized the communication

between customers and businesses online. Branded channels now act as the first touch-point between

buyer and seller, but this isn’t to say the usefulness of branded websites is coming to an end. They still

retain their importance in capturing leads and transactions.

A piece of research by comScore’s explained, by using the confectionery brand Skittles as an example,

how important branded social media channels are. The Skittles website attracted 23,000 unique visitors

in March 2012, while it’s branded Facebook page attracted 14 times more (320,000). With this

information it is clear the importance of creating content and engaging with ‘fans’ via social media. The

study goes on to prove that many branded social media channels/pages now routinely gain more visitors

in comparison to traditional branded websites.

How Social Media Marketing Works

Fan reach, engagement and amplification

While the vast majority of businesses now have a Facebook presence most business owners still focus

on fan acquisition as the most important metric. comScore argue that given a brand has acquired a

certain number of ‘fans’ its target should be to deliver maximum reach, engagement and amplification

in order to achieve brand resonance and influence consumers to purchase the brands products or

services. Fan acquisition therefore should not be focused on as the sole metric of success.

The following framework outlines how a brands message should be delivered through a social media

channel:

Fan reach

The first step after getting fans to ‘like’ your business’s Facebook is to communicate directly to them

through messages that will appear on their News Feed, where 40% of the average Facebook user’s time

is spent. After someone has ‘liked’ your page you may think each and every message sent through your

Facebook page will then appear in a fans News Feed. However, this is not the case as Facebook uses a

complex algorithm to work out which content to show to each user. This is based numerous factors, but

is known to include how often that fan engages through comment, share, like and check-in.

This highlights the importance of creating highly engaging content that will encourage participation and

sharing. If you fail to make great content the messages sent from your business’s social media channels

will not appear in fans News Feeds’.


Engagement

A recent study by Adage concluded that only around 1% of fans actually engage with a given brand

message. This seems alarmingly low, however when compared to the click-through rates for banner ads,

which is 0.1% (DoubleClick 2012), it is proven that social media messages are 10 times greater at

creating click-through. Moreover, social media messages also help expand the reach of a brand

throughout a fan’s network after being clicked on. This phenomenon is referred to as amplification.

Amplification

Amplification is perhaps the most important, yet least understood, element of achieving brand reach

and resonance on Facebook. The concept is defined as the way existing fans of the brand whom are

exposed to a message can act as medium between the brand and all of their friends. Because the

average Facebook user has around 150 friends, each person has the ability to potentially reach dozens

of their friends with earned impressions through engagement with brand message. This is because

every time a friend of yours ‘likes’ or engages with a brand that interaction will be broadcast on that

friends page as well as potentially showing up in your News Feed (It is dependant once again on an

algorithm, if you interact more with a friend it is more likely that branded message they interacted with

appear on your News Feed).

Due to factors like Fan Reach a brand is able amplify its messages by several 100 times their effort.

Starbucks test

Starbucks conducted an 8 week test to measure the efforts of their social media marketing on Facebook.

The test was conducted using a test group vs. a control group. The test group was exposed to Starbucks

social media campaign after 4 weeks. The results illustrated in the chart below show the increase in

Figure 19


purchase incidence among the exposed group compared to the control group. In the 4 week pre-

exposed period both groups nearly had identical rates of purchase incidence.

Within 4 weeks of exposure via social media there was a 38% increase in purchase incidence among the

exposed group. Each and every week of the experiment the exposed test group purchased more from

Starbucks. With the potential for earned media to drive such increases in desired consumer behaviour

clearly brands can realize superb benefits by implementing a social media campaign.

Summary

A brand should look to use a mix of Paid, Owned and Earned media through Facebook to deliver

its business objectives.

Less time is being spent on traditional corporate websites, with a brands social media channel

now being the first touch-point between customer and businesses.

Businesses should not focus on the number of ‘fans’ they have but instead look at engagement,

reach and sharing metrics. Doing so, through ‘friends of current fans’ a brand can reach more

potential customers.

Figure 20


Increasing engagement and participation

Before we move onto the social media best practise case studies we will take a look at how you can

improve the performance of your Facebook page’s engagement and participation metrics.

As we learnt in the previous section just being present on the main social media platforms is not going

to help your business sell more of its products. Focusing on how many ‘likes’ you have is pointless, your

brand needs to interact, create value and produce engaging content for its users to help reach your

business objectives.

Having said that you need to get at least 30 ‘likes’ on your Facebook page as soon as possible. After you

reach this number you’ll gain access to the Facebook Insights dashboard that is exclusive to brands with

over 30 ‘likes’. This dashboard allows you to see how engaged your fans are by highlighting exactly how

many people saw each message you posted, how many clicked on it, how many created a ‘Story’ in their

News Feed, the virality of each message, etc., etc..

Moreover, this tool also breaks down the demographics of each one of your pages users, from exactly

where they are in the world to their age, sex and what language they speak. All very useful data!

Figure 21


Facebook applications

One of the best ways to increase your brands reach and engagement levels is to create an engaging app

for your Facebook page. These can be developed for free (and at low cost) from websites such as

Pagemondo, WildFire and Shortstack. A recent study compiled by Wildfire looked into 7 standard types

of applications businesses can create for their Facebook page. Firstly, let’s define each of the 7 types:

1. Sweepstake: Sweepstakes are similar to a lottery whereby the winner of the prize is selected

randomly. A user would enter their name and any other information required in return for a

chance of winning.

2. Giveaway: Similar to the above, a giveaway application works by users inputting their

information via a ‘signing up’ form in order for a brand sponsored giveaway.

3. Pick-your-favourite: This app allows a user to pick their favourite from a selection of pre-

determined items e.g. a selection of photos depicting different holiday destinations.

4. Trivia: A trivia application gives users multiple choice answers to users to test their knowledge

on a subject area.

5. Quiz: A quiz app, much like a trivia app, gets users to answer a series of multiple choice

questions. Results display an image and a statement e.g. “I took the ‘Which Movie Star Are You’

Quiz and found out I’m Brad Pitt”

6. Coupon: Just like the paper form, this app would allow users to print off vouchers to use in-

store.

7. Video, essay and photo contest: These three apps function identically except for the type of

media the user is called upon to upload. Winners of the contest can be determined either by an

administrator at the company or by a public vote, or by a combination of the two.

What App generates the most engagement?

Wildfire’s study looked at the results from over 10,000 Facebook campaigns over the last 9 months and

concluded that ‘sweepstakes’, ‘giveaways’ and ‘coupons’ made for the most engaging applications.

More users interacted and engaged with these types of apps than any other. The reasons behind this

include the perceived value of the sweepstake prize and the chance of winning something for minimal

effort (low barrier to entry).

However, Wildfire’s study also identified another interesting trend: the most entered campaigns are not

the campaigns which generate the most sharing.

When focusing on the ‘earned media’ campaigns can generate it was found some applications are

inherently more shareable and therefore more likely to go viral than others. The campaigns that saw the

most sharing were ‘pick your favourites’, ‘quizzes’ and ‘trivia contests’. What’s the reasoning behind this

you may be thinking? Well, these apps publicly display a user’s personality, characteristics, style,

aptitude or thoughts on a specific subject area. Users enjoy sharing this sort of information about

themselves as they believe it will make them look good in front of the rest of their social network.


Wildfire concluded that the most shared campaign applications were designed to either:

Allow the user to discover an aspect of their personality of which they were previously unaware,

or

Display facets of their personality that they know about and want to share with their friend list.

Users who post the results of their favourite image/their score in a quiz are actually showing off. When

designing a quiz it is therefore important to look at the results the quiz will generate.

Astonishingly, when a Facebook user clicks on a News Feed post from a friend participating in a quiz

then a massive 82% of them were found to have taken the quiz too! This is an extraordinary large figure

and should indicate to all page owners that they need to work a quiz application into their social media

strategy.

How to run a best practice campaign

When designing your business’ social media application it is important to understand and consider the

behaviors and interactions that will inspire the end user to enter and share your brand’s content.

Wildfire’s study proved that if an interaction with a brands page will show off an individual’s style,

aptitude or personality they will be more likely to share the results on their newsfeed and to the rest of

their friends.

Therefore, if you chose to design an app that allows a user to express themselves, first of all make sure

the results of the quiz make an individual feel proud to share their results. For example you may have a

quiz that asks a number of questions intended to find out a user’s personality type. How a user answers

each question will help categorize individuals into 4 different personality groups. Make sure, whatever

result a user gets, that description the application allows a user to share on their newsfeed is one a user

will actually want to share! Make each result sound interesting.

The marketing team behind the launch of the recent Dark Shadows movie has used this ‘best practice’ to

great effect by creating a beautifully designed quiz app for their Facebook page. The quiz asks a series of

comical questions related to themes around the movie which then determine which character from the

movie a user is most like. The results a user receives from the quiz are compelling and humorous and

show off a user’s personality in a creative way. This resulted in large amounts of sharing which could

have only helped more people learn about the existence of the movie.


Incentivizing sharing

A further best practice Wildfire’s study uncovered was the importance of incentivizing sharing

behaviours. Consider building into your app some elements that rewards users for sharing and posting.

Mountain Dew’s recent “Dew Crew” campaign does just that with its intuitive sharing options that

encourage users to use the applications features and share it with friends to score points which can be

used to redeem branded merchandise.

I would encourage everyone to take a closer look at the following Facebook application as I believe it is

the benchmark for every future social media campaign to come. The Mountain Dew application includes

quizzes and multiple incentives to share. Moreover, it incorporates the benefits of ‘sweepstakes’ and

‘giveaways’ with the ease of entry and the ability to earn a valued reward for little effort. The

application is highly interactive, is branded superbly and is simple to use. It gives users a reason to come

back (earn more points, unlock more free goodies) and also uses a small part of the screen to earn

money through selling advertising.

You can view the Mountain Dew app in action by clicking here.

Figure 22

http://apps.facebook.com/dewcrew/?fb_source=bookmark_apps&ref=bookmarks&count=0&fb_bmpos=1_0


Summary

A strong social media marketing strategy is one that approaches the creation of branded applications

and content for users from different angles. A social media campaign should be broken down in to

different parts; one part of the overall campaign should be designed to achieve high participation rates

to capture user information (email addresses, names) for future marketing. Other aspects of the

campaign should focus on getting users to share the application with as many people as possible to

enhance brand reach. This can be done by creating several different applications that sit of your brands

Facebook page or by creating one application that covers both aspects at the same time. I would

recommend building one application that covers both aspects, but would also encourage creating

several other smaller apps that focus on each of the individual objectives.

Figure 23

http://www.curve-interactive.com/social-media-best-practices-what-kind-of-facebook-application-does-my-page-need/dew-crew/


Case study – AJ Bombers, using social media to create 1-2-1 relationships with customers

How one restaurant used Social Media to double their revenue

AJ Bombers burger bar was founded in March 2009 by Joe and Angie Sorge. With massive franchises

such as Burger King and McDonalds in the local vicinity to compete against AJ Bombers knew they had

to have a unique selling point – a differentiation strategy to survive.

Local social media strategy

They made it their mission “to keep the conversation going”. Joe and Angie understood the importance

of building relationships and how social medial could help them do that. As explained earlier on,

traditional methods of ‘push’ marketing such as TV, radio, print and cold calling are becoming less

effective and there is no denying that fact. New less intrusive methods such as social media marketing

and SEO are gaining momentum by providing added value to consumers whilst also not being pushed in

their faces. Instead of information being force-fed to consumers, people now have the power to be in

control of what information they receive and how.

The world is changing as we know it, businesses now have to react locally and look after each customer

as a valued individual. Big multi-national franchises like McDonalds and Burger King are unable to build

strong one-on-one relationships with customers, but small, flexible businesses such as AJ Bombers and

other local organisations are in a position to give each of its customers a more rewarding experience. AJ

Bombers realised they could harness the power of social media to build relationships and emotional

equity with each of its customers.

The power of building relationships

They figured the best way to build up relationships with their client base was to let them have a say in

how the business was run. The customers have input over almost every aspect of the restaurant. They

help design menu items, determine price structures, opening hours and even suggest promotions. These

conversations are going on right now on their Twitter page – take a look yourself @AJBombers.

From the outset social media was used to reach out and build connections with burger lovers in the local

area, finding out exactly what they like and what they don’t, and generally finding out how they could

better serve the needs of their clientele. Joe and Angie started hosting events at the burger bar offering

free beer and food to their followers and this in turn created real buzz online.

Using Foursquare

It was at this point Joe Sorge discovered Foursquare, the geo-social networking platform that lets people

earn points and badges by checking in at locations and sharing their movements with others via their

Facebook and Twitter accounts. Foursquare enabled him to offer incentives for customers to visit the

restaurant and spend money. He started off by offering free peanuts to anyone who checked-in to AJ


Bombers and a free burger to anyone who checked in enough times in one month to become the

“major” of the shop. This really got people coming back and buying more burgers.

Seeing the future importance of online reviews he also launched a “tips and to-do” page on Foursquare

which enabled customers to post messages about what their favourite meal is, how to get the best deal,

what to avoid and just their general thoughts on the experience they had at AJ Bombers. The incentive

for a user to write a review? A free cookie on their next visit.

And thirdly, for what would become the first of a series of special events Joe made a Foursquare event

which enabled highly coveted “Swarm badges” (given by Foursquare when more than 30 people check

in to a place at the same time) to be won by those checking-in. He would also donate a percentage of

each meal sold to charity. 161 Foursquare users (25% of the local population that had Foursquare)

showed up and more than doubled that days usual takings. Other than the increased revenue that day

the customers tweeted, posted updates and videos about the experience they had. All great for brand

perception and reach.

An average Facebook user has 150 friends, with Foursquare check-in updates posting directly to a

person’s Facebook wall this one event could have potentially reached 24,000 people! And what did it

cost? Just a small percentage of profits to charity.

7 months after adding Foursquare to their social media strategy AJ Bombers doubled the revenue they

made the 12 months before!

So where and how do you begin?

Any local business that hasn’t considered social media as part of their overall marketing plan is seriously

missing out. I can guarantee if you don’t adopt a social media plan in the next year or so then you run

the risk of being overtaken by your competitors. This is not scaremongering; you only have to look back

over the last few years and remember what happened when people were saying the same about e-

commerce and websites… well social media is the next evolutional stage of the wonderful world of the

internet. Jump on board now and get first mover advantage over your competitors.

I will now go in to some detail as to how you can implement a start a simple social media strategy

yourself.


Example social media strategy for a small business

Three social media platforms form the basis of this very simple, but very effective, social media strategy

that will see increased foot-fall to your shop floor and improve your business’s bottom line. This strategy

will also help build lasting relationships with customers and enhance awareness of your brand in the

local area.

How it works

First things first, we need to direct your current customers to your online presence. Advertise in store

with posters and QR codes. (Of course the other SEO and social media learning’s in this book will help

too)

Encourage customers to “Check-in” to your business’s shop with the Foursquare app or via Facebook

Places.

Incentivise customers to do so by offering; a discount with purchase (“spend £50 and get £10 off”).

Something for free (“enjoy a free dessert if you buy a starter and main course”). Special treatment

(“Check-in on foursquare for private access to the penguin feeding”).

Reward your best customers (the classic special offer is, “free coffee on your fifth visit’). Like a digital

punchcard.

This starter social media strategy will create buzz within the local area and draw attention to you brand.

Buzz will be created fundamentally by customers “Checking-in” to your business. Customers doing so in

essence will be leaving a free advert for your business on their Facebook timeline (See images below).

Every time someone “checks-in” to your business, the message posted on Facebook has the potential to

reach each of that customer’s friends (on average 150 people). Giving a customer a special deal in

exchange for an advert? Why not?

It is a fact of human nature, proved in psychological studies, that if your friend does something you will

be more inclined to do it too. It’s called peer pressure, or social proofing if you like.

Figure 24


The most trusted source of marketing is that very old fashioned stuff; word of mouth. Nielsen’s Global

Trust in Advertising study (April 2012) found that 92% of us trust messages from our friends and family

about brands against 47% of us trusting direct messages from companies.

Facebook’s (2012) own research concludes that if Friend x “likes” a brand on Facebook. There is a 65%

chance of Friend X’s close friends liking it too!

By getting your customers to “like” your business’s Facebook or Foursquare page you are opening up

the possibility of more and more people finding out about your company and what it does.

This coupled with offering incentives for people to actually come in to your shop and buy things will see

a direct increase in sales. This is a very cheap and effective means of advertising that is targeted at your

current customers and their similar friends.

Incorporating Twitter

Many people have never heard of search.twitter.com (although I did mention it earlier!) and that to me

is a great shame. This advanced search tool allows you to search for people talking about your brand

Figure 25


quickly and easily. It gives you the opportunity to see what your customers are saying about you. It gives

you the opportunity to interact with these people and start a relationship with them. By being so direct

with customers you will enhance your customer service, understand in real-time how to improve your

business and build emotional equity with people through relationship building.

Search.Twitter is also useful to see what’s going on locally in your area. The functionality of the search

tool allows you to search for tweets via city, town or postcode. If you are a local merchant think how

useful this could be… when Johnny Smith tweets “I’m soooo hungry, I’ve been walking through XYZ Park

all day and I’m ravished!”. You, as a local bakery see this tweet by searching for “hungry” people in the

local vicinity and hey presto you have a potential lead. You can now directly engage with this person and

perhaps offer him a little incentive to come and buy from you.

Social Media Summary

The web has changed. It is now built around people and the interactions between them and this is why

social media has begun to thrive. In this section you have learnt how to use social media channels such

as Facebook and Twitter to find and influence your target market. You should now understand that

social media isn’t just about getting a lot of fans and ‘likes’ it’s about engagement and participation from

those individuals. It’s about building relationships with these potential customers and building

emotional equity. The key to social media marketing is to be remarkable. Be remarkable in the content

you provide and the service you offer.

Use this information to devise and start a social media campaign for your business now. With the

information provided I am sure you will increase the amount of targeted traffic to your businesses web

presence tremendously. Use Google Analytics to track the progress of your social media campaigns, you

should notice a huge increase in the amount of ‘referral’ traffic you receive.


5.0 E-Newsletter and email marketing In the final chapter of this Digital Marketing Lead Generation System we will be focusing on the art of

email marketing and e-newsletters.

Starting an email newsletter and incorporating it into your businesses’ marketing plan will allow you to

build upon the relationship you have started with your new prospects via SEO and social media.

By incorporating all three digital marketing systems at once and creating a ‘system of systems’ you will

be generating potential new leads all the time. Moreover, you will also be hitting those prospects from

multiple angels. This is beneficial because as you know, prospects are not always in ‘buying mode’.

Before purchasing the full version of this book you may well have read a couple of the Curve blog posts,

perhaps downloaded the teaser version of this e-book and maybe subscribed to our digital marketing

updates, while you were in ‘interested mode’. Hopefully, as a result of the regular and relevant

messages you received from us, you eventually reached a position and state of mind to purchase or

make contact.

This type of marketing can be applied to any business sector to vastly increase bottom-line sales.

An email newsletter lets you leverage extreme power with little effort. Signing up for and using websites

such as Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, AWeber or Infusion Soft will allow you to easily create and send

out your own email newsletter.

These websites allow you to load pre-written emails into a system which can then be scheduled and

sent out in a particular order at a certain time every week (or whatever time interval you decide) to your

email list with no input from you, apart from the time spent setting up the system and writing the

emails. It should take you a week or two to come up with enough email content for a year.

For example you may have 52 short emails set up. You can program AWeber to send out your 52 emails

in order, 1 a week, to each of your prospects. Moreover, these email systems are so intelligent you can

program them to send out pre-scheduled messages to your leads in a specific order from the moment

they sign-up. This means different leads will be receiving different emails from you every week

depending on when they signed-up for your updates. Someone who signed-up 8 weeks ago will be

receiving email 8 of 52 from you this week. Someone who signed-up yesterday will be receiving email 1

of 52 from you.

The content of your newsletter should contain something that is legitimately beneficial to your prospect

in exchange for giving away their email address. At Curve Interactive we provide great value in return

for a user’s email address by giving away free marketing advice every week. Moreover, additional value

is provided through the free teaser version of the Digital Marketing ‘How-to’ Guide e-book. Providing

great value will increase the likelihood of prospects providing you their email address and ‘opting in’ for

future communications. Think of something of value your business can provide potential customers for

little no or cost. Use this incentive in conjunction with a daily, weekly or monthly information packed e-


newsletter and before long you will have a long list of leads that have opted-in to sign up for your

business’ updates. The consistent communication you will be having with these leads will build trust

and create brand resonance, eventually leading to a sale for your business.

How to start your email list

Before you start your list you will need to have a way to capture your lead’s email address and other

details. To do so get yourself over to www.mailchimp.com and sign up now. Alternatively, you can use

Infustionsoft or AWeber, but I find Mailchimp to be the simplest to use (note: you cannot pre-schedule a

batch of emails in Mailchimp, AWeber is best for this) When you log-in you will be greeted by the

following page:

Ignore step 1 for now and click on step 2 ‘Design a Form’. The simple instructions allow you to design

and create quite wonderful sign-up forms. These will be used to capture information about your users

so you can market to them in the future. I recommend creating a form with just a first name and email

address fields. Numerous studies have reported that the simpler your form is the more likely people will

be to sign-up. Keeping the required fields to a minimum will speed up the process and the likelihood of

large amounts of people signing-up.

After you have created your webform Mailchimp will give you the HTML code to paste on to your

website. If you would prefer a very simple webform or would like to edit the HTML code yourself

Mailchimp also gives you the option to create a ‘simple form’ and a ‘naked form’.

If none of these options meet your design requirements, and if you are using WordPress to manage your

website think about buying the Optin Skin plug-in by ViperChill. This plug-in provides you with around 20

Figure 26

http://www.mailchimp.com/

http://hamitmedia.optinskin.hop.clickbank.net/


beautifully designed forms for your website which can easily be edited to suit your sites colour scheme.

Optin Skin is also easily integrated with email marketing systems such as Mailchimp, AWeber and the

like.

The screenshot below shows one example of a form that comes free with this plug-in. Each aspect of the

form is editable from the colours of the text, buttons and background to the font style. These can all be

changed easily with the built in plug-in interface.

Further advantages of using the Optin Skin plug-in include that it allows you to split-test different forms

to see which one works most effectively. The plug-in can automatically work out which form is best and

show your web visitors the most effective one. Moreover, with the ‘fade’ feature you can grab the

attention of your leads by making your form fade-in after a certain amount of time, or when a user

reaches a particular part of the page. On some websites this has increased conversation rate by over

5%!

After you have created your sign-up form the Optin Skin plug-in generates you a line of code to insert

the form on your site.

Now we have created our lead generation form we need to learn to place it tactically throughout our

website. I recommend placing it somewhere on every page at least once and almost always ‘above the

fold’. ‘Above the fold’ means the area of your website that is visible when a user first lands on your site.

Obviously different screen sizes affect this. I have highlighted a few good examples over the page.

Figure 27

http://hamitmedia.optinskin.hop.clickbank.net/


Marie Farloe.com

In this example the opt-in form is present at the top of each page and always above the fold. In the

second example below, Viperchill.com, an opt-in form is placed on every page at the top of the right side

bar. Additionally I would recommend you adding the email sign-up form to the bottom of every blog

article you write and in the footer of your site.

Both these example websites offer great value in return for a users email, thus giving the user a good

reason to part with it. Make sure you are doing this too!

Viper Chill.com

Figure 28

Figure 29


Landing pages

Another effective way to increase the number of leads your website is generating is to create landing

pages that are specifically designed and optimised to capture email addresses and names. This is best

done by creating a page without a main navigation, a small bit of text, an image and the email sign-up

form. The simplicity and lack of distraction on these pages result in a far greater conversation rates

compared to that of other pages on your site. The purpose of these pages is one thing; to capture as

many email addresses as possible, so test and measure different formats varying the position of the

sign-up form, text and imagery. In the example below from the Curve Interactive website the sign-up

form is placed below an introductory blurb and image. Studies from Hubspot and various other inbound

marketing agencies have claimed placing the sign-up form on the right hand side of the page usually has

the most success. However, on this particular page on our site we didn’t find this to be true, proving the

importance of testing.

Figure 30


Link to your landing pages from your social media channels and other pages on your website. We have

found the best way to generate visits to these landing pages is to include them as a link in a related blog

article. Driving views via social media channels has also proven to be successful.

In store and at events and your current contact list

On your shop/office counter have a form people can write their names and email addresses on to

receive updates from you. Once again make sure there is a good reason for customers to sign up,

perhaps a future discount, the amazing content of your newsletter or some sort of ‘free prize’ could act

as the incentive.

Whenever you go to any trade events, do any networking, visit or hold a seminar etc., try to get other

peoples email addresses and add them to your mailing list. Go through your current email contacts and

create an invitational email asking them whether they would like to be added to your newsletters email

list.

Email content

Now we have our email system set-up and a way for people to sign-up for our messages we need to get

down to the nitty-gritty and get all our email content sorted! I cannot come up with the content for you

as you know each business offers its own unique produce. So sit down and brain storm what great value

you can provide your customers and potential customers. As explained earlier make sure you are

coming up with ideas that actually provide VALUE. Once you have come up with several ideas, split each

of these ideas into sub-categories and further into sub-topics. Think about how you can link all these

words together, piece by piece interlink the ideas and then hey-presto you now have a list of topics you

can write emails on, each building on the last. Months and months and months of content!

For example, here at Curve Interactive we send emails out about digital marketing, this can broken

down into several sub-categories; SEO, social media, website design, website development, branding,

email, film and video, display, etc. etc. Each individual category can be broken down into sub-headings;

SEO – on-page SEO, off-page SEO. And then even further; on-page SEO; URL structure, heading tags, alt

text, internal anchor text, title tags and so on and so forth. Each of these sub-topics easily contain

enough information to warrant a short email of their own.

Email best practices

Email ‘subject lines’ and ‘from line’ (also useful for writing tweets!)

The most important part of an email is making sure it gets opened! And as they say, you don’t get a

second chance to make a first impression so you have to make sure your ‘from line’ and ‘subject line’ are

in good order. These are the first things subscribers will see in their inbox so you need to make sure they

are compelling, and make the subscriber want to open it. A bad subject line and from line can cause


your email to get caught in spam filters, make your leads unsubscribe and stop people opening it. The

‘from line’ is very simple to make perfect; it should just be your brand name, simple as that.

The following guidelines give several ideas as to how to optimise your subject line;

1. An email subject line should be like a call to action and should start with a verb such as ‘learn’.

‘download’, or ‘sign up’.

2. Subject lines must relate to the content inside the email! This may sound obvious, but it is often

the case that the actual content of the email ends up have nothing to do with the subject line!

This is usually because the sender is trying to write such an attractive subject line that what is

actually in the email is forgotten!

3. The call to action used in the email subject line should be repeated in the email copy.

4. Use your brand name in the subject line. A recent study from Mailchimp found that emails were

more likely to be opened if they included the company’s name in it.

5. Make sure you include the email’s offer in the subject line, so people know the value the email

will provide them e.g. “Discover how one business doubles their revenue using social media”

6. Creating a sense of urgency is a good tactic to use in conjunction with a compelling offer. One

way to do this is to use brackets in the subject line. For example, you might be promoting an

upcoming webinar and you want to make sure recipients realise this right away. Your subject

line could be, “Learn to Become an Efficient Blogger with Curve Interactive [Webinar in 2 Days]”.

7. As mentioned earlier you cannot afford to have your emails get caught up in spam filters. To

give yourself the best chance do not use spammy words like ‘free’, ‘act now’ and ‘offer’. Also do

not have all your words in capital letters or over use exclamation marks!!!!!

8. I recommend keeping your subject line under 50 characters if possible. Having anything longer

you run the risk of words being cut off. Each email client shows a different number of characters

varying from 30 to over 80 but most show around the 45-50 character mark. If your email

system allows it then try to do a split-test on a subject line. Test 2 very different subject lines

against each other on a subset of the database and then set the main bulk of emails to be sent

using the better performing subject line – usually based on Open rate. Take on board the

learnings and then test again the next time around.

9. Make sure the first few lines of your email copy are highly related to the subject line. Most email

clients have a preview function which pulls out the first couple of lines of text, if this is

consistent to what the email says and reinforces its points readers will have more reason to

open it.

.


Email design

If you are using one of the email systems pointed out earlier in this section you will have probably come

across the free email templates they offer. Most, like Mailchimp, have an easy to use drag-and-drop

system that allows you to easily add images, text, social media icons and other widgets into a custom

made email design. These free templates will have been tested across all major email clients (e.g.

Outlook, Gmail) and will render without fault. I would recommend keeping your emails very simple in

terms of design and focus mainly on the copy and the value it provides. Seth Godin is the world’s most

subscribed to blogger and an example of his blog is shown below. As you can see there is no design

element to his emails whatsoever! He sends out a new email everyday just a few paragraphs long. But, it

is always full of quality content.

With the simple formula of providing great

content (with no design) Seth has grown his

blog into the biggest in the world. His blog is

the building block as to which he has built his

career as a bestselling marketing author.

Through his blog, everyday he builds more

trust with his customer base and everyday his

subscribers gain more value from his emails.

In return, in the fore-front of every one of

these readers’ mind are Seth’s marketing and

self-improvement books (related products).

Having said that, if you want to add a little extra personality to your email that’s perfectly fine, but just

don’t over complicate it.

Figure 31


A good example of a simply designed, well worked email can be seen below from Frank Rumbauskas

Figure 32


Email design best practises

There are a few great email best practises Frank implements in the design of his email. Firstly, when he

sends an email with more than one topic he clearly states what is being covered in the email at the very

top. I would recommend improving this further by adding a line of text explaining what the email is

about at the very top, above any images. As you may well know, when you open an email images are

switched off and require the user to download them before they can be seen. It is often the case that

the undownloaded images cover the preview section in an email client and therefore restrict a

subscriber’s view of the email contents. This often causes people to overlook the email and not read it.

Having a compelling line of text at the top of the email will result in more people opening the email.

The second best practice Frank takes advantage of is the use of a mixture of graphical (buttons) and text

call to action links. This is a point not to be over looked! The example email could be improved further

by changing the call to action text from ‘Continue Reading’ to something more compelling and related to

the contents of the linked to landing page.

Frank has aligned the most important aspect of the email (the contents!) on the left hand side. Curve’s

own studies have proven emails that include the body copy on the left have a higher percentage click-

through rate and this is attributed to the fact that we are trained to read from this position. If you place

an image here instead it will distract users from what’s most important. Put all your most important

copy and calls to action on the left hand side.

You will notice that the right hand side of the email has been used to promote his related product and

provide customer testimonials. The 30 day free trial panel is in an ideal position for an advertisement

because 1. it is not on the left and 2. the design makes in stand out to a reader who is looking carefully

through the email. The testimonials below the advertisement and the use of client logos at the bottom

of the email give readers the impression that Frank and his business are highly reputable and worth

using.

Furthermore, each week there is 100% consistency in the design of the email. Readers become

accustom to receiving an email from him and they can anticipate what it is going to look like. Things like

social media sharing icons, unsubscribe and foreword to a friend buttons are easily added in via

Mailchimp’s email builder and are essential.

Finally, Frank uses images of himself in his email marketing making his messages that much more

personable. When designing your own template take these points into consideration, but remember at

the end of the day an email is about the quality of the content, not how fancy the design is!


Email client usage trend analysis

As a specialist digital marketing agency we send out custom HTML emails every month for our clients.

Along with measuring the standard statistics such as open rates and click-through we pay particular

attention to what email client (e.g Hotmail, Gmail) our emails are being opened in. Each email client

renders a HTML email in a different fashion and therefore it is important for us to understand where

emails are being opened so we can make sure the design renders correctly in each one. However, there

is one more important reason we pay attention to which client our emails are being opened in. We want

to see how the open rate on mobile devices increases over time. And it has come as no surprise that the

number of opens on iOS devices (iPhones, iPad and iTouch) more than doubled from the beginning of

2012 to August 2012.

Percentage of emails opened in each email client

As you can see the number of opens in Microsoft’s all dominating Outlook email client has fallen by over

10%. In January this year the number of total emails opened it Outlook was 69.7% and as of this August

this figure has dropped to 57.3%.

The % of emails opened in iOS on the other hand has more than doubled in the same time period. As of

January 2012 the average number of emails opened in iOS was 10.1%. 8.3% of these opens can be

attributed to iPhone opens, 1.7% to iPad opens and 0.1% to iPod Touch opens. As of August 2012, the

total number of opens on iOS devices had risen to 20.9%.

iOS Device January 2012 May 2012 August 2012

iPhone 8.3% 12.1% 12.9%

iPad 1.7% 5.7% 7.9%

iTouch 0.1% 0.1% 0.1%

Total 10.1% 17.9% 20.9%

0.00%

10.00%

20.00%

30.00%

40.00%

50.00%

60.00%

70.00%

80.00%

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Outlook

iOS Devices

Android

Hotmail

Yahoo

AOL mail

Gmail

Windows Live Desktop

Apple mail

Other email clients

Figure 33


Breakdown of emails opened in iOS devices

If the current rate of opens were to continue as they are now by August 2013 emails opened on iOS

devices could outnumber those opened on Microsoft Outlook.

Predicted trend for 2013

Figure 34

Figure 35


We expect as we progress through the year the number of emails opened on mobile to increase further,

but not as much as the trend on the previous page suggests. We expect the rate at which Outlook opens

are falling and iOS devices open rates are rising to slow and reach a plateau at 54% and 28%

respectively.

What we are seeing is that more and more of our clients are adopting mobile strategies in terms of their

email and websites. We can only recommend this behavior as the late majority of the population pick up

their smart phones and start browsing the web and opening emails on their mobile devices. Emails

opened on mobiles without a responsive design are seeing very poor click-through rates so if this is

something your business has not addressed yet, now is the perfect time to take action.

What you need to consider when developing emails for mobile

Although for some time now consideration has been given to how websites are viewed on mobiles and

indeed in many cases websites are built specifically for the channel, this has not always been the case

with emails.

Receive an HTML email today on your iPhone for instance, and even now it’s usually hard to read the

text after it has been rescaled to fit the small screen. As a result you very often you find yourself

zooming in and then scrolling not just up and down, but from left to right just to read the content. Even

if your eyesight is good you may still need to zoom in to be able to click on a link or ‘Call to Action’. If you

created an email template that does not works on mobile devices you may have already lost subscribers

due to how bad your emails render on them.

Some companies are recognising the issues and are designing and building emails with mobile devices in

mind. For example RAC and PruHealth have both taken this into consideration and we now deliver

emails for them that render differently to the desktop version if viewed on a smartphone. To put it into

context 21% of the ‘opens’ on a recent PruProtect newsletter broadcast to brokers and agents was on a

mobile device, predominantly iPhone, and the resultant ‘click through’ was as good as for the desktop

version of the same email. We found that emails that are optimised for mobile way outperform

standard emails, so it is definitely worth keeping this in mind.

So how do we go about it?

The first job is to get the balance right between a ‘creative’ design and one that can work well on

mobile. The first thing to remember is that the optimum design width that we should work to is 600

pixels wide and if possible we design the email so that it is just a single column wide.

However as mentioned earlier we often have to balance creative design with functionality and therefore

often we are asked to design using two columns of 300 pixels wide instead. For mobile then this would

be split exactly in half showing the left hand column of 300 pixels in the screen only. By using style

sheets we can prioritise content by hiding or even moving elements from the right hand column and

positioning them on the left if viewed on a mobile device. The desktop version remains as you have


designed it, 2 columns. But for mobile, although a longer email, you can at least read the text without

having to scroll around and zoom in.

So the next time that you email your customers give a thought on when they are most likely to receive

and open the email. If you think that mobile is the where they will be viewing it then make sure that

what they will see can be read easily, and links can be clicked on easily.


Email summary

You should now understand how best to design an email, how you should structure subject lines and

how to come up with content. You have also learned how to build your email list and most importantly

focus on creating quality content. Keeping these best practises in mind, over time you should build a

large number of email subscribers who are highly interested in what you do. A welcome advantage

email subscribers give you and your business is the high interaction they will have with your online

content. Online marketing expert Neil Patel has been following this pattern for years and has recently

stated that 41% of all blog comments on his website are made by email subscribers. Furthermore, his

research has found that they are 3.9 times more likely to share the content via the social web versus

people who came to the site from another traffic source!


6.0 Conclusion Using the marketing methods in this book you will develop an integrated system of systems which will

help you leverage your time set aside for marketing effectively. As we’ve learnt, outbound based

methods of marketing are now less effective than their less intrusive inbound counterparts. You will find

when implemented correctly, each of the strategies in this book will work together to create a constant

stream of leads through your business’s now highly effective web presence.

By making best use of the advice on offer in this book your web presence will now be providing high

quality content to your customers and potential customers. The great value you are now providing via

your optimised webpages, email marketing and social media content will increase your business’s brand

perception. Moreover, the combination of techniques will increase your brands reach and the chance of

brand resonance.

You will be hitting people interested in your business’s line of work through multiple channels on a

regular basis, and when these people come to the conclusion they are ready to buy, your business will

be on the forefront of their mind.

Search engine optimisation, social media marketing and email marketing will continue to grow in

importance to your business over the coming years. Take action now and get started on your own digital

marketing campaign.

We hope you will use each of the techniques explained to their full effect and that in turn, over the

course of time that your business will generate vastly increased sales. If you require any further

information on any of the subject matters mentioned please get in touch with us directly and we will be

more than happy to help. To keep up to speed on the latest developments in SEO, social media and

email marketing make sure you are subscribed to our e-newsletter and that you follow your blog.

I wish you all the best!

Guide to SEO, Social Media, and Email marketing

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