Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance

There are 5 key steps that each marketer must take to create a successful social media campaign.  What does this include?

• Listening to what is being said online
• Assessing the marketplace
• Engaging with current and prospective clients
• Measuring is a way for us to optimize
• Improving our strategy as we learn more

According to Hemann listening and measurement are the two most important ingredients for success.  You cannot successfully execute on one without the other.  Below are a few of the best practice approaches that Hemann shared with the audience at today’s session.

Understand What Simply Listening Can & Cannot Do

• Optimize your content in real time
• Create a better customer experience
• Quickly learn about potential product issues
• Marketing through conversation
• Gain valuable business intelligence

Create A Solid Social Media Strategy

• Planning and beginning and ending stages is essential
• Internal resources for facilitating and executing is critical
• You can’t listen to everything so fine tune your process
• Don’t rely on just one tool for quantifying results

Tools & Reporting: Questions Every Company Should Ask Themselves

• Has your internal team decided on the tools you want to use?
• Is there a training and implementation schedule in place?
• Has a process for reporting been scheduled?
• Do you know what your competition is doing?

Myths & Misconceptions To Avoid

• Social media cannot be measured: You collect dozens of data points each day that assist in measuring your social media efforts.
• ROI stands for something other than return on investment: ROI does not refer to influence or engagement it is directly related to gaining or saving the company money.
• Social media measurement is different than traditional media measurement: Social media is measured by utilizing a series of strategies and tactics just as you would with any other effort.
• Social media is meant to be organic and we already have too much data: You can never have too much data!

Never Forget the Five W’s

• What people are saying about your brand.
• Where they are talking about your brand.
• When people are talking about your brand.
• Who is talking about your brand.
• Why people are talking about your brand.

Common Measurement Questions You Should Always Keep In Mind

• How many people did we reach?
• Did the program create conversation?
• How do I get ad equivalency so the brand can compare this to our advertising?
• Were our fans/followers engaged?

What Is Our Take Away From This Afternoon’s Session?

• No subject is unapproachable
• This is a step-by-step process
• Gaining access to quality data provides a huge competitive advantage

[Note from Lee: Chuck has published his presentation online so take a look below for the full presentation. Thanks Chuck!]

There are many ways to effectively track social media metrics for B2B sales.  What tools have you found to be effective for social media measurement?

Stay tuned for more posts from MIMA Summit 2011.  Follow the hashtag #MIMASummit on Twitter and watch for any posts on @toprank or @azeckman to see updates and photos from the conference.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | #MIMASummit: 6 Tips for Developing a Best Practices Approach to Social Media Measurement | http://www.toprankblog.com

Chris Boggs led a panel discussion at SES Toronto on Competitive Analysis – What tips and tools can get you the vital competitive information that every SEO needs. According to Boggs, “Competitive analysis is one of the most exciting and important tactics (SEOs) can do.

The session was segmented into 3 areas of focus: on site research,off site research and PPC research.

On Site Research

Marios Alexandrou, Rosetta

When conducting on site (i.e. within your competitor’s site) competitive analysis, start by:

1) Asking yourself, “what companies should I look at?”  Compete.com can come in handy here.  Enter a handful of competitors and look for companies with high traffic. These are the companies that will likely have characteristics that will help inform your SEO approach.

2) Assessing your competitors site.  Be sure to divide on site components into 3 categories: Content, Technical and Internal Links.  By segmenting, you can more easily identify their strengths, as well as their areas of weakness.

3) Crawling competitor sites by leveraging crawler tools like Xemu.  This will help determine:

• size of site
• links to internal pages
• popular search term pages
• Google Index

Once you have conducted your research, create a matrix to get a full picture of the competitive landscape. Do this by listing your competitors within excel on the y-axis and cross reference them against criteria (x-axis) like: Targets Long Tail, Optimized Title Tags, Internal Linking, Image Content, etc.

Off Site Research

Ross Dunn, StepForth Web Marketing

One of the most important elements to consider when performing off site research (i.e. looking at factors outside your competitor’s website) is quantity and quality of their external links.

Like on site research, off site analysis by identifying the competitors.  One way to determine your competition is to enter core phrases like “mountain bikes” as well as long tail phrases like “brand x mountain bike parts”. Survey the search engine results page (SERP) for top ranking businesses.  Be sure to weed out wikipedia and other non-competitive sites.

Now that you understand the different players, follow Ross’s tips for off site analysis.

1) Create Advanced Reports within Majestic SEO for each competitor and export the list to excel

2) Manually review top 50 links for each competitor and ask yourself:

• is their anchor text relevant?
• is their relevant on page content?
• do they have quality on page content?

3) Find and highlight shared links among 3 competitors (hub links). These links are likely attainable and have value for your search results.

4) Look for biased links (i.e. hundreds of supposed different all linking to the same page with the exact same anchor text should raise some flags)

Don’t recreate the wheel.  Learn from your competition’s link efforts to elevate your online strategy.

PPC Research

Matt Van Wagner, FindMeFaster

Start your PPC research with the mindset that to succeed you need to go beyond obvious questions like “what keywords are my competitors buying?” to ask questions like “where is the biggest area of opportunity?” Both questions are important, but the latter will help you look past competitive data to focus on the opportunities that can be gleaned from your research.

Quality PPC research tools are plenty, but before you start your research, arm yourself with questions that will help you hone in on key aspects of PPC.

How many ads are they running? How many different messages/offers do they present? Are they using best practices (i.e. do relevant keywords appear in ad titles)? How often do they present new ads? Do they react to bid changes?

With these types of question in mind, here’s a list of some of Van Wagner’s favorite tools for competitive PPC research:

• AdGooroo
• Compete
• iSpionage.com
• Keyword Competitor
• Keyword Spy
• Comscore

Walking into this session, I have to admit that I was looking for the silver-bullet.  The one tool that does EVERYTHING.  The truth, as we all know, is that although there are powerful competitive research programs, your approach to competitive analysis is truly your most powerful tool. Learn from competitors by researching their efforts with a laser-like focus.

To borrow a line from Alexanderou, “copying your competitors doesn’t make you better than them.  It makes you the same.” Determine their strengths.  Determine their weaknesses.  Incorporate these lessons to take your program to another level.

You can learn more about different competitive intelligence tools by reading the “Competitive Intelligence – Search Insider Summit” post.

Stay tuned for more posts from SES Toronto. Follow @TopRank and #sesto on Twitter for real time updates.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | SES Toronto: Competitive SEO Analysis | http://www.toprankblog.com

This session featured Patrick Lopez from iCrossing, Tom O’Grady from AdGooRoo, LeeAnn Prescott from Hitwise, Matt Roche from Offermatica and moderation duties were handled by Cam Balzer from DoubleClick Performics, who I interviewed early in the conference.

Overall, this session was a bit light, but it was great to get specific numbers from HitWise, as I would expect, and also both Tom O’Grady and Matt Roche did a great job explaining their products. Matt Roche offered an excellent strategic perspective on online competitive intelligence and he was a standout person on the panel.

Cam gets things rolling by having the panel provide a basic intro.

iCrossing: Uses WebPositionGold for rankings and AdGooro for paid search.
Hitwise: Largest user base of sites monitored.
AdGooro: Keyword and competitive intelligence and trademark monitoring.
Offermatica – Optimize ads in ad networks, text ads, landing pages. Increase engagement and sales for clients. Things to look at: demand going to competitors. Offers made by competitors that you’re not. Finding executions that are more compelling.

Cam: Techniques or tools?

Tom: A lot of information is transparent now, increasing the need for competitive intelligence. AdGooRoo measures coverage (share of voice) pre-click and rank. Those are data points to look at.

Cam: How does coverage work in aggregate?

Tom: AdGooroo tracks paid and naturally separately and together. “Coverage” is % of times showing on the first page in paid search results. With natural listings, “coverage” is the number of times the phrase appears in the first 10 pages. With AdGooRoo keywords are added to different groups for monitoring and from that you make adjustments.

LeaAnn: Understanding searcher intent by the sites they visit. Example: “xbox 360″ do consumers go to a retail site or a gaming site? Understanding how much of your own brand traffic is being siphoned off by competitors. Ex: are users going to a Wikipedia entry for your company or to your site?

Cam: What are some ways and sources to mine data?

Patrick: With disparate data resources, it’s important to make the information actionable. Identifying strengths and opportunities is important, but it’s finding terms that no one is going for that generate the most interest.

Cam: What kinds of data sources?

Patrick: WebPosition Gold and AdGooRoo and also a site review by our search team. Also, see what others are doing well and use that information to your advantage.

Matt: What it comes down to is the ability to use competitive intelligence info and take action on it. Example: a negative consumer review can go live seconds later. A site optimization recommendation can take 3 months to implement.

Cam: What is the other guy spending on search?

LeeAnn: Use Hitwise to identify traffic volume, search terms, traffic sources and then compare to your own site to get a round about idea.

Tom: The most direct way is to go head to head and make some assumptions from that.
Cam: In the US Hitwise doesn’t offer a breakout of natural vs paid reporting, but ComScore qSearch does offer reporting of traffic natural vs paid search.

Audience: Are there any synergies with HitWise and AdGooRoo working together?

LeeAnn: Both together would offer a powerful tool. HitWise would provide general numbers.

Tom: AdGooRoo would provide more tactical information for execution.

Audience: What about brand reputation monitoring?

LeeAnn: News sites are beginning to optimize their content. Blogs are starting to get more traffic than mainstream news. For example, the Saddam execution video had more coverage on blogs and traditional news sites.

Cam: Why?

LeeAnn: Blogs and consumer generated media are using the language of most searchers. This gives insight into how people are actually searching for content.

Cam: Should search engines disclose what marketers are spending

Panel: It would be great, but not going to happen.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2007. | Competitive Intelligence – Search Insider Summit | http://www.toprankblog.com