Susan Barnes is the president and founder of Susby Internet Solutions. Susan enjoys teaching and strives to have her clients understand how they can use newer technologies to promote their businesses. Susan has been project manager, designer, developer and lead online marketing consultant for various small to medium sized businesses for over eleven years.
Congratulations to Cariwyl Hebert, our very own Digital Marketing Navigator at Susby. Earlier this month, Cariwyl earned the SEO Practioner Certification for completing the Market Motive SEO Certification Course. In addition to her Google AdWords and Social Media expertise, Cariwyl will also be consulting for Susby on SEO work and search marketing projects.
No other person works harder at gaining new skills and diving in with everything she’s got! I’m proud to have had Cariwyl on the Susby team since 2010 and look forward to her practicing her new skills in SEO this year.
In addition to digital marketing consulting, Cariwyl has experience as an event planner, running her own business where she is the founder and chief Mozart at Salon97.org. Cariwyl steers the organization to make Classical Music accessible to everyone. She holds Bachelor’s degree from San Francisco State University, has worked for the Grammy’s, San Francisco Conservatory of Music and enjoys keeping fit, taking photos and is quite an expert wine taster, having studied to be a sommelier in the not to distant past as well.
If you have questions about SEO consulting services, classical music, Instagram latergrams or just want to chat about interesting wines, contact Cariwyl@Susby.com, or Suse@Susby.com or simply post a comment below. We look forward to hearing from you.
And remember: Search is at the core of all digital marketing and SEO helps you get found.
When it comes to email marketing, the million dollar question is: when do I send it? Any e-newsletters and promotions we send are competing for readers’ attention before they even reach inboxes: demanding workdays, busy personal lives, and floods of business-related emails–not to mention the other promotions competing to be seen!
Determining the best time to send email promotions depends on your audience and can vary greatly by industry. Start by looking back at previous email campaigns to see what worked best for your company in the past.
Email timing has also been studied and researched by numerous marketers and below are some highlights of recent findings that will help you develop guidelines for email testing strategies:
-Don’t mail on Mondays.
You aren’t the only one who is really busy at the beginning of the week! Your email is likely to be lost among everything that came in over the weekend. Many consider Tuesday to be the best day to send email;Wednesday and Thursday are favorable as well. By Friday, people are more focused on weekend plans and completing to-do lists than inboxes, so avoid this day as well.
-Don’t send email promotions while your target audience is sleeping.
E-blasts sent overnight tend to go unseen. If it arrives when they are asleep, your audience is less likely to see it when they’re awake. This is similar to the issue with Monday: a lot of emails come in overnight–more than you may expect. Therefore, your competition to be seen is that much greater.
There is some debate over whether it is better to send email in the morning or afternoon. This can vary by industry, and it also varies by who you ask. Marketers test and research email open rates frequently and a case can be made for mailing on any day of the week. Wordstream recommends sending campaigns between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. or between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m.
And Dan Zarrella and Pure360 offer an excellent infographic chronicling their research on email timing:
Don’t be shy about doing you own testing. What works great for one mailing list may not be the best choice for your company. To eliminate the guess-work completely, use an email service, like MailChimp, that offers Send Time Optimization. This feature uses data from the millions of emails sent using their service to determine the best time to deliver your email.
What experiences have you had with email timing? We welcome you to join the conversation in the comments section below.
We recently discussed the latest Twitter profile updates and how to use them to your advantage. Now that you’re creating banner images and pinning tweets with the best of them, let’s dig a little deeper. According to Twitter Brand Partner Alex Ticas, Twitter has 255 million active users. Ticas also states that there are 1 billion tweets (yes, *billion*!) every two days. That’s pretty incredible. This doesn’t mean you can’t rule Twitter! You’ll just have to work a little harder to cut through the noise.
Here are 3 great ways:
1. Choosy tweeters choose GIFs.
Those often-hilarious moving images you see across the internet are called animated GIFs (Graphics Interchange Format). They were introduced by CompuServe in the late 1980s but have had a recent resurgence in popularity.
This summer, Twitter announced that the platform now supports animated GIFs. Now you can delight your followers with short animated images of fluffy animals or your latest products or sale items. As with all other image-related marketing, the possibilities are endless.
Fun fact: did you know that GIF’s pronunciation deliberately echos the famous peanut butter brand JIF? CompuServe employees used to say that “choosy developers choose GIF” as a nod to the peanut butter brand’s slogan.
2. Embed photos.
If you aren’t attaching images to your tweets yet, now is the time to start! This is a great way to attract more views for your tweets, so reserve this feature for your most important messages. On Twitter, click the camera icon when composing a tweet to add your image. Hootsuite now offers the option to post images via pic.twitter.com as well so that your images will show in native Twitter feeds even if you aren’t posting directly from the Twitter platform.
Social Media Examiner offers a great article on how to prepare your images for Twitter’s automatic cropping and resizing.
3. Find Leads with Advanced Search.
Twitter is a great place to meet people virtually and begin the path to real-world relationships and business exchanges. But what if you want to reach beyond tweets from people and businesses you already follow? That’s where Twitter’s Advanced Search comes in handy.
Do you want to see who is talking to (or about) businesses like yours? Type “to: @username” into the search box.
Only want to see conversations happening near you? No problem. Here is a search for all tweets within four miles of San Francisco’s 94102 zip code, tagged with #sanfrancisco:
You can also search for tweets based on subject and sentiment. Here is a query for people saying positive things about black shoes:
If you spend time on social media, it’s no secret to you that 2014 is all about content. You’ve also likely noticed the lifestyle emphasis of popular content this year. Videos, images (both with and without text), and the beloved listicle are also very popular in 2014. And if it seems like your news is coming from more and more varied sources, it’s true! As the 2014 social media marketing trends infographic below by TalkWalker states, more and more brands are becoming content producers.
Talkwalker.com is an excellent social metrics platform for brands. Signing up is easy and free. And once you are logged in you can search for social media metrics on any brand you like. Track your brand’s buzz, engagement, potential reach, and see how you stack up against brands similar to yours. See what people are saying about you and get a general idea of the sentiment surrounding your brand too. But look closely! Sometimes this aspect of social listening is inaccurate. For instance, Talkwalker sees the phrase “crazy cool” as a negative statement.
As Talkwalker’s infographic states, be passionate with your content and your social messaging!
What social media trends are you noticing this year?
In our last post we discussed recent changes to Facebook advertising. In keeping with the theme of always-changing social media platforms, we’re back with must-have tips regarding the latest Twitter profile changes.
Twitter announced their new profile format in early April. Though resistance to change is typical among those on social media, it was immediately clear that the updates really did provide an enhanced Twitter experience.
In today’s post we highlight Twitter’s recent profile changes and how they can be useful to you and your business:
1. Larger Banners
The large banner images we know so well on Google+ and Facebook have now made their way over to Twitter. Get the most out of this new feature by using images that show customers what your business is all about!
image via hubspot.com
image via hubspot.com
The examples above from Caterpillar and Apple show two very different ways you can utilize Twitter’s enhanced banner size to share eye-catching images with your audience. Be creative and have fun!
2. Pinned Tweets
Finally, we have the ability to leave an important message at the top of our Twitter feeds for as long as we want! In an environment as hectic as Twitter, it can be difficult to be seen–regardless of the importance of your message. With the new pinned tweet functionality you can ensure your latest news will be the first thing visitors see when viewing your profile.
Simply log into your Twitter account, click on “Me” to go to your profile, scroll down to the tweet you want to pin to the top, click the three dots next to the trash can icon, and select “pin to your profile page.” The pinned tweet will remain at the top of your profile until you select a new pinned tweet.
3. Highlighting Your Best Content
Twitter now gives your most popular tweets a larger font size, which both encourages users to post quality tweets and makes it easier for profile visitors to see your best content. More favorites and retweets than you typically receive for a tweet is all it takes to activate the larger font.
Stay tuned for more Twitter tips on the blog next month!
If we told you that Facebook advertising changes were coming your way next month, would you be surprised? We’re guessing you wouldn’t. Marketers and consumers alike notice frequent changes (often with shock and dismay) to their favorite social networks. While sometimes these changes are for the better from a consumer perspective, more often than not social media users are frustrated by surprise layout and functionality changes. As marketers, we understand the ramifications these changes can have if they catch you off guard! Scrambling to catch up is never fun, which is why we’re here to let you know that yet another round of Facebook advertising changes is set to roll out beginning in June 2014. The right-hand column ads we all know and love (pictured below) will be displayed at a larger size starting next month. The current 100×72 size will be phased out, which means the best way to get the most out of your right-hand column advertising is to create new 600×315 versions of your ads. These new ads will be rendered at 254×133 and are expected to increase engagement with your potential customers. We certainly can’t argue with that. Start planning your new right-hand column advertising strategy today and stay ahead of the curve!
According to eMarketer.com, the average American adult spends five hours per day online–more time than we spend consuming any other form of media.
Many factors influence how we interact with a website: easy-to-read text, images, clear call-to-actions, and a clean design encourage web users to stay awhile. But did you know that color has a great impact on user behavior as well?
This infographic from TestKing.com shows us which emotions are evoked by each color, discusses subtleties determined by color shade, and how to best use colors to evoke the emotions you want potential customers to feel when they visit your site:
Does Facebook’s use of blue and gray inspire us to trust the site with the most important moments in our lives? It’s very possible, considering that some of the most-used social networking platforms utilize similar color palates: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
The internet is a noisy place. With numerous social networks, search engines, and popular websites, it can be difficult to remain visible to potential customers. While services such as Google AdWords help businesses acquire new customers via search, retargeting keeps your brand front-of-mind on the sites web users love most. In this post, we explain what retargeting is and how to use it to help your business gain new leads and customers.
What is retargeting?
Retargeting is a type of paid online marketing that targets potential customers based on their previous web-based actions. Visitors to sites that have implemented retargeting are tagged with a cookie or pixel and are later served image ads about that company to entice them to come back and make a purchase.
Have you ever visited a hotel website or shopped for products online and later saw images advertising these businesses as you surfed the web? That’s retargeting.
Example of a retargeting ad.
You also may have heard the term “remarketing.” This is simply retargeting via Google and their partner sites. Google is the company serving the ads and the type of advertising is called retargeting. This can be a bit confusing but don’t fret! They are not two different types of advertising. That said, many marketers are now using these terms interchangeably.
What are the benefits of retargeting?
The rule of thumb with eCommerce is that only 2% of users make a purchase when visiting an online retailer. Retargeting enables you to remain front-of-mind among the 98% of visitors who spent time on your site but did not convert during their first visit. Unlike traditional advertising, you can customize your ads to specific types of users via retargeting. For example, you can serve ads showing specific items from abandoned shopping carts to encourage potential customers to come back and make their purchase. You can also keep current and former customers interested in your brand by showing them ads for customer loyalty programs and other special offers.
I’m already using paid search. Isn’t that enough?
While implementing paid search on Google and other search engines is a great place to start with paid online marketing, it is important to be where your customers are as often as possible. This means having a presence on search, social, and the websites your potential customers visit.
Consider this: say a potential customer visits your site via a Google AdWords ad, looks around a bit, but does not make a purchase. This visitor later sees image ads for your business while surfing the web and/or social media and remembers that they were interested in your products. This user is significantly more likely to come back to your site and make a purchase than if they had seen your content via AdWords alone!
Do you have retargeting success stories to share? Join the conversation in the comments section below! Contact us today to kick off your retargeting campaigns. We look forward to working with you!
A few months ago, I was referred to a new customer by a colleague of another customer. Since most of my new business is referral based, I spent extra time getting to know the business of the new customer and understanding how we could help. As is quite common in the Digital Marketing industry, the project as described originally by the client turned into something a lot more extensive. What started as SEO consulting for an eCommerce site, blossomed into social media marketing, being the webmaster, blogger and web marketing analyst. Needless to say it has been a blast learning a new industry, business and making a new relationship with my client. I am also grateful for the opportunity to share a small success story about it.
What’s the biggest indicator of digital marketing success?
Dollar signs of course! And we saw a significant increase in the number of sales in Q4 2013 compared with all previous sales on the website. We started optimizing the website in August and adding the other responsibilities in September. As you can see from the chart below, the numbers speak for themselves.
“You cannot improve one thing by 1000% but you can improve 1000 little things by 1%” – Jan Carlzon Former President & CEO of the Scandinavian Airlines Group (SAS)
What are your favorite success stories from 2013? Please share in the comments below.
Google Search Updates, Algorithms, Pandas, Penguins and Hummingbirds
You may have heard of Google’s biggest most recent search engine update called Hummingbird, but do you know what it does and how it impacts your search engine results placement? In other words, how does Hummingbird affect your business?
This post covers a little history of algorithms, Hummingbird and what you need to do now to increase your search engine rankings.
First let’s understand what a search engine does. A good search engine will index all content available on the web and then serve up results based on any given search. So if you’re looking for organic blueberry chocolate (without quotes) the engine will provide you with what it considers to be the most appropriate results for your particular search. For a search on organic blueberry chocolate today, Google found about 37,900,000 results (in 0.32 seconds). That means there are 37,899,990 other web results competing for page one placement when people search for organic blueberry chocolate.
How does the engine know which sites to show the person searching (user)?
That’s where the algorithm comes in. An algorithm is a mathematical formula, which calculates the appropriateness of each search result based on each person’s search. So if someone searched for How to make organic blueberry chocolate we will see a different set of results, because Google understands that the search is different. The first search (for “Organic blueberry chocolate”) is likely being performed by someone interested in buying some chocolate and the other search is about learning how to make it. Those two things are quite different. Ponder on that for a minute.
I hope you’re starting to understand that the search engine is trying to be smart and doing it’s best to offer you as the user, the best experience by providing the most appropriate search results. So you want to know a couple of things.
1. How does the engine figure out which sites are the best ones to show?
And 2. How do you get your website or page to show on page one of Google?
Right?
Yes, well that’s where the Hummingbird comes in. Let’s dig a little deeper.
Before Hummingbird there were a few other updates that were talked about in search engine optimization and marketing circles. Most recently, these were Panda and Penguin. Both of them were Google’s way of getting rid of junk content or spammy websites that were cluttering up it’s index and muddying the search results. These were a couple of the bigger updates and gave the search engine marketing industry something to talk about, but in reality Google makes hundreds of algorithm changes per year. According to Moz, “Google makes 500 – 600 algorithm changes per year.”
What are these changes and why does Google make them you ask?
Sometimes the changes are small ones to shift the way the best quality search results are calculated and to keep search engine optimizers on their toes. Other times there are updates to penalize black hat (read unethical) SEOs for trying to game the engines. And yet other times there are major overhauls of the algorithm or engine to make it perform better in numerous ways. Hummingbird is such an update. It is like a replacement of the entire engine instead of just the replacement or repair of a part of it.
Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand.com says that one of the reasons for the name of the Hummingbird updates is because it is “precise and fast.” If you’ve ever seen a hummingbird, they are amazingly small birds with super powerful wings and thrust. They also seem to understand exactly where their food is based on color and scent and can quickly and efficiently retrieve the energy they need to sustain such an active little lifestyle.
While other updates focused on penalties to sites for keyword stuffing, bad inbound links and poor PageRank, Google’s Hummingbird’s main change is focused around understanding what the user wants. In search and web marketing this is known as user intent and a huge amount of energy has gone into being able to understand user intent in order to provide the most appropriate search results. According to Giselle Aguiar, “Hummingbird looks for natural language — well-written (no typos or grammatical errors), high-quality content on webpages.
Google’s goal in all this is to give the searcher exactly what they’re looking for. Google now wants fresh, relevant content written for the human reader.”
And in a recent case study, Giselle found a way to attract the Hummingbird to the feeder. How? She posted to a blog at least 3 times a week with one of them being a video. Because YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine after Google and YouTube is also owned by Google, “embedding video in a blog post combines the best of both worlds.” And Giselle is not a trailblazer there are many other SEOs backing her up. James Wedmore will tell you this as well. Just look at how many “How to…” articles he has posted on his homepage.
MarketingTypeGuys.com says “businesses that take the time to write content that addresses common questions from consumers, will find themselves naturally rising to the top of Google’s search results pages.”
And Salman Aslam writes: “This doesn’t change everything about the way we do SEO, but, we need to now put less focus on specific keywords and instead, think about what the user is thinking/needing/feeling when they’re searching – and then give them the most relevant content and experience possible. As a site owner, this is your responsibility too.”
Salman also brilliantly shows how there has been a significant increase in the number of “how” and “what” words in search queries over the last few years. Look at his chart here and read his thoughts on Hummingbird strategies.
Last but not least, we still have lots to learn from the pool salesman, Marcus Schneider who was able to sell tons of fiberglass pools in a dwindling economy just by understanding his audience’s needs.
So how do you get found with search? In Summary:
1. Focus on good content that will be useful to your audience.
2. Answer questions that your customers are asking.
3. Write blog posts frequently and embed videos in them for your own Jab Jab, Right Hook combination.
4. Remember that SEO is a marathon and not a sprint. Content marketing takes time. Know your audience, understand your market and always provide value.
5. Help people find what they are looking for. Answer search questions.
and read his thoughts on Hummingbird strategies.