Content is a critical factor for successful digital marketing these days. A couple of years back, all you needed to do was do some extensive research, shortlist a few effective search engine marketing techniques, and then just begin. However, search engine algorithms keep changing rendering many SEO techniques obsolete over time. Including keywords in titles, descriptions, and alt tags to get your website’s rank up is not that effective now. Some techniques do work though, but it’s simply harder to surpass competition now.

Many optimizers have started to believe that old school SEO is dead. Might be, but a bit of ‘Googling’ will reveal that it’s very much alive albeit in a different form. The difference is that new age SEO and content are deeply interconnected now.

A successful content marketer should be able to leverage the power of content, making it beneficial not just to the business but to customers as well.

Here are a few tricks that could make a successful content marketer.
 

Behavioral Factors

 
The key is to figure out the problems of your audience, and solve them with educative/informative content. Google has been trying to do the same for years, trying to teach crawlers to assess the relevance of content. They are not yet there but quite close.

Semantic analysis was replaced with an assessment of the interaction indicators like bounce rate and the time a visitor spends on a website. If a user spends more time on a page before going to other pages in a website, it could mean that they found useful content there. This is a behavioral pattern that establishes the informative value of content.

This also makes it evident that well-written content can indeed make Google happy unlike uninformative articles stuffed with keywords.
 

Video Content

 
With Youtube, Instagram, and the likes growing in popularity, it is quite clear that video content will play a bigger role in digital marketing soon. Social media networks like Facebook have added live streaming features now, giving more opportunities for businesses to engage their customers and present their services in a more appealing manner. Besides, a video can hold a viewer’s attention better than long-form text content.
 

Effectiveness of Content

 
Developing content strategies is no simple feat, which is why a content marketer can always use a content manager or auditor. Content managers will have to carefully monitor the content even by the geographical factor, and measure and analyze how each article, image etc. influence buyer’s actions from the first click. Behavioral factors along with the data above can give you great insight on how the content affects conversion.
 

Creativity

 
The only thing that’s more important than SEO strategies for a content marketer is creative ability. Back in the days, some SEO texts and a few SEO-based tweaks here and there on the website would get its rank up on search engine results. Now it all comes down to the time a user spends on the website as well as social media influence. So if a website is brimming with high quality materials created by creative content writers and designers, visitors will want to spend more time going through it all.

Interesting headlines, appealing subheadings, and a unique style of writing can catch readers’ attention.
 

LSI

 
Stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. It’s basically how search engine crawlers use mathematical methods to identify patterns and relationships between the components of text. The analysis determines whether the content is relevant to the search criteria and what the website is about. LSI has been around for a while, and is still effective.
 

Social Promotion

 
Social media is the next best thing for a content marketer. Leverage it wisely, and your content would grow in value. This is why a part of the marketing budget should be allocated for social promotion of content. The key is to find influencers – people having a large number of readers for their blogs and pages, and have them promote your content. This way, publications reach a lot more audience.

Not just people but even businesses of all sizes benefitted from the immense popularity of social media platforms in many ways. This was when social media was just out of its infancy. Now it’s become a part of digital marketing amongst businesses. Social media networks are now invaluable marketing tools that can provide good insights to businesses and engage with customers.

This is why it’s important to make sure that social media marketing strategies align with the business’ goals, which is of course the most challenging part of the whole campaign. By setting the business goals for a year first, it’d be easier to develop social media marketing strategies accordingly. This can lead to big positive impact for that business.

There are a lot of things a business can do to make sure their social media strategies align with their goals.
 

Knowing what to achieve

 
This is what the business should determine first, and it requires them to spend a significant amount of time to work out the company’s objectives for that year or for the coming years. It could be anything from expansion to new markets and launching new products to increasing existing customer base and brand visibility.
 

Determining the most effective social media platform

 
Now that the business goals are worked out, the company can proceed to figuring out the right social media platform that can help them achieve those goals. This is where companies generally go out of their way. They tend to put all the eggs in one basket by working on several platforms at a time. Though this definitely increases their brand presence to an extent, it may just do the opposite when it comes to achieving business goals.

The better way is to focus on a single social media platform with well-devised strategies. It not only enhances brand visibility but also makes it easier to achieve business goals in a relatively short time.
 

Devising an optimal strategy

 
With a goal and a platform to reach that goal, the next step is to work on a ‘route map’ to reach that goal – not the strategy itself but a general idea of the route they want to take in achieving the pre-determined goals.

For instance, if the company wants to increase their customer base, they can start working on a strategy that prioritizes customer engagement through social media. If they want to expand the business to a new market, they can connect with people or businesses that can connect them to potential new markets or even get them a competitive edge in those markets.
 

Creating a step by step strategy

 
This step is where the business has to piece everything together so that everything falls in place – business goals, social media platform, and route map.

To expand to new markets, the company will have to connect with people that can help them do it. So step 1 is to compile a list of such people, and feasible ways to connect with them.

To increase customer base, the company can implement a content strategy by sharing the right kind of articles and blogs to keep existing customers engaged, and attract new ones.
 

Setting priorities

 
This is where resource utilization comes in. After preparing a strategy, the business should prioritize their tactics to make sure that resources are used efficiently. Analyzing the already prepared step-by-step strategy, and the time and effort required for each tactic can give them an idea of the ones that are more important than the rest. They can then tweak their plan so that it can be executed in priority order to obtain the best results.

The objective here is to set priorities by comparing the value of each tactic, its complexity, and the resources required to execute the tactic.
 

Have appropriate people handle the tactics

 
Once the business is aware of the resources each tactic demands, and the results each offers, they will have to choose the right people to implement them. Delegate each tactic to individuals who are more suited to execute it. Give them deadlines so they can come up with plans to get the job done at the right time.
 

Being flexible

 
Even a well-devised strategy might not give the desired results. So it’s always wise to be flexible when it comes to social media marketing. Even business goals might change over time. Even a small change in business goals is important. The company will then have to review their strategy and fine tune it necessarily so as to keep it in line with the goals.
 

Conclusion

 
It’s not that a social media strategy is useful only if it’s aligned with the company’s goals. If leveraged properly, it still presents many benefits for a business. But the platforms are the most effective if the marketing strategies are aligned with a business’ goals. Executing a strategy without a solid plan might end up as a waste of resources and time without significant benefits.

Over 320 million monthly active users…

Close to half a billion tweets every single day…

This is where Twitter stands now. Seven years ago, it had only about 30 million users. But not all of them use it to socialize. A significant number of the users are businesses. You might be wondering how it can be of use to a B2B business, as Twitter is generally a platform most leveraged by B2C companies.

B2B companies can also wield this particular weapon. However, the way they use it is what actually matters.

Today, social media platforms provide users with an experience like none other. The impact is big enough to influence the decisions those users make. When you consider a business, you should realize that it’s run by people too. So, it’s actually people who do business with other people.

Companies with an established digital profile and active social media presence becomes quite appealing to potential clients. This means, people can start working on building relationships with potential clients on behalf of the company.

To market your B2B business better on Twitter, you will need to take a few things into account and make sure you don’t make those common mistakes many companies have made already.
 

Bots Won’t Work Anymore

 
Building followers is part of the first phase of Twitter marketing. A large number of followers indicate that the business is quite successful. So to raise the numbers, many businesses relied on bots. Twitter estimates that there could be over 25 million bots on the platform. But studies by many universities claim that there could be well over 40 million bots.

Twitter is already on a rampage bringing down the bots, and other tools have started popping up that can filter bots from actual users. This means, businesses won’t be able to use this tactic anymore. In the long run, it could do more harm than good if you get caught.

It shouldn’t be about increasing the number of followers to show off your influence and success. It should be about having real followers who are actually interested in your company and the services you offer. For a B2B company, the followers can be other companies. A reputed, well-established company following your business on Twitter would speak a lot about the way you do business. It gives you credibility and some amount of brand value. A lot of such businesses following your company would make things considerably easier for you to market your company.

Now, how will you find and get such an audience to follow your business on Twitter?

Understand them first.

To understand your audience, there should be a lot of market research. You can use various tools for that. One such tool that is getting a lot of praise is ‘Audiense’. A consumer panel which will help you discover the right users to follow your business based on their interests, remove followers that aren’t necessary for your Twitter marketing campaign, target your content at the right time and to the right audience, tweet to your followers at opportune moments etc.

However, you still won’t be able to specifically find out what they are reading. But once you get the followers, you can start focusing on the next phase.
 

Generating the Right Buzz

 
To create the right buzz, you need to deliver the right content in good quality. For that, more research is in order. For starters, try to figure out an answer to these three questions.

• What are the most effective influencers in your industry?
• What types of content give the best results?
• What types of content are regularly shared?

The third question is quite important considering the ever-changing nature of social media platforms. You need to keep an eye on content trends. As for the first question, you can use tools to identify Twitter accounts that get a lot of retweets for their tweets.

If you can get some of those influencers to follow you, your tweets can be retweeted and it will reach hundreds of thousands of users in no time. The key is to find the top influencers in your industry, and start building relationships with them.
 

The Essence of B2B Marketing on Twitter

 
Strategy.

Nothing is more important than strategy for marketing a B2B business. By now, you may have realized that harnessing the power of Twitter demands a significant investment of time.

A perfect strategy is a combination of efficient tools and best practices that can maximize your reach. Once you have the reach, it’s all about engaging with users. But that won’t be enough. You will have to tweet consistently while using appropriate hashtags.

The objective is to make sure your posts reach the right audience. With the right type of content that’s reliable and relatable, your chances of turning them into customers go higher.

With that said, mind you that these are just the fundamentals to help you get started the right way. A proper B2B digital marketing is quite intricate. But if you stick to the basics, you won’t find it as challenging as it really is. If you don’t have the time to do it all yourself, you can hire a team or a reliable digital marketing expert.

Everything in the internet starts with web hosting – the service that makes it all possible by enabling businesses, blogs, and other websites to be accessible online to prospective clients and users. So basically for a business, web hosting is the key to establishing an online presence.

And therein lies the catch…

An unreliable hosting service, despite giving your business an online presence, will occasionally end up making it inaccessible to prospective customers at times when they want to check your website out.

So what does people generally expect from a reliable hosting service then?

• Cost-effectiveness
• 99.9% uptime
• 24/7 technical support
• Ability to handle mission critical applications
• Responsiveness

…just to name a few.

But generally people just want a cost-effective hosting solution. Most of them end up availing shared hosting service. For a business, this is actually not a good deal. In the long run, shared hosting just wouldn’t cut it. This leaves them with three other alternatives.

• VPS hosting
• Dedicated hosting
• Cloud hosting

Before we get into details, let’s analyze why shared hosting isn’t a good idea for businesses.

Shared hosting’s low price tag is the decisive factor that makes it preferable to many website owners. But there are other variables that people don’t usually bother to consider. First off, shared hosting is not something that promotes the growth of a business. Your website will be sharing server resources with other websites. If a few of those neighboring websites utilize a lot of server resources, your website will be left to function with what remains; and it won’t be enough to guarantee accessibility to your potential customers at all times.

As a matter of fact, it can slow down your website. This is known as the bad neighbor effect. However, shared hosting is easier to set up and is a good start to just launch your website. But once your website starts to grow and traffic starts to increase, you will be forced to switch to a better hosting solution.
 

The Alternatives – VPS or Dedicated?

 
You have 3 alternatives – Cloud, VPS, and Dedicated. But in this blog, we will analyze facts and features to help make the choice between VPS and dedicated servers.
 

Virtual Private Servers

 
The best way to describe VPS is to think of it as a condo. When you own a condo, you will be responsible in maintaining it. However, you and the others in the building will be sharing a few resources. VPS is quite similar. Your website will be hosted on a virtual private server (a virtual compartment of a physical server). That is your condo. There will be other virtual compartments that house other websites, and each function independently.

You will get access to the resources you pay for. Other websites on the machine will not be affecting your website’s performance in any way. It also offers more security than shared hosting, and costs much less compared to a low-end dedicated server.
 
Other benefits include:

• Scalability; you can add or remove resources depending on your business needs
• Great control and security with root access
• Minimal server load, in most cases, results in a comparatively better performance

So basically this is pretty much a more reliable version of shared hosting. And the only limitation you should be worried about is the reliability of the hosting service provider. If you don’t have complete access to all the resources you paid for, your website will run out of breath at peak loads.
 

Dedicated Servers

 
One of the best albeit costlier alternative to shared hosting, dedicated hosting solutions give you a server dedicated to serving your website alone. You will not have to share resources with any other websites. Shared hosting may be prone to connectivity issues, downtimes, and even speed drops. Issues like that don’t exist in a dedicated server.

However, you should be mindful of the amount of resources your dedicated hosting solution provides. It’s primarily of use to websites with high or consistently increasing traffic.
 
Benefits include:

• More power and control over resources than other hosting alternatives
• Can handle high traffic without any issues
• Reliable and highly secure
• Customizable; you have the choice of using the software and hardware the way you want
• Supports a plethora of scripting languages

There are two things you need to be aware of if you are interested in availing a dedicated hosting solution. First, the amount of resources the server provides you. Make sure your website has more than enough to function even at peak loads. Second, go for a managed dedicated server if you think you can’t maintain the server on your own. If you go for an unmanaged dedicated server, you will either have to maintain/upgrade/repair the server by yourself or hire help from technicians.

Its biggest limitation is that it’s costlier than other hosting alternatives. If by some chance the server crashes, it will take a good amount of time to get it fixed.
 

Analysis

• VPS is less expensive comparatively and comes with reasonably good features for a low-mid scale website. Dedicated servers are expensive, robust, secure, and ideal for large websites with high traffic.
• Dedicated servers are comparatively more scalable than virtual private servers.
• VPS offers just enough security for a website to function (generally), while dedicated servers offer the best security you can get in the hosting sector.

Conclusion

 
Let’s make things easier. Ask yourself the following questions to figure out the right kind of hosting solution you will need.

• Is your website small, medium, or big?
• What is your budget to avail a reliable hosting package?
• Once the website grows, will there be a lot of traffic?
• Does your website accept payments for products or services, and does it save sensitive information of registered users in its database?

If your website is big and the traffic keeps increasing, a dedicated server will do you justice. If it’s small and you are not expecting a big spike in traffic, you can manage with a VPS package. If there are sensitive information involved, you would need robust security. A dedicated server is the best option when it comes to security. So basically, your choice ultimately depends on how big the website is, and its demands.

If you are running a business, you may have already dealt with negative feedbacks from a few embittered customers. It’s just one reason that could cost you prospective clients. Moreover, it’s not easy as getting rid of embarrassing party pics from Facebook.

Businesses get access to powerful tools from the internet to boost their growth and expand their territories. However, there are downsides as well. For instance, the amount of control you get over how your business appears online is limited. Your business’ reputation is vulnerable online, as even a single person with an ill intent to damage it, will find it easy to do just that…

…unless you are equipped with some online reputation management (ORM) strategy.

A proper online reputation management obviously requires people with expertise in PR, technology, and online makeovers. They should be able to essentially bury the negative feedbacks, and promote those content that assure clients that your business delivers what it promises.

So why does a business need help managing its reputation? They can do it themselves with their own team, right?

Because it requires profound technical expertise. But of course, there are many things the business can do from their end. However, to repair the damage done to their reputation, they will need services that are tailored to serve that purpose, and personalized for the kind of business their client is running.

It’s a bit sophisticated…kind of.

Basically, it does 3 things.

Monitor. Prevent. Clean up.

Monitoring – This is the most important of the three. You need to know what’s going on with your business.

What people think of it? What alternatives do people have other than your business? How your business appears to them? Will they recommend your services to others?

These are but a few questions you need to consider. There are a number of tools that can provide you with answers to those questions. Google Alerts, Social Mention etc. are two great examples.

Preventing – To prevent something from tarnishing your brand means there should be some amount of protection as well. This protection should extend to not just the company but also to its high profile employees and products/services.

Before we go into the details, here’s another fact about ORM. It shares something common with SEO. You see, branding is one very important asset when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). Coincidentally, it’s also vital in ORM. For your ORM efforts to work, you need to establish your brand well.

Social media can help you with that. You can start a blogging domain, and share your content in social networking websites. However, keep in mind that social media is a double-edged sword. If the content you publish lacks quality or are irrelevant and useless, your plan will backfire. Readers will respond with negative remarks, and that in turn affects your brand.

The more established your brand, the higher your position in SERPs (Search Engine Results Page).

Clean up – You can be sure this is what you should do next once the damage has been done to your brand. If you think your online reputation is being tarnished, or when you are overwhelmed with targeted attacks from embittered customers, you will need a cleanup service.

Cleanup is just one of the things an ORM service can do for your business. The main purpose is to unify all of your online accounts including social media accounts so as to establish a solid reputation for your business. Technically, SEO falls under ORM too.
 

Signs that demand ORM

 
Businesses are willing to be ‘transparent’ in the internet i.e. they are willing to be open to criticisms and feedback. If done right, it can provide beneficial results. However, many SMBs (small – medium sized businesses) choose not to take that risk. It can do more harm than good in the long run though. Businesses online should be transparent, but only if they have an online reputation management service to back them up.

Here are a few signs you should watch out for in your business.

• Your products and/or services getting too much criticism
• If your competitors take advantage of the negative feedback you received
• If your employees are clueless about social media marketing
• If your brand is being negatively publicized in online forums

If even one of them is present, you should hire an online reputation manager, and a reliable one at that.
 

Tips to keep in mind

 
If you still want to manage your online reputation by yourself, here are a few tips that could come in handy.

• Earn people’s trust and respect – Trust and respect are hard to gain in the online realm. That is why they are very important for businesses online. Build enough trust and your clients won’t lose faith in you even if a few negative reviews about your products show up online.
• Monitor social media activities – Nowadays, people use social media to post their concerns about a product or to get opinions on a product from a particular brand. If they are talking about you in Facebook, Twitter or any other platform, you should be the first one to know.
• React quickly, respond softly – If you ever receive complaints from customers, make sure not to keep them waiting for a response from you. Let them know that you are aware of the issue, and that you are working on it. Reassure them that things will be fine. But if you keep them waiting, they would get frustrated enough to lose their trust in your brand, and might even post negative feedbacks in public forums.
• Never neglect criticisms – Some firms choose not to respond to criticisms believing that the fire will die out after a while. This will most likely antagonize the customer into taking more drastic measures to get the business’ attention.
• Ask for help if necessary – Sometimes you may feel like your reputation management efforts aren’t making a difference, and is neither protecting nor restoring your brand image. That’s when you should hire a professional online reputation manager.