The Marketing Spark

Ben Elowitz, CEO of Wetpaint, recently found that users who arrive via social stay longer and visit more often than users who arrive via search. With Facebook in particular, Elowitz gathered data proving that site visitors return 70% more often in comparison to those who visited Wetpaint through Google.

These findings shouldn’t come as a surprise, but should rather serve as another case study proving that a loyal audience built through social media can pay off big in the long run. Unlike visitors via search, traffic via social tends to be more vested and willing to commit to a long term brand to customer relationship, provided that the opportunity is present and there’s a compelling reason to do so.

Success rarely happens overnight

When starting out from scratch, earning traffic through social typically costs more than search (in both terms of monetary expense and man hours), and also subsequently takes longer to develop. This double edged sword has lead many to believe that search always trumps social and therefore deserves the bulk of attention and marketing spend.

Apart from obvious flaws in execution or a lack of commitment, many campaigns involving social media ultimately fail because they aren’t given enough time. It’s not that social isn’t as valuable as search (both organic and paid), but rather that the rewards aren’t as quick or as obvious. Building an audience that’s actually committed takes time, thought, and hard work.

And while it’s certainly naive to think that there’s a universal plan to building indefinite brand loyalty, it usually takes much more than just showing up to the party and expecting immediate results.

Putting data into context

To to get a grasp on how search compares to social, first the value of each traffic source needs to be established. The more data specific you can get, the clearer a picture you’ll have.

Using a combo toolset such as Optify and Google analytics, evaluate the following for each medium:

How long do visitors stay on my site?
How often do they return?
How often do they convert?
How many pages on average are they viewing?
What’s the bounce rate?

From here you’ll be able to piece together the benefits of having a dedicated, as opposed to a casual audience. If social lacks heavily in comparison to search, the data is a strong indicator that either your efforts are misaligned, misjudged, or at minimum need to be reevaluated.

Until some type of large shakeup warrants drastic change, committing heavily to both search and social, and finding a balanced diet between the two, makes for the most logical and safe approach.

Photo by Emilie Eagon 

…*Bounce rate*… Just the utterance of this compound noun can make a once confident marketing manager turn queasy. It’s a word that, perhaps unlike another other, has the power to bring even the most experienced of online marketers to their knees.

OK, maybe this is a slight exaggeration (or maybe not?), but no matter how you slice it, bounce rate is a significant barometer of relevancy in relation to your marketing message, design, and site copy.

But what if it’s not my fault?

Well… a high bounce rate is always technically your fault, but what if your bounce rate is high for a reason that’s well within your control? What if you’re crippling your chances for success and you don’t even know it?

If this sounds all too familiar, here are some common sticking points worth double checking:

Loading Speed

If your site takes forever to load, people will get annoyed and leave. On the web even a brief moment can feel like an eternity. It’s been found that 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.

Flash

I hate Flash. Don’t put flash on your site. Search engines can’t crawl it, it often looks tacky, and it’s just not worth the effort. If you must use Flash, let it be a side dish and not the entire meal. But seriously, get rid of the Flash.

Retro / cheap / out of touch design that looks like it’s from 1996

Yes design is highly subjective, but lazy design always sticks out like a sore thumb. If your site looks like it hasn’t been touched in a decade, do you really expect visitors to brush it off and show you some love (in the form of sticking around)? Not going to happen.

Complicated or unclear call to actions

This is a personal pet peeve. If I land on your page, especially one that’s driven by paid search, I want to know exactly what I’m supposed to do next. Are you trying to convince me to open my wallet? Subscribe to a newsletter? Fill out a form? The clearer this is communicated the happier the visitor will be.

Hapless site architecture

How are your internal links stacking up? How can person A, move from page A, to page B, to page C, and so on. Stay mindful of this sort of stuff. Hire a good UX specialist if need be.

Not a definitive list by any means, but a starting point nonetheless.
Fix just one of these five problems and you’re well on your way to a lower bounce rate.

Image credit

There was a time not too long ago when acquiring information always had a definite cost associated with it, by way of not just opportunity cost, such as in investing several months of free time to attend a class, but also in the form of cold hard cash (books, seminars, high ed, etc…). As of recent though, the tables have started to turn. Information has become democratized and pockets of it have become free for the taking. Wikipedia, Google, Twitter, YouTube, and countless blogs have become a gateway to information that wasn’t always readily available 10+ years ago (for better and for worse).

With the spread of information, the problem has turned from that of availability to that of time management and discipline. Does the information that we are taking in have the potential to hurt more than it helps? Is too much of the wrong information, or that of of the time consuming variety, actually standing in the way of the pursuit of valuable and relative information?

Clay Johnson, author of The Information Diet, combats the problem by stressing the need for having a framework to work off of for information consumption.

If garbage in equals garbage out, how do those in the online marketing space, people who are confronted with the real possibility of information overload on a daily basis, learn how to be more selective?

The problem is massive, but here’s 3 questions that can be helpful:

Is this a reputable resource?

Before hitting subscribe, follow, like, or clicking through, ask first if what you’re looking at is as trustworthy as it appears to be. Who is this person or this company, what are they trying to say, and are they actually qualified to be saying it?

Is it worth the time investment?

Every blog post, email newsletter, and Tweet that comes across your radar, no matter how miniscule, takes time out of your day. Your goal shouldn’t be to sift through and judge as much of it as possible, but instead to create filters so that the best material consistently floats to the surface.

What’s the end result?

Spend 15 minutes browsing Inbound.org and you’ll likely learn a thing or two about online marketing. Spend 15 minutes browsing Reddit and you’ll probably find a bunch of cat photos. These choices, as simple as they seem, compound over time and are either reinforcing productive or unproductive habits. If you’re on the fence about whether or not a piece of information is worth consuming, consider defaulting back to the question of what’s the end result. Is this information furthering my career, a project, or a personal goal? If not, it’s likely little more than just another distraction.

Image credit

The old adage that a picture is worth 1000 words may ring true for those of us who have a sincere appreciation for photography or tend to gravitate towards art, but from an internet marketer’s point of view an image is worth, well… significantly less than 1000 pieces of text. Web crawlers thrive off of text and thus it should come as no surprise that most sites, especially ones that rank well, are text and not image heavy. Text has always been and for the foreseeable future will continue to be the undisputed king of the web.

Why should I even bother with images?

There are many reasons, but here are 3 that stand out:

1. Images can drive traffic through search

2. Images pair well social media

3. Images enhance content

Let’s dive into the specifics:

Images for search

Aside from Google and Bing both having a separate search vertical dedicated to images, images themselves can, and do so regularly, appear on the first search engine results page. Having at least one image on a page increases the chances of your site showing up in one of these searches.

A couple of best practices from an SEO perspective:

1. Have the file name match the image

Instead of naming a photo something like 10035.jpg or car.jpg, make the file name more specific, such as hondacivic.jpg or hondahatchback.jpg

2. Use the alt attribute

Add the ALT tag to your images to aid the search engines in their pursuit of guessing what it is.
For the picture at the right I would use <img src=”hondacivic.jpg” alt=”1998 red Honda civic 2-door”. WordPress makes this a breeze, but it’s easy enough to add on your own as well.

Images for social

Facebook

When a visitor decides to share one of your pages directly in their feed or by hitting the “like” button within the page, the content appears on the user’s individual profile and possibly in their news feed if they so desire. Provided that your content has an image tied to it, when it’s posted on Facebook it’ll end up having a higher click through rate than the same content without an image.

Stumbleupon

Stumblueupon, perhaps now the undisputed king of social bookmarking sites, is heavily influenced by images. When a “stumbler” is browsing through content, it’s images and not just text, that catch their attention. Having a large image above the fold (at the top of the page) is a useful tactic for grabbing the readers attention and drawing them in.

Pinterest

On pinterest users share and catalog their favorite images for later reference by pinning them. If your pages and blog posts lack images, it makes them irrelevant to this niche, but fast growing network. No image = no pin.

Flickr

Considered to be the world’s largest online photo social network, Flickr has the potential to send traffic in your direction if you happen to be providing your own photos, especially if the work is of high quality.

Tumblr, Dailybooth, and other social networks

Don’t dedicate too much time towards these, but if your images are incredible, and again especially if you’re creating them yourself, pushing them out to a photo hungry social network such as Tumblr or Dailybooth may lead to some additional traffic.

Images for content

Aside from search and social, images enhance the perceived value of your content. There’s a reason why top blogs and news sites regularly include images, it’s because readers simply love and can’t get enough of them. When paired with the right text, an image or collection of images can add that extra touch that makes a piece of content stand out amongst the constant bombardment of choices readers are regularly faced with.

No matter if you’re creating original material or curating it from others, the time spent adding images in support of text is always time well spent. The search engines, the social networks, and – most importantly – the readers, will appreciate the effort.

Image credit: Martin Gommel and Steven Tom