digital marketing Archives - Resourceful Business

5 Reasons You Must Create Instagram Stories for Your Business

19 June 2019June 21, 2019Ann Mills8 Comments

Social media content is rapidly evolving.

Back in August 2016, Instagram launched Stories to compete with Snapchat Stories. Stories were meant to help capture the daily activities of Instagram’s now more than 1 billion users worldwide, and unlike posts, Stories are short-lived–disappearing in 24 hours.

By January 2019, Instagram stories had grown in popularity to over 500 million daily active users (DAU), meaning half of Instagram’s daily users are on Stories every day. With important, interactive features and a less formal type of content, Instagram Stories have become essential for businesses that use Instagram marketing.

Here are 5 reasons you must create Instagram stories for your business:

Reason 1: Instagram Stories have interactive stickers

With Instagram Stories, you can add a sticker. Unlike Instagram posts, stickers allow users to tap and interact with your Story in creative ways. There are many types of stickers available including:

Donation
Quiz
Countdown
Questions
Music
Poll or Emoji Slider
Location
Hashtag
Current Time or Weather
Selfie

As an example, suppose you are thinking about keeping your business open late one evening of the week. You wonder whether your customers would come. You can create an Instagram Story and add an emoji slider with a thumbs up emoji. Ask, “Do you want us to stay open late one evening?” Customers that see your Instagram Story can slide the emoji to the right if they like the idea, and you get feedback directly from your customers.

Reason 2: Instagram Stories are more informal than posts

There is an analogy used by Bella Vasta, a Facebook Group keynote speaker, which she uses to explain the difference between a Facebook page and a Facebook Group, and the same analogy applies to Instagram posts and Instagram Stories. Bella equates a Facebook page to the front yard of a house–formal and public. Similarly, Instagram posts have a more formal, curated look and feel.

A home’s backyard is the Facebook group – a gathering of people with something in common, informal, more personal and friendly. Likewise, Instagram Stories are the backyard–informal and personal.

The value of Instagram Stories is they give a business tremendous versatility in how it can present content with some reserved for the more formal Instagram page and other content posted in Stories. Another unique feature of Stories worth mentioning is that unlike posts, you can add to your Stories. So, if your business is attending an event, your followers can watch a Story and see new additions to the Story while you are there.

Reason 3: Instagram Story Highlights can help cultivate unique audiences

According to Instagram Business, 80% of Instagram accounts follow a brand. Not surprisingly, Instagram users look for Instagram Stories shared by their favorite brands, and Stories have a feature called Highlights – the circles that appear across the top of an Instagram page. These Highlights can be divided into content-related categories that are relevant for your business, and when Stories are added to Highlights, they do not disappear in 24 hours. One of our favorite Story Highlights categories is “Inspo” because we like to see what people in a company are reading, thinking about or doing for inspiration.

Here are some Highlights examples:

A hair salon may highlight different haircut styles
A retail store may highlight different seasonal clothing styles
A blogger may highlight different blog categories

Businesses should establish relevant Highlights categories so followers can discover new content in their areas of interest. Whereas Instagram pages do not allow partitioning of content by topic, Stories do via Highlights. Using Highlights effectively will allow a brand to cultivate unique subsets of their audience based on their content preferences.

Instagram describes its stories product as a way to promote the sharing of moments that don’t meet the higher bar of a traditional Instagram post. –The Verge

Reason 4: Instagram Stories re-enforce the business brand

An Instagram Story can serve as an extension of a brand’s footprint on Instagram. As with websites or social media posts, Instagram Stories should have a hint of the company’s brand guidelines – colors, fonts, tag lines. People that see Instagram Stories should recognize familiar aspects associated with the brand. Whether it’s a cameo of everyone’s favorite furry mascot in the office or a behind-the-scenes look at the setup for an event, Instagram Stories give people a feel for the soul of the business while subtly reinforcing the brand.

Reason 5: Instagram Stories focus on moments and encourage sharing

An Instagram Story can reflect the little moments that occur throughout the day, and people love to feel part of someone’s journey. Instagram posts, on the other hand, allow businesses to build their brand’s presence in a more systematic way, include thoughtful written copy, tags, and imagery. When it comes to Instagram business pages, viewers expect a carefully curated feed that looks aesthetically pleasing.

Stories, in contrast, are spontaneous and current. The concept behind Stories is that people will want to capture moments and share them. Stories are ephemeral, and Facebook, which owns Instagram, hopes users will actively create content that is personal, relatable and captures the moment.

Great for branding, audience targeting and connecting with your tribe, Instagram Stories are a must for your social media marketing toolkit. If you’re interested in creating an Instagram Story strategy but don’t know where to start, contact us.

Why RELEVANCE is Key to a Successful Digital Marketing Strategy

4 April 2019June 21, 2019Ann Mills23 Comments

An excerpt from Ann Mills’ presentation on digital marketing at Swap The Biz, Short Hills, NJ.

Imagine –

You’ve just been invited to a party, and you have the perfect outfit but need a matching pair of shoes. You head to the local shopping mall and come across a store advertising DRESS SHOES for any occasion. You wander in, and to your dismay, you see rows and rows of sneakers in every style and size. After looking around, you see there are a few dress shoes over in one corner, but certainly not many, and so you leave.

Your experience in the shoe store is a problem digital marketers see played out over and over again in the digital advertising space. People search for a product or service on the Internet and land on a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ad, an ad the advertiser only pays for when the person clicks. Potential customers click on the ad, and they land on a website which does not offer what they are looking for and if it does, it’s pretty hard to find.

In an attempt to prevent this scenario from happening, search platforms and social networks rigorously evaluate advertising campaigns using many different metrics, the most important of which is RELEVANCE.

What is RELEVANCE and why does it matter?

In digital marketing, relevance is exactly what you might imagine–it’s a score that serves as a barometer of whether your messaging truly appeals to the audience you are targeting. It is measured using a combination of variables as a person moves from search query to ad to website. So, for example, if a person types in a search query using certain keywords and sees your business’ Google ad, she will decide whether to click on the ad. If she doesn’t, chances are she did not find the ad relevant to the original query, and over time, that ad will be shown less and cost more for your business to run.

There’s no doubt that marketing your business in the digital space is challenging to execute and when it’s off track, tough to recalibrate. Marketing can be expensive too, so understanding its relevance and your Return on Investment (ROI) are essential. The U.S. Small Business Administration recommends that businesses with under 5 million in sales spend approximately 7 to 8% of gross revenue on marketing. For start-ups in a competitive industry, the percentage can be more like 20% which means advertising can get costly as a business gears up.

Facebook Relevance Score

In Facebook, relevance has historically been defined by an ad’s Relevance Score. Measured on a scale of 1 to 10, highly relevant ads are awarded a higher number. Just one example, if there are positive reactions to a boosted post, it will help the relevance score and not surprisingly, negative reactions will do the opposite. In Facebook, an ad must have 500+ impressions for the Relevance Score to show in the metrics, but marketers have found that a high Facebook Relevance Score does not always correlate to whether the ad works for the business.

In a recent development, Facebook announced that as of April 30, 2019, Relevance Score will be replaced by three more granular relevancy metrics which will measure ad quality, engagement rate, and conversion rate. More importantly, the scores will be relative to similar ads that are competing for the same target audience. Therefore, if these relevancy metrics are not strong for one of your ads, your competitors are doing a better job with similar ads.

Google Quality Score

Similarly, Google defines relevance as, “How closely the elements of your ad campaign match what a person seems to be looking for.” Therefore, optimized ad campaigns have keywords that trigger ads which take the visitor to a user-friendly website page. Ads can also direct people to stand-alone landing pages–single web pages designed to encourage a specific action. A relevant landing page will prompt high click-through rates and Google will reward the business for this positive user experience by prompting more ad impressions at a lower cost. If the ad is truly relevant to the audience it is targeting, it has a measurable marketing advantage over comparable ads in the same space.

Similar to the relevancy metrics recently announced by Facebook, Google has multiple data points which combine to determine an ad’s overall Quality Score. These data points include a Quality Score for the keywords, an assessment of the landing page experience, ad relevance, and the expected click-through rate.

How your website design impacts relevance

It’s important to remember that ad views are impressions, but behind every click is a person. When people who have viewed your ad decide to click the ad to learn more, that click-through takes them to your website or landing page. The construction and organization of your website are critically important to delivering and optimizing the visitor experience once they click.

Look at college and university websites. Often, they divide their navigation into Students, Faculty and Staff, and Alumni when they organize the information for their audience groups. What is relevant to a student or even a prospective student is completely different than what is relevant to an alumnus. Similarly, hotels often organize information by Rooms, Dining, and Events. This type of logical organization structure is essential to relevance. A digital marketer that maps an ad back to a general website page with broadly written content will never be able to impact the business revenue in the same way as if he can direct an ad back to specific, well-written content. Relevant content directly speaks to the audience it is meant to target, and it answers their queries. In the context of the dress shoe example, a store that advertises DRESS SHOES should have rows and rows of dress shoes, not sneakers. If the shoes are organized into sections for men, women, and teens, even better because consumers can easily find what they need.

The DoubleTree by Hilton cookie–a lesson in relevance

If you ever check in at a DoubleTree by Hilton hotel, you are given a warm chocolate chip cookie, a tradition since the 1980s. Aligned with that practice, when you are searching for family-friendly hotels and come across DoubleTree in your search results, you see the following ad:

There’s also a page on the DoubleTree by Hilton website that tells website visitors all about the history of the cookie and that to DoubleTree, “…the cookie means so much more. It represents our constant dedication to our guests and thoughtful touches that ensure you feel special and cared for throughout your stay.”

DoubleTree by Hilton keeps their advertising relevant to customers by associating warm cookies with a welcoming atmosphere and pulls this theme through in their ads and website. Digital marketers have analyzed DoubleTree tweets, and at times, more than 60% of the tweets they are tagged in are about the cookie.

Two takeaways on relevance

Like the DoubleTree by Hilton marketing campaigns, keywords, ads and websites have to work together seamlessly to create powerful, relevant messaging. As you think about your businesses, here are two takeaways on relevance for you to consider:

Figure out your DoubleTree cookie. What makes you different, and by different, I don’t mean just identifying a particular product or service. What really makes your business different from your competitors, and why should someone call you? The answer to these questions is the foundation for an impactful, relevant digital marketing campaign.
Look at your website. On average, when people land on your website homepage, they take 3 seconds to determine if they can find what they need. If they can’t figure out where to go quickly to answer their query, they will leave–it’s the dress shoe example.

Relevance is by far the most important metric in digital marketing, and by the same token, it can be one of the most difficult to pin down. Each brand has a digital footprint which includes all of its assets in the digital space–website, logos, marketing campaigns, social media platforms. If you think your marketing strategy is not engaging potential customers, the culprit could be low relevance. Contact Resourceful Business to learn more.

Let the Power of Google Ads Do Your Marketing Heavy Lifting

27 September 2018September 27, 2018Ann Mills2 Comments

In Field of Dreams, Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella walks through a cornfield and hears a voice that tells him, “If you build it, he will come.” The voice inspires Ray to build a baseball diamond in the midst of his cornfield where Ray later meets the spirits of Chicago White Sox legend “Shoeless” Joe Jackson and his own father. At the end of the movie when Ray is trying to decide whether to sell his property to avoid foreclosure, a local writer assures him, “People will come, Ray. People will most definitely come.”

When business owners invest time and money on a website, their hope is that people will come. The importance of understanding and using Google Ads is that they drive website traffic and ensure people most definitely come. Once on your website, visitors can buy from your e-commerce store, fill in a lead form, or learn more about your business.

What are Google Ads?

Google Ads are Pay Per Click (PPC) digital advertising campaigns. The ads are described as Pay Per Click because the advertiser only pays for the ad when someone clicks on it, not per ad impression. There are Search Network ads which are text ads and Display Network ads which are images. In June of this year, Google rolled out Smart Campaigns, a more automated, optimized alternative geared towards small business.

PPC campaigns drive traffic to your website so visitors can see the products and services you provide. When people look at a page of internet search results in Google, it’s hard to distinguish between ads and the organic search results because text ads have only a small “Ad” box near the website address. Ads blend in with search results, and therefore, are a powerful way to get potential customers to a website.

How do Google Ads work?

In its simplest form, you can think of Google Ads as four-layered ad campaigns. From top to bottom:

Campaigns – how much do I want to spend or geographically, where do I want my ads to show?
Ad Sets – what are my different products, services or groups?
Ads – what is my message?
Keywords – what words or phrases will someone type into Google when they are searching for my product or service?

A digital marketer will set up a campaign by thinking about how much to spend, who to target and where they are, and what product or service you are advertising. At the core of every Google Ads campaign is a keyword list, a list of search terms or phrases a person may type into Google when they search for your product or service.

The Google Ads algorithm determines which ads to show, the Ad Rank, based on two criteria: the maximum keyword Bid you have specified and Quality Score which is a combination of ad relevance, Click-Through-Rate (CTR) and quality of the landing page for the ad. The landing page is the website page where the person who clicks on the ad is directed.

How can Google Ads grow my business?

On a desktop computer, approximately two-thirds of all search queries are done on Google. On mobile devices, some estimates suggest Google controls 95% of all search queries. Therefore, by being part of the search results mix, Google Ads drive website traffic. When someone clicks on an ad, it brings him or her to your website and then you’re in the driving seat. You can try to prompt your site visitors to take actions like purchase a product, fill in a lead form, or schedule a demo.

Google Ads Pay Per Click campaigns do some of the marketing heavy lifting by allowing your business to be more visible in search and driving potential customers to your website. PPC campaigns push your message out in a structured, systematic, and targeted way to an audience that has an interest in your product or service.

When it comes to Google Ads, if you build them, people will most definitely come and your business will grow.

Interested in learning more about Google Ads campaigns? Contact us.

Photo credit: Field of Dreams, 1989, Universal Studios

Finding Your Ideal Customer Using the Power of Digital Marketing

8 September 2018September 27, 2018Ann Mills4 Comments

An excerpt from Ann Mills’ presentation on digital marketing at Swap The Biz, Short Hills, NJ.

_________

You are on your way to a networking event.

When you arrive, you are surprised to find not one room but three to choose from–each filled with 50 people. Tacked on the door of each room is a sign with some information about each of the people in the room–ages, income bracket, and town. The information also includes whether the person is a parent and his or her areas of interest.

You look at the information on each door and think:

In Room #1, there are one or two people who seem like they might be an ideal networking opportunity.

Room #2–about half of the people in the room seem to fit the profile of your ideal networking opportunity.

In Room #3, all 50 people fit your ideal networking persona. They are the right age, live in a nearby location, and they seem like people who might be interested in the product or service you sell.

Which room will you enter? Probably Room #3.

In the context of marketing:

Room #1 with its 2 to 3 prospects is perhaps the equivalent of a mailer like this one about dining room sets. If you are not buying a dining room set, you’ll probably throw the mailer out. Even if you are buying a dining room set, you may not look at the mailer. If you’re the business that sent the mailer, you can’t be sure who actually read it, and as one print company executive said to me recently, “People pretty much open their mail over the trash can.”

Room #2 with about 25 possible networking opportunities is representative of a networking group. You have a higher chance of connecting and exchanging business with people in the room. They more closely fit your ideal networking persona, and you have more in common with people in the group than acquaintances you make outside the group.

Room #3 with 50 of 50 people seemingly possible networking opportunities personifies digital marketing and, in particular, a powerful tool we use called audience targeting.

What is digital marketing?

If you ask someone what digital marketing is, they will probably tell you that it is advertising delivered via a digital channel. It might be a website, Pay-Per-Click campaign (the advertiser pays for the ad only when someone clicks on it), remarketing campaign, email, social media post, or even a response to an online review. Weaved together, digital marketers create omnichannel marketing strategies.

However, that definition of digital marketing does not convey what is so important about it. Primarily:

A digital campaign audience is not guesswork.
Campaign results are measurable, actionable, and data-driven.
Marketing campaigns can be timed to maximize impact.
Digital campaigns can be changed and scaled quickly.

Let me give you two examples of the agility and versatility afforded by digital marketing:

A mortgage banker in New Jersey deals almost exclusively with clients purchasing high-end homes. In an effort to broaden his target audience of potential clients, a digital agency does an analysis of zip codes in Manhattan where residents typically pay four to five-thousand dollars in rent each month. Intuitively, it’s clear that many of these young professionals might be thinking of starting families as well. The agency develops a Pay-Per-Click ad campaign to market the banker’s services into specific zip codes in New York City where the high-rent-paying population lives.

A client with multiple retail locations in New Jersey has her online reviews on Google, Facebook, and Yelp managed by a digital agency. The agency notices that some of the online reviews are in Spanish and come to believe that it is perhaps a far more important demographic than had been previously realized. In addition to Google AdWords Pay-Per-Click campaigns targeting English-speaking people which are already in place, the agency turns Spanish-speaking living in the United States on as a demographic trait for her Google AdWords campaigns. In addition to posts in English, the social media agency also begins to add Spanish posts to her social media feeds. The agency then rolls out corporate overview videos–one with an English voiceover and another with a voiceover in Spanish.

The results seen by our digital marketing clients have been striking. One client has quadrupled sales. Another found that their seasonal summer dip in sales disappeared. One company was named to a prominent list of the fastest growing companies in New Jersey in 2017 and in America in 2018.

Micro-Moments

Google defines something called a Micro-Moment. A Micro-Moment is an intent rich moment when a person turns to a device to act on a need–to know, go, do or buy.

The power of digital marketing is that it allows your business to be present at those micro-moments in a way traditional media cannot. In so doing, your business can get:

the right message,

to the right people,

at exactly the right time.

________________

Interested in learning more? Contact us.

Social Media Marketing Pixie Dust – The Facebook Pixel

13 July 2018July 13, 2018Ann Mills2 Comments

What if there was a marketing tool that would allow your business to tailor Facebook ads based on what pages people viewed on your website or what items they added to their shopping cart?

Think of the possibilities.

Maybe you own a retail store, for example, currently showcasing spring dresses on one of your website pages. Your advertising campaign delivers Facebook ads showcasing dresses only to people who visited the spring dresses page of your website.

This hyper-targeted form of marketing happens every day with a bit of social media marketing pixie dust called the Facebook Pixel. According to BuiltWith, it’s a marketing tool employed on 3.8 million websites across the Internet. So, let’s find out what a Facebook Pixel is and how you can use it in your company’s social media strategy.

What’s a Facebook Pixel?

A Facebook Pixel is a snippet of tracking code placed in the backend of a website page that tracks certain actions or “events” by your website visitors such as buying an item from your online store or searching for specific content on the site. The importance of the Facebook Pixel lies in the data it collects which can help a business build a powerful marketing campaign that targets potential customers in a structured, relevant way. Site visitors that are tracked by the Facebook pixel become part of a Custom Audience created in Facebook, and even if you only install what is often referred to as the “base Facebook Pixel,” you will immediately have more insight into what people are doing when they visit your website. Installation is a little technical, but Facebook covers the many installation options in an excellent knowledge-based article.

Why should you use a Facebook Pixel?

With a base Facebook Pixel, your default Custom Audience is anyone who visits your website. But, now the magic begins.

Let’s say you want to track site visitors by pageview or by the type of content they searched for while on your website. There are nine standard events that can be tracked by a Facebook Pixel. There are also some simpler custom conversions which are different than the events. Within the standard events, most of what a business might want to know about a site visitor is covered. For example, you can track:

Purchase
Lead
Complete Registration
Add Payment Info
Initiate Checkout
Add to Cart
Add to Wishlist
Search
View Content

Think about the value of being able to target site visitors who take one of these actions? You can add them to an event-specific Custom Audience created for your Facebook advertising.

The importance of the Facebook Pixel lies in the data it collects.

Facebook Pixel data and Custom Audiences created, what next?

Grow your target audience by creating a Facebook Lookalike Audience

Using your Custom Audiences, you can then create Lookalike Audiences, which are exactly what they sound like – audiences that have the same characteristics of the Custom Audience created with the Facebook Pixel. To be effective, you want a minimum of 1000 people in your Custom Audience, and the more specific the lead type, the better the Lookalike Audience will work. Your target audience for your ad campaigns has just grown based on the data collected with the Facebook Pixel.

So now you have three ways to hone in on and grow your target audience using the Facebook Pixel. First, you can identify certain behaviors of your website visitors and create Custom Audiences in Facebook with specific interests. Second, you can create custom Facebook ads based on actionable “events” taken by your Custom Audiences, and third, you can grow your target audience by using a Facebook Lookalike Audience.

Using the Facebook Pixel, you can deliver Facebook ads with timely, relevant information to the people that actually want to see them. It’s the type of digital marketing savvy made possible with a bit of social media marketing pixie dust – the Facebook Pixel.

A Digital Marketing Trifecta That Will Turbocharge Reach

30 January 2018January 31, 2018Ann MillsLeave a comment

Sometimes 1 + 1 = 3.

In digital marketing, the connectivity afforded across platforms can sometimes have a domino effect on customer reach and engagement. When you find these synergies, the impact is powerful. With that in mind, here’s one of our favorite digital marketing combinations for consumer-facing businesses of any size. It’s a digital trifecta and a must-do for your marketing strategy.

1. Add all company events to Facebook Events

Every business should have a Facebook company page, even if it’s a solopreneur. There are a number of features available on Facebook company pages that are not offered on an individual profile page.

One of these essential features is Facebook Events, and you will see the Events tab on the left side of a company page. In general, why is adding an event to Facebook Events so important?

With Facebook Events, you can:

Add the event location so page visitors can find it or get directions via an interactive map
Link a registration page where people can purchase tickets
Establish recurring events–especially handy for classes
Tag the event with keywords
Post about the event leading up to the date or afterward; the post can link to the Event page
Boost the event reach with a paid social media ad

Less well-known is a new feature that makes posting in Facebook Events essential for businesses. Now, the Facebook Local app is pushing the Facebook Events feed into Facebook user notifications. If an event is in the area and the Facebook algorithm decides that it may be of interest, a person may see a notification of the event in his or her personal Notifications stream. The Notifications stream is where you typically track page likes, comments, and activity. An example of an Events notification in a person’s feed is, “[Business Name] has added a new event near you,” and when a person clicks on the notification, it goes straight to the Facebook Events page of the business.

2. Create a community calendar for your business in Burbio

Burbio is a digital, local event aggregation platform that pulls event feeds from the community at large. Burbio users can follow calendars created by local businesses, schools, the public library, recreation sports teams or the chamber of commerce. These community calendars showcase all types of events like classes, lunch and learn meetups, or town sports, and people can register for them if website links are provided.

As a business owner, once you set up a business Burbio account, your Burbio calendar can integrate with your Facebook Events feed, so Facebook Events will push to the calendar automatically. If you use a personal calendar for events, Burbio can also integrate with iCal or a Google calendar. All of the events businesses are adding to their Facebook Events, iCal or Google calendars can flow straight through to the local Burbio community calendar. Burbio.com will promote your events in their weekly digests that go out to the community and will also allow users to “follow” your calendar for twice-weekly email updates, integrating your business into the community experience of residents.

3. The Freebie: events are accessible in Ask Alexa voice search

One of the most interesting features of Burbio is that there is a Burbio Alexa Skill for users of Amazon’s Ask Alexa. The integration with the voice platform means that events on a Burbio calendar can be accessed via voice search using Alexa-enabled Amazon devices.

If a person prompts Alexa with, “Alexa, ask Burbio what’s happening in [town, state],” the Ask Alexa app will come back with, “Here’s what’s happening in [town, state]” and proceed to rattle off the events. As long as you configure your Facebook Event titles in the exact way you want Alexa to say them, your event is now available to anyone using Ask Alexa who has downloaded the Burbio skill.

So, now you have an easy, digital marketing trifecta. With two simple steps, you can have your business events pushed to customer notification streams via Facebook Events, integrated into a rapidly growing community calendar application and then get the added bonus of having your events available in voice search.

It’s the payoff of a trifecta without the cost – surely a bet worth making.

Data Studio Connectors: 4 Easy Steps to More Insightful Analytics

28 October 2017September 12, 2022Ann MillsLeave a comment

Data visualization matters – a lot.

By some estimates, 65% of people are visual learners and process information best by seeing it. To a certain degree, however, we may all be visual learners when it comes to complex data because a well-designed visual can condense lots of numbers into a more readily apparent outcome or trend. Not surprisingly, when it comes to business, data visualization is a critical tool. Timely, transparent analytics in graphic, bite-sized formats can help managers understand their companies better, identify potential customers, and hone in on effective growth strategies.

If you’re a digital marketer, chances are you work with data all the time. But, in reality, your clients may not. Even with mounds of fascinating metrics available in their marketing reports, managers often come back to us and ask, “OK…now what?” The problem is compounded by the fact that marketing data is everywhere – different platforms, different formats, different reporting options, different reference points.

In April of this year, I wrote about Google Data Studio, a tool that pulls data from the Google ecosystem and can be used to populate configurable, visual dashboards. It’s become an absolute mainstay in our client reporting toolkit allowing us to give performance snapshots across a broad range of digital marketing metrics. However, beyond the data you can mine from Google, there are many other important performance metrics to consider – social media ad engagement, email campaign click-through rates, video views – to name a few. Now, with Data Studio Connectors, you can pull all types of data into your Data Studio (DS) dashboard from platforms that are outside Google.

I decided to take Data Studio Connectors for a spin. These Connectors were launched by Supermetrics on September 7, 2017. Now there is no need to first pull all the marketing data into Google Sheets and then into Google Data Studio – you can use the Connectors to pull the data directly. I set myself a challenge – I wanted to layer some social media metrics onto a client report we had already created in Data Studio that included Google Analytics and Google AdWords data.

It worked! My new, improved dashboard report consolidated, streamlined, and visually standardized social media metrics into our current Data Studio report.

Here’s a step by step:

Step 1: Pick a Data Studio Connector

Go to the Data Studio Connectors homepage, scroll through the available Connectors and choose which one you would like. I picked Facebook Insights and clicked the Try now button. On the next screen in the top left where it says Untitled Data Source, I named my Connector data source (Agency Tip: Put your client name in there too, so you know which client) and then click Authorize.

Step 2: Connect your outside data source

I was prompted to choose a Google account, and I did. Once the Community Connector was authorized, I then had to Authorize Facebook Insights, my chosen Connector. I followed a prompt allowing Supermetrics to authenticate and connect to my Facebook Insights, and to be on the safe side, I decided to ensure I was both logged into my Facebook account and had the correct client Facebook business page opened in a tab too.

Step 3: Choose the correct Facebook page

This step is mission critical if you’re a digital marketer as you’ll no doubt manage and be an admin to many client Facebook pages. You are given the option to see all the pages you manage and then you choose the page you want. Once you choose the Facebook page from the drop-down list and CONNECT, the Data Connector will pull data specific to that page.

On the next page which shows all of your data sources, you can edit them (I didn’t) and CREATE REPORT. You’ll notice the portal looks pretty familiar now as you are in Data Studio.

ADD TO REPORT the data source that is being pulled into your Data Studio portal via the Connector.

Step 4: Build Out Your Google Data Studio Report

In the final report building stage, there’s good news, bad news and then some more good news.

The first bit of good news is that all of your data is now being pulled in by the chosen DS Connector and is accessible in a list of metrics. The bad news is that there are a lot of metrics – I counted 123 in total for the Facebook Insights Connector.

If you don’t correctly align the:

Data Source
Dimension
Metric

you will not get meaningful metrics in the dashboard. When you have to choose from People Clicking Your Content, Content Clicks, Post Unique Link Clicks, or Post Other Clicks, it can be a challenge. I toggled back and forth to the Facebook portal to confirm I was choosing the exact metric I wanted and built out the report. If you’ve never built a Data Studio report, read about how to build one in our blog, Google Data Studio: 3 Easy Steps to Your Website Analytics.

The additional piece of good news is Supermetrics is in the process of developing a Facebook Insights Template for Data Studio. The metrics will be pre-selected and split by correct dimension thereby simplifying a currently complex process.

All in all, I thought the Supermetrics DS Connector I used to build Facebook Insights data into our Google Data Studio report was excellent. Prompts guide you through the authorization process and once the outside data source of choice is connected, you can utilize the powerful drag and drop report building functionality and customization capability of Data Studio. And although it’s fun to build reports, in the end, it comes down to data visualization.

If, as marketers, we can present data-driven insights to our clients in a holistic, transparent way, they will run better, more profitable businesses.

If Your Business Gets a Negative Review, What Should You Do?

30 June 2017December 1, 2019Ann MillsLeave a comment

It’s bound to happen.

Unhappy customers in a mobile world are a tough combination for business. Dissatisfied patrons seem almost determined to post a negative review and even worse, review sites permit customers to upload pictures too. So, if your coffee house has an overflowing trash can or the floor needs sweeping, a customer can snap a photo and upload it to a review site for all to see. Negative reviews have become the digital version of calling someone out, and they can wreak havoc on your business.

On a 5-star rating scale, everything that is 3-stars, 2-stars or 1-star is within the realm of a negative review. Why? 3-stars mean the customer is not exactly endorsing your business, plus often there are no comments with a 3-star review. 3-stars certainly won’t compel anyone to visit your establishment; potential customers will continue searching the Internet for the 5-star one instead. With 2-stars and 1-star reviews, there is usually a comment alongside the rating, and more often than not, the commentary will painstakingly describe every aspect of the issue.

So, if your business gets a negative online review, what should you do?

1. Answer the negative customer review

No business wants an unfavorable review; but on the bright side, in giving your business a review, a customer is talking to you and telling you something. Customer conversations are always helpful, and if you take the time to address the issue, sometimes customers will even go back and amend the number of review stars as well as their comments. Acknowledge the bad experience the customer had and respond to the review promptly and politely suggesting something that may help if (s)he visits in future. For example, put in your response, “Please don’t ever hesitate to get the manager on duty involved because the quality of your experience is very important to us.”

Negative reviews are the digital version of calling someone out, and they can wreak havoc on your business.

2. Avoid putting your company name in the online review response

Online review comments can come up when customers search the Internet. An important rule of thumb is to keep your company name out of a response to negative online reviews. Instead of, “We are sorry you had a bad experience at Joe’s Coffee House,” say, “We are sorry you had a bad experience at our coffee house.” On the flip side, for positive reviews, do add your company name in the response as well as a positive aspect about your business.

3. Look for patterns in online customer feedback

It’s easy to brush off a negative review as the result of an unreasonable customer, but there are often patterns in reviews. If one of your locations consistently has complaints about the reception staff, for example, chances are you have a problem. Businesses mistakenly believe they will be able to leave positive reviews on the Internet, and they can hire a reputation management company to remove the negative ones from 3rd party sites. Not so. Customer reviews cannot be taken down just because they are negative, so it’s wise to look for patterns in the feedback and see if there is an ongoing issue that needs to be addressed in your business.

4. Know your review sites

The top review sites are household names: Google My Business, Facebook, Amazon and Yelp. Less well known is the fact that you can have an unclaimed or unofficial page about your business collecting reviews, and no one in your business either set it up or is actively monitoring it. Many times we will ask a new reputation management client if they know where their reviews are and in one recent case, they told us, “Yes, of course, we have reviews on Yelp and Facebook!” A quick scan found they had multiple reviews on Google My Business as well.

In another recent example, a patron of one of our reputation management clients had a negative experience and posted a 1-star review on Facebook. He then proceeded to post the same negative review on YP (the online yellow pages) and Google My Business. The lesson is that your customers are pretty savvy, and your reputation management strategy must be too.

5. Use reputation management technology

You must proactively monitor and respond to your online customer reviews. Luckily, there are reputation management software solutions that provide dedicated portals, monitoring services and the ability to answer reviews directly from the portal. You can even use reputation management technology to stream positive reviews into a company website review page while filtering out negative reviews from the stream. This technology allows a business to leverage their positive reviews while actively addressing the negative ones.

The Resourceful Business team recently put together an infographic: Online Reviews: 10 Compelling Reasons to Manage Your Reputation. Download the print version here. And if you’re ready to take control of your online reviews, we would love to help. Contact us to get started.

Google Data Studio for website analytics

Google Data Studio: 3 Easy Steps To Your Website Analytics

20 April 2017April 21, 2017Ann Mills3 Comments

Have you ever wondered what percentage of your website visitors are returning, how long they stay on your website or what pages they look at while they are there? Google Analytics (GA) tracks a multitude of statistics like these, yet according to BuiltWith, only 7.8 percent of the 370 million websites on the Internet use Google Analytics. Given what Google Analytics can do, the percentage is shockingly low, but understandable too. Although GA has long provided a treasure trove of information about a website and its traffic, for business owners, it’s not been an intuitive interface to tackle. Now, there’s the incredibly user-friendly Google Data Studio.

Google Data Studio, still in beta, is a new tool that pulls data from your Google ecosystem, Google Analytics or AdWords as examples, into visual dashboards. We took a spin with Google Data Studio to see if we could put together a quick, informative, visual report pulling key information from website data in GA. It was a breeze.

Now you can create a remarkable, easy to understand snapshot of your website traffic using Google Data Studio. You’ll quickly see the value of the data as you grow your business and marketing efforts. You’ll need to connect Google Analytics to your website first, and then you’re ready to begin.

Step 1: Sign up for Google Data Studio

Go to Google Data Studio and signup for free using your Google account. Use the same Google account linked to your website Google Analytics because Google Data Studio does not replace GA, but rather provides more user-friendly dashboards for viewing the data. Once you login to Data Studio, you will see a dashboard, and there are several pre-built templates which are set up to help you visualize data from many different sources including Google Analytics. You can completely customize and create your own report, but we grabbed the Google Analytics template for Acme Marketing – [Sample] Acme Marketing Website – as a starting point.

Step 2. Select your data source for the Google Data Studio report

When you click on the Acme Marketing Google Analytics template, a turquoise and gray sample report pops up. In the top right of the screen, there is an icon which gives you the option to “Make a copy of this report.” Copy it and you will see a pop-up screen “Create new report.”

The Acme Marketing report uses sample data. To populate your report with your own website data, you will need to connect the Google Analytics data for your website.

In the pop-up window, look to the right where it says New Data Source, then:

Click on [Sample] Google Analytics Data
Click the blue CREATE NEW DATA SOURCE
In the left sidebar menu entitled Connectors, choose Google Analytics
Pick the relevant Account, (website) Property and View
Click the CONNECT button in the top right-hand corner
Click the ADD TO REPORT button in the top right-hand corner
Under the New Data Source section, your website Property is now listed, so you can CREATE REPORT

You’re connected!

Only 7.8 percent of the 370 million websites on the Internet use Google Analytics. – BuiltWith

Step 3. Customize the Google Data Studio report layout, theme, and elements

First things first – name your report in the top left of the screen near the Data Studio icon by typing over the words Copy of [Sample] Acme Marketing Website
Pick your date range by clicking the calendar dates in the top right of the report and select date range in the right sidebar
Click and delete sample elements such as the Acme Marketing logo on the top left and the note centered at the top, “SAMPLE REPORT – MAKE A COPY TO EDIT.”
Add your own graphic or text elements. Here are two examples. Add a logo by clicking the image icon in the top menu (a square with a mountain) and drag out a square or rectangular space with your cursor. Click Select a file in the right sidebar under DATA and choose your logo from your computer files. The logo will be sized and put in the outlined space. To add text, click the text icon in the top menu (a box with a “T”), draw out a square or rectangle with the cursor and type in your text. Customize your Text Properties in the right sidebar.

If you want to add more data views, you can either delete and replace what is in the sample report, or:

Add a blank page to the report with the “+Add a page” option on the top left of the menu.
Add custom elements

Here’s another quick example:

Choose the Table icon on the top menu
Drag out a rectangular or square shape with your cursor
Immediately the table is populated with default source data, so in the right sidebar menu, click the green Source button under Dimensions
Choose whichever data dimension you want to see
Need a shorter table? Drag the lower border up and fewer entries will show.
Prefer a different visualization? Repeat these steps choosing a different option besides Table or change your data source.

You can continue to add pages or visual dashboards that are useful to you. All of the elements of the report can be stylized to match your brand colors by clicking on them and using the STYLE options in the right sidebar. Your report is automatically saved because you are in the Google cloud ecosystem. Plus, all of the features you are used to with Google Docs such as sharing and download as PDF are either available or coming soon.

The best part? Once you create the report you want, you can change the date range each month and refresh the report for an updated view.

We’re loving the new Google Data Studio as an intuitive, interactive interface to view essential Google Analytics data for a website. Give it a try and tell us your thoughts in the comments!

Content Strategy: 4 One-Liners That Made Me Want To Read On

22 December 2016August 15, 2018Ann MillsLeave a comment

Content creation is a tough game for sure. Not only is there too much content, but the quality can be pretty tenuous. Just think of your email inbox and the daily task of combing through mounds of messages in an attempt to find the ones you actually need to read.

According to a recent article, email users send 204 million messages each minute, and there’s even a new expression to describe the onslaught – content clutter. Alongside the steady stream of emails, there are email notifications from social media platforms and calendar pings. There are email advertisements and drip campaigns, automated emails written by salespeople. If you’re like me, you spend a lot of time deleting emails and just skimming others.

Over the last few months, I decided to collect a few one-liners that actually made me stop and read the content. I managed to come up with only four. It’s confirmation just how difficult it is to write compelling content, and I thought I would share these 4 one-liners that made me want to read on.

1. “Had to share”

I am a member of a group that has a closed email listserv, and this subject line pertained to an email by one of the subscribers. She wanted to share an excellent article she had read in a national newspaper about the challenges of the college process for high school students and their families. In her email, she shared the article link and a few other helpful resources she had found as well. The subject line invites the reader – here’s something I really liked which I am giving to you, and I don’t want anything in return. Of course, I jumped right in and read it.

“Gratitude is both rare and impactful

in today’s digital conversations.”

2. “We’re passionate about feedback – and I’ll respond to every message.”

This one-liner was part of an autoresponder message. After signing up for the premium version of this product, I received a confirmation email from the co-founder which included this line. With the proliferation of chat boxes, knowledge libraries and email support, it was a pleasant surprise to read a message from a management team that tells me my feedback is valued, read and answered. I took the time to read the entire email, and it convinced me that the company has a strong set of core values. My team remains committed to this product because of it.

3. “One of the real benefits of social media is the ability to meet people we would not otherwise have the opportunity to meet – grateful for the connection.”

I received this message from a Chief Experience Officer with whom I had connected on LinkedIn. I had sent him an invitation to join a new LinkedIn Group and was touched by his gracious response. It prompted me to click his website link and read all about him and his company. His note is a reminder of how rare and impactful gratitude is in today’s digital conversations.

4. “Thanks for considering, even if you can’t.”

This subject line accompanied a message from a friend who was in need of a favor. What I love about this line is that it conveys her appreciation to me for just taking the time to read and consider her request. She words her sentence in a way that tells me – it’s just fine if you can’t. It made me want to do my best to help, and not surprisingly, I did.

In a digital world that surrounds us with Buzzfeed quizzes, snapchats, tweets, automated emails, and emojis, there is still a content strategy that trumps all. It’s sincerity. Sort of like the handwritten thank you card, it works because it’s a bit of a rarity. Requiring time, effort and mindfulness, content infused with sincerity is powerful and magical at making us want to read on.

RB is a digital marketing agency that is passionate about content marketing strategy. Have you come across any compelling one-liners lately that made you want to read on? Please share them in the comments!