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The SBS Blog

Four Ways to Check Your Content for Freshness

7/14/2017

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Four Ways to Check Your Content for Freshness
​Have you taken a look at all of the pages on your website recently? How about the depths of your Twitter account? Chances are there’s a page lingering somewhere in the dark corners of a drop down menu that hasn’t been updated in a while. In this post, we’ll take a look at four different ways to assess the freshness of your content.
 
“Freshness” can refer to content on your website, blog, or in your email and social media channels.  Why does freshness matter? It sends a signal both to your audiences and to search engines that you’re still there and that you care enough about them and your business to keep your content up to date.
 
There’s nothing worse than showing up at a restaurant only to realize that the hours on their website aren’t accurate, and that they’ve changed for the summer. Or to be working on a policy issue…that’s already passed through Congress.
 
Here are four ways that you can ensure that your content is fresh:

Look for Ghost Towns

​Checking for Ghosts: When’s the last time you updated your Facebook page? How about your blog? The first step in the process is to see if you’ve posted anything in a while. Are you active, or is it a ghost town?
 
If you’re not sure what to talk about, think about the top pages on your website, and pull a fact, quote, or statistic from that page to share on your social media channels. Your blog is a great place to answer all of the questions that your clients are asking. Your email inbox might be a great source of blog post ideas.
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Look in the Back of the Content Fridge

There's Something Scary in the Back of Your Content Fridge: Okay, so let’s say you are pretty on top of updating your website and social channels on a regular basis. What you might want to do is to go page-by-page through your top-level navigation, and check to make sure that the most visible pages on your site are accurate and up to date. 
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Your top level navigation consists of your main landing pages and also the stuff that appears in your drop downs.
Pay particular attention to facts, such as dates, hours, addresses, and staff names and emails.
 
Google looks for a consistent name, address, phone number, and URL for physical locations featured in local search. So if your business or organization has a brick-and-mortar location, you might want to check those facts a second time to make sure that they are formatted identically.
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Look in Google Analytics

​Google Analytics has a wealth of information on your content. One report that we like to look at regularly is Behavior > Site Content > All Pages. This report will give you a nice look at the most popular pages on your website. ​
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But if you click on the column labeled “Pageviews” it will also let you look at the least visited pages on your website. If one of your least visited page is pretty important, you may need to think about ways to make it easier to find on your site. (User experience designers call this “surfacing” content).
 
If it’s a blog post that hasn’t been viewed in a while…it might be time to share it again through your social networks. Looking at blog post metrics over a longer period of time, might yield some insights on topics that are more popular, or less popular.

​You can also rewrite a post, taking a slightly different angle or approach, such as turning a fact-heavy article into an infographic. Repurposing content leftovers are a-ok in our book.

 
Speaking of which, if you want to look at content metrics in a single area (also called a directory or folder) of your website, here’s a handy trick: go to Behavior > Site Content > Content Drilldown and then click on the directory that you want to look at.

This makes it easy to look at the content metrics only for your “blog” or “about” section. In the below example, I see the directories for my homepage, and my blog.
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Look in your Social Media Management Tool 

Get Social with Your Metrics: It’s a good idea to look at your top posts. We recommend doing this on a monthly basis. We like to look at our top 5 posts sorted by reach, and then by engagement.

When looking at engagement (which is a catch-all term that describes likes, comments, shares, retweets, etc.) it's important to keep in mind that if a post reached few people and the engagement rate is very high, that bit of might not be as helpful to you as seeing the stats on a post that reached more people but had slightly less engagement.

Our top five social media posts often give us ideas for future social media posts or even blog posts topics.
 
Below, is an example from a report we pulled in Sprout Social for our client Clergy for a New Drug Policy.
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Why aren't we talking about the bottom five? We often look at those posts too, but if there's a clear reason that a post may have gotten less reach (such as a Facebook boost not being approved, or spending less on a boost), that’s less interesting to us than seeing the posts that really resonated with our audience. 

Keep it Fresh!

We hope this gives you some great ideas to keep things fresh! Let us know if you have questions about content freshness in a comment below.

For more tips on making your social media content work harder, check out some of the other posts in our social media audit series.
Sarah Best, CEO + Chief Strategist of Sarah Best Strategy

Sarah Best

CEO + Chief Strategist of Sarah Best Strategy, a boutique agency that makes social media work for you.  Award-wining social media, SEO, advertising, & marketing consulting services. We supercharge teams so they can maximize their impact & extend bandwidth. Follow us on Facebook, connect with me on Linkedin.

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Why Your Business Needs Talking Points

6/23/2017

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Derek Notman of Intrepid Wealth Partners

We talked to entrepreneur (and client) Derek Notman of Intrepid Wealth Partners about why it's so important to have talking points for your business.

Similar to an elevator pitch, talking points are a set of 3-5 bulletpoint statements that explain what you do, who you do it for, and what the main benefits of what you do are for your customers.

Tell us about what you do.

As a certified financial planner I specialize in working with entrepreneurs, from startup through exit, on their financial planning to help them realize their hopes, dreams & goals.

What did it used to feel like, when you had to introduce yourself and your company, before you had talking points?

​I have struggled with this over 11 years.  I used to try and avoid talking about what I did for a living.  Not having organized talking points resulted in me telling each person I met [what I do in] a slightly different explanation and it always felt like they didn’t quite understand what I was talking about! 

How has having talking points changed your experience of introducing yourself and your company? 
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It has boosted my confidence.  I am much more comfortable explaining what I do and who I do it for.  It comes across as clear and concise, people understand what I do and who I do it for and will even ask additional questions to learn more.

How do you use your talking points? How have you been using them on your team?

I use them in person and in my digital communications.  Regardless of how they are being told, they are telling the same message across all channels.  My team is also using them and we have modified them depending on whether we are talking about ourselves or the overall firm.

Do you think that other business owners should have talking points for their business too?

​It is a must!  If you have a business, then you are selling something, whether it is a service, product, widget, whatever, you much be able to tell your story quickly and concisely to get people’s attention and keep them interested. 

​If you don’t have talking points then do you really know your own business and what you do?  If you can’t clearly explain it, then how could you ever expect your potential customers to ever know what you do or what you sell, and how it may benefit them?

Is there anything else that you took away from our work together to develop talking points?

It was simple and a quick exercise, but absolutely necessary!  It has helped me better pitch my business via a multitude of mediums, all while telling a consistent message.

Sarah Best, CEO + Chief Strategist of Sarah Best Strategy

Sarah Best

CEO + Chief Strategist of Sarah Best Strategy, a boutique agency that makes social media work for you.  Award-wining social media, SEO, advertising, & marketing consulting services. Follow us on Facebook, connect with me on Linkedin.

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Three Yardsticks We Can Use to Measure the Effectiveness of our Social Media Efforts

6/16/2017

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Three Ways to Evaluate Social Media
I spent a lot of time in my father's and my late Pop Pop's woodshops as a kid. They used to say "Measure Twice, Cut Once." Another way to say that is if you plan an effort carefully, you won't waste costly resources and time. I think that's a good lesson that also applies to work that I do in helping companies large and small evaluate their social media efforts, and develop a social media strategy. 

So this post, which considers three different yardsticks that we can use to measure the effectiveness of our social media efforts, is written in their honor. Happy Father's Day Dad! 
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Evaluate Your Social Media Accounts Against Known Best Practices

​Evaluate your social media accounts against known best practices: There are certain well-defined best practices that can help you understand if your accounts are set up to succeed or fail.

These include making sure that your Facebook posts are not too long, tagging partner organizations in your tweets, using hashtags appropriately on Instagram, understanding what types of content (such as DIY projects and recipes) tend to do well on Pinterest, and figuring out how to leverage both your employee's personal accounts and your company's page on LinkedIn.

A social media strategist can perform an social media audit, an independent evaluation of your social media accounts. Or, take a look at what your competitors and peer organizations are doing and see whether their content sparks any fresh ideas. 
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Evaluate Your Social Media Efforts Against Benchmarks

Evaluate your social media program against benchmarks: There are several types of benchmarks you might consider when evaluating a social media program.

Internal Benchmarks: Establishing a Median Across Your Accounts

If you have a very complex social media program, creating internal benchmarks can be very helpful. Let's say you have multiple Facebook pages for different divisions of your business. Throw all of your accounts into a spreadsheet and figure out what the median result is for statistics like account growth and engagement rates.

If you have a median, social media account managers who exceed the benchmark can potentially mentor team members whose skills could improve. Looking at which accounts fall below the median helps you to prioritize which accounts need the most attention.

Industry Benchmarks: Compare Against the Metrics that are Typical for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn 


The second type of benchmark is known industry benchmarks. This applies to engagement, for example. There are known average engagement rates for Facebook (in our experience, for boosted posts, 10-15%), LinkedIn (in our experience, often less than 1%...people aren't necessarily on LinkedIn to hit a "like" button), and Twitter (in our experience, often 1-2%).

Knowing those benchmarks will help you set reasonable goals and understand what you can feasibly hope to achieve.


Competitive Benchmarks: Measure Against Organizations that are Similar to You

With a little effort (and a spreadsheet) you can track a competitor’s audience growth over time. Why is this important? Well, you want to make sure to compare apples to apples.

A flagship account for an international nonprofit should be compared to other flagship accounts for international nonprofits, not against the performance of an account with a more niche following, such as accounts targeted to reporters, scientists, policymakers, human relations professionals, and so on.
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Evaluate Your Content Balance

Evaluate your social media program for content balance, tone, and relevance: Your social media program is not going to be effective if every post that you do is focused on sales.

Rather, you need to create a balance of content that informs, inspires, and drives clear calls to action. You also need to consider what types of content might be most useful and interesting to your target audience.

Similarly, you want to make sure that the tone of your accounts is aligned with your target audiences, and is consistent across all of your social media accounts.
Sarah Best, CEO and Chief Strategist of Sarah Best Strategy LLC

Sarah Best

CEO + Chief Strategist of Sarah Best Strategy, a boutique agency that makes social media work for you.  Award-wining social media, SEO, advertising, & marketing consulting services. Follow us on Facebook, connect with me on Linkedin.

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So You've Completed a Social Media Audit...Now What?

6/1/2017

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So You've Completed a Social Media Audit...Now What?
A social media audit can help any business or organization rally their team around a cohesive vision that fits seamlessly into broader marketing and business goals.

But to be successful after an audit is completed, you need to develop a roadmap to success. It’s important to prioritize what issues you’re going to tackle, and to develop a specific timeline for implementing those changes.

Creating a Roadmap to Success

Here are four questions you can ask yourself when making a roadmap.
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  1. What tactics best support your vision and your goals?

    Part of a successful social media audit process should include the creation of a vision statement for your social media program.

    You can then use your vision statement as a guidepost for making decisions about what you should tackle first.

    To think about this another way, you should stay laser-focused on your core goals. Tackle tasks related to those goals first, then move onto other lower priority activities.

  2. What roadblocks preventing your success do you need to overcome most urgently to achieve that vision? 

    There are simple steps that you can take to improve your social media marketing team’s workflow, such as establishing editorial deadlines so that your team gets content on time.

    Or perhaps your team lacks access to professional social media management tools. Your social media managers may wish to report on the success of their efforts, but may lack the tools that would help them make those reports quickly and efficiently. Giving them those tools can create an immediate impact on your program's ability to report on return on investment, also known as ROI.

  3. What efforts will work within your current workflow? 

    We get it. Rome was not built in a day. And you're dealing with a set of challenges and constraints that are unique to your business. Whether you're working in an industry that is regulated, or are just understaffed, taking the constraints that you are facing into account will be key for your success.

    We recommend developing a detailed timeline for implementing recommendations, starting with tasks that are either low effort (low hanging fruit), highest priority based on your goals, or which are easy to accomplish without making major changes to your team or your website. 

    Knock those puppies off your list and then bask in the energy and momentum you've gained by shortening your to do list.
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You've got to do lists for days. We get it.
4. How can you train staff to support them in achieving your company's vision? 

Training your staff is a common follow-up step to implementing audit recommendations. Identify any internal and external experts that can help improve competency in core areas.

Whether you are bringing in an outside consultant to address the issues that were uncovered by an audit or you’re engaging in peer-to-peer learning such as a brown bag lunch-and-learn series, it’s important to identify who will do the training and to put dates on the group's calendar for training sessions. 

5. How can you train your staff to address any issues uncovered during the audit?

If your social media audit has uncovered any issues that can be solved through training, get that scheduled too! If you have more than one person on your team consider assigning team members who are stronger on certain skills as a mentor to team members who show (through your social media metrics) or who self-identify as needing a little help. 

6. When will we reevaluate your program?

Getting a social media audit should not be a one-and-done activity. It’s important to set dates to re-evaluate your program, staff progress, and to check your progress against your timeline for implementing the recommendations from your audit. These deadlines will keep you accountable and ensure the success of your social media audit.

Read More in Our Social Media Audit Series

  • What is a Social Media Audit?
  • 7 Common Pitfalls in Social Media Workflow
  • Why Audit Your Social Media Program? 
  • 5-Minute Audit Tip: Fix Your Calls to Action
  • 5-Minute Social Branding Tip: Look at Your Bios
  • Let's Take a Radically Different Approach to Setting Social Media Marketing Goals​​
Sarah Best, CEO + Chief Strategist of Sarah Best Strategy

Sarah Best

CEO + Chief Strategist of Sarah Best Strategy, a boutique agency that makes social media work for you.  Award-wining social media strategy, social media advertising, content strategy & marketing consulting services. Follow us on Facebook, connect with me on Linkedin.

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A Radically Different Approach to Setting Social Media Marketing Goals

5/23/2017

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A Radically Different Approach to Social Media Goals for Complex Teams - Sarah Best Strategy

Roadblocks in Setting Social Media Marketing Goals

For large organizations with complex teams who might be dispersed around the country or the globe, there are often significant roadblocks to estimating and capturing social media data in traditional ways. This can make it difficult to set social media marketing goals. This is also a common workflow problem for groups of nonprofits who are partnering together on an awareness or fundraising campaign.

Some of the common obstacles I've observed in my social media audit practice include:

1. Using Different Tools

This can be a problem for both groups of organizations working toward a common goal, and for geographically dispersed teams, or teams across several departments.

Some orgs and departments will not prioritize professional social media management tools in their budgets, or won't allow social media managers to select the tools they'd like to be using.

2. Different Philosophies

When you are working with diverse teams or organizations you may not have a shared understanding of the metrics that matter.

3. Differences in Knowledege

On very large teams, it's common for some people to have advanced skills, and others to have a more rudimentary understanding of social media management and metrics.

4. Access to Ad Spend

Teams who have adequate spend to support their efforts will have an easier time reaching goals than teams who don't. 

Let's Consider a Radically Different Approach

There are a range of tactics for addressing differences in philosophies and knowledge, such as peer-to-peer mentoring or educational brown bag lunches. When teams are using different tools or have different levels of knowledge, templated reports can help you collect information in a standardized way.

But let’s consider for a moment, what would happen if we threw our social media goals out the window and took a radically different approach to setting goals for shared campaigns.

Working Together Toward a Common Goal

A peloton in a bike race
In bike racing, a peloton works together to achieve a common goal.

We All Share the Same Finish Line

A joint campaign, executed by several teams, departments, or partner organizations, might have common key messages or even a library or shared social media content. 
 
What would happen if, instead of trying to collect metrics and reports from a number of different people, groups, or organizations, who all have different reporting workflows, that we gave each person a simple target based on the size of their audience and empowered them to meet that target on their own timeline, using the content and schedule that they felt would best fit their program?

If we think about a campaign as a road race that happens over a month, a quarter or a year, it might be helpful to establish a starting line that is tied to the size of the partner's account.

​(For a longer campaign, you might want to multiply that number by the number of months in the campaign.)

Example of Simplified Social Media Goals

Size of Account
Impressions Goal
Website Clicks Goal
Conversions Goal
100,000
100,000
2,000
40
10,000
10,000
200
4
1,000
1,000
20
1
For the individual social media manager, the task is then to get to the finish line by doing whatever they need to do to reach that goal.

For some groups, it might only take one or two posts, within a library of shared content, to hit their individual target. For others, they may need to post a number of times over a longer period of time in order to hit their goals. And that’s okay. Reaching the finish line is what matters.

 
As long as you enforce where the finish line is (our expectation is that we all need to reach this point) your role becomes less taskmaster and more coach and cheerleader. Individual managers or groups will be empowered to complete the race in a way that makes sense to them. 

Gathering Success Metrics

Here's the best part of this approach: it vastly simplifies the problem of collecting metrics to create a campaign report.

Instead of tracking people down at the end of the campaign, and gathering disparate spreadsheets and reports, doing a lot of manual tabulation and analysis across accounts, you can instead ask this team two simple questions:


  1. Did you hit your goal? If not, what were your results?
  2. Was your goal too easy, just right, or too hard?
  3. Any other successes you'd like to share with us?
 
The answer to the first question gives you the metric to report your success as a group.

The second question will tell you if you need to adjust your goals in the future.

The third question gives you open-ended qualitative data on how things went.
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What approach to you take to setting social media goals? Learn about other solutions to common social media workflow issues in our earlier blog post.
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Sarah Best

CEO and Chief Strategist of Sarah Best Strategy, a boutique agency. Award-wining social media strategy, social media advertising, content strategy & marketing consulting services. ​Follow us on Facebook, connect with me on Linkedin.

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5-Minute Social Branding Tip

5/15/2017

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5-Minute Social Branding Tip
There's a simple, powerful action you can take in the next five minutes to strengthen your social media brand.

This tip, which comes out of our social media audit work, is quick and easy to implement but will make a big impact.

Cornerstones of social branding

The cornerstones of social branding are consistency and repetition. You want to state the same key messages about your company, product, or service over and over again over a long period of time. 

Are your social media bios consistent?

One quick action you can take to improve your social media branding is to look at your social media bios, or your “About” copy, on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.

Are you describing your company the same way every time? If not, take the best, most concise statement and use it as your bio across channels.

Example of consistent social branding: Starbucks

In each of the five examples below, you will see that Starbucks uses an identical bio on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest. "Inspiring and nuturing the human spirit--one person, one cup, one neighborhood at a time."

Are your social bios searchable?

Bios are searchable, so if you are providing professional services, for example, you might want to mention what you do in your bio to make it easier for people to find you. 

If the messaging is consistent, it's okay to tweak your bio slightly to fit the channel. In the example above, you can note that Starbucks' Instagram bio includes an emoji of a coffee cup.

Your Twitter bios may include some tagged accounts and hashtags. Executives, public information officers, and social media managers might want to tag their company accounts in their bios.

The Starbucks Partners Twitter account links back to the main Starbucks Twitter account and includes a branded hashtag for employee engagement.

​​
Example of social branding
Sarah Best, Founder and Principal of Sarah Best Strategy

Sarah Best

Founder / Principal of Sarah Best Strategy, a boutique agency that makes social media work for you.  Award-wining social media strategy, social media advertising, content strategy & marketing consulting services. Follow us on Facebook, connect with me on Linkedin.

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Sarah Best Strategy Selected as Sprout Social Founding Agency Partner

5/5/2017

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Sarah Best Strategy has been selected as one of SproutSocial's Founding Agency Parnters
It's no secret. We are big fans of Sprout Social. We've been using the social media management platform for many years to manage our own, and our clients', social media accounts.

So we were really pleased to have been selected as one of Sprout Social's Founding Agency Partners. 
Sarah Best Strategy has been selected as one of SproutSocial's Founding Agency Parnters

Four Reasons We Love Sprout Social

  • Helps us generate the beautiful and useful reports that we deliver every month to our social media management clients.
  • Makes it easy for us to cross-promote B2B content on our client's LinkedIn Company pages and through Executive's personal accounts at the same time.
  • Gives us the ability to quickly, and accurately, do benchmarking across many accounts as part of our social media audit process.
  • Makes it easy for us to track  and respond to thousands of incoming messages during live social media campaigns, at annual events, conferences, and festivals.​
SproutSocial Report
Sprout Social Report

Our Favorite Sprout Social Resources

What does our partnership mean for our clients? Well it means that we're going to get to share a lot of awesome resources with you. If you've been working with us for a while you probably already have these bookmarked:

  • A Complete Guide to 2017 Hashtag Holidays - a great resource for content planning
  • The Always Up to Date Guide to Social Media Image Sizes
  • How to Measure the Value of Social Media

We'll also be among the first to learn, and tell you, about the products new features in our ongoing work to provide you with superior social media management services. We look forward to what the future brings.
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Sarah Best

Founder / Principal of Sarah Best Strategy, a boutique agency that makes social media work for you.  Award-wining social media strategy, social media advertising, content strategy & marketing consulting services. Follow us on Facebook, connect with me on Linkedin.

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Quick Content Strategy Fix: Shift the Spotlight to Your Customers

5/4/2017

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This video from entrepreneur Marie Forleo has some really excellent advice on shifting the focus of your website copy away from yourself, to focus on your customers' needs and wants.

You can head over to Marie Forleo's blog to read her full post.

Our Approach to Content Strategy

When we start working with a client on content strategy, we advocate taking a similar approach. We often start with the following types of exercises:
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  • Brand Positioning Statement: This exercise helps us craft a simple statement that says what you, or your company, does, how you do it, who you do it for, and how you're solving the problem uniquely in comparison to your competitors.
  • Value Proposition Statements: We frequently help our clients complete a value proposition canvas that identifies the needs and wants of each of your target customers--this is exactly what Marie Forleo is talking about in the video above--and how those match up with your products and service offerings. (The canvas is available for free! You can download it and fill it out for your business).
  • Talking Points and Key Messages: The next step in the process is to take what we have learned to craft a set of 3-5 statements that concisely describe yourself or your company, and the main benefits of what you are doing to your customers.

Outcomes of Foundational Content Strategy

Once you have a set of talking points or key messages you can use them in a number of different ways: you can use them verbally, when you are giving interviews or an elevator pitch about your business.

You can use them in headlines and other prominent places on your website. As Marie Forleo suggests, this work can also influence the labels you use in your website navigation. You can also use them when you're describing your business in a press release, and so much more.

Case Study: ONVI

When we started working with ONVI on the creation of a marketing system to promote their innovative Prophix toothbrush, we started with these exact exercises. 

A year later, we found that the results of these simple exercises were still helping us write focused, consistent copy for everything from packaging design, to a booth at the Consumer Electronics Show.
Examples of messaging from the ONVI website.
Source: ONVI website: https://www.getprophix.com/
Read Our Case Study

Putting Your Customers First

Whether you decide to tweak your copy on your own, or work with a consultant like us on your content strategy, putting your customers first and tying their needs and wants back to your products and services is the best strategy for increasing sales or other conversions, while also fostering trust with your customers.
Sarah Best, Founder of Sarah Best Strategy

Sarah Best

Founder / Principal of Sarah Best Strategy, a boutique agency that makes social media work for you.  Award-wining social media strategy, social media advertising, content strategy & marketing consulting services. Follow us on Facebook, connect with me on Linkedin.

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5-Minute Audit Tip: Fix Your Calls to Action

5/1/2017

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5-Minute Social Media Audit Tip
Today, in our social media audit series, we’re sharing a quick tip that you can tackle in five minutes, to improve the effectiveness of your social media content.

Are you asking people to do anything?

We all know that strong calls to action, such as "buy now" or "sign up today" are critical for getting people to do the things that we'd like to see them do as a result of seeing our social media posts. But it's important to check your posts to make sure that you're actually remembering to include them.
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Here's what you should do in the next five minutes: Take a look at your five most recent social media posts and see how many of them include a specific "ask" to do something, whether that's read an article, sign up for your newsletter, or purchase tickets to an event.

If the answer is "no", here are some follow up actions you can take to improve your posts.

Use Short, Clear Calls to Action

Short, clear calls to action are the best way to pop the question. These include phrases such as: book now, sign up, buy tickets today. Terms like “now” in calls to action improve success because urgency drives people to take action. Turn “I’ll take action at some point” into “I need to take action RIGHT NOW.”

Make it Easy for People to Take Action

If you want to increase email newsletter sign ups, for example, send people to a dedicated sign up landing page. Don't make people hunt for the form in the bottom of your website.

Create Reusable Calls to Action Focused Social Media Posts

For calls to action that support your main goals, such as "sign up for our newsletter" don’t waste time writing Facebook posts or tweets related to these core calls to action messages over and over again. Instead, build a spreadsheet or Word document with reusable content in it, so that you deploy those posts again over time.
Sarah Best, Founder of Sarah Best Strategy

Sarah Best

CEO + Chief Strategist of Sarah Best Strategy, a digital marketing agency focused on social media + search engine optimization. Follow us on Facebook, connect with me on Linkedin. Contact us or learn about our nonprofit services here.

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Filter SPAM Out of Google Analytics

4/29/2017

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SEO Tip Number One: Filter SPAM Out of Google Analytics
There's a quick and easy thing you can do to improve your content metrics, such as bounce rates and time on site. That's to filter SPAM out of your Google Analytics reports.

If you're looking at your Google Analytics Acquisition report and you see a bunch of suspicious looking referral sources, that include phrases like "free traffic", Russian characters (as in the lifehacker example below), or which end in .xyz, then it's important to filter SPAM out of your Google Analytics account.

This is what SPAM referral sources look like:

Example of SPAM in Google Analytics Referral Reports

Why should you filter SPAM out of Google Analytics?

Expert digital marketers are able to look your Google Analytics Acquisition report to assess strengths and opportunities of your marketing program. It helps us assess:
  • Whether the amount of your traffic from organic search is healthy
  • Whether you could be doing a little bit more with social media
  • Whether your hard work with your email newsletters is paying off in more traffic
  • Whether public relations and guest blogging is yielding more referral traffic. 

​If your referral traffic is artificially inflated because it has a bunch of SPAM in it, it won't give us an accurate picture of what's going on.

Other consequences of not filtering out SPAM include:

  • Higher site-wide bounce rate (many SPAM referrers have a 100% bounce rate - so this will throw off your averages)
  • Lower average time on site.
  • Artificially inflated website traffic statistics.

Creating a SPAM Filter

Setting up a Google SPAM filter should take ten minutes of time or less.

Step One: Open Your Acquisition > All Traffic > Referrals Report

This is what you need to do to get a list of the SPAM URLs in your report. Look for URLs in your referral report that end in "xyz", which contain Russian characters, or include the word "free" in them.

​This Moz article on stopping SPAM bots lists some common SPAM referrers in it.

Where to find your Referrals report in Google Analytics

Step Two: In a New Tab in your Web Broswer, Open Your Admin Panel and Go to Views > Filters

Make sure you're looking at the "View" column, and clicking on "Filters". It's a little confusing because there is also an "All Filters" label under the "Account" column.
Where to find Filters in the admin panel of your Google Analytics report.

Step Three: On the Filters Screen, Click the "Add Filter" Button 

If you don't see this button, you're not going crazy. You just don't have the right permissions to add a filter to your account. Talk to the owner of your Google Analytics account about granting you permissions to add filters to your account.
How to create a filter in Google Analytics

Step Four: Set up the SPAM Filer

The graphic below shows what your SPAM filter should look like. Make sure to click on the "Custom" tab. In the "Filter Pattern" filed you can include multiple URLs separate by a pipe ( | ). When typing in the URLs into the filter, leave off the "http://"
This is what a Google SPAMbot filter looks like.

 
Google Analytics only allows you to enter so many characters into the "Filter Pattern" field, so after entering about ten URLs, you may need to set up a second SPAM filter. 

Finally, Check Your Referral Report Once a Month

Finally, it's important to check your Referral report for SPAM on a monthly or quarterly basis, to make sure that the SPAM referral sources are not creeping back into your reports.
Sarah Best, Founder of Sarah Best Strategy

Sarah Best

Founder / Principal of Sarah Best Strategy, a boutique agency that makes social media work for you.  Award-wining social media strategy, social media advertising, content strategy & marketing consulting services. Follow us on Facebook, connect with me on Linkedin.

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