Videos are a powerful form of content. You may easily get bored reading long articles but watching videos cannot easily tire you. According to Digital Sherpa, watching videos comprises 1/3rd of all online activity & increases people’s understanding of a product/service by 74%.
And speaking about videos, YouTube is the biggest platform used for uploading & sharing video-form content. We bring you top 5 ways to optimize videos on your YouTube channel to provide you a better ROI on the content created.
YouTube uses playtime or watchtime a factor in the algorithm to suggest videos and creating playlists can be used to boost the overall playtime for your videos. When the next video automatically starts playing at the end of the first video, there is a higher probability to keep the viewer longer on your page. A playlist created on YouTube looks like this:
Doing keyword research to arrive at top relevant keywords that can be used in the title always provides an edge. Also, look for video keywords which are keywords that have video results in the 1st page of Google search results. There are many free tools that allow you to do keyword research.
Brief descriptions are a crime as long form text around the video is used by search engines to understand the video. You should consider keeping the primary keywords towards the beginning of the description. Also, provide relevant links & hyperlinks to the playlists or videos in the description.
Google+ is an integral part of a YouTube video promotion. Engagement gained by the video is one of the important signals considered to rank the videos in search results. Comments from your community & fans help in providing positive signals, hence whenever the video is shared on social media, it’s great to put in relevant text asking fans to share their feedback & like if they find the video interesting or useful.
YouTube has a feature to create “Subscription Links” that asks the visitors who click on the link to subscribe to the channel before playing the video. This can help gain more subscribers for the channel, thereby boosting the long term reach & engagement. This is how many brands have grown their subscriber base.
The above tips can go a long way in optimizing the video, thus allowing you to rank on top of search results as well as allowing you to gain more subscribers to your channel & views for your video.
For more tips on how to rank your videos, read our in-depth article: YouTube SEO Tips: The Secret Sauce to Ranking Your Videos in 2019.
Often when we track results via digital marketing, we tend to track website traffic along with goals (transactions or leads generated). One element we have seen many bushinesses miss out on is tracking how many phone calls were generated via the online medium. If you do not track and calculate the calls generated, it is a significant number of leads that are missed out or rather not counted into the digital metrics.
The power of pushing a phone number on your landing page, social page, or website is dynamic. Depending on the nature of the business and the product/service type, placing a phone number makes it easier for a customer to engage with your business. Call tracking via Google Analytics, Google AdWords & Google Plus allows you to monitor which visitors from your website, social ads, and other digital promotions who have conversed with you via phone. While the three methods do not encompass or track all calls but its a huge step from not tracking the calls.
So lets look at each of these tracking methods in a bit more detail. Once you have implemented all these three methods, you can add these numbers to your existing results metrics to understand the true impact of your digital marketing efforts.
On Google Analytics
When users click your phone number (on a mobile device) to call your business, Google Analytics is able to track these via what they call "Event Tracking". Events in this scenario could mean phone calls or even downloads, video plays etc. Configuring the Google Analytics event tracking code while easy, requires some technical know how. So do involve your technology or web team to help you get this done. This google analytics event tracking code is used to record a user’s interaction with the website elements and in this use case we tracking the number of people who clicked on the phone number to call the business.
Example:
Specifications to call the _trackEvent() method in the UI element of a page:
As a result, all user activity on the on-site contact numbers provided is calculated and displayed as Events in Google Analytics (under the Behaviour tab)
On Google AdWords
Customers can call your business after clicking on a Google ad and learning about the products and services that you offer on your website. The AdWords click-to-call ads help you connect with these customers. These ads encourage calls to your business by showing the phone number on the ad. On smartphones and other high-end mobile devices, these phone numbers are often clickable and cost the same as a standard CPC would demand.
Click-to-call ads also help you to gain insights about the calls. These stats help you understand which keywords and ads are driving the most phone calls, which results in the optimization of these ads to make the graphs better. To activate these you will need to go to the Ad Extensions Tab.
On Google+
Google+ provides the easiest steps towards gauging the call metrics. One has to simply make sure that his/her business page furnishes all contact coordinates clearly. Furnishing all information makes your contacts visible in the search engine, where customers are given the power to call your business by a single touch of the button.
The metrics towards these calls can be viewed in the 'Insight' tab of you the business's Google+ page.
Learn more about Event Tracking – Web tracking & click-to-call ads to unlock the potential of your landing page or website, to monitor the amount of audience who convert through calls.
“In digital marketing, if you stop learning, you die!” For all those who work, think & breathe digital, this holds true. Digital Marketing is a dynamic, ever-evolving and fast space. This space is so rapid that each day brings along a new lesson, a new idea, and a new angle. The best part is there is always scope for more learning, henceforth, improvisation. And for a digital marketer, the learning curve never ceases to be.
Here’s a compilation of a few learning sources from around the world that can help you stay up-to-date with the digital media trends -
1.Moz – Search Engine Optimization can often seem like a trailing game for marketers who don’t have the amenity of a dedicated search engine team. In a cut-throat competitive scenario, SEO techniques and great content often become the shining knights in armors and it is required for the marketers to keep themselves updated with the ins and outs of the SEO ranking. Moz blog is one such explicit resource that helps to brush up on topics that underlie many routine activities involved in the digital practice. The blog encompasses everything related to content marketing, search engine optimization, latest updates by Google, responsive design, and building communities. Whiteboard Friday blogs are something my team and I look forward to since there is plenty to take away from Rand Fishkin's juicy insights on interesting SEO & Content Marketing topics every week!
2. Convince & Convert – The name says it all! Their blog section is more like a splendid guide to digital marketing and they definitely help in improving social media and content marketing strategies because of all the abundant data which is based on audits, strategic marketing plans, guidelines for content and social media marketing. The best part about the blogs that are shared is that they are entirely focused on helping businesses grow online. Topics like "How to get heard in a noisy world" , "5 simple tweaks to optimize your form conversion" , "How to turn B2B prospects into customers" etc. explore the whole wide area of the digital space to the online marketers and help them understand what could be done better to gain conversions.
3. QuickSprout – Founded by Neil Patel, one of the top 10 online marketers in the world the blog offers all that can be instrumental in revenue growth. Neil is a web analytics and conversion expert and also the co-founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar and KISSmetrics. The blog has a lavish range of case studies loaded with interesting web insights, all focused towards manifold increment in web traffic and conversions. Here's one for reference which we found extremely interesting -
4. Social Media Examiner – One of my all-time favorite posts from this social media focused blog forum would be the one which is titled “26 Creative Ways to Publish Social Media Updates”. The reason being that brands struggle to produce innovative content for social media and this article displays 26 different ways one can approach storytelling on social media. Social Media Examiner is an excellent content source for outstanding tactical coverage of all things social media from Mike Stelzner and his brilliant team.
5. Hubspot – The inbound marketing blog showcases anything and everything related to marketing and sales. The articles delve into precise how-to-topics and the trends that hover in the industry. When you are looking for specific marketing solutions/answers and are looking to adopt new ideas and practices, stop by hubspot! We recently came across a blog from Hubstop "How to Grow your E-mail List by Running a Contest" and tried applying the key points to one of our campaigns whose main aim was to build engagement whilst compile a brand new subscriber database and guess what? It works!
6. Content Marketing Institute – This is the dynamo of content marketing industry. The multi-author editorial team delivers informative content and tactful insights daily for the advanced content marketers around the globe.
The above featured blogs showcase how content marketing can do so much more than just getting people interested in reading your content. We believe that great content eventually leads to business generation and the kind of insights available from Content Marketing Institute helps us think through our content strategy and improvise it on a regular affair.
7. Search Engine Land – Owned by Danny Sullivan, a leading SEO expert in the online marketing space, this is the best venue to grasp in-depth information about SEO, SEM and social media. As digital marketers, we indulge in a lot of advertising online through social media channels and Google. But the key lies in constantly improving and optimizing the ads to get conversions at the best possible prices. Search Engine Land offers information in abundance that revolves around how Google works and search engine marketing. Some of the popular blogs are as follows.
8. JeffBulas.com – Jeff Bullas is a blogging prodigy and a social media marketing genius. All his blogs are about ‘everything social media’ and e-mail marketing and have straight-forward approach of sharing information that can be extremely viable in driving the businesses towards an optimum visibility online. He was titled by Linkedin as a “Top Social Media Expert You Need To Know” and he has also made it to the Forbes’ Top 40 Social Marketing List. Some of his most interesting blogs are around how visual media works best for tapping your audiences and why is it necessary to be visually appealing on digital media.
9. Simply Measured – It is pretty simple with the kind of information Simply Measured has in store for the readers. Strong information backed with data insights and powerful social analytics is what the blog provides which is required by businesses to help them grow.
The type of information and content available at Simply Measured helps us stay updated on what's new in the online space and how it could be beneficial to us. For online marketers to understand how a new discovery can be used to it's full potential to build leads and the brand, there is no other venue better than this one.
10. Audience Bloom – Audience Bloom is a hub for data and content that is productive in nature. The content has great in depth information about various social media and SEO tools that can be extremely helpful in staying up to date with the digital trends.
The reason why my team and I go gaga over the posts shared by Audience Bloom is because apart from the usual digital mantras, they also cover topics that are realistic in nature and help digital marketers as individuals in expanding their knowledge horizon. I as a social media manager, of course have some favorites like the ones mentioned below -
11. Youtube Google Business Channel – A splendid forum for knowledge sharing and google insights in the form of video blogs makes it more interesting for the viewers. The blog contains multiple videos about how Google functions and tools that can helpful in leveraging Google products.
What could be better than watching videos and accumulating knowledge? A couple of recommended videos would be "Promoting App Installs With Ad Words" and "Online Branding - Win Customers In a Moment".
12. Campaign Asia – Campaign Asia is an authoritative voice of media that showcases and highlights the emerging trends in the digital world.
Stay up to date with the giant marketing trends and do what's best to stay ahead of the race in the digital world with the help of these tidbits. We are on it! If there are other blogs that you follow please do share them with us!
In today’s digital world the key for your business to perform well online is to reach the top of the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) and for this to happen your website must deserve to be at the top (We have a slideshare on basics of SEO from an entrepreneurs’ perspective which may be of interest to you).
With Google’s smarter algorithm the need for unique content along with SEO strategies has become a necessity. So has the need for your site to deliver best user experience in the particular niche. Fortunately there are a lot of free SEO tools online that can help you assess the work done thereby helping you achieve your SEO (and business) goals.
Tools for Keyword Research
The keyword planner tool in Google Adwords forms the basis of most SEO strategies today. This free tool from Google can be used to search keywords, ad group ideas and also get an understanding of how a particular keyword might perform. You can also get help in choosing competitive bids and budget to go with your SEO campaign. While this is a free tool it requires you to setup a free account with Adwords before accessing the tool.
Keyword Eye is a free tool for keyword research and helps mostly in PPC/SEO campaigns. This tool can be effective during brainstorming of keywords.
Keywordtool.io, provides about 750+ suggestions for every keyword you enter. Thereby enables quick identification of top keywords in less time.
One of the most used free tool in the industry today, Ubersuggest provides a neat and organized list of keywords that many other tools fail to do.
This one though not a tool, goes a long way in helping identify top keywords that are being searched worldwide. When searching for a particular keyword the suggestions provided by google gives an insight as to what users are looking for in the particular field. Simple shortcut to Incognito is Ctrl + Shift + N.
Content
The site helps identify duplicate content within the site, be it in the meta-tags or content within the site. In today’s scenario where Google algorithms strictly check for duplication Siteliner is very beneficial.
A special tool to check for copied content from other sites. More often than not bloggers are seen referring content from other sites and using them without any modification which is strictly against SEO rules. Copyscape can help detect any copied content to be placed within the site.
Once you have created your meta-tags, it is important to check the optimization levels of the keywords used in them. Google has penalized several sites for over optimization and hence using Remove’em over optimization tool to check the same is highly beneficial
Technical Tools
Google and Bing have their own respective Webmaster tools that can help keep your site optimized and also help check the site’s indexing. Apart from this the tool also provides insight on website traffic patterns, reach, visibility, speed-metrics and authorship statistics.
Moz is considered to be one of the pioneers of SEO and their open site explorer sites will help you understand the various off-page SEO techniques. With Moz open site explorer ou can gauge site’s influence, view subdomain, inbound links to the site, root domain and analyze the link pages.
The tool helps analyze the performance of a webpage. Based on the speed at which the site loads you can quantify and estimate the performance on all devices.
Pingdom Website Speed Tool helps check the time your website takes to load. It provides ample details on average load time and also provides suggestions to help improve the speed.
As the name suggests, the tool helps create a robots.txt file which can be used to instruct the search engine about pages in your site that are allowed to be indexed. Apart from generating the file you can also enter pages that you want the search engine to not crawl without having to do manually.
Ahrefs is a site explorer and backlink checker and is probably one of simplest yet effective tool available. It is well known for its ability to filter backlinks and referring domains. Can be useful in analyzing online strategies to compete with your competitors.
A complete SEO service tool that shows results specifically on link building and domain-based metrics. The free services provided include Site Explorer, Backlink History tool and Keyword checker.
This site will help you create a schema based on which Google and other search engines make sense of content in your HTML. For people new into SEO creating a schema might be difficult to grasp and Schema Creator will turn out to be a huge help for them.
Useful in developing new SEO strategies. This tool shows how search listing will appear in Google and this search list can be downloaded for further analysis.
This is a spidering (crawling) software that will show broken links in your website. It validates text links, images, maps, backgrounds and frames in your website.
Wordpress has become an extremely common platform to submit content online. The Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin goes a long way in taking care of all the technical optimization and helping write better content in terms of SEO.
Tracking SEO Results
Google Analytics offered by Google, is a service that provides detailed statistics about a website’s traffic and its sources. It also keeps track on the conversions and sales. You can look into our article on Google Analytics for more insight into using the tool.
Are there any other free SEO tools you use that you feel should be on this list? Do let us know in the comments below.
Voice of the Brand or Customers?
Social media marketing has brought about a quantum shift in the way marketing is done. It has moved the focus from “The Voice of the Brand” to “The Voice of the Customer”. The balance of power in the purchase funnel is now more skewed towards the customer & his peers, slowly changing the way brands market themselves. Earlier, the entire focus used to be about roping in a brand ambassador and roll out your story. Today, your story is okay but what really matters is the story that’s going on between the millions of bubbles on the social cloud. Add to that, the “bigger bubbles”- the social media influencers, and you are in for a different game altogether.
Word-of-mouth results in 200% sales in comparison to paid advertising
Yes, the above statistic is true, according to a McKinsey study. To delve deeper, they also result in 37% higher retention rate of customers1. Riding this trend of word-of-mouth/recommendation marketing, a form of marketing has gained prominence – Influencer Marketing.
What is Influencer Marketing?
The term “Influencer” in itself can be defined in 10 ways by 10 different people. And, each can be vindicated. A 2014 study by Augure2revealed the following:
For Spidey fans a trivia which says Andrew Garfield admitted to shedding tears the first time he wore the Spiderman costume shooting for The Amazing Spiderman, could be priceless. And for a startup that sells super hero merchandise, this exclusive trivia on their interactive blog could mean serious business. Stories told through videos and blogs are taking the place of advertisements for several startups that are using content to engage with customers.
"Every industry has a story to tell, if they look hard enough. And people continue to love interesting narrative," said Lakshmanan Narayan, founder of Chennai-based Unmetric, a social media intelligence platform whose company has been serving clients like Toyota, American Airlines and Lowe's. Most startups working in the online space find content-based marketing or content marketing as a medium to connect to the customer and prefer it over direct marketing. Without pitching brands directly, content marketing looks at generating relevant content that educates and creates awareness among customers.
"Content marketing allows us to engage the customers better by sharing information that is useful for them," said Rishi Khaithan, cofounder of BuildMyEvent, a Mumbai-based platform, which connects its customers to venues for their events. It also provides platforms for its vendors to connect with the customers via their blog instead of individual marketing.
"Startups don't have the money to compete with the big names," said Vikas Chawla of Social Beat, a Chennai-based digital agency delivering social media marketing and ecommerce consulting. "They have to do things in a different way either around the product or around content. Content marketing helps them to do that."
"People get sick of ads," says Pradeep Rajadas of Sociall.in, a Chennai-based social media marketing company . "Diversity keeps you engaged. So you have to start spinning stories to which customers can connect to and through which you can promote your brand," he added. Sociall has developed and marketed content for city-based real estate companies, focusing on the lifestyle, neighbourhood, appreciation of land and so on. The company has also produced content around "investment opportunities" in technology productivity hacks from tech, ROI from your latest smartphone purchase and so on for a gadget retailer.
This article was originally published in the Economic times
As part of our in-house knowledge sessions we have created a slideshare on the basics of Search Engine Optimisation from the perspective of entrepreneurs. It include insights on creating content for users, site speed, creating good quality links as well as influencer marketing & blogger engagement.
We have also added our insights on how to track the results & ROI of your SEO & Content Marketing efforts.
You may also be interested in reading our earlier blog posts on How not to do Search Engine Optimisation & 10 Free Apps for SEO, Productivity & Social Media.
Social Beat co-founder Suneil Chawla featured in The Times of India coverage on how companies are leveraging the reach of bloggers and influencers for building their brand visibility online. We have also recently launched our new initiative for Influencer Marketing in India which can be seen at www.influencer.in
Riding on the social media wave, #Influencer #Marketing has emerged as the next big thing. We have also recently launched our new initiative for Influencer Marketing in India which can be seen at www.influencer.in. In this context, the Social Beat Influencers’s Meet was held at the Hotel Vestin Park today. The guest list included content marketing experts, bloggers and social media influencers, as follows:
The agenda revolved around content marketing, its evolution and future trends. The key discussion points that came up for discussion are briefly mentioned as follows:
The meet ended on an enthusiastic note with demand for more such events in Chennai. We are equally excited about the next Influencer meet. Watch this space for more updates.
Firstly, thanks for the positive response to our article on top digital marketing courses and top venue booking websites in India. Now, we have come out with the list of top lifestyle bloggers in Chennai, as part of our series ontop bloggers & influencers in India. So, here goes the list, in no specific order:
This blog, aimed at individual travelers, inspires you to cut your strings holding you back and go out exploring. A great array of experiences and cultural perspectives from her travel. The visual aesthetics of the blog is worth mentioning. The lines – “Come wander with me”, aptly describe the essence of the blog.
