How to Discover Your Customers’ Favorite Social Media Platforms

 Every few months, a hot, new social media tool hits the scene — Pinterest, Periscope, Foursquare, Blab — and some marketing experts make it sound like if you’re not using that new platform, you’re missing out.

That notion gives me a massive headache. Like everyone else, I feel pressured to have a presence on every social media platform, but I can’t possibly contribute to every one — at least not without doing a lousy job on all of them.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could simply focus our social media marketing efforts on one or two platforms we know our prospects use to share content and connect with one another?

But how do you know which social media sites to choose?

Smart social media marketing research

If you take a wild guess at your audience’s favorite social media platforms, you may guess incorrectly, resulting in wasted time and missed opportunities.

To avoid mistakes, conduct smart research, figure out which social media sites your audience prefers, and then spend the majority of your social media marketing efforts on those sites.

But that process isn’t as straightforward as you might think. I asked the smartest people I know in the marketing world where they would go to find this information, and I got a lot of different answers. It turns out, there’s no “magic website” you can use to do this research.

Let’s go through this slightly messy process, step by step, so you feel comfortable doing it for your own audience.

Step #1: Conduct interviews with your ideal clients

The best way to find out where your target audience hangs out online is (surprise!) to ask them. The first thing you should do is arrange informal interviews with your favorite clients or customers.

To do this, simply write a short list of questions and reach out to five to ten people from your existing social media following or email list. It’s best to target people you think of as your favorite or ideal clients and customers — active members of your community who you trust to give honest feedback.

Once you’ve got your list, email or call each person and ask if you can chat with them on the phone for 20 minutes and ask them some questions.

During your interviews, ask them about their favorite social platforms, where they typically share content online, and where they typically connect with their friends, family, colleagues, and community members.

Take notes on your conversations — or better yet, record the interviews (with permission, of course).

Step #2: Set up a survey, and use it to gather data from your audience members

Your most reliable information will likely come from client and customer interviews, but unfortunately, interviews don’t scale well.

To collect more data, set up a brief, to-the-point survey and distribute it to your audience. If you first conduct a handful of interviews, you can use the information you gather to craft the survey questions.

Your primary question should be: “Which social networking site (Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, Instagram, etc.) do you use the most?”

You can also include other relevant questions that will help you understand their social media behaviors.

Step #3: Find websites similar to yours

Next up, we’re going to do a little competitive research.

Your job in this step is to brainstorm and put together a list of about five to ten websites that serve the audience you’re trying to reach.

Create an Excel spreadsheet or Google doc to track this information, so you can keep everything organized and in one place.

Think of competitors’ sites or referral partners, and then perform a quick online search to find additional sites. For example, enter “[YOUR TOPIC] + blog” or “[YOUR TOPIC] + podcast” into Google and hit enter. Review the search results to see if your target audience would spend time on those sites.

You can also search on AllTop to find similar sites.

BuzzSumo can be used for competitive research, as well. Enter any topic in the front page search bar, click the “Search!” button, and you’ll see a list of the most-shared posts on that topic, from a variety of websites.

As you discover new sites, add them to your spreadsheet.

Step #4: Find out which social platforms the visitors of those sites use to share content

Our next step is to research the social sharing habits of the people who visit the sites on our list. The question you’re trying to answer here is: “When a typical visitor to [WEBSITE NAME] shares a piece of content from this site, which social networking platforms do they use to share it?”

You can go back to BuzzSumo and perform a slightly different type of search to find this information. On the BuzzSumo home page, look for a blank search field. This time, enter the domain name of the first site on your research list, and click the “Search!” button.

For instance, a results page for PublicWords.com looks like this:

BuzzSumo gives us the top five most-popular posts for that website (from the past year) and then displays social data for that post from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+.

Once you’ve noted the most popular sharing platform for this site, repeat the process for all five to ten blogs on your list. Trends should emerge, and you’ll likely be able to discover readers’ top two favorite social sites.

If you’re looking for even more data, you can also try SimilarWeb.

Step #5: Research your target social platform, and make sure it’s a match for your customers’ preferences and worldviews

At this point, hopefully you’ve narrowed down your potential options to one or two social media sites.

Now it’s time to make sure they’re a good match for your business, marketing goals, and customers’ worldviews. This part of your research is more subjective — it’s essentially a “gut check” test.

During this step, look at:

• The typical demographics of the social site. Many social sites publish demographic information about their users, so you can see a breakdown of the ages and genders of the users.
• The features of the social networking platform. For instance, Instagram and Pinterest are highly visual, so any company that decides to market using these two tools should be prepared to create appealing visual content.
• Your marketing goals. Will this platform help you accomplish your content marketing goals?

Here are some examples of how this might work for content marketers:

• A food blogger decides to focus her social media efforts on Pinterest, because she’s targeting moms who make healthy lunches for their kids. Food is a popular topic on Pinterest, so she can be reasonably certain Pinterest would be a good platform for her to use to reach her target audience.
• A B2B company that sells software as a service (SaaS) has performed research and knows their target audience shares content and connects with colleagues and prospects on LinkedIn, so they decide to try out the platform and see how it performs for them.
• A tattoo artist creates a presence on Instagram because the primarily image-based platform is an ideal place to showcase his portfolio.

The statements above are generalizations, and — as always — your mileage may vary. The most important thing is that you know who you’re trying to reach and perform your own research on the best ways to connect with them.

Spend your social media marketing time and money wisely

When you decide to build a presence on a social networking site, run tests to make sure you’re on the right track.

For example, if you want to give Pinterest a shot, because your research is telling you that’s where your audience hangs out, then throw yourself wholeheartedly into developing a Pinterest following. Give it six to eight months, then review your data to see if you’re getting the results you want (in terms of traffic, subscribers, and conversions).

If a platform isn’t working out for you, don’t be afraid to move it lower on your marketing priority list or drop it completely — no matter what your pre-research says.

You may want to repeat the steps above every six to twelve months, to stay on top of changing trends and remain in touch with your target audience’s behaviors from year to year.

Over to you …

The best way to make social media work for you as a content marketer is to find out where your perfect prospects are and spend time there. Don’t go to the places where they’re not hanging out.

When you conduct your research thoughtfully and make your decisions based on that research, you’ll get far better results.

How do you decide which social media sites to spend time on? Share in the comments below.

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What Is an Email Conversion?

 The success of a business boils down to whether customers buy what you’re selling. In marketing terms: whether they’re converting. And since email marketing programs exist to support the business, email conversions are a critical metric for most programs.

However, in part because email programs have many secondary goals that are unique from the business’s goals, the definition of a conversion has become more than a little hazy, creating misalignments at some brands. To bring some focus to this issue, we asked five experts two simple questions:

WHAT IS A CONVERSION? IS AN EMAIL CONVERSION DIFFERENT FROM CONVERSIONS IN OTHER CHANNELS?

Everyone had a fairly similar definition of a conversion (which we’ve highlighted in their responses below). However, as they expanded on that, things got blurry quickly. Interestingly, everyone agrees that there are a couple of different kinds of conversions—but they don’t agree on what those two kinds are or what to call them. The possibilities include:

micro-conversions and macro-conversions
email conversions and website conversions
direct conversions and indirect conversions
conversions and conversions to sale

Our experts make great points about why each of these distinctions is important.

ALEX BIRKETT, GROWTH MARKETER AT CONVERSIONXL, SAYS:

A conversion can be many things—it’s simply “the completion of a desired action.” That said, there are two general types of conversions: micro-conversions (opens, CTR) and macro-conversions (end-goal conversions like sales and signups). In general, I think many marketers are optimizing for the wrong type of conversions (micro-conversions) because it’s easier and you can see bigger uplifts.

So for example, if you send a bunch of people an email promising them free beer and pizza, you’ll probably get a sky high open rate and quite a lot of clicks. But then when they hit your landing page and find out you only sell socks, be prepared for a massive bounce rate—and lots of burned trust resulting in an eroded brand reputation. That’s why landing page optimization is such a large part of email marketing—if you maintain message match and keep the conversion scent through the funnel, the results are generally better at every stage.

Don’t get me wrong, measure micro-conversions. They can provide tons of insights. But play the long game and optimize for the macro-conversions. In other words, keep your eye on the sales, not the clicks.

STEVE LINNEY, FOUNDER OF EMRKTNG, SAYS:

A conversion is simply an action taking place on your landing page—or any other area of your website—that triggers an outcome you want to track. You define what the conversion is you are looking to measure, such as a new subscriber or a purchase.

For me, conversions don’t take place within the email, but on the website. However, website conversion rate is only one part of the story and you need to make sure that all parts of your email marketing funnel are rocking:

• Targeting your audience | measurement: send number
• Subject line | measurement: open rate
• Quality of message and offering | measurement: click-through rate
• Potential customers on your website | measurement: visitor numbers
• Visitors don’t like what they see and leave | measurement: bounce rate
• Visitors do what you want them to | measurement: conversion rate

A/B testing, refining, and tweaking should be always be happening to ensure you have the best user experience and offering you can possibly give. Keep in mind that testing is never ending as there is always something you can improve to ensure you give the customer the experience they are looking for and you stay ahead of the competition.

ERIN KING, SR. EMAIL MARKETING MANAGER AT LITMUS, SAYS:

Marketers often wrestle with determining the value of conversions if they’re not tied to sales, which can lead to the thinking that if a campaign isn’t making money directly and immediately, it’s a failure. The thing about conversions, for any channel, is that they don’t always have to happen immediately, and they don’t always have to follow a straight line.

Basically, an email conversion can be defined as when a subscriber takes the path you point them toward in your message. For example, if your email promotes an event, a click through to the registration page is progress, but a completed registration is a conversion. If you’re sending a monthly newsletter with links to your blog content, the conversion can be measured by how many of the featured posts are read, or how long your subscribers spend on the blog post-click.

Some emails lend themselves to direct conversions (I promote a product, you buy it). But there’s also value in “indirect” conversions, where your email inspires some other interaction with your site or product.

For example, say I send an email promoting a report download. My subscriber opens the email—and then does nothing. But my email reminds them that there’s other content on my blog that they want to check out. Later on, they visit and read some posts, see a promotion for a weekly email they’re interested in, and decide to sign up for it. Is this conversion the one that the original email intended? No, but the email was still the catalyst that started the subscriber down the path to signing up for a new email list, so it’s an indirect conversion.

APRIL MULLEN, SR. MARKETING STRATEGIST AT SELLIGENT, SAYS:

Very simply, an email conversion is when a desired action takes place as a result of a customer receiving an email from your brand. Many marketers, though, consider an email conversion taking place when email is attributed as the source after a customer makes a purchase or some other action such as registering for a webinar or signing up for a contest. That view is fairly myopic, though. Email is so much more than the final conversion event. It has a critical hand in the revenue-driving process by moving your customers down the funnel toward the website through a series of micro-conversions.

What’s a micro-conversion, you ask? They are all the smaller, desired actions that your customers go through to reach the end goal you had in mind for the campaign. Everything from delivered, opened, clicked, etc. should be considered as conversion events or micro-conversions that all have a hand in a campaign’s success.

In fact, if we really consider where the sale/registration/contest entry takes place, which is on a website, then email’s ultimate conversion event is really a click that passes a customer on to the website. I believe email’s ultimate goal is to sell a click because email isn’t actually the place where the final conversion event takes place (that is, unless you are one of those exceptionally innovative brands that has figured out a good experience to sell right from email without driving customers to your website).

The next time you see an email campaign that has incredible click-throughs, but low conversions, don’t blame email. Unless it over-promised something that the website couldn’t deliver, the email did its job.

JOHN CALDWELL, PRESIDENT OF RED PILL EMAIL, SAYS:

Broadly speaking, conversion means any desired, measurable action taken by prospects and/or customers, irrespective of channel. That was the definition of conversion in pre-internet direct marketing. It’s the broad definition of conversion in email, as well.

A conversion doesn’t always involve money changing hands. A conversion can be filling out a form or downloading a report. This is especially true with high-consideration, high-ticket, long-sales-cycle purchases, such as the business-to-business prospecting that marketing-services providers typically engage in. However, for some organizations, conversion always means a sale. Those are called conversions to sale.

Whether or not conversions involve immediate sales, it is important to measure the value of those conversions on a rolling monthly and quarterly basis. Measure the number of sales that result from the period’s conversions and divide the number of sales by the number of conversions to get the conversion-to-sale percentage.

But remember, any of these desired actions cannot be considered conversions unless they’re a result of some action taken by the organization. You want to be able to accurately gauge your marketing efforts without artificially inflating them with serendipitous leads and sales.

THE RISK OF CONVERSION INFLATION

Our experts make great points and the distinctions they make are valuable ones. But at the same time, it’s easy to see how confusion can arise and conversion inflation can occur.

The risk is that email marketing programs become out of alignment with business goals and objectives so that you may have a “successful” email program that doesn’t contribute to the success of the business. While the conversions associated with a campaign or email can vary from top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel, the conversions that business leaders talk about and care about exist primarily at the bottom of the funnel.

The easiest way to avoid fuzzy metrics, definition creep, and false equivalencies is to keep track of campaign goals and metrics, but then also translate those results so they match up with the business’s goals and metrics. Keeping your email-centric metrics separate and distinct from your business-centric metrics will ensure that your email marketing will be a success in the eyes of your business’s leaders.

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Build Your Online Influence with Guest Blogs

GUEST blogs are a great way to promote content and reach new online users.

So, what is guest blogging?

Well, it’s as simple as writing a post for someone else’s blog, or hosting a piece someone else has written. Whether you are the article writer or the host site, guest blogs can be mutually beneficial for both sides.

By participating in a guest post you can target a diverse new audience, expand your reader base, increase your lead generation potential and build backlinks to your own site.

Whether you were invited to write a guest article, or are planning to host one there are some things you should know that will really make guest posts work for you.

Do your research

We all know that reputation is important. Not only in life, but also with blog swaps, and the company you keep… aka the site you’re contributing to.

When considering a guest post, whether you’re the writer or the host, make sure you do your research. Your name is at stake here just as much as theirs.

Take some time and review the content available on the blog you’ll be featured on, or by the blogger you’ll be showcasing. Make sure you’re in good company, so the end result is worthwhile.

For Writers

• Does the site/blog you’ll be featured on have a good reputation?
• Are the posts current?
• Do the articles have functional links?
• Does the blog feature author profiles?
• Are the posts relevant to your niche? (more on that in the next section)
• Does the blog have solid engagement?

Getting published in a low-quality blog or one which barely has any traffic can at best, waste your time and at worst, tarnish your reputation, so beware.

For Hosts

• Does the blogger have a good reputation?
• Are their example posts recent?
• Do their posted articles have functional links?
• Is their author profile professional?
• Are their posts content heavy and well written?
• Is their writing engaging?

Even if the guest post being offered is free, if a writer is not a good fit, don’t be afraid to decline. Publishing a poor quality article or one that flops, again, would be a waste your time and may even alienate readers.

Focus on quality

Once you’ve established that the guest post situation is worthwhile, turn your focus to the quality of the article itself.

For Writers

This is a great opportunity to get your name out there, so you want to capitalize accordingly.

The best way to stand out?

You guessed it: quality.

From presentation to content, quality is super important.

Ask to see the blog’s style guide, learn about their process and make sure you stay on-point.

Before you submit a draft for review, make sure the post is well-researched, has functional links, appropriate citations, great looking images and effective copy.

And don’t forget to proofread. I know it probably sounds obvious, but proofing is extremely important.

Need some help in that department? Click here for a great proofing checklist.

All-in-all, showcasing yourself as a respectable and reliable source of information will really help your post shine when published for a new audience.

P.S. Being easy to work with is a great and easy way to get another opportunity.

For Hosts

The best way to get quality results once you’ve screened a writer? Have clear expectations and instructions.

If you curate a blog, a style guide is a great thing to have. Not really sure where to start? Check out this great reference guide from HubSpot.

Not quite ready to delve into a full style guide? Be sure you least have a set of guidelines to share:

• What is the deadline?
• What is the minimum/maximum number of words?
• What tone, or voice is best for your audience?
• Do you have a competitors list?
• Are there any specific formatting requirements?

Whether you’re a host or a writer, top-quality guest blogs are a great way to build rapport with other bloggers. Which may lead to more guest posts, more followers, more recognition, more guest posts… and even more guest posts…

Plus, creating or featuring an article with relevant content will also increase your chances of growing within your niche. Which leads us to our next topic:

Stick to your niche

For writers and hosts alike, your niche is hugely important. It has a direct influence on your ability to generate traffic.

Think about it this way, you want to guest post an article to promote your content. Then, you’re given the opportunity to do so, but the blog has nothing to do with your topic of choice.

It could be a great opportunity, right?

Well, ask yourself one thing: “Who are you going to reach?”

Say you’re an email marketing blogger. Getting visitors who are interested in fashion won’t help with building your following or obtaining new leads. At the end of the day, they aren’t interested in what you do, despite your article potentially being an absolute hit.

This is why staying true to your niche is crucial to your success. Connect with readers who are genuinely interested in the topic that you are passionate about and you’ll no doubt develop a solid following.

Be sure to include a couple of backlinks to relevant posts you’ve done in the past. Readers are more likely to discover the other content you’ve created within your niche this way.

As an added benefit you’ll continue to build loyalty and credibility within your niche market.

Start making a name for yourself where it counts, and maintain your focus there. Through quality content and niche-targeting, you will gain the respect you deserve as an influencer within your field.

Expert Tip: Use ClickPerfect to add tracking to backlinks and see which blogs are the most popular. From there, you can develop ideas for new posts!

Maintain your style

This one is more for blog writers, but hosts take note as well:

When an opportunity arises to participate in a guest blog, you may come across specific requirements in terms of topic, article length, focus, and more. Those requirements are certainly important to adhere to, but keeping your unique style is essential to your overall success. Even though you’re a guest, it doesn’t mean you have to change your style.

If you want to get people interested in what you do, you have to show them who you are and what you have to offer. The best way to achieve this?

Write a genuine post that is up to your own personal standards.

Being consistent allows you to build a strong reputation and gain respect from your online audience, as they’ll know what to expect from you and know you are a person they want to follow.

Expert Tip: Most blogs have an author box which gives guest writers the ability to introduce themselves accordingly. Take advantage of this, and use it as another opportunity to convey your style! Always present guest posts with a short author bio, a professional portrait image and social sharing links.

Focus on social promotion

Speaking of social sharing, guest blogs are a great way to extend your reach to social media users you haven’t connected with before.

When participating in a guest blog, use your social media influence to promote the article.

Create some amazing social media graphics with Social Studio FX and start sharing. Share on all of your social media platforms, whether you use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or even Medium.

Tag the host/writer you worked with and ask that they do the same. If they do, take advantage of it and connect with as many new users outside of your circle as you possibly can!

Publicly thank the blog host or writer, reply to comments on their posts, and interact genuinely with anyone who shares feedback.

This will in turn, increase your social media influence and therefore generate more traffic for you.

Final Thoughts

Guest posts can be a great way to enhance traffic, develop new relationships and ultimately, expand your online influence.

If you participate in guest blogs with quality, niche-specific content that fits your style, there’s no reason why you wouldn’t see great results.

If you take it one step further and capitalize on the social media component, well, the sky’s the limit!

Speaking of social media, please take a moment to like, share and comment below!

Have you ever written a guest blog? Or hosted one?

What benefits did you see in terms of traffic, lead generation or social media following?

We’d love to hear from you!

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