С чего начинать продвижение бизнеса в поисковых системах

Здравствуйте!

Полгода назад мы открыли собственное социологическое агентство. И так получилось, что начали мы сразу с проведения исследования (то есть, сразу начали работать), а не с создания сайта и продвижения через социальные сети, как это обычно бывает во многих проектах, с целью нахождения заказчика.

Теперь стал вопрос о создании сайта и его дальнейшей судьбе. И если само создание сайта — вещь не сильно мудреная, то вот его продвижение — задача умов действительно сильных.

И тут возникает вопрос: а что главное в продвижении сегодня? Действительно интересный контент на страницах или просто отдать определённую сумму денег человеку, который уверяет, что сайт будет находиться в топе Google и «Яндекса»? Или можно без лишних растрат заняться этим самому?

Что делать?

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Отвечают эксперты в SEO — Никита Саввиных и Антон Воробьёв.

Никита СаввиныхSEO-специалист, основатель Sawinyh.ru и «ТелекомКонсалтинг»

В первую очередь вам нужно определится с тем, что вы хотите получить в итоге. Трафик на сайт? Позиции в поисковой выдаче? Лиды? Продажи? Причем эти вопросы неплохо было бы задать себе уже на стадии создания сайта, а не когда сайт уже готов и вы раздумываете, как дальше его продвигать. 

Работы по продвижению следует начинать еще до создания сайта. Именно в результате четко поставленной цели перед сайтом, грамотного исследования тематики и подобранных ключевых слов, будет спроектирован эффективный сайт.

Слабо верится в то, что можно просто заплатить X рублей и забыть про SEO в ожидании обещанных результатов. На улице уже 2015 год, и волшебных кнопок в SEO, которые легко приводят к вам трафик на сайт, нет. Требуется постоянная комплексная работа с вовлечением как SEO-специалиста, так и владельца бизнеса.

Заняться продвижением самостоятельно возможно, но без лишних затрат — вряд ли. В первую очередь вы платите собственным временем, которого уйдет достаточно много, чтобы изучить основы интернет-маркетинга, SEO, процесса создания сайтов и множества технических тонкостей (если проходить курсы, то это еще и деньги). Затем вы платите деньгами, которые вы потратите, делая ошибки. И только потом вы получите опыт, который и можно применять для самостоятельного продвижения. Но это может занять пару лет.

Действительно интересный и качественный контент, регулярно публикуемый как на страницах вашего сайта, так и на других тематических сайтах с обратными ссылками, это то, что в вашей сфере должно сработать отлично.

Что важно в SEO сейчас:

1. Качественный дизайн, который помогает пользователю найти и получить на вашем сайте нужную информацию.

2. Интересный, актуальный, регулярно обновляющийся текстовый контент, который вряд ли может появиться сам по себе, если вы хотите получить качественный контент, писать придется самостоятельно.

3. Хорошая внутренняя оптимизация на сайте, которая не обходится без SEO-специалистов и грамотных разработчиков сайта.

4. И еще миллион мелочей, из которых складываются позиции и трафик на сайт из поисковых систем. Я просто оставлю это здесь: микроразметка, сниппеты, перелинковка, верстка под мобильные устройства, и много всего еще.

Антон Воробьевглавный аналитик сервиса WebEffector

Увы, какую-то сумму все равно придется потратить — рано или поздно. Но в ваших силах оптимизировать и затраты, и моральные силы, и временные ресурсы. Если вы не хотите переплачивать за комиссию агентства или доверять проект незнакомому SEO-шнику, что понятно, придется немножко разобраться в основах. Ну а достичь конкретных целей поможет куча современных разработок и сервисов.

Первым делом сформулируйте цель продвижения сайта. Ресурс должны видеть в выдаче поисковых систем, на него должны заходить люди. Важный момент — придя на сайт, они не должны в нем разочароваться и сразу покинуть. Обе поисковые системы в один голос твердят, что сегодня они ценят качество контента. А значит, это первое, чем стоит обеспокоиться. «Начинка» сайта должна быть вкусной и, главное, полезной. Какая информация заставит людей задержаться на вашем сайте, походить по разделам, почитать блог? Какие дополнительные возможности найдут посетители на вашем сайте? Чтобы понимать, как структурировать контент, подумайте о запросах потенциальных клиентов — тех, что они вводят в поисковую строку, когда ищут. Если вы немножко посидите и подумаете, вы уже получите семантическое ядро — список ключевых слов, на которые и нужно опираться в подаче информации на сайте.

Первое, что приходит в голову мне — вас ищут компании, целью которых провести разведку на рынке для принятия каких либо решений. Какими запросами они пользуются? «Маркетинговые исследования», «заказать фокус группу», «организация соцопросов» и так далее. Попробуйте ответить на их запрос честно, без воды, по сути, с интересными кейсами. В идеале на сайте должны быть даны развернутые ответы на все вопросы, которые задают ваши потенциальные клиенты. 

Стройте информацию на страницах вокруг запроса. Обязательно заведите раздел «Блог» и публикуйте в нем хотя бы общие выводы по уже готовым исследованиям, рассказывайте красочно о своих методах работы, познакомьте со штатом, напишите об одном дне анкетера или модератора фокус-группы. К счастью, ваша сфера дает возможность уйти от сухой информации и развернуться в сторону творчества, за которым интересно следить. Публикуйте только уникальные материалы и регулярно.

Казалось бы, какое отношение это имеет к позициям сайта в выдаче? Прямое. Поисковики учитывают поведение посетителей ресурсов в своей формуле ранжирования — так называемые «поведенческие факторы». Считается все: вход на сайт, время пребывания, просмотр страниц, «клики» на предлагаемые ссылки, возвращение на сайт и так далее. «Крутые» показатели — явный сигнал для «Яндекса» и Google, что ваш сайт нравится людям, он достоин ранжироваться выше.

Но не стоит забывать и о технических вопросах оптимизации. Существует множество нюансов, способных лишить вас трафика на долгое время, и ими пренебрегать не стоит. После создания сайта рекомендую провести хотя бы технический аудит. Не буду рассказывать о том, что такое robots.txt и редиректы, как заполнять теги и мета-теги. Если у вас есть желание заняться этим самостоятельно, то найти информацию на просторах интернета довольного легко. Если не хотите вникать, закажите у SEO-конторы аудит с последующим исправлением ошибок вебмастером.

Поскольку ваш ресурс очень молод, рекомендую заказать 40-50 вечных ссылок в течение трех месяцев. Эти услуги предоставляют многие биржи. Насчет искусственного улучшения поведенческих факторов — будьте аккуратны. Заказывайте переходы с выдачи на ваш сайт только у живых исполнителей. По нашим данным, этот метод отлично выстреливает по среднечастотным конкурентным запросам.

Жизненный цикл стартапа: от ИДЕИ до IPO

ЧТО ТАКОЕ "ИКИГАЙ" И КАК ЕГО НАЙТИ

Притча

"Однажды в маленьком японском городке умирала женщина. В какой-то момент она почувствовала, что ее душа покидает тело, возносится вверх и предстает перед духами предков.

Громкий голос спросил ее: «Кто ты?»
«Я жена мэра» — ответила она.
«Я не спрашиваю, кто твой муж. Ответь мне, кто ты?»
«Я мать четверых детей. Я учительница в школе».
«Разве я спросил, сколько у тебя детей или где ты работаешь?»

И так продолжалось до тех пор, пока она не сказала: «Я та, кто просыпается каждый день для того, чтобы помогать своей семье и учить детей в школе». После этого она вернулась в свое тело и болезнь отступила. Она нашла свой икигай."

Икигай

Японское понятие "икигай" довольно сложно однозначно перевести на русский язык, но примерно можно расшифровать как «то, что придает жизни смысл, то, что заставляет нас просыпаться каждое утро с радостью». Другими словами, икигай — это по-восточному изящное и компактное определение вашего главного интереса, того дела, которое приносит радость в вашу жизнь.

Хотя японцы острова Окинава сумели сделать это понятие частью своей философии, нельзя сказать, что икигай совершенно не известен на западе. Мы не раз встречали его последователей, особенно среди тех людей, которые сумели добиться в своей жизни многого:

"Мы едва могли ждать утра, чтобы снова приступить к работе." — Уилбур Райт, изобретатель самолета

"Делайте только то, что вы любите больше всего. Это обязательно приведет вас к успеху! Каждое утро я смотрел на себя в зеркало и спрашивал: Если бы сегодня был последний день моей жизни, хотел бы я заниматься тем, чем я занимаюсь сегодня? И если ответ в течение многих дней подряд был «нет», то мне нужно что-то менять." — Стив Джобс, руководитель Apple

Именно интерес к жизни, желание немедленно приступить к своему делу и выполнить его самым лучшим образом дает людям ощущение собственной значимости, чувство удовлетворенности и смысл жизни. Тем людям, которые знают свой икигай, незнакомы депрессии, они сохраняют оптимистическое отношение к жизни и не подвержены деструктивным привычкам. Поэтому для каждого человека, который хочет прожить долгую и осмысленную жизнь, так важно найти для себя причину вставать по утрам.

Как найти свой икигай?

Открытие своего главного дела потребует от вас, возможно, значительного вложения времени и энергии. Вам придется принять осмысленное и важное решение, и очень жаль, что многие люди понимают его необходимость слишком поздно. Чем раньше вы начнете поиск своего икигай, тем скорее вы начнете ощущать спокойствие и удовлетворение от своей жизни. Вот некоторые вопросы, ответы на которые помогут вам в поисках:

- Достижения. Какие достижения в своей жизни вы считаете самыми ценными? Возьмите лист бумаги и запишите 2-3 своих дела, которыми вы действительно гордитесь. Это может послужить хорошей отправной точкой для поиска своего икигай.

- Знания. В чем ваши состоят ваши особые знания и навыки? В чем вы считаете себя специалистом? О чем вы с удовольствием рассказываете, на какую тему читаете литературу? Какие сайты посещаете чаще всего в свободное время?

- Ощущения. Работа в той области, в которой вы разбираетесь, является залогом карьерного успеха. Но если вы хотите обрести счастье, то надо заниматься тем, что любишь. Ваш икигай не слишком волнуют ваши деловые успехи, если они не подкреплены радостью в сердце. Именно на это надо обратить внимание в первую очередь.

- Самооценка. Кем вы видите себя в своих мечтах? Вы учитель, юрист, мать, ученый, книгоиздатель, фермер? Возможно, именно ваша оценка своего будущего может стать той линзой, которая поможет сфокусировать все ваши усилия.

- Личность. На свете нет одинаковых людей, и разным личностям подходят совершенно разные виды работ. Зная свой тип личности, вы поймете, почему некоторые занятия приносят вам огромное удовольствие, а другие не трогают ни единой струны вашей души.

Можно воспользоваться для поиска икигай и специальной картой, которая показывает, что ваше главное дело расположено на пересечении того, что вам больше всего хочется и того, что лучше получается.

Финальное напутствие

"Ты должен найти то, что любишь. И найти свою любимую работу так же необходимо, как и своего любимого человека. Работа будет занимать очень большую часть твоей жизни и единственный способ получать настоящее удовлетворение от работы — это делать ее превосходно, осознавая это. А единственный способ делать свою работу превосходно — это любить ее. Если ты еще не нашел свое любимое дело, продолжай искать. Не прекращай поиски, пока не найдешь. Как и во всем остальном, к чему лежит сердце, ты сразу поймешь, что нашел то, что искал. И как в любых прекрасных взаимоотношениях, твоя увлеченность работой будет со временем только увеличиваться. Так что, ищи и не успокаивайся, пока не найдешь." — Стив Джобс

What Top Sales Teams Have in Common, in 5 Charts

• Steve W. Martin

JANUARY 20, 2015

What separates high-performing sales organizations from average and underperforming sales organizations? In order to answer this question, I recently conducted an extensive 42-part survey with 786 sales professionals. Participants were asked to share their opinions on their sales organization and personal details about their own quota performance.

Twenty-two percent of survey participants included top-level sales leaders such as vice presidents of sales, 14% were front-line sales managers who manage salespeople, 17% were hybrid sales managers who sell directly to customers and manage other salespeople, and 47% were salespeople who carry their own quotas.

Study participants were asked to compare their company’s year-over-year revenue growth for the past two years and indicate whether annual revenues increased significantly, increased slightly, remained about the same, or declined. Responses were then analyzed by company name, annual revenue, number of employees, and industry type to ensure data accuracy. Thirty percent of participants indicated they had a high level of revenue growth, 44% had slight revenue growth, and 26% had revenues which were about the same or had declined. The survey responses were then grouped into high-performing, average, and underperforming categories according to these revenue classifications.

The study results reveal there are 15 significant differences between how high-performing, average, and underperforming sales organizations perceive themselves, measure performance, staff their organizations, and operate. Below are five of these key attributes and performance-related metrics that illustrate these differences and the gap between optimum and sub-par sales organization performance.

1. High-performing sales organizations rated the quality of their sales organization higher than average and underperforming organizations.

Twice as many salespeople and sales leaders at high-performing sales organizations rated their organization as excellent as compared to average and underperforming respondents. In addition, 76% of high-performing team members rated their organization as excellent or above average compared to 51% of average and 49% of underperforming team members. Only 1% of high-performing team members rated their sales organization as below average compared to 10% of average and 8% of underperforming team members.

2. High-performing sales organizations employ a more structured sales process.

Fifty percent of study participants from high-performing sales organizations responded they had sales processes that were closely monitored, strictly enforced or automated compared to just 28% from underperforming sales organizations. Forty-eight percent of the participants from underperforming sales organizations indicated they had nonexistent or informal structured sales processes compared to only 29% from high performing sales organizations.

3. High-performing sales organizations hold their team members to a higher level of accountability.

Study participants were asked whether or not they agree with the statement that their salespeople are consistently measured against their quotas and held accountable for their results. Twenty-nine percent of high-performing sales team members strongly agreed with that statement while only 13% of underperforming sales team members did.

4. High-performing sales organizations are not afraid to aggressively raise year-over-year annual quotas.

Seventy-five percent of high-performing sales organizations raised 2014 annual quotas more than 10% over 2013 quotas compared to 25% for average and 17% for underperforming sales organizations. Annual quotas remained the same or decreased for 65% of underperforming sales organizations, 48% of average sales organizations, and only 14% of high-performing sales organizations.

5. High-performing sales organizations are quicker to terminate underperforming salespeople.

Eighteen percent of high-performing sales organizations indicated that salespeople will be terminated for poor performance after one quarter compared to only 2% of average and 5% of underperforming organizations. Seventy-eight percent of high-performing sales organizations indicated that a poor performer will be terminated within a year compared to 63% of average and 52% of underperforming sales organizations. Nine or more quarters are required to terminate an underperforming salesperson according to 12% of underperforming and 9% of average sales organizations while no high-performing sales organizations indicated it should take that long.

The results from this study quantify what many sales leaders have intuitively known for years. The best sales organizations have strong leaders who exercise control, monitor team performance, and establish internal processes that all team members must abide by. They hire talent of such high quality that it challenges the more tenured sales team members to continually perform at the highest level. In addition, weaker sales team members who cannot contribute their revenue share are quickly removed. While the company’s goal may be to go public or reach certain revenue milestones, the greatest sales organizations are on a never-ending mission to prove to the world that they are the best.

Customer Experience Improvement is a Team Sport

A company is a team, funded by customers. A company is expected by customers to operate as "one". Nobody likes to hear evidence that the company is not a real team: "That's handled by X" or "We don't have access to Y". And even worse, recurrence of an issue that customers have already voiced is evidence of disrespect of their precious time and funding.

This is why cross-functional collaboration in acting on voice-of-the-customer (VoC) is paramount to achieving customer experience ROI (CX ROI). Company-wide employee engagement in customer experience improvement is an absolute must!

Employee Engagement Urgency
Should you wait to improve customer experience (CX) cross-functionally? No! Your initial pilot of anything you start off with in managing CX should include employee engagement. Otherwise, it will be a long time before you can claim sustainable business results from CX management. Widespread and early employee engagement in systematic CX improvement has these advantages:

• Build goodwill with customers, especially those who have graciously provided feedback to you.
• Fast-track cost reductions as you minimize wasted time, resources, and energy in things that irk customers.
• Build employee morale as your company's alignment with customers becomes more apparent.
• Reap ROI from investments in VoC, CRM, customer care, etc.

Systematic CX improvement efforts are essential to achieving CX excellence that customers reward. A good analogy is the desire to look great in your swimming suit: you can collect data about how others view you now, you can advertise how you want to be perceived, and you can follow-up with individuals who give you feedback — but ultimately, you'll have to do the actual work required to look great in your swimming suit. A pill or a quick diet or occasional gym visit won't do the trick. It will take concerted effort to monitor the positives and negatives in your eating and exercising if you really want to reach your goal. The same principles hold true for CX!

Success Factors
In our 4-year study of CX practices, companies that presented VoC to all employees and expected action by owners of CX key drivers tended to have stronger business results tied to CX efforts. Yet, less than half of companies are making these practices an essential part of their CX strategy.

Advantages abound for sharing VoC with everyone, and expecting every department to manage their respective ripple effect on CX. These practices are among the best ways to instill customer-centric culture, create shared vision for CX, reduce costs, and stimulate innovation that creates mutual value for the company and customers.

Look for patterns across all of your customer intelligence, and prioritize CX improvement areas by customer lifetime value. These practices have strong motivational value.

Systemic Customer Experience Improvement
Most customer surveys have closed-loop case management, where an action alert is generated when a respondent voices a concern or complaint, and managers are committed to following up with the respondent within a specific time period. This practice has been common in satisfaction and experience surveys since the early 1990s. As surveys are a representative sample of the buying population, it's important to think of these action alerts as early warning signals. It's necessary to look for the patterns among these signals and address them systemically so that your entire buying population is spared of repeated concerns.

"Systemic" means "affecting the entire organism or body". This is a critical principle for CX excellence, as we noted: customers think of a company as "one". Think of those pharmaceutical ads with extensive disclosures of the potential downsides of the product. If we were fully honest about the realities of the customer experience, ads for any product might include something like: "Get yours now for $9.99 … Side effects may include extensive waiting time for delivery, incomplete usage instructions, unexpected urgency to contact customer service, confusing billing paperwork, information in disparate systems, …". You get the picture.

Customer experience is more than a product. And more than an interaction. Customer experience is "all interactions people have with or about a solution: messages, people, processes, policies, prices, products, and services." And everyone in the company has a hand in how well these CX components play out for customers.

Cross-Functional Teams Improve Customer Experience
When I led CX improvement at Applied Materials, company-wide employee engagement was key to our CX strategy from the beginning. We provided each account team, business unit, and functional area with their cut of the customer survey results, to minimize finger-pointing and maximize ownership of customer feedback. We reviewed the company-wide survey results to show the context of the organization's situation, and spent time with a cross-functional team in each organization discussing the interpretation of the feedback. Our mantra was "Good news is no news, no news is bad news, bad news is good news."

The cross-functional teams read through customer verbatim comments related to the biggest bad-news topics. Then they worked together to ask "why" five times, in order to identify the root causes of what customers were experiencing. The teams then created action items to address each root cause. And they identified a metric that would track the progress of action item execution.

We treated this metric as a leading indicator of future customer feedback. If we had correctly identified the root causes, and if we successfully eradicated or minimized the root issues, we could expect future customer perceptions to improve — and future buying behavior and recommendations to increase accordingly.

Our CX governance team oversaw all the plans so that synergies could be developed among teams with similar goals. This was very important for systems thinking and nurturing cross-organizational collaboration.

Accountability was emphasized by publishing teams' action plan progress company-wide for quarterly review side-by-side with our financials, as part of executives' preparation for industry analyst calls. Motivation was accentuated by placing significant weighting on action plan metrics in the executive incentive plan, and by providing widespread visibility to achievements through a self-reporting team recognition program.

CX ROI
Our 4-year study of CX practices revealed strong emphases on VoC and customer engagement — and relatively weak "middleware": systemic customer experience improvement and innovation. We call it middleware, because VoC informs CX improvement and innovation, and customer engagement is earned by CX improvement and innovation. ROI on VoC and customer engagement is dependent upon the middleware.

The CX ROI building-blocks model shows this as a left-right flow of CX activities in tandem. All of the building-blocks are needed simultaneously in order to maximize CX excellence and ROI.

Stepping stones within the Improvement of Customer Experience building-block include:

• Engage everyone in VoC actions: present VoC comments to everyone and expect everyone's action on key drivers.
• Resolve & prevent customer pain systematically: use root cause analysis, formal complaint management, quality tools, organizational learning, and systematic prevention and communication.
• Enable customer-focused daily work: empower employees by helping them use CX excellence criteria in their decision-making.

Dozens of tools are available to help deploy these stepping stones. Most are quality tools that are learned through six sigma and lean training. They include Pareto chart, force-field analysis, activity network diagrams, and so forth.

Make continual improvement of CX a way of life in your company. As customers' pressures and interests evolve, your company needs to readily adapt — and ideally, anticipate and prevent issues from occurring in the first place. The cost savings are likely to be quite significant, and the unity across your company may propel productivity. Systemic CX improvement is the key ingredient in the recipe for building trust, which organically encourages customers to be raving fans of your company.

This article is 7th in a 10-part series providing glimpses into the ClearCX^TM customer experience maturity assessment.

1. Customer Experience Maturity Roadmap
2. Customer Experience Strategy is Uncommon
3. Customer-Centricity is Controversial
4. Comments are Customer Experience Gold
5. Customer Experience Intelligence Inspires Innovation
6. Customer Lifetime Value Prioritizes Customer Experience Management
7. Customer Experience Improvement is a Team Sport
8. Customer Experience Innovation Creates Mutual Value
9. Employee Engagement: Living Your Brand Promise
10. Customer Engagement is the Capstone of Customer Experience Management

Increase Your Small Business Blog Engagement by 288%

January 21, 2015 - Posted: Luke Jordan

Running a small business can be tough, particularly online.

How many times have you been preached to that your business needs to blog in order to survive – and thrive – within Google’s search engines?

If you’ve taken this advice on board and tried blogging for your website, or even hired people (whether part-time, permanent, freelance, outsourced or otherwise) to do your copywriting, you’re missing out on something HUGE.

You may have had a dig around in Google Analytics, or any other analytical software you may use for tracking how many visitors land on your website, and been surprised at how many visitors your blog receives – or how many it doesn’t receive, rather.

Increase blog engagement by 288% with Comment Collection. Find out how…

CLICK TO TWEET

Let’s say you’re really proud of a blog post you’ve written for your website. How many views has it had? How many social shares has it had? If it’s a lot, then I’m genuinely impressed.

However, the reality is that the majority of a website’s blog posts – particularly for small businesses – will go virtually unnoticed.

This is because, despite people preaching about creating great content, writing blog posts is only a small piece of a rather large jigsaw puzzle.

 

How to Get More Views on Your Small Business Blog

I’ve come up with a simple technique that I’ve dubbed Comment Collection, which will increase the views, comments, social shares and links back to your blog articles with just minimal effort.

In fact, using this technique has led to my brand new website receiving a comment for one in every 50 visitors. This is a great figure, although the average is brought down by me responding to each comment I receive.

Better than this, I’m averaging a social share for one in every 5 visitors.

That’s right – one in 5 readers of my blog posts shares, likes, +1s, stumbles or whatevers them on social media.

This is on a brand new website that I started just six weeks ago with zero social following and zero link opportunities to start with. In other words, I started from a completely blank canvas.

I’m about to talk you through the Comment Collection technique, something that has given my website the following statistics:

• Increased Avg. Time on Page figure by 288.55% on first article I trialled it on
• Bounce rate dropped by 15.65% on the same post
• Overall Avg. Time on Site figure increased by 92.55%
• Overall website bounce rate dropped by 5.34%

Increased engagement, social shares, links, returning visitors and more will all lead to increased search engine rankings in the future.

Not only have my web metrics improved, I’ve also increased my email subscriber base and met some great new contacts along the way.

How much time have I invested in using this technique so far? Just a few hours. Seriously.

However, I’m going to invest a significant amount more time to keep my small website community growing – and these impressive figures improving further – using Comment Collection.

The best thing yet? Anyone can do it. Including you.

 

How Comment Collection Works

This is going to so sound so simple. That’s because it is.

Interestingly, you’ll probably find yourself asking “how didn’t I think of this?” or “how didn’t anyone come up with this sooner?”

My honest answer – I don’t know!

This process is so easy and gives great results.

Step 1

Firstly, you’re going to need to create a great piece of content. I’m sure you’ve heard all about the need to create amazing content over the past couple of years, so I’m not going to bore you by going into more detail about that.

Let’s say your business is something to do with cars. You therefore create an amazing blog piece about cars – all easy so far – something that will intrigue, interest, amuse or invoke emotion from a wide range of people.

Once the piece of great content is finished and live, you can move onto the first stage; finding engaged content. In fact, this process only has three main stages:

• Find engaged content
• Find engaged people
• Re-engage people

Using Google, or a handy tool I use called BuzzSumo, you should be able to search for “best cars blog” or anything similar – the closer to the content you’ve produced the better.

I recently wrote about my blogging resolutions, so I searched for “blogging resolutions” from the past fortnight to see what other bloggers were saying.

Within BuzzSumo, you can filter by the amount of social shares that a piece has – the more the better. You can bet that popular social posts have a good few comments on them.

Hopefully, you should be able to find at least 3 or 4 blog posts that have been recently posted that you would consider popular.

That’s it! Stage 1 complete.

Step 2

Now, you need to move into the comment sections of these articles.

Who’s commenting? Do they have a website attached with their username? More often than not, users will attach one.

If not, they might have a social media profile attached, another good avenue for you to use.

With stage 2 – finding engaged people – you’re looking to find people that are engaged with content (i.e. commenting) and then hoping to find a way of contacting them; through their website, email address or social media.

Step 3

Finally, with stage 3, you simply need to re-engage these people.

How can this be done? I usually find a quick, polite email is more than enough to get the job done. You might want to do a quick bit of research on email outreach if you aren’t otherwise familiar with it, just to make sure you get the best response and results possible.

The best thing about the people that comment – if they like your content, which they should if it’s of a high quality – they’re likely to share your piece on social media, subscribe to your email newsletter and also return in the future. Perfect!

With them sharing your content, you’re amplifying the reach of your post to an even greater audience; further expanding your views, shares, comments, email subscribers and more.

Reap What You Sow

Sound too good to be true? For once, it actually isn’t. Put in a couple of hours work and try it out for yourself. 

My aim is to contact at least 50 people to ask for comments for every piece of content I write. You set your own targets – the more you put in, the more you’ll get out.

6 Steps to Prepare, Monitor and Measure Your Next Brand Awareness Campaign

BY KATE DUNHAM

Brand awareness campaigns have one goal: to raise awareness and visibility of your brand. While it’s important to focus on the creative elements and execution of your campaign it’s equally important to set a social media monitoring plan so you can follow the progress of the campaign in real time. Plus, you’ll want to ensure you fully understand the effectiveness of the campaign once it has wrapped.

Not sure where to start? Use these handy checklists to prep for your next brand awareness campaign.

1. Set your KPIs. How will you measure success?

Before launching any campaign you first have to clearly define your objectives and goals. The objective of a brand awareness campaign is to increase brand awareness. In order to evaluate if that objective was achieved, you need to pre-determine what metrics you’ll measure to determine the level of success. These metrics are called Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Make sure you and your team (and your boss!) have agreed-upon goals and a list of KPIs before launch. It’s important that everyone has the same criteria for evaluating and measuring the campaign.

Brand Awareness KPIs:

• Increase in brand mentions: Mentions measure the size of a social conversation around a specific search term or phrase—in this case the name of your brand. Mentions are simply the number of times your brand name was used across social media, helping you understand just how much (or little) attention you’re receiving.

• Extended impressions: Impressions measure the size of your brand’s potential audience. Impressions are based on the number of followers that are in the networks of the authors that generate mentions of your brand.

• Increased engagement: Engagement metrics represent how much and how often people interact with your content on social media. A subset of engagement metrics are sharing metrics, which represent when people amplify your content.

• Improved Share of Voice: Share of voice helps you understand how you are performing on social in comparison to your competitors. The metric details what percentage of mentions within your industry or space are about you and what percentage is about the competition.

2. Benchmark

Once you decide on your KPIs, document the starting point for each metric so you’ll be able to track any changes throughout the campaign. Establish the length of the campaign and record your benchmark metrics with the same range. For example, if you’re going to run your brand awareness campaign for three months, determine what your average number of mentions were for the three months prior to the start of the campaign.

In addition to your KPIs metrics you’ll also want to benchmark other metrics to see how they change over the course of your campaign. Not all of these metrics will necessarily help evaluate the success of campaign, but it’s important to understand any shifts the campaign causes for your brand on social.

Pre-Launch Campaign Metrics Checklist:

• Total number of mentions of your brand name
• Exposure
• Share of Voice
• Engagement: average number of RTs, Likes, Shares, Comments, Repins etc.
• Followers/Fans on each platform
• Sentiment
• Geographical breakdown: In what city, state, country do you see the most mentions?
• Gender distribution

If you want to see how your awareness campaign performs on each social platform, isolate these metrics for each platform and benchmark.

3. Set up additional monitoring

In addition to monitoring your brand name on social you’ll also want to set up a campaign-specific monitoring plan before launch so you don’t miss out on mentions and important metrics. Isolating for what’s being said specifically about the campaign and not just your brand will help you evaluate how the messaging and positioning are being received.

Pre-Launch Campaign Monitoring Checklist:

• Campaign name or title with brand or company name
• Campaign name or title without brand name
• Hashtags or other elements specific to the campaign

4. Monitor the brand awareness campaign

Once the campaign launches keep a close eye on mentions of your brand and what’s being said about the initiative so you’ll be able to respond quickly to any issues that arise or make adjustments as necessary.

Look Out For:

• Dramatic shift in mentions.
  • Find the cause. Was it due to one of your tweets, or post by an advocate or influencer?
• Sentiment level: are you seeing an increase in positive or negative mentions?
  • If people are responding negatively, make adjustments based on the feedback or consider halting the campaign.
• Are the topics shifting?
  • Are the conversations around your brand changing? Are people talking about what you want them to talk about? Is the campaign getting any traction?

5. Report up

After your brand awareness campaign has ended it’s time to report on the effort. Create a report that features all the social data you’ve collected over the course of the campaign.

Brand Awareness Campaign Report Elements:

• Your brand’s social metrics pre-campaign and during the campaign timeframe listed side by side. Show the percentages of change where possible. (ex: Brand mentions increased by 10%)
  • Total number of mentions of your brand name
  • Exposure
  • Share of Voice
  • Engagement: average number of RTs, Likes, Shares, Comments, Repins etc.
  • Followers/Fans on each platform
  • Sentiment
• Geographical breakdown: pre-campaign vs. campaign timeframe
  • Did the city, state, or country you previously saw the most mentions from change?
  • Can you tie the change to a specific cause?
• Gender distribution: pre-campaign vs. campaign timeframe
  • Did the ratio of male to female mentions change?
  • Can you tie the change to a specific cause?

• A breakdown of campaign-specific metrics: This will include data from your three monitoring searches* (Campaign name or title with brand or company name; Campaign name or title without brand name; Hashtags or other elements specific to the campaign)
  • Total number of mentions of the brand awareness campaign
  • Exposure
  • Engagement: number of RTs, Likes, Shares, Comments, Repins etc.
  • Sentiment
  • Geographical breakdown
  • Gender distribution

*You can also compile the data from each specific search if you want to evaluate if how people chose to talk about the campaign affected the performance.

6. Evaluate and analyze the campaign

After you’ve gathered and reported on all of the campaign’s data, it’s time analyze your findings to determine if the campaign was successful in increasing brand awareness. Evaluate your KPIs: Did you see an increase in brand mentions, exposure, engagement and Share of Voice? Highlight where you were successful and where you weren’t.

The next step is to take a deep dive into the metrics and the campaign and analyze what aspects of the campaign worked and what could have been improved upon. Should you have posted more or amped up engagement? Did you see positive or negative reactions to your messaging? Take the time to analyze what worked and what didn’t in regards to each KPI and the overall sentiment levels and mentions of the campaign. Use the social data behind your brand awareness campaign to guide changes to your ongoing strategy or to reinforce what’s working for your brand.