If you run a business you have a digital brand. It doesn’t matter what your business is, whether you’re a plumber or a multi-national soft drink – you are a brand and in 2016 you have a digital face. Knowing that you are a brand can be scary because with that power comes great responsibility (ha) but it’s also a great opportunity. Remember that perception is reality and once you acknowledge that you have a brand you can begin to position it for yourself, create and manage that perception.
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The digital landscape presents an incredible opportunity for businesses. By simply claiming your business name on social media platforms such as Facebook & Twitter you can begin to own and forge your own public perception.
While we don’t recommend that a lot of businesses rely on a platform like Facebook as a source of lead-gen or a way to drive substantial online revenue, what it is great for is brand positioning. By simply having a presence on Facebook and interacting with users through it you can begin to create more familiarity and loyalty with your brand whatever it may be.
This applies to all interactions. Don’t be afraid to take an irate customer head on through a platform like Twitter and Facebook. Most people will look at a system like Yelp and realize that if you’ve been in business for a long time you most likely will have a few detractors. But if you keep it honest and keep your overall responses positive you can establish yourself as a trusted business and this will almost always translate into additional customers.
One of the quickest ways to develop a following and win traffic from organic search is to create video. Even Entrepreneur’s digital writers recommend it as one of the first things to think about in relation to Digital Branding.
Your content on YouTube does not have to be complicated. It can be simple things like a quick tour of your store, maybe some video testimonials from customers. If you’re a contractor or do any kind of custom work you can show footage of completed jobs, etc. etc.
Video content is also more heavily favored by organic search. The reason is the user experience, if you are hurriedly searching Google for tips on how to fix a leaking toilet chances are you need the information fast. Google understands this and will try to show their users the quickest most efficient path to that information. If you do anything service based and create “tutorial” content or anything that is instructional and helpful is going to be elevated in search.
At the end of the day – do anything. Even if your video is a photo with a voice over getting that content out there is key. You can spend weeks thinking about what to say, what to show, how to show it, etc. but action is how you win the users. We live in a time where things move at lightning speed so don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. So what are you waiting for, get out there and start creating your digital brand!
WordPress is probably the most widely used blogging / CMS platform out today for a variety of reasons. Number one is probably the ease of use a close second is that it’s mostly free. If you run a website on WordPress and aren’t being found in search engines, the Yoast plugin provides easy SEO for WordPress. Yoast is really nothing special development wise. That is to say it’s not some revolutionary new algorithm or technology. What it is and what it does well is guide the average person through the process of Search Engine Optimization. Here’s a quickstart intro for you…
SEO has become something of a pariah over the past couple years. This is largely because there was a cottage industry built around backlinking. Several companies developed deep (and mostly shady) back channels for links that helped people’s sites pop. The problem was that these sites weren’t always the best content to answer the users search – so Google killed the part of its algorithm that weighted those types of backlinks heavily… and chaos ensued.
The good news is SEO is simple. Make good content and tell the engines what your pages are about. If you do this and people like your page you will win the organic search game.
What Yoast does for WordPress users is simplify the process of making an SEO’ed content post. Rather than continue to type though, let’s walk you through the process I went through while optimizing this very post here!! (*CUE TWILIGHT ZONE MUSIC*)
This seems like a no brainer, but write your article first. It’s much easier to SEO a piece of content that’s already been created. You’ll see why in the next step.
Step 2 – Choose Your Focus KeywordOnce you install Yoast, you will see it in a panel below the edit screen in your posts. After you have created your article you should think about what a person searching for this type of content would type into Google. In the case of this article I chose “SEO for WordPress” but you can go with something more simple or more specific than that, I could’ve used something like – the best tool when doing SEO for WordPress, or Need quick SEO for WordPress?. SEO would be a good shorter, broader choice as another example. However, the more broadly you target the less chance you have of dominating that search term, so try to be specific and creative.
Step 3 – Check Your ScoreThe next step is to take a look at the rating that Yoast gives you right away. In my case it’s green light because I’ve been doing this for years and chose a keyword I know was repeated everywhere in my content and header. Take a look at this… the next step is a bit more involved.
My traffic light score in Yoast is now a yellow light. It’s not terrible but it’s not fantastic either. There are a few things I can now do to improve my SEO for WordPress articles and get Yoast to give me the green light again.
Underneath the field where you write your focus keyword is a list of items Yoast relates to the SEO of your page and scores you on. As you can see I scored well on things like the amount of characters in the page title, coming up with a new and original focus keyword for my blog, creating easy to read copy, etc. But I also lost points for having no meta description and not using my focus keyword in the first paragraph of my article. My next step is to go back to my article and make adjustments based on the recommendations that Yoast has given. Let’s do that and see what we get.
Finally you will want to write a quick meta description that repeats your keyword. In my case that keyword was SEO for WordPress, so the sample image shows you how I created a statement that used this keyword but also helps to describe what the post is about. Just stuffing a keyword into text that is out of context will actually hurt your rankings, so don’t do that.
Think of the meta description as kind of a “preview” or byline of your content that a Google (or Bing) user will see in their search results. Google is focused on creating a good user experience so the more you do to help aid this process the better you will rank.
That’s our quick start guide for the Yoast SEO plugin. If you need more advice on effective SEO for WordPress we recommend you read the full Yoast tutorial on their website here.
Be An Industry Thought Leader
The “blogosphere” remember that buzz word? It’s not one you hear a lot anymore, however it is more important than ever that you or someone you pay be creating content or blogging for your business.
Creating content that speaks to what you offer as a business is the best way to gain visibility on social media sites and in search engines. Additionally, it’s a way for you to showcase your expertise and earn the trust and awareness of potential customers.
It can also be profitable. According to Technorati (a popular blog network) blogs with 100,000 or more monthly unique visitors can earn on average around $75,000 annually.
So if you are not already doing it – it’s probably time to get started. At Apex Digital Media we offer basic business website packages that are reasonably priced and will enable you for blogging. You don’t have to go with us of course, we’ve also written a lot about how to pick the best design / marketing firm for your needs.
If you’re wading into the fray inexperienced and alone – we are here to help. Here are a list of important things to consider before you start cranking out content.
There are several reasons to own a website for your business but to be clear there are about 4 that stand out:
Building a Brand: Unless you are spending heavily on advertising, your website is likely the first impression a prospective customer will have of you. Make sure it looks professional and accurately represents your brand.
Generating Leads: Your business might not exist solely online. You may want to use it to drive consumer traffic to your store, you may want to use it to capture email addresses in the form of a mailing list. If you are looking to generate leads, make sure your site is set up accordingly with a clear call to action (ie. “sign up for our mailing list!” )
Generating Direct Sales: A fairly simple concept. Whether people buy on your website or its used to drive them to your store, direct sales are the goal.
Generating Advertising Revenue: On the other hand maybe what you are blogging for your business is extremely popular and your site gets a ton of traffic. If that’s the case placing ads and making revenue from them never hurts. It can however be difficult to try and run a site focused on direct sales while simultaneously trying to make money from advertising. Ad placements can cause the page load times to decrease and there is a chance a consumer could see an ad from a competitor and click off to somewhere else. Whichever of these items is your focus, be sure to keep everything you create geared towards it.
What Are You Trying to Accomplish?If your goal is generating leads you need to have your page & posts optimized to push people to fill out a form or make a phone call. If you are trying to make money from advertising you will need to do everything you can to drive traffic. There are a myriad of reasons to create content around your business but make sure you have complete clarity on why YOU are doing it. Also, set benchmarks for yourself and goals to achieve. If you are doing lead gen ask yourself “How many leads do I want per month?” If you are trying to make revenue from advertising you will need to find ways to push traffic to your site. (Hint: Social Media is a great place to start)
Once you have a goal set and have answered the “why” you can start to think about creating content for your business or the “how.” If you sell cars maybe you want to write about which new models on your lot have the highest consumer favorability ratings. If you are a restaurant you might want to talk about how your ingredients are sourced from organic local farms. Do your best to find your niche and run with it.
Frequency – Will you post Daily? Weekly? Monthly? The more frequently you create content and share it on social media channels the better visibility you will have. Google loves “fresh” so your chances of being seen by a large audience is much better if you crank out the content daily or even several times a day. Weekly is adequate too but think of how you feel when you look at a brand’s Facebook page or blog and it hasn’t been updated in a month. It seems like the lights are off.
Creating Content Ahead of Time – If you are a busy business owner, chances are good you aren’t going to have a couple hours to sit down and compose a new blog each day. You have a couple of options here. Create 5 – 10 posts in advance and then schedule them. If you can stay ahead of this schedule you will be able to continually have fresh content each day. The second option is to hire someone to do the writing for you. If you are bootstrapped there are plenty of college kids and people who will write for you at a reasonable rate or even for free. Never hurts to check your options.
Include a Call to Action – If you are doing this to drive new business, don’t forget to include a call to action! Most people aren’t just going to magically sign up for your mailing list or download your e-book without being asked to. If they are interested in what you’re doing though, the chances are good if you dangle that carrot in front of them they will go after it. Here are a few examples of worthwhile calls to action:
• Join my email list
• Download my ebook
• Buy my product
• Sign up for my service
• Call or email me for a consultation
• Buy advertising on this blog
• Connect with me on various social sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace etc.)
• Visit my store or office
• Come meet me at this live event
These are just samples – depending on the nature of your business you will want to come up with something that fits best with your site or blog.
As mentioned earlier, Apex Digital Media offers small business website packages at reasonable rates. If you are working with a smaller budget of less than $3 – $5,000, we can help! If you are intrepid and self-motivated you can also save money doing it yourself. Wordpress has free options for blogging as do several other platforms. Of course, if this is for a professional business using http://wordpress.mybusinessname.com might not have the professional sheen you’re looking for. So keep that in mind, your website is your first impression – having a professional design reflects upon your business. Think about it – if you go to a company’s website and it looks like it was designed in 1998 and is not mobile responsive you think less of them. Don’t be that business.
Social Media is hands down the best way to advertise content you create for your business. Here’s why: Relevant audience. Facebook gives you the ability to directly target users by all sorts of data points including “Likes” – so if you’re a website targeting comic book fans, Facebook will allow you to target people who have “liked” Marvel or DC’s fan pages. That’s only the beginning though – you can also add additional layers of targeting in the form of gender, age, zip code and more.
marketing strategy
If you don’t have a budget to pay for advertising – social is still the answer. We have found that simply by tweeting out content or sharing it on Linked In & Facebook we have generated a lot of new business. This also goes back to frequency. If you are frequently posting / sharing content on social platforms the relevant audience will find you. Think of platforms like Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest or Instagram as “Discovery Engines” – a theme we will cover in more detail in a later post. Discovery engines allow users who are interested in a particular theme to easily find you. Take advantage of this!
There are so many free online tools for analytics it’s ridiculous – the pinnacle of course being Google Analytics. Make sure you install Google Analytics and scour your data regularly. You will see which pieces of content are being read by viewing the “Time Spent” metric. If users on average are spending 5 – 1o minutes on a page, it’s a good sign they are engaged and reading. You can then use this data to create additional content in a similar vein that users will enjoy.
Quantcast is another fantastic benchmarking tool that will allow you to see how you rank with other similar content creators. It also has in-depth statistics on the types of audience that likes your content and frequently visits your pages.
(source: http://www.inc.com/guides/10-step-guide-to-blogging.html)
Social Media has grown into a force to be reckoned with. To give you an idea as to how fast things are moving – in 1997 the Internet reached 50 million users. Facebook on its own gained over 100 million users from January 2009 – January 2010. So with numbers like that, there is obviously a large audience there to go after.
Social Media profiles are not only another place to showcase your business and interact with your customers, they also work as directory listings that help to get your business more visibility in organic search.
Facebook is the top of the food chain for social networks but as technology evolves a lot of other notable platforms are popping up with a wealth of potential for business opportunities. Instagram, Pinterest and SnapChat are all places that are currently offering advertising of some sort but are relatively newer platforms than the mainstays such as Facebook & Twitter (to be clear, Facebook now owns Instagram)
First and foremost you want to figure out what platforms are most likely to have your prospects. A platform like Instagram is absolutely perfect for photographers, but Twitter might be a more appropriate place for finding new customers if you run a Software business. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t have profiles on both – just that depending on the type of business you run you will want to spend more of your time on particular platforms.
The best way to figure this out is by asking yourself a few simple questions about your business and the nature of it.
Social Media Marketing isn’t as much about directly selling your product as it is about engaging prospective customers and winning their trust. The goal of a community-based social media platforms is to provide a platform for an open, honest conversation about whatever the subject at hand is.
Rand Fishkin Gets It…
If you look closely at the brands with the most successful profiles and communities you will see that they are the ones who interact with users most often and post content directly related to their brand. Facebook’s Fan Page is a great example of how you should market your company through social media platforms. It acts as an upgraded user profile for brands, companies, and organizations to be as involved as the users, and has plenty of tools to enable informed decisions. As users become ‘fans’ of your page, all of your activity appears in their News Feed each time they log on. There’s also a feature called the “Insights tool”, which allows you to analyze page views, the demographics of your fans, and the number of people who view (or stop viewing) your News Feed posts. Facebook has continued to add new and improved features for businesses to make better use of their user data.
If you simply open up a profile and begin spamming your users with coupons and deals for your product or service you won’t go very far. Providing real value to your users in the form of expertise and news about your industry and brand is how you win.
This is a brief primer on social media strategy but if you need additional assistance or expertise don’t hesitate to reach out to us directly!
(source: http://www.inc.com/guides/using-social-networking-sites.html)
For the past several years Social Media has been the buzz of the marketing world. But even as social channels grow engagement seems to be dropping.
The amount of social content is increasing exponentially but the level of engagement is way down. There will be many thought pieces written about why that is and how to fix it, but from where we are sitting the answer is simple. Saturation – there is a lot more content proliferating which means that you have to up your game. You have to be better than the rest and stand out more than ever before.
A lot of the companies who have spent big will look at this as a problem – we see it as an opportunity. Here are some key things to understand about social media & social media marketing for 2016 and beyond.
In 2015, according to Forrester research, top brands posted:
This represents a minor increase in the number of posts for Twitter and Facebook and more than a 50-percent increase in posts on Instagram over the prior year.
While the change does look like it helped increase the amount of followers a brand might have, it has definitely not helped with overall engagement. With social media the goal is to not just get a massive audience but to get the RIGHT audience. People who have a known interest in what you do or sell.
Content marketing doesn’t seem to be doing a whole lot better. TrackMaven research showed that content marketing output in 2015 rose by 35 percent and engagement dropped by 17 percent. Those are findings from an analysis of 50 million content marketing pieces posted on blogs, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn.
Some believe that a lot of the decreased engagement on social media is due to the fact that most platforms now expect people to pay for advertising there. This could be the case, however we have found that it’s easy to develop audience organically on platforms like Twitter if you put in the time and effort to curate good content and go after the correct audience.
Saturation is also a big problem though. A recent piece in Harvard Business Review described the content marketing problem of the last several years. Due to ad blockers, DVR, and other sophisticated methods users now have several methods of avoiding advertising. As a result, companies have to do more to get their brand in front of an engaged audience. This has resulted in the branded content boom – however the results have been mediocre at best. Brands have spent billions trying to create communities on social platforms but still largely lose out to a typical YouTuber in the way of overall subscribed and engaged users.
One of the big problems right now is that companies still try to measure the effectiveness of social campaigns by metrics such as “Likes” and “followers.” While this is important to keep track of, there are a large amount of artificial social accounts and activities. So relying solely on the amount of new followers a campaign brought could be a useless metric if a week later Twitter scrubs fraudulent accounts and your following drops substantially.
There needs to be a paradigm shift in how social metrics are accounted for. As one example, a tweet that got a large amount of shares or drove a large amount of clicks to a piece of content is probably a much more important metric to look at than how many aggregated followers you gained in a month.
Additionally, driving traffic to a site might not be your goal anymore. A lot of users never visit the homepage of a site and for a lot of media markets the action IS on their facebook page. In those cases how many views a video generates on Facebook or how many people shared it there is a much more important metric. So now that social has become an important part of the media mix marketers need to pay more attention to these types of specific metrics than aggregates of “likes” and “followers.
There are no longer just direct paths to customers through your website or ebay store – there are now hundreds . Expect this number to increase exponentially in the next 5 – 10 years the same way it has previously. New devices will enable new targeting and marketing opportunities.
Smart brands will make themselves available in every last channel available to them. The beauty of digital is that maybe some of these channels only refer a small amount of business, maybe some none. However, by proliferating you will be able to find that one or two channels that really does bring the type of customers that are loyal to you for years to come.
Marketers are so busy being excited about the latest toys like paid Pins on Pinterest or Snapchats platform they forget that this shouldn’t be about the platform but about building relationships and communities.
Here at Apex, we advise our clients with something along these lines:
“Think of your social media channels as a farm. If you do your chores every day (posting & sharing relevant content, favoriting things you like, replying to users) like a farm you will reap a bountiful harvest. The key is doing the work every single day and never letting up. As soon as you start to slack or let up, your harvest will be affected so keep doing your chores every day and reap the rewards.”
We sincerely hope this was useful to you and thank the kind folks at Marketing Land for providing the inspiration and the reference for this post.
(source: http://marketingland.com/engagement-crisis-content-marketing-social-media-happening-fix-166257)
Ok ok, this may be preaching to the choir… By now most people are aware of the importance of having their own website that represents their business and gives them the ability to showcase their brand. However, a lot of small business owners are willing to sacrifice their overall brand in the name of saving a little bit of money up front. At the end of the day though, it’s worth seeking out the right firm or designer and spending within reason to create an online presence that clearly and professionally represents your business.
With Google Analytics & Search Console you have access to incredible analytics and data that you can use to make informed decisions. Google gives these services away for free and part of “best practices” is having them installed on your site and taking advantge of them.
Google analytics tags on your site allow you track a myriad of important metrics on your site? What are metrics you ask? Metrics are data points about your users. For example, one metric on your site is the “Time on site” metric. How long are users on your site? How sticky is it? Google analytics not only shows you how long people stay on your site on average, you can break it down page by page and even see user flow through your site. This is incredibly powerful, for it allows you to find points of interest or points of user drop off and optimize your site. If you see that a particular page that a customer should be spending a lot of time on has a low time on site, you can begin to make adjustments to the page to improve this metric. This is just one example of the many different ways Analytics can help you improve your online presence and overall business.
Formerly known as “Webmaster Tools” Google Search Console shows you what keyword terms are producing impressions and clicks in organic search. For those who are foreign to this world, impressions are “views” or how many times a user searching a particular keyword sees your website. Clicks are pretty self explanatory. Search Console is powerful because it shows you where users are finding you and knowing this can help you to better present yourself and take full advantage of organic and free traffic.
This is something that marketers understand well “KISS” – Keep It Stupid Simple – is the marketers mantra. The easier it is for a customer to get into your site, find what they want and buy it, the more success you will have. Maybe you’re not selling products – if that’s the case you should still consider what your “conversion event” is. Maybe it’s a mailing list subscriber, maybe it’s a Twitter follower, maybe it’s a play on your video. Whatever the case, you want the path to this action to be as simple and uncluttered as possible.
If you’re a modern business you need to have a phone number, address and email address visible on your site. If you don’t, you look shady. Plain and simple – the people who win the most business are the ones who have a degree of transparency. If you look like you are trying to hide yourself it does not bode well for business. Additionally, Google uses “maps” signals to help rank pages in their search. If you are a listed business seeking walk in customers – it is absolutely mandatory you have a visible address and a map listing. It will help with your overall SEO and make you visible in business directories as well.
By the most recent estimates I’ve seen – 60% of your website visitors are going to be on mobile devices. That’s just the direction things are going. Everyone is connected and has a sweet pocket computer. If you do not have a website that looks clean and professional on these devices you are losing MORE THAN HALF of your potential customers. Let that sink in – at Apex we actually begin with a mobile design before we even consider desktop. That’s just the way things are heading.
This might be the most important factor of all… and also it ties back to #2. What are you trying to accomplish here? If your goal is to get people to come to your restaurant and buy taco’s make sure everything about your website points to how amazing your taco’s are and how to get to your location! Embed videos of customers describing the deep sense of fulfillment they have after consuming your taco’s. Flash your address and map listing in the sidebar of every page. Link to sites that contain favorable reviews of your taco’s. You get the idea. If you just throw a page up with your logo and address you’re going to reap what you sow. It’s basically like listing your company in a phonebook at that point. But if you build a site that speaks to why what you’re doing is better than your competitors and engage with your prospective customers through social media you will see growth in your customer base.
These are only 5 small things you can do easily through your website but there are a ton of other reasons that small businesses should invest into having a professional, well thought out website that truly speaks to their business goals.
Large companies don’t just need enterprise SEO because they are enterprise level. Similarly, a small business with a large website might actually need enterprise SEO even though they are not enterprise level. So what exactly IS enterprise SEO?
First you need to ask yourself, what makes an enterprise website? What qualifies as a website that is in need of enterprise SEO?
Well to be clear, it’s mostly about the number of pages, especially products or services. If your website has 1,000 or more products, it is most likely an “enterprise” level site, or one that would require enterprise SEO.
T-Mobile is a perfect example. Their site has several thousand pages. Bing indexes 34.4k pages and Google indexes 41.7k pages. T-Mobile has specific product pages for every device the company supports. It’s this large number of pages that makes T-Mobile’s website an “enterprise” level property, not the size of their overall business.
Alternately, massive holding company that would most certainly be considered “enterprise” level like Berkshire Hathaway has only 796 indexed pages and would not qualify for enterprise SEO. While sites like this could almost certainly benefit from enterprise SEO techniques they wouldn’t be counted as enterprise websites.
By contrast, there are a lot of smaller to mid-level online stores with 1,000+ products but just 300 or so links. The actual number of pages vs. links doesn’t matter. It’s lots of pages, but few links which provides little clout or spidering potential for search crawlers. Enterprise SEO could solve this problem and increase the organic ranking of the site.
One of Apex’s typical clients is a mid level e-commerce store with 1,000+ products. They are unlikely to possess enough authority to rank deep pages. What little organic traffic they do get will come from very specific long-tail queries. Without real enterprise SEO work, a lot of their pages may not get indexed and deep crawls will be few and far between leaving them invisible to most searchers.
As is the case with all SEO, enterprise SEO begins with intelligent keyword selection. A smart business will look at Google trends and choose the most high volume keywords relevant to their brand and build out their core and sub categories around them.
Once these high value keywords have been selected they need to be repeated throughout top level and sub-categories. Then woven into copy, descriptive text, etc.
This seems like a very simple process but is one that can take a lot of time and effort if you have a website with thousands of products and hundreds of categories.
Ever received a spreadsheet or database with 5,000 products? Do you want to set up these pages one by one? Can you? What if you have to have the pages up in a day? For this reason you need a content management system that allows for rules that will create consistent title & meta tags throughout several pages.
At the very least, automation should create the URLs, title tags, H1 tags, breadcrumb navigation links, and canonical tags. A lot of additional technical SEO may need to be done by hand or in most cases a developer can create scripts that will allow for bulk pages to be SEO’ed.
A good template will have all the proper tags ready for you to go (meta description, image alt, machine readable markup) this will prevent you from needing to optimize one page at a time. However, it is wise to take a look at your analytics data and maybe pick out a couple of the pages that are most important to your business for a custom SEO sweep.
At the enterprise SEO level, templates also need a bit of intelligence to be applied to them. The last thing anyone wants is a webpage with holes in the text created by empty database fields, or worse copy that looks like it’s been strewn together poorly by a robot. A human being can recognize when data is not present and adjust accordingly.
With mobile devices already composing on average 60% of your audience, it is also wise to have a mobile responsive template in place. Not only does this make for a better user experience, major search engines will reward you for having a mobile optimized site.
Regardless of how good your CMS is or how many choice templates you have, a lot of pages are going to need to be touched by a person.
A major mistake lots of enterprise sites make, especially ones that receive content and data from suppliers, is to use the stock text. This can seriously hurt your SEO as you have duplicate content or content that is not seen as valuable by a search engine.
If you are a massive company paying people to do the manual labor may not be such a chore. Additionally an SEO agency such as our company Apex Digital Media, has the resources to accomplish large scale enterprise SEO quickly and efficiently. Whatever you do, if you choose an agency make sure you research them and look at case studies.
Optimizing a website with hundreds or even thousands of pages or products is no easy task, even with an expensive top of the line CMS. However difficult the task though it’s likely one that needs to be accomplished.
The Grammys have become deeply intertwined with technology over the past couple years. Social Media has created an environment where viewers can interact live with their favorite artists and other fans during the event. There are always a breaking news items that happen at these events and overall it just makes the event more fun and interactive. It becomes an experience that is more shared by fans than viewed. With that let’s go through some of the night’s winners on social media both artists and brands.
According to Engagement Labs 2016 rankings of grammy-nominated artists, Wiz Khalifa was the big winner on Facebook. Scoring the most likes and new fans. The Weeknd was number one on Twitter due to his use of the official Grammy’s Twitter account to show gratitude to fans new and old, thanking everyone for their support. Best New Artist nominee Tori Kelly also scored high on Twitter. On Instagram Charlie Puth dominated with the highest score according to them based on a lot of shares and likes of his Instagram photos. Taylor Swift gained the most new followers on Twitter and during the show frequently utilized her social media channels to post her reactions to winning awards.
Grammy Artists Social Media
In addition to artists there were a lot of brand engagement opportunities. People magazine ranked first on Facebook they having the most active user base of all sponsors. The magaizne posted a lot leading up to the show and also had frequent live updates on their social channels. Hilton hotels had the highest follower growth of the night, continually posting live images of artists on the red carpet with the Hilton logo / watermark. Hyundai had the best brand score on Twitter mainly from people responding to and retweeting them. Gucci used Twitter to post high fashion images of their brand from the red carpet. One particularly noticable shot of Florence Welch (Florence and the Machine) wearing one of their dresses.
Grammy Sponsors Social
These days brand integration with music is much more common place because of the way that the music industry works and artist can’t really sell records anymore so these days sponsorship money and these types of social media integrations are where a lot of artists make their money
(source: http://www.benzinga.com/pressreleases/16/02/m6299772/the-social-media-grammy-goes-to-artists-the-weeknd-and-taylor-swift-and)
(source: http://www.adweek.com/news/television/these-brands-and-artists-won-grammys-social-media-169666)
A lot of modern retailers are still trying to carve out their niche in the age of online commerce. Brands like Abercrombie, J-Crew & Gap are rapidly losing foot traffic and marketshare to a growing youth demographic who wants to buy and share online via platforms like Instagram, Pinterest & Snapchat.
Modern teens are spending more time with their limited budgets at stores like Zara or Forever 21 according to a recent report by Business Insider. They are also much more likely to share images of their finds on social channels with their network of friends and relatives.
Social Commerce
Social image platforms like Instagram & Pinterest are drastically affecting the way all consumers view fashion. Modern women are likely to use an app like Pinterest to pin “dream outfits” and wardrobes they are interested in. Low priced, low overhead online fashion outlets are equipped to sell the items that compose these dream outfits and as a result retailers who used to get this customer are losing them to online outlets.
Before the internet, the average consumer didn’t have access to higher level fashion. Most retail brands did well just selling their staple products. Now with instant access to a variety of styles and buying options, it’s much easier for a woman to assemble an outfit that looks great and doesn’t cost a fortune. Customers have access to the types of things they see on runways and can order it at the click of a button.
It’s for this reason that companies like Zara who have well conceived and efficient supply chains are taking over. They can respond to fashion trends at the drop of a hat and churn out new products quickly.
women taking selfie with mobile phone
Then their supply chain helps to keep lead times shorter. Since they don’t have to commit all their stock in advance of the season and are manufacturing during the season.
A traditional retailer like the Gap is just not equipped to operate in this manner. They would have to completely rethink their business models to compete in a similar manner. Instead, they end up having to discount outdated fashions to get rid of excess inventory that failed to sell well. The discounting leads to declining sales and overall devaluation of their brand.
One retail chain, Banana Republic thinks they have figured out a way to bridge the gap. For 2016’s NYC Fashion Week they will allow customers to buy newly launched clothes online as soon as they debut on the runway.
What’s clear, is that retailers of all types, not only fashion need to find ways to adjust to an ever changing market. Social Media is also becoming much more important as a tool of networking with the people who like your brand and turning them into advocates for it. The need to spend zillions of dollars on advertising can be compensated for when you have thousands of your customers showcasing your products and prices on their Instagram & Tinder feeds.
A recent study conducted by Ernst & Young found that teens (affectionately called “Generation Z”) have
very high expectations for consumers and this can help retailers to set the bar higher which in turn affects their entire customer base.
The lesson is that by seeking to please the young generation retailers can greatly improve their business model and return their brand to a state of profitability.
(source: http://www.businessinsider.com/social-media-is-killing-traditional-retailers-2016-2)
