community engagement

5 Keys To Engaging and Driving Online Community Engagement

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Online strategies aren’t just about setting up accounts on the right platforms – your strategy needs to involve true engagement.

Driving online community engagement requires planning, risk management, and a cohesive objective that is clearly stated to all of your key staff members.

1. Word-Of-Mouth Only Goes So Far

You need a plan. Simply signing up for an account on any given social platform does not mean your organization has fulfilled its obligation. Social connections via your chosen networks are not obligations but opportunities to engage directly with your members, prospects, fans, or clients.

As your message spreads and your community grows, how will you feed the appetite for more? Will you be equipped as an organization to create and disseminate your message?

This direct connection requires a clear plan with regard to infrastructure, integration, and, most importantly, a set of rules and policies for disseminating your message. There is nothing more important than a planned and coordinated process for responding to inquiries, comments, and requests.

2. Identify Your Advocates and Feed Them

The key to any community is the full engagement of its members. Early on in your campaign you will discover those advocates who are willing to share your message and push that message to their respective networks. With every Facebook post, tweet, or blog post, your advocates wait to share what your campaign is providing.

Gaining the trust of your online advocates and providing them with a continued stream of shareable content provides ever expanding reach; in turn pulling in more campaign advocates from their respective networks.

Reward their efforts. Recognize and identify your advocates publicly. Thank them whenever, wherever, and however you can. These individuals are the backbone of your campaign’s success.

3. Trust Your Community

Astute observers of successful online campaigns understand the nuances of online communication. Well planned, effectively executed online campaigns have assessed the risks at hand and understand how to mitigate those risks when required.

Just as your community trusts and advocates your campaign, you in turn must trust your community when negative comments or posts arise. Well-fed advocates who have been provided with the right tools will assist in regulating your community – most times without direct intervention.

Ask yourself before you begin: Do you understand how to mitigate risk? Can you identify those in your community who are your advocates? Can you identify those in your community that are Influencers?

4. Rules Of Engagement – Rules / Fears / Clarity Over Control

The rule of online engagement has shifted, placing the power of the message in the hands of the viewer, consumer, or visitor. The intention of a Rules Of Engagement policy is not to handcuff those posting and engaging online.

The intention is to provide a set of guidelines for disseminating content, insuring all messaging is on brand, on target, and true to the core message. Direct brand connections create deep inherent value and keep visitors and advocates coming back.

Community engagement using social media requires a shift in the way organizations view themselves and their relationship with the public. The shift is happening on a cultural, organizational, and individual level. Before committing resources to a social media program, organizations need to know how to mitigate the risks while maximizing the rewards.

The first step is to create a safe space for staff, volunteers, and other stakeholders through clear, effective social media policies. Clarity over control.

When everyone involved knows the purpose of the organization’s social media initiatives—if each individual is clear about his or her role in achieving that purpose and the parameters in which they can participate—those social media initiatives will be that much more successful from the start.

Do you understand the nuances of your community? Have you provided your key internal staff and your community manager with a clear community engagement objective?

5. Tools Don’t Build Communities – People Do

Many times online community engagement continues to fall back on the tools an organization commandeers to share their brand message. However, those tools don’t drive themselves. It’s the people that organize and implement the campaign who are the key to a successful campaign.

Your community manager, the advocates, and the influencers will make or break the success of your online initiatives.

Can you identify those in your community who are your advocates? Can you identify those in your community that are Influencers? Have you empowered your key internal staff with the tools they require to create a successful online campaign?

Understanding the Difference between Google Local and Google Places

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Currently Google Local and Google Places are two different Google products each with different data sets. They compete against each other and, in some cases, display duplicate results when those sets are not perfect matches.

Google is in the process of merging Google Places with Google Local. But until then, you need to make sure that your business is up-to-date for both. In the meantime, information submitted on Google Local overrules information listed on Google Places IF the location has been verified.

How will you know if the data for your business has been merged already? The only way to know for sure is observing carefully to see which dashboard appears when logging into Google Places. If the latest dashboard is displayed, then the Google account is already a merged data set. If the older dashboard is displayed, you must still update both listings.

Old Dashboard
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New Dashboard
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Being moved to the newest dashboard is a computerized, automated, process that no one, not even Google employees, can speed up.

The most important thing to remember is that without going through the verification process, it is impossible to change or edit any information on Google Local as well as Google Places.

Localization is as easy as #1, #2, #3

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The Impact Of Google Places / Local On Localized Searches



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There is no more important consideration for a bricks and mortar retailer than discovery. In the past, this type of discovery relied heavily on the local Yellow Pages. The big yellow book was the means by which many people found the services they required.

With the advent of Google Places in 2009, the importance of proper listing within this platform has become more and more important for local small businesses. In fact, the importance of a properly optimized and validated Google Places / Local listing for a small business in many cases outweighs their need for a full-scale web presence.

What drives such a bold statement you may ask? Relevance.

Momentum client Budget Brake & Muffler Auto Centres engages our services to optimize their current web property for placement in organic searches. We have taken on the challenge to create high rank for blanket search terms such as “auto repair” and “car repair.” We are optimizing the web property for localized searches that depend on the physical location that the search is taking place from. The results are dramatic. We concentrate a considerable amount of effort in this optimization campaign on mobile searches – as we can see through proper tracking that a large amount of searches occur from mobile devices. This comes as no surprise considering that a large portion of individuals requiring car repair are searching on a mobile device from the vehicle that requires repairs.

With this focus on mobile platforms we have discovered something about the traffic this type of search creates. A large portion of the traffic that searches for and discovers the location of a Budget Brake and Muffler Auto Centre never end up clicking through to the company website. Why? Properly optimized, up to date Google Places / Local listings for each Budget location provide a direct connection to the local Budget franchisee right in the Google search results. The relevance of the result provides a direct path to the franchisee – discovery equates to a customer at the push of a button. Pushing Budget’s Google Places / Local listings to the forefront requires a consistent effort and a cohesive strategy involving the participation of each franchisee within the organization. Each Places listing requires up to date location information and validation of the business owner through Google’s own phone validation process.

Beyond the administrative tasks of ensuring each listing has the correct contact details and hours of operation, one key factor came to the surface. Reviews in these listings have a direct effect on placement both in search results and map placement. Franchisee’s who have positive reviews within their Google Places / Local listing consistently rank higher than those with poor or no ratings. Google views these reviews as a crucial key to providing their users with relevant results that create a positive outcome for the searcher.

Every small business owner now needs to understand that the relevance of their online listing is not based solely on their hours of operation but on the service they provide to new and returning customers. The Internet and Google itself is in a perpetual state of evolution.

It’s critical to reach out to your digital team to stay in-synch with these changes in order to maximize discovery for your business and real-time conversion of search traffic into real traffic, real satisfied customers, and real revenue.

Reach out now, and let the work begin!

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Do You Know Exactly Who Your Customers Are?

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One of the biggest challenges in marketing and sales is knowing EXACTLY who your core customers are. If someone asked you today “who are your customers?” and you say “people who buy my product”, you’re in trouble. This answer means that you’re selling to whomever stumbles across you in the marketplace and you’re not being strategic. The only way you are going to scale your business is by working way too hard and relying on luck.

If you want to scale your business, you need to have an effective Customer Acquisition Strategy. Who are your customers? How do you tell a customer from a non-customer? Where do you find them? What are they most interested in buying? What pushes them into making a buying decision? A good Customer Acquisition Strategy will answer these questions and more.

At this point, you might be thinking “what makes an effective Customer Acquisition Strategy?” You need good, solid data on the customers you already have or insight into the customers you want to sell to. You may have a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution like Salesforce.com, but the quality of the data in your system varies wildly based on who inputs it and the last time you analyzed your customer data.

Don’t feel bad if you don’t have this information. Many businesses do not have adequate customer data and have not done significant market research on their customers. If you don’t have solid customer insights, you’re going to need to do Customer Segmentation research.

In a nutshell, Customer Segmentation is when you break all of your potential customers into categories that define who they are, how they buy and how to reach them.

For example, if you have a company that sells screws and other types of fasteners, your total addressable market is everyone who needs screws and fasteners. As you can well imagine, you would treat a $500 million company that builds townhouse complexes differently from the suburban homeowner who buys 25 screws a year.

The townhouse builders would probably fall into a segment defined by the volume of fasteners they buy (probably in bulk, by weight) and the fact that you ship directly to job sites instead of having them come to a retail location to buy them. Let’s call this segment “Industrial” and the suburban homeowner would probably fall into a segment called “Retail” where their buying behaviour is defined by the fact that they buy at national hardware chains.

This kind of information can be used to:

– Differentiate customers from one another (eg. Enterprise vs. non-enterprise)
– Determine the best marketing channels to reach specific types of customers
– Determine who NOT to sell to
– Qualify leads (knowing what characteristics or behaviour make a customer more likely to buy)

Typically, a persona is developed for each customer segment before sorting each segments into one of three buckets:

– Those highly likely to buy (Primary Market)
– Those who buy but are harder to reach (Secondary Market)
– Those who are very unlikely to buy (non-customers)

The reason breaking your customers up into segments (with hard data and use cases) is difficult because the exercise is both an art and a science.

At Momentum, we start with an analysis of your current customers and their buying behaviour. Once we understand the characteristics that drive your customers’ behaviour – such as income, technical knowledge about the product category, industry, budget, etc… – we can draw a box around a subset of customers.

From there, we can measure and quantify the factors that drive behaviour before describing each customer segment in a way that informs and inspires your marketing and sales initiatives.

We have worked with customers who discovered through this process that their primary market is utility companies who have between 10 and 50 trucks and cover large rural areas with low population density. These predominantly co-operative utilities were easy to target through marketing channels specific to rural utilities.

You may have Customer Segments that you are working with right now but segmentation exercises go stale. If your company has defined Customer Segments but they haven’t been revisited in the past 5-8 years, it might be time for a refresh to confirm that these segments are still relevant and that their buying behaviour hasn’t changed radically.

If your Customer Segments needs a refresh or if you have never had clearly defined Customer Segments, give us a call. Your sales and marketing teams will thank you.

Customer Segmentation Is The Reason You Are Here

At Momentum, we have found that the single biggest challenge for our B2B clients is reaching perfectly qualified buyers for their good or services. In fact, our own use of customer segmentation for our marketing agency is the very reason you are here.

We can help you evolve your marketing, right now. We begin every client engagement with a Marketing Assessment. And that begins with a free 30 minute phone consultation.

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Conversion Paths – Putting the cart before the horse: Why it’s never a good idea to put design before strategy

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For most clients, design is the fun part of a web development project. It’s exciting to choose colors and pontificate palette decisions. And it’s tempting to start there.

My counsel is always to take a step back and consider critical business issues. Ask key questions. Then let the answers inform the design choices.

For example, in the case of a retail business that sells online as well as in brick and mortar stores:

1. Conversion Paths – The objective for the web presence should be to drive customers to the point of purchasing product, filling the cart, or driving them to physical locations. These conversion paths can be plotted and mapped from existing metrics and taken into account when building out the wireframes. The objective is to get traffic to convert. Understanding and monopolizing the path will ultimately deliver a design that provides conversion. Not the other way around.

2. Wire Framing – Before fixating on stylized elements there needs to be some importance weighed against the architecture, how you are drawing the customer in, and the paths you are pushing them through, etc.

This pushes usability to the forefront and provides clarity to the objectives of the website beyond its aesthetic value. Ultimately, proper wire framing will draw out the inherent flaws in architecture, providing insight into conversion paths, as well as where the roadblocks are from a user standpoint. 
It is important to draw the functionality out of the core branding and creative work. Otherwise the core functions of the website (selling the product) will be lost in the back and forth over colour, style, etc. A contractor wouldn’t build a house without a blueprint.

3. Brand & Creative – There is an established brand that already exists. Once the architecture, wire framing, and mapping is established then it is time to apply the brand elements. This will make the design process iterative in its nature, in turn providing a well thought out, properly executed design that serves the user base and draws them in to convert to a paying customer. I often sound like a broken record (remember those?) but not unlike the in-store experience, where stock is carefully placed according to consumer behaviour, one needs to need to understand the customer before choosing the website aesthetic. By evaluating metrics via Google Analytics, we can develop an experience that better suits the ultimate goal – conversion.

Assess. Wire-frame. Map. Then design it! Approaching it any other way is just plain “bass ackwards.”

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The Website: Shift is Happening

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Over the past 10 years business has been forced to move because an educated consumer has shown up on their doorstep armed with remarkable intelligence. Access to on-demand information has been a game changer in every business sector and with it comes an expectation of how your business enables and responds to its community.

A shift is occurring and we are seeing it with all of our clients – a changing dynamic in the function of their websites. Those metrics, which we track ferociously, now see brand engagement occurring on all platforms equally – or in some cases traffic and engagement of the brand outside of the website well exceeding the traffic to the organization’s URL.

Your website creates one destination for the information customers seek. A cohesive jumping off point for the brand. However, this is only the beginning of an overall strategy that needs to take into consideration all of the platforms currently available to support and enhance your brand.

The creation and dissemination of content may be what binds your website marketing messages together, however, that content now needs to be offered within the right context. Contextual content that your customers are compelled to share to their respective networks is the key to a successful strategy and a high traffic website.

The key motivator for this shift in contextual search results is, without a doubt, the deep market penetration of mobile devices. Predictive in its results, this type of search technology is pushing information to your customers based on what information the device already knows about their likes, habits, and social connections.

Effective marketing campaigns now have to adopt an active listening approach to fully incorporate customers in the feedback loop. The consumer voice has never been so strong and those businesses that pay attention to active consumer voices will see the rewards. Your company’s reputation online has never been as important as is it now.

In addition to active listening, inbound marketing becomes an important factor in an effective marketing strategy. Focusing on being found by your customers by providing high value content that is relevant to their wants and draws them into contacting you is now the strongest tool in attracting potential clients.

As your content takes shape and becomes distributed across networks your offering obtains authenticity. For many, this is a drastic shift from the traditional outbound model, however, brands that do not shift a portion of their marketing budget to an inbound marketing model will have more and more difficulty conveying their message.

We have said it before and we’ll say it again – online strategies aren’t just about setting up accounts on the right platforms – your strategy needs to involve true engagement. Engaging and driving online communities requires planning, risk management, and a cohesive objective.

Your company needs to measure the impact of each platform; your website, landing pages, request for information forms, YouTube channel traffic, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn traffic – all measured.

Consumers are educating themselves on your brand, where they what, when they want. The shift is happening. Business must meet the consumer with content and information that engages, informs, and a path to purchase.

Your inbound marketing agency can help you get your strategy right and show you how to implement and track it for optimum results.

Go ahead and Shift!

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3 Reasons Why Pinterest is a Female Marketing Dream

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Pinterest describes itself as a simple “Virtual Pinboard.” But don’t let this modesty fool you. Pinterest is the second most influential social networking site (behind Facebook) among women. It is also one of the fastest-growing with over 27 million unique visitors and 220 million page views per day. Here are some more reasons why it makes sense to use Pinterest as a marketing vehicle to reach women.

1. Pinterest Fosters Unique Shopping Behaviors

One of the key factors in the success of Pinterest among women is that they use the network in very specific and different ways than men. According to Edison Research, men utilize Pinterest boards as shopping carts to display what they have already purchased whereas female Pinterest users view the platform as wish lists filled with items they are exploring with an interest in buying. According to a recent Women’s Buying Behavior Index survey of thousands of online women shoppers, 36% of women shoppers use Pinterest to research items they are already considering buying and 60% use Pinterest to get gift ideas.

2. Google Doesn’t Understand Fashion and Beauty

When it comes to fashion, the purchase trigger can be discovering and viewing a special item you didn’t even realized existed. Google is the biggest search engine on the planet. It offers an image search but lists every result without the benefit contextualization, which is Google’s downfall. For instance, according to BuzzFeed, a woman looking for “ruffles” on Google image search would end up with these results:

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Whereas searching for the same term on Pinterest yields the following results:

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Pinterest virtual pinboards and women go together like sugar, spice, and everything nice because content is contextualized and curated by its users. What could seem to be a flaw, is actually its greatest strength: Female users are making Pinterest a better visual search engine for women than Google.

For example if she is looking for “trendy shoes,” she’ll see this:

shoes2

3. Pinterest Followers Cost Less and Spend More

The last and probably most compelling argument in favor of utilizing Pinterest as a marketing tool to reach women resides in the quality of the users. According to Reuters, women Pinterest shoppers spend an average $170 per session. That is double the average of Facebook shoppers.

Also women utilizing Pinterest follow more retailers than they do on any other social site, according to Google Ad Planner. Women shoppers who use Pinterest are informed customers that do not fit the typical social networker profile.

The cherry on the cupcake: acquiring a Pinterest follower costs between a 1 penny and 50 cents, which is considerably lower than Facebook (50c to $2.50).

Are you leveraging all the marketing power that Pinterest can offer?

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How Analyzing Big Data Can Lead To A Big Payoff For B2B Companies

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Sharability. Reshare. Retweet. Likes. Inbound links. Page views. Social CRM. All of these digital metrics, and many more, when combined, can be described as “Big Data.”  Big Data is more than the latest tech meme. When mined and measured by marketing specialists and then translated into meaningful information that can be used to move a business forward, Big Data can be a goldmine.

But first we have to knock big data down from its scary overlord perch in order to avoid analytics overload. Then we can view Big Data as a delicate gemstone, a collaborative tool to give business access to the most accurate information about its customers and to develop a targeted, data-driven, marketing strategy.

So let’s break down Big Data shall we.

An Engaged Community Can Drive Re/Branding

The best way for your brand to avoid stagnation is to ask yourself these questions:

  • Does my brand generate organic buzz?
  • Where can I reach my customers?
  • What compelling messages are we delivering to our buyers?
  • Are we giving them reasons to come back?

Finding out what brand characteristics resonate with consumers can diagnose your brand health and prescribe ways to strengthen the relationship with consumers therefore increasing brand loyalty and making customers less vulnerable to competitive marketing.

Example: Samsung Galaxy S4

When Samsung launched their Galaxy S4 smartphone, their keynote was all about services and hardware specs were left on the sideline. This strategy was a direct reflection of the data gathered from their consumers’ use of the previous model: S3 adopters cared more about the Samsung’s software prowess than the number of cores their devices had. To become what some are calling “the hottest smartphone company on the planet,” Samsung had to rethink their brand and evolve to become what their consumers expected it to be.

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-samsung-became-the-hottest-smartphone-company-on-the-planet-2013-1

Content Marketing Builds Brand Equity

Word of mouse is the new word of mouth. Producing valued content is the best way to get consumer attention. By monitoring real time social media conversation it is possible to target affluent brand advocates and learn what will reinforce the brand image and make the public remember it. Creating a water cooler moment is a science, not a lottery.

Example: House of Cards only on Netflix

When Netflix produced the 13 episodes of House of Cards, the company delved into the information it gathers from its users in order to identify what type of content as well as who would be the lead actor its consumers would pick. Investing millions on the show was not a gamble, but a sound investment.  Since its release February 1st 2013, House of Cards has become the most watched piece of content on the streaming service and has been the first show watched amongst the vast majority of new subscribers.

Source: http://www.salon.com/2013/02/01/how_netflix_is_turning_viewers_into_puppets/

Engaging The Next Generation of Consumers/Brand Advocates Starts Now

In a world where social media is driven by consumers, not businesses, coping with change isn’t the problem. It’s our behavior. Online strategy needs to be tailored to our customers. The strategies to engage baby boomers are not efficient when it comes to engaging millennials. Building trust with customers is fundamental to business success. Observing trends and their evolution is key in optimizing the reach and success of a social marketing campaign among the target.

Example: NASA’S Curiosity

To gather public support in order to keep its government funding, NASA decided to learn about the online behavior of its future brand advocates and turn the launch of the Mars-bound probe Curiosity into an event engaging audiences across all platforms. From hyping and then live streaming the “7 minutes of terror” to posting tweets and broadcasting the new tune from Will.i.am from the surface of the red planet, Curiosity has had the same impact on the public perception of NASA as the Moon landing.

Source: http://www.technewsdaily.com/17274-mars-curiosity-social-media-secrets.html

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What Is Inbound Marketing?

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For more than a century, marketing and advertising have been defined by interruptive marketing techniques such as print, radio, and television commercials, cold-calling, sales flyers, and telemarketing.

However, a new era is upon us where the populace is consuming media on their own terms, eschewing commercials, initiating their own search, and embracing social discovery of the products and services they need and want.

It’s no surprise then that marketers are left wondering why it’s getting harder to sell!

Inbound marketing is based on the concept of earning the attention of prospects, making yourself easy to be found, and drawing customers to your website by producing content customers value. These blogs, audio, video, eBooks, eNewsletters, white papers, SEO articles, social media marketing, and other forms of content marketing are considered inbound marketing.

Therefore, the process of Inbound Marketing facilitates and hastens client discovery of your offerings, increases web traffic, generates leads, facilitates sales conversations, and builds loyalty with consumers.

1. Generate more traffic
2. Turn visitors into leads
3. Convert leads to sales
4. Turn customers into repeat higher margin customers
5. Analyze, refine, and repeat

Inbound marketing is especially effective for those businesses with long research cycles and knowledge-based products. In these areas prospects are more likely to get informed and hire those who demonstrate expertise.

In the words of an accomplished marketing professional and new client who found Momentum as a result of our own inbound marketing techniques…
“I need to know enough to know who to hire to get the job done.”

Inbound Marketing will allow you to out maneuver your competition, and be regarded as the expert in your field at the moment of interest.

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What is a Digital Strategy?

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A well-conceived and properly developed digital strategy is absolutely critical to most every successful marketing plan. When executed, it will leverage all your internet, social, and content marketing initiatives in a way that will generate leads and result in new revenue incredibly fast.

Every business is different. The only common denominator is that all business –regardless of industry – is evolving at an exponential rate. For this reason, it is critical that marketers access the best expertise available to design and create an effective ecosystem that is optimized to deliver the desired results.

The digital ecosystem schematic will illustrate how internet traffic (demand) will be generated and how it is commandeered and routed between web site, blog, audio, video, ebooks, eNewsletters, as well as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and other social sharing platforms.

All internet marketing, social media, and content initiatives must facilitate discovery and inspire social sharing across all appropriate platforms. All content should be shaped specifically for the venue in which it is deployed. And above all, clear rules of engagement must be implemented to avoid public relations disasters.

When working with a good digital agency, it’s not necessary that you have all the answers. Your digital experts will guide you through the process and begin delivering results your business needs and deserves.

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