Wednesday, 30 September 2015

Measuring Social Team Member Effectiveness

Measuring-Social-Team-Member-Effectiveness-1

An often neglected way of measuring the success of your social media marketing efforts is looking at the contributions of each team member.

Undoubtedly, your team works hard to drive ROI across all of your social channels; therefore, it is important to identify who’s contributing what, where there are missed opportunities and how to better optimize each team member’s contributions to the overall cause through reporting.

The need to assess efforts at the micro level becomes even more imperative when you consider the impact social has on sales. In fact, according to Internet Retailer, social media influences purchasing behavior even more than retail websites do. Below is the breakdown of impact score by channel, according to the report:

  • Retailers’ social network posts and pages: 35%
  • Price comparison sites: 35%
  • Shopping apps: 34%
  • Brands’ social network posts and pages: 33%
  • Product reviews: 33%
  • Printable coupons: 32%

When it comes to this important function, then, you’ll want to take the following tips into account to ensure your organization is positioned for long-term success.

Choose the Right Team-Focused Goals

To truly understand if your social team’s efforts are paying off, it’s critical to establish what goals your organization is looking to accomplish on each channel. Goals give your social media strategy a focus and help identify what isn’t working to ensure you’re able to quickly adjust your campaigns to account for any missteps.

Setting team-focused goals can both measure the performance of an individual’s contributions and populate data on how well overall campaigns are performing.

Potential Social Media Goals

Goals worth considering for monitoring the success of your social team include:

  • Strong team participation: Gain an understanding of what each team member is contributing to your overall social media management process.
  • Increased efficiency: Develop an overview of which team activities, such as social monitoring or measurement, take the most and least amount of time as well as how each of these features impacts overall results. This will better inform challenges faced by the team while identifying the potential need to hire more talent.
  • Improved customer service: Understand the time it takes for each team member to address customer service requests, then use those insights to improve your team’s response protocols.
  • Proper resource allocation: To better allocate your resources, you need to understand where your team spends the most time and effort on social.
  • Proven impact on ROI: Above all, monitor your team’s contributions to increasing sales, visibility, customer retention and engagement. This will quantify the importance of having a strong social team and enable your organization to optimize the most effective channels.

Pair Metrics to Each Goal

Once you have a clear vision of your larger objectives, match each of your team’s goals with specific, decision-based metrics.

Pure-vanity assessments, such as the amount of followers or Likes on a particular Facebook post, are less meaningful than metrics that illustrate the depth of a customer’s engagement, such as the amount of comments or shares received or the number of customer service requests answered in a given time frame.

Measuring-Social-Team-Member-Effectiveness-Chart2

Embed This Infographic:

Applying Insights Accordingly

The measurement of your social team’s efforts will provide insights into how your organization can continue to grow and improve, as you sift through your data to create an action plan for your entire organization. Here are a few ways team data can be used to impact growth:

  1. Identify team members who aren’t engaged with their job, due to a low task-completion rate; then either better train them, transition them to another role or, if this issue isn’t resolved, let them go.
  2. Understand where the team’s time is spent, then allocate resources to the areas that are the most critical.
  3. Learn more about customer service requests in terms of how they are both received and resolved through social as compared to email, live chat and phone.

Pull Your Own Team Reports

Gaining insights to inform your broader social media strategy is much more manageable with the right tools to help. Below is an example of how to measure and report on team performance, using Sprout Social. In addition to analytics around publishing and task management, this tool will alert you of the speed and rate at which your team is responding to messages. As a result, your organization will be able to increase its efficiency while ensuring your brand is making the right connection with your most valued customers.

Measuring-Social-Team-Member-Effectiveness-Team-Report


 

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How to Use Social Media for Small Business

MailChimp and Skillshare Empower Small Businesses with $100,000 in Scholarships

Now you can shop directly from YouTube videos

Screen Shot 2015-09-30 at 10.00.00
YouTube has started introducing shopping ads, similar to those available on Google, which will allow you to shop directly from the videos you’re watching. The new Shopping ads make it possible for all creators to have shoppable ads in their videos. This is particularly useful for bloggers who might be reviewing a selection of products as anyone watching can now buy the items from within the video. It’s not a surprising move as the Google-owned company also introduced Cards to showcase products in videos and TrueView in recent months, but they only apply to advertiser’s own videos. The new Shopping…

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Tuesday, 29 September 2015

New in Sprout: Attach Images to Your Twitter Direct Messages

Twitter_DM_Upload_Image-01

More and more, customers are reaching out to businesses on Twitter. From asking for store hours to reporting a service issue to troubleshooting a technical difficulty, Twitter provides the right channels (both public and private) to help people solve everyday challenges.

Several recent improvements to Direct Messages in particular have helped to better facilitate the private side of the business-consumer conversation, and Sprout Social has been quick to incorporate these updates.

Today, as we continue building upon these enhancements, we are excited to provide an even better experience for our customers. Because of a deepened partnership, Sprout is one of the first Twitter ecosystem companies with access to new API functionality that supports the ability to upload an image when crafting a Direct Message.

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Use Images to Communicate More Effectively

The ability to add an image is an important part of the Twitter Direct Message experience. There are several instances where including an image would help both parties communicate more effectively. For example:

  • When troubleshooting a technical issue, customers can safely share screenshots that may contain personal or confidential account information.
  • Social customer support agents can save time by attaching a visual asset, such as a step-by-step tutorial, to their DMs rather than transcribing instructions as text only.
  • A brand can demonstrate personality in the same way it might on a public Tweet by including a lighthearted image after resolving an issue.

Attaching an image to a Direct Message from Sprout is easy. Whether replying to a DM from the Smart Inbox or initiating a conversation, simply click the camera icon in the lower left of the compose box, then upload your file.

Twitter as a Platform for Customer Care

As detailed in the Customer Service on Twitter Playbook released earlier this summer, “Twitter offers a one-to-one-to-many interaction, which allows the broader community to form an opinion on your service interaction. Tweets are conversational and public.”

What’s more, as an increasingly important backchannel, Twitter DMs empower businesses to meet growing customer expectations with a tailored, one-to-one experience. In doing so, Twitter not only offers businesses a platform to deliver exceptional social customer service, but it also can enhance operational efficiency to save time and money.

As Twitter expands upon its platform, Sprout will continue working closely with the company to incorporate any new features in a timely manner. This will ensure you have the most up-to-date and powerful set of tools to communicate as openly and as effectively as possible with your customers.

The post New in Sprout: Attach Images to Your Twitter Direct Messages appeared first on Sprout Social.



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Quick Tips Video: How to Create an AWesome Email Newsletter

The email newsletter. It’s one of the most iconic types of emails out there, and it’s easy to see why. The newsletter provides the perfect format for communicating a variety of information with your subscribers, such as company updates, new blog posts and more.

But what’s the right formula for creating one that people want to engage with?

In the latest episode of Quick Tips, we discussed a simple recipe for creating the perfect email newsletter:

In case you missed a tip, read the transcript here:

Oliva (O): Hey everyone – welcome back to Quick Tips. I’m Olivia.

Monica (M): And I’m Monica. Today we wanted to take a couple of minutes to talk about a popular type of email: the newsletter.

O: You know, I’ve always been a big fan of those.

M: Me too.

O: It’s a great way to get a sample of different types of content and updates from a company, and it usually means that I get less frequent emails too, which my inbox definitely appreciates.

M: Agreed. And if you’re looking for an easy way to engage and grow your email audience, the email newsletter is a perfect format for you.

O: What if you’re not sure what to write in a newsletter?

M: Here’s a good place to start: Come up with a template for your newsletter that consists of 3 or 4 different brief topics. This can include your most recent content (like a blog post), curated content, and company updates.  

O: Since you’ll be covering different topics, keep your list of updates brief. Many of your subscribers will be reading your emails on mobile, so your email content should be easily scannable.

M: So now let’s take a closer look at what you can write in your newsletter.

O: If you regularly blog or create long-form content or host weekly podcasts, your email newsletter is a perfect channel for which to share it with your audience.

M: This gets your content in front of more people and lengthens its life. Not to mention, it’s also an easy way to drive traffic back to your website.

O: Why not include your most popular post of the week, and even one that didn’t get as many views.

M: You can do this for any type of content you regularly produce, whether it’s a blog post, podcast, YouTube video, ebook –  you get the idea.

O: You can also use this as a chance to share any contributions you made to other blogs or news outlets. If you authored a unique post that was published on another company’s website, share it with your subscribers to spread the word!

M: Aside from content you’ve written, you can also curate content from your favorite reliable sources. This is a great way to share trending information related to your industry/niche that your subscribers should be aware of.

O: For example, a food blogger might link to an article that talks about a recent food recall. In addition to summarizing the article in a couple of sentences, consider adding your own views on the matter.

M: This helps present yourself and your business as a thought leader in the industry, and it shows that you really understand the people you’re talking to.

O: Now you already have two slots filled in your newsletter – your own content and a piece of curated content. For the final section, consider adding a company update.

M: This can be an upcoming event, webinar, podcast or a new contest – whatever you want to spread the word about, this is your chance to tell your subscribers! It’s a great way to breathe more life into your business and get subscribers engaged.

O: Just make sure the update is relevant to your subscribers and their interests.

M: While that pretty much wraps up our three-pronged approach to creating an email newsletter, there are other things you can share in your newsletter too.

O: Maybe you want to create a newsletter that only has recent blog posts, or has two posts and one company update.

M: There’s no right or wrong approach, as long as you’re meeting the needs of your subscribers. But using your own content, curated content, and company updates is always a great place to start.

O: What ideas do you have for your email subscribers? Tell us about it in the comments!

M: And of course, be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to make sure you never miss a quick tip.

O: That’s it for today; we’ll see you in two weeks!

The post Quick Tips Video: How to Create an AWesome Email Newsletter appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.



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Internal Linking for SEO: Examples and Best Practices



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[Infographic] Your Own Checkable Social Media Checklist

Social Media Managers Checklist-01

Social media is a diverse marketing channel and it can get difficult for managers to remember all the things that make up their workload. That’s why we created this checklist you can consult if you ever feel like you’re forgetting something.

If you’re not sure what one of these items means, scroll down to the bottom where we describe each metric and why it’s important to your brand.

social media checklist

Daily Social Media Checklist

Respond to Inbound Social Messages

At Sprout Social, we think of social media as a channel where customers and brands can come together to communicate openly in order to build lasting relationships. That’s why we believe that responding to inbound social messages from your customers should be the first thing on your checklist.

Monitor & Respond to Brand Mentions

Not every person who mentions your brand or product on social media will tag you in the post. That means it’s important to monitor social media feeds for messages mentioning your brand that don’t actually tag you, so you can still engage with conversations involving your business. Try using a social media monitoring tool to track keywords signaling a conversation you should join.

Create Conversations With Brand Advocates

You may have some social media fans who are more than happy to advocate your products within their own networks. Nurture those relationships so those fans continue to promote your brand to their social following. Even something as simple as favoriting their comment will indicate to them that you really care about the work they’re doing.

Find & Engage With Potential Customers

Just like monitoring for brand and product mentions, it’s possible to monitor social media feeds for prospective customers by tracking keywords that signal purchase intent. For instance, a Chicago hotel company could monitor social for messages that say “vacation in Chicago” and reach out to those users with an exclusive offer.

Research the Social Industry

Social media is one of the most dynamic industries out there. Networks are constantly popping up, shutting down and releasing new features. That’s why it’s important to spend some of your day catching up on industry news and best practices (kind of like what you’re doing now). This industry is lucky enough to have some amazing resources online.

Load Your Social Editorial Calendar

Sharing content is the most fundamental thing you can do on social. While we believe engagement is key, you have to create and post content or you’ll likely see a significant lack in social activity. Take some time to sit down and focus on scheduling social posts, and you can line up entire weeks of content in no time at all. Remember, not every social network requires you to post content as frequently as others.

  • Post 3–6 Times on Facebook
  • Post 1–2 Times on Facebook
  • Post 1–2 Times on Google+
  • Post 1–3 Times on LinkedIn

Study Your Products &Services

Social media managers interact with customers more than most other departments. As such, this role requires taking the time to get familiar with products so managers can successfully navigate conversations with customers.

Monitor Your Competition

Every company should be mindful of their competition and social media is a good way to get a quick view of what you’re up against. Try looking out for recently released products, what your competitors’ customers complain about or find unique marketing strategies that you can adapt to match your own campaigns.

Work On a Blog Post

It’s great to do something that helps develop your own personal brand, especially since every social media manager has a unique perspective they can write about. Try writing a blog post for your company’s site, or for an adjacent site in your industry. You can then use this new article as a piece of content to share with your social media following.

Weekly Social Media Checklist

Engage With Thought Leaders

Almost every industry out there has thought leaders. These are the folks leading their specific market with the latest tips, tricks strategies and advice. It’s great to get yourself in front of the thought leaders in your industry so they may mention you to their large following.

Engage With Marketing Partners

Some companies work closely with other brands on content like events, webinars, eBooks and podcasts. If you have partners like this, it’s always good to interact with them on social in order to grow that relationship.

Discuss Tactics With Your Team

Social media is a team sport. Those working at agencies need to navigate with account managers for each specific company. Specifically for enterprise-size companies, there can be several people working on a single social media profile. Take some time to chat with your co-workers about what you’re seeing and how you can best tackle issues that arise.

Run Your Social Media Analytics

To figure out what will perform best in the future it’s key to look at what has performed well in the past. Use a social media analytics tool to figure out what kind of content resonates with your followers, which networks perform the best for your team, how quickly you’re responding to inbound messages and much more. Then use that information to help plan for the future.

Encourage Sharing Through Employee Advocacy

One of the best ways to get impressions on your social media content is by encouraging your co-workers to share it across their social profiles. This lets employees share content with all of their friends and family members. Try an employee advocacy application to help streamline that process.

Monthly Social Media Checklist

Audit Your Strategy

This is similar to checking out your weekly social media analytics, except it requires you to dive much deeper into your metrics to see what is working and what you need to stop focusing on. We’ve put together a five-step process for conducting your own social media audit that can help you through the process.

Attend Local Events

Part of being a social media manager is actually being social (go figure). It can be fun and productive to attend some local meet-ups to engage with other social managers in your area. The events don’t have to just be about social media either: try looking for some overall marketing or business events as well.

Detox From Social Media

Social media never sleeps: but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to. It’s possible to burn yourself out if you try to keep up with every single message sent to your pages. Train someone on your team to hold down the fort for a day or two each month so you can actually get some much deserved rest and relaxation.

Collaborate With Other Departments

Most departments have a specific place on a business’s social media, and if you can get these groups on board, they can help lighten some of the social load. If you see a question come in on social, simply task it to the proper department and let them respond accordingly.

  • Finance can answer questions about billing.
  • HR can answer questions about job openings.
  • R&D can answer questions about new products.

Quarterly Social Media Checklist

Adjust Quarterly Goals

Set goals each quarter so you know if you’re performing up to your own expectations. If you’re exceeding the goals you set for yourself, create new objectives that continue to challenge you to perform well. If you didn’t hit your goals, revisit where you fell short and analyze what went wrong.

Assess Key Performance Indicators

After you’ve looked at your goals, think about whether or not you’re tracking the proper metrics. There’s not much sense in continuing to hit and exceed your objectives if it turns out that those key performance indicators don’t make much of a difference on your company’s bottom line.

Gauge Team Capacity & Needs

Did you have trouble keeping up this quarter? Even if you managed to stay on top of things, you might have missed some things you wanted test out, but didn’t have the time. If that’s the case, it could be time to think about bringing someone else onto your team to help.

Immediate Social Media Checklist

Check out How Sprout Social Can Help

If you hadn’t noticed, we here at Sprout Social like to provide you with the best tips and advice on all things social. In fact, we have our own social media management and engagement platform that we believe is an amazing fit for social media managers learning from this post.

Our full suite of tools makes it easy to engage, analyze, publish, report, and do so much more with your social media. This makes it easy to quickly check off to-dos from your list. Give it a try completely free for 30-days and see if it’s a good fit for you!

What would you add to your own social checklist? Tell us in the comments so that the next time we update this, it will include everything an active social media manager could ever want.

The post [Infographic] Your Own Checkable Social Media Checklist appeared first on Sprout Social.



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Maintaining Company Culture Through Onboarding

Monday, 28 September 2015

Grow Your Business with Data Insights From Dasheroo + AWeber

Real business goals rely on real data.

Unfortunately, they’re not always the easiest thing to obtain, analyze and digest. Data typically exists in multiple reports or websites, and aggregating all of the metrics into one place can be tricky. As a small business owner, entrepreneur, or whatever your career path may entail, you probably have way too many spinning plates to get bogged down in the numbers.

However, the moment you neglect the metrics, you can start losing sight of your goals. If only there was an application that could pull it all together… (Spoiler alert: There is).

Delightful data insights for the modern marketer

Enter Dasheroo, the simplest way to capture all of your top marketing metrics in one easy-to-use dashboard. Now that Dasheroo integrates with AWeber, you can easily monitor your list growth, email engagement, bounce and unsubscribe rates, and get a list of recently sent emails alongside your other important marketing metrics. Having your AWeber stats displayed with your Google Analytics, Facebook, Twitter, eCommerce, and other custom insights allows you to do more than just track your goals – it helps to connect the dots that’ll help your business grow.

Dasheroo dashboard

Dasheroo’s insight displays can help marketers easily see the correlation between sent emails, social engagement, site traffic, and sales. When side-by-side, it’s apparent what social campaigns may have lead to a jump in email subscribers, and what emails aligned with increases in conversions. You can even create custom insights from feeds or Google Sheets, to leverage and display data from unconventional places.

Turning a Novel Idea into a Successful Project

Last April, I challenged myself to write my first novel in one year. I’ve never written a book before, but wrestled with the desire to do so for over a decade. Finally, I set this big ugly goal, with no plan or metrics to measure myself along the way. Big mistake.

I quickly discovered that without tangible metrics for success, I wouldn’t be able to grow my audience, track my writing progress, and ultimately complete the novel. After outlining milestones, I used Dasheroo to help me along my journey by setting up the following insights.

AWeber Email Marketing

I didn’t want to write my novel in a vacuum. My plan from the beginning was to build an audience and platform through email marketing using AWeber while I was writing, not after it was released. This required me to begin creating regular content on a new blog, and use contextual opt-in forms in my articles to attract subscribers. As the list began to grow, I became focused on improving my email engagement stats. Dasheroo insights can display the overall open and click rate on your emails, and the percentage of bounces and unsubscribes, which is key to gauging engagement.

I was also able to monitor recently sent broadcasts and total number of subscribers.

Dasheroo AWeber screenshot

Dasheroo AWeber screenshot 2

This information also comes in handy, as it reveals areas for you to make improvements and increase engagement. If you notice your open rate is fluctuating, for example, consider tweaking your send times and subject lines. Do emails sent in the early morning get a better open rate than emails sent late at night? Do your personalized subject lines perform better than those that aren’t? These are a few questions you can begin to ask yourself as you dig into the data and analytics.

Custom Charts

Aside from email stats, one of my favorite features within Dasheroo is their ability to display custom data from Google Sheets. Using this integration, I created two custom word count insights to keep track of my most important metrics. With these data points, I can see how many words I’ve written to date, how many words I have left, and my average word count per day. These stats help me see how much closer I’m getting to completing my novel.

dashboard4

If I can create a dashboard to measure the progress of my novel, think of all the awesome things you can do for your business. If you have a goal that can be represented in Google Sheets, you can easily create multiple custom insights to help you measure and achieve success.

For example, you can use this to track inventory of a physical item, track employee performance on a custom leaderboard or track daily events that happen in the physical world – like the amount of high fives your customers might give you each day! With this integration, the possibilities are truly endless.

Google Analytics

If you have a website, you are likely capturing a slew of metrics through Google Analytics. However, the Google Analytics interface can be difficult for novices to navigate. Using Dasheroo, I was able to connect my Google Analytics account to view various insights (e.g., top pages, total daily sessions) alongside my other data to track my blog’s progress.

With this data, you can begin to see how your email, social and content strategies all work together to yield results. And when you can look at it in one place, you can analyze trends and iterate on what works best.

Dasheroo dashboard

Dasheroo dashboard

Dasheroo dashboard

For example, using a Google Analytics insight, you might easily be able to identify that content published and promoted on a Tuesday performs significantly better than content published on a Thursday. Identifying top pages also helps you identify where users are flocking on your site, which can speak volumes about their interests and needs.

Facebook and Twitter

To continue building a platform for my project, I set up a Facebook Page. Dasheroo’s Facebook integration allows you to track a variety of metrics, including clicks, shares, likes, comments, total number of new fans and overall reach. Although my Facebook traffic is admittedly dismal at this time, this dashboard serves as a constant reminder to create and experiment with more engaging posts.

Since my novel is a bit of a hobby, I haven’t invested in any paid social efforts to expand my reach. If you are investing in Facebook’s paid options, these Dasheroo insights will be of much greater use for your brand or business.

Dasheroo dashboard

I purposefully didn’t create a separate Twitter account for my book project, but that didn’t stop me from syncing with my everyday Twitter account and taking advantage of some awesome charts. Dasheroo can pull in a graph of your follower growth, highest engaging tweets and much more. Seeing which tweets received the highest engagement in the past 30 days can have a strong impact on how you plan and create your Twitter content.

All the data, all the time.

I recently read a fantastic blog post by Michael Hyatt titled How to Jumpstart a Stuck Project. In the post, Michael writes, “If we don’t know where we’re headed, it’s impossible to know what it takes to to arrive.”

Whether you want to grow your subscriber list by 20 percent or increase your revenue by 1000 percent, the first step requires setting the goal.

Using a tool like Dasheroo can help you visualize your goals and progress. As an email marketing fanatic, I’m most excited to see my list growth alongside my Google Analytics, social stats and custom wordcount metrics. Checking all of these sources individually would be so time-consuming, and I probably would have given up by now.

So here’s my advice… set the goal, track the data and don’t give up.

Get started with Dasheroo + AWeber and continue to grow your business and hit your goals.

The post Grow Your Business with Data Insights From Dasheroo + AWeber appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.



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How to Get More Likes on Your Content & Posts

A social media guru’s daily, weekly and monthly checklist

checklist
Hmm, I feel like I’m forgetting something.  OK, where to begin? These thoughts will sometimes race through my head when I’m sitting down to focus on social media time. I’ll fire up Twitter and Facebook and Buffer and want really bad to ensure that I’m covering all my bases and spending time in the best way possible. And on the good days, I’m right into the groove where I know exactly what to do next and what are the most important tasks that need to get done. The difference for me is with making a checklist for my social media activities. I’m happy to…

This story continues at The Next Web

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Saturday, 26 September 2015

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Friday, 25 September 2015

#SproutChat Recap: What to Do With Reviews

SproutChat6-insights

Reviews are powerful. Good ones can validate your business and lead to an exponential amount of new users trying or buying your product based on what peers have said. Bad ones can be detrimental to the success of your business. Either way, embracing all kinds of feedback will help guide your product or service in a positive direction.

With that in mind, here is some advice from the #SproutChat community on how to best solicit and then embrace customer feedback.

Start With Offering an Excellent Product or Service

Before looking at reviews, the most important thing to analyze is your product. If you’re working for a company with a poor product or service, you’re always going to be working with a tough crowd.

Seek out Satisfied Customers to Share Their Feedback

The opportunity to get a satisfied customer to write a good review might be right under your nose. Always stay on the lookout for customers making positive comments, giving your organization a shout-out or recommending your product or service. Also, keep a close eye on brand keywords so you don’t miss any social mentions.

Use Insight From Current Reviews to Improve

People who write reviews clearly care about what you are offering—so consider them your most passionate users. Whether they are dissatisfied or super happy customers, their insights are invaluable. Look for patterns or commonalities, and relay the feedback to others in your organization. If you’re not closing that communications loop, what’s your business’ true purpose anyway? Take points from reviews, and make sure your team is consistently improving. When addressing reviews from dissatisfied customers, be sure to show empathy, appreciation and authenticity.

Attract Potential Customers With Positive Reviews

Reviews are content gold. Find reviews that are particularly insightful about your product or service, and reach out to the individuals who submitted them. Also, strategize where a third-party response might have the biggest impact on converting more customers.

Tell Us What You Think & Join Us Next Week

Speaking of reviews, we’d love if you wrote us one on G2 Crowd. Also, be sure to join us every Wednesday (with the exception of next week, September 30) at 2 p.m. CDT for #SproutChat. Get started connecting with our community now here


 

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Meet Team Sprout: Alison, Senior Product Specialist

Meet Team Sprout Alison-01 If you’ve given Sprout Social’s 30-day trial a spin, you’ve likely spoken with a Product Specialist. These experts are a vital part of our team, helping organizations large and small find the right social media management solutions for their business.

Alison Garber serves as a Senior Product Specialist for the corporate sector here at Sprout and in this role she handles inquiries from organizations of 50 or more employees.

Alison started her career in the nonprofit world, then transitioned to a sales role in traditional media before joining Team Sprout—bringing with her a natural curiosity and desire to help others. Read on to learn more about Alison’s career transition, thoughts on culture and top item on her bucket list.

Name: Alison Garber
Department: Sales
Started at Sprout: April 2014

You started at Sprout in April 2014—can you tell me about your career path so far?

Everybody in my family has been in sales. I was the black sheep of the family, because my undergraduate major was in public policy, and I worked in the nonprofit sector. I really wanted to effect change: I worked at a political action committee, then at a women’s foundation and it was awesome. After a while, I got to the point where it was time to move on and try something new.

I had a connection to someone at a PR agency where I had interned when I was younger, and I ended up joining them and working in sales. I was doing outbound sales, or cold calling, for our public relations and media services.

Were there skills and experiences from the nonprofit world that transitioned to your role in sales?

The connection between the two comes down to helping people, whether you’re working in the nonprofit space or as a consultant in the for-profit space. You’re really trying to be of service to somebody. You’re listening to what challenges this person might be facing and you’re trying to come up with a viable solution that works for that person, team and organization. It was a very natural progression for me to move from working for a nonprofit to working with people in a different capacity.

What brought you to Sprout?

Going from PR—traditional media—to social media seemed like a natural progression. I loved the way Sprout’s culture seemed from the online application. The questions were interesting and challenging.

How does the corporate team approach the sales process?

Our team handles organizations with 50 or more employees, and the kind of conversations we have are a lot more consultative. Often people who are trying Sprout are already familiar with social media management platforms, and they’re coming to us because they have very specific pain points. Working with them is a matter of helping them uncover what their needs and problems are and how we could provide a solution.

In your words, an initial sales conversation should feel…

The best kind of initial call should be conversational—talking about what brought you to Sprout Social and what problems you’re trying to solve and keeping the discussion somewhat open ended. As you continue to explore, then you can really roll up your sleeves and figure out what you’re looking for specifically—what features and functionality will help you do your job better.

What trends have you seen in what customers are looking for in a social media management tool?

When it comes to social customer care, everybody’s looking for context. It’s very rewarding to be able to talk about how we offer that conversation management piece—that social CRM with full conversation history. It’s even more exciting with the new Twitter data partnership, since we can give customers access to even more historical data that’s important for social care.

Our ease of use is an asset as well, especially for customers who have large teams and an increasing volume of inbound messages. It’s rewarding to talk with people as they get started in Sprout and watch the lightbulb go off. When they have questions, customers also want to have the safety and security of knowing they can speak to somebody on our support team right away. You don’t have to be an enterprise customer to be directly connected to someone, so that’s really valuable.

What do you find most fulfilling about your role?

The fulfilling part is being able to be of service to people. It’s rewarding to see that the platform is such a helpful tool in people’s day-to-day professional lives. Everyone wants that ROI—everyone wants to see what’s resonating, what’s working and what’s not. Our app is designed to simplify that process. Our reports extract the most helpful metrics so you can modify your social programs based on the data we’re providing. We don’t give you all the numbers under the sun—we give you the important information so you can make decisions that directly benefit your business.

How would you describe the culture on the sales team at Sprout?

The people here are just amazing. It’s fun to have that camaraderie. Oftentimes in sales, you have a designated territory, and it can feel as if you’re working in a silo. At Sprout, because our team handles inbound sales, we aren’t competing against each other. We help each other strategize, we help answer product questions, and we benefit from each other’s experiences.

I see you all around the office—where’s your favorite place to work in Sprout HQ?

I bounce around so much. I’m never in one place for long, but my favorite spot is the high-top tables. The sun beams through, I can put my feet up, and it’s nice and quiet, but I can still hear my phone ring and run over to get it.

AlisonWorking2

Outside of work, what do you enjoy doing?

I love the outdoors, and I love live music. Ravinia is one of my favorite places to go in the summer. I also love to travel, and my bucket list includes a lot of hikes. Climbing Machu Picchu is next on my list.

So beyond, perhaps, the ability to fly anywhere in the world, what would you want your superpower to be?

Probably time travel. I’d love to see what it’s like in the medieval times—it wasn’t a great time to live as a woman, but it would be so interesting. Or to see what it’s going to be like in the next 100 or 200 years.

What advice would you give someone looking to join Team Sprout?

Having a genuine curiosity has really helped me in my career; it creates a sincerity that I think comes across on the phone when I’m speaking to potential customers. You have to be inquisitive and eager to learn about their use case, not just trying to get a deal in the books. That type of personality will help you in terms of sales, in terms of retention and in terms of culture. If you really care about the product, and you’re interested in working an environment with a variety of different sales teams—sales development, inbound sales, customer success—you should definitely join Team Sprout.

Insights-CTAs_Recruiting-01

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How Much Time Does SEO Really Take?

Initiating an effective SEO campaign is time-consuming, but it's essential for success in the competitive digital landscape. Here's a basic breakdown of the process.

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Thursday, 24 September 2015

Experimenting on New or Niche Social Channels Without Wasting Time

4 Ways To Grow Your Email List with YouTube

If you’re producing content for YouTube, you already know the benefits of the platform. Every day, viewers watch hundreds of millions of hours of video content on YouTube – and every year viewing stats increase at an astounding rate.

While YouTube is the undeniable King of Video on the Internet, it can still be a bit of a passive experience. If you have a product or service to sell, you need engaged viewers who don’t just watch your content, but act on it as well.

With email marketing, it becomes easier to build a loyal audience for not only your YouTube channel, but your business as well. While there are a number of benefits for using video in your marketing strategy, we’re going to look at different ways to encourage viewers to sign up to your email list and increase engagement.

But first, let’s take a look at why tying email marketing to your video strategy is important in the first place.

Using email marketing to engage your viewers.

Email is still one of the best ways to keep in touch with an audience. Why? Because it allows you to connect with them in a place they check every day: their inbox.

While YouTube does send email digests about your content to your subscribers, it also contains content from other channels to which they’re subscribed. And not only will your content have to compete with others, viewers also have the option to turn off these email notifications altogether.

When you have your own email list, you’re able to communicate exclusively with an audience of engaged viewers who enjoy watching your videos and are interested in your products or services. With email, you can let viewers know when a new video is released, or share other content they might find valuable, such as a blog post or ebook. And as you build trust with your subscribers, you can use email to educate them about your products and their benefits.

It’s simply a win-win.

Building your email list on YouTube.

Thankfully, there are a number of ways to turn your YouTube viewers into email subscribers. Let’s begin with step number one.

1. Create engaged video viewers.

When you have a loyal YouTube audience who enjoys your content and looks forward to new videos you post, they’ll be more willing to receive communication from you on other channels. To develop your fanbase, there are three key factors that will be essential to your success: consistency, on-screen personality and communication.

  • Consistency: Video should not be a one-off pursuit. Instead of producing just one great video, you need to continually create great video content that keeps viewers coming back. Develop a content schedule so viewers will know when to expect new episodes in your series.
  • On-Screen Personality: With video, your voice and on-camera appearance are important to making a connection with your audience. Are viewers coming back just because your topic is interesting, or because you’ve explained it in a fun way and added some humor? Develop an on-camera personality that invites people to become repeat watchers.
  • Communication: Every time you produce a video, you need to let people know it exists. While videos are super-shareable on social, they may quickly disappear from your fan’s feeds. When you have a way to keep in contact with your viewers, such as email, you can let them know every time you release a new video.

2. Encourage viewers to sign up to your list.

While your video content should help influence a viewer to sign up to your email list, that might not be enough to get them to subscribe. To get them to sign up, try offering an incentive such as a free ebook, coupon or exclusive video in exchange for their email address.

If you’re a photography blogger, you might give away a free ebook of your favorite photos with how-to tips on camera gear and settings. Or a clothing store owner might offer an exclusive discount to your email subscribers that can be redeemed on their first purchase. Whatever you decide to offer, it should relevant to your niche and deliver additional value to your subscribers.

3. Make it easy to subscribe to your email list.

Turning a viewer into an email subscriber isn’t always easy, but don’t be afraid to talk about your email list directly in your video. If you feature yourself on camera, tell you viewers about your incentive and encourage them to sign up for your email list to receive it.

YouTube also has some tools that will display text within the video, and they’re perfect for capturing your viewer’s attention. Here are my favorites:

Cards

Cards, which are visible in the YouTube player on both desktop and mobile devices, are an interactive element that are overlaid on top of your YouTube video. On a desktop, cards will be displayed first as a teaser with a line of text. The link will still be accessible when viewers hover their cursor over the video player and click the “info” icon.

youtube-card-resized 2

Here are the elements you can customize on a card:

  • Website URL: You can link your card to any URL associated with your Google account. To prevent abuse, verify that you own the domain you are linking to by either uploading a small file to the root of your website, or verifying through your Google Analytics account. You can add URLs to your account through the Advanced Settings panel of your YouTube account.
  • Title/Headline: This should be descriptive of the page to which you’re linking. In this case, it should mention your offer and your email list. This is displayed when the card is clicked either from the teaser or the “info” icon.
  • Call to Action: This text will display below the title/headline on the full card. This text should motivate viewers to click your offer, such as “Sign Up Now” to promote urgency.
  • Image: You can upload your logo or an image to support your offer here. Images are displayed as squares, so you’ll need to format your image accordingly.

You can also control when the teaser text is overlaid on your video by moving the card around the timeline of your video, as shown below:

Annotations

Annotations are another way to add interactivity to your videos. With annotations, you can add a text block on top of your video, position it and link it to your sign up form.

youtube-annotation-resized 2

There are a number of display options such as a speech bubble, title, spotlight, label and note. If you’re in the video, clickable annotations come in handy because you can physically point to it so people won’t miss it.

Do note that annotations only display on desktops, so your mobile viewers won’t see anything in that space if you’re pointing to it. Annotations can also be turned off by viewers in the player settings.

Here are the elements you can customize on an annotation:

  • Website URL: Just like cards, you can link an annotation to any URL associated with your Google account.
  • Text: Customize a message to encourage people to sign up to your list. Be sure to highlight your offer. Try something such as “Subscribe to our email list and get a free ebook!”
  • Text Size: You can change the size of the text to maximize its impact, but be careful of overwhelming your viewers by making it too big.
  • Label Color: You can also customize the color of the background label on many of the annotation types, which is great for matching your brand/video colors.
  • Start & End Times: These values determine how long your annotation is displayed. Reference the time indicator in the YouTube player to determine when your annotation should begin and end.
  • Reposition: You can drag and drop the annotation so that it is positioned where it will be most effectively viewed.

Description Text

The description text of your YouTube video allow for your people to find it in search, but be sure to mention your email list and incentive (if you offer one). An effective description should accurately describe the content of your video, and link to your website and sign up form.

If you’re using tracking links in your description text, consider using a URL shortener such as the one provided by Google or Bitly, as the full URL will be displayed in the description.

4. Create an email and video strategy.

Once you’ve captured the email addresses of your YouTube viewers, you’ll need an autoresponder series that welcomes them to your list. This is also a good opportunity to share more information about yourself and what subscribers can expect from your emails. If you promised an incentive such as a free download, be sure to deliver that as well.

Aside from providing a welcome autoresponder series, you can keep in touch with subscribers by sending one-time broadcast emails every time you upload a new video to YouTube. These broadcasts can be much more personal than the automated emails that YouTube generates, and you can customize the message to include additional information about your paid products as well.

Turning your viewers into valuable subscribers.

YouTube is a great platform for attracting new people to your brand. And when you add email marketing to the mix, you gain a unique opportunity to build an engaged and loyal audience.

Now that you have the tips you need to turn your YouTube viewers into subscribers, you’re ready to get started!

Have you found success turning your YouTube viewers into loyal email subscribers? Tell us about it in the comments!

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