3. INTRODUCTION
What is Social Media Marketing? The general understanding of Social Media and Marketing is
not entirely correct. After much practice, trial and errors, we think we know how to define
SMM in terms of: how it should be utilised and for what purposes. We’ve decided to pass on
some of our valuable knowledge and experience, to help you better understand what goes
on in the “digital” world.
Social Media Marketing is extremely complex yet a rapidly advancing environment. If Face-
book were a country, it would be the most populated in the world. Isn’t that Remarkable? The
Internet, Social Media and Networking Sites have shaken the media sector entirely. Challeng-
ing newspapers, magazines, radio and TV-stations as a source of distributing news and enter-
tainment in line with competing for advertising budgets.
4. The Gift of Social Media
Now Google, Facebook, Twitter and many other social media channels have refined and developed
advertising services that rock the media boat. The gift of Social Media Marketing for business owners
is;
• Engaging with brand loyal customers
• Building brand awareness
• Converting leads into opportunities
• Gaining customer feedback
• Developing products and services
• Increasing your business revenue and so much more.
The How
The demographic of users can be segmented, which makes it possible for advertisers to target their
audience more specifically and at a lower cost than traditional mass-media channels. Online custom-
ers spend a lot of their time on social networking sites. Research shows that; while the average individ-
ual might only spend 20-30 minutes per day, many others spend multiple hours every day.
SMM combined with a good plan should include a variety of strategies, and methods that can effective-
ly reach and target your desired audience. Email marketing, newsletters, campaigns along with social
media networking sites are definitely worth the time and effort you invest.
The Why
The Internet has become the backbone of society in most countries. The numbers of “digitally native”
people are growing. Therefore, the best way to market your products and services and expand your
brand’s recognition, is via channels that web users love to network, share content and interact on.
For instance, Facebook ranks highest for being the most popular social networking site. Unless you’ve
been living on a different planet, you will know of or heard about some of the other trendy sites like
Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and so forth.
At Cloudnames, we’ve acquired a set of (new) tools, whereby we are able to reach millions of consum-
ers across the world at the click of mouse (or tap of an icon) through social media marketing.
Consider
We consider a number of major segments before we begin to target new customers or audiences. You
have many target options: location, gravitation, interest, age-group, gender, social communities and
5. interaction (etc), which are all great indications of how to shape or understand your demographic. Your
objectives should be defined by these specific zones of activity.
• We can help you make sense of how you can boost your business on social media. The marketing
strategy that we use is effective and rewarding in targeting a specific segmented audience, and then
being able to mirror that audience.
Also, we know that interaction is key, and the easiest way to better your presence online is to expand
your communication with customers. It’s important that you begin cultivating your brand by utilising
tools with technological capabilities as well as mobility. You can find out more about how to do this in
the following chapters.
Transformation in Broadcasting
We found out from our friends at Salesforce (CRM specialists) that over 90% of the content that exists
online, has come about within the last 24 months of Internet history. This tells us a lot about the
dramatic shift and activity taking place online.
User dependence on the internet to search and find information that is contextual, video or audio
related has become more intense. The demand is always there. If you look at it retrospectively, broad-
casting has transformed extraordinarily.
It took radio stations almost 40 years to reach 50 million listeners, it took Televised channels almost 15
years to reach 50 million viewers, but a Social Media platform like Facebook attained 100 million users,
within the space of 9 months! If this is not incredible, then we don’t know what is.
• Cloudnames can provide you with the right tools to make your Social Media Marketing
experience pleasant. Our services can help you spark up great ideas to share with your audi-
ences, whether it’s your customers or simply your fans that you want to reach out to. If you’re
still not convinced that SMM is the way forward, then simply read on...
6. Things You Can Accomplish With SMM
Customer Acquisition Costs
Exposure
Social Media strategy
Practice Makes Perfect
Dedication and Commitment
Web Appeal
You’ve got the Power
Five Ways You Can Strategise
Social Engagement With Customers
Listen
Be Genuine
Coverage
Sharing is Caring
Business benefits
Five Ways To Engage
SMM Team
Understanding Customer Needs
Choosing Social Media Channels
Start with Facebook
Low Cost
Personal Touches
Increasing recognition
Advertising with Facebook
Target the right audience
Twitter
Followers
How often you should post
Promoting on Twitter
Gaining insight
Linkedin
Connect
Visibility
Youtube
The Audience
Rank High
Massive platform
Make your own channel
Grow your audience
Promoting your content
Mobile users
Cloudnames can help
Google+
Impact on Google search have high value
Hangouts
Circles and email notifications
The Author
Collections
Analytics and reporting
Other Google integrations
Google+ for marketing
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7. Instagram
Creating a profile on Instagram
Get more followers
What to post on Instagram
Pinterest
WHEN, WHAT & HOW
Management Tools
Six Self Service Tools
Four Enterprise Tools
Prepare your website
Developing your Brand
Content Marketing
Call To Action
What is a landing page?
Issues with low conversion
Blog Pages
Support Community
Crisis Management
Email Conversion
Tracking Pixels
Google Analytics
Google AdWords
Social Media Policies
Policies to Minimise Risk
Facebook
Collect all data
Connections
Your devices
George Orwell’s 1984
Twitter
LinkedIn
Limitations
Criteria
HOW CLOUDNAMES CAN HELP YOU
CLOUDNAMES DOMAIN NAMES
CLOUDNAMES APPS
CLOUDNAMES MANAGED WEB DESIGN PACKAGES
CLOUDNAMES SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION MANAGEMENT
CLOUDNAMES SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING MANAGEMENT
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Things You Can Accomplish With SMM
At Cloudnames we lead by example because we have first hand knowledge on Social Media Marketing.
Before we advise our clients on the best strategies to put in place, we carry-out some tests within our
own platform.
We promote content relating to our products and services, as well as other topical news and interests
in the limelight.
• And if you’ve heard about us... then we can safely assume that it must be working!
Keep in mind that 93% of well established companies are reported to use social media as a marketing
tool. Those numbers are impressively high and so will be, your business potential. The saying goes: if
you can’t beat them [competitors], then why not join them!
Customer Acquisition Costs
Reducing Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) should be a key driver for your marketing effort. The lower
the customer acquisition cost the more effectively your budget will be spent. And with the new oppor-
tunities that come with Social Media Marketing, you can reduce CAC dramatically.
You can achieve this by targeting your audience in a more specific way and by measuring all activities.
With SMM, as mentioned before, you can reach out to a high volume of potential and existing custom-
ers, simply by making your brand interactive.
Why not increase website traffic? You can gain great conversions and develop your brand identity as
well as build positive brand association. We advise our customers to establish social communities too,
directing their focus on interactions with the customer (identifiable by their common interests and
activities).
• At Cloudnames we have found a two-way communication with our audiences through collabora-
tion and sharing of content, which as a result gives us a promising networked relationship with the
audience.
Exposure
Jumping on the phenomenal SMM wagon will mean that you can obtain great exposure for your
business, which will generate leads and improve your sales in return. Social Media caters to any market
and any budget; you can start marketing at prices lower than a cup of coffee!
Did you know that an astonishing 56% of consumers, under the age of 35 interact with their favourite
brands on Facebook? Skilled marketers can sometimes get their messages shared and distributed
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organically without having to pay anything. The dream is being “the one” who had a campaign to go viral
overnight.
SMM is an extremely competitive platform, especially when trying to reach a higher volume of custom-
ers. Having a strong SMM plan and a well established presence on the web is vital to build consumer
interest. If carried out properly, SMM can transform your business immensely, bringing success
straight to your storefront online.
Social Media Strategy
One thing that we can put on the table is our knowledge, keep in mind that your Social Media Market-
ing strategy will depend on the line of business you are in. Plan well and act fast. Every company will
have their own ambitions set in stone, which is good for organising and deciding what methods are
ideal.
‘What’ we can accomplish with SMM for you is majorly to do with the how. Our team will use tools like
Social Media, Search Engine Optimisation, Content and Email Marketing (and more) to make this
happen.
• Please refer to our free guide to Modern Web Design to see more information about these
features.
Practice Makes Perfect
It is good practice to audit your current state before you develop your SMM plan. You can do this by
going through all your social media activities and assessing how they are working for you. Make sure to
look at which channels you are represented in, who your audiences are in these different channels,
and how your presence is compared to competition.
• We always advise our customers to check on Google search, to see if there are any channels they
don’t own that claims to represent their company. Take control over your brand and your online
existence.
You should evaluate your strategy and mission for all your social media channels. Evaluate the profiles,
understand the management of the profiles and know the team that is working on your social media
activities.
It’s also necessary that you look to centralising all profile ownership, usernames and passwords and
make a clear process for establishing new channels. Simply, look into social media management tools
that can offer you a solution. We cover SMM Tools in later chapters.
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Dedication and Commitment
It’s vital that you create a plan and prepare your content in advance. A neat number, 47% of marketers
(who have more than 3 years of experience) spend at least 16 hours per week focused on social media
marketing activities.
• SMM takes a lot of commitment and our Cloudnames team is more than happy to deal with your
business’ marketing needs.
Luckily, new web technologies have made it simple for everyone to create content and distribute it too.
A blog post, tweet, Instagram post or Youtube video can be easily produced by anyone and shared,
which can then be viewed by millions for free.
There are many popular social networking sites, you should research what purpose each of them serve
(and how it can be useful to your business). Also, clarify and establish your voice depending greatly on
the content you will decide to share. You must aim to stand out from the crowd.
Web Appeal
Roughly five billion posts are published daily on Facebook, so making sure your content is interesting
and appealing for your target audience is key to your online success. By doing so, you will achieve more
growth for your enterprise, have the opportunity to develop on aspects concerning mobile advertising,
and improve digitisation of your business online.
A staggering 63% of customers that decide to share content on a social networking site, state that it
‘matters to them which brand or organisation produces the content’. You should aim to be a brand or
organisation that customers care about, so really think over ways you can sustain loyalty to your brand.
You’ve got the Power
Giving you data-driven insights, your SMM strategy will serve the purpose you set. We recommend that
you develop a plan that aims to cover your overall company needs. Social Media Marketing is most
powerful when you use it to tell stories; this ultimately creates a personal relationship between you and
the customer. The idea is to inspire; so establish your objectives, identify your target audience,
research the market and build an online community.
• The goal is to stay relevant and updated, and establish a presence and voice that you can follow
through with consistency. You can be different and vibrant, depending on what profile you create for
your brand.
Never underestimate how important your customers truly are. A customer should be the most import-
ant person for any organisation. No matter what kind of business you are running or what your aims
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are; the number one rule is to keep the customer satisfied. Technology changes almost always, but
human nature is perpetual. There are many things in life and in business that we admire; and seeing
one person taking care of another is surely admirable.
• We learn; how to deal with different kinds of people and situations online. If you risk not develop-
ing your efforts to build customer loyalty and happiness, you could lose more than just your custom-
ers. Give the right service, and you will be climbing to the top of the food chain.
5 Ways You Can Strategise
1. Objectives: Define your goals and objectives aligned with your general marketing aims, so that your
activity on social media networks are supporting your business ideas and targets.
2. Plan: Create a publishing or content plan describing what to post, when to post it and where. Distri-
bution of your content is a vital part of your overall plan. It all depends on your business, what channels
you want to network on and your target audience.
3. Competition: Check out what or who else is about. Sometimes the best information or lead will
come from your competitors. By looking at what’s already existing, you can find new ideas to be origi-
nal. Get inspired by your customers, competitors and industry leaders.
4. Community: Start building your online community and promote your brand. You can achieve an
organic spread by having visitors to your page liking, following your social feeds and blog posts or any
other content you wish to relay.
This endorses sharing your content and the promotion of content, which you can carry-out at a fee and
spread to a specific target audience. You can also make nifty ads to promote your content or prod-
ucts/services.
5. Test: Tracking everything is vital, we believe that you should never stop testing your objectives. By
using analytic tools you can draw data from your SMM that can help you make improvements and
adjustments effectively that will get you closer to achieving your goals.
Social Engagement With Customers
It’s important to identify which channels to use to reach your desired audience. Here at Cloudnames
we can safely say that, Facebook is one platform you need to proactively use for SMM. Don’t make the
same mistake most businesses do, which is focusing on just the one or two major social channels. You
should explore as many as possible.
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At Cloudnames we have compiled research for the best social media channels. Also, we specify ways
to target the right demographic as well as build communities for brand loyal customers. You can read
more about it in the following chapters.
Listen
Start by listening. Understand what it is that your customers want to know about your business, and
anything in relation to it. Build and relay content that opens up conversation, since this allows people
to come to you with interest and with responses. Also, keep in mind that you stay human in the
process.
• The ability to really listen to your customers means that you are paying attention to their needs.
Listen to the language and the terms they use to describe their problems. Also, the less automated
your are with yes or no exchanges, and joining in on the conversation, means the better chance you
will have of building a successful relationship.
Be Genuine
The less automated your are with yes or no dialogue and also joining in with the conversation, the
better chance you will have of building successful online communities. Always be proactive in the
process.
At Cloudnames we treat our Social Media platform as if it were a real-life place of hang-out. We share
photos, get interesting discussions going (about new trends), talk about events, we even have a ‘fun
stuff’ section where we post videos, photos and other forms of content on a regular basis.
• Keep in mind that; if customers or consumers are the most important factor of the selling process,
then it is up to you as the business owner (or members of the sales team) to ensure that the relation-
ship and bond between the customer and the business is established, existing and valuable in real
terms, and online.
Coverage
Your targeted group and social media efforts will be a testing process at the very beginning. The aim is
to find your presence online and secure an audience of loyal visitors (and customers).
Competitors are bound to use similar platforms, so the more coverage you have on a number of chan-
nels, the better your chance of exposure. Your aim is, to be known.
We’ve discovered that business - consumer relationships are shifting online and consumer habits.
Social Media is not just a contact centre its serves several business functions. This includes, sales,
marketing, product development, PR and collaborative communication.
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• There is a clear indication that customer support, on Social Media platforms is vital. There are
thousands of people who love taking care of customers, and out of them, comes feel-good stories.
You can never place too much importance on a single customer.
Building communities around customer support/help, means that potential and existing customers
are able to communicate about your products and services. This could be in relation to the goods and
services they have already purchased or, even better, what they intend to buy.
These peer-to-peer communications are sometimes happening before contact is made directly with
your business, suggesting that the content you produce and relay should be sufficient and reliable.
We believe that tapping into these forms of communication, held by customers on Social Media
platforms, will help you learn and participate in discussions to leverage these social conversations for
your business benefits.
Sharing is Caring
Let’s take Google for example, they have entered more businesses than we can think of because they
have managed to influence and disrupt the way we search and refine content (which is in itself is just
mind blowing).
Engaging with your customers is one thing, but being able to share and re-share your content suggests
that, you are able to manage being constructively responsive. A blog post or video that gains popularity
quickly on any social media channel may receive a flood of traffic. However, Google Social Search
optimises the way we can share this information, which ultimately aids online marketing due to their
brilliant search engine capabilities.
We can use fantastic tools like Google Social Search to keep control of your brand over social media
channels and by sharing relevant resources frequently. Eventually, you will have the ability to monitor
and extract customer data and intelligence from your Social Media customers via their activities and
interactions.
• You can then use this information to improve and develop your business and as a result increase
your business revenue.
Business benefits
• Being able to provide better customer service.
• Protect and enhance your brand, drive more sales, drive customer loyalty.
• Use customer feedback to improve our products and services.
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Being mindful and attentive to the feedback, and improving your services as a result can help you
attract new customers in seriously competitive business environments.
• Social Media has become an enterprise-wide movement. At Cloudnames we can confidently say
that SMM can positively impact your sales, marketing efforts, customer service and product develop-
ment which is key in meeting your business objectives.
Develop your business personality, prepare your content and start engaging with your prospect or
existing customers on various channels.
Five Ways To Engage
Engage by finding out where your customers hang-out, you can find out from using web analytics, and
by looking at which social media sites have given you the most leads and customers.
You should also pay attention to what the user is mentioning, providing commentary on and what
questionings are being asked. Then, be ready to answer all queries. You must manage your social
platforms well and prepare to respond to a high volume engagement.
1. Befriend customers to your network. Simply add friends or customers to your platform, search for
people using their email addresses, or promote your social media profile and add links throughout
your site. Run promotions or contests that will involve external interest too.
2. Post content, share images and text and company blog articles, it’s always useful to re-share content
created by others.
3. Be active in your engagement with customers, converse in posts and feeds. Reach out and make a
valuable impression.
4. Consistency is vital, you must engage regularly and effectively. Here at Cloudnames we update our
profiles and posts daily. We can help you do the same.
5. Avoid self-promotion all the time, this will tire and bore people. Come with new ideas and interest-
ing information that will keep the customer interested. Although, it is good to update them with
services and products, it’s not always good to boast.
• When you share your content throughout your community, be sure to take the opportunity to
collect data from your users activity and interaction.
Take into consideration the feedback and commentary to understand the direction you should be
heading with your content. Remember to evaluate your strategy over, and continue to develop on your
social media channels to increase more traffic to your website or page.
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Care is about being able to adjust your personality to think like a customer and provide brilliant service
before, during and after purchase.
SMM Team
You should involve all people from your business in your SMM Team. Different employees will most
likely be suited for different stages in the relationship with your customers. Involving people outside of
the marketing department also opens up for one to one engagement, to support your customers and
prospective customers different needs.
In setting up your social care and support team, include and establish; clear goals, customise social
feeds to connect with right customers , engage by depending on the customer's phase in the buying
cycle. Creating engaging content throughout the cycle will help you gain new customers, repeat
purchase, loyalty and customer references.
• There are many ways to offer good care and service online. Don’t forget to stay patient, be alert,
communicate clearly, know your product, keep positive, be calm and learn from each customer in
the process.
Understanding Customer Needs
To have success, SMM demands that you focus on your customers needs. It will vary customer to
customer, depending on which step in the buying cycle they are currently in. Best practise is to focus
on the customer’s need and then build the social media marketing, content and resources around the
demands.
• Customer happiness plays a significant role in how much revenue a customer will generate for
your business, so every customer or opportunity is vital. Best practise is to focus on the customer’s
need and build new ways of bettering your services.
The point of having a social presence is to allow your brand to reach as many people (or potential
customers) as possible, through networked experiences. Spending time on developing communities
and good relationships adds immense value to your business.
If there were no customers, sadly you would not have an existing business to begin with. As obvious as
it sounds, the purpose of your business is to fulfil the needs of the customer.
We believe that providing your visitors or customers with an experience they will never forget is the
way forward. It’s not easy to achieve, but once you’ve started effectively networking, you will start mark-
ing memory with your brand.
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Choosing Social Media Channels
There are an endless amount of Social media channels to choose from. The most popular being Face-
book, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, Pinterest and Instagram.
To understand which channels will work best for you, depend on your line of business and which Social
Media channels your targeted customers prefer. The best way to find out is to conduct a test to identify
your likely suspects.
We recommend that you start with one channel at a time. You should ideally move onto the next chan-
nel, only once you have mastered the channels you are currently using.
Start with Facebook
Facebook has become the best low-cost social media marketing platform. An individual or business
can sign up for free, which is great news for start-ups. This is something we personally utilise too, which
is why we can recommend it without hesitation. If you do not have an online presence yet, this might
be a good place to start your SMM journey.
Having a website is important, as you can redirect your post or blogs straight to your webpage. Your
customers will demand that of you. We endorse Facebook for increasing your own website traffic.
Marketing is critical for any business, while some of the benefits of Facebook is similar to having a
website. The main difference is, it allows you to have access to millions of target audiences that can be
converted to potential and prospective customers.
Low Cost
At a fraction of the cost, Facebook has a straightforward method, all you have to do is share informa-
tion relating to your brand or business. You can create and set-up a page easily, what’s beneficial is the
content and good insight. The idea is to have users interactively communicate with you on this
platform, which will lead up to building your online community.
• The point of having a social presence is to allow your brand to reach as many people (or potential
customers) as possible through networked experiences. Spending time on developing communities
and good relationships ass immense value to your business.
You should consider sharing photos and videos and content that is relating to; what you are about or
what you are offering.
• Try not to self promote too often, as this is sometimes a deterrent. Remember, your existing and
potential customers or fans will be using the platform to socialise on. Make your content interesting
and fun.
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Personal Touches
It’s harder to personalise your website than your Facebook page, which is why we suggest you make
the most of it. The personal touches you put in place will do you wanders. Plus, your customers will be
able to contact you directly on your page, compared to receiving a shabby automated business email.
Language is a very important part of selling, and customers create perceptions about you and your
company based off of the language that you use. By using positive terminologies and applying a
positive attitude with customers can really change how the persuasion will go.
You can use this platform to provide customer support like most businesses do, it shows friendship in
business rather than your typical merchant-buyer relationship, which is not all that exciting.
Also, you will be able to respond to questions and messages faster and efficiently, allowing you to
resolve any issues. Once you’ve come to the stage where you have successfully built an online commu-
nity, you will find customers and page visitors interacting with one another.
• This builds good brand association and brand loyalty, which endorses your business on a unique
level. You leave a good impression with page visitors as well as achieve great customer satisfaction,
helping you develop personal relationships with them.
Increasing recognition
Users or visitors to your page will have the ability to like, comment or share your content. Not only is
this a brilliant multi-level marketing tool, but it means that once your content is liked, those individuals
will help spread your message, which then extends onto their friends who can then see this too and be
directed.
Brands on Facebook frequently post content to avoid losing their organic reach. Adobe Digital Index
analysed 450 billion Facebook post impressions; 525 billion ad impressions from search engines
Google, Yahoo, and Bing; and two million mentions of social streaming applications between
2014-2015.
This is a clear indication that Facebook is vital as a marketing tool, but we also recognise the impor-
tance of being unique and offering something new.
• You need to be willing to switch strategies if your initial objectives are not working for your brand.
Advertising with Facebook
You may have great content that you want to share with your followers or page visitors, but it becomes
impossible to get the level of attention required in order to increase recognition. You should consider
sparing a budget for advertising. You can start small and increase your budget as you go along.
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Facebook will attempt to show the audience ads that are most suitable to the viewer. That's why the
relevance score of your ads are interesting, it determines how much of the audience you will reach.
Keep in mind that an ad with a high relevance score will be delivered to more people at a lower cost.
You should also have a bidding strategy for every ad you create, if two ads have the same relevance
score the one with the highest bid will be shown. A good plan is to test different pictures and remarket
with different audiences and learn how to get a high relevance score before you make bigger invest-
ments. This is what we call it the testing process.
Target the right audience
The brilliant aspects of advertising on Facebook is that you can monitor your ads relevancy scores
while they are running and make adjustments on your audience segment or the creatives. Choosing
the right audience is probably the best way to get a high relevancy score and hence a low cost for your
ad.
Targeting the right audience is paramount and remarketing can be extremely effective too. Remember,
you can choose your audiences by location, age, gender, education, interests, etc. Within the testing
process, you will be able to see clearly who your target audience is or potential audience.
• While choosing an image that resonates with your audience and illustrates your message, be
aware that you will be required to have ownership over the images (or the permission to use it).
Make sure to limit the text on image, as Facebook does not accept ads with pictures that include
more than 20% text.
Twitter
The benefits of using Twitter as a marketing tool is impressive when carried out correctly. Twitter is a
social platform that allows you to potentially interact with customers on a personal level. Personal
reach and interaction is useful as it promotes reliability, and targets customers individually making it
one the best marketing method that can create long lasting relationships.
Twitter started out as a simple messaging system limiting posts to 140 characters. Today, you can do
much more, such as add pictures, videos and longer text that 140 characters (including the good old
#hashtags).
• Twitter is probably perfect for following trends, and comes in handy when following what competi-
tors (or others) have said about your products and services. This is very useful if you need to make
developments of some kind.
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Followers
This popular networking site works on a social structure that is based on followers. You will need to
grow your followers first, in order to see the benefits of it as a social media marketing tool.
Twitter can act as a free press release platform; you can post news and make public announcements
about your business or brand, tweet special offers, encourage customers to find out more, share links
and articles and provide recommendations at any given time.
• Tweeting also allows you to answer questions as well as pose them, which provokes great interac-
tion and consistent engagement with your audience.
How often you should post
We believe that you should stay active on twitter as much as possible. Our research shows that by
keeping your campaigns, tweets and posts light and humorous, informative and intuitive, you have a
better response rate.
• Being consistent with your posts and offering content often means that twitter can be the ideal
platform to display your brand’s personality. This will help build a positive brand association.
Committing to your twitter account means you will not risk losing the interest of your audience or
customer. Don’t let all your hard work go to waste by slacking with posts. Get your SMM plan going, and
be ready ahead of time so that you’re never running out of material to publish.
Twitter operates in real time, so your customer or audience will follow conversations that are happen-
ing in that moment. That is why tweeting should be a consistent thing, ideally you should be ready with
hot topics frequently. Or why not start a new topic, making room for discussions?
• Do you remember Vice Magazines ‘What colour is this dress?’ debate. This post (#thedress) got
millions fascinated, including well known celebs to politicians talking, commenting and interacting
over this one simple question, on Twitter.
Promoting on Twitter
You can use this channel to promote your posts to your preferred audience. You can use promotional
features to boost engagements on your tweets and target website clicks or conversions.
Once you’ve composed your tweet, you can select your audience and budget. Over the last few
months, twitter has enhanced the targeting options. You can target exactly the audience you want,
without having to search through a list of ideal segments or groups.
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Gaining insight
Twitter offers analytics dashboard that is a great help in measuring performance and adjusts
according to the results. You can measure your organic spread and get insights on your audience.
You can also use conversion tracking pixels to acknowledge the effect of your promoted Tweets
and campaigns.
Linkedin
As a platform to market your brand or business, LinkedIn is one of the popular tools to use. The
features and functions of this channel is invaluable. This online network of well established people
from across the world, is brilliant for gaining contacts. From powerful people to creating a link with
your average joe, this channel allows you to reach out to those you would not expect to bump into
in real-life.
LinkedIn brings business people together in a useful way. You can engage with potential customers
by taking part in discussions, and most importantly build valuable connections. Being active and
posting often on your LinkedIn site means that you can effectively build your brand personality.
This increases your likability and creates trust between you and the audience.
Connect
Regardless of your business objectives, you will be able to connect with all kinds of people. You can
offer recruitment, access expert advice and information-sharing with a multitude of groups. We
recommend that you use LinkedIn’s blog promotion tool, which is fantastic for regular updates of
blogs, as well as promoting it.
You can request recommendations from customers, which is the ultimate way to boost your busi-
ness credibility and reputation and gain new customers. With LinkedIn, one major aspect that we
really appreciate is the prospect of higher conversion rates.
• Essentially, what you are doing is humanising your brand by interacting on social media channels
as a person would in society. The only difference is connecting with other people, businesses and
brands on a digital platform instead.
Visibility
A useful feature of LinkedIn is that it allows you to make your profile information available for search
engine index. This means that when your brand or business is put into Google search, it will rank your
LinkedIn business profile at the top, which is great for spreading brand awareness.
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The more quality content you produce that will back your brand, the more effectively you will run your
group, the more support you will get from the community you build. Advertising efforts is huge with
LinkedIn as it has roughly 120 million users globally, this enables you to expand with your target
segment and provide a richer customer experience.
• In addition, with LinkedIn ads you can create tailor made ads by selecting job title, function, indus-
try and company size, seniority, age, gender and other useful options.
Youtube
There are many benefits of using Youtube as part of your SMM. Youtube has viral marketing advantag-
es whether it’s embedding videos or sharing them, you can really create a ripple effect.
The effectiveness of video marketing cannot be denied. Youtube is not just a platform for viewing and
sharing video content, it’s also a major social networking site. It’s also the most shared video content
on the internet.
• And remember, Social media channels work collaboratively, for instance, an impressive 400 tweets
per minute contain a youtube video.
Youtube is brilliant because it’s highly integratible to your social media strategy. By distributing your
Youtube videos on other popular social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn your
business exposure will grow immensely.
The Audience
At Cloudnames we’ve discovered that brands or businesses have the opportunity to go viral with
younger audiences. For example, when companies include a discount code in their social media posts,
an impressive 57% of 18-22 year olds will engage with the post. And 49% of 22-30 year olds will also
engage.
You also have the option of creating and customising your channel. This is fantastic because you can
build your brand personality visually, choosing theme and colours, the modules you wish to display on
your featured videos list. There is a comment section under these videos, which is where interaction
comes alive.
Everyone can automatically comment, respond or approve. There is always the issue of what com-
ments to allow and what not to, this is up to your discretion, or simply be ready to respond quickly.
An estimated one billion users are on Youtube, this gives you the opportunity to reach a huge audience
(if you get the marketing process right).
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• If you feel this is all too much for you to handle, Cloudnames offer great Social Media Market-
ing services that can create and manage these channels for you.
Youtube like all the other social media channels is cost-effective. It’s never really about the budget
you spare for this kind of brand awareness, it's more to do with the time you invest and the content
you provide that will determine whether or not you have a customer worthy platform.
Rank High
Youtube is a powerful tool because creating and posting videos in a worldwide, compatible format
means; it is a perfect platform for staging your products and services. Google owns Youtube, if
your video is searched directly from the site, it will rank high in its search engine.
With its integration capabilities, Youtube has become the second largest search engine. Research
show that an astonishing six billion hours of video is watched every month! Youtube is an online
sensation worldwide, our research also tells us that half of access made to a Youtube page is via a
handheld device, making sure your website is mobile friendly is key.
• You can look at our Guide to Modern Web Design for more information about website features
and functionalities.
Massive platform
YouTube is popular with younger viewers, but all age groups are represented by impressive user
numbers. Teens and young grownups however often prefer watching YouTube rather than tradi-
tional TV channels.
As mentioned before, YouTube is owned by Google (or Alphabet which is the parent company) and
is nicely integrated in the whole Google ecosystem. Including Google+ and AdWords which is help-
ful when using YouTube for marketing. You have fantastic means of targeting your audience on
YouTube and your ranking in Google searches will benefit from it as well.
Make your own channel
With YouTube you can create your own video channel for sharing useful content about your busi-
ness and products, or other videos you want to share. You can easily embed your YouTube videos
and distribute them on your own website, your Social media pages or in email.
You have the option of customising your channel to build your brand personality visually, choosing
theme and colours, the modules you wish to display on your featured videos list. There is a com-
ment section under these videos, which is where interaction comes alive. Everyone can instantly
comment, respond or approve.
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Grow your audience
If you share interesting videos with valuable content, you can grow your audience organically without
much cost implications. Some marketers have had viral success where videos get millions of views at
no cost, because users engage in the content, like it, make comments and share it with friends on
YouTube or other Social networks.
To make it easier for your target audience to find your content you need to tag your content properly.
This is done by using keywords in the description field to optimise search. As mentioned YouTube is
the second largest search engine, so Search Engine Optimisation(SEO) is key.
Be aware that YouTube SEO is following different metrics than traditional SEO. Use YouTube's tag tool
to create search-friendly tags for your video. Google Search also prioritise websites with embedded
YouTube videos.
Promoting your content
You can also promote your channel and videos and hence make sure that it gets the audience you
target. There are specific YouTube options like the video ad format TruView. But you can also use other
Social media to promote your YouTube videos, or you can use Google AdWords to market your videos
to an audience searching for your keywords.
The purpose of all marketing is of course to increase revenue, and video is an extremely effective way
to spread your message. You can put links on your video description to drive traffic to your websites
landing pages, which has shown to deliver high conversion rates.
While all marketing activities have a branding effect, video is effective to drive conversions and our
research indicate as much as 96% increase in conversions when embedded videos are used in email
marketing!
With all your videos make sure you include a “Call to Action” like a link to a landing page or an invitation
to connect or subscribe to your channel.
Mobile users
According to YouTube’s latest statistics, Mobile clients account for more than 50% of views. And mobile
users now spend in average 40 minutes per session watching videos. This is an incredible 100%
increase over last year!This of course underline the importance of having a website and landing pages
that are made for mobile clients.
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Cloudnames can help
We know that many of our readers have a busy schedule and don't want to spend the time that is
necessary to create your own website or manage your digital marketing. If you are among these you
can safely let Cloudnames do the job.
Cloudnames offer a set of web design packages that is matched to different needs and marketing
ambitions. You will still have to provide the content of your webpage, but we will design your webpage
to the highest standards, manage all updates and security, and we keep it updated for you.
We can also help you with your SEO, Search engine marketing, email marketing and Social media
marketing. We can handle all your technical challenges of maintaining all your online presence and
digital marketing.
Google+
Nobody seems to know the value of marketing on Google+, as this search engine giant keeps quiet
about their many active users. All we know is that users are growing high in numbers and marketing
with Google+ does seem to increase your search rankings (among other benefits). If you are serious
about Social Media Marketing you can’t ignore the possibilities of Google+.
There are more than 2.5 billion profiles on G+, made up of YouTube, Gmail and Android users having
an assigned account to them. Less than 10% of the Google+ accounts have a public post, many of
these being YouTube comments or profile picture changes.
Google describes their services as a “social layer” across all its services rather than a social network.
While some claim Google+ have more than 250 million active users, others indicate less than 10 million
actively post on a regular basis.
Impact on Google search have high value
The number one reason to consider G+ for Social media marketing is the impact it has on Google
organic Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). Actively using Google+ for marketing will place your compa-
ny, products and content higher on Google's organic SERP that represents almost 75% of all global
online search.
Google's universal login is tied in to G+, which means that all searches can be traced by them and
connected to the users G+ account.
• Google’s main revenue stream comes from ads, so it is understandable that the detail of segmen-
tation and data you can tap into as an advertiser on G+, is massive.
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Hangouts
Even though G+ have substantially fewer active users than Facebook and other larger networks, its
Hangout feature allows you to connect closer with your audience and get to know your fans in more
detail. You can also set up group chats and video conferences, or host a webinar.
Circles and email notifications
You can organise your connections in circles. For instance, you can group your circles with existing
customers in one circle while potential customers can be grouped according to their different product
interests. This way you enable targeting accordingly.
Another unique feature with G+ is the close link between the social network and email. As all Gmail
users also have a G+ account, the connection between the two is a great opportunity for marketing, as
you can easily distribute your posts by email to your close circles.
The Author
On G+ you can link your personal profile and company page and claim Authorship when you post
articles or other content. Authorship helps build authority and promote the author as an influencer.
• In Search, your personal profile picture will be display you as the author, which of course is great
for promoting yourself as an influencer in your field. Authorship results in higher SEO rankings and
increased clicks from search.
Collections
Google+ earlier this year launched Collections, which is a Pinterest like feature designed to make it
easier to find posts that you like. Google+ Collections makes it possible to categorise your posts by
topics, so your followers easily can find updates they are interested in. Make sure you use hashtags as
well to make your content easy to find.
Analytics and reporting
Google Analytics is nicely integrated and is one of the leading analytics and reporting tools available. In
addition, there are specific tools like Google+ Ripple, which permits you to analyse your circles and
investigate how your content is shared, or find potential profiles that is likely to help you share your
content.
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• Analytics is extremely important when considering social channels for marketing, because you
should base your marketing efforts on facts and not assumptions. With Google+ you have access to
details you need, to measure your success.
Other Google integrations
Google is the largest search engine, but did you know that YouTube is number two? G+ is closely
integrated with YouTube, which is great for posting video and also all comments on YouTube automati-
cally updates G+ as well.
Also Google Maps and Google Drive are integrated, so you can easily share locations and documents
from your drive with connections on G+. Even SoundCloud is integrated so you can share original
recordings.
The G+1 button can be placed on your blog or other pages on your website to make it easy for anyone
to share your content on their G+ profile. The G+1 button also allow your visitors to leave comments
outside of G+, which is useful.
With applications like Post Ads, you have the option of turning posts into interactive web banner ads,
which is valuable for customer interaction.These post ads are so popular that it results in more than
50% increase in engagement than normal advertising. Google ads alone accounts for a little over 64%
of the clicks. Google+ is packed with apps and features and there are 3.rd party software integrations
available as well.
Google+ for marketing
You need to choose channels depending on what line of business you are in and which Social media
your customers and potential customers prefer.
• At Cloudnames we recommend you make profiles and post content on a variety of Social networks
and then test out which channels work better for promoting your content or advertising your prod-
ucts or services. And don’t forget aggregators, Search engine marketing and email when you explore
and make your choice.
The real question of course, is which channel will give you the lowest Customer Acquisition cost (CAC),
and that does not necessarily mean the network with a high number of active users. We have seen big
differences in CAC between the different channels. Facebook and AdWords have very high volumes but
also higher cost than some of the alternatives.
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Instagram
Instagram was first a mobile application before it became available on other devices, which literally
made it a hit. Instagram is about photographs, so it’s a visually based marketing strategy.
With around 400 million Instagram users, this channel is the perfect opportunity to post images and
messages with speed. You can reach your target audience at no cost, unless you want to target on a
wider scale less organically.
Instagram announced that marketers are now able to promote their posts through Application
Programming Interface. Getting little attention outside the tech world, this may well be the next billion
dollar Social network channel. Instagram is an effective marketing tool because it’s a great way to reach
specific and wider audiences.
Back in 2013, Instagram started testing ads, but it is only just recently that this feature has become
available widely. Until recently, you were expected to spend 200.000 USD to be able to promote your
posts, needless to say something most companies could not afford.
• With the new API’s however, promotion prices have quickly changed as Instagram ads are now
available for anyone at a competitive cost.
Creating a profile on Instagram
One of our favourite things about Instagram is the simplicity. It’s very easy to use and when you design
your company profile there are only four options you can customise; profile picture, username, bio and
website URL.
• As you have such limited options, it’s critical that you make the most of it. Your profile picture
should be a close-up of you or your company logo. With this limited space you need to find an image
that resonates with your target audience and reflect your brand.
Your username should be your full business name, so users immediately recognise your title when
they search for your company. Instagram allows you to change username, but that should be avoided
unless you have made a mistake. This of course also go with your website URL.
• Your bio needs a description of your company as well as products or services. Ideally this text
should be short, informative and straightforward.
Get more followers
The best way to connect and build an audience for free on Instagram is by following other users. They
will get a notification and the option to follow you back. Instagram’s search bar and discovery feature
are great places to start.
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Basically the same strategies that drive likes and engagement will also bring you more followers on
Instagram.
Here are a few options to consider:
• Focus on quality rather than quantity. Post often, on Instagram the more often you post the
better, but don’t post irrelevant content. And if response is low, it is better to remove posts that have
low engagement.
• Use popular and trending hashtags. Use hashtags frequently, on Instagram the more hashtags
the better. Use tools to find trending hashtags and those relevant to your line of business.
• Engage with other users, like content and make comments. Engaging with other users will often
make them engage back.
• Promote your Instagram account on your website and other Social accounts.
• Use Call to Actions in your posts. Ask for feedback or offer a link for more information.
What to post on Instagram
If your business is about being visual, creative and involves a lot of photos, images and videos are a
natural part of your business, then Instagram is highly valuable.
Product shots are ideal if you have physical products. But there are many other ways to display them.
You can use images of customers using your products, images from a presentation or product launch,
or a product demo video.
• Again, you risk losing followers if every post you share is about your own products and services. It’s
a good idea to vary your posts, as self promotion can be overwhelming.
You can use images of office environment or workshops held, employees and co-workers that care to
share their moments. There is a human side to every business.
The good thing about photos is that you can display images that can gain emotional responses which
is useful in marketing. You can use images that probe and receive the reactions you desire and create
meaningful relationships, it’s all a testing process to see what works and what doesn’t.
• Take the time to make the right emotional connection through your posts, this will improve your
engagement with potential and existing customers by a milestone. Consider language, colours and
your message.
This social channel has gathered photography lovers from across the globe and invited them to
network onto one platform. This is why marketing your products and services on Instagram is useful
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especially for competitions and giveaways. You can request your followers to like your posts to enter
into a competition, or have them share their photos with a specific hashtag.
• As the saying goes “...a picture speaks of a thousand words...” and every single post will appear in the
feed, meaning everyone gets their time to shine. Your posts are there in the long term too, every-
thing you’ve ever posted can be located in on your business profile, so there is no risk of it getting
lost or buried so far down in your stream.
Pinterest
Pinterest is a digital Pin-board where you can collate images and visually categorise content that you
like. Our research shows that 47 million users are posting content on Pinterest, and the numbers are
expected to grow rapidly. This channel is ideal for marketing because you can build a following, develop
your pinboards and measure the return of your activities. Like Facebook, and many other channels you
can take advantage of paid promotion of your pins.
If you have a certain product you wish to sell, whether it’s a customised T-Shirt or a pair of binoculars,
you can reach out to Pinterest users instantly. Post a photo or image related to what you are retailing
or a service you’re selling and add a price tag. It acts almost like an online shop full of likely customers.
• However, you must be careful not to use this channel purely to push products and services. You
must create a profile that is going to help build your community, you should look to post things that
will inspire your audience, add valuable content and be informative.
You can publish a blog post and pin a photo or image from your article onto your board, simply copy
the URL of the Pin. You can carry this out in line with other social networking sites like Google+. Your
audience will be able to bookmark the page, and read or share the content whenever they please.
Pinterest is very successful in promoting your business. If you already have a personal account, you can
change it to a business platform with no hassle. You can create a goodies page and place it on your
website. Like your SMM plan, you’ll need to create a little list of things to consider and do, to make the
most of Pinterest for your business.
You can begin pinning instantly, and post your infographics and a checklist, both elements add lots of
value to your page because it’s fun, humorous and it’s a grand opportunity to build your brand identity
on this channel for others to see and appreciate. Evoking emotions and using visual imagery is perfect
in terms of marketing, because you can make it shareable.
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WHEN, WHAT & HOW
What should you post? Simply, good content.
When should you post?
• Facebook and Twitter: (ideal post window)13:00pm - 17:00pm
• LinkedIn and Instagram: 7:00am-9:00am and 16:00pm - 18:00pm
• Google+: 9:00am - 11:00am in weekdays
• Pinterest: (works better) 14:00pm - 16:00pm on the weekends
Our research shows that social media updates of your status are not durable. When you tweet for
example, your status or feed is probably good for 15-20 minutes at most. This does not imply that you
should tweet or post something new that often, but acknowledge the idea that sending an update or
tweet for example, does not mean it will be visible for the whole day.
Users move on to more recent items in their newsfeed, so we recommend that you analyse how long
customers or your audience’s engagement last and how much of your content they share. This will
provide you with some insight on the quality of your content as well as the interests your audience.
How often should you post?
You need to test this but here is our general recommendation:
• Facebook: 5-10 post a week
• Twitter: Minimum 5 a day
• LinkedIn: One per weekday
• Google+ and Instagram: Up to 5 a day
If you find that your audience is hungry for content, then you should be prepared to provide it. Aim to
satisfy your audience or customers by being consistent. You’ll have to look at the flow of your content
and the amount of interest it receives. The general guideline though is best when you test your content
on your channels and understand what works best on each platform.
Analytics and Reporting
Analytics and reporting are great tools for understanding the behaviour of your website visitors, so
being able to do the same with your social media channels is vital. With analytics and reporting you can
see the pattern of user behaviour as a result of their online activity.
You can then analyse how this data can impact your brand or business in terms of development. Also,
discovering how effective your campaign, blog post or social feeds are can be achieved by monitoring
the number of visitors that your page attracts, including what time and from which location.
• You can draw more detailed data such as gender, interests, employment and so forth, helping you
to understand what or who your target is.
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Acknowledging the trends and behaviour of users on social media is the key. Collecting all this data is
generally called “Big Data” and there are many tools available to analyse and understand them.
• Here are some questions you should consider in the process: How are your marketing channels
performing? What is the real cost of a conversion and what value do you get back from your invest-
ment? How effective is remarketing to visitors, and how can you use visitors to your website or
customer list and target similar user profiles?
With the growth of your social media visitors, you will see that there is a lot of information that needs
to be collected and made use of when trying to develop your brand or business.
The high volume of likes, shares as well as commentary will mean that your data can be measurable by
using measurement tools. The idea is having listening solutions to aid the huge flow of data and then
distill the useful information.
• You need to be able to monitor all of the conversations and take action. Analytic and measurement
tools have great functionality enabling you to find what you need to take action. Do not limit yourself
to analysing just your posts, look into all spectrums within all your social platforms.
Management Tools
Social Media Marketing is perfect for managing your reputation online. By building an active social
profile on a number of networks and then using it to engage with customers, will empower your brand
in many ways.
You will, effectively remove any negative search results by churning and sharing new and worthy
content (that can diminish all the other searches pre-existing).
SMM management tools make it possible to reach your business objectives. Designed to help you
manage your content, monitor and measure your social media activities. You need to first decide which
tools would be best for you, and you need to make the choice of what kind of management you need
for your business; will it be self-service tools or enterprise tools.
• If you have small to medium sized business we recommend that you look into Self service tools.
And if you have a very large company, than an enterprise social media management tools would be
more ideal. Each segment serves different levels and uses of features.
Six Self Service Tools
1. Sprout Social: Allows you to manage and monitor keyword searches in one stream. You can also
draw from it reports that are beneficial to your business development, from your social media
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accounts. The good thing about this tool is that it enables you to prepare and schedule your content
for all your social media accounts with a brilliant publishing kit, allowing you to manage your tweets and
posts via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus.
• The impressive thing about Sprout Social is the fact that they offer users a mobile application,
meaning you can manage your social accounts on the go!
• One thing that is slightly disheartening, is the price, it is great value for money and definitely a
fantastic tool to manage your social media. But, there are other cheaper options.
2. Hootsuite: comes in at first place. At a much more affordable price and no obligations, HootSuite
offers everything that you need to manage your social accounts effectively. From monitoring your
accounts, producing reports to being able to meet your publishing needs, you can have your social
media accounts displayed on multiple streams.
Although most users prefer the use of a single stream, like Sprout Social Offers. We believe that Hoot-
Suite is most ideal. This tool also has a mobile application to manage your accounts wherever you are,
which means you can always be on-top of your game.
3. AgoraPulse: is ideal for social media marketing management as well as customer relationship man-
agement. Useful for channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest, AgoraPulse supports
contest applications, monitoring and customised reports in a ‘one-click’ process.
All data collected and information, is presented in an inbox feature similar what your emails would look
like; syncing accounts in real-time and keeping record of past conversations and data from fans and
followers.
• AgoraPulse is cost-effective and offers its customers a simple and affordable solution to manage
your social media.
4. Buffer: Covers all social media networks apart from Instagram. This powerful management tool is
fantastic, as the pioneers of social media publishing, Buffer is known to be the best tool in scheduling
content ahead of time.
It’s the best publishing system out there, and offers a free version that is perhaps minimalistic for what
you want to achieve for your social media accounts. We would suggest that it’s a good way to trial the
product. Buffer is great for management and comes is cost-effective. If you are looking for simple and
basic solution, we would recommend that you try it out!
5. Sendible: This tool supports roughly 30 or more social media sites, offering you an array of services
that can really help with managing your networks. Sendible helps with managing your accounts,
content, content discover, contacts, profile, customer engagement, blog content, promotion and
campaigns, monitoring and analytics. Sendible is truly a super tool. Heavy on the price but worth every
dime.
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6. BuzzBundle: BuzzBundle is a tool we use and highly recommend. With BuzzBundle, you get the
flawless social media management you’ve been dreaming of and, most importantly, more social buzz
than you could ever produce by constantly logging in and out of a social account.
Plus, BuzzBundle offers one centralised location to post, respond, and engage in conversation on any
social platform. You can easily see your Twitter, Facebook, blogs, forums and Q&A streams from inside
the tool.
Four Enterprise Tools
1. Spredfast: An enterprise level social media management tool with lots of amazing features. It has
your typical monitoring and measuring across multiple channels with lots of added extras with White
label option for agencies, allowing you to use existing content from other companies and push it
through your own platform. This means that you will always be able to update your channels with
content (without fail). This tool is suitable for enterprises and large agencies.
2. Sprinklr: Is a highly developed management tool for social media marketing, providing a platform for
consulting services for marketers and agencies for B2B and B2C markets. The most valuable feature
for this tool is researching your audience, content promotion, and measurement tools that is suitable
for enterprise level businesses.
3. Oracle Srm: Is an innovative way of management, offering Social Relationship Management and
social marketing over cloud services. This tool offers you a complete and unified platform. Again,
suitable for enterprises. Oracle is fantastic in connecting every interaction your customer has with your
brand. Oracle will offer solutions to leverage the power of social media throughout your business.
4. Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Salesforce has come along way in providing CRM solutions that
positively enhance your customer management. They offer features relating to email marketing,
mobile marketing, web personalisation, advertising and of course social media marketing. With their
Social Studio tool, you can build meaningful relationships with customers via social media channels.
Social Studio is impressive because it encourages you to listen and analyse social media conversations,
which is great for brand or business development. Planning ahead of time and publishing your social
marketing campaigns have never been easier.
• The advantage of using Salesforce Marketing Cloud, it does not just cover your social channels, but
everything that is associated to it. You can collect data on customer behaviour and activity as well as
track and send mobile messages across campaigns. This is an enterprise level Cloud service that will
exceed your expectations.
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Prepare your website
Preparing your website for Social Media Marketing Management is literally about getting organised.
Your content should be ready and available for your audience to view on demand. Your website should
be constantly developing in line with your business goals.
There are many factors you must consider when shaping your brand or business online, whether it’s
about the design or functionality. It’s a promise you make to your customers in the process of building
trust. Making an effort to fulfil their expectations, is key!
• It’s important to keep your content updated. At Cloudnames we offer cloud technology that caters
to businesses of any size including enterprise level services that can literally transform your business
online.
• Our web design packages are tailored to meet your requirements and we work closely with you to
create the most ideal website that will display the culture that best represents your business.
• • You will find that our packages are full of exciting features, and each bundle offers you something
more unique with extra options of enhancing your website.
We introduced the: basic, business, advanced and premium packages targeting different customer
needs. All of these packages offer amazing looking web pages and when you upgrade to a higher
service bundle, you will be investing more money into the development of your business.
• Features include; security, SEO plugin, e-commerce, chat, social media marketing, blog pages,
bookings/reservations, mobile ready and much more! Take a look at our free Modern Web Design
Guide for more information.
Developing your Brand
Make the time to determine some guidelines to develop your brand on social media channels. You
should start thinking about your brand personality or voice. If your brand were a person, what kind of
attributes would you assign to it? Humanising your brand is what will help your SMM venture, and drive
users to your platform.
Consider the following:
• The appearance of your company logo helping customers to identify you.
• What theme you want to run with, from font style to colour attributes.
• A detailed description of what your brand is about and what it stands for.
• Your tone of voice and persona your brand will embody.
• Other structural elements and presentational attributes.
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• We recommend that you make a conscious effort to know your audience for you to be able to build
positive brand association with your customers in mind. The goal is to stay relevant, and establish a
tone of voice that you can follow through with consistency.
• However, you do not have to maintain the same voice on all your social platforms. You can be
different and vibrant on each one, depending on what profile you create for your brand.
Human interaction is what you want to focus on, and developing your brand in this way will enable you
to create a voice or demeanour that can build relationships with your customers or the audience. So,
what comes next? Your content.
Content Marketing
The purpose of content marketing is about attracting visitors to your website by consistently putting
content out there that is relevant to the consumer. It is a process that is ongoing which will enhance
your marketing strategy as it will focus on retaining the flow of information and flood of customers
wanting to know more. It is different from normal advertising. It is not a new discipline, it’s simply evolv-
ing.
CM today, is mainly about interesting content on webpages and company blogs, in essence the aim is
to increase your revenue. About 8 out of 10 companies are allocating larger portions of their budget
from advertising to content marketing this year.
• Being able to communicate with customers without trying to sell them something is important too.
You can drive desirable customer action by creating and sharing interesting, valuable, relevant and
useful content.
Our experience in content marketing tells us that; if someone is following you on your social media
channels, then usually that means they’re interested in what you have to offer. Here at Cloudnames we
would advise that content you share should, not only promote your products and services, but also
involves the common interests of your audience.
Call To Action
A Call to Action will get your community to respond to your efforts, in transforming your social media
marketing into results you’ve been longing for. Your CTA is a brilliant source of engagement with
customers. By offering white paper downloads, email newsletters, promotions and so forth, you will be
able to understand your customers and seeing how well they respond to your call to actions.
• Usually, we love to offer something to the customer that they will find useful or hard to resist.
Providing free information, guides or promotions is the best way to go about it.
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Also, do not forget to use effective marketing hooks that will grab the attention of your visitors/custom-
ers. You need to scream ‘look at me’ with your CTA’s. Call to actions should be highly visible so it’s not
hard to miss.
Using relevant text and graphics will display relevance and your customer will not assume that they are
navigated somewhere other than where they want to be. The call to action should be your prime
instigator to guide your customers toward the purchase process.
• At Cloudnames we have learnt the importance of integrating your campaigns across all your social
media channels. This can really impact your brand and bring you back some great conversions.
• You can visually attract people to your site as well as collect contact details of those that are inter-
ested in what you have to offer.
Campaigns are useful in ingraining your message or promo across all your social profiles and drive
visitors directly to your website. Campaign Landing Pages can truly be the holy grail of any marketing
venture, if you do it correctly!
What is a landing page?
A landing page is a web page that allows your visitors to sign up for your offer. Often referred to as a
“conversion form.” The landing page is a standalone web page distinct from your main website that has
been designed for a single focused objective and directed towards a specific target audience.
A landing page will have one or more of the following conversion purposes:
• Register orders for a product or service
• Capture lead information for remarketing or follow up by sales team
• Give further information that can lead to sales or referrals
• Any other desired call to action; liking your blog page, sharing etc.
The key is to create effective landing pages and make it easy to find them through your various market-
ing activities.
Issues with low conversion
There are a number of common issues in badly designed landing pages or no landing pages at all.
Before you spend big money on your next campaign, we recommend that you develop three to five
versions of your landing pages and test them with a limited audience. Social Media is ideal to drive
highly segmented audience to your test landing pages. Often small design and message adjustments
will make a huge impact on the conversion rate.
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It is usually one or more of these reasons that lead to low conversion:
• The visitor gets a bad user experience because of poor design
• The message on the landing page is not in line with what the visitor expected
• There is too much information and too many details to understand
• There is too little information and the visitor can’t understand the value
• The call to action is not clear to the visitor
You should bear in mind that the best possible conversion you will get from a landing page that has a
nice and clear design (that is consistent).
• Do not waste the opportunity to focus completely on the traffic your campaign is generating. Also
as landing pages are separate from the website they offer great possibilities with reporting and
analytics.
Make sure all your marketing activities have a landing page specifically designed for whatever your
marketing purpose may be. With the right tools it is very easy to set up, and your success rate will
increase.
Blog Pages
A blog page is literally a platform that you can utilise on your website where you can post items regular-
ly. This is an effective way of feeding relevant and current content to your customers. This can be from
sharing thoughts, information to events and updates.
Often a blog is identified as an online journal, although this is true, you can make your blog page a
place to share ideal content about your business demonstrating the passion you may share with your
customers. The internet is a medium that reaches copious amount of people, this is your opportunity
to build good relationships with your potential visitors on your website.
• The purpose of blogging is to attract and retain customers by delivering valuable and relevant
content that enhance their knowledge of your subject. This should be an ongoing process integrated
with your overall marketing strategy, focusing on owning the content rather than renting it.
Content marketing is an art of communication with customers and prospects without a sales pitch.
Instead of pitching your products or services, you inform and educate through valuable high quality
information. Ultimately your efforts will lead to loyal customers rewarding you with their business.
The most valuable kind of content you could provide for your audience or customers is conversing and
sharing information that will make their lives easier. Ideally, you should try and do this by avoiding too
much brand promotion as this could backfire on your accomplishments.
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• Try and contain as much information that is topical and current. Not every piece of content you
share has to come directly from you; sourcing posts and sharing content from other sites can
improve the traffic to your social media channel as well as your website.
Remember to always keep a sense of humour (if you can), your work should not be too serious. Our
‘fun stuff’ blog page at Cloudnames is one of our successful blogs because it is lightweight content and
fun! Your brand should have a personality, and usually the one that works best is your brand embody-
ing a character that is outgoing as well as professional. This is also an ideal way of building your
customer base and online community.
Support Community
Providing reliable services is vital when trying to maintain good customer relations. Your consumers
will look to you for help, and in most cases they will want to reach out to you. We recommend that you
tackle this by creating a support chat forum proven to be the most popular and effective way to
improve customer services and experience.
• Remember, customers are the best way to market your brand; we depend on reviews and feed-
back to better our services here at Cloudnames we advise you do the same.
To build your customer’s confidence implies many things. It shows reliability and our research indicates
that over 50% of online customers say that, being able to ask real time questions is the most valuable
thing a website or social media community could offer. Both loyal and potential new customers will
want to learn more about your products and services.
• If the customer finds it hard to source relevant information (as most people like to carry-out a
product comparison), then your online business should be prepared to deliver support and informa-
tion quickly.
A typical business hears from 4% of its unhappy customers. Your business should be prepared to be
able to change your customer’s experience. According Ruby Newell Legner in “Understanding Custom-
ers”; it takes 12 positive experiences to make up for one unresolved negative experience.
You can even develop a chat system that is an automated dialogue responding to trigger words
presented by the engaging customer. Building a support community on a social media channel means
being able to offer your service consistently; which will be so key to your business and customer satis-
faction.
Implementing chat support platform has never been easier. This simple and effective help service will
exceed your customer’s’ expectation. This is a fantastic way to gain consumer trust and your customers
will be able to reach you or make valuable comments at any given point, which could be outside of your
normal working hours.
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• A support community can boost customer satisfaction as well as better your products and services
resulting in increased revenue.
Crisis Management
The one thing that you can’t control is what commentary or input comes from the visitors or custom-
ers. The last thing that you want to be faced with is a crisis. On your social networks there will be many
who will intentionally cast a dark cloud over your work, and the negatives of that is not being able to
tackle it in time.
• You should always be on the ball with incoming commentaries. Check who has posted what and
when, and if there is any abuse directed towards your brand or just general trash that's often posted,
be sure to be there to handle it in the best possible way.
It’s important to judge the negativity on the basis of ‘usefulness’. As the saying goes, no publicity is bad
publicity unless it’s offensive. You should be able to examine and handle incidents with professional-
ism.
Either remove and block the offender or reply to upset comments with lightness and understanding.
You can try to turn the conversation around, and make a good example of your brand by always keep-
ing spirits high.
You have to be prepared to understand risk and know how to tackle it before it escalates. You can look
into customer support training programmes if you feel you may need more help in this department, or
simply leave it to Cloudnames. We have experience in identifying and preventing a crisis on social chan-
nels.
Email Conversion
It’s better to build customer relations personally, rather than doing it online. But if your business
requires you to engage and build trust with your customers without being able to physically provide a
handshake with every single one of them, then we recommend that you consider the prospect of email
being the king of all conversion; this is why you should capture and collect email addresses.
Creating trust is paramount for bringing in sales. If your prospective customer thinks that your brand
or business is unreliable, they will not spend a single penny (even if you have something they truly want
or need). In traditional sales, trust and credibility is built by demonstrating professionalism and offering
promotional offers face to face.
But, if your business is online (and you cater to your customers globally) your strategy is most often to
carry out online sales. Without a personal meet and greet, you are already at a disadvantage.
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• By the use of Social Media, you can establish brand loyal customers and build a database of poten-
tial customers and utilise their email contacts for your email marketing.
Running an online business makes it pretty easy to find leads. If you have a good looking website and
people pay a visit, you can capture email addresses easily by implementing Call to actions on your blog,
pop up mail listings and landing pages for your ads.
E-mail newsletters or personal mails sent to your leads are what we consider as the king of conver-
sions. Make sure to include a Call to Action in your outgoing emails too. The best way to get people to
leave their email address is to offer something interesting for free which is what we call ‘a lead magnet’.
• At Cloudnames we offer and provide assessment reports and guides to our potential customers.
We share our knowledge on topics surrounding Web Design, SEO and Social Media Marketing. Other
options could be giving away e-books, reports, presentations, training courses etc.
The important thing is to offer something your site visitors are interested in and relevant to your
business. The idea is being able to obtain contact email addresses to be able to send more information
about your products and services that may be of interest to them, not to spam your customers with
needless stuff.
We advise also that the content you share should not be limited; there is a right time and place for
marketing and sending out promotional messages. However, you must take into consideration broad-
ening your horizon and be creative in the process. Your aim and focus should always be about your
marketing efforts of building trust, engagement and community.
Tracking Pixels
Pixel tracking is the method of implementing a 1x1 transparent gif to track a visit on your website or
social media platform. You can utilise this process to track ad impressions or openings of an email.
Pixel Tracking can be carried by a HTML code snippet requesting to follow user behaviours and activi-
ties. When your page is visited, an image request is made by the user’s browser which communicates
to the server in charge of the tracking. The various parameters are passed through a HTTP request and
the server qualifies this action. The server will send a clear gif image and most often a cookie is
dropped.
With tracking your conversions for example, Facebook recognises site visitors from your ad campaigns.
An offsite pixel is put in place to be able to carry this out. This type of pixel is referred to as offsite pixel,
which is a snippet of code provided by Facebook that is placed in the <head> section of a particular
page on your website. This will then send a notification to Facebook informing that a conversion is com-
plete.
Facebook is notified when someone has clicked on your ad, which results in being able to track that
someone outside of Facebook as a result of you adding that snippet of code. You would add that offsite
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pixel to a success page. So once a user purchases Widget 2.0, they will be directed to a success page
that holds your offsite pixel. Facebook then knows that your ad resulted in a successful conversion.
The brilliance of conversion tracking is the fact that Facebook makes use of Optimised CPM to deter-
mine who sees your ads. Also referred to oCPM, permits advertisers to place importance to marketing
aims, and deliver ads in line with those aims. Your ads or campaigns are optimised and served to those
most likely to perform your aimed action. But what are you optimising?
By setting up your offsite pixel, you are set to optimise checkouts, cart, leads, registrations and conver-
sions and so forth. All you have to do is select the group you expect to send your ads to for positive
conversion rate. There are many methods to follow with pixel tracking and a lot you can achieve. How-
ever, we recommend you take the first step to follow your visitors activity before trying to tackle the
more deep end stuff.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is one of the best ways to get detailed knowledge about how your online marketing
activities are meeting your performance goals, and giving you the information you need to decide if you
should change direction or scale up your investment.
The first step should be generating the best keywords for a specific target market. You should not use
general terms and words that do not help to optimize the ad’s performance. Keywords can be decided
based on exact match, phrase match, and broad match.
If your selected keywords are very common and high-volume you will most probably end up far down
on the search result list as the popular search terms will have very high bids. Focus rather on groups
of 5-10 long tail keywords that you group in ad-sets. This will likely save your marketing budget and
increase ROI.
If you are new to Google Analytics and you don’t have an account, you should create one before
proceeding further. When you have established your profile you can customise your dashboard. The
dashboard give you the option to collect all the data you want to see at a glance every time you login.
You can also define multiple dashboards with widgets that display charts, timelines, tables etc. to get a
quick overview.
With Google Analytics you can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines and social
networks, direct visits and referring sites. It tracks display advertising, email marketing and
pay-per-click networks. It also shows you the full customer picture across ads and videos, websites and
social tools, tablets and smartphones.
Information about which content keep your visitors longer on your website or which content have a
high bounce rate is also key. This will allow you to produce more great content that resonates with your
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visitors and less of the content that does not.The knowledge of where your users come from and what
they do on your site will help you tailor your website and marketing to your current customers, and win
new ones.
Google AdWords
Google AdWords is one of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your campaign. It gives you the
possibility to identify the unique features of your products and services. However, if you are not man-
aging your campaigns correctly, it can be a waste of valuable time and money.
Another important point is to use filters. Filters are negative keywords that exclude searches including
these words. Filters are also effective to analyze unsuccessful keywords that will not communicate the
right messages in your campaign. If you don’t test the performance of the keywords you communicate,
You risk wasting time and money on messages with low performance.
• You should not underestimate the importance of the ads you are displaying on Google AdWords.
These ads do not represent the image alone, they communicate effectively how the products are
able to anticipate the customer needs. The consumers will click your ad only if the messages you
relay will meet the their needs.
Relevancy of Ads is also an important feature that plays an essential role in the PPC campaign. The ads
displayed on Google AdWords are relevant only if these ads are able to reach the target market. Man-
aging your ad groups correctly is vital for reaching the target market.
When you create your campaigns you should avoid directing clicks to the homepage of your website.
Don’t leave it to the visitor to find the information they are searching for. Sure, it will be extra work to
create landing pages for every AdWords campaign, but the reward is huge. If this is done right the
visitor have a clear call to action, being able to order directly or leaving their contact information on the
landing page.
Social Media Policies
There are many aspects of social media that requires censorship. Terms of Use are typically put in
place in order to prevent distribution of content that is unethical. We’ve looked into Facebook, Twitter
and LinkedIn policies, and here is what we found!
There are many ways of expressing and displaying yourself on social media channels. Information,
pictures and videos are shared by millions daily on a variety of platforms. However, the one question
that comes to mind is: how safe, inoffensive or acceptable is the content that is being shared by so
many?
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Facebook offers users Terms of Service that detail their policy according to “principles”. They openly
state: “We do our best to keep Facebook safe, but we cannot guarantee it. We need your [the user’s]
help to keep Facebook safe…”
Policies to Minimise Risk
At Cloudnames we know the importance of social media when shaping public thinking, especially
where building an image or brand is concerned.
Minimising the risks of using social media in the wrong way is vital , as wrong content can really be dam-
aging to your business and reputation. Also, there are a lot of false profiles being created and too much
content being shared to monitor individually.
Many local Governmental bodies and authorities have a say over what can be posted on social media
channels like FaceBook and Twitter that ban users that repeat violation. They can deem content as
unacceptable by reserving the right to delete submissions that contain; vulgar language, personal
attacks of any kind, off topic disturbances, advocating illegal activity and so forth.
If you would like to see 300 plus social media policies and templates, please click on this link: http://so-
cialmediagovernance.com/policies/
It’s important that you also think about where your business stands with respect to your desired
relationship with audiences. You need to determine how far you want to go in utilising social media for
brand recognition, engaging with your customers and for driving sales without damaging your reputa-
tion or allowing others to.
Twitter for example, openly admit that they “...do not guarantee the completeness, truthfulness, accu-
racy, or reliability of any Content or communications posted via the Services or endorse any opinions
expressed via the Services.” So being extra careful on these kinds of social networking sites is ideal.
You may be exposed to content that might be offensive, harmful, inaccurate or inappropriate, or in
other cases, you may receive postings that are deceptive or misleading. So what exactly are the policies
of these social media giants? Let’s take a look...
Facebook
“We need your help to keep Facebook safe, which includes the following commitments by you...”
FaceBook requests users to; not post unauthorised commercial communications such as spam, not
collect users' content or information. Users are not to upload viruses or other malicious code.
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Facebook also asks account holders to refrain from bullying, intimidating, or harassing any user and so
forth as "...users are not to facilitate or encourage any violations..." of their policies.
Collect all data
This social media giant has currently declared that for extra security measures they collect information
about users in accordance with their Data Policy. Frankly the list of data collected includes about every-
thing you do on Facebook.
All the things you do are recorded as data, including when you sign up for an account, what content
you create or share, messages you send or communicate with others.
This can include information in or about the content you provide, such as the location of a photo or the
date a file was created. Facebook also compiles data about how you use their Services, such as the
types of content you view or engage with or the frequency and duration of your activities.
Connections
Facebook also collects data about your networks and connections, such as the people you communi-
cate with the most or the groups you like to share with. They also collect contact information you
provide if you upload, sync or import this information (such as an address book) from a device.
Facebook also own your payment information like your credit or debit card number and other card
information, and other account and authentication information, as well as billing, shipping and contact
details.
Your devices
And in case you were not aware, Facebook also collects your device information. Attributes such as the
operating system, hardware version, device settings, file and software names and types, battery and
signal strength, and device identifiers.
Device locations, including specific geographic locations, such as through GPS, Bluetooth, or WiFi
signals. Connection information such as the name of your mobile operator or ISP, browser type,
language and timezone, mobile phone number and IP address.
Technically Facebook has clearly covered all activity zones of a user and in obtaining information detail-
ing everything about your online presence and virtual space. So preventing wrong or hurtful content
should not be very difficult we’d assume.
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As the highest ranking social media channel in the world, the people at Facebook have really sharp-
ened their pencils when it comes to aspects of data-collection and what is presumably meant to
ensure the security of their users.
George Orwell’s 1984
Here at Cloudnames we can’t but wonder if Mark Zuckerberg have read Orwell’s novel 1984, written in
1948. The futuristic novel describes a society where the government, referred to as “Big Brother” is
monitoring every move and everything expressed. Orwell of course could not forsee Facebook or
social networks, and the extreme detail they know about us all.
Twitter
You may use Twitter Services only if you can form a binding contract with Twitter and are not a person
barred from receiving services under the laws of the United States or other applicable jurisdiction.
If you accept these Terms and are using the Services on behalf of a business, organisation, govern-
ment, or other legal entity, you are expected to represent and warrant the authorisation to do so. You
may use the Services only in compliance with these Terms and all applicable local, state, national, and
international laws, rules and regulations.
All Content, whether publicly posted or privately transmitted, is the sole responsibility of the individual
who created the Content. Twitter say that they “... may not monitor or control the Content posted via
the Services and, we cannot take responsibility for such Content. Any use or reliance on any Content
or materials posted via the Services or obtained by you through the Services is at your own risk.”
You can understand that by using their Services, under no circumstances will Twitter be liable for any
Content, including, but not limited to, any errors or omissions, or any loss or damage incurred as a
result of the use of any Content posted, emailed, transmitted or otherwise made available via the
Services.
Unlike Facebook, Twitter hold rights only on title and interest to the Services excluding Content provid-
ed by users.
Twitter enforces rules stating “Our goal is to provide a service that allows you to discover and receive
content from sources that interest you as well as to share your content with others. We respect the
ownership of the content that users share and each user is responsible for the content he or she
provides. Because of these principles, we do not actively monitor and will not censor user content,
except in limited circumstances...”
