The future of direct marketing

Future Gazing fun

In case you haven’t read enough prediction pieces for 2012, I’ve just provided my two penn’orth to the Royal Mail’s Mail Media Centre website.

Here is a little snippet:

What’s in store for direct marketers in 2012?

Social media in 2012
Katie Lee, owner, Miramus Media

Customer service goes social
Many companies already realise that social CRM is a low-cost and effective way to engage with customers. Customer service teams specialising in social media will become more popular, especially as companies start to make use of the increasingly sophisticated social media measuring tools to monitor success rates and tweak activity.

Long term strategy replace short term stunts
These higher end technologies are all well and good, but the single biggest change in the new year will be that more brands, having understood the power of social marketing and witnessed the growth in social shopping, will start to build a holistic, sustainable social and digital media strategy rather than relying on one-off stunts.

Read the full article: What’s in store for direct marketers in 2012?

How content fits into your social media strategy

Penn Olson recently ran a story about The Big Social Media Marketing Plan, which featured the above diagram. As you can see, content is central to the social media strategy, encouraging engagement and communication. Willis Wee, who penned the post, created the infographic to help those who are new to social media marketing develop a suitable strategy.

Content is key

Knowing the tools is great, but if you don’t have the high-quality content to back it up, you’re unlikely to be successful. Editorial that your community can sink its teeth into lies at the heart of your social media strategy. You can see that the community here are putting in as much as they are getting out and the most engaged and “noisy” of those will act as your brand ambassadors.

It’s also worth noting that without that unique editorial web content, you have a lot less to feed out to your social networks. Being active online isn’t just about making as much noise as possible — even your most faithful followers will tune you out eventually — it’s about working to excite and enthuse your key influentials so they feel they’re getting something out of the relationship.

Want to know more? Keep an eye out for the announcement of dates for our Miramus Secrets of Blogging Success Workshops, We only run them from time to time, so you’ll need to snap up a place quickly!

Recommended Reading:

Want 55% more visitors to your company site? Some pretty amazing stats from Hubspot analysing over 1000 companies. Upshot? Companies with editorial content performed significantly better than those without.
Blogging and social media marketing. Original content is key to success
CEOs are recognising the need for original content — 85% say it’s key to success.
Search Engine Optimization Guide for Beginners – Content is King [Article Intelligence] A really helpful, simple explanation of why editorial content on your site is so important for your search results.

Source: [Penn Olson]

Tempero blog: Social media moderation

The web moderation experts over at Tempero asked us to provide some additional content for the already-excellent Tempero blog.

As specialists in social media moderation, Tempero has some very specific requirements around industry insights and knowledge.

We worked with Tempero's SEO agency to create the right kind of content – the sort that helps improve Page rank without ruining brand credibility.

It's easy to get carried away with SEO optimising content – you see it everywhere. But it's important to build a reputation as a thought leader: you don't want to put off clients (or prospective clients) who don't fancy partnering with a company that smells a bit spammy.

Luckily, building organic SEO through good quality web content, blended with SEO best practice is not as complicated as this sentence makes it sound. In fact, it's what we've been doing for a very long time now.

If you'd like to know more, get in touch with Miramus. We're a friendly bunch!

Check out the Tempero blog for some great advice on social media moderation and the issues around online community management.

Recommended Reading

Why original content is the key to your businesses success online

Blogging for SEO. Improve your Google Rank with good content

Blogging for business. Katie Lee talks to Shaa Wasmund

When I’m not at home staring at the internet, I love nothing more than climbing onto stage to speak about the many benefits of blogging.

Blogging engages your customers, allowing you to gather useful insights and market research. It also improves SEO, benefits customer relations and allows you a base from which to engage with other social media.If you’re running an eCommerce site, you need a blog.

So when Shaa Wasmund asked me to pop into her Sharing the Secrets of Social Media conference at the Sheraton Park Lane on Friday, I was only too happy to oblige!

Katie Lee talks to Shaa Wasmund

Katie Lee talks blogging with Shaa Wasmund

It was a great day, with plenty of inspiring case studies from people who’ve experienced the benefits of social media first hand.

You can track some of the conversations over on Twitter via the SM4B hashtag.

Blogging and social media marketing. Original content is key to success

If you need any further evidence that blogging should be a central part of your social media strategy, a handy new research report has shown just that.

A survey of 450 CEOs revealed that 85 percent of  respondents feel original content is critical to the success of their social media campaign.

Original content

If you’re trying to drive traffic to your site, a blog is not only excellent at natural SEO, it’s also a great way to bring in a new audience via both search and social bookmarking — not to mention traffic from social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Blogging for SEO

If you’re just writing about the latest new products your company offers, you’re unlikely to see a huge increase in traffic or sales, but by producing something that is worth reading, you’re adding valuable content to your site that can be shared amongst online communities.

For more great ideas on how you can add valuable rich media to your site to increase traffic and sales, check out the case studies in the Miramus “Why Your Business Needs a Blog” presentation [4:28, needs audio]

Read full report on HubSpot [via Gold Coast Social Media]

Recommended Reading: Blogging for SEO. Improve your Google ranking with good content.