Since the start of the early 2000s, social media has continued to rise and become one of the most profitable marketing methods for businesses. Social media gives companies direct access to their target market and can create stronger relationships with those customers. With nearly three-quarters of Americans actively using social media monthly, it is vital to have it become part of your marketing strategy.

Create a Solid Social Media Strategy

Before you start posting on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, you must take the time to plan out the social media strategy. Take the time to ask yourself the following questions:

1. What is our target audience seeking on social media platforms?
2. Do we have an existing social media strategy? Have we seen any results?
3. What are our goals for social media marketing?
4. Can we effectively manage multiple social media channels?
5. What are our competitors doing on social media?

Create a social media calendar to push content to the correct social media platforms for proper engagement.

SEO Pro Tip: Use the 80-20 rule for social media marketing. 80% of content to entertain, inform, and educate—20% for brand and product promotion.

Define Social Media Platforms

It is important to take time to define your target audience by understanding where they spend their time. Are your customers primarily on TikTok, or do they spend all day on Twitter or Instagram? The more you know about their social media patterns, the easier it will be to spend most of your time on those social platforms instead.

SEO Pro Tip: Use this helpful social media Audit tool from Hootsuite to evaluate your social media strength.

Find Your Audience

Social media marketing strategies can be successful when you are capable of finding your audience. Start by reviewing the analytics on your website. Find out which platforms they are on the most and go to the social media site’s analytics. Create a marketing strategy that helps to link the two interests to bring in a new audience.

Test Your Advertising

To learn what works for your customers, start by testing different ads on social media platforms. The majority of businesses turn to Facebook for a direct advertising method while Instagram is centered more on “relationship marketing” to strengthen the brand’s image and generate interest.

If you want to see results for a local business, target the local conversations. Facebook groups provide information focused on connecting local customers to local businesses. Look for discussions that pertain to your customers so you can build a more substantial community presence.

Maintaining a strong local presence will expand the trust and loyalty for the company. The higher the interaction rate on social media, the higher your account will appear in the social media search algorithms. Relationship marketing leads to sales over time, based on reputation and trust.

Find the Influencers

Another way to build your following, reputation, and overall visibility is learning who influences your customers on social media. Who do people trust? Why do they follow this influencer? How can you connect with this individual and ask them to promote your product or service?

Instagram influencers often make upwards of $1,000 a post. The micro-influencers assist in establishing brand trust and do not cost as much as the more significant influencers.

Make It Visual

The world today is centered around color. Compelling visuals make for a great way to catch the eye of your target audience. People have come to expect things to be visual and often ignore the posts that are not. Social media networks are all visually-driven. Take a moment to review the top five posts on your feed, how many of those are compelling enough to look at?

Memes are a great way to gain some visual attraction. Start by testing visual posts with older posts by updating them with a new image and seeing how many unique views they receive. The more you watch these trends, the easier it is to see how vital visual posting is for social media.

Use photos to tell a story to your customers. Share the stories of your employees hard at work. Giving your customers a face to connect to names they interact with builds stronger customer relationships.

Social Media Focus Must Be Engaging

Do not just post to post; always look for ways to post something that engages your audience. Do the posts offer value to your customers? If you only post to sell something, you aren’t going to keep your audience motivated. Social media platforms are built upon the foundation of relationships. Look to social media to foster new relationships and strengthen the relationships you already have with your target audience. Posting great content is key to winning on social media.

Respond to Comments and Messages

People have come to expect companies to use social media as their direct source to speak to the company. You must acknowledge when people are commenting and when they send you messages. Respond to comments in the right way and when it is appropriate. Social listening is one of the most critical elements of social media users.

Use Content Scheduling Tools

A great way to free up your time is to use tools like Hootsuite to manage social media. On Hootsuite, you can manage several channels at the same time by planning using the content calendar. A content calendar automates social media marketing and will post the information on the day you choose and with the image and content, you create.

Review and Change Often

Just like the search engine algorithms, social media is always changing. It is important to keep up with the latest information on how to manage social media correctly. Understand how to use new and emerging social media platforms. TikTok is one of the hottest social media platforms in 2020, but not too many small businesses can understand how to use it within their social media marketing tools. Hiring someone with the knowledge and experience with TikTok and emerging apps and tools can help keep your business in the know when it comes to social media.

Social media can drastically alter the way your company connects with your audience. Join Performance Driven Marketing on Tuesday, September 2 to find out how you can empower yourself to drive social media forward for your business!

Google recently rolled out their newest update, which they say is the biggest update in the last 5 years. Google Search is designed to provide the most relevant, helpful results for users and this update is a significant step toward improving these results. BERT is an update that will change the way Google handles queries to provide more useful information. Google’s blog post about BERT lists several before and after examples describing how BERT has ultimately made the search engine results more effective and applicable. If you haven’t yet heard about BERT, now is the time to learn what BERT is and how it might impact your business, as well as your search results.

What is BERT?

BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. It is a form of AI that helps Google to provide better search results by analyzing the relationship between words and their overall context. This is likely one of the most impactful forms of NLP (natural language processing) and is designed to provide more accurate results for more complex search terms. This comes from the idea that users aren’t turning to search engines to find keywords and are more likely to perform searches using a more natural form of language. In most cases, people use search engines to answer a specific question. Before BERT, the search would focus primarily on the keywords, which may bring up results that don’t necessarily pertain to the question. Google says that BERT will improve 1 in every 10 English-language searches, providing better results for 10% of all English queries.

BERT Explained

If a Google user wants to answer a specific question, they are likely to enter that question into the search engine, particularly when using a voice-to-text approach. Users will ask their smart devices the question, rather than simply stating keywords. Prior to BERT, the complexities of some questions would often be ignored, as the search engine didn’t have the tools to analyze the context. Google cites an example where asking for visa information from Brazil to USA would bring up information for US citizens traveling to Brazil. In this example, the “to” is important, but the search engine disregarded the context. BERT is designed to reduce this problem, as it examines the words before and after the main word to more accurately find results. Therefore, in this example, the search results after BERT was implemented brought up information about the Brazilian Embassy in the United States.

In addition to disregarding words that change the meaning of the phrase, Google searches also had difficulty differentiating between words with multiple meanings. There are many words in the English language that have multiple meanings that were previously not differentiated between in Google searches. For example, “rose” can mean a flower or can be a physical movement. “Right” may refer to a direction, a correct answer, or a moral opinion. By analyzing all of the words of the search phrase, BERT brings up results that more effectively answer the original question and pertain to the intended meaning of the word. It can also use synonyms of words to provide effective, accurate results. BERT has currently been released primarily for English searches, as well as a few other languages and locales that use snippets, but will be released for other languages over time.

What Does BERT Mean for SEO?

Ultimately, BERT probably won’t impact SEO a huge amount. It is designed to provide effective search results for more complex phrases, so it likely won’t disrupt keyword rankings in any significant manner. Websites that contain vast amounts of useful information will be found more often than they were previously, while their counterparts with poorly explained or written information will come up in searches less frequently. Text that is mainly keyword stuffing and doesn’t contain any particularly beneficial information will be hurt by this update, but keyword stuffing is already rather heavily penalized by Google’s algorithms. Due to the short time that BERT has been out, it is difficult to gauge just how much of an impact it will have on Google searches, so it may be particularly beneficial to keep an eye on your website’s analytics for the next short while.

Can you Optimize your Website for BERT?

There’s not really any way to optimize a website for BERT. BERT is designed to provide better results for unique phrases that are based on the way an individual would speak naturally. These phrases can’t really be predicted, which means that you can’t use these phrases to optimize your website. Adding regular, useful content for readers is really the only way to take advantage of BERT’s algorithms. This is also a basic component of good SEO practices, so it shouldn’t impact your website too severely. It is important to note that this content needs to be written in natural language to maximize its benefits.

Consult with a Professional

Google is constantly improving and evolving to best meet the demands of their users. For this reason, it can be difficult to keep your website up to date with all of the newest SEO strategies. Not only will you have to invest the time in learning about the new strategies, but you will then have to implement the changes to your website. Hiring a professional SEO specialist can go a long way toward optimizing your website without sacrificing significant amounts of your time. There are many components of a website that help it to be found by relevant consumers. It is important to maintain a blog with frequently added content to provide useful information to your customers. Other things may also impact your website’s SEO ranking, like your website’s responsiveness or mobile functionality.

If you’re struggling with your company’s website, it might be time to consult with an expert. Here at Performance Driven Marketing, we strive to provide you with the tools you need to thrive and obtain success for your business. To learn more about how our internet marketing solutions can benefit your business, contact our experts at 801-326-0582.

Now that we are half-way through 2019, it’s time to look over the changes in the SEO world. What is important to Google, and how can you make sure your website is meeting the Google requirements. Google has spent a great deal of time focusing on mobile and speeding up websites. At Performance Driven Marketing, we provide our customers with monthly insights into website performance, and always focus on improving the user experience. Having a fast, effective website is one of the most important elements to boosting your search engine rankings. Let’s take a look at some of the other elements that contribute to your Google ranking.

Mobile-first indexing

One element you must understand is how Google uses the mobile version of websites to provide ranking and indexing results. A mobile-first index result means Google is considering how well your website provides functionality to the user. Contact us for a free website evaluation to ensure your website is mobile-friendly, and working effectively to attract your core audience.

*PDM Tip – Use our website auditing tool to find out how the search engine spiders see your mobile pages, and to focus on improving certain elements to meet Google requirements.

Our reports will show a complete analysis of your website, and will show the mobile analysis you need to understand in order to ensure your website is meeting the right requirements.

We will also provide a task list of items you can follow in order to update your website, and meet the Google requirements.

Optimization and Speed

Google has also focused extensively on optimization and speed. Speed score reflects how your website loads for each website visitor. Fixing the issues that are preventing your website from being able to load quickly will improve your website ranking. Effective optimization is what matters the most when it comes to improving the rankings. Fortunately there is a list of recommendations from Google that will help you effectively optimize your website. Here are some of the areas where you need to get started:

Build Your Brand

Branding your business in an effective manner is vital to your online results. Using your brand as a ranking signal means you want to have brand mentions. What Google is looking for is the good and the bad, and trying to provide search engine results that show the good. Trust, reputation, complaint-solving, and advertising are all key components to brand building. How can you build your brand? Here are a few suggestions from Google:

• Backlinks – Focus on white-hat backlinking to help your website. What this means is you want to search for brand name mentions in a natural way.
• Reputation management – track your online reputation to know what people are saying about your business. Engage with your satisfied clients, and make sure you are recognizing your customers on social networks.

The search engines are always changing, and being updated. Anyone dealing with strict time-constraints knows how difficult it can be to try and work on your website and online marketing. If you need help with your online marketing efforts, give us a call. Our expert team creates custom solutions based on your business needs, and we do not handcuff you into a contract!