Growth Hacking Academy for Startups. All about Inbound Marketing, New SEO world Social Media and Sales 2.0 Tips for Startups and Early Stage Companies looking to increase visibility.
Use Discussion Injection to immediately boost your content exposure
Do you want more exposure for your content?
Content Marketers need to rapidly boost content exposure to target audience if they are going to be successful. At the same time Content Marketers are usually constrained by a limited budget and resources. Achieving exposure on a limited budget demands what could be called “lean visibility”.
I call it Lean Visibility
One of the best ways to achieve rapid exposure is through discussion injection. This is where you join a discussion that is already taking place on a popular social media site like Quora, Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.
These social media sites can be a very good source of customers for your startup when marketed correctly. 43% of all marketers have found a customer on Linkedin and 36% have found at least one customer on Twitter in 2013, according to recent figures released by Hubspot.
Lets take a look on concrete social networks where your effort is most likely profitable.
Finding potential customers on Quora is super simple with Colibri.io
Right now Quora is the secret weapon for building visibility for more than one Silicon Valley startup. Quora users are often early adopters of new technology which can make it a good place to find the first customers for your startup.
Perhaps one of the best pieces of advice about promoting your startup on Quora comes from Babak Nivi from Venture Hacks -
“Quora’s looking for the best answer — not your answer.”
Join the discussion, give the opinion that is most helpful but don’t use the platform simple to promote your company. The marketing savvy users of the site can be very hard on startups which try to abuse the site solely for their own ends.
But if you can't help yourself because your solution is the best answer for posted question - use a disclaimer. It's common on Quora but you have to remember not to abuse it.
It takes less than 5 minutes to reply on a tweet to your potential customer with TweetDeck
Another potential avenue for discussion injection is Twitter chats. Twitter chats occur when a group of Twitter users discuss the same topic using a specific hashtag. The chats occur a specific time and are often on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. You can find an updated list of twitter chats here.
Twitter chats can be a good way to gain exposure among your target market while demonstrating your knowledge in the field. Remember that it is usually not ok to directly promote your brands or products during the Tweet chat. Place a link to your website or landing page in your Twitter profile and let it do your marketing for you. If you want to gain even greater exposure for your startup consider hosting your own Twitter chat.
Use LinkedIn groups for even more exposure
LinkedIn Groups are another excellent place for discussion injection. There are currently over 1.8 million different groups on LinkedIn where you can use the discussion injection. No matter who your ideal user is, there is likely to be a group which matches their profile. You can find an appropriate LinkedIn group to join in the LinkedIn Group directory which can be found here.
One of the keys to success with discussion injection on LinkedIn is to find an active group. To establish activity take a look at the Group Statistics. On this screen you will be able to look at the Groups demographics, growth rates and its activity. One of the key figures to look at is the discussion ratio. This is how many time each post is commented on.
When deciding between different groups to target, choose the group where there are a lot of comments on each post. This may not necessarily be the group that has the most posts overall. To gain exposure for your startup you need to be able to engage people in a conversation.
How to balance small wins against long term strategy
As a Content Marketer getting quick wins and rapid exposure is important if for no other reason than to be able to test your hypothesis. But just because you are using tactics to produce short term boosts in traffic doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be focused on your longer term strategy as well.
Discussion injection provides a good balance between these two strategies because it can create short term bursts of traffic but also result in long term brand recognition. Participating in discussions also provides valuable insights into the minds of your customers and the challenges that they are facing.
When lean visibility is practiced correctly, a limited budget doesn’t have to mean limited exposure for your startup.
Think about potential of this method. With only 30 minutes a day you can create brand awareness, build a reputation, bring valuable traffic to your site and get customers. You must be thinking - how? If I have limited resources, I'm not able to find a proper discussion and give a smart, worth noticing answer in just 30 minutes. We had the same problem. The idea of discussion injection seemed terrific to us, but we often didn't have time to prepare, or it required engaging more than 1 person or took more that just half an hour. That's why we created Growth Ideas in Colibri. These are tailored to your keywords and site tips which shows you exact discussions on Quora, Twitter, etc. where you should inject to gain visibility.
Karol Pokojowczyk is the CEO and Founder of Colibri.io – an online Growth Hacking Tool that helps early stage companies gain best visibility on the web.
Top 7 Inspiring Inbound Marketers that can Boost Your Creativity!
All of us are looking for answers, inspirations, clues and so on (at least we are at Colibri IO). Especially when it comes to marketing. We spend a lot of time on crafting the best campaigns to gain new customers, to dazzle current ones, and to win back ex-customers.
There's a magic in every kind of marketing - a little spark of innovation or well thought strategy. While getting ready to fire up the next big thing, let's review some great professionals!
The list is in random order.
1. Don Martelli
Don is Vice President and Director of Digital Integration at Schneider Associates. He is responsible for crafting multi-faceted communications and digital strategies that increase brand awareness and engagement. If you are looking for interesting Twitter statuses or quick reads - he's your guy. BigGuyD.
2. Jason White
Jason is Director of Search Engine Optimization at Dragon Search. He has been actively involved in many different forms of marketing including: branding, guerrilla marketing, PPC, email marketing, reputation management and his favorite - SEO. Follow him on Twitter to keep up with SEO news!
3. Danny Groner
Danny is, as he calls himself, The Hardest Working Man in Photo Biz. That's because he is responsible for partnerships and outreach at Shutterstock. Why he's on this list? Thanks to his Medium profile.
4. Grant Tilus
Grant is Inbound Marketing Manager at Collegis Education. His specialties are: Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing, SEO, Internet Marketing, Blogging... You just should check his Twitter.
5. Adam Connell
Adam is Marketing Manager at UK Linkology where he builds websites, traffic, links, authority and reader engagement. His posts are very resourceful, check it here.
6. David Christopher
David is Senior Inbound Marketing Manager at OPUBCO Communications Group. He also founded Confluence, and he's Oklahoma City's first blogger. That's why it is a pleasure to read his blog.
7. Joseph McKeating
Joseph is founder of Pulsar Strategy. If you are looking for great content, you should check his Editorial IV and Medium.
Having defined what growth hacking is, you can find a lot of examples of growth hacks - some are easy and clever, some need time and work. You can do your research, find the adequate one, re-think it and implement it. But it doesn’t always work. Lack of skills, mismatched growth hack to the stage of your startup - there’s are various reasons. After such a moment it’s good to go back to the basics - inspiration. Here you can find growth hacking success stories. But don’t you worry - you won’t find here classic examples like Dropbox, Facebook or Hotmail. This is a fresh list, updated on: 3/5/2014. Here we go!
1. Treehouse
Treehouse was launched in 2011 by Ryan Carson. It’s an online interactive educational platform which teaches web design, web development, and gives business education classes about starting your own business to everyone in the world who wants to learn. In 2011, Ryan Carson in the interview on Mixergy said that Treehouse is making $1.7 million revenue. And has 49,000 users, retrieved 27 November 2013.
Except of having a great product, Treehouse did a few growth hacks, including:
- creating a blog which was the source of valuable content. Later, the ads of Treehouse were placed on that blog and in addition they offered few free videos. Ryan Carson said: „I definitely believe what Brad Felt said about the best way to do marketing is through thought leadership. We do a lot of let’s write about interesting things on the cutting edge, let’s teach interesting things, let’s be seen as the experts, let’s be seen as helping people.”
- leveraging Twitter. From the begging Ryan used Twitter as a source of validation for his idea. When he had a MVP, he tweeted to web designers and developers, asking for checking out his wire-framed homepage. He got back 90% positive response with the opinion „I would pay for it”.
- decreasing churn rate while engaging people in the product: double win! At some point, Treehouse reached 12% churn rate per month. At that time, after 10 months with 12% churn, Treehouse would be be pretty much at zero. This is the moment of quick reaction: Treehouse implemented clever motivation system based on unlocking badges to encourage students to keep learning. 23,000 badges got unlocked in the first week of Treehouse.
- Extra: level hard. This is super effective hack, and it worked for Treehouse, but it’s very hard to pull off. After launch on TechCrunch, Treehouse increased its revenue by 38% in 7 days and number of paying members by 46% in 7 days.
2. WhatRunsWhere
WhatRunsWhere is an online advertising service. It was founded by Max Teitelbaum and Michael Cojanu. WhatRunsWhere allows you to look up what advertisers are doing online, where they are running ads, from who they are buying inventory, and what exact ads they are using. Growth hacks of WhatRunsWhere focus on winning back lost customers. It’s very interesing: Max does all of WhatRunsWhere support e-mail (at least he did). He dedicates an hour or two a day for sitting down and doing our support e-mail from customers who send feedback. As soon as customers cancel, Max asks why and he gets that feedback. It is extraordinarily important. What WhatRunsWhere also do is categorizing customers by putting them on lists „he wants this feature”, „he wants this interface”, etc. After consideration, they pick the best ideas and implement them. Thanks to that they can contact customers again with good news. With this tactic they retained one out of every 4 users. They also used content marketing strategy: distribution of a guide „how to start media buying” was extremely helpful and made people try out WhatRunsWhere.
3. Eventbrite
Eventbrite was founded in 2006 as a self-service for people to create and manage events and sell tickets. According to TechCrunch, Eventbrite has 20 million users (retrieved 3 August 2012).
According to Vipul Sharma, Director of Data Engineering, Eventbrite users click at least one link in about 50 percent of the emails they open. It’s an impressive rate, right? They achieved it thanks to the recommendation system, which is based on data from users of Facebook account and, additionaly, on event history of user. It’s a huge amount of data but it’s led to 50 million tickets sold. This is the ultimate growth hack: pushing your product further.
4. Visual.ly
Visual.ly was founded by Stew Langille, Lee Sherman, Tal Siach and Adam Breckler in 2011. At the beginning they focused on infographics as, according to team’s observations, they generated 30 times more traffic than a text article. Visual.ly is basiclly a communnity platform for publishers, designers and researchers. In 2012 Visual.ly community hit 145,000 users thanks to launching of social features. Those features let users like, share and follow their favourite topics, designers etc. It triggered the following actions: the community got stronger, so the user-base got stronger too, and it helped to promote the best pieces of work.
5. Bidsketch
Bidsketch was founded in 2009 by Ruben Gamez. Bidsketch is an application that lets you create, track, customize, and design beautiful proposals. Bidsketch user base grown to 1,000 users thanks to quite risky growth hack - removal of a free plan. According to Ruben, Bidsketch was getting a lot of people signing up for the free plan but nobody was going for the paid plan. So Ruben decided to kill the free plan. Thanks to it, Bidsketch got 10 times the amount of paid plan sign ups than normal. Bidsketch also took the opportunity and acquired competitor, which later turned out to be a perfect source of valuable traffic.
On 11th of February, the walking encyclopedia of growth hacking tactics - Jon Yongfook, organized Ask Me Anything. We were there - check out the craziest growth hacking ideas!
Jon Yongfook is an entrepreneur based in Asia, operating out of Japan and Singapore. He is a creator of awesome 21 Actionable Growth Hacking Tactics. On Tuesday AMA he agreed to answer questions related with growth hacking tactics, content marketing, A/B testing, lifecycle marketing and his previous startups. We've took our chances, and together with other users asked a lot of questions. Here's a summary, growth hacking in Q&A:
Q: Do you think that coding skills are a must for a growth hacker?
A: Not going to sugar coat this: Yes. I think coding skills are a must to be a tech entrepreneur in general. It's an utterly priceless investment of your time.
Q: What do you think are the most underrated distribution channels for a consumer oriented startup?
A: Honestly? Probably TV. It's something that a lot of startups never think about, either because it's too expensive or because they don't think that the ROI is there (because we don't watch tv, so nobody else does, right?).
But there's still something magical about TV. It's mass, it's automatic social proof ("as seen on TV"), it connects you with demographics that you might never have reached before.
Q: Do you think there is a generic growth hacking strategy that one can apply to any industry?
A: I think lifecycle marketing is something that applies to nearly all businesses. Lifecycle marketing is a huge area, but just as one tiny example - having some kind of automated check in place to email a customer with an offer, based on some kind of intelligence. The key is doing it automatically, and therefore effortlessly at scale. Not everyone will respond to those sorts of emails, but the % that do make it worth the upfront effort to set it up, especially since ongoing maintenance of this kind of system is minimal.
Q: Where would you recommend putting your advertising dollars to use them most effectively?
A: Pick the type of advertising your team can execute the best. Test it. If it doesn't produce results, try another channel.
And the most important message to all startups:
Startup marketing is about trying lots of different things and seeing what works for you. That’s it.
What questions do you have in mind? Which answer is the most valuable one? Let us know!
Karol Pokojowczyk is the CEO and Founder of Colibri.io – an online Growth Hacking Tool. Previously founded 2.0 Web Solutions (Drupal Agency), managed developers and helped number of companies grow online.
52 San Francisco Bay Area Startups To Watch in 2014
During our stay in San Francisco Bay Area we've attended a lot of meetings - not only with our Clients but also fellow entrepreneurs. Those were very stimulating and resourceful meetings. After few meetings we decided to make a list of startups which, in our opinion are so good, unique and cool that we are convinced that we should keep an eye on them in 2014 (the list is in random order). Enjoy, and let us know which tools, products, services and solutions you've already tried!
1. Kahuna
www.useKahuna.com
Customer Engagement Platform for Mobile and Web.
2. Shopseen
shopseen.com
Simplified retail for small business.
3. Love With Food
lovewithfood.com
Marketing Platform + Survey monkey for Food CPG brands.
4. Conspire
goconspire.com
Unlocking your email network.
5. Funders and Founders
fundersandfounders.com
Explaining startups and entrepreneurship visually.
6. Directly
www.directly.com
Better customer service.
7. Sidelines
sidelinesapp.com
Doubles time-on-site and increases revenue for content publishers via smart discussions.
8. Whale Path
www.whalepath.com
On-Demand Business Research.
9. LiveRamp
www.LiveRamp.com
Focused on data onboarding and is integrated seamlessly with all the leading online ad tech platforms.
10. Stitch Labs
www.stitchlabs.com
Democratizing Commerce for Businesses.
11. Prizeo
www.prizeo.com
Celebrity/Brand-Driven Fundraising for Charity.
12. Survata
www.survata.com
Fast, accurate, affordable survey research.
13. DataHero
www.datahero.com
Unmask the answers in your data.
14. imgIX
www.imgix.com
Your images, rendered on-demand, properly cached, served fast.
15. Preact
preact.com
The Customer Success Platform that Learns.
16. RolePoint
rolepoint.com
Reimagining sourcing for the enterprise.
17. Jetlore
www.jetlore.com
Automated marketing platform that semantically auto-tags merchandise and processes user data from a variety of channels.
18. EdSurge
www.edsurge.com
Edtech insights for decision makers.
19. Intercom
www.intercom.io
Simple, personal messaging service for businesses and their customers.
20. Booshaka
www.booshaka.com
Consumer CRM software to engage and convert fans on the social web.
21. Everest
everest.com
Tools and a community to help achieve personal goals of any kind.
22. ShopInterest
shopinterest.co
Powering Social Storefronts for Retailers.
23. Rallyware
www.rallyware.com
Driving action for the enterprise.
24. Smore
www.smore.com
Build beautiful, effective online flyers and publish instantly.
25. Statwing
www.statwing.com
An easy to use data analysis tool.
26. InfoScout
www.infoscoutinc.com
Real World Analytics.
27. InstaGIS
www.instagis.com
Geographic Intelligence SaaS platform, focused on Geo-spatial analysis and visualization of real-time and historical data.
28. Iterable
iterable.com
Enterprise e-mail platform that lets marketers create highly personalized emails optimized for both mobile & desktop.
29. Kippt
kippt.com
Social knowledge management platform.
30. LiveMinutes
www.liveminutes.com
One-stop service that lets you keep all your team work in a shared workspace, where you can add and review content, take notes, and of course host conference calls.
31. ShareDesk
www.sharedesk.net
ShareDesk provides Flexible Workplace Solutions for Enterprise.
32. YouEye
www.YouEye.com
UX Lab in the Cloud.
33. Keen IO
keen.io
Analytics Backend as a Service for modern developers (web + mobile + internet of things).
34. Contacts+
www.contactspls.com
Universal Contacts Platform.
35. AdEspresso
adespresso.com
Facebook Advertising Optimization Made Easy.
36. Heap
heapanalytics.com
Heap automatically captures every user action in your web app and lets you measure it all.
37. NextUser
www.nextuser.com
Deliver relevant customer experiences combining user data & interactions.
38. BrightFunnel
www.brightfunnel.com
Connect the dots between marketing data silos to generate predictive, actionable revenue insights.
39. Algolia
www.algolia.com
Algolia Search as a Service enables developers to make their apps and websites smarter with an outstanding search experience.
40. uniRow
www.unirow.com
uniRow offers a remote training and assessment platform for enterprises.
41. Moolta
www.moolta.com
Fundraising with video challenges.
42. Pick1
www.pick1.com
Surveys to Social CRM and Retargeting.
43. Parakweet
www.parakweet.com
Actionable Signals from Social Media.
44. TubularLabs
http://tubularlabs.com
Audience intelligence and growth platform for YouTube and the future of video.
45. BrightBytes
www.brightbytes.net
Google Analytics for learning.
46. Scripted
Scripted.com
Scripted.com helps businesses get great content for their blogs, websites, and newsletters.
47. DataRank
www.datarank.com
Social intelligence platform for brands.
48. LocalOn
www.localon.com
Web Marketing Platform For Small Businesses.
49. CapRally
www.caprally.com
Salesforce + Mint.com for Fundraising and Investing.
50. Tint
tintup.com
Helps brands drive deeper engagement with their audiences by allowing them to integrate any social feeds onto their digital properties.
51. dakwak
www.dakwak.com
Effortless website translation and localization technology.
52. New Hive
www.newhive.com
The Blank Canvas on the Web.
All right, that's all! Does anyone else come to your mind? Let us know in comments, and don't forget to share!
Brought to you by Colibri IO - Growth Hacking Tool
Colibri.io can tell you in which discussion to inject to influence right people and to get high quality SEO backlinks from Forums, Blogs, Quora, Google Plus and other important Social Media sources.
Startups - Feel the Blues of Customer Acquisition in 2014
The Personas, Extravertics, Selling on Social Media and Networking.
Nobody said Customer Acquisition should be easy. You've taken the leap and set up social business accounts, maybe even on Reddit, HackerNews, Inbound.org, GrowthHackers.com and other niche channels to create brand awareness, encourage engagement and stir up conversation about your products and services. This is hardly breaking news, rather just a good start of Customer Acquisition.
There's a lot of guides how to become a Social Media Ninja, a SEO Guru, Growth Hacker, etc. You probably read those and noticed that's often just a mumbo jumbo, sadly. We tend to forget that Social Media are a lot like real life social networking.
Use a Real Life as the best example:
1. Don't be Self-Centered. No one will ever love you
It's just awkward. Your app is great, for sure. But don’t make everything you post about you or your company. You need to tailor your posts and content to your visitors. People come to Facebook and other Social Media networks to have fun (although if recent news show that we are starting to prefer informational posts), upload pictures and connect with family and friends. So fit your business into that experience.
HINT: Simply Measured is an awesome tool which will help you choose the best influencers to follow, understand who they are and help you target the right content.
2. Imagine Personas!
It's easy to get around on a party when you're extraverted. Good news is that on Social Media everybody is extraverted.
There is an interesting game: before joining a party think of characteristic condition - like "talk to everybody who wears red". Do you have a buyer Persona or a target customer/follower identified? If you don’t, get on that ASAP. If you do, that’s great! Keep that person in mind every time you post or tweet. What would he or she be interested in?
HINT: Need help creating Personas? You can grab all required knowledge from this free PDF guide from DigitalMarketing.nl here.
3. Stop With That Selling
Don't try to sell on social networks. It's a poor idea. Your readers didn’t log onto Facebook or Twitter to be bombarded with sales or marketing messages. Just get closer, feel the blues. Focus on building relationships by providing helpful information and valuable tips.
HINT: Are you tired of looking for places where you can share, engage, help? Colibri's Growth Ideas will show you the exact discussions where you should inject. And, as a result, you will gain visibility.
4. Don't Forget Who You are “Talking” to
Facebook may allow you to post updates to your friends only, but Twitter lets your tweets be read by everyone. So always be aware that while you may be posting with specific Personas in mind, everyone else can read your message, too. You don't have to be shy, it's not the best strategy for Social Media.
HINT: Use MentionMapp to find who does what on Twitter.
5. Get your Foot in the Door!
A 2010 study conducted by Microsoft found that 70% of surveyed companies say they had rejected potential employees based on the content they found online.
And a 2011 survey by Kaplan Test Prep found 24% of responding colleges had gone to applicants’ social networking profiles to learn more about them, up from 10% in 2008.
In short, you could create legitimate relationships on Social Media that might lead to a “foot in the door” you otherwise wouldn’t have or a new customer who wouldn't have found you otherwise. Or it could do the opposite if someone doesn't appreciate the messages you are posting.
So don’t ignore new friends and don’t ignore your online persona because people are looking for it, reading it and judging you by it!
Karol Pokojowczyk is the CEO and Founder of Colibri.io – an online Growth Hacking Tool that helps early stage companies gain best visibility on the web.
Colibri.io - The Growth Hacking Tool for startups who need to gain visibility
What the Beatles Could Learn from using SEO and Social Media together?
It’s obvious that using Social Media is a great way to grow a business and attract new customers. It’s also clear that a consistent SEO strategy ensures long-term advantages in terms of traffic, leads and conversions.
Help! I need somebody, not just anybody! = ROI
According to the “Search Marketing Benchmark Report” released by MarketingSherpa, the numbers confirm that there is indeed a great synergy between Search and Social Media. The survey, which included 2,200 respondents, showed that search marketers who integrate Social Media achieve a 59% better rate of conversion. According to the source it is simply because:
1. Rankings are driven by relevance
2. Relevance improves credibility
3. Credibility increases conversions
Furthermore, over three-quarters of respondents agreed that “many natural search listings today are linked to Social Media content, so the integration of Social Media and SEO is absolutely essential”.
SEO and Social Media can work together, automated!
Need more proof? Lets check the Social Media Marketing Industry Report
Another interesting finding on this subject comes from the 2013 “Social Media Marketing Industry Report” released recently by Social Media Examiner (source: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/social-media-marketing-industry-report-2013/). According to the results of this survey, which involved over 3000 respondents, the main benefits that marketers receive from Social Media presence are as follows:
89% claimed that Social Media generated more business exposure.
69% said they use Social Media for research and collecting information about the market.
64% noticed an increase in lead generation.
62% reported a rise in search engine rankings after using Social Media for at least two years.
62% of small businesses declared a reduction in marketing expenses thanks to Social Media.
But how exactly does that work? A strong Social Media presence can significantly influence your traffic and conversions. That’s because:
Social Media are a valid source of natural and relevant links to your website
Anything “viral" seems to be more significant for search engine spiders (source)
Social Media allow you to leverage your inbound marketing activities
Social Media allow content to be indexed faster – for instance, Tweeting cuts indexing time by a half (source)
Still not convinced? Read on the Case Study of Delivra.com - a perfect example of How to attain the synergy between SEO and Social Media
Here is an interesting case study of Delivra, a professional email marketing and software services company (source: http://www.delivra.com/).
According to the “Search Marketing Benchmark Report” mentioned above, thanks to the synergy between inbound marketing and SEO, Delivra experienced a 70% increase in leads and doubled its annual revenue per account.
This is an interesting example of how synergy between social presence and SEO translates into actual business performance.
The company achieved this by introducing five steps:
Created guidelines communicating the brand and implemented them across all channels. This allowed consistency in building brand image and ensured strong differentiation from the competition.
Put together a social marketing strategy that divided channels used into groups, depending on their objective. Company website and company blog were the hub pages for content conversion. Facebook, Twitter and other chosen social networks served as spoke sites targeted at building relationships and online communities, as well as attracting traffic to the hub pages, where it could be converted.
Delivered two types of high-quality content. Relevant and attractive, eye-catching “how to” and “ten tips” articles were posted as open-access content. At the same time, in-depth, premium publications were available after free registration and served as an additional incentive. This is a great example of encouraging a “small conversion” and taking users down the sales funnel towards the ultimate conversion – the sale.
Introduced an auto-response system. Inbound leads received more personalised reply than the outbound, paid ones. The company also made sure that inbound leads were contacted as fast as possible in order to increase the probability of interaction.
Identified and analysed KPIs. The main measures that Delivra focused on were:
total number of gained leads
ratio of leads to sales
average sales value
average ROI
Colibri IO - Strawberry Fields Forever
Colibri.io can tell you in which discussion to inject to influence right people and to get high quality SEO backlinks from Forums, Blogs, Quora, Google Plus and other important Social Media sources.
Last but not least, it is essential to monitor and measure your Social Media and SEO efforts. You need to identify the channels that bring you the most traffic and the content that generates the most natural backlinks. Moreover, you need to be able to distinguish those activities that attract high-quality traffic and deliver the highest conversion rate.
To save time spent on constant monitoring and in-depth analysis, you can use available SEO tools that help you control, plan and make the most of your online marketing strategy. These tools will allow SERP tracking, traffic and conversions source analysis, backlinks analysis, as well as competitor monitoring. They can give you enriching insights that can help you to optimise your SEO efforts.
Karol Pokojowczyk is the CEO and Founder of Colibri.io – an online Growth Hacking Tool. Previously founded 2.0 Web Solutions (Drupal Agency), managed developers and helped number of companies grow online.
Find More Customers for your Startup in 6 Easy Steps and limited resources
Go Big or Go Home!
Small businesses, startups and early stage companies tend to have limited resources. So, the classic small business response is to go from project to project and emergency to emergency boasting about being nimble rather than getting on track to achieve business objectives. Find below 6 valuable marketing tactics to get your small business look really big and keep you on track to success.
1. Know your niche - don't try to be for everyone
Don't try to be a great product for everyone- this won't work as nothing is in fact for everyone. Try to be specialized for one target group. It makes you look more professional and you have the chance to make one target group happy. Try to find out who your customers are and what they want. Of course it is not so easy when you are having only a few ones, but try to think about people who might need your product. Bear in mind that you don’t want to define your niche so small or obscurely that it’s something people won’t search for. Think in terms of an aspect of an existing topic.
Our example: I get calls from local interactive agencies and bigger companies about making a demo of our product at their premises. Though I know this might end up with them using our product, my answer is always no. Why? Because it is not core focus for Colibri IO to serve companies in the non-SaaS and scalable way. We know we are not big and we might not be able to fulfil all their requests, make amendments to the product only for themselves or have a dedicated account manager at the stage where we try to find the best product market fit.
Read on to find out How to segment customers and target like a laser!
2. Build a plan
Many small businesses brag about being nimble. What this often means is that their limited staff is quick to respond to the next issue confronting them. I don't want to say that this is wrong as it is sometimes necessary, but try to build a business plan. The goal is to have a good strategy that provides a framework for keeping your business on track to grow by building its brand, attracting new customers and closing great sales opportunities.
Hint: Use this Business Model Canvas template to focus on your plan to success, not waste your time on anything else.
3. Create a brand from day one
Branding is not only for big corporations, as everyone started somehow small. You can also afford to develop your brand. The major key is to determine the core attributes of your brand .Try to present your company always in the same way so that it contributes to your overall brand cost-effectively.
Quick win: build your brand identity with these awesome Moo tools. Moo is just another print shop, but much more focused on quality and the way they treat their customers. Be inspired, learn from the best.
So far, there hasn't been a single person who hasn't noticed that I tried to stand out from the crowd by having one of the best business cards ever seen. It makes them think that we care about quality, which is exactly what I tried to achieve and is more than true! Really worth the money.
4. Create best content or go home!
Nowadays almost every startup, early stage company or an SME becomes a content publishing house. Again, try to stand out from the crowd. Whenever you write something do the research. Make sure your article is the best or go home. It's that simple.
Be either:
strangely creative
super knowledgable
really creepy
or damn spooky!
...otherwise you are just boring.
Find out how to choose best ideas for your content.
5. Be Social. Use Media to interact with your potential customers
In fact, you won't have thousand of likes on your Social Media profiles at the very beginning, but anyway you need to have a presence on a variety of Social Media platforms. Schedule your Social Media interaction so that you build relationships with influencers, prospects, customers and the public.
Hint: Think of Social Media the way you think of your coffee break. That's what we though when creating Colibri IO - a tool that will help you inject in the right discussions on Social Media, blogs, forums and give you suggestions on how to improve your SEO, at the same time.
6. Having limited resources and not enough time is just awesome!
I still remember what DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson) said.
"Having limited time and resources was the best thing that happened to us when we worked on creating Basecamp. It has keep us focused and working on the most important things in the project only."
So, schedule the time wisely. Focus on your key projects including major strategic initiatives, content creation and Social Media interaction. Time management is sometimes really complicated for small businesses as they rush to confront the latest issue. Find and use the right tools that will save you time. Good luck!
Colibri.io - The Growth Hacking Tool for startups that needs to gain visibility
Karol Pokojowczyk is the CEO and Founder of Colibri.io – an online Growth Hacking Tool. Previously founded 2.0 Web Solutions (Drupal Agency), managed developers and helped number of companies grow online.
Neil Patel's favourite growth hacking tools shared at #neilsmw - Warsaw Growth Hacking meetup by MaxRoy.com
Neil Patel is a Seattle based entrepreneur, angel investor, and analytics expert. He is best known for his work in digital marketing and as the cofounder of the analytics companies KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg.
Top Growth Hacking tools used by Neil Patel as presented at the searchmarketingweek.com Growth Hacking meetup in Warsaw 11.25.2013.
portent.com/tools/title-maker
wpleadmagnet.com
surveymonkey.com
qualaroo.com
hasoffers.com
whatrunswhere.com
yesware.com
wistia.com
livechatinc.com
socialcrawlytics.com
We are authors of Colibri.io, a Growth Hacking Tool that tells early stage companies how to increase their visibility and get found by their potential customers.
Karol Pokojowczyk is the CEO and founder of ColibriTool – an online Growth Hacking Tool. Previously founded 2.0 Web Solutions (Drupal Agency), managed developers and helped number of companies grow online.
1. Creating high quality content that is valuable and attractive for the viewers
2. Making the content sharable through all sorts of social media
There are a lot of social sharing tools that make up the SMO. The ones that are valid, yet sometimes overlooked or underestimated, are #hashtags. Those are the keywords used for organizing content in social media. They determine what your message, post or photo will be “filed under”. Hashtags are words and phrases, written without spaces and punctuation and preceded by the # sign, that you can find in before, within or after the body of a post or a Tweet. There are many social networks that allow you to use hashtags to put your message in context and attract more viewers. The most obvious advantage of hashtags is that they make you visible to the audience that proactively searches for a certain topic or theme and thus is potentially interested in it. There is, however, more to this sharing tool.
RadiumOne (http://www.radiumone.com/) conducted an interesting survey in 2003 to evaluate how consumers perceive, value, and use hashtags. The results showed that over half of the respondents utilize hashtags on a regular basis and almost three-quarters of them are doing so from their mobile device.
Hashtags, although relatively new, have already become a popular tool for finding relevant content and sharing it. Moreover, this research showed that hashtags are mostly used on-the-go which creates interesting opportunities for marketers and advertisers. Let’s take a closer look at the hashtag campaigns’ ways and benefits in various social media.
How to use hashtags on Twitter
Twitter is the website most associated with hashtags. Here are several ways to use hashtags on Twitter:
1. Monitor existing conversations and start new ones.
Using hashtags is a great way to start a conversation around a chosen topic. If you include the right hashtag in your Tweet, not only will you reach your followers but also all the users engaged in the topic or conversation. At the same time, you can monitor chosen hashtags to stay up to date with what others are saying about your company, your brand or any other related topic.
2. Get familiar with trending topics.
The most popular hashtags on Twitter become “trends”, also called “trending topics”, and are displayed on the Twitter main page (https://dev.twitter.com/media/hashtags). Using them can bring you a significant traffic volume. However, you should make sure the keyword is still relevant to your tweet and content. Moreover, if you use a very popular hashtag, you can simply get lost in the crowd of tweets and become harder to find. You can verify the popularity and the desired hashtag’s meaning by using Twitter Search (Search.Twitter.com) - just type in the keyword you are thinking of to see whether it’s not overused or associated with some other meaning.
3. Promote upcoming events.
Hashtags are especially effective with promoting events and conferences on Twitter. You can include a chosen hashtag when sending out invitations and use it when informing or just talking about the event. Not only will you keep your guests posted but you can also attract new potential users.
4. Leverage local search.
If you operate on a local market, you can consider including your location into hashtags. This way, viewers searching for information on local services, companies and events will easily find you.
New hashtag opportunities – Facebook vs. Twitter
Recently, Facebook introduced active hashtags as well. This means that a hashtag included in a status update is clickable and it pops out a News Feed that combines other posts tagged with the same keyword. Users can also type hashtags in the search bar to find posts, comments and conversations on a particular topic.
Justin Osofsky, Platform Partnerships and Operations Director at Facebook, justified the launch of the new feature with a strong rationale: "Between 88 and 100 million Americans login to Facebook every night during prime time TV hours, which represents a significant opportunity for broadcasters, advertisers and our other partners." (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/10117483/Facebook-hashtags-introduced.html)
Since many Facebook users login to live-follow popular TV shows and other events, the network gave them an opportunity for going beyond your group of friends to talk about them. The idea of Facebook hashtags is similar to Twitter’s and the main benefits are:
1. Increasing reach and traffic volume.
It can be an effective way to spread the message to your target group and potential leads, especially if it’s a niche. You can monitor the effect of hashtags on your Page statistics via Facebook Insights (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/insights/).
2. Composing a News Feed on your own.
You can choose to tag all the information about your service, product or other project with a unique hashtag. This way, all the tagged posts will be aggregated in a separate pop-out feed, which makes it easier for users to find and share information about it.
3. Doing the research.
By researching particular keywords, you can check what the audience says about you. You can also monitor your competitors’ activity and find hot topics that create buzz. In terms of these features, Facebook is still behind Twitter, but it may change in the nearest future because of the mentioned hashtag’s further development.
However, some say that Facebook hashtags are bound to be less effective in comparison to Twitter. Firstly, because of Facebook’s login-to view approach as opposed to Twitter’s accessibility. Secondly, while most Tweets are public, on Facebook there is the issue of privacy settings. Facebook is generally a more private space, where hashtags will only be shown to Friends, unless indicated otherwise. Moreover, it seems that the 140 characters limit for Tweets makes its content more orderly and clear which allows an effective usage of hashtags. On Facebook, on the other hand, where posts are longer and content has many forms, including pictures and videos, the hashtags can get lost in the overall clutter.
Hashtags as a contest and promotion tool
Hashtag is great tool for organizing contests, sweepstakes, promotions, drawings or giveaways on Twitter. Simply ask your followers to tweet their answer to a question, their opinion, picture or any other desired content, tagged with a selected keyword. Only the tagged Tweets enter the competition. There are many ideas for promotion mechanisms that use hashtags. For example, you can ask for the most creative answer to a posted question. On the other hand, you can simply ask for a retweet of the hashtag and select the winner randomly, thus making it a sweepstake. Another idea is to request uploading photos or ask them to follow you on Twitter. It all depends on your goal.
Using hashtags as a tool for contests and promotions brings unquestionable advantages. It makes the event easy to control since it gives you an easy access to all the tweets that take part in it. It’s inexpensive, as you only need to account for the prize cost. Moreover, it encourages the contestants to share your content, which attracts even more traffic to your event. This way, you can truly show the social network’s potential as a promotion tool.
It’s worth mentioning that on Facebook, it’s against website’s promotion policy to organize contest, games or promotions using its native features. Therefore, you can’t use hashtags for promotions driven directly on Facebook. There are two solutions to that. Firstly, you can design a separate application for it. Secondly, you can use a fan page to help viewers find the content across other platforms. By using the same hashtag, you can redirect your audience to your promotional action on Twitter or Instagram.
An important characteristic of hashtags is that you can use them across various social platforms. If you included social media in your digital marketing strategy, you probably set up pages and accounts on more than just one or two networks. Nowadays, many social websites allow using active hashtags and those are, among others, Tumblr, Flickr, Instagram, Google + and Pinterest. For effective usage of hashtag as a sharing tool across many channels, you need to stay consistent. To increase action’s effectiveness, it’s a good idea to use the same hashtag across various social media, such as Pinterest or Instagram. This way you gain compatibility and cooperation between different channels to optimize your exposure. Users will be able to recognize and remember your hashtag from other platforms.
As it has already been mentioned, it’s crucial to watch selected hashtags to keep up with the conversations about you and your competition. It may seem difficult with multiple platforms, millions of users and real-time conversations, but there are some tools that may come in handy, such as Tagboard (http://tagboard.com/). It’s a free service that allows you to simultaneously search for hashtags across many social networks.
How NOT to use hashtags as a digital marketing tool
As with any other online marketing tool, there are certain watch outs when using hashtags in social media. At the end of this article you will find some “DOs” regarding hashtagging. Meanwhile, let’s look at some examples of failed hashtag campaigns to learn about the “DON’Ts”.
- #McDStories – was a McDonald’s hashtag campaign that encouraged users to share funny and interesting experiences that they associated with the brand. What the marketers didn’t expect was that it can attract not only the brand’s lovers but also haters who misinterpreted or abused the hashtag by sharing horror stories about indigestion and disgust. (source: http://www.buzzfeed.com/burnred/mcdstories-twitter-promotion-hijacked-by-unhappy-281t )
- #Aurora – refers to an attempt of hijacking a popular hashtag from an online store www.celebboutique.com. Aurora was then a trending topic on Twitter and Celeb Boutique used it to promote its Kim Kardashian-inspired Aurora dress. However, the reason for keyword’s popularity was Aurora shooting – a tragic massacre in movie theatre during the film Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado. The word “inappropriate” is a gentle way to describe this promotional tactic. This is the kind of hashtag campaign that can jeopardize the brand’s image than improve it.
Top 10 tips for effective hashtagging
1. Remember to avoid punctuation and special symbols as they end a hashtag. For example, if you put #Joe’sworkshop, social media will categorize it under #Joe.
2. Search the hashtag before applying it to see how it is already used, how popular it is and what meanings and connotations it has.
3. Make sure that the content you are tagging is relevant to the search results you will appear in. The key to effective hashtagging is providing interesting and valuable input to the conversation.
4. Adjust your tactic to your goal and medium. Sometimes it makes more sense to use unique and rare tags to “own” them. Other times, you may want to enter a stream of trendy yet more generic keyword to attract broader audience.
5. Make sure your hashtag is short, clear, legible and easy to spell as well as remember. You can’t use spaces but you may use capital letters to distinguish separate words.
6. Choose quality over quantity. A post overloaded with hashtags may not work well so apply two or three carefully chosen tags rather that six or seven of them.
7. Promote your hashtag! Don’t hesitate to include it into your website, newsletter, e-mail marketing and any other form of digital marketing activities. Only then will it serve its purpose.
8. Be consistent. Once you’ve chosen a hashtag, stick to it. You can obviously add more tags or select other tags for different topics, but to make a hashtag effective, you need to make it sort of “logotype” of your campaign, product or project.
9. Avoid hashtag hijacking. This means using hashtags that are popular (e.g. trending topics on Twitter) but not at all related to your content. This only brings random traffic and can be considered spam, which can cause negative influence on your business image.
10. Don’t be afraid to experiment and explore. Hashtagging is still a relatively new sharing tool, especially in certain social networks, such as Facebook. It’s still in development, and new features will be added. So go ahead and see for yourself what hashtag tactics add the most value to your business.
Karol Pokojowczyk - CEO and founder of Colibri.io – an online Growth Hacking Tool. Previously founded 2.0 Web Solutions (Drupal Agency), managed developers and helped number of companies grow online. Online marketing freak, chief editor of GrowthHacker.am.
How to choose the best keywords for SEO and customer acquisition in social media
The mix of art and science
Choosing the right keywords is a tough combination of art and science. You should find a balance between the number of people searching for that particular keyword and competition for it. Although the subject is obviuos, not many of us do it well and do not have any problems with it.
Decision on what keywords your products or services should be searched for is simple, but a bit tricky too.
On the one hand it is certain that you should look for words directly connected with what you offer but the most obvious ones wouldn’t be a good choice. Not too generic or specific either. Take a while to think about your audience. What kind of words they could be putting in search engine while looking for your kind of product or business? Make a list of all the words you came up and the most relevant for your business. Short words are the most popular but more searches doesn’t mean better keywords.
If you rank on short „shoes“ or „jewellery“ there is a low probability that your website would appear and be found among your competition, especially for the small businesses or beginners. Most popular terms get less than 30% of search performance. The lower the competitiveness of a keyword, the better the chances for you to rank higher in the search results. Long-tail keywords are more beneficial. Try to be creative, think of all possibilities of the description. Taking into consideration whole phrases, e.g. „black leather shoes“, „men’s running shoes“ or „handmade beaded jewellery“, you narrow the focus, still keeping the broader focus too. That maximizes chances of being picked up in the browser. What’s more, it is not always about getting visitors to your website but gaining the right ones. Narrowing the search field to the long-tail keywords, more specific, you can get the right audience to your websites, which can convert in your targeted conversion (e.g. registration or purchase). But it works the opposite way, if you put too specific phrase or one that is not entirely connected with your offer, you risk that your website will be hard to find or your bounce rate will be increased by visitors that came and left, seeing your page is not what they were looking for. In the second case you should be also concerned about the accuracy of phrases or keywords with what is being presented on your page because Google can measure it and push at the end of the queue if it’s not matching. Your phrases shouldn’t be longer than 2-3 words, put in title tag for the browser and in headlines for the better user experience. In the content, target no more than 2-3 related key phrases per page. To much of them can be marked as black hat SEO – keyword stuffing – which is breaking of search engine rules and regulations and can lead to some restrictions.
Use Questions
Search queries are often framed in the form of a question, so you can use that phrasing to come up with relevant keywords. For example, a consumer may search for a phrase like “How do I install kitchen countertops?” or “How do I choose a kitchen countertop?” So choosing keywords like “install kitchen countertops” or “choose a kitchen countertop” is an effective way for you to reach consumers searching for those specific terms.
Geographical location
While thinking of right keywords you can also improve your chances of getting a much better page ranking result if you insert your location to the keyword or phrase. If you add name of the city or region within you can or would like to operate, you can fair better in your page ranking.
For example if you are looking for a sport’s shoes: “London sport’s shoes”, “London sport’s shoes shop”, “London sport’s shoes stores”
However, this type of approach usually entails that people are planning on seeing you in person when they do searches like this, so make sure that you only use this technique if you are open to the idea of them visiting you in person.
The Competitors
Do the research of your competition. Find out what your chosen keywords bring. That will help you make decision on which ones you got chances to rank better than others.
The "Other" Tools
There are many tools that can help you getting keywords ideas, among them you can try:
1. Google Keyword Planner - this tool will show you how a list of keywords might perform, and the average number of times people searched for those terms. This can, for example, help you to decide which keywords can help attract more traffic to your website and increase awareness of your product.
2. Wordtracker – generates a list of related keywords, including related keyword phrases and combinations. By clicking on one of the phrases it creates another list of keywords related to the one you have chosen, showing you the number of times that word or phrase was searched for in the previous 60 days.
3. Keyword Discovery – collects data form over 200 search engines, allows you to search keyword database for specific country or e-shops like eBay or Amazon.
Let's do this!
Keyword research is one of the most important tasks along the whole marketing field. The right keyword can build your success, bring visitors and conversion that leads to profit. It is not 10-minutes job, just entering the words connected with what you offer - it is the whole process of constant market research and competition monitoring. Such tools as Colibri can help you manage the whole process with benefits for you. But still there are some crucial things you should bare in mind while choosing the right keywords. It is the mixture of art and science. Try to be creative with finding phrases that best suits your business but remember to be aware of how your audience is searching for such kind of products or services, how competitive those terms are and how can you improve it.
