#1. Decide which review sites matter to your business

Google is always a great place to start because your reviews can show up when your business does in search results (make sure to set up your Google Business page first). While people continue to question Yelp’s integrity in reviews, you’ll have to decide for your area if your customer base trusts Yelp or not. You might find that you can create a strong community base on Foursquare or Facebook too, which also offer reviews. Otherwise, make sure to find out if there are review sites highly relevant to your industry. For example, for home improvement and furnishing-related businesses – Angie’s List, Porch, and Houzz are all sites that curate relevant content and offer reviews for businesses but they may not all be popular in every region. If you aren’t sure which review sites are best, ask your customers where they go to learn more about businesses just like yours online!

#2. Create a “Write us a review!” flyer or email

When you’re asking someone for a favor, you want to make things as easy for them as possible. Asking a customer for a review and expecting them to find the site to review you on is one thing – but if you don’t make it super convenient to post a review, then most likely your customer won’t remember to do so unless they had a truly great or truly horrible experience. So put together an email or a flyer that includes a handful of the sites you’d like to be reviewed on.

Make sure this email or flyer includes:

• The link to your company profile, page, or listing where your reviews show up
• Any helpful instructions that ensure the review process will be quick and straightforward
• A “thank you!” Don’t forget to thank your customers again for helping you out

Here’s an example of an email we send to our own happy customers after we’ve qualified their level of satisfaction with us via an NPS survey tool (more on that in a quick bit!).

Hi {First Name},

Thank you for your kind comments about us yesterday! We love hearing from you and learning about your experience with Rival IQ.

We are trying to get more customer reviews on the website G2 Crowd to help people learn more about Rival IQ. Could you please help us by writing a quick and honest review?

You can post your review here.

As always, please feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions!

Cheers,

The Rival IQ Team

Notice that we start off with a thank you – and we’re specific about what we’re thanking our customers for! Then we’re honest about the small favor we’re asking for, we go right ahead and ask for a review and provide a link directly to the place (G2 Crowd) where our happy customer can make a review for us.

#3. Create A Thank You Package

Providing your sales or service staff with a thank you package is a great way to neatly end a sale on a positive note. It’s a positive touchpoint for a customer, and if a member of your team feels confident that your customer can provide a positive review, they can then slip your “Write us a review!” flyer into the thank you package. Getting everyone into the habit of handing off this thank you package at the end of a sale or service will not only ensure you’re asking for reviews but also be a nice touch for customers that shows you appreciate their business. A thank you note, a little care pamphlet, and possibly a small goodie can go a long way as a finishing touch!

#4. Conduct Quality Checks & Customer Care Calls

You could opt to have a friendly employee with great phone etiquette call on your past customers once per quarter to ask them how their experience was and if they can offer any feedback. This call creates a chance for you to further build a relationship with customers, identify any weak points in your customer experience, and ask for reviews from your most satisfied customers! In this instance, I think it’s important to have realistic expectations for your team member who’s conducting your calls. Keep in mind that many of today’s customers are quite busy and may not have time to take a phone call. Be prepared with a message you can leave in their voicemail, possibly letting them know that you’ll be emailing them a link where they can provide feedback because you value their opinion. Wondering what on earth you’ll be linking your customers to in that email? Read on!

#5. Automate Your Customer Surveys With NPS Reviews

If you’re looking for a more efficient way to qualify your existing customers so you can be sure you’re requesting reviews from only your happiest ones – consider using a customer feedback or NPS (Net Promoter Score) software. We use a service called AskNicely to periodically email our customers asking them for feedback and insights on a 1 to 10 scale. The 1 to 10 scale ensures the survey won’t take up too much time for customers to complete, and our customers also have the option to expand on their scores. AskNicely then takes the results and classifies the customers that have responded as “Detractors”, “Passives” and “Promoters.” We send a follow-up email to anyone that gets labeled as a Promoter the day after they’ve completed the survey. The email that we send is exactly the example that provided above (re: #2), asking our Promoters to leave us a quick review on G2, which is a software review site highly relevant to our business.

So, when it comes to reviews – make sure you’re asking for them! Make asking for reviews a regular part of some sales process either as a thank you package add-in or a regular, scheduled process. Don’t be afraid of bad reviews either. Having an open mind and a willingness to listen to any disgruntled customers, and showing care in attending to an unhappy customer, can help new customers gain a better idea of the level of care they can expect to receive from you.

The post 5 Ways to Ask for Customer Reviews appeared first on Rival IQ.

While there is a certain structure and some things that may help optimize your blog posts to show up early in search results, I’ve always found that answering questions clearly and honestly in blog posts is a pretty safe way to blog and show up in organic search results, which is one of the greatest benefits to blogging. Google and Bing are constantly improving their search algorithms to provide searchers with the best answers – always trying to overcome any dishonest tricks people might use to push lesser relevant webpages to the top of search results – anyways. So here we go with some quick tips that will help you write well for people and for the web on your blog!

1. Frequency Matters – Publish at least once a week

If you’re blogging to boost your organic search results, frequency matters to search engines. The more often you offer something new to the web, the more search engine crawlers will take note and remember that they should crawl your site for new info. So try and publish a blog post at least once – if not twice – a week.

I’ve found that it helps to create a rhythm in my routine for blogging.

Image Credit: writehacked.com

If I know I want to publish a post on Friday, I’ll:

• brainstorm topics the Friday before my publish date
• create a bulleted outline by Monday
• write my first draft on Tuesday
• do some revisions (add images and clarify my sub headers) on Wednesday
• let the post sit for a day through Thursday so that I can…
• review my final draft with a fresh set of eyes before publishing on Friday!

For me, the heavy focus days are Monday and Tuesday where I outline and draft my blog post. Otherwise, I space out my time for revisions because time usually allows me to review my writing with a refreshed perspective. By giving myself time to forget the what or why I wrote what I did in my draft, I’m less likely to unconsciously insert explanations and words that aren’t there – I’m able to approach my draft as a new reader and identify any areas where I may not have explained clearly enough! This is just what works for me, other bloggers may find that they prefer to organize their thoughts in their head and can sit down and produce a blog post in a 2 hour sitting. Just find what works for you!

2. Blog about FAQs in 500-1000 words

Not sure what to write about? Start with your frequently asked questions – and don’t be afraid to answer the tough questions that your industry or competitors tend to tiptoe around. Today’s customers are empowered with smartphones, educated, and able to dig for knowledge and opinions. Just because you dance around the answer to a question doesn’t mean they won’t find the truth somewhere else. So be the one to offer the truth and gain their trust!

Try to answer a frequently asked question in 500-1000 words. A 500 to 1000-word answer to a question not only looks and feels like a full and satisfactory answer, it also plays better with search engines. So take the time to explain the who, what, where, when, why, and how. Give background and context where necessary, explain why a question or topic matters, and illustrate your answers and reflections with helpful imagery – be it charts, videos, or other graphics.

3. Organize your thoughts – use sub headers!

If you aren’t sure how to organize your information, try sitting down with someone who doesn’t know your business for 5-10 minutes and explaining what you plan to write about to them. Before you sit down to chat, organize your thoughts as you would for your blog writing:

• Imagine your blog post broken apart with sub headers
• Your sub headers should properly title and describe what you discuss in the paragraph(s) that follow
• Try listing and reading only your sub headers and see if they, alone, give you a full sense of what your blog post is about. If it’s not clear what your post is about from your title and sub headers alone, you may need to clarify them or add in some more information!

When you sit down to talk about your ideas, ask the person you’re chatting with to ask questions when they need clarification or more information. Be ready to listen, make note of times they ask for more information and see if you should be reorganizing your thoughts to include that information earlier on.

Blogging for Small Business: There’s always a way

Blogging once or twice a week is your investment in getting found in organic search results, in reaching more qualified prospects, in creating a digital database of content you can reference in the future. So why wouldn’t you blog? Not comfortable writing? Consider recording a video of yourself answering a frequently asked question or reflecting on a hot topic and uploading it to YouTube. You can then hire a freelance marketer or writer to take the content from your video and turn it into a blog post. And then you can even embed your video into the blog post too for added engagement!

The post 3 Tips on Blogging for Small Business appeared first on Rival IQ.

So, how can you put customer referral and loyalty programs into motion for your business? For small-medium B2C businesses, these three tactics are key to earning repeat business and word of mouth recommendations that can bring in new customers.

How to Get Repeat and Referral Business for SMB

#1. Ask for, monitor, and respond to reviews!

Reviews are crucial to small, local businesses and services. One bad review can really make prospective customers hesitate entering into business with you. A lack of reviews can make a prospective customer question how experienced you are or whether your product or service is good enough to warrant a review. For both repeat and referral business, you need reviews! You need reviews to look like a legitimate business online, to inspire trust, and to gain feedback on how you’re performing with your customers.

You want to make sure you’re asking your best customers for reviews and also monitoring review sites regularly to handle any negative reviews that might show up. The best way to do this is to really come up with an internal “system” or process that you or your team can follow regularly so asking for reviews doesn’t fall to the bottom of your to-do list. You can create a home grown process or you could enlist an outside tool like Signpost that helps monitor and ask for customer reviews.

#2. Develop Customer Relationships: Optimize Referral & Loyalty Programs

There’s nothing better than repeat or referral business. Customers that come back to you because they were satisfied with your business are often easier customers going forward. And customers that come to you because they were referred by a previous customer is already more willing to trust in you because of the word of mouth referral!

Again for referrals, just like with reviews, all you have to do is ask! Offer your existing customers special offers for coming back to you, or even a little bonus for referring a customer to you.

Some nice ways to do this:

• Put together a book of referral coupons you can include in a thank you packet. Make a coupon for your existing customer and a coupon for the newly referred customer so both can feel a little win!
• Create a major discount for past customers only and make it special! This means, don’t drag out this discount, make sure to offer this huge deal at the same time once or twice a year (perhaps during a time when business is usually slow for you) – so your past customers can know when to expect this discount and know that it isn’t a monthly sales ploy they can take their time acting on.

#3. Don’t Chase Money: Understand Your Customers & Develop Your Relationships!

You’ll read, all the time, about the importance of developing buyer personas or mapping out your buyer’s journey. Really, the crucial point for these concepts is understanding the mindset and perspective of the customer you’re trying to sell to. Take a look at your existing customer base, talk to your sales reps and any of your staff that’s been more involved with your customers post-purchase. Survey and interview your staff and your customers to determine who the majority of your customers are.

Maybe you’ll find that your customers are not the richest ones on the block, maybe your current niche is really meeting the needs of those who can only afford patch jobs or transitional products. If this is the case, did you expect it to be? Are there any ways you can improve your messaging and communications to really solidify these customer relationships?

If you are trying to reach a different customer base or your findings differ from your expectations – don’t cast a wide net because you think your product or service is sellable to “anyone and everyone”. When you dive in to this belief, your messaging becomes muddled and confusing for the customer and they aren’t sure what to expect. Everyone needs to make money to survive – but if the reality right now is that your customers aren’t your ideal customers – you’ll have to map out how your business is going to reach and best serve your ideal customers in the future. Right now, focus on how to master your service to the customers you already have. Prioritize developing your existing customer relationships so that you can turn your existing customers into loyal, lifelong customers who may someday become your ideal customer. Getting your customer referral and loyalty programs in place can help you to further develop your customer relationships!

The post 3 Tips to Earn Repeat and Referral Business appeared first on Rival IQ.

To keep things simple, we’ll use mechanics as a small business example throughout this post, but these concepts can apply to any small businesses such as dry cleaners, local retail shops, boutique grocery stores, house cleaners, childcare, and more.

Focus on Tactics That Help You Get Found in Search

One of the greatest things about search engines is that companies can find customers when they’re in a time of need. In the age of Google and smartphones, most people Google first and do some research before taking action to purchase a product or service. When someone’s searching for the answer to a problem, they have a need and are typically considered a more qualified lead. They’re closer to the purchasing stage.

If someone’s searching for “mechanics near me” or “how to repair breaks on my car”, then they’re most likely looking for a mechanic because their car is showing problems. A mechanic who provides answers to these questions on his website has an opportunity to start building trust and a relationship with the person searching for answers.

What’s the best way to get your answers to show up in search results?

#1. Establish Your Google Business & Bing Places Pages

Before I dive into the more involved tactics on getting your answers found in search results, I want to make sure your company is getting top billing for local searches. This means establishing your business location by claiming your Google Business and Bing Places pages on these popular search engines. By doing this, you’ll show up on a Google map when someone searches for your product or service in a nearby zip code.

The benefits to doing this?

• Your business listing visually jumps right off the search results page
• You can make it easy to drive searchers to your website
• Searchers have convenient access to relevant business info and directions
• Your business looks established and real

So what about reaching prospects who haven’t allowed Google to use their location or that might be a little further away from you? That’s when we think about some long term and short term tactics that will help increase your small business’s visibility in search results.

#2. Blog Regularly to Invest in Your Long Term Search Results Visibility

The best way to show up in search results is “organically”. This means showing up as a search result that Google or Bing has determined highly relevant based on the content of a webpage (includes copy, images, and links to and from the page).

For experienced searchers, organic search results are considered the most trustworthy answers to search queries. You’ll notice in this example above, I was searching for “trustworthy mechanics” and the top organic search result is by Edmunds, an automotive resource. What this immediately says to me is that there aren’t any mechanics out there blogging about what they do and why they do it – or perhaps they just haven’t spent much time optimizing their web presence. This means there’s an easy opportunity for mechanics near me to start blogging now and gain a digital advantage reaching me as a prospective customer in need of a car repair.

As a searcher, reading the Edmunds article will be helpful to me because I’ll be learning how to find a good mechanic, but at the end of the day it doesn’t provide me with an immediate answer to my question. Edmunds establishes itself as a trustworthy resource because they’re providing me with helpful information — perhaps I’ll trust their recommendation for a mechanic near me. But imagine if the top search result was published on the blog of a local mechanic? A mechanic who blogs about the different troubles one might need a mechanic for and who shares his or her own personality and style diagnosing and treating car troubles through his blog posts? If I found a mechanic through his own unique answers to my problems on his blog, I’d have an opportunity to get to know his or her business better before stopping by. Each blog post offers another opportunity to build trust and develop a relationship.

#3. Try PPC Advertising to Show Up Immediately in Search Results

If you feel like your company page showing up in Google maps isn’t far reaching enough and you need to get found quickly in search results, that’s where PPC (Pay Per Click) ads come in. It can take some time to establish authority with Google’s search algorithm and that’s where PPC may help.

A PPC ad is a kind of digital ad that shows up alongside search results.

PPC ads show up above or along the side of search results which can be good for visibility but at the same time, some searchers see ads for what they are – ads – and deem them less trustworthy than organic search results. PPC ads show up for certain keywords you decide you’d like your ads to show up for. A mechanic might bid on the search term “brake repair” and create a PPC ad and a blog post or landing page that speaks directly to brake repairs on their website that the ad will link to.

PPC can be quite an undertaking for someone who hasn’t encountered it before. If you can allocate 10-20 hours a week for a couple of weeks to setup your AdWords account and campaigns, once you get your campaigns running it takes much less time to maintain and optimize them. Google and Bing both even have resources available to help you understand how AdWords works and how Bing Ads works. You can even get in touch with a Google or Bing representative who will help you optimize your campaigns. Alternatively, there are PPC marketing agencies out there that you could enlist to manage your PPC campaigns for you.

Consider trying PPC if you have a decent sized budget (it can easily get expensive and should be monitored closely early on) and either a trusted partner to run your campaigns or you can seriously commit to the time it will take to setup your campaigns. The reason I suggest PPC ads over display ads for small businesses is because you can reach prospective customers in their time of need and you only pay when someone actually clicks on your ads. It’s a little less of a guessing game than display ads can be, where you’re left wondering if you chose the right website, the right time of year, and the right messaging.

#4. Don’t Reinvent the Wheel – Invest in Channels Your Customers Already Use

As we noticed earlier, a blog post on Edmunds was the top organic search result when I looked up “trustworthy mechanics near me”. While Edmunds may not be a mechanic itself, Edmunds is establishing itself as an automotive resource for consumers. As a mechanic, you could consider contacting Edmonds to see if you could sponsor a couple of articles on their website or ask if there are other ways to develop a partnership to the benefit of your small business and Edmunds. At the end of the day, the goal for both parties is to help consumers answer their automotive questions. Why not work together towards success?

Similarly, other small business owners that offer services might find that websites like Angie’s List might be a good place to monitor and highlight their business listing online. Local storefronts might see more success being active on location based review sites and apps like Yelp or Foursquare. Don’t be afraid to ask your customers how they found you and where they go when they’re searching for products and services like your own! This kind of information is key to optimizing your digital content to have stronger online conversations with your existing customers and quickly reach prospective customers.

The post 4 Marketing Tactics to Get Found in Search appeared first on Rival IQ.

Hashtags have always been a great way for marketers to organize their social content and for social media users to participate in campaigns and movements. With hashtags everywhere, I’ve always wondered how to successfully use them. So I sat down with my Social Posts dashboard to take a look at how the world’s leading active lifestyle brands have successfully used hashtags on social media this year.

#1. Identify & Understand Anomalies

Navigating from the Cross Channel Social Posts dashboard to the Hashtags section, this is what I found myself looking at:

Of all of the hashtags used, a Korean hashtag, #방탄신발, used in merely three YouTube posts was the clear frontrunner. The 9.67% and fully blacked out progress bar jumps right off of the page compared to the other Engagement Rate/Post metrics. Right away, you can visually tell that this hashtag is an anomaly with an astounding 350% better performance than the second place hashtag, #foundin.

So what on earth was this hashtag all about? #방탄신발 (“Bangtan shinbal”) means “Bangtan shoes”, Bangtan referring to the k-pop group BTS (Bangtan Boys), who feature Puma’s Blaze shoe line in a k-pop music video style commercial for Puma.

To figure out why this hashtag earned such outstanding engagement rates, you have to take a look at the posts using the hashtag.

In this instance, Puma used this hashtag in the description of their Blaze_Time shoes YouTube videos. These videos are more than just commercials uploaded to YouTube, they’re music videos — k-pop music videos. K-pop videos average in the 10s of millions of views range, so it was a pretty clever choice on Puma’s part to use:

• A popular group that many fans might idolize
• A music video to…
  • Organically feature and endorse their shoes
  • Showcase the kind of lifestyle one has who wears their shoes
  • Highly engage their customers in a gracious, not product-pushy way

With most of Puma’s business coming out of EMEA, partnering with a popular k-pop group to showcase their line of shoes allowed Puma to capture a new audience: Asian urban youth. K-pop artists and songs are popular throughout Asia with a highly engaged, young fan base. In the past decade, Puma’s been strategizing to become more relevant and accessible to urban youth after years of success with the more elite athletic markets (motorsports, for example). Choosing to produce a music video style promo video with subtle product placement was a wise way for Puma to organically reach a new region (Asia) and customer segment (urban youth).

Investigating any metrics anomalies that appear in your Social Posts dashboard can help you quickly identify any outstanding content your competitors may have created. By taking a look at any of your competitors’ awesomely successful content, you’ll have a chance to recreate and optimize what appeals to your customers in a way that’s relevant to your own brand.

#2. Analyze Post Frequency

Once I got over the engagement rate of the Puma video, I wondered what I was looking at for numbers. There was no consistently used hashtag that drove high engagement rates. When I noticed hashtags like #conormcgregor and #NanoShowdown, it seemed like there were a few social media posts that took advantage of popular current events that managed to get their timing right. Knowing how to anticipate popular events and trends and turn them into highly engaging hashtags comes with experience and knowledge of your audience, your customers, and how they view their world and yours. It’s a tough science to recreate successfully with each popular current event.

So what about the number of posts using a single hashtag? Which hashtags were used in the most posts? I adjusted my Social Posts dashboard to sort the hashtags in the Posts Using column (most posts using a given hashtag to the least posts using). This is what I saw:

Bypassing the Superbowl 50 hashtag, I went to investigate the top 5 hashtags here – the most used hashtags unrelated to an obviously popular event. Here’s what I found:

#IWILL is a hashtag used by Under Armour that represents an athlete’s commitment to their goals, a determination to follow through.

#RuleYourself is a hashtag also used by Under Armour that conveys the concept of an athlete being the sum of all their training. Under Armour often uses the #IWILL and #RuleYourself hashtags together, featuring images of athletes “ruling themselves” as they grind through a work out.

#BeMoreHuman is a hashtag used by Reebok that glorifies the capabilities of the human body, of what real people – real athletes – can do.

#BetterForIt is a hashtag used by Nike – mainly NikeWomen – that proclaims you are better for each workout that you complete, for each time you challenge yourself.

#HereToCreate is a hashtag used by Adidas – interestingly also mainly Adidas women – that encourages creativity in sports, encouraging women to push the boundaries in their own way.

What stuck out to me just looking at this dashboard was that each hashtag was only used by one company. This led me to discover that these hashtags are campaign hashtags created by each brand for a specific campaign. For a more in depth look at these hashtags and campaigns, you can check out my last post on the top 5 social media lessons you can learn from active wear brands. But the top takeaway here? Create a hashtag for your marketing campaigns and be sure to use it with each and every post. By investigating Posts Using hashtags in Social Posts, you can figure out how your hashtag post frequency stacks up compared to your competitors and determine whether you should post more or less frequently. In this example, Under Armour and Nike posted at least twice a day and earned upwards of one million total engagements in two months.

#3. Evaluate Engagement Rates

The Engagement Rates/Post for these hashtags weren’t as high as some of those used in fewer posts (.5% compared to 1.3+%), so I wondered why these brands continued to post with these hashtags so much. Don’t you want to aim for the best engagement rates? Wouldn’t that make the most of your time, budget, and efforts? When you take a look at Engagement Totals instead of Engagement Rates/Post, things start to make a little more sense:

The Total Engagement for posts using these hashtags is highest for hashtags used in a higher quantity of posts. Almost all of the most frequently used hashtags were also in the top 10 “Engagement Total” hashtags – every hashtag except #RuleYourself.

Even though #IWILL Engagement Rates/Post seem miniscule compared to the rates for #방탄신발 (0.57% compared to 9.67%), Under Armour managed to drive more total engagement (1.6 million compared to 40k) in the same 2 month time frame by frequently posting to social media with their hashtag.

By looking at Total Engagements in addition to Engagement Rate/Post, you can get a sense of what hashtags can stick with your audience throughout a campaign. While achieving stellar Engagement Rates/Post is still a good goal, being able to drive consistent engagement over time shows that your audience has more of a commitment to your brand or your campaign, rather than to one uniquely engaging post.

You Can Compete With Viral Engagement By Posting Consistently And Frequently

Probably the neatest lesson I learned while using Social Posts to look at how active wear brands were using hashtags is that you can earn the same amount of engagements as a viral video might by posting to social media consistently and frequently. By posting to social media with their campaign hashtag frequently, at least 2 times per day, Under Armour managed to ramp up momentum and earn more overall engagement for their #IWILL campaign than Puma did for #Blaze_Time. So while all of us are always hoping we might create something that will go viral, until someone figures out a sure-fire science of viral, try posting consistently and frequently to achieve the best results. This is just one of the many lessons you can learn when you dive into Rival IQ’s new Social Posts feature!

The post 3 Ways to Use Rival IQ’s Social Posts to Investigate Hashtag Engagement Rates appeared first on Rival IQ.

It’s not just Nike that’s achieved a massive, loyal customer-base – all the major active lifestyle brands have recognized the power of social media and now use it to amplify customer engagement and refresh customer loyalty anew. In this article, we’re going to cover the top 5 social media lessons learned from this year’s leading social media campaigns as created by the world’s top activewear brands: Nike, Under Armour, Adidas, and Reebok. Special thanks to the Rival IQ team for letting me use their beta feature, Social Posts, to really dive in deep with this analysis!

#1. Create a hashtag for your social media campaign

Under Armour, Reebok, Nike, and Adidas all launched major, lifestyle driven social media campaigns this year. What’s the one thing every company made sure to include in their campaign? A specific hashtag that:

Aligns with their brand values

Elicits an emotional response

Let’s take a look at the campaigns and how their hashtags align with brand values and elicit an emotional response!

Under Armour: #RuleYourself

Under Armour’s Brand Values: “Empower athletes everywhere” and “Make all athletes better through passion, design, and the relentless pursuit of innovation.”

“Empower”, “passion”, and “relentless” are all powerful words that connote strength, drive, and conviction. #RuleYourself aligns with all of these values and also carries an electrifying and captivating tone that also matches Under Armour’s values. Royalty and powerful leaders are the ones who “rule” things. It’s a pretty compelling CTA to call on your followers to rule themselves by taking control of their athletic goals and passions.

Emotional Response: Powerful inspiration. An inherent obligation to pledge conviction for your own athletic goals. The hashtag itself stands as a CTA on its own!

Reebok: #BeMoreHuman

Reebok’s Brand Values: “Challenge and lead the fitness world through creativity”, “celebrate individuality in sport and life”, and “fit for life. Have fun and stay in shape”

“Celebrate”, “individuality”, “fit for life”, “have fun”, and “stay in shape” are all much more relaxed words and phrases compared to the powerful ones used by Under Armour. Reebok focuses on the individual and aims to encourage personal, lifelong fitness, which means embracing the realities of staying active every day. #BeMoreHuman aligns with Reebok’s aim to celebrate individuality and encourage its customers to embrace who they are and how they choose stay fit.

Emotional Response: Embrace yourself. Embrace a fit lifestyle. Feel encouraged by a community of individuals much like yourself. Friendly encouragement. #BeMoreHuman embodies all of this in one simple hashtag. Did I mention this hashtag can stand alone as a CTA too?

Nike: #BetterForIt

Nike’s Brand Values: “To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world” and “if you have a body, you are an athlete”

It’s interesting that Nike’s mission statement comes across more general and relaxed. Nike considers every person an athlete. This statement can encourage anyone who never considered themselves an athlete to not just become one, but already think of themselves as one. Nike’s belief that any person that has a body is an athlete can also remind any athlete that they are, also, human. #BetterForIt conveys a somewhat relaxed, matter of fact tone that aligns with Nike’s voice and values. The hashtag suggests that challenging yourself, no matter who you are or what level of your challenge, you are better for challenging yourself to do more!

Emotional Response: Join a community of people – athletes – just like you, yeah you! Challenge yourself, don’t focus on the competition or comparison. #BetterForIt is like your own subtle, personal pat on the back each time you get up and work out.

Adidas: #HereToCreate

Adidas’s Brand Values: “To be the leading sports brand in the world” and “authentic, passionate, innovative, inspirational, committed, honest”

It’s almost as if the Adidas brand is a persona of their ideal athlete – a leader who is authentic, passionate, innovative, inspirational, committed, and honest. That’s a lot of great things to be! #HereToCreate aligns with the Adidas mission to lead, be authentic, inspire, and passionately innovate. Whenever an individual uses the hashtag, they’re instantly suggesting that they also embody Adidas’s brand persona of an authentic, creative athlete that’s inspiring those around them.

Emotional Response: Bring out your inner Adidas persona – be the creative athlete that inspires others to tap into their own creativity. #HereToCreate tags the efforts of each inspiring, creative athlete so you can be inspired too!

Creating a hashtag for your social media campaign not only organizes your social media efforts, it also ensures that you’re clear on your messaging. Oftentimes, lengthy copy can breeze right by its readers but a hashtag and the emotions it can encourage often sticks in your audience’s memory. So choose your hashtag with care. 

#2. Find the emotion in your social media campaign

I took the time to walk through all of the emotional responses elicited by these campaign hashtags because I think they’re pretty profound. While all of these activewear companies do use product related hashtags (Reebok’s #SpeedTR shoes, Puma’s Rihanna line of shoes #FENTYxPuma, New Balance’s #FreshFoam shoes), the campaign hashtags that elicit an emotional response have received the most engagement.

Affiliate mentions and social media advertisements have exploded lately. There’s nothing better than a word of mouth recommendation or review, but somehow including a product focused hashtag feels more sales-y than it does authentic. Hashtags that motivate and are relatable to every person who feels emotions (and that’s just about everybody) are much easier for anyone to use. They also encourage the creation of your own social media brand ambassadors when you create hashtags that align with your company values and customer experience. The right hashtags can turn into beacons for your loyal, enthusiastic customers to use and proclaim that they are one with you!

#3. Create a landing page to showcase your community (technically your social engagements)

As I researched each of these hashtags (shout out to RivalIQ’s beta feature, Social Posts!), I found that each hashtag corresponded with a clearly strategized multichannel marketing campaign. Beyond these social media posts, there were also TV advertisements, billboards, and print advertisements as well. I also found a landing page for each and every one of these hashtags.

These landing pages offered some form of showcasing community posts, which include posts by famous and non-famous individuals, that contain the campaign hashtag. These pages also provide more insight on the “mission” behind each campaign. The hashtag landing pages share captivating images, video, and copy that clearly reflect the values behind the company and the campaign’s message. Not sure how to create a social stream for a certain hashtag on your website? Check to see if there’s a “social streams” plugin for your CMS! For WordPress, there’s a plugin called Social Stream

#4. Create a Social Media Campaign!

This seems obvious, but sometimes when we’re lost in the world of content curation and social media analytics, we can often get lost in the numbers and lose sight of our overarching goals. To drive impact and engagement for the content you’re taking the effort to produce, make sure you’ve created a social media marketing strategy for sharing this content. That means:

• Identify your goals
• Map out your path to achieving these goals via social media
• Utilize brand standard guidelines or a core messaging deliverable to ensure your content stays consistent
• Create a campaign hashtag that aligns with your brand values, your campaign goals, messaging, and visuals (and elicits an emotional response if relevant!)
• Use your campaign hashtag on every piece of your campaign

#5. Post consistently and frequently

All of these activewear brands have posted to social media with these hashtags more than they have with others.

These leading activewear brands posted to social media with their campaign hashtag at least once a day, if not two times a day at most over the course of eight weeks. This kind of consistency earned regular engagement and ensured campaign messaging resonated with their audiences. While Reebok’s #BeMoreHuman hashtag has only driven 3.1k engagements per post, which seems lower than the Engagement Totals for some of the other hashtags, there are over 217k posts on Instagram with the #BeMoreHuman included! How’s that for an engaged audience? When you’ve put together your social media campaign, make sure you post daily and use your campaign hashtag!

Active Lifestyle with Active Social Media Lessons

What do you make of the way these leading active wear brands do social? To me, it seems like these brands have realized their consumers live and share their lives on social media. They’re fostering community around their products and tapping into their consumer lifestyles with emotion-prompting hashtags and campaigns. Stay active with your social media efforts and you can build your own engaged digital community too!

The post Top 5 Social Media Lessons Learned from Active Wear Brands appeared first on Rival IQ.

The B2B sales cycle is much lengthier than the B2C sales cycle, which means you’ll be courting your prospects via social media (and a number of other) channels for quite some time. So make sure you’ve identified your overall social media marketing strategy and have a clear understanding of how your social media efforts will support your overarching goals to get the most out of your B2B social media posts. With that being said, here are the best social media platforms to utilize for your B2B marketing efforts!

B2B Marketing Channel #1: LinkedIn

If you had to choose only one social media platform for B2B marketing, choose LinkedIn. While LinkedIn may not have as many monthly active users as Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn still boasts over 400 million total users and 100 million monthly active users. LinkedIn users also include most Fortune 500 CEOs, upper level management & c-suite professionals, not to mention the capabilities to search by industry and job title that will help you make sure your message is reaching the right target audience. There are plenty of qualified leads you can identify and reach via LinkedIn!

Typically when you’re selling B2B, part of the reason for a lengthier purchase cycle is because your proposal has to make it through levels of approval. By publishing to LinkedIn Pulse or to your company page, you’re increasing your brand awareness and the chances of gaining visibility with some of the higher ups you may need to eventually win over. Establishing a trustworthy impression of your company, product, and/or services prior to the final approvals process can only help your sales team.

The other great thing about marketing on LinkedIn for B2B purposes is that your audience tends to be in a more receptive mindset. Sharing case studies, 1-pagers, or webinar information amongst personal Facebook updates can easily seem intrusive and out of context. But sharing your case studies, whitepapers, and webinar offers on LinkedIn can not only be a welcome expectation but also a highly relevant, helpful piece of content that a user was browsing through LinkedIn to find anyways. LinkedIn is a professional social media platform, so publishing your professional content there fits right in with audience expectations and increases your chances of engagement!

Quick overview of ways to market on LinkedIn:

• Publish company updates
• Publish to LinkedIn Pulse
• Paid, sponsored company updates

B2B Marketing Channel #2: Twitter

While I caution against focusing on Twitter for B2C marketing efforts, Twitter is a fairly decent place to share content and increase brand awareness for your B2B goals. If you choose to use Twitter, spend a little bit of quality time on the platform publishing your tweets with the appropriate hashtags and engaging with other users each day. Twitter seems to reward frequent users and it’s all about interactions, so make sure you aren’t only encouraging a one sided conversation.

Lately, Twitter seems to be completely flooded with marketers and service professionals (in addition to the popular celebs and B2C brands!). While there can be an overwhelming amount of content flying through the Twittersphere, the amount of professional content getting published means your content won’t seem out of place. Twitter being flooded by professionals seeking professionals like yourself means that others may be searching via hashtags to find relevant content to curate, share, or learn from.

The challenge with Twitter becomes getting noticed by the right company or individuals. Finding the appropriate hashtags and posting regularly will increase your chances of getting noticed by the right audience.

You can also try out Twitter’s paid advertising to increase your chances of getting in front of the right eyeballs too! Take 15-30 minutes each day to tweet and engage others on Twitter. Your frequent tweets and conversations will help make your brand more familiar and, assuming you’re publishing quality tweets, trustworthy!

B2B Marketing Channel #3: SlideShare

SlideShare was acquired by LinkedIn in 2012, so without even knowing what SlideShare is, you can get a sense of its utility for marketing to professionals based on its acquisition! SlideShare is a slide hosting service where you can upload your decks privately or publicly. You can embed your presentations on your own website and even share them to LinkedIn!

Why SlideShare? SlideShare lets you establish your expertise and build trust by demonstrating your company’s personality and knowledge through your presentations. Chances are, you’ll be submitting a proposal and walking your contacts through presentations in the future. By offering up some free tips, tricks, reports, or other expertise on SlideShare, you’re giving your future prospects a chance to get to know you, what you do, and your style.

People also browse through SlideShare in search of reports and helpful information, so you’re able to share high quality content to an audience that’s expecting that kind of media and looking for a trustworthy source. Any time you create a presentation deck, put it on SlideShare and post a link to your other social media channels as well!

B2B Marketing Channel #4: YouTube & Google+

Nothing tells a story better than video. Not to mention, video marketing is on the rise and video can be some of the most engaging content published on social media. While you typically hope that working professionals aren’t spending their days browsing YouTube channels, your prospects are bound to be on YouTube at some point. YouTube has over 1 billion users, that’s almost 1/3 of all the people using the internet! Taking advantage of YouTube advertising and optimizing your videos can increase your chances of getting found on YouTube and the internet.

Let’s not forget that YouTube is a Google company. Use YouTube in conjunction with Google+ to create more opportunities in which you can get found organically in search results. Even if you aren’t in the habit of producing high quality videos, if you can record any podcasts, webinars, or presentations and upload these videos to YouTube, do it! Once you’ve published your video, post an update with a link to your video on Google+. These video touch points offer an engaging way for prospects to get to know you and your business, it gives them a more human feel for your style, your voice, and your capabilities.

Establish & Build Trust

No matter the goal of your B2B social media campaign, whether it be brand awareness, lead generation, or lead nurturing, the most important thing to keep in mind any time you publish is trust.

Think about it, you’re going after business customers. You’re asking them to enter into a long term partnership with you. Would you marry someone you don’t trust?

Whether you’re uploading a presentation deck to SlideShare, posting an update to LinkedIn, or uploading a webinar recording to YouTube, make sure you’re sharing high quality content (quality copy counts!) that offers some value to your viewers. Offering something of value for free is an act of goodwill, and goodwill is a great foothold for building trust in the B2B world.

The post The Best Social Media Channels for B2B Marketing appeared first on Rival IQ.

For a while now, everyone’s been trying to cover all of the mainstream social media channels: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn. But if you don’t have a robust team to man all of these channels, trying to maintain a presence across all six channels may hurt you more than it will help you. Whether you choose to focus on two social media channels or ten, you have to make sure you’ll be able to own every channel you embark upon.

There’s nothing worse than a customer tweeting for support, only to receive a response days later (attention spans and expected response times on Twitter are down to minutes!). At that point, the customer has probably already called and emailed customer support and, ideally, come to a resolution. Whether you’re aiming to provide customer support, build your online community, or promote products, social media channels are about engagement. So you must be prepared to respond in a timely manner when your customers and prospects engage you!

Choosing the Right Channels for B2C Social Media Marketing

Last year, we found that Facebook and Twitter were the top social media channels to focus on. Today, while Facebook and Twitter tend to earn companies more followers, engagement rates have slowed compared to those on Instagram. We’ll review the top social media channels to choose from in order of the ones currently receiving the most engagement to those with the least engagement. It’s important to keep in mind where your ideal customer spends their time, just because some social media channels receive better engagement rates doesn’t mean your ideal customer necessarily spends their time there!

#1. Instagram

Not long ago, we wrote about why you shouldn’t discount Instagram for your social media efforts, and recent reports have been published that reveal Instagram as the social media channel receiving the most engagement.

Instagram’s user base has grown rapidly since it was acquired by Facebook in 2014, growing from 30 million registered users to over 400 million registered users today. From big name brands such as Sephora and Old Navy, to self-made momtrepreneurs, lifestyle bloggers, and photographers, Instagram offers its users a simple, straightforward, image-driven way to follow their favorite brands, organizations, and individuals.

As the internet and social media channels continue to be flooded with more and more content, Instagram maintains a simple, focused stream of images that’s easy for any user to browse through at their leisure. This simple stream not only allows users to stay focused on what they choose to follow, but it also means the ads that come up feel less intrusive because they follow a very similar format to regular Instagram posts.

You should use Instagram if any of the following applies to you…

• Your customers value design, style, and aesthetics
• You’re selling visually appealing products
• You, yourself, can offer an engaging day-to-day experience
• You can share daily progress and growth. Some examples include…
  • Fitness
  • Product Reviews
  • Service Impact
  • Style
• Your ideal customer is a teenager or between the ages of 18-29

Not sure where to start? You can read more about using Instagram or learn how to optimize your profile!

#2. Facebook

Facebook has long been the standard for social media marketing and advertising. With over 1 billion daily active users, there are plenty of prospects you can reach and existing customers you can engage on Facebook. If you don’t have any social media channels setup yet, Facebook should be one of the first profiles you setup. Having a Facebook Company Page filled with thoughtfully published updates and recent community engagements will quickly make your company look established and allow those unfamiliar with your brand to get a feel for who you are and how you communicate with your customers.

As a Facebook advertiser, you can take advantage of the wealth of data Facebook collects from its users. You can choose to serve ads to people based on location, specific demographics, interests, past purchases, and more. Even if you’re not ready for Facebook advertising, you can still use your company page to drive users to a CTA for your current campaign and gather insights on those engaging with your page.

Facebook is a great place to start for brand awareness and online selling, but it’s also an ideal social media channel for customer service and community. While responding to frustrated customer tweets in 140 characters or less for all the world to see can be a daunting challenge, Facebook gives you the capability to hide inappropriate comments as well as respond directly to them. You can respond directly to comments for all the world to see, or Facebook has even rolled out private messaging in order to make it easier for customers to contact businesses directly. No more digging through your email to respond to your latest website inquiry!

You should use Facebook if your goal is to accomplish any of the following via social media:

• Brand Awareness
• Community Building
• Customer Service
• Online Selling

#3. LinkedIn

If you’re going for engagement and you’ve already mastered Instagram, consider LinkedIn. LinkedIn is constantly improving its offerings and has become one of the top publishing platforms on the web. Its most engaged users tend to be educated and experienced and the professional quality of content on LinkedIn means those browsing around are more engaged and spend more time reading content on LinkedIn.

When publishing to LinkedIn, be mindful of how and what you share because the user base is professional. Keep in mind that prospects spending time on LinkedIn are likely thinking about work, prospecting sales, or educating themselves. So publishing a company update that’s a blunt push for a product may seem out of place amongst professional how-to articles.

Whether you’re announcing a sale or sharing an educational post, think of title updates that organically relate to any of the thoughts and concerns your audience may be experiencing throughout their workday. Be sure to mention the relatable thought or concern in your title and provide a thoughtful explanation to why you thought your update, sale, or product relates to their day to day activities.

You should use LinkedIn if…

• Your ideal customer is
  • a working professional
  • highly educated
  • 30-55 years old
• You’re prepared to produce professional quality images, updates, and blog posts
• You’re selling higher priced products and services (more likely affordable to experienced working professionals)

#4. Pinterest & Google+

Pinterest has been a bit confusing for marketers wondering about whether ad spend is worthwhile, but in terms of getting found organically, Pinterest is one of the best places to be. Similarly, Google+ has been continuing to grow its user base for years but is most useful for helping your content get found on Google.

If you’re putting effort into producing blog posts, infographics, or other digital content to drive people to your website, you may as well share these links to your website with a clean cut image and descriptive text on Google+.

If any of the following applies to your business, then pin to Pinterest too!

Take 10-15 minutes to create an image in Canva to pin a link to your content on Pinterest if:

• Your ideal customer is female
• Your customers enjoy DIY
• Your customers might be more “dreamers” than “buyers” (Many Pinterest users often browse for inspiration and create boards for their dream homes. If you’re looking to go after a wealthier customer, try Houzz instead of Pinterest)
• Your customers like any of the following/your product or service falls under any of the following:
  • Cooking
  • Fashion
  • Hair & Makeup
  • Crafts
  • Art
  • Infographics (did you know how easy it is to discover tons of infographics on Pinterest?!)
  • Interior Design
  • Gardening
  • Event Planning
  • Traveling
  • Working Out

I wouldn’t spend too much time on Pinterest (and be careful, it’s very easy to get sucked into an ever-scrolling session of discovery on Pinterest too…), just make sure to create boards that make sense to your customers and stay true to your brand. Think of Pinterest as an additional channel through which your company and your content can be found on the web.

But What About Twitter?

At this point in time, I’d honestly recommend using Twitter if you’re a B2B company. While there are more than 320 million individuals using Twitter every month, the attention span and short communications can be challenging to engage customers with unless you’re a celebrity or established brand.

Consider using Facebook over Twitter if you’re looking to provide social customer support because Facebook gives you more control over your online presence and allows you more than 140 characters to respond. The companies that succeed with customer support on Twitter tend to have a team of individuals that are ready to respond immediately and can communicate properly throughout departments so a customer isn’t suddenly bombarded on a variety of channels or encountering a disconnect when handed off from Twitter to a phone call or email.

If you’d really like to use Twitter, consider it as a platform for brand awareness or possibly an appropriate opportunity to advertise sales and events. But it really might be more worthwhile to promote sales and events on Facebook or Instagram where users are more likely to spend more time reading through your post and viewing your content.

Pick The Social Media Channels Right For Your Brand

So, pick your poison! Keeping in mind what your team can handle and where your ideal customer spends their time, dive into the social media channels that make the most sense for your customers, products, and services. When it comes to social, there is no one size fits all! So stay tuned, we’ll be discussing which social media channels make the most sense for B2B soon!

The post The Best Channels For B2C Social Media Marketing appeared first on Rival IQ.