How Taco Bell Won Social Media

With the advent of social media as a marketing tool, there have been a lot of wins and losses from various companies. Never has a gaffe been able to become so public so quickly. Never before have companies been able to develop such clear personalities. Among those companies who are doing it right, a few stand out above the rest. One of those companies is Taco Bell. That’s right, Taco Bell!

Taco Bell’s Social Media Approach

Nick Tran, the head of social media, claims that they use a three-pronged approach.

“You can break down the type of content we share into three categories: The first is anything Taco Bell creates internally. The other type of content we share is whatever we co-create. This is when we collaborate with influencers and give them the tools to create their own content. The last is content curation, which is basically us amplifying interesting content from our social community,” Tran said.

Essentially, Taco Bell is behaving like a person and creating a personality. One of the most popular tweets of all time was a response that they sent to Old Spice via Twitter. Old spice accused them of not using fire in their fire sauce. They accused Old Spice of not using old spices in their deodorant.

Not only that, but they frequently engage their users and provide them with opportunities to promote their brand in a fun way. Their “breakfast phone” promotion had Taco Bell calling and interacting with customers and having them perform special tasks.

Don’t Take Yourself So Seriously

Even for more traditional companies, social media needs to be a fun endeavor. Using humor, even more elegant humor, is one of the best ways to grab interest and get people engaged. Humanizing your brand is the number one best way that you can improve your social media presence, no matter who you are.

Challenge yourself this week to try a new approach. Engage your user in conversation, make some jokes, and use your business page in a more personal way. You might be surprised at the results.

photo credit: Joe Shlabotnik via photopin cc

Consistent Content Always Wins The Day

Content is king, blah blah blah. In the marketing world, pithy concepts and trite phrases can make their way around like wild-fire. Sure, content marketing is what everyone is doing. But what can you do to make your efforts stand out from “everyone”? As it turns out, that answer is pretty simple. Pick a niche, write some interesting, and do it again. And again. And again. Frequent, consistent content is one of the top indicators of good search rankings. 

One Case Study On Consistency

Search Engine Journal recently published a case study in which the author set out to prove that you could build a site from scratch, and get at least 100 unique views a day within just a few months. He signed up to teach a university class, and then asked the students to start a new domain and write quality, frequent, consistent content. They set up Google Analytics, and tracked the results. As you can see, they were pretty impressive. These kids did basic WordPress hosting, no keyword research, no long-form articles, and no social signals. They just picked a topic they were passionate about, and wrote articles that they would want to read. 

Just think what you could accomplish if you combined those efforts with high level web-development, SEO, PPC campaigns, social media, etc. 

Consistency Isn’t Hard To Achieve

As the case study author suggested, consistency isn’t really a lofty goal. As he said, “Go back to that website you want to beat and look back over a few months in their archives. Add up the number of posts and calculate how often their site is updated. Once a day? Twice a week? More? Less? Doesn’t matter. Once you determine how often your competitor updates his/her site, update yours more often.” And then stick with it over the long term. There are no quick fixes. Your competitor isn’t likely to let up, so neither can you. 

A little work and a little commitment can have you outpacing your competition in short order. Have you been putting consistent content to work for your brand? 

photo credit: Sean MacEntee via photopin cc

Creating A Well-Rounded, Web-Centric Marketing Approach

The internet has changed the marketing priorities of major brands. They have backed away from broadcast advertising options like print, TV, and radio that receive no engagement as well as traditional media advertising options like e-mail blasts and banner ads. While these options still have their place, high engagement mediums of reaching potential customers is the method of choice. Blogs, communities, and social media have revolutionized the marketing field. There is a quick overview of how to develop a web-centric marketing approach. 

Creating a Brand Strategy

Creating your brand strategy is always the first order of business. Branding strategy is what allows you to target your business’ primary audience. Branding themes, logos and graphical components permeate all visual/textual components of this plan. This process is a collaborative effort between you and your agency. For more detailing information on branding strategy see our former blog post. 

Developing Your Web Presence

Your website is the central hub for all marketing efforts. The first step to optimizing your web presence is to establish, collaboratively, your key performance indicators (KPI). Once you know what you are after, you will want to bring the people in. Drive traffic to your site through internet marketing components: SEO, SEM, and Social Media.  You will need to provide audience-specific tools that help build brand awareness and customer loyalty, and, finally, track/measure all marketing/advertising efforts through site analytics.

You will also want to focus on mobile-friendly content for your audience when they are on the go. Why? Because mobile searches lead to conversions. Take these latest stats: 

• Mobile search will overtake desktop search by the middle of 2014
• Mobile searches have quadrupled in the last year according to Google
• Mobile search isn’t just limited to phones. The tablet market will soon overtake laptop sales

HOWEVER, mobile for the sake of mobile isn’t worth the effort. Target high-value site content, and make it mobile-friendly. All mobile efforts should be conversion focused!

Formulate a Search Engine Optimization Plan

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) begins with keyword analysis. Keywords are the search terms that your audience uses to find your web content. This analysis is the basis for not only content development but also branding efforts and marketing efforts. Optimal keywords permeate all content developed throughout this marketing plan. The ultimate goal is to rank on the first page for your most important keywords. Keywords ranked on pages 2-3 are the low-hanging fruit. You will also want to consolidate your web presence. Once two sites are combined, authority and therefor organic rank, will increase. Many keywords on pages 2-3 that can be further optimized to get to page 1.

Public Relations Mixed With Social Media

Public relations has moved from traditional media distribution to online distribution. Social media and blogging can help with PR efforts drastically. You need both online and offline article distribution including white papers and case study development. Additionally, cultivate mailing lists and engage in ongoing email marketing campaigns.

Traditional Advertising

Traditional advertising still has it’s place. However, with the higher prices it is important to get it right the first time. The concepts and creative must support your brand strategy. Stay on topic, and make sure the audience understand your message. Offline this can be done in trade publications and online this can be done with PPC,targeted banner, and re-targeting advertising. Consistent visual components and themes must permeate all materials for consistency of message and corporate image. 

Incentive/Loyalty Programs

Audience-specific incentives and loyalty programs create trust, generate leads, and drive action. This could be a rewards system, a member’s only program, a discount program, or a brand evangelist program. Again, stay consistent with your messaging. 

A combination of all of these components will lead to a well-rounded, successful web-marketing approach. However, this is not a one-time thing. Long term success depends on ongoing implementation, management and tracking of plan components. Continue to re-evaluate plan components, themes and market conditions as you go. And don’t be afraid to make adjustments based on the data you collect. 

Understanding and Rocking Content Marketing

98% of all materials and product research begins on the web. For anyone selling products and services, this is an extremely important statistic. Your customers are researching you and your competition before you ever know they exist. If ignored, this can be detrimental to your bottom line. If utilized, you can grow your business at exponential rates. 

Today, your audience wants to first be educated and informed—not sold! When they understand your message, they’ll trust you, rely on you, and they’ll act. Strategic communication is critical to this process. When speaking to different audiences (investors and customers), it’s important to craft different messages. This is the essence of content marketing.

What is Content Marketing?

According to the Content Marketing Institute, “Content Marketing is a marketing process to attract and retain customers by consistently creating and curating content in order to change or enhance a consumer behavior.” In fact, 95% of B2B marketers are using content marketing to their advantage. 

What Does An Optimized Content Marketing Strategy Look Like?

There are a few different types of media used in content marketing: 

An optimized content marketing strategy utilizes all of these media types in harmony with one another. This includes press releases, blogs, keyword articles, feature articles, case studies, SEO, social media, PPC, banner ads, and trade publication ads. 

What Kind Of Content Should You Use? 

This first criteria of good content is that it be fresh. Posting new, non-duplicate content regularly is key. On-site, including keyword optimized content on every page with an emphasis given to the main objective of the page will also improve the page rank. Off-site, fresh content should be posted on Facebook, Google+, and other social networks to help increase overall website authority. 

The second criteria is “quality over quantity”. While you want to have a regular source and schedule of posting content, you don’t want to just post content without a purpose. Content must be keyword enriched, have a focus, and help make you a global source for industry-related news and information. When speaking to investors and shareholders, you want to speak to the successes, community involvement, and other stories that support your corporate story.

Final Results

All of this effort will have the final result of increased website traffic, lowered bounce rate due to increased quality of on-site content, increased keyword rankings, increased high-quality leads, and increased online authority. Give your audience what they want and they will do the same for your. It’s basic reciprocity! 

A Step-By-Step Guide To Creating a Branding Strategy

Your branding effort is at the heart of your overall marketing approach. It supports your marketing plan and determines how and what materials you need to develop or update. This simple process is the basis for a Th!nk branding effort. Not only will you come away with focused branding tools, but also with data and analysis that will help sustain your current marketing plan.

Marketing Plan

Your marketing plan is your playbook. A means of visualizing the success of your company and its products. While there are many components to a marketing plan, the following key factors are paramount in your branding effort.

• Identify your audience, both internal and external. 
• Identify your marketing mix. 
• Identify your package mix by evaluating existing products and considering removing, repositioning, or recategorizing. 
• Establish the expected life cycle of this plan. 

Your branding strategy is part of your marketing plan. Our approach can be visualized as a pyramid. Each step in the process supporting the previous step by incorporating its goals and findings.

Branding strategy

1. Vision

• Differentiate yourself ourselves from not only the competition, but also in buyer and influencer perception.
• Consistently create and distribute marketing materials that support your Corporate Image Statement throughout the life cycle of our marketing plan.
• Grow by forming new relationships with identified audiences or in new markets.
• Establish market ownership by permeating the lexicon of industry insiders, employees and influencers.

2. Mission

• Increase the product and company recognition. 
• Popularize your product.
• Educate customers, influencers and employees.

3. Objectives

• Establish a brand platform/product offerings.
• Establish a brand architecture/sales model.
• Implement sustainable branding and sub-branding strategies.
• Increase sales, increase market share, increase consumer preference, build brand loyalty, raise relative price.

4. Actions

• Market research: discovery/inventory, internet visibility/presence assessment, SWOT analysis.
• Analyze research: establish findings.
• Concept and development.

5. Core Values

• Your core values are your corporate image
• In many respects, your corporate image is determined by your core values—whether intended or not. This process often reveals core values we didn’t know we had. 

Having a solid approach to branding strategy is key to growth in any company. Follow these steps to find a solid foundation for your marketing plan. 

Adaptive Design Means A Website With High Usability

Websites today are all about ‘authority’. A site’s authority can be measured in many ways; from traffic analytics to third party indices to social media approval to organic rank to conversions, aka sales. Ultimately, the value of an organization’s site is measured by its stakeholders’ performance expectations. It’s the site’s authority on the web, however, that gets you there.

Whether it’s known to them or not, companies considering rebuilding their corporate site are likely dealing with authority issues. Low authority on the web can be caused by many factors such as aging infrastructure, site architecture, usability issues, content issues or all of the above. It all boils down to providing a good quality user experience. 

Delivering A High Quality User Experience

The first step in delivering a quality user experience is knowing your audience. This means we must not only attract our target audiences, but we must retain them on our site. If your target audience visits your site and there’s no spark, there’s no retention. And if there’s no retention then your goals and the expectations of your stakeholders will not be met. If there is one thing we know about most audience, it’s that they love attractive visuals. Engaging these audiences through stunning creative is the key.

Beautiful creative, however, is only part of a quality UI design. The design must also provide a fantastic experience across multiple devices with varying screen sizes and resolutions. This is where Adaptive Design concepts should be applied. If you don’t have a mobile-optimized version of your web site then this is not only a problem from a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) perspective as stated by Google (i.e., lower organic rank), but it can result in usability issues on mobile devices such as small tablet devices and smartphones. These usability issues generally result in higher bounce rates and less time on site for mobile visitors. Higher bounce rates also contribute to lower authority.

Solving These Issues With Adaptive Design

Adaptive Design seeks to dynamically adjust you web site’s page content based on the size of the screen or the type of device visitors are using. This methodology results in a smooth user experience regardless of the device being used, plus it adheres to Google’s best practices for high organic rank in mobile searches.

Combining a great user experience with superior functionality is the golden ticket when it comes to achieving authority with your web design. And Adaptive Design is one of the best ways to accomplish this goal. 

The Internet: Addictive Nuisance or Global Opportunity?

The internet will celebrate its 25th birthday this March, and it has left no one unaffected. Ask almost anyone, and they will be able to list the pros and cons of living in such a connected world. For marketing professionals, the advent of the internet has provided both new challenges and fantastic opportunities. So, what does your audience think? Are they as impressed by this brave new world? The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project has the answer. 

Who Is Using The Internet?

Pew issued a survey which found that 87% of Americans use the Internet in 2014. This percentage has increased every year: up from 14% in 1995 and 46% in 2000. We have reached near saturation with internet usage in the US. This is a great thing for marketers, because we can be certain that we will find our target audience somewhere on the web. These numbers get even higher when we look at the users with the most buying power. In fact, 99% of those with household incomes of more than $75,000 are frequent internet users.

And Are They Happy With What They Find?

Most internet users plan to continue their habits for the foreseeable future. 53% of internet users claimed that it would be “very hard” to stop using the internet. This is a larger number than the 34% who said it would be “very hard” to give up television, a flip flop from past years. Internet users are integrating streaming, communication, news, and social sharing into their internet experience. Other individual services are losing their importance. 

You could argue that this is because of the “internet addiction” so often bemoaned. However, most users have a different perspective. 90% say the internet is good for them personally and 76% say that it’s good for society as well. 

Conclusion? Your target audience is using the internet, enjoying the internet, has plays to keep using the internet, and has a positive impression of the internet. It’s no wonder that it has so drastically changed the way we market our brands. 

photo credit: Martin Deutsch via photopin cc