I thoroughly enjoyed facilitating the Women’s Web workshops in Bangalore and Chennai. Here are some photos.
Bangalore
Continue reading Online Marketing Workshop in Bangalore and Chennai: Photos
I thoroughly enjoyed facilitating the Women’s Web workshops in Bangalore and Chennai. Here are some photos.
Continue reading Online Marketing Workshop in Bangalore and Chennai: Photos
What do you know about your website visitors? Earlier, we looked at site traffic and engagement metrics on Google Analytics, and at how your visitors get to your site. Now let’s look at your visitors and what we can find out about them.
The Audience Overview report is what shows up first when you open Google Analytics. So you can scroll down and click to view the detailed report of language and locations of your visitors, or you can click on the left sidebar on Audience > Demographics > Language (or Location).
Continue reading Tracking Website Metrics on Google Analytics, Part 3: Language, Location, Mobile
Are videos part of your content marketing? If not, they should be. Be it a quick product demo, a walk through your facility or office, a testimonial from a happy customer, a training video for some complex feature of your product or an introduction of your team — videos are a great medium for all of this.
But getting professional videos done is so difficult and costly that most of us shy away from it. We recently created a bunch of videos of our product and team, and in the process, discovered that it’s not as difficult as it seems.
There are a number of easy and mostly free tools that you can use to create different kinds of videos quickly. Don’t expect the production quality to be really great, but this will serve the purpose for the most part.
Take a look at the videos we created here, and below is the list of tools we used.
Continue reading 6 Free Tools for Creating Product and Promotional Videos
As a social media marketer, you need to know: what content is working for you? Do you know what your top tweets for this month are? Which tweets got you the most retweets and favorites?
Pricing’s something many of us struggle with, and is a really important part of marketing strategy. And it’s something I’ve been thinking about as we move closer to a paid plan for Markitty. So here are a few interesting posts that talk about how you should price your product.
Here’s why research or surveys usually don’t help you much:
Continue reading Monday Marketing Mash-up: All About Pricing
You probably have a Facebook page for your business if you are a restaurant or an established retail business. How do you promote your page? How do you reach out to the same people online who are already coming to your physical store?
Most businesses rely on their customers (or prospects) to find them online and like their Facebook page or follow them on Twitter. But why not actively close this loop? Let’s look at examples of some businesses in Pune who are doing this.
Continue reading Closing The Loop: Merging Online And Offline Marketing
Often, we tell business-owners that just because someone liked your Facebook page doesn’t mean your posts show up in their news feed. Usually, they are shocked to know this. This blogger on Forbes found out the hard way:
Once we started posting on our Facebook page, we were shocked, shocked, to see that not all the users that liked our page were seeing our posts. For example, with over 6,000 likes on our page, a typical post would only be seen by fifty to several hundred people. To reiterate, only 1% to 5% of the people that liked our page saw our posts.
But does this mean Facebook pages are a bad investment for small businesses, as the title of that post says? No. Continue reading Are Facebook Pages Worthless or Are You Doing Social Wrong?
Yesterday Google officially launched its new tool, AdWords Keyword Planner, to help create better AdWords campaigns. Keyword Planner will replace our favorite Google Keyword Tool and AdWords Traffic Estimator.
You should learn to use this tool even if you never used Keyword Tool or Traffic Estimator and do not plan to use Google ads. Understanding search terms is important because that tells you what words your potential customers use to describe yours and similar businesses so that you can tweak your marketing and sales content accordingly.
Continue reading Google AdWords Keyword Planner Just Launched
Many business-owners we talk to don’t know that not everyone who likes their Facebook page sees all (or even any) of their posts. So this week’s links will tell you how this works.
First of all, you need to know about something called EdgeRank. From TechCrunch:
Facebook’s news feed ranking algorithm (widely known as EdgeRank) chooses between hundreds or thousands of pieces of content each day to show the few dozen most relevant stories in each person’s news feed.
Facebook told me in February that the average Page reaches 16 percent of its fans with each post. That’s because some fans aren’t online when the post is published, a specific post hasn’t gotten much engagement from the people Facebook already showed it to, and because if you don’t interact with that Page when you do see its posts, Facebook will only show you them every once in awhile.
In February last year, it might have been true that a post on an average page is shown to 16 percent of fans. It seems to have gone down significantly since then, to 10% or even less.
Here’s an explanation of how Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm works. It’s based on three variables: Affinity (your fan’s history of interacting with your content), Time Decay (newer posts are more likely to show up), and Weight (what kind of posts do your fans interact with more — in general, as opposed to Affinity, which is for particular fans. Confusing, I know.)
Basically, the more fans engage with your content, the more likely your content is shown to them. This infographic explains more.
How do you increase the reach of your content? Mashable has some (obvious) tips.
Also on Mashable are these more interesting and actionable tips. This article is from 2011, but these should still work!
The short version: focus on engaging your fans. For Facebook, reach –> engagement/interaction –> more reach.
Liked this post? Like us on Facebook for more updates and tips.
Over on Women’s Web, I share my tips on business blogging. Here are some tips from the article that we tweeted.
http://storify.com/Unmana/easy-tips-for-blogging
We’ve been feeling like imposters for the last few weeks. You see, whenever we talk to a small-business owner or startup founder, we advise them to focus. To go after one customer segment. To highlight one benefit. To talk in one voice across their marketing channels.
How can you “focus” on more than one thing at a time? How can you “highlight” 37 services? How can you, with the constraints of a small business, manage more than one brand and ensure that your audience doesn’t get confused by conflicting messages?
But we’ve been doing all of this ourselves. We’ve introduced ourselves as “marketing consultants, and we also have a product” or as “we’re building a product, and we also do consulting services.” We’ve been dividing our time between servicing clients and working on the product.
If your feet are on two boats, what happens when the boats gather speed?
Last week, we looked at basic site traffic and engagement metrics on Google Analytics, such as visits, page views, time on site, bounce rate, etc. We also looked at how to look at the performance of individual pages on your site.
This week, let’s take a look at a few other metrics that you should be looking at regularly. (Haven’t set up Google Analytics yet? Here’s how.)
From where are people coming to your site? The Sources report answers this question. Click on Traffic Sources on the sidebar to see your options.
Haven’t signed up for Markitty yet? This video gives you a look inside the tool.
So what are you waiting for? Get Markitty now!
We have been talking a lot about Google Analytics lately. Do you know of the new Google Analytics reports that show trackbacks and links from social media more explicitly? You should, so read this week’s links for details.
But first, how do you get to these reports? On your Google Analytics sidebar on the left, go to Traffic Sources, and then Social. You’ll see the links for Data Hub Activity and Trackbacks.
Here’s a screenshot of our Trackbacks report. It shows us who linked to our site recently.
Continue reading Weekly Reading: Trackbacks and Data Hub Activity on Google Analytics
If you have a website for your business, you must track visitors to your website and what they are doing. There are a number of tools available for tracking this, and the most popular and one of the most useful is Google Analytics. (Here’s how to set up Google Analytics if you haven’t yet.)
In these two posts, I’ll explain some important metrics you should be looking at in your Google Analytics data (or any other website tracking tool you are using).
The first thing to do, after you have logged into your Google Analytics account and selected the website you want to view data for, is to adjust the date range to your liking. The date range you select at the top applies to all the graphs and tables inside Google Analytics. I usually set it to current month or current week. You can change this any time you want, so feel free to try out different options. Click on compare to get all data for the previous period as well.
Now let’s get started.
We created this short video that shows you how to sign up for Markitty and connect your Facebook page, Twitter account, and Google Analytics account. (You need to be the Manager of your Facebook page and the Administrator of your Google Analytics account to connect them to Markitty.)
As you can see, you can sign up, connect your accounts, and start getting your recommendations from Markitty in three minutes flat!
Sign up now:
We talk often about the power of focus here on the Markitty blog and in person. This blog post explains better than I ever could why this is even more important for small businesses.
If you want 1% of a market, you need to get everyone in that market to at least visit your website.
This ties in with the marketing funnel in our “measuring marketing” presentation. Start from the number of customers you want to meet your revenue targets and work backwards to the number of prospects you need to reach out to. You might be surprised.
If you’re coming over from YourStory, welcome!
Markitty is an online software tool that recommends actions to improve your online marketing. Markitty pulls together stats from your Facebook Page, Twitter profile, and Google Analytics account, and gives you recommendations based on your recent activities and results.
You should get Markitty if:
Here is a video demo.
Continue reading Welcome to YourStory Readers
I’m doing two online marketing workshops with Women’s Web.
Want to get more out of your blog, or Facebook page? Wondering how to get your website visitors to buy? How to track marketing results and figure out what’s working for you (and what isn’t)? This workshop is for you.
This workshop will help you decide on the best online marketing channels for your business, how to use them effectively, and how to track performance and make decisions based on marketing data. This is meant to help you go beyond just scouting for Facebook likes or Twitter mentions, or more visitors to your website, and instead, focus on converting those visitors and interactions to actual results: whether in the form of sales, registrations, enquiries or any other result you are looking for.
Here are the dates:
These workshops are for women entrepreneurs, and I’m very excited to be meeting some of the members of Women’s Web’s smart, engaged community.
We’ll stay in each city for a few days to catch up with friends and contacts there, so if you are in either and want to meet up, leave a comment or send me an email at umnana@markitty.com.
AppSurfer is a cool application that lets you try out apps before you buy them. The startup that built AppSurfer, RainingClouds Technologies, is in Pune. They recently got covered on TechCrunch for the second time.
We chatted with three of the Co-founders: Aniket Awati (CEO or Happy Co-Founder), Ratnadeep Deshmane (Geeky Co-Founder), and Amit Yadav (Business Co-Founder). Check out the videos below. (The audio isn’t good, I’m afraid, but I’ve added annotations that should help.)