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22 Dec 2015

Sticky Post By Filament SEO Specialist Posted in SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION With No Comments Permalink

A Summary of SEO Trends in 2015: What Have We Learned?

Sticky Post By Filament SEO Specialist On December 22, 2015 With No Comments

In some ways 2015 was a big year for the search engine optimization (SEO) field and in others it was less than exciting. In big news, the move to mobile happened. And in the not-so-big news, a solid SEO foundation is still vital. So, let’s take a big picture look at a summary of SEO trends in 2015.

Mobile – This was supposed to be a huge move and it did have an impact on websites and the world of SEO, but it was not nearly as earth-shaking as predicted.
More about mobile – While user experience has been a Google focus for a while, they’ve finally forced us to realize that the real way to SEO in mobile is through the user experience.
Keywords – Will we ever stop talking about how important it is to have a good keyword foundation and understanding? Nope!
Establish a good SEO foundation – Keywords, title tags, meta descriptions, and alt attributes all need to be in place. Then review that foundation every year to two to check relevance.
SEO is Social – The worlds of SEO and social have been bumping into each other for quite some time and the smart companies are now finding a way to merge them and use them together for great benefit.
Fine tune your SEO – for specific products, campaigns and audiences, and avoid broad reach targeting.
It’s all about the ROI – The real goal of good SEO is improving your ROI, which means that this concept has to be in the forefront when creating an SEO plan.
Use SEO Analytics – Learn more about how SEO analytics work or use an outside firm that will help you make analytics a useful tool.
Google #1 Does Not Exist – In the past, ranking #1 on Google was the end-all/be-all. Now searches are specialized and regionalized so being #1 changes from person to person and place to place.
Stay Away from Big Promises – As always, but it bears repeating, stay away from any company that offers too much in the realm of SEO. SEO is a tool that helps a company, it is not a miracle.

So our summary of SEO in 2015 teaches us that SEO is becoming more integral to all marketing efforts and is an ongoing process, not a one-hit-wonder. We expect to see that trend continue and the line between SEO and other fields get a bit more blurred in the future. Stay tuned in 2016 for more Trend Updates and SEO How-Tos!

18 Dec 2015

Sticky Post By Filament Content Specialist Posted in CONTENT MARKETING With No Comments Permalink

Top 10 Email Marketing Takeaways from 2015

Sticky Post By Filament Email Marketing Specialist On December 16, 2015 With No Comments

Last week we covered 2015’s top email marketing trends. Today we take that knowledge and focus on next steps for email marketing success in 2016.

1. Focus on the customer.

Whether you’re improving user experience or building a lifecycle email campaign, put your customers at the center of your efforts. They’re driving the conversation with brands. Focus on their needs by listening, observing and joining the conversation, and you’ll see improved open rates, click-through rates and ROI.

2. Deliver quality over quantity.

Now is the time to focus on quality instead of quantity. Customers will only engage with content they really want to see. Your goal should be to create quality email content delivered on a consistent basis.

3. Integrate.

Integrate your email marketing with social media and other marketing channels to directly target and engage subscribers. For example, more and more marketers are using social media to grow their email list. You can read more about this in our post “Make Your Email & Social Media Marketing Work Smarter . . . Together.”

4. Use visual content to tell a story.

The demand for visual content continues to rise, and email is a great place to give users what they want. Adding images to emails can significantly increase click-through rates. Just be sure to stay on brand and customize your visual content to email. Check out our blog post on how to craft great visual content for more information about how to make the most of this trend.

5. Make friends with data.

Email analytics is critical to creating effective email campaigns. Start tracking meaningful metrics to find out what’s working and what’s not. Collect good data—meaningful and analyzable data that maps to strategic business objectives—in order to understand and optimize how customers interact with your emails.

6. Focus on relevance.

To connect with subscribers, the stories you tell in your emails need to reflect things that are immediate and real to them. With good data in hand, you’ll be able to do that—especially if you use segmentation and personalization. These tactics help you narrow your focus and, in turn, get more opens and more clicks.

7. Put mobile first.

Around half of all emails are opened on mobile devices, and that number is still climbing. Use email analytics to find out how many of your subscribers look at email on mobile devices and what devices and email clients they use. Use this information to create emails your customers can easily interact with on their mobile devices. Then, focus your testing and optimization on how your subscribers interact with those emails. Check out our blog posts on creating mobile-friendly emails for more mobile-first best practices. On the horizon, we’ll be looking at how to create emails for wearable tech.

8. Automate it.

Email automation plays a key role in converting leads into customers. It can help you stay fresh on buyers’ minds and plant the seeds of a relationship with your brand. Triggered emails also have the capacity to help you save time and money. According to the Lenskold Group, a marketing consulting firm that specializes in return on investment analysis and strategy, 78% of successful marketers report that marketing automation is responsible for improving revenue. Get some helpful tips and a look at a few key examples of email automation in our blog post “Triggered Emails & Lifecycle Marketing: Tips & Best Practices.”

9. Build relationships.

Create meaningful connections with personalized, data-driven email marketing. Focus on building stronger loyalty and long-term customer engagement. First, start with good data about your customers’ needs, wants, interests and preferences. (See #5 above.) Then, segment your email list in order to send out targeted and tailored messages. Finally, make your content engaging and relevant with personalization.

10. Optimize across the journey.

The customer journey now involves countless micro-moments as customers go through their day engaging with mobile devices. People move seamlessly across screens and channels. As a result, your brand must deliver content seamlessly in return. Don’t let competing objectives or department silos stand in the way. Provide a great user experience at every touchpoint.

How have your email marketing strategies changed this year? Share your experience in the comments section below.

Get in touch with Filament to keep your email marketing ahead of the trends.

08 Dec 2015

Sticky Post By Filament SEO Specialist Posted in SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION With No Comments Permalink

Filament’s Top 10 SEO Tips: 2015 in Review

Sticky Post By Filament SEO Specialist On December 8, 2015 With No Comments

There has been a “settling” that is happening across the realm of search engine optimization (SEO) in 2015 ,and it will likely continue. Gone are the hectic initial days when one piece of advice suddenly had been touched by Midas and was your golden ticket to “being #1 on Google”. In fact, a #1 Google ranking isn’t even what it once was. So let’s take a look back at this year and see what information stands and which SEO tips will continue to help us throughout the next season and beyond.

Analytics – SEO is branching into 2 different directions with the entire field of analytics becoming vital to a website’s success.
Sales Strategy Analytics – Adding to the above, it’s not only important to have analytics, it’s important to use them. If you have a sales strategy you’re trying, then most definitely set some analytics in place to test that strategy and see where you went wrong and what you did right.
Keywords – We’ll never stop harping on this one. Use them correctly and they are key (bad pun totally intended); use them incorrectly and you may be punished.
Mobile – Wasn’t this supposed to be a big scary year for websites as Google “forced” them to go mobile? Not quite what was predicted – but mobile is still a vital element and clearly will continue to gain in importance.
Social Strategies – Social and SEO are becoming more and more related as time goes on and should often be working hand in hand to create effective strategies.
User Segmentation – A recurring theme – know your audience and cater to them. It’s going to keep coming back in every element of marketing, SEO included.
Let Go of the Past! – So many SEO myths still live on and have become the Bigfoot of the internet. It’s important to let go of mythical SEO that lurks in the backwoods and know the facts.
It’s all about the ROI – In the past getting to Google #1 was the goal but that really didn’t do anything for your bottom line. The better goal is an effective ROI, which means that your SEO needs to be geared for that goal, not the elusive (currently non-existent) #1 position.
Optimized Content – Your web content should all be optimized, not only in a keyword/search manner but to appeal to your audience. This means that writing copy once is NOT good enough, it needs to be fluid to appeal to your changing audience and to respond to their reactions to your website.
Lifecycle Marketing – The key to effective SEO today lies in knowing your market and getting them to become a brand-loyal sales tool in and of themselves. No more scatter-shot marketing.

2015 saw a lot of changes in SEO, but then every year seems to be a big one in the field of search. The over-arching trend that is becoming more obvious is that search engine optimization is about so much more than a trick or two to pull in visitors; it’s about establishing a plan to relate directly to your target audience and keeping that conversation going.

02 Dec 2015

Sticky Post By Filament Email Marketing Specialist Posted in EMAIL MARKETING With No Comments Permalink

Year-End Review: Top Ten 2015 Email Marketing Trends

Sticky Post By Filament Email Marketing Specialist On December 2, 2015 With No Comments

As 2015 comes to a close, we’ll be looking back at the trends that have shaped digital marketing over the past year. Today, let’s review the top 2015 email marketing trends that will continue to affect our strategies and best practices into the new year.

1. Customer-driven marketing

Consumers are now driving the conversation with brands. They will only engage with content they really want to see. As a result, we’re seeing segmentation and personalization becoming more important than ever since these tools allow us to focus on meeting our customers needs and building relationships with them.

2. Holistic marketing

Based on the philosophy that “everything matters,” holistic marketing involves integrating your email marketing with social media and other marketing channels to directly target and engage subscribers. For example, more and more marketers are using social media to grow their email list. You can read more about this in our post “Make Your Email & Social Media Marketing Work Smarter . . . Together.”

3. Lightbox pop-ups

More and more companies are growing their email lists by using pop-up boxes, otherwise known as lightboxes, to collect email address. And it’s working! These pop-ups make email signup more visible and offer a clear call to action. Here’s an example of Pottery Barn’s lightbox pop-up:

4. Optimizing for new devices, applications and apps

With the advent of new devices, we need to pay attention to optimal character counts and more for email from names, subject lines, and preview text. For example, the iPhone 6s Plus shows three lines of preview text, instead of two lines on previous models. Furthermore, the new version of Outlook for Mac also introduced support for preview text, displaying it as the third line in the inbox (after the from name and subject line). You’ve also got wearable devices to take into consideration now. As a result, you want to ensure that you’re using a recognizable from name, a compelling subject line and preview text that works well with your subject line, optimized for all the devices your customers are using.

5. Mobile-centric

Mobile has changed what we expect of brands. The proportion of email opened on mobile devices is still on the rise, and this trend looks set to continue. To keep pace, you need to focus on ensuring that your emails look awesome across all mobile devices—especially those your target audience use. Even if you don’t have a ton of mobile users in your email list at the moment, it’s highly recommended that you move toward creating adaptive content for the future.

6. Adaptive content

One way to address trends 4 & 5 is by turning to adaptive content. We recently covered adaptive content in our post “How Adaptive Content Makes Your Lifecycle Marketing Better.” For your email marketing, you’ll want to start with the intent that your content will go out and live on a wide variety of devices, platforms, screen sizes, and resolutions. This means thinking about content differently and writing differently, too.

7. Good data vs. Big Data

You can use good data (vs. Big Data) to create better emails. Instead of trying to measure everything, look for high-quality data for key data points. You want to collect and analyze data that maps to strategic business objectives. Check out our post on what email analytics to measure and why for an excellent starting place.

8. Better personalization

Mobile use has broken the customer journey up into hundreds of real-time micro-moments shaped by customer needs. Customers act on their needs in the moment, which requires brands to focus on relevance and usefulness all the more. Toward this end, personalization is key. It is a proven strategy for nurturing leads, increasing conversion rates, and cultivating relationships with customers who turn into brand advocates. If you follow through on #7 above, you’ll have some great data that you can translate into meaningful action.

9. Better segmentation

Following naturally from our discussions of good data and better personalization comes better segmentation, which is necessary to deliver quality, relevant and useful email content. By narrowing your focus and sending messages to targeted groups within your lists, your recipients will find your campaigns more relevant—and relevant campaigns get better results, i.e. better open and click rates. Check out our blog post from April of this year on “14 Ways to Define and Refine Your Segmentation Strategy.”

10. Increased automation

Automation is one of those strategies where you can put your data into meaningful action. Email automation plays a key role in converting leads into customers. It can help you stay fresh on buyers’ minds and plant the seeds of a relationship with your brand. Triggered emails also have the capacity to help you save time and money. You can use triggered emails to match up your automated emails with the customer lifecycle, which will help build better relationships with customers at every stage along their journey. Check out a few examples of triggered emails in our recent blog post “Triggered Emails & Lifecycle Marketing: Tips & Best Practices.”

What do you think were the top marketing trends in 2015? Share your insights in the comments section below. Then, check back with us in two weeks for top email marketing tips based on what we now know about email marketing in 2015.

Learn more about Filament and how we can help shine a light on your email marketing.

01 Dec 2015

Sticky Post By Filament Content Specialist Posted in CONTENT MARKETING With No Comments Permalink

How Adaptive Content Makes Your Lifecycle Marketing Better

Sticky Post By Filament Content Specialist On December 1, 2015 With No Comments

In our recent posts on lifecycle marketing, we’ve been talking a lot about getting the right content to the right customer at the right time, about meeting them where they’re at and providing them with the information needed to help move them along the customer lifecycle. We’ve also talked about the importance of following them through the customer lifecycle and creating relevant messages for all the different touchpoints at which customers interact with your brand. This practice requires an omnichannel approach since customers expect to interact with your brand across many different channels. But how do you create an excellent user experience that delivers relevant content across all those platforms — and devices, screen sizes, and even beyond the digital sphere, into print?

The answer, my friends, is with adaptive content. Everywhere, and in every way, customer interactions with your brand affects their experience with your brand and their feelings about your brand. Thus, it’s key to deliver content that embodies all of the features of user experience we outlined in an August blog post. You can make your content accessible, usable, and even more credible with adaptive content strategies.

First of all, what is adaptive content? Let’s borrow managing founder of UX consultancy Bond Art + Science Karen McGrane’s definition: “Adaptive content is a clean base of presentation – independent, well-structured content that you have designed from the start with the intent that you may want it to go out and live on a wide variety of platforms.”

And what, you might ask, does that mean? In a nutshell, it means creating chunks of flexible content—also named “intelligent content” or “nimble content”—that can be reused on different devices, platforms, screen sizes, and resolutions. It’s branded content that’s ready to go everywhere. McGrane suggests three requirements for creating adaptive content: 1) multiple sizes or lengths, 2) meaningful metadata, and 3) written for reuse.

Looking at number 1, we see that we’ll need to create content chunks of different sizes. You would also need a content management system (CMS) that lets writers create content variations within one framework. For number 2, all of those chunks of data must be associated with meaningful metadata so that platforms can query them to decide which types of content they want to include. Metadata provides the answer to the question of how it should look. It creates queries for the content in order to decide how best to fit it into a particular display.

For number 3, we need to write differently. More specifically, we need to write like a journalist might. McGrane points out that journalists have been trained to write in a particular way that has uniquely prepared them to create chunks of text. They’re familiar with headlines and perhaps even writing multiple headlines of different lengths, captions and cutlines, ledes and nut grafs. Each of these pieces of copy has a specific job to do. We can borrow this style of writing to create chunks of copy, each with their own purpose, that platforms can source and that can be used in different combinations. Some platforms will just want a headline, a short summary and an image. Others might want a headline, longer description and video.

Adaptive content allows you to deliver meaningful content to users in the form they want it and on the device and platforms of their choice. Plus, every interaction they have with your content will be clean, easy to use, and relevant—an excellent omnichannel experience personalized for customers at each stage in the customer lifecycle.

Contact Filament today for help creating adaptive content that gives your customers what they need to move down the customer lifecycle.

24 Nov 2015

Sticky Post By Filament SEO Specialist Posted in SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION With No Comments Permalink

How to Fuel Your Lifecycle Marketing with Keyword Targeting

Sticky Post By Filament SEO Specialist On November 24, 2015 With No Comments

The mighty keyword has evolved a great deal throughout the brief history of search engine optimization (SEO). What started as the end all/be all of SEO migrated into something people shy away from out of fear of getting penalized. For legitimate SEO use, however, the keyword is still as important as it has ever been.

There is so much “power” packed into a tiny keyword or keyword phrase that it’s ridiculous to ignore your keyword(s) when they can be working for you. If they’re ignored, they can actually work against you. The right keyword(s) for your website may come organically or be an obvious choice, but in many situations, some research is required.

Once you have your core keywords it’s time to dive further into better practices and explore lifecycle marketing. Get a good grasp of the lifestyle of your customers. Learn where they are in the purchasing lifecycle so you can better address their needs while they’re exploring the pages of your website. This information can be very valuable. For example if someone is just at the initial stages of their lifecycle experience with your website, you don’t want to ask them to fill out a form with all of their personal information – that is extremely off-putting and can potentially scare them away. But the initial stage is one of interest and intrigue – it’s where you can begin introducing them to your products and explaining their great benefits. Note that I said introducing – not overwhelming them with information as they’re not at that stage yet.

It is while you are tailoring your website to match the lifecycle marketing approach that you will really need to hone those keywords/keyphrases and apply them appropriately. By doing this you may actually be able to help a customer through the lifecycle faster by pulling them into your website at a complementary lifecycle stage. By doing that, you’ll be making their experience more satisfactory and rewarding.

Imagine a company that sells cogs. You want to learn about cogs to see if you need one. Your keyword search is likely to be something like “what is a cog”. Lo and behold, our fantastic website has a page labeled “What is a Cog” that explains it in detail for you. The cog company also has a link to “How to Use a Cog” to slide you deeper into the lifecycle. Now imagine that your cog just died and you need a new one. Your search is probably going to be similar to “Buy a Cog”. You’re pretty far in the lifecycle and want to skip the introductory phases of the website. In fact, you’re already a user who wants to use again and may move into the promoter lifecycle stage, so the page dedicated to buying may offer incentives for joining their social media campaign and you’re happy to do so because you are quickly getting to what you need and feel taken care of and understood by the brand.

Contact Filament to see if we can help you fine tune your keywords to make lifestyle marketing work for you.

20 Nov 2015

Sticky Post By Filament Email Marketing Specialist Posted in EMAIL MARKETING With 1 Comment Permalink

Triggered Emails & Lifecycle Marketing: Tips & Best Practices

Sticky Post By Filament Email Marketing Specialist On November 20, 2015 With 1 Comment

When you’re working hard to create relevant messages that deliver value to your customers, it just makes sense to think about customers in various stages of their relationship with your brand. Using triggered messages as part of this process can help save you money and time. In this post, we offer tips, best practices and examples for creating triggered emails for different stages in the customer lifecycle.

Capture

During the beginning stages of the customer lifecycle, you want your emails to focus on driving that first purchase. Start with a welcome series of emails that introduces your brands and your products and services to your new subscribers. Look for ways to differentiate new subscribers, such as by where they signed up for your email list (e.g. Facebook, your website, etc.), by geographic location or demographics. Your email signup form is a great way to collect additional info, including areas or categories of specific interest that can help you hone your messages even further for greater relevance.

Then, set up a system to automate contact with newbies over time, e.g. one week out, one month out, 2 months out, etc., and offer specific promotions at each point in time dependent the customer’s engagement. For example, you can offer progressively higher promotions for folks who haven’t converted by the 30-day mark, 60-day mark, 90-day mark and beyond.

The Welcome Email

The best welcome emails get the subscribers attention and let them know what to expect in the future. They also provide additional ways to connect with the brand to get your relationship off to a great start. Ulta does just that in their welcome emails. What you can’t see in the image below is the part of the email where Ulta invites its new subscribers to connect with them through a variety of social media channels.

From: Ulta Beauty

Subject Line: Welcome! Say hello to your first special offer!

Nurture

In the middle stages of the customer lifecycle, you want to drive repeat purchases and higher customer engagement, be that more visits to your site or on social media. Your focus should be on building that relationship you started when you were trying to get the first purchase. Use what you know from those first interactions to build better campaigns. For example, create a cross-selling campaign in which you make personalized recommendations or highlight specific categories based on that first purchase. You could also send out announcements about new products related to the ones your subscriber purchased.

This stage is also the perfect place to send out thank-you emails, birthday emails, anniversary emails and the like. Acknowledge that you’ve started a relationship with these folks, just like you would any friend.

Lastly, consider creating a strategy for people who’ve only made one purchase. Try out different offers at different touchpoints (again, 30-, 60- and 90-day markers are a good place to start), promoting a larger incentive each time.

The Cross-Sell Email

This cross-sell email from REI does so many things right. They’re highlighting a new product related to an item previously purchased. They provide key information and a clear call-to action. Then, they provide specific, relevant information about 3 items the subscriber can only get an REI. And, lastly, REI goes above and beyond by offering expert advice on choosing the right headlamp followed by tips on taking photos at night using a headlamp. That’s a whole lot of value in just one email.

From: REI

Subject Line: In the Spotlight: New Black Diamond Headlamps

The Cart Abandonment Email

Ah, the cart abandonment email… ’tis an art in and of itself. This classic triggered email works well as part of a lifecycle marketing strategy since you know exactly where the customer is in the cycle. You just need to provide that last impetus to make the sale. To get your subscriber’s attention, go ahead and address the nature of the email from the start. That is, in the subject line—as SheIn.com does with the subject line “Did you forget something?” Then, provide a discount and a clear CTA to help them take that last step.

From: SheIn.com

Subject Line: Did you forget something?

Engage

In the later stages of the customer cycle, you might find that some customers are starting to fade away. If that’s the case, it’s time to win them back. Acknowledge that you haven’t heard from them in a while and give them a compelling reason to come back.

In addition, you want to be sure you’re rewarding your platinum-level customers with consistently relevant messages and standout offers. Consider creating a segment of the best of the best customers to whom you extend extra-special discounts.

The Survey Email

Surveys are a great way to engage your audience and get direct feedback. Follow Joss & Main’s lead by keeping your appeal short and sweet. Write in a voice that suits your brand and your customers. You could also provide an incentive in the form of a discount for completing the survey. In this case, Joss & Main offers their subscribers a better on-site shopping experience as a result of sharing key information.

From: Joss & Main

Subject Line: How are we doing? We’d love your thoughts.

The Winback Email

Uber Florida finesses that art of the winback email by acknowledging the distance in the customer relationship up front in their subject line. This tactic can lead lapsed customers to pause just long enough to prevent them from automatically moving your email to the trash. Then, in the body of the email, Uber gives this subscribers a reason to come back with a limited-time offer.

From: Uber Florida

Subject Line: We’ve missed you.

This winback email takes a slightly different tack. Instead of offering a discount, it gives the subscriber an opportunity to update their preferences, which lets Art.com gather useful data for providing relevant messages in the future—a win-win for both Art.com and the subscriber.

From: Art.com

Subject Line: We Miss You!

Testing

What’s the best time to reach out to past customers for customer reviews? What type of offer is most effective for cart abandonment campaigns? The only way to know is to test. Test different discounts at different times. Test the timing of your emails. Test subject lines, designs, CTAs, test, test, test. And don’t stop testing because things that worked once won’t necessarily continue to work in the future.

Personalization

The best thing about lifecycle marketing is that it lets you tailor your messages to everything you know about your customers. Use what you know about your customers to create content that’s relevant and meaningful to your customers and that will continue to build relationships. Personalize your content, your offers, and your timing to your customer’s needs and behaviors.

What are some of the strategies your business has used for lifecycle marketing and triggered emails? Share your success stories in the comments section below.

Get in touch with Filament today to start creating long-lasting relationships with customers through relevant, meaningful emails and other digital marketing strategies.

16 Nov 2015

Sticky Post By Filament Content Specialist Posted in CONTENT MARKETING With No Comments Permalink

Life Event Marketing vs. Demographic Targeting

Sticky Post By Filament Content Specialist On November 16, 2015 With No Comments

We’re going to say it straight: life event marketing is more effective than demographic targeting. Why? Because life events drastically affect buying patterns in specific ways while demographic targeting cuts a broad swath leaving room for inaccurate targeting.

Let’s take a closer look at the reasons behind this. Within life event segments, we can reasonably know a potential customer’s wants and needs. College grads will be searching for a reliable and affordable car to get to their first job. Retirees are looking to travel. New moms are in the market for dipes, wipes, stroller, crib, nursery furniture, and more baby gear galore. New homeowners will be shopping around for homeowner’s insurance, home hardware, yard equipment, and more. On the other hand, within demographic segments, there are significant disparities in wants and needs.

Life event–triggered marketing is a great opportunity for capturing a high level of customer interest. Customers experiencing the same major life changes are uniquely predisposed to buying based on the event taking place in their lives. It’s the perfect time to reach out to potential customers and continue to build relationships with the customers you already have with lifecycle marketing.

This type of targeting is much more specific than, say, segmenting by age or gender since you’re unable to specifically target the needs and wants within demographic groups. For example, not everyone in their early twenties is attending college. However, if you have a group of young people you know are heading off to college, you can speak directly to their need for college essentials.

Add to this the fact that your customers want to know about relevant offers that will help them save time and make their lives easier. Providing relevant, useful information at the right time opens doors to building lasting relationships with customers whom you will then nurture along their customer lifecycle path toward brand advocacy, which leads to them sharing the good news about what you do and what you offer with their friends and family. You can use life event–driven marketing to start that journey more effectively.

Yes, demographic information—age, income, gender, ethnic background, etc.—is easy to collect and easy to segment. And, yes, it can be cheaper to segment your audience demographically. However, it’s just not as effective. You get what you pay for, as they say.

Does this mean you want to stop segmenting by demographics once and for all? Probably not. It can still be a useful strategy to employ – depending on your industry – especially when you don’t have life event data. Just don’t put all your marketing eggs in that one targeting basket. Make an effort to employ life-event marketing where it makes sense for your customers and your business, whether that be with your SEO efforts or in integrating lifecycle marketing and your social strategy.

What experience has your company had building relationships with customers using life event–triggered messaging? Do you find demographic targeting to be more valuable within your industry? We’d love to read your insights in our comments section below.

If you’re ready to start crafting messages around specific life events, check out Filament’s work to see how we can help you build lifelong relationships with customers and create a customer-driven marketing strategy.

13 Nov 2015

Sticky Post By Filament Social Media Marketing Specialist Posted in SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING With No Comments Permalink

Integrating Lifecycle Marketing and Social Strategy

Sticky Post By Filament Social Media Marketing Specialist On November 13, 2015 With No Comments

Integrating lifecycle marketing and social strategy isn’t necessarily as hard as it seems, but it definitely isn’t easy either.

By nature, lifecycle marketing follows customers from the beginning stages of brand awareness and walks hand-in-hand with them throughout the course of a long and ideally happy relationship.

Effective lifecycle marketing helps people make purchasing decisions. It helps them feel informed and connected, and it keeps them interested in a brand for years to come.

The stages of customers’ lifecycles – Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Retention, and Advocacy – all make sense. They might happen at different rates as some people make decisions and purchases more quickly than others, but they all happen. And, to some extent, we know how to communicate with our customers throughout each of the stages.

Social media, however, tends move a lot faster and in many more directions. Social media marches to the beat of its own drums. There are more moving parts to social media because it encompasses multiple channels and a variety of different frequencies, and they all happen at different times and in different ways – when and if they happen.

Facebook and Twitter, for example, are two very different channels. The likelihood that many of your customers tune into both is high, but the reality is that they typically treat and use each channel differently. They also look for different information from different channels.

What that means for brands is that that they can’t just push the same information out on each of their channels. While that’s not necessarily good news for those who like to broadcast scheduled posts, it does offer more opportunities to tune into different customers at different stages.

Social media allows us to continuously attract new customers, so we need to consistently provide “Awareness stage messaging” for those who may just have tuned-in to our brand. Fortunately, continually marketing the basics of our brand also helps us connect with customers who are further along in their lifecycle because it reaffirms why they like it in the first place.

And wouldn’t it be nice if the communications we have with those in the Advocacy stages also helped us connect with those who are considering purchases? Fortunately, they do! When prospective customers see how pleased current customers are, so much marketing is done for us… there’s little more that needs to be said.

As marketers, integrating lifecycle marketing into our social media strategies is a bit like putting together a complex puzzle. Rather than just sticking pieces together here and there in hopes that they fit, however, we’re better off listening to our social followers and responding to their needs.

While we know we’re aware of the behind-the-scenes seasonality of our messaging and promotions, we also need to hear what our customers are saying when they say it. More importantly, we need to be able to respond to them in real time. That is what keeps customers moving forward within the stages of their lifecycle – not just what the seasonal calendar or our marketing calendars say.

If you’d like help putting together the pieces of your social media puzzle, let us know. We’re glad to help!

The Content Connection

A Summary of SEO Trends in 2015: What Have We Learned?