How Marketers Can Spur Social Content Sharing

Social sharing of your digital content not only boosts marketing ego, it boosts Google search ranking and expands brand audience, according to studies. So how do you spur more sharing? A recent article by Tom Mangan of Reputation Capital Media Services, an agency offering content marketing support, helpfully summarizes the simple advice of multiple experts. Tip No. 1: Make it easy to share by adding social sharing buttons to your blog, website, e-mail, etc. No. 2: Make it exciting to share by adding an image. Web experts agree that any image, but especially an interesting and original graphic, increases sharing. No. 3 is a standard for marketing: Write an attention-grabbing headline. For a basic rule of thumb, keep it short and include a motivator for response or sharing, such as fear, exclusivity, greed or peer approval. No. 4 is more technically challenging: Use content meta data tailored to sharing on the social platforms targeted, which should be the platforms most used by your target audience. Examples are OpenGraph tags for Facebook and LinkedIn, and Twitter Card tags for tweets. And No. 5: Time your posts to maximize sharing. To hone in on the right day and time, you can start by learning directly from your own audience through your online traffic analytics. To read Mangan's article with helpful links, go to http://repcapitalmedia.com/how-to-get-people-to-share-your-content/

How to Rev Up Your PPC Campaigns

If you're a typical small to mid-sized business, you're likely wasting 25% of your pay-per-click marketing budget, according to a MarketingProfs report on a study by search software provider WordStream. So where's your PPC effort leaking dollars? WordStream graded the PPC activity of 500 small to mid-sized businesses in terms of account activity, ad relevancy, keyword optimization, landing page quality and mobile search to come up with five fixes for more traffic, leads and sales. Some takeaways: 1) Make mobile PPC best practices a top priority and get ahead of the over 80% of AdWords accounts that fail to create mobile-preferred ads; 2) Create market-relevant, call-to-action landing pages with conversation tracking instead of relying on a generic home page or single landing page; 3) Improve text writing and relevancy for better click-through and Google quality scoring, and watch your cost per click drop by as much as 50% and your cost per action by up to 80%; 4) Optimize your keywords with strategies like lower-CPC long-tail keywords, modified broad match keywords, and negative keywords; 5) Increase your commitment to PPC by spending at least 20 minutes a week on optimizing your Adwords account. The gain in 2014 from such fixes? Just looking at markets that AccuList USA frequently serves -- multichannel retail, automotive, computer and electronics, education, B2B and insurance -- the study estimated optimized PPC to annually yield 569 more product sales, 273 more vehicle test drive appointments, 211 added enterprise software inquiries, 202 more student inquiries, a 157 gain in B2B supplier leads, and 126 additional insurance quotes. For a helpful infographic, go to http://www.marketingprofs.com/chirp/2013/11993/five-ways-to-give-your-ppc-advertising-an-extreme-makeover-infographic