Don't Sell A Price, Sell A Lifestyle
► Target Marketing To Life Events
► Market To Many Stages Of Life
► Stop Selling By Price Alone
► Create Your Marketing Plan Today!
Different stages of life require unique marketing messages and campaigns. With digital marketing, you can advertise to prospects with content that will increase your conversions. That's this week on Think Tank Tuesday.
You know there are cars on your lot that are going to sell faster than others. Take those that sit for long periods of time and market them directly to customers that want them. That's this week on Hard Facts.
The holidays are quickly approaching. Do you have plans in place to make your dealership a stop on customer's shopping lists? Learn how to take your Black Friday and Cyber Monday strategies further. That's this week on Think Tank Tuesday.
Customer Focused Training
► All Trainers Need To See This
► Specific Language To Avoid
► Develop Your Sales People
► Keep Your Focus On The Customer
If you are in a position to be leading and developing your sales force, I have some Hard Facts you won't want to miss. Learn to use the right language to keep the focus on the customer and create the best experience possible.
Having tracked data for the last seven years in the automotive marketing arena, I can tell you a few things that I've learned that have brought us to where the content marketing world is today. It's all about process and answering the questions that consumers are asking and it's something that, as I've said time and time again in the past, needs to be viewed holistically.
Rather than go into a long post about how to make it all sing properly (that's for future posts), it's important to understand the content marketing trio. No, they have nothing to do with the Three Stooges, but those who don't understand the consumers' mentality might ended up looking like stooges in 2014. This is that important.
To get this understanding, you have to put yourself in the consumers' shoes. You buy things. Take what you know about that and apply it to the mentality and process below.
If they can't find you, they can't do business with you. This is a no-brainer. You can advertise on the various networks, get your branding in place through billboards and radio, put ads in third-party sites across the internet, and a dozen other ways to help people find you, but it's search marketing that truly answers all of the questions that start with "where".
Since content marketing can help your search engine optimization tremendously, it fits in as the first of the trio. Most people are probably finding your website by the name of your company. While this is fine, you don't need to be heavily optimized to be found for your name. It's the other people, the ones that are doing generic searches for you by product or service in your local area, that can have a double impact on your business. By being better optimized, you are moving yourself up in searches which means you are also moving a competitor down.
This is your website. "What" you're trying to sell should be easy to determine once visitors get there. The challenge is that having a website that's just like every other website in your market is silly yet so commonly practiced thanks to the mega-vendors and forced OEM adoption.
There is a psychology that goes along with websites that says, "different is usually better". If your customers visit five websites, four of which look pretty much alike and the fifth, yours, looks different, they'll wonder why. It will register, even if only on a subconscious level. If the design and content are compelling, you have an advantage.
In industries such as automotive where the differences in price are measured in small percentage points, the "why" factor comes into play. Most have a page that's a variation of "Why Buy from Us" on their website but it gets very few visitors. It takes more than that to get a consumer to consider you over a competitor.
This is one of the many places where social media comes into play. When are people most likely to click on the social media buttons on your website? When they're done. In other words, they might visit a handful of websites and put in leads at two or three of them. Once they're done, there's a decent chance that they'll click through to your social media presence to see what you're up to from the human side of the company. What will they see? Will it be a ton of ads? Will it be a ton of "look at me" posts?
What if they saw your community involvement? What if they saw your happy customers? What if they saw the local community engaging with you and you engaging back with them? They might look at you and two of your competitors during the course of their browsing. Will you be the most compelling? Does you social media presence give them a good reason to want to buy from you rather than the store down the block that's posting boring or unauthentic content on their social media profiles?
In future posts, we'll go into how the holistic method of content marketing can make the whole greater than the sum of its parts, but it's important to understand that reasons that it's all tied together. Don't think search, websites, and social. Think where, what, and why.
Does Your Website Pass Or Fail?
► Test Your Website's Merit Today
► The Right Way To Do Product Reviews
► Purchase Justification Is Key
► Make Your Dealership's Website Stand Out
Use this week's Think Tank Tuesday video as a guide. Learn for yourself whether or not your website would pass or fail by the Potratz standard.
It's that time of year, again. We're going to eat a lot of different foods that we rarely eat the rest of the year and we're going to hear a lot of predictions about the future of marketing. The future, of course, is made up of a ton of digital marketing practices. Every year, it gets bigger. Every year, there are more options.
It can actually get pretty confusing.
One of the common themes of the hodgepodge of statistics in the infographic below is that spending will continue its shift away from traditional advertising and more into digital. This trend has been happening for over a decade now and it shows no signs of slowing. The funny part is that what's not mentioned in the graphic is any indication that traditional media such as television is shifting dramatically to include the second screen as a way to interact with content being shown on ads. This is a no-brainer, yet it seems like very few are doing it right.
Another shift is the continued growth of social media throughout the marketing spectrum. Whether through email social sharing buttons, increased spending on various social media advertising platforms, or the good ol' content marketing practices that have been driving us all for the last couple of years, social is clearly the biggest gainer throughout 2013 and will continue to make gains (for both the social sites themselves as well as the advertisers) into 2014.
One final omission from the graphic - an emphasis on video. There's no doubt that video is getting bigger every day. People are spending more time on it. Businesses are spending more money on it. Mastering the art of getting your message to flow and resonate on video advertisements is going to get more and more important. Faster devices. Faster internet connections. It's a recipe for success to those who recognize it.
Here's the graphic itself from the folks at WebDAM.
Fort Lauderdale, FL – November 11th, 2013 — AutoUSA Internet Sales Solutions (www.AutoUSADealers.com) today announced the results of its 2013 annual auto dealer Internet Marketing survey. Financing tools such as online credit applications and trade-in calculators deliver the most valuable website leads, according to respondents. Other significant results from the survey identify pricing and affordability as the most commonly heard sales objection from consumers, while Internet departments' biggest challenges include lead volume and staffing issues.
"We believe the most successful dealerships have effective Internet marketing strategies, and this annual survey helps to identify how well some of those strategies are performing in current market conditions," said Phil DuPree, President of AutoUSA Internet Sales Solutions.
The survey was conducted during September and October and summarizes results from 147 respondents, including Internet sales managers, sales managers, BDC marketing and senior management.
Customer Sales Objections
When asked what the most common sales objection is from customers, the top response was "our price not in line with customer expectations" (28 percent). Other responses were "customer can't get financing" (19 percent), "customer confidence with the economy" (14 percent) and "customer can't afford a new vehicle" (12 percent).
By contrast, in AutoUSA's 2011 Internet marketing survey, not meeting the customers' price expectations was the least-common objection (10 percent). Also in 2011 "didn't have desired model available" was the most common sales objection (25 percent), followed by "can't afford a new vehicle" (14 percent).
"The difference in sales objections compared with two years ago is consistent with what we see in the marketplace; consumers are finding ways to work themselves through the process and further down-funnel," said DuPree. "And while the economy may have improved somewhat, pricing and affordability are still major hurdles for many consumers."
Internet Department Challenges
Survey results indicate that dealership Internet departments are facing a new challenge in 2013. "Not enough leads" (26 percent) is the most cited challenge for Internet departments, which is quite a turnaround from two years ago, when "keeping up with lead volume" (31 percent) was the number one challenge.
According to this year's survey, Internet departments' biggest challenges behind lead volume are related to staffing. Twenty-one percent of respondents cited "not enough staff" as the biggest challenge, while 19 percent stated "quality of staff," and another 18 percent chose "staff does not adhere to processes." Additionally, 18 percent complained their "marketing budget is not large enough to meet objectives," and only 17 percent cited "keeping up with lead volume" as their number one challenge.
"It's interesting that while Internet departments appear to be spending more than ever on search optimization for their websites, they are not getting their desired lead volume compared with two years ago," said DuPree.
Lead Volume and Quality
When asked, "which website conversion tools or add-ons results in the most leads (including phone calls) from your website?" respondents ranked the following: online credit applications (52 percent); chat applications (50 percent); trade-in calculator (37 percent); coupons (20 percent); online service appointment scheduler (19 percent).
Survey participants were also asked to rate the value of leads that they received from their websites. The most valuable are "VIN-specific used vehicle leads" (76% rate as "the best" or "pretty good"); credit application leads (73% rate as "the best" or "pretty good"); new vehicle leads (66% rate as "the best" or "pretty good"); chat leads (51% rate as "the best" or "pretty good"); trade-in leads (45% rate as "the best" or "pretty good") and lastly, general contact info (27% rate as "the best" or "pretty good")
"Inventory leads and leads from financing tools appear to be the most valuable to dealers, which makes sense because once customers start engaging with a website conversion tool they are probably serious shoppers," said DuPree.
Internet Marketing Budgets
In spite of the commonly cited statistic that more than 90 percent of consumers begin their search for a vehicle on the Internet, the survey found that most dealers do not allocate a majority of their budgets to Internet marketing. In response to the question, "What percentage of your overall advertising & marketing budget is spent on Internet marketing?" survey participants shared the following:
-50 percent of dealers spend less than 30% of budget on Internet marketing
-37 percent spend between 30-60% of budget on Internet marketing
-13 percent spend more than 60% of budget on Internet marketing
On the extreme ends of the scale, 10 percent of dealers spend less than 10% of their budget on Internet marketing, while only one percent of dealers spend 90-100% of their budget on Internet marketing.
However, in response to the question "do you plan to increase your Internet marketing budgets in 2014?" 59 percent of respondents responded "yes."
Survey respondents were also asked, "In which areas do you plan to allocate the majority of your Internet marketing budget in 2014?" The responses were:
-Website SEO/SEM (54%)
-Leads from inventory sites, i.e. Cars.com, Autotrader.com, etc. (51%)
-Independent leads from AutoUSA, Dealix, Autobytel (33%)
-Social Media (23%)
-E-Mail Marketing (22%)
-Video production and marketing (17%)
-Reputation Management (14%)
-Online ads (14%)
Finally, the majority of dealerships are optimistic for a profitable 2014. When asked if they believed they would sell more vehicles in the coming year, 85 percent of respondents claimed "yes, my dealership will sell more vehicles in 2014 than in 2013."
About AutoUSA Internet Sales Solutions
AutoUSA Internet Sales Solutions brings the best-in-class tools to increase Internet sales and lower costs for automotive dealerships. Leading products include Payment ProSM, a payment-based pre-qualification tool for dealer websites; ShowProSM incentive program, proven to turn more leads into shows; Leads&ListingsSM, providing the highest quality, new and used car email and phone leads from 100+ sites; PowerListingsSM 2.0, helping dealers increase traffic to—and leads from—their social media sites; and AVA Virtual Sales Assistant, helping dealerships manage more leads at a reduced cost. AutoUSA products are currently benefiting thousands of active dealers all across the U.S.
For more information, visit AutoUSA’s web site, subscribe to our blog at http://blog.autousadealers.com, follow us on Twitter @AutoUSALeads and “Like” us on Facebook at /AutoUSADealers
With the internet in everyone’s pocket, the old mantra of the manufacturer promoting the vehicles while the dealer promotes the deal is dead. It's up to you to promote your inventory to the right customer and make yourself the dealership to visit.
You already have the passion, drive, and excitement. Learn what you're missing to become a great salesman. Follow these four steps to success. That's this week on Think Tank Tuesday.
Over the past decade, advertising budgets across the country have been increasing in the automotive industry. A new eMarketer report projects that the US automotive industry will spend $5.07 billion on paid digital advertising in 2013, with that total rising to $7.80 billion by 2017.
As budgets increase so does the number of channels in which those ad dollars can be spent, making decisions about where to spend your dollars extremely challenging. One important channel that should not be overlooked is mobile advertising on Google.
For the first time, smartphones are currently on pace to outsell standard feature phones. To say that the mobile car-shopping population is growing is an understatement. A J.D. Power & Associates study found that the percentage of US vehicle shoppers who have visited an automotive website via a smartphone grew from 17% in 2010 to 31% in 2012.
This increased access to smart mobile devices in the hands of potential car shoppers is a largely untapped opportunity. Especially when you consider that mobile shoppers are proven to convert better than desktop shoppers.
A recent study of Nissan's digital traffic found that mobile car shoppers are 30% more likely to submit a lead than their desktop brethren. These potential customers tend to be on the go, in more of a rush, and looking to gain information--- and sometimes take action--- as quickly as possible.
If you're not advertising and promoting your brand to roving car shoppers, that will help you build a strong mobile brand
Here are four mobile musts for your dealerships website and ad campaigns that will help you build a strong mobile brand.
Before even thinking about advertising to drive traffic to your mobile site, you first need to get the site ready for proper viewing. The goal should be to make a simplified version of the full website that is user friendly and intuitive for your mobile shoppers.
First, make sure graphics and all content load quickly. Mobile users have limited time and attention spans. Aresearch study conducted by user experience expertsAkamai shows that mobile website bounce rate increases drastically if a site takes longer than 6 seconds to load.
Your next step should be to consider the varying screen sizes of mobile devices. Verify that appropriate formatting is in place to make the content appealing and easy to navigate while viewing on phones and tablets.
Now that you've streamlined your mobile site, it’s time to put yourself in the mind of the mobile shopper. Ask yourself:
What searches would a mobile shopper perform, and how can I utilize that search information to drive relevant traffic?
The user experience when performing a dealership search is different on a phone or tablet than it is on a desktop. For one thing the potential buyer is using a touch-screen, and therefore is less likely to type a long search query. Shorter searches mean that the keywords you need to bid on need to be very precise. It would be wise to consider possible shortenings or abbreviations. And be sure to avoid using keywords that are overly broad that will end up attracting irrelevant clicks.
Enhanced Campaigns in Google Adwords is a powerful feature than can help you organize your different mobile campaigns and set your mobile bids to ensure your ads perform better. Think about the size of a mobile screen and how important it is for mobile ads to rank high. On a desktop there are ten ad positions that take up close to one third of the screen, while phones and mobile devices might only feature three ad positions that occupy 50% of the screen.
That's some valuable real estate right there! This monopoly on screen space is another reason why mobile ads tend to have higher click-through rates.
And in case you were wondering... Yes, Google has effectively monopolized the mobile search market. According to Global StatCounter, Google's mobile search market share was 96.9 percent as of May 2012. This alone is more than enough reason for dealers to embrace Enhanced Campaigns in their mobile strategy.
Potential phone and tablet customers deserve the same experience as desktop shoppers. Directing users to designated landing pages with strong, relevant content--- and not just dropping shoppers on the home page--- is a big part of providing that seamless experience. These landing pages should be mobile optimized, easy to navigate and in line with the site’s overall style and layout.
These steps may seem basic, but there are still brands out there that ignore the simplest things that make the biggest impact on their dealership advertising.
What steps have you taken to make sure your advertising is reaching the growing mobile shopping community?
SCHENECTADY, NY- This month, DealersEdge featured a webinar on the “Tricks of the Trade” for search engine marketing. Nan Mossey, Director of Digital Marketing at Potratz, led the event which featured advanced insights on implementing and optimizing paid search campaigns. Many were in attendance as she covered detailed strategies on effectively using Google Adwords, Bing/Yahoo! and other search engine marketing services.
Mossey has over 20 years of experience in automotive marketing and is fully certified in all aspects of SEM including Google AdWords Certifications for Search, Display, and Analytics. She has administered several apprenticeship programs as head of Potratz’s digital marketing and has thus attributed to the certification of over 18 individual members of the Potratz team.
During the webinar, participants were supplied with proven tactics for improving campaigns and statistical data referencing industry trends in the world of digital advertising. Mossey presented attendees with the tools necessary for establishing campaigns and best practices for optimizing performance. Attendees gained exclusive insights on the ins-and-outs of display advertising and retargeting, keyword optimization, and bidding strategies along with many other vital areas in campaign implementation and management.
“I really enjoyed getting a little bit more in-depth about aspects of search engine marketing that people had heard about, but had little exposure to," said Mossey regarding the webinar.
The live webinar was one of several held by DealersEdge that featured the Schenectady advertising agency, which specializes in everything from digital and traditional advertising to website platforms.
Don’t get me wrong. There’s an extremely complex and effective methodology behind utilizing Facebook as a true marketing and advertising tool that requires some specialized training, a strong sense of creativity, a willingness to experiment, and an unrelenting focus on keeping up with the latest and greatest from experts and Facebook itself.
Then again, there’s a simple way as well. As much as I would love to turn this into a lengthy blog post, I would only be adding fluff. It’s too easy.
Here are the steps:
That’s it. Sorry to disappoint those who specialize in social media as a career (I’m one of them) but those are the steps required to make Facebook sing for your business. If you do those steps, you’ll be doing better than literally 99% of your competitors.
With that said, there’s a caveat. This will get you to the top. It won’t keep you there. The truth about Facebook marketing is spreading and more people are starting to get it. This is why there’s hope for people like me. The next 17 steps in the process are much more complicated and result in a stronger Facebook presence designed to drive business. Thankfully, these are the steps to make clients stay ahead of the 99% now as well as next year when 10%-20% start to “get it” with Facebook.
Today, the best way to do it is to hire a professional or to diligently perform the 4 easy steps above.
If there is one thing that you could do to increase your opportunities and profits, what would it be? What if this one thing was free and already available to you? That's this week on Think Tank Tuesday .
The only way to become better is to practice. It never hurts to practice the most obvious and the things we know until they become perfected. Dennis explains which words to use and how to use them to increase sales from your website. Check out this week's Hard Facts about selling with text.
After watching an amazing video that a client had prepared for their business, I asked how she was going to promote it. She said she already had it set to get blasted out to all of the social networks and posted on all of the video sites. I buried my head in my hands.
There's a big difference between automated video promotion and manual promotion. For those creating massive numbers of videos of items such as inventory, it makes sense to automate the bulk. When it comes to high-quality videos that took time to create, it should be done by hand. Here's how:
Start with YouTube
Some would say that it's best to put videos on proprietary players or other video sites like Vimeo. For the most exposure possible, it's best to start with YouTube. Get it up there. Do the right research and craft the title, description, and tags appropriately. Make it the best possible YouTube video you can.
After it's up and running on YouTube, wait a day or two before uploading it to other sites or other venues (including Facebook). The more plays and likes a YouTube video gets, the more visible it will be in the important places such as YouTube search and on the search engines themselves. Focus all efforts on the original upload first.
There are two phases to this part. First, get it out on Facebook, Google+, YouTube, and Pinterest. If it's a truly important video that has some social sharing legs to it (i.e., not an ad for your store), invest in getting it exposed.
Once it's up on the important networks, set your calendar or put it in your social scheduling tools to post again in the future - a month or so is fine - as long as it's something that's not too timely.
This isn't just a matter of getting it out there on a stand-alone blog post with a quick caption. If it's an important video, talk about it. Write a story surrounding it. Encourage your readers to watch AND share it.
The blog post can then be promoted a week or so later on the social media sites similar to how you promoted it as a direct video in the first place.
You should already have it out on the other video sites and possibly on your website's internal video player. Now, it's time to get it uploaded directly to Facebook. Don't spam it - if you posted it to Facebook from YouTube one week then followed up the next week by promoting your blog post, wait another week before uploading it to Facebook.
There's nothing wrong with repeating a message, but do it in a way that doesn't seem spammy. When you upload it to Facebook, don't do it with the same exact title and description that you put on YouTube or in your blog post.
Unless it's a timely video, you can do the same thing (other than re-uploading it to the video sites) a month or more later. You can even write a brand new blog post about it. Get it out on Tumblr. Refer to it in other discussions or blog posts that aren't centering around the video itself.
Video promotions are best done manually if you want to maximize the exposure. It takes more time but it can yield exponentially more views if you do it right and have a solid video to promote.
Here's an infographic that discusses video tactics even further:
When something is as hot as an iconic automotive legend hitting dealerships across America, it often doesn't need very much additional buzz created for it. Some would say that this is the case for the new Corvette C7 Stingray, just now landing at showrooms.
I think they're making a mistake by not blasting this machine out there to everyone in the world. It's that cool, but you wouldn't know it if you're following them on social media.
There are two possible reasons for this. It could simply be a corporate thing. Social media departments at large companies are often disconnected from the rest of the company. You can usually see this when a Facebook page is dominated by feel-good stories, customer experiences, nostalgia, and the occasional advertising. Most of the time these types of posts were pre-approved by the legal and marketing departments well before the posts went out and the results are good, not great, but at least they're safe.
The other possible reason is that they simply do not believe that the car has enough mass appeal to hit their social media presence prominently. This is a huge mistake, an amateur one, really, if that is the case. Social media is not about general appeal. It's about what's hot. It's about what's amazing. There's a reason that Ferrari has a more prominent social media footprint that Chevrolet, Ford, Honda, or any of the other major brands. It's not that more people drive Ferraris. These people that are liking the pages aren't going to Ferrari club meetings, nor do they have one sitting in their garage. This is social media and in many ways it's a reflection of our desired lifestyle rather than our real one.
If Chevrolet wants to really get people's attention and make a splash on social media, they need to take advantage of this monster of a car. It truly is an amazing piece of machinery, different and better than previous Corvettes. They need to drive this beast into the ground and ride it for as long as they can in order to take full advantage of the algorithmic benefits it would create.
The Corvette can go viral. The Cruze cannot.
Some Chevy dealers are getting it. Here's one video from Holiday Automotive that gives the right amount of attention to this machine. They aren't trying to sell it. They don't need to. Everything they have allocated is already sold. That's not the point. The point is that it's hot and they understand that.
If only their manufacturer understood as well.
Do your sales people know how to fish? They should. I ask you, when was the last time that you wished there was something you could "personally" do to increase your selling opportunities? Have you every thought "just if we could spend more money on radio or TV advertising to increase walk in customers?" Watch this week's Think Tank Tuesday to see where you should be fishing to get more sales than you could ever handle!
Content has been the big play for over a year now in the world of marketing. It’s the glue that holds social media marketing and search engine marketing together and it’s becoming so prevalent that the old ways (the ones everyone started using this year) are already starting to become obsolete.
Don’t get me wrong – the techniques themselves still work. The problem is that everyone is starting to get it. The competition level for content marketing at the small business level has gone from non-existent at the beginning of 2013 to hyper-competitive before the end of the year. It’s too easy, too important, and has too many people talking about it for most companies to miss.
Perhaps as bloggers, we did our jobs right. Now, we’re faced with a dilemma – taking it to the next level. Thankfully, the strategy is pretty much the same with an expansion into a two-style mode. By going with this format, you’ll be able to stay ahead of the competition that is starting to catch up to you.
This is the easy part. For localized small businesses, it’s all about talking to to and about those in the local area in order to build buzz. The concept is this: post content that is enjoyable or useful to your potential customers and they will share it on social media as well as generate an occasional link or two.
It’s the style that everyone’s starting to get. Just in the automotive industry alone, we’re seeing multiple dealers in the same city making videos about how to change a Mazda key fob battery, writing articles about their first shipment of Chevy Corvettes, and bringing in local celebrities for interviews and discussions.
Just because so many are starting to do it doesn’t mean that you should stop. It means that you have to step up your game. You have to make your content better, get more people to share it, and post more often than your competitors. It means that you have to work harder than everyone else, but that’s one of the things that are necessary in order to stay ahead of the game.
The goal with all types of content is to become the authority on your topic. We have known for a while that localized content works, but it’s not able to stand alone anymore in most industries because of the competition level. To make it stand out ahead of the competitors, you need to hit the national arena.
This means that you can no longer just be the local authority. You have to get the type of content out there that can resonate with a broader audience. This is only possible if you’ve already mastered the local content style and you have a strong following for it.
Going broad is harder. It requires that the content have a more general appeal. It means that your local following will share it as well and that their friends and family from the rest of the country or world will see it and find value as well.
It could be reactions to national news about your industry. It could be universal help items that are not localized. It could be great videos, images, or infographics that anyone anywhere in the country can like.
It also requires a bit more professionalism than the localized content. An iPhone video might work for a quick walkaround of a new inventory item, but to get the national appeal, it has to be better made than that.
* * *
This is the type of thing that many people fear. Just when you thought you had localized content mastered, hearing that it won’t be good enough to keep the gap large between you and your competitors in 2014 can be disheartening. However, if you really think about it, every new challenge like this is an opportunity to shine above and beyond them.
Change is good as long as you’re on top of it.
If you do a search on Google for “search marketing” and compare it to a search for “social marketing”, you’ll see that there are pretty much no similarities. The two disciplines have been separated for a long time and companies usually focus on one or the other (though it seems like everyone offers a little of both). As 2014 draws nearer, the need to keep these two disciplines separate is starting to fade.
In fact, talking about them separately is starting to become a huge mistake.
Search is getting more social. Anyone who is watching the way that Google and Bing present their results and determine rankings on keywords can see this. Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest (not to mention Google+, which is trying to seamlessly tie in search with social) are all becoming more prominent in search while continuing to improve their own internal search engines. These two facts are pushing us towards a collision course where search marketing and social marketing are becoming the same overall concept.
It is already a best practice to consolidate strategies around a singular overarching goal. That has been the case for years, even before the rise of social and the true harnessing of search. The change that is happening today and looking to intersect completely in 2014 is geared more around the activities that are required to make both sing properly for a business.
All that one has to do to truly see the importance of social signals from a search engine optimization perspective is to look at the most recent Search Engine Ranking Factors analysis from Moz. As you can see in the image above, three of the top are social. One may think that it’s a small portion compared to the number of factors, but with the majority at the top of the list having to do with inbound linking, it’s clear that those are all individual portions of the same basic factor.
In other words, if you break it all down properly, you’ll understand that page authority is #1, Google +1s are #2, inbound links are #3, and Facebook sharing is #4. Page authority is an abstraction of the following three plus the domain authority itself, so the actual actions that are at the top of the list would look like this:
Two of the top three ranking factors that one can act upon to improve rankings in Google are social signals according to the survey that gets the opinions of the best of the best in search marketing. That’s significant.
It’s hard to do a search on either Google or Bing that does not pop up something from a social perspective. Bing recently integrated Pinterest directly into their image listings. Google+ pages are instantly added to any search where a business is associated.
Searching for companies by name will yield the company website first followed by a flurry of social and review sites. If the Facebook and/or Twitter accounts are active, they’re almost certainly listed on the front page of search results.
Taking it a step further, most social sites are working their own variations of internal search engines to make content on the sites themselves easier to find. Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest are constantly tweaking their search engines to show more, more, and more.
There can no longer be two separate strategies for search and social. To try to separate them is like trying to serve portions of a meal at different times. Instead of giving them spaghetti and meatballs, you would be serving the spaghetti noodles first, then bringing out the sauce and meatballs on a separate plate when they were done with their noodles. It’s an odd analogy, but that’s really what many businesses and marketing agencies are doing with search and social.
The strategies must be unified. It has worked okay in 2012 and 2013 but as we draw near to 2014, the distances between the two disciplines must be removed. We cannot treat them as two different disciplines. They should be worked together with an overall strategy that makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts.
