This post is for you. You can skip my story and drop to the bottom if you simply want to get to the meat of what to do when and how but I hope my story has some edutainment value as well.
I was learning my way through the social media, blog, video, images in order to enhance my eCommerce sites and provide some value about the products people needed. I thought initially they were 2 different things. You build your store(or have me do it for you) then you worried about things like SEO, SEM, Adwords, social media, video, and any other content types you can think of IE marketing your site. I have to say I was really struggling. My day job was to build functions for eCommerce sites. IE how to display products so people would buy them. I have to say my early stores were very spartan on content and as a result very low performers. In trying to figure out how to increase visits and ultimately conversions to my site I learned a lot. I hope sharing these will help you advance your site and commerce much faster. Or to at least be armed with good information to be able to find the right people that can help you.
Build some marketing campaigns into your sites.
- Find, build or use my calendar to begin to organize your information.
- Pick a theme for each month ( some people may have a theme for a quarter) but try not to have a theme any shorter than a month for now.
- Break the month into weeks
- Decide if you plan to publish content daily, weekly or monthly ( you don't have to be consistent but it could help build a following and drive traffic to your site on a more regular basis. Start with monthly)
- Start writing in what content you plan to publish on what days and even down to what time
- Add in social media posts that will happen before and after the content is published
- publish your calendar for your team or others in your company like marketing, sales, product management, support, customer care etc.
- Assign tasks if you can or create your plan to perform these tasks.
- Align keywords, tags for optimal SEO advantage.
- Review comments and join in your conversations.
- This calendar will begin to help you communicate to your team and the entire organization what content is planned for when and what social media is also planned to support driving traffic to the content. You may be surprised at how this brings teams from all over the company together and how many ideas this help coordinate.
- Use your theme to line up with product specials, hot topics, calls to action, new software releases. I found the IT know when they plan to release software but the marketing team rarely know and in cases does belive the date anyhow. So having time between product launch and announcement can be useful to work out issues
- Then break each month down into the weeks IE week 1, weeks 2 and plan if you will publish content daily or weekly .
- Will you publish social media updates before to build some interest, as your publish your new content, and how long after the content is up. By using automated tools you can build your content and even social media posts well in advance of their publish date and well after. Thsi also frees up time for real time posts with on topic or other events that happen to come up
- Some idea on what to write about or videos to record can be found in this link "Content hacks for fun"I found these to be useful to help think of content topic but also to help orginze data I found on those topics. IF I happen to read an article about one of my themes I quickly capture the URL so that I can reference the article later or even reach out to the author for a quote or more info for my content.
- Create some social media planned posts. you can always post live at the time but having pre-planned and automated posts will help reduce the stress and keep your community up to date even if you're on vacation.
- IF you don't have enough stuff for content I bet other groups like sales or customer service can provide some ideas based on questions they receive from potential customers. But this is also a great time to sync up with other groups to get the most out of the content, social media and things like press releases and new product/service updates. Also if there are a large number of calls into your call center creating content that address the issue might be a good last minute update to reduce the cost and noise in the call center.
- If your not doing this all by yourself this is great time to start assigning task(or if you have asked guests to create content for you) now is the time to clearly let everybody else know what is expected of them and by when. If you have planned for content to go live on June 1 then you will likely need it at least 1 week before to proof and to update social media. Also this is a god time to get any approvals or funding now that you have your basics in place. This is a mix of creative and project managment but timelines and due dates are still a part of the business.
- Dont forget to align your tags to keyword and proof for SEO keywords. By adding tags(keywords) to your calendar based on themes you can begin to line up all your digital efforts for the best possible outcomes. In fact this can be a full monthly theme to talk about how you find your keywords(or create unique one for your product or serivce)
- Review comments. As you begin your social media posts about your pending content be sure to review the comments and join the conversation to create a connection to your customers. As readers post comments or add updates to your social media be sure to get in the conversation so be sure to allow time in your calendar for somebody to reply. Best will be that you have access to many groups to help you. Remember this is your chance to help solve customer issues, help customers see the benefits of your products or services for sales and even create advocates that support your products and services just because they like them..
Try these 10 steps by spending about 1 hour once a week or month. Then I would love to hear how it is or is not working for you.
Author: mikeferretti01
