You can watch the video here.

The Job
After your initiation to our brotherhood of ninja, you will work on internal projects and client work in the area of digital, social and mobile marketing. You will gain invaluable experience with website content management, blogging, community management, digital video, email marketing, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, mobile media and much more! The student shall soon become the master…

The Ideal Candidate
Ideally you will already have the following -
Business degree, Communications degree, New media
Some experience in digital marketing and social media
Good Presentation Skills
Excellent writing and editing skills in English
A strong knowledge of Digital Marketing Metrics and Analysis is a plus
Martial arts skills not required (for now…)

About Us
SocialMedia.ie is a specialist Irish social media marketing business established in 2010. We provide a full range of services including digital strategy, digital training; marketing campaigns; blog and website design; and digital content development including video and Facebook Apps.
Our clients include numerous local start-ups, SMEs and international businesses particularly in B2B social media. We are also training partners to NUI Maynooth, Digital Marketing Institute and Dublin City Enterprise Board.

The Offer
This is a full time / part time junior position with considerable training. We are looking at a 2-3 month trial period before we promote the person to a full time salaried position. Commission on sales is available immediately if you can help us win new business.

People eligible for JobBridge can apply through this program and should the candidate prove successful after the the 2-3 month period a full time salaried position will be offered.

Digital Marketing Ninja Application Process

After everyone’s CV has been submitted the most fun and creative candidates will be invited to assemble at our digital dojo to take part in a SocialMedia.ie Masterclass for 2-3 hours. Once our Digital Marketing Sensei completes your training the fun begins and may the odds be in your favour, Daniel-san (or Danielle-san).

Candidates will be divided into small teams and be given a brief designing a proposal for a non-profit organisation. This development will be guided by one of our social media ninjas that will provide all the information that you need to accomplish your mission. The Digital Marketing Sensei will select the candidate best suited to the position. And for those who are not successful this time, hopefully you will have developed some great new projects and skills for your portfolio. As wise men say, “with many little strokes a large tree is felled”. Good luck!

To apply, contact us on team@socialmedia.ie with your CV and details of your availability with Digital Marketing Ninja in the subject line.

Your company website is your virtual shopfront – the place online that anyone interested in your product is likely to arrive at.   Here you highlight the unique value your products can offer everyone in your target market.  As with anything that can be sold online, new markets may open up for your business worldwide.  Of course with opportunity comes competition.  Now you may not be competing only against your rival across town but with similar firms from Melbourne to Milan.

As some online shoppers will never set foot in your own physical store (if you have one), you must wow them and woo them through your website.  The question we ask today is – once they visit, do you make it easy for them to move from curious, to interested, to sold?  Here are 10 tips to help improve user experience and increase sales.

Tip 1: Get Your Landing/Home Page right! - Once visitors click onto your homepage or through an ad to a specific landing page, make sure they know (a) where they are and who you are (b) what they can do while on your site, and (c) why they should stay longer.

Tip 2: Write great copy - Ensure your copy and content is persuasive and highlights the value of your product.  Does it

• read well and is understandable by everyone?
• focus on benefits for the customer, not just features?
• provide answers to any fears or uncertainties visitors may have against purchasing?
• give clear instructions on how to buy?
• provide information on what happens after buying (delivery, returns process)?

Tip 3: Use product images - This seems an obvious point, but a text heavy site with no product images or visual cues often has visitors nodding off if they haven’t already clicked away.

Tip 4: Offer less products per page, with better description - Rather than following a ‘something for everybody’ approach and offering dozens of product alternatives, maybe try to focus on fewer.  This way you can zero in on the benefits of each in more detail.  Some web design guru’s give advice that for online retailers, 4-6 items on any one page is the magic number.  Did you know that Amazon follow the rule of 6?  They limit their highly effective ‘customers who bought this also bought these’ list of related items to a max of 6 per screen.

Tip 5: Test/Change which benefits you use to sell each product - You may be very proud of a certain product benefit.  Do customers feel it is equally as important to them though?  Test different benefits within your headline or sub header and see what visitors are responding to in biggest numbers.

Tip 6: Test layout of any call to action - anything from the headline, copy wording, placement on page or even colour scheme of any ‘call to action’ box or button can increase response rate.  Tweak, test, repeat!

Tip 7: Reduce clicks to get to sale - Ensure that visitors don’t have to jump through too many hoops to avail of a free trial or make a purchase.  The longer the ‘click trail’ they have to follow, the more likely they are to baulk.  Simplify when possible.

Tip 8: Offer time sensitive offers/stocks etc - This is a great way of keeping your website up to the minute, and keep customers coming back to your site.  A timely offer can make your product look scarce and exclusive to potential buyers.  Google loves websites that update content often too, so it won’t do your SEO any harm either!

Tip 9: Promote shareability - using sharing buttons on your site allowing visitors to share an offer or product with their social network can be great exposure.  An example would be a clothing or art & design site allowing Pinterest pinning to special interest community boards to gain you viral attention the easy way.

Tip 10: Be your customer! – The more input you have had in your website design, the more a labour of love it will be to you.  Try to take off your designer hat and wear a visitor’s hat instead.  Use your site like they would.  There may be holes in user experience that you are not seeing, looking from the inside out.

These tips will get you thinking about your website and any potential for improvement.  It may be purring like a kitten to your eyes, but tweaking, testing and always looking at every change from a user perspective can glean even those small improvements that can snowball into better sales.

We have looked at the main success factors in great digital marketing last week, so today we’re going to laser in on one of the social media giants: Facebook.

Besides your own website, Facebook is arguably your online shopfront.  With this in mind, using Facebook to build customer satisfaction is key but monitoring your performance is just as vital.

Facebook – Made to Measure

Okay, so you have built up a healthy following and you feel you are engaging your fans well.  Regular updates and the odd cat meme?  Excellent, but remember that every aspect of your Facebook interaction with fans can be measured to hone your efforts further.   One point to note however, is to link these metrics with your Facebook strategy.

The basic (and the most popular) metrics to note are fan count, likes & comments.  As these grow, they provide many a marketer with a warm and fuzzy feeling of success!  Simply speaking, a rise here is a positive step but if not allied to your objectives they mean surprisingly little.

Measure Against Your Goals – An Example

A brief example that this humble writer can recount was from time spent working with a local visual arts festival.  One early objective was a campaign for artistic submissions launched worldwide to give the festival an international flavour.   The net was spread wide to forums, Facebook & Twitter communities etc to attract them.  After this big push, the event’s Facebook friend count increased by 400% in three weeks!   Cue the celebrations, until the next phase of marketing began.  This was centered upon promoting ticket sales and attendance, where local fans are the obvious target.   The discovery was sobering – our hyper-inflated friend count revealed that most of these new fans were international, from Asia, South America, even Australia…  None exactly in a position to attend a festival in Dublin!

Ready, Take Aim, Measure

What to take from here is that while basic Facebook metrics often highlight positive trends, they may not be the right ones for your aims.

Looking to spread great content?  – Look for number of shares of your links, or its ‘viral’ spread

Promoting an event? – Measure if fans are primarily in your area, promote posts to local users only

Increasing leads & referrals? – Check Google Analytics, are clicks from Facebook to your website growing?

If you want to use social media to improve your business, you’re in for the long game.  Returns may not be rapid, or easy to pinpoint at first but keep your objectives in mind and stay the course.  Growing your Facebook presence must be a means, not an end.  Whatever your business is looking to achieve, use Facebook to assist these goals and measure to suit.

Digital VS Traditional Marketing – No Need To Argue

Your business now has access to an already massive and ever growing digital marketing toolkit – a huge array of methods to interact with, understand and sell to customers online. Pulling back the curtain into this world means that you can dispense with traditional methods in future and bask in the warm success web based marketing offers? Not quite!

Traditional methods should rather be combined with and enhanced by digital options rather than being dispensed with. These methods have not been made obsolete by any means. Depending on the size of your business, the old reliables of TV, radio and print advertising can still be highly effective means for creating mass brand awareness. Direct mailing has stood the test of time but has arguably been surpassed by email marketing and is an example of digital’s great impact on the marketing old school.

Many companies have married old and new and created a little synergy by making the call to action on these campaigns digital based. Point customers to your website, encourage them to follow and interact on social media. Now these passive, unknown customers are made visible and ready for you to build relationships, leads and sales. This gives your brand an extra dimension through digital and is something we will delve into more tomorrow.

Tune-Up Your Other Functions With Digital

Once the marketing department have caught the digital bug, it often takes longer for these same approaches to be considered throughout the rest of the organisation.

Many firm’s customer service is still primarily phone based, but this burden on costs and man hours can be reduced by introducing platforms such as customer forums, live chat services and even website FAQ sections. If you are increasingly savvy gaining customers digitally, they may be disappointed that they cannot then follow up at other stages of their life cycle with you by these means also.

Digital is here to stay, so integrate it when possible all around your business, it should improve performance to misfiring parts and have the already finely tuned functions purring like a kitten.

Today we will look at what separates an old, run down marketing strategy from the sleek, supercharged digital engine that drives a clued-in company.  Let’s pop the hood and see what makes souped-up digital marketing tick!

1. Create Useful and Shareable Content

The web is chock full of companies and brands advertising their wares. Being heard in the digital space with just an advert or sales pitch is a sure fire way of being lost in the ether.  To attract the new and empowered online customer you will need to grab their attention and make them come to you.

How? Create content that is relevant and useful to your customer base.   This will encourage them to return to your site again and again and improve customer perception of your brand.  This can be hugely effective and cost efficient way of increasing leads and sales opportunities.

2. Build Your Community & Fanbase

Now you have a strong and active web presence. To borrow a classic movie quote “If you build it, they will come”?  Not necessarily!  Ensure you get your message heard, if people are sharing your content, find out where and how.  Encourage these behaviours further amongst your customer base. Common examples here are clever uses of polls, questions, contests and competitions.

3. Interact With Your Audience, Build Trust

Social media marketing has allowed mass conversation between companies and consumers.  Brands can now reach out and make real connections with their customers.  Use social media to humanise your brand, start conversations and spark debate.  This will help create enthusiastic customers and in time, brand evangelists.

4. Maintain a Sales Focused Website

Your website is your crown jewel online, the one part of the web where you control every aspect of your brand’s message.  Test your own site from a customer perspective, is the search and purchase process clear and easy to understand?  If customers have to jump through too many hoops to purchase, they will simply leave and never come back.

5. Measure Your Effectiveness

Behold the altar of metrics!  Whatever your digital focus is (increasing fans, engagement, increasing sales leads) ensure that you are tracking the effects your strategy across your various web and social platforms.  Measure before, during and after any campaign, that way you can adjust your behaviour to repeat successes and avoid repeating failures.

6. Re-evaluate Objectives, & Go Again!

Of course, the road goes ever on regarding your brand’s performance.  Whether a campaign has met your goals or not, strive to create an action plan for any peaks and valleys in your performance that you may have noticed along the way.  Learn any lessons, refine your technique and get back into the fray.  Digital never sleeps!

If you’d like to know more about any of the topic discussed above, or how they can affect your business, please drop us a message.

By now many businesses are using social media monitoring tools.  The most obvious application is what some call ‘Ego monitoring’.  ’Ego monitoring’ is listening for any mentions of your own company online, be it positive or negative. This style of monitoring can be useful, but instead, why not take things up a notch?!

Become a Monitoring Master

If you read yesterday’s blog on determining your competitor’s KPI’s, then  you have a perfect framework for zoning in on their strengths and weaknesses. One example we enjoyed reading about was from Harley Manning’s book ‘Outside In’.  Accor Hotels (owners of the Novotel and Sofitel chains) prepare daily reports from head office for their individual managers, these reports contain up to the minute customer sentiment online.  This way they can detect potential problems, branch by branch, and can then act to nip them in the bud before they snowball.

A savvy social media manager would have the same reporting set up, except they’d report on other chains in their market, such as the Radisson Group, Best Western and Marriott Group.  The company can probe for weaknesses in the competition across different territories.  Now armed with this easily sourced, hugely insightful customer data they can base a marketing or ad campaign around highlighting these shortcomings.  Cheeky yet highly effective!  All from gold plated, freely sourced competitor information.

David Vs Goliath – smaller size equals nimble reaction

A 2012 study by Conversocial has shown that a mere 13% of customer complaints delivered to the door of America’s biggest brands (including Footlocker, GAP) are responded to. They receive so many @mentions per week (over 8000 in some cases) that even the largest brands are buckling under the weight of this volume.

At home, with high streets containing empty shop units like missing teeth, independent retailers that are determined to grow could use this to their advantage.  Maintain a laser focus on the big players in town for these type of complaints and service gaps, filtered by geography.  A clever, smaller retailer could jump into the conversation, offer to fill the gap in experience the customer has suffered and hey presto!  You’ve got yourself a lead.

Now, just ensure when they enter your store that you have the means to deliver on any promise you’ve made.  But that’s a project for another day.  One step at a time!

The article talks about CEO Conor Lynch’s previous work with Guinness, Toyota and Vodafone and how the prospect of helping companies navigate the new digital frontier was not something he could ignore.

‘BOSS Metrics is a brand’s best friend when navigating the sometimes choppy and uncharted waters of social media and digital marketing.’

They go on to talk about the Boss Metrics Competitor Analysis reports saying “The jewel in BOSS Metrics crown is possibly its ‘digital espionage function’.”

If you wish to learn more about Boss Metrics please email us at: team@socialmedia.ie

In the digital age, marketeers have the power to measure their performance more effectively than ever before. Well defined and measured KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) are the key to measuring your performance in your own marketplace.  Did you know that you can look at your competitors KPI’s and compare them against your own?   Here are 3 ways you can gauge your social media fitness against the competition using freely available data.

The Basics:  Followers & Visibility

• Follower/fan count
• Post/tweet totals
• Reach/exposure

These are the easiest to find and compare.  They provide a general overview of competitor performance.  But beware!  They can be misleading…  A company could be gung-ho to gain thousands of followers through Facebook ads, but have no meaningful interaction with any of these fans.  That’s why you have to go deeper…

Advanced: Interaction

• Retweets
• Shares
• Replies/comments
• Mentions
• Contributors (who is retweeting you, and how many impressions they created)

Now we’re getting somewhere. Social media is about interaction, you need to know how your conversations and content stack up against your competitors. If they are gaining more retweets, shares etc, look into their style of interacting with their audience.  Maybe they are the kings of clever #hashtagging?   They turn everything into a question that simply must be answered?  If there are lessons to learn here,  incorporate their strengths into your own model. Don’t worry, all they can do is shake their fist at you as you make up the lost ground!  If they are trailing in your wake, don’t ease up as there is no finish line in social media…

Expert:  Content style – Frequency and Source

• Facebook updates
• Tweets
• Blog posts
• eBooks
• White Papers
• Video

Quite simply, look at their content.  Check for times when your competitors channels were most active.  Did this result in spikes in engagement?   Were they posting their own, original content, or mainly links to outside material?  Look at what content worked best with their customers.  This will inform your own social media team on what works best for your particular market.

HOW TO MEASURE UP

As you know, using relevant KPI’s to measure your social media fitness is vitally important.  The real edge though, is using the same criteria to spy on your competition.   This practice, taken regularly, will ensure you don’t fall behind or get into bad habits when dealing with your customer base through social media.

If you’d like to learn more about competitor analysis, then please contact us at team@socialmedia.ie.

Barry tells Alex how he recognised that many applications were being developed with the customer in mind, yet these companies had not conducted sufficient market research or spoken to the customer. This meant that upon release of the product they have been met with ‘a negative  reaction’ from the customers they set out to help.

After listening to customer needs, SocialMedia.ie developed their software and a service model, which adds an extra layer of interpretation in top of traditional analytical platforms. The 3 step process consists of an Audit, Analysis and Action plan. The audit is performed by the software, then the analysis and Action Plan is developed by the team in order for the client to improve their digital marketing strategy.

Barry also talks about the importance of sharing and creating relevant content that must be aligned to overall business goals. Once this content is published across a companies social channels it goes into the ‘Shared content feedback loop of fan generation’. The people who interact with the post will extend the reach of the brand page. However, when analyzing social channels its more important to look at the number of brand advocates you are creating opposed to the overall number of people that follow you.

Barry goes on to give some examples of research which SocialMedia.ie has conducted including an analysis of Ireland’s Banking Sector who have a social presence and who are Ireland’s most social political parties.