The 12 Days of Christmas (or what you can do before the year ends)

Photo by James Sarmiento

Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukkah. Season’s Greetings.

Between egg nogs, scratch some to-do items off your list.

Polish Up Your Social Media

1. Give your social media avatars and profile photos a new look.

2. Deck the halls:
– Fine tune your Facebook Business Page
– Polish up your LinkedIn profile.

3. Double check the list. Cross off a few more items on the Facebook Marketing Plan Checklist.

4. Make sure the reindeer can find your place.
Enable your Google Places listing.

Exercise Your Analytics

5. Familiarize yourself with Facebook’s new Page Insights.

6. Switch to the new version of Google Analytics.

7. Filter Internal Traffic from Google Analytics

8. Review your site’s top visited content and plan blog posts for next year that build on this content.

Be Merry & Bright

9. Set up keyword searches in Tweet Deck or Hootsuite to monitor what people are talking about in your industry and join the discussion.

10. Thank your supporters for a great year. Spend time reading their blogs and posting comments. Retweet, #FF or mention their awesomeness on Twitter.

Dream of Sugarplums

11. Ask yourself these 3 planning questions.

12. Sketch out a 6-month editorial calendar for your blog, newsletter, and social media profiles.

We will start with No. 10 and say Happy Holidays and thank you very much for continuing to read the Boxcar Marketing blog!

How To Use Analytics To Optimize Your Website

Analytics data can be overwhelming. One way to get the most out of your data is to use analytics to monitor how your site is performing and what to optimize.

Here are 3 Google Analytics tools you can use to discover how to improve your site. (And if you don’t have Google Analytics installed on your website, install it, it’s free.)

1. Annotations

Anytime you undertake a marketing activity you should annotate it to see what effect it has on your website. Understanding what impact certain marketing activities have on traffic and traffic behaviours on your site gives you an opportunity to optimize and improve.

If blog posts that offer customer support cause a spike in traffic, for example, you know to optimize your blog with these types of posts.

How to set up annotations.

2. Goal Funnels

Goals funnels monitor tasks on your site that require traffic to go through a specific path—such as email newsletter signup or ecommerce through a shopping cart. Monitoring these paths gives you insight into what’s working and what’s not working.

For example, you can monitor where on a path people are stopping. If people are dropping off at your newsletter signup form, is it because the form is too long? Is it confusing?

Figuring out why people don’t complete a goal allows you to go back and optimize that goal path.

How to set up goals.

3. Advanced Segments

Advanced Segments are useful for comparing what different audience groups do on your site and how to optimize for these audiences.

For example, you can compare how referral traffic from different sources behave on your site. 

If Twitter traffic is more likely to sign up for your newsletter than Facebook traffic, figure out how you can optimize for Facebook. Is the newsletter signup clear on the pages that Facebook traffic lands on? Is the language similar to the language used on Facebook?

Understanding why traffic is behaving in a certain way allows you to go back and optimize for that traffic.

How to use Google’s Advanced Segments.

________________________

Learn what to monitor in analytics to improve your website’s usability.

For more information on measuring online marketing campaigns, watch Monique’s slides from BookNet Canada’s Tech Forum.

UPDATE
Here’s the audio version of Monique’s BookNet Canada Tech Forum presentation:

4 Tips For Using Twitter For PR

Twitter is a great tool for public relations because it can be used for finding conversations and engaging with influencers who are chatting about specific topics.

Stacey Acevero, social media manager for PRWeb, has provided her tips for the best ways to use Twitter for PR:

1. As a listening tool. Before you just dive in, take the time to listen to your target audience. What are they saying? What are trending topics? What makes them happy? What makes them sad? Is there is a need for a product or service this is unfulfilled in their lives? How about an improvement on an existing product or service? Listening allows you to get to know your audience and find out their needs.
2. As an educational tool. Don’t use Twitter (or any other social media platforms, for that matter) as a hardcore marketing or promotional tool. Being sale-sy will drive your target audience away and being sold to isn’t why people are on Twitter—consumers are on Twitter to engage in conversation, to learn about new things and to share information. Be helpful and share resources that aren’t always your own, and always aim to please others before you ever ask for a favor back.
3. As an engagement tool. After you’ve established yourself as someone knowledgeable and helpful in your industry, take the time to get to know people by actually talking to them. People don’t want to be talked AT on Twitter, they want to be talked WITH. Be human, be personal and stay away from auto tweets or replies—the robot thing is really a turn-off.
4. As a customer service tool. Monitor mentions of your brand in social media using TweetDeck (free service, basic) or Vocus (paid, advanced analytics). Respond positively to mentions of your brand and diffuse negative comments that may arise. It’s a great way to build a positive rapport with your audience.

For more tips on how to use social media in your PR campaigns, check out Social Media for PR: How To Write a Press Release and Social Media for PR: Using Your Press Release in Blogger Outreach.

Tips for Managing LinkedIn Groups

Creating your own LinkedIn Group increases your profile and gives you control over the group’s content and reach. The goal with a group is to engage your audience and leverage your company’s thought leadership.

From our experience, it’s best to have a more wide-ranging group for sharing ideas and making connections with people from a variety of backgrounds. If needed, you can create a subgroup later on that is more specific to your company or niche.

Consider taking advantage of LinkedIn’s new Open Groups. With Open Groups, all discussions can be viewed by anyone on the web and be found in search engines. They can also be shared on other social networks like Facebook and Twitter. All of these features increase the potential reach of your group.

1. Choosing a Group Name
When choosing a name for your group, you want to make sure not to limit your audience. Again, you want your group to appeal to a wide variety of people, so use a title that reflects that. Think of keywords people searching for similar groups would use.

2. Inviting Members to Your Group
Start by inviting people who are your contacts already and would be interested in the group. Next, search LinkedIn for prospects who have similar interests and would find your group helpful.

When you send invitations try to make a connection rather than just pitching your group. Have you noticed anything interesting this person’s been doing on LinkedIn? Do you have any commonalities? State clearly why the group will be of benefit to them.

3. Welcome Message
We recommend creating a custom Welcome Message template and setting it to automatically send to new members. The message should include what the group hopes to achieve, some guidelines, and should link to something of benefit to your new members - like a whitepaper or interesting post online.

4. Content
You want to have control over the types of content and quality of discussions within your group. Set the tone by posting content related to significant news in your industry. Be a resource to members of your group by providing quality content and information that is helpful to them.

If you are a resource, it doesn’t matter that you are also a sales person. Research shows that people choose to buy from companies and sales people that have not only been a resource but who have also developed an ongoing relationship with them.

The objective is to ensure a level of trust and credibility that will set the standard and tone for your company overall.

5. Engagement

Tips for Increasing Group Engagement in your LinkedIn Group:

• Find relevant blogs and add their RSS feeds to the group’s news feed. This will ensure that fresh content is being posted to your group and it will also send an email to group members (depending on how members have set their notifications) which will encourage them to visit the group page.
• Post some of your blog articles as news articles.
• Post a message encouraging group members to post their own articles.
• LinkedIn users tend to self-promote. To prevent self-promotion from overwhelming your group conversations, consider setting up a subgroup where people can promote themselves, what they do, and their blog URL, or just invite members to share their blogs and Twitter handles.
• Ask for feedback on the group. You can do this using the Poll app.

3 Questions To Ask Yourself When Planning For 2011

Wow the end of the year is quickly approaching. Are you panicked or well planned?

If you have been meaning to organize your thoughts for the upcoming year, here are some guiding questions to ask yourself.

1. Would you say your company is becoming more effective at meeting customer needs?
2. Have you recently implemented a large-scale innovative campaign or several small-scale innovative pilot projects?
3. Are you collaborating more with others outside your firm?

If you want annual revenue growth next year, then work out how to answer yes to these questions.

1. Customer Relationships
Selling stuff is about creating a value-based relationship that benefits your customers and keeps them coming back. Focus obsessively on their needs and in turn your needs will be fulfilled.

2. Innovation
What are you selling? Is it worth the price, time, attention? Sooner or later, all businesses run out of room to grow. The ability to reinvent is no small feat, but it is what separates the high performers from the one-time wonders.

3. Collaboration
Forest, trees. Trees, forest. Sometimes the most obvious areas of innovation and growth are right in front of you, but you are too close to see it. Gathering ideas from outside your company is one way to source new ideas. Plus forging joint ventures and licensing arrangements can help you bring ideas to market faster and cheaper than slogging through it alone.

Now go have some egg nog and mull that over.

What It Takes to Run a Successful Contest

Flickr Source: David Harber by-nd/2.0

Contests are a great way to spread the word and spark excitement about a campaign. They can increase your audience reach, reward your fans and get people talking about you.

But contests don’t run themselves; they need to be well planned and well executed. When running contests, we recommend using the SPHERE approach.

So what? What’s special about your contest and why should someone care? Are there any great entries? What’s important for your audience to know about in regards to the scope of the contest or the breadth of people entering? Determine this at the outset and integrate your So What statement into all of your marketing materials. If you don’t know why people should be excited about the contest, they won’t be.

Personality driven. Your contest shouldn’t be just a faceless organization; it should have a personality behind it. Who are the spokespeople? Have them bring personality to the contest. Also, who are the active people on the contest page, what personalities do they have?

Hook. What’s your story angle, catchy contest title, hashtag? You need to use phrases that are easy to remember. Your Hook helps to spread your contest via word of mouth.

Ego. Who does your contest need to engage with? Who looks clever or in the know if they share the contest and promote it amongst their fans? The worst thing you could do is encourage entrants to spam their friends to get votes. Instead, find the people who can benefit from promoting your contest. Also, why do people want to enter? Prize money? Join community and share ideas? What else?

Relevance. Why is the contest relevant to the audience you’re pitching it to? If you want people to enter, what’s in it for them? If you want them to promote the contest, how can they benefit?

Effort. Don’t underestimate the time commitment that is required to run a successful contest and create an effective community. Contests are never about giving away the prize, they are about interacting in the community and establishing long-term ties. What effort do you need to put into this in order to keep people engaged after the contest? Proper outreach takes time. Setting up a media resource page to direct bloggers to takes time. Writing a good social media release takes time.

And remember, you’re aiming for Results, not Effort. Ensure your goals are specific and measurable so that your marketing efforts are always driving towards your goals.

Website Usability: Get Your Site Ready For Fall

It’s August and, albeit reluctantly, we are busying preparing for Fall. What better time than now to review your website’s usability?

Todd Sieling of Corvus Consulting recently presented at the SFU Summer Publishing Workshops on usability and outlined his three golden keys to creating better online user experiences. He’s been kind enough to share them with us:

The Three Golden Keys of Usability

See Through Your Audience’s Eyes
Usability is about walking in the steps of your audience and understanding their needs and wants. Todd uses the example of Walt Disney walking around his theme park crouched down so that he could see things from a child’s height.

At Boxcar Marketing, we try to walk in the steps of our audience by creating personas. Personas are character sketches of individual audience members that outline their demographics, likes and dislikes, lifestyles, technical abilities and their needs and wants when using a site. Personas are helpful because they move you away from thinking about what the project team wants and towards what the website visitor wants.

You May Need to Give Something Up That You Love
The user experience trumps design. It doesn’t matter how mind-blowing your design is, if it gets in the way of what a user is trying to do (or what you want the user to do) it needs to go. People are busy on the web and don’t have time for flashy designs that get in their way.

Todd uses the example of Apple’s new remote. Apple loves simple design but, on their new remote, they’ve added an additional button. Todd believes that, in this case, Apple had to give up their love of simplicity for ease of use. Good designers know when to comprise.

Don’t Make People Think
Building on the ideas from Steve Krug’s book on web design and usability, Don’t Make Me Think, Todd says that your site should make it clear what you want people to do. Anticipate your users’ confusion. Make your instructions and guidelines as clear as possible. Clear calls to action need to be present throughout your site.

Steve Krug says to imagine your users are whizzing by on the freeway. This metaphor is closer to the truth of how users interact with your site than the closely scrutinized treasure map we generally believe that we’ve created and they are following.

The Reservoir of Goodwill

In Don’t Make Me Think Steve Krug talks about the reservoir of goodwill. Website visitors start out with a reservoir of goodwill. Each problem they encounter on a website lowers the level of that reservoir.

When reviewing your site’s usability, the questions to ask yourself are:

• How would users see/perceive this?
• Is this element needed for users to complete a task?
• Are the calls to action obvious?

Overall, website usability is about designing from the users’ perspective to create the best experience possible. If a user has a good experience on your site they are more likely to return and think positively about your organization.