Posts by: TheGuerillero
Hi, I'm TheGuerillero, I created this blog and Market & Convert, a small digital marketing agency. You should add me to your circles on Google+. Here's a link to my G+ profile.
Hi, I'm TheGuerillero, I created this blog and Market & Convert, a small digital marketing agency. You should add me to your circles on Google+. Here's a link to my G+ profile.
So a couple of days ago I asked for your advice to help me come up with a social marketing plan for my new client, CuteToddlerCostumes.com.
I got some great responses, but the two that stood out the most were from Alex, who said
You could try to set up a Twitter stream with daily cool articles about kids stuff and start to follow relevant parents. How about that?
And from Adori, who said
What about getting parents to upload photos of their cuties in the costumes along with a brief write up of how much fun the day was and how the costume was a trill etc. Parents love to splash photos of their kids around.
Thank you, guys! Your ideas are by far the best route I have so far – and yes, Adori, parents fo love to splash their kids’ pics around. I’ll work with their design team to get that promotion off the ground.
But while I was researching on this topic, I came up with a surprisingly good guerilla advice from a mainstream Google sales guy, at the Inside Adwords blog:
Basically, what Jim Lecinsky is saying is what we all knew: you cant beat your customer over the head with your ad and expect them to drop what they’re doing and run to your site. He says PPC ads should now focus on adding value rather than disrupt their search/navigation.
And I’m back here thinking… isnt that what we call a BLOG? Duh !
So now, PPC is trying to catch up to Social Media and we have to fine-tune our stuff. Or not?
The people at Cute Toddlers have been running a series of content network campaigns, and their results are terribly common – average on-site time: 10seconds / bounce rate: 60%. They dont offer any value, they simply send people to what they’re looking for: costumes!
But, following Adori’s idea, if I had a campaign going where parents would post their Halloween pictures and maybe win free costumes, I could very well run that through PPC and… would my results be any better?
What do you think? Have you re-considered your PPC campaigns? Will my/Adori’s idea work?
Stay tuned… I will post it all here!
Guerilleros, today I ask for advice – my social guerilla skills have been put to test and I’m falling short at this moment.
I’ve been given the opportunity to manage the social marketing for an online costume store for toddlers called – tcharan… – cutetoddlercostumes.com. Their stuff is really cool (a bit pricey, but so am I…)
They’re brand new online, and according to their analytics, they’ve been receiving a decent amount of organic traffic for keywords such as kids harry potter halloween costumes and cinderella halloween costumes.
They need, however, to increase their brand exposure and want to interact with their customers through Social Media. (Dont we all?)
Their blog is well advertised within the site (on the upper right corner), but receives very little traffic. Apparently, their posts have been indexed, some are even on Digg and Reddit, but far from achieving the social viral effect.
Here’s my issue – social marketing for “real” businesses has the advantage that I can go in and get footage of their service/products, which makes content much more viral-friendly. For an online store, however, I’m coming up blank when I try to create an identity that doesnt consist of “buy our costumes”.
I’ve looked at Zappos and to a certain extent, Amazon, but their approach to Social Media is nothing like what these guys want to do: Zappos has their CEO on twitter, and on a personal blog, which adds a persona, a “face” to the brand. He barely speaks of the company’s products on his blog.
What CuteToddlers has been doing is basically discussing and advertising their costumes on the blog – yes, they add lots of personal touches to the posts, but they’re still salesy. Maybe that’s what I should work towards – getting a social media fan within the company and working with her/him to create a company “persona”.
What do you think?
Leave your comments – they are always DOFOLLOW and approved very quickly.
Guerilleros, the battle has been taking the best of me – not because I’m losing, but because I’m fighting too many 😉
But I’ve got some interesting stats to show, and if you’re trying to conquer ground in your local market, light up your best cigar and join me for the kill.
I’m going to briefly analyze the highlights of two completely different companies that we have DOMINATED their local market (the same market, by the way) through smart, interactive, social media guerilla.
First, the market: we’re talking of a highly-scattered, hugely diverse population of about 20k residents in the Outer Banks of North Carolina (Northeastern NC). If you’ve been to any beach towns outside of NJ, you know the deal: middle-class locals, broke surfers, and the rich retired make for a tough crowd to target.
But…. what brings people together better than TV these days?
If you said accidents on the highway, you’re probably right too, but I’m talking about Facebook!
So let’s get to the nitty gritty:
Their campaign actually started with PPC, and that brought the good-ol’ ppc lead: mickey mouses, john does, jane eres.. Probably because the gym was already established on the beach, the “hit-em-over-the-head” PPC approach did not work very well. The market had been introduced to the product and made up their mind about. (It did work very well for Turists, but let’s save that for later)
When PPC started to get annoying & expensive, I felt it was my duty as social guerillero to set them up with a blog – and since I was there quite often, I took pictures and footage of what was going on in the gym from time to time.
Do you see any work of genious here? Me neither.
What do you, smart guerillero, think happened? Well, a series of things:
Internally, the gym members were all excited to have a place where they could see each other (anybody said online community yet?), and they were even more excited to see our posts going to Facebook – where their friends and family could see how much weight they lost, blah blah..
Externally is where the fun began – It was great having the gym’s profile on Facebook feeding video and news all over the place, but it wasnt until one of their students, completely impartial to their marketing efforts, started posting his own videos of the training, the races, etc… that things really kicked off.
See what happened here? A happy member, posting about his good time at the gym, on his own Facebook profile, started a massive viral reaction!
Suddenly, a great part of their own community also started posting their stuff – and the mess was made.
Now, we’ve got people asking on Facebook about the gym’s rates and how they can sign up. And people in other cities asking about our programs, to see if they can find something similar in their places. It’s creating more buzz than PPC ever did. And all it’s taken is a bit of time to take pictures and videos! Check out the gym’s youtube channel:
Now, for the second case:
Again, we also started with PPC – which brought some results, but infimal, and highly volatile – and since they didnt have an actual sales staff to work on those leads, it was up to me to make sure the leads were extra hot so they could close them easy.
This company also owns one of the best restaurants on the beach, and they already had a decent group page on Facebook before my guerilla services were summoned.
The problem here was that all of their prospects came through word-of-mouth (very effective on this tiny market), so they had ZERO marketing material or experience. Again, there I was with the social guerillero’s killer tool: my camera.
We started shooting their really awesome caterings – this one wedding in corolla was a big hit, and most recently, the owner guided us through the entire footage of this wedding in nags head.
Again, nothing even close to being work of genious, but check this out: footages like this one are still a hot novelty in the industry (specially here in the beach), and we sent the entire restaurant community to go check it out.
They loved it: the company got amazing feedback, and the community received a new influx of members at a very impressive rate. But that wasnt all.
The videos were breaking the seal on that market, but the wedding industry here, specially in the summer, has been dominated by large hotels and event planners. This catering company did not want to compete against a Hilton or a Ramada, but they wanted their piece of that pie.
And where can you compete as equals, without a budget? Exactly – ONLINE!
When we started their Party Catering Blog, the idea was to put all of their knowledge and experience out there, offer great advice to brides and dominate the market through SEO.
At this point, webmaster tools tells me that NONE of the blog’s pages were indexed yet – but thanks to the Facebook exposure, a ton of local websites (realtors, convention centers, towns) have already published our posts on their blogs and our videos are all over the net with “yum” comments.
Can you say Screw Google? Frank Kern would love that!
So there you have it – two small companies, beating old time market leaders because of smart social media guerilla marketing.
I will post more details of our campaigns here as often as I can. If you’re really interested, leave a comment with your question and I’ll answer it really fast. (promise)
If you’re not excited by going into battle alone, I’m available for mercenary work – my guerilla skills are yours, for the right price. That include video editing and distribution, social accounts management, blog set ups, etc…
LEAVE A COMMENT!
PS. Check out the new site for the best Outer Banks wedding photographers. New Island Photography. The site is just getting on its feet but already has some great content. If you have any questions about anything on their site, feel free to give us a shout!
Hey Guerilleros, I know I’ve been out for WAY too long, but there’s way too much going on right now and updating this awesome kind of got pushed to the sidelines.
But I want to come back today talking about something that has been constantly on mind now that I’m managing multiple blogs and social communities. It’s a pretty hardcore guerilla that many social media marketers continue to get bombed at.
I’m going to touch a simple aspect of tracking social media referral traffic using Google Analytics.
This is very basic, but is a major part of your guerilla – you need to know where your wins are coming from. It does you no good to spend hours on social bookmarking places if your real traffic comes from Youtube.
Of course, there are secondary advantages of using social bookmarks, but you get the point – if you’re active on one platform, it will undoubtedly work better for you.
And here’s the key point most people miss when determining social media ROI: you dont have to ponder secondary benefits (awareness, exposure, etc..), at least initially. Track salaried hours and social media expenses against measurable results – traffic, leads, referring links.
That’s ROI when it comes to social media, at its primary stage. But when you’re trying to analyze what your results are, look at the report on the left side and ask yourself:
“are these sites where my market ‘hangs out’?”
If it is, then great.
But some guerilleros have no idea where their market hangs out… Those guys just go out and fight for every inch – no matter which direction they’re going. For those guys, there’s more analytics.
Here’s the complete report for the picture above:
You’ll see on the table above: visits – pages/visit – avg time on site – %new visits – %bounce rate.
What those tell you is basically this:
Your visitor came, looked at X number of pages, in about X minutes. But out of everybody that came to your site, X hit the back button without clicking on a single link.
So your job when tracking social media marketing ROI is to analyze who’s connecting with your content in a more efficient way – You can even add conversion tracking to your analytics:
With simple interpretation of raw data, you’ve just found out which platform gives you the best results. If it’s Youtube, darn, get more videos up! If it’s Facebook, spend some more time connecting and updating your status.
It’s easier to spread your social guerilla marketing all over, but it’s hard to win a battle. If you’re winning, stay on top of it!
Guerilleros, today over at the ASI Central I read a cool post about 5 hot marketing trends and if it’s hot, there’s social media all over it.
No doubt, Social Media was the very first “hot trend” (they call it “trend”, we know it’s a GUERILLA!) and even though they didn’t seem to be very familiar with the topic, they picked a real Guerilla strategy to talk about: The X-One Mug Fan Page
The company that makes the X1 (Gold Bond Inc.) decided that
As a travel mug, the X-one is always going places, so the marketing team figured social media was a natural fit, and the X-one Facebook page was born
Pretty clever, huh?
There are a ton of reasons why Gold Bond marketing director Karen Sherrill should receive a considerable bonus, but here at the Guerilla we’ll discuss why their campaign works like charm:
Now raise your hands those who enjoy when companies make fun of themselves… ???
When you go social, online or offline, it’s your personality that attracts people – and the X-One team have created a darn cool one for their fan page.
Mentioning personality is important not only to make the X-One remarkable but to instigate people to talk about it (like I’m doing right now).
I’ve written about the guerilla marketing viral effect and how content goes viral when there’s a benefit to the user that is syndicating it.
Sherill proved to be a master guerillera when she stated this in regards to being remarkable:
One of the important elements seems to be humor or intrigue that will give friends and fans a reason to pick your tweets and posts out of the onslaught of others
Sherill and her team have made the X-One campaign extremely engaging by asking people to share how and where they take their mugs. When customers send them pictures, they’re all published on the fan page under the album “Places I Have Been“.
Check out these pics from the album:
They’re completely NOT A SOCIAL MEDIA SILO – From their facebook page, you can see that the entire company participates: there are mentions of the plant manager, becky the sales rep…
We could not find a link to the company website at the fan page, and we could not find a link to their twitter account either.
ATTENTION: Good social media guerillas are subtle about these strategies, and it’s not a bad practice to make it a bit less obvious for your visitors that you’re trying to sell something.
In the X-One case, however, they’re really not trying to sell anything. Their approach is almost entirely entertaining, and that’s where they missed the point:
What If I wanted to buy an X-One?
My wife drinks more coffee than Brazil can export it, and I’d love to buy her one.
How about a link to a “getthex1.com” domain with more pictures, and an online order form?
Anyway, many praises to Sherill and the marketing team at Gold Bond Inc. They’ve put together a really powerful guerilla campaign, and it should be an inspiration for companies who think social media marketing is about blasting 140 character ads over twitter.
When I read this post over at Label:Indescript about social media silos, I immediately connected the subject to at least 4 business owners I’ve been in contact with.
Justin Boone, the author (and a darn good guerillero), talks about how companies start their social media strategies with a department (read blogger guy) that becomes completely alienated from the rest of the staff and from other departments.
I’d say that’s a better start than having NO SOCIAL MEDIA WHATSOEVER, but there are points to be taken from this when it comes to a powerful social guerilla.
The majority of businesses that decide to implement a blog or create dedicated social network accounts do so with only one objective: create more revenue.
Now that my guerilla is expanding into the fascinating world of “real” business (read offline companies), I’ve found that all these companies really know about social media marketing is that it’s “cheap” and can go “viral”.
The real benefits of creating an active community start when there’s a commitment throughout the entire company to share, engage, and participate in a public dialog. A good guerilla is never won by one lonely guerillero, but by a tactiful team.
And I’ve experienced lots of lost battles when:
The poor “blogger guy” is left hunting for material to post, and is left out with the task of tracking customer feedback and analysing google and twitter alerts.
Or, what is worse:
That happens more often than necessary, but it seems to be that corporate mentality impregnated on offline people; old ads, product releases, listing of properties… The entire community is now a giant billboard!
Turn projects in development over to the SM department, let them post updates. Collect feedback, and apply their comments into the design.
Integrate multiple areas of your company by asking them to report daily activities to the SM team. Motivate the staff to post their comments on the company blog and to interact with each other within the corporate Facebook page.
And one more thing:
QUIT THE RETURN ON INVESTMENT CRAP!
There are tons of ways to measure social media buzz, to ignite content syndication, and those are valid strategies to evaluate strategies. Hiring a web analytics expert is also a good idea.
But enough with the constant cry about time and effort wasted: if these companies havent noticed yet, online content doesnt “die”, and even though it may not be immediate, a solid online participation will pay huge dividends as online usage wont stop growing anytime soon.
Guerilleros, this will be quick because my offline guerilla is taking up too much time. What I’ll show you today is a quick tip for lazy viral marketers.
I bet you’ve already seen the tweetmeme plugin, which automatically inserts a new status message into a user’s own twitter account.
That is a major twitter marketing tool, and I highly recommend you install it on your blog. After all, the easier you make for people to syndicate your content, the more they will. If you do nothing, you’ll receive nothing. That’s guerilla karma.
But what if you’re looking to add some twitter marketing juice to a good-ole website? What? No wordpress plugins?
Yeap, there are still places where a widget doesnt quite work. For those places, you can use a simple HTML guerilla code:
The only thing you have to pay attention to is that you cannot leave any spaces on the code, so you have to use + whenever you have a space.
For example, if I wanted to tell you to please retweet this awesome post, I’d write the following line of code:
<a href=”http://twitter.com/home?status=RT+@leosaraceni+Gave+me+this+cool+twitter+tip+at+http://socialmediaguerilla.com”>RETWEET ME</a>
It works even better when you have a banner image, or even a simple twitter logo. Check out how I merged this technique at my non-wordpress site, while I was writing about keyword research with google insight.
That’s it for today folks. Be creative with your guerilla, and always include viral twitter thingys on your content. As you know, twitter is profitable for a bunch of people (except its creators), and it will help your social media guerilla.
Talk to you soon!
You’re probably familiar with the wordpress permalink structure showing some sort of date on the url, right? Something like this:
If you know a little bit about SEO, you know that the first place search engines look for keywords is in the domain url. As we see in the example above, 2009/07/10 is not a keyword anybody but a horoscope writer would target.
So, how can you change that silly date insertion to a more interesting, SEO-friendly url?
A permalink is the address given to a blog post, which is an abbreviation for “permanent link”. They are permanent because unlike your main domain url, which changes as you write new posts, the url on your permalinks remain the same. Therefore their importance for SEO.
To make changes to your blog’s permalink structure, follow these instructions:
At that point, you’ll see some WordPress suggestions like these:
You don’t want to use any of these. Instead, at the bottom, where you see “Custom Structure”, enter this code:
Your configuration should look something like this:
What happens now?
WordPress will use the categories you determine for each post as part of the permalink url, which will include (hopefully) more relevant keywords to your url.
After you’ve finished, your permalink will look like this:
So far, all you had to do was enter a half-a-line code to your wordpress admin area. That was ridicuosly easy.
The part that actually requires some thinking is determining which Categories suit your blog best.
For that, I highly recommend an extensive keyword research.
Make sure your categories:
The key with categories is that they’re not TAGS, but more like umbrellas from where your tags will come out.
After a week of updating all of the permalinks, I experienced a better indexation for most of the keywords within my categories, and an overall blog traffic increase of 20-25%.
It’s definitely worth it.