Pinterest SEO Overview

Your brand has a lot of great images and you really want to get them out there so people can see them and then convert to customers. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all of their purpose, but Pinterest can be perhaps the best long term help for building the exposure of your brand’s images. Pinterest SEO can be a huge part of your marketing strategy. Most social media tools are built around a very quick-burn type of content, whereas you should think of Pinterest more of a place where you can build a quality library of images and content.

Most brands don’t have much of a plan on how to use Pinterest as the only staff knowledge on using it revolves around personal usage, which is very different than using it to build a brand. As we have many brands that need to maximize brand images, especially associated with product placement, we have put together a checklist on how to use Pinterest for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and brand building:

1. Carefully fill out your profile and verify your brand’s website! Include carefully researched keywords that you are targeting in your description.
2. Board Names and Board Descriptions: This is your bread and butter for exposure on Google searches. Make sure you have a well researched set of keywords and phrases and build your Pinterest Boards and their descriptions around this list. This is what Google is looking at most with Pinterest, and don’t just use your brand name here or over-thought names that you think are clever.
3. Use keywords with each Pin.
4. Use hashtags. This will be separate from your keywords list. You will want to see what is trending and still relevant to your brand and utilize these hashtags for each pin.
5. Always make a link back to your brand’s website with each pin. This won’t directly increase your site’s SEO ranking, but it will perform a much more important role: conversion. You want to find new potential customers, and by linking back to your site with each pin, you are helping convert new traffic into sales.
6. Use Alt tags when adding pictures to pins, and utilize other tips to maximize the SEO value of all of your images. (We have a separate post on that!)
7. Remember that Pinterest is about “inspiration”. This is why people visit Pinterest pages. Get your creative people thinking of ways your Pinterest page will not just show your brands, but that the content is interesting, and when people find a Board of yours, they will want to bounce around within your overall Pinterest account.

Originally published at Brand Strategy Tips.

SEO Tips for Pinterest was originally published in Product Placement on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Why Websites Fail

Remember when you were creating your first resume and someone giving you advice let you know how important that first sentence was at the top? There was always the warning about how long the average resume was looked at, and how important it was to make a strong first impression. The same principle applies to brand websites. Visitors have a very short attention span, and most traffic to brand sites from new visitors that didn’t previously know about your brand end in them clicking the old Back button. You have spent the time building a beautiful site, with lots of useful, engaging content with lovely graphics that merge with well written text, creating an exquisite brand mosaic.

Why Websites Fail to Convert and How To Change It

However, it is not translating into new sales. You research sites that point out other beautiful sites but you can’t quite figure out what is the magic ingredient that separates them from your site. Well, look again, and we will point out the #1 reason you are probably not converting new visitors to sales. It is the combination of two key elements that you will see on almost any successful brand page:

1. A clear, short, well written Benefit statement
2. A call to action

That’s it. Start to go back and look at brands that are known for their excellence in selling online and you will see some short phrase or sentence that explains clearly what they do and why they are excellent, and then some sort of link to start the process of becoming a customer.

Now revisit your site and see how you can simply create two small elements that immediately engage a new visitor and that starts them on the process of conversion of a new customer.

Originally published at Brand Strategy Tips.

Why Websites Fail was originally published in Product Placement on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

10 Tricks to Brand Marketing:

• Brand Marketing is all about ROI (Return on Investment), and the ROI on Facebook and Twitter are WAAAAY down in the last 18 months. Everybody has them now and the social media giants now want brands to pay for getting their message out.
• The spread of designers using tools like WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, etc. has led to a dearth of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) skills. Brand websites are getting prettier, but less visible and targeted to potential customers.
• The blog as a web marketing tool is alive and well, and is still the best way to get content about your brand out there on the web easily and free. Unlike individual social media content, Google actually includes blog content in their searches.
• An overwhelming majority of all brands have a website and at least two social media profiles. Furthermore, most brands don’t engage in any other form of online marketing.
• In almost any market, for any brand, Google Ads and Facebook boosted and promoted posts outperform the time, energy, and money spent on trying to establish “organic” reach in terms of ROI.
• That short list of keywords and phrases that brands use to target potential customers is generally only 25% at most of what brings people to your site. The rest is called your “Long Tail.” Brands that study their long tail of keywords and that have identified at least 35 keywords and phrases consistently outperform their competitors with website traffic. Here is a little primer on the Long Tail.
• The most effective means to create a “halo effect” of brand positivity in the era of social media is product placement. However, less than 1% of all brands engage in any form of product placement.
• The fastest growing aspect of product placement is “brand integration” or micro-placements. These are unpaid placements that studios use to fill their production sets and cut costs. With the rapid expansion of cable networks and on-demand entertainment, profit margins have narrowed, and all studios are cutting costs. This has led to a new marketing segment that involves filling shoots with unpaid product placements.
• Early-adapting brands consistently and historically experience substantial sales growth. This includes early adapters to using PC’s, email, websites, social media, and now, product placement in its new form.
• The Placement Directory provides low flat rates for brands to be in touch with top studios that are constantly looking for brands to fill their productions.

Originally published at Brand Strategy Tips.

10 Tricks to Brand Marketing was originally published in Product Placement on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Twitter for 2016

Twitter for 2016? Most brands have been on Twitter now for several years, but starting to question their plan. Twitter provides very up to the minute updates about the owner of the profile, whether a person or brand. The problem is that brands are realizing that their followers simply don’t need timely updates about their brands, and are making a new Twitter plan for 2016. To start, here is where Twitter thrives:

1. Celebrities. Fans of celebrities have insatiable desire to stay up to date with what their favorite celebrities are doing, and Twitter is perfect for that.
2. Sports Updates. Whether this is a specific reporter, news organization, sports blog, or team page, Twitter is constructed to provide instant, albeit unpolished info to followers that crave updates as soon as possible.
3. Local businesses that have a lot of changes in their service. A business such as a food truck, a restaurant with a rotating menu, local businesses that travel such as a farmers’ markets, bars and pubs with changing live performances, etc., are all examples of businesses that should utilize Twitter to update their customers in changes in their service.

Twitter in 2016 — Quit or Adjust?

As with the monetization of Facebook, brand owners are starting to contemplate what is the ROI of Twitter, and what should the plan be moving forward. The reality is that for 99% of brands, their followers and potential customers just aren’t invested that much into any particular brand to need up the to minute updates. Brands that are fully analyzing their Twitter strategy are coming up with three possible plans for 2016:

1. Stop putting time into unique content for Twitter, and either quit or just have the account to receive updates from Facebook, Instagram, or a blog automatically (installing an instant feed service).
2. Embrace the monetization of Twitter and go all-in. This would involve the continue use of unique content for Twitter AND buying promoted Tweets to reach an expanded audience.
3. A broadening of the scope of a Twitter account to include content that involves the overall “lifestyle” of a brand through aggregation.

Twitter Aggregation in 2016

The third option is one that many savvy brands are utilizing for their Twitter strategy in 2016. The premise is based on the fact that most brands are simply not as big a part of their customers’ lives as they would hope, and therefore, the content for their Twitter profile should embrace the overall “lifestyle” of that brand. For example, if a brand sells specialty, small-batch Bourbon, they should realize that most followers simply don’t care about daily updates on their brand. However, the “lifestyle” of people that enjoy specialty Bourbon most likely includes specialty foods, possibly cigars, travel, etc. The brand could identify 20 excellent sources that involve this lifestyle and post links to interesting content involving the overall lifestyle that they believe their followers enjoy. This allows for one or two Tweets each week related to their brand, fitting into that overall lifestyle.

Twitter for 2016 — Reality Check?

Brands are finding this approach one that takes very little time and energy to implement, and that keeps followers engaged with their brand. Instead of living in denial that their brand is an important enough aspect of their customers’ lives that they need daily updates about it, brand managers are instead integrating their brand into the overall lifestyle of their customers.

Originally published at Brand Strategy Tips.

Twitter for 2016 was originally published in Product Placement on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How Does Google Rank Pages?

The official, responsible answer is no one knows exactly how your site gets a Google Rank. Nevertheless, with each Google major release we learn a little more and that keeps all of the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and web marketing professionals in business. Google, and other searches engines, have become increasingly sophisticated, and with each release of their SEO tricks, work less and less, but Google Rank becomes better understood.

It is now at a point where it is most important for brands to properly research what keywords and phrases they want to target. They need to create natural, appropriate content that is formatted in a way to help facilitate Google in giving high ranks for pages matched to keywords, without trying to cheat the system. In no particular order, here are the major factors of what is commonly understood about Google’s ranking policies:

• Domain Name. If you search for “California organic raspberries” and you own the domain “www.california-organic-raspberries.com" all things considered, Google will give points for a good match.
• Folder and Page Name. Let’s say you are a specialty brewery and you make an Oatmeal Stout. A web address of: “www.acmebeer.com/oatmeal-stout/oatmeal-stout.html" will get a good ranking.
• Website page <title> This is what you see in the tab at the top of the browser. Most website creation tools allow you to configure this, and the words used in it are generally viewed as very important to Google ranking.
• Page content. Google loves to index pages and read through text and see what is relevant on a page. It is important to include “headings” to sections of text that include keywords, use natural language, not trying to “keyword stuff” and to include images and videos. Google needs content to digest, but also can be punitive with rankings when you try to fudge the results.
• Inbound Links, general. It is good to have other websites linking TO your page. This is an area that has been abused in the past, and Google doesn’t like if you try to overly-manipulate this. That was done with services that you could buy to create many links to your page, but Google only likes links that are within pages in a natural way, not pages with just long lists of links to other sites that are there to boost ranks.
• Inbound Links of other websites that also score well for a particular keyword. This is very important to understand. Let’s say you produce organic deer feed. If you do a search for that and the top result coming up is an article on a blog that talks about the advantages of such a product, and then you can get that article to then include a link to your site, you should receive a big boost in ranking. Google assumes that pages that it has already ranked high for a particular keyword is legit, and that if it links to other sites, they get that validity automatically.
• Site age. You might have created a site and wondered why it took so long to start showing up in Google searches. This is because Google normally takes a few months to really validate a site, and the longer it is up with more and more content, the better.
• Traffic to the site? Nope… no evidence that the amount of people that visit your site has any bearing on the ranking that Google gives you.

Originally published at Brand Strategy Tips.

How Does Google Rank Pages? was originally published in Product Placement on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Brands Know Product Placement Works:

Companies know that the best way to build their brands is through product placement, and they’re willing to pay hefty fees to your Product Placement Agency if you can get their product on TV or into movies. The trouble is, there are massive overhead costs associated with setting up and running a traditional agency. That’s where you can put the Placement Directory to work for you. Here’s how it works.

What Product Placement Agencies Do:

The primary function of product placement agencies is to find TV shows and movies that are interested in contracting with the brands they represent. Of course, anyone can call around to studios offering to buy their way onto a show, but that’s not what your clients will want. The goal of any placement agency is to connect with producers who are willing to place their clients’ products without a fee. The products are then put into the show in exchange for the donated product alone. If you want start your own product placement company, you’ll need to find a way to get clients free product placement on TV shows and movies.

The way most agencies accomplish the goal is by setting up call centers and making marketing calls to all the major studios and production companies. That’s where the overhead costs tend to mount. Another service they provide is validating requests that come in to client companies offering product placement. As a service to your client, your agency must be able to determine whether the offers they receive have come from a real production company.

How to Start a Product Placement Agency and Avoid the Overhead:

Setting up call centers is expensive. So is recruiting, training, and retaining employees to make all those calls — tens of thousands of calls each week. Your staff must be relentless in calling studios and marketing the brands you represent. You can also send out marketing emails, but they are usually ignored by studios. The solution: put the Placement Directory to work for you.

The Placement Directory can reach all of the studios for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This is an online service where studios are actively looking for products to put into their shows. They enter all the products they need for a production: clothing, furnishings, props, you name it. When the Placement Directory finds a match, the system kicks out an email. All you have to do is enter the product information from your clients, and then sit back and wait for an email saying there’s a match. When the requests start rolling in, you’ll forward the email to your clients and bam! You’re a hero. You have found them placement. Congratulations! You are a star in the world of product placement and you didn’t make a single call.

As an added bonus, the Placement Directory has a validation feature that will allow you to endorse unsolicited studio requests. If someone claiming to be a studio contacts one of your clients asking for product, just forward the email to verify@placementdirectory.com and the Placement Directory will authenticate them for you. Once the studio’s been verified, they can resubmit their request. It’s just that simple.

How Much to Charge:

A good placement agency charges around $6,000 per month or $72,000 per year — some more, some less. When you set your agency up as described, your Product Placement Agency will be as good as any of the top Product Placement Agencies in the world. This means you can charge top fees to your clients. Since the Placement Directory service costs only $2,500 per year, you’ll turn a handsome profit of $69,500 per year for each client in your agency. Your only other overhead expenses would be a computer and of course a Wi-Fi connection.

The Catch:

There really isn’t any catch. Using this model, you are providing a highly sought after service and simply subcontracting out all of the work. Perhaps one day your clients may discover the Placement Directory for themselves and work with them directly, but not to worry. There will always be new clients who want to try a “full service” agency before they discover the best kept secret in product placement.

Originally published at Brand Strategy Tips.

How to Start a Product Placement Agency and Do No Work was originally published in Product Placement on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Facebook and SEO for 2016

Your brand is finally rockin’ it on Facebook and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and you have started to notice that you have hit a wall. You have read the books, checked out the blogs, and thought you had a handle on how to implement Facebook as a powerful part of your marketing strategy, but it has seemingly stopped growing. What happened? You are not alone. Just like dating that special someone and one day you start to realize that they are changing into something less desirable, Facebook’s bigwigs went out and decided they needed to start making some money off of this thing. Facebook and SEO are definitely moving apart.

Facebook’s Fading Reach

Let’s say you had 5,000 wonderful fans on your Facebook brand page, and for a long time when you posted, you seemed to reach a large amount of them. Then, one day, the reach of your posts seemed to get less and less. What happened is Facebook changed the way that fans receive posts, even though they have “Liked” the page. Generally, the only fans that seem to get the posts are ones that are actively engaged with the brand page — commenting on a post, sharing a post, answering a survey question, etc. Why did Facebook do this? The answer seems to be that they want the owners of Facebook brand pages to boost or promote their posts. They finally monetized the monster social media tool. What does this mean for your social media strategy? It will be different for each brand. First, you can consider some changes to how you post:

1. Concentrate on posts that beg to be shared, and engage fans with questions, surveys, or whatever you can do to get your fans to interact with your page.
2. If you are a very localized brand, include city names in your posts. This will increase the chance that fans that are also in that city will receive them.

Next, you will have to have a decision on whether and how to Boost your posts. This is the process of paying for your post to show up to fans and even beyond. To be honest, the cost is generally quite low, but it is not something you probably will do too often. What is becoming a common practice is using the post boosting centered around a specific campaign to create awareness of a new brand, event, etc.

A New Way To Build Facebook Fans

What else can you do to build your Facebook audience? Glad you asked… try some cross posting with business partners or other non-competitive, but related, businesses that can be mutually beneficial. For example, if you are a craft brewery that distributes in a certain region, look up different business partners such as restaurants and bars that carry your brand. Create a post that talks about your brand and talk to them about posting it on their Facebook page, and then you do the same for them. This has many advantages besides just helping each other build fans. Hint: When doing this, you might want to search partner businesses on Facebook and pick out ones that have the biggest amount of fans, first!

Originally published at Brand Strategy Tips.

Facebook and SEO for 2016 was originally published in Product Placement on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Marketing a Brand in 2017

If you are a brand manager, own a small business that markets a brand, or have been marketing brands for years, it is a time of frustration. However, by knowing what has changed, savvy brand managers can make some adjustments to get their brand to stand out from the crowd. First, some assumptions and statements about the current status of online marketing:

• Recent Google algorithm updates have eliminated most of the old tricks of SEO experts. Content is indeed “king” again with website SEO efforts.
• Facebook and Twitter have monetized. Features have, and will continue to evolve to push you into paying for posts and Tweets.
• Facebook and Twitter are ubiquitous. That is not a compliment — every brand seems to have them, and with a little know-how have a respectable following.
• Measuring ROI on efforts for social media is almost never done.
• Social media experts are obsessed with “engagement”. Why?

The Top 5 Things Brand Managers Do To Increase Sales
Most brands are stuck in the mud with marketing. There is a social media “expert” pushing for engagement and community-building, SEO professionals pushing out-dated tricks to get at the top of Google searches, and brand owners wondering why they can’t increase sales. The problem is that social media, SEO, and web marketing have created a haze that have gotten us away from taking a global view of all of our efforts, and the saturation of web marketing and social media has created a giant stalemate. Here are steps every brand should take to get out of the stalemate and on to making more sales:

• Learn your brand’s keywords and phrases. Don’t assume. Have all of your marketing and sales people (yes, sometimes that is just one person), take some time and knock out list of keywords and phrases that relate to your brand. Use free online tools that will show you how popular these terms are (search for “keyword analyzer). Also, make a list of your competitors’ websites. Do another search for “competitor keyword research” or similar search and you will find tools that will show you what are the top keywords and phrases that are driving traffic to your competitors. This is the basis of all of web marketing. Do this every 6 months.
• Your website should be written around these keywords and phrases. And do it naturally- don’t “keyword stuff” or get cute. Google is on to this and will be punitive. Just write natural content with an eye toward using these keywords.
• Your homepage needs to have two primary elements that are the first elements that stand out: a clear benefit statement, and a call to action. Check out box.com for a page that does this perfectly. You want to quickly state your case for the quality of your brand and what it does and you want to always be trying to CONVERT these visitors into customers.
• Really take an honest look at the ROI of Twitter and Facebook. The time you are spending on these are taking away from efforts that work much more efficiently.
• Embrace the blog. Your social media content stays just within those networks, but blogs like WordPress or Blogspot have posts that can be found on Google. Blog often and be natural.
• Learn about Google Ads and really consider using them. They simply work, but you need to know how they work. Have one person be the expert, which only involves an hour or two of reading the tutorials. They have proven ROI, and you can adjust your Ads at anytime.
• Take some time to read through our blog posts on web marketing from a Geek’s perspective: Product Placement Tips
• The single best way to stand out from the crowd is to associate your brand with instant-validating sources through product placement. Yes, product placement… TV shows and Movies are now doing everything they can to cut production costs and filling their production needs by contacting brands to provide products. The Placement Directory offers connections to the top studios for a small yearly fee with no fee for placements.
• Analyze what is working every month. Make sure you have a way to measure the ROI of all aspects of your web marketing.

Originally published at Product Placement — Placement Directory.

5 Changes to Marketing a Brand You Should Make in 2017 was originally published in Product Placement on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We want to welcome another giant multi-national company to Placement Directory. Placement Directory is dedicated to cleaning up the communication process between the hundreds of production companies and hundreds of thousands of brands. Now all production companies have an easy way to connect with the right person at Hewlett-Packard. Product placement in movies and television are often difficult to coordinate, but Placement Directory leads the industry in solving these problems.

On our first day of working with HP we already have them outfitting a modern police station in a new movie with Al Pacino. The details are still a secret but will be out soon enough. With a brand like HP many television shows and movies will be looking for products.

A git about Placement Directory:

Placement Directory is the yellow pages of the product placement industry. Our focus is being the hub of communication between the production companies and brands. We work with the top shows on all the major networks and the top studios for film production. We connect the production companies to the right person on the first try. Whether it be the a placement agency, public relations firm or directly to a brand’s marketing department, Placement Directory makes the connection. To learn more please watch our video at http://placementdirectory.com

A bit about HP from their website:

Our vision is to create technology that makes life better for everyone, everywhere — every person, every organization, and every community around the globe. This motivates us — inspires us — to do what we do. To make what we make. To invent, and to reinvent. To engineer experiences that amaze. We won’t stop pushing ahead, because you won’t stop pushing ahead. You’re reinventing how you work. How you play. How you live. With our technology, you’ll reinvent your world.This is our calling. This is a new HP.

Originally published at Product Placement — Placement Directory.

Placement Directory welcomes HP was originally published in Product Placement on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Changes Ahead for Brand Strategy

Brand Strategy for 2017 will change more than it has in years for brands that want to be successful in their marketing efforts. Outbound “spray and pray” efforts are dying out, as they are expensive and ineffective. “Hyper-focused” ads are proving to provide the ROI that brands are looking for, and consumers are getting almost impervious to advertisements that are directed at them with no reason.

The guiding theme of brand strategy in 2017? Dealing with market saturation. In a world of increasingly sophisticated brand managers and their understanding of how to use social media, SEO, and other forms of content marketing, how does a brand separate itself from the crowd?

Brand Strategy Recipe for Success in 2017

So what will savvy brand managers do in 2017 to get their brands to separate from the masses on social media and Google? Here is how we see how a brand will stand out:

• Keep on social media and SEO efforts, but understand this is not a way to stand out anymore, just what has to be done as rudimentary marketing.
• Focus on mobile marketing. This means all websites, blogs, etc. is optimized for mobile, and considering mobile based ads.
• Put a primary on “brand distinction”. It used to be that having a website, or a blog, or a Facebook presence would make you innovative, but now it is just part of doing business.
• Use brand association with already established highly valued properties, such as celebrities, TV shows, movies, etc. (this is not expensive!)
• After associating your brand with high-value productions, NOW use that on your established social media channels and SEO efforts.
• As we said, it is not expensive. The Placement Directory offers a small, flat rate fee to put brands in touch with the top TV and Movie studios that are looking for brands to offset their production costs. Consider:

76% of people feel that marketing has changed more in the past 2 years than in the previous 50, and 86% of digital marketers said they will produce more content in 2017, and 65% said they are going to increase their content marketing spend. At each stage of marketing shifts in the last 10 years, a small group of brands has stayed ahead of “what is working” and separated themselves from the crowd. In the world of ultra-saturated marketing efforts, what will your brand do to excel?

Originally published at Product Placement — Placement Directory.

Brand Strategy 2017 was originally published in Product Placement on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.