Ideal Length of Online Content

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In this fast-paced world, you have to make your message count. Don’t get caught up in trying to say everything in one post or tweet. Aim to make your content as long as it takes to convey the message, and no longer.
Twitter
Twitter
Tweets shorter than 100 characters have a 17% higher engagement role.
Facebook-Posts
Facebook
Posts with 40 characters receive 86% more engagement than posts with a higher character count.
Google-Posts
Google Plus
If your Google+ headline can’t be contained in one line, your first sentence must be gripping teaser to get people to read more.
Paragraphs
Paragraphs
Opening paragraphs with larger fonts and fewer characters per line make it easier for the reader to focus and jump quickly from one line to the next.
Subject-Line
Email Subject Lines
Subject lines containing 28-39 characters get an open rate of 12.2% and click rate of 4% on average.
Blog-Headlines
Blog Headlines
Only the first 3 words and the last 3 words of a headline tend to be read. Rather than worrying about length, you should focus on making every word count.
Blog-Posts
Blog Posts
Overall, 74% of posts that are read are under 3 minutes long and 94% are under 6 minutes long.
Youtube
YouTube
The most popular videos are pretty short. After analysing the length of the top 50 YouTube videos, the average length was 2 minutes 54 seconds.
Podcasts
Podcast
The average Podcast listener stays connected for 22 minutes on average. Studies show students zone out after 15-20 minutes of lecture time. After 20 minutes, attention and retention rates crash.

To see the full infographic click here

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Be Wise with your Facebook Cover Image

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Few tactics are as effective at conveying a brand personality and encouraging engagement on social media as a carefully selected image. In this fast-paced-scroll world of social media, the visual images are the first thing your audience sees and it might be the one thing they remember.

In the two Facebook cover images shown below, which cafe would you frequent? I imagine within less than a second you will have made your mind up about which you prefer based on the image the cafes have chosen to represent themselves.

pearl

This example below shows how the owners have so much to say they have simply put EVERYTHING onto their cover image which has effectively made it impossible to take anything in. Keep your message simple and use the description tool to add extra copy in.

night-cafe

To optimise your social presence, you must ensure that the images you’re using to represent your brand are high quality and the best fit for the various networks. To help, we’ve outlined the best image sizes for Facebook (desktop and mobile) and image type.

Your Facebook Page’s profile picture:
Displays at 160 x 160 pixels on computers, 140 x 140 pixels on smartphones and 50 x 50 pixels on most feature phones.
However, the image must be at least 180 x 180 pixels. Your image will be cropped to fit a square.
Ideally we recommend using your logo here or part of your logo that is easily identifiable. Businesses often make the mistake of inserting an image that works on a desktop on the actual Facebook page but in the fan’s newsfeed it becomes unidentifiable.

Your Facebook Page’s cover photo:
– Displays at 851 pixels wide by 315 pixels high on computers
– 640 pixels wide by 360 pixels high on smartphones.
– Doesn’t display on feature phones.
Ideally you want to achieve a fast load so supply the file as an sRGB JPG file that’s 851 pixels wide, 315 pixels tall and less than 100 kilobytes.
For profile pictures and cover photos that display your logo or text, you may get a better result by using a PNG file.

See our handy reference visual below which indicates the areas that aren’t visible in mobile views. Remember to keep all critical information out of these areas.
FB-Header1

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12 Key Factors to Creating Successful Websites

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The majority of businesses today have a website but how well is it working? Is it drawing in new business and helping to retain existing customers? When potential clients want to research products or services they go online. If the business website does not adequately reflect the quality of your company, then you risk losing revenue opportunities and credibility in the marketplace.
When you are considering building a new site or reviewing an existing website there are some key factors you should include in your process.

1. Website Strategy – you should have a plan for your site, i.e., what are your goals? What are the keywords you want to target? What will be the layout? Get other staff members involved in the planning stage as they may highlight factors you haven’t considered.

2. Define your audience (target market) and listen to them. Tailor your website to appeal to them and find out what your customers want from your site and give it to them. Remember, it’s not about what the company or board think are important but what your customers think is important.

4. Online Research – look at your prospective online competition. What are they doing? What can you learn from others here and overseas and those in different industries? You should always keep a close eye on your competition for new technologies, keywords and new ways to communicate.

5. Make sure you have a well-designed site – this is subjective but there are some golden rules that will always apply: simple, clean and elegant.

6. Protect your brand – make sure your brand is prominently displayed and consistent everywhere it appears on the site. Also, your Brand personality must be on your website. This is where you look at your colours, your typography and all the traits of your brand, to ensure a consistent presentation through your site.

7. A user should be able to easily find what they are looking for. Try not to fill your web pages with unnecessary data – just makes it harder to locate the relevant information amongst the clutter and you end up making your visitor work – eventually they will leave and go to your competition.

8. The content should be current and relevant – allocate a maintenance budget or resources to ensure the site is regularly updated. The content should also have correct spelling, free from typos and grammatical errors.

9. Regularly check your website (customer’s point-of-view) and consider a professional evaluation from time-to-time.

10. Tie in social media intelligently – it shouldn’t dominate your website but it definitely needs to be easily found.

11. Consider how mobile devices – ipads, tablets and smartphones will be able to view your site – ask your web developer if you have a Responsive Design.

12. Promote your website on all marketing material and make use of the Google tools such as Google My Business.

And remember, a website is NEVER finished. A ‘buy it and forget it’ approach just doesn’t work anymore. You have to be constantly updating, refining and optimising. If you’re not keeping pace, you could be losing customers to more dynamic sites.
For further help you can take a look at the website strategy diagram or email philippa@cre8ive.co.nz for assistance.

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Which words in Email Subject lines drive the best response?

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Who ever complains that they don’t receive enough emails? Email overload is a reality in today’s fast-paced environment. Nearly everyone’s inbox is bombarded with email communications, all of which are competing for the recipient’s time and attention.

To filter out unnecessary messages, most people spend just a fraction of a second evaluating email subject lines. If the subject line doesn’t immediately capture their attention, they move on to the next message in their inbox. It becomes extremely clear that your subject line may be your first and only chance at enticing your recipient to open your email.

The team at Smart Insights did some research into which words seem to drive the best responses and assigned a quality score – which was derived from a combination of response metrics, time-decayed results, and external factors. It’s called the Phrasee Score™. Scores range from 1 to 100. The higher the score the more reliably a phrase drives response.

The key findings for the top 5 and bottom 5 words are as follows:

Action words
These are call-to-action phrases that are intended to elicit a specific behavior.

call-to-action
Questions
These are subject lines formed as a question.
Subject-lines-as-question
Sale phrases
These are phrases that relate to a specific offer, discount or sale.
sales-phrases
Superlatives
These are nouns or verbs that elicit emotional response from email recipients.
superlatives-words
Urgency
These are phrases that use time or stock limits as an action driver. Clearly, anything to do with Midnight doesn’t work too well.
urgency-words
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The Importance of Integrated Marketing

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This concept is about carefully combining and coordinating your marketing efforts to deliver a consistent and compelling message about your organisation and products/services. The challenge is ensuring consistency and uniformity across the many media channels available. And importantly, it has to not only be simple for the target audience to connect with and understand, but it also has to work in the marketplace. In an already saturated and cluttered environment of media and advertising, success requires more than ‘throwing darts’ at individual communication avenues. In an integrated campaign, advertisements, direct mail, PR, online marketing, and all other aspects of the campaign must be consistent in message and approach. The goal is to achieve a seamless communication with your target markets that ripples through the re-determined variety of channels. But for an integrated campaign to be great, it takes more than just consistent messaging across the board. A truly excellent integrated campaign takes the multi-platform approach to the next level by using each channel to feed into a complete and encompassing story.

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Social Media & SEO

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Digital marketing is critical to business now days. We know that when customers are looking to purchase their initial search will be an online one. Search engine optimisation is essential for customers to find your organisation, which is the art and science of getting your website ranking high enough to be noticed in web searches.

Search engine algorithms rank web pages based on numerous factors (over 200 that we know of). Most understand that relevancy and authority are critical for your site to rank well but did you realise that social media is playing an increasingly important role?

In the past couple of years, though, social media marketing, which means engaging with customers on sites like Facebook and Twitter, has grown in importance. Social media interaction done right has the power not only to drive traffic to a website, but also to change the public perception of a brand and to win fans who will recommend a product to their friends.

More and more, search engines are incorporating social context into their search results. What does this mean for your website/seo strategy? Your organisation should be adjusting what you are posting/tweeting to align with the changing character of search. Review your list of keywords for which you want to rank highly. Does your content you are sharing on social media match these keywords? If not, you should focus on a couple of your most desirable keywords and find ways to make content about them.

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12 Top Email Marketing Tips

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Email marketing is even more important that ever. A way to connect to your customers and a tool that you have full control over, unlike social media. Done in the right manner, this method of marketing can generate critical business leads. Detailed here are some helpful tips for organising a successful email campaign.

1. Don’t use email to only sell
If you exclusively send the same message repeatedly to your clients, trying to sell, i.e., product offers, discounts and offers such as free shipping then you risk turning off your clients and devaluing your products.

2. Earn the attention of email subscribers
Each time you send out an email message to your database it is important to grab their attention immediately with the subject line and then always include something of value. You might want to share a link to a video, a new webinar, some type of industry report or an infographic. In this way, your recipients will be excited to open your messages because they will expect to see real value in them. Avoid sending emails with exactly the same headline each time as the reader isn't given an incentive to read further Continue reading...

10 Social Media Tips for the Holiday Season

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    1. Start Early & Build your Base of Followers
      Use social media to create a buzz around your brand leading up to the festive season. Try Facebook advertising as a low cost way to increase your audience reach.
    2. Establish your Holiday Season Goals
      Without goals you won’t be able to measure the success of your campaign. Examples of goals might be to increase sales, increase volume of website traffic or have more enewsletter sign ups. You can use website statistics such as Google Analytics and Facebook Insights to measure the effectiveness of your campaign.
    3. Create a Content Calendar
      Detail key dates, special offers, ideas on how to get your audience talking about their festive activities etc. There is no right or wrong answer to when to post or how much to post but establishing a regular cadence that your audience can come to rely on is a great start. Measuring post effectives in terms of content and timing is critical to ensure you are hitting the mark with your social media content.
    4. Follow the 80/20 Rule

      Ensure that 80% of your tweets/posts drive interaction and offer value to your followers. The other 20% use for direct offers or ‘selling’ type messages.

Continue reading...

Healthcare Organisations and FB

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Is Facebook a good fit for Medical Centres and other Healthcare Organisations?

Is your organisation involved in healthcare? Are you using Facebook to develop long-term relationships and promote your medical centre? You may be weary of how Facebook can play a role, however you will be interested to know that the

Facebook product teams have noticed people with chronic ailments such as diabetes are searching the social networking site for advice. In addition, the proliferation of patient networks such as PatientsLikeMe demonstrate that people are increasingly comfortable sharing symptoms and treatment experiences online.

And it is understood that Facebook itself is exploring creating online "support communities" that would connect Facebook users suffering from various ailments. A small team is also considering new "preventative care" applications that would help people improve their lifestyles.

Facebook and other social media platforms should be part of your online marketing strategy. But if your website needs development then start here first – this is the most important online tool any organisation has.

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