Happy Holidays from Spot Color

As the holiday season approaches, we at Spot Color Marketing would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your continued support. We hope your holiday and new year are filled with success and happiness.
Spot Color Marketing looks forward to working with you in 2016!
Social Media Dead Zones: Is Your Message Being Heard?
Even though it seems like everyone is on social media ALL OF THE TIME, research shows there are, in fact, times where not very many people will be around to catch your latest post. If you’re spending any amount of time curating content for your social media channels, you want to be sure your target audience is getting that information. Below is a list of the social media dead zones, by channel.
Avoid posting carefully curated content over the weekend and from 8:00pm – 8:00am. During these times people are more likely out doing whatever they’re going to later post on Facebook, rather than looking at it.
Save your special tweets for the next day if it’s after 8:00pm on all days or 3:00pm on Fridays. You’ll get their attention tomorrow!
In keeping with LinkedIn’s professional persona, most users are not reading on LinkedIn during normal work hours, so avoid posting anything between 9:00am and 5:00pm. Also, LinkedInners drop off after 10:00pm. So post that content in the sweet spot, between 5:00 and 9:00pm.
Google+
Google demands to be heard most of the time, so the only times you should avoid posting here are in the early AM and early evening.
Pinners are not active during normal working hours. Save those precious pins for late afternoon and evening.
Tumblr
Apparently reading blogs usually happens after work, so release those posts at or after 4:00pm.
Hopefully you know your audience well and have figured out when is the best time to engage with them. If not and you’d like to learn how, give the Spot social media team a call today!
Are You Really Engaging with your Audience on Social Media?
Business owners today know that social media can be a valuable tool for building brand awareness, increasing consumer traffic and engaging in conversations with their clients and customers.
What many businesses don’t know, though, are the best ways to communicate over these channels. Most companies don’t have a formalized social media strategy. They start posting, commenting, and liking on a whim. Maybe they’ve seen some results, maybe not, but most likely, they’re just not sure. We find that when our clients plan and utilize social media like any other aspect of your marketing plan, they are able to connect with their target audience with dramatically higher success rates.
There are plenty of things to think about when creating a social media strategy, and the following questions can help get you started in the process.
- What business objectives are you trying to achieve through social media marketing?
- How effectively are you currently achieving those objectives?
- Who is your social media target audience? Is it the same as your walk-in or website audience?
- How effectively are you targeting this audience? Do you know what they want to talk about on social media?
- What social media tools are you using? Did you know there are tools to automate the content curation?
- What is the current content published on those social media channels?
- Is your target audience engaging with this content?
The Spot Color Marketing team members are experts at creating and implementing social media strategies that get results. We tailor plans for each business that include a posting calendar, topic generation, and can even curate and manage your social media content for you. Give us a call and let us get you in shape for the social world.
Is Your Web Content Bringing in Leads? Do a Web Audit to Find Out
Let’s face it. Any task that includes the word “audit” sounds a little terrifying, but auditing your web content is completely painless compared to any interaction you might have with the IRS.
The goal of a web audit is to make sure that your site’s design, structure and content are driving traffic, speaking clearly to your customers, and improving conversions.
When it comes down to it, there are a few simple steps that will get you going in the right direction.
1. Decide on the goals of your audit.
Determining a set of goals for your audit is the most essential step as it will guide every step of the process.
What are the big changes you’re hoping will result from your audit? Increased traffic?
More links to your site?
Establishing thought leadership?
Take some time to think about exactly what you hope to accomplish. This clearly defined set of goals will help you determine exactly what information you need to collect from your site and which information you can ignore at this time. Compartmentalizing your content in this way will prevent you from feeling like you’ve taken on an overwhelming task and help you determine what decisions you need to make during the audit.
2. Create a spreadsheet outlining all of your content.
Gathering your list of web pages and collecting information about them is the most time consuming part of the audit. It’s easy to get lost in the enormity of the task, but there are plenty of ways to divide it up into more manageable chunks.
- Assign segments of your site to different members of your team. Collecting this information is something that anyone can do. Distribute these less-strategic tasks among your colleagues to make the work go faster.
- Generate a list of pages from your content management system. Whether you use WordPress, Drupal or another CMS, the system can export a site map and provide you with extra information about each page, including metadata, keywords and dates created.
- Get a directory listing from your web server. Sifting through the list of files will take some time, but a list from your server will give you a good starting place.
So you know to collect the URL, page title and date created, but what other information do you need to know about each page? Here’s a basic list of information you might need, with an example.
- Page ID
- Category
- URL
- Page title
- Topic
- Type of page (landing, contact, content, etc.)
- Audience (Who is the customer this page is meant to appeal to?)
- Author
- Usage statistics, including traffic and links (You can use information from Google Analytics for this.)
3. Use your business strategy to determine how to create, edit or delete content.
With all of this information collected, now is the time to take a good, honest look at your content. Ask yourself some questions to determine how to proceed.
- Which pages are getting a lot of attention? Can you create more like them?
- Which pages aren’t working for you and why? Do they need to be revised?
- Which business messages are and are not being communicated? Do you have a lot of pages about one segment of your business and not enough about another?
- Do you have a lot of similar pages that are competing with each other? Should you combine them?
- Is it easy to navigate between pages, or does it seem like you can never get back to where you started?
Answers to questions like these will give you a solid plan for moving forward and will make sure the entire procedure has been worthwhile.
Most importantly, take the time to look at your website while putting yourself in your customers’ shoes. While you may know exactly why you chose your content, you need to look at it from the perspective of someone who may not be intimately familiar with your business.
Does the whole process feel overwhelming? We’re here to help! Spot Color Marketing conducts audits for clients all the time. We can facilitate your next web audit so that it is painless, productive and profitable.