• Technical backend optimization
• Extensive use of keywords
• A crawlable internal link structure
•  PR, directory submissions
• Blog posts

Now, the big questions are what next, and is there scope to grow?

Let’s tackle the second question first: yes there is.  Online ecommerce retail revenues are continuing to grow quarter on quarter and there is still great scope to increase the worth of your ecommerce venture.

So how do you take your link-building strategy to the next level? The answer is: content. Let’s look at some ideas how you can use innovative, interesting content to build links for your ecommerce site-

1. Exciting category pages: Category pages are important for an ecommerce site; these are the pages that make the customer get down to business, selecting their final purchases. But getting links to a category page can be tough. This means you have to think of interesting ways to present these pages.
2. Sell a unique, attention grabbing product: One newsworthy, wacky product can gain you a lot of links, and traffic for conversion. Look at your offerings, scour your suppliers’ catalogues or conceive of a unique twist of your own; that one product that stands out can become a flagship for your whole line, bringing in traffic.
3. Do personalized give-aways: Choose an event that is topical to your audience and give away exciting gifts to members of your online community (you do have a community, don’t you?!). This is bound to create buzz and links as community members share details of their gift via emails, blogs, discussion boards and social networking and sharing sites.
4. Build anticipation: Remember all those teaser campaigns we see in traditional advertising? Use the same technique in your store, leading up to new product releases with an exciting pre-launch communication campaign, something fun and interesting that will attract interest and gain links in its own right.

These are just a few ways to gain links for your ecommerce site with innovative content. Innovative content that drives real business goals: that’s what the i-Vista Digital Communication team specializes in. Interested? Get in touch with us!

Google Analytics let you track a number of streams of data; with the right tweaking you can relate these to business goals and get an ongoing dashboard view of your progress. Once you set your goals for visitors to your site or profile, you can link these to your Analytics. These goals could include:

• Making a purchase
• Signing up for a newsletter
• Following your social media accounts
• Requesting a quote/sales call

With the right analytics in place, you can see how different elements contribute to this goal; you can also measure what factors go with a failure to achieve these goals.

Some of the kinds of goals you can set are:

• Pages to visit: You can track hits to a URL destination. You can also add funnel steps to see how well your PPC or social seeding is leading traffic to your chosen landing page.
• Time spent: You can track the visit duration of each user, tracking visits in different bands to see what made people stay and what made them leave.
• Visits to a page: Let’s say you have a landing page that you are directing hits through via a campaign; you can set your goal for the number of visits you want and then compare it with actual traffic.
• Event: You can set up an event such as a purchase, and assign a desired number of times it needs to occur; this is your goal. This makes it easy to track progress towards your goals.

As you drill deeper into Google Analytics, you’ll find more and more ways to track goals around specific URLs and e-commerce objectives. The better you factor goals into your reporting, the more transparent it becomes. Needless to say, our team at i-Vista produces goal-oriented metrics like the ones discussed in this post for every project we undertake!

1. Research: You knew this would be number one, didn’t you? It always boils down to starting with good research. Use online tools like Google Alerts, Reddit and so on to look for new and hot content on topics related to your brand or campaign. Find out what formats are doing well – do people in your target audience prefer blog posts, videos, presentations or something else? What topics are emerging, what topics are perennial favourites? Conversely, what important topics are failing to be highlighted in the existing content mix? Finding out all these factors can help you determine a lot of factors that will help ensure successful content creation.
2. Ideas: The ideation phase should precede actual content creation. Try and find new and unique angles on the same topics. Experiment with unique ways of presenting content: can you mix media, using audio, video, text and images? Can you tell your story with infographics or a comic strip? How about an animation? Can you use a podcast format, can you use a new content sharing method to good effect, creating a Pinterest pinboard around your topic or starting a specialized Tumblr blog?
3. Placement: Where are you going to place your content? What’s the most heavily trafficked site amongst your target audience, and how can you place your content there? To achieve the best placement you might want to start your outreach activity in advance, connecting with sites that you would like to place your content on or building a presence on a platform you want to use.
4. Creation: Don’t rush this. Take the time plan out an effective, attractive flow of information. Remember, you’re not writing as a reporter or an academic; find ways to draw your audience in, telegraph why this content is of interest to them and keep them reading or watching or listening. Explain things, give out as much helpful information as you can. Be entertaining, to the extent relevant. Be sure to include outbound links .
5. Publishing: If you’re getting published on an external site, make sure you know when and can highlight the same to your audience. If you are using your own platform, make sure you establish and follow an editorial calendar. Once you’ve published, stick around and take part in any discussion or commentary that ensues.
6. Promotion: The story doesn’t end with publication. Continue to promote your content, using as many channels as possible. Build solid linkage back to your content and reach out to key influencers for their opinions and responses.

Creating great content and making sure it gets read – and that it achieves your business goals – is a part of our daily endeavour at i-Vista. If you’re interested in finding out how great content fits into your marketing exercise, drop us a line!

The bottomline is that you need to go beyond one-off campaigns. The real action is in creating a sticky, long-lasting community. But how do you encourage your followers to transform into a community instead of a group of disparate individuals with a fleeting interest in your brand?

1. You need advocates, but they’ll be easy to identify. You can’t just push your community on your own – you need advocates who are deeply committed to the topics related to your brand, either professionally or personally. Fortunately, such people are easy to identify when they come along. Engage with them and transform them into brand advocates and community evangelists, as well as valuable data sources in themselves.
2. Cut the clutter. It isn’t just about regular updates, or about trying to be all things to all people. Don’t get lost in the online chatter. Keep your community updates relevant, interesting and leave a little room between them. Stay on message, but do it interestingly.
3. Keep it real. An online conversation is an even playing-field. It is a chance for brands and consumers to engage in a free, unfettered dialogue. Don’t shy away from this or impose false censorship – beyond what is needed in the interests of decency and legality. The more personal and spontaneous communication is, the more vibrant and engaging your community becomes.
4. It’s not just about you. Community members need to voice their opinions and concerns; that’s why they join a community. If you minimize external voices and make it all about your content and your announcements, you’re curbing the very basis of a good online community.

Creating a great online community helps set up a vital, viable pipeline more than traditional marketing campaigning. The accent is on inbound marketing in the digital space. That’s something the team at i-Vista understands well – get in touch with us to find out how you can start building a great community!

So, people are making these platforms an important part of their personal lives and one-on-one interaction as well as networking. But what about businesses? The big brands have, perforce, joined the fray with social media assets. But social media was supposed to level the playing field and give SMEs the power to reach out to mass audiences and engage with them in a way only big players with big budgets could in the traditional media setup.

And yet, less than 30% of this segment has a systematic social media strategy, in the US market. The figures in India are even smaller. So what’s keeping the SME segment from diving in?

• Lack of strategy: Social media is seen a me-too prestige device and as a bit of a gimmick. So too many enterprises rush in without a plan and then back out; or they decide it’s not relevant to the real business of making profits in the real world.
• Execution shortfall: Even when SMEs go into the social media space, execution tends to be slapdash or inconsistent. In-house assets tend to be social media newbies themselves, and the learning curve can be steep.
• No transparency in measurement:  Finally, SMEs don’t have a monitoring system in place. It is only possible to have a meaningful, evolving social media approach if you can measure what works and what doesn’t – and that means being able to measure online activity and link it back to profitability. Without a clear ROI trail, social media seems like so much hot air to SMEs.

So what’s the answer? In short: ask the experts. Social media campaigns don’t have to be hit or miss; there are already proven methodologies and best practices. A good digital agency will assess your needs and tailor a strategy to your needs, together with excellent execution and measuring. Worried about costs? Why not try the i-Vista Digital Marketing team – we deliver real value for money!

Co-creating campaigns has gained traction in recent times, with companies reaching out to consumers for inputs on new offerings as part of a well-seeded social media campaign. However, Brian Solis suggests that we can go further than that, switching to structural collaboration where customers are involved in all decision processes inside a company.  The reasoning behind this is simple, and sound: consumers give more credence to the views of other customers than to what companies say. That’s the ground reality you and I face every day, both as business people and as consumers ourselves.

But moving from co-creation to pure collaboration is difficult for companies; we’re used to keeping our processes to ourselves and to relying on our own knowledge and intuition. Solis’ post suggests a three-step transition that makes sense to me:-

1. Try-out: Scope the scene out and figure out in what ways and to what extent customers can actually, practically be involved in processes. Where can they add value?
2. Projects: Involve customers in strategic projects, working towards a customer centric mode where customer involvement becomes an accepted concept.
3. Structural collaboration: If all goes well, integrate a customer voice element across processes.

But for a collaborative approach to work, five crucial factors need to be in place in your organization:

1. Your culture: You can’t change your company culture overnight. That’s why a try-out phase makes sense. Let the whole company see how and where customer inputs make sense before moving to the next stage.
2. People: You need to work with the right customer; someone who is passionate about your brand, but also someone who is knowledgeable about the segment you address.
3. C-Level commitment: Organizational commitment has to go all the way to the top; unless your top management is sold on it, it won’t work.
4. Share your efforts: This needs a certain blending of internal and external communication but it is important because it involves other customers as spectators and demonstrates that you are genuinely collaborating.
5. Measure impact: As always, measure everything and see what works. KPIs to focus on include cost reductions, consumer feelings toward your company, brand perception and success of new launches.

I strongly believe that in our wired, transparent world barriers are shifting and customers can play a more integral, vital role in shaping the businesses they deal with. The platform for this transformation is a meaningful, integrated engagement program – something the Digital Marketing team here at i-Vista happens to specialise in!

There are specific categories of legal risk you need to be aware of online. Let’s look at them one by one:

1. Defamation: It’s all too easy to post defamatory content on the spur of the moment; something about the perceived anonymity of the net makes us all a little more trigger-happy. Remind everyone who is posting on your company’s behalf to be gun-shy; legal cases have been fought and won on the basis of inflammatory online speech. Similarly, watch out for defamatory remarks about your brand and respond through legal channels before they become widely spread and you have a PR nightmare.
2. Confidentiality: If your employees are blogging or posting about business, make sure they are aware of confidentiality. Avoid posting about any other employee, vendor, partner or client without their express permission. Watch out for trade secrets being let out and for potential breaches of data secrecy laws.
3. Copyright: Make sure you don’t use copyrighted content without permission – people assume it doesn’t matter if it is online. But copyright holders look out for such breaches and a take down notice or legal action can generate negative publicity.
4. Abusive speech, obscene material, bullying: you have to be especially careful about these when you host a community. You must have a way to report abusive speech, but also institute a prominent and legally solid policy that states you do not have control or liability over everything posted by community members.
5. Trademark infringement: Again, you should be very careful to do this yourself and also look out for others infringing your trademark.

There are two key ways to avoid legal problems online:

• Orientation: Institute a clear policy for the use of social media, educate your employees and offer regular re-training
• Vigilance: Keep an eye on your own social channels and also set up Google Alerts or hire a media monitoring company to keep an eye on potential issues.

Also, remember that you can’t control everything; you will face some amount of minor slagging or grey-area usage of your trademarks. Don’t react to everything, or you’ll waste time and energy that could be better spent. It makes sense to work with a partner who can help you negotiate the legal niceties and distinguish fair use or insignificant violations from something serious; a partner like the i-Vista Digital Marketing team.

Then there are communities; in the digital space, these are groups around a common topic or topics of interest. A closely-knit community can be a valuable source of advocacy and information for a business, and that’s why they are increasingly investing in building branded communities. These communities also serve as focus groups for testing new ideas and refining them. A community is something that you have to build using a combination of existing and exclusive platforms.

When do you turn to crowds, and when do you go to your own brand-related community?

Crowds are great for big ideas. You can test out the appeal of a large new concept with crowds, or get a lot of inputs to kick off internal brainstorming for new offerings or features. Because of the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ effect, you can get a pretty accurate dipstick of what is going to work, what people want and what needs are not being fulfilled in the current market scenario.

But when it comes to detailing your new ideas, you need to go to a more private, focused community. Private because crowds are great at broadcasting; but product development is not when you want a broadcast to go out to competition. And the focus is important too; your brand community, over time, consists of fans of your brand, people who will take the time to give you detailed feedback and help brainstorm your ideas.

When you’re ready to launch your new offering, both crowds and communities are important. Your community advocates will help spread the word; reaching out to the crowd will give momentum to your marketing.

Drawing on the wisdom of crowds and the commitment of communities is a vital part of building a digital marketing strategy that will deliver measurable benefits to your business. That’s the kind of strategy the team at i-Vista specializes in. Think of us as a community of online marketing specialists standing by to help drive your business success!

A) Getting there is part of the battle

A great social marketing strategy begins long before your first online update. That starts getting some key elements in

place:-

• Vision: What do you want to achieve online? Awareness? Sales? Referrals? A following?
• Buy-in: Make sure all stakeholders know what the strategy is about and are aligned to it.
• Information: Get your research in place; find out what the trends are, what competition is doing and who and where your audience is
• Goals: Define specific goals: reach, inquiries, etc.
• Find the right tactics: Awareness requires a wide spread of content. Community building is all about good moderation and keeping dialogue going. Driving sales needs great calls to action. Find what tactics are suited to your goals.
• Budget: Find out what it will all cost. This will help shape what you can and can’t do.
• Secure resources: Make sure the people and equipment you need are available to drive your strategy
• Plan and create content: You need to have content calendar and a reasonable amount of content ready before you go live.
• Define metrics: Define what you are going to measure and how.

B) Keeping it going is not about auto-pilot

Once your strategy takes off, it isn’t time to take a breather.

C) Review everything: How is your content being received? What are your metrics telling you? Have you chosen the best metrics? Can you try other content types and platforms?

D) Rethink if you have to: Be prepared to jettison things that are not working and re-assess any of the aspects of what you are doing.

E) Repeat what works: If something isn’t broken, don’t fix it. But do keep at it – consistency pays.

F) Listen as much, if not more than you talk: This may well be the one most crucial magic mantra of successful social media marketing.

As you can see, a good social media strategy isn’t a matter of chance. It is the product of a rigorous, painstaking method that’s geared towards real business goals. For a great strategy, why not turn to the professionals – the i-Vista Digital Marketing team!

But what about that ever-fraught topic when it comes to the digital space: copyright? First of all, Pinterest clearly states in its Terms Of Use that it is not responsible for the consequences you might face if you wrongfully share copyrighted material on Pinterest. This seems harsh considering that Pinterest users are not making money off their boards and it can be argued that being pinned actually serves as publicity. But, be that as it may, the applicable laws are on the side of anyone who chooses to take a dim view of their content being freely pinned.

So what can you do avoid committing copyright sins on Pinterest?

1. Share your own content only; use your own photos and art. This way, you won’t have to face copyright violation notices. But you might also find that you have tacitly agreed to Pinterest owning the rights to your work, so consider that option and look into a Creative Commons license for your work.
2. Look for open-source or free-to-use images. Creative Commons and Corbis Images have extensive collections of these, and you can use the search tool Compfight, selecting the Creative Commons option, to find such images.
3. When in doubt, don’t. No matter how obscure and harmless you might think your use of someone else’s copyrighted image is, should they find out and choose to make an issue of it, you won’t have a lot of legal protection.

This seems to take half the fun out of Pinterest, but in fact with a little creativity and lateral thinking it can make using the site even more fun and rewarding. Speaking of creativity and lateral thinking, these are qualities that are virtually mandatory for members of the i-Vista Digital Marketing team. If that sounds like a good fit for driving your social media strategy – whether that includes Pinterest or not – get in touch!