[MUSIC] I have been impressed with Andy Crestodina of Orbit Media since I first met him. Andy is not only an expert on how to best use social and content to develop high value relationships, he is also extremely dedicated to educating groups and organizations on the best ways to prosper in the digital marketplace. He is an individual you need to follow on social, and his blog is a must read for me and should be for you too. Andy, welcome to the social marketing specialization. >> Thank you for having me Randy. >> Tell me a little bit about Orbit Media. >> Orbit Media is web design company. We're here in Chicago. We've been around for 15 years. We're not a marketing company per se. But we work really hard to put out a lot of content to help people get more value for their websites. >> In today's digital marketplace, what are the challenges facing marketers? >> Well there's basically two main challenges in digital marketing. One is to increase awareness and get traffic to the website. And the second is at the bottom of the funnel, to get people to take action and convert from a visitor into a lead, or from a visitor into a customer. Maybe a visitor into a newsletter subscriber. My friend Barry Feldman says if the website is the mousetrap, the content's the cheese. That's really what it's all about. It's about getting people to come to this site, that's great cheese. And it's about getting people to take an action that's maximizing your conversion rate. >> Then how did digital formats play into that mix of cheese and mousetraps? >> This is a great question. There are some formats that are really, really powerful at cheese and building awareness and driving traffic. There's other formats that have an amazing ability to increase trust and get people to take an action and maximize that conversion rate. So we think about text as being a great format for building awareness, especially texts that're search engine friendly. Content that ranks, web pages that are exhaustive in length, often 1,500 plus words, they are the best answer on the Internet for that question. They have a search optimized title, key word focused title tag and headline. These are the ways that we can increase awareness. It's very powerful. Social also does too. Social is text based, also images. Video has an amazing ability to maximize the conversion rate. This is called conversion optimization. What they do is they build trust. So we wanna use tone of voice and body language and get ourselves on screen and demonstrate expertise and share our best information, tell our story through video. That increases trust and increases the percentage of people who take that action, such as become a lead or purchase something online. >> You talked about conversion rate. How do you calculate that in terms of making that something that'll drive our business forward? >> Sure. A lot of marketers don't like to answer this question, but a decent conversion rate should be more than 1%. If it's more than 3%, that's considered very good. So it's really just what percentage of total visitors take that action and make it to a thank you page, such as thank you for subscribing, thank you for becoming a lead for signing up for our webinar, whatever that desired action is, that desired outcome is that matches the audience's goals with the business objectives. >> Where do things like webinars play into the mix? >> Webinars are an amazing way to build trust. They're basically an online version of a very powerful offline format, which is the live event. So webinars are typically video and audio and they're live. So they have an immediacy that an event has. But they're mostly a bottom of the funnel activator because they don't necessarily increase traffic. A webinar is rarely the first touch point for that person with that brand. >> Okay, so where does audio play in? Is it a more cheese or is it a more mousetrap or a little bit of both? >> It's a little bit of both. It's podcasting is doing really well right now. There's a lot of people that seem to have extra space for audio content in their lives. Right, our eyes are sort of maxed out when we're sitting in front of screens. So many different, millions of blog posts published per day. But audio, there's lots of times through your day, like we talked about commuting or different times when our ears might be open when our eyes are not. So a lot of serious marketers are growing big podcast subscriptions very fast. It seems to be a way to both build trust and increase awareness. >> What about things like WeChat where you can begin to get into conversations in pretty close to real time? >> Yeah, Twitter chats have an amazing reach, and what they do is they're often in interview format where you have a Twitter chat and you are inviting others to contribute through question and answer on a chat. Difficult to give a lot of information in that character limit, that small space. But the reach is huge, right? Because a few people share it, you get enough people on there, sometimes there's hundreds of thousands of people that are potentially reached through impressions within a single Twitter chat. >> On our social marketing bookstore, we have your book Content Chemistry. Can you tell me a little bit about it? >> Sure. It's divided into two sections, lecture and lab. So it's really the theory and then the practice. But it's called the illustrated handbook for content marketing cuz it's just step by step on how to do every tactic related to content marketing. It's not necessarily a read cover to cover book, it's sort of a how to. >> So if you want to say how to do it with a webinar or things like that, it's in the book, it's a step by step what to do? >> How to research key words, how to connect with influencers, how to craft a great e-mail subject line, it covers pretty much everything. >> Fantastic. I love your idea of the cheese versus the mouse trap as a way to think of the top of the funnel and the bottom, that's really a great way to look at business today. >> Credit for that goes to Barry Feldman of Feldman Creative. It was his quote, if your website is the mousetrap, the content is the cheese. >> That is fantastic. Thanks so much for sharing these tips with us. >> My pleasure Randy, thank you. [MUSIC]
