Is your website content getting maximum exposure to engineers? Do you spend time thinking about ways to expand your online audience? Have you tapped the well dry with SEO, PPC and other common traffic boosting techniques? Substantial gains in visits are possible by taking pieces of your content and posting it on other sites that your audience views. The following are current techniques being employed in online and social media marketing to attract a larger audience:
Boost Search Engine Traffic with Social Signals
B2B businesses are increasing their engagement with buyers through social network sites including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and numerous international counterparts (e.g. Baidu, Weibo, eeFocus). Reaching electronics engineers through these channels can directly contribute to your brand's search engine visibility.
Here's how it plays out: Likes, Follows, Votes, +1s, Diggs and similar "social signals" are considered a vote of confidence for your content, company or product. As social signals accumulate, more interaction with your content occurs since it is rated as more valuable or interesting. Usually each social signal carries its own momentum (e.g., a Facebook "Like" spreads through Facebook and +1 content gets extra visibility in Google+). Search engines including Google, Bing and Yahoo then measure many of these social signals to determine content relevance and factor those measurements into search rankings. The higher your content ranks, the more chance you have for search engine and community referrals.
The key takeaway here is that social signals are becoming more than just bragging rights on a web page. They are social proof of authority or content value. They are traffic builders. They are influencers. Here are some tips on building your social signals:
- Add social widgets to every page of your website, blog, forums, videos, photos, etc.
- Add Google's FeedFlare to your RSS feed content to promote sharing of your feeds.
- Encourage visitors to bookmark and share your content.
- Use your brand name in posts.
- Include URLs in Tweets and status updates.
- Authority is a key online metric for search engines. Have trustworthy people share your content. Don't use “like farms.” Try Klout to find strong social influencers and find out the strength of your own influence.
Generate Web Traffic through LinkedIn
Known mainly for its business networking capabilities for individuals, LinkedIn is also a strong source of traffic for electronics marketing professionals looking to grow visits to their business sites. The platform provides powerful apps and tools that can help you promote your content and sites. Here are ten smart ways to leverage LinkedIn as a social media tool to network with prospects and send them to your website:
- Join LinkedIn Groups in your industry. Check out our Group: Online Marketing in the Electronics Industry.
- Grow network connections to expand reach and increase ability to contact LinkedIn members.
- Post links on LinkedIn Groups discussions that point to your blog articles or relevant website content.
- Install the blog widget so that your articles auto-post to your profile through RSS feed.
- Add links in the "Websites" section of your profile. Use the "Other" option in the drop-down to create more descriptive links to your sites (e.g., ABC Electronics Website vs. Website).
- Answer LinkedIn Questions. Include a description and link to your content in both the “Websites” section and the text section when you post your answer.
- Set up your business as a Company and list your products there as well as obtain recommendations.
- Add your Feeds to your Company page.
- Add the LinkedIn Share button to your website and blog.
- Share links in your LinkedIn Status Updates.
SEE LAB42's LINKEDIN USER PROFILE SURVEY RESULTS
VIEW PRESENTATION OF LINKEDIN DEMOGRAPHICS
Promote Content Marketing Efforts with Display Ads
In recent years, display ads were overshadowed by the media industry's spotlight on search advertising. But things change fast... display is back and in a big way! Digital intelligence and research firm eMarketer projects display will surpass search as the top ad spend category by 2015. This is welcome news to many electronics marketers employing content marketing strategies (e.g. promotion of instructional videos, datasheet downloads and product landing pages) earlier in the sales process. Today's targeted ad channels, a variety of online ad formats, and the ability to touch audiences with visually compelling content all make display advertising a very powerful marketing tool.
There are many ad networks and channels that offer display programs, but these options may not give you the targeted audience you desire. We've covered our IPO ad programs in several past communications and thought we'd take the opportunity to mention our display programs. For those of you that desire the same type of targeted audience our IPO ads attract, yet require a colorful visual campaign, animation or specific campaign imagery in your ad, SupplyFrame display programs are a perfect solution.
SupplyFrame offers video promotion campaigns that can expose your new video to millions of engineers every month. Suppliers using SupplyFrame to promote product videos are receiving industry-leading exposure across our global network of electronics designers and buyers. Promoting product videos through SupplyFrame can make a marked difference in ROI for your video campaigns by driving our audience directly to your videos and getting the benefits from your video investment right away.
Sample SuppyFrame Display Ad
TARGET MORE ENGINEERS WITH DISPLAY ADS. GET STARTED HERE.
Piggyback Off Authority, High Traffic or Social Media Sites to Grow Your Own Website's Audience
Piggybacking leverages existing websites' authority or popularity to further grow your own site. It has been a common link building practice for years but is becoming a more necessary tactic for web promotion now that search engines are rethinking how they rank websites. Piggybacking involves posting content to your own website initially and then cross-posting into authoritative, high traffic or social media sites to further promote the content. Visitors go to the authoritative website to view content and are pointed directly to your website from the partial content or from calls to action for more information.
You may wonder why your website wouldn't rank first for related searches or why a one-man blog can garner more traffic than that of a multinational B2B. The answer is that they have built authority (credibility, popularity, strong following and high search rankings) and may rank well above larger businesses. In search, authority comes in all sizes—especially where current algorithms rely more heavily on social signals and content value. If you are ready to try out this practice here are some places to start:
Content Hubs and Ezines
Create varied versions or excerpts from your original content and post it to content hub sites. These sites can be likened to community blogging. The sites are constantly updated and generally strongly ranked in search engines because of their authority and high volume of traffic. Many content hubs allow you to start your own hub or topic, add your profile, link lists and often your own admin rights for the community. Links to your sites from trusted hubs help drive traffic to your own site by enticing users to visit your site to do something further, such as read the full article, download a related guide or PDF or get more information. Here are a few examples of content hub sites: Squidoo, HubPages, Wikipedia, AboutUs, Zimbio, SlideShare.
Social Bookmarking Sites
Posting to social bookmarking sites is another great way to piggyback on high traffic, authority sites. Make sure you choose wisely and opt for sites with strong pagerank. Vary your submission titles so you can rank for different phrases. Following are a few examples of authoritative social bookmarking sites: Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Delicious, TweetMeme, Slashdot, FriendFeed. There are numerous resources online that list social bookmarking sites that have high authority.
YouTube
As noted in "Using Video to Win Over Engineers," instructional videos, testimonials and product demos are great tools for engaging electronics engineers, but they only go so far on your own site unless promoted. YouTube videos have the ability to attract huge audiences and are valued in search engines. Include your website branding and a link to your website in the video description and send more buyers to your own site. |
