Week 8 - MBA 6102 - Introduction to Search Engine Marketing and Adwords

 The seventh chapter of Introduction to Search Engine Marketing and Adwords talks about Ad extensions. An ad extension is an external link and extra information that helps your ad become “more competitive”. In Adwords there is a tab for ad extensions, so this is an easier process than you may think. Often times, these extensions will increase the clicks to your ad and should boost the click through rate. Site links that are added should relate to the sections of your website you would like to highlight. 

For me, maybe I would do golf club repair and fitting as well as teaching golf. If that were the case, I would want to highlight golf club repair and club fitting, because someone might be looking for those services rather than coaching. I would like to have an online program with instructional videos on the mental golf game as well, so this might be another area I would highlight. Maybe someone comes to the site looking for lessons and leaves with a time set up for a club fitting from that site or a separate site you have made. It doesn’t matter as long as people are visiting your website or websites. The more clicks you get, the more possible customers you have.

The chapter asked the reader to do a google search of their own. Naturally, at this time of night when I decide to do schoolwork, I was thinking about sleep, so I Googled Mattress and was left with the following result. Not only was the near by Mattress Firm linked and shown on the map, The company's website showed up. As expected there were several ad extensions listed for "Sale & Clearance", "Queen", "Mattress Guides", and "Mattresses". Sale and clearance coming first is wise as many are likely to click on this link. Mattress guides would likely be clicked on by someone who doesn't really know what they are looking for. Side note, if you have noticed that there seems to be a Mattress Firm on almost every corner in larger cities, so have I. There is a rather intriguing conspiracy theory about that, just saying. Either way, the company uses ad extension which makes it a perfect example for this blog. The ad extensions must be working well enough for them to stay in business at all of their locations, even though it seems there are never any customers at the store. Definitely, couldn't be any illegal activity ... cough cough.

All jokes aside, if you have read your way through my 8 weeks of blogging thank you for your support! stay tuned for more blogging in the future!

Week 8 - MBA 6102 - Introduction to Social Media Marketing

 For the final week of the course, I decided to read both of the last two chapters. Chapter 7 from Introduction to Social Media Marketing talks about Hootsuite. If this is something new to you, Hootsuite is a service that helps you manage all of your social media accounts at once by linking them together in one spot. While the book states there is a free account for Hootsuite, in my searching on line, it seems that the only option is a 30-day free trial which would eventually turn in to a paid account. This could be updated since the publishing of the book. 

Hootsuite gives you the ability to schedule your tweets and posts as to not forget on important dates. Hootsuite also makes it possible to post the same post to multiple social media accounts at once. This allows you to not take the time to sign in to each social media account and make a separate post every time you need to post. Besides saving time, this also might be important in getting the information to each social media platform at once and not miss viewing for anyone who was active on Twitter while you posted on Facebook or vice versa. Hootsuite even allows you to keep up to date on what people are saying about your social media accounts. Afterall, these are the people you are trying to sell to. This is possible as Hootsuite gives you a feed of people mentioning you on social media to allow you to see what people are saying.

 

This leads us in to the final chapter which speaks of the importance of listening to what people are saying. All of the analytics are great for knowing the numbers, but social media also allows for spoken (typed out) words to be viewed. It is important to take note of the consumer’s opinions as they might help you improve your social media accounts. If you have social media accounts you might as well monitor them. 

https://twitter.com/Birkeys?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

https://www.facebook.com/Birkeys/

Here is the Twitter account and Facebook account from A local farming equipment company in my hometown. Luckily, I was able to talk to one of the owners (my father) and learn that the company uses a program similar to Hootsuite. As you can see here, on a Sunday when none of the marketing team is working there were posts four hours ago. This means the posts were scheduled to post today likely leading up to the coming week. Also, the same post was posted at the same time on both platforms.