Thursday, July 9, 2015

Effective Solutions In Heating and Cooling Systems in Australia

Normally, through Australia, 40 percent of the energy we use at home is for heating and cooling. This does not include the heating of hot water. The amount of energy used by your home vary according to their needs and the environment where you live and the type of heating and cooling depends on you. Most households have to be heated or cooled to a certain time of year, but with an efficient home, which could avoid dependence on heating and cooling additional devices in total.

Besides the type of heating and cooling solutions you choose, how to work and take care of your system may also have a significant impact. Once you have used all the options of passive heating involved, the next step is to select a suitable to your situation heating. There are many types of heating with different reasons of energy and environmental quantities efficiency.Your, type water heater, how to use it and to its position in the room can make a positive change in their leisure and heating costs. When sizing and adequate system of your home, you can avoid investing in the energy required. Central heating often can heat an entire home, while the space (room) heat warms everyone in the room (or more in the American zone) is used. Whether you opt for the central heating or space, there are many technologies and different heating options to consider, the best type of heating for you is determined by your circumstances, including the size of the rooms to become heated, the number of people in your home and your local climate.

Efficient gas heaters and reverse cycle air conditioning (heat pumps) are cheaper to acquire than standard electric heaters and create about a third of the amount of greenhouse gases. Note that it is important to work with unflued gas heaters with adequate ventilation when they cause indoor air pollution probably at home that may affect their welfare. See the requirements of your state or place.

Central heating systems are often critical to the gas, but could use a water heater in the fire, or heat pump solar system. Most of these systems circulating hot water radiators through solar panels, fan coils or in some cases indirectly through a concrete slab.

Air conditioning (or heat pumps) reverse cycle represent the type of electrical energy efficiency heater.Heat more levers have a fan and led the parties directly unheated heat your home.

They can be a profitable, low cost of operation. Portable electric heaters can be cheap to buy but expensive to maintain. Many are not as useful as other strategies slab floor heating heating.Electric often stronger fuel emissions of greenhouse gases whole house heating and perform.As rules would be the highest you should clean the filters in your heating system regularly to make sure it works effectively, follow the actual manufacturer. Use thermostats and timers to ensure that you are only heated room with everything you need to make when you need to save energy and money. Research on the best type of heating and cooling for your circumstances, our information could help you get started.

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

How Brands Can Drive Results with Promoted Pinterest Pins

Pinterest has quickly become an important channel for many businesses that share visually compelling branded stories with their highly engaged audiences.

Originally, Pinterest was considered a more niche social network, but it has grown to encompass a larger demographic totaling nearly 50 million users in the United States alone. While its audience is still considerably smaller than the social behemoths of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, what Pinterest lacks in size, it more than makes up for in quality user engagement.

Members of the Pinterest community actively seek and publish their purchasing intentions by publicly pinning their favorite products, brands, and how-to-guides. This is very powerful information in the hands of seasoned marketing professionals.

In late 2013, Pinterest began experimenting with paid advertising campaigns for brands interested in boosting specific pinned content to larger and more targeted audiences. Promoted Pins (or sponsored pins) are managed on a CPC or cost-per-click basis, and campaigns are set with daily budget limitations and managed over a set period of time. This model doesn’t necessarily break the mold of what many marketers are familiar with, but the tactics used to successfully drive results with Promoted Pins are certainly unique.

So, now, let’s go step by step over exactly how to get started promoting your content through Pinterest. We’ll also discuss actionable techniques to increase your chances for success.

Benefits of Promoted Pins and How to Get Started

Unlike many other advertising networks such as Facebook and Twitter where written copy is typically the focus, Pinterest is almost exclusively a visual platform, and visual content is king. According to Content Marketing Institute, 86% of B2B marketers are, or will be, focused on creating visually compelling content now or within the next 12 months.

In addition to taking advantage of Pinterest to publish visual content in a native environment, marketers today can expand their content’s reach with Promoted Pins. This offers a unique opportunity to increase brand awareness, generate highly targeted customer traffic, and stand out on a network that has not yet become saturated with advertisements.

However, the Pinterest advertising network is not open season for any marketer to utilize. Businesses must first apply for a business account and then wait to be approved by Pinterest. This selection process helps Pinterest maintain a high quality user experience by allowing only advertisers with strong brand integrity to market to its audience.

This may seem like a hassle, especially since it can take up to a month to have a business account approved, but this exclusivity actually encourages marketers to play by the rules and create high quality content that matches Pinterest users’ interests. This also means that the ads served on the Pinterest network tend to perform very well.

Before getting started, brands should read Pinterest’s advertising guidelines, rules, and campaign principles to have a stronger idea of the content they should be promoting on the network.

pinterest-ad-principles

STEP 1: Register a Pinterest Business Account and Connect Your Website

In order to have access to all the Pinterest features that can help your business drive results, such as Promoted Pins and in-depth analytics, you’ll first need to join Pinterest as a business or, alternatively, convert a personal account. You won’t have access to advertising functions without doing this.

pinterest-business-account

Next, you’ll need to confirm your company website and link it to your business Pinterest account by adding a snippet of code into the <HEAD> tag of your website’s index.html page.

pinterest-website-confirmation

After successfully implementing this code, each of your pins will include a call-to-action link back to your website. This helps you track the effectiveness of your Pinterest content through analytics and serves as another call-to-action directing your customers to your products.

pinterest-website-confirmed

STEP 2: Design Visually Appealing Content That Spurs Action

Brands that are interested in driving results through Promoted Pins should focus heavily on creating and testing the most visually appealing content for their customers, since Pinterest has successfully grown around a visual foundation.

As with other social networks, it’s best to design content around concepts, trends, and products that your target audience cares about most. It’s also worth noting that Pinterest is currently dominated by the female demographic: 42% of all women online have used the platform in some capacity, so, at the very least, you should be experimenting with how your content appeals to women.

Start by creating multiple boards that align well with your customers’ interests as they relate to the products you are promoting. This can help influence your future content creation and promotion efforts by providing a variety of avenues where you can analyze your customers’ preferences. Some boards are likely to outperform others, which can indicate areas where you should create and promote more content.

Creating a board is fairly straightforward, but you’ll want to pay special attention to call out your target audience’s interests in the name and description sections to create more visibility for your content. Additionally, you can invite board contributors to help you develop a larger following from groups such as social influencers in your industry or other marketers on your team.

pinterest-create-a-board

For an example of a company appropriately aligning their products to their audience interests in a visually compelling manner, take a look at the Nordstrom Rack Pinterest page.

pinterest-boards

Nordstrom Rack’s Pinterest boards focus around a mixture of their audience’s interests, such as music festivals, world travel, and shoe obsessions, among many others. Over time, these theme-specific boards will rise or fall in popularity, and this data can give Nordstrom Rack feedback on what content resonates best with their customers.

There are four primary concepts to consider when creating pins that drive results in your themed boards.

  • Be Helpful: The more helpful your information is to your audience, the more likely it will resonate with your audience, be shared throughout Pinterest with repins, and be followed back to your website. Use detailed descriptions for your pins with targeted keywords, overlay helpful text onto your images, and include a call-to-action in your description to influence clicks.
  • Use a Tall Aspect Ratio: Pinterest recommends a 1:3.5 ratio (i.e., 100px wide by 350px tall) because the platform is designed for vertical scrolling, and tall images are more likely to stand out among the other content. This is a very important consideration when trying to improve click-through rates on your Promoted Pins.
  • Use Multiple Product Shots: Showcase multiple products in your images to tell a stronger story of your brand and inform your audience there are a variety of options that could interest them back on your website, ecommerce store, or other landing pages. This technique is popular for online retailers such as Nike Women.
  • Keep Your Brand and Logos Tasteful: Remember when Pinterest asked you to link your website to your business account? Well, when you’ve done so, your logo and link back to your site will travel with your pins whenever your content gets repinned and shared. Additionally, you may consider tastefully incorporating your logo into your image to reinforce your brand; but remember, your content is designed for your audience, so don’t go over the top by being too promotional.

STEP 3: Use Promoted Pins to Increase Results

After you have created a few Pinterest boards and visual content that interests your target market, you can begin promoting your content through Promoted Pins. To have a better chance of finding success with your first campaigns, you should start sponsoring and experimenting with your highest performing pins.

If you are not sure what your best content has been, or if it has been a while since your highest performing pins, you can search for the highest number of impressions, repins, and clicks in your Pinterest Analytics dashboard. Once inside your dashboard, click impressions, clicks, repins, and likes to sort rank. For best results, you’ll need to have your business Pinterest account linked to your website and at least two weeks of data collected from consistently publishing Pinterest content.

pinterest-analytics-example

While you’re looking for a pin to promote, it’s important to note that your sponsored content must be from a pin that you already created and published to one of your boards. You cannot create a pin specifically for an advertisement that isn’t hosted within one of your boards. This restriction differs from Facebook, Twitter, and other social ad networks. Pinterest wants you to promote genuine content and not ad copy.

Basically, you’ll need to sponsor pins that are a part of your daily content. However, in some cases, not all of your existent pins will be eligible for promotion since they need to meet certain guidelines, including the following:

  • Pins cannot include pricing information, testimonials, or a call-to-action.
  • No nudity or sexual, shocking, disturbing, alcoholic, or profane content is allowed.
  • Only one hashtag can be used in the description of a Promoted Pin.

While some of these requirements may seem obvious, the single hashtag restriction is usually the biggest hindrance. Stick with one well researched and concise hashtag to attract the correct audience.

Once you’ve found a suitable pin to promote from the Pinterest Ads page, simply hover over it and select “promote.”

pinterest-promote-pin

Next, you’ll be directed to start selecting the targeting terms for your Promoted Pin. This is not a section where you should be guessing at what to input. Think about your target market: How old are they? Where do they live? Are they male or female? What language do they speak? Who is this pin most optimally designed to influence?

promoted-pinterest-steps

The more data you have about your customers, the more likely your advertisement is going to succeed. Do careful market research by referencing any previous, but relevant, shopper personas, customer behavioral data, and demographic information. Also, use anything you’ve learned through social listening techniques, customer feedback, surveys, or other audience engagement.

If you do not have data that can inform your advertising or you’re unsure how your Pinterest audience differs from your other social markets, you’ll need to start somewhere and experiment. Follow your intuition at first and a/b test a wide variety of content campaigns until you start finding trends that resonate best with your audience. This is especially important when advertising on a new ad network such as Pinterest.

After determining your targeting parameters, you’ll be prompted to identify the appropriate cost-per-click bid for your Promoted Pin. Pinterest requires a minimum bid of 5¢ per click, but the ideal range to generate results quickly is between the $1 and $2 range.

pinterest-cpc-campaign

If your ads are targeting a particularly crowded market, you may need to experiment with higher CPC bids. The cost-per-click advertising method is created around a competitive bidding formula where ads are delivered more frequently when the payout is better for the ad network. Thus, the higher your bid, the more your advertisement will be served to your target market.

While it would be ideal to blast your Promoted Pins with a massive budget, very few brands are going to have that luxury. To find out what works best with your audience, start slowly. Experiment with different bidding strategies that align with your marketing budget and test different targeting parameters until you start identifying the trends that work specifically for your goals.

The absolute key to generating results with Promoted Pins, and building upon those results, is to make it a habit to conduct comprehensive a/b testing. Use a mixture of visual design strategies, hashtags, targeted audiences, pin descriptions, overlay text, and any other relevant factors that influence your customers to take action.

After your pins have been approved and launched by Pinterest, keep a close eye on your Pinterest Analytics over the following days and weeks. This data can indicate where you should be making changes in your Pinterest advertising strategy and which elements of your content can play the biggest factor in influencing your customers’ behavior.

For more powerful tips and best practices on how to maximize Pinterest for your business, you should bookmark and subscribe to the Pinterest for Business YouTube channel. Their informative videos offer step-by-step walkthroughs. And judging by the low number of views this content has, it is an underutilized resource by too many marketers.

pinterest-business-youtube

As a final thought, here is a quick prediction: Promoted Pins are about to get a whole lot better. In a recent announcement, Pinterest unveiled their latest project – the ability for customers to purchase products from inside Pinterest.

pinterest-buyable-pins

While little information is currently available on Buyable Pins, this is unlike any other advertising opportunity available through social media. Many marketers would kill to have this functionality within Facebook or Instagram. One thing is more certain, Buyable Pins are likely to have a tremendous impact on the effectiveness and impact of Promoted Pins over the course of the next few years.

About the Author: Jacob Warwick is Content Manager at Honigman Media, a consultancy offering content marketing strategy and content creation services. Follow him on Twitter @JacobWarwick.

Thursday, July 2, 2015

5 Articles That Will Turn You Into a Data-Driven Social Media Marketer

Laughing_Data
You mean to tell me you’re not using data to direct your social media efforts?

Social media marketing is often used to pull in new followers at the top of the funnel. People cast a wide net but in many cases, completely miss the mark when it comes to tracking their efforts.

They neglect to set concrete, measurable goals – in other words, they neglect to run structured social media campaigns.

Why should you be running social media campaigns? They are the rudder that steers the boat in a particular direction, charting the course for your activities. And setting finite start and end dates allows you to track your progress so you can iterate and get even better results.

If you’re not using data to direct your social media campaigns, then you’re missing out on massive opportunities. The opportunity to get to know your audience better, the opportunity to reach a larger audience, and the opportunity to fully understand the results of your efforts… so you can optimize them accordingly.

So how do you get the most out of social media with data?

If you want to become a more data-driven social media marketer, you’ve got to learn from others who are already doing it well – and the web is overflowing with articles that can help on that front.

We’ve rounded up five articles that break down how you can use data to get the most out of your social media campaigns.

Ready to reap the benefits? Read on.

1. How to create buyer personas with social media data by Pierre Borodin for Hootsuite

On landing pages and on social media alike, you need to know your customers’ needs before you attempt to speak to them. For that reason, buyer personas are a part of the foundation of any successful social media marketing campaign.

As this article from Hootsuite by Pierre Borodin outlines, buyer personas are representations of the people who are buying, or might buy, your product. With buyer personas, you ‘re able to understand your customers better.

By more fully understanding your customer through buyer personas, you are taking the first step toward creating campaigns that really speak to their needs.

buyer_personas_with_social_media_data

In order to get the best information to create buyer personas, you need data. And guess what?

You can collect that data through your different social media channels.

Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, LinkedIn Groups and other tools contain the information you need to learn about your customers in and out.


Crafting buyer personas? Glean insights about your customers through social media analytics.
Click To Tweet


This article explains that by listening to your customers through these channels, you’ll build models that clearly outline who your customers are, which will ultimately allow you to create the right messaging for that audience.

2. Why we stopped focusing on direct social media ROI: a new way of measuring conversions by Kevan Lee for Buffer

With the rise of several tools that allow marketers  to calculate social media ROI, many articles are pushing the importance of tracking the impact of your  social media campaigns on your bottom line.

But all too often, these articles focus  on “clicks” or “conversions” – failing to account for the fact that everyone makes their journey to conversion a little bit differently.

In this Buffer blog article , Kevan Lee explains how Buffer has started to look at social media ROI a bit differently – by tracking deep down the funnel.

To illustrate this concept, Kevan explains how he started using Buffer (a social media scheduling tool) months before he started working there. He breaks down the story of his journey toward conversion, and how that journey included a lot more touch points than just social media:

social-media-data-journey
Kevan discovered Buffer on Facebook, read the blog, and then continued to return to the site through various means and social media channels before finally converting.

Kevan goes on to explain why Buffer is measuring email signups as their number one social media campaign goal, with conversions from their blog as the number one metric.

The point is to create a base of engaged customers who, while they may take their time to convert — and may not do so directly from a social media click — have all the resources they need to make an informed decision.

3. How does social media affect SEO? by Andy Crestodina for Orbit Media

If you’ve ever wondered whether social media affects SEO, this is the article for you. As web strategist and co-founder of Orbit Media, Andy Crestodina, points out:

The answer: Yes. But not how you think.

As Andy explains in this article, social media doesn’t affect SEO because of the social links themselves, but because people are spreading the word about your content.

If the content is noteworthy, if it provides value to readers, they will link to it (like I’m doing here). Those incoming links help to build authority for that page, which helps search engine ranking.

search-factors

In the end, the point is to have content that people want to share, and that those who read it will want to talk about.

4. Hashtags aren’t gimmicks by Jordie Black for KISSmetrics

KISSmetrics has data that shows how hashtags can help businesses share more effectively. A hashtag does not have to go viral every single time — hashtags can be used for increased audience interaction through Twitter chats, as Jordie Black points out.

Buffer uses the hashtag #bufferchat every Wednesday. From the article:

Twitter chats are a perfect way to show your audience you are listening. It’s a way to understand your audience and find out what it is they want to know. It’s a way for your audience to ask you questions and get answers.

When this article was published, Buffer had achieved the following with #bufferchat:

  • 113,658 Tweets
  • 8,170 Contributors
  • Total Reach: 49,993,695

Buffer has reached almost 50,000,000 people on Twitter with #bufferchat
Click To Tweet


Buffer manages to reach a wider audience through the people they are connected with on Twitter, as we see below.

social-media-influencers

Through these followers and the interactions through the hashtag, they’re able to reach a much wider audience.

Because these followers also have a large number of followers, those who are following them get to see the interaction, and are made aware of the hashtag and, subsequently, they become familiar with Buffer.

In a nutshell, this article explains that by using hashtags as both a connection and a listening tool, you can get a lot more out of social media than you would by just waiting for people to find you.

5. How many Facebook fans visit your website or convert? by Jon Loomer for JonLoomer.com

What is the value of a Facebook fan? Jon Loomer, a Facebook marketing consultant, wanted to find out, and he shared his findings in this post.

To get to the true value of a fan, you’re going to have to go past your Facebook Insights and Google Analytics.

facebook-fans-website-visitors-180-days
A look at the process of building targeted audiences for Facebook ads. Image source.

Jon outlines the process of setting up custom audiences in Facebook, which can then be used to learn the true number of visitors your website receives by segment. From there, you can drill down to the number of fans who converted. Jon says:

We often hear about uncertainties regarding the quality of fans. Well, I know that 31% of my fans have visited my website during the past 180 days. Considering my page has been around for more than 3 1/2 years now, I consider that to be quite good.

What he’s found out is that he has managed to build a quality audience. By following Jon’s method, you’ll be able to find out for yourself the real value of your Facebook fans with real data – and ultimately assess the ROI of your efforts on social media.

The proof is in the putting (it on social media)

Using data to direct your social media campaigns allows you to make more educated decisions about your campaigns. You’ll find out how well they’re doing, and you can use the information to create more successful, results-driven campaigns in the future.

Have you read an article that has helped you social media marketing? Tell us about it in the comments below!