insided News & Blogs Engage your customers and increase traffic, conversions & sales November 2015
insided News & Blogs Digital marketing is all about content. Publishing content that educates, entertains and engages is key to growing and keeping an audience. Blogs are the fastest and easiest way to get your message in front of millions of readers, and to create and grow a loyal customer base. Your brand is what people read and talk about online. In this regard, the social customer experience is the new frontier of competitive advantage - creating opportunities for new ways of doing business that increase brand advocacy, attract traffic from search engines, increase conversion rates, and drive more sales. Your website, SEO strategy, PPC campaigns, social media strategy, customer lifecycle programs, and marketing automation strategy - they all rely on content. This content has to connect with your audience, inspire them to share it, talk about it and in some cases, even participate in it. With insided News & Blogs you can efficiently build a podium for your thought leaders and evangelists which incorporates the customer s voice. The European Leader Key benefits Build awareness and drive sales Increase customer loyalty & advocacy Increase traffic from search engines, generate leads and encourage customers to return. Amplify word-of-mouth content among your brand advocates, and capture conversations on your website that increase buyer confidence. Increase loyalty and advocacy by developing an ongoing dialogue with customers, inviting them to share ideas and experiences with others throughout your website. Improve PR & thought leadership Target your marketing more precisely Make PR more social, transparent, interactive and cost efficient and build a podium for your thought leaders and evangelists by hosting an online newsroom, idea platform, think tank etc. Use user-generated content to understand the differences among consumer groups and the terms they use to talk about your products. Segment and personalize content and create content tracks for specific user groups. 1 - insided News & Blogs
Blogs As one of the easiest, most effective tools to share content with customers and promote your business, blogs can be the center of your content marketing and social media strategy. Blogs come in many forms (e.g. a news room, executive or team blog, community blog, knowledge hub, idea platform, think tank, meet & greet, or market place), serving as a social content hub for various tactics like newsletters, magazines, case studies, videos, events, research studies, and much more. A blog is also one of the best ways to share your point of view. Your competition may be able to duplicate your product, but it s very hard, if not impossible, for them to duplicate your story. Blogs will help tell your story and enables you to have real conversations with customers, prospects and influencers. Customer communities In today s business climate where competition continues to increase, margins are shrinking, and core services become commodities, companies are forced to become truly customer-centric. The ability to build a real community of customers - across channels - is a key competitive advantage in this digital age and begins with owning the social customer experience though customer communities. InSided communities are powerful engines for the creation, capture, discovery and cultivation of conversations - providing a new way for people to truly engage with one another about what s important to them and share their opinions and experiences with brands and products. At the same time, these on-domain customer engagement hubs have created new opportunities for companies to connect with their consumers, develop trust-based relationships, and gain unique customer insights to fuel more effective marketing, sales, and service experiences. Customer communities provide real business value, and are broadly regarded as the cornerstone of any effective social business strategy. InSided News & Blogs integrate seamlessly into your community, offering a level of real-time interaction, integration and ease of use single-purpose point solutions can t offer. Enterprise ready stable, scalable and secure, including advanced analytics and workflow Flexible integrate with your website, community and backoffice systems with minimal reliance on IT Built for engagement gamification, commenting, like & share content and social login Segment & personalize based on content categories, labels, tags, user groups and preferences SEO friendly optimize and enrich content with custom URLs, rich snippets and meta data Mobile friendly broaden your reach with a mobile website, mobile app, or responsive design 2 - insided News & Blogs
How insided can help To get the best results from your social business initiatives, you ll need a managed service run by experts, using a proven platform with best practice built in. The cloud-based insided Social Business Platform provides an integrated and complete set of applications to create, engage, and manage online communities - including ratings & reviews, product Q&A s, forums, blogs, mobile and Facebook apps, user profiles, gamification and advanced analytics & reporting. Based upon 10+ years of experience building and operating successful communities across channels and devices, our platform and community management services helps you to engage your customers, increase brand loyalty and drive sales. Author and publish content Posting new content is key to growing and keeping an audience. Content can be authored and published in an intuitive and smart way, based on the best features from popular platforms like WordPress but without the bloat and learning curve. Author and publish content using the built-in rich text editor. Enrich content by including rich media like photos and videos. Schedule content items to be published on a specified date. Create different content tracks for all visitors using categories, labels and tags. Create personalized content tracks for individual visitors. Let visitors log in using their community, customer portal, or social media accounts. 3 - insided News & Blogs
Integrate content across your website InSided News & Blogs seamlessly integrates into existing workflows, websites, mobile apps and backoffice systems. Community content and user profile data can be integrated anywhere, providing exposure to your own and user generated content and infusing your website and apps with social conversations. Integrate content anywhere in your website and mobile apps. Fully customize weblog content according to your brand guidelines. Include community profile data into weblog articles (optional). Promote content and bloggers with widgets that easily integrate into your CMS. Create custom blog post URLs for use in campaigns and to improve SEO. Import published content and comments into other databases and systems. Build functional extensions and system integrations with our robust REST API. 68% of consumers spend time reading content from a brand they are interested in and 60% feel more positive about a company after reading custom content on its site. Content +, Content Marketing Association T-Mobile On the T-Mobile community, over 250.000 monthly unique users discuss topics like subscriptions and handsets. The community is running since 2009 and delivers a multi-million euro ROI in terms of cost savings in traditional service channels. T-Mobile uses the integrated weblog to deliver centrally managed content related to company or product news, tips & tricks, marketing campaigns, etc. Customers can read, comment and share this content within the community and their extended social networks. We were surprised with the high volume, the serious tone of the discussions and the fact that customers really help each other. Alexander Hamel Director Customer Service T-Mobile 4 - insided News & Blogs
Make your content social and connect it to your community News & Blogs can also be linked to your other social business initiatives. This way, they do not act as a standalone silo but are truly integrated into the customer experience. When an established customer community has been formed around your brand, current community features can be tied to your blog content and features. Members from the community can easily comment on articles and the insided reward management system can be used to stimulate customer participation. Author credibility can be improved by facilitating public user profiles. Various login, authentication, and sharing functionalities offer your visitors seamless access. Integrate content from external social media channels. Allow users to add comments and search content. Invite users to like, tweet and share content to their social networks. Increase engagement with smart activity streams and status updates. Follow people and subscribe to content updates (optional). Enhance the reliability and credibility of content using user profiles (optional). Show engagement statistics such as comments, views, likes and social shares. Send private messages to community members or let them connect to each other (optional). Use reward management to increase customer participation (optional). Why blogs work Great blog content makes us sound interesting and positions us as experts. Search engines and social media love blogs. Your customers read blogs. Blogs are a great way to communicate with customers without directly selling. Blogs are a minimal investment compared to most outbound marketing options. 5 - insided News & Blogs
Optimize your content for search engines The up-to-date, user-generated content from your weblog makes your website stay fresh and dynamic, which improves its position in search engines like Google and Bing. InSided customer communities use custom domain names, well-structured pages, internal hyperlinking, rich snippets and customized meta data to help them rank well in search engines. All search engine links to community topics are highly optimized for your company name and the natural, organic language that customers are using to ask questions, resulting in higher clickthrough rates. More people will visit your website, stay longer because of the engaging content they find, and come back more often. Integrate community content directly into your website to ensure searchability. Uniquely structure weblog pages and use internal hyperlinks. Use rich snippets and customized meta data to enrich search engine listings. Improve long tail content to maximize the keywords your website will be found on. Improve search engine ranking and traffic with social sharing. Include news and weblog articles in your own internal website search engine. Blogs give sites 434% more indexed pages and 97% more indexed links. Organic search leads have a 14.6% close rate, while outbound marketing leads have a 1.7% close rate. Content +, HubSpot Blogging facts & figures 90% of consumers read blogs and over 70% of consumers read more than five blogs. 60% of consumers feel more positive about a company after reading custom content on its site and 68% spend time reading content from a brand they are interested in. 100% of businesses that blog more than once per day receive customers directly from their blog. Businesses that blog are 4x more likely to be found on the web and get 55% more traffic on average. 86% of B2C marketers and 91% of B2B marketers use content marketing, mostly for customer acquisition and lead generation. Per euro spent, content marketing generates approximately 3 times as many leads as traditional marketing. Sources: Content Marketing Association, Content Marketing Institute, Content+, emarketer 6 - insided News & Blogs
Make content accessible for mobile users Engage your customers anytime, anywhere by offering a mobileoptimized version of your content which is accessible from any modern device like iphone and Android phones and tablets. The percentage of website visits coming from smartphones and tablets is rising dramatically, in some cases up to 50% of all visitors. To make sure this growing group of mobile users can tap into your community at any time and have a great experience, insided communities can be integrated into your mobile website and mobile apps, following a mobile optimization strategy that fits your organization and users best. Engage mobile users by offering a mobile-optimized version of your blog (optional). Integrate your blog into your mobile website or app (optional). Adapt to different devices and screen resolutions with responsive design (optional). 74% of marketers say they use content marketing for customer acquisition, 71% for lead generation. Per dollar spent, content marketing generates about 3 times as many leads as traditional marketing. Demand Metric, Content Marketing Institute SNS Bank SNS Bank uses its rapidly growing customer community to improve products and services. Its 5,300+ members actively participate in co-creation initiatives, like the design of a new mobile app, the introduction of a service card, the redesign of a customer portal and corporate communication enhancements. In 2012, customers provided feedback via the website 31,000 times per month. In addition, open feedback was given well over 2,500 times per month, including tips on how to improve the website. With its blog, SNS Bank keeps its website visitors informed about relevant product and service developments. The bank also provides financial tips and tricks and enters in conversations around topics like financial health. Customers can comment on blog articles and are further informed via a content integration in the My SNS customer portal. As Social Media Manager of SNS Bank I am 100% satisfied with the cooperation with insided. At both strategic as operational levels, they are a strong partner to work with. I also appreciate their ever-critical attitude that goes along with a pleasant informal interaction. Marc van den Boom Social Media Manager, SNS Bank 7 - insided News & Blogs
Unlock the business value of your community InSided delivers all the fundamental capabilities and advanced tools you d expect from Europe s leading social business platform, providing you with everything you need to create and manage world-class social customer experiences across platforms and user groups from a single unified workspace. Manage your content The intuitive, user-friendly yet advanced management tools in the insided platform put you in control over your customer community and content marketing initiatives. Marketing, community and content managers can easily view and edit content in a dedicated, platform-independent and simple-to-use environment. InSided News & Blogs is designed to meet enterprise needs with workflows for multiple team members, efficient moderation tools, role-based permissions, and robust integrations with back office systems. Efficiently moderate content with smart overviews, status reporting etc. Classify and structure content with labels, moderator tags etc. Quickly surface information using customizable filters and data display. Use enterprise-grade workflow and collaboration tools. Export community content and user data for use in other applications. Gain valuable insights Understand the performance of your content marketing initiatives and make smarter business decisions with the right analytical tools and reporting capabilities. Our social intelligence tools let you easily measure community vitality, identify influencers and top contributors, and monitor relevant conversations across your community. Get an in-depth look into customer behavior trends and user adoption patterns to help you create plans to increase engagement, drive up community membership and optimize your content marketing strategy. Need more? Our open architecture allows you to easily connect your web analytics package to your insided community to quantify the impact of social conversations on your marketing program. Use a customizable dashboard with key metrics and actionable insights. Identify top performing community content and users based on community activity. Export custom reports for use in other applications. Connect social insights with your current analytics software. Incorporate data from your CRM and other enterprise systems. 8 - insided News & Blogs
insided Social Business Platform Powerful, flexible, secure, complete. The leading customer interaction platform for a multichannel world As a true software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider, insided delivers a cloud-based social business platform allowing forward-looking SOLUTIONS Social Support Social Marketing Social Commerce Social Insights companies to create thriving communities in efficient and effective ways, with minimal reliance on IT. DELIVERY Multi Device Multi Channel Targeting Designed upon 10+ years of experience building and operating successful communities, the insided Social Business Platform delivers an enterprise-grade end-to-end solution for uniting the MODULES Forums News & Blogs Product Q&A Facebook Apps Ratings & Reviews Mobile Research & Co-creation Reward Management social customer experience across websites, mobile devices, and the social web - enabling organizations to reduce costs, build trust ENGINE Cloud Based API / SSO Users & Moderation Analytics & Reporting and strengthen customer relationships. Services To gain maximum benefits and achieve true customer-centricity, social business initiatives should be an integral part of the way companies do business. Our deep expertise in community development and full-service offering help you to rapidly launch a successful community, integrate it into your channels, processes and systems, and keep it healthy, thriving and trouble-free. The result is a fast impact on your business through an effective implementation based on best practices and sound social business strategy. InSided not only delivers the technology, but can help with every step of the process. Strategy Concept Implementation Support social business strategy, use cases, community development, testing, insights, workshops, quickscan & business case, concept, design, content & systems integration, best practices sharing, community roadmap activation strategy deployment, launch continuous improvement We are insided As the European leader in social business technology, insided believes in empowering your customers in order to reduce costs, improve sales, develop better customer relationships and drive innovation. The insided Social Business Platform powers successful communities - attracting millions of visitors - for companies like T-Mobile, KPN Group, Tele2, Volkswagen, Philips and Sundio Group. We are an experienced team with community building firmly rooted in our DNA, and constantly strive to improve our work and its ROI and make our clients 100% satisfied. InSided is privately held with corporate headquarters in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Leverage our passion and experience to transform customer interaction and achieve your vision of social business success. +31 20 4279597 hello@insided.com www.insided.com 9 - insided News & Blogs