A typical value ladder often starts with bait (something you offer for free). It is key that you understand that you are not trying to sell the customer anything at this stage. You simply want to get them to enter your communications funnel. Once in the funnel, you can continue to communicate with them until they are ready to buy. Thereafter, since they are in your communications funnel, you can upsell them new and more expensive products or services as your trust factor with the customer grows and they move up your value ladder.

In order to get your prospects into your communication funnel, you will need the means to communicate with them regularly. That means you will need their email address. Few prospects are willing to give you their email address right off the bat and that is where understanding the source of your website traffic comes into play. Based on the source of the web traffic, you will need to employ a different process to obtain their email address so they can begin their journey through your value ladder.

Three Kinds of Web Traffic

It is important to understand that not all website traffic is created equal. There are essentially 3 types of traffic:

1. Traffic You Own
2. Traffic You Rent
3. Traffic You Attract

Web Traffic You Own

This is ultimately where you want all traffic to reside in the end. When you own the web traffic, it costs you nothing to reach out to them. You can communicate with them when you want to and you control the message. Examples of website traffic that you own are your subscribers, followers, fans, and best of all, contacts in your email list. Once you own the web traffic, you can make them different offers and drive them through your communications funnel.

When you own the traffic, you have the opportunity to build up a rapport through a communication process to find their motivation and guide them toward ever more valuable sales.

Web Traffic You Rent

When you rent web traffic, you have temporary control of the contact to tell them where to go. Essentially when you rent traffic, you are purchasing access to a prospect through some form of paid advertising. Google, Facebook, etc. own the website traffic but you can control it if you are willing to rent access to them for a fee. As indicated earlier, the naive entrepreneur uses paid advertising to drive the web traffic directly to a sales page. At this point in the relationship, the traffic barely knows you and here you are asking them to already buy something from you.

This is like a guy going into a bar and asking every woman he sees if they want to get married. Your chances are slim to none that any prospect will bite on such a proposal. Just like any relationship, the prospect has to know you exist, grow to like you, and then learn that you are trustworthy before they will buy. When it comes to website traffic that you rent, savvy entrepreneurs do not squander the opportunity trying to sell to the prospect right out of the gate and risk losing them. Instead, they understand that the goal is to convert them into web traffic that they own.

Therefore, savvy entrepreneurs know that when they use paid advertising, they need to send the prospect to a squeeze page before trying to sell to them. A squeeze page is a simple page with no navigation where you offer something of value, most often for free, in exchange for their name and email. As bait, perhaps you can offer the prospect a tool, a fact sheet, a paper, an eBook, or something. That way the prospect is willing to become traffic that you own by providing you with their email address in exchange for your bait.

The problem with traffic that you rent is that it costs you money to rent it. The more of it you want, the more you have to be willing to pay for it.

Web Traffic You Attract

The third type of web traffic is traffic you attract. You do not have direct control over the message or where the traffic will land. Essentially, you have to create content that acts like gravity to attract traffic.

Website Traffic that comes to your site via a search (SEO), social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), guest blog, YouTube video, or other similar source are all examples of traffic that you attract. The web traffic you attract can land anywhere on your site, so the savvy entrepreneur will always include some way to convert the website traffic you attracted to become traffic that you own at potentially every point of entry.

All the pages on your site where traffic that you attract are likely to land, such as blogs, need to include some form of bait. After all, the goal with web traffic that you attract, like with traffic that you rent, is to convert the website traffic into traffic that you own. However, since you can’t control where the traffic lands on your site like you can when you rent the web traffic, your goal should be to make a good impression and dangle some attractive bait to drive them to where you want them to go.

Understanding that web traffic comes in 3 different flavors and recognizing that your ultimate goal is to convert all traffic into website traffic that you own so they can enter your communication funnel is paramount to a small business’s online marketing success.

Let’s get more concrete and explore each type of web traffic and the marketing channels they use.

9 Marketing Channels to Attract Prospects to Your Brand

Many business owners are confused with the vocabulary of business. One particular sticky point is related to “marketing channels” and in particular, how a company can create brand awareness with a prospect.

Since I always find it helpful to review a list of options, today I’d like to focus on marketing channels that will help businesses attract eyeballs in a quest to create brand awareness for their business. In subsequent posts, we’ll look at marketing channels that a business can rent and what to do when they own the contacts information. When it comes to marketing channels designed to attract prospects to a company’s brand, they are performing what most people refer to as content marketing. Essentially, the business is creating content that prospects will find via some form of a search. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) therefore essentially creates a kind of gravity to attract prospects to a business.

I recommend that when it comes to anything in the “attract” category of content marketing, the business does not try to sell directly but rather focus on demonstrating its expertise and/or market leadership in their specific industry. Here is the list of content marketing channels that attract eyeballs.

Blogs

Blogs and their video equivalent Vlogs are generally platforms to establish your credibility and to build trust with the prospect.

Articles

Many online and paper-based magazines will accept articles from guest writers. This is a great way to place your content on the publication’s platform and get access to their readers for free. Most allow you to include a bio with a backlink to your site. Here is just one list of publications that either pay you to write an article or will accept guest articles. There are of course many others so this is just a partial list.

Press Release

A press release can come in the form of an official statement issued to a PR site like PRLof.org, or it can be a stunt that will garner media attention.

Videos

YouTube is the second biggest search engine after Google. In addition to YouTube, sites like Vimeo and Facebook also host videos. When people are searching on a video site, they are often looking for a demonstration, review, or some form of a how-to video. Videos are a great place to demonstrate your expertise and link the content to a real person they can see.

Seminars/Webinars

In-person seminars or training courses or their online equivalent webinars are a great way to educate your audience and to build up network deposits.

Website

When someone is considering doing business with you, they will often visit your website to get to know your business better. While you can never guarantee where on the site they will land, it is always a good idea to include some form of Call To Action on each page so they can enter your sales funnel.

Chatbots

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has given rise to chatbots that appear to be human but are in fact robots responding to your queries. Often is it hard for the prospect to know if they actually communicating with an AI-enabled website or a real person on a help desk. Either way, they deliver quick and meaningful responses that meet the customer’s needs and act to enhance the business’s customer service.

Review Sites

Sites like Google Business Profile, Yelp, Foursquare, and even Facebook offer the opportunity to your customers to rate your business. Ratings and testimonials from existing customers can go a long way towards convincing potential customers that you have the goods. This channel does not include paid reviews.

Social Media

The big gorilla these days is, of course, social media. When it comes to social media, as part of the attraction category, we are talking about the bi-directional nature of social media. By communicating with your prospects, you help to build trust and help prove you are human and not just a company. This channel also includes communication via forums and messages boards that engage in bi-directional communications such as platforms like Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn groups.

Beacons

When you have a mobile device with Bluetooth enabled and pass roughly within the range of a football field of a beacon, it can interact with a mobile app installed on the phone. Retailers can use the beacon and the app installed on the prospect’s phone to encourage the prospect to share their location with friends or to make them a special offer. This channel also includes Near Field Communications (NFC).

12 Powerful Marketing Channels That Rent You Access to Prospects

When you rent access to an audience, essentially, you have to pay someone to get access to their audience. When you rent access to their audience, you do not own the contact and are often interrupting the prospect to deliver your message. Depending on the marketing channel, you as the advertiser are sometimes viewed as an annoyance since you are interrupting them from their chosen activity. That said, many online organizations that rent you access to their audience are good at determining the relevance of your product or service to their desires, so the hope is that the advertisement comes as a welcome message as if you were reading their mind.

When it comes to using one of the online channels you can rent access to, it is best to send the prospect to a squeeze page where you can exchange some free information in exchange for their content information. Once you have captured the prospect’s contact information, you can use one of your owned channels to communicate with them for free going forward.

Social Media Ads

Nearly every social media platform captures information about its users and then offers businesses the ability to target ads to them. Ads can be billed based on just the number of impressions (displaying your brand message only to a prospect), or based on click-throughs to a home page, landing page, or squeeze page where billing occurs only when the prospect clicks on an ad.

Print Ads

Magazines tend to be more targeted based on their content. Bow Hunter magazine by its nature attracts bow hunters but are national in scope. Newspapers, on the other hand, are local in scope but are not well targeted to a particular buyer. This channel also includes inserts, which are blow-in cards, which are added to magazines, newspapers, and other publications and can be customized based on geography.

Display Ads

Everything from yard signs to highway billboards constitutes what I will call display ads mostly placed along roadways. When this is the case, the message needs to be very brief as drivers have little time to absorb the message as they drive by. Display ads can work better when the driver can digest the ad such as when their vehicle is stopped at a street light or waiting at a bus stop.

Product Placement

When it comes to broadcast media a subtler form of paid promotion comes in the form of product placements. The movie ET did wonders for Skittles sales, and the movie The Italian Job helped elevate the Mini Cooper brand. Generally, product placements are reserved for larger brands but small business owners often can provide vloggers with their products to use as a way to get their product seen by a much wider audience.

Kiosk/Events

A mobile kiosk or a table at an expo or similar type of event can expose your brand to a new audience. To make the best use of expos and events, be sure to have promotional items as giveaways.

Sponsorships

Many sports teams receive support through the use of sponsorships. Be it a little league baseball team by a local retailer or NASCAR, sponsorships by a national brand, sponsorships get your name in front of the events fans.

Commission Sites

Online stores like Amazon, training platforms like Udemy, and even multisided platforms like eBay all create a kind of gravity that attracts an audience with a purpose. In exchange for a commission, these sites will give you access to their audience to sell to. In addition to online platforms, some retail stores and consignment shops will sell your product in exchange for a percentage of the sale.

Broadcast Media

Network TV, cable channels, streaming video, and radio all use their content to attract a particular audience and then rent you access to them via commercials. Programming is designed to attract a kind of demographic. For example, local newscasts attract an undifferentiated but localized audience. Hell’s kitchen, by contrast, draws a national audience that likes to cook.

Network TV

Network TV stations like CBS, ABC, NBC, and FOX have a mix of national and local advertisers. While the majority of ads are for national brands, most programming stations reserve a few spots for local advertisers. Some programs produced locally tend to reserve spots exclusively for local business, for example, the morning or late-night news. However, the content does a poor job at differentiating an audience except by location.

Cable

Cable channels cater to national audiences only but tend to be a bit more focused based on viewer interest for the content they provide. For example, Disney caters to a young audience or families with younger children while The Blaze caters to a conservative-leaning audience. While network TV attracts an audience through individual programs the entire lineup of programming at cable channels attracts a specific type of audience and specific programs can then further refine that audience even further. For example, the outdoor channel attracts the outdoor enthusiast so advertising a 4×4 vehicle would make sense for any program. However, a fishing show attracts a more specific type of audience that enjoys fishing, so an ad for a boat makes even more sense.

Streaming

Streaming video sites like YouTube cater to anyone with an internet connection and often include pre-roll ads before displaying your selected content. While streaming video sites do not generally have commercials, a specific channel such as one that caters to dual-sport motorcycle riders will often do paid product reviews of equipment and apparel.

Radio

Radio in the AM and FM bands cater to a local audience based on the power of their signal. Internet stations by contract, like, IHeartRadio extends the audience to all points of the globe with internet access.

Direct Mail

Many companies like Data axle allow you to upload your message and select an audience and they do the rest. Others will sell you a list of names and addresses that you can add to your owned category of channels. Lists are customizable based on demographic information. However, the lists you buy are not prospects that have opted-in to receive content from you. Therefore, your content is often considered junk mail. When you buy a list, technically, the contact is now owned by you, but since it is address-based, it will cost you postage each time you conduct a mailing.

Telemarketing

Similar to direct mail, telemarketing services develop lists based on demographics. You can either buy the list and make cold calls yourself or hire a firm to do it for you.

Banner

Many mobile apps and online line tools have a freemium version that is supported by banner ads or pop-ups.

Affiliate

Sites like Commission Junction and Rakuten allow you to connect with affiliates to whom you are willing to pay a commission to in exchange for them marketing your product to their audience. Many affiliates exist to review your product and convey its virtues to their audience and include a call to action with a special link to send them to your site to make the purchase. These channels include paying influencers and celebrities to promote your product.

5 Marketing Channels That Make the Most of Contacts You Own

First, a business employs marketing channels that will attract prospects to their business and the marketing channels where they rent access to someone else’s audience so that they ultimately become a prospect that the business now owns. In this category, because the business now owns the prospect’s contact information, they can continue to reach out to them with content and offers when and where they choose.

Email

This channel is one of the most popularly owned category channels since it costs virtually nothing to drip emails to the prospect continuously. As we discussed in Sales Acceleration Emails, not all emails will trigger an action in the prospect. You can appeal to one of the four buyer psychologies using a series of emails. In general, emails experience about a 25% open rate.

Mobile

When it comes to a channel that receives the best open rates, text messages, sometimes also called push notifications are the king with an incredibly high, 99%, open rate. Often companies will include an opt-in link such as a QR code the prospect can scan with a smartphone to accept an offer or discount and then the business will use the mobile number captured to later send text/push messages to announce special deals.

Fans/Followers

Most social media sites allow a person to follow a particular business or person. In this way, once the prospect opts in, the business can post updates that its fans or followers can see.

Subscribers

Once a prospect becomes a subscriber, they gain access to your content that others may not have access. The content provides information the prospect wants access to, but the content may contain occasional calls to action to drive the prospect up your value ladder with special offers.

Catalog

Many retailers capture a customer’s physical and email address when they make their first purchase or offer a loyalty program to obtain the information. Once in the database, the business can send the customer either an online or printed catalog. Catalogs allow the customer to make phone or internet orders, and customers are often assigned a unique customer number to make the ordering process more manageable.

Read More:

• Best SMS Marketing Software: 10 SMS Marketing Platforms for [cur_year]
• Best Email Marketing Software – 10 Best Email Marketing Services for your Business [cur_year]

The post How to Correctly Target Web Traffic to Drive Growth appeared first on Business2Community.

So we rounded up the patterns we’re already starting to see on effective landing pages, including interactive experiences, playful animation, and so much more. Here are the landing page trends and ideas that are must-try for 2022.

11 landing page ideas & trends for 2022

If you decide to try out any of these ideas, don’t forget to stick to landing page best practices like keeping them consistent with their corresponding ads, optimizing for mobile, having a thank you page, and more.

1. Interactive, customizable experience

I didn’t put this list in order and rank these trends, but this first landing page trend might be my favorite: interactive landing pages for a customizable experience. Interactive content is a great way to increase engagement and time on page—both good things for your landing page performance.

More importantly, though, offering your landing page visitors the opportunity to customize their experience with your brand in a fun, appealing way is good for building customer relationships. That’s because people want personalized content. In fact, 90% of US customers reported that they find messaging that wasn’t personalized or relevant “annoying.” Yikes. Luckily, you can avoid that.

Take a look at this landing page example from monday.com.

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This is the landing page from a software-focused ad, and the copy already reflects this personalization. Then, the tool lets you select the templates you’d need to get a better look at how Monday.com could help your team—a fun way to customize your first intro to the product.

2. Conversational copy

Most landing page trends are design-focused. This makes sense—landing page design is usually the first thing a visitor notices, and it’s usually the first thing to start looking dated. (Or, worse, when you think of anything that requires Flash.)

This year, though, conversational copy is a must-try trend. Check out PayPal’s chatty landing page here.

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Opening with a question is an effective way to invite your visitor to engage, and the casual tone of “Want some?” makes these sound like more of an offer than an opportunity. Excellent way to encourage conversions with your landing page. Try adding a conversational feel to your landing page copy and see what comes of it.

3. Explainer videos

I’ll be honest, I was hesitant to put video on the list (it can’t be a trend if it’s more of an expectation at this point, can it?), but when you look at the best landing page examples, you see that it’s not just any videos. It’s explainer videos that illustrate the product and its use.

Explainer videos are short clips, often with a product view and voiceover, that walk the user through your company’s product or service. Here’s an example from Miro, a visualization tool that’s already using this landing page trend.

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Including videos is great for increasing conversions on your landing page. Explainer videos seem to perform even better. According to HubSpot, 94% of people report watching explainer videos to find out more about a product, and 84% report being influenced into making a purchase.

4. Customer reviews

If you’re running a small business right now, you know that your online reviews are important. Whether it’s a social media shout-out, a Google My Business review, or a suggestion on Reddit, an unsolicited positive view of your goods or services is valuable social proof. It lets you know what your current customers enjoy and, even more, it gives your prospective customers a personalized recommendation. And we all trust personalized recommendations more than even the best ad copy or images.

That’s why it’s not surprising that one of the landing page trends for this year is using customer reviews so that any visitor sees them right away. Chameleon does this really well—check out the header view here.

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Here, Chameleon uses persuasive copy geared toward product managers and product marketers with some illustrated examples of in-app messaging. Then, if you scroll down, you see real reviews from G2 that are related to Chameleon’s in-app messaging capabilities.

G2 is a respected site for reviews, and using the logo and reviews from here makes it clear that these are trustworthy from other product managers who probably know what they’re doing. With these targeted, trustworthy reviews and the personalized copy, Chameleon’s landing page is compelling for its specific audience.

5. Email-only forms

No one wants to fill out multiple fields to sign up for a newsletter or start a free trial. You don’t, I don’t, your leads don’t. That’s why in 2022, we’ll see even more email-only forms on landing pages.

If you’re looking to increase your landing page conversion rates, you should try out this landing page trend, too. Omnisend research found that most landing pages use only one field and, even more, conversion rates fall dramatically after three fields.

And while we’re on the topic of forms, take a page out of our book of best landing page tips and test the position of the form on your landing page.

6. Gender-neutral copy and gender-inclusive forms

If you’re going to ask for additional information, make sure you’re doing it the right way. Gender inclusivity is important to keep in mind for your landing page design and copy, and in general. At WordStream, for instance, the style guide outlines that “they” is used for a singular pronoun for hypotheticals instead of defaulting to a he or she. It’s important to keep this in mind for your landing pages, too, as gender neutral copy is quickly becoming an expectation for 2022 design.

Facebook has been doing this for years for users setting up social profiles, offering dozens of gender options and adding more as needed. Snapchat, on the other hand, doesn’t ask for a gender for its users.

Now, these are two social platforms, but it’s still good to keep this in mind for your landing page copy and your form fill options. If you need a title, then be sure to include Mx., and if you need a gender, be sure to offer multiple gender identities as well as a “Rather not say” option.

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7. Animation with motion

Video and interactive content can make your landing page more engaging for your audience—and we already know that we’re going to see more of this in landing page design over the next year. Another landing page trend we’ll see: animation with motion.

Here’s a great example from Podcorn of how subtle motion can be effective:

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The movement here is light, the imagery is playful, and the effect is perfect.

8. Playful imagery

Playful imagery another landing page design trend to test out this year—particularly if it works for your brand. This means lots of line-heavy animation (like in the previous example from Podcorn), abstract elements (like the background of the Chameleon example above), and lots of bold color. It can also mean mixing animation with photographs or product images.

Take a look at ContentCal uses this last tactic for playful imagery.

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Here, ContentCal mixes bold, classic colors with abstract designs with animated product images and photos of real humans. Together, these elements make for a playful, appealing landing page.

9. Early-aughts design

In case you haven’t heard, the early-aughts are back. That means low-rise jeans, hair clips, graphic shirts, glitter lip gloss—basically many of the reasons I’m glad Instagram didn’t exist to capture some cringeworthy outfits during middle school or high school years. It also means the design aesthetic in general—glossy images, glitter, bubble fonts, bright colors.

Now that the aesthetic is back, this trend is openly a throwback and that nostalgia is great for appealing to emotions and attracting customers. This is what makes Glossier’s landing page design great.

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The red and pink is thick, and the mirror is playful and adds shine that corresponds to the second part of this landing page. In that image, the bottles are bright oy glittery, they’re playfully tilted, and they’re sitting on a shiny reflective surface. Even more, though, the stacked graphics coordinate colors with the other images and overlap in places—just like the logo stickers. Well done.

10. Dreamy backgrounds

We’ve gone over a lot of elements of landing pages so far, including the copy, imagery, video, design. But we haven’t talked about one big element: the background. This year, we can expect to see even more dreamy, gradients in landing page backgrounds.

Google made Core Web Vitals a search ranking factor earlier this year, and there is another update expected early in 2022. That means that having a quick load time is more important than ever. Making sure your images are compressed and your page has lazy-load enabled are good places to start. A dreamy, gradient background can also add depth to your design without increasing the load time.

Here’s a great example of this in action from Starry Internet.

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Even though this blue is bright, it’s light and the peach that it fades into by the bottom contributes to the topsy-turvy dreamy feel—without adding more design elements.

11. Coral

Pantone released its predictions for 2022: warm, familiar, comforting colors. At the top of the list for next spring? Coral. This is going to be a landing page trend, too.

This color fits with some larger themes that we’ve seen here—dreamy, approachable playful, simple. The color is warm and light, which makes it ideal for a background or accents on your page. Or, you can go all-in, like the Recess does on its landing page below.

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I love this monochromatic look: the background gradient, the product colors, the reflection on the box and in the clouds, and even the button colors. It’s an excellent use of this landing page trend—and what could call for trendy more than a CBD seltzer right now?

Try out these landing page trends in the new year

That was a lot—animation, videos, backgrounds, forms. But that’s because there are so many ways to make effective landing pages. Here’s a recap of the landing page trends you need to try in 2022:

1. Interactive experiences
2. Conversational copy
3. Explainer videos
4. Customer reviews
5. Email-only forms
6. Gender-neutral form fills
7. Animation with motion
8. Playful imagery
9. Early-aughts design
10. Dreamy backgrounds
11. Coral color

And remember, when you’re trying out new landing pages, you need to test these elements to see what works best for you and your audience. Who knows, these landing page trends could soon turn into landing page musts for your brand!

Read more:

Read more:

• 10 Amazingly Simple Landing Page Ideas That Work
• Best SEO Software: Top SEO tools for Keyword Research, Linkbuilding and Competitor Analysis
• Top SEO Marketing Tools

The post 11 Must-Try Landing Page Trends & Ideas for 2022 (with Examples!) appeared first on Business2Community.

Many things have shifted in marketing, outreach, and SEO. There are more options available than ever, which has both positives and negatives. I think this surge in technology and marketing is beneficial because it offers business leaders greater flexibility and freedom, often resulting in more innovation. However, the downside is that all these new methods, tools, and strategies can quickly feel overwhelming.

Keep reading if you’re part of the latter group and have trouble determining which trends are worth following and which are passing fads.

Today, my goal is to help clear up any confusion and show you 4 online shopping trends that you absolutely need to pay attention to in 2022. I’ll also provide a few tips you can use to put these strategies into practice.

Let’s get started!

Content is Still King

Publishing content is a great way to attract new visitors to your site and keep current customers interested in your brand. Studies indicate that 47% of people look at 3-5 pieces of content before buying from a new business. This likely relates to consumers wanting to ensure that companies grasp their needs and challenges before making a purchase.

Think about it; would you want to give a new company your debit card information without first establishing that they understand why you need their product or service? When it’s phrased like that, it’s easy to see why adding content to your blog can help build your reputation, keep visitors on your site, and lead to more sales.

One thing that has changed is the types of content users want to see. We’ve seen a massive surge of people asking for more video content. It’s estimated that around 43% of online shoppers want more videos from their favorite brands, with more people sharing this sentiment year-over-year.

There’s also evidence that suggests video content can dramatically improve your search rankings. One study found that adding videos to your site can increase your SERPs traffic by a whopping 157%! In other words, this seemingly small change can help improve your organic traffic and overall searchability.

The best ways to come up with video ideas for your site are to repurpose popular articles, gather feedback from existing customers, and look at trending industry topics on social platforms like YouTube and Instagram. Use what you learn to create engaging, value-packed videos and blog posts for your audience.

Automation Will Impact Sales and Engagement

Automation has become a must-have marketing tool for businesses across all industries. Generally speaking, automation is helpful because it allows business owners to take repetitive or mundane tasks and speed them up while quickly gathering actionable data. This additional data can help you amplify your online store in 2022, and that’s not including all of the time you’ll save by automating tasks.

Automating various marketing processes can also help you skyrocket sales through personalization. Nearly 80% of online shoppers expect brands to show them content and offers that resonate with their specific goals and pain points.

In the old days, you needed someone to crunch analytics numbers and build detailed customer personas based on what they learned. Times have changed. Now, data about how consumers engage with your site is ready and organized in seconds, which makes planning personas so much easier.

Once you gather enough information about your visitors, you can make suggestions through other automated marketing channels, like email, that show relevant products and services. Speaking of email, if you’re not automating your lead generation and segmenting process, now is the perfect time to get started.

I suggest adding a question to your signup form that will trigger your CRM to group the prospect based on their response. For instance, you could ask new subscribers to click the goals and pain points that are relevant to their experience. Based on their choices, you can set up customized marketing campaigns that will undoubtedly lead to more sales and engagement.

Voice Search Has Hit an All-Time High

Believe it or not, sales from voice shopping are expected to hit a staggering $40 billion by 2022. This startling statistic is proof that business leaders and marketers need to gear their SEO strategy towards voice search if they want to thrive.

If you’re new to the idea of voice search, here’s a quick summary. Voice search is when shoppers use a voice-activated device, like Amazon’s Alexa, or their smartphone, to search the internet. Often, these searches result in a purchase. In fact, 62% of people with these devices say they’ve bought something through their voice-driven device.

Optimizing your site for search leads us back to your content marketing strategy. When creating landing pages, publishing blog posts, or otherwise adding to your site, use conversational language when possible.

The thing to remember about voice search is people often speak differently from how they type. If you’re only focusing on what your audience writes, you could be missing out on a ton of traffic and sales.

I suggest thinking about questions your customers might ask their speakers when planning your content. For example, if you sell football jerseys, you may want to target “Where can I buy Football Jerseys?” instead of a more generic term like “New Football Jerseys.” When you include these types of questions in your post, you have a better chance of appearing in the featured answer box for users, regardless of whether they are using a keyboard or smart speaker.

Social Media is Jam-Packed with New Marketing Opportunities

Finally, let’s talk about how you can reach prospects and existing customers on social media. Consumers spend about 2 hours and 29 minutes browsing different social media platforms every day, and in many cases, they are looking for things to buy.

If you can reach people during these critical moments, there’s an excellent chance you can generate more sales and leads across your social accounts. My first suggestion is to create profiles where your audience spends their time. You want to be accessible to people who just discovered your brand, as well as loyal customers.

Once you’ve completed your profile and filled in all of the extra details, start posting! Share content from your website, news about future product updates, and polls and surveys designed to help you get to know your audience. In my experience, these three types of posts lead to more engagement and social sharing.

You’ll also want to invest in dynamic ads on sites like Facebook and Instagram. These platforms give you the tools to create personalized advertisements that are shown to social media users based on their interests and buying habits. If you spent the time to develop stellar buyer personas, now is the time to put this data into action.

An impressive 130 million people tap these types of sponsored posts on Instagram every single month. It’s not hard to see how creating dynamic advertisements can help you reach more would-be shoppers.

You should also consider the benefits of adding live chat to your social channels. A vast majority of shoppers expect omnichannel support from businesses. If you have a team available to instantly help users when they have questions or concerns, there will be plenty of opportunities to turn these people into customers.

Back to You

As you can see, there are plenty of exciting shopping trends to look forward to in 2022. I hope I was able to offer a fresh perspective on these breakthroughs and how they will affect online shoppers and business owners in the year to come. As your company implements some of the strategies mentioned above, make sure to track your progress. Implementing brand new marketing techniques won’t benefit you unless you actively monitor data and make changes that reflect what you learn.

The post 4 Online Shopping Trends You Need to Know in 2022 appeared first on Business2Community.

That’s where urchin tracking module (UTM) tags become an essential tool in a marketer’s arsenal to ensure we’re able to report at a deeper level.

If you’re familiar with UTM tags but unsure how to get started or how to set your team up for success, this is the blog post for you. Below we outline:

• What UTM tags are and how they work
• Why they are important for marketers to use
• Which best practices to follow for creating a naming convention
• How to find UTM tag data in Google Analytics

What Are UTM Tags and How Are They Used?

UTM codes are “snippets of text added to the end of a URL to help you track where website traffic comes from if users click a link to this URL.” UTM tags help inform analytics tools like Google Analytics on how to categorize incoming traffic data.

Standard UTM parameters, or “tags,” include:

• Source: The social network, search engine, or specific source that drove the traffic to your site
• Medium: The channel that drove the traffic (e.g., organic, paid social, email, referral, and so on)
• Term: The paid keywords or key phrases that warrant the UTM tag
• Content: Often used in pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns to denote a page with two identical links on the same page (e.g., utm_content=sidebarlink or utm_content=headerlink)
• Campaign name: Specific types of content that point to the same destination from a common source and medium; each campaign should have a unique name

Whether you’ve used UTM tags or not, I can guarantee that you’ve visited a website with UTM tags to track your engagement and measure the success of their marketing campaign(s). Here’s an example of a URL without any tracking:

www.yoursite.com/pricing

Now here’s an example of the same URL using a combination of UTM tags:

www.yoursite.com/pricing?utm_source=google&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15percentoffpromo

By looking at the above URL with tracking provided, you can see that this is a promotional campaign being run via email that sends people to the pricing page.

How Do UTM Tags Help Marketers?

As marketers, we are routinely trying to develop the most effective marketing campaigns. We do this by operating with the most amount of data available to us to make the most informed decisions. As we gain additional data and insight, we’re able to better refine our efforts.

That’s the beauty of UTM tags!

Using a combination of UTM tags helps marketing teams better gauge and pinpoint exactly where traffic generated by marketing efforts and campaigns is coming from. Thus, we’re able to see what’s working and what may not be performing as expected and iterate from there as needed. UTM tags can also help dispel our own assumptions about which channels we think work best for us, and instead show us which channels actually are working best for us.

The Best Tools for Setting Up UTM Tags

OK, so not only do you understand what UTM tags are and how they can support your marketing efforts with UTM tag reporting moving forward, you’re ready to get started—awesome!

There’s just one thing: These URLs are long and daunting. How do you set them up to ensure they are sending the appropriate data back to Google Analytics for us to track?

Luckily, there are some great tools out there that help generate UTM tags for campaign URLs. These include:

• HubSpot's tracking URL builder
• Google’s URL Builder
• UTM.io’s Chrome extension
• The Excel URL builder

These tools will help with manually tagging your UTM tags for your campaigns. There are also third-party tools that automatically tag URLs using UTM parameters including Mailchimp, Buffer and Hootsuite for paying customers.

3 Best Practices for Naming UTM Tags

With the potential for hundreds of UTM-tagged URLs, it’s critical that you are able to easily filter data when it comes to reporting. Thus, it’s imperative to develop a consistent naming convention that’s easy to remember and documented for your marketing team to ensure everyone is one the same page.

Here are three best practices to help you get started:

• Use consistent casing for better searchability when reporting.

• Use dashes to separate words for better readability and searchability.
• Use descriptive language to ensure it’s easy to track.

Here are some of these best practices in action:

• Campaign: Use a cross-channel description like “ebook-launch.”
• Medium: Always use something specific like “paid-social.”
• Source: Always use something like “facebook.”

Bonus: Plan for complexity, and plan for the future.

The above is a simple naming convention example, but there may be instances where you need a more complex naming convention. This is especially important for “campaign” UTM tags. You want to make sure that your naming convention is consistent but also makes it clear what the campaign is.

Use descriptive language so that it’s easy to track, especially if you run campaigns monthly or quarterly that you need to be able to filter on. These could include:

• Month and/or year: This can be useful for product launches and subsequent iterations/updates, quarterly roundtable webinars, and so on.
• Country: This is useful when there are different campaigns in different countries and we want to understand the performance in each region. We see this a lot for global marketing teams that need to provide reporting to regional managers.
• Target: This is helpful when a campaign launch has specific personas and we want to track the performance across each target audience.

Of course, your naming convention will be based on the needs of your organization. The key is to ensure that you’re not just building a naming convention for today, but that you’re also leaving room for the possibilities of the future. Thus, having an internal huddle and brainstorming the campaigns being run and future wish-list campaigns is important to set your team up for success.

UTM Tag Reporting in Google Analytics

Once you start using UTM tags across your marketing campaigns, you’ll need to ensure you know how and where to find all that precious data. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to find in Google Analytics under Acquisition > Campaigns > All Campaigns.

Here’s a great blog article that outlines where to find UTM tracking data in Google Analytics, with helpful screenshots and further instruction.

Once you’ve set up the correct foundation with a consistent naming convention, specific to the needs of your team, you’re off to the races. Using a combination of UTM tags on your marketing campaigns provides the valuable insight and data needed to make better decisions, pause and/or pivot on underperforming campaigns, and ensure that you’re yielding more positive results.

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The post Best Practices for Naming UTM Tags for Reporting appeared first on Business2Community.

• Display ads
• Sponsored ads
• Paid search
• Google Ad’s
• Facebook
• Carousel ads
• Dynamic Product Ads (DPA)
• Twitter
• Instagram
• Influencer Marketing
• Google Shopping
• Bing Ad’s

Facebook ads, Twitter sponsored ads, Google AdWords, and others are all forms of paid media. Businesses of all sizes use these platforms to manage keyword-focused, eye-catching, or otherwise relevant online ads to get their name in front of the right people — the ones who are likely to buy their product.

How Paid Media Helps Your Business

Compared to the other types of media, paid media is relatively easy to understand. It resembles traditional advertising — you put ads together for your products or services and put them on third-party platforms where your ideal customers can see them. Those two things are what paid media does best:

• Increase revenue
• Raise brand awareness
• Getting Visible quickly

Of course, the first is impossible without the second — people will not buy your products or services if they aren’t aware of your business in the first place. And to do that, you have to go where the people are. Twitter, Facebook, even Google results — all of these areas are prime real estate for paid media ads. These social platforms are ideal for hosting paid media that points back to your owned media efforts to create a profitable awareness loop.

To ignore these platforms is to miss out on an essential component of an online business strategy, but depending on your industry it can be highly competitive (AKA it can cost you a lot of money to put up the ads you want). However, if you pay to play the game then you can create ads that are relevant to your target audiences, boosting your online efforts and bringing customers to your digital doorstep.

But that’s only if you get paid media right in the first place…

This is part three of a three-part series on earned media, owned media, and paid media. Previously, we’ve talked in-depth on earned and owned media, and now it’s time to learn just what is paid media and its unique attributes. Join us as we lay it all out for you!

Paid media is the quintessential solution for many businesses — “spend money, and all your problems will be solved. Invest in robust ad campaigns, and your ideal customers will flock to you.” Except it isn’t that easy, is it? Not when you’re struggling to stay on budget.

Although the idea behind paid media is intuitive, managing yours can be more work than you may be prepared for. And when you consider the many different kinds of paid media platforms that have exploded over the years, it can only make things more overwhelming and confusing. Luckily, making sense of it all requires little more than a proper definition of “what is paid media?” and its comparisons to earned and owned media.

How Companies Get Paid Media Wrong

In nearly all discussions about different types of media, companies seem to get paid media wrong the most. In fact, the definitions for what is paid media, owned media, and earned media have begun to blur as time has gone on — ads present on social media are considered “paid media” even though most content on social media is considered “earned,” etc. But these misconceptions lead to dangerous assumptions that have put many a business in dire marketing straits:

They assume that they can focus strictly on paid media and ignore owned media.

Owned media takes a lot of effort. If a business is small, putting up ads vs. spending time writing shareable blogs may seem a much smarter use of your time, and that may even be true… for a while. But the truth is that paid media at the expense of owned media like blogs and social posts is often not as effective as it could be if used together.

Paid and owned media often work in tandem to bring customers in because they create a “second opinion” effect. For example, someone sees a blog you’ve written shared on their social media feed, then sees an ad for your product — that recognition of seeing two different sources with your name on it increases brand awareness and the likelihood of click-through if they’re a relevant part of your audience.

Understand that it does take time, effort, and money to focus on both paid and owned media, but the results can be priceless.

Final thoughts: Paid media is simple in its initial execution but much more difficult to master. Its highly competitive nature and misunderstood definition brings a high difficulty curve to its execution, but when paired with owned media it can be a powerhouse for your business.

We hope you enjoyed our coverage of earned, owned, and paid media. Please subscribe to our blog for more tips, tricks, and general news blurbs about the SEO industry!

Read More:

• Top SEO Marketing Tools
• Best SEO Software: Top SEO Tools for Keyword Research Linkbuilding and Competitor Analysis
• Best Email Marketing Software

The post What is Paid Media? Paid Media Can Help Drive Revenue. appeared first on Business2Community.

To put it mildly, that’s what running online ads felt like this year. Not only that, but the stories have only just begun! But don’t worry. In today’s post, I’m going to cover the 10 biggest stories in online advertising in 2021 and what they mean for 2022.

So cue the bell ring! This is your *real* syllabus (read: survival guide) for 2022. Class is now officially in session.

1. Google ruffles our keyword matching feathers

Keywords are the backbone of PPC. So of course Google would throw us some keyword curveballs this year!

What went down in ’21

For keywords, 2021 was a rollercoaster ride. First, we saw the sunset of our beloved modified broad match in February. Google’s reasoning was that broad match is more effective now, and that modified broad and phrase match often serve the same use case.

Saying this ruffled advertisers’ feathers is putting it lightly. Many people used modified broad since it acted as a “happy medium” match type. Between the pressures of the pandemic combined with the ever-rising challenges of PPC advertising, many felt these keyword changes from Google were insensitive, unnecessary, and untimely.

Then, in September, just as the dust was beginning to settle, Google announced more changes to keyword matching behavior that stirred the pot again. In short, exact match logic will now be used for all match types, and if you have multiple eligible keywords that aren’t identical to the query, Google will look not just at Ad Rank but at relevance, too. That second part had many advertisers, like PPC Chat host Julie Bacchini, quite unsettled. Isn’t that what you’ve been doing all along, Google?

As if that wasn’t enough, it then claimed that because of these changes and improvements, there is no longer any benefit to using multiple match types for the same keyword if you’re pairing broad match with Smart Bidding.

This left many advertisers in a tissy… In fact, Greg Finn even wrote an article to argue this claim.

What to do in ’22

• With the loss of modified broad match, I encourage you to pair broad match with audience targeting as a workaround.
• Multiple match types or not, Google is right on one thing: less is more! Using plurals or slight variations is a personal pet peeve of mine. Downsize your list to just the core terms you need and stop wasting time on the rest!. Only key core terms are necessary in your keyword lists.
• Keep keywords grouped together in cohesive, thematically consistent ad groups.
• Above all else, let’s also not forget about negative keywords, as they can be your lifeline if you’re stuck using match types that aren’t the most ideal.

Rethinking your keywords for 2022? Our free keyword research tool can help!

2. Facebook advertising falls victim to Apple’s iOS 14 update

Would it really be a 2021 PPC roundup without talking about the infamous iOS 14 update?

What went down in ’21

On April 26, Apple finally rolled out the privacy-first iOS 14.5 update that now allows users to opt out of being tracked by apps—apps like, say…Facebook? Which provides tracking data so advertisers can track conversions and create retargeting audiences?

Advertisers are now facing incomplete data, shrinking audiences, and rising CPMs. Not to mention all the hoops they now have to jump through with Aggregated Event Measurement, domain verification, and shorter attribution windows.

This is because iOS14 allows for users to opt out of data tracking. Now, I understand and respect the importance of consumer data privacy, but as an advertiser, it’s frustrating. If you’re going to be subjected to ads anyway, why not have them be personalized?

Image source

Now, Facebook and industry experts alike are rushing to find targeting strategy alternatives. Some exciting progress has come of it!

What to do in ’22

This might sound crazy, but don’t give up on Facebook ads! It is still an effective channel for growing your business, so if you adapt and continue using it, you’ll have an advantage over competitors who give up.

We have lots of resources to aid you in your 2022 Facebook advertising strategy:

• Follow these tips to keep your conversion campaigns running successfully.
• Use Messenger and lead form ads to generate leads without conversion campaigns.
• Read the seven ways we’re combatting rising Facebook CPMs due to iOS14.
• Implement the Facebook Conversions API
• Continue to upload customer lists and try out these post-iOS Facebook ad strategies like targeting broader audiences.

3. Expanded text ads start packing their bags

Bon voyage, expanded text ads! The removal of these assets was far from quiet, let’s find out why:

What went down in ’21

Back in March, responsive search ads (RSAs) replaced expanded text ads (ETAs) as the default ad type for Search campaigns. Then in August, Google told us we’ll be bidding (no pun intended) our goodbyes to ETAs in June 2022.

Don’t hold your breath, though. ETAs will still run after the change takes effect. What’s really being retired is the ability to edit and create new ETAs. Advertisers will only be able to pause, enable, or remove them.

What to do in ’22

Even though RSAs are effective, the platform still lacks useful reporting for the different ad variations. And even though the change will take effect about half way through 2022, there are things you should be doing now so it doesn’t negatively impact your account. That being said:

• Start building out RSAs now and establish RSA benchmarks so you can know what to expect once ETAs are out of the picture.
• Test your ETAs now and use the detailed reporting to inform your RSA strategy.
• Perfect any ETAs you’ll want to keep running after June 2022 being.
• And keep your fingers crossed for better RSA reporting, as it’s been a common ask in the PPC community.

4. Third-party cookies start unpacking their bags

Google is really just slowly peeling off the bandaid here for us.

What went down in ’21

On June 24, Google announced that the feared deprecation of third-party cookies would be pushed out to 2023.

Google stated that that in order to build truly privacy-preserving technology, it needs to “move at a responsible pace” to allow “sufficient time for public discussion on the right solutions, “avoid jeopardizing the business models of many web publisher,” and “ensure that cookies are not replaced with alternative forms of individual tracking, and discourage the rise of covert approaches like fingerprinting.”

That being said, testing for FLoC—Google’s solution for behavioral targeting in the absence of third-party cookies—has been pushed out to Q1 2022.

What to do in ’22

No action is needed for FLoC, but keep your eye on it.

As for third-party cookies, you’ve heard this time and time again, but keep finding ways to collect more first-party data and get familiar with new solutions available like enhanced conversions, which we cover in this update roundup.

5. Google does a lil’ search term report quid pro quo

Fun fact: this is one of my favorite PPC stories from 2021. Read on to find out why.

What went down in ’21

We know the search terms report was overhauled back in 2020 when low volume searches were taken out of view due to privacy.

This was a tough pill for advertisers to swallow, since we used to be able to see impression and click data on ALL search terms.

Fast forward to August, and advertisers notice the report is showing all search term data once again!

Twitter thread

Turns out it was just a bug that left us feeling sorely disappointed. But the search terms report changed again in September with some good news.

The report still does not show low volume terms that don’t meet the privacy threshold, but it now shows impression data for terms that didn’t get clicks, moving forward and prior to September 2020. In exchange, though, Google mentioned that in February of 2022 it will be removing any search terms prior to September 2020 that don’t meet the privacy volume thresholds.

What to do in ’22

Be sure to save any historical search terms report data you want to hold onto before February of the coming year! However, the search space has changed so much over the last couple of years that the impact those old searches hold will most likely be minor.

Also, start taking advantage of the search terms report a bit more in 2022, since we’ll be able to get more insights again. While this change wasn’t incredibly significant, it was a feather in Google’s cap to give advertisers an advantageous update for once. The platform may seem to have its own vendetta, but clearly it’s still listening and catering to its customers somewhat. Personally, this is the one PPC story from 2021 that makes me feel encouraged and hopeful for 2022.

6. Google Marketing Live leaves us all baffled

Google Marketing Live Stream 2021 was a…snoozefest?

Image source

I love industry events as much as the next advertiser, but this year’s Google Marketing Live summit was resoundingly confusing and underwhelming. Let’s break down why.

What went down in ’21

Let’s start off with one of the culprits behind the 2021 GML hate: customer match thresholds were not really lowered despite Google’s promises. While yes, the platform made the option of these hyper-specific audiences available to accounts below $50,000 in lifetime spend, the fine print read that customer match will only be available to those accounts in observation mode. This still makes targeting them inaccessible to small businesses with lower budgets.

Aside from that, the announcements were either so convoluted or so minor that they caused other roundups to share inaccurate information (understandably so).

What to do in ’22

Okay so GML2021 wasn’t totally hated on. Confusing or not, there are some useful features to take advantage of in the coming year, like:

• The new black-owned attribute option in Google Shopping.
• Image extensions out of beta and the tROAS bidding strategy for Video action and Discovery campaigns.
• Better visibility into performance max campaign reporting.
• My new personal favorite: the Insights page. This page gives advertisers an in-depth look at spend and budget pacing, recommendations, and more. For me and my clients, it’s been surprisingly useful as a way to look into Google’s thinking and brainstorm new optimization ideas to execute on our own.

7. Shopify & Google become besties

GML2021 had another exciting announcement to come of it: Shopify and Google are now two peas in a pod.

What went down in ’21

While Shopify users could always leverage both platforms separately, Google announced this past spring that it’s about to get much easier to use them together. Users of Shopify will now be able to set product placement across all of Google’s entities like Maps, Images, Lens, and YouTube in just a few easy steps.

They’re calling this new collaboration the “Shopping Graph,” as it provides shoppers with more information than ever before about the products they’re viewing and where else they can find them.

What to do in ’22

Shopify’s Google Channel directly in the Shopping platform makes it easier for Shopify users to reach customers beyond the SERP shopping results, regardless of their Merchant Center set up in Google Ads. With an evolving buyer’s journey, this is a futuristic look at how to capture purchases across every step of the funnel.

Image source

8. Facebook goes out for 6 hours

You might be thinking: “big deal.” I know I was. But for advertisers putting lots of hard earned cash into Facebook ads, it was a big deal. Let’s find out why.

What went down in ’21

On October 4, the app, the web version, Instagram, Messenger, and all of Facebook’s assets went dark for six hours on a Monday. All of Facebook’s servers had gone down.

For users, this was a wakeup call to not totally immerse their lives in social media. For advertisers, this meant opportunity lost. For Facebook, it meant $79 million in revenue loss.

What really happened behind the scenes that day, we may never know. What we do know is this was a message to all advertisers: always have a backup plan!

What to do in ’22

In this world, nothing is guaranteed. Even big, bad Facebook has its moments. If this doesn’t get you sold on a multichannel strategy in 2022, I don’t know what will! While the outage was minor to most advertisers, it’s important to be prepared for your advertising worst case scenario. When you’re running multichannel advertising, you’re covering your own butt. If a platform goes down, you’ll still be promoting your business elsewhere.

9. Google Ads monthly spend limits sneak onto the scene

If you’re thinking “Isn’t this already a thing?” you probably aren’t paying for Google via credit card. For card payments, this is a new feature!

What went down in ’21

Google quietly rolled out monthly spend limits this year. They function alongside campaign daily budgets—which continue to be a necessity. Monthly spend limits are implemented at the account level and act as a safeguard against overspend across campaigns. Beware, though, once the limit is hit your ads will stop showing.

What to do in ’22

This can be a great solution for accounts that are tight on budget in 2022. However, there will need to be a level of restraint when using this feature since setting your limit too low can also ultimately limit your results.

Image source

10. Facebook reveals its secrets

I wanted to finish off with a 2021 PPC story underdog. This update didn’t get a ton of coverage, but can tell us a lot about how to plan our 2022 Facebook ads strategy.

What went down in ’21

In June, Facebook dropped an article and video series on how its News Feed algorithm works. But the most interesting part of it for advertisers was its explanation on how it uses machine learning to deliver ads.

In comparison to Google, Facebook doesn’t make clear-cut formulas like Ad Rank or Quality Score available to advertisers. When Facebook released these algorithm insights this year, it definitely caught my eye.

It comes down to three indicators that equate to an “ad score” (not visible to advertisers). This score helps the algorithm determine when and where to show your ad. Those factors are:

• How the advertiser sets the ad up. This can include details like Facebook advertising campaign objectives, audience targeting, location settings, and more.
• The value of the ad. An ad’s total value is based on how much the advertiser is willing to bid on that ad combined with how likely the viewer is to engage with it, as well as the ad’s overall quality.
• Each viewer’s preferences. As an advertiser, you get to choose what type of person you’d ideally like to see your ad. Similarly, Facebook users have the option to set up ad preferences to give the Facebook News Feed further guidance on what’s the best fit for them.

What to do in ’22

While bid is mentioned here, I think one of the main lessons we can keep in mind for 2022 is that you can’t buy quality.

Facebook is looking for high-value ads with attractive visuals and compelling copy. You’ll want to avoid what Facebook Ads calls “low-quality attributes,” like too much text in an image, sensationalized language, or click-bait.

Image source

Not just a 2021 recap—your 2022 survival kit!

In order to improve for the future, we must look at the past. Between everchanging platforms and trends, staying on top of the latest and greatest from 2021 will save you from headaches in 2022.

While there won’t be a test to go along with today’s lessons, here’s a quick study guide of what we covered to help you prepare for 2022:

1. Google changed keyword match types and behaviors.
   Keep your keywords cleaned up.
2. Facebook was impacted by the Apple iOS14 update.
   Be nimble and adapt with new strategies.
3. Expanded Text Ads will be a thing of the past.
   Test your ETAs like crazy and get comfortable with responsive search ads.
4. Third-party cookies
   Stay alert for first-party data targeting solutions in 2022.
5. Google’s search terms report got a facelift.
   Start using it more frequently and collect the data you need before February.
6. Google Marketing Live didn’t live up to the hype.
   Better luck next year. (But also check out the Insights page!).
7. Shopify and Google join forces.
   Use Shopify’s Google channel to capture more leads across your funnel.
8. Facebook had a six hour long “whoopsie.”
   Always have a backup plan!
9. Google Ads monthly spend limits make an appearance.
   Use it to make budgeting easier.
10. Facebook puts out an ad ranking tell-all.
    Stay focused on creating high-quality ads that users want to see and engage with.

With all these updates, a little bit of confidence in automation, a touch of preparation, and a lot of content quality love can go a long way. Use these lessons as a pathway to results that will make your upcoming year the best one yet.

The post The 10 Biggest PPC Stories of ’21 (& What to Do in ’22!) appeared first on Business2Community.

Allow me to make the case.

But first, let me remind you of the backdrop. Social media is not the same space as it was when I got started in this business in 2009. Back then, engagements were everything. Twitter chats were popular (all engagements). Facebook posts would have hundreds of comments with active conversations happening in the threads. Engagements were the focus–no question.

But since then, much has changed. Brands focused on using social to sell. Advertising has taken over. And, many people are just plain tired of “engaging” on social, for a variety of reasons.

So, with that backdrop, here are 3 reasons I think you might want to think long-and-hard about de-prioritizing engagements as part of our social media strategy in 2022:

1: People’s behaviors have changed on the primary social media networks

Let’s just take Twitter, as an example. Pew recently had some very interesting research which illuminates this point precisely. For starters, most people on Twitter are not tweeting a lot, and aren’t seeing any likes or retweets on the few tweets they do share.

Translation: Most people on Twitter are lurking. Specifically they’re looking for news and information to consume or they’re looking to be entertained–Pew’s research found exactly that in its recent report.

Bottom line: Most people aren’t going to Twitter to engage. They’re going to get information or to be entertained.

2: Engagements usually = likes

In 2021, I’ve done a number of social media audits. And one consistent theme in most of those audits has been that engagements are VERY heavy on likes. In other words, brands aren’t seeing as many comments and shares as they would like. Engagement has become all about likes. And that’t not great considering the like is, by far, the most passive form of engagement. Think about your own behaviors on social–what kinds of things do you give a “like” to? If you’re like most people, lots of things! However, how often do you comment or share a post? Probably not that much. That’s the larger trend–and that’s a big part of why I think we should all take a closer look at our engagement numbers. At the very least, we should probably be separating out engagements by likes, comments and shares, or giving them weight (1 point for a like, 3 for a comment and 5 for a share). This would help us get a better look at what meaningful engagement looks like.

3: In many cases, brands aren’t even engaging back!

I’ve been talking about this for years–the trend of brands posting content on social networks, receiving comments from fans/customers/prospects and then not responding or acknowledging those comments. Believe me, it’s far more common than you might think! If we, as brands, aren’t going to take the time to prioritize engaging back with fans when they take the time to engage with us, what’s the point? To me, it seems like brands are just chasing engagements–they’re not really interested in talking to customers and prospects.

Let’s take a look at McDonald’s on LinkedIn. Huge company, right? Engagement is undoubtedly a priority for them on all social networks. But, here’s a popular post they made recently with almost 40 comments–none of which were acknowledged or responded to from the McD’s team:

Here’s a glimpse at just a few of the comments that have went un-responded to.

Not only did McD’s not respond–they didn’t even “like” these comments! And most of these were positive comments from fans, employees and former employees.

Again, I could give you many examples of this–McDonald’s is not alone.

So, maybe it does make sense to de-prioritize engagements for 2022 given all this, right? Again, not saying you move away from tracking and measuring engagements altogether, but if you’re seeing the same signals I outlined above in your industry, it may make sense to rethink your objectives and KPIs from a social media marketing perspective.

The post Should We Be De-Prioritizing Engagements in 2022? appeared first on Business2Community.

One clever and effective way to do this is by including B2B customers into your target audience.

This is something that many small businesses catering to direct consumers already do. They diversify their customer base by selling at lower prices but for higher quantities to B2B customers and it’s a powerful way to scale a small B2C business.

For example, home-based crafts businesses can consider working with a chain of hotels to provide customised ware like soaps, arts and furnishing that’s exclusive to the chain. Or retail clothing stores can target corporate offices for team wear.

When you target B2B clients, you can sell in bulk and give your holiday revenue a boost.

So, you need to work on your marketing to reach more B2B clients. Let’s walk through some B2B promotion ideas that you can use.

Create B2B-specific landing pages

If you’re a B2C company, then the chances are high that your website and blog content has content for direct consumers.

So, one mistake you might make is to target B2B customers while still having website landing pages that don’t matter to them.

Create customised landing pages so that when people click on your link in ads and emails, it takes them to content makes sense for B2B brands. We’ll look at specific marketing messages you can use further down.

Aside from landing pages, you also need to create blog posts, articles, and guest posts that are SEO-optimized to appear for topics that decision-makers potentially research.

Such content also helps you when decision-makers in large companies do research about what you have to offer.

Create marketing messages around saving money

The major holidays that drive sales often happen in the last quarter of the year. It’s also a time when many businesses look over their expenses and even set up goals for the new quarter.

Your marketing messages can focus on helping clients reduce their expenses by offering them products and services at a holiday discount.

Decision-makers looking to cut costs and secure good deals for next year will find your offer attractive. You can make special deals during the holiday season that will be valid for the next quarter. This approach can help you build a strong relationship with a new B2B partner.

Offer a charity-based tie up

If you’re targeting big companies that clearly focus on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), then another way to catch their attention is to create an offering that supports charitable causes.

This approach makes a great deal of sense for non-profit organizations. However, if you’re a for-profit company too, you can develop a tie-up where big businesses that enter deals with you also end up contributing to some meaningful effort.

For example, Marks and Spencer worked with Oxfam to reuse old clothing and learn about human rights issues in its supply chain.

You can create value for businesses by addressing an aspect of CSR while aligning it with your business. And doing this before and during the holiday season will help you stand out while also doing something meaningful.

Express your appreciation

Sending a warm and personalised appreciation email to your existing B2B partners is an important way to strengthen your relationship with them. If you have former B2B connections, then consider making an email campaign for the holidays where you just send them a holiday greeting.

Doing this opens the door to further communication and serves as a reminder of your business’s offerings.

You can also use a holiday email campaign to offer a special gift or a discount. All together, it’s a winning way to build goodwill and drive sales too.

Create customized offerings

One of the major differences between B2C and B2B companies is that many B2C companies can offer virtually the same product and service to millions of customers without changing their offering.

However, B2B companies often have unique requirements that can’t be met with a generic product. Do your research about a potential B2B lead and offer them products and services that are highly tailored to their needs.

Personalisation and customisation are always powerful inducements that compel people to buy. And with offerings that are customized to the needs or large B2B brands, you’ll win more deals that increase your final sales during the holiday season.

Back to you

This holiday season, instead of trying to create more sales with your B2C audience, try winning B2B clients instead.

You can sell more products, and as a result, get the benefit of economies of scale. By reaching out to wholesalers and larger businesses, you can grow your business along a different angle.

Apply the ideas given in this post and reach out to B2B companies during the holidays. You’ll see greater sales and grow your business fast.

The post How B2C Can Market to B2B Companies in the Holiday Season appeared first on Business2Community.

The more campaigns you run in a platform like Google Ads, the more likely you are to have campaigns competing against each other for the same keywords. Without careful campaign management, this can drive up the cost of your CPCs and hurt the performance of your PPC strategy.

Today, we look at how you can identify campaigns that are competing with each other and how to manage them to avoid any conflicts.

Are your campaigns competing against each other?

Some businesses promote a range of similar products or services at the campaign level, which can lead to internal competition. For example, a travel company may promote campsites around the country or a training company may advertise courses at various locations.

In this instance, a travel company may target many of the same keywords on platforms like Google Ads and Microsoft Ads (Bing Ads).

The danger is that your campaigns for different locations could end up competing against each other for these keywords, driving up your CPCs because one of your campaigns needs to win the ad placement.

Another danger is that Google could choose to show a less relevant campaign because it performs better in the auction (eg: it has a higher Quality Score), even though another campaign is more relevant to the search intent of the current user.

This type of internal competition can occur in any instance where the following three settings are applied across multiple campaigns:

1. The same keyword
2. The same match type
3. The same targeting settings

If all three of these settings appear across more than one campaign, you’re competing against yourself for searches where users type in the shared target keyword. This means you need to have the exact same keyword (including syntax), keyword match type and targeting settings (location, demographics, language, etc.).

Without careful management, it’s surprisingly easy for these three settings to match across more than one campaign and companies promoting a range of similar or related products/services can be particularly vulnerable.

How to manage competing campaigns

As long as you understand the potential issues of competing against yourself in platforms like Google Ads, you can take steps to prevent it from happening. If internal competition occurs where certain campaign settings are the same, differentiation is the best way to avoid it.

Again, there are three key areas to address here:

1. Keyword settings (including match types)
2. Landing pages
3. Targeting settings

Managing each of these at the campaign level to differentiate potential similarities prevents internal competition. Aside from that, the points we’re about to cover are solid best practices for campaign management, in general.

1. Differentiate your keyword settings

The first question to ask is whether you should run multiple campaigns in the first place.

Consumer electronics retailers don’t run individual Search campaigns (or even Search ads) for every TV they sell. Instead, they run Shopping ads for individual products and Search campaigns linking to category landing pages for keywords like “Sony 4K TV”.

However, our travel company from earlier – the one that’s promoting camping sites across the country – clearly needs to run campaigns for sites in different locations.

This produces some natural keyword differentiation, such as “campsites in [location]”. The company can also target long tail keywords, such as including local landmarks, for people searching “campsites near Buttermere”.

However, these campaigns are still going to have shared keywords, such as “campsites near me”, and we’ll discuss how you can deal with these when we talk about campaign targeting settings.

Before we move on, though, let’s take a moment to talk about negative keywords, which allow you to prevent your ads showing for specific search terms. This is important where you have unwanted keyword competition that you can’t manage with campaign settings. For example, an online course provider may run campaigns for separate courses for English Language degrees and teaching English as a second language (TESL).

In this case, the course provider would need to carefully apply negative keywords to prevent these campaigns from competing for overlapping keywords and showing the wrong campaign to irrelevant audiences.

2. Differentiate your landing pages

Generally speaking, every campaign should have its own landing page and this is crucial if you’re running campaigns that could compete against each other for the same keywords. In the previous section, we discussed keyword differentiation and each landing page should be optimised for these keywords to maximise relevance.

Dedicated landing pages also allow you to optimise your copy to address the unique interests of your target audience and these differences are the reason you’re running separate campaigns, in the first place, rather than a single campaign that groups each product/service together as a category.

Make these differences clear in the copy and leverage these to make your CTAs more relevant and compelling to the target audience of each campaign.

Let’s say you’re promoting entry-level camera equipment in one campaign, enthusiast gear in another and professional-grade products in a third campaign. These ranges are designed for wildly different audiences, budgets and expectations, which your campaigns, keywords and landing pages should all address.

3. Differentiate with targeting settings

With targeting settings, you can deliver your ads to the most relevant audiences but you can also prevent campaigns from competing against each other by only entering your ads into the auction under specific circumstances.

For example, you can use location targeting to only show your ads to people in specified areas or exclude your ads from showing in certain places. So, if you’re targeting the same keyword in two campaigns but also targeting two different locations in each campaign, they never compete in the same auction.

If you’re running multiple campaigns targeting the same or similar keywords, there has to be some kind of differentiation to justify running separate campaigns. It could be location, demographics, devices, purchase histories or a range of other factors.

Targeting settings allow you to pinpoint relevant audiences but they also help you avoid or minimise internal competition.

For Search campaigns in Google Ads, you can apply the following targeting settings:

• Location: Show your ads in specific locations or exclude them from showing in certain locations.
• Language: Specify the query languages you want to show your ads for.
• Affinity: Reach users based on what they’re passionate about and their habits and interests.
• Detailed Demographics: Reach users based on long-term life facts.
• In-market: Reach users based on their recent purchase intent.
• Your data segments (remarketing): Reach users that have interacted with your business.
  • Website and app visitors: Reach people who have visited your website and/or apps.
  • Customer Match: Reach your existing customers based on your CRM data.
  • Similar segments: Reach new users with similar interests to your website visitors or existing customers.
• Device: Target users on desktop, mobile or both.
• Ad scheduling: Set times that the ads in your campaign are eligible to show.

More targeting options are also available for different campaign types and you can find a breakdown of targeting settings on this Google Ads Help page.

Competing against yourself isn’t always a bad thing

We’ve spent all of this article discussing ways to prevent campaigns from competing against each other but we should also clarify that internal competition isn’t always a bad thing. Primarily, you’ll want campaigns to compete against each other when you want to determine which one performs better.

When you’re testing campaigns, you need them to run under a controlled environment and this normally means the same keywords, match types and targeting settings.

This is fine for the duration of your tests and the internal competition will end once you’ve selected a winning campaign from your experiments. You may experience some inflated CPCs during this time but things should settle once you pick your winning campaign and remove the other one.

Read More:

• Top SEO Marketing Tools
• Best SEO Software: Top SEO Tools for Keyword Research, Linkbuilding and Competitor Analysis

The post How to Manage PPC Campaigns That Compete With Each Other appeared first on Business2Community.

Knowing how Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing works provides you with the same array of tactics that giants like Amazon, Airbnb, and Disney are using to hook users right out of the gate on search engines like Google.

PPC is arguably the most powerful channel available to digital marketers because it presents your brand to potential customers at the top of the search engine results page ahead of organic listings.

By incorporating PPC ads into your digital strategy, you’ll be able to develop coherent marketing campaigns across multiple channels and ultimately attain a single brand voice. And by establishing a presence in your industry, you can continuously remain first in mind with your target audience.

This article will give an overview of what Pay-Per-Click marketing involves and how it can provide a forceful boost to your bottom line.

What is PPC in Marketing?

PPC, or Pay-Per-Click marketing, is a method of digital advertising where the advertiser runs an ad on a specific network or platform and pays every time the ad is clicked. The most widely used PPC platform, Google Ads, generates about 37.2% of the US net digital ad revenue, with Facebook trailing behind at 22.1% and having about 4 million advertisers using their services.

You’ve likely seen PPC advertising displayed within the SERPs of your searches.

These ad campaigns can target specific keywords users may search for and demographic data leading to audience segmentation. They can also be created to achieve multiple marketing objectives, like increased:

• Sales – transactions and purchases made on your online store;
• Leads – qualified prospects interested in your products or services;
• Traffic – visitors to your homepage, landing page, or other specific pages of your website;
• App downloads – new downloads of your app from either the Google Play Store or the iOS App Store;
• In-person visits and transactions – people interact with your ad and end up visiting and/or making a purchase at your physical store location;

According to Google’s 2018 Economic Impact Report, Pay-Per-Click marketing is an extremely profitable channel, with an average of $2 in revenue for every $1 spent. But that’s not all.

Here are five key benefits to incorporating PPC ads into your digital marketing strategy.

1. Pay-Per-Click Marketing Can Produce Results in 24 Hours

The most compelling reason for a PPC strategy is the almost immediate results. In fact, on popular platforms such as Google and Microsoft Ads, most ads are approved within one business day, with more complex ads needing more time for manual review. This is in stark contrast to organic SEO-based strategies, which can often take up to 6 months to get the first results and evaluate what works and what doesn’t.

Since it’s possible to get PPC ads up and running quickly, you can start fine-tuning your PPC strategy almost immediately. With performance-based metrics like impressions, conversion rates, cost per conversion, and geographic data, you’re in a better position to optimize your ads week on week to deliver the best-performing ads.

Speaking of performance, one of your first steps should always be competitor research. You can do this manually by checking the SERP or using an automated competitor checker that gathers data from organic and paid results on one dashboard. It allows you to research what competitors in your product and/or services category are doing with their Google Ads. You can see the ads of your rivals, what keywords they are shown for, ads history, etc. With this information, you can see what’s working for your competitors. Then you can refine your PPC campaign accordingly to maximize your ROI!

2. PPC Marketing Delivers Higher Conversion Rates

Advertising using Pay-Per-Click marketing has proved to be 50% more effective than regular organic traffic generated through SEO techniques. This is mainly for two key reasons:

• Firstly — specific to Google Ads — Google has devoted more space on its SERPs to ad placements. They also have done a better job of making PPC ads look like organic search listings. In previous SERPs, you could identify a PPC by its yellow background and words in bold that indicated it was sponsored. Now, PPC search ads are harder to recognize, with a mere “Ad” label differentiating paid ads from organic results.

• Secondly, individuals who click on search engine results labeled as ads are more likely to have high purchase intent, resulting in stronger conversion rates than regular organic traffic.

3. PPC Marketing Offers You More Control

Compared with SEO marketing strategies, PPC marketing allows you to control and refine every aspect of your marketing campaign. It does this by tacking on layers of data-based targeting. For example, when starting a campaign from scratch, you can narrow down your target audience based on where they live, their language, what sites they’ve visited, and many other factors.

Choose your keywords

You also need to choose keywords to show your ads for. You can use phrases you’ve found through competitor or keyword research or select among suggested by Google Ads.

Choose your ad placement

If you’re using Google Ads in particular, you can also select specific platforms and placements for your ads. This would depend on the type of ad you run. The Google Display Network (GDN) gives you the option to place your ads on websites, YouTube channels, and videos. You can also place your ads on App pages from the Chrome Store that are connected to Google’s ad network. This allows you to reach up to 90% of Internet users across the globe.

With this amount of control, you can design the perfect user-specific campaign while minimizing the initial costs.

Speaking of costs, Google’s PPC platform allows you to set your ad budget according to several variables. For example, besides setting the amount you’re willing to pay per day, you can optimize your ad spend according to a specific performance goal. These goals include cost-per-acquisition (CPA), return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) or maximizing clicks or conversions.

Along with performance-based targeting, Google Ads allows you to filter your audience according to specific demographic criteria, such as age, gender, and income brackets. For more advanced targeting, you can build custom audiences based on shopping preferences as well.

Select remarketing targets

Another compelling function of Google Ads is the ability to create audiences for retargeting/remarketing ads. This means you’re able to show ads specifically to users who have previously:

• Visited your website
• Purchased from your store
• Clicked or engaged with an ad

You can also create custom remarketing segments to target specifically who your ads will be tracked as they browse the web. Remarketing is a great way to reinforce brand recognition and significantly increase conversion rates by gently encouraging purchases.

As you can see, PPC Marketing platforms give you all of the tools you need to create the most efficient ad campaigns down to the granular level.

However, there is some caution going forward with PPC Marketing — especially concerning Google remarketing. Due to the recent enactment of data privacy laws, Google has introduced a new Consent Mode to protect user data. Whether or not the user chooses to accept cookies while browsing a specific site, Google will dynamically change how they capture and share user trait and behavior data. This will affect who and how you’ll target in your ad campaigns in the future. You can view a comprehensive list of user data like cookies, IP addresses, URLs, and more here.

4. PPC Marketing Doesn’t Replace SEO. Use Both to Get the Most for Your Money.

To get the most out of any digital online marketing strategy, you should budget for both PPC and SEO-based content. Each solution works in sync with the other to raise revenues for your business because they both function using the same digital marketing concept – keywords.

The best keywords acquired through the market- and competitor-based research are what fuel PPC targeting and segmenting.

These keywords are the same that can be used for on-page SEO. For example, you can use the keywords which performed the best in your PPC campaign to optimize your titles and improve CTR. This can bolster your SEO strategy by providing insights into top-performing search terms that customers are using to find your website.

On the other hand, you can also leverage your SEO data to develop an effective PPC strategy. For instance, you check in Google Analytics to find out who your audience is that comes from the organic search. Then you can use them as your target audience in a PPC campaign. Committing to both campaigns allows you to target users across multiple channels with the best information available, increasing your chances of conversion.

5. PPC Platforms Make it Easy to Measure and Track Results

The Google Ads and Google Analytics platforms provide the most amount of data about user behavior online. You can use all of this information to modify and perfect your campaigns, from demographic and location data to conversion rates and bounce rates. And the more ads you run, the more data you’ll accumulate, and the more accurate it’ll be.

Some of the key metrics you can use to measure the performance of your ad campaign include:

• Impressions: How many people viewed your ad
• Clicks: The number of times someone clicked on your ad
• Click-through rate (CTR): The ratio of users who clicked on your ad to the total users who saw your ad
• Average cost-per-click (CPC): This is how much it costs you on average whenever someone clicks on your ad
• Average position: This refers to how far up on the SERP your ad appears whenever a user searches for a target keyword. The higher the position, the greater exposure your ad will have. This means you’ll have a better chance of grabbing users’ attention.
• Conversions: This indicates the number of times your target goal or action is achieved. There are many types of preset conversions you can set up, such as transactions, page views, and even phone calls. You can also create custom conversions using Google Tag Manager or Google Analytics.
• Conversion rate: Calculated as the percentage of users who clicked on your ad and also converted
• Quality Score: This indicator is used to measure the overall relevance of your ad concerning a number of factors. These factors include target keywords, ad copy, and landing page content. Based on a scale of 1 to 10, a good Quality Score typically leads to a lower CPC and better ad position.

After your article is published, you can use Google Analytics to monitor traffic to that specific page. You can then assess the feedback, and repurpose your SEO strategy going forward.

The Final Thoughts

Pay-Per-Click marketing is perhaps the most powerful marketing tool out there. Down to the last detail, you can craft and target the perfect campaign to your target audience without wasting money across low-converting segments. This ensures that when a user clicks on your ads, you can be certain that they’re more likely to convert. It’s not like SEO-based marketing. However, using both SEO and PPC in tandem enables you to pinpoint key customers at all levels of the buying process, from top-to-bottom, resulting in increased exposure, greater conversions, and a more cost-effective ROI.

Read more:

• Why PPC? – The Advantages of Pay-Per-Click Marketing Explained
• Best Affiliate Marketing Programs

The post Why Is Pay-Per-Click Marketing Important? 5 Convincing Reasons appeared first on Business2Community.

Are the days of advertising on Facebook finished? Definitely not. As with anything new, it’s about watching, learning, and adjusting to the changes. In this article, I’ll share six strategies we’ve discovered that can significantly boost our client campaigns in a post-iOS14 environment. They include:

1. Rebuild campaigns from scratch
2. Try interest stacking
3. Keep audience expansion on
4. Run on-platform retargeting campaigns
5. Use Facebook lead ads
6. Set up external tracking

First, take care of the account essentials

Let's first make sure your account is set up to track and succeed with these strategies.

Verify your business

When you verify your business, Facebook will request a couple of legal documents to confirm your business is legitimate. This minimizes the risk of future ad banning—of course, also along with abiding by Facebook's advertising guidelines).

Use Facebook’s verification instructions since these will be up to date, but as of this post, here's how to do it through Business Manager:

1. Go to Security Center
2. Select Verification.

Verify your domain

Verifying your domain ensures that you're able to track your ads effectively. It's simply a case of uploading a small file (provided by Facebook) and adding it to your website's header.

To verify your domain on Facebook:

1. Go to Business Manager and find Brand Safety>Domains.
2. Click add, and follow the instructions.

Set up Aggregated Event Management

You need to set up Aggregated Event Measurement (AEM) or your ads won't track properly. Facebook events indicate activity within your full-funnel strategy as the user moves towards your CTA. Events are things like:

• Page view
• View content
• Add to Cart
• Initiate Checkout
• Purchase

For example, online shops might track: View content -> Add to Cart -> Initiate Checkout -> Purchase

In the past, it was possible to create an unlimited number of tracking events within a Facebook advertising account; now, they've limited it to eight. Most advertisers only track 1-5 events per campaign, so this shouldn't create a significant obstacle. But if you do use lots of different tracking events, simply consolidate your events and use the same ones across various campaigns (learn more about this strategy here).

To set up aggregated event management:

1. Go to Events Manager
2. Click on the Aggregated Event Measurement tab
3. Click on Manage Events, and select your (now verified) domain
4. Click Manage Events
5. Add the Events you want to track across your campaign.

You'll need to list your events by priority. If your campaign is about making sales, make sure that Purchase (for example) is the highest priority.

6 strategies to try if your Facebook ads are not performing post-iOS 14

Okay now that you have your account structured properly, let's talk about some Facebook ad lead generation strategies that have been working for us, despite the challenges brought on after the iOS update.

1. Rebuild campaigns from scratch

If you’ve been advertising for some time, you’ve probably been able to get your campaigns to a point where you’re consistently seeing good results. You know the audiences and creatives that work, and Facebook has optimized for those.

But one of the most common pain points with iOS is that previously successful Facebook ad campaigns have stopped performing as well as they used to.

Disastrophe!

But it’s not the end of the world.

As with all major ad platform changes, it's adapt or die. And we've found that rebuilding a campaign from scratch can work exceptionally well. Sure, it's going to take you a little extra time to rebuild your campaign templates, but one of our clients experienced a 59% reduction in cost per lead after rebuilding a previously successful campaign.

2. Try interest stacking

Whizz back to pre-iOS14 when we used to do Facebook ad targeting by individual interest. This level of specificity was priceless, especially if you knew your audience. But it doesn't work as well under the new regime.

For example, we used to create one ad set targeting a singular interest. So if we were looking to target marketers, we might target people who are interested in Buffer. Now, it's more effective to go a little broader. Rather than just Buffer, you might add Hootsuite + Sprout Social + StreamYard, etc. all into the same audience.

Are your ads underperforming? Use our free Facebook Ads Performance Grader to make sure you're plugging every leak in your spend.

3. Keep targeting expansion on

As mentioned above, going broader with your audience's interests gives Facebook's algorithm more to work with. So in addition to stacking interests, we also recommend locking Targeting Expansion to On.

One of the particularly tricky impacts of iOS14 is that it's harder to build effective Custom Audiences, and therefore Lookalike Audiences. Lookalikes were big performers, but we’ve found that campaigns using interest stacking and Detailed Targeting Expansion have started outperforming them in some circumstances.

4. Retarget video views

Want to know a scary stat? 96% iOS14+ users have opted out of tracking. In many ways, you can understand it: most of us didn't realize the extent to which Facebook followed us around the web. So from a libertarian perspective, it kind of makes sense.

But as a result, Facebook website retargeting campaigns are no producing the results they once did. But what is producing results for us lately is on-platform retargeting. In other words, keep users on Facebook because opting out of tracking doesn't apply if the user stays on-platform.

And on-platform video views can be a super effective Facebook ad targeting strategy even after iOS.

App tracking opt-outs can be a total disaster for advertisers...unless you adapt to change. And video engagement campaigns just may be one way of holding down the fort for your accounts.

One of our clients—a well-known whiskey brand—saw a 76% reduction in cost per purchase when using video view retargeting versus their regular prospecting campaigns.

5. Use Facebook lead ads

Another on-platform strategy to generate leads on Facebook is through Facebook lead ads. These used to be the unwelcome guest at the party—the Maleficent that everyone avoided because they produced low-quality leads.

But we’re finding lead ads to drastically reduce our Facebook cost per lead, making campaigns more profitable. We recently launched a lead ad campaign for our agency and generated leads for less than $8.20 each.

Sure, you'll still gather some low-quality leads, but the approach can make a difference to your profits due to the lower cost of leads ads. And you can use some simple lead qualification tactics to pre-qualify those clicks.

Plus, lead ads are trackable. Many iOS users go off the radar once they click on your ad because they’ve opted out of tracking. But lead ad clickers stay within the Facebook ecosystem. So while leads from external clicks can dissolve into the ether, leads from lead ads remain trackable. We recently launched a lead ad campaign for our agency and generated leads for less than $8.20 each.

Brett McHale has also found lead ads, as well as messenger ads, to be particularly effective in generating leads post-iOS 14.

6. Set up external tracking & reporting

One of the real tragedies of iOS14 is how it has negatively affected Facebook's ability to report on results in Ads Manager. Here are three things to do about it.

Use the Facebook Conversions API

Setting up the Facebook pixel used to be all you needed to track and report on your Facebook ads, but with App Tracking Transparency (users can opt to not be tracked) and Google’s eventual depreciation of third-party cookies (which the pixel relies on), the pixel is losing its power.

To avoid underreporting results, it’s essential to start using the Facebook Conversions API (in conjunction with the pixel). The API doesn't require cookies for tracking events because it connects your server directly to Facebook's.

To implement CAPI in Business Manager:

1. Click on the burger menu. Go to Events Manager.
2. Select Add Events using the Conversions API.

The simplest way to add events using the CAPI is through Partner Integrations. Facebook provides partner-specific instructions once you've confirmed which partner hosts your website.

Use UTMs

You'll also get a much clearer reflection of results if you also measure performance using UTMs and Google Analytics, as well as Facebook's tracking.

Give yourself a 3-4 day buffer

Another reason reporting is slightly trickier now is that Facebook’s reporting is delayed up to three days, meaning conversions you’ve received from your ads in the previous couple of days may not show yet.

This is important to remember when reporting. Always give yourself a buffer of 3-4 days to ensure you have the most accurate data possible.

The reality is, there is no perfect way to track ad performance. So you need to find a way that works specifically for you.

Adapt and move on

We might look back one day on the great exodus of the 2021 opt-out and laugh. Like all significant cultural shifts, there's a lot of panic and resistance initially, but those open to learning always catch the early worm. Either way, we adapt and move on. And that’s how we remain successful.

The big takeaways from all of this are:

• Rebuild campaigns from Keep users on-platform and make use of on-platform tools
• Implement external tracking to reinforce your campaign reporting
• Stack interests to broaden your audiences (and Lookalikes)
• Reset your campaigns for the new world
• Optimize your ad account setup

If you try these strategies you should start to see an improvement in your campaigns, but as with anything Facebook ads-related, it’s all about testing. Test these strategies and find out which ones perform best for your business.

The post 6 Facebook Ad Strategies Working for Us Right Now (Post iOS Updates) appeared first on Business2Community.

...herding cats.

But that doesn't mean we can't gather 'em up into no-nonsense roundups with the essential facts and tips! Read on to learn what you really need to know about the latest Google Ads updates, including:

1. Conversion goals
2. Deal features for Shopping
3. New budget report
4. Infinite scroll on mobile
5. New OCI helper tool
6. Enhanced conversions out of beta
7. FLoC testing pushed back
8. Upgraded ad extensions
9. Performance Max campaigns out of beta
10. Engaged-view conversions for video Display ads

Read on to get facts for your FAQs.

1. New conversion goals

• Date: November 1
• TLDR: Conversion goals group conversion actions together to enable bidding optimization at the campaign or account level.

On November 1, Google announced the rollout of conversion goals. With this new feature, Google will automatically group similar conversion actions together into categories of actions (such as Purchases or Submit lead forms) most meaningful to your business. You can then optimize for conversion goals by defining which conversion actions within that goal should be used for bidding.

There are three goals:

• Standard goals: The ones Google automatically creates out of your conversion actions, for which you can choose to optimize bidding in any campaign.
• Account-default goals: Any of the standard goals you tell Google to include and optimize for in every new campaign by default.
• Custom goals: Goals made up of primary and secondary conversion actions. The primary action is the one you’ll use for bidding.

You can view data for conversion goals by going to Tools > Measurement > Conversions. Your existing conversion, conversion optimization, and bidding strategies will not be changed. But terminology is changing:

Action we suggest: Do a bit of a conversion action audit and think about which conversion actions you want your bidding to focus on and which conversion goals you might want to set as account defaults. Also, fix your conversion tracking hang-ups so you can get the most out of this new feature.

2. New features for deal badges in Shopping

• Date: October 28
• TLDR: Your product listings with a deal badge can now appear in a Deals feed, plus improved reporting for these listings.

When running Google shopping campaigns, merchants can apply a “promotion,” “sale,” or “price drop” badge to their product listing if it meets qualifying conditions. Google announced in July 2021 that these deal-badged listings would now be more visible with a “see deals related to your search” prompt in the Shopping tab.

Then, on October 28, Google announced that now (and as promised), there is a designated deals feed, always accessible in the Shopping tab and which will also appear in regular Search for relevant queries (like “black friday deals”).

Note that the deals feed also appears on mobile.

This feed will show recommended deals for that user, based on their query and browsing behavior as well as the attractiveness of the offer and discount

In addition, Google has made improvements to the Merchant Center to show which of your products qualify for a deals badge, as well as performance data for deal badged products broken out separately

Separate reporting for deal-badged products is now available. (Image source)

Action we suggest: Test out a price drop, discount, or promotion now to get familiar with the new functionality and reporting so you can be successful throughout Black Friday and the holidays. Consider implementing a priority bidding structure to maximize your ROAS.

3. New Google Ads budget report

• Date: September 30
• TLDR: You now have more insight into how Google spends your budget each day and month.

When you set your daily average budget for a Google Ads campaign, you are telling Google to spend your budget in such a way that averages out to that amount over the course of a month. This means it can spend up to twice your daily average budget on any given day if it means more clicks and conversions, and then counteract that by spending less on days when traffic or conversions are lower.

This is helpful in maximizing your budget, but advertisers have had limited insight into the fluctuations in their daily average ad spend. Google’s new budget report, announced on September 30, solves for this. With this report, you can view past and future data.

In the cumulative monthly spend section, you can see how much you've spent so far, how much your projected to spend, and your monthly spending limit. You're also able to edit the budget number at the top to see how this might impact your performance.

In the daily spend section, you can see how much of your daily spending limit you’ve spent on any given day. In both graphs, you can hover over the data to see numbers for an individual day.

Action we suggest: Head to one of your campaigns and pull up the report. Take a look at previous months to get a feel for how it visualizes the story. For this month's report, play around with different average daily budgets to see how it can help you plan accordingly. Also, check out our Google Ads budget guide.

Are you wasting any of your Google Ads budget? Find out (and fix it!) with our Free Google Ads Performance Grader.

4. The mobile SERP now uses infinite scroll

• Date: October 14
• TLDR: Infinite scroll feature on mobile does NOT impact Ad Rank, DOES change text ad distribution, and COULD impact your metrics.

On October 14, Google announced that the SERP on mobile will now automatically load the next three pages of results as you scroll so you don’t have to tap “See more.” As a result, fewer text ads will show at the bottom of the SERP and text ads can now appear at the top of the second page and onward.

Does this impact Ad Rank? No. The way Ad Rank is calculated will not change and will be recalculated for each SERP—meaning your ad could show on more than one SERP for the same query.

Will this impact ad performance? Potentially. Your prominence metrics like top and absolute top impression share might change. Google says this may increase impressions in your Search, Shopping, and Local campaigns, thereby lowering your CTR, but that clicks, conversions, average CPC and average CPA shouldn’t be impacted.

Note that there is no change for Shopping and Local ad appearance, and that this is for US-English queries only. Google plans to make this available for additional countries and languages next year.

Action we suggest: Keep an eye on your PPC metrics and review these seven smarter ways to approach mobile search ads.

5. New offline conversions import (OCI) helper tool

• Date: September 28
• TLDR: This self-service tool helps you to view and analyze your offline conversion data in Google Ads.

We all know that your first-party data is becoming the MVP as third-party cookies will be going away—it’s privacy-compliant and your most accurate data. But not all of your first-party data is collected on your website.

On September 28, Google launched the OCI helper tool so you can import and analyze your offline first-party conversion data (like calls) to Google Ads. This way you can integrate this behavior into your entire lead-to-sale customer journey and use that data to find similar high-quality leads.

The tool is a self-service platform that businesses can use to import offline conversions as well as implement conversion values. There is first a questionnaire to identify the right implementation steps for your business (depending on your CRM, sales cycle, and more).

Then it will ask you to fill four roles:

• Project Manager: assigns the rest of the roles and communicates between them.
• Digital Marketing Manager: with standard access to Google Ads.
• Website Developer: with admin access to your website’s source code.
• CRM Manager: with admin access to your CRM.

You can assign up to four people per roll, and you can assign multiple rolls to one person. Once the OCI tool has this information, it will put together a customized implementation plan with a progress dashboard and assign out tasks for each role accordingly.

Action we suggest: Give it a spin! And on a similar note, learn how to import all your cost data into Google Analytics here.

6. Enhanced conversions now available to all

• Date: September 30
• TLDR: All advertisers can now use this solution for accurate and yet also privacy-first conversion tracking.

On September 30, Google announced that enhanced conversions, introduced in the May 2021 Google Marketing Live Stream, are now available in beta for all eligible advertisers. Here's why it matters:

Let’s say a user clicks on a Google ad on their laptop, goes to your website, but doesn’t convert; but then later returns to your site through organic search on mobile and converts. Third-party cookies, which track individuals, across the web, across devices, allow you to see this path from paid ad to organic search to conversion. Without them, the organic visit would be treated as a new user and new visit, not tied to the ad, and the advertiser would falsely believe that their ad did not play a role in the conversion.

With enhanced conversions, you take the first-party data you collect on users from the conversion actions on your website (name, address, phone, email, etc.) and send it back to Google. Google will then match this first-party information to its first-party information (Google user accounts) so it can connect a user’s behavior on your website to their behavior with your ads on Google properties, regardless of device.

The result is the third-party cookie benefit of cross-device conversion tracking, without the third-party cookies. And the privacy piece comes in because the transmitted data is hashed and will be aggregated and anonymized in your reporting.

There are three ways to set up enhanced conversions:

• Manually with Google Tag Manager
• Manually with the Google sitewide tagging
• With API

Action we suggest: Start ramping up your first-party data collection and get more familiar with this feature at Google’s help page for enhanced conversions.

7. FLoC testing pushed out to Q1 2022

• Date: October 1
• TLDR: The removal of third-party cookies could be delayed once again.

As we know, Google will be removing third-party cookies at some point in 2022. Since this has a massive impact on advertisers, it is coming up with new features (like enhanced conversions, mentioned above) and technologies to help advertisers accurately report on and effectively target their ads. Not only does this help advertisers, but in general, consumers prefer to get ads served to them that are relevant.

One of those technologies is Google FLoC. No action needed, but this could mean that the death of the third-party cookie could be prolonged.

Image source

Action we suggest: Make sure you understand about what FLoC means for advertisers and that you have the Google Ads tag on your site.

8. Upgraded ad extensions

• Date: October 26:
• TLDR: Upgraded ad extensions (old features taken away, new ones added) will replace existing ad extensions by next year.

On October 26, Google announced that it has rolled out upgraded ad extensions. These extensions will have more features like the ability to pause but will exclude some existing ad extension features, including:

• Device preference for mobile.
• Call extension start and end time.
• App extension ad schedules.
• Price and structure snippet start/end time and ad schedule.

Upgraded extensions will eventually replace the current (soon to be legacy) extensions, but this will be over the course of the year. You can create upgraded extensions in the meantime (via the API or Editor), but note that reporting will be a little wonky. You will only be able to see the combined legacy and upgraded extension data in the summary view.

Eventually, the summary and table views will show the same data, but after August 2022, you will no longer be able to view legacy extension data.

Action we suggest: If you use the API or Editor, try creating an upgraded extension now. Or if you're not familiar with extensions, check out our Google Ads extensions cheat sheet—wwhich we'll be sure to update accordingly!

9. Performance Max campaigns now widely available

• Date: November 2
• TLDR: Performance Max campaigns now available to all; Smart Shopping and Local campaigns will upgrade to PM in 2022.

On November 2, Google announced that Performance Max campaigns, released in beta in October 2020, are now available to all advertisers worldwide. With this automated campaign type, you provide Google with images, videos, logos, and headlines, and Google will mix and match those assets into ads that can run across Search, Display, Discover, Maps, Gmail, and YouTube.

With this campaign type, automation optimizes your budget and bids across channels and you can see performance in the Insights page and Combinations report. Google also shared that Smart Shopping and Local campaigns will both upgrade to Performance Max in 2022.

Action we suggest: Ecommerce and local businesses, get familiar with Performance Max campaigns now since Smart Shopping and Local ads will eventually get moved into this campaign type.

10. Engaged-view conversions now available for video Display ads

• Date: September 27
• TLDR: I mean, it's three sentences:

Google announced on September 27 that engaged-view conversions (EVCs), which have been available for TrueView skippable in-stream ads, Local and App campaigns, are now also available for video Display campaigns.

EVCs, introduced in 2020 as a more robust non-click metric than view-through conversions, are conversions that occur on your site within a particular time frame after someone views your video ad for 10 seconds.

Action we suggest: Check out these seven video ad ideas and brush up on your Display ad design principles to get those engaged views going!

Stay tuned for more updates!

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]]> At this point, we know that resisting Google Ads updates is a bit like… …herding cats. But that doesn’t…

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]]> https://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/a-simple-guide-to-user-generated-content/ Mon, 15 Nov 2021 18:30:30 +0000 https://www.business2community.com/?p=2441579 Today, consumers crave authenticity from brands, and user-generated content (UGC) is the best way to give them just that.

This change in consumer behavior is caused by the fact that people don’t trust advertisements like they used to do.

But not only that, people don’t trust content created by brands as much either.

76% of consumers say they’re more likely to trust content shared by “normal” people than by brands.

And it makes sense, that a brand will speak highly of its own products.

So consumers still need validation that what a brand says is actually true. UGC does that and much more.

But what is UGC and how can you incorporate it into your marketing strategy? Let’s take a look.

What is user generated content

User-generated content is any piece of content (video, image, text, etc.) created by individuals and posted to social media. As the name implies, this is content created by users of a specific social media platform and not brands.

UGC is nothing new. People have been posting about products and services since the beginning of platforms.

That’s because it is a natural thing for people to do. Consumers naturally want to show, recommend, and talk about the products and things they like.

Brands have an important role in the lives of consumers so it’s natural for a person to share them organically with their friends and followers on social media.

And their friends are open to seeing this type of content.

Why?

Because people show, recommend, and talk about products they genuinely like based on their experiences, not for personal gain (in most cases). More on this below.

However, it’s worth mentioning that content created by influencers also counts as UGC, and is still more trusted than brand content even if there is a personal gain.

Why you need user generated content

As a brand, consumers’ opinions matter.

Their opinions have more influence on purchasing decisions than what you might think.

Especially if those people are friends, family, or peers.

83% of consumers say word of mouth has an influence on their purchasing decisions.

User-generated content is essentially online word of mouth.

Let’s take a look at the specific business benefits of incorporating user-generated content into your strategy.

UGC is authentic

Authenticity in this context means that something is truthful and believable.

Content from a brand can be truthful, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that people will believe it since they know there is monetary interest and because there are many examples of false advertising.

People find the content shared by other users truthful and believable in most cases and that’s why it’s so powerful.

90% of consumers say that authenticity is key when deciding which brands they like and support.

UGC provides your brand with this authenticity.

UGC increases consumer trust

To add to the previous point, user-generated content increases the overall trust in your products or services.

If you see a lot of people using, recommending, and mentioning a product you will assume that you can trust that it’s good.

And it’s the same for the opposite case. If you hear a lot of people you know talking badly about a product you will automatically not trust the brand.

Consumer trust is crucial for these reasons.

UGC drives brand awareness

Another benefit of user-generated content is brand awareness.

With more people talking about you online, more people will discover your brand.

In a way, your customers are spreading the word about your products and services for you.

And it doesn’t matter that your customers don’t have large social media followings.

In the end, the numbers add up. So, more UGC will mean a larger reach.

In addition, the awareness that real people create among the people they know is highly valuable because those people will be more likely to convert, which is the next benefit we will talk about.

UGC converts better

We said that user-generated content converts better, but why is that?

Because 67% of people say that they are more likely to purchase a product after a friend or family member shared it on social media.

That’s exactly why.

Trust and authenticity play very important roles in purchasing decisions. When you have these two things together, your content converts better.

This is why so many companies are starting to feature UGC in their ads.

According to Shopify, ads featuring UGC get 4x higher click-through rates and a 50% drop in cost-per-click than average.

UGC builds your brand community

You might have noticed that nowadays there is a lot of focus on building a community around brands, or at least being part of another community.

And that’s because, as we said before, consumer behavior is changing and now more people are choosing to support the brands that offer a better relationship.

Building your community means making an effort to connect with your customers on a deeper level through communication, good user experience, and providing value to their lives.

By sharing and interacting with your user’s content, you show appreciation and build the relationship with your audience.

But also, your community grows as more people create content and talk about their experiences with your brand.

UGC is cost-effective

Organic user-generated content is free! That’s very cost-effective.

However, in most cases, there won’t be enough organic UGC being created that you can use, so you need to encourage, incentivize, and manage it through an ambassador program.

The good news is that even then, it’s very cost-effective.

An ambassador marketing program lets you reward your brand fans for creating constant UGC through free products, commissions, cash, or discounts.

These compensation methods make it extremely cost-effective to have hundreds of your customers producing high-quality content.

More on this below.

How to get and use user-generated content

With all that out of the way, let’s take a look at the two things you need to know in order to incorporate this into your marketing strategy.

How to get UGC and how to use it.

Getting UGC

The first step is to gather every piece of UGC that is posted on social media relating to your brand.

You can do this by looking at your tags and brand hashtags. Ideally, there will be many pieces of content talking about you in a positive light.

It would be great to have usable UGC organically and consistently, however, this will likely not happen on its own.

And if you are looking for a specific piece of content perfect for another marketing campaign, you might have a hard time.

To encourage users to create UGC, you can:

• Create a contest where people have to submit pictures with the products
• Create a social media challenge or hashtag
• Ask for product reviews with images
• Tell your followers to show you how they use your products

But the most effective way is to…

Start an ambassador program

Starting an ambassador program is not as difficult as you might think.

In this type of program, you simply invite your customers and followers to represent your brand through the creation of UGC in exchange for exclusive rewards.

This way, your biggest brand fans are the ones creating amazing content consistently that you can repurpose for other campaigns.

Now picture hundreds of your customers creating UGC each month, driving awareness, referrals, and more.

Below, we give you an example of a great ambassador program you can get inspiration from.

Using UGC

Now that you have collected quality user-generated content, you can repurpose it in several ways.

Social media

The first thing that you can do is share your customers’ content on your social media pages.

This will make your feeds look authentic, relatable, and human.

But it will also show your products or services being used by actual customers.

Website

Use the content you gather and display it on your site to improve your conversion rates.

If you’re selling your products directly through your site, UGC is arguably the best thing you can show to potential customers.

UGC results in 29% higher web conversions than websites without it.

It works the same way as online reviews, which have an important influence on purchasing decisions.

Paid advertising

It’s a fact that ads showing UGC have better results than other types of ads, as we mentioned previously.

And this strategy is especially effective with Gen Z.

84% of Gen Z consumers are more likely to trust a company if it uses actual customers in its ads.

So you should test your best UGC in your ad campaigns to try to gain the trust of the viewers.

In addition, this method is cost-effective since you don’t need to spend as much time and resources producing the ad image or video.

Email marketing

You can also use it in promotional emails.

The point is that user-generated content can improve all your marketing channels because it provides validation to your products.

Showcasing genuine customer experiences will always have a positive impact.

Any way you choose to do this will also build your community.

Over to you…

Now, it’s time that you pay more attention to your customer’s content.

Use that content as much as possible throughout your marketing campaigns and also encourage it.

And finally, start a brand ambassador program to have a consistent stream of UGC.

This post was originally published here.

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]]> Today, consumers crave authenticity from brands, and user-generated content (UGC) is the best way to give them just that.…

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]]> https://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/starting-paid-advertising-where-do-you-begin/ Mon, 15 Nov 2021 14:00:48 +0000 https://locowise.com/blog/?p=7502 If you are considering using paid ads, you need to know where to start. You can lose a lot of money if you’re not careful. Here, we get you going with paid ads.

Social media, similar to email or SEO, is a marketing channel. It's true that, like most channels, "free" only lasts for a while. Clearly, for any business aiming for success with both paid and organic social media, it won't be a matter of choosing one over the other. In fact, paid campaigns can actually support your organic social media efforts over time.

But where to start, and what is it anyway?

We’ve put together a quick guide that should help you get to grips with paid ads on social media, and navigate the often confusing paid landscape. Starting paid advertising should be a fun process, and not intimidating. Hopefully, we can make that happen.

A few examples of paid social media include PPC, sponsored content, and influencer marketing. You can recognise a paid social media advertisement by looking for a “sponsored” or “promoted” tag near the post.

The nature of each social media channel differs from the next. Instagram is primarily visual, Twitter offers short-form content, Facebook features a marketplace for shopping enthusiasts, and LinkedIn is for networking professionals. As a result, paid social media on each platform varies according to the campaign and audience.

Getting started

You firstly need to work out what your paid social media advertising objective is. This is a crucial part of the overall process, because you do need to know what you want to achieve.

The process gives you a goal to achieve and you need to know what that goal is before you settle down into the paid part. Focus on the objectives that will suit your brand and it’s requirements and business goals. For example:

• You might need people to visit your website
• You may want to have them visit a lead page that captures emails
• You may want them to make a purchase (rare when it comes to social ads but still happens)

Once you know your objectives, it’s about looking at the budget issues next.

The good news about social media ads is that they can be targeted much more than ads through some other means. This means you can carefully manage the budget you have, leaving less chance of any nasty surprises. For example, Facebook’s advertising offers are well known for being incredibly targeted, so you can easily make sure that your budget choices are intelligent and focused on maximum ROI.

Social ads are priced on the length of the campaign and your own goals as regards impressions and actions. This means that you have full control over what is happening. The sensible thing to do is focus on the goals you have identified, and then frame those goals as actions within a certain timeframe. This way, you can set up a campaign that is cost-effective.

You can set a limit so that the campaign won’t spend more than you’ve allowed for this type of advertising. As you reach the limit you have set, keep an eye on your credit card balance because these campaigns automatically stop running when the money is depleted. While it sounds beneficial, it can be annoying at best and detrimental at worst to your campaign. A crash in campaign momentum can lead to lost leads and momentum for your campaign if your campaign budget exceeds your credit card limit. Even just a few hours of downtime to pay the balance can be detrimental.

Using Facebook for paid advertising

Facebook Targeted Ads are a great way to advertise on the social network. This is the most robust ad platform available and for good reason. It is built on a bidding system, an advertising process in which advertisers place bids based on their target audience’s preferences. This bid will be entered in a lottery, giving it a chance to be selected and displayed to that audience. Ads on Facebook can narrow an audience to just a few hundred people based on their geography, interests, and demographics. Small businesses can benefit from this, even if it may not benefit most large corporations.

Using Twitter for paid advertising

Your Twitter ad settings will depend on your budget – such as how often, where, and what type of ad to run. You can choose from different formats when you run social ads on Twitter based on your goals.

Using Instagram for paid ads

You can create an ecommerce store right within the app if you have a business profile on Instagram. If you don’t have a website that accepts payments, or if you are in the early stages of ecommerce, this is a plus.

Test, test

The final piece of advice we can offer is to test absolutely every ad move you make. Paid ads can go disastrously wrong, but by taking a sensible view with goals and objectives, and watching your budget, you should be able to move towards good results quickly.

You can A/B test your ads to see which headlines and content work the best, as well as which images and videos are effective. But if you don’t test, you could find that you are not making as much ROI as you could, or even that you are wasting money.

Read more:

• Things Your Company Should Have in Place Before Starting Paid Social Advertising

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]]> https://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/5-tips-that-will-elevate-your-gmb/ Sun, 14 Nov 2021 18:30:50 +0000 https://curvecommunications.com/?p=92098

*Changes are coming to GMB, read our next blog for more information*

Google My Business is the tool that almost every business overlooks, but it holds a ton of value when new and current customers are looking at your business.

Did you know that 46% of all Google searches are for local information? Google My Business is a powerful tool that people use EVERY DAY to find local businesses through a simple Google search. Essentially it’s that little rectangle of business info that pops up when you search, for example, “ice cream near me”. This is why you should make sure that the information that appears in that pop-up is both accurate and trustworthy. When doing so, pay attention to these specific ranking factors:

1. Business information and hours
2. Google reviews
3. Photos
4. Categories and services/products
5. Business-to-customer interaction

So how do you know if you have a good GMB? As a small business, it really comes down to the basics. Learning how to utilize them to your advantage is important in order to stand out and beat your competitors. If your Google My Business account is not optimized, then Google’s web crawlers will instead prioritize a business that is. Today we review five strategies to guarantee your listing is chosen over your competition.

Accurate Business Information and Hours

How many times have you looked up a business, and the hours on the GMB listing say that it’s open? But when you show up to the business, it’s closed. For many potential customers, this happens way too often. It’s also not just small businesses making this fatal mistake, it’s even BIG brands like Sephora, H&M, and plenty of others. They fail to update even this “small” piece of information. It’s wild that these are companies that have massive marketing teams, but even they overlook the power of GMB. So don’t let that happen to you.

The first thing you need to do is log into your GMB, and take a look at the Info tab of your business page.

Go through the page and see if everything looks correct — and pay close attention to your hours and address.

Many businesses will set up their info, and then never look at it again. Not realizing that information may eventually be outdated. The other reason to check often is that Google users and your potential customers can suggest changes to your business info. And Google may go in and change it without you even knowing it. So it’s important to check this page frequently.

If your address and business hours are looking good, take a look at the the More hours and Special hours sections:

This is another important section to not overlook. More likely than not, there are holidays on which you are closed or have limited hours. So make sure you add those in, and routinely update them (they won’t automatically update yearly). Doing this will take out the guesswork for your clients, who are trying to figure out whether you’re open on Thanksgiving, and will save you an angry review or phone call.

Google Support explains “Businesses with complete and accurate information are easier to match with the right searches.” This is why it’s so important to enter all business information accurately and to update frequently so future customers understand where you are, what you do, and when they can stop in.

Google Reviews

Speaking of reviews, positive Google reviews are one of the BEST ways to nudge your GMB up to #1 on Google Search Results without spending money on ads. Google has a system in place that is constantly checking on the trustworthiness of a GMB, so having lots of reviews not only looks good for a customer, but it also helps build trust with Google, because real people are verifying that you exist.

Next, ensure you are replying to your reviews, whether they’re positive or negative. In the age of information, ignorance is a choice. Customers nowadays want proof that a business is accountable to customer expectations. Engaging with both positive and negative reviews shows the public that your organization cares about customer satisfaction. So thank your customers for positive reviews to build loyalty, and don’t shy away from negative reviews. You can turn a disgruntled customer around by addressing the issues raised.

Lastly, ask your customers to leave reviews! The more the merrier, so don’t be afraid to reach out. If you’re overwhelmed with the task of manually asking for reviews, there are plenty of programs (including Curve’s own program, Cedar) that can automate review campaigns for you! Take some stress off your back and generate lots of positive reviews!

Improve Photos and Videos

Another frequently overlooked feature of a GMB page is the photos section. It is proven that a potential customer is more likely to choose a GMB that has over 100 photos, than a business that only has a few. When first creating your GMB – much like with social media, you can add a cover photo and logo. These authenticate your business in the eyes of customers and will bring more click-throughs to your website and more requests for information. Adding photos to your GMB is vital to bringing in new customers.

Some great photo ideas to add to your GMB are:

• Exterior photos of your storefront or office
• Interior photos of your office, business, or store
• Photos of staff working, having fun together, and interacting with customers
• Photos of your owners interacting with staff and customers, holding events, working, discovering new ideas
• Customers interacting with your business or using products and services
• Before/After photos (if applicable)
• Photos of events and holidays
• Photos of products and/or services

There are many ways to add to the photo section of your GMB. But make sure these photos are flattering to your business. For example, don’t post a photo of your storefront looking empty or closed. You want people to be able to recognize your business both on the computer and in real life.

Another option to consider is getting professional photos taken of your business. For example, Airbnb noted a 40% increase in earnings when hosts uploaded professional photos to their listings. High-quality photos can make a huge difference, and in the end they pay for themselves.

Take Advantage of the Posts tab

The Posts tab is probably the most underutilized section of a GMB. It is a great way to directly promote updates and infuse your GMB with information that both Google and potential customers will want to see.

The Updates tab has 3 main sections:

• Offers
• What’s New
• Events

And you can create 4 different types of posts by adding:

• Offer
• Update
• Event
• Product

You can use these sections to promote sales, discounts, and special events that are happening at your business, and it’s 100% free to do so. (Free advertising in this day and age? Wow!) Bonus: it will boost your visibility even more on Google search results, making it easier for people to find you.

Also, according to Google, posts with rich media (GIFs, videos and photos) attract significantly more engagement from customers. To help increase this engagement, your posts need a relevant call-to-action and a link.

Finally, because your GMB is updated with the latest about your business, why wouldn’t a potential customer choose you over any other competition? It’s a win-win for everyone.

Pro tip: One great way to take full advantage of GMB posts is to share snippets from your most recent blog post and link back to the original.

Create an FAQ for Your GMB

Lastly, a great feature that can be added to your GMB, which is overlooked by many businesses, is the Questions and Answers section. The Q&A section of Google My Business can be used to attract customer traffic to your website. The questions and respective answers are showcased publicly and can even show up at the top of your listing. If a customer happens to search for a term related to a question or answer posted within your listing, then your business will most likely be the top search result for said query.

In order to access it, however, you have to go to the actual listing page on either Google Maps or as a Google search result. There you can actually write your own questions to your page and answer them. So this is a fantastic opportunity to sneak in an FAQ!

We suggest picking three commonly asked questions to which your clients frequently need answers. Respond with some great answers to those questions, and you can even add a link to a section of your site to direct traffic there. That way, when people come across your GMB, their questions will have already been answered and they’ll be even more inclined to choose your service/products. It’s also a great way to show you are engaged and that you CARE about your Google audience and provide more information from the get-go.

Bonus tip! Turn on Messaging

Did you know that your GMB has its own messaging system? This is a great way to connect with people by allowing them to contact you directly through Google Maps or Google Search Results. You can access this feature either through the desktop or even the app. However, you have to make sure that you typically reply within 24 hours. If you don’t, Google will sometimes turn off the feature due to inactivity, and it can even hurt your search results.

Google My Business is a feature that has been out for a few years now, and it’s still very much uncharted territory for many businesses. So take some time to play around with it, and try to figure out how you can best benefit from it. It’s so much more than just filling out your business information and then never looking at it again. Google My Business, if used correctly and effectively, can be one of your most valuable tools when it comes to marketing your company.

GMB STRATEGY BOOK

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]]> *Changes are coming to GMB, read our next blog for more information* Google My Business is the tool that…

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]]> https://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/5-tips-to-help-you-build-your-black-friday-marketing-plan-asap/ Thu, 11 Nov 2021 13:00:15 +0000 https://www.business2community.com/?p=2440706 Anyone else amazed that it's already November of 2021? I could have sworn yesterday was January 1st and we'd barely made a dent in all of the possibilities a new year holds. And yet here we are, barreling towards the biggest sales weeks of the year for most entrepreneurs and small business owners.

Ideally you would have had the time this summer to start prepping your holiday campaigns and promotions but if you're anything like most solopreneurs and small biz owners, I'm guessing time got a way from you and you were hopefully spending June and July surrounded by your kids and their never ending snack requests (just me?)

To help you get a jumpstart on the holiday season (and knock out your marketing and promotions planning in an afternoon), below you'll find 5 tips to help you quickly pull together a killer holiday marketing plan.

#1: Let last year be your guide (and stop trying to constantly reinvent the wheel)

Unless you're brand new to entrepreneurship / running a small business, I'm betting you made an effort to promote your products and offers last November and December. Rather than start completely from scratch on your 2021 plans, it's super important you take the time to review the offers and products you put out last year in November and December.

Here's what to look for:

• Which of your offers, promotions and / or product launches worked really well?
• Which ones had potential but need to be tweaked for maximum impact?
• Are there any that you definitely don’t want to repeat this holiday season (either because your audience wasn't interested or because they were painful /unprofitable for you)?

Make note of want went well and what didn't so you confidently pick the perfect Black Friday offer.

#2: Don't rely on discounts alone, choose at least 2 sales tactics to drive urgency (and maximize sales)

It's easy to assume that the only thing that works to drive traffic and sales on Black Friday is deep discounts but if you take the time to really plan things out and prep your audience, you'll get much better results if you take advantage of multiple sales tactics and don't rely solely on discounts.

Other sales tactics include:

• Time sensitive offers: whether combined with a discount or on their own (i.e., a product that's only available for pre-order for 48 hours,) adding a time limit to your offer is an easy way to encourage people to grab their credit card and buy now.
• Limited inventory: this is a really great one to pull out when you're running low on a best selling product (or even an "ok selling one - adding urgency by letting customers know you're almost out can turn a "so so" seller into a hot item quickly.) It's also great for digital product and course sellers. For example, you might run a workshop and limit it to X number of seats to keep the group really intimate and get people to jump quickly to grab a spot.
• Exclusive bonuses: whether you sell physical or digital products, adding on a free product or special bonus for the first X customers or for all shoppers who buy in the next 24 hours is another way to build excitement and urgency without offering a discount.

#3: Keep it simple

This isn't the time to start completely fresh. Nor is it the time to choose a complicated promo that requires multiple landing pages and a lot of scotch tape. Instead, flip through graphics, emails and social media posts that worked well during previous sales.

What can you repurpose or edit slightly to help you pull together marketing assets without completely starting from scratch? That summer sale graphic with the great CTR - now's the perfect time to add some Black Friday flare and re-use it across all of your key platforms and in your sale emails.

#4: Take advantage of tools like Canva to quickly turn one graphic into images for all of your channels and emails

If you haven't jumped on the Canva bandwagon this is definitely the time to give a great (and user-friendly) graphic design tool a try. With a tool like Canva that you can take that killer Summer Sale post you put on Instagram and quickly resize it to fit all of your social channels and Black Friday emails - without hiring an expensive designer.

When you're short on time, reusing and repurposing is the key to crafting a killer marketing plan quickly.

#5: Triple check your inventory (or your tech setup)

You've set up all of these great plans to crush Black Friday but don't forget to make sure you triple check your inventory and get your supply orders in asap if anything's running low.

With the shipping delays this fall, waiting until the last minute means risking unhappy customers and very late Christmas orders.

Sell digital product and courses? Make sure you've triple checked your tech set up so that when your customers buy, they get easy access to their new purchases without having to bombard you with "help, where's course?" emails.

And a bonus tip that's just as important:

Make time to actually enjoy the season. That might mean blocking off vacation days in advance. It might mean running your Black Friday offer a week early so you can enjoy the Thanksgiving break with your kids (and not have to be glued to your phone or computer.)

Or it might mean setting an earlier shipping cutoff than you normally would for Christmas orders so you're not stressing about whether or not your packages will make it in time.

Yes this season can lead to huge sales numbers but it's also a magical time of year and you deserve to enjoy it as much as your customers do. So make your joy a priority and don't forget to breathe!

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]]> https://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/7-proven-copywriting-tips-to-get-more-clicks-on-your-ads/ Wed, 10 Nov 2021 19:00:00 +0000 https://www.stryvemarketing.com/?p=27878 Words make a difference. Copywriting can make a dilapidated garage sound like your future home, it can make George Costanza sound spongeworthy, and it can make online users click your digital ad in a sea of them.

That is—if you know how to write copy.

Our team recently attended the 2021 AdWorld Conference to learn the latest marketing hacks from Seth Godin and other marketing giants. My favourite seminars came from Joanna Wiebe of Copy Hackers and Alex Cattoni from the Copy Posse, who each shared the ingredients of their secret sauce—their proven strategies for copywriting that spark interest and generate clicks.

Here are some of my favourite takeaways:

1. While technology and media change, psychology stays the same

Ads have gone from catalogues to emails, and from flyers to Facebook. Our industry changes fast, but at the root of it all is consumer psychology and that doesn’t change overnight. When it comes to successful ad messaging, we should always keep in mind the “if this, then that” formula to create a clear association between your product and a valuable outcome.

For example, “Free up time & simplify your routine with 12 free meals. Try it today!” may invert the formula, but it still communicates that I can save time, save money, and get free food all by trying Goodfood meal kits. BRB while I go sign up.

In looking at other ads for meal kits, Goodfood is the only one offering anything for free. Everyone mentions delivery. Everyone mentions great recipes. But no one else grabs my attention with free food.

This brings us to the next tip…

2. Separate yourself from the pack by finding your niche

This is ultra-important for companies in saturated spaces. There’s a fridge-full of companies selling meal kits and every consumer is going to have to choose the one that’s right for them. One way you can stand out to consumers is by finding a market niche and calling it out in your messaging.

While Goodfood and Chefs Plate mention recipes and ingredients, Yumba is the only one calling out sustainability. As someone who hates throwing out food and breaking down boxes on garbage day, this scores points with me. Yumba takes it further on their website, using the headline, “Your meals make a world of difference” followed by a quick snippet about their mission to eliminate food waste.

I’ve known the names HelloFresh, Chefs Plate, and Goodfood for a while, but I’d never heard of Yumba. Despite this, if I’m left unsatisfied with Goodfood’s 12 free meals, Yumba would be next on my list because of its niche strategy.

3. “Should” is the new “Could”

As presented by Joanna Wiebe, there’s a big difference in how these two sentences land:

“You could be as famous as Kim Kardashian.”

“You should be as famous as Kim Kardashian.”

“Could” is a powerful word in marketing because it pushes the consumer to daydream about a world where they’re on top. “Should” turns the volume up by suggesting this daydream should be a reality already. You’re good-looking, you’re charismatic, you’re filthy rich, you should be as famous as Kim Kardashian but you’re not. What’s missing? Maybe it’s this course on how to master makeup? It’s even on sale!

The word “should” gasses up the consumer then frames your product or service as the missing ingredient. They’ve been shortchanged and only you and your offering can make things right in the world by giving them the outcome they should already have.

4. Show your audience they’re on their way with “already” and “still”

The customer journey is just that—a journey. Journeys take time. We’ve all asked, “How long until we’re there?” just to be told we’re not even halfway. It’s deflating. It’s exhausting. You may even question why you’ve embarked on the journey to begin with.

But then you hear, “We’re almost there!” and everything changes. You get excited. You’ve made it this far—what’re another few miles? What’s another couple of hours?

You can create this same energy with your copywriting by using words and phrases like “you already” and “still”. Together, these words signal progress and imply that the consumer is getting closer to their goal.

Consider a protein bar with the messaging, “You already work out, but you’re still skinny. That’s because you don’t get enough protein”. The word “already” implies steps have been taken—you’ve stuck to a workout routine—while “still” suggests a lack of progress. What’s missing? Protein bars.

5. Take an unexpected turn to separate your ad from your competitors’

Continuing with the last example, “That’s because you don’t get enough protein” is the expected conclusion. For a company selling protein bars, playing on the idea that you need protein to gain muscle is a good way to get lost in the shuffle. To stand out, follow up “already” and “still” with something unexpected.

“You already know you need protein to build muscle, but you’re still skinny. That’s because all other protein bars cause tapeworms.”

Maybe don’t go that far, but you get the point.

6. Erase doubt with “Even if”

This is the age of cynical consumers. You’ve been sold snake oil too many times to be fooled again. Everything is too good to be true because you don’t look like the people in the commercial. The last thing you bought didn’t work, so why would this one be any different?

Ad messaging isn’t a conversation. You have one shot to not only build interest but wash away all doubt. For example, “Smell like a summer night right before it starts raining” sounds good, but what if your diet consists of tapeworm-infested protein bars? Your copy should anticipate and diffuse any likely rebuttals. Luckily, you can do that with the words, “even if”.

Smell like a rainy summer night even if you worked a 14-hour shift.

Smell like a rainy summer night even if your stench has left countless dead bodies in your wake.

Consumers will look for reasons not to believe. Meet them where they’re at by dispelling these doubts with “even if”.

7. Fear is a motivator

Circling back to the top, as technology and platforms change, consumer psychology (for the most part) stays the same. People will still take action to avoid missing out, to avoid falling behind, and to avoid becoming part of the minority—unless the minority is successful. There’s a reason why millions of copywriters continue to use the phrase, “Millions of people use…”. It’s because 48% of millennials have spent money they didn’t have in order to keep up with friends. 60% of people make purchases because of FOMO, and 36% of people are afraid of feeling like an outsider. Use this to your advantage by communicating what the masses are doing.

Read More:

• Best Email Marketing Software
• Top SEO Marketing Tools
• Best SEO Software: Top SEO Tools for Keyword Research Linkbuilding and Competitor Analysis

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]]> Words make a difference. Copywriting can make a dilapidated garage sound like your future home, it can make George…

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]]> https://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/7-things-you-must-do-before-expanded-text-ads-go-away/ Tue, 09 Nov 2021 20:00:28 +0000 https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2021/11/02/responsive-search-ad-tips In September 2021, Google announced it will be sunsetting expanded text ads in June 2022. This is certainly a large change, but not a big surprise. Plus, Google has given us plenty of lead time.

All advertisers should take advantage of this time and make sure you’re ready when the June 2022 deadline takes effect. So today I'm going to share with you seven things you can work on in your account during this time period. They include:

1. Test expanded text ads now
2. Set up new ETAs for future use
3. Prepare for declining impressions
4. Start using responsive search ads now
5. Establish RSA benchmarks
6. Pin strategically
7. Understand RSA reporting limitations

Let's get started.

1. Test ETA message combinations while you still can

If you’ve been interested in running a specific ad copy test but haven’t gotten around to it yet...now is your time.

Prioritize ad messaging and get ETAs in place now—while you can see all the performance metrics at a granular level—to determine which headlines, descriptions, and combinations work best.

For help with ad copy and testing, check out these posts:

• 6 A/B Tests Where Small Word Changes Made a BIG Difference
• The 5 Mistakes You’re Making in Your Google Ad Copy
• 7 Ways to Write Super Effective Google Ads Copy

2. Create staged ETAs to use later

On June 30 of 2022, you will no longer be able to create new or edit existing expanded text ads...BUT existing expanded text ads will continue running and can be turned on/off as desired.

So with that in mind, I suggest you create as many expanded text ad combinations in your account that you believe you will reasonably use in the future. They can be paused to start, but remain waiting for a future test. This way, you retain the ability to use them since they were already created and all you have to do is turn them on and off.

But be realistic

You’ll notice I said, “that you believe you will reasonably use in the future.” That’s important. As in, don't create and upload every single ad iteration you can possibly think of and then come back to me in a year and shake an angry fist at me for suggesting you bulk up your campaigns. That’s not my goal.

Think critically about which ad variants are important to you to test in the future and upload only the ones that you are confident you’ll use. There’s no need to upload 500 ad variants per ad group if you only test three new ad variants a quarter. Be realistic with this step, but don’t pass up on the opportunity to create the ad variants you want.

3. Be ready for declining ETA impressions

Although I think it’s important to take advantage of ETAs while we have them, I’m also realistic.

Even before this change was announced, we were seeing declining impression counts on expanded text ads compared to responsive search ads in many accounts. My hunch is that trend will continue.

Test as many messages as you can, stage creatives for future tests, but have the expectation that as we get closer to and past the June deadline, RSAs will likely continue to take an increasing percentage of impressions away from ETAs.

4. Activate responsive search ads now

Google’s standard suggestion is that you have at least one responsive search ad active in every ad group of your account.

At this point, I’m on board with them.

Unfortunately, whether we like it or not, RSAs are going to be the new norm within all Google Ads accounts, so it’s in everyone’s best interest that you start getting used to them now. The longer you hold out, the more you’re going to be struggling once the deadline hits.

If you aren't familiar with them, head to this post: Responsive Search Ads 101: Best Practices You Need to Know

5. Establish RSA benchmarks

RSAs nearly always have a higher click-through rate than ETAs. (Notice I said “nearly always.” Don’t @ me with your exceptions.)

Conversion performance, on the other hand, varies widely. Some accounts do very well with responsive search ads and others can really struggle when it comes to getting customers over the final finish line.

Get RSAs active in all ad groups of all search campaigns in all of your accounts now so you can start establishing benchmarks for each specific account. This will be very, very handy when you have to answer to your boss or client about changes in performance.

We began testing a new ad format that is going to be the default moving forward. Rather than giving you generic benchmarks, we tested these in your account specifically and here is the range that we can expect moving forward.

Even if the benchmarks are lower than previous performance, I can guarantee you’ll soften the blow by establishing clear expectations early on. This is the key to building client relationships that last.

6. Pin strategically

One feature of responsive search ads is the option to pin certain headlines and descriptions in place. Note that ads will still always be two headlines and one description at a minimum, with the option for Google to extend them to three headlines and two descriptions, but ads will never be longer than that. Here are some important tips with regard to this functionality.

Use pinning to ensure a CTA in every ad

Not every headline and/or description needs to have a call to action included, but every ad, of course, should. Pin certain components to ensure that every ad variant that’s eligible will contain a call to action.

Pin multiple components to the same position

If you have a few headline variants that are fairly similar, you can pin them all to the same position. As a result, only that group of headlines will show in that position and not anywhere else. This is a great way to treat call to action headlines. You can create four different CTA headlines and pin them all in position two so that placement will always contain one of those four CTA headlines.

Either pin everything or leave gaps

If you have elements pinned to all five ad positions and then also have elements that are not pinned, those unpinned elements will not show. To prevent this, either pin all ad components to a placement or be sure to leave some headlines/descriptions open for Google to dynamically create ad copy for you.

Understand how ad strength works

Ad strength is NOT to be confused with Ad Rank or Quality Score. The ad strength score within Google Ads is designed to give you guidance on seeing better results from RSAs, but it doesn’t impact how often your ad will enter the auction. If you have nosy clients or managers that are regularly in accounts who will pay attention to this, be sure they understand how this metric works. Google explains ad strength here.

Image source

Make ETAs with the RSA framework

Responsive search ads only require three headlines and two descriptions to be added to a campaign and run. You can also pin elements wherever you like within your RSAs.

Ergo...you can basically make an expanded text ad by creating responsive search ads with minimal ad components and pinning them all in place.

Be careful with this

Although this might seem like an appealing option and one that might make sense for users with legal requirements or disclosures, I don’t suggest it for everyone. In the long run, Google Ads is only going to further automate your ad campaigns. The sooner you’re able to adapt and lean into its machine learning to see better results rather than maintain a tight chokehold, the better off you’ll be.

There really are quite a few ways you can customize RSAs to be exactly what you want/need them to be if you take the time to set them up properly.

7. Understand RSA reporting limitations

The reporting for RSAs is also a bit different than ETAs. We’re still able to see the performance at an ad unit level for all the metrics we would want to see. But if you’re leveraging any level of dynamic ad serving, you’ll likely not be able to get an exact picture of which ad combination generated results.

In the image above, you can see the performance for each ad unit, but since the responsive search ad is leveraging dynamic headlines and descriptions, we’re not totally sure which combinations created the performance.

View asset details

By clicking on the “View Asset Details” link below the ad, you can get further insights into performance.

Unfortunately, these further details are very lackluster and don’t always provide the full insights we would like. You’ll notice that all stats are removed aside from impressions. So although you can tell which components were shown the most, you won’t actually know which ones assisted in each aspect of the ad’s performance.

Get a true read on your performance with our Free Google Ads Performance Grader.

Asset performance rating

Additionally, you’ll notice Google has an asset performance rating system:

• Pending: No information on the asset yet.
• Learning: Not enough information on the asset yet.
• Low: One of the lowest performing of its type. May want to replace.
• Good: Performing well relative to other assets of its type. Keep and add more.
• Best: One of the best of its type. Keep and add more.
• Unrated (“—“): Rating not available due to insufficient activity, traffic, or number of similar assets to compare against.

These are...pretty unhelpful if you ask me. But they do give some indicator on what Google is seeing performance-wise for each component.

The important thing about these scores is they DO NOT correlate directly to conversion performance. Just because a component is rated Best, it doesn’t mean it’s generating conversions. To find that out, you’ll need to pin some ad components in place and get more firm data.

Check the Combinations tab

Lastly, you can see some ad combinations by clicking on the Combinations tab up at the top of the asset details page.

Similar to the other page, you’ll still only see an impression count, but depending on how evenly your combinations are being shown, you may be able to infer which variants are driving the performance your ads are seeing.

Be ready for the sunsetting of expanded text ads

Whether you’re upset or indifferent about the change, it’s important to take advantage of the time that you have before the deadline to ensure your account is in as strong of a position as it can be. Whether you focus more on ETAs or RSAs will depend on what you currently have active in your account.

All in all, fight the urge to hold onto your control too tightly by pinning components in all areas or limiting dynamic learning, but don’t accept all “best practices” from Google as the best option for your account. Use this time to test, learn, and iterate, and you’ll be ahead of your competition when the rollout is complete.

Read More:

• Top SEO Marketing Tools
• Best SEO Software: Top SEO Tools for Keyword Research Linkbuilding and Competitor Analysis
• Best Email Marketing Software

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]]> In September 2021, Google announced it will be sunsetting expanded text ads in June 2022. This is certainly a…

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]]> https://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/11-legitimately-scary-ppc-stats-every-advertiser-should-know-survival-tips/ Sun, 31 Oct 2021 14:45:28 +0000 https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2021/10/26/online-advertising-statistics Each October, my friends and I meet throughout the month to watch scary movies leading up to Halloween. But while it’s cool to be spooked in the fun times, it’s not cool to be spooked when you’re running a PPC account.

And unfortunately, there are some truly concerning stats out there that give us advertisers reason to be. So, in the spirit of Halloween, I’m sharing with you 11 actually scary stats that every PPC advertiser should know, and why you should be concerned.

But don’t worry! I’m going to turn these spooky statistics into not-so-scary tips that’ll save you from a PPC nightmare.

1. 94% of people skip over search ads

You read that right. 94% of searchers fly right by your search ads and onto organic results. On top of that, 41% of paid clicks go only to the top three ads on the page. This means that your ad copy and ad rank matter more than ever.

What you need to do

• First, make sure you're regularly testing your ad copy. The responsive search ad format helps out with this, but it's still important to run A/B tests. The right copy will have a higher click-through rate which will improve your ad rank. This will increase your chances of being a part of the percentage of ads that do pull in clicks, and make folks who usually jump to organic results stop in their tracks.

• And most importantly, make sure your ads pack a punch with eye-catching and compelling ad copy! Here’s how:
  • Use emotional words and phrases
  • Follow these tips for writing great ad headlines.
  • Use our 8 best ad copywriting tips (ever!)
  • Avoid these 5 Google Ads copy mistakes

(It also goes without saying that you should have a strong organic SERP presence too.)

2. 96% of iOS users have opted out of app tracking

Last year, just thinking about the infamous iOS14 update that would give users this option was scary. Now that the update is rolled out, it’s even scarier to know that 96% of iPhone users in the US have actually opted out!

Image source

What’s scary about this is that it makes the Facebook pixel far less effective, which leads to inaccurate tracking data, which messes up your conversion tracking and targeting. Even worse, audience sizes are shrinking, causing CPMs to rise.

What you need to do

To work around this issue, be sure to:

• Start using the Facebook Conversions AI (now!).
• Follow our tips to maintain effective Facebook ad targeting in iOS 14.
• Use these seven ways to combat rising Facebook CPMs due to iOS 14.

3. 80% of advertisers rely on third-party cookies

Most paid advertising strategies are built around the third-party cookie. These cookies capture behavioral data which allows you to see how your ad clickers got to your site, what they did on your site, and what they did afterward—making it essential for conversion tracking and retarging audiences. Cookies also enable platforms like Google and Facebook to offer new audiences to target based on interests.

With the eventual deprecation of third-party cookies, reporting and targeting as 80% of advertisers know it will be no more. Google, Facebook, publisher sites, and other platforms are coming out with new tools and technology to help advertisers navigate this shift, but you should be preparing now.

Here's what you need to do

• Strengthen your first-party data collection. Create lead magnets and build your email list with creative calls to action.
• Set up the Google Ads tag on your site to track first-party data—even if you have tracking set up through an import. Go to Tools & Settings > Shared Library > Audience Manager>Audience Sources.
• For Facebook, implement the Conversions API as mentioned above.
• Get familiar with Google FLoC—which is scary in and of itself.

4. 60% of consumers intentionally provide bogus form info

Bad news for your lead qualification efforts. On top of this high percentage of form fakers, 81% of people have also abandoned at least one online form, and most won’t return to complete it.

What you need to do

• Keep your form fields to a minimum. Forms with less than seven fields are more approachable to prospects since they are quicker to complete.
• Use lead form extensions in Google ads, or lead ads in Facebook, since they will prefill the information for users, making your form responses less likely to be fake.
• Let’s not forget targeting! If you have an audience that is eager to convert, they will be happy to fill out your form. Prequalify your audience by testing more precise parameters. Sure, a smaller audience segment may cause a slight drop in leads, but it will boost lead quality.

5. There are ad blockers on 615M+ devices worldwide

Due to more and more devices having VPNs or built-in blockers set up, that number of 615 million is most likely going to continue rising.

What you need to do

Sadly, there’s really no way of getting around ad blockers. However, a multi-channel strategy can make up for your losses by catching your audience elsewhere. For example, OTT ads can’t be skipped or blocked by ad blockers.

6. 40% of advertisers say their PPC budget is lower than they want it to be

Odds are, you’ve been in this position at some point on your PPC budgeting journey. With the demands of digital ads constantly changing, advertisers are feeling the heat. 40% of them say it’s getting harder and harder to maintain a competitive budget in such a heavily saturated space.

What you need to do

While slapping on more budget isn’t feasible for most, you can still get crafty to make your budget stretch further. Depending on your needs, you may need to:

• Reprioritize your marketing channels
• Narrow down your targeting
• Adjust your bid strategy.

For more PPC budgeting help, head to the following:

• PPC Budget Guide: Are You Spending Your PPC Budget Wisely?
• The Complete, Digestible Guide to Google Ads Budgets
• 5 Perilous Mistakes That Will Destroy Your PPC Budget

7. Only 10% of advertisers optimize their Google Ads accounts each week

Plus, 20% of account managers do nothing on their accounts within a single month. The bad news with this one? You could be a part of this statistic! The good news? Your competition could be, too

What you need to do

• Kee an eye on your account and consistently make tweaks to prevent any unwelcome surprises from popping up.
• Get into a PPC routine and be sure to audit your account regularly. To start, try scheduling just a few minutes per week, per month, and per quarter to check on specific areas of your account.

Image source

Don’t know what to optimize? Find out in a minute with our Free Google Ads Performance Grader.

8. Online ads are the least-diverse media type in the U.S.

Only 9% of people claim digital ads are the most diverse media encounter they’ve had. In comparison, network TV ranked much higher at 43%. Moreover, 54% of people don't feel culturally represented in online ads. From all angles, PPC is clearly lacking diversity in a major way.

What you need to do

People are attracted to brands that represent them—not just their pain points and lifestyles, but their cultural background too. We as advertisers can make an impactful change by implementing accessibility and inclusivitiy in our advertising. Plus, the more diverse your ads are, the more people you can connect with and attract. To do this:

• Represent a variety of ethnicities and genders in your images, including those with disabilities.
• Follow these nine tips to make your website accessible.
• Use diverse and inclusive language in your ad copy.

9. 96% of consumers don’t trust ads

Remember earlier how I mentioned that the paid ad space is heavily saturated? We may have even done ourselves dirty according to this statistic.

Paid ads have been on the rise for a long time—so much so that people are becoming desensitized to them. And with 96% of consumers not trusting ads, advertisers have to work harder to prove their credibility.

What you need to do

• A great way to start is by providing social proof. When you make a claim in an ad, people aren’t going to just take your word for it. They will, however, trust the word of a friend, family member, or fellow consumer. That’s why online reviews and reputation management are so important when running paid ads.
• Another tactic is to include credibility "stamps'' in your ads when possible. For example, you might include "NASSM-certified," or "family-owned" in your ad copy.

• You can also include awards and partnership badges in your landing pages. Moreover, try to opt in to attributes available to you, like woman-owned, black-owned, or veteran-owned to achieve that more personal, trustworthy touch.

10. 67% of people say that once a brand loses its trust, there’s no gaining it back

In addition to people being more skeptical of your ads 67% of consumers will lose trust permanently in a brand once said trust is broken—whether it's due to false claims, damaged goods or services, a poor customer experience, or an uninentional mistake.

What you need to do

Don’t lose their trust, of course! But how can you do that?

• Build a strong brand foundation with a mission statement and core values that everyone follows.
• Maintain brand consistency so your customers know your brand well and feel more comfortable when doing business with you. That way, you can stay far away from permanent trust loss and closer to a loyal, life-long customer base.
• Respond to negative reviews. Just because a customer is unhappy doesn’t mean they’ve lost trust in you. A prompt and proper response to a negative review can prevent permanent damage and sometimes even strengthen their trust and loyalty!

Image source

11. “Near me” searches increased 100% between 2019 and 2020

This stat is only scary if you're a national or online brand. The sharp increase, of course, is due to lockdowns from the pandemic, but odds are that “near me” searches will continue increasing. We can use this statistic as a clue to understand today’s consumer habits.

What you need to do

• Even if you’re a national or ecommerce brand, you need to employ a local PPC strategy to be able to relate to your audience. People want products or services to be closer and more instantaneous.
• Double check your geotargeting strategy and ad customizers. Using tactics like dynamic keyword insertion in your ad copy will help your ads better match local queries.

Don’t fall victim to these scary statistics

Leave the screaming to the horror flicks and prevent your account performance from catching you off-guard. Awareness of these shocking data points is the first step to prevention. Like I always say, friends don’t let friends run bad PPC ads. So, to recap, here are my tips to avoid becoming a part of these scary PPC stats:

1. Always be tweaking and testing your ad copy so your ads won’t get skipped over.
2. Use the Facebook Conversions API to prevent data loss from iOS14 App Tracking Transparency.
3. Start collecting first-party data, and try Facebook’s conversion API.
4. Keep your forms concise and use lead forms to avoid fake form fills.
5. Leverage a multi-channel strategy to manage around ad blockers.
6. Get creative with your bidding and targeting to avoid budgeting shortfalls.
7. Get into a PPC routine and stick with it to keep your account optimized.
8. Cater your ads to everyone in your target audience so they will feel better represented.
9. Use social proof, partnerships, and unique identifiers to prove credibility.
10. Maintain brand consistency to safeguard against losing trust (forever!).
11. Always approach PPC from a small-scale, local perspective to keep up with consumer trends

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]]> Each October, my friends and I meet throughout the month to watch scary movies leading up to Halloween. But…

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]]> https://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/4-easy-lead-qualification-strategies-for-better-clicks-conversions/ Fri, 29 Oct 2021 20:00:20 +0000 https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2021/10/25/lead-qualification Racking up conversion metrics on your channels may look great. Having a click-through rate is something most paid media advertisers work towards. But if the majority of those users aren’t quality, then we are looking at vanity metrics.

I like to tell many of my clients I’d rather have fewer leads that we know are likely to convert than waste a bunch of ad spend on users who are not a good fit for their goals.

Couldn't resist.

And that's where lead qualification comes in. In this post, I'm going to cover:

• What lead qualification is and why it's important.
• How to identify your lead qualification parameters.
• Four lead qualification strategies I use with my clients.

Read on to learn how to get leads that will convert into customers, and customers that will stay with you longer.

What is lead qualification?

Lead qualifications about making sure the leads you attract through your ads and other marketing assets are those who are most likely to drive your business goals. Qualified traffic to your website is more likely to take action there, and qualified leads are most likely to become customers. Lead qualification is essential for an effective lead generation process.

MQLs vs SQLs

In the B2B world, you may have heard of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and sales qualified leads (SQLs). MQLs are those who have shown interest in your product or service, but are probably not yet ready to buy—thereby making them qualified for, well, more marketing—namely, nurturing campaigns to move them down the funnel where they can convert from prospects to customers.

SQLs are those who have shown interest in your product or service and are very likely to buy.

Some leads come in as SQLs, while others start as MQLs, and with effective lead management and nurturing, become SQLs.

Why is lead qualification important?

It's obvious that you want qualified leads coming in from your marketing efforts—you want to get more customers. But there's a financial side to it too. If you're running paid ads and you have a high click-through rate, that means you have an appealing offer and/or great copywriting. But is it appealing to your most likely customers?

If you're pulling in tons of clicks, you may be paying less per click, but if you're not getting conversions, what's the good in that? You're not really saving money, you're wasting spend on unqualified traffic.

Speaking of wasted spend, find where yours is with our free Google Ads Performance Grader!

So while click-through rate and cost per click are important, your conversion rates are at the core of your ROI, and at the core of conversions is lead qualification.

How to identify your lead qualification parameters

Knowing your ideal customers and your target audience is essential for knowing what lead qualification looks like for your business. There are also a number of lead qualification formulas that could apply to your business, but the most basic one is BANT:

Image source

• Budget: Can the prospect afford your products/services
• Authority: Are they the ultimate decision-maker for the purchase?
• Need: What is the need they're looking to alleviate? Does it align with those of your long-time customers?
• Urgency: How urgent do they need this need met?

Your landing page copy and the information you request in your forms will help to qualify your leads, but that doesn't solve for the issue of paying for unqualified clicks in the first place. In this next section, we'll cover four ways to qualify your clicks.

Lead qualification strategies

These strategies enable you to improve your PPC lead quality before the user even gets to your landing page.

1. Be specific in your ad copy

The easiest way to tell people they are not the customer you are looking for is to straight up tell them. It makes complete sense to use certain wording in your ads to and have unqualified users not click on your ad. I know in the PPC world it is tough to see a lower click-through rate. But click-through rates mean nothing if those leads are never going to convert into customers.

For example, I had a client that had a CRM product for startups and small businesses. While of course they targeted keywords like “small business crm,” they also targeted many generic CRM keywords that don’t mention “small business.” In these ad groups, we made sure we pre-qualified our leads with ad copy speaking just to small business owners.

With qualifying ad copy, you may be able to target broader keywords without wasted too much spend on unqualified clicks.

We were letting searchers know if they worked for a company with more than 50 people, our CRM wasn’t right for them. Yes, our CTR in those ad groups decreased. But our lead quality increased. And since our CTR decreased, so did our costs. With lower costs and a higher conversion rate, our Cost/Conv. numbers noticeably went down. That is the most important metric to us. And when the quality gets better with a lower Cost/Conv, the decrease in CTR didn’t hurt us at all.

And if you were confused by all that metric speak, check out our Ultimate Guide to PPC Metrics and it will all make sense!

2. Use price extensions

The same mentality can be applied to your ad extensions for paid search. If you have a more expensive product, you probably only want to reach users who have money. Call out the price or the status of your product in your ad extensions.

Good ‘ole sticker shock. If a user sees higher prices, and the user doesn’t have money, they’re most likely not going to click on the ad. I am now saving my ad budget for the right user later on. Not everything needs to be about price either. Maybe you adjust your value messages based on the right user. Make everything fit for the perfect audience you want to reach; not everyone who may be interested in your product.

3. Optimize lead forms for quality, not volume

Both Google and Facebook have lead form type settings for their lead forms. This gives advertisers the option to optimize either for more leads or more qualified leads. Of course, the channels’ default selection will be for more volume. They will encourage you to get more leads which will make your PPC reporting look great. But if you have tested lead forms in these two channels and received junk leads, consider switching your optimization settings to focus on higher quality.

Here is the Google Ads lead form extension option:

And here is the Facebook lead ads form type option:

You can see Google tries to scare us a bit. It warns that you may get fewer leads for a higher cost per lead (which is true). But I am always willing to pay more for leads that are more qualified and are easier for my clients’ sales teams to close. Feel free to create two different forms, one focusing on volume while the other on quality, to see which ones actually drive a more qualified user.

4. Add more questions in your lead forms

Many lead forms on Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora, etc. start off asking users for the bare minimum like name and phone number. In most cases, the fields are auto-populated based on the user’s profile information. This can make the form easy for someone to fill out and submit, but because it is so easy, you may not be pre-qualifying users.

The good news is, most of the channels that offer lead forms allow advertisers to ask more questions or customize questions. Here are some examples:

LinkedIn lead form custom questions

You can create custom questions in your LinkedIn advertising lead forms to ask users for more information. This will make them work a little more, but if they're willing to spend a little extra time giving you more information, they could be more interested in your product. Also, you may ask questions that scare away unqualified users and that’s okay too.

Facebook lead ad custom questions

Just like LinkedIn, you can create custom questions for Facebook lead ad forms. You can have the user type in a response, choose from a list of options, or even create a conditional answer set based upon an uploaded CSV.

Google lead ad additional questions

Google has additional questions too, but you cannot customize them. Instead, you have a list of question options broken out by specific industries or categories. You can add multiple qualifying questions to your lead forms to get more information form your users. Many of them are multiple choice, so if a user doesn’t see the option that describes them in their questions, they most likely will not fill out the form.

Get more out of your budget with lead qualification

Internal data from your CRM will always help you make better optimization decisions to hone in on the right user. But whether you have CRM information or not, you can still put in some effort with your ad copy and lead form settings to try and qualify the user before they even visit your web site. You may see less traffic and less conversions. But if you are qualifying the right users, you will hopefully see better close rates and less churn. To recap, here are the strategies:

1. Use pre-qualifying ad copy.
2. Add price extensions to your Search ads.
3. Optimize lead forms for quality, not volume.
4. Add more or custom questions to your lead forms.

Read More:

• Best CRM Software Tools
• Best Email Marketing Software
• Best SMS Marketing Software

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]]> Racking up conversion metrics on your channels may look great. Having a click-through rate is something most paid media…

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]]> https://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/every-ppc-metric-under-the-sun-how-to-improve-each-every-one/ Sat, 23 Oct 2021 12:00:08 +0000 https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2021/10/19/ppc-metrics If you’re in marketing, advertising, or doing anything related to PPC, odds are you’re not a fan of math. Crazy, I know, with all the data we have to crunch. But, with so many variables, even the savviest numbers wiz can find their head spinning as soon as they log into the platform.

Luckily, a lot of the hard work is done for us automatically through the metrics displayed in our reports. All we need to do is, well, know what they actually mean.

That’s why I’ve put together this complete guide to PPC metrics. Which includes:

• Easy-to-understand definitions for 28 PPC metrics.
• Specific tips on how to improve each one.
• The context you need to determine which metrics are most important to you.

Treat this post as your one-stop shop to tackle PPC data like a pro by knowing every and any metric you’ll ever need.

PPC metrics table of contents

Click to jump to each metric in this post.

Impressions	Top impr. rate	Value/conversion	Average CPM
Click-through rate	Absolute top imp rate	All conversions	Average CPV
Conversion rate	Search imp lost (rank)	Display imp lost (rank)	View-through conversions
Cost	Search imp lost (budget)	Display imp lost (budget)	ROAS
Cost per click	Conversion value	Relative CTR	Invalid clicks
Cost per acquisition	Conversion value/cost	Viewable impressions	Engagements
Impression share	Conversion value/click	Video played to	Interactions

Universal PPC metrics

Like with anything in PPC advertising, not all metrics created equal. There are some metrics that hold enough weight to be acknowledged across any campaign type. Check out these “bread and butter” PPC metrics:

1. Impressions

At the bare minimum, impressions is the perfect starting point when it comes to understanding PPC metrics. An impression is counted whenever someone views your ad, regardless of whether they click on it.

Let’s say your ad shows in a lower position on the SERP. Unless the searcher scrolls down to physically see your ad, you won’t get an impression.

Impressions are usually free unless you choose to pay by impressions versus clicks. You can also have multiple impressions from the same person.

How important are impressions?

Impressions can be telling in any PPC situation. For example, if you have a high number of impressions but a low number of clicks or conversions, this tells you people are not inclined to click on your ads, and that you may need to improve your ad copy, targeting, or something else.

The highlight of impressions is that, at minimum, you’re getting eyeballs on your ad and increasing brand awareness.

How to increase impressions

If you’re looking to increase impressions, here’s what you can do:

• Increase your budget: The more budget you have to play with, the more you’ll be able to bid in Google Ads auctions. If your budget is small, your clicks will eat it up too quickly in a day and you won’t be able to continue bidding (and showing) for more impressions. Adding budget when you can will allow you to balance out your bids day by day for a healthy impression share.
• Use broad match keywords: For search campaigns, try loosening your keyword match types to phrase match (or even broad match) as another go-to for more impressions. Since looser match types like broad or phrase have flexibility to match up to more searches, you’ll be able to show to more people on the SERP.
• Broaden your targeting: This applies to all campaign types, but broadening your location, audience, or other forms of targeting is a given when it comes to getting more impressions.

2. Click-through rate (CTR)

Click-through rate is clicks divided by impressions. Don’t worry, the platform does the math for you! It's the ratio of how many clicks you pulled in in comparison to how many impressions you showed for. It’s displayed as a percentage, and can vary across accounts as well as verticals.

CTR tells you how well your ad copy is resonating with your audience. Similar to our example above, a high number of impressions but low rate of clicks tells us that people aren’t taking action on the ads you’re presenting to them.

How important is click-through rate?

Not only does click-through rate clue us in on how our ad copy and targeting is doing, but it is also one of the three contributing factors when it comes time to assign your Quality Score.

However, click-through rate often gets a bad reputation because it doesn’t always equate to actual money-making conversions. Think of it this way: if you had a high conversion rate but a low click-through rate, you’d want to improve that click-through rate to maximize your conversion opportunities!

What’s a good click-through rate?

This depends on a number of factors. For example, the average CTR for the hobbies and leisure industry on Google Search is 7.45%, 0.38% on Google Display, and 0.92% on Facebook. And other industries have much lower or higher average CTRs.

Use our search advertising benchmarks to identify a good click-through rate for your industry.

How to improve click-through rate

We have many posts on how to improve your CTR, but here are some brief tips.

• Adjust your bids: If you’re on manual bidding, you could try raising your bid to rank higher. Showing up higher on the SERP (or more frequently across other ad types’ networks) will catch viewers’ attention quicker and you’ll be more likely to snag their clicks. If you’re not using manual bidding, try maximize clicks as your automatic strategy since it has the end goal of driving up your CTR. More help with bidding adjustments here.
• Schedule your ads: Ad scheduling is a smart workaround to a higher CTR because it limits what times of the day you show. Inherently, your impressions are lowered. Plus, you’re only serving your ad during times that you bring in the most clicks. Learn how to set up ad scheduling in Google, Facebook, and Microsoft here.
• Improve your ad copy: Enticing ad copy will increase your CTR because people will be more interested in clicking. Try A/B testing your headlines, descriptions, or images (if applicable) to find which type of ad brings in the most clicks for a maximized CTR. Find out what ad copy mistakes to avoid here.
• Use ad extensions: Ad extensions are other additions to your regular ad that allow users to have more to click on. Sitelinks, call extensions, or image extensions are all clickable material aside from your ad copy that can pull in more clicks—boosting your CTR in a jiffy! See our list of nine CTR-boosting ad extensions here.

3. Conversion rate (CVR)

Similar to click-through rate, conversion rate is looking at how often you pull in a conversion in relation to your clicks. This metric takes click-through rate a step further by analyzing the ratio of clicks to conversions, and displaying it in a percentage format.

Conversion rate often holds slightly more weight than click-through rate because it tells you how likely someone is to complete an action once they click to your landing page.

How important is conversion rate?

VERY. This metric is the cornerstone to any ROI-driven advertising strategy. If you don’t have a healthy conversion rate, you know you’re paying for clicks that aren’t converting.

Conversion rates can also tell us a lot about the people who are clicking on our ads and viewing our landing pages.

If your conversion rate is low, you may want to ask yourself one of the following questions:

• Is my ad copy misleading or being shown to the wrong type of viewer?
• Are the actions on my landing page clear and accessible?

Conversion rates let us know whether the people clicking on our ads are at the ready to convert, or confused or hesitant once they arrive.

What’s a good conversion rate?

A good conversion rate may be higher than you think! Like anything PPC-related, however, there’s unfortunately no cookie-cutter answer. Check out our most recent data on conversion rate averages for your industry.

How to improve conversion rate

We have tons of tips on improving conversion rate, but here is a brief rundown:

• Include CTAs in ad copy: Whether it's “schedule an appointment,” “download our guide,” or “sign up now,” anything that lets your viewer know you’re looking for them to complete an action will do. This makes your landing page’s intentions crystal clear. That way, people who click will be ready to convert upon arrival. Check out 11 awesome call to action examples here.
• Improve your landing page
  Getting your viewers to click on your ad is only half the battle when it comes to conversion rates. You have to have your action front-and-center on your landing page to help push forward with conversions. You’ll also want to make sure your landing page is mobile-friendly and has concise copy.
• Change your bidding strategy: Bidding can sometimes make all the difference in your conversion rates. If you’re struggling with a low conversion rate, try the Max Conversion automatic bid strategy that will optimize to bring you in the most conversions possible. Learn about automated and Smart Bidding here.
• Track more conversions: One sneaky workaround to change your conversion rate numbers is to change what you’re actually tracking. For example, you may only be counting purchases, but there could be other meaningful actions on your site that prove to be valuable in the customer journey. The more actions you have to track, the more likely you’ll have a higher conversion rate. Conversion tracking tips here.

Check conversion rate averages for your industry here.

4. Cost (spend)

Cost is the total spend on any asset you’re analyzing with your account. It’s synonymous with spend. It is calculated by adding up the total cost of each click (or impression—depending on your bidding), and it’s displayed in the form of your account’s selected currency.

Are you wasting spend in Google Ads? Find out in minutes with our Free Google Ads Performance Grader.

How to lower spend:

• Refine your targeting: When you’re more selective of when, where, and to whom your ads show to, you’ll be saving on costs. Think of this as budgeting or managing your finances. You’re looking for places to make cuts. For example, this might mean turning off your ads on certain days or showing to a more specific set of locations.
• Use the search terms report to find negatives/exclusions: You may have unwanted costs hiding right under your nose in the search terms report! This is a great place to go when you want to cut down on spend—especially since the search terms report was just updated to include more search queries. Adding negative keywords from your search terms report will help you avoid spending on clicks that aren’t worth it.
• Identify the culprit with a change history report: In order to save on cost, you need to search all corners of your account for sources of wasted spend. To start your account audit, go to change history. In there, you can change your date range view to see when your cost started to go up. Check to see what changes were done around that time to cause that spike.

  Sometimes, it’s just a small asset within the grand scheme of your account. One pricey keyword, audience, ad group, or any other portion of your campaign, is oftentimes all that needs to be paused to save your budget.

5. Cost per click (CPC)

Cost per click is of course the price of each click you bring in. It’s displayed as a monetary average across all the clicks coming from a specific keyword, ad, ad group, campaign, or any other asset you may be analyzing.

How to lower your cost per click

• Improve Quality Score
  The higher your Quality Score, the less Google will charge you per click. This is because it wants to show the most relevant results to its audience, so it’s willing to sacrifice making less off a click to uphold its ad standards. If you improve your Quality Score, you’ll find you can bid less aggressively to bring your average CPC down over time. Understand how you can achieve a good Quality Score here.
• Adjust bidding: Speaking of bidding, your strategy could be the culprit behind your high CPC. Certain automated strategies bid more aggressively depending on the goal they’re reaching for. For example, Max Conversions will bid whatever it needs to bid to bring you in as many conversions as possible—overlooking CPC.

  Or, you may want to lower your individual bids on Manual, your bid cap on Max Clicks, or your targets for ROAS or CPA. These all affect your bid level, and inherently, your average CPC results. Know what bidding strategy will work best with your CPC here.

• Pause other assets in your account: Let's say you have an ad targeting a competitive location, audience, keyword, other component. This competition will drive up your CPC since you’ll have to bid more to keep up.You need to lower your CPC, but you can’t bear to part with that targeting because the conversions on that ad are high value.

  Instead of pausing that ad, you could instead pause other, lower-value ads in your account. Even if they don’t have super high CPCs, pausing them will still lower your overall CPC so you can afford the high CPC campaign that truly matters. Learn what to look for to lower the CPC in your own account.

Check out the full Facebook ads benchmarks report here.

7. Cost per acquisition (CPA)

Cost per acquisition can also be known as cost per action, cost per lead, or cost per conversion (I always joke that CPC was already taken, so they went with CPA). It’s basically the same idea as cost per click, but with conversions. This metric takes your total number of conversions in relation to your total spend.

The best part about conversion-related metrics is that conversion actions are extremely customizable. Usually, when people think of a conversion they immediately equate it to a purchase, a phone call, or a lead form-fill. However, what you choose to track as conversions is totally up to you and your business needs.

For example, while a page view, chat messages, or a video play may not directly equate to money made on your end, counting those types of indirect actions as conversions may make sense for your business’s goals. Remember, though, whatever you decide to track as conversions will impact metrics like CPA.

How important is cost per acquisition?

To most accounts, it’s usually considered one of, if not the most, important metric. This metric tells us the “bang for our buck.”

If you’re an ecommerce account, though, it’s more likely you’ll be concerned about ROAS over CPA. ROAS is the revenue tracking sister metric to CPA—which we’ll get into later in the post!

What’s a good cost per acquisition?

There isn’t really any clear answer to this or average benchmark, since CPA measures cost per conversion, where conversion can mean anything you want it to

How to lower cost per acquisition

• Identify areas with highest CPA first: Like we mentioned with other metrics, you need to look at your account from a bird’s eye view. When my clients struggle with CPA, the first place we go is either keywords for search or audience and topic targeting for display.

  Usually you can pinpoint a high CPA from one specific place, like a keyword. From there, you can brainstorm tweaks you can make to either lower the cost or boost the conversions coming from that component.

• Lower your budget: A lower budget equates to less spend. Remember, there are two factors that go into CPA: spend and conversions. Raising conversions will be costlier and take more time. Meanwhile, saving on budget will lower your costs immediately which can help to lower your CPA for the time being.
• Set or adjust your tCPA: If you’re worried about your current CPA, I’m betting you’re already building out your PPC strategy in a CPA-oriented way. If you have a target CPA set up on your current bid strategy (whether that be legacy tCPA or Max Conversions), try adjusting your target to be a realistic goal.

  Your CPA may be high due to automated bidding confusion. If you don’t have enough data in your campaign, or the right target set, Google is probably struggling to bid correctly for an optimal CPA. Get more tips on how to lower CPA here.

Get CPA (and lots more!) benchmarks for Google Ads here.

Search-specific PPC metrics

While some metrics are universal, there are a few that are applicable to specific campaign types more than others. Let’s start with Search-specific metrics.

8. Impression share

This, and the next two, are personally my favorite PPC metrics. Weird, I know. In my experience, advertisers get hung up on the rigid metrics like CPA or conversions.

However, impression share (and impression rates—which are coming next) can tell you a lot about your PPC performance in comparison to the general SERP or GDN space.

Impression share essentially answers the question of “out of all the times your ads could be showing, how often are they actually showing up?” After all, getting your ad in front of people is the first step to success.

It’s a platform-specific metric that looks at your total impressions compared to the total eligible searches (or views on GDN) you could have shown for. It’s displayed as a percentage and can vary by name depending on platform or campaign type.

How important is impression share?

Impression share can tell you if you’re missing out on opportunities that could help grow your business. Impression share carries even more weight if one of your PPC goals is to increase brand awareness.

How to improve impression share

• Raise your bids: The higher you bid, the more likely you’ll be to win auctions and be allowed a chance to gain an impression. Plus, your bids work hand-in-hand with your Quality Score to determine your rank. When you rank higher, the more likely you’ll be able to achieve that impression once you make it on the SERP.

  Again, if you’re not using a manual strategy, adjust your bid limit or targets to be more aggressive. Check out our bid management guide here.

• Adjust your keywords: Most of the time, people think looking at their Quality Score is the first place to go when looking to boost their impression share. However, the keywords and match types you choose can make all the difference on how you perform on the SERP.

  A less restrictive match type can make it tougher to achieve a higher impression share. The text and intent of your keyword can also impact which types of searches you match up to—especially since Google just updated how it analyzes matching behavior.. Get more details on keywords (and keyword intent) here.

• Go after the competition: Be sure to regularly check the Auction Insights section of Google ads to see who you’re sharing the SERP with. They may be bumping you down by outbidding you. While Auction Insights isn’t available for Display, the same logic applies. What can you learn from their ad copy or possibly higher bids that you can apply to your own account? The answer to that question will help you brainstorm ways to increase your impression share. Learn more about Auction Insights here.

Learn how to get your piece of the impression share pie here.

9. Absolute top impression rate

The very first ad on the page is reserved for absolute top impression rate—which is like the “big sister” metric to top impression rate. Absolute top, of course, tells you “out of all the times your ads do show, how often are they the very first ad on the page?” This means your ad is the first thing the searcher sees, which is ideal.

Of course, a high rate for either of these metrics can be tough to achieve. I recommend shooting for your top impression rate to hit about 60-80%, and your absolute top rate to be about 20-30%. Your unique needs may change that, though. For example, the more competition you have, the harder it will be to get a high impression share or impression rate.

10-11. Search impression share lost

Okay, so impression share and impression rates tell us the story of when our ads show up on the SERP. But what happens when they don't? There are two reasons behind why you may be missing out on impressions: either your rank is too low (search impression share lost to rank) or your budget is too low (search impression share lost to budget).

It’s easier and quicker to tackle the latter. You can of course raise your campaign budget, but if that’s not feasible, adjust your targeting to make your budget stretch further.

For the former, you could reevaluate your bidding first as a quick fix. Your max CPC bid is factored in when calculating your rank in any auction. For a longer-term fix, identify any pain points within your Quality Score that you can work to improve on.

For example, you may need to rearrange your landing page or refresh your ad copy.

Conversion tracking PPC metrics

While you should set up conversion tracking for all your campaigns, I will say that these metrics are typically most applicable to Shopping and ecommerce campaigns.

12. Conversion value

Conversion value (conv. value) looks at the sum of values for each of your conversions is the sum of conversion values for your conversions.

Think of this as your quality over quantity metric. We know that a $1000 lead is worth more than a $5 lead. Conversion value helps you understand the total monetary value of your conversions.

That way, if your conversion numbers are low but the conversion value is high, you’re still doing alright! Of course, this metric is only useful if you assigned a value to each of your conversion actions when setting up tracking.

To maximize your conversion value, you may want to start outside of your account. Look at your landing page and evaluate the path your customers take. See if there are steps you can add in or take away to lead them to a more profitable conversion action.

13. Conversion value/cost

This metric calculates your return on investment. It takes your conversion value divided by the total cost of all your interactions. This metric looks at the actions within your customer’s journey holistically to understand how your spend relates to how many steps they took to reach a certain valuable action. A lower conversion value/cost number means you’re getting more out of your ads for less money.

14. Conversion value/click

Conversion value over click divides the total value of your conversions by the total number of clicks (or interactions) your ad gets. Google includes interaction in the definition of this one (even though clicks is in the name) because people can click on or engage with portions of your ad without arriving to your landing page. This metric is helpful when understanding the customer journey and your audience’s behavior. However, it’s not as telling in terms of performance since it’s only looking at the value of conversions and interactions—not actual clicks and conversions.

15. Value/conversion

Not to be confused with conversion value, value over conversion provides an average of how much your conversions are worth. Whereas, conversion value, looks at the total value for total conversions. This metric is an easy, quick gauge of, on average, how much an individual conversion is worth.

16. All conversions

All conversions deserved an honorable mention in this section since it often gets confused with the conversions column. To clarify, all conversions shows every action you may be tracking, even if you opted for them to not be included in your standard conversions column.

For example, if you have a two-step form, you may only count the second step as a true conversion. However, you’ll be able to see the number of completions of the first step under all conversions.

Display & video ad metrics

Search isn’t the only campaign type to get its own metric category. Here are some display-specific metrics to get familiar with.

17-18. Display lost impression share

Display lost impression share (rank) and Display lost impression share (budget)

The basics of these two metrics are the same as they are on search. They tell you what percentage of your missed display or video ad impressions are due to a lack of rank or budget.

While raising budget isn’t always feasible, the nice thing about display ads is they have more targeting variables available than on search, making it easier to improve your rank.

To improve your lost display impression share, try adjusting to a less competitive audience or changing your ad creative. Audience targeting tips here.

19. Relative CTR

If you’re in a highly competitive space, this metric is for you. Your relative CTR tells you display or video ad’s CTR in relation to the industry averages.

20. Viewable impressions

Your viewable impressions metric tells you the number of times your display or video ad was considered “viewable” which means more than 50% of it was seen for more than one second. This helps you understand if your ad was actually looked at.

21. Video played to: 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%

You can probably guess what this metric tells you. Sadly, not every viewer will watch your video ad the whole way through. Luckily, the four “video played to X” metrics tell you how many of your video views were only for a certain length of time. Use this to optimize your video ad content from start to finish!

Learn how to create compelling video ads here.

22. Average CPM

For high-volume video campaigns, average CPM is a helpful metric because it breaks down our total spend by chunks of impressions. 1000 impressions to be exact. Confusing, I know. The abbreviation doesn’t translate well, but CPM stands for cost per 1000 impressions. This metric is commonly leveraged when using CPM bidding.

23. Average CPV

Cost per view is a simple yet supportive metric when it comes to understanding the bang for your buck on display and video campaigns. It averages out about how much each view is worth to you, and you can adjust accordingly if that number seems oddly high.

Since you’re pulling in so many views on display and video, though, it’s usually a pretty low number. If you want to lower it even further, you can try Cost Per View bidding or alternatively, tighten your targeting. That way, when you get a pricey view it will be that much more worth it.

24. View-through conversions

As display and video campaigns are becoming more prominent, so too has this metric. That’s because it finally answers the age-old question of: “If my display campaign has a low CTR and CVR, what is it doing for me?”

View-through conversions tell us how many conversions in your account are from someone who saw, but did not click, on your display or video ad within the last 30 days. This proves the efficacy of your display and video campaigns in growing that brand awareness and triggering a conversion via another route. View-through conversions can tell you if your display or video ads are the primary catalysts to spark a conversion later on.

25. ROAS

Return on ad spend is a major metric for Shopping campaigns, but other campaign types can find this data helpful as well. Similar to conversion value, ROAS tracks the overall revenue your ads are bringing in. It then takes that revenue number and puts it up against your spend.

Shown as a ratio or a percentage, a healthy ROAS can vary from account to account. However, the usual starting point for an ideal ROAS is most commonly about 250-350%.

ROAS can be finicky. To start improving, definitely set a target ROAS on your campaign-level bid strategy. Another option, if you don’t want to fuss over it, is to try Smart Shopping campaigns. And definitely check out my post on How to Improve Google Shopping ROAS with Priority Bidding.

Miscellaneous PPC metrics

26. Invalid clicks

Did you know Google watches out for clicks that could be spam, fake, or from bots? That is the entire point of the invalid clicks column within the platform! This is how many out of your total clicks Google has deemed questionable.

This is helpful if you think you’re being targeted by a competitor or any other sort of click fraud. Google has a complaint form you can use for situations like this so that they can step in and stop any inappropriate activity.

27. Engagements

Engagements are any actions associated with an ad. If someone views your ad, then clicks, those are both considered engagements. The more add-ons you have, like extensions, the higher your engagement rate will be.

28. Interactions

Interactions are the main action associated with an ad. This may be a view, a click, or any other meaningful action done on the ad. This metric is usually more commonly viewed on Display, Video, or Shopping campaigns, since on search this would basically be a click.

Did I miss any metrics? Let me know in the comments!

The post Every PPC Metric Under the Sun (+How to Improve Each & Every One) appeared first on Business2Community.

]]> If you’re in marketing, advertising, or doing anything related to PPC, odds are you’re not a fan of math.…

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]]> https://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/how-technology-impacts-online-advertising/ Thu, 21 Oct 2021 21:00:12 +0000 http://expertmedia.design/?p=8426 The increasing use of mobile phones and wearable devices is changing the marketing landscape. One challenge brands face is engaging with their audiences in real-time on all these platforms and developing relevant, direct response marketing campaigns. New technologies and strategies greatly influence digital marketing. Companies need to act wisely if they want to lead in innovative marketing approaches.

Throwing all of your efforts at a newly launched technology is probably a bad choice. Businesses must modify their marketing strategies to meet the expectations of modern consumers by incorporating new technology that enables more tailored and fruitful contact. It’s critical to comprehend how you might adjust and welcome new opportunities. Let’s examine the influence of some of the digital marketing technologies and trends that will continue to grow in the following years.

Marketing on the Go

The majority of forward-thinking businesses have addressed the requirement for mobile responsive site design. However, there is, however, a lot of potential for development. What is a mobile digital ad anyway?

According to studies, retail conversion rates on smartphones are low when compared to desktop conversion rates. As a business owner, you should still prioritize mobile conversion optimization. Though mobile visitors are searching first on their phone, they often end up buying on their computer. In other words, the mobile experience is still integral to conversions.

Because Google places such a premium on providing mobile-friendly experiences, mobile has a significant impact on search marketing. It’s critical to comprehend the needs of mobile visitors and develop websites accordingly.

Marketing Automation

Marketers must now use automated solutions as a matter of course. Businesses can use marketing automation technologies to streamline, automate, and measure a variety of processes. It boosts not only operational efficiency but also provides valuable data for bettering digital marketing operations. Streamlining operations like segmentation, generating leads, content marketing, client retention, and ROI monitoring can help your company achieve exceptional outcomes. All you have to do now is determine which technology or automation software will best support your marketing efforts.

Marketing on Social Media

Nonstop entertainment and rapid communication have become unavoidable expectations. The reach and variety of choices for engaging audiences are two of the main reasons why businesses are so interested in social media. The use of social media marketing is increasing all the time. In terms of usability and growth, social media platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook are thriving. On the other hand, businesses may have to pay to have an influence, despite the attempts of social media platforms to monetize.

Tailored Content

Every marketing campaign is incomplete without content. The nature of content changes as online marketing evolves. One of the most critical aspects of creating content that connects and converts is personalization. According to research, 94 percent of marketers believe that personalizing the web experience is essential for present and future success. Personalization should be a vital component of every campaign, whether for web design, paid search, email marketing, or social media. Tailored content keeps customers coming back and is a crucial reason why digital advertising works.

Marketing through Video

Video will remain dominant internet traffic, according to Cisco, with quantities expanding fourfold between 2015 and 2020. Businesses that concentrate on developing effective video marketing strategies are more likely to succeed in the future. Including exciting videos on your website, landing pages, social media profile, and other platforms will help you attract more visitors and convert them.

There’s no doubting that technology will continue to change how we market our businesses online. Rapidly expanding marketing methods will continue to aid enterprises in better connecting with their customers. As a business owner, you must concentrate on incorporating creative marketing strategies into your campaigns to achieve long-term growth and a higher return on investment.

Online Advertising and AI

Some have regarded Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a marketing jargon — theoretically a component of impending web advertising technology, but not widespread or well-known enough to be relevant to the great majority of advertising clients. “I don’t hear clients inquiring about it; it’s not relevant to them” is a common theme heard and seen throughout the advertising profession. Despite this, tech titans such as Microsoft and stores such as Nordstrom are jumping on board the AI-Advertising bandwagon. According to a pdf report published by Microsoft, improved accuracy of CTR calculation in sponsored advertising has a significant influence on user search experience and financial revenue. “Even a 0.1 percent increase in accuracy would result in increased earnings in the hundreds of millions of dollars,” they claim.

Google, Alibaba, and Amazon have all launched initiatives focusing on the intersection of AI and big data. The explanation is straightforward: too much good data is not to transform into valuable, usable, and revenue-generating insights. We can be confident that AI is changing the character of internet advertising — for the better – using predictive programming and analysis.

Predictive Programming

Predictive programming is one of the more compelling examples of online advertising technology’s growing sophistication. Individual users’ internet behavioral data is collected and analyzed using this technique. AI can track almost any aspect of a user’s online behavior, including where they go online, what they do there, how long they spend there, what they click or look at, and how they get there.

This generates a large amount of valuable data that can be synthesized into a user profile, which may create more engaging, relevant, and efficiently run online advertising. On the surface, predictive programming appears to be comparable to basic re-targeting, but a closer examination reveals that it is far more intricate and carefully tuned. Retargeting has proven to be highly effective in the ad industry, but it has several drawbacks. For instance, imagine being re-targeted, including all guitar-related things, after receiving a guitar strap as a present. In contrast, predictive programming does not rely solely on a single transaction or internet visit to serve adverts in that sector.

What Is a Digital Ad and How Can It Help Me?

As shown above, the online advertising landscape is rapidly evolving. New technologies have arisen that are altering traditional web advertising and changing how consumers interact with advertising material. This technology is one of the main reasons why digital advertising works. Consider the following technologies, which are increasing advertising ROI and transforming how marketers interact with their customers.

As you can see, technology’s relentless march forward continues to alter the nature of online advertising fundamentally. As these technologies enhance and polish their measurement and return on investment capabilities, they will become increasingly important in online advertising and marketing.

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]]> The increasing use of mobile phones and wearable devices is changing the marketing landscape. One challenge brands face is…

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]]> https://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/the-12-best-tiktok-marketing-tips-that-actually-work/ Tue, 19 Oct 2021 17:00:37 +0000 https://www.business2community.com/?p=2437065

TikTok marketing is different in many ways from Instagram marketing and other social media strategies. And that’s because of the platform’s unique algorithm.

No matter if you run a DTC brand or B2B company, the TikTok algorithm has a great way to show your content to your ideal audience better than any other social media platform. But you need to follow the best practices.

In this article, you will find the best TikTok marketing tactics based on how the algorithm works to help you get the most out of your TikTok marketing efforts.

Why TikTok marketing?

In addition to the massive popularity of the platform, TikTok marketing presents a huge opportunity for companies to connect with their audience on a deeper level and reach new markets.

There is no other social media platform that competes with TikTok in terms of the potential of going viral.

Every day, people with virtually no following get millions of views on TikTok because of the algorithm.

So as a brand, you have even more potential of reaching millions of people since you already have customers who care about you.

In addition, since the number of followers doesn’t influence the algorithm, you can potentially reach millions of people without having to grind to get millions of followers for months, like on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

How does the TikTok algorithm work?

In any platform—Google, YouTube, Facebook, etc.—you need an idea of how the algorithm works to know how your content can be more successful.

In the case of TikTok, the algorithm uses various factors to determine your interests at that specific moment.

Some of these factors are:

• Watching a video from beginning to end
• Hashtags and sounds
• Likes
• Shares
• Comments
• Location
• Language

Through these factors, TikTok quickly identifies if you have an interest in a topic, hashtag, sound, or trend, and immediately starts recommending similar content.

12 TikTok marketing tips you need to try

Even though the TikTok algorithm is amazing at recommending content, it doesn’t mean that you can post anything and be successful.

With that in mind, these tips will give you a greater chance of success on TikTok marketing:

1. Use trending hashtags

Hashtags are an important part of content promotion for any social media marketing strategy.

And in TikTok, they are especially important.

When you use a trending hashtag in a video, the algorithm will recommend it to people that showed interest in that particular hashtag.

So pay attention to the hashtags your target audience uses.

2. Use trending sounds

TikTok allows you to use any sound in its library for your content.

And the sound you use—which can be a song or audio clip—is a key factor for content recommendations.

Probably more important than hashtags.

On TikTok, riding trends in a creative way is one of the best things you can do for your strategy.

Take note of the sounds that are popular at the moment or check out Tokboard, where you can find the top trending sounds.

Make sure you use sounds that are rising in popularity, since those are the ones with more potential.

3. Make TikToks that people see from beginning to end

Getting people to watch your videos in their entirety can be a challenge, but it is worth putting the effort in.

If you think about it, watching a video from beginning to end is the strongest indicator of interest.

TikTok understands this, so having a good completion rate on your videos will get them recommended more.

For this purpose, you need the first second to grab the viewer’s attention, and then retain it for as long as possible.

Build suspense in some way, give the answer to a question at the end of the video, and also do short videos.

It’s easier to watch a video in its entirety if it only lasts a few seconds.

4. Make authentic content

People want authenticity in social media and when making purchasing decisions.

Here, they are not looking for typical corporate content, leave that to other social media channels.

In fact, 90% of consumers say authenticity is key when deciding which brands they like and support.

And TikTok is the perfect platform for this type of content.

If you look at successful TikToks, most of the time it’s simple content that feels authentic.

This can be a little tricky for some brands, but just remember to stay true to yourself and make the content feel human at the same time.

5. Build a community

53% of Americans who follow a brand on social media are more loyal to the brand.

This is because people like to interact with their favorite brands and know them on a deeper level.

So try to build your community on TikTok by interacting with your audience, responding to comments, making content specifically for your customers, etc.

Communication is key when building a community, so try to be transparent and really listen to what your customers are saying.

6. Create and participate in challenges

Challenges are another great tool for TikTok marketers for a couple of reasons.

They strengthen the relationship with your community and allow you to reach many people at the same time.

And most importantly, you get user generated content (UGC). Below we talk more about the importance of UGC.

Just look at the #inmydenim challenge from Guess.

The challenge basically consisted of showing a messy outfit first and then changing into an outfit with denim.

That hashtag now has accumulated over 53 million views.

However, you should also participate in existing challenges whenever you can.

As we mentioned before, riding trends is the easiest way to have success on TikTok.

7. Partner with influencers

This is a fact: people trust influencers more than brands when it comes to products.

In fact, 63% of consumers trust what influencers have to say about products “much more” than what brands say about themselves. And it makes sense.

Even if the influencers are being paid for the promotion, they still feel more trustworthy since they choose what brand to advertise.

Influencers are able to validate your solutions, generate UGC, drive awareness, and increase your sales for this reason.

If you are planning on a short-term collaboration, make sure you add influencers to your product launch strategy.

With an established audience, they can drive the awareness you need.

If you want to partner over a longer period of time, make them your brand ambassadors.

8. Start an ambassador program

It can’t be overstated the importance of user generated content for DTC brands. Why? Because:

• 84% of people say they trust peer recommendations above all other sources of advertising.
• 74% of people rely on social media to inform their purchasing decisions.
• 76% of people say that they’re more likely to trust content shared by “normal” people than by brands.
• Word-of-mouth marketing (like UGC) generates more than twice the sales of paid advertising

And most importantly, consumers want to see the product being used by people with genuine opinions.

People organically create content about the brands that they support and the ones they don’t.

They don’t do it to be paid. They just do it to spread the word about a product they like or dislike. That’s why it feels trustworthy.

The problem is that for most brands, there isn’t enough quality UGC being created organically that they can repurpose.

So they need to create a strategy to incentivize it. Fortunately, there are ways to get more UGC from customers, and that’s by inviting them to become brand ambassadors.

Brand ambassadors are people who genuinely love your brand and create UGC in exchange for a reward. They can be big influencers or people without a large following.

TikTok might be the #1 platform to generate user generated content (UGC) through ambassadors.

The reasons being that TikToks feel more authentic than other social media content and that anyone can potentially create a viral video that drives awareness and sales.

9. Engage with other accounts

On TikTok, people want to have an authentic experience with brands.

To provide this experience to consumers you need to talk to them in your own comment sections and in other people’s TikToks.

This lets everyone know that you are genuinely trying to connect with people.

This is also a good strategy to drive awareness to the fact that your brand has a TikTok account.

10. Post frequently

Due to the algorithm, the more TikToks you post, the better.

It’s not uncommon to see users uploading several videos every day.

By being consistent, your account will grow consistently as well, just like with other social media networks.

Some TikToks won’t do great, but having a consistent schedule will increase your chances of success.

11. Test content ideas

To add to the previous tip, always try new types of content because it’s the only way to find what works for you.

Every brand is different, so not every type of content will be a good fit for yours.

Look at the type of content that appeals to your market audience and try replicating it with your own twist.

However, don’t be afraid of trying new things that you haven’t seen before. The point is to stay true to yourself while making engaging content.

12. Use TikTok ads

Last but not least, you should try using ads.

The best social media marketing strategy always includes a combination of organic growth, partnerships, and paid advertising.

And it’s also the case for TikTok marketing.

In the beginning, you should do as much testing as possible until you find something that works.

When testing, apply the same tips we have talked about to your ads. Authenticity will go a long way on TikTok.

Basically, make ads that feel like TikToks.

To achieve this, you can repurpose your ambassadors’ content for advertising.

This post was originally published here.

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]]> TikTok marketing is different in many ways from Instagram marketing and other social media strategies. And that’s because of…

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]]> https://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/can-we-trust-view-through-conversions-an-experiment-reveals/ Mon, 18 Oct 2021 20:30:24 +0000 https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2021/10/14/view-through-conversions Because display ads tend to have low conversion rates, many advertisers (or their clients) are quick to question their effectiveness and profitability.

The truth is, display ads can have a strong positive impact on your conversion rates—but oftentimes indirectly, making it hard to track or measure.

One metric designed to help us out with that is view-through conversions. Even still, many question the validity of this metric. Can we trust it? In this post, we’re going to cover

• What view-through conversions are.
• An interesting experiment conducted to test their validity.
• Tips on how to track and use this metric.

What is a view-through conversion?

To understand this PPC metric, it’s best to first define a direct conversion (or click-through conversion). If a user sees your ad, clicks on it, and follows through with obtaining the offer, this is called a direct conversion.

A view-through conversion, on the other hand, happens when a user sees your ad, does NOT click on it, but then later returns to your site (whether by organic search or direct) and completes any sort of conversion action then.

The view-through conversion is only counted if it occurs within a certain number of days after a user sees your ad. This is called the conversion window, lookback window, or attribution window, and you can set it to be anywhere from one to 30 days.

However, the longer the time between seeing an ad and making a purchase, the less likely it is that that specific ad led to the conversion. After all, a person will come across many other pieces of content in the 30 days after seeing an ad that could also affect their decision to return to your site and make a purchase.

As a result, shorter lookback windows are best for the most realistic and accurate data.

View-through conversions are important in understanding the true value of your display ads.

But can we trust view-through conversions? (experiment)

This question is by no means a new one, but when it came up for the folks over at PPC agency Teamedia, they took a unique approach in answering it.

When one of their clients saw that the Display remarketing campaign wasn’t generating many conversions, they requested to stop it and reallocate resources to more profitable ad types.

However, the client was only looking at direct conversions, and almost 50% of the campaign’s total conversions were view-throughs.

Even still, the client didn’t think that view-throughs should be counted while calculating the total campaign’s CPA; and without counting view-throughs, the campaign wasn’t meeting the target KPI.

The question

View-through conversions are a measure of how often seeing an ad influences a person to later return to your site and convert. But how do you know that a user is actually seeing the ad?

Yes, Google Ads tells us that an impression is considered a “view” when at least 50% of the ad is onscreen for at least one second. But that doesn’t necessarily mean a user has seen the ad.

How can we trust that these aren’t just fake or made-up numbers Google uses so we’ll keep running our Display ads?

The experiment

So, the folks at Teamedia set up an experiment to see whether view-through conversions were accurately measuring the influence of their client’s Display campaign on future website conversions.

After letting the original campaign run for 30 days, they paused it and then launched a clone of it, but this time with a completely blank banner ad. That’s right, blank white space, no headline, no description, no nothing.

And surprisingly enough, Google approved and served it!

So this way, if Google recorded any view-through conversions from this ad, Teamedia would know that this metric is not trustworthy.

In other words, since view-throughs say that seeing your ad influenced a user to go to your site later—any view-throughs from this invisible ad would be bogus since there was nothing to see.

The results

The original Display campaign (with the regular banner ad) generated 2,418,973 impressions and nine view-through conversions.

The test campaign (with the invisible ad) generated 315,677 impressions and zero view-through conversions.

Teamedia also checked the time lag report in Google Ads to verify that for the past 90 days, all view-through conversions happened within one day after seeing the ad (which was the setting they chose).

So:

• Regular ad: 2,418,973 impressions, nine view-through conversions.
• Invisible ad: 315,677 impressions, zero view-through conversions.

Conclusions

A few caveats:

• This was, of course, a small experiment done for one campaign on one account.
• View-through conversions will never be as certain a metric as click-through conversions, since there is no way to concretely measure a view (let alone any resulting subconscious behaviors) versus a click.
• It’s possible that the absence of view-through conversions in the test campaign was simply due to the lower volume of impressions.

Regardless, we like Teamedia’s creativity of thinking here! And for the sake of this campaign, they could use these results to suggest to their client that view-through conversions can be trusted as an accurate indicator that the display remarketing ad in question was indeed influencing website conversions.

In other words, their client believed that the remarketing audiences they were targeting would come back to their site and convert on their own, without the display ads. Teamedia used view-through conversions to prove them wrong and then conducted a blank banner ad test to demonstrate that view-throughs were reliable.

How to get more value from your view-through conversion data

So if this experiment boosts your confidence in view-throughs (or even introduces you to them!), we have some tips on how to use your view-through conversion data.

Gauge brand awareness

There are many different ways to measure brand awareness, such as through branded search volume, social media mentions, and more. But if you see your view-through conversion rate increasing without having made any changes to the copy and creative of your Display ads, this could be a sign that your brand awareness is getting stronger.

Measure memorability

This post provides some insightful tips on using view-through conversions. The first is that eye-catching ads may produce direct conversions, but memorable ads can lead to those indirect view-through conversions. So you can use this metric to run A/B tests and identify which ads are more “sticky” than others.

Rhyming is a psychological copywriting tactic that can make your ads more memorable. (Image source)

Get a feel for your audience’s shopping habits

The second insight from the article cited above is that view-through conversions can help you understand your audience’s shopping habits. You can get a feel for which of your products or services your audience buys spur of the moment (click-through conversions), versus which ones take more time for a decision (view-through conversions).

Optimize placements

View-through conversions help us to identify if some display or video placements are more powerful than others. For example, let’s say you have the same display ad running on two different pages, each one with the same click-through conversion rate. They’re performing equally, right? Not necessarily. If one placement is showing more view-through conversions than the other, you’ve just identified placement optimization opportunities.

Image source

How do you track view-through conversions?

So all we have left is, how exactly do you track view-through conversions so you can make the above optimizations?

As long as you have conversion tracking set up, you can see view-through conversion data in two different ways.

Google Ads analytics

On Google Ads, you can modify your columns so that it appears in the “Campaigns” view.

This is the tool Teamedia used to measure view-throughs in their experiment.

Google Analytics

In Google Analytics, view-through conversion data is available through the GDN impression reporting feature.

Go to Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels

If you want detailed reports and deep analyses on view-through conversions, you would need additional conversion tracking software. However, either of the two methods above should suffice in being able to optimize your campaigns according to this metric.

A creative approach to view-through validity

For many PPC metrics, different advertisers have different viewpoints on them, depending on their experiences as well as the industry, account setup, and overall marketing strategy of the business being advertised.

And by their nature, view through-conversions have always been on the more fuzzy side of things.

But Teamedia’s approach—using view-throughs to demonstrate the value of a Display campaign, and then running a blank campaign to demonstrate the value of view-throughs—was a great one in determining the validity of this metric to their campaign.

Thank you to Zinaida Pchelintseva and her team at Teamedia—a performance marketing agency specializing in paid acquisition for SaaS businesses.

Read more:

• Best Cheap WordPress Hosting
• Top SEO Marketing Tools
• Best SEO Software: Top SEO Tools for Keyword Research Linkbuilding and Competitor Analysis
• Best Email Marketing Software

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]]> https://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/what-growth-marketing-really-means-22-strategies-to-do-it-right/ Sat, 16 Oct 2021 13:00:47 +0000 https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2021/10/12/growth-marketing To many business owners and marketers, the term "growth marketing" may seem redundant. Marketing is what you do to grow a business, so isn't all marketing growth marketing?

Too many professionals get this definition wrong and end up missing out on major opportunities for growth. So what exactly is it? In this complete guide to growth marketing, we’re going to cover:

• The true definition of growth marketing and its benefits.
• Growth marketing vs traditional marketing and growth hacking.
• How to do it using the five stages of the AARRR framework.
• Growth marketing strategies and important metrics for each stage.

Let's get started.

What is growth marketing?

To understand growth marketing, let’s take a look at it in comparison to traditional marketing.

Traditional marketing focuses on campaign-oriented short-term goals. It’s typically company-centric, largely focused on acquisition, and most of the planning is opinion-based and evaluated annually.

Image source

Growth marketing, on the other hand, is strategy-based with long-term goals in mind. Planning is evidence-based and it focuses on acquisition, retention, and cross-selling and upselling,

Simple example of growth marketing

Let's say your ecommerce business is not making enough money because customers only buy one or two products. The order value is low and the profit doesn’t cover the acquisition costs.

In this case, you might use cross and upselling to get the customer to buy more products the first time, and engagement strategies to get them to buy more often, because with the second or third sale you won't have any acquisition costs to cover—especially if you use email marketing to communicate with your customers.

Growth marketing vs growth hacking

Growth hacking is not the same as growth marketing. Growth hacking focuses on short-term results while growth marketing focuses on the bigger picture. Here's a deeper dive into the differences between the two:

• Growth hacking looks to achieve rapid growth, usually with acquisition, while growth marketing seeks to achieve long-term growth with a set of full-funnel strategies.
• Growth hacking looks at data to experiment and refine an outcome, while growth marketing looks at data to identify patterns and refine a strategy.
• Growth hacking involves hands-on tactics with testing and tweaking, while growth marketing involves automated and algorithmic processes with periodic adjustments.
• Growth hacking is centered around business pain points and goals, while growth marketing is centered around customer pain points.

An example of growth hacking in action (Dropbox)

What's great about growth hacking is that through experimentation and iteration, growth hackers can often develop something unique in a short time—like the Dropbox Referral Program.

The company was having difficulties acquiring new users, and paid ads were not doing the trick. Their growth hack, a double-sided referral program, resulted in a 60% increase in signups.

An example of growth hacking turned growth marketing (Slack)

Slack is the fastest-growing B2B SaaS company in history.

While this freemium communication tool was still in beta, founder Stewart Butterfield used widespread media coverage to invite organizations to request access to the platform and try it out—landing them 8,000 signups in 24 hours and reaching 15,000 signups in two weeks. Now that's a growth hack.

Over the next six months, Slack gathered feedback from these users to refine the product. Once the tool was launched and Slack established its brand and upward growth curve, it could then focus on more consistent and sustainable strategies for acquiring new users and enhancing the platform's experience to retain them. And that's growth marketing.

Slack now has over three million paid users today.

Benefits of a growth marketing strategy

Here are some of the many benefits you stand to gain through a growth marketing mindset:

• Better decisions: Growth marketing eliminates the idea of a gut feeling (as with traditional marketing). This data-packed approach to marketing shows what works and what doesn’t to help you make better decisions.
• Enhanced brand perception: This ideology focuses on understanding the customer journey, delivering better experiences, and establishing personal relationships with the customer—ultimately enhancing your reputation.
• Elasticity: Growth marketing is a scalable strategy. You can scale up or scale back your marketing efforts according to your cash flow instead of blindly spending money on big campaigns.
• Unification: Growth marketing necessitates cross-functional collaboration. The marketing team is as involved as the product and sales team, customer support, and analytics team.
• Achieve revenue targets: With the goal of sustainable progress, growth marketing focuses on agile goals to drive revenue. Rather than shooting in the dark, growth marketing seeks promising targets and works toward achieving them strategically.

Now let's walk through every stage of the growth marketing funnel and its key metrics.

What is the AARRR framework?

AARRR is one of the most popular frameworks for growth marketing. Also known as the Pirate Funnel, this framework divides your growth strategies into five stages and assigns metrics to map this journey.

1. Acquisition: Turn viewers into leads and customers.
2. Activation: Create the aha moment where customers realize the true value of your business.
3. Retention: Keep customers coming back to purchase or staying subscribed.
4. Referral: Turn customers into brand advocates.
5. Revenue: Enhance customer lifetime value.

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Let’s use this framework here to understand the best strategies and metrics for growth marketing.

Growth marketing strategy: AARRR acquisition stage

Your goal with the acquisition stage of growth marketing is to find the right leads and turn them into customers. It's the process encompassed in the traditional AIDA model where you take people on the path from awareness to purchase.

Customer acquisition costs are constantly on the rise. If you want to scale your (bootstrapped) business, you have to build a cost-efficient acquisition strategy. Define your budget for this stage and explore multiple channels to create a set stage for acquiring customers. 51% of companies use at least eight channels to interact with their customers.

Growth marketing strategies for acquisition

This aspect of growth marketing encompasses a number of marketing strategies and channels, but here are a few examples.

1. Content marketing

Create a lead-generating content marketing strategy through blog posts, ebooks, online courses, videos, and more that inform, educate, and interest your audience. This demonstrates your expertise, authenticates your business, builds trust with your audience, and drives traffic to your website where you can convert them into leads and customers.

2. Create a community around your brand

Add value for your target audience by building a community around your specialty. For example, CRM brand Pipedrive has a knowledge hub dedicated to sales professionals with useful content and the means to share knowledge with their peers.

3. Create a free tool

Always address your target audience’s pain points. Offering them something they need will naturally increase their interest in your product or service. Build something useful—like Hubspot’s set of free tools ideal for different segments of its user base, or WordStream's free Google Ads Performance Grader.

(Get your grade!)

4. List your products on Product Hunt
List your product on Product Hunt to boost your visibility. Optimize your listing with keywords, attractive and visual content, well-timed launches, and upvote invitations

5. Build an automated LinkedIn lead generation machine

As a B2B brand, you can make turn LinkedIn into a lead generation machine by optimizing your company page, building a hyper-engaged network, creating value-packed content, and through targeted outreach. You can even build a sales pipeline through video nurture campaigns.

6. Leverage YouTube ads

Running ads on YouTube is both affordable and effective. A top-notch promotional or explainer video can reach a large audience and generate interest—like this one by Hello Fresh.

7. Exit-intent popups

Use exit intent popups to elicit some action from the users.

AARRR metrics for acquisition stage

Since there are so many different strategies involved in acquisition, your metrics will depend on the platforms you use.

• Channel-specific metrics: PPC metrics, SEO metrics, social media metrics, email metrics, and more. An important metric is cost per acquisition (CPA) also known as cost per action or cost per conversion, which is how much it costs to acquire a lead.
• Conversion rate: Test the conversion rate for different channels, including your website, landing page, social media, and emails. This metric compares the total number of conversions within a bigger pool of interactions.
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC): This metric measures the cost to acquire a customer. While CPA is a campaign-level metric, CAC is more of an overarching business-level metric that divides the total cost of all your marketing efforts (online and offline) by the total number of paying customers generated in a given time period.

Don't confuse CAC with CPA!

Growth marketing strategy: AARRR activation stage

The activation stage is when customers using your product or service realize the true and unique value your business offers. So it’s all about providing the best customer experience and integretating that “aha moment” into your customer’s journey.

The fact that a customer is five times more likely to purchase again from you has motivated companies to invest in customer experiences, ultimately fuelling the popularity of growth marketing.

Growth marketing strategies for activation

What makes for the best customer experience? Personalization. 80% of customers shop from brands that create personalized experiences for them.

8. Use personalization technology

Personalization technology enhances the customer experience, building loyalty, multiplying conversion rates, decreasing cart abandonment, and increasing average order value. Ecommerce brands can create a customized shopping experience to suit the shoppers’ preferences, while B2B brands can personalize their website based on behaviors and context with tools like Hyperise.

Another example of personalization technology is dynamic LinkedIn outreach personalization, where you can send personalized messages and images to contact prospects and drive conversion rates.

Head here for more ways to gain and retain clients through B2B marketing automation.

9. Create hyper-personalized email campaigns

Along with your website and videos, you can also hyper-personalize your email campaigns to create more meaningful communication with your customers—from onboarding and welcome emails to feature announcement and feedback emails.

10. Use chatbots and video chats

Customer support is one of the most important aspects of user experience. Automating the sales and support process allows you to optimize communication with your leads and customers. Chatbots and video chat tools are great options for doing so.

11. Conversion rate optimization

For both the acquisition and activation phases, conversion rate optimization is key. By creating a conversion funnel based on the actions you want your website visitors to take, you can find dropoff points and identify ways to patch them up through segmentation and A/B testing.

Using a data-driven approach, you can remove the guesswork about what your leads and customers like and create the best experience on your website, social media profiles, emails, landing pages, and more.

AARRR metrics for activation

Here are some metrics to help you formulate your "aha moment."

• Active users: The daily active user (DAU) count is crucial to determine user engagement. This metric allows you to see if users find utility in your product or service.
• Abandonment rate: This metric looks at the percentage of users leaving before they complete the desired action. It gives you an insight into the stage where the users are leaving and helps you take the right mitigation measures.
• Activation rate: This metric measures the pace at which new customers find the optimum value in your product or service. You have to define a particular action to deem a user "activated" when performing this action. The activation rate then calculates the number of users who performed this action against the total number of users who signed up.

Your customers will become loyal customers only when they find value in your product or service. Keep an eye on whether they feel satisfied with your brand through these metrics. Evaluating this data will allow you to take timely action and reduce churn.

Growth marketing strategy: AARRR retention stage

The retention stage, as the name suggests, aims to retain your existing customers by providing consistent value that in turn further strengthens customer loyalty and reduces churn rates. It's about proactively managing the customer experience.

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Growth marketing strategies for retention

The best way to retain customers is to engage with them consistently. From the moment they sign up to the moment they buy a product or take a premium subscription, send them helpful content, offers, and support to keep them engaged and taking action.

12. Send personalized email perks

Make the most of marketing automation with email automation tools like MailChimp to communicate with your customers and keep them returning to your website. Use these free small business email templates for help!

13. Run reenagement campaigns

According to RJMetrics, a company with a 2.5% churn rate can become 50% larger in five years than a company with a 5% churn rate. That’s how big difference churn rates can make!

Devise methods to reduce churn rates using targeted reengagenemt emails. Use behavioral segmentation to identify people who have gone dormant and send targeted emails to identify and solve their pain points. Groove did this and reduced their churn rate to 1.6%.

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Find these patterns for your business—understand user behavior at different points on your website or product using data. Evaluate this data to identify patterns of this behavior and arrive at reasons for your churn rate.

14. Run rewards promos and programs

A big part of customer retention is making them feel special. Reward your loyal customers and express gratitude by sending special discounts and offers, early access to sales, a freebie, thank you notes, or new products tailored to them. Give them reasons to feel special and feel closer to your brand.

VIP and loyalty programs incentivize users' loyalty and create exclusivity to build a stronger connection. Sephora's Beauty Insider program is a perfect example of how brands retain customers through appreciation.

15. Build strong employee loyalty

Your customers can only be as happy as your employees. Create core company values and cultivate a culture of freedom and happiness for your employees to strengthen their loyalty towards your company. Their feelings will naturally reflect in how they talk to your customers and ultimately drive retention rates.

16. Create a customer support knowledge base

In addition to providing blog articles and social media content that educate your audience and bring in leads, consider creating a learning hub for your product specifically, like Asana.

Building a knowledge base and hosting online courses will allow you to:

• Establish credibility as a brand
• Onboard new customers with ease
• Troubleshoot any problems
• Enhance customer engagement and satisfaction

AARRR metrics for retention

By analyzing these metrics, you’ll be able to revise your retention strategies for better results and build a solid recurring client base for your business.

• Customer retention rate (CRR): This metric shows how many customers actively use your product or service. It looks at the number of customers who remained with you by deducting the new acquisition in the concerned period.
• Churn rate (for SaaS or app): The churn rate measures how many users have stopped using the product. Also known as the attrition rate, it measures the number of customers who have left the app in a given period.
• Increased average order value: This metric allows you to measure how much customers buy more from you compared to baseline. An increase in the average order value means the customers are happy with your product and eager to buy more.
• Average customer lifespan: An average customer lifespan is the number of days between the customer’s first order date and last order date.
• Reactivation rate: Reactivation is when you’re converting a churned client into an active one. This metric finds the number of churned customers who came back.

Remember, retention is always cheaper than acquisition!

Growth marketing strategy: Referral stage

The referral stage is when you leverage your customers' loyalty for marketing your brand. It's when customers love your product or service so much that they willingly recommend it to others.

Growth marketing strategies for the referral stage

Referral marketing is one of the best approaches out there, and there are different types of referral incentives:

• Referrer saves money
• Referrer helps a friend
• Referrer and friend both get something of value
• Referrer contributes to a social cause

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Here are some referral marketing strategies to try.

17. Create a referral program

The first step to make the most of the referral stage is to create your loyal customer base. When you have this loyal base ready, strategize a referral program to promote your products. Italic’s refer a friend program of $30 credit helps to drive signups on their members-only shopping platform.

18. Leverage early adopters as marketers

Some of your earliest users can act as the best marketers for your product or service. Your early adopters are the risk-takers who align themselves with your brand for its core values. Use their belief in your product or service to market the brand effectively and create awareness.

19. Leverage influencers

Influencer marketing is another great strategy for the referral stage. Connect with popular social media influencers in your industry for collaboration and drive sign-ups and conversions through their audience.

AARRR metrics for referral stage

Referrals can be a game-changer for driving your business growth. Analyze these metrics consistently and build on the tactics detailed above to secure the profits of referral marketing.

• Customer referrals: This metric measures how many clients are willingly referring your brand to others. It gives you insight into your customers’ satisfaction levels.
• Customer reviews: Social proof is the key to driving referrals and conversions. Ask for reviews, follow these tips to get more Google reviews, and then analyze them to gauge your customer satisfaction.
• Influencer recommendations: Measure how many influencers are open to recommending your brand or are organically recommending it on social media.
• Net promoter score (NPS): This score measures customer satisfaction based on an array of factors like customer support, pricing, usability, performance, and overall experience

Turn your loyal customers into brand ambassadors and position influencers to promote your product or service.

Growth marketing strategy: AARRR revenue stage

The last stage is about the revenue you can generate from all your marketing efforts. It seeks to enhance customer lifetime value by delivering better experiences, increasing average order value, and enhancing retention rates.

The rule of thumb for boosting revenue is to triple your customer lifetime value against the acquisition costs.

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Growth marketing strategies for revenue

A lot of the strategies for enhancing customer lifetime value are built into the previous stages of the growth marketing framework. But here are some:

20. Focus on repeat customers

Look at your analytics and identify the repeat customers to improve their experience. The better brand loyalty you establish, the more revenue you can generate.

21. Promote “eyecatcher” products

Promote entry-level products that work well with additional products. In doing so, you can increase signups and sell more products later, ultimately increasing the customer revenue.

22. Hone your pricing strategy

You might try a price increase. If you have strong customer loyalty towards your product, they are likely willing to pay a substantial price for the same.

AARRR metrics for revenue

Your business growth ultimately lies in the revenue you secure. So, measure these metrics to check the revenue you earn and lose with every customer. These metrics are particularly crucial for subscription-based business models.

• Customer lifetime value (CLV): This metric is crucial to determine the overall customer experience. It measures the value of a customer for your company over the period of their relationship (see average customer lifespan).
• Average revenue per user (ARPU): This metric gives you an idea of the revenue you’re generating from each user in a specific duration. It divides revenue generated in a period by the number of average users in that period.
• Annual recurring revenue (ARR): This metric is for subscription products or services. It evaluates the revenue generated every year for a subscription.
• Monthly recurring revenue (MRR): This metric measures the predicted income from subscriptions sold in a month.
• Revenue churn: This metric looks at the revenue lost in a given period. It calculates the MRR lost in a month and deducts the total price of upgrades or additional services bought in the month.

Keep a check on these numbers to fuel revenue-driven growth for your business.

The real definition of growth marketing (recap)

Growth marketing is more than just a buzzword for growing businesses. It's a well-devised plan for sustainable progress and taking your business to greater heights. We've covered a lot, so let's recap:

• Growth marketing is a strategy-based, data-driven approach to achieving sustainable success and improving revenue.
• Growth hacking seeks to reach short-term goals or solve a business problem, with rapid experimentation and iteration to produce a solution or product.
• Growth marketing seeks to achieve dominance in the market over time, with a framework of carefully devised strategies that use automation to tailor to customers' needs and scale.
• Benefits of growth marketing include better decisions through data, improved brand perception, scalability, cross-functional collaboration, and higher revenue.
• AARRR is one of the most popular frameworks for growth marketing and includes acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue.
• Growth marketing strategies and metrics span across the entire lifetime of the customer, not just the campaigns used to acquire them.

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