Online marketing 4U

Why You Should Focus on Designing an SEO-Friendly Website (And How to Do It)

2018-12-06T00:38:00.001-08:00

Your website is the heart of your online marketing efforts. So it stands to reason that it should be built with marketing, rather than aesthetics, in mind. Yes, there is something to be said for having an appealing website, and you should certainly aim to design one that has both form and function. But the mistake that a lot of small business owners make is focusing on form exclusively, and that is where they miss a major opportunity.

Your website can be the most beautiful one in the world, but if you don’t focus on its function, then it’s all for naught. If you want to build a successful website, you need to start with a solid SEO framework to build a site that is easy to find and works seamlessly with your other online marketing efforts.

Why SEO Matters

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is what gets new prospects onto your site. If someone does a Google search looking to solve a problem that they have, and your business is capable of solving that problem, you want your website to be the first one that they see. Think about your own browsing habits: How often do you look at the second, third, or fourth page search results on Google? If your site isn’t ranking on the first page of results, you’re not being seen by the majority of people.

Start with Keyword Research

Ensuring high rankings on search results is why it’s critical to begin the website design process with keyword research. Start by brainstorming the terms you would search for if you were looking for the good or service your business provides. This can and should be a long list—write everything down and don’t self-edit. Google Search Console can also help you identify the terms that are already driving users to your site, which might help you reframe your own thinking on the list.

Then begin to winnow the list down to 12-20 terms; some that speak to the fundamentals of your business and some that speak to a specific intent a user might have when searching. These keywords will inform all of your website design choices from here on out.

Think Like a Search Engine

The way that a human sees your site is very different from the way Google sees it as it crawls through sites looking for information relevant to a given search. You want to make sure that as much of your content as possible is in HTML text format. Images, Flash content, and Javascript are often not seen by search engines as they’re crawling sites, so if all of the important information about what your business does is displayed on your page within these dynamic formats, it’s possible that Google is skipping right past your website when looking for relevant words or phrases.

Using a tool like Google Cache Checker will allow you to see what your website looks like to Google. If your pages are showing up mostly blank, you know that search engines are missing out on crawling the majority of your content, so you’ll want to restructure your site to be more HTML heavy.

Consider Website Structure

In addition to thinking about the way a search engine will see your site, you want to make sure you’re building a structure that makes sense for SEO and for visitors.

Creating a site map can be a helpful way to think about content and flow. What information do you want to group together? What is the logical path that visitors will take when navigating your site? How can you make it easy for users to get from one relevant piece of information to another? And how can you structure your website in a way that enriches the customer journey and encourages users to move down the marketing hourglass?

Once you’ve thought about the user experience aspect of your site, it’s time to think about structure from an SEO perspective. Creating a site with crawlable link structure is critical to making sure that all of your content is seen by search engines. There are a number of reasons why your links might not be crawlable, including if they’re for pages that are hidden behind submission forms, if the links are within the aforementioned Java content that search engines aren’t able to see, or if there are hundreds of links on a given site (search engines will only go through so many links before hitting a limit).

Create Rich Content

Of course, this effort you’ve put into creating a site that’s easy to find, functional, and appealing will all be useless if your site has sub-par content.

As I’ve said before, the goal of this content should be to establish your business as a leading authority in your field. This valuable content will serve you across the board. It makes prospects come to trust you and moves them to the try and buy portions of the marketing hourglass. When you continue to generate new, rich content, it drives existing customers back to your site for more information, keeps you top of mind with those customers, and makes them more likely to repeat and refer.

Not only that, but when your website is filled with valuable content, and you continue to add more on a regular basis, you generate a stream of information that you can use to drive users to your site. You should be housing all of your content—blog posts, webinars, case studies, podcasts, white papers, and infographics—on your website. Then, as you share links to all of this valuable content on social media or via your newsletter, you’re directing all traffic back to your site.

A website, no matter how good it looks, is nothing without a solid approach to SEO. Your website is the most important piece of your online marketing strategy, and so investing the time, energy, and money in creating a site that ticks all of the boxes for form and function is a worthwhile endeavor.

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10 Strategies to Promote Positive Customer Reviews for Your Brand or Business

2018-10-26T08:00:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of factors that go into a customer's decision to make a purchase from your company.

When I'm deciding whether or not to buy something, for example, I typically ask my friends for recommendations, and then do a lot of online research of my options.

And since it's so fast and easy to make purchases online without ever connecting with a sales rep, the internet usually does the selling for you -- and that can have a huge impact on if a customer purchases from you or not.

The fact of the matter is, your company's best marketers and sales reps aren't your employees -- they're your existing customers.

Customer trust in businesses is fading. HubSpot Research found that customers trust recommendations from friends and family over any type of online marketing and advertising your brand can create. And in the absence of trusted recommendations, according to BrightLocal, 85% of consumers trust online reviews are much as personal recommendations -- the single most trustworthy and credible source of "advertising" out there.

HubSpot Research also found that 60% of consumers believed customer reviews were either trustworthy or very trustworthy -- meaning that businesses that can accumulate positive reviews had a good chance of them helping a customer make a purchase decision.

The same BrightLocal survey found that positive customer reviews make 73% of customers trust a business more, and 57% of customers visit a company's website after reading positive reviews. That also means that, in order for businesses to grow in today's competitive, online-first marketplace, they need happy customers sharing positive reviews of their experiences in order to even get visitors coming to their site for the first time.

The good news is, your customers are usually more than happy to help you out with this: The same survey found that, of the 74% of customers who were asked to provide feedback, 68% were willing to do it. So don't be intimidated by the prospect of asking your customers for a favor -- because all you have to do is ask, and they'll likely be happy to help you out.

So, how do you get your customers to write the glowing reviews that help close deals? How do you ensure a customer is satisfied and happy enough to ask for the kind of positive reviews you need? Read on to adapt strategies that will make generating positive customer reviews a cinch.

How to Get Good Reviews

Create different spaces to leave reviews.
Optimize your content.
Create incentives.
Ask at the right moments.
Meet customers where they are.
Ask open-ended questions first.
Respond to every review -- even negative ones.
Share positive customer reviews you've already received.
Give your customers a positive review first.
Ask the customer in person.

1. Create different spaces to leave reviews.

Before potential customers even make it to your website to learn about your business, make sure they can learn about you no matter where they're conducting online research about making a purchase.

There are a few typical third-party sites people consult to learn more about a business or a product:

1. Yelp

BrightLocal found that Yelp and Facebook were consumers' most trusted source of customer reviews in the U.S., so make sure your business is registered and up-to-date. You can learn how to claim your business (or add it, if your business is brand-new) using Yelp for Business Owners.

Make sure you're regularly monitoring communications coming from this profile -- responsive business owners are highlighted with an average response time and response rate that could encourage readers to move forward in the process towards becoming a new customer.

2. Facebook

You should also claim your business' Facebook Page so potential customers can find you to learn more about you without having to leave their social network. This is another site that rewards high levels of responsiveness, so make sure you assign someone to monitor incoming messages across the channels you're trying to optimize for new customer acquisition.

3. Google

Next, use Google My Business to claim your business on the world's biggest search engine, where potential customers might find you if they're searching for information on Google, or searching for directions in Google Maps. (This is of particular importance to brick-and-mortar businesses trying to attract foot traffic -- learn more about local SEO in this blog post.) People also leave reviews using Google, which appear in the search results for your business, as shown below if you Google "HubSpot."

4. Amazon

If you're an Amazon seller, make sure to claim and customize your Amazon page.

Amazon serves up a lot of different results for different searches, so make sure your Amazon page tells your business' story the same way your website does. If a shopper finds your brand over the course of an Amazon search, make sure your Page highlights product details, testimonials, and reviews.

Source: Amazon

5. Better Business Bureau

For businesses in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, you can register with the Better Business Bureau -- another highly trusted source of customer reviews. By claiming your business on the BBB, you can access more candid customer reviews and become accredited on the site -- which lends greater credibility and trustworthiness to you if customers are deciding between options using these reviews and ratings.

There are also industry-specific review sites you should claim if they're popular within your business's vertical -- such as TripAdvisor and Oyster in the travel and hospitality industries, G2Crowd and Finances Online in the software industries, and OpenTable and HappyCow in the restaurant industries. Make sure your contact information, website, hours, and key offerings are available on these more niche sites, too.

2. Optimize your content.

Your customer reviews might be coming in unsolicited from happy -- or unhappy -- customers on third-party sites.

But once people are already on your site, make sure it's easy for them to leave reviews there, too.

Optimize your website, blog posts, social profiles, and emails to provide quick and easy avenues through which to write reviews by:

Setting up website badges to quickly and easily direct visitors to your Yelp, Facebook, and Amazon pages to read and leave reviews
Optimize your website for mobile devices for people who come to your website when they're browsing social or conducting searches on their phone
If you're asking for customer reviews via email, keep the asks short and sweet.

Here's a review request I received from a tour company in Charleston. It wisely included a link to various ways to review the company on the actual receipt of my purchase shortly after taking the tour:

3. Create incentives.

Your time is valuable, and so is your customers', so make sure you're giving customers a reason to leave a review.

Offer incentives to make your customers want to write a review -- such as discount or coupon codes, entrance into a contest for an even bigger prize, or gift cards for coffee, online shopping, or cold hard cash.

A review request (with a caffeinated incentive) from G2 Crowd

4. Ask at the right moments.

Make sure you're soliciting customer reviews at the right moment in their journey with your business to get optimal results.

Think about it: If you ask for a review at the wrong moment, it could result in a customer leaving a negative review that hundreds more people read when considering whether or not they want to buy from your business.

Ask for customer reviews after positive moments along the customer journey, like:

After they experience or demonstrate success with your product or service
When they re-purchase or re-order
After they tag your brand in a post on social media
If they are spending time on your website browsing other products or services
If they refer another customer to you

These are just a few examples of signs that your customer is satisfied enough that they would leave a positive review of your business.

For example, Etsy asked me to review a recent purchase approximately one month after I received it. I ordered a party favor for a friend's bridal shower, so one month later was the right timeframe to make sure I had time to enjoy and use my product.

On the other hand, some products and services will work within different time frames. For ride-hailing app Lyft, I usually receive a prompt to review my experience with my ride and driver immediately after the ride ends. For language-learning app Duolingo, I receive a prompt to review the app in the App Store after completing a lesson or achieving a milestone in the language I'm learning.

5. Meet customers where they are.

Don't email your customers to ask them to leave you a positive review on Yelp.

Instead, make sure your requests match up with the avenue where you want your customer to write a review. If you're sending out an email asking for a customer review, make sure the email links to exactly where they can leave their feedback. If you want reviews on your Facebook Page, send the request via Messenger. And if you have to ask for a customer review cross-platform, make the request as integrated as possible -- for example, by linking to your Yelp page in your email signature, or asking customers to review their purchase from your Amazon store in a follow-up email post-purchase.

Here's a review request I received from a third-party Amazon seller -- along with some helpful tips for how best to use the product I had recently purchased:

6. Ask open-ended questions first.

Don't start by coming out and asking directly for a customer review.

Instead, start a conversation -- and use an open-ended question to kick off the process.

By asking customers "How are you liking the product?" or "Are you ready to renew/purchase again?" or "How was your recent interaction with customer support?" you can start a conversation and gauge their level of satisfaction before actually asking for the review.

This is helpful in two ways:

You can source helpful customer feedback
You can avoid the awkward mistake of asking a customer for a review before learning they had a bad experience

Use the open-ended question to genuinely collect customer feedback -- and to sneakily make sure the customer is happy before offering them a reason to submit a review. There's nothing you can do about negative reviews coming onto various sites, but if there's a customer who needs a resolution, focus on that before you ask them to rate your business.

An open-ended question in an email subject line -- as BioClarity did here -- prompted me to get ready to give an answer as a reply or in the form of a review:

7. Respond to every review -- even negative ones.

Nobody's perfect, and mistakes sometimes happen that result in a customer leaving a scathing one-star review on your website, on Facebook, or on Yelp.

When you get a one-star review, though, make sure to take the time to respond thoughtfully, without being defensive, to come to a resolution. It's the right thing to do if you work in customer service, and it could actually help your business in the long run.

Harvard Business Review found that businesses responding to negative reviews online actually resulted in better ratings overall. Your customers are human beings too, and the value of empathetic and compassionate customer service strikes a chord and actually leads to an uptick in total reviews, particularly positive ones.

Here's an example of how HubSpot responds to reviews on our Glassdoor page. Although not technically "customers," showing prospective employees that HubSpot responds to feedback and takes it seriously helps our employment brand, too.

8. Share positive customer reviews you've already received.

When you start receiving positive reviews from your customers, keep the momentum going by highlighting and sharing them so other customers are inspired to do the same.

On Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Glassdoor, and many other reviews sites, business owners (and site visitors) can mark certain reviews as helpful, which is like upvoting and moves reviews further up on the site so more people can read them. Make sure to periodically do this to positive reviews so your company's page highlights the cream of the crop.

You could also share positive reviews on your brand's social media channels to open up the option to your audience there. You could reshare positive Facebook reviews in a post on your page, or you could format positive reviews as quotes for Instagram to post for your followers.

Social proof is a powerful marketing tactic -- it means that, if customers see other people like them sharing reviews, they're more likely to do the same by following the crowd. So make sure that, in addition to asking for new customer reviews, you're promoting the positive ones you receive across your brand's channels for promotion.

9. Give your customers a positive review first.

If you want customers to leave you a review, you could leave them one first to get the ball rolling.

This may not always be possible (depending on your industry or product), but in a lot of cases, you can get customers to reciprocate your positive words.

If your product or service allows customer profiles to be reviewed -- Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, VRBO, and TurnKey are examples -- then leave them a positive review if you'd like them to review you in return. Of course, if they were bad customers, you don't have to do that, but if you want to garner more reviews, taking the first step could prompt them to leave you one in return.

Another good option is recommending your customer on LinkedIn. If you're in an account management role and you work with individuals over a long period of time, you could leave them a recommendation or endorsement on LinkedIn. Those go a long way for their own personal branding, and might compel them to reciprocate on their own by leaving your business a positive review. And if they thank you for the endorsement, you could politely ask them for a specific review on a different platform during that exchange.

Customer: Thanks for endorsing me on LinkedIn! I appreciate it.

Business Representative: You're welcome! I've enjoyed working with you over the last few months, and wanted to make sure other people know how skilled you are at web design. If you've enjoyed working with me as well, I'd appreciate a review of our product on G2 Crowd if you're up for it.

I only recommend this strategy if you've built a relationship with the individual over the course of working together. If an unknown person starts endorsing the customer for random skills on LinkedIn, that might seem creepy, and likely won't result in them reciprocating.

10. Ask the customer in person.

If you work in a customer success manager or account executive role, and you have close relationships with the portfolio of customers you work with, don't hesitate to add a personal touch, and ask your customers to review their experiences in person.

If you're taking your customers out to coffee or lunch, or if you invite them to one of your company events, keep things conversational, and ask them how they're doing with your product or service. (Ideally, you'll know if they're achieving success or not based on your regular communications, so you'll ask customers that you know are achieving goals already.)

If your customers tell you they're seeing success, let them know that you value their opinion and their loyalty, and that you'd appreciate them helping you get the word out to potential new customers. Remember the data from the beginning of this post? Most customers will leave you a review -- all you have to do is ask.

To learn more, check out the best testimonial page examples we could find.

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How to Improve Customer Loyalty with Digital Marketing

2018-10-25T08:00:00.001-07:00

ou can’t retain what you don’t understand. When focused on constant customer acquisition, it gets easy to get carried away. Okay, so you’ve figured out an acquisition strategy, you’ve made your product/service fit into the customers’ lives. Your unique value proposition (UVP) works – it entices conversion and guides purchase decisions. Do you know what happens after? Where does the user fit after the completion of the sales cycle?

Start by Understanding your Audience

Although it’s fun to continually find new channels and audiences to sell to, it’s far less expensive to retain one. However, retention doesn’t rely on the same drivers as acquisition – the objectives behind them are different, and although the user behavior and sentiment that arise from these two are complementary they are to be addressed separately. Customer loyalty builds from retention. Customer acquisition is merely a doorway to it.

The key takeaway here is to understand that your customers don’t disappear after the sales cycle but continue to engage with your product/service and tie their experience with it to your brand.

So what do you know about your customers exactly?

To complete the picture of your audience behavior before and during the sales cycle and integrate the findings into your retention strategy, you’ll need to layer in a lot of data. What are the Key Data Metrics to take into consideration? You can start by assessing your:

Search Marketing Metrics

How do users find you? What branded/non-branded search queries ultimately lead to the conversion or a point of purchase? What were the top performing landing pages and where was the funnel the leakiest? Can you tie the specific piece of content to the specific user demography that brought you the largest volume of sales?

If you have Google Analytics tracking enabled and integrated with Google Search Console, you will be able to track down these queries for up to 16 months in the past and identify top performing ones. You can further deepen the analysis by tieing these keywords to specific landing pages and identify them as optimal starting points of the user’s journey towards acquisition. This can be broken down even further by correlating this data to your user’s demography, device type, behavior, and interests to identify the audience types that are more likely to convert.

Sales Metrics

How are your sales performing? What is the average order value you are noting? What is the average value of your repeat purchase rate? What are your top performing products/services and is there a correlation to the user’s demography and seasonal trends?

If you have Enhanced E-commerce tracking setup via Google Analytics or otherwise third-party software dashboard for it, you will be able to track all of these and gather valuable insight. The most important thing to keep in mind is that sales metrics highly vary with the volume of the segment analyzed. Seasonal or trending sales can appear as anomalies when looked through short time spans so keep your eyes open and benchmark the data within the same timeframe of a period that precedes it or within the same period the year before.

Acquisition and Referral Channels

Do you know where your customers come from? What are your main acquisition channels? Are they the same channels they discover you on or are they simply the channels that drive most sales? What are the channels that drive the most revenue?

If we assume that your website is your primary conversion point and that you have Google Analytics setup, you can easily answer the aforementioned questions. Visit Acquisition>Overview report to see which channels drive the most traffic and have the least bounce. You can deepen the analysis by changing the audience segment from All users to Converters. If you have more than one goal or goal group setup, you can further breakdown channel performance comparison to a specific goal.

Customer Personas

With all of the above data broken down and layered into a structure, you are now able to visualize the type of audience that is most likely to convert, their paths towards and after the conversion point and how they behave before, during and after they make a purchase.

Establishing a customer persona as a fictionalized representation of your ideal customer will help you market your product better and understand what drove them to chose you as their seller/provider. This is best explained when visualized so let’s lay out an example. Say you’re selling cookbooks and your goal is to increase the number of sales and promote new series for the upcoming Thanksgiving to a new and an existing customer base. Which one of these is easier for you to market?

“We wish to promote [this] cookbook series for this Thanksgiving on Instagram and Pinterest. Our target is women, ages 24-55 that love to cook and have already bought or considered buying a cookbook this year”

“Our goal is to promote [this] cookbook series to Martha. She’s a stay at home mom in her mid-40s that loves to cook. She loves #foodporn pages and shares her dishes on Instagram. She’s conservative and enjoys traditional values so major holidays are a big thing for her as they are the only time of the year when she can cook for the whole family and their friends. Martha has already bought a cookbook from us and checks our Instagram feed and website for community generated recipes at least once a month. She’s really into slow cooking and organic meals.”

See the difference? This kind of a customer persona representation is what you can get from the above-given metrics layered into a structure.

This type of customer analytics is hard to set up and goes layers in complexity. If it’s too much of a challenge for you, you should definitely seek help from a digital agency that has experience in advanced audience analytics, segmentation, and campaign optimization.

Most Common Retention Marketing Tactics and Their Respective KPIs

Now that you know your customer personas and understand their behavior, the ways in which you can work on their retention become much clearer. Retention marketing tactics may vary depending on your niche, market, customers, and objectives, but the underlying framework of defining them remains the same.

Some retention marketing tactics are evergreen and have been validated numerous times. Of course, given the assumption they are driven by the data established in the previous step.

To name a few.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

While mainly considered as an acquisition tactic, SEO offers the number of opportunities to improve customer retention and build loyalty.

This is mainly done via content optimization – both onsite and offsite. By identifying the keywords, content and referral sources your customers engage and interact with, you are getting a step closer to personalizing the content to capture and hold their attention. Leverage search marketing metrics into your SEO retention marketing strategy and create a content roadmap.

Don’t merely focus on short tail keywords but try elevating relevance to the related topics. You can achieve this by exploring LSI keywords and keyword syntagms that target the users’ interest and intent. Let’s get back to Martha and cookbook promotion. Topics that ultimately may lead Martha into buying another cookbook from you are slow cooking recipes, the pantry, and pots used to make them, the choice of ingredients filtered by the season or the way they are grown and packaged. Martha may be lead into buying a cookbook if she identifies herself as a backbone of the family and sees the dinner table as a point of gathering, community and family values. Don’t simply force the user to self-identify as a part of a large segment, but try to personalize their experience.

Some technical aspects of SEO, specifically in terms of onsite optimization like a solid website and information architecture with a valid HTML5 and structured microdata markup will help crawlers better understand the structure and the semantics behind it. This helps both discoverability and personalization of search results pages according to the target user preferences. For example, structural and semantic website markup will help show different results to different people like this:

When Martha searches for a cookbook via a search engine, she will most probably get slow cooking recipe cookbooks as returned results.
When I search for a cookbook via a search engine, I will most probably get an Anarchist Cookbook as a returned result.

Other technical aspects that relate to the website’s usability and performance such as page load time, responsiveness and availability are important SEO factors that underlie user retention and help build loyalty. If your website is inaccessible or hard to load, users will most likely bounce or rarely engage with it.

Recommended KPIs to track:

Number of inbound links
Number of outbound links
The volume of organic traffic
The volume of referral traffic
Search engine result page (SERP) position for the specific set of keywords
Page views per session
Dwell time (average time on page)
Bounce rate

Social Media

Social media are a great channel for building awareness, trust, and loyalty. It resonates greatly in correlation with SEO/SEM retention tactics. Backed up with influencer marketing it’s your doorway to building brand advocates to further deepen the retention and high-quality referrals.

When synched with your established editorial/publishing calendar for SEO retention marketing purposes and combined with branded hashtags and link tracking it becomes a powerful channel for building customer loyalty.

You can leverage branded hashtags and link tracking to identify and explore new opportunities for engagement and tap the source of potential brand advocates. Probably the greatest benefit of social media is the opportunity to engage with your potential and existing customer base in real time. Utilizing chatbots and educating your sales staff to use social media as a part of your customer service is the single most overlooked tactic that does wonders for building retention and customer loyalty.

Recommended KPIs to track:

Number of followers and fans
Engagement rate – both campaign and page specific
Percentage of referral traffic generated through social media channels
The volume of content pushed through as part of marketing distribution
Number of completed customer service requests via social media chat, comments and messaging

Email marketing

The email will never die and it is an underlying medium of all web works and usage.

Email marketing is most commonly used as a primary driver of user retention and to warm upcold leads. Two most common tactics employed via email marketing to improve customer retention are to mail newsletters with the latest news and content updates and to entice repeated purchases by offering discounts and deals to existing customer base.

Content curation for any of these tactics can be synced with your editorial calendar to provide the best results in terms of open rate and CTR. You can further break down your efforts into segmenting email lists according to the user’s preferences, seasonal trends, and demography.

But email marketing should be approached with greater caution than any of the aforementioned. Overpromotion and poor handling can get your whole domain blacklisted and severely damage the trust built so far. The most important thing to note here is that your user is aware of how he got on your mailing list, how will you handle it and that he is given an opportunity to adjust his/her preferences or unsubscribe at any given moment.

When deciding on whether you are going to use your own mailing server or a third party service for it, please consider if you are able to adhere all of the rules listed above and have the ability to measure and track its performance.

Recommended KPIs to track:

Number of emails sent out – campaign specific and overall
Click through rate (CTR) of an email
Open rate of email campaign sent
Repeat purchase rate through the email channel

Monitor, Measure and Optimize for Growth

As aforementioned, in order to truly improve your customer loyalty with digital marketing, you need to understand your customers. There are numerous frameworks for customer analysis to explore and correlate with your retention marketing efforts. Devising a customer retention marketing strategy may vary from businesses to brands but the processes objectives underlying them correlate.

Deep measuring and enhanced analytics of each part of your customer journey is a great start but will give you a ton of unstructured data. The way you leverage this data to ask and give an answer to specific questions about their behavior beyond the completion of the sales cycle will determine your success in building long-term relationships with your customer base.

And from retention rises loyalty and trust.

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3 Predictions For IG Shopping and the Future of Ecommerce on Instagram

2018-10-24T08:00:00.000-07:00

nstagram is rumored to be building a standalone shopping app, IG Shopping. But what would a separate shopping app mean for the future of ecommerce on the platform?

Social media marketer, Thea Neal, investigates.

With more than 25 million Instagram Business profiles, and more than 2 million advertisers, Instagram is constantly evolving, testing new features, and experimenting with new ways to increase the value businesses can get from its platform.

For example, in June 2018, Instagram unveiled its latest standalone app, IGTV. The vertical video app was poised to be a challenger to YouTube, and positioned as a long-form video hub that would focus on creators and not on content found via search. Then, two months later, The Verge published a report that Instagram is developing an additional standalone app dedicated to shopping.

In this post, I’ll take a look at what a separate ecommerce app could mean for the future of Instagram marketing.

How IG Shopping could change ecommerce on Instagram: 3 Predictions

1. An opportunity for Instagram to increase conversions

The Verge noted Instagram’s shopping app-in-development will likely be called IG Shopping. Within the app, users would be able to “browse collections of goods from merchants that they follow and purchase them directly within the app.”

Instagram continues to grow by adopting features from other platforms, like its Snapchat-like Stories or the Pinterest-inspired “Collection” save button. Next, Instagram needs to find a way to harness the purchasing power of eCommerce giants like Shopify and Amazon.

As Instagram grows, so does its importance to Facebook’s bottom line, and Andy Hargreaves, a research analyst with KeyBanc Capital Markets told Recode that he expects Instagram to grow to about 30 percent of Facebook’s ad revenue in two years, as well as nearly 70 percent of the company’s new revenue by 2020:

In order to achieve these targets, encouraging more and more advertisers to invest their ad spend on Instagram will be essential — and one way to do this could be the rumored IG Shopping app. With Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger resigning from the company, we could also see Instagram adopt a more aggressive approach to monetization.

Shopping on Instagram features, that enable users to buy products featured in images and stories, have existed for less than a year, meaning consumers still need to learn they can shop on the platform securely and confidently on a regular basis.

Talking to Refinery29, Instagrammer and regular online shopper, Tamiracle Williams, says she would worry about the quality of products and trustworthiness of the merchants on an IG Shopping app:

“I believe the app would focus on quantity over quality. I used a third-party app awhile back to purchase my best friend a hoodie and it ended up being a Polaroid-sized print on a massive hoodie.”

But despite these worries, brands are definitely seeing success with the current version of Shopping on Instagram. Since the features rolled out, accessories brand Natori has seen a 100 percent week-over-week increase in revenue from Instagram. This could easily be translated to IG Shopping, if users are willing to shift their shopping behavior to the new app.

2. Decreased in-feed Instagram organic reach, but increased intent-to-purchase

Organic page reach on Facebook has plummeted in recent years, forcing marketers to increase paid Facebook posts and move organic-only content to Instagram.

If IG Shopping does make it to our phones, it seems likely that Instagram could take a similar approach by throttling business reach on the feed to encourage brands to move to IG Shopping. The only clear reason a brand would opt to use IG Shopping over Instagram’s feed (paired with shoppable posts) would be to grab eyes from shoppers who have a true intent to purchase, rather than intercepting them in their usual feed. On a platform where your brand isn’t competing with baby and dog photos, content could drive more conversions on IG Shopping.

But could IG Shopping reveal itself as a branded echo chamber? And how would paid ads work on a platform that exists for brands only?

3. Increased sales opportunities for influencers and DIYers

It’s our assumption that IG Shopping will require a business account to post on the platform. Since many influencers have business accounts already, ecommerce platform, Shopify, should be nervous about how this will make things much easier for influencers and small-scale DIYers who use their platform now.

If IG Shopping unveils itself as a highly-integrated ecommerce platform without requiring an entirely separate site to operate on, it almost certainly will steal business from other ecommerce platforms.

Do consumers want another standalone app?

Instagram’s vertical video app IGTV was released in June 2018, and as of August 2018, the feature’s launch partner’s recent videos received about 6.8 times as many views on their feed videos than they did on IGTV posts.

via Techcrunch

As Techcrunch noted, “if IGTV’s launch partners that benefited from early access and guidance aren’t doing so hot,” the platform likely has bigger problems on its hands. The standalone IGTV app has only peaked at #25 overall in the US iPhone app downloads.

How long will it be before Instagram Stories is a standalone app? Instagram Messenger? The future of ecommerce on Instagram relies on how easy it is to shop on it, but the continued development of more apps will likely contribute to the adoption rate of the platform.

After all, why would you shop on IG Shopping when you could keep shopping on the Instagram app you already have?

But however it’s executed — a standalone app or increased shopping features within Instagram’s main app — it feels clear that Instagram sees eCommerce as hugely important, and lucrative, part of its business going forward.

What are your thoughts on IG Shopping and ecommerce on Instagram? Let me know in the comments.

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Optimizing Your E-Commerce Checkout Process for Maximum Conversions

2018-10-23T08:00:00.000-07:00

Your shopper has smoothly navigated the first few steps of the purchase funnel. They have moved through awareness, interest, and consideration and into the intent to purchase. Their items are in the cart, but something happens, and they abandon the journey at its crux. As an online retailer, this is probably your worst nightmare.

Digital marketers have spent years trying to make e-commerce checkout processes as seamless as possible. As a result, they’ve come up with one general guideline that encompasses multiple solutions: the checkout process should be as brief, simple, and distraction-free as possible.

Shoppers should not encounter any friction in the checkout process. Even the smallest inconvenience could cause them to give up and find the product elsewhere. There are a few key considerations to keep in mind when working to optimize your e-commerce platform’s checkout process for decreased abandonment.

Allow Guest Checkout

This cannot be stressed enough: do not force your shoppers to create an account in order to check out. Offer it as an option, but always make guest checkout readily available. In a 2016 survey, 23% of individuals that abandoned their shopping carts did so because they had to create an account. That’s nearly a quarter of all lost sales.

Many e-commerce companies use account creation to capture emails, but this can still be done separately. Ask them to enter their email in the guest checkout, and provide them with the option to opt-in for special offers. What really irritates shoppers most is creating and remembering a password.

Another alternative is to allow social sign-in. As most people are already signed into their social accounts, and this method doesn’t require password creation, this is a much easier way to go about it.

Make It Mobile-Friendly

With Google’s recent rollout of mobile-first indexing, in which Google favors the mobile version of websites for their index, having a mobile-friendly site is crucial. To further solidify this, current reports show that 19% of all US e-commerce sales take place on a mobile device. This figure is estimated to reach 27% by the end of this year.

These numbers will only continue to increase. Therefore, testing your checkout process for mobile-friendliness is a must. To begin, access the Google Search Console’s mobile-friendly test, and plug in your site URL to see how it performs.

Manually test your checkout’s mobile usability, also. Access it via your mobile device and keep an eye out for fields that are cut off, dropdowns that don’t work, or buttons that are difficult to select. The mobile checkout process should also closely resemble the desktop checkout process, so as not to confuse shoppers that may access their cart through both devices.

Simple Forms & Fields

It can be tempting to try and get all the info you possibly can out of customers. A checkout process with an extraneous amount of fields is a major turn-off. While there are certain high-value questions you can include, know where to draw the line.

For example, including a field for date of birth in order to offer your customers gifts and incentives for their birthday is a high-value ask. Make sure to make the reasoning for asking this known. Other kinds of fields, such as “How did you hear about us?” and “Would you like to refer a friend?” should be avoided if possible. Just seeing these fields in a checkout can make customers groan and turn away.

Evaluate the potential payoffs of the additional fields you wish to include in your checkout form. If it provides an opportunity to upsell or increases the likelihood of customer retention, go for it. But, if it’s solely self-serving, forego it. Questions that provide advertising metrics fall under the latter. Run trackable campaigns to obtain this information instead.

Clear Error Messaging

It happens to most of us. We fill out a form, hit submit, and receive an error message that something was filled out incorrectly. Maybe the field is highlighted in red, but that’s the extent of information the error message has provided you. You try re-entering the information every way you know how, unable to determine exactly what the error is.

Error messages should be specific, detailing exactly what is wrong with an entry, whether hyphens need to be inserted in a phone number, or a credit card expiration year needs to be four digits instead of two.

In addition to this, error messages should be appropriately placed where users can clearly see them after submitting the form. If a user hits submit at the bottom and the submission fails, but the error message is all the way at the top, it could take a user minutes before they scroll up and notice this.

Error messages should be placed on/around the fields in question, as well as within the user’s immediate eyesight. Otherwise, they’ll give up and go back to Amazon.

Less Is More

The ultimate lesson to be learned here is that your checkout process should be as uncomplicated as possible. This might require some A/B testing, as what works for some retailers may not necessarily work for others. For example, in light of making checkout simple, numerous retailers are experimenting with a single-page checkout.

In theory, a single-page checkout compounded by the aforementioned suggestions should boost your conversions. Behavioral studies show that the fewer clicks it takes to complete an action, the higher the conversion rate.

To maximize the convenience of your checkout process, you may also want to implement Google Autofill. This feature will fill out a shopper’s information for them, allowing them to breeze right through the checkout process. Once your customers know what they want, they want to get it as quickly as possible. They’ve spent enough time trying to research and locate the product in question, which means they’ll be all the more grateful for an easy checkout process – and all the more likely to return.

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Analyze Your Facebook Ad Campaign Failure

2018-10-22T08:00:00.000-07:00

Facebook advertising is a nearly $40B dollar industry. The company’s revenues from advertising have been growing in double digits for nearly a decade now. Inevitably, a significant chunk of this revenue comes from new advertisers who are still coming to terms with the do’s and don’t’s of this medium.

If you are one such advertiser, chances are that your campaigns are still not offering you the kind of returns you were looking for. Even seasoned advertisers with years of Facebook ad experience under their belt routinely see their ROI dip over time. Analyzing the factors that move the needle and contribute to the success or failure of a campaign is important to ensure the longevity of Facebook advertising for your business marketing strategy.

Reverse engineering the failure

There are a number of reasons why a campaign fails – poor ad copy, high CPC, poor engagement and low click-throughs. Analyzing the exact reasons your campaign failed may not be possible without knowing the marketing objectives in the first place.

A discount store may look at sales to measure the success of a campaign. A B2B SaaS tool, on the other hand, may look at the leads generated through the process. There may also be media organizations that seek engagement and visibility through advertising. A failure is essentially a campaign that does not meet its stated objectives.

To study the causes behind the failure, it is important to establish the desired benchmarks at each stage of your advertising campaign. Let us take the example of a discount store targeting sales through their Facebook ads. With a $100 advertising budget and a CPC of $1 per click, the store is likely to see 100 clicks. If the advertiser targets 10% conversion at a margin of $15 per sale, then the campaign should achieve 10 sales making $150 in net revenue. Accounting for the $100 advertising investment, the profit, in this case, is $50.

$1 per click –> 100 clicks –> 10% conversion –> $150 net revenue

In the case of a failed campaign, the advertiser may end up making less than $150 in net revenue. To know why it failed, it is important to benchmark each of your metrics against the stated objective. Did the average CPC shoot up much over $1 per click? Or did you fail to get 100 clicks out of a campaign? If these metrics were not a problem, then the failure can be attributed to conversion.

Fixing the issues

Once you have identified the source of your campaign failure, the next step is to look at ways to fix them. Issues in the early stages of the campaign (like poor CTR) indicate two things – either you are targeting the wrong audience or your ad copy is not optimal.

There is more than one way to build a targeted audience for your ad campaign. Facebook’s ‘Custom Audience’ tool allows advertisers to upload their own customer file for the campaign. This is useful if you are targeting buyers of one product to advertise another product. For instance, you could build a list of people who purchased a best-selling book and can advertise to these buyers when the sequel is out.

You could also look at the ‘Lookalike Audience’ feature to scale up this list to reach other users whose profile is similar to the users in the customer file you have uploaded. But please note that this is Facebook’s own projection and may hence not yield desirable advertising objectives.

Other ways to target include using Facebook’s ‘Interest-based targeting’. This is handy if you already have a solid persona of your buyer. It is a good idea to hyper-target your audience to a very narrow niche and measure your conversion rates before expanding it further to include a broader niche. This way, you can continuously measure the impact of increasing audience sizes on conversion, and may thus tweak your ads accordingly.

At the same time, it is also worth pointing out that having too small a niche for a high budget ad campaign may backfire. With a very small audience, there is every likelihood for the ads to be displayed multiple times to the same user. Studies show that when the frequency is increased from 1 per user to 2, the average CPCs rise by 45%. When the frequency is increased to 5 per user, the CPC tends to nearly double. It is hence important to keep your audience size relative to the ad budget

If your campaign fares reasonably in terms of CTR and only fails at the conversion stage, the possible reasons could either be due to a poor landing page or user experience. One common problem among eCommerce businesses, for instance, is the ‘surprise’ charges in the form of shipping fee or taxes that are over and above the advertised price. These factors are known to cause cart abandonment.

To keep the user experience seamless is worthwhile for advertisers to consider native Facebook tools for conversion. For instance, advertisers could deploy chatbots that use the Facebook Messenger application to engage with prospective buyers and capture their lead information. Advertisers could also make use of the ‘Store’ option to promote products and convert customers from within the Facebook interface.

By keeping the UX consistent from the point of touch to conversion, advertisers can make sure that external factors like webpage loading time or design do not impact conversion.

Establishing best practices

Ad management is a continuous process. Campaigns that delivered stellar results in the past may fail to match your benchmarks other times. It is thus important to keep a close eye on what factors contribute to the rise and fall of the various metrics so that your ads can be tweaked to ensure high performance over the long term.

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UTMs and URLs: 10 optimization tips

2018-10-14T22:57:00.000-07:00

UTMs can be tricky to get right. But once you’ve incorporated them into your marketing analytics, there is no going back. The insights they provide are invaluable.

Taking your tagging to the next level can seem like a daunting task – especially if you haven’t got the initial implementation quite right yet. But these ten tips will help you test, tweak, improve and take your UTMs up a notch.

If you’re a complete beginner, check out our introduction to UTM parameters. But for anyone looking to improve their UTM campaigns, we’ve got a range of tips from the Rebrandly team and some marketing pros with experience using UTMs. Check them out:

1. Set out strict naming conventions

One of the trickiest things about UTMs is the fact that they are case sensitive. If you’re not consistent in your labeling, you can easily end up with several sources in Google Analytics that should really just be one. Carefully and consistently naming your tags cropped up as advice from several of the marketers we spoke to. Here’s what they had to say.

“UTM parameters have been one of the most useful tactics to really measure and track what’s working,” says Larissa Murillo, the Marketing Manager at MarketGoo. “The first way it made us evolve was correctly and consistently labeling campaigns. When you see conversions coming from a tag labeled “page” or “CTA” with no other context, and then conversions coming in from the same campaign under a similar but not-quite-the-same label, it makes you want to scream!”

This is how Larissa keeps track of hers:

Using UTMs correctly allowed MarketGoo to be strategic in where it invested resources.

“When we started out we didn’t have a large team or limitless budget to experiment with various campaigns and rich media or content creation… UTM tags were a great way to identify content that was bringing in leads and conversions – we figured out case studies and niche landing pages had the most potential,” she explained

When working with groups, Inbound Marketing Manager at Agile IT, Sean Spicer, recommends using a UTM building spreadsheet with set drop-down selections. This will prevent team members from entering their own values.

“UTM codes are case sensitive. I once joined a company and in my initial research found the following mediums, “email, EMAIL, Email, EMail, eMail, and even emale” making reporting a bit of a pain. At the very least, make sure everyone in your marketing department knows that all of your UTM codes should be created in lowercase.”

2. Avoid spaces

As well as avoiding uppercase letters, you should never use spaces either. Spaces aren’t allowed in URLs. If you use one when creating a UTM parameter, it will turn into “%20”, which is a substitute for the space bar. This will look messy and be difficult to read so it’s best to use dashes instead.

You could avoid spacing and uppercase letters altogether and label UTMs exactly how the source appears in the referring domain. For example, “facebook”, “growthhackers” or “socialmediaexaminer”. Whatever way you choose to do it, make it consistent and communicate the rules with the rest of your team.

3. Merge muddled up UTMs for clear data

If you’ve already ended up with ‘Facebook’ ‘facebook’ and ‘FaceBook’ as three different sources in Google Analytics, you can merge this data in a couple of ways.

You can set up a search and replace filter in Google Analytics so they will be recorded together in future.

You could also edit Google Analytic’s Channel Groupings to group different traffic sources together. This lets you label your traffic in a way that works for you. You can edit the Default Channel Grouping or create your own Custom Channel Grouping. You’ll find the step-by-step instructions here on Google’s support site.

4. Don’t tag links placed on your own site

When hyperlinking within content on your own site, don’t use URLs with UTMs attached. If someone comes to your website from Facebook and then clicks an internal link with a UTM tag, this person will then be recorded as a new visitor. The actual source and details of where they came from will be overwritten and lost.

This will skew the data, ruin your reports and you won’t always know the true source of your conversions. It’s not necessary either as Google Analytics can track this traffic without UTMs.

5. Should you use UTMs on other site’s links?

For people sharing content from other sources Alexandra Cote, a Content marketer at Paymo, says you should make sure to remove the UTM parameters. “Keeping these will show others exactly where you got the link from and even disturb the campaigns of those who’ve posted the link you’re sharing,” she explained.

There is an argument that you should add your own UTMs when linking to another brands’ website to show them that you’re sending traffic their way. This can be especially tempting – and possibly beneficial – if you are an affiliate marketer or a partner company.

You should check in before doing this though. If you happen to use the exact same UTM label as their marketing team, your data will get mixed up. Even if it doesn’t, it’s best to check they want to get these insights as it will affect their data and reports.

Co-ordination is key as marketers can be very protective of their analytics.

6. Separate organic and paid social media correctly

There are lots of ways to drive traffic to your website – via backlinks, videos, blog posts, emails, the list goes on. It’s best to use the ‘medium’ UTM parameter to track details of the type of content you’re sharing. That way you’ll be able to sort your traffic by a medium, such as ‘video’, to see if it’s paying off. This will help you decide what marketing content to produce going forward.

If you want to distinguish between different types of social traffic or specific content for sites like Facebook or Twitter, this is where to do it. Don’t mess around with your source UTMs, as the information won’t display correctly in Google Analytics.

You could set the medium as ‘facebook-post’ or ‘facebook-ad’ or you could want broader insights and set mediums like ‘social’ and ‘paid-social’.

Whatever you decide to use as a medium, if it expands beyond the standard ‘social’ label, make sure to edit the channel definitions in your Google account so they display correctly.

7. Test tagged links before you use them

If you’re ever in doubt, test your UTMs to make sure they’re working. Just pop your URL which features the UTM tags into your address bar. If the tags disappear when the page has loaded, something’s wrong. But if they’re right there where they should be, the chances are it works.

If you’re using Google AdWords’ auto-tagging, it’s important to make sure your website is configured to handle query parameters and enables auto-tagging. To do this you can follow these instructions. Or you can simply add /?gclid=test after your domain and if only your domain appears once the page has loaded, you know there’s an issue.

8. Gain Google My Business Insights

For BJ Enoch, the Vice President of Enterprise Accounts over at the digital marketing firm, SocialSEO, one of his favorite ways to use UTMs is for tracking visits coming directly from Google My Business and other directory listings in Google Analytics.

“You can get a great visibility into how users who come in via GMB interact with the site versus those that come in from a regular organic listing,” he told us. “Another perk is you can see in Search Console what phrases are triggering GMB listings to understand your knowledge graph presence and local maps presence.”

“Businesses, like retailer shopping centers or stores, may see lower organic traffic thinking their search presence has decreased when in reality searchers are getting all they need from knowledge graph listings or map rankings. They don’t need to visit the website. Using UTM strings gives clarity and hard metrics to something that’s normally intangible. This has shown where we rank high for non-branded search but don’t get a high CTR and it has improved how we use paid search as a result.”

9. Use UTMs to fine-tune ad campaigns

The marketing manager over at Pupford uses UTM parameters to track very specific details about his Facebook ads. Devin Stagg says: “Using UTMs has allowed us to analyze our Facebook ad campaigns on an extremely granular level. I’ve set up a Google Sheet that helps us categorize our campaigns as granularly as age ranges targeted, how the ads were optimized, the specific images used, ‘interests’ targeted and more.”

This allows Pupford to refine its ad campaigns on a granular level too.

“When these parameters are in place, it allows me to go into Google Analytics and refine our ad – and even organic – efforts very specifically,” Devin explained.

He can check out how much traffic or conversions come from ads run to people interested in ‘Labrador Retrievers’. This has helped them figure out which types of dog owners perform best on their site so they can cater ad copy and imagery to them.

10. Use them in offline marketing materials

UTMs are often used to track social media, but some often overlooked places to include them are in email signatures, links to apps, and social share buttons.

They are also particularly useful for tracking offline marketing efforts through branded links on flyers, billboards, coupons, tshirts, business cards, and television adverts.

Using a branded link will make it easy for consumers to remember the URL and type it into their address bar. While the hidden UTMs will let you track the impact your offline marketing materials are having on traffic to your website. It’s the most efficient way to see this represented in Google analytics. Just make sure to use a different branded link for each flyer or poster.

What do you think of these ten tips? Do you have any of your own that you think would help other marketers out? Let us know in the comments below.

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Do Twitter Ads Really Work? A Surprising Experiment: 17.2 Million Views From a Single Twitter Thread

2018-10-12T07:48:00.000-07:00

As the New Year approaches, many of us find ourselves in a reflective mood. And that’s exactly how JotForm founder, Aytekin ‏Tank, felt as 2017 was drawing to a close.

As he walked along the Embarcadero, one of the liveliest and most scenic areas in San Francisco, looking back on the year, he was a little zoned out to everything happening around him. Meditative. Introspective. Contemplative.

He had many things to celebrate: JotForm had grown to a team of more than 130 people across the globe, it had more than 3.2 million users and its revenues continued to climb every month. It’s also worth noting that all of this happened without taking a dollar in outside funding — a not-so-common story in Silicon Valley these days.

But despite all the good news, there was something that didn’t quite sit right with him.

“Our competitors were super loud on the internet and their user numbers weren’t even close to ours,” he explained to me. “They were announcing one investment round after another, ending up on top of TechCrunch, and we were just quietly going about our business.”

During these moments of reflection, Aytekin realized that, like his competitors, he also had a story to tell.

So he decided to do just that — share his story. But in his own unique way.

Building a brand through stories

The first order of business for Aytekin was simple:

Write stories to share the JotForm journey.

With autonomous teams around him, he was able to dedicate his time to whatever tasks he felt would impact the business the most, so going all-in on content was an easy decision for him.

His first post — How NOT following my dreams enabled me to build a startup with 3.2 million users — was published in a popular Medium Publication, The Startup, and reached over +50K pageviews almost overnight.

His second post — Time off or the top of TechCrunch? — was equally as successful.

“I published these stories on December 18th and 26th respectively”, he explained. “Given their traction and how they resonated with a huge audience, I made my mind up. I was going to get serious about writing in 2018.”

Aytekin had found his niche.

His authentic, honest stories resonated with startup enthusiasts and he decided to write at least two posts per week throughout 2018 to share his journey as founder and CEO of JotForm.

Embracing Twitter: A $24,098 Twitter ads experiment

After his initial success on Medium, Aytekin was keen to share JotForm’s story across multiple channels in order to reach new audiences.

In July 2018, he decided to experiment with Twitter. Specifically, he was curious:

If Twitter could be a great platform to repurpose content
How Twitter ads could help him amplify his content.

After all, Twitter and blogging aren’t really too different:

“Apart from its character limit, Twitter isn’t any different when it comes to sharing your authentic voice,” he explained. “It’s blogging in 280 characters.”

As a platform, Twitter may not have changed too much since over the years — except increasing the character limit from 140 to 280 characters.

But what has changed significantly is the way people use the platform.

Twitter used to feel almost like an RSS feed, full of people sharing links and hashtags, trying to hijack every ounce of attention possible. But now, as Nathan Bashaw pointed out, things are changing:

Some of the best performing tweets nowadays are those that tell authentic stories.

For example, Rodolphe Dutel’s recent tweet about workplace culture really resonated with his audience (and beyond), picking up 31,265 retweets and 134,655 likes.

Would it have been as successful if Rodolphe had simply shared an article link and headline? Probably not.

Kicking off the experiment

Having seen various tweets and threads succeed like Rodolphe’s, Aytekin set out to reverse engineer a “viral” tweet of his own.

The plan was simple:

Repurpose a successful Medium post into a Twitter thread and boost it with Twitter ads to test the limits of Twitter as a platform to spread Aytekin and JotForm’s message.

In order to craft the Twitter thread, Aytekin used his Medium analytics for inspiration:

With this data, he was able to see which articles had resonated most with his audience and tell a story that he was sure would connect with people on Twitter.

He chose to create a Twitter thread based on his post entitled: ‘Don’t listen to those productivity gurus: why waking up at 6am won’t make you successful’.

Here’s a link to the thread:

The results: 17 million impressions

The aim of this experiment was to test the limits of the Twitter algorithm, and the power of Twitter ads, so Aytekin decided to spend as much as possible on this ad: $24,098 in total.

The tweet generated 17,177,432 impressions on Twitter.

Here are the results in full:

Aytekin didn’t jump right in and spend $24,000 overnight. In fact, when the experiment started, the plan was to spend a maximum of $5,000.

But as the tweet began to take off, the budget was raised accordingly.

“We started this experiment by saying we wouldn’t exceed $5K in spend,” he explained. “But we kept a close eye on the Cost Per Engagement and Impressions, and raised budget accordingly.”

As the advert was seeing super high engagement rates (over 20 percent at times):

And low Cost Per Engagement:

Aytekin continued to ramp up the spend until results started to diminish. In the end, the experiment ran for over a month in total (between July 15 – August 24).

Due to the high engagement, the thread also received plenty of organic reach on Twitter.

Out of 17 million impressions, 4.7 million were organic — so in other words, 27.4 percent of reach was free vs 72.6 percent paid.

Some key takeaways from this experiment follow…

Lessons learned from this Twitter experiment

1. Twitter is a great place to repurpose content

If you’re creating content of any form: videos, blog posts, podcasts, etc, repurposing it across multiple channels is a great way to get the most bang for your buck.

But repurposing doesn’t just mean copying and pasting a link over to Twitter.

If you want to be successful, you need to think about how you can tell each story natively to the platform you’re publishing on.

For this experiment, Aytekin could have simply shared a tweet linking to his blog post and boosted it, but I’m sure that wouldn’t have performed anywhere near as well as the Twitter thread.

By using a format native to Twitter, Aytekin was able to share his story in a way that Twitter users would respond to and be happy to engage with.

2. A Twitter thread can help you to achieve multiple goals at the same time

Impressions and engagement are awesome — especially when you’re quite new to the content marketing game.

But when you use a Twitter thread, you’re able to feature multiple types of content within your tweets and achieve various goals.

For example, in the fifth tweet in the thread Aytekin included a link back to the original articleon Medium:

This tweet received more than 1.1 million impressions and over 35,000 clicks, helping to drive traffic back to the original post on Medium.

The sixth tweet in the thread mentioned @JotForm and 4,346 people clicked from this tweet to JotForm’s profile to learn more about the business:

Aytekin also picked up 5,752 followers from this thread.

When it comes to planning an experiment like this of your own, try to think about the goals you’d like to achieve:

If it’s all about impressions and engagement, you could tell the whole story on Twitter.
If you want to drive traffic, add a link back to your website.
To increase your following, @ mention your profile.

Remember: It’s important to tell a great story in a native format, so ensure you use your first few tweets to get people hooked into your narrative before including any links.

3. Twitter is a great place to start a conversation

With any highly shared tweet, you’ll always get a few trolls pop up here and there, but if you look past this, you’ll realize that Twitter is still an incredible place to start a conversation and build relationships.

Following Aytekin’s thread, he received plenty of questions about JotForm and how the business operates. This enabled him to build new relationships with people he previously wouldn’t have reached.

So, do Twitter ads really work?

This experiment was designed to test the limits of Twitter ads and the results speak for themselves:

Over 17 million impressions
35,000 visits to the original article
5,752 followers for Aytekin
4,346 profile views for @JotForm

But that’s not to say everything was perfect.

Due to the way Twitter ads work there’s no real way to tell exactly how many unique people saw the ad and many people reached out to Aytekin to say they’d seen the ad multiple times.

And for every great conversation started by this thread, there was another slightly negative reaction. It seems that some Twitter users don’t quite accept ads in their feed like they do on Facebook or Instagram, where ads are more ingrained within the platforms.

Overall though, Aytekin sees the experiment as worthwhile:

“Even though the initial cost was high, the 5,000 followers we gained from this experiment are permanent,” he explained.

“Every time I publish a new post, I get clicks, likes, retweets and comments from these followers. So the results are compounding over time. I can’t be sure if they will become long-term, highly-engaged audience members, but they seem to stick around for now.”

And the great thing is that you can replicate this experiment yourself with a budget of any size.

Simply take a piece of content that’s been successful for you on another channel:

A highly-viewed Facebook video.
One of your top podcast episodes.
Your #1 blog post.
A copy of your email newsletter.

And repurpose that content into a succinct story on Twitter.

Even if you don’t want to invest any budget in it, repurposing content to Twitter is a great way to connect with your audience and share your stories to another platform.

Have you used Twitter ads? Do you repurpose content from other platforms to Twitter? I’d love to chat about your thoughts and experiences in the comments below.

Source

The Important Role of Psychology in Social Media Marketing

2018-10-11T07:46:00.000-07:00

Since the controversial US 2016 presidential election, Facebook and Twitter have become the topic of countless news headlines and a few very serious investigations about how they may have been utilized for propaganda efforts. One of these investigations involves a data research firm managed by former military officers who specialized in psychological warfare operations, known as psyops.

An interesting aspect of the aforementioned psyops investigation is that many of the tactics allegedly used to spread propaganda and manipulate political sentiment are actually used by social media marketers and influencers on a daily basis.

When Sunday morning political pundits and BBC experts discuss the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which is centered on a shadowy data research firm and its reportedly underhanded use of Facebook psyops, they use terms such as self-schemata, impression management, ingratiation attempts, perception theory, cognitive associations, and others. These are all principles and concepts related to psychology. While psyops specialists use them for tactical purposes, YouTubers, Instagram celebrities and online marketers know them by different names and use them as part of their social media strategy.

It could be argued that Cambridge Analytica may have been better off hiring popular YouTubers instead of former psyops officers; however, the former would have drawn the line at pushing propaganda, while the latter are all too willing to take on such assignments. Nonetheless, there is something that YouTubers and psyops officers share: both know about the importance of applying psychological strategies to trigger emotional responses.

Balancing the Emotional with the Rational

The Ben Mezrich novel “The Accidental Billionaires,” which would later be adapted into the film “The Social Network,” describes the early stages of Facebook — a motivator for young men who wanted to improve their odds at finding suitable dating partners.

By 2014, behavioral scientists were paying close attention to Facebook’s development into a destination where millions of people around the world flock to for psychological fulfillment; in other words, Facebook has been refined to tap into our psyche. Conversely, online marketers and social media celebrities apply other principles from the fields of psychology and neuroscience to achieve certain goals.

Credit: Socialmediapsychology.eu

According to a 2016 research study conducted by ratings giant Nielsen, media tends to be 23 percent more effective when it strikes an emotional chord. We know from the Glasgow Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology that we can establish a baseline of human emotions that include:

Happiness
Melancholy
Anger
Disgust
Surprise
Shock

Crafting messages and content that trigger one or more of the raw emotions listed above is the foundation of social media success; triggering more sophisticated emotions such as haunting feelings or playful disdain requires the use of rational concepts. Most marketing experts recommend crafting messages that are 75 percent rational and 25 percent emotional.

Establishing Relationships with Followers

Celebrities such as Beyonce and Kim Kardashian are more adept at fostering relationships with their fans than their respective husbands, hip-hop artists Jay-Z and Kanye West. A glance at the social media empires forged by these two American women reveals consistent psychological strategies such as:

Choosing the right visual elements.
Broadcasting human interest stories.
Highlighting social issues, benefits, and common sense.
Exploiting the “fear of missing out” element.
Relating to their followers.

It should be noted that Kardashian and Beyonce are at very advanced levels of social media mastery. They have gone past the level of monetizing their Twitter accounts; when they address their followers on digital video these days, it is easy to see that they have come a long way since they embarked on their journeys to stardom.

The confidence and on-point delivery of messages we get from Beyonce and Kardashian suggest that they have adjusted their personal communication styles through neuro-linguistic programming, commonly known as NLP, which is more of a learned skill than a talent. As we become more attuned to social media platforms such as Instagram Stories, Facebook Live and Snapchat, NLP will likely play a more pronounced psychological role in terms of promotion and effective communications with followers.

Social media relationships are crucial for individuals and brands that wish to craft effective campaigns; to this effect, the rise of vertical video calls for NLP and other advanced psychological strategies to be applied in the near future.

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25 Useful Instagram Statistics of 2018

2018-10-10T07:44:00.000-07:00

Online advertising continues to reach new heights every year, with more and more companies using the internet for their social media marketing campaigns. It is nearly impossible to compete in the marketplace without an excellent digital marketing strategy, and each and every company should be putting a strong focus on this to succeed.

One resource that can help companies boost their sales and gain exposure is Instagram.

Read on to learn how Instagram can help your business, no matter how large or small.

60% of users find products on Instagram

There are a billion users on Instagram, and over half of them have said they have found new products through the platform. That is an amazing number that shows just how successful a company can be if they reach only a tiny percentage of these users. Instagram ads are widely received and have high conversion rates, and your company can benefit from being exposed to this large number of people.

80% of Instagrammers follow a business

Instagram for Business allows you to create a profile that is geared towards advertising and engaging with your customers. Over 80% of users on the platform follow their favorite business, meaning you can take advantage of brand loyalty and guarantee repeat customers. When someone follows you, they are more likely to regularly engage with your posts. They can also share your posts, helping you gain even more exposure and interact with potential new customers.

10x more engagement than Facebook

The numbers show that users are far more likely to engage with a post on Instagram than they are on any other platform. There are a variety of reasons for this, but the important reason is that Instagram is the best platform for interacting. Whether you are promoting a product or service, you will reach and engage with more people than you could ever imagine. This will help drive sales and increase overall profitability.

The brain processes images 60,000X faster than text

This is huge because Instagram is an image-based platform that focuses on photos and videos. Your users will see your posts and be immediately engaged with them, thanks to the minimal amount of text and the focus on visual imagery. This can help users make decisions more quickly and increase your rate of engagement. In addition to this, people remember 80% of what they see and only 20% of what they read, making Instagram the perfect advertising platform if you want your viewers to remember you throughout the day.

90% of the top 100 Global Brands use Instagram

It could just be a coincidence, but this creates a strong correlation between Instagram usage and the overall success of a company. It is important to follow the trends of the world’s top businesses, and the current trend is that Instagram is a major factor in their success. There is nothing to be lost in using Instagram, and everything to be gained.

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How to Use Facebook Groups for Your Brand or Business

2018-10-09T07:42:00.000-07:00

Starting and maintaining a Facebook Group may seem a little daunting, but it can be a great way to add more value to your audience.

In this post, we’ll take a look at how you can run your business Facebook Group efficiently, and use it to maximize your Facebook reach and engagement.

Why use Facebook Groups?

Research from Facebook shows that groups are seeing a lot more engagement than Pages. This is because Facebook groups enable members to start conversations more seamlessly than a Facebook Page does, while it's also part of the broader shift away from public sharing to discussions in more enclosed, private space.

Now I know what you’re thinking: “Dhariana, you’re really asking me to put another social community on my plate?”

Yes I am, but only if it makes sense for your business, and/or if you have the time to maintain a Facebook Group.

Underlining this, here are some benefits that branded groups can provide:

1. Provide extra value for customers

Your Facebook group can easily provide extra value for your customers.

You can use it as a space to do more deep diving into subjects, or as a testing ground for new ideas. It’s also another way for your audience to connect with you, and each other, which can help to facilitate the growth of brand communities.

2. Create a sense of community

Your best bet in building relationships with your audience in the social media landscape is to build relationships and a sense of community.

This, of course, can be a little difficult via post threads and comments, and building a community on your own website can take tech (and money) that you may not have access to. Facebook groups enable you to build a sense of community when you lack the technology to build a community within your website.

As noted in the previous point, members can start conversations among themselves, and eventually even answer each other’s questions.

You can even use groups for your own teams within your company - this can be a way to keep everyone in the loop, and even build company culture with teams that are remote, or just not in the same location all the time.

I'm part of a brand ambassador group for a company I work with, and it’s a fun way to connect with ambassadors from my city, talk about the brand events and share our work and experiences.

3. Create a sense of exclusiveness

Everyone wants to feel special right? Private Facebook groups can provide just that.

With both private and secret groups you need to approve members as the group admin, which means that only people who you accept into the group can be active there. The main difference between the 'private' and 'secret' group options is that private groups can be found in search, while secret ones cannot.

Both options can help build a sense of exclusivity for the people you allow in, while it also makes content you share in such groups only available to those who are part of them. This can be great for event attendees, course subscribers etc.

I have a Facebook Group dedicated to those who join my email list or sign up for my social media resource library. Each subscriber gets the link once they join, and in the group, I take and answer any extra questions about my posts, as well as general social media questions and more.

4. “Beat” the algorithm

Since, as noted, Facebook Groups generally see higher levels of engagement than Pages - and posts from groups in which you're regularly active are also given higher status in the News Feed algorithm - creating and maintaining a group can be a way to “beat” the algorithm and get your posts seen by your group members.

It's not a solution, as such, you can't ever circumvent Facebook's algorithm limitations, but its another way to generate more exposure, and boost awareness among your Facebook audience.

How to use Facebook Groups Effectively

Okay, so now that we’ve covered a few reasons why Facebook Groups can be a great asset to your social media portfolio, let’s go over some tips on how to run them effectively.

1. Fill in all sections

Just like I recommend you fill in all the information in your social media bio, you also need to fill in all the information in your Group.

Helpfully, Facebook walks you through each section when you set up your group.

2. Set the rules

Group rules are important for keeping all things in order. Facebook has some pre-populated rules in the “rules” section of your group (including 'no spam', 'no hate speech'), but you should feel free to add your own.

Creating group rules will set the tone for the behavior of members, and protect you if you have to kick anyone out for breaking the rules.

3. Post regularly

As per usual, consistency is a key element in building interaction on any social media platform.

It can also be the most difficult. My advice here is to create weekly themed prompts and sprinkle in some open-ended questions to get your members to chat a little more.

Using a management tool can make the task a little easier - especially if you’re managing multiple groups - so while you’re already plugging your content into the tool, you can go ahead and schedule your Facebook group posts.

Some tools, like AgoraPulse, enable you to set your posts to recurring, so you don’t even have to think about scheduling the same things every week – you can concentrate on the posts that will build more engagement.

4. Respond to posts

You should always ensure that you respond to any posts or questions your members post in the group to spur further engagement.

5. Create exclusive content for your group

Aside from prompts - and being able to chat with others who are going to the same event, taking the same course or using your product - you need a little something more to keep the attention of your group members.

This is where group exclusive content comes in. It doesn’t have to be complicated – it can range from a group-only discount, a group-only download, or even just you hopping on live sessions within your group.

6. Check your analytics

Facebook Groups also now have analytics. As with your regular social media profiles, keep up with looking at your analytics to know what’s working.

There are so many ways you can use Facebook Groups for your brand or business. Hopefully these notes have given you some inspiration for your own groups strategy.

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9 Reasons Why Your Website Might Not be Showing Up on Google [Infographic]

2018-10-08T07:38:00.000-07:00

Are you struggling to find your own business website on Google? Are you wondering why you’re not listed anywhere in Google’s search results?

The team from Red Website Design share 9 reasons you could be de-indexed in this infographic.

Here’s a quick summary:

Cloaking
Spam
Spammy structured markup
“Free hosting”
User-generated spam
Keyword stuffing
Duplicate content
Doorway pages
Unnatural links

Check out the infographic for more detail.

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Facebook Will Now Allow Pages to Join Facebook Groups

2018-10-05T10:07:00.000-07:00

Here's a small Facebook update that'll no doubt be of interest to social media marketers - Facebook is now allowing some Pages to join Facebook groups, and comment and interact within them as a business Page.

We asked Facebook about the update, and a spokesperson provided SMT with the following explanation:

"We've heard from people that engaging with public figures, non-profits, publishers, and businesses in a more intimate setting can be meaningful. We previously launched the ability for Pages to start Facebook Groups so that they can engage with their communities. We are now testing the ability for Pages to join existing Facebook Groups as well.”

The new option was spotted by Facebook marketing expert Mari Smith (and shared by Matt Navarra), and it could be another way for businesses to offset some of their losses in Facebook reach as a result of platform's algorithm shifts.

Being able to interact in groups as your business Page may provide an alternate means to generate exposure, and to build brand awareness within relevant Facebook communities. As of right now, the 'Allow Pages to request to join as group members' is active by default, so unless a group admin has chosen not to let Pages join, Pages included in the test pool should be able to join most groups.

That could enable you to get involved in relevant communities, and reinforce your brand expertize, helping to make your business a more recognizable source within your respective field.

As noted by Facebook, it first started moving towards letting Pages engage in groups last year when it was announced that Pages would be able to interact within their own group/s as their Page presence. This could now see that same capacity extended to all groups (at the admin's discretion), which is part of the company's broader push to make groups a bigger part of the Facebook experience.

It's not a game-changing function, and it won't bring back all the referral traffic you've likely lost as a result of the platform's distribution changes. But it's another interesting consideration for Facebook marketers, and another option to help generate more attention for your business.

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Facebook Stories Hits 300 Million Users and Rolls Out Ads Globally

2018-10-04T10:06:00.000-07:00

More than 300 million people use Facebook Stories and Messenger Stories every day.

Since Snapchat debuted the Stories format back in 2013, it has taken over the social media landscape. Facebook first introduced the format to one of its properties in 2016 with the launch of Instagram Stories and has since launched similar updates across Whatsapp, Messenger and Facebook itself.

And the format is still growing across the board. Data from Facebook IQ found that 68 percent of people say they use stories on at least three apps regularly, and 63 percent plan to use stories more in the future.

The value of Facebook Stories ads

An Ipsos survey discovered that 62 percent of people said they became more interested in a brand or product after seeing it in a story and Facebook says that “brands testing Facebook Stories ads are already seeing results”.

Stories ads also have the power to help your brand grow via word of mouth, with 38 percent of people surveyed saying that after seeing a product or service in a story they talked to someone about it.

In addition, the survey found that more than half of people said they’re making more online purchases as a result of seeing stories and 34 percent said they went to a store to look for a product they had seen in stories ads.

Facebook says that both Tentree, a sustainable, eco-friendly clothing company, and Skout, a dating app, found that adding Facebook Stories to their Instagram Stories ad campaigns resulted in more customer actions at a lower cost.

The challenges and opportunities with Stories

The audiences on Facebook Stories could be an issue for advertisers. 300 million people use stories across Facebook and Messenger whereas more than 400 million use Instagram Stories daily, and 1.47 billion use Facebook daily.

However, the newness of Facebook Stories could appeal to advertisers seeking a first mover advantage with the format. Brandon Doyle, the founder of digital agency Wallaroo Media, has been experimenting with Facebook Stories ads for over a month, and recently told Digiday:

“CPM and conversion rates have been the best of any placements over the course of the last month, probably due to the fact that the competition is lower there”.

Digiday also revealed that flight-booking service Hopper has seen both Facebook Stories and Instagram Stories ads performing better than ads in Facebook’s news feed and in Instagram’s feed. In fact, the results for Hopper have been so great that the businesses has been “prioritizing designing ads for the Stories format, then adapting them to the other formats”.

Getting started with Facebook Stories ads

Facebook has launched Stories Ads to help businesses reach more people and Stories Ads will be available to advertisers as an additional placement to News Feed or Instagram Stories ad campaigns. Facebook reports that Stories Ads will soon be coming to Messenger soon too.

Facebook Stories ads deliver your message in a fullscreen, immersive environment. Additionally, Facebook Stories ads support every objective that’s currently available for Instagram Stories ads, including:

Reach
Brand awareness
Video views
App install
Conversion
Traffic
Lead generation

Facebook Stories ads have been rolled out globally today. To get started with Stories ads, head over to Facebook Ads Manager and create your ad, then when it comes to selecting ‘Placements’ you’ll see the option to include Facebook Stories:

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How to Strategically Post to Facebook Groups with Agorapulse

2018-10-03T08:00:00.000-07:00

Did you hear the news? You can now post to Facebook Groups with Agorapulse.

This is a big deal for any Facebook group manager who wants to be more strategic and effective in the way that they use their group.

As the manager of several Facebook groups, this feature helps me further streamline my work. Rather than needing to manage my pages in Agorapulse, and then log into Facebook to post my content in my groups, I can now do it all in one place. It also allows for better collaboration and more options for creating content.

Post to Facebook Groups with Agorapulse

Like other types of accounts, adding your Facebook group to your Agorapulse dashboard just takes a couple steps.

First, choose “Facebook group” from the list of possible profiles to add.

Next, you need to authorize Agorapulse to post to Facebook. You will have to do this for each new group.

Finally, you’ll get a prompt to add the Agorapulse app to your group itself.

The prompts through this process are easy and quick to follow– it took me less than 2 minutes to add a new group to my Agorapulse dashboard.

Note: You must already be an admin natively on the Facebook group in order to link the group to your Agorapulse dashboard. If you’re not, ask a teammate to make you an admin on the native Facebook group platform.

Using Scheduling Tools for More Strategic Posts

Now that you have your Facebook group added to your dashboard, how do you best make use of all your new scheduling power? There are three primary functions you will want to use:

Categories and queues for your content
Republish for important notifications
Adding a team member for better collaboration

Let’s take a look at each in turn.

Using Queue Categories to ensure a strong mix of content types/themes

If you are not using content queue categories for all of your social media posts (including Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn), you are missing out.

Queue categories is perfect for groups. You can use them to create predictable posting patterns– such as theme days– so members know what to expect. Here are a few things you can try out:

Monday Motivation. Have your group members share something that inspires them, or react to something that you create.
Tuesday Tips. Invite your group members to share tips from their area of expertise.
Fanpage Friday. Many groups encourage people to help one another by liking each other’s social media profiles. If this is a good fit for your group, try this one out!
Goal setting. It can be a powerful thing to encourage your group members to set goals within the group and then hold one another accountable.
Book of the month. Ask your group members what they are reading.
Quote of the day. Ask your members to share a quote they love.
Challenges. Set a group goal and then give them the step by step instructions on how to get there and have them report back to the group when they are done.

These are only the tip of the iceberg.

Think about what will most help and engage your group, create several post and add them to your queue. You could easily set up monthly posts on topics like this in a queue and have a solid start to a whole year’s worth of content.

The most important word when choosing content for a group is “engagement.” In this space, you want to think about what your group cares about and how they want to interact with other group members.

Use Schedule/Republish to get your point across

Your group rules (community guidelines) are a crucial part of your Facebook group’s success– and it’s a good idea to make sure everyone’s up to date with them. Scheduling posts about upcoming meetings and reminders about important information can help everyone keep up.

Sometimes there are things you want to make sure your members see, but that they don’t need to see forever. For that, using the republishing option is a great tool.

Within this option, you have two choices: republish regularly or schedule again.

The first one is good for a temporary thing that you want to go over a few times. This might be reminders about what to bring to an upcoming event, a reiteration of new rules, or a reminder that something is coming up.

When you choose this option, select a number of days between posts, and how many times total to post.

Alternatively, you might have a date-based reminder that needs to go up more than once. If your meetings are always on the second Tuesday of the month, this is a fast way to schedule a reminder to go out every month and schedule out for a few months at a time.

Still not sure if scheduling is best for you? Trying to better understand queues? Learn more about the differences between queue v. schedule here.

Add a team member to coordinate with your co-Lead

If you manage a Facebook group for a client or co-lead one with a partner, you know how easy it is to cross wires and post at roughly the same time.

With Agorapulse, all group admins can schedule content in advance so that it’s spread out and doesn’t overwhelm the group. Plus, you can easily see what’s coming up and decide when to add additional posts to the mix.

Engage new members with this shared resource

How can you make new group members feel part of the community?

With the Agorapulse scheduling feature, you can add the images of your posts to a group photo album. This is great for collecting and organizing posts that new members may be interested in– a bit like a mini on-boarding resource.

Some ways you can use this include:

Keeping all photos for a single event in one place
Helping people get to know one another by adding a welcome image that you can add to an album
Creating an album of tips or important resources
Creating an album based on different subgroups (for example occupation)

When you have your content organized in the group, it will help you grow.

A lively, engaged group

Bottom line– Agorapulse makes it easy to start posting strategically to Facebook groups. Groups can be a successful tool if you use a little planning in your process and now it’s easier than ever to do so.

(And before you ask, right now you can publish to Facebook groups using Agorapulse. However, there’s no option to get the inbox or reports for groups.)

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Quora introduces Broad Targeting, says audience hits 300 million monthly users

2018-10-02T08:00:00.000-07:00

Question-and-answer platform Quora says it now has an audience of 300 million monthly unique users, up from 200 million reported last year. The company also announced the launch of Broad Targeting. With this targeting option, ads run across the platform and adapt their targeting as the system learns which audiences engage with the ads.

Why you should care

Quora may not rival giants Facebook or Google with audiences in the billions, but to put Quora’s audience of 300 million monthly users in perspective, Twitter reported 335 monthly active users (MAU) in Q2; Reddit claims to have 330 million MAU; and Pinterest said this month it has 250 million MAU. For marketers evaluating so-called second-tier platforms, Quora’s reach puts it squarely in the mix.

Also, Quora’s new Broad Targeting relies on machine learning to optimize ad delivery to reach users most likely to take the desired action.

It’s worth noting that Quora’s ad business is just over a year old. The company has staffed up with ex-Facebook and Google advertising folks who have quickly built out Quora’s ads platform with relatively sophisticated features for a new platform, including multi-event conversion tracking, retargeting and lookalike targeting. Other targeting options include Topic, Question and Interest targeting.

Facebook Stories Ads now available to all advertisers

2018-10-01T08:00:00.000-07:00

Facebook has officially launched Stories Ads on the Facebook platform, making the ad units available to all advertisers globally. The company first brought ads into Instagram Stories in January 2017 and began testing Facebook Stories Ads in May. Earlier this month, Facebook alerted its Marketing Partner Network to the coming ad units, asking ad management platforms to set Stories Ads on Facebook as a default opt-in.

Why you should care

Stories Ads on Facebook offer new ad placement option for advertisers on the platform. As with Instagram Stories ads, these new ad units will include Facebook’s full ad targeting and measurement capabilities — and, soon, will be available in Messenger as well.

Though it’s early days, Facebook is betting on Stories Ads to be a major new revenue source.

The format is rolling out after brands such as iHeartRadio, Kettle Chips, Norwegian Airlines and KFC UK started testing them earlier this year.

“With the addition of advertising within Facebook Stories, we will be able to reach a larger and more diverse audience in a more creative way, allowing us to intertwine storytelling and advertising in the user’s own preferred channel of communication,” said Stine Steffensen Børke, Norwegian Airlines director of global marketing. “Not only is it cost-efficient, but has a significant global reach, and easily accessible for users through their own mobile device, with a clear call to action.”

KFC UK reported their Facebook Stories Ads campaigns delivered a 33 percent lower cost per view and a 19 percent lower cost per impression. The restaurant brand said the ad units allowed them to reach more people at a lower cost, without sacrificing quality or targeting control.

Two other brands to test the Facebook Stories Ads — Tentree, a clothing brand, and Skout, a dating app — reported more customer actions at a lower cost.

7 Benefits of Google Adwords

2018-09-28T08:00:00.000-07:00

Paid online advertising can make your business more successful when done properly. These are the 7 benefits of Google AdWords.

What is a quick, cost-effective way to spend for an ad?

If there’s one lucrative way to do a paid marketing campaign, what will benefit your business the most?

One of the best ways to do paid online advertising is with Google AdWords.

Perhaps the number one player that has changed the marketing landscape is Google. What would we ever do without Google, right? It has been a huge step for digital marketing and how it changed marketing in general. People rely on it for information and to find websites that will answer what they are looking for. The internet and Google has opened a lot of possibilities for people to network and connect faster.

In the late ‘90s businesses have started to see how much of an impact Google can make in their hopes of reaching their audience, whether local or international. With the new age of the internet, advertising online quickly became one of the most important factors toward the success of any business.

Your business has a website. That’s great! But if you’re losing visitors, how can you get your message across your target market? How will you let them know that you have what they need to make their lives better? If you can’t bring them to your website, how will you be able to sell?

This is the basic reason why you need Google AdWords.

Before we lay down all the benefits of Google Adwords, let’s see first how big of a business online advertising is.

Latest 2017 Statistics of Digital Ad Spending

On April 2017, eMarketer released their 2017 forecast on worldwide media ad spending. They have concluded that for this year, worldwide digital ad spending will reach $223.74 billion, or almost 40% of total paid media outlays. With these numbers, it is expected that there will be a double digit growth on digital ad spending by 2020.

Now you might be wondering, how much of these forecasted figures come from mobile advertising? You’ll be surprised to learn that about 63% of all digital ad spending is traced to mobile ads. This only goes to show that you should aim for mobile-friendly ads in all your marketing efforts to make the most out of your money. Most people are on their mobile devices now, but we aren’t seeing people using pc to disappear any sooner either.

Where does this lead us? It is obvious that more and more brands are spending on paid online advertising. Since people are mostly on Google to search for something they want to buy or know about – which also means people go to Google with an intention – it only makes sense to set aside a marketing budget for Google AdWords on a monthly or seasonal basis. Bringing your website at the top of Google’s search engines through Google AdWords at the right time is just a logical thing to do in order to be noticed by someone who may be looking for a business like what you have.

Paid online advertising can make your business more successful when done properly. With Google AdWords, you can never go wrong. Let us now discuss the advantages of this advertising platform and how it can help your business achieve further success.

7 Benefits of Google Adwords

1. Get access to an entire new audience searching for a business like you.
How will you be able to reach a local audience if you own a coffee shop in San Francisco?

When someone in your local area is looking for a nice spot to have a chat with friends or meet clients over coffee, can they find your website when they search it up on Google? Someone in San Francisco will normally type in “coffee shop in San Francisco”.

If you have run a Google AdWord campaign, you’d be on the top search results.

If a group of people has never heard about you and is looking for a new place to hang out over coffee, tea, or comfort food, Google AdWords is your chance to get their attention. You don’t have to run expensive ads on TV, radio, or print media so that you can get new eyeballs to your business. The solution is to have people find you on Google itself, the place people go when looking for information about places, events, products, and even people!

2. It helps increase discoverability and brand exposure.
Any business that wants to be discovered online wants to be found on the first page of Google search results. It’s pretty simple. If you want your products and services to be discovered by well-targeted, potential customers, then the quickest way to do that is through Google AdWords. The beauty of this online advertising platform is the ability to target audience who will see your ad based on their buying behavior, plus other factors including demographics.

All businesses of any sizes look to be visible in front of a targeted audience quick and fast. Google AdWords is the answer to that goal

3. Cost-effective advertising method: you only pay for people who clicked.
Like we said earlier, Google Adwords is a pay per click advertising platform, you only pay for people who clicked on your ad. When somebody has clicked on your ad, it only means one thing: they already have an initial interest on your business. The next goal now is to get them pumped up over your ad once they click it.

Let’s say you were looking for a nice coworking space in London.

And you decided to take a look at the second ad from the search results.

When you click, you’re directed to their website with a form to fill out your details and sign up to their newsletter, so they can help you find the perfect dream office for you in Central London. The page also shows their email address, contact number, links to their social media accounts, and another link to their magazine. It was the perfect page to go to for anyone seeking a coworking space because all the details in order to reach out to them are all laid out.

With the ad, you’re only paying for people who clicked on your website because they have a deeper intention to do. That’s the beauty of cost-effective advertising through Google AdWords.

4. You can track and measure all details of your ad campaigns.
The Google AdWords platform provides analytics where business owners can track how effective their ads are. You will see what exactly you’re getting from your ads on Google. You can measure how many people have come across your ad, how many times people actually clicked on it; and eventually you can compare these figures from your actual sales and revenue. Awesome, right?

5. You’re paying for an ad that can produce huge, high quality traffic sources.
With Google AdWords, you can have an ad that can reach potential customers locally, nationally, and even internationally. You can tailor your ads so that in ways that will appeal to different types of customers. You don’t have to focus on one buyer persona alone.

6. You’ll see a high return on investment.
Since you only pay for ads that people clicked on, you will get a high return on investment from optimizing your Google AdWords campaigns. With other forms of marketing campaigns such as TV, print, or radio ads, it is difficult to measure the return on your investment with the ads because you can’t track who among those who saw your ad actually became a paying customer.

As for Google AdWords, it’s easy to see which ads work best in terms of turning your leads into customers, plus you will also see which factors about your ad yielded the best results. You can then test your campaigns so you can maximize the ads that worked best.

When you know which approach suits your business best, it’ll be easier to increase ROI by focusing your efforts and budget on the successful ads.

7. Google AdWords result to faster and easier results than SEO.
When you set up your Google AdWords campaign today, you can see the results tomorrow. Easy peasy, right? You will get relevant clicks immediately because of the specific targeting of your ads. You don’t have to wait for a week before you can see whether or not your campaign is working well.

Conclusion

Your digital marketing strategies must involve Google AdWords because it boasts of advantages that other forms of digital marketing strategies don’t possess. When you start using it, you’ll discover and learn more about your customers and how far your business can go. We’re sure you want to bring your business to even better heights. Start building Google AdWords campaigns that target audiences locally or globally today.

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9 Reasons Why Successful Brands Do Retargeting

2018-09-27T08:00:00.000-07:00

What is retargeting? Why are brands diving into it as part of their marketing efforts? We’re breaking it all down with these nine reasons.

What is ad retargeting?

Why are so many big brands going crazy over it?

With too many information just on your fingertips when you’re only resourceful enough to search, it’s becoming more challenging to capture people’s attention. Aside from that, consumers are smarter these days when it comes to practicing their purchasing power. They go to Google in search of answers to their how, where, and why questions pertaining to their chosen lifestyle.

New mothers browse the web to search for the best places in town to buy baby clothes at a bargain. Fathers look for grilling equipment and tools on Amazon with the most positive reviews. Kids are hooked on YouTube when it comes to getting updated on the latest, must have toys or video games. Bachelors and bachelorettes want only the best furniture for their first apartment. There are plenty of resources available for the wedding or event planner searching for the best suppliers within or outside of the country.

Whatever you ask for, Google has your back. There is too many information for everyone.

So how do you entice someone on the web to buy from you despite all of that traffic?

Retargeting Explained

The answer is ad retargeting. To understand it better, let’s explore a scenario.

Let’s say you’re moving to a new apartment and you need new fabric or leather sofa for the living room. So you go to Aram’s website, a furniture shop in London.

You found a lot of great items on the website, browsed on the details on a few ones, checked the availability of colors, as well as the prices. You found one that particularly captured your attention.

Oooops, got a call from a client, so you stopped browsing and accommodated the client’s call. Just as you’re about to finish talking to the client, your boss asked you to go to his office.

So you went with your day at work and have completely forgotten about that one furniture you liked from Aram’s website.

Then you’re at home, done with dinner, decided to open your laptop before you sleep to check on some things you should prioritize the next working day. You can’t help but open Forbes website to read just one article about productivity hacks. Oh wait! There’s an ad on one section of your screen showing the sofa you browsed this morning!

The next day, while searching for venues to hold a lunch meeting with some clients, whichever website you go to, there’s that ad again!

A week later, while browsing the web again to book a flight for an out of town conference, there goes that ad again on some sections of the screen. But this time, the sofa is at a discounted price!

Seems familiar? If it does, then I’m sure you’ve encountered a similar scenario before.

That my friend, is ad retargeting. This is based on the basic premise that the more people see your product or brand, the more they are likely they are going to convert and buy.

There are plenty of ad companies that do retargeting (also referred to as remarketing by marketers). Generally, brands are able to do so through Facebook Ads and Google Adwords. Some website pages are “pixelized” so that once they come to your website and decides not to buy, you kinda follow them through by showing them your ads on Facebook or Google. Wherever they go, your ads are kinda following them. It’s your way of getting in front of them as many times as possible, without even having to go to your website.

The goal: to hopefully bring them back to your website and finally buy from you.

Sounds like magic, but it’s real.

But why are the most successful brands spending money on retargeting? We’ll find out below.

9 Benefits of Ad Retargeting

1. Track buying behavior of consumers.
RetargetingIn marketing, it’s crucial to understand visitors’ behaviour such as the following:

that move people to leave your site or stay longer,
which pages on your site have longer viewing times,
how visitors are convinced to subscribe to your newsletters or follow you on social
what factors stops them from pressing the exiting the page even when they’ve already added to cart.
It may take too much work, but understanding your ideal customers this way will help you come up with strategies that ultimately translate into a sale. Retargeting can help with that.

2. Increase brand awareness.
People will normally take action for a brand after they’ve seen it at least seven times. There is a small percentage of people to buy from you immediately. For example, you can get insights about how people use your website by installing a new Facebook pixels on your website or blog.

Therefore, if you’re already spending on Facebook ads, you can create custom audiences of people who visited specific pages on your website. With a perfect custom audience and by running retargeting campaigns based off that audience, you have enhanced your chance to introduce these audiences to your brand.

3. Reach people who already know about your brand.
If you are to build more specific ads campaigns through retargeting, you’d want to expose them to people who have initially shown interest by visiting your website. With retargeting, it’s like you’re courting your audiences to buy from you. But in order to that, you need to let them more about who you are, what you offer, and why they should invest in you.

The more ads you introduce to them after they left your website, the more likely they will go back to learn more about you.

4. A smart lead generation strategy.
What will you do with the people who left your website without leaving their emails? This is where Facebook retargeting gets even better. You can generate leads by using the Facebook Lead Ads form. When users click on your ad on Facebook, that action alone will allow Facebook to gather their emails.

Although you may have to download the data on a CSV which is time consuming, there is also a way to sync your Facebook Lead Ads form to your CRM software via FAcebook Lead Ads Sync.

5. Increases ROI.
Who wants to spend on retargeting if there is no increase in profits, right? With retargeting, gone are the days when it seems that the opportunity to make a sale is gone once people leave your website without buying.

You now have the chance for everyone who visits your website, whether or not they have the intent to buy, to go through the buyer journey. You can now set stages they can go through to help them make buying decision, until it’s really time for you to seek new prospects because they aren’t making any action after many tries.

6. Facebook Retargeting allows you to increase your marketing efforts from other platforms.
Facebook retargeting is perhaps the most popular form of retargeting marketing today, but it doesn’t end there. Remember that you can generate leads from Facebook Lead Ads form. For this particular example, you can then maximize your marketing efforts with email campaigns. You are not able to maximize your expenses on your CRM software by sending out email series which will help you provide more information to the user throughout the buyer’s journey.

7. A cost effective way to spend your advertising budget.
Retargeting marketing’s heart is one people who have visited your website. There is a reason why they visited your site in the first place. They were searching for answers. You just need to convince them that they went to the right place.

With retargeting, you are allocating budget for people who already know you. Now the work is up to you to get them to trust, like, and buy from you.

8. Keep up with the trends in digital marketing.
We’re sure you want to get ahead of your competitors. What better way to do that than to implement marketing strategies that are already available but are avoided by many? Retargeting is not going anywhere, and it will continue to evolve.

9. Generate more sales.
A business doesn’t simply want a return on investment in their advertising efforts. It wants more revenue in a significant way. If you want to pay attention on revenue, then retargeting should be your new best friend. After all, it targets people who have already given you their initial interest. Might as well invest further on them. Also, spending on ads for your warm traffic may be more expensive if you’re still on a tight budget.

Take Action

If retargeting isn’t part of your marketing efforts yet, it’s time you do. Gone are the days of door-to-door visits or cold calling just to make a sale. With retargeting, potential customers who have shown initial interest in your just need a little more pat on the back. The process is simply reminding them to take the next big step. We’re sure you want that.

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7 Ways to Building a Sales Funnel that Increases Conversions

2018-09-26T08:00:00.000-07:00

You want a sales funnel that won’t require you to spend lots of dollars for acquiring new customers. This is how you should build sales funnels.

Are people not buying, not matter how hard you were working on your product development and marketing?

Do you feel like you have a great design, effective call to action button, and engaging copy; but you’re still not getting the results that you want?

Perhaps your efforts were so focused so much on your revenue goals, rather than your customer’s goals. This is where many business owners and marketers fail when it comes to building conversion funnels. Even when they know that their focus should be what their customers want, they sometimes can’t help setting funnels with their profit numbers in mind. That’s bad practice.

But how important really is it for us to put customers’ needs and wants at the center of every sales funnel? We’ll go deeper into that in a while.

First, let’s understand what a sales funnel is and what it is for.

The Sales Funnel Explained

Here’s the thing.

When you know in your heart that you have a great product or service, it doesn’t always mean that your customers know they need it. Even if you think that your prospects will benefit from your product or service, it doesn’t always mean that they’re aware of the need to purchase it.

At least not yet for now. But if someone can get them convinced that they actually need, they will in fact buy it.

Now the question is, how do you get them to know that they need what you are offering them?

Here comes the power and beauty of a sales funnel.

A sales funnel is simply a buying process that ideally encourages companies to lead customers from awareness of your offer to their actual purchase. Below is a basic illustration from DigitalMarketer.

In layman’s terms, customers are brought into these three stages of a buyer’s journey in a manner where companies are letting customers:

know about them first,
evaluate all the information companies give them second,
and finally, make a firm buying decision based on the content presented to them..

Gone are the old days when people go door-to-door to realize that they need whatever product or service the salesman or saleswoman is pitching. As a result of technology and the internet, people can find any information that they need about a product or service from search engines like Google. Customers today can simply go to the internet whenever they want to know more about a product or service they’re deciding on buying.

And that is a good thing. As a business owner, you want to acquire and retain customers. You don’t want to be someone who’s content with one transaction per customer. You want repeat business; and the one way to do that is think of every prospect as a potential lifetime customer, right?

This is the goal of a sales funnel looking into high conversions. You want a sales funnel that won’t require you to spend lots of dollars for acquiring new customers. You also want a funnel that increases lifetime customer value while minimizing costs.

That is smart business.

How Do Companies Build Their Sales Funnels?

Without going too technical about how companies build their sales funnels, the process all begins with a lead magnet.

A specific lead magnet. It delivers a promise that prospects can’t say no to. Who will say no to a cheat sheet, PDF download, coupons, discounts, ebooks, and more if the readers believe it will benefit them in their business or personal lives? A lead magnet has to be promising enough to blow a customer ‘s mind.
A well-designed landing page. As soon as a prospect gives in to the lead magnet and says yes by clicking, that prospect should go to a landing page that effectively communicates with them and their needs. It has a clear message telling them they’re in the right place and, and convinces them to opt-in instead of exiting. This is where companies get their prospect’s email addresses.
A well spaced out email campaign. Marketers can go from 4- to as much as 12-email campaigns once they get new opt ins. This is when all content and copy is crucial; these emails are the opportunity of a business to make prospects know who they are, what they do (or make), and how they can help them. The end goal is to make people buy, and then continue to buy.

We’ve touched on what a sales funnel is and how companies build them for conversions.

Let’s move on to what factors cause high conversions in sales funnels, shall we?

Top 7 Ways to a High Converting Sales Funnel

1. Keep the customer in mind.

Some of the questions you need to ask yourself when keeping the customer in mind are:

What problems do your product or service solve?
What are the emotional factors that will drive customers to buy?
What could their hesitations be in buying from you?

An effective sales funnel always keeps the customers’ thoughts in mind. When you know what their problems are and how your product or service can address their pain points, it won’t be too hard for you to lead them through the entire buying process.

2. Understand really well how to attract customers.

READ 10 Reasons Why Your Sales Strategy Isn’t Working

When you already know what the common problems and hesitations customers might have about your product or service, you may now move on to thinking about how to attract them with your lead magnet. At this stage, it’s time to think about what your competitors are doing.

Think about how you can outperform your competitors through your lead magnet and eye-catching landing page. What is one thing in your industry that you can be an authority of or hasn’t touched on by your fiercest competitor?

From there, use words that a customer can easily relate to. Don’t use complicated words that will jeopardize your message. Have copy that your ideal customer can quickly understand and truly resonate with them at each stage of the buying process..

3. Encourage action.

Once prospects have landed on your page, they don’t want to give out their emails only to be given something they never signed up for. Whatever your promise is on your lead magnet, deliver it in truth without attempting them to give something else.

You want to bring people from awareness to evaluation to conversion. If you fail in providing what they’re expecting on each stage, then they’ll get out of the funnel before you even know it. Remember that the end goal is to make them buy your main product or service.

4. Build a content plan that knows what customers want at every stage of the funnel.

From designing your lead magnet and landing page, to writing an effective copy – your messages should always aim at keeping prospects excited to take the next step because they feel that they’re in the right place for getting more information before they can decide to buy. The copy on the lead magnet and landing page as well as your follow up emails should be geared towards satisfying the customer in every stage of your funnel.

5. Create an enticing lead magnet.

From a customer’s point of view, makes you click on an ad within Facebook or Google? Is it the design of the image or the impact of the headline? Believe it or not, a lead’s magnet powerful headline (which aso becomes your landing page’s headline) will make or break the connection you want to achieve from a prospect.

Again, keep in mind that you need to put your customer in mind. A powerful headline that encourages them to make an action that will improve their quality of life is what makes an enticing lead magnet.

6. Ensure that you have an effective copy.

An effective copy is focused on providing the benefits the customers will experience when they buy your product or service. It will only hurt you if you talk so much about what your product is or what makes them best, without understanding that the customer should be the start of the show.

Use a language that highlights your customer, their problems, the ideal solutions; and then once you gain their trust it wouldn’t be a challenge to showcase that you have those solutions indeed.

7. Test your funnel.

Peter Drucker said that anything which isn’t measured will never improve. In this light, always test your funnel. Review what elements work and don’t work. When you have put several funnels in place, test which ones are getting the most conversions. Ditch the ones that aren’t making the money, and stay on course with those that are giving the sales.

Check the opens, the clicks, the conversion rates, the specific type of audience with the most positive responses – all of these and more will guide you on which areas you should put all or part of your marketing budget.

Take action

The process around sales funnels are always evolving. Customers’ needs today may not be the same a year from now. Therefore, you need to keep up with your customers’ expectations. Always focus on giving customers a memorable experience.

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How to Manage Multiple Ad Account Comments In One Place

2018-09-25T08:00:00.000-07:00

If you are running Facebook or Instagram Ads and people are commenting on them, then you know how hard it is to keep track of all those comments. Things get even tougher when you are split testing and not all of the posts appear on your Facebook Page Timeline or Instagram Feed.

It can be really embarrassing, not to mention potentially detrimental to your business if you are not responding to your comments in a timely manner.

You don’t want to pay for ads if your comment section is full of people bad mouthing your products or business. Similarly, you don’t want to ignore the potential customers who are ready to purchase and are just waiting for you to answer that final question before pulling out that credit card.

Are You Missing This Key Opportunity?

Let’s take a look at some ad comments from a luggage brand I love. See all the great opportunities to provide customer service and increase sales (as well as ad ROI)?

And don’t get me started on the lack of notifications you get in general when using Facebook Business Manager. It’s almost impossible to respond in a timely manner to comments if you aren’t using a third party tool like Agorapulse to help you manage all the activity.

That’s why I use Agorapulse to manage all my social engagement.

You will benefit from using Agorapulse to help you manage your comments if you:

Are managing several Facebook Pages
Have more than one person responsible for responding to comments
Are running Facebook Ads (particularly if you are split testing or running dark posts)
Receive lots of comments on your ads
Are running ads through more than one Ad Account for a single Facebook Page or Instagram Account

That last point is a tricky one, but necessary if:

You have multiple Ad Accounts set up for your Page to assist with splitting budgets
You are an agency running Facebook Ads through your own ads account and not the ad account of your client, but still need to respond to comments on ads run through either account

Link Multiple Ad Accounts to a Social Media Profile

Fortunately, Agorapulse allows you to link more than one Ad Account to each Facebook Page and Instagram Business Account.

Previously, you were only allowed to link one ad account per social profile. However, you can now connect and select multiple ad accounts at the same time. This makes it possible to monitor and respond to the comments relating to a single Facebook Page or Instagram Business Account all in the one spot. Now there’s some time-saving magic!

To connect an Ads Account to Agorapulse one of the Admins from each Ads Account (with editor permissions or above) need to:

Log into Agorapulse
Navigate to the Facebook Page or Instagram Account you would like to link
Click on the Profile Settings icon alongside the Facebook Page or Instagram Account name
Connect your Facebook or Instagram Ad account in order to receive your ad comments.

Next, you need to select Ad Account from the left-hand menu, click on Get Ad Token to link your Ads Account and select the appropriate Ads Account.

You will need to repeat the process, starting with getting a new ad token for each Ad Account you need access to. You will also need the person with access to the other Ad Account to undertake this process in order to gain access to the second (and any other) Ad Accounts.

As you see from the above example, an admin can view another admin’s settings, but cannot change them unless you are an admin on the given ad account.

Once you have this setup, it’s time to do a happy dance, celebrating all that extra time you will now have in your life.

The Easy Way to Manage Ad Comments

I love being able to see all comments on ads in my inbox, regardless of which Ads Account they are in, alongside all comments from organic posts.

Being able to check all engagement at once, without having to visit multiple platforms to do so, is a massive time saver. It removes that feeling of uncertainty I used to get wondering whether or not any comments have been overlooked.

There are two other features that make life infinitely easier: saved replies and the ability to hide comments.

Being able to reply quickly to each comment with saved replies cuts down on the workload even further. The hide feature is also super helpful for making sure that you are not paying to amplify the work of trolls.

I also love that I can do this from either my desktop or mobile. 🙂

Unfortunately, you can’t like or comment on Instagram posts from third-party tools anymore. But I still use Agorapulse as my starting point to check if there has been any engagement with my Instagram Ads and organic content while I check on my Facebook Ads and organic engagement.

By doing it this way, I only need to visit Instagram if there has been something that I need to respond to and if I don’t have time to do that immediately, I can bookmark or tag the content so that I know what I need to deal with later.

Once you have this setup you will be able to eliminate spam, deal with your critics and start generating a better ROI from your Facebook and Instagram Ads in a fraction of the time you used to spend monitoring and managing engagement on your Ads.

How do you manage multiple ad account comments? Let us know in the comments below!

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Twitter begins testing Timeline Ads on publisher sites

2018-09-24T08:00:00.000-07:00

Twitter is now testing Timeline Ads in timelines embedded on third-party publisher sites, according to a report from Business Insider. Twitter started recruiting publishers for the test in May.

Why publishers and advertisers should care

Twitter has been slow to expand its programmatic advertising offering, well behind Google Display Network and Facebook Audience Network. With the Timeline Ads test, currently in alpha, Twitter is opening the door for publishers to generate more revenue from the timelines embedded on their sites and offering advertisers access to more ad inventory.

Ad revenue from Timeline Ads will be split equally between Twitter and the publishers, according to the report, with four ad placements interspersed among the top 20 tweets in an embedded stream.

The company has partnered with ad tech platform OpenX for the test.

“We are continuing to evolve and iterate the ways in which we can work with publishers to help them generate revenue through unique real-time content monetization opportunities, on and off platform. We are running an alpha test to explore new channels of demand with OpenX, and are looking forward to seeing how this evolves,” a Twitter spokesperson told Business Insider.

Twitter said it is reaching out to publishers of all sizes. TheStreet.com and Advance Local, a digital media company that owns 25 local news sites, including AL.com, Syracuse.com and OregonLive.com are cited as current alpha testers.

12 Marketing Videos For Your Business (That Viewers Love To Watch)

2018-09-21T08:00:00.000-07:00

In this post you’ll discover 12 types of marketing videos that viewers love to watch. If you’re thinking of creating marketing videos for your business then these ideas will get you started.

We’ll then take a look of some of our favourite video types from the list and how you can use them – with examples and tips for better results.Movie Clapper by Gecko Studio on Shutterstock

BY DONNA MORITZ | CONTAINS AFFILIATE LINKS

Video a huge part of any customer journey from awareness to becoming a customer then a raving advocate and repeat customer.

But not all types of marketing videos are perfect for every business. I was therefore glad to see that Vidyard produced an awesome infographicbreaking down the different types of marketing videos you can create – and what might suit each business. We’ve shared it below.

Vidyard’s infographic is designed to highlight the different video types for a B2B (Business to Business) Customer and how each type of video can impact the customer journey.

However, I believe many of these marketing videos are equally suited to B2C Customers (business to customer) marketing videos too, so it’s relevant to all of us.

With each of these video types you’ll need to consider a number of factors depending on where your business is at, the complexity of the video project and your budget. Different videos require different budgets, production value, length and distribution to get the best results.

Vidyard have split these factors into 4 parameters on the infographic, to help you decide:

where the video types perform best in terms of the customers’ lifecycle
the most ideal length of the videos
the approximate production value/cost to produce the video
the optimal distribution channels for sharing and promoting the video

Let’s take a look at the 12 Types of Marketing Videos that Vidyard suggest, then show some examples, with some strategies, tools and tips:

12 Types Of Marketing Videos (Infographic From Vidyard)

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See the infographic and blog post at Vidyard here.

Now that you’ve had the infographic to play with (don’t forget to share it later to Pinterest!), let’s dive into some examples of my favourite video types!

Remember, these videos can work for B2B businesses as well as B2C – you just have to find the right kind of video, budget and production-type for you.

Marketing Video Types That Viewers Love To Watch

Let’s start with one of the most popular marketing videos you’ll see on social media and YouTube, How-To Videos.

How-To Videos

I love How-to videos because they come in all shapes and sizes. You can even do short marketing videos of just a few seconds.

Like this video from Easil, showing how to change your background color to transparent PNG format:

Your marketing videos don’t even have to have an intro or outro if you are simply posting it to Facebook or Instagram in this format. Screencasts are a great way to create content quickly.

And check out this next video from Cooker and a Looker on Facebook. Amanda decided to try a hack she had seen online – how to husk corn the easy way!

She captured video footage when testing the hack, and then with a little editing, turned her video into something more shareable by adding the black strip letterboxing effect + text:

And can I just say.. what the? Why did we not know this already?

Hot Tip: Anything can be content, so have your camera ready in case something is interesting enough to capture as a how-to or hack!

Explainer Videos

When an explainer video is done badly it can be very very hard to watch. But when it is done well, it can be brilliant. This is perhaps one of my favourites ever, because it manages to do a great job of explaining something that is pretty hard to explain: the Blockchain.

AdBank is a platform that uses the Blockchain to stop Ad Fraud. Just watch it, even if you don’t have any interest in crypto-stuff and the Blockchain. It’s really well done.

Any explainer video that entertains while explaining is a winner, in my book. Keep your video simple and easy to understand and don’t try to cramp too much content in – you want people to go away with understanding, not confusion.

Focus on the problem your business is addressing, what your solution is (and how it works) and then give a clear call to action.

Another of my favourites is from the team at Slack. It’s a brilliant example of an entertaining explainer video (or Product Demo video – see these below… sometimes they overlap!).

Promos And Awareness

A good example of “promo” marketing videos is Google’s video released when their logo changed a couple of years back:

Notice how it’s not Google telling the story? It’s the users telling the story. This is a great strategy to use if you are creating a promo video.

Capture your users, and customers telling YOUR story (or their story as it pertains to your story). It’s a powerful testimonial and works very effectively as a promotional or awareness video.

A promotional video doesn’t have to be high-end. You can create them for social media to post on Facebook or Instagram….Like this simple video showing one of the best features of a Koala mattress! Your wine won’t spill (and you won’t wake up your partner when you roll over either!).

Product Demo Video

The company “Monday” has created a great example of a Product Demo Video. Monday is a productivity tool a bit like Trello or Asana or Basecamp.

I love the marketing videos produced by Monday. They are so much fun I almost want to jump ship from my existing tool, and use them. I have been known to watch their ads to the end before YouTube videos start – they are that good.

Let’s take a look at how Monday works, in their quirky-explainer-video style:

Fun, right?

Chalk Talks (Or Whiteboards)

Well it would be rude of me not to feature Rand Fishkin here with his Whiteboard Friday videos. He breaks down a boring topic and makes it interesting, practical and useful so you always walk away learning something.

He uses a whiteboard but really it’s just a matter of drawing or writing your message on any medium – whatever helps us learn! The key is not to rely on it! Rand still presents face-to-camera, breaking his knowledge down so we can easily apply it.

Hot Tip – you don’t need to fill the screen with words, like Rand does. He gets away with it as he is engaging and uses the text as a back up while he presents face-to-camera. So really, you are watching Rand, and then the words are cues or reminders + takeaways.

whether it’s drawing or writing, visual content like this can be a great way to bring your point home.

Meet The Team

I like what the team at Vidyard have done with their “Meet the Team” Videos. It doesn’t need huge production but it can be very powerful for your audience to see who they are working with.

Simple face-to-camera with maybe an intro and outro is fine. Or why not do things a little differently and ask unusual questions or show bloopers.

The more you can show the personality of your team, the more your audience and potential customers will relate to you!

Culture Capture Videos

Personally, I like quirky videos. So, to me, the best company culture videos are never going to be about your team standing up and talking about the values of the company.

Yes you can capture video of you at charitable events or behind the scenes.. and all those “company fun” things.

Or you can do something different like Basecamp does in this video. They did a blind coffee tasting!

It shows the fun side of the team, their bad jokes and humour and their coffee… um… prowess.

OK we’ll forgive them for the coffee (I’m an espresso-drinking coffee snob) but nonetheless, it’s a great video.

Speaking of video, here’s another great example of showing your company culture or team. A little while back the team at J29 Creative captured some video of me on stage at Social Media Marketing World 2018. I was speaking in a large room with 700 people, so I asked them to capture some panning shots of me and the audience.

To thank them for taking the footage, I sent them some chocolate treats from Australia, including Tim Tams.

Now, if you’re Australian, you’ll know about Tim Tams and doing the Tim Tam Slam. It’s fun and super delicious. If you don’t know what it is, watch the guys at J29 Creative work it out with my help (I sent them the instructions).

Come on, admit it, you want one now too, don’t you? This video introduces us to some of the J29 Creative team in a fun way. I love how they took an unexpected gift and turned it into a great video opportunity.

Sure, they are talented videographers, but anyone can capture a Tim Tam Slam on a smart phone. The key thing here is that they bothered to film it!

Note: and I do realise that both of these examples contain coffee.

One To One Personal Messages

I want to finish with this one, because I think of all the videos above, it can be the most powerful of all. As you will see on the infographic above, it’s suited to any part of the sales funnel.

A personal video can be created so easily these days – whether it’s your CEO or one of your team… even a solo business owner. It’s personal and it makes an impression.

You can create a personal video simply by opening up your phone and hitting record and posting it to:

Twitter in the newsfeed.
Facebook in the newsfeed or via Direct Message
Direct Message on Instagram
via Email

Have you ever received a personal video that you haven’t responded to? I know I haven’t! I’ll always take the time to respond. The person took the effort to message me with video, why wouldn’t I?

If you are sending personal messages to a lot of people, (say before or after a product launch), there are tools you can use to send a personal welcome to a program member or thank a customer. One of the tools that does this is Bonjoro. Pat Flynn uses it to welcome his new program members after they purchase a program:

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The link stays live and you can watch it anytime. His audience loves receiving the personal welcome.

If your customer is spending decent money on your business, don’t you think this is a great way to leave another good impression on them? It sure did with me!

You could also use a tool like Loom which records unlimited short videos with links for free. Bonjoro is tailored for big groups of people that you want to thank. Either way, as long as the tool gives you a personal link to send via email or social media, you’re good to go!

Wrapping Up And Tools

Phew that’s a few video options for you! Remember, you don’t have to use them all at once. Take some time to work out the right kind of marketing videos for your business, then try just one! It might take a bit of experimentation to work out the best medium for you, but at least you now have lots of options!

And don’t forget to include the simple things like personal videos! Sometimes we can get so wrapped up in trying to make our content super professional (and especially so with video) that we forget to connect with people. Personalised video is one of the BEST ways to do that!

Tools For Creating Marketing Videos:

Here are a few tools I use to create social video that you could use for some of these formats:

Wave.Video – you can create over 30 different sized videos with millions of video stock clips to choose from as well as text and photos. Great for social videos.
Loom Screencasting tool – I use this to capture quick screencasts when I don’t have a lot of time to use a bigger tool. Then just share the link!
Bonjor Customer Onboarding Video tool – great for personalising your customer onboarding like Pat Flynn did, above.
Demio is my current favourite webinar tool as it automatically records and you can use the content for other purposes or send it as a replay.
Your Camera! Have it handy to capture content that you may be able to use later!

Over To You

What kind of marketing videos are you creating? Any from this list?

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6 Steps to Optimize Your LinkedIn Company Page

2018-09-20T08:00:00.000-07:00

You’ve no doubt heard of LinkedIn, the social networking site aimed at making business connections and assisting with job hunting. You may even have your own personal profile there. However, unless you have a LinkedIn company page set up and optimized for your business, you’re not making the most you can out of the platform.

Fortunately, it’s easy to get a LinkedIn company page off the ground. Once it’s in place and optimized, your business will be open to a wider range of possibilities. This includes a large database of prospective employees, and the ability to use your extended social network to recruit new clients.

In this article, we’ll go over how to set up and optimize your LinkedIn company page from scratch. Let’s go!

Why your company needs a LinkedIn profile

There are many reasons why it’s crucial for your company to have a polished, clean LinkedIn page. With over 450 million users, LinkedIn is the most popular social networking site that’s targeted specifically at professionals. For prospective employees, LinkedIn is one of the first places many go to gather information about your company. You’ll want them to get a clear idea about what kind of business you are, as well as your history, goals, and values.

You can also post a job, in order to tap into LinkedIn’s powerful employee database. There are over four million contractors on LinkedIn who have indicated that they’re looking for work. Especially since there’s currently a labor shortage in the US, you’ll want to get as many eyes as possible on your job listings.

For potential clients, LinkedIn is also a valuable tool. 80% of Business-to-Business (B2B) leads originate on the site, and the overwhelming majority of B2B marketers use LinkedIn. What’s more, this platform’s base skews toward educated, high-earning users. Targeted keywords can help connect interested clients to your LinkedIn company page.

In addition, LinkedIn is also an excellent way to take advantage of your ‘natural market’ – the acquaintances and friends-of-friends who know someone who works for your company. In other words, visitors will be able to see mutual connections with your company. If they notice that their cousin Sally knows one of your employees, they may be more likely to choose you over your competitors.

Other benefits of having a strong LinkedIn company page include the ability to share press releases and blog posts, connect with other businesses, and attract followers. In short, it’s a platform well worth targeting for nearly any business with an online presence.

How to create and optimize your LinkedIn company page (in 6 steps)

Now that you understand the benefits of LinkedIn for your business, you may be eager to get started. Fortunately, the process of building and optimizing your LinkedIn company page isn’t hard. Let’s walk through what’s involved, step by step.

Step 1: Create an account

If you don’t have one already, you’ll first need to create a LinkedIn account using a verified email address. It’s usually best to use your own account for this setup process, so that you’ll have admin privileges and can change the password if necessary. You can always add other employees to help manage the account later.

To create an account, simply head to the signup page:

You can sign up in one click using your Facebook account. Alternatively, type in your email address, choose a password, and select Agree & Join. On the next screen, enter your first and last name. Per LinkedIn policy, you must use your real name.

Then, follow the prompts to enter a little more information about yourself. When you’re done, check your inbox for a verification email, and click on the link provided to verify your account.

Step 2: Set up your company page

Setting up your page is very easy. You’ll just need to enter your company’s name and a public URL (i.e., linkedin.com/company/your-business-name):

Think carefully about what your public URL will be – this cannot be changed later. It’s best to stick with something short and professional, or simply use your company’s name. If the name is very long, you might want to shorten it, to make it easier to type. For example, the publishing company Chicken Soup for the Soul might shorten their public URL to just “chicken-soup” for convenience’s sake.

If your company’s name is already taken, consider adding a keyword to it. Again, it’s easiest on users if you pick something simple, such as your business’ location or the type of company you are (for example: “desanto-hardware” or “buttercup-florist-LA”). Once you’re happy with the URL, select the Create Page button.

Step 3: Add your logo and cover image

Once your page is set up, you can start to optimize it. One of the first things you’ll want to do is add your company’s logo. From your profile page, click on the blue pencil icon in the logo area:

This will bring up a prompt that will let you upload a file containing your logo. Make sure to choose a high-resolution image with square dimensions, so that nothing gets cut off or appears blurry.

Next, you’ll want to include a cover image. This is a background splash for your page – the blue area pictured above. You could go with a stock image of something related to what your company does, for example, or a nice photo of your company’s city.

You can add this element by selecting Update cover image. Again, this will bring up a prompt to upload a file. The recommended size is 1536 x 768 pixels. If you use a different size, the site may scale it to be larger or smaller.

You can choose what section of the image to display by dragging it up or down:

When your logo and cover images are in place and looking good, hit Publish to make your changes live.

Step 4: Write a description using keywords

We’ve covered the visual aspect of optimizing your LinkedIn company page, but you’ll also want to tell visitors what you’re all about. You can do this in the About Us section, by adding a brief description of your company:

This description should be focused and direct, as most visitors to your page will be busy people. What’s more, LinkedIn allows no more than 2,000 characters in this section.

Therefore, aim to provide a quick and compelling overview of what your business does, focusing on how you help customers or clients make their lives better. Since LinkedIn is targeted at industry use, you can get a little more technical in this description than on other social media sites.

It’s also a smart idea to include at least one or two keywords here – this can help interested prospective customers and employees find your page through organic searches. Of course, the same rules apply for keywords here as they do anywhere else: incorporate them naturally, and don’t overuse any particular word or phrase.

Step 5: Encourage your employees to join

One of LinkedIn’s most useful features is that you can display a roster of your current employees – and members of their social networks will be able to see those connections when they visit your page.

This can help sway people in favor of your company since it’s a form of social proof. In other words, if someone sees that a trusted member of their extended social network works at your business, they may be more inclined to reach out.

Your employees can add themselves to your LinkedIn company page by editing their work history. Have them edit their current position (or add it if it’s not already listed), and select your company page from the drop-down menu as the location where they work:

While you’re at it, you’ll also want to ask them to follow and share your company page. This will help it start gaining traction a little faster.

Step 6: Share relevant content

After your LinkedIn company page is set up, you’ll need to remember that it’s not a static resource. It’s important to actually update and use the page if you want to increase the chances that it will result in improved business.

One of the best ways to do this is to share news on your company’s page. You can also share or re-post content from your company blog to LinkedIn’s network, using a plugin such as Revive Old Post.

This will help you to appear in other users’ news feeds – the scrolling list of news and blog posts your LinkedIn followers will see on their home pages.

If you make your posts public, they will also be visible to the entire LinkedIn community, which may help new clients discover your business. You can even use relevant hashtags, so people searching by subject can find your posts.

It’s easy to post updates to your LinkedIn company page. Simply type your message, link, and hashtags into the text box provided:

You can use the image that automatically generates from your link, if there is one, or upload your own image or video by using the buttons below the post. When you’re done, select Post to make the new content live.

In addition, make sure to occasionally re-post content to your own personal LinkedIn profile as well. As a business owner, you are literally the face of your LinkedIn company page, and it’s important to remain active.

Conclusion

Having a personal LinkedIn page is a good start, but isn’t much help to your company as a whole. Your business also needs a professional LinkedIn company page. Optimizing this page will help prospective job hunters and clients find and connect with you more often, and can help you keep in touch with clients you already have.

You can make the most of your LinkedIn company page by following these six steps:

Create an account.
Set up your company page and choose a public URL.
Add a logo and cover image.
Write a keyword-friendly description.
Have your employees add themselves to the page.
Share relevant news and re-post your company’s blog posts.

Do you have any questions about how to use LinkedIn for your business? Let us know in the comments section below!

6 Things You Must Do to Find out if Your Content is Engaging

2018-09-19T08:00:00.000-07:00

You create a piece of content.

You share it with the world and hope to engage your audience.

But how do you know if it’s working?

Which signals do you look at to understand if your content is actually engaging?

In this article, we’ll share some valuable tips on how you can figure out if your content is doing a good job at engaging your audience.

What do I mean by engaging content?

Let’s put ourselves in the reader’s shoes for a minute.

They may not know the exact definition of ‘engaging content’ but they’ll easily recognize it from the see of other articles that drive absolutely no interest or action.

If your content did not strike a chord with them, they’ll simply move on.

There are plenty of other places they can go to – your competitor’s blog for instance.

But…

If they’re reading a piece of content that interests them, provides answers to their questions, or simply entertains – they will do something, like share or leave a comment.

These actions may take minimum effort from your audience but they still have to be earned.

Now, let’s look at some ideas on how you can tell if your content is engaging or not.

Are people sharing your content?

Shares on a piece of content are one of the first metrics marketers look at when they want to assess engagement.

Naturally, we all want people to like our content enough to share it with their network.

Shares contribute to the organic growth of your audience while giving more ‘social proof’ to your content.

So, how often is your content shared with others?

Answering this question will help you understand if your content resonates with your target audience.

Lots of shares means you managed to create an engaging piece of content.

Here is an example of a guide on our site that got 6 thousand shares:

No shares usually means you didn’t meet the expectations of your audience.

However, before you start thinking your content is not good enough, make sure you made the sharing easy for your readers.

Sometimes, if there are no easy-to-use social share buttons placed conveniently where readers can see them, they won’t bother to look for them to share your content.

If you are on WordPress, I suggest you try Warfareplugins and create custom social share buttons that work great (and look great) both on desktop and mobile.

The great thing about this plugin is that it lets you add custom text and images for sharing on different social networks.

Learn how to achieve 1000% more shares on a blog post.

Do you people comment on your blog posts?

You can tell a lot about engagement just by looking at the comments section on your blog.

Does it look like no one ever reads your posts? Or do your posts attract lively commentary and healthy discussions?

If the latter is true for you – good job!

If not, try to inspire your readers to comment e.g. ask them questions, be genuinely interested in their feedback and opinion, and when you do get comments, make sure to respond and engage them further.

I always respond to people who take time to leave a comment on my blog because it’s a great way for me to build relationships with individuals who read my content and follow my work.

If you build a relationships with people who take time to read and comment on your content, they’re more likely to comment on the content you write in the future.

Are people reading your entire articles?

Do you know how much of your content people actually read?

Statistics regarding consumers’ online reading habits are not at all encouraging for content creators – people read about 20% of the content on a page simply because they do more scanning than reading.

So if you manage to beat those gloomy odds, you can be sure your content is engaging.

Now, let’s see how you can check that:

a). Time on Page. This metric in Google Analytics shows you the ‘time on page’ for people that didn’t bounce. So if someone comes to your website, reads an article, and immediately disappears, Google Analytics has no way of knowing how long the person spent on the article.

Time on page is useful (the longer the better) but you need to know that this is only going to represent a small percentage of your audience.

b) Pages per session. This is a useful metric to help you learn if your website visitors are exploring your site beyond the article that brought them there. If your content is engaging, you should see that readers are clicking through to more pages on your website.

c). Scroll depth. Tools like Hotjar can help you better understand user behavior on your site. With ‘scroll map’ feature, you can see how far down the page users scrolled i.e. if they read your entire article or not.

Image from Hotjar

Learn more about measuring engagement with Google Analytics.

Are you getting any email subscribers?

How many people are getting your newsletter?

I am guessing that you’re asking your readers to subscribe to your newsletter at the end of your articles, your blog’s sidebar, or via lead-boxes in your content.

But do you regularly get new signups and how many?

A healthy inflow of new subscribers is a good indicator that your content is engaging!

So how can you track opt-ins on your content?

If you are using a tool like OptinMonster to grow your email list you can easily track how forms are performing in terms of conversion. The tool integrates with Google Analytics and tracks referral page for every conversion so you can see which content pieces are driving the most conversions.

Here’s a pro tip for increasing opt-ins with your content:

Use content upgrades!

This is a tactic I regularly use here on RazorSocial and I’ve seen a great conversion rate (10% or more) for this type of opt-ins!

You can read about how we increased conversions by 520% with content upgrades HERE.

Content upgrade is a bonus content that you create for a specific blog post and then offer it to readers to access/download in exchange for their email address.

If your subscriber base is decreasing, then it’s pretty obvious that your content is not engaging or valuable enough to your readers.

Getting any links to your content?

Getting organic inbound links to your content speaks a lot about its quality – your content needs to provide tons of value for someone to link to it!

It also means that people were engaged enough to care and point other people to your content.

So make sure to regularly check the number of inbound links your content has earned. With tools like Ahrefs, this is incredibly easy to do.

Just enter the exact URL of the content you want to analyze for backlinks and you’ll get a report showing the number of backlinks, referring domains, new and lost backlinks, and more.

By tracking backlinks to your website you will be able to identify specific pieces of content that are generating the most links.

Ask your website visitors

One of the best ways to understand your website visitors and how they feel about the content you publish is to reach out to them with a short survey.

The feedback you get from your readers will directly speak about the quality of your content and help you inform and optimize your efforts.

You can use a tool such as Qualaroo to create a survey and gather feedback from specific segments of visitors, in this case, those folks who visit/read your blog.

Nice thing about this tool is that it offers pretty decent templates that you can use or you can make your own. There’s also a variety of answer types so you can, for example, give your visitors the ability to leave a comment.

Conclusion

Keeping your audience engaged is a difficult task given that there’s just so much content out there. People today demand instant gratification, so if they don’t quickly get value out of your content, they will leave and probably never return to your website.

But if you keep a close eye on the metrics we mentioned in this article while consistently creating content that takes into consideration interests and needs of you audience, you’ll give them a good reason to stick around.
Is there another way you’re checking whether or not your content is engaging? Do tell us in the comments below!

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