We’re going to share:

• The right bottom of funnel call to action
• How to increase your BOFU audience
• What to avoid
• Bottom of the funnel offer ideas

Not to worry, we’ve got you covered. We’ll dive into BOFU and how to successfully feed and convert. 

But First…What Is The Marketing Funnel?

Before we break down BOFU for you, you have to understand what TOFU and MOFU are. No, we don’t mean the soy product, we mean the other two tiers of the sales and marketing funnel. We believe that the traditional marketing funnel is broken and outdated. 

The marketing funnel should be focused on your most valuable customers and giving them a massive microphone. But the traditional marketing funnel does get a few things right. 

Traditional marketing funnel

Marketing funnels will be different from industry to industry, but the gist of it stays the same: this is the journey that you’ll put your potential customers through to nurture them into ultimately converting them into a buyer.

The traditional marketing funnel is a blueprint for your business on what the buyer journey should look like. It’s designed so it’s larger at the top of the funnel (TOFU) with channels like SEO, blog post content (hey hey), YouTube, social media posts, or prospecting PPC campaigns. 

In the middle of the funnel (MOFU) we have content like segmented emails and more targeted newsletters. Then finally, it narrows at the very bottom of the funnel (BOFU) with specified content like case studies, trials, live demos, and consultations.

Keep in mind that going down this funnel people will be jumping ship along the way, more so at the top than the middle or the bottom. This is why it is critical to have a solid plan in place and to put yourself in your customer’s shoes to fully understand what they need and what section they are in.

Top Of Funnel Or TOFU

So… you have already built out a comprehensive business marketing plan and marketing strategy? Right, okay so this might be a tad redundant but….. too bad.  Your top of the funnel (TOFU) marketing should be casting a very wide net into the universe (more specifically the internet) as these users are in the awareness stage.

Your role is to educate this potential buyer and show it the wonders of the world (aka being a helpful resource and educating these users on the issue that they are probably not aware of or the unique value prop your company provides) through digital marketing. 

Simply put, this is where you need to gain trust, establish your presence, push your branding, and start to push them down the nurturing phase.

Middle Of Funnel Or MOFU

The next step down is the Middle-of-the-funnel, (MOFU). Now that our audience is aware of your existence. We need to be nurturing them with helpful resources and gaining their trust. It’s time to start to nurture leads even more in the MOFU stage.

Now you have narrowed your audience a bit and you’ve managed to peak their attention they fall into what is called the research phase. SEO, Google Ads, and inbound marketing will begin playing a bigger role with this audience and we will start to see users search for solutions to their problems. 

And now they might be more aware of this new problem because you brought this new problem on their radar in your TOFU content campaign.  

This is your opportunity to empower them with valuable information, unique value propositions, share what sets you apart, and identify pain points from your competition.

Bottom Of Funnel Or BOFU

Assuming you have your TOFU content and MOFU content buckled up and firing on all cylinders- If you had to think for a split second if you do or not…  you need to have your entire conversion funnel buttoned up and firing. Our bottom-of-the-funnel should be doing the heavy lifting for your accounts and the poster child of your marketing campaigns because this is where the lead nurturing intensifies.

Did you know that it takes an average of 8 touches to generate a conversion? The journey your BOFU users had to take was likely lengthy but regardless, they stuck with you through that process. 

Your potential customers were enlightened thanks to your TOFU campaigns identifying a problem they never knew they had and/or your unique value proposition got them excited. Making sure you’re giving this audience the proper CTA to match the traffic type, more on that later.

They didn’t buy yet but they made it into your MOFU campaigns, creating trust and providing them with valuable information via white papers, ebooks, or blogs. Increasing your BOFU audience size by properly addressing the upper funnel traffic types with the proper CTAs. 

And now you have the unique opportunity to wow them and drive home a conversion. They’re at your fingertips at this point and having poor SEO, Email or PPC BOFU campaigns will hurt your bottom line. 

This is why your warmest audience needs to have the strongest campaigns across multiple channels.

What Appetite Does My BOFU Audience Have?

Your bottom-funnel leads have already had a plethora of TOFU and BOFU appetizers, feasting on your blogs, premium content, ebooks, white papers, and the other delicious content you are feeding them. At this stage of the meal, we should assume they want the main course.  

These are your highest qualified leads and they have committed themselves to stick with you and are now ready for the main bottom-of-the-funnel course to be served on a giant platter. 

KlientBoost sales funnel

The Right BOFU Call-To-Action

So, your potential customers are ready for you, but how do you get them to stay for dinner (purchase your product)?

The simple answer… excellent call-to-actions. 

Call-to-actions are not all created equal. Some can scare a potential customer right off if you’re too aggressive. That means making sure you understand the best CTA for the right traffic is vital. 

Here is how the traditional marketing funnel typically works…

TOFU or Ice cubes: people who have never heard of you and haven’t visited your site or landing page before. In the Facebook advertising land, ice cubes are usually the people you’re targeting with a Saved Audience.

MOFU or Lukewarm audience: people who know who you are, but don’t know for sure what you do.

BOFU or Volcano lava traffic: People who have bought something from you before or are at the bottom of the conversion funnel, on the path to becoming a customer.

Cold to hot traffic content

Now that we’ve identified our BOFU volcano, we need to feed it a healthy diet of trials, demos, consultations, and audits. But which call-to-action should I be using to get them to click? Don’t worry, we created an article about 61 call-to-action examples that you can’t help but click, a great resource for you to gain some potential customers. 

This is a critical part in increasing your BOFU audience by understanding the TOFU and MOFU temperature and matching your CTA. If you’re giving your TOFU audience a ‘get a demo’ CTA you’re scaring off customers and shrinking your MOFU and BOFU audience.

Every call-to-action serves a purpose and knowing what works and what doesn’t will change how you design your ads and landing pages.

As we dove deep into the many different calls-to-actions we found a few key takeaways:

• Only use a single call-to-action per page, form, email, etc. As soon as you introduce a second CTA, you worsen your visitors’ attention ratio and lessen your chance of them converting on even a single CTA.
• Increase your BOFU audience by feeding your colder audience (TOFU/MOFU) the correct CTA like coupons, toolkits, email course, infographics, or white papers. 
• Your BOFU CTA should mirror the conversion temperature of your warm traffic. For example, If you have already have given your client a white paper. They are already are aware of you and have had some deeper insight into what you do. It’s time to give them a stronger CTA like a “Free Trial” or “Get a Demo.” 
• You can use a cold call to action for hot traffic, but you can’t use a hot call to action with cold traffic.

What Type Of Content Should I Be Feeding My BOFU Campaigns?

After feeding your top-of-the-funnel and middle-of-the-funnel audiences with blogs, premium content, infographics, white papers, webinars, and ebooks. It’s time to buckle down and end the buyer’s journey in a conversion. 

It’s important to identify your traffic audience and feed them proper offers for the reason that not providing the right offers is a very common ad mistake that should be avoided. You run the risk of giving the wrong audience the wrong offer and risk losing them in your sales funnel completely. Remember to check your CTA with the traffic temperature; don’t be giving your cold traffic (TOFU) ‘get a demo’ or ‘get a consultation’ CTA. 

According to Pardot, 70% of buyers turn to Google at least 2-3 times during their search to find out more about their problems, potential solutions, relevant businesses, etc. Many people also turn to social media and forums for recommendations. At this point, they aren’t looking for promotional content; they’re looking to learn more about potential solutions for their needs.

Google RLSA (Remarketing List Search Ads) ads will play a very important role when it comes to continuing to nurture users down the funnel and providing the correct offer, knowing they have already have done some research. Here are 7 examples of how to use remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) successfully.

Email BOFU content campaigns should be reenforcing that your products/services work and provide users with concrete case studies or strong reviews. Doubling down on your unique value prop or pushing your stronger content pieces will allow you to see your metrics increase exponentially. 

73% of marketers attributed email marketing to increasing their conversion efforts. A very powerful weapon in your BOFU content arsenal that should be sending the appropriate and relevant email content on a regular basis.

Email is also a great way to send time-sensitive offers because by providing your BOFU qualified leads with deadlines in emails, you’re creating urgency to convert.  These emails could include flash sales, coupons, or “preferred customer” deals to add a personal touch to your email. To get your creative juices flowing, here are 35 creative ways to retarget users in email campaigns.

The BOFU SEO audience is in the research phase and is most likely already searching for your brand. Having straightforward branded and product-related SEO content will be critical to close those BOFU leads/sales. 

This is your time to wow them with strong reviews, testimonials, blog posts, and a trustworthy sales process. The value you provide needs to shine through and be the tipping point for users to finally convert.

BOFU content for your PPC campaigns should be a mixture of what you’re using in Email and SEO BOFU. Webinars, ebooks, white papers, and strong content offers, making sure these users do not get fed the same content over and over again. Create a funnel by excluding audiences that have already hit some of these content pieces so you can plan out their journey. Fresh, creative image ads or video ads will be important to capitalize on. On average you have 1.7 seconds to capture a user’s attention on any piece of content on mobile, use that time wisely to close sales and leads. 

A strong Facebook BOFU campaign would consist of either 10% or a 25% time on site visitors or creating an audience list where the user must hit 1 or 2 of your ebooks, white papers, webinars, or whatever content you fed them at the earlier funnels. 

Lastly, give your current customers the microphone. This is a precious resource that you should be utilizing and spreading across ads, SEO, and email. Who better else to give you credibility than your current customers, they should be your biggest hype fans for new customers. From quotes to video testimonials and case studies, these assets will pay dividends in the long run. 

 Recap on BOFU action items

• Test out different temperature call to actions for your BOFU audience
  • Cold CTAs: Coupon, Toolkit, Email Course, White Paper, Infographic
  • Lukewarm CTAs: Webinar, Case Study, Giveaway, Ebook, Quiz
  • Hot CTAs: Consultation, Quote, Purchase, Trial, Demo
• Create different CTA paths for users
  • E.g. – First touchpoint hits infographic, second touchpoint hits your case study and your third touchpoint hits your ‘get a demo’ page
• Don’t be afraid to test out cold CTAs to your BOFU audience
  • E.g. – First touchpoint hits white paper, second touchpoint hits blog and the third touchpoint hits case study
• Get your loyal customers to push your product
  • Pushing ads of your customers ranting and raving about you is critical

BOFU Tactics In Action

My clients, Flo Technologies saw excellent BOFU results when we prioritized the content that would live in the bottom-of-the-funnel.

Flo Technologies BOFU Success Campaign

Definitely a product most homeowners wouldn’t know much about. So, I was feeding our TOFU and MOFU a healthy amount of ebooks, blogs, and other informative literature to bring them awareness and to educate them about the world of smart water devices. 

By applying bottom-of-funnel strategies like CTA offers and conversion-focused landing page optimization, we increased Flo Technologies’ Facebook Ads purchases by 1,665%, increased ROAS by 168%, and increased conversion value by 1,125% from Q1 2020 to Q2 2020. The changes also significantly reduced the campaigns’ cost per acquisition and generated other bottom-line improvements in their PPC campaigns. 

This massive win was in large part due to synchronized BOFU funnels from email, SEO, customer video testimonials, matching CTAs with traffic types, and PPC working in tandem with one another, creating that sweet sweet ROAS. Not having a cohesive BOFU plan we would not have generated these results.

BOFU Takeaways

If you’re just starting to make improvements to your conversion funnel, your best bet is to start at the bottom and work backward. Make sure to have all three layers in place. 95% of buyers chose a vendor that provided content for each stage of the buying process.

You’ll be tackling multiple channels SEO, email, and PPC and each is important and needs to be planned out properly, but PPC is by far taking the cake in terms of importance and maximizing ROAS. You don’t want to waste ad spend at your most critical part of the funnel. If you’re looking to improve your BOFU PPC ROAS and to run effective Bottom-of-the-funnel PPC campaigns, this article by KlientBoost alum Kyle Cavaness breaks down every detail.

Remember to put yourself in the buyer’s journey and match the content offer and CTA to where that user is in that journey. Making sure to not scare them off with a too strong or weak CTA/content offer. Continue to test out cold CTAs with your BOFU audience and create specific buyer journey funnels etc. first offer, ‘white paper’, second offer ‘case study’, and third offer ‘consultation’.

Each part of the funnel is important but when it comes to easy wins and picking that low hanging fruit, BOFU is going to be your bread and butter.

The post BOFU: The Final Step Of The Sales Funnel + How To Convert Leads And Generate Sales appeared first on KlientBoost.

This journey is called a marketing funnel and it starts with a wide audience and narrows down to an audience who has the intention of converting. 

So what exactly are the different stages of a buyer’s journey in the marketing funnel?

1. TOFU or Top of Funnel
2. MOFU or Middle of Funnel 
3. BOFU or Bottom of Funnel 

A good content marketing strategy can help your company get in front of people at each stage and move potential customers to the bottom of the funnel sooner, which puts more money into your pocket.

While every part of the funnel is important, we’re going to dive into why you should include top of funnel content into your marketing strategy. By focusing on the top of the funnel you can help improve metrics around getting new leads, increasing conversion rates, and improving retention of those potential new customers.

What Is Top Of Funnel (TOFU) Marketing?

Top of funnel marketing is referring to potential customers who are at the beginning of the buyer’s journey. They are in the informational gathering and researching phase of decision making.

Most companies focus their PPC, Facebook Ads, and SEO marketing efforts solely on the bottom of the funnel because those people turn into customers the fastest. But, by creating top of the funnel content you can improve the ROI of all your other marketing channels. This is what makes content marketing campaigns, which reside at the top of the funnel, so powerful.

KlientBoost sales funnel illustration
Source

9 Benefits Of Top Of Funnel Marketing

1. Owning The Conversation & Being On The Same Page

Some clients ask me,  “Why should we bother writing about these topics, they are so basic and not our ideal customer.”

The answer I give is that all customers start off with questions at some point.

Even if they are not an ideal customer now if your company starts educating them on terminology and your processes they will be an amazing customer in the future. 

2. Brand Awareness & Being Top Of Mind

A brand that educates and adds value consistently will become the default place potential customers will go to when they have questions.

A quality content strategy can cement your brand at the top of the mind of potential future customers so when they are ready to hire somebody you will be the first person they contact. 

3. Building Trust

Just because you are top of mind doesn’t always mean it’s a good thing. We have all had bad experiences that jump to the top of our minds that make us not want to ever work with a company again. If you have ever gotten food poisoning from a restaurant you know exactly what I’m talking about.

With every quality piece of content that you put out, you are building trust with new members of your audience who are at the beginning of their journey of finding a solution to their problem.

Consistently adding value to people builds trust in your brand and establishes your company as an expert in the space that can keep you top of mind for years. 

4. The Evergreen Snowball Effect

One of the greatest parts of content marketing is that it is evergreen, meaning that it will add value for years to come.

Every day people wake up trying to find solutions to problems that your company solves.

You are probably familiar with Frequently Asked Question (FAQs) pages that have a list of the most common questions that they are often asked by their customers along with a quick answer.

These FAQ pages can be a great outline for the top of funnel pages that your company should create because oftentimes a customer’s questions cannot be answered in just a couple of sentences.

For questions that you get asked repeatedly should get its own dedicated page to fully answer that question. Having an entire page allows you to optimize the page to rank as a solution to that question and fully explain it to new customers.

As you create quality content consistently over time they can start to rank organically for these common questions. We call this the snowball effect because overtime this content gains momentum and eventually becomes an avalanche of new visitors and potential customers.

5. Low Competition

As we mentioned before, most companies only focus on the bottom of the funnel.

This is what makes search engine optimization (SEO) really difficult for newer companies because they need to catch up against the competition who have been doing it for years.

By focusing on the top stage of the funnel topics you are usually competing with websites like Quora or Wikipedia that Google uses to fill in gaps in search results. This low competition is a good opportunity for a company to come along with great answers to overtake these types of sites that are generalists. 

Everyone is competing at the bottom of the funnel which is expensive
Source

6. It’s A Fast Pass To Customer

Have you ever been to a busy amusement park like Disney World or Six Flags? The lines are so long that you end up waiting for hours to get on the latest ride that lasts less than a few minutes. Such a bummer.

But then an amazing invention came around called the Fast Pass. These fast passes allow you to skip the main line and go into another much shorter queue. This can turn a three-hour ride line into a much shorter fifteen-minute line which makes people really happy.  

A well-crafted piece of content can do something similar for your potential customers. It helps them jump from the research phase directly to signing up for a demo or purchase. 

This is amazing because you actually are turning them into customers before they even attempt a bottom of funnel search. You just got them to bypass the tough competition at the bottom of the funnel and become a customer. 

7. Create Assets For Your Sales Team

Your sales team’s time is extremely valuable.

Having a one-pager available to them with quick answers to common questions along with links to your quality top of funnel content will help your sales team to give consistent answers without wasting a lot of time.

8. Improves Your Email Marketing

When somebody comes to your blog through a top of funnel piece of content they are usually not ready to jump into purchasing OR scheduling a demo.

We don’t want to lose the opportunity to add value or reconnect with this potential customer so having some kind of email capture like an ebook or cheat sheet is a great way to grow your email list.

Having a content strategy paired with an email capture and marketing strategy is an incredibly powerful passive way to keep your sales funnel full of potential customers. 

9. Improves Your Retargeting Marketing

Lastly, if you are getting a lot of traffic from organic to your blog even if they do not convert or even give your email you are still able to get value.

By potential customers visiting your website you are able to pixel them and start retargeting them to come back and become a customer.

In 2018, 41% of shoppers abandoned a transaction at a virtual check-out, they went all the way through the process to check out and abandoned it at the last second. A simple retargeting campaign could bring that shopper right back to their cart and finish checking out. 

Measuring The Success Of Top Of Funnel Campaigns

In order to measure success for anything in your business, you need to start with a goal.

The goal for a top of funnel content campaign is to get as many new visitors as possible & push them down to the middle or bottom of the funnel. So any progression down the marketing funnel from the top is a win.

For blog content, we usually have at least two goals at KlientBoost for our clients which are fast lane and a slow lane:

1. Fast Lane Goal

A fast lane goal is how the company makes its money.

Examples of fast lane goals

• Product sales & revenue
• Free trials/demo sign-ups

Having someone land on your blog and then turn into a customer is a huge win.

Most of the time someone who is in the awareness phase is not ready to jump into buying what the company is offering, they are still in the courting phase. 

Measuring Fast Lane Goals

Since these are the same priority goals for the entire company, you want to measure the completions coming from your blog and top of funnel resources only.

What to measure:

• Organic traffic
• Revenue 
• Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) & Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)

2. Slow Lane Goal

A slow lane goal is any other goal that helps you to re-engage or move a potential customer down the sales funnel.

Examples of slow lane goals

• Email captures
• Engagements with a chatbot
• Pixel for retargeting
• Increase in social follows

Measuring Slow Lane Goals

The way to measure your slow lane goals is to track the key performance indicators of those marketing channels.

For example, if you have an email capture and drip campaign you want to see if the rate of emails gathered is increasing and if they are turning into customers. The same goes for chatbots, organic traffic, or any other slow lane goal.

Tips To Help Customers Move Down The Funnel

Make Sure To Have A Compelling Call-To-Action

When somebody comes to your website they usually do not know who you are or what you do. To help guide these visitors on what to do next you need to have a Call-to-Actions (CTA’s) so they can opt into the fast lane or slow lanes that you have set up. 

Did you know that 96.7% of people will leave your site or app without buying anything? If you don’t help these new visitors know where to go they may leave, forget who you are, and never come back. Having a quality call to action helps you to build a relationship with these potential customers. 

Implement An Email Capture

Most of the time when people are in the information-gathering phase of the customer journey they are not ready to jump into a sale or an hour-long demo with a salesperson, they are still trying to figure things out.

Instead of only offering call-to-actions that try to get visitors to “Buy Now” or “Sign Up For A Free Demo,” it’s important to add call-to-actions that allow you to be able to continue to reach out to them directly and help them along their customer journey.

A powerful way to communicate with potential customers is through email. By offering something of value to gain their email you can then systematically email, educate, and warm them up to be a strong customer in the future.

Examples of email list building assets

• Ebooks / Guides
• Reports / Infographics
• Quizzes / Surveys
• Calculators / Tools
• Checklists 
• Case Studies
• White papers
• Webinars

Increase Your Social Media Channel Followings

If social media is a strong part of your marketing strategy either for branding or sales the more followers your channels have the more opportunity you have to stay top of mind with people when they see your posts when cruising through social media.

For example, 97% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn as a content distribution network

How to increase your followers: 

• Simply ask people to follow you 
• Include image embeds from Instagram
• Include video embeds from YouTube
• Ask them to comment on Facebook Community

Spark Engagement

Another benefit of having a blog is that you can engage with your target audience, which keeps you top of mind with your potential customers. It’s hard to tie revenue to blog comments and reads, but blogs that have a lot of engagement often have higher followers and repeat buyers. 

How to increase engagement on a blog:

• Ask for comments
• Create giveaways & contests
• Encourage shares on social media

How To Find Top Funnel Content Topics

Oftentimes we know we need to do things, like blogging, but do not know where to start. Here is a list of four strategies to help you come up with amazing topics to kick off your blog and content strategy. 

Survey Customers

Find out what questions and pain points your ideal customers have by asking your current customers what you can do better. 

It can be for free, quick, and easy with a Google Form that you can send to your customers to see what questions they had or still have.

As you get more and more clients filling out the survey you will start to see trends in the questions they have and ideas on what content should be created to be most helpful for potential customers will come easily. 

Use Google Suggest

Another free and favorite way to find top and middle of the funnel topics is to use Google Autosuggest.

Simply, start typing questions around your industry and let Google do the rest. The search engine will start showing you the most recent and popular queries.

Using the 5 W’s rule of journalism (Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How) along with a keyword can be a great way to find your first few topics to create. If you are not able to find auto-suggested topics around your niche, you may need to be more generic or creative with finding what questions your customers have.

The Google search autosuggest can be great at giving topic recommendations

Keyword Research

If you have access to a keyword research tool, like Ahrefs that we use here at KlientBoost, then you can get a lot more data around what topics have organic demand and how competitive those terms are to rank for.

A great part of using Ahrefs is that they have a keyword research filter just for questions.

If you follow the steps in the screenshot you can quickly find which search queries have the most organic search demand. You can export these terms and create a content calendar to slowly start producing these posts. 

Ahrefs keyword research tool to find TOFU content topics

Quora Top Ranking Pages for Keyword

Another trick to finding great top of funnel content is to put websites like Quora or WikiHow into a tool like Ahref’s to find out if they are ranking for a lot of top-funnel terms in your industry. I like to use these two sites because they rank for a huge amount of terms across almost all industries and can usually be outranked by a brand in the space. 

By putting these domains into an SEO tool you can search and find what pages rank for the most keywords in your niche and the estimated traffic those pages get on a monthly basis. 

Screenshot of Ahrefs Tool finding the top Quora pages around the topic of insurance.

Examples Of Top Of Funnel Content

I know what you’re thinking: “you’ve done a lot of talking but I want to see what this looks like in action.” 

We understand, here are some examples of top of funnel content. 

1. How to Write a Google Review Without a Gmail Account – Signpost
   • Why It Works: This is a great example because a lot of people who want to write a Google Review but do not know how are business owners looking to respond to reviews of their business. These people are their ideal customers who they want to sign up for a demo of their software.
   • CTA: This post does a good job of having a Fast Lane CTA (Get A Demo) and also a Slow Lane CTA (Free Guide to Google Reviews).

2. Repairing A Slab Leak – Restore My Pipes
   • Why It Works: This post is a great example of creating a page that targets top of funnel content around “Signs of a Slab Leak Repair” and “What is a Slab Leak” but also tries to get people to call or contact them for service.
   • CTA: This post does a good job of having a couple of Fast Lane CTA’s (Call Us Now) and another Fast Lane CTA (Contact Form). I think they probably don’t have a Slow Lane CTA because a service like slab leak repair the person is looking for a quick solution instead of doing a lot of research.

3. Gear Guide to Camping in a Truck –  DECKED
   • Why It Works: This is a great example of a topic of someone researching how to camp in their truck. They probably have never heard of DECKED before but after reading this post on the advantages their product offers they might purchase the product to be the base platform of their truck camping adventure.
   • CTA: This post does well at getting people in the Fast Lane (sales funnel) by selecting their vehicle. They also include links to social platforms so readers can easily share this content with their friends on the social platform of their choosing.

4. Facebook Ad Examples – KlientBoost
   • Why It Works: This is a great topic for KlientBoost because we get to show off our skills of being a top-notch Facebook ads agency. People who are trying to do Facebook ads on their own often look for inspiration on what works best. When they see the quality of our work and read some of our Facebook Case Studies they are more likely to hire us to take over handling their social ads.
   • CTA: On the KlientBoost blog we actually have three different calls to action that we leverage. First, we have an email capture where we can continue to build a relationship over time. The other main CTA is to have potential clients ask for a proposal which we do through site chat and buttons. 

Wrapping It Up

It’s easy to focus on the competitive and expensive terms at the bottom of the sales funnel that everyone is fighting over. However, as we’ve shown engaging and adding value to people at the top of the funnel leads to improved ROI across all marketing channels.

The post 9 Benefits Of Top Of Funnel Marketing + How To Measure Its Success appeared first on KlientBoost.

At the moment, you might feel as though you’re doing a good job when it comes to tried and tested tactics, but you may feel as though you’ve hit a plateau. If that’s the case, you might be interested in learning about the latest digital marketing trends so that you can update your digital marketing strategy. 

Well, in this post, we’re going to look at some of the top digital marketing trends you should focus on. If you want to develop a cutting edge marketing strategy, these trends will help you get off to a good start. 

Let’s begin!

1. Chatbots

To kick this post off, the first digital marketing trend we’re going to look at is ‘chatbots.’ It’s fair to say that chatbots have been around for a while, but they’re now becoming more mainstream. In fact, within the past month, you’ve probably encountered at least one website that has a chatbot. 

The chatbot market is expected to grow from $2.6 billion in 2019 to $9.4 billion in 2024. This growth in the chatbot market is related to people’s increased willingness to use chatbots for a variety of needs. If you look at the chart below, you can see that 37% of people would be willing to use a chatbot to get a quick answer in an emergency. 

Predicted use cases for chatbots
Source

As you can see from the chart above, chatbots are often used in a customer service context, and they can help existing, and potential customers deal with issues quickly. 

This is especially helpful when you consider that 33% of Americans would switch companies due to poor customer service. Additionally, because chatbots can automate certain customer service tasks, they can free up your team so that they can focus on other things. 

One of the brilliant things about chatbots is that they allow you to generate a greater number of customers from your website. For instance, if someone visits your website, they might be interested in learning more about a particular offering. Traditionally, this person might have to scroll through ‘product’ or FAQ pages, or they might also need to contact a customer support representative, and they’d then have to wait for a reply to their email. 

Well, if your website has a chatbot, people can just interact with the chatbot to instantly get the answers they need. If someone is in the consideration or decision stage of the buyer’s journey, this interaction could be the difference between them buying from you instead of a competitor. Chatbots can also be a brilliant way to generate leads for your business. 

Common uses for chatbots
Source

This is highlighted by the chart above, which shows that around 22% of companies use chatbots to collect info, and roughly 18% use them to qualify leads. 

This is all possible because during a chatbot conversation you can ask for certain kinds of customer information. 

This then means that you can follow-up with someone after they’ve interacted with your chatbot. Because you have lots of relevant information on a customer, you may also be able to achieve greater conversion rates in regards to closing these leads. 

Another good thing about chatbots is that you can set them up so that a ‘real’ customer service representative eventually joins the chat. 

This can lead to more sales as the customer service representative might be able to ‘close’ this person via the chat after the chatbot has done most of the heavy lifting. 

Chatbots are commonly used for sales
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It’s because of this that 41% of companies say that their chatbot is most commonly used for sales. 

So, with all that said, how exactly do you go about setting up a chatbot on your website? 

Fortunately, setting up a chatbot isn’t hard, and there are many services out there, such as ManyChat and Chatfuel, that’ll help you create a chatbot.

If you want to install these tools on your website, you often just need to add a little bit of code to your website. If you use a platform like WordPress, this is relatively easy, and you might even be able to get a plugin that helps you get the job done. 

Setting up the automated responses is going to be a bit of a trial and error process, and it will take some time for you to dial this in. 

If you want to get off to a good start, you should consider some of the common inquiries people have whenever they email you and ask for help. You could then set up your chatbot so that it helps people with these queries. 

Over time, more and more people will interact with your chatbot, and you can use these interactions to improve the way your chatbot deals with customer service queries. 

Additionally, some chatbots will make use of artificial intelligence tools such as machine learning. 

This then means that they’ll learn from past customer experiences, and they’ll then use this knowledge to provide a better response to future chatbot users. 

Furthermore, some chatbots will integrate with social media messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger. Due to this the chatbot benefits mentioned above can apply to your social media marketing channels, as well as your website. 

Note that when you’re setting up your chatbot, make sure you always give people the option of speaking to a ‘real’ person. If you just try to automate everything, you might not be able to do a good job when it comes to dealing with customer queries, and thus you might end up with a frustrated customer. If that happens, your chatbot will often end up doing more harm than good. 

2. Video Marketing

The next digital marketing trend we’re going to look at is video marketing. 

Now, you might think that video marketing has been around for a while and you may not really consider it to be a trend, however, while this is a fair argument, it’s worth mentioning that video content on the internet has yet to peak. 

In fact, according to one study, internet traffic will account for 82% of traffic in 2022, which is a steady increase from previous years. 

Video growth is expected to grow
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Furthermore, video consumption could rise even more than what is suggested above due to the advent of 5G. This is because 5G will make it easier for people to consume high-quality video content wherever they are. 

If you look at the chart below, you can see how there’s an expected increase in video consumption, after the adoption of 5G. 

5G will impact video consumption habits
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Furthermore, when surveyed, 57% of people are most excited about using 5G to watch UHD video content on their mobile devices. 

More people will watch UHD videos due to 5G
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When you combine this with the fact that 86% of people want to see more video content from businesses, it’s clear that video marketing still remains a great opportunity. 

More people want video content from businesses
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Now, video marketing is a very broad term, and it can mean a lot of things. For instance, if you’re looking to embrace video marketing, you might do the following:

• Post YouTube videos
• Embrace Instagram stories
• Experiment with TikTok videos
• Post Snapchat videos
• Host ‘live videos’ on Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube 
• Run social media video ads

If you want to take advantage of video marketing, creating YouTube content is perhaps the easiest way to go about things. This is emphasized by the fact that 78.8% of marketers consider it to be the best platform for video marketing. 

If you don’t have much experience with creating video content for your business, you may not know what kind of videos you should actually produce. If you find yourself in that position, there are a number of routes that you can go down. 

The first option is to do a ‘behind the scenes’ video, which showcases how people within your company work. Here’s a good example of a manufacturing company that’s based in Kentucky. 

This manufacturing company offers a good ‘behind the scenes’ video
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Within this video, you might show how you launch a particular product or even how a certain kind of product is actually made. These kinds of videos work well because they give your company a human face, and this can make it so that people feel connected to your company. This is key when you consider that 57% of people will buy more from a brand that they feel connected to. 

You might even want to create videos that showcase some of your customers and the results you have delivered. Below you can see a good example of such a video, which is from the Volvo company. 

Volvo offers a good customer experience video
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There’s also no harm in creating some lighthearted, entertaining content. The video below, from Mercedes-Benz, is essentially a series based on the life of a crash test dummy, and it’s a good example of such content. 

An entertaining crash test video from Mercedes
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Additionally, you might want to consider creating content that helps people deal with certain challenges associated with your industry. Creating this kind of content is especially worthwhile because 36% of people want to see more educational/explainer forms of content from businesses. Also, because ‘how to’ is the most consumed form of content on YouTube, you should consider posting these sorts of videos to YouTube. 

For instance, suppose you have a software product that helps people manage board members. If you’re looking to create content for your YouTube channel, you might create videos that teach people how they can attract good board members. Here’s a good example of explainer content from the makeup brand Chanel. 

A good example of how-to content from the makeup brand Chanel
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If you make an effort to create a lot of content like this, you will naturally develop a lot of brand awareness over time.  We’ve focused a lot on YouTube here, but as mentioned, there are lots of other platforms that you can experiment with. You can post videos on social media platforms like Instagram or TikTok. 

For the most part, you can stick to the video creation strategy principles we’ve mentioned in relation to YouTube. However, you might have to adapt your marketing strategy so that it’s suitable for the platform you’re using. You’ll also need to adapt your video creation strategy so that it caters to the varying formats supported by a given platform. 

For instance, if you’re using Instagram, and you want to just post quick snippets of content, you might use the ‘standard’ 60-second video format. However, if you want to post a long-form piece of content, you’d probably want to use the IGTV format, as this format allows you to record and upload videos that can be up to one hour long. 

Most platforms will provide you with varying options in regards to the kinds of videos you can upload, and so you should always clarify what’s possible before you stick with a certain format. 

Each platform has its own quirks in regards to what works well, and if you want to figure out what these quirks are, you’ll need to consume some content on these platforms. Sign up for a few accounts in your niche so that you can develop a feel for what does and doesn’t work. You might also want to consider running some video ads on a number of different social media platforms. 

More companies are starting to invest in social media video ads, and in the chart below, you can see that social network video ad spending has yet to plateau.

Social network ad spending is set to increase
Source

Running social media video ads is a post in and of itself, and so we won’t go into too much detail here. 

3. Omnichannel Marketing

The next digital marketing trend we’re going to look at is something known as ‘omnichannel marketing.’ Omnichannel marketing is worth your time because, on average, companies that focus on omnichannel marketing typically experience a 91% year-on-year increase in customer retention. Now omnichannel marketing can sound like a complicated term, but it essentially means that you provide a coherent, personalized marketing experience across multiple marketing channels. 

Providing a personalized customer experience is important because 69% of customers want a personalized experience. Furthermore, companies that make use of three or more marketing channels generally experience higher customer retention rates. 

Marketers that use more than one channel achieve better customer retention levels
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When you consider these stats, and that omnichannel marketing lets you provide a personalized customer user experience across multiple marketing channels, it’s easy to see why it’s worth investing in. Now, when we talk about marketing channels, we’re essentially referring to all the ways someone might interact with your brand. 

So, that could include: 

• A mobile website
• A desktop website
• A tablet website
• An app
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• YouTube
• SMS
• WhatsApp messages
• Email marketing
• Messages in social media messaging apps

Of course, this list isn’t exhaustive, and there are many other platforms that you might want to consider. It’s worth noting that omnichannel marketing is different from multichannel marketing. 

Omnichannel and multichannel marketing aren’t the same things
Source

Multichannel marketing is essentially when you push out isolated marketing messages to a variety of channels. These different channels work in isolation, and the experience a customer has with one marketing channel will not impact their experience with another marketing channel. 

Multichannel marketing is very good if you just want to expand the reach of your brand. With this approach, you can push out lots of content to all the platforms, and easily reach a multitude of people. So, if you have a video, you can repurpose it for each channel, and gain a lot of impressions. 

However, this approach doesn’t provide a consistent, personalized experience for people, and so that is where omnichannel marketing comes into play. Omnichannel marketing is different in that it’s focused on the experience of a given individual and where they might be within the customer journey. The marketing messages a customer receives on various marketing channels will be based upon their past actions. 

So, the ads they see on Facebook, the emails, or the SMS messages they receive, will all depend on how they’ve interacted with your brand in the past. A basic example of this is someone receiving a cart abandonment message in their email inbox after they’ve visited an eCommerce store. It could also include a retargeting ad after someone has interacted with a certain piece of content either on your site, a social media platform, or within an app. 

It’s worth noting that omnichannel marketing often requires the use of certain marketing automation tools, otherwise known as ‘martech.’ Marketing Technology, known as MarTech, are software and technology tools marketers use for marketing campaigns. MarTech is used to automate marketing processes, collect and analyze data in order to reach and engage with your target audience. 

If you don’t use these tools, you might not be able to connect different marketing channels together, and thus your ability to create personalized marketing campaigns will be limited. These marketing tools can be expensive, and they can also be hard to learn, and in some ways, this can make omnichannel marketing difficult to implement. This is part of the reason that only 53% of companies only have a few channels connected, and 21% of companies don’t have any channels connected. 

Plenty of companies don’t make use of omnichannel marketing
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If you want to benefit from omnichannel marketing, you have no other option but to invest in these tools. When you consider the upside of omnichannel marketing, it’s worth investing in this new technology so that you can provide your target market with a great experience. 

At the very least, you might want to consider consulting with a company that understands how you can integrate marketing automation tools into your company. With their help, you’ll be able to implement these tools properly, thereby allowing you to create a strong omnichannel marketing strategy. 

4. Focus on Digital Customer Experience

Focusing on the digital experience of customers is another digital marketing trend that is gathering pace. That’s because as time goes on, more and more of your potential and existing customers will interact with your brand via a digital medium. If you don’t provide these people with a good digital experience, they will leave and go to a competitor. 

In fact, 57 % of customers say that they’ve stopped buying from a company because a competitor was able to provide a better experience. Many brands are taking this seriously, and nearly 48% of companies have created a digital experience team that focuses purely on the experience of customers across digital mediums. Following this, you need to make sure you’re providing customers with a great digital customer experience, or else you’ll lose out to companies that do. 

Now, providing a great digital customer experience is a very broad term, and it can mean a wide range of things. However, if you look at the graphic below, you’ll notice some of the key areas that are associated with the ‘digital customer experience.’ 

The six key areas associated with a customer’s digital experience
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So, as you can see, the digital customer experience impacts many areas of your business. It could relate to the experience people have when they email customer support and how convenient it is for them to contact support. It can also relate to the simplicity of your website and whether it works well on multiple devices. 

Due to this, you need to take a close look at all the ways somebody interacts with your brand. You then need to consider how you can build upon this experience so that it leaves the customer with a positive impression. The only way you can truly provide customers with a great digital experience is if you take a proactive approach. 

The graphic below does a great job of highlighting the difference between a strong proactive approach to managing the customer experience a lackluster approach. 

How you can assess the quality of a customer’s digital experience
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So, a proactive approach would mean that you monitor and then respond to real-time social media mentions that are associated with your company. It would also mean that you review customer service emails so that you can determine where things are going wrong. 

If you can smooth out these issues, you will be able to reduce the negative emotion associated with your brand. This will then result in better ‘digital experiences’ for those that are interacting with your brand. This is especially important when you consider that 17% of people will stop interacting with a brand after one negative interaction. 

It doesn’t take many bad experiences for a customer to leave
Source

Note that if you take steps to improve the digital experience of your customers, you might want to document your efforts and the outcomes of any changes you have implemented. A standard example of this might include a case study or whitepaper that is readily available on your blog. You might also want to consider creating a video, which details the story associated with the positive customer experience. 

You can then use it as part of your marketing campaigns, as you can show people that you care about the experience of your target market. 

5. Promoting the Values Behind a Brand

Promoting the values behind a brand is another digital marketing trend that’s gathering a lot of steam. This is a digital marketing trend because companies will use digital marketing channels to promote brand values. Additionally, if you go down this route, it’ll likely have an impact on the kind of digital content you produce, both on your website and on other marketing channels. 

Now more than ever, people are starting to care about the values behind a brand. More specifically, 71% of people want to buy from brands that have similar values to them. 

The graphic below highlights some of the values that people tend to care about whenever they’re thinking about buying from or recommending a particular brand. 

The issues that customers care about when buying from a company
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You need to take this into consideration, and you may want to think about where your brand stands on these three different kinds of values. You might then want to make a commitment to achieving certain kinds of goals that relate to these values. Once you’ve done this, you then need to be transparent so that people can see how you’re trying to embody certain values. 

One way you can do this is by announcing how your products align with certain values whenever you release something new. For example, Apple has committed to lessening the environmental impact of their products. 

Apple’s commitment to being carbon neutral
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Following this, whenever they launch a new product, Apple will include a section in the promotional reveal that dictates how their new products don’t have a massive negative impact on the environment. If you go to the sales pages of these products, you’ll see that this message is reinforced further. 

A message from the iPhone 12 Pro sales page that highlights the product’s impact on the environment
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They even publish a report that details how they’re doing in regards to sticking to these values. 

A report released by apple which shows the efforts they’re making to reduce their negative impact on the environment
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Following this, you should consider having a page on your website that specifically highlights your company’s values. Alternatively, you might want to have pages dedicated to big issues, such as the environment, employee culture, and the general societal impact of your company. 

You might even want to create content that showcases how your company is trying to achieve goals that relate to your values. 

There are many ways you can do this, but in most cases, video marketing can be a good way to go. Microsoft’s video on how they will become carbon negative is a good example of a video that is related to this section. 

A video from Microsoft which highlights how they will become carbon negative by 2030
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Of course, if you publicly declare that your company is going to adhere to certain goals or values, you need to make sure you follow through. If you fail to do this, you will often create a negative impression, and you may hurt the goodwill you’ve built up over time with your target market. 

Due to this, you should also conduct yearly or six-monthly reviews so that you can check if your company is actually sticking to certain values. You can also use this period to determine whether you need to update your values or the way you’re trying to hit certain goals. 

If you achieve any big wins when it comes to the goals associated with company values, you should consider how you can promote these wins in the form of content. That might include creating a video or a blog post that you promote using paid marketing. 

You might even want to mention these wins as part of your email marketing campaigns. If you work in a B2B company, it might even be a good idea to post this content on your company’s LinkedIn page. 

6. Focus on Emerging Markets

Focusing on emerging markets is another digital marketing trend that is getting a lot of attention. That’s because internet adoption and disposable income are rising within these regions, and this now makes them viable regions for most businesses. For instance, if you look at the chart below, you can see how disposable income is rising and will continue to rise in certain emerging markets. 

A chart that shows the increase in disposable income across emerging markets
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This chart also shows that in some regions, internet adoption in emerging markets is growing by at least 20% year-on-year. 

A chart that shows the increase in internet adoption amongst emerging market countries
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One of the great things about emerging markets is that they tend to have a lot less competition, and this often results in better ‘digital marketing outcomes.’ For example, you might find that PPC costs are lower simply because there are fewer advertisers in the country you’re looking to expand in. This is highlighted by the chart below, which does a good job of showcasing how CPC costs tend to vary between different regions of the world. 

This graphic highlights how the average CPC varies across the world
Source

Following this, you may find that customer acquisition costs will be a lot lower in an emerging market. 

If you want to expand into emerging markets, it’s critical that you work with someone that not only understands the language but also understands the culture. After all, you want to make sure your marketing materials are coherent, but you also want to be sure they’re not offensive. If you work with someone that understands the local culture, you will be able to avoid any potentially embarrassing and damaging campaigns. 

It’s also worth noting that different kinds of marketing messages will work for different markets. For instance, if you look at the chart below, you’ll notice how different emerging markets are motivated by different things in regards to shopping online. 

The varying motivations that cause people in emerging markets to shop online
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Now, this kind of stat tends to apply more to eCommerce businesses than to something like a B2B business. Yet, it still does a good job of highlighting the different preferences that exist between varying emerging markets. 

If you’re looking to expand into an emerging market, there’s a good chance you won’t get things right on your first go, as you literally are going into ‘unknown territory.’ You should accept that it’s going to be a bit of an iterative process and that it’s going to take some time for you to develop a solid digital marketing strategy. 

It’s because of this difficulty, that you should try to focus on one emerging market at a time. In doing so, you can ensure that you do a brilliant job, and you can then use these lessons when you’re thinking about moving into another market. 

In any case, how can you go about establishing a presence in emerging markets? To begin with, you need to select an emerging market that is right for your business. There are many markets you can focus on, but for the most part, you might want to start with the countries mentioned in the graphic below. 

Some of the ‘top’ emerging markets
Source

These regions have a growing middle class, and B2B spending is also growing. For example, China represents the world’s 3rd largest B2B market. 

For the sake of this post, let’s suppose that you want to focus on the Brazillian market. If you want to enter this market, you’ll need to think about creating a Portuguese version of your website. Ideally, you want to make it so that people in Brazil automatically get the Portuguese version of the site when they visit. 

If you’re going to do this, it’s a good idea to also translate blog content, alongside the general text and landing pages that can be found on your site. By doing this, you will experience a lot of SEO benefits, as your content can now be found by people using Portuguese search terms. If you have any whitepapers or case studies on your website, you should think about translating them too.  

As alluded to earlier, if you’re going to translate the content on your website, make sure you work with someone that truly understands the language. Going down this route can be expensive, but it’s the only way you can ensure you end up with quality content that is translated in a clear and coherent manner. If you just use an ‘auto-translate’ tool, you’re not going to have proper translations, and thus your website can discourage the people you’re trying to reach. 

You might even want to hire a digital marketer that’s based in the region you want to tackle. They will have a better understanding of the consumers in your region, and this may help you reduce the amount of time it takes to get results. 

If you want to quickly test out your marketing materials, you might want to consider running some Google Ads in your chosen emerging market. This isn’t that hard to do since Google Ads caters to most emerging markets. 

If you’re looking to promote an eCommerce store, you might also want to run some influencer marketing campaigns. The global influencer market is expected to grow 25% annually from 2019 to 2025, so there is definitely an opportunity when it comes to international influencers. Plus, because these markets are emerging, you’ll find that influencers tend to face fewer inbound inquiries than influencers in North American markets. 

This can then mean lower costs for you, thereby allowing you to potentially generate a better return on your influencer marketing campaigns. 

7. Podcasting

Podcasting is one of the most obvious digital marketing trends that is starting to gain a lot of attention. Podcast listeners have grown 37.5% in the past three years, and expected to increase. Furthermore, according to an article from Forbes, the number of monthly podcast listeners has grown from 24% to 37% in the past three years. 

The growth in monthly podcast listeners
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This shows that a significant percentage of people keep on listening to podcasts after they start listening to them, thereby indicating that this trend will continue. 

One of the good things about podcasts is that they can have a knock-on effect on how much people consume your ‘other’ content marketing efforts. For instance, if you look at the chart below, you’ll notice that blog views increase with the publication of each podcast. However, once podcast publication comes to a halt, there’s a decline in blog post views. 

Podcast publication can impact your other content marketing efforts
Source

Thus if you want to amplify your other content marketing efforts, podcasting can be a good way to get some traction. 

There are generally three ways you can get involved with podcasts: 

• Be a guest on podcasts
• Sponsor podcasts
• Launch your own podcast

If you want to be a guest on someone else’s podcast, you’ll first need to identify a range of podcasts that might have an interest in hosting you. Perhaps the easiest way to go about this is by searching for podcasts that are associated with your industry. 

Ideally, there needs to be some kind of beneficial value proposition here, otherwise, the host might not be interested in having you on. Thus, when you’re pitching a podcast host, you need to discuss how you will help their audience.  

For instance, if you run a mortgage brokerage company, you might approach a finance podcast. When pitching to this podcast, you might tell the host that you can help their listeners save money on their mortgage costs and provide case studies that highlight your expertise and ability to deliver results. By doing this, the podcast host will now have an incentive to bring you on, as they now understand how you will benefit their audience. 

As mentioned, you can also get involved with podcasts by sponsoring them. This method is worthwhile since 63% of people have said that they’d try out a new product or service after listening to a podcast ad. 

US Podcast spending is on the rise
Source

Podcast ad spending is also increasing, and this is a good sign that investing in podcasts ads is a worthwhile endeavor. If you want to sponsor a podcast, you typically have to follow the same process you’d follow if you wanted to be a guest on a podcast. 

You’d have to find podcasts with a relevant audience, and you’d then need to get in touch and let them know you’d like to be a sponsor. Note that some podcasts will have a dedicated email for sponsors on their website. 

Some hosts are very particular about the things they sponsor, and so you’ll probably have to explain the benefits of your solution and why it’s a good fit for their audience. 

The amount you pay to sponsor a podcast depends on the stats associated with a podcast. Thus, you’ll only know how much sponsorships cost once you actually get in touch with a particular show. That said, here is some data which highlights some of the average costs people face when sponsoring a podcast. 

The average CPM’s you might face when investing in podcast ads
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As you can see, you’re generally charged in a CPM format, which means you’re charged per every 1000 listeners of a podcast. 

As mentioned, the last option you have is to host a podcast of your own. Launching your own podcast sounds like a daunting task, but if you’re already creating some kind of content, it’s not going to be too challenging. 

In terms of the actual logistics involved, you just need to upload your audio files to a platform like Lybisn or Anchor. After doing this, these platforms will then provide you with an ‘RSS feed’ that you can submit to popular podcasting platforms like Apple Podcasts or Spotify. 

When it comes to the content associated with your podcast, you should try to focus on creating podcast content that helps your audience solve a problem. You might also want to host some interviews with people that have relevant industry expertise. 

If you want to promote your podcast, being a guest on another relevant podcast can get you off to a good start. 

You might also want to invest in ads, and you’ll also find that certain podcast apps allow you to run targeted ads that will help you reach your target audience. 

Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from using traditional ad platforms to promote your podcast. For example, you could run some Facebook Ads that promote a web page dedicated to your podcast. 

Note that as your podcast audience grows, you should ask people to leave a positive review for the show. This will then help the general discoverability of the podcast, and it will also signal to potential listeners that your podcast is worth their time. 

8. Voice Search

As ‘smart speaker’ devices such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home become increasingly popular, more and more people are performing ‘voice searches.’ In fact, if you look at the chart below, you can see that there’s been a steady increase in the number of people that use ‘voice assistants.’ 

More and more people are using voice search
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Smartphone voice assistants, such as Siri, are also becoming better and more commonly used. So much so that 27% of the global online population uses the voice search feature on their phone. 

Voice searches are split between different devices
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Another study also found that 56% of people use a voice search whenever they need to look something up. 

The varying ways people look up information
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Voice search works well for a variety of business applications, but it’s notably important for local businesses. There’s data to back this up too, as 58% of people have used voice search in order to learn more about local small businesses. 

Now, you might think that voice search isn’t something that you should optimize for because it doesn’t lead to any direct business. However, a significant number of voice searches result in website visits. After all, one study found that 27% of people visit the website of a local website after performing a voice search. 

Of course, it’s worth noting that this stat can also apply to ‘non-local’ businesses, and so you shouldn’t shun voice searches if you don’t have a local business. 

If you want to benefit from voice search, there are two things that you need to do. If you already have some SEO experience, implementing these tactics shouldn’t be too hard. First, you need to think about creating content that will be relevant to those that are actually performing voice searches. Since most people use voice searches to ask questions, you should consider creating content that aims to answer the kinds of questions your target audience will ask. 

If you don’t know where to begin, think about some of the common questions you encounter when speaking to your target audience. If you can answer these questions in the form of a blog post, your website may be used to answer someone’s voice search query. 

If you need some inspiration, here are some of the terms that are often included in a voice search. 

Common words used in voice searches
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If you want to make sure this content is used as a response to a voice search, you need to use the right kinds of phrases. This is especially important, as the phrases and keywords strings used for voice searches tend to differ from those used for actual Google searches. 

For example, suppose someone is performing a voice search so that they can learn how to keep their website safe from hackers. Someone performing this voice search might say something like, ‘How do I make sure my website doesn’t get hacked.’ If someone was performing a Google search, they might instead use a more contracted, precise search string, such as ‘protect website from hackers.’ 

Following this, if you want to make sure your website is used for voice searches, you need to think about using the kind of phrases that will be used within voice searches. The easiest way to do this is by simply thinking of the kinds of keywords someone might use whenever they’re performing a voice search that is relevant to your niche. In doing so, you should be able to further improve the ‘discoverability’ of your content when it comes to voice search SEO. 

Secondly, you need to use structured data on your site so search engines recognize that your site is optimized for voice search. You can do this by making use of the ‘Speakable’ schema markup offered by Google. 

Below you can see an example of this schema and how it can be implemented on a site. 

An example of the ‘Speakable Schema’ markup
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If you use these markup on your site, you will signal to Google that your site can help out with voice search queries. This will then increase the odds of Google considering your content when it’s deciding on how it should respond to a given voice search query. 

If you don’t have anyone on your marketing team that can install this code, you might want to reach out to an SEO agency. It’s important you bring on a professional, as you might incorrectly install this code and then unintentionally harm your website’s ‘voice search SEO.’

Takeaways

In this post, we’ve taken a look at some of the top digital marketing trends that are impacting the marketing world. 

Acting on all of these trends is going to be difficult, and so you may just want to pick one or two that are best suited to your business. Once you implement those and you begin to see some results, you can then think about moving onto the other marketing tactics that are mentioned in this post.

The post 8 Digital Marketing Trends For A Cutting Edge Marketing Strategy appeared first on KlientBoost.

But, of course, in an industry built on split testing and incremental optimization, launching your campaign(s) and immediately seeing success isn’t always the case.

If only there were a way to instantly start off on the right foot…

As a Senior Account Manager here at KlientBoost I’ve worked with dozens of companies in their first year of business as well as some of the largest SaaS companies and educational institutions. It’s with all that experience, that I’ve cracked the code.

As the digital advertising world expands to new platforms our strategy can’t only be to bid on broad match or phrase match keywords and run search ads on various search engines such as Google Adwords or Bing Ads. We need to be more creative and reach the customer on a multitude of platforms especially when launching a new PPC brand. So, let me take you through my personal 7 step system to scaling a brand from scratch. 

Let’s get going.

Doing Your Brand Homework

When entering the digital marketing world, one of the most important factors in driving success starts with the brand image. When most people think of brand image they think of it as a logo. But it’s more than that.

Brand image is the potential consumers’ perception of the product. 

Let’s take a look at a company that combines 3 of my favorite things: coffee, America, and giving back to our first responders. The Black Rifle Coffee Company is a veteran-owned coffee company that sells high-quality coffee and donates a portion of their sales back to veterans, law enforcement, and first responders. Based on that sentence alone, I’m sure you already have an idea in your head about what their brand and products might look like. 

Black Rifle Coffee Company
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They launched their social media accounts in 2014 and have since grown a loyal following nearing 1.6 million. Now, that didn’t happen overnight but it did happen by knowing their target audience and having a clear brand image and strategy. Who they are as a company is very clear across all channels, organic and paid. 

Keep this in mind as we dive deeper into the paid digital advertising side of marketing.

Building Your New Brand

Now how do you go incorporating your brand image into your paid advertising? Well, that’s where this blog post gets really juicy.

The main focus of your digital advertising strategy should be centered around the company’s unique value proposition or UVP. Your unique value proposition also known as a unique selling proposition (USP), your UVP is a clear statement that describes the benefit of your offer, how you solve your customer’s needs, and what distinguishes you from the competition. 

This UVP should define the backbone of your advertising strategy and be consistent from the impression to the recognition stage. 

The benefits you offer, how you solve your customer’s needs, and what distinguishes you from the competition are the key to getting consumers turned into customers. In order to get consumers to convert we need to position the company, homepage, ads, and landing pages to answer their questions so they have no doubt that this is the company they want to use.

Here’s an example of a very clear UVP in a Google Ad
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It’s important to note that just because we create ads, landing pages, and a couple of campaigns, doesn’t mean that leads and orders are going to come bursting through the door on day one. Just like building a business, nurturing consumers down the funnel takes time too.

We’re starting from the very beginning and launching a new brand with PPC here – so we’ll be working towards nurturing people to that final stage to make a purchase or become a paying customer. But we need to focus on the mini-goals and micro conversions to get to that point because not every person is going to buy a product or commit to a contract for a service after the first interaction with an ad.

Those mini-goals could include:

Interactions, click-through rate (CTR), website traffic, add to carts, email opt-in, content downloads, or webinar participants.

With new brands, it may take a bit longer to establish the trust in your audiences necessary to fill that funnel up to the brim. But given enough time and enough testing and optimization, soon enough you’ll be able to capitalize on how you’ve grown this new brand from scratch and scaled it into a PPC conversion machine. 

The 7 Steps To Scaling A Brand From Scratch

It’s not easy to start from nothing in the PPC world (where the size of your ad budget can make or break your campaigns). But that doesn’t make it impossible.

See how you can launch your new brand with PPC and burst out of the starting blocks successfully.

1. Strategy

Too many companies to count have come to us with the assumption that slapping together a marketing strategy consisting of a branded, non-branded, and remarketing campaign trio will instantly bring in leads and purchases for a new product or service.  

That might work for a company that is well known and established both online and off, but for new brands, that’s not always the case. That’s why us marketers need to create a strategy around a full-funnel. Check out the marketing funnel below, for example:

The KlientBoost marketing funnel
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As you can see at the top we have a large market that doesn’t know the brand exists at all but through marketing, we can nurture these potential customers down the funnel and turn them into paying customers. 

But it’s a process. You don’t get to skip steps 2-4 and expect your customers to randomly appear at number 5, money in hand.

2. Asset Creation

With each part of the funnel being so unique and carrying with it a different user mindset, you need to create different campaigns, with a war chest of ads.

For each stage of the funnel, it’s important to have a different offer or ad copy message. For a lead generation business, having offers such as a free trial, brochure download, free webinar, guide, information kit, or a whitepaper can help nurture leads down the funnel. 

Just a few Facebook Ad examples
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For eCommerce clients, content offerings are a bit more tricky because we’re trying to make the sale as soon as possible. Aside from providing information and answering the questions, a customer might have in order to make the sale, here are a few suggested offerings to get products into the hands of consumers faster: 

• Discount on first order
• Giveaway
• Free shipping
• Flash sale
• Referral code
• Discount on subscription 
• The list goes on as long as you can imagine

All of these offerings lower the threat level of making a purchase that may have held the consumer back before. The lower you can get the threat level/friction level, the better chances you’ll have at conversion.

3. Picking Platforms

Picking the right platform mix is one of the most crucial steps in launching a new brand with PPC. The great part about digital marketing in the 21st century is the abundance of platforms available to market on. However, you don’t need to advertise on every platform in order to be successful.

For reference, here is a list of platforms I typically choose from:

• Google
• Bing
• Facebook / Instagram
• Pinterest
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Capterra
• Snapchat
• TikTok

Now, I’m sure there were a few digital advertising platforms on that list that you wouldn’t have thought to market on right off the bat, but depending on the business, industry, and target market, they might make perfect sense.

Typically the platforms I like to start with are Google Ads and Facebook for most of my clients. Depending on the business and target market, I might add Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, Capterra, Snapchat, or TikTok.

If I were to run ads on all platforms, here’s a quick rundown of what campaigns I’d run (dependent on company):

• Google – Branded / Non-Branded / Remarketing
• Bing  – Branded / Non-Branded / Remarketing
• Facebook – Instagram – Prospecting / Remarketing / Re-Engagement
• Pinterest – Prospecting / Remarketing
• LinkedIn – Remarketing
• Twitter – Prospecting / remarketing
• Capterra – Prospecting
• Snapchat – Prospecting / Remarketing
• TikTok – Prospecting / Remarketing

This isn’t a picture-perfect recipe for success. But in most cases when launching a new brand in PPC some combination of the above should get you started in the right direction.  

The recipe I create for my clients depends on Google Ads search volume and demand. If there is demand, we could launch on Google Ads alone or with a combination of the above categories. Most likely there won’t be a high demand for branded search keywords on Google so that is where we work to create that demand on other platforms.

I would launch a prospecting, re-engagement, and remarketing campaign on Facebook to create a “buzz” for the business and leverage branded and non-branded search campaigns on Google.

When you create a non-branded search campaign on Google Ads be mindful of the PPC keywords and match types you choose. An exact match keyword will most likely spend less than a broad match or a broad match modified keyword. This is where your ad spend comes into play. We’ll dive more into that later.

Make sure your PPC ads provide a clear brand image and highlight your UVP. Take a look at this PPC ad from Black Rifle Coffee Company, they use their ad to provide clear messaging and highlight: the ease of ordering, free shipping, veteran-owned, and giving back to first responders.

The ad highlights clear UVP of company and product
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4. The Campaign Build

Here’s where the fun begins — the campaign build.

For each platform, each campaign should play a different role in the marketing funnel.

Let’s start with Google first.

I keep my Google ad campaigns to a minimum to begin with. I run a branded campaign that uses our SKAG technique or the new and improved version of Keyword Tapering where we utilize single keyword ad groups. In addition to that, I run a remarketing campaign utilizing display ads to target all website visitors excluding people who have already converted on Google’s Display Network.

The ad copy is one of the most important pieces to this puzzle so when I craft my copy I make sure to do my research. I’ll start by doing keyword research, look into search terms (if there are any), and look into Google Analytics to see which pages have the most organic traffic to pull copy inspiration from.

l create my ad copy to be specific to the keyword we are bidding on and use my headline 2 highlighting the UVP of the business and my headline 3 stating a clear call to action. I use my descriptions and ad extensions to answer the question they might have and drive home the major reasons they should choose the company.

The reason I don’t like to start out with a non-branded campaign or a competitor’s campaign in Google Ads is due to the competitive landscape of Google and the cost per click or cpc for each keyword. Established competitors are already bidding on the non-branded keywords and likely have deeper pockets to justify having higher CPAs for non-branded and competitor terms.

Depending on the campaign budgets and the CPC, for some campaigns, you may only receive 10 clicks per day with a limited budget. If you receive many clicks with a low conversion rate CPAs will soar.

Typically when a new brand is starting out, there isn’t always excess money in the bank to be able to support the highly competitive landscape of non-branded and competitor keywords. It’s always best to make the most of what you have in the beginning. If you have the budget it’s important to assess the market/search volume and test high intent – broad keywords.

I like to use Facebook as my main platform and driver of sales and leads when I’m scaling a brand from scratch. This allows us to create brand awareness to our target customers while pushing our campaign goals of product sales or leads.

I set all of my campaigns up using Facebook’s Power 5 to ensure they will run most optimally with Facebook’s Algorithm. From there I will set up a prospecting campaign, a remarketing campaign, a re-engagement campaign, and a DPA or dynamic product ad  campaign for eCommerce businesses.

Here’s an example of a budding new brand’s Facebook ads setup
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I set up each campaign to have specific ads and copy for each stage of the funnel that the campaigns target. My prospecting campaign will have more informative ad copy that describes the product or service and the UVP. My re-engagement campaign will have different ads that are slightly more specific about the product or service explaining the benefits. 

The remarketing campaign has another set of images and copy geared around “don’t forget your free demo”, “don’t forget about the products in your cart” or “enjoy 10% off”.   

I make sure to dark post ads in one campaign ad set to the other ad sets to ensure the social proof builds faster and improves the overall performance of campaigns.

Dark posting puts ad budget behind previously engaged with posts
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I can’t stress enough how important it is in the early stages (and all stages really) to get people to consume the product or service you offer so they can see the value, fall in love, and become brand ambassadors for you. Not in the sense of being Instagram influencers talking about your products (although that would be great advertising) but in the sense of writing a review for you or talking to their friends, coworkers, or colleges about the product.

They will start to create a natural buzz and get more people interested. And just as dark posting puts a bit of the social proof behind your advertising brand, some real-life social proof will put even more fuel in your conversion engine. When we can use that real-life social proof and create testimonial ads to incorporate into our marketing efforts. Checkout Marketing 360 for great examples of testimonial ads that will show your prospective customers you’re worth it.

5. Launching Your PPC Campaign

Once you have all campaigns built it’s time to enable the campaigns and get your initial data. 

Typically with this setup what we will see is most of the traffic and interactions will come from Facebook. Initially, we tend to see some consumers convert in the early stages of ads running but a majority might be slow to convert — and that’s expected.

That’s why we did our due diligence and created a marketing funnel that will nurture the initial leads into paying customers.

The prospecting campaign is working at the very top of the funnel gathering a broad audience who would have a potential interest in the product/services.

As more people have begun visiting the website, that will populate into audiences for website visitors. It’s important to create audiences for website visitors and for people who have converted.

When creating remarketing campaigns, I set my audience to target website visitors from the past 30 days and exclude people who have converted on our marketing goal. That audience will start to receive remarketing ads on both Facebook and the Google Display Network and will be nurtured down the funnel into the consideration phase. 

 6. Branded Demand Generation

Once potential customers are in the consideration phase, if they haven’t converted yet, they will now start to actively search for your brand, and Google ads traffic should start to increase. It’s important to make sure the ads are optimally built with the proper site links and CTAs to ensure they can have avenues to get their questions answered from the initial impression of the ad.

From there, it’s all a matter of well prioritized PPC split testing and landing page optimization to start improving your performance.

7. Campaign Upkeep

The upkeep of the campaigns is one of the most important things you can do to ensure the success of your campaigns moving forward.

Here is where the heavy optimization process comes into play on Google. This is where we keep a close eye on search terms and add negative keywords to the ad groups or campaigns.

Initially, the Facebook campaigns might not receive much traffic in terms of clicks to the website. In that instance, you need to pivot your prospecting campaign to optimize for traffic to get more people to the website.

This should help increase your remarketing audience and allow your remarketing campaigns to run smoother. For eCommerce businesses, once you see more people completing micro-conversions such as view content or add to carts you can change the ad set setting’s conversion event to the unique stages of the micro conversions. For lead gen businesses, I take a slightly different approach. In my prospecting campaign, I direct users to a “request a demo” or a “get a quote” page where they submit their information.

I place a Hotjar poll on the landing page asking specific questions as to why they are not making a purchase or requesting a demo such as if they need more information, need information on pricing, would like to see case studies or would like to learn more about the product. Another tactic I use is an exit intent pop off that has a content offer such as a guide, information kit, case study, or a webinar to give them more information and help answer more questions they might have before they leave the page.

Here are a few example stages:

• View Content
• Customize Product
• Initiate Checkout
• Add to Cart
• Purchase

On top of the usual campaign upkeep, updating ads to combat ad fatigue is also key to maintaining a successful launch of any new brand in PPC. Using new imagery and messaging is the key. But beyond that, using more than one ad message in your creatives is also important. 

We like to refer to this as having a fully stocked Warchest of Ads.

What should your war chest include? 

Well, every type of offer or info that your potential lead/customer might be interested in, such as: 

1. Benefits
2. Features
3. User Testimonials
4. Main FAQs (frequently asked questions)
5. and Competitor Comparisons 

Taking the winning set of ad copy/creatives and testing new headlines will help continue to drive the needle on the paid search side. Other than that it’s a matter of optimizing your bid adjustments and keeping your Google Ads and other ad platforms nice and tidy.

Key Takeaways

If you’re looking to launch a new brand with PPC it’s important to remember the stability that creating a full-funnel strategy can bring to scaling a brand from scratch. A solid PPC strategy across multiple platforms will help you drive sales and lead gen at scale given enough time and enough care.

And, if your funnel is well built, it will also help you get in front of your target market without having to join the competitive landscape of non-branded and competitor keywords on Google Ads/Bing ads.

Have you tried scaling a brand from scratch before? Did you struggle with having the campaigns take off? Or did you receive results that we’re incredible?

I’d love to hear your experience with scaling a brand from scratch with digital advertising below.

The post Running A PPC Campaign: 7 Steps To A Successful Launch appeared first on KlientBoost.

I will be breaking it down so you’ll understand the business mechanics that shape your ROAS, how to know whether your ROAS is healthy for your business, and strategies that support your paid ads to help you build a stronger business. Between the three pillars that support your ROAS and four strategies for long-term improvement, you’ll learn the seven keys for long-term ROAS mastery.

What is the ROAS formula?

Before we get into the thick of things, let’s start with the fundamentals. ROAS is a common marketing metric in the PPC world and stands for return on advertising spend. What’s the formula for ROAS? ROAS is simply your total revenue divided by your total ad spend:

ROAS = Revenue / Cost

If, for example, you generate five dollars in revenue for every dollar in ad spend, then your ROAS would be a 5. Or if you generated $80,000 in revenue and spend $20,000 on ads, then you’d have a 4 ROAS. 

Platforms like Google Ads and Facebook will also calculate ROAS for you. In Google Ads, this is typically presented as “Conversion Value / Cost.” And in Facebook, it’s presented as “Purchase ROAS.”

One thing to keep in mind about ROAS: it’s not the same thing as ROI, or Return on Investment. The calculation for ROI is (Revenue – Cost) / Cost. 

ROI = (Revenue-Cost) / Cost

To use one of our earlier examples, if you generated $80,000 in revenue last month and spent $20,000 on ads, you’d have an ROI of 4. If you’re more concerned about understanding your return on investment, here’s a quick hack you can use: your ROAS calculation minus one equals your ROI. A ROAS of 5, for example, is equal to an ROI of 4. 

While ROAS is a simple ratio of dollars earned to dollars spent, you may prefer ROI to get a clearer understanding of your earnings after costs.

These calculations are helpful for getting a quick understanding of the numbers of dollars made versus dollars spent. But there’s no one ROAS or ROI figure that guarantees profitability for everyone’s ad account. To help you understand whether your ad account is meeting business goals, you need to understand your ROAS through the lens of your gross margins and other variable costs.

The 3 Pillars That Support Your ROAS

ROAS isn’t a universal measure across ad accounts. Meaning, some businesses are happy to get a 1 ROAS while some may barely scrape by with a 4 ROAS. Part of this is goals and context. But it also depends on what’s going on under the hood of your business. Let’s talk about the three underlying pillars that support your ROAS.

1. Profit Margins

The first pillar that supports your ROAS is your profit margins. More specifically, gross margins. And deciding what ROAS you should have before understanding how your margins tie into it is a completely useless exercise. (That is if you want to make money.) 

On the surface, for example, a 1.5 ROAS might not seem like a lost cause. You’re making $1.50 for every dollar you spend. Right? Well, it depends.

Let’s say your gross margins are 50%. If you’re selling a product that costs $100, you’ll keep $50 after the cost of goods sold (COGS). A 1.5 ROAS on that same product would mean you spent $66.50 on advertising to get that sale. After your COGS, you’ve actually lost $16.50. Yikes.

Make sure that you’re not unintentionally setting ROAS goals that put you past the break-even line.

So, how do you at least break even?

You probably know what we need in this case. If your product sells for $100 and you have 50% gross margins, then you’ll need at least a 2 ROAS (no more than $50 in ad spend) to break even. If you have 25% gross margins, you’ll need a 4 ROAS. If you have 12.5% margins, you’ll need an 8 ROAS and a pretty expensive product that people are itching to buy. We’ll cover that in more depth next.

2. Average Order Value

The second pillar behind your ROAS is your average order value (AOV). Your AOV is the average amount your customers pay at checkout, and how much your customers spend at checkout can quickly make the difference between a low ROAS and a high ROAS. You can run a quick calculation of your AOV for different time periods or different channels by dividing the total revenue by the number of orders.

Now, if your goal is to get a profitable return from paid advertising, your AOV has a strong influence over whether you’ll be successful. For example, if your AOV is $10 (an exaggeratedly small number) and you’re paying $1 per click, then you’ll need at least a 10% conversion rate just to pull off a 1 ROAS. That’s a big ask for such a low payoff. Even without any COGS to consider, this is an uphill battle.

If your AOV is $100, on the other hand, you have a lot more breathing room. Let’s say your margins are still 50%, we’ll even go a step further and say that other variable costs, like shipping and payment processing, shave off another $15. So you really don’t want to pay more than $35 in order to actually break even. 

If you’re paying a dollar per click, you have thirty-five chances to gain a conversion. In this case, you’d only need a 2.8% conversion rate. More realistic, right?

Strong AOV and goals focused on first-purchase profitability from paid ads go together like peanut butter and jelly. Without strong AOV, you’re stuck with two pieces of bread and some jelly—an unfavorable, sticky situation.

If you’re reading this and your palms are sweating over your low prices, don’t worry too much. Let’s dive into how to measure repeat purchases, how to extract the most accurate ROAS data from your ad platforms, and some cross-channel strategies you can use to support your ROAS.

3. Customer Lifetime Value

If hearing about lifetime value (LTV) reminds you of sitting in the backseat of your parents’ car as a kid and repeatedly asking “are we there yet?” I don’t blame you. Like a road trip destination that’s countless hours away, LTV feels too far off for comfort. So let’s put LTV into more practical terms—terms that don’t require us to sit around for the rest of our lives, waiting to see the value.

First, we have to confront an uncomfortable truth: acquiring customers is expensive. If you’re not putting any resources into increasing repeat purchases from your existing customers, you’re making your job harder than necessary. Why? Because returning customers are 9x more likely to buy than first-time shoppers while also having a higher AOV. Doesn’t that sound more fun than just focusing on acquisition?

If you sell a replenishable product, like food or supplements, for example, 20-30% of your customers should be buying from you more than once. This is good news. If you’ve been operating under the assumption that your ads need to deliver you profitable results on the first purchase, you can actually grow faster without falling into the red, because the customers you acquire will drive more profit over time. 

The key here is to understand how much your customers buy in a 30, 60, or 90 day period after their first purchase so that you don’t overshoot your customer acquisition cost.

What is a good ROAS for Facebook?

According to a 2015 Nielsen study, the average ROAS across most industries hovers around 287% and according to another source, a common ROAS benchmark is a ratio of 5:1, or $5 in revenue for $1 ad spend.

The difference between 2.87 and 5 is a pretty wide gap. In the interest of being more specific (and more recent), our own data looking at nearly $5 million in Facebook ad spend for KlientBoost eCommerce clients shows an average ROAS of 3.62:

Not a guess, not a study: actual results.

But let’s be honest here: averages don’t help your actual advertising efforts. As we’ve already seen, your gross margins, average order value, and customer lifetime value can not only shape the kind of ROAS you end up with but also what you consider a good ROAS. 

One more thing: we love fancy bid strategies and tactical nitty-gritty as much as—well, anyone. But if you’re trying to make a drastic difference in earnings, you’ll make a bigger dent in your goal from finding ways to improve your customer retention and AOV than making small constant tweaks to your ad sets every day. 

In fact, you’ll want to err on the side of simplicity with your Facebook campaigns. Account simplification is one-fifth of Facebook’s Power 5 framework. And it improves your odds of generating a high ROAS. 

How so? Facebook ads rely on machine learning to find your ideal customer. And with a simpler account structure, the machine learning’s calculations are split across fewer moving pieces. More practically, your advertising budget isn’t spread as thin across different audiences either.

It’s also important to understand your ad account’s delayed attribution and how your ROAS differs throughout the funnel. If you understand these two things, you can ensure you don’t become a barrier to your own growth.

How to Calculate Delayed Attribution for Facebook Ads

Calculating your delayed attribution sounds harder than it is. All we’re doing here is solving the gap between the time visitors click your ads and when they buy. This gap usually gets wider when you’re selling something relatively complex or expensive, and it’s good to know exactly what this gap looks like so that you can look at yesterday’s ROAS and know whether you’re on track or not.

To calculate your delayed attribution, you’ll need to open up your columns in Facebook ads manager, customize your columns, and click on the “Comparing Windows” link so that you can view your 1 and 28-day attribution windows.

This lets you view ROAS from 1, 7, or 28 days since someone’s click.

If our target ROAS is 2, for example, we want to know what our ROAS should look like on a 1-day basis so that we can look at yesterday’s numbers and know what ROAS we need to hit to stay on track. 

The first thing you’ll do is add your 1-day view ROAS and 1-day click ROAS. Next, you’ll add your 1-day view ROAS and 28-day click ROAS. If you’re analyzing data over the last 30 days, this will tell you what ROAS you’re seeing a day after visitors click and view your ads, and then the ROAS over your full attribution window. 

After that, divide your 28-day click and 1-day view ROAS by your 1-day click and 1-day view ROAS. This will give you your delayed attribution difference. 

Once you have that, divide your target ROAS by your delayed attribution difference. This will give you a 1-day ROAS target so that you can make sure you’re making progress toward your goals in the short term.

It’s a lot of math. Google Sheets makes it a little more bearable.

That might seem like a lot of math, but it’s better than waiting a whole month to find out whether you hit your goals!

One last note on understanding your Facebook ads ROAS. Generally, you should expect your ROAS from new visitors (prospecting) to be lower than your ROAS from returning visitors (remarketing). Because you need a steady stream of new visitors to keep your remarketing audiences filled with new prospects, aim to meet your ROAS target at the account level rather than expecting each individual campaign to meet your ROAS target.

What is a good ROAS for Google Ads?

Just like with Facebook, delayed attribution can impact your ROAS, and your Google Ads ROAS will also depend on the kind of traffic you’re targeting. Generally, searches for your own brand will yield the highest ROAS. This is usually followed by remarketing audiences, shopping campaigns, and non-brand search.

Online advertising campaigns more focused on awareness, like upper-funnel Display and YouTube, will tend to return a lower ROAS, but can be useful for acquiring new email addresses. Shopping campaigns typically make up a larger portion of the budget for clients of ours at KlientBoost.

Before diving deeper into ROAS calculations, let’s talk about a few basic tactics you can use to make sure your account isn’t getting in its own way.

First, if you’re still using manual bidding, give smart bidding strategies like target CPA or target ROAS a shot. If you’re like most digital marketers, you like to control the process, but it’s ok to let go of this area. (Bidding is all math, and computers are good at math. We promise.) 

If you have accurate conversion tracking and at least 50-100 conversions per month, you’re in a position to benefit from smart bidding, but if you’re still reluctant, you can create an experiment to split the traffic 50/50 against your current bidding strategy.

Second, machine learning is taking over Google too. If you’re thinking “account simplification,” you’re on the right track. If you apply smart bidding to a campaign that’s loaded with dozens of ad groups, this could hinder the results you get from smart bidding, instead cut down on ad groups that generate low amounts of traffic. It’s ok to have granular targeting but use a separate campaign to make smart bidding’s job as easy as possible.

How to Forecast Google Ads Conversion Delay

With basic tactics covered, let’s talk about delayed attribution in Google Ads and what it’s doing to your ROAS. This is more often referred to as “conversion delay”. If you’ve ever seen a blue dot next to the main chart in your Google Ads interface, your account experiences some level of conversion delay.

Your value will look different because this message is based on data from your account.

Like Facebook delayed attribution, conversion delay represents the gap (in days) between when people click your ads, and when they make their purchase. When a product is pricier or more complex, this gap tends to widen as your customers will give themselves more homework to do during the buying process.

What does all this have to do with ROAS and why should you care? As with Facebook, understanding your conversion delay will help you plan your account growth more accurately because you won’t have to wait until next month for your delayed conversion value to kick in. You’ll have a better understanding of the ROAS targets you need to hit in the short term.

To understand your account’s conversion delay, go to the Tools & Settings menu in your account, then go to attribution. Once there, click path metrics. This table will tell you how many days it takes or your customers to buy from their most recent ad click. 

To calculate your conversion delay, you’ll want to download this data to a spreadsheet. This will let you map out how much of your revenue should be accounted for by the number of days since the last ad click, and let you tie it back to your ROAS target.

We’re calculating the percent of revenue realized by day and using that to figure out our proportional ROAS.

It may seem complicated, but there’s a good tradeoff here. If you know what kind of ROAS your campaigns need to generate in the short-term to meet your long-term goals, you’ll spend a lot less time scrambling over bids and budgets trying to make sure you’re on track, because the ROAS will look lower in the short-term.

4 Strategies to support your ROAS in the long-term

Having a clear strategy with ongoing adjustments to support your strategy is crucial to maximizing your ad account’s ROAS, but that doesn’t mean your eCommerce store needs to live and die by that ROAS. Changes in competition and seasonality can affect your ad costs and conversion rates. Don’t let these fluctuations put you through feast or famine cycles. 

1. Use Email Marketing to Your Advantage

Emails today equal revenue tomorrow. As such, email marketing is one of the best ways to get more mileage out of your ROAS.

How so? 95%+ visitors to your site won’t buy from you on their first visit. This immediately hurts your ROAS from visitors discovering you through prospecting efforts via paid social or non-brand search. You can (and should) bring those visitors back for a second chance to buy through remarketing. 

But who says that’s the only way to do it?

Email capture popups can help add another 5-15% of visitors to your email list. Subscribers don’t automatically translate to more money in the bank. You still have to put out effective email communications, but adding subscribers does help offset your ad costs by: 

• Adding new visitors to a list that you own
• Growing a channel that doesn’t make you pay per click or open
• Having a channel where you can communicate with customers long-term

Email marketing campaigns can be especially helpful to your ROAS in the months leading up to the holidays. Email marketing makes up 27% of revenue for eCommerce retailers during Q4, and on top of that, 60% of 2019 Cyber Weekend sales were driven by consumers who engaged with a brand’s email prior to Q3. 

While we don’t have time to get into detail on email marketing, here are a few places you can get started:

• Welcome Series: Don’t let a new subscriber hear crickets. Introduce yourself. Why do you exist? Why should they love your brand? Throw in a small discount if you can. 
• Cart Abandonment Series: People abandon carts, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. Create an automated sequence to follow up with cart abandoners. Make sure they don’t have any objections and help them complete their purchase.
• Customer Winback: Has it been a month or even a few months since someone bought? Let them know if something they’ve had their eye on is back in stock or if you’ve added an exciting new product. Make the effort to stay in touch, and offer something valuable.

Not everyone wants to buy from you on the first click. In fact, most people don’t, but email marketing lets your customers get to know you over a longer period of time. Some will hold out for discounts, some just want to get to know you better, and even if it doesn’t happen right away, turning an extra 5-15% of your clicks into customers over time is the right thing to do for your ROAS.

2. Offset Your Advertising Costs with SEO

Speed and control are on your side with paid ad campaigns, but you can offset some of these advertising costs by investing in SEO. For example, if a keyword costs you $4 per click, you could potentially save $400/month in advertising costs by ranking high enough organically to get 100 visits per month. Or you can just use it to add even more fuel to your growth engine. 

Two ways you can get started with SEO are by having sound technical SEO and having a content strategy that educates and delights your prospects.

For technical SEO, do the title tags on your product pages line up with how people search for your products? Are they clear and descriptive? 

On the product page itself, do you offer unique, detailed content that gives a potential customer everything they need to know about your product to make their buying decision? This question is worth spending some time on since your product pages are practically doing the heavy lifting of a brick and mortar sales associate.

Outside of product pages, your content strategy should touch on themes that your customers will care about. For example, if you sell kites, do you have content about how to fly a kite? Advanced kite-flying tutorials? Sure, it’s a cheesy example, but don’t ignore the kernel of truth here: if you’re offering your customers nothing other than a transactional experience, they’ll eventually shift to a brand that better understands their emotions.

3. Improve Your Conversion Rates with Chatbots

If your online store has ever had a brick and mortar component, you’ve probably seen that your brick and mortar store has a higher average order value. There’s nothing crazy about that because in your store, there are sales associates to help your customers find what they need, compare different options, and point out relevant benefits. Online, a lot of this work is left to a single landing page or product page, but what if you could replicate the effect of having an in-store associate?

You can use chatbots to help your customers find a product they’re looking for, learn more about your brand, and even answer simple questions. This might sound like overkill for conversion rate optimization, but, customers reported site navigation as one of their biggest frustrations. 

While ongoing testing and optimization will make your site better over time, an automated chatbot can help fill in the gaps without skyrocketing your customer service costs.

4. Build Subscriptions, Referrals, and Loyalty into Your Offerings

If there’s one takeaway you get out of this post, it’s this: you’ll generate more earnings from loyal, existing customers than from trying to acquire every new customer you can. Let’s talk about a few ways you can add some spice to your offerings.

Subscriptions offer a chance to generate more predictable revenue from existing customers. If you’re thinking this doesn’t apply to you because you don’t sell something like food or supplements, don’t skip this paragraph yet. You don’t have to sell something consumable to create a subscription. 

Cuts, an apparel retailer, created a program where members get two shirts of their choice per month at up to 36% off. Not everyone will sign up, but their most loyal customers will. And this predictable revenue will add up over time.

Get creative. Reward your customers for liking you.

Referrals are another great way to leverage your existing customers. Customers who love you are the likeliest to refer their friends, and what does that do? Attract more high-value customers. (A real-life lookalike audience, if you will.) And make it worth their while. 

Consider splitting what you’d typically pay for a customer between the two parties, and give it to them upon purchase. Because it’s offered upon purchase, this kind of investment is virtually immune to unexpectedly low ROAS.

If you’re ready to go the extra mile, loyalty programs get returning customers even more excited to shop with you. 81% of customers said loyalty programs made them want to continue shopping with a brand, and 66% said they’re willing to modify their spending to get the most benefits.

Rhone, for example, offers its loyalty program members free 2-day shipping on all orders, accumulated points, and other perks.

For now, the program is free to join.

Loyalty programs aren’t one-size-fits-all. Monitor engagement with your loyalty program like you would other marketing efforts to make sure your customers are getting value out of it. If repeat purchases decrease, you’ll be more sensitive to temporary fluctuations in ROAS.

So, as we said, there is no such thing as a “Good ROAS”

ROAS is a relative metric. How you interpret your ROAS begins with your AOV and the cost of goods sold and ends with the money your customers spend with you after their first purchase. A bad ROAS for other eCommerce companies could be a great ROAS for you—and vice versa.

To understand the ROAS your ad account’s reporting, you’ll want to make sure you understand the account’s delayed attribution and the different parts of the funnel your campaigns are contributing to. Products with higher price and complexity will have longer delayed attribution. Colder audiences will report lower ROAS.

Once you understand where your ROAS is, and find that it isn’t even close to where it should be, get back to basics. Is your AOV high enough to sustain the costs of paid advertising? Do you have a strong customer retention strategy in place? 

Are you using other marketing channels, like chatbots and SEO, to help offset your costs and generate sales organically?

eCommerce marketing is a three-legged race, and paid ads only make up one of them.

The post The 7 Keys Of ROAS For Long-Term eCommerce Growth appeared first on KlientBoost.

And they expect more and more.

87% of consumers think brands need to put more effort into providing a seamless experience.

That’s why omnichannel marketing is here to stay.

Read on to find out how to create a revenue-driving omnichannel marketing experience.  

First, let’s break down omnichannel marketing.

What is Omnichannel Marketing

Omnichannel marketing is a multichannel sales approach that provides the customer with a seamless shopping experience. The customer can be shopping from their cellphone, desktop, tablet, or even in-person and have a smooth experience.  

Companies with strong omnichannel customer engagement can see a 9.5% year-over-year increase in annual revenue, compared to the average 3.4% increase with a weak omnichannel approach. Marketers with strong omnichannel marketing strategies also see a 7.5% year-over-year decrease in cost per contact.

Multichannel vs Omnichannel Marketing

Multichannel marketing means a company markets in multiple online channels (e.g. a web store, marketplaces, and social media), but the marketing is static. In other words, the marketing doesn’t change based on actions either a lead or customer takes.  

A company may use SMS messaging and email marketing. Still, they act essentially as separate entities with a multichannel approach.

Multichannel marketing also does not factor in that most people use many devices before completing a transaction. According to Google research, 90% of multiple device owners switch between an average of three per day to complete a task.

Omni-channel marketing provides touchpoints that work together across channels and different devices. That way, brands can engage potential customers and encourage more sales. 

Google refers to omnichannel marketing as “ensuring marketing strategies are geared toward enabling customers to convert on any channel.”

These channels depending on a company’s business model can span: 

• Google Ad Network
• SMS messaging
• Social ad networks
• Email marketing
• In-person transactions
• Your website
• Amazon, eBay, and other third-party eCommerce stores
• Capterra and other B2B review sites

Before omnichannel marketing experiences, each channel brands marketed on weren’t meeting their full potential. They didn’t take the full customer journey into account, resulting in less optimized campaigns and higher acquisition costs. With omnichannel marketing, content and offers are in place relevant to a lead’s anticipated next step throughout their journey.

14 Ways to Build Omnichannel Marketing Into Your Customer Experience

Now that we’ve broken down omnichannel marketing, let’s look at 14 ways to build a higher converting customer experience. 

1. Pull Insights From Your Customer Data

Data informs all great marketing. Go through your customer data to understand who they are (demographics, age, gender, marital status, location,  profession, etc.). 

Consider:

• Do specific buyer personas respond better to a given campaign? 
• Are they more active or convert higher on one channel? 
• How often do they buy?

Then factor in where your target audience is within your marketing funnel. If you see a specific bottleneck, start by refining your messaging and targeting. Then test behavioral marketing tactics. 

2. Personalize The Buying Experience

Use geo-based targeting and other marketing segmentation strategies to connect with your target audience and increase your conversion rates further. 

As you’re seeing a positive ROI, you can personalize with one-to-one marketing experiences across channels. For B2B companies, this segmentation is account-based marketing. 

Here’s how we have one-to-one personalization on our website: 

Clearbit Reveal data gathers specific company information and enriches our data. 

With proof, our potential clients get a personalized experience from our customized landing pages to chatbot conversations.

Personalized KlientBoost landing page
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With one-to-one marketing experiences, we’ve seen an over 11% increase in proposals. 

3. Track Micro Conversions

If you have underperforming ads, identify your micro conversions. Micro conversions are each step a potential customer needs to take to convert.

On our website, we look at the time on site for an audience based on the keyword targeted in an ad. 

Our three-step proposal sign-up form

You can also track other micro-conversions such as:

• The number of site visitors who engage with your website based on the number of pages visited in a session
• Whether they opted into a white paper or newsletter signup
• How far the average converting user scrolls down on your page using Crazy Egg

Le Tote, a leading clothing subscription brand, had micro-conversions happening on their site. However, tracking wasn’t in place to keep their company top of mind and to help potential shoppers along the way. We linked their PPC ad campaigns to keyword-level landing pages, doubling their conversion rates in less than two months.

With these pages and remarketing across other networks like YouTube and Google Display, they saw a 263% increase in conversion rates. 

Unbounce’s Dynamic Text Replacement lets us create one landing page that can adjust to over 100+ keywords per campaign.

Here’s what that looks like in action:

Here’s what shoppers see after landing from a “hiking backpack” PPC ad
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Same product page, different keyword search term
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4. Walk In Their Shoes

As you know, not all consumers buy at the same time or place.

According to a BigCommerce study, Gen Zers in the U.S. spend 2-3X more shopping on social channels like Instagram than other generations. They also visit a brand’s social channels 2X more than the average American consumer.

Shopping place preferences by generation
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Separate research by Statista looked at what digital channels consumers prefer to receive updates and promos. Email marketing led the pack across age and gender. 

Breakdown of consumer preferences for offers and updates from brands
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Bottom line: You need to know who your customers are and their preferred channels.  

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. 

Submit a ticket with your customer service. Take the time to complete a mock purchase. Go through all your channels analyzing your content as a consumer. 

5. Create Channel Specific Goals

Establish channel level goals that point back to your overall strategy. 

For example, you may find the bulk of your sales happen through Amazon. Your goal may be to increase your direct sales by x% over the next year. 

Then you can make content for buyers across each stage of their buying journey. Brainstorm what materials you can deliver to help nudge shoppers closer to the point of purchase through PPC ads, email, blog posts, case studies, etc.

6. Give Shoppers More Options

Make last-minute impulse purchases and gifts easier by offering in-store pick up or expedited shipping options.

According to Salesforce, websites offering in-store order pickup will see 28% more revenue in the last five days leading up to Christmas, compared to store owners who don’t offer this omnichannel experience.

Yes, shipping and inventory tie back to your omnichannel marketing strategy. If customers don’t complete purchases, you can offer in-store pick up or even financing options in your cart abandonment email.

Saatva cart abandonment email with financing option

7. Drive Up Lifetime Value With Loyalty Rewards

Customers buy from brands that put in the effort to engage and build trust. Reward your regular customers and encourage customer retention by building a customer loyalty program. 

Starbucks uses several channels to create a seamless rewards experience including their mobile app, email marketing, website, and in-store. 

They also make redeeming easy. Loyal customers can redeem rewards and access their accounts across devices. That way anyone can find a Starbucks location near them on their website or app. 

Starbucks location search on their mobile app

Then they can order online for grab and go pick up. 

8. Arm Customers With Knowledge

A Forrester study found consumers use their mobile device to:

• Research products at home (56%)
• Check inventory availability while on their way to a store (38%)
• Research products while in a store (34%)

Along with availability, you can provide item details on your product page—and even ways to preview your product. 

LensCrafters lets customers upload a photo of themselves on their website and digitally try on glasses before buying. 

LensCrafters myLook landing page
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LensCrafters also offer a digital quiz to help customers find the right pair of frames. The quiz lets shoppers answer questions in a Facebook-Messenger-style chat room. Then they receive product recommendations based on their answers. 

LensCrafters frame quiz
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9. Set Trigger Points

Build offers into your marketing funnel based on specific actions taken by your customers to add lifetime value.

For example, Total Men’s Primary Care sends out a text offering to schedule an annual physical when customers go back and read an older email they’ve sent.

Automated SMS text offer from Total Men’s Primary Care

To set up similar triggers, use a marketing automation platform such as Autopilot that provides both email marketing and SMS messaging. 

You can also re-engage customers by asking for feedback like Lyft does via email. 

Lyft experience email survey

10. Pilot Omnichannel Marketing Campaigns

Start with one omnichannel campaign like the Camuto Group. One retailer that supply trench coats reported this feedback: “Customers who purchased from their store kept losing the coat belt.”

In response, Camuto’s marketing team launched a lost coat belt campaign.

Camuto Group blog post covering the lost coat belt campaign
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This omnichannel marketing campaign via email, social, web, and in-store included:

• “Create a trench look” online sweepstakes
• Stylish suggestions through photos on their site
• Sponsored posts from fashion bloggers

11. Create Checkout-Friendly Social Posts

Brands can sell via organic posts and social ads on Facebook and Instagram. From this social content, you can give potential customers the option to view your product page.

To create shopping posts on Instagram your business must:

• Be based in a country where Instagram Shopping is available 
• Own a business profile on Instagram; if you currently have a personal profile, you can switch your settings to business
• Have your Instagram profile connected to a Facebook page; you can add or change your connected Facebook Page here

Keep in mind also you can only sell physical products on Instagram shopping posts.

Once you create a catalog, go to your settings on Instagram. Click “Business” and then “Sign Up for Instagram Shopping”. Review and approval may take a few days to complete. 

After you’re approved, you’ll have the option to turn on shopping under your settings. 

Then you can tag up to five products in an Instagram post. 

no6Store Instagram shopping post

Instagram’s checkout page feature is available for US-based businesses so users can buy directly on their platform. However, you can’t capture any customer data on any direct purchases. 

Instead, push Instagram traffic to your landing page so you can add a retargeting pixel to their browser or capture their email address.  

12. Align With Your Customer Support

54% of millennials will stop doing business because of poor customer service. 50% of Gen Xers and 52% of baby boomers say the same. Stay on top of what your customers are saying to your support team through sentiment analysis platforms like Dialpad or by reviewing conversations documented in the support team’s customer relationship management (CRM) system. 

You may find recurring questions you can address in your content. Or a mismatch in customer expectations based on your brand’s current positioning. 

13. Enlist Influencers

Generate organic traffic on social media awareness through influencer marketing. Influencer marketing identifies key people with a social presence relevant to your audience, driving traffic from them to your brand.

90% of shoppers say they’ve discovered new products and brands via YouTube.

Help potential new customers by working with influencers to review your product. Look for influencers in your niche searching “x reviews” on YouTube. For example, a search for “headphone reviews” shows:

Headphone review videos on YouTube

Then look at the video titles and watch to see the video’s formats whether it’s a top 5 headphones or unboxing.

Pepsico’s Recycle Rallys aims to encourage recycling in schools. Around this program, Influencer Crafts by Amanda posted a Facebook video showing a fun way to repurpose a Pepsi bottle into a Fairyhouse night light. Over 400,000 viewers have seen the below video.

These tools can help you identify influencers:

• Socialbakers for Instagram influencers
• Upfluence’s database of over 4 million influencers
• Over 100,000 influencers on Influence.co

14. Attribute In Your Analytics

PPC attribution can be tricky. You may have ads set up across multiple channels. But you need to keep track of where users landed from to see which channels are most effective for your brand. 

Set up UTM parameters for all your landing pages to collect data. 

For example, the normal link to this page is:

klientboost.com/omnichannel-marketing 

With UTM parameters it may look like:

klientboost(dot)com/omnichannel-marketing?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=blogpromo

Here’s what everything after the “?” in the URL means:

utm_source – the origin of the traffic; in the above example, it’s Facebook.

utm_medium – the overarching channel where traffic is coming from such as social, email, or search

utm_campaign – the name of your campaign

To set up UTM tags, use Google’s URL Builder.

Most purchases involve many marketing touches. Check for yourself in the Time Lag or Path Length reports in Google Analytics.

Wrapping It Up

It’s easy to chase buzzwords or the next big thing everyone’s talking about in marketing. However, as we’ve seen successful omnichannel marketing requires mapping a buyer’s journey and then tracking the micro conversions. 

Once you’ve identified bottlenecks and optimized core information such as your production details and ad copy, you can try multivariate tests of the hero image and headline.

In your email campaigns, simple tests can involve your subject lines, CTAs, or landing page forms. Then you can test more sophisticated strategies like automating email campaigns by buying cycle via a post-purchase bottom of the funnel email series.

The post Omnichannel Marketing: 14 Strategies To Drive More Conversions appeared first on KlientBoost.

Content marketing is a subgroup of marketing built around developing and sharing both digital and tangible content that is relevant, valuable, and consistent. This content can take many forms but is designed with the intent to reach and inspire purchases from a specifically defined audience group.

Let’s break that definition down a little more. As far as marketing techniques go, content marketing campaigns are generally considered a long-term strategy. Most marketers don’t count on any “quick wins”, however it can make a significant impact over months or years of effort. Some types of content marketing are organic, inbound tactics, while others might be considered paid, outbound tactics. 

Content marketing can be found on numerous platforms like websites, social media platforms, television, apps, in-person events, in your email inbox, or even in your text messages.

Like many other types of marketing, good content marketing must be built around a target audience group. The audience’s needs and desires will dictate the type of content created and topics that will be covered. While not every interaction with content marketing is a blatant sales pitch, each piece should encourage a positive experience with the brand that supports a customer’s interest in making a purchase. 

What’s the Purpose of Content Marketing?

More than ever before, it’s important that customers feel respected, cared for, and connected to brands. With all the clutter and noise in digital marketing, quality, consistent information stands out from the crowd. Customers will begin to trust and appreciate brands they know go out of the way to make every interaction a positive one, whether they’ve purchased yet or not. 

In 2015, The Harvard Business Review did a study on the impact of emotional connection to sales and found that “Fully connected customers are 52% more valuable, on average than those who are just highly satisfied.” Therefore, a high-quality and consistent content marketing strategy built around connection has the potential to significantly improve a business’ bottom line. 

5 Strategies for Great Content Marketing

We know why content marketing is important for business, but how does one achieve grade A content? Here are five core content marketing strategies to use as a roadmap to ensure your content marketing efforts are built on a solid foundation.  

Team brainstorming content marketing

Provide Value

Knowledge is power, and these days can be pricey. Providing value to your audience via free tips, advice, tutorials, or new information is a key method of cultivating a dedicated following. Every brand and industry has a product or service-relevant topics that customers are likely interested in. Creating content that provides valuable education not only serves your audience but marks the brand as a thought leader in the industry which will only serve your sales efforts. 

Whole Foods grocers drive this point home with its beautifully organized Recipe Collection on the brand website. They’ve developed creative, step-by-step recipes for every meal using products offered in the stores, to make shoppers’ lives even easier by supplying the groceries plus snazzy new dinner ideas! 

Get Vulnerable

These days, people are so over the “picture perfect” fake approach to marketing and sales. They want to connect with real, human stories. Brands have been pulling back the curtain and getting real about what truly matters, while also delivering a key message. The results have been groundbreaking. One example of this is Buzzfeed’s “Women Get Photoshopped” video, which has garnered over 12 million views on Youtube. 

Four women of varying appearances and backgrounds undergo an experiment where they allow a professional image editor for magazines to adjust their image to meet the “beauty standards” for their respective races and cultures. The women share their personal stories of learning to love their appearances and give reactions to the Photoshopped work. It’s not only emotional but an educational look at the world of media and marketing. 

Delight and Amuse

One of the tried-and-true successful content tactics? Simply make people laugh and smile. Whether you’re leaning into jokes, wit, and humor, or are sharing images of the cutest puppies and babies on the web, a laugh can actually get you a step closer to a sale. 

Smiling releases neuropeptides, dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins which are often referred to as “natural happy drugs” as they relieve stress and fight depression. Linking your brand to those happy feelings is an excellent way to cultivate happy customers. 

Ryan Reynolds has mastered the art of delighting and amusing audiences beyond his films on the big screen. He brings his unique personality and sense of humor to his Aviation Gin commercials. This video content at first seems like a classic, serious liquor video, but soon viewers are joyously surprised to find that Ryan’s script is actually lovingly teasing the industry, while humorously speaking to the realities of why the “every person” might want to buy the gin. 

Ryan Reynolds using humor in his Aviation Gin commercial
Source: Aviation Gin Homeschool Edition

Make it Interactive

Finding ways for your customers to feel like they’re part of the process is a fantastic way to build that emotional connection and trust. Whether it’s a customizable product suite, a personalized app experience, or savvy customer support links from in-person to online, there are many ways to create interactive content. 

It’s hard to find a better example of interactive content than Walt Disney World. Among their numerous films, theme parks, books, and games comes an interactive mobile app to enhance the theme park experience called Play Disney Parks. This free app contains music, trivia, games, and more for families to enjoy while they wait in line for their favorite attractions.

Solving your customers’ problems by creating an interactive game? We’d call that a big content win.

Create Realistic Experiences

Just because we live in the digital world, doesn’t mean folks aren’t interested in getting active in real life, too. Content that bridges the gap and creates an interactive, realistic experience can go a long way to exciting audiences and spreading the word about your campaign. 

The Murph Challenge is an example of highly interactive content. The challenge was created in partnership with Crossfit Gyms to pay tribute to and raise funds for the foundation of LT. Michael P. Murphy, who sacrificed his life in the military. Every year, competitors register and compete in the self-timed challenge, and upload their results on social media and to an online leaderboard. 

26 of the Best Content Marketing Examples

Great content marketing can be found on every platform imaginable, both tangible and digital. Learn from the successes of the best of the best with these 15 examples of the best content marketing, on every platform. 

Examples of Content Marketing on Websites

One of the most common homes for brand content is on a website. But there are so many more options than just your Home or ‘About’ page. Read on for four important pieces of an online content strategy. 

Clean desk = clear mind

Blog Content

High-quality blog content (like the one you’re reading right now) should not only provide valuable information and amusement for readers, but also follow the rules of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Blogging should reflect the brand’s personality and can consist of stories, research, checklists, recipes, advice, guides, and more. 

Create & Cultivate’s blog hits all the right marks, with an easy-to-access interface and a variety of specific, helpful content. These pieces vary – from inspiring stories, to tips and tricks from experts, to recaps of the brand’s interactive events. While most content serves as a platform to share a brand’s offering, the emphasis is on providing immense value to cultivate a loyal following. 

Quizzes

People love to feel like they’re getting a personalized experience, and a quiz is a perfect way to give it to them on your website. Setting up an automated quiz that leads users to a product or piece of content that meets their needs can help your brand stand out, make shopping more enjoyable, and help boost your bottom line. 

An example of this tactic is Jenna Kutcher’s What’s Your Secret Sauce quiz. The small business and marketing educator uses her quiz tool to help bring clarity and a sense of direction to users, while also getting them into one of her automated sales sequences via email. 

Case Studies

Patagonia content marketing case study
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For any business dealing with data, case studies can prove to be instrumental to establish authority and outline specifically why a customer should pick you. This type of valuable content summarizes past successes or results and the process the brand took to achieve them. This is often done using charts and graphs, essentially using the data to tell a compelling story. 

This Patagonia case study is a great example of how to make numbers fun and interesting for readers to consume. The team outlined their challenge, the philosophy and approach they took to the plan, and the end results. To creatively tell their story, they used a combination of data, maps, social media posts, and images from the experience. 

Free Guides

Isn’t it a delightful surprise when your grocery store gives away free samples? Most of us will likely stop to take a look, try the cream puff, and maybe consider buying a whole box for ourselves. The same concept applies to content. Whether it’s an e-book, PDF-download, series of email lessons or videos, offering free information is a clever strategy to help expose your brand to more potential clients. 

KlientBoost’s free resources consist of guides, checklists, and infographics, all free for readers simply in exchange for their email address. Offering high quality content for free helps users solve their problems and gives them a sneak peek into the quality of work they can expect from the brand when they go all in as a client. 

Social Media Content Marketing Examples

Technically, all Facebook posts, Tweets, and Pinterest pins are considered part of content marketing. To really level up your strategy, try these three social media content ideas.

Social media content platforms

Contests & Giveaways

You gotta give a little to get a little (or in some cases, a lot!). Social media contests and giveaways have a massive potential to maximize brand awareness, and make a few lucky winners very happy! A super example of this marketing strategy (pun intended) is Marvel Studios’ Contest to celebrate their 10 year anniversary. 

One lucky winner would win the opportunity to attend the red carpet premiere of the Avengers: Infinity War film, a set visit to Captain Marvel, and more. All they had to do was share an image to social media of their favorite Marvel superhero memory and include the #Marvel10YearSweepstakes and character-specific hashtag to be entered to win. This garnered thousands of social media posts and hype around the film release. 

User-Generated Content

 For some brands, the most impactful content marketing doesn’t even come from their own team. With the rise of social media influencers, user-generated content (or UGC) has become a wildly powerful social media marketing strategy. Many brands will repost and create collages of content created by users’ real experiences with their products or services.

A successful example of UGC is GoPro. The action-oriented video camera brand has an advantage, seeing as their tool is actually used to make content. They lean into the angle by sharing the most impressive GoPro-made video clips to the official brand social media accounts. Fans are excited to see their content shared, and the GoPro team gets their pick of easy-access content. 

To encourage users to share more GoPro content, they’ve branded several hashtags such as #GoProCommunity and a specific hashtag for just about every country in the world. These days, you can see approximately 6,000 new GoPro videos being shared online every single day. 

Influencer Marketing

Hulu’s The Great poster
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Instead of working harder to attract new audiences to your brand, sometimes it’s better to go where those people already are. Influencer marketing has taken the world by storm, and for good reason. Influencers build a strong rapport with their followers, making them a powerful asset to share your story with up to millions of new social media users.

To celebrate the launch of the new show The Great, Hulu partnered with 14 social media influencers. The influencers were carefully selected based on their Instagram following, interests, and demographics. Then they were sent a box filled with branded vodka, shot glasses, playing cards, and instructions for a drinking game to play along with the show. Even Game of Thrones star, Sophie Turner gave the show a shoutout. 

This influencer marketing campaign yielded impressive results: 87 pieces of branded content (74 paid, 13 earned), 519k impressions, 22.5k engagements, and an overall engagement rate of 4.34%.

Audio and Video Content Marketing Examples

If you want to keep up with the trends, your brand needs to produce content that is audio or video centered. Attention spans of consumers have decreased immensely – falling from 12 seconds in 2000 to only 8 seconds in 2020. Learn how to grab those short attention spans using audio and video content.  

Audio recording room video content

Youtube Video Series

It’s no secret that video content marketing is king in the modern world, and what better place to participate than the original video platform – Youtube. Whether you’re creating a series of information videos on your Youtube channel, or simply aiming to amuse, everyone can agree that a viral video can be a fast track to marketing success. Video content is also an excellent crossover to share with your social network. 

Dollar Shave Club realized quickly that the key to success was bringing irreverent humor to the forefront, via their real-life founder. The personal connection and down-to-earth tone proved a smashing success, yielding a whopping 27 million views for “Our Blades Are F***ing Great”. Founder, Mike, has continued to show up in nearly every piece of Dollar Shave Club’s video content since. 

Podcasts

Marketing Image for McDonald’s podcast The Sauce
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Podcasts aren’t just for former contestants from The Bachelor or personal brands these days. Even product-based businesses can leverage podcast marketing to create engaging content. While it might take a little bit of creativity, think about how you can provide supplementary value to your audiences beyond just rehashing how great your product is. 

The more creative the better, as McDonalds showed us. Their podcast, The Sauce is actually a murder mystery styled show, weaving an original narrative around their famously mysterious Szechuan Sauce. 

Webinars

This ain’t your average college lecture-style video. Webinars offer a unique opportunity to not only connect personally with customers but collect important sales data that can seriously increase sales. The king of webinar content strategy? Tony Robbins. 

A Tony Robbins webinar is carefully planned around the brand’s key connection points that not only leave users feeling like they experienced something great but gets them hooked on buying more. Webinars are a powerful content marketing tool for personal or experience-based brands. 

Video Tutorial

Another example of using A/V marketing to your advantage for your business is uploading tutorial videos of problems your customers frequently face with your product. Instead of explaining in text how to solve the problem, creating a video that covers the step-by-step way to solve it is a quick and productive method your business can use to communicate with your audience. 

Let’s take a look at DropBox and how they create tutorial videos that they foresee or have noticed their customers struggle with on their website. It ranges from how to save images and videos in their system, to how to scan documents with their mobile app. Having this on your website will help to drive traffic since customers will visit your website to troubleshoot their problems.

More Digital Examples of Content Marketing

There are more ways than ever to attract, engage with, and convert potential customers using digital marketing. These two content marketing examples can easily be shared in a number of spaces like websites, email, and even in printable versions.

Kindle e-book marketing image

E-Books

Another authority-strengthening tactic, e-books are longer pieces of content, quite literally the digital equivalent of a hardcover book. They can be on any subject relevant to a brand, but typically outline a brand’s story or great success and steps or lessons that readers can attempt to replicate themselves. 

Linkedin’s Secret Sauce E-Book is a savvy content marketing example. After establishing their brand as a leader in the career and hiring space, they created this e-book as a means to let readers be a fly on the wall of their marketing department. By sharing their own trials and errors, and data-backed advice, they continue to build the human connection and solidifying their expertise. 

White Papers

White papers are research and data-oriented long-form content pieces that help establish authority and trust for brands. While a white paper isn’t typically your best bet if you’re looking for a humorous or emotional connection with an audience, it’s a powerful and straightforward method of providing an immense amount of information. 

Unsurprisingly, many brands in industries such as technology, medicine, and engineering tend to leverage this content marketing strategy. One example is Google’s security white paper. In an answer to user concerns over the security of information, Google created an in-depth explanation of their security standards and processes that is free and easy to access for users around the world. 

Unique Examples of Content Marketing

The world continues to evolve, and so does content marketing. These four examples are some of the most innovative new ways to engage with audiences online.

Smartphone consumer marketing image

Mobile Apps

These days, smartphones are the standard, and consumers are on them a lot – on average 2 hours and 15 minutes each day. This means that designing a brand-oriented app can pay off big time. Content marketing via mobile app typically involves a service relating to your brand. It could be a series of video and audio content, charts and maps, a virtual look book, blog-style content, or games. 

To take their bike rental service to a new level, Citi Bikes released their original Citi Bike App. This mobile app is packed with features to make riders safer and less stressed, such as map routes, drop off locations for the bikes, a timer to help avoid late fees, and more. The design isn’t just loved by users, it was a finalist in the 6th Annual Shorty Awards. 

Email Marketing

Email marketing isn’t just for direct ads these days, even for clothing brands. The key to content marketing via email is thinking outside the box. The apparel brand, Chubbies did just that with its innovative Black Friday email campaign in 2019. 

Striking a chord with a chummy and casual tone of voice, the team talks to readers like they would with a bro over a beer, making it clear that they keep it real about these sales. They then proceed to tease an exclusive collection for the holiday weekend, an outline of the special ‘Thighber Monday’ deals, and an opt-in that puts you on an even further curated email list. When done correctly, email content can connect a brand more deeply with the audience, and sell in a way that feels almost natural. 

Interactive Experiences

AerieReal Summit interactive content event
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It’s one thing to love a brand’s product or service, but it takes a bit more effort to truly transition from a product to a movement. Interactive experiences are expensive, yet impactful ways to build emotional connections with customers. Brand’s who use this strategy are often aiming to branch out beyond their original product offerings, and the clothing brand Aerie is a prime example of this. 

Aerie’s marketing team made waves with its Spring 2014 campaign featuring the first ever un-retouched ad images, and a pledge to strike a new body positive note in the fashion industry. Since that time, the brand has expanded further, hosting a diverse group of yearly #AerieReal ambassadors. The 2020 Aerie Real Summit brought the campaign into customer’s homes with a full virtual conference with speakers and events, all in Aerie gear. 

Texting

With so many different kinds of content out there it can feel like you’re never quite connecting directly with your customers. The text marketing platform Community – cuts out the middlemen of email and social media apps, and allows you to text your people instead. 

This allows you to send mass messaging updates about new content or events as well as individual exchanges to users who add themselves to your address book. It’s booming for businesses and personal brands alike. Celebrities like Amy Schumer, J. Lo, Diddy, Kerry Washington, and more have all been early adopters of the service.

Infographics

An underrated content strategy is infographics. Consumers scroll through 4,000 – 10,000 ads each day, so being able to capture your audience with a striking graphic to quickly tell your story is important. Data itself can be boring, but when it can be visualized, it becomes easy to digest for the consumer and a powerful way to quickly convey your message.

Understandably, a well-designed infographic is one of the best ways to increase engagement and an easy way to share your content and increase awareness. As you would expect, the human brain processes visuals better than text, however, make sure to choose the right keywords when creating your infographic in order to optimize your SEO and increase your Google ranking.

Testimonials

It should come as no surprise that sharing testimonials can be a powerful tool to establish trust and be a deciding factor for your audience to take action. And the best part is, there are many types of testimonials that can be shared. One great example is combining a testimonial with a call-to-action like Zapier.

Testimonial slide-in on a relevant page on Zapier

It’s actually a strategy we are proud to use. We share testimonial links in our email signature for our current and prospective clients to look at to support our work.

Content Marketing Automation

Let’s first clarify what content marketing automation is – It’s identifying repetitive content marketing tasks and then automating those tasks through tools and applications. Essentially it helps you easily engage across multiple channels and helps you stay organized by keeping track of every prospect and client using a scoring system to deliver personalized content on every channel. 

One great example of using marketing automation to your advantage is applying it to cart-abandoners, like Cleobella for example, who sends a personalized email of the item that was left behind. Showcasing the actual item that was left behind can remind the customer or even entice them to make the purchase.

Cleobella cart abandoned marketing automated email

Build on Trending Momentum

Remember the ice bucket challenge? There were 2.5 million people who donated to the ALS association and shared their videos on social media. Now we’re not saying to come up with the next trend or hop on the bandwagon because everyone is, but building on the momentum of a trend can certainly benefit your business because your audience is telling you what they want. You should prioritize relevance over reach in order to nourish your relationship with your customers. 

 A great example comes from Zara and how they quickly realized their target market, Generation Z, cares about social issues. Gen Z who are vocal on items produced in an ethical and sustainable way are willingly to pay a higher price to achieve this. Zara quickly pivoted their marketing strategy and announced their promise of ‘producing clothes in a responsible and sustainable way by stopping the use of synthetic materials derived from fossil fuels and to use nearly all sustainable materials by 2025.’ 

Even though this wasn’t a trend that everyone saw eye-to-eye to, it was important for Zara’s target market to build their brand on a meaningful and important topic that was a win-win situation for Zara and its customers. 

Forums (Downloadable lists)

Saving your audiences’ time by providing them the answers they are looking for is another effective strategy that will build up your brand and drive traffic. You help them by providing easy solutions they can digest, whether that be in the form of a checklist or a forum are great tools that can easily be shared and grow your business’s awareness. Make sure to research what questions current or even potential customers are asking to provide a more valuable tool for your customer. 

Another effective way to help your customer decide to use your service is to create an online brand community where your customers market for you. An example of this that we have in mind is Sephora’s Beauty Talk. Customers upload a photo of them wearing Sephora makeup and Sephora provides a link in the photo to buy the items used to create the look.

Sephora Community gallery
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With Halloween around the corner, this tool is an effective way for Sephora to influence their audience in purchasing their product. Creating a community that feels connected over their brand is a simple and effortless way strategy. 

Hashtag Campaigns

A great way to communicate with your audience and reach new audiences is through emotion. It can be a powerful way to influence a decision, whether through humor or a tear-jerker, and if used correctly can be an effective marketing campaign. 

Successful marketing campaigns such as “Like a girl” by Always, “Real Beauty” by Dove, and “Man your man could smell like” by Old spice all drive their message through emotion with their brand. Creating a topic that is talked about and shared quickly through social media increased their traffic and sales exponentially and it’s no wonder you saw so many of those commercials in the super bowl last year. Companies are quickly noticing how powerful marketing campaigns that spark emotion can be beneficial for their business.

Loyalty Programs

Once you get your customers in, what better way to keep them and come back for more than having a customer loyalty reward program?  Did you know 72% of adults belong to at least one loyalty program? This is an excellent way to create lifetime customers. 

There are many successful examples of this, but because we haven’t been able to travel out of the country and we’ve been daydreaming of a getaway, let’s take a look at Delta Airlines loyalty program: Skymiles. As a member, you earn 5 miles for every dollar spent on a Delta flight, so the higher the price you pay the bigger the reward. These miles can then be used to get a free U.S. flight on Delta, do I hear Hawaii calling?

Aloha to you Hawaii
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Analysis Interviews

This next strategy is newer and an ace up one’s sleeve. Why? Understanding problems your customers experience can better equip you to solve and deliver the right solution. The best way to achieve this is by conducting interviews. 

Successful companies like Johnson & Johnson use this opportunity to fully understand their product before launching by conducting interviews with executives and/or medical professionals who are associated with the product. Analyzing trigger points and key highlights of your product or service, you are able to strategically look at all angles and realize who your target customers are, how to develop your business messaging, and plan on how to promote your product or service. 

Picking the brains of experts who can tell you what problems they’re currently experiencing will better equip you to provide an opportunity to solve and strategically market to your customers.

You will be in a better spot to communicate with your target audience. You can even step it up a notch and look at psychology theories that can better explain a customer’s behavior towards your product or service to know how to market effectively. Whether it’s pet food, eco-friendly products or healthcare services, using this strategy for your business will benefit you and increase your revenue and awareness. 

Event Marketing

What better way to have your customers hear about you than meeting them in person. 84% of event attendees have a more positive opinion about the brand, product, or service being promoted after the event. Either through attending conferences or hosting events/conferences in the industry your audience is in, this is a tactical promotional strategy many companies use to educate their customers and form a connection with them by creating an experience they can relate to your business. 

Don’t worry, you don’t have to pull the Red Bull Stratos jump or create a piano staircase like VW did to get the buzz.

Need Help With Your Digital Marketing?

Creating impressive content is one thing, but what happens next? Many brands benefit from a combined organic and paid digital marketing strategy. Supporting your content with ads can help you reach thousands of ideal customers who have been waiting for your offer.

At KlientBoost, we help you reach your goals and make more money via intelligent digital advertising and creative conversion rate optimization. We can’t wait to learn about your project. Click here to get a free proposal from our team featuring optimization tips, competitor information, and custom pricing.

The post 5 Strategic Marketing Approaches + 26 Of The Best Content Marketing Examples appeared first on KlientBoost.

Doing proper SEO can make it so you don’t have to worry about getting lucky and finding a golden ticket to page one of the SERP, you can just make it yourself.
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Before we dive into exactly how to handle running an SEO audit, let’s talk concepts. What are the major components of SEO to look at first, and what can we start doing to optimize ranking factors?

• Technical SEO
• On-Page SEO
• Backlinks
• Competitor Analysis

These 4 pillars of SEO are essentially what guides search engine ranking, your organic traffic, and in the end, also your user experience. So with that, let’s chat a bit about what each of these pillars mean on a website that way you can start your journey to that #1 spot on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

If only SEO were so easy, try not to be like this guy.
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Technical SEO: 

Technical SEO is a lot of things, some complex, some fairly straightforward. Let’s go over what makes up the technical side of all of this.

Being able to get Google and other tools to be able to look at your website is pretty important for obvious reasons, so let’s start there. Your robots.txt file is what website crawlers look at in order to learn what pages on your website they should or should not look at. Going into that file manually on your website’s backend and checking that you aren’t blocking out website crawls is important, and we’ll cover it in our audit checklist down below.

We have seen that websites that utilize HTTPS, meaning they have SSL encryption enabled, see a lift in ranking. You can find the HTTP status of your website simply by looking at the URL bar up top.

Page speed is something that can greatly improve not only your ranking with search engines but also your user experience. It refers to your website pages load time.

Don’t let Google get lost in your website’s sitemap.
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The XML sitemap is essentially the guide to your website for Google to crawl during its indexation. Ensuring that this is correctly inputted into a Google crawl/index will be covered later, but in the meantime, here is how you can locate your sitemap.

Site architecture and the XML sitemap go hand in hand, the difference is that your site architecture lives within the sitemap. The architecture generally refers to how your page’s URL structure is set up. More on that in our SEO audit quick fixes section below.

Javascript, almost every online entity utilizes this code language in one form or another, and it can prove to be essential to your SEO efforts. It does tend to fall under something that affects your page load speed (e.g. minification of JavaScript), but nonetheless, it can prove a vital part of your SEO efforts and customer experience. This article has a deeper, more technical explanation of JS (JavaScript) SEO and what it can do for you.

On-Page SEO:

On-Page consists of the stuff that is more front-facing on your website, but here’s a breakdown of what exactly that means. 

Your URL is the address found at the top of the page, and usually one of the first things that your visitors will see. What you set as your URL address for your homepage and content is something that sometimes slips people’s minds as important, even Google says it is on their SEO starter guide.

Content is in fact, king, sorry Randy
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Content, as people like to say, is king. So let’s outline what goes into content SEO a bit here before we break down best practices later on. 

Keyword targeting, pretty straightforward, keyword targeting is the concept of gearing your content using some best practices to show search engines that your content is meant to cover a target topic.

Keyword cannibalism goes along with that, where it is possible to have too many pages targeting the same keyword, this can end up with you competing with yourself for that page 1 search result. 

Duplicate content can also hurt you, having pages with exactly the same content can get you flagged as a kind of spam by Google, so ensuring that it’s not an issue on your website is vital.

We all had to start learning HTML somewhere.
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HTML markup is one of the most vital parts of SEO for on-page ranking. It consists of a few different concepts that are categorized all under markup.

Titles in this context refer to what comes up on your Google SERP (search engine result page) and are what populates the title tag at the top of your browser. These need to be done effectively in order to keep things running smoothly not only when people search things relevant to your website, but also when Google indexes your website. Having the same title for 10 different sales pages won’t do you any good, but we’ll break it down further below.

Meta descriptions, meta data, or meta tags as it is more commonly called, are a big part of the supporting on-page ranking factors. They are what comes up under your Google search result title, and can be a major selling point of your page in terms of getting people to click, as well as what keyword your page is focusing on.

Not quite as simple as breaking into the computer, but not that much harder either.
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Images, who doesn’t love a fun relevant image, well as it turns out, Google does too. Where images become relevant for SEO is within what is called the alt text and the file name. For the file name, you want to make sure that it is relevant to your target keyword and is pretty easy to understand the concept. But what is alt text?

Alt-text is an image description that can be read if an image can’t be seen or loaded, it’s also a great place to input some keywords and show Google that when it crawls the page, the image is relevant to the topic.

Links, links, links! A big part of how you position your content involves your linking choices. What links refer to in this instance are when you link out to other websites from content on your own.

Don’t forget <head> and <body> tags though! In your content, how you set up your titles and keyword content are key, as we said earlier, content is king, so give your pages the royal treatment.

Backlinks:

This article on the importance of backlinks tells us that link authority (how many links you have as well as the quality of them), “strongly correlates with higher rankings,” and they are absolutely right. Using SEO tools like Ahrefs (we’ll get to tools later on in the article) we can give you a clear view of your backlink profile and where your external links are coming from, which in simpler terms, is a list of other websites that have pages that link back to yours. Link building is definitely a large part of your SEO analysis to keep an eye on.

Competitor Analysis:

Learning where you are in comparison to your competitors can be a vital part of discovering where the holes are in your website or blog. An SEO competitor analysis is the process of utilizing SEO tools in order to compare the number and relevancy of keywords you and your competitors each rank for. Looking into this comparison can also be called a content gap analysis, something to keep in mind for our SEO audit checklist.

BOOM! Alright, now that we are through the concepts and the nitty-gritty of what makes up an SEO audit, we’re done! You got it all, nothing else to know, now get out there and get that #1 spot… Ok but actually, let’s go down the list of what tools are available to help us perform our SEO audit then jump into how we get it done.

Getting started with SEO and looking at how many tools are out there can make you feel like this.
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Choosing the set of tools you’ll use to tackle your SEO efforts, or at the very least an SEO audit, can be a nightmare. Instead of crawling through every sales page of what comes up on Google, here’s a list of some of the essential tools we use for not only our clients, but ourselves as well. Along with this list, check out our podcast with industry experts on SEO tool mastery.

SEO Audit Tools

1. Ahrefs

If you are looking to get in deep and find the most SEO optimization opportunities possible, Ahrefs is a great tool to do just that. It features a ton of reporting tools that go over SEO best practices. It does come with a price tag though, so keep that in mind.

2. ScreamingFrog

ScreamingFrog is a solid website crawling tool that we use in order to run audits on technical SEO and on-page optimization. There is a free version available, but the paid version is what we would recommend if you’re looking for continual audits.

3. Google Search Console

Our first free tool on the list, we 100% recommend getting on GSC and connecting your domain to it. It’s also the place where you not only can get some decent search data, but it’s also the place where you can input your XML sitemap to help Google crawl your website!

4. Moz

A competitor to Ahrefs, Moz is a cheaper alternative that isn’t quite as in-depth with its available tools and reports but is still a solid option. Here’s an article that compares the two in more depth.

5. GTMetrix

GTMetrix is an awesome free tool that can help you audit your website’s technical SEO at a highly technical level. I know that sounds weird but let me explain. Earlier when we talked about technical SEO, we went over page speed and JavaScript, well, GTMetrix can give you a breakdown to exactly what parts of your code or JS needs to be looked at in order to improve your page speed and crawlability, which is pretty sweet.

You bet your butt it is.
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6. Google Analytics

If you haven’t utilized Google Analytics before, check out our guide on how to set it up for your website. Analytics is a free online tool from Google that gives you access to in-depth analytics, trends, and reports on all traffic that goes through your website. While this is at the bottom of our list, it is 100% something that we recommend hooking up to your site.

7. Spotibo

Spotibo is a free to use tool that allows you to perform on-page SEO audits on up to 500 URL’s a month (with more on a paid subscription). We will be using it to take a look at all the major aspects of on-page SEO and where we have opportunities to optimize.

Now that you know a little about what tools are out there and what they are used for, you’re locked and loaded and ready for the juicy stuff. This next part is our own SEO audit checklist that we use to get each and every one of our SEO clients started.

Locked and Loaded!
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SEO Audit Checklist

1. Current Keywords

Before you get started looking at the rest of your website’s SEO audit, it’s a great idea to take a look at what you already have going for you. That starts with pulling up your list of keywords that you are currently ranking for on organic searches.

In the below example and as we go through our step-by-step process, we use Ahrefs to pull up the organic keyword list of one of our clients Mitio, and we’ll continue to use them as an example as we move through this SEO report checklist. In order to get to your organic keywords on Ahrefs, go ahead and hit the option that you can see on the bottom right-hand side of the picture below.

Ahrefs is showing that we are currently ranking for 962 organic keywords within the United States.

Ahrefs report on Mitio’s organic keywords
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Being able to see what you rank for already can give you a good idea of the effect of any content you have done in the past as well as how your homepage and other web pages have helped you rank. It can also let you know if you’ve been accidentally ranking for anything that maybe wouldn’t result in qualified traffic due to some pages you may have thought you deleted or forgot existed.

2. Authority Gap

From the current keyword list, we go to look at an authority gap report, which not only will tell you your site domain authority, links, and traffic, but also all of those for your competitors as well. This is the first and possibly the most time-consuming part of the SEO audit process, so listen up!

We start again on Ahrefs (starting to see how useful the tool is yet?) and go down to where it says “Competing Domains” in the left-hand menu.

Ahrefs competing domains menu selection help.
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This will then bring up a report on other websites that share keywords in common with you, with the possibility of sorting it by the percentage of keywords in common, which is what we will go with for now.

Ahrefs competing domains report.
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From there, go ahead and open up some of these competing domains and make sure that they are in fact, relevant competitors to your website. Once you’ve established a list of competitors that you are happy with, go ahead and grab a list of your most relevant keywords and head over to the keyword explorer in order to run what we call a batch analysis.

It starts by entering your most relevant keywords into the keyword explorer on Ahrefs.

Ahrefs keyword explorer example
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Once you hit that big orange button down in the bottom right-hand corner, a new report will come up, then you’ll want to learn more about which domains (websites) are ranking for these keywords specifically. To do so, click on traffic share by domains on the left-hand side of the screen.

Ahrefs keyword explorer example
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The report that will then populate will show the domains that rank for most of those earlier inputted keywords sorted by traffic.

Still with me? Awesome, I know this is a long process, but I promise it’s worth it. 

Our next step is to run the actual batch analysis. Based on your initial lists of competitors, and your newly found competition, go ahead and pick seven to ten of your top competitors and head over to Ahrefs batch analysis function, which can be found under the “More” dropdown menu at the top of the page. 

Ahrefs batch analysis menu example.
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Once you’re on the batch analysis page, go ahead and input your website and then list all your competitors, and hit the analyze button.

What comes up then is what we’ve been building towards for a long time, the authority gap report. This report shows us how we stack up against competitors in terms of authority, traffic, keywords, and links! 

Referencing this report, we can see if you have a content problem (low number of keywords), content quality (lots of keywords but low traffic), backlink generation issues (low numbers of referring domains). All of these issues are reflected in the big metric we look at here, the DR or domain ranking, if it’s low, chances are you have one of the above issues.

Final phase of the batch analysis report.
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3. Content Gap

Now that we did all the heavy lifting with the authority gap analysis, we can break into the content gap analysis. The purpose of this part of our SEO audit is to see from a high level how you compare to your competitors in ranking for priority keywords & pages.

To start, we go back to the site breakdown of your website in Ahrefs and scroll down to the “Content Gap” menu option on the left-hand side.

Content gap menu example.
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Once there, input your top competitors, these should be the same competitor list from our authority gap audit section above.

We recommend the setup as shown below.

Example of how to enter competitors into the content gap page on Ahrefs.
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The report that will then load will show you a list of the keywords that all of the inputted websites rank for. To get to a list of what you and your competitors compete for within your content, go ahead, and select only 4 or more interactions. This will give you a list of keywords sorted by traffic volume that 4 or more of you and/or your competitors rank for.

Keyword intersection selection for content gap reporting.
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Once you’ve got that going for you, you’re done! This part is much shorter than the authority gap section, but it gives you a good idea of keywords and content that your site may be missing that you can go for or competition between you and your competitors that you need to keep pushing on to get to that number one spot on the SERP.

4. Backlink Profile

Your backlink profile can have one of the biggest effects on your overall site ranking, who references you and places you as a thought leader in your industry, and how trustworthy those outside references are all that make up your backlink profile. Connecting or earning a backlink from a higher domain rating site boosts your backlink profile and therefore your domain rating faster, to put it simply.

Example of an Ahrefs backlink profile.
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Your backlink profile is what comes up on the site overview of Ahrefs when you first input your domain into the site explorer section (as seen above).

Looking at this profile, you can see that our number of backlinks has slowed lately, and the majority (81%) are from domains that have 10 or less domain rating, this would suggest that the site needs some backlink profile help, and that can give you a good place to start in terms of what to look for in an SEO agency partner or SEO specialist.

5. On-Page SEO

For this part of the audit, we are going to hop off of Ahrefs, crazy, I know. To start our on-page SEO audit, let’s go ahead and check that our domain is indexable in the first place, we do that by going to www.google.com/ and type site:{Your Website}. What results will be Google’s list of your indexed pages and how they appear on the SERP.

Google index domain search example.
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You can also take a look at how Google has indexed your site using Google Search Console (GSC), and going to the “Index Status” section.

Now that you know your site is indexed on Google, let’s take a look at more on-page SEO factors using another free tool called Spotibo. Simply create an account then head to the home page and input your domain. The crawl shouldn’t take very long and will generate a  great breakdown of your title tags, meta descriptions, images, links, URLs, anchor text, and more.

Spotibo results page example.
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6. Technical SEO

The next part of our SEO audit is focused on the technical side of things. To get this part done, we will be using GTMetrix, another one of the free tools that we discussed earlier.

To use GTMetrix, simply input your domain URL and have it test your site. Once it’s done running, you’ll have an in-depth technical report on aspects of your website code that affect your site speed and mobile compatibility.

GTMetrix results page example.
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As for your Robots.txt file that we touched on earlier, now is a good time to navigate to it, manually open it up, and check what’s inside. What we are looking for is to make sure that only URLs that we definitely want Google to ignore are present on the file, and that we don’t accidentally make the big mistake of having all of our website unindexable. (as below)

Robots.txt file that blocks the entire site from being crawled.
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Our last two points on the technical side of our SEO audit involve a bit more of our website structure, the first of the two being our HTTPS encryption.

Ensuring that we are SSL certified and all is well there will not only assure visitors of your website’s security but also help boost your ranking according to Google. You can tell if you are HTTPS certified by looking simply at your URL and seeing if the address begins with https://, if not, here’s some helpful information on how to get it set up.

The last part of our technical SEO audit is our XML sitemap and site architecture. To locate your XML sitemap you can check out this helpful article. Once located, we want to do two things, the first is to ensure that our sitemap is correct. Using ScreamingFrog, we can see how many URLs the crawl encounters, and if it matches the number of URLs on our sitemap, that’s a good sign.

ScreamingFrog URLs encountered results.
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The second step of the sitemap process is to make sure that we submit the XML sitemap to Google. We do this via GSC (Google Search Console). Within GSC, we navigate to the “Sitemaps” section of the left-hand side navigation menu, and in there we can manually submit our sitemap to Google, which will help out with Google’s own crawling process and ranking.

Google search console menu example.
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For the most part, Google is perfectly able to crawl and index your site, but why not make it as easy as possible to give yourself the best possible chances at hitting those target keyword ranking. It will also help Google index your site faster as well as easier. If your site is fairly new, this can be a key boost to getting you ranked on the SERP.

7. Internal Linking

With everything that you can do to generate awesome keyword ranking and appear high on the SERP, we want to ensure that we spread the wealth across more of your site, and internal linking can do just that. Now, I’m not going to tell you that you should go into each and every page on your website and find places to link to your other pages at least a few times, but also, if it’s possible, please do yourself a favor and do just that.

Ensuring that your high ranking pages are complemented by relevant content is one of the single greatest factors to keeping people on your website longer, and in turn, driving more conversions in the long term.

In order to audit where you are at with internal links, you can head over to SEOreviewtools.com and utilize their free internal link analyzer. 

SEOreviewtools.com result report example for internal links
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Based on the results that you see there, you’ll be able to tell how needed a round of internal linking is, if you just need to ensure you’re doing it moving forward, or if you need to sit down and grind through a larger part of your URLs and add internal links.

Congratulations!
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And with that last part of the audit, you’ve officially run your first SEO audit! Woo! Now you’ve got a ton of information on where you stand in Google’s eyes as well as in comparison to your competitors. Now, what to do with your audit report? Well, you can always take it and reach out to us to take some next steps on improving your SEO (sorry, obligatory sales pitch), but if you’re not quite ready to take that leap, let’s go over some easy fixes you can take a look at yourself.

SEO Tips for Easy Fixes

Before you start putting together a big overarching strategy to tackle each and every aspect of your SEO audit results, let’s tone it back for a second and go over some quick fixes that can be taken care of first, that way you can focus more on longer-term solutions and strategies.

1. Sitemap Structure

Having a logical architecture can help keep your links clean and organized, which in turn leads to an easier to navigate website.

For example, here’s a quick list of what a proper sitemap structure would look like for an eCommerce website:

• https://www.websitedomain.com/catalog
• https://www.websitedomain.com/catalog/category
• https://www.websitedomain.com/catalog/category/product 

2. Subpoint: Redirects

Ensuring that your redirects that are already set up are correct, functional, and intentional is a great way to quickly recover some search engine optimization. In part 5 of our SEO audit, we use a tool that pulls a report on multiple details related to your website redirects. Go ahead and use that to form a quick fix strategy that tackles any errors there.

CMitio.org redirection report from Spotibo.
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3. Subpoint: Duplicate Content

Fixing any duplicate content is a must, and can really help show Google that your site isn’t spammy. You can see if there is any duplicate content in part 5 of our SEO audit process above. Getting a proper redirect to just one URL in a group of duplicate pages is a good place to start, and just ensuring that it doesn’t happen again through a regular SEO audit cadence is key.

Your SEO audit and these tips can help you on your way to knocking it out of the park.
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After everything we have been over so far, we’ve only just begun to form an SEO strategy, so let’s talk about the next steps on how to keep things rolling. I promise this is the last list you’ll have to read over.

SEO Next Steps, How to Keep Growing

1. Core Sitemap / Important Pages

Taking a look at your core sitemap, that being the pages under the top navigation bar on your homepage, and ensuring that they are properly set up with SEO best practices and solid keyword targeting and keyword research is vital to set up a good foundation for all of your future SEO efforts to build off of. Utilizing well-built landing pages that are built to turn your website visitors into conversions and not just relying on your homepage is a strategy that we ourselves use, not only in SEO, but also in our PPC client pages.

That’s what it’s all about.
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2. Keyword / Content Strategy

Using the authority and content gap results from our SEO audit (steps 1 and 2), you’ll be able to put together a plan on what keywords you’d like to rank for and become more competitive pretty easily. And even once you work through that list, there’s always more out there. Taking that plan and acting on it is a whole different beast, however.

Writing well-targeted keyword content isn’t super easy or convenient, if it was, Google would probably implode in one way or another. So much can go into a content strategy; article publishing frequency, content best practices, relevant industry research data, and more. The trick is working that all out and making it happen. (That’s where we come in)

3. Using Audit Results

Putting together the above strategies is definitely necessary, but let’s not forget to use what we learned from our SEO audit. Taking your findings from those and working with your webmaster a bit, you can now make informed decisions on how to repair, improve, and grow your online presence. Just don’t think that you are done with everything here, regular SEO audits are always helpful to check in on your progress and growth, sorry.

Yeah, SEO audits aren’t a one-time thing, sorry.
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The Start of a Journey

As you now know, SEO isn’t a super straightforward few things to optimize on a page here or there or link to your website on social media, but something that involves your entire website and beyond it even. But with the takeaways from your SEO audit and new growth strategies, you’re sure to be on your way to growing your business. Speaking of growing your business, we talked through a lot of processes, SEO tools, audit strategies, and next steps here, and it can definitely be overwhelming.

Don’t panic though, we got you. If you want to reach out and see how KlientBoost can help, our dedicated growth strategists are ready and able to help you work through how we can partner up to create new business, growth opportunities, and wins. You can contact our team here or shoot us an email at hello@klientboost.com!

The post How To Perform An SEO Audit + 20 Tips To Boost Your Google Ranking appeared first on KlientBoost.

It’s the guiding light for marketing messaging and ad campaigns.

Some people, though, try market segmentation, but flub their targeting. Or miss other vital points that actively hurt their ROI. 

Whether you’re launching your first segmented marketing campaign or looking to optimize what’s already somewhat working, we’ve got your back. In this article, we’re going deep on how to segment your ads and content including:

• Live, revenue-driving examples of market segmentation from highly successful brands
• How to get richer data to segment your audiences to be more accurate
• Easier ways to segment your current data, like your email lists

Now’s let dive in. 

What Is Market Segmentation?

Market segmentation is grouping your audience and delivering targeted messaging based on specific, predetermined factors. These factors could be activity triggers that your prospect is taking – like certain ad clicks based on UTM parameters or key pages being visited on your site.

You’ve likely seen segmentation happen in a wide range of settings including emails, social ads, PPC campaigns, and website personalization.

Why You Should Implement Market Segmentation

In case you need to convince your marketing team or any other stakeholders, here are a few reasons your brand should take advantage of segmentation:

Higher Revenue

Better segmentation can lead to better personalization, and therefore more revenue. 

Seems intuitive, but if you need hard numbers: 2019 Campaign Monitor data shows marketing plans with segmented campaigns saw as much as a 760% increase in revenue.

But here’s the kicker: most of your customers expect personalization. 

A report by Segment found 71% of consumers feel frustrated when a shopping experience is impersonal.  If you don’t meet customers’ expectations, you can lose them.   

Lower Ad Expenses

Segmenting your audience and messaging towards specific groups of people, optimizes your budget for better performance and potentially lower ad spend. In other words, people viewing more personalized ads are more likely to convert.

Not only that, the major ad networks including Google and Facebook reward personalization. As leads click on your personalized ads, your Google ads quality score increases. 

Like if you use remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) on Google Search.

This lowers your cost per click. 

Yes, acquiring customers becomes less expensive when market segmentation is well executed.

Higher Engagement

Beyond lower CPCs, you can engage your email lists at higher rates than ever before. A study by Mailchimp found segmented email campaigns have a 14.31% higher open rate and a 100.95% higher click-rate than non-segmented email campaigns. Your email marketing goals might include:

• Higher open rates- the percentage of people that open your emails out of the contacts who received that specific email message.
• Higher clickthrough rates- the percentage of email recipients who clicked on one or more links within an email.
• Higher conversion rates- the percentage of email recipients who clicked a link in an email and completed a desired action. Such as purchasing your product or scheduling a demo.

Reallocate Budgets 

Here’s where reviewing your analytics can serve your brand even better. 

As you run segmented campaigns, you’ll likely discover a higher buying response from specific audiences. Then you may end up shifting more of your marketing budget towards specific groups. 

Or develop new products for your more engaged audiences, giving you even more revenue opportunities. 

Now, let’s take a look at how marketers segment their potential customers.

5 Types Of Market Segmentation

1. Firmographic Segmentation

Firmographic segmentation categorizes B2B customers into groups based on factors such as:

• Company size (How many employees do they have? What series of funding did they last receive?)
• Vertical (What industry are they in? For example, are your target customers hotels, spas, and other hospitality businesses?)
• Sales stage in your CRM

Traditional marketing funnel

Firmographic Segmentation Examples

The project management platform Monday.com customizes their Facebook ad copy by industry. The example below targets real estate companies.

Facebook ad copy from Monday.com retargeting real estate companies

Clicking on the “Sign Up” CTA on the above ad takes Facebook users to a landing page, also personalized for the real estate vertical:

Monday.com industry-targeted landing page

Segment creates customized landing pages for product managers and engineers based on their day-to-day responsibilities.

For product managers, they are constantly reviewing their customer’s behavioral data. 

Segment product manager landing page

With engineers, segment emphasizes how easy it is to integrate their API. 

Segment engineer-targeted landing page

B2B organizations taking their first steps to segment their content: start personalizing by developing marketing campaigns based on your lead’s industry. As your market segmentation campaigns mature, you can add more layers of personalization.

For example, if you’re targeting hospitality organizations you can develop messaging highlighting industry-specific challenges. Then create role-specific landing pages and ad copy. This can be the primary user or based on people within that organization who are stakeholders in purchasing your product or service.  

2. Behavioral Segmentation

Behavioral segmentation is the grouping of customers based on actions they take around your business’ content, app, marketing, or website.

Delivering highly personalized content requires strategies to meet people where they are and how they are. Here are a few strategies that incorporate behavioral data…

Browsing History

You can’t treat all your website visitors the same. The ad’s CTA, offer, and linked landing page you send to someone that’s likely never heard of you versus someone who has purchased from you should be different. 

Behavioral marketing also needs to take into account users who visit your website but do not convert. Retargeting campaigns pick up where they left off on your website and get you even more conversions.

Web site visitors retargeted with display ads are 70% more likely to convert on your website. This is why gauging your PPC traffic’s temperature is so vital. 

Popular remarketing ad networks
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For example, Adobe uses retargeting ads based on the products you’ve viewed on its website through a tracking pixel.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Facebook ad

You can also send targeted emails when you want to push your website visitors to complete an action like Girlboss, a networking and resource site for ambitious women. Using CampaignMonitor, they create segmented campaigns including:

• Email reminders to people to complete their site profiles
• Personalized event invites based on the content read on their website

Email for Girlboss Rally

Search Intent

People search not only for brands on Google, in some cases, they even type in specific product models. Our Keyword Tapering technique lets you bid more competitively for a higher ROAS (return on ad spend) on PPC ads based upon these high intent searches.

Purchase Decisions

One of the key metrics you’re likely tracking is your customer’s lifetime value (LTV) since repeat customers make up 41% of eCommerce revenue in the United States. 

With increasing a customer’s LTV, consider:

• What items do they first purchase? 
• How long does it take them to complete a second order and what items do they buy? 
• What items does your data show someone is likely to buy together? 

Amazon uses similar information (and other much larger data points) to their advantage. According to McKinsey research, 35% of Amazon’s sales come from its product recommendations engine. 

On the ‘Your Amazon.com’ section of their website, Amazon users can view a selection of products based on their past shopping. 

Your Amazon product recommendations

For eCommerce brands, you can also display personalized product recommendations to your customers while they shop. Use plugins like Upsell Recommendations and Recommendify to quickly get up and running.

Reward customers that complete desirable actions using automated email solutions. After someone spends $200 or more, Sephora emails a 20% discount. 

Sephora’s rule-based email funnel
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Consider also if customers converted through a specific channel and personalize your content based on that. Book Like a Boss emailed its customers that purchased a plan through AppSumo a one-time offer to upgrade their scheduling software.

Book Like a Boss upsell email to customers that purchased through AppSumo

The above email generated five figures.

Email with CEO Nachum Klingman

Time-Based

Any sort of productized service can anticipate their customer’s needs and target them based on when they access your product. 

For example, Starbucks knows their regular morning customers might be open to a second coffee in the afternoon. They offer happy hour prices via email marketing and mobile app notifications. 

Starbucks mobile push notification

Engagement-level

Reward users for brand loyalty with offers as simple as buy nine burritos, get the tenth one free. You can even add scarcity into your loyalty rewards emails by offering a discount that expires in a few weeks like GNC does.

GNC discount email

Another way you can reward your customers by email: offer a deal to your active customers for renewing a subscription or service early.  

Carbonite subscription renewal email

You can also re-engage customers who haven’t purchased in a while. Like Pinkberry does, by offering customers on their email list a free frozen yogurt. 

Pinkberry re-engagement email

3. Geographic Segmentation

Geographic Segmentation is a form of segmentation where marketing’s personalized based on factors such as a lead’s:

• City
• State
• Country
• Zip Code
• Regional climate

Geography Segmentation Examples

For an email campaign, Airbnb offered a 10% discount offer based on a subscriber’s location. 

Airbnb discount email

Clicking the “Explore discounted stays” button in the email takes Airbnb users to nearby, discounted vacation spots.

Airbnb geo-targeted landing page

You can even geographically personalize your content based on the season. For example, Sleeman Beer runs awareness campaigns on Facebook and Instagram for their summer-themed beer cases that can be used as a box for bag tossing.

Sleeman Beer Facebook ad copy

4. Demographic Segmentation

Demographic Segmentation covers traits like age, gender, marital status, family size, and income. 

Demographic Segmentation Examples

H&M’s ad creative targets multiple age groups. For example, H&M’s back to school campaign developed retargeting ads towards university students: 

H&M display ad

While the below campaign centers around new parents.

H&M Facebook ad copy

You can also segment your audience as they reach a milestone such as their wedding or birthday. 

Alamo Drafthouse offers a free movie ticket to its loyalty program members via email on their birthday.

Alamo Drafthouse birthday promotion email

Birthday emails generate 342% higher revenue than promotional emails.

5. Psychographic Segmentation

Psychographic Segmentation entails an audience’s opinions, interests/activities, personality traits, lifestyle, and social status.

Psychographic Segmentation Examples

Years ago, every keyword you’re targeting for PPC ads needed a separate landing page. If you had many keywords and products, this was a huge time sink. Now you can use dynamic text so you have one landing page for each ad group.

One specific part of your audience might be more intrigued by a hiking backpack for an afternoon hike versus trekking backpack for a multi-day journey. Fortunately, your PPC ads and landing page can reflect specific searches thanks to dynamic text. 

K-Cliffs Backpack’s dynamic text landing pages
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Interest-Based Targeting

Brands tailor everything from their ad creative to products based on individuals’ interests. 

Johnnie Walker developed a whiskey inspired by Game of Thrones. They developed a dedicated product landing page so they can funnel people interested in GOT and whiskey to order online. 

Johnnie Walker’s Game-of-Thrones-themed product page

WP Engine uses Facebook ads to target people who are interested in Entrepreneur magazine.   

WP Engine Facebook ad copy

Values-Based Targeting

Grove’s Facebook ad messaging reinforces an audience’s set of beliefs. And targets people more likely to seek sustainable solutions and will more likely want to cut down on plastic waste compared to a more general audience.

Facebook ad for Groove Collaborative based on their sustainable solution

All that said, if you’re looking for more specific examples of your competitor’s market segmentation strategy, let me show you how to spy on their ads.

How To View Your Competitor’s Targeting & Ads

To check out how your competitors are geographically targeting on Facebook and Instagram:

Visit their Facebook Fan Page and select “See More” under “Page Transparency”.

H&M’s Facebook page

Next click “Go to Ad Library”.

Page Transparency view on Facebook

Filtering ads for Facebook and Instagram users in Australia you can view both their ads and landing pages.

H&M ads running targeting Facebook and Instagram users in Australia

For the Google Ad Network, learn more about PPC Spy Tools to discover what your competitors are up to.

7 Ways To Collect Data For Segmenting Your Audience

Now that you’ve seen all the ways you can personalize your ad funnel, let’s look at seven strategies you can use to gather data for optimizing your ads and content.

1. Survey Your Customer Base

Customer surveys can be a powerful resource to gather more information about your different target audiences beyond gender and age. First, identify the goals of your survey:

• Are you looking to gather firmographic criteria such as their role-specific challenges? (Groove has a great live survey you can see as an example for B2B brands)
• Are you seeking spending, reading, or other behavioral habits? 
• Do you intend this survey to reach a specific geographic location only?  
• Do you want to restrict your target market by any demographic factors?
• What habits, values, or interests do you associate with your target segment that you believe are unique to them? And what insights are you looking to gain from that?

Then once you have an understanding of the specific segmentation characteristics you’re trying to gather, you can create a list of questions that reflect your strategy. 

With those questions, you can use Typeform to send out your survey. Email your list to get a better understanding of who they are. Incentivize completing your survey with a small giveaway. 

The Path’s survey giveaway email

If you don’t have an email list or want more data, promote the survey like you would content.

GetFeedback gathering feedback through a LinkedIn ad

Consider also platform-specific survey options like running Instagram Story interactive poll ads. 

2. Customer Interviews

Another great resource for completing market research about specific audiences is interviewing. Aim to interview at least five people for each group you’ve identified as a persona.

For example, Shopify might ask their customers through interviews questions like:

What was going on that made you use Shopify? 

What did your selection process look like? Why did you decide on Shopify? 

What other channels are you selling on currently? How has that experience gone compared to using Shopify?

What’s the first thing you do when you wake up? Why?

Where do you go to learn more about managing and growing your store?

Pro-tip: The most valuable insights come up as you ask follow up questions. Try questions like “That’s really interesting, can you tell me more about that?”

Also, avoid leading questions such as “As you’re drinking coffee, you’re on social media right?” Leading questions lead to false qualitative data. 

3. Lower the Barrier to Entry

One way you can quickly gather data and segment your potential new customers are lead generation forms. For most businesses, the most common types of lead generation forms include contact forms, registration forms (for a specific event such as a webinar), and newsletter signup forms.

Many contact forms ask site visitors their name, phone number, and email address. Lengthier B2B forms may request more details like company size, revenue, and job role.

But here’s the thing: seeing a long-form discourages most people. One study found reducing the number of fields on a form from 11 to 4 resulted in a 120% increased conversion rate. 

Still, there are strategies you can use to incentivize site visitors to complete your lead form. Provide value to your lead in exchange for completing all fields. For example, we provide a proposal with free optimizations tips and competitive research anyone can leverage. 

Our get a proposal form

We also break down our forms into more snackable steps so they are more likely to complete it using the Breadcrumb Technique.

4. Quizzes

eCommerce stores, online courses, and all sorts of other businesses use quiz funnels to segment and grow their audiences.

I Will Teach You To Be Rich home page

Quiz funnels use multiple choice questions to segment people into email lists. Generally, quizzes ask between 7-15 questions to gather information about:

• General details about their background (eg. “Are you currently single?”) 
• Their current challenges (eg. “What is the biggest problem you’re facing with growing your business?”)
• A reader’s budget

Most quizzes appear at the top of the funnel so you gain data from the answers you receive. And new potential customers! Then you can develop segmented drip campaigns addressing the challenges each lead identified in your quiz.

5. Facebook Audience Insights

Explore specific personas on Facebook Audience Insights through the people connected to your page and Custom Audiences.

A Custom Audience uses data tracked from the Facebook pixel on your website or a landing page. There are four sources to create a Custom Audience:

1. Customer file based on your existing customers, e.g. lists of email accounts, phone numbers or app IDs
2. Website traffic (specific website visitors, converters, non-converters)
3. App activity
4. Engagement on Facebook

Check out our step-by-step guide to creating Custom Audiences. 

Once you’ve created custom audiences based on a behavior such as someone that viewed your landing page and didn’t convert, you can jump into Audience Insights.

Under the Lifestyle tab on Audience Insights, Facebook lets you target users based on shared demographics, interests, affinities, and other data points. 

Facebook Audience Insights Lifestyle chart

After reviewing this data you can personalize your ad and landing page copy further to speak to each persona. 

6. Hidden Interests

Facebook caps the number of interests you can see on Audience Insights. 

The good news: you can still view additional data and create more granular targeting on Facebook through the Facebook Marketing API. 

Facebook Marketing API (Application Programming Interface) lets you see more raw data without the sleeker interface of Audience Insights. 

Sign up to get a Facebook for Developers account and create an app ID.

Facebook for Developers’ app ID creation page

Then you can generate an access token to explore the API’s data. 

Ad Interest Method

The Ad Interest method connects to the API and displays similar interests based on the URL you enter:

https://graph.facebook.com/search?type=adinterest&q=[iPad]&limit=10000&locale=en_US&access_token=your-access-token

First, paste the above URL into a clipboard or browser window. 

Then replace  “iPad” with any keyword you wish. 

Copy your token. Replace “your-access token” with your copied token.

Then paste that URL into a browser window to view the data.

Sticking with interests related to iPad you’ll see related interests including the App Store and specific iPad models like iPad Pro.

Ad Interest method results for “iPad”

Ad Interest Suggestion Method

Although it doesn’t work for every keyword, you can also try searching using the Ad Interest Suggestion Method. This search might uncover additional interests the ad interest method doesn’t. 

https://graph.facebook.com/search?type=adinterestsuggestion&interest_list=[%22iPad%22]&limit=1000&locale=en_US&access_token=your-access-token

The same rules apply. Replace “iPad” with the interest you want to explore and “your-access-token” with your token, but be sure to keep though the “%22” before and after the interest you’re searching for. Then paste the URL into your browser.

With this hidden data, you can go back into Facebook Ads and target people based on these interests 

7. Deeper  Data

You can also gather firmographic data to shorten lead forms and get more data on your B2B leads using services such as:

• Clearbit Enrichment 
• DiscoverOrg
• 6sense

Wrap Up On Market Segmentation

While there are a ton of different ways to segment your audience, start with one to two attributes. 

For example, let’s say you were running ad campaigns for Nike and looking to re-target traffic. You could start with behavioral segmentation based on searches for the brand name or specific products. Then as you gather performance data you can complete segmentation analysis to iterate, optimize your campaigns further, and personalize your ad copy and landing page creative further.

We’d love to hear about your findings on personalizing content and any stories you have from implementing any of the above tactics into your marketing strategy.

The post Market Segmentation Strategies: 5 Types Of Segmentation + 7 Ways To Collect Data appeared first on KlientBoost.

Do you find yourself disqualifying more leads than you are closing sales? 

Why is your perfect audience not buying your product? 

If these are questions you find yourself constantly asking, it is likely that you have not yet figured out who your target audience is or how to speak to them. 

Many new businesses fail to write out their target market from day one. Even worse, more businesses fail to understand who their target audience is after launch, resulting in a spaghetti approach to targeting; throwing noodles at the wall and waiting for something to stick. While this doesn’t mean they never get sales, it just means their campaigns are working exponentially harder to find the right people. 

What if you had the option to put your product in front of the perfect person at the exact moment of them wanting to buy. Sounds pretty good, right?  What is this magic I speak of? 

No, we aren’t spying on people watching their every move, Instead, we are identifying the people who are actually buying your product, also known as your Target Audience. 

Compared to generic evergreen ads, Yahoo found that 54% of consumers found personalized ads more engaging and memorable. Understanding who your target audience is will ultimately improve the performance of your marketing strategies by allowing you to create a more tailored approach to your targeting and ads and increase overall brand engagement. 

Today we will walk through how to define your target market and how to extract your target audience from that larger group. By doing so, you will be able to develop your marketing plan into a full-funnel strategy, tailor your marketing messages to speak to users who actually want to buy your product, and increase the overall efficiency and productivity of your marketing efforts. 

Let’s dive in. 

1. Determining Your Target Market vs. Target Audience

The first step in establishing a target audience is to understand what the heck a target audience even is. Many business owners mix up the term Target Audience with Target Market which can lead to confusion and inefficient marketing campaigns.

A Target Market is made up of the potential customers your product is designed to help or service. These are the people that you want to sell to. However, just because these seem to be the perfect buyers, they will not always be the people you find at your checkout; that’s where the target audience comes in. 

A Target Audience is the group of people that actually buy your product or service, even if it is not suited or even meant for them. This tends to be a smaller, more narrow audience.

It is important to pay attention to your target audience and understand their behaviors rather than just dreaming about your target market. It’s okay to always work towards your end goal but if there is a segment of users buying your product, why ignore them?

If you have a more niche product, for instance, a healthcare B2B SaaS company, begin your marketing plan by defining your exact target market and use that as a guide when setting up your marketing campaigns. This ensures that your target audience stays relatively close to the users you intended your product to target and will help your brand go in the right direction. 

Extracting Your Target Audience From Your Target Market

Now that we know the difference between Target Market and Target Audience, let’s take action and start defining who your buyers are versus who you want them to be. As mentioned above, the first plan of action is outlining your target market. This will provide some guidance to your campaigns so that we aren’t stuck with the spaghetti approach. 

2. Defining Your Target Market

What group of people do you intend to buy your product? If you had a dream customer, what would they look like? To define your target market, you will be answering a series of simple questions relating to your product or service:

• “What problem is my product solving?” 
• “What makes my product unique?” 
• “Who are my competitors targeting?”
• “What does my dream customer look like?”

While you could take all day with this outline, don’t. Think of your target market more as a pathway for your marketing campaigns to walk along. Once you get everything up and running, your target audience will tell you who to narrow down on and segment out. 

“What Problem Is My Product Solving?”

Why did you build your product in the first place? What pain points did you see in your industry or society that you felt the need to solve? More importantly, who will benefit the most from your solution? While creating a buyer persona, this is typically the first question you will answer. 

Every brand has a problem they are solving, whether you are a fashion brand solving the problem of high-quality products for less than premium costs with a large target market all the way to a B2B software company for health clinics with a smaller and more niche target market. Each of these businesses is providing solutions to certain groups of people, therefore outlining and defining their target market based on the problems they are solving. 

“What Makes My Product Unique?”

Unique Value Propositions, or UVPs, everyone has them. Every brand is unique in some sense; what is your unique value proposition? Are you a small business that offers enterprise solutions at a fair price? Or vise versa, are you a publicly traded massive company that offers intimate customer service solutions?  

Piggy-backing off the initial question of, what problem your business is solving, understanding what makes your company different from the rest is just as important in defining your target market.

“Who Are My Competitors Targeting?”

If you are in the same industry, it is likely that your target market is similar to that of your competitors. Check out their social media accounts and do some slight digging to see what kind of accounts they are following or promoting. Who do their posts speak to? What is their tone of voice? A quick Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook scan can provide you with these answers. 

“What Does My Dream Customer Look Like?”

Using the questions above, let’s take it one step further. What audience demographics do you intend to target? What demographics does your product or service best fit?

In the PPC realm, you can set your targeting to any of the following demographics and interests below to create the perfect target market audience.

• Age: Is your product specific to millennials or boomers? Don’t get too specific with age targeting, the decade will suffice. 
• Gender: Does your product target a specific gender only, or does it skew more towards one specific gender?
• Location: Is your customer base specific to a certain location only? (i.e. are you a local business?)
• Education Level: Are you in the education space, or does your product serve a distinct education status?
• Language: This one is interesting. Too often I have seen advertisers exclude certain languages due to their service team. By doing this, you will miss out on potentially 60-75% of the world due to people speaking multiple languages. 

Outside of these demographics, what other key characteristics are important to your business? Think along the lines of the businesses that qualify for your product. 

• Business Size: Does your product or service only fit businesses of a certain size? 
• Business Industry: Does a particular industry benefit more from your product/service? Do you have a bread-and-butter in mind? 
• Job Title: What job title will be the person responsible for purchase decisions? Does it make sense to only target them?

If you are an eCommerce brand, it may make sense for you to dive deeper into the psychographics of the individual themselves. Psychographics are characteristics pertaining to the more personal details or an individual. 

• Interests: What affiliate interests would couple with your brand nicely? 
• Life Events: Does your product fit the need of someone going through a specific stage of life? Is there a certain relationship or marital status that works better for your product?
• Household Income: Maybe you are a high-end retailer or eCommerce brand that requires excess income for purchasing decisions. 

So now you have a solid foundation and understanding of your target market – let’s see how we can use this information to find out more about the users that are actually buying these products or services and conduct some audience research to ensure your marketing campaigns are targeting the right kind of people.

3. Creating The Perfect Buyers Persona Using Your Target Market

Once you are live with your product, it’s time to let the data do the talking. There’s a new sheriff in town and their name is Target Audience. A target audience loves the word, “actually”. Let’s take the same questions above and see how we can apply this word to extract our target audience from the target market. 

• “What problem is my product actually solving?” 
• “What actually makes my product unique?” 
• “Who are my competitors actually targeting?”
• “What do my current customers actually look like?”

The reason the word “actually” is so important here is that it teaches you to think about the real people that are buying your product rather than dream about the people you wish were buying your product.

“What Problem Is My Product Actually Solving?”

Now that we know what problem your product is intended to solve, it’s time to take a look at what problems it is actually solving. 

What this means, you may have thought your new offer would be helping person X save time with marketing reporting but after launch, you find that people love the channel integration offerings more than the time-saving component. 

This information can be obtained through customer surveys from email campaigns, or even website pop-up questionnaires. 

“What Actually Makes My Product Unique?”

Again, use the words from your customers here. Customer surveys or even peeping into your Business Reviews to see what are the features or services that stand out to your buyers. Maybe you have an all-star customer support team that puts you in front of the pack. Maybe your eCommerce brand has a seamless fair return policy process, making your customers feel much safer purchasing from your site. 

Whatever it is, your current customers are likely bragging about it online or to their colleagues; finding a way to incorporate feedback into your campaigns will help you decipher your true UVPs. 

“Who Are My Competitors Actually Targeting?”

Chances are, your competitors already have a few customers in their portfolio. This is great news for you because now you can use their own data to further define your target audience. 

If your competitors are online, you can use various spying tools to analyze their ads and copy to give you a better idea of who they are talking to. 

Additionally, check out your competitors featured customers sections of their websites or even better, their case study pages; this is the best way to peep who they are working directly with and helps you see which titles are engaging with similar products in the industry.  

“What Do My Current Customers Actually Look Like?”

The easiest and most effective way to define your target audience is by looking at who is actually buying your product! (Duh). Obviously, this requires your product to be live and ready to sell, so it is not always the most available step for new businesses. 

We will break this down more in the next section, but for now – take this as a simple task to examine your current customers and understand how they differ from your target market as well as discover how you can leverage Google Analytics and social media campaigns to speak more directly to this specific group of people. 

Using Platform Data To Perfect Your Target Audience

Google and social media platforms offer the best audience insights and demographic information pertaining to your marketing campaigns. To gain more insights even outside of pay-per-click advertising, be sure to integrate your website with Google Analytics to ensure you are collecting audience information through all of your digital marketing efforts. For added clarity, begin using UTM parameters on your URLs within your campaigns so that you are able to track down to the keyword or ad level of conversion actions. For more information about proper URL tracking, check out our blog on PPC Attribution.

Within Google Analytics, the world is your oyster. 

Google Analytics offers an extremely granular view of your audience make-up even beyond paid advertising. Within the platform, you can see the audience breakdown by demographics and interests, the user behavior on your site, and also the user journey from awareness to purchase. 

Accessing the reports section in google analytics gives you all the insights you need.

Facebook Ads has its own audience research insights called, Facebook Audience Insights. Facebook Audience insights provides a breakdown of an audience of your choosing surveyed against a larger audience segment (either fans of your page, or Facebook as a whole).

The blue bars are your chosen audience, while the grey bars are the larger audience being compared against.

Among the other social networks, Snapchat, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, and even Reddit all offer their own audience insights specific to their platforms. As you are looking to gain more clarity on which platforms will capture certain audiences, it is wise to create a full-fledged report outlining your marketing plan according to the intent of your audience. 

Once you understand who your audience is, make sure you know where they live. Every platform has a different core audience/user base. 

When looking at different search engines, of course our first thought is Google; however, Microsoft Bing quietly runs in the background with large market wins. Bing claims 34% of all desktop market share worldwide and brings in 136 million unique searches. Not only that, but Bing captures 63 million searchers that are not reached on Google Ads. 

So who is searching on Bing? Typically Bing searchers are between the ages of 35-54 and have a household income of more than $75,000. Bing also has much less competition when it comes to advertiser competition, so if you find that your target audience falls within Bing’s core demographics you could have a major advantage in your marketing strategy.

When it comes to Social Media Advertising, don’t rule yourself out just because it seems it may draw a younger crowd. Since August 2012, the presence of older Americans who use Facebook has doubled to 46% of users aged 65+. While many social platforms skew heavier towards newer generations, Facebook is a perfect place to capture that older audience you may be after.

Alternatively, if you are a B2B brand, you might want to check out LinkedIn or even Twitter. LinkedIn and Twitter offer users a social platform for news or business sharing rather than a strict social sharing like the others. This offers your brand a place to capture a decision-maker while they are not in the office but still in the business mindset. 

4. When To Target Your Audience

It’s no secret that social ad platforms will reach users in a completely different stage of the buyer’s journey than search platforms.  Never forget the intent levels of your audience and their position in the buying cycle, as this will play a major role in the way you speak to your audience on each platform. 

Knowing when to target your audience is essential to the overall success of your campaigns and ultimately your business. The funnel differs slightly from B2B to eCommerce businesses in that the time from research to purchase is vastly contrasting. 

Speaking To Your B2B Audience

For B2B businesses, understand who your audience is at each stage of the funnel. Meaning, who does your product/service benefit, who will actually pay for the product/service, and who will champion your product or service. Knowing when to hit each of these segments and how to arrange your offer will streamline the process and leave your sales team singing your praises.

When creating campaigns around your target audience in the B2B space, you will want to match your ads and copy to your target audience. Do not have the same ads running for the HR Manager that you would have run for the COO. Each of these titles have specific needs that need to be established and if you miss the mark on delivering that solution, you will likely fall victim to the continued scroll. 

Speaking To Your eCommerce Audience

On the eCommerce side, the funnel is slightly different as the user in the top of the funnel is typically the same individual at the bottom of the funnel. However, one major difference here is remembering the concept of gift-giving. 

Taking it back a couple of sections with the layout of demographics, well on the eCommerce side, it is likely that a percent of your customer base could be buying your products for someone else. With this in mind, I recommend to never exclude any demographic from the start; but rather, only exclude based on performance. 

Just because your product services a specific demographic more than another, does not mean you can’t speak to everyone. If you see in your audience insights that you have some men buying your product geared towards women, use that as an excuse to test new imagery and copy that men will resonate more with. You may find that this increases your overall performance and you have just unlocked a new demographic you never anticipated.  

5. Utilizing All Forms of Marketing

The most important piece of the puzzle when creating a marketing strategy for your target audience is to leverage all forms of marketing to nurture your users. Don’t forget that these are real people that need the care and attention from your brand. 

Incorporating SEO, email marketing, and content marketing into your digital marketing strategy will cover all of your bases. However, if you have taken the approach to segment your target audience by similar groupings in Google and social media, then these channels need to reflect those tailored approaches as well. 

A McKinsey Study reflected that 96% of consumers reported that they receive mistargeted promotions and 94% expressed their annoyance of having to take action either by deleting or unsubscribing from emails. Personalization is key here and with many platforms, can be streamlined seamlessly with some upfront work. 

Want to create a robust conversion funnel but don’t know where to start? We created a walkthrough of developing a successful conversion funnel here. 

6. How To Expand Your Target Audience

Have you performed audience research and discovered your target audience is vastly different than your target market? Is there a certain demographic that is standing out as an anomaly in your customer index? Lucky for you, this is the perfect opportunity for you to expand your target audience! 

Just because someone falls outside of your target market, does not mean you can’t create a campaign (or even product line) for them. In fact, this shows you that your product is desired by more people than you thought. 

Let’s take a look at what Vans®, the skate shoe conglomerate, did to adjust to a segment of their target audience the brand was not originally intended for. 

Vans started as a rugged shoe company that quickly adopted the target audience within the skateboarding scene. In 1993, Vans discovered their target audience had an affinity for snowboarding – leading to the introduction of the Vans Snowboard Boot. Fast forward to 2020 and Vans now has taken full advantage of each specific target audience segment within its larger target customer group, even though many of these users may not exist in their original target market. 

Vans now speaks directly to women, surfers, and skaters all in a unique fashion.

Vans is the perfect example of how one brand can take their target market and adapt to what the data is showing to create nothing short of success. 

Appreciate Your Target Audience 

When you learn to love and accept your target audience, you will watch your brand soar. Oftentimes, brands will constantly chase a target market even if it seems like another audience is eager to buy their product; however, the brands that seem to claim their industry are the ones that welcome all users segments in their customer list. 

As we saw with Vans, giving each target audience segment their own VIP treatment with a specified journey is the way to go. Now, an individual Instagram per audience segment may be a bit extreme in your business case but that’s not to mean you can’t create separate campaigns or drip campaigns.  

Always remember to appreciate your customers and continue to expand your target audience. Eager to grow but don’t know where to begin? We can help – get in touch and let us walk you through the best practices and strategies to begin growing your customer base.

The post The 6 Steps For Building The Perfect Target Audience From Your Target Market appeared first on KlientBoost.