When most people think Facebook advertising, they think B2C marketing. Many tend to assume that B2B marketing on Facebook doesn't make sense or would not be effective because it would be too hard to get in front of professionals, decision makers, and the right industry positions, and even if you do, they're not in the mood to think about business if they're browsing Facebook. These assumptions, however, are quite inaccurate and with the right strategies and targeting in place, Facebook can indeed be an effective B2B platform. Below are three key strategies for how to make your B2B marketing successful on Facebook. Build a layered Lookalike strategyLookalike audiences are one of Facebook's most efficient targeting capabilities. First off, here's a quick refresher: Lookalike targeting is where you can leverage your first-party data (e.g. customer lists, audience lists, etc.) as a seed audience and Facebook will take that list and target users who are very similar in characteristics, behaviors, and traits as that audience. The capability is super-powerful, but rather than taking your entire customer list and using it as a seed list, you need to be smart about how to segment and leverage your first-party data. 1. Think about your customer list and how to segment itTo create an effective seed list, think about your customer list and whether you can segment that list into groups of identifiable characteristics. For example, let's say you are a B2B cybersecurity company that sells cybersecurity to a variety of companies in different industries. You may want to segment out your customer lists by the industries they are in tech, medical, education, financial, etc. Keep in mind you'll need a seed list of between 2K-5K users to be effective. 2. Upload the seed list you've developed to FacebookNext, upload that seed list into Facebook and develop your lookalikes off of it. In most cases, I'd recommend that you build an audience of the 1% most relevant users, which tends to be the audience closest in similarities, characteristics, and traits. However, for this strategy, you should keep your audience size fairly large in order to layer additional targeting to refine the list. I recommend a LAL 5% (LALs go from 1% to 10%), as a 5% will still find users similar to your seed list but rather than receiving an audience size of 2M, you are going after a larger pool of 10M. I know, you must be thinking that 10M sounds way too big!! Don't worry refinement is coming! 3. Start building your ad setAs you start building your ad set, you'll be using your LAL 5% audience as your base audience to target. In other words, rather than targeting all of Facebook's uses, you're starting off with a more qualified audience given they are similar to your customers. You'll layer Facebook's targeting options on top of this audience by selecting job/title targeting to find the decision makers in a company likely to be interested in your product. You have now just leveraged Facebook's various targeting capabilities to ensure that you are going after audiences similar to your customers and targeting true decision-makers. Take advantage of third-party dataRemember that third-party data providers are your friend! You should consider partnering with third-party data providers such as Axciom and Datalogix in order to leverage their relevant lists. Similar to what you can find within Facebook, you can also leverage their third-party lists and get in front of specific industry professionals and decision makers. This is a quick and easy way to identify relevant audiences and target them. Engage users with videoThink about your business. Do your customers need to be educated? Are they conducting lots of research before they purchase? This is often the case with B2B companies who need to build a strong, long-term case to justify high price points. An efficient tactic to avoid excessive clicks, yet get the job done on educating your audiences, is to leverage video ads. You'll want to keep in mind that 30 seconds or less is the recommended time given people's short attention spans but that's more than enough time to inform the users and get them into your funnel. And Facebook automatically builds audience lists based on how long users have viewed your video (e.g. 50%, 75%, 100%), so you can segment by level of interest. Next, you can create an ad set and remarket with static and carousel ads towards specific audiences who have viewed 100% of the video. Introduce more value props to the folks who showed serious interest; pull the users onto your site, push them down the funnel, and ultimately convert. Are these strategies guaranteed to make Facebook a successful platform for your B2B company? Of course not. But we strongly recommend testing these three strategies to see what kind of traction you can get; otherwise, you're letting your competitors grab all the eyeballs on one of the most biggest, most engaging platforms in digital marketing.
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Do you feel like you and your boss are on the same page most days of the week? If you nodded "yes" emphatically, that's fantastic. But many readers might have a different opinion. In fact, a recent HubSpot survey revealed that while 70% of executives might reflect positively on their team's marketing strategy, only 50% of individual contributors agree. As a marketer, it's imperative to communicate effectively with your boss to avoid this executive divide. I wanted to create communication rules that all marketers can follow, so I went straight to the source for some answers and talked to my own boss. I interviewed Rick Kranz about effective communication with his marketing team. He has more than 30 years of business management experience and was more than willing to share his opinions with us. Read on for his thoughts and key takeaways about communication strategies between managers and employees. 8 Rules for Communicating With Your Boss1) Start with the bottom line.I asked Kranz what he thinks is the most effective way for your marketing team to talk to you.
What does this mean?Don't beat around the bush. Your boss is a busy person and you need to respect that. Give her the point of your discussion first, then go backward if questions are proposed. This will keep your communication streamlined and focused. 2) Speak in numbers.I asked Kranz if he prefers the bottom line to be in numerical or qualitative data, and if he prefers to hear about the bottom line or have a document or graph to guide the information.
What does this mean?Numbers are powerful because they can communicate success (or problems) at a glance. Use them to your advantage when communicating with your boss -- numerical data speaks for itself. 3) Schedule when you communicate with your boss.Next, I asked Kranz if he prefers discussions with his marketing team to be scheduled in advance.
What does this mean?We all can attest to the fact that writing back and forth via email can get messy, so try not to fill your boss's inbox with email after email from you. Instead, schedule meetings with your boss to avoid messy lines of email communication and walk-in office interruptions. This will help streamline your communications and save valuable time. 4) Establish the that you have certain "rights" to communication.I asked Kranz if he limits the number of employees that he communicates with directly.
What does this mean?Do you have the right to speak with your boss? Of course -- we all have that right. But that doesn't always make for effective communication. If you have concerns you want to address with your boss, but you're not the main point of contact with her, you should bring your concerns to your direct supervisor. This person will address your concerns with you, or take it up the food chain to your boss. 5) Communicate the anticipated results and next steps of your plans to your boss.Next, we chatted about how Kranz wants to discuss future plans and goals with employees.
What does this mean?Communicate your plans effectively by addressing what the plan is, what the results will be and what the next steps are. If you bring these talking points to the table, you'll be organized, and your plan will be well spoken for. 6) Bring problems to your boss's attention right away.If a problem emerges, Kranz wants his team to bring it to him right away.
What does this mean?Don't skulk away when a problem pops up or a mistake occurs. Respond to it proactively, and don't keep your boss in the dark. Communicate your own proposed solutions when you present the problem so you and your boss have a basis to start a problem-solving conversation. 7) There's a right time and place to promote your achievements.I asked Kranz how he prefers achievements and success be brought to his attention by direct reports.
What does this mean?We all love to brag about what we do well, but there's a time and place to do it. Your work will speak for itself if you're bringing in the type of results your boss is looking for. Then, you can get on your podium and share your achievements when you present reports to your boss or allocate time for success stories at the end of a meeting. 8) All business-related topics are noteworthy.Kranz doesn't believe there are any topics that would hinder effective communication between an employee and his or her boss.
What does this mean:Speak to your boss about business topics that concern you, or any particular success-related stories. Communicating feedback on what is going on in your business environment is an effective way for your boss to see a full picture of the company from someone else's perspective, so don't hold back. Communication Is a Two-Way StreetEffective communication with your boss starts with you. You need to approach it a certain way for the conversation to be as productive as possible, so you can minimize the divide between executive and individual contributor perceptions across companies. To learn more about the global state of marketing and sales industries, download the 2017 State of Inbound report today. What are your strategies for communication effectively with your boss at work? Share with us in the comments below. Editor's Note: This post was originally published in June 2014 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness. Email is the most valuable tool for any content marketer and our research proves it. 93% of B2B marketers use email to distribute content, and of those, 91% consider email to be critical. Email can do so much to help you build better relationships with your audience, understand individuals' behaviors, and even maximize the reach of your paid social content. That was the wisdom from Mathew Sweezey, principal of marketing insights at Salesforce and author of Marketing Automation for Dummies, in his Content Marketing World 2016 presentation, How to Improve the Value of Your Email Through Marketing Automation. His tips on how to leverage email in today's world for better content marketing range from subject lines to email plays and why it's more important than ever to obtain people's email addresses. Customize first impression by buyer's stageThink about how you peruse your inbox in the morning. Do you open the first email, decide if it's good content, and move on to the next? Or do you delete all the worthless emails and read what remains? Chances are it's the latter. That's why your subject line and sender are the only pieces of information to determine if email is credible, Mathew says. Subject line & sender are the only pieces of information to determine if #email is credible. @msweezey. As such, you should use that email real estate differently depending on the recipient's stage in the buying process. Here are the guidelines by stage:
Quickly create emailsOne-third of marketers take seven weeks to create a piece of content; 42% take two to five weeks. You can't craft emails the same way. Identify brief content already created that can be shared through email. Identify brief #content already created that can be shared through #email, says @anngynn. Mathew shares what he learned working with MIT's Sloan School of Management to identify the behavior of people signing up for MBA programs. The research showed that MBA candidates evaluating which schools to apply to value things outside of the actual degree, such as the connection with professors. MIT now knew thatpromoting their professors as individuals could make a difference. In their email marketing, they linked to the professors' LinkedIn profiles. The prospective student then was only a click away from learning more personally about and connecting with an MIT professor. (And MIT could track their behavior by tracking the LinkedIn URL.) Mathew offers a generic visual example based on second stage of the buying process. If someone is seeking social proof in their research for a product or service, a simple email including a link to content from a third party talking about your product, service, or related proof-type research could work, such as this: Don't send the prettiest emailWhile the example above demonstrates the ability to quickly create an email with value, it also exemplifies the real value in communicating the same way a person would email a friend or colleague. It's authentic and personal. Our job is not to be pretty. It's to be effective, Mathew says. He explains that HTML-pretty emails are holdovers from the world of direct mail they aren't a marker of legitimacy but a marker of marketing. Rich text is how humans write emails. HTML-format emails are pretty but pretty isn't our job. Rich text is how humans communicate, says @MSweezey. A large U.S. bank that Mathew works with tested the difference between HTML and rich text. It sent the same email using the two formats. Engagement, as measured in open rates, was four times greater for the rich-text format emails. Get them to ask the next questionMathew offers a scenario familiar to many in business. You go into the boss' office to share an idea. The boss says no. A few weeks later, the boss comes back with a new idea the same one you suggested a few weeks earlier. Your boss now trusts the idea because it is his or hers. Your prospects are like that boss. You can't just send them a series of six emails after they download a white paper and expect them to buy. You have to let them come to the answers on their own. Your job is to nurture them to ask the next question. Companies using lead nurturing the right way find they close deals 34% faster, according to Salesforce research. Companies using lead nurturing the right way find they close deals 34% faster, says @salesforce via @anngynn. So how do you do that in an email? Include a secondary call to action in your email. Then the recipients select what content they prefer and that tells you if they are still in the second stage, for example, or if they've moved onto the third stage. But, Mathew cautions, that only works if your content is tailored to the buyer stages. Put your email in playA PGA golfer has 14 clubs in his or her bag. The professional golfer must pick the best tool based on the setting of each ball and the situation of the overall game. Like a golfer, marketers also have a limited number of tools to use to accomplish infinite scenarios at high efficiency. That's why your email nurturing plays should be limited and able to be recombined to accomplish different scenarios. Mathew shares the scenario of marketing at a trade show. When you get back to the office you have a lot of email addresses but don't know where each contact is in the sales cycle. He urges you to follow the 3-2-1 process:
Repeat this cycle three times when you send an email the recipient finds useful, she or he will select the content, letting you know where that person is in the buying cycle. Mathew worked with eCornell on a 3-2-1 email campaign based on paid search leads. The close rate was 50% and engagement was 16 times higher than non-nurtured prospects. Onboard your subscribersYour company likely has a process to onboard new employees. Do you have one to onboard new subscribers? Or do you just email them the next blog post that you send everybody else? Don't just send the next email to new subscribers. Onboard them with your best content, says @MSweezey. Remember, your next blog post likely isn't your best one. Instead, the first five emails your new subscribers should receive are the five best blog posts you've written. Then, you can start sending them the standard email. Salesforce research reveals that 50% of high-performing marketers use email onboarding, while less than 1% of underperforming marketers do. High-performing marketers use #email onboarding. Less than 1% of underperforming marketers do, says @MSweezey. It's the halo effect. First impressions matter. Every interaction is shaded by that initial impression, Mathew says. Connect on socialWith an email address, you can truly unlock the value of social media, particularly its highly valued hyper-targeted paid promotion (especially important given that the organic reach of social media posts is less than 2%.) Consider the case of Volvo Construction, which Mathew shares. Its dealers sold $100 million worth of new and used equipment in a year through Facebook. The social media platform is its No. 1 one lead driver. Now how can a big B2B company use Facebook to make those sales? Email addresses. It uploads its email lists to Facebook and Facebook can match the ads directly to those individuals. So the Volvo database can see the content by email and by social. Plus, Facebook can target people who look just like the profiles of those direct-match users. Volvo saw overall engagement increase by 22% when recipients received an email from Volvo and saw a Facebook ad from the company far better than any single communication. You're not just sending an email but you can target that person on any channel, Mathew says. Forget cookiesMathew also says the future of omnichannel marketing is the email address. Hashing technology now enables you to track the behavior of an email address online across multiple devices. Cookie technology can't do that. You can learn when theperson last visited your website, the point at which they stopped watching a video, etc., and all those behaviors can be assessed in your marketing automation platform to deliver the next email with the most relevant content. By getting more behavioral data beyond the open and click rate you gain the context necessary to create better content for communication and more targeted content to drive a conversion. ConclusionAs you strengthen your commitment to your email strategy, Mathew offers these reminders:
Remember, growing your subscriber base is not about boosting your numbers for the next e-blast. It's about using that email address to deliver more relevant content when the recipient wants it. Want to learn firsthand from great experts in content marketing? Make plans today to attend Content Marketing World 2017, Sept. 5-8, in Cleveland, Ohio. Use code BLOG100 to save $100. Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute The post 8 Things Any Good Marketer Should Know About Email appeared first on Content Marketing Institute. Posted by PPCKirk I have been chewing on a keyword vs. audience targeting post for roughly two years now. In that time we have seen audience targeting grow in popularity (as expected) and depth. Popularity is somewhat of an understatement here. I would go so far as to say that I've heard it lauded in messianic-like thy kingdom come, thy will be done reverential awe by some paid search marketers. as if paid search were lacking a heartbeat before the life-giving audience targeting had arrived and 1-2-3-clear'ed it into relevance. However, I would argue that despite audience targeting's popularity (and understandable success), we have also seen the revelation of some weaknesses as well. It turns out it's not quite the heroic, rescue-the-captives targeting method paid searchers had hoped it would be. The purpose of this post is to argue against the notion that audience targeting can replace the keyword in paid search. Now, before we get into the throes of keyword philosophy, I'd like to reduce the number of angry comments this post receives by acknowledging a crucial point. It is not my intention in any way to set up a false dichotomy. Yes, I believe the keyword is still the most valuable form of targeting for a paid search marketer, but I also believe that audience targeting can play a valuable complementary role in search bidding. In fact, as I think about it, I would argue that I am writing this post in response to what I have heard become a false dichotomy. That is, that audience targeting is better than keyword targeting and will eventually replace it. I disagree with this idea vehemently, as I will demonstrate in the rest of this article. One seasoned (age, not steak) traditional marketer's point of viewThe best illustration I've heard on the core weakness of audience targeting was from an older traditional marketer who has probably never accessed the Keyword Planner in his life. I have two teenage daughters. He revealed, with no small amount of pride. They are within 18 months of each other, so in age demographic targeting they are the same person. They are both young women, so in gender demographic targeting they are the same person. They are both my daughters in my care, so in income demographic targeting they are the same person. They are both living in my house, so in geographical targeting they are the same person. They share the same friends, so in social targeting they are the same person. However, in terms of personality, they couldn't be more different. One is artistic and enjoys heels and dresses and makeup. The other loves the outdoors and sports, and spends her time in blue jeans and sneakers. If an audience-targeting marketer selling spring dresses saw them in his marketing list, he would (1) see two older high school girls with the same income in the same geographical area, (2) assume they are both interested in what he has to sell, and (3) only make one sale. The problem isn't with his targeting, the problem is that not all those forced into an audience persona box will fit. In September of 2015, Aaron Levy (a brilliant marketing mind; go follow him) wrote a fabulously under-shared post revealing these weaknesses in another way: What You Think You Know About Your Customers' Persona is Wrong In this article, Aaron first bravely broaches the subject of audience targeting by describing how it is far from the exact science we all have hoped it to be. He noted a few ways that audience targeting can be erroneous, and even *gasp* used data to formulate his conclusions. It's OK to question audience targeting - really!Let me be clear: I believe audience targeting is popular because there genuinely is value in it (it's amazing data to have when it's accurate!). The insights we can get about personas, which we can then use to power our ads, are quite amazing and powerful. So, why the heck am I droning on about audience targeting weaknesses? Well, I'm trying to set you up for something. I'm trying to get us to admit that audience targeting itself has some weaknesses, and isn't the savior of all digital marketing that some make it out to be, and that there is a tried-and-true solution that fits well with demographic targeting, but is not replaced by it. It is a targeting that we paid searchers have used joyfully and successfully for years now. It is the keyword. Whereas audience targeting chafes under the law of averages (i.e., at some point, someone in my demographic targeted list has to actually be interested in what I am selling), keyword targeting shines in individual-revealing user intent. Keyword targeting does something an audience can never, ever, ever do... Keywords: Personal intent powerhousesA keyword is still my favorite form of targeting in paid search because it reveals individual, personal, and temporal intent. Those aren't just three buzzwords I pulled out of the air because I needed to stretch this already obesely-long post out further. They are intentional, and worth exploring. IndividualA keyword is such a powerful targeting method because it is written (or spoken!) by a single person. I mean, let's be honest, it's rare to have more than one person huddled around the computer shouting at it. Keywords are generally from the mind of one individual, and because of that they have frightening potential. Remember, audience targeting is based off of assumptions. That is, you're taking a group of people who probably think the same way in a certain area, but does that mean they cannot have unique tastes? For instance, one person preferring to buy sneakers with another preferring to buy heels? Keyword targeting is demographic-blind. It doesn't care who you are, where you're from, what you did, as long as you love me err, I mean, it doesn't care about your demographic, just about what you're individually interested in. PersonalThe next aspect of keywords powering their targeting awesomeness is that they reveal personal intent. Whereas the individual aspect of keyword targeting narrows our targeting from a group of people to a single person, the personal aspect of keyword targeting goes into the very mind of that individual. Don't you wish there was a way to market to people in which you could truly discern the intentions of their hearts? Wouldn't that be a powerful method of targeting? Well, yes - and that is keyword targeting! Think about it: a keyword is a form of communication. It is a person typing or telling you what is on their mind. For a split second, in their search, you and they are as connected through communication as Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson on the first phone call. That person is revealing to you what's on her mind, and that's a power which cannot be underestimated. When a person tells Google they want to know how does someone earn a black belt, that is telling your client - the Jumping Judo Janes of Jordan - this person genuinely wants to learn more about their services and they can display an ad that matches that intent (Ready for that Black Belt? It's Not Hard, Let Us Help!). Paid search keywords officiate the wedding of personal intent with advertising in a way that previous marketers could only dream of. We aren't finding random people we think might be interested based upon where they live. We are responding to a person telling us they are interested. TemporalThe final note of keyword targeting that cannot be underestimated, is the temporal aspect. Anyone worth their salt in marketing can tell you timing is everything. With keyword targeting, the timing is inseparable from the intent. When is this person interested in learning about your Judo classes? At the time they are searching, NOW! You are not blasting your ads into your users lives, interrupting them as they go about their business or family time hoping to jumpstart their interest by distracting them from their activities. You are responding to their query, at the very time they are interested in learning more. Timing. Is. Everything. The situation settles into stickinessThus, to summarize: a search is done when an individual reveals his/her personal intent with communication (keywords/queries) at a specific time. Because of that, I maintain that keyword targeting trumps audience targeting in paid search. Paid search is an evolving industry, but it is still search, which requires communication, which requires words (until that time when the emoji takes over the English language, but that's okay because the rioting in the streets will have gotten us first). Of course, we would be remiss in ignoring some legitimate questions which inevitably arise. As ideal as the outline I've laid out before you sounds, you're probably beginning to formulate something like the following four questions.
We'll close by discussing each of these four questions. Low search volume terms (LSVs)Low search volume keywords stink like poo (excuse the rather strong language there). I'm not sure if there is any data on this out there (if so, please share it below), but I have run into low search volume terms far more in the past year than when I first started managing PPC campaigns in 2010. I don't know all the reasons for this; perhaps it's worth another blog post, but the reality is it's getting harder to be creative and target high-value long-tail keywords when so many are getting shut off due to low search volume. This seems like a fairly smooth way being paved for Google/Bing to eventually take over (i.e., automate for our good) keyword targeting, at the very least for SMBs (small-medium businesses) where LSVs can be a significant problem. In this instance, the keyword would still be around, it just wouldn't be managed by us PPCers directly. Boo. Search engine decreesI've already addressed the power search engines have here, but I will be the first to admit that, as much as I like keyword targeting and as much as I have hopefully proven how valuable it is, it still would be a fairly easy thing for Google or Bing to kill off completely. Major boo. Since paid search relies on keywords and queries and language to work, I imagine this would look more like an automated solution (think DSAs and shopping), in which they make keyword targeting into a dynamic system that works in conjunction with audience targeting. While this was about a year and a half ago, it is worth noting that at Hero Conference in London, Bing Ads' ebullient Tor Crockett did make the public statement that Bing at the time had no plans to sunset the keyword as a bidding option. We can only hope this sentiment remains, and transfers over to Google as well. But Internet of Things (IoT) Frankenstein devices!Finally, it could be that search engines won't be around forever. Perhaps this will look like IoT devices such as Alexa that incorporate some level of search into them, but pull traffic away from using Google/Bing search bars. As an example of this in real life, you don't need to ask Google where to find (queries, keywords, communication, search) the best price on laundry detergent if you can just push the Dash button, or your smart washing machine can just order you more without a search effort. On the other hand, I still believe we're a long way off from this in the same way that the freak-out over mobile devices killing personal computers has slowed down. That is, we still utilize our computers for education & work (even if personal usage revolves around tablets and mobile devices and IoT freaks-of-nature smart toasters anyone?) and our mobile devices for queries on the go. Computers are still a primary source of search in terms of work and education as well as more intensive personal activities (vacation planning, for instance), and thus computers still rely heavily on search. Mobile devices are still heavily query-centered for various tasks, especially as voice search (still query-centered!) kicks in harder. The social effectSocial is its own animal in a way, and why I believe it is already and will continue to have an effect on search and keywords (though not in a terribly worrisome way). Social definitely pulls a level of traffic from search, specifically in product queries. Who has used this dishwasher before, any other recommendations? Social ads are exploding in popularity as well, and in large part because they are working. People are purchasing more than they ever have from social ads and marketers are rushing to be there for them. The flip side of this: a social and paid search comparison is apples-to-oranges. There are different motivations and purposes for using search engines and querying your friends. Audience targeting works great in a social setting since that social network has phenomenally accurate and specific targeting for individuals, but it is the rare individual curious about the ideal condom to purchase who queries his family and friends on Facebook. There will always be elements of social and search that are unique and valuable in their own way, and audience targeting for social and keyword targeting for search complement those unique elements of each. Idealism incarnateThus, it is my belief that as long as we have search, we will still have keywords and keyword targeting will be the best way to target - as long as costs remain low enough to be realistic for budgets and the search engines don't kill keyword bidding for an automated solution. Don't give up, the keyword is not dead. Stay focused, and carry on with your match types! I want to close by re-acknowledging the crucial point I opened with. It has not been my intention in any way to set up a false dichotomy. In fact, as I think about it, I would argue that I am writing this in response to what I have heard become a false dichotomy. That is, that audience targeting is better than keyword targeting and will eventually replace it I believe the keyword is still the most valuable form of targeting for a paid search marketer, but I also believe that audience demographics can play a valuable complementary role in bidding. A prime example that we already use is remarketing lists for search ads, in which we can layer on remarketing audiences in both Google and Bing into our search queries. Wouldn't it be amazing if we could someday do this with massive amounts of audience data? I've said this before, but were Bing Ads to use its LinkedIn acquisition to allow us to layer on LinkedIn audiences into our current keyword framework, the B2B angels would surely rejoice over us (Bing has responded, by the way, that something is in the works!). Either way, I hope I've demonstrated that far from being on its deathbed, the keyword is still the most essential tool in the paid search marketer's toolbox. Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! When most people think Facebook advertising, they think B2C marketing. Many tend to assume that B2B marketing on Facebook doesn't make sense or would not be effective because it would be too hard to get in front of professionals, decision makers, and the right industry positions, and even if you do, they're not in the mood to think about business if they're browsing Facebook. These assumptions, however, are quite inaccurate and with the right strategies and targeting in place, Facebook can indeed be an effective B2B platform. Below are three key strategies for how to make your B2B marketing successful on Facebook. Build a layered Lookalike strategyLookalike audiences are one of Facebook's most efficient targeting capabilities. First off, here's a quick refresher: Lookalike targeting is where you can leverage your first-party data (e.g. customer lists, audience lists, etc.) as a seed audience and Facebook will take that list and target users who are very similar in characteristics, behaviors, and traits as that audience. The capability is super-powerful, but rather than taking your entire customer list and using it as a seed list, you need to be smart about how to segment and leverage your first-party data. 1. Think about your customer list and how to segment itTo create an effective seed list, think about your customer list and whether you can segment that list into groups of identifiable characteristics. For example, let's say you are a B2B cybersecurity company that sells cybersecurity to a variety of companies in different industries. You may want to segment out your customer lists by the industries they are in tech, medical, education, financial, etc. Keep in mind you'll need a seed list of between 2K-5K users to be effective. 2. Upload the seed list you've developed to FacebookNext, upload that seed list into Facebook and develop your lookalikes off of it. In most cases, I'd recommend that you build an audience of the 1% most relevant users, which tends to be the audience closest in similarities, characteristics, and traits. However, for this strategy, you should keep your audience size fairly large in order to layer additional targeting to refine the list. I recommend a LAL 5% (LALs go from 1% to 10%), as a 5% will still find users similar to your seed list but rather than receiving an audience size of 2M, you are going after a larger pool of 10M. I know, you must be thinking that 10M sounds way too big!! Don't worry refinement is coming! 3. Start building your ad setAs you start building your ad set, you'll be using your LAL 5% audience as your base audience to target. In other words, rather than targeting all of Facebook's uses, you're starting off with a more qualified audience given they are similar to your customers. You'll layer Facebook's targeting options on top of this audience by selecting job/title targeting to find the decision makers in a company likely to be interested in your product. You have now just leveraged Facebook's various targeting capabilities to ensure that you are going after audiences similar to your customers and targeting true decision-makers. Take advantage of third-party dataRemember that third-party data providers are your friend! You should consider partnering with third-party data providers such as Axciom and Datalogix in order to leverage their relevant lists. Similar to what you can find within Facebook, you can also leverage their third-party lists and get in front of specific industry professionals and decision makers. This is a quick and easy way to identify relevant audiences and target them. Engage users with videoThink about your business. Do your customers need to be educated? Are they conducting lots of research before they purchase? This is often the case with B2B companies who need to build a strong, long-term case to justify high price points. An efficient tactic to avoid excessive clicks, yet get the job done on educating your audiences, is to leverage video ads. You'll want to keep in mind that 30 seconds or less is the recommended time given people's short attention spans but that's more than enough time to inform the users and get them into your funnel. And Facebook automatically builds audience lists based on how long users have viewed your video (e.g. 50%, 75%, 100%), so you can segment by level of interest. Next, you can create an ad set and remarket with static and carousel ads towards specific audiences who have viewed 100% of the video. Introduce more value props to the folks who showed serious interest; pull the users onto your site, push them down the funnel, and ultimately convert. Are these strategies guaranteed to make Facebook a successful platform for your B2B company? Of course not. But we strongly recommend testing these three strategies to see what kind of traction you can get; otherwise, you're letting your competitors grab all the eyeballs on one of the most biggest, most engaging platforms in digital marketing. Adobe Advertising Cloud named a leader in Forrester's Omnichannel Demand-Side Platforms report
5/30/2017
More and more often, we hear marketers who work with multiple advertising-technology vendors, complaining about how difficult it is for them to reconcile disparate platforms and efficiently manage their ad-spend across channels. According to the latest Adobe Digital Insights (ADI) Digital Advertising Report 2017, 41 percent of marketers work with three or more media-buying platforms, three or more media-planning platforms, and three or more analytics platforms. All these platforms make it operationally challenging for advertisers to manage their audiences' reaches, de-duplicate conversions in reporting, and efficiently plan their ad budgets across channels and devices. Many advertisers are realizing that they need fully integrated, cross-channel, media-buying platforms as part of their ad-tech stacks - one platform to rule them all, with unparalleled access to all paid advertising channels. Adobe Advertising Cloud - One Platform to Rule Them All. Combining the capabilities of Adobe Media Optimizer with those of recently acquired TubeMogul - a leader in The Forrester Wave: Video Advertising Demand-Side Platforms, Q4 2015 Report - Adobe Advertising Cloud was named a leader in The Forrester Wave: Omnichannel Demand-Side Platforms, Q2 2017 Report, achieving the highest score possible in product strategy (5 out of 5) and the top score in digital-ecosystem footprint (4 out of 5) criteria. The TubeMogul acquisition was pivotal in fulfilling Adobe's vision for being the industry's first omnichannel media-buying platform, as the report notes that Adobe Advertising Cloud is the only vendor that has gained access to all paid advertising channels. Complete Integrated Stack for Delivering Ad Experiences Across Channels. We are excited to see Adobe Advertising Cloud designated as a leader, and we believe this recognition further validates our position as the industry's only end-to-end platform for full-funnel ad-buying. The post Adobe Advertising Cloud named a leader in Forrester's Omnichannel Demand-Side Platforms report appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe. Email is the most valuable tool for any content marketer and our research proves it. 93% of B2B marketers use email to distribute content, and of those, 91% consider email to be critical. Email can do so much to help you build better relationships with your audience, understand individuals' behaviors, and even maximize the reach of your paid social content. That was the wisdom from Mathew Sweezey, principal of marketing insights at Salesforce and author of Marketing Automation for Dummies, in his Content Marketing World 2016 presentation, How to Improve the Value of Your Email Through Marketing Automation. His tips on how to leverage email in today's world for better content marketing range from subject lines to email plays and why it's more important than ever to obtain people's email addresses. Customize first impression by buyer's stageThink about how you peruse your inbox in the morning. Do you open the first email, decide if it's good content, and move on to the next? Or do you delete all the worthless emails and read what remains? Chances are it's the latter. That's why your subject line and sender are the only pieces of information to determine if email is credible, Mathew says. Subject line & sender are the only pieces of information to determine if #email is credible. @msweezey. As such, you should use that email real estate differently depending on the recipient's stage in the buying process. Here are the guidelines by stage:
Quickly create emailsOne-third of marketers take seven weeks to create a piece of content; 42% take two to five weeks. You can't craft emails the same way. Identify brief content already created that can be shared through email. Identify brief #content already created that can be shared through #email, says @anngynn. Mathew shares what he learned working with MIT's Sloan School of Management to identify the behavior of people signing up for MBA programs. The research showed that MBA candidates evaluating which schools to apply to value things outside of the actual degree, such as the connection with professors. MIT now knew thatpromoting their professors as individuals could make a difference. In their email marketing, they linked to the professors' LinkedIn profiles. The prospective student then was only a click away from learning more personally about and connecting with an MIT professor. (And MIT could track their behavior by tracking the LinkedIn URL.) Mathew offers a generic visual example based on second stage of the buying process. If someone is seeking social proof in their research for a product or service, a simple email including a link to content from a third party talking about your product, service, or related proof-type research could work, such as this: Don't send the prettiest emailWhile the example above demonstrates the ability to quickly create an email with value, it also exemplifies the real value in communicating the same way a person would email a friend or colleague. It's authentic and personal. Our job is not to be pretty. It's to be effective, Mathew says. He explains that HTML-pretty emails are holdovers from the world of direct mail they aren't a marker of legitimacy but a marker of marketing. Rich text is how humans write emails. HTML-format emails are pretty but pretty isn't our job. Rich text is how humans communicate, says @MSweezey. A large U.S. bank that Mathew works with tested the difference between HTML and rich text. It sent the same email using the two formats. Engagement, as measured in open rates, was four times greater for the rich-text format emails. Get them to ask the next questionMathew offers a scenario familiar to many in business. You go into the boss' office to share an idea. The boss says no. A few weeks later, the boss comes back with a new idea the same one you suggested a few weeks earlier. Your boss now trusts the idea because it is his or hers. Your prospects are like that boss. You can't just send them a series of six emails after they download a white paper and expect them to buy. You have to let them come to the answers on their own. Your job is to nurture them to ask the next question. Companies using lead nurturing the right way find they close deals 34% faster, according to Salesforce research. Companies using lead nurturing the right way find they close deals 34% faster, says @salesforce via @anngynn. So how do you do that in an email? Include a secondary call to action in your email. Then the recipients select what content they prefer and that tells you if they are still in the second stage, for example, or if they've moved onto the third stage. But, Mathew cautions, that only works if your content is tailored to the buyer stages. Put your email in playA PGA golfer has 14 clubs in his or her bag. The professional golfer must pick the best tool based on the setting of each ball and the situation of the overall game. Like a golfer, marketers also have a limited number of tools to use to accomplish infinite scenarios at high efficiency. That's why your email nurturing plays should be limited and able to be recombined to accomplish different scenarios. Mathew shares the scenario of marketing at a trade show. When you get back to the office you have a lot of email addresses but don't know where each contact is in the sales cycle. He urges you to follow the 3-2-1 process:
Repeat this cycle three times when you send an email the recipient finds useful, she or he will select the content, letting you know where that person is in the buying cycle. Mathew worked with eCornell on a 3-2-1 email campaign based on paid search leads. The close rate was 50% and engagement was 16 times higher than non-nurtured prospects. Onboard your subscribersYour company likely has a process to onboard new employees. Do you have one to onboard new subscribers? Or do you just email them the next blog post that you send everybody else? Don't just send the next email to new subscribers. Onboard them with your best content, says @MSweezey. Remember, your next blog post likely isn't your best one. Instead, the first five emails your new subscribers should receive are the five best blog posts you've written. Then, you can start sending them the standard email. Salesforce research reveals that 50% of high-performing marketers use email onboarding, while less than 1% of underperforming marketers do. High-performing marketers use #email onboarding. Less than 1% of underperforming marketers do, says @MSweezey. It's the halo effect. First impressions matter. Every interaction is shaded by that initial impression, Mathew says. Connect on socialWith an email address, you can truly unlock the value of social media, particularly its highly valued hyper-targeted paid promotion (especially important given that the organic reach of social media posts is less than 2%.) Consider the case of Volvo Construction, which Mathew shares. Its dealers sold $100 million worth of new and used equipment in a year through Facebook. The social media platform is its No. 1 one lead driver. Now how can a big B2B company use Facebook to make those sales? Email addresses. It uploads its email lists to Facebook and Facebook can match the ads directly to those individuals. So the Volvo database can see the content by email and by social. Plus, Facebook can target people who look just like the profiles of those direct-match users. Volvo saw overall engagement increase by 22% when recipients received an email from Volvo and saw a Facebook ad from the company far better than any single communication. You're not just sending an email but you can target that person on any channel, Mathew says. Forget cookiesMathew also says the future of omnichannel marketing is the email address. Hashing technology now enables you to track the behavior of an email address online across multiple devices. Cookie technology can't do that. You can learn when theperson last visited your website, the point at which they stopped watching a video, etc., and all those behaviors can be assessed in your marketing automation platform to deliver the next email with the most relevant content. By getting more behavioral data beyond the open and click rate you gain the context necessary to create better content for communication and more targeted content to drive a conversion. ConclusionAs you strengthen your commitment to your email strategy, Mathew offers these reminders:
Remember, growing your subscriber base is not about boosting your numbers for the next e-blast. It's about using that email address to deliver more relevant content when the recipient wants it. Want to learn firsthand from great experts in content marketing? Make plans today to attend Content Marketing World 2017, Sept. 5-8, in Cleveland, Ohio. Use code BLOG100 to save $100. Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute The post 8 Things Any Good Marketer Should Know About Email appeared first on Content Marketing Institute. Posted by willcritchlow Back when I started in this industry, it was standard advice to tell our clients that the search engines couldn't execute JavaScript (JS), and anything that relied on JS would be effectively invisible and never appear in the index. Over the years, that has changed gradually, from early work-arounds (such as the horrible escaped fragment approach my colleague Rob wrote about back in 2010) to the actual execution of JS in the indexing pipeline that we see today, at least at Google. In this article, I want to explore some things we've seen about JS indexing behavior in the wild and in controlled tests and share some tentative conclusions I've drawn about how it must be working. A brief introduction to JS indexingAt its most basic, the idea behind JavaScript-enabled indexing is to get closer to the search engine seeing the page as the user sees it. Most users browse with JavaScript enabled, and many sites either fail without it or are severely limited. While traditional indexing considers just the raw HTML source received from the server, users typically see a page rendered based on the DOM (Document Object Model) which can be modified by JavaScript running in their web browser. JS-enabled indexing considers all content in the rendered DOM, not just that which appears in the raw HTML. There are some complexities even in this basic definition (answers in brackets as I understand them):
For more on the technical details, I recommend my ex-colleague Justin's writing on the subject. A high-level overview of my view of JavaScript best practicesDespite the incredible work-arounds of the past (which always seemed like more effort than graceful degradation to me) the right answer has existed since at least 2012, with the introduction of PushState. Rob wrote about this one, too. Back then, however, it was pretty clunky and manual and it required a concerted effort to ensure both that the URL was updated in the user's browser for each view that should be considered a page, that the server could return full HTML for those pages in response to new requests for each URL, and that the back button was handled correctly by your JavaScript. Along the way, in my opinion, too many sites got distracted by a separate prerendering step. This is an approach that does the equivalent of running a headless browser to generate static HTML pages that include any changes made by JavaScript on page load, then serving those snapshots instead of the JS-reliant page in response to requests from bots. It typically treats bots differently, in a way that Google tolerates, as long as the snapshots do represent the user experience. In my opinion, this approach is a poor compromise that's too susceptible to silent failures and falling out of date. We've seen a bunch of sites suffer traffic drops due to serving Googlebot broken experiences that were not immediately detected because no regular users saw the prerendered pages. These days, if you need or want JS-enhanced functionality, more of the top frameworks have the ability to work the way Rob described in 2012, which is now called isomorphic (roughly meaning the same). Isomorphic JavaScript serves HTML that corresponds to the rendered DOM for each URL, and updates the URL for each view that should exist as a separate page as the content is updated via JS. With this implementation, there is actually no need to render the page to index basic content, as it's served in response to any fresh request. I was fascinated by this piece of research published recently - you should go and read the whole study. In particular, you should watch this video (recommended in the post) in which the speaker - who is an Angular developer and evangelist - emphasizes the need for an isomorphic approach:
Resources for auditing JavaScriptIf you work in SEO, you will increasingly find yourself called upon to figure out whether a particular implementation is correct (hopefully on a staging/development server before it's deployed live, but who are we kidding? You'll be doing this live, too). To do that, here are some resources I've found useful:
Some surprising/interesting resultsThere are likely to be timeouts on JavaScript executionI already linked above to the ScreamingFrog post that mentions experiments they have done to measure the timeout Google uses to determine when to stop executing JavaScript (they found a limit of around 5 seconds). It may be more complicated than that, however. This segment of a thread is interesting. It's from a Hacker News user who goes by the username KMag and who claims to have worked at Google on the JS execution part of the indexing pipeline from 20062010. It's in relation to another user speculating that Google would not care about content loaded async (i.e. asynchronously - in other words, loaded as part of new HTTP requests that are triggered in the background while assets continue to download): Actually, we did care about this content. I'm not at liberty to explain the details, but we did execute setTimeouts up to some time limit. If they're smart, they actually make the exact timeout a function of a HMAC of the loaded source, to make it very difficult to experiment around, find the exact limits, and fool the indexing system. Back in 2010, it was still a fixed time limit. What that means is that although it was initially a fixed timeout, he's speculating (or possibly sharing without directly doing so) that timeouts are programmatically determined (presumably based on page importance and JavaScript reliance) and that they may be tied to the exact source code (the reference to HMAC is to do with a technical mechanism for spotting if the page has changed). It matters how your JS is executedI referenced this recent study earlier. In it, the author found: Inline vs. External vs. Bundled JavaScript makes a huge difference for Googlebot The charts at the end show the extent to which popular JavaScript frameworks perform differently depending on how they're called, with a range of performance from passing every test to failing almost every test. For example here's the chart for Angular: It's definitely worth reading the whole thing and reviewing the performance of the different frameworks. There's more evidence of Google saving computing resources in some areas, as well as surprising results between different frameworks. CRO tests are getting indexedWhen we first started seeing JavaScript-based split-testing platforms designed for testing changes aimed at improving conversion rate (CRO = conversion rate optimization), their inline changes to individual pages were invisible to the search engines. As Google in particular has moved up the JavaScript competency ladder through executing simple inline JS to more complex JS in external files, we are now seeing some CRO-platform-created changes being indexed. A simplified version of what's happening is:
I might have expected the platforms to block their JS with robots.txt, but at least the main platforms I've looked at don't do that. With Google being sympathetic towards testing, however, this shouldn't be a major problem - just something to be aware of as you build out your user-facing CRO tests. All the more reason for your UX and SEO teams to work closely together and communicate well. Split tests show SEO improvements from removing a reliance on JSAlthough we would like to do a lot more to test the actual real-world impact of relying on JavaScript, we do have some early results. At the end of last week I published a post outlining the uplift we saw from removing a site's reliance on JS to display content and links on category pages.
A simple test that removed the need for JavaScript on 50% of pages showed a >6% uplift in organic traffic - worth thousands of extra sessions a month. While we haven't proven that JavaScript is always bad, nor understood the exact mechanism at work here, we have opened up a new avenue for exploration, and at least shown that it's not a settled matter. To my mind, it highlights the importance of testing. It's obviously our belief in the importance of SEO split-testing that led to us investing so much in the development of the ODN platform over the last 18 months or so. Conclusion: How JavaScript indexing might work from a systems perspectiveBased on all of the information we can piece together from the external behavior of the search results, public comments from Googlers, tests and experiments, and first principles, here's how I think JavaScript indexing is working at Google at the moment: I think there is a separate queue for JS-enabled rendering, because the computational cost of trying to run JavaScript over the entire web is unnecessary given the lack of a need for it on many, many pages. In detail, I think:
The idea of JavaScript rendering as a distinct and separate part of the indexing pipeline is backed up by this quote from KMag, who I mentioned previously for his contributions to this HN thread (direct link) [emphasis mine]: I was working on the lightweight high-performance JavaScript interpretation system that sandboxed pretty much just a JS engine and a DOM implementation that we could run on every web page on the index. Most of my work was trying to improve the fidelity of the system. My code analyzed every web page in the index. Towards the end of my time there, there was someone in Mountain View working on a heavier, higher-fidelity system that sandboxed much more of a browser, and they were trying to improve performance so they could use it on a higher percentage of the index. This was the situation in 2010. It seems likely that they have moved a long way towards the headless browser in all cases, but I'm skeptical about whether it would be worth their while to render every page they crawl with JavaScript given the expense of doing so and the fact that a large percentage of pages do not change substantially when you do. My best guess is that they're using a combination of trying to figure out the need for JavaScript execution on a given page, coupled with trust/authority metrics to decide whether (and with what priority) to render a page with JS. Run a test, get publicityI have a hypothesis that I would love to see someone test: That it's possible to get a page indexed and ranking for a nonsense word contained in the served HTML, but not initially ranking for a different nonsense word added via JavaScript; then, to see the JS get indexed some period of time later and rank for both nonsense words. If you want to run that test, let me know the results - I'd be happy to publicize them. Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! Hey Siri, remind me to invent you in 30 years In 1987, Apple came up with the idea of a Knowledge Navigator. You can see the full video here, but it's a concept that's remarkably and perhaps, not coincidentally similar to our modern smart device assistants, Siri among them. Its features included a talking screen, reacting to vocal commands to provide information and sort calendars. In theory, we're there, 30 years later though the reality doesn't always quite match up to the dream. Even when it does work, voice hasn't always been exactly what people were looking for. The thing most adults said they wish their voice search systems could do was find their keys (though teens said they most wished it could send them pizza). Although we're getting to the stage where that's possible now, the majority of developments in voice have been voice search talking to your phone to find out information. Showing search results for Why can't you understand me, you stupid phoneBut while talking to a device can be a better experience than playing around with a virtual keyboard on a phone or a physical one on a computer, there are two major issues with voice search. The first is that it's still clunky. Half the time you have to repeat yourself in order to be understood, particularly if the word you're trying to get across is slang or an abbreviation of some sort, which is to say, the default sort of language you'd think would be fitting for conversational search. It doesn't feel smooth, and it doesn't feel effortless and that pretty much removes the point of it. The other is that it simply doesn't add value. A voice search isn't achieving anything you couldn't do by simply typing in the same thing. But recently, we've seen developments to the voice control industry, starting with Alexa. At this point, everyone's familiar with the Echo and its younger sibling, the Echo Dot it's been in adverts, our friends have it, maybe we have it ourselves. The Alexa devices were among Amazon's best-selling products in 2016, especially around Christmas, and the trend doesn't show significant signs of slowing. But if we've had Siri since 2011, why is Alexa picking up so much traction now? The answer is that it's not voice search. It's voice commands. Alexa is more exciting and satisfying for users because it provides an action you speak to it and something happens. You now can order a pizza or an Uber, or a dollhouse. That's what people have been wanting from their devices the ability to control the world around them by talking to it, not just have an alternative to a keyboard. Ultimately, the commands are more personal. You can go on a website and order a pizza, and you can customise it and pay for it and it'll show up, but talking to Alexa is akin to saying to your friend Order a pizza? (Except Alexa won't stop mid-phone call to ask you what the other topping you wanted was). Where the majority of mobile voice commands are used for search, Alexa's use cases are dominated by home control 34% of users have Alexa play music, just under 31% get her to play with the lights, and 24.5% use it as a timer. While Siri and the Google Voice Search system are both examples of narrow AI like the Echo, they make much more limited use of its capabilities compared to Alexa, Google is not OK, and Siri can say goodbye. OK Google who would win in a fight, you or Alexa?Alexa's success has put Google into catch-up mode, and they have been making some progress in the form of Google Home. Early reviews suggest that it might actually be the better product but it lacks the market momentum of the Amazon product, and it seems unlikely that the sales will be on an even footing for a while yet. However, Google does have the advantage of some high-end technology, namely Alphabet DeepMind. DeepMind itself is the company name, but the more familiar connection is the technology the company produces. DeepMind are responsible for the program AlphaGo that beat the world's foremost Go player 4 1, as well as a neural network that can learn how to play video games with the same approach as humans do. DeepMind can offer Google systems their machine learning experience which means that Google Home's technology might have more room to start leaning towards Deep AI in the future. Your device will be able to start adapting itself to your needs just don't ask it to open the pod bay doors. Watson what wine would you recommend with this?The other major contender in the AI race has only just started dipping into the B2C commercial market, and not nearly to the same scale as Alexa or Google Home. IBM Watson has, however, won Jeopardy!, as well as found places in healthcare, teaching, and weather forecasting essentially, absorbing a great deal of information and adapting it for different uses. Watson is now used by The North Face, for example, to offer contextual shopping through conversational search. Users answer questions, and Watson suggests products based on the answers. Likewise, Bear Naked uses Watson to taste test their customized granola system for the user, so once you've designed your meal, it can tell you if you might want to cut back on the chocolate chips. AI is a competitive market and it's a market synergizing with conversational and voice search to bring us ever closer to the computer from Star Trek, and even beyond it. For now, however, narrow AI is the market and that means optimizing sites for it. SE-OK GoogleVoice search means that people are searching much more conversationally than they used to. The best way to accommodate that in your SEO strategy is to give more attention to your long-tail keywords, especially the questions. Questions are opportunities best met with in-depth, mobile-friendly guides that offer information to your customers and clients. But this also applies when it comes to using apps in the way that Alexa and Google Home do. People aren't just making voice searches now they're also making voice commands. With that in mind, to rank for some of these long-tail keywords, you need to start optimizing for action phrases and Google-approved AI commands like search for [KEYWORD] on [APP], as well as carefully managing your API, if you have one. And it is worth having one, in order that you can integrate fully with these new devices. You can break down the structure of common questions in your industry to optimize your long-tail keywords for devices. You'll also need to look into deep-linking to optimize your apps for search. Deep-linking allows searchers to see listings from an app directly on search, and open the app from those search rankings, making for a smoother user experience. Search results show your app data and link directly into the app This is only going to become more important over time Google have just announced that they're opening up their technology, Instant Apps, to all developers. Instant Apps mean that if the user doesn't have the app, it can stream the page from the app anyway. It's not a stretch to imagine that before long Alexa won't need Skills to complete commands so long as you've properly set up your API to work with search. Siri, likewise, already has SiriKit, which allows developers to build markup into their apps that Siri can read. Alexa What's the Best Way to Deal with AI?Voice search is a growing part of the search industry. But it's not the biggest opportunity of it. Rather, companies should be focusing on integrating voice actions into their strategy by deep-linking their apps, ranking for long-tail keyword questions, and making sure everything they want a customer can do, they can do with their voice. When someone sends me a really great YouTube video, I always want to know who's behind it. Was it an ad agency? A small or medium business? A B2B tech company? No matter who it was, if I'm impressed, I want to see more from the content creator. So once the video is done, I click the link to visit their profiles. And from there, if the brand is really on top of its game, I'll see its channel art -- the horizontal banner displayed across the top of the user's YouTube channel that, hopefully, shows a combination of good design and brand presence. We've all seen design work that inspires us, but can have a bad habit of not taking it any further than that. What makes something like a strong YouTube banner so great? And how can you create your own gorgeous channel art? To answer those questions, we found seven of our favorites that inspire us, and explain why we love them. What Makes a Good YouTube Banner?DimensionsA YouTube channel banner will take on different dimensions, depending on what platform is being used to view it. For example, a banner might have different dimensions when viewed on a TV, desktop, or mobile device. For the sake of display consistency, then, Google suggests going with an image that's 2560 x 1440 px. It also sets the following guidelines:
Here's a helpful visual representation of those dimensions: Source: Google DesignLet's start with a note about where dimensions and design intersect. You might think that 2560 x 1440 px -- Google's suggested dimensions we mentioned earlier -- seems like an exorbitantly large file size. But think about how your image would appear on a 30" smart TV or higher. With a growing number of options to view YouTube videos in this way, you'll want to make sure your channel art is large enough to display with quality on larger screens. Also, take note of the "safe area" we alluded to in the first section. Your banner is essentially the biggest branding opportunity for when people land on your channel, so you'll want to make sure that it's well-represented in the channel art. That's why it might be best to make sure your company name and logo are placed in that space -- to make sure they don't get cut off and cause the viewer confusion as to who's behind the video content on the page. If you're not sure how to take up the entirety of a 2560 x 1440 frame, video production company MiniMatters suggests "build[ing] the image from the middle out," putting the most important assets in the center, and going from there. Finally, as to what to put in your banner, we like to follow a few basic rules:
How to Make a YouTube Banner"That's just great, Amanda," you might be thinking about these tips. "But where the heck am I supposed to get these beautiful design assets?" Well, you're in luck -- it turns out that there are dozens of free resources for creating a great YouTube banner. Here are a few of our favorites:
8 Cool YouTube Channel Art Examples1) Death Wish Coffee CompanyIn 2016, Death Wish Coffee was named the winner of a small business marketing competition held by software company Intuit. The reward? A free 30-second commercial during Super Bowl 50. Since then, the self-proclaimed maker of the world's strongest coffee has capitalized on that momentum by making sure its branding stays just as robust. Its YouTube banner is no exception. It's straightforward, but also, bold. The company's logo is displayed as the channel icon, as well as a tiled watermark that doesn't interfere with the text display. And that message doesn't leave any doubt about what the brand does. World's strongest coffee? Okay, I'm watching. 2) Adobe Creative CloudSeeing as turquoise is my all-time favorite color, there might be a touch of aesthetic bias in our selection of Adobe Creative Cloud's YouTube banner. But color can have quite an impact in marketing -- shades of blue, for example, have been found to invoke feelings of trust. This banner doesn't just make great use of color, though. In a single photo, it connotes creativity and visual quality -- two things that the Adobe Creative Cloud promises with its suite products. The person depicted seems to be creating something remarkable -- an ocean inside of a balloon -- with accompanying text to confirm it: Make wow. Plus, to learn more, social buttons are right there within the image. 3) Bon AppetitIs anyone else hungry? It only seems right that the channel art for a food magazine like Bon Apptit should be, well, appetizing. And with a phrase that's used as frequently as bon apptit -- before a meal or as the title of a pop song -- it's important that folks who land on this YouTube channel know what they're getting into. That's one thing that makes this banner so great. The branding is clear, from the logo icon to the iconic title text in the center of the image. Plus, the photo itself sends a signal of the type of content visitors can expect to consume -- no pun intended -- when they start watching the channel's videos: All things food. 4) TauliaIncOne great thing about YouTube banners is that they can be swapped out or modified whenever you want, time permitting. That makes them especially conducive to temporary promotions or campaigns. That's what tech company Taulia did for P2P Superheroes: a campaign that shows how its software can eliminate difficult, time-consuming tasks, helping everyday professionals focus more on the work that matters and turn them into superheroes. The banner communicates two things: 1) That Taulia is in the business of P2P (procure to pay), and 2) the brand really celebrates procurement specialists. And by using original, cartoon-like art, Taulia is turning what could be a dry topic into something fun and engaging. 5) Refinery29We're big fans of showcasing the people that make your brand great. That's one thing that Refinery29 does well, by frequently featuring its writers, editors, and content producers in its videos. As it turns out, they've all become quite popular personalities -- which is why the brand put them front-and-center in its channel art. Creating a banner of this nature is two-fold. First, you have to find a way to incorporate your company's talent into video content in a way that's engaging and appealing to your target audience. Here at HubSpot, we have our blog writers, for example, recount important information from blog posts in video and audio summaries. Then, once you've produced enough of that media consistently -- and if it's gaining the right kind of attention -- you can use those personalities to promote your channels. 6) TripAdvisor B2BTripAdvisor is a resource used by millions of travelers to discover and rate lodgings, restaurants, and much more information about endless destinations. But did you know it also offers B2B services for hotel and other property owners to make the most of their presence on the site? We like to think of it as a B2B hybrid of review site Yelp and vacation rental site Airbnb. On the one hand, TripAdvisor B2B helps business owners create a profile with photos, descriptions, and other information that's going to be helpful to travelers. But, like Yelp, it also allows them to monitor and respond to the reviews their businesses receive. That's represented in the YouTube banner by portraying what the site is all about -- travel -- but also depicts the act of visitors giving feedback on their experiences by way of rating symbols. 7) Nuvolari LenardThe thing that stands out to us the most about this banner is its simplicity. It represents a Italian yacht design company Nuvolari Lenard, which is known for work that emulates a luxury and chic lifestyle. And while the channel art itself doesn't portray anything specifically nautical, the use of capital letters and tiered monochrome does connote a brand that's high-end. Those kinds of digital aesthetics create what's often known as aspirational marketing -- the kind that symbolizes something that's unattainable by most, but still has a vast following of people who covet the look and feel of the brand, as Mediaboom puts it. Can I afford a yacht? Of course not. But seeing something like this makes me want one anyway, and makes me want to consume the video content pertaining to it. Channel Your CreativityIt's important to note that really cool YouTube channel art is just one part of a comprehensive video content strategy. It doesn't matter how beautiful your banner is, for example, if your channel lacks in quality video, or hasn't added anything new in several weeks. So, along with great design must come consistency. And as you begin to create both, you can turn to these examples for inspiration. What are some of your favorite YouTube banners? Let us know in the comments. |