Optimized the Hell Out of Your Client's AdWords Account? Don't Drive More Traffic, Do This Instead
6/24/2017
This is Dale (okay, it's actually Corey, our Director of Campaign Strategy, but we'll call him Dale for the sake of this post). Dale is the Manager of Paid Media at a local digital marketing agency.
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This Week in Content Marketing: The New York Times Shows That Email Is the Next Best Thing
6/24/2017
PNR: This Old Marketing with Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose can be found on both iTunes and Stitcher. If you enjoy our show, we would love it if you would rate it or post a review on iTunes. In this week's episodeRobert ponders whether saying I don't is a viable alternative to saying no. On the news front, we offer an overview of NerdWallet's content-first approach, which has taken the company from zero to over $500 million in revenue, and outline how The New York Times is killing it in the email game by opening up new marketing opportunities that focus on retention and loyalty. Rants and raves include net neutrality and YouTube's ad crisis; then we close the show with an example of the week from Mobil. Download this week's PNR: This Old Marketing podcast Content love from our sponsor: GoToWebinar (42:55) Why webinars help marketers win As content marketers, we're a bit like triathletes. Thankfully, webinars help us as we compete for mind share across content formats. The research is clear: An effective webinar engages customers, builds thought leadership, and sells products. In this e-book, we'll show you how to attract and engage your audience, create your webinar content, and interact authentically with customers. Show details
The PNR perspective on notable news and trends
Rants and raves
This Old Marketing example of the week(53:53): Mobil's Pegasus Magazine: Though I recently took Exxon-Mobil to task for its self-focused mission statement, Robert just came across a cool effort from Mobil that, if resurrected, might redeem this reputation. Published from the 1960s until the mid '80s, the company's Pegasus Magazine became a creative juggernaut of its time by incorporating the works of rebellious artists and ideas from subversive writers and personalities into its theme-based editorial. As described in this Eye Magazine article, the editorial team often had to battle with the company's top brass just to get the controversial content approved. The magazine was developed to build relationships with high-powered clientele by promoting the image of Mobil as a forward-thinking organization. The effort serves as a shining This Old Marketing example of what can be achieved, in both form and content, within the constraints of corporate publishing. For a full list of PNR archives, go to the main This Old Marketing page. Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute How do I subscribe?The post This Week in Content Marketing: The New York Times Shows That Email Is the Next Best Thing appeared first on Content Marketing Institute. Posted by randfish Most SEO campaigns need three kinds of links to be successful; targeting your content to influencers can get you 2/3 of the way there. In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers the tactics that will help your content get seen and shared by those with a wide and relevant audience.
Video TranscriptionHowdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about how to create content that is specifically influencer-targeted in order to earn the links and attention and amplification that you often need.
Most SEO campaigns need 3 types of links:So it's the case that most SEO campaigns, as they're trying to earn the rankings that they're seeking, are trying to do a few things. You're trying to grow your overall Domain Authority. You're trying to get some specific keyword terms and phrases ranking on your site for those terms and phrases. So you need kind of three kinds of links. This is most campaigns. 1. Links from broad, high-Domain Authority sites that are pointing - you kind of don't care - anywhere on your site, the home page, internal pages, to your blog, to your news section. It's totally fine. So a common one that we use here would be like the New York Times. I want the New York Times to link to me so that I have the authority and influence of a link from that domain and, hopefully, lots of domains like them, very high-Domain Authority domains. 2. Links to specific high-value keyword-targeted pages, hopefully, hopefully with specific anchor text, and that's going to help me boost those individual URLs' rankings. So I want this page over here to link to me and say "hairdryers," to my page that is keyword targeted for the word "hairdryers." Fingers crossed. 3. Links to my domain from other sites, in my sector or niche, that provide some of that topical authority and influence to help tell Google and the other search engines that this is what my site is about, that I belong in this sphere of influence, that I'm semantically and topically related to words and phrases like this. So I want appliancegal.com to link to my site if I'm trying to rank in the world of hairdryers and other kinds of appliances.
So of these, for one and three, we won't talk about two today, but for one and three, much of the time the people that you're trying to target are what we call in the industry influencers, and these influencers are going to be lots of people. I've illustrated them all here - mostly looking sideways at each other, not exactly sure why that is - but bloggers, and journalists, and authors, and conference organizers, and content marketers, and event speakers, and researchers, and editors, and podcasters, and influencers of a wide, wide variety. We could fill up the whole board with the types of people who are in the influencer world or have that title specifically, but they tend to share a few things in common. They are trying to produce content of one kind or another. They're not dissimilar from us. They're trying to produce things on the web, and when they do, they need certain elements to help fill in the gap. When they're looking for those gap-filling elements, that is your opportunity to earn these kinds of links. Content tacticsSo a few tactics for that. First off, one of the most powerful ones, and we've talked about this a little bit here on Whiteboard Friday, but probably not in depth, is...
A. Statistics and data. The reason that this is such a powerful tool is because when you create data, especially if it's either uniquely gathered by you, unique because you have it, because you can collect it and no one else can, or unique because you've put it together from many disparate sources, you're the editorial curator of that data and statistics, everyone like this needs those types of statistics and data to support or challenge their arguments or their assertions or their coverage of the industry, whatever it is.
It's tough because you will not see many of those in your keyword research, because there's a relatively few number of these people searching in any given month for this type of gap-filling data, so you have to intuit often what you should title those things. Put yourself in these people's shoes and start Googling around for "What would I need if I had to write some industry coverage around this?" Then you'll come up with these types of things, and you can try modifying your keyword research queries or doing some Google Suggest stuff with these words and phrases.
B. Visual content. Visual content is exceptionally valuable in this case because, again, it fills a gap that many of these folks have. When you are a content marketer, or when you're a speaker at an event, or when you're an author or a blogger, you need visual content that will help catch the eye, that will break up the writing that you've done, and it's often much easier to get someone else's visual content and simply cite your source and link to it than it is to create visual content of your own. These people often don't have the resources to create their own visual content.
C. Contrarian/counter-opinions. The last one I'll cover here is contrarian or counter-opinions to the prevailing wisdom. So you might have an opinion like, "In the next three years, hairdryers will be completely obsolete because of X."
So using these tactics, I hope that you can go reach out and fill some gaps for these influencers and, as a result, earning two of the three exact kind of links that you need in order to rank well in the search results. And we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care. Video transcription by Speechpad.com 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! Need something to snap you out of your slump? Turn to your fellow marketers for advice about books and a few podcasts that are practical, inspirational, and downright fun. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal ExperienceMihaly Csikszentmihalyi This book is a fantastic reminder of how to recognize joy in the work we do. If we are in flow, we are engaging with all our senses. Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall StreetJohn Brooks I downloaded Business Adventures after hearing Bill Gates call it the best book I ever read. (Gates read it on the advice of Warren Buffett.) The book covers classic business stories including Ford's Edsel, Piggly Wiggly, Xerox and GE and illustrates how great leaders react to and rise above challenges. Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn from Their Mistakes-But Some DoMatthew Syed Failure is the best teacher. This book highlights why we should embrace our failures and how to put processes in place to improve on them. The Mind in the CaveDavid Lewis-Williams If you want to understand media, social media, and storytelling, it's best to begin at the beginning. That's where Lewis-Williams comes in. He is a South African anthropologist who is the preeminent scholar of rock art and cave art, especially the ancient cave paintings of Western Europe that mark the beginnings of humanity. Lewis-Williams demonstrates that the origin of media beginning with Paleolithic cave art was social. The community participated in the creation of primitive art, and the closer one got to the act of creating those images, the more powerful one became in the community. The purpose of this first medium, he argues, was to create the first social hierarchies. In effect, the guy who controlled the medium was the guy in charge. OutNatsuo Kirino Out is a tension-filled, murder mystery novel one not for the faint of heart. I love Kirino's style of writing; each chapter digs deeper into the story, giving you a concentrated perspective on each character. It's not until the end, with all the perspectives explained, that you really understand why the murder happened. Competing Against LuckClayton Christensen It's a wonderful book for any marketer to sharpen persona development and take a renewed look at what customers value. Born to RunBruce Springsteen For a read completely separate from marketing, try Born to Run-a wonderful book by an extraordinary man. His intelligence, wit, and persistent drive are something to aspire to. Recommendations from Content Marketing World 2016's top presenterEach year, the Content Marketing World speaker with the highest average review from attendees is asked to return as a keynote speaker the following year. Jay Acunzo earned the top spot for 2017. Creator of the award-winning podcast Unthinkable, Jay shares the books and podcasts that inspire him. The Essential Calvin and HobbesBill Watterson It's a magical world, Hobbes, ol' buddy. Let's go exploring! We get so caught in the mundane and the practical. Calvin and Hobbes is my all-time favorite comic strip because it's at once superficial and meaningful. Being sensitive to the big thoughts and emotions in this world is the difference between being powerfully creative and copying your way to average. Deep WorkCal Newport I'm so hyperactive (like many of us) across so many channels. And I adore using social media. However, this book is a stark reminder: Blocking off massive chunks of time to focus on one problem or to think deeply is absolutely critical. We need this more than ever. The Way I Heard It (podcast)Mike Rowe Rowe hosts the Discovery Channel's popular series, Dirty Jobs. His podcast, The Way I Heard It, shares a different take on the people and events that you thought you knew. Not only is this an amazing show at face value, it's a powerful example of how creativity does not mean big. His episodes are around 11 minutes, with truly jaw-dropping stories running for just five to six minutes. The Message & LifeAfter (podcast)GE Created in partnership with Slate's podcast network, Panoply, GE's two podcasts outranked even the best from NPR on the iTunes charts. They are shining examples of how brands can take relevant, story-driven tangents away from their actual products to gain (literally) hours of attention from consumers in a week. How much does that 30-second TV spot cost again? Final recommendationUnthinkable (podcast)Jay Acunzo What's it all about? Jay explains: Unthinkable is a travel show for marketers. Instead of places, we pick topics we care about as content marketers, then go exploring. We encounter 'locals' content marketers who live out our weekly themes and meet expert guides who equip us with the weapons we need to continue on our journey. In the end, we believe there's something MORE to our work than all the easy, tired, conventional thinking. ConclusionGrabbing a book (or your tablet) from the list gives you a way to be productive and, at the same time, take a break from your routine. By offering a range of options insight and inspiration we know you'll find something to help you get unstuck and re-chart (or slightly tweak) your path to content marketing success. What content are you reading this summer for fun, inspiration, or insight? Please share in comments. A version of this article originally appeared in the June issue of Chief Content Officer. Sign up to receive your free subscription to our bimonthly, print magazine. Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute The post Read These Books: Summer Recommendations from Content Marketers appeared first on Content Marketing Institute. I don't know about you, but I barely print anything anymore. Seriously, think about it -- when's the last time you had to type Command + P and print out a document? Between e-tickets, virtual payment options, and online signature tools, I think the last thing I printed out was the lease for my apartment. So you can imagine my surprise when HubSpot's audience started telling us they still like to print out our ebooks -- which are often 20 or 30 pages in length -- instead of viewing them on a web page. In 2017 -- during the era of self-driving cars, augmented and virtual reality, and artificial intelligence -- our team here at HubSpot is constantly striving to test and implement the most modern techniques for content creation to provide cool, useful resources for our audience. But as it turns out, our perceptions of what our audience actually values when they download out content were a little ... off. In this post, I'll dive into our hypothesis, how we tested it, and what we're learning about our audience -- and how they actually like to consume our content. What We DoI work on HubSpot's Marketing Acquisition team creating content offers -- such as our downloadable ebooks, guides, and templates -- that our audience exchanges their contact information for in order to download them. If you're familiar with the inbound marketing methodology we've been teaching here at HubSpot for more than 10 years, I operate in the "Convert" stage of the process of helping new people discover and learn about HubSpot: When a person happens upon HubSpot for the first time online -- via a blog post like this one, through social media, or by conducting a Google search -- they might see a bold, brightly-colored call-to-action (CTA) encouraging them to learn more about a particular topic or product. And in order to get that information -- from an ebook, a guide, a template, a webinar, or an event -- the person has to hand over their contact information. This ensures they can receive an emailed version of the content offer or event registration, and it also converts them from a visitor into a lead. My job is to create content that visitors are so interested in learning more about that they exchange their phone number, email address, and professional background information. And to make sure we keep converting visitors into leads for the health of HubSpot's business, I make sure that ebooks, guides, and events are helpful, fascinating, and ultimately educate our audience on how to do inbound marketing. What We WonderedFor the most part, my team's job has entailed creating PDFs that visitors can download once they submit a form with their contact information. More specifically, this has meant creating a lot of PDFs. And although people were filling out forms and downloading our content offers, we started wondering if we should offer them something different -- something more cutting-edge -- than a file format created back in 1993. And we wondered if changing the format of our content offers would change conversion rates, too. We decided to run a survey -- and a little test. We wanted to know if our core persona who we marketed these content offers to still liked PDFs and found them useful. So, how else would we find out than by creating an offer? I created two different version of the same content offer -- one in PDF format, and one in web page format. Then, once someone downloaded the offer, we sent them a thank-you email, and we asked them which format they preferred, and why. What We LearnedMore than 3,000 individuals submitted their information to access the offer, and roughly 9% responded to our question, which gave us more than 300 responses to learn from. And much to our surprise, 90% of the respondents preferred downloading a PDF to reading our content on a web page. We gleaned a ton of valuable information about our core audience from this survey, and the qualitative feedback was incredibly helpful, too. Our key takeaways about format preferences were:
It's incredibly helpful to learn what's going on behind the decisions and choices our audience makes to inform future strategy when it comes to content creation. But this information leaves us with a challenge, too: How do we get our audience excited about content living on interactive web pages, too? Content living on web pages can be crawled by Google to improve websites' domain authority (and SEO superpowers) -- and PDFs can't be. So we're making it our mission to keep offering our audience different options for consuming content the way they want to -- while innovating and testing new ways to offer content our core persona is just as excited about in a web-based format. I'll be back with more details about that next experiment, but in the meantime, download one of our latest content offers, and let us know if you like the format in the comments. What's your opinion? PDF or web page? Share with us what you learned in the comments below. Most online sites at some stage will want to expand, and one of the most common ways to do that is by offering products to an international market. However, it's not an easy or simple task by any means. This post will help you understand the risks, research and steps involved in expanding your business into an international market. Considerations andresearchIs it the right time to go international? Is there a need to go international? This very much depends on your focus for the future and the current needs of the business. If you are increasingly having visitors to your site from international locations, now be may the time to start implementing an international SEO strategy. There are, of course, a few things that you need to take into consideration such as:
Once you have checked all the above, it's essential to carry out further research. As with any new website idea or build, it's all about making sure it's a worthwhile venture. One of the biggest research areas will be around keyword research to find out if there is demand in the locations that the business will be expanding into. It's important to note that the keyword research should be done in the language you will be targeting, and location. If all the above is confirmed and ready to go, the next stage is to plan the implementation. Website structureYou may have seen a number of different implementations of international, each having different pros and cons. Itend to lean towards using subdirectories; however, it very much depends on the type of targeting you will be using. These are the main structure types:
We have provided an example of the set up for a website using the subcategory URL structure for the UK and France. It's important to note our main website is sitting on a .com as this tends to be the norm now. However this would work in the same way for .co.uk. We've done this with variations that include both language and location, but this can be done with just language or just location. This would mean that we add the following code to our website: We can also add an X-default tag to this piece of code to be safe. This will tell search engines that if there is a URL that is not using this structure that it should default to the URL specified. This would change our code snippet to: It's important to note that this is only for the homepage of our example website. Internal links will also need to use this code but with the URLs changed so they reference the specific URL rather than the homepage. We have also left the homepage as .com because in the past we have seen drops when a site has also used the new URL structure for the homepage. If we were to change example.com to example.com/en-gb/ it would mean example.com having to pass through a redirect. It's much easier to do this within the CMS you are using; however, if needed you may use a bulk href lang tool. Sitemap implementationWhen people talk about using sitemaps and international SEO, they tend to be referring to implementing localization through the use of sitemaps. This is another way of accounting for different languages and countries if hreflang is not a possible solution. The solution works in a very similar way to hreflang, butsits within a sitemap rather than in the website's source code. We tend to only suggest using this method if hreflang is completely out of the question. Metadata & contentWe have already carried out our keyword research to find out where the demand is based on different languages, this is where new metadata needs to be used for each language variation. It's also important that the right variation of the word is used, for example when targeting the USA from a site that uses UK or Canadian English. The on-page content also needs to reflect the language that the user is on. If the hreflang is marked up to say the page is in French, it needs to be written in French. It sounds simple, but you would be surprised how many people get this wrong. It's also very important to make sure you have the in-house resource or outside help to be able to get this all done before launch. Yes, it is possible to gradually amend the content, but for users this could be very annoying imagine their frustration in landing on a language they cannot understand. As well as translating the content, it should reflect the audience you are targeting and their behaviors. User behavior varies from country to country and is something that needs to be taken into consideration when generating on-page content. There are many differences that may not be apparent straight away. However, the best tip I can give is to not translate directly from English as what you are saying may not make any sense in another language. It's also very important to take cultural differences into account when writing new content or trying to sell a product in a different market. People from different countries will look at areas of the website in different ways such as: security, payment gateways, type of language used, shopping cart structure and many others. This is why it's worthwhile speaking to people from the country you are trying to target and getting somebody local to write the content and provide feedback. It all comes back to doing your research beforehand. International Google LocalThis section is very much dependent on the type of business you run. However if you have a physical location in the new countries you will be targeting it's very important. Google My Business allows businesses to create a listing giving full details of their company along with the location. This will be important in building up an organic search presence in a new location. There are plenty of posts on local SEO so I won't go into it too much here, but these are the main steps:
Carrying out the above steps will help the new location build up a stable base of links that can be built on top. Iwould also suggest creating relevant social profiles and local listings if relevant. SummaryMaking sure you are fully prepared is by far the biggest step in scaling a business to target an international market. Without the correct preparation, there is a very high chance that you won't achieve what you initially set out to do. International SEO is not a simple process by any means and can easily go wrong. However, if you are in the position to expand your business into an international set-up, there are easy gains to be made. Have you ever spent weeks or even months crafting a perfect piece of content that generated almost no response from your audience? You expected trumpets and confetti, praise-filled emails, maybe even a raise. Instead, you got crickets. While you might accept these disheartening flops as the cost of doing content marketing, they represent an enormous waste of time and resources. Fortunately, Agile practices offer an alternative. Rather than putting all your eggs into one big content basket, you can conduct small experiments by releasing minimum viable content. I'll define this term in a bit. For now, the main thing to note is that minimum viable content enables you to learn what your audience is interested in and then use what you've learned to create big, high-effort pieces that perform well. Why minimum viable content?Back in the days when we all came to work in horse-drawn carriages, marketing departments would draw up huge marketing plans. These detailed maps spanning dozens of pages (or stone tablets) charted the team's path for the next year or so. During that time, everyone in marketing would work to release one or two enormous campaigns. All hopes were pinned on the success of these large bets. If those campaigns failed, all that planning and work was wasted. And someone got fired. To avoid that type of waste, Agile principles call for us to conduct many small experiments. For content marketers, that means we must test several small, low-risk pieces of content, see which ones perform best, and expand only on the most successful. This approach eliminates wasted effort and increases the chances that each piece of content we deliver will wow our audience. Those small bets take the form of minimum viable content. What is minimum viable content?The concept of minimum viable content comes from the Agile idea of a minimum viable product. Minimum means the smallest version that still achieves its goals, and viable means something that could survive in the market on its own. Minimum viable content is the smallest stand-alone content release that does at least one of these things:
To this first bullet, minimum viable content brings about a specific behavior change for specific people engaged in specific activities. In this case, the content is aimed at a particular persona, and it has a defined goal: to influence the behavior of people who consume it. This definition is most closely aligned with Agile principles that value small bets and regular releases. How do you want your content to influence your audience's behavior? @AndreaFryrear #Agile To the second bullet, minimum viable content proves or disproves a hypothesis about your audience. In this case, instead of influencing behavior, a piece of content might help you learn more about your audience's preferences. This version of minimum viable content takes its cues from lean principles, specifically those outlined in Eric Ries' book The Lean Startup. Example of a minimum viable product: A carBefore we apply this idea to content, let's consider how you might deliver a minimum viable product. Let's say your team believes that the customer base wants a car. You hypothesize that by producing a particular output (the car), you will have a particular outcome (the target audience is happy and wants the car), which will result in a business impact in the form of revenue (people buy the car). Your team, however, doesn't understand how to deliver a minimum viable product. You've broken up the release of the car into four stages, or iterations, which will be delivered one at a time. Iterations one, two, and three give you no insights into what customers want. In iteration one, you produce a wheel. If customers are hoping for a vehicle, they're going to be disappointed, as illustrated by the frowny face. In iteration two two wheels on an axle you still don't have a minimum viable product; two wheels in isolation don't help people who are looking for a way to get from place to place. Customers aren't going to buy this pair of wheels. Iteration three, which lacks a mechanism for steering, continues to leave people unhappy and unwilling to buy. Iterations one, two, and three are not viable products. Iteration four finally provides a complete vehicle. Until this point, nobody has wanted anything to do with your output. You haven't had any results to observe and learn from. What if your hypothesis was wrong, and the audience really wanted a boat, not a car? You would have wasted tons of time and resources creating a car, falsely expecting to make people happy and to have them shower your company with money. And you would have learned nothing. If you only deliver a final product, you haven't had results to learn from smaller iterations @AndreaFryrear A more helpful approach would look something like this (with MVP standing for minimum viable product): Here, we simultaneously learn from and (to some extent) help our audience with each iteration. This is the right way to manage a minimum-viable approach. The hypothesis is the same, but the approach is different. While iteration one doesn't delight the customer, the output a skateboard gives people a way to get around. Iteration two produces a scooter, which gets closer to what people want. As you move toward a true minimum viable product in iterations three and four, you getpositive responses. People are changing their behavior, taking bicycles and motorcycles to work. Your minimal products are becoming viable in the market. You see business results as you sell more and more of these products. In this example, if your customers had wanted a boat, you would have found out early if your hypothesis was wrong. Feedback on the skateboard or scooter would have told you instantly that you were on the wrong track. Example of minimum viable content: A car-buying guideHow do you apply this idea to content marketing processes? Let's suppose that you work for a car dealership, and you want to deliver The Ultimate Guide to Car Buying, an interactive online destination full of checklists, videos, step-by-step guides, and beautiful custom graphics. You might spend three months planning the project, six months creating it, and three more months desperately promoting it. If we're following the car analogy, you've jumped to the fully built car pushing the final big deliverable to customers without getting feedback along the way. It might work or it might not. Either way you've made a big bet. Instead, you could take the minimum-viable-content approach, testing and refining your idea so you can be confident of that big piece's success by the time you release it rather than sinking a year's time and budget into it with your fingers crossed. An unhelpful approach would look something like this: Your hypothesis is that producing a particular output, The Ultimate Guide to Car Buying, will make it easier for the audience to navigate car buying. The outcome you expect is a love for the content, evidenced by various engagement metrics, and you expect that love to produce a positive impact on your company's revenue by increasing car sales. In iteration one, if you send out a tweet about the ultimate guide to see if anybody engages without any ultimate guide to link to you can't learn anything. The same thing goes for writing a short listicle (iteration two), and creating a landing page that collects email addresses and tells subscribers the guide isn't yet available (iteration three). Iterations one, two, and three might all be components of your final promotional push for The Ultimate Guide, but they aren't viable content; they provide no value on their own. As in the car example, it's not until you've delivered the final deliverable that you know whether the audience wanted it. Maybe people would have preferred a mobile app to use while walking around a car lot during the shopping process, in which case the desktop-based interactive guide doesn't help them. Since you gave people no minimum viable content to engage with along the way, you had no way to find out what they wanted, so you couldn't correct your course. How much better to learn from each release, as shown here: Instead of starting with a tweet to nowhere, as in the how-not-to example, you might mention the guide in an email and link to a landing page where people could sign up to receive the guide when it's done. If a solid percentage of the email list clicks through the email and fills out the form, that's a measurable outcome signaling that you're on the right track. Then you could move on with confidence to creating a car-buying checklist. If you want to test, learn, and adapt quickly, you can put some money behind that checklist so that it gets in front of a large audience in a short time. Otherwise, you'll have to wait until several hundred people arrive on the page on their own. Either way, metrics like time on page, social media shares, and comments will help you evaluate the success of the checklist. In this case, success means you validate your hypothesis that users will find an ultimate guide useful enough to alter their car-buying behavior based on the guide's recommendations. If successful, that checklist could then be expanded into a longer, more comprehensive blog post, which could in turn become an informative video. Somewhere in these middle iterations at whatever point the audience sees these early content pieces as substantial enough to have value on their own you've crossed into minimum viable content. Based on the response to your minimum viable content, you can determine whether you're justified in creating The Ultimate Guide to Car Buying. If you decide to complete the expansion of your content into this large-scale piece, you'll know that it has a solid chance of success based on what you learned from your previous content releases. The response to your minimum viable content will tell if that big piece of content is wanted. @AndreaFryrear ConclusionYou don't have to be on an Agile marketing team to create minimum viable content. You could easily release small, learning-driven pieces in any process. This approach does work especially well with Agile marketing methods, however. Using scrum, Kanban, or any other Agile methodology enables you to release minimum viable content regularly, review its performance, and adapt your content quickly. Whether or not you're using Agile methods, try minimum viable content to reduce your chances of hearing crickets in response to your next major content release. Sign up for our weekly Content Strategy for Marketers e-newsletter, which features exclusive stories and insights from CMI Chief Content Adviser Robert Rose. If you're like many other marketers we meet, you'll come to look forward to reading his thoughts every Saturday. Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute The post How to Stop Wasting Time on the Wrong Content appeared first on Content Marketing Institute. For a three-person digital marketing team like ours, the prospect of having a big ad budget seemed like a distant dream. So when we were suddenly given $100K to spend on Facebook ads, we were positively giddy. And unbelievably nervous. As a lean SaaS startup, we have to be very wise with our marketing investments. Couple that with our low cost-per-sale ($24/monthly for our starter plan), and you can see that being cost-effective while still spending on ads is a challenge. In May of 2016, we had the honor of working with Facebook Canada. We received a small grant to kickstart our advertising initiatives, and had the opportunity to spend two full days with one of their ad reps. Other than working with the Facebook team, we are completely in-house. On one hand this was an advantage -- since we could make changes to the program in seconds rather than days -- on the other hand, we were on our own for creative, landing pages, and analytics. We ran an early prototype campaign with some decent success. In fact, it performed in the same neighbourhood as our other digital advertising initiatives. Cool beans. But that was just the start. We'd tasted success, and knew that we were only scratching the surface. So, naturally, we made a pitch to our company's executive team to increase our digital marketing budget so we could prove that Facebook was a viable avenue for growth. Our commitment to the business: generate trials at a cost-effective rate of $50/trial. Our pitch was a success, and we found ourselves with a considerable ad budget. Now it was real -- it was time to build out an end-to-end Facebook Ads strategy. Admittedly, we were quite nervous. Our credibility was on the line. Here's what we ended up learning from that process, wrinkles and all. Read on to the end to see our results. Lesson 1: Fully commit resources or your cost-per-acquisition (CPA) will rise swiftly.We received our first lesson early on. We had become complacent with the success of our ad creative in May 2016, and tried to replicate that again. Using the same ad creative from AdWords, we launched on Facebook Ads. Initially, it worked. We generated trials at an acceptable rate. But we mistakenly saw this initial success as a sign that we could set it and forget it. We went back to focusing on our other digital marketing strategies, like creating organic content, while our CPAs gradually rose. Facebook CPAs have a nasty habit of rising suddenly -- I mean, literally blowing up overnight. One morning, we logged into our marketing dashboard and saw that we were generating trials at twice our target CPA of $50/trial. This was crazy business, and we needed to act fast. Fixing this problem took a lot of time and resources, and a few calls with our dedicated Facebook Ads guru (shout-out to the brilliant Mike Empey). The problem was Ad Frequency. What happened was that our Facebook ad frequency had risen so high that our addressable market was seeing ads 3-5 times a day. Ugh. So of course CPAs rose accordingly -- we were irritating people to no end. We resolved to take two actions: first, we swapped in new creative. In fact, we created 5 new ads to push into market. This had an immediate impact, and gave us a deep understanding of how detrimental ad fatigue can be. Second, and more importantly, we committed to a new process for our creative. We call it "the conveyor belt." Here's how it works:
The side benefit of this process is that we've tested so many ad variants that we now have a repository of "winning variants" that we can quickly call out of retirement if our CPAs rise. Lesson 2: Segment your audiences to effectively manage ad set CPAs.Initially, I think we underestimated the amount of ad sets we'd need to manage. Looking back, I cringe to think we only launched our prospecting campaign with three ad sets: USA, Canada, and Europe (today we manage between 50 and 70 ad sets, depending on ad performance). We weren't even going beyond some basic audience targeting. No age specification. No regional targeting. No device targeting. Just a giant ad campaign. We were confident in our ad creative and landing page conversion rates, but forgot the importance of audience profiling. It's no wonder that our results were really hard to interpret. I remember naively saying to Valerie Hamilton, our digital marketing specialist, "Europe is performing well today. What's the story?" We didn't know. Were women converting better than men? Was a certain age bracket doing better than another one? We had no clue. And at this point our CPAs were still floating about 25% higher than our target. It would have been a dramatic understatement to say we had some optimization work to do. We started to analyze our lead generation activities across demographic lines. We used a combination of Facebook Ads, Google Analytics, Mixpanel, and Salesforce data. What we found out was that we did remarkably better with people aged between 24-45. This totally makes sense, too. Folks older than 45 are typically in a more senior role, and rarely the ones actually building or trialing our product. Instead, they are often the ones marshaling their team to demo our software. Our first action was to split out this age range and only focus on where we saw the most success. By cutting more expensive CPA audiences, we were able to reduce our CPA. Since then, we've adjusted our messaging to the >45 crowd by including more language about "their team" and "data transparency." We've also focused a lot more of our ad buys on video assets instead of advertising our free trial. It's worth mentioning that we had good reasons for avoiding audience segmentation. First, we didn't have the capacity to manage dozens of ad sets. Second, we wanted to keep our addressable market as large as possible and let our learnings help us figure out where to whittle down. Lesson 3: Geographic bidding makes sense when you know regional lifetime values (LTVs).The other side of the demographic coin for us was splitting out geographies. Treating Europe as a homogeneous advertising market just didn't make sense for our business at the time (see Lesson 8, where we experimented with world-wide delivery). While our European campaign was performing well enough, it was clear that we were missing an opportunity. For instance, we knew that leads from specific geographies often convert to customers at a much higher rate, and that their LTV was much higher on average. In broad outreach campaigns, for example, we saw that we were attracting a high number of leads at $15/trial from Greece and Hungary. But while we have great customers in that part of the world, we've run a number of internal reports that show paid leads from that region convert at a much lower rate. Despite paying such a low CPA, these leads were not converting and we were paying far too much for them. Internal reports (plus complaints from our sales team) had us digging deep into the data. This is when the lesson clicked for us; we realized it was okay to spend a lot more on leads from, say, the Netherlands, because their LTV and conversion rates were much, much higher. By splitting out different geographies, we enhanced our ability to match CPA targets to an appropriate LTV. Lesson 4: Matching ad creative and landing pages.This is textbook digital marketing, true. But it was a challenge for our scrappy digital marketing team to prioritize this while managing a $100K budget and driving all the day-to-day campaigns required for a fast-growing startup. Plus, we could rationalize pushing this aside because our landing page was performing reasonably well. But when you're spending $100K and your CPAs continue to fluctuate, every conversion opportunity is magnified ten-fold. With our small team and only one dedicated designer, we needed to call in the big guns. We went with Unbounce, and it's had a measureable impact on our landing page conversion rates, helping us grab an 18% conversion rate for Facebook Ads leads. As we design ad creative, we create its sister landing page. From there, we can make tweaks to the page to improve conversion rates. Little things like form position, who we featured in our testimonials, and even which button colours we chose amounted to some big improvements. Lesson 5: The one-two punch of video advertisement.We've always been huge users of video to demo the product and create awareness. We've created explainer videos that talk about our primary unique selling proposition and give a glimpse into the product, and these videos have been quite successful in garnering views, holding attention spans, and increasing conversions. As we launched on Facebook, we put ad dollars behind one particular video. Again, good success, but we felt like we could do better. This decision was more on gut feel (it still counts!) that video had a big role to play. I mean, just scroll through your Facebook feed right now. The challenge for us was that we'd committed to the business that we'd generate trials at or below our target CPA for that entire $100K. Video doesn't have that wonderful direct line to trial that a prospecting campaign does. So, we took a chance, and our product marketing manager, Chris Wolski, called up an Ottawa video production company we now affectionately call "The Rascals." We created a fun, 35-second explainer video that we thought would play well on Facebook and Instagram. The fact is that we generated a hundred thousand views before we could blink. How? People were actually sharing the video with friends and family, even tagging others in the comments section. We noticed lively conversations taking place directly on the posts themselves, as if the videos weren't advertisements at all.Here's that video: Facebook makes it easy to create remarketing programs by creating lists of users that engage with your video. We set up a list for anyone that watched more than 10 seconds of the video. This was a new cost-effective avenue for generating leads well within our target CPA. Video remarketing leads typically come in at about $30/trial, including the initial video buy. More importantly, it expanded our reach on Facebook and Instagram exponentially. And we've seen traffic to our site go up as a direct result of these ads. Lesson 6: Create video specifically for Facebook Ads.When we launched on video, we didn't really know what to expect. Lots of views? Engagement? Shares? As a metrics-obsessed company, we knew we needed to establish a KPI. After doing some research and chatting with peers and the account team at Facebook, we decided on Cost-Per-10-second view. We chose this KPI to help us drive better video engagement and brand recognition. If someone was interested enough to pass over cat videos and baby pictures to watch 10 seconds of our B2B software video, then we were doing something right. This KPI has fed directly into our production process, too. We've worked with The Rascals to ensure that each video includes text to account for the fact that Facebook's default setting is to mute video. We've also added captions to the mix because videos on Facebook autoplay with the sound off; a whopping 85% of Facebook videos are played with no sound. We would have had disastrous results if we'd relied entirely on the audio within the video to tell our story. The overall result has been slashing our Cost-Per-10-second view by 50%. This is huge because it means for the same dollar of spend, we're effectively doubling our reach. And you can bet this metric is front and center on our internal social media dashboards. Lesson 7: Ask for advice and trade ideas.I could rant for days about how much we learned from Facebook- they were truly fantastic, and the attention we received ensured we'd be successful. That said, there are no special or secret tricks. You can find everything through a Google search for "Facebook Ads Tips." Putting all those tips and best practices together into a single campaign, however, is where the real challenge lies. Throughout the process we sought advice from those who've been there before us, who have been learning from others years before we even thought of going this route. It probably comes as no surprise that our team now pays close attention to what other advertisers do on Facebook. In particular, I think Shopify is a leader in this respect. They do a great job of integrating video. We've also struck up a friendship with the team over at PageCloud , and have enjoyed freely sharing ideas. Many of those conversations have spawned new ad campaigns and experiments. Which leads me to ... Lesson 8: Boldly experiment.We allocated a percentage of our budget towards experimentation. When we heard about a new product from Facebook called World-Wide Delivery (WWD) we sort of rolled our eyes and remembered what we had learned about geographic bidding from Lesson 3. But our friend Mike Empey at Facebook persuaded us to give it a try. So we did. What did we have to lose? The experiment was a huge success and with just a small percentage of our daily budget we were able to practically double lead volume. In fact, this contributed to us setting daily trial record numbers for 3 days in a row. When the dust had settled, we analyzed the lead quality, made adjustments to our copy and landing pages, and added WWD campaigns to our arsenal of ads. Lesson 9: Advertising is still top of the funnel.Asking someone to start a trial of your software is a lot like calling a friend and asking them to catch up with you over coffee in an hour. The message is out of the blue and entails a time commitment. No matter what their interest level is, they simply may not be able to do it right then. As we stressed about hitting our trial CPA numbers, we started to lose sight of what we were really trying to do, which was raise awareness and leave our audience with positive first impressions. In chasing those numbers, we ended up making a series of small decisions that led to us making a big mistake: we'd cut so much content from our landing page that it had basically become just an image with a signup form. Sure, that page converted well. But it also pissed people off. Some people were getting so upset that they were commenting on the ads themselves. At this point, we'd driven down CPAs to about $10 under our target CPA. Our hands were sore from the amount of high-fives we'd collected and shoulders we'd patted. But in that process we committed an egregious error: we forgot about the customer. We were so caught up in the metrics that we forgot that leads are people. So, we did the only reasonable thing. We added essential content back into our landing pages (including video content from Vidyard into every landing page), and worked on optimizing that content so the customer could wring as much value from it as possible. Of course, CPAs rose. But our ad relevance and positive scores rose along with it. That was the kind of customer-centric tradeoff we were willing to take. Editor's Note:Editor's Note: aversionof this post first appeared on Inbound.org, HubSpot's community for inbound marketers. Online Video Marketing Tips : 10 SEO Tips For Video MarketingIf you know anything at all about online marketing, you know that search engine optimization (SEO) is an important component of any internet marketing strategy. When you optimize your website properly, you increase the chances that your page will appear high on a list of search results, which in turn makes it more likely that customers searching your keywords will end up on your website. YouTube Video OptimizationHaving a video about your business in great, whether that be telling your customers and potential customers about the services you provide or the products you sell, but, and this is a big BUT, if they can't find those videos, you have wasted you time and money. Every video should have a purpose, a goal the number one of which is getting people to find you. In the below video, you will learn SEO for video and how to optimize and rank videos on YouTube. Not only ranking videos on YouTube but Google too, but helping people find your business. Creating a short and compelling marketing video is a great idea for any business, but in order to get the best return on your investment, you will need to optimize your videos. Every piece of content you create should be geared toward promoting your business and improving your search results. The good news is that, unlike some other elements of SEO, optimizing a marketing video is actually fairly easy. Here are some tips to help you: How To Rank Videos on YouTube1. Put Your Target Keyword in the File Name of Your Video Google's search engines give the most weight to keywords which appear in prominent places (titles, URLs, etc.) so do yourself a favor and put your main keyword in your file name. The file name becomes part of your URL, so you're killing two birds with one stone. 2. Include Your Primary Keywords in Your Script Don't overdo it, but choose one or two keywords that you want to optimize for, and use them in an organic way. Since you want to target local consumers, be sure to include the city/state with your keywords. 3. Make Sure Your Video Content is Relevant To Your Customers Search engine algorithms aren't only concerned with keywords your content must be useful and relevant as well. 4. Don't Just Put Your Video on Your Website Share it Other Places, Too When you post it on YouTube and your social media sites, you increase its visibility. 5. When You Post Your Video on Other Sites, Make Sure To Include Your Chosen Keyword in the Meta Description of the Video. 6. Allow Your Video To Be Rated on YouTube If it receives high ratings, it will be more visible to search engines and can also help to encourage viewers to share your video. 7. Include and Optimise the Video Description When you post the video on your page, include a written transcript of it beneath the video. Not only will this give you another mention of your primary keyword, it may also help you to increase conversions. 8. Add an RSS feed for your videos. This will ensure that your customers can subscribe to be informed of new content, and it will also make it easier for search engines to index your site. 9. Have a Separate Landing Page For Each Video on Your Site Search engines can read individual pages more easily, and having multiple videos on one page can be confusing for viewers, too. Does Embedding YouTube Videos Help SEO?10. Make it Possible For Other People To Embed Your Video on Their Sites When you do that, you encourage sharing and also increase the chances you will get relevant inbound links a must for SEO. Are Your Business Videos Ranking in Google and YouTube?If you need help getting your business videos ranked in YouTube and Google call Blue Square Management now on +44 (0)1689 602 248 or email us. YouTube Video SEO Services W: http://bluesquaremanagement.com Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/BlueSquareManagement Twitter: https://twitter.com/BlueSquareSEO YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/BlueSquareManagement Google: https://plus.google.com/+Bluesquaremanagement/ SEO For Video : How To Optimize and Rank Videos on YouTube The post SEO For Video : How To Optimize and Rank Videos on YouTube appeared first on . No related posts. |