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Combine Email and Facebook Ad Campaigns for Greater Success (Example)
For marketers, the most important thing is how much traffic you convert—right?
Marketers are brainwashed to think they can pick the right offer to the right person, and it’s as simple as that. But it’s not—there is no secret formula that tells you how. Forget about the mainstream marketing advice you always hear, and focus on what you can be doing to improve performance and ROI in the coming year.
There's no sure-fire way to ensure that the content you create will convert. Marketers must do their homework to define and understand their target audience. Focus on segmenting everything that comes next (promotion, paid ads, landing page content, etc.) by those groupings and by channel, all while continually swapping offers to see which nets the highest conversion rate.
The secret to high conversions isn’t based on choosing the right offer. Marketers must test, test, test. First, test four or five different offers to the same group of people. Once you figure out which offer resonates with your audience, test variations of the landing page graphics and content. It’s all a testing game, so be patient.
Marketers should follow the three-pronged strategy from Hubspot that suggests starting with publishing on your own platform, then reaching out to industry influencers (a.k.a. earned media) before opting for paid promotion through social and other paid placements. Why is this important? Because you can learn a lot about your audience, verbiage, and graphics by promoting them through other channels, so you know what you should be testing on paid before you spend mega-bucks.
Marketers need to keep track of their content from a single, centralized place. (highlight to tweet) Whether it’s using a tool like Uberflip, hosting it on your website, or storing it in a Dropbox, you should be able to keep track of content you created last quarter, or last year.
Why? According to Jay Dwivedi, President of Market Research Firm xInvest Consultants, "There is no one type of content that works for all websites. In fact, our analysis shows that even for a specific website, the type of content that performs well may change during the course of a day or week or months."
Continue pushing out new pieces of content, but also focus on retesting old content with new graphics and new ways to speak about the content that will resonate with your target audience.
Download our new eBook "Trends in Paid Strategies for B2B Marketers" here.
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4 Mistakes to Avoid When Revamping Your Paid Strategy
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Content marketers like to think we are important. We've changed the face of modern marketing, haven’t we? We create the content that drives awareness, builds relationships with prospects, and helps move them along their path to purchase.
Well, according to a study of marketing technology buyers by Walker Sands, we have a lot less influence than we might think. Let’s start at the top.
Where do buyers learn about new marketing technology? The top answers in the study are peers and colleagues (30%), news publications and blogs (20%), and search engines (13%). In a study like this, marketers should be looking for the term "vendor" in the answers. That’s how their marketing shows up. Not only is it not at the top of this list, but it’s not anywhere on the list.
Way at the bottom of the list are sales reps. Wait, you mean buyers are still finding out about new solutions from sales reps, and not marketers? Maybe there’s something to this whole relationship building thing after all.
Nothing created by us content marketers is credited with helping buyers discover new technology. But if you look closely at the top answers, there may be more to it than you think.
All three of the top answers are influenced by content created, published, and shared by content marketers to varying degrees. This means your content is not connecting directly with buyers above the level of awareness. Remember, though, that content marketing is not about your products or solutions, but about providing value to prospects in solving their business problems. If your content is truly serving that function, you would not expect it to show up as a source for new marketing technology.
The next phase of the buyer’s path is the research phase. This is when they know that they need a marketing technology solution, and they are actively looking for information. According to the survey, 29% of marketing technology buyers say that all vendor content (including the website, blog, reports, and white papers) are very influential in their research. An additional 60% say that this same content is somewhat influential in this phase. (By the way, peer recommendations led this list too, with 63% of buyers saying they were very influential.)
From a content marketing perspective, let’s focus on a few points. First, don’t get hung up on the fact that both the company website and the company blog were lumped into the same category. Use that to your advantage, and make sure there are clear connections between appropriate sections of the blog and the website.
This phase really is the heart of content marketing. This is when you are driving awareness and earning trust by providing educational content. The research phase is where awareness happens. (highlight to tweet) While the buyers may have heard of your company, this is when they start to understand your approach not just to marketing, but to prospects and customers in general.
Since all the sources of vendor content have the same influence at this stage, why not look at them as equal partners? The products details—what are often called feeds and speeds—are still important as buyers look to understand what your are offering. But the more general content on your blog and in ebooks and white papers are the things that form the bonds of the relationship.
Finally, the study looked at what sources were most influential in making a purchase decision. It is no surprise that your content does not provide much at this point in the process. Only 5% of MarTech buyers choose blogs in this stage. Again, if you are doing your job as a content marketer, this is not surprising. Corporate blog posts are not about products. They should not be influencing the final purchase decision.
But note that 36% cite the website as most influential. This is another indication that strong connections should exist between your content marketing efforts and your product pages on the website.
As an example, we have three different connection points to link our blog posts, product pages, and resources about marketing automation. In addition to having a call to action to a single relevant resource guide, like our lead scoring guide, our blog posts also have a link to our marketing automation resource page that offers a huge variety of content.
The educational resources also appear on our product pages, so prospects can learn about the topic as they explore our offerings. We are able to track all of their activity in this process. This is one way that we support multi-step paths directed by customers, rather than pre-defined journeys.
And what was the most influential in the buying stage? Product demos. No matter how much trust you build and how strong of a relationship you create with the buyer through a variety of content, the product still has to serve their needs.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
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Your Content Isn’t as Influential as You Think It Is
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Social communication platform Rounds has announced the launch of its Booyah video chat app on iOS. The app was designed to be a companion to WhatsApp, and allows users to make free group video calls with their contacts.
Booyah supports video calls for up to 12 users. Once a user begins a call, they can tap a button to invite their WhatsApp contacts into the call. However, the app doesn’t limit itself to just WhatsApp users, as users can invite others to live video chats by sending invite links through email or text message, or posting invite links on Twitter and other platforms. When responding to invites, new users are prompted to downloaded Booyah before joining the call.
Booyah doesn't require users to create an account before joining or starting a call. In addition, the app does not share content back to WhatsApp, or save content on users' devices.
In a statement, Dany Fishel, CEO of Rounds, commented:
WhatsApp is the pioneer in group messaging, and therefore was the natural choice as the primary companion to Booyah. We took it one step further, and brought Snapchat’s ephemerality to group video chat, making these live conversations easy and casual. Ultimately, it’s our job to do all the labor intensive steps, and all you need to do to join a group chat is show up—and Booyah!
Booyah is available to download for free on the iTunes App Store. The app is coming soon to Android.
Rounds Launches Booyah Group Video Chat App on iOS
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Latin America is a stronghold for WhatsApp, while North America presents a weak spot, but the biggest opportunity for the Facebook-owned messaging application may be in Asia.
GlobalWebIndex shared the infographic below showing WhatsApp usage by region, and GWI said in an email to SocialTimes:
WhatsApp has already made substantial progress in Latin America and the Middle East, where around two-thirds of internet users are now WhatsApping. In contrast, North America has always been a problem for WhatsApp, with Facebook Messenger being the dominant messaging service.
But it’s in Asia where WhatsApp’s free model could bring the biggest increases. Leaving aside China, where WeChat is in total control, WhatsApp can claim 35 percent usage rates across the rest of the region – a decent figure, certainly, but one that shows how much room there is for further expansion.
Opportunities in Asia for WhatsApp (Infographic)
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Emojis have emerged as a new language in digital media. The medium, once dominated by text, has moved more toward visual media, with emojis as the means of communicating tone and sentiment on messaging apps and social media among consumers.
This emoji communication creates actionable data for brands, including improving on-site customer service experiences in real time. According to Larry Kim, founder and CTO of online advertising agency WordStream, emojis also have applications for advertising on Twitter.
Kim conducted an experiment where he explored the impact of emojis on engagement. He used the Twitter ad platform to isolate the isolate the audience and A/B tested two ads: one with emojis and one without. The emoji version of the Tweet got 25.4 percent higher engagement than the non-emoji Tweet. What’s more, the Tweet with emoji had a lower cost per engagement, Kim said:
The cost to advertise on [Facebook or Twitter] is inversely related proportional to the engagement rate of the thing you’re looking to promote.
Based on his finding, Kim said brands should use emojis in every tweet, paid advertisements or not. Here were some guidelines to consider:
Behold: The 20 Most Expensive Keywords in Google AdWords – http://t.co/8H5Pqx6VUO http://pic.twitter.com/IU0W8mnAEw
— Larry Kim (@larrykim) September 14, 2015
This is Why You Should Use Emojis to Boost Engagement on Social Media Ads
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