Showing posts with label Target audience. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Target audience. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 19, 2014
Tuesday, August 5, 2014
17 Keys to Success in Social PPC
If you haven't jumped on the social PPC bandwagon yet, it's time you gave it some serious thought. While social PPC won't replace Google AdWords any time soon, it's become an effective source of incremental leads and sales for savvy businesses.
What follows are 17 keys to running successful social PPC campaigns. The first four apply to all social PPC, then we'll talk about keys to success for each major social PPC engine.
Social PPC Keys to Success
1. Identify Your Target Audience
In search, the target audience is "anyone who searches using my keywords." In social, much more thought must be put into the people and personas you'd like to reach. Are they consumers? Business owners? Teenagers? What do they like to do? Where do they work, shop, play?
Defining your audience is critical to success in social PPC.
2. Identify the Marketing Challenge That Paid Social Solves
Think about why you want to use paid social in the first place. Are you active organically in social media, but need a larger or more engaged audience? Are you struggling to reach a B2B audience because consumers also search on your keywords? Do you need awareness of your product, service, or company?
All of these can be great reasons to use paid social – the key is to think about what problem social PPC will solve for you.
3. Define Your Paid Social Strategy and Objectives
If you've done the first two steps, this will be easy.
If your audience is B2B decision makers, and your objective is lead generation, then you'll want to define your strategy and objectives as such. If your goal is audience growth, build that in to your strategy.
Mapping strategy out ahead of time sets you up for good results.
4. Segment Your Audience Based on How You'll be Posting
This is an overlooked and yet important part of social PPC setup.
It isn't unusual for advertisers to have multiple segments within their target audience. You might have different types of businesses that you want to reach, or you may be targeting both men and women, for example.
Look at your current social posts to see what audience they're intended to reach – and then set up your social PPC campaigns accordingly.
LinkedIn Keys to Success
5. Carefully Identify Your Target Companies and Job Levels
LinkedIn's targeting options are great for targeting individuals at specific companies and job levels; it's especially effective for B2B. But think carefully about how you want to target.
Do you want narrow targeting with specific job titles and companies, or do you want to cast a wider net and focus on categories rather than specifics?
Be especially careful about seniority targeting. If you need to reach decision-makers, you'll probably want to exclude entry level people. But be aware that the higher level you target, the higher your minimum CPC will be.
6. Be Ready to Pay $5+ Per Click
Speaking of minimum CPCs, LinkedIn's CPCs run much higher than other social PPC channels. The results are often worth it, but be prepared to pay $5 or more per click and optimize accordingly.
7. Use Sponsored Updates if Possible
LinkedIn Ads have two types of campaigns: sponsored ads and sponsored updates. In my experience, sponsored updates perform much better than sponsored ads. Sponsored updates show in a user's news feed, giving you premium placement.
If you're actively posting updates to LinkedIn, use sponsored updates whenever possible.
8. Segment Your Audience Based on How You'll be Posting
Think about how you'll be posting, and segment your audience accordingly. The LinkedIn user interface isn't very user-friendly, so it's more efficient to set up segmented campaigns at the outset.
Twitter Keys to Success
9. Carefully Identify Your Target Accounts or Keywords
Twitter Ads often feel familiar to those used to Google AdWords and Bing Ads, because you cantarget using keywords. You can also target individual user accounts. It's important to decide which option makes sense for you.
If you want to reach consumers, for example, make sure the keywords or accounts you target are focused on consumer content.
10. Use Images and Hashtags With Caution
It's important to note that Twitter Ads are a pay-per-engagement, not pay-per-click, program. You pay for anything that can be clicked (links, @ handles, hashtags, and images), as well as for each reply, follow, and retweet.
Twitter Ads are great for driving engagement and leads, but be aware that you'll pay for much more than just clicks to your website.
11. Test Lead Generation Cards
Twitter lead generation cards enable advertisers to create a virtual "card" that attaches to a tweet. Users can take an action with one click, without leaving Twitter. The options for lead gen cards are nearly endless, and in my experience they perform very well.
12. Segment Your Audience Based on How You'll be Posting
You'll notice that segmentation is a theme here, because it's important. The Twitter Ads interface isn't much better than LinkedIn's, so it's easiest to think about targeting up front.
Facebook Keys to Success
13. Have at Least 1,000 Users in Your Custom Audience
Much has been said about Facebook custom audiences. They're a powerful way to reach specific users on Facebook.
Having a big enough audience is key to a successful campaign, though. We recently ran a test with about 150 users in a custom audience, and we got very few impressions and clicks. Hitting the minimum number of users is really important.
14. Use Sponsored Posts in Newsfeed When Possible
Similar to LinkedIn, Facebook offers both right-rail and sponsored post ads. Facebook has become so large that I'm not sure anyone looks at the right rail ads anymore – and they don't even show at all on most mobile devices. Make the most of your advertising efforts by using sponsored posts whenever possible.
15. Relentlessly Test Images
It's common advice for Facebook ads, and with good reason. The image is what really attracts the attention to your ad – the actual copy is almost irrelevant if you have a good image.
Aggressively test images to learn which ones work best.
16. Use Lookalike Segments
An added bonus of using custom audiences is the ability to build lookalike audiences. A lookalike audience is a larger audience that Facebook builds of users similar to your custom audience. You can further customize the lookalike audience with exclusions.
If you aren't getting the results you expected from custom audiences, try using a lookalike audience.
17. Use Custom Audiences to Build Lookalike Segments
I've heard from a number of people that they create custom audiences not for ad targeting, but for the sole purpose of creating lookalike audiences. This is a creative way to have both specific and broad reach.
Conclusion
Social PPC is becoming an important part of the online marketing toolbox. Use these tips the next time you launch a paid social campaign.
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Monday, June 30, 2014
Viral vs Shareable Content: Which One is Right for Your Brand?
As modern content marketers are well aware, in order to build relationships with new users and strengthen relationships with existing clients, we must tell a compelling story that motivates, rather than read a script to an uninterested audience about why a product is so amazing and “if you buy it, your life will be so much better”. If we’re being honest, our goal, as marketers in the heavily saturated social landscape, is to create content that is shared. Rapidly. Without cease. Once we get over the hill of understanding how to properly create successful content, the issue at hand is understanding the difference between viral content and shareable content and how the right mindset can drastically enhance or demolish your brand's content marketing strategy, and ultimately, impact the success of your business goals.
The first question at hand is; do you know the difference between viral content and shareable content? Both of these wildfire types of content share three main characteristics; timeliness, heavy disruption, and audience quality. Aside from these key qualities, viral and shareable content couldn't be any further from different in business behavior. Here is a guide to understanding the difference between the two and why a marketing strategy must be intentional about which path the goals for content marketing should take:
Viral Content
Monday, April 21, 2014
How to Effectively Target Your Audience
The Problem:
New convenient forms of technology like smart phones and tablets have drastically changed the consumer’s attention span. This is because the amount of information that they are inundated with daily makes it difficult for consumers to figure out which they should attend to.
Your post is just one amongst hundreds of thousands of statuses, tweets, and posts that people will scroll through everyday. It could be the wittiest, most insightful post ever, but if you’re not targeting it to the right audience, you won’t get the recognition you’re seeking.
How it affects you:
How are you supposed to get people to notice you when they’re so caught up with their various news feeds? You need to stick out from the crowd to get their attention!
How do you stand out from the crowd?
Your ideal customers are out there! You just have to find them, and show them all the wonderful things you have to offer them!
The Solution:
You need to identify your specific audience.
The first step to identifying your audience is to figure out what their demographic is. This will include their age, location, and gender. Sometimes it may even be useful to identify their home ownership and/or employment status.
The second step is understanding their needs. This can include anything from needing a new lawnmower, to finding a sexy single in their area. If it’s the latter, you’ll probably have to pay special attention not to make your ads look like pop-up viruses.
The third and final step to identifying your audience is to profile their behaviour. You should be able to make educated assumptions about the way that certain people will respond to certain content. For example, online memes and pictures of people embarrassing themselves are more likely to appeal to a younger, male crowd, whereas cooking videos and tips on removing stains are more likely to appeal to middle aged housewives.
Figuring out who your customers are likely to be, and what makes them tick gives you a better idea of their buyer persona. Perhaps you could conclude that females aged 18-24 are more impulsive buyers, or that men aged between 20 and 40 are likely to do a lot of research before buying a new car. Buyer personas can make it all the more easy for you to ensure that what you offer them has value, and can potentially fulfil a need, or solve a problem for them. You can then take each segment of your audience and find ways to target them closely, and potentially, individually.
Understanding these kinds of details about your target market will help you to determine what kind of strategies to implement and where. This is because different social media platforms, and different online spaces are occupied by different audiences.
Facebook can offer you a special service where if you’ve accumulated a database of emails, they can take those emails off your hands and find these people on Facebook. Firstly Facebook will make sure that your ads are seen by all of these people. And secondly, Facebook will use information about these people to find people who are similar to them, like their age, location, and interests. ————————–This is called retargeting, and it allows you to broaden your audience, but also to make sure that the people seeing your ads are actually people who would be interested in your product or service. Similarly, you can use LinkedIn to target people with specific roles, job titles, or areas.
Other social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and Pinterest all tend to appeal to specific age groups. For example, Tumblr targets the very elusive minds of ‘tweens’ and young adults, whereas Pinterest tends to focus on women aged 20-60. So keeping this in mind, you should be able to figure out which would be most suited to the audience that you’re looking to find.
It’s important to realise that just because you’re putting good, persuasive information out there, it doesn’t mean the right people are going to see it. Being able to utilise all of this information will help you to devise that plan where you are able to find who you’re looking for, and provide them with quality content that they’ll enjoy.
Friday, April 11, 2014
What to Do When Social Media Is Not Working For Your Business
Why Your Social Media is Not Working?
If you feel like you’ve tried everything to connect with your audience, but it’s just not working, you’re probably looking to social media experts for advice. Maybe you’ve followed that advice, but your audience still isn’t responding. What’s going on?
Not all social networks match your audience. Image source: iStockPhoto
Well, it may not be the advice or implementation that’s your problem. The problem may be your choice of social platform, your industry’s expectations or even your audience’s comfort level with social media.
To find out, I suggest looking closely at age and demographic matches, the size of your audience, industry standards and your audience’s interest in engaging online. In this article I’ll discuss each of these and how they can affect your social engagement, then offer advice on how you can work on those issues.
Know Whom You’re Talking To
A recent Pew Internet study revealed that 73% of online adults use a social networking site of some kind, but only 42% use multiple social media sites.
The following chart demonstrates how these percentages break down.
A Pew Internet study reveals the percentage of online adults using different social websites.
Considering the data from the study, let’s talk about how it can apply to you.
Imagine your audience is primarily made up of middle-aged women who, according to the study, are four times as likely as men to be Pinterest users.
If you’re focusing your social marketing efforts on Facebook because of its high adoption rate but not seeing engagement, it could be because your primary audience is spending its time on Pinterest.
It may be time to reevaluate who your target customer is. When you know your audience and their social platform of choice, it’s much easier to engage them.
Understand That Size May Be a Factor
Another reason you may not be making a strong connection with your customers could be related to the size of your audience on a given social channel.
This infographic from Mediabistro shows interests across Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter.
Not all interests are represented equally on all social networks.
If you’re selling a high-dollar product, you’re more likely to have a very small and specific audience. As a result, sending out broad messages via social media may not be the best way to connect with them.
Consider Your Industry’s Culture
In some cases, a company may not see high engagement simply because of industry culture. Perhaps the overall industry is behind the times technologically. That could be because either their customers or the industry as a whole aren’t familiar with social media or comfortable using it.
If you’re in a very personalized industry (e.g., the funeral profession), getting your clients to engage on social sites may be a challenge simply because they don’t think to look for you online unless it’s to look up your phone number. In those cases, it’s unlikely they’ll reach out via social media.
Not all businesses exist in industries that naturally lend themselves to online engagement.
Some industries have a harder time engaging with their Facebook fans.
As an example, take the partnership my company recently had with Self Storage Finders. They’re a service that helps consumers identify and evaluate different storage providers in their area.
While this type of service is valuable to the customers who use it, those clients don’t necessarily think about discussing their storage experiences on social sites.
While these variables and their impact on engagement are frustrating, it’s not impossible to market to difficult audiences.
The following three tips should help you adapt social media marketing recommendations and best practices to suit the needs of your specific (if challenging) audience.
Keep in mind, though, that your social media marketing strategy may necessarily follow a different path than it would if your audience were more amenable to social conversations.
Know Where To Be
Conventional social wisdom says that all businesses need to maintain a Facebook and Twitter profile. We believe that creating social identities and then essentially abandoning them because of lack of engagement does more harm than good to a business.
What did you discover when you reevaluated your audience? You may have discovered that the most active community engagement portals in your industry aren’t social sites at all—they’re forums and “old-school” message boards.
If that’s the case, you have to set conventional wisdom aside and focus your efforts on the arenas where they’ll be noticed in the first place!
See What Sticks
You’ve looked at your audience, you know where they are and you’ve set up shop there. Now let’s suppose you’re getting ready to start a social promotion for an audience you’re pretty sure is going to be difficult to engage.
There are plenty of different templates out there for possible social posts. I recommend trying as many as you can. I call this the spaghetti-flinging approachbecause it’s as if you’re throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.
Paid ads can grab the attention of your target market.
If you’ve chosen to focus your efforts on Facebook, try posting text-based status updates, images, links, polls, paid ads and more. Post at different times of day and on different days of the week.
While it’s nice to see engagement at this stage, the true goal of early social posting to difficult audiences should be to gather data.
Remember, you can’t trust the industry pundits to tell you what will work best for every audience, so use your own metrics and gather your own data.
Look For Your Loudest Fans
As you post more updates, you’ll likely find the members of your community who are more highly engaged than others. Make sure these people aren’t your employees, close friends or relatives!
When you’ve found your most active fans, pay attention to the exact types of content they’re engaging with. Use this data to refine your posting techniques to include content that’s likely to appeal to these users.
Take a look at the following screenshot from the Self Storage Finders Facebook page before we started working with them. This particular update didn’t resonate with audience members, so it had no engagement whatsoever.
An early Self Storage Finders Facebook update falls flat with followers.
When we started working with them, we began experimenting with different types of posts and content and we noticed that fans reacted well to cartoon images.
Below you can see how catering to fans’ favorite type of post results in more likes, all because we were willing to experiment and base future posts on actual audience data.
Extensive testing revealed that Self Storage Finders’ Facebook fans respond well to cartoons.
Know When to Cut Your Losses
Unfortunately, there are audiences out there that simply don’t respond to social media marketing. But that doesn’t mean you should throw in the towel.
Take another look at the data you gathered from your audience analysis and post experiments. Compare it to your established metrics and install analytics tools that will provide additional data to help you figure out whether your social marketing is working.
Let’s say you determine that including man-hours, image subscriptions and other investments, you put roughly $500 per month into your social campaigns. What does your data tell you? Are your social channels sending you visitors that result in more than $500 per month in sales?
That example is a simplification of social marketing’s value, of course. It’s true that social media can lead to extensive brand awareness that may indirectly lead to sales. But if you consistently see that your profits are falling short of your investments, it may be time to either refocus your strategy or pull the plug on your social efforts entirely.
The Bottom Line
If you’re not getting traction with your social media marketing, take a break from researching broad advice that promises a quick fix. Reevaluate your efforts:meet your customers where they are, consider the size of your audience and set your expectations accordingly.
Not every business will have success with social media marketing no matter how hard they try, but it’s worth the time to experiment with different tactics and gather data before calling it quits.
Friday, March 7, 2014
4 Steps to Building an Engaging Presence on Social Media
#1: Build a Targeted Community
The first step is to build a community of people who care about what your brand has to offer.
It doesn’t matter if you have a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+ page or all of the above. As long as you have a starting point, you can start building your audience on social media.
Haphazardly trying to build a large community won’t be very helpful. Your best bet will be to build a targeted community. How do you build targeted communities? Generally speaking, there are two ways.
Organic Community-Building
To build a community through organic means, you must provide share-worthy and useful content that’s relevant specifically to the audience you want to reach. The more your content (on any social network) gets shared, the more eyes see it.
Whole Foods shares recipes that its food-based community will enjoy and then share with others.
If you consistently produce enough great content, people naturally gravitate toward your brand. Be sure to leverage hashtags when appropriate so your content is categorized correctly and easy to find.
While it might sound cliché, content aimed at your specific intended audience will help lay the groundwork for organically building a loyal community.
Paid Community-Building
Paid community-building is traditionally much faster than its organic counterpart.
By leveraging the paid advertising options of social media channels, you cansupercharge the growth of your community by hyper-targeting the people who are most likely to want to connect with you.
While most of the major social networks currently offer paid advertising options, I highly recommend leveraging Facebook ads to help build a targeted community.
Use targeting to put your paid social ads in front of the right people.
Facebook ads can be extremely useful when you’re trying to get in front of a particular group of people. The targeting options within Facebook ads are so granular that you can target users by interest, age, gender, language, education level and location.
If you’re an insurance company looking to build an audience, you should consider targeting people with interests relating to insurance, risk management, financial services and other interests that might be in the same arena.
With the right strategy, it’s entirely possible to acquire hyper-targeted fans for as little as $0.25 per fan. It doesn’t take a huge budget to make a big impact.
No matter what interest is related to your brand, there’s an audience for it on Facebook.
If you decide another social media network is a better fit for your brand, Twitter,LinkedIn and Google+ all offer opportunities for paid social ads.
#2: Leverage Unused Brand Assets
The next step is to perform a complete audit of your brand assets to identify unused or underutilized content. This process may be time-consuming; however, you can discover valuable pieces of content that have been previously overlooked.
Content Inventory
There are a few ways to do an audit of your brand assets. I recommend you start by asking a series of questions:
- What is your mission statement?
- What idea or concept created the brand originally?
- How many blogs do you have?
- How many images?
- What content are you not using for promotion?
These questions are meant to make you think less about what you are doing and more about what you aren’t doing.
Many brands have an extremely compelling story to tell and they don’t even realize it.
You know that feeling when you look under the bed to find that long-lost favorite t-shirt? That’s exactly the goal of searching for unused brand assets. You never know what you’ll find unless you look!
#3: Identify Indirect Content Opportunities
Now that you’ve rediscovered valuable brand assets, it’s time to map out your content strategy.
To draft a social media content plan, brands usually rely on concepts that are directly related to what they sell or do. This is a tad shortsighted, in my opinion. There are many other opportunities available when you take a step back and identify all of the concepts that are indirectly related to your brand.
For instance, if you are a real estate company, your social channels are probably filled with listings, employee information and maybe even home-buying blogs. Why not mix in some home decorating tips or famous homes from movies? This type of content will spark engagement and support your future “normal” content.
TOMS retweeted content from another brand that shares its values and will appeal to its followers.
Everything you post doesn’t have to be about what you offer, nor do you want to publish content that has nothing at all to do with your brand. Find a middle ground where you leverage content that isn’t exactly about your product or service, but is related to it.
Coca-Cola does a great job here leveraging National Pi Day.
Pi has nothing to do with Coke; however, people drink Coke while eating pie… and pie sounds likePi so this works.
#4: Listen to Your Community
The last part of this puzzle is to utilize content that comes from your social community. User-generated content (UGC) is the holy grail in social media. Everyone is looking for it! However, sometimes UGC isn’t as obvious as you’d think it would be. Most of the time, the good stuff is right in front of you and you don’t even see it.
When users reply to content on social sites, they’re basically telling you what they want. Pay special attention to the Comments section. This is where you’ll find ideas that you can turn into solid content campaigns.
We all know that listening is a huge part of social media; however, we have to know how to listen and what to listen for. It’s not just simply monitoring the conversation to make sure your community is happy. Truly listening to what they have to say can produce amazing content that you might not come up with on your own!
Warsteiner USA posted a plain text update asking a question about Thanksgiving recipes and received a reply that would make a great graphic or video.
Look to your comments and replies to find great content ideas from your community.
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