Content With Your Content?

While most marketing managers would agree that an annual review of their content strategy is well worth the time, most don't know where to begin.

"How do I create a content strategy that works?"

Here are the eight steps to creating a better content marketing strategy:

1.  Understand Your Target Audience(s)

First you should dig deep into your customer data.  How can you group your customers, and potential customers, based on purchase behavior?  See the previous blog post for more information on how to segment a market.  Step 1 is developing your brand personas and identify characteristics shared by the people in your segments.  Pay special attention to common pain points, decision drivers and social engagement trends.

2.  Set Goals

Content tactics vary significantly, depending on your business objectives.  From building brand awareness, to increasing customer loyalty, to customer service, content can be optimized to fill any number of needs.  Step 2 in creating a great content strategy is to identify what you want the content to accomplish and how you will measure the effectiveness of the content (KPIs).  Make your goals measurable and give them deadlines.

3.  Create a Plan

Step 3 in creating a content strategy is to use your business objectives and brand personas to start creating content plans that identify the relevant content mix and topics as they apply across the customer buying cycle.

4.  Keyword Research

As an extension of Step 1, this step is to do research to determine the words and phrases that your target uses to find information about the topics you've selected.  Use the Google AdWords Keyword Planner to get keyword ideas, to get an understanding of how frequently keywords are searched, and to understand how much competition there is for the keywords.

5.  Generate Optimized Content

Step 5 is to create content that is optimized for your target audience.  Using words and phrases that are SEO friendly and are on your keyword list, but read poorly, is a bad idea.  Search engines are smarter than ever and sacrificing readability in order to get higher organic rankings will only get you burned in the long run.  Content that's smart, fresh and relevant is more likely encourage engagement and get shared.  Content that feels robotic and/or grammatically incorrect is less likely to be shared and will likely damage your brand.  That being said, be aware of the keywords that you are targeting and use them naturally in your content.  Don't be afraid to use variations of your keywords (word order, synonyms...) to make it read naturally.

6.  Promote Your Content

Creating and publishing thoughtful, relevant content isn't enough.  There is too much noise on the web to get seen and heard.  Step 6 in your strategy is to outline how you will promote your content to your target market, and to industry influencers who may increase your reach.  One of the benefits of promoting your content is links to your websites.  These links can be gold for your rankings.

7.  Engage

Once you push your content to the web and promote it to your target, don't leave it at that.  Step 7 is to participate in the conversation, most importantly by listening.  The conversation around your content is a great place to find future content topics.

8.  Measure

The last step is to take a look at the KPIs you identified early on.  Is the content resulting in engagement?  Is it leading to your intended behaviors?  As you identify your baseline KPIs, measure future content against these figures to determine if you are improving.  Identify trends where you can.  Are you getting the desired result from content that's technically focused?  Is your target responding to content that's funny or educational?  Use this to guide future content creation efforts.

Using a systematic approach to generating and updating your content strategy will have a positive impact on your ability to reach your business objectives.

How to Segment a Market

On more than one occasion I've been asked "what is market segmentation?".  It's a pretty simple concept, but one that manages to evade many business owners.  Considering how important it is, it's about time we covered the topic.

What is Market Segmentation?

At some point in the history of commerce entrepreneurs realized it didn't make sense to treat all potential customers the same.  It's common sense really.  If you sell widgets, your pitch to a child would likely sound much different than it would to an adult.  You would probably use simple words, a metaphor, a friendly tone... you might even get down on your knees so you can chat at eye level.  Now if you were to use the same communication style with an adult, you would be considered rude and/or laughable.  This is the idea behind market segmentation.

Market segmentation is the exercise of taking a group of potential customers and grouping them based on common characteristics, so you can address them in the unique manner that is most effective for each group.

Why You Should Segment Your Market

The analogy that seems most appropriate here is hunting a sasquatch with a shotgun.  Shotguns shoot dozens of small metal balls all at once.  These balls spread out into a wide round pattern, maximizing the chance of hitting your target.  Unfortunately these balls don't pack much of a punch, so if you shot a sasquatch with a shotgun, you would most likely just irritate him, making yourself his target and probably also his lunch.  Rifles shoot a single bullet, making it much easier to miss your furry target, but when you do aim in the right direction, you're much more likely to bring home a trophy than become his lunch.

When we don't segment and try to communicate with everyone in the same way, it's like hunting a sasquatch with a shotgun.  We're likely to reach more ears, but less likely to bag the sale.

How to Segment a Market

The most common method to segment a market is to simply group people by their demographics.  Women over here, men over there.  Children at the little table.  You get the point.  This method for segmenting a market enables you to be a little more strategic in the way you communicate your value.  If this is your only option for segmenting, by all means go for it, but there is a better way.

Why Move Beyond Demographics?

Segmenting by demographics is quite alluring in its simplicity.  It's quite easy to say to yourself, "I'm going to talk to all women this way, and all men that way" and go about your day.  The problem with this method is it's just too simple to be useful.  We highly recommend that you segment by use scenarios.

Segmenting by Use Scenarios

Instead of thinking first about how to break up an enormous pool of potential customers by demographics, I would recommend thinking about how your product might be used, or what jobs your product might be hired to do.  For example, If you sell toys and attempted to segment the market by demographics, you might incorrectly exclude men and women without children.  

I would recommend that you consider all of the situations in which people toys.  You might first create one primary segment consisting of adults who give toys as gifts, with the first job being to bring joy to children and the second to help the adults feel good about themselves as caregivers/aunts/uncle/grandparents.  To reach this segment, you might consider the times of year (holidays, birthdays...) that toys are purchased as gifts and structure campaigns accordingly.

You might create a secondary segment consisting of children who buy the toys for themselves, with the job being to bring happiness to themselves, or to bring a sense of inclusion into a peer group.  To reach this segment you might consider year-round campaign.

Segmenting in this way will help you develop unique strategies to reach these customers in ways that are much more effective than demographic segmentation.

Tiered Bidding - When It's Great, When It's Not

When it comes time to set up a new ad group, most digital marketers understand it's a good idea to start by adding keywords with all of the match types available.  Using each of the match types will enable you to drive traffic volume, while learning more about the other ways people search.  Implementing tiered bidding to the match types makes the most sense initially, but leaving the bidding that way might be a mistake.  

Keyword Match Types

In order to understand why to start with tiered bidding, and why it might make sense to migrate from it, we'll start by discussing the types individually.

Broad Match Keywords

Broad match keywords allow search engines to be quite liberal when they pair search queries to the keywords you are bidding on.  Early on it's a good idea to use them so you can understand the ways people search for products like yours.  Review the search queries in your account to learn more about the actual terms searched and, when appropriate, add new keywords.  Because broad match keywords bring in traffic that is less than relevant, set your initial bids low.

Broad Match Modified Keywords

Broad match modified keywords are exactly like broad match, except they are more valuable because you specify words that must be in the search query.  As a result, when you set up a new ad group you should set your initial bids slightly higher than those for your broad match keywords.

Phrase Match Keywords

Phrase match keywords are clearly more valuable to advertisers than broad match and broad match modified because you specify the exact words and word order that must be included somewhere in the query.  When you set up your bidding for the first time, make sure you bid higher on your phrase match keywords than you do on your broad match and broad match modified keywords.

Exact Match Keywords

When a searcher types their query exactly like a keyword you are bidding on, this is gold.  These are the searches you want the most, because they have the highest propensity to convert.  When you first set up an ad group, bid highest on these keywords.

Tiered Bidding Strategy

Now that we know what to do, let's talk about how to do it.  Let's say we are setting up a tightly themed ad group.  Using the strategy outlined above, our bidding might look something like this:

• Broad Match: $15
• Broad Match Modified: $16
• Phrase Match: $17
• Exact Match: $20

When to Migrate From Tiered Bidding

Over time, keywords can start to perform in unexpected ways.  In some cases, broad match keywords can actually outperforming exact match.  How can this be?  There's a simple explanation.  Competition.  

Some digital marketers with limited resources, or who need to improve the performance of their campaigns, will pause broad match and/or broad match modified keywords so they can focus their budgets on keywords with the highest conversion rates and minimize waste.  It's a good strategy, but can leave little competition for broad match keywords.  Lower levels of competition for broad match keywords can drop their costs-per-click and, although broad match keywords typically have a lower conversion rate, the resulting costs-per-acquisition can, in rare cases, be lower than those for exact match keywords.

As a result of this kind of scenario, we usually recommend that bidding is adjusted based on CPA only.  Get a handle on the maximum acceptable acquisition costs for your business.  If a keyword is converting above the max CPA, it might make sense to drop the bid.  If a keyword is converting below the max, maybe you should raise the bid.  If it makes sense, make these adjustments without regard for match type, and without regard for the bid amounts for other keywords in the ad group.

By regularly monitoring the performance of your keywords, and adjusting bids according to CPA at the keyword level, your bids for some broad match keywords might be higher than phrase or exact, but it can increase the performance of you accounts.

Why Your Attribution Model is Undermining Your Marketing Efforts

Before jumping into why your attribution model is killing your digital marketing performance, let's do a quick recap on what an attribution model is and what the most common ones are.

Who Gets The Credit?

An attribution model is the method used to determine which tactics get credit for online conversions.  The most common models are:

• Last Click
• First Click
• Linear
• Time Decay
• Position-based

Last Click Attribution Model

If you don't know what kind of model you're using, it's a safe bet you're on Last Click, which is the default setting in Google AdWords.  This model gives full credit for all conversions to whatever produced the last click before the conversion.  

The major flaw in the Last Click attribution model is that it ignores any other activities that led up the last click.  In many cases, the last click came from a search using a branded term.  It usually takes quite a bit of effort to get a customer down the funnel to the point where they are ready to convert and this model gives no credit for that effort.

For example, a customer may have started with a general search term like "women's snowboards."  After learning more about the styles available the customer may have done additional searches like "women's freestyle snowboards" then "women's freestyle snowboards for channel bindings" and finally "Burton women's freestyle snowboards for channel bindings."  Since the last term contained "Burton," that search may have resulted in an ad from a trademark or branded term campaign.  

A novice digital marketer for Burton, using Last Click Attribution, may have assumed the campaigns that served ads before the branded term search, with few conversions and a subsequently high CPA, were ineffective and may have either turned them off or restricted their budgets.  Either decision could have taken the customer's journey to another brand, ultimately giving the sale to a competitor.  Using this model might be influencing you to budget starve campaigns that perform a vital role in assisting conversions for your business.

First Click Attribution Model

As you probably guessed, First Click Attribution gives all of the credit for your conversion to the very first search the customer made.  This model would help an advertiser get their ads in front of searching customers at the beginning of their journey, however, since it ignores the rest of the journey, it's flawed like Last Click.

Linear Attribution Model

Linear Attribution gives equal credit to all clicks along the path to conversion.  Now we're getting somewhere!  Using a model like this helps prevent budget starving those clicks that happen in the middle of the funnel.

Time Decay Attribution Model

For businesses that have longer sales funnels, a Time Decay Attribution might be appropriate.  This model gives more credit to more recent clicks, decreasing that credit for clicks that happened earlier on in the journey.

Position-Based Attribution Model

This model was created to give greater weight to the first and last clicks along the conversion path.  In AdWords this model gives both the first and last clicks 40% of the credit for each conversion, while clicks that happened between get 20%.

Which Attribution Model Should I Be Using?

In our opinion, you should be using either the Linear, Time Decay or Position-Based Attribution Model.  Each of these models give some credit to every campaign that produces clicks, that lead to conversions.  Whichever way you go, make sure you keep your model in mind when making budgeting decisions!

So there you have it.  Attribution can make a major difference in the performance of your digital advertising, so make sure you're using the one that makes the most sense for your business.  If you're not happy with these options, hang tight.  Google is testing some other attribution models that may be added as options to AdWords in the future.

4 Ways Retailers Can Win the Holiday Season

The holiday season is here and if you're like most business owners, you know how important it is to capitalize on the surge in shopping.  Get your paid search, display, retargeting and social campaigns in tip top shape to make the most of the holidays.

Mobile Bid Adjustments

At this point it should go without saying that a mobile should be a major part of your digital strategy.  Recent figures released by Google show that 76% of shoppers made a different decision about which brand or store to buy from after they did a mobile search Google.

More than ever, shoppers are open to purchasing from new retailers.  Don't let a weak mobile strategy get in the way of acquiring new customers.  Do everything you can to ensure your ads are showing to shoppers who are out and ready to purchase.

Measure your cost per lead or cost per sale at the device level so you can set bidding adjustments at levels that make sense for your business.

Local Ad Extensions

Shoppers are using their mobile devices when they are on the go, to find the gifts they need.  Use location extensions so your brick and mortar ads shows up when shoppers are out and about.  While you're at it, add any other ad extensions that make sense for the kind of business you have.  You're ads are more likely to show when you do.

Keyword Bids

Know your the key metrics for your business, so you can set your keyword bids at the maximum level that is profitable for you.  Most times you'll spend less, but during the holidays we typically see costs per click rise.  By setting your bids right, you'll get the most traffic you can, at a level that makes sense for your business. 

Campaign Budgets

Similarly to keyword bids, review your financials and set your budgets accordingly.  You're more likely to spend through your budgets during this time of year, and if the clicks are coming through at a profitable level, you might as well take advantage of it.  Monitor these closely.  You would hate to cap out on a campaign, if it's bringing in business.

4 Reasons to Use Ad Extensions in AdWords

One question we get a lot here in Utah is "Should I use ad extensions?"  To those in the PPC Management business, this seems like a no-brainer, but to people new to AdWords we can understand why it's not clear.

Ad extensions can seem like a bit of a mystery, but we answer this question the same way every time.  Yes, YES, and YES!!  Everyone using AdWords should use every ad extension that makes sense for their business.  Here are four reasons to use ad extensions:

1. They make your ads BIGGER.  A larger ad takes up more room on the screen, which means there is less room that can be taken up by your competitors.  Bigger is better!
2. They cost the same per click as AdWords ads without them.
3. They get more impressions.  If you are struggling to get more impressions for your ads, make sure you are using as many ad extensions as are relevant to your business.  All other things being equal, Google will show an ad with extensions before an ad without.
4. Finally, and most importantly, they provide more useful information to the searcher.  Google has put a serious emphasis on user experience.  Anything they can do to put more useful information in front their users, they'll do, which includes placing a priority on ads that they think provide more value to the user.

Not using ad extensions?  Have your PPC manager to add them to your AdWords advertising today for an immediate positive impact on your digital marketing performance.

New Click to Message or Click to Text Ad Extensions

Chances are, if you've been advertising on AdWords for a while, you're using all of the ad extensions.  I mean hey, they only make your ad bigger and push your competitors farther down the page.  Plus they make the ad more interesting and compelling to click.  But have you heard of the new Click to Message as extensions, also known as Click to Text ad extensions?

Considering the amount of time people spend on their mobile devices, it's no wonder Google is making it easier for consumers to communicate with the brands they love.  By setting up Click to Message ad extensions you can give users an easy way to start a conversation with you.  They are simple to create and you can create a pre-written message tailored to your product or service.

As your paid search manager to set up your Click to Message extensions so you can capitalize on those moments when your potential customers can't make a call and don't want to search for your mobile form.