5 Common PPC mistakes to avoid in your business
If you want to benefit from pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, you need to have clarity and intent when integrating it as a digital marketing tool. The most challenging aspect of PPC advertising is that it is by no means an exact science. There is a lot of experimenting involved in getting the correct formula for your business and budget. The rewards, however, can be substantial with Google reporting up to double revenue for the budget spent in some cases. Let’s take a closer look. 5 mistakes to avoid to fast-track success in PPC advertising If you’re set on success in PPC advertising, here are the most common mistakes that business owners tend to make (and suggestions to help you fix them). 1. Neglecting the data Before making any hard and fast decisions about how your campaign is doing, and which ads and keywords to target, carefully analyse all the available data. You may find that you are doing well overall, with plenty of clicks and conversions, and so you might decide to keep your current spread of ads as it is. However, parts of your campaign may be working well, while others are not working at all. One or two of your ads may be carrying your entire campaign. Analysing the data allows you to shift your strategy and spending to maximise your results. 2. Avoiding negative keywords Many marketers either forget, neglect, or choose to ignore negative keywords. This can be a big mistake. While it may seem counterintuitive to target keywords that are meant to keep people away from your website, it is actually one of the best ways to establish your niche and make sure that you attract only visitors who are most likely to become paying clients. You would be doing both yourself and internet users a favour by establishing these limits at the very beginning. Yes, negative keywords will lead to less traffic, but they will eliminate only the non-converting visitors and ensure that you get the right traffic. 3. Forgetting about ad extensions Ad extensions can increase your click-through-rate by 10-20% – and they don’t cost any extra – yet many people forget to include them in their campaigns. Ad extensions can increase your ad’s reach, they can provide better value for money, and they offer more ways to reach you while increasing your online visibility. They may include contact details, site links, invitations to download an app (if you have one) or testimonials from your customers, among other things. Be sure to include as many of them as you can. 4. Not bidding on your own brand’s keywords You should always run at least one campaign that is dedicated to your own brand keywords. The main advantages of doing so are that brand keywords are generally much cheaper, yield higher search scores and convert much better than generic keywords. By neglecting to set up brand keyword PPC campaigns, you miss out on opportunities to capture your market. 5. Incorrect keyword targeting Sub-optimum keyword selection is a mistake that many companies make in their search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts. It can be particularly costly when it comes to PPC, as choosing the wrong keywords can result in either no hits at all or hits that don’t convert to sales, but which you still have...
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2 ways to maximise the impact of your e-mail marketing
Email marketing can be so effective that it can generate a US$38 ROI for every one dollar spent. Not everyone manages to realise that kind of return, however. Failure to reap rewards like this from your email marketing is not a question of your content, nor is it a matter of the size and quality of your mailing list. If you are not maximising the potential of your email campaigns, it is probably because of a lack of focus or coherent strategy. While you may get some returns from just hitting ‘send’ and hoping for the best, the only way to get the most from your carefully thought out email content, is to take a managed and strategic approach to your mailing list. Here are two tips that can help you turn your email marketing into the ROI machine it is capable of being. Focus your emails by segmenting your contact list One of the most common mistakes in email marketing is assuming that you can get results by sending the same message to your entire mailing list at the same time. However, you cannot treat all members of your audience as if their needs are the same. To maximise the impact of your emails, it is better to carefully segment your contact database so that you send the right message to the right people. On the flipside of that, segmentation will also stop you sending the wrong messages to the wrong people. It may seem as if this is stating the obvious, but it is worth emphasising that sending the wrong message can damage your brand and your audience engagement. The only result you normally get from a misdirected email is an ‘unsubscribe.’ The segmentation of your contact list, therefore, becomes about more than just creating conversions in the short term. It is a matter of long-term audience engagement and nurturing trust. You should be very careful about how you segment your database, however. First make sure that the segments you create properly represent your company’s aims and the business sectors that it serves. Then be sure that you fit the right contacts into the right segments. That will take a bit of scrupulous data gathering and analysis before you drop all your audience members into the right segments. Sets goals, devise strategies and send emails tactically As with any tool in marketing – or any other field for that matter – emails should be used in a carefully planned way, in the service of specific goals, and as part of strategies devised to meet those goals. Before sending out an email, decide why you are doing so. Set a SMART (specific, measurable, attainable and timebound) goal for each mail, and make sure that the mail is drafted and sent accordingly. Part of this is ensuring that you always send the right message to the right recipients at the right time. Make sure that the context and content of the message is appropriate for the specific market segment at the time of sending. This requires full knowledge and careful monitoring of your segmented contact list. For expert help in segmenting your contact list and getting the most out of your email marketing campaigns, contact WSI...
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Ideas to refresh your content marketing strategy
Running out of content marketing ideas for your blog? The good news is that you don’t have to search far and wide for fresh, informative content. Your blog should be focussed on telling the story of your business in a compelling way, so the ongoing development of your business has limitless potential for content marketing topics. Armed with this ever-developing story, creating engaging blogs is then a matter of fitting the content into pre-existing paradigms and formats. These have already proven themselves reliable vehicles for marketing content, and offer you inspiration and a structure to help you organise and present your information. They are frameworks and general outlines, into which the story of your business can be molded. There is a saying among musicians that there are only 12 notes but thousands of ways of playing them. The same goes for blogs: there are only so many kinds of blogs, and the key to their substance, variety and level of engagement is your content. Here are four of the most popular blog post concepts or formats into which any business can fit its stories. Content marketing ideas and topics for your business blog Your business story, the day to day activities, your industry and latest trends should give you plenty of inspiration to create relevant, exciting content for your audience. Let’s take a look at some of the topics that you can use to tell your business story: Share your successes There’s nothing wrong with taking a moment to brag a little – provided you do it with style, of course! A well-chosen success story allows you to demonstrate how your products or services work in a real-world scenario. Pick an example, describe the salient details and use the moment to show, rather than tell your readers why they should buy your products. Delve deep with a series of posts Sometimes a single blog, consisting of a few hundred words, is not enough to communicate the information you want to get across. You may want to explore the background of your industry, analyse complex market trends, or expound on the many uses and benefits of a particular product line. The best thing to do – both for your sake and your customers’ – is to break it up into shorter pieces that you can publish over several weeks or months. It would help if you didn’t let this run on for too long, however. Strike a balance between detail and sustained engagement. Guide your audience through common mistakes in your industry This is a very popular choice for almost all industries. Listicles that expound on the various ‘what not to dos’ of your industry enable direct and honest engagement with your readership, as well as the chance to present your business as a solution provider. You draw readers in with questions of how they could be doing things better – and then you provide the answers. Showcase the latest trends This is one of the simplest options. All industries are constantly shifting and evolving. If you take the initiative and use a blog to highlight your industry’s condition at any given moment, you present yourself as a business that has its fingers on the pulse. You can use the opportunity to tell readers how your products and services exemplify,...
read moreLinkedIn’s COVID-19 marketing guide
In a previous post, we unpacked LinkedIn’s helpful guide for the marketing industry. In this second part, we’re delving deeper into the strategies, activities and information that has been proposed for business owners who want to grow and see a return on the investment they are spending on marketing during COVID-19. LinkedIn’s key steps to showing the impact of your marketing activities: Part 2 1. Make measurement easier Getting an accurate look at the ROI of your marketing spend is vital to understand where you are wasting money that could be better spent elsewhere. With economies declining worldwide, it is more important than ever to know what you’re getting for your investment to ensure growth even in the toughest times. LinkedIn understands that this is a crucial aspect of business ownership, and has made it even easier to measure and prove your ROI when spending your marketing budget on the platform. In this endeavour, LinkedIn has partnered with various providers such as Google, Moat and Acxiom to help you optimise your LinkedIn measurement strategy. The aim of this is to give you confidence in using the platform and proving outcomes based on brand, business and performance. Whether you aim to educate your audience, generate more leads, or create awareness for your brand, LinkedIn’s performance is being showcased through a variety of partnerships, whether native or 3rd-party. When using these accurate measurements to make business decisions, you’ll have better information at your disposal to increase your decision-making abilities and drive your business into the post-COVID-19 era. 2. Implementing best practice This section provides a valuable, easy to follow list of tips to help you measure the impact of your investment in ad campaigns on LinkedIn. It takes you through various stages from launch to A/B testing and provides links to helpful resources for each of the steps in the best practice section. Let’s take a look at the tips: Be clear on your marketing goal and use it to identify your key metrics before you launch a campaign. Use the insight tag in LinkedIn to understand which actions your ads are driving (including sign-ups, downloads and sales). Create Lead Gen forms to accurately track the metrics at the end of the funnel (such as cost per lead) to ensure that you’re spending your budget on value-creating activities. Study your campaign results. The recommendation is to review your results after 7 days, but it’s always worthwhile to check in on your results as your campaign ages to determine performance over different periods. Take note of the audience demographics from your campaigns. This will help you to target audiences more accurately in future and customise your messaging to suit the audiences who respond best to your campaigns. Improve your bids to get the best for your budget by studying your performance insights. The campaign manager should become your virtual “war room” so you can adapt and improve your messaging across the various aspects of your campaigns. Test your messaging with A/B testing, so you understand how to better link messaging with audiences for improved results. 3. Goal alignment with LinkedIn In the previous post, we mentioned different scenarios that you might be facing in terms of your marketing budget (eliminated, reduced or maintained). This section of the LinkedIn guide provides you with...
read moreLinkedIn on marketing in the time of COVID-19
LinkedIn recently published an incredibly helpful guide for the marketing industry. It aims to help businesses to create growth in this challenging time and prove their ROI from marketing spend. There are six key areas in the guide, and each area contains strategies, tips and information that could help your business get on track post-COVID-19. This post will focus on the first three areas, so be sure to subscribe to our blog so you don’t miss part 2. LinkedIn’s key steps to showing the impact of your marketing activities: Part 1 1. Understand the role of marketing in the organisation Marketing covers a range of aspects within the organisation. As a business owner, you need to be well versed on the role that marketing plays and the impact it can make in building the brand, creating a strategic plan, and managing change in the organisation as well as the media and message planning that needs to be undertaken in the business. The LinkedIn guide has a run-down of each of these aspects that were just mentioned. If you want to learn more about activities you should be paying attention to (such as creating human connections through your brand) and potential pitfalls you need to be aware of (such as restructuring without losing key employees in your department), it would be a good exercise to work through the guide. It will help you to understand how to use data for brand building and strategic planning. There are actionable tips for the immediate changes you can implement to protect your business, and explains how to apply the latest media findings to tailor your media strategy for the current circumstances. Understanding the current market situation (through the findings mentioned in the guide) can help you to pivot your digital strategy to be more effective, especially if you have been neglecting your strategy recently. 2. Assess your business position If you’re creating a strategy for the way forward, you need to be fully informed about the current state of the business before heading off in a specific direction. Whether your budget has been eliminated, reduced or maintained, there are steps you should be taking to move your marketing activities forward as best possible. The guide has recommendations based on each of these scenarios (eliminated, reduced or maintained budgets) that will help you to aim your post-COVID-19 planning in the right direction for your organisation. The recommendations are aimed at understanding how to strengthen your organic strategy by posting organic content consistently; how to follow best practices for paid campaigns (especially in lead-building) and how to effectively create new brand campaigns if your budget has not shrunk over the last few months. Implementing drastic changes may not even be necessary, but it is important to understand the data from your operations and to use this information to make accurate decisions that are suited to your current business position. Being flexible and proactive is key in surviving the COVID-19 era in business and learning from previous recessions may help business owners to prepare for the possible financial hardships that could be down the road. 3. Assess your customer base As business owners who want to connect with our target audiences and grow our brands online, we believe in studying your customers continuously. If you have neglected...
read moreShould you add TikTok to your B2B digital marketing arsenal?
With over 800 million active users worldwide, billions of downloads, and a highly engaged audience, TikTok is a digital marketing dream. It’s interactive, collaborative, and undeniably addictive. Recently, TikTok also outshined Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Snapchat in the App Store and Google Play downloads. Does this mean B2B marketers should be taking note? Possibly yes, considering the enormous success seen by the World Economic Forum. The WEF recently garnered over 3.5 billion views of one of their TikTok hashtags at this year’s Annual Meeting and has amassed over 1,5 million followers on the platform. Based on the demographics alone, TikTok does not seem like the most intuitive choice for B2B marketing. We continue to see growth in the popularity of TikTok with B2C brands as they look to reach their audiences in new ways but as the majority of the audience on TikTok is Gen Z, this means that it may not provide the results a B2B brand would hope to expect. Although, we do need to take into consideration that B2C and B2B buyers both want to experience content that is inspiring, engaging, or helpful that adds value to their lives. After all, much like your B2C buyers, B2B buyers are just regular people too with many studies indicating that B2B purchasing decisions aren’t as rationally driven as we might have previously thought. When you think about it that way, TikTok’s ability to deliver bite-sized entertaining pieces of content makes it a great tool for B2B businesses. It has allowed B2B brands to have a more flexible and engaging approach to video as an additional way to educate their audiences. Digital marketing advice: is TikTok good for B2B? It appears that TikTok could be an interesting new opportunity for B2B brands and businesses. That’s not to say that TikTok will replace LinkedIn as the B2B marketers go to and for many, it probably won’t be a good fit. But whether or not you should try TikTok has less to do with the platform itself and more to do with your brand, the demographic your looking to reach and your resources available to create content. Learn more about the TikTok phenomenon and find out if whether or not you should include it in your digital marketing strategy. Need help with your digital marketing and social media? Then contact WSI OMS...
read moreThe 6 best email marketing tools of 2020
Have you assessed your email marketing tactics recently? While it’s true that you can’t afford to neglect any aspect of your digital marketing strategy, email is one that appears to be particularly vital. Roughly 86% of B2B marketers rely on email marketing to reach new clients. That’s a huge number of companies that have recognised the power of email to reach carefully targeted audiences. If you have found that it is not quite as effective for you, it could be that you just need to spend some more time and energy on it, or it could be that your strategy needs a boost – a new tool to help you improve your approach. There is never any shortage of email marketing tools out there. In 2020, with months of lockdown keeping people more attached to their screens than ever, email marketers have really had a captive audience, and developers have been happy to introduce new tools – or perfect existing ones – to aid their efforts. Here are six of the best ones currently available. All of them can be used for free or upgraded to paid subscriptions for even better results. SendPulse SendPulse brings all your customer communications onto a single multi-channel platform: email campaigns, SMS marketing, transactional emails and chatbots. There are over 130 templates to choose from, as well as a drag-and-drop functionality and a feature that allows you to resend unopened mails with different subject lines. The easy-to-use platform enables simple, flexible management of all your email communications. Zoho Campaigns Small to medium-sized businesses will find this tool useful. The free plan gives you access to features such as reports, templates and A/B testing. If you are already using the Zoho CRM, then it would make sense to choose this as your main email marketing platform. The free plan is quite limited, but the paid option is very reasonably priced at only US$6 per month for up to 500 subscribers. HubSpot’s Free Email Marketing Tool HubSpot’s email marketing package is a very attractive offering, with plenty of features available on the free plan. The easy-to-use drag-and-drop email builder helps to create professional marketing mails aimed at growing your audience. For one-person start-ups and larger enterprises alike, this tool equips users to build really high-end emails that your audience will love. It has the ability to make newcomers look like seasoned professionals, with little effort. It is also quite fun to use and encourages you to stretch your creativity without needing any prior design knowledge. Moosend Moosend is another great tool for beginners in the world of email marketing. The free plan offers you a feature-packed mailing platform, although it does limit you to only 1,000 subscribers. Paying the US$10 fee doubles that number. The programme offers a drag-and-drop editor, automation triggers, real-time analytics and more. SendInBlue SendInBlue is an indispensable tool for companies that rely on transactional emails. If you require frequent two-way interaction with your customers, from issuing receipts to offering password help, then this is probably what you are looking for. It is an easy system to use and offers several useful custom technical services. Mailjet Mailjet’s free plan gives you access to unlimited contacts, APIs and webhooks, statistics and a really impressive email editor. Its intuitive UX means you can just sign...
read moreInfluencer marketing for baby boomers
The idea that influencer marketing only works on the younger generation is being disproved, with baby boomers increasingly becoming more of a target. The perception that social media marketing should be aimed exclusively at young people is one that has been challenged, particularly given that Americans over 55 contribute 41.6% of consumer spending. Influencer marketing during a pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic has forced those in the digital marketing space to reassess their strategies, given the changes to our daily routines and ways of engaging with brands. People are using more data at home and 80% of consumers in the U.S. and UK say they consume more content than they did before the pandemic. Baby boomers had embraced social media before the pandemic; since 2012 there has been a 17% increase in the number of baby boomers who use Facebook and a 43% increase in the number who own smartphones. Those that have them are on their smartphones five hours a day, which is almost as much as millenials. Given that the older generation is more vulnerable to COVID-19, their resulting isolation has also caused certain changes in their behaviour online. More baby boomers are using online shopping or communication tools such as Zoom or Facetime to stay in touch with loved ones. This means that brands have a unique opportunity to reach this generation, which has more money and time on their hands than younger people, through strategic content marketing. A great way to achieve this is through influencer marketing, although the selection of the right influencer is key. The right ambassador with the right message which resonates with either the baby boomer generation or their children has the potential to reap major digital marketing rewards given the resources at their disposal and increased time spent engaging with technology. Contact WSI for more insights into how influencer marketing for baby boomers can help your brand...
read moreSocial media marketing adapting to a COVID-19 world
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on social media marketing as brands adapt to the changes in the way that people are engaging with them online. The unique pressures that brands face have forced some key changes such as the dramatic drop in sponsored content from 35% to just 4% on Instagram, but this also presents an opportunity to optimise digital marketing efforts. All about engagement in social media marketing While the volume of social media posts from brands has decreased by an average of 1,8 per day on Facebook, 1,9 per day on Instagram and 2,3 per day on Twitter, there are 7.3 more engagements per post per day on average across all networks and industries, which shows consumers are spending more time online and craving social interaction. The adage of never letting a crisis go to waste rings true in the digital marketing space, as brands who have duly adjusted their social media marketing content to focus on digital sales have reaped rewards such as the surge in e-commerce, with consumers preferring to order online rather than visit stores. Given the changes to daily routines, the ideal times for brands to post have shifted, with the hours of engagement starting and ending later. While the situation surrounding the pandemic for businesses and consumers remains fluid, digital marketing strategies should also be agile and ready to adapt to any opportunities that may arise, by using relevant data and insights into consumer behaviour online. Similarly, there have been several key changes to the various social media platforms themselves, which have also impacted how they should be used to extract value from a digital marketing campaign. You are now able to send marketing emails on Facebook and the new ‘Shops’ feature on Facebook and Instagram allows businesses to highlight their products and services more effectively. With the landscape itself constantly changing and evolving, effective social media marketing strategy should be continually evaluated and adjusted to be...
read moreTips to use PPC in an inbound marketing campaign
Pay per click advertising should form part of any inbound marketing strategy to maximise the reach of the content being promoted. The two should work together to complement and enhance one another. Once pay per click and inbound marketing strategies are pushing in the same direction with the same goals, your business will reap significant rewards. Aligning PPC and inbound marketing While it is common to think of pay per click advertising and inbound marketing as separate strategies, the two can complement one another if used correctly. Paid advertising increases the prominence of your content and sends more people to your website where they can engage further with your inbound marketing content. In order to run an effective pay per click advertising campaign, you should know who you are targeting, which keywords you would like to focus on and make use of data from testing and analytics to back those decisions up. Rather than running general ads promoting your brand visibility in a pay per click campaign, use it to promote your strongest content instead, so that consumers are more likely to engage with it. This works best on social media where people are looking for interesting content rather than just information. Paid adverts have been proven to work even once the customer knows what they are looking for, as long as the content is linked directly to a commercial opportunity. Make sure that your pay per click landing page is aligned to the content of the advert. Any good digital marketing strategy should look to integrate pay per click and inbound marketing devices to make the most of the money you are investing in paid advertising and the organic SEO content you are creating to represent your brand. Get in touch with WSI OMS today to get more insights into how to integrate PPC with your inbound marketing...
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