In this article, I want to talk more about what you need to know about the bidding process for Video Ads. With your targeting in place, we can now plan our bidding strategy. There are three bidding approaches available on the GDN:

1. Default bids:

• If you don’t set specific bids for your targeting, AdWords will use your ad group’s default bid that you have set when creating your Ad group.
• Google Ads also uses your default ad group bid when you don’t have custom bids enabled or you have custom bids that don’t apply to where your ad is being shown.

2. Custom bids:

• Use custom bids if you want to set bids for an individual targeting method in your ad group. You can set these as max CPC or max vCPM.
• You can set a custom bid on each of the targeting options in the GDN. For example, you can set a max CPC bid on a specific placement. If the user is on that placement, you will be bidding with a higher bid than on other placements that your ad is being shown. Or if you place a customer bid on a certain topic, if the page where your ad is shown matches that topic, your ad will be using a higher bid than for other topics and so forth.
• When you implement a custom bid, AdWords will use this bid on the GDN and not your default bid if the criteria match.
• Note, you can only set a custom bid on one targeting method in each ad group, so it’s important that the customer bid choice matches your advertising goals.

3. Bid adjustments:

• Bid adjustments allow for better control over when and where your ad appears.
• Bid adjustments allow you to increase or decrease the bid amount for a specific targeting that is used of the max CPC or max vCPM in the ad auction.
• A Bid adjustment is a percentage change in your bid and is applied on top of the bids that AdWords uses to show your ad, either your custom bids or your ad group bid if you have not set a custom bid.
• A bid adjustment for any ad-group level targeting method can be set from -90% to +900%
• A bid adjustment can be set at the campaign level for the time of day, specific days, location and/or device.
• You can also set this at the ad group level for individual targeting methods and top content but you can’t have bid adjustments and custom bids for the same targeting method.
• You can set a device bid adjustment on both the campaign and ad group levels.

 

 

Enable Bid adjustments at the targeting method level:

In your Google Ads account:
1. On the side menu bar, click All campaigns and click one of the targeting methods – Keywords/audience/demographics/topic/placement
2. Select the line for whose bids you wish to edit
3. Click Edit
4. Select Change bid adjustments
5. Enter your new bid or bid adjustment percentage
6. Click Apply

• It’s important to develop a bidding strategy because a well-developed bidding strategy will make your ad group be at its most competitive at the right time, the right placement, on the right device when you most need it to be.
• Before developing a bidding strategy, you will need to know what your advertising goals are: in general, you will need to know what the advertising objectives are for each specific campaign and you will need to decide what the best targeting methods are and what account structure you need to meet those objectives.

 

How do bidding strategies work together? If you make multiple adjustments to the same campaign, all of the bid adjustments will be multiplied together to determine how much your bid will increase or decrease. Let’s say you set a custom bid of €1.00 for the “Beachbound Travelers” affinity audience, a bid adjustment of +20% for the “female” demographic, and a campaign-level location bid adjustment of +10% for people in Italy.

 

Google Ads will use your custom bid of €1.00 any time your ad shows to people associated with the selected interest. If the ad also shows to someone in the “female” demographic, add +20% of your custom bid to your max CPC bid, to make it €1.20 when your ad shows to these people. And if those people are in Italy, add +10% of your custom bid times your demographic bid adjustment, to make a max. CPC bid of €1.32.

 

 

When you are planning your bidding strategy, do not over look your device bid adjustment and consider the importance of mobile (as well as desktop and tablet) in your video strategy:

• Over half of all views on YouTube come from Mobile devices
• Video length (shorter videos perform better on mobile)
• Orientation (increase in popularity of vertical video)
• Specs (logo sizing, screen sizes)

Netflix tested 3 video ad formats (30-second TrueView ad, 15-second TrueView ad and a bumper ad) to see which resonated best with a mobile-first audience. The main results were:

 

 

• A Bumper ad proved best for product awareness & highest lift in a search query
• Teaser (15-second) ad proved best for Branded ad recall

 

They tested what kind of creative resonated with their viewers to help tap into a previously challenging market (Asia-Pacific).

 

You can alter your bids when your ads appear on desktops, tablets, and mobile devices by specifying a desktop, tablet or mobile bid adjustment at the campaign level or at the ad group level.
Apply bid adjustments for Desktop, Mobile and Tablet devices in campaign settings:

• In Campaigns or Ad groups, select the campaigns or ad groups that you’d like to modify
• Under “Device bid adjustment” in the edit panel, enter a value for “Desktop”, “Mobile,” and “Tablet” from -90% to +900%, inclusive
• You can also enter -100% to opt-out of a device for the selected campaigns or ad groups.

 

 

 

In this article, I will be talking about the advertising buying mechanism for Google Ads. There are three display buying mechanisms to remember when planning activity, including fixed cost and auction buying mechanisms.

 

 

Premium Fixed Price: Cost per thousand impressions (CPM)
A premium CPM campaign, such as a homepage takeover on a popular news website, is not part of the regular AdWords Google Display Network settings or abilities and can only be done through an AdWords account manager or a premium buy, through a platform such as Adroll or Google DoubleClick. The campaign is based on a fixed price (set by the advertising platform) for every 1000 impressions that an ad receives and generally involves bespoke creative.

 

Auction: Cost Per Click (CPC)
CPC bidding means that you pay for each click on your ad and you can set a maximum CPC bid that you are willing to pay for that click. This bid is then considered as part of the auction as the webpage is loading and advertising space is filled.

 

Auction: viewable Cost per thousand impressions (vCPM)
vCPM is the cost per thousand impressions for your ad on the Display network. You can set the maximum you are willing to pay for every 1000 impressions.

 

There are two main mechanisms available for buying advertising which is specific to the YouTube platform:

#1 Premium buys

Mastheads (the equivalent to a Homepage Takeover on the YouTube homepage) or Reserve Buys (guaranteed delivery of a certain volume of video impressions, against a broad or targeted audience segment).

 

#2 Auction buys (Trueview)

Similar to paid search advertising, an advertiser pays when the user chooses to engage, based on a bidding model.
The YouTube Masthead is priced on a cost per day format, which will differ by market. Typically, this format is used by larger advertisers simply due to cost, however, the reach it achieves is impressive, with millions of unique users visiting the homepage every day.

 

 

 

The YouTube Reserve Buy runs in a similar fashion to Trueview in that it runs as a ‘pre-roll’ before the video the user is about to watch. Reserve ads have the option to be ‘non-skippable’ and must be 30 seconds or less, whereas Trueview is ‘skippable’, and can be of any length. It is worth noting, that Reserve Buy pricing also varies depending on the levels of targeting chosen, and the formats available are constantly being re-evaluated and updated including a reduction in the number of non-skippable formats.

 

Video and display campaigns should be viewed as an ‘upper-funnel’ activity (except in the case of non-standard formats such as shopping or app installs), and the KPIs for the campaign should reflect this.

 

Video & display can reach people at all stages of the buyer’s journey, but its strength is considered to be in reaching people at the beginning of the buyer’s journey at the awareness, interest and consideration stages.

 

Remember, your campaign objectives will influence what campaign setting and targeting you choose, what kind of ad format you use and what kind of return-on-investment (ROI) to expect. So it is key to decide your objectives early in the planning stages.

 

Your objectives will also define the campaign measurement you choose to report on, and your campaign optimization should always be related to performance against the objectives set. In short, determining the success of a display and video campaign and ROI is dependent on how it performs against the objectives set.

 

It is important to know your advertising goals as these will dictate which objectives you choose when setting up your display and video campaigns. Consider the key objectives for effective display and video marketing strategy when choosing your campaign objectives and goals:

 

#1 Build brand awareness

This is when you have a new business, or launched a new product and your primary goal is to increase awareness of your brand or product. A campaign with a brand awareness objective will focus on impressions, customer engagement, reach and frequency and not on clicks. These types of campaigns will use placement targeting, rich media ad formats and rely on a CPM bidding strategy.

 

#2 Influence consideration

 This is when you want to set yourself aside from other businesses with a similar product. You need to educate your customer on your product and show them your unique selling points (USP). These types of campaigns will rely on retargeting to your customers as well as audience targeting.

 

#3 Drive an action

 These types of campaigns are focused on having your customers perform an action on your website, such as buying something, filling in a contact form, downloading a document, or going to a particular page. These type of campaigns will use very specific targeting, conversion tracking and remarketing.

 

 

 

In this article, I will cover the process of setting up a YouTube channel, uploading a video to your channel, managing your video details, and measuring the success of your video with YouTube analytics. There are two types of YouTube channel depending on whether you are an individual content creator, or you plan to operate as a brand online.

 

1. Personal channels are populated with personal details and only have one administrator, usually the individual themselves.

 

2. Brand channels are run and managed by an advertiser or company by multiple users; crucially there are no personal details on this channel info.

 

On your YouTube channel, you can upload videos, create playlists to group your videos in a more logical manner, and customise the appearance of your channel.

 

If you plan to advertise on YouTube, your channel will be visible for users to click through to, so bear this in mind when beginning to advertise on YouTube. Your YouTube channel should reflect your business, in a similar manner to your website.

 

It is also very important to ensure you keep your channel updated regularly, for example, any changes to your company branding, any hyperlinks to social media sites that need updating, or just changing the cover photo to reflect your latest campaign or initiative.

To create a Personal YouTube channel:

1. Search for YouTube on a computer or using a mobile site.
2. Try any action that requires a channel, such as uploading a video, posting a comment, or creating a playlist.
3. If you don’t yet have a channel, you’ll see a prompt to create a channel.
4. Check the details (automatically connected with your Google account name and photo) and confirm to create your new channel.

To create a YouTube channel for a brand you will begin with a personal channel that will then be deleted in the process of creating a Brand Channel:

1. Sign in to YouTube on a computer or using the mobile site
2. Go to your channel list
3. Create & fill out the details of your brand account & verify you would like a personal account. Then click ‘Create a new channel’.
4. Use the account switcher in the top right to switch to a personal account (the one that will become the brand account)
5. Visit your account settings, and next to your profile picture click on ‘Advanced Settings’
6. Select “Move channel to Brand Account”
7. Select your new Brand channel and opt to delete the personal channel you are logged in as
8. Select “Move Channel”
9. Follow instructions on the screen to add channel managers

 

 

To get started on YouTube, you have to start uploading your content.

To upload a video, follow the below steps:

1. Sign into your Google account.

2. Click on ‘Upload’ at the top of the page.

3. Before you start uploading the video, you can choose the video privacy settings.

4. Select the video you’d like to upload from your computer. You can also create a video slideshow or import a video from Google Photos.

 

5. As the video is uploading you can edit both the basic information and the advanced settings of the video, and decide if you want to notify subscribers (if you uncheck this option no communication will be shared with your subscribers). Partners will also be able to adjust their monetization settings.

 

6. click Publish to finish uploading a public video to YouTube. If you set the video privacy setting to Private or Unlisted, just click ‘Done’ to finish the upload or click ‘Share’ to privately share your video. If you haven’t clicked ‘Publish’, your video won’t be viewable by other people. You can always publish your video at a later time in your Video Manager.

Next, add metadata to your videos:

1. Video Title – provide a title that will encourage users to click on or watch the video
2. Video Description – accurately describe the content of the video a user is about to watch
3. Tags – add keywords to your video that can be found in YouTube search

 

Metadata enhances the discoverability of your videos and tells the system about your content. It is also the same metadata you will later rely on to effectively target your advertising, so it is a best practice among all content creators to complete this step.

 

You can use Video Manager to make changes to existing videos you have uploaded, including enhancing video quality, editing audio and changing descriptions. To access Video Manager, go to your YouTube Channel, click ‘Uploads’, and then select ‘Video Manager’.

You can add video thumbnails to your videos through Video Manager. This feature lets viewers see a quick snapshot of your video as they are browsing YouTube. It’s important to add a thumbnail to your video that accurately represents the content – this is the viewer’s first impression of your content, it should invite them to watch and engage.

 

Add a thumbnail to your video by following the below steps:

1. Sign into YouTube.
2. Go to Creator Studio > Video Manager.
3. Next to the video, click Edit.
4. On the right of the preview screen, choose a thumbnail.
5. Click Save changes.
You will need to verify your account to upload custom thumbnails – verification proves to the system there is a legitimate user behind the channel and not spam.

To drive further engagement, you can add YouTube Cards to your videos. With these, you can add a link to click through to:

• Your website
• Videos on your YouTube channel
• Playlists on your YouTube channel
• Your YouTube Channel

Learn How To Make Your YouTube Channel A Success

When creating your YouTube content, it’s important to know the “ABCDs of effective creative” for video:

A: Attract attention from the start
B: Brand naturally and meaningfully
C: Connect with the viewer through emotion and storytelling
D: Direct the user clearly to what you want them to do next

There are a number of tools available in the Creator Studio to manage your video content:

1. Dashboard: Check for notifications and alerts
2. Video Manager: Organize and update videos from one place
3. Community: Review and respond to comments, view private messages, see videos where you have been credited
4. Channel: Adjust channel settings
5. Analytics: Review channel performance
6. Create: Create new videos using the audio library and video editor

You can customize and manage your YouTube channel by clicking ‘My channel’ in the top right corner, ‘Customize Channel’,  ‘About’. Click the “Settings” icon by the subscribers’ button for Advanced options. Here you can add:

• Channel Name & Description
• Channel Art
• Channel Icon
• Channel Trailer
• Sections
• Playlists
• Featured Channels

It’s really beneficial to correctly set up and continually manage your YouTube channel. This ensures continued discoverability of your channel and its content on the platform and keeps your presence on YouTube consistent with your wider online, and offline, presence.

 

Within the Creator Studio, you can view a number of reports in the Analytics tab to analyze your video’s performance. YouTube analytics reports can help you maximize revenue and retention.
1. Earnings reports: includes estimated earnings and ad performance reports. These reports show your estimated earnings and total views for your channel. You can also see which ad formats had the most impact on driving revenue.

2. Watch-time reports: includes watch time, views, traffic sources, and audience retention reports. Audience retention reports display the views of every moment of your video as a percentage of views, helping you find the right mix of elements like video style, length, promotion, and more. Traffic sources reports show the various YouTube features and external sites through which the viewer found your content.

3. Engagement reports: includes subscribers, likes and dislikes, comments and sharing as well as cards and annotations reports. They are a great way to understand your audience interest.
This would be of most importance to content creators who rely on the organic success of their videos and are at the receiving end of YouTube advertising activity in that they are producing the content advertising appears amongst. You can also Get Free YouTube Subscribers by visiting YTBPals.

 

 

 

In this article, I want to talk about how to create a Youtube Video Campaign. To begin advertising on YouTube, link your YouTube channel to Google Ads. This will allow you to serve your videos as ads to customers watching videos on YouTube and the Google Display Network.
Follow these instructions to link your YouTube channel to an AdWords account using YouTube:

1. Sign into your YouTube channel.
2. Click your channel icon or name in the upper corner of the page to select the channel you want to link.
3. Navigate to the left side panel of Creator Studio.
4. Under “Channel,” click Advanced.
5. Under Ad Words account linking, click “Link an AdWords account“.
6. Follow the instructions, and then click Finish.
7. Once the owner of the AdWords account approves your request, your YouTube channel will be linked to that AdWords account.
You can also link your Google Ads account to your YouTube channel:

1. Sign in to your AdWords account.
2. Click the gear icon next to your AdWords account name at the top of the page.
3. Click Linked Accounts.
4. Click YouTube in the navigation panel on the left.
5. On the “YouTube channels” page, click +CHANNEL to choose the channel that you want to link to an AdWords account.
6. In the “Link a YouTube channel” dialogue, search for a channel or enter its URL.
7. Follow the instructions to complete the process.

 8. Once the owner of the YouTube channel approves your request, that channel will be linked to your AdWords account.

The reason this is so beneficial because when you are linking a YouTube channel to an AdWords account, you can access additional video view statistics and additional features that you will find yourself relying upon as you start advertising:

• Ad views count towards overall view count: You can view ad completion rates of videos from linked channels
• Add call-to-action overlays on videos: You can create CTA overlays on videos from linked channels. You can use these to share more information about the content of your video or to raise interest in your channel, other videos, or additional websites – especially useful if you’re hoping to drive a specific action.
• Remarket to users who have viewed your videos: You can create remarketing lists within AdWords based on viewer’s past interactions on your linked YouTube channels.
• Report on earned views and subscriptions to your channel: You can view engagement statistics such as earned actions metrics (e.g. earned views, earned subscribers, etc.) from videos and video ads from linked channels within AdWords and learn the value of your advertising for your wider YouTube strategy.

Be aware that linking accounts does not give the YouTube channel owner control over the AdWords account and does not let the advertiser add, delete or modify videos from the linked channel – it’s purely linking the two platforms to boost your advertising capabilities.

Create a video advertising campaign in Google AdWords by following the below steps:
1. Log in to Google AdWords and click ‘+Campaign’
3. Choose ‘Video campaign’ from the dropdown
4. Select campaign subtype – Standard

5. Click Continue

Create a video ad by entering the URL of the YouTube Video to be used and select your video from the list provided:
1. Select the Ads & extensions tab
2. Click the + button
3. Select Video Ad
4. Select the video you want to promote and click the video ad format from the list provided (In-stream ad)
5. Enter the Display YouTube URL of the video
6. Enter the Final URL of the video
Note, for In-Stream ads, the Final URL can be on YouTube or an external website.

 

 

The steps are much the same for Video Discovery ads, until the point you choose your ad format.

For Video Discovery ads:

• You must choose a thumbnail for your ad – think about how this will serve as the ‘teaser’ for your ad on the networks that you select.
• You will write ad copy to accompany your thumbnails – this text follows the same guidelines for Google AdWords text ads.
• When a user clicks on your Discovery ad, you can choose to bring them to either the video’s watch page on YouTube or your YouTube Channel page – you cannot direct users to an external website.

It’s very important to remember your companion banner when creating your video ads. A companion banner is a clickable thumbnail image that accompanies a TrueView in-stream ad. On a YouTube watch page, it appears next to the ad, in the top right corner (on a desktop computer).
You can choose from an auto-generated companion banner or upload your own.
The technical specifications for companion banners that must be adhered to are:
Dimensions: 300×60 pixels.
Maximum file size: 150KB.

 

 

Our third video ad format is the Bumper ad, a short, non-skippable format that is no longer than 6 seconds. You will have to have a video already edited to the required length. You will also have to bid on a CPM basis for these ads as they are not view or click-based.
Like you did before, sign in to AdWords and follow the below steps:

• Click the campaigns tab and create a standard video campaign for your bumper ads.
• Create your first adgroup and select the video you uploaded for this ad and select the Bumper Ads format.
• Next, set your budget. “Bidding” will be set to Maximum CPM because of the bumper format.
• Choose your basic initial settings – networks, locations you want to target, the language of your customers, and any advanced settings.
• Click Save and continue.

3 brands; X-box, La Mer and SurveyMonkey used bumper ads for different forms of storytelling, from remarketing to simple storytelling. Great examples of using short-form content to achieve your goals effectively.
X-box: Launch day of the X-box game Halo Wars 2, they invested heavily in remarketing with bumper ads
La Mer: Used bumper ads to efficiently drive awareness of the brand’s new makeup suite, with a bumper ad for each product of the suite
SurveyMonkey: Used bumper ads to highlight the value and ease of its tool by messaging the main components of their platform: “creating surveys, collecting answers, and analyzing results”.

Advanced advertisers may choose to run a universal app campaign to promote their app across the web – but the solution is not as advanced as you may think once you already have an app live within the Play store.
Create a universal app ad in your video campaign:
1. Sign into your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.
2.In the “Campaigns” tab, click +Campaign and select Universal App campaign.
3. Enter a campaign name. You might use a name that tells you this is an app installs campaign. The on-screen instructions will prompt you through the setup. The benefits of a Universal App Campaign is the wide variety and reach of this campaign which utilises a wide variety of creative assets.
4.Start by selecting the app you will be advertising from the drop-down menu, or “Add a new app” to enter a new one.
5. In the “Ads” section you can enter up to 4 individual lines of text, these will be rotated within your ads depending on the format being displayed
6. Upload your image assets, and be sure to remember:

• You can include up to 20 image files with a max size of 150KB.
• Landscape images are most relevant for native ad units while portrait orientation is most valuable for interstitial content, particularly on mobile.

7.You can also include up to 20 YouTube videos for use as ad creative – in addition to automatically generated videos
created by AdWords with assets from your app store listing
8. Choose any target locations or languages. Just note that AdWords won’t translate your ads so your text and creative will have to align with these settings
9. In “Campaign Optimization” choose to optimize for Installs (gathering new users) or In-app Actions (new users likely to undertake an action, such as a purchase or profile creation).
10. Set target bids and budget – projected install volume is available for Android apps when your Play and AdWords accounts are linked

11. Click “Save and Continue” to launch your campaigns.

Note: Android app installs will automatically be tracked in Google Ads.
Do you really struggle to increase your subscribers? Learn How To Get Free YouTube Subscribers

 

 

 

 

In this article, I will be talking about how to do Advanced Targeting for Video Ads. Observation is an optional feature recommended for advanced advertisers.

 

• Use observations to get reports on certain criteria without restricting the reach of your ad group. This means that observations won’t change who can see your ads, or where they can show, but they do allow you to monitor how ads are performing on your selected placements, topics, or audiences while your campaign is running.
• As well as this, observations show you how additional criteria perform when they fall within the scope of your existing targeting. You can then use this data help you optimize your campaigns, such as making bid adjustments or to create new ad groups with targeting criteria based on your observations.
• Use observations when you don’t want to narrow your targeting any further but you want to see how certain targeting might perform within the criteria already set.

You can add observations by using the “Edit all targeting” page. You can also add an observation as you would add a targeting method except you will select to add it as an observation as opposed to a targeting method.

 

To apply targeting options, follow the below steps in your AdWords account:

• In the page menu on the left, click on a targeting method (Keywords, Audiences, Topics, or Placements).
• Click the plus (if you have no targeting yet) or pencil button (if you already have targeting) to edit.
• Click ‘Select an ad group’, then choose an ad group from the list that appears.
• For observations, click the ‘Add observations’ dropdown.
• Select a method from the dropdown.
• Select the criteria you’d like to add and click Done.
• At the bottom of the page, click Save.

You can exclude specific demographics, audiences, remarketing lists, keywords, topics or placements from your campaign targeting to further refine where your ads show.
You can manage targeting exclusions within Google Ads by:

• Navigating to which targeting method you wish to exclude and apply exclusions at campaign or adgroup level, per targeting method.

To exclude by Demographics:

• Click the Demographics tab.
• Click Gender, Age, or Parental status to select a demographic targeting method.
• Click + Targeting.
• Under “Campaign exclusions,” click the Add campaign exclusions dropdown menu, and then click Demographics.
• Under “Demographics,” select the checkboxes of the specific demographics you want to exclude:
• Gender
• Age
• Parental status

To exclude by Keywords:

• Add negative keywords at the ad group or campaign level by clicking the +Keywords button above either table.
• Use the drop-down to select the ad group or campaign that you’d like to add negative keywords to.
• Add one negative keyword per line in the text field.
• To add broad match negative keywords, you’ll need to add the synonyms, singular version, plural version, and other variations such as cup, glass and glasses
• To add a negative phrase match keyword, surround the term with quotation marks—for example, “wine bottle”
• To add a negative exact match keyword, surround the term with brackets—for example, [bottle opener]

To exclude Topics:

• Click either the “Add ad group exclusions” or “Add campaign exclusions” drop-down menu and select “Topics.”
• Type a term or phrase in the search box to find a topic to exclude or click each topic to see the sub-topics you can select. Click add » next to the topics and sub-topics you’d like to exclude.

To exclude Placements:

• Click either the “Add ad group exclusions” or “Add campaign exclusions” drop-down menu and select “Placements”
• Type a placement in the box, entering just one placement per line. You can exclude up to 10,000 placements per campaign.

 

You can control the categories of content on which you show and the audiences which that content is suitable for, within the campaign settings in Google Ads:

1. Click the Settings tab.
2. Under “Campaign settings,” click “Content exclusions”.
3. In the new window, select the content exclusion that you want to apply to your ads. Note: Mature and unlabelled content is excluded from all campaigns by default.
4. Click Save.

 

Action Point
PS: If you would like to have an online course on any of the courses that you found on this blog, I will be glad to do that on an individual and corporate level, I will be happy to do because I have trained several individuals and groups and they are doing well in their various fields of endeavour. Some of those that I have trained include the staff of Dangote Refinery, FCMB, Zenith Bank, and New Horizons Nigeria among others. Please come on Whatsapp and let’s talk about your training. You can reach me on Whatsapp HERE. Please note that I will be using Microsoft Team to facilitate the training.

I know you might agree with some of the points that I have raised in this article. You might not agree with some of the issues raised. Let me know your views about the topic discussed. We will appreciate it if you can drop your comment. Thanks in anticipation.

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Remarketing For Video Ads: How To Persist In Audience Conversion

 

 

 

 

Remarketing lets you show ads to people who have previously visited your website, watched your YouTube content, or used your mobile app. It allows you to re-engage with them as they visit sites on the GDN or watch videos on YouTube.

 

 

• For example, when a visitor leaves your website without buying anything, remarketing helps you re-engage with them by showing them your ad as they go to other sites. You can target them with specific focused messaging or choose to upsell additional products and services to existing customers.
• You can also remarket to users who have watched your videos, with further video ads.

 

Similar audiences

• A customer audience solution, Similar Audiences allow you to create a list of new users, based on a list of existing users.
• When you create Similar Audiences you can show ads to audiences who are similar to those in your remarketing lists or video viewer lists – these similarities are based on shared traits in their online behaviour.
• You can base your Similar Audiences on your past visitors remarketing list to help effectively broaden your reach to interested users or you could use a list of converted users to potentially more of your ideal customers.

 

 

You will add Audience targeting at an ad group level. If you want to try a number of targeting methods and compare their performance, it would be recommended you create a unique adgroup for each audience targeting method:
1.Start by selecting the campaign and ad group you’d like to add audience targeting to.
2.Click the Audiences tab.
3.Click +Targeting, click Edit Audiences and select “Targeting”
4.In the Audiences dropdown menu, choose the type of audiences you want your campaign to reach. Choose from Affinity audiences, Custom affinity audiences, In-market audiences, Remarketing lists, Video remarketing lists:, Customer email lists:, Similar audiences.
5.As you select the audiences you want to add they’ll appear in the “Selected” column.
6.Finally, click Save and continue.

 

 

 

As said earlier, contextual targeting refers to the ‘Where’ – where you want your ad to be shown.

 

Contextual targeting is the process of matching your ads to the content of a website. Or in the case of advertising on YouTube, the theme or topic of the video content or channel. In using contextual targeting, you are deciding where you want your ad to appear based on the content it will be surrounded by.

 

 

You can target your ads based on content in three ways:

1. Content keywords: Allows you to effectively target your audience through the video content they are watching, the search terms they enter on YouTube.com, or on Display Network keywords within the content of a website.
2. Topics: Lets you reach a broad range of videos, channels, and websites related to the topics you select.
3. Placements: Allows you to choose specific YouTube Channels, YouTube Videos, websites across the internet or mobile apps that you would like to show your ad on.

 

If you choose to target by keywords, there are some factors to keep in mind:

• First, choose words and phrases relevant to your products and services. Just like keywords in Search, AdWords will essentially create a topic around these keywords (though there is no way to know what that theme is) and match that to a website, webpage or app with the same or similar theme.
• It is important to note that it is vital that you tightly structure your keywords by theme in order to be relevant for correct matching. Do not use Broad match keywords and preferably not Phrase match keywords as this will lead to the structure being too loose and your ad showing on non-relevant websites.
• Ideally, it is advised to use keywords in a display campaign very cautiously and with discretion as they can be inaccurate.

 

Similar to keywords, targeting by topics lets you place your Google ads on website pages about the topics that you choose.

• It tells AdWords what topic you want your ad matched to and not the system automating its own topic around your keywords, this allows for a more precise form of targeting.
• For example: By targeting the “Adventure travel” topic, you enable your ad to be shown on a website that includes content about adventure travel or related topics.
• Targeting on Keywords or Topics by themselves will allow you to quickly reach a wide audience or generate more traffic to your website and your ad will be placed on websites with relevant content. This will allow you to reach an audience that is potentially interested in your product or service.
• Topic targeting will typically give you high impressions and a low CTR and conversion rate but can be useful for awareness-driving and upper-funnel activity.

 

To add Topic targeting to your campaigns, begin in the same way you started added targeting to your Ad groups.

1.First, choose the Topics tab below Audiences and Demographics.
2.Click the pencil icon to add targeting.
3.From the drop-down menu, select “Add topics”.
4.Choose as many topics and sub-topics as you like. Any topics and sub-topics you have added will appear in the “Selected” column.
5.Click Close and then Save.

With placement targeting, when we say placements we are referring to a website or specific video on YouTube.
We can also refer to automatic placements, where the system automatically displays your ad, or managed placements
where you manually select to display your ads.
Placement targeting involves choosing the website on the Display network, or YouTube video, where you want your ad to be shown. These can be websites that your customers visit and or YouTube content related to your product or services (managed placements).
You don’t need keywords for placement targeting and the system will only look at your managed placements when looking at which site to place your ad. You can target an entire site or specific pages on the site, similarly, you can target a list of specific YouTube videos.

To add placement targeting in the AdWords interface:
1.Click Placements from the left sidebar.
2.Click the + button.
3.From the drop-down menu, select “Add placements”.
4.Type in the name or URL of the placement where you’d like the ads in your ad group to show.
5.If you’d like to add multiple placements at once to your ad group, click the “Add multiple placements at once” link at the bottom of the box.
6.Click Close and then Save to add the placements to your ad group.

You can refine your campaign by combining contextual and audience targeting at the Ad group level. For example, if you sold a compact digital camera, you might want to target users that have an affinity for travel who are visiting a popular travel photography blog to raise awareness of your product.

 

If you don’t add a targeting method to an ad group, the only restrictions to where your ads can show are by the campaign and account settings. This means your ads can run anywhere on the web, across the Display Network and YouTube, within your campaign and account settings and will result in not receiving a good ROI. So it is worth applying at least one of these targeting options, if not both, in some form.

 

Groupon combined both behavioural, contextual and location targeting and aligned their ads with their offer categories to show the most relevant ads to new potential customers.

This meant they had rich data about what their target audience liked, and they could place their ads in highly relevant placements, for example promoting family activities for parents or recipe-related ads for foodies.

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Google Display Network: How To Reach Larger Audience Through Google

 

The Google Display Network (GDN) is the display and video advertising channel that allows advertisers to serve display and video ads to their target audience using the Google Ads interface. 

• The Google display network reaches over 90% of all people on the internet globally across over 2 million websites. It is the display and video advertising channel that allows advertisers to serve display and video ads to their target audience using the Google Ads interface.
• The GDN allows advertisers to connect with customers and potential customers with text, images, rich media and video ads (including YouTube). It can help you reach people while they are browsing websites, reading the news, their favourite blogs, looking for shopping or travel inspiration, or watching a YouTube video.
• When you advertise, you can choose to show your ads in particular contexts (like “outdoor lifestyles” or “cnn.com”), to particular audiences (like “young moms” or “people shopping for a new sedan”) and/or in particular locations.

 

Also, on the GDN you can remarket to people who have been on your website before and may or may not have converted and show them a tailored ad to increase conversions and/or brand awareness, serving ads to users as they browse the web.

You have two options when you advertise on the GDN:

• Search Network with Display opt-in: Helps you reach people as they use Google search and visit sites across the web. In it’s most basic form, this means allowing your text ads to display elsewhere outside of the search results page using your keywords as your contextual targeting across the web.
• Display Network only: Your ads are matched to websites or mobile apps that include content that’s related to your business or to your customers’ interests – a pure display campaign.

 

Something to be very careful of Each campaign choice also gives you the option for a smart display creation where the system chooses the right bidding, targeting and ad creation for you. This is not recommended as they are difficult to optimize because the system does this for you and very rarely gets you refined results. 

 

 

When you begin building your campaigns, you can choose one of three predefined campaign goals – and for ease of use, you will find that they are aligned to the buyer’s journey. These include building awareness, influencing consideration and driving action.

 

• The “Awareness” goal gives marketers the opportunity to reach prospects at every stage of the buyer’s journey.
• The “Influence Consideration” option is designed to help you find the right audience across millions of websites.
• “Driving Action” lets you be strategic and puts your message in front of potential customers at the right place and at the right time.

The GDN lets you advertise in a variety of formats and sizes with text ads, static and animated image ads, rich media and video ads.

• Text ads: A word only ad format, the same as on the Search network but may display differently on the GDN, adapting to fit websites and screen sizes.
• Image ads: They can be static or animated in .gif or HTML5 format and are a great way of delivering your message or uplifting brand awareness in a visual way with very simple animation.
• Rich Media ads: Rich media ads are essentially image ads that have interactive elements, animations or other aspects that can change depending on who is looking at the ad and how they interact with the ad. Examples of rich media ads include an ad with a moving carousel of products, an ad with animated layers that move into place, or dynamic ads that adapt to display the product a user was last looking at.
• Video ads: You can create a video ad that targets YouTube or any website that has YouTube ads running on it.
• Responsive ads: Responsive ads automatically adjust their size, appearance, and format to fit available ad spaces. They can transform into text or image ads. It is a speedy way to create an image, and you can ensure that you have an available ad format for every website on the GDN, as it adapts to the ad format allowed on different websites. Responsive ads can also be shown as native ads which generally have good impressions and CTR rates.

 

Before creating your ad, you’ll need to prepare an image file that is sized and formatted appropriately. There are a great variety of sizes of inventory on the Google Display Network. Advertisers are able to upload both animated and non-animated image ads on the Google Display Network as well as HTML5 ads in as many sizes as they like.

 

A static, non-animated image ad on the Google Display Network can be created as a .gif, .jpg, .png, .swf or .zip format. The size of these images is measured in pixels (px) and the file can be no larger than 150kb.

 

Animated image ads can be created in .gif format and the maximum length it can be is 30 seconds. If it’s shorter, you can loop the animation, but the animation must stop after 30 seconds and the ads must be slower than 5 frames-per-second.
If you choose to create HTML5 ads, you will need to upload a .zip file containing HTML and optionally CSS, JS, GIF, PNG, JPG, JPEG, SVG. Again, it will have to be less than 150kb.

 

If resources allow, it would be recommended to use the HTML5 file format to create animated image ads as HTML5 allows you to make your ads more engaging and renders better than an animated GIF ad.

It’s recommended to include a wide variety of sizes as different websites will take different formats, therefore increasing your potential reach.
Square and rectangle: 

• 200 × 200 Small square
• 240 × 400 Vertical rectangle
• 250 × 250 Square
• 250 × 360 Triple widescreen
• 300 × 250 Inline rectangle/ Mid-Page Unit (MPU)
• 336 × 280 Large rectangle
• 580 × 400 Netboard

Skyscraper: 

• 120 × 600 Skyscraper
• 160 × 600 Wide skyscraper
• 300 × 600 Half-page ad
• 300 × 1050 Portrait

Leaderboard: 

• 468 × 60 Banner
• 728 × 90 Leaderboard
• 930 × 180 Top banner
• 970 × 90 Large leaderboard
• 970 × 250 Billboard
• 980 × 120 Panorama

Mobile: 

• 300 × 50 Mobile banner
• 320 × 50 Mobile banner
• 320 × 100 Large mobile banner

On YouTube, you also have a number of ad formats to choose from:

 

Trueview In-Stream: Your video ad plays before, during, or after other videos. After 5 seconds, the viewer has an option to skip the ad. This ad format gives users a choice to engage with your advertising. Typically, a user who chooses to engage is more engaged than one who is simply exposed to an ad (through an ad format such as non-skippable video ad or an interstitial on a website), and the added benefit with Trueview is you only pay when a user either watches the ad in full or more than 30 seconds (whichever comes first), or clicks through to your website.

 

 

This means you are only paying for your most-engaged viewers and therefore making it a very efficient form of advertising. In this sense, it gives the same democracy that comes from Google Search to Video advertising – allowing users to choose which content and advertising they want to see, and only charging the advertiser when a user chooses to engage with their business.

 

Trueview video discovery: Promote your video in places of discovery, including next to related YouTube videos, as part of a YouTube search result, or on the YouTube mobile homepage. The TrueView video discovery format on YouTube is extremely versatile – not only can you run video ads on YouTube, but you can also run them on the Google Display Network. This is a great way to expand the reach of your video ad and gain more views.

 

Bumper Ads: Short, non-skippable video ads of up to 6 seconds that must be watched before your video can be viewed. This format is ideal for driving brand reach and frequency. The short time frame makes them very useful for teaser campaigns or echoing longer-form creatives, similar to how on TV a longer ad would be shown to launch a campaign before being edited down to the core campaign messages.

 

It’s important to note that you must create separate ads for each format, as each format fulfills a different objective.

There are a number of advanced advertising options for advertisers looking to drive more specific actions:

• Trueview for Shopping – if you use Google Merchant Center (a tool that helps you upload your store and product data to Google and make it available for Shopping ads and other Google services) you can use your existing Merchant Center product data to generate shopping cards that display your products as part of your TrueView ad. Up to 6 shopping cards may appear on a video ad at a time. It would be a solution for advanced advertisers who are familiar with the Merchant Centre and Shopping feeds.
• Universal App campaigns – allow you to promote your app across YouTube, GDN, Search and within the Google Play store.

 

The premium offering is the Masthead, a customizable creative that runs on the top of the YouTube homepage for 24hours in your chosen market. It is similar to a homepage takeover on a premium publishing site. This placement is bought at a fixed price, booked on Cost-Per-Day basis, the price of which varies by market. Placement such as this is generally used for a large-scale campaign such as a launch or rebrand or it can be popular for movie releases and trailers. Although it can be a very expensive media buy, given its prominence, it does have great potential reach.

 

 Creating High Performing Emails: How To Do It Better (+Examples)

 

In this article, I will take a look at how to create high performing emails. I will also be looking at: 

 

The next principle we will discuss is personalization and the impact it has on running an effective email strategy. By personalizing your emails you give the user a unique experience, which will help drive opens, clicks and conversions.
Here is an example of an email from Amazon, tailored specifically to the user:
A. Recommendation for the customer: the email clearly states “We have a recommendation for you” letting the user know that this email is tailored to their interests
B. Addresses the customer by name: using a customers’ first name makes the email seem more personal
C. Display a product based on the customers viewing history: By using data on customers viewing history you can compose an email the user will immediately recognize and increase the chance of a conversion

 

It is important to be strategic about the timing of your email to ensure it delivers the right message at the right time in order to drive open rates. For the majority of email campaigns, one single send time will not suit all recipients. Here are some tips for improving the timing of your email send:

• Test your audience: there is no specific day and time that will suit all organizations. Utilize A/B testing to find the optimal send time for your audience.
• Optimal days: from the majority of studies Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are the best days to send email campaigns but as mentioned above, always test this with your audience.
• Optimal send times: the best sends times in a day include 10 a.m., 8 p.m.-midnight, 2 p.m, and 6 a.m.

 

Note: make sure to take into account customers in different time zones.
Building an email list is one thing, keeping those subscribers interested through a strong email engagement strategy is another. Here are some actions that can be taken to ensure that your emails draw your readers and recipients in and keep them engaged:

• Start your email communications off on the right foot by welcoming all new subscribers.
• Tell your subscribers how often you will be emailing them. This will set expectations early for the recipients and they will become familiar with how often you email them.
• Set expectations about what your emails are focused on. Let your subscribers know what types of emails they will be receiving and allow them to set preferences for what emails they would prefer to receive.
• Simplify your email messaging. By reducing the amount of different CTAs and text in your email, you can focus the subscribers’ attention and concentrate on a single goal.
• Create targeted segments around individual experiences. As we saw in segmentation, there are many ways to group users and by doing so you will see better results.
• Always test your audience. The best way to see what works for your subscriber is to continuously test and optimize your emails accordingly.

 

After every email campaign, it’s important to perform data-driven analysis and apply the learnings to optimize future campaigns. By applying the learnings of past campaigns you can increase the opens, clicks and conversions from your emails and thus drive business growth.
We will take a look at email analytics in my next article. 

 

To implement an efficient email strategy you will need the help of a software program. That’s where Email Service Providers come in. An email service provider, or ESP, operates and maintains the software and hardware for delivering bulk email. They provide a platform for managing and segmenting your contact lists, building email templates, and sending and tracking your campaigns on a large scale.

 

An ESP should make the process of sending emails and managing your contact database easier. Some of the features an ESP provides include:

• Contact database: this is where the subscribers’ email address and all related information is stored, making it easy to add, edit, and remove contacts
• Segmentation: because the contact database stores all the information about your contacts, the ESP can use this data to segment users
• Personalization: such as adding the users the first name of each email or displaying certain content based on their preference
• Automation: allowing repetitive tasks, like sending a welcome email to every new subscriber, to be automated and sent automatically
• Tracking behaviour: providing insights to who opened and clicked the email
• Unsubscribe management: manage users who want to opt-out from receiving your emails
• Email and landing page creation: drag and drop builders allow you to quickly create and edit your emails and landing pages

 

Effective ESPs enable emails to be tailored to their recipients, facilitating a unique experience.
This unique experience is supported by three different considerations:

 

#1 Merge fields
Placeholders, such as an email address and greeting, where information is populated from the contact database. For example, using the customer’s first name to personalize an email. As you can see in the email on the slide, it is addressed personally to a student called Vanessa.

 

#2 Dynamic content
It allows the content in an email to dynamically change based on data. For instance, if a user’s currency is Euro the email will display a ‘€’ symbol but if it is dollars it will display a ‘$’ symbol. We can see this dynamic content in the example shown above. The email pulls personal data about Vanessa, the recipient, a final year student at Yale. Adding specific and relevant information about the recipient gives a personalized touch to the email and builds a relationship with subscribers.

 

 

#3 Accurate targeting

This has to do with scheduling an email campaign at a relevant time for each user, based on their country and time zone. Here the accurate targeting can be seen in how Vanessa, a student from Yale was targeted in the Summer before going back to college in Autumn.

 

 

Effective ESPs have the ability to send automated emails based on user activity, personalization, segmentation, triggered emails and scheduled emails. Marketing automation helps you to stay connected to your customers every step of the way and reduces repetitive tasks such as abandoned cart notifications, product recommendations and retargeting.
The steps shown in the above example are as follows:
1. The user is sent an email about an upcoming sale.
2. They are then placed in a 3 day wait period.

 

3. After that time expires, the ESP checks to see if the user has made a purchase. If they didn’t they are automatically sent another email about the sale letting them know it’s about to end. This adds a sense of urgency.

 

4. The user is now aware the sale is about to end and is encouraged to make a purchase.
As you can see the ESP reduces the amount of manual work required to perform such a campaign. To do the same campaign without ESPs automation would require a lot more work as you would have to check all users in the campaign and see if they made a purchase, then only send the second email to those who have not.

 

 

Taking a look at the different ESPs available, you may recognize a few of the more household names such as Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook. But what separates these providers from the rest? Which ESPs are best to use for day to day communication and organization, and which ones are more suitable for creating email marketing campaigns?

 

We will now take a look at the features of each email service provider and identify the ones that will enable you to best manage your contact lists, create and design email campaigns, test and optimize your email campaigns and automate your emails.
First, let’s take a look at the ESPs you may be more familiar with:

 

 

Gmail: One of the most popular email service providers with over 1.2 billion people using it for personal and business communications. Its many features include contact list importing and exporting, powerful spam filters, filters based on different types of email (promotional, personal and social), email forwarding and an undo send feature. It integrates cleanly with popular productivity tools including Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Sheets. It is perfect for internal and external business communication, but may not offer you everything you need to create, design, deliver, automate, test and optimize your email marketing campaigns.

 

 

Outlook: Microsoft’s Outlook.com email provider is a strong option and has over 400 million users. Outlook offers some more advanced features than Gmail in the way that it reduces email clutter. It finds emails that are most likely low priority and separates them from your inbox. It has the ability to undelete or recover an email after you’ve accidentally discarded a message.

 

The outlook was originally designed for office use, and it is still the perfect choice for that application, however, this does not signify that it will be a suitable ESP for email campaigning. There are two main reasons why Outlook may not be the best choice for sending your email campaigns, the lack of bulk mail support and the risk of being blacklisted. Looking at the risk of being blacklisted first, Outlook provides the ability to report any email message they get as spam, sometimes too easily.

 

This feature is useful for office workers, but it poses a real risk for email marketers. If your emails have been reported as spam, this can result in your entire domain being blacklisted. Secondly, Outlook was never designed for sending bulk emails, so it lacks the features that report on how recipients engage with emails, making it difficult for a marketer to gauge the effectiveness of their campaigns.

 

Yahoo! Mail: Is one of the earliest Internet companies (dating back to 1994) and is now owned by Verizon. Like Outlook and Gmail, Yahoo! Mail is an email service provider for personal communication use. Its main features include auto-deletion of trash messages after 90 days, huge storage capacity (1 TB), a built-in web search tool, calendar and notepad, spam filters and SSL encryption. Similar to Outlook and Gmail, it does not offer the features an email marketer would need for sending effective email campaigns.

 

Zoho mail: This email service provider has been described as a complimentary email client for small businesses. Its free license allows for 25 users to register under one account, however, each user is limited to 5 GB of storage. It includes antivirus protection and spam filtering and integrates with other Zoho productivity tools.

 

An added bonus to Zoho Mail is that it does not run advertisements. As mentioned, if you are a small business already using Zoho productivity software, Zoho Mail may be perfect for you, but may not be the most suitable for creating large email campaigns.
We have talked about four email service providers that offer a reliable means for personal and business communication, but are lacking somewhat in the areas of email copy design, testing, optimizing and delivery. Now we will take a look at ESPs that provide the advanced features we want in order to create effective email campaigns:

 

AWeber: AWeber is a paid ESP and one of the most popular email marketing service providers. It is considered intuitive, easy to get started on and connects seamlessly to most platforms, including WordPress. Its features include ready-to-use email templates, list management, auto-responders, and email tracking with detailed insights. It also provides support options such as live chat, phone support, email support, live webinars, and a vast library of how-to’s and tutorials.

 

Constant Contact: Constant Contact is a paid ESP and one of the top email marketing services that are considered easy to use and beginner-friendly. You can manage your email lists, contacts, email templates, access tracking and reporting, use the built-in social media sharing tool, and an image library. It also provides a support function with live chat, email, community support and online training.

 

 

GetResponse: Another popular paid ESP, GetResponse comes with a drag and drop builder where you can create campaigns, segment contacts, send content designed for specific groups, create responsive forms and landing pages, carry out A/B testing, track, and include auto-responders. It also integrates with third-party lead generation software like OptinMonster, SalesForce and ZenDesk.
Support is provided by phone, live chat, and email. Their help section is full of free learning material including videos, webinars and how-to guides.

 

 

MailChimp: Offering a forever free plan where you can have up to 2,000 Subscribers and send 12,000 emails, Mail Chimp is another popular ESP that offers an easy to use interface with great tools and thorough support. Its features include an email creator, merge field tags, auto-responders, segmentation contact lists, email testing and simple tracking and analytics. The support is offered by email, live chat, and a knowledge base with how-to videos and tutorials.

 

Using an Email Service Provider can maximize the productivity and efficiency of an email marketer. However, many marketers still use their own email clients, such as Gmail, to send marketing emails, even though these are not specifically designed for creating and executing email marketing campaigns.

 

So what are the advantages of using ESPs over an in-house email system?
1.ESP provisioning, domain, and IP setup: you will want to send emails from your company’s domain name instead of a free one such as Gmail or Hotmail. To use your own domain you have to configure the IP setup with both the ESP and domain service.

 

2.Deliverability reporting: this gives you insights into how your email campaign performed, such as who opened or unsubscribed, and a break down of what links were clicked.

 

3.Enterprise MTA (Mail Transport Agents) configurations: free email domains like Gmail have a limit on how many emails you can send (100-150 per day). ESPs allow almost an unlimited amount to be sent while also managing large campaigns that send to millions of users.

 

 

4.Bounce and complaint handling: an ESP will automatically check if an email address bounces and remove them from future campaigns while also managing any complaints that users may have.

 

While there are many advantages to using an ESP, there are also a few limitations:

#1 Cost: many ESPs can be expensive and the cost can increase with the more subscribers you have and how often you email them. It may be cheaper to develop your own in-house system or send from a free email address.

#2 No control over rate limits and sending volumes: ESPs control how many emails you can send per hour/day and while this might be OK for small campaigns to have just a few dozen recipients, it may be an issue with larger ones who may have millions of recipients.

 

#3 Restricted to their reporting and user interface: While this is not a major limitation, you will have to learn the ESPs interface and you won’t have the option to customize the reporting and UI.

 

 

 

‘By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail’ – Benjamin Franklin. The planning phase is responsible for setting the foundations of your strategy. It involves understanding your current presence online, your resources and who will be responsible.

 

In this article, I want to look at how to organise an effective digital strategy. Follow me as we are going to look at that in this article. 

 

During planning we focus on determining the number of key factors:

• Purpose: What are we using digital to achieve or hope to achieve?
• SuccessOutcomes: How will the success of your digital activity manifest for your business so that you can clearly identify progress?
• ExistingChannels: What already exists so that you don’t duplicate channels but also know what you have already?
• Resources: What Time, Money and People do you have at your disposal?

Planning is crucial to gather as much information as possible and to set you up for success from the outset.

 

The purpose of the planning phase is to establish the foundations of your strategy, its requirements, your current activity, expectations, resources and internal ownership.

 

 

Planning gives you control early on but also creates flexibility in later stages because of how detailed your understanding of your strategy is.

 

Business performance is an important expectation because it is often misguided in solely looking at direct sales. Outside of just focusing on sales, it is important to understand success can also be measured in leads and engagement.

 

 

 

 

Customer engagement is often overlooked as a ‘hygiene factor’, when in fact it represents your brands’ perceived voice and tone. You have the potential to turn both into a part of your brand DNA on your site and on social media. Review these metrics to measure the effectiveness of your customer engagement:

• Awareness: Is your customer service giving you the ability to create higher awareness levels?
• Reduced Customer Service (CS) Costs: Is the use of social media allowing you to manage your CS expenditure?
• Insight: Are your customers giving you an insight into your products and services from which you can make valuable improvements?
• Sentiment: Is your CS quality adding value to the business by creating positive sentiment?

Reach The total number of people you can reach with your activity.

Are you able to prove that the engagement you are experiencing offers value to the business? The following metrics can help to measure user engagement:

• Insight: Are your activities on digital giving you additional insight into what your customers want or how you can design your products and services?
• Awareness: Is your activity showing an awareness of offers, products, services, etc.?
• Sentiment: Can you identify positive sentiment in how your customers are engaging with you?

• Comprehension: If you have complicated products or services – can you see that customers are identifying/searching for features and details that show an understanding of the product/service?
• Site Visits: Is your activity resulting in creative traffic to your site?

 

Earned Media Value: Is your digital activity resulting in earned impressions on top of your paid delivery? This is found within your social channels

 

The most important work is done in identifying early on what your expectations are from your campaign and what value digital will bring to it. However, after you execute your campaign, you can also look at the following metrics:

 

 

 

 

Objective Phase Of Digital Strategy: How To Set Digital Marketing Objectives

 

 

 

The Objective phase is the heart of the process. During this phase, you clearly outline your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and design a strategy to achieve them. The objective phase is focused clearly on beginning with Key Success Outcomes, identifying your KPIs and then designing a strategy that is measurable and clear.

 

Activities of the objective phase are intended to establish clear KPIs that will measure performance and include:

• Channel Objectives: What is the role of your channels?
• Media Benchmarks: What is an acceptable performance for your paid advertising?
• Content Objectives: What do you want your content to do?
• Audience Objectives: What do you want people to do in response to your activity?

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are finite metrics that collectively you can use to prove the existence of your Key Success Outcomes (KSOs). These varied KPIs can be used to measure individual performances of content and activity.

 

KSOs are the resulting outcome of a number of KPIs combined to create an outcome that is used as a marker of success. Firstly, you should create a rough list of all the possible success outcomes that are relevant to your brand. Then, using the SMART goal system, you should identify from your list of potential goals what are your Key Success Outcomes. SMART goals are:

 

 

 

• Specific: Is the goal clear and singular. Try to avoid multiple results, “we want more site traffic and the positive sentiment”
• Measurable: How are you collecting and generating data from your activity?
• Achievable: Can you do it?
• Realistic: Is this a goal that is realistic for the business?
• Timely: Can you achieve results within your given time period?

 

SMART goals are important for your organization as they are the successful outcomes on which your performance on digital channels will be measured.

 

 

For any organisation there are three levels of success:

1. Low Level: your subordinates’ success should be measured in shorter time periods. Establishing weekly goals and objectives that are achievable.
2.Mid Level: These would be goals for yourself. What do you need to achieve during your own review period? Don’t forget that the goals set for you are the ones that management perceive as the most important. Reach your goals and it becomes easier to sell in further investment.
3. High Level: These are the priorities for senior management. These are normally long-term results. If possible, you should limit the high powers to reviewing social twice a year. Any shorter and their expectations may not be met. Try to encourage time to prove results.

 

For any organisation there are three levels of success:

1. Low Level: your subordinates’ success should be measured in shorter time periods. Establishing weekly goals and objectives that are achievable.
2.Mid Level: These would be goals for yourself. What do you need to achieve during your own review period? Don’t forget that the goals set to you are the ones that management perceive as the most important. Reach your goals and it becomes easier to sell in further investment.
High Level: These are the priorities for senior management. These are normally long-term results. If possible, you should limit the high powers to reviewing social twice a year. Any shorter and their expectations may not be met. Try to encourage time to prove results.

 

 

Handling Digital Strategy Reviews: How It Should Be Done (+Examples)

 

 

Digital Marketing Reviews are an important part of the strategic process. Before you begin building the strategy, it’s important that review timelines are set in stone with the teams. It is sometimes important to put reviews in calendars for the year so everyone clearly knows during what period they are being measured. It is also an important part of ensuring that teams are adhering to the guidelines and the strategy set. Everything should be guided by specific timelines, activities and reviews!

 

 

Through consistent measurement, you have the ability to identify performance levels and make decisions on them. Underperforming content and tactics can be addressed. Improve content or at times scrapping activity that just isn’t working.

 

It is important to capitalize on strengths as much as weaknesses. Quite often, the focus is on improving underperformance. The opportunity is to also focus on positive performance. Strong performances give insight into a positive area of engagement. Can it be built on? Can it be made even stronger? Can we optimize through media, creative or process?

 

How will you spot your weaknesses? Over time you will begin to learn what your benchmark is. You will have the measure of what is good and what is bad. You will use these measures to spot what is underperforming. When something is underperforming, you should try to assume why that is the case, then adapt the message, copy or creative, and finally see how it performs.

 

In my last article, I have featured a clear phasing plan. It is from this plan that you decide when reviews should happen. In one document, it should clearly lay out the purpose of each phase, the activity occurring through the year and investment by time period/quarter/campaign.

 

It is so important to give the strategy room to breathe. Strategies in digital should operate for at least two years in an iterative process. Ideally, three-year visions for digital will result in long-term business success. Too many brands rush things on digital and as a result, they see early successes but it is not sustainable. If they don’t see the commercial return they can also revert back to traditional practices.
Remember, strategy takes time and commitment to building performance!

 

 

 Mobile Friendliness And Responsiveness : The Differences (+Examples)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mobile-Friendly versus Responsive: mobile-friendly is a different version of a website that is shown to mobile users. Responsive means the website design is formatted to its ideal fit for the screen it’s on. Responsive is ideal and Google recognizes both as being optimized for the mobile user. Think of mobile-friendly as a step between nothing at all and a responsive site.

 

• Create a mobile-first experience through responsive design
• CTAs focused on mobile users (e.g. location and contact information)– what a user is looking for on mobile is different than what they are likely looking for on desktop. It also affects their checkout time availability.
• Content that is based on what a mobile user would be looking for. For instance, they may not want to view blog posts first if it’s an informative website about a local business– they are more likely to be looking for a phone number, address, reviews, and other info that allows them to make a decision “on the go” about the business (e.g. whether or not to go there versus its competitors).

 

 

The basics of an effective copy are:

• Clear: the purpose of the copy should instantly be understandable. For instance, “We offer air conditioning units to restaurants and hotels” is clear, versus “Our top-of-the-line system offers the highest possible AC performance for your hospitality business.”
• Enticing: the copy should pique the user’s interest. It should make them curious to complete the CTA or learn more about the offering. For instance, “We offer award-winning, certified air conditioning units to restaurants and hotels. No other competitors offer our same 10-year warranty.” is much more interesting, versus “Our top-of-the-line air conditioners are perfect for your restaurant or hotel.” You must explain why in an intriguing way to get your point across.
• Unique: be sure to point out how your products, services, and what you offer is different than your competitors. Be specific. How does what you offer to stand out from everyone else? For instance, “We stand behind our restaurant and hotel air conditioning units. No other competitors offer our same 10-year warranty.” versus “We outperform our competitors with our air conditioning units.”

Each website page should:

• Be easy to read through proper website design and layout: the layout should be intuitive and not make it difficult to read the content and interact with the website. The design and layout should have the sole focus of making the experience easy and seamless for the user.

• Be easy to find through proper website architecture and optimization: the user should immediately be able to find what they are looking for in a few clicks. Some designers and developers follow the three-click rule, which means a user should be able to find whatever they are looking for on a website within three taps or clicks (essentially 3 pages). This is disputed though– see references below for more insight.

• Be easy to understand through proper website content and layout: as mentioned in the previous slides, a copy needs to be easy to understand but keep up the user’s interest at the same time. Be specific and don’t overwhelm the user with too much information that users aren’t actually interested in. Most users only care about what is directly important to them, so cater to their needs.

• Include a call-to-action on each page: on every blog post and content, the page includes a call-to-action that is directing the user to complete a conversion or go to a related page with more information. For instance, if there was a landing page that was about a specific air conditioning model for pizza restaurants, your conversion could be completing an appointment form for a sales call or a contact form to request a pricing estimate for a specific business.

• Pages work together: pages with similar content should link together in a logical way to be as effective as possible.

 

A/B Testing In SEO: How To Test Website Elements Effectively (+Examples)

 

 

In my previous article, I looked at some of the facts that you need to know about web designing. In this article, I want to look at all that you need to know about A/B Testing in SEO. Follow me as we will look at this in this article.

 

What then is A/B Testing?

A/B testing means comparing two different elements of a website to determine what gets more clicks, conversions, and engagement.

This could include:

Pricing: lower versus higher sales

• Offers: a percentage discount versus a set amount off discount (could equate to the same or different values)
• Colours: e.g. does a patterned background make users buy more than a grey background?
• Placement of CTAs on the page
• Timing of animations or pop-up banners: 5 seconds versus 10 seconds

 

Here we see several examples for where A/B testing can be used:

• CTAs: For example, a green CTA box versus a red CTA box, or different offers, such as 50% off versus $50 off for a $100 item.
• Headlines: You could write two different headlines for a blog post and test both of them to see which one gets more click-throughs.
• Graphic elements: You could test illustrations against stock imagery and see which works best for your audience.
• Wording & content: Which works better for your audience, a long landing offer page or a short and concise one?
• Type of promotion or offer: For example ‘Buy one get one free’ versus ‘$50 off when you spend over $100’.

Some CMS, like WordPress, have plugins that will do the A/B testing for you or there are tools like Optimizely that you can set up to run an A/B test on your site.
Remember: It’s important to only test one element at a time!

 

A/B testing can be ineffective if too many tests are running at once: running more than one A/B test on a website doesn’t give us a clear picture of what actually worked.

Be sure to only run one test at a time:
Running more than one A/B test on a website doesn’t give us a clear picture of what actually worked.
A/B testing plugins for WordPress (for WordPress sites only):

 

• NelioABTesting.com: good for testing different elements on a WordPress site
• SimplePageTester.com: focused more on testing landing pages

 

Other tools that can implement A/B testing include:

• Optimizely: works across several different types of websites
• Five-second test: only offers initial impressions (the first 5 seconds) to gather users’ first impressions
• VWMO- test duration calculator: calculates how long to run a test

There are more examples below in the resources. Whatever test works best for you depends on your CMS, budget, and what you want to test.

 

A/B testing WordPress plugin examples:

• NelioABTesting.com
• SimplePageTester.com
• https://conversionxl.com/blog/ux-research-and-ab-tests/

More A/B test tools:

• https://www.optimizely.com/
• https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1745152?hl=en
• https://fivesecondtest.com/
• https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-ab-theme-split-tests/
• https://vwo.com/ab-split-test-duration/

 

#1 Pick one variable to test: this could be something like CTA button colour, page layout, or campaign offer (e.g. $50 versus 10% off, even though they are the same value).

 

 

#2 Choose your goal: what do you want to accomplish with this test? Choosing a specific goal will help you determine whether or not making these changes permanent will make a difference. An example of a goal would be: “Increase conversions 5% in the next 8 weeks.” Make sure it is specific and actionable.

 

 

#4 Set up your control and your challenger: only test one thing at a time, and always have a “control,” where the element doesn’t change. This is so you can make sure that a specific element actually makes a difference or not. For instance, if you wanted to test your offer, you would keep your “control” as your existing offer, say, $50. That would be the “A” in the A/B test. Then, you test the “B” part of the test, the challenger, like 10%.

 

 

  #5 Split your sample groups equally and randomly: you must have the same sample size in order to have a proper test. If one side was bigger than the other, then it may have the advantage.

 

 

#5 Determine your sample size: figure out how big your sample sizes are going to be. This is dependent on what you’re testing. For instance, if it was through email, the number of email subscribers helps determine the sample size (e.g. If you have 1000 email subscribers with a 4% click-through rate on average, you can assume 40 people will click through to the landing page you’re testing. This would mean 20 would be shown in test A (the control) and 20 would be shown test B (the challenge), on average. In most cases, the A/B test software randomizes or alternates it.

 

 

For instance, if we tested both the promotional offer and the headline of the landing page at the same time, and got a higher conversion rate, we don’t know if it was the headline OR the promotional offer that actually caused the higher conversion rate.

 

 

Be sure to only run one test at a time:

Running more than one A/B test on a website doesn’t give us a clear picture on what actually worked.
A/B testing plugins for WordPress (for WordPress sites only):

• NelioABTesting.com: good for testing different elements on a WordPress site
• SimplePageTester.com: focused more on testing landing pages

Other tools that can implement A/B testing include:

• Optimizely: works across several different types of websites
• Five-second test: only offers initial impressions (the first 5 seconds) to gather users’ first impressions
• VWMO- test duration calculator: calculates how long to run a test

There are more examples below in the resources. Whatever test works best for you depends on your CMS, budget, and what you want to test.

 

 

A/B testing WordPress plugin examples:

• NelioABTesting.com
• SimplePageTester.com
• https://conversionxl.com/blog/ux-research-and-ab-tests/

More A/B test tools:

• https://www.optimizely.com/
• https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1745152?hl=en
• https://fivesecondtest.com/
• https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-ab-theme-split-tests/
• https://vwo.com/ab-split-test-duration/

 

 

Unknown Facts About Video And Display Advertising

 

 

 

Video and Display are awareness-generating digital channels that combine the science and precision of online audience targeting with the emotional engagement of audio/video and creative visual formats. First, we must understand that video and display are awareness of generating digital channels. They combine both the science and precision of online audience targeting, which means highly relevant, effective campaign performance, with the emotional engagement of audio/video and creative visual formats that capture the attention of the audience and make the most of your advertising placements.

If you aren’t sure whether to consider display or video advertising in your advertising strategy, consider the benefits these activities can bring:

 

 

• Both display and video have the potential to increase brand awareness for your brand or product amongst your target audience
• You can drive consideration of your brand or product within your target audiences with visual advertising formats
• Create purchase intent for products or services with highly targeted advertising that clearly displays your product
• You can choose to increase reach (broad or narrow) for your content across a target audience, and drive frequency of exposure to reinforce your brand messaging
• Engage and re-engage with customers via display or video remarketing, which can mean upselling additional products to past customers or encouraging non-converting website visitors to complete their purchase
• You have the opportunity to choose from multiple types of ad formats to fit your advertising needs
• Video especially can be utilized to complement TV buying strategies and in some cases, video campaigns can extend TV advertising activity by introducing your content to online audiences that otherwise may not have been exposed to your ad.

 

 

It is important to distinguish display and video advertising, which are “push channels” that spread a message, from search engine marketing which is a “pull channel” that captures existing demand.

 

Both display and video advertising serve ads to people who are on websites/YouTube and match your audience targeting criteria. They may not be in the market for your product at this precise moment in time in the way a potential customer performing a search would be. However, they fit your target audience profile and may have the potential to become a customer in the future, hence the awareness driving function of display and video.

 

Video advertising is a branch within display advertising and has slightly different bidding mechanisms to display, and as we will see in further examples, it not only drives awareness but also engages audiences with its audio and visual elements.

 

Search serves ads to people who are actively seeking your product and show a certain amount of consumer intent for your products or services, this indicates they are already aware of your product(s), like it, and have already started to consider making a purchase.

 

 

The search network is considered to reach people at the end, or near the end, of the buyer’s journey. On the other hand, display and video can reach people at all stages of the buyer’s journey – particularly reaching them at the beginning and potentially finding new customers who were unaware of your product or service.

 

 

Both display and video advertising serve ads to people who are on websites/YouTube and match your audience targeting criteria. They may not be in the market for your product at this precise moment in time in the way a potential customer performing a search would be. However, they fit your target audience profile and may have the potential to become a customer in the future, hence the awareness driving function of display and video.

 

 

Video advertising is a branch within display advertising and has slightly different bidding mechanisms to display, and as we will see in further examples, it not only drives awareness but also engages audiences with its audio and visual elements.

 

Search serves ads to people who are actively seeking your product and show a certain amount of consumer intent for your products or services, this indicates they are already aware of your product(s), like it, and have already started to consider making a purchase. The search network is considered to reach people at the end, or near the end, of the buyer’s journey. On the other hand, display and video can reach people at all stages of the buyer’s journey – particularly reaching them at the beginning and potentially finding new customers who were unaware of your product or service.

 

 

Including display and video advertising in your advertising activity is extremely important. Display advertising has the potential to put your ad onto thousands of websites and in mobile apps, ranging from large websites to smaller niche websites against related content and interested audiences.

 

With video advertising, the user can choose what to watch – meaning you can have a captive audience of engaged viewers among those who choose to view your ads. This activity is made even more efficient when we consider that with YouTube, the advertiser only pays when the user chooses to engage – so we only pay when our advertising is being well-received.

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Generating Content Topics That Ranks: How To (+Examples)

 

 

As a content writer, I don’t know whether it has happened to you. There are times that you would like to write and you would not know what to write about. It is very possible you don’t just know what might be of importance to you. You just need to know what your audience might be interested in before you start writing at all. In this article, I want to talk about ways of generating content topics that ranks. Follow me as I will explore this in this article. 

 

 

Activities
Brainstorming: First and foremost, you need to gather teams together to brainstorm a selection of topics that can be narrowed down at a later stage.
Social Listening: Furthermore, you have to listen to your audience to find out what content they like, dislike or need to solve a particular problem.
Community Engagement: Also, you need to reach out to your audience and find out what content they would like from you.

https://youtu.be/PBKuzhSbV14

 

Tools
Tools like Pinterest, StumbleUpon and RSS feeds are fantastic resources to find content topic ideas. We will look at these tools a little later as they can also be used for content curation.
Bodyform, the women’s health brand, used social listening to help them create a piece of content that has reached over 6m people around the world.

 

 

How did they do it?

• They identified an opportunity through the comments of an individual on social media about what they considered misrepresentation in their ads
• They created a tongue-in-cheek video to respond to the user and showed utility in entertainment and brand personality
• It worked for them as they stayed true to their position of female empowerment and being brutally honest.

Content Calendars

Content calendars are a central document for mapping out social media content across platforms, days, times and objectives for a given period.

Benefits of using a content calendar in your organization include:

#1 Plan

The use of a content calendar in writing will allow you to plan ahead. It will help you to prevent a situation where you have to write on impulse. It will allow you to come up with an extensive article that converts leads to customers.

 

#2 Prevents writer’s block
Writer’s block is a situation where a writer, want to write but you are not able to come up with reasonable content. When you plan ahead before you write your content, you will not run blank when writing. This will improve the quality of content coming from your stable.

 

#4 Stay on track

Having a content strategy in play will also keep social content on track across multiple platforms and re-align the aim/strategy. With it, you can actually choose a theme of discussion for a particular month and decide how those topics will be discussed across different social media platforms. This will allow you to remain focused all through.

 

#4 Focus
in addition, a good content marketing strategy will allow you to remain focused. You would have drafted ahead some of the contents that will be posted across different social media platforms. It gives you the opportunity to remain focused on your content. You can prioritise your actions and see how you can engage your audience in order to get better results.

 

 

#5 Keep team focused

Another major benefit of content calendars is that they will keep your team focused on the assignment. With this, it is very easy for the theme to determine what will be their focus for a particular period of time. They can now work on how these goals can be achieved. This will greatly achieve team members achieve their stated goals.

 

 

#6 Alignment

Furthermore, having a content calendar will allow key dates for functional messaging and topical personality content. It will allow the organisation to align all their social media platforms so that there can be uniformity when it comes to what is being posted on all the social media platforms. 

 

All good content calendars will include five key elements which cover the who, what, where, when and how of your content.

• Copy: the text or narrative that goes with your post (be mindful that some platforms like Twitter have character limits so you’ve to be more succinct) this also allows you to sense-check grammar and typos
• Creative: the image, video, gif, poll or format that accompanies your copy
• Theme: who this content is for, and what purpose, pain point or audience interest is this content serving? This reminds you to stay on track and be relevant!
• Date/Time: when the post is being published and how long it’s being promoted for. Be sure to include relevant time zones, daylight savings, bank holidays and any other vital notes in relation to time.
• Platform: how the content is being published and where e.g. via Facebook Scheduler on Friday at 8 am.

 

Steps involved…

#1 Plan for the month
in order to have a good content marketing strategy in place, you have to make sure that you plan for the entire month. This will give you ample time for the implementation of all the plans that you have. It also ensures that you don’t spend the whole month planning without implementation. 

 

 

#2 Create a simple spreadsheet
There is a need for you to create a simple spreadsheet that covers all your plans. This spreadsheet might also contain a copy of all the contents that you plan to post across all social media platforms. You just copy and paste from there to your media platforms. 

 

 

#3 Add many details 

in posting your content, you need to ensure that you include as many details as possible. When you are detailed about your contents and its implementation, it will allow whoever will implement those plans to have enough details that he needs in order to implement those plans effectively. 

 

 

#4 Edit and amend
After you might have published your content calendar, you need to continue to review it so that it can be in tune with the reality on the ground. At times, you may need to send it to your team and try and get their input. This will ensure that you carry everyone along as you move on with the plan.

 

Aligning your content calendar with business activities is key. Consistency and alignment across your social channels with any consumer-facing messaging will add continuity and a brand narrative for users that is easy to follow regardless of whichever touchpoint they come into contact with you.

 

 

Key considerations would be:

• Your business priorities and timelines including any new products or promotions
• Any PR, Above Line advertising or Marketing activities
• Sponsorship of any description of your business
• In-store promotions
• Time of year you’re seeding your content to obtain relevancy. Consider the time of year your content is being seeded and the content needs of your audience at any particular time for a way of accessing their need state, e.g. at Christmas party invitations template, topics like gifting ideas and festive recipes are popular with B2C audiences online.

 

Content calendars can be weekly or monthly spreadsheets. The best practice is to embed any creative e.g. images or stills from videos into the spreadsheet. Timings paid support, target audience and target channel are all worth including.
 Designing a calendar template:

• Plotting out how your content themes will spread across the month
• Seeking input from all stakeholders
• Creating the content: imagery, video, text
• Plotting paid support where necessary

 

Another helpful feature is to keep a rolling spreadsheet and create a new template for each week or month. This will help keep content in the same place for easy reference.
Before creating your content calendar, it’s important to identify stakeholders for input of ideas, thoughts and recommendations on content. This will lead to a more rounded calendar and prevent potential future issues by allowing for:

 

• Accurate reflection of the business: content marketing should be fully representative of the full business
• Assistance in content ideas: never under-estimate the valuable input of colleagues in other areas of the business
• Easier approval flows: for internal sign-off

Content calendars should allow the inclusion of:

• An in-house editorial team of stakeholders

üCustomer Service, PR/Comms, Advertising, IT, Legal & Compliance, Product Business, Marketing, Digital / Social Media, Mobile, Web team, Sales

• Client (if applicable)
• Creative Team
• Media / Investors (if applicable)

   

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Content Management System: How It Can Be Used To Manage Contents

 

 

A Content Management System, or CMS, is a web application designed to make it easy for non-technical users to add, edit and manage content on a website.

Not only do Content Management Systems help website users with content editing, but they also take care of a lot of “behind the scenes” work, including making content searchable and indexable on search engines such as Google (increasing its visibility and reach).

 

 

Content Management Systems offer the ability to enhance content through professional pre-designed templates and plugins such as social share buttons and “Click To Tweet” functions. They also facilitate personalization and responsive design, which is particularly important considering half of all emails are now opened on smartphones and tablets – a 500% growth rate over four years, according to QuickSprout.

 

Ultimately, a well-chosen CMS can help guarantee a positive customer experience as they consume your content. Popular offerings include: WordPress, Drupal, and Percolate.

A content management system is a single platform that allows a user to control content publishing to a website.

 

 

The benefits of Content Management Systems include:

• Automation: saves time
• Cross-publishing: allows for consistent messaging
• Content creation (if applicable): some platforms allow you to create content within them which reduces additional software investment

Task assignment: you can flag tasks to different team members

 

 

Some common examples of website CMS platforms:

WordPress: WordPress powers a full 25% of all websites worldwide, making it the planet’s most popular CMS. WordPress has become much more than a blogging platform. It can be accurately described as full-featured CMS with tons of options to add plugins that increase features and functionality. It increasingly powers larger corporate sites, and medium businesses as well as personal blogs. It is relatively easy to set up and has a wide range of support and training materials available (much of it is free).

 

 

ExpressionEngine: ExpressionEngine is a multi-purpose content management system with a modular web platform that offers three tiers of licenses: Freelancer, Non-Commercial, and Commercial. One of its benefits is its ease of use. Practically, this means that anyone can use it, without having to know PHP, the programming language EE is built in. The user interface is designed to make websites and content management as simple and friendly as possible, without sacrificing the dynamic power of the platform in any way.

 

Percolate: Percolate provides software to help teams successfully execute their marketing strategy. Percolate allows you to connect your content plans with the rest of your marketing initiatives. It has a centralized system from where you can coordinate your global content efforts, deliver better marketing results, and deepen customer relationships.

Considerations:

• Dynamism: how easy is it to edit the content? How much access have you had? How integrated is it across the digital and social web?
• Intuitive: how easy is it to use? Is it too complex or technical? It shouldn’t require too much technical know-how.
• Cost: CMS systems all come with an investment cost – what makes sense for your business? Does it provide value to your business or is it an expense you do not need?

Make sure to try out a few before you make a decision. Most CMS platforms will have a free trial option that will allow you time to see if the platform is right for you.

 

10 Content types And Formats For Marketers (+Examples)

 

 

There’s a whole host of content formats available to marketers. These can be grouped into format by Visual, Text, Audio and Review. There’s further specific detail on each format later in this article.

Visual content: the web is a visual medium and as such, most amounts of content formats are visually driven.

 

 

The most innovation in content comes in the visual format space. Designing visual content to be responsive to the computer, tablet and mobile screens has become an important consideration for all content creators as the user experience in relation to content is an important decider in retaining audiences.

 

#1 Whitepapers

• These are great knowledge-sharing resources that can help you build thought leadership and credibility in your industry. They’re a strong lead generation tool and can be a great awareness tool too.
• Make sure to educate readers by focusing on an industry topic that is relevant. Provide solutions based on research, insights and facts – a badly researched and flawed white paper could do damage. Make sure to keep the look, feel and language on-brand with your business e.g. “We at Coca-Cola did some research and found…” instead of “I researched…”
• Always include a logical link back to your business or website. For example, if you were a law firm, you wouldn’t do whitepaper research on sugar consumption. You might, however, do a white paper on the legal requirements for a business around calorie declarations on menus. Whitepapers can be text-heavy, so make sure to ease the reader’s job with interesting and high-quality visuals to break up any potential monotony in reading.
• Leveraging user data like email addresses for mailing lists or a social media endorsement to gain access to your whitepaper could be a consideration. Ultimately this could achieve a lower reach for your content but there is a better payoff for your dissemination of content. There are both arguments for and against. A potential avenue could be sharing part of a whitepaper to bait audiences in and then introducing a gate for the full report.

 

Typically whitepapers will:

• Focus on customer’s pain points
• Demonstrate solutions
• Keep to consistent company branding
• Include links to your website
• Include strong CTAs
• Use clear, crisp visuals
• Publish in. PDF format
• Consider gating content

#2 Ebooks

eBooks:

• These are usually shorter and more interactive than whitepapers. They generally focus on multimedia content and nice “how-to” guides rather than thought leadership pieces that aim to build utility and trust.
• They’re generally easier to distribute than whitepapers. Add a creative commons license for your e-Book to allow for sharing by third parties and make sure to amplify through your social channels.
• eBook formats are more likely to be read as they contain functional benefits that businesses can implement immediately rather than whitepapers which are a little more cerebral and require more dissection to process.

eBooks typically:

• Focus on customer’s pain points
• Demonstrate solutions
• Use of engaging multimedia and graphics
• Include links to your website
• Strong CTAs
• Experiment with formats
• Don’t gate content to help the message travel

#3 Infographics

Infographics:

• Are a great way to use data to tell a story
• More engaging than figures and visually appealing
• Can be used as longform singular content or split into social assets with additional motion graphic elements added.

Typically infographics should:

• Focus on 8 – 12 pieces of data
• Have references as the footnote on how the data was collated
• Use as many graphic elements as possible rather than just numbers and stats

#4 Blogs

• Allows businesses to journal their activity through long-form text and imagery
• Blogs have the added benefit of increasing SEO ranking when considered keyword dispersal is used
• Blog content also allows reasons for third-party websites to link back to your website which is beneficial for SEO ranking
• Case studies are often featured in blogs to drive thought leadership and credibility in business

#5 Images

• Are an effective content format within any digital presence
• Allows brands to convey a simple message with strong branding
• Consideration around resizing for “no click previews” on social platforms and also file sizes
• Optimum image sizes per platform change all the time so make sure to stay updated on platform changes
• Facebook’s 360 images allow static panoramas to be mapped into a social post and are really effective for content pieces like skylines or cityscapes.

#6 Interactive Content 

Interactive Content (Specifically Facebook Canvas):

• Interactive formats like Facebook Canvas allow users to dictate their own journey within a social space
• Limited formats are available for now but results are promising
• Taking over a full mobile screen with an immersive content format has increased clicks within the canvas by up to 500% more than account averages.

#7 Video Content 

Video Content:

• Video content is the number one form of content consumed on the web. 87% of content marketers use video in their online marketing.
• More than 50% of video is viewed on mobile.
• Audience retention rates for video content continue to decrease based on the sheer volume of content audiences are exposed to. Generally speaking, 20-30 seconds is the recommended length for brand videos which means:
• Simple narratives
• Easy to understand
• Branding within the first 5 seconds
• Disappearing or Ephemeral Video:

Snapchat Video
10m videos are viewed on Snapchat a day. However, the format only exists for 24 hours.

The platform allows for full-screen vertical video with additional features such as lenses (CGI animated overlays that interact with user-generated video) and filters (graphic overlays that brand onto a video). Videos are only 10 seconds long, however, they can be stitched together in a series of six videos to create a story on the platform.

If using Snapchat for your content marketing it’s worth investigating the audience usage in your market. The platform skews heavily to a youth audience from 16-20 so make sure the platform is right for you. Also, analytics and click-throughs are limited on the platform with self-serve advertising not currently available. Paid media on the platform can cost from $30,000 upwards for 3 x 24-hour slots for branded filters and up to $75,000 for branded lenses. Branded interstitials, full-page static video formats, exist as advertising on the platform.

Instagram Stories
Having replicated a number of features of Snapchat stories, Instagram stories sit as a format within the main Instagram app. Each user has a top menu that runs horizontally (as opposed to Instagram’s normal vertical feed) for a 24-hour life span and runs at a maximum of 15 seconds.

Similar filters exist on the Instagram Stories platform as well as full-page interstitials.

Initial reports have shown globally that daily usage of Instagram Stories has overtaken Snapchat as a platform for users so far.

Many have theorised that the reasons for this are easier to place advertising from brands, the existing utility and audience of Instagram and the ability to cross-promote content between Facebook considering the brand is the owner of Instagram.

Facebook Stories
These are the same format as Instagram stories but sit within Facebook in the exact positioning of Instagram stories.

Live Video
Facebook Live, Twitter’s Periscope, Instagram stories, Snapchat Live Stories and YouTube Steams have opened up a world of live streaming to content marketers to allow brand followers insight into the raw real-time activities of businesses.

Key considerations around this though are that the format can’t be promoted currently other than supporting posts and in a live context. Planning is crucial to make sure you have high-quality content.

360 Video
Facebook and YouTube both allow for full 360 formats within videos allowing users to see all around them.

This takes a lot of resources and planning to do well but can be a very effective format. Great examples of this include Disney’s Star Wars 360 which shows an alien planet.

Key considerations:

Video objective: an emotive brand film that’s worth investing in long-form vs short-form short and simple brand message.

Seeding platform: YouTube for longer pieces versus Facebook for 20sec versus Snapchat/Instagram Stories for 10-15sec.

Subtitles: 75% of video is watched in silent autoplay via mobile – consider using these for videos with dialogue.

#8 Articles

Articles are long-form social posts that help to build thought leadership or expertise in a particular area. They are very effective in driving conversation, and gaining additional perspectives and insight from peers within the same vertical.

LinkedIn and Facebook offer the facility to create long-form articles at present which factor in text, imagery and video into their creation.

In the example here I published an article on Instagram stories being launched in late 2016 and the implications it would have for Snapchat’s business model.

The statistics visible by the icons next to the author byline allow users to identify views, likes, comments and shares.

• It’s important to have a snappy and succinct title
• Articles load pretty fast as the content is mostly plain text so be sure to grab your audience’s attention in the first paragraph
• Engage with comments on articles to continue to amplify your credibility and expertise in the subject area.

#9 Templates and Checklists

Templates and Checklists:
These can be handy formats to help your audience and show them thought leadership.

The example shown here from Hubspot is a quick cheat sheet to content optimum sizing per platform. Why do they work for you?

• They add utility to your audience. They’re often something that can be saved down and kept for future use. Include branding and they won’t forget the brand that helped them out with useful assistance.

• Research what your audience’s pain points are so what you’re creating for them actually provides assistance and shows true effort on your part to understand the challenges of your audience.

#10 Webinars

Webinars:

• These online seminars can help you connect to your audience in a human way by putting a face/voice to your offering. The feeling of dedicated care that an individual can get out of a webinar helps build a relationship with your potential customer.

• Theme your webinars on a specific topic that you are an expert in and use visual aids e.g. videos, animations or PowerPoints over screenshare to talk them through how to solve their business need or educate them in a specialized area.

• Allow time for Q&A and discussion on their experiences. Be warned though, if you aren’t sure of the area you’re giving a webinar on, a Q&A could be tricky so be prepared in advance.

• Lastly, always provide a takeaway e.g. a follow-up email with the presentation you delivered or an invitation to ask more questions. Webinar audiences are investing their time in listening to your expert insight so maximize this opportunity as much as possible.

#11 Podcasts

Podcasts:
With the rise in online audio streaming from platforms like Spotify and SoundCloud, podcasts have become more and more popular. Globally, listenership has risen to 24% of online users with an audience of 18-54, affluent and educated individuals.

Podcasts are the perfect format to build your thought leadership on a topic. Make sure of the following:

• The quality of audio is high
• Each podcast has a discussion area or a theme
• Invite guest participants to add their insight and have discourse.

Be aware that a large volume of podcasts are consumed on the go e.g. commuting, so provide additional information like web links referenced in a supporting article that users can access after the show.

Also, there’s a great opportunity for content repurposing from podcasts where a 20-30 soundbyte could be transformed into a social object e.g. an image or a particular conversation point could be explored more widely in a follow-up blog post.