Courtney Rollins can be your next digital marketing hire!

This past quarter has been the most challenging in all my time in college, but also the most rewarding. It helps to ring true Theodore Roosevelt’s quote “Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty…”

Digital marketing has opened up a new world of career options for me. I am actually leaving this class with the feeling that I have learned highly-applicable skills post-graduation. For starters, Mark has updated the class to include pertinent and sought after knowledge that is lacking in most college graduates. Referencing a Fast Company article, many college grads leave their marketing program without the competence to impress and satisfy employers in key digital areas. Here at Western, we have been given the tools to know and understand content marketing, social media management and strategy, SEO, analytics, and email marketing, just to name a few in the article.

 

Unless you're @WWU (drops mic) @FastCompany http://t.co/v7QoCcOYwS

— Mark Staton (@DigiMark_WWU) January 23, 2015

These keywords sound good, sure, but truly knowing how to use these aspects of digital marketing to impact a business is what we strive to do. Content marketing is the process of creating relevant, valuable content aimed at your target market that helps to educate them and find solutions. Since most of the purchase decision has been made by the time a consumer talks to your sales person, it’s best to give consumers all the tools and know-how that they need. This makes you the trusted authority on the subject in their eyes, and your company name will already be familiar. Content can even be leveraged in order to know more about your site visitors. Landing pages can be set up in order to turn users into leads, but it must be done by offering something of value: content.

The best part about digital marketing is all the data and analytics. When implementing your content strategy and watching your conversion process, you can see how users interact with your site. In the Goal Flow report on Google Analytics, you can see where visitors enter and exit the conversion process. If you notice that users are hitting your landing page, but leaving before the thank you page, then you know that the landing page isn’t accomplishing its task. You can cross-reference this with other landing pages that are seeing a higher CTR and alter the poorly performing page based upon the suggestions you take away from the others. But none of this can be done until goals have been established on GA.

Distribution makes content marketing effective, placing it in front of the eyes that matter to your business. Social media is a great way to distribute content and to get people talking. You should always know who you’re trying to reach and how to reach them. Different social platforms will send different messages to different people, so know where your customer spends their time. Also, knowing where they are in the buyer’s journey helps to send the right type of content to them. Aside from reaching out to consumers on social media, you can also utilize any publicly displayed information from – say – your competitors. Twitter allows you to set up private lists in order to follow those you don’t want knowing that you follow. You can watch what competitors are doing, or follow potential customers to learn more and find a way to delight them.

 

But I’m not just blowing smoke. This quarter, we’ve had the ability to walk away with certifications from 3 large companies in 3 distinct areas of digital marketing – social media, inbound strategy, and analytics. Our HootSuite, HubSpot, and Google Analytics certifications have really catapulted our understanding to the next level. I plan to make that 4 certifications by completing the Google AdWords certification over finals week.

I really feel as though I have a skill set now, and that makes life after college a lot more promising. My husband has even asked that I help him with the SEO on his site (he started learning SEO on his own back in 2009 or 2010 and has kept up with it a bit since then). He has started his own hiking/backpacking site where he’s compiling his trips and trail information for others in the hiking community. I honestly felt proud that he had asked me to look it over, critique it, and help him to improve it. We are not done yet, though. I didn’t have the time to edit all the content he has up or to make the formatting consistent, and he is still working on link building. Still, some of the things I suggest have not been changed by him yet, and I know it is hurting him. The main page of his site offers an easy hike-finding map, but I keep telling him to place it above the fold so that users can find it easily and are happy with the experience.

If you would like to see my husband’s website, visit HiketoHike.com

So far this quarter, I have written 15 blog posts (16 including this one), which comes out to 11,578 words (or 12,473 with this finished post). My blog has received 83 views these past 3 months, all from the United States. My highest viewed posts were for coding and programmatic/native ads, which got 10 and 9 views, respectively. My paid search blog posting was even re-blogged by another WordPress user.

All stock photos are clever marketing materials in promotion of the new movie Unfinished Business.

 

 

Prepping for the Google Analytics IQ Exam: Platform Principles

This quarter has been filled with learning great information on the subject of digital marketing. Along the way, we’ve been achieving certifications that will improve our expertise of digital marketing and the various subsets of the field. At first, we mastered HootSuite Professional, an awesome dashboard that helps businesses and brands manage all their social media profiles. We also conquered the HubSpot Inbound certification, which of course made us all experts of inbound marketing practices. Now we arrive at our last (required) certification: the Google Analytics Individual Qualification exam.

This has been the most intensive course for me, but it has also been the most exciting (not trying to downplay the other certifications). After having gone through the Google Analytics Fundamentals course earlier in the quarter, I turned to the Platform Principles. This course of videos talked about elements of GA that were mentioned in the prior course, but delved a little deeper with some advanced information.

Built from a foundation of data, Google Analytics (GA) can help any company or person with their own website by tracking dimensions and metrics, and by monitoring traffic per users, sessions, and interactions. All data is collected and organized using a simple model with 3 levels of data: users, sessions, and interactions (also called hits). Each user comes to the page you track in sessions, which are made up of website interactions. Each session times out after a default 30 minutes of inactivity, but this timeout length can be changed – and should – if you have content that takes longer than 30 minutes to digest, such as videos.

Dimensions are the qualitative, descriptive characteristics of your data, such as page title, the source site, or the medium of the source (ex: referral – a click from a link on a third-party non-search site). The dimensions are listed in the first column in the reporting view; metrics make up the rest of the table. Metrics are the quantitative measurements of your data, including page views and session duration, and also including averages like average number of pages in a session. The dimensions and metrics must follow the data hierarchy of users, session, and interactions. If we have a measurement of a session metric (avg. time during session), then we cannot combine this data with a user dimension (geographic location) or hit dimension (time on page). Keeping your dimensions and metrics in the correct combinations ensures that your data is meaningful.

Tracking & Collection

Google Analytics tracks data asynchronously (as the site loads) from a website using Javascript coding (placed on every page before the closing </head> tag), and from a mobile app using an SDK (software development kit). Additionally, one can use the tracking ID, which takes the form UA0000-00, in order to track data. When someone visits a website, all information pertaining to that person and that visit is packaged into hits and automatically sent to your GA account. Mobile apps send data back by dispatching batches of hits at one time; Android sends data every 30 minutes, and iOS every 2 minutes. The 2 reasons for this are that (1) mobile devices often lose network connections and are unable to send data when offline, and (2) sending data as often as website tracking does would deteriorate the battery life of the device.

Each visitor to one of your properties is identified based on the 1st party cookies on their computer (these come from the sites you visit directly), but you’re able to create a new identifier to use. The visitor is assigned a unique ID, enabling you to see who is a new user and who is returning. The unique ID can also be changed, which helps to track users across multiple platforms. If a user deletes their cookies and returns to your site, they will have a new unique ID and be labeled as a new user. Thankfully, there are few people who actually delete their cookies, so this isn’t a huge problem right now. Similarly, if a mobile app user uninstalls the app only to reinstall it later, they will be given a new unique ID and be seen as a new user.

Data can be tracked from any digital asset, and GA uses a Measurement Protocol in order to track devices like kiosks or point-of-sale systems. The Measurement Protocol is built manually based on the data points that you want to measure – it “defines how to construct the hits and how to send them back to Google Analytics.” For this procedure, the tracking ID (UA0000-00) must be added to every hit that’s specified to go back to GA.

Importing Data

Aside from tracking data with codes and Measurement Protocols, data can be imported in order to connect and enrich all company information. There are 2 ways in which data is imported:

• Account linking – this links your GA account with your other Google accounts like AdWords, AdSense, and Webmaster Tools, importing data that can be viewed alongside GA data
• Data Import – add company data from internal databases (e.g. advertising, product, or cost data). There must be a common element linking this data to your GA analytics – this is called a key. The 2 types of data import are:
  • Dimension Widening – add new dimensions by importing almost any data into your analytics dashboard using a spreadsheet or .csv file, or by using APIs (application programming interface). In the Importing data into Google Analytics video in unit 3, an example is given where content data is imported (author, topic) and then linked to GA data using the page URL as the key.
  • Cost Data Import – this allows you to import data on any advertising dollars not spent with Google. You can calculate and compare performance metrics including ROI on all ad spends in one place. The keys linking the cost data to GA data are the campaign source and the campaign medium, and both must be present in the file you upload.

Configuration Settings

Configuration of the data in GA will alter how it appears when it’s processed and aggregated into the report. The configuration settings discussed in the unit 3 video Transforming and Aggregating Data are filters, goals, and grouping. They can all be done in the Admin section of GA.

• Filters will help you include, exclude, or modify data based on your needs, allowing you to create a report that is centered on the metrics that matter to you. The first filter that a majority of GA users apply is to exclude employee or personal traffic to a property. To set this filter, click on Filters on the Admin page >> use a predefined filter >> select “exclude,” then “traffic from the IP addresses,” and then “that are equal to” >> finally, type in your IP address in the box provided (this can be found online).
• Goals must be set up in order to determine conversions and conversion rate. You can assign which page views or interactions should be counted towards conversions. If you are a commerce website, then a receipt/confirmation page would be the end of a transaction, and when a user reaches that page, that conversion information gets logged with GA.
• Grouping of certain data points allows you to look at their performance together.
  • Channel Grouping shows the data for various marketing activities. This would include common ones like paid search, display ads, and social media, but might also show TV commercials and billboards if you upload cost data from your company’s internal database.
  • Content Grouping does the same, but based on the content type. You can create product pages for each type of product you sell, or content pages for the different tactics you employ. Gathering them allows for quicker analysis of your strategy for performance and improvements.

The final step of data processing is aggregation, where all data is organized together into aggregate tables. Metrics are pre-calculated and stored for future reference, which enables you to access data faster and avoid sampling.

Sampling

When you have ample data, it can take a long time to process and aggregate a report. Sampling is a technique used to deliver faster results by taking samples of the data and crunching enough numbers to extrapolate results.

As stated before, data is stored in aggregated tables for quick recall, eliminating the need for sampling in some cases. However, when we want to modify our data or create a new report and can’t do so based on the processed data stored in the tables, then GA looks to the raw session data and determines the number of sessions to use to process the request. If the number of sessions needed is small enough, then it uses all sessions to create or modify the report; if the number of sessions needed is too many, then sampling is used. GA then chooses the number of sessions to use in calculations – the sample size. The size of the sample can be changed based on preference: a smaller sample size will give faster results, and a larger sample size will have more accurate results.

Google has a maximum number of sessions that can be used to generate reports – 500,000. Anytime you have 500,001+ sessions, sampling will be used. You can use shorter date ranges to reduce the number of sessions in a report and avoid this problem. Another way to avoid sampling is to use Unsampled Reporting, which is a premium feature that allows you to “pull unsampled data for custom requests.” Alternatively, using an API will also let you process large data requests without sampling.

Ready for the test?

My knowledge for Google Analytics is definitely stacking up, and I feel more confident going forward. I still have more studying of the additional resources and I want to go over some of the more advanced info a few more times. Playing around on the GA interface really helps solidify what I’m doing, and hopefully that translates well to the test. The data from my site has me puzzled. I have noticed that I get a lot of returning traffic from 2 towns in Russia. They come in from an unusual commerce site and bounce right out. I’m having trouble figuring this one out.

Anyway, I wish the best of luck to us all, both DigiMark classes, on Tuesday. Hopefully we can all have our own celebration amidst a hectic dead week — hopefully it’s not a Homer-style celebration.

Mobile Marketing Trends and Opportunities

**Click on any photo to enlarge**

Consumers are rapidly adopting mobile devices and the habit of using multiple screens at once. With the increased presence of screens in our homes (TVs, laptops, smartphones, and tablets) comes the increased use of those screens. It’s no longer simply enough to just watch TV. Now, countless people across the globe (myself included) have begun picking up the phone or tablet in order to fill in the time during commercial breaks, or to entertain us when TV is not doing the job. When people are meshing, they are looking at multiple screens for related content (such as engaging with a show via social media or following up on an ad), and when they’re stacking, these multiple screens are used for unrelated content (perhaps checking Facebook while half-watching a TV show – I do this all the time).

This has become our new reality; TV is no longer enough to keep us entertained. In fact, as stated in the Millward Brown AdReaction Report, 47% of the time spent looking at screens occurs on mobile devices (tablets and smartphones). Additionally, smartphones have surpassed TVs as the screen that dominates our lives: globally, we average about 147 minutes on our smartphones compared with 113 minutes watching TV. This prevalent use of multiple screens holds opportunities for businesses and marketers to reach consumers.

What’s great about today’s world is that we have so much data to drive the decisions that we make in marketing. And when it comes to mobile devices and screen usage, there is no shortage of data! Millward Brown’s AdReaction Report and comScore’s U.S. Mobile App Report are great sources of compiled information of consumer behavior. Where the AdReaction report is a handy compilation of screen usage across TVs, laptops, tablets, and smartphones for a variety of countries, comScore’s mobile app report shows us how consumers are using apps on their phones and desktops. This information tells us which age demographics are using Snapchat, as well as what kind of apps Android and iOS users spend most of their time on. This valuable data can be utilized to reach the right target on the right app or platform.

This rising penchant for using mobile devices also means that we must invest in a mobile site or ensure that the main website is optimized for mobile display. As stated in The Moz Blog: The SEO’s Guide to Building a Great Mobile Site, you might not suffer from missing out on the 10% of internet visitors coming from mobile devices, but when that number jumps up to 20% of visitors, then you’re taking a huge risk and losing potential revenue by not addressing a proper functioning mobile site. Frankly, I wouldn’t want to miss out on 10% of my internet visitors anyways. Today, a website is often a first impression of a business to its potential customer, and it’s quite common for consumers to quickly use smartphones too look up information on businesses. If that first impression is generated on a mobile device, and a business’ website is not optimized for mobile, then a poor first impression will be made, which can lead to losing a sale and possibly a loyal lifelong customer. I know that if I come across a business that has a poor quality mobile site, or none at all, I am usually put off by the lack of business sense by the owner.

Statistics based off a Stanford study on web credibility. Found on Kinesis Inc.’s blog.*

From companies that haven’t even touched the mobile sphere to companies who are leading the way in mobile commerce, there is no limit to businesses that can benefit from mobile marketing. The Washington Post article Starbucks has managed to get you addicted to its coffee – and its app portrays just how Starbucks is working its way into many consumers’ daily routine using its mobile app. As Mark pointed out, the rampant use of the Starbucks app could be aided by the fact that their product is addictive in itself. Still, it shouldn’t detract from the genius behind this marketing decision. While consumers are still very leery of making purchases on mobile devices, Starbucks is seeing around 16% of its total transactions coming from mobile payments. By integrating the mobile payment with the My Starbucks Rewards program, the company has made it easy for consumers to buy coffee and keep track of their rewards. Apps are designed for convenient use of software, and this Starbucks app has made life convenient for Starbucks’ loyal customers. With the addition of order placement on its app, Starbucks is one step closer to making life easier for its customers — and we’re talking about the awful part of life, in between waking up and drinking coffee, where we all manage to shuffle forward through the sleep inertia (the fuzzy, cognitively-impaired portion of our mornings shortly after waking up). Any company that can make this part of my life easier must be doing something right.

It’s hard to ignore the shift that’s occurring in screen usage during our leisure time. Most people have their smartphones out in their “default standby mode” whenever they have downtime (waiting for a friend, standing in line, or waiting at the doctor’s office). We even use our phones when we’re around others and talking to them. The ad space on mobile devices isn’t being exploited as much as it should in comparison to our time spent on them, which is a huge opportunity for businesses.

This shows us that ad spend on mobile platforms hasn’t caught up with consumers’ use of mobile devices.

*Proudly edited with HTML coding learned last week for class.

Programmatic and Native Ads Competing for Ad Dollars

Programmatic is an interesting way to deal in advertisements. Mixing the descriptions from two different articles on the subject (Programmatic Ad Buying for Dummies and Digital Media Buying Gets the “Programmatic” Makeover), it seems that programmatic is essentially an algorithmic purchasing of ad space based upon various data points in order to make the best decisions on media spend. This automated system would use several data points to choose the most effective strategy, selecting optimal time and screens for your ads to appear, and purchase those slots. But how do we know that this is true? In order for programmatic to be the paid advertising venue of the future, we need to know how this platform is performing. And for a long time, there weren’t any ways to ensure that the chosen strategy was best.

As Mark pointed out, this would be where comScore comes into the picture. This MarketingLand article talks about how comScore has developed an independent metrics platform so that media buyers can see if the programmatic market is providing consistent quality across buying options, which will help impart greater trust and confidence in the industry. For those companies who are comScore clients, the platform will track their own ad spends in programmatic. This platform will enable the market for programmatic to grow rapidly. We live in a digital age where we as marketers can make decisions based upon data and statistics, which lead us to make better placement decisions. This will help programmatic to be the future of paid advertising.

The other popular avenue of paid advertising talked about this week is native advertising, which is the placement of ads that appear like regular content amidst regular content, in our everyday lives and reality. However, these ads must be strictly identified as being sponsored ads (Startup’s episode 9 was a great example of the necessity for trustworthy representation and the consequences of not having it). Native ad spend is growing, but this all seem a little tricky and borderline deceptive; because of this, native ads are getting a lot of attention. As this article in Ad Age points out, this attention is making it difficult to tell if native ads are working; it’s hard to tell if the high rates of return are spurred by the publicity that the ads receive, or from the ads themselves. The inability to understand the performance of native ads could be a downfall to them, and this will only die down once the attention is no longer placed on them.

While programmatic is a data-driven, factual basis to purchasing ad space using numerous data points, native ads are crafted advertisements drawing off of the creative in people. These two types of paid ads seem to be moving in separate directions. While most anyone or any size company can utilize the programmatic software platform, native ads are a huge spend, so are mainly used with large corporations who can afford to purchase the space.

As stated before, once the initial shock and awe wares away from native ads, a clearer picture of their effectiveness will develop. My opinion is this will reveal that native ads are no more effective than regular print media. I do think that native ads seem to be great for brand awareness, as they enable creative display for a company. But I feel that programmatic will be the future of media buying. Data provides great insights for businesses, and having purchasing decisions based upon relevant data points will lend to much more effective and sophisticated placement of ads, both online and offline.

Coding and its importance in the digital field

All data presented on a computer originates from code, which isn’t seen by the user. Instead, the user sees the end result, a clean and final presentation of the data in the manner it is supposed to appear per the coding language. There are several languages of code that can be used, from basic HTML to Javascript, which all work for various purposes. HTML is hypertext markup language, and is the standard language used to craft web pages. Meanwhile, Javascript is a much more advanced, dynamic language that is commonly used as a part of web browsers, in game development, and in creating mobile and desktop applications.

Importance to digital marketers

So if all data on a computer is written in code, this means that everything online is written in code as well. Those who are web developers and designers use coding every day to bring to web pages to life. While a digital marketer will not be coding daily, the work that they do is tied to coding, and it could come up quite regularly. Learning to code is a smart skill for a marketer starting out in the digital field because the knowledge gained can be helpful in communicating with developers and designers while working on a project.

Let’s say the young digital marketer is working on creating a call-to-action on a company blog post. This call-to-action is going to take the visitor to a landing page that should be designed optimally to ensure and exchange of information, turning the visitor into a lead. Then, that lead would be taken to a thank you page, all of which would be drafted by the marketer, but coded into reality by the web developer. The young marketer knows how these 3 pieces should be designed in order to create the best chance at converting the visitor into a lead. This means that the marketer and developer work together in order to perfect the look of each step. If the marketer has an understanding of coding, it can make communication much easier between the 2 parties. In addition, if the marketer knows a bit of coding, then when simple changes need to be made in the copy of something – let’s say a PPC ad – the marketer can quickly change the ad copy to what it should be. This saves a lot of time for both parties and allows for more efficiency in operations.

Codecademy

There are people all over the world who know how to code, many of whom not necessarily using it in their careers. Now, there are several websites that teach coding for free to anyone who wants to learn. We used Codecademy, which was fairly simple to use. As per Mark’s instructions, I started my 2 hour learning session.

Prior to this, I had seen a little bit of basic HTML (as is quite common with my generation, a lot of kids jazzed up their MySpace pages with code, tweaking what they needed to get the look just right). Even so, I was never formally introduced to HTML, so I never learned the formal process to writing a web page, including the <!DOCTYPE> and specifying <html>.

As I bounced through my lessons, I had fun learning how to code, a lot more fun than I would have thought! I used to look at code and get a headache just trying to decipher where the actual text was that I could change. Now that I’ve had some experience with coding and writing some tags, I feel more confident in working with coding.

I was actually kind of sad to see that it had already been 2 hours (though my eyes needed the break). I was able to get to the lesson that taught how to bold certain words using the <strong> and </strong> tags. This leaves me with one more lesson to complete in order to finish the HTML Basics II section. I am definitely going to continue learning how to code in my spare time in order to hone my skills. I hope to get through some more dynamic languages like Javascript and Python (a high-level programming language that helps to reduce lines of code and improve readability).

Computing into the future

In the Nautilus article, Moore’s Law is About to Get Weird, Gabriel Popkin discusses the continuation of Moore’s Law and the possible technology that would sustain growth. In case you don’t know, Moore’s Law was observed by Intel’s founder Gordon Moore, who stated that the number of transistors per square inch on a semiconductor chip would double every 2 years. This means that processing power doubles every 2 years. And this has all held up since Moore made his observation in the mid-1960s.

The concern moving forward is that there are only so many transistors that can fit onto a square inch of a chip with current technology. As we shrink the size of transistors, they can no longer be made from conventional materials. Popkin goes over some conceivable alternatives, which include chemical computing and wetware computing.

Chemical computing would use chemical reactions, called BZ reactions, in order to process information. As these reactions oscillate in time and as the wave fronts interact with each other, information can be read in binary (1s and 0s). Although this process is slow, it was described as being suited for problems that need to simultaneously look at large sets of possibilities. While this doesn’t appear to have any commercial value yet, this could be quite useful for science, where experiments often require a supercomputer in order to handle processing the vast sets of data. This actually reminds me of the show Numb3rs, where the main character (Charlie) is a mathematician and constantly running various analyses in order to crunch data and find a pattern to solve crimes with his FBI brother.

Wetware computing is the use of living neurons in creating an organic computer, much like human cells have been using neurons to carry out processes. Cells provide an advantage in that they are chaotic systems (they are non-linear) and they respond uniquely to slight variations in inputs. The main researcher in this field, William Ditto, has now moved away from real cells and has started using circuits that mimic cells. He has created his own company, ChaoLogix, and has developed a silicon ship inspired by his research that has applications in areas where security is crucial. Normal chips today – such as those on your credit card – reveal information to hackers due to the electromagnetic field they produce and the way they consume power. This means that wetware computing would be highly useful in replacing the conventional chips of our credit cards. Really, this would be valuable in any situation where information that’s hacked could pose a serious risk (financial applications, trade secrets, etc.).

While much of the technical aspect to this goes over my head, it is important to realize that current technology can only take us so far, and the possible alternatives may be best utilized for different purposes.

Paid Search and Getting Started with Google AdWords

Search engine marketing is generally referred to as being comprised of search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click ads (PPC). Companies can do everything they possibly can to optimize their websites for search, but an important accompaniment to SEO is PPC, which helps to round out a company’s efforts in search marketing. As noted by Jay Taylor in his blog post on Search Engine Watch, there are a few significant reasons to run paid search ads alongside your SEO campaign. One of those reasons is that you can receive twice the prominence if you have an ad showing on the same page as your organic results. This helps to establish credibility within the terms searched. Another reason to run a paid search campaign with SEO efforts is that SEO rankings can change quickly; running paid ads helps ensure you don’t disappear from the results page. The last 2 reasons are that you can increase your click-through rate (CTR) and likely your conversion rate. The smart thing to do would be to work on your website’s SEO before diving into paid search.

Cost Structures

Well now that we know why we should run paid search campaigns, let’s look at the different types of paid ads, which are differentiated by the cost structure (the Google AdWords Fundamentals Binder was very helpful and detailed in explaining these). The most recognizable and commonly used of these is cost-per-click (CPC) which charges the company the actual CPC anytime someone clicks on the ad, and is best for driving traffic to your site. Then, there’s cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) which charges a price for every 1000 times the ad is placed on a page, viewable by a search user. The all-knowing binder said that this was great for increasing brand awareness.

At last, we have cost-per-acquisition (CPA), where the company is charged when a searcher follows through with a determined action on the company’s website after clicking the ad on the search engine results page (SERP). This last one was left off the HubSpot Beginner’s Guide to Paid Search for good reason: Google said that this is more of an advanced method, and would be best for increasing conversions like sales and signups.

There is one more cost type of ad: Enhanced CPC. But this is only an introduction to SEM and PPC, so I’m not touching that with a 30 ft. pole).

Bidding

In order for paid ads to appear on the SERP, you must put in a bid of the maximum price per click that you’re willing to pay on the keywords that you want to appear for. The highest bidder (along with the Quality Score of the ad) will determine the placement of the ad on the page. Generally, a higher maximum CPC bid equates to a higher position on the page, but not always. If you have the highest bid, but a low Quality Score (which is based on the relevance of your ad to the search term), then an ad with a lower bid but a higher Quality Score may be placed higher. This is one way that Google fulfills its main goal in providing excellent results to its searchers.

Now, there are some cool features about Google AdWords that I had no idea about. The highest bidder doesn’t truly pay that high bid per click. They end up paying 1 cent over what the next highest bidder stated, and this is the actual CPC. In addition to this, Google AdWords’ payment system is set up in a budget format, so you can decide what you want to spend each day on each ad campaign you have, and this amount won’t be exceeded within a monthly billing cycle. Clicks can be allocated throughout the day, so that you don’t go through all of your click budget quickly in the morning. Even if you are a startup with little money to invest in clicks, you can spread those precious clicks out and see which time of day is bringing in the best CTR and conversions. Which leads me to another point …

This process of paid search is damn near pointless without any analysis of your ad’s performance. Looking at the mock Search Terms report on the HubSpot guide was really fun, and I was able to spot a few terms that were not added as keywords yet, but that should be. In the guide, it was stated that the term “search engine optimization tutorial” should be added as a keywords because of its high conversion rate (21%). In addition to this, the term “landing pages” has a conversion rate of over 15% with a much lower cost per conversion of under $12 (as compared to some owned keywords). From this report, I have also noticed that “social media marketing” doesn’t necessarily have a high CTR, but it does get a lot of impressions (the most of any terms on this list). This term also has an exceptional conversion rate (over 23%) and a low cost per conversion (about $13). I know that the rule of thumb is that well-performing keywords have a CTR of 1% or greater and a Quality Score of 5 or greater, but this term sees such a great conversion rate with such a small CTR that I’m thinking it might be a long-tail keyword where searchers are nearer the decision stage and are ready to buy.

General Format

The format of a paid ad is:

• Title – 25 characters max.
• Display URL – 37 characters max.
• Description 1 – 35 characters max. (this is a more general piece of info)
• Description 2 – 35 characters max. (this is a call to action for a specific offer)

Although, it was stated that Google has been testing things out, and ads may appear in another format with only 3 lines (leaving out the 2^nd description).

Speaking of testing, the ad copy used should always be A/B tested for maximum effectiveness. This is easy to do with Google, as it allows you to send out 2 different versions and receive data on each ad’s performance. Testing and analysis are always needed to keep up to date on the search terms that your target market is using.

Inbound Sales and Lead Generation using Socedo

The way that businesses carry out marketing and sales has been changing drastically towards inbound practices, and this will continue to evolve as the inbound method evolves. Inbound activities are extremely valuable to companies as they bring in customers who are seeking solutions that the company supplies. This moves us past the interruptive phase of marketing and into a collaborative permission-based phase. Marketers are able to generate leads from a pool of visitors who are already interested in the product category, then pass these exceptional leads to sales reps who can start warm calling.

Inbound sales is all about helping the customer, educating them beyond what they already know (and they know quite a bit by the time they talk to the sales team). The sales force of the interruptive era would be pushy, hold information as if it were power, and would always be looking to close sales at whatever cost. Once switched to the inbound sales strategy, marketing and sales teamed up in order to attract prospects and convert them to customers. For this, sales must always looking to help customers make the right purchase decision for them.

The process of getting leads can be difficult and time consuming. Luckily, Socedo is here to help. Socedo is a software service that helps companies generate leads from social media, and has automated engagement that can be undertaken in order to qualify those leads. It was an honor to have Aseem Badshah talk to our class about his company and inbound sales. He spoke of some results that Socedo has delivered to its customers: its customers have achieved an average click-through rate of 30%, with the highest reaching 80%! In addition, their average response rates have been around 40-50% compared to about a 10% response rate from cold emailing. These numbers are astonishing, and definitely prove that this is a tool handy for any sales team.

During the talk he gave, Mr. Badshah also spoke of the ideal customer for Socedo: a smaller, newer B2B company with a lower budget looking to find national customers. A company in the business software and services industry would be a great match for Socedo. Thinking specifically of business accounting software, keywords can be made to reach those talking about specific terms, but also profiles can be scanned to find decision makers within the relevant area of the business.

Email marketing is still an effective inbound method

Prior to taking this class, if asked, I would have thought that email marketing was on its way out. It is one of the more traditional forms of marketing with respect to digital marketing; we’ve had email for quite some time, wouldn’t some newfangled way to market to people using social networks or what have you be much more effective? As it turns out – no. Email remains a tried and true method, and (per HubSpot) boasts a whopping 4300% return on investment! With that kind of a return, it would be foolish not to utilize email marketing.

While I admittedly didn’t know anything concrete about email marketing and efficacy, I could have guessed that segmentation of an audience would be right up there among the most important steps in constructing email messages. Both Luis Trevino and HubSpot agree that building buyer personas is crucial to getting to know your prospects and crafting emails that speak to them. On his infographic, Trevino notes that you have 3 seconds to entice someone before they delete the email. This doesn’t surprise me, as I do this with my own emails. But it does pose a challenge to marketers. Know that the subject line is the most critical aspect of getting an email opened and read.

It’s not enough to know what your targets want, we also should know what stage they’re at in the buyer’s journey in order to help increase email’s effectiveness. Thanks to HubSpot, we know that tailoring our content to specific stages in the buyer’s journey increases the success of inbound marketing. Those in the awareness stage are only just getting into the market, and “bite-size” pieces of information that are easily digested are a great way to capture their attention. This could be videos, eBooks, blog posts, or other short pieces of content. When the prospect has reached the consideration stage, they are much more likely to take in larger pieces of information including webinars, case studies, and whitepapers. Finally, at the decision stage, the consumer is ready to find the solution, so it is best to incorporate product demos, free trials, and estimates into email marketing. This further segmentation of the audience will improve the ROI of a business’ email spend.

Looking at HubSpot’s best practices for email, there were a lot of great pieces of advice for marketers. There were things that I had never thought of, such as editing the plain-text version in case this is what is seen by the recipient. While these are new tips to me, there were a few tips that made sense and were offered elsewhere, such as personalizing the message and getting right to the point. This is a no-brainer, especially viewed from the consumer standpoint, as most people do not want to spend a lot of time on their email. It has become quite a tedious chore every day.

This provides a great segue to the article on connecting with email-fatigued prospects by Christopher Lester. As many people begin to feel bogged down by the amount of emails they receive, the tips in this article proved quite handy. (1) Provide more than just deals and discounts, (2) use automated series to deliver customized content consistently, and (3) give recipients the option to be emailed less frequently. This last suggestion is my favorite, particularly from the consumer side. I know that I get emails from the same retailer sometimes 2-3 times a day, which can be annoying and burdensome. By providing the option to reduce communication, you can make your prospect happy while still retaining them as a lead. Like HubSpot said: “Once they’re unsubscribed, you’ve lost them for good.”

Landing on a great landing page through the conversion process

All I was thinking this week was: Thank god I took this digital marketing course! After learning the difference between a landing page and a home page (I thought they were the same thing, big deal) I was definitely ready to learn all about landing pages and the conversion process.

The conversion process is essentially turning unknown website visitors into known leads. This is done via the conversion path, as HubSpot puts it. The conversion path starts with a call-to-action on a piece of inbound marketing content. This button leads the visitor to a landing page (bum-ba-da-dum!) where the visitor gives a company their information, turning them into a known lead. After this is done, they are taken to a thank you page, the final step and the stage where the visitor (now lead) gets their offering. What’s an offering? Well, to explain that, I’m going to have to go back to landing pages.

See…for landing pages to be effective, they must provide a fair exchange. The visitor will give the business their personal information but only if they get something in return: an offer. The greater the offer a company gives, the more information it can ask from the visitor. HubSpot notes that the offer is a key element of the landing page; the other 2 key elements are the buyer’s journey and buyer personas. The offer made on the landing page must be tailored to the stage of the buyer’s journey that the visitor is in (awareness, consideration, or decision), and it also must be enticing to the persona that the company is looking to garner as leads. These components make sense to me. Very few people have time to waste when looking for a solution to their problem(s). If a site can grab their attention with the right content, offering, and by approaching the correct stage, then success in click-through and submission rates will greatly increase, and the company can gain credibility.

Some best practices for a landing page were gone over by HubSpot. From everything read this week on the topic, I gather that the landing page is supposed to be quite focused on the one goal, and shouldn’t have too much clutter on the page at all. No navigation buttons or link, a clear and concise headline, and bulleted information for easy reading are all good attributes to a landing page. Don’t forget to do some A/B testing on a landing page in order to keep improving the quality, and therefore, click-through rates. The Copyblogger eBook even said that using only one column on this page, with nothing on the side to distract the visitor, is the optimum layout for achieving the conversion. Adding a relevant image or video is a great way to cement the visitor’s attention. And (bonus), according to the Mashable article by T.L. Stanley, having a demo video can increase conversions by 10-20%!! Talk about a return on your time investment!

So, now that I fully comprehend the conversion process and landing pages, I can utilize this on my own website. I use Weebly to create and host my site and, prior to discussing this topic, I was editing my website and noticed that my home page was labeled as my landing page. (Perhaps this is why I thought they were the same thing). Now I have the chance to go back and adjust what I want my landing page to be and what I should include on it in order to convey what I have to offer quickly for any company that takes a look. I found an entry from the Lander Blog on the subject of landing pages for a personal website. Its advice seems contradictory to what a professional business’ landing page should be like, but then again, the audience is looking for something different. The person looking at applicants’ websites will not want to spend a lot of time finding people’s pictures and checking their portfolio. For this reason, the blog says that a personal landing page should have a professional photo of yourself and should feature some work that you’ve created. There should also be 3-4 accomplishments that you’ve done for a company in a ‘problem-solution-result’ format (not a full-blown résumé). Another piece of advice is to offer your beliefs, because everyone applying for the job may have the same bland online presence, and adding your own personal philosophy is a great way to stick out against the rest of the applicants. The last (crucial) element in a personal landing page is a way for the visitor to contact you, and social icons can be a fun way for them to do that. I currently have social icons (including one for my Gmail) on my home page, and once I complete the editing on a new landing page, I will have icons there as well.

Managing your Social Media through HootSuite

Managing all social media accounts for a company is a huge undertaking. Luckily, there are platforms designed to make the job easier and more efficient, and HootSuite is a great option. Learning HootSuite this week was an eye-opening experience. Seeing all functionality available to the user kind of blew my mind. I knew that social media was used by businesses, but I didn’t know the extent to which companies could track conversations, monitor links, and capture attention.

Using search and keyword streams to monitor your brand and branded hashtags were a great beginning idea. I also enjoy the fact that drafts can be saved for easy access, and that they could be shared with members inside your organization for amplification purposes. Another feature of HootSuite that I found quite helpful was the schedule. An easy way to organize scheduled messages and edit them for minor changes prior to posting. This comes in handy because one should have a content strategy within their social media strategy.

Because of this need for content, I watched the “Generating and Sharing Content Effectively” course. This was a great wealth of knowledge that we’ve been learning prior to HootSuite, but added some valuable information about best practices for sharing content on each network. There were many useful tips that I never expected, like keeping self-promotional content to less than 30% of your total content, end posts with a clear call to action (Google + has specific call to action buttons that you can embed in your posts), and also to keep retweets to under 20% of your posts (on Twitter). These best practices can help anyone looking to spread content effectively across their social networks.

I also watched the “Setting Social Media Profiles Up for Business Success” course. This course held information about each network’s profiles, increasing engagement on network, and best practices. Maintaining continuity across all profiles is important for businesses, as well as choosing a handful of keywords to describe your company and using them across all networks as well. In Facebook, the first 140 characters of the ‘About’ section serves as a descriptor for links leading to your profile in search engine results. It is important to write this section knowing this, and communicate company offering.

I decided to watch the webinar “Professional Branding and Networking on LinkedIn.” I chose this webinar for personal reasons, because I am not very knowledgeable on LinkedIn or its networking capabilities. The first thing I learned was to include a headshot-type photo, and not one that I would put up on other social channels. Also, if you customize your LinkedIn URL, you’ll be easier to find in search. The video said that you can include rich media into your work history, summary, etc., which can help you highlight accomplishments and creations. I had not known about this capability, and will utilize this information in my own profile. I also learned about leveraging your connections to make new connections through introduction. This seems like a much more meaningful way to connect to people as you can cite a common acquaintance who can verify for you.

I’ve learned so much through HootSuite already, and want to learn more. I hope there is enough time for me to watch all the videos that I can process before the end of this free trial.