8 Tips for Finding and Hiring the Right SEO Provider

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Quick Read: Before you hire a company for your SEO needs, check out these must-know tips including where to find the right provider, what questions to ask, and more.

Before you hire a company for your SEO needs, check out these must-know tips including where to find the right provider, what questions to ask, and more.

Discussion Continues…: Read More

7 Email Copywriting Tips We Swear By (With Examples!)

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Quick Read: When you’re writing emails all day, every day for work and for life, it’s easy to take shortcuts. Skip a signature, forego the proofread—we’ve all done that. But when it comes to your email copywriting in your marketing, you can’t afford to.

The average return on investment for email marketing is $42 for every $1 spent. That’s huge for any business.

Email marketing, still incredibly effective.

In this post, we’ll cover everything you need to know to start improving your email copywriting now, including:

What email copywriting is
How you can improve your email copywriting
Which email copywriting examples you need to see
Let’s get started.

What is email copywriting?

Email copywriting is the process of writing an email for a current or prospective customer with the intention of encouraging a conversion. That conversion could be a reply, a sign up, a trial, or even reading your blog posts—whatever it is, all of the copy in the email should be working towards this goal.

Keep in mind that this doesn’t mean every email you send with a purpose requires great email copywriting.  Replying to your boss’s email about changing your weekly meeting time? Not email copywriting. Sending out a weekly newsletter with business updates and content suggestions? Email copywriting.

Now that we’re clear on what email copywriting is, let’s move on to our go-to tips for improving your email performance with stronger copy.

7 ways to improve your email copywriting

If you’re sending out communication to your prospects or customers, then email copywriting is important for your business. It’s not only a representation of your brand; it’s a chance to engage your audience and achieve your marketing goals.

Here’s how to improve your email copywriting and make the most of this marketing channel for your business.

1. Set your goal

How can you tell if your email does well if you don’t set a goal?

That might seem like a trick question, but it’s not. There’s no way to tell if your email worked—or if a copy change worked better—if you haven’t decided on what success means.

Every email should have a specific target, whether it’s free trial sign ups, blog post views, content downloads, or demos booked. Having this goal set is the best way to measure whether or not your email was successful.

That’s also the best way to ensure your email copywriting is all working towards the same goal. Take this automated email that I got from Semrush after signing up for a free trial.

All of the copy here is working towards a demo focusing on a specific component of their product. The email subject link is engaging, the copy is casually asking about progress, and there’s some supporting information. Now, I wouldn’t recommend hiding a link in the signature, but we’ll talk more about how to improve your CTAs soon.

2. Edit all email copywriting

You know that content editing is important. Editing your copywriting—including your email copywriting—is just as important. 

Your emails should be written clearly without stray punctuation, grammatical errors, or stilted sentences. But this round of editing should also ensure that all of your emails, well, make sense.

Take this email subject line that stood out in my inbox recently.

As opposed to …  those dog walks by yourself? An edit would have caught this needless and, worse, confusing repetition. You don’t want your emails to stand out for mistakes, so make sure to look over all your email copywriting.

3. Be brief—very brief

Over 300 billion emails are sent each day. That number is mind boggling. Until you actually think about it, that is. I get about maybe a dozen emails to my personal inbox each day, at least a few dozen to my work email, and then that’s not even taking into account my promotions tabs that Gmail filters out of view for me anyway.

So if that’s just me, then it completely makes sense that there are literally hundreds of billions of emails sent everyday.

The point here? With that many notifications all day long, we know that the shorter, the better. Keep it brief, and get to your point quickly. That’s the best chance at making sure your email copywriting actually gets read.

4. Stay on brand

When you’re writing an email, you need to keep in mind that the person opening it on the other end will be interacting with your brand. That interaction should be meaningful, and your brand should be recognizable. That means it should be written in your brand voice, feature your brand colors, and follow your brand guidelines.

For email copywriting, it’s the brand voice that you need to keep in mind. 

If your brand voice is formal and authoritative, your emails should include crisp, professional language. If your brand voice is playful, then fit in a joke or pun. Here’s a great example from Madewell.

This “seams” wordplay is a perfectly executed little wink. It feels effortlessly cool and playful, and just a little aloof. Just like Madewell’s brand.

5. Use email preview text

You’re working with a lot of constraints for email copywriting—subject lines can’t get too long, the body of the email should be short. That’s why it’s so important to use all of the space available to you, including the email preview text.

This is a snippet of text that appears next to or underneath your email subject line in your inbox view. Most email marketing tools, including HubSpot and Marketo, let you input this text to take advantage of this space.

One of the best ways to take full advantage of the extra space is to treat it as an extension of your subject line that gets more explicit about the body of the email, answers a question in your subject line, or simply follows up on a thought.

Here’s a great example from Drybar.

The email text preview line finishes the thought expressed in the subject line—and connects it even more explicitly to the offer in the email, which is to go ahead and schedule an appointment to get a blow out.

6. Get your CTA right

Your call to action might be the most important copy you write. If your email copywriting is all working toward the same goal, then your CTA is the final push. So it needs to be creative and compelling to encourage your readers to convert.

Here are a few tips for getting your CTA right:

Use active words. Active words are more engaging, and you want your reader to stay engaged in your CTA, enough to click and commit.
Get specific. Skip over-used, vague verbs and meh descriptors in phrases like “See More” and describe your offer instead. “Generate Better Leads Now” or “Save 10% Today.”
Stay on brand. Think of your CTA as another chance for you to show off your brand personality. That means using words and ideas that are related your brand identity.

This “Explore More” is a great example of AirBnB staying on brand in their CTA.

7. Keep testing

When you’ve got your email workflow or your weekly newsletter template set, it’s tempting to say that you’re good on email copywriting. But the thing is, you need to keep testing in order to keep improving.

Copy testing and A/B testing are great ways to make sure that your emails are getting better and your copywriting is getting stronger. So start by putting two subject lines to the test, then two CTAs, then email headlines—and then start over from the beginning and keep testing so that you can get more opens, more reads, and more conversions.

More email copywriting examples for inspiration

Now you know what email copywriting is and how to improve, but what does awesome email copywriting look like as a whole? We’re sharing some great email examples to help out.

1. Asana: “Hit Your Next Deadline”

The subject line of this email sets the tone for the rest of the email copywriting: It’s punchy, empowering, and to the point.

With phrases like “next big deadline” and “adjust as needed,” it’s clear that Asana knows the reality of working on a team these days. Things change, and you need a calendar that’ll change with you.

Asana also takes advantage of the extra space for copy in the first image and puts an active, engaging title on the calendar: “Mission to the Moon.” That’s how much Asana believes in your projects—it’s comparing launching your next campaign or product with going to the moon.

And above all? The copy is short and focused. Awesome job.

2. Postscript: “Your Postscript Results for March 🎉”

The emoji in the subject line of this email example s great, but it’s even better here because it’s followed through with the confetti in the background heading of the email.

One of the best things about the email copywriting here is the formatting—there’s bold, italics, and headings that make sure you’re getting all the most important information clearly even if you aren’t reading from start to finish.

But if you are, then you’ll notice the concise, casual language, on-brand data references, and multiple opportunities to interact with Postscript.

Plus, that sign off? Chef’s kiss.

3. David’s Tea: “You’re the best!”

I love a direct address in the subject line of this email, and it works even better for personalized emails like this one from David’s Tea. (Believe it or not, we’ve written about David’s Tea in the WordStream blog before.)

The language is inviting, and the complete lower-case copy and lack of punctuation emphasizes this, too. The tone overall evokes warm, fuzzy feelings. This doesn’t work for all brands and circumstances, but here, celebrating a long-term customer relationship, it not only works but also feels genuine.

The playful examples help with this, as well. Buying a chipmunk’s weight in tea is adorable, and telling me what kind of tea I’d be based on my purchases is fun.

Improve your CTR with stronger email copywriting

When you’re using email marketing to reach your audience and build your community, you need to be focusing on your email copywriting. You want to be as engaging as possible, and you want to make the most out of the brand interaction. That’s why it’s important to follow these tips to keep improving.

To recap, here are the email copywriting tips we swear by:

Set your goal
Edit your copy
Be brief
Stay on brand
Use email preview text
Get your CTA right
Keep testing
Now, go use these tips, get inspired by the examples, and write stronger email copywriting now!

When you’re writing emails all day, every day for work and for life, it’s easy to take shortcuts. Skip a signature, forego the proofread—we’ve all done that. But when it comes to your email copywriting in your marketing, you can’t afford to.

The average return on investment for email marketing is $42 for every $1 spent. That’s huge for any business.

Email marketing, still incredibly effective.

In this post, we’ll cover everything you need to know to start improving your email copywriting now, including:

What email copywriting is
How you can improve your email copywriting
Which email copywriting examples you need to see

Let’s get started.

What is email copywriting?

Email copywriting is the process of writing an email for a current or prospective customer with the intention of encouraging a conversion. That conversion could be a reply, a sign up, a trial, or even reading your blog posts—whatever it is, all of the copy in the email should be working towards this goal.

Keep in mind that this doesn’t mean every email you send with a purpose requires great email copywriting.  Replying to your boss’s email about changing your weekly meeting time? Not email copywriting. Sending out a weekly newsletter with business updates and content suggestions? Email copywriting.

Now that we’re clear on what email copywriting is, let’s move on to our go-to tips for improving your email performance with stronger copy.

7 ways to improve your email copywriting

If you’re sending out communication to your prospects or customers, then email copywriting is important for your business. It’s not only a representation of your brand; it’s a chance to engage your audience and achieve your marketing goals.

Here’s how to improve your email copywriting and make the most of this marketing channel for your business.

1. Set your goal

How can you tell if your email does well if you don’t set a goal?

That might seem like a trick question, but it’s not. There’s no way to tell if your email worked—or if a copy change worked better—if you haven’t decided on what success means.

Every email should have a specific target, whether it’s free trial sign ups, blog post views, content downloads, or demos booked. Having this goal set is the best way to measure whether or not your email was successful.

That’s also the best way to ensure your email copywriting is all working towards the same goal. Take this automated email that I got from Semrush after signing up for a free trial.

All of the copy here is working towards a demo focusing on a specific component of their product. The email subject link is engaging, the copy is casually asking about progress, and there’s some supporting information. Now, I wouldn’t recommend hiding a link in the signature, but we’ll talk more about how to improve your CTAs soon.

2. Edit all email copywriting

You know that content editing is important. Editing your copywriting—including your email copywriting—is just as important. 

Your emails should be written clearly without stray punctuation, grammatical errors, or stilted sentences. But this round of editing should also ensure that all of your emails, well, make sense.

Take this email subject line that stood out in my inbox recently.

As opposed to …  those dog walks by yourself? An edit would have caught this needless and, worse, confusing repetition. You don’t want your emails to stand out for mistakes, so make sure to look over all your email copywriting.

3. Be brief—very brief

Over 300 billion emails are sent each day. That number is mind boggling. Until you actually think about it, that is. I get about maybe a dozen emails to my personal inbox each day, at least a few dozen to my work email, and then that’s not even taking into account my promotions tabs that Gmail filters out of view for me anyway.

So if that’s just me, then it completely makes sense that there are literally hundreds of billions of emails sent everyday.

The point here? With that many notifications all day long, we know that the shorter, the better. Keep it brief, and get to your point quickly. That’s the best chance at making sure your email copywriting actually gets read.

4. Stay on brand

When you’re writing an email, you need to keep in mind that the person opening it on the other end will be interacting with your brand. That interaction should be meaningful, and your brand should be recognizable. That means it should be written in your brand voice, feature your brand colors, and follow your brand guidelines.

For email copywriting, it’s the brand voice that you need to keep in mind. 

If your brand voice is formal and authoritative, your emails should include crisp, professional language. If your brand voice is playful, then fit in a joke or pun. Here’s a great example from Madewell.

This “seams” wordplay is a perfectly executed little wink. It feels effortlessly cool and playful, and just a little aloof. Just like Madewell’s brand.

5. Use email preview text

You’re working with a lot of constraints for email copywriting—subject lines can’t get too long, the body of the email should be short. That’s why it’s so important to use all of the space available to you, including the email preview text.

This is a snippet of text that appears next to or underneath your email subject line in your inbox view. Most email marketing tools, including HubSpot and Marketo, let you input this text to take advantage of this space.

One of the best ways to take full advantage of the extra space is to treat it as an extension of your subject line that gets more explicit about the body of the email, answers a question in your subject line, or simply follows up on a thought.

Here’s a great example from Drybar.

The email text preview line finishes the thought expressed in the subject line—and connects it even more explicitly to the offer in the email, which is to go ahead and schedule an appointment to get a blow out.

6. Get your CTA right

Your call to action might be the most important copy you write. If your email copywriting is all working toward the same goal, then your CTA is the final push. So it needs to be creative and compelling to encourage your readers to convert.

Here are a few tips for getting your CTA right:

Use active words. Active words are more engaging, and you want your reader to stay engaged in your CTA, enough to click and commit.
Get specific. Skip over-used, vague verbs and meh descriptors in phrases like “See More” and describe your offer instead. “Generate Better Leads Now” or “Save 10% Today.”
Stay on brand. Think of your CTA as another chance for you to show off your brand personality. That means using words and ideas that are related your brand identity.

This “Explore More” is a great example of AirBnB staying on brand in their CTA.

7. Keep testing

When you’ve got your email workflow or your weekly newsletter template set, it’s tempting to say that you’re good on email copywriting. But the thing is, you need to keep testing in order to keep improving.

Copy testing and A/B testing are great ways to make sure that your emails are getting better and your copywriting is getting stronger. So start by putting two subject lines to the test, then two CTAs, then email headlines—and then start over from the beginning and keep testing so that you can get more opens, more reads, and more conversions.

More email copywriting examples for inspiration

Now you know what email copywriting is and how to improve, but what does awesome email copywriting look like as a whole? We’re sharing some great email examples to help out.

1. Asana: “Hit Your Next Deadline”

The subject line of this email sets the tone for the rest of the email copywriting: It’s punchy, empowering, and to the point.

With phrases like “next big deadline” and “adjust as needed,” it’s clear that Asana knows the reality of working on a team these days. Things change, and you need a calendar that’ll change with you.

Asana also takes advantage of the extra space for copy in the first image and puts an active, engaging title on the calendar: “Mission to the Moon.” That’s how much Asana believes in your projects—it’s comparing launching your next campaign or product with going to the moon.

And above all? The copy is short and focused. Awesome job.

2. Postscript: “Your Postscript Results for March 🎉

The emoji in the subject line of this email example s great, but it’s even better here because it’s followed through with the confetti in the background heading of the email.

One of the best things about the email copywriting here is the formatting—there’s bold, italics, and headings that make sure you’re getting all the most important information clearly even if you aren’t reading from start to finish.

But if you are, then you’ll notice the concise, casual language, on-brand data references, and multiple opportunities to interact with Postscript.

Plus, that sign off? Chef’s kiss.

3. David’s Tea: “You’re the best!”

I love a direct address in the subject line of this email, and it works even better for personalized emails like this one from David’s Tea. (Believe it or not, we’ve written about David’s Tea in the WordStream blog before.)

The language is inviting, and the complete lower-case copy and lack of punctuation emphasizes this, too. The tone overall evokes warm, fuzzy feelings. This doesn’t work for all brands and circumstances, but here, celebrating a long-term customer relationship, it not only works but also feels genuine.

The playful examples help with this, as well. Buying a chipmunk’s weight in tea is adorable, and telling me what kind of tea I’d be based on my purchases is fun.

Improve your CTR with stronger email copywriting

When you’re using email marketing to reach your audience and build your community, you need to be focusing on your email copywriting. You want to be as engaging as possible, and you want to make the most out of the brand interaction. That’s why it’s important to follow these tips to keep improving.

To recap, here are the email copywriting tips we swear by:

Set your goal
Edit your copy
Be brief
Stay on brand
Use email preview text
Get your CTA right
Keep testing

Now, go use these tips, get inspired by the examples, and write stronger email copywriting now!

Discussion Continues…: Read More

19 Powerful B2B Marketing Strategies That Work Now (Based on NEW Data)

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Quick Read: If you perform a Google search for B2B marketing strategies, it’s all too easy to land on articles that simply provide the generic list of marketing strategies we already know to be true: SEO, PPC, email, social media, referral marketing, loyalty programs, and more. And many of the themes layered on top of these strategies are repetitive: know your target audience, personalize, and use your data.

When a post tells you to know your audience. Personalize your content. Use video.

Now I’d be lying if I said I won’t cover any of the above in this post. In fact, I cover all of the above. But my aim here is to break down why these strategies are important for 2021 and to provide some more specific tactics on how to carry them out—backed by new, post-COVID data.

So here’s what I’m going to do:

List out general B2B marketing strategies based on 2021 B2B buyer trends.
Offer some more specific strategies within the common channels of SEO, PPC, email, and social media.
Provide key takeaways that can guide you in coming up with the best marketing strategies for your B2B business.

General B2B marketing strategies

As the workforce evolves, new trends emerge from the pandemic, and major platforms make (major) changes (see ya, cookies), the best ways to carry out the evergreen B2B marketing strategies are going to look slightly different each year. Here are some general approaches to take with respect to 2021 reports.

1. Target millennials

By 2025, millennials will represent 75% of the global workforce. According to Merit’s B2B Millennials Report, 73% of millennials are involved in product or service purchase decision-making at their companies, and 30% of them are the sole decision-makers.

Image source

This means catering your B2B marketing strategies toward millennial preferences, like:

Speed of response (like through live chat).
Easy mobile experiences (through formatting and geofencing).
Social media engagement (and not just LinkedIn!).
Cause-based marketing.
2. Take a B2C approach

The lines are being blurred between B2B marketing and B2C. This is due to the increasingly competitive nature of the digital space as well as the growing percentage of millennials in the B2B buyer population. In fact, according to Foleon’s 2021 B2B Buyer Insights Report, 80% of B2B buyers now expect a B2C experience.

In order to stand out above the noise, and to millennials, B2C approaches are necessary, like:

Personalization (in more than just emails).
Emotional marketing (more on that here).
Ease of access (to educational content and self-service).
3. Cater to a longer buying cycle

It’s always been known that B2B marketing typically has a longer buying cycle than B2C. But according to a study conducted by McKinsey at the end of 2020, the buying cycle has gotten even longer for B2B businesses since the pandemic.

With budgets being tightened, B2B buyers are taking more care to research products and services, and to more thoroughly calculate ROI beforehand.This makes it important to:

Create content to support, and not disrupt buyer research.
Use language and data particularly focused on ROI in your messaging.

4. Focus on first-party data

With the iOS 14 privacy update and Google eventually moving away from cookies, achieving precise targeting will become more challenging. Since knowing your audience is the fundamental first step for all types of marketing (see, I told you I’d talk about these things), first-party-data-friendly marketing campaigns are essential. Ways to collect first-party data include:

PPC lead gen campaigns and email list building.
Google Ads alternatives (like Microsoft or Amazon).
Using A/B content testing to collect your own psychographic data (headlines, tone, related content suggestions).

You can even create custom questions in Facebook ads to collect first-party data.

5. Supplement your automation with AI

Marketing automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are not one and the same. Marketing automation software is geared toward helping humans to carry out simple and repetitive tasks. This still requires configuring workflows around various scenarios and using the data to make manual optimizations. AI, however, uses data to mimic human intelligence and reasoning to make predictions, suggest optimizations, and dynamically apply them.

Combining automation and artificial intelligence gives you the best of both worlds: you get the efficiency and time-saving benefits of automation, along with the ability to recommend and make adjustments to the automation using data-driven insights.

Here are some examples of how AI can augment automation:

Tools that write subject lines or portions of emails within your email automation platform that are highly personalized.
Smart Bidding strategies or the Insights Page in Google Ads
Using past data for more accurate lead scoring in a CRM.
Now that we’ve gone over the overarching themes, let’s talk about ways to apply them in the most popular B2B marketing channels: SEO, PPC, social media, email. 

B2B marketing strategies using SEO

SEO helps you to get found in searches the buyers within your target businesses are performing. Here are three strategies to employ for better B2B SEO:

6. Have an SEO keyword funnel

Since B2B buyers are doing such heavy research these days, and are not yet ready to buy during this process, having organic content that ranks at every stage of their journey is huge. This way, you’re not only supporting their research, but you’re also staying top of mind, displaying your expertise, and building trust throughout their whole process.

Backlinko’s guide to B2B SEO provides excellent coverage for this strategy. The example they use is that of a logistics services company.

Here’s what we can gather from this visual:

Top-of-funnel keywords are very tactical, such as with how-tos to help buyers carry out their role effectively (and to help you facilitate the identification of pain points).
Middle-of-funnel keywords can start to use more strategy-focused and comparison keywords as the buyer gets more educated.
Bottom-of-funnel keywords are focused and targeted at exactly what the buyer (now) knows they want (thanks to your education along the way).
There is so much more to keywords for B2B marketing (intent and location modifiers) but this is an oversimplified version to help you get the gist.

7. Create career development content

Even though you are a business selling to another business, the buyer is still an individual person with a specific role in their company. And solutions aren’t the only things they are searching for online. They’re also looking at ways to educate themselves, build their skill sets, and advance their career. Create career development content to establish your expertise while building connections with could-be customers and tapping into a whole new set of relevant keywords.

How do I know this works? I’ve done it.

8. Stay on top of algorithm updates

Technical SEO is nothing new, but it has grown in importance with new algorithm updates in the past year. For example,

With 100% mobile-first indexing, you need to make sure Googlebot can access and render your mobile content and check your structured data among other things.
With the page experience update, you need to improve your Core Web Vitals by reducing javascript commands, compressing images, implementing lazy loading, and more.
With Google’s BERT update, targeting a keyword according to the intent of the person searching for it is essential.
And what piece of content about SEO would be complete without the overarching reminder: to produce quality content regularly that conveys EAT.

B2B marketing strategies using PPC

PPC comes in many different forms: search ads, social media ads, display ads, app store ads, podcast ads, and more. All of these can be lucrative B2B marketing strategies. For this post, I’m going to highlight three specific strategies you can apply to improve your B2B PPC efforts.

9. Use emotion in your ads

I can’t tell you how many articles there are out there that say B2C marketing is focused on emotion and B2C is focused on logic. (We’ve even been guilty of it.)

I never thought I’d use that stale meme pic, but the cosmos aligned.

But science says that all decisions—even B2B buying decisions—have an emotional basis. Even though businesses spend more time carefully considering options and even have decision-making committees, these committees are still made up of individuals. 

B2B businesses can (and absolutely should) inject emotion into their marketing campaigns. I promise I won’t talk about the Dove Beauty Sketches or the Subaru Emotional Outback campaign. From a B2B perspective you can be much more subtle, like in the example below:

This word choice triggers a bit of anger and indignance. (Image source)

For more help with incorporating emotion into your ad and copywriting, check out our 273 words for emotional marketing copy.

10. Combine broad match keywords with audience targeting in Google Ads 

This isn’t exactly a new strategy, but it’s more important given the farewell we said to our friend modified broad earlier this year.

Without this keyword match type (and without the helpful information that used to be available to us in the search terms report), you can’t exactly be sure that you’re targeting the exact right search query in your PPC campaigns. But you can be sure that you’re targeting the right person.

By targeting broad match keywords with audience targeting you can capture a broad audience of the right people. And since B2B marketing largely targets the decision makers in the company, this is especially helpful.

11. Use LinkedIn Website Demographics for more targeted ads

Back in 2018 when Microsoft bought LinkedIn, they rolled out the ability to use LinkedIn profile targeting for Microsoft Ads. But one tool that doesn’t seem to get a lot of attention is the LinkedIn Website Demographics tool. With this feature, you can look at traffic coming to your site based on company, company size, job function, job characteristics, industry, geography, and more. Use this data to:

Segment audiences: See which departments and roles are clicking on your ads.
Further segment by website pixel: Instead of viewing data for all of your website visitors, you can refine by the conversion behaviors they take on your site.
Compare audiences: Compare the above pixel data for different job functions. For example, if business development professionals make up a large portion of your ad traffic but are not converting, you may want to make tweaks to your ad. If you’re getting decent traffic but no conversions, you may want to eliminate this audience segment altogether.

Insights from Linkedin Website Demographics can help you in your other B2B marketing efforts since you can have a better idea of who’s doing the research and who’s making the decisions within your target businesses.

B2B marketing strategies using your website

With PPC and SEO driving traffic to your website, it’s important to make sure your website provides the right experience for your buyers that aligns with expectations of 2021.

12. Employ dynamic content for personalized experiences

According to Demand Base’s latest B2B Buyer Behavior Survey, 70% of buyers ranked relevant content that speaks directly to their company as “very important.”

Now you can’t exactly cater your website to specific companies, but you can use dynamic content on your site to provide a more personalized experience.

For example, you can create different live chat options on certain pages based on which channel they came to your website from—like an email or an ad—or you can use Drift’s integration with Clearbit to get even more personal:

Image source

You can create pop-ups for guides of varying topics based on the category of the blog post they’re reading. Or even adjust the headline for your homepage based on company size.

Image source

Another option would be to create a popup that asks for information that will help you to guide the B2B buyer on a path tailored to their needs.

Image source

Other criteria for dynamic content includes:

Stage in sales funnel or customer lifecycle.
Geolocation (such as to offer discounts on tickets to nearby conferences).
Referral source (SERP, social media, email).
Website behavior (new or returning visitor, time on site, pages visited).
13. Provide self-service options (with support)

McKinsey recently released a report on how COVID has changed B2B sales forever. One of the key insights is that B2B buyers have become more in favor of being able to evaluate and purchase products by themselves, which means two things:

Remote human interaction and digital self-service.

According to McKinsey, only 20% of B2B buyers want to return to in-person sales experiences.

The former isn’t limited to having video conference meetings during the sales and fulfillment stages, and the latter isn’t limited to buy online. Buy online can also mean free version, free trial, and DIY demos. And remote human interaction can (and should) be provided at every stage of the customer’s lifecycle through live chat.

First off, 63% of millennials (which, as already mentioned, makes up the majority of B2B buyers today) now prefer live chat over any other channel.
Secondly, even though 70% of the buyer journey is already complete before the buyer comes into contact with sales (Leave me alone so I can research), B2B buyers still want support.
Over 60% of B2B buyers have stated they want more communication during the research stage, while making the purchase, and post-purchase (Leave me alone so i can research but be there for me when I have questions.
With live chat, you can cater campaigns based on the page your visitor is viewing, which typically indicates their stage in their journey. For example:

Homepage: Run a “what are you trying to do?” chat that helps guide them toward sales, support, or just browsing.
Blog pages: Offer to answer questions or offer a guide on the topic of that post.
Solutions page: Try something like “Need help identifying the right solution for you?” 
Support pages: Offering support for live chat is particularly important for retention.
For any of these campaigns, you can start off with a bot that collects information and then routes the chat to a live agent who can provide the human interaction.

Personalization, self-service, and support. Now THAT’S a 2021 B2B marketing strategy done right. (Image source)

B2B marketing strategies using social media

14. Use Facebook ads, Messenger, and reviews 

Is Facebook a lucrative B2B marketing platform? The answer is 74. 74% of people say they use Facebook for professional purposes, and business decision-makers spend 74% more time on Facebook as compared to other people. Plus, there’s this:

Image source

Here are some tips on using Facebook for your B2B marketing strategy:

Run B2B Facebook ads using the Brand Awareness, Traffic, Lead generation, and Conversion objectives (product catalog sales and store visits are pretty useless, and unless you have a robust content and retargeting program in place, Reach campaigns aren’t 
Complete your business page. Like your Google My Business profile, your Facebook business page is a second homepage for your business on a highly trafficked site.
Use Facebook Messenger for customer support or even general inquiries (or Messenger ads).
Gather reviews. Millennials are less focused on analyst data and more focused on peer-to-peer reviews and recommendations. Facebook is a good place to provide this information on a platform they frequent.

From the Content Marketing Institute’s latest B2B Content Marketing Report.

15. Use LinkedIn posts, Pulse, and profile targeting

Using LinkedIn as a social channel for B2B marketing is obvious, but let’s go over a few tactics:

Run LinkedIn ads and Microsoft ads using profile targeting and then further refine using LinkedIn Website demographics (which we covered above).
Use a combination of posts and Pulse articles. Pulse articles have the benefit of a permanent presence on your page and showing up on Google, and promoting them in posts gives them the added visibility they need.
Encourage your employees to share your content on their Linkedin profiles. According to Linkedin, the employee network is 10X larger than its company’s follower base. Even better, content shared by employees receives 8X more engagement than content shared by brand channels. 
16. Build community and relationships onTwitter

Surprisingly enough, Twitter and Facebook are tied as the second-most popular social media platform used by B2B content marketers. It’s a good place to have conversational interactions with prospects and customers, take note of trending topics in your clients’ industries, and interact with influencers.

Image source

Here are some B2B Twitter marketing tips:

Start and participate in conversations. One of the main social media use cases for millennial B2B buyers is that of following discussions based on their topic of interest. Instead of hoping to be mentioned in popular conversations, why not start a weekly chat yourself!? (Take inspiration from #ppcchat).
Use it for brand awareness and community building: The bad news is that the average lifespan of a tweet is 20 minutes. The good news is that unlike Facebook and Instagram, posting too much will not counteract your efforts. Post frequently on the platform to provide educational content, connect with your community, and even build backlinks.
Use lists. Create custom feeds for your business through lists. This way you can cut through the noise and stay more closely connected to followers that matter. You may want to build separate lists for clients, influencers, and industry news providers.
B2B marketing strategies using email

Email is the preferred form of communication for 73% of millennials. It’s also a top free organic distribution channel for 87% of B2B marketers. Needless to say, it’s a must-have B2B marketing strategy. Here are my three tips for B2B email:

17. Run nurture campaigns

Drip and nurture campaigns get used interchangeably, but they are not the same. Drip campaigns are a predetermined set of time-based emails you send out to a segment of your list, usually designed to drive a conversion. Nurture campaigns are behavior-based, meaning they go out to recipients according to how they’ve interacted with your site and previous emails. Nurture email campaigns are best for B2B marketing since they focus on educating the prospect as they interact with your brand and provide more personalized content to help build the relationship.

Here’s a great example of a nurture email I got from Moz after creating an account to use their Chrome extension.

The next email I get from Moz will depend on whether I click on this guide.

For more help with your emails, check out these 34 free email examples and templates I created to make your life easier.

18. Increase click-through rates with video emails

We all know that video marketing has been the rookie of the year for like, five years now. And email marketing has been the MVP for forever. So why not combine them? In fact, this winning combo can increase click-through rates by up to 300%.

You can use video as a teaser for the content you want readers to click on, for product or feature releases, to reveal your company culture, or as a part of a tutorial series for nurturing leads. Here’s an example by Wistia:

Image source

19. Make sure your emails have plain text alternatives

Even when sending HTML emails, you should always have a plain text version. Not only does this help your emails get through spam, security, and privacy filters, but also, plain text emails are more compatible with smart watches and voice-assisted devices. This Litmus guide walks you through creating an optimized plain text email.

Believe it or not, some readers actually prefer plain text emails. (Image source)

Try out these B2B marketing strategies to reach your sales goals

As millennials come to dominate the B2B buyer space and businesses are pushing for a more personal approach to marketing, B2C and B2B marketing strategies are becoming less and less distinct. Traditional B2B marketing methods remain evergreen for the most part, but there is a greater emphasis on buyer enablement, education, and empowerment. And with the pandemic, the push for social change, and the major platform changes we’ve seen over the past year, we’re reminded of the importance of staying on top of trends and changing best practices.

There are plenty more B2B marketing strategies that I didn’t cover in this guide—referral programs, interactive content, increasing your overall online presence, influencer collaborations, and account-based marketing to name a few. But hopefully I’ve given you enough material to either try something new or brush up on one of your traditional strategies. 

Here are the 19 B2B marketing strategies covered in this guide:

Target millennials.
Take a B2C approach.
Cater to a longer buying cycle.
Focus on first-party data.
Supplement automation with AI.
Have an SEO keyword funnel.
Create career development content.
Stay on top of technical site fixes.
Use emotion in your ads.
Combine broad match keywords with audience targeting.
Use LinkedIn Website Demographics for better targeting.
Employ dynamic content for personalized experiences.
Provide self-service (with support).
Use Facebook ads, Messenger, and reviews.
Use LinkedIn posts, pulse, and profile targeting.
Build community and relationships on Twitter.
Run email nurture campaigns.
Send video emails to increase CTR.
Send emails with plain text alternatives.

If you perform a Google search for B2B marketing strategies, it’s all too easy to land on articles that simply provide the generic list of marketing strategies we already know to be true: SEO, PPC, email, social media, referral marketing, loyalty programs, and more. And many of the themes layered on top of these strategies are repetitive: know your target audience, personalize, and use your data.

When a post tells you to know your audience. Personalize your content. Use video.

Now I’d be lying if I said I won’t cover any of the above in this post. In fact, I cover all of the above. But my aim here is to break down why these strategies are important for 2021 and to provide some more specific tactics on how to carry them out—backed by new, post-COVID data.

So here’s what I’m going to do:

List out general B2B marketing strategies based on 2021 B2B buyer trends.
Offer some more specific strategies within the common channels of SEO, PPC, email, and social media.
Provide key takeaways that can guide you in coming up with the best marketing strategies for your B2B business.

General B2B marketing strategies

As the workforce evolves, new trends emerge from the pandemic, and major platforms make (major) changes (see ya, cookies), the best ways to carry out the evergreen B2B marketing strategies are going to look slightly different each year. Here are some general approaches to take with respect to 2021 reports.

1. Target millennials

By 2025, millennials will represent 75% of the global workforce. According to Merit’s B2B Millennials Report73% of millennials are involved in product or service purchase decision-making at their companies, and 30% of them are the sole decision-makers.

Image source

This means catering your B2B marketing strategies toward millennial preferences, like:

Speed of response (like through live chat).
Easy mobile experiences (through formatting and geofencing).
Social media engagement (and not just LinkedIn!).
Cause-based marketing.

2. Take a B2C approach

The lines are being blurred between B2B marketing and B2C. This is due to the increasingly competitive nature of the digital space as well as the growing percentage of millennials in the B2B buyer population. In fact, according to Foleon’s 2021 B2B Buyer Insights Report, 80% of B2B buyers now expect a B2C experience.

In order to stand out above the noise, and to millennials, B2C approaches are necessary, like:

Personalization (in more than just emails).
Emotional marketing (more on that here).
Ease of access (to educational content and self-service).

3. Cater to a longer buying cycle

It’s always been known that B2B marketing typically has a longer buying cycle than B2C. But according to a study conducted by McKinsey at the end of 2020, the buying cycle has gotten even longer for B2B businesses since the pandemic.

With budgets being tightened, B2B buyers are taking more care to research products and services, and to more thoroughly calculate ROI beforehand.This makes it important to:

Create content to support, and not disrupt buyer research.
Use language and data particularly focused on ROI in your messaging.

4. Focus on first-party data

With the iOS 14 privacy update and Google eventually moving away from cookies, achieving precise targeting will become more challenging. Since knowing your audience is the fundamental first step for all types of marketing (see, I told you I’d talk about these things), first-party-data-friendly marketing campaigns are essential. Ways to collect first-party data include:

PPC lead gen campaigns and email list building.
Google Ads alternatives (like Microsoft or Amazon).
Using A/B content testing to collect your own psychographic data (headlines, tone, related content suggestions).

You can even create custom questions in Facebook ads to collect first-party data.

5. Supplement your automation with AI

Marketing automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are not one and the same. Marketing automation software is geared toward helping humans to carry out simple and repetitive tasks. This still requires configuring workflows around various scenarios and using the data to make manual optimizations. AI, however, uses data to mimic human intelligence and reasoning to make predictions, suggest optimizations, and dynamically apply them.

Combining automation and artificial intelligence gives you the best of both worlds: you get the efficiency and time-saving benefits of automation, along with the ability to recommend and make adjustments to the automation using data-driven insights.

Here are some examples of how AI can augment automation:

Tools that write subject lines or portions of emails within your email automation platform that are highly personalized.
Smart Bidding strategies or the Insights Page in Google Ads
Using past data for more accurate lead scoring in a CRM.

Now that we’ve gone over the overarching themes, let’s talk about ways to apply them in the most popular B2B marketing channels: SEO, PPC, social media, email. 

B2B marketing strategies using SEO

SEO helps you to get found in searches the buyers within your target businesses are performing. Here are three strategies to employ for better B2B SEO:

6. Have an SEO keyword funnel

Since B2B buyers are doing such heavy research these days, and are not yet ready to buy during this process, having organic content that ranks at every stage of their journey is huge. This way, you’re not only supporting their research, but you’re also staying top of mind, displaying your expertise, and building trust throughout their whole process.

Backlinko’s guide to B2B SEO provides excellent coverage for this strategy. The example they use is that of a logistics services company.

Here’s what we can gather from this visual:

Top-of-funnel keywords are very tactical, such as with how-tos to help buyers carry out their role effectively (and to help you facilitate the identification of pain points).
Middle-of-funnel keywords can start to use more strategy-focused and comparison keywords as the buyer gets more educated.
Bottom-of-funnel keywords are focused and targeted at exactly what the buyer (now) knows they want (thanks to your education along the way).

There is so much more to keywords for B2B marketing (intent and location modifiers) but this is an oversimplified version to help you get the gist.

7. Create career development content

Even though you are a business selling to another business, the buyer is still an individual person with a specific role in their company. And solutions aren’t the only things they are searching for online. They’re also looking at ways to educate themselves, build their skill sets, and advance their career. Create career development content to establish your expertise while building connections with could-be customers and tapping into a whole new set of relevant keywords.

How do I know this works? I’ve done it.

8. Stay on top of algorithm updates

Technical SEO is nothing new, but it has grown in importance with new algorithm updates in the past year. For example,

With 100% mobile-first indexing, you need to make sure Googlebot can access and render your mobile content and check your structured data among other things.
With the page experience update, you need to improve your Core Web Vitals by reducing javascript commands, compressing images, implementing lazy loading, and more.
With Google’s BERT update, targeting a keyword according to the intent of the person searching for it is essential.

And what piece of content about SEO would be complete without the overarching reminder: to produce quality content regularly that conveys EAT.

B2B marketing strategies using PPC

PPC comes in many different forms: search ads, social media ads, display ads, app store ads, podcast ads, and more. All of these can be lucrative B2B marketing strategies. For this post, I’m going to highlight three specific strategies you can apply to improve your B2B PPC efforts.

9. Use emotion in your ads

I can’t tell you how many articles there are out there that say B2C marketing is focused on emotion and B2C is focused on logic. (We’ve even been guilty of it.)

I never thought I’d use that stale meme pic, but the cosmos aligned.

But science says that all decisions—even B2B buying decisions—have an emotional basis. Even though businesses spend more time carefully considering options and even have decision-making committees, these committees are still made up of individuals. 

B2B businesses can (and absolutely should) inject emotion into their marketing campaigns. I promise I won’t talk about the Dove Beauty Sketches or the Subaru Emotional Outback campaign. From a B2B perspective you can be much more subtle, like in the example below:

This word choice triggers a bit of anger and indignance. (Image source)

For more help with incorporating emotion into your ad and copywriting, check out our 273 words for emotional marketing copy.

10. Combine broad match keywords with audience targeting in Google Ads 

This isn’t exactly a new strategy, but it’s more important given the farewell we said to our friend modified broad earlier this year.

Without this keyword match type (and without the helpful information that used to be available to us in the search terms report), you can’t exactly be sure that you’re targeting the exact right search query in your PPC campaigns. But you can be sure that you’re targeting the right person.

By targeting broad match keywords with audience targeting you can capture a broad audience of the right people. And since B2B marketing largely targets the decision makers in the company, this is especially helpful.

11. Use LinkedIn Website Demographics for more targeted ads

Back in 2018 when Microsoft bought LinkedIn, they rolled out the ability to use LinkedIn profile targeting for Microsoft Ads. But one tool that doesn’t seem to get a lot of attention is the LinkedIn Website Demographics tool. With this feature, you can look at traffic coming to your site based on company, company size, job function, job characteristics, industry, geography, and more. Use this data to:

Segment audiences: See which departments and roles are clicking on your ads.
Further segment by website pixel: Instead of viewing data for all of your website visitors, you can refine by the conversion behaviors they take on your site.
Compare audiences: Compare the above pixel data for different job functions. For example, if business development professionals make up a large portion of your ad traffic but are not converting, you may want to make tweaks to your ad. If you’re getting decent traffic but no conversions, you may want to eliminate this audience segment altogether.

Insights from Linkedin Website Demographics can help you in your other B2B marketing efforts since you can have a better idea of who’s doing the research and who’s making the decisions within your target businesses.

B2B marketing strategies using your website

With PPC and SEO driving traffic to your website, it’s important to make sure your website provides the right experience for your buyers that aligns with expectations of 2021.

12. Employ dynamic content for personalized experiences

According to Demand Base’s latest B2B Buyer Behavior Survey, 70% of buyers ranked relevant content that speaks directly to their company as “very important.”

Now you can’t exactly cater your website to specific companies, but you can use dynamic content on your site to provide a more personalized experience.

For example, you can create different live chat options on certain pages based on which channel they came to your website from—like an email or an ad—or you can use Drift’s integration with Clearbit to get even more personal:

Image source

You can create pop-ups for guides of varying topics based on the category of the blog post they’re reading. Or even adjust the headline for your homepage based on company size.

Image source

Another option would be to create a popup that asks for information that will help you to guide the B2B buyer on a path tailored to their needs.

Image source

Other criteria for dynamic content includes:

Stage in sales funnel or customer lifecycle.
Geolocation (such as to offer discounts on tickets to nearby conferences).
Referral source (SERP, social media, email).
Website behavior (new or returning visitor, time on site, pages visited).

13. Provide self-service options (with support)

McKinsey recently released a report on how COVID has changed B2B sales forever. One of the key insights is that B2B buyers have become more in favor of being able to evaluate and purchase products by themselves, which means two things:

Remote human interaction and digital self-service.

According to McKinsey, only 20% of B2B buyers want to return to in-person sales experiences.

The former isn’t limited to having video conference meetings during the sales and fulfillment stages, and the latter isn’t limited to buy online. Buy online can also mean free version, free trial, and DIY demos. And remote human interaction can (and should) be provided at every stage of the customer’s lifecycle through live chat.

First off, 63% of millennials (which, as already mentioned, makes up the majority of B2B buyers today) now prefer live chat over any other channel.
Secondly, even though 70% of the buyer journey is already complete before the buyer comes into contact with sales (Leave me alone so I can research), B2B buyers still want support.
Over 60% of B2B buyers have stated they want more communication during the research stage, while making the purchase, and post-purchase (Leave me alone so i can research but be there for me when I have questions.

With live chat, you can cater campaigns based on the page your visitor is viewing, which typically indicates their stage in their journey. For example:

Homepage: Run a “what are you trying to do?” chat that helps guide them toward sales, support, or just browsing.
Blog pages: Offer to answer questions or offer a guide on the topic of that post.
Solutions page: Try something like “Need help identifying the right solution for you?” 
Support pages: Offering support for live chat is particularly important for retention.

For any of these campaigns, you can start off with a bot that collects information and then routes the chat to a live agent who can provide the human interaction.

Personalization, self-service, and support. Now THAT’S a 2021 B2B marketing strategy done right. (Image source)

B2B marketing strategies using social media

14. Use Facebook ads, Messenger, and reviews 

Is Facebook a lucrative B2B marketing platform? The answer is 74. 74% of people say they use Facebook for professional purposes, and business decision-makers spend 74% more time on Facebook as compared to other people. Plus, there’s this:

Image source

Here are some tips on using Facebook for your B2B marketing strategy:

Run B2B Facebook ads using the Brand Awareness, Traffic, Lead generation, and Conversion objectives (product catalog sales and store visits are pretty useless, and unless you have a robust content and retargeting program in place, Reach campaigns aren’t 
Complete your business page. Like your Google My Business profile, your Facebook business page is a second homepage for your business on a highly trafficked site.
Use Facebook Messenger for customer support or even general inquiries (or Messenger ads).
Gather reviews. Millennials are less focused on analyst data and more focused on peer-to-peer reviews and recommendations. Facebook is a good place to provide this information on a platform they frequent.

From the Content Marketing Institute’s latest B2B Content Marketing Report.

15. Use LinkedIn posts, Pulse, and profile targeting

Using LinkedIn as a social channel for B2B marketing is obvious, but let’s go over a few tactics:

Run LinkedIn ads and Microsoft ads using profile targeting and then further refine using LinkedIn Website demographics (which we covered above).
Use a combination of posts and Pulse articles. Pulse articles have the benefit of a permanent presence on your page and showing up on Google, and promoting them in posts gives them the added visibility they need.
Encourage your employees to share your content on their Linkedin profiles. According to Linkedin, the employee network is 10X larger than its company’s follower base. Even better, content shared by employees receives 8X more engagement than content shared by brand channels. 

16. Build community and relationships onTwitter

Surprisingly enough, Twitter and Facebook are tied as the second-most popular social media platform used by B2B content marketers. It’s a good place to have conversational interactions with prospects and customers, take note of trending topics in your clients’ industries, and interact with influencers.

Image source

Here are some B2B Twitter marketing tips:

Start and participate in conversations. One of the main social media use cases for millennial B2B buyers is that of following discussions based on their topic of interest. Instead of hoping to be mentioned in popular conversations, why not start a weekly chat yourself!? (Take inspiration from #ppcchat).
Use it for brand awareness and community building: The bad news is that the average lifespan of a tweet is 20 minutes. The good news is that unlike Facebook and Instagram, posting too much will not counteract your efforts. Post frequently on the platform to provide educational content, connect with your community, and even build backlinks.
Use lists. Create custom feeds for your business through lists. This way you can cut through the noise and stay more closely connected to followers that matter. You may want to build separate lists for clients, influencers, and industry news providers.

B2B marketing strategies using email

Email is the preferred form of communication for 73% of millennials. It’s also a top free organic distribution channel for 87% of B2B marketers. Needless to say, it’s a must-have B2B marketing strategy. Here are my three tips for B2B email:

17. Run nurture campaigns

Drip and nurture campaigns get used interchangeably, but they are not the same. Drip campaigns are a predetermined set of time-based emails you send out to a segment of your list, usually designed to drive a conversion. Nurture campaigns are behavior-based, meaning they go out to recipients according to how they’ve interacted with your site and previous emails. Nurture email campaigns are best for B2B marketing since they focus on educating the prospect as they interact with your brand and provide more personalized content to help build the relationship.

Here’s a great example of a nurture email I got from Moz after creating an account to use their Chrome extension.

The next email I get from Moz will depend on whether I click on this guide.

For more help with your emails, check out these 34 free email examples and templates I created to make your life easier.

18. Increase click-through rates with video emails

We all know that video marketing has been the rookie of the year for like, five years now. And email marketing has been the MVP for forever. So why not combine them? In fact, this winning combo can increase click-through rates by up to 300%.

You can use video as a teaser for the content you want readers to click on, for product or feature releases, to reveal your company culture, or as a part of a tutorial series for nurturing leads. Here’s an example by Wistia:

Image source

19. Make sure your emails have plain text alternatives

Even when sending HTML emails, you should always have a plain text version. Not only does this help your emails get through spam, security, and privacy filters, but also, plain text emails are more compatible with smart watches and voice-assisted devices. This Litmus guide walks you through creating an optimized plain text email.

Believe it or not, some readers actually prefer plain text emails. (Image source)

Try out these B2B marketing strategies to reach your sales goals

As millennials come to dominate the B2B buyer space and businesses are pushing for a more personal approach to marketing, B2C and B2B marketing strategies are becoming less and less distinct. Traditional B2B marketing methods remain evergreen for the most part, but there is a greater emphasis on buyer enablement, education, and empowerment. And with the pandemic, the push for social change, and the major platform changes we’ve seen over the past year, we’re reminded of the importance of staying on top of trends and changing best practices.

There are plenty more B2B marketing strategies that I didn’t cover in this guide—referral programs, interactive content, increasing your overall online presence, influencer collaborations, and account-based marketing to name a few. But hopefully I’ve given you enough material to either try something new or brush up on one of your traditional strategies. 

Here are the 19 B2B marketing strategies covered in this guide:

Target millennials.
Take a B2C approach.
Cater to a longer buying cycle.
Focus on first-party data.
Supplement automation with AI.
Have an SEO keyword funnel.
Create career development content.
Stay on top of technical site fixes.
Use emotion in your ads.
Combine broad match keywords with audience targeting.
Use LinkedIn Website Demographics for better targeting.
Employ dynamic content for personalized experiences.
Provide self-service (with support).
Use Facebook ads, Messenger, and reviews.
Use LinkedIn posts, pulse, and profile targeting.
Build community and relationships on Twitter.
Run email nurture campaigns.
Send video emails to increase CTR.
Send emails with plain text alternatives.

Discussion Continues…: Read More

The Maker SERP Squeeze: Why Should SEOs Care? –

Is ### an Important Issue for You?
Contact us Today to discuss your concerns and options !

Quick Read: Looking at 500 data points for each year from 2013 through 2021, Russ examines whether a long-standing theory in search engine optimization is true: do reviewers, aggregators, and non-manufacturing retailers push makers and manufacturers out of the SERPs over time?

Looking at 500 data points for each year from 2013 through 2021, Russ examines whether a long-standing theory in search engine optimization is true: do reviewers, aggregators, and non-manufacturing retailers push makers and manufacturers out of the SERPs over time?

Discussion Continues…: Read More

5 Steps to Keep Your Facebook Ads Working in iOS 14

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Contact us Today to discuss your concerns and options !

Quick Read: Back when we found out about iOS 14, there were a lot of question marks as to when it would be enforced, what it would mean for your Facebook campaigns, and how you could prepare. Now that iOS 14 is in full swing, many questions have been answered—but still more arise.

Like how to run Facebook ads with the conversion objective in iOS 14 as successfully as you did before.

And that’s what I aim to answer in this post. I’m going to go over the impact of iOS on Facebook conversion campaigns and then walk you through how to adjust to changes like:

Facebook domain verification (why it’s now necessary).
Facebook Aggregated Event Measurement (what the heck is it?)
Eight conversion events per domain (what happened to unlimited?)
The seven-day attribution window (so long, 28).
Read on to make sure your success with Facebook conversion campaigns in iOS 14 is as closely matched as possible to your pre-iOS 14 glory days.

The impact of iOS 14 on Facebook conversion campaigns

The functionality of the Facebook pixel itself has been impacted in many ways with iOS 14. If you are like most Facebook advertisers, you most likely run or have run conversion campaigns within the platform.

That is, you send traffic from your ads to your website or landing page in an attempt to have those visitors complete an action. Once they complete that action, it is recorded in the Facebook interface via custom conversions or events.

This allows advertisers to derive a cost-per-action or cost-per-acquisition from the platform, giving them the ability to attribute Facebook internally and thus prove that their marketing dollars are working.

The issue with the iOS 14 update is that it poses limitations for apps (like Facebook) and their passing of data through external domains. This in return affects how advertisers are able to run ads and pass conversion or web data back to Facebook for reporting and optimization.

So you are running Facebook ads with the conversion objective, here’s what you need to do to maintain success despite iOS 14’s limitations:

Verify your domain(s)
Select eight conversion events for your domain.
Choose your ad set attribution window.
Rely more on internal data (Google Analytics, CRM, etc.).
Monitor audience size.
Let’s dive into each one.

1. Complete your Facebook domain verification

Facebook recommends that advertisers verify their website domain. Although they consider it a best practice, Facebook claims “it’s important to prioritize verifying your domains if your domains integrate pixels that are owned by multiple businesses or personal ad accounts.”

What this verification does is demonstrates that you are connected to your business. Domain verification requires the webmaster for your domain to place a special code on your website.

The primary reason this is important in regard to the iOS update is that it gives authority over which conversion events are eligible on your domain. In order to comply with the update, Facebook is required to request permission to users on their platform through Apple’s “AppTracking Transparency Framework” which is essentially the push notification that I had discussed in my previous post.

Due to Facebook having to comply with this, advertisers are now limited to eight web conversion events per domain. So if you own multiple domains that you advertise with, it is important to have them verified so you can have more manual control over which events are selected.

2. Select 8 conversion events (Aggregated Event Measurement)

In response to Apple’s Private Click Measurement, Facebook’s Aggregated Event Measurement is a protocol that allows for measurement of web events from iOS users.

The implications?

Domains are limited to eight conversion events that can be used for campaign optimization;
Ad sets that are optimizing for events that are no longer available have been paused.

Facebook automatically chooses eight events based on recent campaign spend from all of the ad accounts advertising to that domain. However, you have the ability to manually select them yourselves in Business Manager. It’s recommended that you choose the events that are most important to your business.

Take a look at the events in your account and begin prioritizing them. Make an assessment of your marketing strategy and your funnel and select the eight conversion events you want to be stuck with per domain. This is sad news for marketers who prefer the agility to create custom conversions on the fly.

For detailed instructions on how to set up your eight preferred web conversions, follow these directions provided by Facebook.

Keep in mind that you will need to verify your business’s domain in order to select these events.

3. Choose your ad set attribution window

Another change you need to be aware of is that of attribution window settings. The attribution window for all new or active ad campaigns is now set at the ad set level instead of the account level. The default for all new or active campaigns is the 7-day click attribution window. You have the option for one-day click, seven-day click, one-day click + one-day view, or seven-day click + one-day view.

These changes impact advertisers who were previously viewing their reporting through a longer attribution window. There isn’t really a fix for this: Regardless of the window that you are currently using, you will ultimately have less flexibility in how much data you are seeing and reporting on.

4. Lean on your internal data

Although Facebook allows you to optimize for eight events, you will still have the visibility on the back end to discern where visitors are coming from and what they’re doing on your site once they land. This means you may need to invest more time in becoming Google Analytics-savvy or rely more on your CRM to get the proper information to make decisions on Facebook.

Similarly, the shortened attribution window makes it harder to tie internal reporting back to your Facebook ad efforts, making it even more important that your internal data is accurate.

5. Monitor remarketing campaigns and ad sets 

As more people opt-out of tracking on iOS14 devices, the smaller many of your custom audiences may become. If the decrease in these custom audiences is sizable (something you probably won’t be able to gauge from the audience projections), you will have to adjust your remarketing or custom list strategy a bit.

What I mean by this is that you will want to monitor remarketing campaigns or ad sets more closely and pay attention to the spend as well as the frequency. This may be something that you already do, but with the potential for shrinking audience sizes, you might want to spend less on these ad sets in order to reduce ad fatigue and frequency.

Audience sizes are generally expected to drop although it is unclear by how much. It is rumored that Facebook ran tests internally to gauge what the damage would be, but only time can tell. Regardless, it would be wise to devote your marketing resources more heavily on remarketing or custom lists now so that you can have alternative ways to reach out to those who are opting-out.

Set yourself up for continued success with Facebook conversion campaigns in iOS 14 

Although many of the conversion-related changes may be irritating at first, they’ll get easier over time. What might not get easier over time is the drop-off in audiences. Facebook has built its advertising empire using a variety of complex targeting tools. If those audiences shrink substantially or become less effective in the coming months, advertisers may ultimately target broader as a response. In turn, costs would increase and with reduced reporting capabilities, many businesses may decide not to advertise on Facebook. Let’s hope this doesn’t happen!

To end on a more positive note, here’s a recap on what you can do to ensure success with the conversion objective despite iOS 14’s limitations:

Verify your domains so you can have more manual control over your conversion events.
Manually select your eight conversion events for each of your domains in Business Manager.
Choose your ad set attribution window.
Lean on Google Analytics or your CRM for accurate data.
Monitor shrinking audiences and allocate your budget accordingly to prevent ad fatigue and misleading data.

Back when we found out about iOS 14, there were a lot of question marks as to when it would be enforced, what it would mean for your Facebook campaigns, and how you could prepare. Now that iOS 14 is in full swing, many questions have been answered—but still more arise.

Like how to run Facebook ads with the conversion objective in iOS 14 as successfully as you did before.

And that’s what I aim to answer in this post. I’m going to go over the impact of iOS on Facebook conversion campaigns and then walk you through how to adjust to changes like:

Facebook domain verification (why it’s now necessary).
Facebook Aggregated Event Measurement (what the heck is it?)
Eight conversion events per domain (what happened to unlimited?)
The seven-day attribution window (so long, 28).

Read on to make sure your success with Facebook conversion campaigns in iOS 14 is as closely matched as possible to your pre-iOS 14 glory days.

The impact of iOS 14 on Facebook conversion campaigns

The functionality of the Facebook pixel itself has been impacted in many ways with iOS 14. If you are like most Facebook advertisers, you most likely run or have run conversion campaigns within the platform.

That is, you send traffic from your ads to your website or landing page in an attempt to have those visitors complete an action. Once they complete that action, it is recorded in the Facebook interface via custom conversions or events.

This allows advertisers to derive a cost-per-action or cost-per-acquisition from the platform, giving them the ability to attribute Facebook internally and thus prove that their marketing dollars are working.

The issue with the iOS 14 update is that it poses limitations for apps (like Facebook) and their passing of data through external domains. This in return affects how advertisers are able to run ads and pass conversion or web data back to Facebook for reporting and optimization.

So you are running Facebook ads with the conversion objective, here’s what you need to do to maintain success despite iOS 14’s limitations:

Verify your domain(s)
Select eight conversion events for your domain.
Choose your ad set attribution window.
Rely more on internal data (Google Analytics, CRM, etc.).
Monitor audience size.

Let’s dive into each one.

1. Complete your Facebook domain verification

Facebook recommends that advertisers verify their website domain. Although they consider it a best practice, Facebook claims “it’s important to prioritize verifying your domains if your domains integrate pixels that are owned by multiple businesses or personal ad accounts.”

What this verification does is demonstrates that you are connected to your business. Domain verification requires the webmaster for your domain to place a special code on your website.

The primary reason this is important in regard to the iOS update is that it gives authority over which conversion events are eligible on your domain. In order to comply with the update, Facebook is required to request permission to users on their platform through Apple’s “AppTracking Transparency Framework” which is essentially the push notification that I had discussed in my previous post.

Due to Facebook having to comply with this, advertisers are now limited to eight web conversion events per domain. So if you own multiple domains that you advertise with, it is important to have them verified so you can have more manual control over which events are selected.

2. Select 8 conversion events (Aggregated Event Measurement)

In response to Apple’s Private Click Measurement, Facebook’s Aggregated Event Measurement is a protocol that allows for measurement of web events from iOS users.

The implications?

Domains are limited to eight conversion events that can be used for campaign optimization;
Ad sets that are optimizing for events that are no longer available have been paused.

Facebook automatically chooses eight events based on recent campaign spend from all of the ad accounts advertising to that domain. However, you have the ability to manually select them yourselves in Business Manager. It’s recommended that you choose the events that are most important to your business.

Take a look at the events in your account and begin prioritizing them. Make an assessment of your marketing strategy and your funnel and select the eight conversion events you want to be stuck with per domain. This is sad news for marketers who prefer the agility to create custom conversions on the fly.

For detailed instructions on how to set up your eight preferred web conversions, follow these directions provided by Facebook.

Keep in mind that you will need to verify your business’s domain in order to select these events.

3. Choose your ad set attribution window

Another change you need to be aware of is that of attribution window settings. The attribution window for all new or active ad campaigns is now set at the ad set level instead of the account level. The default for all new or active campaigns is the 7-day click attribution window. You have the option for one-day click, seven-day click, one-day click + one-day view, or seven-day click + one-day view.

These changes impact advertisers who were previously viewing their reporting through a longer attribution window. There isn’t really a fix for this: Regardless of the window that you are currently using, you will ultimately have less flexibility in how much data you are seeing and reporting on.

4. Lean on your internal data

Although Facebook allows you to optimize for eight events, you will still have the visibility on the back end to discern where visitors are coming from and what they’re doing on your site once they land. This means you may need to invest more time in becoming Google Analytics-savvy or rely more on your CRM to get the proper information to make decisions on Facebook.

Similarly, the shortened attribution window makes it harder to tie internal reporting back to your Facebook ad efforts, making it even more important that your internal data is accurate.

5. Monitor remarketing campaigns and ad sets 

As more people opt-out of tracking on iOS14 devices, the smaller many of your custom audiences may become. If the decrease in these custom audiences is sizable (something you probably won’t be able to gauge from the audience projections), you will have to adjust your remarketing or custom list strategy a bit.

What I mean by this is that you will want to monitor remarketing campaigns or ad sets more closely and pay attention to the spend as well as the frequency. This may be something that you already do, but with the potential for shrinking audience sizes, you might want to spend less on these ad sets in order to reduce ad fatigue and frequency.

Audience sizes are generally expected to drop although it is unclear by how much. It is rumored that Facebook ran tests internally to gauge what the damage would be, but only time can tell. Regardless, it would be wise to devote your marketing resources more heavily on remarketing or custom lists now so that you can have alternative ways to reach out to those who are opting-out.

Set yourself up for continued success with Facebook conversion campaigns in iOS 14 

Although many of the conversion-related changes may be irritating at first, they’ll get easier over time. What might not get easier over time is the drop-off in audiences. Facebook has built its advertising empire using a variety of complex targeting tools. If those audiences shrink substantially or become less effective in the coming months, advertisers may ultimately target broader as a response. In turn, costs would increase and with reduced reporting capabilities, many businesses may decide not to advertise on Facebook. Let’s hope this doesn’t happen!

To end on a more positive note, here’s a recap on what you can do to ensure success with the conversion objective despite iOS 14’s limitations:

Verify your domains so you can have more manual control over your conversion events.
Manually select your eight conversion events for each of your domains in Business Manager.
Choose your ad set attribution window.
Lean on Google Analytics or your CRM for accurate data.
Monitor shrinking audiences and allocate your budget accordingly to prevent ad fatigue and misleading data.

Discussion Continues…: Read More

Does Fixing Old Broken Links Still Matter to SEO? –

Is ### an Important Issue for You?
Contact us Today to discuss your concerns and options !

Quick Read: Fixing broken links has long stood as an SEO best practice. But if you’ve run into situations where you’ve fixed a broken link and nothing happened, you’re not alone. In today’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, SEO expert Cyrus Shepard discusses whether these fixes still matter, and takes you through steps to increase your chances of seeing the benefits.

Fixing broken links has long stood as an SEO best practice. But if you’ve run into situations where you’ve fixed a broken link and nothing happened, you’re not alone. In today’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, SEO expert Cyrus Shepard discusses whether these fixes still matter, and takes you through steps to increase your chances of seeing the benefits.

Discussion Continues…: Read More

The Most Challenging Parts of the Content-Led Link Building Process –

Is ### an Important Issue for You?
Contact us Today to discuss your concerns and options !

Quick Read: Aira’s recent State of Link Building Survey asked respondents about which parts of content-led link building processes they found most challenging. Paddy walks through those results, and looks at the ways in which you can ease those challenges to generate more successful results.

Aira’s recent State of Link Building Survey asked respondents about which parts of content-led link building processes they found most challenging. Paddy walks through those results, and looks at the ways in which you can ease those challenges to generate more successful results.

Discussion Continues…: Read More

How to Succeed in Google Ads Without Modified Broad Match

Is ### an Important Issue for You?
Contact us Today to discuss your concerns and options !

Quick Read: Despite Google’s claims that broad match is more effective than ever before, many advertisers are still reeling from the loss of their beloved modified broad match type. How can you continue getting relevant traffic from your ads? 

Enter: Broad match keywords + audience targeting.

To be fair, this was always something you could do, but was not ideal due to its restrictive nature. However, now that modified broad is gone, we have to get craftier with the few match types we have left—broad match included.

So in this post, I’m going to share:

The benefits of using broad match + audience targeting (with expert input).
How to execute this funky strategy in Google Ads.
My three secrets for combining broad match with audiences effectively.
Follow my tips and tricks, and before you know it, broad match may become your best friend!

Why use the broad match + audiences strategy?

If we remember back a few months ago, Google announced it was sunsetting the modified broad match type. In that announcement, it claimed that “broad match is now more effective than ever,” as the algorithm has improved to allow broad match keywords to use context clues for triggering ads to the right searches.

Typos in last search example intended! Image adapted from Google.

Google continues its statement regarding broad match with the following:

“To help deliver relevant matches, this match type may also take into account the following:

The user’s recent search activities.
The content of the landing page.
Other keywords in an ad group to better understand keyword intent.”
This means broad match keywords will purposely overlook any grammatical errors or misspellings within a search if it’s still contextually relevant.

Despite Google’s claims of broad match efficiency, I know plenty of folks who are still wary of this match type, either due to negative experiences in the past with spending on irrelevant queries, or to the hesitation with risking more traffic while wasting an already-tight budget.

But, whether you feel like the updated phrase match type has been sluggish so far—or just have a stagnant campaign you’re looking to scale—then you may just have to resort to broad match type keywords. Don’t worry! Once you layer on audience targeting, you’ll have the secret sauce you need to avoid the consequences above.

Speaking of wasted budget, our free Google Ads Performance Grader will identify leaks in your spending and tell you how to plug them. Try it now!

 

How Google Ads broad match with audience targeting works

With this strategy, you can layer audiences to target on top of your broad match keywords to keep them in control. Now, we’re not talking a small remarketing audience, but the larger affinity, in-market, and custom audiences Google curates for us that have plenty of impressions to spare. 

Think of these audiences as a safety measure to keep your broad match keywords in check, so even if you’re not showing to the exact right search query, you at least know you’re showing to the right person. This is especially helpful bearing in mind that we can no longer see every single search term we’ve showed for in the search terms report anyway.

With the combination of broad match keywords (which will boost your reach) along with audience targeting (which will refine your reach quality) you’ll be able to scale your campaigns without the risk of irrelevant traffic or increased wasted spend.

The benefits of combining broad match keywords and audience targeting

Aside from being able to freshen strategy along with safely scaling your campaigns, this unique tactic also has a plethora of other benefits to fit any account needs. Maybe you’re not ready to scale out your campaign, but still feel like you’re stuck in a rut with duplicate searches and, inherently, leads. Or, you feel like you don’t necessarily have the brand awareness to capture searches.

This strategy solves both those problems by reaching folks who are in your target audience, but may not necessarily know they want to look specifically for you yet. Not only that, but this does that outside-the-box thinking for you to capture searches from those ideal audiences that you otherwise wouldn’t have thought of to add as a keyword.

Image source

Another expert’s take on this modified broad match workaround

Don’t just take my word for it! I talked to PPC thought leader, Francine Rodriguez, who was voted a 2019 Top 5 PPC Rising Star and a 2020 Top 50 Most Influential PPC Expert by PPCHero, to get her take on this wacky strategy as well.

“This is a very good strategy. It’s like breaking normal PPC rules,” Rodriguez says. “You’re using shorter-term, broad keywords to capture any and all traffic of the desired audience. You can then use the search terms report later to come up with new terms for your other campaigns.” Notably, Rodriguez also mentions that “This is great for a hyper-local strategy as well—if you have a small area to target you want to make sure you get the biggest percentage possible of those impressions.”

So, even if you’re not looking to spend on a ton of new traffic, but you’re a small business looking to boost your local search marketing strategy, then this tactic could work for you.

How to set up this strategy in Google Ads

First, you’ll need a good, old-fashioned search campaign ready to go. This means taking an already created campaign or a new one with your settings, ad groups, responsive or text ads, and core terms for your broad match keywords ready to go. Then, follow these six easy steps:

Set all of your keywords to broad match.
Select either the entire campaign (audiences will apply all ad groups) or an individual ad group (audiences can change ad group by ad group depending on specific needs).
Click into audiences, then click the blue pencil to edit your audience targeting.
Be sure you have toggled the option of Targeting for the audiences you select.
Search through and select Google’s audience options or select a ready-made custom audience (you can try multiple for a wider reach then compare later, or pick just one to test the waters).
Hit save.
Now, your campaign will have your broad match keywords running alongside the audiences you selected to target. They will work hand in hand going forward by essentially saying “I’ll show for any search that contextually matches up to this broad match keyword, but only if it’s coming from someone in my selected targeted audience.”

Tips to make broad match + audience targeting  work

While the setup steps seem fairly easy, there are still a few hacks you’ll want to keep in mind to ensure you find success with this new strategy. Here are three tips to make this strategy work for you:

1. Review your bids

Since you’ll still have the flexibility to match up to more, you’re going to have the opportunity to serve for higher cost queries and may inherently spend more overall. That’s why, if on manual, it’s a good idea to slightly lower your Max CPC bids to play it safe while you’re collecting data during the beginning stages of this strategy.

Again, you may be matching up to more queries that, while maintaining quality through the audience acting as a filter, could result in queries that cost slightly higher in click than what you previously had been used to when doing the same old same old.

If you’re on automatic, then you luckily won’t have to worry. Google recommends using this with broad match keywords anyways, since the automatic bidding knows to bid lower or higher depending on the query relevancy.

However, it’s still a good idea to double-check your automatic bidding strategy to ensure it aligns with your goals. Meaning, if you have to set a bid limit on Max Clicks (or set a target on Max Conversions, Target CPA, or Target ROAS) you may still want to slightly lower that target as well, to encourage slightly lower bidding to keep costs in control to start.

2. Review your negative keywords

Or, add in more negative keywords if need be. While you’re giving Google just slightly more control to make the judgment calls on what queries you show for, you’re still the one in the driver’s seat of the campaign.

So, looking for other areas that you can maintain more power is key. Think of any possible words that could slip through that you definitely don’t want, and add those in as negative keywords before you start with this strategy as another safety measure.

Rodriguez also agrees this is a good idea .“You would need to have a solid negative list,” she mentioned. However, you don’t need to go too crazy. If we spent time adding negatives for everything irrelevant to our business we’d be doing it endlessly.

So, only bother for terms you think could be slightly similar to the broad match keywords you’re already using that you wouldn’t want to match to. For example, if you have the broad keyword of nurse courses or nurse classes, but you don’t offer any job placements after, then job related terms would be a good idea to add as negatives.

3. Review your campaign setup

If you haven’t caught on to the theme yet of checking your bidding and negatives, then I want to emphasize that it’s generally just a good rule of thumb to review your campaign before setting this strategy live.

Are there any other restrictions you had placed previously, like demographic exclusions or ad schedules that you think may make this strategy ineffective? Or, on the opposite end, are your location targeting and network preferences a bit loose, making this strategy a little too effective beyond your means?

Whenever changing to a new strategy, anything previously set could slip through the cracks. So, take a few extra minutes to double check the campaign is set how you prefer when executing this wider reach strategy.

Get more qualified leads using Google Ads broad match with audience targeting!

If you keep your PPC stagnant and never risk switching things up, you’ll find your account’s growth to be slim to none. When you feel you’ve tried everything and the campaign is still not performing how you’d like, then it’s time to think out of the box with something that may feel a bit risky or taboo, but can be immensely rewarding.

This is a great strategy to get to your ideal customers through those audiences without limiting your campaign via the two more restrictive match types. The great thing is it doesn’t take a ton of time to set up either, and you can always switch it back without any data hiccups if need be. Who needs modified broad, anyway? Broad match will work just fine for us—with the right audience that is!

Google Ads modified broad workaround (summary)

Despite Google’s claims that broad match is more effective than ever before, many advertisers are still reeling from the loss of their beloved modified broad match type.
The broad match keyword + audience layering strategy provides a solid workaround, allowing you to get the expanded reach of broad targeting but the quality leads of audience refining.
With it, you can resolve duplicate keywords, reach folks who may not yet know to look specifically for you, and capture new searches to target.
To set it up, select a campaign. Set all keywords to broad match. Select the entire campaign or individual ad group. Click into audiences and apply the audience of your choice. 
Check your bid strategy, campaign setup, negative keyword list to make sure this strategy will be effective, but not beyond your means.

Despite Google’s claims that broad match is more effective than ever before, many advertisers are still reeling from the loss of their beloved modified broad match type. How can you continue getting relevant traffic from your ads? 

Enter: Broad match keywords + audience targeting.

To be fair, this was always something you could do, but was not ideal due to its restrictive nature. However, now that modified broad is gone, we have to get craftier with the few match types we have left—broad match included.

So in this post, I’m going to share:

The benefits of using broad match + audience targeting (with expert input).
How to execute this funky strategy in Google Ads.
My three secrets for combining broad match with audiences effectively.

Follow my tips and tricks, and before you know it, broad match may become your best friend!

Why use the broad match + audiences strategy?

If we remember back a few months ago, Google announced it was sunsetting the modified broad match type. In that announcement, it claimed that “broad match is now more effective than ever,” as the algorithm has improved to allow broad match keywords to use context clues for triggering ads to the right searches.

Typos in last search example intended! Image adapted from Google.

Google continues its statement regarding broad match with the following:

To help deliver relevant matches, this match type may also take into account the following:

The user’s recent search activities.
The content of the landing page.
Other keywords in an ad group to better understand keyword intent.”

This means broad match keywords will purposely overlook any grammatical errors or misspellings within a search if it’s still contextually relevant.

Despite Google’s claims of broad match efficiency, I know plenty of folks who are still wary of this match type, either due to negative experiences in the past with spending on irrelevant queries, or to the hesitation with risking more traffic while wasting an already-tight budget.

But, whether you feel like the updated phrase match type has been sluggish so far—or just have a stagnant campaign you’re looking to scale—then you may just have to resort to broad match type keywords. Don’t worry! Once you layer on audience targeting, you’ll have the secret sauce you need to avoid the consequences above.

Speaking of wasted budget, our free Google Ads Performance Grader will identify leaks in your spending and tell you how to plug them. Try it now!

 

How Google Ads broad match with audience targeting works

With this strategy, you can layer audiences to target on top of your broad match keywords to keep them in control. Now, we’re not talking a small remarketing audience, but the larger affinity, in-market, and custom audiences Google curates for us that have plenty of impressions to spare. 

Think of these audiences as a safety measure to keep your broad match keywords in check, so even if you’re not showing to the exact right search query, you at least know you’re showing to the right person. This is especially helpful bearing in mind that we can no longer see every single search term we’ve showed for in the search terms report anyway.

With the combination of broad match keywords (which will boost your reach) along with audience targeting (which will refine your reach quality) you’ll be able to scale your campaigns without the risk of irrelevant traffic or increased wasted spend.

The benefits of combining broad match keywords and audience targeting

Aside from being able to freshen strategy along with safely scaling your campaigns, this unique tactic also has a plethora of other benefits to fit any account needs. Maybe you’re not ready to scale out your campaign, but still feel like you’re stuck in a rut with duplicate searches and, inherently, leads. Or, you feel like you don’t necessarily have the brand awareness to capture searches.

This strategy solves both those problems by reaching folks who are in your target audience, but may not necessarily know they want to look specifically for you yet. Not only that, but this does that outside-the-box thinking for you to capture searches from those ideal audiences that you otherwise wouldn’t have thought of to add as a keyword.

Image source

Another expert’s take on this modified broad match workaround

Don’t just take my word for it! I talked to PPC thought leader, Francine Rodriguez, who was voted a 2019 Top 5 PPC Rising Star and a 2020 Top 50 Most Influential PPC Expert by PPCHero, to get her take on this wacky strategy as well.

“This is a very good strategy. It’s like breaking normal PPC rules,” Rodriguez says. “You’re using shorter-term, broad keywords to capture any and all traffic of the desired audience. You can then use the search terms report later to come up with new terms for your other campaigns.” Notably, Rodriguez also mentions that “This is great for a hyper-local strategy as well—if you have a small area to target you want to make sure you get the biggest percentage possible of those impressions.”

So, even if you’re not looking to spend on a ton of new traffic, but you’re a small business looking to boost your local search marketing strategy, then this tactic could work for you.

How to set up this strategy in Google Ads

First, you’ll need a good, old-fashioned search campaign ready to go. This means taking an already created campaign or a new one with your settings, ad groups, responsive or text ads, and core terms for your broad match keywords ready to go. Then, follow these six easy steps:

Set all of your keywords to broad match.
Select either the entire campaign (audiences will apply all ad groups) or an individual ad group (audiences can change ad group by ad group depending on specific needs).
Click into audiences, then click the blue pencil to edit your audience targeting.
Be sure you have toggled the option of Targeting for the audiences you select.
Search through and select Google’s audience options or select a ready-made custom audience (you can try multiple for a wider reach then compare later, or pick just one to test the waters).
Hit save.

Now, your campaign will have your broad match keywords running alongside the audiences you selected to target. They will work hand in hand going forward by essentially saying “I’ll show for any search that contextually matches up to this broad match keyword, but only if it’s coming from someone in my selected targeted audience.”

Tips to make broad match + audience targeting  work

While the setup steps seem fairly easy, there are still a few hacks you’ll want to keep in mind to ensure you find success with this new strategy. Here are three tips to make this strategy work for you:

1. Review your bids

Since you’ll still have the flexibility to match up to more, you’re going to have the opportunity to serve for higher cost queries and may inherently spend more overall. That’s why, if on manual, it’s a good idea to slightly lower your Max CPC bids to play it safe while you’re collecting data during the beginning stages of this strategy.

Again, you may be matching up to more queries that, while maintaining quality through the audience acting as a filter, could result in queries that cost slightly higher in click than what you previously had been used to when doing the same old same old.

If you’re on automatic, then you luckily won’t have to worry. Google recommends using this with broad match keywords anyways, since the automatic bidding knows to bid lower or higher depending on the query relevancy.

However, it’s still a good idea to double-check your automatic bidding strategy to ensure it aligns with your goals. Meaning, if you have to set a bid limit on Max Clicks (or set a target on Max Conversions, Target CPA, or Target ROAS) you may still want to slightly lower that target as well, to encourage slightly lower bidding to keep costs in control to start.

2. Review your negative keywords

Or, add in more negative keywords if need be. While you’re giving Google just slightly more control to make the judgment calls on what queries you show for, you’re still the one in the driver’s seat of the campaign.

So, looking for other areas that you can maintain more power is key. Think of any possible words that could slip through that you definitely don’t want, and add those in as negative keywords before you start with this strategy as another safety measure.

Rodriguez also agrees this is a good idea .“You would need to have a solid negative list,” she mentioned. However, you don’t need to go too crazy. If we spent time adding negatives for everything irrelevant to our business we’d be doing it endlessly.

So, only bother for terms you think could be slightly similar to the broad match keywords you’re already using that you wouldn’t want to match to. For example, if you have the broad keyword of nurse courses or nurse classes, but you don’t offer any job placements after, then job related terms would be a good idea to add as negatives.

3. Review your campaign setup

If you haven’t caught on to the theme yet of checking your bidding and negatives, then I want to emphasize that it’s generally just a good rule of thumb to review your campaign before setting this strategy live.

Are there any other restrictions you had placed previously, like demographic exclusions or ad schedules that you think may make this strategy ineffective? Or, on the opposite end, are your location targeting and network preferences a bit loose, making this strategy a little too effective beyond your means?

Whenever changing to a new strategy, anything previously set could slip through the cracks. So, take a few extra minutes to double check the campaign is set how you prefer when executing this wider reach strategy.

Get more qualified leads using Google Ads broad match with audience targeting!

If you keep your PPC stagnant and never risk switching things up, you’ll find your account’s growth to be slim to none. When you feel you’ve tried everything and the campaign is still not performing how you’d like, then it’s time to think out of the box with something that may feel a bit risky or taboo, but can be immensely rewarding.

This is a great strategy to get to your ideal customers through those audiences without limiting your campaign via the two more restrictive match types. The great thing is it doesn’t take a ton of time to set up either, and you can always switch it back without any data hiccups if need be. Who needs modified broad, anyway? Broad match will work just fine for us—with the right audience that is!

Google Ads modified broad workaround (summary)

Despite Google’s claims that broad match is more effective than ever before, many advertisers are still reeling from the loss of their beloved modified broad match type.
The broad match keyword + audience layering strategy provides a solid workaround, allowing you to get the expanded reach of broad targeting but the quality leads of audience refining.
With it, you can resolve duplicate keywords, reach folks who may not yet know to look specifically for you, and capture new searches to target.
To set it up, select a campaign. Set all keywords to broad match. Select the entire campaign or individual ad group. Click into audiences and apply the audience of your choice. 
Check your bid strategy, campaign setup, negative keyword list to make sure this strategy will be effective, but not beyond your means.

Discussion Continues…: Read More

How to Configure Google Analytics for Local Businesses

How to Configure Google Analytics for Local Businesses

Quick Read: Google Analytics is a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes. When used properly, it generates important information that can help to make valuable business decisions in online marketing or SEO efforts. In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, guest host Alex Ratynski goes through five important steps that local businesses can take to configure Google Analytics efficiently.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes. When used properly, it generates important information that can help to make valuable business decisions in online marketing or SEO efforts. In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, guest host Alex Ratynski goes through five important steps that local businesses can take to configure Google Analytics efficiently.

Discussion Continues…: Read More


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What is Google Analytics and how it works?

Google Analytics is configured by insertion of a tracking code in a block of JavaScript code on each of the pages in your website. This tracking code identifies data about the webpage request and pushes this data to the Google Analytics server. This data can be location, date, time, SERP request and more granular information about the page and requester.


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Quora and Reddit: Powerhouses for SEO and marketing in 2021

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Quick Read: If you’re avoiding these platforms, your search strategy is incomplete
The post Quora and Reddit: Powerhouses for SEO and marketing in 2021 appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

30-second summary:

Reddit is the seventh most popular website in the US while Quora has a DR of 91
These factors make for great opportunities to build your brand’s online presence and enhance your E-A-T standing
This comprehensive guide helps you take advantage of Quora and Reddit marketing

Get ready to take advantage of the resources that two-third of marketers and SEO specialists miss out on. We’re talking about Quora and Reddit Marketing and you’re about to know how they can bring tons of value to your business.

Raising brand awareness, driving traffic, and diversifying your link profile with useful backlinks – all that is more than feasible with the right, out-of-the-box approach.

Let’s dive right in and take a look at the pros, cons, and everything in-between concerning the promotion of your website on Reddit and Quora.

Content created in partnership with Crowdo.

What makes these two solid platforms for SEO and marketing?

According to Alexa, Reddit is the seventh most popular website in the US, surpassing even Wikipedia. It’s a community-based platform with 130K+ niche-based subreddits brimming with highly active users.

Although different from Reddit in terms of structure, Quora is equally worthy of marketers’ attention. It’s a Q&A platform with a DR of 91, making it a highly trustworthy resource, frequently shown in SERP.

Both platforms have strict moderation and high content standards, which means no spamming or self-promotion is allowed. Google is known to favor links from clean unspammed resources, which is why backlinks from either of these platforms will be useful for your backlink portfolio.

Apart from that, expanding your brand’s online presence is crucial for the EAT Google algorithm. This is aimed to provide users with relevant, and useful information.

This is where Quora answers and Reddit comments and posts come into play. Submitting helpful and informative answers can get you far in your promotion strategy, but let’s first start with some theory.

Are backlinks from Reddit and Quora useful for SEO?

Many SEO specialists don’t consider Quora and Reddit viable sources for link-building because the backlinks coming from these platforms are nofollow.

Taking into account the myth about the uselessness of nofollow links – nofollow translates into no-good for them.

This misconception is easy to clear up:

Your backlink profile looks suspicious to Google and other search engines if it contains dofollow links exclusively. Diluting it with good nofollow links allows creating an organic-looking and diversified link profile.
Google perceives nofollow links as “hints,” which means they still have a positive effect on your promotion. Even Google’s John Mueller confirmed it, just take a look at the tweet below.

How to get the most out of Quora: A step-by-step guide

1. Create a well-thought-out user profile

A thorough and properly formatted user profile is essential for Quora. Your profile should look trustworthy for your answers to be considered valuable and included in the feed. Here are some points you need to include:

Fill out the “About me” section with information about you and your occupation. Don’t shy away from going into details if it can truly benefit your credibility as an expert. But keep in mind that only 50-character-worth of text, including your name, will be shown above your answers. So make sure you make them count.
List your fields of expertise by choosing them from the “Knows About” section. Expert replies are deemed more valuable by the Quora algorithm, which in turn increases the chance that your answers will get into the feed and won’t be collapsed.
Link your social media accounts in the Settings section. Verified social media accounts add trustworthiness and make it easier to connect with you.
Add credentials

You can either copy them from your LinkedIn profile or fill them out and add some more info. “Credentials” is the part of your profile where you can add links to your portfolio, info about previous companies you worked for, your educational background – anything that can make people believe that you are indeed an expert in your field.

Upload a clear and friendly photo of yourself

Profiles with a photo instill more trust and are more relatable for other users. Try to avoid funky pictures or graphics.

2. Find suitable, niche-related questions

Now that your profile is all set up and looks good, it’s time to get down to business and find relevant questions to showcase the expertise and skills you’ve mentioned.

Start with outlining some keywords, relevant to your niche. You can either do it yourself or you can use a keywords generator tool like SEMRush or Ahrefs.

You can either choose questions with the most views because they’re shown in the feed and get a lot of attention or go for unanswered questions and score a higher chance to get in the top spot.

3. Write informative, source-rich, helpful answers

Your answers on Quora should be informative and answer the question directly – include statistics, references, graphics, and other media that can help illustrate your points and give a better insight into the topic you’re covering.

The Quora algorithm filters out irrelevant answers and collapses them. The more expert and in-depth your answer is, the higher the chance that it gets shown in the feed and won’t get collapsed.

As for the length of the answer – short answers usually don’t look authoritative and insightful. The optimal length of your answer should be between 1500 – 2000 characters, at least that’s what we think at Crowdo.

4. Format your answers in an appealing way

Formatting your answer is essential for making it look professional and easy to understand. No matter how much effort you’ve poured into your answer and prior research – if you submit a wall of text, it won’t do.

Answers like these don’t get enough upvotes and are mostly ignored by the viewers. Use all formatting means necessary to make your answer as appealing as possible: bullet points, appropriate headings, quotes – all of it will help your text look clear, engaging, and comprehensible.

5. If you use someone else’s content – indicate the source

Plagiarism is a big no-no on Quora, and it might get you banned. If you use someone else’s content to emphasize/illustrate/prove your point – always indicate the source.

6. Link to your website naturally

Although Quora allows self-promotion, it doesn’t mean that you can blatantly abuse it. Clickbait titles are frowned upon on Quora, and the same goes for obvious begging for clicks, like “Check out my awesome website!”.

The link to your website must be organically inserted in the text and correspond to the context.

For instance, you can present it as something that provides additional in-depth information: “This detailed overview of best digital marketing practices might come in handy to you.”

7. Use authoritative sources to enrich and add authority to your answer

Answers with a single link to your website look suspiciously promotional and don’t instill trust. Try including other topic-related, helpful links from reputable and authoritative sources like Wikipedia, Reddit, YouTube, or others.

It will add a professional touch to your answer and increase its value for the reader.

How to avoid collapsed answers?

Sometimes, even if you followed the Quora guidelines to the letter, your answer might get collapsed.

The reasons may vary, from an error in the algorithm that can be corrected by writing a support ticket to a mistake on your part. Let’s take a peek at the most common reasons why answers get collapsed:

Your user profile is lacking trustworthiness

If you haven’t indicated your field of expertise, skipped the credentials and bio description, the Quora algorithm may deem you unfit to answer certain questions due to the lack of trustworthiness of your profile.

Your answers aren’t helpful to the author of the question

Make sure you clearly state the answer to the question.

Posting long text walls containing no definitive answer and brimming with irrelevant links helps no one.

You’re overlinking

A common mistake among those who only start working with Quora is to write as many replies as possible and cram all the links they can think of in their answers.

You have to establish yourself as a trustworthy contributor first, show your expertise and only then strategically insert links into your replies. Start with writing 20+ helpful and informative answers without any links.

Your answers are lacking interaction from other users

If the Quora algorithm detects that your answers have no comments or upvotes, it may deem them unworthy of showing and collapse them.

The ideal way would be to try to benefit the readers as much as possible and get this social traction organically.

The rather “grey” way would be to use other Quora profiles to upvote your answer and increase the view count.

The approach you choose is completely up to you.

Product/service promotion on Reddit: All about Reddiquette and Karma

Being a community-based platform, Reddit pushes you to come to the audience and pour actual value into the content you generate and share. On Reddit, you must be a part of the community if you want to succeed.

Before submitting anything, you need to “get the feel” of what every community is about and tailor the content you contribute to be in line with the customs of each and every subreddit.

Reddiquette

An excellent way to start your marketing campaign on Reddit is to learn its basic rules, aka Reddiquette. Let’s take a quick look at the main ones:

Don’t rush to submit – Easy does it

Reddit algorithm and moderators take into account your profile’s age and authority, aka Karma (more on this later). If you rush to post right after you registered and haven’t even researched the subreddit you’d like to post on – it’s a sure bet that your post will be removed.

Never beg for upvotes

Upvotes and downvotes are used on Reddit to show appreciation or displeasure with posts or comments. Submissions with the highest upvote score rise to the top and may even reach the front page – the holy grail of Reddit. Begging for upvotes is rightfully considered to be a “big no”.

Don’t rely on reposting

Reposting is a common bane on Reddit and involves sharing the content of any type, pictures, gifs, videos previously shared by the original poster on another subreddit. In other words, it’s stealing to get upvotes.

In a few cases, the content is reposted to multiple subreddits if it’s extremely important for all, and the more people see it, the better. But in the vast majority of cases, it’s a dishonest way of obtaining Karma points.

Don’t spam with useless comments

Comments in threads are a perfect place to help the OP (original poster), give advice, joke around, provide some tips. Users share links and provide valuable insights here.

You can use the comment section to your advantage and write helpful answers with a link to your website.

However…sometimes people just share the link. Comments like these are immensely annoying and bring no value to the discussion. They are typically removed by moderators and will likely lead to a shadowban (more on that in a bit).

Karma

Karma is a Redditor’s score determined by the number of upvotes against downvotes their posts and comments received. In other words, Karma is essentially the reflection of the user’s reputation and a trustworthiness indicator.

Some subreddits don’t allow submitting content if one’s Karma score is low. That’s why it’s crucial to spend some time surfing the subreddits, understanding the rules, types of content welcomed in each of your target communities, and contributing helpful and interesting content.

It’s a common mistake among new users to rush into posting with no Karma and include links on top of that. If you do that, there’s a very high chance that your post won’t pass the moderation and will be deleted.

And here comes the shadowbanning that we mentioned earlier.  It implies that the posts you submit are visible only to you. Shadowban is used to filter out promotional posts and comments that are made solely for self-advertising purposes.

Marketing on Reddit: Some ground rules

Keep in mind that each subreddit is a close-knit community protective of its habits, rules, and culture. The one thing communities have in common is the absolute hatred towards those whose sole purpose is self-promotion.

Imagine it as a gathering of friends discussing things they like, and that one guy suddenly starts to preach about some irrelevant business and its benefits. It’ll obviously annoy everyone and get your profile banned.

Let’s take a look at how to approach marketing on Reddit the right way:

Grow your Karma by submitting useful content

Learn the ins and outs of every subreddit and contribute content people of the subreddit like to see. The more engaging, useful content you post, the more Karma you’ll generate.

The sure-bet subreddits to grow your Karma are r/aww – for cute pics of animals (no one downvotes these), r/AskReddit – where you can ask literally about anything and everything, or r/explainlikeimfive/ – a helpful and friendly community that rarely downvotes even the most absurd questions.

Remember that your submission history is visible to everyone, and some Redditors make it their point to go through the entire submission history of the person to see if there’s a hint of them being an advertiser.

Once again, don’t go crazy with placing links

It’s not a commonly known fact, but only one in ten of your submissions can contain a link to look natural and be accepted – the rest should be contributed without any links, be it posts or comments.

This ratio is directed at making you contribute more than you take, keeping the benefit of the community above all else. If you exceed this ratio, you’ll be immediately suspected of self-promotion and get a shadowban.

Long story short, be a friendly neighbor and not a salesperson.

Conclusion

Marketing on Quora and Reddit takes a lot of time and effort, but the benefits for SEO (in terms of increased traffic to your website and backlink portfolio diversification), brand awareness, and ultimately sales boost are equally impressive.

Given the extent of work, competence, and resources needed for successful marketing on these platforms, even experienced marketers leave this task to experienced professionals like Crowdo, who offer a standalone Quora and Reddit Promotion Service.

That being said, hopefully, you’ve just discovered two unexplored marketing channels and got a hint of how to approach them wisely!

The post Quora and Reddit: Powerhouses for SEO and marketing in 2021 appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

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