Jon Diorio and the Google+ account for Google Ads announced today that a new feature is available in Adwords that will allow you to get a better look at your data. It is a small addition, but many advertisers will find it very useful.
Beginning today, you can control the time aggregation on Adwords charts to show data down to a day-by-day view. You can also view it by week, month, or quarter. This way, you can see the big and small pictures with just a couple clicks, and keep track of the smaller level trends.
The announcement read:
Today, we’re making it easier and faster to get a customized view of how your performance is trending with a new button right above your chart in AdWords that lets you toggle between Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or Quarterly data (shown below). We hope this will save you time and make you more efficient while optimizing your search campaigns.
00TMOhttps://www.tulsamarketingonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/TMO-Logo.pngTMO2013-08-20 14:29:232013-08-20 14:29:23Google Adds Time Aggregation to AdWords
Content marketing is all the rage in SEO right now. As links continue to get devalued (though they can still be potent if gained properly), optimizers and marketers are moving their focus to the actual content you see on the page. This is potentially a great shift to providing consumers with real value, but generating content on a regular basis is costly and intensive. If you slack, it can be worthless at best, and damaging to your rankings at worst.
This isn’t to say you shouldn’t do it. But, content marketing has to be done right, with smart choices about how to spend your time and efforts. All it takes is some planning and extra thought that too many forget to do. If you think ahead, you can avoid most of the common content marketing mistakes far too many make. Jayson DeMers pinpointed some of those common mistakes, and if you know how to identify them, you can fix them.
1) Writing for the Wrong Audience
Every article or piece of content you put out there should be of value to someone, but that audience shouldn’t be arbitrary. As a business, you have a specific audience that you should be paying attention to. If you understand your audience, you can better choose topics and write in the appropriate tone for who you are trying to connect with. Home services such as plumbing and roofing have very different consumers and audiences than tech startups.
One of the most common ways to forget to write for consumers. We tend to get excited about the content we are putting out and the work we’ve put in – and that is great – but we also tend to geek out and write for those who are spending hours scouring blogs like us. We forget to communicate with the actual people needing their services. For every article, you need to ask, are we writing for our consumers or our peers?
2) Using the Wrong Metrics
Creating content takes a ton of time. You have to research, try to brainstorm unique topics, follow all the social media feeds. It would be tragic if all those efforts weren’t being properly measured and fine-tuned. However, getting started with the right metrics for your business at first can seem even more troublesome than making all that content.
Getting started, it is common to focus on measuring outputs rather than results. It helps ensure you follow through on your content marketing efforts and are achieving the basic creation aspect. But, once you’re in the flow of creating content you have to evolve your metrics to ensure they are actually achieving the larger desired results. You have to make sure you’re getting an actual return on your investment.
Not only do you want to make sure that you are strengthening your front on using the right keywords, you want to be checking on your conversions. You’re content isn’t successful if it isn’t helping direct people to the next step. Are you including clear calls to action? Are you getting people to make the next step you want? If not, you may want to change your strategy.
3) Failing to Focus on Branding
Content serves the purpose of making your brand trustworthy to consumers. Brand development can help build your brand as a leader in your market, or it can build the reputation of a service or product. Simply put, creating content allows you to build your brand as a leader in your industry to those who haven’t used your product or service yet. Writing as a leader or member of your business should showcase your expertise and make consumers trust you. The trick is doing it in a professional way, without being heavy handed.
Trying to make a hard sell with your content isn’t advised, so you have to achieve these goals much more subtly. The primary goal is educating and informing, but that has to be put in a package that will also strengthen your brand. It is a difficult line to walk, but with focus on your brand and the audience, you will find the proper mix.
00TMOhttps://www.tulsamarketingonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/TMO-Logo.pngTMO2013-08-20 11:28:192013-08-20 11:28:19How To Avoid The Most Common Content Marketing Mistakes
Social media marketers have been aware of Reddit for a long time, and many have even tried to take advantage of the large community. But, the site is notorious for rejecting any attempts to disguise marketing, not to mention being confusing for new users and too streamlined for marketers to track any meaningful data.
Now, Marketing Land reports a free new tool called Reddit Insight has been created by Hack Reactor to help Redditors and marketers alike analyze their accounts, posts, keywords, and subreddits.
The tool can analyze an entire profile or a single post simply by entering the username or URL. It displays where users are gaining Karma or Upvotes (signs of approval on the site that also increase visibility of posts)as well as detailed information on numerous other site specific information, such as how keywords are faring by subreddit through word clouds and topic clusters.
The tool allows marketers and analysts to explore the data from as large or small of a scale as you want. While you can overview entire subreddits or user histories, you can also break down how users are reacting to specific comments and interactions.
They present it all in bright colorful graphs that are easy to immediately understand which makes the data both accessible but also great for explaining your social media tactics and their results to clients.
Details can make or break a social media strategy. Little mistakes and small forgotten aspects can make your company look unprofessional and under-prepared. Listing all the ways I regularly see companies making small mistakes that still severely handicap their strategy would be practically endless, but Mashable had nine entrepreneurs share what they think is the one most important detail they see others routinely forgetting. You may have an otherwise strong social media strategy, but if you’re neglecting any of these, you are under performing.
Link to Your Site – It is way to common to see small businesses creating great content and sharing them on their Facebook or other social pages, without any sort of link to the actual website anywhere readily available. Even if users like what you’re putting out, they can be turned off by searching for a link and simply give up. It should be easy for them to find out more about what you do.
Retargeting – Many small businesses forget to retarget people based on their own social media campaigns using specific URLs in order to track specific leads around the web. If done right, this can be a highly effective marketing tactic, but it continues to go under-utilized. If you are retargeting, you can serve potential leads the ads that would make them most likely to convert, as well as collecting data to track exactly how effective your social media strategy actually is.
Focus Your Social Media – Too many small businesses spread themselves thin across a barrage of social media sites. Focusing on a couple of the most popular sites like Facebook and Twitter makes a much larger impact than barely having a presence on all of them. You’ll find you’re better connecting with your audience and making more conversions without any more effort than you were already using on social media.
Email is Still Important – Email may be the oldest “social” way to connect with customers one-on-one, but it is still the easiest method as well. Everyone checks their email, and statistics show that customers who receive emails are more likely to connect on other social sites.
Don’t Forget About YouTube – If resources and skills allow, YouTube can be an incredible piece of your social media strategy. Videos that show your expertise cement your reputation and showcase your skills to potential customers, while entertaining videos draw a wide audience base that otherwise may not be interested in your service. YouTube content is one of the easiest to share across all platforms, but if you can’t invest in a quality video, you might consider putting your resources elsewhere.
Keep the Original Content Coming – The big catchphrase now is “content is king” but for that content to do anything, it has to be valuable. If you create content that is worth viewer’s time, you can easily connect with a wide range of viewers and build your brand’s reputation.
Run a Personal Blog – Running a personal blog humanizes your company and raises your value by highlighting the intelligent and skillful people working within your company. Everyone knows that companies are always trying to market their service, but they view personal blogs as a more honest way to assess the abilities of those actually running the company.
Don’t Forget Facebook Targeting – Targeting software for Facebook admin pages allow select posts to only reach a specific demographic so that you can more narrowly market to their tastes without hurting the sensibilities of others. It’s easy to use (it’s one of the three icons beneath the text box), yet so many small businesses forget about it.
Make Your Employees Into Advocates – Including your employees in your social media builds trust between your potential customers and your business and puts a face on your brand. If you use organic thoughts from your employees leveraged with your strategic direction, you can make your employees some of your biggest advocates.
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When most people think of SEO, they see it as a way to earn the top spot (or close to it) on the search engine result pages (SERPs). Markets can be highly competitive, and if SEO can get you above others in your industry than most companies see the process as being worth their time and money. While that is true in some ways, it is also far from the whole truth.
The wide perception about SEO implies that it is only really important for largely internet based businesses or those in competitive markets. However, SEO can benefit anyone who wants to develop an online presence and make themselves available to the ever-increasing number of consumers who use the internet as their primary shopping tool.
Small or niche businesses with limited resources may ask what the point of investing in SEO could be when there is little to no competition. What is the point when you’ve already earned the top spot, with no signs of losing it in the future? Amanda DiSilvestro has spent quite a lot of time considering this issue (enough for two separate articles across different sites) and the conclusive answer is that SEO can help businesses in niche markets in tons of ways that may not seem apparent at first.
Optimization means improving usability
Between Google’s recent shift of focus from links and keywords to quality usability for users, many aspects of optimization are centered entirely on improving how your site functions for the people that actually use it. SEO can be perceived as a marketing tactic, but it is more importantly a usability tactic. Sites that readers enjoy using are more valuable than those that barely function, and Google recognizes that and ranks sites accordingly.
You’ll have competition eventually
No matter how niche your business is today, eventually the vast majority of companies will see competition. Chances are, if you don’t see competition eventually your niche is in danger of becoming irrelevant. Either way, it is always best to be ahead of any competition that arises, and solid SEO essentially helps you fortify your grasp on the market. Rather than battling a new competitor when they show up, you’ll be prepared and far ahead of their attempts to overthrow you.
You want to be the best, not the only option
Ignoring SEO means your site isn’t living up to its potential. Customers view site usability and professionalism as indicators of the reputability of the company running the page. Because SEO is becoming synonymous with usability, optimizing your site communicates your value to search engines and your users at the same time. If consumers see you as the only option, but think your site and brand look sub par, they will view you as the only option they have rather than the best possible option. That pushes potential customers away and could even cause an enterprising individual who notices your weakness to try to enter your little market.
Conclusion
SEO isn’t immediate. It takes a lot of time to get the results you want. While you may feel comfortably established as the top (or only) option in your niche, things always change eventually. Getting ahead of the curve will save you stress in the long run and make potential customers trust your company more.
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Perhaps one of the most effective ways to market your business on social media is to use it as a customer service tool. The benefits include being able to publicly respond and alleviate any negative feedback or issues and it shows other potential customers that they’ll have a direct line to you.
As Business Journal reports however, great customer service, which in turn means great PR for your business, doesn’t happen by accident. It takes planning and effectively executing that plan.
That all starts simply enough by having the right people in place. If you want great customer service, you should employ a staff capable of humanizing your social media presence while staying within your desired message. Second, in order for them to execute your plan, they have to know what it is. You should clearly define and spell out how quickly they should respond to messages and a plan of action of how to deal with them.
While building your customer service practices, be sure to measure how well you’re doing just as you would study analytics for new ad campaigns. If your customer service isn’t bringing you more customers or more repeat business, you need to change something.
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While on the surface, creating content is about sharing important information of different kinds with the public, we’d all be lying if we said that we didn’t hope to get the most traffic possible coming to your site thanks to some great blog post or infographic. It isn’t easy. Getting over 100,000 views on a page as a startup is a lot of luck, but it also takes a lot of work to make quality content.
There are no magic tricks to make content that will get you exponentially more site visitors and creating one post that gets that many eyes on it doesn’t mean they will necessarily keep coming back, but it can tell us a lot about what people are looking for on the web and what counts as great quality.
Stephen Kenwright works at Branded3 who recently hit the coveted 100,000 pageview benchmark, and he wrote about what he has learned from the short term success over at SEOMoz. You can learn a lot from their isolated case, and the tips Kenwright offers.
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Great content can do just about anything you want it to. You want to draw in more visitors? They’ll come for quality content. Need more conversions? Get some great content. In the best cases, it can go viral. But how do you know what great content is? How do you know what the public wants?
The internet is so insanely populated with content at this point that it is just getting harder and harder to stand out. There are many lists like this one, and they offer different opinions in different ways, but what makes one of those articles more attractive than all the others? It answers people’s needs.
That sounds so incredibly basic that many would say there’s no way it is the whole story, but in reality answering to people’s needs is much harder than you think. There are no guaranteed right answers, and the only way to truly know if you gave the public what they want it to get it out there, but you can get some hints beforehand, if you look in the right places.
Jason DeMers shared some ways you can find out what your target audience is looking for and create the content they need. If you want your content to stick out from the rest, you need to know how to understand your audience.
Competitors’ Forums – This slightly controversial method is also one of the easiest ways to get in the mind of your target audience, and it is definitely one of the easiest. Just find the competitor in your field with the best web presence, and keep tabs on what their audience is interested in and responding to. Of course, some argue that this leads to blatant copying or spylike business practices, and I suggest discretion with the tactic, but if you are looking for a quick way to find out what your market wants, this will show you.
Comments Sections – Just like your competitors’ forums, any place where your audience can directly interact with you offers boundless opportunities to find out what they want and need. Comments sections on your own website, as well as others out there like Reddit, are filled with people looking for solutions, and they are often vocal about looking for it. If you keep your eye on places where the public is interacting, you should be able to easily discern what is on their minds.
Surveys – Where comment threads create an open forum feeling of interaction, surveys allow your audience to speak directly to you and tell you what they want and need. You don’t even have to do your own survey if you don’t have the resources. Just keep your eyes on other public surveys going on. They are everywhere, just look in your daily newspaper.
Product Forums a.k.a. the Support Boards – If you have a niche product and people are looking for support solutions, chances are there is a support board going on somewhere filled with people voicing their problems and opinions all at the same time. In the best situation, you run these boards and can create some good PR while also helping customers and monitoring their interests simultaneously but even if your customers are using a public forum, you can benefit from listening in.
The public is often very open about their feelings and desires, you just have to go where they are voicing them. The internet offers many popular options, and it is easier than ever to keep tabs on what your target audience is thinking. There isn’t any excuse to ignore their needs.
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Want to know if your company understands branding? Just ask if you have a brand bible. If you don’t, your business probably has some large flaws in their branding and their marketing.
Every brand, from the smallest startups to the giants you see on your drive to work, should have their “bible” establishing the guidelines and rules of maintaining their corporate image.
What is a Brand Bible?
A brand bible is a document shared throughout the company that lays out how the company achieves its personality and public voice across many individuals and different departments. It is, as Designshack explains, “the basis for all interactions on behalf of the company.”
These documents, which range from a few pages to a couple hundred depending on the size and needs of the company, cover every sort of public interaction. Brand bibles or books distinguish what types of marketing should be pursued or taken off the table, letterhead, logo usage, and even the specific colors that can be used for corporate design. This book is how every Facebook employee knows exactly what color blue is Facebook Blue.
Creating a Brand Bible
See, above all, a brand bible is about cohesion and consistency. From the first design or memo you send out, creating a brand bible is as easy as keeping notes on what fonts you use, how you lay out public documents, and how letterhead is arranged. Over time, if you keep good notes, putting together your brand bible will be as easy as arranging these notes into a document to share with your employees.
If you’ve waited to create these guidelines, it isn’t much more difficult. Start keeping notes. Set a standard. It may take longer to get established across the company, but it will speed up marketing and design. If you need more specific ideas on how to establish a brand book, Designshack has a few suggestions in their article.
00TMOhttps://www.tulsamarketingonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/TMO-Logo.pngTMO2013-05-15 14:22:002013-05-15 14:22:00Building a United Brand Image With a Brand Bible
These days, everyone has an app. Apple has over 800,000 apps in their store, and Android is close behind. Search for anything you need an app for, and there is little chance you won’t find an option delivering the solution, quite possibly even for free.
With that many apps out there, making one of your own has more than a few risks. How do you attract users? How do you find a market not already covered? How do you improve over the already available options? You’re trying to get people to flock to your application when, according to Noupe, over 60-percent of apps in Apple’s store have not been downloaded a single time.
The truth is, getting your app in front of others’ eyes requires creating a quality product, then optimizing the heck out of it. App stores work just like search engines, and there is plenty of App Store Optimization to be done.
However, just like with SEO, simply optimizing a bad product isn’t going to get you far. There are numerous concerns you must address if you want your own app to stand a chance before you even get to the optimization stage. New Relic, an analytics service, recently released a new product specifically for Apps, and they accompanied the release with an infographic any App designer would be smart to keep around for their next project.
00TMOhttps://www.tulsamarketingonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/TMO-Logo.pngTMO2013-05-08 15:00:382013-05-08 15:00:38What Do You Do To Make Your App A Success? [Infographic]
