Social Media and Marketing News, 8 November 2019

Each week we bring you a wrap-up of curated content containing engaging news, tips and trends from digital marketing and social media. This week learn the difference between Google Ads and Facebook Ads, how to use LinkedIn video, how to make content marketing more efficient, an example of how to take a poorly performing blog and create content that pays; and finally, how to create amazing videos for your business.

Read this weeks articles to stay on top of the latest trends in all things content marketing and social media.

Google Ads vs. Facebook Ads: What’s the Difference?

By Chelsea Johnson

What is Google Ads?

Google Ads, formerly known as Google AdWords, is a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising platform that runs advertisements, paid for by businesses. These ads appear in the search results on google.com, or other websites through Google’s Search Partners or Display Network.

The core of Google Ads is the Search Network, which allows advertisers to show their businesses’ ads to users who are actively searching for products or services that your business offers.

Within the Search Network, keywords are the center of your search campaign. You select keywords that are relevant to your product or business, then when a user searches for a query related to your keyword – they will trigger an ad that shows up on the SERPs for a user to click on.

Each time a user clicks on an ad, the advertiser is charged a certain amount of money, earning the name “pay-per-click” advertising. You’ll assign each keyword a “Max CPC” which tells Google how much you are willing to pay to have someone click on your ad.

Overall, the main goal of advertising on Google is to drive new (or existing) customers to your website who are actively searching for the product or service that you provide.

What are Facebook Ads?

Similar to Google, Facebook Ads are paid ads that – you guessed it – appear on Facebook.

Facebook Ads can appear in a number of different places such as:

    Facebook Newsfeed

    Instagram Newsfeed

    Facebook Marketplace

    Video Feeds

    Right-hand column

    Messenger inbox

For the purposes of this blog, we’ll be focusing on the Facebook Newsfeed placements as newsfeed makes up the bulk of Facebook’s ad business.

Facebook has become highly competitive over the years, with the highest amount of monthly active users of any social media platform creating the optimal space for a variety of businesses to advertise on.

While Google Ads can be considered to have active user intent, Facebook Ads are more passive. Facebook Ads are shown to users not actively searching for a specific product or service, but rather, ads will appear within a users’ Newsfeed.

Read more

How to Use LinkedIn Video to Acquire More Customers

by Koushik Marka

Want to generate more leads with LinkedIn? Wondering how LinkedIn video can help?

In this article, you’ll learn how to create LinkedIn videos that improve your customer acquisition efforts.

How to Use LinkedIn Video to Acquire More Customers by Koushik Marka on Social Media Examiner.

Why Businesses Should Consider LinkedIn for Customer Acquisition

Customer acquisition is no longer what it used to be. According to HubSpot’s research, 81% of consumers trust the advice of family and friends over that from businesses. People are becoming less responsive to traditional advertising and marketing, making it even more challenging for businesses to gain new customers.

That’s where having a robust social media presence on a platform like LinkedIn is advantageous. LinkedIn boasts more than 610 million users with 90 million senior-level influencers and 63 million members who are decision-makers in their organizations. It’s a platform where B2Bs can reach their target audience, generate leads, and ultimately acquire customers.

With a visitor-to-lead conversion rate of 2.74%, LinkedIn beats all other social media platforms including Facebook and Twitter. In fact, LinkedIn is 277% more effective in lead generation than both platforms. Investing in appropriately targeted marketing throughout the buyer’s journey can improve acquisition on LinkedIn.

While images and text have their own merits, recent trends demonstrate that videos rule the roost on social media. On LinkedIn, videos are shared more often than any other type of content. And on average, people spend 3x times longer watching LinkedIn video ads than static ads.

So if you’re not using LinkedIn video for your marketing, you’re missing out on a big opportunity to drive lead generation. Here’s how to get started creating LinkedIn video to improve your customer acquisition efforts.

Read more

Unlocking the Content Bottleneck

By Vivek Sharma

When marketers talk about personalization, the conversation usually revolves around data. It’s true that data is essential for understanding and targeting customers, but data is only half of the story.

Thanks to significant investments in marketing technology, many brands now have the ability—technically—to deliver highly targeted and relevant messages to their customers. The data to understand and target consumers better is often in place, as are many of the tools needed to personalize campaigns. Yet the marketplace is flooded with generic, uncoordinated, and largely impersonal marketing messages that are easily rejected or ignored.

So how can brands unlock the content bottleneck and create the millions of unique creative variations required to support one-to-one marketing in a way that improves performance and ROI? The solution begins by bringing data and creative together with automation.

Why automation is key

As marketers look to up their personalization game, they inevitably face resource challenges from the increased effort needed to coordinate across siloed systems and teams. Automation not only unleashes productivity, it’s the only way brands can generate the tremendous volume of content required to create individualized messages and offers in real-time. As marketers try to move from segments to individuals, the more creative variations—and relevant content—are needed to achieve their goals.

An online travel company, for example, needs to reach millions of customers with a targeted email campaign that includes up-to-the-minute information about flights, hotel rooms, and weather forecasts. Using automation, the marketer can create one email campaign that supports millions of possible creative variations by layering data and text-based information, such as the customer’s first name, reward points, and pricing, onto colorful hero images of travel destinations, room types or available airline seats. This would never be possible with a traditional approach where designers create a handful of alternate creatives for a small number of segments.

Clearly, there is a gap between the capabilities that marketers have and the experiences that customers are getting.

Read more

Break Free B2B Series: Amanda Todorovich on Creating Content that Pays Off

By Kelly Hogan

Amanda Todorovich is the Senior Director of Health Content at Cleveland Clinic. That title kind of undersells what she did over there. She turned a neglected blog into a revenue stream. That’s right –  something that is generating money and is getting over 7 million visitors a month. Now Amanda is a true believer, like our agency, in the power of audience-centered content.

She is living proof that investing in this kind of content pays off. Join us in learning more from Amanda. She is one of the leading lights and is at the vanguard of next-generation content marketers, and we are thrilled to speak with her. View the entire interview below.

Below are a few of our favorite snippets from the interview.

Sue: Recently on your Twitter channel, you retweeted that Cleveland Clinic has monetized its blog successfully. Can you share details?

Amanda: Sure. So we actually started monetizing the site in 2015. We started really small – experimental at that point. We were getting about 3 million visits a month. And we started with a Google pilot, like, let’s just slap up some Google ads and see what we get. If we get any kind of negative reaction internally, or we see a drop in traffic, which we didn’t basically, we got no reaction because people are so used to seeing ads, I think that they just accepted it.

So that was fine. But it’s a lot of work. And as a nonprofit, there were a lot of rules around what we couldn’t have as advertising on our site, and managing that was a lot of work and for not a very high payoff. So we knew that we could do it, we knew that it wouldn’t really affect our traffic much. But, we knew that we needed to think about it a little differently, so we partnered with another publisher very well. They sell and manage all of our inventory. Since then, we’ve tripled our ad revenue and we definitely have evolved and expanded our monetization efforts outside of just our health center’s blog into our constant PT physician blog, as well as our health library content. So it’s revenue that comes directly back into our marketing division, and supports a lot of the work that we’re doing now.

Sue: In terms of SEO, where’s your focus in terms of your really big concepts.

Amanda: SEO has evolved a lot for us over the years and honestly, I just formally took responsibility for our overall SEO strategy this year. It used to be a whole separate thing. So we were trying to work through that and, you know, it had its challenges. Plus, it wasn’t a real big focus for us. Over the years, we’ve shifted from where 60% to 70% of our traffic was coming from social media. Today 80 to 90% comes from organic search. Our SEO strategy today is extremely data-driven, the way that we prioritize the work and the way that we look at what we’re going to focus our time and effort on is really around a couple of things – competitive analysis and content gaps that we have, as well as the difficulty for ranking. Where do we have an opportunity with existing content to potentially climb the ladder a little easier with some tweaking? Now, it’s also a little bit more around assembling a comprehensive, integrated team, and not just from an editorial writing perspective, but from a multimedia perspective. What animation, illustration, and video imagery can we bring to that page to make it the best experience on the internet.

Read more

How to Create Amazing Video For Your Business

By Kim Garst

Most everyone is talking about how important video is to us as marketers but how can you, quickly and easily, create amazing videos for your business without it becoming one more thing?

More specifically, how do you get a direct marketing value from those videos? If I could share ONE strategy and a tool that would make your video creation and production, super easy, would that make you jump for joy?

Then read on…

Blog – How to Create Amazing Videos For Your Business

First, let’s talk about why video is so important…

Video is what’s working in marketing right now, especially on social media. Did you know that 64% of users are more likely to buy a product online after watching a video? It’s no surprise that 83% of marketers said they’d create more video content if there were no obstacles, such as time, resources, and budget.

Well, you don’t need to worry about those obstacles or about having the tech skills needed to create amazing videos. Remember the tool I promised that would help you, quickly and easily, create marketing videos?

That nifty little tool is Animoto.

Animoto is an affordable, (free to try for 14 days!) and easy to use online tool that allows you to create amazing videos, quick as a bunny, for your business.

Even if you’re shy, no worries! You can create engaging videos without having to show your face.

Furthermore, you can take Animoto’s pre-built templates and combine them with your existing content to come up with marketing videos in no time flat. These videos are perfect for sharing across social media platforms and on your own website.

I’m a huge fan of re-purposing content and the strategy that I am getting ready to pop into your lap is just that – taking existing content and turning it into a traffic driving force for your business. You might as well get more mileage from your hard work, right?

I am going to show you how you can take an existing blog post and create a professional video that you can post on social media, embed into your blog for more SEO juice, and even pop it into YouTube.  This little strategy is going to give you the ability to create amazing video content that will get more people engaging with your content, drive more traffic to your blog and ultimately, get more people buying your products and services.

Read more