SEO is vital for any business, but how exactly can businesses use it to drive growth?

Search traffic is historically the best web traffic you can hope for.

Google has been the single most powerful traffic driver for ages, and while its power has been slowly declining of the years, no other traffic channel has come close to organic traffic:

Here’s how SEO can help your business in 2022:

Understand Your Customers Better

One of the immediate benefits of starting an SEO strategy is an ability to better understand (and relate to) people’s journeys around the web.

What is your target audience struggling with? What kind of questions are they asking? What drives their purchasing decisions?

A well-defined keyword research strategy can answer all those questions and enlighten your whole team.

Ahrefs is one of my favorite tools to perform keyword research because it offers so much useful data including, common modifiers, popular questions, SERP features and more:

You can also run your (or your competitor’s) domain through the tool to see your current positions in Google.

This can give you a more holistic understanding of your keyword rankings, and tell you how people are finding your business (or your competitor’s business) across multiple platforms.

Build More Detailed Buyers’ Personas

Customer personas (also referred to as customer avatar) are people you make up to describe your ideal customers.

Personas make digital marketing more streamlines and understandable by making your buyers easier to relate to. 

When creating a persona, you assign some human traits and features, like gender, income, occupation, etc.

Personas also help you create a customer-centric business model, the only business model that will make your business successful in 2022 and beyond.

To build a persona, you need some kind of data, and that’s where SEO-driven web analytics somes very much in handy. Google Analytics comes with detailed demographics data that will turn very useful for persona creation:

As a business owner, you are, of course, prioritizing your customers. Thus, their feedback is important for you to improve your product or service. In order to learn from your visitors, install Google Analytics tool that collects feedback so that you can analyze it and listen to your customers in order to make your website better. 

No matter how many professionals work on your website, visitors’ feedback is the most qualitative measure of your success. Using conversational forms on your site will help you collect even more data for your SEO campaigns and create more detailed personas.

Take Control of Your Buyers’ Journeys

Buying journeys have become more complicated over the years. Equipped with diverse devices and tools, a consumer may start their journey on one device and continue on a different one. 

They are likely to turn to Google multiple times throughout that fragmented journey, and if your business shows up for multiple queries in multiple sections, you are more likely to win that customer:

A well set-up SEO strategy is targeting more than just organic results. It aims at optimizing the whole SERP (search engine result page):

Take a look at all those sections:

Most of them provide businesses with additional opportunities to get found and engaged with. For example, ranking in the Google Video Carousel can help you with conversions as videos present products and services in an accessible way. Nowadays, editing videos can be done with an online video editor and a simple keyword research and video page optimization can help you bring it among the top SERPs.

A critical cog in the wheel of customer relationships is how well you integrate the online-offline experience of the customer. Every interaction your customer has with your brand doesn’t result in a sale. Neither does every Google search they do. However, engagement is a virtual cycle — more brand awareness means more branded searches and more branded searches mean better visibility, rankings, and ultimately, clicks.

So the best thing for you to do would be to understand (and match) customers’ “intent” at every interaction. Again, this requires alignment between your marketing, sales and customer service teams. Using the right CRM software, you can consolidate the results of your SEO, email marketing and lead generation campaigns, create your ideal customer profiles and buyer personas, and funnel back the insights into your content creation process to target them at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

Identify Your Promoters

If you are into SEO, you sure know your backlinks. But backlinks are not just about higher rankings. Knowing who links to you helps you build stronger niche relationships!

Ahrefs is a great tool for understanding your website’s structure and its backlink portfolio. Essentially, your website’s backlink portfolio is all the websites that have linked from their site back to yours. 

Another great tool is Buzzsumo that allows you to see exactly who is linking to you, and even the author who was found on that page. You can see what content on your website is the most popular, which is especially useful if you incorporate a blog into your website.

You can also set up an alert to receive an email once anyone is linking to your site. This is a great relationship building tactic: Once anyone links to you, reach out to thank, follow and become a friend!

Control Online Context and Sentiment Better

Finally, being there, paying attention to what people see when searching and trying to optimize for that will empower your business with ways to control what people see when searching for your brand or your important queries.

Imagine your current or future customer typing your brand name in Google’s search box. What are they going to see there? How will that impact their buying journey?

Whether you are there or not, your current and potential customers are searching for you and your brand. The difference is, when you are there watching, you can make your business better and make sure you provide the best solutions to their answers.

Conclusion

Of course, SEO offers many more ways to help your business in 2022, including an ability to position your brand as a knowledge hub by driving your content creation decision. 

On top of that, SEO allows you to create the most consistent traffic channel out there. Organic traffic is one of the most valuable traffic-driving channels out there thanks to matching intent (users actually search for answers and solutions, so they are more likely to engage with your site if you give them those answers and solutions).

Customers expect brands to run websites where they can read more about a product or a service, get useful tips from your brand, or find FAQ sections to save time. If you’re about to set up your business, think about ‘budget’ ways to launch a user-friendly website as it helps to grow your business.

The best advice is to do some research, find the tools that work best for you, and never underestimate the value SEO offers for the success of your business.

The post How Can SEO Help Your Business in 2022? appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

LinkedIn is a B2B business’s ultimate platform.

Instead of creating B2B audiences, like on Facebook—you get to tap into an entire platform of professionals. These are the people with the buying power to hire your agency or bring you on as a fractional CMO (or other marketing position).

And they’re all hanging out on one platform…ready to network.

Creating a LinkedIn content marketing strategy is like getting to speak at industry events, all thanks to your keyboard. With the right strategy, your LinkedIn content can get seen by your customer avatar (like your ideal agency client) and you can start landing contracts, employment, or freelancing work.

And you get to do this while solidifying your personal brand (a brand that can help you find better clients, employment opportunities, and freelancing projects in the future). Launching a LinkedIn content marketing strategy isn’t just a “nice-to-have” for B2B businesses.

It’s a must-have.

How to Create a Converting LinkedIn Content Marketing Strategy

Creating a LinkedIn content marketing strategy goes through the same 5 steps you’d use to create a strategy for a client. You have to know:

1. Who your audience is
2. What they care about
3. Your content pillars
4. Your schedule
5. Your Customer Value Journey

Step 1: Who’s your ideal audience?

Your ideal audience is full of customers. If your LinkedIn audience is full of ecommerce business owners but your agency only works with SaaS brands—you’ve done something wrong. It’s just like marketing your clients’ businesses. You have to start with who before you move on to what.

Who does your business serve?

• Is it ecommerce business owners with less than $100,000 in revenue?
• Is it SaaS businesses with $1 million in MRR?
• Is it online coaches and consultants looking to increase course sales?

Use the Customer Avatar Canvas to write down all the details about who your business serves. We’ll use this in the next step to figure out what your ideal customer cares about so you can create content that interests them on LinkedIn.

Step 2: What do they care about?

As you fill out the Customer Avatar Canvas, what your ideal customer cares about starts to become obvious.

The “Haves” in the Before State tell you exactly what they want to avoid in the future. The “Haves” in the After State are the topics they’re dying to learn about so they can experience the After State. For example, if your ideal customer is an ecommerce business owner in the Before State they probably ‘have’ low customer lifetime value (LTV). In the After State, they have high customer lifetime value.

That means you know they care about increasing their LTV and your content can cover topics like:

Low Customer LTV? Here are 5 Ways to Increase LTV in 3 Months

Knowing what your ideal customer cares about tells you exactly what content interests them. That’s how you build an audience of people who want to hire you.

Step 3: What are your content pillars?

Every brand needs content pillars. These are the topics that you’ll cover on a regular basis. And they’re entirely based on the Customer Avatar Canvas. Using content pillars, you’ll never run out of content ideas because you always know what your audience wants to know about.

Create at least 5 content pillars based on their haves, feelings, average day, status, and the good vs. evil perspective they have in their mind. For example, the marketing agency targeting ecommerce business owners on LinkedIn can create content pillars like:

Have: They have low LTV and they want to have high LTV

→ Content Pillar: LTV

Feelings: They feel like advertising is getting more complicated and expensive and they want to feel like advertising gets them guaranteed ROAS

→ Content Pillar: ROAS

Average Day: They spend their day looking at their sales flop and they want to spend their day focused on the bigger picture for their business

→ Content Pillar: Being a founder/CEO of an ecommerce business

Status: They relate to a newbie entrepreneur and they want to relate to a successful, established entrepreneur

→ Content Pillar: Entrepreneur lifecycles of ecommerce business owners

Good vs. Evil: The best-case scenario is that they figure this out, but the worst-case scenario is they have to shut down their online store 

→ Content Pillar: Ecommerce businesses “must-knows” to avoid shutting down your store

For each of these content pillars, you can create 5+ topics that you can create LinkedIn posts, articles, and videos on. Now, you have 25 topics to fill your calendar!

Step 4: What’s your posting schedule?

When people first consider posting content, they like to go big or go home. They want to post daily, record videos every other day and write 1,000+ articles 3x per week. Let’s start slow and work your way up (unless you have a dedicated team!).

A solid posting schedule to start out with is 3x posts per week. You can follow a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday schedule. Each of your posts covers one of your content pillars (LTV, ROAS, etc.).

Once you and your team get used to posting, you can start to turn some of those posts into videos. Allocate 1-2 hours in your schedule per week to record videos based on your created posts. You can post those videos in your 3x/week cadence or you can add them in on Tuesday and Thursday so you’re posting daily. 

Whichever schedule you choose—make sure to stick to it. If there’s one part of your LinkedIn content marketing strategy that can go array its posting. If you don’t post, people can’t see your content, learn about your expertise, and build a relationship that leads them to hire you. 

Have a team member assigned to content creation and posting to make sure it gets done.

Step 5: Your Customer Value Journey

There is no content marketing strategy without a funnel. To finalize your LinkedIn content marketing strategy, we have to figure out what call to action you’re using in 20% of your posts. The other 80% of your posts will be free content, where you’re not asking for anything in return. 20% will have a direct call to action to download a lead magnet, join your newsletter, hop on to a webinar, etc.

Think about the Customer Value Journey. Your LinkedIn audience goes from Stage 1: Awareness to Stage 2: Engagement when they follow you, like your posts, comment, or watch your videos. Now, we want them to go to Stage 3: Subscribe.

This is the stage where they share their first-party data with you (which we all know is very important these days…ahem, Apple).

With that first-party data, your CVJ moves to Stage 4: Convert! This is when your LinkedIn audience becomes profitable. You’re turning audience members into agency clients or your fractional CMO business has more interest than you can keep up with. 

Better yet—you can continue mapping this journey so you reach Stage 6: Ascend and can take $1,000/month retainer contracts and turn them into $5,000/month retainer contracts.

That’s how you create a LinkedIn content marketing strategy that works.

Your First LinkedIn Content Marketing Strategy

LinkedIn is a playground for businesses. It’s like having a local coffee shop where, somehow, business owners from around the world are able to come and chat together. Through your conversations (a.k.a content), you get to filter out who you network with and build connections with people who’ve been waiting to hire someone just like you.

With the right content marketing strategy, your agency, freelancing, or even full-time employment marketing career can show you the abundance of opportunities available to you right now. The key is knowing how to get those opportunities to pop out of the woodwork and show you they exist.

And that’s why you implement this content marketing strategy.

So more customers, connections, and opportunities come to you.

The post How to Build Your First LinkedIn Content Marketing Strategy appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Companies are making big money on social media.

And you can too.

The trick to social media marketing is knowing the foundations of what makes it work so well. Making money for your business is a huge pro (and what might be your goal on paper), but social gives companies an opportunity that was harder to come by before smartphones became our best friends.

With social media, you can develop a relationship with your audience in a way that wasn’t possible before Facebook went viral. We get to use social media to talk to our audience and show them we really know our stuff. The right social media marketing strategy speaks to your cold, warm, and hot leads on one platform.

And that’s what leads to revenue.

When people see you as more than a company with a fancy logo and more as a relatable expert in your field (B2B or B2C!), businesses thrive. We’ve seen established businesses use social to increase their audience reach, and we’ve also seen companies come from using social (for example, influencers launching merch shops).

Let’s go over the basics of what social media marketing is to build on a rock-solid foundation.

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing is a strategy that uses social media platforms to connect with your customer avatar and bring them through the Customer Value Journey. The Customer Value Journey is the 8-step process a customer goes through, from finding out your brand exists to becoming a raving fan of your products or services.

Here’s what the Customer Value Journey looks like:

With social marketing, you’re going to target customers in the first 2 stages of the CVJ, Aware and Engage. Generate awareness of your brand and your marketing campaigns and get your customer avatar to engage with your content (blog posts, podcast episodes, etc.) by driving them to your website.

These are the basics of social media marketing that you think of when you decide to launch your strategy. But, there are other pros to having a social audience. You can use your audience to discover what your customer avatar wants to learn about and what topics interest them. Using that knowledge, you can create content around it, lead magnets, or paid products.

You can also use your social audience as a testing ground for paid campaigns. Test out copy and ad creatives on your social feed to see how your audience reacts. The content that has the most engagement, views, or conversions is exactly the content you want to put ad dollars behind. 

Social media marketing is a huge opportunity for most businesses. Even the most niche industries can find their customer avatars online. But that doesn’t mean they have to.

Do You Need to Use Social Media Marketing?

It’s easy to say yes to this question and pretend that everybody should be using social. We’ll say confidently that 90% of companies should use social, but there is a small percentage that shouldn’t.

If these are your goals for your business (or the company you work for), implement a social media marketing strategy:

• You want more leads and customers
• You need more revenue
• You’re looking for more social proof

This is why 90% of businesses have the green light to start a social media strategy. What business doesn’t want more leads and customers?

Well, that brings us to who shouldn’t start a social media marketing strategy. If your business is feeling like any of the below, your social strategy should wait while you fix the leaking holes:

• You can’t keep up with the demand for your products or services
• You don’t have the capacity to give your customers a 5-star experience
• You’re a one-person show and you don’t have any extra time

If any of these are the case, it’s way more important for you to spend your time plugging those leaking holes (by creating systems, delegating and hiring, simplifying your packages, etc.). Once you can keep up with demand, continue to give your customers a 5+ star experience, and have the time to create high-quality, useful content—then you can implement your social media marketing strategy. 

How to Build a Social Media Strategy

Most businesses make 4 critical mistakes when they start their social strategy:

1. They treat social media marketing as a single discipline (there are 4 equally important parts)
2. They use social media as a one-way street, essentially just shouting at their audience
3. They jump straight into trying to make a sell (it’s all about providing value first and often creating multiple touchpoints)
4. They fail to tie social media marketing to overall marketing goals and don’t align with content marketing and promotions

We call those 4 important parts of social media marketing The Social Success Cycle. This is the cycle that helps you avoid shouting into the void or seeing a 0% CTR. It all starts with Social Monitoring & Listening.

The Social Success Cycle: Social Monitoring & Listening

Social monitoring and listening monitors and responds to customer inquiries and listens for important trends and topics. Here’s what you’re doing in this part of your social strategy:

1. Monitor for and respond to brand mentions (positive and negative!)
2. Listen for conversations around relevant industry topics and engage when you can add to the conversation
3. Find content inspiration based on what your audience is talking about or wants to know more about
4. Monitor for feedback and listen for key trends to improve your product or service

The Social Success Cycle: Social Influencing

Social influencing establishes authority in your industry by posting and sharing relevant and valuable content. You want to use your content to provide *BIG* value to your audience. This value is important because it’s building authority within your industry. When your audience reads your content and thinks, “Wow, they really know their stuff!” or “This company just GETS what my problem with [insert pain point here] is!” that’s when you’ve nailed it.

You want your audience to see you as a valuable resource and continue to engage with your content. They’ll share your content and brand with their audience and expand your reach (creating more customer avatars that can enter the Customer Value Journey at the Awareness stage).

The Social Success Cycle: Social Networking

Social networking engages and builds relationships with valuable brands and influencers in your industry. This might sound like an uphill battle now since you might not have a huge audience, but we have a strategy to help you get the ball rolling.

1. Start by sharing valuable content from other industry influencers and brands
2. Create a list of brands and experts in your industry that you’d like to build relationships with
3. Build communication templates and reach out to them where they are most active
4. Create mutually beneficial relationships
5. Focus on WHAT and WHERE your audience will find the most value (for example, sharing tips via an Instagram takeover, going Live on Stories, Facebook, etc.)

The Social Success Cycle: Social Selling

Social selling generates leads and sales by connecting a seeking audience with your products and services. This is the part of your social media strategy where you’re running ads to content pieces, lead magnets, and your products. It’s the part tempting you to jump in the deep end of social media… the same day you launch your strategy. But, now you know—there are 3 other very important parts of The Social Success Cycle. Sales is definitely one of them, but it’s not the only one.

Here are some tips for social selling:

• Focus on engaging your audience and speaking to the benefits of your product or services
• Attention-grabbing graphics and videos
• Maintain your consistent brand voice and showcase your personality
• Splinter relevant content into engaging chunks and use calls-to-actions to compel your audience to want to learn more
• Provide value even with your sales’ posts

That’s the foundation of building your social media strategy. Now, let’s look into what your social profiles will look like and what you’ll actually be publishing.

The 4 Types of Social Content

Time to pull out the Customer Value Journey again. Our social content revolves around 5 stages of the CVJ:

1. Awareness
2. Engagement
3. Subscription
4. Advocating
5. Promoting

At each stage, you’re creating a specific type of content suited for your customer avatars at that stage of their journey with you.

Social Content Type #1: Awareness

Someone can only buy from your brand if they know you exist. That’s what the awareness content is focusing on—telling people what you do and who you do it for. Build complete profiles and be active on the channels where your potential customers are. You can also run brand-building ads with this type of content.

Your homework for this type of content creation is to:

• Build and optimize your social profiles for your customer avatar
• Create relevant content that explains what you do, who you do it for, and shows your expertise

Social Content Type #2: Engagement

We don’t stand behind vanity metrics. Having one million followers is great but if only 1% of those followers engage with your brand, what was the point of getting all that Awareness content in front of those people? Focus on building an engaged audience instead. Having 1,000 followers with an 80% engagement rate doesn’t look as fancy on paper, but it sure looks great in your bank account. 

Here’s your homework for engagement content is:

• Create relevant and valuable content
• Optimize each post to encourage engagement (comments, shares, clicks, saves, etc.)
• Combine a compelling visual or video with engaging copy and strong calls-to-action

Social Content Type #3: Subscription

As Ryan Deiss, CEO of DigitalMarketer, always reminds us, own your audience. Algorithm changes can wipe out your ability to reach your audience on socials. You can’t have all of your eggs in one basket if you plan to have a steady, long-term business. You need to take your engaged audience and move them off of social and into your email list.

After providing value and getting your audience to engage, you can strategically get their contact information. You can do this with social media contests (just beware that you’re making sure to bring in quality leads) and by running ads.

Here’s your homework for subscription content:

• Splinter your subscription content into a valuable post
• Use your copy to generate interest for the opt-in

Social Content Type #4: Advocating and Promoting

Fast forward to the last two stages of the Customer Value Journey, and we’re creating content with help from our brand advocates and promoters. These customers are so happy with our 5-star experience, they want to tell the world about it (we LOVE these customers). This type of content repurposes positive reviews and customer stories and even uses customer testimonials as ads.

Here’s your homework:

• Engage with happy customers and encourage positive reviews
• Turn your positive reviews into social media posts, share customer success stories, and even post testimonials
• Get permission to use reviews on your social channels
• Use email marketing to encourage reviews

We know how tempting it is to make social media marketing more complex than this. We see the gears turning in your mind but we want to slow them down. This is the basics of social media marketing and exactly where you should start as a brand new to social. Don’t get super fancy with your content just yet, or worse, get Shiny Object Syndrome that turns into analysis paralysis. 

These are the 4 types of content you need to create, so just focus on publishing them. You can add in more content later as your brand evolves and you see how certain content impacts your success metrics.

What Social Media Success Metrics to Track

We talked a bit about vanity metrics, but now it’s time for a deep dive. Vanity metrics are any metrics that look great on paper but don’t help you reach your goals. We see companies going after vanity metrics when they haven’t *really* figured out their social media marketing goals. 

Let’s audit your current social media marketing efforts with these questions:

1. What social media channels are you currently posting on?
2. Why did you choose those channels? Is your audience even on those channels?
3. Do you have a complete business profile with bios, relevant links, searchable name, branded profile and cover photos?
4. How often are you posting per week?
5. What type of content are you posting? What’s the content mix (how many videos, photos, link shares, stories)?
6. Are you getting engagement on your posts?
7. What types of engagements are you getting? Comments, shares, saves, clicks, etc.?

Once you’re clear on what you’ve been doing (and why it hasn’t been working), it’s time to set trackable, relevant goals based on what YOU need from your social media marketing strategy. Not what your competitors need, not what that random marketing stranger told you that you needed, or what that internet-famous person’s tweet told you to do.

Align your social media goals with your business and marketing goals. Your goals can be one, some, or all of these:

• Increase brand awareness and authority: This is the TOP reasons marketers use social media
• Drive traffic to relevant content: If you post a lot of valuable content you can use social media to drive traffic
• Generate new leads: Best for businesses with a long sales cycle to create a warm audience
• Social Selling: Valuable goal for short sales cycles and ecommerce brands alongside paid advertising
• Build a community of advocates: Useful for brands that already have a lot of brand recognition

Based on your goals, you’ll narrow down which metrics reflect those goals. For example:

• If you’re trying to increase brand awareness and authority, followers and impressions are the metric you’ll focus on
• If you want to drive traffic to relevant content, click-through rate is going to be your favorite metric to pay attention to
• If you’re looking to generate leads, you’ll focus on your subscriber conversion rate
• If you want to sell products or services, you’ll be looking at sales conversions
• If building a community of advocates is your goal, engagement is going your metric of choice

Don’t get caught up in vanity metrics, in social media marketing or any digital marketing. They’re tempting, so watch out. Remember what really matters and focus on improving those metrics with the 4 types of content we talked about above. 

It’s going to be tempting to stack more social media platforms on your content strategy like you’re playing a game of Jenga. Unfortunately, that Jenga pile is going to come falling down on you if you take on more than you, or your team, can handle. Make sure that you’re not trying to be on *every* social platform that exists and comes out. Instead, focus on where your audience is. Here are our tips for how to do well on major social platforms.

Tips for Major Social Platforms

Facebook:

Use Facebook for paid ad reach and get really familiar with their ad platform. Facebook is great for targeting a specific audience based on buying behavior and interest. They get extra points for owning Instagram, which makes your advertising a bit easier since you can promote across both platforms.

Instagram:

Create how-to guides, highlight more than one testimonial at a time, or cover a lot of content in a little amount of space using Instagram’s multiple photo publisher. End each of these posts with a call to action to subscribe to a newsletter to learn more about this topic or opt-in for a lead magnet.

Twitter:

Use Twitter as your primary social listening channel. Chris gave us the brilliant idea of taking clips from our podcast episodes to share with our audience. Using social listening, we can tap into what our audience wants to see from us and what they want us to talk about.

YouTube:

Make sure to add a call to action to your YouTube videos. As the second largest search platform (second to Google), people on YouTube are generally looking for an answer to their question. Your videos will answer their questions and show them where they can really solve their problem. You can also apply this to Pinterest. People on YouTube and Pinterest are in the “Seeker” Mindset, looking to find something specific.

TikTok:

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking your social audience isn’t on TikTok. There are channels dedicated to plumbing and mixing paint. Make sure that you’re telling your TikTok audience where they can learn more about your products in your videos because you won’t be able to add a link to your profile until you have 10,000 followers.

Common Social Media Terms (And What They Mean)

Average Customer Value: The average order size multiplied by the average order frequency tells you how much to expect from an average customer (this helps you figure out how much budget you have for an organic and paid social strategy).

Call to Action: The action you want someone to take after reading, watching, or listening to your content (it can range from liking a post, to subscribing to an email list, to buying a product).

Click-Through Rate: The number of clicks organic or paid content received divided by the number of impressions and multiplied by 100 to get the percentage (this tells you what percentage of viewers are clicking through to your content).

Cold Traffic: People in your target audience who don’t know anything or much about your business (they’re moving towards or in the Aware stage of the Customer Value Journey).

Comments: People who have commented on your social post.

Core Offer:  The main product or service you’re selling in a sales funnel.

Cost Per Click: How much you pay a publisher (like a website, social media platform, etc.) each time one of your ads is clicked (also called Pay-Per-Click, PPC).

Cost Per Lead: How much you pay for every lead you get from a social media platform (or another advertising platform, ex. Google).

Engagement: The number of times a post was ‘engaged’ with, usually defined as like, comments, shares, and saves (but depends on the platform)

Followers: The number of people who follow your brand account (as seen on your profile under “Followers” on most social platforms)

Hot Traffic: Audience members who fit your customer avatar description and are in the Subscription stage of the Customer Value Journey ready to convert.

Impressions: The number of people who saw a post, in total.

KPI: The abbreviation for Key Performance Indicators used to track the success of a business or marketing initiative (example, a social media marketing strategy).

Lead: Someone aware and engaging with your brand that has qualified themselves as your customer avatar (they qualify themselves by showing interest in specific types of content).

Lead Magnet: A value-driven piece of content that is worth the subscriber giving their email address in return for. The lead magnet goal is to maximize the number of targeted leads you are getting for an offer.

Messenger: Facebook’s messaging app that can be used alongside bots and other marketing strategies.

Organic Content: Content posted to an account without any ad dollars put behind it (to increase impressions).

Organic Social Media Marketing: Posting to a social account without the use of paid ads with content only being seen by people who follow the account (and other users who the social platform decides to show the content to on discovery pages)

Paid Content: Content that has paid ad dollars behind it to boost impressions, have it seen by a specific audience, etc. 

Paid Social Media Marketing: Using paid ad platforms to boost impressions on content and target specific audiences based on interests, locations, demographics, buying behavior, and more.

ROI: The abbreviation for Return on Investment, used to figure out how much money was made on a marketing strategy (ex. Paid ads).

Shares: The number of people who have shared your content with their social network.

Warm Traffic: Audience members who have recently started to engage with your content by reading, watching, liking, commenting, etc., and are in the Engagement stage of the Customer Value Journey.

As you scroll and see other companies making *big* money on social, it’s time to realize that opportunity is there for you too. With your new knowledge, you can start to create the 4 types of social posts that will build your audience and get conversions. 

Remember, everybody was new to social marketing at some point. Even the world’s largest companies had to figure out how to get started posting relatable and valuable content.

Moving forward, you’ll only learn more about your audience, what social content they want to see from you, and how you can use that to give a 5-star customer experience (that drives more sales!).

The post Everything You Ever Needed to Know About Social Media Marketing appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

We have to stay on our toes if we want to stay relevant with the never ending changes to algorithms and regulations—and part of that is positioning ourselves for success.

What is digital marketing going to look like in 2021?

We had had 14 digital marketers weigh in to let us know what they see on the horizon, so we can all plan accordingly and have a great year of engagement, clicks, and conversions.

Here are predictions from 13 of digital marketing’s best minds for 2021.

Dan Dillon, Vice President of Marketing at Reveal Mobile

As the pandemic subsides, shoppers, diners, tourists and consumers of all kinds are going to go OUT. And when they go, they are going big. Marketers will need to know where their ideal customers go, how often they visit, competitors they’re shopping at — as much as they can know about the offline consumer journey. Reaching those audiences will be critical to business growth and will separate the 2021 winners from the laggards.

Steve Hooper, SiteGeek

We saw a massive shift to online in 2020 because no one had a choice, NOW in 2021 those that shifted have choices. The first is to wing it, and carry on thinking they know what they are doing, the second is to get trained or outsource what they are doing to make sure they are benefitting from the new normal. Without doing one or the other, businesses will eventually fail, which just makes me sad.

Kasim Aslam, Founder & CEO at Solutions 8

The massive and sweeping emphasis on privacy is going to alter (and significantly inhibit) the way advertisers are able to target and track prospects. This might be the first time in the history of online advertising that we have actually gone backwards in terms of our ability to capture and utilize data. I believe this is going to place a heavy emphasis on the quality of the creative being used in online ads as well as the need to monitor and optimize the entire user journey (not just the conversion event). Advertisers are going to need to work to qualify prospects through intrinsic values (like user behavior and action) instead of relying as heavily on extrinsic values (like demographic information). The Customer Value Journey just became that much more important!

Russ Henneberry, Founder at theCLIKK.com

We will begin to see a crack in the Facebook/Google ad duopoly as Amazon continues to steal share from Google search ads and networks like Spotify, TikTok, Reddit, Pinterest, become more proficient at serving ads. These smaller networks are gaining ground in the areas of audience targeting, self-serve ad platforms, and cost-per-acquisition (CPA and CPL) objectives rather than just CPM models. 2021 is a good year to dip your toes in the waters of some of these smaller ad platforms and start testing.

Rachel Pedersen, Consultant and Strategist at The Viral Touch & Social Media United

2021 is an entirely new look at social media and marketing. After a long year of growth, hardship, and survival (for many), people are ready to experience authenticity on a new level. Here’s how to implement it: everything stems from intention.

It sounds fluffy, but it’s actually incredibly foundational.

What is your intention with that Instagram post? Sales or service? What is the intention behind your YouTube video? Vanity metrics or value? What is your intention for replying to comments? Engagement or connection?

By starting with your intention before creating a single piece of content, your fans/followers will feel the authentic care you and your brand have for them. Instead of resisting new platforms such as Clubhouse and TikTok, lean into the intention of showing up where your customers are.

Here are some starting points and ideas for intentions:

• To serve our fans and followers deeply.

• To help our customers get out of pain/frustration by offering solutions that actually help them.

• To understand our fanbase more deeply and meet them in their need. To bring light to the issues that matter to our people.

Apply this prediction to your marketing, and watch your fans/followers soar as your intention is felt.

Nathalie Lussier, Founder of AccessAlly

In 2020, at AccessAlly we saw a huge wave of face-to-face trainers, associations, and business owners creating online courses and membership sites because of COVID-19 lockdowns across the world.

In 2021, these newly minted online businesses will get more sophisticated, and find ways to differentiate themselves by:

• Selling “bulk course licensing”, where a course creator can sell multiple seats in a program to a company and earn more for their intellectual property than they could have selling courses to individuals.
• Fighting Zoom fatigue with short actionable self-paced learning videos, and asynchronous communication through forums and Slack groups.
• Championing user privacy while marketing, by removing Facebook retargeting pixels, and switching from Google Analytics to privacy-first companies like Fathom.
• Creating rewards programs and giving struggling subscription members a financial break, to put people first and support the community as a whole.

Although it’s hard to say when everything will “go back to normal”, as marketers we know that nothing stays the same for long.

That’s why I think 2021 will be the year that offline businesses that were forced to learn online marketing are going to see a return on their efforts.

Some may choose to re-open in person, for a premium, but those that figure out how to connect with customers all over the world will likely decide to keep growing their reach and revenue online.

Savannah Sanchez, Founder of The Social Savannah

I believe that 2021 will be the year of channel diversification for paid social spend. Historically, the majority of the ad budget for eCommerce brands has gone towards Facebook and Instagram advertising. However, with all of the changes coming next year with iOS 14, Facebook’s tracking, targeting, and reporting may not be as effective as previous years. I believe that this will have brands looking at channels like Snapchat, TikTok, and Pinterest more seriously. The ad tech, especially on Snapchat, is getting more advanced and many brands are seeing similar returns on Snapchat as they do on Facebook, so I believe there will be much more marketing spend dedicated to Snapchat next year.

Marisa Murgatroyd, Founder & CEO of Live Your Message

I have two predictions for this year!

The Declining “Internet Middle Class.”

As often happens when markets get more crowded and more sophisticated, some people win and some people lose. Because with more opportunity, comes more competition. And competition has never been fiercer on all the major online platforms — especially Google, Facebook and Instagram. Ask anyone who runs a Facebook ad agency and they’ll tell you that it’s getting harder and harder to get a significant return on ad spend (ROAS). I often tell my students that they need to be prepared to blow at least $10K on Facebook ads (if not a whole lot more) before they see any real return. The same goes for getting listed on the first page of Google or getting views, clicks and comments on social media… While it IS still possible, it’s harder and harder to “get lucky” on talent and charisma alone. You have to develop a highly specialized skill set and give each platform what its specific algorithm wants. Which means that, with some notable exceptions, the businesses and individuals with deeper pockets, deeper connections or deeper marketing chops are winning the internet… and the middle is dropping out. The big players are either getting bigger or stepping off the field as savvy new competitors leap onto the bench to take their place. So don’t despair — if you’re reading this article — you still have the opportunity to get on the bench if you’re willing to learn the skills you need to succeed online — not just through talent and charisma, but through smarts and savvy.

The Death of the Dabbler

With more opportunity and more competition, it’s not enough just to play the game. You have to play the game to win. With so much competition and the challenge in finding your audience online, you have to double down and go all in if you’re going to succeed and take a spot on the bench as a real player. Because the middle is dropping out, it’s easy to stay stuck at the starting gate, especially if you’re not 100% in. If you’re not fully aligned and on your mark, you won’t make it on the bench. So on the one hand the old guard is stepping down and new spots are opening up, and on the other hand it’s becoming harder to grab those spots unless you specialize (Trend #2) and develop real internet marketing savvy (Trend #4). The internet used to be the place where a “newbie” could become “internet famous” literally overnight. And while that’s DEFINITELY still possible… it now takes real commitment and chops to build an audience and grow your business online. There is no silver bullet. You have to put in the time, learn proven strategies to succeed (or as I like to say, be the scientist in the experiment lab of your business) and go all in.

Scott Desgrosseilliers, CEO of Wicked Reports

The Apple vs. Facebook war is going to have seismic changes to Facebook advertisers. We are headed “back to the future” where advertisers will need to use Facebook as a traffic source but completely unable to trust, verify, or count on the reporting accuracy.

Ryan Levesque, CEO of The ASK Method Company

There is a massive opportunity around incorporating Personalization in your marketing in 2021. But not just any type of Personalization. There has been a massive backlash toward what’s known as “Algorithmic Personalization.” This is when the major advertising networks – like Facebook & Google – use the massive amount of data they have around our behavior online to show us content, ads, and products that their algorithm “thinks” we might like.

This has come to a head in Q4 2020, when Apple announced that IOS 14.3 would come with standard privacy features preventing Facebook from tracking your “off platform” behavior to feed their Big Data algorithm.

Why did Apple do this? In response to user demand, naturally. To cater to the fact that we as users of the internet, don’t want the “robot overlords” telling us what to like, what to think, and what to buy. At the same time, with the vast amount of data, information, and options to sort through online, as users we STILL rely on heuristics to help us decide “which one is right for me” when it comes to making purchasing decisions online. This is where the BIG personalization opportunity comes in. While people don’t want “Algorithmic Personalization” to tell us what to do, we DO want to be actively involved (and aware) of the personalization experience online. To make choices around what CONTENT we want to see and what PRODUCTS we want to buy. This is what’s known as “Interactive Personalization”. Where the user is given a CHOICE, and AGENCY over expressing their preferences online. In other words, instead of choices being made algorithmically, without us being aware of it happening behind the scenes… The big opportunity is to INVITE your visitors to PARTICIPATE in the choice. Tactically what that means is this: Invite them to answer questions when they land on your website so you can show them the right content or the right product based on how they ANSWER those questions. In other words, to use what’s known as a “QUIZ Funnel”. We recently USED this strategy ourselves to generate over $8.59M in less than 55 days.

And there are thousands of entrepreneurs having success with this very strategy, anywhere from launching from ground zero – to generating hundreds of leads and customers every single day.

This is a strategy we’re going ALL IN on in 2021, and it’s a powerful HEDGE against the battles BIG TECH will be fighting – between companies like Apple, Facebook, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, and Microsoft. It’s a way to TAKE BACK CONTROL of your business, and deliver a powerful, personalization experience for your users so that you can ultimately better SELL and better SERVE in 2021 and beyond.

Natasha Takahashi, Co-Founder of School of Bots

In 2021, we’ll see the biggest increase in businesses using chatbot marketing to date (AKA marketing with mobile messaging apps.) 

Why? Because businesses can now market on 3 of the biggest messaging apps in the world: Facebook Messenger, Instagram DM, WhatsApp. 

As a marketer, you can grow lists on Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram DM, and automate conversations for hundreds of use cases.

In 2016, we saw Facebook enable marketers with Messenger bots. Messenger has been an incredible guinea pig for marketers to understand conversational psychology and what leads/customers want to be able to do in a conversation. 

Now, we get to level up to the next phase of marketing with messaging apps: Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram – collectively and individually. 

If you’re wondering what you can do right now… As of January 2021, Messenger bots are already available for you to utilize at full force; Instagram DM bots are in private beta (we’re currently testing use cases with Facebook); and WhatsApp bots are in private beta (we’re currently testing use cases with Facebook.)

2020 exponentially grew the number of mobile messaging app users and the amount of time they spend on the apps everyday. More businesses than ever had to open up communication channels via messaging apps that they didn’t have before, or they would’ve gone out of business.

Even if you don’t personally plan to learn this new skill of conversational marketing, you need to at least understand how it works and plays a role in a company’s marketing system.

Emily Hirsh, CEO of Hirsh Marketing

When I think about success in 2021, I believe it’s going to be more important than ever to go back to the foundations and basics of marketing as the online space gets more and more saturated. I have 8 predictions that I believe will be critical for your marketing success in 2021:

1. There will be a greater importance of knowing your customer value and your customer’s average life cycle (how long it takes from the time that they first join your list to be coming a paying customer). In 2020, my team and I have seen that the average customer lifestyle is increasing. This data is key as this should drive your strategy. If you know that it takes, on average, three months for one of your leads to go from initially joining your list to becoming a paying customer, then you can plan your marketing strategy and projections around that. It will also be vital to know your average customer value as ad costs continue to increase. You’ll need to know exactly how much you can pay for a lead and still be profitable – and if you realize you’re not going to be profitable after pulling this data, this will allow you to strategize ways to increase your customer value.

2. Videos and Instagram Reels are going to continue to take precedent and convert better than ads that use images. Over the last several months, I’ve seen that ads that are using short videos or Instagram Reel are cutting CPM’s (cost per thousand impressions) in half. I believe that this will continue to be the case as Facebook tries to compete with Tik Tok.

3. Facebook groups will start dying in 2021 (if they aren’t already dead). I’ve seen that as an admin of a Facebook group, your posts only receive a fraction of the reach and engagement as your group’s members’ posts and it’s become increasingly more difficult to get your Facebook group members to convert into customers. If you’ve already established a highly engaged community on Facebook, I think you’ll be okay, but I wouldn’t go into 2021 trying to build a new group from scratch. I think you should instead put more effort into direct methods of nurturing and connecting with people like podcasts, engagement videos, reaching out via Instagram DM’s, etc.

4. Innovating your webinar experience will be critical. The digital marketing space is heavily saturated with webinars, many of which follow the same templates, formulas, and pitching techniques that your audience has probably seen hundreds of times before. If you want to have success with your webinars in 2021 and prevent your audience from tuning you out, you MUST innovate the experience you take your customer on so that you stand out rather than get drowned out. You’ll need to consider how you can connect with your audience more, how you can get them to engage, how you can provide them valuable content they can’t find anywhere else. That may mean making it shorter, longer, turning it in to a workshop, turning it in to a pop-up podcast series, refreshing the title and the content regularly, etc.

5. Nurturing your audience will become increasingly important as the online space gets more and more crowded. There’s so much more noise in webinars, funnels, and online businesses than there was a few years ago. This doesn’t mean it will be impossible to find success, it just means you have to stand out and connect with your audience. To do that, you must prioritize consistently showing up for your audience to deliver extremely valuable content that makes an impact in their lives. You must also a solid nurturing strategy for people who don’t even know about you/your brand yet through brand awareness and visibility content, in addition to nurturing the people who DO already know about you, but haven’t bought from you yet. Why? Because there’s a huge percentage of people out there who are going to join your list, watch your video, listen to your podcast, whatever it may be, but not be a customer yet. You have to strategically nurture those people and bring them back to your offer if you want them to convert. If you don’t care about showing up for your audience and how you can positively impact them, you will not have lasting success.

6. You must refresh and innovate your ad creative in order to stand out and stop the scroll. You can’t just put up templated images and ad copy – that won’t cut it. You’ll need focus on connection, emotion, community, and trust in your ads and go even deeper if you want to stand out from your competition and attract your ideal clients and customers.

7. Online businesses will continue to boom. I think course sales and coaching services are going to go way up next year as more people are moving online. More people are catching up to where those of us who are established in the digital marketing space have been for years now because of the COVID-19 pandemic. More people are getting on Zoom, exploring remote learning, bringing their businesses online, utilizing Facebook ads, etc. I think a lot of people are going to be investing in courses that are going to help them figure out what they need to do to have success online and create a new reality for themselves. So if you’re able to serve your audience in that way in 2021, I see immense success for your business.

8. The life cycle of how long content is good for will shorten. I think at least once a quarter next year you’re going to have to seriously look at your marketing, your strategy and your messaging, and make pivots and changes where needed, based on what your data is telling you. Maybe four years ago you could get away with not updating your content for six months to a year, but not so much anymore. The people who step up with value, innovation, updated content and creative, and show up for their audience in that proactive and consistent way will be the ones who do the best next year.

Elise Darma, Founder of EliseDarma.com

2020 forced a lot of business owners online. And of all the many free tools available to grow a business online today, social media has proven to be at the top in terms of its effectiveness.

When it comes to using Instagram to grow a business (arguably the world’s #1 social app and the darling child of its parent company Facebook), here’s what I predict for 2021: photo-only feeds will continue to kill your account’s engagement.

What worked in 2016 is no longer effective for 2021. Gone are the days of perfectly posed or edited images. Instagram is no longer a place for photographers to show their snaps, but is a content hub of videos, memes, lives and reality TV-like stories. 

Businesses need to get on video. Even if it’s a 15-second story just to get comfortable on camera. But the key is to start today. Because customers buy from brands they feel a connection to and video is the fastest way to create that connection.

Find and use the tools that make content creation fun and fast. Here are a few of my faves: 

• Canva for quote cards and memes
• Kapwing for videos like IGTV
• InShot for making Reels outside of the Instagram app

With that said, if turning your account into a video hub sounds intimidating, start small: film yourself on Instagram Stories and then move onto Instagram Reels. I’ll bet you’ll see faster growth in 2021 just by using these two free tools of Instagram.

Mike Rhodes, CEO of WebSavvy

What a decade this year has been. Covid has accelerated many trends, not least consumer behaviour & with it, digital marketing. But where will that take us in ‘21 & what will you need to focus on to best serve your clients?

I believe you have three main options ahead of you as a Digital Marketer:

Data: dive deep into the data side, understand automation & where AI (& ML) can help.

Creativity: get really good at persuasive copy, crafting offers & understanding human behaviour.

Strategy: or sit above both disciplines. Be able to synthesis information from a wide variety of sources & weave them into your decision making.

For this short prediction post, I’ll focus on data and drill down into Google Ads.

Less 

Under the guise of ‘privacy’ expect the ad platforms to continue to pass on less & less data to you in the future. For example, Google no longer tells you the video what your Youtube ad showed on, just the channel. And, as of Sep 2020, they dramatically reduced the Search Query data you can access.

Of course we’ve all known for a while that ITP & no third-party cookies will affect our tracking & reduce the reliance on remarketing (would you buy shares in criteo?). 2021 will likely see a rise in other tracking methods (think digital coupon codes) as well as marketers focusing on longer-term, more valuable metrics, like lifetime value (LTV).

If you’re not already focusing on how to get more/better first-party data, start soon.

Prediction

We need to use the data we do have to make better predictions (& decisions) about the near future. According to BCG only 9% of CMOs can accurately predict the result of a 10% shift in marketing investment.

We’ve certainly seen a shift in this direction at my agency, WebSavvy.com.au with clients delighted by dashboards & spreadsheets that model various scenarios and forecast changes in ROAS, ROI & LTV.

How certain are you about the return you’ll get from your next $20,000 in a particular channel?

Incremental 

Don’t expect the ad platforms to try & optimise your profit any time soon. Spending more to get additional leads & sales isn’t always the best approach. 

Google’s little used ‘Performance Planner’ is a case in point. They’ll show you cumulative charts (that always go up & right) for cost & conversions, but if you want to maximise profit you MUST understand the incremental cost & revenue. Sure your average CPA might only go from $50 to $52 but if that means the next lead actually costs you $250, was that a sensible investment?

Google recently improved this tool to work with Shopping campaigns as well as Search, but unfortunately don’t have plans to release Performance Planner data via their Ads API, so we built a tool to help you use it. Head to www.AgencySavvy.com/blog to find out more.

Smart

Google continues to push brands & agencies alike to use it’s range of ‘smart’ tools in Google Ads. It’s smart bidding is excellent & much stronger than it was 2 years ago, but be wary of using tools like ‘smart campaigns’ until you’ve mastered the fundamentals

(readers of this blog can get my $299 Google Ad Fundamentals course for free here).

Artificial

We all know that Google is an AI-first company & possibly the biggest user of AI, at least outside of China. So expect them to continue to force more automation & AI on us.

Not all AI is bad of course. Models like GPT-3 (at least, cherry-picked examples) showed mind-boggling creativity. It can do wonderful things (write code, poetry, even do math), but it can’t be relied on 100% & when it goes wrong, it goes really wrong. So use tools like UseBroca.com, Copy.ai & UseTopic.com as idea generators, not something to replace your team.

And if SEO is your thing, keep an eye on this, as natural language answers, like those GPT-3 is able to give, will likely change the entire world of Search sooner than we think.

Summary

2021 no doubt has many surprises in store for us.

Use your time to rebuild & prepare—whatever you thought wouldn’t happen until 2030, get ready for that now. The future is here.

The post How Digital Marketing Will Change: 14 Predictions for 2021 appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

And if you have been listening to Perpetual Traffic, the weekly paid traffic podcast produced by DigitalMarketer, for the last 4 years, then you would also be in the know. Because Perpetual Traffic now has *gasp* 200 episodes on the subject!

Ralph and Molly have been informing their listeners about the happenings at the forefront of digital advertising since 2015 (yeah, you heard that right). And with nearly 4.5 million downloads, it’s safe to say that the listeners are seeing a good ROI of their time.

To celebrate crossing the 200 marker, we took a dive into our archives and collected the 10 most popular episodes of PT. Whether you’re listening to these 10 for the first time or rediscovering them, you’ll find a wealth of paid traffic wisdom in there.

And don’t forget to check out Episode 200 HERE!

A Few Words from the Hosts

But before we dive into the episodes, our hosts had a few words of thanks that they wanted to share.

Molly Pittman

“Ralph and I are so excited to celebrate episode 200 of Perpetual Traffic. Thank you to our listeners and everyone behind the scenes who works hard to make this podcast happen. Perpetual Traffic is one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had in my life. To be able to help grow businesses and better the life of our listeners is truly an honor. We are committed to continue bringing you all the most up-to-date, actionable information about digital media buying out there. Thanks again for your support.”

Ralph Burns

“It’s hard to believe that we’ve now done 200 episodes! Thank you to everyone who’ve listened to us over the years and for all of those who have commented, given reviews, and shared their feedback. It means so much. It’s really amazing to see how many people and their businesses have been touched by this little show we started 4 years ago. A special thanks goes to everyone from DigitalMarketer behind the scenes who makes the show possible—especially our producer Darren Clarke. We couldn’t do it without his technical wizardry, insights, help, and support. Here’s to another 200 episodes!”

Perpetual Traffic’s Most-Popular Episodes

Episode 145: How to Amplify Your Ecommerce Business Using Facebook Ads

Do you run an ecommerce company?

If so, chances are that you’re missing something. That thing is a holistic system for guiding people who have never heard of you through the buyer journey to become repeat customers.

If you’re looking for a system that will bring you more customers while eliminating wasted ad spend, you must listen to today’s episode.

Episode 51: How to Generate Traffic, Leads, and Sales with Social Media

The Perpetual Traffic experts are joined by Jennifer Sheahan, founder at The Social Guild, to discuss how you can build a thriving social media business. Social platforms are powerful traffic generators, but you have to know what to do and how to do them. Anybody can get Likes and engagement. But traffic, leads, and sales come when you follow a process, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

Episode 150: 3 Facebook Funnels to Drive More High-Ticket Leads

Special guest Oli Billson joins the experts to teach you 3 Facebook funnels that start conversations with the prospects who want your services—on the platform they’re most likely to read and respond on.

These funnels generate high-ticket leads whether you’re a brick and mortar, SaaS, internet marketer, or anyone else who needs to have a conversation with their customer.

Episode 33: The Ad Grid: How to Build Campaigns that Convert and Scale

Fresh off of Traffic & Conversion Summit 2016, Molly is sharing her 7-step system for campaign and marketing strategy creation.

In this episode, Molly and Keith will walk through her T&C presentation and how she’s created and utilized this system within DigitalMarketer’s own strategy.

Episode 132: 3 Steps to Build a Perpetual Traffic Machine

Brand based advertising is essential to running a successful long-term digital advertising strategy.

In fact, it’s one of the three cornerstones of the “BCS Triangle” we’re going to show you in today’s episode. Implement the BCS system in your business, and you’ll be able to activate the 90% of your market that most advertisers miss and build a perpetual traffic machine.

Episode 14: Frank Kern on Selling High-Dollar Products and Services with Paid Traffic Campaigns

Are you making offers that require an in-person meeting or consultative sales call?

Frank Kern joins the Perpetual Traffic crew (Keith, Molly, and Ralph) to reveal his 3-tiered system for creating paid traffic campaigns that sell high priced products and services.

Episode 158: How Molly Pittman Generated 157,362 Leads from 1 Facebook Campaign

157,362 leads generated. In 8 weeks. For just $1.08 per lead. All from 1 Facebook campaign!

Join the experts as they share the exact strategy Molly used to achieve these results… and how you can apply it to your next Facebook ad campaign.

We break down everything—the research process, how the ad sets were set up, how Molly maximized the relevance score, why ad sets were removed or boosted, and what the results from the campaign were.

If you want to improve how you’re managing your own Facebook ad campaigns, grab a notebook and tune into this episode.

Episode 43: Ryan Deiss Shares 4 Steps to Crafting and Optimizing the Perfect Offer

Ryan Deiss, co-founder and CEO of DigitalMarketer, and the Perpetual Traffic crew break down how to create an offer that people actually want to buy.

Follow the 4-Step process to get the biggest leverage points to turn a losing campaign into a winning campaign – without being the Don Draper of copy writing or having to change your bidding or targeting.

Episode 147: The 4 Pillars of Advertising on Google

If you’re advertising on Facebook but not on Google, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity. (Especially if you run a product-based business.)

After all, if someone sees a product they like, what’s the first thing they’re going to do? (Hint: Google it.)

Join the experts and guest Brett Curry as they dive into the 4 pillars of advertising on Google so you can leverage Google’s advertising platform and reach your potential customers. You’ll learn how to run ads not only on Google’s search engine, but also on their shopping platform, their display network, and the pre-roll video ads on YouTube.

Episode 49: Boosted Posts: Microtargeting and Other Advanced Uses of Facebook’s “Easy Button”

Dennis Yu, Chief Technology Officer at BlitzMetrics, joins the Perpetual Traffic experts to discuss why keeping it simple on Facebook can go a long way for your business. We’re going to talk about boosting posts, and why they are your bread and butter. Boosted posts work for B2B, for small businesses, for entrepreneurs, for freelancers, for consultants, and marketers on a small budget.

For anyone that’s ever thought they don’t have the tools, or the audience, or the resources to advertise on Facebook, this is the episode that will help you get started.

The post Best of Perpetual Traffic—The 10 Most Popular Episodes appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

You just wrote a brand spanking new blog post! And it’s a doozy!

Now what?

What processes are in place to distribute this wonderful new resource on social media to maximize its impact? And, more importantly, what processes are in place to get LONG TERM impact out of this wonderful new resource?

The truth is that most blog posts have the lifespan of a mayfly.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

With the 6-step social sharing process I’m covering in this case study—your blog post will live a long and fruitful life.  

Our process not only notifies social connections as soon as a post is published, our strategy ensures that the post will continue to cycle through our social feeds days, weeks, and months after it’s been published.

We’ve got an infographic version of this post as well as a text version and video! You can download a PDF version of the infographic here, check out the video at the end of this post!

View the text steps of this article by clicking on one of the links below to view the explanation for that step:

• Step 1: Splinter
• Step 2: Visualize
• Step 3: Broadcast
• Step 4: Tag
• Step 5: Monitor
• Step 6: Schedule

Let’s start with the infographic… (Click the image to enlarge or download the PDF version)

And here is the text version…

Step 1: Splinter

As you know…

Product Splintering is the process of breaking off bits and pieces of your core product and selling them a la carte.

But splintering isn’t only for core products—the same process can be applied to any piece of content you create.

When your piece of content is published and ready for sharing, you have all the source material needed to splinter shareable content for social media posts.

Look to splinter the following from your blog post…

• headlines
• quotes
• images
• questions
• statistics

(It’s not necessary to use all 5 for every post, but if the opportunity presents itself, take it.)

For example, this is a recent article (written by CRO expert Justin Rondeau) with the headline “[Checklist] 5 Image Elements Worth Testing on Your Landing Page“…

Here are 4 splinters we pulled from this blog post for use on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc:

1. [Checklist] 5 Image Elements Worth Testing On Your Landing Page >> LINK
2. “An image is only as powerful as the value it communicates.” – Justin Rondeau >> LINK
3. Is Justin Rondeau spitting in the face of best practices? Find out now >> LINK
4. The elements on your website need to do 3 things. What are they? >> LINK

Ok, now that we have some text content to share on social media, it’s time for…

Step 2: Visualize

If you don’t know, now you know—visual content is necessary to drive engagement and clicks on social media (Buffer saw an increase of 18% in clicks, 89% in favorites, 150% in retweets using images!).

We’d be leaving a lot of distribution reach on the table if we didn’t incorporate images into our social strategy.

The feature image (which appears at the top of our blog posts) is always the first guaranteed visual asset to share on social media channels.

But one image isn’t enough. Create a visual asset for every possible splinter.

We use quote images on sites like Facebook and Twitter…

We created our own branded quote boxes for organic content distribution (and gave you the templates to make some of your own), but don’t think you’re hindered by a lack of graphic designer or templates.

Canva.com is one of our favorite tools for creating images you can share on social networks. Check out this same quote from above created using all standard options from Canva…

The beauty here is that we’re able to share content and engage with our audience… all for free.

If you plan to use the “Boost Post” function in Facebook to throw some paid traffic at your post, create the images with the 20% text rule in mind.  You can check your text % using this tool.

Ok, now we have our visuals locked and loaded.  Time for…

Step 3: Broadcast

Now that you have your splinters and visual assets, you need to create your social sharing links, and share the post on social platforms.

How to Create Your Social Sharing Links

You cannot optimize what you don’t measure, right?

UTM parameters are simply tags you add to a URL — when your link is clicked, the tags are sent back to Google Analytics and tracked.

Creating UTM parameters to track your post performance will give you great insight to how your post performs with different audiences and the journey they take once they read your post.

These are the UTM parameters we use on every post we share—you’ll notice there’s a different UTM link for each platform and distribution method.

For example, here are the UTM parameters for Twitter organic traffic…

Twitter Organic

• utm_source= the social network (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc)
• utm_medium= the distribution method (is this organic/free distribution or paid?)
• utm_content= We add the “slug” or extension here to differentiate the performance from post to post
• utm_campaign= This is the largest bucket and remains constant for all organic and paid traffic respectively

The slug is the extension on the post…

So, for example, this is what some of our other UTM links look like…

Facebook Organic

LinkedIn Organic

Facebook Promoted (These are the links we use when we use ads to send traffic to our content)…

Using UTM parameters allows us to track the performance of our campaigns in Google Analytics…

To build links with UTM parameters, use Google’s URL builder tool.

Once we have all our tracking links created, we put them through…

Bit.ly

Once each link is set up with its UTM parameters, they can be posted into Bit.ly to make shortened sharing links. These don’t give us the same information that Google Analytics will, but they’re a speedier method for regularly tracking performance based on clicks and sharing—more on that in just a minute.

Label your links by platform to make it easier when scanning through bit.ly’s reporting…

Create a document (whether it be a Word document, Google Sheet, or—DM’s personal favorite—a .txt doc) easily referenced and keep all of your content links in it.

Broadcasting on Facebook

When we have all social sharing links ready, we broadcast our content.

We create our Facebook content copy based on the benefits and point of the article, and we close with a hook or curiosity based question. Maintain a consistent personality and tone on your pages—where possible.

If you’re usually fun and address them with banter, appeal to them with your content the same way.

If you’re usually more serious and to the point, don’t waste their time being wordy—give them the goods straight up.

During your first broadcasting of the content, utilize the feature image:

Do you have other pages or handles?  If so, share wherever it is appropriate.

For example, we utilize the Ryan Deiss Facebook page and Twitter account to distribute DigitalMarketer’s content. He’s a personality associated with our brand and it makes sense for him to distribute our content to his followers.

We create different sets of copy for the DigitalMarketer and Ryan Deiss page, even if it’s just a small variation, so that people don’t become accustomed to just scrolling by one of our updates because they think they’ve seen what we have to say in an update from the other page.

For the second broadcast, we use a different visual asset to distribute the content.

When sharing for a second time, make sure to change copy to remove any “today’s” or “new on the blog” and condense copy to make for a shorter, more direct post.

(NOTE: If you’re a DigitalMarketer Lab member, you can learn more about how we do Social Media Scheduling on this Office Hours call.)

Broadcasting on Twitter

We use Hootsuite Pro as one of our social media management systems so that our entire content team can be logged into all social accounts, publishing, monitoring, and networking throughout the day.

(We don’t use Hootsuite to broadcast to our Facebook pages because we’ve found that there’s much more control for specific time scheduling, monitoring, and formatting directly on the Facebook platform.)

On the day of publishing, we create 3 tweets that will be published every couple hours:

1. Headline >> LINK
2. Quote >> LINK
3. Question the post answers >> LINKS

Tweets are scheduled to publish from the DigitalMarketer account and Ryan Deiss account at different times. We currently only schedule the headline tweet to go out from Ryan, and once #2 and #3 publish from DM, we retweet them from his account.

Broadcasting on LinkedIn

The beauty of LinkedIn is that posts shared on LinkedIn have a habit of continuing to be shared long after after they’re posted (even if they’re not using the link you provided). When you share with your connections, you’re sharing with a smaller audience of people that have already indicated they’re interested in your happenings.

We also tag the author in our LinkedIn status update to give them the nudge to share it on their stream as well. It’s a free and low-effort way of saying, “Here’s what I’ve been up to, here’s the content I just created.”

But how do you keep your content on your audience’s mind once you’ve broadcasted it the first time? We’ll be talking automated scheduling in just a bit.

For now, you need a good way to people’s attention with your post, especially if they’re mentioned in it…

Step 4: Tag

When we’re broadcasting a post, we tag people and brands wherever it makes sense.

For example, Justin Rondeau doesn’t have a Facebook fan page, so we didn’t tag him there – however, he has a Twitter account so we tag him in the tweets, giving him an opportunity to retweet and share the link.

But check out another post by Justin that gave us ample opportunity to tag others — and without having to ask them to contribute anything!

We were able to tag the owners of these blogs (and automate this distribution so that we’re driving traffic to the post, while continuing to drive traffic the owners’ blogs).

Step 5: Monitor

Most of the social media action will occur in the first 48-72 hours.

This is where Bit.ly comes in.

Monitoring campaigns (using UTM parameters) are the key to tracking long term performance, but Bit.ly is our favorite tool for immediate performance tracking.

• Who’s clicking?
• Where are they clicking?
• Who’s sharing?
• Where are they sharing?
• Which broadcast performed the best?
• Which platform performed the best?

Bit.ly tells us all of that.

During the initial 24-48 hours broadcasting of links, you can use Bit.ly….

• To see how many people are clicking your link from each platform.
• To see what time your post performed best.

• To figure out where in the world your content is reaching (and % of clicks they contribute to the total) — you want your content to broadcast when the people who are reading it are awake and active.

• To see which of your tweets performed best (helping you determine which copy speaks well to your audience and giving you ideas to test).

• And to see which platform it performed best on.

However, Bit.ly is only good for short term tracking here. People tend to click Bit.ly to read posts, but then share the post with either a basic URL, or directly from a sharing plugin — especially on LinkedIn.

So while it’s good to track who’s clicking your link on different platforms, don’t count your post as a loss if you don’t see tons of clicks on your shortened link.

Engagement

After the first 24 hours a post has been broadcast, one of the best ways to increase engagement is to check and regulate comments. Whether that be…

• On your blog post on your site.

• Comments on the Facebook posts you broadcasted the post on.
• Tweets sent out SHARING your post.

• Tweets sent in reply to your post.
• Comments on your LinkedIn update.

Tweets have a short lifespan, once you’ve published them, they’re already being buried by someone else’s content. The perks of retweeting someone who shared your content, or replying back to them, is that it puts your content in front of your audience with the added social proof that other people in your audience like the content you’ve been sharing.

Finally, we take Step 6 — the step that ties all your efforts together and ensures that your content stays alive and kickin’ for days, weeks, months (and sometimes YEARS) to come.

Step 6: Schedule

This is the behavior of a normal piece of content on social media…

Big spike… then vanishes from the face of the social Earth.  

That’s why long term automated distribution (scheduling) is necessary.

This what a piece of content looks like in a 6 month snapshot with scheduling and automation built into it.

Scheduling your content into a social media management tool results in perpetual sharing and content distribution with no action needed from you after loading it into your library.

We use MeetEdgar for our scheduling and automation across Twitter and LinkedIn. We’re able to make categories, and choose what time content publishes using those categories — the library will randomize itself and post content in rotation so that you’er not bombarding people with the same tweets day after day.

When you’re broadcasting your content, you have everything you need to schedule your content. After we’ve loaded our three tweets into Hootsuite the first day our content is published, we take those same splinters and immediately load them into MeetEdgar.

The other feature that’s really helpful is similar to what Bit.ly does in short term monitoring. Using MeetEdgar, we can track tweets performance over time.

This tells us when copy is getting fatigued and if we should update it—it’s also where quote images come into play. Content blurbs get tiring and are easily ignored. Image based tweets will keep your followers on their toes and clicking your content.

And that’s that! Use this 6-step distribution system to keep your content in front of your audience and give your content everlasting longevity—and don’t forget to swipe the infographic for easy reference!

Want lifelong longevity for your content, but reading isn’t your thing? Get a quick run through of our 6-Step Distribution Plan in this video:

The post How to Splinter Long Form Content appeared first on DigitalMarketer.