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How This Process Will Totally Transform Your Brainstorming Sessions

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By Farmers Insurance

Fast-paced, iterative design thinking could help you discover your company’s next “big thing.”

To grab attention in a crowded marketplace, companies large and small need to deliver fresh products and services on a regular basis. But in today’s fast-paced, competitive business climate, it can be challenging to consistently generate new, high-quality ideas and avoid recycling concepts and offerings. No matter how brilliant any business leader may be, there are only so many times he or she can go back to the same well for the next game-changing idea. So the question keeping that leader up at night becomes, “How do I foster consistent, critical and creative thinking throughout my enterprise?”

My job at Farmers Insurance revolves around helping to provide answers to that question. To generate new, worthwhile ideas, I’ve found that brainstorming while embarking upon the design thinking process can be a highly effective way out of that rut. By combining the tenets of design thinking with a focus on user empathy–doing one’s best to truly understand the end user’s experiences and feelings–the new ideas can really start flowing.

To better structure and optimize those ideation sessions, use this dos and don’ts list as a guide:

Don’t start with boundaries.

To combat fears of saying “the wrong thing” and put participants at ease, kick off the entire process with a wide-open acceptance of any and all ideas. State explicitly that crazy options are not only welcome, they are encouraged. While one wacky concept may not be viable on its own, the conversation could spark another colleague’s creative juices and lead to the next innovative product or process.

Don’t bring any assumptions to the table.

It’s tempting to assume what could come out of a specific brainstorming exercise. A leader that has been so close to the challenge at hand for so long can think they’ve heard all the outcomes, objections, and questions before. The beauty of the design thinking process, however, lies in the unanticipated connections your team can create when they’re given permission to come up with unfiltered ideas.

But do clarify your goals.

If every participant starts spouting off ideas at will, the louder participants may drown out quieter team members. To add focus and encourage all to participate, open with a clear challenge or statement of purpose. The facilitator can still remain open to outside the box ideas while focusing the team’s thinking on the specific problem at hand to be solved.

Do encourage user empathy–and bring it to life.

Take time to humanize the challenge by putting the team in the end user’s shoes. Do some empathy mapping by creating personas for those end users. Post the descriptors of what those personas are “Thinking,” “Seeing,” “Feeling,” and “Doing” in a highly visible area for all participants to reference throughout the session.

Do use a “write first, talk later” process.

Give each participant 10 to 12 minutes to write as many ideas or potential solutions that solve for the challenge statement. At this stage, aim for quantity over quality and limit any conversations that might prematurely define solutions. When time’s up, have each person narrow down their thoughts to two or three of their favorite ideas and share them with the larger group. From there, the full team can provide feedback and select concepts for further development. The entire process should take no more than 30 to 45 minutes.

Do test, refine, and test again.

Once you’ve created detailed, concrete options, start getting feedback by testing the solutions with users who could be impacted by the changes. Keep in mind that revisions are likely, and establishing a consumer feedback loop will be beneficial to the end product.

Creative solutions don’t usually arrive in a single blinding flash of insight, but rather in a series of small steps. One idea spurs a new, related thought, which sparks another idea, and so on. Remember, great ideas can come from anywhere. Fast-paced, diverse and iterative design thinking sessions can help you maximize the likelihood that your organization continues to evolve at the speed of today’s changing marketplace.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Farmers Insurance

By Shayla Callis, Design and Innovation Leader at Farmers Insurance

Sourced from Inc.

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Tips to help small business owners choose a marketing method

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By JOYCE M. ROSENBERG

NEW YORK (AP) — The growth of the internet and social media has changed the way small businesses market themselves — the variety of online marketing channels allows businesses, whether they serve consumers or other companies, to focus on a broad or narrow population.

But many owners find that low-tech marketing methods can work for them. For example, a new retailer or restaurant might send discount coupons through the mail to homes in their area. Some owners who consult or provide services like accounting may find that networking and word-of-mouth are their best bets for finding clients. Often, it can take trial and error to find the right approach.

Before owners pick a marketing channel or channels, they need to answer some key questions for themselves, says Ramon Ray, a small business consultant who often speaks publicly about marketing. Who is your target market? Are you clear about how your service or product will help them?

Here are some tips from small business owners about selecting a marketing method:

— Owners should consider which marketing method is the best way to get information to prospective customers to help build a relationship, Ray says. For example, an accountant could offer in social media posts to send tax tips in return for a potential customer’s email.

“I’m not trying to sell to the customer first,” Ray says. “I want to get their attention.”

— Social media can be ideal for start-ups. Carolyn Bothwell, whose marketing consulting business is just about a year old, social media has been low-cost and effective. “Over 80 percent of my inquiries come in directly from Instagram,” she says. Many of her clients are also young companies and social media channels including LinkedIn and Facebook have worked for them.

— Different social media channels will yield different results. Germain Chastel, CEO of technology consultant NewtonX, says Twitter helps the company be more visible — it shows up at the top of Google searches. LinkedIn is the social media channel most of the company’s clients use, so it’s a natural to try to reach them there.

“You just need to be on the channels that can lend real value,” Chastel says.

— Face-to-face contacts can be just as valuable as online marketing. Robyn Lanci, owner of Owl PR, a marketing firm, has “found the best methods for marketing my business are networking groups and pure, organic conversation.”

By JOYCE M. ROSENBERG

Follow Joyce Rosenberg at www.twitter.com/JoyceMRosenberg . Her work can be found here: https://apnews.com

Sourced from AP News

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4 Social Media Marketing Bad Habits (and How to Break Them)

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Social media is the one thing that almost everyone has access to, yet few fully understand, and this is especially true when it comes to business.

Many people – even some with years of marketing experience – believe that posting pretty pictures on Instagram is “doing social media,” when posting images is really only the tip of the iceberg. The activity that lies beneath the surface is much more complex, and important for successful social media marketing.

There are a heap of posts out there which outline tips on things you should start doing in order to maximize your social media marketing success, but in this piece, I want to look at some things that you should stop doing, immediately, to get your process on the right track.

Here are four social media marketing bad habits, and how to break them in 2019.

1. Focusing Only on Vanity Metrics

Guess what? Followers and on-platform engagement alone will not help grow your business.

This is a fact – thousands upon thousands of studies and articles can prove it. Sure, there’s a correlation between the amount of time consumers spend with a brand online and their likelihood of going on to make a purchase from said brand, while there’s also something to be said for positive consumer sentiment. But brands and marketers who are content to simply track the number of followers they gain on Instagram, and/or the amount of likes they get on a Facebook video, are making a huge mistake.

You absolutely have to base your social media marketing success off of more than just vanity metrics.

While community growth and engagement are pieces of the puzzle, you would be much better served by including metrics such as impressions, website visits, time on site, conversions, and bounce rate. By layering in these true digital marketing metrics, you can start to see how social media activity helps you meet your business goals.

Now, it is important to note that sometimes the main objective of your social media marketing efforts truly might be brand awareness – which is fine. In this case, you’re going to want to push for as many Impressions and targeted brand engagements as possible.

The big thing to avoid here is judging your social media marketing activities by follower growth or engagements alone.

2. Lack of Storytelling

One of the most underused strengths of social media marketing is storytelling.

Let me clarify by saying that storytelling in marketing isn’t this majestic fable that your brand is stringing together. Storytelling is how your brand provides snackable, contextually full snippets about why your brand exists, and how you do what you do. These stories should be concise and easy to understand for uber-distracted social media users.

Sometimes brands try to string out storytelling across a few different blog posts or content pieces, without realizing that distracted social media users are more likely to get confused by the lack of ongoing context than to follow a single story from start to finish. To avoid any confusion, I typically recommend a series of independent stories which can stand alone and be easily digested.

After all, how realistic is it that users will remember post #1 of a five-post series about your product or service?

It’s a fragmented experience – imagine scrolling through your own social media feed and seeing a content piece that’s in the middle of an ongoing story, one which you’ve missed the beginning of (and will likely miss the end). Pretty confusing right?

Consider creating smaller stories that build your brand up, individually, and over time. This way, if users get interested by one content piece, they can dive deeper into those stories across your social accounts and/or blog.

3. Your Analytics are Weak

There are so many data points being spun off by social media activity that it’s unacceptable not to have your analytics organized in a way to capitalize on such insights.

Too many brands simply post daily and hope for the best, as opposed to reviewing detailed reports to learn about what worked, what didn’t, and what opportunities might be on the horizon. To avoid having weak, or useless, analytics, you’re going to want to organize your data so that it helps you derive context from the numbers.

For example, are your impressions lower than the previous month, but your overall engagements are up? This suggests that your content was favored less by social platform algorithms, but people really liked it.

Did your website visits from Facebook spike, but no conversions came through? This suggests that the experience on your landing page might not be optimal or there was an inconsistent experience along the way.

By improving the data collected, you can optimize your social media marketing efforts to ensure that you aren’t wasting time, money, or resources.

Here are the data points I recommend you analyze:

  • Social community
  • Social media impressions
  • Social media engagements
  • Social media website visits
  • Time on site from social media
  • Pages per visit from social media
  • Bounce rate from social media
  • Conversions from social media

You can use a tool like Sprout Social to easily collect social media analytics. I also highly recommend using Google Analytics to review how traffic from social media sites is behaving on your website. This will enable you to standardize activity, and find trends across marketing channels.

4. Social Media is Siloed

A big mistake that a lot of brands make is thinking that social media marketing alone should be responsible for business success.

All too often I’m asked to launch a social media strategy without a high-quality website, an email marketing strategy, or even a solid search engine marketing approach. When social media marketing is the only player out on the field, your team will lose.

When you think about user behavior and your own activity when making a purchase online, it becomes apparent that consumers interact with multiple stimuli before making a final buying decision. By only relying on social media marketing to make sales, you’re leaning on a channel that really focuses on upper funnel awareness activity to carry a consumer all the way through to final buying decision. Don’t get me wrong, it can happen, however it’s not likely to happen as frequently as you might hope.

Another point here is that many brands fail to use social media marketing to support an overarching initiative. For example, if your company has a really awesome piece of downloadable content, you should create blog posts which support it (be sure they are optimized for search engine visibility), deploy email marketing campaigns to generate traffic to the content, publish paid and/or organic social media content supporting the effort, and retarget all traffic that’s visited the content landing page but didn’t convert.

An integrated approach like this will go much further for your brand than placing social media marketing in a silo and hoping for the best.

5. Neglecting Advertising

I am a huge fan of social media advertising. Comparatively, you’d be hard pressed to find a more cost-effective method for targeting consumers online.

With interest data, behavioral data, CRM data, and lookalike modeling, social media advertising can target almost any group of consumers in one way or another. But unfortunately, many brands have been slow to embrace social media advertising. I personally believe there are two main reasons why:

  1. The altruistic intention of social media marketing to bring brands and consumers eye-to-eye digitally doesn’t exist anymore. It’s just unrealistic. There are so many distractions and competitors online that it’s not rational to think that a brand can cut through all the noise via organic engagement alone. Almost all social platforms limit the reach of content in some way, so brands are already starting at a loss.
  2. Most brands don’t understand how attribution impacts the ROI of social media advertising. As noted earlier,  social media marketing tends to be very effective when it comes to building awareness. Social media can help stimulate direct sales, but most consumers bounce around between devices and marketing channels when shopping, so tracking breaks and social media activity doesn’t get the trackable credit it deserves for generating sales. There are ways to fix this, however, when brands are ignorant to the situation, they simply look at conversions and get disappointed that social media hasn’t generated more.

The big missed opportunity here is omitting social media advertising from your social media marketing strategy. No matter your business goals, there’s a social media platform and an ad unit that can help you achieve them.

Once you quit these four bad habits, you’ll undoubtedly begin to see improvements in your metrics, and be well on your way to achieving greater social media marketing success.

By 

Follow Nathan Mendenhall on Twitter

Sourced from Social Media Today

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Steve Jobs Said 1 Powerful Habit Separates Successful People From Everyone Else (and Will Drastically Change Your Life)

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By Marcel Schwantes

It’s as applicable today as it was when Jobs said it nearly 25 years ago.

In a 1995 interview with Computerworld Information Technology Awards Foundation, as part of an oral history project, interviewer Daniel Morrow asked Steve Jobs this question: What are the factors for success for young people today? If you’re playing the role of elder statesman, what pitfalls should they avoid?

Jobs’s response?

I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.

Pure perseverance

Ever met someone with such steady and unwavering commitment in pursuing a cause or course of action, you found that person’s tenacity utterly inspiring? Perhaps that’s you. If so, you and Steve Jobs have something in common.

In spite of difficulties, obstacles, or discouragement from battling cancer, Jobs understood that perseverance comes in a package deal with purpose and a calling; it’s what keeps people going to the end. For Jobs early on, it consumed most of his day. He stated:

If you’ve got a family and you’re in the early days of a company, I can’t imagine how one could do it. I’m sure it’s been done, but it’s rough. It’s pretty much an 18-hour-day job, seven days a week for a while. Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you’re not going to survive. You’re going to give it up.

While we’ve learned to value more our personal and family priorities and our health and well-being since 1995, carving out your path to success still demands hard work and long hours.

But, as Jobs alluded, you can’t do it without passion. It is the engine that puts perseverance into overdrive to think up big ideas, solve big problems, and make the world a better place. Yes, passion is half the battle.

Perseverance is not a lone ranger

Jobs also knew he had to learn to leverage the power of perseverance in others to pursue the lofty, earlier Apple mission under his reign, which stated: “To make a contribution to the world by making tools for the mind that advance humankind.”

I’ve read something that Bill Gates said about six months ago. He said, “I worked really, really hard in my 20s.” And I know what he means because I worked really, really hard in my 20s too. Literally, you know, 7 days a week, a lot of hours every day. And it actually is a wonderful thing to do, because you can get a lot done. But you can’t do it forever, and you don’t want to do it forever, and you have to come up with ways of figuring out what the most important things are and working with other people even more.

During his last years on earth, Jobs understood his place in the information age when he famously quipped:

It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.

It’s a great lesson still applicable for leaders today, whether you’re in a tech firm, a bank, or a hospital. That is, to intentionally get out of the way, to let your knowledge workers persevere and take care of their business in a non-micromanaged setting.

The fruits of a team persevering together to the end are as sweet as a peach in the middle of summer. When Jobs presented the Macintosh at the Apple shareholders’ meeting in 1984, he recalls everyone in the auditorium giving it a five-minute ovation. He later shared in an interview with Playboy magazine:

What was incredible to me was that I could see the Mac team in the first few rows. It was as though none of us could believe we’d actually finished it. Everyone started crying.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Marcel Schwantes

Principal and founder, Leadership From the Core@MarcelSchwantes

Sourced from Inc.

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Is Brand Activism Good for Everyone?

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By Su Duff

Already this year we’ve witnessed love and dislike around social responsibility advertising from Gillette, a new all inclusive venture into happiness with Coke, and a very timely move launching Guinness Clear.   Kotler and Sarkar have recently published a book welcoming Brand Activism and Philip Kotler proposes that “Brand Activism is the leader’s way forward – for your customers, you employees, society, and the planet itself“.

So, Yo Propagandhi !   if you didn’t make it along to #AAIToolkit this week you’ll have missed Trista Vincent and Paudge Donaghy from Hammer & Tongs taking a look at the current trend and broader implications of brands becoming involved in corporate activism. You can find them on Twitter and LinkedIn to find out if they might share the key take out points around keeping a brand safe while an activist.  Or, if you’re an AAI Member company you can download the slides and speaker notes from the members centre on our website. (Email me if you can’t remember your login.)

Trista and Paudge also have created a large list of video content for you to review.  This provides an excellent library of examples of do and don’t reference points as follows:

Verizon 2014
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yND9hDpPwYA

Dodge Ram 2015
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jo5LsKZRwYY

Dove Choose Beautiful 2015
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DdM-4siaQw

Pepsi Kendal Jenner 2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dA5Yq1DLSmQ

Johnny Walker 2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlrtPtxIB5k

MoMondo The DNA Journey 2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyaEQEmt5ls

Heineken Open Your World 2017
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKggA9k8DKw&t=4s

Lush SpyCopys 2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E19S8FVbA4E

AeroMexico DNA Discounts 2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sCeMTB5P6U&app=desktop

Dublin Bus Proud Dads 2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5Ca5QG42dg

Lloyds Bank #GetTheInsideOut 2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAHt59KGVes

A Coke is a Coke 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Hcrz4Jq9WE

Gillette The Best a Man can Get 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koPmuEyP3a0

HSBC Brexit 2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ3uwPHUV9w

See also:
Patagonia, Starbucks, Stella Artois, Chick-fil-A, Expedia, Oreo, AirBnB, Yoplait, Ben & Jerry’s

And finally, a summary of #AAIToolkit views from the Hammer and Tongs poll can be found here  

By Su Duff

Sourced from The Association of Advertisers in Ireland

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6 tactics for PPC marketers to save time, reduce stress and improve performance

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Here’s a checklist to make sure you’re as organized as possible to start this year off on the right foot.

As PPC marketers, everything we do revolves around structure and organization. Sure, there’s a huge amount of unstructured work as the result of performance trends and our analyses but, at the heart of our accounts, structure undeniably plays a huge role.

However, over time, that structure – both in terms of account structure and the structure of optimizations – can become cluttered with account growth over time and with changes in strategy. Plus, with paid search efforts being nearly real-time, when a marketer becomes busy (read: holiday season), it’s not difficult to start to begin to start living in the paid-search-moment as opposed to a more structured routine – but that’s not for the best.

As we kick off 2019, it’s a great time to revisit processes, workflows and structure to identify ways to become more organized, which allows for greater efficiency, less stress, and better performance. Organization is a win – win – win situation.

There are a ton of ways to approach this as organization flows through the veins of what we do so let’s talk through the various ways that we can apply these improvements to our work. Check through this list and make sure you’re as organized as possible to start this year off on the right foot.

Increasing time efficiency through organization

I’ve never met a PPC pro that wasn’t seeking out ways to increase time efficiency. There’s always plenty of work to do and the goal is to accomplish as much of it as possible while still leaving some time on the table for those inevitable things that sneak up on us.

Let’s be real; it’s not uncommon that unexpected tasks and projects pop up – either from a client’s last-minute decision to run a promo and their need for ads, due to performance shifts, or the need to quickly launch something new. The hope is always that we’ll be in the loop well in advance, but the reality is that we aren’t always. Becoming more efficient means that these situations are less stressful as they arise because it becomes easier to accommodate them without interfering with routine optimizations.

There are a few different ways to go about increasing efficiency and the most successful people will tackle them all.

  1. Determine what you need to do manually versus what you can automate. Our world is becoming increasingly automate-able and while that may seem scary to some, it’s an opportunity. The things that can be automated are the decisions that are purely based upon logic. There are still so many other things, though, that require strategy and creativity. Preserve your time for the latter by automating the things that you can.
  2. Create repeatable processes. Instead of re-inventing the wheel over and over, look for ways to find efficiencies in the tasks that you do over and over – especially if they can’t be automated. I’m a big fan of creating tools in Excel to make routine reviews and optimizations quicker and easier. Creating dashboards for repeatable analyses can be a big help, too. The more familiar and distilled that a process becomes, the quicker it is.
  3. Revisit the 80/20 rule. There’s a pretty good chance that the majority of your impact is achieved by a small portion of the tasks that you’re executing. Taking the time to monitor the impacts of your efforts and systematically clearing your schedule of the activities that don’t make an impact is a great way to shed some dead weight from your schedule.
  4. Review your week in advance. Either at the beginning of the week or the end of the week for the following week, outline your big priorities, look at your meeting schedule and deliverables and get a feel for how to best allocate your time to make it all happen without putting yourself in a bind.
  5. Figure out how you operate best and prioritize accordingly. I like to tackle a few quick and easy tasks just to cross things off the list to start my day, while there are others that prefer to start with the biggest project on their list to get it out of the way. I focus best on bigger projects later in the day. That’s just me, but everybody has their preferred rhythm. Figure out what yours is and learn how to organize your tasks so that you can be most effective without spinning your wheels.
  6. If possible, find ways to delegate. This isn’t possible for everyone but if you work on a team with a tiered structure, finding ways to delegate tasks is a great way to free up time while also getting other eyes on the account. Win-win!
  7. Know when to say yes and when (and how) to say no. This may be the most difficult of tactic in this list. Saying no is always tough, but it’s critical. As mentioned above, you will find which tasks are impactful and which aren’t. Selectively saying no to those that aren’t impactful is key to keeping your time available for impactful tasks.

Be more deliberate with your time

Now that you’ve taken steps to be more efficient with your time, it frees up your availability, but the key is not to accidentally squander it. It’s so easy to nickel and dime your own time. Here are a few ways that you can take control of your time to ensure that you’re reaping the benefits of your heightened organization and to increase your overall effectiveness as a marketer.

    1. Dedicate time for projects and tasks. If you have high priority tasks or projects that require more focus or time than others, block the time on your calendar. It’s okay to be protective of your time; in fact, it is wise. At the end of the day, you’re accountable for achieving the tasks that you’ve committed to and that becomes much easier if you take a proactive approach to dedicate time.
    2. Dedicate time for learning. In this everchanging digital world, things are evolving all the time. It’s easy to fall behind if you keep your head down. Blocking out time on your calendar to dedicate toward reading blogs, watching webinar recordings, or even participating in forums and chats can be valuable. This is one of the easiest things to start to shirk when time is limited, but it’s incredibly important to be diligent and you’ll be better for it.
    3. (Occasionally) shut down your inbox. Sure, it’s not realistic to keep your inbox shut down for long periods at a time but if you find yourself easily distracted by email notifications, it can be helpful to shut down your email for 30-60 minutes while you work through projects requiring a lot of concentration. I can almost promise no one will notice if you don’t return an email within 60 minutes.
    4. Schedule your meetings in a way that improves your productivity. Different people have different preferences for their meeting schedule. Some like them back-to-back and some don’t. For example, I hate having only a 30-minute free window on my calendar because it’s hard for me to get into focus within 30 minutes before then coming back up for another meeting. The only thing worse than having a 30-minute window is having a day that is littered with 30-minute meetings and only 30 minutes between each. For that reason, I much prefer to schedule my meetings back to back so that I have 2-3 hours of meetings and then a big block of time to focus. That way, no matter what projects or tasks that I’m working through, I know that I have a block of time that will accommodate it. Different strokes for different folks; if you hate having meetings back to back because you like to structure meeting prep differently, that’s what works for you. Proactively schedule meetings in a way that will help you to be as effective as possible.
    5. Hold more productive meetings. Ineffective meetings lead to follow-up meetings. Don’t be that person. Make an agenda for your meetings in advance; determine exactly what you need to convey and what you need to get from the meeting. Even if you aren’t the one hosting the meeting, knowing what you need to gain from it ensures that you have your directives at the end. Taking notes and confirming takeaways is also a good practice to ensure that everyone can divide and conquer.

Put it in writing to de-stress and stay on track

Mental taxation is a real thing, the more things that you force yourself to retain purely on memory, the quicker that you’ll burn through your sanity. It’s science (it’s not really science).

Sometimes just the act of writing everything down that you’ve been mentally tracking can be a huge stress relief, for a few reasons: typically, the list looks much shorter on paper than it seems and because it relieves you of having to try to remember it all. A to-do list is a great first step for stress-relief and organization, but I would suggest taking it even a few steps further for optimal organization and time management.

  • Set up goals and benchmarks. It’s much easier to improve performance if you know what you’re working toward and how you’re tracking to that goal. Setting up goals and benchmarks helps to hold you accountable.
  • Set up a master performance overview document. This could manifest in many different ways. I have one document that I use to track all of my clients’ performance. I rate each client with green, yellow and red highlighter based upon where they are against their goals and/or where they stand in the midst of current ongoing initiatives (launches, strategy changes, reporting, new landing pages, etc.) and whether there are any obstacles. I update the sheet a few times throughout the week and it serves as my one-stop-shop for client health at a glance. You can be as high-level or granular as you like, but the point is to have one point of reference for the status of all of the initiatives that you are working on.
  • Build a calendar out for all of your routine activities and upcoming projects. With PPC, everything has to be a bit flexible. This calendar serves to ensure that all of the optimizations are accounted for and spaced out across the month to ensure that you aren’t making too many changes at once without being able to monitor the impact of those changes. It also allows you to map out any big launches or initiatives alongside both your optimization calendar and your broader calendar of activities. Now, am I suggesting that the calendar should be written in stone? No, of course not. With PPC, optimizations are flexible based upon what the account needs at any given time based upon results, but there are routine tasks that should be executed routinely so those can be scheduled and everything else can be tentatively planned with the option to shift as needed.
  • Leverage a project management system. There are a ton of pros of implementing a project management system. One of the many is that it allows you to combine your calendar with your to-do list, so instead of having just one list of items to check off, you can easily prioritize what needs to be done today versus later in the week. You can add upcoming deadlines as they arise. You can take the calendar you created and apply it across your paid search project(s). Possibly even better, you can maintain all of your notes in one place. If you’re working off of a recurring task, you can carry over your notes from each prior completion. It also makes it easy to bring in additional team members, since they now have access to all of the historical information. There are quite a few free project management systems – so whether you’re implementing it for a team or just yourself, price doesn’t have to be an issue.

Revisit account and campaign structure

Okay, I realize that this topic is a big ask. Don’t take the fact that I’ve nestled it into a larger post as a casual recommendation. This is one of the tips that will take a little bit longer to work through because there’s quite a bit to unpack here. There are a lot of different ways that you could review your campaign and account structure. I start here:

    1. Review ad group structure to ensure that all ad groups are still structured into small, tightly themed groups. As an account grows over time, it’s easy for ad groups to become a bit hairy and where they may have once been tightly themed they could now be more loosely defined. Tightening these up can have a big impact on ad relevance.
    2. Review query mapping to ensure that queries are mapping to the appropriate search terms and add negatives as needed to channel queries to the most appropriate keywords as needed. More on the importance of query mapping and how to review it, here.
    3. Review targeting layers, cross-campaign efforts and multi-channel funnels to ensure that the full eco-system plays well together and to ensure that all roads point to conversion.
    4. Review performance outliers to determine if any restructures are so that could benefit performance. For instance, sometimes restructuring to separate geography has its merits if the geography is performing much better than others and warrants more budget, or if it’s generating conversions but could be more efficient given other constraints around settings or targeting. That’s just one example of many where restructuring can be warranted based upon performance.

Organize your testing plans

This ties nicely to the last point. Putting things in writing is a huge help in organizing tasks but, I suggest taking it one step further. When it comes to testing, the brainstorming can take as much time as setting up the tests themselves. Save yourself time in the long run by taking the guesswork out of what you’re planning to test next. Develop testing calendars that will guide your subsequent tests. I like to build out plans that are a bit like what you might think of like a tournament bracket, except backward. Each test has an if/then scenario so the winning variant becomes the control and, the test will spinoff of that variant with an additional, new variation. This applies to any form of tests that you plan to perform, including but not limited to ads, landing pages, and campaign experiments.

Organize your nomenclature

For the love of paid search, get organized with your nomenclature if you haven’t already. This means campaign names, ad group names, audience names and so on. Heck, even having a naming convention for your image ad (and social ad) creative can be useful. There are a variety of reasons why nomenclature is valuable; just to name a few:

  • Ease of filtering for reporting and application of edits, rules, scripts and so on.
  • Ease of comprehension – whether it be transitioning an account to another person at your agency, vacation coverage by another PPCer, or even a client’s understanding of performance; nomenclature inconsistencies can create a lot of unnecessary confusion.
  • For better or for worse, sloppy names seem… well, sloppy. That’s not a good look.

Furthermore, it’s incredibly important to organize your tagging if you’re running on any platforms without auto-tagging (or if you aren’t employing auto-tagging on your campaigns). Reporting is a real nightmare without consistent tracking, so make that clean up a priority.

This is so easy that you can often map it out in an hour or less. Block some time on your calendar and get it done.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

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Sourced from Marketing Land

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Venture-Capital Money Is Flowing Like It’s 1999

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By Jon Swartz

Venture capitalists poured a record $138 billion into U.S. startups last year, the most since 2000.

“AI, big data, cloud, autonomous vehicles, health care, blockchain, security–the list is as long as I’ve ever seen of investible themes, and we see a high degree of activity in anticipation of the IPO unicorn class of 2019,” Jeff Grabow, U.S. Venture Capital Leader of Ernst & Young, tells Barron’s in a phone interview.

Information technology raised nearly 20% of all capital in the fourth quarter, behind categories for consumer goods (nearly 30%) and business-financial services (almost 25%), according to Crunchbase.

That’s the good news.

And yet, the huge cash infusion–$47.1 billion in the fourth quarter, a 43% hike from the previous quarter–shares some echoes with the VC climate in 2000, shortly before the infamous dot-com crash. Investors, Grabow and others say, are jittery and making their bets on a strong IPO class that could include Uber, Lyft, Slack, and others before a possible recession or more bad economic news from China.

“We’re in a cash bubble, with money looking to be placed to find yield,” Grabow says, noting that corporations and private-equity investors accounted for 40% of the dollars raised in the fourth quarter. “This hot market pace won’t sustain. It is healthy to pull back on investments.”

Feature Image Credit: Photograph by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

By Jon Swartz

Sourced from Barron’s

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4 Reasons Why Marketing Should Never Be the First Expense You Cut

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By Craig Bloem

Reducing marketing spending will, in most cases, only make a bad financial situation worse.

Early on in their startup’s life, many entrepreneurs find their expenses outpace their revenues. That’s especially true when you’re bootstrapping your startup.

That’s why for many entrepreneurs, growth is the only path to early stage success (although there can be great reasons your startup should not try to grow, at least for a period of time).

Yet sometimes growth — especially rapid growth — isn’t possible. When costs exceed revenue, sometimes your only option is to cut expenses: Inventory. Supplies. Product development. Fixed costs. Variable costs. Marketing.

Whoa. Not so fast.

Unlike many other costs, marketing expenses are relatively easy to cut. You can pause a Facebook ad campaign. You can shutter email or social media marketing campaigns. You can put traditional marketing campaigns on hold.

Sounds great but in the process, you may only increase your startup’s burn rate. It sounds simple, and it is: without sales, you don’t have revenue and without revenue — especially if you’re funding your business with that revenue — you soon won’t have a business.

Keep in mind there’s a difference between efficient marketing and simply throwing money at acquiring customers. While a high customer acquisition cost (CAC) can make sense if new customers generate consistent, long-term revenue, most startups can’t afford a high CAC.

We made that mistake with our business card product. Since customers loved our logo product, we decided to scale rapidly — and in the process paid too much for each new customer. Because we relentlessly tracked key metrics, we recognized the problem and quickly reined in our marketing expenses. Had we not, the company might have failed.

But that didn’t mean we eliminated our marketing expenses. After all, smart marketing is the lifeblood of any business.

So when you miss sales targets, or when you need to cut costs, make sure your marketing costs are not the first expense you cut.

Why?

You can almost never save your way to profitability.

Unless your startup’s spending is totally out of control, it’s almost impossible to save your way to profitability. When fixed costs are high, when cash flow is poor, when labour makes up a major portion of your costs, the only way to become profitable is to increase sales.

And what is the best way to increase sales?

Marketing is the ultimate Catch-22 for a small business.

A startup is like the cliché about a tree falling in the forest: if no one hears about your products and services, your top line won’t make a sound.

It’s almost impossible to raise awareness, generate leads, land customers and build a brand without spending money on marketing. Sure, word of mouth helps, as do referrals. But early adopters — much less raving fans — must come from somewhere.

And that “somewhere” is marketing.

Effective marketing requires time and repetition.

While the “rule of 7” (in short, the idea in which potential customers need to be exposed to an ad seven times before they will act) might be outdated, frequency and repetition are still important. Many potential customers will not act the first time they see an ad, a promotion, or a piece of content marketing. Many will not act the second or third time.

Value propositions take time to establish themselves. Brand awareness takes time. While direct-response marketing can often produce short-term results, most forms of marketing require longer-term investments in money and time to pay off.

That’s why cutting your marketing expense might be the worst thing you can do — especially if all the groundwork you have laid is about to pay off.

The contrarian approach is often the best approach.

A number of studies show that companies who increase spending during a recession enjoy greater gains in market share than those who cut their advertising investment.  In fact, when markets expand, market share is much harder to come by. If your industry as a whole is experiencing a downturn, that may mean the right approach is to increase your marketing spending.

But what if your industry is doing fine and your startup is not?

Take a hard look at your products and services. Make sure your business truly fills a need or solves a problem. Make sure your business provides excellent service. Make sure your operations are as streamlined and efficient as possible. In short, make sure your business is taking care of business.

If it is, don’t let marketing be the first thing you cut.

If you provide great products or services, helping people understand the benefits you provide — and the difference you can make in their lives — could be the one thing you can’t afford not to do.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Craig Bloem

Founder and CEO, FreeLogoServices.com@craigbloem

Sourced from Inc.

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3 Ways to Dominate Instagram in 2019

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By Ryan White

These three value-driven strategies will improve your social media game and help you build a loyal following on Instagram.

Social media has taken this generation by storm. Nowadays, your online following is like your resume. Many millennials see your following and engagement numbers as equivalent to your overall credibility.

Even the big guys – Apple, Starbucks, Taco Bell and many more – have turned to social media as a way of business. They realize it is the future and the best way to reach young people today. Facebook ads, for example, made over $40 billion in total sales in 2017.

I truly believe that this new wave is only going to get bigger – and the people who build the largest brands over the next five years will not only make the most money but will create the most impact in the world.

We live in a time where anyone with an internet connection can earn a living. We are seeing the rise of digital entrepreneurs as we speak. That said, things have definitely changed when it comes to monetizing through social media.

The social media space is a nonstop evolution process. It’s no longer just about being active online or posting an ad for your business – it’s all about the brand. People only buy online from brands they trust and have an actual connection with. Too many people try selling before establishing a relationship with their followers, which doesn’t work like it used to.

I want to show you how to build a cultlike following of excited and engaged people from around the world so you can turn that into an income stream for yourself. We are going to focus on Instagram, as it’s the fastest-growing social media platform, with over 1 billion active monthly users and counting. Instagram allows you to simultaneously grow a brand on Facebook as well – another big perk.

To do this, as an example, I want to share with you three strategies that my friend and Instagram expert Alex Lombard and I are currently implementing to crush it in 2019 with our brands. These strategies work for both a business owner and an individual looking to create a presence on Instagram.

1. Build your personal brand.

The first strategy is to focus on building up your personal brand on Instagram. It doesn’t matter who you are, what you’ve done or what kind of business you own – the world wants to know you. Your buyers will arise and become more active when they see your face and hear your voice. It gives your potential customers the ability to build a real connection with you.

2019 is all about the rise of the personal brand. People are taking over industries by simply documenting their life through their Instagram feed. Things like starting a podcast, doing live videos and posting quality, value-driven content seem to be the winners moving forward on Instagram.

One powerful way to accomplish this is through what’s known as influencer marketing. This simple yet effective strategy made over $1 billion in revenue in 2017 and has helped millions of brands explode on Instagram.

The idea is that you reach out to major accounts within your niche market and ask them what it would cost for them to post your photo or video on their account, exposing their followers to you. You may even be able to collaborate for free in return for you promoting their brand on your account. It’s a common win-win tactic that, when used correctly, can take your brand to another level.

The key is to become known in your industry, to become the go-to expert in your specific field, and one of the best ways to do that is by building up your personal image online, particularly with Instagram.

2. Build an engaged following of people who love everything you do.

Having a lot of followers on the front end looks really good and is the starting point to establish yourself as a figure of authority. However, without a back-end following of truly engaged people, you won’t see true engagement or ever really sell anything. The goal is not only to establish credibility but also to build a culture with your followers so they listen and take action on everything you say.

There are many ways of doing this, but by far the most effective is the story feature on Instagram.

The first strategy of Instagram stories is to provide as much value as possible. Everyone on Instagram is trying to sell you something, but few provide any real value. Remember, no one cares what you know until they know that you care!

Find creative ways to do this. For just a few examples, you can give value by simply uploading motivational or inspiring content, sharing tips and tricks you have learned inside your niche or industry, or actually giving something of value away for free to your followers. E-books, courses, cheat sheets and video recommendations are all great and easy value-adds that people love to receive.

The second strategy for building a cultlike following through your story feature is showing your day-to-day life to your followers. This strategy is what allows your followers to really connect with you on a deeper level. An example of this would be you waking up in the morning and taking a video of you talking about how excited you are for the workday and sharing a tip about your morning routine. As dumb as it may sound, it works.

Another example would be you walking across a stage accepting an award for something. Your story is a peek into your actual life, and I recommend showcasing the good, the bad and everything in between. It shows you are human and allows you to not only establish some credibility with your followers but also connect with them. We live in a filtered world, and the brands that are raw and real will take the upper hand in 2019.

3. Create a clear message through quality posts.

Content is king on Instagram – on any social media, for that matter. One of the biggest mistakes that so many people make is that their content doesn’t portray a clear message in an effective way. If I click on your profile, I should know within seconds what type of brand you have, what niche you are in and what I will get by following your account. I recommend a few steps to achieve this:

  • Decide what type of brand you are building. Is it a fitness page? A sports page? A motivational quotes page? The best way to do this is by starting with whatever you are excited and passionate about. You can’t hit a target that isn’t there.
  • Design your content around that overall theme. If your page is all about health and fitness and the majority of your content is about your favorite Netflix show, you won’t make it far. Post content related to the story you are trying to tell people.
  • Follow a posting structure. I recommend making one or two columns on your feed the same style of photo. This provides clarity for your potential followers and structure for yourself as to what you post. An example would be two columns that show your personal life and what you are all about, while the third column is motivational quotes with a white background.
  • Quality content will make or break your account. You don’t need to live the filtered life, but you do need to make sure your content is sharp, high-quality imagery. Blurry images or video, for example, will push people away. Social media is a visual stimulus, so make sure your content sticks out to capture the short attention span of new followers.

At the end of the day, Instagram is all about clear, concise and quality content. Take some time to figure out what your brand is all about, and create a structure to paint that vision to your followers.

These three strategies work, plain and simple. The ones who apply them consistently over this year will be ahead of everyone else come 2020. Go and set yourself up for success in the new digital age!

To connect or mastermind with Alex or myself concerning social media tips and strategies, you can reach us on Instagram at our handles: Alex – @visionwall | Ryan – @ryanwhite

Feature Image Credit: Worawee Meepian / Shutterstock

By Ryan White

Ryan is a 7 figure digital entrepreneur, influencer, investor, press contributor, and speaker. Ryan founded the globally recognized social media marketing company Social Revelation which helps business and personal brands increase their digital footprint and brand awareness online. Ryan’s company manages the social media strategy for several seven to eight figure earners who are top performers within their industry. He has curated a personal online network around 500,000 people from all around the world. Ryan has also been featured on the award winning podcast “Entrepreneurs on Fire” hosted by John Lee Dumas and on the live television show “Good Morning LALA Land” in West Hollywood.

Sourced from business.com

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LinkedIn reveals top skills employers want

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By: Mike Cook

Amid the New Year resolutions to shed kilos and quit drinking, there’s always one person at the party who holds up the champagne glass and pledges to change their career.

Frequent job switching is now commonplace and it’s expected Millennials will change jobs four times before they’re 32. If you’re finding yourself trawling Yudu or other internet job boards for a new career, you’re not alone.

But job hunting no longer means having experience in a specific role. Instead, as Facebook vice president of human resources Janelle Gale says, it’s your skill set that matters most.

“We actually value skills over experience in the grand scheme of things,” she said.

“Apply if you have the relevant skills even if you don’t have the right experience, because we’re looking underneath the surface for what’s really going to matter here and that’s what skills you can bring to the table.”

Transferable skills that relate to a range of industries are preferred and some big companies like Apple and Google no longer require applicants to have a higher education degree.

LinkedIn has scrolled through thousands of job listings to find the skills that will be the most sought after in 2019.

Last year, statistical analysis and data presentation skills were the top of employers’ lists, with tech design and development abilities also ranked highly.

This year, recruiters are looking to employ people with digital prowess, creativity and strong communication, favouring applicants with both hard and soft skills.

What are hard skills?

Hard skills are specific and teachable abilities, such as reading, writing and mathematics. Due to their adherence to logic and observance of specific rules and circumstances, these skills are often taught in courses. These skills are more easily measured and are directly applicable to particular industries.

The most in-demand hard skills:

• cloud computing
• artificial intelligence
• analytical reasoning
• people management
• UX design
• mobile application development
• video production
• sales leadership
• translation
• audio production
• natural language processing
• scientific computing
• game development
• social media marketing
• animation
• business analysis
• journalism
• digital marketing
• industrial design
• competitive strategies
• customer service systems
• software testing
• data science
• computer graphics
• corporate communications

It’s no surprise tech skills reign supreme. In a report issued by LinkedIn economists, four out of the top five emerging jobs in 2018 were digitally based, including tech developers and engineers.

A little further down the list, communication skills also emerge. Journalism, social media marketing, digital marketing and corporate communications all appeared in the top 25 desirable skill sets.

Yet, as proficient as you might be in these areas, the more intangible soft skills will help you land the job.

What are soft skills?

Soft skills aren’t as easily quantifiable as hard skills. Often abstract in nature, these abilities are derived from the right side of the brain. Soft skills are closely linked to personality traits, and harder to measure or assess.

For those who can demonstrate soft skills, the job market is wider. Around 57 per cent of leaders attribute more weight in the job hiring process to a candidate’s proficiency in soft skills, which are considered to be more flexible assets to the workplace.

The most in-demand soft skills:

• creativity
• persuasion
• collaboration
• adaptability
• time management

This year, companies will invest in hiring staff who give them an edge in competitive markets. People who can lead technology changes and create market impact will be highly sought after. And if you have the ability to develop creative solutions, you’re more likely to be a hot commodity on the job market.

Editor of LinkedIn Learning Paul Petrone said the list reflects a shift in what employers prioritise in the workplace.

“Interestingly, the newcomers to our list were uniquely human traits. Among soft skills, creativity and adaptability joined the list for the first time, and among hard skills, people management was a new addition,” he said.

“While digital skills like cloud computing and artificial intelligence topped the list of hard skills companies need most, the emergence of these three new skills suggests that employers recognise the importance of embracing modern technologies as well as recognising those things technology can’t do — connect with other people, engage in out-of-the-box thinking and quickly adapt to new priorities or problems.”

Feature Image Credit: Photo / 123RF

By: Mike Cook

Sourced from nzherald.co.nz

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