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A Marketing Mid-Year Report: Four Trends That Will Shape B2B Engagement In The Second Half Of 2018

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By Mike Neumeier

Summer brings with it several rites of passage: warmer weather, extended daylight — time for businesses to revisit their annual marketing plans. It’s time to look at sales results, review customer feedback and decide which activities are worth continuing — perhaps ramping up — and which you need to retool or even retire.

As CMO and principal of a company that works with marketing and PR trends on a daily basis, I can say that these four business-to-business (B2B) marketing trends, in particular, are worth considering when reviewing your plans. Discuss among the members of your team which of these could demonstrate enhanced capabilities and wow with innovative new ideas.

Give Thought To Thought Leadership

Positioning a company’s experts as “thought leaders” is hardly a new idea. From bylined articles and blog posts to videos and webinars, such “content” helps give your brand a face and shows you have a finger on the pulse of the industry. Customers appreciate it too: 96% of B2B buyers say they would like to see even more expert perspective.

But how much original “thought” actually goes into thought leadership content? Are these trusted leaders truly breaking new ground, or are they simply regurgitating statistics and talking points already understood?

Before simply ordering your marketing team to get more expert thought leadership coverage, it pays to take time to develop a unique and authentic point-of-view. By bringing something new to the conversation, you’re much more likely to deliver that “aha” moment that inspires readers to engage and want to learn more.

Need to amplify your perspective? Consider generating your own data by conducting a survey of topics and issues within your industry — then mine the responses for interesting trends and surprising outcomes. Your experts can analyze and comment on the findings — building credibility by connecting their insights with data that’s unique. Publish a report, an infographic, whitepaper or e-book, and market across all channels. Then parse the report into bite-size message points that are ideal for social media.

Sell Your Brand Experience

Today’s markets are plagued by product parity. Despite marketers’ efforts to find points of differentiation, the majority of goods, services and technologies do pretty much the same things as their counterparts. This sense of commoditized sameness makes it difficult to deliver the exceptional, next-level experience customers crave.

Instead of repeating product-centered campaigns, consider emphasizing the product experience instead. Customers may not always care — or even understand — what nuance makes your solution better. But they certainly relate to how it makes them feel and how it improves their lives. This requires taking a holistic view of one’s customers and finding ways to personalize their journey, to the point where the experience supersedes — or even becomes — the product.

A recent partnership between Ford, Amazon and Starbucks highlights the type of connection customers love and businesses should strive for. As a Ford driver approaches her local Starbucks, the car’s embedded Alexa service will ask if it should order her favorite coffee for pickup. The brand experience is now far more than just a car.

Challenge your B2B marketing team to understand and articulate how the experience can become the product.

Extend Your Influence

As I previously described, many B2B marketers are turning to influencer marketing having observed the success of such brand voice amplification in the business-to-consumer (B2C) world. Individuals with recognized expertise in a specific market, plus a significant following on social media, can be powerful signalers to new customers. Buyers give credence to such influencers when making their own purchasing decisions.

When you think about it, influencer marketing has been a staple of B2B marketing for years. Your company has likely hired a “third-party expert” to give a webinar or host a speaking panel. The labels may be different today, but the principle is familiar — capitalize on a trusted independent voice to capture audience attention and talk meaningfully and substantively about your product.

B2B marketers need to move beyond the perception that influencer marketing is solely a B2C strategy, or that only celebrities with massive followings can be influencers. Spheres of influence exist in every market — from agriculture to artificial intelligence and from supply chain to semiconductors — and audience size should be low on the list of selection criteria.

Consider whose voice will attract the audience most likely to take action rather than whose megaphone is the largest or loudest. TV stars may not be a good fit for a specialized B2B product, but researchers, think-tank leaders, analysts and other microinfluencers with small but dedicated followings make great partners.

Deliver A Personalized And Interactive Experience

Time-pressed prospects are increasingly looking for information that is specific to their interests and concerns and have a growing preference for interactive content. They don’t just want to acquire information — they want to experience it. Marketers who can deliver on both demands are likely to find favor over those delivering more standard fare.

The growth of video as a B2B marketing tool continues to explode. Research shows that four times as many people would prefer to watch a video about a new product than to read about it. Building on this popular format, advanced technologies now allow marketers to customize videos with personal details such as the customer’s name, industry and even the location where they are watching — as is routinely done in email. Beyond the sheer surprise value, personalized videos also allow convenient calls-to-action to be embedded in the video.

This technology makes it possible for the viewer to set an appointment, access additional information or contact a company representative directly from the video screen, eliminating the risk of losing interested customers when they have to take a follow-up step outside the video.

With much of the year still ahead, 2018 is proving to be an active year for B2B marketing, and there’s undoubtedly more to come. By harnessing emerging techniques and focusing on the customer experience, marketers can translate the learnings from the year’s first half into engaging campaigns that build relationships and deliver results to the bottom line.

By Mike Neumeier

CMO and Principal at Arketi Group, building thought leadership for a team specializing in PR/digital marketing for B2B tech companies.

Sourced from Forbes

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4 Brainstorming Techniques to Innovate Your Business

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By Sammi Caramela

Innovation is key to creating a memorable business. Here’s how to achieve it.

Innovation is essential to creating a memorable business. You want to channel your creativity and passions to achieve a company worth representing. However, originality can be tough to nurture – especially as a leader with numerous responsibilities on your plate.

“It’s nearly impossible to force people to come up with new ideas,” said Kyle McMahon, vice president ofLunar. “The key is to find ways to capture great ideas when they organically occur.”

You don’t have to innovate alone. Involve your team and find methods that help you brainstorm in unity for the benefit of your business. Here are four types of brainstorming to innovate your business.

Non-traditional approaches

You don’t always have to take the traditional route. Innovation calls for creativity and risk-taking. Sometimes that means implementing a new way of thinking.

For instance, at Lunar, employees engage in “negative (or reverse) brainstorming,” which begins with something you’d like to improve, or an issue that needs solving. Instead of thinking of solutions to that issue, participants discuss possible ways to cause it, reversing the problem statement and dissecting those ideas.

“This tends to be an easier exercise for participants and can actually lead to some funny, ridiculous characteristics,” he said. “Participants then take note of all the ‘worst’ characteristics given and then write down the opposite of each idea, or the positive side. While reviewing these now-positive characteristics, look for common themes, and evaluate if any of these commonalities provide a real opportunity for solving the initial problem.”

You can also use a provocation technique, said Peter Mulford, executive vice president and chief innovation officer atBTS, which “forcibly dislodges groups of people from their pre-existing ideas and patterns of thinking.”

“It’s trendy to say things like, ‘encourage wild ideas’ or ‘go for quantity over quality’ during brainstorming,” he said. “But in the absence of a provocation technique, when the sticky notes fly, what you typically get [are] … the first ideas that come to their mind. To get to the interesting stuff, you have to dig deeper, and provocation techniques are designed to do just that.”

Intrapreneurship

Intrapreneurship inspires every individual employee to think like an entrepreneur, encouraging risk-taking and giving power to their ideas.

“Intrapreneurship, in itself, breeds innovation, because employees who work with the mindset of an entrepreneur will utilize all resources when problem-solving,” said McMahon. “When leaders encourage intrapreneurship, they are inviting employees to bring out-of-the-box and industry-disruptive ideas to the table.”

Make sure each worker knows that ingenuity is welcomed and even urged. This will not only spark new ideas for your business from varying perspectives, it also makes your employees feel more confident and passionate about their work.

Rabbit holes

McMahon said to present an issue at the beginning of every brainstorming meeting to prompt creative thinking, ideas and solutions. After that, however, don’t worry where the conversation will go.

“Remember, this is a brainstorming session, so instead of keeping the session on topic, encourage your team to go off track and down different ‘rabbit holes’ to address high-level problems or questions,” said McMahon. “Innovation will occur when you capture and capitalize on large-scale themes.”

However, if you feel that you are too far gone, you can kindly steer the conversation back to where you started: with the problem you are trying to fix.

“In their attempts to stimulate more innovative thinking, leaders often confuse ‘divergent thinking’ with ‘unfocused thinking” to their detriment,” said Mulford. “To get better results, an ideation session should begin with a clear framing (and re-framing) of the job to be done or the need to be fulfilled.”

Collaboration

Two (or more) is better than one. Your group should be a team working in unison rather than employees competing. You can set this dynamic by scheduling meetings and outings when there are new hires or special occasions, so everyone can become more familiar.

“Leaders should first ensure their employees have the opportunity to get to know each other,” said McMahon. “When new employees start at Lunar, they have ‘meet and greets’ with every other team member. It helps them feel acclimated with the team quicker, making them more comfortable and likely to collaborate.”

You can also reach out to people within your company, but outside of your team. Asking for input from those who aren’t invested in a project can help shift your perspective to one your workers would never have considered.

“Perhaps the easiest way a leader can stimulate collaboration and idea flow is to set the bare and simple expectation that … the project team should seek input from a minimum of five people that sit outside their group, business unit and even their geography,” said Mulford. “By requiring this sphere of influence, collaboration will come naturally. It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than getting five minutes to share an idea and five minutes to receive input.”

Also, make sure your workers feel comfortable voicing their proposals. Criticism is acceptable, but judgments and harsh comments are unnecessary.

“Leaders can also breed collaboration by establishing an environment that is safe for all ideas,” said McMahon. “If people are ridiculed in brainstorming sessions, they will naturally shut down. Brainstorming is about throwing things out there and letting the collective ‘mind’ wander. Changing the ideation structure can have valuable results.”

Feature Image Credit: Redpixel.Pl/Shutterstock

By Sammi Caramela

Sammi Caramela has always loved words. When she isn’t working as a Business.com and Business News Daily staff writer, she’s writing (and furiously editing) her first novel, reading a YA book with a third cup of coffee, or attending local pop-punk concerts. Sammi loves hearing from readers – so don’t hesitate to reach out!

Sourced from business.com

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Let’s Keep Influencer Marketing Accountable

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One of the top challenges facing influencer marketing is one common across the entire arena of digital marketing: brand safety.

At this year’s Cannes Lions, Unilever’s Chief Marketing Officer Keith Weed warned that influencer marketing has an integrity issue. The proliferation of fake followers, aided and abetted by a lack of transparency and proper measurement reporting, threatens to destabilize the entire industry.

Weed warned that the industry must take “urgent action now to rebuild trust before it’s gone forever,” and he pledged that Unilever’s brands will never buy followers nor work with influencers who buy followers.

Any brand conducting influencer marketing programs should heed the call to ensure greater transparency and integrity.

The relationship between social media and influencer marketing is at a crossroads. To be clear, the challenge is not one of growth: According to a recent study by the Association of National Advertisers, 75% of brands use influencer marketing, and almost half are planning to increase budgets in the next year. However, in order for influencer marketing to continue to thrive, brands will need to improve their campaign strategies.

Brand safety is of paramount importance in the development of influencer marketing tools and in ongoing campaign monitoring and management. Campaigns – and the technologies that support them – should be designed to track telltale signs of suspicious activity such as sudden bursts in followers or suspicious letter replacements in profile names, such as the use of “1” to replace the letter “I.” More sophisticated algorithms can flag dramatic shifts in performance and unanticipated engagement patterns.

In addition to ensuring transparency and integrity, influencer marketing campaigns should focus on authentic engagement. Influencer marketing is inherently social; when implemented well it can be an open (but directed) conversation that is amplified to the masses. This is why it is vital to focus on follower engagement.

While metrics like volume are of course important (e.g., follower count, posts per day/week, etc.), engagement may have the biggest impact on meeting or even exceeding KPIs. One of the highlights of influencer marketing is the opportunity for a brand to leverage an influencer’s unique voice. That unique voice has a big impact on the type of content an influencer can produce for brands — and it is that unique, authentic voice that ultimately drives consumer engagement with the branded content.

For brands, a trusted environment is one of the most effective places to engage consumers. Passionate influencers who authentically weave branded stories into social platforms that consumers trust are the ones who deliver powerful results.

Whether it is a story told through a blog post, video, a picture, or any combination of these, working with influencers can bring brands and products to life with engaging, custom content delivered to the right audience — amplified through the channels that has the potential to make the greatest impact.

But to help ensure that this marriage between influencer marketing and social not only survives, but thrives, it is up to everyone in the industry to work to ensure that engagements remain authentic, honest, transparent, and measurable.

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By Katie Paulsen, Vice President of Influencer Marketing, RhythmOne

Sourced from MediaPost

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Just How Digitally Literate Are Your Salespeople?

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By  Colleen McKenna 

During a recent interview with a potential salesperson, they asked how many cold calls they would be expected to make every day. Several thoughts raced through my head at that moment.

Do you actually understand what we do at Intero?

Do you realize that cold calling is one slice of a much larger sales process?
How many cold calls do I make in a given week, month, year? (The answer is none.)
Why is this the first question asked?

That’s a lot of questions in the milliseconds before I answered, “I have no idea since cold calls wouldn’t be how we would initiate a conversation with another person.”

To create the proper context, this salesperson’s experience of sales was cold calling day after day. In the end, they had no sales experience; they only had experience phoning people they had never met or talked to previously. Big difference. I had to recalibrate my thinking.

They were initiating potential opportunities for others to pick up, further qualify, engage, sign and work alongside. In today’s world that’s not unusual. Developing “pipelines” or sales development reps is smart. Breaking down assignments within the sales process is now pretty common within larger organizations.

However, if you are a small organization with a small sales team and are trying to hire a salesperson, there are questions you should ask that may not seem obvious.

A CEO asked me about this just the other day. He said he recently realized that he needed to ask different questions when interviewing sales professionals. He needed to understand their digital skills and literacy.

So, we tossed around some questions and here’s what we landed.

  • Ask them to explain their sales process.
  • In what part of the sales process have they seen the most success?
  • In what part of the sales process do they get the most jazzed about?
  • What are their digital sales skills? Ask them to share the top five apps, Chrome extensions, and websites that help them with their sales process.
  • What digital tools do they use to gather information, monitor and engage? If they say LinkedIn, that’s NOT a sufficient answer. It’s a no-brainer, duh kind of response. The better question is, “Tell me ten ways you use LinkedIn within your sales process.” If they can’t think of ten ways they use LinkedIn, they aren’t using LinkedIn with any level of proficiency. End of the conversation.
  • How do they build their personal/professional brand?
  • How do they network? Stop Networking and Actually Get to Know People
  • What differentiates them as a sales professional (notice, I did not mention the word salesperson.)
  • How do they incorporate marketing strategies and techniques into their sales process?
  • Are they comfortable leading all aspects of the sales process/cycle?
  • Provide examples where said process has been successfully implemented.
  • How will they remain focused on sales and not fall into an account management role?
  • What are the KPIs they think are critical for measuring their performance (You might not agree, remember you’re gathering their insight at this point. Revenue may not be the answer, either.)
  • What do they know about your industry and company?
  • How would they start a conversation today if they had to?
  • If they are coming from a larger company that had a marketing department creating and providing content, inbound marketing, and a full martech stack, how will they manage in a smaller company like yours that may not have that in place? (I’d be looking for ways they will be incorporate what they learned from their previous company on a smaller scale.)

The person I talked with missed that we work with clients who want to incorporate new methods to initiate and engage with a potential customer or candidate. If we started with circa 1979 cold-calling what would that dialing for dollars approach say about our business model and us? By the way, we begin in LinkedIn; however, we encourage email, phone calls, events, etc. as we start to test and see where someone responds.

It’s critical to align your sales process with your business philosophy, mindset, and model. Hmmm…that may call to mind another question or two for you to ask when you interview sales professionals.

Test these questions out on your next round of candidate interviews and by the way; it’s not too late to ask them of your current sales team. It may point out that you have some re-aligning to do.
Let us know if these questions uncover new insight into your sales team or process.

Feature Image Credit: QuinceMedia / Pixabay

By  Colleen McKenna 

View full profile ›

Sourced from Business 2 Community

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Brand monitoring – What are the benefits and what can I monitor?

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By Tom Bracher

Brand monitoring is the strategic and proactive monitoring and analysis of a brand’s growth, reputation and associated brand content. It’s carried out through the investigation of media and online sources, to unearth, report on and respond to different conversations and awareness around brands or a specific brand and their competitors.

Brand monitoring tools or platforms monitor content from the web, whether that’s news articles, blogs, web pages or social networks. They provide in-depth data analysis on what, how and when there are discussions taking place surrounding a brand, a competitor or a client.

What are the benefits of monitoring my brand or my competitors?

  • Tells you how people are receiving your brand on various forms of media and how it’s being discussed
  • Pinpoints any negative sentiment related to your brand that needs to be addressed
  • Provides a detailed overview of brand perception that supports and impacts any future product or marketing strategies
  • Highlights the consumer reaction to your brand or competitor’s brand upon the release of a new product or campaign
  • Understand the audience discussing both your brand and category to plan marketing and communication strategies

Brand monitoring is also hugely beneficial for market research – as you can put together information and insights that are relevant to specific topics and keywords surrounding your brand. This provides a platform toward new and improved campaign strategies informed by reliable market research. With social listening platforms you are able to monitor your own brands and gather advanced insights based on the performance of your own social channels. Thanks to advance technologies of today – AI and data visualization provide a clearer, deeper understanding of how the content associated with your brand has reached its dedicated audience.

What is there to monitor?

Branded Keywords

Before you delve too deep into the industry you’re operating in, the first step is to monitor your own brand. You should look to track your brand name first – but make sure you also include variations of how your brand may be perceived online – such as acronyms, misspellings and common phrases.

If there’s a word associated with your brand name that can be used in a similar context – these are just as important. It also helps to track phrases that include your brand name – perhaps a short description afterwards, such as ‘Coca-Cola soft drink’

Topics and industry trends

Here you should be monitoring the big picture view of the topic you’re looking to cover. Start searching for key topics associated with your brand.

This provides you with insights surrounding phrases your audience use to talk about key topics in your industry. You can then start to pinpoint certain trends that can benefit your content and marketing campaigns.

To get an even better view of topic and industry trends, you can start to focus on web search data and the analytics behind your website. With brand monitoring platforms you can take the same keywords relevant to specific topics and industry trends and see how often they are searched for using search engines.

Influencers and industry micro-influencers

There are so many influencers taking to social media these days that the world of social is becoming somewhat saturated. However, with the help of micro-influencers – individuals with between 1000 and 10,000 followers on a social media platform – there’s still the opportunity to benefit your individual brand strategies.

The reason micro-influencers are so vital to understanding your audience – as well as a key component of brand monitoring – is that they both exemplify and influence your overall audience as well as the individual segments within that audience.

If you can come up with a group of micro-influencers using brand monitoring tools, you can use them for testing out new content strategies or marketing campaigns.

The best way to find micro-influencers is – you guessed it – brand monitoring. You can delve into conversations surrounding topics relevant to your brand to identify social accounts engaging with these the most who have a significant number of followers. These are your micro-influencers.

Brand monitoring is now becoming an essential asset to the success of a business – not only because it gives you a better understanding of your audience. It also influences much of what your brand represents, as well as how your brand is represented.

With brand monitoring you can significantly improve your understanding of what makes a successful marketing and communication strategy – and stay ahead of the competition as you continuously learn what’s working – and what isn’t – in real time.

By Tom Bracher

Sourced from Digital Doughnut

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Facebook Ad Guidelines Cheat Sheet

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By Marc Schenker 

Facebook ads are one of the most cost-effective ways to get attention on your brand these days. Not only are they affordable, but the potential reach is huge.

Unfortunately, though, not many small businesses are getting the most from their Facebook ads! A survey released by website builder Weebly indicated that 62% of small business owners feel their paid ads on Facebook are missing their target. That’s not a very comforting statistic when you consider how many small businesses currently use and advertise on the platform.

The potential is there, however, for small business owners to harness the power of these ads to reach billions of people across the world – and, more importantly, the specific segments of people who would be most likely to become your next customer. While it can be challenging, at first, to get the hang of things, once you do it’s more than worth it.

This cheat sheet is meant to help you get the most from Facebook ads in an easy-to-understand format. It will cover basic Facebook advertising guidelines including:

  • Facebook ad types
  • Facebook ad costs
  • Facebook ad targeting
  • Facebook ad copy and creative
  • Staying competitive on Facebook
  • Analyzing your Facebook ad results

Types of Facebook Ads

It’s vital to have an understanding of what you’re working with when getting started with Facebook ads. To that end, let’s start with the different ad types available to you.

According to Facebook, there are 11 basic kinds of ads available on the platform. These include:

  • Video – Video ads that feature sound and motion (more on Facebook video ads here)
  • Image – High-quality but simple visual ads (more here)
  • Collection – Ads that showcase products from your store’s catalog
  • Carousel – Display up to 10 videos or images in the same ad, each with its very own link (more on Carousel ads here)
  • Slideshow – Ads that use sound, copy and motion to tell brand stories
  • Canvas – Mobile-optimized and full-screen experiences for your customers, directly from ads (more on Canvas ads here)

  • Lead Generation – Carousel, image or video ads that present your leads with a form, after they engage with your ads (more on Lead Ads here)
  • Offers – Ads offering discounts
  • Post Engagement – Ads meant to boost page posts to obtain more engagement
  • Event Responses – Video or image ads designed to drive awareness and responses for events
  • Page Likes – Ads intended to drive page likes and engagement

Which ad type you choose will, naturally, depend on your business type and what your marketing goals are, so be sure to establish your goals first.

Facebook Ad Costs

Facebook is outrageously popular for businesses, even in the wake of bad press about how it handles your data. Much like the auction for Google ads, there’s a bidding process to determine where your Facebook ad appears and how much you pay per click. You’ll indicate how much you want to hand over for precise actions on any given ad, such as views, conversions, clicks, etc. You can manually adjust it or have Facebook automatically make calculations for you, based on your specifications.

Various factors can affect your Facebook ad costs, including the following:

  • When your ad campaigns run (time, date, during peak hours when competition is fiercest)
  • Your specific audience
  • Your Relevance Score
  • Ad placement
  • Your bidding method (set a bid limit on every unique bid or just set your average bid)

As you can probably guess, ad costs therefore can vary quite a bit.

Still, if we look at the averages, we can see some interesting information.

WordStream analyzed hundreds of client accounts to calculate the average cost per click (CPC) and cost per action (CPA) on Facebook for eighteen different industries. They found that the average across all business types was $1.72 per click and $18.68 per conversion.

These are averages, so yours, based on your unique campaigns, could well be different.

What if you’re outside the US? AdEspresso performed a study where it looked at 2017 data to gauge average ad costs in the U.S. and other areas. Here are the findings, in US dollars:

  • CPC average for all countries – $0.97
  • CPC average targeting those 65 and up – more than (Q1) $0.70
  • CPC average targeting those between 13 and 17 (Q1) = $0.11
  • CPC average of Instagram ad placement (Q4) – $1.15
  • CPC average of Facebook ad placement (Q4) – $0.50
  • CPC monthly average – $0.40
  • CPC average on Sundays – $0.40
  • CPC average on Tuesdays and Thursdays – $0.50
  • CPC average of targeting women (Q4) – $0.64
  • CPC average of targeting men (Q4) – $0.50
  • CPC average of optimizing for link clicks (Q4) – $0.44
  • CPC average of optimizing for impressions (Q4) – $3.79
  • CPL (cost per like) average for page like campaigns – $1.08
  • CPL average targeting those 55 and up (Q4) – $0.33
  • CPL average targeting those between 13 and 17 (Q4) – $0.04
  • CPL average per month – $0.12
  • CPL average per week (Q4) – $0.14
  • CPL average cost for women – $0.16
  • CPL average cost for men – $0.11

Looking at ad costs on the platform helps you get a sense of how much of your budget Facebook marketing will eat up. There are, of course, always ways to adjust your targeting and other strategies to lower your Facebook ad costs.

Facebook Ad Targeting

Now it’s time to delve into ad targeting. Here’s where you identify your audience and ensure that the ad content you serve up to them actually appeals to them.

How well you’re able to identify your audience will have a meaningful impact on how much you spend on ads, your ROI, and their overall effectiveness. It pays to spend extra time to accurately define whom you’re targeting.

Facebook lets you go pretty deeply into the traits that define your audience. The extensive targeting options include (but are by no means limited to):

  • Gender
  • Age
  • Location
  • Language
  • Interests
  • Behaviors
  • Life events (such as “recently married”)
  • Education
  • Job title
  • Income
  • Political affiliation

These demographic qualities help you narrow down who will see your ads.

For example, if you’re trying to market to teens on the west coast who speak different languages and are interested in entertainment products, your ad-targeting breakdown might look something like this:

  • Male/female
  • 13 to 19
  • Washington/Oregon/California
  • English/Spanish
  • Entertainment > Live events > concerts

Naturally, narrowing down your audience to those more likely to be in market for your offerings gives you better results than just showing your ads to anyone.

Facebook Ad Copy & Creative

Facebook advertising is just like any form of advertising: the quality of your ad copy and creative goes a long way toward determining your ROI.

One of the most important skills you can master in advertising is the art of persuasion. Famous psychologist Robert Cialdini’s 1984 book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, laid out six unique principles to help marketers convince and convert with greater success. They are:

  • Reciprocation
  • Social proof
  • Commitment and consistency
  • Scarcity
  • Authority
  • Liking

It’s a good idea to infuse your Facebook ads with some of these timeless persuasion principles. For that, you have to consider how you can grab your audience’s attention and persuade them to click using various elements of your ads, such as:

How can you use the principles of persuasion in your Facebook ads? For example, reciprocation can be as straightforward as telling people they can get a free report or ebook if they complete your lead form, while social proof can be something as simple as the number of reactions, shares and comments your ad racks up over the course of its run. More creative, engaging ads tend to get more likes and shares.

Here are some more tips on writing great Facebook ads.

Outdoing the Competition on Facebook

It’s always fair game to see what your competitors are doing—and try to best them. After all, if you can deliver better content to your customers, then you attract their attention and more.

Your competition’s Facebook ads are a goldmine of inspiration for what you can do better in your ads. Simply analyze what their ads are doing right and where there’s room for improvement. Then, implement that in your own ads, especially if you’re competing for the same audience.

Case in point: Skillshare and Udemy are both online learning platforms where courses and how-to videos are available.

Whereas Udemy has an ad touting lifetime access to one course with a 100% money-back guarantee, Skillshare touts unlimited access to all of its courses, all for the price of just $0.99 for two months.

Checking out your competitors’ ads might give you ideas for new value props, CTA’s, or emotional angles to test in your own Facebook ads.

Learn more strategies for competitive advertising on Facebook here.

Facebook Ad Reporting

After you’ve gone through all this trouble to familiarize yourself with how Facebook ads work and hopefully implemented some campaigns, you can’t just expect them to do all the work for you while you sit back. You have to take an active role in your campaigns even when they’re underway, so that you can ensure that you’re getting a good ROI from your ad spend and efforts.

Start monitoring results as soon as you’ve launched one of your ad campaigns. Don’t wait until the campaign has run its course to determine if it was hitting all the right targets or not.

Just head to your Facebook Ads Manager to look at your ads’ performance in real-time. The beauty of monitoring in real-time is you can also respond in real-time by adjusting underperforming ads. Within the Ads Manager, you can easily edit your ads to tweak them to reach better performance.

For example:

  • If an ad’s engagement level is disappointing, try improving the copy or the visuals used in the ad to make it more stimulating and persuasive
  • If an ad’s reach is lower than you expected, try to expand the audience in your targeting parameters
  • If an ad’s conversions aren’t where you want them to be, try improving your call to action by using a more action-oriented verb, or working to improve your Facebook ad landing pages

A final note on tracking Facebook performance: Instead of putting an emphasis on vanity metrics like engagement and the like, you should be focused on tracking the metrics that really matter: sales and ROI or return on ad spend (ROAS). If your ad campaign gets you a lot of reach, clicks and conversions, but you’re actually losing money per sale when you figure in all your expenses, then the campaign’s no good.

That’s why you need to track ad performance and sales first and foremost during the course of your campaigns.

You Can Make Facebook Ads Work for You

Facebook ads have a proven track record of success for small businesses. The fact that they’re cost-effective makes them business-friendly and is just another reason to use these ads. However, not many business owners are using these ads to their full potential—not even close!If you decide to jump headfirst into Facebook ads, you have to have a solid grasp of how the entire platform works, how much you’ll likely spend, the different ad types, optimization strategies, and the need to monitor your ads closely.

Only then will your business get the most from this great platform.

By Marc Schenker 

Sourced from Business 2 Community

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5 Tips for Brands on How to Use Facebook’s New ‘Brand Collabs Manager’ Tool

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Influencer marketing has emerged as one of the more effective ways for brands to spark engagement, drive brand awareness and reach audiences via digital platforms. And with the option growing in popularity, social media giants like Facebook are now looking to better facilitate such connection, enabling improved, transparent brand campaigns which deliver better advertiser results.

Facebook’s latest initiative to foster influencer marketing is its new Brand Collabs Manager tool, which helps to connect brands with relevant content creators for such purpose.

Through the platform, brands have the option of finding influencers who have similar audiences based on various factors (age, gender, interests). These influencers – who have follower counts ranging from 25,000 to 8 million people – also have access to insights and data, making it easier for brands to assess their actual reach and capacity, helping to find the right match.

So how will this impact the world of influencer marketing? In this post, we’ll take a look at how brands can leverage the new platform to fuel up their influencer marketing strategies, and get the most out of their efforts.

Identify the Right Influencer

Brand Collabs Manager enables businesses to establish improved connection with influencers who align with their brand values, vision, and purpose.

Influencers can set up a portfolio that’s connected to their Facebook Page, and present campaigns where they’ve collaborated with brands and incorporated messages and products into their content.

The top relevant creators will also have a percentage match on their profile thumbnail, depending on your listed requirements, while you can also be able to see their audience reach, and set an audience match to see how it compares to yours. From there, you can choose any influencer or group of influencers.

Identifying the right person to represent your brand is vital – influencers with a massive following aren’t always the right fit for your audience. Always remember that quality trumps quantity when determining the right creators to partner with.

Great Content Wins Over All

The pillar of any effective marketing strategy is exceptional content – and that’s no different for influencer marketing.

Influencers are content creators who have become exceptionally successful with their craft – brands should not only focus on the influencers they’re looking to partner with, but even more so, the content they publish, and how that might work in representing their brand. Effective content is authentic, resonates with the target audience and represents both sides well.

With the influx of brands and influencers, you need to get creative to break through the noise and stand out. Think of compelling ways to reach your audience by leveraging various channels and formats.

Authenticity Is Key

Facebook is constantly working to filter out fake content and accounts, in order to ensure users only see transparent and authentic content. This is because consumers want authenticity from brands more than ever.

If you think of influencer marketing as a quick way to amp up sales, you’ll quickly fail. Every influencer should be a true brand ambassador, not just a paid spokesperson.

Instead of partnering with big-name influencers for temporary projects, invest in establishing genuine, long-term relationships with those who truly align with your brand’s vision. Create an authentic relationship with your creator – they’ll feel that you’re more invested in the partnership, and in return, they may also become more invested and be more loyal to your brand.

This kind of relationship will help both sides create content that genuinely resonates with your target audience and which doesn’t come off super salesy.

Personalized Messaging

Personalized marketing efforts have never been more important, and with Facebook’s access to a wealth of data on individual consumers, brands have the opportunity to ramp up their personalization efforts.

Brand Collabs Manager opens up the door for even better-targeted experiences – by serving more engaging ads and individualized content, the audience you’re reaching through influencers will likely be impressed and intrigued to discover more about your brand.

Track Your Performance

In order to gauge your success with influencer marketing and Brand Collabs Manager, you need to consistently measure your data and analytics in order to evaluate how users are reacting to your campaigns.

By using Facebook to track your performance, you’ll be able to better understand the type of content that works, which doesn’t, and what CTAs drive conversion. This will, in turn, help you focus on driving measurable results which boost ROI.

Conclusion

The launch of Facebook’s Brand Collabs Manager emphasizes just how significant influencer marketing has become – and really, the option is growing to form a crucial part of any successful digital marketing strategy.

Brand Collabs Manager is only open to a few brands creators at this stage, but it will soon be available to all. We predict that it will become a major disruption to the state of influencer marketing – and if used properly, it’ll maximize the quality of partnerships between the two parties and drive better ROI.

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Sourced from Social Media Today

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3 Steps to Create an Achievable Project Timeline

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By Larry Alton

Imagine how your next client will react when you maintain your original project timeline or close to it.

Achieving project milestones on time is essential to keep from falling behind. Missing one deadline often results in a series of missed deadlines, and before you know it, you’re buried in incompletions.

Struggling to meet a few deadlines is normal, but perpetually struggling isn’t. Despite project management methodology, if you’re regularly playing catch-up, postponing tasks, and pushing out your timelines, your deadlines probably are unrealistic.

To pull yourself and your team out of perpetual struggle, here’s how to plan a more achievable timeline for your projects:

Work backward from your goal

People have a tendency to overestimate what they can accomplish in a period of time because they haven’t accounted for dependencies. Many make the mistake of basing their estimates solely on the time it takes to perform the task. The worst thing you can do is estimate time for isolated tasks.

By anchoring all tasks to your final goal, your time estimates will be more accurate. You’re also less likely to forget to assign minor tasks. Working backward keeps your eye on the end result and forces you to consider how all goals are related.

To get a complete picture of what’s needed to reach your goal, ask yourself what needs to happen to achieve the end result and move backward. For example, to send out a direct mail piece, you need addresses. You also need someone to write the copy. To hire a copywriter, you need to know who to hire and have the money to pay them. Without working backward, you might miss the fact that you also need someone to stuff, stamp, and mail the envelopes. Miss that and you’ll be scrambling at the last minute to find someone willing to do the job quickly.

Dependencies are seen best by working backward

Working backward also allows you to see the relationship between tasks and adjust the amount of time allotted for each one. Clarizen points out that determining dependencies is the most difficult part of meeting a timeline. As projects gain complexity, tasks become intertwined with dependencies that aren’t always apparent.

For example, it might take someone five minutes to update the company website, but if the admin account is being used by someone else, it could take hours to complete. Or, if nobody knows the admin account’s password, it could take weeks to get in, putting the project far behind.

Login issues are a significant problem for many businesses. Trying to meet deadlines and not being able to log into administrative accounts is a common reason for postponed projects.

Be specific when defining your ultimate goal

Say you’re a website developer and your ultimate goal is to complete a website for a client. Although you have an idea of what a finished website looks like, you need to get specific. “A finished website” isn’t specific. How you define a finished website is with the material you’ll use to construct goals, milestones, and tasks placed along your project’s timeline.

Define your goal in terms of specific, quantifiable elements. For example, the website might be finished when the discussion forum has been launched, a minimum of 10 blog posts are published, and your e-commerce shop is ready. Defining these specific elements allows you to turn them into milestones and develop tasks that will lead to their completion.

Allow time for breakdowns

No project is immune from breakdowns. No matter how carefully you plan and organize, an aspect of the project is bound to go in an unplanned direction. While planning time for each task or milestone, pad that time for potential breakdowns. For example, if you have a milestone due January 4, push it out by another week. If that milestone is dependent on another task that usually ends up with breakdowns, push that milestone out further.

Clients know timelines aren’t accurate and expect projects to take longer than planned, but imagine how your next client will react when you maintain your original timeline, or close to it. Unheard of, but not impossible. Part of managing client expectations is planning for breakdowns so shifting the original timeline doesn’t double or triple completion time.

By Larry Alton

Larry Alton is an independent business consultant specializing in tech, social media trends, business, and entrepreneurship. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Sourced from InformationWeek

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7 Ways to Use Google Trends for SEO & Content Marketing

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By Roger Montti  

Google Trends is one of the best tools for SEO research.

With these seven tips you’ll be able to extract hidden insights that no other tool offers.

These tips affect keyword choice to content marketing to how to best promote your website.

Google Trends & SEO Strategy

1. Learn Amount of Keyword Traffic

Google Trends is an official Google tool that offers a visual comparison of traffic levels. It does not tell you the exact amount of traffic. But it does show a relative amount.

This is especially helpful if you know the amount of traffic from a related keyword phrase.

Tip#1 How to Obtain More Accurate Traffic Data

If you want to unlock the traffic data of a keyword, compare that keyword with a keyword you already rank for and are familiar with the traffic levels.

Although Google Trends won’t show you the exact amounts, as long as you know the amounts for one keyword, the traffic levels of the other keyword will become more understandable.

2. Gain Insights for Content Marketing

There are two ways to look at the keyword data, stretched across over a long period of time and a short period of time.

Long Period Trends

You can set Google Trends to show you the traffic trends stretching back five years. This is valuable for showing you audience trends.

Upward Trending Long Range Trends

If a trend is going up this means to focus energy on creating content for this trend.

Downward Long Range Trends

If the trend line is moving down, then it may be a signal that audience content consumption is changing.

For example, review this five year trend for WordPress the search term, WordPress the software and WordPress the website:

An image of Google Trends tool showing a five year trend

There’s a clear downward trend for WordPress in all it’s variations. The downward trend extends to phrases such as WordPress themes, WordPress plugin, and WordPress hosting.

Tip #2 Plan Future Content

The long view helps you make decisions about future directions. The long view helps you understand where to put the focus for content. If a product is trending downward, then maybe it’s time to think about shifting content resources to another topic or product or even change the content model altogether.

3. Short View Insights

Viewing keyword trends in the short view, such as the 90 day or even 30 day view can reveal valuable insights for maximizing your content marketing.

For example, two of the top trending keyword trends are How To and and Near Me searches. When you scale down to the 90 day view you can see what days of the weeks those searches are popular.

Tip #3 Plan Publishing Schedule

This takes the guess work out of creating a publishing schedule. Searches related to How to trend upward on Sundays and Mondays. Searches related to Near Me trend on Fridays and Saturdays.

If you have a site or a podcast focused on how to do things or a hobby related site, then publishing on a Sunday, Monday, or Wednesday and sending out an email to subscribers may be the best approach.

If your business is a restaurant, then you know that it is important to have specials, special pricing and so on published by Thursday so that it’s ready for site traffic on Friday and Saturday.

Tip #4 Keywords by Category

Google Trends has the capability to narrow down your keywords according to categories in order to give more accurate data on your keywords.

Image of Google Trends showing trends for the phrase "How To" within the category of "autos"

Tip #5 Keyword by Geography

Google Trends provides keyword information by geographic location. This information can be used for determining what areas are the best to outreach to or for tailoring the content to specific regions.

Keyword popularity information by region is valuable for link building, content creation, content promotion and pay per click.

For example, if a topic is popular in a particular region you can narrow your content promotion to identifying regional magazines, groups and clubs that are related to the niche you’re publishing or marketing to.

Tip #6 Geography Data May Enhance Ranking

Geographic information can also be used to enhance your content so that it is relevant to the most people. Google ranks pages according to who it’s most relevant for, so incorporating geographic nuance into your content can help it rank for the most people, especially if those people begin to promote your content in social media, blogs and podcasts.

Tip #7 Rising Queries

The ability to gain insight into keyword phrases that are rising is quite possibly the most useful feature of Google Trends.

Image of Google Trends showing how rising trends can be discovered

All you do is type in a keyword phrase and this section will give you twenty five related search queries that are trending upwards. This data helps keep you on target with how consumers are changing. It allows you to react to new opportunities.

Takeaway: Google Trends is Useful

Google Trends is an incredibly useful tool. A little creativity yields important search marketing insights. Spend some time with Google Trends, I’m certain you’ll discover insights that will improve how content is created and promoted online.

Visit Google Trends and explore.

 

Feature Image Credit: Shutterstock,

By Roger Montti  

Sourced from Search Engine Journal

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RIP Snapchat: Marketing Experts Reveal What Works in Social Media — And What Doesn’t

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By Jennie Bell

Snapchat is over. Influencers are oversaturated. And content is everything.

Those were some of the takeaways from a panel discussion about social media marketing held Tuesday at the FN Platform trade show in Las Vegas.

The participants included Rollie founder and CEO Vince Lebon, Sam Edelman marketing director Lizzi Bickford, Chinese Laundry marketing manager Alle King and Karen Bueno, Blowfish Malibu’s VP of marketing. FN’s women’s editor, Nikara Johns, moderated the conversation.

FN Platform Social Media Panel
(L-R): Karen Bueno, Alle King, Nikara Johns, Vince Lebon and Lizzi Bickford.
CREDIT: Jim K. Decker

All four executives agreed that the strongest social platforms for brand marketing right now are Facebook and Instagram — particularly Instagram, thanks to its highly visual format.

“With Instagram, we focus on brand awareness and engagement, and there we’re able to build a visual around who the brand is,” said Bueno. “With Facebook, it’s more of a VIP feel, and with those people, they give us their true feelings about [Blowfish Malibu]. That’s been helpful for us in finding out what customers like about the brand and what they don’t.”

Bickford added that gauging the effectiveness of the programs is twofold: “We measure success through engagement, and conversion is also optimal. We’re seeing a rise year over year of about 170 percent on a swipe or click-to-shop [tool]. Those features have definitely enhanced the platforms for us from a brand side.”

As for platforms that don’t work, the executives said they have all abandoned Snapchat completely and use Twitter sparingly. “The biggest result we’ve had with Twitter is if a celebrity or influencer is wearing our shoes and tweeting about it,” said King. “For me as a consumer, I only pay attention to big people and what they’re saying.”

When it comes to working with online influencers, the marketing experts recommended a careful and strategic approach. “Go in with a plan and make sure you’re aligning with the right people. Influencers are great, but the market has become really saturated,” said Bickford, who noted that she likes to meet — or at least speak with — every influencer who works with the Sam Edelman brand. “I want make sure that we vibe and they understand our messaging.”

King noted that microinfluencers have proved to be highly effective at driving online buzz for Chinese Laundry.

But Blowfish’s Bueno advised always checking the numbers before signing a partner. “Look at the engagement of their followers. They may have 2,000 likes on an Instagram photo but no comments,” she said.

For Rollie, while the label does work with social influencers, Lebon and his wife have become increasingly visible in its marketing. “When I first launched the brand, I tried to keep myself separate. But a brand is not what you say it is; it’s what they say it is,” said Lebon. “We found that people connected with our story. So now we’re putting up more photos of me and my wife, and we’re starting to document us living our bucket list. Because we want to empower our community, and the only way is by living what you say. We’ve become the face of it — not by choice, but it feels honest.”

Overall, the executives stressed that in today’s environment, it’s challenging to keep up with changing technologies and to stand out in a noisy digital landscape. But what is essential is having a strong identity.

“Make sure you have a voice, your tone is consistent, and make sure you have a story to tell,” said Bickford. “People want authenticity and content that they can learn from.”

And in the end, brands also need to be realistic about expectations, explained Lebon. “There’s no quick fix,” he said. “We would look at these big influencers and think, ‘If only we could work with them.’ And then you’d get them, and it wasn’t massive. Accept that and stop chasing. Just work on great content and add value to people’s lives. Instead of looking for that one influencer, create something where everyone you touch is inspired and they retell it and then become your brand advocators.”

FN Platform Social Media Panel
(L-R): Alle King, Karen Bueno, Nikara John, Vince Lebon and Lizzi Bickford.
CREDIT: Jim K. Decker

Sourced from FN

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