editor, Author at Mediastreet

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Social media is making you miserable. Here’s how to delete your accounts.

July 9, 2018 No Comments

In theory, social media promises to connect you with the world. In practice, it compromises your personal privacy, puts you at risk of online abuse, and makes you unsatisfied and unhappy with your real life. If you’re irritated by Twitter or depressed by Facebook, you don’t have to stick around.

We’ve previously discussed a few methods to help you avoid social media for limited periods of time. When you’re ready to say goodbye for good, it’s time to delete those social apps from your phone—and shut down your accounts entirely. Here’s how to do it, one network at a time.

First steps

Before you start erasing all of your content, you might want to download some or all of it. This will let you preserve a personal copy for posterity. To do this for the biggest social networks—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat—follow our guide to saving social media posts.

Next, make sure you’re deleting your account for the right reason. If you’re ready to bid farewell to the whirlwind of social media, that’s fine. But if you’re only closing down your current social media account so you can create a new one for a fresh start, hit pause. Your first step should be to check the do-over options the network gives you. On Instagram, for instance, you can change your username without shutting down your existing account. Once you’ve exhausted the existing options, you can move on to deactivating or deleting your account.

Facebook

When you get fed up with Facebook, you have two ways to remove yourself from the giant network: deactivation or deletion.

Let’s start with the less extreme option. If you deactivate your account, it will disappear from Facebook, but you can bring it back at any time: The network retains all of your data, which will be waiting for you if you decide to go back. Simply log in to your account again, and Facebook will reactivate it.

To deactivate your account from a web browser, visit the site and click the drop-down arrow on the top right of the screen. Choose Settings, then General, and look for the Manage account category. Next to it, you should see an Edit option. Click Edit and choose Deactivate your account. Next, Facebook will prompt you for your password and ask you to give a reason for leaving, such as privacy concerns or wasted time. Make your choice, click Deactivate, and you’re done.

You can also deactivate your account through a mobile app. On iOS, open the app and hit the menu button—a grid icon—in the lower right corner. Then tap Settings, Account Settings, General, Manage account, and Deactivate. On Android, you follow the same process, but the menu button looks like three horizontal lines and you can reach Account Settings from the first submenu.

Deactivation is a good way of testing the waters to see if you can live without Facebook. Give it a few months and see how you feel. When you’re ready to say goodbye to your account forever, it’s time to delete it. To do so, you have to visit this page in a web browser and click Delete my account. As far as your friends are concerned, you will disappear immediately. However, Facebook may take up to 90 days to fully erase all of your data. Once you do that, there’s no going back.

Twitter

If you’ve had all you can take of hashtags and tweetstorms, you can deactivate your Twitter account. For a set period, the social network will hang on to your data, but after that, it will permanently get rid of your account.

To get rid of Twitter, you need to visit this page in a web browser and scroll down to the Deactivate your account option. Read the information that Twitter provides, then click Deactivate. You’ll receive a prompt to enter your password and to confirm that yes, you really do want to deactivate your account.

Once you do so, the process of erasing your Twitter presence starts. As far as other users can see, your profile and tweets will vanish immediately. However, Twitter hangs on to your data for a grace period of 30 days (verified users get a full 12 months) to make sure you don’t change your mind. During this time, you can still log back into the site, an act that will restore your profile and all of your tweets from the digital grave.

After that 30- to 365-day period ends, Twitter will officially delete your data and you will lose it forever. So if you repent your decision and decide to return to Twitter, you’ll need to sign up for a brand new account.

Instagram

Nothing instills FOMO quite like your friends’ smug Instagram photos. Remove them from your life by either deactivating or deleting your account.

To deactivate, you have to go through the Instagram website rather than the mobile apps. Log in, click your profile icon on the top right, choose Edit Profile, and select Temporarily disable my account. Once you do that, you have to decide on a reason why you no longer feel the Instagram love—options range from Just need a break to Too many ads. Finally, enter your account password and click Temporarily Disable Account.

Much like Facebook’s deactivation option, this choice will put your account on hold. As far as other users know, your Instagram page is gone, but the social network will hang on to your photos, comments, and other data. Log into the site again, and it will instantly restore your account.

For a more permanent fix, you need to go to the dedicated Delete Your Account page online. Log in, give a reason for your defection, and enter your password. Finally, click Permanently delete my account. This will wipe all traces of your Instagram life from the network’s servers, including the likes and instant messages. If you decide to come back, you’ll have to start again from scratch.

Snapchat

If Snapchat loses its appeal, have your account disappear like the vanishing photos that made the social network a hit.

To do that, you need to open your web browser and head to this page (yes, Snapchat has a website too). Sign into your account if necessary, then enter your username and password again on the subsequent screen. (Why sign in twice? You have to prove that it really is you and express your determination to get rid of Snapchat.) Click Continue, and the process of removing you from Snapchat begins.

From this point on, your friends won’t be able to contact you on Snapchat, but as with Twitter, you get a grace period before permanent deletion occurs. Over the next 30 days, you can decide whether you really do want to depart from the world of Snapchat or not. If you log back into the network before that time is up, your account will reappear and you can carry on as before with the same username and contacts list.

After the 30 days pass, Snapchat will permanently erase your account from its network. To come back from that, you’ll have to start adding friends and collecting Snaps all over again.

Other networks

Although Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat currently dominate the app charts, they’re not the only social networks out there. Still, you can always find the option to close your account.

While these networks will let you delete your account, they won’t always make that option easy to find. So if you get stuck, check the support pages for that network, which should point you in the right direction. (To deactivate Tumblr, for example, you simply scroll down to the bottom of the settings page.) Support pages should also provide details about exactly what happens to your data when you click “delete” and how quickly it disappears from existence.

Feature Image Credit: Ditch your social apps—for good. Rahul Chakraborty via Unsplash

By David Nield

Sourced from Popular Science

In News

7 Important Digital Marketing KPIs for Small Business Owners

July 6, 2018 No Comments

By Derek Miller

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are measurable data that companies use to track and evaluate strategic activities and business objectives. KPIs are important to businesses because they provide context to organizational goals and place accountability on those tasked with achieving those goals.

While small business owners usually have no problem creating KPIs for sales and production, deciding how to track and measure digital marketing initiatives can be more cumbersome.

As technology becomes more integrated into our lives, so too is the importance of having KPIs for your small business’ digital marketing.

Here are seven of the most important digital marketing KPIs:

1. Email Open Rate

Measures: The number of email recipients who opened an email.

Calculating Open Rate: Most email marketing platforms provide open rate statistics on each email campaign. If you want to track open rates on individual email correspondents, try using a tool like Yesware.

Why it’s important: Understanding and using email open rates can help you improve your email marketing activities and discover trends that lead to more email engagement.

2. Cost Per Click (CPC)

Measures: The cost you pay for each unique visitor from an online paid media ad.

Calculating CPC: Most paid media platforms (Google AdWords, Facebook Ads Manager, Outbrain, etc.) have an analytics report that shows your CPC. You can also use Google Tag Manager and your digital marketing budget report to assess CPC from other paid strategies.

Why it’s important: Knowing your CPC and creating goals using this marketing metric can help you optimize your paid media activities.

3. Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

Measures: The cost you pay for each conversion or acquisition. A conversion or acquisition could include activities like: calling your business, completing a lead form, downloading an eBook, purchasing a product, or any other number of user actions.

Calculating CPA: Where CPC calculates traffic, CPA measures activity. To calculate CPA, you need to track conversions either through the paid media platform, web analytics software, or manually. You will then take the total amount spent on advertising that campaign and divide it by the total users converted.

Why it’s important: Understanding your cost per acquisition and creating a targeted average CPA will help you assess the return on investment from your advertising activities.

4. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Measures: The percentage of people who see your advertisement, inbound link, post, or search result snippet and then clicks it to navigate to your website.

Calculating CTR: Most communication channels will provide a CTR for each marketing activity you execute. If a platform doesn’t, you can look for the total impressions received, and use Google Tag Manager to calculate the traffic from that link.

Why it’s important: A low CTR indicates that people see your post or ad, but are not compelled to act. By measuring your CTR, you can adjust ad copy and marketing messages to entice more people to click on your links.

5. Inbound Links

Measures: The number of internal links pointing to your website from another site.

Calculating Inbound Links: Use an SEO tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush to crawl the web for links pointing to your domain.

Why it’s important: Inbound links are one of the most powerful ways to grow your online presence. You should be working to grow the number of links pointing to your site by creating link-worthy content and conducting link earning/building outreach. By tracking and creating goals for total inbound links, you can help improve your organic rankings and drive more traffic to your website.

6. Monthly Website Traffic (Channels)

Measures: The number of users who visit your website through organic search, referral links, direct URLs, or paid channels.

Calculating Monthly Website Traffic: Use Google Analytics to calculate your website’s total monthly visitors. You can also drill down to specific acquisition methods to determine what channels drive the most traffic.

Why it’s important: Knowing the total amount of traffic you receive every month and the channels they used to find your website provide you the insight needed to measure the effectiveness of your different marketing campaigns. It also helps you find opportunities to increase the amount and quality of your visitors.

7. Bounce Rate

Measures: The percentage of users who leave your website after only visiting the page on which they landed.

Calculating Bounce Rate: Use Google Analytics to track the bounce rate across your entire site and on the specific pages for which you are running targeted marketing campaigns.

Why it’s important: Bounce rate indicates the user-experience on your various pages. If visitors are leaving your site after only visiting one page, you need to assess whether that page is under-optimized, if you’re bringing the wrong audience to your site, or why visitors are not engaging with your other pages.

Working With Digital Marketing KPIs

Every small business should use digital marketing KPIs. While every company will have their own digital marketing KPIs, understanding some of the most popular ones can help you get started with tracking and measuring your digital marketing initiatives against your business goals.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Derek Miller

Sourced from the balance small business

In News

A UX review framework anyone can use

July 6, 2018 No Comments

By Vernon Joyce

As connected products are integrated into more aspects of our day to day lives, UX will be responsible for translating strategy into intuitive experiences.

Forbes

The demand for UX has become clear as organisations rush to create products that put client needs before business needs. These organisation often have large UX and design teams who focus solely on providing the best possible experience to their customers.

But what if you or your business cannot afford to hire a UX designer to review your product or service?

My goal for sharing this framework is to allow anyone to do a UX review; whether you are a UX designer or not. You can use this framework to analyse a product or service* or analyse a piece of work for a potential client. You could even use this to review your own work as the tools and techniques I use leave little room for bias.

*Although this framework can be used for any type of product or service, it will primarily focus on web.

**There are plenty of dev goodies in this article – it’s not purely meant for designers.

Objectives of the review

It’s important to start your review by positioning your objectives. This sets the tone and ensures that both you and your stakeholder have the same expectations — whether you are presenting your review or sending it via email.

Some objectives or outcomes could include:

Identify opportunities
Substantiate design changes
Identify technical issues
Discuss UX improvements

These objectives will mostly relate to your initial briefing — why did your client want you to do a UX review in the first place?

Business objectives

Business objectives are what your client is trying to achieve. Sometimes objectives can easily be ascertained by yourself but they could also require additional research. In the case of research it depends on your client — sometimes their objectives are obvious but often there are deeper needs that need to be brought to the surface through further inspection.

Unpacking these objectives is important — let’s take *increasing sales *as an example. Are they trying to sell more of a specific product or perhaps drive in-store traffic? These details are important as it makes your outcomes much more tangible and measurable. It is much easier to credit a sales increase of a specific product to a UX improvement, than to match a sales increase of a thousand products to an objective that has not been properly defined.

These objectives can be unpacked by conducting interviews with your client and their stakeholders and additional objectives could also be identified through market research. A simple survey through Survey Monkey can provide valuable insights if you have access to your stakeholder’s clients.

Lastly, state these objectives in your review to remind your client of the problems you are trying to solve. This will reaffirm your thinking throughout the review and give your ideas credibility.

Personas and userflows

Now that you understand the business’ needs, it’s time to look at the user’s needs. A popular way of unpacking user needs is by creating personas or persona sheets. In short a persona is a fictional user with needs, aspirations and desires that are usually linked to objectives within their lives.

Take Sandy for example. She is a middle-class professional female with a family of two. She likes learning about technology, watching documentaries and spending time with her children. Sandy is an ideal customer for a geeky toy shop, where she can purchase an electronic toy that both her and her children can enjoy.

Creating personas can be daunting but become an invaluable tool. Personas can be set up through research along with a firm understanding of you or your stakeholder’s business objectives. Shane Williams offers a comprehensive look at creating personas in Getting started with creating personas — questions to ask.

Now that we know who your users are, it’s time to look at the steps they would take to achieve their goals. This can be done by creating userflow diagrams. These diagrams demonstrate sample user journeys based on your user’s objectives and can often be combined with business objectives for a full client experience view.

Example of user flow diagram

There are many ways to create these diagrams, whether using sticky notes or an online tool like Draw.io. There are no rules when it comes to designing these diagrams — but it is important that your diagrams are easy to follow and read-able.

Working with data

Data is the cornerstone of a good UX review and without it you might find it difficult to back up your findings. Google analytics offers a great starting point for user interaction data, provided you know what you are looking for.

Something as simple as a drop in traffic on a given day could indicate a problem — perhaps users had a negative reaction to a new feature or maybe you posted something on social media that got negative press.

Device information (such as mobile vs desktop traffic) could also be meaningful when deciding on which device to focus your usability assessment.

Event tracking in Google Analytics provides another helpful source of information assuming it has been set up correctly. CrazyEgg is a great alternative should you not have the expertise to set up event tracking in GA as it offers heatmaps for both clicks and scroll on different devices.

The behavior flow report is also invaluable and offers insights into the journey users take in the form of a flow diagram. It provides data on drop-offs, sessions and more with the ability to highlight or analyse specific user paths.

Example of Google Analytics’ behavioural flow diagrams

Conducting System Usability Scale (SUS) surveys is also a handy way to quickly gauge the usability of a system through user feedback. SUS tests can be conducted on products, websites, apps or software and provide a scaled result regardless of the volume of feedback. The SUS survey’s data is also useful going into the usability review.

Lastly the persona sheets you set up in the previous section are also an excellent source of data. Keep your user objectives in mind when examining any of these data sources and you might find behavioural patterns that indicate a gap in the user’s journey.

You or your client might not always have data tools set up. In these cases my advice would be to postpone the review until you have meaningful analytics to work with. Installing GA is quick and easy and should give you relevant insights after only a month.

Usability review

Usability rules the Web. Simply stated, if the customer can’t find a product, then he or she will not buy it.

Jakob Nielsen

Usability speaks to the core of the review — is the product usable?

It’s time to make some assumptions about the usability of your project based on business and user needs. Step into the shoes of your users using your persona sheets, userflows and analytical data. Start using the application or service on different devices, browsers or operating systems while following your userflows. You will quickly pick up on journeys that are possibly frustrating or pieces of functionality that do not help you achieve your objective as the user.

You might also come across design flaws, broken or confusing components or responsive issues. Jot all of these potential problems down while taking screen shots. Once you have moved through the project as a user, step into the shoes of the product owner and go through the same process.

Your next challenge is making the feedback easy to understand when consolidated. Remember — your client might not have any understanding of UX or design and it is your job as a UX reviewer to make the feedback concise. Explain your thinking verbally in detail if necessary, but keep your written feedback short and to the point. It is also very important to make sure that the feedback is not seen as a list of problems or issues but rather as opportunities for improvement.

Lastly, do not go into solution mode yet. At this point you are only identifying usability problems. I like to consolidate my feedback into buckets:

1. User journeys

This should cover any problems relating to a user’s journey. If you have trouble convincing your stakeholder of these problems, try placing them in the user’s shoes. Some examples of user journey flaws could include:

Information needed by a user is too low down a page
Important pages are hidden too deeply within the information architecture
Information is unnecessary and does not provide value to a user
Too many clicks are required to make a purchase
Inconsistent user journeys
Important information sits below the fold

2. General

What are the consistent problems across the product or service? List anything that is not specific to a journey or device.

3. Design

Having a design background is very useful in this section of the review, but is not necessarily a requirement. There are some aspects of design that are generally obvious to spot:

Design inconsistencies (i.e buttons are different sizes on different pages)
Problems with alignment
Poor page hierarchy

4. Mobile

The accuracy of your mobile review is very dependent on the different types of devices you use to test (both tablet and smart phones). These issues could include:

Responsive problems (i.e not mobile friendly)
Scale problems such as fonts being too small
Pinch or zoom is required on some pages

5. Desktop

For the most part you would have covered any issues on desktop in the other sections, but from time to time there might be issues that are desktop specific. Also keep your analytics in mind — if your traffic is primarily mobile you might want to skip over this section.

Accessibility review

Accessibility is often overlooked by both developers and designers — I am guilty of this myself. It has however become increasingly important to consider disabled users as we become driven by digital. Something as simple as green text on a red button could completely ruin a colour-blind user’s experience and result in a lost sale or lead.

Accessibility covers several aspects including colour, font size, font types, descriptive text or alt tags. It is important to consider all these design and technical aspects as they might affect the user’s experience.

A tool I often use for testing accessibility on the web is Google Lighthouse. Lighthouse is available via Chrome developer tools and offers detailed feedback on the speed, progressive web app features, accessibility, best practices and SEO of a website.

Google Lighthouse results

Not only does it offer solutions, but also substantiates suggested changes making it a powerful tool in a UX reviewer’s arsenal.

When a button doesn’t have an accessible name, screen readers announce it as “button”, making it unusable for users who rely on screen readers.

Example of Google Lighthouse feedback

Eightshape’s colour contrast grid is a useful tool for analysing the accessibility of a digital colour palette while Colorsafe offers an easy way to find passable colour combinations.

Results of Eightshapes’ color contrast test

Technical review

Whether or not you include the technical review in your presentation depends on the way you position it as well as how technical your audience is.

What makes the technical review helpful is that more often than not small code changes can make a big difference in conversion rates and overall user experience.

1. Performance / speed

A score from Google Page Speed Insights

A great tool for analyzing website speed is Google’s better-known Page Speed Insights. PSI offers some quick tips for improving your page speed which includes caching of assets, optimizing images and more for both desktop and mobile. The suggestions can at times become a bit technical, but Google offers links to helpful articles that explains each suggestion in detail.

Performance can also be analysed using Google Lighthouse (mentioned earlier). Lighthouse provides a lot more detail than PSI and also makes suggestions based on newer technologies (like the HTTP/2 standard).

2. Best practices

Best practices deal with whether or not a project is following standards for a given device or medium. A good example of this is when print standards creep into the web, such as forcing line breaks in headlines, which is bad practice for responsive web projects.

Lighthouse is also a good tool for best practice suggestions; but knowing what is considered best practice often comes down to your experience with the channel or device you are reviewing.

3. SEO

SEO is not often considered when looking at the user experience of a web product— but it should be. SEO deals not only with your rank, but also your search appearance. If your page does not have an enticing title and description you lose every opportunity to bring that user into your website. Often some of the problems you solve for when it comes to accessibility will impact your SEO as well (such as making alt tags more descriptive).

Lighthouse provides some high level feedback on SEO, but for a more detailed view I would recommend Moz.

SEO Software, Tools & Resources for Smarter Marketing\
Backed by the largest community of SEOs on the planet, Moz builds tools that make SEO, inbound marketing, link…moz.com

Opportunities

The next step is to look at how you or your client can close some of the gaps in their user’s experience using the wealth of data gathered from the review. These suggestions could be based on feedback from your review or opportunities you identified while using the product, for example:

Adding related articles to existing pages will allow a user to continue his journey through the website once they finish reading an article
Reducing the length of the form could improve its usability which might lead to additional leads

Be careful of making swooping statements like “Adding a banner area will increase traffic*”. *An opportunity should imply the possibility of improvement and not a promise thereof.

Metrics

Implementing a solution to an identified UX problem might not be enough — you also need to be able to measure its success. This can be done by setting metrics for specific action points.

A good metric needs to be tangible and achievable. “Increase sales” for example is not a tangible metric. How would you accurately measure that and more importantly correlate it to a UX change?

Break your metrics down, give them a deadline and bring them back to your objectives and identified opportunities:

Decrease the bounce rate of X page by 5% by adding related articles
Capture 5 more leads on X page per day by making the form easier to use

Your client might also want to set their own metrics. In these cases make sure that their expectations are reasonable and achievable.

Next steps

Discuss next steps with your client even if you might not be responsible for implementation. Without actionable points the review is bound to become a coffee-stained desk-drop. Creating a list of actions or tasks along with their priority and metrics is a good starting point and will provide your stakeholder with enough guidance to start implementation on their own.

Who knows, you might even become that implementation partner or a UX designer within their team.

I hope you found this framework useful — would love to know more about your experiences in the comments below. Thanks for reading.

Originally posted on Medium

By Vernon Joyce

Sourced from DEV

In News

Deciphering the Terminology of Google Analytics

July 6, 2018 No Comments

By Alex Mercer

Google Analytics provides a wealth of knowledge on your website – from its most visited pages, to the visitors that are browsing. It’s free, easy to set up, and essential for insights on what’s working and not working for your audience.

In order to get the most from this tool, you have to understand what you are looking at! The better you understand the terminology, the more useful Google Analytics will be for measuring the effectiveness of multiple aspects of your website – month by month and page by page – and giving you the insights needed to make improvements. Below is a glossary of essential terms for making sense of Google Analytics.Acquisition – Acquisition metrics show where your traffic is originating from, be it Google searches, social media links, or other websites.

Average Session Duration – The average visit length of time a user spends on your website at any given time. This is a key metric for measuring the effectiveness and quality of your website.

Average Time on Page – The average time that users spend viewing a page or group of pages.

Bounce Rate – A bounce is a single page website visit, and so your site’s bounce rate is the percentage of single page visits that your site has. Generally you want this number to be as low as possible, however sites with standalone pages such as blog articles tend to have lower bounce rates by nature.

Direct Traffic – Visitors that came directly to your site by typing your company website’s URL into their browser’s address bar. Direct traffic indicates how many visitors already know your company and URL.

Exit Page – The last page that someone visits before leaving your website.

Filter – A tool that allows you to include or exclude specific data in your reports. For example, you can exclude internal company traffic so that your employees are not included in the website metrics. You can also exclude known bots.

Goal Conversion – This is the completion of an activity on your site that is important to the success of your business, such as a completed sign up for your email newsletter. You must set this up first before Google will track a goal conversion.

Landing Page – The first page that someone visits when they come to your site. Often this is the homepage.

Organic Traffic – Visitors who come to your website from natural (or unpaid) search engine results.

Pages/Session – The average number of pages viewed during one visit

Pageviews – The total number of website pages viewed. For example, if one person visited your homepage and the contact page, then that would count as 2 pageviews.

Referral Traffic – Visitors that landed on your website through a link on another website, such as Facebook or LinkedIn.

Returning Visitors – Visitors that have previously visited your website.

Search Traffic – Visitors that came to your website through a search engine such as Google or Bing.

Sessions – A session is a single continual active viewing period by a visitor. If a user visits a site several times in one day, each unique visit counts as a session.

Source/Medium – Where your website traffic is coming from. This includes which websites your visitors are coming from as well as what keywords they are using to get to your website.

Unique Visitors – The number of unduplicated visitors to your website (each person only counted once).

Unique Pageviews – The number of new pages per viewing session that users have visited.Users – The number of people that have visited your site at least once during a given time period. One user could have multiple sessions, but will still be counted as a single user.

% Exit – The ratio of exits to pageviews. This indicates how often users leave page(s) compared to how many pages they view.

There you have it. Now that you understand what you’re looking at, you’ll be able to more effectively navigate Google Analytics for meaningful insights. We’ve tried to cover the primary terms you’ll encounter using Google Analytics and, hopefully, this glossary will help you make sense of your metrics a little better. We’ll be diving much deeper into website analytics and metrics on our blog in the coming weeks, so be sure to check back.

Feature Image Credit: Crazyarts / Pixabay

By Alex Mercer

Sourced from Business 2 Community

In News

Marketing Mind: Understand Your Customers to Optimize Performance

July 5, 2018 No Comments

By Angela Hausman

Getting inside the marketing mind means not only understanding your customers and how they make decisions but understanding your own marketing efforts to ensure they align with your customers and prospects.

Marketing Mind

Take a look at the infographic at the bottom of this post (if you have trouble reading it, simply click on the figure to enlarge it). The image shows a look inside the marketing mind.

Divided into 2 hemispheres (unfortunately, a division of labor that has fallen out of favor in the medical community) makes the distinction between analytical and creative aspects of marketing. In the not too distant past, these activities would have been similarly divided with the IT and Finance functions concerned with analytical components and marketing/ sales folks owning the creative components of marketing. Just as the notion that the 2 hemispheres of the brain function independently has fallen, so has the functionality of dividing analytical and creative activities between different departments or functional areas.

Today, I’d like to focus on the data side of the marketing mind. For more on the creative side, check out my posts on content marketing.

The analytical marketing mind

It wasn’t so long ago that marketing was dominated by creatives and expressing marketing performance relied on squishy metrics such as ad recall and reach. Today, properly constructed marketing efforts generate a host of metrics that help businesses optimize market performance in terms of sales, conversion rates, AOV (average order value), and customer acquisition — things that translate to the firm’s bottom line.

Based on the infographic, data analysis generates 7X as many inquiries and 4X as many leads compared to firms who don’t analyze such data. I leave it to you to see other benefits of having an analytical marketing mind.

Caveats:

All data has a cost. Those costs may reflect costs to gather, analyze, and store the data. Or, the cost may reflect annoyances to prospective customers that might interfere with conversion–opportunity costs. Either way, you should only collect data that help improve your marketing efforts to reduce these costs.

Data quality is critically important, as well. Bad data lead to bad decisions and the prevalence of inaccurate data makes this a serious concern. Data mistakes come from a variety of sources, but the most common is human error–either the data was input incorrectly or there was a problem constructing the database. Sometimes, data errors come during analysis when data are combined without a clear understanding of the data contained in the database. For instance, combining inquiries with conversions would be inappropriate but it analysts don’t clearly understand what is in the database, they might make such a combination.

Companies with clean data are 3X more likely to see revenue growth, according to the infographic.

Data analysis and application

In the old days, marketing or someone in the C-suite might ask a business intelligence employee to create a report that can be run daily, weekly, etc or for a custom report. The request might take days or weeks to complete. Today, we need up-to-the-minute data, often in real-time, and our data needs change frequently. Hence, marketers must become more analytical with the ability to query databases using SQL, Python, and other tools. At the same time, traditional marketing research is less about surveys analyzed using SPSS, and more about qualitative data collection using text analytics.

Data analysis has moved beyond targeting, to focus on marketing personas, which contain rich behavioral and psychographic data in addition to demographics.

Sharing the marketing mind

Data must be shared among the various folks who’ll use the data–such as sales, creative, operations, NPD (new product development), and other functional areas. Holding the data hostage with only a few people able to access it is counterproductive.

Aligning the creative with data is necessary to optimize market performance. Good, quality, fresh leads need to go out to the sales force (who also need to funnel insights back to the corporation rather than hold them close to the chest). Creative needs to understand which offers, headlines, images, sharing options, and posting schedules are most effective, they need to understand how and why subscribers respond to email messages, they need to know what social media strategies are working best on which platforms. Helping creatives glean actionable insights from the data is critical for performance.

And, that’s why it’s often ineffective to use statisticians or other data crunchers for data analysis. It’s not that they aren’t experts with data manipulation because they are. But, without an understanding of marketing concepts, these data jockeys don’t know WHAT to look for, as not all metrics that contribute to market performance are obvious to those without such training. By the same token, data analysts might have a hard time translating the data into action for creatives who may also not have a good understanding of marketing concepts.

Hence, someone needs to bridge the hemispheres between data and creatives.

Data helps tailor content

Another way in which the complete marketing mind facilitates market performance is through using data to tailor content to individual users. For instance, knowing that a particular visitor is interested in a particular product and how they’ll use that product, helps creatives tailor their content to better align content with the needs of that customer. Knowing where a customer is along the journey toward conversion and loyalty also helps creatives craft content that specifically addresses concerns a visitor might have based on their own customer journey. Knowing how to effectively address these concerns leads to improved market performance.

By Angela Hausman

Sourced from Marketing Insider Group

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How to Optimize WooCommerce Conversion Rate

July 5, 2018 No Comments

By Sujith Reghu

We have seen ways of tracking customer engagement on your WooCommerce store using Google Analytics. Once you are able to track customer behavior on your store, you can think of implementing improvement strategies. One of the important things that you can start with is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Conversion can be broadly defined as a process where a site user performs a defined desirable action. The most ideal conversion for an eCommerce store would be the purchase of a product. However, there can be other conversion goals too such as registering on the site, or subscribing to the newsletter, etc. This article will look into several strategies that will help you optimize your WooCommerce conversion rate.

How to calculate conversion rate?

Before getting into the optimization strategies, let’s take a quick look on how to calculate conversion rate. Conversion rate is the rate at which a user performs a conversion goal divided by the number of sessions. For example, consider ‘user A’ visited your store five times a day, and this will be 5 sessions. The user made purchases in the last two sessions. So, that is two conversions in five sessions. The conversion rate will be 2/5, that is 40%.

Calculating conversion rate based on sessions makes sense only when your store has multiple products and users can purchase in each session. However, if we are talking about just one subscription product on your site, it won’t be the same. In such a case, you may want to use unique user visits to calculate conversion rate.

Understanding the sales funnel

You need to understand the sales funnel of your store very well to be able to optimize conversion rate. In simple terms, you can look at the general steps a customer would take in your sales funnel and think about improvements. However, a sales funnel is created of multiple components as follows:

Popularity of the products — This will determine whether potential customers know about your products.
Availability of research material — Once they are aware of your product, is there enough material to research? Are your product pages well detailed and attractive?
Interest generation — Does your product or site have enough reasons to sustain a user’s interest on a product?
Purchase decision — Before making a decision to buy, your user may want to know how other customers find your products. Availability of reviews and testimonials might help here a lot.
Pricing deals and coupons — eCommerce users tend to checkout for the best deal available at any given moment. You may have to consistently stay ahead of your competitors by offering the best deals and discount coupons.
Ease of checkout — How easy it is to checkout after making a purchase decision? Are there several payment options to cater to varied interests? Are the checkout forms simple and logical? Is there an option for guest checkout?
Reward points — Once a customer has made a purchase, you can count it as a conversion. However, there is scope to promote repeat purchases there. Reward points and offers on subsequent purchase might assure you some more conversions.

Where to start the optimization process?

One of the first steps of conversion rate optimization is monitoring the sales funnel. This will give you insights that will lead you to the right direction. Here are a few important tools that you can use:

WooCommerce Google Analytics Pro

This is a great tool to track advanced eCommerce events on your store. You can monitor several events that have the potential to influence your conversion rate. It allows you to track events like changes in cart quantity, or customers applying or removing coupons. In addition, you can add events for customer actions on your site. For example, you can create an event when a customer signs in to your site, or leave a review. With normal Google Analytics integration, you can exclude site admins from the tracking report. Using this extension, you can exclude shop managers as well.

The extension also supports shopping and checkout behavior analysis reports. You will be able to gain deep insights into what specific choices customers are making during the checkout process. You need to purchase and install the plugin, which is available on the WooCommerce site for $29 for a single site subscription.

Actionable Google Analytics for WooCommerce

This plugin offers track of a lot of custom dimensions and metrics on your Google Analytics account. You will be able to understand several factors that might be influencing your conversion rate. These include tracking page type, available discounts, day and time of the purchase, chosen payment method, etc. You can look for patterns in these factors, which are helping to improve conversion rate. Once you identify specific patterns, you can improvise your strategies accordingly. Even other factors like location of the customers, display of stock level on your store, etc., can be measured.

You can purchase a regular license of this plugin for $114.

How to improve conversion rate?

Now that you have understood how to monitor conversion rate for your WooCommerce store, you may have to focus on the how to improvise them. Here are a few expert suggested tips to improve the conversion rate on your WooCommerce store.

Help the customers know about your products

This is one of the most direct steps that you have to work when talking about improving conversion rate. To be able to sell a product, you need to let prospective customers know that your store and products exist. This is the first step that you need to take on your WooCommerce conversion rate optimization process. You need to have great product description that describes all the important and unique functionalities of the product. Similarly, your site navigation needs to be smooth for customers to find the products they are looking for easily. WooCommerce extensions like Ajax enabled layered navigation can help a lot in this case.

Providing a comparison chart detailing the features of two more similar products is a preferred option to understand the product better. Improving your product search options with advanced filtering options is another way to improve customer experience on your site.

Make your product pages attractive and more informative

Your product detail pages need to be designed in top quality to ensure customers are not leaving from there. If your analytics insights are pointing to a considerable number of exits from the product pages, you may need to redesign. An attractive product page is a mandatory requirement for any eCommerce store. You may want to browse through some of the popular WooCommerce themes to find out the best product display options.

Get Avada now!

Using high quality product images is another important requirement for conversion rate optimization. Your customers should be able to find out as much details from the product pages. Product zoom-in options, quick demo videos on the product page, etc., too can help in sustaining the interest of customers.

Try dynamic pricing plans

eCommerce industry is rife with competition, and due to this, you really can’t keep product prices stable. Your potential customers have lot of available options at a given time, if you are selling a common product. So what will eventually let them stay on your site would be the price of the product. You can keep the price of the product dynamic by considering a variety of parameters and strategies. Read this article to understand more about dynamic pricing strategies for a WooCommerce store.

Get Dynamic Pricing Plugin Now!

Optimize the checkout

The checkout flow of your site is another determining factor for your conversion rate. You need to make sure that your checkout forms are simple and enabling a faster checkout. There are several plugins that can use to ensure the checkout fields on your store are personalized according to your customers’ interests. Here is an article that would help you find out some of the best WooCommerce checkout field editor plugins.

Enabling guest checkout or social login, and displaying prices in local currency might be some of the strategies you can apply to improve the checkout process. Multiple payment methods and flexible payment plans are strategies used by several eCommerce store owners.

You may have to do extensive testing on your site to understand the most preferred checkout option for your customers. The enhanced eCommerce reporting tools would help you understand if your checkout is not optimized. If you find a possible issue with your checkout, you need to rectify it with instant priority.

Include reviews and testimonials

Product reviews are differentiating factors in eCommerce conversion. A vast majority of eCommerce customers prefer to go through customer reviews of a product before making a purchase decision. It is important for your product pages to feature genuine reviews that educate prospective customers on the usability of the product. According to industry experts, featuring only favorable reviews on your site is a big no-no. The product reviews on your site should be a mixed bag of customer experiences. You may have to work hard to consistently get reviews on your site. When you are asking for a review, experts suggest to do it 24 hours after the product reached the customer.

WooCommerce community has its share of awesome product review plugins. You may want to read this article to understand how product reviews help you improve your WooCommerce conversion rate.

Reduce cart abandonment

Cart abandonment is another factor that can negatively impact your conversion rate. However, studies have shown that you can reclaim abandoned carts to a considerable extent by sending prompt follow up mails. There are several plugins that will help you manage this. Find out a few of the best WooCommerce plugins that will help you reclaim abandoned carts.

Respond to customer queries

The availability of a support person at all times to respond to customer queries is a big factor for improving the conversion rate. Though it is not a feasible option for all sites, it can help a lot if implemented well. Mostly customers will have a query just before them confirming the decision. At this point, if there is a support personnel available to assure about a feature or functionality, it might boost your conversion rate a lot.

Incorporating a live chat software on your site is the most apparent solution for this. However there is a downside to this. When pre-sale queries flood in, there should be someone on your end to answer them. If you just let the queries redirect to your inbox, it can adversely affect the customer experience and conversion rate. You can browse through this article to find out more details about the impact of live chat plugins on your conversion rate.

Tell customers that your site is secure

Security of transactions is one of the biggest concerns of eCommerce customers. You have to actively tell your customers about the security precautions that you have taken on your site to protect their data. Building a reputation of trust would help you significantly in improving conversion rate in the long term. Setting up SSL on your site and displaying security badges on checkout can convince your customers about the security of your site.

Have a good return policy

Most customers will look at your return policy before going ahead with a purchase. As eCommerce purchases are decided based on what is seen on the site, customers will always have a certain doubt. If at all they are not liking the product, there should be a way to return it. You need to display a convincing return policy on your site, and try to make the process hassle free.

Conclusion

There are several factors affecting the conversion rate on your WooCommerce store. You need to track these factors promptly in order to improve the conversion rate on your store. Using advanced analytics solutions will help you track and improvise eCommerce events on your site. Hopefully, this article has provided with a bunch of tools and tips to enhance WooCommerce conversion rate. Let us know if you want to share a specific strategy that worked for your store.

Originally published at learnwoo.com

By Sujith Reghu

Sourced from Hackernoon

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How to Use Facebook Advertising to Beat the Algorithm and Ensure Your Posts Are Seen

July 5, 2018 No Comments

By Kate Peers

Facebook has been experiencing a lot of bad press. Some even say that users are gravitating away from Facebook and towards other platforms.

The current statistics disagree with this assessment, however. There are still one billion active users on Facebook, which means that Facebook is still a strong place to find potential customers for your business. If you use Facebook ads efficiently, you can precisely target your audience and effectively spend for a strong return.

In this article, we examine how and when to use Facebook ads for your business.

Can I reach people without ads?

Facebook are using an algorithm which makes it more and more difficult to reach people organically through posting direct to your page. On average your posts will reach 1–3% of your audience without any ad spend. So, while can you interact with customers without ads, spending money on ads will help you reach more people, as well as more relevant people.

Should I boost a post?

Facebook is very clever. If you have ever posted anything on a business page, you’ll be familiar with the constant suggestions to “boost” your post. You may see a message that says something along the lines of, “This post is performing well, boost it now for more people to view it.”

While boosting a post can increase your customer reach, the most efficient way to interact with customers is by creating an ad from scratch.

How do I create an ad?

Before you make a start with Facebook ads, think hard about your objective. What would you like to achieve with your ad? Do you want to drive traffic to your blog? Would you like people to purchase an e-book? Are you hoping to get more page likes on Facebook and increase your followers?

All of these objectives can be achieved with Facebook ads, but make sure you have them clear before you begin, otherwise your spend will be directed towards the wrong outcome.

Target your audience

Take time to consider your dream client. Who is he or she? Do you want to target women in New York, aged between 30–45 with a high disposable income? You can do this.

Facebook has different targeting options divided into general demographics, interests, behaviors and connections. The real power of Facebook ads lies in interest and behavioral targeting. As we now know all too well, Facebook has tons of data on everyone’s interests, page likes and groups joined. If you know your audience, then you can reach them by creating an audience on Facebook.

Create a strong visual

A strong visual image is key to grab your customer’s attention. You only have one shot to make a first impression — you want to be sure that your images are clear, bright, and convey your message appropriately.

You should also be mindful about the fact that Facebook has very strict guidelines for ad creation, which tend to change a lot. You can only have text covering 20% of your image for instance, or your ad won’t deliver. Ensure your image meets these guidelines before you spend unnecessary time and money on an ad that doesn’t work.

Test, trial and respond to each ad

Facebook insights allow you to track how well an ad has performed. Price per click, number of times the ad was seen and adding URL tags to your ads mean that with a combination of Google analytics and Facebook insights you can play around with a small budget.

It is important to test to see what your audience responds to and ensure you are spending your money to achieve good results. If you notice that no one’s clicking on an ad, you may want to pause it. But, if you notice that hundreds of people are responding, you may want to add more spend and reach more people.

Once you get it right, the results will be mind blowing.

Final thoughts

There are few ways to reach your audience that are as direct and effective as Facebook advertising. If you’ve been hesitant to try out Facebook ads, now’s the time to give it a go.

Have you tried ProWritingAid’s editing tool yet? It will help you edit faster, strengthen your writing, and get your ideas across.

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Originally published at prowritingaid.com.

Feature Image Source: Shutterstock

By Kate Peers

Kate Peers is the writer of the Mad About The Boys blog. A social media and marketing manager, she secretly wants to write a book one day. She is the a contributing author of Walking In The Rain and Washing Up Is Good For You, curated books by Department Store For The Mind. Her work can also be found on Metro online.

Sourced from The Writing Cooperative

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Everything You Need to Know About AI-Powered Content Intelligence Solutions

July 4, 2018 No Comments

By: Chad Pollitt

Content intelligence has been getting a lot of buzz lately, and rightfully so. Content marketers are in need of some real strategic help on a big data scale. This is no secret, either. So much so, in fact, there are now at least 15 martech vendors that specialize in just this one aspect of AI-driven analytics—content intelligence.

The Content Marketing Institute’s own studies have shown that budgets for content marketing have been on the decline the last few years. Additionally, they’ve shown that perceived performance has been declining, too. This is reflected in both B2B and B2C brands. Content intelligence can help fix these problems.

What is content intelligence? There are many definitions floating around out there, but Curata’s seems to be one of the best.

“It’s the systems and software that transforms data into actionable insights for content strategy and tactics. Content intelligence means having the full context of an individual piece of content.”

While this definition is pretty good, it focuses exclusively on the “individual piece of content.” In fact, a well-rounded content intelligence system can also take a macro view of an entire blog, website and ecosystem, as well as each individual article.

This macro view helps uncover underserved content queries (prudent topics) and overserved content queries (topics to avoid) across an entire industry and represents valuable information that can inform a strategy. It also can uncover competitors’ content weaknesses and strengths.

Unstructured Data for Content Intelligence

Most content marketers have access to technology that helps parse structured big data and have so for many years—the tried-and-true, one-dimensional analytics solutions like Google Analytics. However, the problem with these first-generation solutions is that they mostly focus on structured data and output-based insights, which limits how much intelligence they can provide. They also dwell only one degree away from the websites they connect to. Meaning, insights derived are only from sites driving traffic directly to the website.

This is because the foundation of these solutions was built on technology from last decade. Today, we have a second-generation of analytics solutions powered by AI that can tackle both structured and unstructured big data to provide real content intelligence.

In addition, these solutions explore nearly 100% of the topical sphere of potential influence brands desire, not just the current 20% most are used to through Google Analytics or its clones.

This is significant because the level of insights derived are multiples greater than they’ve ever been. This second generation of analytics will be critical for content marketers who want to improve their performance and grow their budgets.

The below screenshot is a good example of what content intelligence can do. It starts off at the macro level and works all the way down to the individual blog post. At the macro level the AI-driven software goes out and maps a brand’s relevant digital ecosystem on the internet.

Unfortunately, most content intelligence solutions require the manual input of competitor websites or keywords and can’t actually figure it out on their own. For the solutions that can figure it out on their own, the macro-results would include websites that link to the brands, websites that link to those, and websites that link to those. It would include competitors, blogs, publications, affiliates and many other different types of websites and apps.

From there, micro data such as social shares, links, author, date, type of article, traffic, etc. can overlay the macro data. When sorted and organized through charts and lists, deep insights can reveal themselves like never before.

Predictive and Prescriptive AI-Driven Content Intelligence

A key differentiator for successful and unsuccessful brands executing content marketing in the near term will be their use of AI-driven content intelligence solutions. They can help determine what content to create to drive potential action at each stage of the buyer’s journey—which topics to focus on, and which topics to avoid (among other things).

Of the content intelligence solutions, there are three types: predictive, prescriptive and both. Predictive solutions predict future outcomes based on big data. Marketers still must make decisions based on these predictions. Prescriptive solutions parse structured and unstructured big data in order to recommend what to do next. Marketers don’t need to interpret the data into the best course of action in this scenario.

The complete solution does both predictive and prescriptive reporting. Content intelligence solutions that are only predictive in nature hearken back to the one-dimensional analytics we’re all used to—report information to the marketer who decides the best course of action. While better than the old school analytics, it still requires interpretation of the data.

It’s an exciting time to be a content marketer. AI is bringing a whole new level of insight into our world. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed at times considering there’s nearly 6,000 martech vendors to date. However, I hope that this post serves to shed some light on the content intelligence category.

This is one of many topics covered in my newest book, “Everything You Need to Know About Marketing Analytics and Artificial Intelligence.” It covers AI’s impact on owned, earned and paid media and is available free for download.

By: Chad Pollitt

Chad Pollitt is a Co-founder of Relevance, the world’s first and only website dedicated to content promotion, news and insights, and is the current VP of Marketing for inPowered. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Internet Marketing at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business and Adjunct Instructor of Content Marketing at the Rutgers School of Business. A member of a Forbes Top 100 list, Chad authored “The Native Advertising Manifesto,” “The Content Promotion Manifesto” and “51 Things Your Mother Taught You About Inbound Marketing.” He is a regular contributor to industry media outlets, including the Huffington Post, Guardian and Social Media Today.

Sourced from Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute

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4 Reasons Why People Stop Reading Before the End of a Page

July 4, 2018 No Comments

By Nick Usborne

Every page you create has a purpose.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s a sales page, a subscription page, an about page, a blog post, or any other kind of page.

You publish it for a reason. You want something to happen.

Maybe you want someone to share the page on social media. Or you want readers to sign up for a newsletter. Or register for an event. Or click through to a sales page. Or complete a purchase.

Scratch the surface and you’ll find every page has a purpose.

But that purpose is rarely achieved if people don’t read to the end of the content.

To maximize the number of people who take action, you need to review every page you write and ask yourself if anything is getting in the way of them reading it from start to finish.

Remember, your reader’s attention is fragile. There are plenty of other pages she could be reading. Give her half an excuse and she’ll abandon you in a heartbeat.

And when that happens, your page just failed to achieve its purpose.

Let’s look at four common causes of that scenario.

Reason #1: You use too many empty words or phrases

Keeping in mind your readers’ fragility of attention, avoid writing like this:

“Always striving for excellence, from our very inception, a visionary, vigilant, and flexible approach has ensured that we are awake to the exciting possibilities science and technology allow, so that we can offer you beautiful, precise, and high-quality hardwood floors.”

I know. It’s hard to imagine that sentence ever got to see the light of day. Forty-one words that tell us absolutely nothing. But yes, that’s a real example, taken from the wild.

Here’s another one:

“These changes reflect our view that tighter integration and closer collaboration between our teams is a critical component of sustainably growing our business. While this process has required us to make some really tough decisions, we believe that rigorously ensuring our team structure always aligns with our goals will make us stronger.”

This is what they were trying to say … (in my own words, not theirs):

“Yeah, we had to fire some people.”

The point being, all that blah blah blah is a great way to drive people away.

Long phrases and sentences with almost zero meaning instantly dilute your readers’ interest and attention.

Empty calories. Air bubbles in a water pump. Not helpful.

Reason #2: You focus on more than one thing

This is a problem as old as marketing itself.

A savvy copywriter knows that to achieve the best results from any page, you need to stay focused on just one thing.

Coffee makers. Not coffee makers and coffee grinders.
Time tracking. Not time tracking and invoicing.
Running shoes. Not running shoes and climbing boots.

But it seems every marketing overlord in history always thinks it would be a cool idea to cover more than one topic per page.

I think it’s a bet-hedging thing.

“If they don’t buy the coffee maker, maybe they’ll buy the coffee grinder.”

Unlikely. Because by dividing everyone’s attention into two different directions, you’re halving the likelihood they’ll buy either one.

By all means, add links to related topics. But keep the focus of your page on a single item, service, or idea.

Reason #3: Your page looks or feels like hard work

This is a close cousin to Reason #1.

Empty words and phrases make it harder to read your page.

That 41-word sentence about hardwood floors is difficult to read because your mind is trying to figure out what the heck is going on.

A huge cognitive load is dumped on the reader. The author is asking his readers to do the work he should have done himself.

“Dear Reader, I’m too lazy to spend the time communicating my point simply and with clarity, so I’m going to dump 41 words of nonsense on your lap and ask you to figure it out at your end.”

Not going to happen.

Never ask your readers to do the heavy lifting.

Always find the simplest ways to make your point.

And then use short words and short sentences.

Like this.

Makes it super-easy to read. And understand.

Reason #4: You fail to engage your readers at an emotional level

Readers are not engaged by descriptions or facts, so don’t just list 25 amazing features of the software you’re selling.

If you want someone to keep reading to the end, you need to make him feel something. Find a way to engage him emotionally.

Tell him how using the software will free up tons of time he can then spend with his friends and family. Or how it will make him look good to his boss. Or make him a hero to other members of his team.

Give him a strong emotional stake in the outcome.

Lists of features do have a role to play. They can seal the deal.

But first you need to engage people at an emotional level. Touch them. Move them.

An emotionally engaged reader is not only a lot more likely to keep reading to the end of the page, but he’s also more likely to buy and then become a fan of your business.

Bonus: a 5th and final reason

I thought I was done with four reasons.

But I have one more suggestion. It’s a bit of a mashup of what we’ve covered so far.

When you get to the end of any page you’re writing, go back and make sure there is no break in the flow or unintended shift in the pace.

Sometimes a single sentence or paragraph can break the flow of an entire page.

And when that happens — when you make the reader pause or stumble — you lose a ton of readers. Remember the part about attention being fragile.

What do I mean by a break in flow or pace?

It could be you’re falling victim, even in a small way, to reason #1. Too much blah blah blah. Wading through that stuff is a total pace-killer.

Or maybe you’re having a problem with reason #2. You’re inserting a related thought or idea that’s kind of relevant, but actually more of a distraction. And as a result, you’re breaking the flow.

That last point? That’s one of my personal weaknesses as a writer.

I have the mind of a magpie and the attention span of a gnat.

The longer I spend on a page, the more likely I am to start breaking the flow with distracting ideas.

There’s a lesson there for all of us.

Know your weaknesses as a writer. Be aware of how you’re likely to fail your readers and lose them before the end of the page.

Then go back and revise.

By Nick Usborne

Nick Usborne has been working as a copywriter and trainer for over 35 years. His book, Net Words, published by McGraw-Hill in 2001, paved the way for a new generation of online writers and copywriters. Nick is the founder of Conversational Copywriting.

Sourced from copyblogger

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How to Use PPC Marketing to Find More Clients

July 4, 2018 No Comments

By Callum Mundine

The age of the Internet has given rise to the kind of workers the world never thought would gain so much traction: freelancers. These are people who use their varied skills to earn enough income without being bound by a contract tying them to only one company. They can collaborate with clients without the long-term commitment. It’s the ultimate freedom — or is it?

Like any job, freelancing has its fair share of challenges. Freelancers are not exempt from dealing with clients, conflicts in schedule, competition, and all those things nine-to-five employees face. If you’re a freelancer, you know this to be true.

Among the many hardships that freelancers face is one that can make or break their career: attracting and keeping clients. Both online and offline freelancers are faced with tough competition. To address this problem, you must stay one step ahead of your competitors. But how?

If you have access to the Internet, which I am sure you do, try using paid online advertising to get the ball rolling. The age of cold-calling is over, and thankfully, we have a new option: pay-per-click advertisements. Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing is one of the most common marketing schemes for small businesses. It works like a billboard ad in the sense that you pay for your space, but it gives you a much wider audience. This is especially beneficial to freelance online writers since we generally can’t employ the same marketing strategies as big businesses and brands.

What are the benefits of PPC marketing?

Unlike print advertising, PPC can instantly get your freelance writing services onto the radar of a large number of potential leads. It will give you the power to target your ads to a specific audience.

Because it is customizable, you can set it up to show your ad to specific areas and at certain times of the day. Best of all, you will only pay for the service each time a viewer clicks on your ad. This way, you’re only paying for those who are more likely to convert to actual clients. You even have the freedom to adjust your budget or redefine your target audience at any time, and the ad will reflect the changes almost instantly. It’s a great way to put yourself out there with maximum return on your investment.

Where do I set up my PPC marketing plan?

There are different types of PPC available on the Internet. You can go for search engine PPC advertising or social media PPC advertising — it depends on your industry and niche. For example, freelance writers may want to opt for search engine PPC marketing, as clients are more likely to turn to Google or Bing to look up writing services.

Search engine advertising provides targeted traffic and is keyword-driven. Leads are generated by people typing certain search words. Meanwhile, social media marketing is more interest-driven and appeals to people who share the same interests.

Whichever the case and whatever PPC you think will suit you best, here are the best PPC marketing channels that every freelancer can take advantage of to find more clients.

Google AdWords

Nowadays, more than 80% of online searches are done through Google. It has dominated the search engine market and is undeniably the most popular search engine.

Google AdWords is the PPC marketing system that Google offers businesses. Ads occupy the first four spots on the search results page and are shown again after ten organic search results. If a user clicks on your ad, they are redirected to your site or page, and Google AdWords charges you the corresponding fee. Advertisers bid for the top spots on the results page. The higher you are on the list, the better exposure you have.

As a freelance writer, you may not have a budget as large as big brands to bid for the top position, but setting up a PPC campaign can help you get the word out there without poking a hole in your wallet. You have the opportunity to attract more clients and only pay for those who are interested enough to click on your ad.

Facebook Ads

Most people who have access to the Internet have a Facebook account. We talk to friends and family, we share photos, we share memes, we organize events, we sell products — almost everything and everyone can be found on Facebook. So can your next client. It’s only a matter of getting the word out about your freelance writing services.

Facebook Ads are cheaper than almost all other online advertising options, and their reach is almost limitless. You can target your ad by behavior, interest, demographics, connections, you name it. You can even tailor it according to age range and location. This is a great way to show up in a potential client’s newsfeed and get noticed.

Be sure to identify who your target audience is and be as specific as you can. What do you specialize in as a freelance writer? Copywriting? SEO? Any specific niche you are best at? You have to know your target audience’s age group, interests, and location in order to reach them with your ads.

Next, do your research. Find out what days and the specific time your target audience is likely to be online. Create your ad based on their online activity. What are their problems and needs? What questions do they ask in relation to the service that you provide? What images do they like to see? Or maybe they would be more attracted to videos? Do they like memes? Would they respond to Facebook quizzes? People go on Facebook to be distracted, so be sure to provide them with the best distraction.

It is important to tailor your ads carefully to make it more effective. While this is true for all marketing campaigns, it applies especially to Facebook ads.

LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn is the professional older brother of Facebook. You will find even the most high-ranking executives on LinkedIn. Ads posted there will allow you to reach the key professionals in your industry. You can target your ad according to company names, company industry, company size, job functions, job titles, membership levels, and the like. If you are targeting professionals of a specific age or gender, you also have the option to target your ad to that demographic. On LinkedIn, you will see industry front-runners in the niche where you want to establish yourself as a writer.

LinkedIn’s PPC runs much higher compared to Facebook, at $5 per click. To get your money’s worth, be as specific as you can so your ad will generate higher quality leads. It is a good idea to segment your ads according to how you’ll be posting. You can also use sponsored updates, which appear in users’ newsfeeds, giving you premium placement.

Twitter Ads

Twitter offers the following advertising schemes:

promoted tweets
promoted accounts
promoted trends

The cost will largely depend on the type of ad you choose.

To promote a tweet, you will have to pay every time a user clicks the Favorite button, retweets your post, or replies to it. You will not have to pay per impression, which is the number of feeds your posts will show up on. A promoted tweet costs around $1.35 per engagement.

Promoting an account is essentially identifying a target audience to which Twitter will promote your account. This will work when you want to gain more followers that may be interested in your business. You pay per confirmed follower a fee of $2.50–$4.00.

Promoted trends, used typically by bigger companies, appear in the Trends section of Twitter and cost up to $200,000 per day.

While this may not be the most cost-effective PPC option for freelance writers, Twitter allows you to interact up close and personal with potential clients. This is still worth looking into if you’re willing to spend a little more on engagement.

How do I write my ad copy?

That being said, all ad copy is not created equal. The PPC campaign may grab a potential client’s attention, but your copy still holds the power of keeping them interested until they convert. Here are a few quick and easy tips to write better copy for your ads:

Hint at your services’ benefits. What will your client get if they hire you as a freelance writer? How will you help their business? Are you an SEO expert? Do you have other skills? Capitalize on that and highlight it in your ad. Remember to answer this question that most clients will ask: “What’s in it for me?”
Hint at your competitors’ weaknesses and gaps. This doesn’t have to be blunt and outright, but you must mention why they should choose you instead of other freelance writers.
Get to know your audience. Target a specific group or industry and focus your message on them by using “you” instead of “we.” It is also important to understand your medium — that is, which PPC platform are you putting your ad in?
Don’t forget a call-to-action. After you’ve laid out all your strengths and your competition’s weaknesses, make it count. Don’t leave your audience hanging and confused as to what you want them to do. Include a clear call-to-action that catches the eye.
Lastly, proofread. Proofreading will save you a lot of trouble, and it always pays to double-check your work before you release it on the Internet where it is much harder to take back.

Final thoughts

Any marketing plan will only initially get the client’s attention, then it’s up to you to keep the client. Remember to be true to what you promised in your ad and keep your integrity as a freelancer. After all, a good reputation goes a long way.

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Originally published at prowritingaid.com.

By Callum Mundine

Callum Mundine is part of the marketing team at One Egg. He is an Amazon marketplace & white hat link building specialist, and has launched multiple successful brands on Amazon.com. Callum like his eggs boiled.

Sourced from The Writing Cooperative