Amazon‘s profits might have fallen for the first time in two years, but its advertising revenue outshone its overall sales growth in the most recent quarter – showing brands are taking it seriously as a challenger to the Google-Facebook duopoly.
During its most recent earnings call on Thursday (24 October), the e-commerce giant revealed that sales were up, but profit had slumped year-on-year for the first time since mid-2017.
The business reported a third-quarter profit of $2.1bn, a drop of 28% on the previous year, which was put down to investments in shipping and warehouses to help its core retail business maintain its edge.
Over the past three months, the businesses has garnered $70bn in revenues; up from 24% on on the same quarter last year.
Advertising revenue growth was a bright spot in the company’s results, with ‘other revenue’ (which principally refers to Amazon’s ad business) hitting $3bn over the three months to the end of September, up 45% on the same quarter last year.
Driving ‘relevancy’ and looking beyond search
The firm’s chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky said it was “very happy” with its ad sales progress and that it was now focused on helping brands deliver more targeted ads within the Amazon ecosystem.
“We continue to focus on advancing advertising experiences there, [making them] helpful for customers and helping them to see new products. We want to empower our businesses to find attracting and engage these customers and it’s increasingly popular with vendor sellers and third-party advertisers,” he added.
“It’s still early and what we’re focused on really at this point is relevancy, making sure that the ads are relevant to our customers, helpful to our customers, and to do that, we use machine learning and that’s helping us to drive better, better and better relevancy.”
Earlier this month it was reported that Amazon was eating into Google’s search dominance, with eMarketer forecasting that Amazon’s share is expected to grow to 15.9% by 2021, with Google’s expected to contract to 70.5%.
However, Dave Fildes, Amazon’s director of investor relations said that increased adoption among brands was pushing the company to expand its video and OTT offerings.
Pointing to the ad-supported movie streaming service it recently launched on IMDb and live sporting deals, Fildes said it planned to ad more inventory to the latter and across its Fire TV apps via Amazon Publisher Services integrations.
“[We’re also looking at] streamlining access for third-party apps and really just making it easier for advertisers to manage their campaigns and provide better results,” he continued.
Aaron Goldman, chief marketing officer, at self-service ad platform 4C Insights highlighted how quickly Amazon is ramping up its ad platform.
“It has the unique ability to close the loop from purchase intent to sales and allow brands use that data for ad targeting and measurement,” he explained, saying clients using 4C’s platform had upped their spend by 250% in the past year.
Feature Image Credit: Advertising revenue growth was a bright spot in the company’s results / Amazon
Hard as it may be to believe, it’s that time of year again – and no, I’m not talking about making Christmas lists, planning how best to avoid the in-laws over the festive season, and having mild panic attacks about how you’re going to afford all the presents and festivities that the coming months have in store. No, it’s the end of another year, which means it’s time to speculate about content trends for the coming 12 months.
Here are four trends that I think will have a significant impact on SEO content in 2020:
It’s not about length – it’s what you do with it that counts
As digital marketers, we sometimes get a little obsessed with hard and fast rules. It’s inevitable. We work in an industry based on understanding and algorithms, on following best practices, using fool-proof formulae, getting the inputs just right to achieve a precise result. A lot of the time, I think that’s what makes what we do rewarding. But I think one of the mistakes we make is to look for a right answer when there isn’t one.
The question of how long a piece of content should be is divisive because there really is no right answer. Actually, it’s worse than that. There are a lot of right answers. People have short attention spans, so writing concise, 500-word blogs is the way to go, right? But if you look at the top result for just about any search, you’ll find the word count rarely dips below a thousand. So longer must be better, then. Well, you can’t argue with the fact that most readers only get about halfway through a piece of content, and that many don’t even scroll to begin with. The reality is that there’s no ideal length for content, because length in itself doesn’t mean anything. What does matter is how well you’re answering the question, or addressing the needs of your reader.
In my experience, it’s safer to lean towards the longer side. There’s nothing more frustrating than seeing a great-sounding blog title, and opening the link to find 200 words of half-baked, keyword-stuffed content that doesn’t really say anything at all. It’s equally painful, though, when you start reading a long-form article and realise the writer is trying to draw out a 300 word idea into 3,000. Ultimately, longer content is good, but there are certainly diminishing returns.
Voice search will make you question everything
‘Always read your writing aloud.’ That might be the single best piece of advice I’ve ever heard as a writer. And, since voice search is expected to account for as much as half of all online search traffic by 2020, it takes on a new meaning: if you aren’t reading your own writing out loud, Google’s going to do it for you, and you’d better make sure the results are good enough to drive interaction or conversion.
The key thing to realise here is that voice search is fundamentally different from text search. The average text search phrase, for example, is around one to three words, while the average voice search phrase hovers more around three to six words. Voice searches are also far more likely to be phrased as questions. People talk to their voice assistants like they’re talking to a real person, so it follows that content should respond in kind if it hopes to meet the needs of the searcher.
For content to soak up the lion’s share of voice searches, it needs to be written more conversationally than you might be used to, and it needs to hone in on answering the questions that the user is asking. Content that answers questions head-on, shows a clear understanding of search intent and sheds as much of the unnecessary detail as possible is bound to perform better for voice search traffic, so expect this trend to become increasingly prevalent in the coming months and years.
Zero is greater than one
Another consequence of voice assistants becoming the go-to search channel is the importance of Position Zero: whenever a user inputs a voice search query, their assistant will read out the position zero result before delivering the rest. So, even if you’re dominating the search results for the entire first page, a competitor with the zero spot is going to soak up 100% of the voice search traffic and leave your hard-fought position one content starved for clicks.
Gartner estimates that around a third of searches will be done without a screen at all in 2020, which means that anything beyond the position zero result might as well not exist for voice search purposes. Expect blogging content and other written forms to include an increasing amount of structured data, rich data snippets, and content specifically designed to rank above position 1. This will be particularly important for content with a local element (since a large part of voice search queries centre around local search) and bottom-of-the-funnel searches.
This time, it’s personal
There’s no doubt that personalised marketing messaging works. We live in the age of the individual consumer: people are accustomed to their social media feeds, email inboxes and mobile experiences being tailored to their preferences and interests. So, it follows that expectations are the same for any content they engage with while searching or browsing.
For advertising the remedy is rather simple: serve ads that are targeted at specific factors and show an awareness of the individual customer’s context, preferences and their position in the sales funnel. But for ‘raw’ SEO content – that is, blogs, website copy, landing pages, etc. – it’s a little less straightforward. Depending on how deep down the rabbit hole you want to go, you could include forms, quizzes and surveys to understand exactly who you’re talking to before serving them tailored content, or you could go the simpler route and profile your user base into different personas who are likely to respond to different messaging.
Expect increasingly tailored, topic-focused content to come to the fore even more so than it already has in recent years. Again, customers are increasingly engaging with content that makes real conversation with them and demonstrates an understanding of their context, preferences and what they’re looking for. The more granular you can get when it comes to understanding those factors, the better you’ll resonate with your readers.
We know that exceptional content is what makes a brand. We also know that analysing our data to very specifically target audiences is crucial for great ROI. But we rarely put the two together and use the data available to actually analyse what content works – and why.
Yet knowing exactly why content works can give us that winning edge. And, luckily, the ability to see what indisputably resonates the most with our audience – and drives our bottom-line – is already in our hands.
The state of play
In the climate of the current ‘data boom’, audience targeting naturally takes precedence, with the majority (55%) of marketers saying ‘better use of data’ for audience targeting is their priority in 2019, according to Econsultancy.
It makes sense. On a daily basis, we’re faced with countless blogs, podcasts, speakers and everything in-between promising that if we perfectly optimise our targeting, our messaging will beat the daunting odds of the 0.9% CTR cited by WordStream. And so, we dedicate hours and hours every week to creating personas, hypothesising about audiences, segmenting users and running lengthy A/B tests to find the piece of content that our audience love. We add to our already-complex marketing stacks tools that tell us what messaging has been more successful, in order for us to optimise.
But when we do find that winner, do we know why it works? Do we know exactly what features caused the higher CTR? Do we know how we’re going to recreate it in our next campaign, to make it better, even?
This lack of knowledge – despite all the tools and techniques we use to offer insight – is what we at Datasine call the ‘black box’ because when it comes to understanding why, we are left in the dark. Just looking at results doesn’t give us the insight needed to truly understand content preferences in an actionable way.
Semantic content analysis
To crack open the black box, we need to start conducting in-depth semantic analysis of our content. Only then can we begin to truly understand why some content resonates and some doesn’t.
As experienced marketers, we come prepackaged with a deep understanding of – and fascination with – psychology and our audience, meaning we’ve already got the skills on paper to analyse our content. It’s simply a matter of breaking it down into parts. We’ll look at this in terms of images and text.
If you want to analyse your imagery, you can take all the image assets you’ve ever created and note down the particular elements you used in each, then check to see if there are any patterns which relate those choices to your ad performance.
For example:
Did you use a photo of your product outdoors? Or in the showroom?
Were people visible in the shot?
What was the size of the text, and the colour of any overlays or CTAs?
It may even be worth inviting a panel to judge your images on the emotions that they evoke, or photographers to assess the quality and composition of the shot.
You can do the same for text content, approaching this by categorising how you describe your product or service. For example:
Do you appeal to your product’s ease of use?
Are you emphasising your innovative credentials?
Do you use particularly casual – or formal – language?
With this process, we can see which types of content are receiving the most engagement. And we can use these features to keep creating great campaigns that we further optimise as our understanding of customer content preferences grows.
Scaling content analysis
If we have just a few campaigns on the go, content analysis is easier, but it gets harder as we scale. It stops being practical to expect humans to spend days, weeks, even months labelling what goes into each piece of content. Here’s where machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) come to the rescue.
By embracing semantic content analysis and working collaboratively with AI, we can feel confident in understanding exactly what content is going to work before we hit send.
A few years ago I was working on the Coffee vs Gangs content series. After a successful launch, which saw Kenco help young Hondurans out of gangs by training them as coffee farmers, l found myself in an all agency meeting. After some initial self-congratulatory backslapping, discussion of the ‘raw authenticity’ led to a new addition to the group confidently chiming in.
‘I loved the first series and was wondering if it might be possible to see some of the kids from the gangs drinking Kenco’.
Awkward pause.
We’ll come back to that.
Fast-forward a few years to The Drum Content Awards, of which I recently had the pleasure of sitting on the judging panel. To kick off the day all the judges took part in an ice breaker, where we were asked to share our thoughts on ‘authenticity’ in content.
A question like this is catnip for content professionals. And the 25 of us, all released from our respective agencies formed a warm cosy echo chamber. One which made us feel reassured that we are all saying the same things to our clients and none of us are doing it wrong.
I listened. But I contributed nothing. Because the only thought I had ringing around my head was ‘isn’t all this just bollocks?’ Which wouldn’t have gone down well at all.
That’s not to say that my fellow judges didn’t engage in an intelligent and considered discussion. But this wasn’t about them. It was about the concept of ‘authenticity’ itself.
Before I go on, I dare any current creative or content specialist to review their proposals, treatments and pitches delivered in the last three months and not cringe at overuse bordering on abuse of the word.
The truth is, it’s become a dog whistle we blow on in front of our colleagues and clients to try and sell ideas without thinking about it. But when you actually think about it, it means very little on the outside world.
When was the last time anyone saw a piece of content and said ‘I love it because of its authenticity’?
Never.
Because no one ever says that.
Alongside ‘disruptive’, ‘authentic’ has become a nonsense husk of a word that means nothing and everything to us in our comfy communications and marketing circles.
That’s not to say that Kaepernick or Patagonia Black Friday didn’t come from a truly brilliant place. In the same way that featuring a bunch of troubled kids from gangs drinking Kenco obviously comes from a hideous one. But let’s not over inflate the sentiment behind this too much. Or to bastardise the words of Scroobius Pip –
Nike. Just a brand
Patagonia. Just a brand
Kenco. Just a brand
When a consumer engages with any form of content made by a brand or business an unspoken contract is entered into. ‘I know you are trying to sell me something or make me like you so I eventually buy something. But I’m willing to let you do that in exchange for getting something back’.
And this is far more authentic than authenticity. Because authenticity may be dead, but the authentic value exchange is very much alive.
I am willing to engage with your marketing, communication or advertising in exchange for you entertaining me. Making me laugh. Teaching me something new. Helping me with utility that enables me to do my job better.
Authentic value exchange. Much better. Not hiding behind the fact that something is authentic just for the sake of it when we all know what’s going on. Consumers are not stupid.
And that’s what was great about judging The Drum Content Awards. To see so many examples of exceptional work that creates a compelling value exchange between brand and consumer.
Examples that used comedy in exchange for brand trust around online security (Santander), that answered fuel economy questions in exchange for consideration of an electric alternative (Nissan Leaf) and that showed future parents what having children really looks like to build market share of their baby wipe brand (WaterWipes).
And by the way, in case you were interested.
We never featured any gang member drinking Kenco.
Now that’s authentic.
Feature Image Credit: ‘Who actually loves authentic content?’ Brands need to understand their value exchange
Ryan Reddick, creative director, Edelman is a judge for The Drum Content Awards 2019. A full list of the finalists can be found here. The awards ceremony will take place in London on October 30 at The Marriot Grosvenor Square Hotel, tickets can be purchased now.
So you have a team of salespeople hungry for more leads.
You already have a few channels that help you acquire leads, but such efforts aren’t scalable and the lead quality isn’t high.
What do you do?
If you want to start generating more leads and avoid any of the problems you currently face, then you’ve got to try LinkedIn ads.
In contrast with two of its most popular counterparts, Facebook Ads or Google Adwords, LinkedIn ads represent a unique opportunity for B2B marketers. eMarketer found that B2B marketers named LinkedIn advertising to be as effective as Facebook.
Last year LinkedIn generated over $2 billion in revenue from its advertising platform. While a small fraction of Facebook or Google’s revenues, increasing numbers of marketers are shifting budgets to LinkedIn, with 42% of media buyers planning to increase their spend in 2019.
Driven by this stellar growth LinkedIn updated it’s ad platform in mid-2019 focussing on what it calls objective based advertising. In this guide you’ll learn everything you need to know about the new experience, so you can understand how to advertise on LinkedIn today.
“The devil is in the detail” or so the saying goes, so before we get started with the nitty-gritty of creating a LinkedIn advertising campaign, let’s cover the basics.
In order to start a LinkedIn ads campaign, you need to have a company page.
You likely already have one opened.
If you don’t, then this handy guide that will show you the steps you need to take to open it.
Another important basic is to install LinkedIn’s Insight Tag. This is a small Javascript tag that will help you set up conversion tracking (so you can measure how many people convert from your ads), website audiences, and uncover your visitor’s demographic data. You can find it under the Account Assets menu in your Campaign Manager.
What’s more, the Insight Tag will help you run retargeted advertising campaigns, which as you will see, are incredibly effective and powerful.
While you install the tag, you also want to set up conversion tracking, which will help you see the actual conversions of your campaigns.
With the basics covered, let’s start with the actual LinkedIn ad campaign creation process.
LinkedIn Ad Campaign Objectives
Step 1: How to pick a winning objective
The first step in any successful LinkedIn ads campaign starts with picking the right objective.
The objective will impact on your entire campaign—from the ad type to the budget to the ad format.
Each objective corresponds to a different part of the marketing funnel, as LinkedIn shows:
These three steps correspond to the typical marketing funnel, where each step focuses on a different objective:
Awareness focuses on reaching as many people as possible
Consideration focuses on engaging and persuading visitors to take action and find out more about your business
Conversion focuses on generating leads and converting people in your site
These new objective based advertising campaigns will focus on delivering your ad to the person most likely to take your desired action—let’s take a look at each of these three steps and which objective works best for your campaign goal.
Awareness Objectives
Awareness is all about showing your brand to everyone with whom you can connect. You don’t focus so much on clicks or conversions; what matters most is that people see your ads, that they get to know your brand through mere exposure, and to get them familiarized with it.
In this step, your key metric is the number of impressions you generate—the point at which an ad is displayed in front of a visitor, regardless of whether they actually see your ad or read its content.
Brand Awareness
LinkedIn offers only one objective for this stage of the funnel, one that’s appropriately called “brand awareness.”
One of the beautiful aspects of online advertising is that you can track the effectiveness of a campaign down to the click. Awareness, however, is all about getting people to see your ad, not act on it, so why would anyone choose this ad?
Simply put, because this objective can help you increase your reach (if that’s what you care about), get more followers to your page, and engage with a new audience.
For example, if you’re running an account-based marketing (ABM) campaign, and you have a specific audience you want to connect with, the awareness objective will help you reach them before you start a sales conversation.
Consideration Objectives
Here’s where the advertising gets scientific. At this stage of the funnel, you want people to click on your ads; you want visits, views, and actions (albeit in a non-commercial way).
There are three objectives you can use in this stage:
Website Visits
The name is self-explanatory: with this objective, you get people to visit your site.
Clear, simple, and awesome—who wouldn’t want more visitors to their company’s site?
What you do with people once they do so is a different game.
You can get people to check a new post of yours (which is great if you’re retargeting them from a previous article they read), to sign up for your latest webinar, or to sign up for a trial.
Because the volume of data needed to optimize your bidding is much lower than with the lead generation objective (as you will see later), this objective is a great start for any action you want people to take in your site.
Engagement
When you’re getting started with LinkedIn advertising, you may want to increase the quantity and quality of your following.
That is, you want people to follow you, and you want them to like you; you want to develop a relationship, and as you know, that takes time.
The engagement objective is the perfect fit if you want to get more people to follow your business page and to like or comment on your posts.
The more people that follow you and the more engaged they are, the cheaper it will be to promote your content to them. What’s more, your messaging will be more effective, a goal worthy to any advertiser.
If your business goal is tightly connected with developing thought leadership, brand awareness, and traffic acquisition, then using videos, and the video views objective in LinkedIn, will help you increase the distribution of your content.
Conversion Objectives
This is the stage where the rubber meets the road. This stage is all about getting people with whom you’ve engaged before to take a specific action.
More specifically, that action could be an information exchange for lead generation, a download, a signup, or a job application.
Similarly to Facebook advertising, these objectives tend to have a higher CPC and the focus needs to be on your cost per conversion, but they are highly effective once you get the whole system working.
In the case of LinkedIn, there are three objectives available, which you’ll see in greater depth below.
Lead Generation
The beautiful aspect of LinkedIn is that it’s a perfect match for those marketers are looking for strategies to generate leads. Just think that 80% of their users are decision makers, and because of that, as Hubspot found, their lead conversion rates are 3x higher than other major ad platforms.
You can acquire leads with a network like Facebook, but you’d need to do a lot of pre-qualification before you can attract professionals to your site. There’s a lot of people who simply aren’t interested in registering for a webinar when they’re relaxing in their homes.
With LinkedIn, you know who’s who—you want a director of marketing to sign up for a demo for your enterprise software? You got it; your entire campaign can be built only for that specific audience.
To make things even better, LinkedIn lets you generate leads right from their site without having prospects go to your site.
Enter lead gen forms, which pre-fills their information and gets them to sign up to your offer right away.
Website Conversions
If you want to target specific conversions on your site, then this objective is perfect for you.
Thanks to the Insight Tag, which by this point you should have installed, you can optimize for any type of conversion—from a product purchase to a demo request to software sign up.
Once you have set up the campaign with the conversions objective, LinkedIn will then optimize towards the people most likely to complete a conversion. That is, the more data LinkedIn gathers on the types of people that complete your on-site conversion, the better it will get at optimizing your ads to show to people with similar profiles.
If you’re a marketer who’s conversion-driven, then this objective is perfect for you.
Job Applicants
The last objective is perfect for those companies who are competing for the best talent and need an extra boost to their job application listing.
As with the previous objective, LinkedIn optimizes your ads for the users who they’ve found to be more likely to click on your job post. Not only do you get more applicants to your job listing; you bid for the right ones.
LinkedIn Ads Targeting
Step 2: How to target the right audience
When it comes to B2B sales and marketing, LinkedIn advertising has a unique advantage over competing ad platforms. Due to the detailed employment information that LinkedIn’s 630M members upload to their profiles, you can target people based on extremely accurate employee and company data.
If you want to target the VP of Engineering at tech companies with more than 500 employees, then guess what? You can do that with LinkedIn; it’s the perfect matchmaker for your brand.
The targeting options LinkedIn provides allow you to develop incredibly precise B2B marketing campaigns which you can use to attract the right accounts.
Alongside basic data such as Location and Language there are five targeting options you can choose from:
Company: Which include company connections, followers, industry, name, and size
Demographics: Which include age and gender of the specific people to whom you want to contact
Education: Which include degrees, fields of study, and member schools
Job Experience: Which include job function, seniority, job title, skills, and years of experience
Interests: Which include groups the user is part of and its interests
One of the most interesting ways you can create unique targeting options is to use the “exclude,” “include,” or “narrow by” options. With these options, you can potentially target someone who doesn’t traditionally fit within a certain audience (like chief executives with not more than 10 years of experience) or that’s highly targeted (like vice presidents who are under 40 years old).
What’s more, you can utilize LinkedIn’s own internal data to grow your reach, a feature that LinkedIn calls “audience expansion,” or your own data to retarget users and prospects who often already know you, a feature which LinkedIn calls “matched audience.”
Use Audience Expansion for Lower Costs and Increased Reach
Once you’ve found an audience that works for your advertising campaigns, you can create a new campaign that targets other similar audiences.
That’s where the “audience expansion” feature comes into play. Audience expansion uses LinkedIn’s algorithms to find and reach people that have similar attributes to your tested target audience.
For example, if you’re getting high conversion rates with a campaign that targets VPs of Marketing, then LinkedIn may find that a campaign with the same message that targets Directors of Marketing works equally well.
Use Matched Audiences for Retargeting
If you’re constantly targeting new people who don’t know your brand, you’re wasting a lot of opportunities.
There’s nothing wrong with generating new demand for your offers, but since your company already generates traffic in your website, that traffic is a potential goldmine for new business opportunities.
Matched audiences help you target people who have visited your site, signed up for a gated piece of content (think a webinar or white paper), or who have done any type of business with you (think a demo trial or a proposal).
Two of the most common uses of matched audiences is to retarget website visitors based on your pixel’s data, or target your email list.
You can even mix and match these matched audiences with audience expansion to expand your audience from your email list.
Use Matched Audiences for Account-Based Marketing
What’s more, you can upload account lists to your matched audiences. That means, you can upload a list of company names and site URLs, and then target anyone who works at those companies.
One of the easiest ways to get started with this is to upload a list of high-intent accounts and advertise to your key buyer persona job titles at these companies. If you’re into ABM, then this is a game-changer.
How do you find high-intent accounts? A great way to get started is to use a platform like Leadfeeder. This enables you to identify the companies visiting your website by connecting with your Google Analytics. You can then export lists of companies visiting your website, upload to LinkedIn as an account list in your matched audiences, and use this data to power your LinkedIn ABM ad campaign.
Take a no-obligation 14-day free trial of Leadfeeder today, identify the companies visiting your website and try running some LinkedIn ABM campaigns with this data.
Forecasted Results
Once you’ve selected your audience targeting, LinkedIn will show the forecasted reach and expected volume of traffic for your campaign. These numbers will be affected by your daily budgets and bids—which you’ll select shortly—and they provide a great way to benchmark the actual performance of your campaign versus LinkedIn’s predictions.
LinkedIn Ad Types
Step 3: How to choose the right ad for your business
LinkedIn offers a wide format of ads, which vary in cost and complexity of implementation.
Such a wide range of options will raise an immediate question: which ad type should you use?
As always happens with anything related to marketing, the answer will depend on your needs, budget, and expertise.
Without a deep look at your company, no one can tell you which LinkedIn ad type to choose from. The best way to make the right decision is to take a look at each ad type with more detail.
Fortunately, that’s exactly what we’ll do next.
Sponsored Content
If you’ve ever been browsing through LinkedIn and you saw an ad right in your news feed midway through your scrolling, then that was a sponsored content ad.
Or, guess what? If a post has a small piece of text that says “Sponsored Post,” then that’s sponsored content.
Simply put, a sponsored content ad promotes content. If this sounds too basic and obvious, it’s because it is.
You’ve got content—a blog post, a white paper, a webinar—and you just want more people to see it. What do you do? You get this ad working.
There are many ways you can feature your content in the news feed, and next I will show you how they look.
Single Image Ads
Single image ads are the standard type of sponsored content. They promote any post you publish to a broader audience, with a single landscape image to capture your audience’s attention.
Video Ads
Video ads are the same as single image ads with the exception that the ad creative is a video instead of a static image. Similarly to Facebook, the video will auto-play as a person scrolls over it in their feed. The sound will be set to mute by default—so it’s a good idea to include subtitle captions in your video.
Carousel Ads
There will be cases where you will have multiple images to show within a given post. Carousel ads allow you to showcase those images and maximize the impact of your ad.
Carousel ads are especially useful when you want to tell a story within your carousel images, so you can command your audience’s attention and connect through the power of storytelling.
Lead Generation Ads
As explained before, lead gen forms allow you to pre-fill your ads with your prospect’s information so you can acquire a lead right from the ad.
It goes without saying that the effectiveness of lead gen form ads lays in the ease to convert a LinkedIn user into a lead. If you have a piece of content, like an ebook, a report, or a specs sheet, then lead gen forms will be the best investment you can make.
Dynamic Ads
The dream of sending personalized ads on scale is starting to become a reality. Dynamic ads allow you to create an ad that targets a specific audience.
For example, if you want to show an ad to chief executives, dynamic ads deliver targeted messages that speak to that audience specifically.
Currently, you can only access dynamic ads if you spend at least $25,000 per quarter on LinkedIn advertising.
Text Ads
Text ads promote a message in the right column of the newsfeed. These ads are smaller and less intrusive than sponsored content, and tend to have a lower CTR.
You can show these ads within a user’s inbox or on the side of the LinkedIn homepage. The text snippet is accompanied by a thumbnail to call the attention of your audience.
These ads look more similar to the traditional Google Ads, where you have a headline, a small description, and a CTA (plus the image, which the former doesn’t show).
Sponsored InMail
If you’ve ever received a message from someone you don’t know and who’s trying to promote a piece of content or push some time of offer, that was a sponsored InMail.
LinkedIn allows users to message people who are within their network. If you’re promoting a piece of content and you have hundreds of relevant connections, you may get some good results. But if you want to message thousands of potential leads, you can’t do it unless you use InMail.
InMail is a premium feature that allows you to send a message to anyone you want, regardless of the fact you lack any connection with that person.
Sponsored InMail takes this feature even further, allowing you to promote a message so it shows up at the top of the recipient’s inbox. Such promotion can be useful when matched with a retargeting campaign.
LinkedIn Ads Costs, Bids and Budgets
Step 4: How to pick an ROI-friendly bid
In order to make your LinkedIn ads cost-effective, you must bid to the point where you get the most exposure—whether that’s measured in impressions, clicks, or actions—and the least amount of money spent.
Such balance is hard to get, especially when you’re first getting started and LinkedIn’s algorithms don’t have enough data to optimize your ads correctly.
There are two types of bids you can choose from that vary slightly dependent on your campaign objective:
Maximum cost bid: With this option, you select the maximum amount of money you’re willing to bid for, by providing a CPC, CPM or CPV.
Automated bid: With this option, LinkedIn uses historical campaign data and user information to automatically set and adjust your bid, optimizing towards your chosen campaign objective.
To define which bid strategy you want to take, think on what’s your ultimate goal behind your campaigns.
If you want the most amount of impressions, clicks, or conversions, then the automated bid is the best option for you. Since LinkedIn optimizes your bids with the intention of maximizing your objective, they will make sure you get the results, albeit by overspending.
If you want to control your costs, then the maximum cost bid is your best choice. The problem with this strategy is that you may underbid—that is, you’ll bid for less than the amount you need to get any exposure whatsoever. For that reason, it’s a smart idea to start with an automated bid—letting LinkedIn gather data for you—and pair this with a daily budget cap to ensure your spend is limited.
Once you know how much each bid really costs, you can then optimize your campaigns based on this data.
You can optimize your bids around different metrics, depending on your objective. LinkedIn offers a handy table with all the information available around this topic:
The ad you create will depend on your LinkedIn ad type and format. Since there are three ad types and eight ad formats, we’ve got 24 different variations from where to create an ad. That’s a lot of combinations.
But to simplify everything, here are the basics for creating the best sponsored ads, the best sponsored inmail, and the best text ads.
Creating a high-converting LinkedIn Sponsored Ad
Sponsored ads are native advertising—that is, the content fits naturally within the LinkedIn feed amongst non-sponsored content your target audience is browsing.
The key to creating sponsored ads then is to make them look natural.
You want people to feel as if they’re not seeing an ad, but reading a useful and relevant piece of content.
Your headline should be under 70 characters, and your main copy should be under 150 characters, both of which act as the leverage that stops people in their tracks and makes them read your ad. You can create ads with longer text, but the copy will likely be truncated.
The image is another important element, which often magnifies the idea of the piece. You can use a text-free image, which should illustrate the idea of the ad, or one with text to cement the message of the ad even further.
You can play with video as well, which is a type of media that has shown more engaging than images or text.
The IAB has found that video ads have much higher CTRs than native, banner, and interstitial (i.e., full-screen) ads.
While it’s time-consuming and more expensive to produce than written content, video ads are part of the new wave of media content that you need to try to differentiate your ads from the competition.
Creating a high-converting LinkedIn Sponsored InMail
No one likes to get unsolicited mail. Such is the fact of anyone who tries to get someone to act upon an offer when sent by mail or LinkedIn’s InMail, but it shouldn’t demotivate you.
LinkedIn has reported that the sponsored InMail campaigns have open rates between 35 to 50%, and they go as high as over 70%, comparing very favourably with email campaigns.
Such results make a sponsored InMail campaign pretty enticing.
Think of your sponsored InMail campaign as if you were writing the recipient an email. Therefore, the rules that apply to effective email outreach apply as well to a sponsored InMail campaign.
To start, your InMail should be clear and concise to get your target to pay attention to your message. Your offer should be clear right away so the recipient doesn’t have to guess what you’re trying to do.
Related to the clarity of your InMail comes relevancy. To increase the relevancy of your message, consider using a list of your website visitors or target accounts you’d like to work with as a potential target list for a sponsored InMail campaign.
Finally, given the upfront and cold nature of the contact, you want to align your offer with your recipient. Think on a high-value offer that doesn’t demand much time or effort for your recipient to act upon, especially if this recipient knows you.
As I’ve said before, text ads have more in common with the traditional Google Ads than with the other ads seen in this guide.
You have much less ad real estate to play with, so your job is to maximize the words you use to engage with your audience.
Text ads are made up of four elements:
Headline
Ad Copy
Ad Destination
Image
There’s not a lot of space for creativity with text ads. It’s all about positioning your ads the right way with the right words and expressions.
Given the constraints imposed with text ads, you want to follow the advice from Upworthy and write a number of variations of each headline and ad copy so you can pick the right combination based on performance.
In contrast with sponsored content, text ads look like ads. There’s no way you can convince people that what you have isn’t an offer. Your text ad thus won’t be competing with other feed content, but with other ads.
The text ads that get all the clicks are the ones that best speak to the end user.
If your audience is made up of directors of marketing, then your headline can say something like:
Your images, while small, can also help make your ad stand out. Something that’s a bit surprising or shocking can work wonders as long as it’s not offensive or misleading.
To find the right text ad combination, there’s a lot of testing you can do. As a marketer, you never know what people like or what will connect with them. Test every element until you find the best-converting ad.
LinkedIn Ads Optimization
Step 6: Analyze, improve, rinse and repeat
One of the wonders of online marketing is that you can track and measure everything you do. LinkedIn Ads are no exception.
Earlier in this guide you saw how the Insight tag allows you to track and measure your conversions, including your content downloads, sign-ups, purchases, and more.
This information is easily accessible in the LinkedIn Ads Dashboard, where you can see all the basic data expected from paid media — like impressions, clicks, CTR, conversions, among other metrics — as well as a performance chart which displays a graph of the results of your campaigns.
Beyond this standard analytics dashboard, LinkedIn offers a unique demographics chart which breaks down your campaign engagement by your audience’s job function, job title, industry and much more.
The data provided in the demographics chart is another fantastic feature which B2B sales and marketing professionals won’t get with another ad platform—it goes beyond basic numbers to show you much more detail about who is actually engaging with your campaigns.
Conclusion
If you have read this far, then you must be thinking “where do I get started?”
The answer is easy: pick one objective; the one that’s most pressing.
From there, define a target audience—if you have an email list or target account list, then upload this as a matched audience, and use it to engage and educate these targets.
Finally, choose your ad type—sponsored content is the safest bet to start with—and the ad creative.
Let LinkedIn optimize the bidding for you, and wait until you start to see results. Rinse and repeat.
Like any new marketing channel, LinkedIn ads will take some time for you to master. But if you keep refining your audience targeting, bidding strategies, and your ad creatives, you will start to see an increased return on your investment.
Want to get started with LinkedIn Account Based Marketing ad campaigns? Sign up to Leadfeeder to generate lists of high-intent accounts that have visited your website and use them to power your LinkedIn ad campaigns. Get started with a 14 day free trial today.
As the old question goes, “If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Well, I want to update it: “If you have a great product, but no one knows about it, then what’s the point?”
I’m proud of my e-liquid, so I want to get the word out to my demographic. How else will they know about it? But budgeting for marketing can be tricky, especially for a small business, so I have to switch my trucker hat for my thinking cap or else I might rush into spending too rashly.
So what is the right amount to budget for marketing when you own a small business? Should you focus on ads or public relations? I’m going to break it down for you.
Advertising vs. PR
Before I get into how to budget, let me define my terms. Advertising is what you project to the world, as in a social media ad that says, “Hey, check out my new e-liquid.” PR involves more of a subtle dance with the community. You want to interact with your consumers and get them to fall in love with your product, and then they can tell the world how awesome it is.
Case in point: Spending money on a billboard at a music festival is advertising, but showing up at the festival and giving out samples is PR. By interacting directly with the public, you can create a buzz. Who knows? You might even make a splash in the local paper, which creates another wave of PR momentum.
Setting Your Budget
When it comes to marketing, you usually get what you pay for. It’s a numbers game, and it scales to fit the size of your business and the scope of your growth. According to marketing communications consultant Caron Beesley in a post on the U.S. Small Business Administration’s blog, many businesses set aside 2-3% of their revenue for “run-rate marketing and up to 3-5% for start-up marketing.” The percentage can vary by industry, the size of your company and what stage it’s in, of course. Retail businesses in their early years, for example, spend as much as 20% of sales on marketing. After all, you’ve got to create a spark before you can ignite your dreams.
Setting a marketing budget can be different for small businesses like mine. “As a general rule, small businesses with revenues less than $5 million should allocate 7-8% of their revenues to marketing,” Beesley writes. That number might even double when you’re first building your brand to account for trial and error, video production and other ancillary factors.
PR is an entirely different beast from advertising, even when it comes to budgeting. Ideally, PR and advertising should each have their own individual budget. I recommend testing some advertising and PR strategies to find out what works best for your brand before you decide how to divvy up your budget. Try putting a small advertisement in a magazine that shares the same customer base as your product.
Or better yet, think of some free or low-cost PR options. In my case, extreme sports events, car shows and concerts are all places where I’ve created some word of mouth by showing up and introducing my product to attendees.
Is It Working?
This is a question to ask early and often as you determine how to allocate your marketing budget. Check the data on where the traffic to your website is coming from and how much of that traffic is converting to sales, and then assess your return on investment before heavily investing in any specific advertising channel or form of PR. If people are seeing your social media ads but ignoring them, for example, then they’re worthless. Ditch the lower performing ads, and determine where your advertising dollars may be better spent.
In conclusion, budgeting for PR and advertising is a testing and assessing game. Some products resonate with people through PR better than they do through an advertisement, but in my experience, trial and error is the best way to find out where you should be spending your money.
It can be difficult for SMEs to remain competitive today, but AdRoll’s new report ‘The Ultimate Guide to Growth’ provides a detailed step-by-step guide to help small to mid-sized businesses, solopreneurs and entrepreneurs to accelerate their growth. The robust report is split into seven categories with each providing case studies and takeaway lessons.
Identifying audiences
The report stresses the importance of marketers to first determine their ideal customer, knowing this then allows them to accurately target them. It cites various characteristics to look out for when compiling customer profiles and suggests that marketers should also tap into customer geographics and work on understanding their online behavioural habits. Empathising with their customers’ needs will help marketers to capitalise on their audience’s activity.
Understanding competitors
While getting to know your customers is important, the report also urges marketers to understand how their competitors operate, so that they can have a strong understanding of their positioning in the market. Marketers should conduct research and analysis on their competitors to work out where marketplace opportunities and threats lie, as well as keep a close eye on their opponent’s messaging.
Know your USP
Key differentiators set companies apart, so identifying these – no matter how big or small they are – is vital. The guide advises marketers to focus on your key attributes but encourages them to avoid concentrating on replicable differentiators such as new technologies or competitive prices as these can easily be beaten by competitors.
Marketing strategy creation
Marketing strategies should act as a roadmap for growing businesses with clear steps as to how to reach and engage new and existing customers. Working out the company’s value proposition will help. Marketers should consider where their customers are struggling and how they can help relieve their pain through the services they offer. They should then develop messaging to reflect this strategy, set attainable goals and create a realistic marketing budget to ensure that progress can be tracked.
Using marketing tactics
The marketing strategy set out earlier in the guide will provide marketers with clear business goals and budgets. Working out actionable tactics and which marketing channels to push marketing messages out on is essential. The report suggests looking at AdRoll’s digital advertising tactics and offers marketers the opportunity to sync up their e-commerce website with their growth platform to attract new visitors and convert existing prospects.
Creating content assets
Marketers should work out which type of content asset will suit their strategy best; the report provides pros and cons of using visual, written and ad content formats, with advice on how best to combine content assets to save on time and avoid duplication. The guide reminds marketers that ad sizes and formats also vary according to each platform, so messages need to be punchy and to the point for them to be effective.
Implementing and testing
Testing is one of the most important steps in the digital marketing growth journey. The report suggests that ads don’t need to be perfect before going live and encourages marketers to experiment with different renditions of ads to see how audiences respond. Various techniques for testing are listed, ensuring that marketers can get the most out of the experiments they do on ads, so that they know what to look out for.
Measurement
The guide advises marketers to build quantifiable KPIs and metrics that correspond to the business strategy and goals outlined earlier. Marketers should look at various analytics tools and work out which would best suit their business, but the report urges them to continue testing tactics to ensure that processes and information are consistently refined throughout the journey. Attribution models can also help marketers to gain better insight into consumer purchase habits.
Feature Image Credit: The Ultimate Guide to Growth report, with AdRoll
Online advertising will soon just be “advertising.”
Online ads will claim more than half—52%—of global ad spending for the first time in 2021, according to a new forecast from analytics firm Zenith. That’s up from 47% this year and 44% in 2018.
Share of global advertising spending, by medium
Internet
Print newspapers/magazines
Television/radio
Other
Growth in online ad spend is coming fastest in online video and social media, something that probably isn’t surprising to anyone who’s waded through ads on YouTube or Instagram lately. Each of these categories is growing at nearly 20% a year. There’s a lot of money to made in the influencer economy.
Ad services are an increasing focus for Amazon, which is challenging internet giants Alphabet and Facebook in the space. Growth has slowed in paid search, Alphabet’s bread and butter and a more established category that made up 37% of internet ad spend in 2018.
Advertising is a massive industry that could reach $639 billion in spending globally this year, Zenith estimates, up 4.6% from the previous year. Almost half of that growth is coming from the US, followed by China, the UK, and India.
Facebook is trying to shine a light on one of the more confusing aspects of the advertising industry: how webs of seemingly unrelated companies use your data to serve ads.
The social network is updating its advertising settings to make it a bit easier to see how advertisers are getting your information, why you’re targeted for specific ads, and how to opt out of them.
To make this happen, Facebook is making a couple updates. The most notable change are new sections in Facebook’s advertising preferences that lets you see exactly how companies wind up with your info.
The first section, labeled “advertisers who have uploaded a list with your information and advertised to it,” includes businesses you’ve frequented (either online or IRL) that have uploaded your information to Facebook.
The second section, called “businesses who have uploaded and shared a list with your information,” might be more surprising. These are the so-called data brokers — firms you’ve likely never heard of that buy large swaths of data about people that businesses are able to use for targeted advertising. (Check out BuzzFeed’s story for more details on how these companies operate.)
While these companies are well-known in the ad industry, it’s not something that the typical social media user had much visibility into until now. But with Facebook’s new tool, you can see exactly how a company with a name like “3Q Digital” or “LiveRamp” has used your info to show you targeted ads from seemingly unrelated companies.
Facebook’s new settings page lets you see how data brokers share your info for other companies’ targeted advertising.
Image: screenshot / facebook
It’s not a perfect explanation, but it at least exposes the relationships retailers and others have with these firms.
Additionally, Facebook is making it easier to see more about why you’re being shown a given ad. Now, when you select “Why am I seeing this ad?” on a post in your News Feed, you’ll get a more detailed look at why you’re being targeted with that particular ad. This includes Facebook’s infamous ad “categories,” the seemingly random group of interests, locations, and activities Facebook guesses are relevant to you based on your use of the service.
The updated “Why am I seeing this ad?” page will also let you dive into your ad settings to opt out of these categories. Facebook users have been able to do this for awhile now, but the setting is fairly buried so it’s likely not something most people check. Having it available directly from an ad might make it a little easier to get to.
Of course, all this disclosure still requires a good bit of clicking around to find. But, if you’re willing to make the effort, the new tools should at least help you understand how your information is getting passed around the internet, and why certain ads seem to be “following” you.
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Rachel Gantz, SVP, commercial, at Comscore.
Time’s up. #MeToo. Equal pay. This is the world many of us proudly live in.
Gender identity and norms have become more fluid and expansive – and they are often at the forefront of discussions across industries.
As a participant in the advertising ecosystem, I believe that today’s environment begs the question: Is advertising doing its part to keep up with the gender conversation? Isn’t advertising supposed to be aspirational and fill the needs we don’t even know we have? How can a successful ad guide me to my next car, or help me select my next roll of paper towels if it doesn’t reflect our modern-day collective experience?
As brands look to adapt to today’s environment and pivot their businesses to engage the next generation, it has become critically important to understand shifts in gender constructs and identity.
Thirty-five percent of Generation Z says they personally know someone who uses gender-neutral pronouns like “they” and “them,” according to Pew Center of Research, compared to 25%, 16% and 12% percent for millennials, Generation X and baby boomers, respectively.
There has been much discussion about inclusive creatives and how gender should be represented or depicted in advertisements. But what about the data used to target those creatives? How can brands refine their targeting strategies to effectively reach audiences in this new era?
And furthermore, what does this mean for data providers? What responsibility do data providers bear to help move the conversation forward?
Inclusivity in ad targeting
While gender constructs are certainly evolving as a whole, it’s clear that the advertising industry isn’t quite ready to retire basic demographic targeting, and there are several examples we can point to as evidence. Comscore data shows, for example, that 88% of consumers shopping for a BMW X7 are male, and 73% of buyers of baby goods are female.
Demographic targeting – at least today – is far from irrelevant, and for some goods it continues to be an important part of a successful ad targeting strategy. However, it’s imperative for brands to recognize today’s rapidly-changing world and that consumers are no longer defined solely by their age and gender; they’re a collection of interests, preferences, behaviors and affinities.
Saying goodbye to outdated stereotypes
Already, we see emerging trends that defy traditional stereotypes. Per Comscore data:
Only 55% of video game console and accessory buyers are male, defying the accepted thinking that gamers and the surrounding markets are nearly all men.
Forty-one percent of visitors to sports sites are female, even though the common perception is that men consume most sports content.
Nearly half of social media site visitors are older than 45, despite conventional wisdom that younger generations are power users of social media.
If you’re targeting based on assumptions and preconceived notions, you’re likely missing out on a large group of in-market, high-value consumers. At best, this simply results in wasted spend. At worst, mistargeted creatives could annoy and even offend particular groups, possibly damaging a brand.
It’s clear that the currency of decades past is no longer sufficient in today’s climate. Brands, agencies and data providers must pivot quickly to a more comprehensive, advanced and inclusive set of targeting criteria.
The targeting for many industries must go beyond age and gender. The advancement of behavioral-based targeting audiences furthers this cause and deserves more buy-side attention.
But how can brands and agencies do that successfully when they are faced with hundreds of demographic data providers and thousands of targetable audiences in any DSP or DMP? Blaming brands and agencies for not digging in deeper on what data they use and settling for cheap alternatives is easy, but it’s just as much on data providers to hold themselves to a better standard.
Inclusivity and quality amid targeting clutter
Our industry is undergoing a reckoning of purging low-quality targeting data (finally). Recently, Oracle Data Cloud announced a set of premium data partners (Disclosure: Comscore is included). Even the Interactive Advertising Bureau is getting involved, as evidenced by their new data label initiative. This is critical not only for the betterment of the industry but is also a key driver for more inclusive advertising.
While these are important first steps, more is needed.
If a brand wants to target a baseball fan, it should be able to target a baseball fan, and not just a man (this from an avid female sports fan).
When our family and friends ask what we do for a living, instead of saying “we keep the internet free,” perhaps it’s time to say, “We keep it free, relevant – and, most importantly – inclusive.”
“