Stop Neglecting Analytics in Your Customer Engagement Strategy

Customers desire experiences, not transactions.

In a world full of distractions, engaging customers beyond the typical purchasing routine is vital for SaaS success.

And B2B consumers crave unparalleled engagement. They want personalized advice, solution-oriented features, and revenue-generating products.

An IBM annual survey noted that “as many as 65% believe customer engagement will be the primary driver of growth going forward.”

Analytics is one of the few ways to gain insights to meet your customers’ needs. It helps bridge the gap between providing a service to solving real challenges.

Enhance the experience between your brand and consumers. Build data into your customer engagement strategy.

It Starts With Value

Studies show that “86% of buyers will pay more for a better customer experience, but only 1% of customers feel that vendors consistently meet their expectations.” That’s a major disconnect for SaaS companies striving to improve customer engagement.

B2B customers aren’t concerned about aesthetic features. And they aren’t amped to hear how your team worked around the clock to fix a bug.

Your consumers want a service dedicated to solving their problems in an efficient manner.

Natalie Chan, an expert handling customer retention at Outbrain Amplify, writes:

“Businesses that focus on customers engagement are focused on value creation, not revenue extraction. These are businesses that know how to engage their customers by providing them with real value whether it be through an exceptional end-to-end customer experience, great content or strong customer support that are about delivering more than the traditional sell.”

Offering value means addressing your customers’ desires. And it’s all about how they perceive what’s important.

For example, if a prospect is concerned about increasing open rates in email campaigns, it’s not in their best interest to discuss layout designs.

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Value requires laser-focus. And that’s where analytics steps in.

Monitor usage data to assess the customer experience. Track acquisition channels to observe where customers are coming from and if they’re converting.

Interview customers and ask them why they chose your product. Figure out how they expect to use your product and what business goals they want to achieve.

Create and deliver unprecedented value. Connect with the customer.

Know Your Buyer

In order for customer engagement to work effectively, your team must know your buyer. And that goes beyond the usual demographics, like annual revenue, company size, and location.

More importantly, for B2B companies, your team must not only focus on the business itself, but also on the employee of the business. Learning about the decision maker is crucial to your sales.

“Leveraging big data to better understand and act upon customer behavior, forces you to think differently not only about what data to keep (all of it!) and how long to keep it, but also which data you should begin capturing,” states Duane Edwards, Co-founder and Senior Vice President of Globys.

Analyze your primary behavioral data to create in-depth customer personas. Understand the decision maker’s goals and challenges. Also, know how you can provide short-term and long-term guidance.

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Bruce Swann, Sales and Marketing professional at Adobe, suggests applying predictive analytics:

“Once you’ve compiled data attributes to create a panoramic view of customers, you can begin to understand and predict customer behavior, which adds depth to that view. Examples include using a range of analyses, including customer value analysis, market basket analysis, customer profitability, response modeling, and churn analysis.”

Use data as an indicator of future behavior. If you know your client’s customers, it may lead to helping your client differently.

For example, NoWait is an app that simplifies the process of waiting for a table at a restaurant. Instead of having a guest tote around a clunky pager with a range of 50 feet, restaurants only need the person’s cell phone number.

When the table is ready, the guest receives a text. Plus, after dining, restaurants can text customers additional discount offerings.

Moreover, with the app, restaurants learn “who their patrons are, what time they come and go, which patrons come back the most frequently, who purchases more.” This data can be used to create messaging that appeals specifically to each customer.

Know your buyer and your buyer’s customers.

Content That Resonates

Content is more than just blog posts. It includes everything from checklists to webinars.

Research shows that “64% of visitors who watch a video are more likely to buy a product online.” Therefore, content isn’t just helpful for your brand awareness; it’s a vital part of your customer engagement strategy, which leads to sales.

Examine heat map data to improve your content. It will help you learn what content is important to the consumer. Then, your team can focus on content placement and how different images and colors in your content affect your website visitors.

Pete Mehr, Principal at ZS Associates, says, “By quantifying which content the customer engages, and how frequently, it becomes straightforward to continue to provide content back to the customer. This continuing content consists of an ongoing series of messages to a customer.”

Moreover, analytics will uncover which type of content matters to your customer. Is it eBooks? Or maybe 30-second video clips?

Mention understands their audience. They produce content that resonates.

The social monitoring company creates webinars highlighting experts in the field. For instance, Mention invited Sujan Patel to talk about ways to create content for “boring” industries.

Study your data to find content that speaks to your customer. It’s an effective way to boost engagement.

Multi-Channel Customer Service

In America, “the cost of poor customer service is $41 billion per year.” That’s a heavy burden for most companies.

Moreover, a report found that “retailers are not listening and responding to their audience enough. Some 89% of consumers’ comments are left unanswered.”

Approach customer service differently. Think beyond phone support and Q&A forums.

Social media has presented another solution. Now, SaaS businesses can provide Twitter and Facebook support.

Under Armour created a Twitter handle solely for the purpose of answering customers questions about their products.

From your analytics reports, determine what channels of support satisfies your customers. What works for your competitor may not work for your SaaS.

“It’s not about deploying on all channels, but deploying the right channels that align with your business. Only deploy on the channels that make sense for your business,” says Kate Leggett, a principal analyst at Forrester Research.

In addition, you must streamline your processes when using multiple channels. For instance, phone support data for a specific customer must also be available to your Twitter service reps.

At ComputerWeekly.com, Lisa Kelly suggests that “organisations need an accurate knowledge base where companies can link information from other channels, including peer-to-peer interactions, web self-service and communities, to share with customer service agents.”

It’s not enough to offer various customer service routes. Your team must work together to use data to enhance the overall customer experience on each channel.

Respect The Data

Customer engagement isn’t anything new. However, your SaaS can approach it differently with the help of analytics.

Add unmatched value to the customer’s experience. Use data to gain insight on your buyer’s habits and preferences. And provide customer service from a multi-channel perspective.

Stop neglecting, and start respecting your data.

About the Author: Shayla Price lives at the intersection of digital marketing, technology and social responsibility. Connect with her on Twitter @shaylaprice.

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Getty vs Google, Long Tail Rants, and More: Weekly Forum Update

There’s plenty of news to discuss this week! Not much SEO-wise, though; most of it is focused on the business aspect of things.

Getty Images is in a spat with Google in the E.U., Google has a new ad design that has folks on WebmasterWorld talking, and Google has promised to get tougher on clickjacking, among other stories.

We’ve also got a fun rant about keywords from SEO Chat and some privacy-focused topics from Cre8asiteforums!

Getty Images Files E.U. Complaint Against Google for Enabling Image Piracy

Getty Images Files E.U. Complaint Against Google for Enabling Image PiracyClick To Tweet

This is a complicated legal case, but here’s a brief summary: Getty Images is extremely protective of its image portfolio. Google Images displays images to the public in response to search queries.

When Getty’s images get pirated by third parties and begin to rank well in Google image searches… Getty feels that Google is encouraging piracy. Users on WebmasterWorld are talking through the details. WebmasterWorld engine writes that

“This complaint is really important, and it may shape the ways this and a number of aspects of Google’s information sources are displayed. For example, the Knowledge Graph panel.”

User Andy Langton writes that

“The easiest comparison is probably with the Google Books case,”

where the courts sided with Google. In that case, the courts determined that Google Books was a “public good,” a “transformative” medium, and that it was respectful of copyright holders.

New Ad Unit Design For Google AdSense

It’s a very minimal design – white space with just a dash of color – but that’s not what WebmasterWorld users don’t like about it. What some users don’t like is that it doesn’t really look like an ad. Martinibuster writes,

“The ad unite is nice looking and will definitely blend. But… user expectation contributes to what gets clicked. Think about this in terms of user expectation. It looks like a block of content… In short, it does not resemble anything that a site user would actually click. So in theory that ad unite may result in less clicks.”

You can take a look at an example ad in the thread, and share your thoughts!

Google’s Gary Illyes Indicates the Next Penguin Update Will be the Last

Google's Gary Illyes @methode Indicates the Next Penguin Update Will be the Last Click To Tweet

The Penguin to end all Penguins! Well, sort of. What Illyes probably means is that Penguin will move to a “real-time” model, so there will be less of the drama and nail-biting of waiting for constant updates. Martinibuster writes that a real-time model will be more fair:

“People who knowingly got spammed got what they knew were coming to them…However, updates that take several months are cruel to the businesses who are victims of poor advice, misinformed or shoddy consultants and to those who are small mom and pop amateurs who were making it up as they went along.”

User Ebuzz agrees:

“…it has been 1.5 years so far since the last update. A very long time and no end in sight. Now that’s cruel…to make people wait an eternity for a shot at redemption.”

What do you think?

Clickjacking Draws Action From Google

You may not have heard the term before – clickjacking is when you click on a video to play it, for example, and instead a new window opens up with an advertisement. Threadwatch has the details on Google’s new crusade against such practices.

Google has said:

“When our system detects a clickjacking attempt, we zero-in on the traffic attributed to that placement, and remove it from upcoming payment records to ensure that advertisers are not charged for those clicks.”

There’s a bonus discussion on WebmasterWorld, where users wonder how fair and accurate Google will be in identifying actual clickjacking attempts.

Ads in Google Get A Little Sneakier

Here’s an update to a Threadwatch report from last week! Adam W wrote last week that Google’s paid ads were starting to appear more and more organic in the E.U. That could lead to confusion over which results are paid and which aren’t. Now Google seems to be adding some new ad entries. For now,

“…it does not look like these ads appear in the standard 3-pack and will only be seen after clicking ‘more places’ on the search results page.”

What do you think? Too many ads, or is this fair play?

What ARE Long-Tail Keywords?

Here’s a compelling rant from a user on SEO Chat. User knuckles writes,

“I’m sick of seeing stuff like ‘long-tail keywords are phrases consisting of [x number of] words. A lot of experts and ‘gurus’ keep repeating this nonsense. All those graphs where 1 word is a head, 3 words is a body and 5 words is a long-tail. It’s all a bunch of crap.”

What do you think about the length of keywords and phrases? Does it matter at all? Knuckles thinks that it doesn’t:

“…keyword length has nothing to do with its properties, some short/long/medium keywords are trash some are head…”

There’s plenty of room for friendly debate in this thread!

Ethics: Name Dropping to Promote Yourself Or a Company

Over on Cre8asiteforums, folks are wondering if it’s fair or ethical to use someone’s name without their permission. Link bait projects often name people as “the top 10 in X profession” without asking them first.

The goal, of course, is to get the people on the list to link back to the article. But what if those people have moved on to different careers? What if they don’t want to be associated with X industry anymore?

Mobile Usage Trends

Over 70 pages of charts and information from comScore is up for discussion in this Cre8asiteforums thread! Users are talking about how mobile usage “continues to explode in 2016.”

You’ve probably also heard that desktop usage may have “peaked.” Are we really reaching a turning-point in how the Internet is used?

Subscribe to our search and social news on Flipboard!

View my Flipboard Magazine.

The post Getty vs Google, Long Tail Rants, and More: Weekly Forum Update appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.

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Why Your Sales and Marketing Stack Needs a Solid Foundation

Imagine the best pancakes you’ve ever had. What made them work? They likely started with a solid recipe of core ingredients, then added just the right blend of proprietary variations to make an unforgettable short stack. But it all started from a solid foundation – flour, eggs, whole milk, baking powder, salt, cooking fat, and sugar.

Your marketing and sales stack is no different. The foundation will make it or break it. Luckily, the ingredient list isn’t nearly as long as the pancake mix.

What are the core ingredients that make up a solid sales and marketing foundation? It starts with a strategy focused on the customer and your content, and the right tool to whip it all together.

Constructing the Stack

The right recipe will help ensure you deliver the right message to the right person at the right point. An effective sales and marketing strategy starts with the customer and content at its core, and is further refined by understanding the journey that customer makes. Glossing over this part often results in half-baked strategies that fall flat.

It’s critical to understand what the buyer’s journey looks like – the stages of awareness, consideration and decision, and the transitions in between. Each phase or stage will be specific to your buyer, which means getting to know your buyer is imperative.

Enter: The buyer persona. These are detailed accounts of your target customer. They go well beyond basic demographics like age, gender, and occupation. A good buyer persona will detail what their motives and priorities are, how they determine success, what their perceived or actual barriers are, where they search for solutions, and who impacts their decisions.

While surveys and reviewing analytics from online behaviors can provide some level of insights, one-to-one interviews are the best way to gather in depth details. You can conduct phone interviews or in-person visits with existing customers, or use industry events and trade shows as opportunities to talk to prospects, current customers and even the customers of your competitors. You’re looking for answers to questions such as:

• What priorities/problems prompted them to search for a solution?
• Why did they choose your brand over another? Or why didn’t they?
• How do they determine success and what are their goals?
• What barriers (perceived or actual) might stand in the way of their decision?
• Where do they look for solutions?
• Who influences their decisions?

In depth buyer insights are the bedrock of customer success-focused content.

With this level of detail, you are better equipped to understand and interpret their actions, and the questions they might ask within each stage on their path to purchase. At this point, the recipe will start to come together as you determine how to align your sales and marketing strategies to harmonize with the buyer’s journey and be there with the relevant content they need to answer their questions or solve their problems.

Understanding the framework – the customer, their journey and the desired outcome of the content you produce – you will be able to identify what parts of the recipe can be changed as goals change or you learn more about buyer preferences. These three ingredients – the customer, their journey, and the content – will be staples, but how that content is delivered or the type being created can be substituted.

In-depth buyer personas and a map of the customer journey is almost like cheating the system. Marketing and sales teams armed with these are better equipped to make a calculated, winning recipe – serving up the right stack (authentic content), at just the right time and in the right place.

Serving Up the Stack

Now that you’ve got a solid foundational recipe in place, there’s one final element – a solid platform to serve it from. Today, there’s a near endless supply of sales and marketing tools to support with everything from automation to customer relationship management and sales enablement, but even the best stack of tools can become unstable without the right foundational platform.

Just some of the tools that can be added to the marketing and sales tech stack. Without the right foundation, this stack can quickly become unstable.

How do you identify the right platform from which to build the recipe? First and foremost, it should support you in building a solid foundation. In other words, it should enable visibility into your customers, the purchase journey they go through, and the delivery of your content at the right place and time. Internal portals, analytics and collaboration amongst the various players on your team is also essential.

(Image Source) How much do you know about your customer? What they’re reading, where they’re reading it, what social channels they use, and what they do?

Try to avoid a cobbled together “Frankenstack” of sales and marketing tools. This creates silos within your team and makes for an unstable strategy that lacks cohesion. Instead look for a primary platform to serve as the hub. It should play nice with a variety of tools – everything should work in concert. Before you commit to a platform, consider the following:

• What is our desired outcome?
• Will this platform support our goals?
• Does this platform integrate with the apps we need for our team to work seamlessly?
• Does this platform help us fulfill the goals of our customer, and ultimately ensure they continue to move through the funnel?

If you are working with an indirect sales channel, that platform should also support them with the training, marketing and sales tools they need to do their job and nurture their customers.

Conclusion

Before you start throwing together sales and marketing recipes, be sure to understand the role of each of those core ingredients and how they can be used to direct all recipes that follow. This will enable you to create far more effective strategies rather than hoping something will work.

The customer and customer journey, and content that originates from those two ingredients, produces a winning recipe and helps ensure your efforts won’t be lost in a sea of marketing messages.

About the Author: Jen Spencer is the Director of Sales and Marketing for Allbound, an innovative SaaS platform that helps companies empower their resellers and distributors to be more customer-focused through content and collaboration. Jen loves animals, technology, the arts, and really good Scotch. You can follow her on Twitter @jenspencer.

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How to Use Pacing in Your Video Soundtrack – 5 Considerations

So, you’ve found the perfect music for your next video. Now it’s time to get splicing! Some marketers and video editors prefer cutting video to music and others like their music to be dropped in after the initial edit. Whichever you prefer, the abstract, yet important technique of ‘pacing’ is what sets your video apart from the bad, good and amazing!

We just need to get this pacing thing down right. I’d like to share with you some tips for getting your video’s soundtrack just right.

What is Pacing?

First of all, what is pacing? Pacing is arguably the most important technique in editing. It’s the sequencing of footage in order to create a cohesive story. A story that ebbs and flows has arcs, excitement, drama, tension, release, and of course, emotion..

It’s the crux of video editing and therefore music editing! The two go hand in hand, they are yin and yang.

How To Use Pacing In Your Video Soundtrack

1. Understand The Story

This definitely has to be number one!

Use music to clarify what’s happening in the story. Determine what feel and mood is being conveyed. Music can deliver a dramatic emphasis and foreshadow events or reinforce the intent of antagonist or protagonist characters.

The viewer will become confused and pulled out of the story if the mood of the music doesn’t match the feel of the story, so this is important.

2. Pacing is situational, it’s not all about speed

In my experience and in my research, I wasn’t surprised to learn that most editors equate pacing with speed., thinking faster cuts equals better pacing. But this is simply not true! Speed does not matter and the pacing can be set perfectly for either fast or slow tracks. It all comes down to the mood and feel that is desired. Pacing is ever changing! The music should move with the flow of the story and support the feel of the scene.

3. Know how the pacing of your music will influence the viewer

Now that we’ve touched on the misconception that fast means good pacing, we can discuss what different paces convey to the viewer. Here are some general ways that you can pace music to a video edit. Keep in mind that these are general starting points…there are always exceptions to the rule.

Slow = Building tension and suspense: Think of slowly evolving and droning high register strings with cuts that are longer. The viewer has time to think about what’s happening. This is an effective dramatic pacing technique.

My example below demonstrates a slow build of tension and suspense. Notice the space between the organ chords and how long the chords are held for while they are hurrying to board the ship.

I should also mention that depending on the subject matter, slower music can also be relaxing.

Normal = Neutral: No drama here. The music is a perfect balance of tension and release. This is perhaps the most common type of pacing in a video. Picture everyday tasks and average conversation. The pace of your normal heart rate is effective in these types of scenes.

The pacing in this example is really great. Feel how it breathes and flows so perfectly:

Fast = Intensity: This could also be tension or suspense (exceptions to the rule). Fast and driving drums are typically characteristic in music that works for a fast cut action scene. Check out the example:

4. Utilize key elements of pacing: Pattern, Timing and Flow

Now that we’ve talked about what pacing is and how it is applied, let’s look under the hood and see the inner working of pacing. In my opinion, pacing as it relates to music and video can be broken down into three different aspects: pattern, timing and flow.

Good pacing doesn’t mean all of these things need to be happening simultaneously, but at least one element should be involved at all times.

Pattern: Recurring music cues can act as themes for characters or subjects. It creates structure and cohesion in a video. Listen to the opening and closing music cues in this video. They act as bookends, which give the video full closure.

Timing: A change in the music at exactly the right moment. The music should hit important cues within the story. I really like the timing between the music and the action on screen in this ad for Jetta

Flow: The sense of the music moving with the picture and reflecting the emotion and feel of the story. The feeling of breathing should come to mind when a piece of music is paced well with video. The neutral pacing example above is an excellent demonstration of flow.

5. Practice! Know the difference between good and bad pacing

Having excellent pacing in your video isn’t something that comes over night. You develop a feel for when the music is paced well and when it isn’t. Listen to what your instincts tell you. You’ll know when the music should keep going or stop, change or not even be there at all.

It takes lots of practice, but it’s something that when done right can make your video stand a cut above the rest.

The post How to Use Pacing in Your Video Soundtrack – 5 Considerations appeared first on Vidyard.

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10 Must-Know Facebook Ads Tips & Features

It’s no secret that paid social is drastically on the rise. Social advertising spend jumped 50% year-over-year in the last quarter of 2015. Social media ad revenue is expected to reach $35.90 billion by 2017, reaching a staggering 16% of the total global digital ad market.

Facebook (including Instagram) unsurprisingly comprises a big piece of this pie, making up an estimated 65.5% of all 2015 social ad spend. This is driven by changes in their CPC model, launch of Instagram ads & the addition of powerful new features.

This post will arm you with 10 important tips & features to ensure you’re getting the most out of this channel.

1. Facebook Lead Ads

One of the most recent campaign types added by Facebook are Lead Ads. This campaign type allows advertisers to collect lead data without a landing page and directly through a form without leaving Facebook.

Some early advertisers found Lead Ads to result in a 4x reduction to their CPL (according to Facebook).

Example experience on mobile

To get started with Lead Ads, simply:

1. Create a new campaign with the “Lead Generation” objective

2. Build out your campaign/advert set, as you would for any campaign

3. Create your lead form at the advert level

4. Choose the questions you’d like added and optionally add up to three custom questions

5. Link to your privacy policy, add your disclaimer and destination URL

6. Customize your form

7. Preview then create your form

Now you’re ready to get started with Facebook’s newest and most powerful lead generation tool.

Tip: Twitter has had this campaign type for years, they call it Twitter Lead Cards.

2. Reporting, Reporting, Reporting

Some of the biggest wins are always found within the reporting section. One of the most important parts of reporting is the ‘Breakdown’ section.

• Are your mobile placements converting?
• What age group has the strongest CPA?
• What regions aren’t converting?
• What gender is responding to your adverts?

These are all important questions that can be answered under the ‘Breakdown’ drop-down.

In this example, the Instagram placement converted a near 500% better than mobile news feed placement, at a fraction of the CPA. Knowing this, we’d shift more spend to Instagram and remove budget from the mobile news feed placement to maximize performance at our budget (if there’s volume available).

3. Attribution models

It’s important to understand Facebook’s attribution models, where to change the view and what makes sense for your conversion goal. These are the ‘rules’ for how each conversion is counted, in regards to the timeframe after an interaction with your advert and the method of the interaction (click or view).

This is important to take note of so you have a clear understanding of the value of your conversions and how they compare to the other networks you may be running.

Within ‘Manage adverts’, the option to change the attribution model can be found under ‘Columns’ > ‘Customize Columns…’ > ‘Change Attribution Window’.

4. Test Instagram

Since September 2015, Instagram placements have been made public in 30+ countries within the Facebook Ads Dashboard. Getting started with this is as simple as connecting an Instagram account and choosing the Instagram placement.

Break out some test budget and see how this placement compares.

Tip: Here are some helpful best practices when running Instagram Ads

5. Lookalike audiences

I’ve found lookalike audiences to be one of the most effective targeting methods on paid social.

A lookalike audience is a targeting criteria where Facebook generates an audience of user who are similar to your current customers or audience.

This audience can be based off an email list, segments of your Facebook Pixel or any conversion goals you have set up. Facebook matches these users with Facebook profiles then finds similarities in demographics, interests, behaviors, etc. Lastly, Facebook uses these finding to generate a list of similar Facebook users which you can target in your campaigns.

Learn how to create a lookalike audience here.

6. Keep an eye on Facebook’s location options

An often overlooked targeting criteria is Facebook’s more granular location targeting options. It’s important to keep this in mind while creating your campaigns and use the targeting option that makes the most sense for your business.

Are you trying to target people living in a specific city, or all people within this city? These are two very different targets.

Take for example, a local service business operating only in downtown SF. You wouldn’t want to be targeting people visiting for the weekend, or commuting in for work.

7. Speak to your audience

With Facebook’s granular targeting methods, in most cases you know who you’re speaking to (at least the interest, behaviours, etc. that define your audience).

Use this knowledge to tie copy and creative closely with each specific audience you’re targeting.

Targeting a recent homebuyer? How about something like “Your new home would be complete with [Brand Name’s] contemporary/ modern furniture line”.

8. Remarketing

All digital marketers know the importance of remarketing, so don’t level this out of your Facebook Ads strategy be left out.

Make sure to take advantage of Facebook’s audience segmentation options, where you can include/exclude specific pages & domains, as well as choose the remarketing window length.

Tip: Did you know Facebook now offers Dynamic Remarketing?

This feature allows advertisers to remarket specific products to users who’ve previously viewed or added them to their cart. The creative and copy of your ads will dynamically change based on what products your visitors have viewed.

9. Test multiple creative and copy

Always test many creative and copy variants to see which ones resonate best with your audience. Facebook will optimize ad serving based on performance and your conversion goal.

An interesting and relatively new creative type I recommend testing is the ‘Carousel’, which allows you to fit multiple images and links into a single creative.

This creative type has been found to reduce your CPA by about 30-50% & decrease your CPC by 20-30% (according to Facebook).

Use this creative type to:

• Showcase multiple products
• Highlight multiple features
• Create a larger canvas
• Outline benefits
• Tell your brand’s story

Tip: Don’t forget to run a statistical significance test to see if the improvement you’re seeing is indeed valid and not just by chance.

10. Breakout campaigns by placement

The different placements offered by Facebook perform very differently. It’s important to keep an eye on their performance and where your spend is being directed (details of how to do this are found in #2 above).

When optimizing for clicks, I find most of your budget will get pushed to mobile or audience network (since these have the most effective CPC), however these placements may typically not have the best overall performance.

In most cases, I find it makes sense to break out your campaigns by placement (or at least mobile vs. desktop). This is especially true if you’re setting manual bids, or if your campaign is set to optimize for clicks.

Conclusion

I hope you find these Facebook Advertising tips & features useful. If you have any questions or additional tips/features that you think merit discussion, let us know if the comments section, or email me at jacob@cleverzebo.com.

About the Author: This guest post is written by Jacob Young, world-traveling digital nomad and Senior Manager, Ad Operations at Clever Zebo. Currently writing from the Co-Work office in Sayulita, Mexico. To learn how Clever Zebo can jumpstart your paid social efforts, shoot us a note at igor@cleverzebo.com or Tweet us at @CleverZebo.

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Integrating SEO and PPC for Multi-Channel Success

Whether you work at a small business or a fortune 500 company, obtaining and utilizing data for your search campaigns is crucial. Conveniently, Google is making you pay for this data by forcing you to use AdWords to get conversion data at a keyword level.

The struggle gets deeper though. Because whether you’re in-house or you are working at an agency, the PPC and SEO teams struggle to communicate with each other. They operate isolated from each other, unable to properly leverage their most important assest: first party data.

We are going to dive into actionable ways you can correctly utilize data from both SEO and PPC to ultimately increase your conversion rate and decrease your cost per acquisition.

We will touch on the following three techniques for practical takeaways on how to integrate your search channels:

• Using Keyword Rankings as a Signal for Dataless PPC Campaigns
• Leveraging PPC for Content Marketing to Answer User Intent
• Using Google Display Ads to Hack Key SEO Terms

In the end we are going to wrap all of these tactics together and provide a gameplan for cross-channel success.

Google Stole The Data. Now What?

Google is an ad engine. They are not a search engine operating without a financial objective. As Google evolves, they are constantly taking more SERP real estate.

As Google daily takes more room above the fold, they also have restricted the availability of free keyword data. While there are plenty of tools that allow for keyword tracking (Moz, SEMrush, Advanced Web Ranking, etc.), none of these tell you the most important piece of data:

Which keywords are converting…

In order to obtain this data, we have to pay. Pay Google via AdWords to be exact. By having access to Google’s keyword data, we can prioritize our SEO efforts correctly.

For example, imagine you are an online retailer selling men’s shorts. How would you traditionally choose your keywords? You might analyze search trends, scope out the competition that is currently ranking and analyze how well they are answering the searchers intent. You may even just look at the search volume and go for it. Unfortunately, these approaches leave you operating in the dark without the ability to quickly understand what keywords convert best historically for your own target market.

By beginning with paid search and then integrating the data into our SEO efforts, we are able to align search volume, rankability, and other traditional SEO metrics with the keyword conversion data from our PPC efforts. We can then correctly prioritize our content marketing and on-page SEO.

Unfortunately, as search engine marketing has grown into a science, departments have become isolated and more specialized. General practitioners knowing both SEO and PPC are a rarity. Instead, search professionals are focusing on a specialty: technical SEO, local SEO, international SEO, AdWords display, remarketing, Google Shopping, local PPC, etc.

As things become hyper specialized and fragmented, the data is lost in communication and SEO departments optimize in the dark relying on frustratingly futile metrics like keyword rankings, page views, overall organic conversions, and time on-site.

When marketing struggles like this arise, the silver lining is that tight knit teams and agencies are able to leverage the data from both the organic and paid search channels for collaborative success.

3 Dynamic Ways to Integrate Paid and Organic Traffic

There is no universal magic wand for search success. Instead, best practices exist. Below are best industry practices on how to integrate your paid and organic traffic for multichannel success.

Using Keyword Rankings as a Signal for Dataless PPC Campaigns

Google search ads are expensive. For some industries (plumbers, lawyers, etc.) cost per clicks (CPC) can exceed $100. It is difficult for most businesses to justify this high of an advertising expense on even one visitor let alone a lead. Instead, these businesses will often focus their efforts solely on SEO.

As they do so, they begin to build models of varying certainty that particular keywords are what generate their revenue.

Thus, when launching a new PPC campaign and there is significant organic traction it is essential to audit not only competitors and CPCs, but also, the Google Search Console report.

Here is a practical step-by-step process for launching a campaign for an account with organic rankings.

1. Go to Google Search Console
2. Click on Search Traffic > Search Analytics
3. Add impressions data by checking the box
4. Analyze impressions report for top queries most related to their buyer intent keywords
5. Launch campaigns around keywords receiving the most impressions and clicks
6. If these keywords are driving new business let’s take more market share above the fold and add search ads to the marketing mix

Lastly, if you are using a keyword ranking tool then simply mine your top keywords driving the largest percentage of qualified traffic and take additional market share with search ads: build, launch, test, measure.

Leveraging PPC For Content Marketing to Answer User Intent

As search marketers, it is our responsibility to interject ourselves into our target market’s online buying journey. Specifically, we need to strategically position our business within SERPs at all stages of the search funnel from ideation to retention.

When our target market searches for what we offer or sell online, they need to find us within the search engine results page (SERP). This can mean that we are advertising on sites that rank for our keywords meaning we show up via AdWords, in the local pack and Google Shopping, etc. The possibilities are endless, but we need to strategically execute.

One essential way search is not integrated enough is content marketing and PPC. These two services are treated far too often as distant planets operating in their own solar systems.

It’s time to end that. No longer shall these services/departments operate in their own silo. Instead, there needs to be a practical intersection of the two services. But first, a basic understanding of both areas of expertise is needed.

In the example below, you will find shopping ads, search ads, and a highly relevant piece of content. Imagine if the PPC team and the content team were on the same page and your brand was in all three spots!

In the discovery stage of PPC, the specialist is looking to design an account architecture that allows them to position their keywords in different areas of a target buyer’s journey through the SERPs.

To fully understand what their target market is searching for, they will often begin with broad match modified keywords. This tactic will show your ad in any search that contains your keywords. For example, “+blender +smoothie” will show your ad for any searches containing both keywords regardless of the order.

By mining the search term reports, we are now able to see the user intent of our target market based on the keywords they are searching for when they click on our ads. We can now provide this data to the content marketing department with all of our highest converting longtail keywords.

With this information, the content marketing team can analyze search volume, rankability, and brand fit to create content around this query.

The end goal is that we are now able to not only show an ad on these high converting SERPs, but also rank organically on this page above the fold.

Using Google Display Ads to Hack Key SEO Terms

Often times, we are not able to take total market share for high performing queries. Let’s use my company, Directive Consulting, for this example. We want to rank for “seo company” in our area, but, because “seo company” is localized, we have a greater chance of ranking in our city, Irvine, CA.

If, however, we want to rank nationally and increase our lead volume, it is pertinent that we look at national results and see if any of those results/websites have display ads.

For this exact query, Forbes wrote an article entitled: “4 Tips for Hiring the Right SEO Firm”. The article ranks very well nationally, and is a frequent stop for someone looking to hire an agency. In a freaky intersection of SEO and Google’s Display Network, we can take advantage of a site that ranks well for our target keyword and position our business once again within the buyer’s journey by advertising with a display ad on that website.

We simply need to go into our Adwords account, create compelling display ads, and position ourselves on the page above the fold! See below.

The goal should no longer be to rank solely organically for a keyword or for pay-per-click advertising. Instead, we need to integrate both channels through remarketing, display, and search.

The key is to place yourself as many times as possible in your target markets SERP journey, while measuring the performance and budget according to results and re-allocating.

Conclusion

No longer are isolated search campaigns an option. The landscape is too competitive and the buyer journey is multi-faceted. Your campaigns need to think beyond isolation and move towards integration.

As mentioned, the following tactics provide a foundational way that you can take a step towards dynamic integration:

• Using Keyword Rankings as a Signal for Dataless PPC Campaigns
• Leveraging PPC for Content Marketing to Answer User Intent
• Using Google Display Ads to Hack Key SEO Terms

The tactics provided here provide a brief look into the dynamic ways you can integrate your campaigns, but the execution will be key.

As Google daily takes more SERP real estate for paid advertising, PPC will play an even larger role tomorrow than today. Furthermore, as the field becomes more competitive, the CPC’s will only rise.

The businesses that best leverage content and integrate their efforts with first party data from their paid search department will lead the pack.

About the Author: Garrett Mehrguth is the CEO of Directive Consulting, a Google Partner and MozLocal Recommended Agency serving mid-enterprise level firms.He has been published in Moz, Ahref, Convince and Convert, Wordstream, Raven, Local Search Ranking Factors, and more. He has spoken at MozCon Ignite, General Assembly, PeopleSpace Innovation Labs, SoCal Code Camp and others.

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