5 Social Media Networks Beyond Facebook and Twitter
With engaged user bases and proprietary first-party data, social
networks can be great traffic sources for marketers. Around 88% users use
Facebook to advertise and around 30% in Twitter. But there are other social
network platforms. Platforms such as Quora, Pinterest, Snapchat are used by
fewer than 10% of marketers despite being popular with users. In fact, Reddit
is the sixth most-visited global website, doesn’t break the top eight.
Advertisers don’t want to test other platforms when Facebook &
Twitter deliver enough scale. But testing ads on multiple platforms is
important to an efficient social media marketing strategy. Smaller, less
competitive social platforms might offer lower advertising costs, and depending
on your industry, more specialized platforms might allow you to target
particular audiences in the right mindset to engage with your ads. By trying
new platforms, you can find new audiences, explore new ad mediums, and maybe even
find some success.
Here are five additional social networks that you should try
advertising on, with advice on how to tackle them.
Pinterest is ideal for B2C brands
with lifestyle products that can be clearly expressed in a picture. You can
sell the products using imagery. Last year, Pinterest reported 250 million
users and more than 175 billion pins. The platform also shared that Pinterest
users find Pinterest ads 1.4 times more relevant than ads they see on other
social media networks—which is reason enough to start advertising on the
platform.
Pinterest Ads
Pinterest offers Promoted Pins,
which are standard pins advertisers can promote in a user’s feed (the ads are
simple, with an image, short text, and an off-site link). These ads blend in
well and are not obtrusive to the Pinterest experience. When creating a Pinterest
ad, use a vertical image at least 600 pixels wide, and remember that people use
Pinterest to discover new ideas and projects. If you can create a
visually-appealing ad that provides a promise of improvement to the user’s
life, you’ll do well on Pinterest.
Snapchat
Snapchat is also a B2C platform for brands. If your B2C business has a younger demographic, you need to consider testing out Snapchat ads. Snapchat provides a great opportunity to connect with a younger audience (among those 18 to 24, 78% use Snapchat).
Snapchat Ads
Snapchat has multiple ad types, including their Sponsored Filters, which are branded filters people can overlay on their photos. Snapchat’s Story Ads live in the Discover tab amongst organic stories from celebrities and media sites. Here, you have just an image and 34 characters to entice people to click, which prompts them to watch at least three video Snaps you upload. Snapchat also offers Snap Ads, which are slightly-obtrusive ads that appear in between Snaps in someone’s Snap Story (these can be static or video).
Advertising in LinkedIn is mostly of B2B. If B2B is your
audience then you should definitely be testing ads there. But B2C advertisers
can still get success at LinkedIn. LinkedIn is an extensive platform to target
people with their professional credentials.
LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn has three main ad units, all native: Sponsored
Content, Sponsored InMail, and Sponsored Job Results. The latter two will
appeal mainly to sales and hiring teams, respectively, while Sponsored Content
is used by marketers to reach people as they browse their LinkedIn
feeds. LinkedIn ads look exactly like organic posts, even showing who
of your contacts follows the sponsoring companies.
The ads themselves tend to promote content like an eBook or
blog article, although on desktop you’ll also see commercial-quality
auto-playing videos. Does this mean you shouldn’t try sending users to a
product page? Not at all, but keep in mind users are likely to be in an
analytical work mindset, versus a buying one, making LinkedIn more of a
top-of-funnel traffic source versus direct response.
Quora
Advertising on Qoura might seem
like a waste of time. But this Q&A platform has over 300 million unique
visitors each month. With its wide variety of topics, Quora applicable to
pretty much every marketer—all you have to do is find your audience and
set up your ads.
Quora Ads
Quora’s self-serve portal has
two major ad units: 1. Promoted Answers, where a specific answer gets promoted
in a user’s home feed (but not within the question itself), and 2. Image/text
ads that appear within answer results.
With Quora you can hyper-target your audience. Beyond
the pre-defined Topic and Interest Targeting options (there are literally
thousands), as well as their recently-released keyword targeting, you can
target specific questions. The interface even shows you the expected
weekly views of each question. A successful Quora campaign will involve upfront
research around relevant questions. Consider this missed opportunity: For
the question of “What are the best running shoes?” there’s not a single
footwear advertiser. It would not cost much for a brand like Adidas or New
Balance to pay to appear in the first result.
5 Steps to Calculate Your Influencer Marketing ROI
According to Relatable’s 2019 State of Influencer Marketing Report, almost 80% brands say that they dedicated budget this year to influencer marketing. By 2020, an estimated $8 billion is expected to be spent on Instagram influencer marketing alone.
These show that growth in influencer marketing, but don’t tell if it’s being done well or not. Tracking campaign performance is the best way to measure the success of your influencer marketing program.
This is step-by-step analysis to track your influencer marketing campaign ROI.
Step 1: Set Campaign Goals To Track ROI Accurately
The first and most important step in any influencer marketing program is to set clear goals and objectives. Determining your goals lets you determine what kind of influencers to work with, types of content, distribution platforms etc.
Some common influencer marketing goals for marketers include:
- Increase brand awareness
- Reach new/target audiences
- Improve brand advocacy
- Increase sales
- Manage brand reputation
However, these are broad goals. To run a successful influencer program, dive deeper and set goals at a more granular level. This will make it easier to track your campaign ROI.
Step 2: Define Metrics to Measure Campaign Performance
With campaign goals set, you need to identify the metrics to measure them. The goals need to be well-defined and clear. These are:
- Be Specific: If your goal is to increase revenue, define by how much in money or percent growth.
- Set a Timeline: You could track the increase in traffic within two weeks of launch.
- Be Achievable: Your influencer program is bound to fall if your criterion for determining success is not clear.
You can’t dependent on single metric to understand whether you’ve achieved the goal. Consider your campaign goal is brand awareness. Your performance metrics can be varied and could include number of impressions, brand mentions, clicks, follower growth, increase in brand engagement, etc.
Step 3: Develop Goals and Performance Metrics for Individual Influencers
It’s important for you to understand which influencers are contributing and which are falling behind your expectations so that you can understand what works and cut resources spent on underperformers. Individual influencer goals must align with your campaign goals. For instance, let’s say your main campaign goal is to generate certain revenue within a certain time frame. An individual influencer goal would detail the minimum amount the person would generate within that time frame.
Individual influencer metrics include:
- Total impressions
- Number of clicks to landing page/website
- Average engagement rate
- Conversions to customers
- Amount of user generated content created
- Revenue
With this data, you can assess the performance or impact of each influencer and make informed decisions on how to use them (or not) going forward.
Step 4: Choose The Influencer Tracking Platform
Rather than tracking manually your campaign ROI, you should look for influencer marketing platforms for help. These platforms will make it easier for you to accurately track your campaign performance and the performance of your influencers. Some influencer marketing platforms are:
- NeoReach
- TapInfluence
- Grin
Step 5: Measure The Influencers
Most brands usually measure the performance of the overall campaign but that usually not enough. Pick an initial group of influencers to start the campaign. First, pick an initial group of influencers to begin the campaign. Track each influencer’s performance at the start. Document the engagement rates for each influencer’s post and compare them to the collective group of influencers.
You can do that by two ways Unique URLS, Unique Discount Codes.
Running a successful influencer program requires proper planning and execution. It also requires a detailed measurement strategy. Using this step-by-step guide, you can assess your influencer program with ease and improve the ROI from your influencer collaborations.
What are you waiting for?
10 Awesome Sources to Get Free Data for Digital Marketers
Who doesn’t like free things? The web provides data practically free. These 20 sources offer free data that are widely considered as reputable.
- Google Data Set Search
This helps you to search available datasets that have been marked up properly according to the schema.org standard. While this could be seen as a one-stop shop for datasets which includes data from NASA and ProPublica, there are many niche datasets that may be ideal for certain purposes.
You’ve shown results and each one is clickable to tell you:
- The name of the dataset
- When it was last updated
- A description
- Google Trends
With this tool, you can get information against keywords. You can get information on interest over time, interest by region, related topics, and related queries. You can also select options including which country (or worldwide) you want to see, narrow it down to categories, or confine your search to all of the web, images, news, shopping, or YouTube.
- The World Factbook
It contains information about 267 world entities. This is a treasure trove of data that is updated weekly with information about the world. You can select a country to view and then click on whatever topic you prefer. The site is also searchable.
- Altmetric
Though Altmetric offers some paid plans but they have a very useful set of top 100 most mentioned articles that have been published in a year.
- Open Corporates
It is the largest database of companies in the world. It gives you the access to information over 100 million organizations. You can search by companies or officers and limit your jurisdiction if you need to.
- National Center for Environmental Information
NCEI covers geophysical, atmospheric, and oceanic data. They are currently the world’s largest provider of climate and weather information.
- Data Sets SubReddit
Though you have to sign up but it’s free. You can search for datasets and find people giving information and requesting it. Reddit, in general, is also a great place to look for information and see what’s trending.
- Pew Internet
If you’re in search of sociological data, then Pew Internet is a great source.
There are some interesting articles that you can find by browsing around too. You do need to sign up to view and download datasets but it’s free.
- Group Lens
This has several available datasets that are useful for more niche projects. Some datasets are over a decade old. You can get a lot of information on books and films here.
- GitHub’s Buzzfeed News
This one gives you data from Buzzfeed. If you want information on a particular topic from 2016 to 2018, this one’s for you.
3 Important Factors to Digital Marketing Transformation in 2019
Digital transformation is the buzzword of today. However, it means different things to different people. If you put it simply, it is the pursuit of achieving the highest level of scale, efficiency, innovation, and profit using data and technology.
When it’s come to strategy and operations, there are three keys to effective digital marketing transformation.
- Organization
Change is a tough aspect to deal with. While implementing, it can seem inefficient. Digital transformations are capable of altering company culture, including long-standing strategies, processes and tools.
Organizational challenges are often considered as toughest hurdles. Adopting necessary technology or data is the easiest way to achieve it. You can only do such things, if everyone is ready to commit a shared vision.
For instance, if you’re a part of a global organization and managing its marketing channel separately by region then there are multiple changes you can make, shifting team structure to drive greater scale and efficiency. It’s harnessing a mindset of think global and execute local.
Think global – It means creating a global framework on that all team members are depending on technical resources, knowledge-sharing, direction, and collaboration.
Execute local- it means putting trust in the regional teams to put in marketing strategy according to unique and measured requirements of the local markets.
Digital transformation is about finding the right balance between standardization and execution on local scale.
- Channel Management
Undertaking a digital transformation to rethink channel management strategy is the important step for any marketing team. Lack of cross-channel optimization can reduce the marketing return on investment (RoI).
Today, applying the rules of traditional marketing in digital marketing could be flawed or misleading. In case of social or content marketing, the outcomes can be visible. These activities are considered as ‘top funnel tactics’.
If you properly manage your digital channels then you’ll get results. When analyzing your sales performance if you look at last-touch attribution, you arrive at a point that best converting channels are paid search and display retargeting. These two do well in converting new customer but stay in the bottom funnel- the stage of the customer journey when people give information that they want to buy something. However, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), content marketing, social are falls into top funnel channel.
The goal for a marketing organization is to grow and manage its audience effectievely.
- Technology
Using data management platform (DMP) you can build and define your audience through every customer touch points. DMP can store several information about customers interacted with over time.
For example, imagine you’ve a company that sells airline tickets, and your SEO team builds a landing page of 5 most beautiful paces in USA. The page doesn’t say about the cost of airline to US. However, the page is intended for those travelers to wants to visit US.
A visitor finds the page via Google search and clicks your article. The visitor reads more articles and leaves the page and doesn’t return for a while. On the contrary, you mark them using Facebook tracking pixel. All this information gets stored in DMP.
Later, you start a Facebook retargeting campaign which promotes a special, low-cost travel special to US. You configure your campaigns to serve ads to cater people who viewed pages on your website related to US content.
The visitor in the example never sees the ad. Reasons? Because a few days before the ad campaign, that visitor returned to the website and purchased a ticket to Berlin. Their information was saved in your CRM which sends data to DMP, and had to set up a rule avoid serving Facebook ads to customers who had bought airline tickets in last 2 months.
Now who takes the credit for the purchase of air ticket to Berlin? Which media channels deserves credit for saving organization the unspent media amount that could have been wasted on this traveler if someone has served the ad? This is a tricky question.
This is an example of marketing success that can be achieved using all digital channels working together.
Digital marketing transformation is a never ending process. If you correctly execute these three factors then you can transform your team members to pioneer change. Your internal process also become streamlined which changes your organization and helps to achieve distinct advantage over your competitors.
PPC vs. SEO – Which is the best option Add value to your ROI
“SEO and PPC are two strategies to increase ROI, Let’s go read our blog before you decide to which will bring you high ROI – PPC or SEO?”
Digital marketing company provides the services of SEO and PPC. Before you decide to invest, first you need to know the real impact of SEO which means Search Engine Optimization and PPC which means Pay Per Click. SEO is the organic way to bring your website on the top of the search result. PPC is a way to buy a link, a marketing technique to invest in the website which will make the advertisement appear on the top of the search result, meant to attract more clicks. Clients fail to decide where to make their investment which will meet their purpose with greater returns.
If you are searching for a digital marketing company to enhance your brand, first you look whether the services provided by them include SEO and PPC. Then the challenge is to decide the better option that will meet your purpose. Both have its own merits and limitations. You have to judge how to maintain a balance between these two marketing strategies to gain maximum returns.
Time needed for better results:
Sole aim of digital marketing is to take the website on top of the search results. If you invest in SEO you have to also invest time to pull your website on top of the SERP (Search Engine Result Pages) using required keywords and attract traffic. Every moment innumerable websites are adding to the list. Therefore to pull your website in top of the result pages following SEO strategy is much time consuming in comparison to results gained from PPC. In case of PPC, you need to run advertisements based on the keywords that will make it appear at the top of the SERP still you continue to invest for the same. This will result to more clicks but only as long as the advertisement is made available by you.
Effective results:
Applying proper SEO techniques, the keywords used to attract traffic decrease the chances of bounce rate. Here only relevant clients will visit your site so much are the possibilities to turn prospects to customers. But investing in PPC can result to attract random user meeting lesser relevance for your business. Even after a click on the link the chances of leaving the site remains high contributing to higher bounce rate with low returns.
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Cost Effective:
SEO is much more cost effective in comparison to PPC. Usage of keywords and relevant links attracts more traffic that is likely to increase with time at minimum cost. In case of PPC you have to continue to invest still you want to run your advertisement. Whenever a click in made on the link, money will be deducted from the linked account. Irrelevant clicks increases cost as well as make it difficult to meet the purpose.
Evaluate and Apply
One cannot achieve while applying single marketing technique. Evaluate both the strategies and apply accordingly to endorse your brand for better returns. Investing time over SEO to pull your site in top results of SERP as well as investing money over PPC will give desired returns to your investments. Investing in PPC can generate sale on the other hand keep your users interested with your brand with SEO techniques.
If you are in need of professional advice to help you decide, the proportionate share of investment on SEO and PPC, then contact us at Keyline Creative Services or Call us at 033-24819206.