Tag Archives: Search Engine Marketing

Why you need Content Marketing.

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In the year ahead, content marketing, in all its shapes and forms, is going to become a more integral component of ones digital marketing strategy – if it already has not been. The value of including content marketing in your strategy and optimizing it for all channels, is crucial to the success of your content, as well as growing your online footprint.

But before we go any further, you’re probably wondering what exactly content marketing is! That is a great question. *By definition, content marketing is a marketing format that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire customers. Content marketing’s basic premise is to “provide some valuable information or entertainment – “content” – that stops short of a direct sales pitch or call to action, but which seeks to positively influence customers in some way. In layman’s terms, content marketing is the form of communicating with your target audience in a way where you deliver information that is educational in nature and helps them to make a more informed decision. Instead of selling, you’re helping your target audience become more intelligent.

Now that we have established the definition of content marketing, what exactly are forms of content marketing? Another great question! Some forms of content marketing include but are not limited to social media (Facebook, Linkedin, Google Plus), eNewsletters, articles, blogs, press releases, content marketing strategies
and more. All of these mediums can be used to reach out to target audiences and be used to build trust, educate, interact with customers, or drive conversions. As I mentioned above, content marketing is not about pitching your products, but more so about educating your target audience in effort to help them make a more informed buying decision.

Content marketing is an effective way to get your message in front of your target audience while persuading them to take action. And, I firmly believe that as more households continue to become multi-screen households (televisions, computers, tablets/smartphones), traditional advertisement will become less and less effective. I say this because consumers have become so immune to traditional advertisements that they do not even notice them or they scan right over them. For example, Internet users typically look right past Internet banner ads while “surfing,” television viewers can fast forward past commercials with DVR, making each of these advertising vehicles less effective as time goes on. You’re probably wondering how I know this. Well, a few years ago, I decided to take a sabbatical from internet marketing and try my hand at selling broadcast television advertising. It was there that I learned how television viewers watch television and what objections advertisers had about television advertising. And it was a very hard gig.

I am also a firm believer that if businesses utilize content marketing and marry it with other digital marketing efforts, they would see outstanding results (again, personal view). Why? Because content marketing is a vehicle where you can offer value to customers and clients with a consistent message of education and persuasion, which in return would ultimately reward your content marketing efforts by them becoming loyal patrons of your business or establishment.

You’re probably wondering by now if I am going to offer any tips that can help you develop a content marketing strategy. Well, below are some tips to help you develop a successful content marketing strategy.

  • Relevant, Ability to Share & Reusable: Develop content so it can be re-purposed down the road. The “blast and forget it” approach is not always the right approach. By giving your content a longer shelf life, you can help improve marketing efficiencies down the road. I want to mention that I am not recommending that you re-purpose the title and edit a few sentences. I am recommending that you use the same template, opening and closing paragraphs, and drop the new content in the middle.
  • Context of Content: Understand your target audience and deliver your message according to their interests. Develop a message that is going to resonate with them and prompt them to take action. Content and understanding your target audience is crucial to the success of your content marketing.
  • Adaptive: Again, make sure your content is consistent among all devices, as well provides the same user experience between computers, tablets, and smartphones.
  • Social Engagement: While developing your content, it’s important to ensure that your content is “social friendly” and it allows users to consume it, engage with it, and share it. This can help build and improve your social footprints.

I would like to leave you with this last thought before I jet. Content marketing will only continue to morph into a larger component of digital marketing and it’s important that you develop a content marketing strategy should you not have one.

*Definition courtesy of Wikipedia

PPC Ad Group Segmentation, How Deep Should You Go?

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Developing keyword lists and building out paid search campaigns can be a very large and a very fun project.  I believe there is some debate among paid search managers as to when you should be adding new ad groups and how many ad groups are appropriate based on the size of your keyword list.  There is really no clear cut answer as to when it is appropriate to further segment your ad groups.  Like most things in this industry, it depends.  The further you can break your ad groups down the better your campaign performance can be.  It takes more work, but it pays off in the end.  You need to be able to analyze your keyword list to determine how many different groups of keywords you’re working with.  Also think about the potential of using different ad copy to speak to each of these different searchers.  Do these different groups of keywords show different user intent?  Are these searchers asking a question, or are they looking for a specific product or service?  Answering these questions will help you determine when you need to utilize some different ad copy to really speak to searchers in a different way.

Rules Of Thumb To Help

There are a few different guidelines that you can use to help determine when you should be making a new ad group or just adding a few different keywords to an established ad group:

  • Use a 2 root words guide.
  • Try to not have more than 20-25 keywords in a single ad group.
  • Different types of keywords that show different intent.

To help explain more about some of these guidelines I’ll use a few different examples.  Let’s say you’re making a campaign to advertise your ppc management services.  You may have a list of terms that include: ppc management, ppc management company, ppc management services, search marketing management, search marketing manager, google adwords management, google adwords management services, etc.  Your ad group list should at least include 3 different ad groups with this small list:

  • ppc management
  • search marketing management
  • google adwords management

When you’re using more than 20-25+ keywords in an ad group you may have a specific reason you need that many keywords, but for most ad groups this seems like there could be further segmentation.  Maybe you’re taking over a campaign for someone, acquired a new client or maybe it’s just time to re-review your ad group structure.  Whatever reason it is I believe your entire campaign could benefit from this exercise.  If there are more than 25 keywords in a single ad group it’s hard to believe that all those different searchers should be seeing the same set of ads, which is why it might be time to build some new ad groups and write some new ads.

There are a lot of ways that people search the internet to find an infinite amount of different things.  This also means that we cannot think of all these searchers as the same.  Some searchers are just looking for information, while others are looking for that product that your site sells.  Professionals in search marketing have tried to group keyword searches into 3 different groups.

  • Informational
  • Navigational
  • Transactional

google adwords ppc ad group segmentation

This is a good way to think about your keyword and where these people are within your sales funnel, or are they in your sales funnel at all?  Based on the intention of the searcher you should have different ad groups with terms that have totally different ad copy which speak to that searcher on an individual level.  If it’s an informational keyword then your ad needs to answer the question or promise more insight into what problem they’re looking to solve.  If the keyword is navigational then your ad needs to direct that searcher to their destination.  Lastly, if the search is transactional then your ad should grab their attention and offer them the product or service that you’re selling and close the deal.

Whether you’re a seasoned PPC manager or just starting out this exercise of segmenting or adding to your ad group list is a great optimization technique.  Don’t get caught up in adding keywords over time to your existing ad groups to gain traffic and exposure be left with a small number of ad groups that all have hundreds of keywords in them.  Your campaigns and business are going to suffer.  Take the extra time to do it right.

Coming To Grips With Your Websites Content Strategy

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I’d like to take some time and focus on the content strategy for your companies website.  Why does website content seem to be an after thought for a lot of businesses?  It seems like a lot of businesses brush over the fact that their website actually needs to have a strong message and a valuable content strategy.  The content for your website needs to be able to drive a visitor to take some kind of desired action.  Whether that’s making a purchase, becoming a lead or coming into your business you want your visitors to feel like they can take that next action.  Websites can serve a variety of purposes, but for the most part businesses want to take their website visitors and turn them into customers.  So how do we do this?

Describe Your Products Or Services In Depth

I’m sure you have more to say about your business than you think.  No matter if you are a local business or a Fortune 500 company.  I would bet that you could expand the content on your website or make it better.  If your website is on the smaller side then you need to think of each product or service that you offer as a unique page on your website that is completely dedicated to that product or service. A lot of times I’ve spoken with companies who think a single page on their website labeled “Services” is going to list out and describe all the different things their company offers.  You should really push yourself to consider more than 1 services page as a general role of thumb.

If your website is on the larger side then you should have more resources and offer more, which means more pages and a larger site.  Don’t just think too that the answer is always adding more pages just to get your page count up.  You always want to approach content by adding value to your website visitors.  Larger websites can do much more with their content and add even more value by evaluating a larger content strategy.  If you need more ideas think about developing content then think about playing the recency card.  Develop something timely that is relevant to your audience.

Blogging For Your Business

Blogging is a great way for anyone to develop content on an ongoing basis very easily.  Blogs present unique opportunities to create interaction with your audience whenever someone comments on your post, and posts are often shared more often than other standard website pages.  Most of the time your blog posts are ordered by date, but you can also do things like assign categories and tags to your posts it often makes it easier for users to navigate to the content they are looking for.  Most people think that writing for a blog is either too much work, or that they aren’t going to be able to come up with new ideas for posts.  Here is just a small list of content ideas we’ve compiled over the years:

  • Changes or additions to your companies products or services.
  • Company or industry updates.
  • News that is relevant to your industry.
  • Discussing the most frequent problems that your customers bring up to your sales department or customer service department and develop answers to those questions.
  • Joining an internet community for your industry and blogging about topics that are presented often within that community.  Examples could be:
    • Social Media
    • Forums
    • Reddit

Developing Local Content

We work with a variety of local and regional clients that often come to us with this same problem about developing content relevant for their audience.  If you want to develop content or optimize content for a local audience think about how your business relates to those local consumers and integrate your web content with the interests of their local region.  Maybe you should start breaking out pages individually for each region you service and merge that content with how your company has serviced or been involved in that local community.  Work with a local journalist who reports on the area you service and help develop content that can be promoted on a local news outlet as well as your site.  Find local bloggers who live in your area that write content that supports your industry and present them with a guest blog post.

Ultimately Trying To Provide Value

At the end of the day whatever content you are producing with your website or for your company you need to be adding value to your visitors.  Also remember that you shouldn’t be running out of ideas.  Try to come up with creative pieces of web content that will help your audience and be pertinent to your business.

Website Landing Page Optimization Based on Traffic Source

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Just reading through a Marketing Sherpa report on Landing Page Optimization and I thought I would share a few thoughts. They typically look at it from three types of landing pages; E-Commerce, Incentivized Leads, and Direct Lead Generation. These are, after all, the reasons you are out there with internet marketing campaigns – to drive leads and sales.

With the tools available (Google Analytics is perfect and FREE), you should spend some time figuring out who converts the best on your site from what medium of advertising. You also need to look at assigning a lead “quality score” in order to balance quantity and quality. Paid media, customers, e-mail blasts, social media referrals, and general organic traffic all do different things when they get to your website and you should be looking at the data to tell you what you need to do based on the source.

Which takes me to some work we did a few months ago for a big automaker here in Michigan. They created a comparison site for their brand site and wanted to know how it was working.  We helped them understand all the ways they could measure their traffic patterns and usage so they could make changes to improve performance based on EACH way someone got to that site – paid, social, Brand site, mobile, etc. for the next model year. This is extremely important to look at in order to make sure you are maximizing your opportunity with each and every visitor to your site based on how they get to you and what they do once there.

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Google Adwords Call Metrics Effectiveness and Billing Changes

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If you haven’t already been using Google’s Adwords Call Metrics feature then you really need to look into it. Sadly, if you don’t already know about it then you have missed some functionality that was initially rolled out as free. This will not be the case very soon. Let’s first take a look at the functionality and the value that it adds, excluding the cost initially.

Call Metrics & Its Benefits

If you’re driving traffic through any form of internet marketing you are always looking for ways to track its effectiveness and justify ROI for your ad $$’s. Often times we are all tracking conversions on sales leads and sales through e-commerce, but what about the person who also gets value from phone sales or drives user interaction through offline communication? This is a great way to justify the offline conversion of your traffic and add value to your clients by letting them know the real effectiveness of a campaign if you are ultimately driving sales leads or calls over the phone.

How To Setup Call Metrics

First, go into your Adwords campaign under the Ad Extensions tab and add a Call Extension to your campaign. The next step is to establish what the phone number you want those calls redirected to. Then check the box to use Call Metrics and you’ll be able to establish whether you would like a toll free number or a local area code number associated with your tracking that will be displayed. This brings up another factor of marketing and the local spin of your business if this applies to you. Users love to see local phone numbers and know that they are talking to someone local, so if you are a local business then I would recommend using a local phone number. Even if you need to start separating out campaigns for different geographic areas to achieve this the extra effort is worth it. Either way now Google will use its Google Voice platform to assign you a phone number and they will handle the forwarding and tracking of that number. Another thing I want to mention with this is there is also another feature I have skipped over. The Call-Only Format is only possible to use if your device is capable of making phone calls. This could be any mobile phone or computer with Skype or a VOIP system. This will disable the functionality to click the headline of the ad and go to the website, and give the user only one option to interact with the ad and that is using the Click To Call functionality. If you’re trying to drive sales through a phone number then who doesn’t love a 100% conversion rate. Also, if you haven’t broken out your PPC campaigns and separated out a mobile strategy then you need to do that as well, but I’m not really covering that whole concept in this blog post.

Call Metrics Changes Very Soon

What will be changing very soon is the way Google bills for this value added service. Soon campaigns will be charged $1 for every time this number is called manually. Now when I say manually basically I mean any time the number is called NOT using the Click To Call functionality. This could be when the user sees the number on an Adwords ad, doesn’t click, but calls the number. You would be charged $1 in that scenario. The worst thing about this is users who may call your business for the first time through a PPC ad and then save the phone number in their contacts list. Users could be using this number in excess and costing your campaign money. This is just one downfall to think about. I still believe the functionality is worth the cost and will be testing to see how many times users will actually be calling the number manually. We can measure this against how many users call the number and do not charge the additional $1, and make our judgments after we see more data.

Reporting On Your Call Details

An extra feature that makes this even more valuable is the way in which we are able to report on this data. If you go into your campaign and look under the Dimensions tab you’ll want to view the Call Details information. This will give you:
  • Start Time Of The Call
  • End Time Of The Call
  • Status – Received or Missed Call
  • Duration In Seconds
  • Caller Area Code
This information is very valuable because it gives you very valuable information regarding the effectiveness of your PPC budget. Also you should be using this data to setup your Day Parting strategy to further target your ads to drive the most ROI.

Seven Steps for Social Media Strategy Integration for your Company

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I love this article from last summer about the 52 questions to ask when hiring a social media company. This article is spot on if you are serious about Social Media. It goes way in depth in some cases, especially for Small-to-Medium enterprises, but it does a good job in helping you determine what you should be asking a potential partner.

After talking to, working with and pitching dozens of companies and organizations on the principles of social media and why it works for more than just Business-to-Consumer Brands, I have realized that it is a much bigger commitment than just “another marketing or advertising campaign” of sorts.

Here is what you need to do to make sure your social media efforts get the Return-On-Investment (ROI) they could and also why playing around doesn’t really drive effective social media. All of these things really depend on who has what responsibilities within your organization and how it is structured but most are applicable in the larger, national and even global size companies. Even smaller organizations can take away some value as well.

First - Your various business units or divisions and partners should be all be looped in and asked if they participate in social media and how. They should all be informed somehow of what you are doing and why even potentially consulted on how they could improve their social media initiatives so you can have some Brand continuity across all of your channels.

Second - You need to look at your audience structure. Don’t be thinking that a “catch all” corporate Facebook page or blog is enough. People are smarter than that. Speak specifically to them, with content that is what they want – be specific in touching all your audience with content and experiences they can relate to. Don’t make it a “news” page. If you are updating them with content they don’t care about half of the time, they will start to ignore it ALL of the time and that is bad. If you have the resources and a large enough market share, you could consider “several” Blogs(or add filters when they follow so they can select what information they want) and multiple Facebook pages for segments that are big enough to warrant them and truly create a dialog/interaction with a specific customer base.

Third - You have to have some buy-in at the C-level. They should be involved in whats going on and even use them to help aggregate industry news, company news, white papers, blog postings, etc. It is important to help them buy into goals that established and measurement of success – in effect the ROI you want. This might also help you navigate any potential objections from “legal”. Speaking of legal, if you do use a third party source, make sure they can work with someone like Bevelwise to ensure no proverbial “lines” get crossed and they feel like you could get into any “trouble” resulting in ligitgation.

Fourth - offer out incentives of some sort to employees to touch customers (sales, customer service, customer care/support, etc) to help feed you good stories, testimonials, content, and things that make good social media posts. Anyone who touches a client could help generate content and drive the initiatives further – A customer service person that asks “are you following us on Facebook yet – we have specials we run for those fans on occasion” can go a long way to helping build your presence. These people can also get you content for posting MUCH faster and more often than most.

Fifth - all of your web resources, teams, should know what is going on and why. They don’t have to “agree” with it always, but aligning what is happening with the website (SEO/Content) resources, all of your marketing/advertising campaigns (email, online, offline, direct mail, etc) and initiatives and your PR team will help feed you more content and help the “big picture” work together. After all, if you are putting effort in, you want to maximize each effort.

Sixth - If you are big enough, try to find a champion from each internal department, especially those that touch customers, so they can farm for content, feedback and other things you can share through your social media channels. They can work with your social media agency or potentially be trained on making posts – You want to make sure you are feeding the content to touch all of your vertical markets, products, services, audiences etc-especially if you have the resources or need for content specific social media. Internal folks live and breathe your strategy 24/7 – they can be VERY beneficial to an outside resource because of that.

Finally - if you are choosing a partner to help, choose a partner that has understanding across all marketing mediums, but with a specialty in the online channels like Search Engine Optimization (SEO), website usability, online marketing – (banners/PPC, e-mail marketing, and especially analytics. That should mean they know how to set up goals and measure results across the many different channels and mediums that are being used for your overall advertising strategy.

We welcome your social media strategy questions.

Google Adwords Extends Ad Titles To Test And Improve CTR

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Google is always making changes and testing the way they display results and ads. We all know about the change from a while back when they stopped calling ads “Sponsored Results” and starting call them “Ads”. This made a big impact, even though it was just a simple change. Well they’re at it again and this time they are testing extending the Ad Title’s of text ads. What they are doing is taking the first line of the ad copy and appending it to the title. This has a variety of things to take into account with this change:

  • Ad Titles are the clickable area of an ad, and extending it gives users a larger area to click and make the text appear as a hyperlink.
  • It will increase CTR and drive more traffic through paid search.
  • As PPC managers we will need to alter the way we write ad copy taking into account the mix of ad titles and ad copy.

To see Google’s post about this topic you can visit the Google Adwords Blog where they describe how they rolled this out and how your ad needs to be formatted to receive this change. You’ll need to end your line 1 ad copy with a form of punctuation. A period or question mark will need to be used to imply your ad has actual sentence structure. The example that the Adwords blog used to illustrate the difference in ads can be seen here.

The implication of this could be huge from a CTR stand point and the volume of traffic that can be driven to your site through paid search. We like when changes like this are made because when you know how to manage and optimize campaigns we can maximize results for our clients. If you’re not actively managing your Adwords campaign then you’ll miss the boat when big changes like this can affect results on a large scale. This is a good reason to have a professional manager of your campaigns that will stay up to date for you. The scarier thing may be that your competitors could be using this to their advantage, which will give them the better CTR and overtake your ads position with a higher quality score. You may be left in the dust.If you have seen this in your own campaigns and have noticed the differences in performance leave a comment and tell us how this has affected your results and strategy. If you haven’t made adjustments that take this into account… go make them now and measure the results for yourself.

Seach Engine Strategies 2010 In Chicago

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This is Steve Wellman @ Bevelwise coming to you just after Search Engine Strategies 2010 in Chicago. What a great event this has been. There are tons of industry experts in town for the event speaking and sitting on panels for seminars. I have had the privilege of attending as many of these seminars as possible and am just soaking up as much as I can. The conference has offered a ton of information on a range of topics. Anything from local search optimization tips all the way to organic and PPC search marketing tips. I really enjoyed Eli Goodman’s take on Competitive Research for SEO. He gave a number of good strategies to utilize all of your competitors information on the web, and how we as SEOs can leverage that to our advantage.

We have even gotten to hear some viewpoints straight from Google, and had a keynote from Maile Ohye, a Senior Developer Programs Engineer at Google. Maile went over a lot of new updates and functionality they are building into the Webmaster Tools. She even let us know that internally their team has a “Webmaster Happiness Rating” they monitor with the forum support team to let them know generally how happy webmasters are with them around the net. I’m surely going to remember that next time I’m going back and forth on their Webmaster’s Forum.

We here at Bevelwise tried to attend as much as possible and wanted to get as much information as we could to help serve all our clients better. Here is a list of the seminars that we thought would help our clients the best and would provide us with the highest level of material.

  • Advanced Keywords Research – Looking at the latest and best techniques and tools used in advanced keyword research and helping discover the best possibilities for our marketing and optimization efforts.
  • Ads In A Quality Score World – When we look at pay per click marketing we are always looking to improve, optimize and expand our campaigns. Knowing how quality score works and writing unique, relevant and great ad copy will help us improve campaigns and get lower cost per clicks than our competitors.
  • Advanced Paid Search Tactics – This seminar shed light into techniques that the best of the best in the industry use to optimize their pay per click campaigns.
  • B2B Search Marketing Tips – We all know that depending on the type of marketing tactics we use depends on the audience we are trying to attract. In this B2B series SES looked at the differences and challenges specifically associated with B2B markets.
  • Local 2.0: The Evolution of Local Search – Depending on your business we are always trying to leverage local opportunities where applicable, and search is no exception. We looked at where local search has come from, and where it will be heading in the future.
  • Competitive Research – It doesn’t matter who you are or what type of website you have. You probably at least have a competitor or 2, and knowing that everyone wants to gain some insight into their competitors and what works for them. Dissecting a competitors SEO strategy can be a very tactful way to figure out what has worked for them, and to also find possible holes in their strategy.
  • Making The Jump From Search to Display – Yep… all of you thought that display advertising was a dying breed, but there are some revolutionary things that display advertisers are doing to get a new fresh perspective on their advertising channel. Well you can guess who they are trying to attract… the search marketers.
  • Stretching Your Marketing Dollars: The Upside of Search – Ok well you don’t have to convince me that when your marketing dollars are tight that the best avenue to pursue is search. What I am concerned with is learning new and revolutionary ways to further stretch things as people continue coming to me looking for ways to improve their sales and leads, while at the same time lowering their budgets.
If you have any questions or want more in-depth information about these subjects you can email me at swellman@bevelwise.com and I will answer any questions.
I plan on trying to write more in-depth posts about these subjects to a further extent in the near future.