Content Marketing Strategy with a Side of Social

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Development of a content marketing strategy that speaks to the target audience plays a key role in successful execution of an overall online marketing program. Companies that embrace the social web as part of their marketing mix need to consider the content created within social media channels just as much as corporate web site content.

Whether you communicate to your audience via a blog, Twitter or social networking sites like Facebook, the only true way to build relationships with a growing network is to listen, engage and provide content they find valuable.

When developing a social media content strategy, start by asking questions like: “What does my network find valuable?”.

A little listening can go a long way to get to the heart of a community’s needs. By understanding the pain points of those your company wishes to connect with, the better you’ll be able to provide the resources needed to make better decisions and improve their business.

You may have heard Lee Odden reference the need to create a social media roadmap, starting first by gaining a better understanding of the intended audience and identifying objectives. A social media marketing strategy is the bridge between reaching that audience and mutual goals. Gain an understanding of how you are going to speak to the community and what you want them to do.

Think realistically about providing and receiving value. For example, will building a network of 1,000 friends on Facebook have an impact on your business without clear goals around what you want those friends to do? There’s an implied connection between quantity of network and marketing effectiveness, but with social media it’s more about quality, not quantity.

Capturing insight about your audience in a social media context can be accomplished through:
Participation
Social media monitoring tools
Analyzing web traffic and behaviors to your web site from social media web sites
Surveys of your existing customers
Referencing demographic information supplied by social media sites that offer advertising
Third party data sources such as Quantcast, Hitwise or Microsoft Advertising Audience Intelligence tools

If the objective for your social media efforts is to sell more product, become a resource to help your audience use that product and give insight into what’s in it for them. Make a bigger impact with your community by giving them the knowledge and tools to help them accomplish their goals and in turn, they will see your company as a valuable resource. Follow the ‘give to get’ mentality to build relationships.

How do I create unique content that speaks to my audience?

Provide opportunities for your network to create their own content. Run promotions involving user generate articles, videos, images or other content that can be shared, promoted and recognized. You can also collect and examine the resources you already have, including case studies, articles, white papers, PPTs or blog posts. Chances are, you have the makings for great unique content or can lay the ground work to repurpose that content.

In this age of Web 2.0, those who are active in social media are essentially publishers. Content creation plays a key role in your social media strategy. One way to ensure you publish consistent, unique content that speaks to your target audience and aligns with your target keyword concepts is to create a content calendar.

Using Banner Ads to Promote Your Website

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We are in a period when banner advertising seems to be on the wane. You know, those rectangular boxes on commercial sites. Click-through rates have dipped to 0.20% for average banners and to about 0.50% for rich media banners, according to the Eyeblaster Analytics Bulletin for March 2009. That's horrible! Are banner ads dead as a viable form of advertising? Not really. A great many companies, large and small, still use banner ads as part of their advertising mix and will continue to do so. Nevertheless, advertisers are becoming more sophisticated about when and how to use banner ads.

Defining Terms

To explore this broad and evolving type of advertising we need to begin by defining some terms:

• Hits -- A fuzzy term meaning the number of times a webserver has been "hit" by a request for a webpage or a graphic image. Since perhaps 5 out 6 "hits" are for graphic images, the number of "hits" can be grossly misleading. Usually people mean by "hits" the number of times a webpage has been seen, but to be precise, the better term is "views," "pageviews," or (more sophisticated) "impressions."
• Page impressions or pageviews -- Refers to the number of times a webpage has been requested by the server.
• Banner views or impressions -- Refers to the number of times a banner has been viewed. Almost the same as "page views," but some banner server programs don't count the banner view unless the visitor stays on the page long enough for the banner to be fully downloaded from the banner server.
• CPM -- A metric from the print advertising, meaning "Cost Per Thousand," using the Roman numeral "M" to stand for one thousand. A price of $15 CPM means, $15 for every thousand times a banner is displayed.
• Banner ad -- An ad graphic hyperlinked to the URL of the advertiser. These are sometimes static graphic images, but animated rich-media banners do much better. The most common banner size used to be 468 x 60 pixels (Full Banner). To standardize, the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) specifies ad sizes in their Ad Unit Guideliness. The sizes they're recommending these days are 300x250 (Medium Rectangle), 180x150 (Rectangle), 728x90 (Leaderboard), and 160x600 (Wide Skyscraper). In fact, I don't see people following these IAB size recommendations very closely. You'll see a lot of 125x125 (Square Button) on sites, too.
• Creative -- "Ad-speak" for the actual banner graphic.
• Click -- When a visitor clicks her mouse on a banner ad, she is transferred to the advertiser's site. The number of responses to a banner ad is sometimes refereed to as the number of "clicks."
• Click Throughs -- Same as "click," commonly used to count the number of visitors who click on the banner and are transferred to the advertiser's site.
• Click Through Rate (CTR) -- The percentage of click throughs to banner views. A 1% CTR means that 1% of each 1000 banner views (or 10 visitors) have clicked through.
• Conversion Rate -- The percentage of shoppers in an online store who actually make a purchase. This varies a great deal, and depends a great deal on the quality of the landing page (See more in my book, How to Develop a Landing Page).
• Cookies -- Small files written to your computer when you view a banner ad, visit a website, or put a product in a shopping cart. This helps the banner server to keep from showing you the same ad, or perhaps show you ads you might be more interested in seeing. Cookies are controversial, but are here to stay; too much of the Web is run by cookies to get rid of them. Cookies also allow an advertiser to track which banner ad a visitor saw that brought him to the advertiser's site, and which banner ads resulted in actual sales.
• Run of Site (ROS) -- Refers to displaying a banner ad throughout a website or a banner network with no targeting by keyword or site category. Run of site advertising will probably cost less than more targeted advertising.

How Do You Measure Success?

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Click Through Rate (CTR). This is a basic measure of how effective an ad is. CTRs range from the industry average of about 0.20% to as high as 5% or 10%. As a general rule, the more targeted the site, the higher the CTR. For example, you'd expect an ad for Wilson Tennis Racquets to get a higher CTR on a tennis site than on a general sports site. On a general site such as MSNBC they would get an even lower CTR. (Disclosure: I hold no financial interest in Wilson Sporting Goods, but wish I did.)

Cost Per Sale. A much more important figure is the actual cost of making the sale of a tennis racquet. In the final analysis, you don't care how high the CTR is if it doesn't result in a proportionate number of sales. What complicates this is the fact that your banner ads on the World Tennis Ratings site may actually sell fewer tennis racquets than those on NCAAChampionships.com. You can only make this determination when you use sophisticated tracking methods using cookies to separate the lookers from the buyers, and determine which sites and which banner ads had the best result. Most ad serving software, ad networks, and affiliate program software and services provide this kind of information. You can also determine this by coding all banner ad links.

Branding. While CTR and cost per sale relate to direct marketing objectives, another way of looking at banner ads is as "branding" tools. They create brand awareness, and a brand image in the viewer's mind, whether or not the viewer clicks on the ad. But hopefully, when the viewer gets ready to make a purchase, those "impressions" (a wonderful ad agency buzz word!) will cause you to select Coca Cola over Pepsi, or Barnes and Noble over Amazon, or JCrew over Lands' End. Branding is very difficult to measure, but can be very powerful. Typically, only the larger and better-established companies have the budget to pursue branding consistently. Brand awareness is sometimes measured in surveys with questions such as: "What brand names can you recall in the field of tennis?"

CPM Banner Economicss

While brand marketers may assess effectiveness in some fuzzy way, direct marketers look at any advertising method in terms of how many sales it produces immediately. Let me give you an idea of how the numbers might look for banner ads. Your results will vary, depending upon where you advertise and the effectiveness of your creative. Here are some arbitrary numbers to use in our calculation:

• CPM = $2 (a not untypical rate for general, not-very-targeted websites)
• CTR = 0.20%
• Conversion Rate = 2% (from your landing page)

Cost per Visitor = CPM / (1000 x CTR) = $2.00 / (1000 x .002) = $1

In our example, the $2 you spent to show the banner ad to 1000 people netted you 0.2% or 2 visitors to your site. Each visitor cost you $1 to get there. Hmmm. Now let's calculate what your advertising cost is per sale. At a 2% conversion rate from you landing page it would take 50 visitors to make one sale.

Cost per Sale = Cost per Visitor / Conversion Rate = $1.00 / .02 = $50

Oops! You mean it costs me $50 to get one sale? Yes, Virginia. Of course, if you have a 10% conversion rate (like a few top merchants) rather than a 2% conversion rate (which is high for many small businesses), it only costs you $10 to get a sale.

Lower Cost Approaches

What this means is that banner advertising on a CPM basis can be expensive. First, you need to determine what cost per sale you can afford. Then consider these alternatives:

1. Develop a compelling ad that 5% of viewers click on. That can radically change the economics! If you're serious about banner advertising, my book How to Write an Ad that Clicks is one of the few recent books that explains ad design techniques for standard banners ads. This is lore that few graphic designer probably are familiar with!
2. Reduce your CPM. Ad agencies specialize in placing ads on selected sites. They usually work on a CPM basis, and often make their money by purchasing the ad space at a 15% to 20% agency discount. Tell your ad agency the most you can pay and don't budge. There are hundreds of ad networks that specialize in placing clients ads on a network of "quality" sites that they can serve banners to. Out of your CPM rate, the publisher site gets a portion and the ad network company gets the rest. Try negotiating a lower rate!
3. Find a PPC or CPC ad network. The advertiser is king -- it's an ad-buyer's market these days. Some ad networks only charge you when you get a click-through, thus you Pay Per Click (PPC) or on a Cost Per Click (CPC) basis. Now you don't have to pay for banner impressions seen by people who aren't interested at all. Note: The line between pricing methods is fuzzy these days. Some networks offer your choice of pricing approaches -- or a combination of two methods.
4. Start an Affiliate Program. Affiliate programs work on a Cost Per Sale (CPS) or Cost Per Action (CPA) basis. You pay a fixed amount only when you get an actual sale or lead! Affiliate program software or service organizations will host your banners and make them available to affiliates. (See my recommendations for affiliate programs and services.)
5. Add Google AdWords PPC text ads to your advertising mix. Keep some banner ads, but try keyword performance based advertising as well.

Don't count banner ads out yet. Developing an effective banner ad strategy may bring thousands of people to your site who will become your customers.

[This very popular article first appeared in the June 22, 1996 issue of Web Marketing Today, was revised July 1, 2000, and was recently revised again.]

What Happens When Twitter Gets Mainstream Attention

What Happens When Twitter Gets Mainstream Attention


Twitter is getting a tremendous amount of buzz from brands, celebrities, media, politicians, and athletes. Despite the hype, it’s still a very small social networking site (likely under 10mm), compared to the social giants like Google, Microsoft, Facebook and MySpace (150-300mm), see my stats page to learn more. I assert that mainstream attention is different than mainstream usage.

Even respected analyst firm Gartner suggests that the backlash may start as this microblogging tool gets mainstream attention, although I’ll suggest we haven’t even begun to see the upcoming revolt, as the pivot point is dependent on mainstream usage.

Here’s what we should expect to happen over the next few months:

Mainstream media and celebrities to flood Twitter
The tool, having received attention from the elections and political media engines has slowly gained the attention of local based TV news and talk show hosts. It’s hard to listen to a talk show, or watch local news without hearing a self-pitch to follow their Twitter account. With several celebrities jumping on board and playing the ratings game (first to a million) we should expect this to be a wake up call to the rest of celebrities and mainstream.

Most media and celebrities will use as a broadcast tool
Being world famous comes with challenges, it’s hard to tell who your friends are, and as a result, they will likely use these tools to communicate with each other, or talk about their personal insights. We shouldn’t expect them to engage in individual conversations with their community. These stars simple can’t scale, are busy, and well, have better things to do. Expect some to hire community managers (Britney does this) that interact with their followers and post up one-way information. As a result, expect this to primarily be used as an insiders tool among the elite, but primarily as a broadcast tool, which is what they do best.

Empowered, celebrities will fend off tabloids
Ashton gets self-empowerment from social media, in fact, he commented that he’s now got the power of a large media network, despite being a single individual. As a result, expect celebs to bypass intermediaries like tabloids, instead they will directly speak to the people using these self-publishing tools. Celebs are now more empowered than ever before.

Increase in brands listening then they’ll join Twitter
Brands, in an ever quest to follow communities and customers are quickly launching Twitter accounts, or dealing with those that have taken over their own namesakes. Now with mainstream attention, expect more brands to jump on board, and within a few months, it’ll be an account grabbing experience, much like we saw in late 90s when companies were registering domains. I’m waiting to see some celebrities promote brands right on Twitter “I drink @coke, don’t you?”

Users get new experience with mainstream –yet many will revolt
The conversation with Twitter has always felt personal, with the exception of the elite ‘A-lister’ community. Now, many people will be excited about the chance to interact with celebrities and get to know their personal experiences, but after a while, the excitement will wane, and people will move back to connecting with their true friends.

The geek ‘A-List’ early adopters seek a new stage
The ‘A-Listers’ are now just ‘B-Listers’ again, in fact, this list of the most popular twitter users has dramatically shifted to mainstream media. We’re already starting to see some early adopter geeks, those that first experimented and evangelize the tool to seek other communities to join that aren’t saturated. I was one of those early adopters in early 2007, but I embrace the mainstream media in this media, it’s validating, although I expect many of them to approach it without fully understanding. Expect the early adopters to shift back to blogs, Friendfeed, or put up stronger filters in Twitter. The power is shifting back, and the bruised egos will force them to move on.

Celebrities will monetize faster than Twitter themselves…
Twitter has only experimented with different ways to monetize such as this sponsored aggregation campaign, but we should expect that celebs will cascade their sponsorships to Twitter, promote their latest work, or benefit from word of mouth marketing. Collectively, celebs have likely generated more revenue from Twitter than Twitter themselves.

Yet expect Twitter to monetize brands, media and celebrities
Twitter has indicated that they plan to offer features and tools that help brands (whether it be corporate, media, or celeb) to help them manage their own accounts and information. Expect them to launch new platforms that involve sponsorship, advertising, and potentially lead management (like CRM).

More Hay and less Needles
This increase in people, and brands of all sorts joining Twitter will cause more noise and content to be created. We haven’t even seen the half of it, as devices like your car, laptop, can start auto-emitting signals that could become tweets. As a result, expect more filtering tools and analysis by humans to matter more and more.

I’m having breakfast with Steve Rubel tomorrow morning, he says he thinks Twitter will never be the same, I’ll update this post linking to his followup.

Love to hear from you in the comments, has Twitter reached a tipping point? (update: or perhaps, “Twipping Point“) If so, what happens next? How does this change your experience? Are you using Twitter to follow friends? get news? or interact with celebs?

Five Phases of Social Media Marketing

I've been creating and executing social media marketing strategies for the past couple of years for clients. The crowds are swarming, and interest - in the days when program dollars are being cut to save jobs - is growing from all sorts of organizations. I hear some very common questions from a wide swath of interested parties, and would like to clarify how to approach social media.

We need to start by recognizing that social media marketing is not free.

BusinessWeek, in their excellent February article called Debunking Six Social Media Myths, exposed this brilliantly as Myth #1, and stated that $50,000 is a beginning point for a two- to three-month social media campaign. In my experience, I believe that's about right. In spite of the free tools out there, every brand needs a strategic approach to social media in order to gain any traction.

In my experience, a strategic approach to social media success takes five phases:

Phase 1 - Discovery

In this phase, we explore three variables:

1. People: Who are your prospects and customers, and how do they feel about your brand, service and products? Are they talking about you online? If so, what is your online reputation? (Positive, negative, neutral?)
2. Competition: What are your competitors doing online? Where can we leapfrog them? What is their online reputation?
3. Spiders: How easy is it for you to be found by an average searcher who may be searching for your products online? (Keywords, site optimization, Search Engine Optimization [SEO], etc. come into play here.)

Phase 2 - Strategy

In this phase, we explore the opportunities and establish the objectives of a social media plan - based on the lessons we've learned in the Discovery phase. Questions include:

• What do you want your prospects and customers to think of you, and how do you want them to experience you, once you've begun your dialogue?
• How is this different from their current perception?
• How might we further pay off your brand promise, and distinguish your customer experience from competitors?
• and many more

This Phase is usually highly collaborative; and involves key players from around an organization, not just the marketing folks.

Phase 3 - Skills

Once we have developed a Strategy, we?ll review an organization's internal resources to identify gaps. Whose skills need building? How might we best train participants? And to what extent would it be wise to train the employee base about what to expect?

(Hint: I always recommend getting everyone up to speed on any social media program - when I was at Marqui, that turned out to be one of the most valuable things we did in support of, and preparation for, one of the most controversial, viral programs I've ever managed.)

In my experience, getting your employees up to speed on social media marketing usually requires a couple of training sessions held on-site. These are generally in-depth training sessions tailored to select audiences in the company ? e.g. your marketing and PR teams, your customer service folks, your executives and the entire organization.

Phase 4 - Execution

As we prepare to implement our strategy, we determine which tools to use, how they interface with your existing infrastructure, and ensure the processes and platforms are properly tied together. We explore the following:

• Are your systems all operating together as desired?
• Is there a crisis communications plan in place? Do participants know what it is?
• Are your company policies updated for blogging, texting and IM and other social media tools?
• Are your employees aware of your policies? If not, do we need to train them?
• Will your CRM system interface with your social media tools? How will you move people into your sales process? etc.

Phase 5 - Maintenance

After the launch, Maintenance becomes key. In this phase, I make myself available for whatever comes up; checking in weekly with the team, make suggestions on content, make reminders for activities, and generally ensure the organization is thriving online.

Any experienced social media expert (and we're crawling out of the woodwork these days, believe me) will have a stepped approach and methodology to launching an organization safely into the social realm.

The 9 Step Guide to Get Some Structure Into Your PPC Life

This blog was written to advise advertisers of the best practices for deciding the why, what and how of re-structuring your adCenter campaigns. We hope this gives you the foundations for moving your campaigns into a more efficient structure leading to improved key performance indicators (KPIs) over time.

Why would I consider a re-structure?

Have you ever found yourself contemplating either of the following?

- I need to set up a new campaign/account, where do I even start?

- My current campaign just isn’t working the way I want it to even after several optimisations. What could I do?

If you have, then don’t despair, we might have the answer... a re-structure.

What is re-structuring all about?

Re-structuring basically means starting your campaign/s from scratch..."a daunting thought" you may be thinking, however, it can have limitless wins for your business and is not something that should be shrugged off lightly. Re-structures can help to lower your CPCs whilst increasing your CTR long-term due to positive changes being made on your account.

As a Media Specialist, I have re-structured some client’s accounts with amazing affects and clients have been delighted with the results. If you’re still not convinced, I would recommend that you try a test re-structure by pausing one of your campaigns and creating a new test campaign following the guidelines I set below in my 9 step guide:

How? - The 9 Step Guide to Restructuring...

1) Develop Your Structure

Firstly you need to decide what you want your structure to look like. You may want it one of 2 ways;

- Break up your campaigns according to product/service

- Break up your campaigns by match-types if you want to monitor your match-types closely.

For this article, I will be concentrating on re-structuring by breaking campaigns out by product/service as this is typically what works best for our clients.

2) Review your landing page to ensure your new structure will be highly relevant.

Decide what the main products/services you wish to advertise are and ensure you have web pages dedicated to those products/services. If you are a travel company and offer holidays to various locations, you might want to create several campaigns for various holiday locations. From there you could advertise the different holiday types under those location names, e.g. if your campaign was Paris, your ad group names could include Last Minute Breaks, Disneyland Breaks, Luxury Holidays, Romantic breaks etc.

If you are a company selling a product, e.g. home furniture, you could break it down by furniture type and have campaigns named Sofas, Kitchen Tables, Chairs, etc. and then break the campaigns’ ad groups down further and include branding ad groups or whichever you would like.

A Sample Structure For A Travel Company:

I’m not saying this is definitely the structure for all travel companies so play around and find out what structure works best for you. Remember wherever possible to add in as many specific ad groups as possible to each campaign. I recommend that you add in very targeted keywords to each ad group as well as at least 3 ads with different selling points to ensure you reach all audiences. Doing this will ensure that your ads/keywords are highly targeted and also enables you to evaluate what product/service performs best for you.

3) Only Include Relevant Keywords/Ads

Once you have your structure set, you need to associate very relevant, targeted keywords and ads to your Ad Groups. To find suitable keywords, you can do some research through adCenter (the "Research" tab) or via adLabs. My colleague Shefali wrote a great checklist for keyword research which is available here and this should help your research too. Don’t ever be tempted to add irrelevant keywords to your account just to boost traffic. It will have a negative effect on your campaign over time and could possibly lead to lower CTR and higher CPCs. Always remember to add negative keywords to avoid any unwanted traffic.

The key to success is to ensure that your ads always go to relevant landing pages so don’t create an ad group for Last Minute Breaks if you don’t have a landing page for last minute breaks in Florida.

When adding new ads to your new ad groups, always ensure that they include the following;

- Mention any offers/”hot deals” you have going on at present e.g. warranty, shipping, low prices etc.

- Try to include dynamic text in your ad titles/descriptions where-ever possible -- it makes such a difference!

- If you have a well-known brand, use it! Make sure the brand name is included in the ad title or description, or even better, both! Also, if you’re an official site of the brand, also mention this.

- People are always conscious of safe online shopping so if you have secure ordering, mention this.

- Use your high-performing keywords in your adcopy.

4) Include Seasonality Campaigns

If there is a seasonal event coming up which you think could boost your sales, include seasonality campaigns. If you are a chocolate company, include an Easter campaign with Easter Chocolates ad groups. The benefit of having these created is that you can pause these campaigns and then resume them the following year.

5) Include Branding Campaigns

As mentioned above, if you have a big brand, consider adding a campaign which contains only branding ad groups. This will help you to analyze how your brand is doing.

6) Consider Match-Types

At adCenter, we always recommend using all 3 match-types however there are some circumstances where we may recommend not doing this;

- If you had an account which wasn’t working for you and you are creating a re-structured account to help your CTR, I would recommend that you start off using Exact & Phrase match-types only as these match-types tend to boost your CTR.

- If you find that you tend to spend a lot on high-spending keywords on all match-types, then only include Exact & Phrase match.

- If you have found that 1 or 2 match-types just haven’t worked well for you in the past, then either a) only use the match-types which do perform well for you or b) increase bids for those match-types which perform best for you.

7) Set Good Bids

Always set the max bid you are willing to pay for keywords. PPC is an auction and the highest bidder wins therefore if you’re not in, you can’t win. You can always reduce the bid after a while once your CPC drops due to good performance. When starting off however, it is key to start off with good bids so that you keep a good history.

8) Set your new structure live

Set your new structure live and watch it succeed!

9) Evaluate, evaluate, evaluate...

Once you’ve created your new structure, you’re not finished. You need to make sure that you check it, at least for the first few weeks, so you can correct anything which may not be working well. This may include deleting under-performing ads/keywords, adding new negative keywords, fixing match-types, updating bids, adding new products services, adding/pausing seasonal campaigns etc. Remember to use adCenter reporting (ad/keyword performance reports etc) when evaluating the success of your re-structure.

The evaluation phase is really critical as once you have completed that; your campaigns will be in good order long term. You obviously need to check in every so often to ensure bids etc are set correctly but other than that, things should tick along well for you.

To summarise;

- Develop Your Structure

- Review your landing page to ensure your new structure will be highly relevant

- Only Include Relevant Keywords/Ads

- Include Seasonality Campaigns

- Include Branding Campaigns

- Consider Match-Types

- Set Good Bids

- Set your new structure live

- Evaluate, evaluate, evaluate...

If you found this re-structuring guide useful & if you have any successes from your re-structures, we’d love to hear your story.

Here’s to low CPCs and high CTR & Conversion rates...

Happy Re-Structuring!