The #1 Reason Paid Ads (On Search, Social, and Display) Fail - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Pouring money into a paid ad campaign that’s destined to fail isn’t a sound growth strategy. Time and again, companies breaking into online ads don’t see success due to the same issue: they aren’t known to their audiences. There’s no trust, no recognition, and so the cost per click remains high and rising.

In this edition of Whiteboard Friday, Rand identifies the cycle many brands get trapped in and outlines a solution to make those paid ad campaigns worth the dollars you put behind them.

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re chatting about the number one reason so many paid ad campaigns, especially from new companies and companies with new products or new ventures that they’re going into, new markets and audiences they’re addressing, fail. They just fall apart. I see this scenario play out so many times, especially in the startup and entrepreneurial world but, to be honest, across the marketing landscape.

Here’s how it usually goes. You’ve got your CEO or your CMO or your business owner and they’re like, “Hey, we have this great new product. Let’s spread the word.” So they talk to a marketer. It could be a contractor. It could be an agency. It could be someone in-house.

The marketer is like, “Okay, yeah, I’ll buy some ads online, help us get the word out there and get us some traffic and conversions.”

Then a few months later, you basically get this. “How’s that paid ad campaign going?” “Well, not so good. I have bad news.”

The cycle

Almost always, this is the result of a cycle that looks like this. You have a new company’s campaign. The campaign is to sell something or get exposure for something, to try and drive visits back to a web page or a website, several pages on the site and then get conversions out of it. So you buy Facebook ads, Instagram ads, maybe LinkedIn and Twitter. You probably use the Google Display Network. You’re probably using AdWords. All of these sources are trying to drive traffic to your web page and then get a conversion that turns into money.

Now, what happens is that these get a high cost per click. They start out with a high cost per click because it’s a new campaign. So none of these platforms have experience with your campaign or your company. So you’re naturally going to get a higher-than-normal cost per click until you prove to them that you get high engagement, at which point they bring the cost per click down. But instead of proving to them you get high engagement, you end up getting low engagement, low click-through rate, low conversion rate. People don’t make it here. They don’t make it there. Why is that?

Why does this happen?

Well, before we address that, let’s talk about what happens here. When these are low, when you have a low engagement rate on the platform itself, when no one engages with your Facebook ads, no one engages with your Instagram ads, when no one clicks on your AdWords ad, when no one clicks on your display ads, the cost to show to more people goes up, and, as a result, these campaigns are much harder to make profitable and they’re shown to far fewer people.

So your exposure to the audience you want to reach is smaller and the cost to reach each next person and to drive each next action goes up. This, fundamentally, is because…

• The audience that you’re trying to reach hasn’t heard of you before. They don’t know who you are.
• They don’t know, trust, or like you or your company product, they don’t click. They don’t click. They don’t buy. They don’t share. They don’t like.

They don’t do all the engagement things that would drive this high cost per click down, and, because of that, your campaigns suffer and struggle.

I see so many marketers who think like this, who say yes to new company campaigns that start with an advertising-first approach. I want to be clear, there are some exceptions to the rule. I have seen some brand new companies that fit a certain mold do very well with Instagram advertising for certain types of products that appeal to that audience and don’t need a previously existing brand association. I’ve seen some players in the Google AdWords market do okay with this, some local businesses, some folks in areas where people don’t expect to have knowledge and awareness of a brand already in the space where they’re trying to discover them.

So it’s not the case always that this fails, but very often, often enough that I’m calling this the number one reason I see paid ads fail.

The solution

There’s only one solution and it’s not pretty. The solution is…

You have to get known to your audience before you pour money into advertising.

Meaning you need to invest in organic channels — content or SEO or press and PR or sponsorships or events, what have you, anything that can get your brand name and the names of your product out there.

Brand advertising, in fact, can work for this. So television brand advertising, folks have noticed that TV brand advertising often drives the cost per click down and drives engagement and click-through rates up, because people have heard of you and they know who you are. Magazine and offline advertising works like this. Sometimes even display advertising can work this way.

The second option is to…

Advertise primarily or exclusively to an audience that already has experience with you.

The way you can do this is through systems like Google’s retargeting and remarketing platforms. You can do the same thing with Facebook, through custom audiences of email addresses that you upload, same thing with Instagram, same thing with Twitter. You can target people who specifically only follow the accounts that you already own and control. Through these, you can get better engagement, better click-through rate, better conversion rate and drive down that cost per click and reach a broader audience.

But if you don’t do these things first, a lot of times these types of investments fall flat on their face, and a lot of marketers, to be honest, and agencies and consultants lose their jobs as a result. I don’t want that to happen to you. So invest in these first or find the niches where advertising can work for a first-time product. You’re going to be a lot happier.

All right, everyone. Look forward to your comments. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

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13 Quick Tricks to Drive Traffic to Your Blog in Minutes

It happens to the best of bloggers.

You produce stellar content that’s helpful and easy to read.

You even publish a blog post a week – or more – to prove you’re serious about blogging.

You genuinely care about your audience.

But sometimes, despite doing everything by the book, the traffic’s a dud.

That’s when the questions start – am I good enough to be doing this? Heck, does blogging even work as a legitimate business model? Am I wasting my time?

If that’s you, let me clear the air by quoting Jon Morrow, “Each and every one of us decides who we are. No, you may not be ready to be a popular blogger now, but you can become ready.”

Blogging works. We’ve seen a lot of proof around us for that. The problem is not blogging; it is doing things that don’t yield trust or traffic to your blog.

You see, a decade ago you could crank out a 300-word piece and get more content published, left, right and center. In those days, just having something published meant you could attract huge traffic. Because not many were doing it.

Gradually, the world caught up and more people started putting out better content. Longer, more in depth, more useful content. Bloggers started calling it “epic posts”.

Today, most of the world has caught up with “epic”. It’s no longer a differential point. It’s a given.

The secret to attracting more traffic is doing what others are not doing, or unwilling to do yet.

And what if I told you it could be done in under 30 minutes?

To make it easier for you, I have compiled a list of 13 quick tricks to drive traffic to your blog in minutes:

1. Add drama to your work

Spice things up by telling a story or starting out with a metaphor. Kevin Duncan of Be a Better Blogger uses this technique like no other. His posts open with engaging anecdotes that establish a connection with his readers right at the beginning.

The result? A hooked reader.

2. Pick a topic that attracts traffic

Needless to say, if your topic is dull, you are not going to attract much traffic any time soon. Start with Google Trends, BuzzSumo and Feedly to research what’s in demand. I suggest the “three-circle strategy” to pick a topic/niche when you’re starting out.

Here’s how it works:

Draw three circles on a piece of paper. In the first circle, write down all areas you’re knowledgeable about. In the second, write what interests you. And in the third circle, pick topics from the above two circles that are in demand.

Your sweet spot is where the three intersect.

3. Analyze your headlines before hitting “publish”

Use a headline analyzer like CoSchedule. Once you are done writing the post, copy and paste your draft headline into the free tool. It’s super-quick and effective.

Once you punch in a headline, the tool assigns it a “Headline Score”. It also gives your headline a grade based on the overall structure, grammar and readability. The report dissects your headline into “common words”, “uncommon words”, “emotional words” and “power words”. It tells you your headline “type” (this post is a “list type”) and does a length analysis. Lastly, you get some cool tips to improve your headline, all for free and in under a few minutes.

Here’s an example:

4. Go visual

Why? Because the human brain craves visuals. The last time I checked, humans had a shorter attention span (8 seconds) than that of a goldfish (9 seconds). The proof lies in the wildly popular visual platforms such as Facebook Timeline, Instagram and Pinterest.

We’re drowning in words and don’t have enough time to read every single blog post out there. If visuals, such as memes, videos, infographics, comics etc, can help you retain attention, why not give them a try?

Visme, Canva and Vine are just a few tools to get started in under minutes. For example, using templates in Visme, you can create stellar infographics for free within minutes.

5. Improve your blog’s loading time

As you probably know, Google considers loading time as an important factor in ranking websites. Research shows that 47% of readers now expect a page to load in 2 seconds.

Let’s start with the low lying fruit – the first thing you want to do is reduce the number of plugins you use. Plugins make your blog sluggish, so unless absolutely necessary, get rid of extra add-ons. Replace these with an all-in-one plugin, such as Jetpack for a more efficient loading time.

Compress images using Smush.it or use BJ Lazy Load for an image to load conditionally when the reader scrolls to the bottom of the page. An alternative is to use a CDN or a Content Delivery Network which is a network of webservers such as Incapsula.

6. Make social sharing easy

A recent study found that using social sharing buttons on posts leads to 7 times more mentions. Start with writing magnetic headlines that are short and brief (for platforms such as Twitter so there’s room for shortened URLs). Include hashtags and usernames when appropriate.

7. Join HARO and answer relevant queries

HARO or Help a Reporter is a “free publicity” service dedicated to bringing reporters and qualified sources together. As a blogger, you can be a story lead or an expert source for a reporter query. Signing up is free and it takes less than 10 minutes to briefly answer a HARO query, which can result in high-quality inbound links to your blog.

8. Convert a visitor into a lead

Add a solid call-to-action at the end of your posts that urges them to either read another of your posts, subscribe to your list, click a link to a landing page – do something.

Here’s an example:

Source: Forbes.com.

Use TrenDemon to add customizable calls-to-action based on visitors’ realtime engagement. It’s made up of several algorithms that analyze and identifies the pages that bring in most traffic and engagement, and helps optimize your marketing ROI.

A landing page is a dedicated page to convert a reader into a subscriber by offering a “freebie” or a “lead magnet”. A great alternative is GetResponse’s Landing Page Maker.

Short on budget? You can try LaunchEffect, a free launch theme, and start collecting leads even before you’ve launched a blog.

Of course, this post is about attracting traffic, so how does collecting leads help? It does — because once you have a thriving list you can always direct them to your blog through a series of well-written autoresponders and emails.

9. Come up with the optimum number of posts, then stick to it

What’s the optimum number? Research shows that the more a company blogged per month, the more traffic it attracted.

On the flip side, how much is too much? One of the easiest ways to figure it out is to watch your subscriber activity closely. Are you getting many unsubscribe requests because of “too much posting” like this blogger? His quick case study will help you to find your minimum viable posting.

10. Start a forum on your website

An active forum will not only serve as a useful community to your readers but also attract new traffic with the help of natural longtail keywords that go into it.

To do a quick search of active and popular forums in your niche, just search for your keyword + forum. Then, all you have to do is create a free account on the best forum(s) and use your brand name as a nickname. You can start contributing as well as studying these forums before you launch your own.

Starting your own forum is easy. For WordPress, you can install the free bbPress plugin. Here is a tutorial to set up bbPress in under minutes.

11. Connect with bloggers who send you traffic

Monitor Backlinks is a neat tool for SEO and web marketers. It notifies you every time you gain or lose a backlink; every time your competitor gains a high-value backlink and compares ranking with your competitors.

12. Respond to your blog comments thoughtfully

According to Neil Patel, responding to comments increases your traffic. The more you respond, the more number of words accumulate on the page. This is ideal from an SEO-perspective. Not only that, repeat traffic also builds over time because they look forward to new posts and even become subscribers to keep updated.

You can also control your traffic by adding a link in the comment URL box and directing them where you want. Neil increased visits to his “About” page by 5,137 visits a month by simply using this feature in the comment box.

Here is a useful guide to help you deal with different types of comments you get on the blog.

13. Build up your professional brand on Quora

It’s a great place to answer questions and build a legitimate following. You get immediate exposure to 1.5 million monthly visitors, and add links to your blog posts and articles as resources in your answers.

If you know everything about your topic, answering a question shouldn’t take you more than 15 minutes. You want to follow all related topics too, just in case. You can also join in relevant conversations and educate your prospects better about your service/product (of course, no spamming).

Here’s a teaser for the topic Content Marketing (Fair warning: It can be addictive!):

The bottom line

I want to challenge you to try these techniques. Of course, not all of them will work for you so pick and choose a handful and run with it.

Gaining new traffic sounds like a lot of work, but it’s worth every minute. And with the above tips, you can boost traffic in 30 minutes or less. You may not feel it happen immediately, but stay consistent. You’ll see the results.

Eventually, the more you do these techniques, the more trust you will build. Writing epic posts is no longer enough – you want the right audience to read them too.

Guest Author: Pooja Lohana is an Online Business Coach + Writer & Editor. She helps entrepreneurs shine their blog and copy, and simplifies online marketing so they can make more sales and live the Un-9-5 life. Check out her step-by-step course on breaking into freelance writing.

The post 13 Quick Tricks to Drive Traffic to Your Blog in Minutes appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.

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6 Reasons Why You Should Consider Podcasting as a Content Marketing Channel in 2018

Podcasting has numerous benefits, however, producing an ongoing podcast is a hard nut to crack. It takes more effort than simply clicking ‘Record’ on your smartphone and then uploading it online.

According to a recent Edison Research report, around 98 million US citizens are listening to podcasts annually, with more than 50 million individuals listening to them on a monthly basis. Indeed, the present podcasting explosion has been presaged as the ideal age of podcasts.

Podcasting involves a tremendous amount of research, planning, acquiring technical skills, managing social media networks and engaging your target audience. Once a podcast is started, the only thing that is going to stay on top of your mind will be: what should the next episode be about?

For companies, podcasting can be a compelling opportunity to interact with your clientele, become noticeable among your competitors, and turn into an industry frontrunner and professional. However, you need to be very accurate about time management.

While only 3% of marketers are currently using podcasting for marketing purposes, around 32% actively wish to learn how to use it, and 23% intend to escalate their podcasting efforts.

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Podcasting: Your shortcut to success

Did you know, MailChimp became a popular brand name overnight by simply running a 20-second ad at the start of every episode of the famous podcast, Serial?

This is just one illustration of a business taking advantage of podcasting, and it inspired several other companies to start producing their own podcasts.

Here’s why you should consider podcasting as a content marketing channel in 2018:

1. Practicing the art of subtle branding

Let’s face it: over-branding can actually kill your brand.

Around 57% of customers report that they avoid brands that bombard them with advertisements and other marketing messages. Podcasts can help you master the art of subtle branding!

As digital marketers, we are continuously reminded that storytelling is a vital instrument for consumer engagement. Through appropriate, enlightening, and valuable stories conveyed by evocative means, companies can connect with customers and develop a devoted audience.

One way to interact with your audience is a corporate blog. However, maintaining an attention-grabbing blog involves several SEO challenges and there is a high probability that your potential customers become more aware of brand involvement.

Therefore, podcasts such as audio content can help you implement a more subtle approach. This way, you can become an intrinsic element of the content itself. For example; eBay recently joined hands with Gimlet Creative to come up with its own podcast series titled ‘Open for Business’ that uses audio content for advertising purposes.

2. Easy to consume and mobile-friendly

Unlike blogs and videos, the beauty of podcasts lies in the fact that audio content can be more conveniently accessed on the go. It does not force users to abandon whatever they are doing just to concentrate wholly on your content. Whether they are working out or cooking, they can easily listen to your podcast.

According to HandMadeWritings, it is imperative for marketers to identify consumer behavior across multiple generations and to renovate their marketing approach accordingly. Therefore, with more and more consumers using smartphones today, it is also important to make your podcast mobile-friendly.

An interesting example of a company producing convenient-to-consume and enjoyable content is General Electric that started a science-fiction podcast titled ‘The Message’. Contrary to the eBay podcast, General Electric focused on the audience to succeed.

Image Source: e-Strategy Trends

3. Swift turnaround time

One of the reasons you should give podcasting a try is the quick turnaround time. Regardless of what audio software is used, the whole process of editing a podcast is very swift.

So, how do you come up with a quick podcast? Here are a few simple steps:

• Record your discussion
• Add a brief introduction to your company or product
• Add theme music (it’s advisable to purchase it to prevent copyright infringement)
• Listen to the recording to ensure that the sound is clear and your message is conveyed effectively
• Edit to make it picture-perfect
• Save it as an MP3 file
• Voila! You’re ready to upload it to your site.

4. Reflection of true brand personality

Along with offering value for customers, podcasts can also reflect a company’s individuality and fundamental values. Rather than using written content for conveying what a brand stands for, it is often more convenient to do so by expressing it vocally.

For instance, Slack, a popular corporate messaging tool, has initiated its podcast series called, ‘The Slack Variety Pack’ that depicts a true picture of the company. This amusing, buoyant and somewhat geeky content engages its main audience impeccably. Consequently, it helps in further strengthening the connection with its customers.

5. Higher reach, wider audience

Once a podcast is published on iTunes, Stitcher or similar platforms, a company exposes its content to a broader audience at no cost. These platforms act as search engines that are used by individuals to look for podcasts along with popular songs. In this way, a brand receives the organic publicity that helps in snowballing its reach and growing its audience.

Moreover, podcasts facilitate companies in developing a loyalty of an extensive range of consumers. Audiences generally subscribe to a podcast series and frequently listen to them. Furthermore, there is a high possibility that the listeners may endorse your podcasts to their fellows, thereby, growing your reach significantly. It can ultimately yield enhanced traffic generation.

6. Fostering improved relationships with your customers

Although a podcast is a unidirectional platform, it can facilitate companies in developing better relationships with the customers. It makes your audience feel as if they recognize the individual talking on the podcast.

The primary reason why individuals listen to podcasts is that they feel something mutual between the speaker and the company being represented by the speaker.

In this way, fostering a good relationship aids in developing conviction, which emboldens the audience to stay connected with the company. All this results in enhanced conversion as individuals are more probable to do business with an acquaintance than an outsider.

Final word

Companies these days are progressively implementing podcasting to increase their projections. It’s an influential marketing tool that has gradually become the novel talk-radio on portable devices such as smartphones and tablets. In fact, the augmented usage of smartphones has resulted in the massive development of podcasting.

However, just as any other method of content marketing, the accomplishment of corporate podcasts depends on genuineness, value, and significance for customers. There is no single formula for success. Nonetheless, it seems more and more companies are enthusiastic to experiment with podcasting.

Guest Author: Donna Moores is a savvy content marketer and a contributing writer at Convince & Convert, SocialMediaToday, and Spin Sucks. She has gained an outstanding marketing experience within the biggest industries and businesses, which she pleasantly shares with the readers. You may reach out to Donna on Twitter or via LinkedIn.

The post 6 Reasons Why You Should Consider Podcasting as a Content Marketing Channel in 2018 appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.

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