How do you measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns? Do you track ROI? A/B test ads to improve performance? Maybe you use a fancy Google Data Studio dashboard to generate slick reports.
There’s still a good chance you are wasting money, and that’s because most businesses measure the impact of marketing after the fact. While knowing the cost per click of your search or social ads is essential, understanding the overall impact of your marketing campaigns can provide deeper insights into your business.
This is where SWOT analysis comes in handy. SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis for marketing campaigns allows you to see the big picture and face challenges head-on.
What Is a SWOT Analysis?
A SWOT analysis is a framework for analyzing and identifying key challenges affecting your business by considering your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
The goal of SWOT analysis is not just to track metrics or see which ads perform better but rather to get a high-level view of the impact of your marketing so you can improve it.
The framework of what a SWOT analysis is.
What Are the Benefits of SWOT Analysis in Marketing?
If you’ve run a Google Ad campaign or boosted a Facebook post, you already understand how to track the impact of your campaigns. A SWOT analysis looks beyond the standard metrics like ROI, CPC, and CAC to uncover the most crucial factors impacting your marketing—whether that is customer satisfaction, competitors squeezing you out of the market, or failure to promote your assets effectively.
That data can be powerful, especially if it’s available when you need it the most. According to Airtable, 46 percent of marketers say lack of timely data holds their team back. A SWOT analysis can help.
A few other benefits of SWOT for marketing include:
a better understanding of which marketing channels to focus on
helps you address weaknesses in your ads or marketing assets
makes it easier to see threats to your campaigns before they impact your bottom line
enables you to leverage the assets and strengths you already have
improves long-term goal setting for your marketing
The average business spends around 12 percent of its overall budget on marketing—a SWOT analysis ensures your budget is put to good use.
What Are the Drawbacks of SWOT in Marketing?
As much as I like SWOT analysis in marketing, it has some limitations. For starters, if you aren’t honest about your true shortcomings, a SWOT analysis won’t provide useful insights. This type of analysis requires self-reflection and honesty to be useful.
It can also be difficult to analyze very complex factors that could be either a weakness or a strength. For example, running ads on TikTok might have the highest cost and drive higher quality leads, which could be both a strength and a potential weakness.
A few other limitations to keep in mind:
SWOT analyses can be time-intensive. Make sure you have the personnel and the time to invest before getting started.
You might generate too many ideas on how to improve your marketing and get overwhelmed.
It can generate a lot of data but doesn’t tell you how to use that data.
Understanding the limitations of a SWOT analysis can help marketers and business owners better prepare and improve their chances of success. Now that you know its limitations, how do you perform a SWOT analysis?
How to Perform a SWOT Analysis for Marketing Campaigns
The first step in performing a SWOT analysis for marketing is determining the scope. Do you want to look at your marketing as a whole or a specific part of your overall marketing strategy? For example, you might want to focus only on your content strategy, SEO, or a specific ad campaign. Defining the parameters of your analysis helps keep you focused.
Keep in mind, there’s no one right way to perform a SWOT analysis, and that’s because every business has a different marketing strategy and faces different threats.
This guide can help you get started, but feel free to skip questions that don’t make sense for your business and add questions that provide a more thorough view of your marketing campaigns.
1. Analyze Your Marketing Strengths
What do you do well? If you’re looking at a specific campaign, think about what elements of the campaign are really working. For example, does your landing page convert at a higher rate, or are ads with people more likely to earn clicks?
Start by asking these questions and documenting the answers. Adjust the questions as needed to focus on a campaign or your entire marketing strategy.
What does your company (or your campaign) do better than others in your industry?
What do your customers love most about your company/product/services?
What positive attributes do customers associate with your brand?
What is your unique selling proposition? Is it effective?
What resources do you have that competitors don’t? This includes people, financial resources, and expertise.
What campaigns are most successful? Consider not just conversions but also lifetime value and cost per acquisition.
Remember, your answers and the questions you ask might vary depending on whether you are analyzing a specific campaign or your marketing strategy as a whole.
How to Find Strength Data
Don’t answer the questions above off the top of your head. Instead, use data to inform your answers. Depending on your business, that might include the following steps:
Perform a customer satisfaction survey, like a net promoter score, to understand how customers view your business.
An example a net promoter score, which is a useful tool when finding strength data.
Pull campaign data from separate tools into one dashboard, like Power BI or Google Data Studio to better understand the most effective campaigns.
Poll your employees to better understand your resources and how your team views your company.
2. Look for Your Marketing Weaknesses
This is often the most challenging part of a SWOT analysis. That’s because you have to be honest with yourself, and it can be hard to admit where campaigns have fallen short.
Start by asking questions. Again, feel free to adjust the wording to fit your campaign or overall strategy.
What do your customers most dislike about your company or offering?
If you sell products, why don’t customers come back?
What could your campaigns do more effectively?
What are the biggest challenges in your current marketing funnel?
Where in your funnel do you lose the most customers?
Where do your competitors win? (This could be specific strategies or platforms they are doing well with.)
What resources are you lacking?
Nearly 40 percent of marketers report having no documented marketing strategy at all, and that can hold you back. Looking at your weaknesses is the first step toward creating or improving your marketing strategy.
Where to Get Weakness Data
As you look for strengths (through customer and employee surveys, for example), also keep an eye out for weaknesses. Other places to locate weaknesses might include:
Customer reviews on sites like Google, Yelp, etc.
In support tickets. If you constantly get complaints about the same topic, that may need to be addressed.
In a competitive analysis.
Exit interview data, for customers or employees.
Analyze your exit pages in Google Analytics. Why are customers leaving those pages?
Assess time-on-page. Do customers spend less time on crucial pages in your marketing funnel?
3. Find Opportunities
This is my favorite part of SWOT—looking for areas to grow and build on your past successes. Where can you make changes and see the biggest impact? This step will help you figure it out. Begin by asking these questions:
What kind of marketing messaging resonates with your customers? Can you leverage that on more platforms?
Who are your most vocal brand advocates? How can you use them more effectively?
Are your budget, tools, and human resources being utilized to their full potential?
Which marketing channels exceeded expectations, and why?
Where to Find Opportunities Data
By now, you should’ve come across a few opportunities already. While reading customer reviews, looking at support tickets, and digging into GA data, you’ve likely already noted a few areas where you could improve.
Take a step back and try to look at the data with an open mind. What areas, platforms, or strategies are most likely to drive the best results? Make a list. You can also look at:
Sometimes the best way to see new opportunities is to introduce a fresh perspective. If you’d like help considering your options, reach out to my team. We’re happy to offer our thoughts and help you build an effective strategy.
4. Locate Threats
Over the years, I’ve noticed one thing the most successful brands have in common: the ability to see threats coming and adjust before they become a major issue.
For example, many websites were devastated when Google rolled out its Panda update, which targeted thin and spammy content. Those who saw it coming had already made changes and weren’t nearly as impacted. That should be your goal—to see threats on the horizon and take action.
Here are a few questions to consider:
Economic trends: What economic trends can or might impact your industry? For example, rising costs, increases in gas prices, a move to remote work, and so forth.
Marketing trends: How are marketing trends changing? For example, Google is getting rid of third-party cookies—how will that impact your marketing campaigns?
Technology trends: What technological changes are coming? Automation is gaining popularity, but could that go wrong?
Relationships: What relationships do you rely on, such as brand ambassadors, vendors, manufacturers, and contractors? How would your business recover if those relationships ended? Can you work to mitigate the impact now?
Intuition: What is everyone else doing that just feels wrong to you for some reason? Try to get to the bottom of why it feels off to you and whether that may become a threat in the future.
Audience: Think about your target audience—are they aging out of your market? Is the market shrinking or shifting?
Where to Find Threat Data
The reports and surveys you’ve already done may have highlighted threats. Look back over those results and look for threats you might not have noticed. Other places to look for threats include:
Technology blogs or publications.
Competitive analysis reports. What changes are your competitors making and why?
Newsletters and blogs of industry experts. What are they worried about?
Have a brainstorming session with your team. Write down all of the possible threats you can come up with, no matter how unlikely. You can review it later to determine whether action needs to be taken.
Frequently Asked Questions About SWOT for Marketing
How can a SWOT analysis help my marketing ROI?
It provides a high-level view of your marketing campaigns so you can better prepare for the shifting marketing landscape.
What does SWOT stand for?
Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
How often should I perform a SWOT for marketing?
Ideally, you should perform a SWOT analysis every 6 to 12 months or whenever you notice changes in your campaign ROI.
Can I use SWOT for marketing at my small business?
Yes, SWOT can be used to analyze the effectiveness of marketing for any sized business. It’s particularly helpful for small businesses to find ways to stand out from their competitors.
Conclusion: SWOT Helps Marketers Make Smarter Decisions
Once you’ve performed your SWOT analysis for marketing, it’s time to put that information to work.
How can you improve your current strengths? What steps can you take to reduce the impact of your weaknesses? What changes can you make to take advantage of the marketing opportunities you uncovered? Finally, how can you prepare for the threats you face?
Whether you use SWOT to analyze your overall marketing strategy or focus on specific campaigns like your content marketing, this approach provides the information you need to launch more effective marketing campaigns.
Have you performed a SWOT analysis before? What is holding you back?
Are you striving for consistency with your social media marketing? A good social media content calendar could be the missing ingredient.
Creating a social media calendar is a simple process, but it can have some impressive results.
Here’s how to quickly set up your social media content calendar and start leveling up your performance.
What Is a Social Media Content Calendar?
A social media calendar gives you a detailed overview of your upcoming social media posts.
This helps you to be more strategic with your content, maintain consistency, and delight your target audience on a regular basis.
Your social media calendar can be as simple as setting out what dates you’re going to post on, or it can be much more detailed.
Many successful social media content calendars will include high-level information to help you get more from each post:
Platform: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or LinkedIn.
Content-Type: Behind-the-scenes video, testimonial, product, etc.
Date: Proposed schedule date.
Time: Proposed schedule time.
Title: The title of the post.
Topic: What the post is about.
URL: The URL of any links you will use.
Visuals: A description of any visuals you want to use.
This information gives you an initial framework you can use to build out each post.
Be careful when you are planning, though.
There’s a clear distinction between a content calendar and a content plan. Generally, a content calendar will set out the dates and times for your posts, whereas a content plan will detail the strategies and topics you want to use for your social media marketing.
Since these ideas are closely related, they’re often referred to interchangeably—and can be incorporated into one document.
To give you a better idea of what to include, and where, take a look at this example of a content calendar:
The question is, how does a social media calendar fit in?
Let’s take a look at two of the most important aspects of social media marketing: understanding your target audience and being consistent.
If you don’t understand where your target audience hangs out, what content they want to see, and how they consume information, then how do you expect to reach them? It’s difficult to connect with your audience when you’re making social media posts on the fly, which is why a social media content calendar can be so valuable.
The other thing that takes you a long way in social media marketing is consistency. It might not seem like it, but this one is actually very difficult to pull off. It’s not easy to keep coming back each day (or however often you post) with top-quality content.
Whatever niche you’re in, there’s tons of competition out there, so you need time to bring your ideas to life and make sure they’re perfectly targeted to your audience.
Those aren’t the only reasons to start using a social media content planner though. They can also help you:
save time
schedule posts
reduce errors
create more cohesive campaigns
create a stronger brand identity
run timely campaigns that fit with holidays and sales promotions
track performance more accurately
The great thing is that anyone can start using a social media content calendar right now and use these benefits to improve their social media performance.
6 Steps to Create a Customized Social Media Content Calendar
You don’t need any fancy software to create an effective social media content plan. All you need to do is open a spreadsheet and follow these 6 steps.
Step 1: Review Your Social Media Goals
Before you create any plan, you need a clear idea of what you’re trying to achieve.
We all have some kind of goal for our social media posts, but it pays to narrow in on this and make them much more implicit. When you know exactly what you’re working towards, then it’s going to be much easier to come up with the content that’s going to help you achieve it.
Before you create your social media content calendar, make sure you sit down with your team and set yourself SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound).
Once you’ve got clearly defined goals, and a process for measuring your performance, then you’re ready to proceed.
Step 2: Audit Your Current Accounts
Now that you’ve got a clear picture of what success looks like, it’s time to find out how you’re currently performing.
This information is important because it’s going to serve as your baseline. Once you have this data, it’s much easier to test the changes you’re making and adjust your strategies accordingly.
You can add a sheet for all your KPIs to your social media content calendar to keep an eye on this and help make sure you’re constantly working to improve your processes.
Gather all relevant information and make sure it’s easily accessible:
account details and passwords
specific goals for each platform
audience demographics
responsibilities of each team member
information on your most successful posts and campaigns
areas for improvement, gaps in your content, poor results
platform-specific KPIs to measure future success
This will require a little bit of hard work, but it’s well worth it!
One of the main reasons you’re creating a social media content calendar is to make sure you’re giving your audience the content they’re looking for, and you’ve got to understand your past performance to do this.
Step 3: Choose What Social Platforms You’ll Use
If we went back a decade or so, this step would have been pretty simple. There were a handful of social platforms dominating the scene, which made this question easy to answer.
Today though, there are lots of thriving social media platforms, each with its own demographics. For instance, if you’re advertising to people aged 18-25, you’re probably going to have to use different platforms than if you’re trying to reach the over 55s age group.
Don’t get me wrong though, they’re all on social media!
You don’t have unlimited resources, so that might mean focusing your efforts on a handful of platforms. Bear in mind, that those platforms won’t necessarily be the biggest ones, they just have to be the ones where your target audience hangs out.
Check out the in-depth demographics in the image below and think about which platform might be the best fit for your target audience.
As you can see, these figures vary greatly, so it’s important to decide where you want to be and when.
Step 4: Outline How Often You’ll Post
One of the greatest benefits of a social media content planner is that it helps you to be more consistent, but the question still remains, how often should you post?
The answer will vary for each business.
If you’ve got a huge marketing team working on different elements like images, video, copy, personal interactions with followers, and everything else, then there’s no reason why you can’t post multiple times a day.
However, if you’re a one-man team working on every part of your business, then this probably isn’t realistic.
Ultimately, it’s about utilizing your resources to achieve a good balance between quality and quantity. If you’re putting out poor content that nobody interacts with though, it’s no use to anybody.
There’s no hard and fast answer to this question, but the key is maintaining a schedule where you can be consistent. Most algorithms (whether that’s Google, Facebook, or YouTube) value consistency.
This is something you can be in complete control of, especially with a good social media content calendar.
Step 5: Decide What Type of Content to Post
It can be helpful to break your posts down into categories to give your audience a mix of different content types.
There are two rules that are popular for this and they can help ensure you’re offering variety as well as making life a little bit easier for yourself.
The 80/20 Rule
This rule helps you strike a balance between engaging your audience and trying to sell your products.
It states that 80 percent of your posts should be designed to engage, inform, and educate, and the other 20 percent should be used to directly promote your business.
47.6 percent of people use social media to stay in touch with friends
36.3 percent of people use social media to fill their spare time
35.1 percent of people use social media to read news stories
31.6 percent of people use social media to discover content
You’ve got to figure out how your content can fit with these goals.
The Social Media Rule of Thirds
If you’re always posting the same type of content then it can quickly get boring. This is why many brands use the Social Media Rule of Thirds throughout their content calendars.
In the social media rule of thirds, one-third of your posts promote your own content, one-third share curated content, and one-third share personal interactions with your followers.
Step 6: Audit Your Resources
The last thing you need to do before setting up your social media content calendar is audit your resources. How big is your team, and what skills do you have available to you?
If you have a team full of social media specialists, videographers, and content creators, then your plans are going to be a lot more ambitious. However, you’ve also got to put systems in place to bring these people together.
This is where your social media content calendar becomes even more important.
When you’ve clearly set out your schedule for the next month, or even quarter, then everybody can see what they need to work on.
Your writer can work on the copy, and your videographer and graphic designer can work on the visuals, bringing everything together on time.
Social Media Content Calendar Template
The easiest way to create a social media content calendar template is using a Google sheet.
Open up a new sheet, and split your calendar into weeks.
Use the columns at the top to set out your dates, and in the rows, enter the following for each platform you intend to post on:
type of content
title
topic
links
visuals
This should allow you to create a basic template in just a few minutes. It should look something like this example of a social media content calendar:
From here, you can build your social media content calendar out as much as you like, however, this should give you an excellent starting point.
If you have a budget, you could look at different project management systems like Trello or Airtable to custom-build your social media content calendar. As you start to use them, you’ll be able to spot trends, plan promotions, and much more.
Social Media Content Calendar Frequently Asked Questions
What are the benefits of a social media calendar?
The benefits of a social media calendar are that it saves you time, helps you to be more consistent, reduces errors, and allows you to be more strategical. This should help you provide your audience with better content and increase brand engagement.
Do I have to have a social media calendar?
You don’t have to have a social media calendar but it can be incredibly helpful. It’s hard to consistently offer your audience high-quality content, and sometimes you need time to plan what you’re doing. Knowing what posts you have coming up gives you time to get your copy and visuals in place and tie them to your promotions.
What should my social media calendar include?
You can get as detailed as you want with a social media content calendar. Some basic information to include is the type of content, title, topic, links, and visuals that are needed.
How do I create a monthly social media content calendar?
The easiest way to create a social media content calendar is in a spreadsheet. It’s very simple to set up, and you can have a functioning content plan in just a few minutes.
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Conclusion: How to Create an Effective Social Media Content Calendar
Creating an effective social media content calendar shouldn’t be difficult.
With some basic Microsoft Excel skills, you can create a content calendar that clearly outlines your strategy for the weeks and months to come. Not only will this help you create better content, but it’s also going to save you time.
Whether you’re a large social media team or an individual marketer, a good social media content calendar is going to make it much easier to coordinate your efforts and ensure you consistently meet your audience’s needs.
Email marketing is one of the earliest and most basic forms of digital marketing available in the modern world. It involves sending regular email messages to individuals on your mailing list regarding company updates, new …
Retargeting is one of the best ways to close sales that didn’t happen.
On top of that, retargeting efforts are pretty cheap compared to most types of advertising.
How do you do it? What retargeting efforts do you need to try?
Here are three examples of retargeting that actually work, how to copy them, and what you need to know about the future of retargeting.
1. Retarget Specific URL Visits
There are a lot of ways to go wrong with retargeting.
Some marketers fire up Facebook or Google Ads and run a retargeting campaign based on website visits in the past 90 days.
Although that can work, it’s not really that effective. As you probably know, I’m all about working smarter, not harder.
I love to spend as little time on a task as I can, but get the same benefits as someone who spends hours and hours on the same task.
I used to run Facebook retargeting campaigns in their Business Manager feature (now referred to as the Facebook Business Suite).
I’d simply retarget everyone who landed on my site.
That didn’t really work. My conversion rates were the same as my website: low.
People weren’t ready to buy yet. Why? I cast too wide of a net.
You can’t reasonably expect a 50 percent conversion rate on an audience of millions.
For example, let’s say that visitor X came to your website and read a single blog post and bounced.
Now let’s say visitor Y came to your site, read that same blog post, but then also filled out a lead-magnet form and even checked out your product and pricing page.
What’s your general website visitor retargeting offer going to be now?
If you offer a lead magnet, that won’t make sense to visitor Y. If you offer a free trial, that won’t apply to visitor X yet.
You risk sending the wrong offer to the wrong person at the wrong stage of their buyer’s journey.
So what do I recommend? Targeting users by specific actions taken on your site.
For example, check out this retargeting ad I got:
Notice how hyper-focused that targeting, messaging, and content are?
The ad is literally about a single product they offer.
I viewed their products, and they noticed I spent large amounts of time and frequency on their pie crust page. After all, who doesn’t love pie?
Then they used that data to target me with an ad focused on how to use their pie crusts.
They gave me an example of how their product could provide value inmy life.
That’s one of the best methods of retargeting I’ve ever seen.
Why? Because people who don’t convert on your products usually experience two things:
They don’t want to pay you money yet.
They don’t know how your product can help them.
Jasper’s Market effectively touched on the second point in a strong way.
They communicated exactly how I could find value in the product I was already looking at.
Here’s another example of retargeting ad:
Again, notice how tailored the targeting is in this ad.
It was delivered to everyone who landed on a specific web page URL, rather than retargeting all site visitors.
This allowed the company to target their ad to a group of interested, potential buyers and get them back to their site.
I visited their webinar-training landing page and was immediately retargeted after not converting.
Or, how about this example from Marketo:
I visited their content marketing e-book page to learn about cheap content creation methods.
Just a few days later, after not revisiting or converting, they reeled me in with a specific, CTA-oriented, retargeting ad based on the exact page I visited.
So the point is:
Retargeting based on specific URL visits works. It’s one of the best retargeting methods I’ve seen.
For this example, we can use Facebook since it’s one of the most popular ways to run retargeting ads.
Plus, I find much greater success on Facebook over display ads on GoogleAds.
But to each their own.
To get started, open the Facebook Business Suite and create a new, custom audience. You’ll click “More Tools” then “Ad Manager” currently, but they do update their platform regularly.
Create a new ad campaign, then add your info until you get to the audience. Select “create a new custom audience.”
Custom audiences on Facebook should be your top retargeting strategy.
They allow for some of the most diverse customization options marketers can use.
You can create a new custom audience from the drop-down menu.
From the menu of custom audience options, we want to select website traffic as our marketing goal.
This audience type will allow you to create lists of people who visited specific URLs.
For the next step, be sure to select “People who visited specific web pages.”
From here, you can get as detailed as you want.
Are you prepping for a webinar? Do you have a landing page you’re driving traffic to for a specific goal?
Do you notice that tons of people read about your product but don’t convert?
This is your time to get them back.
Remember that Jasper’s Market example? They saw that I frequently visited a specific product on their site but didn’t buy.
You can do that by adding URL pages that include that specific word.
You can further refine your Facebook retargeting ads by:
device used
frequency
Doing this will tell you one major thing:
The people visiting this product with high-frequency need a small push to convert.
Use an ad that shows them how to use that product. Show them the value or benefit of buying it.
Since they’ve viewed the product multiple times, you know they’re probably almost ready to buy.
Using this type of retargeting is one of the most effective ways to convert visitors.
2. Retargeting Existing Customers
You may ask, “Neil, why on Earth would I want to retarget existing customers?”
I’ll give you one simple reason: to resurrect unresponsive email subscribers who haven’t purchased in a while.
One big problem with email lists is that most of your subscribers become unresponsive at some point.
The list will experience “churn,” where new visitors join and old ones become unresponsive.
This means your email upsells aren’t even reaching your intended user.
So what do you do? Start retargeting your existing customers.
I like this strategy because it’s incredibly cheap because the ads are so relevant, which means your CTR will be high.
I’m already a customer, and they wanted me to convert by getting another credit card with them.
Are you seeing a pattern with these examples?
They focus on retargeting visitors who have previously converted or are existing customers.
Here’s one of my favorite retargeting examples of this method from ModCloth.
We miss you like crazy!
The targeting premise of this advertisement is pretty obvious.
They’re retargeting old customers who haven’t made a purchase in a while.
This kind of thing works.
Why? Because people have already converted on your products and services, meaning you risk nothing by asking them to come back.
It’s incredibly easy to set up, too.
Again, you can do this on either AdWords or Facebook, and it only takes a few minutes to set up.
To get started, head to Facebook’s Ads Manager and navigate to the audience section, then click Create an Audience.
From here, create another Custom Audience, and select Customer List.
That’s where you can upload your audience list. If a green check mark shows up, then you are good to go. If you see a yellow exclamation point, you might need to update some identifiers manually.
This will allow us to import contacts directly from MailChimp or upload an exported list of current or old customers.
The key here is to sort your customer file or email list by how old or unresponsive customers are.
If you have customers that are consistently buying from you, don’t waste money advertising to them.
Focus your efforts on customers that haven’t converted in a while or who haven’t responded to marketing emails.
This will give you another great shot at bringing them back to your products.
3. Lead-gen Ads Based on Page Engagement
If you aren’t finding success with website-based retargeting efforts, this might be your best bet.
Facebook has a powerful lead generation tool called “Lead Ads.”
These are essentially form-based ads that offer lead magnets in exchange for customer information like email address and job type.
It’s the same idea as running an e-book lead magnet on a landing page on your website, just on Facebook.
They are one of the most intuitive, natural-looking forms you can create.
When I click on the ad, I’m taken directly to a lead-gen form within Facebook.
This is incredibly effective in getting people to convert because it doesn’t force them to leave Facebook.
People don’t browse Facebook every day to see ads.
They browse it to interact with friends and family or read news articles.
So taking someone offsite is a big risk that can waste your ad spend and lower conversions.
That’s why lead ads are so successful. They don’t interrupt the process or habit of a typical Facebook user, yet they still allow them to get the lead magnet.
I’ve used these types of ads before.
They’re great for providing a clear-cut CTA that gets people to convert.
So why should you retarget people based on Facebook page engagement?
Because you know these users are active on Facebook, which means your retargeting efforts are going to be much more successful.
These hyper-aware users are likely always checking out new brands on social media.
It only makes sense to target them with Facebook Ads.
To get started with a lead-generation ad, we first need to create an audience based on page engagement.
Create a custom audience, then choose “Facebook Page” from the list of sources:
From here, you have a bunch of options to choose from depending on how specific you want to be in your retargeting.
For example, you can retarget anyone who engaged with a post or ad, someone who previously clicked on a CTA, or someone who saved your page or post.
Once you’ve selected a retargeting metric, you can save this audience and head to the Facebook Ads Manager to create a new lead-gen ad.
Select “Lead generation” as your marketing objective.
Next, select your ad format.
For this, I recommend using a single image, single video, or slideshow.
Carousels are often too complex for a simple lead-generation-focused ad.
Next, you need to edit the content and lead magnet on the ad.
This is the section where you start to create an offer or incentive for these retargeted customers to give you their email address.
For example, are you going to offer an e-book, white paper, coupon, or something else?
You need to give them a reason to fill out your form and click on the call to action.
Be sure to edit your form fields and optimize them to your needs based on that audience.
Be sure to limit your form questions in the next step to only grab the most important information.
You don’t want to overwhelm visitors or take up too much of their time.
The goal here is to collect leads in an easy, painless way.
Facebook’s page-based retargeting is one of my favorite ways to drive users back to my site or convert on lead magnets and products.
They’re often very engaged audiences who use Facebook differently than most users.
Instead of mainly using it to interact with family or friends, they actively seek out businesses on the platform.
Use this as an opportunity to convert visitors that wouldn’t convert on your site, or showed interest in your pages.
Frequently Asked Questions About Retargeting Strategies
What are some of the top retargeting strategies?
Retarget specific URL visits; retarget existing customers; and retarget leads based on-page engagement.
What is an example of retargeting?
Showing Facebook ads to someone who previously visited your website on their mobile browser.
Is remarketing worth it?
Yes, remarketing is worth the effort if you are able to execute a successful campaign. Targeting those who have interacted with your brand and come close to purchasing gives you a better chance of making a sale than by targeting an audience who has never heard of or interacted with your brand before.
Basically, you’re interacting with your leads at a later stage in the conversion funnel.
Can you run marketing and remarketing campaigns at the same time?
Yes, you can run concurrent campaigns.
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Retargeting Strategies Conclusion
Most of your website traffic simply won’t convert on the first visit. They don’t know who you are, what you do, or even how you could help them.
So they just aren’t ready, or willing, to buy your product or service yet.
Lead generation is the process of creating consumer interest in your products or services. With lead generation, you can attract leads (your potential customer) into a marketing software system with the hope of nurturing them through the buying process.
Once a lead is generated, you can then instruct them about your offerings and begin converting them into a customer.
Without leads, your business will most assuredly fail, so today, I want to show you proven hacks that will grow your leads by 113 percent.
Ready? Here are my top lead generation tips.
What Is Lead Generation?
A lead is a person who indicates an interest in your product or service.
Lead generation is the process by which you generate this interest, and place people in your sales funnel. In inbound lead generation, this is most likely to happen by someone filling out a form and giving you their contact details.
Marketers, particularly B2C marketers, rely on several channels to drive leads to their businesses and boost their conversion rate:
SEO
paid ads
social media
email
landing pages
Often, these channels don’t yield results marketers can bank on though. If you’ve spent a lot of time creating content, hoping to attract the right leads, but you still aren’t getting results, it can be discouraging. Hear this: you’re not alone.
At one time in my content marketing career, I struggled to acquire leads.
With a renewed focus on lead generation, I was able to turn this around, and you can follow these tips to do the same thing.
Why Is Lead Generation Important for Businesses?
Lead generation is a key goal for most businesses because, without leads, there are no sales, and consequently, no revenue.
Sure, a firm may have several important goals, but a large percentage of organizational goals focus on lead generation. When done well, lead generation can nurture qualified prospects from tentative interest all the way to the customers and ambassadors your brand relies on.
Lead generation is important because it asks the fundamental question, “what does your potential customer want?”
Once you’re able to answer that question and tie it to a high-converting landing page, you’ll consistently generate leads. You’ve still got to turn the lead into a customer, but it’s the starting point, and once you’ve got a sales pipeline full of leads, it’s much easier to tweak your sales strategies.
6 Proven Lead Generation Hacks
Hack #1: Lead generation starts at home—review your homepage messaging
For most marketers, their homepage receives the most visits. Tandberg (since acquired by Cisco), a leader in the field of teleconferencing,increased its lead generation by 50% from a simple homepage CTA that blended with other elements such as the headline, subtitle, and images.
If you’ve been actively promoting your site, your homepage will begetting visitors from referring sites, social media sites, search engines and other sources.
Stuart J. Davidson shared how he reached140,753 page views within twelve months, since re-launching his blog. Since the homepage receives a tremendous amount of traffic, don’t you think that reviewing andadjusting your homepage messaging might help you generate more leads?
I’m confident that it works; that it is, in fact, one of the best lead generation tips for you to absorb. For example, Alex Chris, founder of Digital Marketing Pro, said that one of the areas he tweaked, which led to over 400,000 visitors per month to his site, was the homepage. This also led to several thousand leads!
He showcased five sticky posts, together with a list of the latest posts. He also added a must-read section on his sidebar, which is important if you want people to find your best content the moment that they arrive at your blog homepage. This is how Chris’ homepage looks as I write this article:
Although the sidebar usually shows up on every page on most WordPress themes by default, you can permanently set it for your homepage only.
On the flip side, if you have an offer (e.g. an e-book, a report, software) on your landing page, you’ve got to ensure that your messaging (copy) and offer are in sync.
The two should synch, so that visitors will not be confused when they get to your homepage.
Hack #2: Link to your webinars directly in your content
One of the best lead generation tips you should take away from this post is how a webinar can work brilliantly in your favor.
A webinar is a relatively low-cost way to get your useful message in front of a targeted audience who actually asked for it when they registered.
A small consulting firm used webinars to generate over 100 new, qualified leads and resulted in six opportunity-based meetings. This, in turn, led to $50,000 in services being discussed.
If you can host a webinar and link to it directly in your content, your leads will take you more seriously, because you’ve provided value before asking them to register.
This is quite different from a webinar landing page that doesn’t offer much value to the user.
For example, the screenshot below shows how Quality Matters links to its webinar registration page from within its success stories (a blog post).
The challenge that most people face, when they host webinars, is getting enough people to register. But, you can drive webinar registration by linking directly to it. Uberflipknows how to invite blog readers to register for upcoming webinars right from a post. Here’s an example:
When people are engaged, magical things can happen, right on the spot.
Engagement is the sole purpose of hosting a webinar. Stay time (duration) is influenced by the ease of entering into the webinar, the topic, and whether or not attendees stick around during the Q&A.
If you want to take your lead generation to the next level, you should consider hosting a webinar. Successful internet marketers know the power behind a well-planned webinar.
You can generate leads, nurture them and build a thriving business, solely with webinars. According to a survey conducted by ReadyTalk, 30%–40% of webinar attendees are turned into leads.
There’s no doubt that bringing the right people together in a virtual platform increases trust, leads, and sales. No matter what your industry may be, you have to recognize that people want to belong.
People want to learn from the experts.
And, you don’t have to be an influencer to successfully host a webinar.
The most important factor in increasing user engagement is how useful your webinar is.
In fact,38% of attendees will stick around if your topic is hot and what you’re sharing with them will yield significant results in their business and life.
If you’re a B2B marketer, one of the most effective ways to generate qualified leads, apart from word-of-mouth referrals, is webinars. When you bring people together for the sole purpose of educating them, you’ll generate hot leads.
However, you need to make your webinar a part of your content. Naturally, your blog readers, email subscribers, and customers might have developed an emotional connection with your content. When they’re reading your post, they have a mindset that you’re only interested in solving their problems.
Blogging is a great way to build trust. If you want more people to register, reserve their slot and attend your webinar, then you have to establish a level of trust with them. That’s when blogging comes into play.
The role of webinars in the sales process can’t be ignored, because most companies have experienced higher sales when they hosted a webinar.
The more useful and interesting your blog posts are, the better. Consequently, when you link to your webinar from within your content, it’s a sign that you want to offer more value to your readers without giving them the idea that you’re out to make some quick bucks.
When you have the attention and trust of your attendees, you can recommend a product or service that’ll help them. You have a responsibility to qualify your leads and map your leads’ buying journey. Every stage of the customer buying process is important during the webinar.
Yes, you can sell, but there is a smart way to do it, especially when you’re mindful of your brand and reputation. You don’t want anything that will hurt it or separate you and your audience.
Here’s exactly how to sell during the webinar:
Welcome questions: For each webinar that we host, we usually leave up to 30 minutes for questions.
Without a doubt, this is a sure way to tell attendees that we care about them and not their money. It created a stronger bond that led to more qualified sales and customers in the long run.
Give value before asking for anything: Whether you’re hosting a webinar,writing a blog post, orspeaking at an event, you have to offer tangible help before asking for the sale or any other thing that would require the attendee to move out of their comfort zone (e.g., purchase your product). This how to draw in your potential customer – and, hopefully, keep them.
Educate them. Use interesting storytelling methodology to engage them. Address the questions that are occupying their minds. You can then pitch your offer because you truly believe that it can help them move forward.
Launch a poll: Polls can foster engagement and improve customer satisfaction. Polls are simple survey questionnaires that look like this:
For example, through a poll, Tomoson found that nearly 60% of marketers plan to boost influencer marketing budgets.
Similarly, you can use polls during your webinar.
Make them an irresistible offer: If you want to make more sales or acquire better leads, you have to offer your attendees what they can’t resist. If your offer is great and timely you’ll see an increased sales conversion that ranges from 5%–60%. Remember that when you sell or recommend an offer during the webinar, you need to brand your slides. In other words, your company logo, colors, and icons should be used prominently in the presentation design.
When you do that, your brand will always stay fresh in attendees’ minds. This is a priceless and efficient way to get the sale the moment that you ask for it.
Premium content: Another proven way to sell during the webinar is to offer premium content. It could be your new training videos that you haven’t released on YouTube or a few chapters of your upcoming book.
To grow your business and nurture a passionate audience and customers that will stand the test of time, you’ve got to feed them with premium content.
This is the type of content that offers tremendous value and scarcity.
A webinar is quite different from a blog post, video or podcast. According toAscend 2,
When you compare all of the lead generation tactics, webinars are the second most effectivedelivery mechanismof premium content for digital marketers.
Yes, you have to have adedicated webinar page on your site, but always link to both your old and your new webinars within your content. Our dedicated page now accounts for over 20% of our webinar leads per month.
Don’t forget the purpose of this section. It’s not about hosting a webinar, but rather link to your past and future webinars from within your content because you want to establish contact with first-time visitors to your blog and also cement the relationship that you’ve got with your customers.
If you want more people to register for your webinar, you’ve got to partner up with influential bloggers and leverage your homepage (which always attracts the most views).
You’ve also got to blog about your webinar and link to the landing page from your blog posts. Also, don’t forget to market your webinar through social media. And, don’t be afraid of paid media or promoting your webinar through keynote speakers.
Linking to or citing a high-value webinar within your content will position you as a go-to expert in your industry who cares about people. Several marketers who applied this technique have succeeded wildly at lead generation.
Hack #3: Use Google as your login
You should use Google as your login because you canpersonalize your efforts. Effective marketing can be efficiently deployed when you see and address your customers not as a group, but as individuals. That’s why SugarCRM and Trello believe in connecting with individuals.
Most digital companies have not been using this hack to get more leads. The truth is that Google is popular, and most bloggers, content marketers, and online entrepreneurs have a Google account.
The social world has brought us convenience across the web. Our full names, residential addresses, phone numbers, and more are now stored on trusted sites such as Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Twitter. This has made it possible for marketers to create a flexible and simple sign-up flow.
You can acquire more customers to your business by limiting the amount of information that they need to input in the forms. That’s how successful companies are built. It can work for you, too.
These days, you don’t need to request much information from your prospects before they can become qualified leads. Better yet, you don’t need them to fill a long-form before you can keep in touch with them.
Since they’ve got all of their personal details on trusted sites like Facebook and Google, you can just ask users to sign up using those sites. For example, you can sign up with Facebook if you want to join Pinterest.
Since Pinterest started using this strategy, they’ve increased their users. Pinterest now has over 50 billion pins and millions of active, loyal users.
Hack #4: Specialize: Separate your lead generation team from your sales team
If you want to convert the visitors that come to your landing pages and take your lead gen to the next level, you’ve got to continually test out your landing page elements, including the headline, subtitles, bullet points, call-to-actions, and more. Consider this a prime piece of real estate in your marketing strategy. In other words, take advantage of what is to offer and experiment with what drives the best results.
You’ve got to keep testing before you can get it right. A/B testing is not negotiable.
But, there’s an aspect of your content marketing strategy that you have to set limits on. It’s about who’s in charge of generating leads and who manages the sales process.
To grow your leads by 113% or more, you have to “specialize.”
In his classic book, Is It Wise To Specialize?, author John O’Sullivan shares the powerful influence of specialization on a child, and how early sports specialization can have an effect on a child’s athletic performance.
O’Sullivan recognized that we’re always tempted to do more. Life itself will push us beyond our limits, but we must learn to specialize. Niche down and identify areas where your strengths are.
When it comes to lead nurturing, which is an all-important aspect of running a successful online business, you’ve got to separate your lead generation team from your sales team.
According to Marketo, lead generation describes the marketing process of stimulating and capturing interest in a product or service for the purpose of developing [a] sales pipeline.
On the other hand, the sales team is primarily concerned with the exchange of goods and services for money; it’s the action of selling something.
As you can see from the two definitions, lead generation isn’t about selling. Sales also don’t dwell so much on stimulating interest, because that aspect is being coordinated by the team in charge of lead generation.
After selling to a customer, the sales team also has the responsibility of initiating a great customer experience that leads to a high rate of customer retention.
Retaining the customer is important if the business wants to thrive.
Each marketing practice requires a different mindset. For example, the team in charge of lead generation creates awareness for a product.
They also inspire, educate and persuade prospects to take action. But, the sales team is responsible for increasing the revenue of the organization.
Remember that the objective of having separate teams that will handle lead generation and sales is to improve your customer satisfaction.
That’s truly where the profit lies.
Hack #5: Use strong verbs to write powerful headlines that draw attention
A verb is a “doing” word. Or, better yet, it’s an “action” word.
If you want to create a lasting impression in your writing, you have to draw attention with verbs. But first, answer this question:
Isn’t it the structure, keywords used, length, topic, and, most importantly, the action word (verb) that appear in a given headline? Each of these can and should evoke curiosity and persuade people to click.
If you can give adequate attention to crafting your headline, you’ll not only generate targeted leads, but there’s a possibility that your search rankings will improve tremendously because of a lower bounce rate and the additional time that your visitors are spending on your page.
Copywriters all over the world know the power behind a well-crafted headline. It’s the same reason why Ted Nicholas believes that 73% of buying decisions are made at the point of the headline. And, eight out of ten people will click your headline if it catches their attention. So, what are you going to do about your headlines?
No matter the platform — your blog, social media networks, other blogs (when you write a guest post), or when you create any type of content that will drive leads — you’ve got to make sure that your headline contains strong verbs. According to Wikieducator, you’ve got toput muscle in your writing.
A strong verb is a specific, descriptive verb used in writing. Strong verbs are used to convey a direct message. You’ve always got to have it in the back of your mind that we live in a fast-paced world.
Think about it. We’re all about fast Internet, fast websites, fast food; we want everything now. There is no time to wait. Now, imagine how impatient your target audience will be if your writing isn’t straight to the point or doesn’t offer any immediate reward.
When you use strong verbs in your headline, it’ll make you a better writer. Your writing will be concise and descriptive. This is exactly what your prospects want.
Here’s an example of a weak verb in this sentence:
She is going to school
Though the sentence is correct, it’s weak. We can omit the “is going” and replace it with a strong verb. The question that you need to ask yourself is, how does she go to school? Does she crawl, skip, walk, run, ride a bicycle, etc.?
Let’s make the sentence better by including a strong verb:
She walks to school
She rides to school
She skips to school
In the same vein, instead of using weak verbs in your headlines, you should replace themwith a strong verb. That way, you’ll convey your message or idea in a more concise and captivating manner.
Examples of strong verbs are:
Nurture
Terminate
Improve
Increase
Revive
Change
Expand
Boost
Attack
Focus
Write
Drive
Engage
I’m not the only one who understands the power behind strong verbs. Authority content marketers, like Brian Clark and the entire Copyblogger Media team, use strong verbs to craft headlines that you can’t ignore. Take a look:
Seth Godin, the renowned author of over fifteen bestselling books, also uses strong verbs to write his captivating blog posts. Take a look:
Note: Strong verbs in your headline will not grow your leads 113% all by themselves. But, they can add flavor, meaning, conviction and clarity to your headline, so that your readers and potential customers will relate to your message.
Having strong verbs in your landing page headline, blog post headlines, and more will increase your conversions, especially when you testthem out.
For example, at a time, CityCliq, a company that provides low-cost, search engine optimized webpages for businesses, ran an A/B test. They used VWO software to test four different versions of their landing page headline:
Businesses grow faster online!
Online advertising that works!
Get found faster!
Create a webpage for your business
At the end of the A/B test, the fourth headline version, which sends a direct, more descriptive, more relevant, more concise and clear headline, outperformed the others. It generated a 90% increase in conversion rate.
In addition to using strong verbs in your headlines, you also have to focus on length. Headlines that are too long tend to be easily forgotten or ignored.
According to areport by the Guardian, an international news agency that’s been creating headlines for decades, headlines with just eight words generateda 21% higher click-through rate than longer headlines.
If you can’t come up with headlines of exactly eight words, a study by Nielsen Norman Group revealed that headlines between five and nine words seem to garner higher click-through rates, too. So, the next time you write a headline, make sure that you integrate strong verbs.
Hack #6: Create an irresistible offer and syndicate across blog communities
Ultimately, you want to get people to say “yes” to your offer. As marketers, that’s exactly what we want.
It all boils down to creating a top-notch and high-value offer. This simple formula explains it better:
High value offer + persuasion = irresistible
If you have difficulty growing your leads, it could be that your offer isn’t compelling. It’s not irresistible.
How do you recognizean irresistible offer? Chris Guillebeau shared a unique perspective on it:
A compelling offer is like a slice of orange at mile 18. It’s a marriage proposal from the guy or girl you’ve been waiting for your whole life. An offer you can’t refuse is like the $20,000 Bonderman Fellowship offered every year to graduating seniors at the University of Washington.
You want them to say yes to download your latest e-book, yes to your email forms, yes to your webinar or yes to your premium physical product on Amazon.
An irresistible offer will help youattract clients and retain them. To do that, follow the irresistible offer rules, as laid down by Jonathan Mead, founder of Paid to Exist.
Remember that when your offer is scarce, relevant, in high demand and exclusive, it becomes desirable.
People will naturally want to get their hands on it.
For example, in 2004, when Google launched a private beta of their free email service (Gmail), only 1,000 leaders were invited to share their honest opinions. These leaders were also allowed to invite their fans, friends, and family to test out the free email service.
Guess what happened during the initial beta phase of Gmail? Demand was high because it was exclusive to a group of people — not to the whole world.
At a point, Google started selling Gmail service. In fact, its eBay invitations were sold at $150 and other specific accounts sold for thousands of dollars.
Isn’t it funny that a free email service can be sold for $150 or more, just because it was exclusive, robust, and praised by thought leaders? That’s the power of an irresistible offer. When you offerone, your prospects and customers will see the gap between their problems and your solutions.
If you’re looking for an idea to create an irresistible offer for your audience, let me give you an example. Let’s assume that you created a report that will help people save on money on plane tickets.
People read, apply your tips and share their success stories on how they saved $200, $380, or $350. Many others can testify of the ease of securing their tickets at a reduced cost.
As you can see, the report is compelling and offers some practical advice that works. In this case, the length of the report doesn’t matter. Even if it’s only two pages, it’s an irresistible offer, because anyone who wants to save on airplane tickets will be attracted to the report.
Domino’s Pizza had an irresistible offer. Tom Monaghan was on the verge of bankruptcy when he strategized on how to take his company to the next level. It was a risk, but a single promotional idea changed everything:30 minutes or less… or it’s free.
Most people ordered Domino’s Pizza just because of the terms. (They’ve since dropped the guarantee.)
BlueHost also delivers irresistible offers—their web hosting plan starts at $3.49 per month, whereas other competitors such as A Small Orange, Godaddy and Hostgator start at $4.00 per month.
The difference may not be clear to you, but to a total beginner who just started out with a site, this is compelling because they can save some money.Your compelling offer has to be something that people want to buy.
In the same vein, if you want to get more email subscribers, your lead magnet has to be highly valuable, free to download and exclusive. A typical example is Michael Hyatt’s:
In order to be sure what offers will be irresistible or weak, you’ve gotto test it out. In his book, How to Create Irresistible Offers, author Robert W. Bly says that it’s possible to improve the response rate to your promotions anywhere from 10%-90%, just by creating and testing different offers.
Derek Halpern uses a powerful lead magnet to persuade people to join his email list. Though a lot of people don’t like pop-ups since the majority of them annoyingly disrupt reading, his offer (headline) makes a bold promise, so people tend to respond to it, especially first-time visitors.
In all, the way people perceive your offer will go a long way in persuading them to become leads or to drive them away. Perceived value can be applied to your lead magnets for building a list. You couldpresent the retail value of the offer that you’re giving away for free.
There are lots of different ways to generate leads. A convenient distinction in lead generation is outbound versus inbound, although there will be a crossover between the two.
Different businesses will use different lead generation tactics, so it’s about tweaking the type of lead generation you do until you find what works best.
Inbound Lead Generation
Inbound lead generation is when the prospect initiates the interaction with your business. Most often, this is done through content marketing.
A potential customer will find your content through the search engines or a social media link, love your article, and fill in a form with their contact details. From here, you can use your email marketing to progress the lead through the sales funnel, building the relationship until the prospect is ready to buy.
Seventy percent of marketers are actively investing in content marketing as a lead generation strategy, and it’s something that businesses have focused on a lot more in recent years.
The main types of inbound lead generation are:
videos
blogs
guides and e-books
pillar pages and content clusters
social media posts
infographics
newsletters
press releases
These are all content types that are strategically placed so people discover them organically.
Outbound Lead Generation
Outbound lead generation is when you initiate the interaction with the prospect. This may be done through a paid advert on Google or social media, cold email outreach, direct mail, or many other channels.
While inbound lead generation has become very popular in recent years, outbound marketing is still very important. Most businesses will find the best strategy is a mix of both inbound and outbound marketing to achieve their lead generation goals.
Some outbound marketing options include:
paid search ads
social media ads
radio ads
TV ads
direct mail
cold email
cold calls
print ads
Each option has its benefits and drawbacks, so it’s important to consider your budget and find out what will work best for you.
Lead Generation and SEO
A basic requisite for lead generation is to have people interacting with your business.
In the modern world, this is most likely to happen online, which means you’ve got two options: organic traffic or paid traffic.
When you’re looking for an answer to a question, what’s the first thing you do? The vast majority of people will type a query in a search engine. Google processes more than 3.5 billion searches every day, and the businesses that appear at the top of these search results are benefiting.
Search engine optimization is the perfect tactic because you reach people at the exact moment they’re looking for the information you have. You know they’re engaged, and they’re ripe to be converted into a lead.
The other big benefit of SEO is that you’re not paying for each click.
You’re building assets through your content, and if you practice good SEO, that page will be able to keep converting leads year after year.
Lead Generation and Paid Ads
The problem with SEO and inbound marketing, in general, is that it can be a slow process.
When you create a blog, you’re aiming for it to rank at best a few months down the line. If you need immediate results, then paid ads can be a much better option.
By investing in paid search ads or social media ads, you can get your brand in front of a very targeted audience. This is great for your visibility and allows you to drive a high volume of traffic to your landing pages.
Unlike with SEO though, you’re paying for each click, so it’s vitally important that everything you do is optimized. From your headlines to your landing pages, everything has to be geared towards turning visitors into solid leads.
Running paid ads is something of an art, and it can take time, but with these essential paid marketing steps, it can become a big part of your lead generation.
Here are some of the most important parts of your lead generation and the tools I recommend to help make your processes more efficient.
CRM – Zoho CRM
It’s one thing getting leads, but you’ve also got to be able to organize them.
Once someone gives you their contact details, what happens to them? Ideally, you want to put them into your CRM, from where you can organize your sales funnels.
In my list of the best CRMs, I found that Zoho CRM was the best option. It’s a great all-in-one platform that makes it easy to track your leads from prospect to repeat customer.
Email Finder – Voila Norbert
For outbound marketing, one of the most important things is being able to find new prospects to add to your sales funnel.
Many people use LinkedIn to research potential customers and find contact emails. People don’t love getting cold emails though, so as you might imagine, they don’t advertise their contact details too easily.
This is where a lead generation tool like Voila Norbert comes in. Once you’ve found a potential customer, it will find relevant email addresses so you know you’re reaching the right people with your email outreach.
Form Generator – Gravity Forms
Getting contact details is just as important for inbound marketing, and your forms play a big part in this.
It’s easy to think a form is just a form, but an optimized form will result in a lot more leads. Luckily, it’s easy to generate highly optimized forms using simple plugins.
For WordPress websites, I found that Gravity Forms is a great option, allowing you to quickly generate lead-generating forms.
Landing pages are an essential part of lead generation. Small changes to your landing pages can make a big difference to your conversion rate, and you want it to be as easy as possible to optimize this process.
Leadpages offers tons of features with lots of highly optimized templates to choose from, simple A/B testing, and an intuitive layout, it’s a perfect platform to build successful landing pages.
Email Marketing Services – Sendinblue
Email marketing plays a massive part in nurturing leads.
Most leads are going to end up in your sales funnel because they’ve given you their email address, so you need the right email marketing service to help you with the process. In my article on the best email marketing services, Sendinblue was one of my top options because it’s so easy to use.
Sometimes it’s best to keep things nice and simple, and that’s exactly what Sendinblue helps you to do.
4 Amazing Lead Generation Examples
Lead generation is an art, and there’s always room for optimization. Here are some examples of companies that have had great success with different lead generation campaigns.
You’ll notice that many of these campaigns have similarities, and one, in particular, is the omnichannel approach. This is a great way to ensure you’re maximizing your reach and bringing as many leads into your sales funnel as possible.
Here are four amazing lead generation examples to check out:
Ramaley Group refreshes its web presence and builds smarter sales funnels.
These case studies can give you some good ideas on how to improve your lead generation, but the most important thing is finding out what works for you. It’s important to pay close attention to your analytics and keep A/B testing your approach.
It’s all in the optimization, so make sure you’re testing everything out to get the best possible conversion rate.
Conclusion
Don’t get fooled by every fancy lead generation tool out there. Use tools for the right purpose—automation.
Building any real, successful business takes time. Nurturing your social network presence, crafting a solid email marketing campaign, diligently working on creating and producing quality content–all of these tasks require a significant amount of time and focus. You’ll expend energy, but you have to move out of your comfort zone to achieve results – particularly when it comes to building your lead generation campaign.
You may not grow your leads by 113% in a week, but, with consistency, you’ll likely surpass that milestone.
“Hacks” are not some magical push-button tactics that don’t have a strong foundation. On the contrary, they’ve been proven to work and many successful brands and industry leaders still use them to acquire new leads and convert them into customers.
Real satisfaction comes from what you learn in the process of applying these proven lead generation tips.
It’s the same with increasing sales. You have to make up your mind to learn along the way because your customers believe in you—and you can’t afford to let them down with outdated advice.
What other lead generation hacks have worked for you? Share your case studies, questions, or opinions.
This white paper takes a current view of market risk management, its growing complexity and how it can be transformative to institutions as the industry is widely recognising what are the right approaches to addressing evolving risks.
Facebook offers businesses new ways to connect with their audience, promote and sell products, and improve online visibility for their brand. The addition of shopping features such as Facebook Marketplace can also be leveraged by businesses to improve online conversions.
With over 140 million business accounts on Facebook, you may think competition is high. However, the right tactics and execution can help you create a Facebook Business Page that drives new revenue for your business.
Let’s review how to create Facebook business pages that increase your engagement, clicks, and revenue.
What Is a Facebook Business Page?
A Facebook Business Page is a stand-alone page that allows you to promote your business on one of the world’s biggest social platforms.
Facebook Business Pages are different from personal pages because they represent a business or brand, rather than an individual. This means the content on your Facebook Business Page needs to be brand-focused and professional.
A Facebook Business Page will let you share content, respond to customers, have conversations with your followers, and promote products within your feed.
You can also invite other people to manage your Facebook Business Page including any partners or outside agencies you may be working with.
Facebook Business Pages can also run paid Facebook ads to further promote your brand and products.
As you can see, it includes features a personal page doesn’t have, such as a “learn more” button, map, and a Like button.
Why Should You Create a Facebook Business Page?
When you create a Facebook Business Page you are helping people find your business and learn more about what you offer.
Your business page also helps you build an online community and better service your customers. Once you’re set up, your followers can interact with you and ask questions about your products and services in real-time, which is a great way to improve your brand integrity.
To create a great Facebook Business Page, you need to analyze everything, from your profile picture and cover photos to Facebook ads, target audience, and media planning (types of posts and when it’s time to post).
Here is a six-step guide to creating your Facebook Business Page.
1. Login or Sign-up to Facebook
First, you need to log in or join Facebook. You can create your Facebook page from your personal page if you prefer, or you can create an entirely new account for your Facebook business page.
Select the type of page you want to create, either a business/brand or community/public figure, and then click Get Started.
Here, you’ll be asked to supply some basic information.
The basic information you can add includes:
Page name: Which should be your business or brand name.
Business category: One or two words to describe your business. Facebook will give you options once you start typing. If your business falls under more than one category, try to pick the one your customers will associate with your business.
Description: A brief description of what you do, services you offer, and the purpose of your Facebook Business Page.
From there, click Continue. Moving forward indicates you have accepted Facebook’s Pages, Groups and Events Policies so familiarize yourself with these if you haven’t already.
2. Upload Cover Photo and Profile Picture
Your cover photo and profile picture are the main visual assets of your Facebook Business Page.
Many businesses use their logo for their profile picture, but you can choose any photo that represents your business and branding.
When choosing a profile picture, be sure to adhere to Facebook’s sizing guidelines to ensure your photo does not get cropped.
You’ll also want to add a cover photo when you create your Facebook Business Page. Your cover photo should be visually exciting and representative of your business and branding. Refer to the sizing guidelines for cover photo sizing.
Once you complete this step, your page will be automatically published.
3. Enter Your Business Information
Now that you have the skeleton of your page setup, it’s time to start adding content.
Your Facebook Business Page contains basic information about your business that you’ll need to fill in. This includes:
Contact: Share how your followers can contact your business if they have questions or concerns. This can include your phone number or email.
Location: Where you are located. If you don’t have a physical storefront, you can simply input your city and state.
Hours of operation: The hours you are open for business or available for customer communications.
Username: This is a unique username used in your Facebook interactions. This should be @ followed by your business name. Don’t get too creative here or it can make it difficult for your customers to find your business.
A CTA button is featured at the top right-hand of every Facebook Business Page, just below the cover photo.
It’s important to choose a relevant CTA to ensure you are directing your audience to the most pertinent actions.
For example, if you are a physiotherapy clinic looking to book more clients, your CTA button may say Book Now.
If you are an e-commerce business looking to sell products, then you may want to choose a CTA button that says Shop Now.
To edit your CTA button, click “+ Add a Button.”
From there, Facebook will give you a list of actions that your CTA could encourage. These include Start an Order, Book Now, Contact Us, and more. Choose your action and follow the steps given to complete your CTA button.
If you don’t choose a custom CTA here, Facebook will automatically create a Contact Usbutton for your page.
5. Publish Your First Post
Before you invite people to your Facebook Business Page, you should make a post so there is content for them to view.
Your first post can be a welcome post that explains who you are and what you do, or it can be something aimed at user-generated content (UGC) to get visitors engaged with your Facebook Business Page right away.
For example, a contest or giveaway can be a great way to drive immediate traffic. You can also promote sales or discounts to encourage your audience to browse and purchase your products.
Your Facebook Business Page is now ready to get traffic, so you can start inviting your audience to follow your page.
If you used your personal Facebook account to set up your page, you will be prompted to invite your Facebook friends. This group is usually a good base for your Facebook Business Page, so invite as many of your personal friends as you feel appropriate.
You can invite followers by clicking on the three dots “…” below your CTA button and clicking Invite Friends.
You can also use other channels to drive traffic to your Facebook Business page, such as your website, social media accounts, email marketing, and paid advertising campaigns.
How to Track the Success of Your FB Business Page
Now that you’ve created your Facebook Business Page, you’ll want to know how it performs and continuously optimize it to get better results.
There are many ways to track the success of your Facebook Business Page. Here are a few metrics you can track with Facebook Insights.
Engagement: Facebook uses an algorithm to show posts in your followers’ News Feeds. Posts that have higher engagement are seen as more popular and relevant, so they are more likely to show up. This means you want more likes, comments, and engagements on your posts to increase your reach. Pay attention to posts that perform well and find ways to mimic that engagement to ensure your Facebook Business Page is successful.
Reach: Reach refers to the number of people who see your content on Facebook. To see this, click on the Reachtab on your Facebook Insights page. Track and analyze your Reach regularly to learn what your audience likes and doesn’t like to better inform your post decisions.
Impressions: Impressions measure the number of times your post was seen, even if it was seen multiple times by a single user. You can find this in Facebook Insights by switching Reach to Impressions.Impressions can show you how viral your posts are and how likely they are to continuously impact your customers. Remember, it often takes a customer hearing about your brand seven times before they’ll convert to a customer.
Page likes and follows: Page Likes refer to the number of people that follow your Facebook Business Page. You can see this number on your Business Page homepage or through Facebook Insights under theLikes tab. While Page Likes are often considered a vanity metric, they are important to track the growth of your audience. If you find your page is plateauing and your Likes are not growing, it may be time to reevaluate your digital marketing strategy.
How to Create a Facebook Business Page
Summary of How to Create a Facebook Business Page
Log in or sign-up to Facebook
You can use a personal account or set up a new one for your business.
Upload a cover photo and profile picture
These should represent your branding and adhere to Facebook’s sizing guidelines.
Enter your business information
This includes opening hours, contact information, location, your About section, and more.
Add a CTA button to your page
Use a CTA to drive the most conversions for your business.
Publish your first post
This should be engaging and immediately draw users into your business.
Invite your audience
Start with your personal friends’ list and then use your other digital channels to grow your audience.
Conclusion
Creating a Facebook Business Page is a great way to improve your revenue and grow your business online.
Gaining paid search footholds can be challenging, and once you’ve built a successful Google Ads campaign and watched it perform, it can be disheartening to reach the end of that campaign’s lifespan.
However, it doesn’t have to end there.
An excellent strategy for expanding the success of your PPC campaigns is to look beyond Google Ads to other platforms like Microsoft AdCenter, which allows you to advertise on Bing, Yahoo!, and other affiliate platforms.
It’s simple to translate your Google Ads campaign to the Microsoft platform because they have similar functionality. Using the same fundamental best practices, you can create more leads through PPC on an entirely new platform.
What Is Microsoft AdCenter?
Microsoft AdCenter is the centralized hub where advertisers go to buy sponsored ads on Bing or Yahoo!
Previously Bing Ads, the platform underwent a rebrand after combining forces with Yahoo!
While it’s safe to say that the majority of internet search traffic comes through Google, that doesn’t mean digital marketers should be sleeping on Microsoft AdCenter.
Benefits of Optimizing Microsoft AdCenter for Your Ad Campaigns
Whenever you’re running a PPC campaign, you want to be constantly optimizing.
Why?
When you recalibrate through optimization, you increase your chances of reaching your target audience. This practice will not only increase your overall revenue but will also decrease your ad spend.
Microsoft AdCenter is no different. You want to continuously optimize your campaigns for success. While there’s much work to be done before launching a campaign, it’s arguable that the most valuable work is done post-launch.
However, without optimizing your campaigns, how can you ensure you’re reaching the right audience members?
Short answer: You can’t, which is why understanding how to optimize in Microsoft AdCenter is vitally important to your success on the platform.
Difference Between Microsoft AdCenter and Google Ads
As mentioned above, Microsoft AdCenter has similar functionality to Google Ads. However, the two PPC platforms differ greatly in five key areas: campaign-level control, closed variants, engagement rates, search partner targeting options, and ad scheduling.
Campaign-Level Control
Google Ads requires users to set the language, ad rotation, network, ad scheduling, and location settings at the campaign level. Groups are then restricted to these settings.
On the other hand, Microsoft AdCenter opens these options at the ad group level, permitting users to easily make change settings at any time, rather than having to build an entirely new campaign.
Closed Variants
After eliminating exact and phrase match keywords by enforcing a “close variant” target within Google Ads, the reach of exact and phrase keywords extended by 7 percent, including misspellings, pluralized terms, and grammatical iterations.
While Microsoft AdCenter does have an option to use the close variant query, it is just that: optional.
Increased Engagement and Conversion Rates
Users who engage with Microsoft AdCenter PPC ads have increased engagement with the selected sites and landing pages.
In fact, studies found that automotive search users who interacted with Microsoft AdCenter content had conversation rates 10-56 percent higher than Google Ads.
While this is clearly a particular audience subset, it is still indicative of increased interaction overall.
In addition to these factors, another difference emerges between Google Ads and Microsoft AdCenter.
As we discussed above, it’s simple to import your Google Ads campaign into Microsoft AdCenter. Despite this ease, there are considerable differences to keep in mind as you optimize your campaigns on each respective platform, including:
search partner targeting options
ad scheduling
While both Google Ads and Microsoft Ads have search partner networks (external sites that permit advertisers to expand reach on their platforms), the networks are notably different.
Search Partner Targeting Options
Unsurprisingly, Google boasts hundreds of sites in their search partner network. If you’re not seeing big returns on including this extended network in your targeted campaign, you can remove the function. Unfortunately, that removal is all or nothing—you can’t cherry-pick which partners you’d like to reach.
With Microsoft Ads, however, you can select which partners to reach, a key difference as you optimize your campaigns.
Ad Scheduling
While ad scheduling is a key component of any PPC campaign, different parameters for setting ad schedules apply when transitioning your Google Ads strategy to Microsoft.
With Google Ads, dashboard time is automatically set to the time selected upon account creation, so users need to update scheduled times depending on the time zone they’re trying to reach.
Microsoft Ads, however, allows users to set schedules based on the location of the target, making scheduling infinitely easier.
While these differences may not seem huge, they’re important to note as you begin your Microsoft AdCenter campaign.
Tips for Optimizing Microsoft AdCenter
We’ve already highlighted the importance of optimization; now it’s time to break down exactly how to optimize your Microsoft AdCenter campaigns.
1. Perform Keyword Research
If you don’t have a solid grasp on your keywords, now’s the time to start. By researching what terms apply to your purpose and audience, you can incorporate that language into your campaigns to ensure you’re reaching your desired audience.
2. Use Negative Keywords
When you include negative keywords in your campaign, you can exclude confusing or irrelevant terms from your strategy. This allows more accurate audience reach as well as reduced ad spend due to more precise matching.
3. Segment Your Campaigns
For data-driven PPC advertisers, segmenting campaigns into ad groups will allow you to make more intelligent optimization decisions. Segmentation lets marketers focus their message on different groups, which enables the collection of targeted metrics. Through a more segmented audience, you can tailor the message and receiver.
4. Use Ad Extensions
With ad extensions, you can add additional pieces of information about your business, including phone number, address, or a particular link. These free-to-add options can increase the visibility and utility of your ads.
5. Follow Ad Writing Best Practices
Strong, relevant copy is vital to the success of any PPC campaign. As you optimize your Microsoft AdCenter content, keep these best practices in mind:
Underscore the audience’s primary pain point: By speaking toward your audience’s primary pain point, you not only establish how you can solve their pain; you also establish that you understand their pain. This builds trust and connection between the advertiser and consumer.
Incorporate numbers or statistics: Historically, numbers work to grab reader attention. This was true long before the internet and will continue to be true as the internet evolves.
Utilize emotional triggers: It’s no secret that people react to emotional triggers. When you harness the power of emotion in your ads, you can almost guarantee a reaction from your audience. Check out how this law firm used emotion to advertise its services:
6. Adjust Audience Type
Microsoft Ads provides users with several different types of audiences to use to ensure your ads reach the right group. You can adjust the type of audience to optimize your campaign and improve your reach.
7. Experiment With Dynamic Search Ads
These ads will automatically target relevant search queries formed from your website content. The ads are then dynamically created to react to those custom queries, reducing workload and increasing audience reach.
8. Use the Microsoft Audience Network
This audience marketing solution draws on Microsoft’s artificial intelligence (AI) to better target your ideal audience. Be sure to take advantage of this Microsoft-exclusive offering, as it can drastically boost ad performance.
9. Use Universal Event Tracking (UET)
Yet another Microsoft-exclusive solution, you can use UET to view customer behavior after they interact with your ad. By placing a UET tag across your website, Microsoft gathers data that tracks goals and audiences with remarketing lists.
10. Set up Conversion Tracking
By setting up conversion tracking in Microsoft AdCenter, the platform matches you with relevant searchers across the Microsoft network. Conversion tracking also provides tools to optimize your campaigns for success.
Measuring the Success of Your Microsoft AdCenter Campaign
You’ve optimized your campaign throughout its lifespan, and now you want to know if it should be deemed a success or a failure.
Below, we break down three key metrics that will highlight your campaign’s overall performance.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
This metric is key to understanding whether your ads are relevant to your customers. CTR is determined by dividing the number of clicks your ad receives by the number of times your ad is shown.
Conversion Rate
Strong conversion rates indicate that what you spend on clicks is returning to you in profits. This metric is calculated by dividing the number of conversions by the number of total ad interactions tracked to a conversion in a given time period.
Cost Per Conversion
If you’re overpaying for conversions, it’s time to go back to the drawing board. This metric is determined by dividing the total cost for clicks by the number of conversions.
These three metrics provide a strong, foundational assessment of your campaign’s performance. While you can get lost in the intricacies of data, these figures always provide a clear result.
Examples of Great Microsoft AdCenter Campaigns
Although Microsoft AdCenter is filled with examples of great PPC advertising, here are three excellent PPC ads that used a unique feature of the platform for a successful campaign.
Maybelline
Maybelline uses a detailed breakdown in their paid listing to allow searchers to find exactly what they need. By segmenting by eyes, lips, mascara, and face makeup, the beauty company increases the likelihood that the searcher with clear intent will readily find what they need.
From You Flowers
These product ads rely on visuals to interest the searcher. By placing product images, pricing, and information along the side of the page, searchers have all the information they need instantly.
Papa John’s
Ad extensions can go a long way for PPC ads. Pizza vendor Papa John’s made their listing as informative as possible, while also touting their success and visibility by sharing the number of monthly site visitors. This strategy not only provides helpful information like deals and pizza type options, but it also increases consumer trust through the sheer number of social visitors.
While all three of these ads use extensions in very different ways, they bring more texture to the search engine results page (SERP), engaging the audience through images, increasing the immediacy of search success, and building consumer trust.
Conclusion
While both Google Ads and Microsoft AdCenter offer similar functionality, the options to optimize in Microsoft AdCenter are completely different.
Be sure to take advantage of Microsoft’s unique offerings and optimize your content and strategy through the Microsoft lens, ensuring that you get the most bang out of your advertising buck.
As you become more familiar with Microsoft AdCenter’s features, you could see your success rate rise as you optimize for target audience reach.
If you’re ready to find an agency partner to help you kickstart your paid campaign on Microsoft’s ad platform, let us know!
What’s the best Microsoft AdCenter campaign you’ve ever seen?
You want to get your products in front of the people who are going to buy them. When you get your products on eBay, you’re putting them in front of an audience of 185 million people, but with competition from over 1.7 billion listings, how can you make sure you stand out from the crowd?
One way to ensure you’re getting your products in front of the right audience is to make use of eBay ads. These are extremely easy to set up and can help propel you to the top of the search results, even in the most competitive categories.
How Do eBay Ads Work?
eBay ads can boost the visibility of your products by allowing them to feature at the top of the listings. With millions of products on the platform, eBay is a competitive place, and if you’re competing against hundreds of sellers all selling the same product, it can be difficult to stand out.
This is where eBay ads come in, allowing you to pay for your listing to feature at the top of the search results.
In this sense, it’s a lot like advertising on Google. You set up your ads, and your product can be featured higher in the search results, based on the quality and relevance of your listing and how much you bid.
One interesting difference with eBay’s main ad option, promoted listings, is you only pay if your ad is successful. Unlike many platforms where you pay every time your ad is clicked, with eBay, you only pay for your promoted listing if it results in a sale within 30 days of someone clicking the listing.
This allows sellers to get a clear picture of their return on investment (ROI) and is a big benefit of selling on eBay.
3 Types of eBay Ads
eBay offers a few different types of ads to suit your business needs.
Promoted Listings
Promoted listings are used by over 940,000 sellers and are the most common way of advertising on eBay. They’re an excellent way to get your product listing to the top of the search results.
To be eligible for promoted listings, you must:
be in good standing (meeting eBay’s terms and conditions)
have “above standard” or “top-rated” seller rating
have recent sales activity
One of the most important aspects of selling products online is getting people to view your listings, and this ad type is a great way to gain access to eBay’s 185 million active users. By featuring at the top of the search results, you will bring more people to your product page, and then it’s up to you to optimize your product page to make the sale.
eBay offers great analytics to help you get the most out of your advertising, and the nice part is you only pay for your promoted listings once you’ve sold an item.
Display Ads
eBay now runs display ads across its network, giving you another way to reach your target audience. Similar to the display ads you can run on Google Ads, eBay’s display ads allow you to target users with interests in certain categories to drive more traffic to your listing:
business, office, and industrial
cars, motorcycles, and vehicles
clothes, shoes, and accessories
computers, tablets, and networking
garden and patio
health and beauty
home furniture and DIY
This expands your advertising options, meaning you’re not just limited to reaching people through the search function.
Display ads aren’t available through the seller hub; instead, you can speak directly to eBay about this option.
Classified Ads
Classified ads are a good option for people who want to take advantage of eBay’s reach but sell a product that isn’t necessarily suited to selling on the platform.
These ads are available in several categories:
business, office, and industrial: $9.95 for a 30-day listing
specialty services: $9.95 for a 30-day listing
travel: $9.95 for a 30-day listing
real estate: $150 for a 30-day listing
Your ad is shown, the user clicks on it, and then eBay puts you in contact with the buyer to negotiate the sale outside of the platform. This means you’re paying only for the ad, not the fees for selling on eBay, but it also means you don’t get any of the protections you get as an eBay seller.
eBay Advertising for Large Brands
eBay also offers a more bespoke advertising service for large brands.
This option offers big advertisers branding solutions to help optimize their product pages and acquire in-depth insights into customer motivations to help brands get the most out of the platform.
This option might offer great benefits, but it requires a big commitment to advertising spend to be accepted. If you’re a large brand looking to make eBay advertising an essential part of your marketing, then it’s worth reaching out to the eBay team and exploring the option further.
How to Set Up Your eBay Ad Campaign
Setting up eBay ads is quick and simple. In just five steps, you can create promoted listings and boost your product’s visibility at the top of the search results.
1. Log in to Your Seller Hub
Your seller hub is where all your product listings live, and this is where you can create your eBay ad campaigns. Go to https://www.ebay.com/sh/, select “Marketing,” then “Promoted Listings” from the sidebar.
2. Click “Create Your First Campaign”
If you’re new to promoted listings, you’ll be brought to a landing page that explains what they are and how they work. Click “Create Your First Campaign” to get started.
3. Choose How to List Your Promotions
You have three different ways to list your promotions:
Simple listing selection: This allows you to promote your products individually, making good use of eBay’s smart recommendations.
Bulk listing selection: This option is for people who want to promote lots of products with consistent stock and low turnover rates.
Creating rules: Rules allow you to automatically promote current and future products. This option works well for sellers with dynamic inventory and high turnover rates.
4. Apply Your Ad Rate
This is where you choose how much you wish to pay for your eBay ads. Represented as a percentage of the total sale value, you’ll notice that eBay gives you a recommended ad rate for your product.
These are normally a good place to start, but if you want to change it, you can use the slider to set it to anywhere between 1-100 percent of your sale’s value.
5. Review and Launch
Lastly, you need to name your campaign and review the details. You can also set a date for the campaign to begin and end. Once you’re happy with everything, click “Launch.”
Tips for Creating Effective eBay Ads
As with any form of advertising, it’s important to have a good return on ad spend (ROAS), and the way to achieve this is through optimization. It doesn’t matter how many people your ad reaches if you’re not using the right keywords or your listing is of poor quality. There are several elements you need to get right.
Use Relevant Keywords
Choosing the right keywords to reach your target audience is extremely important. People don’t always search in the ways you expect they might, so you need to understand your audience and do your keyword research.
As with Google Ads, it’s important to match user intent with your ads, which means getting the right keywords in your titles, descriptions, and throughout your product listings. Slight differences in your keywords can make a big difference in the success of your ads, so make sure you’re optimizing to meet the demands of your target audience.
While it’s important to make sure you’re using the right keywords, it’s also important to remember not to keyword stuff. eBay’s algorithms are smart, and they understand when you’re using language naturally and when you’re stuffing keywords solely for SEO purposes.
When someone walks into a shop and buys a product, they get to see it with their own eyes and feel it in their hands. When they buy online, they don’t get this benefit. Instead, they’re reliant on your images and words to give them a good feel for your products. This is why your images are so important and can make a significant difference in the success of your ads.
High-quality images are likely to get more clicks and help boost your conversion rate.
Promote the Items That eBay Recommends
eBay faces huge competition for your advertising money. If it doesn’t deliver results, it knows you can easily go to Google, Amazon, Walmart, or any other number of advertising platforms to boost your sales.
To ensure this doesn’t happen, eBay uses its vast amount of data to recommend which items you should think about advertising. These “handpicked” recommendations are the products eBay believes are most likely to benefit from a promoted listing and have a “Recommended” tag next to them in your campaign manager.
Perfect Your Listing Title
When someone sees your ad in the search results, they don’t have a lot to go on. All they see is your title, a thumbnail image, pricing, and some details about shipping.
There aren’t many opportunities to earn someone’s click.
This means small details can make all the difference, and your title is a huge part of this. If you can create concise titles that match user intent, you can give yourself a much better chance of getting the right people to click your ad.
Sometimes people create product listings or blog content, and the title is an afterthought, but this is the first thing everyone looks at. They might just be a few words, but titles play a massive role in whether someone clicks your link and reads through your product listing.
Review Your Performance
One of the great things about advertising online is you have access to so much data. Information is power, and when you make the most of your analytics, you’ll find ways to optimize your eBay ads.
Head to the “Performance” tab in your promoted listings dashboard and make use of metrics such as impressions, clicks, and sales to evaluate how your eBay ads are performing. If you’re not getting the results you want, consider making changes to your titles, product page, bid price, and images. Make sure you keep checking the performance until you find the formula that works.
Conclusion
eBay ads give you an excellent opportunity to reach a targeted, engaged audience of buyers.
However, as with any e-commerce platform, there’s a ton of competition, and you need to be able to find ways to stand out from the crowd. eBay ads give you this opportunity, but you’ve still got to be creative with your titles and make sure your product listings are perfectly optimized to create sales.
For most sellers, promoted listings are going to be the best option to allow them to reach more customers, and they’re easy to set up and very effective. One of the nice things about this ad format is that you don’t pay until you see results, so you’ve got plenty of opportunities to optimize your process and make sure your eBay ads are working for you.
If creating your own ad strategy and optimizing your product descriptions or website isn’t up your alley, reach out to our agency. We can help!
Case studies go beyond simple testimonials by providing real-life examples of how your brand satisfied your customer’s needs and helped them accomplish their goals.
An in-depth case study helps you highlight your successes in a way that will help your ideal potential customer become your next customer. They help you show rather than tell prospective customers how you can help them reach their goals.
But, creating a solid case study can be a challenge. Today, I’ll provide actionable tips to help you write a case study, provide background information, and identify key metrics that will help your case study drive conversions.
1. Write About Someone Your Ideal Customer Can Relate To
Do you know who your ideal customer is? If it’s someone in the education industry, then make your case studies about your university customers. If it’s someone in the automobile industry, then make your case studies about auto parts and accessories manufacturers.
The goal is to ensure that your case study will show prospective customers that you are:
Comfortable in their industry.
Undertand their industry’s specific needs.
Know how to give their industry targeted results.
Think about it on a smaller level, such as when you’re reading a how-to blog post. Most of of these posts are geared toward average readers.
But when you come across a post designed specifically for your needs (such as online marketing for the healthcare industry), you are more likely to understand and apply the information.
The same goes with case studies – people who read about results in their industry will feel like the same approach will work for them.
2. Tell the Story from Start to Finish
Storytelling is a powerful marketing strategy. A great case study will allow someone to really get to know the customer in the case study including:
Who is the sample customer and what do they do?
What were the customer’s goals?
What were the customer’s needs?
How did you satisfy those needs and help the customer meet their goals?
But don’t stop a month or two out. Follow up with the customer in the case study and update your case study a few months down the road to show how your solutions continue to provide long term benefits.
This gives readers the opportunity to see that your goal is not only to help with immediate needs, but also to ensure long term results.
3. Make Your Case Study Easy to Read
No one likes to read one huge chunk of text, no matter how interesting and informative it might be. Case studies, like blog posts, should be scannable and easy to read.
Be sure to use good content formatting elements as you would with articles, blog posts, and copywriting on your website, including:
Headers
Images
Bulleted lists
Bolded & italicized text
In addition to providing great SEO value for your case studies page, these formatting elements will help your readers (especially those that like to skim) find the most important parts of your case study and get a great impression about what your business could do for them.
Consider adding multi-media elements in addition to written content, such as videos, PDFs, and images to mix it up and make the content more engaging.
4. Include Real Numbers
Have you ever read case studies where a business states they “doubled traffic” for the customer in their case study and wondered if that meant they went from 100 to 200 visits or 10,000 to 20,000 visits?
Avoid using broad statements by using clear, direct numbers. This makes your case study more believable and helps build trust in your brand.
You want your case study to be as precise as possible. Instead of saying you doubled their traffic, provide specific, accurate numbers and (if possible) real proof in the form of charts, graphs, or analytics data.
Remember that not everyone is as familiar with analtyics technology as you are, so highlight the most importnat pieces of data and provide context to why it matters.
This way, the reader can see where the customer began and where the customer ended up with your help.
Plus having the picture proof can help the reader envision exactly what you might do for them, making your case study that much more powerful.
5. Talk About Specific Strategies in Your Case Study
So you doubled a website’s traffic or sales, right? How did you do it? This is where you sell your products or services simply by saying which ones you used and how they led to the desired result.
Don’t just say “our online marketing services led to these results.” Instead, say something like, ” A three-month social media campaign focusing on Facebook & YouTube and five-month of link building campaign led to an increase in rankings, plus brand exposure led to these results.”
Don’t worry about giving away your secrets — the goal is to establish your brand as an industry leader and you need to show you know your stuff.
6. Try Different Content Formats
Case studies do not have to be fit into a story form every time. Try different types of case studies, such as an interview format where you have your clients answer the same questions mentioned earlier about what they do, their needs, their goals, and how you met them.
Quoting your customer in their own words will make the case study even more relatable to your ideal customer than you telling the story.
Infographics, webinars, and even podcasts can also be used to highlight case studies. Don’t get stuck in the same old text-only format — get creative and see what type of content your users respond to.
Here’s a case study example from Venngage that uses a brochure-style case study to highlight how Vortex was able to grow conversion. (Notice the results section that highlights specific gains.)
7. Appeal to Different Types of Learners
While some people enjoy reading, others may prefer audio, video, or visual representation of your case study. So consider taking your text-based case studies and re-purposing the content as:
The bonus with YouTube videos and infographics is that they are easy to share. This means that your case study may go further than just your own site, leading to more of your potential customers finding out how they could benefit from your products or services.
Case studies can also be embeded in other types of content — such as an ebook, how-to blog post, or resource guide.
8. Make Your Case Studies Easy to Find
What’s the point of having great case studies if no one will ever read them? Be sure that your case studies are organized and easy to find.
Here’s a few examples of good case studies that are easy to find — and therefore, much more powerful.
AWS provides case studies right on their homepage. They also make it easy to look for an-industry specific case study in manufacturing, financial services, fitness, and more.
Drupal provides case studies right in their hero image. Users considering using their solution don’t have to look far at all to see how other brands are finding success with Drupal.
Conclusion
A great case study starts with case study research. Ask your customers to fill out a short form that highlights how you helped them reach their goals — be sure to ask for specific results.
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