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Good morning, Marketers, and are you thinking about 2022 yet?

As we’re inching closer to Q4, it only makes me realize how close we are to next year. Gulp. I saw a post on StreetFight about how digital advertising has seen a robust recovery from the dips of the initial pandemic panic. 

Most industries, including gaming, e-commerce, health and wellness, fintech, travel, and more, are seeing growth (though some slower than others). “Much of this recovery can be attributed to a general shift from the physical to the digital world as a result of global shutdowns,” wrote Jane Handel. 

But it makes me wonder what sort of fluctuations we’ll see in 2022. More people are venturing back out into public places, though often warily, and some have decided to remain mostly digital until pandemic outlooks are less dangerous to them.

How are you prepping for 2022? What predictions do you have? I’d love to know your thoughts, search marketers. Email me at clyden@thirddoormedia.com.

Carolyn Lyden,
Director of Search Content

Facebook is testing a new marketing tool called Ad Strategies

“Ad Strategies uses automation to help you build complete customer pipelines,” according to an email to advertisers. We first saw this in a tweet from Matt Navarra. The idea is to provide an easier-to-use advertising setup that doesn’t require as much effort for advertisers.

In the thread, Navarra shows screenshots of the step-by-step that social media managers would go through to set up Ad Strategies. It’s a five-step process that includes answering questions about your chosen ad strategy including what you’re selling, your sales cycle, whether you want to prioritize sales or leads, and what your budget is. From there, you can set locations, add creative and review the campaign before launch.

Why we care. Facebook has been saying it cares about small businesses for a while now, and this seems to be a step toward demonstrating that. Ad Strategies would make it a lot easier for SMBs to set up social media campaigns. But just like with Google and Microsoft Advertising’s automated tools, there’s potential for humans to lose the control that many advertisers like to maintain. The most common complaint about automation in ad tools is that it prioritizes impressions over conversions, and we’re interested to see if the Facebook Ad Strategies tool follows the same pattern.

Nominate a search marketer for the Search Engine Land Award for Advancing Diversity and Inclusion in Search Marketing

Search marketing has a diversity problem. Older data from the American Marketing Association shows that most marketing leadership is still majority white and male. It’s a topic we’ve covered multiple times at Search Engine Land:

• The onus of diversity should not fall to Black marketers
• What does commitment to diversity look like in an organization?
• How inclusion can lead to diversity in marketing and communications
• The business imperative behind inclusion and diversity

But it’s not one and done. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are ongoing efforts and something we need to commit to every day. This is why we’re excited to announce the second annual Search Engine Land Award for Advancing Diversity and Inclusion in Search Marketing to celebrate those individuals or organizations who are affecting real change. This year’s awards will include a guest judge, last year’s winner Areej AbuAli, a pillar in the SEO community and the founder of Women in Tech SEO.

You may nominate as many organizations or individuals as you feel deserve the recognition. We ask that you highlight specific initiatives conducted by the nominee and that in the nomination form you include the contact of someone who can “second” that nomination.

Nominate a person or organization now.

Consumers think brands should be responsible for removing fake goods from marketplaces

New data from brand protection company Red Points finds that holiday shoppers plan to start early (think now) and these same consumers believe online retailers should “fix it” if they mistakenly buy fake goods. “With a larger pool of online shoppers to prey on, scammers have even more reasons to take advantage of online shoppers and fool them into believing their discounts on fake items are part of legitimate sellers’ sale events,” said the report. 

“In fact, 56% of U.S. consumers acknowledge having been victims of purchasing a fake or counterfeit item online during previous holiday shopping seasons. It takes only minutes for a scammer to set up an illegitimate site, but the ramifications can be long-lasting for the brand they steal from.”

So who should fix it when consumers are tricked into buying fake stuff? 40% say the brand should be primarily responsible for removing fake items from online channels.

Why we care. With supply chain issues still a problem for many retailers, there’s a high chance that fake goods could infiltrate the e-commerce market. This can be a problem or an opportunity for advertisers. If your brand falls prey to scammers taking advantage of an online marketplace, your customers will feel like it’s your fault and your responsibility to fix it. However, if you’re advertising genuine and authentic products, there’s an opportunity to include that in your ad copy to ensure that customers know what they’re getting is real.

On the hunt for something new? Check out the latest jobs in search marketing

Senior Paid Search Specialist @ d50 Media (Boston or USA remote)

• Salary: $95k-105k/year
• Perform daily account management of pay per click accounts on Google Ads and Microsoft Ads
• Manage and optimize display platforms like Verizon Media, GDN, and MSAN

Paid Search Account Manager @ Croud (New York City)

• Salary: $70k-80k/year
• Focus on Google Ads with Search and Shopping, with some focus on YouTube, Discovery and Display 
• Own paid campaign processes from start to finish, including researching, planning, trafficking, troubleshooting, optimizing and reporting

Senior Manager, Content Strategy @ Cox Communications (Atlanta, GA)

• Salary: $125k-140k/yr
• Collaborate on the creative and optimization process for content and website pages working with our product, legal and web production teams to build messaging and imagery that resonate with our customers and drive our digital and company KPI’s
• Lead the strategy and execution for SEO digital content across digital platforms

Organic Search Manager @ GroupM (USA remote)

• Salary: $90k/yr
• Review and analyze competitor sites and understand their organic search approach
• Optimize campaigns accordingly to maximize client investment and to resolve performance issues

Want a chance to include your job listing in the Search Engine Land newsletter? Send along the details here.

What We’re Reading: How to drive the funnel through content marketing and link building

Businesses turn to content marketing because it can be an effective method for building brand awareness and guiding customers through their sales funnel. Yet, many have been unable to capitalize on their content marketing initiatives because they haven’t covered all aspects of the customer journey, didn’t keep track of their assets and wasted resources on duplicate content, failed to create unique content or were simply unsuccessful with their outreach efforts.

In her session at SMX Convert, Eve Sangenito, director at Perficient, shared her comprehensive content strategy to engage potential customers at every point in their journey and generate backlinks for greater discoverability and higher rankings.

Your content should exist to serve your brand by serving your audience — that should always be at the center of your planning and execution. “It isn’t so much about what you want to tell your audience; it’s what you understand they want to learn and what’s going to be helpful for them to learn more about your solutions and/or about your industry as a whole,” Sangenito said, adding “Just knowing where they’re coming from is one of the key elements you should be focused on.” Check out the full session coverage here.

The post New automation in Facebook Ads?; Monday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land.

In her hit session at today’s SMX Convert, Amy Bishop, Owner and Marketing Consultant and Cultivative, schooled us on multi-channel targeting tactics to turn prospects into paying customers. Her three-step strategy includes ways to better understand your audience, how to determine their varying paths to purchase, and tips to ensure that you’re targeting them at every stage along that path.

Knowing your target audience

Just like on the SEO side, it’s critical to have your personas handy for this exercise. If you don’t have a set group of personas, Bishop included a few questions to ask yourself about your potential target audience (plus some handy sheets for B2B and B2C):

She says the best way to dig into personas is to involve other client-facing teams, as well. This includes getting with customer support, sales, customer success, and more to answer these questions about your target audience.

• What is your target audience solving for?
• Where do they get their information?
• What characteristics make them a good prospect?
• What are indicators that they’re in-market?
• What influences them?

Along with asking these key questions, Bishop also recommends using the data you already have at your fingertips. “If you have a Facebook account, even if you’re not running ads, you have a wealth of information in Facebook audience insights,” she said. It’ll take some sorting through initially, but Bishop recommends identifying top purchaser demographics and zeroing in from there. After that, you can further segment by layering interests and other demographics and then identify specific interests to target. From there, you can monitor performance to flesh out and validate your personas.

Other sources of persona data that Bishop uses include the following:

• Google Ads audience insights,
• Google Analytics demographics insights, and
• Google Analytics conversion data.

Designing your campaigns to support the funnel

Catering to your prospects means supporting their journey toward that final conversion (whatever conversion is for your organization — it isn’t always a purchase!). “A common question that I get,” said Bishop “is which channels belong where [in the funnel]. I would really caution against this line of thinking because most channels have different ways that you can reach prospects. It doesn’t have to be ‘YouTube at the top, then display, and then search.’ You can make any channel work for you depending on who your prospects are and which channels they use and which targeting options are available across all channels.”

Instead, she recommends focusing on targeting options at each stage of the funnel:

In the first stage, work on targeting options that go for potential customers who don’t know all their options yet. After that, seek options that allow you to capture prospects seeking solutions and to re-engage those who have engaged in the past. Finally, at the bottom of the funnel, we want to target options to convert hot traffic to leads or sales.

Bishop maps this out in a spreadsheet asking these questions:

• What stage of the journey is the prospect in?
• What information do they need at that stage to feel comfortable moving to the next stage?
• What action or resource do we have available that is going to meet that information need that they have?
• How are we tracking it and creating an audience off of it?

In order to acquire this data to answer these questions, Bishop recommends looking into the data you DO have to complete this spreadsheet:

• First party data can tell you paths and interactions
• Client-facing resources can give you information on objections and questions
• Publicly available data can serve as market research
• Your market can give you info through customer surveys

Considerations for improving your campaign performance

If you’ve taken all the steps above and in Amy Bishop’s SMX Convert presentation and are still having some hiccups, here are some common mistakes she’s noticed in campaigns before.

Lack of data

“As marketers, we love to have control, so we end up making hyper-specific audience. But what happens is that we over-segment them and, even if [these small audiences have] brought conversions in the past, sometimes CPL and CPA can be pretty volatile,” said Bishop. With automation becoming more of a factor in PPC every day, platforms thrive on data. removing some of the segmentation (device, platform, etc.) can help create a larger audience. This can help give your bidding strategy a boost.

Not optimizing to a higher funnel conversion

“Even if you’re in the bottom of the funnel you can optimize to a higher in the funnel conversion,” she recommends. One of Bishop’s clients was struggling to get out of learning mode, so they tried optimizing to Add to Cart. They saw huge increases in ATC, a 91% increase in purchases, and a 155% increase in purchase value. These are all strategies worth testing for your campaigns if it makes sense.

Not testing better qualifying audiences and look-alikes

“Having any first-party data is good,” said Bishop. “That’ll only become more important as time goes on. Even better than that is putting some qualifications around it.” Analyze the behaviors of SQLs and work to find more of those by feeding those data values back into platforms.

The keys to improving your targeting are threefold, Bishop told us at SMX Convert. Really get to know your audience beyond surface persona data. Work to understand their path to purchase. And, finally, designs your campaigns around that path to purchase.

Want to see the whole session? Sign up to watch the entire SMX Convert learning journey on-demand.

The post Three targeting tactics that power every stage of the funnel appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Having spent the last 11 years surrounded by sales leaders, Amanda Farley Partner and Director of Accounts and Digital Strategy at SSDM, picked up on some of their biggest successes and opportunities. But recently, she had the idea to apply them outside of the sales box and into her digital marketing campaigns. “This is really what sales and marketing integration is all about,” said Farley. “It’s about building the relationships, the trust and guiding [buyers] to impactful solutions that ultimately lead into more sales or leads.

Learning from the sales process: An introduction to buyer influencers

These buyer personas are based on a book called, The New Strategic Selling by Robert B. Miller and Stephen E. Heiman. “Your strategy can only begin when you know who your players are,” added Farley. “The best way to think of it is like a football team: every player must be on the field to close the deal.”

• Economic buyer. Has the ability to commit funds to a purchase
• User buyer. The end-user of your product or service
• Technical buyer. Ensures all the technical specifications are met
• Coach. Really wants your solution to win

When we take this into our marketing efforts, we need to understand what each audience cares about most, what their content preferences are, and what channels they’re most likely to engage in.

Economic buyer

“This person prefers content with data visualizations, photography, and charts because they’re ROI-focused and need the social proof behind any decision that they’re going to make,” said Farley. They’re also high consumers of video content and love to see case studies and financial models.

User buyer

The user buyer is the one responsible for screening out potential solutions and understands all the key factors that go into various options they’re considering. This person is interested more in the details than the high-level overview that the economic buyer might find more interesting. The user buyer engages with charts, infographics, solution comparison guides, or category matrices.

“They’re whole ‘thing’ is being able to pitch [the product/service] to their economic and technical buyers,” added Farley. This user also cares deeply about how the solution will help them: will it make my job easier, better, faster, etc.?

Technical buyers

This buyer’s main role is to run interference for the economic buyer. “At the enterprise level, we see this with purchasing departments or procurement, but it can also be an operations manager. The question this buyer is always asking if the solution has what it takes to make the entire organization successful. The technical buyer is focused on data and leverages the user buyer for expertise.

Coach

This can be any of the other buyers or an outside influencer. They have potential personal gain from you winning. “This is someone who’s going to get something from your solution being the key decision,” said Farley. If you have a key influencer in your audience who is also a coach, that’s how to unlock success from marketing campaigns.

How to leverage these buyer personas in your PPC campaigns

Step 1. Define the buyer influencers. This is the part where you amass as much information as you can. Talk to customer service, sales teams, marketing teams, and more. Determine the person’s role in the buying process, their background and education, the company size, the buyer’s demographics or other defining traits, and their motivations, pain points and entry points.

“If they’re in growth mode, that’s a good foot in the door. But if they’re in trouble, it will always trump growth in sales,” said Farley. “So, from a marketing perspective, if we know trouble pain points, that’s also where we should focus because we know that it will ultimately make the difference.”

Step 2. Perform audience research. Now that you’ve found each buyer type and maybe new ways to think about your audience, you need to deep dive into the data. Figure out what your audience cares about most. What websites are they on? What YouTube channels do they watch the most? What social media preferences do they have? What types of content are they sharing?

From there, Farley recommends noting the differences in this information between influencers. You may find some overlap, but the differences can help inform your strategy even more. In an example with an aerospace client, she found that the economic buyer’s second most-used social media channel was LinkedIn while the user buyer went to Instagram. This can change how you focus your campaign strategies and messaging for each platform.

The last part of the research is keyword and topic analysis. Any of the main keyword tools work for this part. “We look at — what are the key focus points? Is there any overlap? But also can I actually spot the buyer influencer” in what and how they’re searching, Farley said. This can craft how you’re displaying content and creating search ads or messaging landing pages. The key, she says, it tweaking the messaging for each product or service campaign to target those buyer personas.

Step 3. Other ways to use data and audience research. You can look at top channels for sponsorship opportunities like in podcasts or influencer campaigns that each buyer might listen to. You can target your media buys to these channels and even build relationships with hosts and reporters in these areas.

Implementing the research in PPC campaigns

Firstly, Farley recommends paid search advertisers think big and imagine what they would do if budget wasn’t a limiting factor.

Google Ads. “Go into each channel and create, cast, and layer. With Google, I like to use the custom audience or sandbox building of display campaigns. You can upload things like all of the YouTube channels that you found along with those key topic or purchase intents that you found in the keyword research to really get those estimates of: How many people are looking for this? And what could potential costs look like?” she added.

Farley also recommends layering custom with affinity or intent (especially if you have good lookalike or first part data) to see what works. You’ll have to balance what’s too narrow with what’s big enough to be able to serve. The key is understanding what’s possible and testing from there.

Microsoft Advertising. Microsoft’s Audience Network gets kudos from Farley, too. “You can actually target using LinkedIn data into their display network, so things like job function, industry, company, in-market segments… you can build that all and get your estimates and figure out what could a potential budget or strategy look like,” she said.

Facebook and Instagram. While these options are constantly changing and evolving, Facebook and Instagram have allowed us to target by job type and interest, and use our first-party data.

Working within your budgets

Now that we’ve dreamed big and seen what’s possible, we have to work within the frameworks set by clients and stakeholders including budget and regulations, etc. Farley offers a planning framework where she starts off looking at who her primary audience should be. She determines if there are specific focus areas like industry or location. From there she finds the best channel based on the audience insights we gained earlier and keeps her KPIs in mind. Leverage the percent of potential investment based on those set KPIs.

It’s also critical to look at the content or pain point to determine what it means for your ad assets. “We can’t be everything to everyone all the time because we have to work in the budgets,” Farley reminds PPC marketers. She recommends looking at your media map as percent by channel by funnel: “If we can say, if search will need to be 50%, then display is 20% because we can’t be always on for everything.”

Seasonality. Don’t forget seasonal trends, reminds Farley. “It just gives us a high-level look at what the seasonality in each market tells us.” You can know the best times to leverage campaigns, know when competitors will be bumping up costs, and more.

Testing. Make sure your settings are limiting waste before you launch! “Once you launch, test, monitor, optimize, and test again,” she recommends. After that, you can remove low-performers and update creative, ads and messaging to better fit your target audience. And, of course, amplify your best strategies. The cycle is never-ending, though, as she recommends advertisers continue to test, log, optimize, and test again.

Top insights:

• Find your buyer influencers, then leverage into audience targeting for campaigns.
• Determine what’s possible and then laser-focus in, on what matters most with realistic investments.
• Test and optimize audience layering with creative performance. Report, optimize, evaluate for success and repeat.

Watch the full session at SMX Advanced >>

The post A new way to approach your PPC personas: Learning from the sales process to limit waste and accelerate ROI appeared first on Search Engine Land.