Overview of Google Ads

Google is a life saver these days. When we use google, we want to discover, go, purchase or search several other things. What are Google Ads then? It is an online marketing tool, which helps businesses to connect with their customers. Businesses can choose their audience by creating their ad online, this way prospect customers are able to connect to the businesses.

Benefits of Google Ads:

Connect with customers

Google Ads helps businesses to target (demographics, location and keywords) their audience at the right time, at the right place, to the right people.

Control your costs

It will also help you control your expenses on advertising as you choose your spending on ad per/month, per/day and per/ad

Improve Performance

With the help of the tracking tools, you can analyze the actual sales generated via the ad. You can also change the strategy, if the sales are not soaring.

Choose where customers see your ads 

There are different forms of Google Ads ad format, where you can communicate with your audiences on different networks (Google, 2017) :

Text ads: an ad with text and a clickable link showing on google search results

Image ads: a type of display ad, can show on several other partner sites

Video ads: ads that show before the YouTube and other sites with video players.

There are two types of search networks, where the ad can be displayed. Search network (Google search, Google shopping, Google Maps, and Google Play). Display network (YouTube, Blogger and Gmail).

Create effective text ads 

When we create the ads, we want to make sure they are clear, relevant, powerful and attractive for the users. Text Ad should contain headline, URL, path fields (placed after your website’s domain) and descriptions (up to 80 characters). Below are the five tips on writing an effective text ad (Google, 2017) :

1. Highlight what makes you unique: Stand out amongst the crowd
2. Use a call to action: For e.g.: Book Online Today!
3. Include sale terms: For e.g.: Selected locations on sale!
4. Match your ad to your keywords: include search words
5. Match your ad to your landing page: ensure ad takes customers to the right place

Here are also few tips to improve the landing page experience:

• Offer relevant, useful and original content
• Promote transparency and foster trust
• Make mobile and computer navigation easy
• Decrease the page loading time
• Make it mobile friendly

Enhance your ads with extensions 

By adding an extension one can give customers more reasons to click their ad. Ad extensions can increase visibility, performance and is cost friendly. There are different type of extensions, with unique purposes. For e.g. locations extensions (encourages people to the business physical location). Call extensions and message extension (encourages people to call and send message to your business). Sitelink extensions (link people to specific pages) and structured snippets (highlights specific aspects of your products). App extensions such as android software download extension.

Choose the best campaign types

Campaigns are a great way to determine where customers will be able to see your ads. There are different types of campaigns to choose from (Google, 2017) :

Search campaign: ads appear near google search results

Display campaign: ads appear throughout the google display network

Search Campaign: ads appear on the search result page of the google search network

Video Campaign: ads can run on YouTube and google display network sites

Shopping Campaign: ads appear in google shopping

Universal App Campaign: ads are promoted across search display and YouTube.

After you have selected your campaign type, goals should be set up for the campaign to attract customers action.

Organize your account for success

Google is of a great help, when it comes to organizing. Instead of having just one campaign for each product type, you can have multiple campaigns for each product. Another tip would be to create separate ad groups with relevant keywords for each product. Thirdly, keep reconnoitering if the google ads manager account is appropriate for you. Therefore, google can help you organize efficiently to help achieve your goals and objectives.

Reach customers with targeting

The thumb rule is to target the right people, at the right place with the right message. You can take three considerations in mind to find an interested audience; who (demographics), what and where. What would refer to displaying your ad alongside the searched results on google or partner sites. Where can refer to where your customers are in the world, like narrowing your ad to only be visible by people in the city your company is in, or where they’re located online, such as choosing which type of websites you’d want your ad to be on 

Help customers find you 

Keywords can play an important role in helping customers find you. One should build a solid keyword list to help them reach you easily. There are seven tips you all can follow to build your keyword list (Google, 2017) .

1. Think like a customer
2. Organize your keywords by theme
3. Select specific keywords to target specific customers
4. Select general keywords to reach more people
5. Use negative keywords
6. Pick the right number of keywords
7. Choose keywords that relate to the websites

Control which searches trigger your ads 

One should control the keywords so that they match with persons search terms. Customers tend to see the Ad when they search for some keywords, which matches with our keyword list. Match types could be used to control the variations of your keywords. So essentially if you’re only looking for people searching your exact keywords, you can change your settings to give you that result. 

Make your ads seen 

When it comes to your ad being visible to others, Google’s ad Auction helps the viewers to get to see the most useful ads. So, its important to know about the factors that can help in influencing the ad placement (Google, 2017) :

1. Bid
2. The quality scores
3. The ad formats
4. The landing page experience
5. Ad’s expected clickthrough rate (CTR)

Match media cost models with your budget 

Now in the next step, it is important to know as what one should pay for media cost models and which cost model to use for your business (Google, 2017) .

CPM: Pay every time the publisher serves your ad (raises brand awareness)

CPC: Pay each time someone clicks on your ad (drive traffic)

CPA: Pay only if a user sees an ad on the publisher’s site (increases sales)

vCPM: Pay every time your ad is displayed on screen (raise brand awareness)

CPV: Pay for people watching or interacting with your video ad (increase video views)

Determine a good bidding strategy 

There are different type of bidding strategies one can use and make sure they align with your business goals and objectives. First one should consider the overall budget, then the campaign goals and finally the value of the sale.

Three ways to determine CPC bids:

1. Bid Simulator
2. Keyword planner
3. First-page bid estimates

Select your bid strategy 

There are different type of strategies for different type of business goals. There are two ways to manage the bids (Google, 2017) :

1. Manual bidding (you can manually set bids at the ad group level)
2. Automated bidding (one can set a daily budget, and Google ads automatically adjusts it).      

You can choose from these two ways to whether go for manual or automated bidding. Manual bidding is a good option, if you don’t have enough conversions to meet and you need 100 percent control for pay per views and clicks (Google, 2017). The vice versa for automated bidding, as you will have performance goals and your conversion tracking enabled.

Adjust bids to favor performers 

Once you have all the keywords, locations and devices ready, you can then adjust the bids to improve your performance. There are different type of bid adjustments available (Google, 2017) :

1. Device
2. Location
3. Time of day
4. Top Content
5. Targeting methods
6. Remarketing lists for search ads
7. Interactions

These variations should be kept into mind to reach more users. Bid adjustments could be raised or lowered depending on the scenarios. High bid can lead to increase in the visibility of your ads.

Align your budget with your goals 

After the budget has been set up, you should determine the right daily spend for your campaign. Your daily budget can be calculated via (Google, 2017)

• based on your monthly budget
• Based on your average cost per click
• Finding your campaigns recommended budget
• Check your ad delivery method.

Evaluate campaign performance 

You can also assess your performance with Google Ads and readjust your campaigns accordingly to get better results. Google Ad reports and metrics could be used to evaluate the performance.

Following metrics could be used to evaluate the performance (Google, 2017):

• Impressions
• Clicks CTR
• Conversions
• Cost per conversion
• Conversion rate
• ROI (return on investments)

Avoid editorial errors 

Avoid any small editorial errors, which can prevent you form running your ad smoothly. One should be aware of the editorial policies, which enforce quality standards on the ads. So, a compliant ad, without any grammar mistakes and good style should be the aim when going for Google Ad.

Address trademark disapprovals 

If your Ad is disapproved, don’t panic! Just start by removing the trademark from your Ad. Secondly request trademark authorization, reach out to the trademark owner to request authorization. Once it is done, then submit your ad to the review process again. Finally, understand how reseller and informational policies may apply to you.

Conclusion

Google ads is an online marketing tool, which helps businesses to connect with their customers. Businesses can choose their audience by creating their ad online, this way prospect customers are able to connect to the businesses. It takes a lot of time to become a good advertiser and definitely not every time you will be succeeding.  One should set up a budget and keep changing their ads to reach the target return on investment.

I also completed the certificate for Google ads fundamental. It has helped me personally to be more educated about online advertising and Google ads. I will be able to use the best practices for managing my campaigns for the online clothing business that I want to open. It will let me start small and grow my marketing. Plus, analytics. I love figures and they are going to help me gather them, woot.

Here’s the link: https://academy.exceedlms.com/student/path/3132-google-ads-fundamentals

References

Google. (2017, September 22). Google Ads Fundamentals. Retrieved from Google Academy: https://academy.exceedlms.com/student/path/3132-google-ads-fundamentals

Hello again! Welcome back to my blog! Today we will be covering Anson Alexander’s Lynda video, Marketing Tools: Digital Marketing.

There are tons of marketing tools available in the market to support the social media marketing. But there arises a question that, which tool is the right tool to get the optimum results. The goals should align with the tool you are using to achieve that objective.

Foundations of Digital Marketing

Every organization has its own unique goals and objectives. Sometimes you require paid tools and sometimes you don’t have to pay anything to achieve this. The author suggests organic social media marketing, where you tend to just gather subscribers to pay attention to your content (Alexander, 2019).

After the goals has been selected, then comes the task of choosing the right tool. When choosing the right tool, you should pay attention to the proven track record of that tool of at least few years (Alexander, 2019). Another great tip is to take benefit of free trials to test the tool, before committing to it. Furthermore, look for tools which have multiple solutions to cut down on costs and take advantage of saving more time.

Social Media Marketing

Let’s learn more about organic social media marketing, as it is an important component in today’s digital media marketing era. Organic social media is when you don’t pay to promote your stuff (Alexander, 2019). Some of the platforms to promote organic social media marketing are Face book, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and Snapchat; where marketeers can increase their brand awareness and build brand relationship with customers.

There are several ways to use the social media for marketing. Firstly, the companies post on their social profiles organically. Secondly, some companies pay for the display advertising, for e.g. a video in front of a YouTube video. Thirdly, there is a hybrid way, where companies use promoted posts to post for free (Alexander, 2019). This can further be used to target certain type of audiences. Authenticity is the key component that companies should aim at while doing social media marketing (Alexander, 2019).

Now that you have all the platforms, you should aim at automating your social media. All the accounts (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram) should be linked to one platform, so that you can save time by not going to each platform individually, instead post at all of them at the same time. The author suggested to use Hootsuite as a recommendation for social automation platform.

Digital Advertising

There are many aspects of digital advertising. They range from basic display ads, where you see the display ad in the sidebar of Facebook. You can promote links in top of search engines such as google (they say sponsored and promoted). Another way is to incorporate video ads in front of the YouTube videos.

You can use various display advertising campaigns; some of them are big daddy, Google Ad Manager (DoubleClick, google AdWords) and Google AdSense network (Alexander, 2019). This tool is a great starting point to begin your digital ad landscape journey. Additionally, for search engine, video and mobile marketing Google Ad Manager and Bing are the most famous to use.

Content Creation and Curation

In this phase, one can start with adobe Spark for producing graphic design software (Alexander, 2019). It can assist in creating images, graphics and tons of other formatting features. Let’s go over content curation a bit, as it is an important component in building trust with customers. You can share some valuable information with customers to show value for their time and money. Scoop will be a great recommendation for content curation options.

Email Marketing

Choosing the right tool for email marketing is very vital. Some of the considerations that you should look for while choosing the tool are as follows:

1. Determine the size of your email list
2. Tool should have lead generation capabilities and built in.
3. System that integrates with social media profiles.
4. System automation features (automated thank you emails)
5. Try the free trials
6. Tool should fit your budget and reach the target audience (Alexander, 2019)

One of the famous email marketing tools is HubSpot (2004). I personally have heard great things about it. You can integrate social media, media platforms, analyze data, lead generation, lead scoring and take benefits of automation on it (Alexander, 2019). All in all, it can be a good starting point for email marketing.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is another important pull marketing technique and nothing better than the free google search. Whilst the free one is the paid SEO tool; Moz Pro (all-in-one tool), that helps with check back links to the websites, ranking keywords, suggestions, company’s trending graphs on social media.

Affiliate Marketing

If you are thinking of affiliate marketing and thinks it aligns with your companies marketing goals, one should spend some time on finding the right platform. The important tip for selecting the right affiliate marketing platform is as follows:

Payment structure of the different platforms; (cost per action/ cost per click)

Merchants can opt for CJ (commission junction), it has been there in the market for at least a decade and yes! It’s free to enter.

Conclusion

Alexander has mentioned about lot of tools and resources, that can be essential in the success of a corporation in digital marketing. So, when choosing these tools for your organization makes sure to look for tools with the proven track record. I personally have used some of the tools recommended by him and they have been of great help to me. Google Ad manager if his top-notch recommendation for getting started. It is your responsibility to examine through, keep these tips in mind and make your own choice on what tools are best for your goals (Alexander, 2019). I work at TD; this organization is making the max use of digital marketing. Anytime I open Instagram, Facebook or the TD app, they have their latest product promotions displayed. They are even using the platform, where they are getting promoted via people sharing those videos posted on Facebook and Instagram; #TDThanksyou campaign video (watch this video to have an idea about the impact of social media marketing). Let’s get started with using these amazing tools available in the market to make an impact in the social media world.

References

Alexander, A. (2019, 01 04). Marketing Tools: Digital Marketing. Retrieved from Lynda.com: https://www.lynda.com/Marketing-tutorials/Marketing-Tools-Digital-Marketing/753915-2.html?

Welcome to my third blog! In this blog, we will learn how to define and understand the importance of content marketing and part of content marketing foundations by exploring the concepts from a video by Join Dayna Rothman.

In her video, Rothman discusses content marketing and its implications on businesses both large, small and on both B2B and B2C operations. I will be simplifying the concepts from the video through a business lens to help you successfully create, promote and measure your content.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing has become an integral part of businesses today. To be heard amongst all the noise, with tons of information out there, there is a constant need to create relevant, valuable and educational content. Content marketing contains seven elements:

1. It engages individuals on their own terms,
2. Create buyer relevant content
3. Content should tell a continuous story
4. Create diverse content
5. Create content with a clear purpose
6. Content marketing should have pre-defined metrics
7. Content marketing is always evergreen (Rothman, 2015)

In short, content marketing is basically; knowing your customer and the buying process, designing valuable and educative content to foster an enduring relationship with your customer.

Top three benefits of content marketing:

1. Create a brand awareness
2. Create a brand preference
3. Reach more buyers at a low cost

Content marketing helps in creating brand awareness, as good content will create organic awareness via search and other media. Secondly, it also helps in creating trust amongst the buyer, which thus increases customer retention. Thirdly, as the content is evergreen, it will yield a return over a longer time.

Thought leadership vs. selling

Now let’s examine the difference between thought leadership and selling since content marketing is different from traditional marketing (Rothman, 2015). The simple difference is that leadership educate, while the counterpart sells (Rothman, 2015). Thought leadership is like a magnet, pulling customers to you, while selling is pushing content on them.

Another important component discussed in the video was about the “411 Rule” popularized by Joe Pulizzi, which can help in setting up content programs. Break down of the 411 rule is as below:

• Use four educational assets
• One soft promotional piece
• One hard promotional piece (Rothman, 2015)

Creating a Foundation for Content Marketing

Creating a foundation for content marketing starts with the process of hiring the marketing team, who will create constant valuable content daily. There will be an internal team comprising of a managing editor, an associate editor and the employee contributors. Furthermore, the external team will contain external writers and a design team (Rothman, 2015).

Before creating your content marketing, you need to create buyer personas. Most companies have different types of buyers -your personas, each of them has their own journey as well (Rothman, 2015). So, marketers need to focus on choosing the right kind of content for diverse buyers, target the right topics and set the right tone. Therefore, it is very crucial that content marketing is aligned properly to the personas and the journeys.

Brand voice development is also very important so that you provide a consistent experience to the buyer across channels .Pay huge attention to making your content unique and specific to cater to the needs of the diverse buyer. While writing the content, make sure it to relevant for each persona.

Goals are required to be successful; similarly to measure your content marketing success, you should set content goals. Following are the steps required to set the marketing goals:

• Meet with stakeholders to set the goals
• Ask foundational questions to you (Why are you creating content? What are the short-term goals)
• Define your qualitative goals (Rothman, 2015).

Tools like CRM tool (tracks customer engagement) and Google Analytics can be used to track the goals.

Choosing content technology is also important to be systematized and operative. It can “help run your business of content including collaboration, coordination, creation and publishing (Rothman, 2015). Content project management and production platforms are some of the examples mentioned in the video by Rothman that can help in managing content marketing.

Creating your Content Plan

Plan is a vital component prior to creating content marketing. It will help the company in achieving its goals and objectives. It starts with the brainstorming process by gathering ideas and thus creating content curves. Your plan should also include tactics of mapping your content is such a way that it brings and help to retain the buyer. You can choose different types of content such as blogs, definitive guide, E-book and info-graphics. Finally, you should plan your editorial calendar, which will help in assuring that the diverse content and your plan is aligned properly.

Creating Your Content

In this stage, you will start writing and editing to complete the task of content creation. It is a difficult task so that you can take some help from the experts. You can start by creating an outline to keep you on track. The write your first draft, with a clear and precise thesis and you go from there! Yes, you must review your content, if not get at least 1-2 more people to review it for you. Then you should kick off with the second draft, by further screening the content and making it as a final draft.

After the final draft is ready, you should now proceed to the designing process. Your content design should make your brand stand out from the competitors by using brand colours, images and graphs. Finally, you can aim at curating the content, which will help you share more content written by others (relevant articles, blogs, trend highlights and news roundups) (Rothman, 2015).

Promoting Your Content

Content can be promoted in several ways such as blogs, email, social media, television, radio, advertisements and many more ways. Tactics such as “content syndication could be used to place your high-value content assets on a third-party website” (Rothman, 2015). You can also take the help of influencers by early releasing your content and asking them to promote your content to expand the promotional network. Pay-per-clicks is another strategy used by companies nowadays to increase their reach. As advised by the writer “ensure that you are only choosing your best content that shows buying intent. Then, create your copy, develop your custom landing pages, and purchase some ads” (Rothman, 2015).

Measuring Your Content

After the content creation and promotion process, its time to measure the content. Goals should be determined first to measure the content ROI. Factors that should be taken into consideration for early metrics are: how many people are liking it? How many people are sharing the different content you are posting? Did the followers increase? (Rothman, 2015). For mid and late metrics, such as determining which content brings new people, converting leads into customers. One should measure the goals are achieved effectively and efficiently.

Conclusion

Content marketing has become an integral part of business success. Good, valuable and educative content can set apart your company from the competitors. The ultimate goal of making sustainable relationships with the customer is easily attainable with a well written and designed content.

Personally, for me, TED is a great example that can be used to explain the importance of content marketing. Please pay attention!! They are not a marketing company, but the content shared by authors, experts and leaders are becoming crucial is spreading their word. TEDx channel and TED Fellows and TED itself has so many subscribers on YouTube waiting for the new releases. Hence it is a perfect example of that yes promoting is a must but creating good content is a necessity.

References

Rothman, D. (2015). Content marketing foundations. Lynda.com. Retrieved from https://www.lynda.com/Marketing-Lead-Generation-tutorials/Content-Marketing-Fundamentals-2015/369044-2.html

Welcome to my second blog on “Learn Social Media Monitoring”. In this blog, we will learn to monitor social media and integrate social listening as a marketing strategy by exploring the concepts from a Video by Waxman, M.

Social Listening is business intelligence which uses a combination of research and monitoring of the media, customers, employees, competitors and influencers. Social Listening, therefore means to listen to the customer needs, wants, concerns and complaints on different social media channels.

Some of the components of social listening are:

• What are customers saying?
• Is there an opportunity for your company to solve a problem?
• Who is doing the talking (Waxman, 2017)

Develop a Strategic Approach

1.    Integrate social listening into your marketing strategy

In today’s competitive world, companies should really focus on innovating timely. They can do this by listening to their customers and prospects, to remain competitive. Today, customers can be found on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Therefore, companies should use their powerful social listening tools to learn whether the customers are happy or dissatisfied (Waxman, 2017).

2.    Understand your customer needs

It is imperative for companies to take the time to understand the need of customers. This will help the companies to build stronger relationships with their customers. Companies should think from the customer’s point of view to cater to the needs and wants. Hashtags can be followed to determine new opportunities and start further discussions. Companies should understand their targeted audiences by:

•    By listening more and speaking less

•    Ask questions to encourage customers feedback

•    Let the person finish talking

•    Repeat back what you heard

•    Understand their concerns

Have you ever noticed that when a customer is looking for a place in Edmonton to look for a healthy meal place, they will come across with a list of places while searching online. But, if a restaurant wants to take advantage of social listening, they can make strategies by using keywords and social media to capture that market.

How to get started?

Companies should fine tune, how to search for content. They should make social media as their primary source to find things out (Waxman, 2017). This will help companies determine their customer’s needs and want. Companies should search for keywords for their companies to start some social listening. This will ensure that, if they are listening to their customer’s conversations, you will end up missing anything.

Marketers should also know that several platforms and apps can help them fetch more customers. As mentioned by (Waxman, 2017), some of the apps and platforms are unpaid, paid and combination. Some of the platforms are as follows:

•    Google search

•    Facebook

• 

•    LinkedIn

•    Twitter

Furthermore, Waxman, 2017 adds that Hootsuite is another excellent social media marketing platform to manage the company’s social media profiles.

Social Listening in Action

• 

Companies should operate by closely monitoring their internal reports along with the external environment as well. Social listening can help companies gain treasured knowledge about their customers, competitors and the marketplace (Waxman, 2017).  Companies already have internal reports, but by incorporating social listening in their everyday routine, can help them operate successfully.

Furthermore, companies can set up channels to improve their customer service by listening carefully to concerns and any new ideas. This way, a broader audience with similar interests could be helped. Some of the examples of companies using this application are airlines, food industries and clothing companies. Customer can be made happier by focusing on the following aspects:

•    Replying to the customer concerns quickly

•    Tools/Platform should be made available-such as hashtags/feedback pages

•    Clearly explain the company policies

Another critical point is to conduct social listening for issues and crisis management. Mistakes spread like wildfire in this digital world. Companies should be “able to differentiate between an issue and a crisis, and when to escalate” (Waxman, 2017). Companies can face the following kind of crisis:

•    Long-term risk,

•    Financial risks,

•    And reputation damage (Waxman, 2017).

Therefore, social listening can be used as a tool to monitor and manage such crisis and issues.

Conclusion

Social listening should be used as an integral marketing tool by companies to learn about your customers, competitors and marketplace. Every coin has two sides; therefore, the insights drawn through social listening can be positive as well as harmful. This tool can help companies to gain valuable knowledge and hence shape their business accordingly. Therefore, companies should realize the importance of social listening, make it their marketing strategy, set up their social listening dashboards and provide legendary customer service to their clients.

My Conclusion……

After watching this video, I can conclude that social listening is essential. By using social listening as an indispensable tool, one can identify customers’ needs and wants and thus can help the company achieve its goals and objective. I can’t stress enough on the fact that it can help companies boost their customer service and create more opportunities in future. I am working at TD Bank, and I can witness how TD bank is using this tool to enhance their service skills. In 2018, TD launched #TDThanksYou to foster customer engagement and start conversations with their valuable customers. This has benefited TD a lot to meet their customer’s needs and wants. We recently celebrated TD’s accomplishment of winning the 2019 J.D. Power award for retail customer satisfaction in the southeast. This demonstrates that companies use the social listening tool in their best interest and thus achieve sustainable success.

If you would like to learn more about “Learn Social Media Monitoring”, click here to watch Waxman’s video on Social Listening for Research Insights. I hope you enjoyed my blog. If you liked my blog, stay tuned, as I continue my journey through the social media marketing world!

Cheers! – Rajvir Kaur

References

Waxman, M. (2017, June 6). Social Listening for Research Insights. Retrieved from https://www.lynda.com/HootSuite-tutorials/Welcome/546104/621980-4.html

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton