Is your marketing not performing as well as it used to?
Maybe you’ve never been able to see the returns that you were looking for?
With ever-increasing competition in the digital space, marketing optimization has become a priority for a number of brands as they see less and less from their previously effective marketing investment.
As such, we’ve created this guide to help you get your edge back. Marketing optimization doesn’t have to be complicated, so we’ve outlined 7 easy-to-implement ways that can increase the efficacy of your marketing without increasing your budget.
Now, without further ado, let’s begin!
Paid Marketing Optimization Ideas
More brands than ever are using paid digital marketing channels to advertise their products and services. In fact, a staggering 5 million advertisers are using the Facebook platform, with well over 4 million putting their budgets behind Google’s AdWords.
While there are indeed more people online than ever, the number of advertisers is growing much faster than the number of people to advertise to.
What does that mean for you?
Simply put, it means that your costs are going to increase as more brands compete for the same audience’s attention. It also means that you have to approach your paid advertising more strategically than ever before.
How, you ask?
1. Refine Your Targeting and Marketing Message
Refining Your Targeting
First of all, trying to reach everyone with your advertising has proven to be far less effective than a having a targeted focus to your marketing. Instead, work to be as specific as possible while maintaining a large enough audience. For example, Facebook gives you a meter to read as you select your various targeting criteria.
By identifying the unique characteristics of your ideal buyer, you’ll be able to define specific traits that you’ll want to target, such as:
- Interests
- Demographic information
- Behaviors
If you so desired you could target women over 55 that are recently married, interested in garden gnomes, and live in Auckland NZ. While that may be a little too specific for many advertisers, the point is that it’s possible and you should be taking advantage of these features.
By taking the time to accurately identify these characteristics you’ll be able to reach an audience that is far more likely to buy from you, but that’s only half the battle…
Refining Your Marketing Message
Once you’ve selected an audience that fits the description of your ideal buyer, it’s important to create ad graphics and copy that is aimed at that specific audience, this is the affiliate marketing definition.
Your audience will be far more engaged with your ads if they’re interested in the creative they’re being shown. Don’t make the mistake of trying to create a one-size-fits-all ad or ad set that you display to multiple audiences.
Instead, take the time to create new graphics and copy for each audience and for each new campaign you run.
Pro Paid Marketing Optimization Bonus Tip: Create new ads (graphics and copy) regularly to keep your ads from getting stale and your audience from losing interest. Even ads that once performed well can lose their impact.
Avoid Audience Overlap
Finally, avoid overlapping audiences (advertising to the same people) when running multiple campaigns as you’ll essentially be competing with yourself. That means creating entirely unique audiences for each and every campaign you run.
2. Start Retargeting
People who already know your brand are far more likely to buy from you. These warm audiences are available to you via a simple tool called a pixel. Available from both Google AdWords and Facebook, these pixels allow you to track user behavior on your website and, in turn, market to these users based on their behavior.
This way you can show ads to anyone who has visited your site or, for example, just those who have visited a specific product page. With the pixel you can show this audience ads for that specific product and only that product (and maybe even include a special offer).
Retargeting has proven to be one of the most effective forms of paid advertising, but the intricacies of this powerful tactic are beyond the scope of this post.
3. Promote User-Generated Content
People have always bought from brands they trust. As our society as a whole becomes increasingly averse to traditional advertising, this statement becomes more important than ever.
One of the most impactful marketing optimization methods in this list focuses on generating this trust from your audience. User-generated content is any form of content created by your users or customers on the topic of your brand, product, or service.
While UGC comes in countless formats, this powerful content typically comes in the form of:
- Written reviews
- Photos and videos
- Social media posts
- Emails
- Blog posts
As you can imagine, the impact of real-world customers sharing their experience about your brand or product can have a major impact on a targeted audience of prospective buyers.
For example, you could promote a compilation video on Facebook of real customer reviews that highlight your brand, or a customer-submitted photo of your product being used in a unique way or place on Instagram.
User-generated content should be a single facet of your paid marketing optimization program. Use it to catch people’s attention to get them to click through to your site by advertising with a highly targeted audience. Then work to convert those who don’t buy the first time around with a sophisticated retargeting strategy.
Search Marketing Optimization Ideas
Like paid advertising, search marketing used to be a whole lot easier. As little as five years ago you could rank for a lot of search queries by simply posting 500-word blog posts twice a week. Compared to today, very little true search engine optimization was required.
If you’re still publishing those 500-word blog posts they are no longer as effective at driving traffic as they were five years ago, and you need to make a change. We’ve outlined two powerful ways to support your search marketing optimization in the sections below.
4. Learn SEO Basics
Search engine optimization is more complicated than it used to be, sure. But that doesn’t mean that it has to be hard. In fact, ranking your content is largely dependent on one thing.
Value.
Providing value has always and will always be the number one focus of Google (and other search engines). You can score a lot of points with the search engines if you can prove that your content provides their audience with the value they’re seeking.
In fact, most of the metrics Google tracks to determine whether or not to rank your content tie back to providing value. For example, Google considers time on page (TOP, or the amount of time someone stays reading your content) a very important metric.
The reason?
Because the more time your readers spend on the page, the more likely they are to have found it valuable enough to continue consuming. If the content was not valuable, readers would likely click back after a few seconds. See how that works?
While the full scope of SEO and search marketing optimization will take some time to master, the basics are pretty straightforward and can have a dramatic impact on your content’s performance.
Here are a few tips to get you started.
Create Buyer Personas
One of the best ways to provide value to your reader is to focus on writing for the unique audience you’re targeting. Write to address their unique pain points and speak the language they speak.
Topic Selection
Writing on topics that you think your audience wants to read will only get you so far. To define the topics you need to be writing about, start by listing all of the potential questions your buyers face before purchasing your product.
These questions will be specific to your personas, but they’ll all tie back to helping them solve a problem with your product or service. Be sure to document this list of questions as a part of your search marketing optimization strategy.