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Understanding what Google chooses to present can help in assessing the types of searcher intent you can address with your content.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Is a billboard an affordable marketing tool for a design firm or copywriter? Don’t laugh it off. I spoke with Bart Bradshaw, host of the Built to Stay podcast, who educated me all about the latest in outdoor advertising. It’s not as expensive as you think and depending on your niche, it could definitely make you stand out. Listen to our companion interview on choosing a niche.
Are you trying to run ads to people for services that Facebook restricts due to possible discrimination? Have restrictions on audience targeting impacted your ability to reach leads and customers? In this article, you’ll discover whether your ad belongs in a restricted Special Ad Category, learn what targeting restrictions apply, and find out how to […]
The post How to Build Facebook Custom Audiences for Special Ad Category Groups appeared first on Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner.
Understanding what Google chooses to present can help in assessing the types of searcher intent you can address with your content.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Are you trying to run ads to people for services that Facebook restricts due to possible discrimination? Have restrictions on audience targeting impacted your ability to reach leads and customers? In this article, you’ll discover whether your ad belongs in a restricted Special Ad Category, learn what targeting restrictions apply, and find out how to […]
The post How to Build Facebook Custom Audiences for Special Ad Category Groups appeared first on Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner.
Are you trying to run ads to people for services that Facebook restricts due to possible discrimination? Have restrictions on audience targeting impacted your ability to reach leads and customers? In this article, you’ll discover whether your ad belongs in a restricted Special Ad Category, learn what targeting restrictions apply, and find out how to […]
The post How to Build Facebook Custom Audiences for Special Ad Category Groups appeared first on Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner.
This Valentine’s Day, forget a dozen roses. You need a dozen GIFs.
The reason: Eye-catching visuals like GIFs in emails can increase click-through rates by 42% and conversion rates by 103%, and may positively impact your sales.
Go ahead and add GIFs to your February email campaigns. The AWeber design team has already done the work for you and created 12 downloadable Valentine’s Day GIFs!
Just download them and add them to your emails using AWeber’s ridiculously easy-to-use Drag and Drop message editor. These GIFs will be a sweet treat for your subscribers — and your bottom line.
Not an AWeber customer yet? Create your FREE account right now, and see how easy it is to use one of these GIFs in our Drag-and-Drop message editor.
Step 1: Find the animated Valentine’s Day GIF below that you want to use in your email.
Step 2: Save it to your computer by either right clicking the GIF and selecting “Save Image,” or by dragging the GIF to your desktop.
Step 3: Upload the GIF into your email template inside AWeber. Under image size, choose “original.” That’s it!
Related: Everything You Need to Know about Using GIFs in Email
You spin me right round, baby.
Right round like a record, baby.
It’s almost like the 80s band “Dead or Alive” is performing in your subscribers’ inboxes.
This is the email version of a hand-written love note to your crush. Your subscribers will LUV the middle-school nostalgia.
Like Cupid, you won’t miss the mark with this heart and arrow GIF in your email.
Here are some of our readers’ all-time favorite GIFs from past V-Days.
Want to make your emails “pop”? Use this fun balloon GIF.
Glow bright in the inbox with this neon sale sign.
Make your subscribers’ hearts burst with this GIF.
What’s almost as good as candy falling right into your mouth? This GIF.
Knock Knock.
Who’s there?
Olive.
Olive who?
Olive you.
Tell your subscribers how much you love them with this GIF.
What do you call a very small Valentine?
A Valen-tiny. Just like this small heart GIF!
“You must be a keyboard, because you’re just my type.” No cheesy pick up lines required. Get the message across with these two GIFs.
Give your subscribers a hearty hug this V-Day.
Want to show your love for your customers the other 364 days of the year? Here are some clever ways to deliver awesome experiences.
1. Send personalized notes.
Have you ever received a tweet from your favorite company? Or a lightning-fast response from tech support when you’re having an issue? It feels good to be acknowledged, doesn’t it?
Do the same for your customers and send a bunch of individualized emails. You can say “thank you for your business” to a new or interesting customer. You can send a quick note of thanks to your subscribers who gave your product, service, or program great reviews. Or maybe you can send followup emails to the ones who didn’t gave you good reviews — and ask what you can do better.
Include your contact info and tell them to get in touch with you if they ever have any questions.
2. Deliver seasonal content.
Get creative and think outside the traditional holiday seasons. For example, if you’re a coffee shop owner, you could send your subscribers a special coupon that they can use for a pick-me-up during tax season.
Related: Email Marketing Statistics: We Analyzed 1,000 Emails from Today’s Top Experts
3. Reward your customers.
First-time customers could use a push to buy again and return customers deserve to be recognized. Give them a little something — like free shipping on their next order, a free consultation, or a downloadable resource that can help them make a buying decision.
4. Turn your 404 page into an opportunity.
A 404 doesn’t have to be a dead end. Instead, use it as a chance to delight.
One quick example: If you stumble upon a 404 page on the site Flooring Supplies — the UK’s largest online flooring company — it says “Floor…Oh … Floor!” Here are some more awesome 404 ideas.
5. Respond to questions and comments.
Join in on your customers’ conversation. Forums, Twitter chats, and your own social profiles are great places to start. When someone gives you a digital shoutout, respond! It’s a fantastic way to retain customers and maintain stellar customer service.
If a customer has an issue, give them your undivided attention. By simply listening and working with them to solve it, you can turn a negative situation into a position one. Check out these ideas for turning customers into raving fans.
Have more ideas for delighting your customers? Tell us in the comments!
Additional reporting by Kristen Dunleavy.
The post 2020 Valentine’s Day GIF Guide appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.
Did you know:
Pinterest is such a key part of the buying journey for its users that over 90 percent of weekly active Pinners use Pinterest to make purchasing decisions.
Talk about buying power!
Not only are Pinterest users making purchase decisions on the platform, 83 percent say they are making purchases specifically based on the content they’ve seen from brands on Pinterest.
Pinterest is no longer simply a place to save ideas and build dream boards. Instead, Pinterest has turned into the world’s largest visual discovery platform.
And there are a lot of opportunities for brands.
We had a chance to chat with the team over at Pinterest about some of their best practices for brands looking to increase sales. We’re excited to share those lessons with you!
Here’s what we learned…
According to one survey, “47 percent of social media users saw Pinterest as the platform for discovering and shopping for products—more than three times higher than those who cited Facebook or Instagram.”
Seventy-seven percent of weekly Pinners have also discovered a new brand or product on Pinterest, and according to Pinterest, “people actually want to see content from brands while they’re on the platform–78 percent say it’s useful.”
Pinterest might not immediately come to mind as a platform to invest in for many brands, but it should.
Pinterest lives in a unique space on the internet where users are discovering content related to themselves and their aspirations rather than focusing on others, and this has turned it into a powerful platform for users to make purchasing decisions and discover new brands and products.
Clearly, Pinterest is not one to be ignored when it comes to your marketing strategy. Here’s how you can use the platform to drive sales.
There are some really simple ways that you can start leveraging Pinterest to reach new audiences and optimize your pins and profile for sales. Some of these tips might be easy to implement immediately while others might play into later strategies, let’s dive in!
A whopping 97 percent of top searches on Pinterest are unbranded, according to the Pinterest team. For brands, this presents an opportunity to stand out and gain brand recognition through the platform.
Pinterest recommends adding a small logo in one of the four corners of your pin, this can be done really easily in a tool like Canva. You can play around with the design, of course, and add your logo wherever it feels best. In this example from Quip, they went with top centered to fit with the rest of the text on their image.
As with most sites, mobile is extremely important on Pinterest. Eighty-five percent of Pinners are using the mobile app, so it’s important that your content appeals to them while they’re on their phones and appears properly in their feeds. If you’re linking back to your own content, it’s also important that the page that you’re sending users to is mobile friendly as well.
A tip from Pinterest here is to tailor your font size to phone rendering to make sure your fonts are legible on small screens and to design for a vertical aspect ratio. The ideal dimensions are 600 pixels x 900 pixels.
Have you ever clicked on a beautiful image on Pinterest only to be taken to a website that looks nothing like the pin? I have, and it left me really confused.
According to Pinterest, the best practice is to make sure your pins and your website have a similar look and feel, and that doing this pays off. In an analysis from Pinterest, they found that “Pins that went to landing pages with similar imagery had a 13 percent higher online sales lift.”
This example from Ettitude is really great. The pin they are sharing fits seamlessly in a lot of home decor and design tags on Pinterest.
And although their website uses different photos, it still has a similar feel to the pin.
A big element to social media marketing and campaigns is timing. When are people online and when are people talking about the things you want to talk about?
Luckily in the case of Pinterest, they release annual ‘Seasonal Insights,’ which helps take away some of the guesswork. A report that contains more than a dozen specific moments that take place throughout the year.
For example, their 2019 report shared that users start sharing holiday content in June all the way through December and that content related to the Summer starts getting pinned at the beginning of February.
They also have monthly trends reports. Here’s their latest for December 2019 trends on Pinterest, it shares specific trends like the search term ‘peach green tea’ is up 320 percent YoY!
These are great free resources that you can leverage to start timing seasonal campaigns around when people are starting to make specific seasonal purchasing decisions. I would never have thought that people start looking at holiday content in June but that’s super-specific information that can go a long way to help with timely campaigns.
One of the main ways for Pinterest to help generate sales is for the products you are selling to be easily available through Pinterest. Luckily, the platform makes this really easy for brands to set up and feature prominently on their profiles.
Every Business profile on Pinterest has the ability for users to create a “shop” tab.
The shop tab is just what it sounds like, a place where users can go to see all of the products your brand is selling. On the flip side, brands can leverage that tab to share pins that link directly to their sales pages for the specific product.
Pinterest makes this whole process quite easy, they even have a method for importing new products through Pinterest Catalogs. All you have to do is have your data source approved and then as you add new products to your website, they get automagically added to Pinterest as well.
We hope this guide helps you get started with or double down on your efforts with Pinterest. Let us know about your experience with Pinterest in the comments!
If you want even more Pinterest resources, the Pinterest team has created a free Pinterest Academy with tons of lessons in there.
Former Hyatt Hotels global chief marketing officer Maryam Banikarim joined neighborhood social network Nextdoor as head of marketing. Banikarim left Hyatt in May 2018, and she has since served as U.S. board chair for non-governmental organization Reporters Without Borders, as well as joining Adweek’s Women Trailblazers Council and Executive Mentor Program. Prior to Hyatt, she…
According to Gartner, 80% of technology will be built on an AI foundation by 2021.
As AI becomes more prominent across industries, it’s also impacting marketers in subtle ways that might not be obvious to them yet.
While this technology was once described as “over-hyped,” marketers now use a handful of AI-powered tools in their day-to-day tasks.
For example, AI tools help content strategists define SEO and keyword strategies, perform SEO-related tasks like fixing duplicate content, and self-optimize mobile pages.
Aside from SEO, AI can assist marketers in tasks like drafting email subject lines and creating basic social media content. Meanwhile, this technology also helps with important, but time-consuming tasks, like deduplicating contacts and recording market intelligence data on both customers and competitors.
And although the technology is still rather new, the list of tasks it can complete is steadily growing.
At that Marketing AI Institute, we track more than 1,500 AI companies with combined funding of more than $6 billion.
As the institute’s director, I’ve spent years studying the AI market while working with some of the brightest AI minds in marketing. Aside from researching and consulting on AI strategies, I’ve also used AI tools throughout my marketing career. Through these experiences, I’ve gained insights into the opportunities that AI could realistically provide for marketers now and in the near future.
While AI has already subtly crept into the day-to-day lives of many marketers, it’s likely to have even more of an impact on them in the future. According to McKinsey, AI is expected to have up to $2.6 trillion worth of business impact in sales and marketing alone.
Source: McKinsey
Despite all of the positivity around AI, many marketers are still might be skeptical about which technologies are actually useful, and which could turn out to be overpriced hype. After all, in the past, there have been a number of outlandish and inaccurate AI predictions or claims. These false statements — which many AI experts call “snake oil” — have made it hard to distinguish which AI facts are actually real and which are lies told to gain media attention.
To determine where the true opportunities lie with AI in this stage of its development, it’s important to do research to learn more about the tools and current strategies that other marketers are using. You’ll also want to look at research-backed trends to keep certain tactics on your radar in case they might be beneficial to you in the future.
To help you better understand where AI is going and how you could leverage it to build a competitive strategy in the future, I’ve used my research and professional experiences in the AI space to compile a list of four key trends to watch in the next year.
No. Artificial intelligence can’t write compelling long-form content just yet. But, although bots aren’t able to create long narratives, books, scripts, or detailed online articles, AI can still streamline a number of content marketing tasks. According to Jeff Coyle, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of MarketMuse, this trend will only continue in 2020.
“This will be the year that brands begin to seriously use artificial intelligence to build a competitive advantage,” says Coyle. “Right now, many companies are still exploring AI and its potential. But the technology is already having a huge impact on content marketing.”
“The brands using AI tools are already seeing outsized benefits, like huge traffic gains and better search rankings,” Coyle adds.
While AI tools help marketers in drafting light content such as social media updates, online ad content, and email subject lines, Coyle says that many companies are using AI to analyze thousands of ranking opportunities in seconds, identify gaps in their strategies, and create content that skyrockets search traffic.
As a marketing professional who’s done much research on the topic of AI, I believe him. In our own report on the top 25 AI use cases marketers value, analyzing existing content for gaps and opportunities tops the list.
We aren’t alone in thinking that AI tools will be vital to content marketing strategies. The Content Marketing Institute similarly says that text mining AI tools can help marketers by analyzing online content to identify keywords, phrases, and other variables that link to higher traffic. After an AI tool makes connections between topics and traffic, marketers can create a strategy that leverages those topics.
“In 2020, the market is going to wake up to the fact that if you’re not using AI to optimize your content marketing, you’re going to fall behind,” Coyle concludes.
With 64% of consumers expecting personalized shopping experiences based on the interactions they’ve had with a brand, many marketers are taking notice.
In fact, when we talk to senior-level marketers at the Marketing AI Institute, they’re highly cognizant of the need to hyper-personalize content and experiences for consumers.
While it was once extremely hard to create these experiences with older marketing techniques and technology, AI has opened the door for more pin-pointed personalization opportunities.
Right now, AI is primarily used “to help us get tasks done,” says Nick Edouard, Chief Product Officer at PathFactory, an AI-powered B2B marketing platform.
While AI helps marketers “scale faster, write better, and find or mirror target audiences more easily,” Edouard says that he expects leaders in 2020 to say, “That’s great, but how can we use AI to enable our buyers? How can we use it to help them find what they need at every stage of the customer lifecycle? How do we make this about our customers and not just us as marketers?”
“These are increasingly important questions to ask, especially for B2B companies, as people already expect relevant, personalized, always-on experiences in every aspect of their lives,” says Edouard.
We’re already seeing heavy AI personalization in the marketing industry. For example, many tools allow brands to send marketing emails with names and personalized information in them based on contact list information. In retail, consumers regularly get emails or ecommerce site recommendations for certain products based on what they’ve already purchased.
But, personalization isn’t just a popular trend. It’s a revenue generator, A recent study from Monetate notes that 79% of retailers and 75% of general businesses report ROI from personalized marketing.
With evolving technology and our ability to capture data on prospects and customers, it’s not shocking to think that AI-based personalization trend will grow stronger in the near future. In 2020 specifically, expect AI to start being used more and more to create solid one-to-one personalization,
“AI is not only transforming how marketers take business impact to a whole new level. It’s also helping them elevate and advance their careers,” says Krish Kumar, COO and CRO at BrightEdge, maker of BrightEdge Autopilot, which uses AI to automate SEO tasks.
Kumar predicts that marketers are going to reap huge benefits from AI in the coming year, thanks to its ability to automate time-consuming SEO tasks.
“For example, this type of self-driving technology can automatically self-connect website pages, self-optimize mobile pages, and auto-fix duplicate content,” says Kumar.
One example of a company that’s majorly leveraging AI for SEO is Campbell’s. Kumar notes that the soup company uses AI-powered SEO automation to compress 75,000 images in a single day. This allows the brand to rank on page one of SERPs for 4,000 keywords within just a few weeks.
The best part?
AI is helping human SEO marketers, rather than making their jobs obsolete. At companies like Campbell’s, AI technology allows SEO experts to get results that aren’t possible without machines. Not having to worry about this mountain of SEO-related tasks frees them up to work on more intensive projects.
Because it is so beneficial to web traffic and results, expect the investment into AI-powered SEO tools to grow.
While AI and automation have already yielded results, cut time out of marketers days, and streamlined a number of outdated processes, small to medium-sized businesses are still hesitant to use these technologies because they worry that working with them and getting up to speed on how each technology or tool works will be added work in itself.
However, as AI technology and tools evolve, they’re getting easier to access, providing smoother user experiences, and becoming a more natural fit into the every-day marketer’s life.
In 2020 and beyond, “The best AI-powered tools are going to interact with marketers in a way that feels more human,” says Bart Frischknecht, VP of product strategy a Vennli, an AI-powered content intelligence tool.
While many AI tools currently collect data and offer insights that the marketer then has to dive into, Frischknecht says that AI will eventually shift to just offering a marketer a list of improvement suggestions or solutions.
One area where we’re already seeing a shift in AI’s capabilities is PPC advertising. Some AI tools will just collect data about how a PPC ad is doing and provide predictive analytics to the marketer, who can then adjust the budget. However, other more advanced AI tools can now analyze how the ad is doing, offer marketers suggestions on how to prevent wasted spend, and then allow them to choose one of those solutions directly from a dashboard.
“It’s going to feel more human when AI automatically takes care of tasks so that marketers can focus on marketing, rather than on wrangling the tool,” says Frischknecht.
In 2020, expect AI-powered marketing tools to start becoming so natural to your work that you don’t even know they’re AI. As John McCarthy, one of the fathers of AI, once said, “As soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore.”
Want to make these predictions actionable? We recommend you take the following steps in 2020 to navigate AI in the new year.
Want to take on all three tips at once? Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Marketing: Live from MAICON, will teach you how to apply AI in marketing using a holistic framework and begin conversations around piloting AI in your business.
