Friday 29 August 2014

Search Engine Marketing

The concept behind Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is quite simple: when a consumer or business person searches the Web through either a text box or by clicking through a directory hierarchy, they are in "hunt mode." This mode is unique because it indicates that the person is looking for information, usually of a direct or indirect commercial nature. Marketers understand that this "hunt mode" means that the searcher may very well be somewhere in the buying cycle, researching a product or service to try and satisfy an immediate need or future need. That makes search engine results some of the best sources of targeted traffic, whether that traffic originates from "organic" unpaid search listings or paid advertising listings.

To leverage the power contained within this targeted traffic source, marketers must understand how to effectively use both paid and organic SEM and what they can expect each methodology to achieve. Search engine traffic is unique in the following ways:

Search engine traffic is a non-intrusive method of Internet marketing. The majority of online and offline advertising intrudes on the audience, interrupting their activities. Search is unique in tapping a searcher at the exact moment they are seeking knowledge or a solution. Searchers are on a mission – it's "just-in-time marketing".
Search engine traffic originates from a voluntary, audience-driven search. This means the visitors from a search results link have not only selected your listing from among your peers, but chose the search query that resulted in your listing being shown.
Search engine traffic results from a fixed inventory of searches. To truly qualify as search engine traffic (or pure search traffic), the search must be one that the searcher initiated as a search, either by clicking a search link in a directory style portal or by filling out a search query box. See Contextual Link Inventory for an exception.

"Organic" search engine marketing (Organic Search Listings) combines the best practices of technology, usability, copy/linguistics and online PR. This is because many search engines base their relevancy algorithms on a combination of the text they see on a page or site, combined with external elements such as links and user behaviors/preferences.

Marketers can buy text-link search results on all of the top 15 search sites as ranked by Media Metrix and NetRatings. That's quite a change from 1998 or before, when none of the major search engines included paid listings within the search results. The explosion in popularity of paid search results advertising can be attributed to the search engines' need for alternative revenue sources, marketers' increasing requests for search results traffic, and the high value of the traffic generated through search results.

Unpaid (otherwise known as organic or algothimic) search engine traffic was once fairly easy to garner - before there were 3 billion documents competing for attention in the search engine databases.

Some marketers believe that there are "tricks" that will improve the relevancy of sites within the search engines that are spider (crawler) based. Not only do some of these tricks not work, many of them can result in negative relevance penalties as the engines take measures to punish search marketers who seek to manipulate ranking and relevance. That said, there are still compelling reasons to put legitimate efforts behind organic SEO optimization, particularly efforts in site design, HTML formatting, copy optimization and server platform adjustments. Within the last several years, paid listings have played an ever-increasing role in most marketers' minds, due to their increasing screen real estate (some engines now display more paid listings than free!).

The following types of paid listings are most common:

Paid Placement
Directory Paid Inclusion
XML (Per-URL) Paid Inclusion
Shopping Search
Graphical (Rich Media) Search Inventory

Many marketers like to compare organic SEO to public relations because PR is so important to a company, yet the ROI on PR can sometimes be a challenge to measure. In both SEO and PR, marketers have the options of hiring internal staff, bringing in consultants, or using an outside agency. The same options apply for paid search marketing. However, often larger paid search campaigns are so large they may require some campaign optimization or bid management technology combined with internal or external expertise.

Search marketing has already proven itself a valuable part of an overall integrated campaign, for both branders and direct marketers. All kinds of marketers can easily benefit from a dialogue with a searcher; whether that searcher is facing a crisis, is in need of information, or is ready to purchase.


Thursday 28 August 2014

Keywords Selection For SEO

The keyword research is  really a tedious process  that takes a lot of time, but it should be  an ongoing process and should be repeated at regular intervals. Look at the words and search terms by which people seek in the search engines.

Here are the few most important things to consider that you need, when you search for keywords:

Use The right keyword tools

Many "experts" will tell you that the keyword tool from Google is all you need. However, if you are a professional looking for keywords, then you should look for other tools as well. Highly recommended as are Wordtracker and Market Samurai.


Few good keyword research tools are given below :

Google Keyword Tool

SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool

Wordtracker

KeywordDiscovery

Market Samurai

Be Realistic While Choosing Keywords

 If you are targeting a niche market with a lot of competition, then you should in order to be ranked well in the beginning use less competitive keywords. These keywords will give you good rankings faster.

Choose Most relevant Keywords

Make sure that the keywords for which you seek is really the highest relevance to your target. If you are an Internet service provider or sell a particular product, then the relevance of search is relatively easy to recognize as you want to sell a product or service.

Other types of targets and may require more detailed studies. For example, if you want to collect entries for magazine subscriptions, or to participate in fundraising activities then you have to do more research.

Competition Analysis

Use google analytics to Keep track of your visitors and the performance of your keywords.
View source code of the competitor's website & review their keywords. It will help you to gain more insight into what you need to include in your keywords list.

Wednesday 27 August 2014

Promote your website with Google AdWords

Google AdWords - An intelligent advertising method

Google AdWords is an innovative way of running online advertising. Online marketing has undergone a development that has changed many business models and created new platforms for doing business on the Internet's globalised marketplace. The range of advanced online marketing tools is wide. Meanwhile, the competition for the internet users' and consumers' attention has increased as well. The technological development within e-business has made the Internet a much more complex marketplace with strong competition for advertising expenditure and with lots of participants.

Online marketing with Google AdWords

The many online marketing propositions may seem confusing, and prioritising the resources can be something of a challenge. One of the advanced but also user-friendly advertising methods is Google AdWords.
Google AdWords is based on the keywords entered by users on the Google search engine. The user's search words decide which advertisements are displayed on the page. By this the system takes care that the selected advertisements has more relevance to the user than a random ad would have had.
Google AdWords is usable whether you run a commercial website, or you are a private individual who wants to attract more traffic to a website. Google AdWords can help you to gain more visitors and obtain high quality traffic to your website.

Target your campaign with Google AdWords

People are different. Targeting the advertising more narrowly towards the potential users of a certain product is therefore a better method than sending an identical message to everybody. Targeting the marketing towards potentially interested users is a basic idea of Google AdWords.
Google AdWords has many obvious advantages compared to other ways of online advertising: You will reach exactly the readers, users, customers and business partners etc. who are looking for precisely what you can offer them.

Display Google AdWords on other web sites

With Google AdWords your ads will not only be shown on the Google search engine. They will thanks to Google's content network also be displayed on numerous web sites that your customers visit. Thus, you can get attention on web sites that are specialised within exactly your industry. For example, it could be blogs, discussion boards and community sites. It is a win-win cooperation that you can benefit a lot from.

Be successful with Google AdWords

With Google AdWords it is the result that counts. The system is transparent and gives you the response you need to optimise the outcome of your effort. Success with Google AdWords is very much based on choosing the right keywords.
Select Google AdWords keywords of two-three words and avoid the too general and very broad concepts. Instead concentrate the keywords around specific key terms that are relevant to your website and your services. Also make sure to create a good correlation between the keyword and the ad text in general - and to the page that your Google AdWords advertisement is linking to. It is a good idea to start out by writing a list of all the words and sentences that characterize your industry or for the subjects your website is about. Also remember to include brand- and product names and use the list as a starting point for identifying your best keywords for Google AdWords.


Best Strategy to Do High PR Social Bookmarking For SEO

Social Bookmarking which is a common off page seo technique to build high pr backlinks. It is almost impossible to find out a link builder who didn’t do it. That’s why it is getting the attention of the web spam filtering teams. The leading search engine Google’s web-spam team head “Matt Cutts” and other members intend to get an end of the bad link buildings. From beginner to advance SEO experts, all are continuously doing high pr social bookmarking expecting better ranking. But with Google Penguin, they revealed that ‘low quality link building value is over’. In-fact, low quality social bookmarking for seo could result in the destruction of your money site. So, all we had to do social bookmark in the right way. Such as other ranking signals like website load time, structure, it is very effective at all. Do you believe you are doing seo bookmarking in the right way after algorithm updates? Either yes or no, I advise you to check the below strategies that you must implement in your works.
Why am I Repeatedly Saying to Do Social Bookmarking Naturally?

You may ask, why should we change our current strategy as social bookmarking sites have high page rank and authority? The answer is that backlinks what could be gained easily, totally have no value. So, we have to work and spend more time on creating these from bookmark site like StumbleUpon, Reddit etc. You know that link from unique related content has the highest seo value. Why not we also try something different from all. Because, if we do all bookmarks in the same way, the algorithms will catch us easily. The only way to do social bookmarking for seo is through diversity in all works. Let’s see how we will be able to do best seo with this element.

The Best Strategy I follow For High PR Social Bookmarking

#1 Find Top High PR Bookmarking Websites

First of all, we have to find out the best sites for social bookmarks. I recommend websites whose have high pr but a low user activity. And look for sites where it is hard to get links. Search engines like Google will always love high pr backlinks that are really hard to gain. However, it is really easy, here are a few best social bookmarking sites.

#2 Make Variation in All Bookmark Titles

The first thing of a bookmark is the title. Not only that, most of the links will be anchored in the title. So, if we don’t make variation in them, it will surely award you negative effect. As we have to include keywords, make simple proportion between exact matched, partial matched and unmatched. As I do, you have to prevent using the same title in all of the bookmarks.

#3 Write Unique Description Everytime

When creating bookmarks, we have to provide the link description. To save time, most of the people copy paste the same text for all links. That could result into links from duplicate content pages. And link from duplicate content has an awful disadvantage. My new strategy is to write new and unique descriptions every time. As quantity doesn’t matter, it is better to have one unique bookmark than five duplicate bookmarks. So, take social bookmarking seo seriously.

#4 Add Related Tags

Another step in bookmarking is adding tags. These help the visitors to search appropriate results for them. So, carefully using these could also help us in getting targeted traffic. Please keep in mind that the tags are not keywords. In-fact over optimized tags has negative seo effect too.

#5 Mix Nofollow and Dofollow

Among all websites, some are nofollow and some are dofollow. So, it is better to mix it up. Just decide how many backlinks you want to get and thing about nofollow and dofollow websites. Make 50-50 or 60-50 or whatever you want.

#6 Avoid Too Many Links From a Single Site

Another great mistake we do that we never count how many links we have got from one bookmarking website. For better analyzing, you could login into your Google Webmaster and check Links to Your Site. The backlinks amount of all pages will be shown there separately. Bear in mind that, many links from one domain will be counted as one of value. So, it is better to avoid too many backlinks from a single social bookmarking site. Instead of it, it is better to use different domains for each social bookmarking for seo.

#7 Make Limited Backlinks in a Limited Period

The seo naturalism will be lost if we do 10-15 bookmarks a day and 0 (zero) on another. To continue the realism of link building, regularly create a limited amount of seo social bookmarking backlinks in limited periods. I hope, that will help you to do best seo beating Google updates.
How Would You Manage to Make Social Bookmarks for SEO?

I have revealed my working strategy how I do bookmarking. Now it’s your turn. Be creative and make something creative. Footprints in the works are not bad. I think, it is good for search engine optimization. So, I instruct you to follow the best and updated strategies. And when creating seo social bookmarks, leave some footprints to make it natural.

Monday 25 August 2014

Top Ideas To Boost Any Business

With the recent boom in the world of digital marketing, it is vital for business to meet the changing digital trends and make a mark on the digital world. Internet marketer enjoys a vast geographical reach but faces various challenges too. These challenges are in the form of dynamic nature of the digital world and the ease of access to information. It is during these times that the internet marketer seeks out to find some marketing tips.
So as to make the most out of your digital landscape, here are some tips and tricks to make the most out of these ever changing digital trends:
·         PLACE:
The concept of check-ins is gaining popularity recently, where companies offer discounts to consumers who check-in to their restaurant. In this technologically advance era where the usage of smart phones is increasing, check-ins are something that is falling into the digital trend.
·         CUSTOMIZATION OF DIGITAL PROMOTION:
Every company has a message to share; it is the personalization of message that helps you stand out in the buzz. It is vital for an organization to first understand their consumers and then tweak the messages as per their choices, preferences and demographics.
·         CREATIVE ILLUSTRATIONS:
Text seems monotonous when it comes to various organizations’ communicating the message. It is the photos and videos that help make a mark in the digital communication. For any company the digital assets that are of highest value are the visuals that they use. Therefore, the company should incorporate its essence into the visual shared on the digital platforms.
·         SOCIAL MEDIA PAGES & ADS:
With a user base of over 1 billion, Facebook is definitely the King of the digital marketing world. It is one of the most important platforms to show case brand and communicate with the end consumers. Twitter is the choice of new generation and is significant for businesses. LinkedIn on the contrary, is the apple of the eyes for professionals. With various opportunities to advertise, standing out in this digital world is no longer an impossible task.
·         MOBILE – RESPONSIVENESS:
With the increase in the smart phone market, the future of digital marketing is shifting to mobile phones. For any marketing to be complete, it is essential for the internet marketer of today, to understand the dynamics of the audience accessing their company information through the mobile phones. Standing out of the crowd here is possible with attractive and innovative mobile applications and software for the consumer.
·         BLOG – THE ORIGIN OF COMMUNICATION:

Depending on the type of business you are in, blogs when paired with digital marketing platform becomes a lethal tool for the internet marketer. Today, when the consumer has an easy access to the market, it is essential that the company provides them with detailed and up to date information when needed.
·         EMAIL – THE WIDE ACCESS:
Ease to reach people in a personalized way is the easiest with email. Email is something that the individual marketer should never abandon; it is vital that email along with other digital tools is used well and in coherence so as to yield the highest reach.

Best traffic sources on the internet

If you have recently created your own website, it’s about time that you consider driving some traffic into your website so that your website becomes popular and you can earn revenue in the process. There are various ways in which one can increase the footfall of visitors in their website. Though there are numerous and varied ways in which one can increase traffic, some of the best traffic sources which would help you to enhance the prospects of your website are mainly

1.article marketing
2.forum marketing
3.associates and replicate visitors
4.guest comments and
5.Guest posts, email signatures.
6.Social sites like twitter and face book are also good traffic sites.
One should always remember that it is the eminence that matters- not the extent. The keywords used should be of the best quality with accuracy as well as precision. If one follows these simple rules, it is not difficult getting visitors to view your website and turn prospect viewers into permanent customers in a jiffy.....

Thursday 21 August 2014

SEO PPC Marketing

Internet Marketing includes SEO and additional online marketing tools you can use to gain the attention of potential customers and the search engines. Each of the marketing techniques listed below work to drive motivated traffic to your website and allow you to compete more effectively.

With Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, you bid on the keywords you believe prospects would type in the search bar when looking for your products or services. For example, if you sell vintage wines, you would bid on the keyword “vintage wine”, hoping a user would type those words in the search engine, see your ad, click it and buy. These ads are called sponsored links or sponsored ads and typically appear next to the natural (also known as “organic”) results on a search page. You pay for your ad only when the user clicks on it. Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) are currently the largest PPC providers. Our job is to help you choose PPC keywords, craft and place ads that extend your marketing reach cost-effectively.

Interactive advertising uses banner ads, Flash presentations and other interactive media to elicit active participation from recipients. They promote your products and services and educate prospects. If well crafted, interactive advertising allows you to engage consumers in direct and personal ways. And, they enable a sophisticated dialogue between you and your prospects which may affect buying decisions. We help by producing quality presentations and online ad campaigns.

E-mail marketing, which includes e-mails and online newsletters, is a form of permission-based, relationship marketing. Once people opt to receive periodic announcements about your products and services, you have the opportunity to convert prospects, retain customers and create value for your business. We help you build cost-effective e-mail campaigns that extend your brand while establishing lasting relationships with customers.

Blog marketing. A blog is a regularly updated collection of content. From a business marketing view, blogs offer many benefits. Chief among them is that blogs provide an easy way to introduce fresh, relevant content to your site on a regular basis. F resh content attracts more attention from the search engines therefore your site will likely have a higher ranking with a blog than without one. Our services range from helping you develop a blogging strategy, integrating a blog into your website to even ghostwriting blog content.

White paper marketing. White papers are designed to promote your business solutions as they relate to a specific topic. They also help position your business as a leader in a specific field or industry. And, since white papers are distributed typically after a prospect’s contact information is collected, they can be very effective lead generators. From researching and writing white paper content to helping you collect leads, we show you the power of this medium.

Wednesday 20 August 2014

Effective Email Marketing Techniques

Effective email marketing strategies, of course! A recent ExactTarget study found the following to be true:75% of consumers would prefer to receive permissions-based promotions through email, and 93% of online consumers have provided companies with permission to send them information through email.

I’ve categorized effective email marketing strategies into five general types of emails. When it comes to email marketing, your goal is always to develop specific campaigns around product/service areas that your business offers. The next important step is to develop segmented lists so you can separate relevant content and information for particular groups of people. Remember, effective emails should accomplish two things: 1) direct recipients to your website  2) drive them to take some type of action.
1. Educational Emails:

This is my personal favorite type of email because these are the emails that help answer a question or solve a problem for your potential customers. You are providing a service by providing information. You should send educational emails whenever you have a new, compelling piece of content or a new bit of research to promote. These type of emails can often be developed by repurposing a popular blog article or even combining a series of recent blog articles from any education-based content that would fit together into a particular campaign.
2. Informational Emails:

Informational emails are short and don’t usually ask the recipient to take alot of action. In fact, sometimes the email’s subject line alone might communicate everything that is needed. Examples of information emails are meeting reminders, webinar invites or an offer to check out a particular post on one of your social media platforms.

3. Promotional Emails:

While some people avoid this type of email, it is still very important to implement. Just make sure that you do your promoting in a professional, tactful manner. Promotional emails have a main goal of moving the recipient to take some action- usually around a new product, service, event, or special deal. As effective email marketing strategies go, these emails usually don’t have a lot of content associated with them. They focus on selling points and persuasion verbiage.
4. Newsletter Emails:

Generally, these are sent out by companies once per month and often include several pieces of content that you have already published over the course of the past month. Content for newsletters can include blog articles, videos, or many other types of pieces of content.

5. Lead Nurturing Emails:

Every marketer knows that it can take a lot of time and effort to move a lead through your sales cycle. Lead nurturing emails are part of the cycle and a key to help you expedite the process. Once you have a workflow set up, sending out these types of emails will not take much of your time. In fact, the entire process should be automated. These should be short emails that are content rich. Their goal is to get leads to take some type of action on your website. Ask Farotech how we can help you can set up lead nurturing emails for each of your campaigns and schedule them out for an organized workflow through your sales cycle.

As mentioned above, the real key to effective email marketing strategies is know your audience. This will certainly help you determine what type of email you want to send and strategize for a better ROI. We recommend sending out permission-based emails to your recipients.

Tuesday 12 August 2014

Web Marketing Promotional Tools and Techniques

No matter what kind of online business you have, it is essential that customers are able to find your company. Once they locate you, it is necessary to engage them in the browsing or buying process, depending on your site objectives, using various promotional tools and techniques to enhance the online experience.
The challenge in getting customers to visit your site and return in the future is a reflection of the competitive nature of the online environment. Not only do online businesses have to compete against thousands of new companies that go online every day, but they must also consider the increased buying and decision-making power of consumers, who have a variety of options at their fingertips. If you want to stand out from the endless stream of online businesses and gain the attention of customers, you need to promote your site, and you need to do it well.
There are a number of ways you can promote your online site. You can use your own site as a vehicle to drive your objectives forward using various online tools, or you can implement a number of online and offline promotional techniques.

Online Promotional Tools:

Feedback Forms - What better way to find out what people think of your company than to solicit their opinion. Using customer feedback you can improve your site and provide better service to your customers. Using feedback forms also shows your customers that you are interested in what they have to say, and provides an opportunity to build relationships with them. For instance, you may send out an email thanking a particular customer for bringing an issue to your attention and follow-up with a coupon to show your appreciation. The disadvantage with a feedback form is the type of information people provide or the questions they may ask. If customers cannot find answers on your site, they may resort to using the feedback form. To receive targeted feedback, it is useful to develop an online form for customers to complete that leads them through the feedback process.
Bookmarking - A good way to encourage customers to visit your site is to ask them to bookmark it. Through bookmarking, they have easy access to your site and do not have to remember your site’s exact URL to visit. Bookmarking a site is particularly beneficial for web surfers who like to follow links. It enables them to go back and take a more in-depth look at what you have to offer when they need to.
Content - Content is a strong driver for encouraging repeat visits by customers, particularly when it is fresh, timely, and gives customers a reason to visit regularly. For example, perhaps you have a ‘Tip of the Day’ or a regular visit by an ‘expert’ well-known in your field of business who provides online advice. Content that is useful for your visitors and will enable them to leave with new knowledge will attract them to your site, and encourage them to check back regularly.
Daily Give-Away/Coupons/Contests - Sites that offer regular promotions such as a ‘give-away’, coupons and contests are in a solid position to capture a regular audience. While the promotion acts as the driver that attracts customers to visit initially, it provides an opportunity to showcase new products and services, and deliver important news about your company. For instance, you may initiate a ‘give-away’ that is a printer, but also take the opportunity to tell your customers about a printer sale next week. Your promotional tool has not only lured customers to your site, but it has also increased the likelihood of getting a sale. Offering various promotions also enables you to obtain customer information that you can use in future marketing campaigns.
Surveys - Surveys provide an effective avenue through which to gather important customer data that will help you to improve your business and plan for the future. To encourage visitors to complete the survey, you can provide an incentive such as an opportunity to win a prize.
Awards/Testimonials - Including awards and testimonials on your site will provide credibility to your business. They will also provide a foundation for you to build rapport and trust with your customers, who will be more willing to visit a site they can trust.
Online Chat - Online chat mechanisms provide a forum where customers can come together and share their experiences with each other and you. This interactive tool allows you direct access to customer opinions where you can gauge trends and determine their views on the industry.
Tours - Online tours provide you with an opportunity to showcase particular products and services, and highlight their key benefits. For instance, you may have a CRM product that you would like to promote. What better way to show how it works than to provide a tour of the product - making what could be a potentially complex product look simple and easy to use.

Sunday 10 August 2014

Top Keys to Success in Social PPC

If you haven't jumped on the social PPC bandwagon yet, it's time you gave it some serious thought. While social PPC won't replace Google AdWords any time soon, it's become an effective source of incremental leads and sales for savvy businesses.
What follows are 17 keys to running successful social PPC campaigns. The first four apply to all social PPC, then we'll talk about keys to success for each major social PPC engine.
Social PPC Keys to Success
1. Identify Your Target Audience
In search, the target audience is "anyone who searches using my keywords." In social, much more thought must be put into the people and personas you'd like to reach. Are they consumers? Business owners? Teenagers? What do they like to do? Where do they work, shop, play?
Defining your audience is critical to success in social PPC.
2. Identify the Marketing Challenge That Paid Social Solves
Think about why you want to use paid social in the first place. Are you active organically in social media, but need a larger or more engaged audience? Are you struggling to reach a B2B audience because consumers also search on your keywords? Do you need awareness of your product, service, or company?
All of these can be great reasons to use paid social – the key is to think about what problem social PPC will solve for you.
3. Define Your Paid Social Strategy and Objectives
If you've done the first two steps, this will be easy.
If your audience is B2B decision makers, and your objective is lead generation, then you'll want to define your strategy and objectives as such. If your goal is audience growth, build that in to your strategy.
Mapping strategy out ahead of time sets you up for good results.
4. Segment Your Audience Based on How You'll be Posting
This is an overlooked and yet important part of social PPC setup.
It isn't unusual for advertisers to have multiple segments within their target audience. You might have different types of businesses that you want to reach, or you may be targeting both men and women, for example.
Look at your current social posts to see what audience they're intended to reach – and then set up your social PPC campaigns accordingly.
LinkedIn Keys to Success
5. Carefully Identify Your Target Companies and Job Levels
LinkedIn's targeting optionsare great for targeting individuals at specific companies and job levels; it's especially effective for B2B. But think carefully about how you want to target.
Do you want narrow targeting with specific job titles and companies, or do you want to cast a wider net and focus on categories rather than specifics?
Be especially careful about seniority targeting. If you need to reach decision-makers, you'll probably want to exclude entry level people. But be aware that the higher level you target, the higher your minimum CPC will be.
6. Be Ready to Pay $5+ Per Click
Speaking of minimum CPCs, LinkedIn's CPCs run much higher than other social PPC channels. The results are often worth it, but be prepared to pay $5 or more per click and optimize accordingly.
7. Use Sponsored Updates if Possible
LinkedIn Ads have two types of campaigns: sponsored ads and sponsored updates. In my experience, sponsored updates perform much better than sponsored ads. Sponsored updates show in a user's news feed, giving you premium placement.
If you're actively posting updates to LinkedIn, use sponsored updates whenever possible.
8. Segment Your Audience Based on How You'll be Posting
Think about how you'll be posting, and segment your audience accordingly. The LinkedIn user interface isn't very user-friendly, so it's more efficient to set up segmented campaigns at the outset.
Twitter Keys to Success
9. Carefully Identify Your Target Accounts or Keywords
Twitter Ads often feel familiar to those used to Google AdWords and Bing Ads, because you can target using keywords. You can also target individual user accounts. It's important to decide which option makes sense for you.
If you want to reach consumers, for example, make sure the keywords or accounts you target are focused on consumer content.
10. Use Images and Hashtags With Caution
It's important to note that Twitter Ads are a pay-per-engagement, not pay-per-click, program. You pay for anything that can be clicked (links, @ handles, hashtags, and images), as well as for each reply, follow, and retweet.
Twitter Ads are great for driving engagement and leads, but be aware that you'll pay for much more than just clicks to your website.
11. Test Lead Generation Cards
Twitter lead generation cardsenable advertisers to create a virtual "card" that attaches to a tweet. Users can take an action with one click, without leaving Twitter. The options for lead gen cards are nearly endless, and in my experience they perform very well.
12. Segment Your Audience Based on How You'll be Posting
You'll notice that segmentation is a theme here, because it's important. The Twitter Ads interface isn't much better than LinkedIn's, so it's easiest to think about targeting up front.
Facebook Keys to Success
13. Have at Least 1,000 Users in Your Custom Audience
Much has been said about Facebook custom audiences. They're a powerful way to reach specific users on Facebook.
Having a big enough audience is key to a successful campaign, though. We recently ran a test with about 150 users in a custom audience, and we got very few impressions and clicks. Hitting the minimum number of users is really important.
14. Use Sponsored Posts in Newsfeed When Possible
Similar to LinkedIn, Facebook offers both right-rail and sponsored post ads. Facebook has become so large that I'm not sure anyone looks at the right rail ads anymore – and they don't even show at all on most mobile devices. Make the most of your advertising efforts by using sponsored posts whenever possible.
15. Relentlessly Test Images
It's common advice for Facebook ads, and with good reason. The image is what really attracts the attention to your ad – the actual copy is almost irrelevant if you have a good image.
Aggressively test images to learn which ones work best.
16. Use Lookalike Segments
An added bonus of using custom audiences is the ability to build lookalike audiences. A lookalike audience is a larger audience that Facebook builds of users similar to your custom audience. You can further customize the lookalike audience with exclusions.
If you aren't getting the results you expected from custom audiences, try using a lookalike audience.
17. Use Custom Audiences to Build Lookalike Segments
I've heard from a number of people that they create custom audiences not for ad targeting, but for the sole purpose of creating lookalike audiences. This is a creative way to have both specific and broad reach.
Conclusion
Social PPC is becoming an important part of the online marketing toolbox. Use these tips the next time you launch a paid social campaign.