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.

Business Promotion via Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is the advancement of your organization or brand using one or more of the various digital channels, such as email, cellular phones, social networks and the like. This could be a classy birthday greeting sent to the customer's smartphone, a personally relevant coupon sent by SMS to the customer or a weekly newsletter than includes updates and specials. Customers and affiliates are interested in receiving these good news messages from you, and we're here to help you deliver the messages to them and advance your business simply and effectively - no prior knowledge required.

The Advantages of Digital Marketing

The advantages of digital marketing are astronomical. First of all, this is a type of direct marketing, with all of the advantages that come with it: personal attention to the customer, motivation to action and more. Second, it's possible to create uniform messages which are personally formatted for each recipient with great ease, for example, by addressing the recipient by his first name or referring to activities performed by the customer in the past. In addition, the use of digital marketing allows you to measure quantitative results, giving you information about exactly who was exposed to your message and when, and which actions the viewer performed as a result. In addition, anyone can launch successful campaigns with digital marketing without any prior knowledge and without hiring special professionals. With so many significant advantages, digital marketing is a valuable addition to your business and helps you achieve more for less.

Digital vs. Traditional Marketing

Until just a few years ago, the methods of advancing a brand were pretty limited. However, since the communication and internet revolution, the ways you can reach your customer have multiplied. Cellular coupons, a well-developed email campaign or a customer survey on Facebook reach your customers in various situations and give a new light to your business, thus complementing one another to strengthen your business.

Digital Marketing

In simplistic terms, digital marketing is the promotion of products or brands via one or more forms of electronic media. Digital marketing differs from traditional marketing in that it involves the use of channels and methods that enable an organization to analyze marketing campaigns and understand what is working and what isn’t – typically in real time.

Digital marketers monitor things like what is being viewed, how often and for how long, sales conversions, what content works and doesn’t work, etc. While the Internet is, perhaps, the channel most closely associated with digital marketing, others include wireless text messaging, mobile instant messaging, mobile apps, podcasts, electronic billboards, digital television and radio channels, etc.

Why Digital Marketing Is Important:

Digital media is so pervasive that consumers have access to information any time and any place they want it. Gone are the days when the messages people got about your products or services came from you and consisted of only what you wanted them to know. Digital media is an ever-growing source of entertainment, news, shopping and social interaction, and consumers are now exposed not just to what your company says about your brand, but what the media, friends, relatives, peers, etc., are saying as well. And they are more likely to believe them than you. People want brands they can trust, companies that know them, communications that are personalized and relevant, and offers tailored to their needs and preferences.

Manage Customer Relationships Across All Channels:

Digital marketing and its associated channels are important – but not to the exclusion of all else. It’s not enough to just know your customers; you must know them better than anybody else so you can communicate with them where, when and how they are most receptive to your message. To do that, you need a consolidated view of customer preferences and expectations across all channels – Web, social media, mobile, direct mail, point of sale, etc. Marketers can use this information to create and anticipate consistent, coordinated customer experiences that will move customers along in the buying cycle. The deeper your insight into customer behavior and preferences, the more likely you are to engage them in lucrative interactions.

Challenges Facing Digital Marketers:

• Proliferation of digital channels. Consumers use multiple digital channels and a variety of devices that use different protocols, specifications and interfaces – and they interact with those devices in different ways and for different purposes.
• Intensifying competition. Digital channels are relatively cheap, compared with traditional media, making them within reach of practically every business of every size. As a result, it’s becoming a lot harder to capture consumers’ attention.
• Exploding data volumes. Consumers leave behind a huge trail of data in digital channels. It’s extremely difficult to get a handle on all that data, as well as find the right data within exploding data volumes that can help you make the right decisions.

Top Keys to Digital Marketing Success:

So, what does it take to do digital marketing right? Here are three keys to digital marketing success:

· Manage complex customer relationships across a variety of channels – both digital and traditional.

· Respond to and initiate dynamic customer interactions.

· Extract value from big data to make better decisions faster.

Top Email Marketing Strategies

Having a clear and focused email strategy is vitally important to your marketing mix; without a well-defined strategy your email marketing ROI is likely to suffer. This may seem fairly basic advice for those of you who work within marketing; however from our survey we found that 39% of marketers do not currently have an email strategy in place.

It is important to build a strategy around your email marketing activity, just as you would with your wider marketing activity. There are many elements to consider within email marketing, which is why pin pointing your aims and objectives and planning your activity before executing your email campaigns really is vital for your ROI.

Email Marketing Best Practice

Best practice covers a lot of areas of email marketing, specifically the do’s and don’ts which every email marketer should be aware of. The following areas cover some of the email marketing basics which are important in every email campaign you send out.

Unsubscribe

The law states that there must be a clearly displayed ‘opt-out’ link on every email which allows recipients to opt out of receiving future emails from you, whereas best practice states that you should never try to hide your opt out link.

As you cannot avoid the unsubscribe or opt out link, then you should work with it. There are a variety of ways that you can work with the unsubscribe link, yet a massive 64% of marketers don’t currently offer any alternatives to the traditional unsubscribe process.

List segmentation

Email marketing segmentation might seem like an entry-level strategy for veteran email marketers but you’d be surprised at how many marketers overlook the tactic in their own campaigns.

Our research found that almost half (44%) of marketers don’t segment their email list. It is all well and good persuading subscribers to share their email address with you but if you are not segmenting your email address lists, you’re not optimising your email marketing campaigns to their full potential.

Automated campaigns

Behavioral email marketing is a powerful technique to automatically follow up online customer actions; helping to increase conversions to sale at a low cost. Even so, the technique is still used by relatively few companies, with 54% of marketers reporting that they do not currently use automated campaigns.

Automated campaigns can be a great way to spice up your email strategy, consider first time buyers, loyal customers and abandoned product emails.

Mobile optimization

Mobile optimisation is a fairly new focus for email marketers; therefore it is understandable that 45% of marketers don’t currently optimise their emails for mobile. Even so it is becoming an increasingly important element of email marketing strategy and therefore should be focused on by more marketers.

Measurement and reporting

Measurement of performance is one of the fundamentals to marketing best practices and increasing your ROI. You would be hard pressed to find a methodology or framework out there that doesn’t incorporate measurement as a key pillar, yet 32% of marketers do not currently report on their email marketing.

Perhaps this is because marketers don’t know what to measure and when to measure it, or even where to start. Many marketers practice email marketing simple because everyone else does, however it is important to measure what it actually delivers in terms of ROI.

Conclusion

Companies are now sending out some fantastic email designs using cutting edge strategy; however it seems that the majority of email marketers are falling behind in even developing a solid email strategy.

There are lots of exciting elements to email marketing, however make sure that you develop a firm strategy, outlining your aims, objectives and people involved in the tasks at hand, before you delve into more advanced email marketing.

Money Making Ideas

In the starting of year 2014 I here now finding the top 5 ways to earn money in 2014. Well! I have researched a lot on this topic for 5 to 6 days on internet and I have finally come at the point that the top 5 ways to earn money in 2014 or in any year can be any of the ways. The way you earn money quickly totally depends upon your skill. But here I will talk about the ways for which everyone can be suited to adopt. And off course after a little hard work there would be great money in your pocket.
The easiest way to earn money is to earn it through internet. Why??

• Because everyone can access the internet by sitting on the chair in his drawing room or study room.
• No one needs to go out to access internet.
• Internet is super available now-a-days.

So the above are the reason why I am saying that to earn money online is easy rather than to earn it by going to some office. Now the question is that how you will be able to earn money online? Here I am telling you the top 5 ways to earn money in 2014 online.

1- Blogging On the top of the list I am writing this way because it is the easiest way of top 5 ways to earn money in 2014. See everyone is having internet access and it’s a good luck that many platforms let you allow to configure a blog on the internet for free and in several minutes. You just have to make a profile and choose your favorite name for the blog. Choose a blog and write healthy and beneficial content there so that people may visit it. Then put some ad sense there or provide some real time services like online tuitions etc. Some free blogging platforms are

- WordPress
- Blogspot
- Weebly

2- Freelancing
I think you know the term of freelancing before. It is like someone will hire you in the cyber world and then pay you in return of your services. If you are a good writer or you know how to elaborate something into your own words then you should apply online for freelancing. Many employers have tasks like content writing and article writing. Some of the freelancing engines are;

- Freelancer
- Guru
- Elance

3- Online Surveys

It is very interesting way that I personally like it very much. I mean to say that just think that somebody is going to pay you just for you surveyed his things. Many online sites are available who pay you for the surveys. Trust me it is the most working way in case if you know nothing. Some online survey paying sites are;

- Surveysavvy
- Surveyscouts
- Surveyhead

4- Earn through youtube
Everyone has visited youtube I think you watch videos and someone should also had some look at Joining Youtube partner program. Yes! It is the way that you can earn from youtube. Just upload a video on youtube and if its likes and views are a lot then even Google will email you to show their adsense on your video.
For increasing likes and views your video should be attractive and entertaining. You will need to edit your video with some video editing tool to achieve large audience.

5- Q&A Earning:If you have good knowledge about something then it is a good option for you. Some Q&A sites pay you for answering the questions which have been posted on them

Advertising, promotion, packaging and branding

Advertising, promotion, packaging and branding are important marketing tools which are used to make products and services more desirable and hence increase sales and profits.
Any form of publicity is advertising. There are two main forms of advertising although in practice the two are inter-related.
The informational aspect of advertising involves providing information about products, services, or about important issues. For example, the government provides information about the dangers of cigarette smoking, which is an example of informative advertising.
Persuasive advertising goes further and uses a persuasive message, for example by:

• showing a famous personality (e.g. Gary Lineker) using the product
• comparing the advantages of one product with another
• using sex appeal.

There are a number of processes involved in producing effective advertising, including:

• identifying the most appropriate market segments to target the advertising
• choosing the best possible media, e.g. television, radio, posters etc
• projecting the right message in the adverts
• getting the timing of the advertisements right
• tracking the effectiveness of the advertising, e.g. checking to see how many people can recall the advert and its message.

Advertising is just one way of promoting a product. Promotion is the business of communicating with customers. There are a number of ways of promoting products and services, including:

• in-store promotion e.g. giving away free samples in a supermarket
• publicity in the media, competitions, and sponsorship
• PR - public relations activities - i.e. presenting the public image of a company to a wide audience
• presenting products in attractive packaging
• creating an attractive brand for a product....