Category: Marketing

Total digital ad spending worldwide exceeds $450 billion. By 2024, that figure will rise to $645 billion.

This kind of spending means crowded ad platforms, which makes it more difficult to stand out. 

If your business has a five- or six-figure digital advertising budget, you can put more money behind campaigns. But this is exactly what has caused online ad prices to increase by an average of 45% on Google and Facebook (and up to 1000% in some sectors). 

If you don’t have those kinds of resources or would rather not continually increase spending, you need to think outside the box.

In this article, we’ll talk about some less saturated digital advertising strategies you can use to get ahead. We’ll also show you what it takes to create advertising that gets people to act.   

Advertising in the current landscape

To steal customers away from competitors without throwing endless amounts of money at major advertising platforms, work smarter, not harder. 

This means relying on creativity and quality.

It also means leveraging data and intent to optimize your advertising better. 

Before you begin using tactics to hit your goals, tap into your analytics and search data. Understand how users interact with your pages and ask yourself:

• Which pages get the most traffic?
• Where do visitors spend the most time?
• Which actions do visitors take?
• Which terms are people using to search for your products?

Use this information to identify what interests your audience.

Dig into your sales data too. Detail the customer demographics that purchase certain products or services. This will help you build a picture of the target audience that will underpin your digital advertising strategy. 

It will also ensure you’re not “spraying and praying” with campaigns—and you’re not wasting your budget. 

Next, look at the current state of your market:

• Who’s interested in your product or services?
• How many of them are likely to buy?
• Who are your competitors?
• What do their advertising strategies look like (i.e. What types of ads are they running, and on which platforms?)

This is most likely covering old ground, but it helps to know that your audience and market position remain relevant before investing in something that may fall flat.

By conducting competitive research, you can spot new opportunities to grab audience share.

For example, instead of bidding on the same terms as rival platform Asana, which will probably be more expensive, monday.com bids on its competitor’s name: 

Because of lower competition, competitor brand names tend to be cheaper. Monday.com can also gain brand awareness and competitive advantage by appearing in front of a relevant audience.

Putting more constraints on your creativity are two significant challenges:

1. Ad blockers

Research shows that over 42% of internet users worldwide now use ad blockers to reduce how much advertising they see. 

Men tend to use ad blockers…

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Product marketing is today’s most critical marketing function. And yet, it’s unfamiliar and confusing to many. The best way to think about it: product marketing is strategy.

Product marketers work to understand the market and what motivates customers. They choose the market segments to target. They determine what attributes the product needs to win against the competition. They design an effective go-to-market plan along with the required positioning and messaging.

In this article, we brought together 17 of the best product marketers from companies like Gong, Privy, HighSpot and Vanguard (most of them are your instructors in CXL’s Product Marketing Minidegree) and asked them for their best advice for those who want to rise through the ranks of the most in-demand marketing role today.

1. Start with product features

“I’m always trying to turn seemingly technically inaccessible concepts into not only accessible ones, but to score the three Es: enticing, engaging, and exciting,” says Andrew Stinger, product & corporate marketing lead at Coda.

The full understanding of your product’s features is the first step to turning those features into valuable benefits your customers will experience after acquiring your product. 

Sure, sometimes it’s not a hard task since some products are simple by their nature and bare clear benefits. But if you’re a product manager dealing with a complicated tech product, knowing its features becomes crucial.  

2. Understand that B2B buyers are still humans 

Maya Shah-Ceccotti, senior product marketing manager at ScreenCloud, claims that marketers in the B2B space often neglect that end buyers are still humans who are only representing businesses. 

In her view, “an excellent product marketer understands and unlocks the human needs related to their solution.”

They center their business and targets their products around customers’ needs. Because, ”if your product or business is your main focus, you’ll probably end up neglecting your customers. And nobody wants that.: 

Steve Jobs used to say that you must understand your customers’ needs and deepest desires. 

There is no reason why the same shouldn’t apply to B2B customers. They are also humans with needs, and product marketers working in B2B should keep that in mind.  

3. Integrate across the business

James Doman-Pipe, senior product marketing manager at Remote, has learned that “Product marketers cannot operate in silos and must integrate across the business to have the standing required to really drive change.”

As Daniel Wilson said long ago, things grow stronger when you integrate. It’s the simplest, yet most аpplicable way to understand the importance of integrating product marketing across the business. 

You’ll find that great product marketers always integrate their work not just with other departments, but also with customers they’re striving to understand. Remember, no product marketer is an island.

4. Create stories backed by data, not opinions 

The best product marketers are driven by an insatiable sense of curiosity about their products and customers alike. 

Tamara Grominsky, chief strategy officer and the product marketing…

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Adam Lyons: an accidental business owner.

Adam owns 8 different companies, has consulted for over 1,000 different companies, and still makes time to be a coach for the EPIC program and for Scalable.

WHAT IS DIGITALMARKETER:

DigitalMarketer is the premier online community for digital marketing professionals. It’s a place where you can learn how to market like a pro, connect with industry experts, and get the strategies and tools you need to grow and scale your business to new heights.

https://www.digitalmarketer.com/

Related DigitalMarketer Products: https://www.digitalmarketer.com/products/#workshops

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There are not enough hours in the day for a business owner to get all the things done on their “To Do List” when operating within a company. Add in having a family, friends, social life, community responsibilities and you’re basically running off fumes at the end of each week questioning is what you’re doing worth it. Luckily, today we are in a time where you can leverage “Outsourcing” in pretty much anything you do. Outsourcing not only applies in business it applies to everyday life tasks. 

Don’t want to clean the house? Hire a house cleaner or cleaning service. 

Hate cutting the lawn and doing yard work? Hire a landscaping company. 

No time to walk the dog? Hire a dog walker.

Women, don’t want to carry a baby and go through the body expansion of childbirth? Hire a surrogate. 

Kidding on the last one, since that is a major life decision, but you get the point! 

Same rules apply in business! 

How do you know when you’re ready to outsource jobs for your business? 

First step to knowing is by taking an inventory of all the things you do day to day, input vs. output, for 1 week. Listing them out on a sheet of paper or e-note. Bonus points if you also write down how those jobs made you feel ex: proud, excited, happy, drained, stressed, anxious etc. After the week is up and you have that list, take 15 minutes to rate the task on a 1-4 scale: 

1- You LOVE the task, it comes easy, fun, and you feel energized when doing it 

2- You ENJOY the task, it’s easy for you to knock out quickly since it’s in your wheelhouse of expertise 

3- You are NEUTRAL to the task, you don’t love it and you don’t hate doing it since you know it gets done and moves the business forward  

4- You HATE this task, dread it every time you see it on your calendar, procrastinate, head for that extra snack you don’t need, and get on social media, when you think about having to do it. 

After you’ve rated your tasks you can immediately see what you want to outsource first… All the 4’s! It’s a no brainer to stop doing anything that is not in your zone of genius and you’re forcing yourself to do. It’s an energy time suck to keep these tasks on your calendar and  “To Do List”. By making the list you’ve started the job descriptions and can identify the role(s) you need to outsource.

Now, take a look at the 3s you’ve listed and add these duties to the outsource list and job description. The more time you spend on your 1 and 2 tasks the better off you and your business will be. The output will match the input and you’ll receive a greater return on energy. 

You can take the rating a step further and put a…

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Wondering how to get more followers on Instagram? You’re not alone.

Whether you’re trying to grow your own business or personal brand, or you just want more people to see your creative genius, there are a lot of benefits to increasing your Instagram following.

After all, some 500 million people use Instagram daily, and close to 80% of them search the platform for a product or service. That’s a lot of eyeballs that could be potentially looking for your content.

To help you along the way, we’ve compiled a list of 20 tips and tricks you can use to build your audience on Instagram.

Why does Instagram follower count matter?

Instagram is perhaps the most important social media platform when it comes to building a brand. A high follower count:

• Helps you get your content in front of more people
• Serves as social proof, adding credibility to your business
• Lets you build and enforce a positive brand image by posting the things that your many followers want to see and interacting with comments and DMs

Take digital media company Brit+Co. With close to 350,000 Instagram followers, the American business has been able to establish a big, active audience.

Brit+Co has done this by positioning itself as an industry leader when it comes to online DIY classes and other creative endeavors. Fittingly, the company’s feed heavily features fun, colorful images and quirky messages.

Should you buy Instagram followers?

The short answer is no. The slightly longer answer is that buying followers or likes will actually hurt your brand. Best case scenario, you’ll end up with a high follower count and a non-existent engagement rate. Worst case scenario, Instagram will suspend your account for violating the platform’s guidelines.

It turns out the Beatles (and this dad) were right.

Check out this experiment from our pals at Hootsuite to learn more about what happens when you buy Instagram followers.

Here’s how you can organically grow your number of followers instead.

How to get more followers on Instagram: 20 tips

1. Define your target audience

You can keep track of who is looking at your content through Instagram Insights, the platform’s analytics tool. Just keep in mind that you can only use the tool with a Business or Creator account.

There are a number of other tools you can use and metrics you should track to find out who is looking at your posts. Once you know who is looking at what, it’s easier to create targeted content.

2. Use high-quality images

Instagram is driven by visual content, so it stands to reason that many of the photos on the platform are of the highest quality possible. Check out National Geographic photographer Cory Richards and how he grabs attention on the platform.

Obviously Richards is a professional…

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Facebook ads and Instagram ads dominate most advertisers’ attention when it comes to PPC advertising on social media, with Promoted Pins, YouTube ads, and LinkedIn ads typically hovering somewhere close behind. But what about Twitter ads?

Twitter ads have gone through multiple significant changes in the past five years, including two major interface changes to the self-serve advertising platform. An extensive list of new features and new advertising objectives were added too.

In this post, we’ll go over everything you need to know to get started on the platform and rock your first Twitter ads campaign.

Types of Twitter ads

The first thing that we’ll want to do when looking at Twitter’s ad system is to look at the different types of ad formats you can use to connect with your audience.   

Twitter Single Image ads 

Twitter Single Image ads feature one image below a block of text. They can include additional components like polls or CTA buttons. They’re one of the most common Twitter ad formats as they’re fast and easy to create. 

Source: Twitter

Twitter Video ads 

Twitter Video ads are another highly popular Twitter Ad format. Twitter recommends keeping your video at 15 seconds or less, but advertisers can apply to have videos up to 10 minutes long serve as ads. The default you can start with is a max of 2 minutes and 20 seconds.

Videos under 60 seconds long will loop.

Note: Closed captions or text overlay are mandatory for Twitter video ads.

Source: Twitter

In addition to using pre-recorded video ads, you can also promote live video. Learn more about this advertising option here. 

Twitter Carousel ads 

Twitter’s Carousel ads are a relatively new format, and they closely resemble Facebook’s carousel ads (also called “multi-image ads”).  Advertisers can create ads with anywhere from two to six image or video slides. 

Here’s an example of a Twitter Carousel ad:

Delivery is never surged. Always just $1.95.

Get $5 off your first two orders using code TWX.

— Gopuff (@gopuff) June 4, 2020

Giving advertisers an opportunity to showcase multiple products and tell their brand story in multiple slides, carousel ads are known to be highly effective. Twitter highlighted one case study from 2018, where using the format resulted in a 20% increase in campaign awareness and a 7% increase in purchase intent.

Twitter Moment ads 

Twitter Moments allow you to curate multiple Tweets into a single “moment” that you can share or, in this case, promote as an ad. Twitter Moment ads are a fantastic option when you want to get eyes on specific threads of content that, for example, feature user-generated content that can add…

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Banner ads, webinars, email marketing automation, social media promotions, SEO, content marketing. You invest in a variety of digital marketing channels to get in front of new audiences and drive traffic back to your site.

Your landing page is the make or break of these efforts. It’s the point where effort spent on creative and dollars spent on ads culminate in a successful conversion—or not.

Unfortunately, most landing pages are ineffective, with an average conversion rate of only 4.6% across all industries.

Landing page optimization is the process of continuously testing, amending, and retesting the effectiveness of your web pages to improve conversion rates. 

It’s the difference between being in the majority and being one of the top pages that converts.

Tactics such as A/B testing are crucial for evaluating the efficacy of your landing pages, but won’t move the needle unless you understand what contributes to a high converting landing page.

To illustrate, we’ll break down seven great landing page examples to show you what works and why.

1. Memberstack 

Secure login and payments SaaS company Memberstack is a great example of how interactivity, movement, and customization can create a unique landing page experience.

The top of the page is set up to deliberately guide the visitor to the flashing blue dot on the left side.

When we hit either of these toggles, the animation on the right side changes, visualizing the change in workflow instigated by using Memberstack.

This is a clever way of demonstrating how the product works. It’s also a tactic to reduce bounce rates and encourage user engagement.

Studies show that interactive content can be up to twice as effective at engagement as static content.

The steadily climbing revenue and membership numbers also subtly leverage psychological priming, creating the unconscious connection that Memberstack means more members and more revenue.

The hero section effectively places CTA buttons at the top right and bottom left corners, two areas where eye-tracking studies have shown most gazes gravitate to when they first look at a landing page.

Below the lower CTA, Memberstack has hinted at the security of their platform using a social proof-based friction remover “Backed by YCombinator.”

Memberstack’s B2B audience are familiar with YCombinator.

This is a clever piece of copy that answers the objection: “How secure is Memberstack’s payment application?”

Scrolling below the fold, Memberstack builds trust further by introducing a subheading with some important figures to demonstrate proof of results.

Notice how Memberstack places the larger numbers toward the center, with smaller figures on the…

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Lloyd Dixon, of TheSingleGuy on YouTube, explains how to better your personal relationships as an entrepreneur. Prioritizing both a relationship and a business can be difficult. Lloyd explains why it’s important to maintain a healthy work/home relationship, why it’s so challenging to juggle both, and gives practical steps on how to enhance your work/life balance!

WHAT IS DIGITALMARKETER:

DigitalMarketer is the premier online community for digital marketing professionals. It’s a place where you can learn how to market like a pro, connect with industry experts, and get the strategies and tools you need to grow and scale your business to new heights. https://www.digitalmarketer.com/

Lloyd Dixon

Lloyd helps single professional men and entrepreneurs with their dating lives through practical and actionable advice. He helps men through his various programs and his YouTube channel TheSingleGuy and his Instagram @a.single.guy linked below!

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The low barrier to entry for advertising on Instagram makes it tempting to create ads with minimal planning. But not all ads have an equal chance of making a mark on Instagram’s 500 million daily users.

Keep reading to learn about the 10 mistakes that marketers ten to make when advertising on Instagram — and actionable solutions that will help you get Instagram advertising right every time.

1. Not having a clear goal

Many Instagram advertisers make the mistake of creating ads with vague objectives. Goals like “increase revenue” or “improve business” are all well and good. However, without more specific goals, your ads won’t help either of those big-picture ideas.

Solution: Set a specific goal

The clearer you are about the goal of your ad, the more effective it will be. The goal you choose is a guide for the form and content of the ad. Examples of possible goals include:

• Increase traffic to your website
• Drive user engagement with your posts
• Build awareness of your brand on the platform
• Increase sales or app installations

2. Not targeting a specific audience

The best, most clearly articulated ad campaign can fall flat if you don’t know who your audience is. Ads aimed at everyone usually reach no one. It’s important to identify specific groups of people who are likely to get your message — and react to it.

The example below is from The Very Good Butchers, who have a specific product, high-end meat. They put all the specifics of their offering in one simple graphic to attract exactly the people who are interested in their product.

Source: @theverygoodbutchers

Solution: Create custom audiences

It’s important to take advantage of the tools at your disposal to make sure your ads end up in front of the target audience you’ve identified. You can create a custom Instagram audience based on users who have already interacted with you on the platform.

Because Instagram advertising is integrated into its parent company’s Facebook Ads Manager, you can also use other custom audiences (e.g., people subscribed to your newsletter). This makes it even easier to target people who are interested in your business.

Solution: Automate your audience management

There are many ways to produce and use data about your audience, but it can be overwhelming to do it manually.

Take advantage of tools for managing social media advertising, like AdEspresso, to automate the tedious processing of audience data.

3. Creating content that doesn’t speak to your audience

A common Instagram marketing mistake is focusing on your own tastes rather than your audience’s tastes when creating ad content. This can result in ads that speak more to your coworkers than to the people who would actually buy your product.

Solution:…

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Your marketing clients are just like you.

As a marketing consultant or agency owner, you want to see:

1. More traffic
2. More engagement
3. More subscribers
4. More customers
5. Higher customer lifetime value

These metrics are the foundations of a successful business (whether it’s a marketing agency or an ecommerce drop shipping business). If you don’t have traffic, you won’t have customers. And if you don’t focus on your customer lifetime value, you won’t have a sustainable business model.

This is exactly why these are the metrics your marketing clients want to see. They want to know you’re increasing their brand awareness and marketing to their customers after the first sale. Because that’s how you build a long-term relationship with the brands you work with and create a marketing consultancy that makes people ask, “How the heck did you pull that off?!”

And it all starts with focusing on these 5 metrics and sharing them with your clients.

#1: Traffic

Every marketing client wants to look at their Google Analytics dashboard and see that beautiful up and to the right line that signifies they’re getting more traffic than ever before. Traffic is a huge part of marketing because it leads to the first stage of the Customer Value Journey, Awareness. 

People can’t buy your client’s products if they don’t know their products exist! With increased traffic, more people see their brand. The more people that see their brand, the more people can buy their products.

Just like 1+1 = 2, more traffic leads to more customers. Well, as long as you’re making sure to attract the right kind of traffic. Not only can you show your clients their increased traffic to social media (impressions) or their website (through Google Analytics), but you can also show them the demographics behind this traffic. This shows that these aren’t random people who *might* be interested in buying their products. These visitors are their customer avatar, which means they can quickly turn into customers with the right funnel. 

Here are a few traffic metrics to share with your clients:

• Impressions on social media
• Demographics on social media
• Traffic on Google Analytics
• Demographics on Google Analytics

#2: Engagement

Engagement is the number of likes, comments, shares, and interactions people have with your content. For example, if someone comments on your Instagram post—that’s engagement. If they read your blog post—that’s engagement. If they reply like your tweet—that’s engagement.

And that’s the start of turning a viewer into a customer. Like the Customer Value Journey outlines, the first step in the customer journey is awareness. It’s the moment someone finds out your brand and products exist. It’s a crucial moment, but what’s even more important is what comes afterward… 

…the first time someone actively engages with your brand. 

Engage is the second stage of the Customer Value Journey. It’s so important because it’s like this person just raised their hand and said, “You have products…

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