The provided document comprehensively explores various digital marketing strategies. It begins with search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM), illustrating how to improve website visibility and drive traffic through organic and paid methods. The text goes into detail regarding email marketing, affiliate marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, and mobile marketing, outlining best practices and examples for each. It then examines the customer lifecycle from awareness to purchase and post-purchase, suggesting digital channels appropriate for each stage. The explanation extends to cover useful skills and tools for digital marketers, focusing on SEO, PPC, copywriting, social media, and data analytics. In sum, it serves as a guide for digital marketing, covering essential channels and strategies.

Digital Marketing Study Guide

Quiz

Answer the following questions in 2-3 sentences each.

1. What are the two main components of SEO and what does each entail?
2. Why is it important to set up goals in Google Analytics?
3. What types of insights can you gain from YouTube Analytics?
4. Give three reasons why a business would use a competitor analysis tool.
5. How can “allintitle:” syntax be used for competitive analysis using the Google search engine?
6. Name three platforms where you can use paid marketing tools and advertising.
7. What are the benefits of using Google Ads Editor?
8. What are the different ad types on Youtube?
9. What does it mean to “optimize your content” and what are two tools can you use to do it?
10. How can you use short tail keywords for visibility versus longer tail keywords for conversions?

Quiz – Answer Key

1. The two main components of SEO are on-page and off-page. On-page SEO consists of optimizing elements within your website, like page load speed and content optimization. Off-page SEO focuses on building the website’s relevance through metrics such as domain authority and external links.
2. Setting up goals in Google Analytics is crucial because it allows you to measure the performance of different dimensions, like channels or landing pages, against specific objectives. This enables you to track conversions and understand which marketing efforts are most effective in achieving business outcomes.
3. YouTube Analytics provides insights into video performance, audience engagement, and traffic sources. You can see metrics like views, watch time, audience retention, and how viewers are discovering your videos, which helps refine content strategy and promotion efforts.
4. Businesses use competitor analysis tools to identify competitors’ backlinks, monitor changes in their rankings, and discover their top-performing content. This helps them understand what strategies are working in the market, find opportunities to improve their own SEO, and compare their performance against industry benchmarks.
5. Using the “allintitle:” syntax followed by a keyword in Google search allows you to see the number of websites that have that specific keyword in their title tag. This provides a more accurate estimate of the direct competition for a particular term, which is crucial for ranking well on that keyword.
6. Three platforms where you can use paid marketing tools and advertising are Google Ads, Bing Ads, and Facebook (including Instagram). These platforms offer various advertising options, including search ads, display ads, and social media ads, along with tools to manage and optimize campaigns.
7. Google Ads Editor allows users to make bulk changes to campaigns offline, saving time and improving efficiency. It also enables collaboration on campaigns, since multiple people can work on the same account and sync changes.
8. The main ad types on Youtube include TrueView ads (in-stream skippable and non-skippable ads), bumper ads (short, six-second ads), and shoppable ads (which list products alongside the video). Different ad types are useful in various use cases and achieve different marketing goals.
9. Optimizing your content means ensuring it is fully optimized according to search engine algorithms and user intent. Tools like SEO Site Checkup and Site Analyzer can help with this, giving objective reasoning as to what more can be done.
10. Short tail keywords can drive more traffic because of their visibility. However, longer tail keywords result in a higher conversion rate by attracting visitors who are usually ready to make a purchase.

Essay Questions

1. Discuss the importance of competitor analysis in digital marketing. What tools are available for conducting such analysis, and how can the insights gained be used to improve a company’s marketing strategy?
2. Explain the role of SEO in a comprehensive digital marketing strategy. What are the key elements of on-page and off-page optimization, and how can they be effectively managed to improve search engine rankings and drive organic traffic?
3. Analyze the benefits and challenges of using social media platforms for marketing. How can businesses effectively engage with their target audience on social media, and what metrics should they track to measure the success of their social media marketing efforts?
4. Compare and contrast different paid advertising channels, such as Google Ads, social media ads, and display advertising. What are the strengths and weaknesses of each channel, and how can businesses determine which channels are most suitable for their marketing goals?
5. Discuss the role of video marketing in a comprehensive digital strategy. What are the different types of video ads that can be used on platforms like YouTube, and how can businesses optimize their video content to maximize engagement and achieve their marketing objectives?

Glossary of Key Terms

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization): The practice of improving a website’s visibility on search engines through organic (non-paid) search results.
• On-Page SEO: Optimizing elements within a website to improve its search engine rankings, such as content, page load speed, and site architecture.
• Off-Page SEO: Building a website’s relevance and authority through external factors, such as backlinks, social media signals, and online reputation management.
• Google Analytics: A web analytics service that tracks and reports website traffic, user behavior, and marketing campaign performance.
• YouTube Analytics: A set of tools within YouTube that provide insights into video performance, audience demographics, and engagement metrics.
• Competitor Analysis: The process of identifying and evaluating competitors in a market to understand their strategies, strengths, and weaknesses.
• Keyword Analysis: Researching and identifying relevant keywords that potential customers use when searching for products or services online.
• PPC (Pay-Per-Click): An online advertising model where advertisers pay a fee each time their ad is clicked.
• CTR (Click-Through Rate): The percentage of people who view an ad or link and click on it.
• CPA (Cost-Per-Acquisition): The cost of acquiring a new customer or achieving a specific conversion goal.
• Social Media Marketing: Using social media platforms to promote products or services, engage with customers, and build brand awareness.
• Retargeting (Remarketing): Displaying ads to users who have previously interacted with a website or app, with the goal of re-engaging them and driving conversions.
• Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): The process of improving a website or landing page to increase the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a form.
• A/B Testing: A method of comparing two versions of a webpage, ad, or email to determine which one performs better in terms of a specific metric.
• Impression Share: The percentage of times your ad was shown when it was eligible to be shown.
• Click-Through Rate: (CTR) The percentage of people who view an ad or link and click on it.
• Cost Per Click: (CPC) The amount you pay each time someone clicks on your ad.
• Sponsored Posts: Content on social media platforms paid by an advertiser to reach a wider audience.
• Geotags: Digital tags that attach geographical information to photos, videos, and other media.
• Stories: Short-form user-generated video and image content that disappears after 24 hours.
• Social Blade: An analytics website tracking social media statistics.
• Google Ads Editor: A downloadable application for managing Google Ads campaigns offline.
• Long-tail Keywords: Longer, more specific keyword phrases that tend to be less competitive and attract a more targeted audience.
• Short-tail Keywords: Shorter, broader keyword phrases with high search volume, generally attracting a less-targeted audience.

Digital Marketing Strategies and Tools: A Briefing

Okay, here’s a detailed briefing document summarizing the main themes and important ideas from the provided document excerpts:

Briefing Document: Digital Marketing Strategies and Tools

Overview:

This document summarizes key themes and actionable insights related to digital marketing, covering various channels, tools, and strategies. It focuses on leveraging data, optimizing content, understanding competitor actions, and building customer loyalty. The source emphasizes the importance of measurable results and continuous improvement in digital marketing efforts.

Key Themes & Ideas:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): SEO is highlighted as a premier channel for lead generation, with Hubspot data confirming that “57% of B2B marketers stated that SEO generates more leads than any other marketing initiative.” The document divides SEO into two key areas:

• On-Page SEO: This involves optimizing website elements to improve search engine rankings. It requires technical skills (“you have to know what a 4-4 error is…how to generate a site map”) and copywriting skills (“skills to write content but skills to optimize content”).
• Off-Page SEO: This involves understanding metrics like page authority, domain authority, and backlinks. Tools like SEMrush or Moz are essential for managing off-page optimization.
• Metrics and Measurement: “Understanding the metrics and understanding what you’re seeing in order to measure results and improve upon those results…what metrics and how do I measure the results.” Key on-page metrics include keyword analysis, volume, and competition. Off-page metrics include domain authority, page authority, and internal/external links.

1. Post-Purchase Customer Engagement: Maximizing the value of a purchase through various channels is crucial. This involves providing advice, answering questions, and suggesting additional purchases (“hey you just purchased this product thank you very much did you know you could do this this and this with it”). Cross-selling opportunities, such as recommending complementary products with discounts, are also key.
2. Google Analytics: Google Analytics provides a wealth of data about website traffic, user behavior, and conversions. The key is to “measure any dimension whether that be channel source medium keyword campaign mobile device could be demographic gender or age you want to be able to measure any dimension against the goals you have set up so you can measure performance”. Understanding audience, acquisition, behavior, and conversions is fundamental.
3. YouTube Analytics: Provides insights into video performance. Key metrics include views, watch time, impressions, click-through rate, and traffic sources. Understanding audience retention is vital for optimizing video content. The document highlights the importance of encouraging viewers to subscribe (“88% of the people who watched my videos over the last 28 days were not even subscribed”).
4. Competitor Analysis: Monitoring competitor activities is essential for improving digital marketing strategies. A variety of tools, including Sprout Social, Social Blade, Spyfu, Moz, and BuzzSumo, can be used to identify backlinks, track keyword performance, and analyze top-performing content.

• Moz’s Link Explorer: A tool for comparing link profiles, identifying link intersect opportunities, and discovering/analyzing inbound links. The link intersect tool “allows me to see where my links intersect with my competitors and if it doesn’t intersect then I have an opportunity to generate a backlink.”
• Spyfu: A tool for gaining insights into competitor keyword strategies for both paid search (PPC) and organic search. It provides data on organic keywords, estimated monthly SEO clicks, and paid keyword bidding.
• Benchmarking in Google Analytics: Comparing your website’s performance against industry averages.

1. Paid Marketing (PPC): Using platforms like Google Ads, Bing, LinkedIn, and Facebook to advertise and track ad performance. Focus on ad performance, keyword identification, location/device monitoring, and competitor analysis. Google Ads offers “auction insights reporting” to understand competitor performance. The document also notes the utility of Google Ads Editor for making bulk changes to campaigns offline.

• “If you’re doing some advertising on google bang linkedin you probably want to work within those platforms as the tool of choice”.
• Tools discussed for display advertising include: adroll, curtillo, celtra, and wide orbit. For social media marketing: facebook ads manager, ad espresso, quiet tweepy.

1. Keyword Strategy (SEO & PPC): Distinguishes between short-tail and long-tail keywords.

• Short-tail keywords: Generic, high-volume keywords used for visibility.
• Long-tail keywords: Specific, less competitive keywords used for conversions. “When visitors land from longer tail keywords they’re usually ready to make a purchase.” The document advises to use long-tail keywords when targeting pages with specific products or articles.

1. Google Ads Benefits: Google Ads increases visibility, builds brand awareness, allows retargeting, offers data-driven insights, and provides high flexibility. “Google ads advertises your product or service to the relevant audience to ensure the users perform the action required of them”. If you’re not ranking organically then you might want to consider Google ads.”
2. Video Advertising: Leveraging YouTube advertising, with an emphasis on optimizing video ads.

• “Carefully define your metrics and goals…Align your goal with your video and then track low performing ad placements.”
• Include a call to action, use negative targeting to specify who gets to see your ad, use closed captioning, A/B test, reduce bids in areas where you see lower performance.
• Make sure that your ad conveys your brand’s message in the first six seconds.

1. Social Media Marketing: A lucrative methodology that has brands creating and sharing content on social media. Great for brand awareness, giving traffic to your website and improving search engine rankings.
2. Instagram Marketing: A popular platform for businesses to set up shop and tell their story through photos and videos. Good place for companies and brands to showcase their services, tell their story through photos and videos, with over 25 million businesses already using it.

• To increase Instagram followers: Engage with competitors followers, pay for sponsored posts and product reviews, use geotags, use Instagram stories, highlight important stories, ask for followers, align to the latest trends, run contests and giveaways, stay consistent with posts, keep track of your instagram following, use instagram ads, and create visually attractive ads.

1. Brand Storytelling: Discusses how to create a brand story, either with short, simple, easy stories, or focusing on the problems that are solved by the brand.

Actionable Takeaways:

• Data-Driven Decisions: Emphasize the use of analytics tools to measure performance and make informed decisions.
• Content Optimization: Continuously optimize content for both SEO and user engagement.
• Competitor Monitoring: Regularly analyze competitor strategies to identify opportunities and improve your own marketing efforts.
• Customer-Centric Approach: Focus on providing value to customers and building long-term relationships.
• Experimentation and Testing: Continuously experiment with different strategies and tactics to identify what works best for your business.

Conclusion:

This briefing document highlights the importance of a multifaceted approach to digital marketing, emphasizing the need for data-driven decision-making, continuous optimization, and a focus on customer engagement. By leveraging the right tools and strategies, businesses can effectively reach their target audience, build brand awareness, and drive conversions.

Digital Marketing FAQs: Strategies and Analytics

Frequently Asked Questions About Digital Marketing

1. What is the core principle behind measuring the success of any digital marketing channel?

The central idea across all digital marketing channels is to understand the key metrics specific to that channel and use that information to measure results and improve performance. For example, in SEO, this means understanding on-page metrics like keyword volume and competition, and off-page metrics like domain authority and backlinks. Measuring performance against established goals in tools like Google Analytics is crucial.

2. What are the key skills required to manage Search Engine Optimization (SEO) effectively?

Managing SEO requires a blend of technical and copywriting skills. On-page SEO skills include ensuring website health (site speed, resolving errors, creating sitemaps) and optimizing content for relevant keywords. Off-page SEO involves understanding and improving metrics like domain authority, page authority, and backlinks using tools like SEMrush or Moz. Keyword analysis and competitor analysis are also vital.

3. How can Google Analytics and YouTube Analytics help improve website and video performance?

Google Analytics allows you to track user behavior on your website (audience, acquisition, behavior, conversions). You can measure any dimension (channel, source, medium, keyword, device, demographics) against your goals to understand what’s working. YouTube Analytics provides insights into video performance, including views, watch time, subscriber gains, traffic sources, and audience retention, helping you optimize video content and strategy.

4. What is the benefit of using competitor “spine” tools and what are some examples?

Competitor analysis tools help you identify competitors’ backlinks, track their rankings, identify top-performing content, determine website referral traffic, and compare your data with theirs. Examples include Sprout Social (social media listening), Moz’s Link Explorer (backlink analysis), and Spyfu (PPC and SEO keyword insights). Even just Googling keywords, using the “all in title:” syntax can help you understand your competition.

5. How can businesses effectively use Google Ads for both search and display advertising?

For search ads, monitor ad and keyword performance, ensuring high-quality scores and relevant keywords. Use negative keywords to refine targeting. Leverage Google’s Keyword Planner for keyword discovery and forecasting. The Auction Insights report reveals competitor bidding strategies. Google Ads Editor facilitates bulk changes.

For display ads, monitor keywords and customer engagement. Target the right audience through demographics, topics, and placements. Retarget website visitors and measure campaign performance with available analytics.

6. What strategies can be employed to increase engagement and followers on Instagram?

Strategies include using relevant hashtags, posting consistently, engaging with other users (especially competitor followers), using geotags, leveraging Instagram Stories and Highlights, running contests and giveaways, asking for followers directly, and creating visually appealing and authentic content. Tools like Socialblade can help track follower growth and engagement.

7. How can businesses effectively leverage video marketing on YouTube through Google Ads?

To optimize YouTube video ads, define clear metrics and goals, track low-performing ad placements and remove them, use a custom thumbnail image, and drive viewers to a specific action with a clear call-to-action. Use negative targeting, closed captioning, and A/B testing. Remarket to re-engage viewers who didn’t take action. Ensure the video is relevant and conveys the brand’s message within the first few seconds. Consider different ad formats like bumper ads (short) or TrueView ads, which are skippable after five seconds.

8. What are the key considerations when crafting a compelling brand story and how can it be used to increase customer engagement?

A compelling brand story should focus on the company’s purpose, values, and the unique way it solves a problem for customers. Highlight the impact the company has on its customers’ lives. Brands like Airbnb and Dollar Shave Club focus on the problem they solve, which, in turn, helps generate a personal connection with the target audience. Consider making the story personal through staff stories.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization Strategies and Techniques

SEO, or search engine optimization, is a marketing method that organizations use to increase the quality and amount of traffic to their websites by making them more visible to users of web search engines. SEO enhances unpaid results and does not count traffic gained through paid advertisements. It is a method of getting relevant traffic to a website from organic search results. It is essential to stay up to date and have complete knowledge of the latest algorithm updates and factors that affect search engine ranking.

Here are some key concepts of SEO:

• Technical SEO The technical side of SEO, such as server-side settings, site maps, and server response code rewrites, helps in optimizing page and server levels, ensuring they are found by search engines, which helps generate traffic and conversions.
• Content marketing Expertise in content marketing is essential, as SEO and content marketing cannot exist without each other. Content marketing provides high-quality content, and SEO provides the appropriate keywords to help it get noticed by search engines. Creating and sharing valuable, relevant, and consistent content such as blogs, videos, infographics, and case studies brings the attention of a targeted online audience to a brand’s products and services.
• Link building Successful search engine optimization requires a combination of external link building with credible websites and internal link optimization on your own properties and social media platforms.
• Site usability SEO focuses on good site usability, which indicates how objects are placed on a website and whether the information provided is useful for users. It also indicates if the site is easy to use and navigate.
• Tools Experience with tools like Moz and Google Analytics helps in making appropriate inferences from the data obtained.
• Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Google Analytics helps with tracking and reporting website traffic, while Google Webmaster helps track a website’s search performance with the help of Google Search Console and additional resources.

To drive traffic to a site, an SEO strategy can be implemented to improve overall searchability and visibility on search engines. Search is still king in terms of the volumes of people using it daily, so there is a great opportunity to be found. Being found organically builds trust and credibility because most people who search click on an organic search listing. Increased engagement and traffic provides an improved user experience, and it helps target quality traffic because SEO is the only medium in which you’re meeting somebody halfway by addressing what they’re looking for.

There are different types of SEO techniques:

• On-page SEO entails things that can be done to a website to help it be found in organic search. On-page optimization involves keyword research, technical audits, on-site optimization, and enhanced user experiences. It consists of optimizing a website, including elements such as headers, meta descriptions, title tags, and linking.
• Off-page SEO, or off-site SEO, refers to actions taken outside a website to affect its rankings in search engine result pages. It involves promotional methods to improve search engine and user perception of a site’s popularity, relevance, trustworthiness, and authority. Off-page SEO can also be performed with the help of link building, which involves getting other websites to link back to your website.

When doing SEO, it’s important to use “white hat” techniques, such as keyword research and choosing a natural language processing format to choose keywords that are relevant and natural to the content. It is important to get backlinks from relevant sites and use keywords naturally. Engaging content should be written, and unique title tags should be used for every web page.

Social Media Marketing: Strategies, Platforms, and Engagement

Social media marketing involves using social media platforms to build a brand, drive website traffic, and increase sales. Social media marketing helps marketers achieve their marketing and branding goals by creating and sharing content on social media. This includes activities like text and image updates, videos, and other content that can drive engagement.

Here are some key aspects of social media marketing:

• Building Brand Awareness: Social media marketing improves brand awareness by pushing out appropriate content in front of the appropriate people.
• Paid Advertising: Social media marketing enables marketers to perform paid advertising, exposing a brand’s content to a high-quality, targeted audience.
• Audience Understanding: Social media enables interaction, engagement, and relationship building with an audience. Understanding audience needs helps deliver content that positions a product or service as the answer they seek.
• Content Strategy: A social media calendar is used to determine the message conveyed to the audience and the content posted on social media platforms.
• Platform Selection: Choosing the right social media platform is crucial. Questions to consider include the platform’s purpose, the audience it reaches, and the content that works best on it.
• Engagement: Social media marketing centers around engagement, offering the ability to increase brand awareness.
• Tools: Social media marketing tools help create high-quality content, attract potential customers, and drive engagement. They also aid in planning, creation, and scheduling.
• Visual Storytelling: Visual storytelling uses pictures and videos to convey information simply, overcoming language barriers and engaging the audience.

Nearly 4 billion of the world’s population uses social media. Social media provides a platform to promote a brand, product, or service and build awareness. It also allows messaging to a user base, community, prospective clients, and people unfamiliar with a brand.

Different social media platforms include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Each platform serves a unique purpose:

• LinkedIn is a professional network suited for B2B audiences.
• Facebook is used by just about everyone, and content related to news or entertainment finds success here.
• Instagram is best for visual content.
• Pinterest is limited to static images but drives traffic to blogs effectively.
• YouTube is a video platform for gaming, entertainment, or vlogging.
• Twitter is a platform for various industries, including beauty, fitness, news, media, and entertainment.

A digital marketer must understand social media platforms and be able to formulate a social media marketing plan. It’s important to understand the different social media platforms and develop a strategy for social media marketing. The goal is to avoid posting content aimlessly and to measure results, understand engagement, and react to data.

A social media marketing manager needs skills including understanding of strategy and different social media platforms. They should select a platform that allows control over post scheduling, helps understand engagement, and offers a listening tool to monitor user reactions to hashtags or trending topics.

Content Marketing: Strategies and Best Practices

Content marketing is an effective way of distributing valuable content online. It is a marketing method that involves creating and sharing online content to generate audience interest in a brand’s products or services. This content provides information that the audience considers valuable and relevant in a consistent manner to drive some sort of profitable customer action.

Here are key elements of content marketing:

• Assets Content can be text in a blog post, a video, an infographic, or an image.
• Targeted audience Content is written for a targeted audience, and the type of content posted depends on the platform.
• Goal-oriented Content marketing helps achieve marketing goals by generating interest in a brand’s products or services.
• Content Variety A variety of content can be produced, and digital marketers should branch out and talk about things that support digital marketing.
• Brand voice It is important to make sure content matches a brand’s voice by constantly reviewing editorial standards and ensuring tone and quality remain consistent.
• Keywords Using specific keywords in content takes care of the SEO aspect and helps content have a greater chance of being found, indexed, and ranked.
• Call to action Content should have a clear call to action at the end.
• Originality Always create original, high-quality content.
• Visual appeal Content should be visually appealing.
• Organization Content should be well-organized and structured.

The content that falls under content marketing includes blogs, videos, infographics, case studies, white papers, and ebooks. A blog is key to a website because you can write about products or services and speak directly to a targeted audience.

Content marketing is important because it:

• Builds awareness, trust, and loyalty in your brand.
• Is relatively inexpensive.
• Increases traffic to your site and get more conversions.
• Improves other marketing tactics like search engine optimization, social media, and public relations.

The content marketing process involves:

• Determining what goals to achieve with a marketing campaign.
• Setting up buyer personas.
• Setting up content audits to determine the best type of content.
• Setting up a content management system.
• Brainstorming for new forms of content.
• Focusing on a particular form of content that works best.
• Publishing and managing content.
• Measuring content performance.

Tips for content marketing include:

• Remarket your content to build awareness and engagement with your audience.
• Answer complex questions with content and focus on Google’s featured snippet to drive traffic and cement a position as an expert.
• Create a personality for your brand.
• Back up arguments with data using statistics and facts.
• Be consistent with content and post on a consistent schedule.
• Make content actionable by providing actionable steps or information.
• Create trending and evergreen content.
• Understand content that works for you on different social media platforms.
• Understand your target audience.
• Perform A/B testing to understand what your audience likes and what content works.
• Reach out to people sharing similar content.

When creating content, it is helpful to integrate case studies and show clear examples to stress points.

Email Marketing: Concepts, Applications, and Tools

Email marketing is a digital marketing method that involves using emails to promote products and services to a targeted audience. It is an efficient and inexpensive way to generate a high return on investment.

Key concepts of email marketing:

• Personalization and automation Emails can be set up to regularly send to customers to keep in touch, informing them about new products and other forms of engagement. With email, it is possible to personalize messages and send them to a segmented audience.
• Data privacy compliance It is essential to adhere to privacy guidelines like GDPR.
• Content experimentation Emails can contain images, GIFs, or videos, impacting your customer base differently. Experiment with content to determine what works best.
• Tool and metric understanding Experience with tools like HubSpot and Mailchimp is necessary, along with understanding metrics like contact segmentation, autoresponders, and A/B testing.
• A/B testing A/B testing is taking an original email and creating a variant and testing the two to see which performs well.

Email marketing can be applied at different stages of the customer lifecycle:

• Awareness Share newsletters to educate customers on how your brand can solve their problems.
• Consideration Send relevant emails to promote your product.
• Purchase Send emails that encourage customers to purchase a product by providing an offer.
• Retention Nurture relationships with customers to ensure loyalty by sending emails with exclusive offers.
• Advocacy Convert active customers into brand advocates by encouraging them to share emails with friends and promoting the brand.

Benefits of email marketing:

• Cost-effective It is neither expensive nor time-consuming.
• Time-saving Setting up an email campaign can be quick.
• Real-time marketing It meets customers’ needs at the right time.
• Less intrusive Emails can be customized and personalized, making them less intrusive, especially to a segment that already knows your brand.
• Builds credibility It gains credibility by offering exclusive offers and working with nonprofits.
• Increases visibility and brand awareness It generates brand awareness by sending emails to a large group of people.
• Easy ROI tracking It easily measures open rates, click rates, and how many people purchased.

To perform email marketing:

• Define Goals Define the goals you want to achieve.
• Identify the target audience Identify a target audience and create segments based on their behavior.
• Select Campaign Type Select the type of campaign based on your goals.
• Design Select a suitable design for your campaign.
• Compelling Content Have a compelling subject line and email content.
• Schedule Send campaigns immediately or schedule them.
• Measure Results Measure results such as open rate, click-through rate, and response rate. Perform A/B testing to find out what works.

There are various email marketing tools:

• Mailchimp
• HubSpot
• Marketo
• Sendinblue

One thing often overlooked is using Google’s URL builder, which allows the tracking of different campaigns. By appending links with UTM tracking, the performance of email campaigns can be tracked right in Google Analytics.

Paid Advertising and Google Ads: A Guide

Paid advertising involves paying to advertise products or services with ads and is one of the easiest ways to drive traffic to a website. Millions of people use search engines and social media daily, making paid advertising a popular choice for many companies.

Paid advertising options include search ads, social media ads, and display ads:

• Search ads These are displayed in search engine results. When a user types in a keyword query, you want your ad to show up based on that keyword query. When someone clicks the link in the ad, you pay the search engine.
• Social media ads Social media marketing involves increasing traffic or engagement or brand awareness, but instead of doing this on search, you’re doing it on a social media platform. You can advertise with an image or a video on any particular platform.
• Display ads Display ads are created to be placed on specific websites. Unlike search ads, you have a choice in the ad format with display ads. With display ads, you have text ads, image ads, rich media ads, and video ads. The idea is to get your ad in front of the right audience. When they see your display banner ad, it will be more visual and appealing, which will generate some brand interest and hopefully get someone to click on that ad and go over to your website.

Google Ads

Google Ads is an online advertising platform where advertisers pay to display ads. Google Ads can increase visibility to a high-quality audience. Search is a great place to advertise because you’re meeting the consumer halfway. Google Ads advertises your product or service to the relevant audience to ensure the users perform the action required of them. Google Ads can also increase brand awareness.

Google Ads offers the following benefits:

• Increased intelligence
• Measurable performance
• High flexibility

With Google Ads, you can customize ads based on an audience, a keyword, a specific website, or retargeting. Google Ads also has flexible options in terms of ad format, like text ads, dynamic responsive ads, video ads, and display ads.

If you’re not ranking organically, then you might want to consider Google Ads. If you want to bid on a keyword relevant to your business but you aren’t found for it organically, then you can bid on it. It is also an option if you are ranked for specific keywords and it’s a highly competitive industry, then you can use Google Ads to help you leverage the amount of clicks you get from that ad.

Types of Google Ads

• Shopping ads Shopping ads on Google search showcase your products to those looking for that particular product. By listing the price, if they like the price and they click on your ad, they’re probably going to go ahead and follow through with the conversion.
• Call ads Call-only ads are great for mobile. If you have a phone number associated with your business, you can add that phone number to the ad, and if someone clicks on your number, they’re actually going to call your business.
• Text ads Google will list a maximum of four text ads at the top and at the bottom. If you’re running text ads on Google, you want to make sure you’re always at the top, ideally between positions one and three.

Where Google Ads are Shown

• Google search With Google search, your ads will appear basically below or above the search results on a Google search.
• Google search partners You can advertise on Google search partner sites. These are sites that have partnered with Google and are allowing Google to show ads on their site.
• Display network The display network allows you to advertise elsewhere, which is outside of Google search. If you’re going to advertise on Google’s display network, you have more ad formats available to you, including image and video.

Optimizing Google Ads

When optimizing Google Ads, define your metrics and goals carefully. Track low-performing ad placements. You can scan the list of placements where the ad was shown, and if you don’t like one of the placements, you can always select it, edit it, and exclude it from the campaign. You also want to drive people to perform a particular action with the appropriate call to action. You can also use remarketing to re-engage with customers.

The Original Text

the basic concepts on seo google tag manager google ads social media marketing facebook ads youtube instagram and twitter marketing content marketing email marketing affiliate marketing marketing hacks digital marketing skills careers and much more for this video we have our experts rob and rahul taking us through all the topics so without further ado let’s start by talking about digital marketing before we begin make sure to subscribe to our youtube channel and hit the bell icon to never miss an update from simply learn meet joey a digital marketer he works as the head of digital marketing for amazon but how did joey get here a few years ago joey began to see a large number of opportunities popping up in the field of digital marketing to begin his entry into the field he needed to understand what exactly digital marketing was and what was so great about first joey learned that digital marketing was a form of marketing through which you could advertise to people digitally digital marketing leveraged different channels like search engines websites social media platforms emails and mobile applications it would give marketers the opportunity to interact with and understand their audience better and to increase the trust in their brand digital marketing would also show marketers advertisements to people based on their actions and preferences on the internet while being less expensive than traditional forms of advertising after understanding the main concepts of digital marketing joey realized there was more to digital marketing than he initially thought there are also many types of digital marketing types like content marketing search engine optimization pay-per-click social media marketing email marketing and affiliate marketing and once he understood those types he set up a digital marketing campaign for his uncle’s e-commerce website let’s have a look at what he came up with first joey created content like blogs videos infographics and case studies so that he could generate audience interest in the brand’s products or services this was content marketing next he needed his audience to actually see his content the first step was to create content on specific search keywords that were relevant to the target audience joey would make optimizations on the website and have credible websites linking back to the content and lo and behold the website began ranking on the first page of the search results by continuous optimizations joey would continue to improve the ranking and ultimately make the website rank at the first position this was seo for search engine optimization and joey could do all of this without spending a single penny he could also drive traffic to the website with advertisements but for this he would have to pay a certain fee each time the ads were clicked he could have text ads that show up in search engine results image ads and video ads that show up in websites and much more this was possible with the help of ppc or pay-per-click however joey wasn’t done yet to reach a larger audience he needed to tap into social media platforms he would use social media platforms like linkedin youtube facebook and instagram to advertise the brand’s content he would use these platforms to advertise the brand’s products or services with posts images videos and more to bring out the brand’s story and engage with the brand’s audience who spend a lot of time on social media like pbc he could use the platform to advertise the brand’s products or services with text image and video ads which needed to be paid for that’s social media marketing joey realized that a large amount of the audience weren’t visiting the brand’s website a second time he needed to keep them engaged nurture them to make sure they purchased the product for this he would send them emails that helped them better understand the products they visited on the website and assist them in the buying process he would also send emails to advertise his products or services to potential customers that is with email marketing and finally although joey was able to grow the brand’s funnel he wanted more traffic from third-party websites this could be achieved with affiliate marketing affiliates would promote the brand or product to their audiences for a fee with the help of email signups registrations conversions subscriptions etc after setting all of this up joey had the hardest part of the process to get through the wait although joey had worked really hard on each of these forms of digital marketing he only had moderate success that’s when joey realized he had to gain more knowledge and experience so he decided to get certified and get ahead in his career with the help of simplylearn he took up simplylearn’s digital marketing certification and got the skills and training he needed to become an expert digital marketer and now you know where he is you too can do the same and grow in your career by clicking on the top right corner and with that we’ve given you an introduction to all the major concepts of digital marketing greetings everyone this is rob sanders and today we’re going to talk about what is digital marketing so thanks for joining us here at simply learn and let’s get started let’s start talking about why digital marketing is important so let’s start there on the why so we’re just a fly on the wall and we’re in an office environment we’re looking at two friends having a conversation about digital marketing so really if we’re listening in everybody every marketer is using digital marketing for his or her business now digital marketing has become more popular than traditional marketing that’s not a surprise so in response hey over the past few decades digital marketing has evolved at a rapid pace these days a lot of people spend most their time on the internet so what happens in the internet every 60 seconds well a lot happens every 60 seconds so according to social media today i mean there’s a lot of snaps there’s a lot of clicks there’s a lot of text there’s a lot of videos watched there’s a lot of pictures being taken there’s a lot of voice activated activity going on a lot of tweets emails swipes there’s a lot going on here in 60 seconds so there’s a lot of activity on the internet a lot and so the one gentleman says hey can you also imagine a few differences between digital and traditional marketing systems and then the expert responds of course i can certainly clarify a few differences between digital and traditional and so he goes on to say what the differences are between traditional and digital and let’s look at that okay so on traditional marketing we’re talking about print radio billboard newspaper tv anything that’s not on your mobile or laptop so we know what traditional marketing reach is limited with digital marketing reaches maximum and what we mean by that is hey when you print something you’re printing it for x amount of people if you’re trying to promote an event and you basically create a thousand flyers okay you figure it’s going to a thousand people maybe they’ll share it so you’re looking about 2 000 people maybe just to be generous well digital marketing we’re promoting an event we can promote it to a whole lot of people depending on the platform so 2000 is nothing when you’re targeting an audience on facebook or google search traditional marketing non-versatile and with digital marketing very versatile so again going back to our flyer printing an eight and a half by eleven okay that’s it you know with with digital marketing running display banners 468 by 60 200 by 200 250 by 250 300 by 300 i mean the list goes on on the types of different display sizes not to mention text ads not to mention video or multimedia so there’s a lot you can do to get your message out there okay with traditional it’s always delayed communication okay so meaning if you’re trying to get that tv spot there might not be a spot open until one in the morning okay well with digital marketing there is no hours okay you can certainly get your point out there and have people see it instantaneously so with traditional marketing there’s a lack of real-time results i mean this seems like uh it’s obvious but you know digital marketing that’s one of the biggest benefits instant real-time results instant okay nowadays go to analytics you can look at real-time reporting okay so we could see real-time results okay traditional marketing can be very costly i mean if you’re not only doing postcards and printing postcards but you have to mail those postcards so there’s postage fees where with digital marketing it’s very very very cost efficient i mean meaning you could pick and choose who you want to target when you want to target where you want to target what you want to target and if you’re doing search you can put your bidding in place you can put your hours in place you can really control how much you actually spend that to me is one of the biggest advantages to digital marketing not only do you get real-time results but you can control costs and then obviously optimize based on the amount of cost you’re spending based on those real-time results with traditional marketing it’s difficult to reach a target audience you know with digital marketing it’s easy to reach a target audience i mean you know i don’t wanna bash traditional marketing too much i mean if you’re gonna put a tv ad in place you know you’re gonna do it on a tv show that tends to gear more towards your target audience but that doesn’t guarantee anything here we can simply go to facebook or twitter or linkedin and just pick and choose specifically who we want to target when we want to target them so it just becomes a lot easier to reach a targeted audience on a digital marketing platform and then with traditional marketing poor campaign measurement with digital you have easy to measure and optimize campaigns and what we really mean by that is because you get instant time results because you can control cost because you can reach your target audience more easily all those a result of okay you can measure and optimize based on what our audience is seeing and how much they’re spending to see it we can quickly make adjustments in order to optimize the campaign for better performance so that’s generally that means that’s a culmination of pretty much everything that we’ve listed as a benefit for digital marketing okay so now why digital marketing has been answered with all the benefits that it carries let’s talk about the what is digital marketing so you know that you know you want to do digital marketing so how do we go about that what what is it exactly well let’s just define it digital marketing is just the act of promoting a company’s product or individual’s product or service with the help of a device or technology and so obviously when we talk about device we’re talking about maybe a laptop we’re talking about a mobile device when we talk about technology it could be an app it could be you know a cloud-based platform okay it could be a piece of software okay so a lot going on on the digital side in terms of variations and what you can do but that’s in a nutshell what digital marketing is you’re really just using technology to promote your product or service so we know because of the benefits in digital marketing you can promote your campaign on different platforms okay so all those benefits we mentioned about instant real-time results cost efficiency optimizing campaigns you could do that on search you could do it on social via email on mobile apps etc so that’s what we mean by with the help of digital devices and technology well these digital devices and technology come in the form of search engines and emails and mobile apps etc so when we want to go and promote our product or service using a campaign we have different options so there are different types of digital marketing channels that we can choose from and let’s just go through that list of digital marketing channels and the first one is what i consider the king of them all and that’s seo so seo stands for search engine optimization there’s search engine marketing there’s email marketing affiliate marketing social content mobile and then we can get into subsets of each of these digital marketing channels but really we’ll start with seo because that’s the king and to me that’s basically increasing the quality and quantity of relevant organic traffic on the search engines including google so depending on where you’re located in the u.s market google tends has a large market share so you want your pages on your website to be found and clicked on organically and so that means that somebody types in a keyword you want that relevant page to show up first on google so somebody can click on that link okay and we know that millions of people specifically in the us but worldwide you search on a daily basis so if you’re ranking for those relevant keywords you can imagine how much traffic you can get okay so that’s seo okay and here’s an example so you type in online shopping well you can see the first listing here is a paid search ad and we’re gonna get to that in a minute the second organically is amazon okay so online shopping you think maybe walmart you think maybe alibaba or you’re thinking probably amazon okay so no surprise amazon’s ranking for the keyword online shopping and so if somebody clicked on their listing that’s traffic for amazon let’s move on to search engine marketing you know known as sem or pay per click or cost per click or ppc or cpc or sponsored search or google ads i mean there’s a lot of different names synonymous with sem so search engine marketing is really just using paid ads on search engines just as we saw the previous example if you want to be found for keyword you don’t have to worry about organic if you’re willing to pay for it you just bid on that keyword and voila you have the opportunity to appear number one in the search results at the top of the page for that keyword now when somebody clicks on it you have to pay google if it’s google you’re advertising on but that’s the beauty of search engine marketing you can bid on keywords and appear at the top of the search results for that keyword example here if we go back to online shopping well myus.com is bidding on that keyword online shopping so they’re actually appearing above amazon’s organic listing but that’s what they want to do they want to be found for that keyword so if they’re not ranking for it organically well they’re bidding on it and if somebody happened to click on that listing then myus.com is going to pay google something depending on what the cost per click is and so that could be anywhere from one penny to a hundred dollars it depends depends on the keyword depends on who else is bidding on the keyword depends on the location depends on the time of day it depends on quality score there’s a lot of factors involved and regarding what you pay however the benefit of sem is visibility and getting traffic to your website for keywords you’re not found for so that’s why sem’s such a popular choice for a lot of companies okay let’s talk about digital marketing that’s a traditional type of digital marketing channel it’s been around a long time you know we all send emails on a daily basis and we probably all receive emails on a daily basis this is an effective way to capture leads and convert them to customers because with email you can personalize your emails and you can send your emails to a segmented audience okay so if you have emails from females who are 35 years of age to 44 that live and say this southern part of the united states you can segment that and send them an email and cater that email directly to that audience and of course you can put some nice call to action in there you could design it really snazzy and you could track it just like you can any other digital marketing channel so email is a very effective way to really reach a target audience because everybody for the most part has a functioning email account so basically here’s an example of an email that could go out you’re selling a product and the products promotion is about to end well you know get that email out to your target audience let them know hey you have until tonight to purchase the product and if you purchase it you’re going to get 30 off and you can put the coupon code right in there with a nice call to action and you can measure how many people click on that email go to that web page and purchase the product using that coupon code so that’s an example of email marketing okay we have affiliate marketing so affiliate marketing is an effective way for digital marketers to basically create a sales force of people so basically what you’re doing is you’re getting merchants to promote your products and services and you’re using usually a third party broker like commission junction or cg.com as an example to introduce you the the person selling the product the merchant with the affiliate so that affiliate could likely be a merchant him or himself and they can basically be a good partner of yours by publishing your product or service on their website so that they can sell in order to get commissions so it’s all based on a commission so you basically are going to use a third-party affiliate like cj get all these affiliates to work for you they’re going to promote your product or service if they do sell your product or service you’re going to pay them a commission that’s more or less how it works with affiliate marketing and you know with affiliate marketing to me it’s a good way to you know really promote your product or service and you can pick and choose the affiliates or the publishers of whom you want to work with so here’s an example of affiliate marketing at work okay you basically see a banner basically you can see earn up to 12 advertising fees with a trusted e-commerce leader okay so if somebody clicked on that purchase for example or joined you could pay off that commission okay let’s turn our attention to social media marketing so social media marketing you know i would say it’s fairly new i mean if i think about it we’re in 2019 and i remember talking about facebook back in 2006. so you’re talking about 13 14 15 years of social media it’s definitely evolved over the years and but the concept remains the same it involves creating different types of content depending on the platform okay so you could be on pinterest or instagram and be dealing with photos or you could be on twitter tweeting out certain characters up to a limit okay so it really depends on the social media platform uh that really drives the type of content you’re gonna promote but we know social media can be effective because people use social media i mean facebook is one of the more popular platforms and if you want to get your product or service out there you can certainly pay to have an ad on facebook or you could just post your content organically okay that’s the beauty of social most of your social platforms like linkedin and twitter and facebook and pinterest and instagram they’ll have a paid form of advertising that you can use to promote your product or service or you can go the organic route and you know post content organically in hopes of driving traffic back to your website so with social you do have two options here but social is interesting because a lot of different social media platforms out there really depends on your product or service okay so an example of social media marketing especially on facebook with facebook you got mobile and desktop and you obviously have the opportunity to post something organically and have that liked or commented on or shared or you could post an app and get that liked commented or shared or clicked and have people go back to your website and fulfill the goal of what you want them to do so moving on to content marketing so content marketing is really an effective way of really distributing valuable content online and when we talk about content marketing you know we’re talking about different types of assets so it could be simply text in the form of a blog post or it could be a video or it could be an infographic or it could be an image okay there are lots of ways to create content these days especially in digital marketing and the great thing about content marketing is you’re writing content for a targeted audience so if you’re trying to targeted audience on say instagram then you know who your audience is and you know what the type of content you’re going to post on there so it could be in the form of a video or infographic or just a graphic and so that’s the beauty of content marketing really putting yourself out there and depending on the platform putting yourself out there with various types of content so for example we look at youtube you can see this video here about digital marketing certified associate well hey you don’t need to always write the content you can produce the content in the form of a video and post it on youtube this is a form of content marketing so that’s content marketing and then let’s talk about mobile marketing so content marketing again different types but if we go now to mobile marketing you can kind of segue from content to mobile because the only difference here is with mobile it’s strictly on mobile phone it’s not desktop so mobile marketing is really a strategy on its own that helps you the company promoting your product or service to reach your target audience through a mobile device and that includes tablets and how you could do that is via messaging you could do it via email or you could be do it via an app okay so you have different ways of getting your content out there to people okay so as an example you can use basically sms or instant messaging via mobile devices to promote your product or service here’s another example of a mobile marketing via app install and so you can even compound that by running a say google ad as an example and running your google ad on say just mobile you could do a bid adjustment just for mobile and the goal could be app installs okay so and you can even do a mobile or app extension so there’s lots of ways to really promote your app or your product or your service via mobile marketing okay let’s talk about the customer life cycle so we know why we want to do digital marketing we want to know we want we know what the digital marketing channels are because we just talked about them from seo to social to affiliate to mobile to content to sem okay you have a lot of different digital marketing channels at your disposal so now how do we go ahead and approach our customers so that’s what we’re gonna talk about first so we’re gonna talk about different stages of the customer life cycle okay and the first one is the awareness stage so we need to get our customers aware of what we’re selling or what we’re promoting okay so the awareness stage is really what product does your brand offer that’s a question we want to get out there and we want to answer okay what does a customer need your product or excuse me why does a customer need your product that’s a question we want to answer with digital marketing okay what solution does your product provide okay that’s an answer to a question we want to make sure people understand so these are questions that we want to be able to answer in the form of digital marketing whether that be mobile or content okay so getting our information out there that answers these essential questions and if we could do that then somebody’s going to become aware of our product or service okay so what product does our brand offer why does a customer need it and what solution does it provide okay those are some key questions that people tend to ask themselves when they look at a brand okay and when they look at a product hey do i really need this is it gonna help me in my life okay and who who is selling this i mean who is this brand i mean that’s those are just things that run through people’s mind intuitively that with the right messaging the right channel the right type of asset the right targeted audience you can quickly make somebody aware of your brand’s product or service in this stage it’s help potential customers discover your brand with the help of these different marketing channels so in the awareness stage you know content is key so it’s to me if we have a website we need a blog because if somebody does come to our blog from say organic search seo then we can write about that product or service via blog and talk to our customer talk directly to our targeted audience through that blog and if we’re not ranking organically we can use paid search to promote it because paid search on google for example basically we can be right at the top of the search results and so somebody can actually see it when they do a search because we know millions of people you search on a daily basis you could do social media marketing okay so you can publish that product or service on facebook while you’re building your community and you can use affiliate marketing to help get the word out by using cg.com as an example build up a sales force of people these publishers that are going to put your product or service out there so to me in the awareness stage these are the digital marketing channels you could focus on now i will say one thing about display ads display is part of search engine marketing you could use display because you can reach a large number of people so even though it’s listed here low priority in the awareness stage display ads mean that if you’re on google’s display number you could pick and choose your sites your demographics keywords topics an audience you can focus on all those different demographics to really attract a large number of people so low priority but it’s probably also good to focus on in the awareness stage okay so content marketing you must create a high quality content that people are searching for without content it’s hard to get found and so to me this is you know where the blog comes in seo take that content get it optimized okay sem if we’re not ranking organically we can make sure we’re at the top of the paid search results or the the search results for a particular keyword we want to be found for and then social media marketing using different channels depending on the channel if we’re selling you know training like simply learn does you know linkedin is a good platform for us okay and then affiliate you know basically building up a nice network of publishers to get the word out so these are all good channels that we can focus in on so traffic sources may include paid unpaid social referral display email or direct so they they could come in the awareness stage from all different types of channels even though you’re focused on content i mean you can still get traffic from mobile or email so now that we got the word out via all these different marketing channels there’s that consideration stage so you know people are aware of us now they’re considering us and that’s kind of the next stage in the process okay so a few essential questions to address on the consideration stage hey what features make your product valuable to others and how will i increase customer engagement towards my product so those are answers to questions you want to ask okay what features make your product valuable you want to basically separate yourself from the competition basically that’s what you’re trying to answer okay so if you’re promoting your product or service on paid search and other people are bidding on the same keyword how are you going to stand out and then how will i increase customer engagement towards my product so for example if you’re on facebook okay and you’re trying to get people over to your site to purchase your product then how are you going to improve that engagement you got to create something really snazzy or really it’s gonna be attention grabbing or something that’s gonna get them to become aware of it that’s gonna separate your posts from all the other posts that are in somebody’s facebook newsfeed okay so you really have to work hard to really convince somebody to get their consideration towards your product or service so in this stage your customer considers your product so help them understand how your product is valuable okay to me email works really good here because if you have a targeted audience this gives you the opportunity to really answer these questions in that particular channel email you could support that with a promotion and display i think display is a good option here too because even though you know people are trying to become aware you know you can really hone in and really get them to take that next step okay with display you can even do remarketing so if somebody’s been to your site because they’re aware of your product they’re curious you can cookie them and remarket to them via display so display to me is a good a good channel to use here okay so you have email mobile display you know sem these are all you know good channels to use on the consideration stage especially on search because somebody’s looking for something and they’re aware of your brand then you have the good opportunity to get them to click on your ad especially if you’re offering a promotion and get them to convert the goal here is to increase our engagement so people are aware we’re moving them further along the funnel with email marketing we have the opportunity to promote the product by sending an email directly to our audience so with this stage plan your campaigns around welcoming emails newsletters we can talk about product descriptions add ratings and reviews in the email you know we really just want to encourage people to purchase the product that’s we’re trying to sway them over so email is a good source to allow us to do that so with mobile marketing we can promote the products by sending relevant messages to our target audience display again retargeting because we can retarget an audience that has been to our website already did some research about our brand our product or service and now we’re going to reach back out to them to sway them so remember we want to encourage customers to buy a product by creating detailed articles about the product that always helps and that’s content okay we want to opt for a customer testimonial okay that helps sway people and add some guest blogging okay we can have ambassadors blog on our behalf or we can go out and blog on somebody else’s site okay so blogging works both ways it’s ways of of showing yourself and telling people hey we know you’re looking for this product here’s why you want to choose us okay moving on from the consideration to the purchase stage so they’re aware of you they’re considering you and now we’re on to the purchase stage so the questions we want to really make sure we address here are how are my prices compared to my competitors and is my brand more credible than others okay so they’re considering you but that price point and it may not even be the price it could be the shipping for example the price could be good but the shipping cost could be high so you really want to do some due diligence and research on what your competitors are doing credibility that goes back to the consideration stage and testimonials you want to make sure you have reviews and testimonials to really elevate what you’re trying to tell customers and that that is hey i have a good brand i have a good product i have a good service come buy my stuff come buy my product and service but you really need to support that claim you just can’t go out and say it and so supporting that comes in the form of what other people say and that could be reviews that could be comments on a social media platform it could be you know stars on say yelp or google my business you know make sure you do your due diligence and make sure you get people to you know review you or provide testimonials because people are going to do their due diligence before they purchase especially if it’s on google my business or yelp or trip advisor or whatever it is you’re trying to sell they’re going to be able to see those reviews and so do your due diligence to get the reviews and if it is a negative review hey that’s okay you can’t please everyone you’re gonna get them that’s the world we live in just make sure you show your upper hand and respond even to the negative as well as the positive reviews that you get that actually bodes well to some people because hey it shows that i made a mistake and you’re willing to correct it and so people actually see that that could be the tipping point to getting them to purchase hey look hey this brand really cares because they’re really responding to people they’re not ignoring negativity okay just those small things that can get people to change their mind now with the purchase stage according to e-consultancy 83 of the online audience require encouragement to complete a purchase encouragement what does that mean well it could mean providing a promo giving them that extra incentive you know if you don’t offer promo consider it especially on the email and the example we looked at earlier sending in an email means that if the promo is going to end at midnight send that email out and tell people they have until midnight and if they purchase today you’ll even increase it to 20 and email’s a good channel for that mobile can reach a lot of people through sms okay social media reaching people instantaneously and then you know really with the purchase stage it gives pro prospects an offer to help them make that purchase so you have plenty of channels to choose from in fact most of these channels the only one really that doesn’t fit the instantaneous mode is seo but you can really focus on affiliate even though that’s a low priority here you can really you know coordinate with your publishers who especially those publishers that have proven their worth and have sold your products in the past you get them to help promote it and incentivize their audience so let’s move on from the purchase to the purse post purchase stage so this is after somebody purchases okay so some essential questions we want to be able to address here so what additional product could my customer buy now that they’re my customer what else could i sell them what you know without being too pushy could if they buy a coat well a hat work or a pair of gloves or you know blouse you know you want to be able to not push a product on your customer but think about how you can complement that purchases that purchasers or customers product and then how to improve the customer buying experience so again this goes back to you know what we just said about reviews get somebody to offer a review and if they don’t give you a full compliment of five stars they only give you three and a half stars then you know what that’s great feedback because then you can learn from that and then the other question is will the customer refers to others and if so why so that’s definitely something you want to be able to address in the post purchase stage so let’s take a look here so with post purchasing stage you know it’s me emails at the top of this list because if somebody purchases something you can send a nice thank you email because if they purchase they’re giving you their email in return because you’re likely going to be sending them the receipt via email so email to me is a nice channel you send in a nice message even you know social media you know you can thank your community for supporting you on this recent campaign that you ran you know even throwing an extra five or ten percent on a future purchase is a thank you and that’s easily done on social media you know you could even post a blog you know promoting you know the success of a product and then offering a promotion okay so there’s a lot of things you could be doing here on the post purchasing stage so to me even looking at content again you could even you know put a survey together you could even put a survey together for your affiliates okay you could even post a poll on facebook so it’s just working in with these different channels to get some feedback about your product and service so with email mobile you can engage customers with follow-up emails or customer care content you know with mobile if you have somebody’s mobile number hey text them a simple thank you goes a long way you know you can say hey look if you’re satisfied let us know give us a call you can even in the ee mobile text message you can put a link to a survey send emails to active subscribers give rewards for customer feedback so if somebody does provide feedback give them an extra 10 off you know you want to be able to reward loyalty loyalty comes in the form of a partnership if you’re giving somebody discounts and you have a good product or service then they’re going to recognize that they’re going to say hey look i really like this product and they’re giving me 10 i’m going to go ahead and purchase from these guys again so give those discounts to those active customers or on the affiliate network give referral opportunities to your customers so if it’s an affiliate publisher hey if they’re getting people to your site you know reward them or if it’s an email and you put a four to a friend get an extra 10 off it doesn’t hurt because you’re incentivizing people to help you sell your product so with social display and content use those banner ads or use that content that you display on social or the blog you’re gonna write to give customers advice in order to maximize the value of the purchase so again you can use these platforms to also enhance what they purchased so hey you just purchased this product thank you very much did you know you could do this this and this with it and so that’s the idea of a post-purchase stage is to maximize these channels to be able to answer those essential questions about what else could they purchase you know do they like how do i get these people to become loyal customers okay so with the first purchase stage if a customer has bought a pair of sports shoes for example running shoes you can recommend cross product sale a cross sale it could be a pair of shorts or a water bottle or an accessory with an exclusive discount so that’s another example what you can do on the post purchase date greetings everyone this is rob sanders from simply learn happy new year and today we’re going to talk about digital marketing skills so digital marketing allows business owners regardless of the business non-profit for-profit large or small national local international to really expand their business allows them to personalize their content they could save money and most importantly they can measure the results and so that’s what we’re going to focus on today when we talk about digital marketing skills focusing on measuring those results so suppose anybody wants to work in marketing or grow a company or help grow an individual’s company or ensure to keep up with the appropriate skills this is what we’re going to cover today so we’re going to cover a few channels and so let’s get right to it today we’re going to start off with search engine optimization or seo also known as organic search so seo is an interesting channel uh it’s probably the premier channel for most companies in fact hubspot confirms that 57 of b2b marketers stated that seo generates more leads than any other marketing initiative so it’s really important for not only just generating traffic but it’s also important for generating leads and and generating more business including e-commerce and so what does seo entail and what skills should you acquire in order to manage seo as a marketing channel well if you think about it seo is really divvied up into two pies one pie is called on page the other pie is called off page and so on page consists of things you can do to the website to help you be found in organic search so what are those things well it could be anything from you know page load speed to four or four errors to site maps and so the point here is if you’re going to manage seo and you know that you got to make sure your website’s in tip-top shape or your clients websites and good enough shape for google to recognize it as a legitimate site you have to have some technical skills now i’m not saying you have to be developer but at the same time you have to know what a 4-4 error is you don’t have to know where and how to generate a site map and upload that sitemap you need to know how to edit a robot’s text file so those are you know what i call soft technical skills but they’re all valid for seo so you have to have some technical background staying in the on-page pie okay you need to make sure you have not only skills to write content but skills to optimize content so you need to be aware of all the different elements on a page in order to optimize that page so again that entails you know some copywriting skills but more importantly and probably more challenging is to take those copywriting skills and enhance them for seo okay so making sure that you’re able to understand what it is that you need to do to get a page optimized so it can rank higher in the search engine results so those are on page skills then you got the other piece of the pie which is off page so understanding you know what it takes to make sure your site is relevant so it’s understanding different metrics off-page metrics like page authority domain authority external links internal links and so generally most seo managers have a third party seo platform that they work with like sem rush or moz so it’s understanding how to work with those platforms to measure off page results so we always say that seo as a digital marketing channel is an 800 pound gorilla well it is because you have on page and off page to worry about so the two of those together you know is is quite a task in order to rank and so what brings seo and all digital marketing channels is understanding the metrics and understanding what you’re seeing in order to measure results and improve upon those results so that’s really the theme for all these digital marketing channels we’re going to talk about today it’s really about okay what metrics and how do i measure the results and so when we look at seo in terms of measuring results on the on page side okay you’re gonna have to do some keyword analysis you’re gonna have to understand okay what volume is you’re gonna understand how to get the competition numbers okay and you’re gonna have to understand what keywords to choose okay so that in itself is a skill being able to choose keywords based on several metrics then you’re gonna have to be able to ascertain you know what pages and what keywords are driving traffic and how those pages are performing okay and then again the off page you got different metrics like domain authority or page authority you have external links internal links you have no follow and follows and and you allow these little metrics related to off page seo so you’re going to have to understand what those metrics mean and if you can understand what those metrics mean and then more importantly act on those metrics then that’s what’s going to help you improve your results in terms of seo so again that’s going to be the common theme here so i’m just going to highlight again those metrics that you’re going to need to understand in order to better manage seo as a channel get on the on page side you need to understand the technicalities involved but for example page load what’s a good page load time it’s about page load time from a keyword perspective what’s good volume what’s bad volume what’s good competition what’s bad competition so if you can understand the intricacies of the measurements related to seo then that will help you improve upon this big channel called organic search so seo is the practice of getting relevant traffic to the website okay from organic search results so it really is essential to stay up to date and have a complete knowledge of the latest algorithm updates and factors that affect search engine ranking so that’s seo let’s transition to search engine marketing also known as paid search sponsored search google ads bing ads pay per click cost per click a lot of acronyms a lot of ways to describe it at the end of the day search engine marketing means that hey you as an advertiser have the ability and have the opportunity to rank at the very top of the google search results now it’s different than seo because you’re actually paying for the placement and so to be found at the top of the search engine results as a paid placement or sponsored ad means that if somebody clicks on your ad you’re gonna pay google x amount okay so unlike seo sem is very fast moving and so when we talk about fast moving we mean that you’re collecting a lot of data very quickly so sticking with the theme of what skills should i have for search engine marketing well if you’re going to collect data then that means you need to measure the results of that data and so sticking with our theme of measuring results you need to understand first and foremost what all the different metrics mean related to sentry engine marketing okay so i’m just gonna rattle off if you will a few of the metrics but the commonality here is yes you can learn what those metrics mean but you have to act on those metrics so one of the the main metrics involved with search engine marketing is impressions so impression is just basically how many people have seen your ad okay so if your ad shows up on the search results page regardless of whether somebody clicks on it or not you’re gonna get an impression okay so if you’re getting a lot of impressions that means a lot of people have seen your ad what’s a lot of impressions well it’s subjective okay so it could be a thousand impressions or ten thousand impressions at the end of the day that’s how many people have seen your ad now more importantly you have another metric called clicks clicks means how many people actually saw your ad and then clicked on your app okay so if you have 100 people that have seen your ad and one person who clicked on your ad then you have a click-through rate of one percent now when it comes to google ads and search engine marketing in general you want to have a high click-through rate especially on google because that does impact quality score so quality score is another metric you need to be aware of okay it’s a quality score simply a number between one and ten that’s assigned to each keyword okay so what impacts quality score click-through rate is one of the factors that impact quality score so if you have 200 or 300 or 500 or a thousand impressions and very little clicks that means your click-through rate is going to be low if your click-through rate is going to be low then your quality score is going to be low and in order to pay less to google you need to make sure that your quality score is good so you need to understand the factors involve a quality score you need to understand impressions clicks click-through rate because if you don’t have a good click-through rate then how do you improve that so it’s about measuring the results and acting upon the results those are the skills involved with search engine marketing and that’s just on the click side you got the conversion side of the house so you need to be able to understand how to get conversions and how to maintain a high conversion rate so for example if you have 100 clicks and only one conversion that is a one percent conversion rate okay fair enough but what are you paying per conversion what’s the cost per conversion okay and if that number is high like say 20 dollars and you’re only selling a product that’s say ten dollars well then you got a problem and so there’s a lot of different metrics involved with search engine marketing you’re collecting this data very quickly so you need to be able to react to the data that you see so that’s the skill set really involves search engine marketing if you’re getting the data if it’s a low click-through rate or low conversion rate or high cost per conversion or very low impressions you need to be able to understand how to react to what you’re seeing and what your data you’re collecting that to me is the primary skill bottom line with search engine marketing and there are other skill sets involved don’t get me wrong i mean it’s nice to be able to write copy because with search engine marketing typically the ads have very few characters involved so you need to be able to write a compelling ad to convince somebody to click on your ad and so writing copy being able to understand your target audience those are all things involved with managing search engine marketing but really the key component here is again measuring the results okay let’s switch over to a traditional marketing channel email marketing you know one of my favorites you know listen we’re all bombarded with emails uh and you know what it it becomes cumbersome at times i mean it’s easy to just disregard an email and so to me the key here if you’re going to do email marketing you need to have a certain set of skill sets and so what that skill set is is really understanding your audience because if you send an email to a certain set of recipients you need to hope that that email is relevant to that audience okay so you need to be able to really identify who it is we’re sending this email to and a recent study done by statista stated that 49 of consumers really like to receive promotional emails from their favorite brands so if you have a very strong brand then email marketing is probably a good channel for you if you don’t have a strong brand or nobody really knows about your brand or your product or your business then email marketing could be a little bit of a steeper hill to climb if you will but really email marketing is it involves emails that promote the brands products and services and if you could target the right audience or making sure you have the right audience then you got a good chance of having successful email marketing campaigns but when it comes to emails you know it’s like having a blank canvas you can be as creative as you want as long as you’re talking to the audience so the big skill set here again is copywriting and having some you know creativity involved with that copywriting saying the right things but not saying too much the same time making the email aesthetically pleasing as possible so that when somebody does open the email they’re going to be able to react to it so you know writing copy with strong call to action or really relevant copy that really talks to the audience i mean those are all keys for email marketing in my opinion also one thing we didn’t bring up in search engine marketing but it certainly holds true with search engine marketing as well as email marketing and that’s a b testing and so a b testing is simply taking an original and creating a variant and testing the two to see which one performs well you could certainly do av testing with email marketing that means taking a subject line that has traditionally worked for you or is relevant for that audience and then creating a variant or different subject line so if i’m going to send an email to 100 people i’m going to send 50 people one subject line and then the other 50 is going to get my variant subject client and why is this important because i want to be able to see what people react to okay so if i see the open rates higher for the variant versus the traditional or the original subject line then i know that this subject line works and therefore i’m going to apply this subject line moving forward and then what am i going to do i’m going to take it and test it against another variant so you should always do a b testing on subject lines so the concept of a b testing should not be lost on any digital marketer okay whether that be seo search engine marketing or email marketing okay so you should have an understanding of a b testing and of course going back to measuring results with email you have a different set of metrics we already mentioned open rates so if you send out 100 emails how many people open the email okay you want that open rate to be as high as possible and then when they open the email the people click on that cta or any of those links in the email okay so you want a high click-through rate and then more importantly when they click on a link in the email they’re gonna go to a landing page you want that person to engage with that landing page so what’s the engagement rate of the landing page from the email okay so it’s really important that you have an understanding of all the different metrics involved with email marketing and again how to react to that data so if you’re getting a low open rate could it be the subject line isn’t that good possibly that’s why you have to do testing if you’re getting a low click they’re right on the emails that could be because the copy may not be that great or the design or the call to action or it’s not compelling enough for the recipient of the email and then again the engagement on the landing page if you have a low engagement rate a low conversion rate you gotta look at that and figure out how to improve that okay so you can apply a b testing the landing page so there are always ways to react to the data regardless of what campaign or regardless of what digital marketing channel you’re working in so that’s the commonality here one point on email marketing is if you’re going to measure the results of the campaign whether you’re using you know vertical response or mailchimp or you know some other email marketing platform you want to make sure you have what we call a utm tracking and if you’re using google analytics having utm tracking or understanding what utm tracking is allows you to measure the results of that email marketing campaign in google analytics so that’s another skill set you should have being able to apply your tracking to your digital marketing campaigns including email okay because if you don’t it’s going to be hard to measure the results in google analytics so let’s focus on one more marketing channel here and that’s social media so we all know social media isn’t going anywhere it’s becoming more and more popular in fact your offshoot of social media is really influencer marketing uh you know if somebody an influencer has millions of likes on say tick tock or instagram you might want to engage with that influencer and help you promote your brand or your product isn’t that really what social media is it’s a platform whether that be you know facebook or or twitter it’s a it’s a platform to help you promote your brand your product your services and it’s a chance for you to get to message your user base your community prospective clients people who don’t even know about your brand it’s a chance to build awareness so social media holds a lot of different uh strategies if you will in fact nearly almost 4 billion of the world’s population uses social media let me see there’s seven something billion people in the world well that’s a large percentage the majority of the percentage of the world uses a social media platform okay in fact just like seo when you need an seo platform there are plenty of social media platforms there’s later there’s sprout social there’s hootsuite there’s buffer in fact buffer confirmed that 73 of marketers believe social media marketing has been somewhat effective or very effective for their business and that’s promising because social media in my opinion having been in this industry a while it can be a very fickle channel meaning if you’re trying to promote a product or service on facebook and it’s very very going to be very hard to pull that person away who’s engaged with their facebook feed not only just to get them away from the facebook feed onto your website but then to turn around and allow that person to try and convert okay based on what you have on your website so it’s challenging enough just to get them away from the social media platform let alone converting so that’s why when i say very fickle but you know it’s somewhat encouraging if buffer’s telling us that marketers believe that social media marketing can be effective and it can be effective you just have to have the right strategy so to me one of the skill sets you should have if you’re going to be a social media marketing manager is being able to understand you know what is the strategy here what are we trying to achieve when we set up a social media platform or enact a social media campaign okay and so that’s really the first thing it’s really understanding what platforms what’s the strategy here because if the strategy is brand awareness then what channels or social media platforms if you will work best for us is that twitter is that facebook so it’s being able to kind of formulate a strategy a plan if you will for social media marketing because the last thing you want to do as a marketer is endlessly just post content for the sake of just posting content because just like any other marketing channel you’re going to have metrics and social media is not shy on the metric front okay so you have reach you have impressions you have engagement rate in fact every social media channel has its own set of specific metrics whether that be likes followers shares uh reviews stars if you will so it really depends on the social media platform that you’re using but at the end of the day you need to be able to measure the results if you’re posting let’s just say on facebook and your whole job or strategy is to entice engagement meaning get people to share that particular post or act on that post then you need to be able to measure the engagement how many people saw the post how many people engaged with the post okay and so just like any other marketing channel you’re collecting data and you need to react to that data but more importantly it’s about being able to you know put a strategy together first and then i would you know a skill set i would recommend you have is understanding all the different social media platforms that are out there you know i just named buffer or hootsuite or sprout social they’re all good in their own right but they’re all going to have different features so to me understanding what social media platform works best for you you want to choose a social media platform that you know allows you to control what post you schedule when you schedule them how they’re scheduled what platform they’re scheduled on at the same time you want a social media platform that’s going to help you understand the engagement that you’re getting from that platform and you’ll probably want a social media platform that allows you to quote unquote listen in if you will on what users are you know reacting to in terms of hashtags or what’s trending on that particular platform okay so you want a listening tool if you will uh as part of that social media platform so it’s understanding what platform you want to use when it comes to social media marketing it’s understanding what strategy that that platform is going to help you when they enact okay and then it’s also that social media platform that’s going to help you understand the data so you can react to the data so those are all to me the skill sets you need as a social media manager and then an offshoot of social media is paid social so just like search engine marketing you can advertise on say twitter linkedin facebook on a cost per click basis meaning if you’re showing your ad on linkedin and somebody clicks on it you’re gonna pay for that click you’re going to pay linkedin or you’re going to pay twitter you’re going to play facebook so it’s understanding you know the skill sets involved with paid social is understanding what assets you can have when advertising on these platforms you know can you use video on linkedin or facebook um you know can you use what type of images and you know how big do those images need to be and can you have wording on those images or what are the guidelines involved with having images as part of your ads so having a full understanding of the types of assets that you can run in terms of your advertising on social media is very important in my opinion because it’s always changing and you want to be able to put the best asset the best message you want to put your best foot forward when advertising on social media and of course when you do advertise again a whole nother set of metrics you know how many people saw your at how many people clicked on your ad how many people engaged with the landing page how many people converted what was the cost per conversion so all of those are metrics that we covered in search engine marketing they apply with paid social so you have the opportunity on paid social you have the opportunity on social media to really get your message out there it’s really understanding what kind of data you’re collecting what are the results of the ad or the post and how do you react to that and that’s really the common theme with digital marketing skills if you’re not a big fan of numbers you’re not a big fan of excel if you will or spreadsheets if looking at a mountain of data scares you well then you might want to think otherwise when going into digital marketing but if you want to embrace the data then digital marketing is really a great career because if you can get the data and you know how to react to the data then you can be successful in any campaign you run right that should do it for today thanks for joining look forward to reaching out to you uh for more of these uh webinars uh feel free to email us or go check out our website at simplylearn.com thank you so much and i’ll see you soon [Music] before we get on to talking about mobile marketing let’s have a look at some stats related to mobile marketing first off mobile devices are used for over 40 of online transactions next we have marketers and advertisers put 51 percent of their budget into mobile ads and finally mobile is responsible for an average of more than 40 percent of revenue in leading b2b organizations so what is mobile marketing mobile marketing is a digital marketing strategy that started all the way

in 1992. remember sms’s that advertise stuff that’s what mobile marketing started off as the main objective with mobile marketing is to advertise products and services to a target audience through multiple channels on smartphones tablets and other mobile devices this is done through websites emails sms social media in-app notifications and other applications so here are key concepts related to mobile marketing first we have focusing on the customer and personalized marketing in mobile marketing the primary focus is on the customer want them to increase brand loyalty give customers special offers or show them personalized ads based on their location and purchase history basically by focusing on the customer it gives them the feeling that the brand is directly interacting with them and as a result their loyalty towards the brand greatly increases next we have identifying trends with data by leveraging data different trends can be identified from there you can create customer profiles and then with predictive and behavior analysis you get an understanding of what will better grab the attention of a customer then we have testing testing provides insights and learnings that would be extremely important to the success of the campaign for example say you do an a b test with that you’ll get the optimal variant of the two as well as further understanding of what works and what doesn’t and finally understanding mobile analytics having some experience with mobile analytics with some of the metrics that need to be focused on like engagement ratio cost per install and average revenue per user are very important for mobile marketing experience with mobile analytics tools can also help with insights that would help future decisions and experiments so if you’re interested in getting certified in mobile marketing you have options like mobile app marketing 2020 aso advertising and monetization by udemy and you also have digital marketing specialist certification by simply learn now let’s go to number nine crm or customer relationship management here are some interesting stats it is stated that towards the end of 2019 86 percent of customers are willing to pay 25 percent more for better customer experience also crm marketing will be worth 73 billion dollars in 2020. finally businesses that leverage crm software see sales increased by 29 sales productivity increased by 34 percent and sales forecast accuracy increased by 42 now that we have looked into these stats let’s understand what crm is all about crm is a technology with which an organization’s relationships and interactions with existing or potential customers are managed it’s basically a collection of strategies tools and technologies and crms aim to develop new customer relationships retain them or require new ones along with that it also helps companies with sales marketing and service management crms mainly store data like purchase history personal information and purchasing patterns so here are a few areas to focus in crm first we have data analytics crms provide a number of different metrics that can be analyzed and whose results can be incorporated into forthcoming campaigns now although what metric you focus on entirely depends on your requirements here are some of the commonly used metrics there’s customer churn which is basically customer attrition there’s nps which is a measure of how satisfied your customers are best customer retention cost and first contact resolution rate which is a percentage of customer support tickets that get resolved at the first shot next understanding how different crm tools work there are loads of options to choose from when it comes to crms there’s salesforce hubspot crm zoho crm microsoft dynamics and much more it is really important to have experienced at least the most commonly used ones since each of them have their own nuances advantages and disadvantages now let’s have a look at some of the certifications we have options like salesforce administrator certification training course by simplylearn dynamics 365 by microsoft and finally hubspot academy sales professional credential by hubspot so now let’s go to number eight at number eight we have designing like usual let’s have a look at some of the stats did you know that 32 percent of marketers say visual images are the most important form of content for their business with blogging in second well 70 of companies in western content marketing which could include visual marketing strategies so now let’s take a closer look at designing with designing the objective is to communicate as well as promote the products or services the brand is advertising in a visually appealing manner designing goes hand in hand with a great copy though even if you had the best looking creative in your ad it’s possible it won’t catch on if the copy accompanying it isn’t good you might wonder what does designing have to do with digital marketing plenty actually if you have an understanding of designing yourself in the scenario where graphic designers are unable to bring your idea to life you could do it yourself desiring for yourself what the content will convey not only that you might be able to provide some insight in the designing of the creative for the ad next let’s have a look at key concepts of designing firstly a basic understanding of design philosophies are necessary which means you need to know about concepts like using attention grabbing and relevant images the golden point rule and much more then there needs to be an understanding of tools like adobe photoshop and after effects these are some of the most commonly used tools for creating creatives and even the basic experience with these software could be extremely useful later on now let’s have a look at some certifications we have certifications like graphic design by coursera introduction to graphic design by linkedin and fundamentals of graphic design again by coursera next at number seven we have listening now let’s talk about social listening social listening is a method through which a brand can learn about what customers are saying about them and the industry online by monitoring digital conversations the brand social media channels can track analyze and respond to conversations and feedback improving their relationship with the users who may become potential customers and thus increasing loyalty of present customers and it’s a proven fact that customers are drawn towards brands that are prompt in response now let’s have a look at some key concepts understanding how different social media platforms work how is each platform different from the other where does most of your audience come from which platform is better suited for your content those are the questions that need to be answered then experience with popular social listening tools like hubspot and hootsuite these platforms can help with a number of different situations like pr crisis respond to customer complaints find user generated content to obtain competitive intelligence take suggestions and much more next at number six we have copywriting first let’s have a look at some stats it is stated that 64 percent of b2b marketers outsource their demanding copy needs next it also says that a compelling copy draws 7.8 times more site traffic and produces brand recall which brings higher engagement rates now let’s talk about what is copywriting copywriting is an act of creating promotional texts that could be advertised in brochures notifications billboards emails and so on the primary objective here is that the written content called copy or sales copy increases brand awareness and persuades individuals to take a particular action be it signing up to a website buy a product and so on now let’s have a look at some key concepts of copywriting first understanding the customers and the competition so from the customers several bits of vital information can be obtained like what kind of writing gets the maximum amount of engagement what kind they dislike and much more likewise from the competition you can find out what kind of writing they have success with what they are doing better from your brand and so on this one goes without saying but to have success with copywriting you need to be well versed with grammar and have sufficiently good writing skills let’s have a look at some certifications now here we have the creative copywriter academy then we have the idm award in digital copywriting by the institute of data and marketing and finally we have american writers and artists copywriting course next up number five email marketing first let’s have a look at some stats according to statista in 2019 global email users amounted to 3.9 million by 2023 this is set to grow to 4.3 billion next it also states that 81 smbs rely on email as their primary customer accusation channel and 80 for retention next again by statista it states that 49 of consumers would like to receive promotional emails from their favorite brands so now let’s have a look at email marketing email marketing is a method for performing digital marketing by using emails to promote products and services to a highly targeted audience in a way email marketing could nurture the relationship with your customers or completely drive them away with email marketing customers can be communicated with directly with personalized emails helping them stay updated with items or offers it also serves a purpose of informing people about your brand or keeping existing customers engaged between purchases now let’s have a look at key concepts first we have focusing on personalization and automation emails can be set up in such a way that customers are regularly sent emails on a regular basis to keep in touch with them inform them about new products and other forms of engagement then we have complying with data privacy rules privacy has been the talking point for a while now most recently the gdpr brought about a number of restrictions that have to be adhered to by organizations so it’s absolutely necessary that these privacy guidelines are followed or would you rather spend 10 million pounds next experimenting with different kinds of content emails can have images gifs or videos attached to them and each of them can impact your customer base in a different manner depending on their requirements so different kinds of content need to be experimented with to determine the one that works best for you and finally understanding popular tools and metrics to be successful at email marketing it is absolutely necessary to be experienced with tools like hubspot and mailchimp these platforms come with a number of features like contact segmenting autoresponders service and app integration a b testing and much more next up we have certifications here we have certifications like hubspot academy email marketing by hubspot then email and affiliate marketing mastermind by uteny and finally advanced email marketing certification training by simply learn so now that we have reached midway i have a question for you guys what do you guys think is in the number one section let me know in the live chat i’d like to know what you guys think if you enjoy watching informative tech videos like this one consider subscribing to simply learn’s channel to stay up to date on the trending technologies and hit the bell icon to never miss an update in the future now back to number 4 social media marketing before we go in let’s have a look at some stats according to statista nearly 50 percent of the world’s population uses social media 73 percent of marketers believe social media marketing has been somewhat effective or very effective for their business lastly 90.4 percent of millennials 77.5 percent of generation x and 48.2 percent of baby boomers are active social media users so now let’s have a look at social media marketing social media marketing involves the usage of social media platforms to build a brand drive traffic to your website and increase sales this helps marketers achieve their marketing and branding goals by creating and sharing content on social media activities like text and image updates video and other content that can drive engagement social media marketing also enables marketers to perform paid advertising with this your brand’s content like articles videos and images are exposed to a high quality targeted audience next let’s have a look at some key concepts of social media marketing first understanding how to work with different social media platforms is necessary every social media platform comes with its own kind of audience nuances advantages and disadvantages so it’s important to have experience with them so that the one that best suits your requirements can be selected next we have monetization on youtube which is also a social media platform you could monetize your videos to get some income out of them other options include affiliate marketing influencer marketing events and much more then we have analytics experience with social media marketing tools like buffer and buzzsumo can help organizations by providing alerts based on keywords brand names links domain and much more among other things it also tracks competitors and analyzes their content to determine what they are doing better then we have knowing your brand’s user base and optimizing your content it’s important to understand your brand’s user base to determine what they like the most on your social media page and then optimize it now let’s have a look at some certifications here we have advanced social media certification training by simplylearn then we have social media marketing on linkedin learning and finally hootsuite social marketing certification by hootsuite and now for the top three number three pay-per-click of ppc first let’s have a look at some stats 33 percent of people click on paid search ad because it directly answers their search query it also states that paid ads have a 11.38 ctr on google and finally according to google businesses make an average of two dollars in income for every one dollar they spend in google ads now let’s talk about ppc it is a form of online advertising in which advertisers spend a certain amount of money each time their advertisement is clicked this process if done properly can drive people to your website without having to get them organically search engine marketing is one of the most popular methods to perform ppc for ppc most search engines are part of an automated process performed by the search engine to determine how relevant and valid they are to appear in the search engine result page now let’s have a look at some key concepts of ppc first it’s important how different search engines and their advertising works each of them have their own but somewhat similar rules prices restrictions and so on then we have google ads one of the most popular and lucrative players among the search engines google ads provides marketers with a sizable chunk of the internet to advertise to it is important to properly understand how google ads works and how its many features and functionalities can be used efficiently for more on google ads why don’t you check our introductory video on it i’ll link it in the chat next analytics different metrics like cpc or course per click clicks click-through rate and quality score need to be understood so that optimal and well-informed decisions can be made finally we have copywriting and visual design ability as i mentioned earlier either of these don’t work without the other which means the experience in both these concepts would be greatly beneficial for the individual and the organization now let’s have a look at some certifications we have google ads certifications by google then advanced pay per click ppc certification training by simply learn and finally we have microsoft and excellence program by microsoft now for the top two search engine optimization let’s first look at some stats according to zero limit web on the first page alone the first five organic results account for 67.60 of all the clicks and according to google where to buy plus near me mobile queries have grown by over 200 percent in the past two years and finally according to hubspot 57 percent of b2b marketers stated that seo generates more leads than any other marketing initiative so what exactly is search engine optimization search engine optimization or a ceo refers to the method adopted by an organization to grow the quality and quantity of website traffic by making it more visible to the users of a particular web search engine this is possible with the help of organic search results seo improves unpaid results and doesn’t count traffic obtained from paid ads next let’s have a look at some key concepts of seo technical seo the technical side of seo like server side settings site maps server response code rewrites and so on will help you take advantage of both page level and server level optimization to ensure they are found by search engines this by extension helps generate traffic and conversions next content marketing it is important to be well versed in content marketing as both seo and content marketing can not exist without the other content marketing provides high quality content and seo provides the appropriate keywords that would help it get noticed by search engines next link building the process of search engine optimization can only be successful if there’s a combination of both external link building and internal link optimization one builds links with credible websites and the other performs link optimization on your own properties and social media platforms now we have site usability seo must focus on good site usability this is an indication of how objects are placed in your website and if the information provided is useful for the users it also indicates if the site is easy to use and navigate then you need to have experience with tools like moz and google analytics to take appropriate inferences from the data obtained and finally we have google analytics and google webmaster google analytics will help with tracking and reporting website traffic google webmaster will help track your website’s search performance with the help of google search console and additional resources now let’s have a look at some certifications here we have seo training course by mers which is provided by udemy and we have search engine optimization training course by simply learn and finally we have hubspot seo training course provided by hubspot finally number one it’s data analytics data analysis is a process which looks into collecting and organizing data by doing so helpful conclusions are drawn these conclusions can be incorporated into the upcoming campaigns of the organization the information that is analyzed is collected with the help of analytical and logical reasoning here are some key concepts of data analysis first understanding popular data analytics tools like apache spark tableau and sas can be greatly helpful in the process of data analysis then we have google analytics google analytics is a tool that helps businesses analyze their website it records activities of users visiting your website along with additional information like their age gender and interests this is then sent to the google analytics server and then can be used by you to make decisions regarding upcoming campaigns then we have data visualization data visualization enables data to be translated into a chart graph or other visual component understanding data visualization would help with understanding data in a quick and clean manner it enables brands to identify emergent trends and to respond to it quickly with it the brand story can also be shared with others thanks to being able to create a narrative with graphics and diagrams and finally a clear understanding of data structures fundamentals and basic statistics can greatly ease the process of data analysis now let’s have a look at some certifications here we have introduction to data analytics for business by coursera then we have data analyst masters program by simply learn and finally we have micromasters program and marketing analytics by edx today i’m going to tell you how you can become a digital marketer so first off let’s answer the most important question who is a digital marketer now a digital marketer is responsible for several things let’s go through some of them first off they’re responsible to develop as well as manage marketing campaigns to ensure that the goals of the organization are fulfilled they need to create a marketing strategy which is based on analyzing their competition as well as the benchmarks within the industry they need to drive website traffic as well as acquire leads which are then worked upon by the organization or the business they need to utilize web analytics tools so that they can measure and optimize the campaign which is basically figuring out how well the campaign is doing and if it’s not doing well how they can make it better and finally they need to be able to enhance brand awareness which is just letting people know that the brand exists and how the brand can make their lives better next up let’s talk about how to become a digital marketer to become a digital marketer you need a certain set of skills skills like search engine optimization search engine marketing or sem email marketing social media marketing affiliate marketing content marketing and finally mobile marketing so the first step you need to take to become a digital marketer is to learn seo so seo or search engine optimization is the process of increasing the quality of your organic traffic which is nothing but the traffic that comes to your website without having seen any paid advertisements just because your website is one of the first few results when they search a particular query on a search engine seo involves on-page seo as well as off-page seo so how to do on-page seo first off you need to do keyword research keyword research is one of the most important steps when it comes to seo it is the process of identifying popular words and phrases used on search engines by users you need to be able to identify keywords with high search volume high relevancy and low competition next up we have technical audit so search engines around the world have internet bots performing a particular process known as crawling in this process these search engine internet bots these search engine bots also known as spiders scan a website and copy the entire website’s content and store it within the search engine for it to index now you need to ensure your site is being crawled and indexed next you have onsite optimization you need to develop high quality content meta tags url and sitemaps and finally user experience you need to provide good website architecture as well as internal linking structure next up let’s talk about how to do off-page seo this is made possible with the help of link building this is the process of navigating links from other websites to your own and by building external links to your website your organic search ranking can be improved now let’s talk about some seo tools you have moz google keyword planner semrush and ahrefs now let’s talk about the next step required to become a digital marketer which is to learn sem or search engine marketing search engine marketing is a practice of marketing a business using paid advertisements on search engines and other websites so basically this is a way of attracting users towards your website or a particular product that you’re offering so how can you do sem or search engine marketing first off you need to determine your goal and define a budget you need to ensure that you have a goal in mind for example do you want more leads do you want to increase traffic or improve brand awareness and much more after you’re done with that you need to define a budget how much money are you ready to spend to achieve this goal then you need to choose a list of relevant keywords which is keywords on which you’ll be bidding to advertise you need to finalize your keywords and then bid on them which is basically are you ready to pay for how many clicks you’re getting or for acquiring customers or making them leads and so on you need to create a compelling headline for your ad campaign you need to monitor the performance of campaigns and measure results which is basically finding out whether the campaign is working out well and if it’s not to optimize it so that it works the next time and you need to target your audience with remarketing campaigns for example if a customer does not go through with the conversion process they can be added to the remarketing audience so that they can be advertised to again some of the popular sem tools are google adwords editor fb ads manager bing ads and adroll now for the next step to become a digital marketer you have to learn email marketing now email marketing is a really efficient as well as inexpensive way to generate high return on investment it can be used to convert prospects into customers by sending personalized emails to a targeted audience so how do you perform email marketing first off you need to discover your target audience and create segments in which you can divide them depending on their behavior you need to select and create your type of campaign depending on the goals you want to achieve you need to select a suitable design for your campaign you need to have a compelling subject line and email content which is very important when it comes to email marketing you need to send campaigns immediately or schedule an email and finally you need to measure results such as open rate click-through rate response rate and so on you also need to perform a b testing to find out what works and what doesn’t some of the popular email marketing tools are mailchimp hubspot marketo send in blue and so on and now for the next step you need to learn social media marketing social media marketing involves the promotion of your product and services on different social media platforms using different types of content now this could be just sponsored posts video advertisements images articles and so on now how can you do social media marketing first off you need to choose a suitable social media platform for your business it could be facebook youtube twitter linkedin and so on next up you need to find your target audience now each of these platforms has a particular niche that occupies it now for example facebook requires an active social media marketing strategy pinterest is usually used by females linkedin can be used for employee networking and youtube is a platform where people create as well as share video content and that’s the only content that works on youtube you need to create as well as curate engaging content because without your content being engaging nobody’s going to be interested in your product or service then you need to choose a social media management tool and finally you need to test evaluate and optimize your results now let’s talk about some popular social media marketing tools we have hootsuite tweet deck buffer sprout social and so many more now for your next step to becoming a digital marketer you need to learn affiliate marketing now affiliate marketing is a form of digital marketing that involves two players a merchant as well as an affiliate now a merchant is an individual who pays a commission to the affiliate who could be a third party site or entity to drive sales bring leads or new customers with the help of referrals now how can you do affiliate marketing first off you need to choose a tool through which you can find affiliates who can advertise your product now you need to choose affiliate on the basis of how much traffic the affiliate website gets how successful the affiliate’s previous campaigns were and and how much commission the affiliate asks for then you need to specify the format that the affiliate must use when they’re advertising your product or service you need to keep a record of the customers who purchased your product or service through the affiliate and finally pay the affiliate based on the commission rates now let’s talk about some of the popular affiliate marketing tools there’s cj affiliate volume has offers and even now for the next step to becoming a digital marketer you need to learn mobile marketing now mobile marketing enables the business to communicate with the targeted audience through any mobile device this is through sms emails mms’s and so on so how do you do mobile marketing first off you need to create a mobile buyer persona which is you know what kind of person is using the phone you need to set business goals like what goals basically determining what goals you want to achieve with the mobile marketing campaign then you need to conduct your campaign and reach your target audience with a personalized message to these users and finally you need to monitor these metrics and optimize them if required now let’s talk about some popular mobile marketing tools there’s slick text localities admob facebook mobile ads and much more now for your next step in becoming a digital marketer you need to learn content marketing content marketing is a bull marketing technique of creating as well as sharing valuable content now this could be blogs videos or articles which solves the problem of the target audience this holds their attention by adding value to their lives and can end up converting their interest into a purchase so how do you do content marketing firstly you need to define your goals as in what you want to achieve you need to define your target audience then you need to determine what kind of content you are creating it could be blog posts ebooks case studies infographics and so on you need to brainstorm for new content ideas you need to perform a content audit which is to evaluate content elements and information assets and choose a suitable content management system now you can plan create publish and measure your results all in one place using a content management system using a content management system such as the hubspot software next you need to promote your content using email affiliate and social media marketing finally you need to measure your success and optimize your content now let’s talk about some of the popular content marketing tools there’s linkedin pulse paper.li flipboard traffic and many many more now let’s talk about some additional resources now there are a huge number of videos online about digital marketing and i recommend you go through some of them so that you have a basic idea about their fundamentals now this is where simply learn’s youtube channel can help you you can take advantage of simply learn’s digital marketing tutorials you can go to this playlist right here and here you have tutorials on what is seo how you can rank number one on google keywords research facebook ads tutorial how you can rank your youtube videos facebook advertising tips and tricks social media marketing google tag manager google analytics and so much more now let’s have a look at the salaries of a digital marketer in the united states the average salary of a digital marketer is approximately 65 000 per year similarly the average salary for a digital marketer in india is approximately 5 lakh rupees per year now let’s talk about how you can become a certified digital marketer now there are a number of different certifications available for you there’s the google ads fundamental certification the facebook certified planning professional certification the hubspot content marketing certification the hootsuite social marketing certification and simply learns digital marketing specialist masters program now here’s another way simple learn can help you simply learn has a number of different digital marketing certification has a number of different digital marketing certifications let’s talk about the digital marketing specialist masters program in this program there are a number of different certifications such as the digital marketing certified associate advanced web analytics advanced seo and so on the certification also provides the omcp certification exam voucher worth 395 dollars upon the completion of the masters program it has 45 plus projects and can help you get a salary of close to 17 lakhs per annum it is also accredited by hootsuite facebook the omcp and so on so now let’s have a closer look at the digital marketing course or the digital marketing certified associate certification training now this certification provides 53 hours of instructor-led training 40 plus hours of self-paced videos instructor-led online project mentoring sessions helping you prep for examinations from the omca google ads and so on it has industry accreditations from hootsuite facebook and the omcp and it covers more than 35 tools such as facebook insights youtube analytics crazy egg google keyword planner google ad manager linkedin ads buffer semrush and so on so why don’t you go on to simplylearn.com so that you can get started on your journey getting certified and getting ahead hey guys welcome to this video on digital marketing career jobs resume salary skills roles and responsibilities so without further ado let’s jump right into it the 21st century has given us many things to be thankful for from technology to health care our lives have greatly improved for the better and many of these things wouldn’t have been possible without the internet not counting about the several ways it has improved our lives the internet has also made the life of marketers a whole lot easier earlier unless you had lots of money or were very popular your brand’s popularity would be limited to your locality but thanks to the internet you can advertise your content to anyone anywhere in the world the whole world is now your marketplace and that is because of digital marketing which is the process of advertising goods services and your brand with the help of digital channels like websites social media platforms search engines and so on digital marketing has the following types search engine optimization content marketing social media marketing search engine marketing affiliate marketing native advertising marketing automation and email marketing but you might be wondering who can ensure these digital marketing concepts are incorporated into a brand’s marketing campaigns to ensure the best possible output a digital marketer of course so now let’s talk about everything related to a digital marketer but before we can get started let’s go to a more familiar setting on where a digital marketer belongs and strives the office now let’s start by talking about who is a digital marketer a digital marketer is someone whose objective is use digital channels like search engines social media platforms affiliates and other opportunities to generate leads and build brand awareness everything the digital marketer is aimed at helping the brand grow but that’s not where his or her responsibilities end a digital marketer is also responsible for developing and managing marketing campaigns this means that the success of the entire marketing efforts of a brand or an organization entirely depends on how competently a digital marketer develops the marketing campaign the work doesn’t end there though the digital marketer also needs to manage the campaigns next like we mentioned earlier he or she needs to acquire leads and drive traffic to the brand’s website taking advantage of the digital channels we mentioned earlier alongside providing high quality content the digital marketer also needs to perform competitive analysis and industry benchmarking to understand what kind of content works best within your industry the kind of content that your competition posts and what works for them they’re also responsible for using tools like buffer hootsuite and sprout social to measure and optimize marketing campaigns based on data obtained from the tools and finally they’re responsible for improving brand awareness by advertising the organizations or brands content on digital marketing channels let’s now talk about the skills required to become a digital marketer now let’s have a look at the different types of digital marketing there’s search engine optimization content marketing social media marketing search engine optimization affiliate marketing and email marketing let’s talk about search engine optimization first search engine optimization is the process of improving the overall quality and quantity of the organic traffic coming to your website via search engines with seo you’re able to attract visitors who would be actually interested in the products or services that your brand is offering without having to pay a single penny the process of seo has two parts on page and off page seo let’s have a look at each of them in detail first let’s have a look at on-page seo on-page or on-site seo is a method of search engine optimization that involves the optimization of elements on a website like its content or html code to help increase the amount of traffic coming to your website and improve its search engine rankings it also helps users easily understand what a page is all about and whether or not your page addresses their search query on-page seo is possible with the help of keyword research technical audits on-site optimizations and enhanced user experiences next we have off-page seo off-page or off-site seo refers to actions taken outside your website to affect your rankings in search engine result pages it involves promotional methods to improve search engine and user perception of your site’s popularity relevance trustworthiness and authority off-page seo can also be performed with the help of link building which is getting other websites to link back to your website some of the popular seo tools are moz google keyword planner and ahrefs next up we have content marketing content marketing refers to the process of marketing that focuses on creating and sharing valuable relevant and consistent content like blogs videos infographics and case studies to bring the attention of a targeted online audience to the brand’s products and services the process of content marketing involves firstly to decide what goal you want to achieve with your marketing campaign do you want more subscribers more conversions increased leads that’s what you need to decide here then you need to set up buyer personas a buyer persona is a profile created based on research that represents the target customer that might enjoy your products or services with this you can identify the ideal audience that might be interested in your content next you’ll need to perform a content audit it involves taking a look at all the content on your website and assessing its relative strengths and weaknesses in order to prioritize your future marketing activities then you need to choose a content management system of your choosing there are a number of options available like wordpress mailchimp and squarespace you will need to keep brainstorming for new forms of content that will attract the attention of new audience you will need to focus on a particular form of content you want to focus on and finally you’ll need to publish and manage your content now let’s talk about popular content marketing tools there’s buffer basumo follower wonk and hootsuite let’s now talk about the next type of digital marketing that is social media marketing social media marketing refers to a form of marketing that involves the usage of social media platforms to connect with your audience to build your brand to increase sales and to drive traffic you will need to listen to and engage with followers analyze results and run social media advertisements the process of social media marketing involves like before you first need to determine what goal you want to achieve you need to determine whether you need increased conversions email signups lead generation or any other marketing goal at this stage you need to determine what your audience enjoys the most you need to find out which files get the most amount of engagement likes or shares then you’ll need to research about your competition within your niche see what kinds of content they post what content of theirs receives the most engagement from their audience and how you can make similar content you will then need to perform a social media audit through which you can analyze content on your social media profile and understand their strengths and weaknesses to determine what kinds of content you can post then you will need to create an account on a social media platform of your choice like linkedin facebook instagram twitter or youtube and start creating marketing strategies on how to make the most out of them you should also take into consideration other brands that have already established themselves in social media for inspiration you can analyze what kind of content they post and how you can replicate the same you will then need to create a social media calendar these are spreadsheets or applications that will enable you to plan your social media posts in advance you can plan when content will be shared manage them and track the deadlines and finally you will need to keep testing evaluating and making adjustments to your marketing campaigns to finally reach the sweet spot where you have a perfect social media marketing campaign here are some of the popular social media marketing tools there is hootsuite tweetdeck sprout social and buffer just to name a few next up let’s have a look at search engine marketing search engine marketing or sem is a marketing process that involves websites increasing the amount of traffic as well as their visibility on search engine result pages by taking advantage of paid advertising let’s now take a look at the process of search engine marketing first off as usual is to determine what goal you want to achieve with your sem campaign mode leads conversions subscriptions you decide then you will need to research what kinds of keywords you want to advertise on this is a really important decision that carries a lot of monetary weight as choosing the wrong keywords may have your brand competing against larger ones in a bidding battle you have no chance of winning you will then need to decide on what keywords you want to advertise and then start bidding on them to ensure that a user sees your ad when they search for that particular keyword you will need to set up a headline for your ad campaigns as a well-written headline for your ad can make the difference between a potential customer coming to your website and buying your products and then being completely turned off by your brand you will need to monitor your campaigns and measure how well you’re doing so that you can make the appropriate adjustments and finally you will need to make sure you make regular optimizations and adjustments based on the data you’ve collected and re-target potential customers to renew their interest in your brand some popular search engine marketing tools are google ads facebook ads manager ad role and binge ads just to name a few next up let’s take a look at affiliate marketing affiliate marketing is the process of paying an affiliate who could be a particular website or other entity to advertise a merchant’s products the affiliate usually promotes the product and earns a commission for each sale they make this is usually done using referrals via registrations email sign ups conversions and subscriptions here’s the process of affiliate marketing first you will need to decide the affiliate network you want to choose the affiliate network is like a favor for both merchants and affiliates here a merchant gets to decide which affiliate they want to work with and vice versa as a merchant you will need to set up specific rules guidelines image specifications commission costs and other details that an affiliate needs to accept before they can apply to advertise for you after this affiliates apply to advertise on the merchant’s behalf the merchants decide which affiliate they want to go with and would be the best representation of their brand now once an affiliate has been selected he or she places ads on their website or the platform of their choosing advertising the merchant’s products interested customers then click on these ads and are sent to the merchant’s website if customers make a purchase the affiliate network makes a note of it the transaction is then validated and credited to the affiliate and finally the affiliate is given his or her commission and likewise the process repeats itself here are some of the popular affiliate marketing tools we have cj affiliate volume even and has offers just name a few again now we are having a look at the last type of digital marketing and that is email marketing email marketing is the process of using personalized emails to convert prospective users into potential customers here’s the process of email marketing first you decide on what goal you want to achieve with your email marketing campaign then you decide what kind of emails you want to send is it a welcome email a newsletter a lead nurturing email a re-engagement email that’s what you’ve got to decide here next you can choose an email marketing tool of your choosing these tools can help you with templates for emails create email lists track performance and do much more you will then need to attract users with a reason to subscribe to your emails with attractive opt-in advantages like exclusive access to sales discounts and so on you will need to plan emails and their respective follow-ups with an email calendar you will also need to create an attractive subject line and copy that’ll attract the attention of potential customers but the job isn’t done after creating an attractive subject line in copy your email also has to have an attractive design and finally you will need to perform a or b tests and use analytics to measure how well your campaign is doing based on this you can make the appropriate adjustments to make sure the upcoming campaigns are a success some popular email marketing tools are mailchimp hubspot sendinblue and marketo just to name a few now let’s take a look at some digital marketer carriers here are some of the most popular job roles you can have we’ll be talking about the salaries of these job roles courtesy of glassdoor first we have digital marketing manager a digital marketing manager earns approximately seventy five thousand dollars per annum in the us in india he or she can earn approximately seven lakh rupees per annum next we have seo manager in the united states an seo manager earns approximately 62 000 per annum whereas in india an seo manager earns approximately 5 lakhs per annum then we have search engine marketing or ppc expert a ppc expert in the us earns approximately 74 000 dollars per annum whereas in india a ppc expert can earn approximately 4 lakh rupees per annum next up we have the social media manager in the us a social media manager earns approximately fifty thousand dollars per annum in india he or she can earn approximately five lakhs per annum and finally we have the content marketing manager a content marketing manager can earn approximately 65 000 in the united states in india he or she can earn approximately 5 lakh rupees per annum let’s have a look at a sample digital marketer resume first off you start off with the usuals like name address and the other stuff following this you will need to add a brief summary of your years of experience and the different important skills you have experience with in this case this person has two years of experience in just about every important type of digital marketing your summary can vary based on the job role you’re looking for you give them links to your socials and then add experience this is the part where you can highlight your achievements during your years of work here you can see how this person has brought growth in just about every channel he’s gotten into the most important part to remember here is that the stuff you add here must be quantitative with actual stats about how your work brought growth to your organization again depending on the job role you’re applying for you can choose to elaborate on some of your achievements over others then you can cover the different tools you’ve got experience with make sure you add relevant tools related to this job role you’re looking for for example for the role of a sem expert having experience with google ads and google analytics is mandatory so that has to be a part of this list you can add concise details about your education and then talk about the courses you’ve completed having completed the right courses can have a significant impact on your higher ability today we’re going to talk about digital marketing tools so fasten your seat belts and let’s get started so what we’re going to do is we’re going to take a look at some of the best digital marketing tools for not only 2019 but ones that have performed well in the past that are popular and ones that we foresee as being the go-to tools for the future so past present and future digital marketing tools is the way to look at this with a good focus on a lot of different marketing channels here so we’re going to focus first on seo talk about some of the tools related to on-page and off page we’re going to switch over to paid search talk a little bit about paid search tools we’re going to talk about email marketing and some of the email marketing platforms and the tools within those platforms the center of it all is web analytics so google analytics is the tool we’ll be taking a closer look at in today’s webinar and all that it has to offer okay affiliate marketing we’ll talk about some of the tools available to you and for affiliate marketing we’d be remiss we didn’t talk about social media and all that it has to offer and all the metrics and tools available all the platforms available so we’ll hone in on a couple of examples there and then we’ll also talk about some competition tools available for you so there’s a whole suite of tools the one caveat being hey if you have your favorite tool continue using it in fact if there’s a tool that we didn’t mention in today’s webinar feel free to mention it in the comment box below this video we’d love to hear what you’re using to manage your particular digital marketing channel okay and so the goal for today’s webinar is hey we hope you get something out of this in terms of using new tools there’s some tools that i use some tools that my colleagues use everybody uses different tools so be good to kind of see what else is out there so if you have something to share share it by all means what we’re trying to do is share what we think are you know best practices and some of the most popular or most used tools out there in the industry so that’s what we’re going to do the goal is to get you to better understand some of the tools we’re using a little bit more detail and what we’re going to do is start out with search engine optimization okay so search engine optimization or organic search we have a mixture of paid and free so there’s a lot of different platforms but if you’re focusing on seo you certainly need to use an seo platform so there’s sem rush okay you also have google search console which is free so if you don’t have a seo platform you definitely need to be using google search console and so we’ll take a closer look at that there’s google keyword planner which is actually situated under google ads and so if you’re running google campaigns on google search network or even the display network you have access to a great tool called keyword planner and if you know anything about seo you’ll know that using google’s keyword planner is a good tool so we’ll take a look at that moz is a freemium tool meaning they have a free trial that you can sign up for to test drive it but it’s another seo platform and it does cost money got a great tool in screaming frog that’s a paid version again not too expensive we’ll talk a little bit more about that and then we have you know a tool in ahrefs that help us with all aspects of seo primarily focusing on off page so these are just some examples that we’re going to hone in on but this is just a small subset of what really is available out there in the market so let’s go ahead and dive a little bit deeper and understand why we use some of these tools well the first reason when we talk about seo is to find relevant keywords not only do we want to find relevant keywords we want to find relevant keywords with high volume and low competition okay we wouldn’t want to find non-relevant keywords with high competition low volume that wouldn’t make sense so we need a tool to kind of help us put it all together and so the tool of choice for us is google’s keyword planner and google’s keyword planner helps us hone in on keywords we may be interested in optimizing for because not only one are they relevant but two they’re going to have high volume and low competition so let’s take a look at an example in google’s keyword planner so here i am i’m in google’s keyword planner and as i mentioned before google’s keyword planner is situated under google ads okay so you have to have a google ads account to use google’s keyword planner and so when you’re in google ads you simply go to tools and then under tools you’re going to select keyword planner so what we want to do is look for keywords we’re focusing on organic search not necessarily paid search so organic search we want to hone in on some keywords so let’s just use one of the examples that google has given us here mail delivery so we’re going to just type in mail delivery and get some results so notice i can enter a domain as a filter and so in other words hey i could say look hone in on keywords related to this website if i wanted to but i’m asking google hey just give me something closely related to mail delivery because that’s my business so i’m going to click click get results notice i can add another key to it if i wanted to but i’m just going to stick with one keyword but there are certainly other keywords that i can certainly hone in on if mail delivery is my business and so let’s just hone in on that one keyword mail delivery we want to be found organically for that keyword so what google keyword planner does is not only give us the keyword and other keywords relevant to that but it gives us the average monthly search volumes and this is an average over the course of the last 12 months and notice here i get a column for competition so i’m able to see whether that’s a very competitive keyword or not and then just to give you an extra edge when you’re choosing keywords you can get a sense of what the keyword may cost if you wanted to bid on that for paid search so for mail delivery i can see it’s anywhere between 7.46 and at the top of the page high range 16.61 so that should alert me to the fact that hey if i’m gonna try and optimize for this keyword i know it’s competitive because not only google is telling me it’s competitive by telling me high competition but i know that the cost per click seems a little bit high and what is a little bit high well you know i can see some other keywords here that you know a dollar to three dollars okay i could see some other ones that are even lower than the seven dollars they’re suggesting so that’s a indication that the keyword is highly competitive so the idea here using google’s keyword planner is one we want to get an idea of what other keywords are out there that are relevant so it helps stimulate some ideas for relevancy two we can get an average monthly search volume so we want to know on average over the past 12 months how many search queries i can expect from this keyword and then three i can get a sense of the competition how competitive is this keyword so if i try to optimize for this keyword and i want to rank for it organically is it competitive if it’s competitive then it’s probably going to take me a bit longer to be found for this keyword on page one of google so that’s the whole idea behind google’s keyword planner and note that you could change some of the settings here so if you want to choose a different language okay you can hone in on a longer or shorter period of time you can even choose a specific location so i chose taxes i can certainly choose the entire united states to get a sense of what the volume would be for the total u.s so you have settings that you can change and manipulate to get you the data you need to choose keywords so that’s the whole idea behind google’s keyword planner to find relevant keywords high volume low competition now alternatively i can certainly use another tool to find keywords so i have a moz account so i logged into moz and moz has a tool called keyword explorer so if i use that same keyword i used in google’s keyword planner mail delivery i’m going to ask moz to give me some data on that keyword so this is for the entire united states and again i can change that if i wanted to okay so i can hone in on a specific country or different country so what moz is telling me hey for this keyword in the entire united states i’m looking at anywhere from eleven and a half thousand to thirty thousand on monthly volume now what moz does is they give you a difficulty score so a difficulty score is a score between one and one 100 and so i could see this is pretty much right down the middle in terms of difficulty okay so if it’s zero it’s an easy keyword if it’s if it’s a hundred it’s very difficult and then that means you have a lot of competitors who are optimizing for this keyword that are ranking for this keyword and so moz gives us the volume they give us the competition and they just like google’s keyword planner gives us some other keywords that we can potentially hone in on so here i could see keyword delivery plans delivery services etc so i can see a lot more suggestions than what’s listed here so moz delivers a bunch of other analysis related to the keyword you know they also give you some good keyword suggestions so moz is a good alternative tool and we’ll be coming back to moz related to seo for some other of its features but for now if you don’t want to necessarily use google’s keyword planner because maybe you’re not running google ads you can always use mazda remember moz has basically a freemium version meaning you can sign up for a free account and you can sign up for a free account as a test trial and you could test it for a period of days and leverage its tools during that free trial to get a better sense of how these tools work so we want to be able to use mods we want to be able to use google’s keyword planner not only to search for all those relevant keywords available to you but we want to be able to choose keywords with high volume and low difficulty low competition we also want to select primary and second keywords wisely so remember when you optimize you’re optimizing a page for more than one keyword so you want to be able to have a nice portfolio of diverse relevant keywords with high search volume and low difficulty and then you want to be able to identify those keywords that your competitors are ranking for so moz gives you that information and so we want to be able to leverage the tools available to us to choose the right keywords so if you need any more information on this we got a nice webinar on keyword research for seo so take a look at that video on youtube and to get more specific details about using seo tools for keyword research and all about keyword research in general for seo so let’s talk about some other reasons under seo what we would use some of these tools available to us well we want to be able to understand the search engines and how they crawl and index our site okay we also want to check the correct format of the site map and we want to monitor backlinks okay we also want to analyze linking to our web page okay which ones are good which ones are not good okay we also want to perform some competitor analysis so these are some of the reasons why other than keyword research why would we use some of these seo tools so we have tools available to us some majestic hrefs again moz let’s take a look at google search console and i want to hone in on google search console because it is free and it’s a must if you’re going to work on seo you need to be working in google search console and so the whole key behind google search console is you have a website and you need to get that site verified once it’s verified when school can recognize that you are associated with this website then you’re going to be able to see some important information so here i’m looking at a website and what am i looking at i’m looking at something called coverage under index so what does coverage mean well going back to what we just said we want to be able to understand how google’s crawling and indexing our pages and so what google does is through this platform search console is they’re letting us know once they go to our website and start crawling it and they pull these pages back to their server they’re letting us know if we actually have any issues so here i can see i have some issues with 112 pages and some of those issues are listed down here so there could be a crawl issue a 404 you know redirect okay so you could see there’s some five unique issues across 112 pages so here i could see submitted url marked new index there’s a hundred of those pages we have some redirect errors there’s seven pages that you know fall victim to this error and so we can really hone in um what the error is and address the error okay so if google’s telling us hey this is an issue and you want that page indexed by google then we should probably address the error and so that’s the great thing here about going into google search console is you can under index go to coverage and get a sense of what google is indexing and what they’re not indexing so these are the errors i can see they

certainly were able to crawl and index 9115 pages they were able to crawl okay and they excluded 54 000 plus pages and then we also have some pages with some warnings so this is kind of an overview of what google sees when they crawl our site so when they say crawl they’re coming to our site they’re following links on the site and every link they follow they’re either going to index that page or they’re going to report to you an error or an issue that they found if we want these pages indexed we need to address the issues the errors and so that’s the beauty of this report here is google is telling us firsthand what the issues are so we also want to take a look at the sitemap so you have an opportunity to submit a sitemap and a sitemap is just a formatted file that includes all your website urls and so you’re going to have this file sitting in your root directory and you’re probably going to call it or should call it sitemap.xml xml being the format so once you have this file you’re just going to let google know that that file exists so you’re going to enter in the sitemap url so if it’s in the root directory all you’re going to do is type in sitemap.xml and click submit so once you’ve done it just like this site is done what google’s going to do is say hey look we see you’ve submitted this and we last read it a couple days ago and we could see that we discovered 1419 urls so i can go back under coverage and i can see some of the issues that they found but if i go back under site maps i can see that these are the urls they’ve discovered via the sitemap and so the whole point of a sitemap is we want to be able to get and push the urls to google not have google come to our site and discover them this is a quicker faster more efficient way to communicate with google all the urls that you have on your site that you want google to index and so that’s the beauty of search console now while we’re in search console we might as well take a look at some of the other features it has and so one of the most important features under search console is this mobile usability report okay so google is a staunch believer in mobile first so nowadays most people start and finish a lot of their searches a lot of their behavior on mobile so they begin it on mobile and they may end it on mobile so if they don’t end it on mobile then you know perhaps they’ll go into a store or perhaps they’ll go via desktop but google is a staunch believer and definitely a lot of what’s going on today starts with mobile so they want you to understand how your site fares via mobile and when i say fares via mobile is it mobile friendly is it responsive is it loading quick enough you know is it formatted to google standards and so if there are any issues google is going to let you know what those issues are so here i could see google’s recognized 206 pages before different issues okay so here i can see what those issues are just like the coverage issues we can see specifically what they are and so here i can see for 206 pages text too small to read click elements too close together the viewport not set to device width and then content wider than the screen so there’s 10 pages that fit under this error and if i actually click on it the error i can see what those 10 pages are and so when we’re done we can actually when we address the issues we can actually have google validate whether the fix has been made so you can definitely use this as a means of communicating directly with google telling google look i see what the issues are i’m gonna fix them and then i want you to validate them okay so this is important because if you can communicate with google and let them know hey we do recognize the errors we are fixing the errors please validate them you know it’s going to draw google’s attention google’s going to validate them and get these pages indexed quicker so if you ignore the issues and the errors especially for mobile then you stand the chance of your pages not getting indexed so the mobile usability report to me is an important report because we want to better understand whether google’s picking up issues on mobile and if they are we want to address them get google valid them so google can index them quicker now there’s another report that is of interest to you or may be of interest to you in google search console and that’s the links report so the links report in google search console shows us what pages have the most links okay so here we can see the home page has 26 000 plus links if we hone in on interior pages we can see the links to those pages okay so we can get a sense of what are the top link pages from external links meaning links on other websites pointing to these pages i can also see internal links so google is recognizing links from within my website from one page to another so external links internal links both factors for seo when ranking so then i could see top linking sites what sites are linking to my site and then i can see top linking text so google search console has given me kind of an overview of what my leaking structure looks like okay so externally i want links from other websites pointing to various pages on my site and i certainly want my pages linking to one another on my site and so i’ll be able to better understand what that structure looks like using google search consoles links report okay there’s one more report that i think’s of interest in google search console and that’s the performance report so the performance report is a report that actually you can link up with google analytics so you can see the same report and analytics if you’re able to link up google search console with analytics and you should be able to do that all you need to do is make sure you use the same email address that you use for analytics and search console so it needs to be the same email address you could certainly link up the two and have this data imported into google analytics so what is this data that we’re talking about well it’s called performance so what we can actually see is the queries the actual queries people are typing in to google so when they’re typing them into google we can actually see how many impressions the keyword queries received and how many clicks the keyword queries received and then i can see click-through rate and average position okay so here i can see for this particular keyword on the first line i could see over the course of the last three months it received 209 297 impressions so what does that mean that means this keyword was used at le or typed in as a query at least that many times and that’s how many times my listing appeared in the google search results pages based on this particular query and so as a result of somebody typing in this query 209 000 plus times this site received 120 000 plus clicks so to get a sense of the click-through rate all you would need to do and google can obviously do this for you is you would simply just divide the 209 000 297 into the 120 000 397 okay so that’s really going to give you that’s going to give you a click-through rate and the click-through rate in this case is 57 so over half of the clicks occur when this listing appears for this keyword okay so we can get a sense of the click-through rate for each one okay and you could simply just use the filtering here now we can also see average position okay so we could see a little bit more than that too we can go from queries to pages we can go from pages to countries so we get a sense of how many impressions and clicks i’m receiving by country and importantly we can see by device so here i can see a majority of the people who conduct a search related to my website primarily do it on desktop now i mentioned the beauty of the google search console performance report is that you can link it up to google analytics and when you do that all you need to do then is go to acquisition google search console and then from there you can choose landing pages countries devices or queries so i could see the same data that i see in search console but this time i’m looking at it in google analytics and so here i can see what my search queries are my clicks my impressions my click-to-rate bike search query and then the average position so that’s the great thing about that performance report is that when i link up google search console with analytics i’m able to see that data in analytics so that’s an added bonus so to speak now let’s talk about some other reasons why we’re going to use these seo tools available to us and so we already listed a number of different reasons ranging from site maps to keyword research but we also want to hone in on you know what domains are driving links to our site so i showed you an example in search console we also want to hey maybe identify and disavow poor backlinks so search console is a great tool for that because if we don’t want to be associated with a particular website we can certainly disavow that link we could track a number of follow and no follow links okay we could track our website’s rankings we can measure click-through rates and impressions just as we did with search console we could track keyword ranking for desktop mobile cross locations just as we just did with the search console performance report we can identify top performing gaining and losing keywords again the performance report so we could certainly look at the google search console report but if you have a platform like moz you can certainly also look at a lot of that data available so for example rankings so if you have a moz account we can certainly go into rankings okay and we can see for the keywords that we’ve chosen that we want to optimize for we could certainly see where they rank the great thing about moz is it’s a great tool not only for rankings and on-page optimization but for off-page optimization as well so if i go ahead and take a look at a domain for example i’m just going to type in this domain i’m going to be able to get what they call a domain authority so a score out of 1 and 100 i’m able to see how authoritative my domain is and how authoritative a domain is is based on the quality of links pointing to it so moz gives me some good insights as to how many linking domains how many inbound links i have ranking keywords and it goes into detail as well so here if i click on the linking domains i’m going to be actually able to see the actual domains pointing to my site as an external link and not only can i see the domains i can actually see the domain authority of those domains so if there’s a domain for example that doesn’t have a good domain authority and the site appears a bit scammy per se then we can disavow that so i can certainly look at all the domains that are linking to me and then i can highlight the ones that have poor domain authority what mazd even takes it a step further they also give me a spam score so moz is able to measure how spammy a website is so if i have a combination of say a low domain authority and a high spam score then i probably want to disavow myself from that site and so i can use this report here you can see here i was like this particular site because it has so many links pointing to me or it has at least one link pointing to me that i probably want to disavow myself because it’s probably hurting my own domain authority so that’s the great thing about this linking domains report is i’m able to hone in on not only who’s link linking to me meaning domain but how many linking domains does that domain have what’s the spam score of that domain what’s the domain authority of that domain and then i can get into a little bit more detail and actually see you know all the links pointing to that domain so it really goes into detail about backlinks domain authority spam etc everything you need to use in order to measure off-page seo so that’s the great thing about moz is they have not only on-page seo tools but off-page seo tools and moz is a freemium so to speak so here you can see if you just go to moz.com free dash seo-tools you’ll be able to use some of these tools available to you not just for seo but also for local seo as well so here you like some of these tools you can start your free 30-day trial so i use and lean on moz a lot for all that it has to offer from choosing keywords to rankings report to checking issues on my website to even checking who’s linking to me so this fits in the mold with everything i need to do for seo so in addition to that keyword research video you could certainly lean on some other webinars that we’ve done in the past on seo so we’ve done a webinar on seo tools and we’ve also done a webinar on seo tips and tricks so if you want any more information about the tools we covered or seo in general take a look at those two videos and check them out and that should kind of complement what we talked about with using some of the tools google’s keyword planner moz and google search console okay let’s switch over to email marketing tools and so with email marketing tools we have a lot available to us in the form of reporting in the form of platforms in the form of you know tools that really help us go from a to z on our email choosing you know what email to send out to creating a list to measuring how the email campaign went and so we could start with mailchimp because mailchimp’s a freemium version when we say freemium meaning they have a free trial available then you’re expected to upgrade but you know mailchimp to me is a tool i use i like the interface very easy for beginners so we’re going to take a look at mailchimp but there are certainly many others available you know marcato is a good tool you know marcato is a good tool because if you have a business and you’re trying to funnel people through your pipeline so to speak meaning they sign up as a lead and you want to nurture that lead from the beginning to the end meaning at the end they’re actually going to turn around and purchase well marketo is a good tool for you to use because you can then set up trip campaigns or also known as email campaigns you know so that you’re talking and communicating with that particular prospect through every point in the funnel so that’s the great thing about marketo it has drip campaigns available along with some other features there’s a hubspot a very powerful tool it does a lot from creating landing pages to a b testing to social to you know email so this is another freemium tool that you could use you have another freemium and send in blue email platform and then you also have convertkit another email platform there’s more dimension that we can’t even fit on this screen now if you have a favorite email marketing tool that you use constant contact vertical response there are plenty out there emma you know feel free to to note that in the comments section below this video i’m curious as to how many people actually use you know different tools because there are so literally so many email marketing tools out there why because email marketing has been around probably the longest amongst all the other digital marketing channels and a lot of people use email on a daily basis so it’s no wonder why there’s just so many tools available and so with these tools you could certainly send bulk emails now in the case of marketo you could send emails to a segmented audience and so that’s actually what you want to do as a strategy is always send emails to a segmented audience you know you want to use a tool where you’re going to be able to create campaigns then send those campaigns to again segmented contacts and then be able to design your email around that particular audience so you know you have a good tool when you can do that when you can really segment for your audience okay you want to be able to use a tool that’s going to be able to segment your users you know use transactional emails meaning hey look if somebody go ahead went ahead and purchased can you follow up with an email and creating workflows just like i mentioned with marketo you want a workflow set up where hey if somebody does this you’re sending email b etc so you want an email marketing tool that’s flexible enough to handle what your business strategy and goals are okay so you want to be able to also use a tool that you know has various email templates available okay you don’t want to be stuck with just a vanilla template again you want to be able to customize an email for your audience you want to be able to manage your list appropriately meaning if you have 10 000 users or emails in a list you want to be able to manage them accordingly you know break them up or or have sub lists so to speak and then most importantly you want to make sure you have a platform that not only does its tracking on its own but will give you some detailed insights meaning you know what percentage of users opened your email what percentage of of recipients clicked on your email what links do they click on you know which which emails bounce so you want some detailed insights right in the platform that you’re using it just makes it more simpler and easier and more effective to manage you certainly want to create those smart automated campaigns meaning you don’t even have to send out the email and then you want to be able to have some flexibility to set up email delivery based on a specific time and day so these tools also allow you to you segment contacts based on geolocation you want to be able to use a tool that allows for multi-variant testing again you want to analyze performance and optimize campaigns you want to trigger automatic responses somebody purchases something are you using a tool that will automatically send that email out so these are all the reasons why you would use an email marketing tool so let’s dive in and take a look at an example and we’re going to use mailchimp as our example today so let’s dive in and take a look at mailchimp so with mailchimp once you log in you know you’re going to be able to see some historical campaigns that you’ve sent out or you’re going to be able to create your own campaign and so this is kind of under campaigns you can kind of see an overview of the ones you’ve sent out or if they’re in draft mode you’ll be able to see they’re in draft mode so you can go ahead and edit them so here we have one that was set up on august 26th and it’s still in draft mode so we can go ahead and edit that so if we just click edit you know we have the flexibility to you know pick and choose who we’re sending this to who it’s from what the subject line is and then we can certainly design the email so if we click design email again this is important because with email marketing you want to be able to cater your email to your intended audience so if you’re selling men’s shoes your audience should be men okay so you don’t want men to receive an email about women’s shoes it sounds like it’s common sense but the point being you want to be able to use an email platform that’s going to be able to allow you to put two and two together the message and the design with the intended audience and so here you can see mailchimp allows us to do that okay you can see some of the layouts here okay you also have themes that you could choose from okay you could search for different themes or you can even just code your own so you can just paste your code in or you can import it so mailchimp allows that flexibility you’re not stuck with one of their templates and so if we go back to the dashboard the one thing i like about mailchimp though is the reporting okay so yes it is easy to choose a template and map that template to your audience but i really like the reports that they have to offer so you know here you can see there’s some lists that we’ve sent to and if we choose one of our audience list then we can see some really detailed reporting here and so here i could see this email that was sent out in june i could see it was sent to 95 000 plus subscribers okay of the subscribers i saw 2 000 plus open it and 157 clicks so i can view this report in more detail just by clicking on view report so again we want an email platform that’s going to be able to give us some detailed information about how that email campaign performed and so i can get down really to the nitty-gritty i can actually see you know on the content what was clicked and what wasn’t clicked so here i sent two different subject lines so i’m able to compare the two against one another okay so i can really go into detail about one of them here so if i click view report i can specifically see what the average for this list is so here i’m able to compare against the list average and it’s 16 i only had an open rate of 2.5 percent so the industry average is 18 and so here i’m able to see the list average for the click rate and the industry average for the click rate as well so then i can see some specifics about it how many people unsubscribed then i could see a graph i could see the top links that were clicked okay the top subscribers with the most opens i can link social to it if i want to and then i can see geographic information so the point being is mailchimp really goes into some nice detail here about the email campaigns and how they performed so the great thing is too with the mailchimp you could link it with a google analytics you can link it with e-commerce okay so if you have an email and you’re you’re selling products and somebody purchased that product mailchimp is able to integrate in with your shopping commerce platform for example woocommerce so if somebody did purchase you can send out that thank you email mailchimp even goes a step further and if somebody did click on a link go to your shopping cart add something to the shopping cart and then abandon the cart you know mailchimp allows you the opportunity to retarget them via email so mailchimp is flexible and that’s what you want in a email marketing platform you want something that’s flexible that you can cater to your audience you can manage your audience list and you can get detailed reporting on your different campaigns for that audience so that’s mailchimp and summary and so most email platforms do a lot of similar features or have some of the similar features but that’s what you ideally want to look for in an email marketing platform so here’s a tool that doesn’t get talked about enough when it comes to email marketing and that’s google’s url builder and the reason why we’re going to talk about this tool today is because most people in the us use google analytics as their web analytics tool and the one thing about google analytics is it allows you to track different campaigns so if you’re doing pay-per-click campaigns outside of google you can certainly track the performance right in google analytics and email is no different so if you’re using google analytics and you’re sending out an email let’s just say on mailchimp or any other email marketing platform you want to be able to append your links with what we call utm tracking so for example if i have a url that says visit florida and i’m going to send out an email i have up to five parameters that i can use okay so here’s my email or url that i’m using in the email so i have up to five parameters that i can use to track this particular email so let’s go through some of those parameters so the first one is campaign source so what’s the source of the campaign well we could certainly identify mail champion for using mailchimp as the source now the the thing about the url builders you always want to use lowercase because google analytics is case sensitive so as a rule of thumb just stick with a lowercase so our source is going to be mailchimp because that’s the platform we’re using if you’re using you know constant contact or vertical response or you know some of these other one convertkit then go ahead and put in that platform as the source now for the medium which is the means in which we’re driving traffic to the site let’s go ahead and put in email because that’s what we’re using to drive traffic to this particular page now what’s the campaign name well we’re in summer so we’re going to call this the summer promo so their summer promo here is visit florida beaches okay so we’re going to send this email out to the masses and particularly not only the masses but the masses in the north because we’re going to say hey look come to florida for the summer come visit our beaches that’s the point of the campaign so that’s what we’re going to use for the campaign name is whatever the campaign is it’s a summer promo now notice i got an asterisk next to these particular parameters so google’s asking us hey these are mandatory so go ahead and put something in there now for campaign term and campaign content we could certainly leave them blank because they’re not mandatory but since we’re talking about email i would certainly recommend that you use the campaign content parameter and why do i say that because if we’re sending an email out to say you have 10 000 recipients i want to be able to split out the email into two segments one segment that’s going to get subject line one and one segment that’s gonna get subject line two so in this case i’m gonna put whatever subject line one is in the campaign content field so now i have four parameters and once i’ve entered in my variables in those parameter fields i now have a revised or appended url so my original url was visit florida.com slash en dash us slash florida dash beaches.html my original url i’ve now appended that with some utm parameters and now i see my original url appended with the utm parameters based on those variables so i can copy it just by clicking the copy url i can go to my browser i can paste that url in there and i want to check to see if it works so here i could see this particular page loaded florida beaches with my utm parameters appended to the url so that’s for the first subject line that’s for the audience that’s going to get the first subject line i want to do another one for the second subject line so now i’m going to change my campaign content parameter to subject line underscore 2. i’m going to copy that url i’m going to check it okay so i can see that the page loads with those utm parameters and so now what am i going to do i’m going to use the first url and the second url in my email okay so any link that i have in this case i’m using subject line two so for the email with the second subject line going to that segmented audience this is the link i’m going to use in the email so if you have one or two or three links in the email this is the url you’re going to use because when somebody clicks on that link you’re going to be able to see that that click in google analytics so if i jump over to google analytics after i send out my email i’m going to go to acquisition i’m going to go to campaigns i’m going to go to all campaigns now based on the variables i put into my parameters meaning source medium campaign name content or term that’s what i’m going to look for in google analytics so we can start with source and medium so if i click on source and medium as my primary dimension here i can see mailchimp and the actual date was used as part of the variable for for source and then i will can i see the medium being email so now i can see for this email that was sent out in mailchimp in may i could see how many users how many sessions and more importantly how many conversions so we could certainly hone in on that particular email if we wanted to if we choose some of the other parameters available to us so here i could see the campaign name okay so i could see exactly what campaign what source what email drove in traffic and conversions and if i’m doing subject line testing i can choose content as my parameter so here i’m going to change it to content and now i can see the subject lines in this case if i go back to my source medium i’m going to be able to see what subject lines from my emails generated the most traffic and not only the most traffic but also conversions so that’s the whole point behind using the url builder again you’re taking a url that you’re going to use in email and then you’re going to pan that url with different parameters campaign source campaign medium campaign name and then optionally campaign content or campaign term okay once you’ve entered variables into those parameters you’re going to get an appended url which you can then use in your email so when the email gets sent you’re going to go back over to google analytics and you’re going to look at the results of that campaign of that source of that medium of that content i.e subject line and so that’s why the url builder is so important because mailchimp gives us some good insight as to how the email performed in terms of open and click rates but what we really want to see is how that campaign performed once it drove traffic to my website so that’s the whole idea behind the url builder if you’re using google analytics you’ll be able to use the url builder with whatever email platform you’re using so let’s move on to web analytics tools and this is an important section because web analytics tools kind of the central focal point of all digital marketing and it starts really with google analytics google analytics is a freemium meaning that they have a free version that you can use there is also a paid version of google analytics but given the advent of google its popularity especially in the united states a majority of users are using the free version of google analytics so it’s a very popular tool especially for marketers but there are also other tools available so it’s not just google so we have adobe analytics which is also freemium you have kiss metrics you have spring metrics you have youtube analytics which is part of google but youtube has its own separate analytics insights so a lot of these as you can see are free to use they’re available no reason why you should not be using an analytics tool to measure your marketing campaigns or website behavior and why would we want to use these tools again well again we want to really measure behavior we want to measure what’s going on with our website so we want to be able to identify the location of where our website visitors are coming from and a lot of these analytics tools use ip address to identify the location of a website visitor so if you’re trying to target a specific country then you want to be able to see that the visitors to your website are coming from that specific country or location we also want to measure the engagement of our website behavior so we get traffic to the website what are they doing how long are they staying what pages are they visiting so this is the overall nature of really why we want to use web analytics to measure how successful our website is at treating our website visitors with the same courtesy you would if you had a brick and mortar store somebody comes into your store you want them to find what they’re looking for quickly you want them to be happy with their experience you certainly want them to pay for the products very quickly and easily and efficiently and you want them to come back and that’s no different than a website so we want our website to perform in a manner that’s going to suit our audience and that’s why we want to track engagement so why else well we want to really look at who’s coming are they returning visitors or new visitors you know ideally you want a nice mix between 50 new and 50 returning because you know returning visitors are loyal there’s some loyalty to that they already know your brand they’re coming back to your website new visitors are curious and you want new visitors because that means more traffic so you want a nice balance between that analytics tools will help you measure that you want to be able to measure organic traffic whether you like it or not whether you know it or not but google and other search engines are indexing your pages and your pages are being found via the search engines and so you want to be able to measure how much traffic you’re actually generating from those search engines we talked about this with email marketing utm tracking so if you set up email campaigns or non-google campaigns you want to use utm tracking and google analytics and other analytics tools but specifically google analytics will help you see the results of your campaigns if they’re tracked with utm tracking so that’s another good reason why to use a web analytics tool probably most importantly amongst all these bullet points is our goals our website conversions we want to be able to see how much traffic is coming to our website and not only the engagement of the traffic but how much of that traffic is actually doing what we want them to do i.e are they converting and we want to optimize our sites and channels performance so the whole idea of collecting all this information is that you can turn around and improve performance so if your bounce rate is high well how do you lower bounce rate well we need to do something about that and analytics tools will help us identify what’s not working from our site perspective and from a channel perspective and we can take action to improve performance so that’s the whole idea behind optimizing our site’s performance so let’s jump into google analytics and let’s take a look at everything we just talked about in those bullet points so about improving website performance measuring engagement looking at our goals and conversions measuring campaigns with utm tracking all those good things that we can get in a good analytics tool so adobe mix panel spring metrics you know they all work in a similar fashion in that they’re really measuring website behavior and so if we’re in google analytics really what we’re doing is we’re measuring the performance of our website broken down into four components audience acquisition behavior and conversions so what do we want to do well we want to look into each one of these sections so let’s start with audience and so audience and google analytics tells us who is coming to our website now they’re not going to specifically tell us hey rob sanders came to your website but they are going to say that somebody from san francisco california came to the website and these are the pages they looked at and this is the language and they came from this device and they’re a returning user so they’re painting a picture for you okay so they’re not giving you a list of names that would not be legal but they are providing you with a good picture of who is coming and when i say picture we have to paint that picture and so if we look at say demographics for example and i go a demographics overview here’s a picture i’m painting well i can see that 25 to 34 year olds are the majority of the age group that is coming to my website okay i can see on the gender side of it i can see that 63 of my traffic and again this is year to date that i’m looking at is coming to my website so two-thirds of my traffic is female one-third male and they’re between the ages of 25 and 34. so i’m painting a picture about you know gender and age coming to my website well i can also look at geo so where specifically might these people be coming from so if i go to location under geo i’m going to be able to see a breakdown of country or i can even hone it down to city or specific location and here i can see united states is the primary driver but not by much so we have 16 almost 17 percent from the us and then 16 from argentina 13 from mexico 10 from india so we have a nice mix of traffic from different locations in the world coming to our website so that’s geo but more importantly let’s take a look at mobile so if we go to mobile overview how are people coming to our website are they on a desktop or laptop are they using their mobile device are they using a tablet and so google analytics breaks it down very nice for you and so we could see percentages and actual numbers by device category and so in this case i can see year to date i can see 62 percent are coming from desktop 35 percent are coming from mobile and so that’s important because most people start their journey from mobile and that is growing and that’s going to continue to grow so you want to keep an eye on mobile so to me this is one of the more important reports under audience because people who come from mobile have a different not only experience because the website should be responsive to the mobile device but their mindset is going to be different they’re actively looking for something they’re probably going to either then follow up on their desktop or follow up in person at your store or they’re probably looking for directions or they may just call you so the experience is a lot different on mobile so we want to hone in on the growth of mobile okay so to me this is one of the more important reports in google analytics especially under audience so let’s move on to acquisition so acquisition reporting tells us how the traffic was driven to the website so if audience tells us who is coming to the website acquisition tells us how that traffic got to the website and so really what you want to do is get a sense of what channels what marketing channels are driving traffic so remember we talked about organic search well those search engines are indexing your pages well how much of that traffic from the search engines is actually coming to your site and i’m a believer in if organic search is the primary driver of traffic then you have a pretty healthy website because that means the search engines are indexing your pages people are searching for something related to your business you’re being found you’re getting clicked and that represents a majority of the traffic so that’s always a good thing so here we can see it broken down by channel if i go to all traffic channels report i can see in my dimension that organic search represents 72 percent of my traffic when this is year to date then i can see paid search then i can see direct which means somebody went directly to the site i could see referral email social then i could see more paid search broken out so these are the different marketing channels now analytics allows you to look at a specific source and medium so the source would be the actual website or search engine and the medium would differentiate how that traffic actually got to the site so if we’re talking about a search engine did they come to the site via paid search or did they come to the site via organic search and so all we need to do is change our primary dimension from default channel grouping to source and medium and we can see specifically the breakout of the different sources and mediums driving traffic to the site so here i can see google organic at 71 and then google cpc or cost per click at 15 16 of our traffic so then i can look down i can see email in here being organic i could see some referring sites i could see some social in terms of mobile facebook okay so we could see a mix of the different sources and mediums driving traffic to the site okay so you don’t always have to look at channel per se you can look at it via source and medium and if you’re running google ads under acquisition analytics has a whole section of google ads reporting so if you’re running campaigns on google ads remember we looked at the keyword planner in google ads so if you’re running campaigns on google ads you can certainly see the performance of those campaigns just by clicking on campaigns we can also see campaigns other campaigns that we’re running so remember that utm tracking that we set up for email well we want to be able to track the performance of email and any other non-google campaign with utm tracking so when we do that we’ll be able to go to campaigns all campaigns and we’ll be able to see the campaign performance if we look at source and medium we’ll be able to see what campaigns drove traffic to the website so here i can see vertical response email as a driver of traffic so that’s the campaign reporting and then also if you have search consoles so we looked at search console earlier we talked about seo tools well remember i said you can link up search console with google analytics well here’s search console and we could see queries devices landing pages countries so all the performance metrics that we could see in search console because we have it linked up with analytics we can see it right here so this gives us a nice snapshot of what keywords are driving traffic to the site organically i could see the impressions i could see the clicks then i could see the click-through rate and then the average position so in theory the higher something ranks the more traffic you’re gonna get so that’s the idea behind it we want to make sure that we’re ranking for our coveted keywords and if we are we want to be able to measure how many times our listing was seen and how many times it was clicked so that’s the great thing about you know google they have a family of products and those products tend to talk to one another in the form of google search console and google ads you can connect them directly to google analytics so let’s move from acquisition to behavior so here in behavior we have a number of different reports so behavior tells us once the traffic actually arrived at the website how are they behaving and so really what i would do is from there go to site content all pages and so this gives us an idea of how many pages were actually viewed so site content all pages tells us what page and how many times it was viewed during a period of time and again we’re looking at year to date so i can see engagement related metrics associated with the page so this particular page here on line one i could see how many pages unique page use which is equal to sessions so i can have a session come to the website and look at a page multiple times in that session i could see the average time the person has spent on a page and i can also see the bounce rate so a bounce rate indicates that they arrived on the page and didn’t go any further they left the website from that page that they arrived on and so i can also see percentage of exits meaning what page did people exit the site from so these are all engagement related metrics so here is where i want to react and optimize my website performance so i if i see a page not performing well meaning it has a high bounce rate or maybe load time on page then i’m probably going to optimize it meaning test it or change it to improve performance so these are all pages but i could certainly look at landing pages okay so landing pages tells us the behavior of the page when somebody landed on it so a landing page means that somebody came from organic search or paid search or another channel landed on this page so here i could see this particular page on line one had 4970 sessions okay and i can also see the performance of that page so measuring engagements against pages is definitely important because page isn’t performing in terms of bounce rate or time on page then we want to be able to make changes to that page to improve performance okay there are some other great reports under behavior so we want to go to site speed we want to look at how fast or how slow our pages load so this is important from an seo perspective because if a page isn’t loading very fast then chances of it getting ranked in google are not very good so google’s organic search basically takes page load time seriously so a page doesn’t load very fast then we need to be able to fix it so we can go to page timings i can get a good sense of the average page load time of a particular page and what google does here is under speed suggestions they actually will give me some ideas and speed suggestions on how to address a page that’s loading very slow and so when we load up the speed suggestions report what google does is say hey we know that this page is loading very slow the average page load time is 15 seconds here’s some suggestions we’re going to give you seven suggestions so if you click on that what’s actually going to happen is you’re going to go to another tool called page speed insights and page speed insights is analyzing the page as you can see here and when it’s done analyzing the page it’s going to give you some feedback on how to improve page load performance not only for desktop but for mobile so here i can see if i scroll down this is desktop and these are some of the opportunities that i can address when trying to improve the page load time of that particular page so here i could see there’s some server response time issues image sizes probably need to be resized i can remove unused css okay so there are a lot of different things i can do to improve the page load time on this particular page okay this is for desktop i can also see mobile so mobile a lot of the same issues so if we address these these opportunities then we could see a lift and page load time we see lift and page load time we’re going to probably see a lift in organic rankings or even user engagement because if a page takes a long time to load a user is probably not going to stay on that page very long so to me site speed is an important report under behavior now one more report here that i want to point out under behavior is events and to me events are important so if you’re trying to measure engagement on your website you need to make sure you have event tracking set up and when we talk about event tracking we’re talking about measuring things that analytics doesn’t measure by default so if you have a button on your website if you have a pdf download if you have a submit button on a form submission if you have a subscribe button if you have a video if you have an external link anything that is going to trigger engagement on your website you need to measure with event tracking and event tracking is simply set up by breaking out the event into a category an action and a label and so here we could see for our particular website we have categories already set up for event tracking so here for example i can see on line six video i could see how many people actually watched our video okay so here’s the action video start okay so over this period of time i could see i had 49 unique events 50 total so that’s how many people actually watched the video and you can always revert to label and that’ll tell you what page people watched in this case the video so event tracking is important because we want to be able to measure engagement so if you go to events under behavior and you don’t see any events listed you probably need to get that set up and that is set up through google tag manager so what you want to do is you want to be able to set up your events through google tag manager which is another google platform but you certainly want to do that so that’s where you set up your events when you set up your events for your website with a category an action and label you’ll be able to measure those events in analytics under behavior under events and the important thing here is you’ll be able to measure engagement so i’ll be able to see how many people came to the site and how many people clicked on a button downloaded a pdf uh submitted a form played a video did whatever we wanted them to do so events are important so let’s move from behavior to conversions and this is important because we want to be able to measure conversions on a website so analytics has four types of conversions so if i go to admin down at the bottom and then i go to goals i could see that i have four different types of goals that i can use now right now i have event related goals set up for the website for this particular website so we just talked about event tracking so if you’re measuring a button click on your website you can certainly turn that into a goal and so all you need to do is tell analytics hey this is the particular category this is the particular action so for example if i click on this particular goal and take a look at it i can see that we have a category set up that anything that resembles donate now okay or donate go ahead and fire this event as a conversion okay so event is one type of goal another type of goal is destination so if somebody goes to a specific page like a confirmation page we can turn that into a goal so here i could see if somebody goes to donation dash confirmation then analytics is going to fire that goal as a conversion and we’re going to see a conversion against a different metric or different dimension like channel or audience okay so destination is the second type of goal the third type of goal is duration so how long did somebody stay on my website so in this example if they stayed at least one minute and 30 seconds or more then analytics is going to count that as a goal conversion okay so duration is the third type and then the fourth type is pages per session okay so if i look at this example here if a user came to my website and looked at more than three pages in that particular session then analytics is going to fire a goal conversion so four types of goals you don’t have to set up all four different types my recommendation at least have one goal set up if you’re not sure what goal to set up then at least set up a duration or pages per session okay so at least you can measure how long somebody stays on your website or how many pages they went to okay so when you actually do have these goals set up you can go back into conversions we can go back into goals we can go back into overview and we can measure our goal completions over this period of time so here i could see 313 goal completions total with a goal conversion rate of 1.88 and then i could see it broken down by gold type so remember the only goals i have available and set up are event related goals so 69 newsletter sign ups 156 donate click buttons i have 32 contact form submissions 37 email click completions and then 11 phone number click completions so i can measure engagement as a goal and so goals generally are important to the business so you want to make sure that if you have a goal for your website then you want to be able to set that up as a goal in google analytics so that way when you’re looking at example channels if i go back to my channels report i can then measure channel by goal conversion so these are all goals but if i want to look at for example how many people from organic search clicked on the donate now button i could see that i could see year to date ten 10 887 users which meant 11 000 sessions 76 clicked on that donate now button and that’s comes out to 0.65 conversion rate okay so that’s important so you want to be able to measure any dimension whether that be channel source medium keyword campaign mobile device could be demographic gender or age you want to be able to measure any dimension against the goals you have set up so you can measure performance and that also includes pages or landing pages as well so that’s a quick overview of what you can expect to see in google analytics again audience acquisition behavior and conversions so a lot of data in google analytics but you want to be able to take advantage of the data in order to improve website performance now let’s jump over to youtube analytics because if you have videos on youtube if you have a channel set up some playlists you’ll be able to get some really good insights as to how your video is performing and so here i could see i’m in youtube all i did was i went to my account then i went to the baited the studio version of youtube and then from there i went to analytics so my account youtube studio analytics and analytics here is going to give me all sorts of information about my videos okay so here i could see over the last 28 days my videos produced over 8 600 views my watch time in minutes totaled over 17 000 and i’ve netted 48 subscribers and this is an overall okay so i can actually see when i publish videos and i can see the date they were published and here i’m looking at you know total views over this particular date range i can also see specifics on a particular video so i could see the top video in terms of minutes here i could see this particular video had 602 minutes over the last 28 days so here i could see views on a particular video so this is just an overview i could certainly look at some other information if i click on reach viewers i could see the total impression so how many times my video was viewed or how many people looked at it okay and then the click-through rate so here i could see the different traffic sources so 29 came externally okay here i could see 25 came within youtube itself i could see how many times a video was viewed and played via playlist via suggested video so i could see different ways in which the traffic found my video and actually watched it here i could see externally how people were able to find my videos and i could see 46 found it via google search see some lots of information here uh about sources of traffic how the traffic got to these videos so i could see then once the traffic found my videos how many times they actually saw it and viewed it and then watched it so that’s how many times i was able to reach viewers via different sources and then their reaction to that how many times i saw it and watched it here i can click on interest viewers so again i could see the top videos in terms of watch time i could see the top playlist so here i could see my partner’s playlist was the top playlist so i can see some interest here in terms of average view duration and then here we have build an audience so we can look at specific audiences if we have them built in youtube to see how many people actually watch my videos so here i can see 88 of the people who watched my videos over the last 28 days were not even subscribed so that tells me a lot of people are finding my videos spending some time watching them they’re not subscribed so we’re trying to get them to subscribe to our channel so they can watch more so a lot of information here in youtube itself about how our videos performed again this is good insight because ideally what you want to do is you really want to take a look at a specific video see how it’s performing so if i just click on one particular video i can actually see the audience retention over the course of the video itself i could see the ways in which people found the video okay again externally or via youtube search i could see how many people liked it or disliked it i could see all sorts of information on a particular video itself or an overview of my channel so that’s all available to you in youtube analytics under youtube studio so take advantage of that so if you’re publishing videos on a regular basis you want to hone in on how your videos are performing so if you have any additional questions about youtube analytics or youtube in general take a look at our video that we created earlier this year about how to create a youtube channel we go into some in-depth insights into youtube itself especially youtube analytics so take a look at that video and if you have any other insights about youtube analytics or analytics in general go ahead and put a comment below this video so let’s turn our attention to competitor spine tools very important to keep tabs on what the competition’s doing and there are a lot of tools out there so when it comes to social we can use a freemium tool like sprout social to listen in on our competitors we can use another freemium tool social blade there’s a popular tool out there called spyfu that’s freemium as well moz we looked at moz earlier for keyword organic moz is a great tool for also leveraging our competitors in terms of backlinks and buzzsumo so that’s another freemium tool get there lots of tools out there these are just examples of some of the tools that we use here at simplylearn i use personally and professionally to get a sense of what our competition is doing so why would we want to use a competitor spine tool well it may sound like a very straightforward question but there are lots of reasons why and so let’s look at some of these reasons and the first reasons we really want to identify you know our competitors backlinks and monitor changes in their ranking so the reason why we have this is the top bullet point is because seo organic search is a long-term strategy on-page off-page website very technical and creative there’s a lot going on with seo a lot going on and sometimes it takes a long time to rank for something and a lot of seo does depend on relevancy relevancy being how many quality backlinks are linked to you so it’s always good to leverage what your competitors are doing so you can see how you stack up and so that’s why this is up there as number one we want to be able to really take a look at what our competitors are doing another example would be hey how much uh traffic a competitors gaining on certain keywords this could go either way for paid search organic search what are competitors bidding on are they really getting traffic from those keywords so there are tools out there that help us leverage what our competition is doing okay we can also identify our competitors top performing content for relevant topics okay we can determine what our competitor’s website referral traffic is okay we can pull our competitors data and compare it with our own campaigns so lots of tools out there to help you do this and we may want to track the total amount of clicks a competitor receives and how much they pay for each keyword so let’s go ahead and take a look at a few examples how we can leverage all these bullet points that we just discussed and so we’re going to start out with sprout social and sprout social is a tool i use it’s a social media platform there’s a lot of things you can do with sprout social definitely generate reports for your social media platforms you could set up post that get published at a certain time and day but there’s also one particular tool in here called listening and so what we could do is we just put in for example rv rentals and twitter so what we’re doing is we’re actually listening to see who else is tweeting about rv rentals so we could do this for twitter we could do it facebook some other social media platforms the whole idea here on sprout social is to get a sense of what our competitors are doing so we could have easily put in a brand name we’re just going general here because we want to rank for the keyword rv rentals and so here we could take a look at you know what some of these particular brands are doing like go rv rentals cruise america rv we could see just scroll down and we can get a sense of in particular what people are tweeting about what other companies are tweeting when it comes to this particular keyword rv rentals now if i want to hone in on a particular competitor i could just really refine my search for that competitor’s brand name so rv share so here i can take a look at you know what they’re doing when they’re posting to or tweeting how long ago the time of day get an idea of what they’re actually saying what campaigns they’re promoting okay i can get a sense of everything about this tweet and so here i can scroll down and i can see what’s been shared by other people for this particular brand and i can see a lot of people are as an example retweeting this particular giveaway and so to me it just gives me a sense in this particular example on twitter as to what our competitors doing okay let’s turn our attention to seo so remember that first bullet point we want to get a sense of what our competitors are doing when it comes to backlinks and so moz has a great tool called link explorer and link explorer there allows us to actually compare link profiles so for my domain i can go ahead and put my competitors domains in there and definitely get a sense of you know how many links my competitors have external intel internal i can get a cent i can get a sense of page authority linking domains so i can really do a comparison across my domain and my competitors domains to get a snapshot of how i compare against my competitors so this gives me an overview of everything i need to know organically now moz also has a another great tool under link explorer called link intersect and i like link intersect i use it a lot because if our competitors really have a number of external links and domains pointing to their site and they have a better domain authority and page authority then you know i want to be able to you know see what they’re doing where they’re linking who’s linking to them i want to get be able to get a snapshot of why is their domain so much better than ours in terms of authority and so the link intersect actually allows me to do that so i can go ahead and put my competitors domains in there and then i can find opportunities and so you just click on opportunities and you can see where my site intersects with their site and if it doesn’t actually intersect then i have an opportunity to actually try and get a link on that particular site so that’s what the link intersect report does it allows me to see where my links intersect with my competitors and if it doesn’t intersect then i have an opportunity to generate a backlink so that’s ideally what the link intersect tool is in moz it allows me to really get a sense of you know where i’m linking and where my competitors are linking now what we can also do is also take advantage of another report under moz’s link explorer and the discovered and lost report so we could put in our domain or we could put even our competitors domain in there and we can get a sense of what domains were found and linked to them so really within mods we can get a good snapshot of what websites are linking to our competitors we get a good snapshot of the overall links to our competitor sites and specifically with sites so the whole idea is if it’s good for our competitors meaning they’re linking from a site that has good domain authority and low spam score then it’s probably a site i want to be able to tackle as well okay so you have discovered and lost okay you have comparing link profiles and you have link intersect so those are three good reports you can leverage right in moz’s link explorer tool now there’s one more report we can leverage in moz and that’s the inbound links report and so we can go ahead and type in our competitors domain here and again we can get a snapshot of what their domain authority is page authority for the home page but really this is what we’re after linking domains so this particular domain has over 9 000 linking domains so what we can do is actually go through and see based on domain

authority i could sort by domain authority where these pages are being linked from and so here i can see reddit reddit reddit so a lot of reddit here which is a good site for backlinking new york times so you know there’s a lot of different uh sites here washington post so i can get a good snapshot of my competitor by seeing every link that’s pointing to them now of course i don’t want to go through 9 000 links i can really just hone in on a specific link source or link type or link state so i can really filter it if i wanted to i can export the report and do some further analysis but really the whole idea here as i could see what url is linking to this particular competitor site what the anchor text is what the page and domain authority is so this gives me a really really good insight on all the backlinking that my competitor has and again if i’m trying to catch my competitor it’s probably not a bad idea to look at what they’re doing and even copy what they’re doing in terms of backlinking so we’re not on reddit then we probably need to be on reddit because if that’s where our competitor is and they’re getting good link juice from reddit which has a domain authority of 90 then hey if it’s good for the goose it’s good for the gander so they say so inbound links is it just another good report you can leverage in moz under the link explorer reporting tool now if i want to get a good snapshot as to what my competitor’s doing on search exactly well look no further than spyfu so spyfu is a another tool that you can leverage from a ppc seo perspective you know from an seo perspective you got some back linking data as well just like you did in moz from a ppc perspective you can get some good keyword insights and so here i just went ahead and typed in the domain and what this is going to do is just give me an overall snapshot for my competitors domain so here i could see you know how many organic keywords they’re found for the estimated monthly seo clicks they’re getting based on the volume of those keywords okay i can see here the keywords their top competitors also rank for the rank history 12 years so this particular domain has been around a long time okay so that’s on the organic side i can flip over to the paid side and i could see that they are doing paid search i could see 5 000 plus keywords they’re bidding on okay based on that what they’re actually paying and then i could see you know some of the other competitors listed here from a paid perspective and an organic perspective i could see the shared keyword overlap okay now again you can pay for this because it’s freemium and get some really good insights as to how your domain compares to your competitors so i’m using the free version and here the free version spyfu is just giving me some overall data on the specific domain i entered in and so i entered in my competitors you can certainly enter in your own domain to get a sense of organic keywords and paid keywords so you can see top keywords top paid keywords okay this is google ads okay so this is what recommendations as to what to purchase okay here you can see some even some at google ads history i could see exactly what ad copy my competitor actually wrote and for what keyword and then i can see some organic ranking history here as i keep scrolling down this overview report so i can see for rv rent where they rank and then i can see inbound links just like i did in moz spyfu is providing me with some insight as to hey what links are pointing to them and what the domain strength is and how many clicks they expect to receive so this is all free data take it or leave it but it’s all free data available to you under spyfu so spy view gives you kind of an overview for free some really in-depth analysis if you actually pay for it and it just really hones in on what your competitors are bidding for paid wise and what they’re ranking for organic-wise and so spy food is a really good tool to leverage if you just want to get a snapshot of how your competitor overlaps with you so let’s turn our attention to google analytics because in google analytics under audience i can go to benchmarking and basically the benchmarking reports allows me to see what the industry as a whole is doing compared to my own website now the caveat here on this particular report is that it’s all anonymous data so i can’t exactly see what competitor is doing what in this report but if i hone in on my industry in this case autos and vehicles and i hone in on a specific country or adjust the size of the daily sessions that i get then i can see hey analytics in this case in this example i’m sharing 8 863 web properties okay so they’re sharing the data for over 8 000 web properties and i can compare those web properties against my own so if we’re all in the same industry it gives me a sense here as to how i stack up against the industry as a whole in this case as it pertains to channels so you can see here red not good green is good so in the industry we’re not doing as good as others in the same industry who are receiving the same amount of sessions now we could certainly adjust and we can adjust our locale and if we do that google’s going to be able to adjust how many web properties are actually contributing to the report and so when analytics makes that adjustment we’re going to be able to see in this case just new zealand so we’re going to adjust for new zealand and we’re going to go with 4999 and so we could see there are about you know 300 something web properties contributing 47 web properties now contributing to this report so if we’re focused on the new zealand region and this is the amount of traffic we get we’re now comparing us against 47 other anonymous web properties so now if i go back to the report after i’ve honed in i’m looking at channels and i can see how many sessions we’re getting by channels and how i compare against the competition i can also measure up against percentage of new sessions new users pages per session average session duration bounce rate but that’s just channels i can also do location and devices so the whole idea behind this report is yes you’re not honing in on a particular competitor but you’re honing in on your industry so you’re getting a good idea as to how you compare against your industry just by making some adjustments in the benchmarking report you obviously want to make sure you’re looking at the same industry adjust for your country or region adjust for the site size meaning how many sessions you actually get on a daily basis and then analytics will do the rest they’ll compare you against those in your industry and so i find this to be a good tool because it allows me to stack up our site against those in the industry and obviously if we’re not driving as many sessions especially say from organic then we have our work cut out for us okay so that’s the whole idea behind the benchmark report now if you want to get some good insight as to what the competitors are doing and you don’t want to use a tool well look no further you can always go to google.com okay so this is how we used to do it back in the day before all these tools became available you just typed in a keyword and we’re going to type in rv rentals and now we’re going to be able to see who’s bidding on that keyword so we could see we have a number of different uh companies bidding on the keyword we’re interested in okay here i can see some featured snippets okay and then i can see some organic search results okay if i scroll down i’ll be able to see some other companies bidding on that same keyword meaning they’re paying for rv rental so if i clicked on somebody’s link here they’re actually going to pay google for the click and so this just gives me a good sense of you know how many people are actually trying to rank for this keyword or trying to be found for this keyword so that’s all i did i just did a search now from an organic perspective if you really want to hone in on your competition you can always do the syntax all in title colon and then hit enter so now i could see i have 163 000 results and what does that tell me that tells me that i have 163 000 websites with rv rentals in the title tag so if you’re trying to optimize for the keyword rv rentals as an example then you know that you have a 163 000 different listings ahead of you that you need to jump over in order to rank for the keyword rv rentals so using the all in title syntax and the keyword right after that actually just gives you a more accurate picture of how many sites are actually ahead of you for a particular keyword so that’s the whole idea so if i get rid of the syntax and you can see for rv rentals i have 132 million but that’s not really accurate because not all these listings have the keyword rv rentals in the title tag and title tag if you’re working on organic search is one of the key important factors for ranking so you need to have that keyword in the title tag so that’s the whole idea behind using the all in title syntax it gives us a good idea as to what our competition is doing and how many sites we have to jump over to get to number one on google now if you’re running google ads just as we did with rv rentals we went up there and we saw we typed that in as a query and we saw how many advertisers there were for rv rentals now if we are running our own campaigns google ads actually has a good report that i really like it’s called auction insights and so you can get to auction insights just by clicking on campaigns and then from campaigns click on auction insights and what auction insights allows us to see is what competitors or domains are bidding on the same keywords we are and so what google does here is it allows us to actually see where we stack up against our competition for all the keywords we’re bidding on and so here i’m looking at year to date and here we could see us and i can see our competitors okay so i could see impression share so for if we’re talking about one keyword every keyword has a 100 impression share how much of that impression share are you getting and when we say impression share meaning eyeballs when we talk about eyeballs are we getting a majority of the eyeballs or our competitors getting majority of the eyeballs so we can see our average position i can see how often i overlap with my competitors okay i could see how often i’m above a particular competitor i could see what percentage i’m at the top of the page versus my competitors the absolute top of page rate and then i can see how often i outrank my competitors and vice versa how often my competitors outrank me so i can see all this good insight as to what competitors are bidding on the same keywords i am okay so this is if you’re running google ads okay so if you’re running google ads okay you can just click on the auction insights report you can find that the top navigation just by clicking on campaigns and by doing so you’ll be able to gain some insights as to where you stack up from a paid search perspective against your competitors so let’s turn our attention to paid marketing tools so if you’re doing some advertising on google bang linkedin you probably want to work within those platforms as the tool of choice so you know if you’re doing paid search on say google search dot com or display you could be doing display advertising on you know a network like adroll or google or you could be doing social media paid ads say on facebook so whatever it is you’re doing you probably want to work within that platform itself to get the ideal data that you need okay so here are some of the tools some of the places you can go of course if you work in google ads you also have google ads editor that you can leverage okay and i’ll show you that in a couple minutes you have google ads keyword planner of course both of these are paid if you’re running campaigns okay so bing if you’re running campaigns on bing okay you get all this good data that you can digest through some reporting okay you also have some third-party tools out there that you also have to pay for in word stream okay so word streams a third party tool that you can leverage bing and google are actual advertising networks so you would advertise on the platform itself and get all the data you need right in the platform and leverage a lot of the tools that they have available in the platform as i mentioned you could also use google ads editor so bing also has their own editor as well so and as well as facebook so you can use an editor type version and i’ll show you that here in a couple minutes but let’s talk about why we want to use the tools in the platform itself well we want to be able to monitor how our ads performing so which ad receives the most traffic as an example we want to identify keywords that are performing for us okay so our keywords converting not converting now they cost us a lot of money and not netting a high enough return for us so we want to keep an eye on that okay so we want to monitor our cost okay across different locations and devices not only cost but we want to also monitor how our ads are performing across different locations and devices keywords across different locations and devices so we want to be able to measure by device okay so we also want to analyze competitors data and as we showed you in the competitors section google as an example has auction insights reporting analytics has benchmarking so google itself does provide some information in the case of auction insights as to how your competitors are performing against you on google search so that’s on the paid search side then you have display okay so display advertisements okay you’re across a different network so there are different types of networks out there for example adroll okay you have curtillo celtra is another paid version of or paid tool you can use in wide orbit so these are some of the paid marketing tools you can leverage of course i like to stay if i’m advertising on google i like to stay on google ads and measure my display performance that way but if you’re on adroll for example then you want to leverage adroll’s reporting platform and some of the tools they have to offer so if we look at display why do we want to leverage some of these tools well just like search for example where we want to look at keyword and ad performance same kind of concept here we want to be able to monitor whether we have the right keywords and right customer engagement so when when it comes to display we want to be able to make sure we’re choosing the right audience of course that means looking at not only audience insights but our target insights as well are we reaching the right audience when it comes to display and google has a good breakdown that i’m going to be able to show you here in a couple of minutes okay so we want to improve our campaigns by monitoring our competitors display ads as well so there are tools available that’ll help you do that and that’s on the display side and if we look at social okay why what tools can we use on social well you got facebook ads manager okay you got ad espresso quiet tweepy you got all these cool paid search tools again i usually stick with where i’m advertising so if i’m advertising on linkedin or twitter i’m gonna leverage that platform but just know that there are other tools available for you so with social like display it’s all about targeting our audience so for these some of the tools like on facebook we can review and relaunch our ad campaigns based on target audience we can measure conversions and gain insights in this example about facebook users how are our users interacting with our ads and then we want to target people based on their activities such as purchase intent device usage travel preferences etc so social allows us to do that and then with facebook as an example we can monitor any a b test we run for example if we’re running call to action test we can measure the results that write in facebook and i’m going to show you an example of that here shortly so let’s jump right into google ads and look at some tools available to us from the search side of the house so if we’re running search campaigns right in google ads we could see campaign data we could see keyword data we could see add data so for example if i want to see what ads are performing i’m just going to click on my ads and extensions okay and here are my ads and now i can see what ads are performing in terms of clicks click-through rates etc and so that way i can go ahead and pause ads activate ads so that’s right here in the google ads uh platform itself now if i want to look at specific keywords i can do that so i can see what keywords are driving traffic and clicks here i could just sort by clicks and now i could see not only what keywords are driving clicks i could see what the click-through rate is i could see the impressions how many people actually viewed my ad after click typing in a keyword query that i’m bidding on i could see how much i’ve paid by keyword and more importantly i want to be able to see conversions or conversion rate and then with google ads you have quality score so we want to be able to measure quality score so this is a google ads keyword reporting and so the great thing about the keyword reporting is that there’s some other features available to me here so here i can add negative keywords okay just by clicking on negative keywords i can also see a search terms report and so when it comes to search terms i can actually see what specific keywords people typed in and based on the keyword that somebody typed in as a query i can see what match type triggered that particular ad and so if i see a keyword query that i don’t particularly care to be shown for or i want my ad shown for then i can go ahead and just select it and i can add it as a negative keyword okay so that tool is available to you right in google ads okay then you have the auction insight so we’ve reviewed the auction insights when we’re looking at competitive analysis and so here if we look at the auction insights we’ll be able to adjust our date range and we’ll be able to see basically you know who else is bidding on the keywords and what the impression share is what their average position is what the overlap rate is position above rate top of page absolute top of page right now rank and share so once we have google has data then they’ll be able to share that information with you okay so that’s just keywords but there’s a cool tool that i really like and i leverage it for seo and pay-per-click and that’s google’s keyword planner so if you click on tools and then you click on keyword planner we’ll be able to leverage the keyword planner and the whole idea behind the keyword planner is do we want to discover new keywords or for the keywords we have selected we can get volume and forecast on that so here let’s type in a keyword mail delivery and if i click get started okay so google’s going to give me some other keyword ideas and they’re going to give me what the average monthly searches are for that keyword they’re going to let me know the competition they’re going to give me a range in terms of how much i can expect to pay for that keyword so if i happen to click on that keyword i can add it to a plan and then once i’ve added to a plan then i can go ahead and look at that plan and measure what kind of volume i’m going to get and how much i can expect to pay so now once i’ve added my keyword to that plan i can go ahead and see how many clicks and impressions and costs and click the rate and average cost per click i can expect to spend so and this is based on a maximum cpc of two dollars so i can go ahead and adjust my plan accordingly if i want to in order to see basically how much i can expect to spend so that’s the whole idea behind the keyword planner in terms of choosing new keywords and once you choose keywords you’re interested in bidding on you can actually do a forecast to see exactly how much you can expect to spend how many clicks how many impressions you can expect to get and if you have conversions set up how many conversions you can expect to receive so that’s all part of google’s keyword plan that’s viewing forecast as well as choosing keywords so there are so many different tools and features within google ads we need a whole whole segment just on this so really i’m just going to highlight some of the more important tools and features so i mentioned the keyword planner i mentioned the campaigns keywords and ads reports another thing i would look at in google ads again we mention this as one of our key defining why would we use it bullet point and that’s because of devices so we mentioned devices why would we use google ads reporting tool because we want to look at devices and we want to be able to see what devices are driving traffic from what campaign and then the cool thing about google ads is right in google ads platform you can go ahead and do a bid adjustment so if i increase my bid adjustment for example on mobile phones then my particular ad in this particular campaign is going to show more than on computer so i can always decrease it for example do a bid adjustment on computer and that means i’m going to show my ads less so i can go ahead and do bit adjustments based on device that’s the cool thing of working right in google ads platform is you can make adjustments right here in the platform based on devices well you also have locations too so we mentioned that as one of the reasons why we want to use some of these tools and if i see a particular location i’m not interested in advertising well i can always select it and i can always just pause it or remove it so or i can change the bid adjustment on a location as well so i can make a lot of different changes right in the google ads platform for those seasoned in search advertising paid search advertising especially on google ads you can always use google ads editor all you need to do is just do a search for google ads editor you can download it so basically what google ads editor is it’s a it’s a tool it’s the software that you work your ca with your campaigns on locally so you’re making changes to your campaigns on your computer and basically when you’re done making changes you can always upload them to google ads to the account on google ads in the cloud so to speak so that’s the whole idea behind google ads editor it’s a great tool for you to use if you want to make household changes really quick for example i’m looking at an account with a bunch of campaigns so now if i click on one of those campaigns i can see the ad groups here okay so for example i just want to turn off all these ad groups i can just highlight them all and just click status enabled to pause and i can revert back if i want to okay so you can make household changes so here i could see the campaign the ad group level if i choose an ad group then i can see some key words and again i can make changes at nauseum here i can copy i can paste i can delete okay so i can make a lot of changes really quick right in google as editor and that’s the whole point of editor is to go ahead and work locally while somebody else is working locally on the same account you could both be working simultaneously and being more efficient on getting things done in the campaign now if you are working with somebody else on the campaign you want to make sure that you get recent changes so if i say get recent changes to all campaigns what google editor is going to do is contact google ads in the cloud and download all those changes so here i can see the changes being download in editor from google ads and when it’s done it’s going to highlight all the changes that have been made and so once i’m done reviewing those changes i can go ahead and click done and now i know i have the recent latest changes in editor so now i can go ahead and continue to make some changes and when i’m done making changes i can go ahead and post them so that’s the beauty of google ads editor bing has a version facebook has a version it allows you to again go at the keyword level the ad group level okay you can look at ads itself and make changes to the ads okay you could do a lot of different things write an editor in fact you could do pretty much most of what you could do in google ads you could do in google ads editor and so that’s google ads editor to me i would recommend it if you’re experienced with google ads again it’s software you have to download it you’re going to use it on your computer as software but when you make changes all you need to do is post those changes or get recent changes that have been made on google ads and so that’s google editor ads editor in summary now let’s go back into google ads and talk about display advertising because display is a different network but the platform’s still the same and some of the same tools are available from the search network as well as for the display network right in google ads so if i want to take a look at a campaign and ad group on the display network i can just click on that ad group and i can look at the ads that are running for that particular ad group on the display network so here the difference being on the display network is you can use image ads on the search network you can only use text ads so here i can look at image ads and i can see how they’re performing in fact you could even go a step further and use responsive display ads so google has responsive display ads meaning it’s going to respond to what’s performing best okay and so now i can see clicks impressions click-through rate etc right on on my ads and extensions report in google ads platform now this happens to be retargeting campaign so if we click on audiences we’ll be able to see what audiences we’re targeting here okay so when this report loads when you run retargeting campaigns you’re targeting a specific audience and so we want to be able to see okay of the audiences we have set up what audience is performing best okay so here i can see a breakout by audience again i could see the same metrics i could see on the search side i could see clicks impressions click-through rate more importantly i want to be able to measure conversions okay so that’s the whole idea when you’re in these platforms and you’re paying for ads is you want to be able to measure against conversions and you can also measure against cost per conversion conversion rate okay so those are some key metrics to measure up against whether it’s audience keyword ad whatever the dimension is so here on the display network we can get a sense of demographics okay so unlike the search network the display network allows us to see demographic data and so now i can see an age breakout or an age range breakout that google provides us and i can see again based on the age range breakout which age range has the most clicks impressions etc including conversions so you also have the opportunity on the display network to add keywords you have the opportunity topics and you have the opportunity to see placements or run placements so here if i click on where ads have shown i can actually see where my ads have shown up for this display campaign and google ads allows you the ability to go ahead and you can exclude it from the ad group or exclude a specific placement from a campaign so you could take action on a specific placement and i could see the type of placement whether it’s a mobile app whether it’s a site i can go ahead and see exactly where that placement was so that’s the placements report you have demographics you have audiences you have keywords you have all these different reports available to you on the google ads platform so before we jump over to social media paid search advertising i just want to remind you we do have you know a nice tutorial on google ads okay so take a look at the google ads tutorial we have set up on youtube okay if you search for google ads tutorial 2019 this is a good uh tutorial on everything related to google ads so check out this video because in today’s webinar we’re just mentioning tools across the board and if you are advertising on google ads as most people do then you could see just how powerful it is and all the different features that are available so take a look at the video it’s a nice complementary video to this one this digital marketing tools and this will give you a nice and deeper insight into everything that’s available on google ads and if you have any tools or features on google ads whether it’s the search network or whether that’s the display network then feel free to comment below this video happy to hear your comments about what tools and reports and features you specifically use in google ads so let’s move into uh facebook ads manager and show you how the platform looks when you’re running ads on facebook so we can look at all the different tools and reports available here so here we can see if we’re in the facebook ads manager we could see our campaigns we can see our ad sets and we can see our ads so just like on google ads you have less side navigation so we can drill down so if we want to see ad sets for example we could just click on ad sets that are showing up in this particular account and here we can see we have two ad sets that are live so if i click on one of these ad sets i’ll be able to see an actual ad that’s running here and so for the actual ad that’s running i can then see the results of that ad and how it’s performing for example you know how many clicks it’s received what the reach is what the impressions are so impressions similar to google ads how many people are actually looking at the app and i could see the cost per click here at one dollar as an example and so now i can go in and i can go ahead and look at the ad performance and go ahead and change out that ad if it’s not performing to my expectation so if i click on more tools and then creatives i can just simply click on creators and then i can actually see the creators i actually have running for that campaign i selected so now i can see all the creatives that are running and i can see the results of those creatives so facebook ads manager also has reap different reporting so if i click on the reports pull down menu you can see here i could see some standard reports by add ad set age and gender and then i can see all reports here listed out by placement by placement and device time of day country etc so if we just look at age and gender we’ll be able to get a breakout age and gender here so you can see by campaign i’m looking at all campaigns here and i’m looking at just age and gender i can certainly deselect one of these and i can look at a specific time range so now i can see who’s looking at my ad specifically so here i could see 35 to 44 female i can see the reach impressions and how often they’re actually seeing my ad now this is key for facebook because if somebody’s seen your ad a lot they’re probably going to tune out to it so that’s what makes the frequency metric so important on facebook because then we can go ahead and you know turn off that particular age and gender if we needed to and we could see how much we spent so this just gives you some idea of the type of reporting that’s available in facebook ads manager now the great thing about facebook reporting in ads manager is you know i can group or ungroup uh my dimensions if i needed to i could change the view and arrange columns i can get rid of columns just as you would in google ads reporting very similar stature here so i have a lot of flexibility here on how i review the reports you know you got different metrics that you can pick and choose as well okay and you got lots of different flexibility when you’re looking at the reports on how your campaigns are performing now here i can pick and choose i can choose campaign ad set ads objective again i can choose different demographics so i have a lot of options available to me in terms of how i want to you know view the performance of my campaign view the performance of my ad set or my ad now remember if you’re in facebook you can always go in and edit the campaign you can edit the ad set remember in the ad set that’s where a lot of your decisions are going to be made including how you want to drive the traffic okay what your budget is okay you can basically choose your audience here so you’re going to be able to choose what type of campaign is going to be and based on the campaign you’re going to go ahead and choose the kind of audience you want to focus in on you’re going to be able to choose the location the age range the gender so all of this is going to be set up in the ad set or the campaign or the ad if you go ahead and edit it out remember you can do a b testing as well so you have a lot of different options and features available to you right in ads manager when you’re managing your paid search campaigns on facebook so if you want some more information about all the different features and tools and facebook ads manager check out the facebook ads tutorial 2019 uh webinar that we did earlier this year in addition you can also look at another one that we did on facebook called facebook advertising tips and strategies so that should give you some sense of everything related to facebook ads and how to take advantage of the facebook ads manager platform so if there’s anything on social that we may have missed or that you use feel free to add a comment below the video we’d love to hear your feedback okay let’s talk about some affiliate marketing tools let’s turn our attention affiliate marketing a lot of affiliate marketing platforms out there the number one probably is commission junction also known as cj they’re an affiliate platform they have a freemium model meaning you can have a free trial but basically you’re gonna have to move on and pay for the platform likewise for house offers you have volume you really when it comes to affiliate marketing a lot of platforms out there click inc hey when so a lot of these are brokers per se and when i say brokers like for example with cj you as a merchant or you as a publisher can get in touch with a merchant you as a merchant can get in touch with a publisher meaning cj helps bridge the gap between you finding somebody to build your network with okay so that’s what really affiliate marketing is and you really need a platform to kind of put it all together and it’s a lot a lot of affiliate marketing platforms we’re actually going to take a look at cj and go through some of the features in the platform here shortly but let’s just take a look at why we need these affiliate marketing tools well these affiliate marketing tools identify you know affiliates inflowers employees other advocates you want to partner with so again you could be on the merchant side you could be actually selling a product and you’re going to want somebody to help you sell that product somebody with a website who’s an influencer who drives a lot of traffic to their own site who you know does sell reputable brand etc so you need somebody to help you introduce you to these sites okay so cj and some of these other marketing platforms affiliate marketing platforms do that okay so these tools are there to do the introductions the brokering the relationship so the other benefit here is you can contract with affiliates and track the traffic and conversions well what do i mean by that well if you do use cj.com by no means am i only endorsing that platform there are plenty others out there but whatever platform you use you’re gonna want to be able to set up terms and conditions with that particular affiliate so you could set up with terms and conditions for say 10 off all sales as an example okay well you’re getting a platform that will help you broker that contract okay contract terms or program terms furthermore you’re gonna need a platform to help you track hey is this affiliate helping me drive traffic or is this affiliate driving traffic to my products and is this affiliate helping me sell so these platforms help you do just that okay so you can gain high website rankings with the help of your affiliate meaning that hey your affiliate can be promoting your product and if they’re promoting your product you have a chance to show up via paid search organic search off other websites so social so you have a lot of benefits to working with affiliate marketing in itself and the tools available will help you gain website rankings as one example we want to be able to track certain metrics okay so an affiliate marketing you have earnings per click epc as an example most platforms measure epc from a seven day period to a three month period okay you can also figure out what the actual cost per click is just like you do on say google search you can actually measure that in affiliate okay you want to eliminate fraudulent clicks impressions and conversions so any affiliate platform worth its weight is going to help you understand you know how many pressions and clicks and conversions you’re getting and help you manage that in terms of fraudulent clicks or hey if you’re getting a lot of impressions and no clicks that’s a problem too so these platforms are really built on helping you manage your relationship with the affiliate by offering up all sorts of reports and tools you know the other big benefit here to affiliate marketing tool is hey we can influence our customers throughout their buying journey so we could set up different promotions based on hey did somebody go to the website did somebody see our product does somebody click on our product did somebody go into the shopping cart with our product did somebody purchase our product so there’s all sorts of steps in the funnel so to speak and hey you can work with an affiliate a publisher to influence your customers throughout that purchasing funnel throughout that journey so let’s go ahead and log in here so when you log in like any other digital marketing tool any other platform you’re gonna have your own settings and whatnot so really the whole idea behind any affiliate marketing tool is really there to manage your publishers who do you want as a publisher who do you want selling your product you obviously want somebody who’s relevant somebody who’s going to be able to sell a product somebody who has a targeted audience that’s similar to yours okay so we go into cj.com we’re going to log in and here you can see a publisher’s link so we’re going to click on the publishers link and remember when you sign up publishers you have to have program terms and so if we click on publishers program terms we’re going to be able to see all the different program terms available so here we could see the different program turns we have set up for certain publishers so we just click on that we’ll be able to see that’s the default program term so remember you could set up your own program term for any publisher so as a best practice if you have publishers who are actually performing well who are selling your products maybe you want to offer them a little bit more on the commission side maybe you want to sweeten the deal maybe you know these guys these publishers get better program terms versus say other publishers who don’t and so here we can see the program terms basically you could see what the terms are the action and the different policies here so everything you need to do to manage that publisher in terms of payment is done under the program terms now if the program terms are met the publisher actually sells your products cj is the broker they’re the ones who are going to initiate the payment based on the program terms so be careful on the program terms you want to be able to set them appropriately cj has templates cj has some default program terms that you can use and offer up to different publishers so based on the program terms that’s how your publishers are going to get paid and so here you can have as many different program terms as you want there’s no limit here you want to be able to align and reward program terms again based on performance and so here we can see what publishers are under what program terms so again if your publisher is performing well sweeten the deal offer them a better program terms and so you can align publishers with different program terms and so that’s the whole idea behind program terms is you want to be able to align publishers with that so when you sign up a publisher they’re going to get a line with a program term meaning what are they going to get paid for selling your product now if we want to manage by status instead of by program terms we could see all the different organizations we have in our network these are our publishers we’re the affiliate we’re the ones selling the product we want to know who’s selling who’s not selling and so we can look at all our publishers by program terms or by status okay so basically you can see here the term status whether it’s active or not earnings basically what they’ve sold over the last basically seven days or three months so you could look at basically how your publishers are performing just by clicking on manage by status here in cg.com so when you’re looking at reports in cg.com or really any other affiliate program you might see the acronym epc this stands for earnings per click actually it’s a little misleading it’s actually earnings per 100 clicks so basically cj calculates you know how much your publisher is actually making per click you know just like paid search we’re paying google x amount per click it’s the same thing here we can’t or these publishers can’t make any money if they don’t generate clicks so that’s why you have an epc model or metric so to speak so you can measure earnings per click cj does it over seven day period and over a three month period so you could sort based on seven day or three month to see who’s earning the most per click in terms of publishers now you can select under publishers groups now you can group your publishers okay so if you have say a group of publishers in a specific region like the united states or india or if you’re just focused on the united states and say you have publishers in different states like texas california missouri arkansas well you can group those publishers into different groups and you can look at your different group names here so here we could see canada and so we have our publishers grouped into a group called canada why because they’re based in canada makes sense so you want to be able to organize your publishers because the whole idea behind affiliate marketing cj is you want to be able to get the best publishers available for your network and so as you get more publishers for your network you’ll be able to basically start grouping them where it makes sense now the example i gave you is by geography you could do by geography or you could do by publisher status meaning my best performing publishers go into a group if they’re in a group then they get aligned with a certain program term so you could group your publishers any way you want by status meaning they’re selling more these are our best performing publishers or by region or you know by promotion i mean how you group your publishers is totally up to you however take advantage of the option to create publisher groups because the whole idea again i’m going to repeat it is you want to get publishers and you want to start building your base of publishers because the more publishers you have the more chance you are to sell your product remember if nobody clicks on your product then nobody’s going to buy your product so if you have publishers who are promoting your product for you then you have a good opportunity to sell it so the more publishers you have on board the better the opportunity so now once you have publishers you can start grouping these publishers accordingly to whatever makes sense as a business decision just know the options available in cj to group publishers let’s turn our attention to social media marketing tools social media always a great topic to talk about so we’re gonna finish up all our digital marketing tools with social media we talked about seo paid competition affiliate email you know web analytics it’s just appropriate to finish up a social media because social media has so many tools available so many okay the first one i can think about here is hootsuite hootsuite is a great social media marketing tool to use okay it’s a freemium okay you can set up a free trial here you basically a base account and then uh you can use hootsuite to do a lot of things anything from setting up landing pages to actually publishing content to listening hootsuite to me is one of the most powerful social media marketing tools available you got buffer buffers a paid version but you can actually set up a low cost or free account actually on buffer and then move to a paid account okay you got tweet decks been around a long time that is actually free and i would recommend tweetdeck and we’re going to take a look at that here in a couple minutes okay and then you got sprout social sprout social is another social marketing platform similar to hootsuite do a lot of reporting a lot of publishing you can a lot of listening and so we’re going to take a look at sprout chelsea today as well before we do that let’s go over why these tools are important to us from a social media perspective you’re pumping out a lot of content so you need to be able to smartly efficiently you know schedule and manage your post okay so you’re not just working likely with just one platform like facebook you’re probably on a number of different platforms depending on your business depending on your bandwidth depending on what you’re selling your products etc your audience obviously has a lot to do with it you know it could be instagram pinterest you want to be able to consolidate all that and manage it in one place and that’s what social media marketing tools do they allow you to manage everything in one place so if you could manage everything in one place then these social media marketing platforms need to be able to make it easy for you to add and manage different accounts okay so a lot of them have the ability for you to add you know not just one twitter account but multiple twitter accounts and not just one social media platform but multiple social media platforms and a good social media marketing so worth its weight will help you monitor the results so monitor social media posts that help drive leads and sales in other words you’re going to have a lot of different metrics associated with each social media marketing platform okay which one is actually doing its job okay so you want to be able to easily manage these platforms applications and websites very efficiently okay so instead of having to log into each platform is log into one place get a sense of what’s been posted what the engagement is did they purchase etc and what you want to do is be able to individually customize every social media post across different platforms so it just makes it a lot easier to do that in the social media marketing tools okay you don’t want to send out a blanket message across different platforms you want to be able to go ahead and customize a post depending on what that post is depending on what the product is what time of day what target market what target audience so customization is a lot easier using these social media marketing tools you want to be able to engage with brand advocates so listening is a good thing with social media marketing tools using the listening functionality so you can actually see who is a brand advocate who’s not a brand advocate who’s an influencer who’s not an influencer and then of course you want to analyze the behavior of your audience and optimize individual posts on real-time data so if for example you post something using one of these social media marketing platforms and you see it go viral then you want to be able to react to that in real time so you’re going to be able to see that in real time on these social media marketing tools these platforms like sprout social and hootsuite and then you’re going to be able to react to that behavior and then of course monitoring website traffic and conversion rates that’s key we always want to monitor conversions based on our kpis our business goals so there are also a few important digital marketing tools that can help you in different ways okay so without further ado let’s jump in and take a look at what’s available in terms of social media marketing so just a quick reminder if you are running ads on facebook or you’re posting on facebook as an example or any platform in general that platform’s going to have its own metrics if you will so for example facebook has something called facebook inside so you’ll be able to actually see you know what’s been posted based on you know the last seven days in this example how many page views you’re getting engagements recent posts so just to let you know yes you can go into any one of these platforms on its own and look at metrics just like you can do if you’re running facebook ads hey you can go right into facebook ads manager and view data there okay so the whole point here though on using a social media tool is that you can measure all that in one place so if we log into sprout social i can set up these accounts right into sprout social so i don’t have to log into twitter individually or facebook individually i can link them up all within sprout social and then i can go to reports just like i can with facebook insights and then once i’m in facebook excuse me once i’m in sprout social reporting then i can go ahead just like i can in facebook insights except it’s all right here for me i can jump into you know facebook and dig a little bit deeper as to what’s going on with my account so i don’t have to log into facebook directly i can see you know the impressions the engagement the clicks over a period of time i can see my audience growth i can see my publishing behavior how often my publishing i can see the top post individually i can see impressions by day you know a lot of this same material same information is already in facebook insights so if it’s available on facebook insights you know you’re definitely going to have it available in a tool like sprout social so you want to be able to just efficiently log in and jump from one platform to the other so here you know i can go to instagram you know and look at instagram data or i can look at twitter information so you want to be able to efficiently jump from one platform to the other using in this example sprout social now as i mentioned as part of one of the benefits of a social media tool is that you can publish content you want to be able to publish content because you want to be able to organize and schedule accordingly you don’t want to be submitting and publishing content right after one another okay you want to be able to spread it out efficiently and effectively and so here we could see you know we could publish and schedule content accordingly so all we have to do is click compose select a profile write whatever we need to do we could schedule it for tomorrow at a specific time and there you go voila scheduled so this is on twitter okay so you know we could choose another platform here it’s just that easy to schedule so you want to be able to schedule accordingly because again when you schedule something then you want to look at the behavior of it so it’s just as simple as going from publishing to reporting and then based on when something got published you could see the reaction of it and react to it so another thing here that i like about it’s about social hootsuite a lot of these other platforms do it really well you got listening tools so you can listen in on conversations that are being had for example uh mail delivery you know if we do mail delivery and twitter search we’ll be able to see what’s been tweeted about mail deliveries you know if that’s the business we’re in we can refine our search and choose a specific location or radius to hone in if we’re local okay so this is sprout social’s example of listening here let’s take a look at another example i’m in later.com so later very similar sprout social and that it does a lot of the same things you can actually schedule content on a particular platform and one thing i like about later here you can actually see it visually you can see a calendar and what’s been scheduled so i could see today i have scheduled something scheduled at 1 15 local time and again i have five profiles set up for this account so i can pick and choose the profile that i want to publish to so it just makes it that much easier and i can visually see it and that’s important so here i can click on media library so the one thing about later.com is that you know you have a library of images that potentially you can reuse so if i click on this image here okay i can get a sense of when it was used and i can view it on a calendar i can add label for it so that’s another benefit to later is that they have this media library here they have conversations so i can actually connect to a platform and listen in on conversations that are being had similar to the listening tool in sprout social and they have analytics so you can actually see write in later.com how your particular social media platform is performing so i could see it here over seven days i can see the number of followers have increased i can see the growth rate i can see the number of impressions that i’ve received okay so i want to be able to see how my particular platform is performing over a period of time so i can look at reach a lot profile views website clicks okay so i can get a lot of good insights here right in the analytics platform later you can look at specific post performance so if we posted something i could see basically how many likes it received how many comments impressions the reach and then if i want to do i can click on details and get more specific information on it engagement rate okay discovery actions comments saves etc so later.com goes into some nice detail about post performance they even have date on hashtags so if you use an hashtag you can actually see how many times the hashtag’s been used or saved how many impressions it’s received okay so they really go into some nice detail here about how your post and how your accounts are performing and here’s a tool i really like i’ve been using for a long time and that’s tweetdeck so what tweetdeck does is connect with your twitter account so you can see in a different visual so to speak of how your twitter account looks in terms of your feed here i can see this is my feed here okay i can see some notifications i can see specific messages then on this column i can see activity okay so i can add different columns here if i wanted to and basically by adding columns you can see i can look for what’s trending as an example so i’m going to add in a column that says trending and so now i can go in and see okay these are all the different things that are trending on twitter uh so you can actually add a column and pay attention to something really specific okay so for example search okay so right now i have men’s health but i could type in let’s just say world cup okay so i can see the you got the qriket world cup you got you know the soccer football world cup going on so you know we could pick a particular topic to follow if we wanted to so again here i’m following men’s health so i can now see you know everything that’s been posted on men’s health now if i click on for example one of these hashtags here that’s trending i can actually see who’s tagging or using that friday feeling in their tweets and so the whole idea behind you know tweetdeck it serves up a interesting overview so to speak of not only your account but you know a specific topic or what’s trending or you know other things that are being said so if you really want to pay attention to your brand or something really specific like you know your competitors or a specific product then you can just do a search on that and so that’s the great thing about tweak deck it allows you to kind of just look and listen in on everything going on in twitter now we do have a good video out here on youtube how to start social media marketing so if you haven’t had a chance to look at it take a look it goes over some of these tools that we cover today like sprout social you know facebook insights so it does cover in more detail some of what we covered on these social media marketing tools so take a look at how to start social media marketing so we covered a lot of different marketing tools digital marketing tools everything from seo to email to social to paid to affiliate to competitor but there’s also a few other digital marketing tools that you can use in different ways like video seo for example so vid iq you know we want to use vid iq to get a good sense of how particular video is performing so here if we go into youtube you can see vid iq is a browser extension or browser a plug-in if you will so i can go and take a look at a specific specific video and see how many hours it’s been watched how many views minutes watch subscribers etc you know the great thing here i can look at the entire entire account so i can get good insights into my video or my entire account here just by adding in the vid iq extension into my chrome browser so vid iq actually does give you some really really good insights into not only your account but the video and so recommend vid iq because it’s good for video seo okay there’s also tools related to content optimization so you know if you’re doing seo and you have a lot of content on your site well you know what we want to be able to use a tool maybe a third party tool to give some objective reasoning as to what more we can be doing so you got tools like seo site checkup or site analyzer these are pay tools but you know if you’re really heavily invested in seo then they may pay dividends for you you want to be able to make sure your content is fully optimized to the fullest according to you know google’s algorithms and so you maybe you know want to invest in that third-party tool so these are good tools to use for content optimization you know there’s also other key reddit but you know there’s keyboard planner uh in google there’s also a word stream there’s a lot of different keyword tools out there so you may not have a google ads platform and so if you don’t have google ads then you may not be able to gain access to google’s keyword planner so having a third party keyword tool will pay dividends as well because those dividends pay off in the form of not only pay-per-click but also seo and if you’re heavily invested in content heavily invested in social then you may want to take a look at the keyword tool keyword it and it’s primarily used for reddit we talk about page load time so we looked at that in google analytics we know that it heavily impacts seo so there are other tools available you got a third party tool here that’s free solarwinds pingdom you actually have page speed insights by google so these are free tools that you could take advantage of in determining how you can improve your page load time my favorite topic conversion rate optimization so you got a couple in here crazy egg and target okay so i’m going to show you another tool called hot jar so here if you log into hotjar.com you can set up an account it’s actually free and with the free account you can have hotjar measure the heat map not only the heat map but the click mapping the scrolling of a particular page and so here you can see we’re looking at a particular page here so hotjar allows me to you know see on that page where people are clicking um i can also see where people are moving i can also see you know the scrolling of a particular page okay so you can see here on the page i can see people are moving over here to the right that’s where they’re clicking mostly if i switch over to move mode then i can see on that particular page where people are actually moving their mouse and then i have my scroll analysis so i could see you know how far down people actually scroll on the page and so again with a paid account you can measure up to ten thousand page views with the free version you can measure up to 2000 pages and so 2000 page use allows you to get some insight as to what people are clicking on or where they’re moving or how they’re scrolling on a particular page and so i definitely recommend hot jar they also do funneling they also do forms polls lots of other tools available in hotjar so hotjar.com is a tool i would recommend as well so one final tool and i’d be remiss if i didn’t mention it and that’s google optimized so google optimize is a google platform that allows you to a b test and so a b testing means that you have an original page and you’re changing one element on that page to see which one performs better and so with google optimize it’s just very easy to set up to run and the whole point of google optimize and a b testing is to improve website performance so here you can see i have an account set up and optimize you can see we’re running one test here and we’re just testing one element versus the original so we move photos to the top of the page the original didn’t have the photos to the top of the page and so we can go into reporting here google optimize does all the heavy lifting and so here you can see we can look at bounces or we can look at you know basically a measure the test up against the metric that’s important to our business and again the whole point is to improve website performance and so definitely take a look at google optimize we’ll have another webinar in the future on the topic but you know to me google optimize is free you can run up to five tests okay and if you can run up to five different tests then that means you have the ability to really improve website performance okay so google optimize is a tool that i would recommend carl has a website on cake recipes unfortunately his website on google is not ranking well moreover when searching for cake recipes keyword his website ranks way below than his competitors this can be due to various reasons but one that sticks out is seo to solve this issue i have a few important tracking factors that karl needs to know and apply if he wants his website to rank well before we get started with the ranking factors let me first explain what seo is seo is the practice of getting traffic from organic search results on a search engine like google bing etc depending upon the keywords search engines rank websites based

on what content they consider most relevant to users without further ado let me tell you the top 5 ranking factors which can help karl to rank his website first is content quality then it’s page speed of a web page after that its website structure next is ssl certificates and finally its backlinks which is the most important ranking factor let’s have a look at good content quality a good content quality is an essential factor that helps a website to rank on google google ranks content that completely answers a user’s query in our case cake recipes also longer content rank higher on search engine results apart from longer content you can also optimize your content with few techniques such as you can start with a comprehensive introduction this article on the best vanilla cake i’ve ever had is a good example of having a comprehensive introduction ensure to write content relevant to the chosen keyword for example if your keyword is cake recipes ensure to write a content on how to bake a cake rather than focusing on cake decorating ideas always create a click-worthy title and include lsi keywords in your content in seo lsi stands for latent semantic indexing they’re used to drive content traffic and create more visibility on serves an easy way to look for lsi keywords is on google serve some of the lsi keywords for cake recipes are easy cake recipes vanilla cake recipes chocolate cake recipes and a lot more as shown on the screen ensure your heading and subheadings consist of keywords for example all the heading and subheading for this article have the keyword cake build a comprehensive internal linking structure of web pages it helps in spreading link equity across the site it is important to create a simple internal website link structure in the below example a bot crawls on web page 2 by following internal link of the web page 1. next add suitable images with descriptive alt text here using relevant images can help search engines understand what your content is about and this method helps in site ranking for example for carl’s website on cake recipes he should use suitable images like wedding cakes birthday cakes etc incorporate call out boxes as it will highlight the important information and increase the dwell time for example if carl wants to sell his cake he should place call out box with contact details immediately after the cake recipes ensure your webpage is completely crawlable for bots as it will enhance website ranking here as you see this website is high up on the google search because every web page in it is crawlable by bots next opt for mobile friendly designs it will result in good user experience for a mobile friendly design always prefer short and crisp sentences for easy reading a poor example and a good example of mobile friendly designs are shown here and most importantly update the content regularly by doing this search engine rearranges your site’s ranking for example the sally’s baking addiction cake recipe blog ranks at number one on google the reason it updates content regularly next we have page speed page speed defines how fast the content of a web page is displayed on the screen it is important to ensure that a page speed isn’t slow otherwise it will result in high bounce rate paid speed can be optimized through improving your server response time this can be done by fixing major issues like slow database queries slow routing or a lack of etiquette memory use a simple website design and reduce the image size that is larger than 150 bytes next use a content distribution network as it distributes the load of delivery content at multiple geographical locations you can also optimize your code minify files if your website has numerous css and javascript file you can minify and combine them google says slow page speed results in high bounce rate as you can see here next comes optimizing title tags and url a title tag summarizes the website’s content and url is a web address title tags are displayed on serps it is a clickable headline for a given result title tags are displayed on serps it is a clickable headline for a given result for example chocolate cake recipe cake recipe carl cake.com is a title tag of a website where chocolate cake recipe is the primary keyword cake recipe is a secondary keyword and callcake.com is the brand name backlinko recommends writing a relevant keyword in the title tag is important as it gives an overview of what your content is about now talking about urls always refer a well-structured short and simple url according to backlinko analysis short urls tend to rank better than long urls moving on to our fourth ranking factor let’s talk about ssl certificate websites using https server have a higher chance of boost in rankings https is used for secure communication over a computer network as you can see here google confirms https as one of the ranking factors there are two ways to improve site security you can protect your domain by enabling dns sec protocol or use hsts to add an extra layer of security over https whereas hsts protects from hijacking the next ranking factor is website architecture the famous digital marketer neil patel says the better your site structure the better your chance of ranking higher in the search engines also backlinko confirms that an optimized website architecture helps bots to find and index all of the web page a good site structure results in good use experience some of the ways to optimize your site structure are creating a logical hierarchy structure which means a good site architecture not only makes content easier to find but also helps to gain traffic include site maps so that the bots can easily access and index the content code your site navigation in css or html because these two languages are easy to code and understand build a comprehensive structure of internal linking as it improves indexing of a website and helps in spreading link juice coming to our last ranking factor that is backlinks backlinks is an online navigation of hyperlinks from other websites to your own website in this way we can drive referral traffic and increase the website’s authority in seo the more backlinks in a web page receives the better it will rank in google backlinks enhances search engine rankings brand awareness and referral traffic backlinks can be gained through influencer marketing engaging with audiences on multiple social media platforms like telegram linkedin etc participating in high pr q a sites like quora and post answers to the questions related to your business today we’re going to talk about why you would want to rank using seo and seo is search engine optimization also known as organic search you also may as hear us say organic listings we’re going to talk a little bit about why you’d want to rank your website in organic search okay what is search engine optimization then we’re going to follow that up with how does google rank websites so why does it rank one website over another and how do we get our website to rank number one then we’re going to talk about the different types of seo or search engine optimization techniques so you can get your website ranked number one and then we’re going to finish that off with the do’s and don’ts of seo so let’s get right to it and talk about why seo so we’re going to use a basic example and let’s just say you have a blog you’re a food blogger you’re passionate about food and your niche is ice cream and let’s just say you have a lot of ice cream recipes you want to get traffic to your blog you want people to read your blog and you’re curious why am i not ranking for my blog why when people type in ice cream recipes and say google my blog posts don’t appear at the top of organic rankings and there’s a number of reasons why you wouldn’t be ranked for your blog post or your ice cream recipes and the main reason would be your competitors so there could be somebody else out there who is also passionate about ice cream and has been blogging along longer than you and they have more content and more blog posts and more pages for google to rank so that’s usually the number one reason the other reason is improper usage of keywords and we’re going to talk a little bit or it’s actually a lot more about you know keyword usage in your content so what kind of keywords do you want to rank for that’s really what we’re talking about when we talk about usage of keywords what keywords do you want to rank for and how do we work those keywords into the content another reason is port link building practices and really that means our other blog posts or other websites linking to you also are you linking to other pages on your website and so it’s all about link building and with link building it’s internal linking so are we linking from one blog post to another and it’s external linking are other websites of high quality linking to us and so that’s what we talk about when we talk about link building and then another reason is web page load time so you could be running your blog post on say wordpress for example and your blog post isn’t loading fast enough well if you look at it this way think about it if you’re google would you really want to rank a website or blog post in this example number one on google rankings if that particular page loaded very slow no you wouldn’t because when somebody clicked on that link in organic search and went to your website they’re going to have a bad experience because the page is going to load slow so google doesn’t want their users to have a bad experience you don’t want your users to have a bad experience and so that’s why web page load time is a critical factor for ranking so we need to make sure that our web pages load fast and then your user experience is not good enough so google again based on my example about the web page load time google wants people to have a good experience when they go from their search engine to your website and there’s a lot at play there specifically web page load time but also you know google doesn’t want any spam content google doesn’t want any pop-ups or overbearing ads on the web page they want people who are searching for something in particular let’s just say ice cream recipes and they want to find a relevant website that has ice cream recipes they want to be able to click on that link and read some good content about ice cream recipes it’s that simple and that’s really what google’s trying to create in their environment and that’s you as an end user as a website owner you want your users to have a good experience and then last but not least your website is the indexed by mistake and really what we mean is the indexed is google needs to be able to index all the pages on your website so if you have a blog with a hundred recipes you want google to have access to all 100 recipes so we’re going to talk a little bit later about how to get your pages ranked or indexed on google organic search so let’s move on to what is seo so sticking with our ice clean blog theme really seo search engine optimization really is the practice of increasing your pages that google has indexed up the rankings so the end result is we want all our pages to be ranked number one for particular keywords so if you want to be ranked for ice cream recipes well there’s certain things you need to do so that’s generally how it works we need to apply search engine optimization to increase a page for keyword we want to be found for so let me give you an example so let’s just say there’s a hundred students that participated in an essay competition and so the competition in this particular case is evaluated on the basis of is the content relevant are they using suitable titles for their essay do they have structure when they’re participating in this essay or talking about the essay and do they have a suitable synopsis and is the content neat and readable these seem all logical for an essay competition well guess what they seem logical for seo because that’s exactly how seo works it’s exactly all those points i just made mention about structure logic readability organization title all those things are what’s important in seo and so we need relevant content we need titles for our pages google needs to be able to see structure we need to have synopsis of what the page is about and that’s called a meta description and then again the content needs to be readable and that’s important and so in order to be readable again we’re going to talk more about site speed because site speed is important okay and when we talk about responsive design when i say responsive design that means your site your page needs a load both on desktop and also on mobile and so all these things are important just like an essay competition google is the judge and they need to be able to determine what page is best to rank number one number two number three etc on google search and then link building remember i mentioned link building a moment ago well link building internally and externally also plays a vital role and so we’re going to talk about that a little bit later in the class when we talk about off-page seo how does google rank website and basically google follows three basic steps to rank a website they need to crawl your website they need to take what they call back to their servers and when they take it back to their servers your your web pages they need to you have them available for indexing so when somebody actually types in a keyword into google.com it’ll be available to be found on organic search so that’s what indexing is all about and then google’s job when somebody does type in a search query is to basically rank the those pages that they’ve indexed from number one to infinity depending on how many pages are relevant to that search query so really it’s about crawling indexing and ranking so crawling is simply a process done by which google has bots and what these bots do is they go to your web server and they’re going to crawl every page that they can find and how do they find these pages well they basically follow links you might have heard the term spidering but that’s what they call search engine spidering so basically what google’s doing is they’re building a web so to speak all the links that they’re following and so when they can follow all these links on your website they’re going to be able to crawl them and when they crawl them basically they’re going to take that content and store it on their servers so it’s available in their index so based on this method google finds out which websites have relevant content and which ones don’t based on certain keywords that are typed into google because if they can’t crawl your website you’re not going to be found and if you can’t be found they’re not going to show up for relevant keywords so we need to make sure your site’s available to be crawled and we’ll talk about that a little bit later okay but let’s show you an example so let’s just go to google search and if i type in the keyword simply learn okay i can see i have 1 million 10 000 results okay and that’s how many results are showing up for simply learn okay now they may not all be simply learned pages but nonetheless simply learned is ranked number one here organically and there are 1 million 10 000 pages related to the keyword simply learn now when it comes to organic search uh we don’t want to get it confused with paid search so anytime you see paid search you’re going to see something that says add next to it okay so we could see that there are paid ads here but when it comes to organic search those are generally below paid ads and so that’s where google counts the 1 million 10 000 results and so that’s the whole idea behind crawling and indexing google is able to cross simply learn’s website and based on all the pages that they gather they’re going to make those pages available in organic search so if you type in a keyword and your web page is not available for indexing then you’re never going to show up for that keyword so that’s why it’s important to make sure your website is available for crawling and indexing and so when a user types a query on search google search the most relevant websites that are in google’s index are going appear in the search results so in the example i gave uh was simply learn well simply learn is the brand name of the company simply learn so there’s a lot of relevancy there so that’s why you see simply learn show up here organically number one like we mentioned about what is seo and why seo we talked about that user experience so there’s a lot of factors that go into ranking relevancy being one of them so in the simply learn example simply learn is relevant to a lot of the simply learned pages because that’s who they are simply learn however simply learn also needs to make sure that you know for their pages the page load time is fast meaning these pages load very fast for the end user and google also takes into account other factors like how long someone is staying on a website or are they bouncing meaning are they going to one page that they land on and then leaving the website okay and so the user experience is very very important there are other factors also like language and location and so for example location if you do a search say in india the results are going to be a little bit different than say the results in the united states why because google is indexing as many web pages as they can find so if somebody’s doing a search in india their results may be a little bit different than the results show up in the us because google has different bots and these bots are crawling different pages at different times and so google’s index is updating continuously but it’s not real time syncing so if you do a search in india you may not see exactly the same thing because both search engines the google and india and the google in the us are may not be exactly synced up so an example would be you know if you’re looking for cafe so if you search a cafe and say san francisco you’re going to see different results now if you do a search for cafes in mumbai you’re going to see different results there’s going to be local search here at the top there may be some paid search but again you may see different results because one location but two google search engines in india and united states google.com aren’t exactly synced up exactly at the same exact time you do that search so location is important language is important and relevancy is important along with user experience so all those are important factors in how google ranks websites okay so we’re going to talk about the types of seo now so if we want to rank for a particular keyword on google we’re going to have to apply search engine optimization and so there’s two strategies to search engine optimization on-page seo and off-page seo so first we’re going to talk about on-page seo so on-page seo is nothing more than optimizing your own website and so when we say optimizing your own website there’s certain elements on your website and on your web pages that we need to take into account and so some of those elements are headers meta descriptions title tags linking so all of those elements are something we can control as an end user who wants to rank our web page and our website on google and before we do anything with our website the first thing we need to do is understand what keywords we want to rank for in order to understand what keywords we want to rank for we need to do keyword research and if you do anything in seo keyword research is the most important activity that’s the most important thing you can do for seo and why do i say it’s the most important because you need to understand if you choose a keyword that you want to rank for you need to understand how much traffic you’re going to get from that keyword if you’re ranked organically say number one on google so how much traffic will you get if you’re ranked number one on google so you need to understand what the volume is and then number two we need to understand what the competition is for that keyword that you want to rank for so if you choose a keyword and there’s not much competition for it then chances are you can rank for that keyword for a web page on your website quicker than say a keyword that has a lot of competition so we need to understand those two basic factors volume and competition before we choose a keyword and it’s it’s simply the practice of going through the motions of getting your volume and getting your competition data so you can choose the keywords you want and then once you choose the keywords you want then you can go and apply on page seo you can change the title tag the meta descriptions the headers all those elements can be changed but first you need to choose your keywords and so again the primary components we’re looking for are how much traffic you can get or the search volume how much competition there is for that keyword and of course relevancy okay you need to be able to choose a keyword that’s relevant to the web page you’re trying to rank for and so let me show you example of how to go through this so the first thing we want to do is we want to use a tool and the tool i would recommend is google keyword planner and why do i choose google keyword planner because if we’re trying to rank on google.com or google search engine we want to be able to get the data right from the source so google’s going to be able to give us information about how much volume a keyword has and how much competition it has so let me show you an example so if i want to use google’s keyword planner and i want to rank for the keyword how to become a digital marketing specialist then i’m going to type that keyword into google’s keyword planner and what google’s going to do is they’re going to give me some trends about how much volume this particular keyword gets over the course of a year and so for that particular keyword i can see that there are trends that that appear for both desktop and mobile so mobile is important because people start their search process a lot of times on their mobile device so we want to be able to get data from mobile as well as desktop and so we can see a trend here that for each particular month over the last 12 months we can see how much volume this particular keyword how to become a digital marketing specialist gets per month and so on average on average over the past 12 months i could see how to become a digital marketing specialist is averages 30 searches a month and this is on google.com and so google gives us the volume what they also give us is the competition and so here i can see google says for that particular keyword the competition is medium and so in the google’s keyword planner what they also do is give me other relevant keywords that i might think about optimizing for because you don’t want to optimize for just one keyword so how to become a digital marketing specialist they’re going to also offer up other types of keywords that are relevant so just digital marketing specialist social media marketing specialist so for those keywords i can see the volume so for example digital marketing specialist i can see the average volume is 1 000 per month on average of the last 12 months i can also see the competition is medium but for some other keywords i can see the search volume being high like digital marketing course at 2 900 per month but also the competition is high and so what i would recommend as a best practice is to collect all your relevant keywords okay and put all your relevant keywords in a spreadsheet and when you put all these relevant keywords in a spreadsheet you want to get the data on those keywords and the data i’m referring to is the volume and competition so in this case we have volume from google planner google’s keyword planner and i have competition from google’s keyword planner and so if i go into a spreadsheet and i put all that information in here i’m going to be able to see the volume and competition and so that’s important however one thing to note here is that google’s keyword planner if i go back just gives us low medium and high and if i want to compare numbers to numbers maybe i want to be able to get exactly the competition number for the keyword how to become a digital marketing specialist what i can do is go into google and i can type in that keyword so if i type in the keyword how to become a digital marketing specialist i can see there’s 76 million results so i could see 76 million results 76.1 actually and for the keyword how to become a digital marketing specialist now that’s a whole lot of results for this particular keyword especially when the volume is only 30 uh per month on average and so what i want to do is get a more clear picture of the competition and so what you could actually do is type in the syntax all in title and then colon and then your keyword how to become a digital marketing specialist and when i do that i get a different result here i can see only 136 listings for how to become a digital marketing specialist but that’s not just 136 that’s 136 with that particular keyword that we want to rank for in the title tag okay so the title tag is what you see when you type in a keyword or search query in google search and the title tag is what you see at the top of every search result and so now i can see i typed in how to become a digital marketing specialist with the all in title syntax and now i can see every listing every one of these 136 results have that particular keyword in it so i could see every one of them how to become a digital marketing specialist and why is that important because now that tells me i only need to climb over 136 listings to rank for that keyword how to become a digital marketing specialist and so the idea here is you want to get your volume from google’s keyword planner but you want to get your competition from google search and again that’s simply typing in the the syntax hall in title and then your keyword in this example how to become a digital marketing specialist once you get those two numbers you’re going to plug them in to your spreadsheet and then once you do that for a number of different keyword queries and these keyword queries again have to be relevant once you do that then you can go in and pick the keywords you want to optimize for and that’s important because again if you’re not sure about a keyword then you want to do the keyword research so you can be sure of how much traffic you can get and how much competition there is those are two important three important factors in starting the process for on-page seo so again you want to create content for say a keyword like digital marketing but digital marketing may seem a little bit broad so you want to probably stay away from broader keywords because broader keywords tend to have a lot of volume which is great but they may also tend to have a lot of competition but that’s the whole point of doing the keyword research maybe it doesn’t maybe there’s more volume than competition that’s what you need to find out when you do the keyword research you need to find those keywords that are relevant to your content that have a lot of volume and low competition and then once we identify those keywords then we are free to go in and start optimizing our web pages for those keywords and the first place we want to start is the title tag so if you remember my example going back here to our search how to become a digital marketing specialist we saw that every one of these listings had that keyword in the title tag and the title tag is important because that’s what users who use google search see first when they type in a query and get results so they’re going to see the title tag so the title tag is the most important element for on-page seo it’s the most important factor because that’s what people see and so ideally when we choose our keyword we want to make sure that keyword is in the title tag because that’s what shows up in google search and that’s what makes that particular web page relevant for that keyword query so the idea behind a title tag it’s between 50 and 60 characters and so we want to make sure we stay within that limit no more than 60 characters because what happens if it’s beyond that then google will truncate the title tag so if i go back to my search you can see here on this particular title tag google truncated it meaning they added the ellipses after the title tag because it exceeded the 60 character limit so you want to stay within those character counts and so the title tag is the first place you should start when optimizing your website because when we have the right keyword in the title tag and somebody types in that keyword then chances are it’s going to be relevant they’re going to see it and they’re going to click through to your website and that’s the whole idea behind ranking we want to get clicks so that’s how the title tag appears so when you optimize it you’re going to update the title tag and this is how it shows up it’s going to show up at the top of your listing okay and it’s going to be bigger and bolder than anything else google displays so the second thing you want to optimize is the meta description and the meta description is simply just a brief description up to 155 i would say about 155 to 60 160 characters but probably no more than that and so the meta description is nothing more than a summary of the web page itself so if i go back to my google search results i see my title tag and i see the page that this particular listing belongs to and underneath that is where i can see my meta description so in this particular keyword query how to become a digital marketing specialist i see the meta description an ultimate guide on how to build a career in digital marketing and the skills required to become a digital marketing specialist note that it’s a well-written meta description within 155 characters and it includes the keyword digital marketing specialist so we’re trying to rank for how to become a digital marketing specialist and here you can see become a digital marketing specialist so there’s a lot of relevancy between not only the title tag and the keyword but the meta description and the keyword so when you’re optimizing a keyword you want to start with the title tag but you also want to update the meta description because if you don’t update the meta description and you leave the meta description blank then you’re leaving it to google to add in copy that they deem relevant and so for on-page seo we want to take control of the copy and we want to optimize it for the keywords we want to be found for so the meta description is a powerful tool at our disposal it gives us more characters to work with it gives us more to talk about so for that particular page and so if the title tag is only 60 characters maximum it’s not a lot of information to try and get somebody to click so the meta description helps us in identifying what that page is about in order to get the click so the two working in tandem will hopefully increase your click-through rates so when you’re found organically we want to get the click and then the third element that’s important is the url and url stands for uniform resource locator and why is the url so important because that’s what people see so if i go back to my search result how to become a digital marketing specialist notice that the url also includes how to become a digital marketing specialist article okay so it’s very relevant the url is very relevant one we can see it in the search results but two you know it’s relevant to the keyword query and that’s important for the end user and google google wants to know hey is this the page that’s relevant to the user’s query and if it is then this user is likely going to have a good x user experience after they click on the listing so the url is an element that helps not only with the click-through rate but with ranking and having a poor url structure doesn’t help at all because not only does google not recognize the url as being relevant but the end user may not want to click on that page given the the way the url looks so you want to try and avoid a poor url structure so the rule of thumb is this if you don’t understand what the url is then google is likely not going to understand what the url is and so we want to try and keep our url structures clean and when i say clean ideally you want to make sure that whatever keyword you’re trying to optimize that’s the keyword that’s included in the url nothing included that is not understandable so again going back to our example how to become a digital marketing specialist it’s very clean the title tag is the keyword the meta description is cleanly written has the keyword and then the url is the other element that the end user can see and that url includes the keyword in it so after we’ve done those three elements the title tag the meta description and the url then we want to start optimizing the page itself so ideally when we say optimize the page itself the page remember needs to be structured and when we say structured it needs to be structured in terms of you know headers and subheaders and organized in a manner in which the end user can read the article read the content clearly and concisely without being confused and so that’s the job of headers they add they add basically an organizational structure to the content and with headers there’s a hierarchy so you have anywhere from h1 which is the top of the hierarchy to an h6 and so you’re free to use any one of those headers when building out a page in order to organize the content but ideally you probably want to stick with an h1 or an h2 because those are at the top of the hierarchy and what those do is they actually stress to google that hey this header with this particular keyword in it is important so if you use an h6 with the keyword in it it’s telling google hey this is an h6 but it’s not as important so an h1 and an h2 tag show importance and so let’s look at an example of what that is so here you can see an h1 is going to be at the top of the hierarchy so that means it’s going to be bigger and bolder then you have an h2 which is going to be bigger and bolder than an h3 but not as big and bold as an h2 so with headers not only are you organizing the content accordingly but you’re also signaling to google how important that particular header is and of course the header needs to include the keyword we’re trying to rank for so let’s take a look again at that example so if we go to how to become a digital marketing specialist if i click on that page i can look at the content and i can see that there are headers in here so the headers are there to organize the content and that’s what we want we want to be able to organize the content and if you look at the other example i’m showing here how to become a digital marketing specialist a learning path explored you can see that’s an h1 but below it’s a subheader the growing digital marketing job market so that’s an h2 and so we’re not stressing to google that that’s more important than h1 but nonetheless we’re stressing at google that it’s important nonetheless so we want to be able to use headers we want to be able to use keywords in our headers in order to stress to google what’s important and also to organize the content because google likes content organized okay the next element we want to focus on is internal linking and so internal linking if you remember earlier in the presentation it’s basically links from one page on your website to another and so here we can see on this particular article how to become a digital marketing specialist there’s also links to other pages on simply learn’s website and so for this particular content it also links to seo specialist ppc specialist social media marketing specialist and digital marketing specialist so the whole idea behind internal linking is to link from one page to another where it’s relevant and in this case it’s relevant because we’re talking about how to become a digital marketing specialist that’s what the whole content is about and so what simply learns doing here is offering up other pages on their website that are relevant to becoming a digital marketing specialist and so this is a best practice when you’re optimizing a web page so you want to be able to have internal linking on your site and the whole idea behind internal linking is it also allows users to navigate through the site naturally so when i say naturally they don’t always have to refer back to the top navigation they can naturally and seamlessly go from one relevant article or page to another and so that’s the whole idea behind link building and internal link building it allows google to identify you know pages that they want to crawl and index because they’re linked to one another but it also helps the end user because it allows the end user to go from one page to another and it’s signaling to google hey this particular page is linked to this page so we’re going to also index that page and so that’s the whole important part of internal linking it’s about the end user experience and it’s about allowing google to find the pages on your website so they can crawl them and index them so you can be ranked for them and so also in addition to internal linking we want to be able to use natural language and so what do i mean by natural language or natural language processing so what google does is in terms of natural language processing they’re looking for the content and the keyword it needs to be relevant so when your website is about digital marketing you don’t necessarily want to rank or try to rank for the keyword digital marketing one it’s too broad two there might be some competition but three you’re probably not going to write something as broad like digital marketing so ideally what you want to do is you want to choose other relevant related keywords that’s going to be more natural and so that’s what we mean on natural language processing we want to choose keywords that are more natural to the content you’re writing so instead of the keyword digital marketing maybe we want to talk about the types of digital marketing or digital marketing examples or what is a digital marketing strategy or how to become a digital marketing specialist so those are all relevant keywords to digital marketing and more relevant to the content because if you try to rank for the keyword digital marketing again it’s probably going to be a little bit broad probably more competition and not as relevant to your content and as a result probably not a good user experience so think about some other keywords that you could optimize and rank for and that goes back to the keyword research that’s why the keyword research is so important because it allows us to identify other keywords and the natural language process what keywords are more relevant for the content and then another element on page seo is the sitemap and so with the sitemap it’s basically a list of all the pages on your website and the whole idea of listing all the pages on your website in one document is it helps both users and search engines understand the structure of your website so there are two types of sitemaps one is an html sitemap and that’s designed for humans so if you have a website with a lot of content at the footer or the bottom of your web page you probably want to have a link to sitemap so if somebody clicks on that site map they’re going to be able to see all the pages on your website structured in an organized manner well an xml sitemap and xml is just a different format it’s designed for crawlers and so the whole idea remember is google likes to crawl content when they crawl content they bring it back to their servers and index it and so we want to be able to create a sitemap for google or other search engine crawlers and so xml is the format so let me show you example of how that looks so if i go to simplylearn.com and simply type in say sitemap.xml just as an example i’m going to get this particular page and this particular page displays two xml sitemaps so these site maps are there for google to go ahead and crawl and nothing more than a list of all the pages on your website and so this is a quick and easy way for google to get a hold of all those pages so that they can index them and that’s the whole idea behind seo you want to be able to have google index all the content you want to be found for for the keywords you want to be found for so it all starts with the sitemap so let’s go from on-page seo which in recap is basically optimizing certain elements on your website so that you are relevant for a particular keyword and that meant updating the title tag the meta description the url the headers choosing the right keywords to put into the content having internal linking and also updating the sitemap well those are elements that you can do on your website so we’re going to switch gears and talk about a different strategy off-page seo because without on-page or off page you can’t have a page ranking so the two work together so you can do as much as you want on onpage but you still need off page seo and you could do all the off page seo you want but you still need on page so both of these strategies have to be in full effect in order for you to rank so let’s now switch gears to off-page seo and so off-page seo is simply the process of linking or promoting your website using link building and so if you remember i talked about this earlier on there’s two types of links internal and external linking and so for on-page seo we used internal linking for off-page seo we’re going to talk about external linking and external linking allows us to improve our website’s recognition or relevancy or credibility and why do we want to improve our relevancy and credibility and trustworthiness and authority because we want google to know that our web page is trustworthy it is recognized by other websites and it is relevant for a particular keyword and so if we can do that using off page seo methods then google’s going to rank our web page for the keyword we want to be found for so it’s really off-page seo synonymous with link building and there’s plenty of opportunities to do link building it just comes down to creating a strategy so again some of the benefits to off page well we talked about you know being credible and trustworthiness and relevant we need to do that in order to rank but there’s some other benefits there so if we have a link on another credible website then it’s likely going to increase the traffic to our own website it also creates high domain authority and so what i mean by high domain authority is if we have basically links to other web pages pointing back to us then basically our domain authority is going to improve and when our domain authority improves other websites are going to want to link to us so the higher authoritative we are for our website then other web pages are going to want to link to us and so the more external linking we have the higher the domain authority so it all starts with linking to other high domain authority websites so linking to a high domain authority website for example having a link on wikipedia that points back to our web page creates high domain authority for us and it helps drive traffic so some of the other benefits of off-page seo are credibility so if we’re linking from wikipedia to our web page it does create credibility for us it also helps us increase our page rank so remember that external linking helps build domain authority helps build credibility trustworthiness and it’s going to in turn help us rank for that particular page and then certainly not last having a good off-page seo link building strategy increases our brand awareness because if we’re on other high authority websites wikipedia or say a social platform it’s going to increase our brand awareness and increasing our brand awareness increases our trustworthiness and so if somebody is looking to say become a digital marketing specialist then likely instead of typing in digital marketing specialist on google they may type in our brand name in this case simply learn and so these are all the benefits to off page seo so it’s nothing more than having links on other websites that are pointing back to ours and again there’s lots of benefits it’s drives helps drive traffic and increases our authority so those are things that we want to take advantage of when we want to rank and the key behind off-page seo or link building is always going to be content so from an on-page seo perspective having quality content allows that content to be optimized for relevant keyword and ranked but also from an off-page seo strategy having high quality content allows us to have other sites and it doesn’t necessarily have to be a website it could be a social platform or can be another blogging platform or blogging website linked back to ours why because the content is original it’s natural it’s well structured it reads well and so that’s the whole idea behind off page you can’t have links on other websites if you don’t have quality content so one of the ideas behind off page seo is not only do you want to create good content but you probably want to spend a lot of time or a bit of time on others websites so remember the example i used earlier in this presentation about having an ice cream blog and ice cream recipes well it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to say spend some time on other blogs related to desserts related to cakes related to food in general related to vegetables or other items that people could link from so the whole idea is understanding who else is out there who has relevant content that you could share so you could share your content with them they can share their content with you and generally that’s how it works naturally anyway in the web sphere if somebody likes your content they’re going to link to it they don’t necessarily have to wait for you to ask them but it might not be a bad idea to understand who else is out there that has content similar to yours so that you can you know get a link on that particular website or blog post and so some other ideas behind having external links pointing back to your website is social media so social media is not just facebook or twitter but it expands beyond that there’s there’s core there’s medium there’s all sorts of content generated websites like reddit so the list goes on and on you just need to find what’s relevant for your content if it’s relevant for your content then it’s worth putting or trying to get the external link on that social media platform and then again going back to my ice cream blog recipes blog post yeah if you find a particular blog that you want to have an external link on there’s nothing wrong with reaching out to that particular blogger you know in some cases very flattering but in other cases if the content is relevant then why not it’s only going to help your end user experience if you add somebody who has a say a blog about cakes having their link on your blog post so there’s nothing wrong with it because it also adds to the user experience and if you’re going to ask somebody to put an external link on theirs you might want to be open-minded and make sure that you’re are able and willing to put an external link on your blog post or website pointing to their content that’s how the web works especially if the contents are quality relevant and of good nature okay so let’s move on and finish up with the do’s and don’ts of seo so we talked a lot about why seo what is seo you know how do we rank for seo what is on page seo what is off page seo and so let’s just wrap up with some of the things you again want to do to rank your page for a particular keyword and some of the things you don’t want to do so the first thing on the list is optimize for white hat techniques and what i mean for opting in for white hat techniques is basically everything i just mentioned today you want to do keyword research you want to choose a natural language processing form format so you could choose keywords that are going to be relevant natural to the content and you don’t want to opt for black cat techniques and black hat techniques are probably not even worth going into detail but one example is choosing a keyword arbitrarily like say digital marketing and just stuffing that keyword into the content so that’s probably not something you want to do because again it’s not going to be good for the end user so stay away from black hat and focus on some of the techniques we talked about in today’s presentation the other do we want to do is get backlinks from relevant sites so that’s off-page seo again it’s what i mentioned earlier it’s about linking your quality content to another person’s website that also has quality content we don’t want to have a backlink from an irrelevant site why because it’s not going to be relevant and it’s also going to hurt our authority because if it’s on a site that’s not of good quality then google is going to look at us and say well this site is linking to your site but it’s not relevant so therefore you know we’re not going to look at you in the same way as if you were on a quality website we do want to use our keywords naturally because title tags are what people see first on organic search but you don’t want to use the same title tag on every page of your website so we want to stay away from doing that so you want to have a unique title tag for every web page on your website and ideally what does that mean that means using our keyword research to choose one of two keywords per page and optimizing your web page for those one to two keywords so you ideally what you want to do is have one to two different keywords for every page on your website we definitely definitely definitely want to write engaging content so the content should be engaging remember user experience we want users to stay on our website we want them to enjoy the content that they’re reading and we want them to go from one page to another naturally we definitely don’t want to leverage or plagiarize or just copy content from others websites because it’s not one probably going to be relevant to what you’re writing about two it’s duplicate content and it’s somebody else’s so that’s a black cat technique we want to stay away from i can’t emphasize this enough we need to do keyword research first before you do anything else you need to find relevant keywords and not only that you need to understand the volume and the competition for each of those keywords okay you don’t want to choose a keyword that has low volume high competition you want to choose a keyword that has high volume low competition but above all you want to choose keywords that are relevant to your content we want to avoid keyword stuffing so don’t take a keyword and just stuff it everywhere on the page it’s not going to be natural and google’s going to be able to pick up on that so we want to maintain some level of quality with our content and quality with the keywords that we choose so reminder when you have quality content it’s always going to link internally to another page on your website with quality content but it’s got to be natural and don’t just build site-wide backlinks meaning don’t just have an internal link to the home page or don’t have every page on your website linking to just one page so internal linking should be natural naturally linking from one page to another not only does it help google understand and crawl all the web pages on your website but it’s good for the end user it’s good user experience and certainly last but something i didn’t talk about does take time to rank your content so remember the process you’re going to write your content you’re going to choose keywords you’re going to change the elements on that page for those keywords and all the while you’re going to make sure google can crawl that content and when they crawl they’re going to index it the process takes time especially if you choose a keyword that’s competitive so just be patient if you have quality content and you’ve optimized for on-page seo and off-page seo then you will rank for that keyword and then make sure your website’s user-friendly and mobile friendly so we talked about responsive content earlier so remember most users today start the process of search on mobile so we want to make sure your websites are mobile friendly search engine optimization starts with the keyword because we want to be found for relevant keywords and so the first step and search engine optimization is always going to be keyword research so it is the most important step and so what is keyword research all about well it’s a process of identifying keywords we want to be found for on the search engines so millions of people use search engines on a daily basis we want to be found for those keywords that people type in that are relevant to the content we want to be found so going back to the italian restaurant example if we’re writing a blog post about italian restaurants if somebody types in the best italian restaurants or italian restaurants in a specific city we want to be found for that content if it’s relevant to what we wrote about so keyword research should be done based on two factors really it’s fact based on the factor of how much traffic or volume a particular search engine query has and it’s based on competition and really the underlying factor here is that all keywords in your keyword research should be relevant so you need to understand what those keywords are so are they relevant to the content that you want to be found for if they are then really the two factors you want to look for is the volume how much volume or traffic each keyword has associated with it and then the competition how many other websites are trying to be found for the same keyword so those are the factors involved with keyword research you always want to choose relevant keywords and then once you find or choose those relevant keywords you want to be able to find out exactly how much volume and how much competition is associated with each of those keywords and so when you look at keywords you’re always going to choose relevant keywords but there are two types of keywords there are short tail keywords and they are long tail keywords and we’re going to talk about both of these here so let’s start with short tail keywords so short tail keywords are generic keywords generally they’re less than three words in a keyword phrase for example italian restaurants so short tail keywords generally have very high search volume that means that if somebody types in italian restaurants then there’s going to be a large amount of volume with that meaning that generally a lot of people type in the keyword italian restaurants however with high volume always comes high competition so if you want to be found for italian restaurants know that if you are ranked number one or number two or even on page one of google you’re going to get a lot of traffic however to get to page one of google or even position one or two it’s going to take you a while because they’re probably a lot of websites who are in front of you who want to be ranked and found for the same keyword so the whole idea with short tail keywords is it’s a lot of visibility it’s a lot of traffic a lot of volume but also a lot of competition and generally the underlying factor here is that if you are ranked for a very broad or short tail keyword like italian restaurants then chances are it’s not going to be as relevant so if you get the traffic to your website then chances are the conversion’s not necessarily going to happen because we don’t necessarily know the mindset of somebody typing in a very short tail generic keyword like italian restaurants they could be doing research on italian restaurants they could be a chef who’s trying to get recipes for italian food it could be a tourist looking for italian restaurants in a different city or it could be a person just looking for italian restaurants near their location or where they’re living and so there’s a lot of different factors with short tail keywords so you just don’t know because it’s so generic and because it’s so generic if you do get the traffic for that generic keyword then the chances of the conversion are going to be lower than say if it’s a more specific relevant keyword so let’s take an example of a short tail keyword let’s just stick with italian restaurants so i’m going to go to a tool called moz and while moz has a tool called the keyword explorer and within moz so if you go to moz.com and then use the keyword explorer you can get an idea of how much volume and competition are associated with a particular keyword so in this example we’re using italian restaurants it’s a very broad keyword we could see that the monthly volume is between 70 000 and 118 000 per month okay so that means for a particular keyword in the united states on a search engine you’re going to get about 70 000 to 118 000 people who type in that keyword and so if we were to look at the difficulty of that keyword you could see that it’s fairly difficult because out of 1 to 100 it’s got to score 43 so it’s fairly difficult however if you notice the click-through rate is very high so moz estimates that we’ll have a 40 organic click-through rate for that keyword if we’re ranked for it so if it’s relevant to us and we want to get some visibility to our site then yeah we want to use that generic short tail keyword however if we’re interested in conversions then we really want to turn our attention to longer tail keywords however if you want the visibility then you want to use short tail keywords if you want the conversion then you want to switch over to longer tail keywords so longer tail keywords are more specific they usually consist of more than three keywords so tie in restaurants very generic if we add a few more keywords that keyword phrase it then becomes longer tail so compared to short tail keywords longer tail keywords are generally less competitive and the search volume is not as high case and points if we go back to moz and then we look at the keyword explorer and we’d actually type in italian restaurants and let’s just say orlando florida moz is going to generate some monthly volume for us and they’re going to allow us to understand how difficult that keyword is and so here you can see very very little search volume in fact so little volume there’s 11 to 50 okay so that means on average that this keyword generates 11 to 50 queries a month so very low compared to our short tail keyword italian restaurants the difficulty here didn’t necessarily lessen but it is less uh competitive so if you’re interested in conversions and you have an italian restaurant in say orlando florida then this is the keyword you may want to use so there’s a trade-off between longer tail and shorter tail but when visitors land from longer tail keywords they’re usually ready to make a purchase they’re usually more specific intent there’s more intent involved with a longer tail keyword so best restaurants in a time in florida branded shoes in florida something very specific is going to generate probably a higher conversion rate than something more generic so that’s the trade-off and so when to use long-tail keywords well we want to use long-tail keywords and for targeting pages with a product or specific article so if we’re interested in that particular conversion then longer tail keywords are likely more the way we want to go versus something more generic which means if you’re using a generic shorter tail keyword you’re more interested in the visibility and the traffic not necessarily the conversion when you’re setting up your brand and you need to make sure it reaches the right audience and provide the best results there’s really only one place to turn to it’s one of the largest online advertising platforms really in the world and that’s on google and so today we’re going to talk about how to advertise on google and let’s get right to it and talk about google ads and its effect with advertising so we’re gonna start out with what are google ads well google ads used to be called google adwords and it’s been around a good while almost 20 years now so really google has grown at a really rapid pace it’s become one of google’s main sources of revenue uh you could say probably in the 90 percentile of its revenue comes from google ads and when we say google ads we mean people who pay for advertising on google.com so google ads really what it does is it provides services that fall under the category of ppc which stands for pay-per-click you a also may hear google ads or ppc referred to as cost per click or cpc or sponsored search really what it comes down to it’s a model so when you advertise on google.com and somebody clicks on your ad basically you’re paying google for they click okay so it’s just really a business model where an advertiser pays google to have their advertisement on google.com but they only pay google when they get the click so that’s really in a nutshell how it works for advertisers if i want to advertise my business i can go to google ads and say google place my ad on google.com and then my ad does get shown on google.com somebody clicks on it it’s just as simple as i pay google a fee so google ads is just an online advertising platform developed by google with which advertisers can pay to display ads they can offer up their services there’s video involved there’s obviously mobile’s involved so you got all the necessary devices and platforms available in google’s ecosystem so for example if i go to google search even if i type in you know what is google ads here i could see a total of 1.8 billion results for what are google ads as my search query so in search you got a lot of different things going on here you have organic results you have videos that are being pulled from youtube you got a knowledge graph here you got feature snippets you got an organic listing but really at the top this is what we’re going to focus on today we’re going to talk about sponsored search so you can see here for this particular keyword query that i typed in what are google ads really two sponsored search or pay-per-click ads appeared now if i happen to click on any one of these two and go to that particular advertisements website they’re gonna pay google a specific cost per click so that’s how it looks on google.com it really depends on your query and what ads show up but the great thing about your google ads is they make it known for the user who’s doing

the search query what the ad is so here i can easily pick out what’s an ad a sponsored search or pay-per-click ad and what’s not because if it’s a pay-per-click ad or an advertiser advertising on google.com i’m going to be able to see this little box here that says add next to the listing and so by displaying that little logo their ad it’s letting the end user know the person who’s searching know that hey this is an advertiser who is advertising their product or service on google.com okay so that’s how you can differentiate between paid search and organic search organic search here or even down here doesn’t have that little ad box next to the listing so you know if it doesn’t have the little ad box you know it’s a paid search ad now why do we want to advertise on google ads because it increases visibility to high quality audience so what i mean by that is you know search is really a great place to advertise because you’re meeting the consumer halfway meaning somebody’s typing something in and your ad is there to help them find what they’re looking for so google ads advertises your product or service to the relevant audience to ensure the users perform the action required of them so it’s really a great way to get quality audience to your website because if somebody types in something and you happen to offer what they’re looking for basically your ad is going to show up somebody clicks on it you pay google for the click and you get quality traffic in return so the other great benefit to being on google ads is increases brand awareness so it’s a great way to get your product and brand out there google has a vast network uh also known as the display network but even on google.com the search network itself the search engine itself millions of people use it every day in fact here in the united states it’s been said or studied that you know people over the age of 18 use search at least once a day at least once a day here in the united states so you can figure that’s millions and millions of people so it’s a great way to get your brand in front of a large captive audience okay so top of mind awareness refers to a brand of product being the first one that comes to a customer’s mind when thinking about a particular industry or category so it really does provide top of mind awareness another benefit to being on google ads is retargeting so when we say the word retargeting in marketing that means you know showing our ad to somebody who’s already been to our website so we can use google’s display network or we can run remarketing lists for search ads right on google.com to ensure that we’re targeting those folks who have already been to our website and have not performed a function that we want them to perform such as converting or buying something or downloading something or subscribing to a newsletter or visiting a certain page okay so if somebody doesn’t do what we want them to do it’s okay maybe they’re ready to commit to our product or service and that’s why google offers up retargeting so it allows us to reach that audience a second time so they’re going to be familiar with their product they’re going to be familiar with their website because they’ve been there and so we can offer up a very unique specific ad to that audience so that’s a really good benefit to being on google ads so some other benefits here increased intelligence so you know we can certainly get data about who is coming to our audience so we can look at what device what you know browser etc so we can really gain some information about who’s coming to the website we could certainly measure our performance so with google we’re paying cost per click and so based on that model you know we can certainly measure what keywords what ads are generating traffic to the website and how much we’re paying for that okay and if that traffic turns out to be a lead we can measure that against that specific keyword or ad or campaign so we can certainly measure our performance all the way down the keyboard level and can we can measure up against how many conversions or what we’re paying for those conversions so google ads is a very highly quantitative approach to advertising because there’s lots of numbers involved and you’re constantly collecting information about your advertising on google.com and its network and another benefit really is its high flexibility so google ads has a number of different options so we can customize our ads based on an audience based on a keyword based on a specific website based on retargeting so we really have a lot of options not to mention the number of options in terms of the ad format text ads dynamic responsive ads video ads display ads so google ads has very flexible options in terms of advertising and we’re going to talk about some of those as we move along here today so another big benefit here and this is what i always suggest is if you’re not ranking organically then you might want to consider google ads because as we shown here in our example if i go back to our example a couple minutes ago you know if you want to bid on the keyword what are google ads why would you bid on that well it’s relevant to your business maybe you’re in the digital marketing industry and you want to help folks who need help and advertising on google ads but what if you want to be found for that organically well if you’re not found for it organically then you can bid on it so it definitely is a good option if you’re not ranking for a particular keyword organically so it serves as almost an option i always say that you know search is like a fruit bowl okay you have apples and oranges in that fruit bowl well the orange is organic search and the apple is paid search they’re different approaches but they share the same fruit bowl the same real estate so you can really really help yourself by using google ads to complement what you’re doing organically so if you’re not ranked organically for keyword you can certainly use google ads if you are ranked for specific keywords and it’s a highly competitive industry then you can use google ads to help you leverage the amount of clicks you get from that ad so it’s okay to be organically listed and have a paid search listing at the same time so if we go back to our example here we could see wordstream.com has a paid ad and here we can see just two spots below organically they’re showing up with an organic listing so you could certainly be in both positions to try and maximize your clicks so it’s definitely a good strategy to run with google ads on top of everything we mentioned in terms of measurement flexibility google ads does offer up a really good incentive to advertise and let’s not lose focus that again search is really the only medium in which you’re meeting somebody halfway based on what they’re looking for and when i say halfway meaning your ad is going to appear for somebody who’s looking for something whether that be food a cafe a plumber a doctor or directions search is there to serve that that person needs there’s no other advertisement platform or another channel out there in terms of advertising that reacts the same way whether that be tv or radio or email marketing or affiliate marketing search is unique in that regard so search engine results pages are the pages that are displayed by search engines in response to an ad so that’s serp and so you could certainly you know be listed in the serps or also known as organic search but the great thing is google ads is there to help you get your brand or product in front of that user looking for a specific need or service so let’s shift focus now and talk about the various formats in google ads on google search we have text ads so text ads are the only ad format on google search and so here you can see in this example you have a headline so not only do you have one headline you have three headlines in one ad so jbl headphones one headline wide range of headphones second headline amazon.in third headline so you have three headlines and the great thing about google ads with with this text format is that you can have up to two descriptions of 90 characters so the headlines are up to 30 characters the descriptions are up to 90 characters and so you can really write some specific information about your ad about your product about your service okay and the ad is also going to contain what we call ad extensions so here you can see shop by category in-ear headphones on-ear headphones those are all site link extensions meaning they’re going to link to something on your website and so the purpose of the extension is to help get the click so the reason why you’re running google ads is to get the click you want to generate the click you want to get that traffic to your website so by writing three headlines and writing to description lines and adding extensions to your ad i’ll help you get that click yes you’re gonna pay google for the click but that’s the whole purpose is to generate the click from search because remember search is there to respond to somebody’s need or query and so if you get the click on your ad chances are it’s going to be a highly relevant visitor to your website so google offers up a lot of opportunity for you to write a lot of information in your text ad on google for google.com so google also has other formats and so they also have responsive display ads so when we say responsive we mean google can serve up a specific image from your website based on what somebody’s looking for based on the page that they went to so these ads are responsive they adjust their size appearance and format depending on the space available so responsive can also be text text and or image and so the whole point of response is if you have a large website let’s just say with a lot of different products and categories like amazon well it’s hard to write static ads for thousands of particular categories and products so why not let google do the heavy lifting why not let google serve up the images and ads based on what somebody looked at on your website and so that’s the whole idea behind responsive ads is it allows google to you know show the particular ad that’s most relevant to that user so it’s a really a great option when you’re advertising on google you have image ads as well so image ads are as we mentioned part of responsive or they can just be static and so here you can see an example from slack okay you can see just an image app but the great thing about image ads is you have a lot of different size options so 468 by 60 250 by 250 160 by 600 all these are pixel sizes so you have a lot of different size variations when you run image ads okay so you don’t have to run a small image ad let’s just say in comparison to facebook where you have a thumbnail okay and one size for a particular image ad on facebook first says google you have multiple multiple sizes that you can choose from in terms of running image ads so image ads are really a great option if you’re going to advertise on google okay you also have app promotional ads these ads are used to drive app downloads and engagement so here you can see an example for uber so that’s another option too if you have an app and you really want to drive engagement for that app and then you also have video so google owns youtube so you can run advertisements video advertisements on youtube so they could be standalone or they can be inserted into other streaming video content as say pre-roll meaning people are going to look at your ad before actually watching the actual video they went to youtube for so you have a lot of different options with video advertisements on youtube so the other ad format you have on google are shopping ads and shopping ads are really a great way to get your product in front of the right user so somebody’s looking for shoes or running shoes it’s an opportunity for you to run shopping ads so you could put that particular shoe with a description with the price with your brand name in front of that user and so with a cost per click model if a user clicks on your shopping ad then chances are they’re probably going to convert because they could see the product they could see the price they could see the product name they can see the brand and so it’s an opportunity for you to really drive high quality traffic to your site with the opportunity to convert somebody at a very high rate so shopping ads are really good because it prevents unwanted clicks if somebody clicks on that ad they’re definitely interested so let’s take a look on search to see how that looks so if i go to google search and i just type in running shoes so my search results are going to list not only some paid ads but a lot of different options on shopping ads so here i could certainly scroll around and see all the different brand names i could see the price point if i hover over it i can actually see you know some other information about it like reviews return policy so if i actually click on this ad chances are i’m going to buy it otherwise why would i click on the ad as an end user and so that’s the great thing about shopping ads it gives you the advertiser an opportunity to really get your products in front of people who are looking for your product or service and given that you’re listing the price if they like the price and they click on your ad they’re probably going to go ahead and follow through with the conversion so it doesn’t necessarily have to be running shoes it could be anything that you have to offer a user so running shopping ads on google is a good strategy if you have products okay so you can showcase these these shopping ads on google search by certainly really giving google access to your product inventory connecting in some reviews connecting in some information connecting in the pricing points and voila it’s really very fairly easy to set up google shopping ads within google search and the great thing about shopping ads is it also appears under images and also pairs under shopping so if i’m on google search you know i can go to shopping or i can go to images and i’ll see those same image ads show up here at the top and i will certainly see those under shopping as well so shopping ads allow you to really showcase your products on google search to those looking for that particular product so it’s really a great option with google you also have call ads so when we say call ads really call only ads are great for mobile so when you run advertisements on google if you have a phone number associated with your business you can certainly add that phone number to the ad so if somebody’s searching on their mobile device and your ad is displayed along with your number they click on your number they’re actually going to call your business and google can track that they can track how many people click on your number and even turn that into a conversion for you so if you have a phone number associated with your business it’s wise to go ahead and set up you know what we call a call extension as part of the ad because if somebody sees that ad with that phone number on mobile it allows them to easily just click on the number and call your business and so google can track calls as well so keep that in mind if you have a phone number and you want to associate that phone number with an ad okay so let’s move over to where is google showing your ads i showed you an example of google search so we looked at text ads we looked at shopping ads on google search network so google search network really allows you to advertise on google search so with google search if i go back to google search and i go to all i typed in running shoes okay here i can see shopping ads here i can see a couple of text ads so you have the opportunity if you’re running only text ads to show at the top and if you’re not at the top then google will place you at the bottom so it really depends on the keyword that somebody’s querying in google search so it really depends on how many people are advertising and so what google does if i didn’t have any shopping ads here google will list a maximum of four text ads at the top and at the bottom any other ads that weren’t shown at the top will get placed at the bottom so ideally if you’re running text ads on google you want to make sure you’re always at the top and i would say between positions one and three you always want to make sure you’re at the top okay so you can certainly measure that remember google had has measured performance so you can measure everything about your ad so if you’re going to advertise on google with a text ad you want to make sure you’re always at the top so let’s have a look at the different types of search networks that google ads is affiliated with so the first is google search okay so let’s focus on google search and so basically when we say google search or search sites we really mean google.com or all google search engines for that matter so if you want to advertise to a mass audience you want to probably start with google.com because again millions of people use it on a daily basis and so if you’re advertising on google.com your ads will appear basically below or above the search results on a google search so if somebody searches for something depending on the search query they’re going to see results now depending on the device also so they could be on mobile or on desktop they could see sponsored ads or paid ads they could see local listings and they could see organic search results so for example this is what an ad would look like so let me show you what that looks like on google search so if we go for example to google.com and type in the keyword classes on digital marketing we could see some search ads here these ads appear above some featured snippets and the organic search results okay so depending on a lot of different factors again i’ve mentioned this throughout the webinar there are a lot of factors in showing up in the top position second position third position and so forth okay if i scroll all the way to the bottom you may even see ads down here depending on how many people are actually bidding on the keyword phrase classes on digital marketing so we could see simply learn here in the second position why because again i can see the logo add here okay so i can see simply learn using three headlines i can see simply learn using there are two description lines here and i can see simply learn using some other extensions with the ad now all of this is geared towards getting the click so when you’re on google search the whole idea is somebody’s looking for something you’re offering that up and so it doesn’t even matter if you’re in the top position ideally you want to be in these top three positions in order to get the click okay so that’s the whole idea behind being on google search if you’re on google search you have the opportunity to be at the very top of the search result or in the top three above local listings and above organic results now if i change my search query and typed in coffee in san francisco my search results are going to be completely different i’m going to see local listings here okay so this is tied to google my business not google ads okay so this is completely different so don’t don’t mix this up with running ads on google search so google my business is tied to local listings or google maps and again with desktop which is what i’m showing you the search result on you’re going to see likely google local listings above organic results okay and if i go back to my previous query of classes on digital marketing i’m going to be able to see paid search results above local and organic listings so in other words if you’re running ads ads are going to trump any other type of results on google search if you can be in positions one through three now in addition to google.com google also has something called google search partners so if you set up an account and you set up a campaign in google ads you have the option to choose google search as your network and then as an alternative or an additional option you can advertise on google search partners sites and so some of their search partners can range so basically these are sites that have partnered up with google that’s allowing google to show ads on their site so the sites can range anywhere between youtube to amazon to new york times let’s take a look at an example it could even be another search engine so if i go to say ask.com and type in classes on digital marketing it’s a completely different search engine but i can see the same ad for simply learn so i can see same i could see a different headline here actually but i could see the description and i could see some site link extensions and so notice the ad is still at the top in this case it’s in position one and i can see multiple companies running advertisements why because they could see ad next to it and i could see those over over organic listings so these are google search partner listings so you can opt in to be on other partner sites that google or other sites that google has partnered up with so you have options outside of google search and that option is display network so display network allows you to advertise elsewhere which is outside of google search and if you’re going to advertise on google’s display network you have more ad formats available to you including image and including a video for example your ad can be found on a specific website if you choose to advertise on the new yorktimes.com or webmd or marriott.com you could certainly do that okay you just need to tell google hey this is the site i want to advertise on so some of the advantages of being on the display network so if you don’t want to advertise on google search okay google.com you can certainly go to display and on the display if you’re running display ads or or even video ads you’re going to grab the attention of potential customers because of the format of the ad okay so putting your ads in front of people early on in the buying cycle can have a very positive effect so you’re basically reaching out to a large number of people on google’s display network and giving them an opportunity to see who you are as a brand and giving them an opportunity to see what your product is all about so for me the display network is a good opportunity to get your product and service in front of a lot of people because the way the display network works is it’s a millions of websites who want to have advertising on their site and so you can really pick and choose a specific site where your audience is going to be and get your ad in front of that audience so you can really retarget to potential customers so retargeting as we said earlier is really reaching out to people who have already been to your website and didn’t perform a particular function that you wanted them to perform meaning somebody came to your website from paid search on google.com and they went to page a and then they left so you really wanted them to go to page b add a product to a shopping cart and check out and purchase that product however if they didn’t do that you could certainly run ads knowing that they’ve been to page a and page b and you can offer up that specific ad to that person who’s been to your website and so that’s what retargeting really is all about and you can retarget on google’s display network so remarketing your product to people who previously visited your your website or even your app allows you to really get your ad in front of a qualified audience and so you could take advantage of analytics so google’s ads has all the information you need so let’s actually take a look at some of these options in google ads for the display network so if i actually go to google ads and i actually go to display campaigns i can see i have a lot of different options available to me so if i click on keywords for example okay i can choose keywords for my display campaign so what google does if you choose keywords basically what they’re doing is they’re going to contextually place your ad based on the keyword okay so that’s an option for you if you’re not sure what websites to be on with the display network you can certainly just add keywords and based on those keywords google will place your ad on websites that they deem relevant to the keywords you choose so you can also choose demographics so on the splake network you can say hey google i only want to advertise to say 18 to 24 year olds or 25 to 34 year olds and so based on that google is going to place your ads on websites related to that age demographic you’re interested in on the display network you can also choose topics so if there’s a specific topic that you want your ad to be associated with you can certainly do that so google has a number of different topics at their disposal so here if i just choose a particular ad group now i have specific topics that i can choose from arts and entertainment food and drink to news to pets and animals and so under each one of these topics i can get really specific so if i go under science i can see subcategories under the topic science i can see chemistry and physics and scientific institutions and equipment so i can really pick and choose specific topics where i want my ads to be shown as i mentioned already you can pick and choose specific placements okay so if you have a specific website that you want your ad to be shown on you can certainly let google know okay you can also advertise on gmail you can also advertise on youtube so you can really pick and choose where you want your ads to be shown so you have all these different options available to you to me one of the best options for advertising on the display network because when you tell google you have a specific audience you want to target and that audience could be somebody who went to a specific page or somebody who went to your website and didn’t convert you can associate that audience with the campaign and when you associate that audience with a campaign you can retarget them with an ad so the display campaign is very powerful with google because you have all these different options available to you so with google ads you can also determine how well you’re reaching your goals which websites you’re running your ads on which ads are bringing in clicks and which site gives you maximum value for the minimum cost so you can see all that in google ads so when i actually pick and choose how i want to target i can certainly measure that so for example audiences or demographics for example if i go back to demographics i have all this data that google’s collected on my advertising so i can see for example by age range based on my campaign how many clicks how many impressions impressions are how many times my ads been seen click-through rate meaning the rate at which people see my ad and are clicking on my ad how much i’m paying per click cpc is cost per click total cost and conversions how many conversions am i getting so i could see all this data available to me in google ads so it’s a very powerful platform for measuring performance imagine it’s the year 2004. this is phil phil’s looking to release a book and set up a blog he’s sure that he’d be successful but he’s only worried about one thing he doesn’t know how to ensure that his book reaches the right target audience who could enjoy his book during that period of time however there were only a few forms of advertisement available like print ads billboards radio direct mail direct sales and the television all of these options were pretty expensive their effectiveness couldn’t be accurately determined and they didn’t let him advertise his content to the appropriate audience phil’s book would never find the audience it deserved now let’s have a look at the same scenario in the present day alongside traditional forms of advertising phil would have access to digital marketing a form of marketing that’s a lot more lucrative inexpensive and configurable marketing that would enable marketers to advertise their audience digitally using channels like search engines websites social media platforms emails etc among these types social media marketing cot fields eye social media marketing would give phil the opportunity to take advantage of social media platforms to advertise his content to a highly targeted audience it would help more people learn about his book increase the interaction with his audience it’s relatively inexpensive unless he goes into advertising and will help him get marketplace insights that might help in understanding his audience preferences better phil started by taking up a certification to learn about social media marketing since he was already familiar with the concept of social media marketing his next step was to learn about the different types of content he could post on social media some of the most common forms of content that phil could post would be images text posts polls and videos but over time phil began to notice that not a lot of people were being exposed to his content phil needed to advertise his content for that he would need to use the advertising options provided by the social media platforms like facebook instagram youtube linkedin and twitter most advertising platforms offer users with a number of different options like image ads these ads involve the use of single or multiple images that are attractive and have the optimal amount of text they also have a call to action that encourages user interaction bill could use images from his book advertise websites that sell his book and more then there are text and post ads these ads could advertise posts or excerpts from phil’s blog or his book further garnering interest from an interesting audience he could also use video ads phil could use video ads that feature favorable reviews and customer testimonials to advertise his books phil could also use lead ads through which he could collect information from users who are interested in a weekly newsletter or regular updates from his blog but that wasn’t the only thing phil could do with social media platforms he could create a brand for himself and drive audience interest to it engage with them create an identity engage with content finding content that works for him social media platforms also allowed him the opportunity to target audiences based on demographics like their age location gender and much more and in time phil began to see an increase in the number of viewers coming to his social media page and by extension his blog he also saw an increase in the number of people who bought his book greatly increasing his audience here are some things he learned one to set goals that were quantitative smart and follow a constant deadline two to understand his audience by engaging and connecting with them three to set up a social media calendar to plan competitions polls surveys videos and more four using tools like buzzsumo ifttt buffer and more for lead generation creating email lists setting buyer personas and more 5. to perform visual storytelling with the help of images and videos but how did phil get so good at social media marketing phil had taken up simplylearn’s digital marketing course it was thanks to this course that phil had the skills and training to get good at social media marketing and now you can too by clicking on the top right corner and with that we’ve given you an introduction to all the major concepts of social media marketing the world we live in now it’s highly digital place but that wasn’t always the case until four years ago so if we rewind letting people know about your products was a little harder then so even if you go back say five or ten years promoting your products wasn’t as easy as it is today i mean people had to resort to you know good old-fashioned newspapers putting in an ad or those big thick books called the yellow pages that usually sat in your closet and wait a ton i mean those were the ways to get your product and message out there a lot of advertising in those yellow pages then you have billboards you know driving down the highway you see that billboard on the side of the road you wonder who are those people that are actually advertising this stuff of course you have television that’s been around for decades a good source of advertising but costly and then facts facts ads uncommonly known way to advertise by the way who has faxes now but people did advertise vfx just a few decades ago so these were all the ways in which people had to get their product and service out there it seems like so archaic looking at it now but back then that was legitimate that was the way to do it and then one thing made our lives a lot easier so if you’re a marketer you’re thinking yourself man i’m glad i’m a marketer in today’s day and age because it’s social media marketing social media marketing has made everyone’s lives better from the company that’s selling the product or service to the marketer promoting the product and service to the end user who wants to see that product or service that engages that product or service so social media is a good source of getting your product and service out there and it just makes everybody’s lives a heck of a lot easier so we’re gonna answer that million dollar question and what’s that million dollar question it’s how can you rise above the rest and so today’s session is going to be how to start with social media marketing so you can rise above the rest leveraging this great platform that we all take advantage of today so let’s start by asking the question what is social media marketing social media marketing involves increasing website traffic it centers around engagement it offers you the ability to increase your brand awareness and it has other marketing goals you know so you can create various forms of content for different social media platforms so that’s really in a nutshell with social media marketing so again if we want to increase our traffic or we want to increase our engagement like likes or comments then look no further than social media marketing if we want to engage with our users our customers our potential and prospective customers we can really put a personalized experience in place using social media marketing we want to create different forms of content like videos and blogs and infographics and other types of graphics with the potential to actually go viral and what we mean by viral is spreading like wildfire one user sending it to another as rapidly as can be and before you know it you get you know millions of views and millions of likes i mean that’s the power of social media marketing so why do we want to do social media marketing and i think we just answered some of those questions but let’s dig a little bit deeper we mentioned in our definition of social media marketing that we have the opportunity to really build our brand awareness and that is no more truthful than with social media marketing more so than any other digital marketing channel social media marketing allows us to really put our brand in a good light in a good position in front of the right eyeballs so it allows us to really improve our brand by pushing out the appropriate content in front of the appropriate people social media is a great channel for that we can look to conversion rates so if we are pushing a product and service in front of the right eyeballs and we are building up a funnel of prospective customers who then turn into customers who then turn into loyal customers who then turn into lifetime customers we could see it every step in the process that our conversion rates may increase we can certainly leverage social media marketing for seo for search engine rankings it’s about off-page seo it’s about posting content on social media platforms to build up some link juice okay so there is some inherent benefits to working seo and social media side by side it’s cost effective well if you’re posting content on twitter or facebook it doesn’t cost you anything it just takes a little bit of time and creativity now if you want to go ahead and do some advertising on these platforms yes it’s going to cost you but you’d be surprised not going to be as costly as say other search platforms like say google or bing where you’re actually paying for keywords and paying per click for those keywords so social media marketing can be very cost effective and then increase top funnel traffic so it goes all the way back to brand experience and brand awareness if you’re putting yourself in position to get seen by your target audience okay your target audience goes from seeing your brand for the first time to getting to know your brand a little bit more to maybe buying a product or service from your brand then returning to buy another product and service and then continuing to buy that product or service i mean that’s increasing the top funnel traffic and not just the traffic but the conversions so at every step in the process social media allows you to build that funnel depending on where somebody is whether they’re seeing your brand for the first time or actually returning to purchase the product or service again so that’s the inherent benefit these are the inherent benefits of social media marketing today we are going to talk about all the different ads that facebook has to offer so introduced back in 2007 the facebook ads platform has grown tremendously over the last few years almost four billion dollars of revenue in one year so what does that mean that means there’s a lot of advertisers why is there a lot of advertisers because a lot of people use facebook it’s a popular platform so not only is it popular but it’s popular with advertisers because if you’re advertising on facebook you have the opportunity to share your product and your brand with users who you think are going to buy your product or associate with your brand and on facebook you can do that a number of different ways specifically in somebody’s news feed and specifically that person’s news feed that again is interested potentially interested in your brand your product so there’s a lot of ways to advertise and a lot of reasons why you want to advertise so i just mentioned one of the reasons hey it’s an opportunity for you to reach out to people who are targeted who are specific to your product and your brand so not only that but you combine that target audience with the amount of time that people spend on facebook okay people spend a lot of time on facebook in fact not only do people spend a lot of time on facebook there’s a lot of people on facebook in fact 2.27 billion in the third quarter of 2018 and so when we say spend a lot of time we mean going to that facebook profile at least once a day okay so a lot of eyeballs throughout the day checking their news feed on facebook facebook also enables you the advertiser to find the perfect audience and so that’s the great combination a lot of people on facebook and targeted audience so it’s a platform that allows you to put your product in front of people based on specific interest specific demographics specific location so you’re really really putting your product out in front of the right people at the right time and so the other positive and pro about facebook is it’s lesser spend greater reach and what do we mean by that well traditionally facebook is a little bit cheaper than other online advertising models it is definitely a lot cheaper than your traditional advertising models and facebook has been known to have good return on investment because it’s cost a little bit less than other advertising models and other advertising platforms so that’s the other benefit to being on facebook so if you’re into building a brand you want to be on facebook why because it helps you increase your brand awareness it’s going to help you allow users to know what your brand is all about because remember you’re putting your brand in front of like-minded people or people you think that are going to associate with your brand that are going to associate with your product so you put your brand out there you incorporate your your advertisement in somebody’s newsfeed it’s going to add value it’s going to establish trust and credibility especially if that person’s friend is associated with that brand so instant credibility if friends and family members of a person on facebook are associated with your brand so it has the opportunity to really lend a lot of credence to somebody who is on facebook active on facebook and is your targeted demographic and the great thing about facebook is it also has other features as our advertising features such as retargeting so you could target people who’ve already expressed an interest in your servicer product but if they didn’t go through the conversion process meaning they didn’t go all the way through and and buy your product you can certainly reach out to them again just like your traditional retargeting options on say google or some other advertising platform facebook works the same way we want to be able to reach out to people who aren’t fully committed at that point in time but we can reach out to them at another point in time and so facebook’s advertising platform allows us to do that so it’s a great feature that we could take advantage of that we’ll talk about more throughout this session and then it helps increase revenue sales and leads and and that’s primarily what most advertisers are after you know more revenue more sales more leads so facebook allows us to educate our audience again a targeted audience about a specific product we have to offer so the more our audience knows about our product especially if their friends and family members and colleagues are using the product then the more likely they’re going to purchase so if you go back to the other feature higher revenue less spend this is the primary reason because you have a chance to influence somebody who’s very targeted who’s very active on the platform and who may have like-minded people in their life associating with your brand and product so it’s a perfect combination for advertising perfect combination and so today we’re going to talk about all the different types of facebook ads and we’re going to start out with the single image ad and the single image ad are just single image advertisements that have an optional text on top and a link description that links to the website so single image ads are probably the most popular you can see them on probably your own facebook feed if you look so in fact i’ll just jump over to my facebook feed right now and if i go there what do i see i see a single image ad here and it’s from shopify partners so become a shopify partner at e-commerce to your list of qualifications so shopify must be you know a brand that is trying to woo my business okay so they know that somebody that i’m associated with or maybe i fit their demographic so they’re targeting my newsfeed with a single image ad so that’s what a single image ad looks like it’s simply just one single image with some description and the great thing about this single image if you haven’t noticed is the pixels are pretty large it’s 1200 by 628 so it kind of stands out a little bit it’s not your traditional thumbnail it really pops when you look at the news feed so again if i go back to my news feed here you can see it just really stands out within the news feed so i can’t miss it if i’m a targeted part of their targeted audience it’s hard for me to you know not see this ad interact in some way especially again if i know somebody in my network on facebook or either that be a friend or family member is associated with that product okay in addition to the single image ads facebook also has multi-product ads or also known as carousel ads and so what the carousel ads do is allow you in carousel form allow you to rotate different ads with different messaging and different call to action and so here you can see simply learn has a example of a carousel ad where they’re showcasing their different courses so this allows users to view a range of all your different products and services if you have multiple products and services to offer then the carousel ads would be a good option for you so in addition to the carousel ads and single image ads it gets a little bit more sophisticated in terms of technology where facebook allows us to offer up video ads and so video ads are interactive it’s a good way to really showcase your product your brand your service and the great thing about the video ads is they can go from just a few seconds all the way up to you know two minutes or excuse me all the way up to 120 minutes and so you can really really put a lot of time and effort into the video ads to really put your brand out there and so the one thing about video is it is interactive most people engage with video and they tend to get about 10 to 30 percent more views than other forms of ads so the video ads are really a popular way for you as an advertiser to put your brand or product out there so you can put your brand and product out there in not just a few seconds but you know really tell a nice complete story to get the engagement to get the person to take the action you want them to do so that’s why video ads have become very popular because they tend to get more engagement more interaction than your traditional single image ad or say your carousel ad so facebook also allows us to advertise something called lead ads and what lead ads allow us to do is obtain user details okay so we can acquire or get an email address or phone number from somebody who’s interested in our product or service and that person doesn’t even have to leave facebook so if you look here in the example here we have the ad somebody clicks on sign up and they get this form submission and the great thing about the lead ad is that it can sync up with any crm or most of your popular crms i should say for example salesforce is a good example of a crm where somebody fills that out the information goes directly to salesforce and so lead ads are really good if you’re trying to generate you know leads for your business and the form itself the interaction stays right in facebook and so that’s the great thing about it they don’t really have to leave the platform another form of advertising on facebook are slideshows okay so unlike the carousel ads which rotate and the carousel ads remember rotate and showcase different products or services these ads are are interactive but they’re rotating different imagery so it allows you to really put your best images out there with a really strong call to action just like you see here with the simply learn example okay so they’re showcasing you know they’re different classes and then they have the get started today call to action to really punctuate the slideshow ad so what’s interesting is you can really gauge a person’s interest by throwing different products or images out there you know you can really immerse a user’s experience here by showing different different images and then the last type of ad on facebook is called the collection ad and so these ads combine basically your video your slideshow or your product images taken from your product catalog okay so if you’re an advertiser who wants to advertise several products at once then this could be a great option for you the collection ad so here you can see the simply learn example here they’re showing you know not only you know some some good slide shows and imagery with some good messaging below that instagram is a social media platform that needs no introduction with nearly 1 billion monthly active users and 500 million daily active users instagram is a platform drive with marketing potential more than 7 billion revenue has been generated from instagram mobile and it’s home to more than 2 million advertisers not only that marketing on instagram has the following advantages too you have increased conversions according to research more than one-third of the people using the app have used it to purchase products which means by marketing your products on the app there’s a higher chance of conversion you also have advanced targeting options this is in part thanks to instagram’s parent company facebook instagram has access to just about all advertising features offered by facebook ads with this you can advertise to people based on their age location gender interests and much more you can also build better brand follower relationships you can stimulate conversion with your followers and build a connection with them you’ll also get a greater understanding of what your followers like and dislike based on their engagement this enables you to make content they enjoy more and increase the chance of converting a user to a consumer so let’s have a look at how marketing is done on instagram let’s start with number one optimize your bio your bio is the first thing people notice when they get to your page that’s where they make the first impression of your brand and that’s why it’s important for your bio to be informative captivating and engaging use your bio to provide a brief description of your brand or product the type of content you’ll be posting brand hashtags links to other social media platforms and more your bio should also include a url to where you want to drive traffic to be it your brand’s website or a page for a particular product make sure to track this link as well to see how much traffic it brings here’s an example of how samsung uses its bio effectively you can see it’s a very straightforward it’s got a branded hashtag it talks about all the services samsung offers there are links to other pages and a link to the website as well it’s to the point and covers everything you need to know about it next up at number two we have create a content calendar now if you ask anyone who works with social media one of the most important things they’ll tell you is to have a content calendar a content calendar enables you to keep track of your posts it’ll help you plan ahead and automate the process of publishing your posts when your audience is most active a calendar helps you decide what content caption hashtags videos goes live on what day date or time a consistent post schedule will enable you to make the most out of instagram it’ll also keep your audience engaged and also give you access to historical posts if you want to repost your older content next up we have number three get greater reach with ads paid ads can enable you to get more followers engagement leads and conversions the caveat here being that you’ll need to pay for it too the ad options are pretty similar to what you have on facebook like audience segmentation based on likes interactions buying habits and more you also have a variety of ad formats to choose from like story ads image ads video ads collection ads and more moreover they can also be set up from facebook ads manager here’s an example from an ad from bodyshop in which they’re using a single image ad the advertising works because of its interesting creative and attractive ad copy that attracts the customer to interact with the post and click on the link let’s go to number four have a visually consistent feed instagram is a platform in which people gravitate towards aesthetically pleasing content to authentic expressions and diverse perspectives the objective is that your feed needs to match with your brand’s identity and must appeal to the audience within your industry what works nowadays are candid shots muted earthly tones with a low key editing style your content must feel down to earth and your brand approachable as you can see in the images all of them have aesthetically pleasing images and a somewhat blue or underwater theme and that’s the kind of thing you should aim for your content following an understandable and interesting aesthetic depending on the product you’re trying to sell now for number five tell a story the images videos and stories you post need to tell stories that can captivate your audience and establish a connection with them this makes it more likely that they feel closer to your brand and by your products your captions can tell stories that can help your brand appear more human and build deeper connections with your audience your content needs to align with what your audience cares about or solves problems they face here’s an example of how the page patagonia talks about forests in america each of their posts tells stories about a different issue that affects nature their brand on instagram revolves around bringing awareness to such issues that’s the kind of stories you should tell with your brand next up number six use the right hashtags using the right hashtags can make the difference between your posts showing up on the explore tab for everyone to see and it getting lost in the sea of content your hashtags shouldn’t be too generic like new year or hash style since they’ll have too much competition instead mix up trending and industry specific keywords to connect with your followers research on successful hashtags and limit yourself to less than seven in each post the more the hashtags in your post the more likely it seems spammy untargeted and unprofessional find out what and how many hashtags your competitors use and how you can do something similar you could also create a hashtag for your brand these need to be short easily memorable and involve your brand name in some way let’s now go to number seven take advantage of ugc ugc or user generated content gives your followers to further involve themselves with your brand ugc also by them as well regardless of the field your brand belongs to ugc can be used to convert followers into advocates of your brand here’s an example of how starbucks uses user-generated content and takes advantages of their audience to advertise their products in this post here they are attracting customers with an image of happy children dressed in products stored at starbucks the post posted by another user would be appreciated by the audience and improve brand loyalty next up number eight take advantage of video ads most instagramers state that users have visited websites searched or told a friend after being influenced by posts even though photo ads are still the more popular form of advertising video advertisements aren’t too far behind there are three key video formats when it comes to instagram ads single video ads that can create 60 second ads carousels are a combination of images and videos and instagram stories that enable you to combine images and videos to create visually attractive ads here’s an example of the brand pizza 73 using story ads to advertise their pizzas it’s successful because you’re showing off the product they are advertising with well short videos and captions now for number nine partner up with influencers connecting with influencers will enable you to connect with thought leaders within the industry and enable you to show off your brand to a larger audience by connecting with them your brand will have greater authenticity and authority influencers need to be given new tools resources and guidance to carry out their role effectively and to work together as partners micro influencers are also considered to be more affordable and they have a closer connection with their audience here we can see how ralph lauren have collaborated with an influencer to advertise their products the influencer showing off the latest ralph lauren has to offer this encourages his interested followers to check out the page and buy something for themselves next for number 10 host contests and giveaways contests enable your audience to engage with your brand with 3.5 times more likes and 64 times the comments you can give away a product or a service which enables you to boost engagement and brand awareness contests and giveaways need to be planned brands need to be partnered with contest rules need to be identified posts need to be created and much more monitoring the contest and then running it is also really important you would need to track your contest performance and promote the results on other social media platforms as well here’s an example of a contest run by domino’s pizza which encourages people to contribute their own short stories and connect better with the brand number 11 take advantage of stories and igtv stories enable you to create a combination of photos and videos that disappear after 24 hours stories can greatly influence your reach and engagement rates even giving your story the chance to show up in the explore section it can also help make your brand seem more approachable and authentic adding links to the instagram stories can also help with driving traffic to your website igtv on the other hand although now seemingly on the decline still has a few advantages to offer to the savvy marketer igtv provides you a unique mobile friendly layout that serves as an evergreen content very well like featurettes and interviews another new tool they have introduced is instagram reels instagram’s answer to tick tock instagram released reels through which users would be able to upload 15 second clips and since it released very recently it’s rife with marketing potential finally we have number 12 track and learn identify effective hashtags visual styles and the best times to post doing this you can develop the best practices for your brand social listening and analytics will help you fine-tune your marketing strategy and increase instagram engagement so let’s talk about how to create a youtube ad so this is going to require some access to google ads and we’ll go over that in a few minutes here but first we need to think about setting up a campaign and setting up a campaign goal okay what’s the goal of our campaign to get eyeballs you know we want to pay cost per 1000 impressions or we want to run some actionable type ads to get people over to our website so that really is step one we need to identify what the goal of our campaign is then we need to create the ad so we want to be able to create a video out here that is going to show on youtube and to our target audience so or whether it be a bumper ad that’s only going to be six seconds long we need to be able to figure out what type of ad we want to run so here i am in google ads if we’re going to run a campaign on youtube we need to make sure that we’re choosing a display campaign and so remember the first step is you know setting up that campaign setting up that campaign goal so we’re going to go ahead and select a new campaign here we’re going to run a new campaign and so what’s the goal of our campaign so if we’re just out to generate brand awareness and reach that’s certainly fine if it’s all about sales or if it’s all about leads then you know the type of video run is going to be a little bit different so if we select brand awareness and reach okay here we’re going to select the campaign type and so if we select video basically what we’re doing is we’re going to tell google we want to go ahead and set up some video ads on youtube and so here you can see the different types of video ads we discussed today you know we got your bumper ads you got your skippable in-stream non-skippable so the difference being that if it’s non-skippable somebody has to watch the entirety up to 15 seconds okay so we have our out stream which is basically our viewable cpm model so we’re going to go ahead and you know check one of these types of campaign types or ad types so we’re going to click continue and then once we do that you know we’re gonna get prompted to you know move forward with selecting our ad so you can see here after i set up my campaign now i’m just gonna go through some of the settings for my ad and i’m gonna give it a campaign name a budget okay when it starts or ends the bidding strategy so again we’re going to focus on costs per 1000 impressions and then here’s the network so this is an important selection here so we’re dealing with youtube videos so we also have the option to select video partners on the display network so that means that if you want your video to show on websites that want to host ads in video format then you can select this option here notice you also have this option available if you’re running certain types of ads on youtube we’re running those bumper ads so bumper ads aren’t available on search results so i’m going to stick with the video partners okay youtube videos and here we can get into some other specifics like language country the type of inventory so here you can see the default is standard inventory so that means that this is what google recommends we want to show our ads on content that’s appropriate for most ads okay so we can go expanded or limited so we’re going with the recommended here okay and then when we go down we’re going to have an ad group so when you create a campaign you can have an ad group so with an ad group that means that we can have a more or less a video in every ad group we have but we have to have at least one ad group so we’re gonna go ahead and set up you know this ad group here and here’s where it gets interesting and important because here is where we can start targeting our audience so here we got demographics okay so we can choose gender age parental status household income okay we can focus in on audiences if we want to so we can we can choose a specific audience that we’ve set up we can get some ideas or browse specific audiences we could also choose a specific placement so here you have youtube videos or we can go with youtube specific channels okay or we can even be on apps okay we have to set a bid for our target cpm and once we do that basically it’s all up to now for us to add our video ad and so remember in this example we’re going to bumper ads so we’re looking at about six seconds and once we do that then that’s pretty much the campaign but i just want to stress here that when you’re setting it up ahead of time you want to make sure you identify what the campaign goal is and then that’s going to align with the type of video you’re going to run and then once you choose that type of video then it just comes down to where you want that ad to be and who you’re targeting so it’s really crucial here that you go through these steps and these options very closely so because you want your video to show in front of the right audience on the right placement so let’s talk about how you can optimize your youtube ads

so once you get your campaign set up once you select your channel or the type of videos where you want your ad to be and you select your target audience and you’re off and running with your video ad well we’re going to give you some tips here that you can focus on for optimizing those ads and so going back to what i was just saying on the setup you want to carefully define your metrics and goals okay so that’s step one so when you’re setting up the campaign remember you have that option to choose the type of goal for your campaign that can be brand awareness it could be a sale it could be a lead so to me that’s the you know a very critical step one so you want to make sure you align your goal with your video and then the second is track low performing ad placements so if we just ask google to place our video ads anywhere they want then it’s up to us then to go through and choose the ad placements and remove them okay so let me show you an example of what that means so if i’m back in google i’m gonna go to my campaign and i’m gonna select placements and here i could see placements but then i’m going to select where my ads show and so this is important you want to be able to scan the list of placements where the ad was shown so if you don’t like one of the placements on youtube you can always select it edit it and exclude it from the campaign or record so that’s really the key is you want to be able to manage your placements properly and when we say low performing ad placements we mean really what what’s your goal if your goal is to get sales or leads if you’re that placement is not converting sales or leads then you need to remove or exclude that placement so it’s all done within the google ads platform and then you know you can also use a custom thumbnail image in your ad as well it’s always helpful in terms of optimization so a couple of other pointers here to help you optimize okay you want to drive people to perform a particular action with the appropriate cta so again depending on the ad type you know if it’s a true view ad 20 seconds long you want to have a call to action you want to maybe even have your domain name at the end of the video so at least somebody knows where to go so you always want to have a call to action with your video ad you want to use negative targeting to specify who gets to see your ad and who doesn’t okay so that goes back to your settings so you can pick and choose who your target audience is you can pick and choose who you don’t want your audience to be as an other setting you can use closed captioning in your ads to make it more interactive so that way people can actually see or read what the ad is all about just to make it a bit more interactive you can always perform a b testing on your ads so if you have one ad version you can create another one just to see what it which one performs better testing is always a positive okay so if you’re paying too much maybe think about reducing your bids so if you remember we said a 10 cpm bid that may be too much maybe we don’t need to pay 10 so we can always reduce our bids at the ad group level so reduce bids in areas where you see lower performance so in other words you don’t want to pay a lot for poor performance you can also use remarketing to re-engage with customers so if somebody views your ads and doesn’t take action you can always retarget that person uh to show your ad another even another ad format it could be text ads or display ads but if somebody looked at your video and they didn’t take the action you preferred them to take then you can always retarget them with another ad so that’s a good way to optimize okay so we want to make sure the ad has content that what viewers would find relevant okay that really you want to make sure that your ad is you know is with the end viewer you don’t want to put out an ad that isn’t going to give somebody you know a good feeling after they’ve watched it okay so you want to make sure viewers find the content relevant so if they don’t find it relevant then that means your engagement rate and your engagement is probably going to be low so you want to take a look at those metrics that we viewed earlier engagement rate engagement and if they’re low then you probably need to look at the content of the ad to try to make sure your ad conveys your brand’s message in the first six seconds so that’s why bumper ads to me are so critical because you’ve got to get the entirety of the ad and make it impactful and so with any ad you run any video ad you’re on you really want to make sure that that message is conveyed at the very beginning early as possible otherwise you know people are going to be turned off or not engaged and just going to go ahead and skip it anyway so you want to make sure you get the purpose of it right up front and out of the way okay you can also include visual and auditory components in your ad that can make it more memorable to the viewers okay meaning music or other cool visuals okay so again you want to be able to play around and test different ads yes i mean click-through rate engagement rate all of those are indicators whether the ad is of good quality or not with the end user and when i say good quality i mean do they find it did they find it interesting if so they’re going to click and if you don’t have good click-through rates or good engagement rates then you definitely want to try doing something different to the ad like adding those audio components or other visuals that could be appealing to the end user so go ahead and and test some of those out with a b because you have nothing to lose but higher or lower engagement rates or lower click-through rates so you want to be able to improve those metrics improving those metrics means trying some different components on different ads so let’s take a look at a case study if you will and let’s focus on super dry so they’re a good success story on youtube so super dry leaned on some youtube advertising to help lift products so in september last year 2018 talk about how you can optimize your youtube ads so once you get your campaign set up once you select your channel or the type of videos where you want your ad to be and you select your target audience and you’re off and running with your video ad well we’re going to give you some tips here that you can focus on for optimizing those ads and so going back to what i was just saying on the setup you want to carefully define your metrics and goals okay so that’s step one so when you’re setting up the campaign remember you have that option to choose the type of goal for your campaign that can be brand awareness it could be a sale it could be a lead so to me that’s the you know a very critical step one so you want to make sure you align your goal with your video and then the second is track low performing ad placements so if we just ask google to place our video ads anywhere they want then it’s up to us then to go through and choose the ad placements and remove them okay so let me show you an example of what that means so if i’m back in google i’m going to go to my campaign and i’m going to select placements and here i can see placements but then i’m going to select where my ads show and so this is important you want to be able to scan the list of placements where the ad was shown so if you don’t like one of the placements on youtube you can always select it edit it and exclude it from the campaign or record so that’s really the key is you want to be able to manage your placements properly and when we say low performing at placements we mean really what what’s your goal if your goal is to get sales or leads if you’re that placement is not converting sales or leads then you need to remove or exclude that placement so it’s all done within the google ads platform and then you know you can also use a custom thumbnail image in your ad as well it’s always helpful in terms of optimization so a couple of other pointers here to help you optimize okay you want to drive people to perform a particular action with the appropriate cta so again depending on the ad type you know if it’s a true view ad 20 seconds long you want to have a call to action you want to maybe even have your domain name at the end of the video so at least somebody knows where to go so you always want to have a call to action with your video ad you want to use negative targeting to specify who gets to see your ad and who doesn’t okay so that goes back to your settings so you can pick and choose who your target audience is you can pick and choose who you don’t want your audience to be as an other setting you can use closed captioning in your ads to make it more interactive so that way people can actually see or read what the ad is all about just to make it a bit more interactive okay you can always perform a b testing on your ads so if you have one ad version you can create another one just to see what it which one performs better testing is always a positive okay so if you’re paying too much maybe think about reducing your bids so if you remember we said a 10 cpm bid that may be too much maybe we don’t need to pay 10 so we can always reduce our bids at the ad group level so reduce bids in areas where you see lower performance so in other words you don’t want to pay a lot for poor performance you can also use remarketing to re-engage with customers so if somebody views your ads and doesn’t take action you can always retarget that person uh to show your ad another even another ad format it could be text ads or display ads but if somebody looked at your video and they didn’t take the action you preferred them to take then you can always retarget them with another ad so that’s a good way to optimize okay so we want to make sure the ad has content that what viewers would find relevant okay that really you want to make sure that your ad is you know is with the end viewer you don’t want to put out an ad that isn’t going to give somebody you know a good feeling after they’ve watched it okay so you want to make sure viewers find the content relevant so if they don’t find it relevant then that means your engagement rate and your engagement is probably going to be low so you want to take a look at those metrics that we viewed earlier engagement rate engagement and if they’re low then you probably need to look at the content of the ad so try to make sure your ad conveys your brand’s message in the first six seconds so that’s why bumper ads to me are so critical because you’ve got to get the entirety of the ad and make it impactful and so with any ad you run any video ad you’re on you really want to make sure that that message is conveyed at the very beginning early as possible otherwise you know people are going to be turned off or not engaged and just going to go ahead and skip it anyway so you want to make sure you get the purpose of it right up front and out of the way okay you can also include visual and auditory components in your ad that can make it more memorable to the viewers okay meaning music or other cool visuals okay so again you want to be able to play around and test different ads and you want to be able to you know measure the ad performance based on the metrics we discussed i mean click-through rate engagement rate all of those are indicators whether the ad is of good quality or not with the end user and when i say good quality i mean do they find it engaging do they find it interesting if so they’re going to click and if you don’t have good click-through rates or good engagement rates then you definitely want to try doing something different to the ad like adding those audio components or other visuals that could be appealing to the end user so go ahead and and test some of those out with a b testing because you have nothing to lose but higher or lower engagement rates or lower click-through rates so you want to be able to improve those metrics improving those metrics means trying some different components on different ads so let’s take a look at a case study if you will and let’s focus on super dry so they’re a good success story on youtube so super dry leaned on some youtube advertising to help lift one of their products so in september last year 2018 super dry if you’re not familiar with the brand they’re you know centered some asian markets european markets and they focus in on clothing uh all different styles and sizes and genders uh from jackets to jeans to t-shirts and so their global brand they really wanted to take a different approach here and their approach was they wanted to focus in on sales they wanted to see if video can help lift them with sales and so what they’ve done is they set up some campaigns on youtube and their focus here was on jackets and jackets to specific ages across the board all genders and interests and so what they did was they wanted want to take advantage of all the different ad types that youtube had to offer and let’s take a look at one of those ads here so if we go to youtube and let’s just take a look at this one minute ad here 53 second ad buy super dry this is the jacket the jacket you’re raving the jacket you’re waiting the jacket you’re pulling the jacket your play pal and posing in this jacket this is the jacket the jacket that will get you through so that’s the video that super dry ran you could see that you know it was had some particular goals there and so super dry is pretty well known so it probably wasn’t built around brand awareness per se it was probably growth consideration and interest and also driving action okay it’s a pretty cool video it was definitely not a bumper ad because bumper ads are six seconds so it was definitely a true view probably take action and so whatever ads they actually did run specifically they did see a lift and so we kept pulse on super dry’s account and these videos actually had you know 4.8 million views and so cool video ran for 53 seconds not a long time not a short time was able to you know target their audience a younger crowd you noticed in the ad they had different jackets both female and male different gender types so they were messaging a very broad audience of gender uh some younger people is who they were targeting so younger people tend to slant on youtube and so they were able to get some nice views out of it 4.8 million but the more important thing is because these videos were to drive action and so they were able to see a four to one ratio on return on investment and as a result these jackets saw a 138 percent increase in brand lip i mean the jacket ad so it was a pretty successful campaign see as well choreographed good audio good video just well professionally done and they probably were able to now get a few more loyal customers under their belt because of this ad alone so that’s the power of video okay so you’re able to know who your target audience is you can go out and target them with a cool video and given that youtube is vast then you can really take advantage of a lot of their ads so what they probably did again was those trueview in-stream ads uh with a cost per view uh through a skippable video ad format and they they also use the shoppable ad format so that is another option on youtube so they took advantage of all youtube had to offer in terms of who they were trying to target the length of the ad and given that their product or selling a product or promoting a product they will take advantage of the trueview shoppable ad format which basically lists your products alongside the actual video ad and so this is just a good case study you super dry we’ll probably do this again based on the numbers that they’re reporting and so basically that’s the power of youtube getting out in front of your audience with a really good video ad targeting an audience taking advantage of different formats today we’re going to talk about how to increase instagram followers today’s webinar we’re going to have some tips and and best practices for you to take advantage of to increase instagram followers so let’s get started and talk a little bit about instagram so instagram is not really an up-and-coming platform it is already up and coming a lot of users in fact 500 million daily active instagram users 500 million daily the user base growth of more than 300 year-over-year so it’s growing and growing and growing it’s become more and more popular ever since it’s launched back in 2010 and then there’s more than 100 million photos uploaded daily so it’s a platform where you can upload photos tag those photos even use and implement videos and photos have become very popular with the advent of mobile technology that the instagram app makes it easy for you to post your photo so there’s no surprise there’s a growth there’s no surprise there’s a lot of users there’s no surprise that there’s a hundred million photos plus uploaded daily and then there are 400 million stories posted daily so when you post something you can create a story out of it and there’s 400 million of those per day and then there’s more than 50 billion photos shared to date so since 2010 platform nat which is now owned by facebook has become really really popular a good place for you if you have your own company if you have your own brand if you have your own product it’s a good place for you to really showcase that service that product that brand because of the user base how easy it is to use and the wide reach it has for you in which to tell your story as i mentioned there are lots of photos shared today close to seven billion dollars revenue generated through instagram mobile so on top of everything i just said there’s a lot of e-commerce going on here too so instagram is a platform in which there’s e-commerce integrated within the platform so as a business who offers up products you can actually generate revenue for yourself on the flip side instagram which is owned by facebook has an opportunity to sell advertising space on instagram so instagram is an e-commerce platform to say the least in fact instagram is because it’s so popular because it’s part of facebook’s advertising platform they’re more than two million advertisers on instagram so amongst all those stories videos and photos and hashtags you’ll see some ads and then because you’ll see ads because you’ll see users you’re going to see businesses it’s just good place to really set up shop and really tell your story through the world of photos and videos so 25 million plus businesses have already migrated over to instagram and that’s growing and growing and growing so it’s an opportunity for you to work with other businesses so the arrow is definitely pointing up on instagram there’s a lot going on here easy to use application especially when it comes to photos and videos so we’re gonna go through some tips and tricks today and we’re gonna talk about everything there is to know about instagram and how to increase your followers so let’s take a look at tip one here so because instagram is an application everything you do on it is through the application now you could certainly view a web page version on it but you really can’t do much out of that so if i go to my instagram account for example using my desktop i could see my profile and i can edit my profile to a degree but everything you’re doing is through the application so when it comes to that tip one here is take advantage of your bio so regardless of what industry you are you’re in who you are you really want to have a clear and concise and compelling bio why because this is your introduction to the world you want people to know who you are and because if you don’t really become very clear to people they’re not going to follow you so this is where it all starts you need to take advantage of your bio have a clear and concise bio and have a link to your website or some contact information so to me this is where it all starts you gotta have a bio because that’s what people are gonna look at and they’re gonna decide whether to follow you or not based on primarily that bio that’s where it all starts so make sure you have a good bio that’s tip number one so you’ll have to make sure that your landing page is also mobile optimized since most instagram users are on mobile so if you’re going to put a link to your website and somebody’s on the instagram app and they see your bio and they like it and you have a link to your website make sure that landing page they go to is mobile optimized so tip number two everything you do on instagram when it comes to posting evolves around hashtags so that’s the backbone of the platform just like most platforms out there social media platforms like twitter or facebook pinterest you’re gonna have hashtags accompany those posts so instagram is no different but in this case you really really want to take advantage of the hashtag so hashtags are there to help users find your content so you want to start out by using hashtags that are relevant to your business so if you’re in the food industry you’re gonna post something related to food do the appropriate amount of research to find hashtags that describe your brand and also are being searched on instagram so what does that mean that means do a little bit of homework on instagram you know see what searches or see what other brands in your industry are using for hashtags don’t be afraid to use the same hashtag but mix it up hashtags are important so don’t be afraid to put a hashtag in there that really defines what your business is about but if it’s relevant use other hashtags that are popular or people are using to find information so mix it up but the key here is relevancy you want to make sure you align your hashtags with your content and making sure the connection between the hashtag and the content is relevancy so using the popular tags on your photos or videos might get you some immediate engagement but it may not help with future goals like long-term engagement new interested followers and sales so here really what i’m trying to say is look pick and choose your hashtags carefully because if you use something broad or something non-relevant yeah you may get that click to your instagram page but that doesn’t necessarily mean somebody’s going to follow you or that doesn’t mean really mean somebody’s going to be interested in what you have to offer so if you use something really popular and broad yes you’re going to get short-term gratification but not long-term interest tip number three post your content at the right time so according to sprout social which is a social media scheduling platform among other things so they deal with a lot of people using their platform and posting content via their platform they have data and they’re telling us based on the data they’ve collected that the best time to post is between 2 and 3 p.m and the best day to post is thursday now that may be all fine and true according to a sprout social study and so you may want to go with this 2 to 3 p.m and this is probably local in case you’re wondering what time zone we’re referring to so this is all local to you so go ahead and try that out try 2 to 3 p.m on thursday the thing is what you’re gonna have to do eventually is figure out what the best time to post is okay so if you’re pointing out a lot of content and you’re putting out content throughout the week at certain times of the day or throughout the day you’re gonna have to determine which time of day and what day is generating the best engagement for you who’s looking at your post at what point of the day what day of the week and so you’re gonna really have to lean on a social media platform to help you determine that because they’re gonna have the data that you need to determine what the best time of day to post is okay so we’ll talk about social media platforms here shortly we just know that when you post post with some rationale in mind ask yourself before you even push that publish button or before you even schedule that post this time a day in this day of the week makes sense so you always want to post at the right time because you could be missing your audience so remember when you do this you’re going to be working with some platform and instagram also has some analytics for business accounts so instagram will also give you some feedback as to how you’re supposed to perform it and we’re going to talk about that here shortly as well so let’s move over to tip four here so steal followers from your competitors okay so if you’re dealing in a very competitive industry and your competitors have a lot of followers it’s very very easy to see who’s following them so the easiest way to do this is just interact with your competitors followers you could follow a user like or comment on their photos and so the more you engage with people the more you stand to gain from them so you could see who your competitors followers are and you can add them as a follower just by following them so start engaging with them if they’re liking your competitors brand then what the chance of them liking your brand could be great so check out who your competitors followers are if they seem like somebody who you would want to be following your brand then go ahead and interact with them and how you interact is again you can like something that they post or you can comment on something that they posted and engage with them okay it doesn’t take that much time it’s a good way to gain followers so if we’re on instagram we can simply just click on the brand’s followers so here i can see this brand has 127 followers and here i can see all the followers and what i could do is simply just click on one of the followers and i can go to their profile and from there i could see what they’ve posted in terms of videos and images and i can like or comment so just doing something as simple as this gets you an opportunity to engage with somebody who can then turn around and follow you so tip five pay for sponsored posts and product reviews so a number of ways you could do this here so pay for a sponsored post so you could find an influencer satisfies a couple of requirements they have large following and an email address in the profile so you can connect with them and ask them for sponsored post pricing so it’s as simple as that as reaching out to somebody who has a large following okay so if you do this then it’s going to put you in front of a large number of people and so by doing this it’ll help expose your brand to that larger audience and help build your cr credibility because you’re connecting with somebody who has a large audience as well so do a little bit of homework find people out there in your industry who has a large following and make sure they have that email address in their profile so you can contact them and when you contact them you know ask them for sponsored post pricing so if the influencer has an email address then they’re open to sponsored post or shadow so that’s the key so they gotta have that email address and when they do then it’s all about asking them and connecting with them on being a sponsor to one of your posts okay you want to get yourself out there in front of people this is the quickest way to do that okay so tip six we want to use geotags for easier discoverability okay so tag your images videos or stories by tagging the location city or venue where it was posted from so very easy to do as you’re posting just go ahead and and there’s an option in there to say hey where are you located or what city are you located in so locations have their own feed and stories which you can contribute to so go ahead and add that extra element to your tags so if somebody’s in that location the chance of them engaging are going to be great and it’s good for local businesses because if you’re local and you’re posting your location then again somebody in that location is likely to engage with you so tip seven use instagram stories to attract followers and grow your user base a story is a really big feature on instagram so what stories could be used for is just show footage of an environment so it could be your office it could be your home it could be you know the playground it could be the golf course it could be anywhere that you want to show village of so you want to post new relevant to your industry so if you’re in the food industry hey why not go in the back into the kitchen and post a story about how a particular bread or cake is made okay show off your product so if you are in that food industry and say you’re in the pizza making business perfect opportunity to show people via an instagram story how to make that pizza and how you make that pizza what ingredients you use how unique is your particular product and that’s really what you want to get across when you do a story you want to show something unique and relevant that’s going to grasp people’s attention you can promote a company event so if you’re celebrating say 200 000 subscribers create a youtube video or you can create an instagram story it works just as well so you can endorse your company’s blog posts you can post positive user reviews so these are all features of a story increase interactivity with polls sliders etc and then you can also mention other companies that work with or follow you so great use of instagram stories is do a shout out to somebody else so instagram stories is a really big feature with instagram check it out you know you can just do a search for instagram stories in fact let’s get some of you users involved what best practices do you have when creating instagram stories why don’t you go ahead and share your instagram story with us by putting that instagram story in the comment section below so we want to get everybody involved here because there’s thousands upon thousands of great instagram stories out there to be shown and viewed and engaged with so go ahead and share your instagram story if you have any other tips or tricks then go ahead and put those in the comments section so that everybody can benefit from them so the only thing to keep in mind when you’re creating these stories is what are your followers interested in seeing so your stories could teach or promote something to your user base so always keep that in the back your mind you know for me i always go back to what industry are you in if you’re in the food industry hey you know people who are following you are interested in food if you’re a pizza company you know show off that pizza if you’re a bakery show off how you make your breads and goods baked goods whatever it is you have show it off because if somebody’s following you that’s what they’re interested in so tip number eight highlight important stories so you want to highlight highlight serve as the easiest way to create a first impression for a potential follower so with highlights can be used to tease what your content’s about create a trailer for what your brand offers promote and promote your product highlights are there it’s a good feature it’s a first impression for potential followers so it teases what the content’s about it creates a trailer so to speak for your brand and promote your product so use highlights and again any users out there who have good examples of highlights go ahead and put those in the content section or comment section uh right below this video so remember stories have only a 24 hour life span so highlights can be used to give them a second wind okay so highlights serve a purpose it teases what the contents about it promotes the product and it really kind of accentuates that story tip number nine ask for followers so sometimes people need a little push before they can follow you on instagram even if they enjoy your content so you can ask users to become your followers in the caption the comment section even work it into your content so in other words when you’re posting something don’t be afraid to say hey follow me you know i got some good stuff here be confident you don’t want to do it for every post of course but you know pick and choose if you feel you have a really good post you know really good image that you think is going to gain a lot of followers and engagers then you don’t necessarily need to put a caption in there but if if it is popular then go ahead and say hey this is a popular post you know think about following me or put something in the comment section you want to do it kind of succinctly you don’t want to be begging but just work it in to some degree okay but don’t be afraid have some confidence and asking for followers so when you do this it’s very similar to how we do it on youtube so you can ask viewers to subscribe to their channels at the end of the video so it’s if on youtube basically you’re saying hey if you like what we have go ahead and subscribe it’s no different on instagram if you have something you’ve posted just go and say hey you like this you know go ahead and follow us it’s that simple so tip number ten take on the latest trends to get more followers so align your content to cater to trendy topics or hashtags to improve engagement and discoverability so really what we’re trying to say here’s your competitors follow influencers what are the latest trends and you can get an idea of the latest trends by looking at hashtags so what hashtags are trending which ones are people using the most so really what you want to do is whatever’s trending in your industry you know ride that wave so to speak now it doesn’t have to take on your entire profile but there’s nothing wrong with one or two posts if something’s really taking on popularity then go ahead and post about it as well you know for example in the wine industry if there’s a new wine that really came out that’s really gaining some popularity go ahead and post about it with the same hashtag and with the unique hashtag so don’t be afraid to you know ride the wave of popularity so to speak because it shows that you know you know what you’re talking about it adds some credibility and it’s going to get some you know viewers over to your instagram profile so keep in mind you need to keep your content relevant because if your audience is interested in what you have to offer then they’re going to be engaged however you know if you’re joining the discussion in a relevant manner keeping in mind whether your audience will interact or not is important but just always keep in mind you always want to stay within your industry and relevancy for your target audience so tip number 11 run contests and giveaways and so just like on youtube just like on facebook i mean instagram is no different you can increase reach and exposure by running contests since most followers would tag their friends to let them know about it it’s a good idea to run contests and so what’s an idea of a contest well again if you’re running a pizza parlor you know you could say hey what’s your favorite pizza or give me your favorite pizza ideas and you can run a contest and you know you can have people even create their own pizza and post an image of it you can have people create stories on the best ways in which they create pizza or their experience in another pizza parlor there’s lots of things you can do to create a contest and you don’t always have to give something away you can just do something for fun especially if you have a lot of followers if you have a lot of followers and somebody’s going to take part in it so don’t be afraid to run contests just to make it fun and light it up a little bit so each tag can bring you a new audience member who could be a potential follower so anytime you run a contest people are going gonna tag their friends to let them know about that contest so those friends are gonna come over and likely engage so that’s the beauty of running a contest or giveaway is chances are word’s gonna spread and it’s gonna get you some new followers so that’s the the end benefits so to speak but the real benefit is keeping your audience engaged so tip number 12 we want to stay consistent with post so having a consistent pace and theme for your post can have a huge impact to convert visitors so when we say consistent you know if you’re again that pizza parlor stay within pizza you could branch out a little maybe and talk about salads or talk about beverages to you know as a complementary factor to the pizza okay but don’t talk about hamburgers if you’re focused in on pizza so we want to stay consistent with your theme this method involves less effort with a faster production of instagram content so that mean what we’re really trying to say here is focus stay focused on who you are if you do that if you’re consistent and you’re gaining some followers and that’s what people are coming to you for the content that you’re good at for the industry you’re in okay so if you start varying it and branching out then it’s gonna muddy the water suppose so to speak and you’re probably gonna get less engagement so set a theme on instagram by maintaining consistency and your personality filters colors and layout and really what i’m referring to is post and when you have post something you’re you’re really creating a personality for yourself okay so if you’re in fashion for example and you’re in the genes industry well jeans jeans jeans right that’s your personality accentuate it with different outfits related to jeans but you know when you start talking about dresses and shoes and that kind of blurs your your personality a bit so if you stay consistent with thin jeans and outfits that go with jeans then i think people are gonna start to pick up on that personality so tip 13 keep track of your instagram following so you can analyze the growth of your channel with tools like socialblade i could tell you how many followers you lost over time and how engaged they are okay so you can use data gather from here and from instagram business account to diagnose where you’re faltering so let’s take a look at socialblade as an example here so if i go over here i’m going to go to socialblade here i can enter in basically any account after i register and i could see how that account has performed you know where they rank you know how many uploads they have what country they focused on what industry and the beauty here is i could see and i’m looking at youtube as an example i could see you know how my post to perform well you could do this for instagram you could do it for facebook so you can really get an idea of how your account’s performing so socialblade’s a great platform for measuring it and again you do also have instagram business insights so with instagram business insights basically what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna go to your app right and then from the app you could basically look at your insights from there so in the app itself you’re gonna click on the upper right three lines and from there you’re gonna see insights and when you go to insights you’re also gonna see you know what your reach is how many impressions and some engagement metrics terms of your audience where they’re located the age range okay you’re gonna also see some content related information so there’s a lot you could see from the instagram insights analytics insights but you can also see additional information from socialblade so the key here is when you’re looking at your data you want to look for patterns and post what posts receive the most amount of engagement so if you see something working obviously replicate it you know you don’t want to replicate it immediately but make note of it and use it for future content so tip 14 use instagram ads so instagram ads give you complete control over advertisements so how they appear and who sees them so with instagram ads you can run photos you can run videos carousels slideshows stories so we mention this on other webinars for facebook advertising it’s worth repeating so if i go back into say facebook ads manager i can pick and choose my placements and really what i want to do is pick and choose for example instagram and so i have instagram feed i have instagram stories so and i could see what the video requirement or the media requirement is for running on instagram so with instagram you can run stories you can run videos single image ads you can run carousel so really you could put your best forward meaning take the post that’s performing well and maybe you want to advertise that promote it so you’re going to run this through facebook ads manager and it’s gonna tell you you know what your audience size is your potential reach okay what your daily results would be so you’re gonna get all that information when you run your ads on facebook ads manager but it’s a great opportunity for you to really push forward if you’re running a promotion it’s really an opportunity for you to push forward that promotion other advantages scalable pricing self-serve and instant robust reporting and highly refined audience retargeting so all of that is in the facebook ads manager you can get all the reporting units you need meaning you know who saw the ad did they click on it okay you can refine that target audience you can go back into facebook ads manager and refine who your audience is so lots of flexibility here and advertising on instagram but the key here is if you want to run advertising on instagram you know think about what it is you’re trying to promote if you feel something needs to get promoted then go ahead and you know you can either again reach out to somebody and have them sponsor it or you can run it as an advertisement so let’s move on to tip 15. so we want to create visually attractive and eye-catching ads so if you are gonna run ads you know here’s some things to keep in mind okay you want to use images that are natural and seem native okay you don’t want to use any stock photography first off you want to use something that you’ve done okay you want to minimize the amount of text so let the image do the talking you want to ensure your caption relates to the image and resonates with your audience okay so you have an opportunity to add some text below the image okay so make sure it resonates and then of course use hashtags to show your ads to target your audience but a wider relevant audience so hashtags do play a role here as well so these are some tips if you’re going to create ads you want to take these into account the whole point of the ad is to get people over to either web page or to your profile page okay so that they can engage and take action so instagram ads will help showcase your product service or brand in a way that’s memorable and unique so if you really want to get your vision your brand your product out there in front of a lot of people then advertising on instagram is a good way to do that so since we’ve been talking about pizza throughout this webinar there’s a good instagram a profile here about pizza you know i’m getting hungry just looking at this hopefully this is an example for all veg and non-veg pizza consumers i mean you can see this profile here they got the website you know they got the handle okay so they have a lot of followers so you know if i’m in the pizza industry i can go ahead and you know click on their followers and see who who’s following them who they’re following so some really good shots of pizza here it looks like you know a lot of people were involved in this you could see lots of different examples here some cute ones you know some funny ones some humorous ones so you know just taking a look at something like pizza which you know most people enjoy you know most and you can kind of appreciate you know how much of an advantage instagram can be because it really you can accentuate photos you can have fun with it you can really run some contests here you know give us your best pizza photo so here you know you could say use daily pizza as a hashtag for feature okay so they’re even encouraging you to use a specific hashtag so you can really do a lot here on instagram this is just a good example of what you can do and have fun with you know with an example like pizza just to give you some ideas so let’s move on to tip 16. take advantage of instagram tools so you can use scheduling tools like later hootsuite and buffer so i can’t stress this enough you know when it comes to measuring the engagement of your instagram post you’re definitely going to need a social media tool so you’re also going to need it if you do a lot of you know posting on instagram so let’s take a look at an example we’ll use later.com so if i go later here i can see you know i can use this to upload my images to my profile so here you can see it’s scheduled throughout the day of the week so that way we’re not overlapping you know we’re scheduling based on the times of the day that people are gonna look at this so you know here i could see you know particular stories if any stories are posted okay i can look at it from a weekly or monthly preview i could see what’s been posted okay and more importantly as a schedule tool i can also see the analytics i could see you know how many were posted how many followers so this is really important because you know if my profile is growing i want to be able to see what posts perform best what the audience was like you know by gender by age by a location so again i can look at it by post performance story or hashtag analytics as well so later really goes into details about you know what’s driving engagement so here you can see some hashtags that this become a particular company is using on instagram so here you can see how many posts with this hashtag you know and what and kind of engagement did they receive do they receive likes comments impressions how much reach do they get how many saves and it really just does go into detail so later does a good job i like this platform especially for instagram it’s great for scheduling but more important you know in addition to the instagram analytics you can really lean on you know this particular platform to get a really good idea as to you know how particular posts are performing remember if a post is performing you want to reuse it at a certain point in time okay learn from best practices learn from what’s working learn from what’s not working if something’s not working then don’t do it again so you can really get a good breakdown here and later.com so remember these tools place an emphasis on automation okay enabling you to automatically post at a scheduled time so you want to lock it in at a certain period of time and i have to worry about it so it allows you to really hone in on that particular time of the day and day of the week so that you’re really maximizing your chances of getting good engagement okay so develop your own signature styles to set up a style and content theme so that you’re able to stand out amongst the various competitors so you know again just going back to our pizza example lots of good photos of pizza and but this is their style this is who they are you know they’re not a particular brand they’re just you know people who like pizza okay and they’re having fun with it okay so that’s their style you know they’re posting really good shots of all this different types of pizza different styles different toppings and just to give you an idea of how popular pizza is and what you can do with it okay so again this is a good basic example um of what you can do with something as simple as pizza so don’t be afraid to experiment you know try something different with your profile you know do something different you don’t always have to follow what everybody else is doing that’s the great thing about instagram it allows you to be free and creative in fact if anybody has any styles that have worked for them you know feel free to put something in the comment section we’d love to hear your thoughts so tip 18 use user engagement to your advantage so i just mentioned that using the later example so we want to be able to learn from what’s working and not working so user generated content shows off your brand to be authentic and improves your relationship with your followers so you know you want to be unique with the content that you’re posting so if you do that you’re likely to build that relationship and you know increase your followers and you want to be able to see of that user generated content that ugc which is performing which is not performing okay so basically your followers and your audience are telling you what’s working and not working so take advantage of that remember going back to hashtags you could set up your own unique hashtag and ask your users to post images or videos relating to that which you can post in your brand’s account so just like the whole pizza thing they’re saying hey look you know use daily pizza for a feature okay that’s a good example of something you can do as well so you could set up a unique hashtag and say hey use this hashtag and that’ll help you gain some followers that’ll help you gain some notoriety and some visibility on your platform tip 19 use high quality images and videos just like on youtube just like on facebook instagram is no different images must be of high quality authentic and original i mean again one more time go back to the pizza these images look to be pretty high quality i mean if you have a decent mobile phone that’s all it takes a mobile phone with a camera that is that’s all it usually takes you know you want to be able to get that that right shot you don’t want to use anything that’s of low quality because it really is going to take away from you know the story you’re trying to tell so you don’t have to be professional per se just make sure what you’re posting whether it be video or whether it be an image is of high quality and remember videos needs to be fun and informational without causing the user to lose interest so you know if you’re going to create a video you know go ahead and you know make you can make it short make it fun okay you can see here these guys are just showing you how pizza’s made doesn’t take a long time they’re just going through the motions they’re not boring you with details they’re not talking really quick and easy just to give you an idea it doesn’t have to be as serious it can be fun so video content needs to be fun and informational without causing users to lose interest that’s the key short sweet unique authentic and fun have fun with it so worth repeating don’t use stock images on instagram because you know they don’t really bode well for your particular brand you know it’s instagram it allows you to post original content that’s the whole purpose of it okay and on the video side be concise high quality and informational enough okay so you have to hold the user’s attention here so when we say concise you know don’t make it a five minute video obviously make it high quality relevant to what you’re trying to offer and if you could do that you’re likely gonna hold the user’s attention so tip 20 promote your instagram page and other social media channels so facebook and instagram are part of the same family so this seems like a natural but you know don’t be afraid to promote it on other channels like pinterest or or youtube the whole idea is to get users to your instagram page and encourage them to follow it so you know you can always put that url in you know other platforms like youtube nothing wrong with that at all okay you can also promote your page offline with print ads and during other relevant events and then i would even take this to further is you’ll probably see you know an instagram logo on a web page along with other social media icons so you always want to help promote instagram on your web page as well but you can do it for offline with print ads so you can simply just put you know whatever your your slug is for instagram whatever your id is whatever you’re using on instagram that’s what you can use don’t be afraid to promote it offline or online today we’re going to talk about how to increase twitter followers so welcome and let’s get started so with twitter it’s all about tweets it’s actually a verb now uh when you do something on twitter you actually tweet and there are a lot of people out there tweeting in fact twitter has over 1.3 billion accounts so a lot of tweets going on in the world of twitter so as of the third quarter in 2018 last year twitter had 326 million global monthly active users okay so active meaning every day using the platform on a daily basis so a lot of people using twitter it’s very easy to use as you’ll find out and what you’re going to find out today is how to increase followers on your twitter account so they can see more of your tweets okay a little bit more about twitter there are 500 million tweets posted every single day that’s a lot of tweets so you can imagine with every tweet is a hashtag that accompanies that tweet so a lot of information being disseminated across the platform so tweets with videos so twitter does allow videos as well as images attracts 10 times more engagement than other forms of content so if you watched our youtube videos and some of the other videos we had out there regarding facebook or instagram you’ll know that videos do perform better twitter is no exception so if you have a video even if it’s done on youtube or if it’s not unpublished on youtube use it with twitter you’re going to get more engagement so twitter has 75 of its users use the platform for news okay so people go to twitter to get their news that’s where they go they don’t go to a regular website content-based website they get their news via twitter it’s just very easy to digest because it’s so few characters 75 of b2b businesses market on twitter so not only is it a b2c or business to consumer platform it’s a b2b business to business platform so a lot of businesses are on twitter basically promoting either a product service or trying to establish themselves in the industry using the platform so let’s take a look at twitter and let’s take a look at some of the ways in which you can increase your followers it all starts with your profile you always want to make sure you have a complete profile your name obviously the twitter platform that you have is going to have a handle okay in this example here it’s a totally real person at totally real person is the twitter handle and that’s what you’re going to want to use to disseminate your twitter profile to others so you want to make sure that you have a good image you have a real name and a good handle that people can associate with and remember so you want to be able to set up this profile with a keyword friendly bio okay a link to your website and a picture that represents your brand always helps so make sure it’s complete you can even take a step further by customizing the color scheme of your profile you can add a header image that sticks to your theme that will help your profile stand out and so let’s take a look at an example here so if i go to twitter here we go to simply learn twitter account okay their handle is simply at simply learn okay and they’ve customized the header they use their logo now if you’re an individual you probably want to use a nice profile pic here where they’re based a little bit about them so just a you know customized complete profile goes a long way you don’t have to go overboard with an elaborate design so to speak but just make it stand out make it associate with who you are as a person and a brand those are best practices in getting that profile up and running you don’t want to use something bland and generic you know take the extra step create something unique make sure your profile is unique you have a good image okay make sure it’s complete with you know telling people who you are and what you’re all about that’s really the first step on really any social media platform so you want to promote your twitter profile to drive users from other social media platforms so when you actually get that twitter account set up and you actually do have your handle go ahead and share it that’s the first step in getting followers if you’re already on facebook if you’re already on instagram then use those platforms to announce that you’re on twitter you can also take that a step further and you know send out an email to friends or family or like i said if you’re on facebook go ahead and set up a post say hey guys i’m on twitter you know come follow me so you can also use business cards advertisements marketing materials events to put that twitter profile on okay so it doesn’t have to be within the social media sphere it could be even on your website it can be even in email so you can basically promote that profile again you want to make that profile that handle easy to remember so totally real person is the profile on this example we’re going to use that profile every way we can whether that be offline or online you don’t don’t be afraid to use it on a business card especially if it’s easy i can just simply go to twitter and type in that handle so you want to stay active on twitter with regular retweets replies and favorites and that’s just it’s just so easy to retweet and reply and add favorites so let’s take a look at that on twitter so you could just simply i’m logged in as me and if i want to retweet something that simply learn did i can just simply click on the retweet button and i can add a comment if i want to and then i’m going to retweet that simple so now that tweet is going to show up on my profile my handle and i could simply like it if i scroll down here okay top 10 it trends shaping 2019 notice a simple tweet supported with an image so i’m just going to like that so i can even comment on it i can click on the comment and click a reply here okay and that’s going to show up in this tweet here just like if i click on this i’ll be able to see what other people have written and so it’s that simple if i want i can just click on the email button and even send a message to somebody right from that tweet the point is i can do everything i need to do right in the platform but to get started if you don’t have any tweets you know go and find other companies similar to you look at their tweeting and you can always retweet that that’s a good way to get going with tweets that’s what i started doing when i started on twitter in 2008 i didn’t know what to write particularly and i didn’t know how to write it particularly well so i looked at what other people wrote and and tweeted and just retweeted those that’s a good way to get your twitter account started okay so engaging with users is a great way to get more followers so on simplylearn i retweeted one of their tweets i liked another one of their tweets and it’s probably going to get their attention somebody at simply learn is gonna say okay rob sanders went ahead and liked us and you know what we’re gonna go follow this guy he seems to be somebody who’s an audience member who likes what we have to do likes what we have to say like what we’re tweeting let’s go ahead and follow him and so that’s a good way to get going with your twitter account is to really start retweeting and liking other tweets from other users so you can find an appropriate time to post your tweets to increase exposure retweets and followers and you want to do this you could do it within twitter or as i’ll mention later you can do it in a social media platform like sprout social or hootsuite or later or buffer and there’s plenty of social media platforms out there for you to schedule tweets point is you want to be able to schedule those tweets when it’s the appropriate time so you don’t want to do it in the middle of the evening because what’s going to happen is likely by the morning other tweets are going to bury your tweet so you want to be able to find the appropriate time to post your tweets so according to a survey conducted by hubspot the best time to post is between 12 and 3 p.m and why is that well most people are usually on lunch checking their phones yes twitter has an app and in fact most people use the app just like on instagram just like on youtube the app is very popular on twitter so it’s very easy for somebody to check tweets especially during the lunch hour and then from five to six pm that that in between time when when people are wrapping up work or heading home okay so weekdays have shown to have the maximum amount of engagement so during the week when people are working highly engaged with whatever they’re doing depending on what industry you’re in they’re likely going to check the twitter and react during those times okay so that was a a survey conducted by hubspot but really what you want to do is you want to be able to use one of these social media platforms like a hootsuite or later and find out exactly when are people engaging with your tweets when a what time of the day what day of the week are you getting the most retweets or the most likes okay that’s what you want to do so you can use this as a starting point as a best practice but eventually you’re gonna have to cater to your audience based on when you’re getting your tweets engaged so you want to increase followers by following more people it’s that simple and so it really is that simple let me rephrase that so it really is that simple so if i go back to twitter you know twitter is always going to recommend somebody for me to follow and normally those are people that are similar as myself okay so they’re not just going to choose random people they’re going to choose people who are following people you’re following so there’s going to be a connection to some degree or they could be people who use similar hashtags tweeting the same content so you want to go ahead and follow people the rule of thumb on twitter is if you follow somebody on twitter chances are they’re gonna follow you back you know i was once told when i was using twitter that hey you want to give somebody about three days to follow you back so that’s always what the rule i stuck to you know wait about three days start following people you can see here 833 people that or accounts twitter accounts that simply learns following and over 10 900 followers to simply learn’s twitter account so for me i don’t mind having a nice balance myself i have just as many followers as i do following and that’s a good thing so because you want to be able to keep up with what people are tweeting and so you can retweet at the same time you want to be following

people as well because they’re going to follow you back okay and that’s how you can build up your twitter followers by following people and it’s as simple as clicking on a follow link so the key here is to follow people who follow your content people who are followers of your followers and you can use twitter’s who to follow list and upload your email contacts to twitter okay since they know you they’re more likely to follow you back okay so you can use twitter’s who to follow list and so if we go back to twitter here’s the who to follow list and so this is what twitter’s gonna recommend but you can click on this link here find people you know okay so if i click on find people i know then i can upload my contacts from outlook or gmail and they’re going to find people who are already on twitter based on who i’m connected with so generally that’s how it works that’s a quick way to get more followers is to connect with people you know by the way i’m gonna follow simply learn because i wasn’t following them prior so now i just clicked on the follow button now i am following so now i’m gonna see simply learns tweets in my feed so let’s take a second to look at a brand okay so it’s time for brand watch let’s have a look at some of the best tweets of 2018. now remember there are a lot of active users millions of active users that’s a lot of tweets so what we did was we scoured twitter from 2018 and we went ahead and picked out some tweets that we thought were pretty good and so the first one is wendy’s now i don’t know if any of you have actually eaten at wendy’s i used to eat at wendy’s a while ago i know their frosties are pretty good so what they’ve done is they incorporated that frosty as part of a giveaway okay so basically they’re saying hey grab yourself a free frosty with any purchase in our app so they’re encouraging people to use our app and then they’re following that up by saying hey and then join us on twitch from two to five eastern as we unlock all that frosty goodness so they’re promoting something that’s going to happen on a specific point in time this is of last january they’re encouraging people to use their app and they’re using that frosty as kind of a carrot if you will okay it’s a catch it’s a giveaway so they were able to you know basically wrap a bunch of things into one so get encourage people to take part and i’m sure a lot of people went ahead and took part of this but we could definitely see that 206 retweeted this tweet 302 basically commented on it and over 3 000 liked the tweet so the tweet was good and it basically engaged with users who doesn’t like a free giveaway especially free frosty so that’s why this particular tweet really does some justice for the target audience their audience they’re they’re giving something away to their audience just by allowing them to you know use her out okay so this tweet combines a lot into one and i like it apparently a lot more people than i did 3 000 plus also like this tweet and so moving on to how to increase your followers on twitter you want to mention other people in your tweets to increase engagement so what do we mean by that so let’s look at twitter so go back if we look at simply learn just take a look at some of their tweets what they’re doing if we scroll down here they have hashtags so they are mentioning specific hashtags but you can also mention handles as well so the hashtag is always going to start with either the pound sign but if we scroll down here if you use the at symbol you’re actually mentioning somebody so in this case we’re mentioning matt bailey so matt bailey says is matt bailey’s handle and so if you get a shout out to somebody they’re gonna pick up on that and then they’re going to probably follow you okay who doesn’t appreciate getting recognized for something especially something as small as a tweet okay notice i can go ahead and click follow if i want to follow them out bailly but it’s not a bad idea to add people into your tweet and you simply do that by just using the ad symbol and using their twitter handle it’s a good way to get recognized by that twitter follower it also increases engagement because it’s adding validity to the tweet and it definitely catches the attention of the person mentioned remember if you use that person’s handle they’re going to see that that you mention them okay and what it’s likely going to do is start some type of twitter relationship okay they’re going to then follow you you’re going to follow them and chances of them retweeting you in the future or mentioning you in the future is probably going to increase and overall that increases engagement so another important thing you want to do is find and use hashtags that are relevant to your brand and audience so this is a must this is mandatory on twitter you need to use hashtags twitter’s all about hashtags every tweet that goes out should have a hashtag okay and so what you can do is figure out what hashtags are trending so here what twitter does is they trends for you so these are all specific hashtags that are trending it’s mother’s day happy mother hey sunday morning whatever works for you these are trends that happen to be moving meaning a lot of people are using them clicking on them okay so you can use a popular hashtag what i would also recommend is using a unique hashtag the rule of thumb is usually about two hashtags in a tweet but that’s a rule of thumb but rules are made to be broken do what’s best for you if you want to include more than two hashtags go for it the only thing i’m recommending is include a hashtag so find out which trending you could just look right in twitter or you could just create your own unique hashtag it works both ways but when you have a hashtag in your tweet and somebody clicks on it then they’re going to go to that particular handle that hashtag and so when they look at the hashtag you’re going to see all the tweets with that hashtag in it so that’s the idea behind hashtags you want to have hashtags okay so if somebody clicks on a hashtag that you used then they’re likely going to see your tweet in that hashtags feed okay so that’s how hashtags work you want to use hashtags okay but you want to use hashtags that are relevant to your branded audience that’s really the key so hashtags help your tweets to be found through twitter search thus improving your reach and increase the visibility of your post so that’s another benefit twitter has search functionality so somebody can simply go in and start searching on twitter so if i go back to twitter i can just do a hashtag and start typing in something like spanish and i’m gonna get some of the most popular spanish hashtags or hashtags with the word spanish in it and so this is an idea for me that if i want to use a hashtag with spanish in it these are some ideas but they’re certainly searchable on twitter okay so if i just click on spanish okay i’m gonna be able to see all the hashtags with the word spanish in the hashtag so definitely use hashtags it’s the most beneficial feature of twitter bar none so some reasons why using hashtags also a good idea well you’re gonna get more engagement and you’re likely to get retweeted as well so when you get retweeted then that means more eyeballs because if somebody sees your tweet and retweets it they’re retweeting it for their audience and so it could go viral so to speak on twitter and that’s where the engagement comes in so if you’re using a hashtag that’s trendy well somebody might like that okay if you’re behind a specific movement or you’re following a specific baseball or football team or cricket team or whatever team you’re following then if you use that team and the hashtag that could also get you some some likes so don’t be afraid to use hashtags mix it up play around a little use something unique use something that’s trending just use something but make sure it’s relevant to the tweet find out what works for your competition what works for them might work for you too so you know i work with simply learn but you know simply learn has a good twitter account you know they have lots of followers they’re doing a lot of tweeting so if i wanted to be just like simply learn well i could simply just go to their twitter account and see what they’re doing okay see what they’re using as hashtags see what kind of tweets they’re implementing and see who’s following them so i can simply just click on the 10 900 followers that they have and what i could do is i can go through and start following the people that are following them so just mimic your competition to some degree or mimic others in the industry you know look at what they’re tweeting again start out by retweeting some of the stuff they’re retweeting if it’s good stuff if it’s a good tweet don’t be afraid to retweet even your competitors tweets okay use unique hashtags use the hashtags they’re using look at who’s following their brand so you can really learn a lot from others in your industry including your competition because what works for them again might work for you especially when it comes to hashtags or people who’s following them again people who are following them would likely follow you if you’re in the same industry so it’s as simple as looking at who’s following them and following those same people remember the rule of thumb is if you’re following somebody they’re likely to follow you back so again you can analyze things like the number of followers they have the frequency of their tweets what their profile looks like how they respond to the competition of customers okay what are they tweeting about what types of content brings them more engagement meaning of all the tweets which one is getting the most likes or retweets gets some sense of what they’re doing and again when i say mimic i mean whatever what i’m saying is pull best practices from that twitter account this will give you an idea what you need to do to get more followers so it’s always a good form of flattery when you can mimic what somebody else is doing just like every other social media platform following twitter influencers who belong in your industry is always a good idea so if you’re in the food industry and there’s these star chefs out there probably not a bad idea to follow those star chefs you know if you’re in the technology industry well probably not a bad idea to you know follow bill gates or elon musk or richard branson or somebody else and that’s a big influencer has an influence on a lot of people okay but make sure they’re in your industry that’s the key if you can make sure they’re in your industry and you follow them chances are if they look at your twitter account and see you’re posting or maybe retweeting some of their tweets they’re likely to follow you and if they’re following you your tweets are gonna show up on their handle on their feed and so don’t be afraid to go out and connect and follow those influencers it’s a good way to boost up your followers so again this will help you gain followers since you can replicate what they’ve done with their profile so again just like the competition mimic what your influencers are doing okay so people tend to follow people who follow influencers so you’re all of one like mind so to speak okay influencers might retweet or share your post if they find you retweeting favorites and replying to their post so remember if you’re following a retweeter or excuse me an influencer and you retweet their post chances are they might retweet one of your posts and again put you in front of a large number of people since they’re influencers so all of these are good valid reasons to follow influencers because if you’re out to increase your reach and exposure it’s hard to ignore influencers in your industry okay you want to use images and videos while tweeting remember videos get multiple multiple times more engagement than not using them at the very least use images but you use images don’t use stock photography use images that are relevant so one of these tweets caught my eye here from simplylearn so if i click on you know here it was further down here it looked like you know these are people who are engaging in a conference and it might have been one that matt bailey was at so it was a retweet from matt bailey as a matter of fact but you can see what simply learns doing is they’re including either a video or they’re including an image in every tweet and so that’s likely to boost up engagement so according to buffer which is a another social media platform adding a relevant high quality image in your tweets can help you gain more than 150 percent engagement okay videos are six times more likely to be retweeted so if you have an arsenal video or even one video don’t be afraid to use it my recommendation is trying to use images as much as you can in almost every tweet images go a long way and again it’s going to help improve engagement meaning more retweets more followers okay more followers more eyeballs so it’s a snowball effect just by using images okay so let’s take a look at another brand from 2018 okay pizza always my good example to use on these webinars i like pizza here this just says it all you know they’re talking about art and they’re using pizza in the form of art so they didn’t really have to say much else here this pretty much says it all and they did get some retweets to get some to some likes so sometimes you don’t have to say a lot to make your point sometimes just the image itself will do the job this was actually not from 2018 this goes all the way back to 2016. so still holds true if you use an image that image is going to get engagement okay so on platforms you can promote your tweet so you can use twitter ads to do that so you can promote your tweet and what you do by promoting it is putting it up above so that most people will be able to see it okay so see if we can find an example if i go here i can see this person is promoting their handle but if i go down here i can see a promoted tweet by constant contact so they’re promoting their tweet here so it’s not a bad idea if you have some media budget to go ahead and either promote your tweet or advertise on twitter so what that’s going to do is put you in a more prominent position and get your tweets out there and the whole idea for that is to get people to engage here you can see a call to action from constant contact so if i click on that i’m gonna go to probably a landing page on their website and so the whole idea when you advertise on twitter is really just like any other social media platform you want to put yourself in front of the right audience and so twitter’s no exception so with twitter you could put yourself in front of the right audience so what you could do is you could promote a tweet you know do promoted trends or you could do promoted accounts so you have a number of different advertising options on twitter what we just looked at was you know looking at promoted accounts and a promoted tweet so when you do advertise there are advantages you have to pay only after achieving your marketing objective so that’s a benefit of twitter the cost per click it’s a cost per click model so it tends to be fairly low you could tell your audience so again you’re picking and choosing who you want your promoted tweet or trend or account to be in front of its targeting is based on either engagement or it’s based on keywords i.e so really you could tailor who you want your tweet or your handle to be in front of and so that’s the really the benefit of twitter if you have a lot of active users on twitter you can really put yourself in front of those active users if they’re your relevant audience at a low cost per click so it’s definitely worth the test so you want to offer twitter support to your users okay so i can’t stress this enough okay so what you want to do is when users have questions about your product they’re more likely to tweet you for support hence they’re likely to follow your account so don’t be afraid to use the messaging option as well so we go back to twitter okay chances are somebody might have a question for you here you can look at bing ads it’s great connecting with ppc experts can’t believe tax season is here we’ve got some great insights so what they’re doing is they’re using the messaging app but they’re offering that messaging app in the form of customer service so don’t be afraid to use you know direct messages to reach out to people in the form of support what you don’t want to do is buy twitter followers chances are you’re going to get the wrong followers so even though it may boost your twitter follow account these bots cannot use or buy your products or services so stay away from all sorts of buying of twitter followers you want to build your twitter following naturally twitter is also cracking down on bot followers so a lot of bot accounts that were paid to follow users were shut down shut down by twitter so just my point is everything we’ve mentioned today is what you want to take advantage of okay if you want to pay for something pay for a promoted tweet reach out to influencers look at what your competition is doing use hashtags okay these are all best practices and organic ways to build followers so don’t get involved with anything that’s going to involve bots and adding thousands of followers to your twitter account because chances are it’s just going to lead to no engagement so create useful and relevant content so what we started out by saying is hey if you’re not sure what to do retweet retweet what somebody else is doing you know look at your competition’s twitter account see what they’re tweeting get some ideas as to what you want to tweet so you want it to be useful and relevant to your industry okay you want somebody to engage that’s the whole idea behind twitter the whole idea is if you’re going to tweet something you want to get somebody to engage with it so use twitter polls your old recent blog post brand news industry news and events and highlight customer stories i mean all of those are ideas that you can do to put content out there okay so for me one of the things i do is i’m definitely one for industry news so if i’m in the industry of digital marketing if google did a recent algorithm update i’m going to likely tweet about it or retweet it i also am a blogger so on my particular website if i blog i’m going to make sure that blog gets over to twitter so those are some ideas in which you can create useful and relevant content on your twitter account you definitely want to get that content out there but you want to make it useful and relevant quality over quantity because you want people to engage so bring variety to the type of content you share so i’m in digital marketing i deal with pay-per-click seo but am i going to just do pay-per-click and seo no i know that analytics i know that you know google tag manager i know that a b testing all of those are elements of digital marketing so i’m going to branch out and talk about some of those things that support digital marketing so that’s an example of bringing a variety to the type of content you share so don’t just stick to one thing you know feel free to reach out a little bit shake things up by sharing other forms of updates like engaging quotes and questions these work best when complemented by an image and an act as a great discussion starter so good point here even if you want to branch out of your industry and just throw in a nice useful quote it’s always a good way to gain some attention and get some engagement okay let’s look at another brand and see what they’ve tweeted about so we’re looking at forester here so think about emotional qualities and their implications so here you can see customers that feel surprised or grateful or appreciated they’re sharing that insight with you and so this was interesting when i saw this so what i did was i simply you see the hashtag here for digital basically if you wanna look at this particular study i just went to twitter and i typed in that hashtag and now i’m going to be able to see you know some of the other studies that they’ve done here you can see top 10 i teach friends shaping 2019 so i’m just following the twitter handle that they used so forrester does a lot of good research a lot of good insights and so what they’ve done here that makes this tweet look so good is they’ve actually put an image of the results in the tweet so they used an image to help gain engagement or increase engagement notice they also gave a shout out to somebody as well as use some good hashtagging so good tweet this was back in 2016. but again a good use of the image with the tweet so you want to organize tweet chats to interact with your users and bring in new followers so you know you basically want to be organized when you’re dealing with with chat so tweet chats enable you send out tweets on a particular topic using a designated hashtag so during a certain time to interact with your your followers and other users so you could do it at a specific time to really get out a specific topic but you want to be able to stay organized so that you know you what you’re chatting about is reaching the wider audience and you’re getting the right following and the right engagement okay you can also pin your best updates and tweets to your profile so you can just use that pin and what that’s going to do is pin it to the top and keep it there so that you know people who go to your twitter handle are going to be able to see that best tweet that you’ve done so what you want to do here is use the one that’s most engaging so pinning your best update or tweet meaning the one that’s really had a lot of engagement meaning retweets and followers and likes you want to do that you want to pin that to your profile and that will enable first-time visitors to see it and if they could see something that other people engage with and that’s going to encourage them to share and probably follow you so and and that’s always what you want to do you always want to put your best foot forward so pin your best tweet to your profile so i mentioned this earlier use tools to schedule when to publish your tweets so here are some of the most popular platforms you know i.e sprout social so if we take a look at sprout social here i’m in sprout social i’m connected to my twitter account i can simply just start tweeting about something here so you can see it’s gonna let me know how many characters i have remaining so to 180 to start out with when i’m done tweeting notice i can add an emoji i can upload media i can tag a specific location okay i can even you know call out a specific twitter profile now i can schedule this myself or i can use the schedule below i can pick and choose a time to schedule the tweet now again you want to be able to use the sprout social whatever social media tool you’re using two figure out when the best time of day and the day of the week to actually tweet when are you getting the best engagement so ideally that’s what you want to do you want to tweet when you’re likely to get the best engagement when those eyeballs are actually going to look at that tweet okay but you also want to separate out your tweets so they’re not on one on top of another because if you actually tweet back to back then those tweets are just gonna get buried so if you spread them out a little bit then you’re likely to maximize your number of impressions or eyeballs on that tweet so if you schedule a tweet multiple tweets in the same day then post them a few hours apart or an hour apart so that way you’re always going to get that maximum visibility so these social media platforms really help you in not only scheduling but figuring out what tweets got the best engagement and when and then that way you can replicate that success so again it’s not just sprout social hootsuite buffer they’ll help you determine the exact time your audience is most active and schedule posts to increase traction so you know most of these social media platforms do the same thing so really what you want to do is you really want to nail down that exact time your audience is going to be most active okay that’s the whole idea behind using it and when you actually do tweet you are going to get results and these social media platforms are going to share those results with you and then when you understand based on your audience behavior when they’re engaging when they’re not engaging that’s when you’re going to fine tune your scheduling so what you also want to do as you’re doing these tweets as we looked at earlier with wendy’s is run contest or giveaways remember randy’s gave away that free frosty you don’t be afraid to give away something if it means more engagement more eyeballs which could lead to basically future customers so contests can help increase your reach and exposure and each new participant can be considered as a potential follower so it also gives your followers an opportunity to tag their friends who would be interested in participating so really come up this is a great way to be creative come up with a good idea to get your your audience involved because what’s likely going to happen is your audience is going to share this contest with others that aren’t following you and so what’s going to happen is when they share it you’re going to get more followers you’re going to get more eyeballs and again potentially more customers so embed your twitter updates on your website you could simply do that uh it’s very simple but when you do then people to your website will be able to see your tweets so if i just go to my website here if i scroll down we actually have your twitter embedded on our website as well because we want you know people to see what we’re tweeting about and you can see i just retweeted the simply learn tweet at the beginning of this particular webinar and it’s showing up in my feed here so that’s when people actually go to my website they’ll be able to see what i retweeted and that’s going to help simply learn out because simply learn is likely to get some clicks on this particular tweet from my website so it’s also a good way to keep your website fresh and updated because if you’re an active twitter user and you’re tweeting a lot then hey that’s gonna show up on your website and it’s gonna show that hey you’re fresh you’re engaging you keep up to date it’s just going to make it look good and make your website feel fresh and not stale so embedding your twitter updates will help you add new followers as well because it’s people who are coming to your website that may not even know you have a twitter account so you can also do this in a blog post and a newsletter and other forms of communication media so it doesn’t necessarily have to be just your website but i would definitely recommend it because it will give a boost to your twitter account so now let’s take a look at the final brand watch let’s take a look at another tweet that caught our attention when this is from playstation so playstation is mentioning hey we got a multi-view on apple tv today with support for up to four live channels on one screen okay so you know they’re promoting a new feature that they have with playstation and you can see they supported that with an image and they got some really good engagement here so they’re basically saying hey look what happened to us today you know check out this new feature that got supported on apple tv so you never know what’s going to happen with a tweet when you tweet good things are likely going to happen whether that be somebody liking it retweeting it or somebody adding you as a follower something’s good is going to come out of tweeting twitter is an easy platform to use and if you take into account all these best practices you are going to increase your twitter followers after watching this video you should be prepared to explain why the human tendency to daydream can be interrupted using a storytelling marketing approach to list three key benefits of storytelling when it comes to consumer engagement to realize that different consumers are looking for different relationships with your company and to explain the difference between storytelling and story sharing let’s begin lesson one why storytelling is essential in social marketing when we think about the way that our company or our brand or our organization is represented to the world it’s easy for us to be focused in on things like quality and credibility and whether or not someone wants to buy from us but it’s also important to understand that for a lot of consumers the very idea of who you are is also important it’s not always just enough for people to know the name of your company or product they’re interested in understanding what the story is behind your brand and that might be something like how you came to be or why you exist or what your mission is or it might be something about the personality and sort of the lifestyle that’s represented by your individual company now the storytelling movement has been an area that we’ve really seen a lot of growth and a lot of improvement in the last several years in social media with more and more brands moving towards this idea of sort of humanizing their companies by telling the stories that come out of the company itself out of the use of the product or even out of the consumer stories that you know share how products benefit their lives or again just what goes on in that interaction and that dynamic between the organization and between the customer side of things now when it comes to storytelling there’s several different ways in which this approach offers value to a business and one of the key ones is on the emotional side we’ve talked a lot in the social sharing dynamic in some of the other areas of you know the the spread and the viral concept about how emotion is one of the most powerful things that impacts people’s decision-making and engagement with the brand so when it comes to creating that emotional connection or leaving people with some type of emotional response storytelling is one of the most powerful ways to impact that it gives you an opportunity to sway the emotion of consumers in terms of how they look at or view or are receptive to your brand now another thing that storytelling can really do that adds a lot of value is the idea of making you credible because a lot of times the way we tell stories especially when we’re incorporating in true to life examples or you know consumer stories there’s an implied credibility that comes through that storytelling and comes through those third-party experiences that can help people feel more secure about doing business with you not just more emotionally positive but actually feel that security of trusting that what they think they’re going to get or what they’re hoping to get that there’s going to be enough follow through and enough other people have had a positive experience for them to really trust that that’s what’s going to happen now another area that storytelling brings a lot of value into a company is the in the idea of making you memorable because human beings are wired for stories we are much more capable of recalling broad ideas and concepts and emotions when they’re communicated via a story so if we give someone a list of facts a list of selling points you know a list of reasons why to do business with you the ones that touch them emotionally or that you know problem solve those tend to stick with them but a lot of the data gets lost but when we put it in the format of a story and someone is sharing what their experience was our brains literally archive it and categorize it differently and our recall level goes up so again along with building trust and along with creating that that emotional impact the fact that people are better able to recall the information that’s communicated to them via that story helps make it a very powerful marketing tool now in addition to that it’s important to keep in mind that on average people tend to be daydreamers in fact study after study shows that if our minds aren’t occupied with an important task if we’re not truly focused on something we tend to drift off and when we look at that concept of daydreaming the average human spends literally half of their waking hours daydreaming we average 2 000 waking drifts per day with an average length of about 14 seconds so you do the math on that 2000 times times 14 seconds that’s a pretty good portion of our day where our brain is drifting off but when they look at the brain’s ability to stay focused versus having those drips we stay focused during a story if we’re reading a book if we’re watching a movie if someone is telling us an engaging story we are better equipped and better able to put those drifts off and really stay focused on what’s happening so that’s one of the other sort of scientific and concrete reasons why that memorable factor comes into play when we present things via stories now stories also allow us to connect in one of the easiest ways possible again because our brain is going to be a little more focused on being able to receive that message so by using stories to spread your brand message or to explain your offerings or to demonstrate how they work you increase the chance of keeping your audience focused on you and giving them enough recall that they can come back at a later point to actually do some business with you now think of storytelling from sort of the mindset of how we meet and engage with other people so in general when we’re meeting up with a prospective friend or a job prospect maybe we’re coming for an interview a service workers even just a stranger on the street any conversation that goes past just hello how are you doing and the cursory you know kind of polite responses it tends to be a story this is what we do when we meet we’re naturally wired to seek out insight and common ground and information about who another person is and in those interpersonal relationships the types of questions we ask you know the words we use they’re indicative of the type of relationship we want to build so clearly if you know if you’re single and you see someone else that you know you hope might be single that might be one of the early questions you ask and then based on whether you know there’s a romantic interest there you’re probably going to ask different questions than if it’s a interview prospect for a job or if you’re meeting up with a you know co-worker for the first time the relationship that we’re looking for denotes the type of information we want and that’s one of the important things for us to keep in mind when it comes to storytelling is we also have the ability to tailor our story to the audience so we can put those different features up front we can weave them in in a different way if we’re appealing to a group of 60 something females that love to sew versus a group of 20 something millennials that love whiskey tasting it’s a different message that gets put together with different focuses and features there’s also different things that we’re going to put forward if we’re proposing you know a million dollar contract versus a 25 impulse buy that someone can you know click and order online and have delivered the next day now on the business side of this we need to think about what the story that we need is because a lot of times we get so focused in business on getting the conversion that we forget that sometimes part of getting that conversion is creating those emotions building that credibility and trust you know helping them have exposure to what’s possible and for a long time this has been done through education we might put up videos or articles that aim to educate and to demonstrate the story side of it brings that more social interaction and environment into the mix and that’s something important for us to keep in mind so a quote that i really love about this concept that sort of lays the foundation of why it’s so important comes from the chief content officer over at digitas and he says the challenge is clear by now intrusive interruptive self-centered marketing no longer works the way it once did and its effectiveness will only continue to diminish in the social age because again the way that we share information back and forth with each other and the ways that that messages spread it happens differently in the social media age than it did before when it was more advertising focused and where marketing really was more about you know pushing the advertise pushing the message and sort of the don draper style of you know if you don’t like the conversation change the conversation and tell people what you want them to hear because so much marketing is now driven by consumers through that conversation we need to be able to approach it in a different way now another side of that is the idea there’s a difference between storytelling and story sharing and some of it boils down to semantics but some of it also does need to be kind of taken into account when we look at how we might put our message together because semantically consider the difference between telling and sharing so to tell is to communicate information facts or news to someone in spoken or written word it’s to order instruct or advise someone to do something that second part that i want you to keep in mind but to share is to give a portion of something to another to tell someone about something especially something personal it’s a again it’s a slight semantic difference but it’s a huge difference in terms of our approach and i love this seth godin quote that really pairs up with that idea the best part of show-and-tell has never been the telling part it’s been the showing letting someone see an experience and inviting them into that shared experience and that’s one of those things that makes the social version of storytelling really more like story sharing especially if you want to do it in a way that creates that back and forth consumer engagement story telling in its traditional sense is more the stories that we’ve put into commercials and advertising and there’s a place for that there’s a place to put that together in the social realm and it’s very important but the other area that that we’re just starting to kind of merge into and that really needs some exploration by brands is that idea of the social sharing where it really is about engaging back and forth with your audience and inviting them to be part of an experience with you and with your brand so ask yourself do you want to tell your story to people or do you want to share it with them and let them share their story with you and how do you meld those two together and what does that look like within your particular company or among your target audio so now that we’ve laid the foundation of why storytelling is so important and sort of what type of impact it can have the next thing we need to do is look at the business side of telling your story what does it look like to create a narrative or something that’s representative of either your business’s story or sort of the lifestyle or concept or ideas that you want to promote to people now there’s tons of questions you could ask yourself to start building your story but we can focus in on a couple key areas as a starting point to build from one of the first ones is the idea of whether or not you have a founder’s story now for a lot of brands the story of their founder is so interesting or inspiring that it catches the eye and it makes people take a second look at the product so think of the companies that are sort of iconic in terms of who their their founder or their leader is so whether that was steve jobs and the role he played at apple or walt disney and the inspiration and the role he brought to you know the entire disney complex or loads and loads of other businesses there are lots of examples out there of how the brand itself was so tied to the person who was sort of leading the helm that that became part of their story and people were really interested in it now we can find loads of examples of different brands where the founder really plays a critical role in representing who they are now great example of this is spanx the founder sarah blakely has really embraced the story both of how she came up with the idea which was basically she was trying to fit into a pair of cream pants for a party and they didn’t fit quite right and she knew that when she put her pantyhose on everything seemed to lay nicer so she literally cut the feet out of a pair of pantyhose and put them on and that’s what launched the brand you know she loves to sort of tell that story but she also loves to tell the story you know from her tagline of putting her own butt on the line pays off because the way that she made her first sale to neiman marcus is that she literally dragged the buyer into a dressing room and she went in and she put on a pair of white pants and came out and said you know here’s what i look like without them and went back in and put her pair of spanx on under the white pants and came back out and said now here’s what happens when i’m wearing these and the buyer from neiman marcus ended up placing a huge order and it was the first major sale that she got that put her in place somewhere so those stories and sort of the yeah this is how it happened you know this is literally what a difference it makes that becomes part of the brand and sort of sarah blakely’s journey as an entrepreneur and you know moving her way up into the you know the forbes list of uh you know highest earning females in the united states all of that plays a huge role in how they promote the brand itself and in sort of the the storyline and the lifestyle line that they want to promote to the people that might buy the product now on a completely differently themed vein we have fast food chain wendy’s in the us and canada where dave thomas was the founder and even though he’s you know he passed away several years ago he’s still a critical part of the brand and of the story because basically it was the idea that a working class guy makes good and continues to act like a working-class guy while building a massive charity because it wasn’t uncommon even when he was ceo to see him show up in a store somewhere and start working behind the counter or sweeping the floor somewhere he always played that role that made it clear to his employees that he wasn’t above them that he was one of them and part of them and has a huge huge ongoing charity effort for adoption because he was adopted as a child and so all of that plays into the narrative of wendy’s and who they are and what their brand message is and and the lifestyle that they want to promote to customers in fact if you if you go there now and you buy a meal and you get your cup all of the cups have stories of kids when they were finally adopted and what it meant to them when they were adopted or you know what their first experience was having a new family so again that plays into the story just because people are interested in the start of where how it came to be so looking at you know what the stories are from within your team and it doesn’t always have to be that founder story sometimes it’s just someone who works there post cereal paired up with burns group and use real factory workers to create a round of honey bunches of oats commercials and let’s let’s take a quick look at what one of those actually look like so you can kind of see the storytelling in action here i get out of work and i go to the store and somebody’s smelling around i smell cookies i said oh no you just smell me i just got out of work that’s honey bunches old that’s all i said don’t eat me now [Music] now there’s short simple easy stories there’s nothing complex to them they more just make you smile and laugh but they’re the types of stories that come from listening to the people who work at your company from thinking about how your company and their experience impacts the world around them now another question that we can look at is does your company or group solve a problem now this isn’t about the reasons you think you’re great or the reason you think people should buy from you it’s about that unique way that you solve an issue that consumers or on the b2b side of things you know that the buying agent is looking at that they’re trying to fix now a great example of this is airbnb or you could look at uber or lyft on a similar vein allowing people to experience travel in a new and affordable way but also letting you know owners or drivers earn extra money you know from something that might have been sitting there empty anyways you know that idea that when you’re traveling you don’t have to stay in a bland expensive hotel in fact when i travel for business pretty much any place i go i always book via airbnb because you know if i can have a bedroom and a living room and a kitchen especially for traveling as a family and there can be you know separate bedrooms as opposed to having my kids all stay in the same room with my husband and i it just makes sense but there’s also the story side of that of its different experiences and that’s one of the big things that people talk about is how the experience changes and even on the side of trying to recruit people to put their properties it becomes about the freedom and the lifestyle that’s enabled and there’s tons of examples on youtube of people sharing how you know leasing out that you know their vacation property the rest of the year when they’re not there you know pays for the vacation property and more or you know the people who now travel full-time because they’re able to lease out you know their apartment or their home or something else on airbnb the story side comes from the problems that are solved for people now another great example of a company that focuses on their story from that side is dollar shave club they basically took a problem everyone complains about and they made it go away you know the idea that razors cost a ridiculous amount of money that you always forget to buy new ones until it’s too late so you’re shaving with a dull blazer and it’s just inconvenient so all of their messaging focuses in on that idea of we make it cheap we make it easy and you know it shows up right at your house and you don’t ever have to think about it anymore and their commercials all tell the same story with kind of a you know funny modern millennial focused way so let’s take a look at one of those as an example as a founder of my own club i’d love to know how does yours work dollar shave club presents what the fact it’s simple you choose from one of our three great razors we’ll give you a free reusable handle and each month we’ll send you replacement cartridges for just a few bucks that means you get to shave with the fresh blood any time you want which feels amazing will i be locked into a contract no we wouldn’t lock you into anything that’s a relief how long for delivery i’ve got a conjugal visit next week well what if i don’t have to shave that often no problem after you sign up you can choose to get replacement cartridges every other month you sound like my mom i like that what’s this i hear about dollar shave club selling more than just razors you heard right we make all our own high quality grooming products like dr cover shave butter boogie’s hair gel and big cloud daily face moisturizer with sunscreen now you know what the fact is up from dollar shave club so join the club today now before we get into the tips and tricks let’s take a refresher on what exactly is social media marketing social media marketing which is one of the most commonly used and lucrative forms of digital marketing is a methodology that has brands creating and sharing content on social media now if you’ve ever been on any form of social media be it linkedin facebook or instagram you’ve probably been exposed to some form of social media marketing remember that burger king video advertising their new whopper or about a marketing tool that can help you visualize your team’s workload better than any other in the market right now now these are just some of the many ways that you’ve been marketed to the objective when it comes to social media marketing is to achieve the brand’s marketing and branding goals now this could be increased engagement more clicks conversions and so on so how do they do it with text and image updates videos or any other form of content that can attract the user’s attention and can drive engagement from them now alongside publishing quality content it also involves analyzing your data and running social media advertisements now some of the more popular social media platforms right now are facebook instagram twitter linkedin and so on next let’s talk about some of the advantages of social media marketing first off social media marketing provides great brand awareness now with the help of interactions with people on social media brands are able to build up their reputation as a business and with each interaction each post each share the brand is exposed to a larger network of potential customers who might be interested in the products or services offered next it gives you more traffic to your website marketing your products or services on social media will also attract customers to your website outside your usual customer base next it improves your brand’s search engine rankings now although this isn’t a direct correlation social media marketing does have a part to play when it comes to helping your page rank higher up in search engine rankings now if you start posting high quality content people will start liking and sharing it this will in turn bring it to the attention of influencers within the industry who will be willing to write about your business and then this gives you backlinks which as you know will help you improve your search engine rankings next it will give you improved conversion rates now with your brand being much more visible and interactive on social media every text image video or comment could potentially drive users to your website social media also humanizes your brand now this leads to more customers trusting your brand and being more interested in your products and services then we have improved customer satisfaction when your customers interact with your brand on social media it provides you with an opportunity to show compassion for your customers personal messages to customers addressing their concerns will be viewed in a positive light and can go a long way when it comes to humanizing your brand social media marketing is also cost effective now compared to other forms of digital marketing social media marketing offers some of the most flexible and relatively low cost options available now this opens your budget for more marketing and business expenditures now if you do get into paid advertising a good strategy will net you a great return on investment and finally it will help you become thought leaders now with your high quality posts communicating with your audience sharing content and promoting your authority you can have your followers look up to you now this will allow you to become a figure of expertise in your industry now let’s go into the social media marketing tips and tricks number one set up your goals now what good will your actions do if you don’t have a goal in mind the goal of your marketing strategy will be the driving force behind every decision that you make now this is exactly why setting up goals is very important moreover your marketing efforts have to align with the goals of the organization now here are some things that you need to keep in mind while setting up your goals first of all your goals need to be quantitative for example you need to have thousand conversions by the end of the quarter or 5000 followers on instagram by the end of the month and so on number two you need to stick to a consistent deadline this gives wait for each of your actions number three make sure your goals are smart now smart refers to specific measurable attainable relevant and time based now let’s go to number four like i mentioned earlier your goals need to be aligned with the marketing strategy now alongside these goals there also needs to be the north star metric now what is the not star metric this represents a main goal or a fixed reference point that will ensure that your team is on the right course this north star metric will also give your team clarity and focus now let’s have a look at some popular not stars there’s increased engagement greater conversion rates more leads generated app downloads and so on now let’s go to number two understanding your audience social media enables you to interact engage and build relationships with your audience now by understanding what they need want and desire you can deliver content in a way makes your product or service the answer that they’re looking for now there are also other ways you can understand them better this could be surveys to determine the issues that bother them the age demographics of your audience by conversing with them in forums responding to their comments on blogs and social media taking up their feedbacks or suggestions into consideration and acting on them and so on now here’s an example of different channels and the audiences that use them now here we taken our personal example hither simply learn now simply learns audience is predominantly working professionals and graduates an academy has high school graduates and the baiju’s app has high school students as users now let’s go to number three determining the right social media platform now while performing social media marketing choosing the right platform is really important now while selecting them you need to ask questions like why you’re using that particular platform who you’ll reach with this platform what content would work best on the platform and is there any content that was unique to that platform for example youtube and then there’s videos on it now answering these questions will help you zero in on a platform for you now while there are several platforms available for you to choose from let me tell you about some major ones there’s linkedin facebook instagram and pinterest let’s talk about the purpose of each of these platforms now linkedin is a professional network that’s best suited for b2b audiences now for facebook just about everyone has an account on it content that’s related to news or entertainment usually finds success on facebook then we have instagram visual content works best on instagram now although it works well for static images and short form videos it doesn’t drive a lot of traffic to your website then finally we have pinterest pinterest is also limited to static images however it’s highly effective at driving traffic to your blog now let’s go to number four setting up a social media calendar a social media calendar determines the message you want to convey to your audience it also consists of information regarding the different kinds of content that will go up on the social media platform now let’s have a look at some of the most popular types of posts on social media first off we have competitions now i’m sure all of you have seen posts like tag a friend who does this or comment or like to win something and stuff like that competitions like these provide great opportunities for engagement with the audience now they can be used to encourage your followers to share your content it could be also for them to create their own content along with the predefined hashtag competitions help grow your presence on social media then we have polls or service polls can help you with data collection that also encourages followers to take action and interact polls and surveys also provide opportunities through which you can learn from customers to understand what they like about the product or service or what they don’t and to receive their feedback then we have videos and live streams now although we’ll be covering this in a little more detail further on visual storytelling along with videos and live streams goes a long way to drive engagement among your audience now these help get your followers attention increase trust and credibility and have a high response rate and so much more to offer live stream with its live nature and having a human face alongside your business humanizes your brand and by extension helps increase customer loyalty and trust then there’s infographics articles and images social media calendars are successful because of their ability to increase collaboration within the team help understand what works and what doesn’t and in distributing resources in an effective manner next up we have number five using social media marketing tools social media marketing tools align to the goals of your organization with it you can create high quality content attract new potential customers and drive engagement it also helps you with the planning process you can plan create and schedule posts on your social calendar now some of the more popular social media tools include buffer hootsuite bus sumo if triple t and much more now these tools also help with generating leads creating email lists finding a relevant audience to show your content to creating buyer personas providing you insights on what works and what doesn’t and giving you templates for different kinds of posts now for number six visual storytelling now visual storytelling involves passing out a lot of information in the simplest of forms visually using pictures and videos your followers are able to grasp the message quickly and remember it for a long time afterwards visual storytelling is also not limited by language barriers this helps it become interesting and entertaining to anyone watching it this can help your audience stay interested and engaged grab the attention of potential clients and so much more but it also has some other advantages it helps you build a bond with your audience visual storytelling connects with your audience methods like live streaming help humanize your brand and help grow customer loyalty and trust it helps the audience quickly grasp the intended message thanks to its simple nature and finally most importantly content like images and videos are what go viral with visual storytelling you increase the chance for your content to be seen by more potential customers have a look at some of our videos now here’s what is machine learning data science in five minutes and ai in five minutes now these are some of our most viewed videos on our channel and now you know why visual storytelling if you guys are interested in watching these videos you can check them out on our channel home page we also have similar videos about blockchain devops and six sigma now back to our list let’s go to number seven paying for advertising this is a method that helps you find target and reach your audience with ease it can greatly help with achieving your organization’s marketing goals this can help you improve your reach and improve your brand’s visibility its pay-per-click model ensures cost effectiveness while providing great results and return on investment it also helps improve targeting by letting you control who sees your ad you get to choose from a number of different factors like interests hobbies personality types and so on alongside the basic user demographics like age location gender and so on now since most social media platforms have native analytics you also get to assess and refine the performance of your ad campaigns now as great as it sounds there are certain pitfalls that come along with paid advertising first of all your audience could get exposed to your posts too many times and tune out your content disregarding it in the process second it could get really expensive for smaller businesses or startups to manage a campaign to its maximum effectiveness third people could pass off your content as irrelevant and unimportant you’ll also have to deal with a whole lot of competition smaller companies with lesser budgets have an uphill battle to deal with better funded organizations next we have number eight newsjacking new stacking is a method that involves using current events to promote your own brands products and services now it’s a popular method that’s used to improve brand awareness news jacking uses the popularity of the current events and drives it to your brand it also helps shine a spotlight on your products it also helps you show off that you are up to date with current events in the industry and that your product is relevant by extension it also improves engagement and website traffic now for number 9 a b testing a b testing is a popular method for comparing copies creatives and ctas or call to actions of the posts that you put on social media now since audiences would react differently depending on the content a b testing helps determine which of the variants your audience engaged with the most a b testing can also be performed on variations of location age gender education your audience interests and so on next up number 10 community and influencers joining communities helps your brand link up with like-minded people and other companies belonging to your niche it’ll also help you establish your brand as an authority within the industry now actively participating in these communities can help create your own audience of potential brand advocates to group up with on the other hand partnering up with influencers helps promote your products or services to a brand new audience it helps provide an additional layer of authenticity in youtube which is also a social media platform if you didn’t know here are some very very popular influences we have marcus brownlee unbox therapy mr who’s the boss and lioness tech tips each of them with more than 4 million subscribers and finally we’re at number 11 measuring and analyzing results accurately tracking and measuring your marketing efforts are an important part of the process it ensures that you’re making the most out of your campaigns now it’s really important that you find key metrics that are crucial for your brand now these metrics can be tracked weekly monthly or in a quarterly basis and

based on these results appropriate actions can be taken on facebook you could look out for reach and engagement on twitter you could look out for impressions clicks and impressions and interactions on linkedin likes comments and mentions on instagram and engagement and impressions on pinterest some of the most popular tools used for this purpose are sprout social buffer hootsuite google analytics and so on now before we get into the tips and tricks let’s take a refresher on what exactly is content marketing content marketing is a form of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online content to help generate audience interest in a brand’s product or services this means providing information that the audience considers valuable and relevant in a consistent manner so that it drives some sort of profitable customer action so let’s talk about the content that falls under content marketing there’s options like blogs videos infographics case studies white papers and ebooks so why is content marketing so important firstly it helps build awareness trust and loyalty in your brand the more your brand provides accurate and well-researched content the more people learn about and trust your brand the more the audience trusts in you the more they’re likely to buy from you creating the content is relatively inexpensive and can be done in-house content marketing will also enable your brand to increase traffic to your site and get more conversions it also helps improve other marketing tactics like search engine optimization social media and public relations now let’s have a look at the content marketing process the first step is to determine what goals you want to achieve with your marketing campaign it could be increased conversions website sign ups and so on then you set up buyer personas from among your audience that can buy your content but what exactly are buyer personas now these are research-based profiles that represent your target customer buyer personas help you describe your brand’s ideal audience the decisions they make the challenges they face their interests and so on next you’ll have to set up content audits to determine the best type of content that works for you you also need to set up a content management system like hubspot squarespace wix and wordpress they’ll help you with increased collaboration greater support run a b test and much more you need to brainstorm for new forms of content that your audience can enjoy after that you can zero in on a particular form of content that would work the best for you and finally you can publish and manage your content now let’s talk about content marketing tips number one remarket your content content marketing is one of the many ways you can spread your content to a buyer audience you can define the audience you want to market to and then tag visitors who come to your site and using google’s display network you can strategically position your ads in front of people on google or its partner websites who previously interacted with your website and advertised to them through this you can build awareness and engagement with your audience here’s an example of a banner advertisement i would be shown if i was shopping for a macbook pro on amazon and changed my mind at the last moment this ad would maybe stay at the back of my head until eventually i go and finish that purchase now let’s go to number two answering complex questions with your content targeting specific keywords is extremely helpful with your content this is why you need to focus on google’s featured snippet this position also known as position zero enhances and draws user attention on the search engine’s result page through the featured snippet you can drive a large amount of traffic to your website while cementing your position as an expert in your industry you can have different forms of snippets like definition boxes where a snippet of text gives researchers direct and concise definitions and descriptions you could have tables where data is taken from the page and displayed in a table you could have ordered lists where items are presented in specific order and you can also have unordered lists next up number three we have create a personality for your brand if you’re looking to grow a following for your content try not to copy how already established and successful corporate blogs do things nowadays audiences tend to prefer content that has a certain humanness about it tend to follow solo influencers they advertise their brand by being themselves in a way they’re selling themselves by being themselves you need to analyze what these popular and influential blogs are doing and incorporate into your brand’s website thanks to this your audience will connect with you and come back for more now here’s an example of one of the largest players in digital marketing neil patel see how he himself is the brand and if you’ve gone through his content you know it’s pretty great as well that’s what you should be striving for moving on to tip number four ensure that your content matches your brand’s voice to make sure of this you need to constantly review your editorial standards and make sure your tone and quality remain consistent you need to ask your audience questions about how you can develop and refine your brand’s voice by answering these questions you can provide your audience with a more cohesive and helpful experience your tone of your brand can vary on the basis of what type of content you’re planning to post and what the goal you want to achieve from the campaign next up we have number five back up your arguments for data using statistics and facts to make a point by including a link to the original source makes it extremely credible this data can help the audience grow trust in your brand to persuade them that your content is valid and valuable this will also help your brand grow as an industry expert at number six we have use specific keywords now make sure you use specific keywords in your content this takes care of the seo aspect behind your content this will also help your content have a greater chance of being found indexed and ranked it could also help your content rank for niche topics within your industry moving on to tip number seven evaluate the success of your content with data earlier we talked about why it’s so important that you back up your content with data now let’s talk about how data can help you improve analytics tools will help you learn more about how well your content is doing the age demographics of the people enjoying it who doesn’t their locations the best time to post and much more with this data you can make sure that your time and money are being used in the best possible way some of the most popular tools in the market are buzzsumo evernote hubspot trello and wordpress these will help you find topics and influencers within your industry you can capture organize and share notes collaborate with team members create sales funnels and much more now we’ve reached midway right now so i’ve got a question for you do you guys have any tips for content marketing that we haven’t covered yet let me know in the live chat alright so let’s get back to our list tip number eight is to be consistent with your content post your best performing content and make sure they follow a consistent schedule finding a balance of the different types of content to be posted with the help of a content calendar will show your audience that you’re committed to providing them helpful and informative content this will also establish your brand as an authority and thought leader within your niche it will help your audience depend on you for quality content and give them a reason to return tip number nine is to make your content actionable providing actionable steps or information in your content will coerce your audience to take a particular action quickly it can help you create value-built content and fix pain points faced by your audience build a strong relationship with them and earn their trust it also leads to increased engagement and a positive brand experience it provides users with real value and solutions leading them to take action here we have an example from trello where we see a pop-up with a call to action asking interested users to input their email ids to sign media today involving more than 200 marketers more than 49 of them felt content marketing was really important to their digital marketing campaigns and more than 25 percent of their budgets are used for visual advertising content like images infographics videos and other forms of rich media will help you enhance the message of your brand and reach a wider audience here’s an example of advertising by coca-cola although there’s not a lot of text in the ads you can immediately recognize the unmistakable branding and the message they’re trying to send moving on to tip number 11 create trending and evergreen content creating content that’s evergreen and trending with your own unique angle statistics and research will be a huge advantage since you’ll have to update it every now and then you’ll get a great deal out of the work without having to do a lot of work here’s an example of one such evergreen article people are never going to stop wanting to learn how to do seo so with a little tweaking every few months to reflect new changes that google may have done you’ll have an article that you can get considerable mileage out of next up tip number 12 is to understand content that works for you you need to analyze what content works on different social media platforms for example you all know youtube is the best place for video content instagram and pinterest for visual content twitter for smaller snappy content and so on understanding what works and what doesn’t will help you better spread your content across the internet tip number 13 is to understand your target audience now like i mentioned earlier your marketing campaign isn’t going to bear fruit without targeting a specific audience understanding who your audience is is one of the most important steps for this you can find this out by asking questions like who you’re engaging with online their age location language etc by using social listening to find out what audiences are talking about your brand using tools to research what social channels your audience is using and so on after understanding them you can set up buyer personas for your audience tip number 14 is to perform a b testing now abs testing will help you understand what your audience likes or doesn’t what content works for you and much more you can do a b testing on headlines and title tags call to actions content formats image types content length and much more it can also help you make better decisions in the future and finally our tip number 15 is to reach out to people sharing similar content one of the best ways to build your audience is to get people or influencers who already share content within your niche to share your content now since these people already have a trusting audience they would be a lot more likely to enjoy your content content marketing strategy so buckle up and let’s get right to it and we’re gonna get right into some of the best practices some tips some methodologies some things you should be doing with content marketing so right out of the gate let’s start talking about knowing your audience okay so content is all about writing for a particular audience so it’s just like speaking except when we’re speaking to somebody we’re speaking directly to them content is very similar and so we have to be able to know our audience ahead of time so what you can do is collect demographics of your target audience based on who’s coming to your website so you can get that data in google analytics under audience email subscribers i mean who is subscribing to your emails who do you already have in your email database and you can look at social media i mean you look at facebook you can look at the people who are already connected to you okay these are just some three three of many examples you could be doing to gather data on your audience okay you have to know who your audience is before you start writing you know for a successful content marketing strategy you really just need to know your audience and basically you’re going to segment them based on their interests so that content is going to be catered to that audience okay so if it signs that likes a specific you know product uh that you offer or feature that’s part of that product that you offer then that’s the segment you’re going to be writing about so you need to collect your data on your audience ahead of time then you’re going to segment that audience okay so you’re not going to write content for everyone because the shoe doesn’t necessarily fit for everyone okay the shoe has to fit for specific foot and in this case we’re talking about an audience we need to be able to segment our audience out and you could certainly segment them out by age by gender by education level by income by interest i mean these are just some of the examples again it could be new returning or new reusers versus returning users it could be users who have purchased from you in the past versus users who haven’t purchased from you in the past it could certainly be an age range or it could be even going further on interest level or combination thereof okay so for example you can get that demographic information using google analytics just got to go in the analytics under audience under demographics you’re going to see age and br it’s age is broken out by age range and they’re going to see gender so you’re going to see a breakdown of gender and use that to your advantage so if you’re going to you know write some content and you know 99 of your traffic is female the age of 18 to 24 then you know that content’s been catered accordingly so we could certainly go to facebook page insights and get some really good demographic data there because facebook is all about demographics okay so you could see exactly you know how many fans you have broken out by men versus women and then you can see again same thing as google analytics you could see an age range breakout you could use twitter analytics i mean twitter has shared some really good insights into education level so you know if you’re dealing with you know highly sophisticated people who have master’s degrees or even higher or let’s just say even on linkedin you know that a majority of the people you’re trying to target are c-level meaning ceos or cfos or cmos you know chief marketing officers or chief executive officers then you’re going to cater your message a little bit different than say mid-range managers or or you know even high-range managers or even vps so use your audience information you collect on these various platforms to your advantage okay so let’s jump into number two we want to create high quality content now i know this sounds like a given but and i say but heavily there’s not a lot of high quality content out there on the internet so separate yourself first and foremost always always always create high quality content it’s going to result in a lot of things that are going to benefit you you know one you’re gonna come across as you know somebody who knows what they’re talking about and that’s gonna help increase your brand awareness okay when you increase your brand awareness people know about you so it’s likely going to increase traffic to your website or if you’re on social media you know if you produce good high quality content people are gonna share that content okay so from an seo perspective it can improve website ranking meaning if you have good quality content you know and it’s really focused in on a specific topic or a certain set of core words keywords then you’re gonna rank improves website dwell time meaning hey you’ve got good content people are gonna hang around to see what else you have to offer okay so it’s no secret that you know good content you usually leads to you know quality engagement and then certainly last but not least you can gain a lot of leads here meaning hey somebody likes what you have to say whether it’s a video or a blog post or or infographic you know people are going to become more interested more engaged spend more time and that’s all going to funnel through to somebody taking that next step in the funnel and becoming more interested in your service or even purchasing one of your products so creating high quality content involves brainstorming topics and terms you know you got to do the upfront work due diligence is at work here so brainstorm some topics use a keyword research tool to gather results so if you have a topic you know one of the benefits of quality content is rankings go to google’s keyword planner understand how much quality and and understand how much competition each keyword has or understand how much volume each keyword has that’s what’s available in google’s keyword planner or any really any keyword planning tool you always want to create original content okay so you don’t want to plagiarize or take somebody else’s content and then you want to support that content with compelling headlines so if you have a piece of content you got to get somebody’s attention write a nice headline that’s going to grab their attention okay so give valuable content to readers and add resources from well-known sites so if you you do borrow say a data point from another source then you know cite that source you also want to create engaging and thought provoking content get somebody to think i mean people are going to rage your content because they not they don’t know the subject matter their interest in the subject matter and they want to be able to spend the time taking something away from that content follow a logical structure and use relevant images i can’t stress this one enough you know just throw things on a web page you know put some structure to it maybe you have to break it out if you feel like you have too much content there’s no harm in breaking it into part one versus part two get people uh tease them a bit get them to come back and read part two okay use different content forms in case somebody’s interested maybe you want to capture some data you know prefer short paragraphs to make the content readable remember if you’re talking to c-level folks you know maybe you don’t have to dummy down the content so to speak but if you’re dealing with you know folks or people that are right out of high school or still in high school then adjust your content in format and paragraphs accordingly and then update the content as well just because you publish it doesn’t mean that it’s done i mean when we’re talking about a web page we’re talking about something that is actively changing or can change the medium that is dynamic okay so if a data points change go back in and update that data point and then let people know about it because they may want to come back and and you know check in to see how much that data points change so these are all you know good takeaways for creating high quality content there’s some other things that you should be aware of you know grammatical mistakes you know you need to avoid those there’s no reason for grammatical mistakes today’s technology doesn’t allow for it and hey listen we all have friends we have colleagues my desk is sitting next to a colleague who’s more than happy to read something before it gets published so take advantage of the resources you have available no reason for it because if you have a grammatical mistake you just lost a lot of credibility you know don’t be afraid to add a clear call to action at the end of your content if somebody’s interested in reading it they’re probably going to be interested in taking the next step whatever that next step is okay so creating content that fulfills viewers requirements meaning if somebody’s searching for something and your content shows up in the search results then they’re actively looking for you what are you offering them is it fulfilling their requirements you know don’t be afraid to use examples throughout your content in fact work in or integrate some case studies in there show clear examples to stress your points and then just don’t put words on a web page you know to break up that content with an image that’s going to be visually appealing okay and you can add images from public domain sites meaning stock imagery if that’s what’s going to help create visually appealing content and then give more information to your audience and we say prefer to give more information meaning hey going back to the content i was saying about breaking it up organizing it if you have more information you don’t withhold it have them come back and read a secondary blog post or secondary piece that supports the original now we want to move from high quality content to running a b test baby test so important why because with a b split testing you can increase your conversion rates okay so four elements to test in your content marketing strategy so if you have content say a blog and you’re testing that blog you know test out the images test out the forms do you have a long form or short form you know test out the content length you can have a variation that is a lot shorter than the original does that increase or decrease bounce rates play around with call to actions your call to actions do matter you know do you want to use a softer call to action a softer tone or do you want to use something very direct and strong you know test call to actions to see what’s going to get people to move closer through the closer to purchasing and through that funnel so a b testing to me is something that should be naturally done with google optimize it’s free so with images you know you could test a lot of different variations of images anything from people to you know outlandish imagery to just something very stock and neutral but just make sure that those images are relevant to the post you know test the length of that content you know again if you know that your average time on page is very low you know don’t write something very long write something that you think is going to stick with that time on page but on your a b test create something maybe a little longer if it’s engaging enough maybe somebody’s gonna stay a little bit longer on the page so you know create a variation it’s gonna play with that length okay so use analytics to your advantage to figure out as a baseline what amount of content is getting people to stay on the page then see if you can push the envelope one way or the other okay improving the page with sign up forms really what you want to do is create a user friendly experience so when you have sign up forms and don’t make them non-intuitive don’t make them difficult you know link maybe up to facebook or google so if they’re creating an account they can create an account via google or facebook or you know don’t put too many forms on the page and then on those ctas as i mentioned play around with the tone you can also play around the color i mean i test color all the time believe it or not color does matter don’t use red use green people react to different colors but again you have cultural variances as well so you got to take that into account if you’re in the middle east or the far east asia you know color schemes and what you say matters and it changes versus say you know europe or the west okay so keep that in mind when you’re making changes on color or tone or placement and things of that nature so you want to conduct a competitor analysis so we’re talking about creating high quality content testing that content you know brainstorming some topics you know looking at your audience you’re doing all this work you might as well take the next step and figure out what it is your competitors are doing so you can opt for competitive analysis by identifying your competitor’s top performing content for specific topics okay and so really what we’re trying to do here is improve our conversion rates so what are your competitors doing what are their baselines we can maybe up that annie i mean that data is also available in google analytics so you can look at benchmarking reports in google analytics to get some form or fashion you can also go to facebook and look at your competitors facebook pages and see what’s performing in terms of engagement but what you want to do is find out your strongest competitors by using search engines or check which websites are competing with you and again that could include facebook as well or maybe even linkedin so you go with the search engine route you can always type in that coveted keyword that you want to be found for see who’s ranking ahead of you and you can see the metadata meaning the title tag and the meta description you can actually see hey what are these guys writing that’s getting them recognized in the search engine rankings so you can certainly if you go to search engine route you could certainly leverage an seo platform like search sem rush or moz or something like that that’s going to allow you to get some good insight on competitor information so keep in mind there are seo platforms that will give you information on your competitors and that’s what these seo platforms are good for so number five moving on choose a suitable content format so now we’ve done all this homework we know what we want to say we know who we want to say it to we’re ready to do some testing but we need to find a format because it’s not always about a web page per se meaning content on a web page there’s not always about a blog post with content in that blog post okay we need to decide the type of content that’s going to fit what we’re trying to say so again you can go the traditional route with just posting a blog post and there’s nothing wrong with that because with a blog post you can incorporate video and imagery you could also go a more harder route when i say harder more let’s say official route with an e-book or case study something that a user is going to be able to take away with maybe download something more official um something more in-depth something with a harder stamp on it so that that shows individuals that you’ve taken the time you’ve done this homework you’ve done this research you’ve done some really in-depth analysis and now the proper format for that is not a blog post it’s an ebook now if you’re into talking like i am then you could certainly do a podcast and podcasts are always popular depending on the topic so you got to be aware of the topic now videos are always always a good option you got the likes of video and video and youtube and some other you know video platforms out there that allow you the ability to get found very quickly especially with the likes of youtube you know people use youtube before they go on to purchasing a product so think about that so if you’re trying to get somebody if you’re trying to sway an audience to move from being a brand awareness and a loyal you know customer to taking the next step okay to purchasing more or purchasing for the first time and so videos kind of help convey that now if you’re trying to convey a lot of different points then an infographic might be your best option instead of having to write out all those points try using an infographic to convey those points visually now again with blog posts it should have valuable content that can be shared by your website visitors on social so that’s the key make sure you have those shareable social icons now with ebooks it should have longer in-depth content so and it shouldn’t be published frequently so maybe if this is something you’re doing annually then ebook could be the format with a case study what you should have a customer story that succeeded in and you solving that customer’s problem so the case study is always there for you know somebody to get an idea of what you’re all about infographic is just visualizing data in a more organized way in a more visual way so somebody understands what you’re trying to convey now with that podcast again suppose your audience doesn’t have an interest in reading again it could be a certain age certain gender a certain culture hey everybody absorbs information differently so think about it ask yourself is the podcast the best way to communicate to my target audience and then videos are highly engaging they’re also shareable on blog posts and pretty much most if not all social media platforms so once you’ve done that once you choose the proper format you want to choose a content management system that’s going to work for you so you want to be able to choose something where you can plan appropriately produce manage publish and measure results all in one place there are plenty of content management systems out there that will help you do all of those things okay so some examples are wordpress hubspot binder i mean we can list hundreds if you’re into blogging you know wordpress is the way to go if you’re into building out landing pages that you want to you know share you know hotspot could be the way to go okay there are lots of available options out there so moving on number seven target your audience using emails okay so what are we talking about well we all know what emails are emails help us to communicate directly with our target audience and convert them to leads so email is a good way to follow up with your audience so if you’ve done a podcast follow up with an email you know maybe get them to you know fill out a survey via email based on that podcast or if you create a podcast about some data that you talked about in that podcast follow up that with with them via email with an infographic perhaps okay built into the email okay there’s lots of ways that all these formats can complement themselves via email okay you could certainly take a blog post and package it into an email and have a link pointing back to the blog post maybe as a teaser or if you’re doing a series a series of blog posts you know you could tease that in an email so an email is a good way to you know follow up with your target audience indirectly or directly when we say indirectly you know you can collect emails and send out those emails with you know certain information or what you should be doing is targeting and segmenting your emails just like you are your content so if you’re producing content for certain audience then make sure that particular audience gets that same email now some of the email content that you could share with your target audience are newsletters okay seasonal emails promotional emails automated messaging and what we mean by automated messaging hey if somebody just purchased from you send them a thank you email maybe follow up a couple days later with another email with a survey or what you could do is if you know who your loyal customers are you target them with a promotional email so there’s lots of ways to slice and dice content via email okay just make sure you know your target audience is there’s lots of things you can do in email again you can complement lots of different formats within email as i mentioned before with a podcast or a blog post so keep all that in mind email’s a good way to communicate with your audience okay the last point we want to make here is use native ads okay so we talk about native ads it’s one of the smartest ways to connect your audience with your brand so for example this is a native ad on buzzfeed okay it’s about 15 bands that probably won’t exist without led zeppelin okay so for you folks out there that don’t know who led zeppelin is a rock group from the 70s late 60s 70s okay disbanded in 80 81 82 early 80s okay but you know people grew up like myself listening to led zeppelin okay so you can see the headline here 15 bands that probably won’t exist with the outlet zeppelin you know i’m interested in who those bands might be even if you don’t know who led zeppelin is okay you might be inquisitive to say okay who is this led zeppelin group and what are these 15 bands the key here is not to say the headline or led zeppelin per se but it’s a native ad and it’s sitting next to content talking about music okay so according to forbes online audiences are 25 more likely to look at a native ad than add a banner and so that native ad in this case we’re talking about music needs to be sitting or accompanied alongside content talking about in this case music you know would help if it was rock music just music in general might get enough to get peak people’s interest okay so if you’re going to create content you know align that content with something that’s you know naturally going to fit and that’s why we call them native ads because they’re native to the content that they’re associated with so finally after all that’s said and done when all you’ve done is create good content follow up via emails targeting your audience and associating that content with you know content natively then you can always measure your content performance so my favorite part of it all you going to analytics going to facebook insights you know you want to go in and check out how that content’s performing and you want to do that because you want to be able to see what’s performing what’s not performing the key here is associating the content with kpis that’s really the key so measuring the right metrics can help you understand whether your content is engaging or not so again measuring the right metrics okay so when we’re talking about a video you’re not necessarily going to look at page views you’re going to look at video views so you know some of these basic metrics of users and sessions and pages bounce rate you know dwell time that’s all great but you just need to make sure that you’re aligning the right metric with the right asset so for example if you have a case study or ebook you want to make sure that you’re measuring how many downloads the ebook or the case study received again with the video you want to measure video views now if you’re packaging up emails and sending them out to your target audience you want to make sure you look at open rates and click rates okay so a lot of things you can be looking at so make sure you choose the right metrics because there’s hundreds and hundreds of metrics to choose from so just be aware all the different metrics that are available you know if you’re in it for search okay how much traffic getting from search where are you ranking so there are a lot of things you need to think about so think about the content that you’re producing and think about how you want to be able to measure that content so let’s go back over our checklist here so what you could do is create an editorial calendar in fact i would highly suggest you create an editorial calendar in order to keep track of all the content you’ve done over a period of time are you making your content worth reading that means are you checking the results of that content what we just went over measuring the content is it worth reading have a column set up in that editorial calendar you know performing or not performing if it’s not performing don’t do it again okay curate your content okay you always want to you know make sure you’re reusing or using or adding to the content that you’ve created guest post on influential blogger websites you want to add statistics numbers and quotes to your content make it engaging make it look like you’ve done your homework you could share all your content not just on social media but you know platforms like slideshare now you can share it on all social media platforms i’d highly recommend it and again you can even repurpose it as a blog post so if it’s a podcast then you know you can recite that podcast in the form of a blog okay so get some testimonials that support some of your content again create a podcast you can send out an email with a survey or trying to solicit some testimonials or if you post something on facebook you know leverage the feedback you get from facebook in the form of a testimonial okay and then you want to promote your blog post for maximum success and a lot of that means seo so make sure you do your due diligence and get the right keywords in that blog post okay so you can create personas for different user audiences okay so remember it’s all about tone okay so if you’re going to create a blog post make sure your tone is aligned with that right audience whether that be young middle aged or older are you choosing the right type of content okay you’ll know based on the results okay you want to add h1 and h2 tags on your web pages why because when we’re talking about content we’re talking about organizing the content and h1 and h2s help you organize the content appropriately customize the metadata metadatas title tag and meta tag descriptions and even alt tags okay all of that is for search so you want your content to show up in search whether that’s video infographic or blog post all of it can be shown in search results so make sure you write a good title and make sure you write a good meta description because that’s what people are going to see when they search okay so you want to create a detailed summary and title and again that goes along with the title tag and meta description and then you want to make it easy for the audience to ask questions and comment on your blog so don’t be afraid like i’m gonna do right now in this video is if i’m missing anything from this checklist feel free to comment hey i’ve written my fair share content but i could be talking to an audience that is just as qualified as i am and they may have some tips so feel free to comment underneath this video now don’t be afraid to ask just like i just did people are always willing to provide constructive feedback so don’t be afraid to ask for it and make it easy so to me every blog post needs to have some form of a comment box because blog posts are out there to solicit engagement now let’s recap everything we talked about because we’d certainly covered a lot and there’s a lot to cover when it comes to content marketing so one know your audience again you can lean on google analytics you know demographic data whether it be age or gender you could do the same with facebook and twitter and linkedin you know every platform has some data you could take away create high quality content when i mean high quality content just brainstorm some topics has it already been written to death about or is this unique you know don’t write something your competitors are writing okay don’t copy what your competitors have written organize your content support it with good imagery all of these are tips to creating high quality content okay when you create that content think about running some a b test you know run some variations and switch out the image switch out the call to action see what’s going to get people to react and engage with the content conduct competitor analysis so lean on the facebooks of the world to see what your competitors are posting see what’s engaging for them okay you can also lean on these seo platforms like sem rush and moz all you got to do is plug in a domain and they’re going to give you some information about where a particular competitor ranks for keyword or how many backlinks and what websites are linking to them so all that’s available in these seo platforms okay so you want to choose a suitable content format we listed a few from ebooks to case studies to podcasts to infographics to blog posts to videos it’s up to you what you think is best for your audience just keep in mind you need to be able to measure it and so that’s the important thing if it doesn’t work the first time out then you might want to consider changing out the content format choose a content management system you know plenty out there wordpress is a good one if you’re going to be a blogger okay blogging allows you to you know post optimize that blog post you know you could have the ability to share that blog post across social platforms and you can also have that blog post show up in search engine results so you can’t do any of that without a good content management system so you want to target your audience using emails okay so email is a good way to again further communicate with that particular segmented audience and again you could use it to send out promotional emails to loyal followers or you can use systematic emails to send an email a thank you email somebody purchases and then another follow-up email and again you can repurpose some of the content you’ve done in another format in the form of an email so you know if you created a video you know put that video in the form of an email and send it out to your audience to make sure they’re not missing out on that video you just created so lots of ways to use email take advantage of email it’s your ally here okay use native ads okay don’t be afraid to put that content and pair it with some other content on another website it’s been proven people are going to engage in an ad that they see based on the content they’re currently reading because the ad if it’s native it’s going to be similar in nature to the content they’re currently engaged in and then measure your content performance i can’t say this enough make sure you’re leveraging google analytics okay with google analytics or facebook insights or twitter or linkedin or any other platform you’re running on they’re gonna have data on what you’ve posted so take advantage of it line your kpis so if it’s an e-book or case study don’t measure just traffic measure how many people are actually downloading them okay if it’s a video how many people like the video how many people are commenting how many people are sharing the video how many people subscribing to your playlist based on that video content okay so these are all things you can measure okay so every platform from wordpress to youtube to reddit has some form of analytics associated with it today we’re going to talk about how to get traffic to your website so thank you for joining and let’s get started so let’s imagine you’re setting up your own website okay you’re clicking away you’re developing using some good tools you’re developing you’re designing you’re doing some qa you’re testing you’re sharing with friends and an alpha version and then finally your website is all set up congratulations well when you hit enter and your website is finally published what’s going to happen well a few days later you’re checking your website and you’re looking at analytics and you notice your traffic’s very low okay well you’re scratching your head because you’ve done all this work with your website but you’re not getting any traffic so the reason is you spent all your time developing designing the website to make it look good but you didn’t do anything or any planning or any strategy around bringing users to your website so the two go hand in hand you just can’t build a website without thinking about how to drive users to the website and so before i tell you how to bring traffic to your website let me tell you why this is so important okay why do we want to bring users to our website i mean it has to be on equal ground as web development and design is somebody who goes to your site and then does something when they get to your site so you have users and when those users get to your site they’re generating page views and traffic and you want to turn that traffic into engagement okay so each page’s traffic is configured independently of all their pages so when you go when somebody goes to your website they look at a page that’s a page view in certain pages on your website you want to turn that page view into a conversion okay whether that be you know looking at a video or purchasing something so think of these pages on your website as salespeople they’re trying to convert visitors who come to your website but first we need to get the visitors to your website so when you get visitors to your website again you can generate sales which means revenue or you can increase brand awareness or you can earn revenue through sponsored posts and advertisements so if you have for example a lot of content on your website you can turn that in to revenue by hosting ads on your website so when somebody clicks on that ad you’re going to earn a percentage of that click okay what that click is worth so having a website means a lot of good things for you but first you got to get the traffic there and so what we’re going to do is we’re going to tell you how to drive traffic to your website so there’s lots of different ways in which you can bring traffic to your website well the first is paid advertising so paying to advertise your products services with ads is one of the easiest ways to drive traffic to your website so some of the options available are search ads social media ads or display ads so search ads are ads that are displayed in the search engine results so when a user types in a keyword query you want your ad to show up based on that keyword query okay so an example is digital marketing course somebody types in digital marketing course and simply learn is the first app that shows up how do we know it’s an ad because you can see the word ad next to the domain so when somebody clicks on that link simply learn is going to pay google so that’s how search advertising works okay the next is social so social media marketing involves increasing traffic or engagement or brand awareness a lot of different strategies but you’re instead of doing this on search you’re doing it on a social media platform okay so for example you can advertise on any particular platform and the way you advertise could be with an image it could be with a video so in this case you could see cobreo is doing a sponsored ad here how to succeed with google ads and then another form of advertising is display so display means creating ads that are placed on specific websites so with display unlike search you have a choice in the ad format with search you only have text ads but with display you have text edge image ads rich media ads video ads so you have lots of different options in which you can advertise on other websites so the idea here is to get your ad in front of the right audience when they could see your display banner your banner ad then it’s going to be more visual more appealing generate some brand interest and hopefully you can get somebody to click on that ad and over to your website so that’s paid advertising again through search through social through display but you can also promote your site on social media so once your content has gone live you could take advantage of different social media platforms i mean it really depends on what you’re trying to promote because what you’re trying to promote needs to align with the appropriate social media platform so facebook is best suited for industries like food and beverages and news and media and if you’re selling a product so you fall into one of those categories and facebook could be the right platform for you if you’re involved in again beauty or food and beverage or e-commerce then you can also leverage instagram which is part of facebook’s ecosystem so if you advertise on facebook you can also advertise on instagram and or instagram so it doesn’t have to be and facebook and instagram it could be facebook or instagram you also have linkedin as a platform linkedin is great for b2b so if you’re trying to promote industry news or or tips and best practices or job postings then linkedin is the place for you it’s a b2b platform it’s great for targeting specific industries targeting specific job levels or job descriptions okay so linkedin is great if you’re into b2b focusing on the business side of it so you also have youtube now youtube is part of google’s ecosystem youtube is a video platform okay so it’s great if you’re trying to promote gaming or entertainment if you’re a vlogger okay so youtube’s a great way to promote your site uh by getting your product out there in the form of a video and then you have twitter twitter to me encompasses a lot of different industries beauty and fitness news and media entertainment okay you have limited number of characters but a lot of people are active on twitter and it’s a great way to generate some awareness and get some clicks over to your website so these are just some of the most popular social media platforms of course there are plenty more out there the third way in which you can drive traffic to your site is guest post blogging so most of you already know what blogging is all about well if you’re blogging for your own site you can jump on somebody else’s site and blog on their behalf so having the opportunity to guest post on another website can be very helpful because one that other blog could have lots of traffic and have a a well-known brand so if you’re blogging on another blog it’s gonna build your brand awareness and potentially increase traffic to your blog or website so it exposes to you to targeted traffic so if you’re going to guest blog guest blog on a site that’s very relevant to your business or industry that way you’re targeting the right audience okay you can expand your personal network so getting yourself out there getting your brand out there in front of a different audience and then obviously for service because it generates a backlink so serps search engine ranking pages means that hey if you want to rank organically you’re going to have to generate some backlinks so guest blogging is a way to generate some backlinks to your site and an effect that’s going to help you get your pages ranked higher because google is going to recognize the relationship from one blog to your blog and build up your relevancy so some other benefits here to guest blogging is you can grow your social media following because you can then promote that on social media that you’re guest blogging okay again you can improve your online authority okay because when you’re guest blogging and you have recognition on that guest blog if it’s a popular blog then it’s not going to help your domain and page authority for seo and then the end result is going to improve your backlink score so a lot of benefits to guest blogging to me at the end of the day it’s just about reaching out to your audience using another platform to do that in the form of a blog and the results of that is going to mean more brand awareness for you and turning that traffic from that other blog into qualified leads so you can also interview industry thought leaders so that’s another way an interesting way to generate traffic to your site so reaching out to thought leaders for interviews okay could generate some credibility for you and the other person so it’s reciprocal so it means that you’re active in the industry that you’re in and it allows you to engage with other leaders in the industry and the indirect net result of that could be increased traffic because if you do the interview and you record it or if it’s via video then you can obviously post it on other platforms and that could in turn drive traffic to your website obviously just like guest blogging it’s going to increase your reach so getting yourself out there nobody knows who your brand is and they know who they thought leaders are and they say you’re interviewing the thought leaders then that’s going to put you in front of these people and so it’s going to increase your reach another way to drive traffic to your website is just to make sure your website’s responsive and what do we mean by response of well we mean does it work on multiple devices specifically mobile so depending on the device your website hides shows shrinks enlarges or moves content so that it conforms to the browser that that person’s looking at on your web for your website so if somebody’s looking on mobile at your website you want to make sure that your website adjusts accordingly so you want to be able to you know test to make sure it’s responsive and so is content arranged based on importance okay does it work across different browsers on different devices and do the images text and everything else align just like it does on desktop so there are plenty of tools out there on the web all you need to do is just do a search for you know check my website for responsiveness you know so you you can use plenty of tools to check to see if your website is responsive towards multiple devices why is that important because if somebody goes to your website via mobile and your site doesn’t align properly or the contents all stretched out and somebody has to maneuver their browser just to see your website then chances are they’re not going to come back chances are they’re not going to convert okay so you want to be able to revise your device browser combinations you want to make sure that everything works accordingly you want to be able to test those fonts make sure they look good and then you also want to make sure that people can navigate so if they’re on mobile are they going to navigate just as easy as they can on desktop and if you have any pop-ups you want to probably make sure they’re removed so that way when somebody’s looking at your website they’re not getting interfered with on mobile and then of course you want to make sure that these pages load okay so they load just as quick on desktop as they should on mobile and vice versa so this should not take a long time to load so moving on from responsiveness on mobile to building a brand community so brand community refers to a group of people who identify your brand and use your brand as a platform to exchange ideas and contribute content some advantages of having a brand community are promoting brand evangelism and loyalty it can be a source of feedback loyalty and ideas so build a community build a brand community who you know identify with you okay so continue to you know treat these people as loyal customers okay maybe give them a promotion uh to use specifically just for them that they can use on your website or talk directly to them because you know that they’re followers they’re repeat customers they purchase for you multiple times so talk to them differently as well you know who these people are and that’s what building a brand is all about it’s about identifying your brand with other people okay and then identify people who identify with your brand and messaging and talking to them as if they’re part of your own community your own family so you can use user generated content that provides future marketing strategies so the feedback you get from your own community could be in turn used to promote or used in future marketing strategies i.e advertising i.e post on social okay it can also provide pr opportunities so it’s a chance for you to you know put out press releases based on the community that you built so any brand regardless of who it is should be able to identify with your audience their target audience and that target audience eventually going to become part of a community these are group of people who identify with you what you’re trying to sell what your cause is what your mission statement is what your services they identify with you so leverage them and reciprocate identify them talk to them separately give them the what they deserve the respect and loyalty that they deserve as well because they’re communicating and they’re following you as a brand so the next thing you could do to drive traffic is be active in the comments section so engage in relevant and thought-provoking conversations on other blogs and sites it doesn’t necessarily have to be another blog per se could be other sites like reddit or cora or media sites that have a lot of content that are broken out by industry that allow you to engage in conversation allow you to either upvote or share or respond okay so be active because when you’re active people are gonna see that hey you’re a leader in the industry you know what you’re talking about you have some some brand equity you have some thought and some knowledge on the specific topic and subject so it just puts you in a better light when you can respond and be active on these different platforms okay let’s turn our attention to search engine optimization also known as seo or organic search so in order to drive traffic to your site you’re going to have to implement an seo strategy why do you want to implement an seo strategy because it can help you improve your overall searchability and visibility on search engines and obviously that comes with advantages one of those advantages is obviously more traffic to the site search is still king in terms of volumes of people using search on a daily basis so you have a great opportunity to be found it also builds trust and credibility because still a majority of the people who do a search click on an organic search listing and so if you’re found organically and you’re ranked number one then chances are somebody’s going to click on your listing and it provides increased engagement and traffic and so what that means is more traffic more engagement an engagement is something you define it could be again a download of a document or the clicking on the play button of a video or or submitting a form or signing up for a newsletter or calling these are all forms of engagement so the the amount of traffic you drive from organic search to your website is only going to improve engagement okay so you can also provide an improved user experience and what do we mean by that well if you’re getting lots of traffic from organic search you have a really good opportunity to do a b testing and when you do a b testing you can improve user experience meaning you’re showing one variation against the other from people coming from organic search and so this is helpful and that you know if you’re running an a b test the variation has a chance to improve or outperform the original and if it outperforms the original you’re improving user experience and then it helps target quality traffic so seo to me or all search is the only medium in which you’re meeting somebody halfway you’re you’re addressing what they’re looking for so somebody’s looking for a pair of red women’s nike shoes the 2019 model and you have that particular product to offer well you have a chance of showing up via organic search somebody types in new women’s red nike shoes size whatever at the year 2019 model then of course they’re going to probably likely click on your listing because you have what they’re looking for and and that goes with any keyword any industry any business any segment any type of product you’re selling so again you have a chance to really be visible for what people are looking for and so that’s the beauty of search engine optimization you have a really good opportunity here to meet people halfway to drive quality traffic to get them to enjoy a good user experience all the while generating engagement and along with seo we want to be able to build backlinks so seo is a two-pronged approach meaning you have two strategies in one on-page and off page and so off-page involves backlinking so backlinks are just links that direct users from other websites to your own website so with that inherently it’s going to drive traffic qualified traffic to your website because if somebody’s on a relevant website that’s linking to yours and they click on that link and go to your website it’s likely going to be qualified meaning they’re going to be relevant and so backlinking because it’s an off page strategy why is it an off page seo strategy because if google crawls that other site that has a link to you then that’s going to give you credit because google say hey this site’s getting some links from some relevant sites we must think they’re relevant and therefore we’re going to trust this site so by google trusting your site it’s going to improve your organic ranking and with the organic rankings being approved meaning it’s going to mean faster indexing so what does that mean so you want to be indexed by the search engines and so the quicker google can find your pages even if it’s on somebody else’s site then that means they’re going to follow that link go to that page on your site and take that page back to their servers to be indexed okay so the quicker you can get index the quicker you get found and then it helps with referral traffic so again we noticed that our efforts are on seo organic search but if you’re getting traffic from another website hey that still counts that’s referral traffic okay so that’s a side advantage to having backlinks is good traffic from other sites okay so those those are inherently the some of the reasons to do backlinking okay never hurts i mean there’s brand awareness reasons to being on other sites as well there’s industry leadership meaning if you you post content on reddit okay you’re coming across as an industry leader but yet generating a backlink which helps with seo and referral traffic so there’s a lot of benefits to building backlinks and the opposite of backlinks are internal links so you want to do internal linking and that just means connecting one page on your site to another and why is that beneficial because it can help direct visitors to other pages they wouldn’t normally otherwise find via your navigation so if you’re active on a blog don’t be afraid to include multiple internal links you want to move people through your site you want the flow of traffic to go from one page to another to another and so when you do internal linking just like with backlinks it’s going to improve the indexing of your website google is going to follow those links and index those pages and google does give credit from an seo perspective from an internal linking perspective so if one page is linked to another and that page has really good relevance in the eyes of google then the other page is probably going to benefit from that the other reason you want to do internal linking again you want to move people from your one page of your

site to the other and when you do that it’s going to reduce bounce rates so bounce rate is simply the rate at which people land on a page and then leave so if i have a hundred people land on my home page and only one person went to another page and the other 99 left the site then that’s a 99 bounce rate so by putting internal links in place you’re helping people move from one page to the other and thus reducing the bounce rate and that’s what you want you want to keep people on your site you want to be greedy it also drives traffic to older posts so again when we say older post we’re really referring to blog posts so if you have a relevant blog post and you’re writing a new blog post then link the two together if it’s relevant link it i don’t you know regardless of how old it is you know you want to show google that these older blog posts just because they were written a year ago doesn’t mean they’re outdated and old-fashioned okay or useless you want to keep them alive by linking to them so to me that’s a good strategy for internal linking link to older blog posts you know show people you’re an industry expert you’ve been doing this for a while and then you have lots of content to share okay so the longer you can keep somebody on your website the more likely it is they’re going to engage and convert and some other inherent benefits improves page rank so what we mean by pagerank is simply just a rank that google gives pages so the more internal linking you have the better off you are and then it helps spread link juice across websites and we’ll meet by link juice again just like backlinking it builds relevancy so just keep all these inherent benefits in mind to internal linking the end result is keeping the flow of traffic on your site and all these other benefits will fall into place okay so another way in which you can really hone in on traffic to your website is long tail keywords and long tail keywords to me are more than just one or two keyword phrases okay so they’re usually three or longer keywords in a phrase okay so long tail keywords really nowadays account for most web searches people really take the time to even post questions as a search query say likely somebody it’s unlikely somebody’s going to go into search and just type in the word shoes they might type in red shoes but that’s unlikely what they’re probably going to type in is you know red nike running shoes 2019 or some variation of that okay that’s a long tail keyword and some of the advantages of using long tail keywords to be found for are less competition so if you’re using broad keywords like red shoes then who doesn’t want to be found for red shoes well you don’t necessarily you don’t want to be found for red shoes because it’s too broad you don’t know what type of shoes somebody’s looking for you just know they’re looking for red shoes it could be running shoes it could be work shoes it could be you know boots it could be slippers okay it’s too broad so long tail keywords help narrow it in and the more narrow and focused the keyword is the less competition it’s gonna have and when something’s not competitive in the form of a keyword then that means your chances of ranking for that keyword are going to be greater and the chance of you ranking faster are going to be greater and then of course if somebody’s looking for exactly what you have to offer then you have a higher chance to convert that person so if you have exactly those 2019 red nike women’s running shoes and somebody does a search for that and that’s a long tail keyword and they click on your organic listing if you have the right price then they’re probably going to convert so you have a really good chance of converting somebody using long tail keywords so my point here is if you’re looking for keywords to use focus on longer tail don’t focus on one or two keyword phrases what it also does is it brings targeted traffic so even if somebody doesn’t convert hey they could be back because it’s exactly what they’re looking for and if you’re focusing on longer tail keywords like i just mentioned stay away from the shorter ones it’s just easier to optimize your page for seo so remember seo is a two pronged approach on page and off page we talked about off page with internal linking and backlinks on page is all about making sure those keywords you choose are integrated in with the page you want to be found for and so if you’re using a long tail keyword it’s just easy to work that keyword in so it enables easier on-page optimization okay let’s switch away from seo to email marketing so let’s focus on email marketing as a form or method of driving traffic to your website so email marketing has been around a long time in terms of digital marketing why because it provides an effective way to convert leads into sales why because you can send personalized emails to a target audience so when you send an email to somebody on a regular basis you know who that person is so what are you doing in the email you’re writing a specific message to that person well email marketing is the same thing except you’re just sending an email to a larger group of people and when you send an email to a larger group of people you’re still going to personalize the message right you’re not going to send a generic email to 1 000 people okay nobody’s going to do that so make sure your email is targeted if it’s targeted it can be cost effective why because sending large amounts of emails or let’s just say an email to a large amount of people or a large group of people is going to be cost effective it’s not cost per click you know it’s not cost per open okay so email usually depending on the the email provider you’re using really is a flat fee so it just really depends on how many emails you’re sending or how how many people you’re sending the email to as well so but email generally tends to be more cost effective than other forms of marketing so look at the email content provider you’re using and just get a sense of what they charge but if you look at it and do a comparison email generally is cheaper than say doing pay-per-click because with pay-per-click you’re paying for each click okay so that could be expensive depending on the keywords so email marketing is also time saving okay meaning it’s a one-time thing and done so once you send the email it’s just a matter of you know watching and looking at the metrics and learning what’s going on so you don’t make the same mistakes again but it is time conducive meaning you send out one email and that’s it with pay-per-click you’re constantly measuring and managing the campaigns and it provides real-time marketing so when you do send the email more than likely majority of the people on day one or the day you send the email are going to be able to view it open it click on some of the links and convert so that’s normally what happens an email majority of the people open it on day one and it kind of tails off from there so think about it as real time so when you send that email and if you have a thousand people on your email recipient list break it up send the first 500 first with a different subject line and then you can see the data come in and if you don’t see the good results from the subject line or the body of the email or you know the page you’re going to then make adjustments before you send the other email to the next 500. so that’s a great thing about emails you can break up the email into two groups the first group and then the second group with different subject lines and you can probably send them a little bit of time apart that way you can learn from the first email because with email you are generally going to get results right away okay within the first 24 hours so that’s a great thing about email okay so the other thing about email it’s less intrusive so normally people who are going to get the email are the ones who sign up for the email so they’re almost expecting your email so when they get your email again as long as you’re not sending an email on a daily basis normally most companies send it monthly or bi-weekly it’s not going to be as intrusive okay and then it also helps build credibility increased visibility and brand awareness meaning you’re going to build your brand in that email you’re going to put content in that email that’s going to show off your credibility meaning you could put some testimonials in the email you could put some good affiliations you can put a good article to an industry article you just wrote so email is going to inherently continue to build brand awareness for you okay and it’s an easy way to track roi so if your e-commerce it’s pretty clear you send the email somebody opens it clicks on it checks out and purchases something it’s easily trackable because you could track it right from that email so one thing i want to say there is just if you do send an email make sure you’re tracking that campaign and you want to be able to use an analytics program like google analytics if you use google analytics you’re going to be able to track when you send the email who clicks on it and who converts so you want to be able to measure an roi for these emails and you can and that’s the beauty of email marketing okay let’s move away from email marketing to webinars so webinars great method for effective social media promotion it’s a great way to bring traffic to your website so why do we recommend webinars well because it provides direct content contact within your target group what do we mean by contact with your target group well you’re going to host a webinar and you’re going to invite this targeted group of people who are interested in your product or service so if you have a facebook community you could do a facebook live event or you could do a youtube or you know you can even set up a webinar on another platform but promote it on social media and if you’re pronouncing something on social media you’re probably promoting it to people who are already following you or like you and so that’s what we mean by direct contact with your target group so you’re going to be able to create a webinar and talk directly to that group and that’s going to help build brand awareness and credibility and the great thing about webinars is you don’t need some fancy software i mean i’m talking to you on a webinar right now and so webinars are free all you need is a video camera and a recorder that’s all and that’s all built in with software so there’s plenty of software out there that allows you just to do a webinar really quick and easy there’s lots of opportunities in software so and a lot of them are very cost effective so if you want to build uh create a webinar you could do that by spending very little money and webinars again allow you to talk to your targeted group your community maybe prospective clients it helps build credibility and in effect drive traffic to your website and when somebody does attend a webinar they’re likely going to be highly engaged because you’re inviting them they’re going to opt into the webinar and the great thing about webinars is even if they don’t attend the webinar the day you have it it’s going to be recorded so they can always go back and watch it so whoever watches the webinar is going to be engaged because it’s going to be a topic they’re interested in and then users are likely to become prospective customers so having a webinar talking about something inherently interesting to maybe a larger group of people you can promote that on social media and potentially get prospective customers to sign up and watch the webinar and if you do they’re going to be engaged and then take the next step oh i like what this guy this person has to say they seem to be credible i like their personality i like their brand i like their product i’m gonna go check their web out their website okay so webinars allow you to kind of pull in more people as well as just your community because you can promote the webinar and you can promote it in advance and you can leverage social media for that okay so something related to webinars incorporating video content so videos have been proven to be a really good way to attract new visitors and it just it makes your website very engaging when you have videos on your website as well so if you create video you have an opportunity to post it on various video platforms like youtube or vimeo okay there’s plenty of video platforms out there or just embedded in a blog post or embedded in a facebook post or a tweet okay so you can do a lot with video and having video on your site is going to increase engagement okay when you increase engagement good things happen that’s going to lead to increased conversions in sales or or roi or just like we mentioned the webinar can help build trust with your audience so even that webinar you could post on your website so you want people to engage by watching this video they watch the video they’re going to gain trust in you because you’re talking directly to that person that user that audience that visitor to your website and when you get bail trust it’s going to increase engagement and that’s the beauty of video unlike text or imagery videos really do engage with the audience and so the more video you could do the better off you are because again you can leverage social to draw attention to your brand and product and service and then you can have that video on your website to increase engagement which in turn increases conversions and sales and improves roi so always think video there’s plenty of video software out there that you can leverage and the great thing about video 2 is hey most people are using mobile phones these days smartphones and so video works just as well on mobile as it does on desktop so keep that in mind you know video is going to be engaging regardless of what device somebody uses and then of course if they’re watching the video on facebook or youtube then chances are they’re going to share that particular video which is going to bode well for your brand and traffic okay so video if somebody likes a video it’s very easy to share video especially from a mobile phone so youtube just makes it so easy to share or like or subscribe to a channel it just it becomes that much easier things can go viral and chances of them going viral video are gonna be greater okay so other ways to drive traffic to your website is submit your content to content aggregators so what’s a content aggregator well a content aggregator is like reddit that provides a great platform for you to post your content so that’s what a content aggregator is really a site like reddit or medium or quora where you could post content to a large number of people okay so with reddit people are either going to upvote it or downvote it so the more upvotes you get or thumbs up or likes or people who encourage that content the more of a chance it has to be found and so first thing out of the gate if you do provide content to a content aggregator like reddit make sure it’s good quality content that’s interesting and that should be a case the case around across the board whether it’s a a social post or blog post make sure the content’s unique professional and interesting and then if you do say put something on medium or you do put something on cora and it is professional and interesting and thought-provoking then people are going to react to it and then that again could lead to traffic but even if it doesn’t lead to traffic it helps build brand awareness so if you have content just like videos leverage it put the content out there and when you put content out there it’s only gonna especially if it’s good content put it’s gonna put you in a good light so don’t be afraid to share your content on the likes of reddit or medium or core or some of these other content aggregator websites because good things are only going to happen and again referral traffic seo brand awareness conversions so all these are inherent benefits of just sharing your content okay and then finally we want to learn from analytics okay so what do we mean learning from analytics so there are plenty of analytics platforms out there one of the most popular is google analytics so you want to make sure you’re tracking traffic on your site with google analytics so i have to do is just go to google analytics via search sign up add the analytics code to your website and while uh they’re doing all the heavy lifting they’re going to track traffic coming to your website and not only are they going to track traffic but they’re going to tell you how that traffic engaged and so the benefits of it google analytics is hey you could figure out where users are coming from are they coming from that email campaign that i sent out to a thousand people are they coming from youtube based on that video i posted or are they coming from reddit based on the content i just posted there or are they coming from organic search it is so google analytics can help us understand how much traffic we’re getting from organic search so it’ll help us measure our seo efforts and then with google analytics you could segment so we could segment by mobile we can segment by desktop returning user new user by campaign by page by language by city by region i mean there’s so many ways in which to segment your audience and segmenting simply is breaking up the entire group of people who come to your website into different segments based on what you want to see so if you want to look at you know females between the ages of 18 to 24 who come from mobile via organic search that’s a segment and you can look at that information in analytics if that’s your target audience then you could see how they’re performing okay so and there are a lot of benefits to google analytics definitely want to take advantage of segmenting in google analytics you could look at your competition so there’s a benchmarking report the great thing about google analytics you can also look at content and how your content is performing when somebody lands on your website are they what page are they spending time on what page are they engaging on the most okay what pages have the highest bounce rate or the lowest time on page so you can really determine what pages work best and then of course the end result in analyzing all this data is you want to be able to fine-tune your website so take advantage of the data that google analytics or any other analytics platform is giving you by learning once you learn what’s going on with your website you can make adjustments to your website to improve user experience okay so we went over a lot of different ways to drive traffic okay you can incorporate all this to your website immediately welcome today we’re going to talk about email marketing tutorial so buckle up and let’s get started with email marketing tutorial and so let’s start out asking the question why email marketing so linda is the owner of an e-commerce company and basically she isn’t able to take her leads the leads she’s collecting per day per month and convert them into customers okay so customers sign up but they don’t buy her product so she’s left scratching her head wondering what to do so how’s she gonna solve the problem of converting the lead she gets into paying customers well look no further than email market so you can boost your sales funnel with the help of email marketing so email marketing leads to email campaigns that lead to website visits that can lead to product purchasing email markings also and a it’s a very good way to generate a high return on investment so linda thinks this is too good to be true your tail i made is a very efficient way to generate a return on my investment how expensive is email marketing well email marketing is neither expensive or time consuming that’s the beauty of email marketing and so linda is now very interested we’ve piqued her interest she wants us to explain email marketing to her in detail and that’s exactly what we’re going to do we’re going to talk about email marketing in detail so for everyone out there listening what’s in it for you why are you going to invest your time and listening to simply learn and me talk about email marketing because we’re going to talk about everything there is about email marketing in today’s webinar so what is it for those that aren’t really familiar with the intricacies of email marketing we’re going to talk about how to set up email marketing we’re going to discuss all the benefits of email marketing we’re going to get into a b testing we’re going to get into the automation of emails the types of emails how to engage new users and we’re going to give you a demo so there’s a lot going on in this webinar like i said buckle up and let’s get started and talk about what is email marketing so as i mentioned to linda it’s an efficient way to convert leads into sales why because we can send personalized emails to a specific audience a targeted audience if somebody’s interested in our products we can reach out to them via email it can also be used to remarket pre-qualified leads so anybody who’s pre-qualified we can go ahead and communicate with them as well so email marketing is very effective at different stages in the funnel okay so when i say funnel customer life cycle so we have awareness consideration purchase retention and advocacy okay so let’s talk about each one of these parts of the funnel or customer life cycle if you will so let’s start with awareness at the very top so email marketing allows customers to recognize their problems after which you can educate them on how your brand can solve them okay just like any other marketing channel somebody’s looking for something in need of something and we can come to the rescue in this case we’re going to come to the rescue with email and we can go ahead and educate them on what their need is and how we can collaborate with them help them educate them solve their problems with our products okay so that’s what email is going to do we’re going to communicate with them via email and we’re going to bring awareness to the problem by solving the problem that’s what email is good for okay good for generating awareness for our brand for example we can share a newsletter with our customers so we’re running a cosmetics company we can basically educate them on the five important skin care products that everyone should have okay so we can get them to click on the call to action to learn more so if somebody’s having some skin care issues or not sure what products to buy you know an email can cover that okay the next step in the customer life cycle is consideration so customers focused on searching for relevant products and compares the products with similar ones okay so they’re definitely looking they’re a little further in the process they’re educated they know what they’re looking for so we can really hit them with the right email we can send a relevant email to promote our product okay discover that perfect moisturizer for your skin that perfect skin moisturizer smooths hydrates and contains spf 20. so we got the perfect product for that person who’s further along the funnel and really is ready to purchase that product so we can hit that person up with the perfect messaging talk about purchase the next step in the life cycle well purchase well with purchase we can send an email that encourages that customer purchase our product by offering them something okay by giving an offer for example we can give a discount discount’s always tend to work so that moisturizer that that particular customer was considering buying well they can move from consideration to purchasing because we’re gonna offer them a discount they can’t refuse okay so you know it could beat for a specific date okay it could be you know something that’s going to get them excited to buy the product 20 off of moisturizers pretty good deal and especially if that percentage off is better than the other products they were considering buying so getting somebody that extra incentive to purchase the product goes a long way via email okay we want to take that next step in the life cycle and nurture our relationship with customers to ensure they’re loyal okay they’ve already purchased how do we get them purchased again that’s retention we want to retain our customers we want to get them back to buy the same product or similar products or completely different products in our inventory so what do we do we’re going to send an email we’re going to send an email to active customers okay we’re going to give them an offer just for them exclusively just for them in this example we’re going to give them a combo pack a facial kit at just 39 and get a sunscreen worth ten dollars for free so you can come up with all sorts of different combinations on offers key is the offers exclusively just for those who you want to target and retain as customers because if you just get somebody to purchase once it’s not going to work those people have already taken the that step in the relationship where they trust your product they purchase your product now you want to go ahead and treat that customer special by giving them an exclusive offer and then what we want to do is advocacy last step in that customer lifestyle we want to convert that active customer into brand advocates okay we want that customer to talk about our brand for us we want them to promote it and talk about it with your friends so for example we want to send an email to those customers to promote our products okay so for example we could say hey the sales of our products for this particular day or for this month is going to go to our favorite nonprofit could be educating poor children or cleaning up plastic in the ocean or saving animals we want to be able to get them to speak on our behalf and say look guys this is a really good company you know they’re offering me products exclusively they’ve offered me discounts in the past they have good products they have a lot of different products and on top of all that they help they help the environment they help the needy okay they care and so we can go ahead and provide a call to action for these customers that are loyal to our brand and have them share the email with their friends to spread the word on you know what we’re trying to accomplish for our nonprofit or if anything just get them to promote it maybe give them a discount for every friend that they get to buy a product okay it doesn’t have to necessarily be you know just sharing with friends it can be that extra incentive of giving them a discount if they do share with friends and their friends buy okay so this is the customer life cycle and examples of different emails that you can use at every step along the way in the life cycle so let’s talk about the benefits of email marketing so what are some of the benefits well we’ve already mentioned to linda that it’s cost effective it’s time saving real time marketing less intrusive builds credibility increases visibility and brand awareness and it’s an easy way to track roi these are all the benefits for email marketing and we’re gonna go talk about some of these now so basically when we talk about cost effective you know some email marketing platforms charge based on the number of users who you send the email to time saving well you saw how quick it took me to set up that email campaign the key is figuring out who you want to send it to when we talk about real-time marketing you know we’re sending this email out basically in real time trying to meet our customers needs at the right time it’s less intrusive because we can customize the emails okay we can as you saw i can put first name in there to make it more personal so when something’s more personal it’s less intrusive especially if it’s a segment that already knows your brand okay builds credibility hey we gain credibility when we offer exclusive offers to repeat customers or you know try and build advocacy by working with non-profits okay it increases visibility and brand awareness why because you know we could send our email out to a large group of people and that’s a good way to generate brand awareness and as you saw we can easily measure you know not only open rates click rates but roi so how many people from that email went on and purchased so we can measure that it’s very easy to measure email today we’re going to talk about affiliate marketing so let’s jump right into it and take a look inside an office environment right now we have chuck here chuck’s doing a little bit of pacing john walks in the office hey man what’s with all the pacing everything all right chuck responded hey i’m just worried that i might have exhausted every way we can advertise our product i mean i’ve done seo i’ve done paid search i’ve done email i’ve done social man nothing’s working i gotta come up with something new asap well john responds hey don’t worry i think i’ve got your solution for you man hang tight relax take a load off here’s my solution affiliate marketing first off before you ask the question what’s affiliate marketing let’s talk about why we need affiliate marketing so let’s dig into affiliate marketing so john’s just taking over now and he’s gonna let chuck know everything there is to know about affiliate marketing so the first question john answers for chuck what is affiliate marketing so affiliate marketing is a form of digital marketing that involves a merchant it involves a merchant paying commissions to a website or other entities so if i’m selling a product basically somebody else sells that product for me i’m gonna pay that person a commission for selling my product it’s that simple that’s what affiliate marketing is okay so basically what these merchants are doing or other entities they’re advertising your product so they’re advertising your product with a referral so they’re passing on their own customers to you so that they can buy your product and again the exchange is you give that website or other entity a commission that’s more or less what affiliate marketing is so john’s gonna have us take a look at each of these components of affiliate marketing in detail take it away john so john says first we have the merchant aka the brand the seller the creator the founder the owner the inspiration the innovator hey this is the person who came up with this brilliant idea this brilliant idea has to get out there we’re the merchant we’re trying to get this brilliant idea out to the masses so this is the component of affiliate marketing that creates the product the merchant could be anyone okay so it could be startups to large multinational companies international companies non-profits for-profits individuals independent contractors freelancers a group of people who have a passion for something okay it could be anybody there’s no limit the affiliate aka the publisher so the affiliate is basically that third-party website or entity which promotes the merchant’s products and tries to convince potential customers of the merchant’s product’s value so this affiliate going to represent the merchant on their behalf and try and get their clients to basically purchase that particular merchant’s product so the affiliate could be incentivized based on you know registrations email sign up sales and subscriptions so it doesn’t always come down to you know sales you know if i’m just trying to get you know build my email list then hey i can incentivize that affiliate to push email signups if i’m got this big you know offline you know promotion that i’m doing at this particular mall and i want to get people there well i can get an affiliate and incentivize that affiliate to drive and help me drive registrations for this event so it doesn’t always have to be sales per se so in effect you the merchant and the affiliate work out some type of commission deal based on what you’re incentivizing so the relationship between the affiliate and the merchant is made possible with the help of an affiliate network so that’s the third component here we need somebody to bring the two together that merchant who has this brilliant idea and the affiliate who has potential customers that could potentially drive registrations sales signups etc to the merchant so the affiliate network is the one who brings the two together so the affiliate network in effect acts as the middleman the person in between the merchants and affiliates it allows merchants to find and collaborate with not just any affiliate but the affiliate best suited for their particular brand and product because you want to find somebody who is going to be passionate who’s relevant who has your prospective customers in mind because they’re the ones that are going to help those protective customers purchase your product so that’s what the affiliate network does it helps bring the merchants and affiliates together so that the affiliate can help advertise and sell on behalf of the merchant so with the affiliate network merchants can use tools for tracking and reporting and processing payments for affiliates so really that affiliate network is the glue that holds it all together they’re not just one to introduce a merchant affiliate they offer it all so as a merchant you want to be able to manage your affiliates so you’re not going to have one affiliate you’re going to have multiple affiliates so you want to be able to use the appropriate tools available to you in the affiliate network to see and track how sales are going and when sales happen okay or commissions happen you want to be able to use that affiliate network to compensate that affiliate appropriately and then finally the customer customer aka the consumer is the most important component of all of this take it away john so the consumer is the final and most important component without customers to buy products the merchant would not have any revenue and the affiliate would not get any commission so we need customers so john what is the process of affiliate marketing well john says let’s have a look at the process so it’s affiliate marketing time so we’re going to use a tool or platform like commission junction commission junction is a popular you know platform that affiliate network platform that brings merchants and affiliates together so the merchants can use those affiliates to advertise their product so let’s take a look at uh commission junction as a good digital marketing tool for affiliate marketing so we’re going to use commission junction as an example here remember in affiliate marketing it’s an ecosystem between publishers and merchants so remember merchants are selling products publishers are selling those merchant products on their site and so commission junction is the middleman so to speak okay so commission junction just known as cj now is the middle person they’re introducing the publisher and the merchant and so let’s go ahead and log in here so when you log in like any other digital marketing tool any other platform you’re gonna have your own settings and whatnot so really the whole idea behind any affiliate marketing tool is really there to manage your publishers who do you want as a publisher who do you want selling your product you obviously want somebody who’s relevant somebody who’s going to be able to sell a product somebody who has a targeted audience it’s similar to yours okay so we go into cj.com we’re going to log in and here you can see a publisher’s link so we’re going to click on the publishers link and remember when you sign up publishers you have to have program terms and so if we click on publishers program terms we’re going to be able to see all the different program terms available so here we could see the different program turns we have set up for certain publishers so we just click on that we’ll be able to see that’s the default program term so remember you could set up your own program term for any publisher so as a best practice if you have publishers who are actually performing well who are selling your products maybe you want to offer them a little bit more on the commission side maybe you want to sweeten the deal maybe you know these guys these publishers get better program terms versus say other publishers who don’t and so here we can see the program terms basically you could see what the terms are the action and the different policies here so everything you need to do to manage that publisher in terms of payment is done under the program terms now if the program terms are met the publisher actually sells your products cj is the broker they’re the ones who are going to initiate the payment based on the program terms so be careful on the program terms you want to be able to set them appropriately cj has templates cj has some default program terms that you can use and offer up to different publishers so based on the program terms that’s how your publishers are going to get paid and so here you can have as many different program terms as you want there’s no limit here you want to be able to align and reward program terms again based on performance and so here we can see what publishers are under what program terms so again if your publishers performing well sweeten the deal offer them a better program terms and so you can align publishers with different program terms and so that’s the whole the idea behind program terms is you want to be able to align publishers with that so when you sign up a publisher they’re going to get a line with a program term meaning what are they going to get paid for selling your product now if we want to manage by status instead of by program terms we could see all the different organizations we have in our network these are our publishers we’re the affiliate we’re the ones selling the product we want to know who’s selling who’s not selling and so we can look at all our publishers by program terms or by status okay so basically you can see here the term status whether it’s active or not earnings basically what they’ve sold over the last basically seven days or three months so you could look at basically how your publishers are performing just by clicking on manage by status here in cg.com so when you’re looking at reports in cg.com or really any other affiliate program you might see the acronym epc this stands for earnings per click actually it’s a little misleading it’s actually earnings per 100 clicks so basically cj calculates you know how much your publisher is actually making per click you know just like paid search we’re paying google x amount per click it’s the same thing here we can’t or these publishers can’t make any money if they don’t generate clicks so that’s why you have an epc model or metric so to speak so you can measure earnings per click cj does it over seven day period and over a three month period so you could sort based on seven day or three months to see who’s earning the most per click in terms of publishers now you can select under publishers groups now you can group your publishers okay so if you have say a group of publishers in a specific region like the united states or india or if you’re just focused on the united states and say you have publishers in different states like texas california missouri arkansas well you can group those publishers into different groups and you can look at your different group names here so here we could see canada and so we have our publishers grouped into a group called canada why because they’re based in canada makes sense so you want to be able to organize your publishers because the whole idea behind affiliate marketing cj is you want to be able to get the best publishers available for your network and so as you get more publishers for your network you’ll be able to basically start grouping them where it makes sense now the example i gave you is by geography you could do by geography or you could do by publisher status meaning my best performing publishers go into a group if they’re in a group then they get aligned with a certain program term so you could group your publishers any way you want by status meaning they’re selling more these are our best performing publishers or by region or you know by promotion i mean how you group your publishers is totally up to you however take advantage of the option to create publisher groups because the whole idea again i’m going to repeat it is you want to get publishers and you want to start building your base of publishers because the more publishers you have the more chance you are to sell your product remember if nobody clicks on your product then nobody’s going to buy your product so if you have publishers who are promoting your product for you then you have a good opportunity to sell it so the more publishers you have on board the better the opportunity so now once you have publishers you can start grouping these publishers accordingly to whatever makes sense as a business decision just know the options available in cj to group publishers now when you’re in cj and you’re starting out okay you want to start recruiting your publishers so you click on recruit and based on your settings based on what you’re selling cj is going to try and put you in front of some good publishers and so here we could see if we click on recruit we’re going to get a list of publishers and this search results list of publishers that we can recruit into our network are all listed here and you can actually see what’s interesting you can see the name of the publisher and you can see the url and then you can actually see if they’re a good performer or not so you could actually see their history as a publisher just by looking at their network earnings and then also looking at their seven day earnings per click or three month earnings per click and so if a publisher has a very high earnings per click epc then they’re probably a good publisher somebody you’re probably going to be interested in so if i see a publisher with you know three month earnings per click of 105 then that means hey if that’s my publisher i’m paying 105 or 106 over seven days you know they’re generating some clicks for me and they’re generating sales you can’t deliver commission if they don’t sell and so to me i want to be able to look at the seven three month earnings per click for these publishers and so i can just click on any one of these publishers here and get some more insight about that publisher right here in cj so here i can see the particular url the company some other urls that they have associated with them in cj i can see the category that they’re in again i can see the seven three month epc here you can see description okay you can see some other promotional methods that they’d use when promoting products and you get some permanent performance from this particular publisher just by pulling down the pull down menu here i’m going to look at this year and see what the performance and why i’m waiting for that to load i could see hey they’re also in other countries as well so i can get a good snapshot of a particular publisher by recruiting publishers seeing what their performance is over a period of time and potentially you know recruiting that publisher to be part of my network because if they’re part of my network then hey if they’re selling products if i’m selling products and i want my product on their site and they’re doing a good job of selling other products then i want them to be you know part of my ecosystem part of my network now remember cj’s doing the introducing here they’re introducing you to recruits so you want to be able to again take a look at the site does do any of the sites that a particular publisher has interest you you know again we can just click on it go to the specific site take a good look hey virgin atlantic okay do we want them selling our product maybe maybe not um so you want to take a look at the website make sure it’s not spammy make sure it aligns with your business goals it makes your aligns with your product your target audience remember a lot of things you want to make sure the website aligns with because they’re representing your brand okay very important here very important and so that’s what you want to be able to do and you could do all that just by looking at the publisher detail in cj and then again take a look at earnings per click if they’re selling products for other merchants and they’re doing a good job maybe you want them selling your product as well okay so you can also you know sort by country you can also do network earnings and you can really filter here so we want you know choose high network earners in a particular country a particular state you know we could definitely filter in on a particular type of publisher okay so you want to be able to hone in on somebody to align with your geography or you know definitely you want to align with somebody who’s a high network owner now when you get all your publishers set up you’re going to need to provide them with some good promotional materials some good banners um you know it could be text links some messaging okay so you’re the one who’s going to provide the publishers with you know the information they need now as a best practice remember you can get on the phone with these publishers have monthly calls or quarterly calls see what they need you know reach out to them via email or reach out to them via the cj platform figure out hey you know how’s your banners working for you do you need new banners so you want to be able to constantly you know push new content out and so if i click on links here and manage i’ll be able to see everything that i have available for my publishers to use okay and then you can actually look at banners that have actually produced for you in terms of epc or you know if it’s a specific promotion okay you could set that up here so you could be able to see it here you can see all the banners you can see some text links in here so all the you know advertising that you want these publishers to have is going to be situated under links and so you can see what the active ones are you can look at archived you can look at again text links content links or banners and as a best practice if i click on a banner as a best practice ideally what you want to do is use utm tracking okay so you want to have some type of tracking in place however cj does a lot of the tracking for you so they’re going to be able to tell you how many times a banner has been clicked and how many times a banner’s been seen okay they’ll also tell you more importantly not only was that banner click but did it generate a sale and so here i can see that i have three publishers using this particular banner i can see over this period of time 412 impressions meaning 412 people viewed the banner and i received one click on it so you can get some in-depth detail about your different marketing materials and how they’re performing okay you can also see what publishers are using them okay so the key here is you want to be able to communicate with your publishers give them the promotional material and that they need to promote your product now you could set up specifically you could set up a unique banner for a publisher or you could set up a banner for a group of publishers that’s where the group comes in so you have some options here and then as a best practice what i would try and do as you can see here is come up with different banner sizes so you can see here we got a 728 by 90. okay you got a 160 by 600 you got a 300 by 250 okay so you want to have different banner sizes and you also want to mix in some text um ads as well okay you want to be able to give your publishers some options in terms of what to use on their websites so that’s the whole idea because a publisher may not have space on the home page they may only have enough space for you know a text ad or a 300 by 250. so you want to be able to mix it up and then also mix up the messaging as well so you can have the same 300 250 banner but you can have different messaging just like you see here 300 by 250. got this messaging here and we got a different set of messaging with the same banner size so the more options you present for yourself the more of an opportunity you have for the publisher to use that messaging that banner that text ad on their website and then that gives you a better opportunity to get the click get the conversion that you seek out so that is links so you want to be able to continue to push out different banners and text ads now cj also has a great feature in here if you’re selling a lot of products you have a large inventory of products you could actually upload a product feed to cj so you can see in this example we don’t but if you did let’s just say you have a hundred products that you want to sell you can go ahead and upload that fee to cj and then the publisher will be able to use that entirety in its of the feed or pick and choose different products to use and sell so let’s jump over to reports and cj you have reports so this is really the bulk of where you want to be spending your time because you want to be able to you know not only recruit those publishers but after you recruit them you want to be able to see the performance how are things moving or are publishers moving product are they generating clicks are they selling your product so go no further than reports right here at the top navigation we’re going to click on performance reports and so we want to be able to see over a period of time you know are we selling our product and here you can see over the last 30 days you could see how much commission was paid out remember cj gets a fee they’re the broker okay so that’s part of the program terms okay so it’s based on program terms is selling okay what program term are they associated with cj gets their commission okay so you can see the total commission and then the sale amount okay so we could see how many sales were generated how many items were sold how many clicks were generated how many impressions so i can get a good sense here day by day over who’s selling who’s not selling and it’s all broken down at the very end to earnings per click so that’s my performance report so we want to be able to see over a period of time you know are we selling now i can go into detail if i click on transaction here from the pull down menu i can look at a specific order i can choose a specific publisher or website and i can get details about that specific order publisher website etc just be look by choosing transaction so i can get really granular about the data i see for a specific transaction that’s just by clicking reports transaction now you can also click on promo codes and if you’re running any promo codes for your publishers you’ll be able to see how many conversions those promo codes delivered and the set total sale amount over the last 30 days so building a network is all about recruiting the right publishers giving them the materials they need measuring the performance of the publishers and then communicating it’s just so key so cj has a nice message center built in so you can actually you know look at the messages you’re getting from your publishers and turn around and communicate with them so communicate seamlessly and efficiently right in cj here so i just clicked on mail and we can see the messages we have so you can also click on email campaigns and if you have any email campaigns that you want to run you can look at them right here in cj so cj offers up some email campaigns then we can see how many people we targeted you know how many people opened it and how many people joined in this case joined our network so here we have you know a breakdown of each of the email campaigns that we’ve run over a period of time and their status and how many people we’re targeting and opens deliveries etc so if you want to run an email campaign write in it’s available to you as part of the platform so if we move over from mail to placements we have an opportunity to place some promotional material on a publisher’s website and so here we could see a breakdown of different publishers who basically will offer up some promotional material that we can leverage okay so here you got this particular promotional placement it’s a one month placement and review page with your ad so we can actually you know take advantage of what publishers are offering up on their own website so the whole idea here is if it’s in a prime position on their website then we can take advantage of that so then what we want to be able to do is if we like what they’re offering up you can see hey this particular publisher saying hey i have a creative the placement is a home page banner or full page review provide an email with a copy of the ad that you’d like to be displayed and we’re going to email this person here so if we want to take advantage of a specific promotional placement on a publisher’s website then we can do that just by clicking on placements and we’ll be able to see who’s offering up what notice there’s a fee involved so it just gives you an opportunity to reward a publisher that’s performing well for you and if they turn around and offer you a better placement for a little bit more money it might be worth it so the whole idea is to take advantage of placements because if your product is in place properly then nobody’s gonna see it if nobody sees it then you know they’re not gonna click on it and then you’re not gonna get sales so that’s the whole idea here is take advantage of what publishers are offering up in terms of promotional opportunities so cj also has a pay-per-call click uh model as well pay model so basically your pay per performance is based on calls so basically the whole point here is a cj points out you want to promote more high ticket and consultative products and services you want to expand your reach and you want to get more qualified sales then you can offer up a pay per call and the beauty here is cj tracks the calls so you will be able to see the actual phone number and calls so instead of offering up say you know banner with a click you can offer up you know promotional number and have cj track the calls from the publisher and that just opens up another opportunity for you to give your publishers an option to have people call if they call then great you know it’s another way for somebody to get in touch and purchase the product so the pay-per-call method is available under cj as well so if we want to get more insights about how our program is performing we just click on the insights cj’s going to take us to this overview this dashboard if you will with some really good data based on a time frame okay so we’re comparing july through of july of 19 through july of 2018 we’re able to see revenue and commissions paid out and how many clicks average order value so there’s kind of an overview dashboard if you will about how our overall program is performing there are other similar tools and resources to include you know max bounty trade doubler amazon associates there’s plenty of networks out there you want to find a network where you’re gonna have affiliates that are gonna be passionate and gonna be relevant and have the prospective audience that you need to sell your product so do your due diligence on the number of different platforms out there and with that we have come to the end of this digital marketing full course for 2021 i hope it was informative and interesting if you have any questions about the topics covered in this video please ask away in the comment section below our team will help you solve your queries thanks for watching stay safe and keep learning hi there if you like this video subscribe to the simply learn youtube channel and 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By Amjad Izhar
Contact: amjad.izhar@gmail.com
https://amjadizhar.blog

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