Leads are the lifeblood of every business. You need a constant flow of high-quality prospects to make your sales team happy and regularly close more deals. Channels like social media, email, SEO and PPC all play a vital role.

In this post, we’ll go over the best tactics to generate leads via content marketing, social media marketing and email marketing.

TABLE OF CONTENTS: ↓

Content Marketing Lead Generation Tactics

Almost one third of Internet users will be using ad blockers — which means that almost one third of all ads won’t reach their target and these companies will lose a good chunk of revenue. So how can you avoid experiencing such a loss?

Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to attract and engage potential customers.

Content marketing is one type of inbound marketing, and inbound marketing leads tends to drive higher-quality leads. By creating and sharing valuable content, businesses can build trust and authority, establish a loyal audience and ultimately generate leads. And it’s effective for both B2C and B2B lead generation.

Consider this: Not only would 70% of people rather learn about products through content, but content marketing delivers a higher ROI than paid ads.

In this section, we will explore some of the best tactics to help generate leads via content marketing at a better ROI.

1) Write Content for Your Buyer Persona

A buyer persona is a detailed, research-based description of your target customer. It’s a simple document that lists everything from demographic information to hobbies, and from career history to family size — all written as if the persona were a real person.

71% of companies that exceed their revenue and lead goals have created buyer personas.

A buyer persona like the one below helps you get answers to critical questions like what are your customers’ pain points and, thus, what they need to solve them:

When you have such information at your fingertips, you can create more specific (i.e. better) content that will be much more efficient in generating qualified leads because people are more likely to give out their email if they feel that the content is crafted especially for them.

How do you create specific content for your different customer demographics? Think of it like a Q&A: Research which questions your customers are asking and then answer them in detail in your blog or video content. Here’s a detailed guide on how to create content for each stage of the marketing funnel.

Dive Deeper: The Ultimate Guide to Developing Buyer Personas (with Templates!)

2) Select Your Content Type Carefully

Once you’ve determined what you will write for your potential customers based on what they want (see #1 above), how do you know what type of content you need to create? It should be based on the targeted platform, buyer behavior and the buyer persona. Some examples of content types are:

• Infographics: Infographics generate 94% more clicks and 30x more leads. An infographic is a visual representation of information and while most people are familiar with the basic format, this is starting to change:

• Informational Content: This type of content focuses on educating your customers with your expertise. When you write on a topic specifically related to your business (i.e. on which you’re an authority) in the form of “How-to” guides, white papers and case studies, this is informational content.
• Video Content: Videos are great for keeping your viewers engaged: Video marketers get 66% more qualified leads per year, achieve a 54% increase in brand awareness, and have gotten new customers from a video on social media. You can put in optional email gates to your videos to start generating leads.

• Podcasts: Podcasts are a great way to share your expertise with your prospects in a format that is the easiest to consume. In 2019, 90 million people listened to a podcast on a monthly basis – a number that is expected to reach 132 million by 2022. Adding pre- and mid-rolls (CTAs) throughout your podcast will increase your chances of turning listeners into customers.

Keep in mind that the primary aim of the content format you choose must first match the customer’s or lead’s need, then must answer their questions and only then can it generate interest in your product or service. Otherwise it’s too salesy – in which case, why don’t you just invest in paid ads?

Dive Deeper: What’s the Right Content for Each Stage of the Marketing Funnel?

3) Create High-Value Lead Magnets

A lead magnet is an incentive that you offer to your potential customers in exchange for their email address or other personal information. Your free offering is typically downloadable content, like a PDF checklist or short, concise how-to article, a thorough PDF report with clickable links, an e-book or a white paper. It could also be access to a video, a webinar or a course.

Below are some of the best types of lead magnets that can help you generate leads for your business.

• PDF checklists: You can provide a handy and thorough list of tools or advice that people are desperately looking for. For example, Single Grain offers a free, downloadable 21-point on-page SEO checklist that we display in our SEO-related articles:

• E-books or free reports: People love to save and read e-books that go into more detail than a typical blog post. Offering a free report or e-book in exchange for an email is always a great strategy:

• Quizzes: Allow your visitors to play a free quiz but display the results only after they have entered their email address. This is another great way to grab leads in a way that makes it fun for them.
• Infographics: If your article is fact- or number-heavy, offer a lead magnet that is an infographic of all the key data. That way, your readers can download the infographic to conveniently refer to the information when needed.
• Free courses: This could be a one big webinar or a series of shorter videos explaining something that your users are most interested in learning. Use CTAs in your videos or in the landing pages to generate leads.
• Templates: Once you’ve explained to your reader how to do or create something, such as a buyer persona, don’t make them go away and have to create the buyer persona from scratch. Instead, offer a downloadable, interactive template that they can then use to put to use what they’ve just learned. Like this one below:

Get My Free Marketing Plan

4) Use Powerful CTAs in Your Blog

Calls to action (CTAs) are any kind of a link or button that prompts a reader or visitor to perform a desired action on your website, landing page, email, etc. A good CTA helps enormously to convert these visitors into leads and there are various types that you can use in your blog, such as:

• Subscribe CTA: This is one of the best ways to generate leads. Ask visitors to enter their email address if they want to receive regular updates from you. A “Subscribe” button gives people a reason to return to your blog by sending emails to them every time you publish a new one.

• Slide-in CTA: Slide-in CTAs are a great way to grab readers’ attention and offer additional information to them before they bounce off the page. Unlike static calls to action, they follow the reader as they scroll up and down the page.

• Get It Free: If you offer a free trial of your products, add a “Try for Free,” “Get It Free” or “Join Free for a Month” CTA to encourage people to try out a demo of your product. Once someone uses your demo product, not only will they be more likely to purchase the full product or service, but you will better understand their requirements and can thus propose the paid version of your product in a way that speaks to them directly.

• Social CTAs: Social media is the best way to keep your prospects engaged, and social CTAs allow your readers to easily follow you on your social channels. When they start liking what you post to social, they are more likely to become a lead.

No matter which CTA you use, just use one per page and make sure that it aligns with the page’s copy and intent in order to increase the click-through rate. Check out the below link to learn how to create compelling copy for your CTA button.

Dive Deeper: How to Create CTAs that Actually Cause Action

5) Leverage the Power of Paid and Organic Distribution Channels

Although organic channels of lead generation are cost effective, you shouldn’t ignore the power of paid channels. In order to reach the customer at every point in their buyer journey, paid channels play a crucial role.

When it comes to lead generation, both paid and organic distribution channels have their own benefits:

• Organic channels like SEO are great for lead generation in the long-term
• Paid channels can help you generate leads from the first day

At a minimum, you should be using these channels:

• Blog: Post valuable and relevant content on your blog regularly as this will help you rank for new keywords and increase the overall organic visitors on your website. (Learn more.)
• Guest Blog: Additionally, you can write guest posts on websites related to your industry to attract people who are already interested in your business. (Learn more.)
• Social Media: Interesting content is one of the top three reasons people follow brands on social media, so start posting engaging content on your social networks. (Learn more.)
• Paid Ads: Run PPC ad campaigns on Google, Bing, LinkedIn and Facebook to attract prospects looking for your products or services. (Learn more.)
• Retargeting: You can even retarget prospects who are interested in your business but are not actively looking to buy anything. (Learn more.)

6) Invest Time and Resources for Lead Nurturing

If you’re not nurturing your leads with the right content offers, the chances of them converting into sales decreases drastically. As per Marketo’s definition:

“Lead nurturing is the process of developing relationships with buyers at every stage of the sales funnel and through every step of the buyer’s journey. It focuses marketing and communication efforts on listening to the needs of prospects and providing the information and answers they need.”

A great way to foster better lead nurturing is to conduct surveys and use analytics tools such as Google Analytics or Kissmetrics to understand what your customers expect from you.

Study their online behavior and segment them into different groups based on their characteristics, needs and interests. Why is segmentation so crucial? Well, 74% of customers feel frustrated when website content is not personalized, and a further 59% say that personalization influences their shopping decision.

Source

After you have segmented your leads, curate personalized content for each of them to move them forward in your sales funnel. You can use email marketing to deliver personalized content or offers that benefits your customers.

You also need to respond to your prospect’s queries quickly. Companies that respond to a query within an hour of receiving it are nearly 7x as likely to qualify the lead as those that respond an hour later.

Get My Free Marketing Plan

Social Media Marketing Lead Generation Tactics

With billions of active users, social media platforms offer a vast pool of potential leads.

The stats on social media are not to be dismissed:

• There are 3.2 billion social media users worldwide, which is about 42% of the world’s population.
• Around 73% of marketers believe social media marketing has been effective for their business.
• Moreover, 71% of consumers who have had a positive experience with a brand on social media are likely to recommend the brand to their friends and families.

However, to effectively generate leads through social media, businesses need to adopt a strategic approach.

In this section, we will explore some impressive ways to generate leads via social media.

1) Organize Contests

Running contests on social media is an easy and fun way to increase engagement and brand awareness. When running contests on social, ask people to like, comment and share your content.

You can ask them to provide their email address as a way of gaining entry to the contest as they’re more likely to give their personal details when they think they might win something.

You can also run a tag-a-friend contest in which users need to tag their friends to be eligible to enter the contest. This will help you generate lots of leads in a short period of time.

Keep in mind, however, that the prize needs to be valuable enough that people will want to enter and encourage their friends to enter as well. If your winning prize is something they can easily get anyway or something that isn’t very useful or interesting, your contest just might backfire and you can kiss your high-quality leads goodbye.

2) Go Live or Host a Webinar

Figure out the pain points of your target audience and then host a live video on social media channels to address those problems and provide a solution.

In order to increase engagement, ask your viewers to type in their questions or problems and then respond to them in real time.

Both Facebook and YouTube offer live video facilities where you can add links to your website or your webinar to turn your viewers into leads:

You can also host a webinar on subjects that your prospects are most interested in. Start with advanced registration because this way you are more likely to get relevant leads.

3) Use Lead Generation Social Ads

Social media ads are not only great for improving brand awareness, but they can also help attract new leads. You only need to figure out which channel is right for your business.

Facebook lead ads make it easy for people to sign up and provide their information without leaving the platform. Once people click on your CTA, they’ll see a form that is pre-filled with their Facebook contact information (instead of redirecting them to your landing page), that is ready to submit:

Similarly, you can use Instagram and LinkedIn lead gen forms to acquire leads rather easily:

Dive Deeper:
* 7 Ways to Leverage AI in Social Media Marketing
* TikTok Marketing: How to Get Started with Ads on This Platform
* How to Boost Your Social Media Marketing Efforts with Content Marketing Tools

4) Leverage the Power of Social Listening Tools

Social listening simply means monitoring your brand’s mentions, customer feedback and discussions related to your industry or competitors on social media platforms.

Social listening tools give you the ability to gather information based on the overall sentiment and tone of conversations going on about your brand as well as your industry on social media. Here are some of the popular ones:

• Agorapulse
• Mention
• Brandwatch
• Awario

• TweetDeck

Source

With the help of social media listening tools, you can find your competitors’ at-risk customers and approach them with a better offer.

5) Pin a Post to Promote Your Contact Form

In order to acquire leads via your contact form, you can use the pin-a-post feature of Facebook, which leads to your contact form that might otherwise get lost in the crowd.

Go to the published post you’d like to pin to the top of your page. Click on the three dots at the top right corner, then select “Pin to Top of Page.” This will be the first thing on your Facebook page that visitors will see.

But remember that a pinned post stays at the top of your timeline for only 7 days, after which you’ll need to pin it again to bring it to the top.

Get My Free Marketing Plan

Email Marketing Lead Generation Tactics

No matter how many times people say that email marketing is going the way of the dinosaurs, it still remains a powerful tool for businesses to connect with their audience and drive conversions.

Email marketing is the most cost-effective ways to generate leads:

• Email marketing has an ROI of $40 for every $1 spent.
• The average email open rate for all industries is 19.7%

Moreover, 99% of people check their email at least once every day — and some as much as 20X a day — which means that, if done right, email marketing can be a game changer.

In this section, we will explore some of the best tips to start generating leads with email marketing:

1) Personalize Your Emails

Emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened.

Not everyone visits your website for the same reason. Segment your subscribers into different groups and create multiple email campaigns for each group. You can use your buyer personas to send highly targeted emails to your subscribers.

Check out this infographic from Post Funnel on the impact of personalization in email marketing:

There are various ways to personalize your emails, such as:

• Write an eye-catching subject line so it doesn’t sound like spam.
• Use the customer’s first name in your emails (the body as well as the subject line).
• Use automation to trigger emails when visitors perform certain actions on your site.
• Send your emails at a time when they are most likely to be opened:

• Praise your customers and use their names more than once in the email body.

In order to increase the chances of success, pair personalized emails with relevant landing pages.

Dive Deeper: How to Use Personalization to Increase the Impact of Email Marketing

2) Improve Your Subject Lines

Users click on an email only when they find the subject line interesting and valuable. In fact, 35% of marketing emails are opened based on the subject line alone.Even if you create an amazing email body, people won’t click it unless you write a compelling and eye-catching subject line.

CoSchedule says there are three points that make for a great subject line:

• Write short subject lines for mobile devices
• Communicate a clear benefit
• Use words that positively impact open rates

Check out how Rent the Runway, an apparel and accessory rental service, used the subject line “Don’t Buy It” to create curiosity among recipients and forced them to open the email:

Take time to craft your subject line that users can’t resist clicking (hint: think about what would make you, a seasoned marketer, curious enough to open an email). Let people know what’s in the email for them but don’t reveal everything. Here are some examples:

• Thanks for joining! Here’s what on sale.
• Avoid these lead generation mistakes.
• Get this before it’s gone (at midnight tonight!)
• Mastering YouTube Ads (New Course)

Creating a sense of urgency and scarcity in your subject line (all in a creative manner) can compel readers to take immediate action.

Dive Deeper: Top 10 Best Email Marketing Services

3) Use Verbs in Your CTAs

Using verbs in your CTA is important if you want your readers to perform certain actions. How? Because verbs force readers to think about the action and then when you couple it with a pronoun like “your,” it makes readers think about how their actions will benefit them.

For example, Flock, a team messenger and online collaboration platform, uses a verb (“Go”) and a personal pronoun (“Your”) in the CTA of its emails to give it a personal feel:

Some of the most effective verbs you can use in your CTA are:

• Get
• Start
• Stop
• Go
• Activate
• Try

When subscribers have an idea of what the exact action that needs to be taken is, they’re more likely to perform that action.

4) Present Your Complete Blog Post in an Email

Many marketers think sending complete blog posts in an email might reduce their blog traffic, but there’s a logic behind it.

When you send your complete blog post in an email, your readers are that much closer to conversion. This happens because you reduce one step, going from email to blog.

In order to get the most out of it, write a “how-to” blog post and support it with a relevant and compelling call-to-action button. The key is to ensure that it looks as slick as a blog post.

Have a look at how Webpage FX sends a full blog post via email:

Then they put the stand-out CTA at the bottom of the email directing the user to their service page instead of the blog post. An innovative approach!

Dive Deeper:
* The Types of Videos to Use at Each Stage of the Marketing Funnel
* 17 Engaging Video Content Types that People Love to Watch
* How to Make a Video That People Will Watch Til the End

5) Use Video in Your Emails

Using video in your emails can increase your click-through rate by 200-300%. Similarly, just by using the word “video” in your subject line, you can boost open rates by 19%. Videos help you create a deep connection with your viewers and, as a result, increase the likelihood of converting them into a lead.

Keep in mind that video email marketing doesn’t necessarily mean that your subscribers will be able to play the video without leaving their inbox. Because of spam and security reasons, embedded videos are not supported in email across most major email clients.

But you can link a video thumbnail image with a fake play button within an email to a landing page where the video is hosted.

Check out Brian Dean’s email that explains what viewers can expect in his video and then adds a fake play button to the thumbnail image. Clicking on the “play” button takes you directly to the video. This strategy works!

Get My Free Marketing Plan

Top Customer Acquisition Tactics to Get New Customers

The process of bringing in new clients is referred to as customer acquisition. With the right customer acquisition tactics, you won’t only attract new customers, you will also be able to retain existing ones.

Using the best lead generation tools will also help with customer acquisition for your lead generation strategy.

Let’s have a look at how you can acquire new customers using the latest customer acquisition techniques.

1) Update Your Older Blog Posts

Updating an old blog post requires less effort and time than creating new content from scratch.

Moreover, Google loves new content, which means that the chances of your older blog posts ranking at the top of the SERPs are higher when you update them.

Here are the most important elements that you can update in your older blog posts:

• Replace outdated information (facts, stats, links).
• Rewrite your title to signify freshness, like “updated for 2023”.
• Add more images and videos because this will help increase time on page.
• Add extra high-performing keywords that boost SEO.
• Add fresh internal links to your post to improve relevancy.
• Rewrite portions of the content to improve readability.
• Edit your URL and meta description.

Increasing the value of your old blog posts with updated info, research and formatting will give your content a much-needed lift.

Related Content:
* 7 Creative Ways to Make Your Blog Posts Stand Out
* How to Create Quality Blog Posts that Convert Customers

2) Try Ranking for New Keywords and Increase Rankings for Existing Keywords

Over time, the way people search has changed drastically. More and more searchers are using long-tail keywords or conversational phrases, particularly for voice search.

Research new keywords with a tool like Ubersuggest to determine high-performing long-tail keywords, and then create blog posts based on those keywords.

Similarly, you can check the rankings of your existing keywords via Ahrefs rank tracker and acquire links to pages that aren’t performing well:

You can also use a tool like Semrush to find high-performing keywords for which your competitors are ranking but you’re not.

Source

Dive Deeper: Why You Should Use Long-Tail Keywords in Your SEO Campaign

3) Use Marketing Automation for Better Personalization

Marketing automation drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity – and companies using automation enjoyed an average 12.2% reduction in marketing overheads. It helps you automate repetitive tasks and send personalized messages to prospects across multiple channels, as well as nurture and acquire new leads.

When someone opts in to receive emails from you, a marketing automation tool can send them a sequence of messages designed to increase their interest in your product.

Here’s an example of marketing automation:

Suppose ten visitors land on your e-commerce store and register themselves. The automation software triggers a set of emails to confirm the email IDs of the customers and welcome them. Five out of those ten customers visit the e-commerce store again after a day or two and add products to their cart. However, two of them leave without purchasing anything.

The automation software keeps an eye on the customers’ behavior and sends a different set of emails to the different customers, such as:

• An email containing special offers are sent to the five customers who never visited the site after registering.
• An abandoned cart email is sent to the two customers who have left part way through checkout.
• An order confirmation and product tracking ID email is sent to the three customers who have purchased products from the site.

This is how marketing automation software works. It identifies the lead, nurtures it and closes the sale all by itself without the need for any manual interference.

Dive Deeper: What Is Marketing Automation: Definition, Benefits & Uses

4) Master Website Inheritance

Website inheritance means buying a website and redirecting it to your main site to boost your SEO. This is one of the best growth hacks for SEO in which you can quickly increase your organic ranking for several keywords at once.

It’s also known as multiple domain strategy, and many large companies are able to dominate the SERPs with this tactic. For example, if you Google “real estate,” both Zillow and Trulia show up on the first page. But these are not two independent companies; Zillow owns Trulia.

All you need to do is to browse a list of available domains on sites like Flippa and acquire the ones that have the maximum traffic and links. You can then 301 redirect the acquired domain to your site.

5) Give Something Away for Free

Everyone loves free things, so why not give them what they want? It could be anything from a ten-minute free consultation or a discount coupon or an actual product. Make sure the freebie you’re offering adds value and is available instantly (as much as people love freebies, they hate waiting to get it!).

Here is a simple and easy example of Subway giving away a free sandwich coupon in exchange for your email address:

6) Upgrade Your Product Based on Customer Feedback

Market research that you conduct before launching your product gives you an idea of what your potential customers like. However, you can only learn about the flaws in your product after customers use it.

Customer feedback is a report card that tells you what is working well about your product and which areas need improving.

When you upgrade your product based on customer feedback, it makes them feel valued, like they contributed to your success. As a result, the chances of their becoming your loyal customers increases because they feel like they have more of a stake in your brand.

You can use tools like Client Heartbeat or GetFeedback to create surveys and measure customer feedback/satisfaction over time.

Dive Deeper: 5 Ways to Re-Engage Those Long-Lost Customers

7) Leverage Newsjacking

Taking advantage of current news stories or events to promote your brand is one of the most effective ways to grab your potential customers’ attention and convert them into a lead. This is called newsjacking.

Have a look at how KitKat leveraged the BendGate controversy (in which the iPhone 6 Plus would bend in people’s pockets) to promote its product in real time. They received a very good response with more than 28,000 retweets:

The exposure that’s possible with newsjacking is great for building brand awareness and acquiring new customers because when you create compelling and/or funny content to deliver your message within a popular story, viewers can’t help but share it on their own social networks.

Dive Deeper: How to Newsjack: A Guide for Content Marketers

8) Reach Out to Journalists Using HARO

HARO (Help A Reporter Out) is a free platform that connects journalists with experts. The biggest advantage of using HARO is that you may get featured on major digital publication sites such as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and more.

Once you’ve joined the platform as a source, journalists post requests for experts about certain topics, which you’ll receive by email. You can then send the pitch to the masked email address in the source request. If the journalist is interested after reading your pitch, they’ll reach out to you.

When people read about your business on the top digital publication sites, they’ll trust your brand even more. Trust generates a higher number of sales qualified leads and a better conversion rate.

9) Use Influencers to Improve Your Brand Value

A brief description of influencer marketing:

“Referrals have long since been one of the most effective marketing strategies. If you have a problem and one of your friends tells you about a great solution for it, there is a good chance that you’ll go buy it.

Influencer marketing is just like that – only at scale. Influencers have already built a loyal following of people who trust them. So when they tell their fans and followers about how great your product is, there is a much higher chance that their audience will convert, simply because they need the product and trust the influencer.”

Before you start working with influencers, do thorough research about the influencer’s followers. Do they reflect your business? Do the influencer’s followers list reflect your target audience? Is their engagement rate good? Also, decide your KPIs and work on the messages you want to convey to your target audience.

You can use tools like Buzzsumo or Upfluence to find relevant influencers for your business:

Source

Dive Deeper: Influencer Marketing Strategy: The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Business with Brand Partnerships

10) Share Your Expertise on Podcasts

Podcasts are one of the best ways to make a deeper personal connection with your audience or potential audience. Use long-tail keyword research tools such as Answer the Public to figure out questions and phrases that your target audience is searching for that could be used in the podcast.

Source

In order to generate leads from podcasts, use a CTA as you wrap up and make sure that it is related to the topic of the podcast.

To increase your podcast’s visibility and attract more potential customers, submit your podcast to relevant sites and directories, such as:

• Apple iTunes
• Google Play
• Spotify
• SoundCloud
• Stitcher
• Blubrry
• TuneIn

Dive Deeper: 10 Best Marketing Podcasts to Help You Grow Your Business

11) Optimize Your Website

Optimizing your website helps it rank for a higher number of keywords, thereby increasing organic traffic and conversions to the site. Things you can do to optimize your website to attract more customers include:

• Reducing the page load time.
• Optimizing your site for mobile.
• Optimizing your site for question keywords.
• Fixing broken links.
• Spreading keywords strategically across your website.
• Posting fresh content regularly.
• Developing new sitemaps for Google and Bing.
• Adding “Alt Text” to every image on your website.
• Using tools like Google Search Console to check how search engines view your website and fix the things that are harming your SEO.

Also, don’t let users wonder what the hell your company does or provides when they visit your website; make sure to display your tag line or mission statement prominently on the homepage.

Dive Deeper: 9 Effective SEO Techniques to Drive Organic Traffic

12) Measure What You Do

It’s important to measure everything you do to acquire new customers, as it will help you understand the areas where you excel and the areas where you need to improve.

Use a tool like Google Analytics or other alternatives to track track the total number of form submissions, clicks on your CTAs, e-book downloads or newsletter sign-ups.

Last but not least, calculate cost per lead (including cost-per-click and cost-per-acquisition) for every channel. This will help you identify the exact channels that are working for your business.

Dive Deeper: 9 Mission-Critical Lead Generation Metrics You Need To Track

Final Thoughts

Lead generation is a crucial aspect of any marketing strategy, and content, email and social media marketing offer numerous tactics to drive results. Generating highly qualified leads should not be tough, especially when you have a solid strategy in place.

By leveraging the lead generation strategies outlined in this guide, you can attract high-quality leads, nurture them into loyal customers, and ultimately grow your business.

Remember, lead generation is an ongoing process, so don’t forget to measure the performance of each channel to know what’s working best for your business and what’s not. You can then invest more time and effort into well-performing channels and eliminate the non-performing ones.

Hopefully you learned some practical lead generation tactics, but if you just want someone to do all the work for you, click the orange button below!

Get My Free Marketing Plan

The post Best Lead Generation Tactics for Content, Email & Social Media Marketing appeared first on Single Grain.

In the world of social media marketing, Facebook Groups are a powerful tool for building a community and promoting your brand.

After the Facebook algorithm update that de-prioritized brand content several years ago, these groups have become even more important for connecting with your followers.

However, growing a Facebook Group from scratch can be a daunting task, especially if you don’t have a budget for paid advertising. But fear not, because it’s absolutely possible to build a thriving group without spending a dollar!

Whether you’re a small business owner, a marketer or a community manager, these tips will help you increase your group’s visibility, engagement, and member base.

In this post, we’ll show you how to grow your Facebook Group from 0 to 10K members using proven strategies that don’t require any money.

TABLE OF CONTENTS: ↓

What Is a Facebook Group and How Is It Different from a Page?

A Facebook Group is a place where a community can come together to engage on a shared interest, whether that’s a cause, an issue or an activity. They’re not the same as Facebook Pages, aka business pages, which were designed to be the official Facebook presence for brands, business or celebrities.

As an example, let’s say you’re a fan of the Netflix show Squid Games. If you want to keep up to date with the latest information about the show, you’d connect with the official Facebook Page:

Alternatively, you could join a Squid Game Facebook Group – such as this one – to chat about what’s happening on the show with fellow fans.

There’s one other key difference. Whereas Pages are automatically public, meaning that anyone can see them, Groups can be set up in one of three ways:

• Publicly Available: Anyone can join
• Administrator Approval: The Facebook Group admin reviews applications to join and decides whether or not to approve them
• Private Group: Group membership is by invitation only

Get My Free Marketing Plan

What’s the Big Deal About Facebook Groups?

You might already be posting regularly across LinkedIn and other social networks, alongside a host of paid and organic search activity. So what’s so special about Facebook Groups? Why should you be paying attention?

Practically speaking, they’ve become a necessity for brands on Facebook since the site tweaked its algorithm at the start of 2018 to promote more posts from family and friends and less commercial content. This move limited the reach of organic posts from businesses, forcing them to choose between investing more money in Facebook Ads or building a vibrant Group to continue reaching their target audience on the platform.

Brands that chose the Facebook Groups approach have seen real success:

Groups generate far better engagement than fan pages and can create an active community centered around your products or services.

It seems that users like them, too. If you’re anything like me, you’ll regularly interact with half a dozen or so Facebook Group for exclusive content or just a feeling of community with the other members of the group. They can be professionally focused, hyper-locational, service-based or related to your hobbies and interests.

And the numbers back up my experiences:

• More than 1.8 billion people use Facebook Groups every month.
• There are more than 70 million admins and moderators running active Facebook Groups.
• More than half of all users are in five or more Groups.
• The median number for Groups ranges from 25 to 100 people (in this particular survey).

Fun fact: In 2018, Zuckerberg said he wanted to see the number of users in these Groups climb to one billion by 2024. He reached that goal more than one year early!

Dive Deeper: 12 High-Performing Facebook Group Engagement Tactics

Use Your Facebook Group to Quickly Grow Your Email List

Before we get into how to grow your Facebook Group from 0 to 10K members without spending any money, here’s an underused hack you’ll want to know:

Facebook Groups are one of the best ways to build an email list.

That’s because Facebook allows you to set up new membership questions:

Basically, you can ask folks any number of questions when they first join your group. Including this magic question:

If you’d like to join our email newsletter to stay in the loop, what’s your email address? We’ll send you occasional, educational content on [group topic].

You’ll find that a portion of new members will happily give your email list a try.To set this up, you can use software like Group Collector to automatically sync emails from your Facebook Group into your email marketing platform.

Powerful, right?

Dive Deeper: Moosend Review: Is This the Best Email Marketing Tool for Beginners?

Facebook Group Case Studies

Now that you know why Facebook Groups are so powerful, let’s take a look at how two brands leveraged their Groups to drive impressive growth.

Case Study: Condé Nast Traveler

Luxury lifestyle and travel magazine Condé Nast Traveler raised a few eyebrows when it launched a secret Group (aka “closed” Group, which has more privacy options) called Women Who Travel:

Rather than chasing followers with giveaways and competitions, the magazine’s Group encouraged users to apply for membership by explaining why the Group matters to them.

It worked. Within a year, the Group grew to more than 50,000 members, three-quarters of whom actively engaged with it on a monthly basis (at time of writing, it’s grown further still and currently has over 155.8K members).

Since then, Condé Nast has launched Facebook Groups for a further eight of its brands, including The New Yorker, Teen Vogue and Vanity Fair.

Dive Deeper: How to Write a Case Study that Converts Prospective Buyers into Customers

Case Study: Bannersnack

Digital graphics service Bannersnack created a Facebook Group to connect with its clients, build a community for sharing work and receiving feedback, and offer exclusive insider news and early access to new products to its members.

The brand used a diverse range of tactics to grow its Group, including using Facebook Messenger to invite people who had already engaged with the brand, and promoting the Group through email newsletters like this one:

The company’s efforts paid off, resulting in a 400% increase in members and boosting engagement with the group by 350%.

Get My Free Marketing Plan

Considerations Before Starting a Facebook Group

If you’re convinced that a Facebook Group can play a vital part in your brand’s social strategy, there are a few key things to consider before you launch.

What Does Facebook Group “Success” Look Like for You?

It might sound like an obvious question, but it’s often overlooked: Ask yourself why you want to launch and grow a Facebook Group.

Presumably, the real reason isn’t simply to acquire a few thousand followers. More likely, the end goal for all your marketing efforts is to drive sales or generate leads. If that’s the case, it needs to be reflected in your Group’s Facebook posts, whether that’s through exclusive offers, previews of upcoming product releases or video tutorials demonstrating how your product or service works.

Whatever your ultimate goal, you need to have some way of measuring your performance. Do this by setting actionable KPIs using the “SMART” methodology:

A good example of a KPI could be: “Increase clicks to our website from our Facebook Group by 15% over the next quarter.”

Dive Deeper: 30 Winning Facebook Ads and Why They’re so Effective

Do You Have the Time and Resources to Manage a Facebook Group?

As with any organic marketing tactic, Facebook Groups don’t just blossom overnight. You need to put the effort in to make your Group a success and give users a reason to sign up (generally because they can’t find this elsewhere).

If you don’t have the time or resources to commit to your Facebook Group, you can’t expect to build a strong, engaged community on the platform.

But don’t ever outsource Facebook Group management, at least until you’ve set a Group tone. Your Group is an intimate setting where you’re facilitating conversation, so it should be run by someone who knows your brand inside and out.

How Do I Set Facebook Group Rules?

The best Groups have clear guidelines in place about how they operate. This sets user expectations from the moment they join and keeps things running smoothly (as long as Group admins enforce them).

Again, this might sound obvious, but I’ve seen plenty of Groups that don’t do this – and they rarely work as well as those that do.

Creating rules for your Group is simple if you follow these steps:

1. From your News Feed, click Groups in the left menu and select your group. If you don’t see Groups, click See more.
2. Click Group Rules in the left menu.
3. Click Get Started then click to add from the example rules or write your own.
4. Click Create.
5. To adjust the order in which group rules appear, click the icon with the 6 gray dots and drag and drop the rules into the order you’d like.

So what should your rules look like? The guidelines you’ll want to put in place will obviously depend on your brand and audience, but as a helpful starting point, here are the kinds of things you should include:

• Group description: An in-depth explanation of the Group’s background.
• Group goals: Your goals for the community, such as promoting group chats about a certain topic.

• Group privacy: A clear explanation of what sort of activity is considered “spam” or disrespectful to other members, and the actions you’ll take to police it. This is important to maintain the safety and comfort of all members.
• Group resources: A rundown of resources available to Group members, such as videos or guides, and how to find them.
• Group names: A list of all current admins, plus details of their authority level.

Once you’ve created your rules, save them in a Facebook document and make this your pinned post, so that they’ll appear at the top of the Group at all times.

You’ll also need to dedicate the time to enforce your rules. If you can’t commit the time yourself, you’re either going to need to bring on moderators (volunteer or paid) or invest in a different marketing tactic.

Facebook Group Do’s and Don’ts

Over the past few years, I’ve been a part of dozens of Facebook Groups, and I’ve picked up plenty of insights along the way about what to do and what to definitely not do when running one:

Do:

• Offer your members valuable content and targeted offers
• Interact with your members and ask questions
• Ask your most dedicated fans for help in growing the Group
• Set clear rules (including privacy settings) so your members know what to expect
• Send links to the Group to Facebook users you think would be interested
• Create a strong theme to the content you post
• Upload an engaging cover photo that immediately illustrates what your Group is about

Don’t:

• Spam members with constant discount codes
• Post dozens of times a day (you’ll risk driving members to switch off their Group notifications)
• Overstretch by trying to handle all the admin yourself
• Allow regular rule-breakers to spoil the Group for everyone else
• Add people to a Group they know nothing about (or encourage others to do so)
• Veer off topic and latch onto irrelevant trends

Once you’ve got the basics down, you’re in a great position to shift your focus towards increasing your membership. Follow these tips, and there’s no reason you won’t be able to grow your Group to thousands of members without having to spend a single dollar.

Think you might just want someone to do all the hard work for you? Check out:
The Absolute 20 Best Marketing Agencies in 2023 👈

How to Grow Your Facebook Group

So you’ve put in the hard work. You’ve figured out what you’re trying to achieve, you’ve got the time and resources to make it happen, and you’ve drawn up a clear set of guidelines.

Now for the fun part – launching your Group.

Give People a Compelling Reason to Join

“If you build it, they will come” might work for baseball diamonds, but it definitely doesn’t work for Facebook Groups. You can’t expect people to sign up just because it’s there.

Fortunately, there are a few ways to create a compelling reason for users to join:

• Use the “About” section – found at the top left of the Group page – to explain exactly what makes your Group so great. Detail the Group’s purpose, the sort of Group posts they can expect to see, and the kind of experience that users can expect. You’ve only got 3,000 characters to play with, so use them wisely.
• Give users an incentive to sign up. I’m not saying you have to give away a discount code or free shipping the second they join, but you should outline your value proposition. Let them know if you run weekly giveaways, competitions and promotions that are exclusive to Group members, for example, or promise to give them the first look at your upcoming product launches. Give them a feel for the variety of content they’ll be able to find in your Group, including resources like lead magnets, scripts and templates.
• Pick an engaging theme for your Group – something that people will want to talk about with other like-minded people. Take a leaf out of social media maven Sunny Lenarduzzi’s book; she has more than a dozen Groups, but significantly, not one of them is about her. Instead, they’re based around topics that are relevant and interesting to her audience. Unless you already have a huge, engaged social following – think Nike or Tesla – people probably won’t want to join a Group solely to discuss you or your business.

Inform Your Existing Audience

Unless you’re a completely new brand, you’ll already have some sort of audience, whether that includes visitors to your website, previous and prospective customers, subscribers to your newsletter or readers of your blog.

Let them know that your Facebook Group exists:

• Mention it in email blasts, as in the case study I showed you earlier from Bannersnatch
• Reference it on your website and personal Facebook account and provide a link to the Group
• Drop CTAs into your blog posts (for example, “Like what you read? Be the first to know about our latest guides by joining our Facebook Group.”)
• Use exit pop-ups to drive users toward your Group

Get in Front of New Audiences

While there’s certainly value in building a tight-knit community of people who are long-time followers of your brand, chances are you’ll also want to attract users who aren’t so familiar with you.

When it comes to getting in front of new audiences, ads can be effective, but if you don’t want (or lack the budget) to run paid activity, you’ll need to get a bit creative. Here are a couple of my favorite tried-and-trusted ways to amplify Facebook Groups:

• Guest blogging: Reach out to a website owner with a relevant audience and offer to write about a topic that would interest them, in return for mentioning (and, ideally, linking to) your Group.
• Offer yourself up as an interviewee: Ask people to interview you (or some other figurehead for your business) on their blog or podcast. You don’t need to be a big name. You just have to have something interesting to say. Just be sure to mention your Facebook Group.
• Create webinar content for Group members: Offer your members exclusive access to a webinar. Promote it outside the Group – in your newsletters and via your other social profiles – to get the word out. For bonus amplification, get a co-presenter onboard and ask them to promote it to their audience, too.
• Reach out to influencers: Identify people with large, engaged followings who operate in the same space as you and ask them to promote your Group. While you’ll almost certainly need to give them a reason to do so, this doesn’t necessarily mean paying them. If your content is high-quality and genuinely unique, there’s a much better chance that influencers will be prepared to recommend you.

Both of these approaches can be really effective, but there are no guarantees that people will say “yes.” If you ask 100 people to guest post or interview for them, maybe only five or ten will agree. Don’t take it personally. Instead, keep going. Eventually, the numbers will pay off for you.

Dive Deeper: Live Streaming Videos: The Most Powerful Way to Share Content

Take Advantage of Live Streaming to Drive Visibility

Creating video is more likely to get your Page noticed organically, which in turn gives you the opportunity to promote your Group without having to shell out any cash. That said, not all video is created equal: People watch live video 3x longer compared to videos that aren’t live.

In short, you should be using video to get in front of more users, generate more engagement and encourage people to join your Group. People are often intimidated at the thought of creating Facebook video content, but it’s really pretty simple thanks to the site’s Live and Watch Party features.

Facebook Live

As its name suggests (and as you probably already know), Facebook Live allows you to broadcast live video to a Group or Page. Seeing as we’re trying to grow your Group, you’ll want to go live from your Page.

Struggling for a topic for your video? Draw inspiration from the news and trends affecting your audience.

Let’s say you’re running a marketing agency. Create a video to cover your reaction to a big development in the industry, such as an algorithm update by Google or the launch of a new feature by Facebook. If it makes for a good blog topic, chances are it’ll make for a good video.

Write down some talking points, do a couple of rehearsals and give it a go. I’ve found it’s often easier (and less intimidating) if you stage the video as a discussion with a colleague or a fellow expert.

To go live from a phone or tablet, just follow these simple steps:

Whatever topic you choose, remember to mention your Group and encourage viewers to join for exclusive video content (and more). Which brings us to Watch Parties…

Dive Deeper: Quick Tips to Optimize Your Facebook & Instagram Live Broadcasts

Watch Party

Watch Party was introduced as a means to bring people together and create conversations around video. Interestingly, during the testing phase, the social network found that some Watch Party sessions ran for more than ten hours, with viewers dropping in and out throughout the day:

Since its launch, Watch Party has been rolled out to all Page and profile types on Facebook. So while it was already an invaluable way to keep your Group engaged, it’s also become a go-to tool for growing your membership.

The idea of connecting with large audiences through video on Facebook is nothing new. But a crucial stumbling block has been the struggle to reach enough users and make it simple for them to interact while watching.

Watch Party attempts to solve this problem by introducing scheduling, invites and notifications, making it easier for video hosts to motivate their audience. It seems to be working: Watch Parties generate 8x more comments than non-live videos.

Plenty of brands have been taking advantage. The WWE, for example, uses Watch Parties to engage its international audience by re-airing episodes of its Mixed Match Challenge show. Buzzfeed raised awareness of the latest season of its Worth It series by hosting binge-watching parties of previous seasons:

To create your own Watch Party from your News Feed, follow these steps:

1. From your News Feed or timeline, click Make Post.
2. Click the Watch Party option.
3. From the Add Video menu, search for a video.
4. You can also browse through For You, Watched, Live, Saved, and My videos.
5. You also click Add to Queue next to any video to add it to your queue.
6. Once you pick a video, add a description for your Watch Party post, then click Post.
7. You’ll see a message that says “Your Watch Party Is About To Begin.”
8. Once your Watch Party starts, you can add friends to watch with you.

Once the party begins, you’ll be able to add additional videos to the queue, invite more people and interact with your audience. When you want to wind things up, just click “End Watch Party.”

Use SEO to Drive Traffic from Search to Your Facebook Group as a Lead Magnet

SEO is another powerful tool when it comes to growing your Facebook group. By optimizing your website to rank for certain related keywords, you can capture that traffic and redirect it to your Facebook group.

For example, if you run a paleo Facebook group, work on ranking for “paleo diet recipes” on Google. Then use a pop-up on your website landing page to direct those blog visitors to your related Facebook group.

Dive Deeper:
* 17 Effective SEO Techniques to Drive Organic Traffic in 2023
* How to Rank Your Brand-New Website When You Don’t Know SEO
* Facebook Messenger Chatbots: The Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Massive Results

Turn Your First 500 Members into Group Evangelists

Once your Facebook Group gets to a certain size, growing it further becomes less about your own direct actions, and more about evangelizing your existing audience by making them feel like a key part of your journey.

Remember: the larger your Group, the greater potential it has to grow quickly. Just don’t be afraid to ask your members for a little help.

Use Other Groups for Cross Promotion

Ask your members who else should be in the Group, and incentivize them to bring in new members by offering them a free e-book, a place on an exclusive webinar or even some type of promo code. This can be particularly effective when your members are in other relevant Groups, providing them with an easy platform to promote your own Group.

A word of caution here, though: While some Group admins will be more than happy for you to engage in a bit of cross-promotion, others will frown on it and might even kick you out. They’re well within their rights to do this; it’s their Group and their rules.

Do what I do: reach out to admins before you try to coax their members into your Group. Good manners cost nothing. Ask really nicely and admins might even be willing to pin your promotional post for a day or so, guaranteeing you plenty of visibility.

Spread the Word Through Social

While your potential members obviously have Facebook profiles, chances are they’ll also be active on other social platforms, too. Encourage your existing members to link to your Group on other (relevant) social networks, whether that be Instagram, Quora, Reddit, Tumblr or Twitter.

As with the previous step, you might want to incentivize them for doing this. But if your Group is genuinely useful, funny or interesting (or even all three), it should simply make sense for members to reference it in their conversations on other platforms. Say your Group is dedicated to curating the best Indian food recipes; why wouldn’t your members want to link to it if they come across a similar discussion on a different site?

Dive Deeper: 17 Engaging Video Content Types that People Love to Watch

Last Word on Growing from 0 to 10,000 Members

Growing a Facebook Group with a zero-dollar budget might seem intimidating, but all it takes is time, patience and a little effort (plus some help from your earliest members).

To summarize, here are the five steps you should be following to take your Facebook Group from 0-10,000 members without spending a single cent:

• Come up with a compelling theme for your Group – something that people will want to discuss and that you can offer genuine expertise on.
• Give people a reason to join. Tell potential members about the fantastic content you create and the exclusive giveaways and offers you run.
• Let your existing audience know that the Group exists, and encourage them to join – people who already follow your Facebook Page, read your blogs or watch your videos.
• Get in front of new audiences through guest blogging, influencer outreach, interviews and podcasts.
• Evangelize “early adopters” of your Group to bring in new members.

Follow these steps, iterate as necessary and watch your Group subscriber count grow!

If you just want someone to do all the hard work for you, click the orange button below to discuss your needs with one of our team members! 👇

Get My Free Marketing Plan

The post How to Grow Your Facebook Group from 0 to 10K Members Without Spending a Dollar appeared first on Single Grain.

What was known as the E-A-T principle is now E-E-A-T, which stands for Experience (there’s your new E), Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.

The recent Phantom update exemplifies the importance of E-E-A-T – especially first-hand experience – for content creators, which is now a more important than ever factor for ranking higher in SERPs.

In this post, we’ll discuss what you need to know about E-E-A-T and how to use it to improve your SEO and rank your content better.

Get My Free Marketing Plan

What Is the Phantom Update?

Before we dive in, let’s review Google’s Phantom update.

The 2015 Phantom Update got its name because at first Google would not admit that it happened. They buried their head in the sand and didn’t acknowledge the changes in their search algorithm.

But since then, Gary Illyes, a Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, has stated that “Phantom” updates simply mean a broad change to Google’s entire ranking algorithm:

Shortly after the first Phantom Update was released, a copy of the Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines got leaked, and they responded by releasing the whole document in November of 2015.

The document explained that besides evaluating user experience and penalizing sites for excessive pagination and annoying pop-up ads, Google is also looking at who wrote the web content.

In other words, they want to know: Does the writer of each piece of content actually know what they’re talking about?

That’s where the E-E-A-T principle comes into play.

Related Content: What Is the Google BERT Search Algorithm Update?

What Is the Google E-E-A-T Principle?

The E-E-A-T model is the upgraded version of what was previously known as (and is sometimes still called) E.A.T. The change happened in December of 2022, along with a few other smaller updates in Google’s Searcher Quality Ratings Guidelines.

The E-E-A-T concept essentially assesses how trustworthy a particular article may be, based on a few different factors. It evaluates the website itself that published the article, along with the authority of the individual writer.

This is what E-E-A-T stands for:

• Experience. This assesses whether or not the author has personal experience with the topic at hand. Examples may be using the product being discussed or working in the field of the topic. It’s clear that there are plenty of “best of” curated product reviews that the author has never actually tested themselves, making them near pointless to read.
• Expertise. Does the content creator have the necessary knowledge or skill for that topic? As Google puts it, “different topics require different levels and types of expertise to be trustworthy.” I’d much rather get advice on insect bites from an actual doctor than from my grandmother, who swore up and down that putting nail polish on tick bites would heal them quickly.
• Authoritativeness. To what extent is the content creator or the website known as a go-to source for the topic being discussed? High-quality authors who create strong content with plenty of references in one subject over time gain authoritativeness. Most topics on a site with .gov in the website address, for example, will take precedence over third-party sources.
• Trustworthiness. Trust is the most important element here, and it determines how honest, safe, reliable and accurate a specific page is. For instance, having secure payment systems, trust badges, honest customer reviews, and accurate informational pages are crucial here.

Why Does E-E-A-T Matter for Users?

E-E-A-T is not just some abstract Google algorithm, it’s huge for the user experience. The better the user experience is, the more they’ll come to trust the results they find in the SERPs. Win-win for everyone: Users, brands and Google.

The reality is that people make huge life, health and purchasing decisions based on what they find on Google. So they want to know that the articles appearing on the first page of the search engine will be reliable and trustworthy and actually give them the information they need.

Suppose you’re reading an article about how to plan for retirement. In that case, you’d prefer the material to be written by a fiduciary with a financial background and not just a freelance writer getting paid $.05 a word who doesn’t even know what the word “fiduciary” means. Even worse, it could be written by a scam company that tricks people into “investing” with them and then just taking their money.

The point is: If people don’t trust that the top information in the SERPs is accurate, thorough and written by an expert, Google will have a huge problem. That’s why E-E-A-T is crucial for both users and Google.

Learn More: Google’s Search Quality Rater’s Guidelines: Here’s How to Ensure Your Site Gets a High Quality Rating! [infographic]

What’s Different Between Google E-E-A-T and E-A-T?

The biggest and most obvious difference between E-A-T and the newer E-E-A-T is the addition of the extra “E.”

The new E stands for “experience,” which works to assess how much first-hand experience the author actually has.

It’s common, for example, for well-established sites to have curated lists of “best” products in a niche, everything from The Best Bath Pillows in 2023 to The Best Project Management Tools You Need in Your Tech Stack.

Many of the posts, however, clearly say “other reviews mention” and indicate that they’ve never even tried the products themselves:

These posts are going to be inferior to reviews that come from brands like America’s Test Kitchen, where experts actually put different products in a category to the test:

The other highlight is the emphasis on “trust” as the most important part of this model:

As Google puts it:

“The most important member at the center of the E-E-A-T family is Trust… because untrustworthy pages have low E-E-A-T no matter how Experienced, Expert or Authoritative the content may seem. For example, a financial scam is untrustworthy, even if the content creator is highly experienced and an expert scammer who is considered the go-to source for scams.”

Google’s guidelines have details about how they evaluate the reputation of websites and content creators, including what it means for content to be considered as “harmful.”

You can see these in the examples of low quality pages below:

Get My Free Marketing Plan

How to Succeed with Google E-E-A-T

Want to rank higher in the SERPs? Then you need to be factoring E-E-A-T into your content creation process.

Most brands that are dedicated to publishing high-quality content do this already. They’re either creating quality, trustworthy resources themselves or working with expert writers who are already established in the particular niche.

In addition to that, there are also a few specific steps you can take to improve your E-E-A-T performance. Let’s take a look at each.

1) Publish Content in Your Area of Expertise (Especially if You’re a YMYL Site)

The first step to becoming an expert is to write in your area and level of expertise.

But what makes you an expert? Will Google actually check Harvard files to verify that you’re a professional lawyer before rewarding your content with page one rankings?

Not necessarily. Google explains in their General Guidelines handbook the difference between “sharing of life experience” and “advice best left to experts”:

This category of content is referred to as YMYL topics (Your Money or Your Life), and includes::

• News and current events: News about important topics such as international events, business, politics, science, technology, etc. Keep in mind that not all news articles are necessarily considered YMYL (e.g., sports, entertainment, and everyday lifestyle topics are generally not YMYL). Please use your judgment and knowledge of your locale.
• Civics, government, and law: Information important to maintaining an informed citizenry, such as information about voting, government agencies, public institutions, social services, and legal issues (e.g., divorce, child custody, adoption, creating a will, etc.).
• Finance: Financial advice or information regarding investments, taxes, retirement planning, personal loans, banking, or insurance, particularly webpages that allow people to make purchases or transfer money online.
• Shopping: Information about or services related to research or purchase of goods/services, particularly webpages that allow people to make purchases online.
• Health and safety: Advice or information about medical issues, drugs, hospitals, emergency preparedness, how dangerous an activity is, etc.
• Groups of people: Information about or claims related to groups of people, including but not limited to those grouped on the basis of race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender or gender identity.
• Other: There are many other topics related to big decisions or important aspects of people’s lives which thus may be considered YMYL, such as fitness and nutrition, housing information, choosing a college, finding a job, etc. Please use your judgment.

Take a look at Intercom, for example. They’re a customer messaging platform and regularly publish in-depth content on that topic on their blog:

Google is much more likely to view Intercom as an expert in their industry because of this content. And—you guessed it—Intercom is rewarded for their authoritative content with over 185K visitors arriving to their site each month from organic search:

How to Prove You’re a Subject Expert

So, how do you create content that proves to Google you’re a subject matter expert?

You’ll need to check these 5 things off your content to-do list:

• Details: Your content should provide detailed information—even if it’s brief. It should include all the steps necessary to complete a do-it-yourself task, for example. A partial or “fluff” list will earn a lower ranking. (Just Google “how to…” to see for yourself.)
• Value: An article must contain information of value—whether that’s news, a new development or comprehensive explanations or instructions.
• Well written: Content being published to your website should be engaging and well articulated, and the author should have an excellent grasp of their language.
• Well edited: All content on your site should be free of typos, misspellings, misused words and punctuation errors. All these things hurt the authority of the content as well as the website and should be avoided—even if that means hiring an editor and/or proofreader for your content creation department.
• Good user experience: The person arriving on your site shouldn’t be assaulted with ads or pop-ups, and articles shouldn’t be excessively spread out. (For example: “30 Things You Didn’t Know about Hollywood. You Won’t Believe Number Seven!” and then spread the content out over 30 pages to force the reader to click “next” over and over.)

It’s worth evaluating your site’s Domain Rating, citation flow, and trust flow using tools like Ahrefs and Majestic as you do this. Track these as your attempts to create authoritative content continue, and watch your SEO metrics skyrocket when Google begins to view you as an expert.

Learn More:
* Absolutely Everything You Need to Know About 10x Content
* 6 Tips for Scaling Up Content Production without Sacrificing Quality
* The Skyscraper Technique: How to Build High-Quality Backlinks to Your Content

2) Invite Authoritative Guest Bloggers to Contribute to Your Website

Just because you don’t have time to write things, or you’re not the most experienced person in your industry, doesn’t mean you can’t still publish expert content by experienced writers.

It’s called guest posting.

You can open up your website to external contributors to help build your library of authoritative content. Freelance writers, guest bloggers and other experts might be happy to write a high-quality piece of content in return for a backlink. And having their name, which is already respected in the industry (and by Google) attached to your website could be the perfect starting point.

For example: Here on the Single Grain blog, we need to persuade Google that we’re experts in digital marketing if we’re to improve our search ranking factor for marketing-related topics.

So instead of creating all our content using in-house resources, we open our blog to guest bloggers who are experts in the same industry—like this post on quick SEO tactics by Backlinko’s Brian Dean:

In return, Google sees an already-established marketing pro associate themselves with our website. Therefore, some of Brian’s reputation passes onto ours, and Google begins to believe that Single Grain is a website run by marketing experts. (Which, spoiler alert: We are!)

To do this for your own website, simply put together a “Write for Us” page that details how an expert can get in touch with you, like ours:

Or use a tool like Emplifi (formerly Social Bakers) to find experts in your industry, and ask whether they’d be interested in writing a post for your website. You might have to give a few contextual backlinks in return, but it’s a sweet deal for the authoritative content with which you’ll impress Google.

Learn More: The Power of Guest Blogging (And How to Get Started!)

3) Create a Strong, Authoritative Bio Page on Your Site

You work hard to make your website appear credible to Google. You’re inviting guest bloggers to contribute and hitting the “publish” button on blog posts you’re truly proud to have written.

There’s one more thing you need to do to cater to E-E-A-T guidelines: Create author biography pages that tie your blog posts to a real person.

Remember how we mentioned earlier that Google looks at the expertise and first-hand experience of the person behind each blog post? The author bio page is a simple way to showcase this expertise.

Just write a small blurb about the author, including special (relevant) information like:

• Their qualifications
• Their awards
• The college where they studied your industry
• Their job title
• The company for which they work

Take a look at the author bio for one of our freelance writers, Ana Gotter. She is an “expert business writer,” a “regular contributor” at well-known websites and she has “multiple marketing certifications.” There’s also a link to her site for more info:

The best part? Some WordPress theme settings automatically create author bio pages for every author on your website. All you need to do is head into the page, write a short description about the person behind your content, and allow Google to crawl it.

Get My Free Marketing Plan

4) Contribute Guest Posts on Industry Websites with Your Author Bio

Following on from guest blogging, you should start spreading your eggs (i.e. content) across multiple baskets (i.e. websites) to really prove to Google that you’re an author who knows what they’re talking about.

Google looks at the author of each page, so along with making your website more credible, your personal name needs to have a strong connection to your topic, too.

If you haven’t already, find websites in your industry that are open to guest posts using one of these search queries:

• [INDUSTRY] + “write for us”
• [INDUSTRY] + “contribute”
• [INDUSTRY] + “submit”
• [INDUSTRY] + “guest post”

Then, plug the domains you find into an SEO tool like Ahrefs or Moz Link Explorer to judge whether the site is already well-respected by Google.

I’d advise aiming for sites with a DR or DA of over 40:

Carefully follow the guidelines that each of these “write for us” pages includes, and work with the editors to create a highly authoritative, detailed piece about a topic in your industry.

Oh, there’s just one more thing to remember when guest blogging:

Make sure you get a byline (your name) as opposed to “Guest Writer” or under an in-house writer’s bio—preferably with a link back to your site.

Do this a few times each month and Google will start to view your name as an expert in your industry. Then start to branch further afield and position your name on sites like:

• SlideShare to publish and promote your presentations
• Medium to publish and distribute your own articles, as well as curate others’ articles
• Contently, an “industry leader in creating, distributing and optimizing content,” that curates your content for you
• Amazon or Goodreads if you’re an author, which lists your publications and reader reviews

Learn More:
* How to Establish Yourself as a Reputable Freelance Writer
* My Site’s DR Is 1.2 but My Article Ranks #1 in Google!

5) Consider Using Structured Data to Add Author Info to Your Site

Structured data (also known as “Schema markup” or just “Schema”) allows you to add information to your website in a way that’s easy for Google to crawl and understand.

Here’s an example of how web pages with schema markup for events appear in the SERPs:

To put it simply, it is spoon-feeding Google and telling them exactly who your authors are so they can make connections they may not have otherwise, including recognizing established guest posters.

Here are a few helpful schema markups:

• The Organization schema can be useful, especially if your site is already established and often ranks well.
• The Person schema is a good one here. It allows you to add author information like credentials or awards earned, occupation and job title, and their brand for Google to read.
• The Author schema is also a good one, because it tells Google exactly who has written the content:

You can learn more about how to add author data through Schema markup here.

Related Content:
* How to Prepare Your Site for the New Google Page Experience Update
* 10 Most Important Google Ranking Factors (& How to Optimize for Them!)
* CWV Update: Why Google Keeps Changing How It Measures Your Site’s UX (and What to Do About It)

Final Thoughts on Google E-E-A-T & Phantom Update

Becoming an expert content creator according to Google’s Phantom Update will take time and planning. But if you’ve been building your area of expertise for a while, you have likely already laid the foundation for this.

(If you haven’t, start right now. It’s not too late!)

Make sure that you keep the new E-E-A-T principle in mind, and that you prioritize trust above all else as you create helpful content. That’s the central part of the new update, even with the addition of the extra “E.”

Google will continue to look at expert credentials for each new piece of content you post. Establishing your personal and website authority truly is the key to succeeding with content marketing and your SEO strategy in 2023 and beyond.

Want help increasing your site traffic? We can help! Just click the orange button below 👇

Get My Free Marketing Plan

Additional contributions by Elise Dopson and Ana Gotter

Google E-E-A-T FAQs

Why is E-E-A-T important for SEO?

E-E-A-T is important for SEO because it helps determine a website’s rank in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs). A high E-E-A-T score can result in improved visibility and higher traffic to a website.

How can I improve my website’s E-E-A-T score?

Improving your website’s E-E-A-T score requires demonstrating experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness in your niche. This can be achieved by creating high-quality content, having a professional website design, building credible links, and demonstrating expertise and personal experience through industry credentials and publications.

What are the components of Google E-E-A-T in more detail?

• Experience refers to a content creator’s first-hand experience with a subject.
• Expertise refers to the knowledge and skills necessary to produce high-quality content.
• Authoritativeness refers to an author or website’s reputation as a credible source of information.
• Trustworthiness refers to an author or website’s reputation for providing accurate and trustworthy information.

How does E-E-A-T impact my website’s rankings in Google search results?

Google uses E-E-A-T as a ranking factor in its search algorithms to determine the quality of a website’s content and its relevance to a user’s search query. A high E-E-A-T score can result in a higher ranking and improved visibility in search results.

Can Google E-E-A-T scores change over time?

Yes, E-E-A-T scores can change over time. Google’s algorithms are constantly evolving, and a website’s E-E-A-T score can be affected by new information or changes to the website’s content or reputation. It is important to regularly assess and improve your website’s E-E-A-T score to maintain its visibility in search results.

The post Google E-E-A-T: How to Signal That You’re an Experienced Content Creator appeared first on Single Grain.

At one time, Metaverse marketing, voice search engine optimization (VSEO) and the Internet of Things (IoT) advertising were ambitious concepts bordering on the ridiculous. Today, these are some of the top digital marketing trends.

And why wouldn’t they be? After all, if your business intends to remain competitive in this crowded online landscape, you must adapt to the latest innovations.

In this article, we’ll list 34 important digital marketing trends you can’t ignore in the coming year because they will help your business not just survive, but thrive in this age of never-ending marketing changes.

TABLE OF CONTENTS: ↓

34 Digital Marketing Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2023

Get My Free Marketing Plan

1) AI Marketing

Artificial intelligence is the technology behind many services, including content creation, chatbots and search engines, which has particularly ramped up over the last few years.

The use of artificial intelligence in digital marketing is becoming increasingly popular, and for a good reason. AI-driven digital marketing campaigns can provide faster and more accurate insights into customer behavior, leading to higher campaign success rates.

AI can also be used to automate mundane tasks such as data collection and analysis, freeing up marketers’ time for more complex activities like creative strategy development. By leveraging the power of AI-powered marketing automation in digital marketing strategies, businesses can gain a better understanding of their customers and maximize their digital ROI:

Jasper is an example of AI-powered software that is used for content creation. By using this (or a similar) AI tool, marketers can quickly generate relevant content – for ad campaigns, email campaigns, blog post writing – without having to manually search for content ideas or create new content from scratch.

With features like automated keyword tracking, trending topics analysis and personalization capabilities, as well as the ability to create headlines and outlines, Jasper makes content marketing easier than ever before.

AI can also analyze consumer behavior and search patterns, and use data from social media platforms like Instagram and blog posts to help businesses understand how customers find their products and services.

One such company that has made AI the center of its value proposition is Google. Over the last few years, their implementation of AI has allowed their search engine to understand with higher precision what people are looking for and what kind of content best serves their search intent.

Google understands what people are looking for and what kind of content best serves their intent. For example, if you search for ‘fish oil’, Google knows that the dominant search intent is to learn about the health benefits and side effects:

This means that it’s become more crucial than ever to nail the search intent, and content optimization is an excellent way to do this.

With AI-driven tools, such as chatbots, digital assistants and natural language processing (NLP), becoming increasingly sophisticated, artificial intelligence is a powerful marketing asset.

Dive Deeper: 10 Easy Ways to Get Started with Marketing AI (Artificial Intelligence)

2) Metaverse Marketing

The Metaverse is becoming an increasingly popular concept. It’s a digital universe where people can interact in immersive three-dimensional, computer-generated environments. The virtual world allows users to explore digital spaces, create digital objects and purchase digital assets.

For businesses, the metaverse presents opportunities to reach consumers with more engaging experiences than traditional digital marketing methods can provide. This could include creating interactive branded campaigns or launching digital stores inside the metaverse that customers can visit.

Metaverse marketing is an innovative marketing concept that involves the integration of digital and physical spaces via VR and AR to create an immersive digital experience in which brands sell their products or services.

For example, a retailer could use metaverse marketing to create a virtual store where potential customers can browse products as if they’re actually in the store. This way, customers can shop anywhere in the world without having to leave their homes.

Metaverse marketing also allows companies to track customer activity and provide personalized experiences for specific customers based on their preferences.

Some key metaverse stats:

• Metaverse marketing is expected to reach $783.3 billion by 2024 at an average growth rate of 13.1%.
• It is estimated that by 2026 25% of people will be spending an hour daily in the virtual world.
• By 2026, it is estimated that 30% of companies will be selling in the metaverse.
• 33% of adults are already interested in purchasing digital products in the metaverse.

Dive Deeper: Best Metaverse Marketing Agency: Top 10 Choices

3) Augmented Reality (AR) & Immersive Technologies

Although virtual reality (VR) gets everyone excited with grand sci-fi ideas, augmented reality (AR) has been more realistic for marketers.

Facebook recently unveiled its long-awaited smart glasses, and although the focus is more on taking photos than augmented reality, it’s the beginning of what could be a game-changing venture.

Other companies have launched their AR apps, like IKEA. Their IKEA Place app allows users to take a picture of a room in their homes with a smartphone camera (with just iOS 11.0.1 for now) to “test drive” IKEA’s furniture in it. Users can move the furniture around and check out how it looks from different angles:

L’Oréal is another brand that is making good use of AR with their Style My Hair app, which allows you to get a makeover or try out various hairstyles without touching a single strand on your head.

You just upload your picture (or use their preloaded image of a model) to see what you look like with different hairstyles or makeup:

With AR improving rapidly, we will see a huge uptake in brands finding useful applications for the technology in the future.

Related Content: Beginner’s Guide to Virtual Reality Ads

4) Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic advertising is the process of using AI to automate ad buying. By removing humans from ad buying, companies receive a more reliable and cost-effective solution to their needs.

Here’s a quick look at how programmatic advertising works:

According to SmartyAds, the power of programmatic advertising lies in its optimization scale capacity, which exceeds that of a human:

“Most search-driven manual advertising campaigns (even those performed with professional tools) take into account three or four targets: the keyword, time of day, and location.

Such tools like programmatic demand-side platforms can use hundreds of targeting signals to individualize the advertisement and even target according to lifestyle or behavior habits when integrated with customer data platforms.”

If paid media buying is a crucial customer acquisition channel, you should start paying attention to programmatic advertising.

One popular application of programmatic ad buying you should consider adopting is real-time bidding (aka. RTB), which uses real-time auctions to buy guaranteed ad impressions in advance from specific publisher sites.

Get My Free Marketing Plan

5) Conversational Marketing

With all that talk about chatbots, AI and personalization, the reality of modern marketing becomes clear: it’s more conversational than ever.

Conversational marketing is a marketing tactic that involves creating real-time conversations with prospects or customers to build relationships, increase engagement and even make sales. The aim of conversational marketing is to create unique experiences for each user by providing an interactive experience through chatbots, voice search, SMS and other digital channels.

By leveraging AI technologies such as natural language processing (NLP) to analyze customer intent and provide personalized responses, businesses can offer more engaging interactions while gathering valuable insights into their target audience. This allows them to deliver personalized experiences at scale which can ultimately lead to increased conversions.

People want it that way, and so brands are reacting accordingly. When consumers have a question, 82% want an “immediate” response.

Conversational marketing facilitates a personal, instant connection between marketers and customers:

Unlike traditional strategies, this form of marketing is now available across multiple channels, allowing brands to meet customers on their terms: on the devices, platforms and time schedules that suit the customer best.

David Cancel, founder and CEO of Drift, explains: “Today’s buyers expect to find what they’re looking for now, not later….[And in] the way people prefer to communicate.”

The primary goal of conversational marketing is to enhance the user experience through a feedback-driven model that fosters higher engagement, greater loyalty, and more sales.

In fact, Drift has found that 41.3% of consumers use conversational marketing tools for purchases.

Some methods companies use to execute a conversational marketing strategy include:

• Chatbots
• Personalized videos
• Personalized emails
• Virtual selling assistants

One example of a company that benefited from conversational marketing is ThoughtSpot, which, after its implementation, saw 10X more sales conversations, 70% more marketing qualified leads, and 64% more meetings booked:

Dive Deeper: VSEO: How Voice Search and Conversational AI Are Changing SEO

6) Chatbots

One implementation of conversational marketing is chatbots. Chatbots leverage AI technology to provide automated human-like messages to web visitors in real-time:

Surveys show that:

• The greatest benefits of chatbots for companies are 24-hour service (64%), instant responses to inquiries (55%), and answers to simple questions (55%).
• Uberall has found that 80% of consumers have positive experiences with chatbots.
• Juniper Research predicts that eCommerce transactions via chatbots will reach $112 billion by 2023.
• By 2024, Insider Intelligence predicts that consumer retail spends via chatbots worldwide will reach $142 billion — up from just $2.8 billion in 2019.

Many customers prefer interacting with chatbots because they are responsive 24/7, give answers promptly, and accurately recall their entire buying history. These virtual assistants offer outstanding customer service by meeting customers’ expectations and automating repetitive tasks, freeing your resources for more important work.

As more consumers become accustomed to chatbots, they will become increasingly crucial for a positive customer experience.

Dive Deeper:
* 13 Messages Your Chatbot Should Be Saying to Prospects
* Why Chatbots Are a Must-Have for Businesses (and How to Build One!)
* Facebook Messenger Chatbots: The Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Massive Results

7) Personalization

If you want to stand out in 2023, you need to personalize your marketing, which means personalizing content, products, emails, etc.

This short clip from the movie Minority Report may be a bit of an exaggeration (not to mention completely overwhelming), but it shows a world of ongoing personalization:

It turns out that consumers like personalization:

• SmarterHQ found that 72% of shoppers act on marketing messages only when they are customized to their interests.
• A Salesforce survey found that marketers see the highest benefits of personalization on their customer experience (64%), a conversion rate increase (63%), and visitor engagement (55%):

Similarly, Kevin George from EmailMonks asserts that “personalized, triggered emails based on behavior are 3X better than batch-and-blast emails.”

When you want to study examples of the power of personalization, it’s hard to overlook Netflix and Amazon, with their incredibly successful tailored recommended products or movie titles.

Here are a few other companies that are successfully using personalization today:

• EasyJet launched a data-driven email campaign that uses customers’ travel history with the airline to build personalized stories, suggesting where they might like to travel next. About 12.5 million unique emails have been sent, which had a 25% higher click-through rate than non-personalized emails.
• Cadbury’s created a personalized video campaign that matches a Dairy Milk flavor with users based on data from their Facebook profile, including age, interest and location. The campaign generated a 65% click-through rate and a 33.6% conversion rate, proving that the personal touch works.
• Starbucks uses a gamified mobile app that draws on data like purchase history and location to get as personal as possible, allows customers to customize their drinks, and encourages further use with its rewards system—which skyrocketed their revenue to $2.56 billion:

Dive Deeper: 3 Ways to Personalize the Customer Journey Experience

8) Customer Experience

Customer experience (CX) as a digital marketing strategy is all about optimizing the digital interactions that customers have with your business. With the rise of digital channels and increased competition, customers now demand a more personalized, seamless experience when interacting with brands.

CX helps create personalized experiences by understanding what customers want and need when engaging with your website or digital platform. By leveraging digital marketing tactics and tools such as personalization, automation, augmented reality and gamification, businesses can ensure that they provide their customers with an exceptional digital experience that keeps them coming back for more.

According to a study from Temkin Group, “a moderate increase in customer experience generates an average revenue increase of $823 million over three years for a company with $1 billion in annual revenues.”

Bad customer experience is the biggest threat to any business:

But 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better experience.

Some ways to give your customers a better experience are:

• Understand your customers by creating multiple, detailed buyer personas
• Create a good UX on your site by simplifying usability and navigation
• Offer an omnichannel experience (see the next section for more)
• Offer the best level of personalization so they feel valued
• Make it as easy as possible for the customer to do anything (make a purchase, contact a human customer rep, return a product or cancel a service)
• Actively listen to your customers (send an email or include a feedback form on your site asking them to rate their experience)
• Reward loyal customers (with special discounts, rewards/points programs, etc.)
• Make it easy for customers to leave reviews, either on your website or a review site, and write a public response to each one
• Give your employees more leeway to solve customers’ problems themselves without having to “speak to my manager first”

An example of a brand making the customer experience as easy as possible is, surprisingly, Amazon. You’d think that a giant e-commerce store would be hard to get hold of, but that’s not so.

Amazon provides a “call me” service that will have you speaking to a human in under a minute (no being put on hold and no pressing 1 for such-and-such department), and when you need to return a product, they send you a shipping receipt which you take to a UPS store who boxes it and sends it for you.

Dive Deeper: 9 Ways to Deliver the Best Digital Experience to Your Customers

9) Omnichannel Marketing

Omnichannel marketing was one of the buzzwords of 2020. While the phrase may now seem a little worn out, the strategy is as ripe and relevant as ever.

Omnichannel marketing is the process of marketing across multiple platforms — such as social media, apps, email, and blog posts — to offer an enhanced customer experience and cohesive brand message that lead to higher conversions and loyalty.

And don’t forget to include offline marketing strategies in your omnichannel plan, such as:

• Promotional emails that contain digital coupons that customers can use in-store.
• Direct mail campaigns like sending out physical letters or postcards to promote digital marketing initiatives.
• Placing digital screens in stores to display online and offline promotions.

Stats show that marketing teams using three or more channels in an automation workflow can generate great results:

• Engagement rate: 18.96% on omnichannel vs. 5.4% on single-channel
• Purchase frequency: 250% higher on omnichannel vs. single-channel
• Average order value: 13% more per order on omnichannel vs. single-channel
• Customer retention rates: 90% higher for omnichannel vs. single-channel

With more and more SaaS companies providing the tools to manage multiple channels more efficiently, implementing omnichannel in your content strategy is easier than ever.

This is another area where AI and big data are playing a role by helping brands understand consumer behavior better and personalize at an individual level at scale.

Dive Deeper: 5 Tips to Build a Seamless Omnichannel Customer Experience

10) Account-based Marketing (ABM)

Account-based marketing is a (typically B2B) marketing strategy that targets specific accounts rather than a broad audience, allowing them to tailor their messaging and build relationships with key decision makers.

This strategy also allows businesses to save time and resources by focusing on the accounts that are most likely to be successful. Additionally, ABM fosters strong customer relationships which can lead to higher conversion rates and increased customer loyalty.

This 3-minute video will explain what account-based marketing is:

With ABM, you have a marketing funnel that looks like this:

Bizible is an example of a company using an ABM approach to connect with their target prospects by sending them a physical care package through the mail.

After identifying who the key decision makers were in their account list, Bizible:

• Created 37 custom care packages which included a physical copy of their Total Economic Impact Bible
• Donated to an environmental charity in their prospect’s name
• Sent them a handwritten card:

Afterwards, Bizible followed up with every single one of their prospects to ensure that they received their care package and sent them links to customized landing pages that addressed the decision maker and their business by name.

By using an ABM strategy, Bizible generated over $33,000 in additional revenue and beat their quarterly sales quota by 15%.

Dive Deeper: The Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Mega Guide

11) Video Shorts & Video Marketing

Video marketing is one of the most important marketing trends today and likely for the foreseeable future. Here we’ll touch on both short-form videos and longer, traditional videos.

63% of advertisers think that TikTok and short-form videos will be the biggest ad trend in 2023.

According to HubSpot, short-form video (generally speaking, about 60 seconds or less) has the highest ROI of any social media marketing strategy. People love sharing videos and do so about 2X as much as other forms of content.

For brands, video shorts is a quick and easy way to get some engaging content out there to your audience on the platform that they’re already hanging out on, such as TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and Facebook Reels. But rather than inundate all of these platforms with your short videos, remember to focus on just 2-3 channels that your audience is using.

You can use video shorts to create:

• product teasers
• UGC
• behind the scenes videos
• quick explainer videos

Here’s an example of a Leveling Up YouTube short called How to Grow as a TikTok Content Creator:

When we talk about traditional (i.e. non-short-form) video marketing, don’t just think of YouTube. There are plenty of ways to drive higher engagement with your videos.

Video is a useful channel where you can repurpose and republish your existing content or vice-versa. On the one hand, that means taking a content piece like a blog post and turning it into a video.

For example, we implemented this tactic with this Amazon advertising 101 article, which Eric repurposed into a video:

On the other hand, you can take a video, publish it on your website and YouTube channel, and then:

• Get it transcribed and publish it as an article (with an embedded YouTube video for better rankings)
• Upload the raw video with the transcription as subtitles to Facebook (native Facebook videos get a much higher impression share and engagement than shared YouTube videos)
• Rip the audio alone and use it as a podcast episode
• Use video thumbnails in your email marketing campaigns and the word “video” in subject lines, as that has shown to increase open rates by 19%

Dive Deeper:
* 9 Ways to Repurpose Your Old Blog Content
* 10 Inspiring Examples of Promotional Campaign Videos
* The Types of Videos to Use at Each Stage of the Marketing

12) Visual Search & Visual Content Marketing

Visual search is a new practice where people can upload an image into search. Although it’s relatively new, there are two companies that are leveraging visual search:

A) Pinterest

Pinterest jumped on the visual search bandwagon with the launch of Lens, a visual search tool that allows users to take a photo of an item to find out where to buy it online, search for similar products, or view pinboards of related items:

Pinterest’s Lens recognizes 2.5 billion home and fashion objects and has inspired over 600 million searches on Pinterest’s mobile apps and browser extensions. Since its launch, they have seen a 140% growth in Lens usage.

Pinterest has continued to update its functionality with the launch of the following features:

• Pincodes, which use QR codes to find inspiration while their users are out shopping or flipping through their favorite magazines.
• Idea Pins, a similar concept to Snapchat or Instagram Stories that use multi-page video formats for creators who want to publish high-quality, evergreen content directly to Pinterest. So far, it’s only available to users from the U.S., UK, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
• AR Try, an augmented reality feature for testing new eyeshadows from leading brands such as Lancome, YSL, Urban Decay, and NYX Cosmetics.

B) Google Lens

Google Lens is a visual search engine by Google, which recognizes objects and landmarks through a camera app. Here’s what you can do when you take a photo of the following items:

• Apparel and home goods: Find similar products and where to buy them.
• Barcodes: Use a barcode to find info about a product, like where to buy it.
• Business card: Save the phone number or address to a contact.
• Book: Get a summary and read reviews.
• Event flyer or billboard: Add the event to your calendar.
• Landmark or building: See historical facts, hours of operation, and more.
• Painting in a museum: Read about the artist and learn more.
• Plant or animal: Learn about species and breeds.

And by the same token, visual content marketing takes this idea one step further.

Visuals are an incredibly powerful way to engage audiences. With a great-looking visual – videos, images, charts, GIFs, infographics – you can create a much stronger connection with potential customers than if you were just relying on text alone.

Keep in mind these 6 facts about visual content:

Visual content marketing also allows you to:

• Convey complex information quickly and effectively
• Increase brand awareness (particularly with a fun, clever or helpful visual)
• Make your product or service more memorable – and when people remember the message being conveyed, they’re much more likely to take the desired action
• Encourage your audience to share the image, GIF or video (people love sharing cool things like this)
• Improve your SEO because with the right alt tag/keyword, images and videos will show up in the SERPs (and not just image search engines)

13) Live Stream Shopping & Shoppable Ads

Live streaming is becoming more and more common in the Western world, but in China, it’s extremely popular. In the first half of 2020, one third of China’s internet users — which is roughly 309 million people — tuned in to a live streaming shopping session.

What’s more, Viya, one of China’s most popular live streamers, earned roughly $49.7 million in just one day of live streaming: 🤑🤯

Shoppable livestreams let you educate your viewers about your products in real-time and then make it super easy for them to purchase it right then while they’re still excited about it.

According to McKinsey, the most popular product categories for live stream shopping are apparel and fashion, beauty products, food, consumer electronics, and furnishing and home decor:

Levi’s and Tommy Hilfiger have started running their own live shopping events:

For optimum live stream e-commerce shopping, McKinsey recommends starting with infrequent streams focused on 1-5 products.

They also suggest using TikTok, Instagram, Facebook or Amazon Live, and then moving on to a “dedicated in-house team or agency staff to plan and develop content for livestreams, including storylines, scripts, and hosts or micro-influencers” and broadcast them across multiple channels.

According to Marketing Brew, because of Apple’s privacy and data update, more and more advertisers are experimenting with shoppable TV ads.

Shoppable ads are expected to grow to nearly $80 billion in 2025, up from about $45 million this year. Much like shoppable livestreams, shoppable ads are becoming more popular because it makes discovering and then immediately buying a product extremely convenient.

Advertisers are turning to Roku’s new shoppable ad pilot, which allows viewers to buy items at Walmart from their Roku devices.

Dive Deeper:
* How Apple’s iOS 14 Release May Affect Your Ads (& What to Do About It)
* What Is Live Stream Shopping?
* How to Use Live Video (Facebook & Instagram) to Grow Your Business

14) Voice Search (VSEO) & Voice Commerce

The increasing use of voice search has pushed companies to rethink their digital marketing strategies. Consider these stats on voice search:

• 40% of all internet searches in the U.S. are voice-based
• 58% of consumers used voice search to find local business information
• 40% of adults use voice search daily
• 1 billion voice searches take place every month

Voice search engine optimization (VSEO) is becoming increasingly important as the use of digital assistants continues to rise and people become more comfortable with using their voices to search online.

VSEO involves optimizing your website content so it can be easily understood by digital assistants like Siri and Alexa, helping them deliver faster and more accurate search results. In 2023, businesses will need to ensure that their content is easily found via voice search.

Voice search already plays a crucial role in providing relevant information for search engine users. Google Assistant has 1 million actions and Alexa has over 100,000 skills, which represent functions that allow their voice assistants to react very specifically to user commands and queries:

Not only will more brands produce audio content in the hopes of gaining appearing in voice search results, but ads are on their way next. This means that Alexa will tell you the answer to your question along with a “word from her sponsor.”

The latest data (which is now a few years old, so we can assume that this number is higher) shows that 27% of all mobile searches are voice-activated, meaning that they come from a set of “trigger words” such as “how,” “what,” “best,” and “easy.”

The launch of voice assistants has disrupted more than the search engine world. As it turns out, consumers don’t just like to use them to execute their search queries — they also like to use them to purchase.

To understand the power of voice commerce, we need to think about one aspect of the consumer’s purchase process: convenience. A consumer may not purchase a 55” TV through a voice assistant, but they are most likely to buy a small, low-priced product that’s too annoying to search for online.

According to Walker Sands, “food and grocery” ranks highest on the list (at 21%) of what consumers have purchased via a voice-controlled device, followed by Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) at 16%.

• One company that took the lead in this new trend is Walmart, which partnered with Google to launch the Walmart Voice Order feature. People who own a Google Home can now say, “Hey Google, talk to Walmart,” choose the product they want, and add it to their cart.
• Amazon also incorporated voice commerce with AmazonFresh, which allows customers to shop through any Alexa-enabled device.

Here’s how your e-commerce store can benefit from voice commerce:

• Treat your search strategy as a conversation. Design content with long-tail keywords as a searchable conversation with the customer.
• Focus on expected queries and suitable keywords. Make use of trigger words for voice searches (such as who, why, when, how, where, should, could, does, etc.).
• Do not limit yourself to exact words. Instead, consider the possible context of the customer’s queries and offer valuable content that answers the question.
• Blend multiple terminologies to create variable sets of keywords and phrases. They should naturally cover all the relevant data of questions.
• Come up with catchy product descriptions that sound great when read aloud. Write naturally to align with regular speech patterns.

Dive Deeper: 5 Steps to Optimize Your Content For Voice Search

15) Social Media Stories

Social media stories have been gaining popularity since Snapchat first came out with Stories, and for good reason.

Stories (now available on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter) are an effective way to engage users and drive visibility to your products or services. They offer a unique format that can be used to promote events, showcase products, announce deals, or even just tell a story.

Stories are posts that disappear after 24 hours. Despite representing such a simple concept (or, perhaps, thanks to it?), stories allow marketers to share genuine content and connect on a personal level with their audiences:

Here are some ways you can use social media stories to engage with your audience:

• Use polls within Instagram Stories
• Add links to your social media Stories
• Take advantage of Snapchat geofilters
• Add location tags
• Add mentions for other brands and your fans
• Give live video a try when creating Stories
• Invite followers to explore more with clear call-to-actions

Dive Deeper: How to Create Instagram Stories Ads that Your Ideal Customer Will Swipe Up

16) Push Notifications

The launch of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations) and stricter privacy laws have dented the potency of email marketing. Moreover, younger audiences favor other methods of communication and prefer to deal with fewer touchpoints when engaging brands.

As part of the bid to engage users on multiple channels, browser push notifications are something you will see more and more brands adopting in 2023 — and they are getting more sophisticated and personalized.

In fact, using personalized push notifications increases conversions:

• 7% open rate for segmented push messaging compared to a 3% open rate for generic, broadcast messages (a 2x improvement)
• 54% of users convert from a segmented push notification, compared to only 15% for broadcast messages (a 3x improvement)

Notifications triggered by behavior are being used to re-engage people who have shown interest but failed to convert, and to recover revenue from abandoned shopping carts:

Notifications can even include images and CTAs to maximize conversion rates from such efforts:

Get My Free Marketing Plan

17) Interactive Content & UGC

In 2023, we’re destined to see a shift from traditional text-based content toward dynamic interactive content that offers users an immersive experience, such as:

• Quizzes and polls
• Embedded calculators
• Augmented reality ads
• 360-degree videos

Here’s an excellent example of a 360 VR video (be sure to use your mouse or finger to move the video left, right, up, down):

And here’s an example of our Marketing Impact Calculator to help you calculate how much more money you’ll make with marketing:

Interactive content is more engaging, more memorable and more likely to generate the results your business needs. People like it not just because it’s fresh and original, but because it makes them feel more connected to brands and more involved in the buying process.

That’s why:

• 88% of marketers say interactive content helps brands differentiate themselves
• 79% say combining interactive content with other content types improves message retention
• Over 96% of people who start quizzes on Buzzfeed finish them

And user-generated content goes hand in hand with interactive content.

UGC is content that is created and shared by users on social media. It can include images, videos, reviews and blog posts about products or services.

Keep these stats in mind:

• 85% of consumers find UGC more influential than content from brands
• 60% of people say that UGC is the most authentic type of content (compared to just 20% for brand-generated content)

Using UGC in your marketing strategies has numerous benefits:

• It increases brand visibility and engagement as customers share their positive experiences with the product or service to their friends and followers.
• It builds trust between the brand and its customers because user-generated content is seen as more authentic than traditional advertising campaigns since it comes from people who have actually tried the product or service themselves.
• It provides valuable feedback which can be used to improve customer experience and make the product or service even more appealing to potential customers.

Encouraging your audience to create and share UCG can be as easy as a customer posting their favorite Starbucks drink and tagging the company:

Or the GoPro Million Dollar Challenge, which comes out every year with GoPro’s newest camera and encourages both the purchase of the camera and the creation of quality UGC content:

Dive Deeper: 8 Ways to Encourage More User-Generated Content (UGC)

18) Predictive & Augmented Analytics

Predictive analytics is the practice of using data mining, predictive modeling and machine learning to identify patterns and attempt to predict the future. Due to its potential, it has become more sophisticated and widespread in many industries.

In terms of digital marketing trends, we can expect to see an even higher number of predictive analytics tools and applications, such as advanced lead scoring, customer segmentation, and personalization.

One such example is Amazon Assistant, a Chrome extension from the retail giant that allows users to permit product recommendations from Amazon to extend beyond the website to make personalized offers while they are browsing elsewhere on the web:

On the other hand, Augmented Analytics uses machine learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to automate data preparation and enable data sharing.

The differences between predictive analytics and AR lie in the technologies used:

“Where predictive analytics uses machine learning to predict what will happen, augmented analytics uses machine intelligence to boost human intelligence with the why, so we can work faster and smarter on ever-larger datasets.”

According to Gartner, 75% of enterprises will move to using AI for their operational needs by the end of 2024, driving a 5X increase in streaming data and analytics infrastructures.

Dive Deeper:
* How to Use Predictive Analytics for Better Marketing Performance
* The Future of Data Science & Predictive Modeling

19) Geo-Fencing

While the idea of marketing to people based on their location is nothing new, we do expect an increase in the use of geo-fencing, a market that is expected to grow to $2.4 billion by 2023 — along with the rise of mobile use:

Geo-fencing allows real-time targeting based on a user’s location. A target area is defined as, say, within a mile of a restaurant, and when a user enters or leaves this area, they receive a push notification, text message or another form of marketing communication.

According to Reveal Mobile, more than 50% of marketers surveyed see restaurants and bars, health and beauty, entertainment, grocery, and pet stores as the top five retail locations for geofencing:

What’s more, they found that geotargeted audiences tend to perform better or the same, on average, than other targeting tactics:

The American gas company called 76 uses Waze to mark their gas stations on a map throughout California. As drivers approach, a logo pops up on their map showing them where to stop for gas and offering entry to a competition if they fill up. Their “Tank 5” campaign resulted in a 6.5% navigation rate to fuel stations:

For industries that need to convert digital users into brick-and-mortar customers, geo-fencing will become more and more important in their marketing strategy.

Dive Deeper: Geotargeting: How to Find the Right Customers for Your Brand

20) Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)

Progressive Web Apps are websites that work like mobile apps but whose functionality resembles a native mobile app.

PWAs offer fast load times, allow push notifications, offline usage and much more without being limited to either Android or iOS. PWAs enable development teams to create web apps for any device that works just like a mobile app.

By 2026, the number of smartphone users is expected to reach 7.5 billion:

With total page views on mobile increasing year-over-year by 57% worldwide, mobile is more crucial than ever to your digital strategy.

As such, PWAs are going to become ever-more prevalent as the mobile revolution continues at pace.

Dive Deeper: 14 Ways to Kickstart Your Mobile Email Marketing Campaign

21) Blockchain Applications

As defined by Blockgeeks, a blockchain is:

“A time-stamped series of immutable data records that is managed by a cluster of computers not owned by any single entity. Each of these blocks of data (i.e., block) is secured and bound to each other using cryptographic principles (i.e., chain).”

Here’s a visual representation of how a blockchain works:

Despite being initially focused on cryptocurrencies, blockchain technologies and their applications are far more wide-reaching than just the financial world.

According to Leandra Monteiro from IBSintelligence, some key blockchain trends to follow in 2023 are:

• BaaS (Blockchain-as-a-Service), which represents the third-party creation and management of cloud-based networks for companies in the business of building blockchain applications
• Verifiable Credential & Self Sovereign Identity (Universal Identity), which will offer verifiable, globally resolvable, and privacy-preserving credentials to store and manage from the security of our own devices and can show it to anyone, anywhere
• DeFi (Decentralized Finance), which represents a shift from traditional centralized financial systems such as brokerages, exchanges or banks to smart contracts on blockchains
• NFT (Non-Fungible Tokens), which are a special cryptographically generated token that uses blockchain technology to link with a unique digital asset that cannot be replicated
• CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency), a digital form of central bank money based on Blockchain, which is a legal tender created and backed by a central bank

Dive Deeper:
* The Ultimate Guide to Blockchain Digital Marketing and Cryptocurrency
* How Blockchain Can Be Instrumental in Preventing Digital Fraud

22) Quantum Computing

Quantum computing has the potential to revolutionize digital marketing. With its ability to work on vast amounts of data simultaneously, quantum computing could help digital marketers make informed decisions much faster than ever before.

Quantum computing is a new technology based on a quantum physics theory, which asserts that subatomic particles exist in more than one state simultaneously.

For clarity’s sake, here’s how ITSPmagazine compares it to traditional computing:

“Traditional computers store data in bits, which can exist in one of two states: one or zero. Quantum computers, however, use a new unit of measurement, a single atom known as a qubit (literally ‘quantum bit’), which greatly increases the computational power of a system.”

Another way to visualize quantum computing is to imagine a huge library:

“While a classic computer would read every book in a library in a linear fashion, a quantum computer would read all the books simultaneously. Quantum computers are able to theoretically work on millions of computations at once.”

Source

So how can marketers use quantum computing? Here’s what we can expect:

• Improved mobile data coverage and security with the future adoption of 6G wireless communication networks
• More human-like AI, such as Google AI, which is developing quantum algorithms to drastically improve machine learning
• Increased relevance of ads such as the use of quantum annealing to let advertisements reach a wider range of people at a better cost
• Develop more targeted digital campaigns by quickly analyzing customer data with machine learning algorithms to detect customer behavior patterns and preferences

Source

Get My Free Marketing Plan

23) SERP Position Zero / Featured Snippet

Featured snippets can get you a lot more clicks.

Why? Because being featured at the very top of the SERPs gives websites greater visibility and authority.

For the past couple of years, we have seen the rise of the featured snippet, which is a result that appears in search engine rankings as a box containing a brief summary of content related to the user’s query. A page that receives a featured snippet is said to have a “position zero” because it shows up before the first result:

As Google explains:

“We display featured snippets when our systems determine this format will help people more easily discover what they’re seeking, both from the description about the page and when they click on the link to read the page itself. They’re especially helpful for those on mobile or searching by voice.”

Featured snippets are essential for SEO because they let you display your website in the highest position of the SERPs (position zero), which greatly improves domain visibility.

The average CTR of featured snippets is around 8.6%:

Additionally, featured snippets are vital for improving voice SEO.

Moz did a study which found that featured snippets do impact voice search. Voice assistants like Google Assistant, Siri and Alexa use featured snippets to answer users’ voice search queries. These digital assistants pick content from the featured snippets because they are easy to read.

To acquire featured snippets, you don’t need a high-authority website. Low DA/DR domains can also rank as featured snippets by creating quality content and optimizing it. Ranking your website for featured snippets with additional long-tail keywords improves your click-through rate, since featured snippets steal CTRs from position #1.

The rise of position zero SERPs means that nowadays, search volume, intent and organic competition aren’t the only things that define a keyword’s worth. You must also analyze whether a keyword has a featured snippet or not.

As Google adds more AI into its ranking algorithm, we can expect an ever-higher part of their results as zero-rank-based.

Dive Deeper:
* How to Rank on Page 1 of Google for Thousands of Keywords
* Featured Snippets: How to Optimize for Position Zero

24) 5G Technology

In a world gone mad for mobile, arguably one of the most significant digital marketing trends of 2023 is 5G technology. The fifth generation of mobile technology heralds a new era of digital communications, and its impact will be felt across virtually every industry.

According to AdAge:

“The arrival of 5G may also finally bring millions of rural consumers into the high-speed data lanes where marketers increasingly sell their products. It might even disrupt the digital duopoly of Google and Facebook by arming telecom companies with unprecedented data for ad services.”

T-Mobile points to the benefits 5G speed has for the burgeoning augmented reality industry, noting how it could be instrumental in developing a virtual heads-up display. As this picture below shows, 5G Internet speeds can help cyclists spot danger from all sides:

The European Union has an ambitious 5G action plan that includes uninterrupted 5G coverage for major roads and railways by 2025. What’s more, the technology is expected to power 100x more connected devices.

Undoubtedly, 5G technology will transform how we access online content, from digital marketers to the average user.

25) First-Party Cookies

The European Union’s GDPR and California’s CCPA were passed into law to put limits on the way companies use their customer’s data.

Since then, dozens of the largest companies in the world have been fined exorbitant sums of money due to user privacy violations, such as:

• Amazon — €746 million ($877 million)
• Google – €50 million ($56.6 million)
• H&M — €35 million ($41 million)
• TIM – €27.8 million ($31.5 million)
• British Airways – €22 million ($26 million)

The implications of the new privacy laws are far more reaching than economic. Marketers are now faced with a situation that has always been their biggest nightmare: the end of third-party cookies.

Cookies allow marketers to collect all sorts of data to measure, personalize, and develop their ad campaigns. With the slow but steady end of third-party cookies — such as the ones most marketing tools used to power their technologies — companies can only rely on their own collected data.

In an effort to streamline a bloated digital advertising infrastructure and help create a new set of user privacy-focused open web standards, Google announced that it was ending support for third-party browser cookies in its Chrome browser with its Privacy Sandbox.

The data collected by these tiny scraps of code beams a huge range of information about users and their preferences back to third parties, who often sell that data to a range of businesses and individuals:

First-party cookies will force marketers to be mindful of the data they collect and how they use it.

Although the future is still uncertain as to how much will this change affect marketers, in the meantime, here are some recommendations you should start to deploy before it’s too late:

• Use an omnichannel marketing strategy (see trend #15) to get data in every touchpoint while respecting the user’s consent.
• Use an invitation that’s highly visible, explicit, and personalized.
• Present the first-cookie data collection form/checkbox in a friendly manner, as if you were issuing an invitation to a loyalty program.
• Explain every data attribute you collect from your visitors, what it means, and how you use it for full transparency.
• Allow your visitors to modify their data collection and usage preferences through your preference center.

Dive Deeper:
* Google Privacy Sandbox: What Does It Mean for the Future of Targeted Ads?
* How Apple’s iOS 14 Release May Affect Your Ads (& What to Do About It)

26) Website Security

In the same breath as privacy, website security is becoming more important than ever.

When a visitor lands on your site for the first time, they’ll make up their mind about your security within seconds. If they don’t feel safe, they won’t stick around, which leads to a lower dwell time, which is a relatively recent Google ranking factor.

That means you may see a decrease in rankings if people don’t feel safe on your website.

What’s more, with the Core Web Vitals update in 2023, websites must have secure sites. From now on, the bare minimum is to enable the HTTPS protocol for your site, which will show your visitors a little green padlock icon in the URL:

In addition, prominently displaying a security seal of trust or trust badge on your website will reassure your site visitors that you take their safety seriously:

Dive Deeper: How Poor Website Security Negatively Impacts SEO Rankings

27) Mobile Commerce

We’re living in an ever more mobile-centric world, and mobile devices will continue to play a larger and larger role in the consumer’s purchasing cycle.

To make mobile commerce more user-friendly (and profitable), Amazon recently launched Amazon Pay, its own online payment processing service, which lowers checkout friction:

Merchants also get easy access to millions of Prime members with this service., which is why they have added Amazon Pay as a payment vehicle to increase sales. Similarly, Google revamped its Google Pay app for Android and iOS users, which includes checking and savings accounts in partnership with Citi and Stanford Federal Credit Union.

By leveraging mobile commerce strategies, digital marketers can reach customers on the go and create personalized experiences for them. These strategies also provide digital marketers with access to valuable customer data such as location-based information, which they can use to create targeted campaigns and increase conversions.

Here are a few tips to help you ride the new mobile commerce wave successfully:

• Make your website responsive. This tip may be very 2008, but it’s so crucial that you can’t ignore it.
• Use mobile payments. Registration data gets stored on the mobile device itself, which helps to reduce wait times.
• Make good use of the space. Feature important elements on the upper section of your home page and ensure that the search window is visible.
• Make the call-to-action big enough to attract the attention of online shoppers and easily tap on with your finger.
• Tailor the online experience to your target audience so they have a reason to keep coming back.
• Remove all distractions from the checkout process so that customers near the “finish line” can easily cross it.
• Provide access to different digital wallets while keeping everything on your website secure.

28) The Creator Economy

2023 will bring us even more into the era of creators, one where consumers communicate directly with independent content creators, such as those you see on YouTube and niche Substacks.

The creator economy refers to a community of independent content creators (bloggers, writers, YouTubers, influencers, etc.) and content curators who follow their passion, build a following and monetize their skills.

This is in direct contrast to traditional media.

Basically, if you create something online and your creation starts bringing in profits, you are already part of the creator economy.

According to SignalFire, there are 50 million creators, 2 million of which make a full-time living (4%), and some 47 million that make a part-time income:

The creator economy has been driven partially by the desire to make a living with a job that’s fulfilling and autonomous. On the other hand, consumers want to connect with people they can relate to.

Examples of individual content creators who have followed their passion and now earn a massive online income:

• Fashion influencer Forever Yours Betty
• Y Travel Blog on YouTube
• Fitness instructor Cassey Ho of blogilates
• Blogger Brian Clark of the popular Copyblogger
• YouTuber (science experiments, skits, DIY arts & crafts) Ryan Kaji
• Podcasters Beth & Sarah of “Pantsuit Politics“
• Writer Kelly Mustian of the Amazon best-seller Kindle ebook, The Girl in the Stilt House

With the rise of the creator economy, brands will have to engage with these independent content creators who command highly engaged audiences.

The Creator Economy as a digital marketing strategy means building relationships with creators/influencers to capitalize on the power of their networks. By harnessing the reach of an influencer’s network, brands can effectively target their audience and have greater control over who sees their ads.

Furthermore, marketers can leverage influencer analytics to gain insight into customer preferences and trends which they can use to craft targeted campaigns.

In this regard, three trends we expect to see are:

• Creators moving their top fans off of social networks and on to their own websites, apps and monetization tools (such as Substack)
• Creators becoming company founders, such as fitness YouTubers who start their own supplement brands
• Creators gaining power in the media industry as fans connect with individual content creators rather than TV companies

Dive Deeper: What Is the Creator Economy (& Why Should You Care)?

29) Live Streaming Video

Video content may be the future of social media, but live streaming is the most preferred video marketing channel. In fact:

• The live-streaming industry is predicted to reach $184.3 billion by 2027
• 80% of consumers prefer watching a live video to reading a blog
• 63% of Millennials watch live streaming content regularly
• People spend 3X longer watching live videos compared to pre-recorded video

Consumers want authentic, unique content with the opportunity to interact or connect with the creator. Live streaming offers a viewing experience that puts them closer to the action. As a result, more and more companies use live video for business.

Instagram has ramped up its live streaming capabilities with the launch of Live Rooms, a feature that allows users to run a live stream with up to three people:

YouTube also offers a live streaming service called Live, while Facebook does the same with a feature called… Live (social media companies aren’t too creative with their features’ names). Both companies want more creators to leverage their platforms to raise a following and grow their business there.

Here are several ways of using live video to grow your business:

• Organize customer Q&A sessions
• Broadcast the launch of a new product
• Live product demonstrations (particularly for any that may be a bit more complex to use)
• Host webinars to engage with industry professionals or teach customers something
• Social media challenges to increase engagement with followers

Here are some of the best live streaming platforms:

• YouTube Live
• Facebook Live
• LinkedIn Live
• Instagram Live
• TikTok Live
• Reddit Live
• Vimeo Live
• Twitch
• Streamlabs
• Livestream
• Ustream
• Restream

Keep in mind that, unlike other platforms, Twitch has a stringent policy towards publicity, as it doesn’t allow sponsored links, a key part of a YouTube marketing strategy. Similarly, Twitch doesn’t offer content to its users; instead, users get notified when a creator uploads a new video or starts a live stream session.

Get My Free Marketing Plan

30) Podcasts

People like listening to podcasts, whether they are from individuals or companies. One source indicates that 80% of people will listen to most of a podcast episode.

And with Google now displaying podcast episodes directly in its SERPs…

…you must put more emphasis on optimizing your podcast.

Additionally, “people are set to interact with voice-enabled devices more often, so podcasters can increase brand awareness and audience engagement with voice SEO tactics,” including:

• Choose a keyword for each podcast episode
• Create a specific page for every episode
• Create a blog post of ~300 words for each episode

However, podcasts can be tricky for marketers as listeners may not be prompted to take action, such as signing up for an email newsletter. In the next few years, marketers will take a more user-friendly approach that will prioritize:

• Using one call to action per episode
• Summarizing the episode’s key points
• Making it easy to listen to a podcast — that means not requiring a sign-up, download, or any other issues just to listen to an episode

Dive Deeper:
* The Ultimate Guide to Podcast Advertising
* 9 Podcast Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2023
* Audio SEO: The Complete Guide to Ranking Your Podcast Successfully

31) Native Advertising

Is it a surprise to say that people hate online ads?

It shouldn’t be, considering that 763.5 million people worldwide use ad blockers to avoid ads, which forces marketers to try new acquisition channels.

Among the many options available, some of which we mentioned here, marketers have found native advertising.

Native advertising is a type of non-disruptive digital advertising in which the ad seamlessly blends in with the design of the web page it is published on. Consumers usually can’t distinguish native ads from the content in which they show up — hence the name “native”:

An AppNexus study found that native ads see an average CTR of 0.80%, while display ads see 0.09% — that’s 8.80x higher than display ads:

ADYOULIKE has revealed that native advertising spend is expected to increase from $85.83 billion in 2020 to a total global value of $402 billion by 2025, which is a 372% increase:

As a consequence, native ads will continue to grow in popularity, making them a staple on a marketer’s overall advertising strategy.

Dive Deeper: How to Scale Your E-commerce Traffic Acquisition with Native Advertising

32) IoT Advertising

The “Internet of the Things” (IoT) has been making a lot of noise over the last decade. To understand its marketing potential, let’s quickly define it:

The IoT represents a network of devices, from smart cars to household appliances to wearable tech, that are connected between each other and the Internet. In this network, the connected devices can gather, share and analyze information and create actions synchronously.

A few examples of IoT are:

• Controlling a home thermostat remotely using a mobile app
• DHL tracking vehicles and monitoring warehouses using environmental sensors to optimize their processes
• A smart toothbrush that encourages good brushing habits
• A health monitor that reports on a variety of biometrics and will contact your healthcare provider if needed

By 2025, there are expected to be more than 75 billion IoT devices worldwide, with an estimated global spending of $1.1 trillion.

IoT advertising involves connecting digital screens to specific products and services in order to inform customers about them. This works by gathering data from sensors installed on the digital screen and then using this data to personalize advertisements for customers.

By leveraging customer data, marketers can create targeted ads that are tailored specifically to an individual’s needs and interests.

Brands that are already implementing IoT advertising include:

• Johnnie Walker has a Blue Label bottle with built-in electronic sensors that can tell if the bottle has been opened and where it is in the supply chain. The sensors can also display information to customers who scan the bottle with their smartphones and deliver the appropriate content to them. For example, it will display promotional offers if the bottle is in the store and cocktail recipes when the bottle is at home and has been opened.

• Malibu, another drinks company, takes it a step further, using their “connected” bottles as digital touchpoints to promote exclusive content
• Google’s local search ads, of course, make good use of IoT in advertising. When people search locally on their smartphones, they’re shown relevant ads based on their current location

The Internet of Things can also be used to “display real-time in-store advertising to consumers, with the goal of increasing sales and revenue. This application is based on a type of technology called beacons.

Beacons are miniature transmitters that emit signals to nearby devices via Bluetooth. Therefore, they can identify the products a user is bringing to checkout and show him or her related product promotions. All of this contributes to improving the store’s average order value and revenue.”

The opportunities for IoT advertising are just surfacing, which may disrupt the industry in ways we can’t imagine. The only challenge ahead is privacy. Given the detailed amount of data IoT devices gather, marketers will have to use it in ways that are relevant and respectful of the user’s privacy.

Let’s just hope that these devices don’t start to read our minds…

33) Inclusivity and Diversity & Social Responsibility

Inclusivity and diversity no longer belong to the HR world. In 2023 and beyond, it’s a marketer’s job to elevate diversity in all of its forms, represent the marginalized or underrepresented, and reduce long-standing cultural biases to strengthen connections with customers and foster a culture of positive social change.

Companies need to be careful that their messages, images, voices and values represent the full spectrum of potential customers and not leave anyone out due to their own unconscious bias.

In 2019, Adobe conducted a research report of more than 2,000 U.S. consumers and discovered that:

• 61% found diversity in advertising important
• 38% said they are more likely to trust brands that show more diversity in their ads
• 120 million Americans (out of a 332-million population) don’t see themselves portrayed in ads

A Nielsen report shows that:

“With 43% of the 75 million Millennials in the U.S. identifying as African American, Hispanic, or Asian, if a brand doesn’t have a multicultural strategy, it doesn’t have a growth strategy.”

Some ways that brands can make their marketing more inclusive include:

• Tone: Take a deep, careful look at how you represent a subject — say, an average member of your target audience. Analyze the words and expressions you use in your ads and content to represent them.
• Language: Pay special attention to the words, symbols and phrases you use to describe people and their problems.
• Representation: Before publishing a content piece or ad, ask yourself: Does this reflect society? Are we elevating diverse voices?

Along the same lines, social responsibility is becoming increasingly important in 2023. For digital marketers, this means marketing campaigns that are ethical and transparent.

This includes making sure that digital campaigns are not pushing false information or promoting content that could have a negative impact on society. Additionally, digital marketers should strive to create content that is respectful of different cultures and communities, as well as demonstrate how digital campaigns can be used for the benefit of society.

Brands that take these practices into consideration when developing their marketing campaigns will find themselves better positioned to succeed because they’ll be able to build trust with customers and stand out from the competition.

34) Alternate Search Engines

Research from StatCounter shows that about 92% of all traffic on search engines is through Google. Although small, it’s worth noting the changes from 2019 to 2022 – Google’s market share dropped almost one percent, while almost every other search engine grew:

It’s hard to fathom a catastrophic collapse happening to the world’s most dominant search engine any time soon.

That being said, DuckDuckGo – a privacy-focused search engine founded in 2008 that has gained a niche popularity among privacy-minded users – has made some waves recently with its tagline “the search engine that doesn’t track you” because “search engines don’t need to track users to make money.”

While Google has been embroiled in data scandals such as the Cambridge Analytica fiasco and was officially charged with antitrust violations related to its search and advertising businesses last year, DuckDuckGo has meanwhile been quietly growing their privacy-first search engine. Their daily search volume hit 110 million early this year.

Even Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey uses it:

Ultimately, marketers should consider their audience (and not just Gen Z, but all demographics) and think about where their brand’s content is likely to be viewed. With that in mind, optimize your content for more than just one search engine.

Looking for a full-service marketing agency? Check out:
The Absolute 20 Best Marketing Agencies in 2023

Final Word on Digital Marketing Trends

For anyone in digital marketing, change is an integral part of the job. You must keep looking ahead and strive to embrace new technologies, tools, and marketing efforts to gain an edge over your competitors.

Digital marketing trends such as quantum computing, Position Zero, and IoT advertising can provide brands and marketers with unprecedented insights and opportunities to succeed.

By understanding and leveraging these marketing strategies today, businesses can stay ahead of their competition and be successful in 2023! Good luck!

If you want to  grow more efficiently in 2023, our experts can audit your marketing and bring you fresh ideas for Paid Media, SEO, Content, CRO, and more. Just click the button below to book a chat with our team!

Get My Free Marketing Plan

Additional contributions by CJ Haughey, Ivan Kreimer and Selena Templeton.

The post 34 Digital Marketing Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2023 appeared first on Single Grain.

• 91% of marketers use content marketing to reach their audience.
• Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates up to 3X more leads.
• 70% of survey respondents said that SEO is better than PPC for generating sales.
• 55% of marketers say blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority.

Businesses leverage content marketing because it helps them grow their audience base, improve search traffic, increase conversions, and establish their brand as the leader in their target niche. But creating a regular and lucrative content strategy takes time and effort, so businesses hire expert content marketing agencies to do this for them.

This guide lists the top content marketing agencies and provides additional information to help you understand what such an agency does and how to choose the right one for your needs.

TABLE OF CONTENTS: ↓

Top 8 Content Marketing Companies

Now that you know what to look for in a content marketing agency, here is a carefully curated list of the best content marketing companies and their specializations.

1) Single Grain

Single Grain started out as an SEO agency and a decade later have grown into a leading 7-figure full-service digital marketing agency. Their creative and talented online marketing team can help your company build conversion-driven content marketing strategies with the help of their search engine optimization tactics and lead generation experience.

They can help you develop content that will channel your lead into the company marketing funnel.

Single Grain specializes in:

• Single Grain has a team of content marketing experts who design and execute agile content marketing campaigns, enabling your business to grow.
• They offer personalized content marketing solutions based on your business goals that drive real results.
• The team develops fully optimized, conversion-driven content marketing strategies using expert SEO techniques and lead generation experience.
• With teams of experts in other digital strategies, such as paid media, PPC, conversion optimization, e-commerce marketing, demand generation, blockchain & ICO marketing, NFT marketing, and enterprise SEO, they are fully equipped to offer any business the best ROI for their buck when it comes to high-converting content.
• They work carefully with your business to craft copy that engages, converts, and tells your brand’s story and expands brand awareness.
• They are specialized in understanding and testing how different messages, copy, and web design graphics can yield specific results for your business.

Top clients:

• Amazon
• Airbnb
• CrunchBase
• Uber
• Salesforce
• Intuit

Pricing: They offer custom pricing based on your business needs.

Get My Free Content Marketing Plan

Check out Single Grain founder Eric Siu’s short video Nifty Content Marketing Strategies to Get More Traffic (with Less Work!):

2) NP Digital

NP Digital is a performance marketing agency founded by Neil Patel that aims to deliver the right content by matching your digital marketing requirements.

One of the main focus areas of NP Digital is to deliver the right content in the proper context on a comprehensive scale by utilizing its ability to pivot as fast as the digital marketplace.

This company ranks at number six in Adweek’s fastest-growing agencies list for 2021.

NP Digital specializes in:

• Provides engaging content to its client that piques the interest of their audience.
• NP Digital offers a service to promote the content where your audience is present online.
• They use insights and data to create content for the future. They first understand your audience and develop personas to adjust the tone of voice in their content.
• They pick suitable topics based on search volume, buyer intent, difficulty relative to investment, and brand alignment.  
• NP Digital also enables you to determine the amount of content you need to create to establish your brand.
• They help you figure out how you can utilize your existing site content to better your presence and growth. They decide which existing content should be retired, reformatted, redirected, and repurposed.  

Top clients include:

• Facebook
• NBC
• eBay
• Google
• Intuit

Pricing: They offer custom pricing based on your business needs.

3) Growth Machine

Growth Machine is an SEO and content marketing agency that is trusted by growing companies as well as Fortune 500 brands.

When Ridester hired Growth Machine, their organic visitors per week stood at 48,000+, but after a year of working with Growth Machine, their number grew to 282,000+.

Growth Machine specializes in:

• Planning with an organic search-focused marketing strategy to help clients grow their blogs to 100,000+ monthly visitors within a year or even more to double the website’s existing traffic.
• The company has a team of 7,000+ writers responsible for delivering their expertise best matched for the kind of content your site requires, leading to overall traffic conversion.
• Growth Machine is best at optimizing the content before it reaches your customer. Once the article is prepared, it goes through a thorough process of SEO audit to deliver quality content that draws the right customer to your website.
• They also help you beat your competitors by building targeted backlinks to your website to get the best out of your content.

Top clients:

• Adobe
• Yummly
• Intuit
• Brex
• Tovala

Pricing: The average cost for the services of Growth Machine is $8,000-$10,000. However, it depends on the size of your business and requirements.

4) Grow and Convert

Grow and Convert is a content marketing agency run by two curious founders, Benji Hyam and Devesh Khanal. They look after the end-to-end content requirements of your company to deliver high-quality content for increased traffic and conversions.

Grow and Convert specializes in:

• Extensively researches content ideas for attracting the right customers. They help you to gain qualified traffic instead of un-targeted traffic.
• Prepares high-quality content based on your campaign goals.
• Customized and in-depth content promotion. They generate traffic through paid advertising and SEO.
• Authority link building for higher rankings to boost overall domain authority faster in Google.
• Customized strategy for converting blog traffic into conversions. 

Top clients include:

• Patreon
• Leadfeeder
• Crazy Egg

Pricing: Grow and Convert offers two pricing plans:

• Standard service that includes customer research, content strategy, three articles per month, promotion, link building, and reporting. It costs $10,000 per month.
• The second plan includes an optional link-building service that costs you an additional $5,000 per month.

5) Omniscient Digital

Omniscient Digital has worked with some renowned companies, and they help growing B2B software companies accelerate growth through full-service, conversion rate-driven content marketing.

The company works on fair values, such as believing in content marketing as a business function and delivering exclusive content that cannot be copied easily.

Omniscient Digital specializes in:

• Their team of experts audits your existing website, analyzes competitors, and gets familiar with your industry. They then help you find relevant keyword opportunities for your business to grow your traffic.
• They offer a content roadmap report, also known as CORE. It is based on the content barbell strategy, which helps you quickly grow organic traffic and convert visitors.
• Omniscient Digital also offer a fully managed content production service, which includes preparing an outline for a ready-to-publish article, making your work easy.
• They also focus on building white hat backlinks on websites with a domain rating of 50 or higher. This helps make your content rank faster.​

Top clients:

• Lokalise
• Blissfully
• Wordable
• Appsumo

Pricing: They offer custom pricing based on your business needs.

6) Chosen Data

Chosen Data is a content marketing agency that mainly provides services to the health, finance, tech, and marketing industries. They usually get hired by directors of marketing departments or marketing agencies.

Chosen Data specializes in:

• Chosen Data produces high-quality and original content to educate your audience and drive them closer to the sales funnel.
• They also provide visuals and video content creation services to make your business stand out from the crowd.

Top clients:

• Bango
• Colvita Creative
• The Longhairs
• Straight Line Landscape
• Cover Three

Pricing: They offer custom pricing based on your business needs.

7) WP Suites

WP Suites is a company with more than 16 years of experience and over 350 clients. They are on a mission to change the view of people regarding SEO and digital marketing.

WP Suites specializes in:

• They have contributed to the development of 100+ brands by helping them generate exceptional website traffic, customer connections, and overall ranking.
• They are dedicated to the growth of the brands they work with.
• WP Suites helps you rank above your competitors with unique SEO and digital marketing solutions that deliver winning results.
• WP Suites helps you understand how content marketing can work for you.

Top clients include:

• Mike Staff Productions
• Amprion Inc
• loPriore Insurance Agency

Pricing: They offer custom pricing based on your content marketing needs.

8) Ardent Growth

Ardent Growth helps build content marketing strategies to produce high-level content for B2B brands. They leverage data, machine learning, and creativity to deliver high-quality content to B2B SaaS companies who want a clear path to ROI with financial modeling.

Ardent Growth specializes in:

• Research: Topic clustering, content audit, content gaps, and content optimization
• Creation: Content planning, financial modeling, content briefs, evergreen blog articles, and thought leadership.
• Promotion: Outreach training, outreach strategy Tableau, podcast outreach, and social copy.
• SERP-driven clusters: These are built using live SERP data from Google and grouped by topic and subtopic, making it easier to plan content.
• Revenue potential: They calculate revenue potential by topic clusters to help you determine whether a given cluster is worth going after or not.
• Search intent: They help you determine the search intent for each keyword to quickly determine the type of content you need to reach your marketing goals.
• Personalized priority score: They provide a personalized priority score to make it easier to get quick wins by taking your current topical authority into account and balancing it with potential value.

Top clients include:

• True Legacy Homes
• Omni Biotic
• Akasa
• Priddy Chimney Sweeps

Pricing: They offer custom pricing based on your business needs.

Book My Free Content Marketing Consultation

What Is a Content Marketing Agency?

A content marketing agency is a specialized firm that creates content as per the digital marketing needs of your business and, often, helps publish and promote it, too.

These digital marketing agencies take responsibility for managing the entire content marketing process of your business, which includes creating a content marketing strategy, content ideation, creating day-to-day content, content distribution, and reporting on the results of each content marketing initiative.

Content marketing companies generally have a multi-faceted skilled team, including:

• Content writers
• Content editors
• Content strategists
• Project managers
• Marketers
• Graphic designers
• Videographers
• Programmers

With these experts on hand, the agency easily provides and shares content on behalf of your business. Content marketing firms can help you create a variety of content, such as:

• Blog articles
• Case studies and white papers
• E-books
• Website content
• Email marketing campaigns
• Landing pages
• Product descriptions
• Infographics
• Image and video production

A content marketing firm also uses the latest SEO techniques and understands the required LSI and long-tail keywords needed to create high-quality content that can quickly rank on search engines and increase conversion rates.

Dive Deeper:
* 10 Effective SEO Techniques to Drive Organic Traffic in 2023
* Why You Should Use Long-Tail Keywords in Your SEO Campaign
* How to Create a High-Performance Content Marketing Strategy in 2023

How to Choose a Content Marketing Agency

Some factors that you must consider when selecting a good content marketing agency are:

Experience

Researching the credentials and studying the experience of a content marketing company enables you to make an informed decision. The first step is to check their website to see what kind of experience they have.

Look for any testimonials:

And case studies:

A good content marketing agency should have sufficient experience (and possibly some award-winning campaigns) in your industry, and the agency should have a legacy of accomplishment. Often, they will display a list of brand logos of the companies they have helped:

You can also ask for content samples and ad campaign samples to better understand their work.

Expertise

Every agency has expertise in a particular niche: Some may have teams dedicated to formulating SEO-based campaigns, while others may be good at product launches. Either way, you must gauge the potential of a content marketing agency based on its specialty.

How do you assess that? Check their “About” page and services section to see their niche areas:

And a good content marketing agency always has a blog section that regularly publishes content in its niche:

Analyze their blog posts to get an understanding of the quality they are capable of producing. 

Reputation

Collaborating with a content marketing agency with a good reputation in the market is lucrative, as it can assure quality service and optimum results if they work on your projects.

To verify the reputation of a content marketing firm, check online reviews like Google:

Or on review sites:

A good content agency also has a good reputation with journalists, publishers, and influencers.

Approach

Initial consultation and meetings with the content marketing agency are crucial.

Before hiring an agency, organize a meeting with the prospective content marketing agency for an in-depth discussion on your content requirements.

Here are things that you need to discuss with them:

• Give them an idea about your business, goals and objectives.
• Inform them about the KPIs and key metrics that you want to grow.
• Understand the tools and techniques they use to build content and grow companies (and whether they focus on small businesses and startups or large enterprises).
• Ask for a sample blog post or the content marketing strategy they would use for you.
• Discuss their pricing plans, contracts, turnaround time, and anything else you need to know.

Book My Free Content Marketing Consultation

Benefits of Hiring a Content Marketing Agency

Some advantages of hiring a content marketing agency are:

1) Subject Matter Experts

Content agencies have content experts who are well versed in all aspects of copywriting techniques for SEO-friendly content. Being subject matter experts, they are up-to-date with the content marketing trends and best practices to help you produce valuable blog posts and other content. They deploy the latest SEO strategies to generate maximum return on your content writing and marketing investment.

Subject matter experts perform data mining and extensive research to come up with compelling topics that are relevant to your business. They also focus on using the right channels to publish and promote your content.

For example, if you have a tech business, you can partner with an agency with relevant experience in creating tech-related content. They will monitor trends and topics in the tech industry to offer you excellent content that is accurate and up to date.

2) Save Time and Money

Hiring a full-time employee for content creation is expensive and has limitations concerning the volume of content and the breadth of topics that can be created consistently.

Since content marketing agencies have a team of content specialists, you can pick a niche writer according to your specific business requirements without the need to hire a full-time employee. You’ll get multiple topic specialists working simultaneously to help you create content based on your digital campaign needs.

Hence, working with a content marketing firm allows you to publish regular content without compromising on the quality while you and your team concentrate on your core business, thereby saving time and money.

3) Budget Friendly

You save money by just paying for as-needed services when you hire a content marketing agency, not for infrastructure, legalities, office space, or software. You also cut recurring costs, such as salary and benefits to the full-time employees.

In addition, the amount of money you pay to an agency is based on either price per word or per content copy, depending on your industry niche and content firm policies. This means that, in comparison to the cost of an in-house operation, hiring a content marketing company is less costly over time.

4) Fresh Perspective and Streamlined Content

Hiring a content marketing firm helps you get a different perspective on your content strategy. It also enables you to generate new and fresh blog posts, from interactive content and UGC to explainer videos and detailed guides, on topics relevant to your niche.

Moreover, content agencies streamline your content by using the right keywords, ensuring the recommended readability score, and maintaining optimal word content with an excellent content score:

Analyzing and optimizing your content for all these vital metrics helps your content climb the SERPs for more traffic and conversions quickly.

Dive Deeper:
* How to Create a High-Performance Content Marketing Strategy in 2023
* 48 Content Marketing Tools to Make Your Life Easier
* 30 Actionable Content Marketing Tips for Digital Marketers

What Do Content Marketing Agencies Charge?

The rates for content marketing services depend on several factors, such as the duration of the content campaign, type of campaign run, marketing approach, communication channels used, and much more.

The cost range at a content marketing agency varies greatly, and it depends on many factors, like the amount of content (you can often get a discount for higher output), whether you hire them on a monthly retainer or what specific services you hire them for.

Average rates for content development are:

• Per hour (general): $100-$300
• Per word (writing only): $0.05-$0.50
• Monthly retainer: $1,000-$25,000+
• Content development: $500-$3,000/month
• Content optimization: $75-$200/hour
• Content promotion: $75-$150/hour

As you can see, the cost of content marketing can range quite a bit, from $500-$25,000+ per month.

Related Content:
* How to Determine a Marketing Budget for Your Brand in 2023
* Content Strategy on a Budget: How to Grow Your Online Presence on a Shoestring

What Does a Content Marketing Agency Do?

One of the most important aspects of content marketing is the creation of compelling, engaging, high-quality content.

Content marketing agencies work beyond traditional methods and tactics to get potential customers and drive more traffic to your website via articles, blogs, case studies, or other content pieces. Some will also help update your website design for a better user experience (or at least recommend a good design agency).

Here are the top tasks for which you can hire a content marketing agency:

1) Prepare Outstanding Text Content

A content marketing agency is responsible for creating captivating content as per your business requirement.

The content marketing team drafts articles and blogs that are unique, plagiarism-free, and grammatically correct to enhance your business’s online presence. The types of written content can include:

• Blogs
• Landing pages
• Social media posts
• White papers
• E-books
• Case studies

They prepare high-quality content by performing the following activities:

• Keyword research to evaluate the effectiveness of your content.
• Trend analysis to identify the best topics in your industry.
• Content creation to prepare engaging and original articles.
• Content optimizing to ensure that your blog post has the best possible chance to rank well in the SERPs.
• Content repurposing to share your content across different platforms for extra visibility and traffic.

Thus, a content marketing agency not only helps you create content, but also takes care of its promotion.

2) Produce Engaging Video Content

Videos are highly shareable content and easier to consume. In fact, videos get 1,200% more shares on social media.

Content marketing firms can help you create video content and integrate it into your marketing strategy based on your business requirements. They can help you create different forms of video content, such as:

• Educational videos
• How-to videos
• Product demonstrations
• Testimonials
• Video ads
• Event videos
• Video emails
• Company culture videos
• FAQ videos
• Thank you videos

3) Create Action-Oriented Gated Content

Users get access to gated content when they fill out a form by providing their email addresses. Gated content can be in the form of an e-book, case studies report, how-to’s, or white papers.

The idea is to offer something valuable for which your audience is willing to give their email address.

Creating impactful and well-researched gated content is one of the specialties of a content marketing agency. They write strategic case studies, e-books, and white papers that are accurate and up-to-date.

While creating gated content, their primary focus is on:

• Creative writing and storytelling skills to prepare high-quality content.
• Researching current trends.
• Looking for ways to condense text into an infographic.
• Planning the distribution of gated content.
• Finding ways to repurpose the content across other platforms.

Being copywriting experts, the content marketing team has an impeccable command of the language and a fantastic choice of words to take your business to new heights.

4) Write Compelling Social Media Marketing Copy

The power of social media platforms is humongous. There is a golden opportunity for brands and businesses to interact and establish rapport with their audience through platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Snapchat and TikTok.

A content marketing agency can help you design an effective social media marketing plan to increase the online visibility of your business.

They will help you identify your target audience’s platforms and prepare custom content for your target channels accordingly. They also enable you to produce and schedule content when your audience is active.

Summary: What to Look for in a Content Marketing Agency

Now that you understand what content marketing agencies do, how they work, what they charge, and the advantages of hiring them, you’re better equipped to choose the most qualified content marketing company that best fits your business needs.

Follow the tips discussed in this content marketing agency selection guide to find the next content marketing agency for your company that delivers outstanding results that you can measure and replicate.

To sum up, here are the key points that you should consider before selecting a content marketing company:

• Check whether they have updated and quality content on their website.
• Evaluate their work results with previous clients.
• Always ask for a sample post (or whatever you are hiring them for) to evaluate the kind of content they deliver.
• Communicate your audience type and see if they are capable of understanding your customer base.
• Look for versatility in their work by looking at the range of services they offer, because it’s best to work with an all-in-one agency.
• Analyze the experts they have on their teams and their experiences.
• Search agencies that contribute their expertise to leading industry publications relevant to your niche.
• Ask for a list of their past and present clients you can talk to.
• Choose an agency that is transparent and trustworthy around its pricing model.

If you’re looking for a full-service content marketing agency to help with your content marketing needs, Single Grain can help you! Click the orange button below 👇

Book My Free Content Marketing Consultation

The post Best Content Marketing Agency: Top 8 Choices for 2023 appeared first on Single Grain.

And in this comprehensive guide, we’ll show you just how to do that. When it comes to creating a powerful marketing funnel, we’ll cover:

• What a marketing funnel is (+ examples)
• The five stages of a marketing funnel (+ the AIDA funnel)
• How to create each stage of your funnel
• Qualifying leads in your funnel

Easier said than done, right? 

If you need help and just want to create a simple marketing funnel that best fulfills your needs, read on!

TABLE OF CONTENTS: ↓

What Is a Marketing Funnel?

A marketing funnel – aka purchase funnel – is a roadmap laid out by a company to guide potential customers from their first interaction with the brand to becoming a paying customer.

This roadmap usually consists of paid ads, social media, SEO, content marketing, and many other channels. 

While the concept is simple enough, conversion funnels can be very complex for a multitude of reasons, including:

• There are many different marketing channels to choose from (paid ads, SEO, etc.)
• Your customers may have varied pain points (a doctor who wants a survey tool may have different needs from a teacher who needs a survey tool)
• Every customer has a different level of awareness (some have heard of your brand and are looking at alternatives and others don’t even know that solutions exist)

Given these variables, it’s easy to understand how creating a marketing funnel can quickly become very complex.

Even if you’ve never sat down to formally create a marketing funnel, you probably already have a funnel without knowing it. Here’s an example of what a marketing funnel might look like:

However, the reality is that most businesses have multiple funnels. In addition to capturing people through blog posts, a business might also capture prospects through paid ads, influencer marketing, or some other channel.

I’ll discuss how to choose which channel to target, but for now don’t assume there is only one way to capture new prospects.

Related Content:
* What’s the Right Content for Each Stage of the Marketing Funnel?
* 3 Scalable Content Promotion Strategies to Blast Your Funnel
* The Types of Videos to Use at Each Stage of the Marketing Funnel

What Is an Example of a Marketing Funnel?

An example of a marketing funnel or purchase funnel could be someone who travels the buying journey via:

• Blog Post > Email List > Conversion
• Podcast Ad > Blog Post > Conversion
• Facebook Ad > Landing Page > Conversion
• Influencer Social Post > Landing Page > Conversion

Basically, if people are purchasing your product or service online, you have a marketing funnel whether you know it or not.

Here’s an important thing to keep in mind: Although your marketing model may appear quite clear and simple on paper, it is not always that linear in real life. There are often regressions and jumps as people actually go through your marketing funnel. 

For example, in the marketing funnel below, even though both Customer A and Customer B came in through content marketing, they had very different customer journeys and experienced the purchase funnel differently:

This is one of the reasons why our strategy at Single Grain is to create an omnichannel marketing plan – because you never know where you will capture potential customers. Even after a customer has made a purchase, your funnel can continue with cross-sells and upsells.

Now that you know what a funnel is and how it works, you’re probably wondering how to build one that uses the channels most appropriate for your business and isn’t ridiculously complicated.

After creating a marketing funnel that earns our business enough valuable leads to sustain a seven-figure revenue, I wanted to share a marketing funnel framework that will help you reliably generate leads regardless of your current available resources and industry.

Get My Free Marketing Plan

How Does a Marketing Funnel Work? (Stages of the Funnel)

If you’ve ever used a paper funnel at the gas station to help you pour oil directly into your car’s oil reservoir and not all over the engine, then you understand the basic idea of how a funnel works. 

A marketing funnel works via stages, from the broader section at the top (Top of Funnel) that pulls in many people, through the narrower section in the middle (Middle of Funnel), and down to the even narrower section at the bottom (Bottom of Funnel) that is populated by serious buyers:

That’s why the most important thing to understand when it comes to building a marketing or purchase funnel is that you need to look at it from the customer’s perspective. Doing so will save you a lot of guesswork and headaches. 

With this in mind, let’s look at the various marketing funnel stages that customers experience. 

Stage 1 – Problem/Need Recognition (TOFU)

Recognizing that you have a problem is the beginning of the buying process. This is the awareness stage.

If you don’t know you have a problem, why would you purchase a solution for it? You may have gum disease, but if you don’t see or feel anything out of the ordinary in your mouth, it won’t even occur to you to do an online search for gum disease. 

On the other hand, if your furnace goes out in the middle of winter, you immediately know that you have an issue and will quickly jump to the next step (information search) in the buying process. You may do a little bit of research, but because your problem is so pressing, you won’t take long. 

Other products or services will require much more education. An example might be purchasing a pharmaceutical drug. In this case, a person may recognize a physical symptom (“problem”), but it might persist for some time before they take action and look for a solution.

Stage 2 – Information Search (MOFU)

Recognizing a problem or need is the step that triggers a search for more information and brings potential leads to the second stage of the funnel.

The strategies used to gather information tend to vary based on the size and scope of the purchase. Recognizing that you’re hungry, for example, might result in a quick Yelp search for restaurants in your area. Deciding which provider to hire to install a new in-ground pool at your home, on the other hand, will involve doing some search engine querying, calling around, reading customer reviews, visiting showrooms, and talking with salespeople.

According to Trust Radius, in 2021 about 33% of buyers spent more time researching products prior to purchasing than they did last year, suggesting that this stage of the funnel is becoming more in-depth. At this point, people aren’t looking for promotional content; they’re looking to learn more about potential solutions for their need.

Stage 3 – Evaluation of Alternatives (MOFU)

Once customers are aware of a solution, the next step is to compare the alternatives that your article or ad has discussed. Again, the time spent in this consideration stage will vary based on the type of purchase being contemplated. Choosing a restaurant might be as simple as deciding, “Well, I feel like Chinese food, not Mexican, tonight.”

But say the customer is evaluating marketing automation programs to help improve the sales funnel they created. Because these programs can require investments of $1,500 a month, they’re likely to undergo a much more careful and thorough evaluation process. They might seek out referrals, request free trials of the different systems they’re considering, have online demonstrations with each company’s representatives or view training videos to get a feel for how each system will perform.

If you’re running an accounting business, at this stage, the middle of the funnel, your customers would be evaluating different potential service providers. They might need resources like pricing guides (so they know what ballpark rates are), how to evaluate the landscape of accounting services (i.e. whether to hire a solo accountant, an agency, etc.), or how to choose an accountant.

If you’re running a marketing services business, you might create content about:

• how to choose a marketing agency
• agency pricing guides
• whether a company should go contract or hire in-house 

The above examples are non-promotional, educational content resources we’ve created for our readers who are considering hiring digital marketing agencies.

Note that prospects reaching this stage are more serious about making a purchase than customers doing initial research. Therefore, if you have limited resources, you don’t have to start at the top of the funnel. Instead, you can start by targeting only bottom of the funnel prospects for maximum conversions from minimum effort.

Stage 4 – Purchase Decision (BOFU)

The purchase stage is the natural conclusion of the preceding three stages. The potential customer has determined that they have a problem, investigated their options, decided which one is best for them… and now they’re getting ready to pull out their wallets.

At this stage, optimizing your website for conversions (CRO) is an excellent way to increase sales.

You can also provide risk-free trials, money-back guarantees, and similar offers that make purchasing your product or service a no-brainer.

Stage 5 – Post-Purchase Behavior 

One more thing. The customer journey isn’t over just because a purchase has been made. What happens after the sale is just as important.

If your new customers are greeted by a thoughtful onboarding process, personal attention and all the resources they need to use your product successfully, they’re more likely to become loyal customers that refer you to friends and colleagues. And when they’re confident, they’re more likely to pass on their satisfaction to others in the form of recommendations and product endorsements.

On the other hand, if your new customers experience disappointment after their purchase, they’re more likely to request refunds, write negative reviews and recommend that others in their social circles purchase from your competitors.

There’s not much content you can create to help facilitate a good post-purchase experience — apart from just creating a great product. If you have a great product that solves a problem, post-purchase behavior will take care of itself.

And there are certain actions you can take to help facilitate better post-purchase behavior, i.e. retention. For example, you could create FAQ content, add testimonials from brand advocates, make it easier to get customer support or solicit feedback on the buying process.

Related Content: 5 Ways to Re-Engage Those Long-Lost Customers

AIDA: Another Way to Remember Content Creation Stages

There’s another way to remember the stages of the sales funnel and match them to content creation — with the acronym AIDA:

Whether you prefer the traditional sales funnel stages or the acronym AIDA, the results are the same:

Customers enter the sales funnel and through a process of discernment, choose to either move to an alternative solution or purchase from you. The action at the end of the funnel, or the purchase, concludes the stages of the conversion funnel.

Although most people enter the funnel at the top, not everyone does. Some will enter at subsequent stages, but the process remains the same no matter which stage someone enters the sales funnel.

Get My Free Marketing Plan

How to Build a Marketing Funnel for Your Content

Now that you know how people make decisions, it’s time to create your marketing funnel.

As mentioned earlier, one of the main points is choosing which marketing channels to include in your marketing efforts. Ideally, you want to do all of the marketing channels below: 

However, the reality is that few companies have the resources to tackle all of these channels (podcasting, paid search, social media, email marketing, newsletters, e-books, whitepapers, etc.) effectively.

Therefore, although we’ll discuss each stage of the funnel, keep in mind that it might be more effective to start at the bottom of the funnel and work your way up, since those already at the bottom of the funnel are much more likely to make a purchase and become repeat customers.

Stage 1 Channels – Problem/Need Recognition (TOFU)

Your customer may be vaguely aware that they have an issue, though they may not be actively looking for a solution.

For example, let’s say you sell cooling vests that keep outdoor workers cool in the summertime. Your target audience may find that being hot is annoying, but they may not be aware that anything exists to solve it, so they likely won’t even be thinking of looking for a solution.

However, if they see or hear an advertisement for a cooling vest, they might have an “aha!” moment and do some further research on the subject.

Therefore, capturing people at this stage is generally going to consist of outbound marketing or advertising. Here are some of the channels that typically attract people at this stage in the process:

• Podcast advertising
• Billboards
• Influencer marketing
• Paid Ads (Facebook, YouTube, Google, etc.)
• Radio ads
• TV ads
• Attending live events

As you can see, most of these channels also double as “brand awareness” channels. Some of them are likely to drive direct conversions (such as paid ads and influencer marketing), though the majority will not. 

This is also interruption marketing as the listener/viewer isn’t actively searching for a solution – rather, you’re hoping they have a pain point that your message can resonate with.

Examples of Marketing Campaigns at This Stage

• You sell a SaaS product and pay for ads on a podcast with a SaaS audience
• You sell beauty products and partner with an influencer to post about it
• You sell plastic surgery services and pay for radio ads to promote it to people in your geography

Action Tip: Discover where and how your competitors have been advertising the longest. If they have been advertising for a long time on a certain platform, it’s likely that it’s converting well for them.

Purchase Intent: This is the stage farthest from purchase intent. Start by optimizing your website for Stage 4, then Stage 3, then Stage 2, and finally Stage 1.

Stage 2 Channels – Information Search (MOFU)

Now that your customers are interested in finding a solution to their problem, the next step is to create the information they want to know.

At the conclusion of the campaign you ran in Stage 1, you should have included a CTA that points people to either this stage, or a stage further down the funnel.

For simple products that require little information to sell, you can send them directly to the sales page. However, for the sake of showing you each step that can be included in the funnel, we’ll assume the product has some complexity and requires some education. In your blog post, it helps you build trust with the audience if you can speak authoritatively on the pain point.

In this case, these are the channels you will probably be leveraging:

• Content marketing (Blog posts, YouTube videos, etc.)
• SEO
• Social media

For most brands, the easiest place to start is writing blog posts. Although it is competitive, there is still room for improvement and, unlike the other channels, the results compound over time. 

However, the keywords at this stage will draw a very elementary audience.

For example, if you are an SEO agency, the keywords people will probably search for at this point are:

• “What is SEO?”
• “How to Optimize My Website for Google”
• “What Is Keyword Research?”
• “What Is Link Building?”

At this point, there are plenty of people who are interested in doing SEO on their own, or it may not be a big enough pain point to hire an agency.

These top of the funnel keywords are also quite difficult to rank for, so unless you have already done all of the bottom of the funnel steps we’re about to discuss, I recommend against trying to immediately rank for top of funnel keywords.

However, if you have a larger brand and want to rank for these keywords, start by updating content that already ranks within positions 11-20 in the SERPs.

Related Content: Why You Should Update Content – Or Risk Losing The Traffic You Have [Case Study]

Look for ‘Striking Distance’ Keywords

‘Striking distance’ keywords are those that are currently in positions 11-20. By using content optimization techniques, you can upgrade your content which will very likely result in it being bumped up onto page one of the SERPs.

The simplest free method to find these is to simply go through your Search Console data and sort queries by position. 

Once you have a list of target pages to upgrade, you can lean on various tools to help you with edits/upgrades to improve your page:

• Use a tool like Frase to find relevant keywords and subtopics to cover in your article
• To increase the average dwell time, use a tool like InVideo to make a video for your page and embed it.
• Make sure your website loads fast. If your website is slow, consider using a CDN to increase your page speed (and rankings)

Nonetheless, if you’re absolutely against blogging (for example, if you sell in a super competitive industry like car insurance), here are some additional examples.

Examples of Content at This Stage

• Create content for broader, top of funnel (TOFU) keywords
• Create a YouTube channel that focuses on general how-to, what is, and other early educational topics
• Produce social media content that informs users of basic pain points around your product/service

Action Tip: Discover what the first thing people search for is when they realize they have a problem, and then create content that shows up for that search.

Purchase Intent: This stage is still relatively far from purchase intent. Start by optimizing your website for Stages 4 and 3 first.

Related Content: What Is Content Decay and How It Affects Your SEO

Stage 3 Channels – Evaluation of Alternatives (MOFU)

At this stage of the marketing funnel, your customers know that a solution to their pain point exists. Therefore, the next stage (if they continue down the funnel; most will simply bounce at this point until the pain grows strong enough that they take action) is to evaluate different solutions.

The purchase intent dramatically increases from the previous stage of people merely educating themselves on the pain to actively evaluating solutions. 

Therefore, here are a few marketing channels you can try:

• BOFU content marketing (competitor alternatives posts, competitor vs competitor posts, etc.)
• Writing case studies of the product’s best users
• Campaigning for more reviews
• Retargeting ads 
• Optimizing pricing pages

At this stage, your messaging should be less about educating the audience on the pain point and more about educating them on why your solution solves their pain point the best.

For example, show off any unique features or a pricing model that make your solution preferable to the competition.

Examples of Content at This Stage

For the sake of simplicity, let’s pretend you are doing marketing for FreshBooks. In this case, you might:

• Create content for keywords that demonstrate purchase intent like “best accounting software for small business”
• Bid for branded competitor keywords like “Quickbooks”
• Create retargeting ads for people who already visited the pricing page
• Optimize the pricing page by building links to it and internally linking
• Send out surveys to current customers and ask all happy, loyal customers to leave reviews

Action Tip: The great thing about this stage is that it is often the cheapest stage to optimize for as it targets a much higher-quality audience. Therefore, exhaust every single one of the steps on this list before moving up the funnel.

Purchase Intent: Purchase intent is very high at this point. If you have limited resources, start here and fully optimize this stage above all else.

Related Content:
* How to Write a Case Study that Converts Prospective Buyers into Customers
* Retargeting 101: Why It’s Essential for Any Marketing Funnel

Stage 4 Channels – Purchase Decision (BOFU)

By this stage, you’ve already done about 99% of the work. Now, all you have to do is make purchasing a no-brainer to turn the prospect into a paying customer.

To accomplish this, you can deploy various CRO tactics. 

Here are just a few conversion rate optimization tactics you can leverage:

• Add a 30-day money-back guarantee
• Offer a free trial (or $1 trial to prove intent)
• Offer a pay-by-performance pricing model
• Add customer support chat for last minute objections
• Better yet, add an FAQ section made up of last minute objections
• Add reviews around your purchase page

You can also use a heat map like CrazyEgg that shows where people are scrolling on your website and provide insight on how you can remove roadblocks.

Action Tip: You can either read our guide on CRO, or you can even just hire a CRO expert. You may also want to try different versions of your sales/pricing page to see which one converts the best.

Purchase Intent: People are ready to make a purchase and just want reassurance of the value you will provide them. This should be a priority after stage 3 (usually, if you nail stage 3, they won’t have many objections).

Get My Free Marketing Plan

Qualifying Leads in Your Sales Funnel: MQLs and SQLs

At this point, you have a great marketing campaign outlined.

In order for your marketing funnel to be truly effective, you need to take things one step further by determining how leads will be qualified throughout the process.

This allows you to better utilize salespeople by bringing prospects into the sales process only when then are qualified prospective customers.

Unfortunately, not everyone who makes it through the first few stages of the funnel will be a good fit. As an example, a prospect might complete stages 1-3, but not have the financial resources available to complete the purchase.

Or a lead might be enthusiastic about the product, but is not the decision-maker in his or her organization. While content is helpful in educating all prospective customers and moving them through the different stages of the funnel, you want to understand these two concepts:

• Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)
• Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs)

What Is a Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)?

A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a prospective customer who has demonstrated a particular level of engagement that leads the marketing team to conclude that real sales potential exists.

The level of complexity involved in this assessment will vary based on the resources available to the team as well as the length of the sales cycle.

You might conclude that anybody that fills out an online demonstration request form is an MQL. Another company might set the bar of MQL qualification at something involving a combination of viewing specific pages, interacting with certain forms, and opening a certain number of email messages. For that kind of analysis, we recommend using a marketing tool that can automate the process.

Once an MQL has been identified, it can be passed on to the sales team for future follow-up.

What Is a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)?

When a salesperson qualifies a lead and deems it likely to eventually lead to an opportunity, this becomes a sales qualified lead (SQL).

Like MQLs, it’s up to your business to determine what that is.

Salespeople qualify the lead by looking at interest and fit. Interest refers to how invested the prospect is in moving forward with your company’s type of solution. Fit refers to how closely the lead matches your company’s definition of an ideal buyer (e.g., role in company, industry, budget).

This analysis results in four possible primary combinations:

• Low interest/low fit – The leads don’t meet your company’s target criteria and are unlikely to make a move soon. A common example of this type of lead is the low-level employee who’s browsing solutions out of curiosity, not an immediate need.
• High interest/low fit – These MQLs are often people who are searching for a solution, but are unlikely to ultimately go with yours. If, for example, you sell a cloud-based software program and the prospect is clearly more comfortable with a desktop solution, you could be dealing with this type of MQL.
• Low interest/high fit – Typically, these leads closely resemble your target customer, but aren’t actively seeking solutions. Even though they may not be a good fit right away, it may still be worth pursuing them to create brand awareness that will pay off down the road when their need becomes apparent.
• High interest/high fit – These MQLs are the “sweet spot” of people who are actively seeking your type of solution and are likely to convert to buyers. These leads should be the highest priority of your sales team.

Sales teams with both junior and senior sales representatives may choose to have junior representatives conduct initial calls to qualify prospects before assigning only those that fall into the “high interest/high fit” category to senior reps for online demonstrations.

The specifics of each stage of qualification aren’t particularly important. What is important is that marketing and sales set these parameters.

This helps you identify the marketing campaigns and content leading to the most new qualified prospects, and ensures that you’re using your salespeople’s time effectively.

Marketing can iterate based on the MQL to SQL conversion rate, as well as feedback from sales. Sales can look at their processes if they’re not converting SQLs to purchases.

Related Content:
* MQL vs. SQL – Serve Up The Right Type Of Content To Your Leads
* How to Guide Your Customers Through the Marketing Funnel with Interactive Content

Which Marketing Funnel Metrics Should I Track?

So now you’ve created your funnel and defined exactly how your personnel will interact with it. The final step in the process is to figure out which metrics you’ll track to determine how well your funnel is functioning.

It’s crucial to work with the SQL and MQL data here to track patterns between who closes and how they interact with your site, content, channels, ads, etc. Once you have more information, you can continuously optimize your funnel.

A quick word of caution, though:

With every piece of content you create for every stage of your funnel, you’re generating data. Though all of it is useful to your sales process in some way, it’s easy to get bogged down in data and metrics tracking instead of focusing on the few key performance indicators (KPIs) that will actually give you the information needed to make meaningful improvements.

For that reason, while you might want to experiment with tracking all the different metrics below (or any others that you think could be valuable), it’s best to choose 2-5 to focus your attention on.

You can always add more later, but be sure you’re actually making changes based on the data you generate from these few metrics before expanding your data operations:

• Sales funnel conversion rate – If you’re going to choose only a few metrics to focus on, make sure this is one of them. This metric tracks the number of prospects that enter your funnel at any point and how many convert into customers. As you make changes to your marketing strategy in the future, seeing this number improve will let you know you’re on the right track.
• Entry sources – Monitoring the sources from which people are entering your funnel can be useful data to track, as it gives you ideas for expanding the reach of your marketing campaigns. If, for example, you see that a large number of your prospects are coming from a single guest blog post you did, you can upgrade and expand on it, add a free consultation opportunity on that blog post, and/or find similar guest author positions.
• Time in stage – In an ideal world, your marketing content would be so compelling that people move from the TOFU to BOFU in a single day. But since that’s rarely the case, it’s worthwhile to know if your prospects are getting hung up in one of your stages. If so, you’ll want to add more content to your site that answers the questions that are unique to this stage of the funnel.
• Exits from stage – Similarly, seeing an excessively high number of people falling out of a particular stage is an indication that you aren’t doing enough to answer their questions or you’re asking them for too much of a commitment too early. Add more content to give them the information they need to move forward or make it easier for people to convert (e.g. don’t ask for a phone number when they’re downloading a certain e-book).
• Content piece engagement rate – If you have calls to action on multiple blog posts or other onsite content pieces, you’ll want to know which are sending the most converted customers through your funnel so that you can replicate your success by updating that piece of content, sending paid traffic to that blog post, promoting it via email, and/or creating more content pieces like that. Tracking engagement rates on each CTA will give you this information (you can easily set up Google Analytics goals in order to see which posts drive more conversions).
• Opportunity arrival rate – Opportunity arrival rate refers to the number of opportunities that are currently in your funnel. Track this rate and see how changes to your marketing strategy impact it. Ideally, you’ll see positive increase in the number of opportunities you’re able to generate.
• Close rate – Your close rate (or “win rate”) refers to the number of these opportunities that turn into eventual sales. If your close rate is lower than you expect, look at some of the other metrics you’re tracking for ideas on improving the success rate of your marketing funnels. You may be sending sales unqualified leads because your content is for a far more technically savvy audience while your ideal customer is a novice.

There are a number of different tools on the market today to help you track these and other metrics, though for most businesses Google Analytics represents the most comprehensive, easy-to-implement solution. Since it’s free, use the service’s funnel-tracking tools until you determine that you need something more advanced and then move on to another sales analytics program or a complete marketing automation program.

Related Content:
* 9 Mission-Critical Lead Generation Metrics You Need To Track
* Top Marketing KPIs that Every B2B Company Needs to Track
* Google Analytics for Content Marketing: How to Track and Improve Your ROI

Final Word on Marketing Funnels

Make no mistake, creating a sales and marketing funnel using the process described above is no easy feat. This isn’t a project you’re going to complete in one afternoon — it’s a pursuit that you’ll want to actively address as long as your company is in business.

Creating a marketing funnel is not a simple undertaking, but it’s one of the few opportunities you have to drive significant improvements in your efficiency and effectiveness when closing deals.

Need help with creating high-converting sales funnel? We’ve got your back! Just click the orange button below 👇

Get My Free Marketing Plan

The post How to Create a Powerful Marketing Funnel Step-by-Step appeared first on Single Grain.

Influencer marketing has exploded over the past several years with the rise of social media stars. This type of marketing is much more powerful than it may appear – which is why you need an influencer marketing strategy.

Influencer marketing is more than just likes or shares on social networks; it’s like a single customer recommending your product to thousands, or even millions, of friends.

How many other channels allow you to tap into a large audience of ideal prospects that are eager to trust your product or service?

So how do you build a successful influencer marketing strategy to grow your business? Should you target celebrities or micro influencers? How do you find these influencers? How do you track influencer marketing success?

This ultimate guide has the answer to all of these questions and more. 

Get My Free Influencer Marketing Plan

TABLE OF CONTENTS: ↓

Chapter 1: First, a Brief Overview of Influencer Marketing 

This first chapter is a general overview of influencer marketing, including what is an influencer, how to choose an appropriate person to achieve maximum ROI, and where to find legitimate influencers. (As well as the biggest lesson we’ve learned from doing influencer marketing. 😀 )

Then, as per the table of contents above, we’ll dive deeper into each aspect of an influencer marketing strategy in chapters 2 through 10.

1) What Is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is a strategy that businesses use to promote their products and services by partnering with popular social media users or bloggers. Influencers usually have a large, engaged audience that brands can tap into to build credibility and even drive sales.

When you see Beats by Dre, which is owned by Apple now, you might wonder why it was so popular. It’s because every single celebrity, from LeBron James to the Kardashians, appeared in TV commercials saying: “Hey, you have to wear these headphones. They’re cool. We all wear them.”

That’s a form of influencer marketing.

Partnering with influencers is a number one marketing strategy for many brands. These are the benefits of influencer marketing:

• Reach a bigger audience
• Build trust for your brand
• Grow your social following
• Increase site traffic
• Get more leads
• Drive sales

When you see celebrities and other famous people you look up to wearing things or using certain products or services, you are much more likely to purchase them as well.

The different types of influencers whom you see on social platforms have a few hundred thousand or over a million followers on Instagram or Snapchat or YouTube. These people have built up their earned audiences, which is why they’re called influencers.

Keep in mind that building up a following is very hard. YouTube and Facebook are paying these people good money because they have these huge organic audiences.

2) How to Leverage Influencer Marketing

The easiest way to leverage influencer marketing is to pay influencers directly for posts.

Take Instagram, for example. There are tons of models on there pushing their protein, water bottles, and similar products. These models are being paid per Instagram post. You don’t even have to be a huge company for this type of marketing to be valuable.

Let’s say you’re in e-commerce and you’re pushing products. You don’t necessarily need influencers on the level of LeBron James or Kim Kardashian. I was just talking to an influencer the other day with 500,000 followers. I asked her how much she was getting and she told me that she’s getting paid about $800 per post. She’s 24 years old. At that age, that’s a lot of money for very little work.

If your e-commerce company is paying $800 per post and your average order value is $50, you can see how the numbers add up in your favor. Let’s say one of this woman’s posts gets you $5,000 worth of orders. That’s a deal you’d do all day every day.

In fact, you’re going to be looking for even more Instagram influencers. This is something you want to double-down on.

Learn more in Chapter 2: How to Grow Your Business With Mutually Beneficial Influencer Marketing

3) The Biggest Lesson I’ve Learned from Influencer Marketing

I’ve implemented an influencer marketing strategy for a while now. I’ve even done it for my personal brand to see if I can increase my popularity, which would help increase the overall brand awareness of Single Grain and Growth Everywhere.

What I ended up learning is that when your influencers are posting sporadically, it doesn’t have a big impact. But if you have a huge marketing budget and do it consistently and frequently, you can really start a movement.

I don’t have the budget that Beats by Dre had, so I did the next best thing. I tried to have influencers post once a week, every week, on a specific day. When I had all the influencers do it on a Monday or Wednesday and stuck to that schedule, I noticed a much bigger impact.

That’s because on those specific days thousands of people were seeing my name and my brand multiple times from different influencers in the same space. They’re thinking, “Wow, I’m not just seeing one or two pictures, I’m seeing five or six or seven on the same day from this company or of this product or service. Maybe I should check it out now.”

But when someone sees it sporadically over a week, it doesn’t have as much of an impact compared to that rapid-fire frequency in a short period of time.

The last thing I want to add is that you should track your influencer ROI with specific coupon codes. That way you can track the effectiveness of any given campaign from any given influencer.

Now that you’ve gotten a general overview of influencer marketing, let’s move on to growing your business with an influencer marketing strategy.

To keep up-to-date on influencer marketing, check out 9 Influencer Marketing Trends You Can’t Ignore

Back to Top

Get My Free Influencer Marketing Plan

Chapter 2: How to Grow Your Business with Mutually Beneficial Influencer Marketing

Referrals have long since been one of the most effective marketing strategies.

If you have a problem and one of your friends tells you about a great solution for it, there is a good chance that you’ll go buy it.

Influencer marketing is just like that – only at scale. When influencers tell their fans and followers about how great your product is, there is a much higher chance that their audience will convert, simply because they need the product and trust the influencer.

Typically, the seller or marketer will give a special discount code just for the influencer’s audience in order to track how effective the campaign is.

1) The Growth of Brand Influencer Partnerships

About 82% of people follow the recommendations of micro influencers. 

Brands and influencers are now forging long-term relationships:

Long term relationships are not only more attractive to influencers, but they also provide a much better ROI. For example, on the Marketing School podcast, we have a single partner, DreamHost, which has renewed with us over the years. Clearly, that partnership is still providing value, so they continue to run the campaign.

It should be no surprise that the influencer marketing space is expected to grow from just over $13 billion to at least $15 billion by 2022.

As paid ad costs continue to rise on social platforms like YouTube and Instagram, businesses have to find a way to survive. This is where influencer marketing steps in.

Working with influencers can be cheaper than paid advertising and is much more effective because you can buy into the influencer’s loyal (and often huge) following.

The influencer marketing space still has a long way to go before it becomes saturated, though you should expect it to become more expensive soon because it works so well.

Still not sure if you should jump on the bandwagon?

Take a look to see if there are other brands in your industry running ads with influencers. You’ll probably notice that several are, and if any of them have been running ads for several months or years, it’s a good sign that it’s working.

Even if you don’t see anyone using it in your industry, it still might be worth finding a highly compatible influencer and testing it out.

2) Why Brands Rely on Influencer Marketing

Because influencer marketing is still a fairly new strategy, it continues to be a viable solution for marketers who are willing to think outside the box on building trust with their audience.

Here’s why brands are relying on influencer marketing.

• Influencers Have Real Power. Nearly 55% of consumers read at least four reviews prior to purchasing a product, and about 84% of consumers have made a purchase based on an influencer’s recommendation. It’s hard to ignore the power of these unofficial brand ambassadors:

• Influencers Are Social. According to Oberlo, everyone uses social media, even your grandparents:

• Influencers Affect Your SEO. Having an influencer help you increase your follower count on various social media platforms, particularly TikTok and Instagram, also improves your SEO. While a social presence isn’t a confirmed ranking factor, it is a signal to search engines that you have a substantial following which they equate to brand quality. As you are probably aware, brands are indeed the way of the future.

3) Brand + Influencer: Make It Mutually Beneficial

Just like any relationship, your influencer program should be a two-way street. If your brand is the only party that benefits, you likely won’t get anyone to agree to partner with you, and if they do, they probably don’t have a great following.

The average formula looks something like this: $100 x 10,000 followers + extras = total rate

There are several different ways in which you can compensate influencers:

• Cash. This is the most common form of compensation. Most influencers prefer this method and will request it. Just make sure that the person is truly invested in your brand so they can put their heart into the project rather than just take the cash and run.

• Free product or discount. Why not offer somebody a free product or discount in exchange for a shout out? This is how GymShark initially grew its user base. When influencer marketing was still in its infancy, they sent their products to YouTube influencers for free, and in turn, those influencers would wear the products in videos.

• Commission. This is a win-win, as both parties have skin in the game. You pay the person to share your brand with their audience and any sale they generate will result in a commission paid to the influencer. As long as you are fair with the commission structure, this is one of the best arrangements.

What Makes Brands Attractive to Influencers?

• First, 96% of brands prefer long-term relationships that result in multiple campaigns. Therefore, select a few quality influencers and build a real relationship with them rather than spreading your budget across various different influencers.
• It’s also important that you align well with their audience as 72% of influencers say that brand alignment is the most important factor when choosing a brand.
• In addition, influencers like to have their own creative freedom as one in three influencers say the biggest turn off is a brand with long guidelines.

Set a Budget, Track Your ROI

Before you get too excited and influence your way into bankruptcy, it’s important to set a budget.

A poll by Viral Nation and NeoReach shows that for every dollar spent on influencer marketing, businesses generate $5.20 in revenue. In other words:

For every dollar spent on influencer marketing, brands generated over 5x as many impressions and engagements as paid advertising.

If this is your first influencer marketing strategy, start with a small budget so that you can figure out what works and what doesn’t. By tracking your ROI, you’ll know what is and is not working so that you can tweak your strategy and increase your budget in the future (more on this in Chapter 7: Tools to Find Influencers and Track Your Marketing Campaigns).

Back to Top

Get My Free Influencer Marketing Plan

Chapter 3: Evaluating Influencers for Your Marketing Campaign

First, let’s take a quick look at some examples of influencer marketing partnerships.

According to a survey run by Qualtrics, about 91% of people aged 18-34 trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation, which leads to a very important conclusion:

Customers place confidence in complete strangers more than they do in well-known companies.

Let’s take a look at a few examples of successful celebrity endorsements.

Neymar Jr + Superdry

Neymar Jr recently signed a deal with cotton undergarment brand Superdry. Within the first few weeks of the partnership that will last for three years, Superdry revealed that they achieved a record 2 million plus engagements.

This is the “magical” effect of influencer marketing: When you see or hear about a product or company, you automatically associate it with a well-known person, such as a famous athlete or movie star, and vice versa.

But don’t be put off by thinking that if you’re not a big, well-known brand this type of marketing won’t work for you. You don’t have to pay a personality six or seven figures to have him or her promote your products.

In fact, the majority of influencers are not so notable and famous. Read on….

Tappan Collective + Amanda Frederickson

Have you heard of food blogger and mom Amanda Frederickson? Most people probably haven’t as she only just crossed 100,000 followers – a decent size, but not world famous.

Nonetheless, Tappan Collective, a company that helps emerging artists sell their artwork, reached out to partner with her.

She posted herself with one of the artworks created by them and the post received nearly 1,000 likes — and other customers in the comments exclaimed how much they loved Tappan:

While this isn’t the crazy engagement you might get from a celebrity influencer, her following is quite loyal and therefore likely still drives sales.

67 Different Influencers + 67 Shades of Dior

Dior launched various new shades of makeup and used influencer marketing to give it a boost. They partnered with Buttermilk, a global influencer marketing agency, and located 67 different influencers across the globe that matched each of their 67 shades of Dior makeup:

From there, they had each influencer post themselves using that foundation with the day corresponding to their foundation number (for example, the influencer using the first shade would post on day one whereas the influencer using the 67th shade would post on day 67).  

The results:

• 67 Influencers 2.66m Audience Reach (+33%)
• 1.85m Impressions (+85%) 290 Content Created (+44%)
• 591k Engagements (+269%) 6.6%
• Engagement Rate (120%) 72% content was repurposed on owned channels and used as shoppable assets

Now, here’s how to evaluate influencers for your brand.

Social Media Reach

An influencer is only an influencer if they can actually influence the purchase decisions of others. Makes sense, right?

Simply put, the larger the reach, the larger the number of people who will see your product or service. An Instagram user with 1,500 followers may be able to generate some results, but an IG user with 150,000 followers can really push your message to your audience.

Of course, bigger is not always better. You should also take into consideration past engagement, as this helps you understand if the person’s audience truly listens to what they have to say:

Sticking with Instagram, you may find that a person with 15,000 followers receives an average of 500 likes on each update. Conversely, a person with 30,000 followers may only receive an average of 100 likes per update.

While the person with more followers will put your brand in front of more people, the update may not receive as much engagement. This is a balancing act with a trial and error component.

Depending on your budget, and the level of engagement per follower you want, you may want to look into a micro-influencer, or an influencer with a smaller (usually up to 10K) audience in a specific niche. Again, a macro-influencer may promote you to millions, but how many are really listening? Are they really willing to engage the way someone specifically in your niche would?

Influencer Rates

How much influencers charge:

• Nano-influencers (1,000-10,000 followers): $10–$100 per post
• Micro-influencers (10,001-50,000 followers): $100–$500 per post
• Mid-tier influencers (50,001-500,000 followers): $500–$5,000 per post
• Macro-influencers (500,001-1,000,000 followers): $5,000–$10,000 per post
• Mega-influencers (1,000,001 plus followers): $10,000+ per post

Creating a Database

Rather than just randomly reaching out to various influencers, create a database in Google Drive or Docs with the most promising influencers.

Here are the main things you should add to your database for every influencer that you research:

• Name
• Niche
• Fan base size
• Social channels (and links to them)
• Strong points
• Weak points
• Contact info
• Observations: write down their peculiarities (tend to use video a lot, has a great sense of humor, has lots of ads, our competition has him/her under contract, etc.)

Influencer Platforms

Influencer marketing platforms provide searchable databases of influencers to help brands find a perfect match for their campaign.

The benefit of using such a platform is that much of the work is already done for you. The influencers come pre-vetted and their profiles offer lots of information regarding their niche, activity on different channels, fan base count, etc.

More on this in CHAPTER 7: Tools to Find Influencers and Track Your Marketing Campaigns

Back to Top

Get My Free Influencer Marketing Plan

Chapter 4: 5 Hacks to Start a Conversation with an Influencer

Influencers and industry experts are swamped with senseless offers, advertising, and spam. People ask them to share, to help, and to advise. This is why they tend to ignore most of the messages they receive without even reading them.

The best approach is to do the influencer a favor first, not asking them for a favor, which will help them notice your message among all the others that are doing the opposite.

Once you strike up a conversation, you’ll be able to start collaborating on some projects and building long-lasting relationships.

Here are five ways to start a conversation with an influencer you’d like to work with.

1) Conduct an Expert Interview

Here are two undeniable reasons for this approach:

• People love sharing their experience and discussing things they’re passionate about or they’ve learned.
• Because influencers don’t have a lot of time, your offer to interview them as an expert is a great opportunity for them with very little work on their part.

It’s best if you pitch some large publications and have a publishing contract or agreement in place first before asking experts to contribute. Without an agreement, you may end up unable to find an appropriate platform for publishing your interview. And asking influencers to take part in articles that never go live isn’t something that helps build strong relationships.

So tell the influencer your idea and where you’re going to publish it. They are usually more than happy to contribute. Once your interview goes live, it will be much easier to ask your influencer for a favor or discuss some other ways to collaborate.

How to Implement

To find exciting questions for your interview, I suggest using BuzzSumo’s question analyzer:

It gathers millions of questions from Q&A sites, e-commerce sites, and forums like Quora, Reddit, and Amazon Q&A.

Try searching for your main idea for the interview, look through the list, and grab the most exciting questions you’d like to ask your subject. Then:

• Decide where you are going to publish this post (on your own blog or another platform).
• Add it to your editorial calendar or make an agreement with the other platform.
• Find influencers by using one of the tools in chapter 7, by searching LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter communities, and by finding lists of industry experts on Google.
• Add influencers on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, and follow them on other social platforms to make it easier to reach out or follow up in future.
• Start reaching out to influencers! Send a personalized email explaining who you are, what you want, and what your idea is.

I believe strongly that no one is so busy that they have no time to write “thanks, not interested.” So don’t give up after sending a single email and not getting a reply.

Follow up at least two times if there is no response for 3-4 business days, and then try to reach out via LinkedIn/Facebook/Twitter, or the contact form on their site. But remember, don’t be too pushy and don’t write too often. Stop after 2-3 messages.

The main idea of this approach is to offer a unique and exciting idea so that the influencer notices you in the email chaos.

2) Don’t Ask for a Favor; Offer a Favor

As I said earlier, influencers are swamped with messages from people asking them for a favor. If they helped everyone, they wouldn’t have time for anything else! So that’s why I offer the opposite approach: do a favor for them first.

How to Implement

What kind of favors can you do for an influencer? Here are few ideas:

• Comment on their blog post
• Share their blog post
• Review their book
• Endorse their skills on LinkedIn
• Find and report a (significant) error on their blog

These ideas are easy to implement if you’re already a part of the professional community. If you want to find an influencer in your niche, you should always be in the community commenting and sharing influencers’ social media posts, their blog posts, and their articles on the leading publications in your niche. 

These steps will help let influencers know about you so that your name rings a bell when they see it in their inboxes.

The most important thing here is to find the right words to start a conversation so that it doesn’t look like:

“Hey Ben, I reviewed your e-book. Now I want you to share my article in return.”

The better variant would be:

“Hey Ben. Recently I was reviewing your e-book on Amazon and I came up with a brilliant idea for a blog post that would complement your book. Could you please take a look at it and share your opinion?”

3) Create a Personalized Pitch

Influencers usually have their own blogs, and pitching a high-quality article is a great way to start a relationship. If your idea is good and unique and your pitch doesn’t look like spam, you have a great chance of getting noticed by the influencer.

While the wonderful idea for the guest post is up to you, I’ll give you some tips on how to create a personalized pitch.

How to Implement

A few years ago, merely adding the recipient’s name to the subject line was an effective way to improve your open rate. These days, you’ll have to put in more effort to personalize your message than just writing the person’s name.

In fact, studies show that only gives you a 2% lift.

Some examples are:

• “Hey, I found this article on your blog, and I think I could develop this topic in another direction…”
• “I found an article about backlink building strategies in 2017 on your blog. I’d like to write an updated article on the same topic…”
• “I’ve found that articles about content marketing are the most shareable on your blog, so I would like to offer…”

Use a tool like Serpstat or BuzzSumo to find the most shareable content on any blog or website:

The ideas for personalization are endless – you just need to use your imagination a little. At the same time, you should keep your pitch as brief as possible.

In fact, your pitch email should consist of a short introduction, a personal note, suggested topics for a guest post, and several writing samples (if necessary). So cut out the fluff and get straight to the point.

Related Content:
* How to Use Personalization to Increase the Impact of Email Marketing
* How to Get More Responses From Your Cold Emails
* 10 Best Cold Emailing Tools to Help You Quickly Close Sales Deals

4) Ask for a Piece of Advice

As I said earlier, people love sharing their experiences, but most influencers are too busy to talk to strangers and help newbies.

That said, if you ask meaningful questions, some of them will respond, and it’s a great way to strike up a conversation and get the chance to collaborate in the future. Micro-influencers are particularly likely to respond.

How to Implement

• Write down several complex or difficult issues that only an experienced person could answer. Never ask something that everyone can find on Google! If you can’t think of anything, try looking on Quora or other relevant forums.
• Send a brief and polite message asking the influencer if they could help you out by answering a quick question(s).

When Eric Siu, CEO of Single Grain and founder of Growth Everywhere, was first starting out, he used this exact strategy to learn from Neil Patel. Not only did he learn from an expert, but now they co-host the popular Marketing School podcast.

From an interview with Neil on Growth Everywhere:

“In the course of time that led up to Neil deciding to take Eric on as a mentee, Eric was constantly messaging Neil with short, to-the-point emails that contained sophisticated, non-basic questions – asking just one question at a time, making it easier for Neil to reply.

At the same time that Eric was asking him questions to help his business, he was also trying to help Neil’s. For example, he gave Neil suggestions on ads by comparing his ads to someone else’s and showing him the statistics.”

5) Mention the Influencer in Your Content

The last approach I’m going to cover is mentioning influencers in your blog posts. In fact, you’re helping the influencer promote his/her blog, personal brand, or service, so of course, he/she would be happy to take a look at this post and share some feedback.

How to Implement

• Find influencers who are interested in your topic. To do this, you can use special tools, follow LinkedIn/Facebook communities, and follow influencers on Twitter.
• Find a way to mention them in your blog post. It could be a quote, a link to his/her post or research.
• Email the influencer and ask them to take a look at your post and share their feedback. If the post is good, an influencer can share it with his/her audience, and you’ll have something to talk about.

The best article on this kind of outreach I’ve seen is this one called “I Just Deleted Your Outreach Email Without Reading. And NO, I Don’t Feel Sorry.”

Back to Top

Get My Free Influencer Marketing Plan

Chapter 5: How to Reinforce Your Customer Acquisition Strategy with Influencer Marketing

Collaborating with influencers to reinforce your customer acquisition strategy is probably the most cost-effective way to gain new customers. 

But make sure to find relevant influencers in your niche for the success of your campaign.

Let’s take a look at some winning influencer marketing tactics to help you create a robust customer acquisition strategy.

1) Get Influencers to Promote Your Brand’s Story

Stories are the best way to build an emotional connection with people, so you can ask your influencers to share your brand’s stories with their social media followers in ways that will appeal to them. But why do you need an influencer to become a storyteller for your brand?

Influencers are known for their creativity and authenticity, so when they present your stories to their followers, it can do wonders for your customer acquisition strategy.

For example, Amber Fillerup is a fashion influencer and an expert storyteller on Instagram with 1.3 million followers. Popular brands like Urban Outfitters and Nordstrom have often teamed up with her to promote their brands’ stories.

In the post below, she is promoting a product from Skatie Swimwear. This post is effective in that it is selling the product (with nearly 30,000 likes) yet still follows the influencer’s typical posting style. 

2) Get Influencers to Collaborate on Giveaways and Contests

When done correctly, giveaways or contests will definitely draw new customers to your brand because it’s always exciting to win a prize, free of cost. And when you collaborate with influencers to run contests or giveaways, you can reach a wider audience which may not have been possible otherwise.

For example:

• dbrand partnered up with Marques Brownlee and his YouTube channel MKBHD for a $1,000 smartphone giveaway. The giveaway was quite successful with the video earning 1.6 million views and generating plenty of buzz on social media.

• Kcstauffer also has several excellent examples of how you can run a successful influencer giveaway. Recently, she ran a giveaway for the brand Thatsit Bars where they offered a $1,000 Costco giveaway. This post alone generated over 126,000 likes and significant engagement for the brand.

Just make sure that the instructions to enter the contest are clear and so are the winning criteria. Of course, you need to also make sure that you’re offering something valuable so that people want to participate.

3) Get Influencers to Use Campaign-Specific Hashtags

The key to getting discovered by relevant audiences and increasing brand awareness is to use the right hashtags, but remember that it takes time, effort, and extensive research to find relevant ones. Ensure that they are a mix of common and unique ones and encourage your influencers to use this successful combination of hashtags in their posts.

For example, Cadbury, a chocolate bar company, works with micro-influencers to promote their product and gain new customers:

As you can see here, the brand uses specific hashtags and they’ve asked the influencer to use them too (#SayItWithCadbury).

Just like Cadbury, you can also promote your products by using specific and relevant hashtags in your campaigns. One way of collaborating with micro-influencers is to send them free samples of your products and ask them to review and/or promote them on social networks.

4) Get Influencers to Write Honest Reviews

To further strengthen and support your customer acquisition strategy, ask your influencers to write and share honest reviews about your products. Genuine feedback never fails to attract new customers.

User reviews and testimonials are even more important when you are a fairly new brand in the industry. In such cases, a positive review from an influencer whom customers trust can speak volumes about your brand and it’s value.

So collaborate and ask relevant influencers to give you their honest feedback of your products or services and ask them to share their experience with your brand on their social accounts. These tactics will surely help you win the trust of new customers.

For example, when the Sony ZV1 was released, there were plenty of influencers that did reviews of it. One was DPReview TV, which has over 300,000 followers and that video alone earned 131,000 views:

5) Get Influencers and Common Users to Leverage UGC

Leveraging user-generated content (UGC) is one of the most successful and powerful tactics to gain new customers.

For this tactic to work, you need to first establish and build connections with your influencers and then leverage their trustworthiness and reliability to position the image of your brand on social media.

This is exactly what GoPro did to create a loyal following. They encouraged users to film their adventures and submit them for a million dollar contest. As a result, they’ve gotten over three million posts with the hashtag #goprohero and plenty of micro influencers to join in the fun.

For example, micro influencer Matthias Weger won two of the #goprohero Million Dollar Challenges and his post has earned over 300,000 views:

Back to Top

Get My Free Influencer Marketing Plan

Chapter 6: SEO: How to Build Links with Influencer Outreach

Before I show you how to boost SEO with influencer marketing, I’ll first explain why it works. 

1) How Influencer Marketing Can Boost Your SEO

Here are four ways that influencer marketing can boost your brand’s SEO.

• Build Brand Awareness. When you partner with established industry players, you can shorten the process of building awareness for your new brand. It’s no surprise that about 67% of marketers promote content with the help of influencers, particularly those who have a loyal following of hundreds of thousands of people.

• Get Backlinks. When you reach a larger audience through influencer marketing, you also get significantly more opportunities to build backlinks. Links are one of the most important ranking factors that Google uses in search. When you partner with bloggers through guest posting, product reviews or other types of collaboration, you’re almost always guaranteed a new link back to your site. 

• Gain Social Media Followers. SEO experts like to argue over whether social media marketing has a direct impact on PageRank in search engines. Either way, most people agree that a strong social media presence typically correlates with stronger SEO. When your business engages with a new social audience, it unlocks the potential for more followers and engagement. This can lead to more site traffic, backlinks and other factors that improve SEO.

• Create More Organic Content. The more content you create through influencer marketing, the more opportunities you have for your brand to rank in Google search results. Say your business is new and your domain authority isn’t good enough to rank well. If you write a guest post on a big site, this content will likely rank much better in search while spreading the word about your brand.

The same goes when you work with a YouTube influencer (more on this in Chapter 8: How to Work with YouTube Influencers to Grow Your Brand) to promote your brand. It’s a big opportunity to rank better in Google Video Search and regular organic results:

2) Strategies for Working with Influencers to Build Links

There are a lot of different ways to collaborate with influencers. Here are a few strategies you should focus on if building links is your main goal:

Link-Building Strategy 1: Product or Site Reviews

When looking for influencers to review your product, make sure you check their domain authority. Bloggers who offer review opportunities tend to link back to a lot of different sites. This could negatively impact their domain authority if they’re linking to a lot of low-quality sites. You don’t want that kind of link juice for your website.

The more domain authority a site has, the more valuable their links will be for your SEO.

You can use a number of tools to compare their domain authority to yours. Moz’s Link Explorer, for example, offers a free domain authority score based on the potential of a domain to rank in search results:

Link-Building Strategy 2: Guest Posting

Guest posting is a great way to grow links while collaborating with another site, free of charge. As with review sites, you should target domains that have comparable or better domain authority.

It’s easy to find guest posting opportunities on sites that have published submission guidelines. Just use search queries like these to get started:

• [Niche keyword] “write for us”
• [Niche keyword] “contributor guidelines”
• [Niche keyword] “submit a guest post”
• [Niche keyword] “guest post”
• [Niche keyword] “become a contributor”

Read the fine print of their guidelines and try to target blogs that allow you a dofollow link back to your website.

Link-Building Strategy 3: Discount Code for Their Readers

If you aren’t prepared to give away free products to work with influencers, a discount code should be enough to start working with them and reaching a new audience.

Dealspotr can help with this. It’s a platform where brands can promote their product deals and connect with blogging influencers. You provide the coupons and influencers will share them with their audience.

Link-Building Strategy 4: Mention the Influencer

People love to link back to and share content that features them. You can benefit from this by regularly creating blog content that mentions or features other influencers.

Roundup posts are a great way to do this and DataBox is an expert at this:

You could also quote an influencer or feature their business/product in your content.

After your content is published, reach out to them by e-mail (you can find their e-mail address with Hunter) to let them know they’re mentioned. Provide a link to the content so they can easily share it.

Link-Building Strategy 5: Contribute Your Expertise

If you take a closer look at some of the best content on the web, you’ll almost always see that it was the result of collaboration between industry figures.

For example, Neil Patel and Eric Siu collaborated to create a daily Marketing School podcast:

If you have some industry data that another industry player could analyze and use, or just helpful knowledge on a topic to improve their content, propose a collaboration.

Link-Building Strategy 6: Content Optimization

Content optimization is content that’s been carefully optimized performs better in the SERPs. It ranks higher and for a bigger spread of search terms.

That means more eyes on your content and a greater chance that others will link to it from their own content. Not only that, but the work involved on your side to score any extra links that may come your way is minimal.

Related Content:
* 4 Ways to Signal to Google that You’re an Expert Content Creator
* The Ultimate Guide to Link Building with Content for SEO
* 9 Effective SEO Techniques to Drive Organic Traffic in 2023

Back to Top

Chapter 7: Tools to Find Influencers and Track Your Marketing Campaigns

If you’ve gotten this far in this post (hurray!), you now fully understand the power of influencer marketing. But what good is this power if you aren’t tracking it?

Tracking your influencer marketing campaigns is an important strategy to help you make informed marketing choices to drive better ROI. 

The one-dimensional insights you gather from UTM codes and social impressions simply aren’t enough for many brands to maximize the value of influencer marketing.

Here are the average engagement rate benchmarks across four key platforms (Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter) and influencer follower size (nano, micro, medium, mega):

Statistics like these offer an industry snapshot, but how do you make sure that you manage the same level of success for your brand? Consider trying one of these advanced tracking tools and see the benefits for yourself.

Top Tools to Find Influencers and Track Your Marketing Efforts

1) Traackr

Just like the name implies, Traackr is one of the top tools out there to help you build an effective influencer marketing campaign and track it. Traackr was built with the idea of helping brands manage their relationships with influencers, but it also comes with a host of features that help you monitor the effectiveness of your campaigns.

How It Works

Upload your list of existing contacts and use Traackr to search for the best possible influencers. Traackr helps you validate your influencers by offering in-depth metrics about who they are and where they’re active on the web.

Next, you can tier and organize your influencers into meaningful groups based on their niche, team members they’re relevant to, which projects they’re associated with, etc.

Traackr analytics features allow you to:

• Set a benchmark for your brand’s current influence in the market so you know your starting point for improvement. Compare your share of influencers against competitors to set a baseline.
• Get a complete picture of how each influencer marketing initiative is performing (content, platform, etc.). Track changes in mentions and engagement with new influencers.
• Analyze your investment and influencer results together to determine who is the most effective at driving engagement for your brand.
• Set up reports to track fulfillment and compliance when you ask influencers to help promote your brand.

The main pain point Traackr aims to address is eliminating cross-functional conflicts when you work with a large team and a lot of influencers.

Pricing

Traackr does not list any set pricing, and instead asks you to contact them directly for a quote. Discussions around the Internet suggest that they are not cheap. That said, whatever they do charge will be customized to your influencer marketing needs, so you won’t have to pay for features you don’t use.

2) Dealspotr Marketplace

The Dealspotr Marketplace is a free influencer marketing platform that combines the benefits of a promo code website with a CRM-type management system to track your influencer marketing campaigns. You can add exclusive codes to the platform, browse Dealspotr’s database of micro-influencers to enlist in promoting these codes and your product, and track everything from one comprehensive dashboard.

How It Works

Since Dealspotr functions as a hybrid promo code database and influencer marketing platform, you’ll have access to two basic types of marketing capabilities:

• Promoting your promo code(s) on the web
• Partnering with influencers to run sponsored content about your brand/store

Much like posting a job on LinkedIn, Dealspotr allows you to create a sponsored campaign that is visible to their network of over 4,000 micro-influencers. 

Here are some key features:

• Pre-calculated Influencer Rate. When running an influencer marketing campaign, a lot of time can be spent negotiating with influencers on their rates. In the Dealspotr Marketplace, each influencer is given an Influence Score, which is calculated by an algorithm. This score determines the fee that an influencer is paid, and is designed to combat these fake followers and overinflated influencer rates.

• Manage All Your Campaigns from One Dashboard. When you create an influencer marketing campaign in the Marketplace, you’ll have access to a full dashboard – your hub for everything you need in order to track your campaign. You’ll be able to see pending applications from influencers who want to work with you and track the status of each one. You’ll be able to track invites you’ve sent out as well.

• Track Clicks and Conversions. One of the hardest things to track with an influencer marketing campaign is the ROI. It can be a hard number to quantify and requires a lot of analytical data and processing. The Dealspotr Marketplace automatically tracks clicks and sales for each influencer you work with. The platform’s tracking technology integrates with Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, and other popular e-commerce platforms, and gives updates on clicks and conversions in real-time.

Pricing

The Dealspotr Marketplace is completely free for brands to use. Any type of “fee” is baked right into the exposed influencer’s rate, so what you see is what you pay.

3) Klear

Klear is first and foremost a place to search for and find influencers to work with, but it has also become a sophisticated platform to manage and track your campaigns as well.

How It Works

Klear is fully equipped to help you find, analyze, manage and monitor your influencers. Here are some key features:

• Find and Analyze Influencers. Klear offers a database of 900 million influencer profiles with historical data. You can browse or search through more than 60,000 categories based on skill, location, platform, and more.

• Manage Campaigns. Klear offers a built-in CRM to help you manage your influencer campaigns. It was designed specifically for influencer marketing so you can focus on key insights that matter most, like hashtag mentions for your campaigns, influence, reach, and total fans for each influencer.

• Monitoring Performance. With Klear’s Performance Report, you’ll see hard data for your influencer campaign key performance indicators. All these metrics are tracked in real-time, keeping you up-to-date on your true reach. You can also create your own custom reports to visualize the impact of your influencer marketing efforts.

Pricing

Klear does not list any set pricing, and instead asks you to contact them directly for a quote.

4) GroupHigh

GroupHigh is an all-in-one tool to help you find bloggers and social influencers, manage your relationships with them, and measure the impact of the content that they create for your brand or agency.

How It Works

GroupHigh has quite a few features that will help you launch, track and improve your influencer marketing campaigns:

• Blog Search Engine. GroupHigh offers a database of 50 million websites you can search to find the right influencer to fit your brand message.

• Website Research. If you have spreadsheets from your old influencer outreach efforts, you can upload the URLs to GroupHigh to get deeper insights into their social footprint, traffic, SEO and other key website metrics. Use this information to track key blogging influencers and make informed decisions about which to work with.

• Influencer CRM. GroupHigh’s Influencer CRM offers some advanced features to help you track your influencers and manage your relationships with them. Use folders and lists to organize them based on performance, affinity, niche, and other metrics. Then, filter down based on recent content, followers, keywords, etc. 

• Blog and Social Content. GroupHigh makes it easy to collect all your brand or campaign mentions related to your influencer marketing efforts. It scours the web to find blog posts, Tweets, Instagram posts, and YouTube videos associated with your campaign so you can see the results of your efforts.

• Content & Engagement Reporting. Lastly, track the performance of your campaigns as a whole and by individual influencers with Engagement Reporting. See which content is driving the most engagement, mentions, conversions, impressions, etc. The report will also rank your influencers to give you insights and encourage them to share and post.

Pricing

GroupHigh doesn’t list any pricing options on their website — you’ll need to reach out to them for a quote.

Third-party sources around the web say full-access can range between $5,000-$9,000, making it a pricey option to track your influencer marketing campaigns. But it’s likely that GroupHigh customizes their pricing to the needs of each user so you can focus on the features that matter to you most.

5) Onalytica

Onalytica is an influencer relationship management software to help you find, reach out to, and track your influencers. It offers an impressive amount of data to help you track and measure your campaigns.

How It Works

Onalytica provides influencer discovery software, a relationship management platform, and professional services to help you optimize your campaigns.

If tracking features are what you’re interested in, then check out their Influencer Relationship Management (IRM) platform. It offers:

• Customizable Dashboards. See and analyze your influencers all in one place. Customizable dashboards offer a snapshot of top influencers and their conversations, along with whatever other charts you want to see.

• b) A Real-time Influencer Feed. Here you can keep track of key market influencers and see real-time reports of their social conversations. You can set this feed to focus on certain influencers, topics, time periods or social channels.

• Influencer Profiles. If an influencer catches your eye, you can visit their profile to get more insights into what they talk about online and who they’re connected to. This information can help you make your engagements more relevant.

• Content Sharing Opportunities. Here you can upload your white papers, case studies and other marketing content, and Onalytica will automatically alert you when that content becomes relevant to an influencer.

• E-mail Topic Alerts. Receive automatic e-mails when opportunities to influence come up, such as one of your target influencers mentions a topic that you can share with your audience to further nurture your relationship with them.

• Insights & Measurement Reporting. Lastly, Onalytica offers powerful analysis features including 12-months’ worth of historical data on your influencers, their social discussions, and your relationship with them. You get access to key insights such as volume trends, share of voice, and share of reach to help you monitor and analyze the impact of your efforts.

Pricing

Onalytica doesn’t list any pricing options on their website — you’ll need to reach out to them for a quote.

From reviews on the web, it seems that the platform is a good fit for medium- to large-sized companies who can customize their plan to fit their particular needs.

BONUS: 6 Additional Tools for Influencer Outreach

Here are a few more helpful influencer marketing tools that you can use to build backlinks and improve SEO:

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a great tool to find both blogging and social influencers. Use it to search for keywords related to your niche and BuzzSumo will show you the most popular content on the topic.

You can target the authors of that content and maybe even collaborate with them or guest post on their site to build brand reach.

If you’re looking for social influencers, click the “View Top Sharers” button next to the content (on the very far right) where you’ll see powerful social users who like to share content related to your niche. Or you can go straight to the “Influencers” tab on the top menu to search by author or topic:

You can also search for influencers by keyword and see important data like number of followers, domain authority, etc.

HYPR

HYPR is a database of more than 12 million influencers, including bloggers and social media personalities, and 30,000+ topic categories. You can search and narrow them down based on audience demographic factors:

Then you can reach out to the influencers whose audience best matches yours.

Octoly

Octoly is an influencer marketing platform that enables brands to collaborate with a community of 30K+ vetted influencers with a reach of over 3 billion engaged consumers:

Influenster

If you’re interested in getting product reviews, Influenster can help. Submit your product to their “VoxBoxes” program, and you can ship free samples to their database of influencers. The influencers will post product reviews on the platform and share with their social audience.

Tribegroup

Tribegroup is a marketplace where you can find and work with social media influencers to promote your brand on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter:

Brands upload a brief of their product and marketing campaign to the platform, then influencers can create their own unique posts about it and submit them to you for approval. If you like it, they share it.

Upfluence

Upfluence considers itself “the smartest influencer marketing platform” because you can find relevant influencers and run better campaigns with their AI-powered, all-in-one platform for smarter, data-driven influencer marketing.

Gone are the days of spreadsheets, endless hours searching for influencers, sending cold invites one by one, and time-consuming campaign reporting. Upfluence makes it easy to find influencers quickly with their data-driven search engine, send automated bulk emails in one go, streamline your campaign workflow, and measure ROI all in one place.

Back to Top

Get My Free Influencer Marketing Plan

Chapter 8: How to Work with YouTube Influencers to Grow Your Brand

Working with YouTube influencers allows you to leverage two of the most effective forms of advertising – influencer marketing and video marketing.

YouTube, the most popular website for videos in the world, has over 2 billion monthly active users with more than a billion hours of content consumed daily. It is only natural that marketers are inclined to explore the immense potential of YouTube as an advertising tool, like this ad by Nike that generated over 57 million views:

With more than 720,000 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every day, making your content stand out is challenging. This is exactly where YouTube influencers can come to your rescue.

Many YouTube influencers have thousands of subscribers who get a notification every time they upload a new video. When you collaborate with these YouTubers, you get access to this highly engaged audience. Your content also earns credibility due to the friendly rapport these influencers have with their fans.

Here are the most important things to keep in mind when trying to work with YouTube influencers (bear in mind that much of this applies to other influencers, too, but in this section we’ll provide specific YouTube influencer tips).

1) Set Your Goals

In order to execute a successful influencer marketing campaign, it is important to define the outcome you want:

• Do you want to reach a larger audience?
• Maybe you want to create buzz about your products or services?
• Or perhaps you want to generate leads and drive sales through the campaign?

Being clear on your desired outcome will dictate which influencers you should collaborate with, the kind of content you should create for effective collaboration with YouTubers and, thus, how to measure your campaign progress.

So, make sure you have a clearly defined set of goals in mind before you approach any influencer.

2) Choose the Right Influencers

If you randomly pick a YouTube influencer with a lot of subscribers and collaborate with them, your efforts won’t yield significant results. So even before you start ideating, it is important to identify the right influencers to collaborate with.

When selecting an influencer for your marketing campaign, you should take the following points into consideration:

• Relevance – The influencer you choose to work with needs to be relevant to your product, service or industry. Their niche should align with yours. Only then will you be able to grab the attention of their subscribers.
• Reach – Look for relevant influencers with a large number of subscribers on their YouTube channel. They can help you grab more eyeballs with their content.
• Engagement – Reaching a large audience won’t be fruitful unless viewers engage with your content. Don’t be fooled by the high number of subscribers on an influencer’s YouTube channel. Take a closer look at the comments section of their videos – that will tell you how well their audience interacts with their content.
• Experience – It is always better to collaborate with influencers who have worked on similar projects before. Their expertise and insights can further enhance your marketing campaign.

For example,  Michael Garrett and Ryan Duey created The Cold Plunge, which is essentially a cold bath designed to improve your health and fitness. At the beginning of COVID-19, they had nothing but an idea. But just a year later, they did $3.5 million in sales and are continuing to grow.

They credit their rapid growth rate to influencers like Tony Robbins, Tony Hawk and other A-listers in the entrepreneurship industry. As these influencers had a large and loyal following of entrepreneurs deeply interested in health and fitness, it was a no brainer to partner with them.

The selection of your influencer will also depend on your budget and ultimate goals. For instance, if you want to target a local audience, working with local micro-influencers can be extremely fruitful. They have a relatively small, yet highly engaged audience. And they are less expensive compared to those with millions of subscribers.

In the case above, the founders of the Cold Plunge only reached out to influencers who already had a cold therapy routine and asked if they could send a free tub (of $3,000 retail value).

Therefore, while sending free products often isn’t enough to earn an influencer marketing partnership, it likely worked in this case because:

• The influencers already demonstrated interest in products similar to The Cold Plunge
• There weren’t any other comparable cold plunge devices on the market
• The product had a $3,000 value, so giving it away for free had substantial value

How to Find YouTube Influencers

You can simply run a Google or YouTube search to get a list of the most popular and relevant influencers and then take a look at their YouTube channels to get an idea of the content they are creating.

Navigate to the “About” section on their channel to get their contact details:

However, you might not have the time it takes to search through hundreds of channels for the best fit, and might want to look at more detailed channel demographics.

For such scenarios, you can also use a data-driven influencer platform like BrandConnect, YouTube’s branded content platform, to find the right influencers for you.

3) Create User-Centric Content

Video is an extremely effective tool for communicating crucial information in an interesting and easy-to-digest format, and is incredibly effective at brand awareness.  

However, creating a video that goes on and on about how awesome your product or service is won’t be of much use. Instead, you need to develop an interesting narrative around your brand to grab the attention of your target audience.

In addition, you need to communicate how your product or service can help resolve their problem. Seasoned YouTubers already have a fair idea of what works well with their audiences.

Here are a few types of videos you can partner with influencers to create:

Product Reviews and Testimonials

In a fiercely competitive consumer market, it is difficult to win the trust of potential customers. They are less likely to rely on brands that sing songs of self-praise.

Instead, they trust recommendations and testimonials from real-life users such as friends, acquaintances and influencers. In fact:

• 92% of consumers trust influencers more than traditional celebrities
• 33% of consumers trust influencers when making shopping decisions, though only 17% trusted friends and family for shopping recommendations.
• 63% of consumers trust influencer messaging more than brand messaging

So if your goal is to generate leads and increase sales, you can ask your influencers to create honest product review videos. Give them the freedom to share their own experiences with your brand, outlining both the pros and cons. Coming from a trusted influencer, such a review is likely to foster brand awareness, add credibility to your product or service, and inspire your target audience to purchase it.

This is exactly the strategy that was adopted by Yubico, a hardware authentication company. They collaborated with YouTuber Linus Sebastian of Linus Tech Tips, which has over 14 million subscribers.

They worked with him to create and upload a detailed review of their product. The video has garnered nearly a million views, 57,000 likes and over 3,000 comments:

Storytelling for Your Brand

Videos with strong narratives often stand out amidst the plethora of random content. Furthermore, if your target audience enjoys the video, they are likely to share it on their social media profiles. As a result, your content will reach a far wider audience.

Although this might not drive direct conversions, it is extremely effective in generating brand awareness and customer engagement.

Google recently did a collaboration with comedic skit influencer, Lele Pons. Rather than having her review a product, she included Google products throughout the video.

In the skit, you follow her through planning a Quinceañera and she uses Google Assistant products to help plan her day. The video has amassed nearly 13 million views, over 244,000 likes and nearly 10,000 comments:

Tutorials, Demos and How-to Videos

Educating your target audience about how your product or service works can influence their purchase decisions. Video, being an effective and effortless communication tool, is the ideal format to create tutorials or demos showcasing your products. Since influencers are perceived as industry experts, having them create a how-to video can bring exceptional results.

Coming from influencers, such videos can increase your brand’s visibility and reinforce brand trust. They can also be helpful in lead generation.

Tecno, a smartphone manufacturer, adopted this strategy to promote their new product, the TECNO PHANTOM X Smartphone. The company partnered with Lewis Hilsenteger of Unbox Therapy, who created a video demonstrating how the new product works.

The video garnered immediate traction because Unbox Therapy’s audience consists of people who are interested in the latest technologies. It received more than 1 million views on YouTube and over 31,000 likes:

These videos also serve as a double promotion as the company can later use this influencer’s review when marketing the product.

4) Insert Calls-to-Action

If an influencer’s audience likes your content, they may want to know more about your brand. Including a clickable link in the video or adding a link in the video description prompts them to take immediate action.

In addition to raising brand awareness, it can also drive organic traffic to your website. This can have a positive impact on your website’s search engine rankings as search engines love to see positive user signals such as long dwell times and low bounce rates.

Conversion copywriter Peter Boyle recommends these rules to ensure that your CTAs cause users to take action:

• Use value-focused words
• Test different color combinations (try to find contrasting yet complementary colors)
• Place the CTA at the logical decision-making points on the page
• Utilize urgency elements for more immediate action
• Keep a 1:1 ratio between actions and conversion goals

5) Keep Your Legal Documents Handy

It is advisable to sign a legal contract when working with YouTube (or any) influencers because it helps to define roles, timelines, deliverables and payment terms in a clear and irrefutable way.

If all goes well, you might never have to take a second look at the contract. However, it can be useful in case there is a dispute between you and the influencer. Having everything on paper helps avoid miscommunication and complications.

Influencer Marketing Hub offers influencer contract templates as well as some typical points you should include in your own influencer contract:

6) Engage Continuously

Your collaboration with a YouTube influencer doesn’t end when the final video is uploaded to their channel. Once the video is released, you have a whole new set of responsibilities. In order to make your campaign truly successful, you need to monitor how the audience interacts with your content.

• Respond to Comments. A good way to start a conversation about your brand is by replying to the comments posted by viewers. If they have provided feedback, thank them for doing so. If they are soliciting more information, offer to answer all their questions. 

• Keep in Touch. It isn’t a good idea to abandon a YouTube influencer once you have successfully executed your marketing campaign with them. You should strive to build and maintain a long-term association with them. Keep them updated on the latest company news. Once in a while, send them incentives in the form of freebies or discount vouchers. This will help build strong relationships with influencers. 

Back to Top

Chapter 9: All You Need to Know About the ROI of Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is helping big brands reach out to more people and it’s helping small businesses scale better by giving them more publicity. And the best part is that it provides better ROI than other marketing methods.

89% of all marketers find ROI from influencer marketing comparable to or better than other marketing channels:

But how do you calculate ROI from influencer marketing?

Check out this infographic!

Start Your First Influencer Marketing Campaign Today!

Despite its rise in popularity, influencer marketing is still an underutilized channel and it will continue to be an important marketing strategy in businesses for years to come.

Now that you know everything you could possibly want to know about influencer marketing, get started with your first campaign today. It might take some trial and error to find what works for your brand, though in time, you’ll find that a solid influencer marketing strategy is one of the most powerful marketing strategies to quickly tap into new audiences and generate quality customers.

If you need help starting your influencer marketing campaign, feel free to talk to our team of digital marketing experts. Just click the orange button 👇

Get My Free Influencer Marketing Plan

Case Studies: How Influencer Marketing Helped Multi-Million Dollar Companies:

• What Yanik Silver Learned About Work – and Play – From Richard Branson
• How Entrepreneur Gretta Van Riel Used Her 16M Social Media Following to Grow Her Businesses
• How YouTube Influencer & Banish CEO Daisy Jing Launched Her Successful Skincare Line
• How FabFitFun Uses Influencer Marketing to Grow 3x Yearly

The post Influencer Marketing Strategy: The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Business with Brand Partnerships appeared first on Single Grain.

A solid brand building process is crucial for your company because it is the visual identity of your business and, done properly, gives your business not just a name, but a voice and encourages consumer awareness about your business.

First, let’s understand what successful brand building is and then let’s learn the strategies to enhance the identity of your brand.

Get My Free Brand Building Marketing Plan

What Is Brand Building?

Brand building is the process of generating awareness and promotion of the services of a company through direct advertising campaigns or through sponsorship. Brand building strategies bring consumers closer to the brand and provide value for them so that they can know, feel and experience the brand personality:

There are two types of businesses that exists on this planet: a brand and a commodity. People pay for the brand and bargain for the commodity. You need to decide which category you want your business to be in.
Click To Tweet

Digital marketers have a big responsibility on their shoulders – promotion of a business – and must take every step to convert that business into a brand so that leads will follow. They work closely with the design, content marketing and social media marketing departments. If they collaborate and work simultaneously towards promoting the brand image, the business is bound to be successful.

As a digital marketer, you need to ask yourself these questions:

• Are higher rankings of any value if people don’t recognize your brand?
• Do people mention yours as a great brand when compared to your major competitors?
• Are you promoting keywords in the domain name or promoting the brand story (as powerful brands such as Nike and Starbucks do so well)?
• Are people searching for the brand name on Google?

I’m sure you’ve figured out the real reason I’m asking you these questions. You can’t be successful with your digital marketing goals unless you convert a business into a brand.

Let’s learn how to do it!

Further Reading:

• What The Oldest Brand in The World Can Teach You About Marketing [podcast]
• 3 Ways to Use AI for Instant Brand Building
• How to Build a Strong Personal Brand Using Webinars
• 30 Brands with the Best Digital Marketing Campaigns

How to Build a Brand, not a Business

Google loves brands like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s because they deliver a promise that they make to their customers. Ideally, a brand offers exceptional customer service, provides high-quality products, has a website that is fast to load, displays a clear mission statement, and there are few experiences of customer dissatisfaction.  

According to Moz:

Although branding is not a direct ranking factor, it is something that positively impacts SEO.
Click To Tweet

1) Get the Basics Right

Whether you are a small business/startup or a large enterprise, brand growth starts with a strong foundation, so the first step is to make your brand roots strong. As a digital marketer, you need to follow the below checklist to identify if your business is on the right track.

• What is the promise that the business is making to the customer?

Promise is the expectation the customer has of the business, so put yourself in the shoes of your customer and try to evaluate the brand promise from that point of view before you start to market your product or service.

The brand promise should be genuine and it should be better than what your competitors are offering. The figure below suggests the steps to take in order to identify the brand promise:

Source 

• Is the brand logo unique and memorable?

Color increases brand recognition by up to 80% – which means that your brand must have a colorful, powerful and memorable logo. The color palette and font used in your logo should be different than your competitors.

• Is the website fast and responsive?

Brands have super-fast websites and this is what distinguishes them from smaller business sites. Website speed is often the first impression in the minds of the site visitor/prospect and it needs to be fast, particularly for ecommerce brands. People prefer sites to load fast or they will abandon it. How fast? According to Neil Patel:

• 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.
• 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
• A 1-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.

• Do you have a better understanding of the brand equity?

Study your competitors and analyze all the current marketing materials. This will help you to align your goals and value proposition in the right direction.

2) Earn the Trust of Your Customers

There can be no brand/consumer relationship without trust. We are living in an era where people don’t trust businesses easily, so techniques like publicity in which the company boasts of its own achievements doesn’t work as well as it used to. Instead, Millennials trust peers (social proof) and you need to find new ways to gain the trust of your target market.

A study by Cohn and Wolfe revealed that consumers trust brands that are authentic. Here are the top 10 brands that were found to be the most authentic:

It comes as no surprise that brands who were able to gain the maximum trust generated the maximum revenue. As a digital marketer, you should create brand marketing strategies that help to gain the trust of the consumer, such as:

• Do not mislead people with false advertisements. Always be authentic to the brand’s mission.
• Be consistently available for customers when they need you. A good approach is to adopt the practices of micro moment marketing. Nowadays, more searches occur on mobile devices than on desktop computers. The below chart displays the reasons why people use their smartphones and why is it necessary to remain in touch with consumers when they are searching for answers on their mobile devices:

• Find ways to bring value to your target audience. Create infographics, short videos or other content pieces that educate people about your new product or service. If you are constantly offering value, then consumers will surely remember you.
• Believe in doing rather than telling. Do not just tell the customer why you are the best; show them. Make your customers believe that you really care for them and your prospects wish that they were your customer.

• Do not send mass emails to people whom you don’t know. Good brands never do that. Instead, find email address with the help of tools like Voila Norbert and enrich your email lists with valuable data like current job title and location of the person you are emailing.

• Follow the three elements of consumer trust: promise, competence and integrity.

• Customer service is extremely crucial for the success of brands. Make sure that customer support is always available, via phone, email and live chat.

3) Develop a Voice for Your Company

A leader is recognized by the tone of what he or she is saying, and not just their actions. If you want to become a leader in your niche, then you need to decide on the tone of your brand voice.

Your brand voice should not be focused on what you say, but rather HOW you say it.
Click To Tweet

So, how can you create an authoritative brand voice? Here are some solid ways to do that:

• Define the personality of the voice you want for your brand. For example, if your product or service targets young hipsters, your tone should match that. Dollar Shave Club is one of the best examples of a great, distinguishable brand voice:

On the other hand, Apple takes a sleeker, more minimalistic tone with thoughtful, even philosophical, musings:

• Analyze your competitors’ voice to study what makes them stand out and figure out how to differentiate your tone from theirs.

• Listen to the tone of your customers and try to mimic it in your brand voice. If your audience likes casual conversation and you are too formal, then you might want to rethink your tone.

• Your brand voice must inspire people to take actions.

• Let the brand voice evolve gradually. You can’t have a perfect brand voice right from the start! Give time and let your brand voice evolve slowly.

Your brand voice can take the following forms:

• Text content
• Video content
• Podcasts
• Images

In order to have a balanced voice across all the channels irrespective of the content type, I recommend that you follow a content ideation process:

• Client Briefing – Conduct surveys with your audience about their needs and likes.

• Group Brainstorm – Two heads really is better than one. Take part in regular brainstorming sessions with people from different departments in your company to eliminate unnecessary aspects or your service, product or brand statements and add what matters most. Then allow everyone to vote on their top three favorite ideas.

• Ideation Scoring – The brainstorming step is all about being free to allow the creative juices flow. In this step, you’ll score the top ideas that were voted on by everyone and include those in the content creation phase.

• Client Feedback – Finally, gather feedback from your audience to see if the content you’ve provided is up to their expectations.

Further Reading:

• Here’s A Unique Way To Keep Your Brand Top Of Mind [podcast]
• What Facebook’s Algorithm Update Means for Brands & How to Take Advantage of the Shift
• How Neil Patel Built and Grew His Personal Brand
• How to Reinforce Your Customer Acquisition Strategy with Influencer Marketing

4) Partner with Other Brands

Co-branding is an integral part of strategic marketing and one of the easiest ways to earn brand recognition is to partner with companies that can generate awareness and leads.

There are three types of co-branding partnerships that every digital marketer must create for their clients’ brand:

• Influencers or Awareness Partners

An influencer is a brand in itself. With the help of influencer marketing platforms, you can partner with micro-influencers to get that much-needed brand awareness for extra publicity. You can also consider a partnership with other brands that might not provide direct leads but may serve to generate awareness for your brand.

• Lead Partners

These are the hardest to get but can help to generate direct leads and revenue. The best example of this type of partnership is between Pottery Barn and Sherwin-Williams. Pottery Barn displayed a banner on their site that helped customers easily select paint colors from Sherwin Williams that matched their furniture styles.

• Functional Partnership

Sometimes, you may need the help of another partner to defeat your competitors. This is what a functional partnership does. It raises the quality of the product and the end result is a product that instantly gets the audience’s attention. The Apple-Hermes partnership is a prime example of this kind of partnership that helped Apple continue to “out-creative” their competitors:

Analyze and list down the different types of partners you can have for the brand. For a digital marketer, obtaining partnerships with influencers and lead partners should be a must.

Get My Free Brand Building Marketing Plan

5) Build and Optimize Brand Signals

The most overlooked part of any marketing campaign is the optimization of the brand. There is no doubt that Google prefers to rank brands in the search results because they provide a better user experience.

Rand Fishkin explains it like this:

“Google wanted to separate the ‘brands’ that produce happy searchers and customers from the ‘generics’ – sites they’ve often classified as ‘thin affiliate’ or poor user experiences.”

Here are some signals that Google considers when deciding to categorize your business as a brand:

• Nurture your loyal social media following.

Big brands are present across each of the social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google Plus and Pinterest. Most brands have a lot of loyal followers on every social platform, so a complete brand profile and proper engagement is extremely necessary for the ultimate brand exposure. Having an active social media presence and a loyal social following helps send indirect signals to Google that your business has escalated to a brand.

• Try to generate a lot of brand related searches.

Google predicts which companies are brands based on the percentage of people who click on the top result. This is illustrated by the below graph which depicts that brands receive the maximum clicks for #1 and #2 results:

• Make sure your website provides an awesome user experience.

There must be no 404s or mobile errors. Your site should not provide a spammy, useless or annoying experience. Get rid of irritating pop ups, use HTTPs, and boost the security of your site so that there is no malware. If your users find a message like the one below while browsing your site then your entire brand experience is negatively affected:

• Optimize your site for Answer Box.

Get your content featured on Google Answer Boxes (read up on the difference between a featured snippet and an answer box). People trust the business that gets ranked in the answer boxes, so this is a great way to generate much-needed brand awareness.

• Complete and optimize your NAP.

Make sure you have a working phone number and office address on the contact us page along with your business name (NAP = Name, Address, Phone). The below image correctly depicts the brand signals that Google might use to determine whether a site is actually a brand or not:

• Use Schema markups.

Schema markup is “semantic vocabulary of tags (or microdata) that you can add to your HTML to improve the way search engines read and represent your page in SERPs.” It properly defines every entity in your web pages so that it becomes easier for search engines to extract information out of the data.

• Build co-citations and links.

Brands often have a large number of links pointing to them from high-authority sites which non-branded sites fail to achieve. Moreover, using branded anchor text and avoiding keywords in the anchor text is another way to build brand value.

Get My Free Brand Building Marketing Plan

Final Thoughts on Brand Building

One last thing: Now that you’ve learned why brand building is essential for growing your business and the strategies in this guide to enhance the identity of your brand, you should also think about how to measure your brand.

“Brand measurement is the process of identifying brand metrics, creating a methodology and cadence for taking measurements, and then adjusting your marketing strategy using the insights you gather over time.” Check out this guide on how to measure your brand because, as the saying goes, you can’t improve what you don’t measure.

It’s important to measure brand strategy as you build it. With any measurement strategy, you need objectives, select KPIs, along with the right tools and processes to measure your efforts. If you’re doing it right, you can build a sweet report like this:

Always remember that your job as a digital marketer is to enhance the brand value of the business you are promoting and to generate a constant flow of leads along with goodwill. A brand is loved by both the search engines and the people, so make use of the above techniques and take every step to convert a business into a brand.

The post The Complete Guide to Brand Building (Must-Read for Digital Marketers) appeared first on Single Grain.

According to Statista, 4x as many people are spending time online on a mobile device compared to desktop:

In this listicle post, we will cover 11 brands who are seeing tremendous success with mobile ads.

But first, a quick word on gamified mobile ads….

Dive Deeper: The Ultimate Guide to Mobile Advertising

Gamifying Mobile Ads

Gamified ads are advertisements that people can interact with as though they were playing a game. For example, if you’re advertising a new app that you produced, you could run gamified ads so that users can interact with, or “play,” your app as they would if they had downloaded it.

Because about two-thirds of Americans play video games and 62% install games on their phones, gamifying mobile ads are a great way to advertise to this audience:

With the Millennial generation having grown up on games, gamified mobile advertising is more entertaining and create a better ad experience for users. Consider these facts:

• There are more than 2.5 billion video gamers worldwide
• 72.3% of mobile users in the U.S. are mobile phone gamers
• 54% of mobile gamers said they’d rather watch video ads if this leads to in-game rewards
• 23% of U.S. gamers who own smartphones or tablets said they have an average of 3-5 paid games on their devices
• In a study, gamified ads had engagement rates nearly 6% higher than non-gaming ads, and saw a 28.8% click-through rate (compared to just 3.9% for standard ads)

Now that you understand the importance and reach of mobile advertising, here are some of the brands that have excelled in this area. Read on to get inspired, learn from them and implement their ideas to make your mobile ads even better!

11 Companies That Are Doing Mobile Advertising Right

Pond’s 

Pond’s, a brand that sells beauty and health care products, partnered with InMobi to create the “world’s first face detecting augmented reality rich media mobile ad.”

This interactive ad allowed people to experience a unique and relevant brand experience in an effort to buy the brand’s new Acne 10-in-1 Solution:

In a market that is oversaturated with similar face products, they knew they had to stand out somehow, so they decided to target prospects where they were already spending their time: staring at their smartphones. Using several filters, Pond’s made their ad personalized and relevant, and by using the front-facing cameras in everyone’s smartphones, they made their ad truly interactive — no downloading anything or visiting another site.

When users looked at their phones, the camera would track the various features of their face and automatically detect the acne-prone areas of their skin — as the user moved their face through augmented reality.

The results of this campaign included 39,000 users interacting with the ad and an average engagement of 29 seconds.

Related Content: Best Programmatic Advertising Agency: Top 6 Choices for 2023

Netflix

Netflix, the world’s leading entertainment service provider with over 151 million paid subscriptions worldwide, won the Drum Mobile Award for the category “most innovative use of mobile.”  The company captured the attention of viewers by creating a super realistic advertising experience that was both haunting and adventurous.

In the campaign, Netflix mimicked the fear that people experienced after watching an episode of the popular techno-paranoia drama Black Mirror. The mobile screen of the viewers resembled a broken piece of glass as though they were living in the show.

The ad was an instant hit and Netflix was able to capture the attention of both new and previous Black Mirror viewers.

Dive Deeper:
* Marketer’s Guide to Mobile App Advertising
* 12 Quick Fixes to Make Your Mobile Traffic Convert
* Is Netflix a SaaS? 25 Examples of SaaS Companies That Are Rocking It

Ruffles

Ruffles is the world-renowned potato chip brand that has been marketed by Frito-Lay since 1961. Recently, its sales started to decline sharply in Brazil and this is when they thought of leveraging the power of mobile to reach audiences.

Ruffles wanted to resonate with teenagers in Brazil between the ages 12 and 18, so they created a mobile-only augmented reality game named AmiGO:

To play the game, “a user activated the camera on their phone and put in headphones. Their friends could see what the phone’s camera saw, while the user saw what the game showed them. Thanks to the game’s augmented reality, friends would see Ruffles chips around the user, and they could send voice commands to guide the user to grab the chips. The user had to follow their friends’ directions since only they could see the Ruffles. The more chips the user grabbed, the more points for everyone. The points went into a weekly ranking, and top scorers were announced on the brand’s social media accounts.”

The campaign, called “Everybody In The Same Package,” was implemented in three stages:

• Hype: High-impact media such as Facebook videos designed to receive broad coverage by partnering with influencers
• Maturity: Peak engagement to spark and encourage conversations about the game
• Decline: As interest waned, content created by influencers was promoted on social media accounts to encourage consumers to play

Ruffles created mobile ads that targeted teens on various social networks in order to promote the game. The success of the campaign included:

• More than 26,000 downloads during the two-month campaign
• The Facebook Live session that was created with soap opera actors and featured Ruffles content received more than 2M views for AmiGO
• Increased sales by 43%
• Users engaged with the app for an average of six minutes every day
• AmiGO was among the 10 most talked about campaigns on Twitter that month

Dive Deeper:
* 8 Tips for Successful Mobile Video Advertising
* How to Target Your Mobile Users with Push Notifications
* How to Produce Paid Facebook Video Ads for Mobile Like a Pro

Starbucks

Whether you’re a coffee aficionado or not, there’s no denying that Starbucks has always led the way when it comes to keeping up with the times and giving their customer base what it wants.

Although they launched their mobile app years ago, it now has more users than Apple’s or Google’s mobile apps and has the most regularly used loyalty rewards app than any other restaurant chain.

To ensure success in today’s digital age, their mobile app offers:

• Special offers/free stuff. Offering incentives like birthday gifts, loyalty discounts and complimentary beverages increased engagement among its customers.
• Loyalty program. People love free stuff, and if they know they can receive a free drink or food item after they’ve purchased a certain number, they’re more inclined to buy more stuff. This accounts for 39% of U.S. sales.
• Notifications. Customers can fill out surveys on their phone (and earn more rewards stars) and get notifications when a special is going on.
• Mobile ordering/paying. Avoid the lines, order ahead and pay on your phone. What’s not to like? Because Starbucks is so busy during the morning rush before work, this feature is particularly successful. This accounts for 12% of its transactions in the U.S.
• Personalization. As we know, when you personalize something, it increases customer engagement. More recently, they added in-store music playlist to the app, which means that customers can check out which song is playing while they’re visiting any store. They can also access the playlist through Spotify after leaving the store.

As per Retail TouchPoints, it’s clear that Starbucks will “continue its dominance over other mobile payments platforms through 2022.”

Nissan

Nissan, the Japanese multinational automobile manufacturer, leveraged the power of the mobile touch screen in a brilliant manner to generate engagement for its compact SUV ad (note, this is just the regular video ad):

The Evil Snowmen ad had a video featuring Nissan’s Rogue SUV that fought a gang of snowmen. The ad had various hotspots that users could tap on their mobile screen in order to learn about the features of the car. The tablet ad also had five hot spots, with content highlighting statistics on winter weather and snow safety.

Juice Mobile ran this 60-second video ad on its network, which saw a 78% completion rate and a 93% engagement rate.

Dive Deeper:
* 4 Essential Steps to Create a Go-To-Market Plan For Your Mobile App
* Top 10 Mobile Optimization Best Practices For E-commerce Sites
* 15 Thought-Provoking Statistics about Mobile Commerce [Infographic]

Snickers

Snickers is a chocolate bar from Mars, Incorporated that partnered with Spotify to create an ad that targeted users when they listened to songs out of their usual genre on the music streaming service.

The goal of the Snickers “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry” campaign was to make their chocolate bar the obvious choice during consumers’ “hungry moments.”

Source

Key performance indicators for the campaign included:

• Increase year-on-year sales
• Interaction with the Hunger Hits playlist
• Reach
• Impressions
• Social engagement with the campaign

Using Spotify’s streaming data, Snickers was able to pinpoint users who were not listening to their normal genre of music and then in that micro-moment deliver their audio ad. The idea was impressive and it caught users by surprise, who were then driven to Snickers branded playlist named “The Hunger List”.

Most Spotify customers listen to music on their mobile devices and “mobile listening is a 100 percent logged-in experience, which generates the streaming intelligence required to make campaigns like “Hunger Spotter” possible.”

The campaign was able to generate 78,861 total clicks, 1,710,564 unique reach and 6,805,995 overall impressions.

Related Content: 22 Alternative Ad Networks for Best PPC Conversions in 2023

GAP

To connect with Millennials, American clothing and accessories retailer GAP created an ad on Instagram that showcased a decade long archive of the world’s top logos:

GAP showcased its new collection and enabled viewers to become a part of the logo remix launch with an energetic full-screen carousel ad in Instagram Stories with short-form, vertical videos that are idea for mobile viewing.

The 19-day ad campaign was an instant hit that saw a 73% higher click-through rate than in its past Instagram ads and a 4-point rise in message association.

Doctor Who

Doctor Who is a British science-fiction TV show that’s been on the BBC since 1963. In order to promote a new season of the show, mobile advertising agency Mobext used Doctor Who as a “sidekick” to content on a set whitelist of high-profile websites.

The ad showcased the doctor persuading readers to expand the ad, which then displayed a “flip cube” format displaying all the show’s characters.

The campaign was an instant hit, generating 45,000 engagements at a rate of 2.5% and a 4% expansion rate. It also won an award at the Effective Mobile Marketing Awards (EMMA) for Most Effective Rich Media Campaign.

Headspace

Headspace is an English-American online healthcare company that specializes in meditation and users can download the app and learn to meditate as well as be mindful. More than 40 million people suffer from stress in the U.S. alone, and research shows that regular meditation helps keep stress levels down.

Headspace targeted Instagram users who may be suffering from anxiety with this colorful ad:

The ad uses fun cartoon-style storytelling to encourage users to try their app and reduce their anxiety levels in as little as 10 minutes. It’s eye-catching, the design is simple, and the message is ultra clear, and anyone who lives with anxiety is sure to stop and watch the ad.

Dive Deeper:
* 14 Ways to Kickstart Your Mobile Email Marketing Campaign
* 7 Killer Digital Advertising Trends Every Marketer Should Know in 2023
* 13 Best Super Bowl Ads of all Time: What Your Business Can Learn from Them

Sony Pictures

Sony Pictures produced an animated film called Peter Rabbit, which was directed by Will Gluck.

Source

Sony Pictures wanted to build brand awareness for its new movie so they created a mobile ad campaign. The main objectives of the campaign were to measure Engagement Rate (ER), Average Time Spent (Seconds), and Video Completion Rate (VCR).

In order to reach its target audience, Sony created a custom, mobile-only video trailer and ran it across iOS, Android and mobile tablets. At the end of the trailer, viewers were invited to play a video game and click on character hotspots to learn more about the characters in the movie:

The game took users into a garden environment where they were required to slice the vegetables being thrown at them (so they could feed Peter Rabbit) while avoiding blackberries by tilting their mobile device. Sony’s ads were displayed within custom gaming apps that had content similar to Peter Rabbit. 

According to the case study, the results gained were amazing:

• The average time spent on Peter Rabbit was 14.59 seconds (almost triple the benchmarks of similar gamified units)
• 91.37% average completion rate across iOS, Android and tablet
• 55.81% of users replayed the veggie chop mini-game
• The Instant-Play HD Video delivered an added value of 317,455 video completes for the campaign

Related Content: Geotargeting: How to Find the Right Customers for Your Brand

Samsung

When Samsung wanted to promote its Galaxy S6 smartphone, they worked with InMobi to create interactive ads that created a “personalized ‘real-time battery identification’ mobile ad unit,” which allowed people to experience what the company was talking about with a relevant demo on their smartphone:

Knowing how important battery life is to most people, they created an expandable interstitial ad to demonstrate this phone’s “super fast charging capability” by reaching out to existing customers with the objective of getting them to upgrade to the S6 as well as non-Samsung users.

With “moment marketing, Samsung captured users’ at the moment when they most needed this charging capability,” and their CTA button that said “Experience” gave users a personalized ad and relevant demo on the new S6 phone:

This campaign resulted in 1.6% of users tapping on the “Tap to find more” button, 1.1% of users clicking on the “Experience” CTA and an average of 20 seconds spent on the interstitial ad.

Last Word on Mobile Advertising

Mobile advertising is the best option to get the word out about your brand.

There are numerous ad formats, including native ads, in-app ads, app store ads, text ads and banner advertisements, for mobile devices that easily and effectively allow you to reach your current and potential customers like never before.

The ad spend on mobile (and the subsequent conversion rates) is way higher than any other digital advertising platform, so if you want to reach a wider range of demographics, from Boomers and Gen Xers to Millennials and Gen Z audiences, then mobile should be your preferred platform for advertising.

This listicle showcases some of the best mobile advertising campaigns delivered by some of the best brands around the world. Let these ideas for different types of mobile ads inspire your own mobile advertising strategy and take your business to the next level!

Hopefully you got enough inspiration to launch your own mobile advertising campaign, but if you just want an expert digital marketing agency to do it for you, click the orange button! 👇

Get My Free Mobile Marketing Plan

Mobile Advertising FAQs

Are mobile banner ads effective?

Banner ads — also known as display ads — are one of the most common types of mobile advertising. They are popular in digital marketing because they are very effective at driving more clicks and conversions.

What is an example of mobile advertising?

There are many ways to display ads on mobile, including Facebook Ads, Snapchat Ads, Instagram Ads, YouTube video ads, in-game ads, SMS ads, and push notifications from smartphone apps.

Facebook ads are a classic example of what good mobile app advertising looks like: Users are able to scroll through their news feed and see ads that are specific to their interests without feeling like they’ve been interrupted.

Another example of mobile advertising are push notifications, such as those you receive from Amazon. These are used to give customers shipping updates with personalized messages and user attributes, such as name, location and purchase history.

Which mobile advertising platform is best?

There are a number of excellent mobile ad platforms, including:

• Google Ads
• Facebook Ads (aka Meta Ads)
• Instagram Ads
• Twitter Ads
• Bing Ads
• YouTube video ads
• Apple Search Ads
• AdColony
• Airpush
• Mobile in-app ads

What is a mobile advertising strategy?

A mobile advertising strategy is simply a digital marketing strategy aimed at mobile device (smartphones, tablets) audiences. Some differences from desktop ads include the ability to leverage push notifications and location-based advertising.

What’s the difference between text and push notifications?

Text messages are sent via SMS ad campaigns to a user’s mobile device in the same way you receive text messages from your friends and family (who hopefully aren’t marketing themselves to you!).

Push notifications are short, one-way messages (or notifications) that pop up on users’ smartphones via an app they’ve downloaded.

How effective is mobile advertising?

According to Agility, mobile advertising is the most effective form of advertising on the internet, with a response rate of 2.72-11%. 

SMS mobile marketing sees some of the most impressive engagement rates, compared to other channels, with open and read rates at about 98%. No one can resist opening a text message!

The post 11 Brands That Are Doing Mobile Advertising Right appeared first on Single Grain.

In this post, I’m going to show you how we increased organic traffic to three separate SaaS blogs in one month – without publishing any new posts.

We increased organic traffic to:

• Mailshake’s existing blog posts by up to 117%
• Time Doctor’s existing blog posts by 12.8% (this may not be a huge number, but it was enough to get a nice bump in sign-ups which increased by 47.7%)
• Moosend’s existing blog posts by up to 327%

How’d we do it?

The magic of content updates.

Here’s how we pulled this off, step by step, and how you can get these same results.

Book My Free SaaS SEO Consultation

The 7 Steps We Took to Grow Their Blog Traffic

I’m going to walk you through exactly how we refreshed five Mailshake posts, five Time Doctor’s posts, and five Moosend’s posts.

This is the structure we use to refresh any blog posts, including our own on the Single Grain blog. 

Step 1: Check the Blog for Content Decay

First, I had Mailshake, Time Doctor and Moosend connect their Google Search Console accounts.

This lets our software surface quick wins from their SEO data for refreshing old posts. We easily found five articles from each blog that were perfect for a refresh according to their Content Decay report.

What is “content decay”?

Basically, it’s when your blog posts are losing traffic (i.e. the content is “decaying”) because the competition is putting out better content on the same topic, thus rendering yours outdated or incomplete. It’s recommended that you update your best-performing (often evergreen) articles at least once a year to keep them fresh and relevant – for both readers and the Google bots.

So, we chose two posts from Mailshake that had been decaying:

• Meeting Request Email Templates + Subject Lines
• 8 Subject Lines That Will Get That Networking Email Opened 

• 18 Ways to Improve Your Work Environment and Optimize Productivity
• 15 Qualities of A Great Team Member

And two decaying posts from Moosend:

• How To Build An Email List From Scratch: 14 Powerful Tactics
• How To Build A Brand That Will Last In Time And Space

We then picked three Mailshake posts that were “within striking distance” of ranking on page 1 for their target keywords:

• How to Generate Leads Yourself as a Sales Rep (3 Can’t-Fail Tactics)
• How to Write a Follow-up Email After No Response
• How to Cold Call: 5-Step Cold-Calling Technique to Close More Deals   

Three “within striking distance of page 1” Time Doctor posts:

• How to Create Zoom Breakout Rooms (Step-By-Step Guide)
• How to Use Zoom: A Step-by-Step Guide (2021)
• 24 Virtual Team Building Activities Remote Teams Love in 2021

And three “within striking distance of page 1” Moosend posts:

• The 9 Best Email Marketing Services In 2021
• 45 Cool Email Sign-Offs That Generate Replies
• 30+ Best Affiliate Programs For 2021 [Best Commissions $$$]

Takeaway: Content decay is what happens to your older blog posts when you stop giving them attention and, instead, focus only on your exciting new content. Monitor which blog posts are losing traffic regularly and create a process/schedule for updating these. 

Dive Deeper: What Is Content Decay and How It Affects Your SEO

Step 2: Optimize Each Blog Post for User Intent

We pasted the original articles into a Content Editor and saw that they got anywhere from a “B-” to a “C-” grade – marks I would have been overjoyed to get in school, but for ranking purposes, your content should get an “A+”.

Our writer took stock of the relevant keywords from the right-hand column that were missing from the article and started naturally adding them. The tool indicates not only which keywords you should use, but also how often you need to include them. Once you get that right, you get a green checkmark:

Some ways of improving your content’s grade include rewriting a sentence so that it includes the keyword, adding new paragraphs to mention the keyword in context, adding a header that includes the keyword, and cutting repetitive or non-valuable text.

This moved all the posts up to a higher grade that meant they could compete with other posts ranking for the same target keyword.

For the full updating guidelines (which aren’t all necessary for a content refresh) we use at Single Grain, check out Why You Should Update Content – Or Risk Losing The Traffic You Have [Case Study]

Takeaway: Because you’re refreshing the content and not revamping it, most of the changes you make are going to be minor. Try adding a few sentences or paragraphs here and there with relevant keywords to provide more detail, linking to updated sources, adding new stats, improving headers to incorporate the keyword and be more descriptive, etc. 

Dive Deeper: What Is a Content Optimization Tool and Why Do You Need It?

Step 3: Build Internal Links to the Post from Other Pages

Including internal links – i.e. linking to another of your blog’s posts – helps Google rank your site better. Along with suitable anchor text, it tells the search engine which of your web pages are relevant to this keyword.

As Moz relays: “While there is no definite answer as to how many internal links on a page are too many, Google has indicated they can crawl 100s of links per page.”

We didn’t add anywhere near 100 as these posts already had some internal links. Instead, we included 2-4 additional contextual internal links where it was most helpful for the reader, either as a “Related” or “Read More” standalone:

Or linked to appropriate anchor text:

Takeaway: There are two ways to add internal links. Choose an appropriate anchor text and hyperlink it to another post, or add a “Related Content” or “Learn More” line with the full name of the article hyperlinked. Using both formats is ideal, as readers won’t necessarily click on the anchor text. Sometimes they need to see the title of the post. 👇

Dive Deeper: How to Implement Internal Linking for SEO (Step-by-Step)

Step 4: Embed a YouTube Video Where Appropriate 

Having a video embedded in a blog post increases dwell time, so we chose a relevant video from Mailshake’s, Time Doctor’s and Moosend’s YouTube channels.

A video keeps people on the page longer, helps potential customers understand your product or service better, and generates more leads. Embedding a video also makes reading the article easier by breaking up the text.

For example, we used a video called ​​How to Hire People You’ll Actually Like in Time Doctor’s post 15 Qualities of A Great Team Member:

Takeaway: If you don’t already have a YouTube channel, now would be a good time to create one. Try making different kinds of videos, like explainer videos for your product or service, product demos, software tutorials, vlogs, etc. 

Step 5: Add an FAQ Section to Rank in “PAA” Questions

Next, we took a look at the “People Also Ask” questions (also listed on the right-hand column, under the “Research” tab). We pulled this data directly from Google’s SERPs, so adding them to your blog post increases searcher intent.

When these can’t be naturally incorporated into the body of the text, it’s a great idea to add them to the bottom of the article as an FAQ section. This is an easy way to include helpful information for the reader, as shown in this Mailshake example:

At this point, we achieved an A+ grade in the Content Editor, hit the right readability level (more or less), and had the recommended word count – for all fifteen posts across these three SaaS blogs.

Takeaway: When creating an FAQ section at the bottom of your blog post, be sure that the questions are taken directly from Google, because that’s how people are starting their query. Make sure to answer the question in just a few concise sentences. If you have more to say, turn it into a proper section in the body of your content. 

Step 6: Run a 30-Day Content Test to Track Our Results

Before making any changes directly to the blog posts, I started the content tests for the fifteen refreshed articles (five apiece from Mailshake, Time Doctor and Moosend). This took me about five minutes to complete for each brand (so fifteen minutes in total).

I clicked on “New Test,” plugged in the blog post URL, selected “Content Test” (you can do a separate Meta Test for the title and meta description), and clicked “Start Test.” The default time period is 30 days, although you can run the test for 7, 15, 30, 60 or 90 days. I also added a tag (my name) so that I could easily find any of these tests later on.

Step 7: Republish and Request Re-Indexation in Google Search Console

After starting the content tests, I had our contact from each brand upload the refreshed version of these blog posts to their WordPress (or whatever CMS they used), change the date to the current date, and hit the update button.

We then had Mailshake, Time Doctor and Moosend re-index their five refreshed posts in their Google Search Console.

Requesting re-indexation in Google Search Console for the posts you updated helps Google’s spiders find and crawl your site sooner than if you don’t request it. This helps these refreshed posts gain more visibility in the SERPs faster and, hence, drive more traffic.

Dive Deeper: Why You Should Update Content – Or Risk Losing The Traffic You Have [Case Study]

Book My Free SaaS SEO Consultation

The Results: Increased Organic Traffic + Rankings in 30 Days

Here are the overall results. Thirty days later, five content refreshes had grown:

• Mailshake’s organic blog traffic by 117%

• Time Doctor’s organic blog traffic by 12.78% (an additional 72,762 sessions in one month) which increased sign-ups by nearly 50%

• Moosend’s organic blog post traffic by 357.56%

Let’s take a look at each of the three brands’ five improved blog posts. By the way, I used Ahrefs to check ranking.

Mailshake’s Results

The two posts that had been decaying, as per their Content Decay report, had favorable changes:

1) Meeting Request Email Templates + Subject Lines:

• now ranks #3
• 14% increase in clicks
• 12% increase in CTR

2) 8 Subject Lines That Will Get That Networking Email Opened

• now ranks #1 for “networking email subject line”

Even though there was a decrease in clicks and CTR, it still hit the #1 spot in the SERPs. The lower clicks and CTR for this post were strictly due to changing intent and search volume (desktop vs. mobile) rates for the topic during the duration of the test.

Tip: To get an accurate look at your stats whenever you notice a slight decrease in clicks or CTR, let the test run for at least three months. This will give you the correct data you need to make further content tweaks even with a keyword where intent and demand is constantly changing.

The three posts that were “within striking distance” of ranking on page 1 (hitting spots between 11-20) are all now on page 1 of the SERPs:

3) How to Generate Leads Yourself as a Sales Rep (3 Can’t-Fail Tactics)

• ranks on page 1 (#6)
• 117% increase in clicks
• 149% increase in impressions

Even though the CTR decreased a little as a result of changing month-to-month search trends, this post still moved up the SERPs to page 1.

4) How to Write a Follow-up Email After No Response

• ranks on page 1 as a featured snippet for their main keyword “follow up emails”

5) How to Cold Call: 5-Step Cold-Calling Technique to Close More Deals

• ranks on page 1 (#3) for main KW “b2b cold calling”
• 66% increase in clicks
• 38% increase in CTR

Time Doctor’s Results

Here are the two posts that had been decaying.

1) 18 Ways to Improve Your Work Environment and Optimize Productivity 

Now ranks: 

• #2 for main KW “ways to improve work environment”
• #4 for “ideas to improve workplace environment”
• #5 for “workplace improvement”

2) 15 Qualities of a Great Team Member

Now ranks: 

• #2 for main KW “team member qualities”
• #3 for “team member”
• #3 for “qualities of a good team member”

And these are the three articles that were “within striking distance” of ranking on page 1. They are now all on page 1 (two of them even got a featured snippet):

3) 24 Virtual Team Building Activities Remote Teams Love in 2021 

Now ranks: 

• Featured snippet for “virtual team building activities” (note: title was changed to 2022 this year)

• #2 for main KW “virtual team building”
• #6 for “​​team building activities”

4) How To Use Zoom: A Step-by-Step Guide (2021) 

Now ranks: 

• Featured snippet for “how zoom works”

• #1 for “what is zoom and how does it work”
• #2 for main KW “how to use zoom”
• #2 for “how does zoom work”

5) How to Create Zoom Breakout Rooms (Step-by-Step Guide)

Now ranks: 

• #2 for main KW “zoom breakout rooms”
• #3 for “how to do breakout rooms in zoom”
• #3 for “how to make breakout rooms in zoom”

From their Google Analytics:

Moosend’s Results

Here are the two posts that had been decaying.

1) How To Build An Email List From Scratch: 14 Powerful Tactics (2021)

Now ranks:

• #2 for “build an email list from scratch”
• #2 for “​​how to build an email list from scratch”
• #4 for main KW “build an email list”

And their Google Analytics stats:

2) How To Build a Brand That Will Last in Time and Space [2021]

Now ranks:

• #5 for main KW “how to build a brand”
• #6 for “build a brand”

The Google Analytics stats for this post:

And these are the three articles that were “within striking distance” of ranking on page 1. They are now all on page 1, and two of them even got a featured snippet:

3) 45 Cool Email Sign-Offs That Generate Replies

Now ranks:

• #1 for “sign offs”
• #1 for “cool email sign offs”
• #1 for “cool sign off phrases”
• #3 for “email sign offs”
• #4 for “best email sign off”

The Google Analytics stats for this post:

4) The 9 Best Email Marketing Services in 2021 [In-Depth Review]

Now ranks:

• #1 for “email marketing services”
• #2 for main KW “best email marketing services”
• #3 for “best emailing services”

The Google Analytics stats for this post:

5) 33 Best Affiliate Programs of 2021 That Generate Revenue

Now ranks:

• Featured snippet for “best affiliate programs for 2023”

• #4 for main KW “best affiliate programs”
• #5 for “affiliate program”

The Google Analytics stats for this post:

Dive Deeper: Best SaaS Marketing Agency: Top 5 Choices for 2023

Hopefully you learned how to get started with native advertising for your SaaS company, but if you just want a SaaS agency to do all the work for you, click the orange button below!

Book My Free SaaS SEO Consultation

The post We Refreshed 15 Posts on 3 SaaS Blogs – And Increased Organic Traffic on All appeared first on Single Grain.