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Local SEO & Google My Business Optimization with Amanda Jordan [Podcast] https://ift.tt/2IY7VOL Loren & Amanda will jumping into quite a bit of topic matter on local search including: How has Google My Business changed in the past year? What are some of the missed opportunities in GMB? How does the connection between onsite content & GMB visibility work? How can a brick & mortar effectively track foot traffic back to Google searches? Click to Collect, is this a local search KPI? Recommendations for streamlining GMB certification. Local Search: Tips for location page optimizations? What to avoid with local on-site SEO? Is localized expert content effective and scalable? The post Local SEO & Google My Business Optimization with Amanda Jordan [Podcast] appeared first on Search Engine Journal. SEO via Search Engine Journal https://ift.tt/1QNKwvh November 21, 2020 at 10:42AM
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How social media influence 71% consumer buying decisions https://ift.tt/391kWly 30-second summary:
A large share of purchases are made online nowadays and in 2020 this number has grown significantly thanks to the lockdown. As the number of internet users increases and tech companies develop more ways to integrate the online world into shopping, online retail is expected to grow exponentially. Logically, many consumer buying decisions are made online as well, and where do people spend most of their online time — on social media. According to GlobalWebIndex, 54% of social media users use social media to research products and 71% are more likely to purchase products and services based on social media referrals. I bet you yourself made a purchase decision based on what you saw in your feed at least once, be it a post from a friend or an ad that convinced you. It’s hard to say exactly how much social media influences customers, not just what they buy, but their consumer habits in general. Social networks changed the way we promote products and even gave us new ways to advertise. Let’s talk about some factors that impact customers nowadays. How social media influences consumer buying decisions1. The shortened customer journeyThe first thing that you notice when it comes to customers on social media is the shortened customer journey. It used to be that people found out about a product, saw an ad on TV multiple times, and next week they may have gone shopping and finally bought the product. Now, this process can take minutes. According to the Deloitte report, 29% of social media users are more likely to make a purchase on the same day of using social media. That means that once they see a product, they simply click on the link and buy it: there’s no need to wait before they go shopping. Moreover, the same report states that consumers who are influenced by social media are four times more likely to spend more on purchases. The customer journey is not just shorter but it’s also more complicated now. Social media has made product research more accessible to users. For example, if your customer sees a product on Instagram, they can immediately search the hashtag to look up other reviews and decide whether they should buy it or not. As a result, customers spend more time on research and check more sources for reviews. 62% of customers say they share bad customer experiences with other people. Thus it’s extremely important to keep an eye on your online reputation and seek out reviews on social media. Remember that every review on social media is important — and that fits nicely with my next point. 2. The influence of social proofAdmittedly, social proof is not a new concept: man is a social animal, and we’ve been giving each other recommendations for centuries. The thing is, these recommendations and anti-recommendations can now be heard by hundreds of people. Every time you tweet or post about this amazing cafe or the shampoo that did wonders to your hair, your social media followers see it and might be moved to try it as well. The same goes for negative opinions and rants. As per Forbes, 81% of consumers’ purchasing choices are influenced by their friends’ posts on social media. Moreover, people proactively ask for recommendations on social media (and brands unfortunately often ignore them). According to this study by Awario, only 9% of brand conversations are answers to customer questions, however, depending on the industry, there can be more than 100 people asking for recommendations on social media in one month. As I mentioned above, social proof mostly impacts your friends and the people you know. But more and more people on social media don’t just follow their friends — they also follow influencers. That’s where influencer marketing comes into play. 3. The power of influencers on consumer buying decisionsInfluencers are the social media users that have a robust loyal audience that often shares the same interests. Their opinions are naturally seen by a bigger number of people, people that trust them. According to a study by the Influencer Marketing Hub, almost 50% of Twitter users have made purchases as a direct result of a Tweet from an influencer. Micro-Influencers are especially effective in persuading their audience since they are usually experts in some niche and specific topic, which makes them a natural source of recommendations for this topic. If you’re selling a niche product, finding social media influencers in your niche — Instagram bloggers, vloggers, TikTokers, or Facebook group admins — is a great way to reach your audience. Gen Z and Millenials are more likely to be influenced, with 84% of millennials saying user-generated content from strangers has at least some influence on how they spend their money. The influence of Stories on consumer buying decisionsEphemeral content is a relatively recent trend but it’s already winning over social media users and brands alike. Snapchat was the first to use Stories as a format, but it’s Instagram that popularized it and now boasts more than 500 million daily active users. The content shared via Instagram Stories is typically more raw and unfiltered, which allows brands to create a more genuine image. It enables companies to take people behind the scenes and show how they operate, their work culture, and the team behind the products. All this helps to foster an authentic connection to a brand. So these are the features exclusive to social media that shape customer behavior today. But as you probably know, every social media platform is a little different. Oftentimes, brands wonder which social media platform they should focus on. Let’s go through a list of most popular platforms and see what differentiates them from one another. Most popular social media platforms1. FacebookFacebook remains the biggest social media platform in the world (with almost 1.7 billion users), even though it had its fair share of scandals and controversies in recent years. The sheer size of the network means that you’ll be able to reach more people on there but be careful — Facebook is not as popular as it used to be. Edison Research’s Infinite Dial study from early 2019 showed that 62% of U.S. 12–34 year-olds are Facebook users, down from 67% in 2018 and 79% in 2017. This decrease is particularly notable as 35–54 and 55+ age group usage has been constant or even increased. Still, Facebook accounts for 50% of total social referrals and a further 64% of overall social revenue, shows Business Insider. In 2015, Facebook was responsible for influencing more than half, 52% of consumers’ online and offline purchases, shows DigitasLBi Commerce. Lately, the company has been trying to fix its reputation by introducing more control over advertising and data management. 2. InstagramInstagram is an amazing platform for brands since it gives you so many opportunities to show off your product: photos, videos, Stories, galleries, filters, and more. It now boasts more than one billion monthly active users. What’s great about the platform is that it’s popular among all generations in all countries. 80% of Instagram users follow a business account. 73% of U.S. teens say Instagram is the best way for brands to reach them with new products or promotions. Moreover, the platform itself facilitates shopping by adding shopping tags and checkout options to the posts. 130 million Instagram accounts tap on a shopping post to learn more about products every month. 3. TikTokAlthough TikTok is a relatively new platform, its rapid growth made it an important source of brand awareness for social media users, especially Gen Z. TikTok now has 800 million active users worldwide, and 41 percent of these users are aged between 16 and 24. So, if you want to reach a younger audience, TikTok is the place to be. TikTok’s algorithm is also amazing for niche and specific products since it curates your feed based on your interests. It makes your job of finding new followers easier — the algorithm will push your content into the feeds of your potential audience. Moreover, TikTok recently launched new ways to advertise on the app, giving brands more opportunities to attract customers. 4. TwitterAccording to Hubspot, Twitter is a source of product discoveries for many people. Because of its quick nature and ability to connect to basically anyone, it’s a perfect place to ask for recommendations. SproutSocial shows that 53% of consumers recommend businesses or products in tweets while a further 48% follow through to purchase those products or services. 5. YouTubeThere’s a debate on whether YouTube is actually a social media platform or more of a streaming platform or content platform. Nevertheless, it’s one of the most popular platforms out there. More and more people are looking up product reviews on the platform. Keep in mind that 80% of people who said that they watched a YouTube video related to a product they want to buy said that they did so at the beginning of their buying process. If you’re ready to invest your time in creating content for YouTube, it can be a highly rewarding task. Just look at the BonAppetit channel that belongs to the magazine of the same name. It has almost 6 million subscribers and more than 1,3 billion views when the total circulation for the magazine doesn’t exceed 1,600,000 copies in a year. ConclusionAs you see, the data and our daily experience on the Internet show that it’s hard to argue that social media influence purchase decisions. The impact of social media on customer purchase decisions can be explained by many factors: social proof, the penetration of social media, and the availability of online retail. However, it’s getting more and more difficult to make your brand stand out on social media. Focusing on the right platform, building creative social media marketing campaigns, and using up-to-date technologies will help you with that. The post How social media influence 71% consumer buying decisions appeared first on Search Engine Watch. SEO via Search Engine Watch https://ift.tt/2jPJ80l November 20, 2020 at 05:10AM
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Five SEO tips to dominate local search this holiday season https://ift.tt/3kUTfNC 30-second summary:
A shorter than usual shopping season, last-mile shipping uncertainty, and ongoing health and safety concerns are just a few of the factors driving wild shifts in consumer behavior in the lead-up to holiday season 2020. Given how wide-reaching and long-lasting the coronavirus pandemic is proving to be, we couldn’t possibly have predicted or envisioned the circumstances we now find ourselves in. Local businesses already pushed near the brink may find this shopping season more competitive than usual, making your local SEO strategy a top priority. This holiday season more than ever, marketers need to keep a hand firmly on the pulse of their market and opportunities. Activating as much relevant, real-time consumer data as possible is going to be key. 1. Offer payment options, COVID precautions, and other key conversion information front and centerWe know what the important issues are for shoppers this season:
Consumers are browsing, researching, and shopping across online channels. They are more value-conscious than before and are looking for reassurance that their privacy and data are protected when making purchases online. Get ahead of frequently asked questions by updating your website, social profiles, local listings, and landing pages with answers. These are critically important optimizations—so much so that Google, Yelp, and other listings platforms are highlighting this information for consumers on business profiles. If consumers can’t find what they’re looking for on your listing, they’ll simply move on to the next. 2. Really get to know your audience this holiday seasonPlanning campaigns based on historic data simply won’t cut it this year. Agile marketers and smart automation will come together to power the messaging and experiences it takes to convert in upended markets. Nielsen released consumer profiles late in October based on research and surveys undertaken in different periods throughout the COVID pandemic. It’s impossible to predict just who you’ll find at your door (or in your online shopping cart) this holiday season, but expect to see each of these consumer types in the mix: You can see the very different motivations and types of shopping happening this year. Those who’ve escaped a direct impact from COVID may be compensating for luxuries they’ve forgone this year—trips that were canceled, or large purchases put on hold due to the initial uncertainty. At the other end of the spectrum, you see consumers who are affected both financially and physically, having less money to spend and also constrained by lockdown measures. Understanding both your macro market and micro opportunities, at the individual web visitor level, is key to capitalizing on your opportunities to convert this holiday season. 3. Feed browsing behavior with high quality, engaging content that complements holiday season searchIn our recent research, BrightEdge mentioned that 60% of consumers have been shopping online more often since COVID-19. It’s a behavior that 73% of those plans to continue after the pandemic. Shoppers are browsing more frequently and making more purchases, although they are smaller in value. This holiday season, it’s critical that the content on offer is personalized and engaging; that it is an accurate reflection of their needs, intent, interests, and behavior in the moment. Activate your search insights with dynamic content optimizations to keep in step with changing consumer behaviors. Think like your COVID-weary customer—what is giftable this year? As Nielsen points out in their recent article on the consumer types retailers can expect this year, “From a necessity that can no longer fit the budget, to a product that has been harder to get in stores this year, the definition of a ‘gift’ will look very different this year.” Help shoppers understand how your product/service delivers comfort, entertainment, security, or is otherwise a necessity for that special someone in their life.
4. Focus on creating experiencesConsumers have been spending significantly more time watching and reading the news, participating in hobbies, and engaging with TV, movies, and games at home. They are hungry for experiences to fill at least some of the void left by closed restaurants, shuttered concert venues, canceled events, and the inability to travel. Even outside of the influence of the pandemic, the customer experience was expected to surpass product and price as the key brand differentiator. Regardless of how much thought or planning you put into it, customers are having an experience with your business. It’s a worthwhile place to focus your efforts on the eve of this holiday shopping season. July 2020 survey insights from YouGov show that consumers have been engaging with product demonstrations, pop-up shops, and installations. Some of these experiences translate naturally online—product demonstration videos, for example. Events you used to hold in-store could work as Facebook Lives or omnichannel promotions. Give traditionally local shoppers ways to engage, such as QR codes in the window to drive them to an online experience when in-store shopping is not possible (perhaps preferable for them). Whatever the format and channel, think about the experience you are curating for your audience. How do you show them you are invested in their satisfaction and happiness? How do you facilitate their moving from one piece of content or channel to the next? How do you capture and keep their interest? Think of your customer interactions not as touchpoints but within the context of their overall shopping journey. Grow My Store is a tool from Google that assesses any retail site, whether for an online or a physical store and brings back recommendations to help improve the customer experience. 5. Highlight your local relevanceRecent Yahoo! Small Business Research found that the vast majority of shoppers (75% of those surveyed) want to shop at and support small businesses. Another survey, this one by Alignable, found that 32% of respondents said they would be spending more money at locally owned businesses in Q4 2020. How do you make your local relevance clear to shoppers and the search engines you rely on to get you in front of them?
Use Google’s Local Opportunity Finder to quickly assess your local presence and get tips and hints for optimizing your GMB. If you want to keep nearby shoppers off Amazon and away from major box stores this year, focus on meeting customers where they’re looking for products and services like yours: in local search. Keep them reading and browsing out of entertainment, not in an effort to find information that should be readily available. Proactively head off concerns about payment methods, COVID precautions, special hours, and more by keeping your site and local listings up to date. This promises to be an unusual shopping season for many. Local essential is for small retailers and local SEO for multiple locations is vital for enterprises and Now that you can’t count on previous experience, it’s critical to tap into your search insights. Customers are telling you what it’s going to take to win their business. Are you listening? Jim Yu is the founder and CEO of BrightEdge, the leading enterprise SEO and content performance platform. The post Five SEO tips to dominate local search this holiday season appeared first on Search Engine Watch. SEO via SEO – Search Engine Watch https://ift.tt/2jPJ80l November 20, 2020 at 04:30AM
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Five SEO tips to dominate local search this holiday season https://ift.tt/3kUTfNC 30-second summary:
A shorter than usual shopping season, last-mile shipping uncertainty, and ongoing health and safety concerns are just a few of the factors driving wild shifts in consumer behavior in the lead-up to holiday season 2020. Given how wide-reaching and long-lasting the coronavirus pandemic is proving to be, we couldn’t possibly have predicted or envisioned the circumstances we now find ourselves in. Local businesses already pushed near the brink may find this shopping season more competitive than usual, making your local SEO strategy a top priority. This holiday season more than ever, marketers need to keep a hand firmly on the pulse of their market and opportunities. Activating as much relevant, real-time consumer data as possible is going to be key. 1. Offer payment options, COVID precautions, and other key conversion information front and centerWe know what the important issues are for shoppers this season:
Consumers are browsing, researching, and shopping across online channels. They are more value-conscious than before and are looking for reassurance that their privacy and data are protected when making purchases online. Get ahead of frequently asked questions by updating your website, social profiles, local listings, and landing pages with answers. These are critically important optimizations—so much so that Google, Yelp, and other listings platforms are highlighting this information for consumers on business profiles. If consumers can’t find what they’re looking for on your listing, they’ll simply move on to the next. 2. Really get to know your audience this holiday seasonPlanning campaigns based on historic data simply won’t cut it this year. Agile marketers and smart automation will come together to power the messaging and experiences it takes to convert in upended markets. Nielsen released consumer profiles late in October based on research and surveys undertaken in different periods throughout the COVID pandemic. It’s impossible to predict just who you’ll find at your door (or in your online shopping cart) this holiday season, but expect to see each of these consumer types in the mix: You can see the very different motivations and types of shopping happening this year. Those who’ve escaped a direct impact from COVID may be compensating for luxuries they’ve forgone this year—trips that were canceled, or large purchases put on hold due to the initial uncertainty. At the other end of the spectrum, you see consumers who are affected both financially and physically, having less money to spend and also constrained by lockdown measures. Understanding both your macro market and micro opportunities, at the individual web visitor level, is key to capitalizing on your opportunities to convert this holiday season. 3. Feed browsing behavior with high quality, engaging content that complements holiday season searchIn our recent research, BrightEdge mentioned that 60% of consumers have been shopping online more often since COVID-19. It’s a behavior that 73% of those plans to continue after the pandemic. Shoppers are browsing more frequently and making more purchases, although they are smaller in value. This holiday season, it’s critical that the content on offer is personalized and engaging; that it is an accurate reflection of their needs, intent, interests, and behavior in the moment. Activate your search insights with dynamic content optimizations to keep in step with changing consumer behaviors. Think like your COVID-weary customer—what is giftable this year? As Nielsen points out in their recent article on the consumer types retailers can expect this year, “From a necessity that can no longer fit the budget, to a product that has been harder to get in stores this year, the definition of a ‘gift’ will look very different this year.” Help shoppers understand how your product/service delivers comfort, entertainment, security, or is otherwise a necessity for that special someone in their life.
4. Focus on creating experiencesConsumers have been spending significantly more time watching and reading the news, participating in hobbies, and engaging with TV, movies, and games at home. They are hungry for experiences to fill at least some of the void left by closed restaurants, shuttered concert venues, canceled events, and the inability to travel. Even outside of the influence of the pandemic, the customer experience was expected to surpass product and price as the key brand differentiator. Regardless of how much thought or planning you put into it, customers are having an experience with your business. It’s a worthwhile place to focus your efforts on the eve of this holiday shopping season. July 2020 survey insights from YouGov show that consumers have been engaging with product demonstrations, pop-up shops, and installations. Some of these experiences translate naturally online—product demonstration videos, for example. Events you used to hold in-store could work as Facebook Lives or omnichannel promotions. Give traditionally local shoppers ways to engage, such as QR codes in the window to drive them to an online experience when in-store shopping is not possible (perhaps preferable for them). Whatever the format and channel, think about the experience you are curating for your audience. How do you show them you are invested in their satisfaction and happiness? How do you facilitate their moving from one piece of content or channel to the next? How do you capture and keep their interest? Think of your customer interactions not as touchpoints but within the context of their overall shopping journey. Grow My Store is a tool from Google that assesses any retail site, whether for an online or a physical store and brings back recommendations to help improve the customer experience. 5. Highlight your local relevanceRecent Yahoo! Small Business Research found that the vast majority of shoppers (75% of those surveyed) want to shop at and support small businesses. Another survey, this one by Alignable, found that 32% of respondents said they would be spending more money at locally owned businesses in Q4 2020. How do you make your local relevance clear to shoppers and the search engines you rely on to get you in front of them?
Use Google’s Local Opportunity Finder to quickly assess your local presence and get tips and hints for optimizing your GMB. If you want to keep nearby shoppers off Amazon and away from major box stores this year, focus on meeting customers where they’re looking for products and services like yours: in local search. Keep them reading and browsing out of entertainment, not in an effort to find information that should be readily available. Proactively head off concerns about payment methods, COVID precautions, special hours, and more by keeping your site and local listings up to date. This promises to be an unusual shopping season for many. Local essential is for small retailers and local SEO for multiple locations is vital for enterprises and Now that you can’t count on previous experience, it’s critical to tap into your search insights. Customers are telling you what it’s going to take to win their business. Are you listening? Jim Yu is the founder and CEO of BrightEdge, the leading enterprise SEO and content performance platform. The post Five SEO tips to dominate local search this holiday season appeared first on Search Engine Watch. SEO via Search Engine Watch https://ift.tt/2jPJ80l November 20, 2020 at 04:27AM
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How Coursedog is navigating an ABM journey https://ift.tt/2KmK8bH 30-second summary:
I have a passion for driving demand generation for start-up companies: buyer’s journey planning, content ideation, account-based marketing (ABM) program execution, and more. Currently, I’m focused on B2B ABM campaigns mixed with sales and marketing orchestration geared to drive pipeline and revenue. Not those vanity metrics. This is my ABM story. Originally, my challenges included eliminating our sales and marketing silos, maximizing marketing team talent, and bringing together business intelligence into one view from which both groups could work jointly. I was also interested in gathering account journey information about anonymous and known individuals to better understand campaign impact and segment accounts. ABM platform, anyone? Speak the same language. Use the same dataTraditional lead generation will always have a place in marketing, but ABM is becoming even more critical inside demand generation. It was the strategy we needed. As a sales enablement solution, it would help sales do jobs better. And because the sales team is a customer of marketing, I wanted to make sure whatever platform we adopted could be used by both departments. Along with enabling sales, I could orchestrate different plays, prioritize sales outreach, and automate MQLs (marketing-qualified leads). After evaluating a number of platforms, I felt that Demandbase best fit our needs with its ABM capabilities, proprietary advertising platform, and easy-to-use UI. As a proof-of-concept for Demandbase, I developed an experience where we pursued 100 accounts with a personalized experience campaign. While our goal was for 2 of the 100 target accounts to become customers, we actually converted 20 with a $1 million in revenue and a $5,000 spend. After clearly demonstrating value, our leadership agreed that we should implement the platform. Benefits: Making the buying experience betterWith Demandbase, we could define and execute a new marketing strategy that was different from traditional demand generation. With the platform we can do things like automatically kick off an MQL to an outreach sequence for the SDR team, identify anonymous and known accounts, engage with personalization campaigns, and automatically move accounts to the correct personalized ads based on their stage in the journey with us. Our continuing success facilitated the adoption rate by the marketing and sales teams. Now, our teams are more aligned than ever before, and ABM has also helped us give sales more to work within their daily roles. We send them daily alerts for account engagement and hold a standup meeting every two weeks with account executives from each of our territories and go over their plans for different tiers of prospects. We talk about what they’ve done since we last spoke, what they plan to do next, and what obstacles are in their way, which marketing can help them overcome. Thanks to the insights we have through Demandbase, we can bring data to sales to prioritize their time and shape their territory plan. While the pandemic has caused uncertainty and frozen budgets, we’ve still been able to decrease our time-to-close on marketing deals and improve personalization in outbound marketing. Rather than sending a broad email, we look for accounts showing intent or website activity and have Outreach sequences build that looks at institution type, what pages are being visited, etc. So, we know what each target cares about and can speak to it. ABM has helped us make the buying experience better by looking at what the most common pages or content prospects view and bringing it to them via website personalization or nurture campaigns. We want them to be in control of the buying experience, removing barriers to the content that helps inform buyers. That’s my main goal when it comes to the experience. Two become one ABM platformThe acquisition makes sense because both Demandbase and Engagio focused on ABM and had more than 30 shared customers. With the unification of the two platforms, we get Demandbase’s strength in helping marketers take advantage of third-party data and proprietary advertising coupled with Engagio’s focus on helping them use their own first-party data and visualizing the data to make it more consumable for sales and marketing. COVID-19 hasn’t eliminated the need for an ABM solution. In fact, I suggest that it should be a priority because we still have to generate revenue, and traditional tactics don’t work. With a solution like Demandbase, you are going to be able to identify the accounts that are actually in the market looking for a solution by seeing the engagement across your channels. Once you see this engagement you can run a play rather than blasting people, which shows a major lack of empathy during this time. I’m looking forward to experiencing the unified platform’s next iteration (coming soon). Interested in ABM? Here’s my adviceHow would I advise those marketers looking for an ABM solution? One thing is not to stress too much about your Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) at the beginning. It works best to approach everything in ABM from a Minimally Viable Product (MVP) kind of lens. Then, plan to look at your closed opportunities’ firmographics and adjust your ICP scoring model monthly or take a look at the campaigns and see what kind of lift you had for in target accounts. If you get an MVP going, you’ll have the foundation you need to move forward. To other B2B marketers out there, I highly recommend considering ABM for getting into those more significant accounts. You can create personalized experiences, drive action with the data you’ll have, and simplify and automate your ability to push prospects from marketing automation to sales to orchestrate plays. While ABM can be overwhelming at first, a unified platform like Demandbase allows you to do these things automatically and at scale. I encourage you to push your creativity and think about what will interrupt the pattern your prospects are used to seeing. Break the mold, and dial in more closely. Our future with ABM looks bright. May the (ABM) force be with you. Jimmy Montchal is the VP of demand generation at Coursedog. The post How Coursedog is navigating an ABM journey appeared first on ClickZ. SEO via ClickZ https://www.clickz.com November 20, 2020 at 04:07AM
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Why ecommerce marketers should look beyond Facebook & Google this holiday season https://ift.tt/396cilP 30-second summary:
For ecommerce marketers, the 2020 holiday shopping season represents an unprecedented opportunity. COVID-19 has hurled us five years into the future in terms of addressable market size, and giants like Amazon have doubled their profits. The industry at large is expected to grow by at least 20% before the end of the year, with much of that growth attributed to mobile shoppers. On the other hand, high unemployment, presidential election dynamics and a growing national debt could lead to a shorter, flatter, myopic holiday shopping season in the United States, traditionally a tentpole market. This confluence of cultural, technical, and macroeconomic factors has given ecommerce marketers an important choice to make when it comes to their paid mobile advertising: Should they seek out new opportunities to take advantage of the expanding market? Or double down on what’s worked in the past? Consolidation vs diversitySetting aside labor controversies and political boycotts, responding to growing demand by increasing spend with known entities like Facebook and Google is objectively attractive. Engagement is up, albeit largely in areas not monetized by ads, and major advertisers are slashing their spend with the duopoly as they try to weather the storm at reduced costs, resulting in less competition when it comes to bidding on impressions. Unfortunately, benefits like these are unlikely to reach mobile ecommerce marketers, as theirs remains one of the few industries to actually benefit from the pandemic. It’s more likely that the momentum of last year’s 20% year-over-year increase in online holiday shopping will be further accelerated, producing higher media costs for ecommerce marketers as more businesses compete for the same audiences. In fact, overall Facebook CPMs have already increased 40 to 50% since January of 2020. Consolidation is a liability. It creates a negative correlation between market competition and return on ad spend (ROAS) with no chance of offsetting costs. The real opportunity for ecommerce marketers this holiday season lies in spending less within walled gardens and instead investing in a plurality of solutions that treat the mobile ecosystem as a constellation of communities, each with their own unique advantages to offer. Only through diversity can marketers outmaneuver their competitors and insulate themselves from the dangers of an overly conservative advertising budget. Beyond Facebook and InstagramAs marketers, we do ourselves an immense disservice in limiting what we consider “mobile” to just the Facebook and Instagram apps. While it may have been accurate as a shorthand for where the majority of mobile engagement was directed years ago, today it’s lazy, and ignores the truth of the new digital world taking shape. As more people than ever rely on their mobile devices to play, connect, explore and stay informed in a time of uncertainty, the entire mobile ecosystem is bustling with activity. Lockdowns have introduced vast amounts of unplanned mobile surf time, resulting in a 20% jump in mobile app activity across the board. Mobile game downloads are up 39% year-over-year, a category in which 63% of all revenue is generated by ad impressions. At the same time, streaming platforms like Twitch have seen an influx of new audiences and creators seeking meaningful connection. Emerging social media platforms like TikTok are surging with user generated content and even regional news sites are seeing traffic levels rise by as much as 150% over their seasonal average. Embracing first mover advantageCombined, this mass exodus to digital environments has resulted in an immense increase in requests for advertisements from publishers as mobile users tap, swipe, and scroll in record numbers. As mobile publishers of all kinds eagerly seek to monetize their growing user bases, countless opportunities for cost-effective user acquisition are emerging. Realizing these opportunities requires that mobile marketers take control of their budgets, venture outside their comfort zones, and embrace ownership of their success instead of entrusting it to the algorithms of digital advertising giants. By familiarizing themselves with the underlying technologies that power the greater mobile advertising ecosystem, marketers can equip themselves with the tools necessary to succeed. Good marketing is about calculated risk-taking and believe it or not, there was a time when allocating budget for Facebook video ads would have been considered a risky move. The brave few who took the risk enjoyed immense rewards as a result. The situation today is much the same: Only by embracing new channels and open market solutions can marketers afford themselves the agility necessary to compensate for rising media prices, outmaneuver their competition, and take the risks needed to succeed this holiday season and beyond. Thomas Shin is Head of Americas for MOLOCO, a mobile DSP based in Silicon Valley that was just ranked #5 by the Appsflyer Performance Index for Non-Gaming Retention. An avid ad tech fan, Thomas brings 25 years of experience in digital marketing as an advertiser, product manager, and sales leader. He spent the last 10 years at companies such as Facebook, Efficient Frontier/Adobe, and MediaMath where he pioneered ad product development, led ecommerce and disruptor teams and now focuses on the intersection of programmatic, social media, and the mobile app ecosystem. The post Why ecommerce marketers should look beyond Facebook & Google this holiday season appeared first on ClickZ. SEO via ClickZ https://www.clickz.com November 20, 2020 at 04:00AM TV or not TV? That is the question: Insights on World Television Day https://ift.tt/2IUIJsl 30-second summary:
It’s hard to imagine what John Logie Baird, who invented the first TV back in 1924, would say regarding the modern TV landscape. Would he support cord-cutters or help the Connected TV (CTV) industry consolidate efforts and solve measurement issues, or maybe he would simply binge-watch popular TV shows sitting on his couch? This World Television Day we reflect on some of the most curious TV-related metamorphoses over the decades. Milestones in the journeyTV, as a phenomenon, has gone through a number of transformations, from the screen size of a postage stamp and a price tag equal to half of one’s average annual income to every American living room’s feature.
In other words, almost as futuristic as the parlor walls described by Ray Bradbury in ‘Fahrenheit 451′ and while television is very different now from what it used to be in the last century, so are the viewers. Another chicken and egg situation which questions whether people are the reason TV has changed that much, or is it TV that has changed people? What has TV brought to viewers’ tables?Here’s what value add TV has brought on various fronts. 1. Unity and entertainmentThe sense of integrity is very important for people, as social creatures. When TV first appeared, it made most of its viewers feel like they were suddenly cut from the same cloth. So, TV hit two birds with one stone. On the one hand, it created a base for sharing interests and, on the other hand, it physically gathered people together in one room glued to the same screen. Certainly, things started to look distinctive when TV sets flooded households, being installed in as many rooms as one could pay for. Not to mention what digitalization did to people’s screen time. Nevertheless, Marketing Charts’ figures from 2020 suggest watching TV remains the favorite evening past time for 23% of Americans. Traditional TV introduced new frontiers of entertainment, some of which have become a part of the zeitgeist. Digital Connected TV, in turn, offered instant access to round-the-clock fun. This fueled the growing popularity of binge-watching, the mode of watching TV shows and movies in one go. Recent figures by Statista showed that most age groups, apart from those aged 65+, binge-watch TV shows on a regular basis. This year, major cinema premieres and sports competitions have been postponed. Thus, people were left with lots of free time on their hands and the unmet need for entertainment. No wonder streaming services climbed the charts, as well as the number of subscribers. From established channels that didn’t rest on their laurels in linear reality and rushed to fit in the new digital space, like National Geographic, Discovery Channel, or CBS, to young creative apps that originated from the TV listings-free era, there are enough channels available today to sink a ship. What’s more, it’s totally up to viewers now how entertained they want to be, when and by who. Hence, television went from one-size-fits-all entertainment to its tailored version in less than a century, which is genuinely impressive. 2. GamingGaming consoles emerged only a few decades after the first TV had been created. And though the true gaming boom is rooted in the developments of the PC and Internet rather than television, there’s an obvious boost a TV screen can bring to any gaming experience. In 2020, 92% of young people in the US and UK (Generations Z and Y) are considered gamers, as per GlobalWebIndex. The same age group is known to be a heavy live gaming stream and Esport watchers. Despite the fact that mobile phones surpass PCs and TVs among preferred gaming devices, a recent uptick in streaming took the relationships between the TV and gaming worlds to the next level. Today, gamers can stream from Xbox One to Windows 10 PCs, or from PlayStation 4 to Windows/macOS and Android devices. As for PC (Windows/Linux/macOS) games, they can be streamed to Android/iOS smartphones and tablets as well as any TVs that support streaming apps. With the rising number of CTV gaming apps, it looks like the full gaming potential of TV is yet to be revealed. 3. AdvertisingTV has always been a core advertising platform with the ability to reach wider audiences. It’s not surprising that this kind of promotion has also cost an arm and a leg. Today, depending on KPIs, brands are inclined to consider digital alternatives. Connected TV (CTV) is rightly among the most appealing ones. It allows advertisers to release budgeting pressure by offering them to pay for results within the performance-based advertising concept. Furthermore, CTV platforms are where most consumers’ age groups can be reached nowadays anyway. Leichtman Research Group, Inc. reported earlier this year that there were 400 million Connected TV devices in the US. As this is almost as much as the number of people living in the country, CTV advertising is understandably a tool most marketers willingly go for. 4. Opportunities for creators/publishersIn the olden days, creating a TV channel was a really big deal. It required solid investments, relevant connections, a team of professionals, and a clear business vision. Modern-day channels march to a completely different drummer. Each pillar of the Connected TV channel ownership, such as creating content, launching an app, monitoring its performance, and fiddling with monetization, can be outsourced. If not all of them. Take, for instance, a Roku channel. To make it gain plenty of installs, it’s worth referring to Roku Direct Publisher or Allroll. Their granular targeting options, cost-effective promotional techniques, and broad analytical instruments will help the channel hit the jackpot in the blink of an eye. Ultimately, eMarketer predicts the reduction of Connected TV CPMs due to the significant surge of supply. Bearing in mind, advertisers in the US are expected to spend around $11.36 billion on CTV ads in 2021, owning a CTV channel sounds like a brilliant timely idea. What’s next in the world of TV/CTV?Let’s look into the current affinity for CTV and OTT advertising, ad spend budgets and publishing opportunities in 2021. 1. For CTV/OTT advertisersSince digital Сonnected TV gained popularity among viewers, especially younger generations, according to Nielsen, ad spend followed the trend. In 2020, IAB reported a 19% increase in CTV ads budgets and a 24% decrease in those of Traditional TV. Although Linear TV remains a powerful advertising platform, it lags behind CTV in terms of flexibility, targeting options, and advanced cost-effectiveness. So, despite a certain degree of measurement confusion, advertisers tend to lean towards CTV in their current and future strategies. Regarding ad formats, there is a strengthening focus in CTV on TV-to-Mobile elements, non-disruptive pausable, and responsive shoppable video ads. These are likely to be followed by further adoption of new formats, which have already created a stir among other digital channels, like rewarded ads and 3D swirl, or Virtual reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). In 2021, performance-based advertising will continue to lead the game in CTV, supported by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning for enhanced measurement options, optimization, and prediction. And though performance metrics might remain to be built around awareness, engagement, and sales, experiments with new formats, time frames, landing pages, and cross-channel attribution will give a fresh perspective on the advertising experience. 2. For CTV/OTT publishersWhilst adhering to shifts in viewing habits, more and more publishers favor Connected TV. With the market’s entry barriers being lower than ever, the CTV landscape looks like a bonanza for creators and channel owners. Thus, new channels are expected to keep on springing up, like mushrooms after the rain. This will inevitably make the competition between CTV publishers even stronger, and the demand for original creative content even higher. The future undoubtedly holds hyper-personalized content, powered by the advancements of AI data mining, consumer-centric algorithms, seasoned with a pinch of interactivity and immersion. Hence, user-generated content, Ultra-High Definition (4K) TVs, as well as further integrations with the emerging Internet of Things’ sensors, are likely to disrupt the TV routine and grab consumers’ attention at least in the medium-term. As for the actual categories, Nielsen states that SVOD (subscription video on demand) and AVOD (ad-supported video on demand) will continue to stay on the rise, outplaying TVOD (transactional video on demand) or BVOD (broadcaster video on demand). TakeawaysIt’s incredible what a breakthrough TV has made, turning from an avant-garde technological innovation of the 20th century to a supplier of every imaginable (and unimaginable too) entertainment of the 21st century. A source of information, place of gathering, means of having fun, and on many occasions all the above-mentioned simultaneously, TV has proved to be one of the most resilient industries, ready to adjust, evolve, pioneer, and even rise from the ashes if needed. By being a powerful medium, TV has also revolutionized the way brands communicate with customers, offering them a robust shortcut to their target audiences. Since TV is determined to save its position as the main source of entertainment, it has no choice but to become less fragmented as an industry, keep up with ever-changing viewers’ expectations and take a sneak peek at those outside the TV landscape, scouting for consumers’ time. This will guarantee that once the experiential economy makes another move to challenge the common order of things, the TV will have all the necessary resources to reinvent itself again, like a phoenix. Alex Zakrevsky is the CEO of Allroll marketing platform for CTV/OTT channel owners. Alex is an innovator, product lover, CTV, and programmatic enthusiast. The post TV or not TV? That is the question: Insights on World Television Day appeared first on ClickZ. SEO via ClickZ https://www.clickz.com November 20, 2020 at 03:53AM
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How to Get Backlinks in 2021 [Series Part 2: Prospecting] — Whiteboard Friday https://ift.tt/35OwTss Posted by BritneyMuller As we head into 2021, the work of reclaiming lost links and building new ones remains crucial. In this week's brand new episode of Whiteboard Friday, SEO expert Britney Muller is back with the second installment in her link building series, this time walking us through some tips and tricks for an important part of your link building journey: link prospecting. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab! Video TranscriptionHey, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today me and my space buns are taking you into the future to evaluate link prospecting, a really important part of link building. This is part of my link building series. If you missed the first video, definitely go check it out. It's all around no-brainer link building. It's the easiest thing you can possibly do today to reclaim and score some backlinks for your website. So super helpful. Check that out. What are your business goals?To kick things off, this gets a little overwhelming. There are so many ways that you can prospect backlinks today that it can get a little intimidating. So if you start to find yourself going down a rabbit hole or getting overwhelmed, fall back on this button here. Just think about your business goals. What are your website's goals, and is the path that you're falling down conducive to that? Is it helpful? So that kind of just helps you course correct. I use it all the time, and I still manage to go down tons of rabbit holes. But it can be quite helpful. Link prospectingSo there are really two ways to do link prospecting. One is to evaluate what's worked well in the past. How have websites in this particular industry gotten links in the past? The second is where are there content gaps? Where are there some opportunities to create wanted or desired content for a particular space? Explore competitive backlinksLet's go down the first one. So one of the more popular ways is to use a backlink tool to evaluate competitive backlinks. So not only are you evaluating the backlinks to Competitor A and Competitor B, but you can start to do some fun things with the intersection of these. So what we're looking at is: What are the shared backlinks that Competitor A and Competitor B both have that you don't? What does that look like? If these websites are linking to both A and B, why couldn't they also potentially link to you? Those tend to be more promising backlink prospects. It's also very easy to use a tool like Link Intersect, my all-time favorite, within Moz Pro to very, very quickly identify what those opportunities are. From there, you can also start to evaluate old or outdated linked to content. This is really just sort of setting the stage and better understanding again what's worked well in the past. What are the top pages that are linked to for Competitor B and Competitor A? What kind of content is that? Is there anything that's incredibly outdated that has a ton of backlinks to it, where you could potentially update it and encourage those sites to link to you? There are tons of very interesting and fun ways to explore that. Link Explorer, I mean, honestly so, so powerful and easy to quickly filter and sort different opportunities there. Leverage advanced search operatorsThird is to leverage advanced search operators. Now I'm not going to go through all the operators I listed here. I got a little nuts. But some important ones to remember is that if you use quotes, those words have to be in the search results. So here I'm looking for dog training, and then it must include statistics, tips, resources, news. Why am I looking for these first and foremost? Because these keywords, they carry link intent. People doing particular searches around something something statistics are more likely to link to one of those resulting pages than your average dog training search that just might be people putting material together or referencing things. So it's really great to sort of bake in your link building plan with keywords that have link intent. It just makes so much sense. You can also use intext:, which just means show me results that include this within the text, and here I have "links." It sounds super old school, but there are still lots of pages that use links within the page to identify resources moving forward. You can also use the minus to exclude results from a particular URL. We're going to link to Moz's Advanced Search Operator Guide. It's super helpful. It has all of these and more. Definitely play around. Leave comments down below if you have other suggestions. It's super fun to kind of come up with different formulas. Evaluate link propensityNumber four is to really evaluate the link propensity of these potential link targets. What I mean by that is have they linked to websites in the past? Do they never link out? Is that not a thing that these particular websites that you're finding do? It's really important, and it will help you in the long run to identify sites that are more likely to link to you. Number five, there are so many fun link discovery hacks and tricks, and it's one of my favorite conversations at SEO conventions and just in general. Discover fun hacksEveryone has really fun kind of things within their industry. One of my new favorites is for local SEO, where local links are so incredibly valuable for local SEO sites. A trick that I've discovered recently is the one and only Rand Fishkin's SparkToro tool will show you, if you put in a topic and a particular area, it surfaces what the top media outlets are for that particular area. It's incredible, especially if you're doing work for a local SEO client that isn't where you live or you don't have all that awareness of it. It's extremely insightful. So a fun little trick there. I want to hear your tricks down below. There are tons of others. Super fun. Content gapsThen just to briefly touch on where are the content gaps. This deserves a whole other Whiteboard Friday in and of itself. But I have mentioned them before. I am an insanely huge fan of Fractl and the work that they're doing. They use old-school journalism tactics, and they discovered that they could pull offline DUI data and bring it online in a really beautiful Tableau interface, and it did very well. They got lots of backlinks. It was very, very useful for users, and it just made sense. So I absolutely love that example. It's important to kind of look at both of these. Play around and have fun with it. Again, please leave any tips and tricks down below in the comments. I cannot wait to read them. I will see you all again soon. Thanks for watching. Video transcription by Speechpad.com Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! SEO via SEOmoz Blog https://moz.com/blog November 20, 2020 at 02:08AM |
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