‍Instagram evolved from an exclusive photo-sharing platform to one that now includes video formats. From 15-second Instagram Stories to long-format in-feed videos, marketers can leverage these powerful marketing tools.

Video ads on Instagram, in particular, are an attention-grabbing way to showcase your product or service. According to Meta’s Q3 2022 earnings release, production and consumption of Instagram Reels grew by 50% to 140 billion shares across Facebook, Instagram, and DMs. So, now is the best time to capitalize on Instagram video advertisements.

In this guide, you’ll learn how video ads on Instagram can help you achieve business objectives and best practices. 

Different Types of Instagram Videos

But let’s back up a bit. What are the different types of videos on Instagram in the first place? Here are four:

In-Feed

These videos appear on users’ feeds the same way image posts do. They can run up to 60 minutes long. This gives businesses leeway to create different types of content – from behind-the-scenes videos to promotions. It’s a surefire way to get Instagram likes. Plus, you can engage customers in the comment section.

This in-feed ad looks like a regular post with the like, comment, and caption section. The call to action button (CTA) sits between the video and the engagement features.

^{Instagram Stories}

These posts use a full-screen, vertical video format, appearing in the Stories section. They run for up to 15 seconds and ‘disappear’ after 24 hours (Note that Instagram Stories ads are different from regular Stories; they allow you to customize ad length). Interactive elements like tagging and stickers give Instagram Stories content an organic feel. It’s one of the few places you can post a direct link on the app.

This Instagram Story doesn’t have like or comment features, but viewers can share the ad with their followers. The CTA button sits at the bottom of the screen, and users swipe up to go to a converting landing page.

Instagram Reels

These 90-second videos are the newest video format on the app. They appear on the Instagram Explore page, followers’ feeds, and the Reels section of your profile. Customers engage with them by liking, commenting, and sharing.

This Reels ad looks like a cross between Instagram Stories and In-Feed posts. The video is a vertical full-screen. The caption, engagement, and CTA buttons are onscreen and not separate from the video.

Live

Instagram Live allows users to stream videos for up to four hours. Live streams appear in the Stories panel and only your followers can view them. Even though Meta is phasing out the Live Shopping feature, it is a great marketing format to interact with followers. You can also share exclusive content like tutorials or events.

Whatever format you choose, well-designed Instagram ads should feel like organic posts.

Instagram Video Advertising Goals

The statistics on video marketing are compelling – demand for video content is 91%. However, it would help if you had a well-thought-out content marketing plan to capitalize on the trend. Your marketing strategy should identify the marketing or business goals you wish to achieve with video ad content.

These goals can be one or more of the following:

Brand Awareness and Reach

Brand awareness is the degree to which target audiences recognize a brand, product, or service by name. Customers are more likely to buy products they know than those they don’t. Therefore, businesses with high brand awareness rates generate more sales and create economic moats that protect their market share from competitors.

Some ways to measure brand awareness on Instagram are mentions and engagement.

Engagement

It refers to creating meaningful customer interactions and building customer loyalty. According to Forbes, people are exposed to almost 8,000 ads a day. If you want customers to remember you, you should create engaging and organic content for every step of the customer journey.

You track your engagement rate by how many likes, video views, comments, and shares your video post gets.

App Installs

This objective falls under the category of increasing brand audience. SaaS brands don’t sell physical products; they sell subscriptions. These companies use video ads on Instagram to demonstrate their software value and drive app installs. So, instead of a ‘Buy Now’ CTA, you may see an ‘Install Now’ or ‘Download’ CTA. The more downloads you get, the bigger your audience.

Conversions

The goal of every marketing campaign is to turn prospects into customers. It is difficult to justify the budget spend on video marketing with low conversion rates. Fortunately, 92% of marketers believe that videos give them a good return on investment (ROI), with increased leads, traffic, and sales.

Instagram Video Ad Best Practices to Follow

If you’re considering video ads on Instagram, study the various video feeds to understand features, engagement capabilities, and content trends. The best ones usually blend into followers’ feeds. Here are five tips to optimize your Instagram video ads.

Choose Appealing Visuals

According to a study, you should deliver value in the first three to ten seconds to ensure viewers keep watching your video.

So, you need to make your ad visually appealing.

Start by minimizing the number of visual elements in the ad. Mobile screens don’t have a lot of space. You want to reduce the visual clutter and direct the viewers’ gaze to the product.

Also, use bright colors to capture attention. Check out this great example from Apple. The yellow green and pink colors stand out:

Use your brand colors, too, to improve recognition.

Also, place your product front and center in your video. You only have a few seconds to leave an impression; the viewers should know what the product is even if they don’t watch the full video.

There are technical requirements to making video clips appealing. We recommend vertical videos to fit the natural orientation of smartphones. Instagram Stories and Reels are full-screen formats and look better in portrait orientation. Other technical guidelines include video size, resolution, MP4 or MOV format, and 4:5 aspect ratio video settings.

Write Compelling Captions

As important as ad visuals are, you mustn’t underestimate the power of captions. Videos on Instagram automatically play without sound. That means viewers must tap the sound icon to hear the marketing message.

Again, you have a short time to grab customers’ attention. If your ad relies on sound, you must convince viewers to switch on the video sound. Onscreen captions help audiences hook into ad storylines and increase view time by 12%. They allow you to communicate your marketing message with or without sound and are browsing-friendly for people with hearing disabilities.

The video captions of this Nike reel (this isn’t a video ad, but just want to prove a point) are timed with the audio narration. The font color stands out for easy reading. So, whether the video sound is off or on, the audience receives a cohesive experience. You can do this with your Instagram video ads, too.

Remember, ad copy can clutter your ad, so keep your message concise.

Use Call-to-Action Buttons

The call to action turns prospects into leads and leads into customers. If you want users to download an app, sign up for a newsletter, or buy a product, the CTA directs them to the right place.

Instagram doesn’t provide many opportunities for direct links to drive conversions. There is the link in the bio and the link sticker in Stories. However, Stories are short-lived. If you send leads from your video to your bio to a landing page, you might lose them.

A third option is available to business/professional accounts to run ads. The CTA button appears at the bottom of the screen. Check out the Learn More CTA in the screenshot of Velocity Black’s video ad above.

To catch viewers when they are most interested, ensure your CTAs appear in the middle of the video. If you wait until the end, you will miss the chance to convert the people who didn’t watch the entire video. If CTAs appear at the beginning, you might seem pushy.

Utilize Hashtags

Hashtags are keywords or phrases that help people find content around searched topics. But if you’re using a pay-per-click strategy to amplify your ads, do you need them?

The short answer is yes.

Hashtags give context to your ads, allowing Instagram to understand and categorize your content. Instagram uses hashtags as signals to determine which content gets in front of which audience, affecting your rank on the Explore page and content delivery to your followers' Instagram feed.

Test Different Ad Formats

Even if you create an ad you think customers would like, it’s best to test different ad formats to find the one your audience responds to. Customer viewing preferences change. A/B testing helps you learn what they want to see.

A/B or split testing compares two or more versions of the same ad. This helps you determine which version leaves the most impact and drives conversions. Test each element individually, i.e., CTA buttons, color schemes, or caption copy, to find the best combination. For instance, the only variable between two ads could be the caption text color or video length.

Split testing adds another step to your video ad campaign. However, with A/B testing tools, you save time and money by running ads that bring results. When you sign up for Meta Ads Manager, you can use the same tools that optimize Facebook ads for your Instagram A/B testing.

In Closing

Instagram recognizes the value of video. Savvy marketers are capitalizing on the social channel’s video formats to reach audiences and drive sales. They use the platform to demonstrate product uses, highlight unique features, or tell their brand story. This guide showed you how Instagram video ads could help you meet your business goals. You learned five best practices to optimize your video ad campaigns. As a final tip, remember that your Instagram videos must be authentic, entertaining, and high-quality. Otherwise, customers will just swipe or scroll past them. Good luck!

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Harry Flynn is a guest contributor to Marin Software.

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Google is retiring the version of Google Analytics we have all been using for years and requiring us to move to Google Analytics 4 (GA4). Because GA4 is built on an entirely new data model, we need to set up GA4 from scratch. This post is intended to highlight a few topics for consideration as you manage this upgrade from Universal Analytics (UA).

What is different about GA4?

Mobile First:  GA4 is built around an event-driven data model that tracks user interactions across different platforms and devices, providing marketers with a more holistic view of user behavior. UA, on the other hand, is pageview-based, meaning it tracks website pages' interactions and doesn't provide insight into user behavior outside the website. Additionally, GA4 uses machine learning to analyze user behavior and provide deeper insights into audience demographics, interests, and behaviors.

Events First: In UA, Goals were the focus of any conversion-related analysis and were set up in Google Analytics. Not in GA4. Everything is an Event and there are four type of events. Events can be marked as Conversions in GA4 for use in funnel reports. 

To get the most from GA4, you will want to configure the events in Google Tag Manager although you can define up to 30 custom events in GA4 directly. Instead of a few pre-defined parameters (Label, Action, etc.), events can have multiple custom-defined parameters to align with how they are used. 

Google offers a Goals Migration Tool that can be used for Destination Goals and Events, but they recommend restructuring your events to match the GA4 data model.

Goodbye Views, Hello Data Streams: GA4 maintains Accounts and Properties, similar to UA, but the concept of views is gone. Views were often used to filter your data to focus on a subset. In GA4, each data is collected from one or more Data Streams (websites, apps, or other digital properties), and any filtering must be done in Google Tag Manager.

Farewell Bounce Rate, Welcome Engaged Sessions: Because page-oriented metrics like Bounce Rate don’t translate to a mobile app, GA4 is focused on session metrics. One casualty is Bounce Rate. The closest approximation is an Engaged Session which attempts to determine whether the user interacted with your content. It’s similar in that 2 or more page views should count as an Engaged Session, but it also works on mobile. If the numbers surprise you, remember that it translates more closely to 1 - Bounce Rate.

Built on Big Query: Google’s Big Query underlies GA4, giving you improved access to the underlying data for querying or use in Google Data studio.

How does my workflow change?

Google is attempting to clarify the workflow around analytics by breaking it into separate pieces handled by distinct applications. Many of us already use Google Tag Manager and Google Data Studio, but GA4 encourages or even requires some of the work to be done in those tools.

Conversion Setup in Tag Manager: As mentioned earlier, you no longer set up Goals in Google Analytics directly. Instead, you set up anything you want to track as an Event, and then you can mark some of your events Conversions in Google Analytics. Many activities you probably thought of as metrics in UA (e.g., Page Views) are automatically tracked. For custom events tied to your conversion funnel, these need to be set up in Google Tag Manager, including things like reaching a specific thank you page or submitting a form, or viewing a video. This gives you tremendous flexibility but requires more forethought in your setup.

Reporting in Google Data Studio: Google envisions Analytics as a tool for Analysis or asking questions about the data. They are pushing pure reporting functions to Google Data Studio. The idea is that you probably have some users who will be overwhelmed with the complexity of analytics (not to mention they might break something in the process) and would be better served with a Dashboard from GDS.

There is configurable reporting in GA4, and one of the first things you may want to do is set up a Library that mimics the reports found in UA to make the transition easier.

Linking Google Ads: GA4 can still be used to power your Google Ads conversions, but you will need to reconfigure your setup to make sure this happens.  

First, you need to take the existing conversions from Universal Analytics and make them Secondary Conversions, so Smartbidding does not consider them. Then you will import the new GA4 Conversions by selecting New Conversion Action from Tools > Conversions. Once there, select Import, and you will be able to import any events that are marked Conversions in GA4. Once imported, these will be available for Smartbidding optimization.

Improved Analytics: This migration presents an opportunity to review your Analytics setup to ensure it is up today with the needs of your business. It’s easy to have your analytics on autopilot, even as your website, app, and go-to-market motions change. Take the opportunity to audit the events you want to track, the audiences or segments that are important to you, and the report your stakeholders need. Of course, you want continuity with your existing data, but don’t miss the chance to improve things.

What about historical data?

There is no migration of historical data from UA to GA4. Google has stated that historical data will be available in UA for 6 months, but after that, there is no guarantee that you will have access. This is why it is important to set up GA4 tracking as soon as possible if you have not already.

UA’s reporting tools If you work with a 3rd-party PPC platform such as MarinOne, you should be able to import your conversion data as far back as needed 

Need Help?

This article isn’t intended to be a complete guide to making the migration, so it barely scratches the surface of what’s possible with GA4. If you find yourself in need of additional bandwidth or expertise, our team of analytics ninjas are ready to help. Click here to set up a free consultation.

Meta, formerly Facebook, is one of the most powerful ad platforms on the planet. If you want to increase sales online with ads, the best place to start is with Facebook/Meta and their nearly 3 billion users.

Inside Facebook is the Meta Ads Manager system that was precisely tailored and designed by the social media giant for businesses so that regular accounts can be differentiated from personal ones.

Meta Business is the platform that lets businesses use Facebook and Instagram’s vast customer base to sell to. In short, Meta Business Manager is where effective monetization of your digital presence begins.

Meta Ads Manager simplifies life for digital marketing professionals with its capabilities of creating and monitoring separate accounts for each business they manage. This allows them to easily distinguish between different organizations and assign distinct roles based on the user's job function.

Furthermore, administrators can gain centralized control over multiple users' accounts by setting specific permissions from one easy-to-use platform. This article will dive into everything you need to know about Meta Ads Manager.

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What is Meta Ads Manager?

Meta Ads Manager is a platform that allows advertisers to manage and optimize their online advertising campaigns across multiple channels. It provides a centralized system for creating, launching, and tracking advertising campaigns, making it easier for marketers to manage their campaigns efficiently.

What Will You Get Out of This Guide?

This guide aims to provide an in-depth understanding of the best practices for using Meta Ads Manager to maximize advertising campaign performance. This guide will cover the essential steps for setting up and optimizing ad campaigns and provide insights into common pitfalls to avoid.

Overview of the Best Practices for Meta Ads Manager

This guide will provide a comprehensive overview of the best practices for using Meta Ads Manager, including setting up an account, creating and launching ad campaigns, optimizing campaigns for better performance, measuring ad performance, scaling campaigns, and avoiding common pitfalls. By following these best practices, advertisers can ensure their campaigns are performing at peak and delivering the best possible results.

Now, let’s dive into what you need to know about Meta Ads Manager.

Setting up Meta Ads Manager

You need to know here about getting set up on Meta Ads Manager.

Creating an Account

The first step in using Meta Ads Manager is to create an account. This involves

• Providing essential information about your business
• Name
• Contact details
• Setting up payment methods for ad spend

Once the account is created, you can start adding campaigns and setting up targeting parameters.

Adding Ad Campaigns

The next step is to add ad campaigns to the Meta Ads Manager account. This involves selecting the type of advertising you would like to run. You will then need to select the platform or channels where you want to run your ads. 

Setting up Ad Budget and Targeting

Once your ad campaigns are added, it's time to set up the ad budget and targeting parameters. The ad budget will determine how much you are willing to spend on each campaign, and the targeting parameters will decide who will see your ads.

Targeting can be set based on demographics, interests, behaviors, or other criteria. It's essential to carefully consider these parameters and set them correctly to ensure your ads reach the right audience and achieve the desired results.

Optimizing Ad Campaigns

Optimization is essential for your ads. You must ensure that your ads will perform as effectively as possible.

Ad Copy Writing and Testing

Ad copywriting is an art and science. Your ad copy should be attention-grabbing and relevant while including a clear call to action. It's also essential to test different ad copies to determine which ones perform best. A/B testing can help you determine which ad copy is most effective in achieving your desired results.

Artificial intelligence has recently come onto the scene in a big way. To create the best ad copy, consider using AI writing tools when appropriate.

Choosing the Right Ad Format

Choosing the proper ad format is another important factor in optimizing ad campaigns. Different designs, such as display ads, video ads, or carousel ads, have different strengths and limitations. Consider the target audience, message, and desired outcome when selecting the correct ad format for your campaigns.

Landing Page Optimization

The landing page is the first impression potential customers will have of your brand. It's vital to ensure that the landing page is optimized for conversions. This means it should load quickly, be easy to navigate, and include a clear call-to-action. Ensure that the messaging and design of the landing page align with the ad and that it's optimized for the target audience.

Measuring Ad Performance

Next, you need to know how to measure your ads. Like the stock market, you must learn how to ride the winners and ditch the losers. Meta has advanced analytics you can use to track all your ads' performance.

Understanding Ad Metrics

To effectively measure the performance of ad campaigns, it's essential to understand the critical ad metrics. Metrics such as cost per click (CPC), click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, and return on ad spend (ROAS) can provide valuable insights into how your ads are performing and how they can be improved.

Setting up Conversion Tracking

Conversion tracking is a critical component of measuring ad performance. By setting up conversion tracking, you can see which campaigns drive the most conversions and optimize your campaigns accordingly. Conversion tracking can be set up using tools like Google Analytics or a conversion tracking pixel provided by Meta Ads Manager.

Analyzing Ad Performance and Making Data-Driven Decisions

Once you have a solid understanding of the vital ad metrics and have set up conversion tracking, it's time to analyze ad performance and make data-driven decisions. Regularly reviewing ad performance and making adjustments based on data can help improve the outcome of your campaigns over time. This can include adjusting the budget, adjusting targeting, or improving ad copy and landing pages.

Scaling Ad Campaigns

Now that you have found some ads that work, it’s time to scale them up to reach the most people and bring in maximum revenue.

Managing Ad Spend

As ad campaigns scale and reach a wider audience, managing ad spending is essential. You must:

• Set a clear ad budget
• Monitor ad spend regularly
• Make adjustments as needed to ensure that spend aligns with the desired results and priorities

Expanding Targeting and Geographies

Once ad campaigns are performing well, advertisers can consider expanding to new markets with updated targeting. This can include targeting new demographics, interests, or behaviors or reaching new geographic locations. By increasing the overall reach of ad campaigns, advertisers can increase impression share in their competitive space and drive more conversions.

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Common Pitfalls to Avoid

While the Meta Ads platform has many positive attributes, it does have some downfalls and things you should avoid, or consider using a third party tool like Marin Software to layer on top of Meta and push advertising possibilities even further.

Overcomplicating Ad Campaigns

One of the biggest pitfalls in Meta Ads campaign management is overcomplicating the account structure. Ad campaigns can quickly become complex, with multiple ad formats, several different audiences, and many important metrics to consider. It's crucial to keep ad campaigns focused and straightforward to avoid adding unnecessary complication that can negatively affect overall campaign performance.

Failing to Optimize Ad Campaigns Regularly

Ad campaigns need to be optimized regularly to ensure they continue to deliver the best possible results. Failing to optimize ad campaigns regularly can diminish returns over time as ad performance gradually deteriorates. Regular optimization can include adjusting ad budget, targeting parameters, ad copy, and landing pages and testing and refining strategies as needed.

Final Thoughts

Advertising is a dynamic and ever-evolving process that requires constant fine-tuning to maximize your ROI. That's why it pays off to be knowledgeable about best practices when using Meta Ads Manager, from setting up campaigns correctly in the first place to optimizing them continually for more efficient performance.

With careful attention paid to avoiding common pitfalls along with testing, refining, and analyzing data regularly - you can reach new heights of success by taking advantage of all this platform has to offer!

Whether you're a seasoned advertiser or just starting with Meta Ads Manager, it's never too late to optimize your ad campaigns. So take action today and implement these best practices in Meta Ads Manager.

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Andrew Dunn is a guest contributor to Marin Software's blog.

Creating high-quality content that resonates with your audience is more important than ever in 2023. The amount of content produced and shared online is staggering, and you need to find ways to stand out from the crowd.

Marketers also need to be consistent, so finding ways to make your content creation more efficient, impactful, and memorable should be a priority. To help, we've put together 10 fresh ideas for efficient content creation in 2023 that will help you connect with your audience, drive engagement, and reach your content marketing goals. 

From beginners to those who wish to revamp an existing content strategy, these tips will make things easier for you this year, and beyond.

Tip #1: Plan and organize your content

To ensure you create content efficiently, you must have a clear plan and strategy. A content calendar is a great way to accomplish this strategy while also guaranteeing that you publish relevant and engaging content regularly. Always prioritize your tasks based on audience demand and your content goals, and use a mockup generator with pre-designed templates to provide an idea of the look and feel of your content.

With a content plan, you can ensure your content focuses on your current products, releases, services, and business happenings while aligning with the overall marketing strategy. Your content plan should be a roadmap for creating, publishing, and ensuring that you achieve a better return on investment (ROI) for your content marketing efforts. 

Tip #2: Repurpose and upcycle old content

Instead of starting from scratch every time you create new content, consider repurposing and updating existing content. For example, you could turn a blog post into an infographic or use it to create a podcast. This approach saves time and ensures that you're making the most of the content you've already created; no one is scanning back through your feed to see what you posted a year ago, and if they do, they likely won't point out a double-up.

Take your existing content and modify it in new and innovative ways to speak to new audiences, drive engagement, and above all, save time. Extending the lifespan of your content by turning a blog post into a video, for example, also means you'll see more value from all content efforts while building brand recognition and creating a strong, consistent brand image. 

Tip #3: Collaborate with micro-influencers and crowdsource ideas

Collaborating with other departments, influencers, or subject matter experts can help create better content. Use crowdsourcing techniques, such as surveys, to gather feedback and understand what types of content your audience wants to see.

This strategy will help point your content creation in the right direction, whether it be a social post or a high-converting blog. You can also leverage the audiences of the people or organizations you collaborate with to see higher reach to new audiences, who are potential customers. For example, micro-influencers, individuals with a relatively small but dedicated social following, can be a great way to generate sales. 

Some benefits of working with micro-influencers include:

• Higher engagement rates: Micro-influencers often have higher engagement rates than more significant influencers, as they have a more dedicated and engaged following. Your brand message has a better chance of reaching and resonating with your target audience.
• More authentic relationships: Micro-influencers often have personal relationships with their followers. This connection means their endorsement is more authentic and trustworthy.
• Cost-effective: Micro-influencers typically charge less for their services, making them a cost-effective option.
• Niche reach: You can target a specific niche or area of expertise, which can help your brand reach a targeted audience. 
• Long-term relationships: Micro-influencers are often open to forming long-term relationships with brands, which can help build brand recognition and credibility over time.

Tip #4: Use storytelling and other visual elements

Make your content more engaging and memorable with images, videos, and other data visualization to understand complex information. Where possible, try to tell a story about your brand, the products, or whatever your content is focusing on. People want to be entertained and interested by the content they see; if you can achieve this, your content will perform much better.

To weave storytelling into your content, consider the following tips:

1. Identify your story: Determine the main story you want to tell and ensure that it aligns with your brand and messaging.
2. Use relatable characters: Help audiences personally connect with your story, either with relatable fictional characters or real people such as customers or employees.
3. Create a strong emotional connection: Use emotional appeals such as humor, excitement, or heartache to create an emotional connection with your audience.
4. Use vivid imagery: Descriptive language, images, and video help bring your story to life.
5. Make it relevant: Ensure that your story is relevant by tying it to your customer's needs, wants, and interests.
6. Keep it concise: A focused story is good; avoid unnecessary details that can distract from the main message.

These storytelling tips apply to everything from social posts to sales promotion examples and landing pages. Great visuals and interesting stories go hand in hand with other SEO tactics. If you run a Shopify store for your business, some of the best Shopify apps can help you combine all of these elements seamlessly.

Tip #5: Inform your content with data

Data is a powerful tool that can inform your content strategy and help you create stories that resonate with your audience. By using analytics and metrics, you can track the performance of your content and make data-driven decisions to improve its effectiveness.

If you build a scalable content marketing campaign, you can easily pivot as you receive new data about content performance. From the types of people reacting to your content to the most popular pages of your website, data helps you understand what your audience wants, which is the key to successful content creation.

Tip #6: Incorporate voice and audio content

Voice-activated and audio content, such as podcasts, are increasingly popular. These formats allow you to reach new audiences and create more immersive experiences, making them a great way to diversify your content and engage with your audience in new ways.

You can also think about voice-activated video content designed for voice assistants and triggered by voice commands. This strategy can be a great lead magnet if your video content is engaging and informative.

Tip #7: Create interactive and immersive content

Engage your audience by encouraging them to take action. This can be done with interactive quizzes, 360-degree videos, or augmented reality experiences. These formats help you create a deeper connection while driving higher engagement and conversion rates.

Consider elements such as user input, which encourages audience engagement and involvement as they build a deeper connection with your brand. Immersive content can also help users to better understand complex concepts. For example, imagine a 360-degree view of a product or VR experience demonstrating how a service works.

Tip #8: Use higher quality video content

Video content is a powerful tool for engaging and building a deeper connection with your audience. However, whether it is live video or animation, it needs to be of a certain level of quality to help bring your content to life in a more impactful way. 

Invest in high-quality video editing and production to help maintain your audience's attention and show the value of your products and services. Poor-quality video can create a negative effect, reflecting poorly on your business and lowering the perceived quality of your products and services. Once completed, enlist the help of tools that ensure quality and secure uploads for efficient content processing with large video files.

Tip #9: Specific content tailored for social media 

While you can use social media to distribute and promote any of your content, it is important to think about specific content built for designated platforms. This content can be short and humorous videos for TikTok, industry-relevant opinion pieces for LinkedIn, and carousel posts or reels for Instagram. Craft content that suits the platform, then engage with your audience in real-time. 

To do this successfully, you will need to understand the unique strengths and weaknesses of each platform. As some social media sites reward users who post regularly, use an AI Content Creation Platform to get a head-start on your social media-specific content and create in advance.

Tip #10: Benefit from personalization and targeting

Personalization and targeting are essential for creating content that speaks directly to your audience. Be it personalized email campaigns or targeted eCommerce ads, this method allows you to work smarter as opposed to harder with your content marketing. 

Ensure that your content reaches the right people at the right time to see higher engagement and conversion rates. This strategy is a cost-efficient way to spend your marketing budget and will likely yield greater results as your attention and effort are focused on people who are somewhat already interested in the products or services you offer.

Focus on these areas to enjoy quality results

These efficient content creation ideas will help you make sure you provide quality output for your audience in 2023. Always remember that the key to success is understanding your audience, goals, and whatever makes your content stand out. 

Experiment with these ideas and find the ones that work best for you and your audience, then lean into them and reap the rewards. We also recommend supercharging your paid search, social, and e-commerce advertising with MarinOne, and maximizing the return on every single marketing dollar you spend.

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Luke Carlino is a guest contributor to Marin Software.

Since Snapchat made its debut in 2011, it has drawn millions of users to its platform. And although other social media competitors burst onto the scene to compete, it has stood the test of time. In fact, Snapchat still remains one of the most popular apps for users between the ages of 15 and 25. 

With 319 million active users each day, the app continues to be a valued marketing tool for brands looking to reach millennials and Gen Z’ers. Because of its unique ad formats and its power to extend audience reach and increase brand awareness, Snapchat has gained much attention and made it possible for marketers to create some of the most memorable Snapchat ads. 

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Why you should use it

Here are a few convincing reasons to add the social media platform to your marketing mix.

Highly engaged audience

Because they’re young and highly-engaged, Snapchat users are more likely to pay attention to and interact with ads. This makes it an ideal platform for reaching younger demographics.

Targeted advertising

Snapchat allows businesses to target their ads to specific demographics, locations, and interests. Through targeted advertising, marketers can ensure that their ads are seen by the right people and increase their effectiveness.

High ROI

Many businesses have seen a high return on investment from their Snapchat ad campaigns, making it a cost-effective marketing tool.

Strong mobile presence

Snapchat is primarily a mobile app, which means it's easy for users to view and interact with the ads on their smartphones. This can be particularly effective for reaching users on the go.

The best Snapchat ads ever

Sephora

Sephora, a leading beauty brand, partnered with Snapchat to create a gamified AR Lens. They ran their campaign for four weeks and increased the total amount of transactions on their website by 5%. 

What they got right: Users were directly engaged for 37+ seconds because the brand created an interactive game that kept their audiences’ attention by teasing them with a coupon code redemption. 

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Hopper

An airline-booking app, Hopper helps users find the best deals on flights and the best time to fly. To engage Snapchatters, Hopper developed creatives for different routes with ads that were simple, static, and had a clear call to action. Through their campaign, Hopper discovered that Snapchatters were not only 37% more likely to watch a route, but booking rates from Snapchatters were 4x higher than users of other platforms. 

What they got right: The airline-booking app used location radius targeting along with geographically relevant creatives to reach millennials. 

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Bacardi

Bacardi spearheaded a Snapchat ad campaign with the slogan “Do what moves you” to target their ideal audience. They chose Snapchat as their primary vehicle for digital communications, because not only does it offer ad engagement varieties, but it allowed them to reach the age group they were after. As a result of their strategy, the brand was able to gain maximum proximity to their target group, ultimately reaching 2.5 million Snapchatters. 

What they got right: In an attempt to update their brand image and attract more followers from the younger generation, Bacardi utilized Snapchat’s ad formats to create an immersive “summer feeling” for Snapchat users that kept them engaged. 

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Motorola

To increase consideration intent and brand awareness for their Moto g7 power smartphone, Motorola used Snapchat to present the product’s three-day battery backup feature. 

What they got right: By leveraging Story Ads and Snap Ads, Motorola was able to show their customers just how much they could benefit from the brand’s long-lasting battery. 

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Gucci

As the first brand to partner with Snapchat for a global AR shoe try-on campaign, Gucci had a very successful outcome. Through the campaign, Snapchatters were able to virtually experience trying on four different kinds of sneakers. From the Lens, Snapchatters were able to go straight to Gucci’s website to purchase the shoe of their choice.  

What they got right: Gucci’s AR try-on experience not only captured the attention of many Snapchatters, but it also kept them engaged, leading to an increase in sales and positive ROAS. 

Shipt

To cement themselves as a leader in the competitive grocery delivery space, Shipt turned to Snapchat’s impactful ads to expand their audience and reach potential prospects with relevant Snap Ads. As a result of their creatives, their message was received by over 10 million Snapchatters in as little as two months. 

What they got right: They chose an illustrative animation strategy to generate awareness of their brand and increase reach. 

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Snapchat Ad best practices

With so many users worldwide, Snapchat is an ideal platform for connecting and engaging with consumers. When planning your Snapchat campaign, keep these best practices in mind.

Use interactive features

Snapchat offers a range of interactive features such as sponsored lenses, filters, and polls that can make your ads more engaging and memorable. Consider using these features to create an interactive experience for your audience.

Always use NEW story content

While it may be tempting to reuse an existing ad, it’s not recommended. Snapchat’s user base attracts a broad audience, so creating a tailored message will help you take advantage of the platform’s Gen Z niche. 

Be consistent and stay on brand

If your brand has a limited budget, develop a strategy that allows you to advertise consistently rather than being highly active one month, and completely inactive another. Of course, if your budget allows and your strategy permits a sprint advertising style, then go ahead with it. While every brand is different, it’s a preferred practice to keep your brand front of mind over long stretches of time. 

Ditch the sales pitch and create content that’s fun and natural

Work with micro-influencers and content creators to produce content that’s appealing to your audience. Keep content organic and authentic, and shift your focus away from being 100% sales-pitch oriented. 

Focus on the first two seconds

The first two seconds of your ad can either make or break performance. When promotion pop-ups appear immediately rather than in the final end card, optimal results can be achieved. Ads that have followed this best practice have outperformed others that have not. 

Test different ad formats

As part of your Snapchat advertising strategy, be sure to test different ad formats to see which ones are performing well for your brand and your target audience. By gaining key insights into how your ads are doing and why, you unlock the maximum return on investment for your budget so you can grow your business.

Supersize your Snapchat presence 

Whether your goal is to boost sales or raise brand awareness, Snapchat is an ideal platform for innovative and effective advertising campaigns. Creative Snapchat ad design relies on the combination of eye-catching visuals and a clear and compelling message that guides viewers to take the next step. 

By creating memorable, shareable, and interactive experiences that resonate with your target audience, you can supercharge your advertising efforts. Partnering with an expert in Snapchat advertising can get you started on the right track. MarinOne can help you develop engaging ads that inspire action and drive results to unlock more opportunities for your business. With its Snapchat integration, you can easily identify budget by channel, audience, and products that can be tested across multiple platforms. 

To learn more about how you can maximize the potential of your Snapchat ads and fine-tune your omnichannel advertising strategy, reach out to one of our MarinOne experts today.

You’re a customer-first brand that prioritizes customer satisfaction, but no matter how hard you try, there will always be a handful of unhappy customers who leave disgruntled reviews or share negative sentiments about your brand on social media. Perhaps they received a faulty product, or maybe they were just having a bad day and the product didn’t live up to their expectations. You can’t please everyone, but having a strong online reputation management (ORM) strategy can minimize the impact of negative feedback to help your brand maintain a positive reputation. 

Online reputation management (ORM) involves monitoring mentions of your brand name on the internet, primarily in reviews and on social media. This may sound like a job for your PR team, but ORM is different. PR teams work proactively to increase exposure to your brand and strengthen your reputation. ORM is a more defensive strategy that centers around seeking out negative content and working to minimize the damage. 

Virality's Role in Online Reputation Management

In the age of Instagram, ORM is more important than ever before. Social media algorithms favor viral content, and unfortunately negative and controversial content has some of the highest potential for virality. This is because virality is based on engagement. Engagement meaning, how many people are watching the video (most likely a tiktok or reel) from start to finish? How many people are liking and commenting? The more controversial a video is, the higher the engagement will be. This can cause negative press around a brand to spread quickly. However, the phenomenon of virality also causes trends to come and go rapidly. So while negative press around a brand could be trending for a day or two, as soon as a new scandal happens, the internet will all but forget about it. 

Internet trends move so quickly that most viral mishaps are often looked past within a matter of weeks. For example, many of us remember the Kendall Jenner + Pepsi Ad Debacle of 2017. For those who don’t, Pepsi released an ad where Kendall Jenner walked into a crowd of protestors, approached front line police, and handed the police officers a can of Pepsi which miraculously ended a conflict between police and protestors. Viewers were outraged as they felt this ad belittled protestors and minimized the issue of police brutality.

In April of 2017 it felt like this ad was all anyone was talking about. Folks on Twitter were calling for boycotts of all Pepsi products, and Pepsi’s stock certainly took a hit. But today, most people scarcely even remember that it happened. This scenario exemplifies how brands can quickly move past even the most ‘cancellable’ scenarios. Between Pepsi’s reputation as a staple household soda and the speed at which internet gossip moves, Pepsi recovered quickly. By May, the internet had moved on to other scandals, and nowadays no one thinks twice about drinking a Pespi. Virality is both an enemy and a friend to brands trying to maintain a positive online reputation.

Online Reputation Management aims to get ahead of any negative sentiments and address them before they become a larger, or even a viral issue. Things rarely escalate to the viral level, but regardless, social media has made people more connected than ever before which enables negative or positive sentiment about a brand to spread quickly if you let it.

Here are a few key steps to an effective ORM strategy:

Hire a Community Manager or Community Management Team

If someone tweets about a negative experience and tags your brand, they expect a response within a few hours. The speed of communication on social media demands a dedicated employee or team to monitor mentions of the brand on Twitter, Instagram and Tiktok. Additionally, if a customer contacts a brand via social media and does not receive a timely response, they may post a negative comment on the brand’s account in order to get the company’s attention, or to express their frustration and gain sympathy from others online. Instagram has even started including a ‘typically responds within’ blurb that users see when messaging a verified business account. People are utilizing social media as a way to get a quick response from a company representative when they have an issue. And this makes sense; we scarcely talk on the phone anymore as everyone communicates through Instagram instead. So instead of relying on a customer support hotline, brands need to meet customers where they're at, which is on Instagram and Twitter. For example, check out this helpful exchange with a member of the community management team at clothing retailer Savage X Fenty:

Their community management team responded within minutes and began working to answer the question at hand. This quick response was possible because Savage X Fenty has a dedicated team managing their social media accounts. If this customer were to receive no response to their direct message, they might start commenting on the brand’s posts asking why they’re being ignored. Then, others will see the comments and develop a negative impression of the brand.

It’s interesting; people spend so much time on Instagram talking to their friends who are also on Instagram all the time and therefore respond quite quickly to each other. But now, people expect the same behavior from brands. Which is fair, since brands want their followers to see their social media content as native and relatable, just like a post from a friend. In turn, brands are held to the same standards that we have for our peers when it comes to social media interactions. These high expectations are exactly why having a community management team is so important.

Provide a Respectful Public Response, then Move the Conversation to Private Messages

Let’s say a customer tags a clothing company in a tweet stating their pants developed holes after just two wears. The customer likely wants two things; a refund and a public apology. A generic example of an appropriate response would be to reply to the tweet stating “This is not the experience we want our customers to have. Please message us directly so that we can make it right.” This way, you’re showing you care and will work to correct the situation, but you're also taking the conversation out of a public forum so the details can be handled privately. The disgruntled customer gets their resolution, and the public viewers of the tweet see that you value customer satisfaction. 

The same goes for responding to negative reviews on your website. Publicly state that you are sorry to hear about the customer’s negative experience, and ask them to email your customer service team directly so you can make it right. This way future customers who read the review will know that if they receive a faulty or defective product, the situation will be remedied.

Here’s an example of a great response from Starbucks to a customer complaint on Twitter:

The Starbucks care team expressed empathy, apologized, and provided clear and concise instructions on how to continue the conversation in a private forum. That’s how it’s done!

Be Honest

Do not delete negative reviews or “bury” negative reviews under positive ones. Customers are smart, and an overwhelming amount of 5 star reviews will be seen as a red flag that your company is hiding negative reviews. It may seem counterintuitive, but a couple bad reviews actually help to validate the positive reviews by proving that the feedback is unbiased. However, if a review has overly vitriolic or profane language, it’s best to delete it as that is an unreasonable reaction and you don’t want other customers to be confronted with foul language when visiting your site.

If your company makes a more widespread mistake, quickly post a public apology stating why the mistake happened and what you plan to do to fix it. Utilizing the pants with holes example again, I’d recommend an instagram story post explaining that the fabric was faulty and the team will be sending out higher quality replacements or refunding customers who experienced that issue. The Instagram story is the best placement for a public apology because it is easily visible by your engaged customer base, but it won’t live on your Instagram grid forever like a feed post will. This way, you’ve addressed the issue without drawing unnecessary attention to it, so it can be resolved and your brand can move on.

Be Helpful

In order to be forgiven in the court of public opinion, you must truly take action to remedy the issue at hand. This often comes in the form of issuing a refund or store credit for a problematic item. Or if you provide a service, making fixes easy for the customer. Here’s a great example of a helpful response from Jetblue Airways:

The ORM team responded quickly and helpfully. Rather than just telling the customer to stay on the line until they reach a customer service representative, the community manager offered to fix the issue for them. The key here is that they are making issue resolution as easy as possible for the customer, diffusing frustration. This experience could have caused K. M. Sutton and their followers to stop being brand loyal to Jetblue, but by fixing the issue, their team was able to retain a loyal customer.

Stay Informed with Google Alerts

Set up Google Alerts for brand terms so that you know immediately when any negative press arises. Setting up a Google alert is easy. Simply visit https://www.google.com/alerts, type in your brand name and enter in a few settings around where the alerts should be sent and how often you would like to be alerted:

Google alerts are a great way to monitor sentiment around your brand, both positive and negative.

In conclusion, a branding issue or bad review can feel like a big deal, but utilizing our ORM tips, your brand should be able to recover quickly. The internet moves fast! So as long as you’ve got a plan in place that involves reacting to negative sentiment with empathy and truly making things right with your customers, you’ve got nothing to worry about.

ORM is a part of your business that requires empathy, energy and genuine connection between the customer and the brand representative. If you're struggling to find the budget to hire a dedicated community manager, or your current team lacks the time to do community management yourselves, consider using a tool like MarinOne to automate some of your more mundane and time consuming tasks like reporting, paid media ad creation, and ad account optimization. Automate the things you can, so that you can focus on the things you can’t. Click here to schedule a demo of MarinOne today.

With its vast professional network and communication tools (including Sales Navigator), LinkedIn is a powerful platform for establishing a sales pipeline and generating leads. It can be used to connect with potential customers and build up your business network in the professional metaverse.

In this blog post, we will discuss 7 innovative ways to conduct sales and lead generation-driven outreach on LinkedIn. If you are looking to expand your reach online to increase sales, LinkedIn is a great place to start!

Join LinkedIn Groups to Connect with Potential Customers and Generate Leads

One of the most effective ways to pursue sales via LinkedIn and to conduct LinkedIn marketing is by leveraging the platforms' Groups feature. By joining relevant groups, you can make inroads with potential customers and establish yourself as an expert in your field.

You can also use these groups to stay on top of industry trends and share helpful resources with other members. Additionally, you can join conversations about topics related to your business or product offering. This will help you build relationships with potential customers and increase brand awareness both for yourself as an individual and for the organization.

And you don't have to rely on groups that other people have created, either. You can start your own LinkedIn Group and begin a unique or niche conversation in the digital space.

Utilize Advanced Filters and Target Specific Audiences

LinkedIn can be an extremely effective tool for your business if you use it correctly. One of the best ways to get the most out of LinkedIn is by utilizing its advanced filters and targeting particular audiences.

The Benefits of the Filters Feature

These filters allow you to narrow down your search results so that you are only seeing people who fit into your desired demographic or industry. Plus, they make it much easier to find leads that could become new customers because you have a better idea of what these individuals are seeking or trying to get out of their LinkedIn engagement.

Use Paid Ads to Reach a Wider Audience

Paid advertising on LinkedIn is another great way to quickly reach a larger audience online. With paid ads, the targeting capabilities of LinkedIn become even more powerful because you can select exactly who will see your ad.

Examples of Paid Ad Targeting

For example, you can target by job title, industry, location, language, gender, interests, and more. Like the advanced filters feature mentioned above, this allows you to put your sales message in front of the right people, thereby maximizing your lead generation process and boosting your sales opportunities.

Create Engaging Content That Educates Your Target Audience

From creating a slick user profile to producing meaningful social media posts and articles, creating content on LinkedIn is a great way to engage and build relationships with potential customers as you educate your unique audience.

By crafting content that provides value to readers and followers, you can provide valuable insights into the latest industry trend or a new marketing strategy. In addition, this allows you to show off your expertise in the field.

Creating Top-Shelf Content

For example, you could write posts about the latest trends in ecommerce sales strategies or share other helpful resources, such as detailed guides or tutorials on how to start an online store. You could also provide tips for optimizing product sales pages or increasing sales conversions.

This type of informative, expert-level content can help generate leads, increase sales, and build trust with your target audience.

Incorporate Video Content into Your Lead Generation Strategies

Video content is an increasingly popular way to engage potential customers on LinkedIn. Incorporating this type of content into your sales outreach strategy can help you stand out from the competition while engaging your target audience more meaningfully.

Video Content That Makes an Impact

For instance, you can use video content to showcase a product demonstration, give an exclusive sales pitch, or provide helpful tips and advice within your industry field.

You could cover a variety of topics, including:

• How to create a sales pitch that drives sales
• How to use video content to demonstrate a product's features and advantages
• Strategies for increasing sales through targeted ads on LinkedIn
• Ecommerce best practices

By using videos that showcase your expertise and commitment to excellence, you can effectively establish a rapport with potential customers and increase sales opportunities.

Take Advantage of the Power of Endorsements and Recommendations

By leveraging the power of endorsements and recommendations on LinkedIn, you can boost your credibility on the platform.

What Are LinkedIn Endorsements?

Endorsements are simply when another LinkedIn user endorses you or your products/services. This helps to validate your expertise and put your sales message in front of more people.

What Are LinkedIn Recommendations?

On the other hand, recommendations are when someone provides a written testimonial about you or your product or service.

Both endorsements and recommendations can be incredibly beneficial if you are looking to gain an edge over your competitors.

Monitor Competitors’ Activity on LinkedIn for Insightful Ideas

Like with many facets of business, finding out what your competition is doing better than you can be a game-changer for your creative and out-of-the-box thinking.

By monitoring competitors' activities on LinkedIn, you can gain valuable insights into their sales and marketing strategies while also identifying any opportunities they are missing that could benefit your own sales efforts.

By keeping an eye on your competitors, you can spot emerging trends in the industry or sales techniques that you can borrow and apply to your own sales efforts.

Whether you are learning from what your competitors are doing right or learning what not to do based on what they are doing wrong, there is a lot to be gained from paying attention to rival businesses.

Lead Generation Strategies That Work

LinkedIn has a host of lead-generation tools that you and your marketing and sales teams can use to build trust, make connections, and spread your sales message throughout the professional sphere. By leveraging the power of endorsements, recommendations, video content, paid ads, and more you can quickly maximize your outreach opportunities on this notable platform.

No matter which LinkedIn strategy you decide to employ, MarinOne has your back to maximize the effectiveness of your digital outreach efforts.

Overcoming challenges from recent changes and resetting your sights on scaling centers on the common themes of simplicity and increasing liquidity. We’re sharing actionable and accessible changes you can make in your accounts today to improve your outcomes. 

These changes are fairly universal in application, but if you’re a current Marin Software client you can also get personalized recommendations from your dedicated expert account team.

Simplify Account Structure

All new ad sets, or those that are treated as new by the system because their learning phase has been reset by a significant edit, start out in ‘Learning’. This isn’t necessarily a bad stage to be in - all ad sets will spend some time in learning, and typically anything less than 20% of spend (overall) being in learning is fine and won’t negatively impact performance. However, we want to spend as much of your campaign budget in an efficient way, and reduce time in Learning as much as possible. Simplification and consolidation are key to improving liquidity, in particular by moving spend past the Learning Phase more efficiently.

There are four key levers that impact the learning phase:

• Campaign and Ad Set Volume

• A simplified account structure will maximize signals in the auction to get you out of the Learning Phase faster. Ad Sets and segments that exist more for reporting over value or receive less than the 50 conversions/week threshold (88 installs/day for SKAN campaigns) should be consolidated.

• Manual Edit Frequency

• Each time you make a significant edit (such as to budget, bid or targeting, at campaign, ad-set or ad level) the Learning Phase is reset. As a result, hourly and daily performance metrics will be noisy and incomplete due to restricted and delayed reporting.
• Meta recommends waiting 72 hours to evaluate performance to allow for the reporting delay in opt-out conversions and to avoid editing an ad-set or ad until it has exited the Learning Phase.

• Targeting and Placement

• Gone are the days of over segmentation, especially in retargeting campaigns. Since user opt-outs from tracking will reduce the potential reach of retargeting campaigns, Meta recommends broadening placements and targeted audiences for more effective optimization over time. The “expanded interest” option is another great way to increase liquidity.
• In retargeting specifically, Meta also recommends monitoring for audience saturation and considering shifting more budget to Lookalike Audiences and Broad Audiences.
• When deciding on placements, Meta recommends taking advantage of their machine learning system, that will place your ad in the most optimal surface for you. Including more placements often helps you find a wider audience because our audience targeting works the same across all available placements. The more places your ad is displayed, the more chances your target audience has to see it and take the desired action.
• Bidding and Budget

• Ensure that your budgets are set high enough to reach 50 conversions per week. If you’re launching a net new campaign, take a look at the average account CPA for a good starting point, then multiply that number by 50 to get your ideal weekly budget.

• Conversion Event Frequency

• Are campaigns/ad sets failing to hit 50 conversion events per week? A quick analysis could be: “Of the X number of ad sets you are currently running only Y are hitting the requisite 50 events per week (or Z hitting 100 per week. Learning doesn’t stop at 50!)”. Watch out for very new campaigns/ad sets!

With all of this talk of simplification and liquidity, you may be wondering, can I simplify things too much? The answer is yes! 

Sometimes consolidating activity too much can do more harm than good. Generally speaking you shouldn’t consolidate when:

• The ad sets have different objectives
• The ad sets are targeting audiences with different values that the auction cannot detect
• There are differences in franchises obligations or shipping costs
• There are significant differences in performance - we don’t want to drown out good performing ad sets.

When considering scaling strategies for the new normal, our common theme is to increase liquidity. Take these steps to get your accounts to a place to scale:

• Simplify account structure

• Do you often see your ads stuck in the “Learning” stage? This could be a sign that it’s time to simplify. If the adset doesn’t reach the 50 conversions threshold needed (or is predicted to not reach this threshold), it will display as “Learning Limited” and won’t hit optimal performance. If this is the case, check for audience overlap using the “Inspect” tool in ads manager. If you have overlapping audiences in your account, learning will be split between multiple ad sets. This means you could be missing out on potential opportunities! If you don’t have overlapping audiences but still have ads stuck in the Learning stage, pick your strongest performers and pause the rest to allocate budget more effectively.

• Reduce frequency of manual edits

• Manual edits, while sometimes necessary, can push your ads back into the learning phase and prevent your ad sets from reaching optimal performance. Even if there is enough conversion volume to exit the learning phase, repeated manual edits will reset the learning process and keep your ads in learning longer. Try to limit manual edits post-launch or group together necessary edits, and find a list of manual edits that trigger the learning phase here.

• Broaden audiences

• Our inclination can be to be extremely refined in our audience targeting, but this can work against us by limiting the reach and thereby learning of our ads. Test out an expanded lookalike audience or even broad audiences to discover new scaling opportunities.

• Utilize CBO

• CBO, or Campaign Budget Optimization, is when you set one overarching campaign budget instead of setting budgets individually at the ad set level. This helps simplify campaign setup and helps reduce the number of budgets to manage manually, since the budget at the campaign level is flexible across all ad sets and prioritizes top performers. If you prefer to have more control over ad set budgets and leverage manual bidding, Marin customers can enjoy Social Rules that automate bid changes based on your internal KPIs to similarly automate with more granular control.

• Prioritize events with the largest, most diverse audiences

• If you’re looking to scale, you’ll find that growth in event optimizations that are further up in the funnel. For example, if you typically optimize for Sales you might test a Leads or Engagement objective in order to broaden your reach, then nurture those users to drive additional scale in your ultimate goal of Sales. Learn more about different Campaign Objectives in Meta here.

If you’re a Marin customer and would like more tailored recommendations, please reach out to your account manager for assistance. Our team members are seasoned experts in social advertising and can help you create a personalized scaling strategy. 

Marin social customers also enjoy time saving tools such as bulk uploading, bulk ad creation, and unified reporting. If you’re interested in learning more about Marin’s social capabilities, please reach out to us today.

In today's customer-centric world, User Experience(UX) plays a crucial role in determining the success or failure of a product. With a singular focus on the target audience and their experience, an expertly-designed UX ensures that users have a seamless, enjoyable, and immersive experience with a product. This, in turn, leads to a steady stream of satisfied and loyal customers. This is why industry giants like Google and Amazon have made UX a fundamental aspect of their business operations.

To stay competitive in today's market, successful companies continually test and iterate their products to align with the evolving needs of their users. Investing in UX has become an essential component for achieving success. Furthermore, UX plays a critical role in elevating the return on investment (ROI) for organizations. This article delves into the ways in which UX design can impact customer satisfaction and boost ROI.

UX and CX: Are they the same? 

The customer experience (CX) covers a customer’s holistic interaction with a brand across multiple touchpoints such as customer service, advertising, brand reputation, sales process, pricing fairness, and product delivery. In short, it is concerned with all the user touch points including social channels. Analyzing CX helps companies to know where their brand is positioned. 

On the other hand, user experience (UX) relates to how a user interacts with a specific product and it focuses mainly on the digital touchpoints of the user like website, applications, and devices. UX primarily focuses on areas such as usability, interaction design, visual design, information architecture, content strategy, and user research. 

CX is a more holistic initiative for customer retention whereas UX design aims at providing a pleasurable and easy experience for the users while using the product. UX is a subset of CX and is essential to enhance ROI. 

Both UX and CX have to be in tandem to boost customer loyalty and customer retention.   Let’s see an example of purchasing a product from an online store to illustrate this. 

• A user logs into the website to search for the product with the desired specification. If the navigation is seamless and product recommendations and customer reviews are personalized, the user can quickly arrive at a decision. 
• Then, within a few clicks, he can complete the payment. This is a positive user experience. Such an experience will make the user come back as the customer experience was great. 
• Imagine the package will be delivered to the user on time but the product was defective. 
• The next step for the user will be to contact customer service to figure out whether the product can be exchanged or not. 
• If the customer service team promptly responds to the user and resolves the issue, it is a positive customer experience. 

Thus we see how both UX and CX are essential for customer loyalty which is a determining factor of the profitability of the business. 

UX Strategies to Improve CX and ROI

Eliminating the risks of product failure is the main goal of UX to improve customer satisfaction. For this, certain principles of UX have to be focused on. 

• Usefulness: The design needs to have a purpose, and only user research can help in finding what is useful for the users.  
• Usability: Valuable insights and feedback have to be gathered from the users to measure the usability of the product and iterate the design accordingly. 
• Speed: The product design must ensure that it can cater to the fast interactions of the users on the web page/mobile app. 
• Trends: The UI/UX design has to be relevant and empower users to buy more. 
• Simplicity: Users like to have simple, accurate, and user-friendly solutions for their pain points. So keep the design as simple as possible. 

A good UX and CX are the pillars of a great ROI. Investing in UX enhances customer satisfaction which directly affects the company’s ROI. Following these core UX strategies will help to create a flawless user-centric design.

User Research to Create a Customer Persona

Before getting into UX design, UI UX designers need a firm understanding of the user types, their needs, and their pain points. For this, designers interview people who are using similar products, gather feedback from them to identify the pain points, conduct one-to-one meetings or launch online questionnaires to gain valuable insights into customer needs, motivations, and concerns. Keep in mind that the user needs may vary with demographics, interests, and purchase behavior. To summarize, knowing the exact target audience will help tailor user-centric designs that eliminate pain points and deliver the best customer experience. 

Mapping Customer Journeys

The data from customer personas can be applied to design a flawless customer journey. The key touchpoints that customers have with the product are identified and difficulties faced by the customer while interacting with the product are mapped. Using these maps, UI UX designers ensure that every interaction of the customer with the product is seamless. Such customer journey maps eliminate the errors that can arise due to assumptions made by designers. In addition, these maps are a great tool to understand where the customer needs are not met and then iterate the design to serve them better. 

Prototyping and Wireframing 

The design team creates a layout to demonstrate how the key interface elements look and work in a digital product. The layout can be low-fidelity wireframes or high-fidelity wireframes, also known as rapid prototypes. The choice of wireframes depends on the purpose of the design of the product and the requirement of the team members. Such basic skeletons of the design help designers prioritize all the elements with customers at the center point. The high-fidelity prototypes are close to the ultimate version of the product and developing such prototypes helps to gather feedback from the customers at an early stage. 

Testing the Usability 

Usability testing is performed to evaluate the design or prototype with real users. It helps UI UX designers to make corrections and modifications at an early stage of the design process. As discussed earlier, prototyping is the best way to find out the bottlenecks of the UX design and fix them before it goes on a large scale. Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer conducts permanent A/B testing to redesign the product that caters to user needs. 

Why should you calculate ROI for UX? 

UX/UI  improvements in design will deliver brands more positive product reviews, enhanced brand loyalty, considerable reduction in user errors, and better conversion rates. There are many success stories of companies that had an indirect increase in profits due to improvements made in their UX design. 

• Humana, a health insurance company performed A/B testing on their homepage banner. The first design was good but the company felt that it had to be improved to increase click-through rates ( CTR). Simple changes were made in the design and copy. These small changes in the UX design of the homepage banner resulted in a 433% increase in clicks. 
• Virgin America wanted to make its website more usable for modern travelers. So in 2014, they decided to make minor changes to their website to give a pleasurable digital experience for their customers. After successful A/B testing, they released a responsive website. As a result, they observed a 14% increase in conversion rates and 20% fewer support calls. 
• Rev, online transcription and captions service, completely redesigned their website to give it a modern look. Initially, the website had a carousel as the main design element to highlight the value propositions of the company. In the new design, the carousel was replaced with a simple bold value proposition with call-to-action(CTA button). This resulted in an increase in conversion rate by 19% in 9 months. 
• Vocier, a luxury suitcase brand found out that their website lacked usability. They made A/B testing pages. After implementing the changes, the conversion rate of the final version was 75% higher than the older website. 

These real-life examples show that simple changes in the UX design can have a positive effect on the conversion rate and dramatically impact your company's bottom line. So it stands to reason that investing in UX can contribute to the growth trajectory of the company, and already has for many brands. 

How can I Calculate the ROI for my Investments in UX/UI services?

It's quite challenging to get raw data on return on investment(ROI) in UX/UI services, as the result of the changes has an indirect impact on the profitability of the company. But these observations can help in determining the impact UX has on ROI. 

1. Cost-benefit analysis: In this method, the costs of the UX/UI services, including the development and test of the design, are calculated. Then the value is compared to the benefits, such as increased productivity, improved user experience, and reduced support costs. This analysis gives the net benefit of the investment.
2. Return on assets (ROA): Here, the return on the UI/UX services is calculated as a percentage of the assets invested. To calculate this, divide the net benefit of the investment by the total cost of the services and multiply by 100. 
3. Net Present Value (NPV): The present value of the future cash flows of the UX/UI services are assessed by considering the time value of money. 
4. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) measurements: Track the before and after key performance metrics such as the task completion rate, error rate, and task completion time. 
5. Cost of rework: Compute the cost and effort of UI/UX design services at the beginning of the project. Then compare the data to the cost of rework after software implementation to analyze the total cost savings. 

A solid UX design enhances CX and boosts ROI

A pleasurable user experience greatly influences the customer experience. Research by Deloitte and Touche reveals that customer-centric companies were 60% more profitable than companies that were not focused on the customer. And a good UX is inevitable for a positive user experience. Therefore, investing in UX is a smart move due to the following reasons: 

• Greater ease of use boosts overall revenue/conversion as the customers get emotionally attached to the brand. And this results in customer loyalty. 
• A well-designed product enhances customer satisfaction along with business-to-business satisfaction. 
• UX techniques preempt user issues in the development stage of the product. This lowers the company’s expenditure for support calls. 
• A product backed with comprehensive user research is less likely to fail to eliminate the risk of a wrong thing. 

Now that you know how to get started with improving CX and UX, increasing overall on-site conversions, you can also start the process of bringing higher quality traffic to your website in the first place…through effective advertising and targeting. With MarinOne's paid media management platform, you will be able to see what ads perform across all paid media channels you're running, and invest wisely accordingly. Get started with our expert consultation team today to learn more about improving your customers' brand experience.

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Aparna K.S. is a guest contributor to the Marin blog.

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According to Pew Research, 72 percent of U.S. adults use at least one type of social media, and 23 percent of these use Twitter, making Twitter the 7th most used social media platform in the United States in 2021.

Twitter is a free social networking site that houses over 300 million active users, allowing people to post ‘tweets’ to engage, socialize and connect with users on the same platform. 

While the purpose of Twitter for each person or organization remains the same, the ‘hows’ of using the platform vary for regular Twitter individuals or organizations using Twitter as a marketing platform. 

Why Twitter Marketing—and How?

Digital marketing has a long history, and one can’t deny how it has transformed the way marketers and audiences consume content, especially on social media platforms like Twitter.

Twitter might seem like a daunting platform to venture into for marketing, mainly because, unlike Tiktok, YouTube, or Facebook, Twitter’s main algorithm focuses more on conversations rather than visuals. 

We’ll look at this tweet from the Climbing House as an example:

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Alejandra Leyva, a Content Manager working with Climbing House emphasizes, “Different social media platforms require different techniques for marketing. In this case, we tried to spark a lighthearted conversation around climbing as a go-to activity for a first date. This makes it easier for us to converse on Twitter and grab the attention of young or old people looking for exciting date alternatives while leading them to our website.”

This is what the magic of Twitter marketing is—conversations. As a social media platform, Twitter is well-known for its ‘trending’ lists, be it words or hashtags. This trending list shows Twitter users the most talked about topic at a given moment for a specific location or worldwide. This is one of the best ways to clue into what’s happening in the zeitgeist quickly and understand what topical conversations your team should pay attention to in relation to your industry.

Benefits of Twitter Marketing

Because the charm of Twitter is centered around conversations, the benefits of using this platform as a marketing tool are centered around this as well.

The benefit of Twitter marketing is that because people are used to conversations, tweeting multiple times a day is normal and is not annoying for most users. However, Twitter is heavily chronological in the sense that it could take a nanosecond for one tweet to be buried among the tweets of the other people your followers follow, so making the best out of your content that would make people stop scrolling should be one of your top priorities.

There are endless benefits to Twitter than you might think, and these benefits have become successful strategies that marketers have utilized over the years. 

Strategies for Twitter Marketing

Establish a Brand Voice

Twitter is one of the most excellent platforms for establishing a company’s brand voice. While selecting a brand voice and reputation takes time and effort, Twitter as a platform makes this easy.

A company’s brand voice can either come off as lighthearted and casual or serious and professional, and you can establish this through your tweets and interaction on Twitter.

Take, for example, this tweet from Felix:

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Kyle Zien, Director of Growth Marketing at Felix, says, “We aim to reimagine the Canadian healthcare experience, and we believe it starts with how we interact with our audiences. We try to build our brand voice in a casual, friendly way where people feel like they’re taking advice from a friend rather than an organization.”

Make a Content Calendar

Social media marketers often have a lot on their hands, juggling three to four social platforms simultaneously. Using a social media content calendar allows you to plan and organize content ahead of time, making strategic content posts rather than just winging whatever content at any moment.

What’s more, most social media content calendars let you schedule posts even without logging in to the platform, so you don’t have to fear forgetting to post your marketing content.

Create and Join Trends and Conversations Through Hashtags

If you ask any person who uses Twitter what’s the most significant feature of Twitter that’s most attractive to them, at least three out of five will have one thing in common—hashtags.

While other social media platforms also use hashtags, Twitter makes the most use of this feature through its trending tags list immediately visible when you log in to the website. 

An important aspect of Twitter's marketing campaign is that it utilizes hashtags to join conversations or create and invite discussions surrounding its product and services. 

An example is this tweet from Prize Rebel:

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A person who does not necessarily follow Prize Rebel will discover this tweet because it has joined in on the conversation about making money online or earning extra cash. 

According to Jerry Han, CMO of PrizeRebel, “Ever since we established our Twitter account, the use of hashtags has proven how easily people can see us when they search for the same tag on Twitter. We sometimes supplement this with a “retweet to win” CTA as a condition for the prize, which also gives us more visibility to our audience.”

This tweet from PluginHive about their FedEx WooCommerce plugin also uses several hashtags to help increase the tweet’s visibility among those looking for information on shipping through FedEx.

Get Verified and Increase Your Follower Count

Before the great Twitter overhaul by Elon Musk, getting the tiny blue checkmark beside your profile name meant that your profile was your ‘proof of authenticity. Today, two forms of verification badges exist on Twitter—the old blue checkmark (which can now be bought on Twitter Blue by any user) and the ‘Official’ badge found at the bottom of your profile name.

Technicalities of these verification badges aside, there is a sense of authority emitted by accounts with blue or official verified badges, making them more reliable to Twitter users. Working to increase your follower count also helps in marketing and spreading your content throughout the platform and also helps establish you as a reliable content creator and organization.

Sponsored and promoted ads

On Twitter, you can do both paid and organic social media ads. The question is how can you harness the power of both. 

This is an example of a paid ad:

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You should be able to see a “promoted” tag at the bottommost part of the post for a paid advertisement. Having a promoted tweet increases the visibility of a tweet and is just basically paid advertising, taking your tweet to users who might be interested in your products and services.

In the case above, BPI utilizes Twitter advertising to encourage more people to apply for a credit card with the bank. Not only are they getting more credit card applications, but they are also generating more leads using the information users input through the application.

Stay Human and Interactive

The best way to ‘attack’ Twitter as a marketing platform is to stay human. You may be thinking, “But wait…what does that even mean?”

To put it frankly, in many cases marketing posts sound like they were extracted from an AI machine and then copy-pasted to the platform. This is the last thing you want to do if you wish to engage and convert your Twitter campaigns.

Twitterverse loves conversations. So go ahead, converse! Just like this tweet from Fig Loans:

Jeff Zhou, CEO of Fig Loans, says, “Our Twitter marketing campaigns don’t only rely on regularly creating or posting content for our follower’s timelines. We interact and reply to our customers or anyone interested in our products and services. That way, they know they will get top-notch customer service with us.”

Take another look at this Snickers-UNO interraction: 

There is a more lighthearted approach present here for both organizations. Engaging in conversation for your followers to see an unusual interaction between two verified accounts is a fun way to tickle and grab the attention of Twitter users. Not only is Snickers bringing fun to their initial post, but they’re also subtly implying how your next pre-football tailgate isn’t complete without Snickers. UNO calling them out on the typo was really the cherry on top to reaffirming that both companies are made up of real people behind the brands, having real conversations.

Why and How Twitter Marketing Matters

It should be no surprise that digital and social media marketing has been all the rave in the last few years. As humankind fixates on digital technology, marketers must adapt to these changes and be interacting where their target audience likes to hang out virtually.

These social media platforms are different in their ways and should be dealt with differently. Twitter, as a marketing platform, should center around conversations and engagement. This allows marketers to establish a brand voice and take valuable information and data about consumer behavior in return. 

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For help on strategically approaching any social media platform, meet with one of Marin’s marketing experts today. We will ensure your paid social advertising performs at it’s best.

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Rachel Melegrito is a guest contributor to Marin Software.

Augmented analytics is drastically changing the way marketers work, empowering them with better ways to identify customer needs, develop more effective campaigns, drive conversions, and ultimately improve business outcomes. 

Using advanced tech solutions such as artificial intelligence to collect and analyze data, augmented analytics helps marketers make more informed, data-driven decisions. Simply put, it’s a smart and powerful solution that enables marketers to move way ahead of competitors by helping them achieve more with less. From providing smart insights to revealing valuable intelligence, augmented analytics is a game changer that can transform your business in 2023 and beyond. 

What is Augmented Analytics?

Augmented analytics is a data processing approach that uses a variety of techniques, including data mining, statistical modeling, and machine learning, to analyze a wide range of historical and current data to improve data exploration and analysis. Applying advanced algorithms to the data enables businesses to better understand customer behavior, identify trends and anomalies, and make predictions that inform decisions based on facts, rather than intuition. By leveraging these complex algorithms, augmented analytics enhances the way businesses can use data for further analysis in business intelligence applications. This strategy has huge potential and is a key tool in helping marketers develop a strong competitive advantage. In fact, the augmented analytics market is expected to grow by 25% in the next five years, reaching $22.4 billion by 2025.

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4 Ways Augmented Analytics can Help Your Business

Using augmented analytics can multiply your business’s success by improving your bottom line and introducing new ways to boost campaign efforts. 

Maximize ROI

Marketing teams confronted with frozen or shrinking budgets are nonetheless still expected to generate leads and build pipelines to increase revenue. Using augmented analytics, marketers can make data-driven decisions and optimize their marketing investments through accurate insights and recommendations. Instead of just relying on past experience, estimates, gut instinct, or trial and error, the technology provides an accurate picture of which campaigns are performing well and which aren't, enabling marketers to allocate their budgets effectively to maximize returns. Here are two ways augmented analytics can help optimize marketing budgets.

• Budget Forecasting

Budget forecasting supports operational improvements that can lead to greater business success. For many marketers, monitoring spend versus allocated budget is a time-consuming process that is often prone to inaccuracies — especially when juggling several clients simultaneously. With augmented analytics, however, forecasting allows marketers to stay on track by providing historical and current information about budget spending so they can act on timely suggestions. This way, marketers can ensure that allocated budgets are spent according to plan, freeing time to spend on granular analysis of under- and overspending, preparing them to navigate future campaigns that will achieve higher ROAS. 

• Anomaly Detection

Another practical way augmented analytics can help marketers maximize ROI is through anomaly detection, a tool that uses historical data on metrics including clicks or CPM and impressions to identify and self-learn expectations for the metrics. When an anomaly is detected, the outlier is automatically flagged, indicating issues that can drain a budget. These anomalies reveal campaign performance problems that might have otherwise gone unnoticed, helping to minimize negative effects – or eliminate them altogether. 

Rapid Time to Insight

The beauty of augmented analytics is the way its powerfully constructed machine learning algorithms reveal important insights that can save time and improve a company’s bottom line. Through real-time insights and recommendations based on data analysis, marketers can make more informed decisions, understand customer behavior and needs, and tailor their campaigns accordingly. 

With such proactive insights, augmented analytics can not only help reduce risk, but can also minimize issues by allowing marketers to use its highly sophisticated number crunching to drive more sales, build effective pipelines, and retain customers.

Improve Customer Experiences

Augmented analytics give marketers accurate and detailed information about their customers that they might have not been able to obtain through other means. With greater insights about prospective and existing customers, marketers can improve customer experience by understanding how their customers will interact with their brand. 

Since augmented analytics is able to unify a diverse range of datasets such as demographics, CRMs, psychographics, and more, it can provide critical information marketing teams need to maximize customer value. By exploring large volumes of different data, augmented analytics can also model and predict customer behaviors, calculate customer lifetime value, and discover customer trends and patterns — all of which can be used to improve customer experiences. 

Task Automation

Marketers can also harness augmented analytics for smoother operations. By automating certain tasks, such as data preparation, data discovery, and data visualization, marketers can save heaps of time and effort. Additionally, augmented analytics can automatically generate charts, graphs, and other visualizations based on data analysis, helping marketers to quickly and easily understand and communicate the results of their analysis. When data is streamlined and manual tasks are automated, marketers can spend less time combing through data for insights, and more time focusing on other strategic business initiatives that demand attention. 

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Getting started with augmented analytics

Here are three steps to help you get started with your augmented analytics journey. 

Start Small and Choose a Use Case that is Aligned with Your KPIs

To begin using data science and artificial intelligence, your data doesn’t need to be perfect. Identify the business problem or opportunity you want to address. Focus on a use case that is aligned with your KPIs and has high business value. Once you see that it is successful, you can move on to other larger projects. 

Invite your Whole Organization to be a Part of Your Analytics Initiatives

Being strategic about rolling out augmented analytics and collaborating with your entire company can help build trust and show employees that you want them to be involved with the implementation. Communicating with different stakeholders in your company will help them understand the value of the technology and how it can be used to drive business results. Encourage employees from across the organization to play a role in the initiative, demonstrating that you value their input and cooperation in achieving your business’s mission and goals. 

Provide the Right Training to Gain the Most Value out of Your Investment

Concentrate on creating a data-driven culture. When you’re ready to start using augmented analytics as part of your company’s daily operations, establish strategies and offer training in place so employees can get the most out of the valuable data assets. When you include users from the beginning, they will likely be more invested in the outcome. 

Exercise Flexibility

Be prepared to make changes along your augmented analytics journey. Encourage others to contribute feedback so you can gather insights and make adjustments as needed. A flexible approach supports iteration. In turn, when you iterate with stakeholders, you’ll be better equipped to adjust to their needs. Adopting a flexible outlook will help ensure a successful transformation for your business and make for a more seamless transition. 

Using Augmented Analytics to Improve Your Campaigns

From identifying user segments to refining your target audiences, you can use augmented analytics to gain a deeper understanding of customer data and optimize your campaigns. With the right insights, you can effectively focus on those customers most likely to buy or respond positively to your offers, putting the right messages in front of them at the right time.

As you embark on your augmented analytics journey, remember that success is achieved through collaboration, training, flexibility, and the right data-driven strategies. When implemented properly and consistently across all areas of your business, these principles can help you maximize the value of your investment and take your analytics initiatives to the next level.

If you're eager to elevate your marketing efforts with sophisticated analytics, reach out to MarinOne for help. As a customizable, enterprise-class solution, MarinOne can help you more efficiently analyze your customer data, better understand your customers’ needs, and take advantage of the opportunities augmented analytics provides.

Affiliate Marketing for Beginners: What It Is and How To Get Started

If you haven’t heard the term “affiliate marketing” before, it’s a popular advertising tactic where businesses reward third parties for generating traffic and leads for them. The affiliate marketing industry is worth over $17 billion and for 20% of brand marketers, it’s the most important customer acquisition channel they have at their disposal. With statistics like that, it’s no wonder affiliate marketing has taken off so rapidly over the last few years. 

Simply put, a good affiliate marketing program will allow you to promote and exponentially grow your business while simultaneously blending smoothly with your other marketing channels. It’s a great way to generate significant online revenue and drive more sales. 

The growing popularity of affiliate marketing as an effective digital marketing tactic is a sure sign that you should get on board. Our beginners’ guide will walk you through everything you need to know—from basic definitions to how to get started with your own program. 

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a revenue-sharing model in which an affiliate promotes a business's goods or services to help them achieve their sales goals. In turn, affiliates earn a commission from the sales made as a result of their advertising efforts. The push toward less traditional marketing tactics is opening up new avenues to generate significant online revenue, benefiting brands and affiliate marketers alike. 

How Does it Work?

By leveraging the abilities of a variety of individuals for a more effective outreach strategy, affiliate marketing spreads the responsibilities of product marketing and creation across parties. To ensure affiliate marketing success, three distinct parties need to be involved: 

Seller and Product Creators

A seller can be either a product creator, vendor, merchant, or retailer with a product — be it goods or service — to market. Occasionally, the advertiser can participate as the affiliate and also profit from the revenue sharing associated with affiliate marketing efforts. 

The Affiliate or Publisher

An affiliate, also referred to as a publisher, markets the seller’s product in a way that’s appealing to potential consumers. Whether an individual or a company, the affiliate focuses on persuading consumers to make a purchase. To attract consumers, affiliates often target a specific audience and adhere to that audience’s interests. 

The Consumer

For an affiliate system to work successfully, there must be sales. And, of course, consumers are the ones who make that happen. Affiliate marketers advertise products and services to consumers through various channels by using affiliate links that direct them to the merchant’s website. When consumers do so, however, the Federal Trade Commission requires that affiliates clearly disclose their relationship to the retailer.

How do Affiliate Marketers get Paid?

For those looking to increase their income online, affiliate marketing is an inexpensive method of making money without the hassle of actually selling a product. However, the way affiliate marketers get paid after linking the seller to the consumer can get complicated. For the affiliate to earn a commission, the consumer doesn’t always need to buy the product. An affiliate’s contribution to the seller’s sales will be measured differently depending on the program.

Here are four ways an affiliate gets paid:

Pay per Sale

After a consumer purchases a product, the affiliate receives a percentage of the sale price of the product from the merchant. In this program, before they are compensated, the affiliate must get an investor to actually invest in the affiliate product. 

Pay per Lead

In this more complex program, affiliates are compensated based on lead conversions. Pay per lead demands an affiliate persuade consumers to not only visit a merchant’s website but to entice customers to click and take action. 

Pay per Click

Utilized by some affiliate marketers, pay-per-click (PPC) programs help affiliates redirect consumers to a merchant’s website. Because an affiliate is paid based on the increase in web traffic, their focus remains on engaging consumers to the extent that they move from the affiliate’s site to the merchant’s site. 

Pay per Install

With this payout system, each time an affiliate directs a user to the merchant’s website and that user installs a software product the affiliate gets paid. 

Common Types of Affiliates

Affiliates use different methods and practices to reach their target audience and make sure they stay engaged. 

Influencers

Affiliates can benefit from leveraging influencers in their marketing strategy. Since influencers already boast an impressive following, they are likely to persuade consumers’ purchasing decisions. When influencers successfully direct a seller’s products to consumers, they receive a share of the profits. 

Bloggers

Through content marketing, bloggers excel at increasing a seller’s conversions. A blogger can spread the word about a product’s value by writing about it and promoting it along with providing links to drive traffic back to a seller’s site. 

Paid Search-Focused Microsites

Advertised within a partner site or on the sponsored listings of a search engine, microsites can garner a serious amount of affiliate sales. Paid search-focused microsites offer targeted audiences relevant content with straightforward call-to-actions. In turn, this increases conversions. 

Email Lists

Email marketing holds the power to impact affiliate marketing income. Despite its older origins, it can help promote a seller’s products. Affiliates may build email lists over time, or leverage email newsletters with hyperlinks, increasing the chance of consumers purchasing a product, thereby earning the affiliate a commission. 

Large Media Websites

Media websites have the potential to create huge amounts of traffic and build large audiences. Most commonly, these large websites provide product exposure through the use of affiliate links or banners, which ultimately improves conversion rates. As a result, both the affiliate and the seller benefit from top-notch revenue. 

Benefits of Affiliate Marketing for Brands

To help you understand the real benefits of affiliate marketing, here’s a list of the top six benefits.

High ROI

Aside from being an effective tool for attracting new customers and increasing sales, affiliate marketing is known for producing a high return on investment (ROI). In fact, 84% of businesses rate affiliate marketing as a better marketing channel than others. In addition to increasing ROI, affiliate marketing produced an average return on ad spend (ROAS) of 12:1 across all industries. To determine your ROI, divide your gross profit — your revenue minus your costs — by your costs, and then multiply it by 100. 

Low Start-up Costs

To protect your bottom line, it’s essential to avoid getting tied into pricey and unprofitable purchases. Compared to other advertising techniques, affiliate marketing allows marketers to partner with online retailers at a much lower cost. It’s also responsible for 16% of U.S. eCommerce sales, which proves how beneficial it can be for companies. 

Increased Traffic

With affiliate marketing, you’re likely to witness a surge in traffic to your site. Not only do affiliates expand your audience, but they also bring them to your site. When traffic volume is higher, your rankings improve, brand awareness grows, and sales and profitability increase. 

Reputation Boost

After building a reliable affiliate network to promote your brand, you will soon begin to see how this marketing strategy can also boost your company’s reputation. A business with credibility attracts more consumers and has a more loyal customer base.  Companies with a reputable brand can often charge premium prices for their products or services. 

Brand Recognition

In addition to boosting your reputation, affiliate marketing is a quick and effective method for building strong brand recognition. With affiliates working as brand ambassadors to advertise your company in a relevant, colorful, and positive way, you can also rapidly improve your customer acquisition strategy. Affiliate marketing companies can benefit from building relationships with influencers and bloggers to increase traffic to their sites through word-of-mouth advertising. 

Getting Started

If you’re ready to get started, follow these steps. 

Pick your Niche

Merchants turn to affiliate marketers because they can reach target audiences composed of potential customers. When you pick a specific niche, you’ll be more likely to build an affiliate platform with original content that meets the demands of an underserved audience. It’s wise to pick a niche that offers value to a sizable, underserved audience.

Choose the Right Platform

Use a platform that matches your niche. Consider which platform is best for your audience. You may discover that using a mix of platforms is the best route to help your affiliate marketing endeavors. 

Create a Website and add a Disclosure Page

After you’ve chosen which platform to use, you’ll need to create a website. As an affiliate, you’ll need to let your users know how you make money from your website by adding a disclosure page.

Add a Privacy Policy and Terms of Service Page 

In addition to a disclosure page, you need to include a privacy policy along with a terms of service page. This way, you’ll be protected from legal issues, but also be able to build trust with your audience. 

Join an Affiliate Marketing Network

Joining an affiliate network can both improve income opportunities and streamline relationship-building processes with merchants. While it’s not always necessary, many affiliate networks will help affiliates optimize their chances of success. To find one that best suits a product and audience, researching your different options can lead you in the right direction. 

Expand your Network

Using a mix of digital marketing tactics including SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, and so on can increase your network and your overall audience size. By combining these tactics rather than using only one of them, you may find that your marketing efforts will create a bigger impact. 

Tips for Optimizing Affiliate Marketing Campaign Performance

While affiliate marketing can improve your company's bottom line, it takes work and often requires a lot of optimizations. Here are our top tips to make it pay off. 

Analyze Through Average Performance

Pay close attention to performance metrics by tracking your typical daily, weekly, and monthly average performance. To get a sense of average activity, keep tabs on your leads, clicks, and sales. By collecting average performance data, you can verify whether your campaign is effective and focus on what needs to change. 

Combine Customer Behavior Data with Affiliate Marketing Data

By analyzing customer behavior data along with affiliate marketing data, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of what’s working and not working. This information will help guide your marketing strategy, allowing you to adjust your affiliate marketing campaigns to deliver desired results. 

Look for the Best Converting Sources of Traffic

To optimize your affiliate marketing campaigns, focus on your main traffic sources. Analyze current data to determine any traffic sources or segmented audiences that are generating a high conversion rate. 

Improve your Funnels

Make sure your funnels are designed to make consumers take action. An affiliate marketing funnel is effective when each stage of the clients’ decision-making process is properly mapped out, guiding them to purchase the products they’re searching for.  With the right funnel, the customer journey path will lead consumers to the designated product/service landing page, encouraging them to act on the desired goal.

Partner with MarinOne to Successfully Incorporate Affiliate Marketing into your Paid Media Strategy

Because affiliate marketing offers a big bang for your buck that other strategies can’t compete with, it’s quickly becoming a central aspect of many marketing strategies. With the benefits being so apparent and as the market continues to grow, more businesses are adopting it so they can stay ahead of their competition.

MarinOne has all the tools you need to make affiliate marketing a successful pillar of paid media. We can set you up with actionable tactics that will help you drive more sales, boost conversions, and gain influence, repurposing your affiliate relationships for high performance advertising.

Whether you're new to affiliate marketing or looking to step up your current performance marketing game overall, our MarinOne experts can help. 

There is surely something in our collective consciousness that responds to well-produced persuasive advertisements. From the highly memorable “Mac vs PC” series of ads to Coca-Cola’s use of a classic song from yesteryear, most people have an ad they remember fondly. 

Businesses are constantly trying to gain the attention of customers through new persuasive advertising ideas and some have found more success than others. What’s their secret? Here are a few of the attributes that make some advertisements more persuasive than others. 

Persuasive techniques in advertising

The following are psychological triggers that can be used to nudge people toward making a purchase. 

Tell a Story

A persuasive ad should focus on telling a story that is hard for the viewer to forget. Research suggests that people are 20x more likely to recall stories than facts or figures. More often than not, people remember the story even more than the product, service, or brand being advertised!

How to do it: When you create an ad, use settings with characters that cause the viewer or listener to identify with a character's plight. Give your ads a narrative arc and watch as customers become more engaged.

Use Tailored Messaging

While there are a variety of persuasive advertising tactics that can work for your ad, focus on those that will resonate most with your target audience. Audiences respond better to tailored messaging that illustrates the benefits of what you offer and how it can improve their lives. 

How to do it: In addition to making your messaging emotionally impactful, strive to make it short and sweet. Keeping things simple is a marketing strategy that works best to keep consumers interested. 

Tap into Emotions

Emotions are responsible for the decisions we make in more ways than we realize and they play a far greater role in decision making than logic does. In fact, studies reveal that 70% of viewers are more likely to purchase a product after experiencing an intense emotional response. Connecting with your audience using emotional cues in your advertising — whether you’re making them laugh or pulling at their heartstrings — will make your brand more memorable. 

How to do it: Emotional persuasion begins with understanding your audience. Once you know your audience well, you’ll be able to determine which trigger words are likely to work best. Combining trigger words with storytelling creates emotional engagement. But to truly evoke emotional appeal and gauge attention, make sure to be authentic. 

Incorporate Celebrity Endorsements

The public is highly influenced by celebrities — what they say matters to a lot of people. Using celebrities as part of your promotion strategies will make your ad more persuasive. Tap into the ethos of popular people and online influencers and get them to tout your brand. 

How to do it: Look for celebrities that are relatable to your target audience and a good fit for your brand. Better yet, reach out to celebrities who are already using your product or service. Plan to work through a talent manager or agent. And remember, make your ask very clear and be sure to provide the details of your campaign goals.

5 Persuasive Ads to Inspire You in 2023

With a new year ahead, it’s time to look back and take stock of some of the most persuasive ads that launched during 2022 and why they worked so well. 

Dove “Toxic Influence”

Together with the marketing agency Ogilvy, Dove created this ad as a sequel to their previous campaigns such as “Reverse Selfie”, “Show Us”, and “Legacy” in pursuit of fighting for real beauty standards. 

As part of their self-esteem project, Dove has made it their mission to inspire young individuals to remove toxic beauty advice from their social media feeds. The ad features teenage daughters and their mothers discussing the disturbing promotion of false beauty advice through using deepfakes and face-mapping technology to expose the dangers of social media’s toxic influence. 

What they got right: By ensuring that their ad messaging is authentic, Dove has successfully reframed purchasing their beauty products for their audience. Beyond making people feel good about their brand, the ad focuses on connecting with others, evokes an emotional reaction, and expresses important values. 

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Pringles “Stuck In” 

During 2022's SuperBowl, the chip brand used its ad spot to highlight the 43% of consumers whose hand gets wedged at the bottom of the Pringles tube while trying to get to the last shattered chips. 

The commercial declares that any discomfort their customers experience is “worth it” by highlighting the misadventures a determined Pringle snacker faces as he goes through life with a chip can permanently wedged on his arm. 

What they got right: The brand took a comical approach to address a common pain point that Pringle fans encounter. Their sense of humor caters to the playful side of consumers by pointing to their brand’s heritage as a snack intended to be fun. They also appropriately combined the ad’s message with the perfect soundtrack: “Stuck on You” by Lionel Richie. 

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Specsavers “I Don’t Go”

The optical retail chain Specsavers uses a playful tactic to raise awareness around its home visit proposition. The ad’s goal is to challenge public perceptions around the variety of services the brand offers. It showcases a series of characters laughing off the idea of going into a store since they can experience the service from the comfort of their own home. 

What they got right: Through their ad, Specsavers successfully spotlights its home visits service while also driving brand reappraisal. It’s both powerful and emotive, and most importantly, aims to charm its customers while emphasizing the brand’s purpose of changing lives through better sight.

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Samsung “Love Hurts”

Cleverly crafted, this Samsung ad features a spider named Sam who falls in love with the Samsung Galaxy S22. The ad depicts the arachnid’s rollercoaster of emotions — ardor, pain, and joy — as it realizes the beauty of the phone’s camera lenses. The commercial closes with a happy ending and runs to the tune of “Love Hurts” by the legendary Scottish rock band Nazareth.

What they got right: Through the use of emotional storytelling, Samsung creates a memorable love story that is hard for consumers to forget. By doing so, the brand is able to shed light on its new camera innovation and also ensure a strong positioning in the highly competitive smartphone market. 

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Apple’s “911” 

Apple’s suspenseful ad revolves around how three individuals are conveniently able to call for help from their Apple Watch in the midst of an emergency. It’s as simple as dialing 911 from your wrist, by using Apple’s Emergency SOS feature. 

What they got right: By using real-life trauma to advertise their product and portraying how it can make the difference between life and death, Apple’s ad becomes relatable, effective, chilling, and dystopian all at the same time. It creates a strong emotional response from viewers by striking a balance of fear and goosebumps, illustrating how powerful it can be in saving lives. 

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These ads all attract and persuade viewers through emotional connection, relatability, and shared values — but above all, storytelling. These are the most powerful ways to create an ad that is sure to resonate with your audience.

How MarinOne can help you reach your audience

MarinOne can help you extract maximum value from your most persuasive marketing materials across different mediums, platforms, and channels. To find out how, contact one of our MarinOne experts today.

Create Landing Pages that Convert

Your marketing landing pages are receiving a lot of traffic — but are they converting visitors into leads? A landing page is an essential part of your marketing strategy for attracting new prospects and pulling them further into the customer funnel. 

The average conversion rate for landing pages is 2.35% across industries. Of those, 25% of sites have a conversion rate of 5.31% or above. The top 10% of sites have a conversion rate of 11.45% or higher. If your conversion rate isn’t reaching the high end of these percentages, we have some key strategies to share that will help you create top-performing landing pages that convert.

Eight Ways to Create a Landing Page that Converts

Here are actionable tips to get your landing page to convert like the top 10%.

Create a Good UX

For an optimal user experience, follow the best design principles. Sometimes, even if your copy is good, a poor design can hurt your landing page conversion rate. 

What you need to do: Test different designs and tweak the highest-converting elements until you reach an ideal landing page look, feel, and experience. 

Example: Lyft

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Lyft’s landing page is well-designed and well-balanced, with a good proportion of text and imagery. With a single-field form and a CTA that stands out, they make it easy for users to sign up right there and then. The page also includes a benefit-oriented headline, encouraging visitors to take the next step. 

Include Testimonials

Using social proof as part of your marketing strategy is one of the easiest tactics to adopt. Once you’ve successfully driven visitors to your website, you want them to stay there. Findings reveal that online reviews impact 88% of consumers’ buying decisions. Customers don’t trust brands as much as they trust other people. Using testimonials on your landing page can also:

• Give you the opportunity to showcase important features in an easy-to-read format
• Help you get ahead of your competition
• Establish use cases that might otherwise not be highlighted in marketing copy
• Give prospects a chance to read a review that addresses their concerns
• Demonstrate your product has been approved by a wide range of different people

What you need to do: Include testimonials on your landing page by displaying simple quotes or videos to help build trust. Alternatively, link the quotes to a person’s direct social profile. To add a more personal touch, use customer photos where possible. 

Example: KeyScouts

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KeyScouts is an online marketing agency that has chosen to use a socially proven customer testimonial widget on their landing page. Not only does it look authentic, but for visitors who want to verify that a review is real, it connects them to the reviewer’s LinkedIn profile. 

Keep Forms Short (and don’t forget to link to a thank you page)

You don’t want to sacrifice lead quality, but if you find a way to eliminate a form field or two, it could have a serious impact on your conversion rate. When you reduce the number of form fields, even by one, it improves your conversion rate by almost half. If users have to go through a lengthy process just to receive your offer, chances are they will leave the site without completing the form. 

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What you need to do: Determine the value of what your offer will bring your consumers. Then begin formulating how many fields, and what types, to show your user, eliminating any that are unnecessary. 

Example: Shopify

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Shopify has created a single field on their landing page, making it as easy and quick as possible for customers to take action. All you have to do is provide your email address to start a free trial. When a form is simple to complete and customers don’t have to offer up too much personal information, they may be more willing to commit. 

Compel Visitors to act NOW

Leverage a sense of scarcity and urgency. This creates higher demand by inducing FOMO (fear of missing out), thereby motivating consumers to act faster. However, scarcity alone will not create demand. Using a combination of the value of an item and showing consumers that they can trust you as a vendor when the deadline hits is key. 

What you need to do: Determine what offer will drive urgency and decide how you want to present it. Be sure to make a clear and meaningful distinction between the offer and the normal price. You can use keywords like “hurry,” “limited quantity available,” and “time is running out.” Using red throughout your designs is also a powerful tactic that tends to attract consumer attention. 

Example: Amazon

There’s a reason Amazon is one of the most widely used e-commerce sites. If you’re already an avid Amazon shopper, you’re probably well aware that it’s one of the best places to strike a good deal—and that’s because Amazon knows how to make its customers keep coming back for discounts. They show you the quantity left for the product you’re considering with a harmless “order soon” side note that generates impulsive purchases. Amazon also masters the principle of creating urgency by sneaking in copy that lets you know how much time you have left. And if that’s not enough, they incentivize customers to act quickly by advertising “lightning deals” and offering warped perspectives on savings to “trick” you into buying things. 

Use Video

If you aren’t already using videos on your landing page, it’s time to start. Videos are a valuable way to create trust and comfort. It gives the information you’re conveying more context and makes it more personal. In fact, businesses that utilize video as part of their content marketing strategy see an 86% increase in conversion rates. 

What you need to do: Define why your visitors need your solution and what’s going to happen next. If you can effectively answer these questions in your video, you will exponentially increase your chances of landing more conversions. 

Example: PartnerMD

PartnerMD uses a video to address the common pain points of the normal healthcare experience. In the video, there is a clear explanation of what PartnerMD offers and why concierge medicine is the best solution. More importantly, the video explains why the form is there and what the visitor will accomplish by filling it out. 

Don’t Underestimate the Power of White Space

Using white space on your landing page helps you create a visual hierarchy that guides the viewer where you want them to go. By focusing on white space placement, you can strategically draw attention to the most important elements of your page first. Essentially, creating a bigger impact for your content. 

What you need to do: Break up your content by separating text from images to improve readability. Remove any distractions and give all elements enough surrounding space so your landing page isn’t cluttered. 

Example: Wix 

Wix has created a captivating and stunning illustration of a website design on its landing page. The headline copy is short and to the point, the white text is easy to read, and the use of white space is carefully balanced with the other elements on the page. By using white space, the page’s touchpoints are clear, encouraging visitors with a direct call to action. 

Grab Attention with the Right Imagery

Using relevant images or humanizing your offer can make it more relatable, encouraging visitors to convert more easily. Images usually catch consumers’ eyes before they even read your headline. In fact, because our brains process images 60,000 times faster than text, they influence a visitor’s immediate opinion about your brand. 

What you need to do: Since you don’t have long to make a first impression, choose your images wisely. Make sure the images you select accurately promote your product or services. And of course, use visuals that are high quality. Your goal should be to create a landing page that is memorable, easily understood, and emotionally relatable.

Example: TUSHY

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Tushy’s landing page is creatively brilliant. From a humorous image to its soft pastel color palette and clean design, they successfully capture their visitors’ attention. It’s minimal, attractive, and memorable. Their value proposition is laser-focused, identifying who the target audience is while highlighting the benefit of their product. 

Eliminate Customer Fears

There are many strategies you can use to alleviate customer fears. Take buyers’ concerns into account, and you’ll be seeing more conversions before you know it. By eliminating any hesitations they have about your product or service, you can boost their willingness to buy. 

What you need to do: Give consumers the confidence that your product is one they can trust. Keep your promises. Follow through on shipping policies if you offer them, consider offering money-back guarantees, and give customers a way to test-drive your product. 

Example: Warby Parker

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Warby Parker gives customers ease of mind by letting them try on glasses before fully committing to buying them. By giving their customers time to make a decision from the comfort of their own homes, Warby Parker sways its customers towards a more enjoyable experience. 

Ready to Start Converting Leads?

When done right, landing pages can generate a significant number of qualified leads. By implementing our tips you’ll get ahead of your competitors in no time. 

Contact MarinOne today to learn how our platform can help improve your paid media management processes and get the landing page conversion rates you seek.

Modern consumer expectations and behaviors demand a creative edge from advertisers and a winning strategy that customers will respond to. Even when you know your target audience well, it’s not always easy to figure out the secret formula that gets consumers to say, “here’s my money.” However, when the right advertising techniques are used, you will captivate your audiences’ attention and direct them enthusiastically into your marketing funnel without them even realizing it. 

In a world where digital overload has made consumers resistant to ads, if you want to keep your audience engaged, you need to go above and beyond. Here are 13 compelling advertising techniques that will help you do just that and deliver the results you're seeking. 

13 Advertising Techniques the Deliver Results

Color Psychology

Many colors elicit a specific emotional or physical reaction and, in doing so, shape human behavior. When it comes to your brand and your marketing strategies, they not only influence perceptions, but can create an intentional mood for consumers, setting the right tone and conveying a desired message. In fact, research has proven that between 62% and 92% of people make a subconscious judgment to purchase something based on color alone. 

Lego’s “Make Your Own Story” ad, for example, uses color psychology to develop a playful scene with Star Wars figures. The brand strategically places the figures into a fun, casual atmosphere to tell a new story. By selecting orange — known to evoke emotions of warmth, friendliness, and enthusiasm — as the background color, they’ve created an open and inviting mood. 

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Partner with Influencers and get Celebrity Endorsements 

Partnering with a well-recognized influencer can help fast track your marketing efforts by getting your brand on the map. Doing so will also help build a big following. When consumers see popular influencers vouching for your products or services, it has a much more powerful impact on consumers than it would if the message were to come from your brand directly. 

Take Nike, for instance. In their video ad with Billie Eilish, the brand successfully reached audiences through partnering with a star who’s recognized for her distinct style. The pop artist gave meaning to the campaign, placing an emphasis on sustainability. 

“I want my collaboration with Nike to tell a story that not only highlights the importance of recycling but also reminds us that we need to take better care of our planet,” said Eilish. 

By taking a stance on a social issue, the star took the brand initiative to new heights, tying into the emotion of the buyer to help create a following. As Nike has demonstrated, celebrity marketing is a high-impact marketing tool that can produce significant gains — an increase in brand awareness, credibility, and sales.  

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Remember Time is a Valuable Asset to Consumers

According to recent statistics, 64% of customers prefer to shop with companies that can accommodate their needs in real time. In this day and age, consumers expect businesses to deliver results immediately, and if they can’t, consumers will look for someone else who can. No matter what product or service you offer, consumers are drawn to speed — how fast you can meet their expectations, or how you can save them time so they can spend it doing other things. Be sure to incorporate your time-saving advantages into all of your messaging across various marketing channels. 

Sedex, a supply chain company, demonstrates their commitment to speed by using extreme illustrations in their ads to support their promise to consumers: “Trust us. We deliver it fast.” Consumers take comfort in knowing that they will get what they want, when they want it. When brands live up to consumer expectations, it results in customer loyalty, brand trust, and more. 

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Focus on Needs, not Features  

It’s easy for advertisers to fall into the trap of focusing on their product’s features. However, customers aren’t compelled to make a purchasing decision based on features alone. When you sell an outcome that impacts the consumer on an emotional level, customers are more persuaded by the value a product has to offer to them. 

In the case of WeTransfer, their global brand campaign politely asks consumers to “Please leave”, explaining that their file sharing service is designed with the customer’s needs in mind so they can make the most of their time and get back to living their real lives. By focusing on needs instead of its features, WeTransfer highlights its company’s values: that it puts people first. 

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Make it Relatable

To resonate with your customers on a deep level, create an ad that feels immediately familiar and establishes a meaningful connection. When you inspire a strong emotional reaction, you are more likely to convince consumers that you understand how they feel. 

Nivea Men’s brilliant ad for Active Age moisturizers is a stellar example. In their “Because Life Makes Wrinkles” campaign, the brand illustrates how ordinary moments in life take a toll on us, causing wrinkles— something many people can relate to. Whether it’s taking care of children or getting in a fender bender, Nivea makes it apparent that stress affects everyone, and using a moisturizer is something everyone can benefit from. 

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Use Landmarks in your Design 

Using landmark images in your advertising campaigns can be a valuable visual asset. In fact, they can influence consumers' attentional focus and subsequent judgments. Take Asics, for example. To entice their marathon runners, the brand used a beautiful print ad to appeal to its consumers, conveying that they have the entire city of Los Angeles on the sole of their shoe. With a piercing image like that, who wouldn’t be motivated to go for a run?

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Minimalism

Implementing minimalism in advertising can be profoundly effective. When thoughtfully crafted, minimalist digital ads can get your message across without distracting clutter or over-stimulation, and are also more likely to increase conversion rates. These simple messages can be both thought-provoking and enticing for your consumers, ultimately capturing their attention in a way that motivates them to take action. 

McDonald’s McDelivery service has mastered the art of this advertising technique. Their ads are simple, yet bold. In their campaign, elegant illustrations speak louder than words. As you can see from the example, the iconic food chain has proven that less, really is more. 

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Repetition 

Repetition is key to keeping your brand or product at the forefront of consumers’ minds. The marketing Rule of 7 states that a consumer needs to see or hear something seven times before it actually sinks in. Exposure to repeating images, words, and messages makes consumers more likely to remember your brand. Thankfully, today’s digital environment provides multiple channels like your website, social media, video, and online advertising to make it easy to add repetition to your marketing strategy. 

Of the many brands that have utilized this approach, L’Oréal has proven that frequency paired with repetition can make a brand memorable. Their famous slogan “Because You’re Worth It” sprinkled throughout all their ads has been ingrained in the minds of millions of consumers. The cosmetics giant has not only created a sense of familiarity and trust amongst its customers, but has also successfully achieved brand recognition. 

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Body Language 

In advertising, body language can have more influence on an audience than words can. Body language is a powerful form of nonverbal communication that can translate a message without relying on text to prove a point. A person’s body movements, posture, and/or facial expressions are three of the most common forms of body language that can be adapted for your ads. 

In its “Melt” series of campaigns, Perrier incorporates a Renaissance twist into its advertisements based upon a Surrealist classic painted by Salvador Dali. By combining it with attractive models who use body language to exaggerate extreme heat, the brand creates an emotional trigger response from audiences, making them realize how much the sparkling refresher can quench a person’s thirst. Through using timeless and thoughtful imagery, Perrier is able to communicate a strong resonating image that makes their brand stand out. 

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Association

Association marketing relies mostly on sophisticated psychology and aims to create associations for the viewer through feelings, ideas, places, or nostalgia. Associations often lead to strong, positive brand recognition and affirm its position as a premium service or product.

Throughout Lacoste’s Ageless campaign, the brand seamlessly emphasizes its ageless style. By featuring unusual pairings of people across their print ads and commercials, Lacoste points to the fact that no matter what your age is, clothes can still make you look fashionable. 

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Turn to Pop Culture 

Using pop culture cleverly has been a mainstay of pro marketing campaigns for years. Leveraging pop culture icons in your advertisements is a great way to gain content visibility, increase brand loyalty, and build a strong connection with consumers. Not only does it have an enormous impact on buying behavior, but pop culture influences also shape your brand's personality, making your customers feel like you’re one of them. 

In this imaginative ad, Band-Aid selectively chose the Hulk to represent that its brand heals, protects, and is strong. The brand’s messaging is clear, concise, and uses a pop icon to market their flexible-fabric band-aids. The ad speaks volumes and the color choices effectively set a healing and calming mood. 

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Symbolism

Symbolism attracts consumer attention and alters buying psychology. Symbols play a crucial role in successfully conveying messages and creating meaning. The most common uses for symbols are dramatic visuals, metaphors, or similarities that draw attention or interest towards a product. Essentially, symbols are a creative visual shortcut that can be used to effectively build your brand and convey a concept that will be remembered. 

In its cleverly designed park assist ad, Volkswagen compares a spiky hedgehog squeezed between two goldfish in vulnerable plastic bags to the difficulty of parallel parking. With a unique image, the brand makes a powerful statement and a lasting impression in consumer minds. 

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Highlight the Problem AND the Solution

Consumers respond more favorably when brands make it easy for them to spot a solution quickly and affordably. IKEA is no exception. They have mastered the art of solving space-related challenges for their customers through smart storage solutions. 

As is their tradition, IKEA usually uses quirky means to get their message across. In their brilliant “Need Space” campaign, they highlight the issue of space crunching, depicting how users stuff one shoe into another to save storage space. But, they don’t just address a pain point. They provide the solution too — a sleek and thin shoe cabinet to help customers make the best use of their living spaces. 

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Mastering your Ad Campaigns

While there are countless tactics you can use in your advertising strategy to create a strong appeal, using the ones that resonate best with your audience will ultimately generate the most success. 

Change is constant in digital advertising, but these techniques and strategies are timeless and will continue to be effective now and in the future. In the campaigns above, we can see that clever visuals, subtle symbolism, strong associations and pop culture influence can go a long way.

From the advertising examples above, it’s clear that if done right, ad campaigns have the power to evoke emotions and keep products in our minds, influencing our buying decisions both directly and indirectly. 

If you’re looking to create a lasting impact with your ads, MarinOne can help. Contact our team to get started today and learn more about how we can help you continuously improve your marketing campaigns.

For marketers, there are more ways than ever before to conduct outreach, contact your target audience, and increase sales. With so many different methods available, it can be a challenge to determine which will produce the best outcomes and which ones are worth incorporating into your marketing efforts. 

While everyone has their favorite strategies, certain forms of outreach have proven to have a higher rate of success. The key is in the variety of methods you employ, and the consistency with which you use them. 

8 Proven Prospecting Techniques That Actually Work

While excelling at prospecting still demands mastery of many of the same age-old techniques that worked 30 to 50 years ago, there are new approaches you can take to level up your game. 

Here are eight advanced tactics you can use to secure more sales. 

Use a Qualification Framework

To assess which prospects are strong potential buyers, you’ll need to identify the major criteria that you and your salesforce team consider to define a good candidate. Before you reach out to your leads, develop a set of qualification questions to help prioritize your outreach efforts. This way, you’ll discover which leads are worth connecting with, and which can be ruled out immediately. 

Create a Lead Scoring System

Don’t let your hottest leads grow cold while you spend time on lukewarm prospects. After you’ve identified which leads are qualified, rank them using a lead scoring system so you can prioritize advancing those most likely to close. Develop a lead scoring system by assigning value based on data pulled from previous lead successes. 

Follow your Prospects on Social Media

The best insights into your leads will come from your leads themselves. Scanning their social media channels can help you determine whether or not they’re a good prospect by yielding relevant data. LinkedIn research reveals that social selling influences more than 50% of revenue. Staying informed about your audience’s interests and values can give you a deeper understanding of their needs while simultaneously allowing you to build rapport and win their trust. 

Strategically Structure Your Communication

The way you approach your prospects can impact how you close a deal or lose one. Use these methods to discover the best ways to reach out.

• “Wow” them: You don’t need a complex strategy to capture attention. If you’re going to draft an email, go beyond a standard pitch. Instead, use a clear statement of what you do and how you’re different, one that makes the prospect say “wow.” With so many software suites available on the market today, testing emails to see which work best is easy to do. If your outreach involves phone calls, recognize that leads warm up more when you make it personal. Pay close attention to what their needs are, gain a clear understanding of their industry, and research your competitors. By knowing what they want, you can tap into solving their needs and “wow” them with a golden pitch they’ll respond well to. 
• Offer added value: With any kind of sales communication, adding value is critical. Leads are more responsive when you win them over with free offers. Consider giving them a free demo or providing a sales guide. Not only does this give you an opportunity for a follow-up later on, but it gives your prospects a chance to become more familiar with your products. 
• Use a single call to action: Whether you’re pitching your lead via email or on the phone, ending with a single call to action is key to encouraging them to take the next step. Request a follow-up phone call, another meeting, or ask them directly to buy. When presented with a single, clear CTA, your lead is more focused and you’re more likely to close a deal.

Ask for Referrals and Recommendations

Referrals and recommendations are a powerful sales prospecting technique that can earn you the credibility you deserve. Word-of-mouth is incredibly impactful and should not be underestimated. In fact, when making buying decisions, 91% of B2B buyers are heavily influenced by first-hand accounts.

With numbers that high, it pays to be proactive about tapping into your network. You can use this opportunity to build relationships with your current customers by offering them discounts or other incentives for referring new people. Sometimes, it might be as simple as getting a testimonial, quote, information for a case study, or other social proof from past customers, all of which can elevate your leads’ confidence in you, ultimately converting them into a prospect.

Consider Using Video

The rise of video is one of the latest trends sales prospecting pros are using as a marketing and outreach tool. Incorporating video throughout your sales cycle can boost your numbers significantly. According to current statistics, after watching a video, 88% of buyers continue to complete a purchase, and 73% prefer to learn about products this way. With video rising in popularity, it’s worth taking advantage of this medium. 

Be Well Aware of the Competitive Landscape

To be a sales prospecting pro, it’s critical that you scope out your competition. By keeping a close eye on the competitive landscape, you can rest assured that you are optimally positioned for your intended audience. If you aren’t already doing so, analyze magic quadrant results, follow competitor news, survey competitor websites, and track the latest advancements across relevant industries. 

Leverage Marketing Automation Tools

Complement your prospecting strategy with an automation tool so you can nurture your leads and convert stragglers into sales. By using these tools, you can link content distribution, allowing you to get the right message out to the right people at the right time. Automating various processes to optimize your marketing-sales pipeline can convert leads into customers more quickly and efficiently. With the right tool, you can segment groups based on specific criteria, prioritize based on highest needs, generate interest along every step of the buying process, and much more. 

Closing More Deals with MarinOne

To stay ahead of the curve, sales pros need to be proactive about leveraging the latest prospecting tactics and technologies. From researching your prospects to using automation tools, every step counts when it comes to closing deals faster and more effectively. By mastering each of the above techniques, you’ll have an edge over competitors and will see better results from your outreach efforts. With so many opportunities to help you outsource work and many automation tools at your fingertips, along with a vast array of software choices to help you work more efficiently, you can multiply your successes and fill your pipeline with an abundance of qualified leads.

Using tools by MarinOne can help your marketing team optimize paid advertising processes, bring in more interested candidates into the sales funnel, and ultimately close more deals. MarinOne is a customizable, enterprise-class solution that can help accelerate your paid media efforts.

Ready to start prospecting for new leads? To learn more about how MarinOne can help you achieve the results you want, get in touch with one of our team experts today.

Affiliate content has skyrocketed in popularity alongside social media marketing and other digital marketing tactics. Since social platforms have inconsistent monetization policies, influencer content offers creators a way to vouch for their favorite brands while generating income. Lifestyle brands, in particular, can align themselves with creators whose audiences overlap with their own. 

Lauren Neels, Customer Engagement Manager and Marin Software’s resident expert on all things related to ecommerce, paid search, and digital marketing, shares some valuable insights about how lifestyle brands can use creator content to reach highly specific audiences more effectively. 

How influencer content can help brands reach their audience 

Shed the negative perceptions associated with advertising 

While advertisements used to be a popular way to reach large audiences, viewers seem to have had enough. According to research from Statista, 41% of people online find themselves regularly annoyed by advertisements. More than a quarter of web surfers went as far as installing ad blockers to make their browsing experience better. 

Advertisements are everywhere but Lauren shares that “people are more likely to trust influencer content since it comes from trusted creators that already have a relationship with their audience. This is evidenced by higher conversion rates experienced by businesses that leverage this type of content in their marketing campaigns.”

Allow your customers to engage with your content using actionable touchpoints 

It’s not enough for your customers to view your content. Businesses must be able to measure how their ads are performing and ensure that each investment is yielding the appropriate results. 

“Affiliate content is generally better than television ads for businesses that want to engage with the customer. This content is usually clickable or has some other CTA that customers can actively engage with,” Lauren shares. 

Encourage greater conversion rates compared to cheaper outreach alternatives

Businesses can sometimes show a preference for alternatives such as television or billboard advertising. However, each method of outreach has a place within a greater marketing campaign. 

Lauren explains that “paid ads work well for people who already have intent to purchase, but are less effective when people need convincing. Influencer content would be more effective at convincing or when trying to build a brand.”

Influencer content can be repurposed as paid social media posts or ads if needed

Some influencers have very niche audiences, but the reach of their content can be amplified when it is converted or repurposed as paid social media posts. However, Lauren warns that when creator content is converted to paid ads, “not all of that audience has chosen to follow that influencer so some of the trust won’t carry through to the new, wider audience. Conversion rates could go down but your reach is larger. This could help brand awareness, and boosted creator content would still have more trustworthiness than just a paid ad.”

Things to keep in mind while engaging creators for content

Social media trends often change before businesses can hop on them

All social media marketers are intimately aware of how quickly trends can change online. What is fashionable and topical today might be outdated next week. Businesses must always have their finger on the pulse of running trends and have employees that understand these trends to take charge of marketing campaigns that need to run alongside certain fads. 

“If trends change before your approval process is complete, you’re too late. Millennials, for example, have a good idea of how trends work online. Put them in charge and trust them when it comes to trends and how to use them for effective marketing,” Lauren suggests. 

Trends can differ wildly across platforms, content types, and audiences

Marketers often view social media as an effective channel for reaching younger audiences but each platform is unique. Trends, content types, audience demographics and more can differ significantly from platform to platform. TikTok, for example, is more likely to host a younger audience with a preference for short-form video content while Facebook is more likely to host a middle-aged audience with a preference for image-based content. 

Background checks should be conducted for every collaborator you work with

When businesses sponsor a particular creator, they connect the brand with the creator in the minds of the viewer. While this can be a powerful way to gain the trust of customers, it also means that any misdemeanor committed by the creator can be associated with the brand or can lead to backlash against the brand. 

“While apologies are more readily accepted now, it is always better to be in a position where an apology is not required at all,” Lauren recommends that you should “do your research to check the background of people you might be sponsoring to make sure they’re legitimate and not problematic.” 

Rates can vary greatly depending on a creator’s reach, engagement, and more

As audiences become more diverse and use more social media channels, marketers must be strategic in how they spend on each platform and each creator. Marketers must always measure how much a creator is charging against their reach, engagement, history, alignment with the brand, and more. Each of these factors can lead to great variations in asking price from the influencer. 

Affiliate or influencer content should be part of a larger marketing strategy

Affiliate content is a great way to reach targeted audiences and improve engagement rates with the brand. However, it’s not enough for a marketing team to rely exclusively on affiliate or influencer content. Like every other marketing method, creator content should be a smaller part in a larger marketing strategy designed to cover all of a business’ customer bases. 

MarinOne’s modern optimization solution helps marketers ensure that each dollar spent on partner content and other marketing strategies yields maximum results. Our paid advertising management solutions creates automated recommendations to optimize your marketing configurations that will improve return on investment. 

If you would like to reach your customers with relatable and likable content, reach out for a free demo of our solution today.

Do you remember the last advertisement you saw on social media? Chances are the answer is no, and not just because your memory is poor. As soon as you (and most consumers) recognize an ad, you are far more likely to scroll on.

That's why native advertisements are becoming increasingly popular. These “disguised” ads are meant to blend in with their surroundings and give advertisers an extra moment to hook viewers. Native ads are usually found in social media feeds, but they can be used in other places like email newsletters and search engine results pages.

If you are interested in testing this marketing approach at your own business, read on for 8 native advertising examples you can use to start brainstorming.

What is Native Advertising?

Native advertising is a form of online marketing associated with branding that integrates promotions into the content that people are already consuming. Native advertisements are designed to blend in with the surrounding content, making them appear less intrusive and more natural.

Because of their strategic placement, native ads are a powerful way to build brand awareness and connect with a highly targeted audience. Most often found on social media and in long-form written content, these ads have the potential to drive much higher click-through rates and engagement rates when executed well.

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Keys to Effective Native Advertising

Native ads are meant to be a non-disruptive way to share your product or service, so it’s important to keep a few principles in mind when creating them. Here are three key elements to consider:

• Relevancy: Native ads need to be relevant to the user’s interests and what they are already browsing. While this is highly platform-dependent, native ads can be used to provide additional context around a topic, highlight a related offering, or feature customer-generated content.
• Creativity: Although they are intended to blend in with their surroundings, native ads still need to be creative and engaging enough to keep people’s attention. Use AI to create new images, visuals, formats, and messaging to see what works best with your audience.
• Authenticity: The modern consumer can see right past an obvious sales pitch, so it is necessary to be genuine and honest in your native ads. Native advertising should not feel overly promotional — instead, focus on providing value and educating your audience.

How Native Advertising can Backfire

Native advertising sometimes gets a bad rap due to the potential for users to be misled or taken advantage of. Native ads can easily blur the line between an organic post and a sponsored one, which can damage the trust and credibility of a brand.

To make sure that doesn’t happen, avoid these pitfalls:

• Overpromising: Native ads should never make unrealistic or exaggerated claims that don’t align with the product or service you’re offering. Even if the ad is more disguised than normal, always be true to your brand and the value you provide.
• Using misleading visuals: Native ads should never use visual elements that are intended to deceive. This includes images that don’t represent the product or service you offer, or presenting facts or data in a way that might not tell the full story.
• Not being upfront: Native ads should be clearly labeled as sponsored content and not made to look like editorial pieces. To maintain your brand's integrity and reputation, be transparent about who is behind the ad and make sure users can distinguish between promoted content and organic material.

8 Native Advertising Examples for Inspiration

Native ads are all about finding clever ways to advertise while still blending in with the surrounding platform. To give you an idea of what this looks like, here are 8 native ad examples to inspire your creativity:

1) Adidas on Spotify

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Adidas partnered with Spotify to create a unique experience and promote their new shoe line — the Nite Joggers. Users who opted into the interactive campaign would receive a "Nite Score" based on their evening listening habits as well as a personalized playlist. This soundtrack was a blend of favorite hits, new recommendations, and promotional content for Adidas.

This native advertisement is a great example of nondisruptive yet nondeceptive marketing. Although it was clearly an advertising campaign, Adidas was able to engage a targeted audience without interrupting their listening experience. Plus, the company effectively tapped into a growing marketing opportunity in the music streaming industry.

2) General Mills on The Guardian

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General Mills wisely sponsored content on The Guardian to align its brand with regenerative agriculture and small-scale farming. These themes are reinforced with high-quality closeups of their sustainable practices and the families that they work with.

The photos and videos show the human side of food production, which helps viewers establish an emotional connection to the brand. Other than its "Paid content" label, this informative article looks and feels like a regular piece of expository news on The Guardian — making it a powerful example of subtle native advertising.

3) SpongeBob on Instagram

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Where are SpongeBob's original fans hanging out? On Instagram, of course. Nickelodeon's hit show recently partnered with Instagram to create an interactive filter called "What SpongeBob character are you?"

This collaboration is one of the most engaging native advertising examples on this list because it tapped into the nostalgia of an older generation and made it easy for anyone to participate. The SpongeBob fan base didn't care whether it was a marketing ploy or not. This filter was genuinely fun, it fit in with other content on the platform, and it allowed people to reconnect with the characters they love.

4) Purina with BuzzFeed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJPJUaZZOss&t=12s (to embed)

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Purina teamed up with BuzzFeed to create a clever marketing video from the perspective of a cat. The cute and comical two-minute production explains how cats view their responsibility to take care of humans.

Although it highlights Tidy Cats, Purina's cat litter product, the video is not purely promotional. In fact, it offers real entertainment value to its targeted audience and anyone who can appreciate cats' quirks. Even almost 10 years after its creation, this content marketing example still sets the standard for how to both reinforce brand identity and drive sales.

5) Taco Bell on Snapchat

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Taco Bell created a Snapchat filter that turned users' faces into a taco. Released just in time for Cinco de Mayo, the filter was an instant viral hit with more than 224 million global views.

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This campaign was a success because Taco Bell nailed both the timing and the culture of Snapchat with its native ad placement. Plus, the company was able to boost brand awareness by prominently including its logo on every snap. 

6) Netflix on WSJ

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To promote its upcoming show Narcos, Netflix worked with the Wall Street Journal to create an interactive webpage on "Cocainenomics", the business of the Medellin cartel's drug trafficking operation. This detailed profile of a $4 billion underground empire is the perfect fit for the business and finance-minded readers of the WSJ.

Netflix put together one of the most compelling native advertising examples on this list by elevating a standard piece of content from the daily newspaper. The article reads like a piece of investigative journalism but is paired with clickable maps and timelines, and a timed quiz.

For most WSJ consumers, the portal likely serves as one of the most interesting stories they read that day. And if readers are hooked by the topic, watching Narcos is a natural next step for even more detail.

7) Allbirds on The New York Times

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Allbirds partnered with The New York Times to create an incredible full-page experience for readers, complete with sound, vivid imagery, and responsive video. This native advertisement ran as an article in the paper, but rather than promoting its signature footwear directly, the brand instead focused on sustainability.

The Allbirds article dives into the importance of birds to our environment, and what eco-conscious readers can do to help birds. At the conclusion of the post, the brand offers a single call to action — visit the Allbirds website to learn more about conscious commerce.

8) Samsung on TikTok

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To raise awareness for the Galaxy Z Fold3, Samsung launched a Branded Hashtag Challenge on TikTok. Boosted by TopView ads, Brand Takeover ads, and Reach & Frequency ads, the phone maker was able to eclipse more than 1 billion video views.

Samsung's "I'Mpossible Generation" campaign slogan was a nod to the innovative foldable smartphone. And the challenge's catchy tune and promise of prizes engaged creators from all over Vietnam. The native ad strategy not only caught fire boosting Samsung's brand awareness, but it also proved social commerce is alive and well with a 14% uplift in sales.

Final thoughts

Native ads have the potential to hook viewers in a more subtle way than traditional advertising methods. With relevant and engaging content, brands can communicate their values, foster an emotional connection, and fill their marketing funnels.

The most successful native advertising examples leverage creative content and fit in seamlessly with the surrounding user experience. By matching the appropriate look, feel, and voice of the adjacent content, brands can break through the noise to capture attention and form authentic relationships with potential customers.

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Daniel Anderson is a guest contributor to Marin Software.

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Communication is the most important arrow sales teams have in their quiver for generating leads and producing sales. It also happens to be the most important tool for marketers to create relevant, qualified content, personalized customer query forms, and more. Making excellent communication an initiative throughout your organization will help you approach more prospects and increase conversion rates.

Unfortunately however, most demand generation tactics still do not encourage easy two-way communication between the brand and the user. You can create loyalty with existing customers and attract new potential customers by reaching them with your content, but for most companies, users can really only get in touch with a brand via the customer service team.

This is why we as marketers need to start to view customer service as a lead-generating channel. Opportunities to keep customers with your organization for the long run, upsell customers or encourage repeat purchases, and create an incredible brand reputation are omnipresent in the customer service process. These are all key ways that your customer service team contributes to the overarching bottom line. So how can you formalize making customer service a cog in your larger demand generation machine? Read on to learn more about strategies for making customer service a revenue-generating team.

Customer Service and Demand Generation

Freshdesk’s blog says, “Customer service is the key to generating leads in your marketing strategies that can be used not only to develop prospects but to nurture them and enhance customer retention.” 

Still, customer service will only have a positive effect on your customer journey if buyers feel their concerns are heard and addressed. The first step is to follow customer service best practices to leave every person who contacts your company on an individual basis with a great experience. Once your team has a solid understanding of how to make customers happy and resolve issues quickly, then you can funnel energy toward retention and lifetime value.

Marketing strategies have evolved as catchy advertisements and self-promotional events no longer attract consumers. Now organizations are turning their focus to being recognized for their services and products and learning to develop long-term customer loyalty. Here are a few ways you can do the same.

• Be methodical about the number of audiences you target and create a unique customer journey for each persona. This will create an inbound dynamic that will engage prospects more efficiently.
• You can build brand awareness among customers via email marketing. This helps to keep your business top of mind–it can be particularly impactful for service-oriented companies that may not have a physical product to sell. The more people recognize your brand, the greater likelihood you will see more ratings and customer responses coming in, increasing brand equity and website traffic.
• Advertising is the best short-term tactic any marketer has. While it can sometimes be pricey, especially when compared to PR, SEO, or other slow-burning channels, a great digital advertisement can capture the attention of thousands very quickly. This will kickstart your business and help you create a pool of people to nurture for lifetime sales.

How can you Integrate Customer Service into your Demand Generation Channels?

Customer service can easily use your marketing team's messaging to directly communicate your brand’s ethics. Do this by showing how your team emulates those values in real time instead of simply telling prospects what your company stands for without supportive action. Here are some ways to optimize that communication cycle.

Use Personal Lead Information to Endow Future Communications 

Before initiating any communication with a customer service contact, ask the user relevant questions like their name, email address, or contact number. It helps your team to have the data they require to develop future relationships with the client and be proactive should technical issues arrive, like dropped phone calls or ineffective email sends.

Employ Chatbots to Streamline Response Processes

Automated chat features have assisted quite a bit in this area. Developing frequently asked questions are a great way to get your chat feature up and running. It also allows wiggle room in the customer service process that keeps you in the drivers seat. Once a customer has exhausted the FAQ series in chat, your CS team members can then jump in and interact with customers with more complex queries to help them get their issues resolved. You'll be surprised how many customers will get the answers they need from the pre-loaded questions, which saves your customer service reps valuable time.

Engage with Customers Even When Your Team is Offline

In addition to saving time during regular office hours with FAQs, chatbots can also be setup to communicate with customers 24/7 when your customer support agents need to go offline. For issues that require a representative, these chatbots can ask potential visitors for their email address or phone number for your team to respond later the same day. According to the latest surveys, 82% of visitors who interact with these chatbots are more likely to convert into long-term purchasers. 

Maximize Your Efforts with an Outbound Call Center

Outbound call centers have been an integral part of sales and marketing strategies for a long time, adopting methods beyond cold calling. They can coordinate with your CRM platform and various other tools delivering targeted user experiences. This can also be a good way to utilize customer service teams' time when they don't have a high number of inbound calls.

Get the most out of your call center services by transitioning from analog to online phone services, as VoIP mechanisms provide customer service attributes like call recording, automatic tracking, customer concerns analysis, and more.

Key Takeaways

Customer service is a crucial part of your association for building a strong brand identity and to keep customers coming back to your organization again and again. Demand generation tactics are far more successful when paired with great customer service. Look at how to streamline these processes and make your CS team a revenue contributor to the company's bottom line by using tools like chatbots and live chat, seeking customer feedback, and training your customer support representatives on how to identify and take advantage of upsell or cross-sell opportunities.

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Joy D'Cruz is a guest contributor to Marin Software.

There are plenty of online shoppers in this day and age, but there is also increased competition! If you are looking for a way to stand out from the crowd, increase engagement, and say thank you to your customers, get into the spirit of giving with competitions and giveaways.

Here are our top four favorite competition strategies to incentivize shoppers to get involved with your digital communications, boosting sales in the process.

Competition idea #1: Video submissions

Improve your brand awareness with a themed video contest that asks customers to perform a specific task or show off forms of customer appreciation via video. User-generated content is a great way to spread the word about your products or services.

Some popular video contest ideas include:

• Sing your favorite trending song
• Show off your best product idea
• Demonstrate how fast you can perform a certain task relating to your product (speediest submission wins)
• Send some before/after shots of an area of your home the product improved

Always set a time limit for the video submission, and be sure to share the user-submitted videos and tag your customer's social media accounts (with their permission). You can choose the winner by the highest customer votes; be sure to follow a strict deadline and shout out the winner on your website as well as your social channels. 

Competition idea #2: Refer a friend

There are plenty of ways to get your content in front of people who do not already follow you, such as hashtag marketing and refer-a-friend competitions, which both work in a similar fashion. An effective way to cut through the competitive noise is by getting recommendations people will trust; and who better than their personal friends.

Get in front of new customers by running a referral contest and generate organic word-of-mouth while boosting brand awareness and minimizing customer acquisition costs. This approach can also help to retain existing customers by offering a discount for the person doing the referring.

Some referral contest best practices to consider include:

• Offering a reward to the person who refers, and their referral
• Setting a purchase limit to earn the referral reward
• Ensuring you have social sharing buttons available to share the referral link
• Providing a dynamic referral link for individual customers
• Setting a contest deadline 

When promoting your competition, don't forget about using offline channels, especially if your business has a physical presence. Make your storefront a feature with posters, props, or other forms of visual communication that grab the attention of new shoppers.

Competition idea #3: Run a sweepstakes contest

A sweepstakes contest is a little different from a standard contest, but is still a valuable engagement-boosting activity. As all participants receive some form of prize, people are more likely to enter as they are not off-put by high odds. Prepare to receive a high number of entrants, all of whom require a prize, so keep your prize budget in mind when choosing rewards. The lowest level prize can be as simple as a small discount off the next purchase (encouraging purchases in the process).

As sweepstakes have many winners, these can all be selected by chance, like in a lottery. This is a great way to acquire valuable information which you can use for future business marketing strategies and growth with data mapping. Think about the type of data you would like to gain about your customers, and use these as question prompts to enter the sweepstakes.

Sweepstakes are very easy to run, as all you need is a simple landing page that collects email addresses for people to enter. The key with sweepstakes is promotion, and it is important to consider the following before running one:

• Ensure you have enticing visuals and prizes to grab attention
• Make it easy for people to enter
• Set a predefined probability for choosing the winner
• Include attractive social sharing buttons
• Give bonus entries to people who complete short surveys

Competition idea #4: Gamification 

If you can make your competition fun, you'll likely get more participation. This is where a gamification contest can be an effective tool; simply play a game to win a prize! Incentivize unique actions and then reward customers, gaining their business and loyalty in the process.

Gamification contests can include any of the following:

• Spin the wheel
• Scratch and win
• Enter a quiz or raffle
• Scavenger hunt
• Play trivia

Make sure the theme of the game is relevant to the season and that it is easy and fun to navigate. Promote the game on your site's homepage and social channels, and keep the prizes a surprise to increase interest.

Creating fans of your brand

People who enjoy your brand’s output are more likely to become repeat customers. Rewarding followers for their loyalty is a great way to keep them coming back to your business. Consider the cost of your competition, how much the prize you are offering is worth, and if the cost is viable when considering the potential spend of a new, loyal customer. The marketing return of a contest should also come into consideration, as the exposure it gives you to new segments can often be more cost-effective than some other marketing methods. MarinOne can also help with this by supercharging your paid search, social, and e-commerce advertising, so reach out to meet with one of our expert consultants today.

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Luke Carlino is a guest contributor for Marin Software.

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People rely heavily on Google searches to discover new brands and products during their purchasing journey. Meanwhile, every business is looking to increase its visibility, reach its target audience, and get maximum return on investment. Google Shopping can play a pivotal role in a company's ability to successfully achieve their goals. 35% of all product searches start on Google. Think of how many new customers Google can help you reach and what that could mean for your business.

According to Andrew Gonzales, President of Business Loans, "Upcoming eCommerce startups must understand how to take advantage of the wide reach of Google Shopping to help get their products out there in front of those that need to see them and boost their sales."

This guide will walk you through the basics of Google Shopping, its importance, and how to leverage it to get the best return on investment.

What is Google Shopping?

Google Shopping is a service that displays products relevant to a user's search query. With Google Shopping, e-commerce retailers can advertise their products directly on the search engine by providing key information such as; images, prices, and descriptions that will help build trust and make more customers convert.

According to Kyle Zien, Director of Growth Marketing at Felix, "Google Shopping is a great way for businesses to build credibility for their brand and drive more sales. Not all merchants are accepted into Google Shopping, so getting your product listed on the Google Shopping platform is usually an immediate trust builder."

For maximum returns, brands must understand how best to optimize their Google shopping campaigns and leverage them as a pay-per-click marketing channel and a source of organic traffic.

Benefits of Google Shopping for Businesses

Google Shopping listings present your products to customers in an information-rich visual format that help drive consumers to quick decision-making among potential customers. But this is just one of the many benefits of Google Shopping.

Here are a few reasons why many entrepreneurs and e-commerce retailers are beginning to pay attention to the amazing value Google Shopping can provide.

Expands Your Online Presence

The biggest advantage to using Google Shopping is Google itself continues to be by far the most popular search engine. By using Google Shopping Ads to promote your products, you will be able to reach a much larger audience, attract more customers, and generate more sales.

According to Jerry Han, CMO at PrizeRebel, "Google has a reach that is second to none. Your potential customers visit Google daily to research and compare products, and your products must be there waiting for them. If you don't leverage Google for your business, you will leave a lot of money on the table."

With 51% of shoppers saying they use Google to research a purchase they plan to make online, Google Shopping can help connect you with more potential customers exactly when they need your product.

Higher Quality Leads

By providing relevant product information needed to drive customer purchase decisions, Google shopping can help increase the number of leads that will end up making a purchase from your organization. When people find your products on Google Shopping, it is because it is relevant to their search query, and these visitors usually land on your website with a high intent to purchase.

Insightful Reports and Metrics

Google Shopping has an easy-to-use feature that makes reports and metrics easy to track. After setting up your Google Shopping ads, evaluating their performance is important.

According to Nate Tsang, Founder and CEO of WallStreetZen, "Analytics is a great tool that businesses must take advantage of to measure performance. There's no doubt that companies that use business analytics experience improved productivity, better decision making, and overall better financial performance." These analytics will let you know what's working and what's not and how you are progressing toward achieving your goals.

Most Effective Tricks for Improving your Google Shopping ROI

While Google Shopping Ads are one of the most effective ways to bring traffic to your site, they can easily drain your advertising budget if not implemented properly. Here are a few best practices to ensure you get the best return on your Google Shopping investment.

Optimize Your Product Feed

Optimizing your product feed is the first and most essential step to better shopping ads. Google uses the data from your product feed to make the best ad for you. The more optimized your product feed is, the better your shopping ads will be, potentially leading to an increase in ROI.

 For best results, each of your product listings should include the following; Product title, Product type, Product Category, Description, and Global trade item number (GTIN).

Optimizing your product title and description should be the top priority, and you must ensure that these two are relevant to what buyers search for on Google. It is good practice to use simple words when writing your product feed and mention any unique features of your product.

Ensure Your Ad Is As Appealing As Possible

When potential customers come across a shopping ad, the first thing that catches their attention is the image. So you must use only attractive images with excellent quality, as this is key to increasing the conversion rate of your ads.

If you don't want visitors to skip your ads and move on to ones with more captivating pictures, then you need to make sure that you use excellent images that immediately attract their attention.

Take Advantage Of Customer Reviews and Product Ratings

Customer reviews and product ratings are important in grabbing customers' attention and increasing sales. The majority of online shoppers look out for reviews and ratings of a product before deciding on whether to purchase it or not.

Positive reviews and good ratings will leave the right impression about your products and give buyer's the much-needed confidence they need to buy from you. You must ensure your products have high ratings to stand a better chance of increasing your sales and ROI.

Use A/B Testing

A/B testing different portions of your Google Shopping campaign is a great way to find out what works better and what will yield better returns. You should refrain from entertaining guesswork if you want a productive Google Shopping campaign.

Different aspects of your campaign you can A/B test include your product titles and images. Certain variations will always perform better than others. With the knowledge you acquire from your test results, you will know where to make necessary changes to improve your ads' performance and increase your ROI.

Conclusion

Investing in Google Shopping as an advertising tactic can yield incredible returns. However, if campaign optimization is not done correctly, these types of ads can quickly eat up the bulk of your budget. Putting your best foot forward in campaign management with the above-mentioned techniques will ensure you maximize your ad spend and get the best value for the company's money.

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Erika Rykun is a guest contributor to Marin Software.

From emails to chatbots to scheduling, automation has transformed the way we work—and it’s only getting bigger: 86% of employees surveyed think automation will help them improve their efficiency, productivity, and growth. And one area that’s grown by leaps and bounds recently is creative automation. 

Creative automation can be a lifesaver for small and/or stretched marketing teams (which is probably every marketing team ever) because it does the heavy lifting for you when it comes to some of the most time-consuming parts of creating, launching, and managing ads.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at how marketers can take advantage of creative automation to save time. 

What is creative automation?

In a nutshell, creative automation uses technology to automate the creation and/or optimization of your ad campaigns. This can include anything from simple A/B testing to more complex machine learning algorithms that will automatically generate new ad variations based on past performance. 

There are a number of different platforms that offer creative automation, each with its own unique features and capabilities. Some of the more popular ones include Creatopy, BannerFlow, and Celtra. 

How does creative automation work?

Creative automation apps create multiple versions of a base template automatically. Dynamic elements like text and audio are customized on top. Teams then link these components to a field in a data repository spreadsheet. When something in the spreadsheet changes, the dynamic elements respond. This makes it possible to launch an entire ad campaign with just a few clicks—and without ever having to leave your creative tools.

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Why use creative automation?

Saving time is a major benefit of creative automation, but it's not the only one. Here are a few more reasons to consider using it in your marketing campaigns.

• Improved quality: By running multiple versions of an ad simultaneously and letting the data determine which performs best, you can be confident that you’re always putting your best foot forward.
• Increased efficiency: Automating the ad creation process frees up your team to focus on other tasks, like strategy and analysis. It also makes it easy to align your marketing campaigns, collect data, and learn what’s working (and what isn’t) faster. 
• Better organization: With all your creative assets stored in one central location, it’s easy to keep track of everything and ensure that everyone is working with the most current and effective versions.
• Reduced production costs: By using automation to create ads, you have shorter production cycles, which saves time and therefore keeps costs low (not to mention reducing your dependency on agencies).
• Better brand consistency: Automated ads can be templated to match your brand guidelines, ensuring that every ad that goes out meets your standards.
• More scalable: As your business grows, you can quickly and easily scale your ad campaigns to reach more people without having to increase your team’s headcount.
• Easier marketing localization: If you’re running campaigns in multiple countries, creative automation can help you customize your ads for each market while still maintaining brand consistency.
• Easier A/B testing: A/B testing is famously time-consuming. With creative automation, you can test multiple versions of an ad—from banner ads to Facebook ads—to concurrently and quickly gather insights to inform your next round of tests.

5 Ways to get started with creative automation

If you’re convinced that creative automation is right for your business but you’re not sure where to begin, here are a few tips to help you get started.

1. Define your goals

What do you want to achieve? Do you want to save time on ad creation? Improve campaign performance? Collect data? All three? Be sure to establish some clear goals before you start shopping for a solution.

2. Do your research

Not all platforms are created equal. Spend some time researching your options to find the one that best meets your needs. 

3. Consider your team’s needs

What does your team need from a creative automation platform? Make sure to take their input into account before making a final decision. Things like a user-friendly interface and good tech support are a must.

4. Compare features

Once you’ve narrowed down your options, it’s time to start comparing features. Which platform offers the features you need at a price that fits your budget? Create a shortlist. 

5. Test it out

Don’t forget to test out the platform before committing to it. Most providers offer free trials so you can explore the features and see if it’s a good fit for your needs.

Discover MarinOne, the all-in-one advertising platform 

Once you've determined the right tool for automating your creative assets, you can then save time with a tool for automating the distribution of those assets. Paid media management puts all your ads in one centralized campaign manager, from TikTok to Facebook to Google Ads…so you can see what creatives perform well on multiple platforms and what creatives will need to go back to the drawing board.

MarinOne is the most versatile PPC management tool on the market. It makes it easy to plan, buy, optimize, and report on all your campaigns. Plus, with our automation insights feature, you can easily uncover opportunities for reducing spend, make the most of high-performing areas, and analyze data across your channels to improve your campaigns with ease. 

Request a demo today to see how we can help you streamline your ad creation process and improve your campaign performance.

Marketers are commonly tasked with making educated guesses covering an array of topics, such as buyer’s journey, which accounts are worth targeting, what content will resonate best with their customers, and so forth. While these guesses help drive business decisions and are used to create marketing campaigns, they are not the best tactic for accelerating your business. 

To maintain a true competitive edge by making smarter, more informed decisions, marketers must stay on top of new technologies and trends such as predictive analytics. Let’s take a closer look to see what it’s all about and hear from MarinOne expert Joe Southin on how it can help you improve your business and increase your company’s bottom line. 

Understanding predictive analytics

Predictive analytics is the use of machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), data mining, predictive modeling, and other statistical techniques to forecast behavior, trends, and activities by analyzing past and present data. Using these analytics, you can strengthen your marketing efforts, enabling you to respond to developments more strategically. Predictive analytics can be used for predicting:

• Which factors impact customer preferences and their buying decisions
• Customer behaviors and their purchasing journey
• Bidding
• Marketing strategies and forecasting sales

5 ways predictive analytics can optimize your marketing budget

According to Gartner, marketing budgets are steadily climbing across all industries in 2022, increasing from 6.4% to 9.5%. That’s why using predictive analytics is more important than before. 

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Predictive analytics can be immensely useful. Here’s how:

1. Analyze data to predict how your strategy will perform over the next few days and the immediate future

For enhanced marketing performance, applying predictive analytics is crucial. With accurate data, you can implement a marketing strategy that will generate the impact you need to be successful. When you use predictive analytics to guide your strategy, you'll be more prepared to make informed business decisions and deliver campaigns that drive the results you’re seeking with minimal risk. 

“Here at MarinOne we predict with confidence how an individual object is going to perform, not just tomorrow, but for the next few days,” says Joe Southin.

2. Use forecasts to manage, adjust, and optimize budget allocations 

Predictive data helps you determine where to focus ad spend. It identifies the advertising channels and times that warrant increased spending and resources, and it provides useful insights so you know when to reduce investments. Use your forecasts to pinpoint where adjustments need to be made and how you can allocate your budget more efficiently. 

According to Joe, “Forecasting gives you the opportunity to accurately project sales, revenue, and expenses. When you can map out how an object will respond with marketing spend, you can evaluate different price points.”

3. Respond to the latest trends to stay current and relevant

You can optimize your marketing budget by staying up to date with the latest marketing trends. Not only will it make your marketing campaigns more targeted and effective, but it will improve ROI, customer retention, and customer experiences as well. Competition in today’s marketing landscape is fierce. Understanding current market trends is key to remaining competitive. With predictive analytics, you can predict future shifts and plan your campaigns accordingly. 

“Keeping up with the most current trends is key to strategizing so you can make better business decisions,” says Joe. 

4. Use customer data to adjust campaigns

Provided it’s assessed and interpreted properly, customer data can be used to maximize the efficiency of advertising expenditure. By harnessing the power of predictive analytics, you can pinpoint everything from usage to customer buying behaviors. Customer data can help ensure that you don’t waste ad spend on irrelevant ad positioning or unnecessary communications. In turn, this can free up part of your budget for other revenue-boosting opportunities. 

“No matter what industry you’re in, predictive analytics provides you with the necessary insights you need so you can make your next move. With a deep understanding of customer data, you can change your course of action for your campaigns to be more successful,” explains Joe. 

5. Manage spend across different publishers to optimize effectiveness 

If you are looking to optimize your marketing budget and maximize profitability, it's essential to allocate every dollar effectively. To fine-tune your budget allocation across different publishers, focus on the ones where you can fully control targeting and cost instead of spreading your budget thin. This will condition you to get rid of what does not work and focus your resources on what does. 

Joe adds, “It’s essential to manage spend efficiently so you can yield the most optimal results. To do so, pay close attention to what’s actually working and what’s not by using predictive analytics to maximize value.”

3 Predictive analytics best practices

Managing and coordinating all steps in the analytical process can be complex. By following best practices, you’ll be well-positioned to glean the maximum benefit from predictive analytics. 

1. Define your objectives

Predictive analytics empowers you to optimize operations by predicting outcomes. The predictions directly inform the action to take such as focusing marketing efforts on those most likely to make a purchase or identifying those who may commit fraud. To get the most value out of your data, be sure to align your strategy with your business objectives. 

2. Organize your team

Before you determine your marketing spend, thoughtfully assemble your marketing and sales teams. By making sure everyone is on the same page, departments will be able to work together more successfully. Having a transparent approach is not only beneficial for collaboration, but it also helps generate useful feedback regarding marketing tactics from different teams. 

3. Plan for disruption and continue to refine your predictive analytics models

There will always be factors that change. As a result, as you develop your predictive analytics models, you must continue monitoring them, improving them where necessary, and refining them when needed. These steps ensure the accuracy of your analytics. 

MarinOne powers success with predictive analytics

No matter what industry you are in, the need for predictive analytics is more critical than ever before. Predictive analytics can help you make better marketing predictions so you can start to achieve real growth. By mastering predictive analytics, you will also gain a competitive advantage. 

For a deeper understanding of how you can put predictive analytics to work for you, consider MarinOne. 

When you partner with MarinOne for your predictive analytics needs:

• Your marketing spends go further and you can make effective use of your budget
• You can scale campaigns that are predicted to perform well and filter out those that are not achieving your desired results
• We can advise you on how to allocate your spend across multiple publishers and campaigns and much more.

Want to learn more about how our platform can help you integrate predictive analytics into your marketing campaigns and bring added value to your business? Schedule a demo with one of our MarinOne experts today.  

If you’re new to advertising on Meta, it can be a bit overwhelming. But never fear, Marin is here with a guide to set you on the right path. I’ll outline the process of setting up your Facebook Business Manager account. Then, I’ll provide a few strategic recommendations to help you get started. 

Creating Your Facebook Business Manager Account

Business Manager is a hub designed to help you manage all of your business’s pages and ad accounts in one place. Creating a Business Manager account is free and easy to do. Simply visit business.facebook.com, log in to your personal account, and then enter some info about your business.

Once you’re in, it's time to link your business’s page to your ad account:

Be sure to link all Facebook and Instagram pages you plan to run ads for. You will be given the option to add a page, request access to a page, or create a new page. Select whichever applies to you.

Next you’ll want to link an ad account to your Business Manager account:

You will be given the same options to add an ad account, request access to an ad account, or create a new ad account. Select whichever applies to you.

Next, you’ll want to grant your team members access to your Business Manager account. You have two different access levels to choose from:

• Admin access gives the team member full control, allowing them to add and remove other employees, edit settings for the business, and link pages.
• Employee access allows the team member to view (but not edit) settings for the business, and be assigned to manage pages or ad accounts.

You will also need to assign access levels for your Ad Accounts in Business Manager:

• Admin users can manage all account settings, add new team members, assign access levels, create and edit ads and campaigns, and have full access to the Meta reporting suite. This access level is a good option for your advertising program manager.
• Advertiser users are able to create and edit ads and can view all reports. This is a good option for marketing team members.
• Analyst users have access only to the reporting features. This access level is designed for the analytics team.

After all your roles are assigned, it’s time to set up your billing information, which can be done on the ‘payment methods’ page:

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Billing on Facebook can work in one of two ways. Automatic billing will automatically charge your card for advertising costs, while manual billing will allow you to add funds to your account that Facebook will then pull from as ad money is spent.

You can cap your total ad cost by setting an account spending limit, in which case your ads will be paused when you hit that limit and won’t serve again until you increase or remove the limit. 

Once you’ve got billing set up and your proper user roles assigned, you’re ready to start advertising! If you’re not sure where to start, check out these strategic recommendations.

Utilize Top Organic Content

If you’re new to buying ad space on Facebook and Instagram, the first thing you’ll want to do is make sure that the organic content on your social media pages is optimized to drive engagement. For example, a woman’s clothing retailer should make sure that their instagram page features their most popular pieces and that the posts on their instagram contain links to buy the items featured. B2C businesses can also benefit from creating an instagram ‘shop’ page. This way customers can click a link to shop at the bottom of each instagram post and be taken to your company’s shopping page within the instagram app. This makes the buying process easier than ever for customers, as you don’t even have to leave Instagram to make the purchase.

Once you’ve got your organic content optimized, start by promoting a few of your top organic posts. Analyze which posts received the best engagement. Once you’ve chosen your top organic content, Meta makes it easy to turn an organic post into an ad using Business Manager. 

Marin’s Message Booster makes this process even easier. Simply select the post you’d like to boost, choose a campaign and a few settings, and you’re good to go.

Creating Paid Ad Content

Once you’re ready to progress from boosting content to creating intentional paid ads, I recommend a top-to-bottom marketing funnel approach. 

Building an Audience

To get started, you’ll want to cast a wide net to fill your marketing funnel from the top down with potential customers. 

Video views are quite cheap with Meta, so that ad format is a great way to gain traction and build an audience. If you send out a video ad to a broad audience, for example targeting only by age range, you can then analyze who watched more than 5 seconds of your ad. Those who engaged with your ad for longer than 5 seconds are at least somewhat interested in your product. Users who viewed your top of funnel, broad targeting ad should then get moved down to the middle of your funnel so you can retarget them. 

You can also analyze these audiences to gain demographic data about what potential customers’ online profile looks like, and target lookalike audiences.

For example, let's say you’re a university trying to acquire more students and you know that prospective university students are likely between the ages of 16 and 35. Start with an ad targeting just that age range. Then you can study the demographic that engages with your ad, and build an audience of interested prospects from there. 

Retargeting Middle-of-Funnel Users

Now you’ve built your middle funnel audience from whom you see at least some intent to purchase, or learn more about your products/services. Retarget this audience with a click-to-website ad that leads to a landing page where they can learn more. Click-to-website ads are affordable but a bit pricier than video ads, so be sure that your landing page contains multiple calls to action so you can learn more about what your potential customers are interested in and then use that info to segment your audience further as you continue to retarget them, hopefully pushing them further down the funnel. 

In the example of a university marketing to new students, the advertiser would want to drive ad clicks to a landing page on which users can click different links to learn about each degree program. This way, the advertiser is gathering more information about each potential student. They can then push those who clicked on a link further down the funnel by retargeting them with an ad tailored to the degree program they showed interest in. 

Ad Customization

This retargeting audience is now towards the bottom of the funnel, and you can continue to serve them customized ads in hopes of pushing them across the finish line and getting that application.

Hopefully this guide helps you get started! Many of the recommendations discussed here can be implemented quickly with the help of MarinOne for social. Click here to learn more.

Businesses are increasing marketing spending in a bid to stand out in highly competitive environments. As spend increases, executives and decision-makers must ensure that each dollar spent on marketing generates proportionate revenue for the business. 

Click-through rate (CTR) is a metric that is regularly used by businesses to analyze marketing performance and determine future marketing strategies. However, understanding of CTR remains woefully inadequate. Read on to learn what CTR is and how analyzing it can help businesses achieve short- and long-term marketing success. 

What is CTR?

Businesses often track how many users view and interact with a particular ad or social media post. CTR is the metric used to measure the percentage of viewers who click the link embedded in that ad or post. CTR is used to determine how well an ad, keyword, or social media post is performing. 

CTR can easily be calculated by dividing the number of clicks that each ad receives by the number of impressions or views the ad has and representing that number as a percentage. For example, if 10 people click on an ad that was viewed by 100 people, the CTR of that ad would be 10%. 

Companies can evaluate their CTR against the performance of other ads from the same industry. For example, ads from companies in arts and entertainment average a CTR of 10.67%, while ads for legal services experience an average CTR of 3.84%. Knowing how your industry typically performs helps put your performance metrics in the right context to evaluate them accurately and effectively. 

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What marketers must know before they can effectively analyze Click-Through Rate

Higher CTR does not necessarily mean positive marketing results

Results generated by marketing efforts may seem difficult to measure, quantify, or link to specific business results. However, this is often due to a misunderstanding of how each metric reveals specific insight into marketing performance. 

Marketers must have specific goals and must choose the right metrics to evaluate if these targets are being met. Marketers who focus heavily on conversions might use CTR to view how effectively each ad is being used to increase visibility—but CTR does not measure how many of those clicks lead to conversions. 

Keywords are valued differently depending on their ability to directly generate profits

Keywords play a major role in the CTR of an online ad. The right keywords can encourage more clicks, higher conversions, and better engagement with the ad. However, every keyword has a unique value within each industry depending on how effective they are in generating profits, so marketers must carefully evaluate how keywords are valued in their specific industry. 

Industry research showed that marketers typically use keyword rankings, organic traffic, and time spent on the page in conjunction with CTR to measure the value of each keyword. This information can then determine how much of the budget should be spent on each set of keywords and how frequently they should be used in marketing campaigns. 

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CTR must be analyzed through the lens of affordability and relevance

CTR can provide significant insight into marketing performance for digital marketers. However, it should always be analyzed with the specific financial needs of the campaign. Even if an ad converts a customer, the profit generated by the customer must be higher than the amount of money the marketer spent to get that click. 

3 Ways to achieve consistently positive business results in an increasingly saturated online space

Segment keywords into groups to enable improved Audience targeting and segmentation

Businesses can use many keywords across different marketing campaigns and channels to better reach a wider audience. Each of these channels must be properly evaluated to truly understand their importance to the company. Marketing spending on each channel must accurately reflect its importance to marketers and their audience. 

Park ‘N Fly, an offsite airport parking company, used keyword segmentation and optimized paid-search spending to double their CTR to 6% from 3% the previous year with the use of Marin Professional. Effectively analyzing CTR helped them optimize spending across 65 campaigns that used 2,000 keywords across multiple channels and platforms. 

Ensure consistency in messaging across ad text, marketing collaterals, and landing page copy

Once you’ve figured out how each keyword performs, it’s important to use the same keywords to reach that audience effectively across different channels. This also ensures that the marketing message is not diluted or forgotten when viewed on platforms that deviate from the language that was determined to be effective. This consistency has to extend beyond ads to marketing collateral such as email blasts, promotions, and landing page copy. 

Regularly analyze the links between keyword usage and business results with modern attribution analysis methods

The modern customer demands that companies learn their preferences quickly and expects communication that aligns with their values, beliefs, needs, and preferences. This means marketers must always have their finger on the pulse to learn when customer preferences have changed. Attribution analysis can help businesses understand if their keyword usage and ad language have kept up with changing customer behavior and the extent to which certain keywords are still relevant to existing marketing campaigns. 

Manage your  ads with insights from MarinOne

Marin’s online ad management software makes it easy for marketers to learn how their ads are performing and place that information in the right context. Analyzing the yield generated by each keyword, ad, copy, and product can help marketers optimize their ad spend in a way that maximizes conversions and sales. 

Learn more about MarinOne today. Get in touch with one of our experts to see how we can help you get the information and tools you need to increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

Customers are interacting with brands more than ever, and they’re doing so across channels that can provide marketers with important customer insights. In a world where customer data has never been more important, marketers must navigate increasing scrutiny over data handling while collecting and processing data about their customers’ behaviors, needs, and preferences.

Approximately two-thirds of customers expect brands to know and understand their needs and expectations. With rising competition and amplified customer voices, businesses must find new and better ways to attract and retain modern customers. 

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Brand website analytics, custom applications, feedback forms, and cookies have empowered businesses to understand how customer interactions affect sales, marketing, and communication efforts. The extent to which businesses can extract actionable insights from behavioral data depends on their understanding of how customer behavior analysis can serve them, however. 

Businesses have also had to evolve to keep up with a rapidly changing regulatory landscape. Third-party cookies are being phased out around the world and businesses are constantly looking for new ways to collect and analyze critical customer data. 

Why businesses struggle to extract insights from customer behavioral data

Customer information is stored across operational silos

While most businesses collect customer information in some form, they struggle to build a coherent and complete image of their customers—especially when departments don’t collaborate and share the data they have. When fragmented data is scattered across departments in the organization, it can’t help businesses understand their customers and make informed choices about how to reach them.

Sales and marketing teams can benefit from knowing a customer’s communication preferences, social media teams can view a customer’s online interaction history, and finance teams can understand a customer’s payment preferences. In general, businesses can use this data to make sure they are making financially responsible decisions. 

Paid marketing campaigns can sometimes go under the radar or be under-analyzed because of this data fragmentation. 

Businesses fail to establish and integrate effective data processes into existing workflows

Data processes can be cumbersome and tedious for non-technical staff who are unfamiliar with complex data management systems. As a result, mistakes are made and data is not collected effectively and efficiently.

Businesses must find new ways to encourage widespread participation with data processes across the organization. This could include automating repetitive or tedious tasks or improving education on data processes and how they can be conducted without excessive disruption to non-technical staff. This data also needs to be funneled effectively to marketing teams who can then use it to strategize future initiatives and outreach. 

Data processes are not aligned with business objectives

Even though data processes can confer significant benefits to businesses from reduced costs to increased efficiency, these benefits have to be targeted. Business leaders must design and implement processes to align with their data strategy goals. Marketing campaigns can vary wildly in their objectives, from increasing visibility to changing customer perceptions of the brand, to improving conversion rates. The metrics used to analyze customer data change significantly depending on the priorities of the business. 

A haphazardly planned data strategy can lead to significant time and resources being wasted in service of a poorly defined plan. Poor planning during the data process design stage can also increase the likelihood of data errors caused by a lack of understanding of these processes within the organization, inconsistent participation with data practices, and more issues that could be costly and cumbersome to resolve. 

4 tips for transforming your data into truly actionable insights

Evaluate the data that has already been collected

The average person generates 1.7 MB of data per second. Businesses can sometimes collect insightful data without realizing it. Before designing and implementing widespread changes to existing data operations and workloads, business leaders must evaluate the data that has already been collected or is continually being collected unintentionally. 

Businesses that interact with customers on social media often have a base-level understanding of important metrics that the platform’s integrated analytics tool provides. That would be considered data that is already collected or being continually collected. Modern businesses have to go beyond that and analyze attribution data to optimize their presence on each platform.

Morgan Gelot, Director of AdTech Partnerships at Marin Software, revealed how marketers can use attribution data to receive insights that standard social media back-ends fail to provide. 

MarinOne provides marketers with “a collection of insights that are refreshed daily, that looks at things like search queries and performance trends. Advertisers can filter through this information to visualize the importance and the impact of certain sites and prioritize on the most impactful ads or platforms,” he shared. 

Modernize data collection strategies to receive a holistic view of marketing performance

Insightful data can be collected in a variety of ways. Some businesses set up data pipelines to directly collect data from the customer but most companies supplement that data with information that they receive from social media platforms and different marketing channels. 

In the past, companies could simply use cookies to collect the information they need to meet their business needs. However, platforms have recently “set up their own solutions to mitigate some of the risks that have appeared on the market with cookies being more limited,” Morgan explained. He also shares how MarinOne can combine insights generated from APIs across social media platforms to provide business leaders with a holistic view of marketing performance. 

Close the gaps between information silos and integrate data workflows into regular business processes

It’s not enough for businesses to collect and analyze data effectively to achieve marketing success in highly competitive markets. Marketers must be able to easily access these insights and integrate them into their daily activities. The first step to achieving this is to close the gaps between information silos and make sure information is collected from multiple sources and combined on a single platform. 

This information has to then make its way to crucial operational teams such as customer service. MarinOne empowers marketers by making marketing data easily digestible and providing them with the information they need to optimize interactions with customers across communication channels. 

How MarinOne can help businesses improve digital marketing performance by unifying customer data

Many factors influence a customer’s purchasing decision. Information about these factors exists across communication channels and social media platforms. MarinOne, Marin Software’s flagship product, allows marketers to easily consolidate performance data, customer behavioral data, generated insights, and more from multiple sources, platforms, and campaigns. A native automation engine allows marketers to simplify how they identify opportunities and tie them into existing customer journeys. 

To get started in understanding more deeply how your customers interact with your brand contact one of our MarinOne experts.

Pay Per Click advertising is a great way to generate leads and sales, especially for new e-commerce businesses. It can help you get instant results, whereas something like an SEO strategy can take months. Some of the benefits of PPC advertising are:

• Targeting prospective customers precisely based on location, demographics, interests, etc.
• Tracking ad campaign goals is simple. 
• It is easy to test what produces the best results quickly. You can A/B test keywords, headers, descriptions, etc.
• Paid ads provide a wide range of formatting options compared to SEO through ad extensions.

As an e-commerce brand, you can maximize your ad spend and improve your conversion rate through proper PPC campaign management. The challenges and roadblocks e-comm companies face are distinctive from B2B companies or brick-and-mortar retailers. To help you improve your e-commerce PPC management approach and get the best performance marketing results possible, we have put together some optimization tips to support your efforts:

Tap into Targeted Dynamic Ads

Google allows you to target specific website pages that reflect the search intent of your users. Google does this by crawling your website for things such as text phrases, headlines, descriptions, and other custom labels. These are called dynamic search ads.

If you are an e-commerce website with many product pages, a blog, and landing pages for your downloads or newsletters, you might want to set up targeted dynamic ads.

Google can crawl your website and automatically match the content to the PPC ad. Additionally, having an alternative to AdSense would help you set up dynamic ads based on different target types, custom labels, page types, content, or target URLs. An example of custom labels for different page URLs is shown below.

Remember that you can upload an excel sheet with all your custom labels and other product tags. With dynamic search ads, you will generally want to stick to demand gen ads focused on accelerating sales and leads. 

You should also split-test your headlines and descriptions to see which previews are best. For example, the image above shows a preview test of two different product descriptions.

Focus on Product Page Optimization

A product landing page for your paid search campaign is primarily designed to convert a lead. Your product pages should align with your PPC ads to reduce bounce rates and optimize conversions. 

On top of that, you’ll need social proof, compelling CTAs, and a fast-loading product page to convert most of the traffic coming in.

Let’s take the example of a keyword search for “IT solutions company,” and the Google ads pop up below. We click on the second “Freshservice” ad.

Clicking on this ad result takes us to the landing page in the next screengrab. This landing page does something effective; it provides social proof of the product (“trusted by global brands”) and has a strong CTA (“Get Started for Free” or “Request Demo.”)

So, how do you optimize your product landing page? Here’s how: 

• Use strong headlines, prominent call-to-actions, and an attractive design
• Make your landing page mobile-friendly and easy to navigate
• Add visuals showcasing your product
• Utilize social proof on your landing page

The use of relevant keywords is encouraged on your landing page. But make sure to maintain optimal keyword density to avoid Google treating your content as spam.

Leverage Google Shopping Ads

Shopping ads appear at the top of organic search results, but they pack a little something extra. Shopping ads are more visual and can also be enriched using ad extensions. 

Both Google and Bing offer shopping ads. An example of Bing shopping ads is shown below.

Numerous industry case studies support the effectiveness of Google Shopping Ads in driving traffic and boosting conversions.

You can optimize your Google Shopping Ads by applying the following useful tips:

• Fill out completely your Google Merchant Center shopping product data feed - this should include descriptors like product ID, description, category, type, availability status, sale price, etc. 
• Create different ad groups if you have a wide array of different products.
• Create a separate ad group for your best-selling items.
• Add promotional text to your shopping ads, such as “Get the Winter Sale Discount” or “Free shipping for all orders above $100”.
• Use HD pictures and use catchy titles and descriptions for your ads.

You have a greater chance of moving products quickly with shopping ads. For example, if you are dealing with products with a shelf life, you can pull an inventory aging report for all your products and list at-risk products on Google or Bing shopping ads.

Choose Keywords That Align

Most PPC campaigns focus on growing leads and sales since this is where you get the most ROI for your advertising budget. Thus, you should conduct keyword research that aligns with the campaign that you are running. You might want to identify target transactional or commercial keywords for a sales campaign.

Some tactics you can use to identify and implement rich PPC keywords include:

• Targeting long tail keywords with transactional search intent and low competition. 
• Targeting affordable branded keywords of your competitors.
• Conducting competitor analysis to identify their target keywords.
• Create ad groups for your selected group of PPC keywords.

You can use tools such as Google Keyword Planner and Ahrefs to get keyword ideas for your campaign. 

In the example below, a business is targeting the keyword “espresso machine.” From Ahrefs, it’s possible to know metrics such as the monthly search volume, long-tail variations of the keyword, etc. 

Important metrics to note as you do your keyword research include CPC (cost per click) and CTR (click-through rate) for each keyword.

Finally, include negative keywords in your campaign to eliminate similar but irrelevant or non-performing keywords that could impact your ad spend.

Improve the CTRs of Your Ads

Click Thru Rate refers to the number of people clicking on your ad from the total number of impressions. 

For example, a CTR of 5% for 100 impressions would total five clicks. This might seem small. However, for an e-commerce click that costs, say, $1 per ad, a return of $20/item can be considered a good ROI.

You can employ several tactics to improve your CTR:

• Use ad extensions to showcase additional information. You can use extensions like site links, product reviews, features, and structured snippets.
• Use relevant keywords for your headlines, product descriptions, and captions. Adding relevant keywords is good for both your PPC and SEO campaigns.

Here is an example of a well-done e-commerce PPC ad utilizing ad extensions (price, reviews) and keyword-rich product descriptions and captions. 

Finally, don’t forget to improve the quality score of your ad keywords continually. For example, you can test the same ad with slightly varied keywords and analyze them. High-quality scores will result in lower CPCs and better ad positions.

In Closing

E-commerce PPC management  that is streamlined, easy, and effective offers numerous benefits to your business by saving you time, headache, and precious internal resources. Make your life easier by automating parts of the PPC campaign management process, such as ad targeting, attribution tracking, budget pacing, and reporting.

To effectively carry out an e-commerce PPC campaign, use methodical strategies such as setting up dynamic search ads, doing intense keyword research, optimizing the product page, leveraging Google Shopping Ads, and improving your CTRs.

Most importantly, your business must have a clear e-commerce PPC management strategy in line with your business goals. Track your business metrics and campaign performance constantly using MarinOne, Google Analytics, and other tools. You can also hire e-commerce PPC management services or a digital marketing agency to help you make solid gains.

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Matt Diggity is a guest contributor to Marin Software. He is a search engine optimization expert and the founder and CEO of Diggity Marketing, The Search Initiative, Authority Builders, and LeadSpring LLC. He is also the host of the Chiang Mai SEO Conference.

With Black Friday right around the corner, brands are looking for creative ways to stay ahead of their competition and steal momentum. During 2021’s holiday season, nearly 155 million consumers participated in Black Friday sales—and that was despite the ongoing pandemic and supply chain disruptions. Of those consumers, 66.5 million did their shopping in-store while 88 million made their purchases online. Online spending alone totaled $8.9 billion. In years to come, this growing trend of purchasing online is expected to hold strong. 

With Black Friday remaining one of the most popular shopping times of the year, businesses must do all they can to supercharge their marketing campaigns and get in front of customers. 

8 tips for building the perfect Black Friday ad campaign

Here are eight of the top ways to make a big impression on consumers. 

Choose your channels mindfully

Decide which channels are the most active and the best fit for your brand. Be wise about where you decide to place your ads and which type of ads you’ll use—for example, are you going to run Google display ads, in-app ads, or social media ads? Knowing the answers to these questions ahead of time allows you to create deals and ads suited to the audience of each target platform.

Prepare your ads early

Get in front of consumers before your competitors do! It’s never too early to plan your Black Friday campaign. Once you’ve chosen the channels you’ll use, prepare your ads. Broaden your appeal by reaching shoppers who are looking for early deals—and those who prefer to space out their purchases. You don’t want to lose out to competitors because you didn’t get in front of customers soon enough. According to a PR Newswire survey, 54% of shoppers begin their holiday spending as early as October. By publishing your ads early, you’ll also be able to adjust your strategies for Black Friday weekend because you’ll have time to figure out what’s resonating with customers—and what’s not. 

Personalize your ads

It’s been proven that personalization efforts go a long way. To leverage the power of personalization, consider using dynamic display ads to expand your reach. For a step-by-step guide, you can follow MarinOne’s tips on how to use display ads to make the most of your ad dollars and run a successful campaign. 

Offer discounts that are impossible to turn down

Provide deals consumers can’t find anywhere else. On Black Friday, you’ll want to give customers an offer they can’t resist. Make sure the discounts you give are deeper than what you offer year round. Customers aren’t just looking for any deal—they’re hunting for the offers that allow them to buy things that are normally out of their spending reach.

Leak deals as the holiday gets closer

Take advantage of social media, influencers, emails, and other communication channels to create teasers for your audience. Tempt your consumers early on with deals they can anticipate. Creating this kind of excitement will help you win consumer attention which will translate into faster sales for you. 

Maintain brand consistency

Make sure your brand creatives look similar. With familiarity across your Black Friday ads, your brand will be more recognizable and trustworthy to consumers. By taking this extra step, you’ll give your audience the confidence they need to close the deal. 

Create visually engaging designs

Create visuals that are hard to forget and don’t overlook the value of powerful visual effects. Creating memorable Black Friday ads is a crucial step in drafting your holiday marketing plan so you attract more traffic and boost sales. Step up to the challenge of creating something that really stands out. Choosing unique designs and vibrant colors can help impress your customers, winning them over with just one glance. When you make the extra effort, your consumers will remember you and keep coming back. To do this:

• Get your point across with the right copy
• Use imagery and colors consistent with your branding
• Draw attention by using videos and animated graphics

Encourage shoppers to take action NOW

Make consumers excited to purchase products that benefit them. Creating a sense of urgency is one of the best ways to do this. You can make potential customers feel hyped about your brand an take action sooner by:

• Adding deadlines
• Using a countdown widget
• Including emotional triggers in your ads through power words and color
• Making them aware of how many products are left in stock
• Using copy like “last chance,” “final discount,” “limited time,” and so on

The best Black Friday ads to take inspiration from

If you’re looking for some inspiration, here’s a roundup of some of the most noteworthy Black Friday campaigns that caught lots of attention.

IKEA: “Buyback Friday”

Consumers love brands that prioritize global issues like sustainability. As a brand that values sustainability, IKEA built it into its annual Black Friday campaign launch. They offered customers the opportunity to return used IKEA furniture in return for a credit voucher for up to 50% of the item’s value. After running the campaign in 27 countries, IKEA donated or recycled all the items that could not be resold. By celebrating Black Friday with genuine discounts, IKEA demonstrated a commitment to its brand values and also gave consumers a reason to make more purchases. In addition, loyalty program members were given an extra 20% off on vouchers used between November 19th and 29th, making them feel valued and also motivating them to engage with the campaign. 

Bed Bath & Beyond 

With its fun Black Friday commercial, Bed Bath & Beyond can get inside the heads of its target customers. In this ad, when a shopper has trouble justifying her purchases, a reassuring sales clerk convinces her it’s “for the house.” While capturing the guilty pleasure of Black Friday shopping, this creatively genius video ad gives customers an easy “out,” encouraging them to buy the things they really want for themselves.  

Google:  “#BlackOwnedFriday”

In its Black Friday campaign, Google chose to focus on a key social justice issue by supporting black-owned businesses. The brilliant campaign commercial they used cleverly included a Google search component, allowing viewers to search for Black-owned shops that were closest to them. With results specifically configured to promote relevant links and content, Black-owned stores received greater visibility. 

Walmart: “#Unwrapthedeals”

In its out-of-the-box TikTok campaign, Walmart turned Black Friday sales into a gamified experience. By using a filter that allowed customers to “unwrap” deals, they created an element of surprise that kept consumers engaged. They also encouraged consumer participation by having TikTokers post their #Unwrapthedeals hashtag along with their challenges for everyone to see. Through its interactive campaign, Walmart broke all TikTok hashtag challenge benchmarks, gaining over 5.5 billion hashtag views in total. 

Ray-Ban

Ray-Ban successfully got its customers excited not only by offering an unbeatable discount of 50%, but also by using a countdown clock. In addition to creatively advertising saving possibilities, they created a fun design to capture customers’ attention. 

DECIEM: “Slowvember”

Instead of hosting a flash sale to encourage uninformed impulse buying, this Toronto-based umbrella company of skincare and makeup brands extended its discounts for the entire month of November. As part of a Black Friday campaign, they asked customers to approach their shopping differently and take their time. On the holiday itself, they shut down their brick-and-mortar stores and paused their website so consumers could “celebrate the beauty of slowing down.” 

How MarinOne Can Help You Make This Black Friday Successful

For marketers and advertisers, Black Friday is one of the busiest times of the year. But with the right imaginative Black Friday ad campaign you can stand out amongst the fierce competition and get consumers flocking to your holiday deals.  

Whether you’re launching a campaign to increase revenue numbers, improve engagement, or cultivate interest in your brand, our tips will serve you well. Studying the top ads that ruled the internet will give you guidance on how to create your successful ad campaign.

If you’re looking to elevate your e-commerce marketing strategy, start with MarinOne’s platform to help you analyze, automate, and optimize those Black Friday ads. 

Ready to get started? Contact our team today.

Innovations in marketing and the popularity of social media have made it easier than ever for businesses to reach their customers effectively. However, this has also led to customers being inundated with marketing material. Competitive benchmarking can help your business rise above the competition and make an impact on potential customers.

What is competitive benchmarking?

All marketers want to drive the best performance of their campaigns, but how do you know if your efforts are paying off? Understanding and analyzing performance in a vacuum can be unproductive—or worse, misleading. Competitive benchmarking analysis is the study of marketing performance as measured against the performance of your closest competitors.

“There are several competitive analysis tools marketers can use to monitor their competitors organically - which track most things available to the public, and there are also tools you can use to track your competitors' paid activity,” Candace Boren, Product Marketing Director at Marin Software explains. “Once you’ve collected metrics for your competitors, you can use that information side-by-side with MarinOne to analyze your performance to see how you are or aren’t stacking up to your competitors.”

Monitor organic competitive intel

Take a look at what content your competitors are producing for their website, blog, and social channels. Press releases and news mentions will also allow you to keep track of the messaging strategies employed by your competition. Vendors such as Crayon, Klue, and Contify can help you keep track of your competitors’ owned content and mentions. You could supplement this research by analyzing competitor SEO performance using vendors like Semrush and Ahrefs. 

Monitoring paid competitive intel

In addition to organic intel, you should also keep an eye on paid media and where your competitors are advertising across search, social, display, television, and other channels. The success they experience can be replicated while their failures can be avoided. Some tools that can help you keep track of your competitors’ paid marketing efforts include MediaRadar, The Search Monitor, and Pathmatics.

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How analyzing the competition can give you greater insight into your own marketing performance

So you’ve gathered intelligence on when and where your competitors are advertising and distributing organic content. Now what?  

The key to competitive benchmarking is to use this data to your advantage! Take a look at which channels your competitors focus on. This may be a good indicator of where to best reach your target audience. Have they moved away from a particular channel? Maybe they haven’t seen strong performance here. And of course, notice if there are channels you’re missing in your campaign strategy—you want to maintain a presence everywhere that your competitors are reaching potential customers. 

“Competitive benchmarking is important because even if you think your performance is where it needs to be, you don’t want to look at it in a vacuum because there’s always more opportunity to acquire customers who might otherwise go to your competitors. So if you are monitoring their performance to make sure you are in line with it, you're capturing every opportunity that you can see,” Candace explains. 

Keeping an eye on your competitors can help you ride the wave of success that they might be experiencing on another platform. For example, TikTok has become important since its rise in popularity in 2019. Analyzing the competition can help you identify the opportunities a new popular social media platform can present to businesses. 

The benefits of competitive benchmarking don’t stop there. Modern customers are highly opinionated and fragmented. Effective targeting can help you find and reach customers who are being underserved by your competitors. If a competitor is experiencing success on a platform or with a specific marketing strategy but are unable to meet customer demand, competitive benchmarking would put you in the perfect position to fill that gap in the market. 

3 ways to extract maximum value from competitive benchmarking data

Make your competitive benchmarking data work for you by pairing it with effective analysis and improved strategizing using these tips. 

Use the RACE Framework to analyze the effectiveness of your marketing activities across all channels

Sometimes, it can be difficult to pinpoint the exact area within a wider marketing strategy to adjust for the best results. The RACE Framework gives marketers a simple way to analyze marketing activity and it can be applied to any channel or platform that you wish. RACE is a mnemonic device. It stands for Reach, Act, Convert, and Engage. 

These steps represent the journey that marketers must take from the beginning of a customer interaction to its conclusion. Analyzing marketing results at each of these steps can help marketers understand how to capitalize on the opportunities presented to them by competitive benchmarking data. 

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Improve marketing data utilization with effective and uncomplicated reporting processes

Data is only as valuable as the insights it can provide. These insights also have to reach the right team members to actually be useful. Marketing teams must make sure that decision makers, team leaders, and other relevant stakeholders have access to critical information so they can strategize effectively. It is also important for this data to be presented in an easy-to-understand manner. 

Optimize spending on channels and strategies that have a proven track record of encouraging conversions

The average social media user visits over seven social platforms each month. How do you decide how much attention each platform should get from the marketing team and how the marketing budget should be distributed across these channels? Competitive benchmarking data can pinpoint the platforms that seem to generate the most conversions and interactions for businesses with a similar profile to your own. Marketers should use this information to optimize their spending on important platforms while keeping niche platforms in consideration in case they become more important in the future. 

"Analytics tools like MarinOne can help you look at your performance and compare it to your competition. And if it's not where you need it to be, budget allocation tools can help you find the right level of investment for your campaigns to get you up to par," Candace explains. "And as you move through your spend period and find you are not performing in one channel and performing really well on another channel, these algorithms will automatically shift your budget allocation for you. You'll be outperforming your competition without having to manage your campaigns manually day in and day out."

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Demystify data-driven reporting and marketing strategy with MarinOne

To compare your competitors’ marketing strategies with your own, you need a comprehensive picture of your digital program. MarinOne’s advanced analytics suite pulls all your search, social, ecommerce, display, and app advertising into one view. It’s easy to see at a glance where you are spending and where you are performing, so you can easily compare your performance with the competition. 

If you want to take it a step further, MarinOne’s budget allocation tools will shift your budget between campaigns and channels based on how well they’re performing—all while ensuring you hit your budget targets at the end of each month. 

Learn more about MarinOne today. Get in touch with one of our experts to learn how MarinOne can help you make the most of insights generated through competitive benchmarking.

Modern businesses serve an increasingly diverse and demanding customer base. Between older customers who prefer traditional methods of outreach and younger customers who want a more personalized approach, marketing efforts must always be balanced to appeal to each target audience. 

The popularity and widespread use of social media also increases pressure on businesses to ensure that their marketing and messaging hits the right notes with every customer every single time. Attribution can help teams decide which messages resonate with their audiences and adjust tactics accordingly. Read on to find out how incrementality can help modern marketers conduct attribution research more effectively and accurately. 

3 Ways marketing strategies have changed in recent years

Data availability has increased significantly

Customers are engaging with businesses through digital channels more than ever. This allows businesses to monitor, measure, and adjust these interactions to yield the best marketing results. Social media interactions, engagement data from digital marketing tools, and many more systems are available for business leaders to learn about how their customers react to certain messages and marketing material over time. Modern marketers can combine this insight with effective targeting mechanisms to ensure that carefully crafted messages reach the customers that would resonate with them the most. 

Marketing campaigns are becoming more complex

In the past, marketing campaigns typically relied on traditional methods of outreach such as advertising or promotions to increase interest in their offerings. However, the rise of social media combined with the ease of e-commerce has changed the marketing landscape dramatically. Marketing collateral now has the ability to directly drive traffic to channels owned by the brand or to a landing page designed to convert customers. This has led to marketing material being spread over a wider variety of channels to increasingly targeted audiences. 

Rising marketing budgets come with higher pressure to deliver results

Modern marketers have cutting-edge digital solutions to help them reach their customers more effectively. They also have more data about their customers than ever. Business leaders understand the potential that this combination of marketing insight and strategy can realize for their organizations. This has led digital advertising spend to rise consistently in the past few years. Industry estimates show that worldwide spending on digital advertising will cross $500 billion by 2024. This increased spending also places significant pressure on marketers to deliver results and present these results in a compelling way. 

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What is incrementality?

Marketers must study their outreach efforts closely across channels, messages, and outreach types. This can make attributing business outcomes to a specific platform, tactic, campaign, or ad set challenging. While most social media and websites provide marketers with rudimentary data about their ads on their own site, these analytics are limited in the insight they can provide for omnichannel marketing efforts. 

Incrementality refers to the measurable increase in business outcomes as a direct result of specific activities. This measurement typically includes significant testing and experimentation with various test and control groups for maximum accuracy. 

“In the context of marketing, when there is a concerted action, what is the compounding action of that concerted action compared to if you take that concerted action away,” shares Supriya Shukla, Customer Engagement Manager at Marin Software. “It’s like a tap. You open the tap and water comes out - you assume all the water coming out is from you opening the tap - you took an action and there was an outcome but then you close the tap and there’s a leak - from where? - is it from you opening the tap or was the leak always there?”

Why incrementality is a powerful arrow in the modern marketer’s quiver

More businesses are employing data-driven marketing to improve the effectiveness of campaigns

Most businesses use data to effectively segment and target audiences. Social media platforms, sales sites, and owned marketing channels each provide marketers with significant data about their customers, marketing effort success, and the relationship between the two. Since this data is so easily accessible, the accuracy of this data and its ability to generate strategic insight often makes all the difference for successful marketers. 

Marin can help make the difference for businesses that operate in highly competitive marketplaces. Supriya shares an example of a financial services client who employed Marin’s solution:

“Financial services is a very competitive space known to have very high dollar CPAs. Over time, MarinOne has seen, because this client lead-scores their customers along their buying journey, various patterns and insights as they’ve tracked them incrementally as they move from one part of the funnel to the next that they wouldn’t have foreseen otherwise,” she says. “This has enabled them to formulate hypotheses that they’ve been able to test. This demonstrates how incrementality can play a huge role in sophisticated marketing measurement for customers in the digital age.” 

Multiple social media platforms with divergent user bases require unique marketing strategies 

Social media users have more options for online engagement depending on their unique needs. This has led to audiences being spread across multiple platforms such as LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, and more. While this helps marketers reach their target audiences more efficiently, it also means that omnichannel marketers have to tweak their marketing material based on the formats that are most effective for each platform. 

Marin is able to adapt to the platforms that are most valuable to you. Supriya explains how Marin’s solution “can be highly customized in terms of the data you can pull into it through business intelligence connection tools, as well as the ability to bring in custom call-ins and calculations to display in a grid format. You can calculate custom metrics within a BI tool that brings the data in or you can manually set it up within Marin. This will enable you to attribute by seeing side-by-side campaigns to see how they’re converting when compared to custom conversion touchpoints.”

How incrementality gives marketers greater insight into campaign performance and business impact

Combine internal data with industry insights to benchmark campaign performance against key competitors

Marketing data can be received from a variety of sources but it is always important to put this information into the right context. Market conditions and customer preferences change and evolve regularly. Measuring internal marketing performance and comparing that insight with competitor data and industry benchmarks can help marketers keep track of these movements and ensure that they are consistently effective in rapidly changing marketing environments. 

Effectively target increasingly discerning customers with better messaging

Modern customers are always on the lookout for brands whose value sets align with their own. Value-based marketing is more popular and effective than it has ever been. It is important for businesses to choose the right words in their messaging and adjust them where necessary to better align with their customers. Incrementality allows marketers to measure the extent to which their messages resonate with their customers and adjust accordingly. 

Accurately determine the value of each lead generated through specific marketing efforts and optimize spending accordingly

Marketing efforts can generate significant rises in sales and interaction figures and are directly responsible for a measurable amount of revenue. Incrementality measurements allow business leaders to weigh the amount they are spending on each lead against the value they generate for the business. This measurement can also improve reporting and enable better decision making at all levels. 

Meet your marketing goals with accurate insights generated across complex omnichannel marketing campaigns

Marketing data comes in all forms and has to be consolidated from multiple sources and platforms. MarinOne allows marketers to access all their crucial marketing data on a single platform while still conducting attribution analysis at various levels. 

‍Get in touch with one of our experts to learn how MarinOne can help you plan, monitor, and adjust marketing activities to achieve optimal results every time.

The marketing world is constantly changing and developing with new tools and methods. Strategies that are effective today may not work next year, or even next month. What we know for certain is that successful marketing requires looking beyond the top of the funnel for customers who will stick around. Without retention, there is no growth. 

That’s why growth marketing is more important than ever. So, what is growth marketing all about? Learn why growth marketing is important, what its core components are, and five different ways to turbocharge your business with it. 

Growth marketing defined

Growth marketing is a spin on traditional marketing with additional digital layers such as A/B testing, SEO optimization, data-driven blog posts and email campaigns, and careful attention to each aspect of a user’s experience. Insights inform strategies that are quickly implemented to achieve sustainable and robust growth. Unlike traditional marketing, growth marketing prioritizes small hypotheses, fast experimentation, and rapid iteration over large, long-term campaigns.

Why growth marketing matters

An average of 4 million businesses are opened every year, and over $297 billion is collectively spent on marketing expenditures. With those figures, it’s more important than ever to make your business stand out. To compete, it's crucial to have a growth marketing strategy. A strategy that is creative and compelling will:

• Help improve customer acquisition rates and allow you to expand your loyal user base
• Allow you to grow and scale your business rapidly

• Enable you to maximize your marketing activities across many different channels
• Provide you with insights into the full customer journey

Core components of a growth marketing strategy

The primary focus of your marketing strategy should be based on metrics like retention rates, acquisition rates, conversion rates, and customer lifetime value. Some of the most frequently used tactics that growth marketers find successful include:

A/B testing

A/B testing can be used in a variety of formats, such as email marketing, landing pages, social media ads, and more, making it one of the primary tactics to be used in a strong growth marketing strategy. By deploying “A” or “B” tests, you can gain a better understanding of which content pieces are performing better. With better insights into how to engage your audience, you can optimize future campaigns and increase your likelihood of boosting conversion rates. 

Pro tip: Just because one test proves to be more effective with a particular audience segment doesn’t mean you should stop testing. Concentrate on customized segments and keep testing new content variations to understand which content resonates best. 

Cross-channel marketing

With cross-channel marketing, your focus should be on building a plan to extend customer reach. It can include push notifications, email marketing, direct mail, in-app messages, and other action-driven initiatives. The key is to know your audience’s preferences. When you incorporate your plan into your growth marketing strategy, zeroing in on communication preferences will help you build your campaigns accordingly. 

Pro tip: When you integrate multiple channels into your marketing plan, your audience can remain engaged from anywhere. Use contextual campaigns to help you gain a deeper understanding of your audience’s behavior across different platforms. 

Customer lifecycle

As part of your growth marketing strategy, be sure to pay close attention to the three critical life cycle stages: activation, nurture, and reactivation. You need to: 

• Target your audience with introductory campaigns to build credibility
• Nurture them to strengthen relationships through cross-channel marketing efforts
• Re-engage them to drive retention and loyalty through post-purchase or win-back campaigns. 

Pro tip: Each customer will progress through the life cycle at their own pace. However, proactively accommodating users' changing needs will help you create more need-specific campaigns, setting you up for success. 

5 ways to turbocharge your business with growth marketing

Know your clients and competitors

To optimize your campaign, know your clients. Analyzing their data can often shed light on surprising insights such as discovering which leads have a higher likelihood of converting. It can also help you tailor communications to improve retention rates. 

While it’s important to analyze your client base, it’s equally important to determine what your competitors are doing. Seeing what works well (or doesn’t work at all) for them can give you insight into new marketing opportunities to test, too. 

Pro tip: To see what your competitors are doing well, use an online competitor analysis tool. To learn what media your clients consume or what terms they use when searching for your product, use the Google Keyword Planner and try client and industry surveys. 

Optimize your content marketing

When done right, content marketing can create a lasting impact as part of your growth marketing strategy to help you generate new leads. Demonstrate your expertise in your field with articles, videos, and other sources that your potential customers are searching for. By optimizing your content around keywords your audience is looking for, you can boost the chances of them coming to you and staying. 

Pro tip: Be sure to plan, test, and analyze which content is working. When you determine which content is attracting the most attention, adjust your campaigns to ensure you improve results. 

Maximize your advertising

You’re probably already employing advertising as part of your marketing strategy — be it sponsored content, display advertising, remarketing, pay-per-click, social media ads, and so on. In most scenarios, real-time data is accessible, allowing you to closely monitor your ads’ performance. Dig into the data and follow growth marketing principles by planning, testing, tweaking, and repeating. 

Pro tip: By digging into that data, you will be able to identify insights that enable you to improve leading indicators over time. But to truly maximize your growth marketing efforts, don’t lose sight of the big picture. While data is important, stay focused on broad performance metrics (like sales and revenue) over time so you don’t repeat ineffective advertising moves. 

Prioritize your website

Optimizing your website is key to generating more leads. It’s important for communicating why prospective customers should choose you. If you haven’t already done so, advance your SEO strategy. Ultimately, your goal should be to funnel your clients to the action you want them to take. Additionally, your site’s aesthetics and user experience should be familiar for your target audience. 

Pro tip: Seeking advice on your SEO strategy is wise, since it’s a specialized technical area. You can also consider identifying CRO improvement opportunities by conducting A/B testing, individual user testing, qualitative research from focus groups, and client surveys. 

Make sure your customer service team is motivated

For growth marketing to be sustainable and successful, focus on the customer experience. Having quality service will help you build loyalty and turn consumers into brand advocates. Your products alone will not keep customers happy — they must be coupled with high-quality customer service. Make sure that all brand interactions leave your customers feeling satisfied and valued. If your customer service team isn’t motivated to give each person the "white glove" treatment, your customers probably won’t be coming back…which can make the colossal effort of attracting new users feel like a waste. As we said at the beginning of this article, growth marketing is nothing without a great retention strategy. 

Pro tip: To create a good customer service experience, collect customer feedback through surveys and ask for suggestions on how to improve. You should also empower employees with the latest solutions so that they can fulfill their roles effectively. For instance, using a telephone system that automatically distributes incoming calls will benefit team members and customers alike.

Scale Growth Efforts with MarinOne

With growth marketing comes countless tools, channels, platforms, and tactics. One thing is clear: growth marketing requires work, but the return makes it very worthwhile 

MarinOne has the tools you need to be a successful growth marketer and can help you focus on both testing and optimizing to boost engagement and provide a better customer experience. 

Ready to take your growth marketing to new heights? Contact one of our MarinOne experts today.

‍Market segmentation is the foundation of a successful marketing campaign. There are likely many different types of consumers that could be interested in your products, and sending the right message to each type of customer is key to acquiring new users. Whether it be targeting customers based on their age, or understanding that different types of customers value different aspects of your product or service, you’ll want to deliver unique, personalized messages to different segments in order to foster enthusiastic brand loyalty.

Let’s run through the 5 different types of market segmentation in detail so that you can understand which is right for you.

Demographic Segmentation

This is usually the first type of segmentation we think of when starting to define our different customer personas. These are basic defining characteristics such as age, gender, race, income level and education level. Demographic targeting can be anything from advertising high end products to those with higher income levels, to a clothing company advertising gendered clothing to women and men separately.

This is mostly used in B2C marketing efforts, as these traits focus on the individual. The B2B counterpart is firmographic segmentation.

Firmographic Segmentation

Firmographic segmentation is the most basic form of market segmentation for B2B marketing efforts. Firmographic traits of a company include size, location, industry, structure and financial performance. For example, you’ll want to use different messaging when marketing towards a small business than when reaching out to an organization with hundreds of employees.

Geographic Segmentation

A subset of demographic segmentation, geographic segmentation entails segmenting customers by their location. You can segment by city, country, zip code or even language region. The most straightforward example of this is trying to drive foot traffic to a brick and mortar store by targeting people who live within a certain number of miles from the store. But even for online businesses, it’s important to analyze which geographic areas your website traffic is coming from. Sometimes these answers may seem obvious, like a company selling cowboy boots targeting states in the south. But you may be surprised what other regions are interested in your product, beyond the most obvious opportunities. Often market research brings about data that cannot be acquired by intuition alone. Who knows, there could be a lot of cowboys in Vermont…

Behavioral Segmentation

This is the most complex and arguably the most valuable type of segmentation. Behavioral segmentation is the ongoing process of tracking and targeting users’ behavioral trends. As you collect data about your target market over time, you’ll be able to segment your audience into groups based on things like purchasing habits, brand interactions, buying history, website visits and interactions with competing brands. This form of market research is very valuable because it brings to light users with intent to buy, allowing you to target your most interested audiences.

Psychographic Segmentation

This form of segmentation attempts to understand the consumers’ motivations. It’s not the what, or where, but the why that psychographic segmentation strives to make sense of. Why do customers buy your product, or choose your competitor's product over yours? Is it their values? Their political beliefs? Their interests? This sort of segmentation is extremely valuable for media companies, for example. News stations will market towards those with aligned political beliefs. Gossip magazines will target those interested in celebrity content. This form of segmentation can be difficult to nail down, but is very powerful.

Now that we’ve got an understanding of the different types of segmentation, let’s discuss how to begin segmenting your market. 

Start with testing

The first step is market research. You’ll want to cast your net wide with broad targeting, then see what content appeals to different segments of users. Once you’ve identified segments based on engagement with your different categories of content, you’ll understand what sorts of products or services they are interested in. Then you can hit those segmented audiences with more specific retargeting ads.

It’s important to set a measurable goal when testing. Let’s say you’re trying to understand if your products appeal more to women or men. Send ads to both groups equally, and measure performance with a metric such as click through rate or conversion rate. If women seem to drive a higher conversion rate for a particular product, break men and women out into separate audiences and allocate proportionately more ad spend to the female audience. This is one simple example; but there are countless ways to run this same sort of test based on the segmentation factors you believe could apply to your particular campaign.

Never stop analyzing

It’s important to continually analyze these different sorts of user trends, as things can change over time and new segments may emerge. Moving forward, allocate a small portion of your marketing budget to testing ongoing so that you can make sure you're capitalizing on emerging segments and keeping your audience fresh.

Streamline analysis with MarinOne

If you create strong audience segments and send the right message to each segment, you’re sure to win in performance marketing. With so much data to navigate when analyzing the unique performance of your various market segments, it's best to bring it all together in a powerful tool like MarinOne. MarinOne makes your life easier by enabling you to optimize campaigns in bulk, pivot bidding types on the fly, and get a holistic view of all your paid media campaigns in one place. Start your journey to better market segmentation and great advertising performance with MarinOne today. Our team of experienced marketers is ready to help you achieve your goals.

When retailers want the attention of a particular market segment, they use all kinds of strategies to effectively target their ads to specific audiences and increase conversions. The most effective one? A Google Adwords feature known as Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA). 

You have probably visited a website in search of a product, only to leave that site to be targeted with an ad for the exact product you were just researching. This happens because of remarketing lists. Once we’ve shown interest in a product, businesses want us to keep thinking about it—and hopefully come back for a purchase. 

What Exactly is RLSA? 

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) are a crucial part of any digital marketing strategy.  RLSA allows you to target users who have already been to your site with new ads so you can bring them back again and land a sale. This allows you to customize your search campaigns by tailoring ads and bids for related keywords on Google or other Google Display Network sites. By leveraging this tactic, you can connect with pre-qualified prospects to increase your conversion rates, revenue, and overall profits. 

How Does RLSA Work?

When shoppers are surfing the digital landscape for products, standard display remarketing catches their attention with ads. However, users are not very receptive to these kinds of placements, and many people use ad blocking technology to avoid them altogether. In fact, a study done by Statista indicates that more than 42.7% of people worldwide use ad blocking tools. 

RLSAs are different. They target audiences with search ads instead of intrusive display popups. In contrast to typical Google display ads, RLSAs only appear when a user has actively searched for a term.  

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5 Benefits of RLSA

When used correctly, RLSA ads refine your ad campaigns and help direct your ad budget into a highly valuable market. Here’s a look at some of RLSAs biggest advantages.

Compared to Other Targeting Strategies, RLSA is More Likely to Drive Conversions

Because you can customize content, you can increase customer engagement. Using search ads allows you to offer personalization and increases win-back potential. According to a ComScore study that analyzed 103 campaigns from 39 different advertisers covering seven industries, retargeting ads generated an average lift of 1,046%. 

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You Will Increase Click-Through-Rates (CTR)

RLSA enables you to target people who have already shown interest in your brand. Because these leads are considered qualified, they are more likely to return, giving you a higher CTR and a better quality score. With a higher quality score, your ad ranking in the SERPs is also likely to be higher. 

RLSAs Enable You to Trial Broad Keywords

Using broad keywords can lead to more conversions by expanding your reach. By using RLSAs, you can set up different campaigns or ad groups for the keywords you want to try so you can determine whether they improve conversion rates.

RLSAs Make Ad Spend More Efficient

With RLSAs you can choose to target only valuable and qualified users, excluding those who are not providing value, thus saving money. You can also adjust your remarketing lists so users who have chosen to disable ads are not targeted, making your campaigns more cost-effective. 

RLSAs Improve ROI

Remarketing lists allow you to segment your audiences into lists based on their performance. As a result, it can help you stay connected with potential customers who have previously shown interest, leading to increased sales and improved ROI.

The Do’s and Don’ts of RLSA

Do Understand Your Audience Before Beginning

For better results with your targeted ads, learn about your website visitors and their typical behaviors throughout their customer journey. Analyze the funnel steps they travel through before converting.

Do Start Slow

Conduct an experiment to see what works and what doesn’t work. 

Don’t Bid on Vague or Generic Keywords in Search Campaigns

Instead of selecting your #1 prospecting keyword, consider starting with your 2nd, 3rd, or 4th ranked prospecting keyword.

Do Reduce Your Bid Dramatically When Retargeting Past Visitors

Bid aggressively lower, not conservatively lower. Don’t be afraid to adjust your bid to be lower than what you are bidding on your current prospecting campaign. Doing so will allow you to realize the true impact of your retargeted search. 

Don’t Use Broad Value Propositions and General Claims When Retargeting Past Website Visitors

Remember that you are retargeting visitors who have already been to your site and are familiar with your brand or product. Instead of beating around the bush, be direct, clear, and bold. Write copy that hard sells, something that will encourage people to take immediate action on your offer.  

Do Match Messaging to User Action

Make sure that the ad copy you use is relevant to the action your users have already taken that got them on your remarketing list originally. 

How MarinOne Can Help

Interested in boosting your remarketing results or improving your search ad campaigns? Implement RLSAs to see your performance increase with less time, money, and effort. 

By partnering with MarinOne, you can improve your targeting efforts and increase your financial lift. With MarinOne’s platform, you can segment and target high value customers by audience across search, social, and display to drive your next wave of cross-channel optimization. To learn more, read our article on how to use RLSA.

Ready to get started? Contact one of our MarinOne experts today for a free trial.

Recently Google announced that Performance Max campaigns would be a more significant part of the Google Ads platform and therefore a greater part of paid media strategies for marketers at large. Since then, many questions have been raised as to what exactly this campaign type is and how it differs from other campaigns. With that in mind, we’ve compiled a few of the most common concerns coming up for advertisers and best practices to deal with the changes below.

First of all, what are Performance Max campaigns?

Performance Max (PMax) means you can now buy Google Ads across the entire inventory of products from a single campaign, with expanded coverage across a myriad of different placement types, including:

• YouTube
• Display
• Search
• Discover
• Gmail
• Maps

PMax uses a mix of automation and machine learning to help advertisers reach their conversion goals with all of these placement types all within one campaign. Performance Max campaigns should complement keyword-based search campaigns, as well as boost performance across Google's less competitive advertising channels like Gmail and Display.

If paid media marketers invest wisely, this could bring in a whole new set of customers who are not as familiar with online shopping. Previously in Beta and compatible with Smart Shopping and Local campaigns, Performance Max will be a replacement for Performance Max Offline and Performance Max for Retail by the beginning of October 2022, meaning paid specialists need to make the pivot now.

How do Performance Max campaigns work?

Performance Max helps you drive performance based on your specified conversion goals, delivering more conversions and value by optimizing performance in real-time and across channels using Smart Bidding. Performance Max combines Google's automation technologies across bidding, budget optimization, audiences, creatives, attribution, and more. They're all empowered by your specific advertising objective (for example, if you have a CPA or ROAS target) and the creative assets, audience signals, and optional data feeds you provide.

“Performance Max puts your business goals front and center, and prioritizes these above other signals by inputting your specific conversion goals,” 

-Rodney Ip, Global Product Lead, Google Ads

Performance Max are goal-based campaigns, designed to deliver the value that matters most to you. So, to get started, you choose the goals that are necessary for you to reach your marketing objective. Then Google asks you to provide a series of inputs that help the AI tool get campaigns started. These inputs include:

• Budget
• Creative assets (like text, imagery, and video)
• Geo-targets
• Optional feeds such as: 

• Google Merchant Center
• Google My Business
• Dynamic Ads Feed
• Other Business Data Feeds

• Audience Signals

• First party / remarketing lists
• Google Audiences / custom audiences

PMax campaigns are then able to take those inputs and invest your budget as effectively as possible, maintaining a core focus on the initial objective you set. Google’s automation goes to work finding the best potential customers and serving those customers the most relevant ad. Bidding and attribution technology then determine the most optimal bids to meet your goals. And of course, it’s all done in real time in the auction. 

Targeting technology, machine learning, and automated bidding all culminate to a campaign with the best possible ROI outcome. In fact, Google’s data thus far indicates Performance Max campaigns average a 13% lower cost per conversion than any other campaign to date. 

How to maximize the effectiveness of PMax campaigns

Because they leverage machine learning and automation to drive performance, Performance Max can leave advertisers feeling like they have given up some control over their campaigns. But there are still some levers you can pull to maximize your PMax campaigns. 

Audience Signals

Adding audience signals to your Performance Max campaigns enhances Google’s machine learning to help you reach the best customers. Google takes your audience data and looks at the audiences for signals to identify similar buyers likely to exhibit the same behaviors and interests. You can add audiences from:

• Your first party data (customer lists, website visitors, remarketing lists, etc)
• Custom segments based on search activity, websites visited and apps used
• In-market customers with interests in products like yours
• Demographics like age, income level, and family status

Google can then use the information you have provided to inform its targeting algorithms to find customers who are most likely to convert. This is a good way to help jumpstart your Performance Max campaigns and can also continue to inform throughout the lifecycle of the campaign, especially as your first party data changes over that time. 

Offline Conversions

Consider importing your offline conversions to help improve your PMax performance. By giving Google access to offline sales data in addition to your online digital attribution channels, you will give the algorithms a more comprehensive view of what’s working. 

The system can then interpret which leads have resulted in sales and also the assets being used in the ad groups that are ultimately driving conversions. Incorporating these valuable insights will help deliver the best content to the customers most likely to convert. 

MarinOne Engine + Performance Max Campaigns

The team at Marin has been hard at work updating the MarinOne Engine infrastructure which will deliver a powerful experience for advertisers. MarinOne Engine already powers MarinOne's newest and most advanced grids and enables new campaign types, more data, more flexible reporting, and enhanced processing for scalability.

MarinOne Engine will allow us to support additional campaign types from Google including Performance Max as well as local campaigns and additional data for video campaigns. 

As you start formulating your strategy for adding Performance Max to your digital campaigns, the marketing experts at Marin are here to help. Reach out today to schedule a demo and see how MarinOne’s advanced analytics, automation, and optimization tools can work for your Google Ads programs. 

Apple Search Ads is a powerful acquisition tool for app marketing that has been around for several years. It’s a proven method that connects advertisers with a relevant target audience to increase conversions. Using Apple Search Ads, app developers can drastically improve their visibility in the App store, thereby gaining an edge over competitors. And with two different solutions offered—basic and advanced—advertisers can implement either simple or complex campaigns, depending on their organization’s goals. 

While Apple Search Ads are a gateway for advertisers to convert more users, users are hyper-aware that companies are trying to glean as much information as they can to track them. Consequently, privacy settings in Apple’s mobile ecosystem are growing ever-more stringent. More and more users are tapping into Limit Ad Tracking (LAT), a simple but sophisticated feature that can be enabled on their mobile devices to prevent data collection by apps and to help maintain privacy rights. Limit Ad Tracking disrupted the advertising space simply by providing users the option to safeguard their personal data. 

iPhone devices now make up approximately 45% of the US smartphone market and users are turning on Limit Ad Tracking (LAT) to feel safer. This means advertisers face new challenges as they launch their App Store search ads to connect with iOS users. 

Share of Apple iPhone users in the U.S. from 2014 to 2021

What Is Limit Ad Tracking (LAT)?

Limit Ad Tracking (LAT) is a feature on Apple’s mobile OS that gives users a choice to opt out of having an ID for Advertisers (IDFA) and can be turned on from a user’s Settings app. When this setting is on, networks are unable to locate an identity associated with a device, and users who seek privacy protection do not receive unwanted targeted ads. While LAT doesn’t completely block ads, it prevents targeting users based on their behavior, and ad tech companies can’t collect as much data as they normally would if the setting is turned off. Rather, tracking is largely limited to contextual data points such as the device’s OS version, the app store subcategory, the version of the app, and so on. 

LAT was the predecessor to App Tracking Transparency, or ATT. Both iterations are Apple’s way of letting users choose to decline personalized ads. Essentially, the opt-out prevents Apple Search Ads from recognizing the user as a returning customer and using their information to serve more relevant ads. While previously referred to as the Limit ad tracking (LAT tracking) feature, Apple’s verbiage of choice is now “personalized ads”. Instead of turning on LAT tracking to prevent personalized ads, users with iOS 14+ can simply turn off the personalized ads feature. Users who choose to guard their privacy with either version of the feature prevent advertisers from targeting them through any aspects of their Apple ID. This includes demographic and search data. 

With so much riding on whether or not a user consents to personalized ads, you might be wondering if the initial ATT prompt is your only chance to acquire ATT consent. Users can turn off the “Allow Apps to Request to Track” option in their privacy settings. If they enable the requests, advertisers have one chance to request ATT permission. If the user denies the native ATT prompt, you don’t get another chance. 

At this point, your only option is to provide information in your app informing users on the benefits of tracking, as well as how to adjust the settings to enable it. 

Why It Matters for Advertisers

As more users enable the LAT feature on their devices, advertisers are being hit with a big challenge. Many users see LAT as a privacy-preserving tool. For advertisers, however, it reduces their ability to reach their target audience. The implications for marketers are not favorable; here are some of the reasons why. 

1. As the mobile marketing era shifts, user information will no longer be automatically collected. Rather, the user will have to provide it voluntarily, either willingly offering their information or denying it. While users feel more secure using the LAT feature, mobile marketers are unable to access as much information as they were able to previously.

2. The App Store may remove an app that uses an iOS ad identifier outside its intended purpose—and understandably so. A user's Limit Ad Tracking settings should be respected. 

3. If user privacy rights are violated, a developer's app risks its reputation, and users are likely to turn to competitors. The LAT feature has created new challenges for mobile marketers, urging them to step up their game or lose a user’s attention. 

4. For opted-out users, lack of attribution makes it harder for advertisers to measure the success of campaigns. 

Impact of LAT on attribution

Prior to iOS 10, companies did not have to honor the user’s LAT request. Apple also previously allowed companies to use permanent device identifiers (called universal device IDs or UDIDs) for frequency capping, attribution, conversion events, estimating the number of unique users, advertising fraud detection, and debugging. Once iOS 10 entered the picture, Apple began showing zeros in place of the user IDFA for those who selected LAT. IDFA stands for “identifier for advertisers” on Apple mobile devices. It’s like a web cookie, but for ad tracking. An IDFA notifies advertisers when an iPhone user takes a certain action on their ads or apps. 

iOS 14 changed the game by only assigning IDFAs to those who explicitly opt into tracking. IDFAs let advertisers know when a user takes an action as a result of an ad. They’re also used for fraud detection. Post-iOS 14, advertisers have to use Apple’s SKANetwork (StoreKit Ad Network) to get attribution data per campaign and marketing channel without device-level data for privacy safety. 

What to do about Apple’s App Tracking Transparency pop-up

After updating to iOS 15, users receive a prompt explaining what personalized ads are, equipped with buttons for the users to turn the feature on or off. Apple’s data on their first-part advertising efforts shows that when prompted, 78% of users opt to turn off the personalized ads feature. The same data revealed that the conversion rate between users with personalized ads on and off are practically identical. Advertisers report a 62.1% conversion rate for customers who opt in and a 62.5% conversion rate for those who opt out. In response to this data, Apple recommends developers target users with the feature disabled as they are far greater in number. Because there are more users with the feature disabled, bidding prices for that audience are lower. 

How does LAT tracking affect campaigns 

Advertisers who choose to target users based on demographic data like age or gender will not reach those who opt out of personalized ads. Those who don’t target using demographic information will automatically advertise to LAT-on users. 

• LAT-on users don’t share identifying information with Apple Search Ads. This includes age, gender, user behavior, etc. If you use these criteria to refine your audience, LAT-on users will be excluded.
• Targeting LAT-on users is not an option. Advertisers can target either LAT-off users or both LAT-on and LAT-off users. Geographic targeting doesn’t exclude LAT-on users. Discovery campaigns can target LAT-on users, but advertisers will get this data at the ad group level rather than the keyword level. 

Benefits of Limit Ad Tracking (LAT) 

Even with the limitations that LAT poses, Apple search ads enable app marketers to reach their target audience on a global scale. Apple search ads are a very effective channel of advertising with very high user intent, and so the ongoing ad-blocking evolution still has advantages for mobile marketers. 

• Limit Ad Tracking leads to a higher conversion rate. In fact, there is a 50% average conversion rate for search ads. 

• Limit Ad Tracking improves cost per taps and cost per download.

Challenges/Drawbacks of Limit Ad Tracking (LAT)

Although there are many advantages to LAT, there are some obvious downsides. Without IDFA, behavioral targeting becomes impossible, leaving advertisers to depend on contextual targeting criteria. As a result of IDFA opt-in rates ranging from 4–13%, many organizations are seeking solutions that can provide accurate analytics, reporting, and attribution. 

Worldwide Daily Opt-in Rates

For mobile marketers, tracking for LAT-on users is extremely limiting because a user’s data is off-limits unless they provide consent via App Tracking Transparency (ATT). Apple Search Ads ad groups with specific targeting (either age or gender-based) will be unable to reach users who have enabled LAT. Without a way to track LAT-on users, mobile marketers risk missing a quarter of the potential traffic. 

As a result, by only being able to obtain install data from LAT-off users, mobile marketers suffer from data discrepancies that lead to an incomplete picture with a lower number of attributed conversions. Furthermore, turning on LAT can negatively affect the functionality of certain apps by disrupting advertisers’ ability to track revenue and other post-install metrics.

How advertisers can adapt

Possibly the biggest step advertisers can take to adapt as privacy preservation becomes more prevalent is to transition advertising measurement away from deterministic, user-centric models and instead use a holistic model that incorporates variations in ad spend and revenue to attribute efficiency to channel-specific ad campaigns. 

Essentially, privacy preservation and ATT aren’t going anywhere. Workarounds are possible, however they are temporary. Eliminating the need to use extremely targeted ads simplifies the process of reaching target customers. 

How MarinOne can help

MarinOne can help your organization optimize your app campaigns to improve performance and gain efficiencies. So even with the limitations of LAT, you can drive mobile revenue as well as app installations by using MarinOne to get the most out of your Apple Search Ads campaigns. Learn how MarinOne’s Apple Search Ads integration supercharges already powerful Apple Search Ads campaigns.

If you’d like to learn more about how you can use cutting-edge software to reach your customers more effectively, contact us. We’ll be happy to schedule a no-strings-attached demo of our solution for you today. 

Conversion rate is a crucial metric for digital marketers. It indicates how well your ads are working—since conversions are the main reason you're running ads in the first place. If your conversion rate is low, your advertising dollars are going to waste. But if it's high, you'll have much more money to spend on other marketing campaigns, like PPC. If you're running display ads and not seeing the results you want, it might be time to tweak your strategy. So, what exactly can you do to increase your digital ads’ conversion rates? 

In this article, we'll walk you through eight tips to help boost conversions so you can reach a larger audience and increase sales. Remember, there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to conversion optimization, but following these tips will help get you started on the right path!

What is conversion rate and why is it important?

Conversion rate is a tricky concept. It's not as simple as measuring how many customers you get out of each ad. Instead, it's a measure of how many people who see your advertisement actually do what you want them to do, like download an ebook or make a purchase.

By increasing your conversion rate, you can make the most of your digital marketing budget and maximize your return on your investment. 

A high conversion rate is a result of:

• A streamlined and appealing sales funnel
• A well-designed website that is formatted effectively
• A unique and compelling brand and proposition
• An effective call-to-action

A low conversion rate means your website’s performance or design may be lacking.  This could be as a result of slow loading pages, forms that are broken, or content that doesn’t accurately convey the offer’s value. 

Through conversion rate optimization (CRO), you can allocate your PPC budget more efficiently and persuade prospects to take action. 

How to calculate your conversion rate

To calculate conversion rate, divide the total number of conversions by how many visitors clicked on your ad. To get the percentage, multiply that result by 100.

Leads Generated ÷ Website Traffic x 100 = Conversion Rate % 

This formula can be used for every conversion opportunity on your site. Count only the number of visitors on the web pages where the offer is listed. 

8 tips for improving conversions

Identify your conversion goals

To optimize your conversion rates, create a robust conversion optimization plan. Consider what your prospective customers really want from you so you can make the conversion path as smooth as possible. Conversion goals help you optimize your advertising objectives more easily. With defined goals, you can also measure your marketing performance and set benchmarks for improvement. Clear objectives will lead to more successful campaigns. 

Make sure your landing page copy is clear and concise

There are a few ways to make your content more accessible and clear to readers:

• Your landing page copy must be short, simple, and easy to understand. 
• The tone should be conversational so it makes a natural connection between you and the reader, rather than sounding like an overly formal marketing pitch. 
• If possible, use bullet points to highlight key benefits that would appeal to the specific type of customer who is visiting this page. 
• Separate long lists into multiple sections so they don’t create readability issues when viewed all at once.

Create a sense of urgency to get customers to act now

“Accelerators” offer the extra push users sometimes need to convert. To increase conversions on short-lived deals and offers, use copy that provokes a sense of urgency such as “Limited time only,” “Last chance,” or “While supplies last.” As part of your ad creative, add direct call-to-action buttons to increase conversions. Offer limited-time discounts or free shipping for orders placed in the next 24 hours with no coupon code needed! This will help drive traffic and increase sales, especially for those final hours before major holidays. 

Add an interactive element like an online chat window or live demo for more engagement opportunities

By engaging customers with a live chat capability, you can increase both customer satisfaction and conversion rates. Live chat tools are perfect for consumers who are on the fence. This is one of the best ways to respond quickly when a customer has a question about your product or service, which can lead to increased sales. 

Offer content upgrades that are relevant to people who have already converted

If someone has bought a product, they might be interested in learning more about the topic or how to get even more value from the purchase. If someone has signed up for your email newsletter, they're probably interested in staying up-to-date on new products and promotions. Content upgrades can include: 

• More information on the same topic
• A free trial of a paid service
• A coupon code for a discount on future purchases
• A digital download

Use social proof such as testimonials from other satisfied customers

Social proof is a powerful persuasion tool that we've all seen in action—and reviews are one of the most instrumental forms:  89% of consumers read reviews before making a purchase. Social proof builds trust and when your customers have established trust in your brand, they’re more likely to convert. Here are some tips:

• Build  a strong online presence 
• Incorporate social proof into your digital ads by including links to where others have left reviews
• Include testimonials from happy customers 

Reading reviews and testimonials puts consumers at ease. If it’s not apparent that your customers have faith in your product or enjoyed using it, your conversion rate will likely suffer. 

Create a FAQ page so customers can find answers quickly and easily

Include a search button on each landing page where a customer can type in their question or issue so a link to the answer appears at the top of the page for them. Next, make sure you include links to the FAQ page from both your homepage and contact page, or wherever else is relevant. This ensures that anyone who uses Google to research your business before clicking on one of your ads will be able to find this valuable resource immediately after landing on one of these pages. 

Surround buttons with lots of negative space

When your button stands out from its background, it becomes more obvious and easier for users to spot when they're scrolling through pages of content or shopping carts filled with products. This means that more people are likely to click on the button than if it was surrounded by other things like photos and logos, which can make buttons less visually prominent or harder to see.

Get started improving your conversion rate today

There's no doubt that digital advertising is one of the fastest-growing industries in the world. In fact, display ad spending is projected to increase by 20.9% in 2022 alone. So if you're looking for a new way to increase conversions and improve your bottom line, MarinOne can help. 

Knowing how to improve the conversion rate of your digital ads is critically important to the growth and development of your business. With MarinOne, you can create, manage, and measure your digital ads so you can gain insights into what's working and what's not, allowing you to make adjustments that improve your results. MarionOne’s automation tool enables you to track ad metrics and conversions automatically. 

Learn more about MarinOne’s ad automation tools. Or reach out to one of our MarinOne experts today to schedule a demo.

Advertising is more of an art than a science, and digital marketing is certainly no exception. In the last decade, a lot has changed in the world of online marketing, and the field will continue to adapt along with the quickly evolving technology landscape and ever-shifting consumer trends. In this article, we’ll take a look at how it all began, how it has evolved, and where it's headed next. 

The evolution of digital marketing

Let’s first take a look at how digital marketing has developed over the years by looking at some major milestones in its history.

The late 1990s: The rise of the internet

Digital marketing made a strong start in the 1990s due to the rising popularity of personal computers. Between 1994 and 1996, the number of people using the internet jumped from 25 million to a whopping 77 million. Why? Well, when the World Wide Web launched in 1989 and the first popular browser, Netscape, arrived on the scene, it caused an explosion of new users. From then on, the digital landscape began to grow exponentially as more and more browsers and search engines popped up, including many of the most popular search engines we know and still use today. 

Early 2000s: The social media revolution

The invention of the World Wide Web created a collaborative space for sharing information, leading to a social media revolution. You may or may not remember MySpace, but it was the first truly popular platform of its kind, and it set the trend for all the others to follow. After its release in 2003, Facebook made its grand entrance. As a social media leader, it quickly became an outlet for businesses to reach global audiences. Brands began to realize the immense opportunities that could be achieved through tweets, posts, videos, emails, blogs, PPC advertising, and more—and this opened the door for digital marketing to expand. 

By 2011, TV viewership began to decline for the very first time in history, and marketers were taking note of the transition. With this shift came the introduction of “cookies.” If you’re not already familiar with them, cookies are small pieces of code that are useful for tracking user behavior and content retargeting. Advertisers took advantage of tracking techniques, giving attention to browsing habits and usage patterns so they could fine-tune their campaigns and other marketing efforts. 

The emergence of the internet and the rise of search engines also created an ideal space for what came to be known as native advertising. Using native advertising, marketers can promote content more effectively and connect with target customers through search ads. 

Mid 2000s: Mobile devices surpass desktop internet usage 

When iPhones became available around 2007, they completely changed how we access the web. As the world quickly invested in the many glories of smartphones, mobile usage served as a major motivation for brands to undertake search engine optimization. By 2014, mobile device usage crossed a key threshold and predictive analytics started to gain some traction. 

In 2016, marketing automation went into effect and marketers started to build more personalized and efficient campaigns. When Facebook and Google prevailed as the two most recognized leaders of the internet in 2017, influencer marketing skyrocketed—and advertisers took the opportunity to grow their audiences. Paid advertising was no longer considered a supplementary strategy for marketers. 

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2018 and beyond: content popularity surges

When 2018 rolled around, marketers continued to improve their SEO efforts, realizing that long-form content was another strategy they could use to increase session durations. But SEO wouldn’t be the only strategy on the minds of advertisers. By 2019, marketers were dealing with an entirely new frontier: the quickly growing landscape of video platforms. By this time it was clear to advertisers that if they wanted to succeed, they would have to prioritize content creation as part of their marketing strategy — be it short-form or long-form text content, or videos. 

However, the digital marketing landscape changed once again in 2020 when the pandemic hit and there were restrictions on many daily activities. Digital marketers were forced to keep up with skyrocketing social media use, new purchasing behaviors, and changing consumer behavior patterns. Consumer expectations skyrocketed and marketers had to shift their strategies to create more digital experiences. Marketers realized to adapt they would need to focus on customer values and experiences while placing a stronger emphasis on relationships than ever before. While online strategies are nothing new to the marketing world, COVID-19 initiated a stay-at-home virtual age that couldn’t be ignored. Since then, marketers have needed to focus on online strategies more than ever as a channel for reaching their existing and potential target audiences in order to remain competitive. 

The future of digital marketing

As it has done in the past, digital marketing will continue evolving and developing every year. So what can you expect for digital marketing next? Current trends forecast that AI, automation, and machine learning technologies will likely become more pervasive. Influencer marketing will continue to grow and voice search and chat bots will soar in popularity. Interactive marketing content will pop up more, and you can also expect to see digital marketing become algorithm-driven. 

While it’s impossible to say with complete certainty where the ever-changing digital marketing landscape is headed in the future, it’s exciting to see where it will go next. 

How to stay in the loop

Digital marketing has come a long way in its development. However, the digital market industry is continuously evolving and digital marketers must keep up with the rapid acceleration of changes. They must be able to identify emerging trends as well as the creation of newer and more intelligent search engine algorithms.

To help you keep up with trends and make the most of your digital advertising campaigns, MarinOne gives you full visibility into your campaigns while continuously integrating the latest developments in digital marketing.

MarinOne can help you elevate and scale your paid search, social, and ecommerce advertising by helping you automate your campaigns. To see how contact one of our experts today and schedule a personalized demo.

Content marketing is buyer-centric. It’s measurable, compounding, and scalable. In fact, it typically performs more reliably than other tactics, which makes it one of the best foundations to build marketing success. Creating unique, consistent, and valuable B2B content is simply the best way to connect with your audience. In this article, we’ll explore what B2B content marketing is, why it’s important, how to build a strategy, and how you can use it to grow your business. 

What is B2B content marketing?

Business-to-business (B2B) content marketing is the practice of producing and distributing content methodically to increase brand awareness, improve traffic, generate leads, and boost sales. It’s the process of using content to grow your audience, strengthen brand affinity, and ultimately improve your bottom line. Traditional forms of B2B content marketing include blogs, podcasts, email newsletters, and infographics. 

Why do B2B companies need content marketing?

Builds brand awareness

Content marketing directly influences your organic traffic. When traffic is flowing, you’re building awareness for your brand. Done right, content marketing can help 

• Improve customer retention rates 
• Boost organic ranking of your site 
• Help you create brand partnerships, and 
• Attract more followers on social media. 

Creates better engagement rates 

Simply focusing on content creation isn’t enough to create an effective B2B strategy. Marketers must also take notice of leading metrics like engagement rates, clicks, and bounce rate. When content is tailored to suit their interests, audiences will continue to consume it. If content is geared towards a buyer’s tendencies and intent, it will also improve overall engagement as well as conversion rates. 

Affordable, cost-effective, and supports long-term growth

A good SEO strategy coupled with high-quality content produces long-lasting results that compound over time. Once content is generated, it has great potential to drive organic traffic to your site—without you having to compete for top spot ads. 

Although upfront costs for content marketing may initially seem high, it is considered to be more cost-effective than other traditional forms of marketing, paid advertising, and video marketing. 

Additionally, the content you create can be frequently updated and repurposed, costing you a fraction of the price it took to make it. In the long term, the more you use your content, the cheaper it will become. 

High ROI

According to Statista, 30% of marketers believe content has the highest ROI of any channel. Marketers commonly try to amalgamate content’s strategic and financial value into a single metric: campaign ROI, or the success of a single campaign. When measuring the value of your content, be sure you stay focused on the challenge you are trying to solve. Content assets can be employed in numerous ways and can simultaneously be used across multiple platforms. It can also be used for video purposes, on your website, as a transcript for a blog, and so on. 

How to build a successful B2B content strategy

Every B2B content marketing strategy is unique. However, to create a successful roadmap, you need goals and understanding of your company's long-term objectives. Don’t let the idea of a content strategy be too daunting. It’s actually not very complicated and once you understand what it takes to plan one, you can start creating content that can drive success in your business.

Understand your audience

When you know your audience well, you’ll find it a lot easier to create the right content for them. Even if you have a large audience, explore your Google Analytics data on a granular level. By doing so, you can learn a great deal about your site’s visitors such as gender, age, location, and what topics interest them the most. Once you have more insight into your audience, you can expand content into new relevant subject areas. 

Map the customer journey

When you have a good understanding of your audience, review the customer journey. This can be complex, as they probably went through multiple touchpoints. However, it will help you discover which kinds of content are most effective at leading prospects down the sales funnel. When you have a good idea of where a prospect is in the customer journey, you can adjust your content to keep them interested.

Set yourself apart from competitors

Determine who your biggest competitors are and what kind of content they’re producing. To distinguish your company, aim to deliver content in engaging ways that your competitors can’t.  Present content that highlights the unique value of your business and services. If they have specific content that is performing well, you can use an AI writing solution like Quicktools to quickly generate copy that is similar to the competitors' content, yet unique and approachable enough to give you a better chance of attracting ideal customers. Unique and approachable messaging will give you a better chance of attracting ideal customers. 

Measure leads and micro-metrics

Data can provide a lot of information, allowing you to measure what’s working and what’s not. To advance your B2B content, you must take analytics seriously. Some metrics that are worth measuring include: 

• Current statistics such as total views, conversions, and shares of posts
• Benchmarks and trends
• High-performing content

Once you understand how your content is performing, you can adjust your strategy accordingly. If there is specific content that gets better than average conversion rates, promote it via sponsored content or paid social ads. 

Common mistakes content marketers make 

Content marketing pitfalls can often be prevented with careful planning. With the market so crowded, there’s little room for error and missed opportunities. Marketers need to focus on getting it right as they are limited by a finite number of potential customers. Common mistakes include:

Not taking advantage of user-generated content 

When user-generated material goes ignored, marketers miss out on a major opportunity to build a solid foundation of trust with consumers. To ensure content reaches their audience with a greater impact, marketers can include reviews and testimonials where appropriate, and even outsource content creation to users. This saves time and resources.  

Not having a content approval process 

A review and editing process is vital to ensure high-quality content that is relevant and engaging. It is also wise for marketers to create a content review and approval checklist. Alternatively, using a content management platform can help mainstream the process, making it easy to create, approve, and publish your content. 

Not promoting content enough

Promoting content is key to extending your reach to relevant audiences. Include new content in your emails and social media posts to drive more traffic to your content pieces and help nurture potential prospects. Keep in mind that producing content is only as effective as the efforts you make to advertise it. Native ads, display ads, and paid social are also great tactics for distributing articles or whitepapers as far reaching as possible. It no one reads the content then it doesn't matter how much you have or how good it is…which is why content creation is just as important as content promotion. 

10 quick tips and tactics for effective content marketing

1. Use personalized nurture journeys
2. Engage employees in active audience building
3. Create content for ALL search engines
4. Make sure your case studies aren’t too formal or stuffy
5. Use “smart” popups
6. Maximize digital PR to extend promotions and reach
7. Use content snippets to make product education more digestible
8. Segment your retargeting audience
9. Promote your high-converting blog posts
10. Partner with brands and influencers in your industry

MarinOne can help you supercharge your content

As a B2B company, MarinOne is well versed in what it takes to reach the right audiences with the right messages. Through our cross-channel approach, your campaigns will persuade and convert like never before. 

Business to Business advertisers gain a competitive advantage by identifying and analyzing the right data and integrating insights from that data to help campaigns perform. With MarinOne, you can easily optimize your content and automate key workflows using first-party data.  

Get in touch with one of MarinOne’s experts today to see how we can help you with your marketing needs.

It’s hard to keep up with what’s new in the world of marketing with so many new strategies emerging every day. A decade ago, marketers focused on creating catchy ads and putting them in the right places at the right time. However, a lot of things have changed since then. For one thing, effective marketing now requires businesses to implement a more holistic approach. 

With more competition than ever before, simply creating an ad won’t yield the best results. In this day and age, customers are more in control and are more discerning. You must understand your buyer, learn what they want, and develop a strategy to meet their needs. One of the best ways to do that? Precision marketing. 

Read on to learn about precision marketing and gain meaningful insights and advice from one of our very own MarinOne digital advertising experts, Anu Adegbola, on how to create an effective strategy that will get your brand noticed and help you win your customers’ loyalty. 

What is precision marketing?

Precision marketing uses data and relationship-building to precisely target a brand’s customers. The technique involves nurturing relationships—specifically, prioritizing existing customers over new ones and connecting with them in a more relevant way. It’s about customer retention, upselling, and cross-selling. Using precision marketing, marketers rely heavily on market segmentation to analyze shopper habits, behaviors, and other patterns to help increase the success of their marketing efforts while providing a better and more intelligent customer experience. 

Why precision marketing is important

Marketing needs to be agile

The internet has made it easy for customers to respond to marketing campaigns and ads in real time. If you want to stay ahead of your competition, you need to be prepared to adapt quickly. 

Marketing is more complex than it used to be

To thoroughly understand your customer base, you need more than just demographic information. While it’s helpful to know the basics of where and who your customers are, it’s just as critical to know what’s important to them, how they communicate with one another, and more. When you have accurate data, you’ll be able to create messaging that resonates with your key audiences. 

Customers have high expectations

Customers expect their user experience to be frictionless. In this new digital age, they want what they want, when they want it. To ensure customer satisfaction it is critical to stay up-to-date with the latest marketing trends. If you don’t, your customers may look elsewhere, seeking out your competitors instead. 

Connections matter

Marketing is no longer about copy that sells. While engaging ads are still very important, success now requires social insight along with an understanding of psychology. When you understand why customers are making their purchase decisions, you can develop a more tailored marketing strategy. 

5 tips for an effective precision marketing strategy

Implementing an effective precision marketing strategy that produces results requires following a careful and comprehensive plan.

Engage with your customers

When promoting your product, don’t forget that commitment to your customer comes first, and their purchase comes second. Developing real relationships will help foster more brand loyalty along the way. 

“If all you’re focusing on is getting clicks, you’re not going to get the return you’re looking for. It’s not all about volume—it’s about the right volume. You need to make sure you’re showing things to the right audience,” says MarinOne marketing expert, Anu Adegbola. “Those who have focused on just the data and not building a relationship with their clients won’t succeed because they don’t have the whole picture.” 

Have a strong online presence 

Besides having had a profound effect on marketing, social media has proven to be an essential part of a successful marketing strategy. Old marketing strategies like live events and cold calls may have worked in the past, but not now. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social media platforms give you a way to connect with customers more personally. 

Anu’s advice: “If you’re going to have a presence on a social platform, you need to do it well. Test the various platforms to see what’s working for your brand or company—if it’s not working for you, move on and find what does. Make sure you’re on the appropriate platform for your brand and your customers. If you’re in the wrong space, you may get a negative reaction.”

Offer real value to repeat customers

Customers respond well to brands that cater to their needs and consistently offer them real value. “It’s not just about targeting the single purchases, but it’s about building repeat customers,” Anu explains. Make lifecycle marketing an integral part of your precision marketing strategy by creating interesting and dynamic content that brings your precisely targeted customers back to your brand again and again. Personalized offers that relate to past products they've bought, birthdays, or unique interests are all great ways to get repeat purchases from the same customer over time. 

Be authentic

Customers appreciate authenticity. Understand where your brand sits in the market and what makes it unique. To be effective, know your brand values and make sure you represent those values through your marketing efforts. It also helps to have an approachable brand voice–test out multiple variants of landing page or ad copy when running a targeted campaign. Most likely the assets that will perform the best will be the most simple to comprehend; making things too complex increases the likelihood that you'll lose interest by those unfamiliar with your brand.

Create a desirable customer experience

Customers today live in a digital world with unlimited options. Give them a compelling reason to work with you. By delivering an exceptional customer experience, you can win their trust and expect that they will keep coming back. 

“You need to make things easy for the customer,” suggests Anu. “For example, if the return process is easy, they’ll come back to shop again, and hopefully buy something even more expensive the next time they shop with you.”

5 keys for success in brand loyalty

Here are some of the best ways to get in front of your customers and build their loyalty. 

Maintain a strong brand

Customers naturally gravitate towards brands they’re familiar with and can trust. Aim to align your brand with your values, mission, and your customers’ expectations.

Understand your audience’s habits

Use precision marketing to gain accurate insight into your audience’s behaviors. When used effectively, audience data can help you create content that is engaging and relevant. 

Stick to your goals

Setting realistic goals will make it easier for you to track the success of your marketing efforts. By measuring what’s working and what’s not, you can adjust your goals accordingly. Consider evaluating click through rates, the number of email newsletter subscribers, how effective CTAs are working, as well as ups and downs in website traffic. 

Make retention a priority

While it's good to attract new customers, it’s far more cost effective to focus on retaining your existing ones. The goal is to have people keep coming back. To drive more conversions, focus on creating personalized experiences and deals that your existing customers will find appealing. Segment your audiences, collect data about each audience group and their behavior, and you’re sure to be on your way to higher retention rates. 

Stay on top of trends

You may already be aware that marketing trends change frequently. Staying on top of trends—even if they come and go—gives you a competitive advantage and helps you maintain a close connection with customers. When a new trend pops up, assess whether it will be effective for your brand. To make sure you're in the loop, read current blogs and listen to your customers so you can meet their needs. 

Use MarinOne to boost your precision marketing efforts

The marketing industry is constantly evolving and it will continue to do so in the years to come. To remain responsive, marketers must use precision marketing to build solid relationships with their existing customers and attract the right audiences for new potential customers. 

MarinOne can help you streamline and amplify your precision marketing campaigns using the latest analytics and automation tools. We can also provide tactical and strategic advice, guide you on what strategies will work best for your specific needs, and much more. Learn more about MarinOne today. 

‍Get in touch with one of our experts to see how we can help you get the information and tools you need to increase the effectiveness of your precision marketing campaigns.

It’s no secret that the social advertising ecosystem (and the rest of the world) looks much different than it did just a few years ago. We know that many advertisers are searching for direction as they learn to navigate the constantly evolving landscape. 

Explaining the Ad Auction and Delivery System

Understanding how the Facebook ad auction works is the first step to adaptation. The ad auction formula consists of components that advertisers can leverage to increase their ad performance in the auction. The formula itself is a linear relationship between all components, making it easier to understand and predict how each variable will affect outcomes.

The Ad Auction

When advertisers create ads, they tell us who they want to show their ads to by defining a target audience. A person can fall into multiple target audiences. For example, one advertiser targets women who like skiing, while another advertiser targets all skiers who live in California. The same person (in this case, a female skier who lives in California) could fall into the target audience of both advertisers. When there's an opportunity to show someone an ad, the ads with a target audience that the person belongs to are eligible to compete in the auction.

To ensure that the winning ad maximizes value for both people and businesses, the winner of the auction is the ad with the highest total value. The total value is a combination of 3 major factors connected by the formula below:

• Bid: The bid placed by an advertiser for that ad (in other words, what the advertiser is willing to pay to achieve their desired outcome).
• Estimated action rates: An estimate of whether a particular person engages with or converts from a particular ad (in other words, the probability that showing an ad to a person leads to that desired outcome of the advertiser).
• Ad quality: A measure of the quality of an ad as determined from many sources including feedback from people viewing or hiding the ad and and assessments of low-quality attributes in the ad, such as withholding information, sensationalized language and engagement bait.

Together, estimated action rates and ad quality measure ad relevance. Because these are components of the auction, an ad that’s more relevant to a person could win an auction against ads with higher bids.

The Ad Delivery System

Because the ad auction and ad delivery system behave like a supply-and-demand system, there are seasonal fluctuations and ecosystem changes that will affect the outcomes and costs of ad performance. There are two main causes of CPM fluctuations you may have experienced before:

• Seasonal and Economic events:  The impact of seasonal and economic events on advertiser cost can be represented by supply and demand. Supply and demand typically have an inverse relationship, but multiple simultaneous forces on supply and demand can create different outcomes. Considering the impacts of seasonality and economic events in terms of supply and demand can help advertisers predict how this will translate into the ad auction. The examples provided by Meta below illustrate the expected impact of different macroeconomic variables and seasonality on the ad delivery system.

A positive economic event illustrates the typical inverse relationship between supply and demand. When supply (usership and user behavior) remains constant but we see advertisers competing for user attention by raising budgets, this leads to a flat level of impressions and thereby a higher cost per impression (impacting CPMs).

A relatable example of seasonality for advertisers is the holiday season. During this time, we see both supply and demand move as users are more actively searching for gifts to purchase, while advertisers are also spending more to capture this increased intent. In this example, purchases are likely to increase while CPAs remain constant.

A negative economic event in this example moves both the supply and demand curves. If users are spending more time on Facebook, the supply rises. But concerned advertisers also typically pull back spend during a negative economic event, pushing down demand. This resulted in increased impressions at a lower cost per impression, and subsequently lower CPM.

• Effects on reporting due to user adoption of iOS tracking updates: With iOS 14.5+ adoption ramping up since July 2021, there has been an impact on advertising delivery and reporting, and performance fluctuations. While these effects have been widely felt, it’s important to recognize that these known reporting gaps do not mean our platform is not driving real business value for advertisers, or that your campaigns are not resulting in a purchase or major event. These changes just make it harder for us to measure the outcome. After extensive internal analysis, we’re able to publicly share that we now estimate - in aggregate - that we are currently underreporting iOS web conversions by approximately 8%, which is down from the 15% estimate we reported last September.

In part two of our collaboration, we’ll apply these concepts to strategies advertisers can use to structure for scale. Visit Meta for Business, for more information on the ad auction and delivery system. 

We all have a fundamental need to belong. In fact, this is not unique to humanity; some animals only survive or thrive in groups as well. The foundation of a community is built upon support from acquaintances or family, as well as shared interests or backgrounds. Churches, schools, clubs, neighborhoods are some of the primary ways people get a sense of community or togetherness. Brands can create a community using the same methodology: a group of people that are all passionate or interested in a central topic.

Why Should Community Marketing be Important to Brands?

Community marketing's primary objective is to help companies engage with members of their target audience through their products, creating an engaged and long-term audience of customers. A key component to true lifecycle marketing, creating an active brand community can keep the same customers coming back to your brand again and again. It is a pillar of brand loyalty. 

Community marketing leverages the power of social media or other online platforms to build meaningful relationships with consumers. Many consumers want to get the "brand perspective" on various topics they are interested in, and this can impact how the community members interact. Many companies underestimate the influence they may have to start meaningful conversations online. Fitness, beauty, and lifestyle brands often do this quite well as consumers of these products are addressing needs that are quite personal, like their appearance or health, and they crave a safe space to discuss those needs. Organizations doing community marketing well are hosting and owning that safe space for discussion.

What Goes Into a Successful Community Marketing Plan?

There are a few crucial aspects to establishing a healthy community marketing strategy. One component of this involves creating messaging that focuses on everything your target consumers love doing. Look at the broader universe surrounding your product and the problems it solves. 

Savage X Fenty did this successfully when they set out to have a unique discussion around body positivity and inclusivity in the lingerie space. Their approach in setting up email lists, and Facebook groups, and community boards, all added to that sense of togetherness where many people of different backgrounds could connect on feeling "on the outside" with other lingerie companies marketing tactics. The result of this harmonious messaging resulted in incredible growth for the brand. Making your company mission about more than just a set of products brings customers or prospective customers together, getting them psyched about what they already have a genuine interest in.

Advantages of Initiating and Running a Brand Community 

If you still have doubts about using community marketing for your business, here are some benefits that might help you make up your mind.

• Improved customer experience for your prospects. By constantly interacting with the community, you get first-hand information about customer satisfaction. In turn, you can use this info to upgrade your products to suit their needs.
• Increased customer retention and brand growth. An effective program seeks to build loyalty in customers who buy from your brand severally. The goal of every business is to achieve loyal relationships with their customers.
• Instead of monitoring your brand reputation like an eagle overlooking an expansive landscape, with community marketing you're more like a deer living within the environment, overhearing what is being said and interacting with the other creatures in your brand forest. Your company becomes an integral part of the conversation. The opportunity to answer questions, redirect customers, and have ownership over public opinion in this way, especially if there are any questions being thrown your way from a PR standpoint, is invaluable.
• New members of the community easily become your customers. Although a larger following does not always translate to more significant sales, you get new customers from the brand awareness that comes through your existing customers interacting and enjoying the community. 
• The business grows organically. Thriving communities have people willing to share their good experiences with the world. These advocates can result in tremendous growth, and this kind of engagement becomes a great funnel and natural segue into ambassador, influencer, or affiliate marketing strategies.
• Customers can feel the product's authenticity. We all know that advertising can sometimes be a bit fabricated. Community branding brings out honesty and transparency, resulting in an authentic feel to your product and brand.

Misconceptions Surrounding Community Marketing

Even with many benefits to businesses that use community marketing, the lack of clarity in some areas has led to misconceptions surrounding it. Let's look at a few that are the most common.

1. An extensive community is always the best.
2. Communities can only spring up naturally.
3. A product can only have a single community branding.
4. All the members should be customers.

Best Ways to Start and Run Community Marketing

If you are starting or want to better your strategy, brace yourself and put your best foot forward. You do not want your audience feeling too much pressure, coercion, or any form of spam. Here are some tips to get you started without coming across too "salesy."

• Interact with the members of the community on general topics surrounding your industry. Start with an internal brainstorm session to have a full list of ideas that you can refer back to whenever in doubt. Remember too that you're facilitating conversations, not lecturing. No need to stand on a pulpit and declare things–ask questions and let the community bring their ideas to you. The community will tell you what they care about and want to discuss.
• Exercise your expertise in the specific field. If you strike your followers as an expert, people will start coming at you with questions and seeking clarification. Seek more knowledge in the niche and focus on helping your audience build their expertise. Positioning multiple employees as thought leaders and including them in the engagement process also builds authority for your company and humanizes the interactions that take place.
• Be reachable. Group participation alone is not enough. Show up regularly, respond to direct messages, and avoid ignoring reactions. After all, you want followers to see your brand as authentic and human.
• Be consistent. If it has been a while since you created a community and no one has shown up yet, or you can only hear cricket noises, don't lose hope. Keep sharing, and in time, the audience will gain confidence in your products and their ability to contribute in a meaningful way.
• Engage with the audience. This is the surefire way to quickly learn what your community values and what they appreciate, between plain posts and videos. If you can also do a poll, that would come in handy. Sometimes simply liking, commenting, or tagging community members is enough to make people feel they are important to the company.

Conclusion 

Community marketing contributes significantly to accelerated growth and a positive brand reputation. Incorporating this channel as a tactic can help keep company goals in line with the audience's wants. Identify the best platform for building your community based on where you believe your existing target market spends their time online.

Once your organic social media strategy is inline, MarinOne can assist in continuing to drive brand awareness, revenue growth, and holistic omnichannel analysis. Our tool provides an all-in-one place to see how all your campaigns are performing against each other, and how organic channels are assisting paid channels. Speak to our marketing team of experts today to learn more about cross-channel paid media management.

‍Online grocery delivery has grown exponentially since the start of the pandemic and retailers are fighting to secure their place in the online shopping world. Retail advertisers are eager to get in front of hungry customers at the moment of purchase and have discovered that Instacart is one of the best ways to do that. 

Since 2020, Instacart has experienced a 500% increase in order volume. To keep up with this escalating traffic volume and successfully reach customers, advertisers are quickly realizing that they need to spruce up their e-grocery advertising campaigns. 

In this guide, we’ll explain the basics of Instacart advertising and explore Instacart ad inventory and the different ad types to help you find out which is right for you. We’ll also look at various campaign structures and keyword strategies, your bidding options, and some advanced tactics for optimization. 

How To Determine If Instacart Advertising is Right for Your Brand

Instacart advertising is the perfect way to extend your brand’s presence into the digital world of e-grocery shopping. 

Instacart is designed to give shoppers what they want, when they want it. They can do so because they leverage a huge number of brick-and-mortar retailers. Instacart’s ability to help advertisers maximize brand reach and consumer awareness makes it a suitable option for brands of all sizes. 

With brands reporting very good ROAS, the platform’s advertising is destined to become even more crowded than it already is. Research shows that more than 45,000 stores participate on Instacart. 

The Basics of Instacart Advertising

Retailers can create “Featured Product ads” through Instacart’s grocery pick-up and delivery services. The purpose of the ads is to reach prospective buyers on Instacart who are using specific keywords while browsing. Featured Product ads are typically displayed in areas of high visibility across the platform and can appear in two different categories: Search or Non-Search Ads. 

• Search Featured Ads or “Self-Serve” Ads

These ads appear in a shopper’s search results and are a powerful tool to help amplify your brand’s visibility. In fact, 40% of all clicks on search results are on the top 1 to 3 products that populate a results page. 

• Non-Search Featured Ads

Unlike Feature Ads, Non-Search Ads pop up in various places on Instacart and are not restricted to specific search keywords. They commonly appear in one of four placements including the home page, your items, item details, or department. 

Campaign Structuring

Keywords and products on Instacart can be grouped in two different ways: 

• Similarly-Priced Products

As its name indicates, this type of campaign structuring refers to grouping products together that fall into a particular price range. 

• Like Products

These are products that share more than 70% of particular keywords. 

Keyword Strategies

Understanding the differences that keywords can make will help you create effective Instacart ad campaigns.

• Category Keywords

These keywords present a large opportunity for Instacart growth. Because Instacart has a low volume of advertisers, Cost Per Clicks will be lower than what you would get on Amazon. If shoppers purchase your item using these keywords, it’s likely that they will make repeat purchases via your item section. 

• Branded Keywords

Typically, branded keywords have the highest ROAS and lowest CPC. However, when using branded keywords, it's wise to allocate only a small portion of your budget to them because you want to ensure that your ad spend remains incremental. 

• Competitor Keywords

“Conquesting” or bidding and winning your competitors' keywords can be a tricky strategy. While your CPC for these keywords is always more than that for category keywords, it can be ineffective and costly, and can also result in low conversion rates. Competitor keywords are best suited for items that are frequently purchased since the lifetime value of a shopper can help offset the initial high cost of the bid. 

Bidding Options

With the platform’s second-price auctioning system, advertisers' Cost Per Click (CPC) will be $0.01 more than the next highest bidder whenever they win an auction. 

• Keyword Override Bids

Specific keywords you want to target can be used when launching your campaign. To make sure you secure the most efficient bid price, you can make always-on optimizations yourself or by using a third-party service. 

• Default CPC Bid

These bids can be used for non-keyword traffic or by Instacart for new keywords that were harvested automatically. 

5 Advanced Tactics for Optimizing Instacart Ads

Instacart has revolutionized the way consumers buy groceries and it’s clear they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. To ensure your campaigns are successful, consider using these suggested tactics:

1. Consistently Update Product Details and Images

It’s crucial to ensure that your product inventory and your UPCs are accurate. Plan carefully and make sure products are in stock—Instacart will not promote products that are not.

2. Separate Campaigns

When setting up your campaigns, apply paid search best practices. Dividing your campaigns by sub-brand or product category will make them easier to manage and optimize. You can also take it one step further and separate them by product type at the Ad Group level.

3. Take Advantage of Your Instacart Ad Team

Instacart’s ad teams provide outstanding customer service to committed customers, with your brand’s success in mind. By joining forces, you can improve your Instacart presence. You can also utilize the platform’s reporting features and deep insights to help you make more informed buying decisions. 

4. Focus on Relevancy

Use keywords that are relevant to your campaign and pay close attention to default keywords that Instacart may have added automatically. Keywords that are indirectly related do not perform as well. 

5. Monitor and Test Frequently

Consistent monitoring is key to a successful campaign. When the campaign begins, gather as much data as you can and prioritize your budget. Run tests so you can see what’s working and what’s not so you can reallocate your budget quickly. 

MarinOne Can Optimize Your Instacart Ads

With advanced automated bidding solutions and our powerful reporting, MarinOne can optimize your Instacart ads. Our platform works seamlessly with Instacart’s platform so your bidding strategies perform at their peak on each retail marketplace. Read about this in more detail here. 

Want to significantly improve the performance of your campaigns? We’ve got you covered. We make it easy by building out campaigns for you automatically, alerting you when there are changes in performance, and proactively identifying opportunities for you so you can achieve top results. To get started, simply connect your Instacart account.

‍Don't have an Instacart account or want to learn more about how we can help? Reach out to us at info@marinsoftware.com and one of our account representatives will be in touch.

As most performance marketers will tell you, knowing your audience and how they interact with your brand is crucial to help you measure and optimize your campaigns. While advertisers used to rely on guesswork in devising strategies to reach more prospects, they can now confidently make informed decisions based on real-time data, thanks to tracking pixels.

Tracking pixels are crucial when you’re thinking about campaign planning, targeting, and optimization. Although pixels are simply small snippets of code on the backend of your website, they have the power to transform your entire marketing strategy. In this article, we’ll break down the basics of pixel tracking, how it works, the different types, and how you can start using pixels properly for any kind of marketing campaign. 

What is a tracking pixel?

Simply put, a tracking pixel is an HTML code snippet embedded in a site or email. Although it’s a nearly invisible component of the site, it contains a tag that tracks user behavior—things like the pages they’ve visited, the actions they’ve taken, and their purchasing history. This is powerful because it can capture important information that reveals consumer interactions with advertising and other marketing efforts. 

How does a tracking pixel work?

• A pixel code is added to your site’s HTML code or email.
• A user’s browser processes the HTML code when they visit your website.
• The browser then follows the link stored in the code and opens the graphic. 
• The server registers this activity within its log files.
• The data is then available to analyze.

What are the different types of tracking pixels?

There are a few different types of tracking pixels: 

• Conversion pixels focus on what happens once your targeted audience interacts with your ads. They inform you of the products customers added to their cart, which contact forms they completed and submitted, and what they bought, among other things.

• Impression pixels measure the number of times an ad unit displays on a customer’s screen. The goal of these pixels is to provide you with a precise number of impressions that have been served so you can determine whether an ad is successful.

• Retargeting pixels track the behavior of your site’s previous visitors so you can tailor ads to suit their particular interests.

• Click tracking pixels allow you to see the exact number of clicks on your URL, email links, ads, or text links, which helps you understand which sites are generating the most clicks. 

What’s the difference between a pixel, a cookie, and a tag?

We could spend a great deal of time on the distinction between various types of tracking codes. For those just trying to get a basic understanding, however, here’s a brief overview.

• Pixels allow you to follow users on all their devices, linking marketing efforts across your mobile ads and website. Because they don’t rely on an individual’s browser, users can’t disable them. Pixels are useful for tracking conversions on your landing pages, partner sites, and even affiliate networks.

• Cookies, on the other hand, are saved in a user’s browser. Unlike pixels, users can disable, block, or clear cookies as they choose. Cookies are most commonly used to create an easier login experience and also for adding multiple items to a visitor’s cart for a single checkout.

• Tags are often used interchangeably with pixels. Defined loosely, tags are the keywords that describe elements on a page and all their attributes.

While all three are different, they are all used to capture user information so you can deliver a more customized web experience for your site’s visitors. 

When I am planning a new campaign, which things should I pixel?

• Key landing pages: Adding a pixel to key landing pages such as a “contact us” page can make a difference to your conversion lifecycle. 

• Home page: A pixel here will help you figure out which visitors are coming to your site. 

• View product: This pixel will help give you insight into who is looking at your products but not actually purchasing them. 

• Add to cart: Adding a pixel further down the funnel at the “add to cart” phase of the lifecycle is intended to track your high buying potential audience. 

• Lead forms: Placing a pixel on the start button of your lead form will help you determine the percentage of users who complete the form. You can also add one to the confirmation page. This pixel placement will also help you understand any upper funnel interaction from your campaign or different tactics. 

Helpful tips 

Before getting started, here are some helpful tips to consider.

• Be intentional. Be selective with your pixel usage. You don’t need to attach a pixel to every single web page. Rather than casting a wide net with your tracking data, work on refining your focus, which will result in more accurate user data. Quality over quantity is key here. 

• Track pixel frequencies cautiously. They can make your site slower—and slow load times will make users more likely to leave. Keep in mind that users can’t see a tracking pixel, so if it’s the last item to load on a page, that’s quite okay.

• Don’t lose sight of your targeted campaigns. Stay focused on your target audience. Don’t waste tracking pixels on demographics you’re not aiming for.

• Respect users’ privacy. While you may not like the idea of users opting out of tracking, respect their choice. Even though you have good intentions, some users prefer that their movements go unwatched. 

• Monitor ad performance. Identify which ads are resonating best with your audience. Tracking pixels can help determine which ads perform well so you can create content that your audience responds to and optimize your online ad spend. 

• Use a platform that provides detailed reports. To track your marketing performance and analyze information such as digital ad impressions, email responses, social media conversion rates, and other types of activity related to your campaign, choose a platform that can do it all for you. Eliminating the guesswork from your tracking pixel strategy will enable you to see real-time results and also allows you to make adjustments quickly. 

• Set up tracking parameters. Implementing tracking parameters can help you discover which channels are producing high conversion rates, which campaigns are successful, which creatives are performing well, and much more. 

Ready to get started with pixel tracking?

MarinOne can help. Our Marin Tracker is a conversion tracking solution with optimization tools built into its platform to give you a better understanding of your buying cycle.

We help you make data-driven marketing decisions by unifying your campaign data with sales outcomes and machine learning. Our tracker makes it easy for you to measure your revenue impact from all of your digital marketing efforts. 

Save time managing tracking codes so you can spend more time on what matters most—driving your campaigns with rich insights.

Tracking pixels can give you the edge you need if you’re ready to take your online advertising or latest campaign to the next level. Get in touch with one of our experts about how we can help you set up, plan, execute, and optimize your campaigns.

The global e-commerce market reached a value of $13 trillion in 2021—and is forecasted to rise to $55.6 trillion by 2027. What are some of the major factors that led to this growth?  There was an explosion in demand for smart devices like smartphones and tablets, making it easier than ever for people to shop online from anywhere. COVID was another big factor: when stores closed, consumers  all went online—and they liked it.

In this article, we'll share some of the benefits of the current e-commerce landscape, then give you some tips on getting your e-commerce site to perform at its best this year and beyond.

Reasons to Ramp Up your E-comm Presence

There's no doubt that online sales are more important than ever, regardless of your company structure. With a growing population of e-comm shoppers and a marketplace that's constantly expanding, it's essential to have a strong e-commerce presence if you want to stay competitive and meet customers’ demands. Here are five reasons you should focus your efforts on e-commerce: 

Meeting Consumers Where They Are

Since the onset of the pandemic, consumer behavior has dramatically changed, shifting more towards digital shopping habits. A study done by Pew Research states that 79% of U.S. consumers shop online, indicating that this new habit is here to stay. And for good reason: it’s far more convenient than having to step foot in any physical retail store. It saves time, gives consumers the flexibility to shop for the best prices, and allows them to choose from a wider range of products.

Unrestricted Store Hours

Having an e-commerce site means your store is theoretically open all day, every day. With 24/7 access consumers can browse whenever they want, be it 1 AM or 1 PM. Not only does this make digital shopping more appealing for customers, but it also increases sales opportunities. 

Manage Your Business From Anywhere

As opposed to a traditional brick-and-mortar storefront, using an e-commerce site allows you to run your company from anywhere. Whether you prefer to sit in an office, work from home, or even your local coffee shop, you can watch your business grow without being tied to a physical space. 

Extend Your Reach

As an e-commerce company, your number one priority is to get the word out about your products and services. It is possible to advertise in different ways and improve traffic to your site. However, this is easier said than done. It's always hard to get noticed online with so much noise and competition shouting their message out. By honing in on the right niche messaging for your target demographic, and utilizing an omnichannel marketing approach with SEM, email marketing with proper authentication protocols, influencers, and more…you can "find your people" on a global scale. Once the right brand message is identified, the opportunity to extend your reach to a wider target audience is virtually limitless.

Reduce Your Costs

If you were at all hesitant to start an e-commerce site because of the cost, think again. Launching a site is more affordable than owning a store, and it minimizes infrastructure, communication, and other overhead costs. 

Tips for Creating a Profitable E-commerce Site

Follow the Latest Trends

With e-commerce best practices constantly evolving and changing, it’s vital to keep your e-commerce site current and your business competitive. By keeping up with the latest trends, you'll find new and innovative techniques that will offer your business huge value, while identifying the tactics that may not be suitable for your specific company needs. To determine which trends are worth pursuing, know your customers and competitors well so you can make the right move. 

Understand How to Optimize your E-Commerce Presence

Adopt advanced conversion tactics and push your organization to improve your baseline goal. Routinely examine bounce rates, exit rates, click-through rates, and average session durations. It is also wise to invest in e-commerce tools that can help analyze your current conversion rate issues. Some other strategies for boosting conversion rates include using high-quality images and videos on your product pages, providing limited-time coupon codes, and tweaking your store checkout process. 

Develop Strategic Shipping Policies and Options

Offer your consumers free shipping on orders over a specific amount and offer expedited delivery options like three-day shipping or two-hour delivery windows for customers who need their items immediately. An effective product delivery strategy will help to differentiate your business from competitors.

Include Customer Reviews on Product Pages 

Without a storefront, customers can’t physically experience an item before purchasing it. Give them the confidence they need to make informed decisions about products by providing them with easy access to online product reviews. By helping them navigate your business’s digital space, you maintain a positive reputation and a strong brand name, leading to happy customers and returning business. 

Create Social Media Profiles for Your Brand 

Having a social media presence allows you to connect with existing customers and reach out to potential new ones. Statista data indicates that users spend an average of a whopping 147 minutes per day on social media. Using social media to market your e-commerce store allows you to reach shoppers directly, advertise new products, or engage them with attractive promotions. According to BigCommerce statistics, businesses with an active and unique social media presence have at least 32% more sales than those without one. 

Integrate your Point of Sale and Inventory Management Systems for Best Results 

Consumers prefer a seamless shopping and purchasing experience, with expectations that their products will arrive at their doorstep as fast as possible. Backend integration can help streamline e-commerce operations like inventory management, so that your customers remain satisfied and get what they want, when they want it. Integrating inventory management allows your organization to track its stock so you can balance the quantity of products on hand while meeting customer demands. By being able to analyze trends and sales patterns, you can also successfully maximize sales margins. 

Make your Site Mobile Friendly

Making sure your e-commerce site is mobile-friendly is the key to driving more sales and ensuring a smooth customer journey. A mobile-friendly design leads to more page views, stronger customer loyalty, increased online purchases, and many more benefits. 

Site Speed Matters

The last thing you want is a slow-loading website that will irritate your visitors. If your site can’t move fast enough for your customers it will negatively impact the user's perception of your brand, increase bounce rates, and encourage buyers to look elsewhere. In fact, studies prove that if a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, 40% of users will quickly give up and leave.  

Conclusion

Not only is centralizing your business to an e-commerce website cost-effective, it’s also been the preferred way for customers to shop for several years now. To stay competitive, it's essential that you get your website running like a well-oiled machine.

Not sure where to start? MarinOne can help by streamlining your advertising efforts and give your website a jumpstart in sales and traffic. This will buy your team time to get the web backend exactly how you want it while we build your front-end brand through advertising on marketplaces, paid search, and social. With MarinOne, you can gain an edge over your competition, maximize performance across all channels, and utilize impactful retail marketplace advertising features to set your e-commerce site up for success. 

Learn more about how MarinOne can help. Get in touch and speak to one of our team experts or schedule a free demo today.

In 2023, Google will stop supporting Universal Analytics and switch all customers to Google Analytics 4. Prepare ahead of time to make your transition as seamless as possible by making GA4 an integral part of your tech stack now. We will discuss how Google Analytics 4 differs from earlier versions and there will also be pointers for maximizing the platform's functionality. 

Google Analytics 4: What’s new?

So now comes the question of what new features there are in GA4, and the answer is, in short… a lot. The data collection algorithm and data structure in GA4 are quite different. Now, rather than sessions as in the past, everything is built around users and events. Every user interaction is treated as a separate event in an event-based approach.

This shift is important since, in the past, we relied on a session-based model that categorized user activities over a certain time. Marketing grows significantly from shifting the focus from sessions to events, including improved pathing analytic capabilities and cross-platform analysis.

By switching to an event-based approach, GA4 becomes more adaptable and has improved user behavior prediction.

Google Analytics 4 property events

Normally, the data in your reports comes from activities that occur as people engage with your website or blog. A page view event is triggered whenever a user accesses a page on your site.

The following events may be gathered without the use of any code:

• Automatically collected events: Events that are automatically captured when data collection is set up include first visit, ad clicks, and file downloads.
• Enhanced measurement events: This option automatically gathers enhanced measurement events such as page view, scroll, and video engagement.
• Recommended events: This represents events that you design but that have fixed names and parameters. Common events in this category could be ad impressions, coupon use for purchases, or a search performed by the user on your website directly. 
• Custom events: Custom events are ones you designate and give a specific name. If none of the events in the other categories meet your requirements, you can build events that are completely bespoke to your business.

How to make the transition from Universal Analytics to GA4

To update the GA version, you can follow the steps that are listed below:

Step 1: 

Easily install GA4 by navigating to the admin part of your reporting view in your GA3 property. Open the admin section and start the process.

Step 2:

You will see that the "Setup Assistant" link for GA4 located under the Property column. Click on it. 

Step 3:

You will find the heading "I want to create a new Google Analytics 4 property," click the "Get Started" button.

Step 4:

In this step, you need to click on the Create Property button. New GA4 properties will now be created automatically by Google Analytics. Your current GA property will continue to exist. So you will have access to at least two GA properties. With gtag.js, the GA4 setup assistance operates automatically. You must add the Analytics tag manually if you use a website builder like WordPress, Wix, etc. However, this new GA4 property won't start gathering data automatically. For the data to begin flowing into your new GA4 property, you must configure your GTM (Google Tag Manager).

Step 5:

Now click on the "see your GA4 button. A new tab will open. Click on the Data stream link.

Step 6:

In this step, click on your web data stream. Note: Both "web stream" and "data stream" are used in Google Analytics 4. These two terms refer to the flow of analytics information your website sends to Google Analytics.

Step 7:

Select "Use existing on-page tag" from the Tagging instructions section. Select Google Tag Manager from the drop-down option. Now you will see the instructions for setting up a tag to track your website data in the new GA4 property. Note down the measurement ID.

Step 8:

Go to your GTM account and click the link for New Tags. Give your new tag a name like "GA4 tracking - All pages" and choose Google Analytics: GA4 Configuration as the tag type.

Step 9:

In the Measurement ID text box, type the measurement ID you recorded earlier. Make sure that your trigger fires on all pages. To save your tag, click the Save button.

Step 10:

Click on the Preview button, which is situated in the upper right corner. The Tag Manager Preview mode window will appear in a new browser tab. If it doesn't, it indicates that your browser is blocking the window.

Step 11:

Now enter your website address and click on the Connect button. Your website will appear in a new tab in your browser window as soon as you click the Connect button.

Step 12:

Return to the tab of your browser that displays the Tag Manager Preview mode window, and click the Continue button. Your tag is firing properly if you see the tag "GA4 tracking-All pages" in the Tags Fired column.

Step 13:

Now again, open your GTM account and click the submit tab. Click the Publish button after naming your version. Go back to your website, click on a few pages, and open them. After scrolling up, open your GA4 property again and click the cross button next to the Web stream details.

Finally, check your reports

From the menu on the left, just select the Reports icon.

Your home page report's quick response will be:

• What are the locations of your new users?
• Which of your campaigns performed the best?
• Which screens and pages receive the greatest traffic?

Select Real-time report by clicking over it. Your real-time report should show new data. Remember that Google Analytics 4 reports differ significantly from the Universal Analytics reports. In addition to using the new catalog, several well-known metrics and reports have been totally removed. Basically, you would have to start again with Google Analytics 4 if you were using standard reports like the Top Landing Pages report.

Keep in mind that GA4 property is the default option while establishing a new property from within an existing GA3 property. However, you can still use the GA4 Setup Assistant option in your GA3 property even after you have created your new GA4 property.

The option to "See your GA4 property" should appear when you click the GA4 Setup Assistant link once more, indicating that you have successfully set up the GA4 property and connected it to your previous GA3 property.

What is an App + Web Property?

App + Web was basically Google Analytics 4's beta version. All App + Web properties are now accessible as GA4 properties. This means that you don't need to do anything.

Open the property in your Google Analytics account. The previous Universal Analytics interface will have been replaced with the new GA4 interface.

Next Steps

Google Analytics 4 uses artificial intelligence (AI) to effectively gather user data, provide statistics based on customer life cycles, and help you customize your advertising to your target audience. Combining these elements can increase your chances of conversion and ROI while also building your business.

Using GA4 in combination with MarinOne reporting and conversion tracking tools will give your marketing team complete visibility on all your website impressions, engagement, and actions…with a holistic view of users and events across channels and devices. By automatically connecting and combining siloed marketing data from thousands of sources, you can understand the impact of your marketing at both high and granular levels. 

Ready to know your best-performing tactics across the consumer’s journey and optimize every marketing dollar? Speak with one of our expert consultants today to learn how to get started.

When it comes to creating snap ads, the little ghost has your back. Snapchat distributes quite a bit of information to help advertisers find success on their platform. In this post, we’re consolidating their tips along with the insights from veteran users to give you an all-in-one guide to Snapchat ad strategy and campaign optimization. Let’s get into it. 

How to create a Snapchat Ad strategy from scratch 

When you start out, you’ll set up your campaign similar to how you would with Facebook ads. It goes like this: campaign > ad set > ad. You can have multiple ad sets in one campaign and multiple ads in one ad set. 

The Snapchat ads manager doesn’t save your work halfway through. If you start creating an ad, make sure you have time to finish it. The last thing you want is to waste time creating ads that only the Snapchat ghost will end up seeing. 

Instant Create vs Advanced Create

Choose your campaign objective

With Instant Create, you can build a single ad in under 5 minutes. It’s a solid option for beginners. 

For more detailed targeting options, you’ll want to opt for Advanced Create. 

Choosing a campaign objective in Instant Create is as easy as clicking one of the 5 options in the screenshot above. With Advanced Create, the options are a bit more thorough. Here’s what that looks like:

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When choosing your campaign objective, think about what you want your audience to do when they swipe up on your snap ad. Choose from the following options:

Awareness

• Awareness
• Promote Places

Consideration

• App installs
• Drive traffic to website
• Drive traffic to app
• Engagement 
• Video views
• Lead generation

Conversions

• App conversion: Drive specific actions on your app.
• Website conversions: Drive specific actions on your site.
• Catalog sales: Drive sales on your chosen product catalog.

You can find out which ad types are available for each objective here.

Once your campaign objective is set, choose a start and end date (or just a start date, if you plan on running the campaign indefinitely) and set your daily and lifetime spend caps. Campaign spend caps must be at least $20.

On the next page, you’ll name your Ad Set then attach Snap Pixel and Snap App ID Tracking. Snap Pixel is a tool that helps you measure your campaign’s cross-device impact. This means you’ll be able to track the actions Snapchatters take on your site after seeing this ad. Snap App ID tracks actions snapchatters take in your mobile app after seeing your ad. Using this feature unlocks additional targeting benefits like Mobile App Custom Audiences, App Re-engagement Optimization Goals, or SKAdNetwork. 

Right under that is where you pick your ad set budget and schedule. The daily budget minimum is $5. Then you have the option to pick your placements. Snapchat recommends choosing automatic placement, but here’s what it looks like to customize:

Instant Create Audience Targeting

Select the appropriate demographics for your campaign. Here, you’ll specify your audience by gender, age, and language. Next, you pick the location(s) you want to target. 

Click “Show Advanced Targeting” to view the final two targeting sections: “Interests and Custom Audiences” and “Devices”. 

“Lifestyles” and “Visitors” are the two Snapchat Lifestyle Categories within the Interests and Custom Audiences section. According to Snapchat, these are “Audiences that have been built and packaged using Snapchat and Third-Party Data, allowing you to reach people based on their online and real-world interests and behaviors.” 

• Lifestyle categories are created based on what the users are most interested in according to what media they consume.
• Visitors are categories based on where the users go on their mobile devices.

There are a lot of options to choose from, so spend a good bit of time scrolling through and designing the audience that best fits your target customer base.

Last up is device targeting. You can pick between android and iOS, cellular or wifi, and specific device makes. This is only relevant in some situations, like if your app is only available for iOS. Otherwise, clicking “All” is your best bet. 

Advanced Create targeting options

In addition to demographics offered in Instant Create, you also get to choose a household income, education level, and marital/parental status.

The biggest difference between the two is the Interests and Custom Audiences section. With Advanced Create, you can pick from Predefined Audiences or create custom audiences from scratch. Predefined audiences are the Lifestyle and Visitor categories available in Instant Create.

Custom Audiences can be created using Snap Audience Match (CRM Lists), Snap Engagement Audience, and Lookalikes. You can choose to deselect the option to expand your audience automatically to optimize performance if you want, but it’s automatically selected based on Snapchat’s recommendations. 

When you click the “Create Audience” button, you’re taken to a page where you choose from one of 3 options: 

• Custom Audience
• Lookalike Audience: Choose a seed audience, a location, then a Lookalike type. 

• Similarity: Matches your seed audience the best, but is smaller. 
• Balance: Mid-sized audience that balances resemblance and reach.
• Reach: Larger audience that prioritizes reach by broadening resemblance to the seed audience. 

• Saved Audience: This option takes you to the Audience Insights page. Here, you can customize your audience and then save or export. You can also click through a visual representation of the audience you create. 

In addition to the operating system, device make, and connection type, Advanced Create also allows you to target specific mobile carriers. 

Here are some best practices to keep in mind: 

• Keep your audience size under 20 million people per ad creative (be warned: a minimum audience size of 1,000 is required to run an ad). 
• Create one ad set per unique audience. 
• Use the Lookalike Audience feature to find new customers. 
• A/B test ad sets with a specific audience by running multiple ads with unique creative assets.

Choose your budget and goal

Now’s the time to pick your daily budget, goal, and bid. 

Auto-bid will get you the lowest CPC if you’re new to Snap ads. If you plan to choose a bid amount, go with whatever you’re willing to pay to get the action you want.

With Advanced Create, you’ll adjust your per-ad budget in the Delivery section. The options change based on your goal, but here’s what it looks like if you choose “Swipe Up”:

While Snapchat recommends auto-bid, you can play around with Target Cost and Max Bid and see how they affect your results. When you click the Max Bid option, Snapchat will offer a recommended range to choose from. You don’t have to pick within this range, however. 

Choosing Max Bid also unlocks the Pacing feature, You can pick Standard to spread your CPA organically across your set dates or you can choose Accelerated to deliver your ads as quickly as possible (best for time-sensitive campaigns). 

How to create a Snapchat ad

The next page is where you create your content. 

1. Choose your ad type/placement at the top of the screen. 
2. Create an ad name, headline, and make your ad sharable. 
3. Upload your Top Snap media (AKA your ad’s creative asset). Snapchat’s Instant Create has built-in templates for the Top Snap, but you can also create your own on a design platform like Canva. Alternatively, you can use a pre-existing logo from Wepik to give your ads a professional and recognizable look.
4. Select and customize your attachment (where you want your viewers to go). 
5. Select your CTA. 
6. Last but not least, add impression tags and swipe up tags for impression tracker verification.
7. Click next to review your ad, pay, and publish.

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You’ll also get access to additional features depending on where you send your viewers. For example, you might see the option to enable autofill for lead generation or smart prefetching to speed up mobile site load times. 

How to optimize your Snapchat Ads campaigns 

When it comes to optimizing your Snapchat Ads, it all comes down to trial and error. First check that your ad type aligns with your advertising goal:

• For example, single image ads are great for conversions. 
• Use filters and lenses for UGC marketing. These ads tend to inspire trust in your brand and are less intrusive than traditional ad formats. And when users in your chosen location use your filter or lens to send Snaps to friends in other locations, you get even more exposure. When creating a filter, opt for something artistic that doesn’t obscure the main part of the user’s Snap. That’ll encourage more Snapchatters to use your filter.
• Lenses are also a powerful AR shopping tool. Create a lens that shows users how your product will look when they bring it home and put it to use. 
• Story ads are good for snagging attention quickly.
• Commercials are only available to selected advertisers, but they’re super effective as they can’t be skipped.
• Collection ads are ideal for e-commerce stores looking to drive sales. To set yourself up for success here, choose the top-performing products on your site, optimize your photos, and add some enticing CTAs. 
• We all know how effective video ads can be. Keep your Snapchat video ads short and hook viewers by calling out their pain points from the start. Use audio and captions to make your ads accessible. Lay out your solution to the viewers’ problem, then end with a strong CTA. 

9 tips for optimizing your Snapchat Ad campaigns:

1. A/B test (aka split test) your ads.
2. Define strong KPIs.
3. Keep up with your audience insights and optimize targeting accordingly. Pay key attention to the purchase intent metric.
4. Familiarize yourself with Snapchat culture.
5. Only advertise to locations where your product is available for purchase (that includes shipping options for e-commerce).
6. Make your creative asset fun, snappy, and shareable. Shoot for 5 or 6 seconds.
7. Create Snapchat ads that feel like native content. That means throwing out the polished, professional vibe and going for a more casual, conversational ad. 
8. Launch a broad, data-gathering campaign; then study your Delivery Insights.
9. Try out goal-based bidding. It’s a strategy where you optimize ads toward a specific action you want viewers to take. You set a cost-per-action requirement, and Snapchat will deliver impressions to efficiently achieve your desired outcome.

Want to make Snapchat an integrated part of your marketing strategy?

Marin Software's team of marketing consultants are standing by to get you started. Our tool makes cross-channel executive perspectives easy to see, and helps you make the best tactical marketing decisions possible…which is especially important when testing new channels. When you integrate the management and analysis of all your social and paid search platforms together, you'll save time and energy for everyone on the team. Our experts will make sure everything is tied together properly at the start so you can automate the systems that slow you down.

This is a story about people doing bad things on the internet. It’s not the first and certainly won’t be the last. We decided to tell our story to help prevent others from becoming victims. Of course we don’t want people misusing our brand, but the people who have spent their precious time and lost money in this are the real victims and are the ones we are looking to protect.

It started with a DM

We started getting strange messages to our social media accounts and various company email addresses asking “is this project real?” The project: Translation work from somebody who is using a name very similar to ours and our company logo.

This has nothing to do with our company (if you look closely, you can see the misspelled name). We responded to these inquiries letting the email senders know the project was not real and that they should not communicate with these Scammers (I’d really prefer to use a stronger term here, but my editor would not allow it). We also let the platforms where these conversations originated know what was happening.

As we received more messages, some of them became more urgent. Some of these new Victims were panicked because they had done the work and then sent money to the Scammers. One of them had sent $1,500.

How does this work?

We believe that these scams start with a job posting on sites like Freelancer.com and Upwork. The Scammer then asks the Victim to move their communications off the original platform and to communicate directly through Telegram or another messaging platform, including email. 

The Victim is given work that seems legitimate, and completes the task. When the Victim seeks payment, the Scammer then requires the Victim to establish an account for payment, which requires the Victim to send an “account registration fee” to the Scammer. This advance-fee scam is not new. Similar scams have been around in various forms for decades or longer, including the Spanish Prisoner and Nigerian Prince scams.

The Scammer promises that the account registration fee will be refunded upon the Scammer’s payment for the Victim’s work. At this point, many of the Victims realize that they have fallen for a scam.  But some Victims, having already done some work and not wanting to walk away from a potential payment, go ahead and pay the account registration fee. A behavioral psychologist might refer to this as an escalation of commitment or sunk-cost fallacy.

In a few cases, the Scammer further escalates the commitment by asking the Victim to make an additional payment to link their account.

How can freelancers protect themselves?

According to HR statistics, freelance work in the US has been on the rise, with 53 million registered freelancers in 2014 versus 59 million in 2020. So how can these freelancers protect themselves? The first thing that people can do when working on freelance projects is to always work through the platforms. They have established policies in place to ensure that payment happens once the job is completed and that payment should happen directly through the platform. Being asked to move communication to email or another platform should be a red flag. 

Secondly, there is absolutely no reason that we can think of where a legitimate company would ask you to provide payment in order to get paid. If it sounds like it doesn't make sense, it probably doesn't.

Third: watch out for projects that look too good to be true. The pay for the projects that we've seen were quite generous and this of course gets people more interested. If it seems like you are being overpaid for the amount of work involved, keep your guard up. 

There are many articles and videos with additional advice on what to watch for.

What are you doing to stop this? What can other companies do?

We aim to work with the freelance platforms and relevant law enforcement to try to prevent these types of scams from happening. Below are some contacts and links that we used so you can use them if needed.   If you become aware of a scam online posting, please report the posting and/or the user to the relevant platform.

US Agencies

• US Federal Trade Commission Fraud Reporting
• US FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center

Online Platforms

• Freelancer   
• Upwork  

Also, provide a way for people to contact you. People who have lost money are very resourceful about getting in touch with someone who can help. We have seen direct messages on social networks, emails to every alias listed on our website, and well as personal telephone outreach to team members and their families. By posting a link on our Contact Us page, we have made it easier for people to connect with our legal team and get additional information.

Open request to freelancing platforms

As we discussed how to handle this internally, one of the things that we think could provide a significant Improvement in the freelance ecosystem would be to allow companies to become certified. This would be similar to the blue check on Twitter. This way, a freelancer would know that the job is legitimate and coming from the official company account. It seems like a step in the right direction. It appears there is something similar for individuals, but we couldn’t find anything for companies.

We are not experts in this area, so there may be other things in place or better ways to solve this problem. We'd love to start a discussion about how we can do that. For now, know that Marin's cyber security practices are strong. If we need any freelance assistance, we will not be contacting anyone through Telegram or Whatsapp.

As we live in a world with increasingly remote employees, we expect that we will all face more of these types of threats.  We all should keep our guards up.

There's no reason to put all your social media advertising eggs in one basket when there’s a whole world of low competition and high ROI advertising opportunities out there. If you’re ready to branch out, consider giving Snapchat a chance. 

Snapchat demographic statistics

With a recent resurgence in popularity, the platform is experiencing a new fleet of users among teens and young adults. As of the second quarter of 2022, the app had 347 million daily active users worldwide, which is an 18% increase from the previous year.

Snapchat reaches 75% of Gen Z. If you’re trying to reach a younger demographic, Snap ads might just be your secret weapon. Many of today’s teens even use Snapchat over their phone’s native messaging platform for chatting with friends. While these users might also use social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, the fact that many advertisers sleep on Snapchat means less competition for your ads. 

Take the airline-booking app Hopper, for example. A recent case study from Snapchat’s inspiration page revealed some pretty impressive stats:

• Snapchatters were 37% more likely to watch a flight on Hopper vs users acquired from other social platforms. 
• Snapchatters had a booking rate 4 times higher than users acquired on other platforms. 
• The brand achieved a 50% decrease in cost per install (CPI) by using radius targeting on Snapchat.

What sets Snap apart from other social media platforms

Now that we’ve piqued your interest, let's find out what Snapchat ads are all about. Snapchat started as an app used solely for sharing vanishing images. Soon after, they added the ability to send direct messages and send short videos. They led the pack when it came to the Stories concept, lenses, and geofilters. 

Nowadays, they’ve expanded to include a Discover Page filled with news, articles, and stories by featured creators. That Discover Page is your ticket to advertising success. It houses Stories at the top. Scroll down a bit to see the featured content.
Snapchat ads are similar to the ads you’re used to on popular advertising platforms like Facebook and Instagram. They appear between Stories, on the Discover Page, and in the form of branded lenses and geofilters.

Ad types available on Snapchat

Below are all the Snap ads formats you can use to reach your target audience:

Single image or video ad

This is Snapchat’s basic ad format. It displays a single image or video full screen and can be used for most any brand objective. Videos can be up to three minutes long, but the platform recommends keeping them between 3 and 5 seconds for the best results. Snapchat’s images and videos are lumped together in the same category. This full-screen ad format enables users to take action by swiping up.

These ads take up the entire screen, meaning they don’t have to compete for the viewer’s attention with other content. They appear between content in the following sections: User Stories, Publishers, Creators, and Our Stories. 

Here are a few use cases:

• You can attach your website to the ad so that the CTA swipe-up link lets users make a purchase without leaving the Snapchat app. 
• Generate more app installs by attaching an “Install Now” swipe-up CTA to the bottom of the ad screen. This allows viewers to download your app without leaving Snapchat.
• Long-form video is also an option. Snapchat will play a 10-second preview of your chosen video. The bottom CTA will have a swipe-up link directing users to watch the full video. 

Collection

Perfect for ecommerce brands, Snapchat’s Collection ads allow you to showcase a series of products. If a Snapchatter is interested, these ads include four different tappable tiles that make it easy for them to buy and browse.

On-Demand filters

Create an On-Demand geofilter for users visiting your location of choice. This is a good option for brand awareness campaigns. There are a few different types of geofilters:

• Event geofilters: Become available at the time and location of your event.
• Shared Spaces geofilters: Appear to users in communal areas like malls, airports, parks, etc. 
• Chain geofilters: Available to your brick-and-mortar store customers.
• National geofilters: Available to everyone in your chosen country.

Filters can be made smart to serve ads with real-time updates based on the user's location, name, time, etc. 

Lenses

Snapchat really paved the way for TikTok and Instagram filters. I mean, how could we forget the OG puppy ears? Snapchat’s lenses are its AR filters. 

Lenses give Snapchat advertising a creative edge. Using these, advertisers can encourage viewers to participate in memorable interactive augmented reality experiences. With the platform’s Lens Web Builder, marketers can select from hundreds of animations, 3D objects, and effects to build a branded AR lens to connect with audiences in an engaging way.

Face lenses manipulate the user's facial features to make them appear different in some way or another. They can be used to transform users into a character relevant to your brand or as a way for users to try on your products without leaving the Snapchat app.

World lenses appear on the outward-facing camera (aka the back camera). They detect the user’s environment and allow users to interact with 3D objects overlaid on their world. These filters are also an effective method of showcasing products. 

Branded filters allow brands to advertise inside user interactions. Most of the other ad types offered by the platform live on the Stories/Discover Page. Branded filters show up when a user goes to send a Snap to a friend. Filters are, by far, one of the most fun things about the social media app because they can be applied to photos and videos as an extra, entertaining add-on. Brands can also develop their own unique filters for users to apply. Creating these filters is a great way to build brand awareness among users who might not have clicked your ad on the Discover Page.

Story ads

Story ads, part of Snapchat’s Discover feed, help you reach your target audience and drive brand awareness with a branded tile. Snapchat story ads are a series of images or videos that appear in between user stories or in the Discover Feed. They can display a collection of between 1 and 20 images or videos. These are pretty effective considering many Snapchat users watch their entire Story feed multiple times a day.

You can also advertise an article via the article ad format. It will pop up in the Discover section amongst other featured Stories and Articles. 

Product catalog ads

Display a series of products with this shoppable ad format. These catalog ads can display as collection ads, single image/video ads, or story ads. They allow users to purchase without leaving the Snapchat app. 

Commercials

Commercial ads are non-skippable 6-second video ads. The actual video can last up to 3 minutes, but the ad is only non-skippable for the first 6 seconds. They appear within curated content and for better or worse, Snapchatters can’t skip them. 

Dynamic ads

Marketers who are active users of Facebook, TikTok, or Instagram may already know that running dynamic ads is a great way to promote your brand. However, unlike other social media platforms, the Snapchat dynamic ads are only sent to users who’ve previously interacted with a brand. Offered in two formats — single image and collection — these dynamic ads are designed from pre-set templates and from your product catalog, eliminating the need to create them manually each time.

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Wrapping up

Now that you understand the basics of Snapchat ads, it's time to get to snapping. Snapchat's ads manager has a pretty nice suite of analytics where you can find what segments interact with your ads (including segments you didn't choose to include in your campaign). This is super helpful when it comes to improving your campaign relevance and reducing your advertising costs.

Paired with MarinOne's Snapchat integration, you can see all your advertising campaigns in one place, making it easier to identify budget by channel, successful products, and successful audiences that can be tested across various platforms. Speak to one of our marketing experts for a free consultation to get started with am omnichannel advertising strategy, featuring Snapchat.

There's nothing worse than feeling like you're wasting perfectly good product in storage facilities because certain items in your inventory just don't seem to be selling. This is frustrating both for operations and marketing teams. Operations teams are facing supply chain issues, shipping headaches, storage fees, and more while they watch waning product take precious warehouse space that best selling items could occupy. 

Meanwhile the marketing team is pouring money into ads, thinking that more exposure will lead to more sales, while certain items cannot seem to get out the door quickly enough. Sometimes, no matter how many times you tweak a campaign, the results just aren't there. Too many companies suffer from the "left hand not speaking to the right" in regard to marketing and operational teams. If this sounds familiar, it might be time to take a closer look at your inventory management strategy and realign the effectiveness between operations and marketing. 

As Julie Durante, the Director of Inbound at Impulse Creative, said, “Operations must serve the customers that marketing helps attract. If marketing and ops aren’t in alignment, no one will be successful.”

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What are the benefits of aligning operations and marketing roadmaps?

If your operations and marketing teams work side-by-side, you'll see great results. Making sure operations are aligned with what marketing is doing ensures a smooth workflow and you'll end up with more leads and revenue because of this close collaboration. Entering into a mutual agreement means you can share ideas, improve efficiency, and create the right environment for company growth. Here's a quick overview of the advantages of this approach.

1. Avoid over-ordering products that aren’t selling well 

By reducing your exposure to products that aren’t moving, you can save money on advertising and inventory costs. By ordering just enough to meet consumer demand— no more and no less—you can avoid major losses. 

2. Improve your company cash flow with inventory management

When an effective management strategy isn’t in place, you can tie up your money by purchasing large quantities of inventory all at once. With careful management, this can be avoided, resulting in improved cash flow that can be spent elsewhere when needed, like special marketing initiatives. 

3. Improve your organization’s bottom line 

When you streamline processes, it impacts the rest of your business by increasing revenue growth and leading to more consistent profitability. 

4. Benefit from a well-organized operations and marketing system 

Since you now have insight into exactly how much product you have, it makes it easier to determine the right products for upselling, cross-promotion, and bundling. An inventory that is well organized and well documented will also help save staff time and prevent errors, leading to tight shipping schedules and a greater overall customer experience, which is an important part of reputation management for the marketing team as well. If your inventory is properly organized, the rest of your supply chain will fall right into place.  

3 Challenges of operations-marketing alignment

Obviously creating the kind of multi-team synergy we're describing takes time and effort. That’s why it's important to find the right balance between having autonomy amongst each team and finding the most opportune moments for both teams to work together. 

1. Changing processes can be difficult to implement for larger businesses

Poor operational oversight and control can slow down fulfillment, and make errors more frequent. Some of the tactics we've mentioned, like engaging an inventory management tool, or reorganizing documentation processes, will make things much easier.

2. It requires accurate and up-to-date communication

As with most things in business, communication is key. Constant, transparent communication between the marketing team and operations team is a vital part of achieving success. The idea is to encourage the free flow of information. Promote collaboration by giving everyone a chance to share their ideas and knowledge. Make sure that people can easily talk to one another in person or through conference tools, and help break barriers between departments.

3. Assigning ownership and responsibility can get messy

Great teams work to understand the full range of what work is taking place and who owns what pieces of the puzzle. Who will take charge and make sure your teams function as well as they should? The answer lies in the question of ownership, not control. Establish early on the areas where one team will have to dictate the actions of another and vice versa, based on the greater good and big picture objectives of the company. 

If a shipping promotion marketing wants to run will ultimately cost the company too much, operations may have a veto in that area. But if a product bundle idea could potentially bring in a significant amount of additional revenue and it doesn’t add too much time in terms of labor or packaging, marketing may have the final vote in that scenario. 

At the end of the day, everyone is on the same team of reducing costs and increasing revenue for the company at large. Keep that singular focus in mind, have a spirit of teamwork from the top-down, and every situation will play out as smoothly as possible.

What role does inventory-based spend management play?

Inventory-based spend management is a way of making marketing and advertising budgeting decisions based on the product inventory you have available. 

By tracking and forecasting inventory levels and targeting your campaigns more specifically to the products you have in stock, you can increase your chances of making a sale. Surprisingly, 43% of small businesses don’t track their inventory—and 21% of companies overall say that they don’t have proper inventory management in place. Starting with a basic understanding of where things are now is paramount in order for all parties to move forward. To make a strategic sales approach based on inventory management successful you must get on top of existing inventory, the current marketing plan, and identify where those two componencts do not align in the big picture.

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How do we get started?

In this case, unlike other marketing tactics, the operations team takes the first step. Inventory-based spend management starts with a forecast and analysis of your product inventory. You'll need to take a close look at what products you have in stock, the expected rate of turnover, and any supply problems on the horizon. Without this kind of information, the "tail will be wagging the dog" as marketing continues to guess on which products to promote and feature.

Once that data is all in one place, you can start to make decisions about where to allocate your marketing budget both in the short-term and the long-term. If there’s a problem with supply for one item or category, you can shift your marketing strategy to other products. 

Thankfully, all of this can be done by implementing inventory software. With a good system in place, you can automate your strategy, optimize cash flow, successfully manage and control orders, oversee warehouses, reduce handling costs, and much more.

Inventory-based spend management techniques

There are predefined techniques to help you optimize inventory-based spend management. By choosing the techniques that work best for your business, you can maximize your budget and optimize your spend strategy. Here’s a look at just a few of them.

1. Just-In-Time (JIT) inventory management

The goal of JIT is to have the minimum amount of inventory on hand to meet demand. That means you bring in inventory on an as-needed basis, rather than buying in large quantities. 

2. ABC analysis

With this technique, goods are split into three categories, A, B, and C. Category A products represent your most valued goods—those that make a huge impact on your overall profit; Category B reflects products that fall somewhere in the middle of your most valued products and your least valued ones; Category C includes small transaction items that are critical to overall profit but don’t individually matter too much. 

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3. Demand forecasting

Demand forecasting focuses on historical sales data to forecast customer demand. Companies use this type of forecasting as a rough estimate of the amount of goods they expect consumers to purchase in the future. 

Inventory-based spend management is crucial if you want to ensure your customers get the goods they want when they want them, but can also be a key tool to help you properly manage your marketing budget. 

Realizing the potential of inventory-based spend management

Inventory-based spend management is a great way to save money and get the most out of your marketing budget. By targeting your campaigns specifically to products you have in stock at a surplus and those that generate the best profits, you can avoid over-ordering products that aren't selling well and bounce back as a business when inventory levels are off. This approach can also help you make more sales by increasing your marketing focus on products that are in stock.

How MarinOne Can Help

Whether you’ve got a solid marketing and operations strategy in place already, or you’re looking to develop one, MarinOne can get you headed in the right direction.

MarinOne helps your marketing team see all of your ad spend data in one place, so you can make more informed decisions about where to allocate your marketing budget instead of watching your dollars go to waste. 

Paired with a great inventory management tool, you'll have effective multi-team visibility for both operations and marketing needs. Consult with one of our advertising experts to learn how you can successfully manage and optimize spend.

There’s no denying the popularity of Amazon. Amazon is a major player in the world of ecommerce and one of the biggest online marketplaces. With over 300 million customers worldwide, 2.3 billion sellers on the platform, and over 100 new advertisers daily, competition is fierce. Countless brands battle for shoppers around the clock. In the race to be successful sellers, advertisers are aiming to win first place—or at least the best position when it comes to getting their products seen. The trick? Amazon bidding, with a combination of effective strategies to increase sales that will put you on top and set you apart from your biggest competitors. 

What is Amazon bidding?

Amazon bidding is an auction-based system that allows sellers to place bids for keywords or products with the goal of showing their ads to potential buyers. When a shopper clicks on their ads, an advertiser pays for the bid. This is known as cost-per-click (CPC) advertising.

How does Amazon bidding work?

Amazon has access to a vast amount of data that helps them calculate the probability of a shopper clicking your ad and converting.

• When creating Amazon pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, advertisers bid on specific keywords that could make their product appear when a buyer searches for that word.
• Buyers type search terms in the search bar and scroll through the search result pages driven by the keywords selected by sellers. 
• Winning the keyword primarily depends on a combination of a seller's bid, the relevance of their product, and the quality of their product listing.
• If you win the bidding auction, Amazon’s PPC algorithm uses a Second-Price Auction, resulting in your winning bid being lower than your original bid. 

3 Amazon bidding strategies

Amazon Dynamic Bids, down only

Amazon reduces bids by up to 100% if a click is unlikely to result in a sale and is less likely to convert. This option is automatically applied by default to all existing campaigns. 

When to use it: This is a good option for a profit-driven strategy. Dynamic bids help you preserve ad spend for conversions that are unlikely and help to ensure that you don’t overspend on advertising.

Amazon Dynamic Bids, up and down

For first-page search result placement, Amazon raises bids by up to 100% if a click is more likely to convert. It increases bids by 50% for all other placements, and will reduce a bid by up to 100% if a click is less likely to convert.

When to use it: This option is recommended if bids happen to be highly variable in your market because up and down dynamic bids are more flexible. Up and down are perfect for existing campaigns that are well-optimized. 

Fixed bids

Amazon will not dynamically adjust a bid based on the likelihood of a conversion.

When to use it: Fixed bids are great for an impression strategy and are ideal for raising brand awareness. Using this strategy, however, will most likely cause you to overpay for a good amount of your clicks. Why? With fixed bids, Amazon applies your bid to every single placement—regardless of the likelihood of conversion. The silver lining is that they allow you to exercise complete control of your sponsored ad campaign budget.

How to calculate the optimal bid

To calculate the optimal bid, use the formula below.

• Bid = Max. CPC = Avg. Order Value x Conversion Rate x ACOS Target
• Alternatively, the equation can be understood as:

Bid = Max. CPC = (Ad Sales / Ad Orders) x (Ad Orders / Ad Clicks) x (Ad Spend / Ad Sales)

• Additionally, the formula can be simplified like so:

Bid = Max. CPC = (Ad Sales / Ad Clicks) x (Ad Spend / Ad Sales)

While these formulas are there to help you with the Amazon bidding process, the goal is to maximize your profit while simultaneously decreasing your spend. 

4 tips to increase sales

Fine-tune keywords

Keywords influence the chance of conversion and the amount you need to bid. They are key to determining the search results that your campaign will target. To identify the most profitable and relevant keywords, consider using an Amazon keyword tool or reverse ASIN search. 

Improve your product listing

If your listing is impressive, attractive, and enticing enough to draw a potential customer’s attention, a click is more likely to result in a conversion. Make sure to use clear and informative descriptions, include high-resolution photos, and improve your Amazon feedback rating. 

Get on Amazon Prime

Shoppers like it when their Amazon products arrive as quickly as possible. There’s no doubt that Amazon’s same-day or next-day deliveries are a huge appeal for customers —especially when there is no extra charge for it. In fact, 83% of shoppers favor free delivery so much so that more than half (54%) of them will abandon their carts if they have to pay a delivery fee. Take part in Amazon’s fast shipping program by getting the blue Prime badge or by qualifying for Amazon Prime via Seller Fulfilled Prime or FBA. 

Follow an advertising strategy

Determine the outcome you’re trying to achieve in order to decide which bidding method is best for your campaign. Develop a strategy so you commit to your goals by selecting the bid that’s most appropriate. 

Amazon Bidding Key Takeaways

Amazon bidding is a big determinant in the success or failure of your Amazon campaign advertising efforts. Regardless of how much target-marketing research you conduct, it’s still a challenge to truly know what shoppers want and why. Amazon’s algorithm does a good job of analyzing and predicting success, so with a detailed understanding of how Amazon bidding works, you can still implement winning campaigns to ultimately achieve your business goals.

How MarinOne can help

Getting your products seen among millions of other Amazon sellers is no easy feat. 

If you're not yet up to speed with advertising on Amazon, MarinOne can help. Our automated bidding tool can be used to manage bids for Amazon Advertising accounts directly within the MarinOne platform. 

MarinOne also manages keyword-level and target-level calculated bids for Amazon Advertising accounts:

• For manually targeted sponsored products
• Auto-targeted sponsored products
• Sponsored brands
• Sponsored brand video
• Sponsored display

To learn more about other Amazon Advertising management functionality in MarinOne, check out our Amazon Advertising article.

If you're new to MarinOne's automated bidding, learn more about our automated bidding tool from our Bid Strategy article.

Interested in learning more? Try a free trial today.

‍Apple Search Ads is a powerful acquisition tool for app marketing that has been around for several years. It’s a proven method that connects advertisers with a relevant target audience to increase conversions. Using Apple Search Ads, app developers can drastically improve their visibility in the App store, thereby gaining an edge over competitors. And with two different solutions offered—basic and advanced—advertisers can implement either simple or complex campaigns, depending on their organization’s goals. 

While Apple Search Ads are a gateway for advertisers to convert more users, users are hyper-aware that companies are trying to glean as much information as they can to track them. Consequently, privacy settings in Apple’s mobile ecosystem are growing ever-more stringent. More and more users are tapping into Limit Ad Tracking (LAT), a simple but sophisticated feature that can be enabled on their mobile devices to prevent data collection by apps and to help maintain privacy rights. Limit Ad Tracking disrupted the advertising space simply by providing users the option to safeguard their personal data. 

iPhone devices now make up approximately 45% of the US smartphone market and users are turning on Limit Ad Tracking (LAT) to feel safer. This means advertisers face new challenges as they launch their App Store search ads to connect with iOS users. 

Share of Apple iPhone users in the U.S. from 2014 to 2021

What Is Limit Ad Tracking (LAT)?

Limit Ad Tracking (LAT) is a feature on Apple’s mobile OS that gives users a choice to opt out of having an ID for Advertisers (IDFA) and can be turned on from a user’s Settings app. When this setting is on, networks are unable to locate an identity associated with a device, and users who seek privacy protection do not receive unwanted targeted ads. 

While LAT doesn’t completely block ads, it prevents targeting users based on their behavior, and ad tech companies can’t collect as much data as they normally would if the setting is turned off. Rather, tracking is largely limited to contextual data points such as the device’s OS version, the app store subcategory, the version of the app, and so on. 

LAT was the predecessor to App Tracking Transparency, or ATT. Both iterations are Apple’s way of letting users choose to decline personalized ads. Essentially, the opt-out prevents Apple Search Ads from recognizing the user as a returning customer and using their information to serve more relevant ads. 

While previously referred to as the Limit ad tracking (LAT tracking) feature, Apple’s verbiage of choice is now “personalized ads”. Instead of turning on LAT tracking to prevent personalized ads, users with iOS 14+ can simply turn off the personalized ads feature. 

Users who choose to guard their privacy with either version of the feature prevent advertisers from targeting them through any aspects of their Apple ID. This includes demographic and search data. 

With so much riding on whether or not a user consents to personalized ads, you might be wondering if the initial ATT prompt is your only chance to acquire ATT consent. Users can turn off the “Allow Apps to Request to Track” option in their privacy settings. If they enable the requests, advertisers have one chance to request ATT permission. If the user denies the native ATT prompt, you don’t get another chance. 

At this point, your only option is to provide information in your app informing users on the benefits of tracking, as well as how to adjust the settings to enable it. 

Why It Matters for Advertisers

As more users enable the LAT feature on their devices, advertisers are being hit with a big challenge. Many users see LAT as a privacy-preserving tool. For advertisers, however, it reduces their ability to reach their target audience. The implications for marketers are not favorable; here are some of the reasons why. 

1. As the mobile marketing era shifts, user information will no longer be automatically collected. Rather, the user will have to provide it voluntarily, either willingly offering their information or denying it. While users feel more secure using the LAT feature, mobile marketers are unable to access as much information as they were able to previously.

2. The App Store may remove an app that uses an iOS ad identifier outside its intended purpose—and understandably so. A user's Limit Ad Tracking settings should be respected. 

3. If user privacy rights are violated, a developer's app risks its reputation, and users are likely to turn to competitors. The LAT feature has created new challenges for mobile marketers, urging them to step up their game or lose a user’s attention. 

4. For opted-out users, lack of attribution makes it harder for advertisers to measure the success of campaigns. 

Impact of LAT on attribution

Prior to iOS 10, companies did not have to honor the user’s LAT request. Apple also previously allowed companies to use permanent device identifiers (called universal device IDs or UDIDs) for frequency capping, attribution, conversion events, estimating the number of unique users, advertising fraud detection, and debugging.

Once iOS 10 entered the picture, Apple began showing zeros in place of the user IDFA for those who selected LAT. IDFA stands for “identifier for advertisers” on Apple mobile devices. It’s like a web cookie, but for ad tracking. An IDFA notifies advertisers when an iPhone user takes a certain action on their ads or apps. 

iOS 14 changed the game by only assigning IDFAs to those who explicitly opt into tracking. IDFAs let advertisers know when a user takes an action as a result of an ad. They’re also used for fraud detection. Post-iOS 14, advertisers have to use Apple’s SKANetwork (StoreKit Ad Network) to get attribution data per campaign and marketing channel without device-level data for privacy safety. 

What to do about Apple’s App Tracking Transparency pop-up

After updating to iOS 15, users receive a prompt explaining what personalized ads are, equipped with buttons for the users to turn the feature on or off. Apple’s data on their first-part advertising efforts shows that when prompted, 78% of users opt to turn off the personalized ads feature. 

The same data revealed that the conversion rate between users with personalized ads on and off are practically identical. Advertisers report a 62.1% conversion rate for customers who opt in and a 62.5% conversion rate for those who opt out. 

In response to this data, Apple recommends developers target users with the feature disabled as they are far greater in number. Because there are more users with the feature disabled, bidding prices for that audience are lower. 

How does LAT tracking affect campaigns 

Advertisers who choose to target users based on demographic data like age or gender will not reach those who opt out of personalized ads. Those who don’t target using demographic information will automatically advertise to LAT-on users. 

• LAT-on users don’t share identifying information with Apple Search Ads. This includes age, gender, user behavior, etc. If you use these criteria to refine your audience, LAT-on users will be excluded.
• Targeting LAT-on users is not an option. Advertisers can target either LAT-off users or both LAT-on and LAT-off users. Geographic targeting doesn’t exclude LAT-on users. Discovery campaigns can target LAT-on users, but advertisers will get this data at the ad group level rather than the keyword level. 

Benefits of Limit Ad Tracking (LAT) 

Even with the limitations that LAT poses, Apple search ads enable app marketers to reach their target audience on a global scale. Apple search ads are a very effective channel of advertising with very high user intent, and so the ongoing ad-blocking evolution still has advantages for mobile marketers. 

• Limit Ad Tracking leads to a higher conversion rate. In fact, there is a 50% average conversion rate for search ads. 

• Limit Ad Tracking improves cost per taps and cost per download.

Challenges/Drawbacks of Limit Ad Tracking (LAT)

Although there are many advantages to LAT, there are some obvious downsides. Without IDFA, behavioral targeting becomes impossible, leaving advertisers to depend on contextual targeting criteria. As a result of IDFA opt-in rates ranging from 4–13%, many organizations are seeking solutions that can provide accurate analytics, reporting, and attribution. 

Worldwide Daily Opt-in Rates

For mobile marketers, tracking for LAT-on users is extremely limiting because a user’s data is off-limits unless they provide consent via App Tracking Transparency (ATT). Apple Search Ads ad groups with specific targeting (either age or gender-based) will be unable to reach users who have enabled LAT. Without a way to track LAT-on users, mobile marketers risk missing a quarter of the potential traffic. 

As a result, by only being able to obtain install data from LAT-off users, mobile marketers suffer from data discrepancies that lead to an incomplete picture with a lower number of attributed conversions. Furthermore, turning on LAT can negatively affect the functionality of certain apps by disrupting advertisers’ ability to track revenue and other post-install metrics.

How advertisers can adapt

Possibly the biggest step advertisers can take to adapt as privacy preservation becomes more prevalent is to transition advertising measurement away from deterministic, user-centric models and instead use a holistic model that incorporates variations in ad spend and revenue to attribute efficiency to channel-specific ad campaigns. 

Essentially, privacy preservation and ATT aren’t going anywhere. Workarounds are possible, however they are temporary. Eliminating the need to use extremely targeted ads simplifies the process of reaching target customers. 

How MarinOne can help

MarinOne can help your organization optimize your app campaigns to improve performance and gain efficiencies. Through MarinOne, you can drive mobile revenue as well as app installations by leveraging Apple Search Ads and Google Universal App campaigns. Learn how MarinOne’s Apple Search Ads integration supercharges already powerful Apple Search Ads campaigns.

If you’d like to learn more about how you can use cutting-edge software to reach your customers more effectively, contact us. We’ll be happy to schedule a no-strings-attached demo of our solution for you today. 

Savvy digital marketers know that Google Ads is a great way to reach more customers and bring leads to your business. 96% of brands spend money on Google Ads, so this is Marketing 101, right? But while you know it's a must, getting Google Ads to deliver can sometimes prove tricky.

You could be making common mistakes that cost you money and reduce your ROI. 

So, to help you squeeze the absolute most from your marketing spend, we'll discuss some of the most common Google Ads mistakes to watch out for. Let’s get started. 

Mistake 1: Not Targeting Ads Correctly

Let's say Bob runs a small business that sells blenders online. He's been running ads for a while now, and he’s gotten pretty good at it. But there is one mistake he keeps making: he isn’t targeting his ads correctly.

Bob’s ad with the keyword “blender” is getting a lot of clicks from people searching for the 3D graphics tool. That’s a problem—he needs to target his ads to cooks specifically. To do that, he needs to use the right keywords.

For example, he could use keywords like “kitchen blender” or “smoothie blender.” Using these keywords, he can ensure his ad is shown to people who are actually looking for what he’s selling.

Once Bob's worked out which keywords are most likely to perform best for his business, he must weave these phrases into his product descriptions, website copy, and blog posts.

Our recommendation? Hire a conversion copywriter to help you. Writing with keywords can be a bit like playing Tetris—if you can’t slot them in naturally, it won't work.

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Mistake 2: Not Using Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are words or phrases for which you don’t want your ad to show. For example, if you sell blenders, you might want to add “software” and “3D imaging” as negative keywords. That way, your ad won’t appear when someone searches for the software development tool.

This might seem like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many people forget to add negative keywords to their campaigns. As a result, they waste money reaching people who are not searching for their products.

Mistake 3: Not Bidding On the Right Keywords

You need to bid on the right keywords when running a display ad. If you don’t, your ad might not show up at all. And if you bid on the wrong keywords, you could waste money.

For example, let’s say you sell women’s clothing. You could bid on keywords like “women’s clothing” or “dresses.” But if you bid on the keyword “clothing,” your ad might show up for searches like “men’s clothing” or “kids’ clothing.” And you don’t want to waste your money on those clicks.

To avoid this mistake, use Google's Keyword Planner to research which keywords are most relevant to your business. Add those keywords to your campaign and bid on them accordingly.

Mistake 4: Not Using Ad Extensions

Ad extensions give your ad more space and include more information—like a CTA, phone number, address, image, or video. All this information can be beneficial to potential customers, and it can help you stand out from the competition.

To add ad extensions to your campaign, go to the “Ad extension” tab in your Google Ads account and choose which extensions you want to add.

Mistake 5: Not Tracking Your Results

If you’re not tracking your results, you won’t know if your ad is working, and you could be wasting a lot of money. Check the performance to see what’s working and what isn’t. To do this, you need to set up conversion tracking.

Conversion tracking measures how many people who see your ad go on to do what you want them to do. This could be making a purchase, signing up for your newsletter, or downloading a white paper.

To set up conversion tracking, you’ll need to add a piece of code to your website. This might sound daunting, but it’s pretty simple (check out the link for a step-by-step guide).

Mistake 6: Not Optimizing With Conversion Testing

If you’re not testing and optimizing, you could miss out on many conversions. Test different headlines, descriptions, and call-to-actions to see what works best. You might be surprised by the results.

To test different elements of your ad, create two (or more) ads that are identical except for the component you want to try. For example, you could test two headlines and see which one gets more clicks.

Once you’ve created your ads, run them for a set period (usually at least a week) to collect data. Then compare the results and see which ad performed better.

Mistake 7: Search Network & Display Network Default Campaign Targeting Options

When you create a new campaign, Google will automatically set your targeting options to the Search Network & Display Network. It might not be necessary to target both of these networks (though they often work well together), so be sure to get a sense of which is best for you if that’s the case.

To change your targeting options, go to the “Networks” tab in your campaign settings. You can deselect the Search Network and/or Display Network.

Mistake 8: Not Using Location Targeting

Location targeting helps restrict your ad to people in a chosen region so you can maximize your marketing spend and have your ads seen by those most likely to respond.

There are a few different ways to target your ads to a specific location. The first is to target by country, state, or city. For example, if you only want to show your ad to people in New York, you would select “Target” and then “Location.”

You can also target by radius. This is useful if you have a brick-and-mortar store and you want to target people who live nearby. To do this, select “Target” and then “Radius.”

Finally, you can target by zip code. This is similar to targeting by radius, but it’s more precise. For instance, you might want to advertise to residents in a suburb but not in the adjacent business park. Select “Target” and " Zip code " to execute this tactic.

Mistake 9: Ignoring Regional Trends

When you’re targeting a specific region, knowing the trends in that area gives you a tremendous advantage. For example, if you’re targeting the United States, you might find that there are certain states where your product or service is more popular than others. Or maybe you sell fans, and there’s a heatwave in one part of the country. Trends can help you spot these opportunities. 

Google Trends can show you insights about a specific region. Simply enter a keyword or phrase and select a region. Google Trends will then show you how popular that keyword or phrase is in that area.

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How MarinOne can help

Display advertising is a great way to reach your target audience, while search ads are the best way to get prospects down the sales funnel and help them convert. The fight to stand out is fierce, but by avoiding these common mistakes, you have a real shot at reaping the rewards. If you want to improve your search engine marketing or display ads strategy, MarinOne can help you identify opportunities and optimize your campaigns.

There are many moving parts to a GA campaign, from targeting to keywords to ad extensions. MarinOne gives you one platform to manage all of your paid search campaigns so you can avoid mistakes and save time. It integrates with GA so you can see your analytics in one place, allowing you to track your results and make adjustments as needed. Finally, you can automate and optimize your ads with just a few clicks. To get things rolling, you don’t need to be a technical expert—our platform is designed for non-technical users.

Would you like to find out what MarinOne can do for you? Schedule a free demo to learn more.

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Getting Started with Amazon Live

Visibility is the key if you are aiming to succeed as a seller on Amazon. Keeping up with platform changes and new features is a great way to stay ahead of the competition and have more visibility on Amazon for your brand. One such feature your company ought to be utilizing is Amazon Live.

Since the inception of Amazon Live in 2016, it has slowly but surely grown in status and notoriety. What initially seemed cheesy to many brands has now become a highly profitable revenue platform. As Prime Day 2022 numbers have improved year over year, being able to engage users already shopping on Amazon offers up audiences who are more likely to convert right away. 

This is great news for individual influencers as well as major brands. Most of the users active on Amazon Live view shopping as being highly therapeutic or personal in some way. So with an ever-growing audience of highly-engaged active shoppers, the question arises ‘How can my brand use this too?” Here’s a playbook on how to get started.

What is Amazon Live?

Amazon Live is regarded as one of the most successful initiatives launched by Amazon in the form of a live streaming platform. Sellers can create videos and tutorials as a way to market new or unique products. Creators can host live streams on their Amazon Live to advertise their product to their customers and followers. The live streams come in a myriad of formats: from direct interactions between seller and shopper, to giving product demos, offering promo codes, and holding Q&A sessions, all amounting to the creator earning commission from sales produced by their streamable content. 

Amazon Live has been made customer and seller friendly, as both parties can access the platform on desktop as well on mobile. There is also growth potential from a global perspective for brands, as the website and mobile app versions of Amazon Live are available across many countries. 

What are Amazon Live influencers?

Social media influencers have been an integral part of the entire concept behind Amazon Live. Amazon’s foray into live shopping with this QVC style shopping stream changed the influencer landscape at large as thousands of streamers have taken advantage of a new place to sell their products in an interactive way. 

The Amazon Live platform also offers the Amazon Influencer Program, where individuals with an existing social media following can re-direct that following to the influencers' favorite Amazon products. Using tagged codes and links, the influencer in turn receives a sales commission for those product purchases from Amazon. 

By developing a unique Amazon Storefront, influencers can choose and promote any product on the platform on this layout to generate a permanent income stream. Based on the type of product, total influencer sales, etc., the commission for influencers is set up in the range of 10% of all revenue. 

Developing great Amazon Live content as an influencer

Amazon Live offers the influencers a chance to showcase a products' features in real time while answering questions and engaging with shoppers, much like Facebook Live and Youtube Live. Developing content for live streams is as personal as any other content an influencer may create. If you're a content creator looking to produce a unique streaming experience on Amazon Live, don't be afraid to wear your product, use it, and flaunt it the way you want…just as you would on any other social media platform. (So long as you're within Amazon's guidelines of course.)

Keep in mind that shoppers want to see:

• How the product works
• What sets it apart from other similar products
• Why you recommend it as their trusted influencer.

You can sign up for the Amazon Influencer Program in order to live stream products here. All you need to apply for the Amazon Influencer Program is your YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram account information. It takes 3-5 days to get the application approved and setup your account. 

Partnering with Amazon Live influencers as a brand

Just like other forms of influencer marketing, there are several benefits to working with influencers on Amazon. For brand owners looking to use Amazon content creator relationships as part of your omnichannel marketing strategy, a few objectives you could set as part of an Amazon influencer program are:

• Exposure to new audiences and brand awareness
• Authentic, top of funnel content creation
• Reputation boosts through influencer trust
• Optimization of your Amazon product listings
• Increased sales and conversion

When done correctly, influencer marketing has been shown to drive qualified traffic that will not only deliver an immediate return on investment but also provide momentum for Amazon listings. This helps increase Best Seller Rank, organic rank, and ad visibility.

Remember, in influencer marketing, authenticity is #1

Keep in mind that content creators prioritize their own brand identity and authentic voice above all else. So to have success, you must find the right partnerships that are a fit for the company and the influencer. 

In a recent interview with Amazon, popular influencer Trisha Hershberger described her early experiences as a content creator, and how she was met with resistance by the industry to be herself. Many brands only wanted to collaborate with her if she changed her appearance to what they considered the "typical" gamer look. 

“I was told, ‘you can't wear a dress on camera and talk about video games, no one's going to take you seriously, you have to wear a graphic T-shirt.' I was told often that I didn’t look like the gaming type,” she says. 

Hershberger shared that she was adamant about her point of view despite the pushback she had received. Her reward for this fortitude came in the form of seeing audiences respond positively to her individuality. Viewers are wanting to connect with creators who are being true to themselves and their interests. By sticking to her guns and presenting the image she wanted to portray, Hershberger managed to help shape a culture of communication and openness between herself and the brands she promotes. 

She believes the stalwart attitude she and other influencers have had has helped to create more diversity in online content at large. “With more diverse creators coming forward with different backgrounds and interests, there is something for everyone,” she says.

Connecting Amazon Live and Amazon influencers to your omnichannel marketing strategy

Amazon Live has the potential to be another powerful asset in the digital marketers' toolkit, just like many other platforms, tools, or features that have come before it.  You've most likely already tackled Pinterest advertising, TikTok content, programmatic ads, and many other unknowns in the past…so don't be afraid to get bold here too. Amazon Live is simply another opportunity to dig deep and get creative, scaling your marketing initiatives to new heights. Some low hanging fruit for omnichannel applications we would suggest include:

• Repurpose Amazon Live content on other social media channels
• Extend your Amazon Live influencer collaborations to include promotion on their other content platforms
• Use Amazon Live as an opportunity to test new product launches, or get passive market feedback on existing products
• Create community and ongoing dialogue amongst the Amazon audience by driving them to other forums where your brand spends time

Managing Amazon Live budgets and campaigns with MarinOne

While some of the execution to an Amazon Live campaign may be distinctive to other campaigns your brand is running, what will be consistent is the need for clear audience tracking, insightful data analysis, and accurate attribution. Marin Software is prepared to help you do just that with our all-in-one paid media management platform. Our tool integrates directly with Amazon Ads so you can see how a multitude of campaign types are performing all at once, against one another. It's also one of the only tools available that offers true omnichannel budgeting across nearly 30 publisher platforms, so you'll know whether to put more or less engine spend toward Amazon, Facebook, TikTok, or anywhere else your ads are running. Let our team set up the infrastructure for your team to make the best advertising decisions possible. Get a consultation from one of our digital marketing experts today.

Amazon receives over two billion visitors a month. With such a large audience frequently visiting its platform, it’s no wonder the number of marketplace sellers has exploded over the last decade. The volume of online shoppers is making it harder than ever for sellers to make an impression and grab the attention of customers. If your goal is to expand your reach and attract new customers, Amazon’s Demand-Side Platform (DSP) may be the answer. And there is no better time than now. Why? Amazon DSP is on track to make $17.6 billion from advertising this year and is expected to reach a staggering $46.6 billion by 2025. 

What is Amazon DSP?

Amazon DSP enables programmatic buying and selling of display, video, and audio ads. The demand-side platform allows you to reach audiences both on and off of Amazon and across leading publishers’ sites like Twitch.tv, IMDb, Audible, Zappos, and others. The ads often appear not only on Amazon and Amazon-owned websites, but across Amazon-owned apps, Amazon devices, and affiliate websites and apps within Amazon’s network. Through Amazon DSP, you can create more brand and product awareness to encourage shopper re-engagement and retarget lost or potential customers. 

The 4 Amazon DSP Ad Types

Dynamic E-commerce Ads

Dynamic ads automatically optimize which ad to display based on your campaign goal. Using machine learning, Amazon DSP can feed audiences relevant ads based on predictable behavior—delivering coupon code strategy tactics to incentivize impulse buyers and generating ads with customer reviews in them to engage customers who prefer to read reviews before purchasing a product. Since dynamic ads only direct to an Amazon product listing page, they are not a viable option if you use DSP to promote your direct website. 

Static Ads 

Unlike dynamic ads, static ads feature a call-to-action and a simple image. They can lead customers to an Amazon product listing, an Amazon Brand store, or directly to your website. 

Video Ads Through DSP

In-stream or out-stream video content can be displayed both on and off Amazon. Your video ads can link directly to your website or to a product detail page on Amazon. Video ads through DSP help you leverage Amazon’s audiences to target the right shoppers. 

Over-The-Top Video Ads (OTT)

These ads, displayed as full-screen videos on TV, allow you to create brand awareness in a separate medium. By using OTT, you can expand your reach to millions more people and target specific Amazon audiences. Keep in mind though: with OTT ads shoppers have no way to click and take action. 

Amazon DSP Targeting Options

With Amazon DSP’s thousands of customer segments and its insights into shopper history and intent, it can help support many of your advertising goals. Here’s a glance at the different targeting options available.

Behavioral Targeting

Behavioral targeting is often used for brand awareness purposes and enables you to set any number of triggers so you can target shoppers further down the funnel. 

Lifestyle Targeting

With Lifestyle targeting, relevant ads are served to people who buy from a particular category habitually. This type of targeting allows you to target customers who share similar characteristics with your current customers or are interested in brand-relevant categories. 

Demographic Targeting

You can target ads based on gender, age, income, or location.

Device Targeting

Target your ads based on specific end-user devices including Android or Apple phones, different operating systems, desktop users, or other niche devices such as the Amazon Fire tablet. 

In-Market Targeting

By using in-market targeting, you can build brand awareness and increase sales. Audiences who are “in-market” are those who have high intent with a greater likelihood of purchasing your product or services.

Contextual Targeting

Serve ads to users based on what they are browsing right now. Contextual targeting is a great option to encourage impulse buys and drive conversions quickly. 

Remarketing Targeting

For consumers who are on the fence about buying a product or a competitive product, remarketing targeting can help. The different types of remarketing targets include Pixel-Based, ASIN, Purchased ASIN, Brand Halo, and Similar Product remarketing. 

Audience Lookalike Targeting

Audience Lookalike targeting hones in on customers who share similarities with your existing customers. With this option, you can take advantage of Amazon’s unique data combined with its collaborative filtering that can create detailed consumer profiles. 

Advertiser Audiences 

Amazon DSP allows you to leverage third-party data so you don’t have to solely rely on the first-party data that Amazon provides. Through the use of pixels, CRM data, and/or DMP audience transfers, you can reach customers who have previously engaged with your brand. 

5 Reasons Amazon DSP Is a Powerful Tool for Advertisers 

By using Amazon DSP, you can take your campaign performance to a whole new level and achieve your programmatic advertising goals. Here’s how:

Audience Insights and Analytics 

One of the greatest benefits of Amazon DSP is that advertisers can tap into Amazon’s first-party shopper data. Every search, view, click, purchase, and other shopper action along the customer journey is tracked. With Amazon DSP’s robust data capabilities, you can glean more information about how, what, when, and why customers buy what they buy. You can also gain access to key performance metrics such as total purchases, product units sold, add-to-cart rates, and more to help you determine what’s driving results and what’s not.

Retargeting

Retaining your current audience is not only critical to sustaining your company’s success but is also a more cost-effective way to spend your ad dollars instead of attracting new customers. Using Amazon DSP, you can retarget potential customers who have already engaged with your brand or products. 

Dynamic Targeting

Targeting shifts over time. Amazon DSP allows you to adjust your strategy accordingly so you can move your ad placements, reroute your creative spending, or reposition your domain ads to reach customers who have expressed interest in your product.

Extended Reach

With Amazon DSP, you can expand your audience reach across a vast range of sites. An attention-grabbing display ad or video campaign can improve your brand perception and increase awareness by being displayed on a large number of websites simultaneously.

Time Savings

Amazon DSP enables you to have your campaigns up and running in just minutes so you don’t have to spend time playing phone tag, negotiating, handing off creative tasks, reconciling billing, and settling up payments.

How MarinOne Can Help

Looking to take your Amazon DSP to the next level? 

MarinOne integrates with Amazon DSP to help you better understand your customers on Amazon. Our platform goes far beyond what Amazon provides with a comprehensive suite of tools that activate and amplify your entire Amazon advertising campaign portfolio. 

With MarinOne, you can analyze paid search and social advertising as well as other retail media, shipping campaigns, and marketplaces, giving you a cross-publisher and cross-channel view of performance. 

Our alerts provide real-time updates on changes in activity so you can always be in the know and never miss an opportunity to improve performance. Use our marketplace signals to link your DSP performance to reviews, ratings, inventory status, price, and more. In addition, MarinOne features Amazon metrics like detailed page views and new to brand.

Ready to find out more about how MarinOne can help with your Amazon DSP campaigns? Get a personalized demo today.

Is your business struggling to make a digital impact despite having a fully developed and designed website? The problem could be that your website is not as dynamic as it ought to be with UX-driven software and plugins. Whether you are dispensing information or selling goods and services online, marketing automation beyond your basic CMS is necessary to bring your audience to your website the first time and keep them coming back for more. 

Here are some of the best integrations you should be using for a functional website that captures your audiences' attention while giving your marketing team the transparency needed to reach those audiences ongoing.

Lead Generation

Instapage

A quick way to identify lead quality is by having customized landing pages for every type of lead coming into your sales funnel. With Instapage, you can develop unique landing pages quickly and efficiently for every client category you serve. Its compatible nature enables you to connect with other software and applications to funnel the generated leads to your CRM, and you can plug LPs into your CMS and domain without much hassle.

Instapage has also taken some of the guesswork out of landing page design; as they have provided hundreds of high-converting templates, ready for you to test. You can customize the template as you please with Instapage's drag-and-drop functionality; and with easy-to-use duplication, a/b variant, and mobile-friendly editing tools…you'll have dozens of great landing pages in no time, without ever touching raw code directly. Pricing starts at $199 per month, or you can contact their biz dev team for a custom quote, depending on the needs of your website.

MailChimp

There is no thorough lead generation campaign without email marketing. To enable a winning strategy, you will require an email marketing automation platform. While there are many behemoths in this space, such as Marketo and Pardot, for those just starting out…our recommendation would be MailChimp. The software is great for novices, it has a surprising number of drip funnels ready to go, and it easily integrates with dozens of other tools and platforms. 

Depending on your needs and existing contact list, MailChimp offers both free and paid subscriptions to their service. You can send emails to up to 2000 contacts for free; beyond that point, there is a sliding scale of premium plans ranging between $9.99 for 500 contacts and $299 for 10,000 contacts. Like so many others, they also offer enterprise account quotes through one of their sales consultants.

Support

Intercom

If you want to keep potential customers entering your website engaged, incorporate conversational marketing into your website experience. Intercom is an excellent tool for ensuring current and potential clients get a live and personal touch. The application is fast, and you can set it to ensure customers are directed to the right pages for their needs, with various triggers based on multiple choice responses or keywords. It can also track return customers and create a more natural experience for them with different messaging. When needed, the site visitor will be routed to a live individual who can answer their questions in real-time as well. The monthly rate for Intercom varies quite a bit depending on which of their packages your business needs, but to test out the chat functionality only you can get started with just $74 per month.

Helpjuice

For knowledge base software and FAQ directories, there is no better option than Helpjuice. This highly-rated software helps you organize help articles, user tutorials, and more into categorized, functional workspaces for your customers. If the support section of your website is taking over the marketing content that actually leads to new business, you need to make a shift in the balance of power and make that help-related content digestible and simple to navigate. Helpjuice can make that possible. Their packaging starts at $120 per month for 4 users, and goes up to $499 per month for unlimited users.

Data & Analytics

Marin Software

While we may be a bit biased on this one, it is undeniable that Marin has been an industry leader in cross-channel advertising management and data analysis for almost two decades, which is about three times longer than most of our competitors have even been in business. As one of the pioneers of the modern digital data space, we have one of the best analytics tools available for people seeking comprehensive omnichannel summaries. The product development team at Marin is constantly re-designing and elevating the software to focus on what’s essential, so your team can be focused on innovation, not number crunching. We work hard to simplify data into insights while simultaneously hiring the best marketing consultants in the world who can help you turn those insights into action. Pricing is customizable according to your unique business needs.

Google Analytics

This is the go-to web analysis tool to understand your user behavior, source, demographics, etc. Google Analytics is excellent in providing user segmentation, website optimization, and key website metrics like the number of visitors and average bounce rate. It has influential audiences you can use to boost ads campaign and intelligent user tracking and privacy features. When paired with a paid media management solution like MarinOne, your ability to know who your audience is, where they're coming from, and what they want is virtually limitless.

Payment & E-Commerce

PayPal

One of the reasons businesses are turning to online operations is to increase transaction efficiency. PayPal is a great tool for this as it is almost universally accepted as one of the safest and most user-friendly digital payment platforms. Both business owners and consumers like PayPal as it is easy to use on both sides of the transaction. For brands, it seamlessly integrates with dozens of online shopping carts and e-commerce platforms. On the customer side, PayPal offers quick payment options that put the user in charge of their security preferences. This tool is safe, tested, and popular across the globe, making it a reliable choice for almost any business.

Shift4Shop

While Shopify, Magento, and WooCommerce are certainly the leading powerhouses in the online checkout market, what is sometimes limiting with those platforms is how inherently tied they are to your website's CMS. Shopify and Magento are all-in-one solutions, meaning your entire site needs to build on those platforms directly. WooCommerce is a great plugin but is primarily paired with WordPress sites. So if you already have a CMS on anything besides WordPress, and you don't want to go through the trouble of rebuilding your entire site, Shift4Shop is your next best option. They are considered a top choice due to the tools' ability to transact and retain data on the customer, invoices, and other financial transactions. Notable benefits include a smooth UX for the shopper, order transparency for administrators, and ease of integration with other business software applications.

Customer Relationship Management

Bitrix24

If you are hoping to enhance communication and collaboration among your employees, Bitrix24 is an excellent choice. The tool has top-notch data management and cloud storage abilities. Automating marketing and sales processes boosts teamwork, thus enhancing customer care through service delivery. 

Whether you want a digital assistant to handle your project management or want to just catch up on the day's tasks, this is a great tool for overseeing productivity and task management. All the features you need to start your own project are available on Bitrix24 in the free version. The paid plan, starting at $43 per month for 5 users, includes advanced functionalities and customization for bigger companies with bigger needs While Bitrix24 comes with many features, here are some of the best task management tools for increased productivity.

• Create tasks, indicate the priority level, and evaluate your progress.
• Bring all your team's interactions and projects into one single shared space.
• Automate tasks to save time and grow faster by centralizing your workflows. Doing so allows you to eliminate repetitive tasks and focus on the big picture.
• From a central access point, you can get to all of your files and documents.
• Share directly with others with real-time collaboration, discuss in forums, and make use of a variety of communication options.
• You can set plans for short-term, medium-term and long-term deadlines and make sure you don't miss any of them.

Nimble

A relationship-focused CRM for your entire team, it is best known for customer prospecting. With Nimble, you enjoy reduced data storage costs, low business risks, optimized business performance, and easy integration with other software apps. Besides, Nimble can “scale up” and “scale out,” thus enhancing performance capacity. It's easy to use; and it works in your Outlook/Gmail inbox, social, web. You can tap into every part of your contact's interaction history, so you don't miss anything the team does when you step away. You can also make comments on a record, update deal status, and keep an eye on social handles. Nimble starts at $19 per month per user, and it's value is well worth the cost.

In Summary

Even if you’re not a professional web developer, many CMS tools combined with the right plugins, have made it easy enough to get the results you want. No matter what you're looking for in terms of business goals, it's important to have a website that attracts your audience. Refer back to this list as you refine and revise your site to keep testing new integrations and determining what would be most compatible with your particular setup.

Once your business starts to get solid footing with a fully optimized site, our Marin team of paid media experts are ready to help you launch things to the next level with digital advertising. 

Reach out when you’re ready to get started promoting your now streamlined and well-functioning website.

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Display advertising is one of the best ways for businesses to grow their online presence—and there are plenty of sites where you can promote your products and services. Unfortunately, many beginners make mistakes that impair their advertising efforts.

Several factors need to be considered to create a successful display ad campaign. This article will discuss display ads and why you should use them, and we’ll give you 11 tried and tested tips for standing out. 

Why You Should Use Display Ads 

It’s true that text-based search ads have their advantages when it comes to click-through rates and conversions, but there’s still an important place for display ads. Some important uses of display ads include highlighting products or services that are visual in nature, and cultivating and educating potential customers in the early stages of the sales funnel, regardless of whether they click on the ad. It’s no wonder, then, that companies in the US have been spending more every year on display advertising—and this trend is set to continue. 

Why else should you use display advertising? First and foremost, display ads can—when done correctly—put you in front of your target audience immediately. This is in contrast to the longer-term investment of time needed for organic content marketing—making it an excellent option if you’re trying to scale a newly established business quickly. 

Because you’re getting in front of more of the right people more quickly, display advertising is an excellent way to increase sales right out of the gate. Since you’re driving more traffic to your website right away, you’ll have more leads to send down the marketing funnel—enabling you to convert more of those leads to paying customers while you build your brand organically at the same time.

Here’s how you can get started with display ads so you can keep your business growing. 

Keep it Brief 

Regardless of the industry you operate in, you’ve probably got fiercer competition than ever. However, at the same time, you’re fighting for limited attention spans: research from Microsoft found that average attention spans dropped from 12 seconds to eight seconds between 2000 and 2015. The rise in short-form video platforms like TikTok will likely have an additional effect, but the full impact won’t be visible for a while yet.

Your advertising copy must be brief if you want to engage users. Keep the text content to no longer than a few words, and make sure that every word adds something valuable. 

Focus on One or Two Benefits 

If you’ve never tried display advertising before, you might find it tempting to try and stuff as much information into your ad as possible. However, adopting this approach will confuse your target audience. 

Remember: your display ad is only an introduction for users. Focus on one or two key benefits conveyed through strategic use of words and powerful visuals and give interested users more information once they’ve clicked through. 

Reel Users in With Your Headline 

When you consume content online, you probably skim headlines—but how many articles, videos, or ads do you click on? Probably a small percentage. Users do the same with your ads, so your headline must reel them in. 

Ask yourself this question: Why should a customer buy from you instead of a competitor? Once you know that, you’ll have an easier time creating your headline. 

Avoid Vague or Metaphorical Words 

Since you don’t have much time to convince users that they should engage with your ad, this is not the time for symbolism. Don’t force viewers to struggle with a riddle—give them the straight goods using a clear and compelling message in simple language.

Use Positive Language and Avoid Negative Words 

When a sentence is a negative statement, the reader must perform an extra mental step to decipher it, so use simpler language to help your readers understand your message at a glance. A positive statement is more engaging—and more likely to be clicked on.

Additionally, a negative attitude can repel prospective customers, so adopt a light and entertaining tone when possible.

Create Scannable Copy

Display ads are not the place for lengthy descriptions—effective ones act like a hook to lure readers to your more detailed content. Make it clear what your offer is; it should be interesting and obvious at a glance. 

Use Powerful, Relevant Visuals 

Did you know that people remember 65% of what they see three days later, compared to 10% of what they hear? And according to Venngage, 52% of research participants said that visual content is “very important”: 

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You can include several kinds of visuals in your display ads, including still images and animated GIFs. Think about your audience's interests to ensure you choose visuals that appeal to them. 

Be Creative and Authentic

Users ignore boring ads, but ads that are too flashy are also best avoided. Strive to find a balance that's authentic to your brand. Use colors and messaging that are consistent with your branding. Be daring, but take calculated risks. Listen to feedback from others, as this will guide you in the right direction. 

Tailor Ads to the Platform 

Requirements will vary depending on where you place your ads. What works on Google might not work on Bing, and ads that have succeeded on LinkedIn might not be as effective on Twitter or Facebook. Before running campaigns, take the time to think about what interests users on the platform you're using to maximize your engagement rates.

Set Clear Goals Before Your Campaign 

Setting goals before you create ads is the most important thing you can do. A campaign without direction will look disjointed, so users won't know what to expect from your products and services—and they won't click through. Clear goals give you KPIs you can assess to be sure you’re on the right track.

Examples of goals you can set include generating leads, growing your audience, or earning a certain number of subscribers. Get clear on these, and everything will run more smoothly. 

Showcase your USP: Unique Selling Point

Making an impression is the most important goal of a display ad, so use the opportunity to become familiar to your audience. Define your USP—the attribute you most want to be known for—and express it in your ad using clear and impactful words. Consistency in your messaging will help make your ads more memorable.

Now you've got everything you need to create a successful display ad campaign

Running a successful display advertising campaign means considering many factors and adopting a strategic approach. Create ads that are clear, compelling, and scannable. A campaign with no defined goals is destined for failure, but experienced marketers have developed their eye through effort and testing—and using these 11 strategies, you can do the same. 

Also remember that display ads should be a piece of your overall omnichannel marketing strategy, and it’s important to see how they are performing in relation to your ads on other channels. 

Schedule a demo to learn more about how MarinOne’s cross-channel reporting and optimization platform can give you the insights you need to put your best foot forward on display ads together with search, social, and ecommerce to help you grow your business.

Native advertising is the use of paid advertisements to make your content look more attractive by blending in with their organic surroundings, somewhat veiling the fact that a native advertisement is indeed paid placement. 

You may find native ads in various social media platforms as they are recommended on the feed, videos, images, etc. For example, posting an informative article to Facebook instead of promoting a traditional banner ad makes the article an effortless part of the editorial flow of the page. 

Native ad placements can be found anywhere online, not just on social platforms, as millions of websites sell ad space on their site pages through networks like Outbrain, Basis, and Yahoo Gemini. 

Why is native advertising important? 

Now that you have a bit of an idea of what native advertising is, you are probably asking yourself where it falls in importance within the advertising ecosphere. Surely most consumers know an ad when they see one, so is the guise of “blending things in” even helpful anymore? 

For the modern consumer, native advertising simply offers users the opportunity to connect in a format that the user chooses themselves. While studies suggest that most people searching online know they are being advertised to almost constantly, many consumers still take kindly to the effort of making content relevant and unobtrusive. By personalizing content as much as possible, and letting your ads be an organic part of a users’ online experience, your brand will have a higher likelihood of building a favorable reputation amongst new potential customers.

Additionally, you can expect to produce a good amount of brand lift through high engagement rates, click through rates (CTR) and pageviews with a well-produced native ad strategy. 

Types of native advertising 

One of the great things about native advertising is that there are several different types, allowing ample opportunity to take the same piece of content and produce multiple variants for promotional distribution. Most native ads are designed to help keep the general viewer engaged in a piece of content they are reading. This is one of the most common types of marketing tactics that can be used by new businesses to expand their products and amplify brand awareness. 

1) Content recommendation 

The first and the most common native ad type is the content recommendation. These are simply ads that appear as recommended articles and blogs. One thing about them is that they appear in the middle or at the end of an article rather than being on top. 

2) Search and promote the listing 

Another type of native advertisement is the search and promoted listings which essentially appear at the top of an article so that viewers can engage in the ad. Besides appearing on top, they may also appear on the side page of the article so that as viewers scroll down the article or blog, they can watch the ad. This is a great way to attract more viewers to any website. 

3) Feed advertisements 

The third type of native advertising is the in-feed advertisement which are ads that appear as social media posts as you scroll through social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and even Twitter. Since so many people use Instagram and other social media daily, these advertising types prove to be extremely useful for improving your overall engagement or top of funnel visibility. 

Relevancy of native advertisement 

Since native advertising has been around for a bit longer than other digital marketing methods, like video ads or social commerce, it’s easy to be enamored with newer, shinier pennies. But do not underestimate the value that this advertising method can bring to your holistic marketing plan. Native ads continue to be a relevant tactic for many businesses as they build brand trust and authority with users, due to their inconspicuous nature. The success of these ads depend on the quality of their content. If the content is memorable and gripping, it is more likely to engage an audience and bring new people into your customer funnel.

Native advertising best practices

You should be following best practices to get the most out of a native ad strategy. That includes:

• Plan and budget all of your campaigns. Setting achievable goals by campaign type also helps a lot.
• Save time and effort with high-quality content.
• Targeting is important here, so you can make sure to optimize your reach and impact.
• In order to provide a good user experience, test and optimize creatives so that you always show the best variant for the audience.
• Data analysis can help you identify the best content for each geographical region to which you are advertising. With content-driven marketing it is particularly important to ensure culture and regional context is considered.

Be a storyteller

Brands are shifting their strategies for more effective native ads; instead of running ineffectual campaigns, they're prioritizing storytelling and putting content in the right context.

This includes tangible assets such as advertising on premium publishers with a clear brand message to tell. Many brands already apply this methodology other channels such as PR and SEO, and the same can absolutely be done with a well thought out native advertising roadmap. Be in control of you brand's story. 

Meet with a MarinOne marketer today on how we can tie all of your advertising campaigns together in one place…including your native advertising.

When it comes down to it, your users are the only ones who know what brings value to their lives. When you deliver on that value, sales and customer satisfaction rates soar. Companies often get caught in the trap of outrunning competitors, making products bigger and better without stopping to think about what “better” actually means to their unique audience. In this post, we’re covering how to define and measure user value to help you meet your customers’ wants and needs with a product that actually brings value to their lives. 

Define value for your audience

The first step here is to determine what value is for your audience, which requires actually talking to your users about what their goal is when using your product, how they are currently accomplishing that goal, and what problems they face throughout the whole process. 

You can’t just survey customers on what is valuable to them. It’s difficult to put that into words. Instead, you have to use specific questions that draw out that customer’s definition of value in relation to the problem your product solves. 

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To define user value, you have to follow the steps below:

Identify the value proposition

The value proposition is what your product offers to its users. For example, Uber’s value proposition is “The smartest way to get around”. They offer a convenient mode of transportation. Budgeting tool Digit’s value proposition is “Save money, without thinking about it.” The tool optimizes your spending habits and automizes saving for different goals. Each of these value propositions clearly illustrates how the tool benefits its users.

Defining your value proposition starts with identifying the problem statement. Use these five prompts to brainstorm:

• I am…
• I’m trying to…
• But…
• Because…
• Which makes me feel…

An example using Uber might be: I am a traveler trying to visit a location but can’t because it is out of walking distance which makes me feel like I need to spend money on renting a car or finding alternate transportation. 
The value proposition above is the perfect solution to this problem statement. Do this correctly, and yours will be too. 

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Identify the core action

For every value proposition, there is a core action that must be taken for the customer to experience the value. If the user does not connect their bank accounts to Digit and start spending, the product will be useless to that user. The core action needs to be easy to do within the app if users are going to follow through.

Measuring user value by interviewing customers

The information in steps one and two will then be used to interview users about the product and its value in this step. 

First, prompt users to complete the core action. Once they’ve done this, ask them to rate the experience in reference to your value proposition. Keep questioning to identify why that score was given as well as what specifics about the product contributed to their decision. Ask about competing products that also help the user with your value proposition, gathering information on how your experience holds up in comparison. 

Listen to your audience

By defining and measuring user value, you gain visibility into what your product should be accomplishing and whether or not it is meeting that goal. Use this data to make adjustments so that your product continuously meets customer expectations.

While the financial cost of the product does play a role here, there are also intangible costs that impact user value. Here are some examples:

• Customer experience
• Time to purchase 
• Core action

User research might reveal that your core action is not intuitive enough, meaning customers cannot figure out how to use your product after opening it. Or maybe the core action requires more effort than its perceived value. In this case, updates are necessary to clearly define the core action and make it effortless so that customers will know exactly what is required for them to get value out of the product and will take the action necessary to do so. 
Prioritize the customer experience so that users can get value from your product without friction. The higher the customer costs, the lower the user value. The overall user value is comprised of the benefits minus the costs. So if your value proposition is ranked 10 and your customer costs are 5, your overall user value can only be 5. To increase your user value, you need to think about knocking out some of those customer costs– which brings us right back around to understanding and improving the product’s user value. 

At the end of the day, products and services that don’t offer value to the customer are a waste of time for everyone involved. The most successful products are the ones that fill a need and do it well. Speak to a Marin consultant on how our tools can help you identify the right customer for your products or services and the best moment to engage them. Learn more now.

Launching a new product is exciting, but expecting things to go well without any prior preparation would be naive. The vast majority of product launches aren’t successful—not because of the product, but because the business hasn’t thoroughly considered how to showcase the products’ value to the right customers. 

There’s a lot to consider when you’re getting ready to release a new product. The list includes determining who you want to sell to, identifying your competition, and deciding how you will set yourself apart. 

Why You Need a Product Launch Checklist 

Even when teams identify a need for their product, a lack of preparation can result in unforeseen obstacles and delays. For example, Gartner found in 2019 that 45% of product launches get put off by at least one month. 

Meanwhile, research published by Marketing Charts revealed the most important factors separating product launch failure and success. Pre-launch testing, authentic messaging, and data monitoring all contributed to better results: 

A pre-launch checklist helps you get the branding right for your product, which makes it easier to target the right people and prevents any disconnect between what customers expect and what they get. 

9 Steps to Include in Your Product Launch Checklist 

Define the Audience 

Before you create a product, you must define your target audience. For most products, there is a focused demographic to advertise to—and it will be clear what the main pain points are that you can solve. 

Dig deep when defining your audience. Create detailed buyer personas that consider demographics such as age, gender, job role, daily challenges, and why they should purchase your product. 

Identify Your Competition 

Regardless of the industry and niche you serve, you’re probably not the first company in that particular area. You will have competitors, many of whom have years of experience and established brand names. You must prepare for your product launch accordingly. 

Look at the top companies in your field and note what they do well. Identify their weaknesses and think about where you can fill those gaps. Once you’ve fully understood who you’re competing against, you can spell out your USP—unique selling proposition—to let customers know how and why your product is the best choice.

Develop a Marketing Plan 

Once you’ve completed the market research phase and you know who your target customers are and why they need your product, you need to start thinking about how you’ll promote your product. Be sure to consider both organic and paid advertising. 

When developing a marketing plan, make sure you answer the following questions:

• Which channels will you advertise your product on? 
• How frequently will you market your product? 
• How will you measure your success? 

You should also set SMART goals:

A robust plan will give your team better guidance when putting together the final strategy for your launch. 

Clarify Your Branding 

Your product needs to appeal to your target audience, so you must get your branding right. Think about aspects of branding such as the colors you use and the messaging style to align with your brand’s target audience. 

Your branding will vary depending on how you want others to perceive you. Brighter colors should prevail if you want customers to see you as playful and approachable, for example. But if you want to appear sophisticated, you might opt for more of a minimalistic theme instead. 

Develop the Product’s Pages on Your Company Website 

If you want your product to sell, dedicating space on your company’s website is non-negotiable. Create engaging copy that communicates what the product can do for the customer and be sure to include product images, details, and specifications.

Build Your Product’s Online Presence

Did you know that 55% of consumers discover new brands on social media? If your product isn’t being mentioned on social media, you risk going unnoticed by the people you want to purchase your products. 

When creating an online presence, consider the social channels your target audience will frequent. Hint: they’re probably on the channels where your company already has profiles. Select the top one or two to start talking about the product and its launch. Once you have the ball rolling, you can expand to other networks if you notice a demand.

Gather Testimonials 

Social proof is one of the best ways to convince others to buy your product, and gaining trust is crucial. As part of your pre-launch process, you must gather feedback from happy customers. Consider offering product samples to some of your existing customers in return for their feedback. 

You can use your testimonials in your ads to show how potential buyers will benefit from investing their faith in you. Similarly, you can add them to packaging as well.

Have Enough Inventory for Your Demand 

Many entrepreneurs worry about not selling enough of their product, but the opposite—having ready sales and no inventory—is also a problem. When you launch your product, you must ensure you have enough supply to meet the demand. 

If you sell a digital product, like an online course, this won’t be an issue. But for physical items, ensure your inventory exceeds your sales predictions by at least a small margin—and have a handle on the supply chain to know how long subsequent production may take.

Track Your Results 

After completing the above steps and beginning your launch campaign, you’ll need to measure progress. Over the following days and weeks, you’ll receive feedback from your customers—and you’ll know whether you’ve met your sales projections. Be agile and ride the momentum forward, adjusting your sales strategy as needed.

How MarinOne Can Help 

Launching a successful product requires a lot of preparation, and getting things right from the beginning will make the whole process much easier and much more likely to succeed. The primary focus areas are to create a product that will meet a customer need, build a solid brand, and make sure the target customer knows about it.

Once you’re ready to advertise, thinking about the channels that’ll maximize your profits is equally important. After each campaign, refine your efforts and adapt your strategy based on what you’ve learned. 

MarinOne offers several advertising management tools, including automation and analytics that will make your product launches more successful and help you improve sales as you go. Schedule a demo to learn more.

What’s the difference between Amazon CPC and vCPM cost models?

It’s important for brands to measure their digital marketing metrics, including comparing CPC vs vCPM (cost per thousand viewable impressions). CPC is based on the number of actual clicks the ad receives, while vCPM is based on the number of times an ad is viewed, regardless of whether shoppers click on it or not. Sponsored Display vCPM adheres to the MRC definition for an ad view: at least 50% of the ad should have been in the shopper’s view port for at least one second for it to be registered as a viewed impression.

CPC = Total Spend / Total Clicks

vCPM = Total Spend / ((Total impressions * % in-view) / 1000)

vCPM is often used for advertisers focusing on brand awareness or delivering a specific message, because this pricing model is more focused on exposure as opposed to a cost-per-click model. 

In Marin, brands can use both metrics, considering the implications of each, for a more comprehensive view of the performance of their ad campaigns. This information will help advertisers better understand the impact of their Sponsored Display campaigns, regardless of whether you are using click-based (CPC) or view-based (vCPM) attribution.

How does Amazon’s vCPM cost model work?

Conversions and Revenue for Sponsored Display vCPM campaigns are an ESTIMATED value that is attributed to BOTH viewable impressions AND clicks (because the cost type is based on viewable impressions - vCPM). To put it simply, alongside the actual Conversions and Revenue generated via the vCPM campaign, Amazon is also including estimated Conversions and Revenue when someone VIEWs your Sponsored Display Ad, but does not click on it.

It's also worth noting that the vCPM Conversions and Revenue are attributed to your brand sales and not the products in the campaign. For example if you run an 'Advertised Product Report' from Amazon you'll notice that the orders and sales do not match what is being displayed in Amazon's UI at campaign level. See below screenshot from a Sponsored Display Advertised Product Report:

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• The 14 Day Total Orders (#) and 14 Day Total Sales columns reflect the Cost Type of a campaign
• The 14-Day Total Orders (#) - (Click) and 14-Day Total Sales - (Click) columns are based on click attribution (CPC Cost Type), regardless of whether your campaign cost type is set to CPC or vCPM

• Campaign A has parity across all 4 columns - because it’s campaign Cost Type is set to CPC
• Campaigns B to M, unlike Campaign A, differ because their campaign Cost Type’s are set to vCPM - the (Click) columns are your actual Orders and Sales, whereas your non-click columns are a combination of actual Orders and Revenue as well as Amazon’s estimated Orders and Revenue based on your ad being ‘viewed’.

Example

Campaign C generated 8 orders with a total revenue of £112.96 and to identify the estimated view Orders and Revenue, you subtract the (Click) column away from the regular column;

207 [14 Day Total Orders (#)]  -  8 [14-Day Total Orders (#) - (Click)]   =   199 estimated ‘view’ Orders

£2,564.39 [14 Day Total Sales]  -  £112.96 [14-Day Total Sales - (Click)]   =   £2,451.43 estimated ‘view’ Sales

How does this impact reporting of Amazon Sponsored Display campaigns in Marin?

Regardless of the cost type that you specify when creating your Sponsored Display Campaign (CPC or vCPM), Marin is able to report on both attribution models against that campaign.

For example, if you create a Sponsored Display campaign with vCPM as the Cost Type, Marin is still able to show you the Conversions and Revenue generated from the ad being clicked on (CPC Cost Type), alongside the ‘estimated’ view Conversions and Revenue (vCPM Cost Type) that Amazon is providing, and vice-versa. 

In the screenshot above you can see that, regardless of cost type, for a Sponsored Display campaign Marin is able to report on both traditional Conversions and Revenue (click based) and also the ‘view’ Conversions and Revenue - which is the combination of both actual and estimated Conversions and Revenue set by Amazon.

The table below shows the Conversion Types available via the MarinOne column selector that you can bring into view alongside your Sponsored Display campaigns.

How should I bid on this activity?

The decision is entirely yours. In Marin you have the option to either bid based upon actual clicked Conversions and Revenue or use the estimated ‘View’ Conversions or Revenue to target a CPA or ROAS goal - regardless of the cost model you’ve chosen to set up for your Sponsored Display campaign.

If your goal is performance (CPA / ROAS) Marin’s recommendation is to optimise towards actual clicked Conversion and Revenue and not ‘View’ Conversions or Revenue (even if your campaign is set to vCPM) because this is the actual performance of your Sponsored Display campaign and not an ‘estimated’ number of Conversions or Revenue. 

If you've used Marin's automated bidding tool to manage Bid Strategies for other publishers, then managing bids for Amazon Advertising accounts should be pretty familiar. Marin manages keyword-level and target-level calculated bids and supports all ‘performance’ Goals for your Amazon activity:

• Maximise Conversions to CPA
• Maximise Revenue to ROAS

If your goal is awareness advertisers and registered sellers in CA, DE, FR, ES, IT, IN, JP, UAE, UK and the US can set up an “Optimise for Viewable Impressions” strategy directly in the Amazon Ads UI to help create product awareness.

If you have any further questions related to the above please reach out to your Account Representative.

In 2021, more than 250 million items were purchased by Prime members worldwide over the two-day timeframe. This year, preparations for Prime Day should be well underway by now so that your brand can be ready when millions of consumers shop during one of the most significant retail events of the year. Here are a few tips so you can be prepared ahead of time.

Amazon Prime Day Tips:

• View your historical performance of past Prime Day events
• Create a ‘Prime Day’ page within your Amazon Store
• Start planning your budgets NOW. Remember, traffic to Amazon’s website is increased exponentially during the Prime Day event, so you want to capitalize on this. If you don’t have enough budget for your campaigns to stay visible throughout the day(s), your ads will be paused until the next day.
• Build brand awareness ahead of the event with Sponsored Display Ads and Sponsored Brand Video ads. Shoppers are more likely to purchase a product during Prime Day that they discovered during the lead-up to the event.
• During Prime Day, use Sponsored Display and Sponsored Product ads to engage with shoppers browsing similar products or even remarket to audiences that visited your product detail pages before Prime Day to stay top of mind on the day of the event.
• Use negative targeting to help prevent your ads from appearing on shopping results pages that don’t meet your performance goals.
• Check your inventory levels for your products, as well as understand your top-selling and least-selling products, so you know where to focus your efforts.
• Create and choose strong products to focus on in your Sponsored Product campaigns. Ensure their product detail pages are informative, have high-quality and detailed descriptions, and include four or more high-resolution images with a strong title.
• There are many more solutions for brands to reach audiences you might not be aware of. Consider diversifying your content before Prime day by streaming a video game on Twitch, listening to music through Amazon Music’s ad-supported tier, or streaming video via Freevee (formerly IMDb TV) and Fire TV…all of which are available via Amazon DSP ads.
• Use Sponsored Display Ads to target other products in your category to help reach new customers, or consider targeting your product detail pages to introduce shoppers to other products you sell. Let’s take ‘Computers & Office’ as an example: to engage new customers and ensure that your laptops are top of mind, you can target similar product pages within the Computers & Office category, or you can target your own product pages to promote your complementary products (e.g., laptop cases or external hard drives).
• Lastly, don’t forget, there’s the lead-up (- two weeks) and lead-out (+ two weeks) of the Prime Day event. Brands that advertise throughout all phases of Prime Day can better build brand presence with shoppers. According to Amazon’s internal data, “Brands that advertised leading up to and during Prime Day showed a 216% increase in awareness and 214% increase in considerations, compared to the week before.”

Amazon Prime Day Deadlines

Keep the following deadlines in mind for Prime Day as they are right around the corner, and some have already passed.

Prime Day Deals Deadline (for consideration):

• April 29

Lightning Deals Submission Deadline:

• April 29 (U.S. and Canada)
• May 13 (France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, and the UK)

Coupon Submission Deadline:

• June 10 (U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, and the UK)

FBA Inventory Cutoff Deadline:

• June 20 (U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Portugal)
• June 29 (Japan)

Inbound Shipping Cutoff Deadline:

• June 2 (U.S. and Canada)
• June 22 (Mexico and Portugal)
• June 29 (France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, and the UK)

Prime Member Promotions Deadline:

• April 29 (U.S. and Canada)
• May 13 (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Mexico, Portugal, Australia, Japan, India, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, and the United Arab Emirates)

Prime Exclusive Discounts Deadline:

• July 8 (the U.S., Canada, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Mexico, Portugal, Australia, and Japan) 
• July 19 (India, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates)

Prime Day:

• July 12-13 (U.S.)

As a marketer, you know that paid ads and organic social media traffic are both valuable. But how much effort and resources should you put into each? In this article, we'll explore the pros and cons of each campaign type to help you make smart choices. We'll also offer tips on how to measure the success of your campaigns. Read on to learn more. 

What are paid ads, and what are they used for? 

Paid ads are one of the most popular online marketing strategies for people and businesses to get their message out and drive traffic through their sales funnels. 

There are many types of paid ads, but the most common are pay-per-click (PPC) ads. As the name implies, the advertiser pays each time someone clicks on their ad.

Paid ads can be a great way to get your brand in front of an audience that’s already interested in what you have to offer. Since you're only paying for results (clicks), it can be a very cost-effective way to market your business.

Benefits of Using Paid Ads

• One of the biggest advantages of using paid ads is that they can quickly provide results. Unlike building followers through creating content and relying on SEO, which can take months to bring results, you can start seeing traffic from your paid ads almost immediately.
• Customers like them and respond well to them: especially social ads that feel native to the social media feed. Facebook advertising has been growing by leaps and bounds over the last few years and has many options for detailed audience targeting.
• In general, people like seeing ads that are targeted to their interests, and they're more likely to click on them.
• You can track and measure results: When you're running a paid ad campaign, you can track how many people are seeing your ad, how many are clicking on it, and what they do after they click through to your website. This information is invaluable in helping you to fine-tune your marketing strategy and optimize your campaigns.
• Paid ads can reach a large audience. For example, with Facebook Ads you can set your ad to appear to people in a certain geographic area.

Paid ads can generate a lot of traffic quickly and easily. Simply create the campaign, choose where you want it to show, and make it live.

Drawbacks of Using Paid Ads

• One of the biggest drawbacks of using paid ads is that they can be costly, especially if you're in a competitive market. The cost-per-click (CPC) can be high. You might also need to spend a lot of money on your ad campaign before seeing results. For example, the more your ads are served to potential buyers, the more data Facebook is able to collect. More data leads to better targeting and higher conversion rates down the line, but conversion rates may not be great starting out. 
• Campaigns need to be constantly monitored and adjusted to be effective. You need to keep an eye on your CPC and cost per action and ensure you're getting the results you want. If not, you may need to re-evaluate your strategy.
• Some people find paid ads to be disruptive and annoying. Paid ads have the disadvantage of being seen as a form of spam, and some may be less likely to trust your brand as a result.

What is Organic Social Media Traffic?

Organic social media traffic, on the other hand, is driven by unpaid posts, stories, and blogs, etc. that appear on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Organic social media content can be a great way to increase brand awareness and build relationships with potential customers. It’s also less disruptive than paid ads.

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Benefits of Targeting Organic Social Media Traffic

• The most obvious benefit of targeting organic traffic through social media is that it’s free. You don't have to pay for each click or impression as with paid ads.
• Organic traffic is also more likely to convert than paid traffic. This is because people who find your business organically may be further along in the buyer’s journey; they're actively searching for information related to your business, product, or service.
• Organic social media marketing campaigns are more sustainable in the long run than paid ads. Once you build a following, you'll continue to get organic traffic as long as you maintain the quality of your content. This is not the case with paid ads, which need to be continuously paid for.

Drawbacks of Relying on Organic Social Media Campaigns

• Organic traffic can be slow to build: One of the biggest drawbacks of relying on organic social media content is that it takes time to create quality content and build a following, and you may not get much traffic until you do so.
• To get the most out of organic social media content, you need to pair it with investing time and resources into search engine optimization (SEO). This includes keyword research, link building, and content marketing. The same principles that make your content valuable to search engines also make it valuable on social media, which in turn drives more traffic to your site and signals to search engines that your content is useful.

Organic Content vs Paid Ads: Which is Better for Your Business?

The answer depends on your business goals and objectives. If you're looking for a quick way to increase brand awareness or generate leads, paid ads may be the way to go. However, if you're interested in sustainable, long-term growth, organic ads are probably a better option. There’s a good chance that your business would benefit from both, but the relative resources you invest in each strategy can be assessed by looking at the pros and cons of each one.

Both options have their pros and cons:

• Both require ongoing management and optimization: Otherwise, your return on investment could be negative.
• Paid ads offer consistent and reliable returns: Since paid ads get more impressions from potential new buyers, they generally perform better than organic results.
• Organic content is free (aside from the time it takes to create, post, and manage it). 
• Paid ads can be disruptive: Ads can be intrusive and may put potential customers off your brand.

In the end, if you’re not sure where to start, try experimenting with both paid and organic social media campaigns to see what works best for you.

How to Measure the Success or Failure of Each Type of Campaign

An analytics program is needed to determine whether specific content from your organic social media campaign is performing well and the ROI you’re getting compared to your paid ads. To work out the best formula for how to divide your resources, use a combination of ad spend and organic content and analyze the results. The best way to do this is using an ad management platform like MarinOne. With MarinOne, you can see all your campaigns in one place, including performance data for both organic social media content and paid ad campaigns. This makes it easy to track the success of your organic and paid ad campaigns and compare the two side-by-side.

5 Quick Tips for Implementing a Successful Campaign With Both Types of Advertisements

1. Identify your goals before running a campaign. This will help you determine which type of ad is best suited to your needs.
2. Define your target audience. This helps to ensure you're targeting relevant users and not wasting ad spend on a demographic uninterested in your product or service.
3. Budget for both paid and organic campaigns. Don't put all your eggs in one basket—a mix of both can lead to the best results.
4. Monitor your campaigns regularly and make changes as needed. What works today may not work tomorrow. So, it's important to stay on top of your campaigns and keep tweaking them for optimal performance
5. Use MarinOne to simplify your efforts.

While paid ads can be very effective when done correctly, they do require investment, which might not be feasible, depending on your budget and the industry. To make paid ads work for you, be prepared to do A/B testing, reallocate funds if needed, and make sure to use retargeting strategies. Organic social media marketing is free, but it takes effort. You won't see results overnight, but investing in building a solid organic foundation can lead to great long-term exposure for your company.

Regardless of how much you put into each strategy, you’ll likely find that integrating both types of campaigns into your marketing strategy works the best. To fully take advantage of both types of campaigns, however, you’ll need a tool to automate and syncrhonize your efforts. This is where a platform like MarinOne comes in.

How MarinOne can help

With MarinOne’s automation tool, you can set up goals on your site using the programmable automation features in Google Analytics. You'll be able to track ad metrics, CLV, and conversions without having a full-time employee dedicated solely to analytics duties.

Analyze your organic traffic and paid ad data early and make changes according to your results, automatically boost popular organic posts, and build campaigns from your product feed. Since MarinOne works with Google Analytics, there’s no need for a separate tracking code or web property ID either.

Learn more about MarinOne’s ad automation tools today. Get in touch to speak with a team member to see how we can help you get the information and tools you need to increase the effectiveness of your paid ads and organic content.

Creating profitable banner ads is a non-negotiable skill in the marketing world. Like understanding Twitter and knowing your way around Google Analytics, it's just something you need to know. But mastering banner ads is no walk in the park.

Here are eye-opening stats to consider:

• Click-through rates for banner ads are .1% 
• The 468 x 60 banner has a .04% click rate
• Up to 50% of clicks on mobile banner ads are accidental 

It’s hard to get banner ads right. When done well, not only are they an effective way to generate leads and sales—but they can also be used to increase brand awareness and drive website traffic.

We'll take a look at what banner ads are, why you need to use them—and how to make them profitable. Keep reading to learn more.

What is a banner ad?

A banner ad is a digital marketing placement that promotes a product, service, or brand using a rectangular image, GIF, or video. Banner ads are typically displayed on websites, social media platforms, and email newsletters. 

Banner ads come in a variety of different sizes, and each size has its own unique benefits and purpose. Here are the most common banner ad sizes:

• Medium Banner: 300 x 250. This is a popular size for rectangle ads on websites, social media platforms, and email newsletters.
• Leaderboard: 728 x 90. This is the largest banner size and is typically used at the top of a website. It can also be used as a rectangle ad on Facebook and Instagram.
• Wide Skyscraper: 160 x 600. This is a popular size for skyscraper ads that appear on the edges of websites.
• Full Banner: 468 x 60. This is the standard banner size that's used on most websites. It's also the smallest size that can be used for a 728 x 90 leaderboard ad.

How do banner ads work?

Banner ads typically work on a cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-mille (CPM) basis. This means that you'll pay every time someone clicks on your ad (CPC), or every time your ad is displayed 1000 times (CPM).

When creating a banner ad, you'll need to consider the following:

• Your goals: What do you want your banner ad to achieve?
• Your target audience: Who are you targeting with your banner ad?
• Your budget: How much are you willing to spend on your banner ad campaign?
• The size of your ad: Banner ads come in a variety of different sizes. Choose the size that's right for you.
• The placement of your ad: Where will your banner ad be displayed?
• Your call to action (CTA): What do you want people to do when they see your banner ad?

Once you've considered all of these factors, you'll be ready to create your banner ad.

Advanced tips for creating a profitable banner

Here are some tips to follow:

1. Keep it simple

When it comes to banner ads, less is more. You only have a split second to capture someone's attention, so don't try to cram too much information into your ad. 

Stick to one message and make sure it's clear. CTAs surrounded by negative space see an increase in conversion rate of 232% compared to those surrounded by clutter—so remember: give your buttons room to breathe! 

2. Use strong visuals

People are visual creatures, and that's especially true when it comes to banner ads. Use high-quality images and videos that are relevant to your product or service. And make sure your visuals are attention-grabbing and visually appealing.

Pixellated pics, busy backgrounds, and generic stock photos are all big no-nos if you want your banner ad to stand out and look trustworthy. To add an extra layer of visual interest, consider using a high-quality black background to make your design pop. This can help your images and text stand out and grab the attention of potential customers.

In addition to choosing a good quality image, make sure your banner ad carries the blueprint of your brand: your colors, fonts, and logo should all be present and correct. Consistency is key to building trust with your audience—if they see a banner ad that looks like it belongs to your company, they're much more likely to click on it.

3. Make it mobile-friendly

More than half of all web traffic is coming from mobile devices—so you can't afford to ignore this crucial step. 

Make sure your banner ad is designed with a mobile-first approach. This means creating an ad that looks good and is easy to navigate on a mobile device. Use a large, legible font and big, bold CTAs. And keep the overall design of your ad simple and uncluttered.

4. Test, test, test

The only way to know for sure whether your banner ad is effective is to test it. Try out different versions of your ad and see what works best. Test different images, copy, CTAs, and layouts. Keep track of your results and continue tweaking your ad until it's as effective as possible. There's no one-size-fits-all approach to testing. 

When it comes to testing your banner ad, there are a few things to keep in mind:

• Test different versions of your ad: It may surprise you which designs appeal to people more than others.
• Keep track of your results: You won’t know what’s working unless you watch your metrics.
• Optimize your ad regularly: It's important to continually optimize your banner ad so it remains effective. As your business and target audience change, so should your ad. 

5. Use the right format

The display network you choose should have all the info you need on which sites your ad will appear. Make sure you read it!

Banner ads perform best when they're:

• Close to the content
• Above the fold
• On the left-hand side

It's unlikely you'll have a say over where your ad appears on the page, but you can target specific types of websites that align well with your brand.

6. Use persuasive copy

Your banner ad copy should be short, sweet, and to the point. You only have a few seconds to get your message across, so make sure it's clear and concise. Use persuasive language that speaks to your target audience and drives them to take action.

Remember, banner ads are not the place for long-form copy. Stick to one or two sentences at most.

Influencer marketing, which includes businesses collaborating with influencers, is a powerful strategy for brands to broaden their social media reach. It's growing in popularity– over three-quarters of US marketers will employ influencer marketing in 2022. Influencer marketing initiatives are not one-size-fits-all. Much depends on your specialty, goals, and the pool of influencers in your audience. With the right strategy and approach, influencers can help any business reach its marketing objectives.

What exactly is influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing is a social media marketing strategy in which companies collaborate with influencers (also called content creators) to promote a product, service, or brand. The influencer creates and distributes material about the brand or product, and the business compensates them with cash, free items, or both. Typically, businesses will supply the influencer with whatever product they will be featuring on their platform. To guarantee the influencer will post about your product, you’ll have to pay according to their sponsorship rate sheet. Reach, traffic, engagement, and conversions are the most common influencer marketing KPIs.

The first type of influencer marketing was celebrity endorsements. Social media content creators with highly engaged specialized audiences may now provide more value to marketers than superstars with large but generic followings. This is because social followers find social content producers relevant, trust their suggestions, and are committed to exhibiting their support.

How to plan an influencer marketing campaign

Here are the stages to launching a successful influencer program for your company.

Establish your objective

Like any effective marketing plan, the first step is to define your objectives. Defining your goals for influencer marketing can help you develop a practical approach throughout your campaign. It will also assist you in understanding the metrics you should follow to determine the effectiveness of your campaign.

Below are some good influencer marketing objectives to consider:

• Boosting brand recognition
• Increasing your fan base
• Raising engagement and generating leads
• Increasing your sales and conversions
• Boosting brand loyalty
• Link building for SEO

Understand who you're attempting to reach

A successful influencer marketing strategy requires reaching the right people with the appropriate tools and influencers at the right time. Create audience personas to better understand who you're attempting to target with your campaign. Outline specifics regarding your target audience, such as:

• Chronological age
• Optimal spending habits or comfort level (if you want to drive sales with your campaign)
• Their pursuits
• Geographic location
• Where they spend their time online.

You have to know your target audience to know which influencers they engage with. The influencer must be relevant to your target audience– otherwise, you’re throwing money down the drain. 

Recognize the guidelines

Before implementing an influencer marketing plan, you must first grasp the guidelines. The Federal Trade Commission establishes those rules in the United States. Transparency is key here. Influencers must also be aware of sponsored content requirements, and they frequently fail to do so. Or the influencer may make the revelation of their sponsorship delicate and partly buried. The restrictions for advertising vary widely by nation, so verify them. The sponsorship must be disclosed to the audience with clarity. Social media platforms like Instagram and YouTube are simplifying this by adding features that identify a sponsored post as such. 

Consider the three Rs of power

These three factors determine influence:

Relevance

The appropriate influencer for your campaign shares content about your industry and company, and their target audience must be similar to yours.

Reach 

Reach is the number of individuals who could see your material through the influencer's audience base.

Resonance

The influencer's potential degree of engagement with an audience that resonates with your brand is referred to as resonance.

Influencers to be considered

The key to a successful collaboration with influencers is trust. Whoever you collaborate with must have your audience's confidence and respect. Without authentic content, your influencer marketing campaign is unlikely to achieve the desired marketing objectives.

The best approach to tell if a prospective influencer is trustworthy is to look at their engagement and the feedback they already receive from their followers in the form of comments, direct messages, likes, and shares. Socialblade is a great tool for doing a closer analysis of each influencer with which you are considering collaboration. To ensure that you are hiring the most trustworthy and reputable influencers, you may consider partnering with a reputable event staffing agency that specializes in influencer marketing. This could provide you with a wider pool of qualified prospects, allowing you to make an informed decision.

Conduct your research

Your study does not end with creating a shortlist. Before signing any contracts, there are a few more steps to solidify the success of your campaign. Determine how frequently your potential influencer uploads paid material. If they share a lot of sponsored posts, their engagement rate may be lower than what you would like. 5% engagement is generally considered healthy, so keep that in mind as a general rule of thumb. 

Keep the influencer's posting schedule in mind when considering the content you'll want the influencer to share. Any influencer strategic about their approach is very cautious about what promote and when. So if you ask them to share too many pieces of promotional content in a short period, the influencer will reject your offer (or their compensation expectations will increase dramatically).

Reach out privately 

Invading a potential influencer's DMs and asking for collaboration right off the bat may not be the best method to start a relationship. It can sometimes be perceived as too forward and even a bit tacky, so do your best to navigate the start of the connection with care and professionalism. Don't get me wrong: it may be effective to reach out cold, but there are other communication methods for planting seeds that lead to longer-lasting partnerships. Influencers accustomed to working with brands often list an email in their bio for this purpose. Start by engaging with the influencer’s content...Enter their direct messages after establishing an authentic interest in them as an individual and an interest in supporting their content.

Create great content in collaboration with your influencer

A social media influencer who has worked hard to build their brand would refuse any offer that jeopardizes their integrity. So it's better to offer some rules/guidelines on what you want but leave the actual content creation process to them. Content creators know what their audiences resonate with. They can also spot what will be an immediate turnoff. Best practices are to offer talking points and guidelines that the influencer can work into their native content however they see fit.

Analyze your outcomes

When you begin your influencer marketing campaign, the number of likes and comments on your branded content may overwhelm you, especially if your influencer has a significant following. These are vanity metrics that don't accomplish anything for your brand. You must calculate your actual return on investment (ROI) to determine the value of your campaign.

Even though users who engage with the sponsored content might not purchase right away, they are now aware of your brand and have started their journey to becoming a customer. Getting them to follow you or visit your website opens that door.

And even if they don't follow your account, your product will come to mind when a need arises. They can revisit the influencer's post to find the link and make a purchase. That's the power of influencer marketing-- an influencer's audience trusts their recommendations. If a follower needs something, they use the influencer's recommendations to make their purchasing decisions.

After running a successful sponsorship, consider pulling the influencer's content and posting it to your own account as a paid ad. This maximizes the value and ROI of the partnership and allows you to reach segments of your target audience that are not already following the influencer, but that would still benefit from the influencer's content.

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Bing has an emoji search feature that allows users to find information on a variety of topics by simply typing in an emoji. But why? What does it mean? And how does it work?

Allow us to explain...

What is Bing Emoji Support?

Bing emoji support is a feature that allows users to insert emojis into their search queries. This can be done by typing in a colon followed by the desired emoji code. For example, if you want to insert the smiley face emoji, you would type in—  :smile: or you could just type in — 😊. Bing will then search, based on the semantic meaning of that emoji.

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“As you likely know, emoji are small pictures used to express an idea or emotion. With the explosion of mobile devices and the ubiquity of texting, it has become a shorthand language used by billions of us around the world. At Bing we want you to be able to search the same way you communicate every day,” the company said.

What's the deal with emojis?

The emoji has come a long way since its inception in 1999. The first set of 176 emojis were released by Shigetaka Kurita, a Japanese designer who was working on a messaging system for NTT Docomo, Japan’s largest mobile carrier. At the time, most mobile phones could only display black and white text. So, Kurita designed a set of 12×12 pixel images that could be used to express various emotions.

“Emoji” by Shigetaka Kurita, which can be seen in the MoMA

The word “emoji” comes from the Japanese words “e” (picture) and “moji” (letter or character). The term entered the mainstream in 2010 when it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary. Since then, the use of emojis has exploded.

There are now over 3,000 emojis in existence, with new ones being introduced all the time. In 2015, the Unicode Consortium, the organization responsible for approving new emojis, approved 72 new emojis. And in 2016, they approved 250 new emojis, including a range of diverse skin tones and gender-neutral characters.

Emojis are now widely used for communication purposes—sometimes more than words. This makes them a great tool to have when you need to explain something complicated in a simple way without adding too much extra information.

How do I use Bing emoji support?

It’s easy. Just go onto your favorite web browser and type in "Bing" then click on the smiley face beside the search bar.

Next, start typing in your query as you normally would. For example, if you want to find out how to make a cake, you would type in “How to make a cake.” But if you want to use an emoji to express your query, you would type in “🧑‍🍳🎂.”

You can also use Bing emoji support to filter your searches. For example, if you only want to see results for videos, you would type in “🎂📹.”

Bing will then display a list of results that are relevant to your query. You can also click on the “More” button to filter your results even further.

Why is this feature useful?

This feature allows users access to incorporate emojis into their everyday searches. This is especially useful when you consider that Gen Z uses emojis exclusively in text messaging 39% of the time.

The feature doesn’t just work for emoji associations, but also for those times when you’re not sure what one image actually means. Then, in a move that’s similar to image searching, Bing will tell you what it means so you’re no longer puzzled and you can use it correctly.

How can marketers take advantage of Bing emoji support?

Marketers can use Bing emoji support to better understand how users are searching for their products or services. For example, if you sell cake mix, you could track the number of searches for “🧑‍🍳🎂” over time.

This would give you an idea of how many potential customers are searching for the products you sell and provide valuable metrics to show how you can reach them. For example, if you notice that a lot of users are searching for “🧑‍🍳🎂”, you could create a campaign that targets people who are interested in baking cakes.

Overall, Bing emoji support is a great way to understand how users are communicating about your products or services. It can also be used to create more targeted marketing campaigns that will reach a wider audience.

So many choices… (Image Source).

The future of emojis on search engines

Typing out words and phrases is still the norm when entering a search engine query, so emojis won’t replace text any time soon. However, they are becoming more prevalent in our everyday usage—not just to augment our messages, but also as a language on its own.

Here are some creative ways you can use Bing emoji search:

• Ask where the best donuts in NYC are by replacing the word “donut” with the 🍩.
• Try out clever combos. For example, find cupcakes near you by picking out the cup emoji and the 🍵🎂emoji. 
• Request a random result by using the 🎲 emoji.

Wrap-up

Emojis are becoming increasingly popular across all types of media. They can be used to express ideas without having to say a word, but they also have other, more creative uses.

From asking where the nearest cinema is, through to being able to search for cupcakes—you can use Bing emoji support in different and clever ways.

How MarinOne can help

Whether your users are searching via emoji or traditional text—on Bing or Google—we can help you connect with more users.

MarinOne is a comprehensive marketing platform that aims to give users the ability to discover and take advantage of all marketing opportunities. With its intuitive interface and powerful features, it is one of the most versatile and user-friendly platforms around.

Learn more about MarinOne’s automation tools today. Get in touch and speak to one of the team.

Earlier this year, Google announced its updated partnership based on industry changes and user feedback. They fall into three key areas: education and insights, access and support recognition, and rewards. If you’re not taking advantage of Google Partners, it’s worth taking a look.

Updated Google Partner Program benefits 

Premier partner status is now offered to the top 3% of partners in each country. Premier partners can access the following exclusive perks:

• product betas
• advanced google ads support 
• Premier partner awards a new 2002 premier partner badge
• high value incentives

All google partners and premier partners get access to the monthly insights briefing from Think with Google. It contains the latest insights from Google on consumer behaviors and industry trends.

Additionally, all Partners and Premier Partners will gain eligibility for high-value offers ($500 Google Ads credits) for new clients. To qualify, the clients must spend $500 in the first 60 days. This is an upgrade from the program’s previous $100 credits and 30 day threshold. These offers will only be available for Partners and Premier partners. 

As of late February, all Partners are also listed in the new Google Partners directory, available to advertisers all over the world. With these new benefits come a new set of requirements that companies seeking partner status can meet at any time. They’re designed to help you maximize your clients' performance, identify new opportunities, and accelerate digital growth with Google Ads.

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Updated Google Partner Program requirements

The requirements fall into three categories: performance, spend, and certifications.

According to Google, Partners requested two major alterations to the requirements as a result of the global economic situation and to make badge criteria more transparent:

1. Partners have the choice to apply or dismiss recommendations to achieve a 70% optimization score. While the optimization score requirement was due to take effect in June, it previously only allowed for the application of recommendations. However, Google listened to feedback regarding the ability to dismiss recommendations for clients in situations where it may not have made sense to accept. Allowing marketers to refuse suggestions by Google is a significant change.
2. Spend thresholds will stay at a 90-day spend of $10,000 US across all of a partner’s managed accounts. Pre COVID-19, the Partner badge requirements were set to increase to $20,000 every 90 days. However, Google listened to marketers and kept the requirement at $10,000.

Agency Partners also communicated to Google that not every Ads Manager within their agency teams should be eligible for certification. In response, Google agreed that advertisers will be able to tell Google the number of account strategists within their business, and “at least 50% of the account strategists you’ve identified will need to be certified in Google Ads” to meet the new requirements. Either update your number of account strategists if it’s out of date or encourage more strategists to get certified on Skillshop to comply. Additional details are outlined on the Google Support Page.

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Meeting the performance requirement 

With many agencies and search marketers being affected by the pandemic, the delay of these requirements from February 2020 to February 2022 was welcomed by agency partners. Google’s response to marketer feedback was also a refreshing change of pace. Now that the revamped program is here, it’s time to snag your badge status and start utilizing the new benefits.

If you’ve been considering implementing Meta’s Conversions API, there’s no time like the present. Meta is pushing advertisers to integrate Conversions API as a more robust tracking product than the existing Meta Pixel. While we won’t rehash the logistics associated with iOS 14, Conversions API is now the gold standard of tracking on Facebook (and beyond).

For those newer to Conversions API (CAPI), in essence it’s a server to server tracking system that works in conjunction (for now) with the Meta Pixel to improve data quality and campaign performance. Per Meta, CAPI was built to “honor people’s privacy and tracking preferences” while giving marketers a solution to share their internal data to improve advertising efficacy. It’s a win-win for both advertisers and platform users. But as with any new publisher solution, advertisers can be slow to adopt until they absolutely need to. 

Part of this hesitation likely comes from confusion around the options for CAPI implementation, of which there are several that vary in accessibility and cost. Meta has recently introduced some easier options for implementing such as CAPI Gateway and Commerce Platform Integration. You can find the best solution for your advertiser here.

Even considering the potential challenges in setup, CAPI is still undeniably part of the future of advertiser tracking and Meta’s top solution for performance optimization and measurement. There are many reasons we recommend that our social advertisers use Conversions API, but these are at the top of our list:

Want to Test on Facebook? You’ll Need CAPI  

• Meta is developing measurement and privacy enhancing tools that will be increasingly dependent on Conversions API. In case you missed it, Conversion Lift testing on Facebook now requires CAPI. It won’t be the last tool to transition to this requirement either. Per Meta, “we expect all advancement in our measurement solutions and signal improvement in the next several years to require CAPI.” Proactive implementation will lead to a seamless transition into the future of testing on Meta platforms.

You Can Use Lower Funnel Data to Optimize Ad Targeting

• Those who have worked with ads on Facebook pre-CAPI know the limitations of data that can be captured by the Pixel well. One of the major perks of Conversions API is the ability to send a wider array of data than the pixel, such as subscriptions, converted leads, and a variety of other custom events that happen post-purchase. This is especially impactful for ecommerce and lead generation advertisers, as this data can be used to better optimize your ads. 

Better Data, Better Measurement, Better Results

• Advertisers have been asking for a solution to reduced Pixel effectiveness, and CAPI is that answer. Conversions API improves measurement and attribution across the full funnel, giving more visibility into the impact of digital advertising on cross channel results. Currently, users can see Pixel and Conversions API data in Meta Events Manager with aggregation in the Aggregated Events Measurement tab. 

Lead Quality Level Up

• Lead generation advertisers know the struggle to obtain leads both in quality and quantity. By using a post conversion event with Conversions API, advertisers can factor in leads that have actually converted into a sale/subscription/etc to campaign optimization. CAPI gives advertisers the ability to use this additional converted lead data to improve the overall lead quality from their campaigns. Read a success story here!

Supercharge Retargeting and Custom Audience Effectiveness with CAPI

•  + Marin Tracker Conversions API enables better retargeting with two key components: Cross channel custom audiences and improved identity matching. Cross channel custom audiences are custom audiences that correspond with an action taken on the advertiser’s website or other sources. Improved identity matching is the ability to send hashed customer information along with Conversions API events to help attribute more conversions.

Integrating Marin Tracker with Conversions API means even better visibility into cross channel conversions and the impact of your Meta advertising dollars. Marin Tracker comes with an “always on” dashboard with near real time data, simple tracking link creation, attributes user behavior across the customer journey on mobile and web, and more. Reach out to your Marin rep or schedule a demo with us to learn more!

The buyer journey is complex and digital marketers need to be able to connect with the right customers through the entire process. Different ad formats and placements can help brands make consumers aware of their product, push them into consideration for that product, and ultimately drive them to purchase it. Two key ad types to consider are search ads (served on search engines like Google, Bing, etc.) and display ads (served throughout the internet on various websites).

The main difference between display and search ads is that search ads are considered "pull" advertising while display ads are considered "push" advertising. So, search ads only appear to consumers actively searching for the required product or service. In contrast, display ads are considered paid placement and can appear anywhere on the web that a user may be navigating. These advertisements are based on several targeting parameters. Search and display advertisements are set up and run using various ad networks, from Google Ads to Amazon DSP, Criteo, and many others.

If your company's marketing budget is substantial enough to support various ad types, then you can (and should) test both search and display ads in your advertising strategy. But keep in mind that these ads are not interchangeable. Depending on the product or service type, you may have better click and conversion performance with one or the other. Think through the customer journey and how customers find your products. Is your product something that people need to seek out actively when the need for it arises, or maybe your product is something buyers might not know they need until they see an ad and the potential use case of your product? 

Advantages of Search ads

There are a lot of advantages of search advertising or search engine marketing (SEM). The first of many factors to consider is budget. If the available engine spend of the company is on the smaller side, say less than $10K per month, then SEM may be the best tactic for your business, as it allows more control over who finds your business and at what time. Targeting the right keywords is paramount in SEM for capturing users seeking your service or product. Getting focused and intentional in keyword targeting means that the business doesn't have to waste money on people that are not interested in the industry or are not yet ready to make a purchase decision. 

Another benefit is that businesses can easily cater to a local market via search engine marketing. Many targeting options can be paired with keyword targeting, so you end up with more niche and specific audience segments. Geographic, language, gender, age, and affinity (or interest) targeting are all available segments on Google Ads, for example.

In SEM, the sales cycle is typically short, and you are seeking to capture users at the bottom of the funnel or close to the point of purchase. Therefore, there is no need to continue advertising to individuals that have taken action or converted on-site unless remarketing is an essential tactic for your business. This strategy keeps audiences fresh and malleable. 

Advantages of display ads

Display ads are an effective tactic for any product that is visual in nature. Clothing, cars, beauty, pet care, and more are all excellent candidates for display as the customer offering can be summarized quickly and visually with a single image. 

In less visually friendly industries, like SaaS, insurance, education, or many B2B services…display can still be an effective ad type but with a different approach. In these sectors, short impactful phrases or statements, a key value proposition, or some kind of explanatory graphic (like illustrations) is the better way to quickly reach a display ad viewer. If the CTA and key message cannot be grasped in under 3 seconds on a display ad…your messaging is ineffective and needs to be revisited.

Another advantage of display advertising is that it provides unique access to niche or luxury buyers. With many demand-side platforms (or DSPs), segments can get as granular as a limited website list where you believe your potential customers would visit. Data mining paired with display advertising is also an effective method of getting your message to the right person at the right time, but be cautious that your data provider follows all privacy guidelines in your target geographical region.

Another technique for utilizing display ads is to focus on building brand awareness. If you want to build brand equity or get more top-funnel traffic to your website, consider display advertising a suitable medium. Simple company slogans or flagship product images ought to be utilized. If it looks like it belongs on the homepage of your website, it probably belongs in a brand awareness display ad.

Search ad considerations

We’ve established that display ads are shown on websites across the internet, but search ads only appear in search engine results. Therefore, the advertisers selecting a list of keywords relevant to the product or service must be incredibly judicious and strategic in identifying the right keywords to target. Suppose you are new to this exercise or working with the wrong advertising experts who don’t have enough know-how to develop effective keyword lists. In that case, your costs can become prohibitive quickly, and your overall ad account performance will suffer.

For search ads, each search engine advertising platform requires the advertiser to put a bidding type in place for each campaign. Identifying the right bidding type and optimization techniques for each campaign can be nuanced and sometimes a difficult task of trial and error. 

Display ad considerations

The primary consideration with display advertising is that the number of businesses using this method to advertise their business has increased. Due to this, for site owners, it becomes difficult to choose the right advertisers; from a competitive perspective, many verticals are pretty crowded. Expect higher CPMs (cost per 1,0000 impressions) or CPVs (cost per view) than what was once acceptable. 

Platforms like the Google Display Network make segments through categories and then offer them to advertisers as a package. Moreover, the ad networks are involved in taking bids from advertisers and working with the highest recommendations that will help them earn space on their chosen site. 

How MarinOne can improve display and search ad performance

Using a campaign management platform like MarinOne can help you automate mundane tasks associated with display and search ads. Our team has experts available to consult you on the most significant opportunities for improvement. And with machine-learning and automated bidding built directly into the software, we make omnichannel advertising as simple as possible. See how your PPC campaigns across all platforms are doing in a single place, and change bids or budgets according to performance with our all-in-one solution. Our advertising team is standing by today to give you a demonstration and get you on the path to easier advertising management.

As many of us already know, on Amazon half of the work is already done if you can manage to have a quality organic listing and positive seller standing with Amazon itself. The algorithm on Amazon is a combination of organic and paid advertising, and to get the most out of Amazon in terms of sales and revenue, these two channels must be working hand-in-hand. This is far more crucial on Amazon than most other platforms, where organic and paid work can be somewhat disparate.

Recently, competitiveness amongst Amazon listings continues to escalate. Getting a quality ROI from this marketplace is not as simple as it once was. There are plenty of sellers, within the United States especially, who seem to be struggling in establishing their businesses and getting their brand the visibility they would like. 

We have assembled a list of tactics that should help you get the edge over your competition in 2022 and into the coming years. A sophisticated advertising strategy stands out as the most empowering place to start. If done correctly, Amazon search ads and display ads can be a game-changer for your business.

Be methodical when making budget decisions

If you are just getting started with Amazon ads, it is better if you take it slow, one day at a time. Start with a limited budget so that you can easily do trial-and-error testing to see what works for you. You are bound to face high competition in the beginning. 

When you set your budget, it’s important to look at your average cost of sale (ACoS). This is the amount you spend to obtain leads which can help make sure that your budget will work with it. You need to understand how this works so that you can maintain healthy profitability.

Just like any other channel, you'll want to carefully weigh the costs of advertising and production when it comes to determining just how much you should spend on marketing. Amazon advertising is no different.

Sales tax, fees, product and overhead costs take off around 50% from your earnings. After those are accounted for, you'll only have 50% of the original budget to go around on advertising and then finally, profit.

This means that your ACoS needs to be less than 50% for your business to gain a profit. Anywhere from a 15-40% ACoS is not uncommon on Amazon advertising, so you’ll want to keep this in mind as you account for your budget on this platform.

As you identify your ACoS, your confidence as an advertiser and business owner will increase as you establish a system for healthy profitability and increasing revenue over time.

Try a web-based calculator to calculate the margin built into a product. There are many online tools for calculating ACoS as well—don’t be afraid to try these shortcuts to know for certain you are making sound financial decisions…especially if you’re just starting out in this kind of budget management.

Opt for Sponsored Display Ads

Sponsored Display Ads are yet another unique feature introduced by Amazon for self-advertising one’s business. The primary distinction of these ads from other Amazon ads is that they don’t target keywords. Instead, they target customers by their interests and behaviors. They also compare consumers’ with similar interests or purchase histories to grow the audience segments and see if new customers might also be interested in what you're advertising.

Therefore, for all the newly established businesses or even the well-established ones, these Sponsored Ads might work as an important tool for bringing incremental traffic and brand awareness your way effortlessly. Using Sponsored Display Ad campaigns, you can feel assured that any potential customer who might have viewed a product similar to yours at another business store will be able to view your product(s) as well, making your brand more prevalent within the category segment. 

Sponsored Display Ads are currently one of Amazon’s less popular campaign types due to their newness. As advertisers become more comfortable with this ad type, competitiveness will surely increase; so this is one easy way to get ahead of the competition. 

Amazon DSP (Demand Side Platform)

Amazon DSP, or Demand-Side Platform, is where advertisers can go to programmatically buy video and ad placements. Like many other DSPs, Amazon provides the connection for programmatic ads that include placements on Amazon directly or across the web, including a network of thousands of Amazon partner websites. This gives brands a more diverse range of targeting opportunities. Use audience insights to determine what reach is available in your audience segments. Exclusions are an effective way to keep your audiences fresh: rule out past purchasers or set a 30 day purchase window…there are very few products on Amazon that would have a buying cycle longer than 30 days. If a customer was not ready to make a purchase decision in that time frame on this platform, they are not likely to make a purchase at all.

Take advantage of your Amazon ‘honeymoon period’ wisely

The initial 45 days of advertising on Amazon are known as the ‘honeymoon’ or ‘learning’ period. This is the time when you can best put your efforts into making the most of experimentation and learning about everything that goes on in establishing one’s business. 

If you fail to make the most of this period, chances are high that even after this time, you will struggle to meet your goals in this very competitive marketplace. The first month or so is a crucial time for testing product pricing, keywords, descriptions, ad messaging, and promotions. All of these factors could greatly impact your effectiveness on Amazon, so be aggressive and don’t be afraid to test many different approaches week over week. Just be careful that your A/B testing is clean and well-documented so you know exactly what was productive and what wasn’t moving into the post-honeymoon phase.

Don’t use too many keywords(or the wrong ones)

Keywords can become a source of big problems for you when you are targeting too many terms on the ad side, keyword stuffing your description or product names, or simply taking the wrong approach in how or what you are bidding on. 

To avoid these pitfalls, it is best if you do your research, evaluate similar sellers, and see how many keywords they use to promote their products. Thorough competitive analysis at the forefront will save you a lot of headache in the long run. There are many tools that can help you with this work, or it can be done manually. Either way, be specific in establishing the right competitor list to evaluate; and be thorough in your analysis of each competitor.

Consider using an Amazon partner

Once you feel comfortable with Amazon ad formats and key strategies, you may want to consider leveraging an Amazon Advertising partner. Amazon evaluates and approves key vendors to help their advertisers drive even more value from their campaigns. A partner like Marin Software can help you use machine learning and cutting-edge technology to streamline and amplify your Amazon campaigns.

Advanced analytics can deliver reports and insights within and across your Amazon campaigns and also give you a cross-publisher view if you are using other marketplaces like Instacart, Criteo, or CitrusAd. MarinOne also proactively scans your account every day to identify opportunities to grow revenue and decrease costs. It’s important to note that Amazon only holds your historical data for 90 days. A tool like MarinOne can give you access to all your previous campaigns with unlimited data retention. 

It’s never a bad idea to incorporate automation into the day-to-day management of campaigns to save you time. Actions like bulk changes perform the same edits across objects and campaigns so you don’t need to do that manually. Another big time saver is SmartFeed which pulls in your inventory feed and syndicates that data to Amazon (and other publishers) to automatically pause and resume campaigns based on your inventory levels. You can also take advantage of day parting which schedules and deploys your budget during the most effective times of the day for your products. 

Some Amazon partners, like Marin, also offer bid optimization to help advertisers determine the right level of spend and forecast the expected conversions, revenue, and profit based on your goals. You can also use MarinOne’s pacing tool that shows you how you are progressing over your selling period and adjusts your bids to keep you on track. 

Key takeaways

While it is a competitive market, don’t be off put or consider stepping back from Amazon advertising just yet. With thorough research, careful planning, and ongoing optimization, Amazon absolutely can produce the results you are looking for. It is unmatched in terms of customer intent, quick purchase conversions, and return on investment. It also happens to be the second largest search engine in the world; and therefore, not to be ignored. 

To embrace Amazon for the good of your business, go along with its competitive pace and keep on implementing new strategies until you feel confident in your AMZ marketing chops. If you are keen to learn and implement the right techniques, you will find yourself reaching your KPI goals on Amazon in no time.

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It's no secret that users on social media are scrolling through their feeds for much more extended periods. In 2022, social commerce sales in the United States are expected to reach $45.74 billion, with more than half of the nation's adults purchasing directly on the social media platform of their choice. 

With such robust behavior data, brands must have an omnipresent presence across social media platforms to take advantage of these trends. Recent studies indicate that the majority of significant brands plan on increasing their social commerce investments in 2022.

Get a quick look into emerging social commerce trends for 2022 and how they can help you grow your brand's sales, marketing, and profits. Continue reading and discover key trends that have shaped social business over the past few years and what you should do in 2022. 

What Is Social Commerce?

Social commerce is a part of e-commerce and refers to consumers' shopping experience on a social network. In other words, social commerce is selling products through social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

Social buying is a growing trend within the US and is becoming more popular worldwide. It's estimated that social commerce will grow to $79.64 billion by 2025 in the US. Although that may be a very healthy number for the market overall, marketers still have a long way ahead of them if they want to succeed on the individual brand level.

Brands can utilize various techniques in this space to take advantage of impulse purchase decisions and consumer FOMO. The major players in social media like TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat have optimized the buying experience by reducing friction throughout the buyers' journey within the platform.

Social Commerce Trends

One of the most inherent benefits of social media marketing is how quickly it can change and adapt to new consumer trends. Text-based updates have been replaced by more visual, transient content on social media platforms in the last two decades. Companies can draw on their strengths historically to determine how they approach social commerce now. Think of it as an opportunity to present the same brand messaging that has worked before in a new medium, like taking the headline of a billboard and turning it into a PPC ad. This transition from organic social media to social commerce ought to work much in the same way. 

For example, Instagram Shopping, Facebook Shops, and Pinterest Buyable Pins have all been updated in response to consumers’ want for quicker, easier purchase experiences. Snapchat is another platform taking steps to introduce social shopping trends to its 229 million users. Snapchat’s recent introduction of “lenses” allows users to read product descriptions, reviews, and specs.

Verbiage within the content (whether in video, audio, or written form) is often purchase-driven on social media now as well. Common phrases such as "swipe-up to purchase" or "click the link in the bio" make it easy for social media users to purchase the advertised items and services. Users have come to expect these captions or comments within brand messaging, as they reinforce the CTA (call to action) in another way and make the user’s most simple next step very clear.

A Shift in Marketing Strategies For Brands

Just like any other channel, the social shopping experience for each industry can vary quite a bit. Social commerce ads that promote athleisure clothing is very different from ads that promote electronics, for example. Take the time to do thorough competitive research for your social commerce strategy, just as you would for any other new medium. If you don't have the internal resources to do this research, you can also hire marketers who have experience in the space.

With so much content available to consume, users are unlikely to engage with or pay attention to brand-generated content. Because of this, more brands are starting to understand the value of user-generated content, live stream shopping, chatbots and influencer marketing. This content is both user-friendly and approachable–the key being that UGC is humanizing your brand and building authenticity, much like a low-key testimonial. With such a shift in traditional content engagement, these organic opportunities should not be overlooked. They will play an important supporting role in your social commerce strategy.

Social Commerce & the Importance of User Experience

E-commerce purchases are affected by the interaction a shopper has with the website. Merchants who run online stores have ultimate control and can often view direct actions when all purchases are taking place on site. Social commerce diversifies that shopping experience. The benefit of course is that this can increase the amount of revenue and number of sales overall, as a step is removed from the users’ conversion journey. The downside is that you may not have as much data or control as an advertiser that you would have on your own site or e-commerce shopping cart.

Keep in mind that the objective is digital convenience whenever looking at important decisions within the social commerce space. Brands that still use outdated business models with a long buyer journey and complicated purchase models will frustrate customers. The faster and more seamless the path is to checkout, the better your chance to capture more revenue. 

Another factor to consider is the fact that users' attention spans have fallen dramatically. This makes it even more critical for brands to optimize their user experience to gain more confidence and increase sales with as little work from the consumer as possible. Consider diversifying your purchase integrations to optimize this process fully. Plugins from tools like Shopify Pay, PayPal, Apple Pay, and more will yet again remove a step from users’ finishing their checkout.

Social Commerce Market Stats And Outlook

It's been fascinating watching how social trends have driven innovation in social networking beyond just communicating with friends or family. Over the last several years, legacy direct-to-consumer brands (DTC) have invested billions in paid social advertising to drive new revenue. Their success caused a flood of more unique, independent brands to follow suit…which made the competition for advertising slots that much more aggressive. This led to higher costs for advertisers and increased ad fatigue for social media users. Global advertising spend on social networks was 26% higher in the third quarter of 2021 than in 2020. In 2022, Insider Intelligence forecasts that US retail and social commerce sales will rise by 24.9% to $45.74 billion. Fashion categories, such as apparel and accessories remain the largest market for social commerce. However, other lifestyle brands wanting to market electronics or home decor are also doing incredibly well with social commerce campaigns. Brands that offer new and differentiated goods are best suited to social commerce. But if the patterned growth is any indication of the value still to come for advertisers…we recommend testing it out, regardless of what kind of DTC product you’re selling.

In Conclusion

Social commerce enables brands to develop frictionless shopping experiences and reach consumers in the most critical places. As social media continues to evolve in 2022 and beyond, brands will have more options to create social commerce experiences with potentially explosive growth. Brands with a proactive approach to moving to the next level should shift their marketing efforts and build trust with customers through social commerce implementation.

What makes Pinterest different from other social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., is that its primary use is not connecting with others. On the contrary, it is a search and discovery platform. People spend hours and hours looking at things they want to do, learn, or purchase. Most of the users on the platform are looking to purchase items of interest that will somehow help them achieve a goal or complete a project.

When it comes to marketing, Pinterest is an extremely underutilized platform. According to Hootsuite, there were almost 459 million users on Pinterest in 2021 per month. In 2020, almost 100 million users were added. This shows just how many people are using the application and the potential market. Read this “getting started” guide on how you can dive into the world of Pinterest advertising and bidding.

What are Pinterest Ads? 

The reason why Pinterest ads are so powerful is the fact that they are presented as normal pins. The only difference is that you will see a “Promoted by” tag on the pin that is an advertisement. These ads seamlessly mix in with normal pins and do not seem out of place like ads on other social media platforms. The ads are displayed on the home screen by an algorithm that tracks their historical activity on the platform, much like Instagram or TikTok. This means the ads target potential buyers and not just people at random. You can target different people based on the following criteria:

• Location
• Gender 
• Age 
• Interests 
• Categories

Pinterest allows you to choose from 5 different ad formats. The format you pick will depend on your brand and needs. 

• Standard pins 
• Carousel ads 
• Video pin ads 
• Shopping pins 
• App install pins 

How to Set Up an Ad Campaign 

So, how can you stand out with your Pinterest ads? Setting up a new ad campaign requires following a few simple steps. 

Make a business account 

The first thing you need to do is to set up a business account on Pinterest. You can set it up by clicking your user profile icon which is present on the top corner of the page. 

Describe your brand or business 

The next step is to describe what your business or brand is. You will be given some options you can choose from. Is your business beauty, home, travel, etc.? Make sure to click the most appropriate business category as this will greatly affect how your ads are listed to users. 

Create a campaign 

Once done, go ahead and create your ad campaign. Simply click on “create” and then on “create campaign”. 

Choose your goals 

What is the aim of your business? Why are you promoting your brand on Pinterest? Even though it seems complicated, this step is easy. It’s best not to overthink it, and keep in mind you can always test multiple campaigns with different goal settings. You will need to choose from the three options given. These include awareness, consideration and conversion. Are you looking to create awareness about your brand/business only? Do you want video views or content engagement? Are you looking for increasing traffic to your website or Pinterest page? Or, do you want to promote your catalog or brand? Start with the goal you’d most like to achieve and test variants from there. 

Set your budget 

Choose whether you want to set a lifetime or daily budget. Go ahead and choose a start and ending date for your campaign. 

Bidding 

The Pinterest campaign manager has two options for setting bids.

Custom Bidding: Here you will enter your maximum CPC bid amount via the Ads Manager or Bulk Editor. While you may have more control over what you are bidding at the ad auction, keep in mind this is a manual process which could be time consuming if you need to adjust your bid amounts over the course of the campaign.   

Automatic Bidding: With this option, Pinterest will manage your bids for you, working to get the maximum clicks for the lowest possible cost to maximize the budget you have prescribed. There is a learning period when you begin automatic bidding as Pinterest’s algorithms work to find the best outcomes for your ads, but once Pinterest finds the sweet spot for your bids, automated bidding can help get you the most for every dollar spent, not to mention saving you loads of time.

Pinterest also partners with various third party solutions to give their advertisers more options for better results. By layering a bid optimization solution over Pinterest’s bidding tools, you can take your results even further. A few of the added benefits of using a tool like MarinOne include:

• Advanced bidding algorithms that take in over 75 signals for the best responsiveness and accuracy.
• Custom bid modifiers to adjust to external market signals that are relevant to your business.
• Forecasting to help you find the right level of marketing investment and help predict expected conversions, revenue, and profit for your entire account or specific bid strategies. 
• Budget allocation that assigns spend levels to your bid strategies by setting targets and campaign budgets based on your campaign goals. 
• Budget pacing which tracks your spend over the course of the month, quarter, or custom spend period, and adjusts your bidding targets to keep you on track.
• Performance insights and recommendations that scan your accounts for any and every opportunity to decrease costs and improve results. 

Tips for optimizing your Pinterest ads

Get specific in how the ad is positioned

To make the ad more specific and ensure it reaches individuals who can potentially turn into customers, you need to provide details within the creative. One effective approach is to select who you are going to target and put together a “how to” or “tutorial” that directly addresses that target demos’ particular needs or problems that your product solves. It’s a good idea to use multiple keywords within the written content to make your ad impactful for many different searches.

Ensure the Pinterest tag is installed properly and firing

The Pinterest tag allows you to track conversions and optimize your Pinterest campaign budget. With the right setup, you can report conversions from nine different types of actions on your website and view them in Pinterest Ads Manager. Proper installation of the Pinterest tag is essential to get the most out of it. The tag can be installed manually on the website or through Google Tag Manager. To check that the tag is firing and fuctioning, you can utilize the Pinterest Tag Helper.

Use impactful visuals to showcase your brand

Your brand is only as good as you portray it to be. So, choose colors, imagery and videos carefully. Showcase your work and expertise through the aesthetic presence of your brand on Pinterest. Many businesses, both large and small, use Pinterest ads to create awareness about themselves. Therefore, it is important to share real-life pictures of your brand/business in action.

Make the most of your Pinterest advertising

If you have a product that you want to share with the world, Pinterest is an excellent platform to do so. The biggest advantage you will have is that it is still highly unexplored and still a fairly untapped marketing platform today. Most advertisers and marketers are not using Pinterest to its full potential, meaning the available audience is not experiencing ad fatigue. The likelihood your vertical has thousands if not millions of users ready to engage with your brand, without excessive competition, is very good. By placing Pinterest Ads, you can gain that competitive advantage that others don’t have. 

In addition to the bid optimization tools mentioned above, MarinOne can also help you measure the results of your Pinterest Ads with advanced analytics that detail performance within and across Pinterest campaigns and also side-by-side with other search, social, and ecommerce publishers. Pull in your customer data from your web analytics and CRM tools for a more advanced view of conversions and LTV. And once you have all the data processed in MarinOne, you can push that out to Excel, Google Sheets, your data warehouse, or BI tool.

Now that you know what a gold mine Pinterest is for leads and conversions, reach out here to get started with MarinOne for Pinterest. 

As a business leader, staying ahead of the curve is key to success. It can also be challenging trying to keep up with all the latest changes in marketing. 

To help you on your way, we've put together this comprehensive guide on display ads—complete with everything you need to know about this ever-evolving advertising format. Read on to learn more. 

What are display ads?

Display ads are a type of online advertising that use images, videos, or text to promote a product or service on websites and apps. These ads can appear in a variety of formats, including banner ads, interstitials, native ads, etc.

Display ads are an effective way to reach a wide audience with your marketing message. They can be used to raise awareness of your brand, drive traffic to your website, and generate leads and sales.

How do display ads work?

When a user visits a site with display advertising, a small piece of code called a pixel is placed on their browser. This pixel allows the ad server to identify the user and track their activity across different sites. Based on this data, the ad server will serve relevant ads to the user as they browse the web.

Display advertisers create a custom ad for a given site that includes relevant keywords about the site or offer. The ads are typically served by a third party based on the previous behavior of the user to increase relevance.

What are some examples of display ads?

Display ads can appear in many different forms including pop-up ads, side-banner ads, image ads, and more. You've definitely spotted them while clicking around (usually in the form of an ad for a site you've just visited that keeps following you around).

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Let's take a look at the most common types of display ads

Image ad: This is the most common type of display ad and usually includes a static image with some text.

Video ad: Video ads are becoming increasingly popular and can be used to grab attention and convey a message more effectively than an image alone.

Native ad: This type of ad is designed to blend in with the surrounding content on a website or app. It is often less intrusive than other types of display ads and can be more effective as a result. The CTA (call to action) associated with native ads are usually regarding some kind of longer content piece, such as “Read the article about X topic.”

Pop-up ad: Pop-up ads are those that appear in a new window or tab when you click on a website. They can be effective in getting your message across, but they're also a bit annoying for the user—so use them sparingly. Important: choose sites that deploy them in a user-friendly way, or you could end up irritating the user, appearing spammy as a brand, and losing a sale.

What are the benefits of display ads?

There are several reasons you might want to use display ads as part of your marketing strategy. Here are some of the most common benefits:

• They are eye-catching and familiarize your audience with your brand
• They allow for remarketing opportunities
• They make it possible to track and monitor the engagement and success of your campaign

What are the challenges of display ads?

Some things to keep in mind:

• They can be intrusive and annoying for users, and that’s not good for your brand
• They can be blocked by ad blockers
• It can be difficult to stand out from the competition

Despite these challenges, display advertising can be a powerful tool for reaching your target audience and achieving your marketing goals if deployed correctly. 

Important considerations to make before buying a campaign

Before you start your campaign, it’s important to first carefully research and weigh the pros and cons of the two main buying models.

CPM (cost per mille/thousand)

PROS:

• Can reach a large audience quickly
• Good for building brand awareness
• Ideal for targeting a specific demographic

CONS:

• Less effective for driving conversions
• Can be more expensive
• More difficult to track and measure results

Impression (CPC)

PROS:

• More effective for driving conversions
• Less expensive
• Easier to track and measure results

CONS:

• Takes longer to reach a large audience
• Not as good for building brand awareness
• Can be more difficult to target a specific demographic

If you’re looking to quickly reach a large audience and build brand awareness, CPM may be the better option. However, if you’re looking to drive conversions and sales, CPC may be a better choice.

When deciding which model to use for your campaign, don’t forget to consider your budget. CPM can be more expensive than CPC, so if you’re working with limited funds, you may want to consider using CPC.

Once you’ve decided which model to use, you can start planning your campaign. Take note of the following best practices:

• Create compelling ad copy that stands out from the competition
• Use attractive visuals that are relevant to your brand and product
• Target your ads to a specific audience
• Test different ad placements to see what works best
• Monitor your campaign closely and make changes as needed

How to measure the effectiveness of display ads

If you don't know how you're doing, you can't improve—which is why measuring your ads is non-negotiable.

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When measuring the success or failure of a display ad campaign, you'll need to track the appropriate metrics. Here are some of the key metrics to have on your radar, along with tips on how to measure each one:

Clicks: This metric measures how many times users have clicked on your ad. You can track clicks by using Google Analytics or another similar tool.

Click-through rate (CTR): This metric measures the percentage of people who see your ad and click on it. To calculate CTR, divide the number of clicks by the number of impressions. For instance, if your ad has been seen 1,000 times and clicked on 10 times, your CTR would be 1%.

Cost per click (CPC): This metric measures how much you're paying for each click on your ad. To calculate CPC, divide your total advertising spend by the number of clicks.

Conversions: This metric measures how many people who click on your ad go on to take the desired action, such as making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter. You can track conversions by setting up conversion tracking in Google Analytics or another similar tool.

Cost per conversion: This metric measures how much you're paying for each conversion. To calculate cost per conversion, divide your total advertising spend by the number of conversions.

Once you've decided which metrics to track, you'll need to set up a system for tracking them. The best way to do this is by using Google Analytics or an ad management and analysis tool like MarinOne. By setting up event tracking, you can track how many people see your ad, click on it, and take the desired action.

Tips for making the most of your ad dollars

When spending money on display ads, there are a few simple things you can do to ensure your ad dollars are being spent wisely. 

• Use your chosen platform’s insights section to help determine your optimal times for posting on the platform
• Carefully research the specific target market demographics before purchasing an ad campaign
• Run split tests to identify what works best for your brand or product
• Experiment with new avenues to figure out the best days, times, and even types of content for your ads
• Use MarinOne’s advanced analytics tools to optimize and easily manage your ads 

The best times for running an ad campaign on social media

There's been a lot of research into the best times to post on social media. As you can see, it varies by platform:

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The most important thing to do is test your efforts and figure out what works for you. And remember to keep testing. 

FAQs about display ads 

• What is the difference between an in-stream video ad and a banner ad? In-stream video ads are those that show up before, during, or after a video. Banner ads are static or animated images that usually appear in the sidebars or header/footer of a website.
• What's the difference between an impression and a click? An impression is when your ad is seen by a user. A click is when a user clicks on your ad.
• What's a good CTR for a display ad? There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, as it will vary depending on your specific goals and target audience. However, a CTR of 1% or higher is considered good.
• What's a good CPC for a display ad? Again, there is no one right answer to this question. However, a CPC of $0.50 or less is generally considered to be good.
• What is a pixel? A pixel is a small piece of code that allows you to track conversions, or specific actions people take on your website. Pixels can be used to track a variety of things, such as whether someone has added to a cart or initiated the checkout process.
• What is an ad set? An ad set is a group of ads that share the same targeting, budget, schedule, and bid type. Ad sets allow you to control how much you're willing to spend on a daily or lifetime basis, as well as who will see your ads.

Wrap-up

While it's always best to experiment with different strategies before making any major decisions, there are some criteria that your ads should meet to be considered successful. Meeting the criteria of your chosen social media platform, and using MarinOne’s ad management platform, is the best way to run a successful campaign. 

MarinOne is an all-in-one ad management platform that helps marketers create, manage, and measure their display ads. It's a powerful tool that provides insights into what's working and what's not, so you can make adjustments and improve your results.

Learn more about MarinOne’s automation tools today. Get in touch and speak to one of the team.

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