Category: Digital Marketing

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Digital Marketing

A Guide to Bing Webmaster Tools

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date May 17, 2021
No Comments on A Guide to Bing Webmaster Tools

While Google continues to retain a share of over 90 percent of the worldwide search engine market, webmasters and marketers shouldn’t be so quick to overlook Bing, the runner-up in the industry.

Despite its relatively tiny worldwide market share of about 2.7 percent, Bing has a US market share of 36.96 percent.

More interestingly, Bing plays a role in searches most users aren’t even aware are interfacing with Bing – such as search functions in pretty much every single Microsoft product, including the 1.3 billion devices throughout the world using Windows 10. And while those 37 percent amount to about 66 million Americans searching through Bing alone, 62 million users use BOTH Bing and Google.

Even two of the most popular voice assistants on the market – Cortana and Alexa – run their searches through Bing. Furthermore, Bing’s largest age group is primarily older, in the age range of 45-54, with an average annual income above $100,000.

In other words, if you want your website traffic to increase, especially domestically, you need to be looking at the bigger picture.

How is Ranking on Bing Different?

First, let’s go over what isn’t all that different. You might not be surprised to learn that many of the cardinal rules of Google SEO continue to play an important role in Bing. That means:

Create relevant and high-quality content.
Pay attention to your Domain and Page Authorities.
User experience matters (including technical SEO, such as website speed, website architecture, and mobile-friendliness).
Quality backlinks go a long way (though they’re less important on Bing than Google)

That being said, there are still differences. These include:

Bing prioritizes authority based on age and official domains. This means it’s more likely to rank websites that are established longer, as well as resources from .gov and .edu pages. I.e., Bing prefers what it feels might be more relevant or factual, rather than what might be more popular.
Bing places a lot of importance on user engagement. This means it pays to heed especially to how users interact with your website, including your bounce rate. Minimizing your bounce rate (by targeting your SEO towards users who are more likely to stick around and improving your UX) may be more important on Bing than Google.
Social signals score big points, perhaps even more so than for Google searches. This means pages that have been frequently posted, reposted, retweeted, shared, and liked on multiple social media platforms may rank higher on Bing.

These are just some of the differences between the two. Thankfully, Microsoft offers webmasters a variety of tools to get started on optimizing their website for the Bing search engine, through the Bing Webmaster Tools. Microsoft’s free service can help you better monitor your website’s metrics, send your website to Bing to be crawled and indexed, and improve your SEO natively.

What Can Bing Webmaster Tools Do?

The current iteration of Bing Webmaster Tools is a web-based, mobile-friendly service built accessible via Bing. After verifying ownership of your website, Bing Webmaster Tools lets you:

Submit URLs for indexing.The primary feature Bing Webmaster Tool is used for is its site indexing. That feature is now automated, allowing webmasters to index new or updated content via their native Bing Webmaster Tools URLs submission API, compatible with most content management systems (CMS). Webmasters may index up to 10,000 URLs per day.
You can also temporarily block URLs, so certain content will be blocked and removed from Bing for a total of 90 days. This is an option if you need certain content to remain unseen for a time, but not deleted.
Review and troubleshoot crawl issues, as well as set preferences for how Bingbot crawls your page.Bing’s Crawl Control feature lets you control the rate at which Bing crawls your pages, allowing you to minimize crawling at peak hours to reduce pressure on the hosting server, for example.
Bing also includes a Verify Bingbot feature that lets you input unknown IPs found on your server log to check if they’re one of Bing’s, or not (and let you subsequently block the fake bot).
Review your backlinks via a curated Backlinks report (sorted by Domain, Page, and Anchor text).Bing’s Backlinks report feature lets you sort data by domain, page, and anchor text, view Similar Sites to yours, or block (disavow) specific backlinks.
Check out Bing’s keyword research tool.Like Google’s keyword research tools, Bing’s version is designed to help webmasters and content creators find specific terms to rank for.
Check if you meet certain technical standards on your domain and pages.These include W3C standards on web design, web architecture, and more, as well as Robots.txt specifications.
Review how Bing is processing and viewing your Sitemap.While you only need to submit a sitemap once, you can review and update your sitemap daily.
Review your search performance on Bing.This translates into specific trackable metrics that Bing uses to give you an idea of how your site is performing on the search engine, including total clicks, total impressions, click-through rate (CTR), and your average position per ranking keyword over the last six months.
And even download certain data as a CSV file.You can download data tables on the first thousand searches as a CSV file.

Confused? You can check out Bing’s official webmaster blog for a more in-depth look at each feature, as well as keep up to date on new features as they’re announced and rolled out.

Bing Webmaster Tools and Microsoft Clarity

Microsoft launched Microsoft Clarity in late 2020 and has since integrated some of its new tools into Bing Webmaster Tools, including session playbacks, heatmaps, and data-driven insights. These help webmasters further narrow down how users experience their content, and where they might want to make improvements (or build on existing strengths.

Bing Webmaster Tools can offer you a comprehensive view of your website through Bing’s eyes and keep you in the know on how to refocus and reformulate your SEO strategy to account for Bing’s preferences.

Need a partner to help you navigate through today’s SEO landscape? Send us a message. We’ll help you rank on both Google and Bing – and greatly improve your traffic.

Tags Bing, Bing Webmaster, Bing Webmaster Tools

Digital Marketing

Google Delays Page Experience Update

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date May 10, 2021
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Earlier this year, we wrote about how the upcoming Google Page Experience update might impact your ranking – and what factors to look out for when preparing for it. That update was slated for this month but has recently been pushed back to a gradual rollout beginning in mid-June this year, concluding with a total implementation by the end of August.

Google’s page experience update might amount to making a small overall impact on your ranking, to being incredibly important. The update revolves around a few core page experience signals, and will include a change to the way pages are selected for Google’s Top Stories carousel, expanding the usage of non-AMP content in Google News, as well as updates to the Google News app.

What is the Page Experience Update?

At its heart, the page experience update provides developers with greater tools to assess and improve their page experience through the new Page Experience report.

This new tool will combine the existing Core Web Vitals report and add in additional trackable UX signals, including mobile friendliness and safe browsing status.

Google is also announcing the general availability of signed exchanges for all web pages, not just ones build with the AMP framework. Signed exchanges (SXG) are meant to introduce a safer way of distributing portable content while maintaining the content’s integrity based on its original source.

How Will the Page Experience Update Benefit SEO?

If you’ve been keeping up to date with your SEO, then your website should already be optimized for user and page experience. These metrics have been known to play a role in rankings for quite some time.

The bigger change here is the introduction of a new toolkit to help track and visualize the impact of these metrics and give you greater insight over how Google rates your page experience based on their own data.

This can give you a much better idea of where to redouble your efforts when optimizing pages.

That being said, we still don’t know what kind of an impact this update is going to have on rankings, and it’s best to reserve any judgment for after it’s been released.

A Recap of the Page Experience Update

From what we know of the page experience update so far, the bulk of the update will concern itself with new tools to track the three core web vitals outlined by Google, as well as four additional vital signals.

Core Web Vitals

Of the signals emphasized in the update, the Core Web Vitals are the most important trio. These are three metrics called the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and the First Input Delay (FID). To keep things brief:

Largest Contentful Paint: This is best explained as a new metric designed to track how fast the majority of a website’s visual content loads. In other words, it’s a metric to see how long it takes for your website to load its main content and be useful to the user.The exact element being tracked is the render time of the largest image or text block within the user’s viewport on first load. To simplify it, a good LCP score is within or under 2.5 seconds.
Cumulative Layout Shift: This is a metric for how often shifts in layout occur – ones that can disrupt the user experience and annoy a user.Picture a block of text suddenly shifting in the middle of scrolling down, causing you to lose the sentence you were reading – or picture trying to click a link, only for the link to shift, causing you to instead click something else. These layout shifts are often caused by elements loading asynchronously, as well as pop up elements.What might be a minor issue most of the time can become a severe problem, especially in e-commerce. CLS will track how often these shifts occur throughout the page’s lifespan.
First Input Delay: This is a metric for measuring site interactivity, particularly how fast page elements respond to user input. This is especially important for login screens, for example. A good score requires an FID of 100 milliseconds or less.

The other metrics critical to Google’s user page experience update include:

Mobile friendliness: How well does your website run across multiple different devices? Mobile friendliness is judged by whether a page loads and interacts as well on phones and tablets as it does through a desktop.
HTTPS
Ad experience (Interstitial Ads): Google is clamping down hard on interstitial ads, especially ones deemed intrusive.
User safety: Preventing the spread of malware, harmful downloads, and the like.

It should be mentioned that Google emphasized seeking to “rank pages with the best overall information, even if the page experience is subpar”. Page experience signals will join hundreds of other signals currently being tracked for ranking. That being said, it doesn’t hurt to squeeze an advantage wherever it’s available.

Are You Prepared for the Update?

The last time we wrote about Google’s upcoming update was January, and we’ve since urged content creators and companies to revisit their user experience, and make sure everything is up to spec. Consider this a second chance to do your homework and prepare for the update before it blindsides you.

The easiest way to give your website a once-over is to have Google do it for you, through the existing Core Vitals report through Google’s Search Console toolkit.

While Google has emphasized multiple times that the rollout is going to be gradual, we don’t know how heavily it’s going to affect search engine results and current rankings.

Many experts still speculate that it’s a largely minor change, with the biggest announcement herein being the ability to check your page’s user experience signals via a visual indicator. This is because most of the previously mentioned user experience metrics – from page loading speeds to mobile friendliness, HTTPS, and safe browsing – already play an important role in how websites rank on Google.

Nevertheless, it doesn’t hurt to take advantage of this delay to doublecheck your metrics and make improvements.

Tags Google, Google Page Experience, Google Update

Digital Marketing

The End of Modified Broad Matching

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date April 19, 2021
No Comments on The End of Modified Broad Matching

Earlier this year, Google announced its most recent change to the way keyword match types will work. This change sees the end of the modified broad match while expanding one of the other existing match types, the phrase match.

The modified broad match was introduced in 2010 and allowed advertisers to specify keywords that needed to be included in a search query to pull up their content.

Commenting on the change, Google explained that the modified broad match’s functionality was partially folded into the phrase match because the two often intersected. However, for many advertisers, the removal of the modified broad match feels like the loss of an important tool for manually specifying what keywords are most relevant for any given ad.

Before we get into the finer details, let’s review how match types work, and how the recent February changes will reflect on common keyword practices.

What Are Match Types?

Search results on the internet are displayed based on a complex set of factors, each of which attempts to contribute to the accuracy and relevance of the results respective to the query entered by the user. Keywords have always played a central role in this, and search engine optimization techniques have always involved utilizing a targeted approach to match content and ads to popular, niche, or valuable search queries.

This goes for both organic and paid results, paid results (or Google Ads) being the sponsored search engine results that usually show up near the top of a Google search. Keyword match types are a unique and important metric for pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns on Google, and they determine what search queries your ads are matched to. You can utilize different keyword match types by formatting your keywords accordingly.

Before the February 2021 change, there were five main match types for you to select for your ad. These were:

Broad match type. This would bring in the widest audience, but with the least specific targeting. As long as a query would be even contextually related to the keywords you have specified, your ad might be shown to the user. For example, the keyword “men’s shirts” as a broad match type keyword would trigger your ad on relevant searches, including queries for jackets, coats, and hoodies. Broad match keywords are written without brackets or quotation marks.
Modified broad match type. When selecting modified broad match type, you could further specify what keywords must be included in a query to trigger your ad. For example, adding “+shirts” as a broad match modifier keyword means your ad would show up to contextually similar queries as long as they included the term “shirts”. Queries for just jackets, coats, or hoodies would be ignored. Word order also didn’t matter. You could add multiple modifier keywords to your campaign to increase the relevancy of your ad to specific queries. Modifiers were specified through a prefixed plus sign.
Phrase match type. Phrase match type keywords were a little bit in-between, putting a greater emphasis on queries that match the keywords provided. When using the phrase match type, your keyword would need to be found in the query, but other terms could be added behind and after (but not in the middle) of your keyword phrase. For example, “men’s shirts” would also cause your ad to show up on queries for “shirts for men”, “men’s shirts for sale”, “casual shirts for men”, and “striped men’s shirts”. Phrase match keywords are written in quotation marks.
rolling it into a feature. The exact match type allows you to target very specific queries to maximize your conversion rate, at the cost of missing out on a wider audience. For an exact match type keyword, the query must be exactly like your keyword phrase, or a close variation thereof (i.e., “men’s shirts” is functionally identical to “shirts for men”). Exact match keywords are written in brackets.
Negative match type. rolling it into a feature allow you to filter terms that would disqualify a query from seeing your ad. You can set negative broad match keywords, negative phrase match keywords, and negative exact match keywords. These function just like normal keywords, but for search term exclusion rather than inclusion. This is useful when you want to make sure your product isn’t confused for something else, or when you want to improve conversion by cutting out contextually similar queries that end up being completely irrelevant. Negative keywords are specified with a prefixed minus sign.

Throughout the years, Google has been making changes to its search engine – including how each match type really works. In other words, broad match keywords were always spec’d to reach the widest audience, but the mechanics behind how they worked have been tweaked time and time again.

While this change is more substantial than usual – removing a match type altogether – it was presumably done in the service of leaning out the concept of keyword matches and avoiding redundancies. Whether or not the idea was executed properly is still up for debate between advertisers and SEO experts.

Why is Google Phasing Out Modified Broad Matching?

Google has removed the modified broad match type in favor of rolling it into a feature as part of the phrase match type. In other words, at least on a conceptual level, nothing has changed. But on a more specific level, advertisers now need to be careful about how they add modifiers to their keyword strings, and they need to keep in mind that modifier keywords now count as phrase match keywords.

To sum it up, you can continue to prefix keywords with a plus sign to single them out in your ad campaign, and they will continue to function as broad match modifiers. However, Google will also treat these as phrase match keywords, which means word order and context is important.

What You Should Do Next

Google itself is discouraging the use of the modified broad match type, as part of this shift towards the focus on the phrase match type is to highlight the improvements Google has made in recognizing context and intent for search optimization, through machine learning. Going forward, Google wants advertisers to utilize keywords on a simple slider of three basic settings

Very broad, barely targeted (broad match type)
Somewhat broad, somewhat targeted (phrase match type)
Barely broad, very targeted (exact match type)

Whether these changes are positive depends on how your ad is currently performing. Google states that there should be no change in performance data and keyword migration wouldn’t be necessary and that modifiers can still be used until July when the change is completely integrated.

However, some campaigns will inadvertently do worse (reaching fewer people), but most should generally be doing better, as the increase in flexibility and automation means, at least on paper, your ad will be shown to more potential users. Here are some basic tips to navigate the change moving forward:

Review Google’s recommendations. Google’s optimization tips can be a handy starter checklist to help you work through the most obvious issues in your ad campaign, especially new duplicate keywords and match type suggestions.
Utilize negative keywords to specify queries you DON’T want. If you’re worried about Google’s new changes pulling in traffic you don’t want or need, take the time to highlight and exclude terms that are definitely bringing you non-converting visitors.
Listen to what advertisers have to say. Keeping up to date on the conversations and discussions between PPC experts and advertisers can help you optimize your keywords moving forward.

Worried about the new changes to your PPC campaign? Get in touch with us today for a free consultation.

Tags broad match, digital marketing, Google, modified broad match

Digital Marketing

Google My Business Fields That Matter

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date January 28, 2021
No Comments on Google My Business Fields That Matter

From an SEO perspective, there are several Google My Business fields that have a more significant impact than others. Key fields include accurate business name, address, and phone number (NAP), which ensure consistency across listings. Categories and attributes effectively describe services, enhancing relevance. High-quality, updated photos and regular posting of updates or offers engage users. Importantly, encouraging and responding to customer reviews builds trust and authority, boosting local SEO performance and online presence.

With the number of customization options in your Google My Business Profile, it can be hard to decide what to focus your efforts on. But when it comes to ranking in the search engine result, they’re really only four fields that influence where your business will end up.

In this article, we explore the Google My Business fields that matter most for SEO.

Before we take a look, you might want to check out this guide for some helpful SEO tips for local business visibility.

Business Name

This field seems to have the strongest effect on rankings, which is less than ideal for people who don’t have keywords in their business names. Since it’s not easy (or worth it) to change your business name, you’ll only see an advantage here if you happen to have keywords in your business name. Why not add some keywords? Because it’s against Google guidelines.

So what can you do? Search for your competitors. If they’re adding descriptive keywords to their business name, you can report it to Google with the Google Business complaint redressal form. It’ll at least level the playing field, so you have a better chance of ranking.

It’s worth mentioning that you can include descriptors in your business name in your Bing Places business listing, so feel free to do it there.

Website

Your website field is the third most important factor. It’s perfectly fine to link to your home page. But, for businesses with multiple locations, it is sometimes better to link to a specific location page.

That’s why testing the page on your website that you link to is important. If you’re a business with lots of different listings – such as departmental or practitioner listings, try to make sure you link those to different webpages across your site. This maximizes your exposure while making sure you’re not simply trying to rank all your listings for the same thing. That won’t happen – as Google will filter them. Test and see what works best for your industry and your company.

Reviews

Perhaps no surprise really, your reviews matter. The number of reviews has an impact on your ranking, but it does have diminishing returns. If you go from zero reviews to 30 reviews, you’ll see your business rank better. But let’s say you go from 30 to 70 reviews. You likely won’t see the same kind of increase you did with the first one.

That’s why working with your customers to encourage reviews is important. People rely on reviews to determine if they want to do business with you – so putting your best foot forward matters. If you get some bad reviews here and there, it’s not the end of the world. It’s how you respond that makes all the difference.

You may be tempted to get angry in your response, especially if you know the reviewer is stretching the truth or outright lying. Save that frustration for off the screen, and away from your place of business. At the same time, though, you don’t want to completely ignore the bad review…. Or any of your reviews for that matter.

It’s best practice to reply to all your reviews. It not only shows your customers that you’re paying attention and appreciative of the time they took to leave the review but also tells Google that you’re paying attention and proactive in your business.

When responding to a negative review, keep the tone polite and helpful. Apologize for the issue and invite the person to take the conversation to email or phone, so that further conversation takes place outside of the public forum. This way, your unhappy customer has a chance to speak their peace and you can make an effort to solve the problem. And, any people who come along and read the review see that you have made an effort to rectify the issue, which helps them keep the faith in your business.

What about the other fields? Should you ignore them? No, definitely not. The more complete your profile is – with services, Q&A, and other information, the more you can tell your potential customers about your company. The main issue is that those fields won’t necessarily do anything to help improve your ranking – but they are still important for customer experience.

Do you monitor your GMB ranking on a regular basis? Would you like to learn more about how to rank it better? Get in touch today!

Tags digital marketing, Google My Business

Digital Marketing

Actionable Content Marketing Tips to Build More Traffic

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date December 9, 2020
No Comments on Actionable Content Marketing Tips to Build More Traffic

Research from the Content Marketing Institute shows that 91% of B2B businesses use content marketing to reach their customers. And when it comes to the b2c sector, 86% of those marketers think using content marketing is crucial to their overall digital marketing strategy.

The Content Marketing Institute also shows that 72% of marketers say their content marketing efforts increase engagement and that it has increased the number of leads.

Your content is worth optimizing because 95% of people only look at the first page of search results so if your content appears on the second page or after, the majority of people will not see it.

Most of the content marketing advice out there is general and does not give you actionable tips you can use to see a return on your investment. This list gives you a solid place to start.

1. A New Spin on Gated Content

Gated content requires a subscription or an email address to access. You can grow your email list with these kinds of posts by creating a small selection of normal blog posts that only your email subscribers can get access to. When someone clicks on one of these posts, a pop-up should appear that asks for their email.

This approach can help you grow your email list while playing up the “exclusivity” part of some of your content, without having to charge people to read it.

2. Attack Content Decay

If you’ve produced content for a while, chances are you’re losing traffic as a result of content decay. Simply updating and relaunching your old post can dramatically improve your traffic. If you’ve been blogging for some time though, it may be hard to tell where to begin with updating your old posts. That’s where the Animalz Revive tool comes in. It’s a completely free tool that will analyze your Google Analytics data and provide a list of posts that you should refresh.

It’s up to you whether to relaunch the post like it’s brand new or if you want to quietly update the content. Either way, you should see an increase in traffic to the post. The more posts you revamp, the more traffic you can capture.

3. Use Templates to Mimic Past Successes

Templates are helpful when it comes to scaling up your content marketing. Whenever you start a new post, avoid opening up a blank Google Doc. Instead, work from one of your proven blog post templates. When you sit down to write a blog post, use the template to help you get all of the important parts down on paper.

After you’ve done that, transfer it to a Google Doc and start writing. Working from a set of templates Makes it easier to scale up your publishing schedule. Where you used to publish a new post once a month, with this approach, you can publish a post every two weeks.

You’re not sure where to start with creating templates, take a look at the most popular posts you have and determine if they are of the same type. For example, if you noticed that your most popular posts are case studies, you’ll definitely want to create a case study template to use in the future.

4. Create Stats Pages

Creating a stats page is a wonderful way to build backlinks without needing to do a lot of outreach. Those pages are optimized around your “topic + stats” keywords and the people who tend to search for those kinds of keywords are journalists and bloggers.

Typically speaking, when they use one of your stats in their article, they’ll link back to your stats page.

5. Reverse Engineer the Competition

When it comes to digital marketing, there is certainly a place for originality and creative thinking. But, it’s okay to copy what your competitors are doing and you don’t need the Google analytics password to do it. There are a number of tools that show you what is already working for someone else.

For example, if your main focus is link building, Detailed.com provides you with a list of where the top blogs in nearly every niche get their links from. Knowing this, you can craft a strategy that helps you earn links from those places to making it easier for you to compete.

Not sure what to write about? You can use BuzzSumo to see a specific site’s most shared content, to give you an idea of what resonates with their audience so that you can develop your topics accordingly.

6. Use the PBC Formula

Backlinko says the PBC formula is when you quickly preview what your post is all about. Then, follow it with a list of benefits that someone gets from reading your post. And finally, you finish the introduction with a brief call to action. Why does this approach work? your blog post introductions are important because they are the first thing people see when they land on your post. However, the majority of blogpost intros are way too long. Using the PBC approach keeps your intros lean and gives the user exactly what they want or need to keep reading the post.

7. Focus on Trending Topics

Trending topics are those that are popular, yet haven’t reached a super competitive point. If you’re tired of using tools like Google Trends, there’s a free tool, Exploding Topics, that’s helpful. In the last six months, covering the business and marketing categories, the “exploding” topics include local SEO, regenerative agriculture, YouTube hashtags, customer persona, and UX writing.

What’s cool about this tool is that you can set it for a wide variety of time frames – starting with one month and going all the way to 15 years. You’ll find that some topics are brand names, but if they are your competition, you can do an X vs. Y post to make use of the branded keyword and topic while still reaching your goals.

Let’s talk about other things you can do to improve your content marketing. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Tags content marketing, digital marketing

Digital Marketing

What is a Foldable Web?

A Foldable Web refers to designing websites adaptable to foldable devices, such as smartphones and tablets with foldable screens. This trend matters for web design and digital marketing as it requires responsive layouts that seamlessly adjust to varying screen sizes and orientations. It ensures optimal user experience and engagement across these emerging devices, becoming crucial in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.

Though not widespread, foldable mobile devices have hit the market. As these devices become more commonplace, and we see devices with dual screens that can be used as one continue to grow in terms of usage, we can expect web design to change to keep up with the trends and keep a quality user experience. This could lead to the biggest change to web design in more than 10 years. Let’s take a closer look at what this could mean for web design as we know it.

Source: Google Trends

The “foldable web” will bring with it new challenges and opportunities, and quite possibly new syntax. It could be the biggest set of changes we’ve seen since the introduction of the smartphone. Coders and users have gotten used to things – desktops, smartphones, and tablets. If only it stayed that easy! Responsive design has helped, but foldable innovation changes everything.

New Experiences Mean New Standards and New Problems

Foldable screen technology research started in the 1970s, but its development didn’t really start until the turn of the millennium. It’s only within the last few years that consumer devices have made their way to the market.

The Galaxy Z Flip mimics an old school flip phone, but others like the Huawei Mate X feature screens that wrap around the outside of the phone. Others operate like electronic books that feature two interior displays that function as one screen when the device is fully open. It’s common to see a separate smaller screen on the outside that lets users get the information they need without having to unfold the device to use it.

New hardware means updated software. Microsoft has been responsive to foldable technology because they are working on foldable devices of its own. Microsoft developers have published an explainer proposing a new CSS media query and a new JavaScript API. In a GitHub post, they discuss a number of potential issues with foldable devices, including fold area functionality and the variety of hardware in the market.

By developing a spanning CSS media feature, it’s possible to test whether a browser window is displaying across two screens or across a fold. This allows the content to position relative to the fold or seam, to evolve the responsive design. Along with this, they’ve proposed environment variables to help recognize orientation and segment size. These additions would allow websites to shape across three dimensions, allowing the page to behave differently when it’s flat and when it’s in an L shape. The JavaScript API would allow sites to behave more dynamically, changing what’s displayed when the screen is bent, or whether users touch one half or the other.

The proposals don’t make considerations for more than two screens or segments. If they are implemented, it will add another layer to responsive design. If things continue as anticipated, we’ll no longer be able to assume sites behave in single rectangular spaces.

As long as new web primitives remain ahead of technology, developers will be able to focus on improving site functionality.

Dual Screen Experience and the New Fold

“Above the fold” has always been prime real estate for web design, because users are more likely to pay attention to what’s on the page before they have to start scrolling down. With the introduction of foldable devices and the foldable web, comes the fold in the middle of the page.

At least, this means adjusting content so users aren’t required to interact with anything that would appear “on the fold.” If touch control is limited at the fold, or the device is partially folded, it makes the most sense to reposition certain elements so they are on one half of the screen or the other.

On the other end of the spectrum, designers will able to treat websites like a mini dual-screen setup where the two halves can be used to display different things. Ultimately, this allows content to displayed more like an app.

When looking at a recipe in the kitchen on your tablet or smartphone, how many times have you wished you could have the ingredient list on one side and the directions on the other? With a dual-screen setup, this could easily become the standard. On a news website, it may mean having the article you want to read on one side, and the related reading on the other.

In the majority of cases, the “foldable web” will mean better-optimizing sites for tablet-sized displays. Right now, tablets don’t account for much of the global market share – coming in at around 3%. Mobile phones account for 52% and desktops cover 45%. If we reach the point where foldable devices make a dent in the market share, it will be harder to ignore them, and we’ll have to change the standards to account for them so that users get a quality experience on those devices.

When we start to see Apple releasing foldable devices, it’s a safe bet sales will increase. As foldable tech comes into the market, responsive design will have to adapt simply to maintain existing user experience and functionality.

Right now – we can expect the trend will at least mark the next phase of responsive design. It means creating multi-screen experiences. How far these experiences go depends heavily on how widespread the foldable device market becomes. There’s no guarantee that we’ll see foldable devices take off the way smartphones did – and we can expect that they’ll remain fairly rare until the price of the technology decreases rather significantly to make it more affordable for the masses. Most of these devices cost nearly $2,000, putting them out of reach for the average consumer.

Developers and designers have to push the platforms. There’s the chance to make websites more fluid, with functionality never before available. It’s an opportunity to venture into uncharted territory. It’s the biggest change the web has seen since the iPhone. The changes to syntax are still largely unknown, so now is the time to begin experimenting, making suggestions, and offering feedback.

Tags digital marketing, foldable web, web design

Digital Marketing

The Myth of Intuitive Design

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date October 19, 2020
No Comments on The Myth of Intuitive Design

If you’ve been in web design and digital marketing for any length of time, you’ve undoubtedly heard the phrase intuitive design. What does it actually mean? I’m here to tell you why this phrase doesn’t make sense and ways we can better approach design solutions.

What’s the Definition of Intuitive?

According to Merriam-Webster, intuitive means, “known or perceived by intuition: directly apprehended; readily learned or understood.” And according to the Cambridge Dictionary, it is defined as: “based on feelings rather than facts or proof.”

Based on the dictionary definitions, intuition is something associated with gut instinct or feelings that enable us to make decisions without proof of reasoning. While this does help in various life situations, our intuition doesn’t necessarily provide us with the function to guide ourselves through digital interfaces.

The truth is the intuitive behavior that designers aim to create relies on familiar design patterns that users have experienced before. In this context, intuitive design interactions aren’t grounded in unconscious reasoning but in familiarity.

While many clients say the design needs to be intuitive, it’s not something that is easy to define or measure. Many of us have experienced intuitive or gut feeling about a decision. I’ve had intuitive feelings about my children where I feel like something bad has happened and thankfully I’m not always right. However, it still feels like a bad impulse at tapping into my emotions. This demonstrates how intuition can behave for us and a particular moment and it’s hard to imagine having those kinds of instinctive feelings when interacting with an interface on a website or within an app.

Why Intuitive Design Isn’t Real

In reality, what’s intuitive for you or your client isn’t the same as what’s initiative for their clients, or your parents. Interfaces can feel familiar if you as the user have experienced something similar before and it’s the familiarity that we often call intuitive.

The first time I saw a nondescript menu on a mobile app, there was nothing intuitive that called out and said “Tap on me, I’m a menu. It was only because I tapped around and I discovered that the three bars gave me a menu when I tapped. Now, when I see a menu like that, I know what it does. I don’t know what it is because of intuition, I know it because I’ve done it before; so there’s nothing instinctive about it.

We know that intuitive design isn’t the real thing, but we know that familiarity with certain interactions we have experienced before is easier to understand. For users to have some technical experience, designers can make use of those already familiar interface patterns when it comes to making decisions about design patterns. UI Patterns defines design patterns as “recurring solutions that solve common design problems.” The UI Patterns website is a great resource for designers to see various patterns to use in new designs.

What are Design Patterns?

Design patterns are essential because they provide recognizable interactions. This ensures users spend less time trying to understand how to interact with something and more time interacting with it. Keeping things as simple as possible helps to minimize the time spent on achieving an outcome and thus creating a better user experience.

Common Design Patterns

Should You Deviate from These Patterns?

Any design that deviates from the well known and recognized design patterns is unfamiliar. When users have to learn something new, this can adversely affect the overall user experience. Designers are constantly striving to minimize and eliminate that learning curve so it can be hard to balance the need to create new Innovations while presenting a contextual experience that makes sense.

That’s where considering business outcomes and conducting user research for a good market fit along with user testing your design with the intended audience comes in. If you find you’re dealing with an audience that is not particularly technologically savvy and needs to keep things as simple as possible, you know it’s not the time to deviate from the familiar and understood

User testing ensures that you can validate your hypothesis as much as possible to help mitigate additional risks that are inherent in executing designs for products or services. Ideally, you should design to incorporate interactions that measure a user’s level of comprehension while also allowing them to personalize their path to achieving the desired outcome in the unknown environment.

Artificial Intelligence and Design Innovation

AI technology is continuously innovating, but companies still managed to design good user experiences using these advancements. For instance, Pinterest uses AI to understand the intention behind a simple search and deliver personalized results. Research shows that 80% of users are more likely to make a purchase if their experiences personalized.

Below, you’ll see an example of a search for vegan. Pinterest uses artificial intelligence to return a slew of related topics to make it easy for users to discover new content. These related topics are displayed as text across the top of the page.

As we continue to integrate AI into products and services, we can use it to create notifications for a user to take a specific action or not. This creates a more passive user experience as tasks that used to be manual are now automated behind the scenes.

Gmail for instance has a spam filter to automatically move suspicious emails into your junk folder without you needing to do anything. Google has been using rule-based filters and AI for many years but we continue to see innervation because Google AI now recognizes the weekly newsletters you may not be interested in and moves them directly to the spam folder. The spam filters are now able to identify and respond to individual preferences.

The Future of Interface Design

As we move to a world where voice assistants remove the need for a screen, we are starting to rely less on visual user interface design and more on the overall user experience. We can now talk to our devices and ask for what we need and we can ask for it to be given at exactly the right time. However, we still have a long way to go in terms of what virtual assistants can do. As technology continues to advance, we will see great improvements to the understanding of how people naturally speak. this is particularly like changing for older people who are not tech-savvy.

Tags digital marketing, intuitive design

Digital Marketing

Google Makes Effort to Combat Internet Misinformation

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date September 8, 2020
No Comments on Google Makes Effort to Combat Internet Misinformation

Google is now asking some searchers to “verify the facts to help others.” This feature is a new development – not available for all queries and not available for all searchers. Evidence at this point indicates that it appears to be an option for some knowledge panels.

Take a look at this example shared on Twitter:

Upon clicking the button, an overlay presents itself to allow you to indicate whether the information they have is correct.

There’s not much to indicate how widespread these searches are – or whether people will be able to manipulate Google’s results by blatantly providing it with wrong information. We’ll have to keep an eye on this to see how it pans out.

Fact Check Google Images

Fortunately, that’s not the only thing Google is doing to prevent the spread of misinformation on the internet. Back in June, they announced that fact check information was being added to Google Images.

When someone searches on Google Images, there may be a fact check label below the image thumbnail results. If you tap on one of the results to see a larger view, you’ll get a summary of the fact check that appears on the underlying webpage. Labels may show both for fact-checked articles about specific images, and for fact check articles that include that image in their story.

The fact check label appears on results that come from authoritative, independent sources across the web that meet Google’s criteria. These sources rely on ClaimReview which is an open method publishers use to indicate fact check content to the search engines.

Fact Check Labels in Search and News

Google has offered fact check in Search and News since 2017. The fact check label in Google News was made available everywhere and expanded into search globally in all languages. When you conduct a search that returns an authoritative result that contains that check from at least one or more public claims, the information is clearly displayed on the search results page. The snippet displays information on the claim including who made the claim in the fact check of that particular claim.

This information is not available for every search result, and there may be search results pages were different Publishers check the same claim while reaching different conclusions. The fact check does not belong to Google and is presented to allow people to make more informed decisions. Even though differing conclusions can be presented, it is still helpful for people to understand the level of consensus about a particular claim and have clear information on the sources that agree. As fact checks have become more visible in search results, people will be able to easily review and assess the fact checks to make their own informed opinions.

YouTube also uses the ClaimReview to surface fact check information panels in the U.S., Brazil, and India.

How You Can Fact Check Your Content for Google Searchers

The ClaimReview schema is part of the review schema. It is a fact-checking review of claims either reported or made in some creative work. It can be referenced via itemReviewed.

To add the fact check tagged to your content, there are some rules to follow. You need to build content around what users want, relying on trusted sources of information to back it up with facts, and be transparent as to where the thoughts came from. Your customers, prospective buyers, and fans will come to know your business and digital reputation as either one that provides the truth or stretches it.

Even though the fact-checking articles do not get any kind of special ranking boost, the visibility can boost traffic in terms of clicks, and help increase your conversions.

The fact check snippet references search words or phrases instead of being a cad for specific news. While aiming to offer valid sources of information, it includes a link to help readers develop their own views on the topic.

ClaimReview is a source label that helps to inform the search engines that use machine learning about the content of your website and offers insights that help them classify that content for rendering on the SERPs.

Google states: “We acknowledge the difficulty in characterizing different types of content in the rapidly changing publishing landscape, but we also hope to provide useful ways of helping users select what they want to read.”

The fact check label helps users to evaluate content before clicking on the link. The web page that contains the fact check data provides a link to the original data itself so that viewers can analyze it. Fact checks may provide the page quoted with a higher relevance than they might otherwise have. Google does not determine what is true or objective.

It’s important to note that fact checks are not guaranteed to be shown. The inclusion of fact check elements in search results is determined programmatically, based on things like how the search is phrased and the domain trust of the site that is referencing the fact. It also depends on whether the topic that has been fact-checked by someone participating in Google’s program, and if the necessary schema markup has been implemented on the page correctly.

For those who are curious, the full fact check tool, Fact Check Explorer, can be searched here, and APIs are available for developers.

Does Fact-Checking Influence Search Ranking?

If you, as a publisher, have fact-checked your content – either text or images – you will not see an increase in ranking just because you added the fact-checking schema to your site. The system is designed to provide users with the most relevant and reliable information available, including from the sources that provide the fact checks.

Tags digital marketing, Google

Digital Marketing

What is Page Experience?

According to Google Developers, page experience is a set of signals that measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page. This is where core web vitals come in. Core web vitals are a set of metrics that measure real-world user experience or loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of a page.

Before you start to panic, the page experience algorithm roll out is expected in 2021. Due to the coronavirus, Google decided to let everyone know about the future algorithm and what it covers so that you can adjust your website accordingly to prevent your traffic from plummeting.

According to Google, optimizing these factors makes things better for everyone across all web browsers and devices. It also helps sites move toward user expectations on mobile devices. Google believes this change will contribute to business success online as users grow more engaged and make transactions online with less friction.

Basically, Google is looking at how usable your website is. Things like whether the site runs on HTTPS, whether the site is mobile-friendly, and more.

Closer Look at Core Web Vitals

At this point in time, the CWV are focused on three aspects of the user experience: load time, interactivity, and visual stability. The metrics that make up the CWV will continue to evolve, but for 2020, this is what you should focus on.

Largest Contentful Paint

Also known as LCP, this metric measures loading performance. The LCP should happen within 2.5 seconds of when the first page begins to load. Anything after 4 seconds provides a poor user experience.

First Input Delay

Known as FID, this measures interactivity. For a good user experience, pages need to have an FID of less than 100 milliseconds.

Cumulative Layout Shift

Also known as CLS, this measures visual stability. For a good user experience, pages should maintain a CLS of 0.1.

For each of the metrics, to make sure you’re hitting the right target, aim for the 75th percentile of page loads segmented across both mobile and desktop devices. Tools that assess your CWV performance should consider a page as “passing” at 75th percentile or above, for all three metrics.

Optimize your site speed and reduce 400 errors

The faster your website loads, the better experience your users will have. When testing your page speed, it should be under three seconds to load. If at all possible, get it to one second or less. You can use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom to test your site speed. Page Insights helps by providing suggestions to help you speed up your site, too.

Check your site for broken links, so you don’t end up with 404 errors throughout your site. You can design a custom 404 page to match the rest of your site and brand’s messaging to make the experience of a 404 error a little less frustrating for users – but you should still aim to have an error-free website.

Analyze the competition

Take a moment to compare your experience to that of your competitors. If you believe you have an awesome user experience but finds that it doesn’t stack up well against the competition, you’ll have a harder time outranking them. Look at their top pages – at least the top 25 to 50, and make sure you’re doing more in terms of speed, content quality, and overall user experience. View the keywords they’re ranking for, and how you stack up.

Look at your design

Usability is about more than site content and speed. Heatmaps show you where people are paying the most attention on your site, where they are clicking the most, and ultimately, how they are engaging with your content. To learn more about how your audience behaves on your website, you’ll want to run some heatmap tests – which are helpful in split-testing because you can see which version of your site your audience responds to better. Heatmap tools include CrazyEgg, Smartlook, and ClickHeat.

Looking at your entire website, you should emphasize page experience. While this doesn’t mean that your whole website shouldn’t have a good user experience, it does mean that Google is probably going to focus its algorithm at a page-level basis.

If you have a few pages on your website that promote a poor experience, but the rest of them are good, it doesn’t make sense for Google to reduce the rankings in your entire site especially if many of your pages provide a better experience than your competition.

Tags digital marketing, Google, page experience

Digital Marketing

Google Webmasters Unconference

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date August 11, 2020
No Comments on Google Webmasters Unconference

The Google Webmasters Unconference is an innovative event where the webmaster community engages with Google’s team in an open, collaborative format. Unlike traditional conferences, it features interactive sessions where attendees actively participate, suggest topics, and lead discussions. This format fosters direct communication with Google experts, enabling attendees to gain insights, share experiences, and discuss the latest trends in SEO and webmaster best practices.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced either the cancellation or the digitization/virtualization of many events across the globe. Google has announced that rather than cancel their conference, this year they are offering a virtual version, known as the “Unconference”.

These events are hard to get into – and this year is no different. The website states that people can register to attend until August 19th, and be alerted about their attendance status by August 20th. Unfortunately, at the time of this writing on August 10, registration is already closed. While many are hopeful it will open again, chances are slim.

The conference starts at 8 a.m PDT on August 26th, and won’t have formal presentations. Instead, there will be a series of “interactive discussions.” Attendance is free for all registered users – but you aren’t officially registered until you get the confirmation from Google.

Google writes, “In this event, you decide what sessions will happen and will actively shape the content in them, by taking part in discussions, feedback sessions, and similar formats that need your input.” They go on to say attendees are expected to “actively participate in sessions you’re interested in, either through a voice or voice/video call through Google Meet.

Registrants have been asked to select two sessions from the list of proposed sessions, discussed below, that they would like to be part of. Only the sessions that receive the most votes will take place on the day of the event. Google also notes, “Depending on your feedback during registration, some of these sessions may not take place and we will group the sessions into two blocks.”

The Possible Session Topics at Google Webmasters Unconference

These are presented exactly as on the official event website. I’ve added links to more information about the topics/subjects themselves where I see fit.

Ads and SEO Mythbusting

How can ads impact/not impact your SEO?

Tell us about your experience with Ads and SEO
What makes people believe that Ads affect SEO?
Who’s spreading this? Where is it coming from?

Tips to Get Your Content Displayed in Discover Feed

Google recently updated the help document on Google Discover. In this session, attendees can learn about tips to increase their presence in Discover.

Approaches to Improve Core Web Vitals for Non-Tech Savvy Webmasters

There are many ways to improve CWV. Some of them are easy to implement but some of them aren’t.

In this session, attendees can learn about the optimization of CWV that is relatively easy to implement while showing noticeable improvements.

Web Performance: What Metrics are Important, How to Measure, and How to Spot What is a Priority

What ways are there to gather details?
How do you access them currently?
What do the metrics mean for you / your site?
What aspects confuse you or don’t work for your situation?

This is aimed at mid-level and advanced users.

Mobile/Desktop Diffing – Parity Findings

Why is it important to find the gaps
What’s truly at risk when prioritizing fixes

Helping You (or Your Clients) Understand How Their WordPress Site is Doing on the Web with SIte Kit

How do you combine information from different Google products to understand how your site is doing?
How do you set goals for your site and translate them to specific metrics to track
If you maintain sites for clients, what key metrics are they interested in and how do you share those with them?
Do you have to educate clients on how to set goals for their site?
If you use Site Kit, what can we do to make your life easier?

Common JavaScript Issues

Let’s talk about JavaScript and SEO. We would love to discuss which kinds of problems you see often and exchange ideas on how to tackle common issues.

Brainstorming Session: How Can the Search Console Team Further Help Publishing on the Open Web?

The Search Console team invites you all to a brainstorming session where we want to hear about your day-to-day challenges with publishing on the open web and try to think together of additional tools we can provide to help with these challenges.

E-Commerce SEO 101: Best Practices for Optimizing Online Stores

E-commerce stores come in all shapes and sizes -from commercial platforms such as Magento, Prestashop or WooCommerce, to custom-built and enterprise ones, online shops often face challenges coming up with the right SEO setup.

This session will cover common issues, solutions, and best practices that developers, webmasters, and SEOs should keep in mind when building and optimizing e-commerce sites.

CrUX Show and Tell

Bring your Chrome User Experience (CrUX) tools and show off how you use the dataset to understand real-user experiences. For any custom solutions, describe how you built it and what your feature wishlist looks like.

Accessibility and JavaScript

In this session, we want to talk about:

Ramifications of neglecting accessibility testing at-scale
Prioritizing fixes
Accessibility and JavaScript in general

Hreflang: How to Implement, When to Implement

Taking a look at the different approaches to specifying hreflang (tag, header, sitemaps)

When should you use them?
When shouldn’t you?
What issues do people experience?

Improving Search Documentation

How can we improve documentation to help SEOs to beginners to developers? Bring examples and suggestions! Are case studies helpful? How do you use them?

Mobile-First Indexing and How to Prepare For it

Are you confused about what mobile-first indexing is? Do you feel lost on how to prepare your site for it? Bring your questions!

We’ll help to address your confusion.

Talking About Talking About SEO

I think Google’s messages & information about SEO are getting better & clearer, but we often get flak for being vague. How can we improve in ways that help the average person? Bring examples & suggestions!

Communicating Our Publisher Policies and Monetized Updates

Policy updates: How do monetized policy changes change your experience? Our policies are constantly evolving. How can we convey updates to you in a way you can understand?

Timeline: We’ve gone from site level to page level (granular policies and enforcement) – to restrictions – how can we make your life easier/fairer as a partner?

Policy communication: Are our Policy documentation and training materials clear? What are we missing? Bring your ideas!

Fun with Scripts!

Show and tell! We bring a few examples:

txt diff checker – automated!
Mixed content warnings – identifying assets per page

Common Issues With Structured Data for Rich Snippets

Google documents guidelines for a gallery of rich results that you can obtain via structured data. This is an opportunity to talk about your struggles to enable those sought after enhancements and to discuss possible improvements.

How are Attendees Chosen?

Google maintains they have limited spots, so they may have to select attendees based on their demographics and background so as to ensure a good mix of perspectives in the event.

Will the Sessions Be Recorded?

Google notes that the sessions will not be recorded. It’s reasonable to assume they are doing things this way to keep it simple, keep the event intimate, and best mimic the in-person attendance experience. Instead of releasing recordings of the sessions hosted throughout the day, Google says it will instead publish a blog post that highlights some of the “top learnings” after the event.

After the event, I’ll come back with a summary of what was covered and any insights that may help you in your digital marketing and SEO journey.

Tags digital marketing, Google, Google Webmasters Unconference

Digital Marketing

How COVID-19 Has Changed Marketing

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date June 23, 2020
No Comments on How COVID-19 Has Changed Marketing

COVID-19 has changed marketing in a big way, shifting focus towards digital channels as consumer behaviors and preferences evolved. Brands have adapted by increasing online presence, leveraging social media, and creating more empathetic and contextually relevant content. The pandemic emphasized the importance of agility, digital engagement, and personalized marketing strategies, leading to innovative approaches in reaching and communicating with consumers in a rapidly changing environment.

We’re now three months into the Coronavirus pandemic, and while many states are re-opening and trying to bring things to a semblance of normalcy, analyses indicate that ad spending has hit bottom. Though this puts the industry in a great position to rebound in Q3, it’s worth taking a look at how the virus has changed the face of marketing – forever.

As people go back to shopping, we won’t see consumerism the way we saw it before. Consumer priorities have shifted, and to keep up with the change, marketing strategies have to reflect that, too. Out-of-touch marketing campaigns will alienate audiences, and quickly at that.

Take a look at this Coppertone sunscreen commercial. Their “summer is still on” ad seems to speak to the current situation, yet misses the mark. Specifically calling out things like road trips and concerts, saying that they are still on, negates reality for many people.

While some may still elect to take short road trips to destinations close to home, cases of the virus are still climbing, and many are choosing staycations in an effort to avoid getting sick or spreading the virus. And many concerts and music festivals have either canceled their events completely or rescheduled tours for 2021. Several artists have postponed shows, but have yet to work out new dates. Those who don’t wish to attend the rescheduled events have the option to request refunds for the shows, so overall attendance may be down – but we’ll have to wait to see how that pans out.

The “new normal” means that people will focus more effort on saving money, rather than spending it. Research from McKinsey & Company shows Americans will remain financially conservative, reducing discretionary spending for the foreseeable future. Only 36% of those surveyed expect the economy to rebound this summer.

So, what can marketers do to navigate the post-pandemic world?

Focus on Connection

In a world where everyone was always busy and on-the-go, halting everything to stay inside our homes with family for weeks on end has reminded us that we really are all connected. Brands who highlight ways to stay connected but still get things done are ahead of the curve.

When gyms closed, Planet Fitness jumped on Facebook and YouTube to start doing a series of home “work-ins” to encourage people to keep up with their health and fitness routines. People can hop on live and work out with trainers or watch the videos later on their own schedule.

Nike is asking everyone to “play inside, play for the world” to encourage people to stay home, but like Planet Fitness, keep up with healthy activity habits. To support that message, they’ve waived fees on their premium content within the Nike Training Club app.

Shift Marketing Budgets to Test New Strategies

In times of financial crisis, marketing teams are among the first to go, but that’s not the case in this situation. Because people are home now more than before, internet usage has been up. Even though customers may not be buying, it’s still a great time to engage with them.

Direct sales companies like Tupperware and Colorstreet are seeing record high sales because the in-home party has been replaced with social media and video conferencing. People are cooking more meals at home, and using nail polish strips as a way to make up for the fact that they can’t go to the nail salon like they used to. Both companies have had to make adjustments to their website hosting structure to accommodate for the increased virtual sales volume.

Star Director, Michelle Barrett of Heart’s Desire Tupperware notes that her sales team has reached record-breaking sales levels compared to the same time period in 2019.

Colorstreet Stylist Angela Kunschmann joined at the beginning of the pandemic. Colorstreet turns 3 years old this month, and sales are higher than ever before. Since COVID from April – June, companywide sales have exploded and have been growing at 200% in sales and 207% in sponsoring, on top of regular growth.

Companies that can offer virtual replacements for the same things once offered face-to-face will still be able to operate. Restaurants have shifted to providing curbside delivery, while services like GrubHub and Instacart offer no-contact delivery options.

Worry Less About Your Company and More About Your Customers

Yes, your company’s revenue matters. If you can’t stay open, it affects all of your employees. That said, by focusing on your customers – providing help and resources selflessly, you can do a great deal to protect your company and keep it above water.

Your customers may be having financial issues, especially if they’re waiting on unemployment benefits and aren’t considered an essential employee. Offering payment options and flexibility with financing options like Affirm or Klarna makes it easier for customers to pay.

Where you can, offer educational training to help others, as many are seeking new ways to earn money. Create as much content as you can that speaks to your audience’s biggest pain points, worries, and concerns.

As the number of cases continues to grow, we can only expect things to get worse before they get better. Personally, all you can do is practice social distancing and limit trips outside the home to only what is necessary. But, in terms of your business and marketing, it’s possible to make adjustments so that you can keep things running as smoothly as possible until the pandemic runs its course.

Tags content marketing, Coronavirus, COVID-19, digital marketing

Digital Marketing

First-Party Data and Your Marketing Strategy

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date February 17, 2020
No Comments on First-Party Data and Your Marketing Strategy

First-party data, collected directly from your audience, is vital for an effective marketing strategy. Unlike third-party data, it offers deeper insights into customer preferences and behavior, ensuring more personalized and targeted campaigns. With increasing privacy regulations and cookie deprecation, first-party data becomes even more crucial, enabling businesses to build trust and deliver relevant content while respecting user privacy. Its strategic use can significantly enhance customer engagement and loyalty.

As a marketer, the customer data you have is as good as gold. There are several ways to collect data with internal and external sources.

The most common data sources are from first party and third party. First-party data is essentially you are data because it is the information you collect directly from your website and or your customers. Third-party data, on the other hand, comes from other sources aggregated across a variety of sources.

Because of changes required by the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, the future of third-party data is uncertain. Combine this with the fact that Safari and Firefox have made cookies from third parties blocked by default and Google has announced that it will no longer support third party cookies by 2022, there are concerns about how marketers will continue to operate.

Under the GDPR, companies are required to inform consumers about the data they’re collecting and how they intend to use it as well as with whom they intend to share it. Because of this change, there are concerns that we may see the end of third-party data as we know it.

What This Means for Marketers

Because of the changes surrounding third-party data, now is the perfect time to rethink your marketing strategy and use first-party data as much as possible. If your website is already using a remarketing pixel for your various media platforms, then you’re off to a good start. Remarketing pixels are considered first-party data because they capture the user’s behavior and activity while they’re on your website.

If you’re using customer relationship management (CRM) software to help manage your customer information, then you likely have information about your customer’s past purchases and other interactions with your business. When you use that information properly, you can leverage your remarketing audiences and CRM data to create highly targeted marketing lists that engage site visitors and packed customers.

Research shows that marketers are increasingly prioritizing first-party data as a result of these changes. 39% of retailers are asking for data directly, while 27% are recording more observed data. If your company isn’t making an effort to collect data directly from your customers and relying completely on third-party data, your marketing strategy could lead to company collapse as more legislation comes in to help consumers protect their privacy and their data.

Making the Most of First-Party Data in Your Marketing Strategy

As the major corporations continue to drive consumer acquisition cost up, profitability decreases for those who can’t compete. That’s why it’s important to build strong data Driven customer relationships. First-party data makes it easier to personalize the experience which is something consumers expect in today’s e-commerce industry. Research shows that 56% of people are more likely to purchase from a brand that recognizes them by name let alone one the personalized has the entire shopping experience.

Use Upsells and Cross-Sells

After a visitor converts, use the CRM data to determine complementary products they could be interested in. For instance, if your customer buys a swimsuit, follow up with ads to sell them a swim cover-up, beach towel, or beach/water shoes.

Use Lookalikes and Similar Audiences

Leverage Google and Facebook for their ability to build new audiences based on your first-party data. This is a great way to extend your reach and find users who are like your current customers. Facebook launched custom audiences to improve their ad targeting and it has been an essential tool for retargeting and prospecting across a shopper’s purchase journey. Email match rates on Facebook typically fall between 40 and 60%, but if you segment well enough, you can get that number closer to 70 and 80%. And since Google has launched Similar Audiences, advertisers now have the ability to refine their current targeting efforts and expand prospecting campaigns to find new customers.

Best results, focus on your highest value customers and reverse-engineer a customer acquisition and retention strategy by using tools such as smart bidding, similar audiences, and remarketing lists for search ads.

Re-Engage Seasonal Shoppers

If you have a set of customers who only make purchases during a certain time of year such as the summer of the holidays, that’s perfectly fine. Create lists for these customers and ramp up your marketing efforts during that time of year as their most likely to convert. Also, think about whether or not there are other holidays are promotional events that you can use to re-engage the visitors.

Add Video

Video advertising is becoming increasingly popular and it’s a wonderful way to reach your audience. Think about using a sequential messaging strategy to build a story and keep users interested in your brand.

Use Cart Abandonment Reminders

Knowing what your customer is like gives you an idea of what products to show them. Start with what they’ve liked enough to add to their carts. It’s crucial to master your cart abandonment messages because the overwhelming majority of online shopping carts are abandoned. Research shows that 40% of the internet’s abandoned shopping carts are filled with clothes.

Cart abandonment is a behavioral trigger but there are also merchandising triggers. For instance, if a customer that was looking up a jacket that’s since been marked down, you should let them know. The trigger message could help you convert someone to a customer.

Add Direct Mail to Your Strategy

Although some marketers view direct mail as an outdated advertising channel, direct mail does offer an offline advantage that’s good for win back messaging. Mailboxes often have less clutter and distraction than email inboxes. But, for it to be effective you have to do it correctly. Using the spray and pray approach ultimately waste paper and postage. But, if you rely on your digital data to inform your offline campaign, you can use the same personalization that people have come to expect online.

It’s true first-party data may not offer as much opportunity to scale your marketing efforts as a third-party data. However, there’s still plenty of potential to use the first-party data to increase your revenue and improve return on investment. Put your customer data and insights to good used to refine your strategies for Acquisition, retention, and remarketing.

Tags digital marketing, digital marketing strategy, First-Party Data, marketing strategy

Digital Marketing

Google Says No More Cookies

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date February 7, 2020
No Comments on Google Says No More Cookies

Google says no more cookies in its announcement of the discontinuation of cookies in its Chrome browser. This move marks a significant shift in digital advertising and user privacy. Cookies, which have been essential for personalized ads, will be replaced by a new system. This change aims to enhance privacy while maintaining ad relevance, reflecting growing concerns over personal data security and evolving internet privacy standards.

Recently, Google announced that they are phasing out support for third-party cookies in 2022. Phasing out this support will affect everyone in the digital media industry. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Google drop 3rd party data or web browsers. But the stakes are a bit higher this time. Publishers are seeing the change as a potential turnaround in what has been a difficult digital transition.

According to Webopedia, a cookie is a message given to a web browser by a web server. The browser stores the message and a text file. The message has been sent back to the server each time the browser requested page from the server. You may also hear cookies referred to as an Internet cookie, browser cookie, web cookie, or HTTP cookie.

Cookies are used to identify users and possibly customize web pages for them. When you enter a website after using cookies, you may be asked to fill out a form to provide information such as your name and interest. The information is packaged into a cookie and sent to your browser which is stored for later use. The next time you visit the website, your browser sends the cookie to the server and they can use this information to present you with custom pages. For instance, rather than seeing a generic welcome page, you may see a page that welcomes you by name or shows the last time you visited the site.

Industry insiders expected the move however, most will be preoccupied with it during the two-year window to overhaul and replace what has been one of the key parts of digital media trading since the industry began.

Marketers who are wary of the industry’s reliance on Google have to figure out how they can adapt their first-party data strategy as some of the marketing tools in recent years have become redundant in a lot of internet browsers. These include third-party data and data management platforms, along with multi-touch attribution providers. Third-party data has been a critically important part of how marketers shape their communication strategies for nearly 25 years. For example, Procter & Gamble, one of the industry’s largest spending advertisers excitedly spoke about its frequency capping efforts at the National Retail Federation annual conference in January.

Because of this change, identifying audiences online will become significantly more challenging after 2022 within Google Chrome. Right now, it holds about a 69% global market share on desktop only.

Advertisers are Disappointed With Google

In a joint statement, the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s) and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) said, “It may choke off the economic oxygen from advertising that startups and emerging companies need to survive. We are deeply disappointed that Google would unilaterally declare such a major change without prior careful concentration across the digital and advertising Industries. In the interim, we strongly urge Google to publicly and quickly commit to not imposing this moratorium on third party cookies until effective and meaningful alternatives are available.”

Cookie Support Rolled Back by Others, Too

If you’re upset at Google for making this change, it’s important to know that the other major players in the industry have already started doing the same. The difference is that because Google accounts for such a large part of the market, then making this change will have a much larger impact overall.

In April 2017, Apple started rolling out intelligent tracking prevention in the Safari web browser. Shortly after, Mozilla implemented something similar in Firefox. The Firefox feature is known as enhanced tracking protection which blocks third-party cookies by default. In Germany, Firefox has a much larger browser share than the United States. The browser share is reported to be between 20 to 35% of publisher traffic depending on the source. Given the high degree of market share, the effect of enhanced tracking protection on German publishers has been severe. They have seen a 23% decline in CPM, a 45% decline in revenue, and a 38% decline in bed rate.

When considered with Safari’s intelligent tracking prevention, this clearly demonstrates the third-party cookie base identifiers are rapidly coming to the end of their life. Without a method to identifyAnd reach audiences, media companies are finding it increasingly difficult to sustain their business models and are in figuring degrees of crisis. Ad spend funds media and media plays a vital role in providing an investigative check against large companies and publicly accounted for governments.

What’s the Solution?

Though things appear grim for Germany, there is a clear path forward. Publishers and buyers can opt to leave third-party cookies behind and create real addressability, born from people-based first-party data that is determinist.

People-based identity is built on a foundation of user consent. You can get first-party data in publisher logins, newsletter sign-ups, and free walls, for example, but it comes from anywhere and user authenticate. In exchange for a minute or so of their attention, users give explicit consent to feed an engaging online experience. The open web then shifts to a more trusted environment based on user choice.

Spend the next two years focusing on ways you can improve your brand and trust so that users will voluntarily consent to provide you with their information. This way, if and when things like the California Consumer Privacy Act go nationwide, you won’t have to go through leaps and bounds to become compliant, because you’ve obtained all the information you have on your customers with their consent and don’t plan on sharing it anyway.

Though you may not want to ask users to register their data, effectively meaning that they have to sign in to your website, it is a good way to ensure you have a start on your first-party data strategy. If you are a publisher who is already been feeling the effects of Mozilla and Apple’s targeting restrictions, you may already be doubling down on your first-party data strategy.

Tags Cookies, digital marketing, Google, third-party cookies

Digital Marketing

Neuroscience and Marketing: Understanding the Decision-Making Process

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date February 3, 2020
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Neuroscience in marketing delves into understanding the brain’s role in consumer decision-making. By studying neural responses to marketing stimuli, businesses can grasp how emotions and cognitive processes influence purchasing behavior. This approach enables the creation of more effective marketing strategies, tailored to how the brain perceives and reacts to advertising. It’s a fusion of science and commerce, offering deeper insights into consumer psychology and behavior patterns.

Have you ever had a series of marketing campaigns do poorly and then suddenly you have one go viral? Have you tried to recreate that magic only to find you couldn’t? Don’t worry, you are not alone. Many people have tried and tried to become the next marketing campaign that is the talk of the internet. Many have failed. Some are successful, but it only seems like chance. According to some neuroscience marketers, there is a formula for making the right choices in a campaign.

In this article, we explore the connection between neuroscience and marketing:

Cause and Effect? Action and Reaction?

Many marketers who have had digital marketing campaigns spark positive responses may think it’s a one-time deal. A fluke that they don’t quite understand how they got right. The trick has been triggering people on a subconscious level. The right pictures, headlines, taglines, and a copy may seem to be the reason for it. But you could recreate the same thing again and have no response.

This is where neuromarketing comes into play.

Neuromarketing? What Is It?

To answer this, we need to get a little scientific. So you have this brain and it’s your hard drive of life. The subconscious parts are your operating system. The hard drive is full of files that were written during your childhood, information that gives you a visceral reaction at times, without you knowing why. Let’s say you are in a room with tarantulas and there are 2 other people in the room with you. You may scream and fear the spider. Another will love the spider and the third may not think much about it at all. This is all related to each person’s written file about how they feel about spiders on a subconscious level.

As adults, many of the choices we make are based on what we were molded with before we were 10 years old. We tend to react to make the choice rather than respond and make a choice. Neuromarketers realize the human tendency to react. When we understand what is common among the people in our target market, we can improve our campaigns. Creating content and presentations that are designed to trigger the people subconsciously leads to the desired effect.

Think of neuromarketing as marketing to the primal brain. We tap into the belief systems and by default, tap into emotions. Trigger emotions, and your target market will respond quickly and effectively.

What Are The Six Principles of Persuasion?

The six principles of persuasion are:

Reciprocity
Consistency
Social Proof
Liking
Authority
Scarcity

So how do these work in a marketing campaign? Let’s take a look at reciprocity first. This is the feeling that someone has done something for us, we should do something for them. This is popular with non-profit organizations that serve veterans. Vets have fought for our freedom, have served their country, and now they have needs. Non-profits will remind the public of this when they need donations to provide services to vets in a local area or on a national scale.

Consistency in neuromarketing is presenting your business authentically. Your entity will have a mission statement that reflects the service of the company and what you strive to do in the betterment of the world. If your campaign is in direct conflict with your mission statement, you lose consistency. You want to show that you haven’t lost sight of the mission and you need the public’s help in spreading the word on your consistency.

Social Proof is essentially tied to leadership. If your company does a specific thing and you get others to do the same thing, they will follow your brand with loyalty. Let’s say that your target market really likes a specific animal rescue. So you donate, hold a rally, or create a fundraiser for that rescue. It may not have anything to do with your business, but the action does. Others see your actions and begin to support you because you support something they love.

Liking is easy. Like your target market. Talk to them frequently. Listen to their thoughts, complaints, and praises. Engage with them. Develop a thoughtful relationship and you will go far.

Authority is another easy one. Humans have been ingrained to respect people and entities that are authoritative. We perceive them as something to be respected. Actors and other celebrities are often used in campaigns to spark an interest in a market. If you present yourself as an authority figure on a subject, model, or project, people will respect you. Make sure to respect them back.

Scarcity is a popular one you see at the holidays and on websites. If something appears scarce to your target market, they will want it more. It is ingrained in our minds that what is not readily available has more value.

So What Is The Right Balance?

There is no simple answer to this. Get to know your target audience. Learn what they are emotional about and you can find the right balance.

Some key things to consider are what was language like when this group was young. If they are an 80s baby, the slang of that era can be used. What was a key belief system of that era and in what area you are targeting? The imagery of belief systems can be helpful in a campaign. This is not necessarily a religious belief system, it can be a belief of how people were supposed to behave. Or it could be the belief of defining hard work or gig economy. Don’t forget to also look at the economic status of the era. That has a big role in how people view saving money, spending money, and tapping into emotions about resourcefulness.

Use the six principles of persuasion in some way with each campaign. You don’t have to use all of them at once, just use what fits in with what your goals are. That is the glory of marketing, being able to pick and choose what works and leaving the rest behind.

What do you think about neuroscience and marketing?

Digital Marketing

Optimizing Your Online Marketing Plan

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date January 31, 2020
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Optimizing your online marketing plan involves a strategic blend of analytics, creativity, and technology. It’s crucial to analyze data for insights into customer behavior, adjust campaigns for maximum engagement, and utilize the latest digital tools for efficiency. Personalization, SEO, and social media integration are key components. Continual refinement based on performance metrics ensures your marketing efforts remain effective, relevant, and aligned with your business goals.

Need to ensure that present marketing plans are optimized for the future? Do you need a framework to follow so that you don’t have to change things so often? Let’s look at auditing and adjusting your next marketing plan.

In this article, we explore the importance of optimizing your online marketing plan.

Look At Your Social Footprint and Online Consistency

Brand health is important. If you have been using the same methods for the last five years, it’s time to reevaluate. Sachs Marketing Group specializes in all things branding and marketing, so we can give you an extra set of eyes with honest feedback.

Where is your brand headed? How is your message spreading? Look over your brand assets. Consider the logo, packaging, website, marketing materials, and your digital marketing channels. Does it tie together? If not, when determining your marketing budget, plan for the expense of updating it all to make it match.

Look at your photos and product imagery. Do they send the right message to your target audience? Do they adequately reflect the brand image you’re trying to convey? If not, budget for new photography.

If you run a brick-and-mortar store, does it match the look and feel of your website? You want customers to have a positive experience regardless of whether they choose to visit you in-person or online.

Redefine Your Marketing Goals For the Next Year

Look back at your previous marketing goals and budgets. What worked? What didn’t? What can you adjust to help you reach the goals you missed? How can you surpass the ones you achieved? If you don’t change your goals and plan to get there, the business will stagnate.

If you are unsure of what steps to take, review the business plan and mission statement. Those two things can help you keep focused and prepare for the future. Here are a few things to consider:

Define your goals – be specific and realistic
Identify your target market – know their behavior patterns
Analyze the competition – if something works for them, mimic it
Understand your product/service – get unbiased and objective opinions from the consumer

These four things can help you find the right goals and provide plenty of information for marketing. Use it to your advantage.

Prioritize and Organize

You’ve defined your goals, so now it’s time to set a date to achieve them within the next year. Break the year down into quarters, each with their own goals and goal dates. Then set out the plan of execution. What can really help is a vision board. It may sound cliche, but it can help keep you focused on your goals. Images and words relating to your goals can be arranged so that when you look at it, you know what you need to do. Others like to make lists for the execution. Or they doodle in a notebook with the execution ideas in the doodle.

Prioritizing is also important. Especially when a goal relies on the success of another. Focus on what has to happen first. Sometimes it may seem like several things have to happen first, don’t let it consume you. Find out what the budget can do and what your time can allow and tackle the first thing quickly. Or maybe you just need to redo the budget before anything else happens and then tackle the goals.

Plan Your Campaigns for the Year

The best thing you can do is to plan out your campaigns for the entire year. The easiest is to put in all of your holiday campaigns first. Those have to be out there at the right time to get the right leverage. Then you can work in others around the perfect shopping times for your specific product or service. Off-season campaigns can be penciled in to boost sales when they are usually low.

Social media campaigns are important for your online presence. They should match if you have any simultaneous campaigns on television, in the local paper, website, and brick and mortar stores. Be wise about your platforms. If most of your target audience is on Facebook, it wouldn’t necessarily help to use Snapchat. You also don’t have to do every social media platform. Look at what has been useful in the past and stick with those.

Collaborative partnerships are a good campaign to add to your schedule. Working closely with a brand that complements yours can save you money on advertising and get you access to new audiences.

Partnerships with influencers can also be included in the plan. Having someone else to talk about your products and special sales is very helpful in broadening your target market and boosting sales. It doesn’t have to be many, just enough to get the word out.

Optimize public relations to remind people that you are a person too. Interviews on podcasts, YouTube channels, and the various relevant print publications to get your name out in the front. The more noticeable you are, the better the outreach.

Use new trends that suit the company’s look. It may be time to expand to a new social media platform. It could be learning slang from the youth to attract them to your product. Look for new promotional opportunities. Or explore podcasts by creating your own.

Something as simple as altering marketing goals can become a major boost to your online footprint and sales goals. It is still a learning process. Some new trends may not work for you. You may find a collaboration didn’t go quite as planned. But the lessons learned can be applied to the following year. The important thing is to keep going, using what works, and learning from what doesn’t.

Tags digital marketing, online marketing plan, optimization

Digital Marketing

7 Marketing Ideas to Grow Your Business in 2020

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date January 24, 2020
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Effective marketing ideas to grow your business include leveraging social media for brand awareness and customer engagement. Creating valuable, SEO-optimized content establishes your expertise and improves online visibility. Email marketing, with personalized messages, nurtures leads. Collaborations with influencers can expand your reach. Offering promotions and loyalty programs encourages repeat business. Utilizing customer feedback for improvement and referral programs can also drive growth and enhance reputation.

Business owners need to know how to promote their businesses in the right way. You may know promoting your business online is necessary in today’s world, but you don’t necessarily understand all of the ways you can do it or the ways that will give you the best results.

No matter which of the methods you choose, the key is putting your customers first in everything you do. Speak to entertain them, inform them, and teach them.

In this article, we share 7 marketing ideas to grow your business.

Revamp Your Website

When it comes to promoting your business online, everything needs to lead back to your website because it is the one piece of the internet you completely control. While social media can help you grow your business, you’ll never have complete control of those spaces and you must have a plan should Facebook decide to put you in Facebook jail or delete your Instagram account.

Investing in your website helps you build long-term equity in your brand. You’ll develop an asset that never stops working for you, and gives your customers a home base.

The key to a successful website is one that is not only aesthetically appealing but is easy for your customers to use and contains content that they find useful. Your website should be treated as a living and breathing organism that must be kept up-to-date and continues to grow.

Invest More in Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of attempting to drive traffic to your website organically through search engines. As Google continues to exert more influence on its own results, SEO is becoming more difficult, but it doesn’t mean you should completely abandon it.

A properly executed organic SEO campaign builds equity in your site which keeps it working for you over the long-term. Organic SEO is better than pay per click ads in many cases. However, because SEO can take months to see results from, it needs to be only a portion of your overall marketing strategy.

Create or Advertise on Podcasts

2019 research indicates that nearly ⅓ of Americans over age 12 listen to a podcast monthly. 41% of Americans say they are listening to podcasts now more than they did last year. And, Americans average 7 podcasts per week during the period of the study.

This tells us that there is a high demand for podcast content which is becoming the new radio. It’s cheaper, easier, and has a much greater reach. If your company has the resources, our regular podcast can be the center of your content marketing strategy. You can build an audience and establish your brand’s authority.

It’s okay if you don’t have the resources to do a good podcast on a regular basis because few do. If you don’t want to start your own podcast, you can find podcasters whose audiences match your target audience. This allows you to leverage the podcast audience and use advertising on those podcasts to promote your business.

You may also consider finding podcasts to be interviewed on, so you can spread the word about your business this way. It may take a bit longer with this approach because you need to build relationships, but guest starring on podcasts is a wonderful way to grow your reach.

Focus on Your Email List

If you don’t already have one, you might not think about emails when you consider promoting your business. When you invest in building your email list you are creating and long-lasting asset for your business.

A HubSpot survey showed that more than half of respondents check their personal email account more than 10 times a day. It is by far their preferred way to receive updates from brands. 59% of those surveyed indicate that marketing emails influence their purchase decisions and more than 59% of marketers say email is their biggest source of return on investment.

If you can get them to trust and value your brand, people will be more than willing to share their email address. Make sure you use smart marketing with compelling and useful content. you need to demonstrate to your audience that you’re worth listening to. Don’t just blast them with annoying emails every day.

Build Your Review Profile

We’ve known for a while now that Google and other search engines use online reviews from customers as a ranking signal. You should be looking for reviews on these platforms for your customers. Reviews serve as a basic kind of social proof to demonstrate quality.

Make sure you’re actively seeking feedback from your customers and using it to improve the products and services you offer. Ask your customers for reviews after your service has been performed or your product has been delivered. Follow up with your customers regularly, if you have long-term customers. and aim to have the best possible customer service at all times.

Why are reviews so important? A 2018 survey revealed 91% of consumers between the ages of 18 and 34 trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. 40% of customers only take into account reviews written within the past two weeks. and 89% of consumers read business’ responses to reviews so it’s crucial that whenever someone leaves the review for you that you respond to it.

Start with making sure you claim your Google My Business profile, as this gives you some control over how your information may display in the search results.

Start a Customer Loyalty Program

A customer loyalty program can be as simple or as complex as you want to make it – but it needs to be easy for people to sign up for, participate in, and redeem rewards for. Whether you use a card that’s scanned every time a purchase is made or another approach, you’ll get data to help you make decisions about your company.

You can use it to see who your most loyal customers are, and send them exclusive deals not available to the rest of your customer base. You can use it to convert more customers into repeat buyers. Your loyalty program can also help you see your most popular products and find other trends you can use to create promotions and other specials to keep your business growing.

Join Professional Associations

Chances are no matter your industry or niche, there is a professional organization available to you. You can use your local Chamber of Commerce or other B2B organization to not only market your business but to build relationships and camaraderie with other members. Membership in professional organizations helps increase your business visibility within your community and provides you with opportunities to network with other businesses in your area.

If you’re ready to kick your marketing up a notch in 2020, let’s talk!

Tags content marketing, digital marketing, email marketing, seo

Digital Marketing

The California Consumer Privacy Act – What You Need to Know

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date January 17, 2020
No Comments on The California Consumer Privacy Act – What You Need to Know

The California Consumer Privacy Act, or CCPA, went into effect on January 1, 2020. The law creates new consumer rights regarding access to, deletion of, and sharing of personal information that businesses collect. The law also requires the Attorney General to solicit broad public participation and adopt regulations to further the CCPA’s purposes. The regulations established procedures to facilitate consumers’ new rights under the law and to provide guidance for businesses on how to comply. It applies only to consumers in California however, it is reasonable to expect other states to follow with similar laws in the near future.

Does it Apply to Your Business?

Your business is only subject to the CCPA if it is for-profit, does business in the state of California, collects consumers’ personal information or determines the purposes and means of processing their personal information. It doesn’t apply to small businesses.

The CCPA only applies to businesses that have annual gross revenue greater than 25 million dollars, businesses that buy or receive customer information for commercial purposes or businesses that share or sell that information for commercial purposes. They must have information for 50,000 or more customers, devices, or households. It also applies to businesses that derive 50% or more of its annual revenue from selling consumers’ personal information.

The law does not apply to medical information collected by a covered entity governed by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) or the California Confidentiality of Medical Information Act. It does not apply to personal information collected, processed, sold or disclosed pursuant to the Gramm-leach-Bliley Act or the California Financial Privacy Information Act. It does not apply to the sale of personal information to or from a consumer reporting agency that is to be used in or to generate a consumer report.

Until January 1st, 2021, it does not apply to personal information collected from job applicants, owners, employees, directors, staff, officers, and contractors of a business. Until January 1st, 2021, it does not apply to personal information about an employee, owner, director, contractor, or officer collected pursuant to due diligence or business to business communication or transaction.

What is Required of Businesses?

Under the law, consumers have the right to know all of the data that is collected by a business, twice a year, free of charge. Consumers also have the right to say no to the sale of their information.

Consumers are also given the right to sue companies who collected their data where that data was stolen or disclosed pursuant to an unauthorized data breach if the company was negligent or careless about how it protected the data. Consumers also have the right to delete data they have posted, the right to be not to be discriminated against if they tell a company not to sell their personal information. They also have the right to be informed of what categories of data are collected about them prior to its collection and at a point of collection as well as to be informed of any changes to the collection.

The law also provides mandated often before the sale of any children’s information applying to people under the age of 16. Consumers have the right to know the categories of third parties with whom their data is shared and the right to know the categories of sources of information from whom the data was acquired. They also have the right to know the business or commercial purpose of collecting their information.

This means, as a business that is subject to follow the rules and regulations of this law, you must be able to tell your consumers the information you are collecting and why, and the third parties you may possibly provide the information to and why.

You must also provide a way for consumers to see all of the data you’ve collected on them as well as to give them a way to decline selling their information and deleting any data you have collected.

Compliance Issues Thus Far

We’re not too far into 2020 yet, and we’re seeing that many publishers are making it hard to find their Do Not Sell links. Notices are often highly inconspicuous, which suggests large companies are testing their minimum compliance. Many publishers are attempting to call as little attention as possible to the data opt-out option for their consumers.

Major publishers such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Hulu, and Pandora are listing the required length at the very bottom of their respective home pages in small font. You’ll find that Netflix and Amazon hiding their opt-out language behind plain privacy links on their homepage. The links are also difficult to find on Facebook and Google. The point is that if you’re not actively looking for them, you likely will not find them.

Statute itself requires publishers to “Provide a clear and conspicuous link on the business’s home page titled ‘Do Not Sell My Personal Information’ which links to an internet web page that enables a consumer, or person authorized by the consumer, to opt-out of the sale of the consumer’s personal information. The reality is that what most of these publishers are doing probably doesn’t qualify as “clear and conspicuous”.

The initial efforts to comply with the CCPA may uphold the letter of the law but not the spirit. Hiding the links at the bottom of the page won’t Inspire consumer trust or bring more transparency. While the path forward is complex and murky, smart marketers are embracing privacy rather than fighting it.

I personally believe these bottom of the homepage placements will not be deemed sufficiently conspicuous and publishers will be forced to make them more prominent and potentially simplify the entire process. Rather than hoping users won’t notice, publishers and technology providers should be educating them about the benefits of not opting out, and language that laymen can understand. making it difficult for consumers to opt-out only furthers customer distrust.

Tags california consumer privacy act, CCPA, digital marketing

Digital Marketing

Are Micro Niche Websites a Good Idea?

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date January 10, 2020
No Comments on Are Micro Niche Websites a Good Idea?

Micro niche websites – or those that cover a small topic in only a few pages – still remain fairly popular online today. Why? Because when executed correctly, you can turn them into money-making websites pretty quickly. However, as Google seeks to provide its users with high-quality results, it can be harder to get those micro niche sites the traffic they need to produce conversions…..so, are they really still a good idea?

What is a Microniche Website?

A microniche website is a super small website made of just a few pages. Generally speaking, it’s anywhere from one to 10 pages. It’s a niche because it focuses on a specific keyword. There are a lot of profitable ideas out there, and in most cases, a micro niche site is an exact match domain. For instance, if you’re targeting the keyword, “discount watches online” your domain would be discountwatchesonline.com (or .org, .net, etc.). You’d fill the site with content that’s about discount watches, all targeted at that main keyword, and use advertising or affiliate marketing to generate income.

There’s Power in Volume

You won’t be able to quit your day time anytime soon if you only have one or two of these micro niche sites. In other words, the more you build, and the better the keywords you target, the higher your income potential. Marketers who began building these small sites in 2008 or so were easily able to quit their jobs by early 2011 because their AdSense income provided more than their corporate job.

The primary benefit of these kinds of small sites is that you can quickly target keywords and having an exact match domain usually provides a benefit for ringing in Google. By targeting such specific terms, you’re often able to write articles about exactly what the searchers are looking for whereas sometimes the competition only generally discusses the topic.

Times Have Changed

Though many marketers have built hundreds of small niche sites, times have changed. With the Panda and Penguin Google updates, there are now hurdles to how easily sites used to rank. You can still rank micro-niche sites but it really isn’t the best strategy anymore. It’s often easier to switch your focus to fewer sites with more content. Using a strategy of building larger more authoritative sites is better in the long run. Instead of having 30 micro niche websites, focus your attention on two or three authoritative sites in different niches to keep your income stream varied.

You can use small sites to test the market, make some quick money, or in general, test your skills. but, for the amount of time it takes to rank today, it’s better to build something more significant that can bring in even more money. A better long-term strategy is building up your small niche websites with more content, and higher quality to attract natural links.

Defining Your Micro Niche

Most people in business know what a niche is. Health, fitness, business, finance, those are all niches. But a quick search reveals millions of people blogging about those topics. If you want to set yourself apart from your it makes sense to start with a micro-niche. Rather than focusing your brand on general fitness, you can opt to specialize in fitness for those with disabilities, fitness for teen girls, or fitness for seniors. Those are micro-niches.

Some other micro niches are:

Tiny houses: Micro-niche in real estate
Disney Cruises: Micro-niche in the travel/cruise industry
All-natural makeup: Micro-niche in the skincare industry
Curly hair care: Micro-niche in the beauty industry
Drones
Home automation
Air purifiers
Beard oil
Yoga
Virtual Private Network (VPN)

When choosing your niche, it needs to be popular in the United States and have a high commercial value or a high CPC, cost per click. Choose a topic that you are comfortable with and related to your business. Look for something that has a good search rate.

Benefits of a Micro Niche

As a small business, when you consider streamlining your services to a more specific area, it’s natural to worry about the loss of potential clients. However, the opposite is quite true. Developing a micro niche for your brand helps to increase your client numbers because you are targeting those who are most likely to be interested in what you have to offer.

Benefits of micro-niches include:

Easier Marketability: Standing out from the crowd is the key to getting attention for your brand and increasing sales. Micro niches make this possible and lead to business growth.
Increased Profitability: Because of the low competition, you’ll naturally experience greater profits. You have access to more clients who share your desires, passions, and interest.
Low Competition: Since the niche is highly specialized, there are fewer businesses to compete against.
Easier to Gain Traction: All small businesses need momentum to get started and continue growing. Using a micro-niche can help you gain the traction you need to make progress.

Gone are the days where you could do a little keyword research, buy an exact match keyword domain, and build a basic website within 10 minutes or less on WordPress. However, using the micro-niche approach to create an authoritative quality website with lots of content targeted at the right audience can be just as beneficial as the old-school microsites used to be.

Tags digital marketing, micro niche, micro niche website

Digital Marketing

Marketing Your Business Beyond Social Media

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date December 30, 2019
No Comments on Marketing Your Business Beyond Social Media

Marketing your business beyond social media involves leveraging SEO for organic search visibility, email marketing for direct customer communication, and content marketing to establish thought leadership. Networking at industry events and public relations can enhance brand presence. Collaborations and sponsorships also provide avenues for outreach, and community involvement can strengthen local connections.

Social media marketing offers a great place for businesses to spark conversation, build trust among their target community, and engage with people interested in their products or services. Over the years, social media platforms have developed into well-designed advertising platforms, essentially evolving into pay-to-play platforms where free, organic visibility isn’t as available as it once was.

Fortunately, social media marketing is just one of many channels available for business marketing. For the best results, we recommend developing a strategic omnichannel marketing campaign – an approach that not only involves several types of marketing but creates a cohesive conversation between you and your customers.

In this article, we’re exploring the idea of marketing your business beyond social media.

Clients Love Rewards

Your customers love to know they are special and a rewards program is a perfect tool to convey that message. Take a look at bookstores, grocery stores, and even gas stations. Reward cards are everywhere and people love to sign up. Any business can create a rewards program. You can offer a percentage discount after so many qualifying purchases (some set a minimum of $10-$25 purchase). Service-based businesses can reward for referrals with free services.

Host Anniversary Parties

When your business reaches a milestone, such as your opening date or when you made your first profit, have a party. Send invitations to your email/address list. Provide discounts and fun things to do in your small business. Play games or host a raffle. One business would pull out a wheel of “fortune” that they created on their own. Everyone had to do a small task (sing a song, answer trivia, etc) in exchange for a coupon for a free item. People love parties and discounts and will bring friends who don’t know your business with them. That introduces you to new potential clientele.

Host Your Giveaways In Person

Even though people love giveaways on social media, you can also do them in your brick and mortar store. One business has one for every holiday in the calendar year. Their vendors will donate an item and the store will take something from the clearance shelves to include in the basket. People come into the shop to fill out a paper with their name and phone number for a chance to win. This can be adjusted for those that also have a service business.

Create an Event With A Local Business

While other businesses are your competitors, come of them can be complementary. Consider a special event working with another company. Pizza companies may want to team up with a beer and wine company. A local women’s shoe store might want to have a wine and cheese party with another business. Be creative and look to another company that can help boost your connections. It can also be beneficial if they use a lot of social media to advertise the event.

Support Local Non-Profits

All cities and towns have non-profits who work hard at raising funds and awareness for social issues. Find one or two that is an important one for your business and find ways to support them. This may mean that you are advertised on walk-a-thon or 5K t-shirts. You provide coupons for services or items for a swag bag. You provide space for their informational material in your brick and mortar store. You financially support their efforts annually or for specific fund drives.

It doesn’t have to be just a social issue either. Some businesses will support local sports teams in their neighborhoods. Some will work with local boys/girls scouting troops or fund raise with a house of worship. There are a lot of ways to support your local community while getting an advertisement in return.

Reach Out To New Neighbors

Welcome Wagons were a big deal way back in the day. People would create welcome baskets for people who were new to the neighborhood as a welcoming gesture. Very few towns do that and when they do, it’s up to the individual to request the Welcome Wagon. You can choose to be a part of a Welcome Wagon if it exists or you can take it into your own hands. A nice card with a discount coupon is a great way to welcome a new neighbor and garner interest in your business. It’s a personal touch and that can go a long way.

Personalized Business Mail

Personalized business mail might sound like an oxymoron but it’s a great way to be personable with your clientele. Consider sending holiday cards to your loyal customers. You do not have to include any discount or sales ads, just the card. In this day and age, it’s not too often that mail is personable. We send e-cards, emails, and a card is more intimate. When we receive a card, we feel that the other person (or business) really values us. You can also take it a step further with condolence, birthday, congratulations, or anniversary cards. Your customers are another type of family and those who nurture it are the most successful.

Connect With Brand Ambassadors

There are ways to get your business known on social media by allowing others to talk about you. Brand Ambassadors are common on Instagram but can be an asset on any social media platform. They can be a “face” of your company or review your products/services to the masses. You can partner with them on

marketing campaigns to bring new customers to your events. They can help advertise your giveaways, contests, or rewards programs online for you. Just be sure you are in compliance with FCC and TOS agreements on social media platforms regarding advertising and transparency.

Jump On The Podcast Train

Podcasts do use social media, but you can do this one regardless of your platform. Connect with folks who have local podcasts or to podcasts related to your niche. You “appear” in a studio or through a phone call. Some podcasts are filmed for cross-posting to YouTube or Facebook, but many are recorded for various podcast platforms. It gives you an opportunity to talk about your business. It can be about exciting new changes happening, events, grand openings, sales, or discussing your involvement with the community.

Social media is helpful, but there are so many other ways to keep your business relevant. A good marketing plan has a variety of techniques that work. Use what you can, dismiss what doesn’t work, and be flexible.

Tags social media, social media marketing, social media trends

Digital Marketing

How to Boost Your Email Marketing Results

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date December 16, 2019
No Comments on How to Boost Your Email Marketing Results

Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing channels available to business owners. That being said, email marketing success is not guaranteed.

There are a number of key factors that contribute to email marketing results. This includes everything from the content of your email to the way you format it.

In this article, we will explore some email marketing tips that can help you boost your email marketing results.

1. Segment Your List to Personalize Content

Today’s consumers want a personalized experience.

58% of people are willing to provide personal information in exchange for a better shopping experience, under the right circumstances. You’ll need to build trust and a clear value exchange before they will hand it over.

Does it make sense to send the exact same content to people who haven’t made their first purchase and people who are longtime loyal customers? No! Doing so is a major missed opportunity.

Many of today’s email marketing platforms make it easy to segment your list based on a number of parameters, including:

When choosing the email marketing platform you want to use for your company, pay attention to the available integrations. Find something that integrates with programs and platforms you’re already using to not only make your segmentation and personalization efforts easier but to streamline your overall workflow.

You can also use APIs to combine as many of your databases as possible to give you the largest amount of data to work with for personalization purposes.

2. Make Use of Animated GIFs

Animated GIFs have been popular on social media for a while now, and we see lots of brands including them in their email marketing strategy, too. They are a wonderful way to further illustrate your point, add a bit of humor or add some visual flair to the content. After all, visual content increases the desire to read by 80%, and though Google Trends shows animated GIFs piqued in December 2018, the graph below indicates they are still popular.

3. Add Images and Video

Images and video provide a break from standard text, and have been known to help boost engagement rates. If you take the time to make your content shareable on social media, your images and video are much more likely to be shared with others, which can help grow your subscriber base.

4. Adjust Send Frequency

You’re just getting started with email marketing, you may think that you should only send a message when you have news to share, specials or sales, or announcements about your company. This approach isn’t the best one because your e-mail newsletter should be considered a way to build relationships with your followers. Every time you send one, you have the chance for them to go from a satisfied customer to a dedicated fan. If you consider your newsletter some things that may annoy or distract them, then you will be less likely to send quality newsletters more often.

Consider your newsletter as something that adds value to your subscribers’ lives and something that they should look forward to. Send it on a regular basis, even every weekday, perform surprisingly well because subscribers learned to know when they can expect it and add it to their daily reading.

If on the other hand, you are sending your newsletter once or twice a month and suddenly start sending it 5 days a week, it’s easy to get carried away. And it’s also easy to fall into a trap that backfires.

People would like to get regular content, but they don’t want to be inundated when they are trying to spend time with their families or take time to relax. Limit your newsletters to weekdays or late on Sunday nights, and no more than once a day, unless you have a real reason to send more often. This approach prevents the newsletter from being so scarce that people forget about it while also keeping it from being so available that no one feels compelled to open it at all.

5. Keep the Layout Simple and Clean

Following the KISS rule ensures that your readers can focus on the content. If your formatting clutters your newsletter, it may stop the readers from seeing the value it offers. If you feel like your formatting may be causing your engagement to drop, try to limit your newsletters to one or two photos or animated GIFs within simple HTML.

6. Split-Test Until You See What Works Best

Split testing isn’t just for your website. You can use it to test your subject line, layout, content, and even your send dates and times.

Like with your website, you’ll want to run one split test at a time so you can get a better idea of how each tested element influenced your results.

After a series of tests, you can, in theory, develop the perfect recipe for your audience. While you can follow general guidelines based on available research, it’s important to remember that what works for one business or industry may not work for another.

Improving your email marketing results may be as simple as changing the time of day or the day of the week you send your email. It may mean resending the message to the people who didn’t open it first, using a different subject line. A quality subscriber list doesn’t happen overnight, and it can take a while to find the balance between your content, sending times, and all the other elements that influence engagement. Aim for improvement with each issue, and you’ll get to where you need to be.

Conclusion

Email marketing can be a highly effective way to reach out to customers and prospects. However, in order for email marketing to be successful, business owners need to focus on the results and experiment.

The more you experiment with your email marketing strategy, the more success your business will enjoy.

If you need help with your digital marketing strategy, reach out to Sachs Marketing Group for a consultation.

Tags customer outreach, digital marketing, email marketing, outreach

Digital Marketing

The Evolution of Digital Marketing

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date December 13, 2019
No Comments on The Evolution of Digital Marketing

The evolution of digital marketing spans far and wide, from basic banner ads to sophisticated, data-driven strategies. The rise of social media platforms introduced new channels for engagement. Search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising became vital for online visibility. The advent of mobile marketing and influencer collaborations further diversified the landscape. Today’s digital marketing is highly personalized, leveraging big data and AI for targeted campaigns.

As we head into a new decade, it’s a great time to look back at 25 years of digital advertising history. Regardless of how good a product or service is, to attract potential customers, you must advertise. Since the early 1990s, digital advertising has changed the concept of marketing for several businesses. We’ve all seen the era of billboards, flyers, and posters used to advertise products. Now, we see digital Billboards that change advertisements had every few seconds in densely populated areas, but we see much less of the “old school” methods like flyers on posts all over town.

Have you ever taken the time to think about why it has changed over the years? One of the main contributing factors to that evolution is the result of analytical technologies. As technology continues to innovate, we’ve seen digital advertising morph alongside it, and we don’t expect it to stop evolving any time soon. From the flashy banner ads of the early 90s to the artificial intelligence-powered bidding optimization we see today, digital advertising has made quite the journey to deliver the right content to the right potential customer at the right time to convert them to a customer when they discover a need.

Adobe recently researched all the milestones in digital advertising over the past 25 years, which I’ve listed here.

1994 – Banner Ads Galore

Hotwired – part of Wired Magazine started using banner ads in 1994. The click-through rates of ads at the time was a whopping 44%. Today, according to Smart Insights, the overall display ad click-through rate is just 0.05%.

1995 – Yahoo Launches

Yahoo launched and became the primary search engine online. That same year, HTTP cookies were introduced as a way to track user behavior and activity online.

1996 – Flash Makes Its Debut

Flash 1.0 debuted to internet users and became a robust way to advertise on the web. Content marketing was introduced through the American Society for Newspaper Editors. Google Chrome is ending its support for Flash at the end of 2020.

1997 – Hello, Pop-up Ads!

These were developed to gain user attention and get potential customers interested in the products and services they offered.

1998 – Google is Born

Though the company had already been formed, this year, they introduced the Google Search Engine. Advertising networks created their own way and connected to various websites with advertising.

1999 – PPC is Introduced

PPC advertising is highly competitive now, but the pay for placement concept wasn’t Google’s brainchild. GoTo.com introduced it.

2000 – Google Launches AdWords

In 2000, Google introduced its AdWords product. It was designed to help they pay per click advertising method become easier. That same year, mobile advertising was also introduced.

2001 – The Dot Com Bubble Bursts

The.com bubble, which expanded from the mid-1990s to 2000, busts. It cost investors 5 trillion dollars.

2002 – The Dawn of Adblockers

The first ad blocker was launched as a browser extension this year. This was designed to stop the pop-up ads that were deemed annoying by users.

2003 – LinkedIn is Born

The social media platform specifically for professionals launched this year.

2004 – Facebook Launches

The largest social media platform till now launched this year. Its first advertisement was known as Facebook Flyers.

2005 – YouTube Launches

In addition to the YouTube video website launching, we saw the launch of broadband connections to provide better performance and faster connectivity.

2006 – Digital Ads

The use of hyper-targeted digital ads started this year. Google buys YouTube.

2007 – iPhone Launches

This was a significant milestone in the mobile industry.

2008 – Digital Agency becomes a Term

Beyond coining the term digital agency, the App Store for iPhone users was also launched

2009 – Instant

Google releases Instant to support real-time search.

2010 – iPad Launches

Apple adds the tablet to its product offering this year.

2011 – Snapchat

Snapchat, the social network that uses videos with augmented reality features launches this year.

2013 – Real-Time Marketing

Instagram launches a new feature with promoted posts that enable users to run ads while promoting previous posts on Instagram.

2014 – The Dawn of In-App Advertising

As a result of the surge in smartphones, the focus of advertising changed from mobile advertising to in-app advertising. This year, Amazon launched its first speech recognition technology as well.

2015 – Mobile Traffic Overtakes Computer Web Traffic

At this point, the internet gets more traffic from mobile devices than desktop devices. For the first time in history, the usage of video content is also increased.

2016 – Pokemon Go

The new app had more than 45 million users globally. It changed the concept of augmented reality.

2017 – Ads.txt

This year the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) introduced Ads.txt. Project intended to increase transparency in the programmatic advertising ecosystem. It stands for authorized digital sellers. It offers a simple, flexible, and secure method that publishers and distributors can use to publicly list the companies they authorized to sell their digital inventory.

The file can only be posted to a domain by a publisher’s webmaster to make it valid and authentic. Because it is a text file, it is easy to update. It supports multiple types of supplier relationships, including domain owners who sell on exchanges through their own accounts, networks and sales houses who programmatically sell on behalf of domain owners, and content syndication partnerships where multiple authorized sellers represent the same inventory.

The amount of revenue digital agencies generated almost doubled since 2009, and Google drops Instant search.

2018 – Voice Technology

Enter the dawn of digital assistants such as Siri, Cortana, Alexa, and Google.

2019 – Personalized Advertising

Because of the use of the internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI), companies can now deliver more relevant content and personalized advertising.

Though we already know one thing about 2020, what else do you think we can expect to see in the coming years? Over the next decade? Beyond? Share your predictions with me in the comments below. I’d love to hear what they are!

Tags digital marketing, evolution of digital marketing

Digital Marketing

6 Marketing Attribution Models That Help You Understand Conversions

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date December 9, 2019
No Comments on 6 Marketing Attribution Models That Help You Understand Conversions

Six marketing attribution models help you understand conversions. Various marketing attribution models assist in understanding conversion drivers. Last-click attribution credits the final touchpoint, while first-click highlights the initial engagement. Linear models distribute credit evenly across all touchpoints, and time-decay gives more credit to recent interactions. Advanced models like data-driven attribution use machine learning to allocate credit based on actual conversion impact, providing a comprehensive view of the customer journey.

Want to make sure you’re fully understanding your customer journey and making the most of your resources? Learn about six of the most common attribution models to use.

Why Attribution is Important to Marketers

A common challenge for many marketers is taking care of in-depth analytics. Chances are, you’re using several channels to market products or services. How do you know which channels are performing well and which ones aren’t?

Is the dramatic increase in traffic to your site from a piece of content you just published or a Facebook ad? Which of your marketing channels caused an increase in conversions that led to additional revenue?

Without proper attribution, you’re only looking at vanity metrics like the number of comments that are linked shares. To gauge the success of your marketing campaign, you have to go deeper and look at things such as how a lead first came in contact with your content, and what pushed them to make a purchase.

Proper marketing attribution allows you to study the entire customer journey of how a person went from a lead to a paying customer, which helps you determine what is working. Maybe your Facebook ads aren’t converting it all, so you’re better off pausing your campaign and reworking your strategy. Or perhaps you’re getting a high return on investment from email marketing, in which case you would want to do more email outreach because you know it works.

Without using marketing attribution to help you see the touchpoints that are contributing to your business growth, you’ll keep wasting time and energy on resources that are not providing a positive ROI.

Let’s take a look at some of the most common attribution models along with the pros and cons of each one so you can determine which model is best for your business and marketing channels.

First-Touch Attribution

Using a first touch attribution model, you give credit to the channel that first directed a lead to your product or sent a visitor to your website.

For instance, if a lead was first introduced to your website through a Facebook ad, and then clicked a link on your site that sent them to a webinar. At the end of the webinar, they subscribe to your email newsletter and then later converted to your email outreach. The credit for that conversion would be attributed to the first touchpoint, which is the Facebook ad rather than the email outreach.

The idea behind this attribution model is that many conversions occur at the end of the funnel, but they wouldn’t have been possible without the first touchpoint. This type of model is not usually the best option for B2B because there are generally a lot of touchpoints involved before a lead converts.

Last Touch Attribution

The last touch attribution model is similar to the first touch model, but in this instance, instead of measuring what the lead first came in contact with your business, it attributes the entire sales process to the last touch or the end of the marketing funnel. This is generally the default setting in the majority of attribution models. If you rely on Google Analytics, this is the default attribution model. This approach focuses on what drove the lead to convert and ignores everything before the conversion.

Linear Attribution

With linear attribution, you’ll get a more complete overview of everything that happened between the beginning of the funnel to the end where the lead converts. With this approach, the middle of the final is no more important than the beginning or the end of the funnel because it gives everything equal importance. This model is easy to set up and can be used to compare results from other data models because you don’t have to worry about which touchpoints should receive credit for a conversion. The only real issue with this approach is that, in reality, not all touchpoints are created equally.

Position-Based Attribution

Also known as the u-shaped attribution model, the position-based model gives credit to three main touchpoints. 40% goes to the first and last touch, while the remaining 20% goes to the middle touch. Emphasis is on the first touchpoint because it is the primary impact where the leads come in contact with your business and the last touchpoint because it is the point at which the lead converts.

In marketing, the first and last touchpoints are generally the most important, but this doesn’t mean you should neglect any middle touchpoints. The middle touchpoints may be having an impact that is necessary for conversion.

This model is a good approach because, unlike the first and last touch attribution models that place importance on just one aspect of the data, the u-shaped model provides equal significance for both values. This is not a good approach to use when the first or last touchpoint is not as important. As you do your analysis, you should always check if the first touchpoint is as crucial as the last.

If you have a long sales cycle or a campaign that has to nurture leads, you should avoid using this model. Instead, save it for when the lead engages with your content and decides almost immediately that they want to use the product or service you offer.

Algorithmic Attribution

This method is the most accurate way to measure a customer journey from prospect all the way through to conversion. This model’s success rate is higher than the others because it’s uniquely created for the business. Depending on the tool you use, this process may be done quickly by manually entering the parameters or using machine learning.

In this approach, you can give credit to the touchpoints that matter most of your business instead of providing equal credit to the first, middle, and last touchpoints. It gives you the most accurate data from the customer journey. However, this process is complexed and involves a variety of calculations so you may need the skills of a data analyst along with more powerful and advanced tools. As such, the tools may not be available to smaller businesses since they are often pricey.

If you have a short and straightforward sales cycle, using the algorithmic attribution model is not ideal for you. If, on the other hand, you have a long and complicated sales process that involves both marketing qualified lead and sales qualified lead reporting, the algorithmic model is the perfect option for you because it allows you to conduct in-depth analysis at each stage of the funnel.

Time-Decay Attribution

With the Time-Decay attribution model there is more significance to the touchpoints that are closer to where the conversion occurred then at the top of the funnel. This attribution model is similar to the linear model but is a multi-touch model that gives more credit to the middle and the bottom of the final. It represents them as being worth more because they are the points that drove the conversion.

Which ones do you use and why? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Tags attribution, attribution model, customer conversion, digital marketing

Digital Marketing

PPC Trends to Watch for in 2020

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date December 6, 2019
No Comments on PPC Trends to Watch for in 2020

There are several PPC trends to watch for in 2020. PPC trends focus on automation and machine learning for improved ad performance and efficiency. Voice search optimization becomes crucial as voice-activated device usage rises. Audience targeting is refined, prioritizing user intent over keywords. Video ads gain prominence across platforms. Visual search evolves, offering new advertising opportunities. Advertisers increasingly adopt these trends, adapting to changing technologies and consumer behaviors for effective PPC campaigns.

Over the last year-and-a-half, we’ve seen developments occurring in the paid search industry from both Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising. So far, the changes have involved audiences, average position, smart bidding, and ad copy.

As innovation in digital marketing continues to grow exponentially, smart pay-per-click pros need to be able to keep up with the market.

To stay ahead of the game, here are five trends we are on the look for in 2020.

Voice Search

Comscore predicts that by next year, half of all searches will be voice searches. The search terms that trigger ads that will appear will change as people interact with the search engines more conversationally when they use their voice-enabled devices.

Though we are still quite a long way away from seeing paid search within voice, there’s no reason you shouldn’t start preparing for it now. You can do this by:

Beginning to use more conversational and long-tail keyword terms you are targeting
Keeping your landing pages more conversational for the user experience and SEO reasons
Testing and learning more Long Trail terms in 2020. Focus on the impression and impression share, as well as the CTR and CVR.

Account Management and Automation

We’ve already seen automation start, but we’re going to see it become even more crucial in 2020.

We’ve seen automation in PPC optimization and account management. The ability to identify opportunities within your PPC account and make changes to improve performance and account hygiene is now automated. When it comes to account management, you can automate rules within your account to manage the bidding and daily account management tasks.

Though it’s a good start, there’s not enough automation in the industry. Automating processes such as big management can help harness the power of automation. Even if you are not too keen on the idea of automating bid management, there are many other areas you can apply automation to.

For example, Albert is an AI tool that takes data from across all of your marketing activities to decide where your investment should be focusing. There are moment marketing tools like Mporium that allow marketers to automate changes to their campaigns based on triggers from third-party sources such as social media content, weather, stock market changes, and TV.

In 2020, we’ll see even more attention placed on marketing performance with businesses and clients requiring additional data analysis, reporting, planning, and servicing. As more companies advertise online, it will become increasingly challenging to cut through the clutter.

Because of the higher prominence of automation tools to help with optimization, account management, daily tasks, and reporting, you should start looking into ways you can use automation in your paid search, such as:

Using scripts in Bing and Google to automate your account management alerts and changes
Testing smart campaigns in Google ads to hit your target KPIs
Reduce manual reporting time with automated reporting
Rely on bidding rules to manage campaign performance
Set up alerts across all of your activities to find out about significant changes
Spend more time analyzing your audiences and data so you can deliver the best possible experience for your customers

Audience Segmentation

Audience segmentation is based on taking a group of people who have interacted with you online, either on your website, through a YouTube channel, your CRM, or another social media channel.

You segment the audience based on the URL they visited on your website, how they’ve interacted on your site, and the videos they’ve watched.

You place them into buckets that serve specific ads based on how they’ve interacted with you. This allows you to increase or decrease bids to make sure you are more or less prominent to the audiences based on the value they have to your business. Though it seems very in-depth, this is still among the most basic ways to use audiences.

As we gather more data on our customers and audiences, we can break them up into specific buckets and thereby personalized are messaging and visiting strategies even more based on certain data points, such as:

What demographic group they fall under
Age and gender
The type of user they are
Their interests
What devices they are on
How they came to your website and what keywords they found you through

Including specific data sets as well as inferred emotional data allows you to make your ads extremely personalized toward the people you want to target. You can also identify the type of person you should be spending your resources on to grow your business. You can create audience lists in Google Ads to make use of this opportunity.

Visual Search

Search is not only becoming possible without a screen, but it is also becoming more visual. Now it’s possible to upload an image to a search engine and use it to find relevant results based on other images similar to the one you uploaded. This development started in the social media world with Pinterest and its visual search tool in 2015. Since then, both Snapchat and Instagram have also allowed users to search with images.

Last year, Snapchat announced a visible search partnership with Amazon to allow users to search for products on Amazon straight from their Snapchat camera.

In response, Bing has also released its own visual search engine that allows people to do the same thing with their entire and Ducks of the web rather than just what’s available on a social media platform or retail website.

Preparing for the growth of visual search now will make it easier for you in the future. Do this by:

Ensuring you have plenty of images that showcase what you offer on your site
Fine-tuning the ALT text of these images have the correct alt text to allow the search engines to pick them up
Ensuring you’re using only the best quality images to Showcase your products and services.
Where possible, using multiple images, so the bots have a choice of what images to index.

PPC and SEO Integration

As we move forward, it’s essential to address the relationship between PPC and SEO. Both of them have their pros and cons, but you can use them together to get the most of your results.

In 2020, you can make an effort to integrate your PPC and SEO strategies with:

Efficient position strategy
Keyword unearthing
Increased SERP coverage
Data and information sharing

What do you think the next few years will bring in terms of PPC? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Tags digital marketing, pay per click, ppc, ppc trends

Digital Marketing

Holiday E-Commerce Tips: How to Prepare Your Site for Shopping Season

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date November 25, 2019
No Comments on Holiday E-Commerce Tips: How to Prepare Your Site for Shopping Season

There are several holiday e-commerce tips to consider this year. Successful holiday e-commerce strategies involve optimizing a website for mobile users, creating holiday-themed content, and offering special promotions. Implementing a robust email marketing campaign to highlight deals and gift ideas is crucial. Enhancing customer service with chat support and clear shipping policies can improve the shopping experience. Additionally, utilizing social media for holiday campaigns increases engagement and drives traffic.

Getting your website ready for the holidays takes a lot of preparation. The servers that support your site, the onsite search technology you are using, and the keywords you’re using to target new people during the holidays all have to be in the best shape to make sure you get the most out of the shopping.

Here are a few holiday e-commerce tips to help you increase the chances of getting conversions during the holiday season.

Make Sure Your Site is Secure

As the holiday season approaches, there is an increased risk of falling victim to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. These site outages are always bad, but they are highly damaging when you’re dealing with high volumes of traffic and transactions.

Make sure your site can tell the difference between the influx of new visitors and malicious calls made to your site. Use a service like Cloudflare to help you block the bad calls while still allowing legitimate visitors to come through.

At this point, you should have invested in converting your site to https, but if you haven’t, you should create a plan to do that because of the redirects involved. If you don’t, you’ll lose a lot of organic traffic in the process.

Visitors may receive warnings about your site if you haven’t converted to https, which can cause your conversions to suffer.

Review Your Keywords

Take a look at last year’s organic search terms, and improve their experience on the landing page for the most transaction-oriented terms. This way, the terms people use the most during the holidays will lead them to pages that you’ve carefully designed to convert them into customers.

Check Your On-Site Search

When you have new visitors to your site, you’ll have more people who need a bit of help finding what they need. It helps yo have a solid navigation system to make finding things easier. Even still, there will be people who rely on your on-site search to find what they need. As such, you need to make sure your internal search engine serves relevant results to everyone.

Setup on-site search tracking if you haven’t already done so. After your tracking establishes what the top searched terms are, you can use them to improve the on-site search experience.

Check for Errors

If you use Google Analytics, create a report that focuses on 404 error URLs so you can fix them before you start seeing an increase in traffic.

If you’re also using Google Search Console, export a report of errors GSC detects and then look for the sources of the errors so you can fix them.

If you have a number of top URLs people try to reach but don’t exist, you can create redirects to get them to the right place.

Optimize Site Campaigns

Holiday traffic boosts are short-lived, so you need to optimize site campaigns to create a sense of urgency so people act. Consider adding deals that expire, timed offers on holiday bundles, and advertising limited stock.

Using the scarcity principle can do wonders to convert that holiday traffic.

Get Your Promotions Calendar Ready

The content that promotes your product bundles, your Google Ads search terms, and landing pages, the email promotions you send to your list – these are all things that need to be timed and executed perfectly to make the most of your sales opportunities.

As such, you’ll need a project management tool like Trello, or something like Google Sheets and Google Calendar to keep your teams working together. This way, it’s easy for everyone to find out what is launching next, how to escalate when there’s an issue, and whom to contact when something needs to be pushed backed or canceled.

Someone needs to be in charge of your marketing automation efforts, and they need to be in contact with the web team that anticipates the traffic from that effort.

Your PPC specialists need to work with the people managing the website to make sure the messaging is aligned.

You can’t afford for both your website’s pages and shopping cart to be down so the team that deploys any code for enhancement on the site also needs to be in contact with the people who are managing the campaigns. This way, you ensure nothing is affected by upgrades or maintenance projects that may be running on the site.

When the stakes are high it is a good idea to have a master calendar to run everything.

Up Your Shipping Game

For certain shoppers, it won’t matter how much they like your deals if they don’t understand how your shipping works.

A 2018 retail holiday survey found that free shipping is one of the most appealing promotions to customers, second only to discount prices.

If you offer free shipping for certain deals, make sure that it is clear two visitors. Don’t hide it in areas where it will look like an ad.

Be clear about your shipping thresholds because it’s better to have messaging like free shipping on orders above $150 rather than hiding those details and saying free shipping and handling click here for more details.

Free shipping will generally win over fast shipping even for Holiday Shoppers. However, if you can follow through on your promise to ship fast, messaging on how quickly you can deliver the customer’s order needs to be featured prominently to help differentiate you from your competitors.

Improve Your Site Speed

Your site speed is always important. During the holidays, however, it is even more crucial. You’ll have an influx of new visitors who are more likely to spend their money now than at any other point during the year. If you have back burner projects geared toward improving your page load time, now is the time to implement those plans.

Your holiday site preparations can take a toll on your overall page size if you’re not careful. You must use well design and optimize images that look good even on the largest laptop screens. This can impact the total size of all the elements your page needs to load which can slow down the load time.

Pairing this with higher than usual visitor counts can overload your servers which brings your site to a crawl.

Use these tips to help you:

Make sure you’re using a Content Delivery Network.
Use Scrset to deliver the correct optimize images for different devices so your images are responsive.
Minify your JavaScript to avoid any unnecessary site slowdowns.
Determine whether your site uses asynchronous scripts so the important elements are loaded first

Have a Retargeting Budget

While you want to ensure that your checkout experience is as Stellar as it can possibly be, no matter how great it is, a portion of your audience will leave items in their cart and not push all the way through to purchase. Cart abandonment is just as much a part of online marketing as conversions.

Save a portion of your holiday ad spending for retargeting rather than just spending it on PPC or other avenues that bring additional visitors in. Plan how you’ll remind visitors to come back to their car when they see your ad and then sure they can go back to where they left off rather than having them start over.

Tags digital marketing, ecommerce, holiday plan, holidays, shopping season

Digital Marketing

How to Create a Style Guide for Your Brand

Post author By Eric Sachs
Post date November 8, 2019
No Comments on How to Create a Style Guide for Your Brand

Creating a style guide for your brand is essential to ensuring a smooth, deliberate, clear, and intentional message in your marketing and brand representation. Knowing how to create a style guide for your brand is a valuable skill—one you can use as an entrepreneur or in service of a corporation of any size. A successful style guide tells internal employees how to create messaging reflective of your brand and takes into account the recipient of those messages.

What Is a Style Guide?

A style guide is a central document that defines, exemplifies, and executes a brand’s voice. Style guides define language preferences and tones as well as direct an organization’s representatives to use the brand’s style in specific ways, for specific outlets. The style guide may include details about:

Which major styles to use (AP Style, Chicago, MLA)
Oxford comma usage
Tone or formality of language
Fonts, typography, and colors associated with the brand
Information about the audience your brand reaches.

It may also include assets such as your logo in a number of formats and a black and white version.

How to Create a Style Guide for Your Brand

When it comes to understanding how to create a style guide for your brand, it’s best to break up a potentially large project into pieces. Divide, delegate, conquer, and publicize (internally) with these steps and stages.

Understand Your Buyer Persona

As your brand, who are you trying to reach? You should consider choosing the language and other stylistic elements partially based upon your prospective and current customers. Your buyer persona can help you understand what type of language you should use to reach your ideal audience.

A buyer persona is basically a profile of your ideal customer, and it’s an essential component of understanding your brand. Here’s an example of a buyer persona for a company that produces high-end coffee machines.

Name: Kathy Sample

Gender: Female

Profession: C-suite executive

Generation: Millennial

Age: 33

Income: $115,000/year

Marital Status: Domestic partnership, no children

Education: Masters degree, Business (MBA)

Religion: Christian

Affinities and biographical information: Kathy is a busy working professional living in an urban environment, likely a loft apartment or condominium, with her partner. She doesn’t own a car, but rents one for long trips. When it comes to brewing coffee, she prefers speed, convenience, and quality, while the cost is not a large concern for her. Kathy enjoys coffee in the morning at home when she wakes up and mid-day at the office. She drinks top-shelf liquor and dines out in the evenings on the weekend. She usually brings pre-planned meals to work or dines out with coworkers at lunch. While Kathy experiences generational tension with her parents, she finds that they can often discuss life over a cup of coffee, and considers it a central bonding experience when spending time with her loved ones.

From this information, we can extrapolate that Kathy might best receive advertising messages during her workday, perhaps when she’s craving a cup of coffee. If she’s thinking about her family, she might want a warmer message, possibly a seasonal one during Christmas.

Adhere to Document Creation Processes

Does your organization already have structures in place for creating documentation? Many businesses adhere to an Agile model, which means you’ll need to plan and allocate time and resources in a structured fashion. This means choosing a deadline, delegating relevant pieces of the style guide creation, ensuring in-house distribution, and in many cases, proving ROI (return on investment) for this piece of content.

If there are already document creation procedures, find out what they are and plan your process.

Seek Input

When it comes to defining your brand, the first step involves evaluating and defining the voice of your brand. To accomplish this, you’ll need measured input from your team. Identify key stakeholders and ensure they contribute to this definition. You can do this through:

A series of meetings
An electronic survey
Compilation of existing documents

In a large organization, consider asking department heads to brainstorm with their individual groups and provide one sheet of feedback per department. Make sure to always provide a deadline.

Once you’ve collected input, identify any trends and consider whether they reflect your brand.

Design Your Brand’s Style Guide

Your brand’s style guide is primarily a document of text defining the limits and expressions of your brand. Naturally, you’ll want to layout your document in an exemplary fashion: your document should exemplify any rules you have for your brand’s style.

You may wish to seek help with the layout of this document, depending on its size, or you may wish to collaborate with a designer to create a complete brand book. Brand books include heavy visual elements and guidelines for using visual imagery along with your brand’s style guide.

You can also use tools such as Frontify or Canva to design it and make it easier to update over time.

Publish In-House in a Shared or Accessible Location

Your style guide is only as good as its ability for others to use it. Once your style guide is complete and published, you’ll need to determine:

How you will distribute the style guide
Where you will house it (shared internal location is the best bet)
How and when you will remind people to use it
Remain a point of contact for employees who have questions about using the style guide

Update Existing Materials

Your website, printed marketing collateral, and other messaging may need updates to comply with the style guide. Create a defined schedule for reviewing and updating your marketing materials to ensure they comply with your new style guide.

Update Your Style Guide

Culture changes, both generally and within your organization. Organizations rebrand, relaunch, and go in new directions to survive. As that happens, you’ll need a plan to update your style guide to suit. This means providing a schedule for review (I suggest a quarterly review) as well as a means for others to provide feedback and updates.

Ultimately, knowing how to create a style guide for your brand is all about expressing your brand clearly and encouraging the desired response from your ideal customer or business partner. The presence of a style guide can also create clear direction within your organization and provide a means for you to have agency and advocacy within your brand.

Tags brand identity, brand style guide, branding, digital marketing, style guide

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