It helps your to do list, of never ending requirements for staying on top of your social platforms.
A good way to start an organised list of requirements is to schedule your social media posts.
This post is going to share with you what I have learned from completing the Google Digital Garage course and my time working at OMD EMEA, and hopefully help some of you expand your knowledge and awareness of different marketing aspects.
Social Media Posting
Content Marketing is based on the creation and sharing of post on social media platforms, with aims to drive engagement to your site.
To drive engagement to your site/ product you need to be aware and completely transparent of when these people are active on there phones and social media.
For example, you maybe a girls clothing company, who are looking to target teenage girls between the ages 14-18 years old, the best time to engage with this audience is outside of school hours, post 3pm - 10pm. This allows you and your company to reach a wider audience, which can help increase audience engagement and allow your products to be seen, with chance of purchase.
How and Why you Create a New Piece of Content on a Website
At OMD, we are an agency who run campaigns for our clients. When a new demand appear on the market, like any business, we all begin to format a brief relating to the risen trend.
When creating the piece of content on a website, you must make sure that it is relevant to the target audiences demands. If you are producing content based off an old trend you will lack engagement, as its no longer relevant to your audience.
Also, you must identify your USP and use this to target each of your websites personas, in order to engage with a variety of different people. You need to write for your audience. If your audience is a technical audience then it would be appropriate to use language, that maybe not everyone will understand. However, if you have a more creative audience Jargon may not be the best language approach.
Developing a Content Calendar will help you manage your new content. A content calendar will provide you a realistic time frame of what to publish and when. It will also help you to define you audience at each stage of the customer life cycle and the different touch point on your site.
Best Ways To Engage With Your Target Audience
Once you have created a new piece of content on your website, you should begin to look at the best ways to engage with your Target audience. You need to use methods, which target your audience, through social media (using cookies to re target you audience on a social ad) or by using key words to target your audience on the search engine.
If you are working as part of a wider company, you may have separate teams who focus on different aspects of audience engagement.
Reaching out to other team in your office will help you run a smoother campaign, as each team will have a sole focus on each aspect of a campaign, hopefully leading to a well managed and successful outcome.
Search have an important role when running a campaign they focus on what the audience are engaging with and what will make a campaign rank higher on a search engine based on the audience demands.
Google Ad Word is a text-based only format.
Google isn't the monopoly, there are other tools of its kind. For example in the UK Bing is a competitor to google, taking up 10/15% of the market. In Russia, there main search platform is Wandex. Also, in China they typically use a different search engine as Google is heavily censored.
Google Ad Word is good for use at all stages of the funnel, however are at the best use during the upper funnel and lower funnel.
The upper funnel being when the audience is searching for a product. Mobile researching provides a lot of demand for these search tools at the top of the funnel, due to people using search engines, such as google, when discovering a brand or product.
However, these tools are prominently used at the end of the funnel when the consumer is researching prices. Google Ad Word allows you to target the consumers at the end of the funnel by including relevant key words based around price and promotions.
Why Key Words?However, these tools are prominently used at the end of the funnel when the consumer is researching prices. Google Ad Word allows you to target the consumers at the end of the funnel by including relevant key words based around price and promotions.
Search works based on a key word basis, to target your products and service, but you can also target your competitors!
Ad Rank = Quality Score x CPC
CPC/PPC (Cost per click/ pay per click) is the cost that your business pays when someone clicks on an add.
The Quality score is based off 3 key factors:
This image highlights where Google Ad words displays the CTR percentages.
1. CTR
The higher your key words CTR is shows that you are seeing a large amount of traffic being driven from that word. If your key word appears to have a low CTR it may be time to consider replacing it with a new word...
2. Ad Relevance
You want your key words to be relevant! If its not a relevant key word it can cost more, therefore this is not cost efficient for your business.
3. Landing Page Experience
Your website must be usable! This means:
- No broken links
- Quick loading time
- Relevant content etc.
Your ads can appear down to two different formats, paid ads and organic ads.
Paid Ads appear with a green 'Ad' sign in front of there URL. This is to indicate to the audience that these Ads have appeared based on a companies bid.
To bid for one of the top spots your business will have the be apart of an online auction for these key words. The auction is based on CPC, Quality and Relevance.
However...
Relevance is one of the most important factors. If your key words are not relevant to what your Target audience are looking for, your ad will be ranked lower, or wont even be displayed.
Organic Ads appear below the paid ads, however do not display the green Ad icon. This is because these Ads have earned a place on the search engines results page. These Ads are free and based on quality and relevance.
In the image above we can see that some of our words have a low quality score. This is a clear indication that we need to go back and check each key word to see what is putting our score down, for example, is it relevant?
Cost and Risk
There is a very low risk when carrying out a campaign using search, because you can see data in real time (what people are searching at the time you are looking), and you can increase and decrease your cost, allowing your business more flexibility.
We are lucky that in today's time we have been provided with machines that can track your keyword performance, and your overall campaign performance. These machines perform all your data research and show where your best and worse performance is.
This machines mean less manual analysis, resulting in less mistakes and a higher accuracy.
Also, For example, If your ROI (Return on Investment) is £10, and you are achieving this target, the machines will automatically increase your CPC, therefore your business is always progressing.
Other Digital Marketing Tools Available
One additional tool I learned about during my time at OMD is Google Insights/ Trends.
Google Insights/ Trends tell you what is popular on google. If your business are looking to see what is trending on other search engines, it is likely that other search engines have a similar platform to google.
People are always comparing trends in peoples searches (e.g. number of searches Taylor Swift has VS Kim Kardashian).
Looking back at the example around shoes, if you want to know what are the most searched topics relating to shoes, or what are the top related queries people are imputing into the search engine, by looking at Google Trends you can identify what relevant topics apply to your business and focus your key words of these topics, to engage with the audience.
Also, these tools provide you with a summary of top searches in the previous, year, month and day, allowing you to compare your work and result, benefiting you because it will allow you to identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and treats (SMART Targets).
Insight tools do not tell you the number of clicks you receive, unlike Google Ad Word. These tools tell you your index across a period of time.
Using the image above, for example, on January 15th Kim Kardashian had a 100 index score. If on the 18th of January Kim Kardashian had more searches than on the 15th then her index score on the 15th will decrease and her score on the 18th would be 100.
Types of CRMs
Customer Relationship Management is useful to both the large and small businesses. During the whole process of running and completing a search or social campaign, it is important to have CRM in place to keep your business relevant and engaged with the business. At OMD I learned a lot about CRM and how it is is important for my team, my company and the client. Once running a campaign for a client, me and my team help the client with there follow up process. Having a good follow up approach will keep the consumers happy and make them feel acknowledged.
There are several different types of CRM:
1. Operational
This is where your business focuses on using software applications which help to incorporate sets of information on each client, like there purchase history etc.
2. Sales Force Automation
This system records every stage of the sales process, helping employees make reports and scheduling calls and mailing.
3. Analytics
Analytics systems provide an analytical angle, which help come up with better sales and marketing strategies for future campaigns.
4. Collaborative
Collaborative systems help integrating external vendors and providing data to its customers through and extract.
5. Campaign Management
This is a collaboration of Analytical and Operational Systems as it stores, analyze and track various campaigns.
6. Sales Intelligence
This is looking at trends and sales performance.
At OMD we uses a range of all of these CRM's across our different teams. I work in the Affiliate and Lead Generation team, where we use Campaign Management (to track the progress of our campaigns) and Analytics (so we can notice trends in the campaign and pull together reports to give to the client, to see where they are seeing best and worse engagement in their campaigns). However, the clients we work with will be using the Sales Intelligence (to see there overall sales trends and an individuals sales trend) and Operational (as they are the people who look after there consumers data and information through the sales process.
Summary
Hopefully, this has helped some of you understand some of the processes of digital marketing when reaching your target audience.
Some key takeaways from what I have learnt:
- Relevance and quality place an important role in this development and it is important to maintain a high score on these 2 components.
- Managing your customer relationships can have a massive impact in the performance of your campaign and the number of overall sales, so it is important to engage with your consumers as each stage of the funnel.
- Search is an effect approve with targeting your audience via search engines. It is cost effective and there are a lot of tool supporting this marketing technique (such as the data analysis machines) to help prevent mistakes or miscalculations.
