Are you a business owner looking to build a successful ecommerce website?

If so, then SEO should be at the top of your list.

Search engine optimization can make or break an online store – optimizing for search engines is essential for any ecommerce website if you want to stand out from the competition and increase traffic.

This ultimate guide to SEO for ecommerce websites in 2023 will give you insights into how SEO works, what are the best SEO strategies for ecommerce websites, and how to create an effective SEO strategy for ecommerce websites that will help grow your business.

Let’s get started with the burning question, “What is ecommerce SEO?”

What is Ecommerce SEO, & How Does It Work?

Ecommerce SEO is the process of optimizing your online ecommerce store for search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

This means taking all the necessary steps to make your website appear higher in search results when users search for related keywords.

SEO for ecommerce site involves optimizing your website’s written and visual content, as well as its structure and technical aspects. This makes it easier for search engine robots to crawl, index, and understand your website and ultimately rank it higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).

What does “indexing” mean?

Indexing is like registering your website on Google’s directory or database.

If your website is not indexed, users won’t be able to see it, which means you can’t rank on search engines.

How Does Search Engine Optimization Work?

SEO is a combination of on-page and off-page optimization strategies.

On-Page SEO

On-page optimization involves optimizing elements on your website, such as the design, content, coding, and URL structure.

Some of the basic on-page optimization tasks include:

• Writing keyword-rich website content, titles, and meta descriptions
• Setting up an internal linking structure
• Enhancing page speed and mobile-friendliness
• Optimizing images with alt text
• Using structured data (Schema markup)
• Adding quality external links

All of these factors help search engine robots understand the purpose and content of your website so they can compare it to other ecommerce sites in organic search results.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page optimization, on the other hand, involves activities outside of your website, such as building links from other websites, using social media to promote your content, and submitting your website to directories and webmaster tools like Google Search Console.

These activities all help to increase your website’s visibility and authority in the eyes of search engines.

These on-page and off-page factors are generally known as ranking factors in technical SEO language.

But what exactly is the purpose of ecommerce SEO besides boosting search engine rankings?

Let’s have a quick rundown of the benefits of SEO for ecommerce website.

Benefits of An Ecommerce SEO Campaign

SEO for ecommerce site is essential because of the following:

1. Boost In Website Traffic & Search Visibility

One of the most obvious benefits of ecommerce SEO is that it increases the visibility of your ecommerce site and promises better engagement chances with potential customers.

Doing so builds your digital presence, drives more traffic, and increases customer conversion rates.

2. Minimize Paid Ad Costs

Investing in your ecommerce SEO campaign could mean a significant reduction in your paid advertising budget.

But, thankfully, it would still offer a higher ROI.

Why? and HOW?

Because “53.3% of all organic traffic comes from organic search.” (Source = Ahrefs)

This means more than half of the users ignore paid ads and click on organic search results.

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So, cut your paid marketing costs, and double down your investment in SEO tools.

3. Enhance Brand Image

Customers are likely to trust and buy from top stores on search engine results pages simply because they are seen more often.

4. Sit Above Your Competition (Literally)

Ranking higher in search engine results not only puts you above competitor ecommerce sites on Google, but it also gives you the edge when it comes to capturing leads.

The higher your website appears in the SERPs, the more likely customers are to click through to it and make a purchase.

5. Improve Your Retargeting Campaigns

Retargeting campaigns involve targeting previous website visitors with personalized ads in order to remind them about your products and win back potential customers.

SEO can help you with this by providing you with data that lets you know how many people are visiting your website and which pages they’re viewing.

This data will allow you to better determine the right retargeting campaigns and optimize them for maximum ROI.

6. Better Usability & Customer Experience

Good ecommerce SEO practices mean that your website is optimized for usability, which in turn enhances the customer experience and makes it easier for visitors to find what they’re looking for.

This can lead to more satisfied customers and higher conversion rates, making SEO a great investment.

All in all, ecommerce SEO is one of the smartest investments you can make for your online store. It doesn’t just help you to rank higher in search engine results; it also helps you grow in every aspect and emerge as a trusted brand.

Now that we’ve covered the working and benefits of ecommerce SEO, it’s time to dive into the ecommerce SEO best practices you should be using.

12-Step Proven & Effective Ecommerce SEO Strategy (+1 Bonus Step)

Here is what a comprehensive ecommerce SEO strategy should include:

1. Registering Your Ecommerce Site On Search Engines

The very first step to kick off your ecommerce SEO campaign is to submit your website on Google, Bing, and other search engines.

Why?

Registering your website with search engines will ensure that your website is visible to search engine spiders and crawled more frequently.

Moreover, it will send you notifications about any technical issues related to crawling or website usability in general.

How to register your website with search engines?

By adding your website’s URL to the respective search engine’s webmaster tools.

For Google, it’s Google Search Console, and for Bing, it’s Bing Webmaster Tools.

2. Setting Up & Optimizing Your Website Structure

Optimizing your site architecture is one of the key ecommerce SEO tools to benefit from. A well-organized and structured website tells search engines that your ecommerce site is easy to crawl and index.

Moreover, a well-structured website appeals to customers and helps them find the information they are looking for quickly and easily.

So, you need to optimize your website structure for both.

How to optimize ecommerce site architecture for search engine bots?

It’s easy. Simply add your sitemap file to Google and Bing using the respective webmaster tools.

A sitemap is basically a visual representation of all the pages on your website that you want search engines to crawl. This should essentially include all of your product pages, category pages, blog posts, and other content.

What does a sitemap do?

It helps search engine bots crawl and index all the pages of your website. Plus, it also helps users see how your website is organized and where they can easily find the information they’re looking for.

You can create a sitemap yourself or take advantage of automated solutions such as Google’s Webmaster Tools. XML and HTML are both used for sitemaps, but HTML sitemaps are a user-friendly option.

How to optimize ecommerce site architecture for website visitors?

Besides adding a sitemap, make sure that all major pages of your ecommerce store aren’t far away from the homepage.

Users like it when a product or category page is easily accessible within three clicks from the home page, as this lets them navigate your website easily.

So, have a clear navigation system with well-defined categories and properly labeled product pages. But avoid adding unnecessary layers of pages; it could make customers feel lost.

Also, add an easy-to-spot search bar somewhere on the page (preferably in the header area). This will allow customers to quickly search and find what they’re looking for on your website.

Bonus Tip: Want to build more trust with your visitors?

Add an About Us and a Contact Us page so customers know who you are as a brand and where they can reach you.

3. Performing In-Depth Keyword Research

The next step to setting up an effective ecommerce SEO strategy is keyword research.

Why?

Because keywords are the foundation of any successful search engine optimization campaign.

They help you understand what people are searching for when they look up something related to your business and the products you offer.

So, how do you find keywords?

Two of the most effective methods are:

Use a Keyword Research tool:

There are plenty of free and paid keyword research tools available online. Ubersuggest, Answer the Public, and Ahrefs Keywords Explorer are some of the popular ones.

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These tools will provide you with a list of keyword suggestions related to your business and products, their search volumes, CPCs, keyword difficulty scores, and more.

Or, you can use a free tool like Google Keyword Planner. It’s a great way to find relevant and popular keywords for your website.

Bonus Tip: You can use the auto suggest feature on Amazon, Etsy, and other platforms to find more relevant keywords.

Google’s Autosuggest:

Another easy way to find keyword ideas is through Google’s auto suggest feature. All you have to do is type a keyword into the search box, and Google will automatically suggest related terms.

For example, if you type ‘running shoes,’ it’ll give you a list of related keywords such as ‘best running shoes,’ ‘running shoes for women,’ and so on.

These keyword suggestions will give you a better idea of what people are searching for, allowing you to create targeted content and campaigns.

Plus, you’ll uncover excellent long-tail keywords with high buying intent — which brings us to another aspect of ecommerce keyword research.

4. Understanding Search Intent & Creating Relevant Content

Search intent refers to the intention behind search queries: the reason why people are searching or looking up a particular keyword.

Identifying search intent and optimizing your content accordingly is the key to driving more organic traffic and conversions.

For example, if someone is searching for ‘running shoes,’ their search intent could be learning about features, pricing, and different options available in the market.

You can optimize your content around this intent and write product-review articles, comparison articles, or guides, including informational keywords.

On the other hand, if someone’s searching for “running shoes for men under $200,” it means they’re almost ready to spend that amount. You can create website pages targeting those keywords and include relevant calls-to-action in your product pages, category pages, and product descriptions.

The key is to understand what people are searching for and create content that aligns with the search intent. This will surely help improve your SEO rankings.

5. Optimizing Your Website

Once you’ve done your keyword research and identified search intent, the next step is to optimize your existing website content.

Add Keywords

Include your keywords in the following:

• Title tags, meta tags, and meta descriptions on your home page, ecommerce category pages, product pages, and blog posts.

Why?

Because users see these tags and descriptions first when they search for a keyword on Google, so it’s important to make sure they are optimized.

However, you would want to stay away from keyword stuffing and place them naturally throughout your content.

• URLs.

Write descriptive URLs including your primary keyword, to get an edge over your competitors.

Having keywords in the URL helps you stand out in the eyes of both the search engine and visitors.

• Alt tags (or alt text).

This is the text you add to images to serve as an alternative text for search engines. This gives Google the ability to read what your image is about, giving you an extra boost in rankings.

Tip: Adding modifiers such as “Coupon,” “Discount,” and “Free Shipping” in your meta description can increase clickthrough rate (or CTR), which is a strong ranking factor in the eyes of Google.

Focus On Link Building

Link building is an indirect ranking factor, but it can make a huge difference in your SEO rankings. There are two sides to it:

Internal links – Link to other pages on your website. This helps Google better understand the structure and content of your website, which can help boost rankings. Moreover, it also helps visitors stay on your site for longer.

External links – Link to other relevant websites and blogs. This helps Google verify that your content is valuable and trustworthy, thus boosting rankings.

But make sure you only link to relevant and credible websites and don’t link to irrelevant or low-quality sources. Not only is it bad for SEO, but it also ruins user experience and reflects poorly on your reputation.

Also, try not to link to direct competitors, as it will give them free traffic and a possible ranking boost to outrank your website.

6. Creating High-Quality Backlinks To Your Ecommerce Website

Backlinks are one of the most powerful ranking signals for Google and an excellent way to strengthen your SEO strategy for ecommerce website. The more high-quality backlinks you have, the higher your website will rank in search engine results pages (SERPs).

You can get high-quality backlinks from authority websites in your niche. Consider guest blogging, directory submissions, and leveraging social media to get some relevant backlinks. You can also reach out to influencers in your niche to get them to link to your website or products.

Lastly, make sure the backlinks are from credible sites and use relevant anchor text to increase the chances of getting a higher ranking.

7. Enhancing User Experience

Google uses a number of factors to determine the quality and relevance of content, one of which is user experience. It looks at how long users stay on a page and whether or not they find the information useful.

A good user experience is essential for ecommerce SEO success, so make sure your website is easy to use, and navigation is simple.

Here are a couple of things you can do to improve user experience.

Have a Responsive Design:

Make sure your website is optimized for mobile devices and has a responsive design. This will ensure that users on all types of devices have a good experience navigating your website.

Reduce Page Load Speed:

Page load speed is one of the most important factors for user experience and SEO. If your website takes too long to load, users will quickly leave, and it will hurt your rankings.

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Make sure the page is optimized for speed by using caching, compressing images, and minimizing scripts.

Add a Search Bar:

Adding a search bar to your website makes it easier for users to find what they’re looking for. This helps reduce bounce rate and keeps users on your website for longer.

Create User-Friendly Checkout:

The checkout process should be simple and straightforward. Make sure the checkout process is easy to navigate and keep distractions to a minimum.

Also, provide features like guest checkout and payment options such as PayPal and credit card to ensure customers have a smooth checkout experience.

Following these tips will help you make your ecommerce website more user-friendly and help visitors stay long enough to convert into paying customers. It will, in turn, signal Google to rank you higher than websites with poor design and high bounce rates.

8. Having An Optimized, Simple URL Structure

Having a simple URL structure is super important from an SEO perspective. Why?

Because it simplifies navigation for users and helps search engine crawlers understand the structure of your website more easily.

Here are a few URL tips to keep in mind:

Your URL should be short. 50 to 60 characters is the recommended limit.

• It should be easy to read and understand.
• Include your target keyword in the URL.
• Don’t use stop words in URLs, such as “the,” “and,” “of,” and “a.” This will help keep your URL short.
• Also, make sure you use hyphens (-) to separate words instead of underscores (_).

For example, a bad URL structure would look like this:

On the other hand, a simple URL structure would be:

9. Using Schema Markups To Facilitate Google And Users

Schema markup is a type of structured data that helps search engines understand the content on your website. It’s basically a code added to your HTML that provides additional information about what’s on the page.

Using schema markup can help search engines display your website’s information in the form of rich snippets, like product markup snippets and review snippets. These snippets help users spot useful information faster and easier.

The most common ecommerce schema are:

• Product schema: For displaying product-related information like price, availability, and images. This extension also allows more efficient displaying of product ads.
• Review schema: For displaying review ratings and summaries on the search result page. Users can see the reviewer’s information and verify if the review is credible.
• Video schema: For displaying videos in search results. This extension helps search engines understand the type of video and its content.
• Price schema: For displaying pricing information of products. It is often used to display price ranges for product variations.

Using schema markups will help you get more visibility and clicks from search results, which eventually leads to better SEO rankings (and more sales).

10. Tackling Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is when one page has the same or similar content as another page, which is a common issue for ecommerce stores.

Having duplicate content on your website is bad for SEO because it creates confusion for search engines and makes it difficult to determine which page should be ranked higher in search engine results pages.

You can avoid this by using canonical tags. These tags essentially tell search engines which page is the original or “master version” and that all other pages with similar content are to be ignored.

Or, you can use the Robots.txt file to block duplicate content from being indexed.

Both methods work, but the canonical tag is preferable since it offers more control over duplicate content.

By avoiding duplicate content, you will be able to improve your SEO for ecommerce site and get better SEO rankings.

11. Monitoring & Tracking Your Ecommerce SEO Efforts

Finally, you should monitor and track your ecommerce SEO efforts to measure their effectiveness.

How?

Google Analytics is one of the best ecommerce SEO tools out there, and it can be used to track your website’s performance. By setting up goals and tracking metrics like bounce rate, time on page, and click-through rate (CTR), you can get insights into how well your SEO efforts are working.

You can also use other tools like Screaming Frog, DeepCrawl, and Ahrefs to audit your website and track changes in the backlinks.

You should also use A/B testing to determine which changes have a positive impact on your SEO rankings.

By tracking your ecommerce SEO efforts, you will be able to identify areas where you need improvement and make the necessary changes. This will help you achieve better SEO rankings and more organic traffic in the long run.

12. Keeping Up With SEO Trends

SEO trends are constantly changing, and you need to stay up-to-date if you want to keep up with the competition.

You can do this by attending SEO conferences, reading industry blogs, and staying up-to-date with the latest Google updates.

You should also keep an eye on your competitors’ SEO strategies and use tools like Ahrefs to monitor changes in their backlinks.

By keeping up with SEO trends, you’ll be able to create effective SEO strategies for ecommerce websites, stay one step ahead of the competition, and stay on top of the SERPs.

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And now for some more value, here is a BONUS that most ecommerce brands ignore.

13. BONUS = Leveraging The Power Of Pinterest SEO

Did you know that Pinterest is a search engine in itself?

People search on Pinterest just like they would on Google or Bing.

However, instead of delivering traditional results like Google, it offers visuals.

So, when someone enters a query in the Pinterest search bar, it will work to find the most appropriate (read: optimized) pins for that individual’s needs.

This means with a proper Pinterest SEO strategy, you can increase your profile’s visibility and get more website traffic from this unique search engine.

Here are a few actionable tips to optimize for Pinterest SEO:

• Get a Pinterest business account, as it has more optimization features.
• Use relevant keywords in the pin description and post titles.
• Create visually appealing pins optimized for Pinterest.
• Include links to your website in the pin description.
• Incorporate rich pins into your strategy.
• Optimize the board titles and descriptions for keywords related to the content you are sharing.
• Use keyword-rich headlines on your blog posts and link them to corresponding Pinterest boards.

Follow these simple tips to improve your SEO for ecommerce website, drive more traffic, and increase your overall visibility online.

Build Your Way To Success With Ecommerce SEO

Following the above-listed strategies will surely help you build a successful ecommerce website that ranks well and drives more sales.

But remember, ecommerce SEO is an ever-evolving field, and staying up to date with the latest trends can be a challenge.

This is where an Ecommerce Marketing Mastery Certificate can help – it will equip you with the most up-to-date knowledge and competencies to make your ecommerce business succeed.

Or consider having an expert team that understands SEO strategies for ecommerce by your side to implement the latest tricks of the trade.

No matter which way you decide to go, your ecommerce business will surely benefit from the power of SEO.

The post Best SEO Strategies For Ecommerce Websites in 2023 appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

In the world of digital marketing, data is king. With so much information available, it can be overwhelming to try and make sense of it all. One of the best ways to gain insight into digital marketing trends is through the use of graphs.

Graphs can help to visualize complex data sets and identify patterns that may not be immediately apparent when looking at raw data. In this article, we will explore the top nine graphs for revealing digital marketing trends.

Line Graphs For Digital Trends

Line graphs are one of the most commonly used graphs in digital marketing. They are particularly useful for showing how a particular metric has changed over time. For example, a line graph could be used to show how website traffic has changed over the course of a year.

By plotting data points over time, it is easy to see any trends or patterns that may have emerged. Line graphs can also be used to compare data sets over time, such as comparing the performance of two different marketing campaigns.

Chord Diagrams Connecting Different Marketing Channels

Chord diagrams are a type of visualization that show the connections between different variables. They are often used to show the relationship between different parts of a complex system or network.

In digital marketing, chord diagrams can be used to show how different channels (such as social media, email marketing, and search engine marketing) are related to each other. By visualizing the connections between different channels, businesses can optimize their marketing mix and ensure that each channel is working together to achieve their marketing goals.

Scatter Plots for Digital Correlations

Scatter plots are often used in digital marketing to show the relationship between two different metrics. For example, a scatter plot, designed by a graph creator, could be used to show how the bounce rate on a website correlates with the time spent on the site. 

By plotting data points on an x and y axis, it is easy to see any correlations that may exist between the two metrics. Scatter plots can also be used to identify any outliers within a data set.

Bubble Charts Show How Differing Variables Relate to Each other

Bubble charts are similar to scatter plots, but they add a third variable to the mix by varying the size of the bubbles based on a third data point. This can be a useful way to visualize trends and patterns in complex data sets.

In digital marketing, bubble charts can be used to show how different variables (such as ad spend, click-through rate, and conversion rate) are related to each other.

Bar Graphs for Quick Comparisons

Bar graphs are another common graph used in digital marketing. They are particularly useful for comparing different data sets. For example, a bar graph could be used to compare the conversion rates of two different landing pages.

By presenting data in a visual format, it is easy to see which landing page is performing better. Bar graphs can also be used to compare data sets over time, such as comparing the number of leads generated by two different marketing campaigns.

Heat Maps Revealing Behavior

Heat maps are a unique type of graph that are particularly useful for analyzing website user behavior. Heat maps show how users interact with different parts of a website by using different colors to represent user engagement.

For example, a heat map could be used to show which parts of a landing page receive the most clicks. By analyzing heat maps, marketers can identify areas of a website that may need to be optimized to improve user engagement.

Pie Charts For Categorical Divisions

Pie charts are often used in digital marketing to show how a particular metric is divided among different categories. For example, a pie chart could be used to show how a company’s social media followers are divided among different age groups.

Pie charts are particularly useful for highlighting the most significant categories within a data set. However, it is important to keep in mind that pie charts can be difficult to read when there are too many categories.

Funnel Charts Reveal Bottlenecks

Funnel charts are a type of chart that shows how many users or customers move through a series of steps in a process. They are often used in digital marketing to track the conversion rate at each stage of a sales funnel.

By visualizing the drop-off rate at each stage of the funnel, businesses can identify potential roadblocks or bottlenecks in the conversion process and take steps to optimize their marketing strategy.

Gantt Charts for Keeping Campaigns on Schedule

Gantt charts are a type of bar chart that show the duration of each task in a project, as well as the start and end dates. They are commonly used in project management to track progress and deadlines.

In digital marketing, Gantt charts can be used to plan and track the progress of marketing campaigns. By breaking down a campaign into smaller tasks and assigning deadlines to each one, businesses can ensure that their marketing efforts stay on track and meet their goals.

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Conclusion

In conclusion, digital marketing is a complex field that requires businesses to track and analyze a large amount of data. Charts and graphs are essential tools for visualizing this data and identifying trends and patterns.

By using the right types of charts and graphs, businesses can gain insights into their marketing performance and make data-driven decisions to optimize their marketing strategy.

From line graphs and scatter plots to heatmaps and chord diagrams, there are a variety of charts and graphs that businesses can use to reveal digital marketing trends and stay ahead of the competition.

The post Data-driven Marketing: How Graphs & Charts Transform Digital Strategies appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Every marketing position requires a different skill set. While some of these skills overlap with other marketing positions, understanding each skill specific to the type of marketing you’re interested in is foundational for becoming a successful marketer.

Social media marketers understand engagement entirely differently than email marketers. Social media marketing defines engagements as likes, comments, shares, impressions, and follows. But, email marketing looks at engagement through the metrics of open rates and click-through rates.

To figure out what skills you need for the marketing position you desire, you want to look at how that marketer spends their time and define success. 

But, before we go into the skills you need for each marketing position, we first have to talk about the 3 foundational skills every marketer needs (regardless of what type of marketing they specialize in). 

These 3 foundational marketing skills are:

Understanding the customer avatar: Marketers need to research customer avatars and turn that information into campaigns and strategies that convert. If you’re not showing the right message to the right person…your campaigns are doomed.

Knowing the customer journey: The customer journey is the 8-step process that starts at awareness, leads to conversion, and ends with a customer becoming a brand ambassador. Marketing is showing the right message to the right person at the right time.

Figuring out customer optimization: Businesses rarely rely on selling a product one time and acquiring a new customer immediately after—customer optimization is essential to create customer lifetime value (LTV) and a successful, sustainable business.

Once you’ve mastered these skills, you can start to build your marketing knowledge empire on top of them. Based on the marketing position you desire, here are the skills you need.

Content Marketers

Content marketers market…content. Their job is to turn ideas into high-quality articles, podcasts, emails, and social content. Content cultivates relationships with prospects, leads, and customers (increasing LTV!), making this type of marketing essential for brand longevity.

The skills every content marketer needs are:

How to create high-quality content: Publishing content that doesn’t stand out from the competition is like throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping a noodle sticks. Content marketers have to understand the content landscape of their industry and how they can write, create, or record content that makes their customer avatar engage with the brand.

SEO: Search engine optimization is a big part of content marketing because if people can’t find your content…they can’t buy your products. You don’t necessarily need to rank first for every article or video you publish, but getting a few of those top-ranking spots is important for driving organic traffic.

Organic reach: SEO can drive organic traffic, social media, partnerships, and collaborations. Great content marketers build a strategy that uses organic reach to increase their brand awareness while turning viewers into subscribers (and customers down the line).

Promotional content vs. organic content: Even as a marketer, you don’t want to follow a brand that’s just constantly promoting itself. You want to engage with brands who teach or entertain you. Content marketers need to understand this balance, posting some promotional and organic content only designed to nurture the relationship with their readers, viewers, subscribers, or followers.

Copywriting: What’s a great piece of content with a call-to-action? Most of your content should have some type of call-to-action written with copywriting strategies (but this doesn’t mean it’s always promoting your products or services). Call-to-actions can range from reading an article, listening to a podcast, filling out a worksheet, subscribing to your newsletter, buying a product, etc. 

Email Marketers

Email marketers spend most of their day inside Klaviyo (for all you agency or ecommerce business owners!), ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, Mailchimp, or your other preferred email marketing platform. They understand content and the metrics that can lead to a predictable selling system, making email marketers an essential part of any business.

Funnels: Funnels start during the awareness stage of the Customer Value Journey and end once a customer has become a brand ambassador (well, kind of). Technically that customer continues into another Customer Value Journey since they’ve already ascended their way through the first one. With funnels, email marketers can turn content viewers into subscribers and subscribers into customers. They can also ascend those customers into higher-tier products. 

Landing pages: Landing pages take viewers and turn them into subscribers or customers using strategic copywriting. Every landing page has one goal and one call-to-action, and email marketers are proficient at making sure their landing pages are converting. (These are a big part of marketing funnels!).

Automations: Welcome email sequences, post-purchase sequences, and abandoned cart series are examples of automations email marketers are very familiar with. These automations are essential for building a relationship with subscribers by telling them what to expect from your emails and following up with them when they show interest in a product or service. Email marketers are all about automations (and optimizing them as time goes on!).

Copywriting: Email marketing involves lots of campaigns that are directly asking the subscribers to buy. This means copywriting practices, like the PADS formula, are an essential skill set for email marketers. Even if you’re not writing the copy, you still have to know if it’s following the right formula to turn subscribers into customers. 

Promotion calendars vs. organic content: Like content marketers, email marketers can’t only send promotional emails. That leads to decreased open rates and minimal click-through rates. Even an email list of 100,000 subscribers can’t come back from that. Organic content (like newsletters, free trainings, entertainment, etc.) is essential to cultivating a healthy relationship with your subscribers—and ensuring they keep opening your emails.

Data and Analytics Marketers

You don’t have to tell us—we know you spend your spare time in Excel. That’s what data and analytics marketers do. They love to let the numbers tell a story. Then, they use that story to create a predictable launch or campaign for their employer or clients. All hail the data and analytics marketers who make our marketing worlds go ‘round.

Metrics: Data and analytics marketers are professionals when figuring out which metrics are most important to a business. They also know how to use those metrics to figure out predictable ways to reach their goals. If you ask them, the answers are in the metrics.

Tools: If you’re looking for the tool junkie of your team, it’s probably this marketer. Data and analytics marketers, with good reason, know the best tools to compile the necessary information. Consider spreadsheets their best friends.

Visuals: A great data and analytics marketer knows that a spreadsheet of numbers doesn’t make sense to everybody. They take the time to create visuals (graphs and charts) that help the business owner or company leaders figure out what’s going on behind the scenes.

Strategy: Not only do these marketers figure out what story the numbers are telling them, but they also use that information to figure out a business’s North Star. They’re not just there to present numbers and pretty graphs. Their job is to show you what’s working well, what’s not working well, and where the best place to spend time, money, and resources is for the next quarter. 

Scorecards: Scorecards ensure a company is on track. KPIs and goals are great, but if you don’t have a weekly report telling you if you’re hitting them—what’s the point? Your data and analytics marketers can set this up.

Paid Media Marketers

Paid media marketers deal with all marketing related to advertising platforms. They’re the person who’s setting up your Facebook Ads Manager or building out your Google Smart Shopping. When you’re ready to put ad dollars behind your marketing strategy—this is your marketer.

Account management: Paid media marketers are experts at advertising platforms. They’re not always experts at every platform (for example a Facebook media marketer has a different skill set than a Google media marketer). They’ll be up-to-date on the latest changes (ahem, we’re watching you iOS!), understand what success means on that platform, and ensure you stay compliant with ad and privacy regulations.

Ad testing (A/B testing): As advertising platforms have matured, they’ve become good at figuring out which ads perform best with your target audience. You can test variations of headlines, call to action, and graphics and let the ad account AI figure out which is performing best and decide how much of your budget you want to put behind that ad. 

Graphic design: Paid media marketers don’t need to be expert graphic designers, but they need to understand what ad creatives are working best right now. They need to tell their design team the graphic variations they want to test out (and not let the design team creatively figure it out on their own). Design is just as much of a formula as copywriting.

Copywriting: Just like you don’t need to be an expert graphic designer, you also don’t have to be an expert copywriter. But, paid media marketers need a thorough understanding of copywriting best practices. They need to spot mistakes that decrease conversions and know where paint points and benefits should be placed on ads.

User-generated content: UGC is a huge part of marketing, not just because it means your team doesn’t have to create content but because it gets higher conversions than brand-created content. This makes sense considering we all trust recommendations from friends, family, and (thanks to the internet) strangers over a brand telling us how great their products are. Paid media marketers know how to utilize UGC in their ads to get the clicks they’re looking for. 

Search Marketers

Search marketers love Google. Or, maybe it’s best to say it’s a love-hate relationship. These marketers focus on search intent instead of interruption-intent (like paid ads). Their job is to get clicks from Google, Bing, and other search engines.

Ranking: The number one skill set of a search marketer is a deep understanding of ranking. Ranking is everything in the search marketing world. It’s the difference between page 1 and page 25—and we all know how many cobwebs are on the page 5 websites.

Keywords (and keywords by volume): Keywords tell search engines what your content is about and who to show it to. They’re essential to a healthy SEO strategy—but they’re not everything. Knowing which keywords to target to fill in gaps in missed opportunities is a search marketers’ jam.

Content for humans vs. content for SEO bots: Content can’t be created just for the SEO bots. If it is, all the humans that land on your content are going to bounce right off (and that will make you rank lower!). Content has to have a balance of optimization for humans and bots.

Copywriting: Search marketers are looking for conversion, and usually, that conversion is the click. They need a search engine user to click on THEIR page, not the competition. That makes copywriting an important part of a search marketer’s skillset.

Traffic: Search marketers are all about traffic. Either organic or paid, they’re looking to get more views on landing pages, sales pages, and product pages. They’re knee-deep in the traffic ocean looking for any opportunities they can find to boost their numbers.

Social Media Marketers

Social media marketers are not interns. Phew, glad we cleared that up. Social media marketing takes a lot of work and generally requires a team of people. These marketers are savvy in content trends and know just what to post to increase following, engagement, and, most importantly—conversions.

Organic content: Organic content is a huge part of a social media marketing strategy because it’s not focused on promotion. It’s just content to entertain or educate and build a relationship with followers. Social media marketers know exactly what content to post (thanks to the Customer Avatar Worksheet).

Engagement: Likes, comments, and shares are social media marketers’ ideal metrics of success. They’re looking for proof their customer avatar likes their content and an understanding of how to present promotions in a way that drives conversions.

Analytics (impressions, engagement, follows): Social media marketers are constantly in the backend of their accounts. They’re comparing what posts helped them get more followers and which flopped in engagement. These metrics are crucial to creating content their audience genuinely cares about.

Influencers, partnerships, collaborations: Trying to build a social media presence alone takes years. Collaborating with influencers and brands who already have an audience of your customer avatar takes a few weeks. This is like the cheat code of social media and why social media marketers are always looking for a partnership, collaboration, or influencer marketing opportunities.

Copywriting: Copywriting shows how well a brand knows their customer’s pain points and the after state they desire to be in. Social media marketers create strategic content that shows how well their brand understands their customer avatar, so their audience chooses their products. 

Ecommerce Marketers

Ecommerce marketers know their stuff. They understand the entire Customer Value Journey and don’t mess around when it comes to customer optimization. They know their success is in customer lifetime value—and they’re prepared to do what it takes to increase it.

Google Shopping: Ecommerce marketers understand intent-based marketing (when someone searches specifically for a product or solution). They know that Google Shopping is an essential part of their marketing strategy because it makes their products appear in the search results—ready to purchase. 

SEO: If you’re not ranking as an ecommerce brand, how will your customers find you? That’s why ecommerce marketers have a thorough understanding of SEO and make sure to read a few articles every time there are new algorithm changes. They have to know what they can do to increase their ranking because a higher ranking means more views.

Social media: Ecommerce and social media are two best friends. Social media can drive traffic to your ecommerce website (or you can set up shopping directly on the apps). Ecommerce marketers work closely with the content marketing team to publish high-quality content that promotes their products and cultivates brand relationships.

Email marketing: What’s an ecommerce brand without an email funnel? Non-existent. Email funnels turn followers and viewers into customers, but they also turn them into repeat customers. Email funnels are an essential part of increasing customer lifetime value. 

Metrics: And we’re back to the spreadsheets. Ecommerce marketers know success is in the numbers. They have to keep a close eye on their ROAS and LTV to make sure their client’s business or their business is profitable.

Do you have the skills you need for your desired marketing position?

Even though every marketing position requires a different skill set, you can see how much overlap between skill sets and positions. (It might be extremely clear that you should have a really solid understanding of copywriting to find success as a marketer).

Regardless of the marketing expertise you choose, remember that your skillset has to build on top of the 3 foundational marketing skills: 

1. Understanding the customer avatar
2. Knowing the customer journey
3. Figuring out customer optimization

Once you’ve mastered these skills, you can start to build your marketing knowledge empire on top of them. And that empire starts with knowing where to get your marketing education from. You want to be taught by the best marketers in the world, not the people who strategically placed a Lamborghini in the back of their Instagram post.

Learn from the world’s top marketers with proven track records of multi-million dollar campaigns and expertise in different marketing positions. Inside DigitalMarketer Lab, you’ll get access to Workshops and Insider Trainings from these top marketers, as well as Playbooks and Certifications. 

Join DigitalMarketer Lab to start building your marketing knowledge empire—so you can become a world-class marketer in whatever position you choose. 

The post The 5 Skills You Need Based On Your Desired Marketing Position appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

There are 5 simple but yet effective things you can do on LinkedIn to drastically improve your business. Here Scott Aaron, author of The Linkedin Book for Network Marketing and The Marketing Workbook for Linkedin, gives five simple ways to optimize LinkedIn for your business.

#1 You Must Have An Optimized Profile

The first thing is to make sure that your profile is optimized. What I love about LinkedIn, is when Microsoft bought them out several years ago, the embedded SEO on all our profiles so they are more searchable, visible, and able to be connected with. There are specific keywords that you must have on your profile to appear in the searches for those individuals that you seek to connect with. 

This is something that I understood, that if I wanted more speaking engagements, client acquisitions and podcast interviews, I had to have those keywords fluttered throughout my profile. Need some help? Check out my LinkedIn Profile Optimizer.

#2 Define Your Client/Business Avatar

The second thing that you should do is defining your client or business avatar. In other words, the person that you are most likely to want to engage with, the person that you are most likely to network with or the person that is most likely to purchase your services.

This is something that I learned very early on. When you are super specific with the network that you were building, it raises your chances inability to close more sales to grow your business using LinkedIn. Make sure you only connect with those who could truly benefit from what you offer and those that can introduce you to your ideal client avatar.

#3 You Need to Message Contacts Correctly

The third thing that you should focus on is the proper way to message a contact. For those that are reading this, I am sure you can relate to me when I say that I have been victimized by a lot of people sending me unwarranted messages on LinkedIn that are 18 paragraphs long drunk-a-logs trying to sell me. That is not going to get me on a phone call or a zoom meeting with you.

What I found is that there is a strategic and best way to message someone on LinkedIn. This took me years of crafting and perfecting messages that are getting back the responses I wanted to build my business.

When sending a message make sure that you craft your message by stating the person’s name first. Make it a relaxed and simple opening line such as, “Hey Chris. It’s great to be connected to you”. 

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The next thing that you want to do is bridge the gap between the other person and yourself.

Stating the connecting point of why you should connect without trying to sell them. Here is an example. “I noticed that we had similar backgrounds in xyz industry, and it would be great to hop on a call to learn more about what we are both doing and how we can best support one another here on LinkedIn”. 

The final thing that you should do is to end your message with a call to action.

Always remember, that questions lead to answers and statements lead to nowhere. I would simply say, “Is there a best day, time and number to reach you on so we can connect?”

#4 Utilize Automated Notification Messages

The fourth thing that you should focus on within LinkedIn is using the automated notification messages that you were provided each day to reengage with all the connections that you have not spoken to in a while. The great thing about LinkedIn is just that. The platform truly wants you to continue building meaningful and genuine business relationships with people on the platform.

Use these automated messages that are given to you every single day in the notification section of the platform to your advantage. You don’t have to get fancy.

What I found was, the more of these messages that I sent out every day, the more reengaged conversations I would create. This truly creates more leads than you have time. Which my friends, is always a good problem to have.

#5 Provide Valuable Content

The fifth and final thing that you must do to grow your business using LinkedIn, is providing relevant, educational, and informative content. The best content practice that you should initiate in your business, is providing three pieces of content per week. This does not matter if it’s a post, article, or video.

Just make sure that you do not sell or pitch in any of the content that you put out on the platform.

Your network is looking to engage with you and learn from you at the very same time. This is something that I learned over the years, that the more that I give to my audience, the more they give back to me.

The post 5 Quick Ways to Improve Your Bussiness Results on LinkedIn appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Want to reach millions of potential new leads and generate thousands of new customers?

There are countless ways to generate paid traffic online, including dozens of ad networks, solo ad providers, social media sites, native ad networks, and more.

Each of these options has its own pros and cons. But, if you want to achieve MASSIVE scale in your business, there’s one network that deserves the bulk of your attention:

The Google Display Network (GDN).

There’s one reason why you should focus on the GDN, and it can be summed up in one word: potential.

That’s why, in this post, I’ll be sharing a new system I developed for building effective ad + targeting combinations for your campaigns.

I call it…

The Display Grid.

Think of The Display Grid as your one-page “cheat sheet” to building out effective Google Display campaigns.

Here’s what it looks like:

In Part 1 of this article, I’ll cover the top row, which includes all the different targeting options in The Display Grid.

And in Part 2, I’ll cover the left column, which includes all the different ad types & formats. Then I’ll cover more in-depth and advanced uses of how you can employ The Display Grid to build more effective display campaigns.

We have a lot to cover, so let’s get right into it. First, let’s talk about…

The Infinite Potential of Google Display Network

Google Display has an enormous reach. Through it, you have the potential to reach over 90% of users online. You can place ads on YouTube, on mobile apps, and over two million websites that monetize their visitors with Google ads.

(The number of individual pages you can reach on GDN reaches into the billions.) 

As a result, your ability to scale and reach new users on GDN is nearly unlimited.

Keep in mind that Google display ads are different than Google search ads. When many people think of Google advertising, they think of search traffic.

Search traffic is when you advertise to people who have just searched for a keyword that’s relevant to your business. Here’s an example of search ads for the keyword phrase “dental dog treats”:

Advertising on the Search Network is a great strategy because it puts your ads in front of people who are actively searching for something related to your service.

In this case, I searched for “dental dog treats”… so the odds of me purchasing dental dog treats in the near future is very high. (If you smelled my dog’s breath, you’d understand.) As a result, Google Search Ads tend to have a high conversion rate.

The downside to search ads is that your audience is limited.

There are only so many people searching for “dental dog treats” in Google. And once you max out that traffic—when you’re showing up for all of those searches—there’s no easy way to generate more searches.

This is where the Display Network comes in.

The GDN lets you serve your ads to a much larger audience of people who might be really interested in your product or service, but who are not actively searching for it at the moment.

Here’s an example of a display ad for a dental dog treat:

Display ads allow you to really expand your reach.

It’s a great choice for mass-appeal markets like weight loss because it can send you a tremendous volume of traffic.

GDN also works well for topics that have a lot of interest but not a lot of search activity. For example, a person may rarely search for topics related to spirituality… but if you put a good spirituality ad in front of them, they’ll stop what they’re doing and pay attention.

So, if the GDN has such great potential, why isn’t everybody using it to rapidly scale their business and bring in a flood of new visitors and customers?

Well, the truth is that it’s (unfortunately) rare to see a GDN campaign that is well set-up.

Why?

Google’s Display Network offers a dizzying array of options and settings, including multiple targeting options and ad types.

And if you don’t set up your campaigns well, you’ll end up showing the wrong ads to the wrong people… blowing through your ad spend without generating any sort of return on investment (ROI).

Lucky for you, I’ve developed a system that makes it simpler than ever for you to figure out the most effective ad + targeting combinations for your campaigns. I present to you…

The Display Grid: A New Way of Visualizing & Building GDN Campaigns

As I’ve said, think of The Display Grid as your one-page “cheat sheet” to building out effective Google Display campaigns.

It shows you all the different combinations of ad types and targeting options.

When it’s all said and done, you will have 147 different ways to narrow down your GDN campaigns to help you scale your business bigger, faster, and more profitably.

To get your copy of The Display Grid, just visit thedisplaygrid.com and click on “File,” then “Make a copy.”

To summarize, The Display Grid gives you a quick visual overview of all 147 different combinations of ad types and targeting options available inside of AdWords.

Most advertisers, not realizing just how many options are available to them, end up using the two most basic options: managed placements with image banner ads.

As a result, they end up filling only ONE of these 147 squares (and missing out on the other 146):

But now, with The Display Grid in your arsenal, you’ll never make that mistake.

Let’s dig into the targeting options in GDN.

You can group the targeting options into four main buckets: Managed Targeting, Contextual Targeting, Behavioral Targeting, and Combined Targeting.

Managed Targeting

Managed targeting means that you personally choose the websites where you want to show your ads.

If you know some of the places where your target market likes to hang out online, you can add those websites to AdWords as a Managed Placement.

How to Add Managed Placements in AdWords

To add managed placements inside of AdWords, we’re going to use a tool called the Display Planner.

You’ll find this tool inside your AdWords account by clicking “Tools” at the top, and then clicking on “Display Planner”:

If you click on “find new targeting ideas,” you can enter keywords and/or a landing page to find new placement ideas:

(Keep in mind, you can also enter your competitors’ landing pages here to get even more ideas for managed placements.)

When you click the “Get placement ideas” button, you’ll see a page that looks like this:

To show your ads on these websites, all you need to do is scroll through this list, find sites that you think will be relevant to your audience, and add them to your plan by clicking the “>>” button on the right.

(Or you can click the Download button under “Your Plan” to download the whole list as a CSV if you’d rather scroll through it in Excel):

You don’t want to blindly add all these websites to your campaign because it’s likely that some of the results will be irrelevant to your product or service.

Instead (and especially if this is your first time adding managed placements), take the time to dig through the results and find 6-12 good matches to focus on.

You can click on the name of each site to learn more about their visitor demographics (age, gender, etc.), along with some stats on how much inventory there is and the type of ad formats they support.

It’s also a good idea to visit the website and take a look around to make sure it feels like the kind of place where your market would hang out online.

The Pros & Cons of Managed Placement Targeting

The big benefit of Managed Targeting is that you have TOTAL control over where your ads appear. (You are choosing the sites by hand, after all.)

You can even choose to display your ads on certain sections of sites. So, for example, you could target the entire site www.nytimes.com, or you could target only www.nytimes.com/section/technology to show your ads just to people visiting the “Technology” section of that online paper.

The downside is that, because adding managed placements is such a manual process, it’s difficult to scale out your campaigns and discover new websites where your ads might perform well.

That said, if you’re new to the Display Network, then Managed Placements is a safe way to get started because you can be assured that your ads will be showing up only on relevant websites.

But when it’s time to start really scaling up your campaigns, you’ll need to expand your targeting to include Contextual and Behavioral Targeting.

Contextual Targeting

This is where you show your ads based on the context in which they’re being seen.

Think of the context as basically being the content on the website. (Just think content=context.)

Here’s an example of contextual targeting at work:

Here you see an ad for healthy dog food being displayed on a website called “Healthy Pet.”

Makes sense, right?

Contextual targeting is a powerful strategy because it allows you to display your ads on websites that are relevant to your product or service, without having to manually pick them yourself.

(Remember, there are over two million websites on the GDN… so there’s no way you could manually choose all the relevant sites yourself.)

So how does it work?

There are two different ways to do contextual targeting: You can target by keyword or you can target by topic.

Contextual Targeting with Keywords

When you target websites based on a keyword, you’re basically telling Google: “Go find web pages where the overarching theme of that page is about this keyword.”

For example, if you sell “dental dog treats” then you would want to show your ads on pages that match the keyword “dog dental treats.”

You might also want to target related keywords like “dog treats for teeth,” “healthy dog treats,” and “dog teeth cleaning bones.”

If you want to get a little more advanced with your keyword targeting, you can categorize your keywords into three main buckets:

1. Branded Keywords
2. Competitor Keywords
3. Non-Branded Keywords

Branded keywords are those that include the name of your brand.

This could be the name of your company or a product you sell. If you’re an author, for example, a branded keyword would be any keyword that includes your name, the name of your book, or even the name of a character in your book.

Competitor keywords are those that include your competitors’ brands.

If you’re an author who writes mystery books, then, branded keywords could include the names of other mystery writers and their books.

Why target your competitors?

Because if the visitors to those pages are interested in those other mystery writers, there’s a good chance they’ll be interested in your mystery book, too.

Non-branded keywords are those that include the products and services you sell that do not include a branded term.

These are more broad and general than your branded keywords. Here, our mystery writer might target keywords like “mystery books” or “mystery authors.”

Keyword targeting is more precise than the other form of contextual targeting, which is…

Contextual Targeting with Topics

When you target websites based on a topic, you’re basically telling Google: “Go find web pages where the page is about this topic.”

In general, topics are broader and fuzzier than keywords.

For example, our mystery writer could choose to target the “Books & Literature” topic. It’s still relevant to his product (a mystery book), but in this case the topic is less precise than the keyword “mystery books” because it will include pages that are related to many different types of books (romance books, science fiction books, etc.).

As of this writing, Google has 2,221 topics available, and it categorizes every page into one or more topics. (Most pages probably have more than one topic.)

Because topic targeting is less precise than keyword targeting, you will definitely want to take your time and be deliberate in which topics you choose to add to your campaigns.

How to Add Contextual Targeting in AdWords

To implement contextual targeting, we’re going to head back to the Display Planner results page in AdWords. Just to the left of the “Placements” button, you’ll see buttons labeled “Keywords” and “Topics”:

From here, the process is very similar to adding Managed Placements.

You can click on each keyword or topic to learn more and see information on demographics, inventory, and some example potential placements:

The next way you can target people on the GDN is through what we call behavioral targeting.

Behavioral Targeting

With behavioral targeting, we are choosing to target people based on how they have behaved online. 

And there are two different ways of behavioral targeting: We can target users based on interests or by remarketing.

Interest Targeting

With interest targeting, you show your ads to people based on something they have shown an interest in (through their previous search history).

It can be easy to confuse interest targeting with keyword or topic targeting.

The difference between them is that with keyword and topic targeting, you’re targeting based on the content on the web page (remember, context). You don’t necessarily care who is visiting that web page… you just want to target websites that are relevant to your product or service.

Interest targeting is just the opposite. With interest targeting, you’re targeting based on the interests of the person. You don’t necessarily care about what page the ad is showing up on… you just want to target people who have demonstrated an interest in something relevant to your product or service.

Google breaks up interest targeting into two different types:

1. Affinity Targeting
2. In-Marketing Targeting

Affinity targeting means you can show ads to people based on their long-term search history to target people who have demonstrated a longstanding interest in something.

Google uses its vast amounts of data to figure out what type of websites you visit over and over again, which types of websites you spend more time on, and so on, to figure out what your interests are.

For example: If you visit sites related to basketball on a regular basis, Google will categorize you in the affinity group “basketball fans.”

Google has about 100 affinity categories.

In-market targeting, on the other hand, is based on people’s recent behavior in the past one to two weeks. In-market targeting identifies people who are “in the market” for a particular product or service.

For example, most people buy a car every few years. So, you wouldn’t necessarily want to serve car ads to all people all the time; a smarter strategy might be to focus on people who have demonstrated that they’re in the market for a new car.

Google has about 500 in-market categories to choose from.

It can be a little difficult to find all the affinity and in-market categories inside of your AdWords account, so to make it a little easier on you I’ve put together a spreadsheet with all your options.

Just go back to TheDisplayGrid.com and click on the tabs at the bottom to view all the current in-market and affinity categories available in AdWords.

Remarketing

The other type of behavioral marketing is called remarketing. In the case of remarketing, the behavior you’re targeting is the visitor’s recent decision to visit your website.

You’re probably already somewhat familiar with the concept of remarketing. But we’re going to get a little more specific and identify the five main types of remarketing:

1. General Remarketing
2. YouTube Remarketing
3. Customer Match Remarketing
4. Dynamic Remarketing
5. Similar Lists

General remarketing is what most people think of when they hear the word “remarketing.” It means showing your ads to people who have visited your website in the past.

For example, you could remarket to someone who added a product to their shopping cart but did not visit the order confirmation page.

(RELATED: The Remarketing Grid: The Science of Ad Retargeting Audience Segmentation)

If you’re running any YouTube ads, you can use YouTube remarketing to tell Google to create a remarketing list of anyone who has seen your video as an ad.

You can even get more specific by targeting people who have taken a specific action on your video, such as liking it, commenting, or subscribing to your channel.

(This requires quite a bit of volume to pull off, but it ensures you’re targeting only people who have demonstrated an active interest in your video.)

With customer match retargeting, you can upload an email list and target the people that Google recognizes.

This gives you the ability to target people who have subscribed to your email list, regardless of the context of the web page or the person’s Google-defined interests.

To upload your customer email list to AdWords, click on “Shared Library” on the left, and then “Audiences,” “+ Remarketing List,” and “Customer Emails:

Dynamic remarketing is where you display a specific product to a visitor, knowing that they have seen that particular product page on your website.

For example, DigitalMarketer is running dynamic remarketing campaigns on their certification courses.

If you visit one of these pages, like the landing page for DigitalMarketer’s Paid Traffic Mastery Certification Course, then you’ll start to notice ads for that particular course following you around on the Internet.

If you run an ecommerce store, dynamic remarketing will probably be one of your highest-ROI campaigns.

To set up dynamic remarketing, you’ll need a product or service feed (you can tag your site with various plugins from Shopify or Magento to help you do that).

Then, you’ll need a dynamic ad inside of AdWords, which looks something like this:

The ad that displays will change based on the various products that the visitor has viewed on your website.

The fifth and final type of Google remarketing gives you the option to use what Google calls similar lists.

This is the same basic idea as Facebook’s lookalike audiences. It tells Google to go and find people who are similar to another one of your audiences.

It’s a good way to scale your campaigns by finding new people who are likely to be interested in your product or service.

And you can create similar lists based on any of the other types of remarketing. So, you can create a similar list based on YouTube remarketing, dynamic remarketing, customer match remarketing, and so on.

Combined Targeting

Finally, your last option is combined targeting. And this is just what it sounds like: It’s where you use a combination of the options above to create an even more tightly focused campaign.

When you use combined targeting, both of the conditions have to be true for your ad to show.

You can think of it like a Venn Diagram, where each targeting method is a circle. When you use combined targeting, you’re targeting only the area of overlap between the two circles:

For example, you could target the keyword “basketball drills” + the affinity “basketball fans.”

Here, what you’re saying to Google is, “Show ads where the page is about basketball drills and the person viewing it is a basketball fan.”

It allows you to get even more tightly focused on your market.

You can use any combination of targeting options you like, such as keyword + topic, keyword + in-market, topic + in-market, etc.

The Display Grid: Part 2…

We’ve now covered all the different targeting options inside of GDN, which run across the top row of The Display Grid:

With everything we’ve covered here, you should be looking at the Google Display Network in a brand-new light.

Part 2: GDN Ad Formats and Advanced Tips for How to Use the Display Grid

We’ve now covered all the different targeting options inside of GDN, which run across the top row of The Display Grid:

Now, in Part 2, I’ll go through all the different ad formats, which you can see in the left columns on the grid:

When you put the two together, the resulting table shows you EVERY possible ad + targeting combination possible on the Google Display Network.

Finally, I’ll show you some of the more advanced ways to use The Display Grid to start building effective GDN campaigns and achieve massive scale in your business.

So, without further ado, here are…

The 11 Different Ad Formats on the Google Display Network

The right ad can make all the difference for your GDN campaigns.

It’s not uncommon to see an enormous difference in terms of performance from one ad to another, even when all the targeting options are the same:

This is why it’s so very important to run the best-performing ads possible inside your campaigns.

So, the next question is:

How do you know which ad is going to perform the best?

The unfortunate answer here is… you don’t.

Nobody knows which ad is going to resonate best with your prospects. I don’t care how much of a marketing expert you are, or how familiar you are with your target market. You never know for sure which ads will work best until you test them.

And that’s why you should always be testing many different variations of each type of ad in your Display Network campaigns.

When you click the red “+ Ad” button inside Adwords, you’ll see a list of all the possible GDN ad types available to you:

Now, let’s dig in and examine each of these possible ad types in more detail:

Google Display Network Ad Format #1: Responsive Ads

This is Google’s current default ad type. And the concept behind Responsive Ads makes a lot of sense:

Just supply an image, a URL, a few lines of text, and Google will automatically resize and add/remove text to make your ad fit in just about any available ad placement:

Unfortunately… I’m not a big fan of responsive ads (at least not yet).

The problem with Responsive Ads right now is that you don’t get enough control over how they display or what the performance was of those ads. I like to be able to specify how I want my ads to appear in more detail—so I know exactly what size it will be, exactly what the text will say, and so on.

Why am I such a control freak?

Simply because I know that the performance of an ad can vary tremendously, even when the only difference is the ad’s size.

For some of our accounts—about a quarter of them—switching to Responsive Ads improved our results. But for the remaining three-fourths of accounts, performance actually got WORSE when we turned on responsive ads.

So, by all means, feel free to test these out in your campaigns, just be aware that you’re liable to get better performance with other ad types. (At least until Google improves Responsive Ads to give you more control over the way they display.)

How to Create Responsive Ads

When you click “+ Ad” and “Responsive Ad,” you’ll be taken to a screen that looks like this:

Here you can supply all the separate ingredients that will make up your responsive ad:

• Short Headline
• Long Headline
• Description
• Business Name
• Final URL
• Images

Then Google will mix and match these elements to fit your ad into many different placements spots across the Display Network.

Google Display Network Ad Format #2: Image Ads

Most people start their display campaigns with image ads, and with good reason.

A good image ad can stand out on a web page, grabbing your prospect’s attention and send a steady stream of engaged traffic to your landing page. And because they come in many different sizes, image ads also have a lot of placement options available.

Now, here’s a little hint to help you create better image ads: When most marketers are getting started, they’ll pay a designer to create one image ad in 14 different sizes.

This is NOT the right approach.

One ad in 14 sizes is still one ad. You aren’t really testing any variations, and your chances of hitting a homerun with your very first ad are very low.

Instead, I recommend choosing just one size—start with the medium rectangle (300×250 pixels)—and have many different ad layouts created for that one size, using a combination of different text and images:

Then, after you’ve found an image design that performs well, you can start to test different sizes.

How to Create an Image Ad

When you click “+ Ad” and then “Image Ad,” you’ll see a screen that looks like this:

As you can see, there aren’t many options here. That’s because you’ll need to have your image ads already created by a designer before you upload them to Adwords.

If you don’t have any image ads created and you want to get started right away, Adwords also has a feature you can use to get started with some quick and easy ads right off the bat. To do that, click “Create an ad” when you see this lightbox:

Next, Adwords will show you a handful of banner ad ideas based on some of the images it finds on your website:

You can use this tool to create your first few banner ads in a matter of minutes. But if you’re serious about scaling your campaigns on the Google Display Network, eventually you will want to have your own ads created by a professional.

My company, WebSavvy, now offers this service based on all the data we’ve collected spending millions of dollars on ad spend and testing literally tens of thousands of different ads.

Google Display Network Ad Format #3: Expanded Text Ads

Adwords recently retired their standard text ads and replaced them with “Expanded Text Ads,” which give you two headlines along with a description:

This new format gives you more room to write some convincing copy and convince website visitors to click through to your landing page. 

Text ads don’t stand out, visually, the same way that image ads do. But there are some significant benefits to running text ads.

For one thing, text ads are quick and easy to create… which makes them a great way to test new ads quickly and get fast feedback on which marketing messages are resonating with your prospects.

How to Create an Expanded Text Ad

When you click “+ Ad” and then “Expanded Text Ad,” you’ll see a screen that looks like this:

From here, simply add your text along with the final URL of your landing page.

While you’re at it, you might as well go ahead and create at least a handful of different text ads. Write a new ad that focuses on each of your product’s or service’s main features, benefits, and selling points.

Once you find which text ads convert best, you can use the copy from those ads to create a killer image ad!

(RELATED: The Ad Grid: How to Build Traffic Campaigns that Convert Higher and Scale Faster) 

Google Display Network Ad Formats #4-6: App, Lightbox, & Video Ads

Other ad options include App, Lightbox, and Video ads. These are beyond the scope of this article, as they’re used by only a tiny small fraction of advertisers.

Google Display Network Ad Format #7: Gmail Ads

This is one of the most commonly overlooked types of ads in the Google Display Network, which is a real shame—because Gmail can be one of the best-performing placements on the entire Display Network.

Gmail ads give you two main options:

1. You can show an individual ad (which can contain a YouTube video or an image)
2. You can show product images

When you run a Gmail image ad, your ad will show up directly in the person’s inbox like this:

When they click on your “collapsed” ad, they won’t be taken to your landing page immediately. Instead, they’ll see an “expanded” version of your ad:

If they click on this expanded ad, then they will be taken to your landing page.

You can also run product ads from within Gmail:

Very few people are doing these product ads inside of Gmail right now. You know what that means? There’s a big opportunity there for anyone in ecommerce!

How to Create Gmail Ads

To create Gmail ads in Adwords, first, click “+ Ad,” and then, go to the “Ad Gallery”:

From there, go to “Gmail Ads”:

That will take you to this screen, where you can explore all the different types of Gmail ads available:

Once you choose which type of ad you want to create, the rest of the process is pretty straightforward. Just add your text, logo, and images as requested on the next screen:

YouTube Ad Formats on the Google Display Network

Don’t forget that the Display Campaign also handles advertising on YouTube, which is a pretty big deal in its own right (it’s only the #2 search engine in the world ).

Many marketers write off YouTube ads altogether because they don’t have video ads or assets. But you don’t even need videos to get started with YouTube ads!

YouTube offers four different ad types, and only half of them require a video on your part.

Just be sure, when setting up YouTube ads, to put them in a separate campaign—because you can get much cheaper clicks on YouTube, and you’ll want to keep those campaigns separate to keep your data clean.

Here are the four types of ads you can run on YouTube:

Google Display Network Ad Format #8: YouTube Image Ads

Just as with the rest of the Google Display network, YouTube allows you to place image ads (almost all placements you’ll have access to are the medium rectangle size, 300×250).

Your ad will usually show up next to the video, like so:

If you’re precise in your targeting, your ads will show up next to highly relevant videos—which means the person watching the video has a good chance of being interested in your ad.

Google Display Network Ad Format #9: In-Video Overlay Ads

Overlay ads are another type of image ad. But instead of displaying next to the video, overlay ads actually appear in the video itself (near the bottom, just over the video controls):

Overlay ads are 480×70 pixels and can include an optional companion banner (300×250) if you want both an overlay and a banner ad to display in the same video together.

Google Display Network Ad Format #10: TrueView in-stream Ads

Being a site full of videos, YouTube is probably best-known for its Video Ads. (Makes sense I guess.)

In-Stream video ads are a great way to get your prospects’ attention with a video that is funny, helpful, interesting, or surprising in some way.

There are two main types of Video Ads: skippable and non-skippable. Skippable ads are the most common—these are the ads that run before a video and have a “Skip Ad” button in the lower right:

After five seconds, users have the option to skip the Video Ad and jump straight to the video they’re waiting to watch.

Skippable TrueView Video Ads can deliver a great return on investment, especially because you won’t be charged for people who skip your ad after five seconds.

Instead, you’re charged only when the viewer interacts with your video (such as clicking on one of your call-to-action links) or watches at least 30 seconds of your ad.

Non-skippable ads can’t be skipped, and, because of that, they are usually shorter in length—running 15, 20, or 30 seconds long (although Google announced that they are doing away with 30-second non-skippable ads in 2018).

YouTube also offers a non-skippable six-second video ad called “Bumper Ads.” Both of these types are bought in a different way and it’s totally fine to ignore these for now.

Video ads are the MOST difficult and time-consuming type of ad to create, so unless you are already doing video, I would recommend getting started with text and image ads first.

Once you nail down which marketing messages are the most effective, you can translate those messages into video format and really scale your campaigns on YouTube.

Google Display Network Ad Format #11: Video Discovery Ads

This type of ad allows you to promote a YouTube video in “places of discovery,” which includes YouTube search, alongside relevant YouTube videos, and on the mobile homepage of YouTube.

Here’s an example of a YouTube Discovery Ad:

When you click on the ad, you can go one of two places: to the video’s normal “watch” page, or to the advertiser’s Channel page with that video loaded at the top, like this:

Because these ads require the visitor to click on them, they typically bring in highly engaged traffic.

How to Use the Display Grid to Scale Your Adwords Campaigns

We’ve now covered all the different targeting and ad type options available to you inside of the Google Display Network.

Phew!

When you look at the Display Grid, you can see that every combination of ad type + targeting options gives you one square in the grid:

This grid shows you every possible combination of ad and target type inside the Google Display Network. Altogether there are 147 different combinations.

Now, at first, that number might sound intimidating. Does that mean you have to open up your Adwords account and create 147 different campaigns?

Thankfully, no. Because depending on your business, market, and offer, some combinations will make sense more than others.

So, the next thing I want to do is help you narrow down your options, so you can get started with the most effective campaign types.

And to do that, there’s a thirst-quenching acronym I like to use, called:

The “BEER” Formula

Don’t worry, I’m not actually going to start drinking a beer right now.

(OK… actually I am. )

But there’s another BEER I want to go over now too, and this one is going to help you to find the most profitable GDN campaigns as quickly and efficiently as possible.

B: Bullseye

When I say “Bullseye,” what I mean is this:

Start with what is most likely to be profitable. 

So, what IS most likely to be profitable?

The answer will vary somewhat from business to business, depending on what market you’re in. But as a general rule of thumb, your best bet is to get started with these targeting options:

• Remarketing
• Customer Match
• In-Market
• Contextual
• Affinity

Assuming you already have traffic coming to your site, Remarketing is almost certain to be your lowest-hanging fruit. If you aren’t remarketing, you’re leaving money on the table.

(RELATED: The Remarketing Grid: The Science of Ad Retargeting Audience Segmentation)

After setting up remarketing, your next step should be to set up Customer Match. This allows you to show ads to your buyer list, which should generate a TREMENDOUS ROI on your ad spend.

Once that’s done, you should also create a separate campaign targeting people who are similar to your customer list.

Next, take a look through the in-market categories to see if one applies to your business. If it does, this is a great way of targeting people who are in the market for your product or service.

Remember, you can browse through all 500+ in-market categories by clicking the “InMarket” tab at the bottom of TheDisplayGrid.com:

(RELATED: 3 Advanced AdWords Tactics That Increase ROI)

When you’ve finished taking advantage of in-market targeting, next it’s time to turn to contextual targeting. Your ads will be shown alongside relevant content, so these ads should bring you a steady stream of highly engaged traffic.

Finally, notice that #5 on the list above (affinity) is crossed out.

Generally speaking, you don’t want to use affinity targeting on its own. Feel free to test it in combination with other targeting methods, but by itself, it’s just too broad. It often leads to your ads showing up all over the Internet, resulting in some of your least profitable Display Network campaigns.

And to help you find the “Bullseye” in your campaigns, here are a few more targeting tips that make up the happy acronym GLAD:

• Gender: If your product is particularly skewed to one gender or the other, you should start by only showing your ads to that one gender (at least for now).
• Location: Is your product capable of being sold all around the world? That’s great. But it doesn’t mean you should target the entire world. Instead, use the 80/20 principle and start by targeting just the U.S. Heck, start by targeting just California, or San Francisco. The GDN is such a huge network that you can begin with very tight targeting and still generate TONS of traffic.
• Age: If your product skews to a certain age group, start by excluding all other age groups. Selling women’s fashion for 18-25-year-olds? Don’t show ads to anyone over 25. Selling travel insurance for seniors? Don’t show ads to anyone under 55.
• Device: If your audience has an up-to-date phone, you can target them specifically by their device. Selling iPhone accessories? Only show your ads to people using an iPhone.You can also use this information to target desktop/mobile users in general. After you get a little data, you may find that your campaigns perform better on either desktop or mobile. If that’s the case, then only run your ads for those users!

E: Epic Automation

Automation is a great way to improve your campaign performance while also saving time.

Here are some of the things you can automate in Adwords:

• Spend
• Placements
• Ads
• Reporting
• Analysis

And here are some of the tools you can use to do this automation:

• Auto rules inside Adwords
• Scripts
• PPC Samurai
• Optmyzr

Here are a few examples of some easy-to-set-up automations to get you started.

An Example of Automating Ads

When automating your ads, look at cost per acqusition (CPA) first and foremost.

Using the auto rules inside of Adwords, you can choose to pause any ad when it reaches a certain amount of spend without generating any conversions. Here’s an example of an auto-rule that will pause any ad that has spent $20 with zero conversions:

So, when, exactly, should you pause a poor-performing ad? (Or ad group or campaign?)

First, you’ll need to decide on your target CPA. For this example, let’s say your target CPA is $10. From here, my recommendations are pretty simple:

• Pause any ad with a CPA that is twice your target CPA. (In this case, pause any ads with a CPA of $20 or more.)
• Pause any ad group with a CPA that is 3x your target CPA. (In this case, pause any ad groups with a CPA of $30 or more.)
• Pause any campaign with a CPA that is 5x your target CPA. (In this case, pause any campaign with a CPA over $50.)

An Example of Automating Placements

As your campaigns start to generate data, you’ll start to discover placements that don’t perform well.

Please don’t try to go through all your placements by hand, though. There will be way, way too many to go through manually.

Instead, I like to write a simple script to pause poor-performing placements automatically. You can schedule it to run every day, or even hourly, to minimize any wasted spend on these poor-performing placements.

Here are some of the things you’ll want to look out for when automating placements:

• Unusually high click-through rate or cost per click (this could be click fraud)
• High spend with no conversions
• High CPA

E: Expand the Winners

By this point, you’ve got at least 6-12 campaigns running. Some of them will be very profitable, some will be borderline, and others will be losers.

What many marketers do at this point is to focus on the losing campaigns, trying to fix them.

This is the wrong approach!

Instead, you want to pause the big losers and work on scaling up the campaigns that ARE working.

For example, if you have 10 keywords that are bringing you a great CPA, add 100 more! Make sure to include every variation on your most profitable keywords. So, if “fast company” is a keyword, try all these variations:

• fast company
• fast company com
• fastcompany.com
• fast company site
• fast company magazine

(Make sure to put every keyword in a separate ad group, so that you can find the best-performing ad for each keyword separately.)

R: Repeat

OK, so you’ve started with the campaigns that are most likely to be profitable…

You’ve automated everything possible to cut down on your manual work…

And you’ve expanded your winners to scale up.

All that’s left to do now is repeat the process again using a new square from The Display Grid!

This gives you a repeatable process you can use to scale your campaigns, over and over again. There’s almost no limit to how much scale you can achieve using this method.

One Final Thing to Keep in Mind

To profitably scale your campaigns on the Google Display Network as quickly and efficiently as possible, you’re going to have to FAIL. A lot.

Get comfortable with it.

The most successful media buyers are the ones who aren’t afraid to fail. Instead, the actively seek out failure…

…because they know they have to find the losers in order to find the winners.

So, don’t be afraid to fail. Be bold, and know that you will create some losing campaigns.

But in the process, you’ll also find the winning ad + targeting combinations that will help you achieve massive scale in your business. 

Hopefully, the Grid has given you a different way of thinking about scaling up your campaigns, along with some new ideas to get better results from the Google Display Network.

The post [Parts 1 & 2] The Display Grid: How to Scale Your AdWords Display Campaigns Profitably with Laser-Focused Targeting and the Right Choice of Ad Type appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

You just wrote a brand spanking new blog post! And it’s a doozy!

Now what?

What processes are in place to distribute this wonderful new resource on social media to maximize its impact? And, more importantly, what processes are in place to get LONG TERM impact out of this wonderful new resource?

The truth is that most blog posts have the lifespan of a mayfly.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

With the 6-step social sharing process I’m covering in this case study—your blog post will live a long and fruitful life.  

Our process not only notifies social connections as soon as a post is published, our strategy ensures that the post will continue to cycle through our social feeds days, weeks, and months after it’s been published.

We’ve got an infographic version of this post as well as a text version and video! You can download a PDF version of the infographic here, check out the video at the end of this post!

View the text steps of this article by clicking on one of the links below to view the explanation for that step:

• Step 1: Splinter
• Step 2: Visualize
• Step 3: Broadcast
• Step 4: Tag
• Step 5: Monitor
• Step 6: Schedule

Let’s start with the infographic… (Click the image to enlarge or download the PDF version)

And here is the text version…

Step 1: Splinter

As you know…

Product Splintering is the process of breaking off bits and pieces of your core product and selling them a la carte.

But splintering isn’t only for core products—the same process can be applied to any piece of content you create.

When your piece of content is published and ready for sharing, you have all the source material needed to splinter shareable content for social media posts.

Look to splinter the following from your blog post…

• headlines
• quotes
• images
• questions
• statistics

(It’s not necessary to use all 5 for every post, but if the opportunity presents itself, take it.)

For example, this is a recent article (written by CRO expert Justin Rondeau) with the headline “[Checklist] 5 Image Elements Worth Testing on Your Landing Page“…

Here are 4 splinters we pulled from this blog post for use on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc:

1. [Checklist] 5 Image Elements Worth Testing On Your Landing Page >> LINK
2. “An image is only as powerful as the value it communicates.” – Justin Rondeau >> LINK
3. Is Justin Rondeau spitting in the face of best practices? Find out now >> LINK
4. The elements on your website need to do 3 things. What are they? >> LINK

Ok, now that we have some text content to share on social media, it’s time for…

Step 2: Visualize

If you don’t know, now you know—visual content is necessary to drive engagement and clicks on social media (Buffer saw an increase of 18% in clicks, 89% in favorites, 150% in retweets using images!).

We’d be leaving a lot of distribution reach on the table if we didn’t incorporate images into our social strategy.

The feature image (which appears at the top of our blog posts) is always the first guaranteed visual asset to share on social media channels.

But one image isn’t enough. Create a visual asset for every possible splinter.

We use quote images on sites like Facebook and Twitter…

We created our own branded quote boxes for organic content distribution (and gave you the templates to make some of your own), but don’t think you’re hindered by a lack of graphic designer or templates.

Canva.com is one of our favorite tools for creating images you can share on social networks. Check out this same quote from above created using all standard options from Canva…

The beauty here is that we’re able to share content and engage with our audience… all for free.

If you plan to use the “Boost Post” function in Facebook to throw some paid traffic at your post, create the images with the 20% text rule in mind.  You can check your text % using this tool.

Ok, now we have our visuals locked and loaded.  Time for…

Step 3: Broadcast

Now that you have your splinters and visual assets, you need to create your social sharing links, and share the post on social platforms.

How to Create Your Social Sharing Links

You cannot optimize what you don’t measure, right?

UTM parameters are simply tags you add to a URL — when your link is clicked, the tags are sent back to Google Analytics and tracked.

Creating UTM parameters to track your post performance will give you great insight to how your post performs with different audiences and the journey they take once they read your post.

These are the UTM parameters we use on every post we share—you’ll notice there’s a different UTM link for each platform and distribution method.

For example, here are the UTM parameters for Twitter organic traffic…

Twitter Organic

• utm_source= the social network (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc)
• utm_medium= the distribution method (is this organic/free distribution or paid?)
• utm_content= We add the “slug” or extension here to differentiate the performance from post to post
• utm_campaign= This is the largest bucket and remains constant for all organic and paid traffic respectively

The slug is the extension on the post…

So, for example, this is what some of our other UTM links look like…

Facebook Organic

LinkedIn Organic

Facebook Promoted (These are the links we use when we use ads to send traffic to our content)…

Using UTM parameters allows us to track the performance of our campaigns in Google Analytics…

To build links with UTM parameters, use Google’s URL builder tool.

Once we have all our tracking links created, we put them through…

Bit.ly

Once each link is set up with its UTM parameters, they can be posted into Bit.ly to make shortened sharing links. These don’t give us the same information that Google Analytics will, but they’re a speedier method for regularly tracking performance based on clicks and sharing—more on that in just a minute.

Label your links by platform to make it easier when scanning through bit.ly’s reporting…

Create a document (whether it be a Word document, Google Sheet, or—DM’s personal favorite—a .txt doc) easily referenced and keep all of your content links in it.

Broadcasting on Facebook

When we have all social sharing links ready, we broadcast our content.

We create our Facebook content copy based on the benefits and point of the article, and we close with a hook or curiosity based question. Maintain a consistent personality and tone on your pages—where possible.

If you’re usually fun and address them with banter, appeal to them with your content the same way.

If you’re usually more serious and to the point, don’t waste their time being wordy—give them the goods straight up.

During your first broadcasting of the content, utilize the feature image:

Do you have other pages or handles?  If so, share wherever it is appropriate.

For example, we utilize the Ryan Deiss Facebook page and Twitter account to distribute DigitalMarketer’s content. He’s a personality associated with our brand and it makes sense for him to distribute our content to his followers.

We create different sets of copy for the DigitalMarketer and Ryan Deiss page, even if it’s just a small variation, so that people don’t become accustomed to just scrolling by one of our updates because they think they’ve seen what we have to say in an update from the other page.

For the second broadcast, we use a different visual asset to distribute the content.

When sharing for a second time, make sure to change copy to remove any “today’s” or “new on the blog” and condense copy to make for a shorter, more direct post.

(NOTE: If you’re a DigitalMarketer Lab member, you can learn more about how we do Social Media Scheduling on this Office Hours call.)

Broadcasting on Twitter

We use Hootsuite Pro as one of our social media management systems so that our entire content team can be logged into all social accounts, publishing, monitoring, and networking throughout the day.

(We don’t use Hootsuite to broadcast to our Facebook pages because we’ve found that there’s much more control for specific time scheduling, monitoring, and formatting directly on the Facebook platform.)

On the day of publishing, we create 3 tweets that will be published every couple hours:

1. Headline >> LINK
2. Quote >> LINK
3. Question the post answers >> LINKS

Tweets are scheduled to publish from the DigitalMarketer account and Ryan Deiss account at different times. We currently only schedule the headline tweet to go out from Ryan, and once #2 and #3 publish from DM, we retweet them from his account.

Broadcasting on LinkedIn

The beauty of LinkedIn is that posts shared on LinkedIn have a habit of continuing to be shared long after after they’re posted (even if they’re not using the link you provided). When you share with your connections, you’re sharing with a smaller audience of people that have already indicated they’re interested in your happenings.

We also tag the author in our LinkedIn status update to give them the nudge to share it on their stream as well. It’s a free and low-effort way of saying, “Here’s what I’ve been up to, here’s the content I just created.”

But how do you keep your content on your audience’s mind once you’ve broadcasted it the first time? We’ll be talking automated scheduling in just a bit.

For now, you need a good way to people’s attention with your post, especially if they’re mentioned in it…

Step 4: Tag

When we’re broadcasting a post, we tag people and brands wherever it makes sense.

For example, Justin Rondeau doesn’t have a Facebook fan page, so we didn’t tag him there – however, he has a Twitter account so we tag him in the tweets, giving him an opportunity to retweet and share the link.

But check out another post by Justin that gave us ample opportunity to tag others — and without having to ask them to contribute anything!

We were able to tag the owners of these blogs (and automate this distribution so that we’re driving traffic to the post, while continuing to drive traffic the owners’ blogs).

Step 5: Monitor

Most of the social media action will occur in the first 48-72 hours.

This is where Bit.ly comes in.

Monitoring campaigns (using UTM parameters) are the key to tracking long term performance, but Bit.ly is our favorite tool for immediate performance tracking.

• Who’s clicking?
• Where are they clicking?
• Who’s sharing?
• Where are they sharing?
• Which broadcast performed the best?
• Which platform performed the best?

Bit.ly tells us all of that.

During the initial 24-48 hours broadcasting of links, you can use Bit.ly….

• To see how many people are clicking your link from each platform.
• To see what time your post performed best.

• To figure out where in the world your content is reaching (and % of clicks they contribute to the total) — you want your content to broadcast when the people who are reading it are awake and active.

• To see which of your tweets performed best (helping you determine which copy speaks well to your audience and giving you ideas to test).

• And to see which platform it performed best on.

However, Bit.ly is only good for short term tracking here. People tend to click Bit.ly to read posts, but then share the post with either a basic URL, or directly from a sharing plugin — especially on LinkedIn.

So while it’s good to track who’s clicking your link on different platforms, don’t count your post as a loss if you don’t see tons of clicks on your shortened link.

Engagement

After the first 24 hours a post has been broadcast, one of the best ways to increase engagement is to check and regulate comments. Whether that be…

• On your blog post on your site.

• Comments on the Facebook posts you broadcasted the post on.
• Tweets sent out SHARING your post.

• Tweets sent in reply to your post.
• Comments on your LinkedIn update.

Tweets have a short lifespan, once you’ve published them, they’re already being buried by someone else’s content. The perks of retweeting someone who shared your content, or replying back to them, is that it puts your content in front of your audience with the added social proof that other people in your audience like the content you’ve been sharing.

Finally, we take Step 6 — the step that ties all your efforts together and ensures that your content stays alive and kickin’ for days, weeks, months (and sometimes YEARS) to come.

Step 6: Schedule

This is the behavior of a normal piece of content on social media…

Big spike… then vanishes from the face of the social Earth.  

That’s why long term automated distribution (scheduling) is necessary.

This what a piece of content looks like in a 6 month snapshot with scheduling and automation built into it.

Scheduling your content into a social media management tool results in perpetual sharing and content distribution with no action needed from you after loading it into your library.

We use MeetEdgar for our scheduling and automation across Twitter and LinkedIn. We’re able to make categories, and choose what time content publishes using those categories — the library will randomize itself and post content in rotation so that you’er not bombarding people with the same tweets day after day.

When you’re broadcasting your content, you have everything you need to schedule your content. After we’ve loaded our three tweets into Hootsuite the first day our content is published, we take those same splinters and immediately load them into MeetEdgar.

The other feature that’s really helpful is similar to what Bit.ly does in short term monitoring. Using MeetEdgar, we can track tweets performance over time.

This tells us when copy is getting fatigued and if we should update it—it’s also where quote images come into play. Content blurbs get tiring and are easily ignored. Image based tweets will keep your followers on their toes and clicking your content.

And that’s that! Use this 6-step distribution system to keep your content in front of your audience and give your content everlasting longevity—and don’t forget to swipe the infographic for easy reference!

Want lifelong longevity for your content, but reading isn’t your thing? Get a quick run through of our 6-Step Distribution Plan in this video:

The post How to Splinter Long Form Content appeared first on DigitalMarketer.