All too often the fact that human lives are increasingly enmeshed with and dependent on ever more complex, and ever more inscrutable, technologies is considered a good thing. Negatives don’t generally get dwelled on. And for the most part people are expected to move along, or be moved along by the tech. Read More
Posted by KaneJamison
Stuck in a content marketing rut? Relying on your existing newsletter, social followers, or email outreach won't do your launches justice. Boosting your signal with paid social both introduces your brand to new audiences and improves your launch's traffic and results. In today's Whiteboard Friday, we're welcoming back our good friend Kane Jamison to highlight four straightforward, actionable tactics you can start using ASAP.
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Howdy, Moz fans. My name is Kane. I'm the founder of a content marketing agency here in Seattle called Content Harmony, and we do a lot of content marketing projects where we use paid social to launch them and get better traffic and results.
So I spoke about this, this past year at MozCon, and what I want to do today is share some of those tactics with you and help you get started with launching your content with some paid traction and not just relying on your email outreach or maybe your own existing email newsletter and social followers.
Especially for a lot of companies that are just getting started with content marketing, that audience development component is really important. A lot of people just don't have a significant market share of their industry subscribed to their newsletter. So it's great to use paid social in order to reach new people, get them over to your most important content projects, or even just get them over to your week-to-week blog content.
So different things you can do include:
So everybody's instant reaction, of course, is, "I don't have the budget for video." That's okay. You don't need to be a videography expert to create decent social ads. There's a lot of great tools out there.
All of those tools are great ways to create short, 20-second, 60-second types of videos. They let you create captions. So if you're scrolling through a social feed and you see an autoplay video, there's a good chance that the audio on that is turned off, so you can create captions to let people know what the video is about if it's not instantly obvious from the video itself. So that's a great way to get cheaper distribution than you might get from your typical image ad, and it's really going to stick out to users because most other companies aren't spending the time to do that.
We can upload those into a custom audience in the social network of our choice and then create what's called a lookalike audience. In this case, I'd recommend what's called a "one percent lookalike audience." So if you're targeting people in the US, it means the one percent of people in the US that appear most like your audience. So if your audience is men ages 35 to 45, typically that are interested in a specific topic, the lookalike audience will probably be a lot of other men in a similar age group that like similar topics.
So Facebook is making that choice, which means you may or may not get the perfect audience right from the start. So it's great to test additional filters on top of the default lookalike audience. So, for example, you could target people by household income. You could target people by additional interests that may or may not be obvious from the custom audience, just to make sure you're only reaching the users that are interested in your topic. Whatever it might be, if this is going to end up being three or four million people at one percent of the country, it's probably good to go ahead and filter that down to a smaller audience that's a little bit closer to your exact target that you want to reach. So excellent way to create brand awareness with that target audience.
When you start running ads to this type of group, you're going to find that it costs a little bit more per click. If you're used to paying $0.50 to $1.00 per click, you might end up paying $1.00 or $2.00 per click to reach this audience. That's okay. There's a lot more embedded value with this audience than the typical user, because they're likely, on average, to have more reach, more followers, more influence.
It's worth testing share focus call to actions. What that means is encouraging people to share this with some people they know that might be interested. Post it to their page even is something worth testing. It may or may not work every time, but certainly valuable to test.
So the way we recommend reaching most of these users is through something like a job title filter. Somebody says they're a blogger, says they're an editor-in-chief, that's the clearest way to reach them. They may not always have that as their job title, so you could also do employers. That's another good example.
I recommend combining that with broad interests. So if I am targeting journalists because I have a new research piece out, it's great for us to attach interests that are relevant to our space. If we're in health care, we might target people interested in health care and the FDA and other big companies in the space that they'd likely be following for updates. If we're in fashion, we might just be selecting people that are fans of big brands, Nordstrom and others like that. Whatever it is, you can take this audience of a few hundred thousand or whatever it might be down to just a few thousand and really focus on the people that are most likely to be writing about or influential in your space.
So what we can do is convert this into more of a social ad unit and just show the same messaging to the people that didn't sign up on the site. Maybe they just hate pop-ups by default. They will never sign up for them. That's okay. They might be more receptive to a lead ad in Facebook that says "subscribe" or "download" instead of something that pops up on their screen.
The other thing we can do is start testing new messages and new content. Maybe this offer wasn't interesting to them because they don't need that guide, but maybe they need your checklist instead, or maybe they'd just like your email drip series that has an educational component to it. So keep testing different types of messaging. Just because this one wasn't valuable doesn't mean your other content isn't interesting to them, and it doesn't mean they're not interested in your email list.
We can keep testing messaging. So if we are testing messaging on our site, we might take the top two or three and test that messaging on ads. We might find that different messaging works better on social than it does on pop-ups or banners on the site. So it's worth redoing split tests that seemed conclusive on your site because things might be different on the social media network.
So that's it for today. What I'd love for you guys to do is if you have some great examples of targeting that's worked for you, messaging that's worked for you, or just other paid social tactics that have worked really well for your content marketing campaigns, I'd love to hear examples of that in the comments on the post, and we'd be happy to answer questions you guys have on how to actually get some of this stuff done. Whether it's targeting questions, how to set up lookalike audiences, anything like that, we'd be happy to answer questions there as well.
So that's it for me today. Thanks, Moz fans. We'll see you next time.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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The initial step LucidChart took was to dive deep into data to better understand and evaluate the customer journey across their site. They learned what users were doing, where they were going and where they were dropping off across their site. Using insights from Kissmetrics they found key areas in the journey where they could drive efficiency and which pages they wanted to test a redesign.
After creating the new pages LucidChart used the Kissmetrics Funnel Report in correlation with the A/B Test Report to determine the effectiveness variation of the new pages both as a stand alone and part of the customer journey. Until they locked in on the best performing pages and process to drive conversions.
Our Funnel Report is used by growth and marketing teams to see where dropoffs occur before conversions. This report is entirely customizable and can be used to track any conversion path you’d like. Furthermore, you can segment the data based on lead source, location, referring links, etc.
LucidChart was able to track different segment’s across the customer journey and compare one another as well as use the A/B Test report to test the new design against the old.
With this report, you’ll create your test in an A/B testing tool, such as Optimizely, and track the results in Kissmetrics.
What makes this Kissmetrics report unique is that you’ll be able to see how a test impacts any part of your funnel. Want to see if a new headline on your homepage leads to more purchases? Or see how a test in the middle of the funnel impacts the bottom line? Get your answer in just a few clicks in Kissmetrics. Having both reports coordinated in the same tool allowed LucidChart to measure the effectiveness of the new pages’ impact on the customer funnel with the old pages.
The outcome? By combining the power of the Kissmetrics A/B Test Report with the Funnel Report, LucidChart discovered that 2 pages in particular, their new homepage and new product page, were driving a huge 30% increase in conversions.
“Insights from Kissmetrics drove a 30% lift in our conversions. All of our key customer behavior data lives in Kissmetrics, for both our product and website, so we can quickly identify and take action on any roadblocks across our growth cycle. Kissmetrics is essential to Lucid Software’s growth efforts.”
Spencer Mann, VP of Growth at Lucid Software
Every time a prospect visits your site or uses your product they’re leaving a digital trail of their behavior – showing what they’re doing, where they get stuck, what they like, don’t like and why. There’s tremendous value in that data and it’s critical for driving growth.
Kissmetrics enables you to capture and leverage all that behavioral data to increase conversions, acquisitions and retention.
Kissmetrics’ Customer Engagement Automation platform helps product and marketing teams turn insights into growth. Our software is comprised of 3 key features:
Get, keep and grow more customer with Kissmetrics. Request a demo below to learn more.
About the Author: Jonathan Cabin is a Growth Analyst at Kissmetrics focused on initiatives that create sustainable growth. His background covers sales, project management and marketing. In his free time you can find him surfing, golfing and asking his boss for time off to travel.
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