MozCon 2018: The Initial Agenda

Posted by Trevor-Klein

With just over three months until MozCon 2018, we’re getting a great picture of what this year’s show will be like, and we can’t wait to share some of the details with you today.

We’ve got 21 speakers lined up (and will be launching our Community Speaker process soon — stay tuned for more details on how to make your pitch!). You’ll see some familiar faces, and some who’ll be on the MozCon stage for the first time, with topics ranging from the evolution of searcher intent to the increasing importance of local SEO, and from navigating bureaucracy for buy-in to cutting the noise out of your reporting.

Topic details and the final agenda are still in the works, but we’re excited enough about the conversations we’ve had with speakers that we wanted to give you a sneak peek. We hope to see you in Seattle this July 9–11!

If you still need your tickets, we’ve got you covered:

Pick up your ticket to MozCon!

The Speakers

Here’s a look at who you’ll see on stage this year, along with some of the topics we’ve already worked out:

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Jono Alderson

Mad Scientist, Yoast

The Democratization of SEO

Jono will explore how much time and money we collectively burn by fixing the same kinds of basic, “binary,” well-defined things over and over again (e.g., meta tags, 404s, URLs, etc), when we could be teaching others throughout our organizations not to break them in the first place.

As long as we “own” technical SEO, there’s no reason (for example) for the average developer to learn it or care — so they keep making the same mistakes. We proclaim that others are doing things wrong, but by doing so we only reinforce the line between our skills and theirs.

We need to start giving away bits of the SEO discipline, and technical SEO is probably the easiest thing for us to stop owning.

In his talk, he’ll push for more democratization, education, collaboration, and investment in open source projects so we can fix things once, rather than a million times.

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Stephanie Briggs

Partner, Briggsby

Search-Driven Content Strategy

Google’s improvements in understanding language and search intent have changed how and why content ranks. As a result, many SEOs are chasing rankings that Google has already decided are hopeless.

Stephanie will cover how this should impact the way you write and optimize content for search, and will help you identify the right content opportunities. She’ll teach you how to persuade organizations to invest in content, and will share examples of strategies and tactics she has used to grow content programs by millions of visits.

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Rob Bucci

CEO, STAT Search Analytics

“Near me” or Far:
How Google May Be Deciding Your Local Intent for You

In August 2017, Google stated that local searches without the “near me” modifier had grown by 150% and that searchers were beginning to drop geo-modifiers — like zip code and neighborhood — from local queries altogether. But does Google still know what searchers are after?

For example: the query [best breakfast places] suggests that quality takes top priority; [breakfast places near me] indicates that close proximity is essential; and [breakfast places in Seattle] seems to cast a city-wide net; while [breakfast places] is largely ambiguous.

By comparing non-geo-modified keywords against those modified with the prepositional phrases “near me” and “in [city name]” and qualifiers like “best,” we hope to understand how Google interprets different levels of local intent and uncover patterns in the types of SERPs produced.

With a better understanding of how local SERPs behave, SEOs can refine keyword lists, tailor content, and build targeted campaigns accordingly.

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Neil Crist

VP of Product, Moz

The Local Sweet Spot: Automation Isn’t Enough

Some practitioners of local SEO swear by manual curation, claiming that automation skips over the most important parts. Some swear the exact opposite. The real answer, especially when you’re working at enterprise scale, is a sweet spot in the middle.

In this talk, Neil will show you where that spot is, why different verticals require different work, and some original research that reveals which of those verticals are most stable.

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Dana DiTomaso

President and Partner, Kick Point

Traffic vs. Signal

With an ever-increasing slate of options in tools like Google Tag Manager and Google Data Studio, marketers of all stripes are falling prey to the habit of “I’ll collect this data because maybe I’ll need it eventually,” when in reality it’s creating a lot of noise for zero signal.

We’re still approaching our metrics from the organization’s perspective, and not from the customer’s perspective. Why, for example, are we not reporting on (or even thinking about, really) how quickly a customer can do what they need to do? Why are we still fixated on pageviews? In this talk, Dana will focus our attention on what really matters.

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Rand Fishkin

Founder, SparkToro, Moz, & Inbound.org

A man who needs no introduction to MozCon, we’re thrilled to announce that Rand will be back on stage this year after founding his new company, SparkToro. Topic development for his talk is in the works; check back for more information!

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Oli Gardner

Co-Founder, Unbounce

Content Marketing Is Broken and Only Your M.O.M. Can Save You

Traditional content marketing focuses on educational value at the expense of product value, which is a broken and outdated way of thinking. We all need to sell a product, and our visitors all need a product to improve their lives, but we’re so afraid of being seen as salesy that somehow we got lost, and we forgot why our content even exists.

We need our M.O.M.s!

No, he isn’t talking about your actual mother. He’s talking about your Marketing Optimization Map — your guide to exploring the nuances of optimized content marketing through a product-focused lens.

In this session you’ll learn:

• Data and lessons learned from his biggest ever content marketing experiment, and how those lessons have changed his approach to content
• A context-to-content-to-conversion strategy for big content that converts
• Advanced methods for creating “choose your own adventure” navigational experiences to build event-based behavioral profiles of your visitors (using GTM and GA)
• Innovative ways to productize and market the technology you already have, with use cases your customers had never considered

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Casie Gillette

Senior Director, Digital Marketing, KoMarketing

The Problem with Content & Other Things We Don’t Want to Admit

Everyone thinks they need content but they don’t think about why they need it or what they actually need to create. As a result, we are overwhelmed with poor quality content and marketers are struggling to prove the value.

In this session, we’ll look at some of the key challenges facing marketers today and how a data-driven strategy can help us make better decisions.

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Emily Grossman

Mobile Product Marketer & App Strategist

What All Marketers Can Do about Site Speed

At this point, we should all have some idea of how important site speed is to our performance in search. The mobile-first index underscored that fact yet again. It isn’t always easy for marketers to know where to start improving their site’s speed, though, and a lot of folks mistakenly believe they need developers for most of those improvements. Emily will clear that up with an actionable tour of just how much impact our own work can have on getting our sites to load quickly enough for today’s standards.

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Russ Jones

Principal Search Scientist, Moz

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

Russ is our principal search scientist here at Moz. After a decade as CTO of an agency, he joined Moz to focus on what he’s most interested in: research and development, primarily related to keyword and link data. He’s responsible for many of our most forward-looking techniques.

At MozCon this year, he’s looking to focus on cutting through bad metrics with far better metrics, exploring the hidden assumptions and errors in things our industry regularly reports, showing us all how we can paint a more accurate picture of what’s going on.

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Justine Jordan

VP Marketing, Litmus

A veteran of the MozCon stage, Justine is obsessed with helping marketers create, test, and send better email. Named an Email Marketer Thought Leader of the Year, she is strangely passionate about email marketing, hates being called a spammer, and still gets nervous when pressing send.

At MozCon this year, she’s looking to cover the importance of engagement with emails in today’s world of marketing. With the upcoming arrival of GDPR and the ease with which you can unsubscribe and report spam, it’s more important than ever to treat people like people instead of just leads.

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Michael King

Managing Director, iPullRank

You Don’t Know SEO

Or maybe, “SEO you don’t know you don’t know.” We’ve all heard people throw jargon around in an effort to sound smart when they clearly don’t know what it means, and our industry of SEO is no exception. There are aspects of search that are acknowledged as important, but seldom actually understood. Mike will save us from awkward moments, taking complex topics like the esoteric components of information retrieval and log-file analysis, pairing them with a detailed understanding of technical implementation of common SEO recommendations, and transforming them into tools and insights we wish we’d never neglected.

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Cindy Krum

CEO & Founder, MobileMoxie

Mobile-First Indexing or a Whole New Google

The emergence of voice-search and Google Assistant is forcing Google to change its model in search, to favor their own entity understanding or the world, so that questions and queries can be answered in context. Many marketers are struggling to understand how their website and their job as an SEO or SEM will change, as searches focus more on entity-understanding, context and action-oriented interaction. This shift can either provide massive opportunities, or create massive threats to your company and your job — the main determining factor is how you choose to prepare for the change.

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Dr. Pete Meyers

Marketing Scientist, Moz

Dr. Peter J. Meyers (AKA “Dr. Pete”) is a Marketing Scientist for Seattle-based Moz, where he works with the marketing and data science teams on product research and data-driven content. Guarding the thin line between marketing and data science — which is more like a hallway and pretty wide — he’s the architect behind MozCast, the keeper of the Algo History, and watcher of all things Google.

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Britney Muller

Senior SEO Scientist, Moz

Britney is Moz’s senior SEO scientist. An explorer and investigator at heart, she won’t stop digging until she gets to the bottom of some of the most interesting developments in the world of search. You can find her on Whiteboard Friday, and she’s currently polishing a new (and dramatically improved!) version of our Beginner’s Guide to SEO.

At MozCon this year, she’ll show you what she found at the bottom of the rabbit hole to save you the journey.

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Lisa Myers

CEO, Verve Search

None of Us Is as Smart as All of Us

Success in SEO, or in any discipline, is frequently reliant on people’s ability to work together. Lisa Myers started Verve Search in 2009, and from the very beginning was convinced of the importance of building a diverse team, then developing and empowering them to find their own solutions.

In this session she’ll share her experiences and offer actionable advice on how to attract, develop and retain the right people in order to build a truly world-class team.

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Heather Physioc

Director of Organic Search, VML

Your Red-Tape Toolkit:
How to Win Trust and Get Approval for Search Work

Are your search recommendations overlooked and misunderstood? Do you feel like you hit roadblocks at every turn? Are you worried that people don’t understand the value of your work? Learn how to navigate corporate bureaucracy and cut through red tape to help clients and colleagues understand your search work — and actually get it implemented. From diagnosing client maturity to communicating where search fits into the big picture, these tools will equip you to overcome obstacles to doing your best work.

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Mike Ramsey

President, Nifty Marketing

The Awkward State of Local

You know it exists. You know what a citation is, and have a sense for the importance of accurate listings. But with personalization and localization playing an increasing role in every SERP, local can no longer be seen in its own silo — every search and social marketer should be honing their understanding. For that matter, it’s also time for local search marketers to broaden the scope of their work.

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Wil Reynolds

Founder & Director of Digital Strategy, Seer Interactive

Excel Is for Rookies:
Why Every Search Marketer Needs to Get Strong in BI, ASAP

The analysts are coming for your job, not AI (at least not yet). Analysts stopped using Excel years ago; they use Tableau, Power BI, Looker! They see more data than you, and that is what is going to make them a threat to your job. They might not know search, but they know data. I’ll document my obsession with Power BI and the insights I can glean in seconds which is helping every single client at Seer at the speed of light. Search marketers must run to this opportunity, as analysts miss out on the insights because more often than not they use these tools to report. We use them to find insights.

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Alexis Sanders

Technical SEO Account Manager, Merkle

Alexis works as a Technical SEO Account Manager at Merkle, ensuring the accuracy, feasibility, and scalability of the agency’s technical recommendations across all verticals. You’ve likely seen her on the Moz blog, Search Engine Land, OnCrawl, The Raven Blog, and TechnicalSEO.com. She’s got a knack for getting the entire industry excited about the more technical aspects of SEO, and if you haven’t already, you’ve got to check out the technical SEO challenge she created at https://TechnicalSEO.expert.

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Darren Shaw

Founder, Whitespark

At the forefront of local SEO, Darren is obsessed with knowing all there is to know about local search. He organizes and publishes research initiatives such as the annual Local Search Ranking Factors survey and the Local Search Ecosystem.

At MozCon this year, he’ll unveil the newest findings from the Local Search Ranking Factors study, for which he’s already noticing significant changes from the last release, letting SEOs of all stripes know how they need to adjust their approach.

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6 Powerful Ways UX Can Affect Your Conversion Rates

Websites live and die by their conversion rates. Good conversion rates mean more sales and revenue while poor conversion rates mean that you’ll struggle to keep your business afloat.

 

Since maintaining healthy conversion rates is so integral to running a successful online business, it’s vital to examine and master one of the most significant factors impacting conversions: your site’s user experience.

UX relates to everything your leads, visitors or customers experience as they navigate and interact with your site on each page or page element. It relates to how easily they can find what they’re searching for on your site—without being slowed down by unnecessary friction, which can make them bounce, never to return.

Here are six key ways your site’s UX can affect your conversion rates.

1. Video on Landing Pages

Any time you navigate a landing page, there’s usually a lot of text to absorb. That’s because landing pages are really sales pages that want to persuade you to click on the call-to-action button right on the page or click through to the main page for the actual purchase. Some landing pages can be exceptionally long if they have a very detailed value proposition to communicate to visitors.

In terms of UX, this can be absolutely arduous for people because—let’s face it! Who has the time or wants to read all that text?

Situations like these are tailor-made for video. Studies show that using videos on landing pages can increase conversion rates by a sizable amount. Any time conversions shoot up, it’s because a page’s UX is improved. Conversions happen because a page successfully communicates its value proposition and seamlessly encourages users or customers to complete the page goal.

Image via EyeView

Take the case of TutorVista, a one-on-one, web-tutoring service. When EyeView, a video-solutions provider, added video to TutorVista’s landing page with the goal of increasing subscription signups, conversions skyrocketed by 86%, just due to the video.

The takeaway? Leads are visual creatures and appreciate video over text.

This is part of a broader trend, with the web as a whole becoming more video-centric. As Cisco reports in its 2017 Visual Networking Index Forecast, a decisive 82% of all IP traffic will be video by as soon as 2020.

2. Call to Action Button Placement

Where you place your calls to action greatly influences your customers’ UX. If the CTAs are hard to see, read or click, then that has a negative impact on UX and conversions. The goal of many pages is to sell something—whether products, subscriptions, or signups. CTAs are integral to conversions and so is their placement.

The UX phrase the fold pertains to that imaginary line on websites that divides everything users can see on the page without scrolling down from that which they can see only when they scroll down. Naturally, bigger screen sizes—desktop versus tablet and mobile—will have more space for content to be above the fold.

According to UX experts at the NN Group, 84% is the average difference of how users treat content above versus below the fold. Put another way, content above the fold is seen 84% more than that below the fold. The study arrived at this conclusion by conducting its own study and analyzing a Google study of display advertising across different sites.

This already provides a very strong indication that content that’s important that you want your customers to see—like a CTA!—should be placed above the fold. One company tested this out and found it to be true.

Image via Unbounce

Unbounce experimented with its PPC landing page, which originally had the CTA below the fold, by adding a secondary CTA above the fold, which directed leads to scroll down the page to the pricing grid, below the fold. This change in CTA placement produced a conversion spike of 41%.

The takeaway? Don’t fight your leads’ user behavior by putting the CTA in hard-to-see places. Put it above the fold for greater conversions.

3. The Speed of Your Website

Today, more than ever, site speed is one of the most crucial determining factors in whether your UX is up to par or not. Sites that are noticeably slower suffer from conversion losses compared to sites that are blazingly fast. (It can even affect your organic rankings.)

How do you know what’s fast enough, though?

A classic study conducted in 2009 by content delivery network provider Akamai and Forrester revealed that 40% of consumers refuse to wait longer than three seconds for a page to render before they abandon the site. If your site takes three-and-a-half or four seconds to load, then poof. Your leads vanish along with your conversions.

A much newer study done in 2016 by DoubleClick by Google confirmed these earlier findings. When it comes to mobile, if pages take longer than three seconds to load, then 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned.

Image via DoubleClick

So your answer is three seconds or less. That’s how fast your site’s pages have to render if you don’t want your leads to think your site has poor UX due to slowness!

Here are some handy site-speed tools to help you ensure that your site stays blazingly fast:

• Google’s PageSpeed Insights
• Pingdom’s Website Speed Test
• GTmetrix’s Website Speed and Performance Optimization

4. Website Readability: Make it Bigger

An often underappreciated aspect of UX is how readable your site is. It stands to reason: When your leads and visitors can’t make heads or tails of the content on your site, that means they’re not going to understand what they’re supposed to do. And that means lousy UX.

Should they read reviews? Look at a video? Maybe they should just skip straight to the CTA?

If your copy isn’t readable enough, they won’t know what to do.

Consider the reality that your leads and visitors don’t even actually read much of the copy on your site. According to UX Myths, people usually just skim site content. With these short attention spans, it’s all the more crucial that what little of your content they read is actually…easy to read.

Case in point: In a report titled The Effect of Font Size and Line Spacing on Online Readability, UX researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Spain’s Universitat Pompeu Fabra discovered that 18-point font sizes are the best for UX readability as well as comprehension in the body text of pages.

Image via Pielot

Doing so just makes your content harder to read. Content that’s harder to read is, in turn, harder to comprehend. When your customers can’t understand what you want them to do on your site, that spells disaster for your site conversions.

Since most people already won’t read much of the content on your pages, you have to make it even easier for them to absorb what little they read. Making fonts bigger is always better.

The takeaway? Don’t use less than 18-point font sizes in the body text of your pages.

5. Free Shipping Works Wonders

Sometimes, adding specific page elements to entice your shoppers to actually convert is all that it takes to increase conversions. Think of this as the little, extra nudge that shoppers need to be persuaded to convert in greater numbers.

For ecommerce sites in particular, adding a free shipping threshold can meaningfully boost your conversions, as one retailer found out.

NuFace, an anti-aging device maker, discovered that giving their customers, who were already familiar with their brand and products, just a small incentive during the checkout process increased their conversion rate.

They ran an A/B test with the treatment page displaying a message of free shipping for orders over $75. The results were amazing: Not only did the average order value increase by 7.32%, but the number of orders almost doubled, jumping by 90%.

Image via VMO

This case study sheds light on other areas of ecommerce UX psychology, that help to explain why free shipping is so desirable.

According to the 2016 Walker Sands Future of Retail Report, almost everyone asked said that free shipping is their number-one incentive to increase their online shopping. 90% of all respondents said they’d buy more through ecommerce if there was more free shipping.

The takeaway? When your customers are clamoring for incentives like free shipping, you give it to them, especially when it increases the number of orders and average order value!

6. Getting Rid of Friction in the Form of Navigation

The majority of pages on the web and all landing pages, for sure, have just one goal: to get their visitors to convert. One of the biggest problems that can negatively impact conversion rates is when a landing page suffers from too much clutter in the form of navigational links that take said visitors away from the page. These links act as distractions, working to undercut the whole goal of the page.

The solution? Declutter the page, of course!

A case study from AmeriFirst Home Mortgage illustrates this principle to a tee.

AmeriFirst has a policy of naked landing pages, that is, landing pages with no navigation. That way, visitors aren’t tempted to click away from the only offer on the page. Instead, they can focus, distraction-free, on the offer, fill out the form, and complete the conversion.

Image via Relevance

This policy of removing navigation from landing pages has resulted in an impressive 30 to 40% conversion rate increase at AmeriFirst.

From a UX standpoint, it makes all the sense in the world: When you remove distractions from a page, your users aren’t bombarded with competing decisions to make. Their minds are at ease, able to focus on just the one task—the page goal—of the landing page.

The takeaway? Get naked on your landing pages, and reap the benefits of a higher conversion rate.

Take Care of the UX, and More Conversions Will Follow

We highlighted numerous case studies to demonstrate one of the truest laws in digital marketing. When your site’s UX is impeccable, your site is rewarded with more conversions. In other words, ensure your UX is awesome, and your visitors will be much likelier to convert in higher numbers.

Look at it from the perspective of your leads. If you land on a page—even if you’re interested in the offer you come across from an AdWords ad or organic search result—yet the offer is so unintelligible that you can’t understand much of it, then your experience as a user is very poor. You’ll be frustrated, and your patience for staying on the page to figure things out will drastically decrease. You’ll likely exit the page very quickly. You’re not going to convert.

That’s why, when you ensure the UX on a site is excellent thanks to clarity and well-defined page goals, you can be sure that higher conversions will follow.

About the Author

Marc Schenker is a copywriter and marketer who runs The Glorious Company, a marketing agency. An expert in business and marketing, he helps businesses and companies of all sizes get the most bang for their ad bucks.

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13 Tips for Creating More Effective Instagram Video Ads

Instagram has more than 400 million users that share 80 million posts daily, making it a pretty compelling platform for advertisers – particularly as other platforms struggle with concerns over data and privacy.

Instagram itself boasts a highly engaged audience and says its ads help drive awareness. The platform offers multiple options, including photo ads and carousel ads, as well as video ads and ads on Instagram Stories—with the latter two offering sight, sound and motion to further connect with users. And we all know video is hot right now.

Connor Voss, social media strategist at Veterans United Home Loans, said brands considering Instagram Stories should start by spending time interacting with them to better understand interactive capabilities, trends, and content expectations.

“When viewers are engaging with Stories, they’re expecting to see video and, often, to interact—so placing a video ad [within] Instagram Stories can reach users who are more open to watching videos and to swiping up to see more products or read the rest of an article,” she said. “In the feed, users are accustomed to scrolling and glancing—not necessarily stopping, interacting or clicking through to another web page.”

In addition, Vivien Conway, cofounder of Instagram-focused agency Ace the Gram, said users don’t curate Stories as much as they do their feeds, and that makes it easier for advertisers to stand out.

No matter which video ad format you choose, here are ten tips to maximize their effectiveness.

1. Make the first seconds count.

Instagram users quickly scroll through their feeds, so brands need to make video ads that compel users to stop.

Per Natasha Courtenay-Smith, CEO of digital marketing firm Bolt Digital, this means incorporating movement in the first three seconds.

“You have no time at all to capture anyone’s attention,” she said. “Don’t be arty with slow openers…you want something that is bright, moves and catches attention.”

And Voss said to make sure consumers can immediately tell your ad is a video.

“Make sure that the first second of your video has enough movement that, with the sound off, viewers know immediately that it’s a video and not a still image,” she said. “If the first few seconds are so subtle that it appears to be an image, they’ll scroll right by without realizing they missed anything.”

2. Add text.

Because Instagram audio is muted by default, Jonathan Jacobs, partner of digital agency Digital Natives Group, said brands must lead with visuals and/or text.

“You can grab their attention—or just get your message across—by providing more than just captions,” said Chuck Cotterman, social media marketing specialist at business software and services review firm G2 Crowd. “Create dynamic text effects using apps like Apple Clips to highlight main points that you wouldn’t want any viewer to miss.”

Ehud Basis, senior online acquisition manager at discovery platform Outbrain, agreed this kind of text can help reinforce the most important messages a brand wants to deliver.

However, Veronica Romney, president of digital marketing agency LoSoMo, cautioned against using too much text.

“A few short captions in the video will help pique your audience’s interest so that they watch the entire video and even end up playing the sound later on,” she said. “Too much text, however, can be overwhelming for the viewer and make the video seem cluttered.”

Conway noted that a quick and easy way to generate video captions is to use services like Rev.

That being said, Vincit-Lee Lloyd, CEO of digital agency Lloyd Media Solutions, said to nevertheless ensure audio is high quality.

3. Solve a problem.

Instagram video ads should identify a problem and show how a particular product or service solves it.

“By identifying a problem your potential customers have, you’re creating an emotional bond with them, so they’re already intrigued with what you have to offer,” said Tom Caulton, digital growth specialist at digital agency Dijitul. “Once you’ve got them hooked, show them how your product or service solves that problem.”

4. Focus on a single goal.

Natalie Athanasiadis, head of digital at marketing agency Digital Visibility Group, said to focus on a central theme, topic and goal for each ad.

“This could be brand awareness, product education or ‘buy now’ options,” she said. “Just don’t try to incorporate all of this into the one ad because you will bombard your audience and they will just scroll past your ad.”

John Surdakowski, founder of digital agency Avex Designs, agreed to focus on one thing at a time.

“If your video ad contains too many products or selling points, it will seem like a pitch,” he said. “Target your customer base and create video content tailored for them.”

5. Look less like an ad.

Video ads should blend naturally into Instagram feeds for the best reception and not be overly self-promotional, Athanasiadis said.

Surdakowski agreed advertisers should make sure video ads blend into feeds organically.

“When users scroll through their feeds, you want to capture their attention,” he said. “Posting video content that brings value to the user is more likely to have engagement.”

Lloyd also recommended using drones to capture content that really wows audiences.

6. Shoot in the right dimensions.

Unlike on Facebook, in-feed videos can’t be enlarged to take up the whole phone screen on Instagram, so Voss said to recognize viewers will consume a video ad within an Instagram post. In Stories, however, the video will fill the entire screen but should be designed and filmed vertically.

“The best ads are ones that fill the entire space,” said Olumide Gbenro, founder of media marketing agency Globo Media Marketing. “Scrap the horizontal videos and have an editor format to 600×600. This has an entirely different look and should catch the viewers attention even more.”

Basis, however, recommended using a 1:1 aspect ratio of 1080×1080 and 1080×1920 for Stories.

7. Think about thumbnails early on.

Elizabeth Venanzi, online marketing manager at marketing agency Sparq Designs, noted another difference with platforms like Facebook or YouTube, where advertisers can customize thumbnails. With Instagram ads, brands have to use thumbnails from videos.

“This needs to be in your mind while you are shooting or preparing a video, as the thumbnail is the most important part of your Instagram video ad,” she said. “The thumbnail will define whether or not someone turns on the volume to watch your ad, click on your post in the search section and ultimately end up on your profile. So save yourself the time and incorporate your desired thumbnail into your video.”

8. Optimize your landing page for mobile.

If the call to action on a video ad leads to a landing page, the brand has to make sure these pages are optimized for mobile, Surdakowski said. Instagram is accessed overwhelmingly from mobile devices.

“There’s nothing worse than tapping on ‘Learn More,’ and the page you’re directed to is not optimized for the device you’re on,” he added.

Reuben Field, creative director of video production company Lights Camera Business, agreed advertisers will want consumers to easily be able to take the desired action from their mobile devices.

“You lose your user as soon as you make this difficult in any way for them,” he added.

9. Use visual consistency.

In addition, Jacobs said brands should keep the momentum going with supporting content that is aligned with the ad.

Romney said the same is true for the ad as a whole.

“This includes the colors, the style of video and the music involved in the video ad,” she said. “Each small component makes a significant impact on the video as a whole. If the message of the video does not line up with your brand identity, it will come off as inauthentic and users will scroll right past it.”

10. Add a clear call to action.

Venanzi discouraged advertisers from using Instagram video ads as teasers as users are looking for content that can be quickly consumed, and tracking down a link in a bio requires a lot of effort.

“You should always simplify your call-to-action as much as possible,” she said. “Instead of sending them from your video to your profile to a landing page, try incorporating the ‘learn more’ on your video advertisement and complete your entire message within the video advert. This will encourage interested viewers to learn more on your website, rather than have to go searching for your call-to-action.”

11. Test.

According to Field, advertisers should create multiple versions of their Instagram video ads and A/B test them to see which work best with their audiences.

Via Add Mustard

Nate Masterson, marketing manager for personal care company Maple Holistics, agreed advertisers should take advantage of Instagram tools to enhance results.

And, beyond Instagram itself, Marcus Harjani, cofounder of data-centric web destination FameMoose, said to also track the user’s path from ad to conversion.

“What is the experience like? Make sure it is a good experience and a user is headed toward conversion,” he added.

12. Wait until users are connected to WiFi.

Lesya Lui, social media strategist at news site The Social Media Current, said to show the ads only to consumers connected to WiFi to avoid a subpar experience where videos slow to a crawl.

“People are very impatient and have so many distractions on social platforms, they won’t wait for your video ad to buffer and start playing,” she said.

13. Make loopable videos.

Warren Jolly, CEO of digital marketing agency adQuadrant, said to create a video ad with loopability in mind, with fade-out video and music at the intro and outro.

The longer your prospect spends with your video ad, the more likely the ad and your brand are to make an impression.

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4 Boxes to Check Before You Think About Scaling Your Online Ads

What separates us from other savage beasts is our ability to plan for the future.

(That being said, a staggering number of humans have consumed Tide pods; whether or not you think our species is special is kind of up to you.)

The problem with planning is that we live in a world where gratification is instantly attainable. You scroll through endless feeds until your dopamine receptors light up like a Christmas tree. You enter a search query and any question you could possibly have is answered in seconds.

When you take that same approach towards things in life that require strategy, planning, and purposeful execution—like digital marketing, for instance—$h#t hits the fan.

Without the proper infrastructure behind ANY marketing efforts, including Google AdWords or Facebook ads, scaling will put your wallet and your psyche in jeopardy.

Whether you plan on hiring an agency or managing your paid media personally, make sure your house is in order. In this post I’ll run through the four essential items you must complete prior to scaling your paid advertising efforts.

#1: Have a Functional Website That Encourages Action(s)

For the most novice among us, my first nugget of advice is to actually have a website.

It seems like a no-brainer but you’d be surprised at the number of folks who are so eager to get their brand in front of the masses that they try to do so without having a web domain to begin with. You have to crawl before you can run, friends.

Even if you want to advertise your business page on Facebook, once users realize you don’t have a website they’ll be skeptical of your legitimacy. If you’re brick & mortar or use other third-party platforms to sell your services, you are absolutely going to need to have a website to go anywhere on Facebook or Google (or any other ad platform for that matter).

Luckily, creating a simple and attractive website has never been easier with (relatively) inexpensive services like Squarespace and Wix. For more long-term integration capabilities I would suggest using something like WordPress. The only problem with that route is the more complex your website, the more difficult it will be to create and maintain. You may find yourself needing a web developer; it may in your best interest to invest in these simple options initially and migrate over time.

 

In the roaring 2010’s having a website is not difficult. Having that website make people want your product or service is another obstacle all together.

Sometimes people know their business to such a technical degree that conveying its value in an aesthetically pleasing and simple manner doesn’t come easy. Others are just reluctant to admit that something isn’t driving results because it’s ugly or confusing. Either way, you’re going to run into trouble running ads and scaling effectively if either of those scenarios is true.

Having the self-awareness to know when your website is ugly can be difficult, especially if you’ve poured a considerable amount of time into it. What do I actually mean by ugly? In a word, “ineffective.”

Here’s what an ineffective website might look like:

No mobile optimization

One of the quickest ways to ensure that your advertising dollars aren’t blown is to make your site mobile-friendly. The good news is that most web hosting services have either fully mobile optimized templates or allow users to have alternative versions based on device.

A way to test this, aesthetically, is to either go on your website on your phone or resize your desktop window. If you are resizing the window and the site does not scale with the reduction, that means your site is only going to look reasonable on a larger screen. After all, users spend on average 69% of their media time on smartphones.

 

You’ll also want to check load time on mobile devices to ensure that, even if your site scales effectively on smaller screens, it does so fast enough. People lose interest quickly, and a few extra seconds can mean the difference between a sale and losing a prospect forever. Luckily, Google has some free tools that can help you determine whether you’ve got the site speed blues.

Too much text

If your website looks like a chapter from the unabridged versions of The Count of Monte Cristo, you may have trouble keeping guests there. If you’re going to have less than a few seconds to convince someone to click on a paid ad, then they should be able to digest the following information as concisely as possible.

The layout and copy of your site should facilitate the action that you want prospects to take.

 

A common misstep is to try to say everything on the home page, with subsequent pages being afterthoughts. If your website was a tourist attraction, you would want to direct people to the spots that they came to see in the most concise way possible.

Do that.

Your site looks like it’s from 1993

If you have any of those 3D spinning gifs or anything that resembles Word Art or Mario Paint I’m going to assume that 16-bit masterpiece isn’t going to be mobile-optimized.

Although I’m a fan of the 90’s, your skip-its will look a lot better on a 21st century device without the reminiscence of dial-up. Unless you’re targeting Nokia burners of course…

***

My reasoning for being so hard on the website side of things is because when it comes to running paid ads, the page that users land on is arguably the largest factor in whether they leave with your product or services.

#2: Set up Google Analytics and Track Conversion Goals

Traffic and the actions completed because of it matter. Like, kind of a lot.

The best solution for tracking everything from site visits to obscure conversion goals is to integrate your website with Google Analytics.

Whether you have started advertising online or plan to, you’re going to want to be able to tie every dollar back from action to source. To most seasoned marketers this may also seem like a no-brainer, but a vast number of businesses out there are eager to start advertising with the belief that Facebook and Google are going to identify conversions and web traffic down to the individual within each platform. They won’t.

 

Your life will be a lot easier if you have an infrastructure in place that says people came in through “X” page and converted through “Y” offer. Setting this up can appear to be a daunting task at first but it’s a lot like waking up and going to the gym. You’ll thank yourself later for it.

Setting up Google Analytics

This video gives a brief overview of getting started in Analytics, and is a heck of a lot more helpful than I ever could be in explaining how to do so.

If that wasn’t helpful, this Google support page should do the trick.

Creating conversion goals (that mean something)

The key to measurement is to define what actions are most important to your business. You achieve this in Google Analytics by setting up goals. For the sake of not going too far down the rabbit hole in this post, here is a walkthrough on how to set up goals in Google Analytics, as well as the different goal types and what they mean. 

The objective of all of this is to be able to get visibility into how many users are visiting each page of your site and of that percentage how many are completing goals. The more effective your website and targeting, the higher volume of goal completes you will receive. When someone converts from AdWords or Facebook, you should be able to see those conversions as goals within Google Analytics. This will make clear any reporting issues between the platforms in addition to allowing you to create remarketing audiences which is a key component to scale.

The most important relationship between the paid advertising platforms and your Google Analytics structure pertains to your ability to tie costs back to results (or lack thereof). Additionally, setting up Google Analytics allows you to get into the habit of placing pixel codes throughout your site, which will come in handy once you start advertising on multiple platforms that require their own code to be placed.

#3: Ensure that Your “Back-End” Makes Sense for Your Business

“Everyone has a back-end, Brett.”

Niiiiiice.

To reduce any confusion about what I’m talking about here, we’ll refer to anything happening in Facebook, Google, etc. as the “Front-end” and any processes that involve your website and sales cycle as the “Back-end.”

Another common issue that businesses have is that they begin to drive leads and sales through their paid advertising activities but don’t have the back-end to support that volume or lack systems and processes to effectively organize and clean leads (eliminate spam without pushing it to your sales team). Google Analytics is the first step to building an internal foundation but the road between tracking results and actually having a system to process them is a long one.

Depending on the nature of your business, you may accept anyone who visits a page and converts as long as their credit card works (i.e. ecommerce). However, if you are a business that needs to groom the leads you drive for sales, the need for a system to help you do so becomes exponentially greater. There are a variety of SAAS companies to assist you in this and they all have variations in quality, complexity, and cost (not mutually exclusive). Some of the most popular include:

Hubspot

With a robust offering of marketing products HubSpot has become well-known for being the prototype for SAAS success and phenomenal showering facilities. The disparity between popularity and quality should be noted, however, as well as HubSpot’s “jack of all trades; master of none” approach to their product line.

With HubSpot you get a CRM that works, and landing page templates that work (kind of) but none of which will blow you away regarding usability, aesthetics, or customization. I will say, however, it has the shortest learning curve.

Marketo / Eloqua

I grouped these together because they are similar in nature, with some arguing that Marketo is more focused on the mid-sized business with Eloqua being more enterprise level.

 

Whichever you choose, they both have a fairly steep learning curve and certainly aren’t cheap. If your operation becomes increasingly complex with multiple lead flows and customer acquisition paths, hiring someone to be your CRM architect within one of these platforms is your best bet to continued scalability.

Salesforce

Most popular CRM, and for good reason.

 

Salesforce integrates with almost everything and allows you to coordinate marketing and sales efforts.

Drift

Drift created the category of conversational marketing, an approach to lead generation and nurturing that’s taking many marketing and sales orgs by storm.

 

The fact of the matter is they have an effective product. Having chatbots on your site can allow you to easily convert visitors in real-time and depending on the nature of your business you may have to build your sales systems around them.

Just make sure that you know how to track them in Analytics.

#4: Build a Consistent Brand

When a business first embarks on its marketing journey, its brand identity may not be fully developed. It may take some time for an adolescent company to grow into the manifestation that achieves success at scale.

 

The problem occurs when businesses spend so much time being marketing chameleons that their brand identity becomes muddied and ambiguous by the time they are in fact ready to scale operations. I could write an entire post separately on branding in the digital realm, but for now I’ll list out the basic necessities for the consistency and strength you’ll need behind your ads.

Have a consistent tone & visual identity

You not only need one, you should work hard at getting the best one possible. Whether you have artistic skills or need to hire a designer, there’s no way you’re going to build a strong brand without a great logo, bold colors, and legible typefaces.

Your brand is going to be broadcasted everywhere. Make sure your logo isn’t low resolution and doesn’t seem dated. The idea is to limit the discrepancy between the brand perception and the brand reality (or ideal). Books will always be judged by their covers, especially ones that haven’t been read.

I have seen several cases where businesses have multiple tones based on their specific promotion. This is a short-sighted tactic and will only serve to dilute and weaken your brand over time. Pick a specific messaging tone and stick to it, unless you have tried one and it doesn’t work. Then it’s time to re-brand.

The idea is that your brand can be thought of as a part of your infrastructure. The stronger that infrastructure, the easier it will be to grow efficiently, across paid channels and otherwise.

Have a clearly defined value proposition

Your web copy, tangential promotions, and sales collateral should all share the common ancestor that is the value proposition of your business.

 

Understandably, some businesses are complex and can have multiple products with multiple selling points. The point is to consolidate all of those into a unified concept that is the brand, the umbrella from which your products live under both physically and within the minds of your target audience. The more synonymous the brand becomes with the value it delivers, the easier it will become to scale within paid advertising. Like a snowball rolling down a hill. 

Final Thoughts

There are a number of failing businesses out there who believe that running paid ads will save them (most of which have screwed up on points 2-4 above). I hate to break hearts, but they won’t. There are also very successful businesses who believe they are too good for paid advertising or have distorted beliefs for what AdWords, Facebook, and other paid channels can deliver.

Both attitudes are incorrect and of course they manifest for opposite reasons. If you’re somewhere in the middle then it’s important to understand that paid advertising isn’t going to help you scale by default; you need to take time and be strategic. You also need to take responsibility when the results aren’t what you hoped for and understand that “scale” is only achievable upon the foundation of success.

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