4 Ways Facebook Messenger Ads Are Awesome (& How to Set Them Up)

Remember when one billion was cool?

Well, Facebook recently surpassed two billion monthly active users on their site.

But that’s not good news. Not for you and me, anyway.

It means there are millions of advertisers you’re competing against. There are easily thousands of other companies in your niche.

How do you differentiate?

Facebook’s new Messenger Ads give us the ability to reach customers instantly. And according to Facebook, they’ve already been shown to increase conversions and response rates.

So, what are Facebook Messenger Ads, and why should you care? How do you use Messenger Ads to drive sales, increase conversions, and qualify leads?

Here are four things you need to know about Facebook Messenger Ads, plus some tips on how you can set them up today in just a few minutes.

What Are Facebook Messenger Ads?

Facebook Messenger Ads are a relatively new ad feature that allow users who see your ads to initiate a text conversation with your business with the click of a button. Facebook currently offers a few different types of Messenger Ads:

1. Destination ads
2. Sponsored messages
3. Home section ads

These are all designed for advertisers to start conversations with users and drive interactions and sales.

The destination style Messenger Ads show in your Facebook newsfeed like a typical ad, but the objective is vastly different.

Instead of a typical call to action like “Shop Now,” users see “Send Message”:

 

(Image Source)

Where a normal ad would send people directly to a landing page, this Messenger-style ad will engage customers without directly asking them to buy – meaning you don’t have to scare away cold, non-brand-aware users with a heavy ask.

The second ad type is called a sponsored message. These ads allow you to deliver specifically crafted messages directly to a user’s inbox:

(Image Source)

It’s a great tool for driving strategic engagements and actions relating to your business while keeping a user on the platform and reducing the risk of a bounce.

The last type of ad that works for Messenger shows up directly in the home dashboard of your messaging application:

(Image Source)

The main use of these ads is pretty simple: To generate real, organic conversations with your customers. You know, to actually interact with them rather than treating them like another user on your list.

Once you’ve made initial contact, you have the opportunity to personalize your customer service and tailor the experience for each user.

(Image Source)

The results speak for themselves. Globe Telecom has already reduced calls to their hotline by 50% with the implementation of Messenger Ads.

So, why should you invest your marketing budget into this ad type? What are the key aspects that you need to know about?

Here are four things you should know about Messenger Ads.

1. You can reach people faster on their preferred medium

Customer support is moving towards messaging.

If you aren’t using a live chat service in some way, shape, or form, you risk losing out on conversions. Because it’s no secret that responding to a potential lead faster will only increase your odds of closing a deal.

The Harvard Business Review conducted an impactful study a few years ago to see how a company’s response time to leads would impact their qualification rate.

They wanted to see if response time played a role in conversion rates. Can you guess the results?

If you don’t respond in the first five minutes of a customer reaching out to you, you decrease your odds of converting them to a lead by 400%.

And according to a Drift study, the vast majority of sales teams don’t respond within anywhere near five minutes or less:

In their study, only 7% of sales teams responded within 5 minutes. On the other hand, 55% took more than five days to respond to inquiries or never responded at all.

In today’s world, the standard response time is only shrinking. Meaning you need to be responding ASAP if you want to find success when driving sales and qualifying leads.

Nobody wants to wait four days to get an email response from your company.

That’s why messaging apps have started to surpass social networks in their usage:

In fact, 73% of customers prefer talking to companies via live chat rather than email. And 56% of people would rather message you than call you for customer service.

Why? Because you can get your problem solved almost instantly. No more sending hopeless emails to inboxes that seemingly never get checked.

Waiting on the phone, only to be bombarded by an annoying sales rep, isn’t your only option for fast help anymore.

On top of just fast messaging to potential leads, over two billion messages are sent between consumers and businesses every month. Facebook also tells us that 53% of consumers are more likely to buy from you if they can message you.

Facebook Messenger Ads allow you to effectively reach more people faster, giving your business the chance to convert users at higher rates.

2. You can personalize ads like LinkedIn’s Sponsored InMail

LinkedIn’s Sponsored InMail is equal parts awesome and creepy.

You can essentially send personalized messages to users who you aren’t connected with and land them straight in the user’s inbox.

How’s that for an invasion of privacy? But they work because online ads are often a numbers game.

Facebook Messenger Ads now allow you to do pretty much the same thing, except you can’t target non-brand-aware users – meaning you can only do this for people who have interacted with your ads previously.

That’s actually a good thing because it virtually removes the creepiness associated with it. It’s like remarketing on steroids, allowing you to personalize ads from head to toe.

Remarketing also works. Clothing company Barbell Apparel was able to raise 49x their product launch goals using remarketing tactics.

You can get your message directly to a user within their messaging app, so you’re not restricted only to the news feed, meaning you can (somewhat) naturally reach out via a direct, personalized message.

You can use these for almost any type of remarketing. For example, Jon Loomer uses them to give users who engaged with a previous webinar ad a reminder to convert:

(Image Source)

But the kicker here is being able to scale this effort to huge lists – you can retarget thousands of people with these semi-personalized messages.

Typical display advertising conversion rates aren’t great. And the Facebook News Feed is already cluttered.

With these ads, you also don’t run the risk of being seen as creepy or overreaching because you’re only targeting people who’ve already shown interest in your brand. And sending a personalized message gives you a better shot at landing conversions than a basic, mass-produced remarketing ad on their feed.

3. Messenger ads offer better local targeting options

One of the best ways to use Facebook Messenger Ads is for building localized brand awareness.

Have you ever tried to run ads on Google or Yelp to drive local traffic? Did it work?

If you haven’t used those sites or found success, Facebook Messenger might be your new favorite tool for advertising.

With their new “Local awareness” feature, you can create newsfeed ads that drive huge levels of engagement. You can select a specific local audience depending on where your business is located to determine who will see your ads:

(Image Source)

Once you’ve selected a target city or audience, you can come up with specific offers that people can use at your local business:

Meaning you can drive real foot traffic with a simple, message-style ad!

Driving local traffic has become increasingly difficult, but with these Facebook Messenger-style local ads, you can reach customers that live nearby with deal-based conversion offers.

4. Messenger ads are best for starting a conversation

If getting leads to converse with you is tough, which it probably is, these ads should be your bread and butter (yes, I’m hungry).

Qualifying leads and gauging interest is critical when it comes to producing real sales. Nobody wants to spend five weeks talking to a lead before finding out that they don’t even care about your product.

And when you can’t simply ask a user to convert instantly (meaning cold traffic), you need to start a casual conversation to assess their needs and interests. Otherwise, you’re going to have to run tons of remarketing ads with your fingers crossed, hoping to land a sale.

Facebook Messenger Ads are a perfect balance between ads and real sales conversations.

For example, check out how Jon Loomer uses these ad styles to initiate a real conversion with potential leads:

(Image Source)

Instead of instantly asking prospects to sign up for a training course and pay him, he asks them to message him directly and chat about it.

He helps them see if it’s really a good fit, rather than expecting the user to know immediately and shell out their hard-earned cash on it.

Plus, this ad style has the added benefit of extreme personalization: Is this training right for you? Let’s talk it through!

It gives the user an experience that regular remarketing ads simply can’t provide. And once a user responds, you can even customize automated response messages using bots:

(Image Source)

Delivering custom offers and CTAs has never been so easy.

You can see another example of how powerful messaging-style interactions can be in Drift’s recent “Year without forms” article.

They scrapped the typical marketing and advertising playbook of lead magnets and forms and switched their site over to a mostly messaged-based form of lead gen.

They used welcome messages to engage prospects, similar to how these new Messenger Ads work:

Using this strategy of initiating the conversation, they found that 63% of people who clicked on their message ended up speaking with a sales rep.

Now that’s a good conversion rate.

Remember: there are millions of companies advertising on Facebook. You need to stand out and differentiate (ah, college marketing buzzwords) your business if you want more leads.

Start a conversation with them using Messenger Ads to qualify leads with fewer steps than a traditional sales funnel.

How to Set Up Facebook Messenger Ads

Now that you’ve got a grasp on some of the best ways to use Messenger-style ads, it’s time for the fun part: setting them up.

I can tell you’re already jumping for joy.

You’ve got a few options for setting up Facebook Messenger Ads.

It’s relatively easy, and anyone with a Facebook Business Manager account can do it in just a few minutes.

Keep in mind that this platform is still new, growing, and changing, so your options are currently somewhat limited.

Currently, you can only create Messenger-style ads with three different goals: Traffic, conversions, and app installs:

Click on your desired marketing objective and create a new ad account for it.

Next, scroll down to the conversion section and select “Messenger”:

This option ensures that users who click on your ad will start a conversation with your business rather than having Facebook direct them to a landing page. That way you can tell them how awesome you guys are. But seriously, don’t do that.

Now you want to edit your placements to fit your goals:

The key here is to make sure that “Messenger” is selected and in use.

You’ll also notice that “Sponsored Messages” is not eligible yet. That’s because it’s a form of remarketing, as we discussed in the first tip of this article.

Once you’ve selected “Messenger,” your ads are just about ready to run. Fill it out with your desired content and head to your call to action.

Make sure that “Send Message” is the call to action users will see on your ads:

Now you want to set up your message offers. This is different from your headline or description that you’ll find on the standard ad.

Essentially, this is what the user will see once they’ve clicked on your ad and are taken to their messenger app. For example, here’s how Jasper’s Market customized their message for users that clicked:

Once a potential customer engages with their ad, they’re sent a coupon straight in their messenger dashboard.

You can customize just about everything in the message, from the initial message to the custom responses that a user can choose from:

For example, here’s how you can structure a potential message to consumers:

You can offer up a welcome message coupled with a headline and give them multiple options on how to respond.

If you want to use the messaging interaction to take users off-site, you can add buttons instead:

Once you’ve customized your messaging, all you have to do is place the order, and your messenger ads will be live.

A few final words on Messenger Ads

Facebook Messenger Ads allow you to speed up and personalize customer interactions, and reaching people faster is key in today’s cutthroat marketing environment.

Chances are, if you don’t like waiting for an email response or being on hold with customer service, neither do your customers.

Instead of blasting an ad to thousands, you can deliver custom messages to your audience in the form of messaging-based ads.

Reaching a customer in five minutes or less is critical to qualifying a lead, and personalizing those messages can help you drive lower costs and build loyalty.

Facebook Messenger Ads can specifically help you with personalization and great remarketing.

The new platform also helps with local targeting. You can direct specific, in-store offers to the inbox of local residents with ease.

Lastly, it’s great for starting a sales conversation that is otherwise hard-to-obtain. You can instantly start real, natural conversations that can help you nurture a potential lead until they convert.

And once you initiate that connection, you have instant access to their inbox for the rest of time.

from Internet Marketing Blog by WordStream http://ift.tt/2A4rzQ8

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2z1Gees

How to 3X AdWords Conversion Rates Without Touching AdWords

Over the last six months or so, one of my colleagues and I have been able to cut the cost of conversion by 2-3x, from over $325 per conversion to under $100. Here’s what that looked like:

Pretty impressive, right? If you can cut your cost per conversion that much, you can drive way more conversions with the same advertising budget. So how did this happen?

What Happened?

It’s often extremely difficult to connect cause and effect in search marketing, because there are so many variables changing at the same time. However, this analysis was aided by the fact that I hadn’t made any changes to the campaign in question:

• Did we change the landing page? No.
• New bid strategy? Nope.
• New ads? No. We ran the same ads over the entire time.

I had done nothing at all to the campaign over the period in question, as it was a smaller RLSA campaign that we didn’t bother focusing on because it wasn’t housing a ton of spend.

When I discovered CPAs had gone down so much, I needed to know what the heck was going. It’s not every day an untouched campaign goes bonkers like this!

The first thing I checked was to see if the CPCs were going down. That could play a huge role in lowering CPAs. But as you can see here, the CPC is steady from week to week, with the exception of August where I had to turn off the campaign for 3 weeks for budget reasons.

It wasn’t that click prices were going down – it was that that the conversion rates were going way up. From the 2% range to the 7-8% range in recent months, as shown here:

How Did Conversion Rates Triple So Quickly?

Here’s what was different: During the time period in question, the company ran Facebook ad campaigns targeting higher-funnel audiences corresponding to people who have the same interests and demographics as their buyer persona. The audience size was approximately 20 million people.

We bombarded this selected audience group with tons of different videos, ads, offers and content. On average people in the target audience saw the ads just over 10 times each between February and October of 2017, as shown here:

The Facebook ads generated clicks and conversions as you would expect from any pay-per-click advertising campaign.

But I believe the campaigns had an additional halo effect of creating a strong brand bias among the people who clicked through to the site, which profoundly impacted the RLSA campaigns, since they only target people who have previously visited your site.

Over the spring and summer months, we bought a ton of Facebook ads, bombarding their newsfeeds with ads (essentially manufacturing brand affinity), and the conversion rates for the RLSA campaign went up every month.

What we’re seeing here is that people with stronger brand affinity have higher conversion rates than people without any, because people tend to buy from the companies they have already heard of and begun to trust.

What does it all mean?

I’m a CRO skeptic. I think there’s a lot of the CRO bs out there that is just a bunch of smoke and mirrors.

Most of the time when people talk about conversion rate optimization they focus first on the obvious things like tweaking ad copy and landing pages or changing your bids – yes, these are all important things we must attend to, but they rarely yield sustainable 200-300% decreases in cost per conversion.

When it comes to increasing conversion rates and lowering CPA, the unicorn of all conversion rate optimization hacks is to create brand affinity among your target audience, for your business.

Quantifying the impact of brand affinity on direct response marketing is very difficult to measure, but this case study isolates a lot of the noise and illustrates the huge impact it can have on purchasing decisions.

from Internet Marketing Blog by WordStream http://ift.tt/2zQGJr3

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2zRAMdF

Case Study: Google Search Ads vs. Facebook Ads for a Small Local Business

For small businesses with limited budget, it can be hard to decide how to distribute your advertising budget. Money is tight, and a lack of time is often a problem.

Worse still is when you’re a new business fighting for visibility in the search results.

My client Kerry’s Fresh, a local business offering fruit and veg delivery, wanted to increase their online presence, but also wanted to reach their financial targets. We had a hypothesis that Google search ads would be the better platform to capture leads compared to Facebook advertising. However, we were also interested in the additional value that could be gained from Facebook advertising, such as Facebook page likes and brand awareness.

In this case study, we will explore whether it’s worth investing in both search ads and Facebook ads for a small local business like this.

Note that these platforms are very different in nature, and a like-for-like campaign is not possible, but we’ll still attempt to compare costs and results.

The Scenario

The data we will be looking at is over six months, from 1st April – 30th September 2017.

The objective for both platforms was to gain website transactions. For our Google search ads, we focused on keywords with high intent. As this is not possible on Facebook, we set careful audience targeting based on customer personas, to show our ads to users who were most likely to convert. This targeting strategy was paired with engaging product images and calls to action.

For the search ads, we ran many campaigns, aimed at B2B and B2C users. Yet, on Facebook we focused on the B2C audience and continued to improve and update the Facebook ads frequently, so that they didn’t become stale.

Example of a Facebook ad from the Kerry’s Fresh campaign

The landing page used for both platforms was the same, as we designed a landing page with paid search in mind, which had minimal steps to complete a conversion.

Kerry’s Fresh landing page

The Results

When comparing the results of search ads and Facebook ads, we can conclude that for new businesses, paid search ads are the best way to spend their budget in the short term.

Google search: The pros

The data shows that it was 72% cheaper to gain a transaction with Google search ads than Facebook ads. The search ads had a much lower average Cost Per Acquisition of £30.72 over a six-month period; this is far lower than the CPA for Facebook ads, where we saw a very high CPA of £109.

*Conversions for Facebook were all online transactions. For AdWords, one conversion was from a phone call, the others were transactions.

Yet, when comparing all transactions from Facebook over the six-month period, the CPA is reduced to £23.30, and Facebook shows to be the most cost-effective platform, as the CPA was 24% cheaper than Google search ads.

Facebook ads: The pros

Without the investment in Facebook ads, boosted posts and competitions this low CPA would not have been achieved. From Facebook ad manager, we can see that running Facebook ads played a significant role in growing their Facebook presence.

During this period, the client’s Facebook page gained over 460 new ‘likes.’ With the addition of boosted posts and running a Facebook competition, the client gained nearly 200 shares and 6,177 link clicks to their website. We found that as the Facebook audience increased over time, so did the online transactions.

Google search vs. Facebook ads costs

When comparing CPC, the average cost per click for Facebook was 71% cheaper than Google search ads. With many competitors fighting for the same keywords in the SERPs, the average cost per click was £1.22 over a six-month period. Yet when targeting B2B phrases, the CPC was £2.06 for the average position of 2.6 in the search results.

One of the main differences between the campaigns was the spend. During this period, we spent less on search ads due to low search volume. Yet, Facebook would continue to spend the daily budget due to the nature of Facebook ad delivery and targeting settings.

Here you could argue that search ads are more cost effective, as Google Search ads will only spend the budget when keyword requirements have been met, yet Facebook continued to use the full daily budget if the audience requirements were met.

Conclusion

As mentioned previously, it’s hard to compare like for like campaigns between Google search ads and Facebook ads. Also, results may vary widely depending on your industry and business type. Yet, when we do compare Google search ads to Facebook ads for this particular client, the search ad campaigns were more cost-effective.

However, it’s important to consider the impact that the Facebook ads had on the overall success of the client’s Facebook performance.

WordStream has found that businesses running Facebook ads get more organic page fans

Even though Facebook ads proved to have an expensive CPA for this client, I would not ignore the overall impact and brand awareness that can be achieved using the platform. We were able to reach more people who weren’t actively searching for relevant terms.

I recommend that SME’s invest the time and effort into Facebook, and consistently post and share content to develop their brand and online presence.

By testing and trialling both Facebook and search ads as part of the marketing mix, you can find what works best for you. I would also suggest having patience when it comes to social media advertising – the more you grow your following, the more success you’ll have.

Learn more about the differences between these two platforms here.

About the author

Lauren Ahluwalia is a Digital Marketing Consultant at Hallam Internet, offering paid social advertising. Lauren is one of eight social media trainers for Facebook’s ‘She Means Business’ campaign, which aims to train 10,000 female entrepreneurs.

from Internet Marketing Blog by WordStream http://ift.tt/2gOcnBA

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2heUxVk

5 Content Promotion Strategies to Drive More Traffic While Writing Less

The prescribed recipe for success in today’s content marketing game looks a little like this: write as many mid-to-high-quality blogs for as many targeted keywords as possible. Write at a breakneck pace, and write your competitors under the table. Challenge the Klingons for interstellar domination. That kind of thing. 

It’s all very noisy; and, as it turns out, occasionally ineffectual. Even if you control all your content for quality and originality, writing for quantity can be an easy way to sink your site’s search visibility. Why? There reaches a point of diminishing returns. Duplicate content comes into play. Multiple blogs begin to challenge one another for the same keywords. That piece you wrote about how Napster had a timeless platform, and was going to change music forever, didn’t age well, wasn’t de-indexed, and is now awfully cumbersome for Google to crawl.

Content marketers in the habit of working smart while their competitors work hard take their work-promoted-to-work-produced ratio seriously; one, notably, to the tune of 80:20. From a manhour standpoint, that’s a full day spent finding creative ways to promote a blog that took two hours to write. That might sound like an aggressive time commitment, and for your purposes, it might be.

The goal of today’s blog is to give you some creative ways to spend the time you’ve allocated to content promotion. Your goal should be to find the ratio that nets you the best return on your work.

Data shows companies that publish 16+ blog posts per month get almost 3.5 times more traffic than those that publish 0-4 posts per month.

Image via HubSpot

If your blog is on the newer side, therefore, and your content budget is low, your ratio might look more like 20:80—you’ll be spending most of your time building your cache of quality content.

If your blog has been around for several years, on the other hand, some of the below strategies are worth considering. It’s time to get more traffic from the content you’ve already created.

Let’s hop in!

1. Embrace Video for Social Media Promotion

Video marketing is projected to account for more than 80% of all internet traffic by 2019. The state of video marketing in 2017 is comparable to that of content marketing in the mid-2000s—companies understand the importance of incorporating video into their strategy, many just aren’t sure how to go about doing so. The landscape is underdeveloped and ripe for cultivation. A Fertile Crescent of yet-realized-content, if you will.

Per HubSpot, almost 50% of marketers are adding YouTube and Facebook channels for video distribution in the next year.

Image via HubSpot

Today, you have companies like Wistia SEO-ifying transcripts (embedding your descriptions in metadata for a more streamlined on-page experience); and you have access to free tools like Lumen5, which make it easier than ever to create compelling videos with virtually no talent.

By way of example, I used Lumen5 to create an introductory promo to one of our recent blog posts, “14 Fun & Festive Holiday Marketing Ideas for 2017.”

 

Here are two snapshots: our best performing tweet in which we used the Lumen5 video, followed by our best performing tweet in which we used a standard gif.

 

16 more engagements: not the worst! And all it took was a few snippets of copy from our blog’s introduction and a few light-hearted gifs.

Based on the nature of your content, you might decide that a summary works better than a teaser. Perhaps you haven’t invested much in your visual design team, and you decide to turn the camera around on some choice members of your marketing team (think Whiteboard Fridays).

Longer, more informative videos have a benefit of their own—a valuable piece of video content is more likely to generate shares than, say, a teaser; it’s more likely to drive traffic to your YouTube or Vimeo channel; and it’s more likely to be of lasting value for your brand.

That said, comprehensive social videos can discourage the need to click through to the blog you’re marketing. If blog traffic and on-page conversions are your bottom line, incorporating short, fun promos into your social strategy (particularly in Instagram stories, if you have the ability to link-in-story) might be a worthy experiment.

2. Ditch Headlines on Social

A sad and tasteless creation. By yours truly.

If a theme begins to emerge in this post, I hope it’s this: Don’t do vigorously and with abandon that which you can do deliberately and with care. Not that writing a million blogs and tweeting 10 tweets with the same headline isn’t its own kind of deliberate. But it is, I’d like to think, a less sustainable kind.

You need look no further for a social account that “does it right,” in my opinion, than SEMrush’s Twitter account. What do I mean by doing it right? They rarely waste copy space on throwaway headlines. Check out the below two tweets:

Which blog got less engagement? The second one. Despite being all industry-leading, and stuff. My theory? It’s because more effort went into the teaser copy; they didn’t just copy and paste the headline.

Actually, mixing in a few standard headlines is totally fine in moderation. The problem for most social managers is that they’re low on time, they lean on their bulk schedulers, they’re spread thinly across several responsibilities, and on top of it all, J Crew Factory is 50% off site-wide and practically giving away those v-neck sweaters that display just the right amount of chest follicle. What’s an optimized marketer to do?

Get more human! Comb through your content for three or four snippets of text you can use as social copy. Statistics perform well, as do quotes from influencers. Perhaps your author had a sexy line in the introduction.

Whatever you choose to go with, the idea is to treat your social posts like ads. Pretend you’re paying for them. You’ll take better care of them, and you’ll turn off less followers in the process.

3. Experiment with Influencer Marketing

When companies pay social influencers to market their products, they’re paying for credibility. They’re buying the trust of an audience they wouldn’t otherwise have had access to. They’re skipping hours of targeting, exposure, and nurturing.

Per DemandGen, 87% of B2B buyers give more credence to industry influencer content. The ramifications of that statistic go beyond having the ability to create effective Twitter copy, though.

When you take the time to reach out to an influencer for a quote before you write your piece—or even if you just quote a line from one of her blogs or videos and cite the source—you put yourself in a position to receive exposure on her platform once your content goes live.

Perhaps she retweets your post on Twitter. Perhaps she’s flattered by the mention, or takes a liking to your content, and decides to link to you in a future post. Whatever the case, you’ve put your content in a position to thrive in a wholly new environment. And we’re not talking Vader-mug thrive.

This is valuable content we’re talking about!

The one constant in all this is outreach. There are several tools you can use to gauge a person’s “social influence”—Followerwonk comes to mind—and once you’ve identified the big players in your market (you probably already know them), you can proceed to send out emails. Do this before you write your blog (to acquire quotes) or after (to tell them you mentioned them). In fact, it’s a good idea to experiment with both.

Take a look back at any statistics, studies, companies, or people I’ve mentioned thus far. These are all opportunities to expand the promotion strategy for this post.

4. Set Aside Some Budget for Paid Promotion

An advertisement about advertisements.

There are plenty of unpaid options worth exploring before you start paying for blog traffic. That said, if you have the budget, paid promotion—in particular paid social—is the fastest way to get your content in front of qualified readers. Because you control audience creation, you get to deliver your blogs all neat and pristine-like to your ideal readers’ social feeds.

A favorite strategy of ours here at WordStream is to serve our most evergreen blog posts—the posts that have accumulated the most traffic over the longest periods of time—to people that have visited our blog in the past 30 days. It gives us the opportunity to build brand loyalty while providing readers with content tailored to their past consumption.

We have other audiences too, though—created based on interests, behaviors, locations, ages, and genders—and for our efforts, we usually average out at around $0.12 per blog visit ($0.14 for Facebook, $0.10 for Twitter). Here is an inside look at one of our Twitter audiences:

The first image shows you some of the Twitter handles we target (this is called follower targeting) in this specific ad group; the second, some of the locations. We also targeted men ages 25-54. Follower targeting is a particularly useful feature for audience creation because it allows you to target the followers of users closely tied to your business. Not sure what those are? Twitter tells you!

Now, $0.12 per blog visit is a relatively low cost across both platforms—the average cost per click (CPC) of Facebook Ads in the business-to-business sphere is $2.52.

But again, if your blog is on the newer side, you might not have much budget to devote to promotion. If that’s the case, you may want to make friends with the other four promotion methods on this list.

For more on paid promotion in its various forms, Quick Sprout put together a solid guide here.

5. Leave High-Value, Non-Spammy Comments

If you like guys in suits, you’ll love our thing!

Comment sections are a great place to show authenticity, because there’s so very little of it. They’re dominated by spam links, robots, pent up consumer vitriol, and introductions to the Illuminati. A relevant, valuable resource, offered in earnest, is a miracle. 

You can be that miracle! The consensus among internet folk seems to be that, if it is your first time contributing to the comment section of a given blog, it’s best to leave out the link to your resource and merely offer an opinion. Then another opinion. Then, when you’ve convinced your fellow opiners you have legs, a pulse, and a valid perspective, you can lay the hammer—that great piece of relevant content—right on ‘em.

There are blogs—blogs that attract a lot of meaningful commentary—for which I think this is true. That said, there are also tons of blogs whose comment moderators are so inundated with crap that they’d be relieved to offer your gem of a resource a share, a link, endless praise, what have you. Here’s an example of a good comment from a recent post of ours about AdWords budget changes.

A genuinely useful script for budget pacing.

Not only did Nils earn a perky response from our perennially surly author:

He was a unanimous selection for Comment of the Week in our team’s Slack chain (prestigious), and he also earned an unsolicited mention in this post. Good on ya, Nils!

The takeaway: be genuine, find blogs that might actually benefit from your resource, and don’t hesitate to comment liberally.

Some Thoughts…

If the theme I mentioned earlier hasn’t come fully to the fore, allow me to continue to force it on you: so much of content promotion is about marketing like a human. Narrow the scope of your work and be deliberate about who you place your content in front of. Before you move on to that next targeted keyword, reward the time you spent crafting your last piece of content by putting it in a position to thrive.  

About the Author

Gordon Donnelly is a college hockey washout, failed poet, and all-around oxford comma enthusiast. He’s a sucker for: fly fishing, mudslides, and the dwindling half-light of Clery’s basement. Tweet him @gord_donnelly.

from Internet Marketing Blog by WordStream http://ift.tt/2hbhWqZ

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2ySbgrn