As you look forward to growing your business in 2019, I'm here to offer you my outlook on the best ways to spend your energy and dollars in the coming year.
The holidays are a busy time of year. Whether at work or home, the to-do list doesn’t seem to ever shorten, and the nostalgia of the year just passed will soon give way to the exciting possibilities of the new one. Here at PG we are gearing up for a biggest year yet, connecting with the largest and most engaged audience of guitarists in the world.
As you look forward to growing your business in 2019, I’m here to offer you my outlook on the best ways to spend your energy and dollars in the coming year: your 3-part Marketing New Year’s Resolution.
Say it with me...I WILL
Start (or increase) creating content
Creating content may feel unnatural to a lot of companies. It can seem like something that is unattainable or that has a high barrier of entry. I would encourage you to put aside your fears or doubts and just do it. Start. It doesn’t have to be on expensive equipment or have a high production value -- just get something out there and edit your methods as you go. Showing a human side to your business by highlighting your employees via a blog, giving a behind-the-scenes glimpse into your production process, or starting a weekly tips or how-to series is the best way to establish your brand as a place where knowledgeable PEOPLE work. Your customers want to know you. And when they know you, they can develop trust in you. Once you have a feel for simple content creation, you can move strategically in providing value to your customer that will compel them to choose your product over everything else. Gain their trust, provide them value (content), make the sale.
Take charge of advertising analytics
When you’re choosing a restaurant to eat at this weekend, stop and consider the factors behind your decision. Will it be crowded? Is the food any good? Did I get sick the last time I ate there? How long is the drive? Is it expensive relative to the quality? If you consider that many things about one meal, then where and how you spend your marketing dollars should have at least much data to back it up. In the digital age, we have more data than ever to help us make sound decisions. But, you have make the effort to acquire, analyze, and use it. Every place you spend your money should offer you analysis on the platform your ads will be displayed, why it could work for you, and the products that best fit your goals. And, most importantly, they should be helping you once your campaigns are complete to analyze the results. Was it worth the money relative to the value provided to you? Is there something that can be improved upon? What aspects showed promise and should be used in future efforts? Analyzing your ad spend is the key to increasing your ROI for future campaigns.
Set goals and a plan to get it done
This may seem like the most obvious of the three and it’s probably the most important. There is no shortage of where, how, and when to spend your advertising dollars on the internet and because of this, it can often feel like the process and procedure is the most important thing. What should I set my budget as for this Facebook boosted post? What keywords should I target on AdSense? How can I structure this giveaway to attract the most opt-in email addresses for my list? Before you ask yourself any of those questions, you need to ask yourself what you are trying to achieve. What you want to accomplish should dictate the plan by which you will achieve it. Acquiring email names, increasing brand awareness, launching a new product, or generating traffic and sales on your website all require different strategies and methods. Setting explicit goals and managing your expectations for results is the best way to do the right things again and to steer you away from making the same mistake twice. After all, you can’t hit a target if you don’t know where to aim.
On behalf of the entire staff of Premier Guitar, we wish you a joyous holiday season and continued success and growth in 2019. If you’re looking for help getting ideas for creating content, learning the ins-and-outs of advertising analytics, or defining your marketing goals and plans for 2019, PG’s Marketing Lab is here to help. Give me a call or sign up for a FREE 30 minute consultation below and let’s dig in.
Your guide to modern marketing acronyms for today's digital landscape.
If you’re like me, you open your inbox each morning to at least 5-10 cold emails from marketers, agencies, or software salesmen. You start reading and there they are -- confusing buzzwords, cheesy platitudes lamenting how they "haven’t heard back from you", and 5 confusing acronyms for every 1 verb. Normally in polite society, we use acronyms for convenience or aesthetic. Who wants to tell someone you have to quickly run to the “Automated Teller Machine”? No, you’d use ATM. Or, how much MORE time would be wasted if we actually told people we were headed to the “Department of Motor Vehicles” rather than the DMV? Acronyms are so common in our lexicon that there are several that people think are actually words (see: SCUBA, LASER, and PIN). But, all convenience (and sometimes a little pride) is lost when we don’t understand their meaning. It can lead to time wasted looking them up, or a tendency to ignore the information all together, sometime to the point of losing opportunities, or even money. So, I, your faithful guide, am here to help. Below is a list of acronyms that you may encounter most in the online advertising world:
CPC: Cost Per Click
An advertising metric used to identify the cost to the buyer of a single user click.
CPM: Cost Per Thousand (M)
An advertising metric used to identify the cost to the buyer of one thousand ad impressions. ‘M’ is the roman numeral for 1,000
CTR: Click-Through Rate
Usually delivered as a percentage, the ratio of the number of users who click on a specific link to the number of total ad impressions.
URL: Uniform Resource Locator
Often referred to as a website address, an address to a resource on the Internet. A ‘link’.
GIF: Graphical Interchange Format
A lossless format for image files that supports both animated and static images
HTML: Hypertext Markup Language
The most common language of code on the web, used to create web pages and display advertising.
JPEG: Joint Photographic Experts Group
The most common file type for static images, provides the best tradeoff of quality and file size.
UTM: Urchin Tracking Method
A string of characters pasted on the end of a URL to help identify the source of an incoming link in Google Analytics.
ROI: Return on Investment
The benefits returned from an investment to the investor.
CRM: Customer Relationship Management
Most often used in reference to software databases and services where client and relationship details (i.e. address, phone, notes, etc) are stored.
CTA: Call to Action
A phrase or word used to instruct or persuade an audience to take action, i.e. to click, buy, or read more.
SaaS: Software as a Service
A software business model where software is licensed on a subscription basis as opposed to purchased outright.
SEO: Search Engine Optimization
The process of optimizing a website’s content to appear higher in search engine results.
SEM: Search Engine Marketing
A branch of marketing that improves the visibility and traffic of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results.
KPI: Key Performance Indicator
A measurable value chosen by an advertiser or company that best demonstrates their desired success or outcome.
RTB:Real-Time Bidding
A method of purchasing unsold inventory by CPM via programmatic auction.
ROS:Run-of-Site
Refers to the distribution method of advertising to the totality of a website and not specific pages.
If you’re struggling to make sense of the ever-changing lingo of the online marketing world, give me a call or sign up for a FREE 30 minute consultation below. Together, we can help identify your KPI, get ideas for your SEO, help you decide on the best SaaS for your goals, or STS (shoot the sh*t). Regardless, I’m here to help!
Buying impressions and buying attention are not the same thing.
As we near the holiday retail season, many marketing teams around the world are knee-deep in spreadsheets looking for answers to these burning questions. What did we spend this on year? Where did we spend digital promotion this year? Is it working? If not, why isn’t it working?
In many cases, the key questions revolve around marketers’ reliance on programmatic advertising – their primary mode for digital marketing.
What is Programmatic Advertising?
Since the early part of this decade, programmatic banner advertising has taken the marketing world by storm. If you aren’t aware of what marketers are spending 75-85% of the their digital display advertising on, programmatic advertising can be defined pretty simply: advertising bought, placed, and paid for by computers. I mean, it makes sense, right? From our offices to our cars, and even our kitchens, computers dominate our lives. Why wouldn’t they be the best at buying and targeting online advertising?
For the last 10 years or so, a growing number of marketers became convinced that their best value in digital advertising would be to place ads through 3rd-party, programmatic marketplaces. It seemed like an easy, efficient course-of-action. You set a budget and buy into a marketplace of publishers offering their website real estate to target the audiences of your choice - allowing a marketer a hands-off approach from the leg-work required to grow brands.
Does it work?
As usual, with a little experience, most things that sound too good to be true are just that. As noted in this fantastic piece from marketing expert David Kohl, marketers are quickly discovering that programmatic advertising isn’t the end-all-be-all solution to attracting customers online. Marketwide, the results have been declining year after year. But, why? The social media age has taught us all firsthand about audience targeting. You search for a pair of scissors on Amazon. You decide not to buy them and move on to checking Weather.com. You scroll to the middle of the page and there it is -- an ad for scissors. Despite the dystopian, 1984-esque, concerns, there is another clear point here: You’re looking at the weather, is now a great time to offer you that can’t-miss deal on scissors?
Consider the Context and Environment
And, so, we’ve reached the meat of it: Context matters. Here it is directly from Mr. Kohl on the reasons behind the ineffectiveness of programmatic advertising:
“I’d argue we’re witnessing the perfect storm of three interwoven factors that make it nearly impossible to close the gap between programmatic advertising investment and returns: namely the dismal ratio between digital media budgets and their actual media buying power, an over-reliance on audience targeting, and the near complete disregard for the content environment perpetuated by marketer’s love affair with too-cheap-to-be-true programmatic advertising CPMs.”
The environment in which consumers view advertising is perhaps the most essential factor in driving engagement and, eventually, conversions. A 2016 comScore study examined “the effectiveness of advertising appearing adjacent to content generally considered to be premium”. Its research demonstrated a 67% higher brand lift attribute to the contextual environment in which ads are seen. If given the choice between extremely low-cost advertising on a thousand different sites unrelated to my brand, or a more expensive, but high-quality and premium content campaign in my industry, I’m taking the latter every time.
The Takeaway
Buying impressions and buying attention are not the same thing. As Kohl says, “Attention is built on a viewer’s trust of the environments in which ads are seen. Premium, professional content is an environment where attention is greater, dwell times are longer and trust in ad messages is highest.”
Audience targeting can still be a quality choice in reaching consumers. I would argue that the best strategy is to do both audience targeting AND content targeting. Find the content where users are highly engaged and are paying attention and buy your digital ads there.
After all, computers aren’t better at everything.
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These are just a few, simple ideas to get the most out of your ad buys. If you need a more personal touch, PG’s Marketing Lab is here to help with any and all of your marketing questions. We’d love to help you develop a strategy specific to your brand, including how PG can help you spread the word via our social media channels. You can sign up for a free, no-pressure consultation with me using the calendar below.