While it’s true that blog content creation is an important element of content marketing – it’s not the only one. Many types of content exist, from mailshots and testimonials to interviews and podcasts, and so with fresh, creative ways to tell your story, you can easily boost your content strategy by implementing these content types into your marketing campaign.
So, as a leading content marketing agency, we’re taking a look at ten types of content you can create alongside blogs.
Email marketing should be part of your content strategy for the simple fact that it helps create and develop relationships with customers. They can help you to generate leads and build trust and are useful to inform people of your latest company news.
In addition, newsletters bring people to your website, so as part of an effective email marketing campaign, you should include plenty of links to pages you want people to visit. Similarly, measuring how the newsletter performs is just as important as the content you write. By checking out how many people open it and what they click on, you can understand the content they want to see more of. Platforms like Mailchimp have a section similar to Google Analytics that gives you all this information. If it’s done well, your audience will get plenty of value from it since you can round up your recent content, offer incentives, add links to your latest deals, and so much more.
A case study is an ideal format to highlight a success story. If your clients have used your products or services and loved them, tell that to the world. Case studies double as testimonials because they encourage potential clients to consider your business. They also build confidence, help during the decision-making process, increase audience engagement and allow you to repurpose content.
Your case studies can be written as articles, published as videos, or shared in audio format; it’s up to you. For inspiration, browse our case studies page, and you’ll see some of the great work we’ve done for our clients.
There’s been a 70% increase in online audio content in the last few years, which is a huge leap. This is largely because audio content is a more convenient way to consume information, especially considering our increasingly busy lives. With podcasts, you can reach your audience while on the go, whether on their commute or when they’re getting on with household chores. And, with distributors like SoundCloud and iTunes, it’s now easier than ever to inform, educate or entertain people.
Similarly to audio, videos are increasing in popularity because they’re quick and easy for audiences to digest. You can use them to show product demos, showcase your company culture, inform your audience, tell stories about your brand, and much more; video has endless possibilities. And it doesn’t have to be a glossy, expensive, high-end production that takes weeks to assemble. Depending on your brand and tone of voice, a short, simple video can increase website engagement and conversion rates.
Webinars (or web seminars) can be anything from video presentations and lectures to workshops. These online, interactive events will help you share your knowledge and expertise with large audiences, no matter where they are. Webinars can help you generate new content for your website. They’re a great way to engage, educate, and, most importantly, get to know your audience. Additionally, they help develop followers as well since you can have unlimited numbers of participants.
They’re also a cost-effective way to promote your business, allow you to add more value to your brand and help to cast you as an expert in your field.
This type of content is perfect for various businesses, from small to large companies. White papers are your opportunity to address an issue in detail and offer a solution to a problem, all with plenty of research to back it up.
For example, if you sell domestic appliances, a white paper can show your clients the benefits of purchasing a particular product. The same goes for watches; a white paper will have all the details and specifications of a watch, which can help people to make a purchasing decision.
There are many benefits to producing interview content. For example, it can help you develop ideas for your content and spark collaborative relationships between you and others in your industry. This type of content is fantastic as written blogs, podcasts and videos.
And if you’re the interviewer, you don’t even need to provide most of the content. Just ask the question, and the interviewee will provide the rest; is there any easier way to create valuable, engaging content?
Another big advantage is that people who know your guests (or follow them on social media) can find you when you interview them. This means you can reach a wider audience just by talking to people.
This is a visual way to educate your audience. Putting bite-sized information on a visually appealing image makes this information fun to engage with and easy to understand. Infographics can be shared and create backlinks to your website. These links from other websites to yours are seen by Search Engine Results Pages, like Google, as a vote of confidence. If you have many good-quality backlinks, you’re more likely to rank for relevant keywords.
Ebooks can easily turn into evergreen content and act as lead-generation tools. They also help to establish you as an authority in your industry. A major advantage of digital books is that they’re hosted on several apps and platforms, making them convenient for your audience no matter how they consume content.
If you’ve ever encountered the ‘social proof’ concept, you’ll know that it helps buyers feel more informed and confident about a purchase. For example, if you’re planning to buy a product, large or small, you probably check out reviews from existing purchasers. Likewise, if visitors to your website find positive reviews and testimonials from happy customers, they’re much more likely to choose your products or services over a competitor.
Because they come directly from your clients, they are the social proof needed to convert more people to your business. Testimonials are like referrals and help build trust, show the benefits of your products, and build an emotional link to your products.
And, while getting testimonials is one thing, you must add them to your website so people can see them when they’re scrolling through the pages on your site. Pepper them throughout the site instead of having a dedicated testimonials page – most people don’t tend to look there.
These are just some examples of the different types of content you can add to your overall strategy to help your business reach a wider audience.
As a content marketing agency, we can help you develop a content marketing campaign as part of your overall digital marketing strategy. Feel free to contact us to learn more about what we can do for you, and we’ll be happy to chat.
Businesses are presenting information to online audiences in various ways. Google continuously promotes user-friendly mediums by allowing content to appear in search results in multiple formats. Video content is increasingly popular on websites and across all marketing channels. More and more companies are taking advantage of video, and it is fast becoming a fundamental ingredient for a successful digital marketing strategy.
Videos can be used to share information about brands, products, services, reviews, how-to guides, and so much more. The use of visual media is increasing, and when considering the future of digital marketing, there is no doubt it will be front and centre. It is estimated that 92.6% of internet users worldwide consume video content each week.
When it comes to developing website content to be more engaging and informative, videos should be at the top of the list for several reasons:
Videos increase the time visitors spend on your website. If a person lands on a webpage but leaves quickly, it can be seen as a quick exit, suggesting poor content to search engines. The more time a visitor spends on a webpage signals to search engines that the page contains engaging and helpful content. This helps with your website’s SEO optimisation and the chance of converting that visitor into a customer or client.
Embedding the video on your page keeps the content highly shareable. Users can access and share the original video when content is uploaded to a video-sharing website such as YouTube or Vimeo. Using a third-party platform means the video isn’t hosted on the website and prevents the page from being resource-heavy and slowing it down. Slow loading pages will be frustrating to a visitor and reduce engagement.
Also, as well as videos being able to be shared across social media platforms, Google can also index the video in search results from the third-party hosting platform as well as the webpage it is hosted on within your website. Hence, the video can be indexed twice.
Research has shown that users are two times as likely to purchase a product after viewing content such as a video review or demonstration compared to text or images alone.
Many B2B companies use videos to generate website traffic as part of a B2B marketing strategy. Selling a service can be harder than selling a product online. Video format provides you with the opportunity to share more information about a service and who you are, all in a succinct and digestible way compared to text. When it comes to building trust, a video can be a powerful tool.
Mobile devices offer convenience and information at your fingertips. It's no surprise that mobile use has been on the up for years with no signs of slowing down. A mobile phone screen simply can’t show the same amount of text or images that a desktop can. This is why responsive web design has developed in the way that it has, providing different but equivalent user experiences across device types. Videos bridge this gap by offering the same high-quality experience regardless of device.
The starting point of any video is content creation. Develop an understanding of what you want the video to convey. Think about the tone, length and film quality. Consider using a professional videographer to make this first step easier with professional results that match your brand. Videos are a great ranking factor for SEO, consider creating relevant videos to enhance key product pages or services pages for a boost to your organic reach. Or, to help boost conversion rates and trust, consider using video for testimonials, case studies or on your key business information pages. Whatever you decide, make sure you have a clear aim and stick with it.
You have many options for video hosting. Vimeo and YouTube are two very popular free platforms. Facebook is also a free video hosting platform however it does compress files. Be prepared to see the video quality reduce if you choose to upload your video to your Facebook Business page. The second option is to upload the file to your website but be warned videos can increase the loading speed of your website.
Both YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook provide embed codes that can be directly added to website pages to ‘pull’ the video into the page.
Use Schema markup to clearly mark the video properties to Google and other search engines. VideoObject Schema includes details such as the content or embed URL and can be used with HowTo Schema. Marking up the videos increases the chance of them being indexed by search engines.
There is a reason that digital marketing agencies like ourselves will encourage the use of videos. Not only do marketers see the value in video, but Google also recognises this valuable media format, allowing it to be found in Google search results, Google Images, video search results, and Discover. They've even launched a Video Indexing feature in Google Search Console, allowing website owners to track the coverage website videos receive in search (whether it appears in Google search or not).
This new feature also provides information about why a video might not be indexable. There are several reasons why Google cannot index a video; the file could be too large or too small, a thumbnail may be missing, or the URL could be invalid. All information can be found within the report, allowing you to identify and amend the issue easily.
In addition, if a video file is too large, not only will this cause indexing issues, but it could negatively impact core web vitals, an important SEO ranking factor. For more information about video indexing, please see the video below from Google.
For additional information or help with your video marketing strategy, the team here at SQ Digital can help you out. Please request your FREE SEO audit today to discover what we could do for your website's SEO. Or, get in touch, and we will be more than happy to discuss our services with you.
Many components make up a successful Facebook advert, like the right objective, relevant targeting, engaging content, and great visual assets. In this blog, we share some elements that discuss what makes a Facebook advert successful, including testing ideas beyond your adverts to drive the best results.
Aligning content and images will benefit your campaign in multiple ways. Firstly, your target audience will feel your advert is personalised to them, increasing their chance of converting or engaging. Secondly, if your target audience is better engaged with your advert, this will positively affect quality ranking, engagement rate ranking, and conversion rate ranking.
Your adverts need to have a clear goal. Your CTA button should encourage your target audience, whether you design your adverts to increase brand awareness or drive a specific action like a sale or app install or generate leads.
For example, a conversions campaign should focus on CTAs that lead to revenue like “Shop Now”, “Order Now”, “Download”, and “Sign Up”. Whereas a traffic campaign could prompt users to ‘Learn More’ or ‘Subscribe’.
Make it clear to users in your target audience why they should click on your adverts or buy your products during your sale period rather than shopping with other advertisers when the competition is heavy.
No matter how long or short your sale is, state how long your sale is running to create urgency. Include a countdown, the percentage off, and how much people can save by shopping with your business. Adding social proof like testimonials can further encourage success for the products or services you’re promoting.
Your advert design and landing page should share similarities for a smooth transition from Facebook to your website.
By keeping elements like colours, fonts, logos, characters, and the structure of these elements the same as your landing page, users will feel like your landing page is an extension of your Facebook advert. The content in your advert should also match up, including CTAs, offers, prices, etc.
This continuity means you can avoid high bounce rates and achieve your overall objective better.
According to Ad Espresso, in 2020, 79% of Facebook users accessed the platform via their mobile, highlighting it’s essential to think mobile-first.
Consider designing images or videos for vertical placements, so it’s a full phone screen experience for your target audience. As a best practice, adverts should be created and optimised for each placement but on a lesser scale, consider prioritising mobile-first creatives then desktop.
Now we’ve covered advert elements and landing pages, consider how relevant your text and images are to your target audience. If your adverts don’t resonate with users, they will likely keep scrolling through their feed and not engage.
For example, suppose you are running a dynamic retargeting campaign on Facebook. In that case, your adverts will automatically show the most relevant products to your audience based on user behaviour, acknowledge that you know the user has visited your website and not yet taken the desired action.
For instance, a retargeting campaign that serves adverts to people who have added to their cart but not purchased. In this scenario, consider headlines like:
Whereas if you are running a prospecting campaign for an audience who hasn’t visited your website, the language you use will be very different. People in this audience will need to find out more about your business, service or products and be provided with a ‘hook’ before you can introduce specific retargeting phrases.
Carrying out continual testing is the only method of building the ‘perfect’ advert. Essentially you are trying to determine key information about your audience to deliver results.
You can easily categorise the elements of an advert to test and use the Facebook A/B testing tool. Without testing, it’s not possible to determine which adverts will give you better results.
Once you have established a method of testing and gathering data for your advert elements, you can also try testing other parts of your overall campaign.
Campaign structure:
Audience targeting:
Our tips can help you create the foundation for the perfect advert, so you can build upon this to find the best formula for your business.
Successful Facebook adverts also require considerations around targeting, audiences, objectives etc., that feed into your overall advertising strategy, which is why we’ve highlighted the importance of testing to drive results.
If you feel like you need further assistance to perfect your paid social media adverts, please do not hesitate to get in touch with our expert digital marketing team at SQ Digital. We have over 20 years of experience in digital marketing, and we are happy to hear from all businesses looking to improve their online presence.
Over the last two decades, especially in the previous few years, online marketing is becoming crucial to help your business succeed.
However, knowing how to start your digital marketing campaign can seem daunting, let alone keep up with the latest trends and best practices. Nowadays, it can even depend on your industry to know what you should do and what you should avoid; it can get complicated!
Here, we'll help you understand how to start your digital marketing campaign as a B2B (business-to-business) operator.
If you want to learn about what you can do ahead of launching your campaign to improve the chance of success, we recommend you read this guide from the beginning. However, if you want to skip straight to the “How to” guide, use the links below.
The ecommerce (commercial transactions conducted electronically) market is something we can all relate to since most of us have bought something online at some point. The buyer journey usually begins with research, often on a search engine such as Google or Bing.
With the B2C buying journey, the purchase decision is often driven by emotion, and the sales process can be quick and impulsive. The consumer will search for product information, which tends to be followed by market research looking for the best deal. This stage of the buyers’ journey can be influenced by adverts such as social media retargeting or Google retargeting banners on other websites.
For B2B, sales tend to be influenced by budgets, ROI (return on investment), and a logical mindset - the sales process can take months, and we will see how this impacts your strategy later.
On different platforms such as social media, you can advertise products to a given demographic and potentially prompt sales from people who initially had no intent to buy online. This tactic usually only works for B2C and is not viable for B2B.
You can begin to understand what may and may not work for a B2B marketing campaign by understanding more about your target market. Before you can do that, you should also understand your company’s purpose. Sharing your purpose with your target audience will lay the foundations for true success in marketing.
Building a brand is just as important as selling a product or service. Customers will return time and time again to a brand they can trust.
Before launching your marketing campaign, it’s essential to establish your brand values and proposition. Determine what products and services you provide and what the benefits are. Invest time to understand your customers' expectations, values, and what they deem important.
Trying to market everything you do to a relevant target audience can be time-consuming, costly and lead to thinning resources. The best marketing strategies will line up with a company's goals. For example, suppose the company wants to increase revenue for a new product. In that case, the marketing should primarily focus on the product launch and make it visible across all marketing channels and platforms. The focus of resources and effort will see more success than a broad but thin campaign across all products and services.
KPIs (key performance indicators) break down and clarify company goals into bite-size and digestible objectives to help teams understand their targets and how they fit into the broader company objectives.
For instance, if the aim is to increase revenue by attracting new customers, the KPI target for the Sales team could be to increase the number of calls with new customers. On the other hand, a Marketing team may have a KPI of growing customer sales leads through the website. The KPI could be website metrics such as new vs returning visitors, number of contact form submissions, email subscriptions, and so on.
KPI’s should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time-Bound) and be able to identify real improvements. The same is true for a marketing strategy – define the KPI’s, so success is measurable.
You know your target market is a business that needs the products or services you offer, but knowing who you are trying to attract specifically is even more insightful. A few factors you should consider are;
Knowing who to approach will undoubtedly change your marketing messaging. Remember that you will often be looking to identify two to three different client personas’ depending on your industry.
An established B2B business will have established USP’s. These are the factors that will set you apart from the competition. For instance, perhaps you offer an initial free consultation or a volume discount that increases when order number increases? Whatever it is, use it in your marketing strategy, shout it to the hills to get your target market to come to you and not the competition.
All businesses are unique and specific methods will work better than others. However, we’ve listed tried-and-tested methods that are best suited for B2B marketing. Use these tools in your B2B campaign to achieve your set KPI’s
As a B2B business, email marketing is something you really should be doing. It can offer the best ROI of all marketing channels when done correctly. When planning your emails, you should segment your email list into different persona’s to target your audience more effectively. You should automate the process to plan for scaling your email marketing.
Also, think about your audiences’ needs and not yours. It’s great that you have a new service or product, but that won’t necessarily catch their eye. Focus on how it will help your customers and what benefits they can expect. Create a catchy subject line to get their attention. Don’t forget to measure the success of your campaigns and tweak them accordingly.
B2B businesses tend to have less success with social media marketing channels such as Facebook and Instagram. LinkedIn offers an alternative platform to engage and connect with other businesses. There are almost 50 million business decision-makers active on LinkedIn.
Create engaging content using a social strategy that forms connections and interacts with your target audience. Aim to build beneficial relationships to help generate leads and referrals.
From our own experience and that of our clients, often personal profiles do better than company profiles, but both should be used synergistically as part of your LinkedIn marketing strategy.
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the practice of optimising a website to appear higher in a search engine, such as Google. Unlike paid ad listings using PPC (pay-per-click), these are organic results. A successful SEO campaign will help you bring in new customers and is an excellent tool for expanding your online reach.
Most user’s regard organic listings with greater trust as they are selected to rank higher based on merit. The keywords you target with your SEO campaign must be relevant and match the correct intent of a potential searcher. This will mean fewer irrelevant leads down the line.
The main thing to remember with a B2B SEO campaign is to be patient! Improvements in rankings can take months, depending on how much time you invest in your website. Coupling this with longer lead times for B2B, seeing a ROI can take time.
Launching a marketing strategy for your company is exciting, but regular check-ins with KPI metrics for each marketing channel must be a pillar of the strategy itself. Make sure that you are recording what is important for each channel.
As an SEO service provider, we monitor Google analytics and click data in Google Search Console and Google Business Profile metrics (formerly known as Google My Business). Calls and directions, for example, can be monitored, but the actual value of the SEO work is measured by the value of a lead, not just lead number.
For B2C businesses, it is easier to track a transaction value and is usually instant. As a B2B business, take the time to match up your marketing channels to lead value. This will improve your strategy and save you money in the future.
Often overlooked by B2B businesses, content marketing can offer numerous benefits. Webpage content explaining your products and services and what sets you apart from your competition is key.
A website is a modern-day substitute for the initial face-to-face contact with a company. Instead of being able to tell someone directly why they should buy from you, you will need to use content marketing to do this for you. Guiding the reader through the website and explaining what you can offer is essential. You should highlight your technical capabilities and expertise.
B2B webpages often lack content and don’t provide the user with much information to make a decision. This can be frustrating and results in a poor user experience and a potential client will go elsewhere.
Blogging regularly can improve your SEO and target clients who are still in the research phase of their enquiring journey. It is a simple technique that can expand your online reach. This could be your secret weapon!
One metric we track, is the device type used to look for our clients’ products or services. We regularly see that more B2B target audiences use desktop devices more than mobile, however this gap is narrowing and both platforms need to display a good user experience. A website must load quickly and efficiently across all devices. On average, if a webpage takes 3 seconds to load, 40% of people abandon the page and use a webpage from a competitor website. Effective B2B website design is one of the most overlooked parts of most B2B marketing campaigns and such a simple concept as page experience can impact lead generation significantly. A fast and responsive website works hand-in-hand with SEO, it can encourage PPC conversions and yet, without it, your marketing strategy can go down the pan. We would recommend you consult a website design agency, if you are not sure whether your website meets these criteria.
This is aimed at B2B companies who have a local presence or a physical address. Optimising your Google Business Profile with the correct information, photos, opening hours, service category and regularly posting content, can help you appear higher in local map pack results (please see an example image of these results below). For localised searches, these results capture most of the traffic available and so you need to appear here. In addition, good review ratings and review count, impacts advocacy and your profile’s rank. Ensuring that you have the infrastructure in place to encourage reviews from clients will help you out and increase the conversion potential of prospective clients. [insert image below]
The benefits of a PPC campaign are plentiful. Before investing in a long-term SEO campaign, PPC can ensure that even very niche B2B businesses can succeed and bring in relevant online traffic. PPC is an immediate form of marketing that can bring in leads fast. It can also verify the need for an integrated SEO and PPC campaign to maximise your leads. This marketing platform is a conversion driving tactic and involves using a budget to bid for advert placement at the top of Google search (we focus on Google in both our SEO and PPC campaigns due to the search engines 92% global market share). PPC for B2B companies can be expensive but focusing on long-tail (generally less competitive but more specific) terms can be rewarding. It can also help with brand awareness.
Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is another branch of your B2B marketing strategy, which without, can make it all pointless. Every single channel used links in one way or another to your business’s website as a central resource, but if the structure, layout, or any element of the website is confusing, unhelpful, or messy, then people just won’t enquire. Think of this as having a high-street shop but with bins and boxes cluttering the sales counter, very few people will make the effort to break through. A bad website user experience can unfortunately make your strategy destined to fail. You need to have a slick and easy to navigate website with an easy contact option. This involves minimal effort on the user’s part, but maximum information and slick design on the website’s part. It is not easy to know how everyone interacts with your website, but tools such as Microsoft Clarity are a great place to start.
This channel was traditionally considered as a B2C technique, however, increasingly B2B businesses are finding value in remarketing. Also referred to as retargeting, Google’s remarketing platform, allows adverts for your business to follow a website visitor across the internet after they have left your website. They can be set up so that they follow people who did not enquire on your website. This can be help you stay present in the minds of potential customers as they evaluate multiple different companies. Retargeting on Google’s Display Network has a lower cost per lead than other non-branded campaigns such as PPC.
Now we have looked at the top 10 B2B marketing strategies for 2022, it is important not so consider these different techniques as isolated campaigns. Every single branch works with the other channels and so you must approach your strategy in the same way. Remember, think SMART, regularly review progress and adapt based on your results. SQ Digital are an award-winning digital marketing agency who work with several B2B businesses. If you need any assistance in launching your B2B marketing campaign, then please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
There's been a significant shift in how small businesses use marketing, and traditional marketing efforts, such as print and billboards, are taking a step back. More and more businesses are realising the benefits of digital marketing and are investing more resources in digital marketing services, such as SEO, PPC, Content Marketing and Social Media. Business owners now have a wide range of digital marketing methods at their fingertips that can be adapted to suit their objectives, budget or industry.
It’s fair to say that digital marketing has entirely transformed how businesses connect and engage with their customers. With more consumers searching and buying online than ever before, digital marketing has become crucial. In essence, it allows businesses to effectively put their brand in front of their target audience at the right time and in the right place cost-effectively and measurably.
So, what does digital marketing have to offer you as a small or medium-sized business owner?
Investing in digital marketing services is crucial for your business; if existing or potential customers can’t find you easily online, they will likely go with another business. This is the nature of business today. If someone wants to learn more about your brand, they will probably research you online; perhaps they’re looking for reviews to see whether or not your company is a good fit for them.
As of last year, around 36% of small businesses were operating without a website. Without an online presence, potential customers may assume that you’re not legitimate or may not take you seriously. The result is that they will choose a competitor instead.
Consumer expectations have changed in today's digital world; the average customer tends to search for a product or service online, likely starting with Google. If you don’t have a website or social media presence, it will be next to impossible to compete.
Digital marketing helps to promote smaller businesses in a way that allows them to compete with well-established brands.
Unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing gives you the ability to monitor the performance of your campaigns in real-time. You don’t have to wait until your campaign ends to gather the data and analyse the results. By accessing timely data through tools like Google Analytics, you can review the effectiveness of your strategy and make changes accordingly.
Being able to gain these invaluable insights into your digital campaign allows you to respond quickly. You can adapt and refine your digital marketing strategy in line with your customers’ requirements.
It’s also much easier to measure the success of a digital marketing campaign. You can easily track metrics such as engagement and conversions, which is much harder to pinpoint for traditional marketing, such as print ads. With digital marketing, you can see results within a matter of hours, whether it be the number of visitors to your website, the number of people clicking on your ads or the level of engagement you’ve had on your social media posts.
Gaining additional customers is essential for growing your business in terms of revenue and profitability. There are several ways of reaching customers through digital marketing, from websites to video marketing and social media.
It also helps you to attract mobile customers, which is a huge and rapidly growing market. At the end of last year, in 2020, mobile devices (apart from tablets) generated 52.6% of global website traffic; in 2009, this value was 0.7%. Digital marketing helps you to capitalise on this traffic to ensure you’re not missing out.
Digital marketing offers a platform to explain why your customers should choose your business and why your products and services help them.
Rebranding a small business that you’ve been growing can be a daunting decision and task. You may hesitate at the idea; however, even though rebranding can be overwhelming, it can also offer many benefits, from breathing new life into your business to changing the way your target audience perceives you.
There are several reasons why a company might consider rebranding, such as transforming a brand that may have become outdated, further distinguishing a brand from its competitors’ or reflecting a change in your product line.
Such was the case with ROCCIA, the largest independent retailer of tiles in the North of England. The Company wanted to transition from Tile Mart into Roccia to reflect the high-end services and products. The challenge, however, was to ensure they didn’t lose the reputation they’d built over 20 years. To accomplish this, we created a content marketing strategy aimed at the new audience ROCCIA wanted to target, and a Digital PR campaign picked up by many publications.
After a 100% retention of authority and rankings and a 254% increase of traffic to blog posts, it’s fair to say that a well-thought-out digital campaign can help a business to follow a new vision by transforming its brand.
For a small or medium enterprise, keeping within budget is essential. Investing in staff to promote your services and products can be costlier in the long run; while you may have to spend some money on sales efforts to grow your business, having a strong online presence can help you boost sales and reach your audience more efficiently.
A well-designed website will ‘work’ for you every hour of the day, every day of the year, allowing potential customers on the other side of the world to easily browse your services and products outside of office hours. This means that, while your sales team is off the clock, your website is still hard at work and helping to bring in more business.
Many small businesses don’t have the budget available to utilise costly traditional marketing services such as TV and billboard adverts, putting them at a distinct disadvantage to competitors with larger marketing budgets. Only well-known brands can adopt this approach regularly, which meant that they could dominate the market with ease.
Luckily, digital marketing is an affordable and cost-effective option for all businesses. A well-executed and effectively targeted digital marketing strategy can reach potential customers at a much lower cost than traditional marketing. By only targeting users actively looking for your services or products, you save money and time.
This puts smaller businesses back in the game. By giving them resources that were previously only accessible to larger corporations, these businesses now have the ability to compete for the same traffic as those with much bigger marketing budgets.
For an example of this, you can read about the work we do for Electronic World. The trick is to be ‘strategic’ about your marketing campaigns; by clearly understanding the results of your data, you can increase your revenue without spending a lot of money.
We created a valuable asset for our customer Morecambe Metals; in this case, a well-researched infographic supported with creative content based on the popular TV show Game of Thrones. We succeeded in getting this featured by The Express newspaper, securing a link from a high-authority website and generating brand exposure nationally.
This only serves to prove that you don’t have to spend big money to get big results.
The reason why companies invest in marketing is simple: they want to maximise profit. Return on investment is the ultimate goal, whether it be through traditional or digital strategies.
We’ve already mentioned that digital marketing is cost-effective. Still, for business owners who want to achieve a high ROI, digital marketing has also proven to be successful without a shadow of a doubt.
We can track almost every aspect of our customer’s campaigns, rankings, conversions, leads, or traffic with our digital marketing services. Analytic tools allow us to focus on what is and isn’t working, enabling us to utilise the available marketing budget effectively. Simply put, we can stop spending money in areas that aren’t working and focus on what is most likely to drive enhanced ROI.
When it comes to paid advertising, ROI – or, more commonly, ROAS – is often the main KPI, especially for e-commerce businesses. ROAS (return-on-ad spend) is found by dividing ad spend by the revenue generated by ads.
Not only does this assist in identifying areas for optimisation, but it also allows decisions to be made using the data provided, such as how much money needs to be assigned where. ROAS essentially measures how much of your advertising spend you get back in revenue.
Digital marketing has completely revitalised the way businesses engage with both current and potential customers. It has made them at once accessible to new customers and familiar and recognisable to existing customers. So How Does Being Accessible Help with Brand Awareness?
Firstly, digital marketing has become an incredibly effective tool for building trust and fostering long-term relationships. It’s important to take advantage of social media platforms when it comes to connecting with your audience. By posting regularly, answering questions and queries quickly, and responding to reviews and comments – positive and negative – you are fundamentally improving brand loyalty and therefore increasing brand awareness. You are showing customers that you care about what they say and think.
Alongside this, you can also improve brand awareness through strategically planned content marketing that reflects your brand’s personality and motivations.
Content created with your target audience in mind can ensure that your brand is reliable and approachable. Writing articles and blog posts that reflect and address their interests and pain points will encourage more engagement and highlight you as an expert within your industry.
This is an approach that we have taken with our customer, The Aesthetic Skin Clinic. We have carefully developed a content strategy that has established them as an authoritative voice within the cosmetic sector, achieved through well-researched and well-written blogs, which have helped build trust among potential patients by educating them on their own health.
Traditional forms of marketing once meant sponsoring an ad during the break of a prime-time TV show and hoping that it reached the right audience. Fortunately, digital marketing allows for much more specific audience targeting. It’s no longer “one-size-fits-all” when it comes to marketing campaigns; it is now possible to become a lot more personalised. You can tailor campaigns to specific demographics, such as age, location, interests and gender, making them more effective.
With our client Axess2, a company that specialises in lifts, we targeted homeowners, architects and interior designers to establish Axess2 as a reliable expert in their industry. To amplify the reach of our content, we also created a targeted Digital PR campaign. This led to publications in important industry magazines, such as the Chartered Association of Building Engineers, and on websites such as the Durham Cathedral (after installing a lift in this UNESCO World Heritage Site building).
Specific audience targeting doesn’t restrict you to local campaigns either. In fact, you can realistically target people worldwide with just one marketing campaign. You can access a global audience through effective but specifically targeted strategies.
Social media platforms, in particular, have the ability to target ads to almost anyone; by using information collected from their users, they can target people according to their behaviours, lifestyles, interests and connections.
By using this insight into your customers’ interests and preferences, you can easily tailor and personalise the marketing messages they receive. This is often considered digital marketing’s biggest advantage over traditional marketing, as personalised messages make customers feel much more valued.
One of the best things about implementing digital marketing is that people no longer need to come to your physical store for you to make a sale. It now takes a matter of clicks to convert customers online. Your website is your store; it should offer potential customers everything they need to know about your product and services so that they can make informed decisions on whether to purchase and enquire.
Whether you’re spending money on sponsored Facebook ads or Google Ads, you can embed unique codes that allow you to track who, when and how people saw your ad, as well as what they did after this. Did they visit your website? And if so, which page did they view? Did they download content? Place an order? With digital marketing, you can monitor your conversion rate to see which leads turned into revenue.
With our customer Banks Lyon, we have executed a paid media strategy that utilises Google Ads and Google Display Network, creating a seamless user journey, from remarketing at the initial customer touchpoint through to enquiry and purchase. This has allowed us to track them every step of the way.
To make digital marketing really work for your business, you need a strategy that uses the resources available to you. Many businesses experiment with digital marketing services, e.g. using social media and posting a few Facebook posts here and there or spending a bit of money on SEO. To really benefit from the power of digital marketing, you need to adopt a more holistic approach. An efficient digital marketing strategy means tying in all digital channels and creating a collective and collaborative campaign. Integrating all the platforms available will go a long way to achieving your set objectives.
Without an online presence, it’s now impossible to compete and grow your business. We work with our clients to develop digital strategies that are an innovative blend of analytics and creativity. We work together to seamlessly create and implement innovative and robust digital marketing strategies that help grow their business.
You can view more of the fantastic work we’ve carried out for our customers on our case studies page.
You can also get in touch with us if you want to learn more about how we can help your business reach its potential online.
Boosting Facebook posts is an easy way to generate engagement on your business page. By paying a fee, you can direct your posts towards your target audience to increase the ad’s visibility. However, this differs from using Facebook Ads Manager because targeting and customisation options are more limited for boosted posts.
So before you rush off to boost all your Facebook posts in the hope of increasing ad engagement, you should be aware that there are limits to how much output you can get for your money.
While it’s better than not promoting your posts at all, you might not be getting the most from your ad spend. Here are 7 main differences to consider when deciding whether to simply boost your Facebook post or to use Facebook Ads Business Manager.
In Facebook Ads Manager, you have 11 objectives to choose from depending on what you want to achieve, including messages, store visits, conversions and leads.
When you boost a post, Facebook simplifies this by offering fewer campaign objectives. You do get a few optimisation options such as limited placements and audience targeting, but you won’t have access to the full scope of objective options offered in Ads Manager.
Before you decide to boost those Facebook posts, consider whether your ad would perform better with a much broader range of objectives to choose from in Ads Manager.
Custom audiences let you target people who are connected you to in one way or another, including customer lists, website visitors, and people who have engaged with your content, such as videos or blogs.
If you’ve used Ads Manager before, you can use these audiences in a boosted post. But, if you’ve never used Ads Manager, these relevant audiences won’t be available to create via boosted posts.
It’s essential that you target and interact with warm audiences that you’ve connected to before; these people are more likely to recognise your brand and engage with you.
Boosted posts let you customise in only three placements – Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram.
If you want to reach people on Facebook in other places, Ads Manager offers an extensive list of placements. The list includes (and there are many more) Facebook and Instagram Stories, Facebook Marketplace, Facebook Video Feeds, Facebook Groups Feed and Audience Network (both the external apps and websites). Like with boosted posts, you can select automatic or manual selection of placements.
Boosted posts are more limited. For example, you cannot isolate boosted posts to mobile or desktop, select a device type or choose an audience network. If you’ve data to prove that your ads work better on mobile rather than desktop, then your marketing budget may be better spent on ads displayed on mobile only. This isn’t possible when you boost a post.
Manual selection on Ads Manager is also great for A/B testing. You can split-test with specific ad objectives and learn more about how your target audience engages with your link ad. This will provide you with valuable data that can influence how your ad budget is spent in the future. This feature is only available in Ads Manager.
When boosting a post, Facebook creates a single campaign with one ad set and one advert. Ad sets consist of parameters like targeting and placement.
What if you want to test which audiences respond better to your product or service? You can do this in Ads Manager and create multiple ad sets under one campaign. For example, you might set up a conversions campaign and target one warm and one cold audience. This isn’t possible to do when boosting Facebook posts.
Similarly to creating multiple ad sets, it’s only possible to create multiple adverts in Ads Manager. You can test different images, copy and ad formats (such as carousel, video, collection, single image) all in one campaign in Ads Manager.
The boost post button is only built for one post.
Want to promote a flash sale or seasonal offer?
Ads Manager gives you the option to select accelerated delivery, meaning Facebook will show your ads as quickly as possible. Short, concentrated bursts of adverts can help to boost sales.
Boosting a post will only offer standard delivery, so it may not get in front of the right people at the right time.
Tracking the behaviour of your audience is essential. When boosting a post, you can add UTM parameters (tags) to the URL on your Facebook post before boosting, but both paid and organic traffic will be considered the same audience. UTM tracking also includes individual product identifiers for e-commerce, so you can track which products are your most popular and are attracting audiences.
Ads Manager lets you segment Facebook paid traffic so you can track and understand the effectiveness of your campaigns. However, you’ll need a website analytics tool to track the results.
When trying to decide whether to boost a post, it’s essential to consider what you’re hoping to achieve with your ad. Boosted posts are a great way to develop brand awareness and maximise your visibility and grow your audience. But for more advanced ads and campaigns that you have more control over, Ads Manager is the choice every time.
If you’re ready to take the plunge into the world of Ads Manager, don’t do it alone. No matter how big or small your marketing budget is, with the right team behind you, you can get your ads in front of the right people and increase your audience engagement. At SQ Digital, we understand the needs of small and large businesses and how a creative social media strategy can build long-lasting relationships with audiences to drive your business forward.
We are a digital marketing agency with over 20 years of experience providing digital marketing services, and our expert team are on hand to help get your business to the next level. Get a free website SEO audit today or get in touch to see how we can help.
Whether you’re a small business or a large company, your business will benefit from adopting the perfect tone to suit your audience. Tone expresses your company’s values, shows clients who you are, helps you to build trust and attracts people to your products and services. Striking the right tone makes your content more readable too, which will improve user experience and page rankings.
So, it’s clear that communicating with your audience with the right tone of voice is important – and finding it isn’t as difficult as you think.
Your brand personality is unique to your business and striking the right tone will show it.
If you’re a fun brand, your tone will convey that to your audience; you can rely more on light-hearted and quirky content, for example, and you should be chattier when you engage with people - choose a more active voice, shorter sentences and contractions as well.
Many brands do it right. Virgin, for example, is a massive company, but its personality and tone are centred on being bold, chatty and fun – and it works. People appreciate that a big brand like this is approachable and speaks their language.
If you’re struggling to find your tone, consider your personality so you can promote your best self.
For a great example of how tone can help your business’ personality come through, take a look at Wendy’s, a US fast food store. The brand is fun, bold and cheeky, and known for its ‘savage’ comments against competitors. Wendy’s also makes use of puns and made-up words (as well as emojis) to convey its messages on social media. Wendy’s is clearly not shy about letting its personality shine and this has been a successful strategy because people enjoy engaging with the brand.
Spicy, spicy! Very nice-y. Score yourself one FREE Spicy Chicken Sandwich with mobile purchase in the Wendy's app! 🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/wIYUkeVVJA
— Wendy's (@Wendys) April 30, 2020
A good tone of voice is also consistent.
By ensuring that everyone who represents your brand communicates in the same way with your audience, your message will be in the same tone at all times. This leads to consistent branding and to a boost in confidence that your brand is steady and dependable.
Whether you’re writing blogs, sending out newsletters or creating company videos, your tone must remain consistent if you want it to be recognisable by your audience.
Another way to find the tone that best works for you, is to make sure it fits with the social media platforms you’re using.
While your tone should be consistent, it should also adapt to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or any other channel. This is because platforms have different audiences and different expectations, and they also work very differently.
You can add up to 30 hashtags on Instagram (though you should pick only a few to avoid looking spammy) while you’re better off not adding any to Facebook. Instagram is highly visual, so images work better there when compared to Twitter, for example. Twitter has a post limit of 280 characters, so brands aren’t expected to write huge blocks of text. Being concise and straight to the point is preferred.
When adapting your tone to each platform, keep your target audience in mind and what they expect to see from your posts.
First of all, think about who your audience is. If you work with corporate clients, you should adopt a more formal tone; if, on the other hand, you own a clothing store, it’s better to choose a tone that connects with people on a more personal level, so aim for friendly or chatty.
So, knowing your audience will help you to find the perfect tone and whether or not to cut out jargon or techy language. It helps to know exactly what you want to say and the image you want to present. Remember that your clients might not speak your language, so keep it simple and easy to read – and understand!
Once you have this nailed down, you then want to make sure that the tone sets your brand apart from your competitors. It needs to be distinctive and unique to you so that your customers (and potential client base) can immediately recognise it. This, in turn, will build trust and help you to develop stronger relationships with your audience.
Greggs does this very well. Its tone is fun and chatty and refers to British culture with a great sense of humour. People enjoy replying to Greggs and re-tweeting its content, which is fantastic for brand awareness. Another thing that Greggs does well is to engage with public figures, as was the case with Piers Morgan and the famous vegan sausage roll ‘controversy’. The public banter actually helped to sell the product!
Top 10 romantic texts from my other half:
10. You
9. Can’t
8. Rank
7. Them
6. Because
5. They’re
4. All
3. Equally
2. Special
1. I’m going to Greggs do you want anything?
— Greggs (@GreggsOfficial) February 14, 2020
It goes without saying, the best thing you can do for your brand is, to be authentic and honest. Your tone should reflect who you are. If you’re not a quirky brand, don’t try to be! Choose the tone that reflects your values as they are, otherwise, you will risk turning your audience away.
People have certain expectations. If you work with lawyers, the language should be formal and authoritative, but if you’re targeting teenagers, you want your content to be fun and conversational.
Don't try to be something you’re not.
Dove is a great example. Its values focus on responsibility and on empowering its customers, and that’s easy to see in its tone. Dove is all about positivity and building self-esteem and confidence and uses language which reflects that ethos.
The tone of voice you use can be a powerful tool and it shouldn't be overlooked. Find a recognisable tone that will personify your brand’s values, and keep it consistent across all your marketing efforts – your audience will find it easier to follow your brand this way.
As part of our approach, we define the brand and tone of voice of our clients to ensure all our content marketing efforts are consistent with the clients. SQ Digital helps clients find the perfect tone that connects with their audience. Feel free to get in touch to find out more.
Trying to manage your own Google Ads account can be overwhelming, the multiple campaign types, bidding options and targeting methods are enough to intimidate anyone who wants to manage their own campaigns.
I’ve been working in digital marketing for over 5 years, predominantly in Paid Search, and I’ve helped a multitude of small to medium size businesses improve their PPC performance.
So, I decided to use my experience to help anyone who wants to understand Google Ads a little more clearly and save precious time and money in the process.
I’ve come up with 11 top tips to help improve your Google Ads account performance and (hopefully) increase your Return On Investment!
Google Ads offer many ways to advertise your business. From Search Network adverts to videos, there are several options for you to choose from. My first tip is to think about your overall business goals before you even begin creating campaigns. Ask yourself ‘What do I want to achieve from this campaign?”. Having a solid plan in place before creating and running a campaign will make it much easier to optimise and grow your Google Ads revenue.
Over time your landing pages may change; this could be due to the removal of a product or service from your website or the implementation of redirects for marketing purposes. It is of great importance that you ensure all of your landing pages used for Google Ads are up to date and do not redirect (301 or 302 response codes) or even worse, return 404 errors with no information on the page, which will lead to Google disapproving your advert.
If you use auto-tagging to handle tracking, you will notice that any clicks on adverts add a URL parameter called Google Click Identifier (GCLID), which enables you to see how effective your Ads campaigns actually are.
If your landing pages redirect this can stop the GCLID from being added to the landing page URL, meaning that your traffic and conversions may not be recorded as Google Ads traffic in Google Analytics. In my experience, you will see a large increase in ‘Direct traffic’ as there is no way of Google knowing the correct source of this traffic.
Google recently released the ability to add even more information to your adverts, allowing you to promote more of your key selling points to a user before paying for a click. Adverts now comprise of 3 main components:
In an advertising environment where it is difficult to stand out from the crowd, this change can give you a competitive advantage in your market. If your competition hasn’t yet updated their adverts, then you will have a larger and more visually appealing alternative than them.
Ensuring that all the above features are used as efficiently as possible will allow you to pre-qualify traffic more efficiently, ensuring that all clicks on your adverts are as relevant as possible. The more information you can provide to a prospect before they click on an advert, the more you will be spending money on the correct type of traffic, therefore increasing the likelihood that these users will enquire/complete a purchase.
Taking the time to ensure you have a structured hierarchy when building your campaign will save you management time in the future and even a reduction in average costs per click for your adverts.
When creating campaigns and advert groups, ensure that they are as relevant as possible, and themes are grouped together. It can be tempting to bundle multiple keywords into one advert group - this will only increase the amount of time you have to spend on optimising these campaigns/advert groups in future.
One trick is to create Single Keyword Advert Groups, or “SKAG’s”. This allows you to have total control over bids and adverts shown for specific keywords, alongside helping to decrease the amount you pay per click. SKAGS allow you to tailor your adverts more relevantly to keywords/landing pages, thus increasing your ‘Quality Score’ (Google’s rating out of 10, that forms 50% of where your adverts will appear on the Search page).
If you don’t build and manage PPC campaigns daily as I do, this one may seem like an obvious step. Well, when linking Google Ads and Google Analytics it’s important to keep in mind that this will not automatically import metrics such as ‘Bounce Rate’, Average Session ‘Duration’ and 'Pages Per Session'.
These are key metrics that allow you to understand how your Google Ads traffic is interacting with your website. You will be able to make data-driven decisions for your advertising to improve performance. For example, you may have an advert that is generating a good number of clicks, however, the bounce rate for the advert is high or the average session duration is low. This information gives you an indication of where an issue may lie, it may be that your landing page is not relevant to the searches that triggered your advert, the advert itself gives incorrect and/or outdated information (or information/offers in the copy are not replicated on your website) or your landing page itself may not be working.
Potential customers do not always convert on their first visit to a website, so you need to make sure that your brand is still at the forefront of people’s minds, even when they are not on your website.
You can do this by running a Google Remarketing campaign alongside your Google Ads campaign. Remarketing allows you to show specifically designed banners to prospects, who have visited your website but have not yet enquired, as they browse other websites on the internet.
If you own an ecommerce website, you should also run a Dynamic Remarketing campaign. The benefit of Dynamic Remarketing is that you can show prospects the specific products that they have been viewing on the website, rather than static banners. This increases the relevancy of your adverts and can lead to increased conversion rates when compared to static Remarketing.
Remarketing Lists for Search Ads allow you to add bid adjustments to prospects who are held on your remarketing list, as they search for your keywords on Google. This is slightly different to normal remarketing as the prospect is still actively searching for your product/service, meaning that the chances of them converting is higher than standard Google Remarketing.
A conversion is a valuable action that is taken on your website; a contact form submission, phone call or even purchase through the website. Setting up conversion tracking is something that you will probably need assistance with as amendments to your website will be needed to allow for the tracking of certain actions; your website developers should be able to assist you with this.
Conversion tracking is the best way to analyse the performance of your ads, and I would recommend having all the tracking set up and tested before enabling a Google Ads campaign.
Successful Google Ads campaigns are all about testing and tweaking. In advertising, you do not always know if something is going to work or not until you give it a go. Jumping into the unknown can be an unnerving experience, but when a test works well it is worth all the effort.
Google makes testing different bidding strategies easy with the use fo their automated tools. These allow you to quickly and efficiently change the bidding strategy that your campaign uses based on the goal you have in mind.
Automated Bid Strategies available in Google include the following.
Target CPA – Helps you generate the most conversions possible while reaching your average cost-per-acquisition (CPA) goal.
Target Return on Ad Spend – Helps you generate the most revenue from your campaign whilst maintaining a target Return On Ad Spend.
Maximise Clicks – Sets bids to generate the maximum number of clicks for your set budget
Maximise Conversions - Sets bids to generate the maximum number of conversions for your set budget.
Target Search Page Location – Helps you get your ads to the top of the page or on the first page of search results.
Target Outranking Share – Helps you outrank other domains adverts
Enhanced CPC – Automatically increases or decreases your manual bids to help increase conversions.
Target Impression Share – Automatically sets bids to target a certain percentage impression share.
Utilising the bidding strategies can save you time when managing campaigns, as Google takes care of the tedious tasks such as bidding, thus allowing you to spend your valuable time on the more important tasks such as your customers and growing your business.
When running Google Ads campaigns, it is important to view metrics that mean something to you. For example, if you are running a display advertising campaign where your main goal is brand awareness, you should ensure that you are looking at the correct metrics to assess the performance of the campaign.
In this example, you wouldn’t be as interested in Conversions generated from the campaign so you wouldn’t want to focus on metrics such as Conversion Rate and Cost Per Conversion. You would be more interested in advert impressions, frequencies that adverts were shown at and where your adverts appeared. These metrics would give you the information you need to analyse performance by making sure that people are seeing your adverts at an effective rate, in the correct places.
Advert Extensions allow you to provide additional information to be displayed by your adverts, some examples of these in Google Ads are:
You need to remember that any clicks on advert extensions are charged the same as a click on your base advert, clicks on advert extensions are not cheaper or free!
For a more in-depth guide to utilising advert extensions to their fullest, find our blog here!
Making the most of negative keywords can stop your campaign from wasting money on adverts that appear on irrelevant searches.,.
For example, you have an advert group specifically for the Phrase Match keyword “Organic Skin Products”. Your adverts can appear for keywords such as “Organic Skin Products for Men ”, however, you can also appear for “Free Organic Skin Products” which isn’t the type of keyword that you would like your adverts to appear for.
Negative keywords are a must when you are utilising different keyword match types such as Phrase Match and Broad Match keywords. These match types can be very lucrative as they can be used to find lower volume, high performing variant keywords that you may not think to use in your campaigns, however, they can also lead to irrelevant clicks on your adverts if you don’t utilise negative keywords.
Google Ads is an invaluable tool for SMEs when well maintained and effectively managed. The above information is only the tip (or should I say 11 tips!) of the iceberg when it comes to managing Google Ads campaigns. One of the main challenges of managing your own campaign is having the time to ensure your campaign is performing well. Hopefully, the above tips will help improve your Ads performance and save you some heartache.
If you are interested in speaking to a Google Premier Partner about Paid Search Management, you can get in touch with us through our website or by giving us a call on 01524 580 777 for more information.
Getting your business noticed on Google is pretty much every business owner's goal - or at least, it should be. With the digital age getting bigger, faster, and more competitive every day, you must be pulling out all the stops to ensure that you're top of your game - and getting to the top of those Google searches wouldn't go amiss, either!
However, to get the most out of being in the prime top spot on Google, it's important to know what works best to get people to click on your ads and drive traffic and potential business leads. One of the most successful ways to catch the eye of potential customers is to utilise advert extensions.
Advert Extensions are a feature of Google Ads that allows you to implement additional information into your adverts and extend the amount of information you can use to influence a prospect's decision.
Basic Search Network adverts can be quite linear, adverts convey a simple message, directing users to one page on your website. This limits the performance of your adverts as one message doesn’t suit all, and what one prospect may find appealing, another may not.
According to Google, for every ad extension within your adverts, Click Through Rates can see an uplift of between 10% and 15%, highlighting their significance.
Furthermore, most advert extensions increase the actual size of your adverts, especially on mobile devices. Increasing the real estate of your adverts limits the number of competitor adverts visible before scrolling down the Search page, making your advert a more likely option to be clicked and therefore increases the likelihood of quality traffic being directed to the website.
For this post, we will focus on 7 advert extensions that will help your business generate more enquiries, these extensions are;
All the above advert extensions, when implemented properly, can help take your Google Ads campaign to the next level. With each having a specific goal in mind, it makes it easier for prospects to call your business or give more information to a prospect before they click on your advert to promote yourself as knowledgeable in the industry.
Advert extensions can influence a prospect on their path to purchase. You shouldn't dismiss the importance of relaying your intended message when it comes to PPC advertising, as this is your “Shop Window” to a potential customer.
Utilising Sitelinks will enable you to show all this information in the same advert, along with a link to a relevant page on your website. This makes it easier for prospects to look for information, pre-qualifying the traffic before they click on your advert and saving you money.
In the above example, a prospect may initially search for “Holidays in France” however they may also be looking to book a holiday home for their stay. The Luxury Holiday Homes sitelink extension tells the prospect that holiday homes are also offered, making the overall advert more relevant to the individual. This relevance may increase the chances that the prospect turns into a customer.
Callout extensions allow you to “Callout” services or unique selling points, which is vital when setting your business apart from competitor advertisers. The below example shows the type of information that this extension is perfect for.
Conveying important information before a prospect clicks on your adverts is pivotal to running an efficient PPC campaign. Before clicking on the above advert, you know that you can use the website to search by make and model whilst also searching for a dealer near you. Pointing out these user experience points helps set the prospect's expectations before they click on your advert, increasing the likelihood of them turning into a customer.
Similar to Callout Extensions, Structured Snippets allow you to list more information about your products or services. There are many types of Structured Snippets that you can choose from; such as Brands, Courses, Destinations, Amenities, and Neighbourhoods.
As you can see in the above advert, before we click on the advert we know that Siblu offer holidays to Les Charmettes, Domaine de Soulac and many more destinations. This improves the relevancy of the advert to the prospect, and allows you to filter out, pre-cost, users who are actively searching for a service/destination you are not looking to promote.
Call extensions allow advertisers to display a phone number in their advert, enabling prospects to easily call a business.
Call extensions are vital, especially if you conduct most of your business over the phone.
Making it as easy as possible for prospects to get in touch with you will increase the chance of them making that step to purchase, especially when call extensions show as a “Click to Call” function on mobile devices. It is important to note that you can schedule call extensions, meaning that they only show on adverts when your phones are operational.
Thanks to Google's 'forewarding numbers', we can not only measure how many times a user has clicked the extension, but we can also track the call as a conversion, including the number called from and the time spent on the call.
Location extensions are perfect for online businesses that also have physical stores. Linking your Google My Business and Google Ads accounts will allow you to show the location of your physical store, with an option to get directions to your store.
Even in this digital age people like human interaction and, depending on your business, it may be easier for people to come and see you, rather than buy online.
Using location extensions blends both digital and physical marketing.
With the introduction of Google's 'Signals' Beta, eligible Google Ads customers using Location Extensions and Google My Business listings for 2 or more stores can record 'Store Visits', giving more data and insight into how a user interacts with your brand post-click which was not previously available.
Price Extensions are a must-have for advertisers, as these extensions allow you to display a product/service price within your advert. As clicks cost, it is important to pre-qualify traffic based on their expectations and budget levels.
Displaying the cost of your offerings can save you money, as you are not paying to send people to your website, only to find out that you are out of their price range. Therefore, it’s important to ensure you have the budget available for users who are in a position to pay for your services.
Seller Ratings allow you to show a Star Rating against your advert and offer subliminal trust to a prospect as your advert is verifying your integrity as a business.
To run seller ratings, you need to have over 150 unique reviews and a composite rating of 3.5 stars or more. However, the work will pay off as these ratings are invaluable in terms of the subconscious trust given to users. In the world of advertising, it can be difficult to stand out from the crowd. Seller Rating extensions will allow you to do this, especially compared to any competition not using them.
It’s fair to say that advert extensions are a brilliant way to make the most of your advertising space. They allow you to add extra, vital information to adverts that would otherwise be quite plain and linear. They also allow you to build subliminal trust between your business and a potential customer.
However, just adding extensions to your adverts will not make your business an overnight success. This is where PPC management comes into play, being able to interpret data and optimise accounts to perform at their best - driving quality leads and sales into your business.
Talk to a member of the SQ Digital team to find out if advert extensions and PPC management could work for your business.
During the past decade, there has been a revolution in search technology that has deep implications for any business with a web presence. That revolution centres around semantics – the meaning behind words, or Schema Markup and Structured Data.
This article will look at the background of search and how semantics have become important; the tools at our disposal to help index a site’s content semantically; a brief introduction to the practical side of this with supporting links; and an exploration of some of the fundamental concepts underpinning this - entities and trust. Finally, we’ll look at what is on offer as far as search results go and what the end-user might see.
The nature of online search technology has changed quite considerably since its birth in 1990. Once they had evolved a bit, from 1995 onwards, search engines worked by providing a list of possible answers to search queries. This was based on the words they contained in the search query, and it was then left to the searcher to select what looked like the best match to show them what they were searching for. This ambiguity and transparency in the search engine algorithms meant that you could use many tricks to gain high positions in the search results without necessarily containing the information that the search query was trying to find. Or in other words – search results were often not very useful to the searcher, and there was a lot of “spam”, so to speak.
Early search engines like Lycos, Yahoo, WebCrawler, Excite, AltaVista and Infoseek all made contributions to how end-users could navigate and find things on the World Wide Web ("WWW"). But they all struggled to stay ahead of those seeking to game the systems. Natural language queries, methods of indexing, the crawling of meta-data, back-links – these were a few of the innovations that gave search engines far greater scope. However, it also opened them up to being “gamed” and subjected to “Black Hat” techniques, which perhaps ironically gave rise to the vast majority of the SEO industry 15 years ago.
Google made a lot of effort to try and put this underhand activity firmly in the past, and it put restrictions in place to stop spam with the introduction of “nofollow” links in 2005. The Panda update in 2011 also put the squeeze on using techniques like content farms and scraper sites - all popular underhand ways to try and get those precious top page rankings. During this time, search engines that had become dominant – Google, Yahoo! And MSN – collaborated to develop Schema.org, a key development for realising a semantic web. The search engines designed schema to provide a fundamental lexicon of terms that would be useful for describing websites and the activities that go on around them.
The Google Hummingbird algorithm in 2013 was designed to make semantics central, and it was at this point Google started to reward websites incorporating semantic markup and Schema. Context and meaning started to become a reality in an internet search. The aim: to make search return accurate and relevant information for the end-user. Since 2013 AI and semantics have become the heart of search engine technology, and user experience has become absolutely central. As recently as 2017, a Google search algorithm update unofficially dubbed “Fred” punishes sites with low-quality backlinks and sites that prioritise monetisation over user experience. These days websites have to do what they say on the tin and mean what they say. Also, speed, ease of use and clarity are crucial factors in getting listed in search results.
Even those who only have a passing interest in internet technologies are probably aware that the words associated with a web page are important. As with any index, keywords are used to match the search with the most relevant results when trying to find something in a mass of information. However, searches based purely on keywords – strings of text – don’t consider ambiguity, synonyms, etc. Before Hummingbird, searches on Google were not particularly accurate and required some digging around to find exactly what you were looking for. Inevitably, competition for certain keywords became very high, especially when the “real estate” of the Search Engine Results Pages ("SERP") is effectively just the first 3 or 4 positions, and the whole industry was born to take advantage of searches based entirely on keywords.
The problem was both the ambiguity of meaning and the ambiguity of identity. To illustrate the issue, here’s an example from the Wikipedia page on “Word-sense Disambiguation”:
“To give a hint of how all this works, consider three examples of the distinct senses that exist for the (written) word "bass":
and the sentences:
To a human, it is obvious that the first sentence is using the word "bass (fish)", as in the first sense above, and that in the second sentence, the word "bass (instrument)" is being used as in the latter sense. Developing algorithms to replicate this human ability can often be a difficult task, as is further exemplified by the implicit equivocation between "bass (sound)" and "bass (instrument)".
While machines can manipulate pure data at incredible speeds, the measure of context is a recent development. Semantics – the differences and/or similarities in perceived meanings of words, sentences, and/or phrases relative to context – is now a factor in the machine algorithms running search engines. And so there has been a lot of effort made by Google to make it clear and easy for those submitting websites and pages that they need to make their content understandable to these machine algorithms and specify the meaning of their web pages with a high degree of accuracy.
The vocabulary used by web pages needs to be authentic. It used to be enough to include certain words in the text of pages to rank for them, but no more! Google’s artificial intelligence algorithm (RankBrain) detects patterns of search queries, their context and consequent user behaviour. This has resulted in the focus shifting very strongly towards providing a good user experience and useful information. The real advantage is now in content with a clear context solidified around trust. Ambiguity is no longer useful, and as a result, confusing and unengaging content is irrelevant. Google is now giving major boosts to quality content. Why? The end-user, the searcher. From their behaviour, Google can now tell if the search results gave a meaningful answer to what they were looking for.
In the early days of the search engines, a large percentage of the vetting of site submissions used to be done “by hand” to give search results some accuracy. However, the scale of growth in the WWW and the number of pages and sites to be tracked became too much for that technique (though it is still used to calibrate search accuracy, apparently). A machine algorithm became essential and, by default, a language for it. And thus, we have…
In 2011, the major search engines collaborated to lay down a vocabulary and language so that machines could read content made available on the internet. The result was the Schema ontological framework – a vocabulary to be used in conjunction with a certain type of markup that makes the content of a web page explicit in the metadata. Since then, JSON-LD has steadily been gaining ground as the preferred markup method over RDFa or Microdata. A quick look at the entire Schema hierarchy should give you some idea of its scope.
The vocabulary is made up of URI’s – stable nodes in the web that are used as atomic or basic statements in the language.
“A Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) is a string of characters designed for unambiguous identification of resources and extensibility via the URI scheme.” - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URI
For example, to identify the nature of your business unambiguously, you might use the URI http://schema.org/HealthAndBeautyBusiness or the more general http://schema.org/LocalBusiness. While Schema.org sets a fundamental set of terms, you can add other ontologies. For example, auto.schema.org adds specific terms for cars, motorcycles, etc. Similarly, Wikipedia can be used as a stable reference possessing unique addresses for concepts and things. Because Wikipedia is such a well-established and trusted entity, its pages can also be used as part of the ontological language.
Schema.org provides a universal semantic language for those wanting to markup their identity and content with machine-readable data. Since it is based on RDF, it can also be linked to many other ontologies with their own URI’s for particular terms. The data that it holds can then be interpreted and linked to other semantic statements.
“Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) are a single global identification system used on the World Wide Web, similar to telephone numbers in a public switched telephone network. URIs are a key technology to support Linked Data by offering a generic mechanism to identify entities (‘Things’) or concepts in the world.” - Australian Government Linked Data Working Group
A semantic statement would be a “triple”, made up of stable URI’s. For example, we could state in semantic terms:
[http://schema.org/LocalBusiness] [http://schema.org/Service] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_marketing]
That is: This Local Business provides the Service Digital Marketing.
Using the Schema Ontology and JSON-LD markup, this would look something like this:
{
"@context": "http://schema.org",
"@type": "LocalBusiness",
"makesOffer":
{
"@type": "Offer",
"itemOffered":
{
"@type": "Service",
"name": "Digital Marketing",
"sameAs": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_marketing"
}
}
}
This is a very brief and rudimentary example of implementing Schema with JSON-LD. There is so much detail in the Schema vocabulary that it quickly becomes overwhelming. Also, be warned that some of the documentation and examples on the site are incomplete and/or confusing. It seems that the best way of using it is still being hashed out. However, the main pages on the site are definitely worth digesting.
When trying to tackle Schema to markup your website, you should also bear in mind that there are only so many things that have been implemented from it in the search engines. So, to begin with, it’s probably worth sticking to the examples given in Google’s Search Gallery. For further examples and information on the writing JSON-LD markup, check out some of the following sites:
“Things, not strings”
Illustration 1: The fundamental requirements for Semantic Search, courtesy of David Amerland
Entities in the semantic web are trusted points around which other data revolves. An entities address – how to reference and link to it – is its URI. http://www.schema.org is the base URI used for all the vocabulary of Schema. Companies and businesses could establish their entity by specifying a URI with a website and including semantic statements to that effect.
By embracing semantics, the nature of search on the internet has changed from a system that you could easily fool into a larger conversation where authority, trust, reputation and influence are integral to the stability of the node and where it sits in the overall landscape. Thus, websites representing businesses and companies must be consistent, useful, reliable, and easy to access.
Illustration 2: The Semantic Web Tower, first proposed by Tim Berners-Lee, with annotation.
An entity could have many semantic statements attached to its node or URI. This describes its identity in certain terms that are machine-readable. Relationships with the Entity can be stated, determined, and found. The language used to describe a business becomes central. Straplines, key concepts, themes, and identity could and should all point to URI’s to strengthen their place in the WWW and help form a clear picture of the business's presence online. The sum of these forms the Digital Signature, and this is, to some extent, what is visualised in the Knowledge Graph on Google. Associated images, facts, data and so on can be drawn from all over the Web to populate this.
Back in 2006, Tim Berners-Lee described linked data as follows:
“The Semantic Web isn’t just about putting data on the web. It is about making links, so that a person or machine can explore the web of data. With linked data, when you have some of it, you can find other, related, data.”
And that is largely what Google’s Knowledge Graph is intended to consolidate so that answers to user questions and queries can be displayed in one place directly on Google.
Here is an excellent example of some of these concepts being applied by Connecting Data: London as a Graph – make sure to check out the Schema in Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool. More recently, Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster tools) has introduced a new reporting section for unparsable structured data. Should you implement any Schema on your website, GSC will flag any errors or opportunities for improvement in this report.
Semantic statements are held by the quality and authority of their references (i.e. the URI’s). The entity described by these statements takes its place in a wider conversation of context and meaning. For some idea of the extent of what these mean, have a look at http://lod-cloud.net/clouds/lod-cloud.svg – the LOD cloud is a visualisation of the extent of the Semantic Web and its many data silos, nodes and vocabularies.
Illustration 3: Can you spot your business entity? Find a place in the conversation. (Source: bordalierinstitute.com)
The below two screenshots give you some idea of the changes that have taken place in Google’s Search Result Pages since the introduction of the Knowledge Graph. The main thing to note is that the “10 blue links” have been slowly breaking up and various “Cards” and “Rich Snippets” now sit amongst the search results. In terms of SERP’s, this is the payoff for implementing Schema markup on your site. In terms of the Semantic Web Tower illustrated earlier, this is the top-level – the human access –, and it is a sign of things to come.
Illustration 4: Google SERP's c.2011
Illustration 5: Google SERP's c.2018
It would help if you understood that semantic markup doesn’t necessarily improve ranking (though structured data markup is becoming increasingly essential), but it will improve visibility and provide specific answers to specific questions. When a search query elicits a particular entity, its appearance in search results will have a lot more detail or, in other words, will be content-rich with associated images, information, data, links all appearing, hooked into that entities web presence. Here’s a good article highlighting the benefits of engaging in Structured Data markup.
Click-Through Rate ("CTR") is important, as well as dwell time on a page. Good quality content and excellent user experience are essential, and it will get your content and data appearing in those Rich Cards and Snippets. When users click on your listing and spend time on the page or share it and link to it, all that will be read by Google and solidify that page’s internet presence.
So, businesses themselves need to have a clear picture of who they are, what they do and why. Marketing experts are well acquainted with this sort of idea as it has solid ties to branding. The difference here is that every term can be linked to other WWW entities to disambiguate and make the message strong and clear.
Furthermore, the massive increase in voice searches and other non-PC queries makes allowing the essential data that is associated with an entity to be accessed by search engines even more important. Once Google has a verified and solid graph, it can use that to provide direct answers to questions.
Semantic markup is not yet obligatory, but it is fast becoming essential as the internet pitches towards “Things” and their presence as “Entities” with a place in the WWW. All this is aimed at helping the end-user by increasing accuracy, reliability, trust, and authority. It is essentially a return to the initial premise of creating content that is valuable and easy to find for the user. Yet, it is also a fundamental shift in the basis of connectivity and searches on the internet. The effects are only beginning to be felt as the data, context and meaning are sorted and analysed by the AI behind the big search engines. The transformation of the medium into entities connected by their meaning rather than arbitrary links brings the internet closer to the ideal as conceived by Tim Berners-Lee. Ultimately, looking at your digital presence with this in mind will help appreciate what you do, what you represent, and where you are as a business. And your visibility will be a signifier of how profound that appreciation and your ability to take part in the online conversation really are. Schema conveys many benefits, including the recent automatic eligibility for free shopping ads.
Useful Resources:
