Marketing Blogs

The Tools and Tech You’ll Need to Level Up Your Influencer Marketing

Wed, 13 Apr 2022 18:06:00 GMT

The influencer marketing space has radically changed over the past two years.

TikTok Testing New Kindness, Safety Options

Wed, 13 Apr 2022 17:15:00 GMT

TikTok is now testing a way for people to identify comments that they believe to be irrelevant or inappropriate, with the goal of adding that community feedback to the range of other factors it uses to keep its comment section relevant and ensure that it is a place for genuine engagement.

How To Write Effective Listicles

Wed, 13 Apr 2022 16:44:00 GMT

Pilsen Paraguay: The Pilsen Extra Moustache

Wed, 13 Apr 2022 16:38:00 GMT

According to different studies*, at least 1.2 million litres of beer are wasted every year as they get trapped on facial hair, with about 0.56 millilitres getting stuck in the beard per sip. To tackle the issue and save the beer, Pilsen Extra, the AB InBev beer of “pure malt with the perfect level of creaminess”, has created a new moustache style which made the front page of magazines in LATAM.

The beer brewer, along with creative studio Grey Argentina, teamed up with the finest barbers to fashion a special facial hairstyle that leaves clear a very specific area of the upper lip where beer drops tend to accumulate.

Lifebuoy Shampoo: Mein Choti Si Aik Ladki Hoon (I am a little girl)

Wed, 13 Apr 2022 16:38:00 GMT

Lifebuoy Shampoo and the Ministry of School Education Punjab have partnered and made a real impact on girl-child education, empowering them to fulfil their potential through inclusive school experiences and opportunities.

In Pakistan, there is only 7% of female representation in the school curriculum. This groundbreaking campaign 'Mein Choti Si Aik Ladki Hoon' (I am a little girl) has created a movement and inspired policy-makers to revise the curriculum to a more balanced syllabi -for the first time in Pakistan's history.

To kick off the initiative, Lifebuoy Shampoo and GREY Pakistan revisited Jameeludin Aali's iconic children's poem, which is told from a male perspective. The original poem has been part of the school curriculum through the ages to encourage and motivate all children.

Zehra Nigah, a much-loved and critically acclaimed Pakistani literary figure, has rewritten the poem through a female lens, aiming to inspire young girls to also dream big.

Twitch: How to Turn Off Animated Emotes in Chat

Wed, 13 Apr 2022 15:45:00 GMT

By default, when Twitch users send animated emotes in chats, the animation will play for other viewers to see. However, users have the option to turn off animated emotes if they'd prefer.

Pinterest Rolls Out Extension for Ecommerce Platform WooCommerce

Wed, 13 Apr 2022 15:40:00 GMT

Pinterest released a new extension that enables merchants on ecommerce platform WooCommerce to convert their product catalogs into shoppable Product Pins.

John Deere: Arctic Watch

Wed, 13 Apr 2022 15:22:00 GMT

“The Arctic Watch“ campaign tells a visually stunning story about the reliability of John Deere—and how real Deere owners make the most of their land, even in places as remote and rugged as the Canadian Arctic, thanks to equipment they can trust. Video of Tuesday in the Canadian Arctic | John Deere Gator™ Utility Vehicles Video of The Arctic Gator™ | John Deere

Red Bull Athlete Dario Costa: The Tunnel Pass Project

Wed, 13 Apr 2022 15:22:00 GMT

On September 4th, 2021 in Istanbul, World-famous Red Bull Athlete Dario Costa accomplished a hair-raising stunt in his racing plane. The daredevil aerobatic pilot took on his greatest challenge yet, defying all odds to become the first person ever to fly a plane through a tunnel and setting 5 World records in the process. Dario and Red Bull brought the guts and creative agency Wien Nord Serviceplan together with brand partnership specialist Now Serviceplan provided the right backup for him to turn a dream into a success story.

CDC National Center for Injury Prevention and Control: The Path to Recovery

Wed, 13 Apr 2022 15:22:00 GMT

Addiction is a treatable disease, not a character flaw. But social stigmas related to substance use disorders still serve as a barrier to treatment. Challenges like healthcare provider bias, misrepresentation in media, and judgements about treatment options were all cited as real obstacles for those seeking recovery. This spot reframes the conversation by focusing on it from an individual level. Through clever casting and imaginary world-building, the preconceived notions about recovery are stripped away, reframing the discussion from one of judgment to one of unconditional support.

Veuve Clicquot: Good Day Sunshine

Wed, 13 Apr 2022 15:22:00 GMT

Veuve Clicquot, the iconic champagne House, has long been a symbol of profound optimism, boldness, and steadfast resilience. To commemorate 250 years of excellence, Veuve Clicquot will unveil an international brand campaign titled, “Good Day Sunshine”, highlighting the House’s solaire culture, which expresses one of Madame Clicquot’s convictions that each new day opens new paths to build a brighter future.

How Marketing Silos Can Hamper Your Business And How To Break Them With Cross-channel Marketing

Thu, 13 Jan 2022 17:03:00 GMT

Employing multiple marketing channels to increase your brand’s reach and visibility? Great tactic! However, simply setting up these channels shouldn’t be the be-all-end-all of your marketing strategy. Imagine this- a prospective customer chances upon your Instagram handle and is impressed by your posts; they’re informative, conversational, and very engaging. Subsequently, they sign up for your newsletter, too, only to be put off by the content and tonality that greets them over there. But, what’s to say that the disappointment of your newsletter won’t cause them to disengage from your brand altogether.

Source

Basically, the takeaway from this illustration is that establishing multiple marketing channels will bear you fruit only if you ensure consistent messaging across them all. Allowing your channels to exist as independent entities that are disconnected from the happenings of one another will only bring you more harm than good.

The scenario that we highlighted above is an accurate example of silo marketing- all the channels are isolated; the insights derived from one marketing channel are neither taken into account nor integrated with another. None of the constituent units of your marketing department communicate with one another, meaning there’s absolutely no exchange of ideas and reflections. The silo approach, therefore, when it comes to marketing is largely frowned upon because it drastically hinders the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

When you see a single marketing channel prospering and thriving, you want to capitalize on it to the maximum possible extent- this is the primary reason why most businesses fall prey to the clutches of silo marketing. In the process of extracting short-term gains from one channel, they overlook the long-term dividends that they could have obtained by leveraging other channels. It is essential for marketers, thus, to not only factor in all their marketing channels while executing a campaign but also to have a unified goal in mind.

Silos can hamper your business in the following ways:

When none of your channels have any clue about the kind of traffic and engagement that each of them is receiving, they’ll never be able to deliver a unified and seamless experience to your customers. As a result, your buyers might either need to start from scratch when they hop from one channel to another or receive communication that is entirely irrelevant to them. Consider this scenario- you’re launching a new service, and you want your writing team to come up with a host of promotional blogs for your website; you brief them about the same. However, since your social media team has no idea about this development, they carry on with their business as usual. Meanwhile, the team working on Google Ads is busy promoting a different product altogether.

Now, imagine this from the customer’s perspective. When they visit your website, they’re alerted to the launch of a new service via your blog. To find out more about the same, they decide to look up your social media profiles, only to find no mention of it over there. This makes them doubt what they read on your website. And to top it off, the targeted ads (from the Google Ads team) sent their way revolve around a completely different product altogether. All of this is highly confusing and disorienting for your buyers. Such an experience will prompt them to either stop engaging with your business or unsubscribe from your communications. At the end of the day, there is only one outcome- poor and inconsistent customer experience.

When your marketing department is siloed, there might also be instances where different fonts and colors are used across various channels, leading to an inconsistent brand image. All silos do, essentially, are breed confusing situations, thereby robbing your business of genuine engagement opportunities. Consequently, this leads to reduced brand loyalty and ultimately lesser conversions and sales.

When there’s no coordination between the different departments of your marketing team, there’s no way of keeping a tab on the tasks that the team has accomplished as a whole. As a result, much time is wasted attending to tasks that might have already been taken care of. Let’s say you open a website for your business and populate it with high-quality, engaging, and SEO-optimized content.

However, a few weeks down the line, you notice that the blog is not amassing as much traffic as it should have. So, what went wrong? Turns out, while your content is undoubtedly top-notch, it is not at all palatable to your business target demographic. If only the writing team had once consulted the sales team to find out about the same. Now, all the content has to be done from scratch. Situations like these not only pile up your workload but also considerably demotivate your employees.

Cross-channel marketing helps you foster an interconnectedness between your different marketing channels, which breaks marketing silos and ultimately powers you to deliver an integrated and personalized experience to customers and prospects alike.

Take a look at this example. Revolve has used consistent messaging across channels to deliver a great customer experience.

Listed below are a few more ways in which cross-channel marketing comes to the rescue.

Every cross-channel marketing strategy hinges religiously around data, and the best part is that the data repositories are made accessible to all the marketing channels in the setup. Because there’s an exchange of data and insights between the participating channels, they continuously build off one another. From a customers’ perspective, they’re spared from the trouble of starting from scratch upon switching from one channel to the next. This heightens their user experience by leaps and bounds.

In a cross-channel marketing setup, the participating channels complement one another, allowing businesses to deliver a unified experience. Suppose you visited the website of an online grocery store and browsed their dairy section. Next, you’ll receive a product recommendation email highlighting their best-selling dairy products. This mail, in turn, will have a CTA button that’ll lead you to their mobile application or website where you can complete the transaction.

Cross-channel marketing allows you to intercept your customers with the right message at the right time irrespective of the channel with which they’re interacting with you. Because the communications are targeted and personalized, brands enjoy significantly higher customer satisfaction levels.

Your business has a diverse range of customers who get exposed to your products and services through different marketing channels. Cross-channel marketing allows you to deliver a unified experience across all channels, thereby ensuring that you remain in the back of your customers’ minds at all times. This brings about dramatic improvements in your brand recognition and recall.

With marketing campaigns growing more and more customer-centric with every passing day, cross-channel marketing has now become the need of the hour. To help you gain an in-depth understanding of the same, we compiled this insightful infographic with the help of our friends at Cordial. Hope it helps!

The post How Marketing Silos Can Hamper Your Business And How To Break Them With Cross-channel Marketing appeared first on Scoop.it Blog .

Domino's: Betty-Hoo-Hoo

Thu, 13 Jan 2022 15:39:00 GMT

Domino’s, the UK’s favourite pizza company, has launched the next iteration to its hugely successful DOMIN-OH-HOO-HOO campaign across the country today. Back by popular demand, the new playful creative reveals a highly sought-after new deal offering 50% off pizza when £30 or more is spent online.

Created by agencies of record VCCP alongside its CX and production arms VCCP CX and Girl&Bear, the DOMIN-OH-HOO-HOO campaign continues to delight the nation following the success of the first two films which reached 95% of the UK population and started a yodelling movement. The third instalment reveals a reason to be happy this January, a month common with tighter purse strings - a crowd-pleasing nationwide deal.

Adidas: A 100 million loves

Wed, 12 Jan 2022 19:16:00 GMT

Mo Salah, is one of the best football players in the world, and is inspiration to every Egyptian, so Adidas launched back in 2018 campaign called a 100 million strong to urge fans in Egypt to support Salah in the world cup 2018, later in 2019 Egypt was hosting the African Cup of Nations so we created a digital initiative where we a football signed with inspirational words and quotes by normal Egyptian fans from all over Egypt to deliver to their inspirational icon Mo Salah to motivate and cheer for up before he plays the African Cup of Nations in 2019

A marketer’s glossary to essential agile marketing terms

Wed, 12 Jan 2022 17:39:00 GMT

For the past few weeks, we’ve been sharing chapters from MarTech’s Guide to agile marketing for teams, a comprehensive e-book that takes a look at how teams can best execute in an agile marketing playbook.

But like any good discipline, it’s important to know the terms before diving into the concepts. That’s why we’ve created this quick guide to key terms in agile marketing. And in order to keep this guide usable when you are in quick need of a definition, we’ve kept it to the truly important terms.

The glossary is divided into four sections: Methods and Frameworks; Roles; Artifacts (which is the agile term for “tools”); Meetings; and Managing Work.

Enjoy the guide.

Agile

Agile is the ability to create and respond to change. It is a way of dealing with, and ultimately succeeding in, an uncertain and turbulent environment.

Agile Marketing

Agile marketing is an umbrella term for a set of frameworks and practices based on the values and principles expressed in the Agile Marketing Manifesto . When you approach marketing in a particular manner, it’s generally good to live by these values and principles and use them to help figure out the right things to do given your particular context.

Kanban

The Kanban Method is a means to design, manage, and improve flow systems for knowledge work. The method also allows organizations to start with their existing workflow and drive evolutionary change. They can do this by visualizing their flow of work, limiting work in progress (WIP) and stopping starting and starting finishing instead.

Lean Marketing

Lean Marketing is about being agile, about viewing each campaign or marketing activity as one step in the ever-improving progress towards customer acquisition and ultimately customer satisfaction.

Scrum

Scrum is a process framework used to manage product development and other knowledge work. Scrum is empirical in that it provides a means for teams to establish a hypothesis of how they think something works, try it out, reflect on the experience, and make the appropriate adjustments. That is, when the framework is used properly. Scrum is structured in a way that allows teams to incorporate practices from other frameworks where they make sense for the team’s context.

The Agile Marketing Framework

This is was recently created to meet the unique needs of marketing organizations. It’s inspired from the common frameworks of Scrum, Kanban & Lean, taking the best of all three into a formula that marketers find most useful based on real customer experiences.

Agile Champion This role from The Agile Marketing Framework is about coaching the team and the organization on agile ways of working. This role is not there to project manage work, but rather to empower teams to take ownership and accountability.

Agile Coach is someone brought in, typically from outside the organization, to help your organization enhance it’s agile practices and live out the values and principles of agility.

Marketing Owner is a role that’s responsible for stakeholder relations and prioritization of work. This role has authority and respect from leaders to determine what the team will work on next. This role also updates the Marketing Roadmap and Content Calendar as priorities change. This role often is given to a Marketing Strategist who understands customers, the marketplace and the future direction of work.

Marketing Team

Everyone contributing work is a member of the Marketing Team, despite their official job title. Ideally, there is no hierarchy within the team, allowing for ideation by all team members. In agile marketing, team members have broad skill sets and are able to go beyond their specialties to work on business priorities.

Practice Leads

These are leaders of functional departments. In agile marketing, their role changes significantly. They no longer manage their employees’ work, but instead lead the functional area to achieve optimal quality and best practices.

Product Owner

The product owner is a role in Scrum responsible for managing the product backlog in order to achieve the desired outcome that a team seeks to accomplish. The product owner role was created as part of the Scrum framework in order to address challenges that teams had with multiple, conflicting direction, or no direction at all with respect to which work is the most important to the business and customers.

Scrum Master

This is the team role in the Scrum framework responsible for ensuring the team lives agile values and principles and follows the processes and practices that the team agreed they would use. The role does not generally have any actual authority. People filling this role have to lead from a position of influence, often taking a servant-leadership stance.

Scrum Team

Same as “Marketing Team” used in the Scrum framework.

Stakeholders

These are people invested in the work that the marketing team produces such as Sales, Product Development and Customer Service representatives.

Content Calendar

If your marketing team creates content, you may have a need to schedule when each piece gets published. Having fixed content release dates will still be agile, as long as you can be flexible on some of the details that you put in your content, iterating and revising as you learn more from earlier pieces.

Marketing Backlog

The Marketing Backlog is a place where all of the team’s ideas for future work lives and is transparent to everyone. The backlog is emergent and flexible, changing continuously as campaign data and metrics inform the team on which ideas to move up in prioritization and which ones should not be worked on anymore because they didn’t perform as expected.

Marketing Roadmap

A timeline of anticipated delivery of campaigns to clients that is typically for a quarter at a time, but is reviewed regularly by marketing owners and stakeholders and is subject to change as market and customer demands shift.

Product Backlog

Scrum Term for “Marketing Backlog” typically referring to future work to develop a product.

Sprint Backlog

The set of product backlog items in Scrum selected for the sprint by the team, plus a plan for delivering the committed work.

Backlog Readiness

This should happen as needed to make sure that the team’s Marketing Backlog has enough detail to discuss how work will get done during planning. However, it’s important to move quickly and don’t get too deep into the logistics as agile is about switching gears up until the time the team begins work.

Backlog Refinement

Scrum term for “Backlog Readiness”, formerly known as “Backlog Grooming”.

Campaign Performance Review

This session is for the team and stakeholders to look at how campaigns in market are performing, using data and insights to inform future work. The team will also showcase any new work done that cycle that’s ready to launch. Finally, the marketing roadmap should be reviewed based on these findings and updated based on market performance, new customer insights or marketplace changes.

Daily Huddle

This is a time for the team to coordinate timing on work in progress, share any updates on feedback from campaigns in flight and to ask for help from team members. This should feel more like a football team huddling to make its next play than a status update. The Daily Huddle is for team members to talk to each other and to keep themselves moving forward with their planned work.

Daily Scrum

Similar to the Daily Huddle, the Scrum team inspects the progress toward the sprint goal and adapts the sprint backlog as necessary, adjusting the upcoming planned work. Maximum of 15 minutes each day.

Launch Planning

This is where the team collaborates and plans for the work they hope to launch in a 5 or 10-day cycle. The goal is for everyone on the team to commit to what work they plan to accomplish and how they’re going to work together to achieve that goal. Good Cycle Planning involves synchronizing the timing around work and understanding everything involved to deliver something of value to customers.

Sprint

A timeboxed, consistent period that the team works with minimal interruptions to meet its goal of getting committed work items done. A marketing sprint is either one or two weeks, maintaining consistency in the length.

Sprint Planning

Sprint planning is an event in the Scrum framework where the team determines the product backlog items they will work on during that sprint and discusses their initial plan for completing those product backlog items. Teams may find it helpful to establish a sprint goal and use that as the basis by which they determine which product backlog items they work on during that sprint.

Sprint Retrospective

The Scrum team inspects how the last sprint went regarding individuals, interactions, processes, tools, and definition of done. The Team identifies improvements to make the next sprint more effective and enjoyable. This is the conclusion of the sprint.

Sprint Review

The entire Scrum team inspects the sprint’s outcome with stakeholders and determines future adaptations. Stakeholders are invited to provide feedback.

Team Improvement Workshop

This is a collaborative session for team members to look at continuous improvement. The goal is to find a small action item that the team can implement in the coming cycle to improve how they work together. Reflecting back at the most recent cycle may help the team learn from actual events.

Big Goals (or Big Hairy Audacious Goals, or B.H.A.G)

A collaborative creation activity between all team members and stakeholders. The goals should align to higher-level business objectives or KPIs. The team should create 1-to-3 Big Goals of what they hope to achieve in the upcoming timeframe, thinking about what would make them successful. When everyone is in alignment, priorities become much clearer.

Customer Story

There are how Marketing Backlog items can be written to view work from a customer’s perspective. A customer story includes the “Who”, “What” and “Why” of the work. Within the story, individual team members create the tasks necessary to complete the story.

Epic

A really big story that needs to be broken into smaller stories before a team can work on it in a sprint.

Minimally Viable Campaign

The earliest point that a piece of a larger campaign can be delivered to customers to add value or test an assumption.

Story Points

Story points are a unit of measure for expressing an estimate of the overall effort that will be required to fully implement a product backlog item or any other piece of work. When we estimate with story points, we assign a point value to each item.

Subtask

Subtasks are created at sprint planning by the team and are used to determine the “how” and “who” will work on the story to get it to done. Subtasks are often estimated in hours.

Test, Learn and Measure

Testing your marketing with many small experiments, abandoning failed experiments and scaling efforts that perform well.

Theme

A group of stories that are tied together in some way, such as by campaign or project.

User Story

Product backlog items written in story format to align the team on the work from the users’ perspective, typically of a software system.

What it is: Marketing work management platforms help marketing leaders and their teams structure their day-to-day work to meet their goals on deadline and within budget constraints, all while managing resources and facilitating communication and collaboration. Functions may include task assignments, time tracking, budgeting, team communication and file sharing, among others.

Why it’s important today. Work environments have changed drastically due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This has heightened the need for work management tools that help marketers navigate these new workflows.

Marketers have been at work developing processes that allow them to work with those outside their own offices since marketing projects—campaigns, websites, white papers , or webinars —frequently involve working with outside sources.

Also, with marketers required to design interfaces, write content, and create engaging visual assets today, more marketers are adopting agile workflow practices , which often have features to support agile practices.

What the tools do. All of these changes have heightened the need for marketing work management software, which optimizes and documents the projects undertaken by digital marketers. They often integrate with other systems like digital asset management platforms and creative suites. But most importantly, these systems improve process clarity, transparency, and accountability, helping marketers keep work on track.

The post A marketer’s glossary to essential agile marketing terms appeared first on MarTech .

B2B Vs. B2C Content Marketing: The Differences to Consider

Tue, 11 Jan 2022 15:45:00 GMT

Businesses are either B2B (Business to Business) or B2C (Business to Consumer).

While you may be familiar with the two types of businesses, B2B and B2C content marketing strategies may not be familiar.

The two strategies have several similarities, but they also have significant differences. Understanding these differences is crucial to having successful marketing campaigns.

For marketing agencies dealing with both B2B and B2C businesses, it’s crucial to understand these differences to create successful marketing strategies.

B2B marketing is a form of promotion aimed at companies that sell their goods or services directly to other businesses rather than consumers.

B2B content marketing focuses on the practice of distributing relevant, high-quality information to business owners and other professionals. Some B2B content marketing examples include blog posts on a hospital equipment manufacturer’s website and product reviews.

The goal is typically to build awareness around your brand and drive traffic to your site to increase sales.

B2C marketing promotes businesses that sell their goods or services directly to consumers. This type of marketing targets the general public and specific consumer demographics.

B2C content marketing, like B2B, uses high-quality information distribution. However, B2C has a different end goal in mind.

Instead of building brand awareness and driving traffic to a website, B2C content marketing focuses on selling your products directly through the use of social media posts, engaging blog articles, and videos.

The key is to educate people to feel comfortable buying from you rather than from the competitor. B2C content marketing examples include content on websites belonging to restaurants, drug stores, car dealerships, etc.

When it comes to content marketing, B2B lead generation and B2C lead generation take some time before achieving expected results.

For example, if you are running a B2C content marketing campaign, then expect sales to come in weeks or months after publishing your first blog post, not immediately.

This is the nature of building brand awareness through articles and videos instead of paid ads that target people directly by showing them your message.

The goal is to have a long-term marketing strategy centered around creating high-quality content so you can establish yourself as an authority in your field and drive sales through organic traffic at the same time.

Both B2B and B2C marketing offer several benefits for your business, including:

It’s all about the customer.

Your B2C content marketing strategy should focus on making your customers happy. If they are not satisfied, no amount of promotion will help you.

It’s also about business. If you use content marketing to promote B2B, the business should be the focus. You must provide an insight into how it works and why people should do business with you instead of competitors.

B2B Vs. B2C content marketing can be summarized into one question: who are you trying to sell to ?

If you’re trying to sell your product or service directly to other businesses, you need a B2B content marketing approach.

However, if you’re looking for more consumer-focused content such as how-to guides and reviews, then B2C is your go-to approach.

There are several primary differences between B2B and B2C marketing

In B2B, your primary goal is to establish a relationship with companies that will buy from you in the future. You create content that speaks directly to their needs and provides solutions they need.

In B2C, your business knows its customers personally. With this knowledge, you can tailor the content specifically for them based on gender, age, location, etc. Your goal is to establish a relationship that will lead to sales .

B2C content marketing focuses on building trust and establishing yourself as an authority in your industry. This is done through informative posts and videos, so people feel comfortable buying goods or services from you instead of a competitor.

On the other hand, B2B marketers use high-quality content. These include how-to guides or long-form blog posts about their business model to build relationships with buyers for future deals.

Social media platforms are used more effectively in B2C marketing than B2B content marketing.

This is because B2C marketers want to sell their products or services directly to customers. They use social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram to find leads by offering discounts and specials.

In contrast, B2B marketers don’t see as much success on social media platforms and focus more on LinkedIn and other business-oriented websites (which also means that these websites receive significantly less traffic than those used by B2C marketers).

Source

B2C marketing targets individual consumers; the audience is more spread out and in a larger-scale market.

Some B2B businesses combine several niches, thus a wider audience. And even in smaller niches, there are different types of consumers .

Thus, content for B2C is enticing, engaging, and skewed towards product-driven and emotional purchases.

B2B businesses, on the other hand, have a niche market. Their audience is other businesses looking to make a profit and get value for their money.

Unlike B2C customers, these don’t make emotional purchases and are more analytical. Content marketing efforts should target the key decision-makers and focus on trends, data, and ROI.

Source

B2C content marketing is focused on making money. If you’re looking to sell directly to your customers, then this means you should write each post with the end goal in mind (i.e., how does this help my business make money?).

B2B content marketing is about creating a relationship with future buyers through high-quality content shared over social media platforms.

It can also bring in revenue from sales of products and services, but only if you first establish a long-term relationship with prospects.

Like any other purchase, B2B influencers look for specific information about which companies they buy from.

They want to learn about the company’s business model and what makes them different from its competitors.

In contrast, B2C customers only read content that is directly tied to purchasing a product or service.

So instead of reading long-form blog posts about how a product can help them solve a problem, customers will look for short-form videos offering quick demonstrations of the product in action.

A B2C marketer will focus on their ROI regarding website traffic and engagement rate, while a B2B marketer focuses more on influencing the buying decision.

Both metrics, however, are essential for marketers to track so they can improve their marketing efforts over time.

The added benefit for B2B marketers is that focusing on these two elements should result in more deals happening between you and your customers – which means the number should be much easier to track than other metrics like website traffic or social media followers.

B2B marketing costs are high as decision making is a lengthy process that involves several people. The key decision-makers must consult between themselves and involve a chain of command.

B2C consumers don’t require consultation to buy a product. They make quick decisions in a short time; thus, marketing costs are low.

B2C content marketing aims for a more general audience to increase sales and bring in new customers.

B2B content marketing seeks to provide advice on how to improve your business, including things like how to use the product or service.

There are, however, some common things that both marketing strategies share:

Content marketing is a more complex process than some may think. The type of content and the goals you have will largely depend on what your business does, who you’re trying to sell to, and how you want customers to experience your product or service.

A B2B marketer might be more interested in informing potential customers why choosing them is better for both parties.

In contrast, a B2C marketer might focus more on showing off different features that make their company preferable over others in their industry.

Whether you are looking for informative blog posts or videos demonstrating your products, many factors determine if content marketing will work well with B2B or B2C clients.

The post B2B Vs. B2C Content Marketing: The Differences to Consider appeared first on Scoop.it Blog .

SuperLemon WhatsApp Support Review – Does Your Shopify Store Need This App?

Tue, 11 Jan 2022 15:06:00 GMT

The average eCommerce cart abandonment rate is 69.57%… it rises to over 85% on mobile!

Not that I need to spell it out, but that means for every 10 people that visit your website and add a product to their cart, 7 are deciding not to complete the purchase.

I’m not talking about casual website viewers, either. These shoppers have browsed your products, selected one (or several) they like, and then got cold feet at the very last second. They’re ready-to-buy leads.

If you consider these statistics over a larger sample size, things start to get scary. Hundreds of people could be abandoning carts on your Shopify store, costing you thousands of dollars every month.

What can you do about it?

Well, there are dozens of abandoned cart recovery strategies for Shopify stores. Some involve remarketing, others email follow-ups, and almost all of them utilize Shopify apps to re-engage with lost customers.

We were lucky enough to get our hands on SuperLemon’s WhatsApp Support App for today’s review. It’s one of the highest-rated automated abandoned cart recovery apps on the Shopify marketplace, and we were super-impressed with how it worked.

Let’s take a closer look…

SuperLemon connects your Shopify store with WhatsApp and dramatically improves the customer experience. It has a beautiful WhatsApp button that is fully customizable to match your brand and has a Google Chrome Extension to handle customer support smoothly on the web.

This app comes with automated WhatsApp message templates for abandoned cart recovery, order confirmation, order shipment, cash on delivery (COD) confirmation, and more.

It helps you reach your customers in real-time (and allows them to contact you) and removes friction from the purchasing process. If someone wants to know about your shipping times, they can get an answer via this app. If they’re unsure about payment processors, you can handle it here, too.

Most website visitors leave without purchasing because they can’t find the product they want or get quick answers to their questions – SuperLemon’s app solves both of these problems.

SuperLemon is not just an ordinary messaging tool but has great features to help boost your sales. Here are some that stood out during our review:

Yes, there are other abandoned cart recovery apps available on the Shopify App Store such as WATI, Sendmation, and Softpulse, so how does SuperLemon compare?

Pros

Cons

All-in-all SuperLemon’s WhatsApp app for Shopify is an excellent customer service solution that could save you thousands of dollars in abandoned carts. It’s worth trying the free trial!

Getting started with SuperLemon’s WhatsApp Support app is really easy.

There are three plans to choose from; Free, Pro, and Ultimate, and there is also a 30-day Free Trial with the Pro and Ultimate plans.

Here’s a breakdown of what you get from each package:

Free

Pro ($7.99 per month)

Ultimate ($9.99 per month)

Start a FREE trial of SuperLemon today.

WhatsApp is an extremely popular messaging app in Brazil, India, Mexico, Spain, Colombia, Italy, the UK, South Africa, the USA, Nigeria, Germany, France, Canada, Pakistan, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Netherlands, and Costa Rica – basically the entire world!

With SuperLemon’s WhatsApp Support app for Shopify, you can engage with customers via an app they are already using and familiar with. All the message templates are pre-approved by WhatsApp and available in 11 different languages.

With over 25,000 users and 800+ reviews, this app is a must-have for eCommerce businesses.

Ready to get started? Install SuperLemon now.

The post SuperLemon WhatsApp Support Review – Does Your Shopify Store Need This App? appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog .

10 Easy Ways to Drive Sales With Social Media

Tue, 11 Jan 2022 14:02:00 GMT

Businesses use social media to engage with fans, raise brand awareness, and build an audience, but are you using social media for sales?

Social media is one of the best marketing channels for driving sales and generating a great ROI. You just need to know the right sales strategies and tactics to use.

In this guide, we’ve broken down the easiest and most effective ways to use social media to increase sales. Use these strategies to turn your social media channels into revenue.

1. Be Where Your Audience Is
2. Create the Content Your Audience Wants to See
3. Use Your Social Channels to Sell Directly
4. Use Social Media Influencers
5. Run a Giveaway
6. Encourage User-Generated Content
7. Run Social Media Ads
8. Share Customer Stories
9. Generate More Leads On Instagram
10. Create Meaningful Relationships On Social Media

The first step to any good social media marketing strategy is knowing where your target customers are spending time online and using these channels to reach them.

Don’t waste your time trying to build an audience on every social media platform. Instead, concentrate on a few essential platforms where your target audience is active. By using the social channels that your followers use, you’ll create a bigger impact with less effort.

So, start by knowing your target audience. Do a target audience analysis. Understand your target demographic, find common characteristics of the right prospects, or dig into profiles of your existing customers.

Some good general guidelines for different social media users are:

Being present on every social media channel can spread your resources too thin, and cause more damage than it’s worth.

By being where your audience is, you’ll be able to target them in their native habitat where they’re ready to buy. This will result in reaching more customers and making more sales.

Social media marketing all comes down to great content.

Your aim is to sell to potential customers, but this doesn’t mean your content should be sales-y. Instead, you need to be focused on quality content that your audience actually wants to engage with.

Rather create a small batch of high-quality content than post mediocre content frequently.

Remember, people come onto social media to see content that excites or inspires them. Don’t focus directly on sales, rather create valuable content that makes followers want to become customers.

To do this, post content inspired by real-life situations. Social proof is incredibly powerful here. Post content with helpful tips and advice in it, content that is entertaining, or content that gives potential customers a reason to buy from you without forcing sales on them directly.

Valuable content excites and engages the user first. Once the user is engaging with your brand, they will be inspired to become a customer.

If you want to use social media platforms for sales, then you should be selling directly through these platforms.

Social commerce allows users to discover products and buy them on social media, without ever leaving the app. This makes the checkout process a lot quicker - resulting in more impulse buys.

Right now, all the major social media platforms have developed their own in-app shopping experiences.

Instagram Shopping allows eCommerce store owners to sell their products directly on the platform. Your Instagram Shop is just like your usual online storefront.

Here are some of the features and different ways to use Instagram Shopping:

Selling on Facebook is done through the platform’s easily accessible Facebook Shops tool.

Anyone with a business profile can set up a Facebook Shop for free, which is connected to your eCommerce product range.

Facebook’s social commerce solution allows buyers and sellers to easily communicate via Messenger. This can be a great way for your brand to connect and engage with its audience.

Facebook is also a good platform for shoppers to organically find products that match their interests. Organic discovery works well through the mobile app, and users can complete their transaction from discovery to purchase all within the same app.

TikTok has partnered up with Shopify to introduce organic product discovery and shopping tabs to TikTok.

The goal is to make TikTok a hub for social media eCommerce. Being one of the fastest-growing social media platforms, TikTok is definitely a place to look towards for social media marketing.

With its new social commerce feature, the potential to reach a large new audience of customers is huge.

Follow this guide for a more complete understanding of how to use TikTok for eCommerce .

Pinterest has become a popular platform for selling online. In fact, 89% of Pinterest users are on the platform to find purchase inspiration.

Pinterest social commerce is done through the use of Shoppable Pins. These rich pins are directly linked to your eCommerce products, and users can just tap on your product image and be directed to a product purchase page.

The visual appeal of Pinterest makes it a great place for brands to show off their products online and attract new customers.

Pinterest also has a link to Etsy, which can make it easier to use the social media platform to boost your Etsy store sales .

Follow this guide for a more complete understanding of how to use Pinterest for eCommerce.

Twitter Shopping is starting to test out eCommerce on the platform, which could be a major breakthrough for this social media channel.

Twitter shopping is done through a new “Shop" module where brands and retailers can showcase their products on their Twitter profiles.

Users can tap products, and this will open the business’s website inside the Twitter app. Shopping will only be available for those with a Professional Profile.

Influencer marketing is huge right now. It’s also one of the best ways to sell products on social media without pushing the products yourself.

Social media users trust influencers more than they trust businesses. If an influencer recommends a product to their audience, this seems a lot more natural and convincing than a business trying to convince its audience to buy a product.

Influencer marketing helps you reach a big new audience and build trust. This is why it delivers such a high return on investment.

In fact, when you look at recent marketing trends , influencer marketing has consistently produced the best ROI for businesses.

Find influencers that match your niche. You need to make sure their audience is also your target audience. Connect with these influencers, and work out a deal for them to promote your products.

Just make sure that the influencer has high engagement rates - this is generally more important than a large follower count.

A social media giveaway remains one of the best ways to ramp up your sales.

Giveaways help you highlight specific products, increase brand visibility, and get more engagement. Of course, they also help you make more sales.

This is because your social media giveaway draws in people who want your products. With every entry into your giveaway, you gain an email address that you can target with valuable marketing content later on.

A great strategy is to send out a limited-time discount code to all entrants straight after the winner has been announced. These are already people who are interested in your products, so there’s a good chance this discount will give them just the push they need to become customers.

With Wishpond , you can create easy social media giveaways and contests that do more for your business. Try it out today .

One of the best ways to promote your products on social media is to get other people to do it.

User-generated content is incredibly powerful for your business. This is when existing customers can become brand advocates by posting about your products and business online.

This type of content helps your brand build up a lot of trust. If potential customers see positive mentions of your products from real-life users, they will trust this more than product posts by your business page.

You’ll need to encourage user-generated content if you want to get your brand more exposure. The best way to do this is to run a contest that requires users to post about your brand to enter. This is often done in the form of a branded hashtag challenge.

And when people mention your brand online, share it. Sharing user-generated content in your stories is an excellent way to improve brand exposure and trust.

And this doesn’t have to end with user-generated content from social media. Other areas of social proof, like positive reviews, can also be shared on your social media channels. The more good social proof you share, the better.

If you want to reach a bigger audience on social media, then you should run paid ad campaigns .

Social media is incredibly competitive. Even if you’ve got great content on all the right channels, there’s a good chance it won’t reach many people.

The good news is that paid ads on social media let you target very specific potential customers. Social platforms hold huge amounts of data on their users, so you can be very specific about who you want your ads to target.

All social platforms have their own advertising options. Make sure you invest in the right social media channels where your audience is most active.

If you’re not sure where to get started, Facebook ads are generally the best place to begin.

83% of buyers have said that word of mouth has influenced their buying decision.

Incorporating word-of-mouth recommendations into your social media sales strategy can help you attract a lot more customers.

These are stories that potential customers can relate to, and they will have a lot more influence over how customers perceive your brand.

So, make sure your marketing team and sales professionals regularly share the stories of happy customers. Sharing real-life customer success stories will make a big difference to how your brand is perceived, as well as your social selling efforts.

It’s important to have an engaged Instagram audience, but you should also focus on converting this audience into business leads. If your business relies on leads, then social media is a great place to reach targeted prospects.

There are a couple of different ways that you can combine Instagram’s features with calls to action (CTA) to generate leads for your business.

First, make sure your Instagram bio includes a link that goes to a lead-generating landing page . Then, include CTAs in your organic posts. Include a value-added proposition that makes users want to click on your link.

You can also generate leads through stories with a swipe-up link. Just make sure you include an enticing CTA in your stories.

Of course, these lead generation principles can also apply to your other social media channels.

Social media shouldn’t only be used to promote your brand. It should also be used to build relationships.

Creating meaningful relationships through your popular social media platforms will go a long way in boosting the sales process. This is because you want people to trust and like your brand.

So, don’t just make social media marketing a one-way flow of information. Respond to comments, engage with users, encourage feedback, ask questions, and do anything else that could build relationships with your audience.

Social selling is all about developing positive relationships with potential customers on your social media channels. So, make sure you remember the “social” part of social media marketing.

You don’t have to be an expert to generate more sales opportunities through social media. Driving sales on social media is easy, as long as you know which strategies to focus on.

Identify potential customers, understand the channels they use, target them with relevant content, and start building relationships with them. That’s really all it takes to create an active presence on social media that boosts the buying process.

If you want to learn more social selling tips from the experts, then don’t forget to register for our upcoming free webinar . You don’t want to miss out!

How to Start an Ecommerce Business in 2022 [Steps + Must-Follow Tips]

Tue, 11 Jan 2022 12:40:00 GMT

In June 2021, over 440,000 businesses were launched , making it a record high since the start of the pandemic in March 2020.

Many are focusing on ecommerce businesses, as they offer an easier point of entry. There's no physical space to scope out, rent to pay, or permits to obtain. However, that doesn't mean starting an online business is a piece of cake.

Learn what it takes to start an ecommerce business and the steps to start one today.

Your website is your storefront – you don't want potential customers arriving, looking around, and walking right out.

Think of your website title and meta description as your window display. You want the description to be enticing enough to beat out the competition and get users to click on your website.

Your homepage is the first thing visitors see when they land (or walk in). What will you present to make them keep scrolling? Maybe it's your latest offer or a striking image from your latest campaign, or perhaps it's a simple but compelling CTA that will invite curiosity.

Users should be able to navigate your site seamlessly with little friction. That requires a lot of planning, designing, and iterating.

Just as you would take time to curate every section of your store, be sure to give that same care with your website. Every section should have a clear goal and lead users to your desired action.

A first impression can last and can be hard to change – so make sure it's a good one.

We've already mentioned the importance of designing your website with care and intention.

Now, let's get into the elements that will make up your website: your copy and visual elements, such as images and videos.

Your creative assets can make or break your brand perception. Don't believe me? Look at insurance company The General.

The company recently rebranded and revamped its entire marketing strategy because the public doubted the brand's credibility due to its perceived low-budget ads. They even addressed it in a commercial.

All this to say that it's vital that you invest in high-quality visuals as they will be a representation of your brand.

As for your copy, this is important to ensure every message you are putting out is driving the action you want. Otherwise, you may get visitors to your site but not get them to convert. If you don't feel equipped to take this on yourself, hire a copywriter who specializes in your industry.

For your visual assets, you can:

Think of social media as a high-traffic area you want your store to be in.

Social media is one of the biggest discovery points for ecommerce brands, aside from search. If you post content where your audience lives online, you can help them discover your company and build a strong community of brand loyalists.

If you're doing it right, social media gets them interested in your brand, your website gets them to stick around and move to that next step in the buyer's journey.

Many ecommerce brands struggle with customer service.

They often have a small team that's unable to manage large volumes of requests from customers. One way to combat this is by offering helpful resources to current and prospective customers so they can the answers they need quickly.

After running your business for a while, you may notice that you get the same questions repeatedly. This is a clear sign that customers are experiencing friction on your site and need more support. FAQ and knowledge base pages are great ways to address that.

An FAQ section will not only be great for SEO, but also address your visitors' most pressing questions. A knowledge base will help your customers troubleshoot and solve their issues on their own.

This will also allow your team to focus on addressing more important issues instead of fielding simple requests.

On the topic of customer service, automation is the name of the game.

There are many ways to automate interactions in a way that leads them further down the buyer's journey. For instance, you could set up a chatbot that is designed to answer common questions from website visitors.

Automation can also look like:

If you have a workflow in place, there's probably a way to automate it.

As an ecommerce business, you want to maximize your reach and be everywhere your audience lives.

You may have some customers who shop directly from your store on your website. However, you may have some who shop exclusively on Amazon or Etsy.

To maximize your earning potential, sell your products on multiple marketplaces, as long as they align with your target audience and product.

The best ideas stem from personal experience.

Maybe you experienced friction when completing a task and figured out a way to streamline it. Or perhaps you thought of a product that would make your life 10 times simpler.

Wherever the inspiration comes from, it's definitely worth exploring.

If you're having trouble coming up with an idea, try the SCAMPER method for brainstorming:

These options give you the freedom of developing something without the pressure of starting from scratch.

Once you identify a product or service, you have to validate it.

The hard truth is that not every idea is sustainable for a business. In this stage, you want to make sure that there's an audience for it and a need in the market.

How do you accomplish this? There are a few ways:

This stage is the one that may take the longest.

You'll need to figure out manufacturing, sourcing, packaging, shipping, pricing – all of the -ings.

The process you follow will all depend on your business type and industry. For instance, if you are developing a new product, that will involve a lot more steps than if you are white labeling (the process of purchasing products from a supplier and marketing it under your brand).

Need more help on this? Read this article on the product development process .

Once you have a clear understanding of your business and what it offers, you must come up with a name.

When it comes to naming your business, here are a few tips to keep in mind:

After submitting your business name to your state department, you'll also want to apply for an employee identification number (EIN) for tax purposes.

Lastly, do you need any permits and licenses to operate? Be sure to speak with a professional about the rules and regulations in your state and submit proper documentation before launching your business.

Now that the legal details are all covered, you can get to the fun part: Building your brand .

This step is key as it will influence how you market your brand to your target audience. In this step, you'll need to ask yourself a few questions:

From there, you can start working on your brand logo, colors, tone, and other creative assets that reflect your identity.

Developing a strong online presence will be instrumental to the success of your ecommerce business. As such, you want to start early.

It's easy to find and buy a domain online. Top domain sites include:

Many site builders, like Squarespace and Wix, and most hosting platforms also allow you to buy your domains directly from them. That way, the site that owns your domain will be the same one where you host your ecommerce site.

The internet is full of ecommerce platforms, each offering different features and benefits.

To start, determine the level of customization you want. There are four categories of ecommerce platforms you can choose from:

To decide, look at what your timeline and what you want to accomplish. Pre-built websites make it easy to build an ecommerce site quickly. However, they're not very customizable and can be limiting.

On the flip side, there are fully customizable platforms that offer a lot but can take much longer to set up.

Top features to look for in an ecommerce platform include:

The last step before launching your business is developing a pre- and post-launch strategy.

The idea behind a pre-launch strategy is to get your target audience excited about your product or service before it's available. If done right, you'll have a line of customers waiting to try out your products.

A post-launch strategy is a more long-term marketing strategy that involves tying your business objectives to specific marketing goals, such as building brand awareness and acquiring more leads.

Your marketing strategy should also account for audiences at all stages of the buyer's journey. If you focus too much on the top of the funnel, you won't be able to convert leads into customers. If you focus on the bottom of the funnel, you won't be able to attract new customers to your business.

In 2022, building an ecommerce business is more accessible than it's ever been. If you follow the steps outlined above, you'll have your company up and running in no time.

How to Use Instant Experiences on Facebook and Instagram

Tue, 11 Jan 2022 12:19:00 GMT

Are your ads underperforming? Wondering if there’s a better way to engage prospects? In this article, you’ll discover how to use Instant Experiences as a more immersive alternative to your existing campaigns. What Is a Facebook Instant Experience? Instant Experience is a type of mobile ad from Meta, available for both Instagram and Facebook. Most […]

The post How to Use Instant Experiences on Facebook and Instagram appeared first on Social Media Examiner | Social Media Marketing .

Google Logo On Barbell Weight Plates

Tue, 11 Jan 2022 12:03:00 GMT

Toyota: FasterClass - "Urban Professors"

Mon, 10 Jan 2022 18:48:00 GMT

The “FasterClass” campaign for the all-new 2022 Toyota GR86, highlights the next-generation sports coupe tailored for those looking for a thrilling driving experience – on or off the track. To tap into Hispanics love for driving, Conill developed a series of creative spots for social and digital platforms that highlight this impressive and sporty new vehicle. The essence of the “Urban Professors” series takes the GR86 from racetrack to city streets with real people who embody street smarts. These “urban professors” live to drive and drive to live. From a delivery and taxi driver to a paramedic, these true masters of the streets demonstrate the smooth and high performance of the GR86.

Valu: The Buy Buy Loop

Mon, 10 Jan 2022 18:48:00 GMT

When you decide to purchase something you find yourself buying more stuff complementing it, for example when you buy a phone you then buy earphones for it then you buy its smart watch then the cover etc, suddenly you find yourself in an endless loop of purchases, But what happens if you don't have enough cash for all of that? That's where our Brand Valu comes in, whatever you purchase you can buy it through Valu (the new payment tool) that allows you to buy anything you desire with installments so you can save your cash.

Happy Dog: Healthy Mode

Mon, 10 Jan 2022 18:48:00 GMT

Put your Dog in Healthy mode!

Feeding your Dog a Healthy Food will make it in a wealthy mode, even he will play Yoga!

How to Align Product, Marketing, and Sales Goals in 2022

Mon, 10 Jan 2022 17:50:00 GMT

The new year is here, which means businesses are reevaluating goals, budget constraints, and roadmaps for the upcoming year. It’s an excellent opportunity to redirect company efforts and eliminate inefficiencies. Unfortunately, in most cases, product, marketing, and sales goals are far from aligned as department heads compete with one another for resources or priority.

It’s a story almost as old as time. Product creators continually want to innovate and make the best product possible. Meanwhile, your marketing team wants to increase visibility no matter the cost. Your sales department may wish to do whatever is most profitable in the short term, even if that doesn’t gel with the needs of other teams.

Image Source

Although these goals seem inherently opposed, there are ways to make them work together. Just as you must align goals with business partners , so too must you focus on internal alignment. Done properly, your product, marketing, and sales goals can be aligned for a fantastic 2022. Let’s break down how you can do just that.

Individual balancing strategies will vary from place to place. However, all executives should focus on one key effort to ensure smooth changes : strong communication. Too often, teams within the same organization fail to communicate, leading to confusing goals and misappropriated efforts. Let’s explore how to avoid these issues.

To get started aligning your product, marketing, and sales goals for the coming year, make sure that there are clear communication channels between different departments. Your department heads should not have to go through you to send a message to the other teams.

For instance, say that your market research team takes note that there has been a 50% rise in the number of people applying for comprehensive insurance plans. This could be an invaluable opportunity for quarterly growth if the other two pillars of an insurance organization get on board. This needs to be communicated to product design teams and sales staff so everyone can benefit from the insight.

As an executive, you need to make it easy for your sales team to communicate this information to the others in your company through tools like workplace conferencing software. Even if they’re remote, schedule weekly meetings for sharing insights, goals, and departmental challenges. Strong project management platforms are also crucial for collaborative success.

Most importantly, each team needs to explain why what they prioritize is important to the others. This may involve significant coaching on your part. But if the sales team doesn’t explain why jumping on a short-term opportunity is important to the product team, for example, the product team will struggle to get on board.

Many of the most successful companies, including Google and Amazon, have seen fantastic cohesion from all three department types. How? By realigning goals in each department to focus on customers above all else.

Image Source

Each department can easily realign its goals or ambitions to emphasize what they bring to the end customer experience. For example:

When done properly, each team will realign its objectives and see how they contribute to overall customer satisfaction for your company. Once each team aligns for a customer-focused endpoint, you might see increased communication between these departments and better coordination.

Say that your product team wants to revamp your online platform. According to recent surveys, over 70% of online customers report favoring using a credit card for online transactions. Attention to this impacts the customer’s experience, which impacts sales, marketing, and more.

Your designers want to improve the payment process on your platform to make it easier for repeat customers to pay automatically. When the product team brings this need up in a departmental meeting, the sales and marketing teams understand why it takes precedence. By emphasizing the importance of the customer experience, your product, marketing, and sales goals will be much more aligned and your business will be better positioned to serve customers.

The different departments for product creation, marketing, and sales would see increased returns on their efforts if they understood how each department depended on the other. Consider a few examples.

Your marketing team works with sales and analytics to determine which aspects of your company’s products are most attractive and important to those who buy them. The marketing team takes this information and uses it to revamp their attraction marketing campaign , collaborating with product design to offer a free tier service that earns you major leads.

Your product team pools their efforts with marketing strategies, learning what customers desire and what pain points were present with the last product iteration. They discover a niche underserved area and are able to create a much better product than they would otherwise by following their previous intuition.

Your sales team works with the product team to advertise new products or services accurately and show how they work. When customers purchase the product, they aren’t disappointed and they don’t feel as though they have been falsely advertised to. Sales teams take these explanations to boost their sales scripts and improve customer trust and satisfaction.

In essence, each department is truly dependent on the other for maximum performance. Odds are most executives know this intrinsically – you just have to put it into practice. If you want your business to not only survive but thrive in the competitive marketplace, your product, marketing, and sales teams must understand this. Once each team’s goals are aligned, your enterprise will be more efficient and more successful than ever.

At the end of the day, product, marketing, and sales goals are the same: foster financial success for the company. But too often, teams within an organization compete against one another for limited time and resources, weakening the enterprise as a whole. By taking the end-of-year opportunity to realign expectations and goals, you can significantly improve communication in your organization and get each team working together.

Guest author: Nahla Davies is a software developer and tech writer. Before devoting her work full time to technical writing, she managed — among other intriguing things — to serve as a lead programmer at an Inc. 5,000 experiential branding organization whose clients include Samsung, Time Warner, Netflix, and Sony.

The post How to Align Product, Marketing, and Sales Goals in 2022 appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog .

Three of the Biggest Opportunities to Elevate B2B Marketing in 2022

Mon, 10 Jan 2022 17:44:00 GMT

women of color in B2B marketing

B2B marketing roles

let's have a conversation

The post Three of the Biggest Opportunities to Elevate B2B Marketing in 2022 appeared first on B2B Marketing Blog - TopRank® .

6 Reasons Why You Need a Digital Media Strategy

Fri, 07 Jan 2022 15:51:40 GMT

Everyone needs a digital media strategy, and not for the reasons you may expect. In fact, if you think digital strategies are just promotional, think again.

Notable Viral Marketing Examples to Inspire Your 2022 Strategy

Fri, 07 Jan 2022 10:06:00 GMT

Is there really such a thing as a strategy that can make campaigns go viral? Well, yes and no. The topic of viral marketing is not straightforward; that’s why we’ll uncover its colorful past, present, and uncertain future as we head into 2022.

The definition of viral marketing is a strategy in which a person, group, or company creates content designed to inspire a large number of people to share, engage with, and talk about it (a.k.a. go viral). The content can obtain a large audience rapidly and without paying in the same manner as traditional advertising because the audience increases its reach organically.

Like viral marketing, viral advertising aims to encourage large numbers of people to share content organically to promote a product or service, while viral marketing campaigns can encompass a wider variety of objectives.

Do you remember the Fyre Festival? It might be a textbook example of how to not set up a large event, but before the Internet was making “fyre” memes about its failure, it had one of the best viral marketing campaigns of its time. In fact, the only reason why millions of people were tuned into its disastrous outcome was its social media campaigns were so successful, and they remain a brilliant example of viral marketing.

Fyre Festival’s viral marketing technique cleverly combined the power of influencers and human curiosity. Several noteworthy social media influencers – mostly Instagram models – gave the festival an initial audience to start with. They all posted a blank orange square with captions like “SO excited!!! #fyrefestival,” and the festival’s promotional video featured the orange square as a thumbnail.

This quickly got tons of people to pay attention simply because they wanted to know what the orange square on their feed was about and why Bella Hadid found it so exciting. The orange square became a meme of sorts as users reposted it to make their own followers perplexed and curious. Soon enough, entire feeds were covered in orange squares and the Fyre Festival was being talked about by millions around the world. Maybe if their marketing team was in charge of the festival, it wouldn’t have flopped so hard.

Old Spice created one of the most successful viral marketing campaigns to date. Their ad featuring actor Isaiah Mustafa was so well done that his character became the company’s mascot and a long-lasting theme for their advertisements. The original commercial “ The Man Your Man Could Smell Like ” aired in 2010, yet over a decade later, an astonishing amount of Americans still remember its iconic lines and cite it as one of the best commercials of all time.

Behind the scenes, Old Spice targeted “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” very strategically on channels where couples were most likely to be watching TV together. Though the team probably didn’t anticipate just how successful the viral campaign would be, it was intentionally designed to be a cultural phenomenon. The content was memorable, funny, and compelling, but most importantly, its format and Mustafa’s lines were replicable. In other words, it was very meme-able. The ad reached far beyond its original viewer base wherever and whenever it was referenced.

YouTube gave the viral advertisement an additional 60 million views. Imagine making an ad so iconic, it starts generating its own income. Old Spice took advantage of the video-sharing platform even further in a lesser-known but equally-clever interactive campaign called “The Response,” in which Mustafa individually responded to comments from users on platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook in over 180 videos.

Sales of Old Spice body wash increased 60% that year.

Old Spice and Fyre Festival serve as straightforward examples of good viral marketing, but make no mistake: there’s a lot of different strategies within viral marketing that aren’t as direct. Guerilla marketing and viral marketing, for example, often go hand-in-hand.

Guerilla marketing is a promotional strategy in which companies use unconventional and/or unannounced stunts to reach and engage with their audiences.

Take this Reddit Post from 2013, for example:

The Reddit user is not a marketer or influencer. They saw a frozen banana food stand while walking around London and found it so bizarre and funny that they figured it could earn some upvotes – which is exactly what Netflix was hoping for when they put it there.

How does a random banana stand advertise Netflix in any way? It’s a reference to the show Arrested Development, and the Reddit user’s post proves how and why it works as a viral marketing strategy. Placing a show reference in a busy city seems subtle, but “sophisticated” is a more accurate description. Netflix’s stunt proves two concepts that are key to modern viral marketing strategies:

Think about it: do you think anyone would have found this as funny and awesome if Netlfix ran ads about it? How many people do you know that would walk past something like a frozen banana stand and not take a picture or tell any of their friends? It was only a matter of time before Burt’s Frozen Banana Stand appeared on every major platform. “There’s always money in a banana stand.”

It’s important to note that to this day, the producers of the 2017 horror film IT have consistently denied causing the Creepy Clown Craze of 2016 . To be fair, it quickly became a problem – police were getting involved, embassies were warning citizens of potential clown dangers, and Mcdonald’s had to stop using its mascot for a while. Plus, even if New Line Cinema had (allegedly) sent out a few rogue clowns at any point, they certainly weren’t the core of the craze. It went viral in the first place because putting on a clown costume is a very easy way to scare approximately 12% of the human population.

The timing is conspicuously in-line with the buildup to IT’s release. Also, viral marketing stunts were a verified component of the film’s promotion. In Melbourne, thousands of Australians were treated to red balloons on multiple street drains. They were accompanied by “IT IS CLOSER THAN YOU THINK” neatly spray-painted onto the pavement.

It was clever and achieved its goal of creeping people out while creating interest in the film. And even if IT had nothing to do with the clown craze, both stunts combined helped IT earn over $317 million – hundreds of millions more than any other scary movie that year.

If history can borrow the term “viral marketing,” The Sun may have had one of the best campaigns of all time. The Sun was an emerging New York newspaper and the workplace of reporter John Locke in 1835. Locke had a bone to pick with companies like The Atlantic for publishing absurd articles, like Thomas Dick’s “celestial science” publishings. They were about the 21 trillion biblical creatures he calculated were on the moon (based on the population of England – very scientific), so it’s not hard to understand why Locke called it an “outrage upon science.”

Locke decided to mock the media status quo by writing a fake story in The Sun, using its sensationalism to provide the paper with more readers in the process. He pretended to be famous astronomer John Herschel, proclaiming that a new telescope had allowed him to see unicorns, beavers, and “Vespertilio-homo” (Latin for bat-men, literally) on the moon.

Locke’s stunt worked. The Sun rapidly obtained a massive audience for its time as people scrambled to get their hands on each new editorial for the latest details on the moon batmen – Locke somehow made The Sun go viral with nothing more than a printing press. After six editorials, The Sun admitted it was all fake and the Great Moon Hoax was officially over. The story became a cult phenomenon, arguably one of the first examples of viral marketing, and possibly the first meme; it was common to see The Sun’s depictions of moon people framed in people’s houses. Even the astronomer Locke impersonated thought it was funny until he realized how annoying it is to be a living meme.

The Sun maintained much of its audience from Locke’s hoax and continued on as a popular non-satirical newspaper until 1950.

Not all viral campaigns come from viral marketing. In fact, it’s more common for ads and marketing stunts to go viral unintentionally and for the wrong reasons, usually due to one or more of three things:

Brands trying to advertise aren’t the right messenger for social issues, so one misstep can lead to a controversy that goes viral. Viral infamy from this strategy is so common it’s become documented research with quantifiably poor results, but for some reason that hasn’t stopped big brands from creating their own controversy for the world to see.

A recent example is Tesco’s 2021 UK ad for the holidays. It was intended to be a “lighthearted take” on the pandemic-related struggles we’ve experienced this year. Santa has his vaccine passport, allowing him to avoid quarantine and make it in time for Christmas. Queen played in the background. Everyone clapped.

The ad received over 5,000 complaints from the public to the Advertising Standards Authority, the second-highest record in its history.

Starbucks managed to gain an even larger amount of online hate when it made the #RaceTogether campaign to fight racial intolerance and “start a conversation” about ethnicity in America. They did indeed start a conversation – multiple, all over the Internet, about their corporate urge to cash in on a delicate topic.

The wild west days of the Internet left behind a counterculture that remains strong within many online communities. A long list of companies accidentally come across Internet counterculture when their ad campaigns catch the attention of Reddit, Encyclopedia Dramatica, 4chan, and 8chan. In most cases, it’s because the campaign had a weakness that large numbers of people could collectively exploit for fun. Though it’s nowhere near as damaging as controversy, the wrong kind of attention from the Internet can completely ruin a campaign.

Brands are becoming more aware of how organized these communities can be if they feel like it, but it was a tough learning curve throughout the past two decades. It took nearly a decade for businesses to learn to avoid polls in their marketing campaigns:

Any time viral messages call for interaction, there’s a chance this part of the Internet will remind them to be careful what they wish for. For example, SeaWorld probably should have thought harder about how polite the discussion was going to be in their #AskSeaWorld campaign on Twitter. LifeLock’s CEO should have considered that several people absolutely would try to steal his identity for years when he dared them to in his 2007 commercials. And how did a company like Coca-Cola not consider the possibilities when allowing people to custom-fill bottle labels?

Sometimes all it takes is an awkward delivery for a brand to be lambasted by the Internet. There’s nothing social media loves more than gathering around in the millions and collectively saying “Wow, that’s cringe.”

On the surface, it sounds like the most harmless form of negative viral attention. Professionals stuck in traditional marketing mindsets often make this mistake, and it costs them their brand reputation in the long run. On the Internet, being out of touch is a much bigger crime than being controversial or crude. You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who remembers the Starbucks #RaceTogether campaign despite its heavy subject matter; the same cannot be said about Wendy’s 2018 “ Like a Boss ” commercial.

The reason why these campaigns are cringe-worthy isn’t just because a joke didn’t land or the message wasn’t conveyed well. It’s also the fact that the try-hard and/or outdated messaging proves to an ad-conscious demographic that these companies are trying to sell products to customers they don’t understand.

All of the noteworthy successful viral ad campaigns mentioned were launched several years ago. Of course, it would be helpful to get some more recent examples. The problem is, if you look up the top results for “viral marketing campaigns” or “viral ads” in 2021, you’ll get results like Coke’s “Real Magic” campaign holiday ad, or Fisher-Price’s “ See toys everywhere ” campaign. Does anyone remember these? The bar for “viral” seems to be getting lower.

Some try to slap quantifiable views like “5 million” onto the definition of viral, but in truth, viral content isn’t quantifiable – the manner in which it becomes a cultural phenomenon makes it near-impossible and also pointless to count views. When something goes viral, you know because everyone knows.

Content with that kind of virality doesn’t seem to come from strategies like it did a few years ago. Why is that?

The landscape in which viral marketing found its sweet spot in social media marketing no longer exists.

Businesses overstayed their welcome online both on social media and in digital ads. They desensitized people by advertising too much, they used authenticity as a marketing message instead of a value, and they made “relatability” untrustworthy over time. When paired with the natural evolution of social media, it was a death blow to strategies that worked well just a few years ago.

If people don’t like brands enough to give them word-of-mouth advertising, forget going viral.

It wasn’t entirely honest to say no ads went viral in 2021, but the only true candidate has a complicated backstory. According to TikTok, was an error, not an ad – allegedly.

The “error” was an accidental mix-up of the creatives for an Amazon ad and a random video. This resulted in random, slightly horrific yet slightly funny audio with games like Roblox being played on screen, ending with a link to Amazon for perplexed viewers to click. It got millions of views on TikTok and within days, everyone online was wondering what on Earth this ad was, who made it, and why.

The problem is, this explanation doesn’t make any sense. The link in the ad was to the search term “revealhome1,” not a product or store, meaning no specific thing or seller on Amazon was being promoted. Plus, no one ever came forward as the original owner of the “random video.” You’d think the creator would want to take credit for it after it accidentally managed to outperform professional ads with a fraction of the budget despite having no product, right?

Here’s a conspiracy theory: The link is a search term on Amazon because the advertiser was a rouge seller using search arbitrage to cheat their way up in search results (or maybe on the Amazon Internet Famous Page ). And of course, TikTok wouldn’t like to admit that a fraudulent advertiser had not only snuck onto the platform, but his unconventional tactics and chaotic editing also made one of the best viral campaigns in 2021.

Chaotic editing is a method of creating content that invokes frantic, unsettling, but also humorous feelings. The videos or pictures use strange audio clips, and low-quality visuals as well as editing characterized by sudden, fast, and/or drastic changes that complete its “chaotic” feel. It’s not a new content style and lighter forms of it are all over the Internet – deep fried memes, for example – but gen z and TikTok have made chaotic editing more mainstream.

Best of Whiteboard Friday 2021: 21 Smart Google SEO Tips

Fri, 17 Dec 2021 08:00:00 GMT

Our top Whiteboard Friday episode of the year was originally published all the way back at the beginning of January! So much has happened in the marketing industry since then, but Cyrus’s 21 SEO tips for the year are still definitely smart, and these go way beyond the SEO basics . He's also included a bunch of helpful resources for your reference in the transcription below!

How many of these were you able to implement throughout the past 12 months? Let us know on Twitter @Moz , and we’ll see you in 2022 with brand new episodes!

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Cyrus Shepard. Today, so glad that you can join us. We are talking about 21 smart Google SEO tips for 2021. We're getting ready for a new year, a new year of SEO strategies. These are 21 practical tips that you can implement that should, hopefully, move the needle on your organic traffic.

These are some of the best tips that I've collected over the past year. Many of them that I'm going to use myself in my own SEO strategies.

Now we have four categories: increasing clicks, content/on-page SEO tips, technical SEO, and a little bit of link building. There are 21 of these. These are going to go fast. We're trying to do 10 to 12 minutes, so we don't get to spend a lot of time on each one. But don't fret. We're going to link to appropriate resources in the transcript below so that we can keep along and explore a little bit more. All right. Ready to dive in?

Increasing clicks

Let's start with clicks, specifically earning more clicks from Google without actually ranking higher, because that's one of the great things about SEO. You don't actually have to rank higher to get more traffic if you can get more clicks from the rankings that you already have. So let's talk about some specific strategies for getting more clicks without increasing rankings.

1. Favicon optimization

First, favicon optimization.

Now I'm surprised more people haven't talked about this in 2020. Google displays favicons in mobile search results, and they can influence your click-through rate if they're high contrast, if they're visible or not visible. Having a good favicon can make a few percentage points difference, very minor, but it does make a difference if you can get it right. Aaron Wall, SEO Book, wrote one of the very few posts about that .

2. Breadcrumb optimization

While we're optimizing our favicons, let's take a look at breadcrumb optimization. Google displays breadcrumbs in both desktop and mobile search results. They can be keyword-rich breadcrumbs, which can influence your click-through rate. Now Google gets their breadcrumbs from a lot of places. That can be your URL, your schema markup, your actual breadcrumbs on the page.

What you want to do is make sure Google is displaying the breadcrumbs that you want them to display, using those keywords that you choose. The best way to do that, make sure that you have breadcrumbs actually on your page with links, that you're using schema markup. Ideally, it would match your URL structure, but that isn't always necessary. So a great breadcrumb optimization audit.

3. Meta descriptions

Let's optimize those meta descriptions. This is so old-school SEO. But a recent study shows that 30% of websites don't even use meta descriptions . Now that's understandable because another study shows that 70% of the time, Google will rewrite the meta description , usually because it's not using the keywords that the user is searching for. But if we write a well-crafted meta description, it can compel users to click, and that means using keyword-rich descriptions that people are actually searching for, so when Google does use your meta description, it's encouraging those clicks and acting as marketing copy for your website.

4. Numbers in titles

Along with meta descriptions, titles . Just shared a study recently showing that dates added to titles increased rankings for a particular brand . Numbers are generally one thing that I always test in title tags that usually produce pretty consistent results. Specifically, dates in title tags are often a winner, January 2021.

Don't be spammy about it. Don't include it if it doesn't make sense and don't fake it. But if you can include a number, it will often increase your click-through rate for any given query.

5. <Title> boilerplate

How about doing a boilerplate audit for your title tag? Tip number five. What's boilerplate? Boilerplate are the parts of your title tag that repeat every single time.

For example, here at Moz, we put "Moz," our brand name at the end of every title tag. We used to put "Whiteboard Friday" at the end of every Whiteboard Friday until we tested it and found out that we actually got more clicks and higher rankings when we removed it. So boilerplate, you want your titles to be unique, provide unique value. So I would encourage you to experiment with your boilerplate and see if removing it actually increases your rankings.

Sometimes it's not going to. Sometimes you need that boilerplate . But do the test to find out.

6. FAQ and how-to schema

Tip number six: schema, specifically FAQ and how-to schema. Google gave us a huge gift when they introduced these in search results. FAQ schema gives you a lot of SERP real estate. You can't always win it, and you can't always win the how-to schema, but when you do, that can definitely increase or influence people to click on your result, expand those FAQ schemas out.

It's not appropriate for every page. You want to make sure that you actually have those FAQs on your pages. But it is one way, in appropriate situations, that you can increase clicks without increasing your actual Google ranking. All right.

Content/on-page SEO

Let's move on to some content and on-page tips.

7. Relaunch top content

All right, number seven. This is the year I want you to look into relaunching your top content .

Content can go stale after a few years. So we launch content. You have a blog, you launch it, and you share it on social media. Most people forget about it after that. So go back, look at your top content over the last two to five years or even 10 years, if you want to go back that far, and see what you can relaunch by updating it, keeping it on the same URL. In some cases, you can see gains of 500% to 1,000% just by relaunching some of your old content with some updates.

So do a relaunch audit in 2021.

8. Increase internal linking

Number eight: increasing internal linking. Now a lot of top SEO agencies, when they need to quickly increase rankings for clients, there are generally two things that they know are the easiest levers to pull. First, title tags and meta descriptions, what's getting more clicks, but second is increasing the internal linking .

You know that you can increase internal links on your site, and there are probably some opportunities there that you just haven't explored. So let's talk about a couple easy ways to do that without having too much work.

9. Update old content with new links

Number nine is updating your old content with new links. This is a step that we see people skip time and time again. When you publish a new blog post, publish a new piece of content, make sure you're going back and updating your old content with those new links.

So you're looking at the top keyword that you want to rank for, and going in Google Search Console or checking tools like Keyword Explorer to see what other pages on your site rank for that keyword, and then adding links to the new content to those pages. I find when I do this, time and time again, it lowers the bounce rate. So you're not only updating your old page with fresh content and fresh links and adding relevance. You're adding links to your new content. So make sure, when you publish new content, you're updating your old content with those new links.

10. Remove unnecessary links

Number 10, remove unnecessary links from your content. Now this is a form of PageRank sculpting . PageRank sculpting is a dirty word in SEO, but actually it works to a certain extent. It's not nofollow link page sculpting.

It is removing unnecessary links. Do you really need a link to your team page on every page of your website? Do you need a link to your contact form on every page of your website? In many cases, you don't. Sometimes you do. But if you remove the unnecessary links, you can pass more link equity through the links that actually count, and those links are a major Google ranking signal.

11. Mobile link parity audit

Number 11, need you to do a mobile link parity audit . What is that? What is a mobile link parity audit? That is ensuring that the links on your mobile site are the same as the links on your desktop site. Why is that important? Well, the last couple of years Google has moved to a mobile first index, meaning what they see on your mobile site, that's your website.

That's what counts. So a lot of sites, they have a desktop site, and then they reduce it to their mobile site and they're missing links. They get rid of header navigation, footer links, and things like that. A recent study showed that the average desktop page has 61 links and the average mobile page has 54 links . That means on the web as a whole there are seven fewer links on mobile pages than desktop pages, meaning a lot of link equity is being lost.

So do a study on your own website. Make sure you have mobile link parity between your desktop and your mobile site so you're not losing that equity.

12. Invest in long-form content

Number 12: need you to invest in long-form content. Now I am not saying that content length is a ranking factor. It is not. Short-form content can rank perfectly well. The reason I want you to invest in long-form content is because consistently, time and time again, when we study this, long-form content earns more links and shares .

It also generally tends to rank higher in Google search results. Nothing against short-form content. Love short-form content. But long-form content generally gives you more bang for your buck in terms of SEO ranking potential.

13. Use more headers

When you're doing that long-form content, make sure you do number 13: use more headers. I'm talking about H2 and H3 tags.

Break up your content with good, keyword-rich header tags. Why? Well, we have research from A.J. Ghergich that shows that the more header tags you have, generally you rank for more featured snippets . Sites with 12-13, which seems like a lot of header tags, rank for the most featured snippets of anything that they looked at in their most recent study.

So make sure you're breaking up your content with header tags. It adds a little contextual relevance. It's a great way to add some ranking potential to your content.

14. Leverage topic clusters

Number 14, leverage topic clusters . Don't just launch one piece of content. Make sure you write about multiple pieces of content around the same subject and link those together. When you do that and you link them intelligently, you can increase engagement because people are reading the different articles.

You can add the right contextual inner links. I have a great case study that I want to show you in the transcript below, where someone did this and produced amazing results. So look into topic clusters for 2021.

15. Bring content out of tabs

Finally, bring your content out of tabs . If you have content that is in accordions or drop-downs or you have to click to reveal the content, study after study after study shows that content that's brought out of tabs and brought into the main body, so people don't have to click to see, generally performs better than content that's hidden in tabs.

Now to be clear, I don't believe that Google discriminates content in tabs. They seem to be able to index and rank it just fine. But I think people generally engage with content when it's out of tabs, and maybe some of those signals help those pages to rank a little better.

Technical SEO

All right. Just a very few technical SEO tips. We're going fast.

16. Core Web Vitals

Number 16: this is the year to invest in Core Web Vitals. These are some of the page experience signals that Google is bringing to the forefront in 2021. It's going to be an actual ranking factor very soon. We're talking about cumulative shift layout, hard word to say. Generally, we're talking about site speed and delivering great page experience. Now some of these things are very technical, and Google has some tools, like Lighthouse, to try to help you to figure them out.

One tip I like to share, if you are on WordPress, I highly recommend using Cloudflare, in particular their APO for WordPress . It's a great way to speed up your WordPress website and help you score better for some of these Core Web Vitals. It's very low cost, it's easy to implement, and it's a great way to speed up your WordPress website.

17. Limit sitemaps to 10,000

Number 17: sitemaps. Sitemaps, you're allowed to have 50,000 URLs per sitemap. This is always a question in every SEO quiz. How many URLs per sitemap are you allowed? Instead, if you have a large site and you have indexing issues, tip number 17, limit your sitemaps to 10,000 URLs . You don't have to use all 50,000.

We have some evidence that using smaller sitemaps, compressing those into a limited URL set can actually improve your crawlability of those. It's kind of like Google might prioritize those in some way. The data seems to support it. You also get a little bit better data out of Google Search Console. You can see what's being indexed and what's not.

18. Leverage dynamic sitemaps

Also, leverage dynamic sitemaps. Our friend Oliver Mason shows — that I'll link to in the transcript below — that a dynamic sitemap is a sitemap that changes based upon what you want Google to crawl . So if you have a large corpus of URLs that you want Google to crawl, put the high priority ones in their own special sitemap.

Maybe you limit it to one thousand URLs. As Google crawls and discovers those, remove them and put in additional high priority URLs that you want Google to discover. Keep the sitemap small and tight, and let Google know that those are the ones that you want them to pay attention to.

Link building

Let's quickly talk about link building tips for 2021, because everybody loves link building.

No, kidding. Everybody hates link building. Link building is so hard. There are some professionals and there are some great people in the industry who do love it, who are great at it. Personally, I'm not that great at link building, but I still am able to build a lot of links.

19. Passive link acquisition

One way that I'm able to do that is number 19: passive link acquisition . What passive link acquisition means is creating content that passively earns links as people discover it in the SERPs.

It means I don't have to outreach to people. It means that when they find it, when journalists find it, when bloggers find it, they naturally want to link to it. You do that by creating the types of content that journalists and bloggers and web creators are looking for. These are generally data, guides, definitions, how to, such as this video. When you create that kind of content, it generally earns a lot of links as people find it. Passive link building is one of the most sustainable ways to earn links over time.

20. Page-level link intersect

Number 20, page-level link intersect . When you do have to do outreach, you want to do outreach to the pages most likely to link to you. Now we've known for a long time one of the top SEO tips for link building is find websites that link to your competitors but not to you.

I like to make that a little more specific and find web pages that link to at least two of my competitors but not to me. That means that they are generally a resource page, if they're linking to multiple competitors but not to me, and more likely to link to me if I ask them. We have a great tool here at Moz, Link Explorer , that does page-level link intersect. I think it's the best tool for this specific task in the SEO industry, not because I'm biased, because I actually use it.

21. Be the last click

Tip number 21 for 2021, be the last click. What do I mean by that? I mean satisfy your users. Once you earn the first click, you want to get that first click that people click, but you also want to be the last click. That means they found what they are looking for. User satisfaction is ranking signal number one. Your goal with all of this is to satisfy the user, to give them what they search for.

That's the magic of SEO. They're searching for something, and you're delivering it to them at the exact moment they search for it. When you can be the last click, you're almost guaranteed to rise in rankings and get the traffic that you deserve.

All right, those are 21 tips. That's your roadmap for 2021. Hope you enjoyed it. Please share this video and share your tips for 2021 in the comments below.

Thanks, everybody.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com