Wednesday, 30 June 2021

MozCon Virtual 2021 Interview Series: Dana DiTomaso

We’re thrilled to welcome Dana DiTomaso back to this year’s MozCon Virtual where she’ll discuss modern web development that puts SEO first. Check out what she has to share ahead of the show!

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How to uncover digital growth opportunities for SMBs in 2020

How to uncover digital growth strategy opportunities for SMBs in 2020

Now that you reviewed your SMBs’ 2019 performance, it’s time to refocus and think about goals for 2020. Have your goals changed? Are you now focusing more on efficiency, new customer acquisition, or building upper-funnel leads?

Are you trading efficiency for awareness or vice versa? Are there new customer segments that you are pursuing? Do you have new products, services, or functionalities to introduce? The answers to these questions should form the foundation of your digital growth strategy and should define the tests you run to support that strategy.

In this post, we’ll talk about the alignment of goals and tests to get you on the right path for 2020 growth.

Goal/test alignment

If your main goal is building brand awareness and your base of engaged users, testing new audiences should be a key focus, with a secondary step planned for retargeting these users in the future. Facebook/IG has great demographic intelligence to tap into, and LinkedIn allows B2Bs incredible targeting capabilities by title, industry, company size, and other relevant parameters.

If you’re more focused on getting more value out of an already-healthy customer base, bringing them back to your site and working to earn more conversion, turn your attention to remarketing and user experience. 

What does this mean for B2C and ecommerce?

For B2C and ecommerce, this means optimizing remarketing campaigns (testing promotions and other messaging) and running CRO tests to make sure your landing pages are finely tuned and moving the users through the conversion funnel. 

What does this mean for B2B and lead gen?

For B2B and lead gen, moving a strong upper-funnel base of leads through the funnel means making sure your content and messaging is aligned with their place in the purchase journey – so test different copy and themes to see which resonate the best, then target leads that went dark during the sales process with retargeting campaigns on LinkedIn and GDN.

If your goal is to lower CPA and establish more reasonable CPCs in a world of oversaturation on Google and Facebook, I recommend testing new channels with less competition and lower CPCs/CPAs. Those platforms include Instagram, Pinterest, Quora, and Reddit.

Goal-agnostic testing

No matter what your overall campaign goals or business type are, it’s critical to establish a testing strategy and framework for creative assets and automated features. For creative, this includes everything from ad format (video, single-image, carousel) to the aspect ratio, and specific messaging/offers. For automation, consider that Google and Facebook’s powerful machine-learning tools, including automated bidding and campaign budget optimization – can help improve performance. However, they would require oversight to ensure they’re on target. Automated creative tools, including Google’s responsive search ads and Facebook’s dynamic creative, blend machine learning with creative testing and should be tested and monitored to leverage in campaigns for all business types.

Measurement

Once you begin these tests, the rock-solid measurement must inform decisions and optimizations moving forward. If your goal is to drive brand awareness, focus on improvements, on metrics such as impressions, clicks, site visits, and reach. Customer acquisition goals for B2B and lead gen should incorporate metrics including upper-funnel leads, converted leads, opportunities, CPL, and lead-to-opportunity conversion rates. 

Ecommerce businesses focused on driving sales should focus on metrics like ‘add to cart’, purchases, CVR, ROAS, and CPA. Reviewing these metrics at a campaign level, ad group or ad set level, audience, and creative level will help inform decisions and future tests. 

There are many more testing layers to get into, but make sure you have started towards your 2020 goals by aligning the first wave of tests and KPIs accordingly to give yourself a foundation for growth in the coming quarters. 

Lauren Crain is a Client Services Lead in 3Q Digital’s SMB division, 3Q Incubate.

Whitepapers

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This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: Lauren Crain

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Tuesday, 29 June 2021

Vlog #42: Jennifer Van Iderstyne On Better Content & Multimedia For SEO

Jennifer Van Iderstyne

When I was scheming to give Lisa Barone a hard time before our interview, Lisa recommended I sit down with Jennifer Van Iderstyne (@vanetcetera) to discuss SEO with her. She has been doing SEO since 2006, working at the old We Build Pages company, so she has some experience under her belt, to say the least.

We did our interview in the focus group room, which has a one way mirror – so I had to mention that.

In 2015 she moved from her previous company and joined Overit. She is one of the primary SEO at Overit. She explained the differences of doing SEO for a digital marketing company versus at an SEO company. In short, you have a lot more resources available from the developers, video creation, paid search and so much more.

We talked about content creation and SEO, she is a believer of creating a substantial amount of content. But specifically about making sure to solve the intent of the searcher with your content. You need to make sure that the entry way from search satisfies the searcher intent and then drives that searcher to the conversion point you ultimately want to see from that user.

Video in search is something Jennifer is super excited about, not just video but also multimedia. She said the type of content you create needs to appeal to the searcher and what that searcher enjoys. Do they enjoy images, video, content, etc?

There is also an opportunity in “misalignments” she said. If you see people coming to you from search but the query is misaligned, that is an opportunity to change the page to drive that user to align better to what you can offer that user. That information you can only get from analytics.

Here is he video interview (I apologize for the weird audio issues, a mic must have been misaligned during this interview):

You can subscribe to our YouTube channel by clicking here so you don’t miss the next vlog where I interviews. I do have a nice lineup of interviews scheduled with SEOs and SEMS, many of which you don’t want to miss – and I promise to continue to make these vlogs better over time. If you want to be interviewed, please fill out this form with your details.

Forum discussion at YouTube.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)

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3 Social Media Strategy Templates for Any Business Size

3 Social Media Strategy Templates for Any Business Size

To be successful on social media as an enterprise business, you should be bold, different, and push boundaries with your posts. You should have developed the strategy for small businesses and have a rigorously tested posting structure with set times of day and days of the week for optimum engagement. But to really

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Understanding & Addressing Concerns of Your Website Users

Conversion rate optimization is…

  • … a system for increasing the percentage of visitors to a website that convert into customers, or more generally, take any desired action on a webpage. It is commonly referred to as CRO. (Wikipedia)
  • … the process of enabling people to take an action when they visit a website. (Hubspot)
  • … understanding how users move through your site, what actions they take, and what’s stopping them from completing your goals. (Moz)
  • … the process of optimizing your site or landing page experience based on website visitor behaviour to help improve desired actions (conversions) on the said page. (VWO)

As you can see from all of these explanations, the core of conversion rate optimization is getting users to take a desired action, or rather, altering their behavior. If our goal is to alter their behavior, we need to first understand how they currently behave and what’s preventing them from taking that desired action.

As you dive deeper, you’ll uncover their reasons for not taking that desired action, but how can you alleviate those concerns?

By addressing them.

A Case Study

An e-commerce client sells high-end, customizable doors for the home. We needed to understand exactly what our customers were feeling when navigating our website and what was preventing them from completing the desired action – making a purchase.

Utilizing Hotjar, we created a poll on our top 2 product pages that asked users, “Is there anything stopping you from making a purchase today?”

hotjar wordcloud

Being a customizable product with a hefty price tag, it’s not surprising that “price” was what stopped the majority of users from purchasing. Knowing this information and taking into consideration the other words we can see – expensive, depth, opening, unassembled, shelves, wood – we then had more information to address concerns. Now what?

Lower the price? That’s unrealistic and will negatively impact profitability.

Modify or improve the customization process? This could definitely improve the experience and lead to more purchases but will take quite a bit of development time and resources that do not currently exist.

Better align user expectations and improve the existing content? This is a quick adjustment that will provide clarity on what’s included in the price.

The Problem

To reiterate, the problem is that the price is a hindrance to the purchase process. For additional context, it isn’t obvious that this price will fluctuate. You’ll notice on the page below that the price of this door is $749.00. However, this is only the starting price, which isn’t made clear to customers.

ab landing page control

Once a customer begins to customize this door, the price goes up. We actually addressed this concern in a different manner on their previous site and saw a 46% lift in revenue just from changing the color of the price calculator.  However, this change was primarily suggested in hopes of eliminating fear or alarm due to the high price tag.

The current concern is misaligned expectations. If they’re not expecting the price tag to fluctuate, of course the price is what stops them from purchasing. They’re probably expecting a door for $750 when in actuality, their customized door will end up costing $1000+. 

The Solution

Customers need to know that $749 is the starting price. They also need to have a better understanding of what’s included within this price. Our solution addressed both.

Instead of the price at the top of the page changing when a user customizes their door, this now says, “Starting at $749.00” and does not dynamically change. Keep in mind, the price near the “Add the Cart” button does still change so that users know the true price of the door before they add it.

In addition, the copy now says, “Select our base model for $749.00 or upgrade with customizations.” Below this is a list of all of the specifications included in the base model.

ab test landing page variation

The Results

The results spoke volumes.

  • 86.24% increase in revenue
  • 48.25% increase in e-commerce conversion rate
  • -24.23% decrease in bounce rate
  • 26.16% increase in average order value
  • 72.73% increase in phone calls

Notice we saw a large increase in phone calls as well. Phone calls are important because a lot of orders do come through this channel; however, you might have assumed that phone calls would decrease since this new content addresses their concerns. Though we can’t say for certain why phone calls jumped so drastically, we can assume it’s due to the emphasis we’re putting on product specifications such as door depth, jamb depth, etc, because these were already common inquiries. If more customers are taking time to customize and purchase, there will be more customers wanting to confirm what these specifications are referring to.

The reason this influx in phone calls was not concerning to us was because we received feedback from the sales team saying that this change to the content did improve their calls and customers were referencing this list and having fewer questions surrounding these details!

Final Thoughts

A simple change to the copy and product details resulted in $23K+ of additional revenue spanning four weeks. It was that simple.

By understanding the customers’ concerns, we were able to successfully address those concerns head-on. We were able to gather both quantitative and qualitative data to better understand just how impactful these changes were to the customers and their experience.

We altered their behavior with a simple change to the content.

Visit our complete CRO handbook to read more about the tools and resources you can use to learn more about the concerns of your users.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: Samantha Kerr

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Daily Search Forum Recap: June 29, 2021

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web…

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)

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Google Analytics Conversion Data Now Exporting To Google Ads By Default

If you have conversion data for your web site or app in your Google Analytics profiles and you are running Google Ads, Google by default will export the data from Google Analytics and bring it into Google Ads. Google announced this in Google Ads and on Twitter.

The notice reads “update your conversion actions to use in bidding.” “Web conversions you import from Google Analytics App + Web (excluding remarketing conversions) will automatically be used in bidding. To turn on bidding for your current conversion actions, go to your conversion table.”

Here is how to do it:

As a follow-up to the launch of web-conversion export from App + Web properties, conversions exported to Google Ads (except for remarketing conversions) will by default be enabled for bidding moving forward. Conversions previously exported will be editable in Google Ads so Advertisers can manually enable them for bidding.

A notice will appear in your Google Ads account:

Use the following column in your Google Ads account to enable bidding:

click for full size

Forum discussion at Twitter.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)

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