Is email dead? With the rise of social media, instant messaging, and other forms of online communication, you might think so.
But the truth is that email is far from dead. In fact, McKinsey & Company reports that it is 40 times more effective at acquiring customers than Facebook and Twitter combined.“That’s because 91 percent of all US consumers still use email daily, and the rate at which emails prompt purchases is not only estimated to be at least three times that of social media, but the average order value is also 17 percent higher,” the report says. Still, writing effective marketing emails can be difficult, especially if it’s a cold email.
In this article, we’ll go over what a cold email is, the benefits and challenges of cold emailing, different types of cold emails, how to write cold emails that convert cold leads into warm leads, and more.
Let’s get started!
A cold email is an unsolicited email sent to someone you have no prior connection with (aka a cold lead). It’s basically the email equivalent of cold calling.
Cold emails are most often sent to potential customers or someone with whom you want to build a business relationship and add to your network. However, if not done correctly, they can easily end up in the spam folder, reducing their effectiveness.
It’s important to note, however, that cold emails are different from spam. Unlike spam emails that are sent indiscriminately, cold emails are sent to qualified leads only. In addition, cold emails are personalized and not just a carbon copy of an email sent to many recipients.
Some of the main benefits of cold emailing are that it’s something you can do for free, it’s completely in your control, and it’s easy to scale.
The biggest challenge of cold emailing is that it’s hard to do well. According to a study of 12 million cold emails conducted by Backlinko, the vast majority of cold emails are ignored. The average response rate for cold emails is 8.5%, which means if you sent out 100 cold emails, only 8 or 9 of them would get a reply.
That said, when done right, cold emails can have a huge ROI. Depending on what kind of product or service you are pitching, a successful cold email campaign has the potential to generate thousands of dollars in revenue.
Cold emails can serve different ends. Some common ones include:
When it comes to actually crafting an effective cold email, follow these steps:
If the subject line doesn’t grab the recipient’s attention, it won’t matter how good the rest of the email body is because they won’t see it. So, you’ve got to nail the subject line.
To do this, make it short and sweet, personal, and interesting. You might ask a question, include an emoji, or use numbers (e.g., “How I earned $9,781 in one day").
The point is to grab your recipient’s attention, so they don’t overlook your email. Just make sure that your subject line isn’t clickbait. It must actually relate to what’s inside the email.
This is an easy step to forget, but it’s an important one. You want to tell the recipient why you are reaching out to them specifically as opposed to anyone else. People are more likely to respond when they feel uniquely qualified to help. Say you’re emailing a fintech executive. By telling them upfront that you’re interested in networking with an experienced fintech executive, they may be more likely to oblige.
Give the reader a reason to listen to you. This is an excellent opportunity to list off some of your credentials, past accolades, and experience. If you can work in some social proof by mentioning past clients or partners you’ve worked with, do it. The point is to validate yourself so that the reader is more likely to take you seriously. If you don’t yet have much credibility, find something you share in common instead. For example, you could point out that you and your reader both enjoy rock climbing (this takes some research, obviously). The rarer the commonality, the better.
As humans, we work much harder to avoid pain than to gain pleasure. You can use this to your advantage. Research what’s bothering or hurting your reader and tap into that. Perhaps they’re a workaholic struggling to find a healthy work-life balance.
Acknowledge that making time for family, hobbies, and relaxation can be difficult. This will help your message resonate more with your readers and they will be more inclined to read on.
Don’t bring up your reader’s pain points without pointing them to a solution. Ideally, the solution is your product or service. This is the whole point of the cold outreach campaign, after all. So be specific about what you have to offer and how it can add value to your recipient.
For example, you might have a software scheduling tool that can eliminate the administrative burden of making appointments. Try to quantify your solution by saying how much time or money it could save your prospect.
Every cold email needs a compelling CTA. This is how you lead your readers to do whatever you want them to do, whether that’s booking a consultation, requesting a free audit, or placing an order.
You want to make it as easy as possible for them to take the next step. Leaving them confused about what to do next is missing a huge opportunity.
Your email signature consists of the information below your name. Most email providers let you create one that automatically sends with each message.
A nice email signature can reaffirm your credibility by showing your title, the company you work for, and a logo. It can also make it easier to reach out to you by including your phone number, address, and alternate email.
At the end of the day, crafting effective email outreach campaigns is an art. It takes practice and a lot of trial and error. However, there are some tried-and-true principles that can help make your cold emails stand out. Here they are:
Hopefully, you now feel more confident about sending cold emails. If you still need help, Marketer.co is here for you. Our marketing experts have years of experience in crafting powerful cold emails that generate lots of leads. Work with us to take your business’s marketing to the next level.
Feel free to contact us today for a free consultation. We look forward to learning more about your marketing needs and seeing how we can help.
While there may be many methods for generating leads organically, there are some circumstances when buying leads can be a quick and efficient alternative to scaling your marketing efforts.
Nonetheless, not all lead sellers and business lead providers are created equal, and with the extensive range of options existing, it can be challenging to decide who or what to contact for support.
The LinkedIn platform is even more effective as a tool for generating leads thanks to the LinkedIn Sales Navigator service.
Given how successful LinkedIn is right now, this is a major improvement. You have a wide range of search criteria at your disposal when using Sales Navigator to look for leads. These criteria include things like the job title, the sector, the location, and other elements.
Also, you have the option to save leads and accounts so that you can keep tabs on their happenings and see how involved these accounts are with your company. You have access to this function if you decide to save leads and accounts.
If you are serious about producing sales leads for your organization, advancing in Sales Navigator will more than pay for itself despite being relatively costly.
UpLead is a platform for generating leads in the cloud with many different features. Real-time email verification, lead enrichment, and interfaces with common customer relationship management (CRM) systems are a few of these features.
With UpLead, you may look for leads based on a number of aspects, like the job title, the size of the company, and the geography.
The application also provides users with a Google Chrome add-on that enables them to look up possible leads while browsing the web. You can download this add-on from the system's website.
With the help of the website visitor tracking tool Leadfeeder, you can determine which businesses have visited your website even if they haven't submitted a form or gotten in touch with you. Because Leadfeeder is a visitor tracking system, this is possible. This is now possible thanks to Leadfeeder, which lets you identify the companies that have visited your website.
By using Leadfeeder, you can learn which pages the company viewed, how long they spent on your website, and what search terms they entered into the search field to discover you.
It is also simple to convert website visits into leads thanks to the platform's collaboration with widely used customer relationship management (CRM) solutions like Salesforce and HubSpot. This gives it an edge over rival platforms.
A business-focused database called ZoomInfo gives its users access to millions of organizations and connections that are spread out around the globe. You can use ZoomInfo to find leads by using a range of criteria, including the job title, the industry, and the location. To guarantee that the business leads you get are current and accurate, the platform also offers a wide range of services, like lead enrichment and email verification.
The business-to-business (B2B) sales and marketing intelligence platform from DiscoverOrg offers customers access to a variety of data about businesses and contacts throughout the world. You can use DiscoverOrg to look for relevant leads based on factors like job title, industry, and location. The platform provides capabilities for account-based digital marketing and lead enrichment, which can be used to locate and interact with clients that are the best fit for your business.
With the use of the website visitor monitoring application LeadForensics, you can track down companies that have visited your website even if they haven't submitted a form or gotten in touch with you. You may find out which pages on your website the business visited, how long they spent there, and what search terms they used to discover you. It is simple to turn website visits into qualified leads thanks to the platform's interaction with widely used customer relationship management (CRM) solutions like Salesforce and HubSpot.
A platform for generating leads for B2B companies called LeadGenius gives them admission to a network of more than 500,000 researchers and data scientists. You may use LeadGenius to find leads based on factors like industry, geography, and job title. Also, you can screen leads depending on the size of the business, income, and other factors. LeadGenius uses a mixture of artificial intelligence and human researchers to collect data, resulting in leads that are surely focused and well-targeted.
A platform for B2B lead development, D&B Hoovers gives users access to more than 120 million company contacts globally. Users of the portal can look for leads using a variation of criteria, including industry, business size, job title, and more. Users can also sort leads based on criteria like revenue, employee count, and others. The in-depth information on each company, including financial data, corporate history, and news stories, is one of the main advantages of using D&B Hoovers and is useful when contacting potential customers.
Data.com is a well-liked option for finding potential clients because it has a large database of company contacts. To preserve accuracy, the database is frequently updated with new information. In order to assist consumers in finding fresh leads pertinent to their target market, Data.com also offers a lead-generating service.
With over 30 million records in its contact database, Salesfully is a lead supplier. Users can utilize the website's filters to focus on certain industry sectors, job functions, and geographical regions. Email verification, corporate information, and lead commendations based on user preferences are among the other services offered by Salesfully. One benefit of Salesfully is its pay-as-you-go pricing structure, which enables users to buy business leads that they actually need for their organization.
Another lead supplier with access to a contact database with more than 10 million records is AeroLeads. The website offers a number of filters that visitors can use to focus on particular industry sectors, job functions, and geographical regions. In addition, AeroLeads delivers lead recommendations based on user preferences, company information, and email authentication. Users may find and save leads more easily when cruising the web with the help of a browser plugin.
One of the significant benefits of using Lead411 is its flexible pay-as-you-go pricing model, making it an excellent option for organizations that don't need a large number of leads. This pricing model permits businesses to control their lead generation costs and only pay for the leads they need, without any long-term commitments or contracts. Lead411 also offers a range of integrations with popular CRM and marketing automation tools, making it easy for businesses to import their leads and start using them right away. Additionally, the platform is user-friendly and intuitive, making it easy for businesses of all sizes to use and benefit from.
To sum up, generating high-quality leads might be difficult, but these top five lead-buying locations give businesses the instruments and materials they need to speed up the procedure. Every platform, from Hushly to LinkedIn Sales Navigator, has distinct advantages that are personalized to a particular business kinds. Because of the many pricing options, businesses may select a lead generation program that fits their budget while still generating high-quality leads to help them grow and expand.
There are many factors to consider while looking for a lead provider. Some of the most important factors to think about are listed below:
The most important consideration when choosing a lead supplier is the quality of the leads. Excellent leads have a higher chance of becoming clients, so it's critical to pick a source that provides accurate and current leads. When purchasing leads, look for a vendor who has a track record of delivering high-quality leads, and make sure the leads are established and authenticated.
Depending on the provider, the cost of leads can vary significantly. It's key to picking a supplier who charges fairly for high-quality leads. Be sure the cost is reasonable given the caliber of the leads you will acquire by comparing the prices of various sources.
Filters A lead generation tool would be incomplete without filters. The greater your chances are of discovering leads that fit your target demographic, the more filters a supplier offers. In order to target particular industries, job titles, regions, and more, look for a supplier who provides a wide selection of filters.
When choosing a provider to buy sales leads, customer support should be a top consideration.. No matter if it's a technical problem or a query concerning the leads, you want to be confident that you can get assistance when you need it. Choose a supplier who provides responsive customer service, including phone and email support.
Data security is essential when buying leads. Be sure the vendor you select takes general data protection regulation seriously and adheres to industry standards. Choose a supplier who is open about their data protection practices and has a solid track record of keeping client information safe.
Finally, when deciding to buy leads online, it’s critical to consider the supplier’s ratings and reputation. To learn about the supplier's advantages and disadvantages, read user reviews. Take into account the supplier's standing in the market and history of producing leads of the highest caliber.
To sum up, there are numerous locations where you may buy leads for your company, but not all vendors are created equal. It's crucial to take into account aspects like lead quality, price, filters, support, data protection, and reviews when choosing a lead supplier. You can ensure that you get leads of the highest caliber to aid in the expansion of your company by taking the time to select the ideal supplier.
As a website proprietor, you understand that maintaining a website can be an excellent approach to allure novel clients, provide valuable facts, and generate revenue.
But what transpires when your website's rankings begin to dwindle dramatically? Your website might become less conspicuous to budding customers, leading to an unfavorable impact on your enterprise.
In this composition, we will furnish you with some suggestions on how to address your plummeting website rankings.
The primary step in resolving your falling website rankings is to execute a website review. This assessment will assist you in pinpointing the areas that necessitate improvement. Some issues to look out for include:
Broken links Sluggish loading speed Duplicate content Missing meta descriptions Inferior quality content Inadequate user experience.
After identifying the issues, commence correcting them individually. You can avail of a website audit instrument to facilitate you in identifying these issues.
One of the most crucial elements that determine your website rankings is the eminence of your content. You should guarantee that your website contains exceptional and high-quality content that is pertinent to your target audience. The content should also be optimized for search engines. This signifies that you should incorporate pertinent keywords in your content and meta descriptions.
Furthermore, you should ensure that your website is updated recurrently. This will aid in improving your website rankings and keeping your target audience engrossed. You can accomplish this by appending blog posts, news updates, or any other kind of content that is pertinent to your audience.
Take the time to run relevant scans on your content using the latest semantic language tools, including Google Natural Language AI, Cora by SEOToolLab and SurferSEO.
Each of these tools, especially when used in tandem, can help you find what makes your page or post (and even your site overall) deficient compared to a competing post.
When you use these tools correctly, you will find what statistically relevant keywords are missing, how your site's content length may be too low (or too high) and what H1-H6 words you're not using (but which you should be).
You will also find out what others are doing that you may not be, so you can bridge the content gap with other competing sites.
Because the most relevant ranking factor online is that your site is diversified among the ranking factors, tuning your content for SEO (search engine optimization) is more important than anything else, including backlinks!
Create quality content and then tune it up with the right keywords.
Link building services are an important component of a holistic digital marketing strategy. It involves acquiring hyperlinks from other websites that point back to your website. These links are viewed as votes of confidence by search engines, indicating that other websites consider your content to be valuable and relevant. As a result, search engines tend to rank websites with a greater number of high-quality links higher in their search results.
However, it's important to note that link building should be done in a strategic and thoughtful way. Simply adding too many anchor text links indiscriminately can actually have a negative impact on your overall search engine ranking.
Search engines have become more sophisticated in recent years (from Panda 3.3 to Panda 3.4--in the early years to more recent SpamLink and content quality Google updates), and they can detect when websites are engaging in manipulative link building tactics to artificially inflate their ranking.
Mobile devices are gaining momentum as a popular medium for browsing the internet. Hence, it is crucial to optimize your website for mobile devices. This implies that your website should be user-friendly, load promptly, and be responsive to diverse screen sizes.
If your website is not optimized for mobile devices, you might encounter a decline in rankings. You can employ an instrument such as Google's Mobile-Friendly Test to verify whether your website is optimized for mobile devices.
Backlinks are a vital factor in enhancing your website rankings. Backlinks are links that other websites use to link to your website. The quality and quantity of these links can have a substantial influence on your website's search engine rankings.
To foster high-quality backlinks, you can reach out to other websites in your industry and request them to link to your website. You can also create high-quality content that other websites will want to link to. It is paramount to note that you should only foster backlinks from respectable and high-quality websites.
Social media is a first-rate approach to promote your website and improve your website rankings. By disseminating your content on social media, you can amplify your website's visibility, allure novel clients, and enhance your website's rankings.
To utilize social media effectively, you should ensure that your social media profiles are optimized for search engines. This implies that you should incorporate pertinent keywords in your profiles and descriptions. You should also ensure that your content is shareable and engaging. This will aid in increasing your social media following and improving your website rankings.
Monitoring your website performance is critical in addressing your plummeting website rankings. By monitoring your website's performance, you can pinpoint the areas that necessitate improvement and take action before it is too late.
Several instruments can help you monitor your website's performance. Google Analytics is an excellent instrument that can aid you in monitoring your website's traffic, bounce rate, and other crucial metrics. You can also avail of an instrument such as SEMrush to monitor your website's rankings and track your competitors.
Google Search Console is a free instrument that can aid you in monitoring your website's performance in Google search results. It is a valuable resource that can help you to identify any issues that may be affecting your website's SEO rankings. By using this tool, you can track your website's search performance, identify any errors or issues, and ensure that your website is optimized for search engines.
In conclusion, fixing falling website rankings in the SERPs (search engine results pages) can be a formidable task, but by following these tips and utilizing various online tools, you can augment your website's visibility to potential customers, attract more traffic, and generate more sales.
In today's digitized epoch, establishing a content strategy is a crucial component of any business's marketing blueprint. Amid the proliferation of digital avenues and the ever-evolving consumer demeanor, businesses must concoct content that appeals to their target audience and propels business consequences.
However, executing a content strategy can prove to be a herculean task, particularly for businesses that lack a dedicated marketing team. This is where ChatGPT, an AI-powered tool trained by OpenAI, can lend a helping hand.
ChatGPT is a colossal language model that can aid businesses in executing their content strategy. With its natural language processing capabilities, it can dissect the language of a business's target audience and engender content ideas that are pertinent and captivating. Here are some steps to execute a content strategy using ChatGPT.
The first step in executing a content strategy is to delineate your target audience. ChatGPT can help you unravel the language patterns and predilections of your target audience. By scrutinizing the language employed by your audience in their online interactions, ChatGPT can furnish insights into their interests, afflictions, and motivations. This intel can facilitate you in creating content that resonates with your target audience.
Once you have identified your target audience, the subsequent step is to fashion content ideas that are germane and enthralling. ChatGPT can aid you in this process by generating content ideas based on your audience's language patterns and preferences.
By inputting a few keywords associated with your business and your target audience, ChatGPT, as a large language model trained on extensive training data, can generate a plethora of content ideas that you can leverage for your digital marketing and marketing campaigns.
These AI-driven tools also integrate well with marketing automation platforms, streamlining your content creation process and saving you time.
After you have crafted content ideas, the next step is to bring them to fruition. ChatGPT can assist you in creating top-notch content that is relevant to your target audience. By analyzing the language patterns of your target audience, ChatGPT can proffer sentence structures, grammar, and diction that are most likely to strike a chord with your target audience. This can be particularly beneficial for content marketers looking to streamline their content creation process while ensuring their messaging aligns with their audience's preferences.
Additionally, ChatGPT can lend a hand in writing headlines, introductions, and calls-to-action that are optimized for engagement. By incorporating relevant keywords, your blog post or other marketing efforts can gain better visibility for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes. For those involved in social media marketing, ChatGPT and other AI tools can help craft posts that not only generate human-like text but also convey emotional intelligence to resonate with your audience. This makes your content creation strategy remains authentic and impactful.
Lastly, it's time to publish and promote your content. ChatGPT can help you optimize your content for search engines by suggesting pertinent keywords and meta descriptions. Furthermore, ChatGPT can lend a hand in promoting your content on social media by recommending the optimal times to post and the most efficacious social media platforms for your target audience.
In conclusion, ChatGPT can be an invaluable tool for executing a content strategy. By harnessing its natural language processing capabilities, businesses can create content that resonates with their target audience and drives business consequences. However, it's imperative to note that ChatGPT is just a tool, and it should be wielded in conjunction with human proficiency to ensure that the content strategy aligns with the overall business objectives. With the right approach, ChatGPT can assist businesses in executing a successful content strategy and accomplishing their marketing goals.
Your business needs marketing and advertising.
Unless your business is the recipient of some mystical blessing that allows it to naturally generate more paying customers, it's on you to build awareness, make your brand more appealing, and ultimately get more people to buy what you're selling.
The problem is, that marketing is hard to do on your own. If you don't have much experience or knowledge on the subject, it may seem intimidatingly complex. There's no guarantee that your strategies are going to be effective, and even if they are, you could end up overpaying for what you get.
That's why so many businesses turn to the help of a great digital marketing agency for all their digital marketing and advertising needs. But this has a problem associated with it as well; there are literally hundreds, if not thousands of digital marketing agencies available to serve you.
How can you choose the best digital marketing agency for your business?
Why would you consider working with a digital marketing agency? It should be self-evident that working with a professional marketing team, or at least a handful of digital marketing professionals, can help you see better results in the marketing world. You'll get better advice, better resources, and more supportive digital marketing solutions.
That said, there are a few different ways you can enjoy these benefits. You could hire a team of your own internally, you could work with freelancers, or you could even hire a temporary consultant to help you improve your digital marketing efforts.
Digital marketing agencies still have several advantages over these other methods, including:
One important thing to understand before we move further is that no two digital marketing agencies are the same, and no two clients are the same.
Some may provide social media management and search engine optimization services, but perhaps you're looking for paid marketing management. Digital marketing is broad, but most agencies don't cover the gambit or have the internal bench depth and expertise to provide end-to-end digital services.
Many of the claims we made about the advantageous nature of digital marketing agencies can't be applied to every agency on the planet; some of them aren't experienced or trustworthy enough to help you see favorable results.
Similarly, just because a digital marketing agency did a good job for one of their clients in the past doesn't mean they're going to do an identically good job for your brand. You have to consider the unique fit in addition to core competencies.
Before you start researching digital marketing agencies, it's a good idea to prepare yourself by assessing your own needs and goals. Why are you hoping to hire A digital marketing agency? Which types of marketing strategies do you want to follow? What are your biggest objectives and do you have specific numbers you're trying to hit? How much are you willing to spend and how much control do you want to retain over your tactics? I love to use a content marketing matrix (like the one below) to ensure the core competencies of the agency match our own internal needs/goals
Each company is going to look for something different. There's no such thing as a perfect digital marketing agency that works for every business. Accordingly, you may have very different priorities than the average business, and you may look for a marketing agency in a totally different way than one of your competitors. Still, this list should effectively capture some of your biggest priorities when researching and evaluating different digital marketing agencies:
Which of these factors are most important to you? Which ones are you willing to compromise on? Think through these questions carefully before proceeding.
At this point, you should be ready to start the discovery and research process. That means coming up with a long list of different digital marketing agencies you might want to work with.
It also means uncovering more details about those agencies and evaluating how good of a fit they're going to offer.
Throughout this process, you should focus on the following:
Hopefully, this guide has given you the resources, concepts, and frameworks necessary to make a better decision for hiring the right digital marketing agency for your brand.
But your responsibilities don't end there.
If you want to have the best working relationship with your digital marketing agency, there are some important ways you'll need to prepare yourself:
There are a lot of digital marketing agencies out there, but we strive to distinguish ourselves from the masses. On top of offering almost everything you need for a comprehensive digital marketing strategy, including white label SEO services, content marketing services, paid advertising services, and more, we have specialized experts from a variety of marketing niches – and account managers ready to work with you one-on-one on your next project. Contact us for a free consultation today!
Content marketing strategies demand multiple mediums and multiple outlets in order to be effective. Too many content marketers rely on a traditional, basic structure, writing blog post after blog post in the same format and syndicating them on social media. This strategy is effective, since it will gradually build your brand reputation, earn you more direct traffic, and improve your rankings in search engines, but for a full-fledged content marketing campaign, it should only serve as the foundation.
Adding a landing page, a dedicated page under your domain to house incoming traffic can be a viable strategy to improve your conversion rates and funnel your traffic. While it will take some extra work and maintenance to keep up, the return on investment (ROI) makes it all worth it.
Consider these seven reasons why landing pages can improve your campaign:
First and foremost, a landing page can improve your conversion rates. Rather than relying on customers eventually finding their way to your contact page (or anywhere else you seek to convert them), your users will be immediately confronted with the opportunity to convert. Using a landing page builder can simplify the process of creating high converting landing pages that are tailored to your audience.
There are several ways you can approach this. For example, you could set up a landing page as a kind of barrier to your content, presenting a link to a downloadable whitepaper in exchange for some information about the user. This standalone web page serves as a focused environment to achieve your target conversion. In this case, retrieving the whitepaper becomes your target conversion, and you can use your blogs and social channels to increase traffic and the likelihood of eventually converting.
If you’re more interested in selling one of your products, you can set up a specific landing page for one. Leverage landing page templates to design an effective layout quickly and professionally. Use social media or other content-based channels to attract traffic, then use the landing page as their immediate destination.
Landing pages can also be used to funnel your traffic into more specific areas. This is particularly useful for companies with a wide range of products or services. For example, if you sell bikes and rollerblades, you can segment your traffic appropriately through separate landing pages. To do this effectively, start by creating custom landing pages tailored to each category.
Rather than sending all of your traffic to your main site, or individual product pages, you can easily split your users into appropriate categories.
Let’s say you blog about bikes and rollerblades individually. People interested in buying rollerblades will respond more to posts about rollerblades, and the same is true for bikes. A good landing page for each category can help align your content with user intent.
When you’re communicating with a large pool of followers, however, it’s difficult to distinguish which followers are interested in which. Rather than resorting to general messaging, create a landing page for each specific product or service using a landing page template as a starting point. Drawing users into all your landing pages will allow you to speak more specifically to each portion of your audience and give you the chance to collect and store their information for future use.
Sometimes, it’s difficult to show off the best characteristics of your brand while working in the confines of a blog post or social media schedule. Content marketing is designed to show off your expertise passively, giving users a valuable experience while hoping they associate that experience with your brand. Calling out your brand specifically or openly bragging can actually turn people away from your content strategy.
Using landing pages gives you more freedom to show off what makes your brand great. With the best landing page builder, you can easily create landing pages that highlight your unique brand identity. You’ll be able to create a design that obviously shows off your brand elements, and you’ll have the space to show off your brand’s greatness with testimonials or other statistics. Carefully crafted landing page content ensures your message resonates with your target audience.
By using your content to funnel users into a specific landing page, you’ll get the opportunity to get your brand squarely in your users’ faces without alienating them in the process. When you build landing pages with a focus on effective landing page design, you can engage users while maintaining their trust and interest.
Content marketing programs sometimes suffer from a lack of direction. Instead of focusing in on a specific user goal, they’re designed to communicate generally with an audience, and gradually build a reputation. That might be useful for generating lots of traffic to your site, but if that traffic never converts or doesn’t know where to go, that traffic is essentially useless.
Landing pages provide a quick fix for that problem. Instead of worrying about where your users are going after they read your material, or crossing your fingers and hoping for the best, you can use your landing page to ensure your traffic gets to a worthwhile destination.
Some content marketers grow frustrated because of how difficult it is to measure the success of a campaign. Since one of the primary goals of content marketing is to increase brand familiarity and brand loyalty, two very subjective qualities, it can be hard to put a dollar amount on your content marketing results.
Landing pages make the process much more objective. By using sales metrics, you can easily determine how much value each conversion brings you, and by using goal metrics (which you can set up in Google Analytics), you can easily determine the number of conversions your content is bringing in. With those two metrics, you should be able to accurately project an objective estimate of how much value your content marketing strategy is bringing.
Landing pages are also great because they allow you to perform A/B tests. If you have two competing products and you aren’t sure which one to spend more time promoting, you can set up two individual landing pages under the same conditions and see which one generates the greatest number of conversions.
Alternatively, if you’re toying around with your branding and advertising strategy, you can easily use an “A” version and a “B” version of your landing page to gain valuable insights on your design and copy. You can then take this information and use it in your broader marketing and advertising campaign.
Like A/B testing, user behavior testing is to determine the most valuable parts of your landing pages. For example, by using heat maps, you can track exactly where your users are looking and interacting with your landing page. If they tend to congregate around the testimonials and you’re enjoying a high conversion rate, you better start using those testimonials on other applications. If your users focus on a bulleted list of product benefits and your conversion rate is low, you know you need to spend time refining how you market your product. Setting up a landing page with some kind of user behavior tracking is key to gaining insights about your audience.
Unfortunately, just setting up a landing page isn’t enough. You also need to pay close attention to the design, placement, and written copy of your landing page to maximize your chances of conversion. Landing pages demand a different set of standards than traditional web pages, so prioritize the following qualities:
If you can design a landing page with these qualities and integrate it smoothly into your content marketing campaign, you’ll start seeing the benefits as soon as it goes live.
Search engines are evolving in strange new ways. Mobile searches have overtaken desktop searches (at long last), and competitors like Bing and Yahoo are growing more and more like Google every day, unifying the capacity of every major search brand.
As if that weren’t enough, a wave of virtual assistants like Siri, Google Now, and Cortana have begun to emerge to redefine the search process—rather than opening a browser window, going to a search engine site, and plugging in an entry only to wade through a string of possible results, users can now use conversational commands and queries to engage with a human-like advanced computer program and be met with an almost immediate answer.
Modern virtual assistants function almost as intermediaries, with search engines themselves operating in the background. Oftentimes, traffic from searches is completely negated—users get the answers they need without browsing or navigating to individual websites—and in other cases, personal assistants take you to websites directly based on your queries. This capability is driven by machine learning and natural language processing, enabling these systems to interpret user queries with remarkable accuracy.
Also, voice recognition technology makes these interactions seamless and accessible, allowing users to speak naturally while the system processes and responds appropriately. With this new paradigm of search in place, is it even possible to optimize your site for a digital assistant?
On the surface, most digital assistants find results in a process similar to the search engines we’ve all become familiar with. There are, however, a few critical distinctions:
It’s also worth mentioning that not all digital assistants function identically, just as individual search engines never functioned identically. Their similarities can be grouped as generalizations worth noting, but idiosyncrasies and unique characteristics will still keep them differentiated.
Still, the most popular digital assistants rely on artificial intelligence-driven algorithms for certain types of queries—i.e., ones that can only be sufficiently answered by directing a user to a specific website. For example, if you ask your digital assistant about a product that’s only offered by one e-commerce platform (however unlikely that scenario might be), you’ll likely be redirected to that website. It gets a little trickier if that product is offered on multiple platforms, especially if a mobile app is one of them, but if the key is to offer something unique that can only be found on your website—and can’t be summarized with a simple informational breakdown.
Knowing this information, there are a few key takeaways you can incorporate into your current SEO strategy to account for the rise of digital assistants:
Digital assistants aren’t the most used form of search today, but they’re growing more popular and could one day replace the typical browser-based search engine entirely. When that happens, users will become reliant on immediate answers and local solutions for everything, and overall visits to websites will diminish. Already, giants like Wikipedia are feeling the effects of the Knowledge Graph and similar quick-answer programs. When the trend develops further, SEO as we know it could vanish entirely, replaced by a new means of achieving digital visibility with users and resellers.
Until that time comes, it’s worth your time and money to invest in your online presence. Hedge your bets by covering as much ground as possible with great, diverse content, and a presence on as many external platforms and apps as possible. The goal is visibility, however, you can get it.
The most important part of social media marketing is the “social” element. Your effectiveness doesn’t depend on how hard you sell products, or how often you post, or even how many interesting things you offer. What matters is that you connect with an audience, on some fundamental level, enough to increase their admiration for your brand or come to your website for more information.
To solve this perpetual problem, your first step is to identify and target the right audience. Facebook, the most popular social media platform in the world, gives you every opportunity to do this—even beyond the tools it offers for paid advertisers (which are ample). In fact, most social media platforms have the functionality and capacity for you to do this, but only a fraction of marketers end up taking advantage of it.
I want you to become a part of that fraction.
This section is more of a disclaimer than it is an actual guide, but it’s important to address before we ever start talking about how to target your key demographics. After all, how can you target your key demographics if you don’t know who they are? Imagine, for a moment, an extreme example:
(Image Source: Luvs/Adweek)
This message, by a diaper company, is targeted toward mothers—and even more than that, is targeted toward mothers of multiple children. It’s clever, concise, and original, so you can imagine it performing well when syndicated to an audience of second or third-time mothers. How would you expect it to perform if syndicated to an audience of teenage boys? Or an audience of retired, single septuagenarians? As part of effective audience optimization, this shows the importance of aligning content with specific interest tags and demographics.
As I said, this example is extreme, but it illustrates my point. This article will tell you how to create and distribute appropriate messages to your target audience, but this advice is useless unless you know who your audience is. Don’t make assumptions. Do the research, and figure out who’s going to buy your product. Use tools like geo targeting and preferred language filters to refine your audience insights.
You may have multiple target audiences, but for the purposes of this guide, I’m going to imagine you have only one. You can replicate the steps below for any of your audiences. Incorporate strategies like adding interest tags or location tagging to better define your audience in platforms like Facebook marketing or other social media management tools.
Do you have an audience in mind? Okay. Let’s start targeting.
First, I want to take a look at what kind of people actually use Facebook. This is a section I’ll include for all my platform-based guides, and you’ll find that each platform boasts a different type of audience. Some of those audiences will overlap with your target demographics; others will bear no resemblance. This will help you choose which platforms to add to your social media arsenal (hint: it shouldn’t be all of them by default).
Essentially, we’re asking: is it worth it for your brand to be on Facebook?Facebook has 1.59 billion monthly active users, worldwide, making it the biggest and furthest-reaching social media platform around today. This probably isn’t news to you; most of the people you know have, and actively use, a personal Facebook profile.
But what kinds of people are on this platform?
According to Facebook’s own breakdown page, 83.6 percent of its users are outside the U.S. and Canada, meaning about 260,760,000 users are in the United States (for reference, the U.S. population is close to 320 million). Promo Republic offers the following breakdown:
Some highlights to consider: the gender and ethnic split is negligible, with between 66-77 percent of each demographic segment participating as an active monthly user. Though increasing age does correspond with decreasing user numbers, the drop-offs are not significant until age 50. Education and salary don’t play much into the demographic makeup, nor does geographic location.
Aside from this data, it’s also important to note that almost all Facebook profiles are verified, by individual users, who are using Facebook for personal purposes (usually keeping in contact with friends and family members).
This means Facebook is pretty much open season, with a few key exceptions. Now let’s take a look at some businesses that stand to win or lose automatically based on this data.
If you don’t belong to the second category, Facebook is likely a reasonable place to start pinning your audience down. Now, let’s get to the meaty part: actively selecting your audience from the vast pool of Facebook users.
You can’t target the entire Facebook population all at once (though some of you might try, given the chance). Even if you could, this wouldn’t be a good use of your resources. For the most part, any content you publish on Facebook (assuming you’re using a business/organization page) is only inherently visible to people who have already liked your brand. It’s only shown to people outside your follower base if one of their contacts has “shared” it, or if they specifically seek you out.
To make matters harder for brands, Facebook’s organic reach has been steadily declining for some time, meaning even if someone follows you, there’s no guarantee they’ll see everything you post. Accordingly, every piece of news or content you publish has to be a home run. You can’t afford to waste time or target an indifferent audience.
There are two components to effective audience targeting: choosing the right message and making that message visible to the right people. Before you start combing through your audience, run a check to make sure your content is appropriate for your audience.
There’s no “easy” way to tell if your message is effective for your demographics. You have to know what your users want to see, which is tricky to predict unless you have reliable data. You can generate ideas for this based on market research, what your competitors are doing, or even anecdotal evidence you’ve experienced in the field. Verify this is the case by AB testing your messages (possibly on Facebook itself; don’t hesitate to use it as a testing ground). Trust the numbers.
When it comes to Facebook posts, certain factors almost always make a post inherently more valuable, so polish your message by shaping it into a format with the following qualities:
Don’t just take my word for it; take a look at data from BlitzLocal’s study on the matter:
This barely scratches the surface of what makes a “good” Facebook post (a topic for another time), but these are the most important takeaways regarding how to target your Facebook audience through messaging.
Now, you’ve got the message. You know what you want to post to your users, and it’s just a matter of doing the actual posting. How can you make sure your message is seen by the greatest number of people in your target audience while excluding those outside it?
Until recently, this was only possible through paid advertising tools. Now, every company and organization page has the ability to filter their audiences for every post.
This screenshot is doing my job for me. When you log into your company page and start typing a draft, you’ll notice a new(ish) button to the left of the Publish button that looks like a target—how appropriate. Click it, and you’ll be introduced to a variety of new demographic targeting options to ensure your message lands in the right newsfeeds.
From here, you’ll see two tabs—Preferred Audience and Audience Restrictions. You can guess what each of these is used for.
(Image Source: Social Media Examiner)
Your Preferred Audience allows you to select interests that might be popular in your target demographics. Remember my diaper ad example from earlier? Luvs’s target audience might be interested in things like “parenting” or “child care.” Again, don’t select these randomly; see what you can find about your target audience based on empirical, fact-based research.
(Image Source: MarketingLand)
Your Audience Restrictions gives you more quantitative control. There’s significantly less guesswork here, so base your restrictions on what you know to be true for your target audience. Don’t be afraid to step a little outside your niche; you can always refine your content for tighter or broader segments of your audience later. Currently, Facebook allows you to control your audience based on age, gender, location, and preferred language.Once posted, you’ll be able to tap into the performance metrics for each available post. Here, you can track engagement rates among different segments of your demographics; for example, you’ll be able to tell how well your post did for users with an interest in “monster trucks” versus users with an interest in “cotton candy.”Use this data to your advantage, and experiment with interests and quantitative identifiers that you might not instinctively prefer. You’ll find that at least some audience behaviors conflict with your preconceived notions, so make changes based on what the data tells you.
Together, these methods of audience targeting work well—but they only work for people who are already members of your audience. What about all the members of your target audience who aren’t yet following your brand? What about all the people following your brand who don’t belong to your target demographics?
Let’s address the latter question first. You’ll undoubtedly attract followers who don’t really have an interest in your brand or service; for example, they might have clicked “like” accidentally or as part of a contest unrelated to purchasing from your brand. Obviously, you want your social following to be as comprised of your target demographics as possible, but does this mean you should weed out those who don’t belong?
The simple answer is no, for two reasons:
Accordingly, don’t worry about the outsiders who trickle in.
Instead, invest your efforts in acquiring new followers who match your ideal demographics. There are powerful ways to do this:
As great as audience targeting on Facebook is, there are still some key limitations. First, the organic reach of business posts is diminishing—and will presumably continue to decline. Even though you’ll improve your visibility by selecting only your most relevant audiences, you can expect this value to decline over time.
Next, your audience segmentation strategy is only as strong as the audience you already have. It can increase the effectiveness of your messaging and strengthen brand loyalty, but it can’t inject fresh blood into your system.
Finally, no matter how well you know your audience, your tactics are still dependent on the strength of your content. I’ll be doing similar guides for how to improve your content quality, including one specifically for Facebook posts, but it exists as a separate effort.
Facebook’s paid advertising system is one of the most robust ad features of any social media platform. With it, you have access to far more sophisticated audience targeting options than your organic reach will allow, and you’ll even get to reach people who don’t currently follow you.
For example, in addition to age, gender, location, language, and interests, you can target users based on behaviors (like previous purchases) or current connections.
These are valuable, but whether it’s worth your investment is up to you, your goals, and your budget. With the right content strategy, you can achieve almost any marketing goal without investing in direct advertising, but it’s a significant option you should be aware of.
I hope this guide has helped you make sense of the audience targeting tools and strategies necessary to craft and publicize organic marketing messages on Facebook. Like with any strategy, the theory is helpful, but it’s the practice that truly matters. Put your ideas and your knowledge to the test in a live environment, dutifully learning from your mistakes and adjusting for efficient improvements. Because every brand has a unique audience and a unique product, the only way to learn effectively is to try something and see what happens.
If you liked this guide, you can look forward to my upcoming feature on audience targeting via Twitter, or read up on what it takes to launch a successful content marketing or SEO campaign.
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