Appropriate Campaign Goals

In marketing, public relations, and communications, there are many different campaign goals that your organization could be trying to accomplish. Are you trying to build more awareness? Are you trying to launch a new product? Are you trying to grow your audience? For the sake of simplicity, the EMF should be used to help tie your social media marketing goals and other marketing goals directly into your achievement of your major business objectives. At the most basic level your goals as a marketer should be to:

1. Increase conversions
2. Generate revenue
3. Increase market share
4. Customer acquisition/retention

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING CHECKLIST

1. Step 1: Do a complete social media audit.
   • Which networks are you currently active on?
   • Are your networks optimized (photo and cover images, bio, URL, etc.)?
   • Which networks are currently bringing you the most value related to the four KPIs above?
   • How do your profiles compare to your competitors' profiles?
2. Step 2: Identify your ideal personas (you have heard this before and here it is again).

   If you don't know who your ideal customer is, how are you going to market to them? We gave you tips and a template on this earlier, but Hubspot also has a quick and dirty persona generating tool at MakeMyPersona.com. It will walk you through a bunch of questions and then generate a Word document for you.

3. Step 3: Identify key success metrics for tracking and reporting.

   You need to be able to define your success ahead of time. By mapping out and identifying your metrics ahead of time, you can begin working on optimizing those areas of your marketing campaigns. It will help you think about and ask the right questions. Data don't lie, baby. A few metrics worth measuring are:

   • Conversion rate
   • Time spent on website
   • Reach
   • Brand mentions
   • Sentiment
   • Total shares
   • Customer acquisition costs (CPC)
   • Likes/fans
   • Clicks
   • Backlinks to your website
   • E-mails added to your lists

   There are many other metrics out there that may be relevant to your business. Choose wisely and remember to measure what is valued more than you value what is measurable.

4. Step 4: Create a Dominating Content Marketing Strategy.
   1. Content in the proper context is king. And it really is a driving force to affect business performance when you have adopted the philosophy of creating and curating informative, helpful content for your ideal customer. In fact, content is VITAL to your business. Content shows up in several ways not limited to the categories below:
   • Video
   • Images/infographics
   • Text/articles/blog posts
   • Audio/podcasts
   • Links
   • Live events
   • Hiring processes and protocols
   • Paid media and advertisements
   • The social media posts of your employees and executives both personal and professional

   There are many types of content out there, as you can see in the following graphic from Michael King, @iPullRank (Figure 8.2). So, you'll want to mix and match it up. Keep it fresh. Keep it relevant.

5. Step 5: Invest in Social Media Marketing Tools & Technologies.

   Modern marketers use tools to help them in their daily efforts. As you will see in our accompanying “Marketing Technology Glossary” (available at www.digitalsen.se/mktgtools), there are hundreds of categories of tools, which reference thousands of actual tools.

   Some of the general types of social media tools that you may have:

   • Monitor social media conversation.
   • Schedule your content
   • Discover & curate content.
   • Maximize your audience.
   • Interact with influencers and customers.
   • Measure results

   Anyone who has been to a social media marketing conference should know Kevin Mullett, @kmullett. He and Travis are constantly trying to one-up one another on their tools. They finally decided to quit competing and work together. You get the benefit of that collaboration with a frequently updated Digital Bit resource.

6. Step 6: Track, Analyze, and Optimize your Efforts.

   This is key when it comes to succeeding on social media. Even the most seasoned social marketer will fail; that's to be expected. Testing, experimenting, and optimizing campaigns are part of the fun. It might seem basic, but tracking your results, analyzing the data, and optimizing is essential to excel in this space. Let the data flow through you.

   Social media strategy has been written about ad nauseam in the past decade. Many organizations still haven't figured out how to value it across the enterprise and see it as more than just a silo of tactics in the marketing department. Hopefully, this simple audit checklist will help you finally make the plunge to becoming a more socially integrate business.

   

Content Marketing and Paid Media Amplification

We could talk forever on content marketing, but there are plenty of great books and blogs out there. ContentMarketingInstitute.com is one of the best resources on that topic. QuickSprout has a great definitive guide on content marketing, as well.³

We aren't going to teach you anything that they won't; however, we can teach you some sweet content marketing hacks. We will talk about some later in this chapter in the social selling section, and it rings true with any great piece of content.

Can you relate to the following? You create a magical piece of content for your ideal targeted persona, you post it on your blog, and all you get is crickets chirping. Ever have that happen? It's infuriating. Well, if you take that same piece of content, and put a bit of paid media behind it—specifically Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, or even Reddit ads—you have a chance to get that content in front of exactly the right people. If you have built out your personas, you can target those exact people with advertising. That's one more reason why building out personas is an important task.

One trick for social marketing is creating an idea that can break through culture, giving you an unfair advantage on earned media reach. Basically, making an idea that can be digested and pushed around the Internet with headlines. The key to virality in 2017 is still headlines, not brand pages. Headlines are the artifact that people can exchange and share. Put the right paid dollars against something and build an idea that journalists can't resist.

Many brands have found out that the easiest way to break through and amplify what they do in social media is by designing the idea to travel through all channels of media. Designing the idea through a process of writing the headline first. They've figured out that people rarely share posts from a brand page—what they share most is headlines and links to trusted media sources. The anti-affectionate term for much of this content is clickbait, but when it is done strategically and with relevance, it is extremely powerful. Travis sometimes calls this PR hacking.

Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) is one brand that we've been keeping an eye on that has really proved themselves to be skillful at this media jujitsu, with back-to-back headlines about weirdo products that smell like chicken. Nail polish that tastes like chicken (proving that they're still finger-licking good) and sunscreen that smells like a bucket of extra crispy. The latter was able to garner over 90 blog posts from medium to large publishers in just 6 hours following the release. These products don't even have to be real or commercially available! Only two bottles of the nail polish were made, but that's enough to get a picture, and it makes for a headline that journalists can't resist.⁴

Real-Time Marketing isn't dead, per se, but it's definitely more saturated now. That's why putting social amplification money against content that isn't even your own, but articles about how amazing you are from third parties, works so well.

A great tool to check out that takes social listening, sentiment analysis, and scoring with automation of the one-to-one communication of triage or offers is Earshotinc.com. It can even recognize brand logos on clothing and so on in pictures where the brand may or may not be mentioned. It scores against relevance, risk, and sentiment and allows for a single dashboard to automate your promotional and reactive responses in a highly personalized, one-to-one way at scale.

Another example of content amplification, Mike “Jortsy” Gelphman, CEO of the Disruption Institute, a mobile app and coding school in Kansas City, puts on a yearly conference called Compute Midwest. This is a premier event, but not many outside of the region know about it. Kansas City? That's right. Hailing from the first city chosen for Google Fiber, Compute Midwest is one of the world's leading future-focused tech conferences. More than 1,000 attendees exploring the technologies transforming tomorrow and learning how the world-class speakers overcame enormous challenges to create breakthrough innovations. Topics include self-driving cars, robots, space travel, and artificial intelligence.

Since this is a great conference, Travis included it in an article on Inc. magazine featuring seven other top tech conferences happening around the world.⁶ Gelphman was then able to use that piece of content to build trust and convince other people to come to his event. He was even able to leverage it to gain additional sponsorship dollars. This conference has attracted some of the world's most innovative and influential people in tech over the past 5 years, including Robert Scoble, Alexis Ohanian, Stephen Wolfram, Cynthia Breazeal, and John Underkoffler.

“I've been fortunate enough to speak all over the world, but what I found at ComputeMidwest was something really special—entrepreneurship has a great stage in KC thanks to this conference.”

—Alexis Ohanian, Cofounder of Reddit

The key point here is this. It is better to have someone else talk about how great you are than to blather to everyone about how great you think you are. If you get a good piece of press, don't just tweet it a couple of times and share it on LinkedIn. Put some ad spend behind it and really target the eyeballs of the people you want to see that content.

This is just one example of what you can do with paid media and content. Try to think outside the box a bit, and get eyes on some of your more valuable content. Also, take that content and repost it on your site with a link back the original work. Why? Because you can tag visitors with a retargeting pixel and you can market to them all over the web. Keep in mind that reposting content that was originally posted elsewhere won't help you with search rankings at all. But it will help you with amplifying the right content to the right people, as you build custom advertising audiences, and then retargeting them later with Adroll, Facebook ads, or the Google Display Network.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Travis started in search engine optimization before it was a thing and well before Google hit the scene. The under-30 reader just thought “there was search before Google?” He intuitively knew, for example, that if you were a plumber living in Kansas City, you should consider owning KCPlumber.com. While selling yellow page advertising in the mid to late ‘90s, he started consulted with businesses and working side by side with them to establish their web presence.

In the beginning, SEO was a black hat cowboy's uncharted Wild West. There were so many ways to manipulate the search results, because the search engines were nowhere near the sophisticated tools we're used to today. For example, Travis quickly figured out that if you wanted a webpage to rank for a term like “Britney Spears” all you needed to do was put the words “Britney Spears” in a <div> that was the same color as the background. Then you could move that <div> off the edge of the margin, so that only the search engines would find it. Simple hacks like this ruled the SEO industry for the first years, until the search engines smartened up and began rolling out penalties to websites breaking their published guidelines. Those days are long gone. And Travis hung up his black hat long ago. He now wears a more gray-ish hat, typically with a KC Royals logo on it.

Search engine optimization has evolved into an entirely different beast today. With all of the algorithm changes and rules by Google, it's no longer about gaming the engines. It's truly about meeting the customer at the center of their intention as they query. With Google's Penguin, Panda, Hummingbird, and other major search engine algorithm updates, your site's search engine rankings can plummet overnight if you aren't up to speed on the latest mandates from our Google Master Overlord.

The key to success with the search engines these days is all about the long game and customer intent. It's based on establishing a solid foundation of on page optimization and growing your site's authority in the eyes of the search engines as well as providing a solid experience of relevant content for your customers. A simple way to design a successful website is to constantly review it for user experience. Not only will your customers be happy but also Google bases many of its ranking factors on user experience, so it's a win-win. Now ask yourself, “What do people looking for something online want?”

Key Determinants Impacting Your Organic Search Ranking

1. Page Speed: How quickly your site loads is huge for keeping your customer on your site. Nothing will make someone click away like a slow page load. Besides it being a ranking factor, speed has become such an obsession with Google that they've recently launched the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project. This project has a goal to shift as many webpages as possible to a simplified streamlined HTML page designed to load almost instantly. The issue is that this platform is only realistic for news sites and those businesses focused on publishing a lot of content. It's just not realistic for small businesses or ecommerce sites in its current state. However, Google is dedicated to its success so it won't take long for AMP to become more user friendly for all types of websites.
2. Mobile Friendly: Any website that wants to be successful MUST be easily accessed from any mobile device. The format endorsed by Google, as well as all the other search engines, is responsive design. Responsive design allows the content from your website to automatically format itself for any sized device, from a desktop computer to your smartphone. Having a website that is mobile friendly gives you an advantage in the search results.
3. Secure Site (HTTPS): Another ranking factor that Google has been pushing onto sites is the shift from HTTP to HTTPS by installing a secure certificate on the server side of your website. This certificate is supposed to add a level of authority and trust to your website for your users. It's recommended for all sites regardless if you take payments or not.
4. Content Quality: Many of Google's penalties revolve directly around the quality of a website's content. It's a known technique to write poor quality content full of your chosen keywords in order to manipulate the algorithms to rank your pages higher in the search results. Well, Google has gotten so smart about this strategy that not only does it no longer work but also it's getting to the point where only the best content gets those top spots.

There are entire books about creating the right content for your audience, so we will just tell you that it's vital that your website is designed to help your customers solve a problem or answer a question. It needs to provide them with in-depth unique information on each and every one of the potential questions they may have to be successful.

As you can see, building a solid search-engine-friendly website is not something you can do overnight. However, the process is also not a secret process cloaked in mystery. There are a few trusted places to turn for up-to-date guidance on how exactly to approach SEO for your website. Here are a few experts in the SEO industry to explain it…

“Long term online success for 2017 and beyond is not about a secret tip, how much you spend or being sure you do that one thing exactly perfect,” says Kristi Hagen, president and senior editor of SearchEngineNews.com. “It's about getting all of the little things right because in today's competitive markets the race is won by inches. So find an SEO informational source you can trust and roll up your sleeves—that's when the magic happens.”

“What's the current State of SEO? One focused entirely on User Experience. Google's push to Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), its recent war on mobile interstitials, its continual embracing of mobile-friendly content, HTTPS, and page speed are all about one thing: increasing User Experience. This means fast-loading pages designed around 1 MB in size that; eliminate interstitials, break up content into mobile-friendly chunks, and are designed for smaller screens,” shares Casey Markee, founder, Media Wyse. “SEO isn't shortcuts and link schemes. It's a game of inches and it's constantly evolving. If you aren't testing and retesting your ranking hypotheses and marketing strategies constantly, you aren't innovating. Those that do all of this will rank higher now and well into 2017 and beyond.”

As you can imagine, staying abreast of the changes within the search engines, as well as the trusted long-term ranking strategies, is a business in itself. That being said, here are some of the resources that we've worked with over the years and have leveraged for much of our own success. The top of the list is SearchEngineNews.com, a simple Internet-marketing-based membership site that is worth every penny. Travis has had an active membership for over a decade. Some others to consider are Search Engine Land, Moz, and Search Engine Journal.

The SMX, Mozcon, and Pubcon conferences are where you want to go to network with the brightest minds in the industry.

Finally, the oft-updated book by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, and Jessie Stricchiola, The Art of SEO—now in its third edition—is a must for anyone who wants complete digital sense.¹¹

Enterprise Paid Search

If you've been in the enterprise search game for as long as we have, you've seen many of the same vendors dominate the ecosystem for the better part of a decade. Marin Software, Kenshoo, Adobe Media Optimizer/Efficient Frontier, Google DoubleClick, and others have been the major players, but many of these have yet to capitalize on the trend of using data science to automate the optimization of your pay per click (PPC).

Predictive Advertising Management

Predictive advertising management is supposed to improve advertising performance, but if that transition isn't smooth, chaos ensues—along with lost revenues and customers. Marketers who take advantage of all the data signals available have a competitive advantage over those who are using a more limited set of data. For example, what if you could target searchers based on keyword, device, time of day, zip code, weather conditions in two days and the current NASDAQ rates? Today, predictive advertising management platforms provide this level of granular targeting. When data science meets search advertising, you can improve advertising ROI dramatically (Figures 8.3 and 8.4). One of the reasons we personally think QuanticMind could have a leg up over its rivals is the sheer volume of data points it optimizes.

Data science, FTW! Digital Marketing Depot's Enterprise Paid Media Campaign Management Platforms 2016: A Marketer's Guide report by MarketingLand, discusses targeting and using data science on search marketing platforms, which is one of the cornerstone services that QuanticMind delivers.¹² This method ups the value of a customer for life, by mixing purchase intent with data.

At CCP Digital, we've found that QuanticMind is giving us a competitive advantage for our large clients, so much so that Travis is now advising for them. If you're spending more than $1 million a year on enterprise paid search, it may be worthwhile to your organization to consider moving onto a platform that uses smart data science to optimize your campaigns and ad spend.

GEO Targeting and IP-Based Advertising

Imagine if you were able to pick anyone's physical address, reverse-engineer it, and translate it into their IP address. You could then target company by injecting advertising into only that IP range. For example, a client of Travis's was hiring engineers. They wanted to target people who were engineers at Oracle. We figured out where the engineers in Oracle were located, and we injected advertising into their building only, so anyone using that Wi-Fi or the Internet in that IP range saw our ads. We were able to hire some great engineers with this simple yet somewhat expensive ad hack, using a technology by El Toro.¹³