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Paid Social for Content Marketing Launches - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by KaneJamison

Stuck in a content marketing rut? Relying on your existing newsletter, social followers, or email outreach won't do your launches justice. Boosting your signal with paid social both introduces your brand to new audiences and improves your launch's traffic and results. In today's Whiteboard Friday, we're welcoming back our good friend Kane Jamison to highlight four straightforward, actionable tactics you can start using ASAP.

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

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans. My name is Kane. I'm the founder of a content marketing agency here in Seattle called Content Harmony, and we do a lot of content marketing projects where we use paid social to launch them and get better traffic and results.

So I spoke about this, this past year at MozCon, and what I want to do today is share some of those tactics with you and help you get started with launching your content with some paid traction and not just relying on your email outreach or maybe your own existing email newsletter and social followers.

Especially for a lot of companies that are just getting started with content marketing, that audience development component is really important. A lot of people just don't have a significant market share of their industry subscribed to their newsletter. So it's great to use paid social in order to reach new people, get them over to your most important content projects, or even just get them over to your week-to-week blog content.

Social teaser content

So the first thing I want to start with is expanding a little bit beyond just your average image ad. A lot of social networks, especially Facebook, are promoting video heavily nowadays. You can use that to get a lot cheaper engagement than you can from a typical image ad. If you've logged in to your Facebook feed lately, you've probably noticed that aside from birth announcements, there's a lot of videos filling up the feed. So as an advertiser, if you want to blend in well with that, using video as a teaser or a sampler for the content that you're producing is a great way to kind of look natural and look like you belong in the user's feed.

So different things you can do include:

• Short animated videos explaining what the project is and why you did it.
• Maybe doing talking head videos with some of your executives or staff or marketing team, just talking on screen with whatever in the background about the project you created and kind of drumming up interest to actually get people over to the site.

So that can be really great for team recognition if you're trying to build thought leadership in your space. It's a great way to introduce the face of your team members that might be speaking at industry conferences and events. It's a great way to just get people recognizing their name or maybe just help them feel closer to your company because they recognize their voice and face.

So everybody's instant reaction, of course, is, "I don't have the budget for video." That's okay. You don't need to be a videography expert to create decent social ads. There's a lot of great tools out there.

• Soapbox by Wistia is a great one, that's been released recently, that allows you to do kind of a webcam combined with your browser type of video. There are also tools like...
• Bigvu.tv
• Shakr
• Promo, which is a tool by a company called Slidely, I think.

All of those tools are great ways to create short, 20-second, 60-second types of videos. They let you create captions. So if you're scrolling through a social feed and you see an autoplay video, there's a good chance that the audio on that is turned off, so you can create captions to let people know what the video is about if it's not instantly obvious from the video itself. So that's a great way to get cheaper distribution than you might get from your typical image ad, and it's really going to stick out to users because most other companies aren't spending the time to do that.

Lookalike audiences

Another really valuable tactic is to create lookalike audiences from your best customers. Now, you can track your best customers in a couple of ways:

• You could have a pixel, a Facebook pixel or another network pixel on your website that just tracks the people that have been to the site a number of times or that have been through the shopping cart at a certain dollar value.
• We can take our email list and use the emails of customers that have ordered from us or just the emails of customers that are on our newsletter that seem like they open up every newsletter and they really like our content.

We can upload those into a custom audience in the social network of our choice and then create what's called a lookalike audience. In this case, I'd recommend what's called a "one percent lookalike audience." So if you're targeting people in the US, it means the one percent of people in the US that appear most like your audience. So if your audience is men ages 35 to 45, typically that are interested in a specific topic, the lookalike audience will probably be a lot of other men in a similar age group that like similar topics.

So Facebook is making that choice, which means you may or may not get the perfect audience right from the start. So it's great to test additional filters on top of the default lookalike audience. So, for example, you could target people by household income. You could target people by additional interests that may or may not be obvious from the custom audience, just to make sure you're only reaching the users that are interested in your topic. Whatever it might be, if this is going to end up being three or four million people at one percent of the country, it's probably good to go ahead and filter that down to a smaller audience that's a little bit closer to your exact target that you want to reach. So excellent way to create brand awareness with that target audience.

Influencers

The next thing I'd like you to test is getting your ads and your content in front of influencers in your space. That could mean...

• Bloggers
• Journalists
• Or it could just mean people like page managers in Facebook, people that have access to a Facebook page that can share updates. Those could be social media managers. That could be bloggers. That could even be somebody running the page for the local church or a PTA group. Regardless, those people are probably going to have a lot of contacts, be likely to share things with friends and family or followers on social media.

Higher cost but embedded value

When you start running ads to this type of group, you're going to find that it costs a little bit more per click. If you're used to paying $0.50 to $1.00 per click, you might end up paying $1.00 or $2.00 per click to reach this audience. That's okay. There's a lot more embedded value with this audience than the typical user, because they're likely, on average, to have more reach, more followers, more influence.

Test share-focused CTAs

It's worth testing share focus call to actions. What that means is encouraging people to share this with some people they know that might be interested. Post it to their page even is something worth testing. It may or may not work every time, but certainly valuable to test.

Filters

So the way we recommend reaching most of these users is through something like a job title filter. Somebody says they're a blogger, says they're an editor-in-chief, that's the clearest way to reach them. They may not always have that as their job title, so you could also do employers. That's another good example.

I recommend combining that with broad interests. So if I am targeting journalists because I have a new research piece out, it's great for us to attach interests that are relevant to our space. If we're in health care, we might target people interested in health care and the FDA and other big companies in the space that they'd likely be following for updates. If we're in fashion, we might just be selecting people that are fans of big brands, Nordstrom and others like that. Whatever it is, you can take this audience of a few hundred thousand or whatever it might be down to just a few thousand and really focus on the people that are most likely to be writing about or influential in your space.

Retarget non-subscribers

The fourth thing you can test is retargeting non-subscribers. So a big goal of content marketing is having those pop-ups or call to actions on the site to get people to download a bigger piece of content, download a checklist, whatever it might be so that we can get them on our email newsletter. There's a lot of people that are going to click out of that. 90% to 95% of the people that visit your site or more probably aren't going to take that call to action.

So what we can do is convert this into more of a social ad unit and just show the same messaging to the people that didn't sign up on the site. Maybe they just hate pop-ups by default. They will never sign up for them. That's okay. They might be more receptive to a lead ad in Facebook that says "subscribe" or "download" instead of something that pops up on their screen.

Keep testing new messaging

The other thing we can do is start testing new messages and new content. Maybe this offer wasn't interesting to them because they don't need that guide, but maybe they need your checklist instead, or maybe they'd just like your email drip series that has an educational component to it. So keep testing different types of messaging. Just because this one wasn't valuable doesn't mean your other content isn't interesting to them, and it doesn't mean they're not interested in your email list.

Redo split tests from your site

We can keep testing messaging. So if we are testing messaging on our site, we might take the top two or three and test that messaging on ads. We might find that different messaging works better on social than it does on pop-ups or banners on the site. So it's worth redoing split tests that seemed conclusive on your site because things might be different on the social media network.

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So that's it for today. What I'd love for you guys to do is if you have some great examples of targeting that's worked for you, messaging that's worked for you, or just other paid social tactics that have worked really well for your content marketing campaigns, I'd love to hear examples of that in the comments on the post, and we'd be happy to answer questions you guys have on how to actually get some of this stuff done. Whether it's targeting questions, how to set up lookalike audiences, anything like that, we'd be happy to answer questions there as well.

So that's it for me today. Thanks, Moz fans. We'll see you next time.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Your Content Strategy Needs More Consistency

If I told you that content creation is a vital part of every company’s marketing strategy, your response would probably be a sarcastic “Well, duh. Thanks for that cutting-edge insight, John.”

That’s because most of us know how important content is to our inbound marketing and our brands — both our respective company brands, as well as our personal brands as a thought leader. We understand that content is important, but it doesn’t seem like we always agree on how much content we need, or how to create it well enough to consistently engage our audience.

But how you address that might depend on what your goals are for your content and who your audience is. But there’s one rule that holds true no matter what: Content consistency is key.

Why Focus on Consistency?

If you’re not consistent, you’re not taking advantage of all the opportunities you have to connect with your audience. Creating a few pieces of content here and there might help someone understand a topic better, but they won’t help you hit all of those touch points between your brand and your audience -- and they won’t help you build a meaningful relationship with it. To do that, you need to be a consistent content creator. It’s that simple.

What’s not so simple is breaking down the nuances within your audience and your processes to deliver not just any old content consistently, but content that meets its needs in a way that attracts it to your brand.

Think of it this way: Picture your favorite actor. This person is probably in a few of your favorite movies, consistently delivering amazing performances, and you might find yourself interested in the projects he or she stars in, simply because you know and love his or her previous work. That’s powerful.

With consistent, engaging content, you can hit touch points on your audience members’ online journeys, build connections with them, and position your brand to be top-of-mind when they think of their most trusted and liked resources. (This approach to branding and relationship-building is one I go into in much more depth in my business book, Top of Mind.)

But if you want to get started creating effective content consistently now, here are five essential tips.

How to Create a Strategy That Works

1) Document an actionable content strategy.

While 89% of B2B organizations are actually utilizing content marketing, only 37% have put together a documented strategy around that content’s creation and distribution.

Creating this kind of strategy is similar to setting goals for yourself: You’re more likely to achieve them if you write them down and break them into actionable steps to hold yourself accountable than if you decide to wing it and hope for the best. The same applies to content -- you need to write down what you want to achieve and how you want to get there.

That last part -- how you want to get there -- is particularly important. You can spend all the time in the world documenting your strategy, but if it isn’t set up to make consistent execution feasible, it won’t help you very much. So set goals, like your overall mission, audience personas, content mix, and promotion tactics. Then, make them actionable by laying the foundation for your process that makes consistency simpler right in your document.

2) Make use of a knowledge bank.

One of the biggest challenges inherent in creating loads of content is keeping track of it all, and organizing all the insights you’ve learned about your customers and your industry -- and leveraging them to create more than just one piece of content.

Enter the knowledge bank, which allows you to store and organize key information about your company, your content, and your customers. It makes creating multiple pieces and types of content that speak directly to your audience’s wants and needs much easier -- not to mention, it helps with consistency, because the more seamless the process of creating, finding, and managing your content, the easier it will be to do so in a quicker and more consistent manner.

3) Build the best team you can find.

With an actionable strategy in place and a system for leveraging your company’s expertise, it’s time to start actually creating content — and for that, you’ll need a talented team.

Sure, you could possibly write and promote all your content yourself -- if you really wanted to that -- but it’s difficult to scale this way. You’re busy with dozens of other tasks on your plate, so you’ll likely end up sacrificing either quality, or consistency.

That's where a great content marketing team and a network of freelance writers come into play. My team at Influence & Co. has found a lot of success with this process, which starts with a thought leader’s expertise, a freelancer’s skills at turning that insight into a written piece, and our team’s ability to strategize, edit, publish, and promote that content. When every person focuses on his or her strengths, your content will shine, and you’ll find yourself publishing more consistently than if you tried to do it all yourself.

4) Get comfortable with your editorial calendar.

An editorial calendar can do so much more than set the schedule for your upcoming posts -- it can also be a place to brainstorm ideas, plan your social media campaigns, and organize everything you’ve got coming down the pike.

That can help streamline the entire content process because everything is in one place, allowing you to see where you have gaps, and where you have excess content. Once you settle into your schedule and process, you can get even more efficient, giving yourself more time to focus on creating content, rather than organizing it.

A content calendar can also help track your successes and shortcomings, so you can make more informed decisions in the future. If, for example, you find that content posted at a certain time of day -- or a particular day of the week -- tends to outperform the rest, you can make changes accordingly. That way, you’re consistently on schedule and maximizing your impact.

5) Make distribution a priority, not an afterthought.

Each of these steps will help you create content consistently, but you can’t stop there. If you’re not also distributing and amplifying your content consistently and strategically, then all you’ve really accomplished is improving your content production -- not your content marketing.

Don’t wait until an article is published, for example, before you start thinking about how you’ll use it as a tool to connect with your audience. Your content distribution plan should take as much priority as your content development process -- content that you sit on or passively distribute won’t accomplish much.

Content creation can be a chore -- if you don’t know where to start when it comes to developing or distributing your work. But it’s an essential component of your company’s marketing strategy. Consistent content is key to keeping your audience engaged, your brand top-of-mind, and your content investment worthwhile. With these five simple tactics, your path to consistency will become much clearer.

How to Get More Done by Doing Less

Productivity is generally thought of in terms of, “How do I get more done?”

If we’re lucky, we work in teams and environments where that perspective is at least softened by combining it with a measure of efficiency or impact, but even then we don’t fully escape the rat-race-like pursuit of more.

In fact, we usually answer “How are you?” with “I’ve been very busy.” And we wear our 80-hour work weeks like a badge of honor.

Speaking on his upcoming book, The Calm Company, Basecamp cofounder Jason Fried digs into the dangers of this troubling trend:

“Long hours, excessive busyness, and lack of sleep have become a badge of honor for many people these days. Sustained exhaustion is not a badge of honor, it’s a mark of stupidity. Companies that force their crew into this bargain are cooking up dumb at their employee's expense.”

This was similar to the mindspace that I too occupied when I stumbled into mindfulness and meditation 18 months ago.

At the time, I had been working on my own startups for about nine hours a day, and even though I had the flexibility to work in any way that I wanted, I was in the mindset of doing more, working longer hours. I was chasing my own tail, and a proposal to sit still to meditate for 15 minutes a day, provoked a simple reaction: “Who has time for that?”

But through the evolution and expansion of my mindfulness practices since then, I’ve come to learn that an action geared towards less (like sitting, breathing, and not thinking) has the surprising effect of creating some more (calm, clarity and space).

If you've heard or read anything on meditation and mindfulness, that shouldn't sound too unfamiliar. But in this article I’d like to reveal a couple of tactics where I optimized for less, only to get an exponential more on the other side. These tactics span different areas of my life, and each has their individual, contextual goals -- but they are all intertwined and focused ultimately on my experience as I pursue various projects, goals and dreams in life.

I literally stumbled into mindfulness and meditation via a prompt from my therapist who had intervened as my monkey mind was running havoc and jeopardizing most good things in my life. I still work towards mindfulness today because I have experienced significant changes in my life and work as a result of my practice.

So here's how I have managed to gain more in my life as a result of pursuing less in some situations.

Plan Slower Mornings

Waking early in the mornings has always been one of the easier things for me to do. In fact, I used to believe that I personally needed very little sleep -- until I learned about the real effects of sleep debt over time.

In the past, I would use an early morning start as a way to get a headstart on the day ahead. I can remember during my time at WooThemes, I was at the office before 7am on most days. The rest of the team only arrived from 9am onwards, and most of our remote team would only sign on much later. Those first two hours were glorious though: I could just hack away at my to-do list for two hours straight without anyone or any notifications interrupting my flow.

And then I had kids.

For any parent reading this, you’ll know that babies and toddlers operate on their own schedule, which means that none of my mornings were as predictable or within my control as before. Initially, I completely resisted this change and tried to stick to my previously focused and productive morning routine. I also tried various iterations to this routine, from waking up even earlier to trying to get work done while giving Adii junior his morning bottle.

Suffice to say, by trying to multitask, I wasn’t being a great dad and I wasn’t doing great work either -- everyone was getting a compromised result.

Fast-forward to today, and my morning routine looks something like this: I wake up at 5am on weekdays. I immediately get a cup coffee and breakfast (the same every morning to avoid having to make a decision). The next hour or so I spend reading, and I then meditate for 15 to 20 minutes. Then from about 6am onwards, I get my two boys ready for school. This means on most mornings I only get to my desk (and work) at 8am.

With the benefit of hindsight and comparison, I can now see how singular and rushed my old morning routine was. Because my goal was to get to work as quickly and efficiently as possible, it meant that any friction or obstacles along the way had a major negative impact on my experience. And a crappy morning would eventually turn into an even crappier day on most occasions.

These days, by the time I get to work I have a sense of space and calm. No rush to do anything specific. No existential fear about not answering yesterday’s emails quickly enough.

Instead I find that I’m more aware of the whole day and week’s landscape, which has helped me prioritize the things I need to work on (versus the things I can delegate or allow to drop off my radar).

Curiously I have also found that the first hour or so in the morning has not become less productive at all, and I still often manage to do some of my best work in that time (especially when I manage to also prioritize the most important task for the day during this time). For example, it's currently just after 9am as I’m writing this article, and I find the words flowing easily.

In the past, I used to run out of steam later in the day due to being so rushed. This inevitably meant that I either felt that I hadn’t accomplished enough on that day, or that I would try working until late in the evening to make up for lost time. We should however all agree that our brains do get tired, and if we continue to push ourselves beyond the point of exhaustion, we end up merely sitting in front of our computers, not getting anything done.

Disconnect from Interruptions

Software makers use often use gamification, notifications, and a combination of instant gratification and FOMO to keep us as engaged with their products as possible.

I'd never given much thought to how the programs and apps I use on a daily basis impact my productivity -- until I read Cal Newport’s book “Deep Work: Rules for focused success in a distracted world” earlier this year and was introduced to the concept of attention residue.

To explain what attention residue is and how it impacts us, Newport references a 2009 paper titled Why Is It So Hard to Do My Work?” from Sophie Leroy, a business school professor at the University of Minnesota. As Leroy explains in the paper:

“People need to stop thinking about one task in order to fully transition their attention and perform well on another. Yet, results indicate it is difficult for people to transition their attention away from an unfinished task and their subsequent task performance suffers.”

I finished the book in a single sitting, and it prompted me to really investigate my work behaviors. I would like to tell you here that it has helped me to do more deep work, yet I don’t think I have a consistent workflow to do deep work often enough (even though, my awareness of pursuing deep work is more developed).

The book did however prompt me to do something more radical: I almost entirely switched off my phone without entirely switching it off. My iPhone is now permanently on silent, and has the “Do Not Disturb” feature switched on at all times.

I also disabled all notifications -- badges on my icons, popup notifications or notifications on my lock screen. The only notifications that makes it to my lock screen are from WhatsApp, which I only use for family and close friends. And yes -- I also disabled Slack notifications, which is the primary communication tool we use for Conversio, a team of 14 remote team members.

This has turned my phone into less of an attention-demanding force. I don’t get interrupted or distracted as often as I used to. This helped me read 22 books in about ten weeks because I picked up a book when I was bored instead of fiddling on my phone.

I also started writing more, which helped me get more thoughts out of my mind. And most importantly, limiting my phone time has without a doubt helped me sleep better (I have always struggled to fall asleep because I struggle to switch off my thinking mind).

The flipside of this is also true: whenever I now pick up my phone, I can pay attention to the possible interactions that it presents. If an old friend sent me a message on Facebook, I can invest in replying purposefully instead of both reading and replying in a fleeting moment (when the notification of the message popped up).

I don’t have any scientific evidence to determine how these decisions have impacted my attention residue. What I do know is that by allowing less external sources to demand my attention, I have been more purposeful to prioritise the most important things to me -- in a way that also brings more clarity to my life.

Change Your Reading Habits

Consider for a moment that much of your daily communication consists of reading emails, Slack messages, texts, tweets, or comments on your latest Instagram photo.

A big part of our communication is in written form, which means that we need to read in order to respond and interact. Beyond that you are likely reading articles (blog posts) like these, short rants your dad has posted on Facebook, or a firehose of 140 character opinions on Twitter.

Even if you aren't reading books everyday, you are reading a lot.

A couple of months ago, I hit a wall. I was consuming a lot of content, but not much of it really resonated with me. To link this back to my previous point about distractions, there was a particularly relevant quote from Cal Newport’s book that best represented my reading habits at the time:

“It’s amazing how overly accessible people are. There’s a lot of communication in my life that’s not enriching, it’s impoverishing.”

So I made a simple change: I de-prioritized most shorter-form content, and started dedicating my reading time to full-length books. Mostly classic fiction -- nothing that had a direct tie back to work.

I have now read 40 books this year already. I’ve worked my way through older classics from authors like Viktor Frankl, Kurt Vonnegut, Truman Capote, Herman Hesse, Marcus Aurelius, and Alain de Botton. By consuming less modern day content, I give my mind a much needed break from the usual written content I consume online.

Tackle a Big Non-Work Goal

On New Year’s day 2016, I set one goal: I wanted to complete my first marathon (and do it under four hours.)

When I started my training a month later, I also stumbled into mindfulness. The combination of these two things soon had an unexpected impact on the way I led our company.

Since my primary goal was not about work, it meant that the first priority each week was planning my daily runs. Work started to fill the spaces around these more rigid blocks. As a result, I starting giving myself more mental space from my work than ever before. Even catching up on work in the evening -- a usual habit of mine -- wasn’t an option after a three-hour long run -- I was just too tired to work.

Working less wasn't part of my plan or intention, but it had a profound impact on our journey at Conversio. For the first time in my entrepreneurial journey, it felt like I wasn’t tumbling up and down constantly on the proverbial rollercoaster anymore. And since I felt more grounded in my day-to-day, my leadership style started to reflect this attitude. As a result, the team was doing great work in a stable, safe environment.

The results in 2016 spoke for itself: we 3x’ed our revenue, reached profitability and celebrated with a major rebrand and product update. This was clearly a consequence of the team feeling more stable.

I then stepped into 2017 with the aim of applying all of my ambition towards really growing our business. I started pushing and pulling wherever I saw a gap. I started conversations that proposed new ideas that questioned previous decisions, and recommend brand new directions.

During the first quarter of 2017, I was focused on the wrong things, which made my behaviour erratic and meant that I lumped a lot of stress on our team. The team was confused, felt less secure, and wasn't collaborating at our previous levels.

As these things go, the team eventually managed to pierce my stubborn drive forward and I received the message: things were not as great as they were before.

Pretty much as soon as I started unraveling my own motivations underpinning my behaviour (primarily, seeking more and faster growth), the team got back to a calmer, more efficient collaborative flow once again. We once again found alignment on both our core values, as well as shared goals, which meant we were making progress again. For the first four months of the year, our revenue only increased by 8% and in the four months since we’re up 24%. (Naturally the change in our growth rate was a result of many different things, but this change was at the core of many of those.)

The only shift here was in my own focus. When I was narrowly focused on work and had no other person goals I was striving for, it created an unbalanced approach that was neither helpful nor healthy for our progress.

When I was working towards a goal outside of work that was just for myself, it gave me more clarity in our mission and helped me be a better leader.

Embrace Not Having All the Answers Right Now

I have an annoying tendency to feel like I need to answer every question in a group setting, simply because I'm the leader.

In many situations, this isn't an inherently bad attitude to have. Afterall, I am the leader, and in many situations I have the context, knowledge and experience to give a valuable answer.

But there's a downside. Many times individual team members will just ask me directly for the answer, which means not involving the team and possibly excluding different perspectives and opinions. Once I've addressed a question, I sometimes shut the conversation down because my answer is deemed as authoritative or final (even when that is not the intention). That's not great for inclusion and collaboration.

In recent months, I have been trying to avoid being the first to answer questions in meetings. Not only has this alleviated some of the demands on my time, but more importantly it means that the team is coming to more collaborative, creative answers on their own.

Get More Done By Doing Less

The truth -- even for startups -- is that most of the time it doesn’t really matter whether you finish something today or tomorrow, reach a goal this week or next month, or grow by 5% instead of 10%.

Yes, there are some exceptions to this. But for everything else, you can probably pursue the less obvious choice and route, while not compromising on your goal at all. In fact, you might be surprised that doing less actually helps you exceed your goals and expectations.

SEO for non-profits

Finding the Best Search Terms for Your Business: 10 Tools and Tips

Despite the ever-present advice that long-tail keywords are king, many businesses still struggle to strategically use them to get content to the top of organic and paid search results.

The truth is, tackling these long-tail keywords feels hard when you know you're up against the giants. I know. I worked with many startups before I joined HubSpot, and scouring Google Keyword Planner every day for keywords to fuel my blog posts drove me close to insanity.

But -- it worked. When I skipped the keyword research, convinced that my blog post was just THAT epic, THAT viral … I was wrong. I was chasing an immeasurable goal (virality) with an unaccountable metric (my gut). That kind of strategy is really only a luxury restricted to those with pre-existing ample website traffic, sizable social media following, copious brand advocates, and a list of high-profile customers.

So if you're one of those companies without those luxuries, listen up. I'm going to show you how to uncover new keywords to target and assess if you're already targeting high-value phrases.

How to Find New Keywords

If you want to generate more organic traffic, it’s necessary to find the sweet spot between easy-to-target keywords and keywords relevant to your business.

A great (and familiar) place to start is to simply type some phrases into Google’s search bar, and watch how it pre-populates the rest of what you are typing.

Google’s search bar algorithm is built around a searcher’s intent. Beware, though: What is suggested is not just based on popularity or relevance, but it's also personalized to the searcher. This exercise is simply to get you started with some ideas for keywords to target, and is by no means sufficient step on its own to do comprehensive keyword research.

That's where the following tools come in handy -- they'll help you flesh out your keyword research. (And if you need a place to keep track of all of your research, download our free on-page SEO template.)

Below, we'll dive into the following search term and keyword research tools:

• Moz Keyword Explorer
• Google AdWords Keyword Planner Tool
• Google Trends
• Wordtracker’s Free Basic Keyword Demand
• keywordtool.io
• Keyword.io
• Infinite Suggest

Top Keyword Research Tools to Try

1) Moz Keyword Explorer

This keyword explorer is one of the best free SEO Tools available, providing an all-in-one tool to both discover and prioritize the search terms you'll want to target.

2) Google AdWords Keyword Planner Tool

Like many of the other tools on here, the Google AdWords Keyword Planner provides a great way to discover new keyword ideas, especially for paid search campaigns. Criteria can be based on your product or service, as well as your target customers. 

3) Google Trends

Google Trends, if nothing else, an incredibly cool resource for trending search data. Not only does it provide information on search trends, but it also provides great visualizations that represent the data in a highly consumable way. You can also narrow the information by location.

4) Wordtracker’s Free Basic Keyword Demand

One of the best things about Wordtracker is that it helps users conduct keyword research across a variety of platforms. In addition to Google, for example, it helps marketers discover search term data for YouTube and Amazon, as well.

5) keywordtool.io

Keywordtool.io is, as the name depicts, a keyword research tool. What’s awesome about this tool is that it includes not only Google.com, but also all Google localized search languages, as well as YouTube, Bing, and the App Store. Sweet! Type in the ideas you recorded from the previous step, and expand your list.

As you go, make sure to remove keywords you know deep down cannot be relevant to your website. This will save you time and money in the long run, and result in a far better experience for the web searcher. Trickery is a fool’s game!

6) Keyword.io

Keyword.io has the disadvantage of only using Google data, but it's handy in that it not only does keywords, but also looks at Google Trends information and lists the pages you have to beat for that keyword.

7) Infinite Suggest

You’ll need to have a long long list of keywords in order to boil it down to the golden nuggets. This tool will help you generate lots of terms (as it claims, “infinite”), and it's up to you to pick out the best ones.

How to Evaluate Your Existing Search Terms and Keywords

Not only do you need to explore new keywords for your future content, but you also need to pay attention to your current keywords. When deciding on prioritizing your phrases and pages you must consider three things:

1. How many extra clicks will I get if I move up in Google’s results?
2. How much money will I make if I move up?
3. How strong is the page I’m trying to outrank?

To find out how to answer these questions, we spoke with Dan Petrovic, one of Australia’s best-known name in SEO and the director of DEJAN marketing. Here's what he recommends:

1) How many extra clicks will I get on a keyword or phrase if I move up in Google’s results?

Export your keywords and work out your CTR averages.

This exercise is about predicting how many extra clicks an increase in rank would bring for a particular keyword. You may have seen clickthrough rate (CTR) studies such as this one in the past, but they’re anecdotal at best because every website is different.

We recommend you start by defining averages specific to your own website before working out click scenarios in different ranking positions. Once you know what your averages are for search queries, CTR, and position, you can start creating ranking scenarios for each keyword (e.g., if I move from position 10 to position 9 I will receive 12 extra clicks based on site CTR averages?). Be mindful though: If a keyword over- or under-performs compared to the site CTR average, you may need to adjust the expectation for its growth accordingly.

Here is how you can export your keywords and uncover these key metrics:

1) Log in to Google’s Search Console, navigate to the "Search Analytics" page under the "Search Traffic" header, and select the widest date range available on your website. This is typically 90 days.

2) If your website targets a specific geographic region, ensure you’ve got it selected before you export data:

3) It’s also wise to filter out any branded terms from the export. Branded terms tend to have very high CTR, which is not useful when calculating averages for non-branded keywords:

4) At the end of the report, click "Download" and select CSV. Now you have a file that contains:

1. Queries
2. Clicks
3. CTR
4. Position

Once you have these averages in hand, you can calculate which phrases will result in sufficiently more clicks for the effort put into moving up the rankings for that keyphrase.

2) How much money will I make if I move up in the rankings?

Add conversion rate and value to your CTR calculation.

The data gleaned from your keyword export can be enriched with your company's financial information, such as the average value of a conversion and the average conversion rate. That way, you can project how much of a bottom-line impact your rankings changes could have (e.g. if an order value is $200 and conversion rate is 3%, how much more money will I get if I get 100 extra clicks from moving to a top spot in Google?).

You can now prioritize the keywords that drive the highest potential revenue on your website.

3) How strong is the page I’m trying to outrank?

Find results above you and look up their strength metrics.

Finally, once you have growth potentials calculated, it’s recommended that you balance them out with a difficulty metric. I personally use Flow Metrics from Majestic, but you can also use Moz’s Page Authority or similar values. These providers provide API access, too, so you can automate your research as well.

Advanced users can also map all keywords to their corresponding URLs, sum up potential scores from all keywords that lead to a URL, and end up with a list of priority pages to work on.

I use this exact methodology for my own research, and if you’re curious as to how it works, you can check it out.

Always Be Keyword-ing

Getting your keyword strategy right is the recipe for a long-term return on investment in digital marketing. Unlike other types of promotions, organic traffic is the gift that keeps on giving. Even when you're not actively publishing new promotions, you're still receiving traffic to your website.

To properly use keywords in your marketing, don't just pepper them across meta descriptions, image alt tags, and H1s -- apply them appropriately across your marketing campaigns and overall content strategy. Your marketing software should make implementing and tracking this easy. (HubSpot customers, you can use the HubSpot software to easily brainstorm, implement, and track your keyword strategy across all the content on your website.)

Remember: SEO is about serving the searcher with the best possible result. There are people out there searching for your very business, and you need to get in front of them. As your authority grows based on less-searched long-tail keywords, you’ll be able to tackle the giants as good as anyone.

Want even more tips? Check out the video below. 

Gestalt Psychology and Why It's Essential for Good Design [Video]

How to Track Your Local SEO & SEM: A Guide

Posted by nickpierno

If you asked me, I’d tell you that proper tracking is the single most important element in your local business digital marketing stack. I’d also tell you that even if you didn’t ask, apparently.

A decent tracking setup allows you to answer the most important questions about your marketing efforts. What’s working and what isn’t?

Many digital marketing strategies today still focus on traffic. Lots of agencies/developers/marketers will slap an Analytics tracking code on your site and call it a day. For most local businesses, though, traffic isn’t all that meaningful of a metric. And in many cases (e.g. Adwords & Facebook), more traffic just means more spending, without any real relationship to results.

What you really need your tracking setup to tell you is how many leads (AKA conversions) you’re getting, and from where. It also needs to do so quickly and easily, without you having to log into multiple accounts to piece everything together.

If you’re spending money or energy on SEO, Adwords, Facebook, or any other kind of digital traffic stream and you’re not measuring how many leads you get from each source, stop what you’re doing right now and make setting up a solid tracking plan your next priority.

This guide is intended to fill you in on all the basic elements you’ll need to assemble a simple, yet flexible and robust tracking setup.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is at the center of virtually every good web tracking setup. There are other supplemental ways to collect web analytics (like Heap, Hotjar, Facebook Pixels, etc), but Google Analytics is the free, powerful, and omnipresent tool that virtually every website should use. It will be the foundation of our approach in this guide.

Analytics setup tips

Analytics is super easy to set up. Create (or sign into) a Google account, add your Account and Property (website), and install the tracking code in your website’s template.

Whatever happens, don’t let your agency or developer set up your Analytics property on their own Account. Agencies and developers: STOP DOING THIS! Create a separate Google/Gmail account and let this be the "owner" of a new Analytics Account, then share permission with the agency/developer’s account, the client’s personal Google account, and so on.

The “All Website Data” view will be created by default for a new property. If you’re going to add filters or make any other advanced changes, be sure to create and use a separate View, keeping the default view clean and pure.

Also be sure to set the appropriate currency and time zone in the “View Settings.” If you ever use Adwords, using the wrong currency setting will result in a major disagreement between Adwords and Analytics.

Goals

Once your basic Analytics setup is in place, you should add some goals. This is where the magic happens. Ideally, every business objective your website can achieve should be represented as a goal conversion. Conversions can come in many forms, but here are some of the most common ones:

• Contact form submission
• Quote request form submission
• Phone call
• Text message
• Chat
• Appointment booking
• Newsletter signup
• E-commerce purchase

How you slice up your goals will vary with your needs, but I generally try to group similar “types” of conversions into a single goal. If I have several different contact forms on a site (like a quick contact form in the sidebar, and a heftier one on the contact page), I might group those as a single goal. You can always dig deeper to see the specific breakdown, but it’s nice to keep goals as neat and tidy as possible.

To create a goal in Analytics:

1. Navigate to the Admin screen.
2. Under the appropriate View, select Goals and then + New Goal.
3. You can either choose between a goal Template, or Custom. Most goals are easiest to set up choosing Custom.
4. Give your goal a name (ex. Contact Form Submission) and choose a type. Most goals for local businesses will either be a Destination or an Event.

Pro tip: Analytics allows you to associate a dollar value to your goal conversions. If you can tie your goals to their actual value, it can be a powerful metric to measure performance with. A common way to determine the value of a goal is to take the average value of a sale and multiply it by the average closing rate of Internet leads. For example, if your average sale is worth $1,000, and you typically close 1/10 of leads, your goal value would be $100.

Form tracking

The simplest way to track form fills is to have the form redirect to a "Thank You" page upon submission. This is usually my preferred setup; it’s easy to configure, and I can use the Thank You page to recommend other services, articles, etc. on the site and potentially keep the user around. I also find a dedicated Thank You page to provide the best affirmation that the form submission actually went through.

Different forms can all use the same Thank You page, and pass along variables in the URL to distinguish themselves from each other so you don’t have to create a hundred different Thank You pages to track different forms or goals. Most decent form plugins for Wordpress are capable of this. My favorite is Gravityforms. Contact Form 7 and Ninja Forms are also very popular (and free).

Another option is using event tracking. Event tracking allows you to track the click of a button or link (the submit button, in the case of a web form). This would circumvent the need for a thank you page if you don’t want to (or can’t) send the user elsewhere when they submit a form. It’s also handy for other, more advanced forms of tracking.

Here’s a handy plugin for Gravityforms that makes setting up event tracking a snap.

Once you’ve got your form redirecting to a Thank You page or generating an event, you just need to create a goal in Analytics with the corresponding value.

You can use Thank You pages or events in a similar manner to track appointment booking, web chats, newsletter signups, etc.

Call tracking

Many businesses and marketers have adopted form tracking, since it’s easy and free. That’s great. But for most businesses, it leaves a huge volume of web conversions untracked.

If you’re spending cash to generate traffic to your site, you could be hemorrhaging budget if you’re not collecting and attributing the phone call conversions from your website.

There are several solutions and approaches to call tracking. I use and recommend CallRail, which also seems to have emerged as the darling of the digital marketing community over the past few years thanks to its ease of use, great support, fair pricing, and focus on integration. Another option (so I don’t come across as completely biased) is CallTrackingMetrics.

You’ll want to make sure your call tracking platform allows for integration with Google Analytics and offers something called "dynamic number insertion."

Dynamic number insertion uses JavaScript to detect your actual local phone number on your website and replace it with a tracking number when a user loads your page.

Dynamic insertion is especially important in the context of local SEO, since it allows you to keep your real, local number on your site, and maintain NAP consistency with the rest of your business’s citations. Assuming it’s implemented properly, Google will still see your real number when it crawls your site, but users will get a tracked number.

Basically, magic.

There are a few ways to implement dynamic number insertion. For most businesses, one of these two approaches should fit the bill.

Number per source

With this approach, you'll create a tracking number for each source you wish to track calls for. These sources might be:

• Organic search traffic
• Paid search traffic
• Facebook referral traffic
• Yelp referral traffic
• Direct traffic
• Vanity URL traffic (for visitors coming from an offline TV or radio ad, for example)

When someone arrives at your website from one of these predefined sources, the corresponding number will show in place of your real number, wherever it’s visible. If someone calls that number, an event will be passed to Analytics along with the source.

This approach isn’t perfect, but it’s a solid solution if your site gets large amounts of traffic (5k+ visits/day) and you want to keep call tracking costs low. It will do a solid job of answering the basic questions of how many calls your site generates and where they came from, but it comes with a few minor caveats:

• Calls originating from sources you didn’t predefine will be missed.
• Events sent to Analytics will create artificial sessions not tied to actual user sessions.
• Call conversions coming from Adwords clicks won’t be attached to campaigns, ad groups, or keywords.

Some of these issues have more advanced workarounds. None of them are deal breakers… but you can avoid them completely with number pools — the awesomest call tracking method.

Number pools

“Keyword Pools,” as CallRail refers to them, are the killer app for call tracking. As long as your traffic doesn’t make this option prohibitively expensive (which won’t be a problem for most local business websites), this is the way to go.

In this approach, you create a pool with several numbers (8+ with CallRail). Each concurrent visitor on your site is assigned a different number, and if they call it, the conversion is attached to their session in Analytics, as well as their click in Adwords (if applicable). No more artificial sessions or disconnected conversions, and as long as you have enough numbers in your pool to cover your site’s traffic, you’ll capture all calls from your site, regardless of source. It’s also much quicker to set up than a number per source, and will even make you more attractive and better at sports!

You generally have to pay your call tracking provider for additional numbers, and you’ll need a number for each concurrent visitor to keep things running smoothly, so this is where massive amounts of traffic can start to get expensive. CallRail recommends you look at your average hourly traffic during peak times and include ¼ the tally as numbers in your pool. So if you have 30 visitors per hour on average, you might want ~8 numbers.

Implementation

Once you’ve got your call tracking platform configured, you’ll need to implement some code on your site to allow the dynamic number insertion to work its magic. Most platforms will provide you with a code snippet and instructions for installation. If you use CallRail and Wordpress, there’s a handy plugin to make things even simpler. Just install, connect, and go.

To get your calls recorded in Analytics, you’ll just need to enable that option from your call tracking service. With CallRail you simply enable the integration, add your domain, and calls will be sent to your Analytics account as Events. Just like with your form submissions, you can add these events as a goal. Usually it makes sense to add a single goal called “Phone Calls” and set your event conditions according to the output from your call tracking service. If you’re using CallRail, it will look like this:

Google Search Console

It’s easy to forget to set up Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools), because most of the time it plays a backseat role in your digital marketing measurement. But miss it, and you’ll forego some fundamental technical SEO basics (country setting, XML sitemaps, robots.txt verification, crawl reports, etc.), and you’ll miss out on some handy keyword click data in the Search Analytics section. Search Console data can also be indispensable for diagnosing penalties and other problems down the road, should they ever pop up.

Make sure to connect your Search Console with your Analytics property, as well as your Adwords account.

With all the basics of your tracking setup in place, the next step is to bring your paid advertising data into the mix.

Google Adwords

Adwords is probably the single most convincing reason to get proper tracking in place. Without it, you can spend a lot of money on clicks without really knowing what you get out of it. Conversion data in Adwords is also absolutely critical in making informed optimizations to your campaign settings, ad text, keywords, and so on.

If you’d like some more of my rantings on conversions in Adwords and some other ways to get more out of your campaigns, check out this recent article :)

Getting your data flowing in all the right directions is simple, but often overlooked.

Linking with Analytics

First, make sure your Adwords and Analytics accounts are linked. Always make sure you have auto-tagging enabled on your Adwords account. Now all your Adwords data will show up in the Acquisition > Adwords area of Analytics. This is a good time to double-check that you have the currency correctly set in Analytics (Admin > View Settings); otherwise, your Adwords spend will be converted to the currency set in Analytics and record the wrong dollar values (and you can’t change data that’s already been imported).

Next, you’ll want to get those call and form conversions from Analytics into Adwords.

Importing conversions in Adwords

Some Adwords management companies/consultants might disagree, but I strongly advocate an Analytics-first approach to conversion tracking. You can get call and form conversions pulled directly into Adwords by installing a tracking code on your site. But don’t.

Instead, make sure all your conversions are set up as goals in Analytics, and then import them into Adwords. This allows Analytics to act as your one-stop-shop for reviewing your conversion data, while providing all the same access to that data inside Adwords.

Call extensions & call-only ads

This can throw some folks off. You will want to track call extensions natively within Adwords. These conversions are set up automatically when you create a call extension in Adwords and elect to use a Google call forwarding number with the default settings.

Don’t worry though, you can still get these conversions tracked in Analytics if you want to (I could make an argument either for or against). Simply create a single “offline” tracking number in your call tracking platform, and use that number as the destination for the Google forwarding number.

This also helps counteract one of the oddities of Google’s call forwarding system. Google will actually only start showing the forwarding number on desktop ads after they have received a certain (seemingly arbitrary) minimum number of clicks per week. As a result, some calls are tracked and some aren’t — especially on smaller campaigns. With this little trick, Analytics will show all the calls originating from your ads — not just ones that take place once you’ve paid Google enough each week.

Adwords might give you a hard time for using a number in your call extensions that isn’t on your website. If you encounter issues with getting your number verified for use as a call extension, just make sure you have linked your Search Console to your Adwords account (as indicated above).

Now you’ve got Analytics and Adwords all synced up, and your tracking regimen is looking pretty gnarly! There are a few other cool tools you can use to take full advantage of your sweet setup.

Google Tag Manager

If you’re finding yourself putting a lot of code snippets on your site (web chat, Analytics, call tracking, Adwords, Facebook Pixels, etc), Google Tag Manager is a fantastic tool for managing them all from one spot. You can also do all sorts of advanced slicing and dicing.

GTM is basically a container that you put all your snippets in, and then you put a single GTM snippet on your site. Once installed, you never need to go back to your site’s code to make changes to your snippets. You can manage them all from the GTM interface in a user-friendly, version-controlled environment.

Don’t bother if you just need Analytics on your site (and are using the CallRail plugin). But for more robust needs, it’s well worth considering for its sheer power and simplicity.

Here’s a great primer on making use of Google Tag Manager.

UTM tracking URLs & Google Campaign URL Builder

Once you’ve got conversion data occupying all your waking thoughts, you might want to take things a step further. Perhaps you want to track traffic and leads that come from an offline advertisement, a business card, an email signature, etc. You can build tracking URLs that include UTM parameters (campaign, source, and medium), so that when visitors come to your site from a certain place, you can tell where that place was!

Once you know how to build these URLs, you don’t really need a tool, but Google’s Campaign URL Builder makes quick enough work of it that it’s bound to earn a spot in your browser’s bookmarks bar.

Pro tip: Use a tracking URL on your Google My Business listing to help distinguish traffic/conversions coming in from your listing vs traffic coming in from the organic search results. I’d recommend using:

Source: google
Medium: organic
Campaign name: gmb-listing (or something)

This way your GMB traffic still shows up in Analytics as normal organic traffic, but you can drill down to the gmb-listing campaign to see its specific performance.

Bonus pro tip: Use a vanity domain or a short URL on print materials or offline ads, and point it to a tracking URL to measure their performance in Analytics.

Rank tracking

Whaaat? Rank tracking is a dirty word to conversion tracking purists, isn’t it?

Nah. It’s true that rank tracking is a poor primary metric for your digital marketing efforts, but it can be very helpful as a supplemental metric and for helping to diagnose changes in traffic, as Darren Shaw explored here.

For local businesses, we think our Local Rank Tracker is a pretty darn good tool for the job.

Google My Business Insights

Your GMB listing is a foundational piece of your local SEO infrastructure, and GMB Insights offer some meaningful data (impressions and clicks for your listing, mostly). It also tries to tell you how many calls your listing generates for you, but it comes up a bit short since it relies on "tel:" links instead of tracking numbers. It will tell you how many people clicked on your phone number, but not how many actually made the call. It also won’t give you any insights into calls coming from desktop users.

There’s a great workaround though! It just might freak you out a bit…

Fire up your call tracking platform once more, create an “offline” number, and use it as your “primary number” on your GMB listing. Don’t panic. You can preserve your NAP consistency by demoting your real local number to an “additional number” slot on your GMB listing.

I don’t consider this a necessary step, because you’re probably not pointing your paid clicks to your GMB listing. However, combined with a tracking URL pointing to your website, you can now fully measure the performance of Google My Business for your business!

Disclaimer: I believe that this method is totally safe, and I’m using it myself in several instances, but I can’t say with absolute certainty that it won’t impact your rankings. Whitespark is currently testing this out on a larger scale, and we’ll share our findings once they’re assembled!

Taking it all in

So now you’ve assembled a lean, mean tracking machine. You’re already feeling 10 years younger, and everyone pays attention when you enter the room. But what can you do with all this power?

Here are a few ways I like to soak up this beautiful data.

Pop into Analytics

Since we’ve centralized all our tracking in Analytics, we can answer pretty much any performance questions we have within a few simple clicks.

• How many calls and form fills did we get last month from our organic rankings?
• How does that compare to the month before? Last year?
• How many paid conversions are we getting? How much are we paying on average for them?
• Are we doing anything expensive that isn’t generating many leads?
• Does our Facebook page generate any leads on our website?

There are a billion and seven ways to look at your Analytics data, but I do most of my ogling from Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. Here you get a great overview of your traffic and conversions sliced up by channels (Organic Search, Paid Search, Direct, Referral, etc). You can obviously adjust date ranges, compare to past date ranges, and view conversion metrics individually or as a whole. For me, this is Analytics home base.

Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium can be equally interesting, especially if you’ve made good use of tracking URLs.

Make some sweet SEO reports

I can populate almost my entire standard SEO client report from the Acquisition section of Analytics. Making conversions the star of the show really helps to keep clients engaged in their monthly reporting.

Google Analytics dashboards

Google’s Dashboards inside Analytics provide a great way to put the most important metrics together on a single screen. They’re easy to use, but I’ve always found them a bit limiting. Fortunately for data junkies, Google has recently released its next generation data visualization product...

Google Data Studio

This is pretty awesome. It’s very flexible, powerful, and user-friendly. I’d recommend skipping the Analytics Dashboards and going straight to Data Studio.

It will allow to you to beautifully dashboard-ify your data from Analytics, Adwords, Youtube, DoubleClick, and even custom databases or spreadsheets. All the data is “live” and dynamic. Users can even change data sources and date ranges on the fly! Bosses love it, clients love it, and marketers love it… provided everything is performing really well ;)

Supermetrics

If you want to get really fancy, and build your own fully custom dashboard, develop some truly bespoke analysis tools, or automate your reporting regimen, check out Supermetrics. It allows you to pull data from just about any source into Google Sheets or Excel. From there, your only limitation is your mastery of spreadsheet-fu and your imagination.

TL;DR

So that’s a lot of stuff. If you’d like to skip the more nuanced explanations, pro tips, and bad jokes, here’s the gist in point form:

• Tracking your digital marketing is super important.
• Don’t just track traffic. Tracking conversions is critical.
• Use Google Analytics. Don’t let your agency use their own account.
• Set up goals for every type of lead (forms, calls, chats, bookings, etc).
• Track forms with destinations (thank you pages) or events.
• Track your calls, probably using CallRail.
• Use "number per source" if you have a huge volume of traffic; otherwise, use number pools (AKA keyword pools). Pools are better.
• Set up Search Console and link it to your Analytics and Adwords accounts.
• Link Adwords with Analytics.
• Import Analytics conversions into Adwords instead of using Adwords’ native conversion tracking snippet...
• ...except for call extensions. Track those within and Adwords AND in Analytics (if you want to) by using an “offline” tracking number as the destination for your Google forwarding numbers.
• Use Google Tag Manager if you have more than a couple third-party scripts to run on your site (web chat, Analytics, call tracking, Facebook Pixels etc).
• Use Google Campaign URL Builder to create tracked URLs for tracking visitors from various sources like offline advertising, email signatures, etc.
• Use a tracked URL on your GMB listing.
• Use a tracked number as your “primary” GMB listing number (if you do this, make sure you put your real local number as a “secondary” number). Note: We think this is safe, but we don’t have quite enough data to say so unequivocally. YMMV.
• Use vanity domains or short URLs that point to your tracking URLs to put on print materials, TV spots, etc.
• Track your rankings like a boss.
• Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels is your new Analytics home base.
• Consider making some Google Analytics Dashboards… and then don’t, because Google Data Studio is way better. So use that.
• Check out Supermetrics if you want to get really hardcore.
• Don’t let your dreams be dreams.

If you’re new to tracking your digital marketing, I hope this provides a helpful starting point, and helps cut through some of the confusion and uncertainty about how to best get set up.

If you’re a conversion veteran, I hope there are a few new or alternative ideas here that you can use to improve your setup.

If you’ve got anything to add, correct, or ask, leave a comment!

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8 Experiential Marketing Campaigns That Will Give You Serious Event Envy

Work events are really hit or miss. Let’s be honest: How many times have you found yourself anxiously fidgeting with a paper napkin in the corner of a stuffy networking happy hour?

That’s why I was not only relieved, but also surprised and delighted, when I attended a holiday party that featured a live, interactive version of an arcade game.

An entire room had been curated to look like a video game setting, and people were dressed up as characters from it. There was a giant, real-life scoreboard, boppy electronic music, and best of all, there was no tedious small talk.

It wasn’t just another tired work event ... it was an experience. And in our line of work, that sort of thing has a name: experiential marketing.

While a surprising number of people haven’t heard of the concept, it’s kind of a big deal -- there’s an entire three-day summit dedicated to it, and 65% of brands that use it say that it positively correlates with sales.

But what is it, exactly? And how has it been used effectively? We found eight of the coolest experiential marketing campaigns that really break down how it works, and how those lessons can be applied to marketers everywhere.

What Is Experiential Marketing?

To understand experiential marketing, just look to its name. It's a type of strategy that engages an audience with a real-life invitation to engage with -- or experience -- a brand and what it makes or represents. It's participatory, hands-on, and tangible.

It might sound a bit like event marketing, which makes sense -- experiential campaigns do tend to be event-centric. But there are also times when they have nothing to do with a specific event, as you’ll see from the examples we picked.

And when they are event-centric, they’re less dedicated to the type of event -- like a concert, festival, conference, etc. -- and focus more on interaction a specific brand. (If you already have an event in the works, you might want to check out this guide to adding experiential elements to it.)

These campaigns can take an integrated approach. The primary purpose is to experience a brand in a tangible, offline way, but you’ll still want an online dialogue around it. When you consider that 49% of folks create mobile video at branded events -- 39% of which is shared on Twitter -- it makes sense to incorporate a digital element. A branded hashtag, for example, can get people talking about the experience.

8 of the Coolest Experiential Marketing Campaigns We’ve Seen

1) Refinery29: 29Rooms

For about three years now, lifestyle brand Refinery29 has hosted the 29Rooms event: What it calls "an interactive funhouse of style, culture, & technology." As the name suggests, it consists of 29 individually branded and curated rooms -- and attendees can experience something different in each one. The rooms are designed and created with brand partners, who range from personalities like artists and musicians, to consumer-facing companies like Dunkin' Donuts, Dyson, and Cadillac.

Each year, 29Rooms has a different theme, with this year's being "Turn It Into Art." Attendees, it seems, are encouraged to enter each room and use the surroundings to create something -- one room, for instance, invites participants to put on punching gloves and hit punching bags that each produce a different sound when contacted to create a symphony of sorts. A truly hands-on experience, indeed. 

Takeaways for marketers:

• Go nuts, but keep it on-brand. An experience should be memorable, but relevant to the people attending.
• Partner with creators like artists and musicians to create experiences, especially if they are recognizeable within the region where you're trying to build or augment an audience.

2) Lean Cuisine: #WeighThis

One night, when I was watching “The Bachelorette” (it’s okay -- I judge myself, too) I started tallying how many commercials told women to change something about themselves. The result: I lost count after about two minutes.

That’s why it’s so refreshing to see brands like Lean Cuisine, whose marketing used to center solely on weight loss, stray from diet-centric messaging. And its #WeighThis campaign is a great example of just that.

As part of the campaign, Lean Cuisine curated a gallery of "scales" in New York's Grand Central Station, and invited women to "weigh in." But here's the catch: The scales were actually small boards where women could write down how they really wanted to be weighed. And rather than focusing on their weight in pounds -- or anything pertaining to body image -- the women opted to be measured by things like being back in college at 55, caring for 200 homeless children each day, or being the sole provider to four sons.

What’s particularly cool about this experience is that none of the participants actually interact with a Lean Cuisine product. No one was interrupted, asked to sample something, or stopped to answer questions. In fact, no one was really asked to do anything -- the display itself was enough to make people stop, observe, and then voluntarily interact.

Lean Cuisine figured out what message it wanted to send: “Sure, we make stuff that fits into a healthy lifestyle. But don’t forget about your accomplishments. That matters more than the number on the scale.” But instead of blatantly advertising that, it created an interactive experience around the message.

Still, the experience was clearly branded, to make sure people associated it with Lean Cuisine. The company’s Twitter handle and a branded hashtag were featured on the display in large text, which made it easy for people to share the experience on social media. And that definitely paid off -- the entire #WeighThis campaign led to over 204 million total impressions.

Takeaways for marketers:

• Don’t interrupt -- especially if you’re trying to grab someone’s attention in New York City, like Lean Cuisine was. If you create an experience that provides value to the people who pass by it, they’re more likely to participate.
• Figure out the message you really want to your brand to send -- that may or may not be directly tied to an actual product, and it might be something that your brand hasn’t said before. Then, build an experience around it.

3) Google: “Building a Better Bay Area”

Corporate philanthropy is definitely on the rise. Between 2012-2014, 56% of companies increased charitable giving, and Google is no exception. But when the search engine giant gave away $5.5 million to Bay Area nonprofits, it let the public decide where that money would go -- in an unconventional, interactive way.

Google allowed people to cast their votes online, but they also wanted to involve the Bay Area community in a tangible way. So they installed large, interactive posters -- in places like bus shelters, food trucks, and restaurants -- that locals could use to vote for a cause.

Source: 72andSunny

In the video below, the narrator notes that this experience reaches “people when they had the time to make a difference." That’s a big thing about experiential marketing: It allows people to interact with a brand when they have the time. Maybe that’s why 72% percent of consumers say they positively view brands that provide great experiences.

And that concept works in this experience because it takes advantage of a “you’re-already-there” mentality. In San Francisco, finding people waiting for the bus or going to food trucks is pretty much a given. So while they were “already there,” Google set up a few opportunities:

1. To learn about and vote for local nonprofits
2. To interact with the brand in a way that doesn’t require using its products
3. To indirectly learn about Google’s community outreach

With the help of the online voting integration -- and a branded hashtag: #GoogleImpactChallenge -- the campaign ended up generating 400,000 votes over the course of about three and a half weeks.

Takeaways for marketers:

• Create a branded hashtag that participants can use to share the experience on social media. Then, make sure you’ve integrated an online element that allows people to participate when they learn about it this way.
• Keep it local! It’s always nice when a large corporation gives some love to its community -- in fact, 72% of folks say they would tell friends and family about a business’s efforts like these.
• Remember the “you’re already there” approach. Find out where your audience is already hanging out and engage them there, instead of trying to get them to take action where they don’t usually spend their time.

4) Misereor: Charity Donation Billboard

When was the last time you used cash to pay for something?

Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Tough to remember, right? We’re kind of a species of “mindless swipers” -- globally, an estimated 357 billion non-cash transactions are made each year. And knowing how often we whip out our cards, German relief NGO Misereor decided to put our bad habit to good use with its charitable giving billboard.

It was what they called a “social swipe”: Set up in airports, these digital posters would display images of some problems that Misereor works to resolve -- hunger was depicted with a loaf of bread, for example.

But the screen was equipped with a card reader, and when someone went to swipe a card -- for a small fee of 2€ -- the image moved to make it look like the card was cutting a slice of bread.

Even cooler? On the user’s bank statement, there would be a thank-you note from Misereor, with a link to turn their one-time 2€ donation into a monthly one.

Needless to say, this experience required a lot of coordination -- with banks, airports, and a mobile payment platform. Because of that, the experience couldn’t just be a one-time occurrence. The people who interacted with it were later reminded of it during a pretty common occurrence: receiving a bank statement.

Takeaways for marketers:

• Visually represent the impact of participating in the experience. People interacting with this display were shown exactly where their money was going -- like slicing bread for a hungry family. (Infographics work nicely here, too -- check out our templates.)
• Partner with another brand to create an even better experience. In this instance, Misereor worked with Stripe.com for the payment technology, and with financial institutions to get a branded message on users’ bank statements. (And stay tuned -- we’ll talk more about the value of co-branding here later.)
• Don’t be afraid to nurture your leads. Even if you don’t use something like a branded hashtag to integrate the experience with an online element, find a way to remind someone that they participated.

5) Guinness: Guinness Class

One of my favorite types of marketing is the “aspirational” kind -- or as the Harvard Business Review defines it, marketing for brands that “fall into the upper-right quadrant.” Think: luxury cars, haute couture, and private jets. Things we aspire to own.

It’s that last one -- private jets -- that set apart the Guinness Class experience. For a few weeks, ambassadors dressed in Guinness-branded flight attendant uniforms entered bars across the U.K., where they surprised unsuspecting customers with a chance to win all kinds of prizes.

In order to participate, bar-goers had to order a pint of Guinness. After doing that, they would shake a prize-generating mobile tablet that displayed what they won. They could win everything from passport cases to keychains, but one player per night would get the ultimate prize: A free trip to Dublin -- via private jet, of course -- with four mates.

What we like about this experience was its ability to associate Guinness with something aspirational, like traveling by private jet. And according to Nick Britton, marketing manager for Guinness Western Europe, that held the brand up as one that doesn’t “settle for the ordinary.”

That’s important -- and can be tricky -- for a brand that’s nearly 257 years old: to maintain its authenticity, while also adapting to a changing landscape and audience. But Guinness didn’t have to change anything about its actual products in this case. Instead, it created an experience that addressed changing consumer preferences -- for example, the fact that 78% of millennials would rather spend money on a memorable experience or event than buy desirable things.

Takeaways for marketers:

• Think about the things your target audience might aspire to, and that you’d like to associate with your brand. Then, build an experience around that.
• If you do require a product purchase in order to participate in the experience, make it convenient. In this case, people had to buy a pint of Guinness to win a prize, but they were already in a bar that served it.

6) GE: Healthymagination

Think experiential marketing is just for B2C brands? Think again -- 67% of B2B marketers say that events make for one of the most effective strategies they use.

That’s why it made sense for GE to invite industry professionals to experience its Healthymagination initiative. The point of the campaign was to promote global healthcare solutions, especially in developing parts of the world.

Source: agencyEA

To help people see the impact of this initiative, GE worked with agencyEA to create “movie sets” that represented different healthcare environments where Healthymagination work took place: a rural African clinic, an urban clinic, and an emergency room. The idea was that doctors would share their stories -- live, in front of 700 attendees -- that illustrated how GE’s healthcare technology played a major role in each setting.

When people measure the success of experiential marketing, one thing they measure is how much of a dialogue it prompted. And that makes sense -- 71% of participants share these experiences. In GE’s case, the point ofHealthymagination was to get people talking about a pretty important, but uncomfortable issue: Access to healthcare in impoverished parts of the world.

But when you create a way for people to become physically immersed in the issue, it also allows them to acknowledge a topic that isn’t always easy to talk about. And that can have quite an impact -- this particular campaign, in fact, won a Business Marketing Association Tower Award.

But fear not: That concept also works for not-so-serious, but equally uncomfortable discussion topics. Just look at how well it worked for Charmin.

Takeaways for marketers:

• Experiential marketing does work for B2B brands. Think about who you’re selling to, and create an engagement that would not only attract that audience, but also present an opportunity for them to experience your product or service first-hand.
• Get uncomfortable. If your business centers around something that’s difficult or “taboo” to talk about, creating an experience around it can prompt a conversation. But make sure you keep it respectful -- don’t make people so uncomfortable that they have nothing good to say about your brand.

7) Facebook: Facebook IQ Live

Facebook -- who also owns Instagram -- has always understood how much data it has on how people use these platforms. For that reason, it created the Facebook IQ Live experience.

For this experience, that data was used to curate live scenes that depicted the data. Among them was the IQ Mart: A “retail” setting that represented the online shopper’s conversion path when using social media for buying decisions. There was also a quintessential Instagram cafe, chock full of millennial-esque photo opportunities and people snapping them -- latte art and all.

The campaign wasn’t just memorable. It also proved to be really helpful -- 93% of attendees (and there were over 1500 of them) said that the experience provided them with valuable insights on how to use Facebook for business.

But what makes those insights so valuable? Momentum Worldwide, the agency behind Facebook IQ Live, puts it perfectly: “When we understand what matters to people ... we can be what matters to them." In other words, we can shape our messaging around the things that are important to our target audiences.

And by creating this experience, Facebook was able to accomplish that for its own brand. In creating this experience, it also created a positive brand perception for a few audiences -- including, for example, the people who might have been unsure of how to use the platform for business.

Takeaways for marketers:

• Build an experience for people who aren’t sure about how they would use your product or service. Find ways for them to interact with your brand in a way that creatively spells out how it can benefit them.
• Bring your data to life. We love numbers, but creating a live installment that illustrates them can help people understand exactly what they mean. And since 65% of people think that live events help them understand a product, this setting is a great place to do it.

8) Zappos: “Google Cupcake Ambush”

To help promote its new photo app, Google took to the streets of Austin, Texas, with a cupcake truck in tow. But people didn’t pay for the cupcakes with dollars -- instead, the only accepted currency was a photo taken with said app.

And really, what’s better than a free-ish cupcake? We’ll tell you what: A free-ish watch or pair of shoes.

That was the answer from Zappos, anyway. That’s why the brand playfully “ambushed” Google’s food truck experience with one of its own: A box-on-feet -- strategically placed right next to Google’s setup, of course -- that, when fed a cupcake, would dispense a container with one of the aforementioned goodies.

In order to reap the rewards of the Zappos box, people had to have a cupcake. So while only one brand came away from the experience with an epic sugar high, both got plenty of exposure. And since 74% of consumers say a branded experience makes them more likely to buy the products being promoted, Google and Zappos both stood to gain new customers from this crowd.

But what we really like about this example is how much it shows the value of experiential co-branding. Because Google and Zappos pursue two different lines of business, they weren’t sabotaging each other, but rather they were promoting each other (which is what happens when you pick the right co-marketer).

Takeaways for marketers:

• Use experiential marketing as a co-branding opportunity:
• • Pick a partner with an audience that would be interested in your brand, but might otherwise be difficult to reach.
  • Make sure your partner would benefit from your audience, too -- you want the experience to be a win-win-win: for you, your co-brand, and the consumer.
• When you do pick a marketing partner, build an experience that requires an “exchange” of each brand’s product or service. That way, the audience is more likely to interact with both of you.

Clearly, taking some very calculated risks worked out pretty well for these brands. So when it comes to creating an experience with your brand, don’t be afraid to think outside of the box -- and don’t be afraid to work together on it with someone else.

Invest some time into thinking about the ways people could interact with you, even if it seems a little nutty. If it’s aligned with what you do and executed thoughtfully, people will be talking -- in the best way possible.