Week 7 - MKTG 349 - Setting A Budget

After setting up your campaign, you need to set up a daily budget.  Base your budget off of your advertising goals and how much you are willing to spend.  The average cost-per-click (CPC) is 10 cents.  So if you are expecting 100 clicks each day, set your budget to $10 per day.  If you are more comfortable budgeting your campaign on a monthly basis, you can calculate how much you will spend per day by dividing your monthly budget by 30.4, the average amount of days in each month.

Now that you know the amount of money you are willing to spend. You need to understand that this budget only applies to one campaign.  You set your budget up through a few steps.  The first step is to click on the campaign tab.  Under this tab, click on the + and select the type of campaign you would like to run.  Under the select campaign setting, scroll down until you find "Budget" and enter your daily budget.  After selecting a daily budget, you are all set and your campaign is ready to run.

Week 7 - MKTG 348 - SEO - Traffic Analysis

Traffic analysis is the act of evaluating referrals from different search engines, which are based on the conversion of traffic keywords.  Visitor traffic analysis aids in optimizing the campaign in greater details in order to increase the return on investment.  There are many ways the visitor traffic analysis can be done.  Some of these parameters include: traffic on keywords, keywords and landing pages, whether the call to action was followed with conversion, qualified traffic, and converted traffic.

With regards to keywords and landing pages, you are trying to figure out which pages are attracting more pages than others and why are certain pages attracting more viewers than others.  With a call to action, marketers are looking to see that certain activities are being done on their sites.  Marketers need to make sure these activities are being done or not, and if they are not being done, why aren't they.  With converted traffic, the whole goal is conversion through sales.  It is crucial to track your sales.  Sales is everything when it comes to SEO and converting your website trafficking into sales.

Week 7 - MKTG 348 - Hubspot - Why The Conversion Process is So Critical

The conversion process is the second step in the inbound marketing methodology.  Conversion allows you to generate leads.  The conversion process turns unknown visitors into real people that you begin to know (a lead).  As a marketer, it is important to create conversion paths.  There are three steps that lead to a successful conversion path.  The first one is a call to action, the second is creating a landing page, and the third one is a thank you page.

How, as a marketer, do you convert the right visitor into leads?  The whole goal in the conversion process is to attract your buyer persona and guide them to the sale.  The best way to guide your buyer persona is through your conversion paths.  The buyers' journey, if you recall, is the awareness, consideration, and the decision.  For each stage in the buyers' journey, you need to have your conversion paths laid out.  By setting up a call to action, creating a landing page, and a thank you page for each step in the buyers' journey you will successfully turn visitors into the right leads.

Week 6 - MKTG 348 - Hubspot - Effectiveness of Email

While the common knowledge of email is that it is obsolete and "old school", the reality is that email is still relevant and growing.  Currently, there are 3.2 billion email accounts.  95% of online consumers use email, and 91% of those consumers check their email accounts at least once a day.  Ironically, email has a longer life span than social media.  In a poll taken, 77% of people prefer email for marketing communications.  And finally, email has a 4,300% return on investment.  76% of marketers say they use email more than they did three years ago.

So now that the numbers prove email is still relevant, how do you use it to help with your inbound marketing strategy.  Email actually works for every stage in the inbound marketing strategy.  Email can be used to attract new visitors, and attract those visitors into leads.  With those leads, you can nurture them into customers, and finally keep your customers happy so they in turn develop into promoters.

Week 6 - MKTG 349 - Successful Text Ads

In order to have successful text ads, you need to have specific, relevant, empowering, and attractive ads.  There are many ways to create successful text ads.  The first one being to highlight what makes you unique.  By pointing out what separates you from everyone else, you are showcasing why you are better than your competition.  You should also include prices, promotions, and exclusives that your are offering.  Another thing you should add to your text ad is to empower your audience.  If you are selling something tell the people what they can purchase.  If they have questions, show them who and how to contact people.

There are many other methods to creating successful advertising.  Including a keyword in your text ad shows relevance to the site and what the audience is looking for.  Appealing to mobile users is another great method that will result in successful text advertising.  Having an easily visible phone number and a location on the ad will cause intrigue.  And finally experimenting with three or four text ads is a great way to know what is and what isn't working.  After a few weeks of experimentation, you will know which keywords work and which ones do not.  From there, you can create one or two ads with the most successful keywords.

Week 6 - MKTG 348 - SEO - Bid Strategy

When it comes to setting up a bid strategy, there are many things to consider.  First, every PPC site basis their bids off of different merits.  Keywords or phrases may be more effective on certain PPC engines.  Depending on which PPC engine you choose, you need to have a distinct strategy for that specific engine.  All engines are all made up differently.  A perfect example of this is Google and Yahoo.  Google takes into consideration past performances and click through rates (CTR).  Yahoo, on the other hand, only takes into consideration how much you are bidding for each campaign.

If you are only concerned with getting the first position on search results, then bidding high on an engine like Yahoo is the way to go.  Offering expensive bids will almost certainly put you at the top.  If you are just trying to reach your target audience, selecting specific keywords that relate to your site will be effective.  While the traffic is less, the competition is not there, so when your target audience enters your keywords or phrases in the search query, your site will show up on the results page.  Another strategy that can be implemented is to bid slightly higher than your competition.  This is a great way to get ahead of your competition without going to the bank.  This strategy has proven to be effective when used properly.

Week 5 - MKTG 349 - Ad Reach

With ad reach, you have the ability to control what cities and states your ad will appear.  You can even compare the number of people who might see your ad in specific areas.  This comparison can help you determine if you even need to control where your ad should be seen and not seen.  To find your reach results, go to settings and click on locations, and from there you can see where your ad was seen.  This is a great way to see, geographically, who's looking at your ads and who is not.  By having this knowledge, you have the ability to shut it down in certain areas, need be.  This lead to a more efficient and effective ad campaign.

Reach is based on an estimation of the number of users seen on Google properties within your specified geographic region.  Reach numbers in adwords may differ in comparison from census population data or any others.  There are many factors that can cause this, including: number of devices being used, number of web browsers, number of temporary users, length of time, cookies, and the search partner or Google Display Network.  Because of these factors altering other data, reach should be used as a guidance tool, and not something that you should base your entire campaign off of.

Week 5 - MKTG 348 - SEO - Tracking Your PPC Campaign

A successful pay-per-click (PPC) campaign depends on optimization.  In order to optimize your PPC properly, you need all the data from your site and analyze it thoroughly.  Analyzing your data thoroughly will help you understand how you are performing on the World Wide Web.  There are many tools out there that will help you track your performance.  Google and Yahoo have great tools that are free to use.  There are a couple of other sites that are side-tracking tools.  These tools are Webside Story's Hitbox Professional or Hitbox Enterprise.  Hitbox allows you to accurately track all of your marketing campaigns with one system (SEO, PPC, organic, email campaigns, marketing campaigns, etc.).

The success of PPC relies on five elements: keyword selection, bidding, landing page, ad copy, and optimizing.  These five elements all go hand in hand.  So if one of these elements is implemented poorly, than the rest of your elements will be as well, leading to a failed PPC campaign.  There needs to be balance in these elements as well.  You cannot focus solely on three of these elements and forgot about the rest.  All need to have equal attention and focus in order to have a successful PPC campaign.

Week 5 - MKTG 348 - HubSpot - Creating Remarkable Content

Content is everything when it comes to attracting viewers to your website.  About 90% of successful SEO is content.  Without remarkable content your website is nothing.  Remarkable content is the solution to a problem.  By understanding the problem, you can come up with a solution.  Therefore, the solution is the remarkable content.  There are two keys in creating remarkable content.  The first key is the buyer persona.  The buyer persona is a fictitious representation of your target customer/audience for your website.  You must know who your buyer persona is in order to know what they are interested in.  If you do not know their interest, how will you create remarkable content?

The second key in creating remarkable content is the buyer's journey.  The buyer's journey is research a buyer goes through before making a purchase.  There are three stages in the buyer's journey: awareness, consideration, and decision.  Throughout the buyer's journey, your content needs to be educational in order to provide your audience with the knowledge they need.  Talk about a specific issue, the root of that problem, and finally, the opportunity at hand.  Content is often described as the honeypot.  It's job is to pull people from one stage of a methodology to the next stage.

Week 4 - MKTG 348 - SEO - Content

When it comes to successful SEO, the most crucial aspect is the content.  Having well-developed content makes your SEO that much better, and is usually the reason your site is successful.  Having good content does not just mean having simple text that is easy to read.  There are various factors that go into your site moving up the ranks of a search engine.  First you need original well written content that is of interest to your target audience.  It crucial that you have content that your audience wants and is looking for.  Without that, you have failed.  Content is everything when it comes to SEO.

Having content is great for SEO, but your content needs to be optimized.  There are four methods that you should take into consideration when optimizing your content: heading tags, special text, inline text links or anchor text, and keyword density.  Having these text and links makes your site more visible when search engines are crawling web pages.  It is important to have specific keywords and tags that your audience might search.  Having the correct keywords and tags will definitely move your site up the search ranks and make you more visible to your target audience.

Week 4 - MKTG 349 - Blending Placements and Keywords

Placements and keywords go hand in hand when it comes to determining where your ad will be seen on Display Networks, and the price you are willing to pay for them.  Editing keywords is exactly how it is displayed, you edit keywords based on what you want.  The placements are determined on how much you bid.  So basically what you are doing with placements and keywords are determining what keywords will trigger your ad, and determining the price of the bid, strengthens your ad placement.

There are other ways to enhance your placements besides increasing your bidding.  You can use a tool called placement targeting.  Placement targeting helps you promote your brand by strategically placing your ad on specific websites or group sites on the Display Network.

AdWords uses a tool called contextual targeting, which is used to find pages in the Display Network with content specific to your keywords.  Contextual targeting is the tool to use when you want to combine optimal keywords and placement targeting.  Contextual targeting refines the targeting of your ads.  This method is great when you are targeting a wide range of content.

Week 4 - MKTG 348 - HubSpot - Social Media And Its Importance On Inbound Marketing

Social Media is perhaps the biggest factor when it comes to effective inbound marketing.  Just about everyone uses some sort of Social Media, and the numbers prove it.  Studies also prove that being active on Social Media improves your marketing strategy.  The first big stat to look at is comparing Facebook and Google.  Users spend 4x more time on Facebook then they do Google.  So while Google is great and is a very powerful too, it may not help with your marketing strategy.  If you are trying to attract viewers, Social Media is the way to do it.  74% of marketers saw an increase in traffic after spending only six hours per week on Social Media.

Statistics prove that Social Media also turns these views into leads.  Social Media just be used in a three step process: obtain viewers, garner leads, and turn those leads into customers.  This three step methodology has proved successful.  When it comes to Facebook, 52% of channel users acquired a customer.  LinkedIn and Company Blog 43% of their users acquired at least one customer.  And when it comes to Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest, 36%, 15%, and 9% of their users acquired a customer, respectively.

Social Media is the new way of doing "business".  Before, in order to gain new leads, salespeople would go out and make cold calls, and many other traditional strategies, in hopes to garner some interest from prospective customers.  If and when they got some interest, they would turn them into leads, and from there do their best to keep these customers happy, and in the loop of what is going on with the company, and other interesting facts and tidbits.  Now with the development of Social Media, you can do all three of these things on Social Media.  It is quicker, cheaper, and more effective.  Once you have your new customers, it is very easy to keep in touch with them without annoying them.  By liking their post or retweeting their tweet, you are showing them your appreciation, and maintaining a solid relationship with them.