Boosted Posts vs. Paid Ads: Key Differences and When to Use Each

November 11, 2021/by admin

Boosted Posts vs. Paid Ads: Key Differences and When to Use Each For many businesses, social media is an intimidating landscape. You know that you need to be on several platforms to reach your audience, but you’re not entirely sure if your content is getting enough organic reach to make the time investment worth it. To add to that, you’ve been collecting followers and page likes for years and your audience is somewhere in the thousands. Why then, do your posts only reach a few hundred people at a time? Thanks to complex social media algorithms, your posts will only reach a fraction of your actual audience. This means that no matter how good your content is, it will never be seen by everyone who could benefit from it. Sure, every once in a while, a post may be liked, commented on, and shared so many times that Instagram or Facebook deem it worthy to be seen by the masses… but that shouldn’t be your only strategy. If you need to get it in front of a lot of people to introduce a new product, announce an event, or just spread awareness about who you are and what you do, it’s time to invest in paid advertising. Facebook Advertising Within Facebook, you’ll find two types of paid advertising: boosted posts and Facebook ads. Let’s take a look at what each of these is and their pros or cons. What is a boosted post? A boosted post is a post...

Read Full Story

What Is an Ad Network and How Does It Work? [+9 Networks to Try]

Advertising

November 10, 2021/by admin

What Is an Ad Network and How Does It Work? To state the obvious, researching, finding, and buying digital ad space is a time-consuming process. In fact, an article by the Wall Street Journal compares it to "pulling out weeds online." But what if there was a middleman who could connect advertisers to websites that are seeking advertisers (and vice-versa)? Enter the ad network. Let's learn more about ad networks, how they work, and the best networks for digital marketers. The chief function of ad networks is to collect unsold ad inventory from online publishers and match them with advertisers looking for ad spots. This makes it seamless for both sides to interact and, ultimately, come to a deal. The benefit of using an ad network depends on which side you fall. For publishers, it helps to secure buyers for unsold ad space, although the revenue is typically less than what they could earn from direct sales. For advertisers, it helps to find inventory that fits their audience and budget. It's important we make a distinction between ad networks and ad servers. While both operate as advertising technology, they serve two distinct purposes. An ad server is used by both ad networks and advertisers to run, track, and manage advertising campaigns. An ad network is also an advertising technology, but it's used exclusively to broker buys between publishers and advertisers. Different Types of Ad Networks If you need to find an ad network that fits your particular...

Read Full Story

7 Marketing Tools for Black-Owned Businesses

November 9, 2021/by admin

7 Marketing Tools for Black-Owned Businesses Welcome to Breaking the Blueprint — a new blog series that dives into the unique business challenges and opportunities of Black business owners and entrepreneurs. Learn how they’ve grown or scaled their businesses, explored entrepreneurial ventures within their companies, or created side hustles, and how their stories can inspire and inform your own success. Over the last year and a half, entrepreneurs have had to revamp their marketing strategies to navigate doing business during a pandemic. This shift hasn’t been easy, especially for Black business owners. According to an H&R Block study, more than half of Black-owned small businesses experienced at least a 50% decrease in revenue during the pandemic. As a Black woman who launched two businesses in the last year and a half, I’ve had to revisit my marketing strategy to avoid this dip in revenue. My goal was to pay close attention to who my audience is, keep track of performance metrics, and create engaging content without wasting time or money. The key was to use marketing tools that make our company more strategy-focused and data-driven. If you have a small team, you don’t always have to hire more people to maximize results — you can invest in tools and systems to streamline your marketing strategies. Read on to discover seven high-quality tools that are user-friendly, cost-effective, and able to help you succeed. 7 Marketing Tools for Black-Owned Businesses 1. HubSpot Best for: Customer Relationship Management Price: Starts at $45/mo...

Read Full Story

How to Clean Up Your Email List With These 5 Tips

Email Lists and Segmentation, Email Marketing Tools

November 6, 2021/by admin

How to Clean Up Your Email List With These 5 Tips Email marketing is continually evolving as subscriber preferences shift toward more personalized experiences. On average, 99% of people check their email every day, and the average email open rate is 17.61%. However, that doesn’t guarantee your email will make the cut. Several factors impact email deliverability, opens, clicks, and conversions. So, what’s the first step to keeping your email KPIs strong? A clean email list. Clean email lists (with a great email marketing strategy behind them) will keep your email engagement high and your unsubscribe and spam rates low. 1. Limit unsubscribes. The more people on your email list, the higher the likelihood that some have lost interest in your email. It happens. It could be a good idea to review engagement and remove any subscribers who no longer seem interested before they hit the unsubscribe button. 2. Decrease spam complaints. Spam complaints are bad for your reputation with ESPs. If your emails are constantly marked as spam, your ESP might flag your account for sending unwanted solicitations. If this happens too often, your deliverability rate can suffer. 3. Improve deliverability. The cleaner your list is, the greater the number of subscribers who want to open it. On the other hand, a list full of people who don’t engage, have changed their email address, or worse, never opted in will result in spam filters and bounces — both of which can hurt your deliverability. 4. Improve a...

Read Full Story

How to Outsource SEO Correctly & Avoid the 5 Most Common Mistakes

SEO

November 6, 2021/by admin

How to Outsource SEO Correctly & Avoid the 5 Most Common Mistakes If you want to grow your business, great search engine optimization (SEO) is a must: Recent survey data found that 53 percent of all trackable website traffic originated from organic search, which means that if you want to get noticed, you need to show up at the top of search rankings. The challenge? Many small businesses don’t have the time, skills or expertise necessary to handle everything that comes with a solid SEO strategy. From keyword research to content evaluation, from page optimization to internal linking, it’s easy for companies to end up with a generic web presence that doesn’t inspire engagement or drive conversions. The result? It’s worth considering an SEO consultant or agency to help manage this process and maximize your impact. In this piece, we’ll tackle key outsourcing operations, including how it can benefit your business — and why SEO can’t be entirely outsourced. Then, we’ll break down top SEO pitfalls and offer actionable advice to find an SEO agency that best fits your brand. Why Outsourcing SEO Can Be a Good Idea Designing an effective SEO strategy isn’t a simple task. Companies have to consider how search engines are evaluating content, what aspects of SEO offer the most impact, and where they could change their current content to better align with search engine expectations. This is especially critical as search engines like Google continually refine their ranking process. For example, page loading...

Read Full Story

7 External Linking Best Practices for SEO

Link Building

November 6, 2021/by admin

7 External Linking Best Practices for SEO Content. Links. RankBrain. These are the top-ranking factors Google considers when it comes to showing results on the search engine result page (SERP). Given that much of search engine optimization centers around getting lots of good links to and from your website, it’s essential to learn how to make these links work for you. In this article, we discuss what external linking is and why you should do it. We also reveal seven external linking best practices. At the end of this article, you’ll know how to use external linking to help your content appear higher on the search engine results page. When should you link to other sites in SEO? External links are hyperlinks that direct readers to a website other than your own. On the surface, using external links seems counter-intuitive—these links take people away from your website, after all. However, as we shall see later in this article, it’s one of the most essential sources of ranking power you can ever use. Four Benefits of External Linking Linking to outside websites, when done right, offers several benefits: 1. External linking improves your credibility. When you add trustworthy and relevant website links to your content, it improves the credibility of your website. In addition, valuable external links provide your readers with references, which will enhance your website’s authority. External linking is similar to the way you cite sources in a bibliography for an academic paper—it shows that you’ve created...

Read Full Story

Website Traffic Down? How to Diagnose and Fix Traffic Drops

Measuring SEO

November 4, 2021/by admin

Website Traffic Down? How to Diagnose and Fix Traffic Drops Website traffic represents the volume of users visiting your site. Higher is better because more people visiting your site means more opportunities for advertising, engagement, and eventual conversion. Ideally, you want to steadily increase website traffic, or at least keep it stable over time. But what happens if your traffic starts to drop? Whether it’s slow or sudden, the results are the same: A smaller pool of users who are seeing your content and potentially generating revenue for your brand. Even more worrisome for site admins is that traffic drops may not have an obvious cause. With multiple traffic sources and factors that influence your site ranking and accessibility, even small drops may be the result of several independent or codependent conditions. While there’s no quick fix for these drops, we’ve got you covered with actionable tips to pinpoint, diagnose and address falling traffic. Why is my website traffic down? To boost traffic levels, site owners must first discover why traffic is down. With multiple traffic sources such as email, social media, organic, and referral, it’s not enough to simply know that traffic is falling — you need to identify the source of the drop itself and then take steps to specifically address the problem. There are several ways to determine which traffic source is driving your numbers down. Let's take a look at those next. How To Identify the Source of Traffic Drops HubSpot Sources If you’re using...

Read Full Story

How to Sell on Twitter With These 13 Tips

Twitter Marketing

November 4, 2021/by admin

How to Sell on Twitter With These 13 Tips Connecting with your audience on social media might seem as simple as a post and a follow, but it’s actually a lot more complex. Twitter as a marketing tool can apply to PR, thought leadership, brand building, and lead generation. Selling on Twitter takes some skill and practice, but it’s a viable platform for growing your business that is definitely worth the effort. What can I sell on Twitter? The short answer is: Anything! The great thing about social media marketing is that it can be used to sell such a wide variety of products. There’s a lot of business to be done on the internet across many channels. There is a niche somewhere on the web for anything you may have to sell. To tap into your niche and sell on Twitter like the pros do, follow these best practices. The internet can be unpredictable, but there are some specific actions you can take to make sure you get a positive ROI from using Twitter. No sale is guaranteed, but utilizing some of these best practices will help you get the most out of Twitter as a tool for sales. 1. Interact with your audience. Social media was created for people to be social, so don’t be shy! Respond to your mentions and retweets, do Q&A sessions, and be active with not just your followers but other relevant people in your industry. This helps build interest and trust...

Read Full Story

How to Find, Choose, & Hire the Best B2B Marketing Consultant or Agency

Marketing Jobs

November 4, 2021/by admin

How to Find, Choose, & Hire the Best B2B Marketing Consultant or Agency Marketing is an umbrella term for a wide variety of methods and strategies meant to benefit your business. Your business has different needs that will require different types of marketing efforts. For instance, engaging with your audience and improving sales are related, but still separate goals, so you can’t apply the exact same strategy for both. And if your need is to connect your business and product to other businesses, it will require business-to-business (B2B) marketing. Growing and expanding your business will require a strong marketing plan. Running a business doesn’t require the exact same skillset as marketing a business. Many marketing professionals will specialize their focus on a specific sector, such as B2B marketing. These consultants or agencies utilize their specialization to help businesses improve their marketing strategies. The Benefits of Hiring a Consultant Focusing on a specialty has a lot of benefits compared to having surface-level knowledge of a general topic. Hiring a consultant will give you more time to focus on your business while they build you an effective marketing strategy. A consultant will also bring a fresh perspective and a new angle to your marketing. As well, they only have one role that they can dedicate their full time to. It’s also easier to teach one person your business needs and style versus a group. How much does B2B consulting cost? According to ZipRecruiter, the national average pay for a marketing...

Read Full Story

17 Marketing Job Descriptions for Hiring Managers & Job Seekers

Recruiting Tips

November 3, 2021/by admin

17 Marketing Job Descriptions for Hiring Managers & Job Seekers Looking to grow your marketing team? As you embark on the hiring process, don’t neglect the importance of providing clear, well-written job descriptions for your team’s open roles. Having accessible and easy-to-understand job descriptions can make or break the quality of candidates that apply for a job. According to Indeed, 52% of job seekers say the overall quality of a job description is an influencing factor when they decide to apply for a job. That means if you want a pool of high-quality applicants, it’s imperative to provide a high-quality job description. As you embark on writing job descriptions for open roles on your team, make sure you include the following pieces of information. Marketing Job Requirements and Qualifications What kind of experience will the ideal candidate have? Factor in the level of seniority needed for the role, as well as realistic asks for your candidate pool given your compensation budget. Job requirements and qualifications can include desired education level, and areas of previous experience a candidate would need to have to be successful in the role. It’s worth noting that the requirements and qualifications section can be intimidating for some job applicants, and if it’s too extensive you could scare off candidates who may be a good fit for the role even if they have a different level or type of experience. Marketing Job Responsibilities This section should clearly outline what tasks and duties the person in this...

Read Full Story