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What is Search Retargeting & How Does It Work?

Advertising
September 1, 2021/by
What is Search Retargeting & How Does It Work? When a user is on Google and searches for "athletic shoes," companies like Nike and Skechers probably want their ads to continuously show up for those users online because they're currently in the market for a product they sell. But how could they do that when the user isn't searching for them and perhaps doesn't even know that their company sells athletic shoes? That's where search retargeting comes in. With this behavioral targeting, companies can have their ads show up on search engine results pages (SERPs) and social media sites after a user types in certain keywords. This is a popular strategy among marketers. In fact, 68% of marketing agencies and 49% of brands have a dedicated budget for retargeting. Additionally, it's also popular among online users -- 25% of online viewers enjoy seeing retargeted ads. In this post, let's discuss what search retargeting is, how it works, and how you can use it to reach new audiences. Continuing the example above, if a user searched for "athletic shoes," they might go on Facebook a few days later and see an ad for Nike or Skechers. This would mean that the company has set up a digital campaign to retarget users who are searching for athletic shoes in search engines. Now you might be wondering, "How does this work?" Let's dive in below. How does search retargeting work? Essentially, search retargeting works through automation. Once a user searches for...
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How to Conduct the Perfect Marketing Experiment [+ Examples]

A/B Testing
August 31, 2021/by
How to Conduct the Perfect Marketing Experiment After months of hard work, multiple coffee runs, and navigation of the latest industry changes, you've finally finished your next big marketing campaign. Complete with social media posts, PPC ads, and a sparkly new logo, it's the campaign of a lifetime. But how do you know it will be effective? While there's no sure way to know if your campaign will turn heads, there is a way to gauge whether those new aspects of your strategy will be effective. If you want to know if certain components of your campaign are worth the effort, consider conducting a marketing experiment. Marketing experiments give you a projection of how well marketing methods will perform before you implement them. Keep reading to learn how to conduct an experiment and discover the types of experiments you can run. What are marketing experiments? A marketing experiment is a form of market research in which your goal is to discover new strategies for future campaigns or validate existing ones. For instance, a marketing team might create and send emails to a small segment of their readership to gauge engagement rates, before adding them to a campaign. It's important to note that a marketing experiment isn't synonymous with a marketing test. Marketing experiments are done for discovery, while a test confirms theories. Why should you run a marketing experiment? Think of running...
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Marketing vs. Operations: The Battle for a Small Business’ Attention

RevOps
August 31, 2021/by
Marketing vs. Operations: The Battle for a Small Business' Attention "Your company is one viral moment away from a potential shutdown." Yes, you read that correctly. Imagine your company is fortunate enough to appear for a few minutes on a national TV show with millions of viewers. You can hardly contain your excitement. All eyes are on you. There's no turning back.  Your excitement soon turns to horror, however, when you realize your company isn't ready for this type of attention. Suddenly, a surge in traffic to your company's website causes it to crash. Team members quit from the stress of performing under pressure. Vendors threaten to sue you for late payments. Customers are angry because their orders are either incorrect or weren't provided on-time. What took you years to build has effectively been destroyed overnight.  How can a successful organization good enough to land a coveted spot on a TV show succumb so quickly? The answer lies in Marketing vs. Operations. The Paradigm Shift from Not Enough Customers to Too Many  When an organization officially opens its doors for business, marketing-related activities tend to be the primary focus. And it makes sense. After all, if no one knows about your product or service, you won't be in business long. Those activities can include sales strategies, P.R. and social media campaigns, and digital ads that catalyze advancement from the startup to the growth stage of business.  Eventually, if you have a great product or service that customers want, you'll...
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The Ultimate Guide to RFPs

RFPs
August 28, 2021/by
The Ultimate Guide to RFPs Have you been tasked with the job of creating a request for proposal, or an RFP? Whether you have no idea what that is or haven’t written one in awhile, today’s guide can help. We’re diving into the specifics of what an RFP actually is, why you might need one, and how to create your very first one today. To start, you should understand what all these letters even mean.   When your company has a new (often large) project, or one that’s more complex and requires a bit of outsourcing, an RFP can help you get the job done right the first time. The RFP doc becomes a way for you to quickly uncover the strengths and weaknesses of potential vendors in relation to your project without having to spend too much of your time hunting for them yourself. RFPs can also give you a sneak peek into different strategies you may not have considered since each vendor will include their own unique action plan along with their bid. And you’ll have this information before you ever have to commit to the vendor. Keep in mind, this should not be confused with an RFQ. RFP vs. RFQ An RFQ, or request for quotation, is slightly different than an RFP since it’s just the quote itself. Here, companies solicit multiple price quotes from various vendors to compare services based on price alone. While an RFP includes a price quote (along...
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How to Write a Professional Resignation Letter [Samples + Templates]

Job Search
August 28, 2021/by
How to Write a Professional Resignation Letter If you are leaving your job, you’re not alone. In April 2021 alone, around 4 million people quit their jobs, according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics. That number is the highest recorded since the bureau started recording such rates. Even though millions quit their jobs every month, we understand that telling your boss that you’re leaving the company is never an easy conversation. A respectful resignation letter can mean the difference between an awkward goodbye and a chance for a long-term professional connection. Ideally, you’ll provide a resignation letter two weeks before you leave the company. A resignation letter lets you officially announce your termination at the company and also offers essential housekeeping information, like your last day and other details about your departure. An effective one helps you ensure a positive conversation with your boss and a smooth transition to your next journey. But how do you write a good resignation letter? What should you include and exclude? Writing a resignation letter can feel like a daunting task, so we’ve created a professional resignation letter template to get you started and included examples for inspiration. What do I include in a professional resignation letter? Writing a professional resignation letter starts with understanding each of its components: 1. Statement of Resignation and End Date Begin your letter by stating your position at the company. This might seem redundant if you work at a small company and...
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The Ultimate Guide to Service-Level Agreements (SLAs)

Marketing Alignment with Sales
August 28, 2021/by
The Ultimate Guide to Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) 60% of global respondents in a LinkedIn survey believed that misalignment between sales and marketing could damage financial performance (LinkedIn 2020), yet there are a number of disconnects between the teams from strategy to process. At many companies, it can feel as if there are 100 miles between sales and marketing. One of the most critical steps to aligning your sales and marketing efforts is creating a service level agreement (SLA). Traditionally, an SLA serves to define exactly what a customer will receive from a service provider. But SLAs serve internal operations as well, and sales and marketing agreements are among the most crucial. Ultimately, an service-level agreement is designed to create alignment between two parties by setting clear expectations and mitigating any issues before they happen. With that in mind, there are multiple types of SLA depending on your use case. 1. Customer Service-Level Agreement A customer SLA is precisely what it sounds like: an agreement by a vendor to deliver a certain level of service to a particular customer. Here's a fun example: In the TV show The Office, the company, Dunder Mifflin, supplies paper to various organizations. They might have a customer SLA stipulating that Dunder Mifflin will supply with 50 reams of paper per month, shipped every Monday to and by Darryl Philbin -- with a confirmation of delivery sent to Jim Halpert. (Sorry, we had a little too much fun with the references...
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Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): 8 Ways To Get Started

Conversion Rate Optimization
August 27, 2021/by
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): 8 Ways To Get Started Today, most marketing teams are focused on driving traffic toward websites in hopes that this traffic then converts into qualified leads for sale reps to close. But that's only half the battle. Getting more out of existing traffic and leads (versus entirely new traffic) can propel companies toward long-term, sustainable growth. That's where conversion rate optimization (CRO) comes in. In this guide, you'll learn about the power of CRO, why your business should focus on improving your conversion rate, and how to get get started. What is a conversion rate? A conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action, like completing a web form, signing up for a service, or purchasing a product. A high conversion rate means your website is well-designed, formatted effectively, and appealing to your target audience. A low conversion rate could be the result of a variety of factors related to either website performance or design. Slow load times, a broken form, or copy that doesn’t convey the value of the offer are common reasons for a poor conversion rate.  What is a good conversion rate? A "good" conversion rate depends on your industry, niche, goals, traffic channel, and audience demographics, among other factors. For example, the average conversion rate of ecommerce sites globally was 2.17% in the third quarter of 2020, which was down from 2.37% the previous year. The ecommerce conversion rate in the US was higher, however,...
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How to Add HTML Embed Codes to Your Website [Quick Tip]

Website Development
August 27, 2021/by
How to Add HTML Embed Codes to Your Website If you want to curate others' content from social media or just make your own visual social media content work harder for your overall content strategy, you need to know how to embed HTML code onto your blog or website. But wait a second ... before we get into the nitty-gritty of this tip, what the heck does "embed" mean? And what is HTML? If you don't know how to code at all, no worries — embedding external content is extremely easy. Let's take a second to break down the basics. What does embed mean? Embed means to integrate external content into another website or page. You embed something when you place a block of code — called an embed code — into the HTML editor of another website. When you hit ‘Save’ or ‘Publish,’ the media then renders on the published page. Embedded content is referenced with HTML. HTML is one of the most basic languages used on the web to design and lay out web pages. You often see this code when you're in the "back end" of your blog post. There’s where you’ll add your embed code. Most social and multimedia websites have an option to generate an embed code right in each individual post. Here’s an example of an embed code for a HubSpot YouTube video: And here’s the embedded result. Want to do the...
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How Glow Recipe Pivoted From a Curation Site to a Beauty Product Brand

Product Marketing
August 25, 2021/by
How Glow Recipe Pivoted From a Curation Site to a Beauty Product Brand Did you know the current U.S. cosmetics market is worth over $95 billion?  With the fast growth of the cosmetics industry, it's become competitive and saturated -- especially for startups.  This industry can be even more challenging to break through when you're trying to sell a product that you're audience might be less familiar with. With this in mind, Glow Recipe, founded by Sarah Lee and Christine Chang, aims to bring U.S. awareness to Korean beauty (or K-beauty) trends, as well as its own lines of natural, fruit-based cosmetic products.  But, before Glow Recipe sold thousands of cosmetic products and built an audience of more than 1 million social media followers, it actually started as a simple product curation site aiming to highlight other K-beauty brands.  In a recent episode of The Shake Up, Alexis Gay and Brianne Kimmel sat down with Co-CEOs Sarah Lee and Chang to learn how they built a well-known beauty brand and positioned their products for the U.S. and other global markets. Below are just a few great highlights from the episode, as well as an audio player so you can listen while you read. Glow Recipe Highlights How and Why Glow Recipe Began With Curation  Gay: It seems to me like through the work of several companies, but particularly Glow Recipe, Americans are increasingly aware of K-beauty and the...
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