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Are Amazon ‘Sponsored Products’ Ads Worth It?

Daily, Ecommerce and Amazon
March 28, 2020/by
Are Amazon 'Sponsored Products' Ads Worth It? Say you're in the market for a new pair of headphones or a new guitar tuner. Where would you start your search? Google, right? Not so fast. Amazon came away with nearly 40% of the US ecommerce market in 2018. Google still remains the top search tool for B2B purchases and services and informational queries that lead to purchases, but Amazon is the dominant front runner in ecommerce. Need help getting started with inbound ads on Amazon, Google, LinkedIn, or Facebook? . So what does this mean for you? When you’re thinking about your online advertising strategy, you want to meet your consumers where they are. And if you're an ecommerce company, that place is — more likely than not — Amazon.  That’s where Amazon advertising comes in. Amazon has several advertising programs to choose from, but the best one to get started with is Amazon Sponsored Products. Amazon Sponsored Products Sponsored Products on Amazon are pay-per-click (PPC) ads that appear in strategic locations on Amazon, giving your products more visibility and purchase opportunity. You select the products you want to boost, set your bid and daily budget, and write an ad to entice shoppers to click. The Sponsored Product ads are really just image ads — similar to display ads in Google Ads — but the cool thing is that they appear in search results on Amazon right next to the searched products. So, when I...
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How to Create a Revenue-Generating Google Ads Campaign

Google Shopping
March 28, 2020/by
How to Create a Revenue-Generating Google Ads Campaign The trouble with search engine optimization (SEO) is that it takes a long time to work and doesn’t come with any guarantees. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, on the other hand, can provide results a lot faster. For companies that have no organic presence and need ROI fast, a paid ad is sometimes your best bet for driving traffic to (and conversions from) your website. The problem is that your competitors are using the same search terms and keywords you will. Not only do you need to know how to build a campaign through Google Ads, but you also need to know how to stand out from the crowd. What Is a Google Ads Campaign? Google Ads is a pay-per-click (PPC) system for advertising in the search engine results pages (SERPs) on Google. You can create Campaigns, which are used to organize groups of similar ads. Your Google Ads account can have one or many Campaigns running at a time. Let’s start with a few real examples of Google Ads campaigns — a service formerly known as Google AdWords — and then throw in some pro tips for succeeding with your own search engine marketing (SEM) strategy. By the time we're done, you'll be an expert. AdWords Examples New Breed Marketing: what is inbound marketing Nettitude: cybersecurity Rock Content: content marketing course Destination Canada: cheap holiday destinations FM Training: LEED certification...
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How to Write an Incredible Startup Marketing Budget for 2020

Marketing Strategy
March 27, 2020/by
How to Write an Incredible Startup Marketing Budget for 2020 As a marketer, it's undeniably critical you're fully aware of your own budget and resources, and use that information when making decisions. For instance, let's say you're a marketer at a startup, and have decided to propose investing in Twitter Ads to the decision-makers at your company. Of course, one of the biggest questions you'll be asked is, "How much is this going to cost?" If you've prepared a marketing budget, you can refer back to it for the answer. A budget shows how much you have to spend on campaigns overall, and the 'Paid Advertising' section shows how much you intend to spend on social ads. With numbers from the budget, you can demonstrate how Twitter Ads fit into the overall strategy, and prove your team can afford to make those purchases. Additionally, when you know the revenue available for marketing efforts, you can then decide how to maximize your spending to align with your goals. Marketing budgets are imperative to a company's success. However, if you work for a smaller startup, resources and money can be tight, making it difficult to determine how much should be spent on marketing. Here, let's explore the typical budget for marketing teams at start-ups, so you have a ballpark to consider when determining your own team's marketing budget. Marketing Costs for a Startup When your company is new it can be...
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Why CRM and Marketing Automation Need Each Other

Marketing Automation
March 27, 2020/by
Why CRM and Marketing Automation Need Each Other When I was younger and I listened to Hannah Montana sing "The Best of Both Worlds," I didn't fully understand what she meant. Now, as a marketer, I get it. Having the best of both worlds is the feeling you have when your company's marketing automation software and CRM work in tandem. But it's not just about how much easier it makes your job. When the two software work together, your company will convert more MQLs to SQLs and make more sales. In fact, marketing automation software can increase sales productivity by 14.5%. That's why marketing and sales teams need to integrate their software and work together. Below, we'll review what marketing automation and CRM software do and why they need to be integrated. CRM and Marketing Automation Before we dive into why marketing automation and CRM need each other, let's discuss what each software does. To start, marketing automation software helps marketers automate some of their processes such as sending email campaigns or posting social media posts. Marketing teams use automation software to produce and promote content. Additionally, this software includes reports and analytics for when leads visit your website, open an email, fill out a form, or read a blog. Ultimately, the goal is to streamline the process of taking a lead, nurturing them, and moving them to a sales qualified lead. Essentially, it's all about lead generation and personalization. If your team needs more marketing qualified leads,...
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7 Amazingly Effective Lead Nurturing Tactics

Lead Nurturing
March 27, 2020/by
7 Amazingly Effective Lead Nurturing Tactics As companies adopt inbound marketing as a way to generate more leads, the importance of having an effective lead nurturing strategy becomes very clear. In most cases only a relatively small percentage of your inbound leads will be ready to make an immediate purchase, leaving upwards of 90% of your inbound leads on the table. Implementing an effective lead nurturing strategy can have a huge impact on the results of your inbound marketing strategy. In 2018, lead generation, sales, and lead nurturing were the top three organizational objectives for content marketers.  How to Nurture Leads Lead nurturing is the purposeful process of engaging a defined target group by providing relevant information at each stage of the buyer’s journey.  You want to actively move the prospects you’ve created through your marketing and lead generation efforts, to the point where they become paying customers. Some tactics on how to nurture leads are through targeted content, multi-channel nurturing, multiple touches, timely follow-ups, and personalization. Despite the clear benefits of lead nurturing, marketers can struggle to build the right strategy around it. According to the 2019 Lead Nurturing & Acceleration Survey, 60% of respondents gave their nurture programs a failing grade. There’s a huge opportunity for savvy marketers like you to implement effective lead nurturing strategies and gain an advantage over your competition.So you are probably wondering… Which lead nurturing tactics work best? What do super successful marketers do differently? ...
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How AI Tools Dropped One Agency’s Reporting Time by 97%

Artificial Intelligence
March 26, 2020/by
How AI Tools Dropped One Agency’s Reporting Time by 97% As marketers in 2020, there's one major thing that we have in common: We're driven by data. Regardless of whether we're copywriters, social media managers, videographers, or web designers, data is key to helping us determine which projects are successful, which strategies might require more of a budget, and which tactics we need to leave behind. But those who thrive on data also know its one major downfall: it can take hours to collect and organize. Even if you have an analytics software that tracks a campaign's traffic, engagements, ROI, and other KPIs, you'll likely still need to take time to organize these numbers, analyze them, and come up with an understandable way to report on your projects to your team or clients. In the past, marketing firms and agencies tasked full-timers with reporting-related duties. And, although much of the data collection process has been automated by various analytics software, marketing teams and firms are still losing countless hours on manual data reporting. This is a problem that my Cleveland-based marketing firm, PR 20/20, ran into a few years ago. As part of our process, we create monthly performance reports for each of our clients. When we create them, we pull the data from HubSpot and Google Analytics. Then, we write a report to explain the data to our colleagues, clients, and project stakeholders. These reports allowed our clients to make better sense of the numbers they were...
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Remote Smarketing 101: How to Align Distributed Marketing and Sales Teams

Remote Working
March 26, 2020/by
Remote Smarketing 101: How to Align Distributed Marketing and Sales Teams To create the optimal customer experience, it's undeniably critical your sales and marketing teams are well-aligned. If you don't, your prospects will suffer. For instance, imagine this: your prospect has been researching a new video conferencing tool for weeks. She's finally found one company she's extremely interested in — yours. Before calling a sales rep, your prospect decides to read numerous blog posts on your website. She also downloads an ebook, watches your company's YouTube videos, and even chats in a few of your community forums. Once your marketing materials have convinced her your product could be a good fit, she decides to call one of your company's sales rep. Unfortunately, the sales rep has no background knowledge on the content with which the prospect has already interacted. The sales rep begins a generic introductory sales pitch, not realizing your prospect is almost ready to buy — she just has a few final questions. This results in a less-than-ideal user experience for your prospect, who won't feel valued as someone who's been interacting with your brand's content for weeks already. Additionally, it isn't an ideal experience for your company's sales or marketing teams, either. If the sales rep was aware of the content with which the prospect has interacted, they'd have an easier time connecting with the prospect and understanding her needs upfront. Ultimately, well-aligned sales and marketing teams have a major impact on your business' bottom...
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Local Lead Generation: The Tips, Tricks, and Tools to Do It Right

local marketing
March 26, 2020/by
Local Lead Generation: The Tips, Tricks, and Tools to Do It Right Let's imagine you manage a balloon animal artist collective in Omaha, Nebraska. You notice your company's growth is plateauing. You mostly serve a strange crop of repeat customers who throw a lot of parties and really like balloon animals, but they can only do so much for you. You realize you need new business and decide a base of interested contacts would be a great place to start. In other words, you need to generate new leads, but you're not sure what you're supposed to do. Your company isn't some multinational balloon animal conglomerate — it's just a collective that features three of the top ten most celebrated balloon animal artists in the greater Omaha area. And you only book customers in Douglas County (that's where Omaha is — I just looked it up.) If you're trying to generate leads for your business, it doesn't make sense to employ the same lead generation strategies as companies that operate on a global scale. Instead, you would do something called local lead generation. Let's get a picture of what that concept is and how to do it right. Local Lead Generation Tips Local Lead Generation Software What is Lead Generation? Before understanding what local lead generation is, it might help to know what lead generation itself is. As per HubSpot's own definition, "Lead generation is the process of attracting and converting a strangers and prospects into...
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