It’s plain to see that B2B marketers, at large, see the value in social media. The latest B2B benchmarking research from CMI and MarketingProfs found that nearly two out of three respondents (61%) increased their usage of social media for content marketing purposes in the previous year. Another new report shows that social content is atop the list of focal areas for B2B marketers in the coming year.

It’s also fair to say, based on various data points and conversations with folks in the biz, that most of us feel we could be doing better with social. The size of the audiences on these platforms make them essential to any digital strategy, but breaking through suppressive algorithms and showing clear ROI is a perpetual challenge for brands.

One pivotal key to excelling with social media marketing is understanding all the tools you have at your disposal. Each platform offers a number of capabilities that seem to be underutilized by marketers who either don’t know they exist, or don’t fully recognize their potential impact.

With this in mind, we’re setting out to highlight some of the most useful yet overlooked features for driving results on social media platforms. Today we’re focusing on the channel most pertinent to B2B marketers: LinkedIn*, with its member base of more than half a billion professionals.

Take Notice of These 5 Marketing Tools & Features on LinkedIn

Whether your goal is building brand awareness, generating leads, or boosting conversions, these five fundamental functionalities can provide a big assist if you aren’t taking advantage of them already.

#1: Robust (and Now Simplified) Audience Targeting

LinkedIn recently overhauled its Campaign Manager tool (the interface through which marketers build, manage, and measure ads) around an objective-based advertising framework. The basic purpose of this initiative was to make it easier for users to align every element of their campaigns with the overarching objective. One of the slickest improvements to come out of this is the audience setup experience, which is now simpler and more intuitive.

From a B2B marketing perspective, the depth of available professional targeting parameters is by far LinkedIn’s biggest relative advantage compared to other social platforms. Nowhere else can you accurately filter audiences based on facets such as Job Title and Job Seniority. This provides unparalleled ability to reach decision makers and purchase influencers directly.

The revamped interface makes it quicker and more straightforward to select a qualified audience in line with your campaign goals.

#2: Revamped LinkedIn Analytics

The latest Social Media Marketing Industry Report via Social Media Examiner found more than half of respondents (54%) either uncertain or disagreeing that they are “able to measure the return on investment (ROI) for my organic social media activities.”

This is another area of Campaign Manager that LinkedIn recently spruced up. Given that advertising on this platform tends to be more expensive than other social networks, it’s especially important to ensure you’re getting return on that spend. The new reporting experience makes it easier to see results at a glance, and make optimization tweaks on the fly.

The underlying appeal of LinkedIn’s targeting facets also applies to its reporting mechanism; you can get an aggregated look at who is viewing and engaging with your content (i.e., which companies, which job titles, which experience levels). These insights can help you align your LinkedIn strategy and even your content marketing strategy more generally.

#3: Content Suggestions

Can’t figure out what to share on social media? That’s a common enough challenge. The Content Suggestions tab, found on the top nav bar within LinkedIn Page admin center, offers ample inspiration. It serves up a list of third-party articles your defined audience is engaging with — essentially a readily available stream of targeted, trending content.

Not only does this make it easy for marketers and social media managers to find share-worthy content that’s more likely to resonate with their followings, but it can also fuel employee advocacy efforts.

#4: Website Retargeting

Retargeting is a popular digital marketing tactic, which involves serving ads to people who’ve already encountered your brand. The element of familiarity, plus a concrete demonstration of past interest, tends to drive considerably higher clicks and conversions than standard ads.

Through its Matched Audiences feature, LinkedIn allows you to place a pixel on your company’s website, then serve ads to people who’ve visited it before, while they’re on LinkedIn. It’s a great way to follow up with someone in a different context. One especially savvy approach is to create customized retargeting creative based on the specific section of your site a person visited (i.e., upper-funnel messaging for someone who went to your “About” page, and lower-funnel for someone who checked out a solution page.)

#5: Lead Gen Forms

This might be my favorite marketing tool on LinkedIn, and it definitely seems like one that more B2B brands could be utilizing. Lead Gen Forms are leveraged in combination with various types of ads, enabling your company to collect valuable contact info (and additional data about a prospect) from an individual who downloads something of value with minimal friction.

Unlike most gated-asset forms, which require a user to tediously fill out multiple fields, Lead Gen Forms automatically populate based on the member’s LinkedIn profile data. As such, it takes only a couple of seconds to get through the process. Because you’re attaining a more comprehensive snapshot of people who download, you can better qualify them as leads in comparison with other form-fills that often procure only a name, phone number, and email.

Step Up Your LinkedIn Marketing Game

LinkedIn can be one of the most valuable components of a holistic B2B marketing strategy. As mentioned earlier, there’s no denying it’s a pricier place to play than most other social networks, but you’re also paying for access to a higher-quality audience. Using the five features above can help you understand, segment, reach, and engage this audience efficiently while closely tracking the impact of your efforts.

Another underutilized tool on LinkedIn is video, which has been a key focus for the platform recently. Learn about all the metrics and specs for video on LinkedIn, as well as every other major social network!

*Disclosure: LinkedIn is a TopRank Marketing client.

The post Social Media Secrets: 5 Under-the-Radar LinkedIn Features for Marketers appeared first on Online Marketing Blog – TopRank®.

Source:: toprankblog.com

Search engines and people love the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) pages. Having a well-written FAQ section on your website is a great way to show online customers that you care about their experience and get you found from outside your website, directly responding to the needs of your audience and their search queries.

For good reason, voice search is becoming increasingly popular. Google reports that 20% of searches are voice related. So, it cannot be denied that people are looking for easier and faster ways to get answers to their questions.

FAQ content can drive a bunch of highly targeted traffic to your website. In many cases, business owners have to use it as a winning content marketing strategy. Here are some reasons why you should create an SEO-friendly FAQ section:

• It helps refund and customer service inquiries.
• It attracts potential customers and builds trust in your business.
• It improves your SEO rankings because Google values that your website is focused on helping people to get all the information to take an educated decision on your product.

So, if you want to get the most out of your FAQ resource, you should build it right. Here are five ways to make it both focused and comprehensive.

1. Collect relevant FAQs

Before creating your FAQ page, it’s crucial to raise the right questions to educate your online customers about your service or product and generate demand. It takes a thorough and continuous question research, a lot of planning, and a little strategic work.

If you have a support center or customer service reps – frontline employees that are always getting bombarded with questions, you can easily find out what questions your customers regularly ask. They are valuable sources of information for collecting questions and giving answers to multiple people at the same time.

To take this further, collecting customer and visitor feedback is a good practice to improve any business. Online survey tools like Survey Anyplace helps you create an online survey questionnaire, identify pain points that your target audience has, and supplement your content with unique data and insights.

Keyword research tools like SE Ranking lets you detect the most popular keywords people are using around the web. The tool uses a separate algorithm that generates the most common words in your niche questions together with search volume, traffic cost, keyword effectiveness index (KEI), and other parameters. You can easily filter and export your results so it can be saved.

Source: SE Ranking

While Google highlights a lot of insight into the most popular questions, forums like Quora or Reddit will bring up the most trending questions people are interested in at this very moment. The best way to find questions is to follow a particular category and check for new questions on a regular basis. There is also an additional benefit of making more meaningful connections out there and position yourself as a niche expert.

Check out your competitors‘ FAQ pages, product reviews for items in your niche, and look closer at what they are doing, and what questions they answer that you haven’t. Have you heard these questions from your consumers before? Adopt their best experiences and improve your FAQ page.

2. Implement structured data

Adding structured data to your FAQ page is a good way to become more visually appealing in the SERP, get a higher average click-through rate, and pull ahead of your competitors in your niche. Fortunately, Google recently added support for FAQ structured data in search and Google Assistant.

By implementing this structured data, you can make your content eligible to show questions and answers directly on Google Search and the Assistant. Notice that FAQ can be used for single pages that provide official questions and answers.

You should not be confused with Q&A Page markup that is designed for sites like forums, Quora where users can submit answers to questions. You can find out more about this markup in the FAQ developer.

Here’s how it looks like in the search.

To learn more about implementation details for Google Assistant, you can visit a FAQ Action with markup.

To track any FAQ issues and search appearance, Google included a new enhancement report in Search Console. It displays all warnings, errors, and valid items related to your FAQ pages.

3. Think visually

Sometimes a picture is a better way to explain touch concepts, grab attention, and make the learning process more fluid. Don’t limit your answers to text. Use stunning and well-designed images, graphics, illustrations or videos to add more visual appeal to your FAQ page and make it easier for visitors to receive clear answers to their questions.

For example, if you’re giving instructions for executing a specific process, or are providing details about how to use a certain feature of one of your services, images, charts, graphics, and screenshots can guide customers through it step-by-step. They simply help people break up big chunks of text and improve their comprehension.

4. Build a brilliant navigational structure

No matter how well-written your FAQ section is, it’s not going to get to your prospects if users can’t find it or even navigate it. Giving your FAQ section a structure will improve customer satisfaction, loyalty, and SEO for the entire website.

If you have longer FAQ pages, many categories, and subcategories, search functionality will make it easier for users to find answers instantaneously. It keeps them from clicking through your knowledge base to find the right question. Notice that the FAQ search is distinguished from the general search option of the website. Consider this difference to shorten the number of search results and provide the right solutions for your customers.

Source: HeroThemes

It’s a good idea to divide questions into categories and lead to informative subheadings. For example, shipping, sizing, features, and other such relevant details – and in case you provide a long list of questions.

In the image given below, Pepper offers the FAQ page that is intuitively categorized and easy to navigate.

Source: Pepper

To reduce your page to a more manageable size, you can list only the questions and include links to take readers to the answers. It’s great for SEO as it drives traffic to many pages on your site and causes high spikes in page views that Google measures to decide how valuable your content is. If you want to optimize your FAQ section for search queries, this structure can be a good fit for that.

Source: Mint.com

Make short SEO-friendly URLs for each FAQ post to simply direct customers to exactly the right answer, build trust in the searcher and easily share useful information with others. Use popular social media to spread the word about your FAQ page.

5. Check analytics on a regular basis

Once you’ve created your FAQ page, you should start with the analytics of your website in order to see whether the page is getting traffic and ranking for useful keyword phrases.

Are users visiting your FAQ page or are they going by? How long do they stay? Where do they go after looking at the FAQ page? What paths are they taking? Getting these meaningful and actionable insights, you can add some minor changes or rework your page to better direct visitors to the FAQ section.

To get advanced web analytics, you can start a quick overview of a page in Finteza. The tool features full-cycle data management to find out whether your marketing campaign has reached desired targets, which channels and sources generate the highest traffic and how conversion rate can be further improved.

Source: Finteza

Checking analytics regularly will help you fine-tune your FAQ pages and other web pages within your site.

Wrapping up

Generally, an FAQ page looks like an afterthought for many websites. But if used strategically, it can give you much value in different ways, from reducing purchase anxiety to easing the burden on support teams.

What’s more, you’ll be able to educate your teams and yourself while creating a list of FAQ questions, and offer a better service or product on the go.

Are you making the most of your FAQ page? What tactic works well for your business? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments section.

The post Five tips to create an SEO-friendly FAQ page appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

Source:: searchenginewatch.com

When you’ve worked in paid search for as long as I have, you’ve undoubtedly received emails from your clients that all go a little something like the one given below.

Hi [insert your name here],

Revenue is looking a little lighter than usual this month versus last year. What can we do to close the gap? Please let me know by EOD today.

Thanks,

[insert client name here]

Short, sweet, and oh-so-stressful, or at least it used to be. But now? Well, this isn’t your first rodeo, my fellow PPC partner, you’re prepared. Placed firmly in your holster is a solution that’s fully loaded. Ok, enough with the quick draw metaphors, let’s dig into how to respond, assuming the following criteria are being met:

• You can confirm the trends your client is seeing.
• Brand checks out (since it accounts for the majority of your revenue at any given moment):
  1. Brand terms are maxed out aka meeting or exceeding a certain impression share threshold.
  2. You are serving against the same brand terms as last year, but if not they are at least being caught by BMM.
  3. No new competitors have entered the auction or suddenly become more aggressive, causing CPCs to rise and in turn, cause traffic and revenue to fall behind.
• The right ads are active and all available real estate is being utilized.

Find yourself checking all the boxes? This is usually indicative of brand demand decline, a trend that is all too common among online retailers due primarily to the rise of Amazon. Yo, Bezos! What gives? As a secondary check, we use Google Trends to confirm brand demand decline. But if all the boxes above are checked, odds are the plague is real. Fortunately, you’ve got the silver bullet (metaphor alert). Unfortunately, your client may shoot you down before you’re able to use it. Why? Because that silver bullet is non-brand.

I’m serious, and I’d be happy to explain

All too often we neglect non-brand CPC advertising because, in the client’s eyes, it’s seen as one or all of the following:

• Too expensive
• Too competitive
• A lot of work for a little payoff
• Not beneficial to the bottom line

And most of the time, they’re completely right. Hard to argue with that, right? Wrong. Focusing purely on search text, non-brand has the power to close the gap widened over time by brand demand decline. However, there are stipulations. Most importantly, we’ve got to stop measuring the success, or validity, of non-brand based on last-click attribution. If we stay this course, the tactic will continue to be deprioritized and defunded and basically never given a chance.

Think of non-brand collectively as those keywords in your account that ads rarely get a chance to serve against because bids aren’t competitive enough. Instead, Non-Brand success should be measured based on its multi-touch influence. There are several apt attribution models out there, the trick is honing in on one that both you and your client can agree on. This usually requires both parties to do a bit of extra digging up front.

For example, one of my clients made the decision to increase its non-brand investment after (a) being plagued by brand demand decline and (b) learning that each time our non-brand investment increased, omnichannel sales — both grew online and offline. This happened outside of peak online retail season, too, so it wasn’t just an anomaly. From that moment on, we stopped viewing non-brand as a last-click attribution tactic and started assigning a certain multiplier to the last-click revenue it generated to better defend our investment. Positive by-products of this change included:

• Increased brand awareness, resulting in more Brand searches which helped to reverse the downward trend caused by brand demand decline.
• New customer acquisition, resulting in larger audience pools and more efficient spend, particularly in Non-Brand where audiences are often applied (why inflate brand CPCs by bidding up on audiences there?)
• Greater SERP ownership by serving non-brand and PLAs simultaneously for certain products, resulting in higher visibility and CTR.

If you’re like me, even overwhelmingly positive change can be scary, so during this time, I kept my eyes peeled for the first hint of danger. Surprisingly, negative by-products of this change were sparse and totally manageable:

1. Higher CPCs, resulting in a lower last-click ROAS, pre-multiplier
   • Solution: Created alerts using proprietary tech that pinged us on Slack when CPCs rose considerably (also set max bid rules)
2. Larger potential for keyword and ad copy/extension misalignment
   • Solution: Created an Excel macros doc for fast-n-easy creation of new campaign/ad group/keyword structures, including a tab for ad group-to-ad copy concatenation + rigorous QA process (Manager > Senior Manager > Lead = Live)

Still not convinced?

One of our wiser presidents, FDR, once said,

“It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”

That’s really all your client is asking of you. If it fails, it fails, then you move on to the next thing. In the meantime, however, here are some thoughts to get you started:

• Consider investing as much as you did last year in non-brand, at a minimum.
• Investment level could also be just enough to maintain a certain impression share threshold on various high-visibility products, especially if your competitors are less visible or non-existent in those spaces.
• Try to maintain a steady investment level — even if it’s on the lower end, so as not to inflate CPCs by erratically pausing/enabling, as we undeniably tend to do with non-brand.
• Running display? At least with non-brand search, people are actively looking for products associated with those terms (pull media) versus being served an ad for certain products regardless of search intent (push media)

The post Making the case for more non-brand funding in paid search appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

Source:: searchenginewatch.com

The post Digital Marketing News: B2B Video & Social Usage Studies, LinkedIn’s Brand Refresh & Photo Tagging, Growing Digital Ad Sales appeared first on Online Marketing Blog – TopRank®.

Source:: toprankblog.com