If you have spent any considerable time online trying to promote your business / brand, you've probably felt a bit overwhelmed at times with the amount of work involved. You may be wondering, Does Social Media Affect Google Rankings?
Is all the work I put into social media a waste of time?
Social media is a great way to get the word out, it's free and many people are on social media 24/7.
Social media can yield business to companies that do it consistently and really know how to reach their customer base effectively.
Let's learn how social media affects SEO.
Does Social Media Help With Google Rankings?
Yes, and here's why.
Google is actively working and spending money building something called the semantic web.
The semantic web depends largely on Artificial Intelligence and Internet user data to give you, the user a great experience when you are searching online.
When a person searches online, Google wants them to be able to find the information they were looking for quickly.
Take it one step further, they want each user to have an experience that is customized to their actions in other places online besides Google.
Google monitors people and businesses actions online using Social Media.
Basically, when a business is active on social media and Google sees people interacting with the business' brand, it receives signals that the brand is an important part of the community / market they are working in.
Social Signals affect your Google Ranking in 3 different ways:
Increased Website Traffic
Increased Backlinks To Your Website
Increases Your Website's Domain Authority
Those 3 factors are very important ranking metrics Google uses to prioritize website rankings when people perform a search.
In fact Search Engine Journal said the following:
"The increased importance of social signals towards the SEO end-game should prompt you to step up your social media presence everywhere. The major social players will continue to make strides into the SERPs, as seen by Google’s recent firehose access to Twitter.
Sites like Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Tumblr are starting to again increase in impact when it comes to SERPs. These social media sites have millions of regular users, and that’s a resource primed to be tapped." - Search Engine Journal - Does Social Media Help SEO?
The bottom line is this: Google uses Artificial Intelligence to monitor, grow and improve search engine results for it's visitors.
How Does Artificial Intelligence (AI) Affect Google Rankings?
Artificial Intelligence is another way of saying Machine Learning software.
Essentially, programmers have created code that learns and tracks the behavior of humans interacting with computers.
Add to that, the information that is tracked via your ip address, mac address (computer hardware serial number) and your Internet Service Provider, Google knows a whole lot about you and your habits.
They are not the only one tracking and using your habit data to their benefit, Facebook is also a big player in the game of data tracking.
Google's machine learning software is called TensorFlow.
Here's what writer, James Vincent at The Verge had to say about Google's AI Software:
"For Google, this doesn’t just mean using AI to improve its own products. (Although it’s certainly doing that). The company wants individuals and small companies around the world to also get on board. It wants to wield influence in the wider AI ecosystem, and to do so has put together an impressive stack of machine learning tools — from software to servers — that mean you can build an AI product from the ground up without ever leaving the Google playpen.
The heart of this offering is Google’s machine learning software TensorFlow. For building AI tools, it’s like the difference between a command line interface and a modern desktop OS; giving users an accessible framework for grappling with their algorithms. It started life as an in-house tool for the company’s engineers to design and train AI algorithms, but in 2015 was made available for anyone to use as open-source software. Since then, it’s been embraced by the AI community (it’s the most popular software of its type on code repository Github), and is used to create custom tools for a whole range of industries, from aerospace to bioengineering." - The Verge: Google’s latest platform play is artificial intelligence, and it’s already winning.
Google is not joking around when they say that they want to be the #1 company ever created.
They are at war with Facebook to become the go-to provider for all data sharing in the world.
Data Sharing and Machine Language go hand-in-hand and equal trillions in revenue for these companies.
Here's what Google says about their Machine Intelligence endeavors:
"Research at Google is at the forefront of innovation in Machine Intelligence, with active research exploring virtually all aspects of machine learning, including deep learning and more classical algorithms. Exploring theory as well as application, much of our work on language, speech, translation, visual processing, ranking and prediction relies on Machine Intelligence. In all of those tasks and many others, we gather large volumes of direct or indirect evidence of relationships of interest, applying learning algorithms to understand and generalize.
Machine Intelligence at Google raises deep scientific and engineering challenges, allowing us to contribute to the broader academic research community through technical talks and publications in major conferences and journals. Contrary to much of current theory and practice, the statistics of the data we observe shifts rapidly, the features of interest change as well, and the volume of data often requires enormous computation capacity. When learning systems are placed at the core of interactive services in a fast changing and sometimes adversarial environment, combinations of techniques including deep learning and statistical models need to be combined with ideas from control and game theory." - Research at Google
Conclusion
So to answer the question, Does Social Media Affect Google Rankings?
The answer is clearly YES!
As of today, Google depends a lot on backlinks to rank websites.
But, in the future as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Language improve, rankings will largely be based on real human interactivity.
Where is human activity happening the most? Social Media of course.
So no, you are not wasting time building your brands presence on social media. The importance of social media in SEO is only going to continue to grow.
If you are advertising your products and services using Facebook Ads, you probably are aware of the major learning curve involved in truly understanding all that Facebook has to offer. To date, Facebook has arguably the best and most accurate data warehouse on the planet. With an active daily audience reach of 1.13 billion people worldwide, it's hard to not at least consider using Facebook advertising these days.
Here are some other stats that may wow you:
4.5 billion Likes are generated daily
1.57 billion users access Facebook through mobile devices (a 20 percent year-over-year).
Facebook Like and Share Buttons are viewed on over 10 million websites daily.
Lately, we have been using Facebook ads for some of our other ventures outside of SEO Graphic Design so we know, there is a bit of a learning curve. Google Ads have been the go-to ad source in the SEO world for years but now with the detailed metrics Facebook provides. Google has some real competition!
When you are in Facebook ads one of the first things you'll want to become familiar with will be the terminology that is featured throughout the platform. Before you spend a dime with any advertising platform you need to make sure you understand how everything works. You don't want to foolishly waste money on ads just because you didn't understand the platform.
Here are two important links from Facebook that will help you get a firm understanding of how the platform works:
After you read through the two Facebook links above, you will run into two terms that needs a little more explaining to fully understand:
Facebook Reach vs Frequency
Facebook "Reach" and "Frequency" are basically two metrics that show you how many people "saw" your ad and how many times your ad was shown to your audience.
As you'll see in the video below, statistics that show in your reach and frequency report aren't exact. Just because Facebook places your ad on a person page/timeline, doesn't mean that person actually "saw" your ad.
Video: Facebook Ads Reach vs Frequency
Video Takeaway to Remember: Reach x Frequency = Gross Rating Points (GRiPs). This metric will give you an even better clue as to which ads perform the best and where you should spend your money.
If you have questions about marketing your products and services on the Facebook Ads platform, feel free to leave a comment below. I'll be more than happy to help.
I often wondered how people who make apps that are free actually make money and at minimum, recoup the investment required to create an app. The most viral, over-the-night sensation apps all cost money to make yet, they are free...how can that be? The typical cost to have an app developed is $15k+ so how and why would someone want to make it free?
In the following article below, Whitney Rhodes of Savvy Apps breaks it down beautifully. Enjoy!
How Do FREE Apps Make Money?
It may seem counterintuitive, but many of the top grossing apps actually cost nothing to download. Clash of Clans, HBO NOW, and Spotify Music are just some of the free top grossing iOS apps in the App Store according to App Annie. And they're all free. In a market where the majority of users expect their apps to be free, how do app creators recoup their expenses and profit after the average 4-6 months of time it takes to ship an app?
In-app purchases and advertising allow app creators to make money off their free apps. But in order to make money from a free app, you have to do more than just stick paid premium options or ads in your app. Smart app monetization strategies come from understanding what revenue-generating options are available, familiarizing yourself with your market and competition, and leveraging your knowledge of your audience and business to cater the right paid user experience. Here's what you need to know to make money off your free app.
TL;DR
Research your market competitors to identify missed monetization opportunities.
“Freemium” apps are free to download and offer paid access to additional features.
In-app purchases are a way to offer optional, paid features within an app.
Subscriptions provide paid content or features over a set amount of time.
In-app advertising generates revenue from user click-throughs and impressions.
Grow a large, active user base to improve your chances of generating significant revenue.
Successful monetization strategies look and feel like a normal part of the app experience.
Understand App Monetization Options
There are several monetization options available for free apps. In-app purchases and in-app advertising allow apps to bring in revenue while forgoing the initial price tag that can discourage users from downloading the app. Choosing which to use is a matter of the type of app you plan on launching and the nuances of your users.
IN-APP PURCHASES
An app that utilizes in-app purchases offers a free version of the app that includes additional, optional, paid features. These are commonly seen in gaming apps where users are encouraged to purchase new levels, gear, and items. These types of purchases encourage repeat purchases because they are consumable, such as buying extra lives in Candy Crush Saga.
In-app purchases are also found outside the mobile gaming world in apps like Calcbot, 1Password, or even Apple Music. This second category of in-app purchases lets you continue to use what you purchase unlike consumable items that don't remain once they're used, such as extra lives in Candy Crush Saga.
Free apps that have a paid component to provide access to an additional feature or set of features are referred to as “freemium." There are various ways to approach a freemium app. You can offer a free version of your app with reduced features such as with Calcbot (e.g., a user can purchase the “convert” feature) or even let users try a certain feature initially and then lock it down behind an in-app purchase like with Apple Music. The latter approach requires much more development work but is a workaround for there being no true trials in the app stores.
iOS and Android apps also offer auto-renewable subscription options for in-app purchases. These subscriptions allow an app to provide content or features over a set amount of time. A good example is our customer FamilySignal, which uses an auto-renewable subscription on iOS for its apps that helps families better stay in touch with one another. Recurring subscriptions are especially useful for apps that have ongoing costs associated with them, such as maintaining servers or creating new content.
IN-APP ADVERTISING
In-app advertising comes in a variety of sizes, positions and placements in mobile apps. The amount of revenue you generate from in-app advertising is based off of traditional advertising models. Advertising can pay differently for click-throughs, impressions, which countries the users are from, and the format of the ads, with videos tending to be worth more than static ads.
There are advertising networks catered for mobile that offer a variety of models and formats within the in-app advertising strategy as well as metrics to keep track of how the ads are performing. Hongkiat runs through some of the big networks here, including Google's AdMob and Millennial Media.
Focus on User Growth
It doesn't matter if your free app relies on in-app purchases or in-app advertising, only a small fraction of your users will ever help you generate revenue from your app. That’s why your free app needs to grow a large, active user base so that this small percentage actually amounts to significant revenue.
It's important to think about metrics like free-to-paid conversion rates, lifetime value of a customer, churn rate (for recurring subscriptions), and comparable items. Andreesen-Horowitz recently published a guide to important revenue-focused metrics to help businesses, especially startups, identify the metrics most significant to tracking the health of a company. And John Egan, growth engineer at Pinterest, showed what those metrics look like in a post earlier this year. Without a keen eye on these metrics, you'll be ill-equipped to grow your app to the point where that minority of users is actually generating revenue.
Know Your App Market and Users
Do your research. Examine apps in the app stores, including competitors, to identify best practices for monetizing similar apps. While it's difficult to surmise exactly how much money your competitors are pulling in, you can identify the types of monetization strategies they use and how they frame their app content for ad impressions or optional transactions. Familiarize yourself with your competitors' techniques and then ask yourself whether they're missing a major opportunity. You should note elements of competitor apps you can improve on to enhance your monetization strategy or flat out make a better app.
Cultivating a deep understanding of your users is just as important as competitor research in building your app, if not more so. This is especially true for crafting a mobile monetization strategy. Because only a few users of your entire audience will ever pay for something extra in your app or tap on an ad, it's crucial to know what attracts and motivates your users. Research the demographics and tendencies of your audience and present relevant advertising for what they want. For in-app purchases, you need to balance what your free app offers with the desirability of extra, paid features. Skew too far one way and users will see no value in using your app. Skew too far another way and users won't purchase additional features.
Be Subtle and Actionable
Remember the purpose of your app. Mobile users are sophisticated. Few will tolerate an app that's only focus is making money off advertisements or in-app purchases. Successful free apps weave their monetization efforts into the app so that they feel like a normal part of the user experience.
Just how obtrusive your in-app advertising should be depends on the type of app and your audience. A 2014 study by Medialets showed that the top performing banner ad sizes/positions by conversion rate were about 320x50 or 300x250 pixels and took up either a slice of the bottom of the screen, the lower half of the app, or a slice across the center of the screen. Interstitial ads, commonly found in gaming apps, are full-screen video or static image advertisements that can be very obtrusive if not timed correctly. These are often used during natural breaks in the app, like between chapters in a story or levels in a game, to maximize impressions while minimally breaking the flow of the app. Native ads, on the other hand, are ads that are designed to look like they're part of the app. These are usually seen as sponsored content and promotional videos found in content apps like Facebook and Twitter.
It's just as important to implement an easy to use and actionable purchase system for in-app purchases that makes sense within the app. The best in-app purchases are intuitive and just make sense within the context of the user experience.
Concluding Note
Make sure you focus and refine your monetization strategy to your business goals, your market, and your users. If your app is meant to boost your existing brand or business, you may not want to include in-app purchases or advertising. The mere existence of the app can make you money simply by expanding the ways your customers can find and interact with your business. Whatever strategy you implement, keep track of your own data and monitor it to ensure your assumptions are right, especially for free to paid upgrades. Once you have a good stream of data, innovate. Try new things based on this data, test them, and iterate based on your results to find the monetization strategy that works for your users and your business.
All companies have blogs, all of them want to engage customers in a dialogue… We create more and more content, but does it make sense? What’s the truth behind it?
Herewith we debunk 7 common beliefs about content marketing and reveal which are myths and which are truth.
1. Content Marketing Is Expensive
MYTH & TRUTH: Creating a good, long post, a valuable ebook, not to mention -a video – can consume lots of time and energy of your team. If you have already forged this Opus Magnum, use it more than once!
One piece can be used in several ways. Take care of multiple sharing for your recipients’ good. It’s called repurposing, which means if you put so much effort into creating something valuable, you should distribute it widely and translate it into other educational forms: transform the ample blog post into an infographic, a slideshow, a webinar, and then combine it with some others and give people the new free ebook.
Mold multiple materials from one piece of content and it pays itself – but only if you can get as much as possible from it.
2. Content Must Be Packed With Keywords To Be Visible Among Search Results
MYTH: Definitely not! Current Google’s algorithms are way too smart for this trick. More important is for a post to be fresh and liked by human readers.
3. It’s Hard To Measure Content Marketing Efficacy
MYTH: Although revenues from this practice might be rather long-term, you can easily establish KPI’s for your content. They are:
Website (blog) Traffic
Returning Readers Percentage
Time Spent on Website
CTA Conversion Rate
Number of Leads from Particular Source (e.g. ebook downloads)
As you can see, defining some KPIs isn’t a problem – the essence of what you expect this content will do and setting realistic goals is what’s fussing about. PRO TIP: Don’t announce you want to make a viral. And speaking of virals…
4. It’s Likes, Shares and Viral Distribution That Counts
MYTH & TRUTH: Your post became the hottest ticket in town? Users spread it from wall to wall, from tweet to retweet? Bombastic! Now it’s time to think about true, measurable profits it can bring you. Do new recipients equal new leads? Will they ever come back to your blog?
We don’t want to spoil it for you. It’s rather about making you think of this simple fact: bare likes won’t mean a thing. There must be an idea that includes them into the overall lead and customer acquiring strategy. Does your content do that? Do you combine posts with Lead Generation strategies?
5. Quality Is Everything
TRUTH: Good, valuable, relevant posts or those that show the issue from a new angle are crucial for your marketing. Nonetheless, research shows an interesting oddity: while 92% of companies claim they produce high-quality content, only 54% of them rated their content strategy as efficient (source).
Where did that come from? It might occur that both: entrepreneurs and marketers are way too optimistic about their content, which isn’t that good as they see it. It’s really hard to say something new today and make it interesting and digestible.
The second option (rather complementary than alternative) is that the content is great but the lead acquisition strategy, tactic of keeping users on the website and contact forms fail. In other words, you may write Pulitzer-winning articles, but they don’t convert into sales. Effect: it is all just a load of hot air.
6. You’re Obliged To Write About A Product Or A Business
MYTH: Although your content should be educational, don’t restrain your blog to be expanded product catalog or leaflet. Focus on materials useful for your readers. Identify the target group and write something practical for them.
Look at this blog – posts not directly related to marketing automation did their work. Many of our readers are owners and marketers in SMB, so they loved “100 free online tools for business: planning, SEO, content, social media.”
Also, they liked non-Marketing-Automation post about the world’s youngest entrepreneurs – it was original and exciting (a little ego boost for us).
There’s no need to stick to your niche and write only about the product and its entourage. It will drain your ideas within few weeks!
7. Content Marketing = Blog
MYTH: No! Content marketing has many blog-concentrated forms that reach further than your domain. Video, infographics, ebooks, templates, webinars or podcasts will definitely spice up your content collection and make them more interesting. It also makes using them easier: you can forge a nice webinar from an ebook, and your readers will be given an opportunity to decide which form they prefer.
How’s your content? Do you have it in your company? Do you find it worth trying?
The biggest problem in marketing in the tech world today is that too many marketers do not know the first thing about marketing.
Digital marketers — who, as marketers, really should be cynical enough to know better — have fallen into an echo chamber of meaningless buzzwords.
First, the phrase “inbound marketing” was invented and popularized in the mid-2000s by HubSpot, a company that sells — of course — “inbound marketing software” and is receiving some bad publicity in the form of a book by former employee Dan Lyons that was released on April 5.
As Lyons alleges and seems to imply, the company’s initial success seems to have been based on the promotion of the created term rather than its actual product:
HubSpot’s first hires included a head of sales and a head of marketing. Halligan and Dharmesh filled these positions even though they had no product to sell and didn’t even know what product they were going to make. HubSpot started out as a sales operation in search of a product.
Second, the phrase “content marketing” was largely established around the same time by Joe Pulizzi. He created the Content Marketing Institute, which sells — of course — “content marketing training,” as well as tickets to the Content Marketing World conference. And what is “content marketing?” Wikipedia’s definition (as of this moment of writing) is a textbook example of saying something without actually saying anything: Content marketing is any marketing that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire and retain customers.
The use of these and other buzzwords has caused a new generation of marketers to enter the field without knowing even the basic terms and practices that underpin our industry. The result is that too many tech marketers are basing their work on faulty premises, hurting our profession and flooding the Internet with spammy “content.” To understand where the marketing world went wrong, let’s first compare how marketing departments operated before and after the mass adoption of the Internet.
Imagine that it is the year 1996. What did traditional marketing departments think about? The four Ps. The promotion mix. Communications strategies. SWOT analyses. The five forces. Building brands. Then, by 2006, what did digital marketing teams think about? High Google rankings and more website traffic. Getting Facebook “likes” and Twitter followers. Keyword density. Building links.
“Marketing departments” were using professional strategies that had been developed over many decades. “Online marketing departments” were calling themselves “marketers,” but did not even know what every 18-year-old marketing student in business school knows. Two very different teams were doing two very different things.
Online marketers should have started to practice real marketing and brand building.
In the following years, however, online marketing changed. Google got better at stopping artificial attempts to manipulate rankings. Brands started to have to pay to have any Facebook reach. Most links to startups’ websites had always come simply as natural by-products of news coverage and publicity efforts and not SEO-type link building, as a March 2016 study by Credo founder John Doherty published on Moz found.
“Content marketing” is nothing new
While all of these changes were occurring, online marketers should have discarded their imitation marketing and started to practice real marketing and brand building.
But “inbound marketers” had always been wrongly declaring — without any proof or evidence — that “outbound” strategies such as advertising, PR and publicity were “dead.” (See Gartner’s Martin Kihn’s refutation of such boneheaded claims.) So, they still needed to differentiate themselves somehow to remain relevant and keep their staff salaries, client retainers and software users.
The digital marketing world instead responded by coining new buzzwords for existing practices to make it seem as though they were doing something new and different. “Content marketing” arrived shortly after online marketers began to utter the single stupidest phrase that has ever existed in the entire history of marketing:
“Content is king!”
Anyone who needed to be convinced of the truth of that statement has no business working in the marketing industry.
The content has always been the most important part. It’s a pandering beer commercial that is shown on TV during the Super Bowl. It’s a shocking video of a publicity stunt that spreads throughout Facebook. It’s a duckface selfie photo that a narcissistic millennial posts on Instagram. It’s a contributed article to a major news outlet (such as this piece, which will probably be ignored in the marketing community because attention-hungry marketers must always claim that some “paradigm has shifted” to build a name for themselves even though nothing significant ever really changes).
If the beer commercial falls flat, then nothing else matters. If the publicity stunt does not attract the public’s attention, then nothing else matters. If the duckface selfie fails to receive enough “likes” — well, that would actually never matter in the first place.
Marketing has always been the creation of a message, the insertion of that message into a piece of content and the transmission of that content over a channel to an audience in an effort to build brands, increase demand and move people down sales funnels. The same is true today — the only differences are that we have two additional sets of available channels, called the Internet and mobile devices, and those channels allow for a greater variety of content formats.
In the 1950s, a marketer may have created a message about a product and then put that message into a print advertisement that was then transmitted through a newspaper. Today, a marketer may create a message about a product and put that message into a video that would then be transmitted through YouTube.
The tools and channels change, but the process remains the same. “Content marketers” are doing nothing different from what creative teams have always done. In the SEO community specifically, more marketing software tools and digital marketing agencies are beginning to understand the negative effect of buzzwords as they rebrand themselves away from “SEO” and more toward “marketing.”
In the end, all marketing is “content marketing” because all marketing uses content. Most people who use the generic word “content” are unsure of what they are precisely doing. If it is an advertisement, say so. If it is sales collateral for a direct marketing campaign, say so. If it’s a publicity video, say so. Defining a creative precisely will help you to know the best practices for that specific type of collateral.
Creativity cannot be scaled.
If marketers do not change their mindsets, they will continue to treat “content” as the “widgets” of business school and spam the Internet with crap as they try to publish more and more “content” at a cheaper and cheaper cost. But “content” is not a commodity. Creativity cannot be scaled. As Greg Satell wrote in the Harvard Business Review:
We never call anything that’s good “content.” Nobody walks out of a movie they loved and says, “Wow! What great content!” Nobody listens to “content” on their way to work in the morning. Do you think anybody ever called Ernest Hemingway a “content creator”? If they did, I bet he would punch ‘em in the nose.
If, for example, what you are really making is an advertisement, then do not call it “content” — be proud that you are making a commercial for your company or client and then make it awesome enough so that people will remember you years later.
The myth of “inbound marketing”
The overall marketing process I described above occurs within one or more of the five frameworks within the promotion mix: direct marketing, advertising, personal selling, sales promotion and publicity. (The promotion mix is under one of the four Ps of the marketing mix: product, price, place and promotion.)
I explained the four Ps, the promotion mix and the step-by-step approach to marcom strategy elsewhere, so I will summarize here:
Direct marketing is the sending of sales collateral to a list of specific people with the goal of eliciting a direct, immediate response. It includes direct mail, email and most advertising over the Internet, mobile and social media channels. (Yes, most online and mobile advertising, as Ad Contrarian Bob Hoffman has noted, is actually direct marketing and not advertising.)
Advertising is the use of paid placements in mass media outlets and channels to increase brand awareness and create brand associations among a mass audience.
Personal selling is the use of salespeople and is often the chosen strategy when companies are selling expensive B2C products or B2B products with long sales cycles.
Sales promotion is the use of short-term incentives to encourage the purchase or sale of a product or service through discounts and coupons.
Publicity is increasing the public visibility or awareness through (owned or earned) media.
I have not listed “inbound marketing” or “content marketing” or “social media marketing” because those things are not parts of the promotion mix and do not actually exist in the first place. Any example of those three things is simply a function of an existing element of the promotion mix by another name:
The Dollar Shave Club’s hilarious first video was not “content marketing” — it was advertising (transmitted over the channel of YouTube) Red Bull’s space jump was not “content marketing” — it was a publicity stunt (transmitted over various social media networks and the news) Oreo’s famous Super Bowl tweet was not “social media marketing” — it was a publicity stunt (transmitted over the channel of Twitter)
Such examples, by the way, are almost always from mass-consumer brands. It’s extremely rare to see high-tech startups doing anything similar because of the nature of the industry.
The dominance of direct marketing
One of the largest online marketing publications, Marketing Land, focuses almost exclusively on direct marketing (by various names):
A word of advice to the publisher: I would include coverage of the advertising, publicity and sales worlds so that you will attract additional marketers and salespeople who are interested in other parts of the promotion mix. (Disclosure: I have spoken at conferences of Search Marketing Expo — a sister company to Marketing Land — in Silicon Valley and Europe.)
The tech startup world loves direct marketing. Why? Startups live or die based on precise analytics and growth rates, and direct marketing platforms easily provide these metrics. Google’s recent announcement of its Analytics 360 Suite is merely the latest attempt to cater to this demand for this information.
Whether one’s desired direct marketing channel is email or Google AdWords or Facebook, all of those platforms come with precise data that can measure opens, “likes,” clicks and shares, as well as any resulting purchases, conversions or downloads. A/B and multivariate tests can be run to squeeze out every possible increase in conversion rates.
Moreover, marketing automation platforms are simply ways to run all direct marketing campaigns specifically and efficiently from a single place — they are not “all-in-one marketing software platforms” because they cannot help with other types of marketing such as advertising and publicity campaigns. No automated system or algorithm is creative in a way that will amaze human beings.
To become better marketers, those in the tech startup world need to … read a Marketing 101 textbook.
Still, the startup tech world has no patience for the time it takes to build strong brands, which is what advertising — and publicity, to a lesser extent — has always done. Marketers need direct responses in the form of trackable sales, leads, downloads and installations as quickly as possible to satisfy impatient investors and potential acquirers.
The direct ROI of advertising and publicity campaigns are extremely difficult to measure with any degree of precision and do not typically deliver immediate returns. The tech world increasingly demands direct marketing metrics for all marketing and PR work, but it’s difficult to determine direct and immediate ROI from brand marketing campaigns.
One example is when people want direct marketing metrics, such as “How many customers did we get?” from publicity work such as getting news coverage or contributing articles to publications. The number of customers that come from an article’s referral traffic will usually be low. Direct marketing and publicity are two different things that are used for different purposes for different goals, and some of the goals of such articles are to increase brand awareness and thought leadership (and those cannot be measured). Assigning the wrong goals to the wrong functions is one mistake that occurs when online marketers do not know the foundations of traditional marketing.
The positive side of direct marketing is that it is easy to track results. The negative side is that it is boring to create and invasive to receive. People tolerate offline advertising; people hate online advertising. Why? Most online advertising is actually direct marketing — and people hate direct marketing whether it is junk mail in their mailboxes, junk email in their inboxes or junk ads that target them on social media or follow them around the Internet.
Moreover, for advertisers themselves, online advertising — as I wrote in a prior TechCrunch column and discuss as a marketing speaker at various conferences — is a hotbed of fraud, corruption, privacy invasions and kickbacks that is sleazier than Don Draper at his worst.
How tech marketers should respond
Get back to the marketing basics. Over the past decade or so, many digital marketers entered the field from the technical world and, therefore, lacked any traditional marketing education. That’s why they focus on algorithms, discuss how to automate best practices and invent random new terms rather than think about how to build brands with the techniques that have been developed over the past century.
To become better marketers, those in the tech startup world need to skip the latest redundant blog post on “inbound marketing” or “content marketing” and read a Marketing 101 textbook. (I recommend Principles of Marketing by Philip T. Kotler and Gary Armstrong. Tip: Buy a used edition that is a couple of years old to save a lot of money.)
Learn about direct marketing strategy, advertising strategy and publicity strategy within the promotion mix and then apply those traditional principles to your online and offline channels of choice — whether they will include television, Facebook, news outlets, Google AdWords or anything else. Essentially, it is completely changing one’s “marketing algorithm” to integrate traditional and online marketing best practices.
Do not separate traditional and online marketing teams. The more that human activity moves online, the more that traditional and digital marketing will become just “marketing.” Direct marketers will need to know how to apply the best practices in their work to both online and offline channels. The same will be true for advertisers, publicists and salespeople. A good publicist, for example, should know how to get a product on national TV as well as spread on Facebook.
Explore alternatives to direct marketing. Technical people are very good at marketing analytics and algorithms, but they are not always very creative. However, advertisements such as the Dollar Shave Club one mentioned earlier and publicity campaigns such as Israeli PR agency Blonde 2.0’s work for the Yo mobile app can deliver huge results.
We in the tech world have thought like direct marketers for so long that we have forgotten how to act like brand marketers. But remember: How did Apple become the most valuable brand in the world? Through television commercials such as “1984” and print ads such as “Think different.”
Remain skeptical at all times. Marketers should be the most difficult people to whom to market, but even we can be bamboozled. Ask yourself: “How much money will this person or company make by popularizing this idea?” Whenever marketers claim that “everything has changed” or that something is “dead” or that some new buzzword “is the future of marketing,” ask for evidence. Make them cite their sources and explain their reasoning.
If you are advertising your products and services using Facebook Ads, you probably are aware of the major learning curve involved in truly understanding all that Facebook has to offer. To date, Facebook has arguably the best and most accurate data warehouse on the planet. With an active daily audience reach of 1.13 billion people worldwide, it's hard to not at least consider using Facebook advertising these days.
