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Most marketers are familiar with the complexities of managing siloed data across different platforms, and many have their own internal workarounds for dealing with those challenges. But as our digital teams develop and the volume of data we manage swells with the expansion of our martech stacks, tricky workarounds simply don’t cut it anymore. That’s where Customer Data Platforms come in.

Customer data platforms (CDPs) unify customer data from across various sources to create one “source of truth” for your entire organization. Marketers using CDPs can ensure that regardless of who is speaking to the customer — sales, customer service, etc. — everyone has the same view of that customer. 

Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce

Earlier this week, announcements from Adobe, Oracle and Salesforce addressed the need for unified data and steps toward bringing this to their customers: On Monday, Adobe released Triggered Journeys in Adobe Campaign, and Oracle announced it will partner with Accenture and Capgemini to help its customers tackle CDPs. And on Tuesday, Salesforce announced it is expanding its Customer 360 platform to help customers unify their data with a single customer ID. 

Adobe Experience Platform updates

The enhancements to the Adobe Experience Platform include Adobe Real-time Customer Data Platform, which seeks to help marketers deliver consistent, personalized experiences by providing a centralized data hub for its customers. Adobe says its platform will its users bring together known and unknown customers to activate customer profiles and can be integrated with other martech through APIs.

“In speaking with customers, they’re very much challenged with understanding how to be customer experience- and customer journey-focused. Brands understand how vital it is to deliver unforgettable, exceptional customer-led experiences for every individual at scale, yet the ‘how’ is the challenge,” said Kristin Naragon, head of GTM strategy at Adobe Campaigns. “Our customers expressed a need of a way to continuously map engagement and marketing activities to individuals’ preferences and context – across all the devices they may use, and in real-time – which is precisely what we’re addressing with Triggered Journeys in Adobe Campaign.”  

Salesforce expands Customer 360

Salesforce is expanding its Customer 360 platform to help its customers connect Salesforce apps, integrate with different systems and create a single, unified customer profile for each individual customer. The new features are expected to help marketers bridge gaps in their data to and deliver personalized, integrated interactions with customers at scale. The new features include data unification, consent management, advanced audience segmentation and personalized cross-channel engagement.

Oracle’s partnership with Accenture and Capgemini

In order to help its customers address challenges around CDPs, Oracle announced that it is partnering with two Oracle PartnerNetwork members, Accenture and Capgemini. Through the partnerships, the companies plan to help organizations understand and map different data sources, business outcomes and KPIs.

“The customer journey has changed beyond recognition, making it much harder to gain a single source of customer truth,” said Jane Arnold Hommet, global partner executive for Oracle at Capgemini. “As our clients adapt to the evolving nature of customer interactions, they are looking for customer data strategies and data sources that go beyond marketing which can enable anyone within their teams to have quick and easy access to comprehensive insights and intelligence.”

Prioritizing for CDPs

All three marketing cloud vendors have noted that they will address CDPs this year, and with enhanced capabilities, they take steps towards unifying customer data in real-time —combining customer profiles updated in real-time with real-time access to the profile for users across an organization. But the crowded CDP field offers a variety of options, leaving some marketers unsure of where to turn for the solution. Many CDPs offer real-time profiles and access, prediction modeling, personalization tools and segmentation.

“There has been a lot of doubt and confusion about CDP as a category, and what factors are needed for an effective CDP,” said David Raab, principal at Raab Associates and founder of the CDP Institute. “Salesforce was the last hold-out that didn’t store profiles in its CDP (as opposed to assembling them on-the-fly by reading data from source systems). This adds needed clarity to the market, establishing the knowledge base for asking ‘which CDP is right for me?’”

Why we should care

The CDP market shows no signs of slowing down, and the scalable solutions could make a significant difference in your marketing efforts. Even for savvy marketers who are able to string together their siloed customer data, the further challenges of understanding elements like timing, content optimization persist. With some of the largest martech players entering the mar, marketers can expect more marketing-friendly capabilities across CDPs to drive continued growth in the market. If you’re not currently using a CDP to unify your customer data, it’s time to start looking for the best solution for your organization.

Every business should have a local SEO strategy if they don’t want to miss out on high-intent qualified leads and this is especially crucial for local businesses who need to target people in their city or region.

The priority of local businesses is to secure high ranking positions in a particular location. With that said, it’s important to note that the nature of SEO is not stable, it keeps on changing. So, it would be best if you think of actionable and effective ways to strengthen your local SEO and secure high rankings.

When done correctly, local SEO can help you generate more high-quality traffic, leads, and conversions. In addition to this, it can also help you compete with big brands and stay relevant in the competition.

This post will guide you with four effective tactics to strengthen your local SEO strategy. Let’s get started.

1. Optimize your “Google My Business” page

One of the obvious yet the most important tactics to strengthen your local SEO strategy is to optimize your Google My Business page.

Listing your business with Google My Business makes it easier for people to discover your business. Once listed, your business will show up on Google Maps when users search for businesses like yours.

This will also help your business to rank better in search engine results. Your business can also appear on the sidebar of Google search results pages when Google verifies your business as legitimate. You should follow the below tips to optimize your Google My Business page and strengthen your local SEO:

• Perform a hygiene check to your Google My Business listing.
• Make sure that you provide detailed, accurate, and up-to-date information about your business.
• Add your business’ logo, relevant images, exact location, payment methods, the services or products you offer, and hours of operation.
• Encourage your customers to add their feedback and ratings.
• Always be quick to respond to your customer reviews.

These tips and tricks will help you strengthen your local SEO and generate more high-quality leads for your business.

2. Optimize your local business listings

Local directories are one of the most common places where users search for local businesses. So, you should add your business listings to all popular directories in your niche.

These directories often rank high in Google search results for local search queries. Anyone who checks these directories can be redirected to your website or business if you optimize your listings. This will not only help you increase your organic search traffic but will also help you get qualified leads.

Update the name, address, and phone section

These are the most important elements of your Google My Business listings because these will provide your contact details to potential customers. It is crucial that all of your details are accurate and updated, otherwise, you might lose potential, high-intent customers.

Also, ensure that there are no misspellings and avoid using abbreviations or anything confusing. If there is any change in your contact details, update all of your listings accordingly.

Also, ensure that these details are consistent across all listings. Otherwise, people might get confused and won’t know which one to trust.

3. Optimize your website content for local keywords

You should optimize your website content with keywords that are relevant to your local customers too.

You can use Google’s Keyword Planner to find relevant yet local keywords using the location filter. The tool can help you identify the most popular and relevant local keywords that you should target.

Once you have a list of local keywords, you should include them in your website content, meta descriptions, titles, and URLs.

However, you need to examine the competitiveness of your potential list of keywords before you use them. For this, you can use tools such as SpyFu to see if your competitors are also using these keywords. If the same keywords are strengthening your competitors’ local SEO, they might work well for you too.

However, a word of caution, never over-use keywords. That’s because keyword stuffing might make your website content seem spammy. Make sure that you evenly distribute your keywords throughout the content and add them in a way that they seem to fit in naturally.

For instance, Focus Booth, which is a famous photo booth in Toronto, uses their location-based keyword “Toronto photo booth” wherever possible.

As you can see in the screenshot below, they have mentioned the location of their business exactly at the center of their landing page. Similarly, their meta title also starts with the same local keyword.

Source: Focus Booth

4. Ask your happy customers to give positive online reviews

Positive reviews influence 68% of consumers to use your local business?

This suggests that positive reviews can help you attract new customers. So, go ahead and ask your happy customers to share positive feedback. You should also encourage them to give good ratings to your business online.

91% of millennials trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. So gaining positive reviews for your business online can help your brand appear as more trustworthy.

Always provide quality services to your customers. It will encourage them to become your brand advocates, write more positive reviews, and recommend your business to their friends and families.

Positive reviews can help you earn the trust of your target audience and drive more qualified leads. Here are some tips to motivate your customers to write good reviews for your business:

• Always make sure to ask for a review in person once a customer avails your services.
• You can also send them a text message or an email after the purchase, asking your customer to give a review.
• Always reply to customer reviews as soon as you read them. Thank your customers for positive reviews and encourage them to visit again.

If you receive a negative review, you should apologize for the discomfort and try to solve their problems politely and professionally. For instance, when you type “electricians in Seattle”, you can see a list of local businesses along with their ratings.

Source: Google

4. Create a mobile-responsive website

The use of mobiles is increasing significantly, and so is the number of mobile searches. The credit goes to the increasing accessibility and availability of high-speed internet.

According to Statista, the expected number of mobile users will reach 4.68 billion in 2019.

52.2% of all website traffic came from mobile devices in 2018. Also, this percentage is likely to increase further.

Source: Statista

That’s why you need to design and develop responsive websites to improve user experience on mobile devices.

Using a responsive website design can help you get an edge over your competitors and can also improve your local SEO. You should follow the below tricks to create a mobile-responsive website:

• Always optimize your images and videos to reduce page load time.
• Carefully plan your website layout and navigation menus. Make sure that it is easier for visitors to find what they are looking for.
• Improve page load speed. If your web page takes longer to load, it will be unable to hold a user’s attention.
• Add social media sharing buttons to your product pages and blog posts. Make sure that it is easy for visitors to share your content in their circles.

You can use tools such as Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to examine whether or not your website is mobile responsive. This tool can help you improve the mobile responsiveness of your site by providing you with valuable suggestions.

Source: Google

5. Strengthen your social media presence

Social media does have an impact on your presence in search engine results. Let’s discuss this in detail.

Establishing an excellent social media presence can help your brand to appear as more credible and trustworthy. Social media could also serve as a great source of backlinks and high-quality traffic.

You need to be very active on your social media handles. Proactively promoting your business on social media can help you increase your brand awareness and reach. This can help you attract more people to your brand, products, and/or services.

However, you should always post content that is relevant and useful to your audience. If they find your content valuable, they are more likely to follow you and visit your website. They can also share your content with their social networks.

Promoting your business on social media is an effective strategy to increase your brand’s visibility and traffic. It can also positively impact and strengthen your local SEO strategy in the long run.

Final thoughts

It is important to take time to develop an effective local SEO strategy. However, at the same time, it is also important to keep an eye on the recent SEO trends. That’s because the SEO industry is evolving fast.

You should always stay up-to-date about the latest SEO trends and capitalize on them to stay ahead in the competition.

Follow the actionable tactics we’ve discussed above to strengthen your local SEO strategy and rank higher in local searches.

Do you know of any other ways to improve your local SEO strategy? If so, please feel free to share them in the comments section.

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Google announced that podcasts will start showing up in SERPs. “Podcast SEO” is a great opportunity to build an audience through search traffic.

Spotify has expanded its ads capabilities with podcast listener targeting. Advertisers can reach Spotify Free podcast listeners, and in select markets, they’ll also be able to narrow their campaigns to certain podcast categories, such as “Comedy,” “Lifestyle & Health” and “Business & Technology.”

Spotify is investing heavily in podcasts. Earlier this year, Spotify spent a total of $400 million to acquire podcast companies Parcast, Gimlet and Anchor. On top of bringing those firms under its wing, the music streaming service has built up a respectable repertoire of exclusive series, including a multiyear deal with the Obamas.

Spotify has a new interface for paid subscribers with Music and Podcast sections.

Spotify has also begun rolling out a refreshed UI for paid subscribers. The update divides a user’s library into two main categories (music and podcasts) that reflects Spotify’s emphasis on podcasting as a potential revenue stream.

Why we should care. U.S. podcast ad revenue grew 53% in 2018, according to the IAB, and with 32% of Americans (age 12+) having listened to a podcast in the past month, according to Edison Research, marketers and platforms are seeing untapped potential. Spotify is looking to entrench itself early to become a leading platform in the sector.

Insufficient campaign conversion data has been a barrier to growth for podcast advertising. Marketers have attempted to overcome this by using direct response calls to action (such giving listeners a unique code or URL) or by launching campaigns aimed at awareness. Targeting at scale has also been limited. Spotify’s newest capabilities help begin to address those limitations.

Verizon Media has rolled out a new tool for its DSP users to offer more transparency into the programmatic ad platform. The tool, said Verizon Media, is designed to give advertisers a comprehensive view of the programmatic landscape — showing reach and cost analysis by channel (display, CTV, DOOH, audio, etc.), ad format and exchange. It also provides forecasting insights.

“With today’s announcement, we are continuing to take a leadership role, bringing our DSP customers granular omnichannel intelligence at the auction level, giving them everything they need to understand how and where to best allocate budgets,” said Verizon Media’s chief business officer Iván Markman.

Why we should care

Advertisers have long been calling for more transparency from programmatic platforms and exchanges. With this feature, media buyers see granular reach and cost analysis for each channel, format and exchange and then forecasts based on those insights to inform their campaign strategy, creative and targeting optimizations.

“Adding Verizon Media’s capability to our own transparency tools allows us to understand deeper bidding insights at the auction level, ensuring that we are accessing the inventory through the optimal path. This level of DSP supply path flexibility should be the expectation moving forward,” said Omnicom Media Group’s EVP of global partnerships Steve Katelman.

More on the news

A healthy and quality backlink profile can help you stay ahead of the competition. After Google rolled out the Penguin algorithm in 2012, it became clear that the quality of backlinks matters, not just their quantity. The more is not the merrier anymore. 

Luckily, over the years, it has become easier to analyze and monitor backlinks thanks to a number of specialized tools available on the market.

Through the use of such tools, you can dissect any backlink profile and discover where the competitors reverse engineer their SEO strategy to generate new backlinks. Plus, you can find out what kind of content performs best for obtaining certain types of backlinks or social engagement.

This post focuses on five tools agencies can take advantage of to benchmark the link quality of their clients against competitors, keep an eye on specific backlinks, and discover opportunities to partner up with other websites to reach the set SEO goals.

1. SE Ranking

Source: SE Ranking

SE Ranking offers a complete range of tools designed to help you stay on top of your entire SEO workflow, including backlinks.

With the Backlink Checker tool, you can discover all incoming links to any website, regardless of whether it belongs to you, a client, or a competitor.

Along with the full list of backlinks, referring domains, and Do/NoFollow links, the tool provides data on the backlink’s status, specifies the anchor text, the date the link was last seen and added on, the destination URL, and the Domain Trust score. Plus, you can add filters to conveniently sort the data.

The entire list of backlinks can then be added to a website in a single click where the data can be further analyzed. That’s where the other backlink tool comes into play.

Source: SE Ranking

The Backlink Monitoring tool enables you to work closely with the backlinks that have been added to a website, and get daily reports on any changes. This is where all the day-to-day backlink management tasks are performed.

By connecting Google Search Console, the list of backlinks will constantly get updated automatically. Otherwise, you will have to use Backlink Checker every now and then to pull up an updated list of backlinks.

Furthermore, you can switch between tabs to get an overview of the backlinks, see all the anchor texts, and set up a Disavow file to signal to Google what backlinks you don’t want it to take into account when analyzing the reference weight of the website.

Now, in addition to the parameter data provided in the Backlink Checker tool, the Backlink Monitoring tool offers a lot more information on each backlink, such as Google Index Status, Moz DA, Referring IP, Country, External Links, Alexa rank, and Social shares. This data gives you a good grasp of the backlink profile at hand.

Besides providing an array of backlink parameter data by default, the Backlink Monitoring tool gives you an opportunity to specify additional information on each backlink via custom parameters that need to be filled out manually, such as Source, Price, Anchor type, Category, Backlink manager, Setting up dates, Validity period, and Notes. Doing so will give you a convenient way to go through large amounts of data.

All in all, the tool provides comprehensive data, the interface is very clean, modern, and definitely not an eye-ache to look at. On top of that, the white label feature along with automatic reporting makes it easy to communicate with clients.

What else comes with the package

• Website audit
• Keyword rank tracker
• Keyword suggestion tool
• Competitor research
• Page changes monitoring
• Social media management
• Keyword Grouper
• Lead generator
• Search volume checker
• Index status checker
• Page changes monitoring
• API

Pricing

It’s a paid tool (starting at $39/month) but it offers a free 14-day trial. The Enterprise package suitable for agencies is available for $189/month.

2. LinkMiner

If you’re looking for a backlink analysis tool that’s specifically designed to help you find backlink building opportunities, LinkMiner is the right solution for you.

Just like other backlink analysis tools, LinkMiner also enables you to check the backlinks of any imaginable site, including your clients’ and their competitors’. Naturally, it also has a lot of other useful features.

With LinkMiner, you can analyze up to 50 backlinks a day at no cost regardless of the access level. And when analyzing such backlinks, you can click any one to get an instant preview of that website along with the highlighted anchor text, referring website title and URL — and decide whether or not it makes sense to replicate the backlink.

Furthermore, the service automatically breaks backlinks down into groups based on their category like Q&A, blog, forum, making it easier to spot new backlink opportunities and tag your favorite backlinks for later use. LinkMiner also provides a number of third-party metrics such as Citation Flow, Trust Flow, Do/NoFollow attributes to help you evaluate a link’s strength.

The provided third-party metrics can be a great way of analyzing the backlinks and determining the most valuable ones. Plus, the system will notify you if any backlinks break or go missing, but it’ll be up to you to reclaim the link from the site owner.

As for LinkMiner in general, it has some flaws that are a result of the tool being too simple for experienced SEO specialists, but it’s great if you’re just starting out with building links, so be sure to give it a go.

What else comes with the package

LinkMiner is a part of the Mangools SEO suite which also includes:

• KWFinder
• SERPChecker
• SERPWatcher

Pricing

It is a paid tool (starting at $44/month) but it offers a free 10-day trial. The Agency package is available for $79.90/month.

3. URL Profiler

URL Profiler is a powerful software-based SEO tool that can pull bulk data from sites at a domain and URL level. Considering the fact that there are plenty of SEO tools out there like Majestic, MozScape, Ahrefs, Google, MY Addr and Copyscape, to name a few, URL Profiler was designed to group such tools to provide comprehensive insights under one roof.

The tool can actually be used to perform a number of SEO tasks that include the audit of content, social media, and Google penalties, link prospecting, keyword rank tracking, and, most importantly, backlink analysis.

URL Profiler analyzes the quality of backlink profiles, allowing you to quickly go through a huge number of links by analyzing various data such as location, link type, and the anchor text for spamming and unnatural use of keywords.

Since there’s a lot of data to work within this tool, it is up to your knowledge and experience to select the metrics that you value most.

Once you fill everything out, the tool produces an Excel file with multiple sheets containing a detailed analysis of every specified URL. You can look at the link score together with its explanation, view a list of URLs on Google’s blacklist, automatically get the contact info of all the sites you want to reach out to, and a number of other metrics.

With the power of this data, you can make informed decisions regarding every single backlink. To facilitate data analysis, you can customize the settings and look at URL and domain data separately to have a clear grasp of why certain URLs rank higher.

To sum up, URL Profiler is a tool for advanced SEO professionals as there’s a learning curve newbies will have to go through. Moreover, if you’re already using a number of the biggest SEO tools on the market, then URL Profiler is a what you need as it puts everything in front of you in a single data-rich, but, unfortunately, boring interface.

What else comes with the package

• Keyword tracking
• Analytics
• Data export
• External integrations
• Link tracking
• Data import
• Multi-user

Pricing

It is a paid tool (starting at $19.95 + VAT/month) but it does offer a free 14-day trial. The Agency package is available for $64.95/month.

4. Monitor Backlinks

The name is an instant giveaway, but, either way, Monitor Backlinks was designed to help professionals check their and their competitors’ backlinks.

With this tool, you can find and keep track of backlinks, and Google keyword rankings on autopilot via email notifications. So, whenever a competitor successfully uses a keyword to obtain a new quality backlink, you’ll have a chance to act quickly and not let your clients fall behind.

Monitor Backlinks gives you an overview of your backlink profile, providing details on the domains that are helping your SEO efforts, and those that are not. Additionally, the tool sends out reports full of insights on the competition, highlighting what keyword resulted in a high Google rank, as well as backlink data. With data like that, all that’s required from you is to reverse engineer the process to devise a solution that works for your clients.

The tool is aimed at helping you build a strong backlink profile and come up with an SEO strategy to foster business and traffic growth. To help you achieve this, the tool is packed with the most critical SEO metrics that give you all the data you need in one neat interface.

The graph in the dashboard deserves a special mention. It allows you to measure keyword-based site traffic dynamics, as well as the efforts to build a healthier backlink profile. Such graphs provide information to clients that they can easily visually comprehend without doing any digging.

What else comes with the package

• External link count
• Backlink status
• Import/Export
• Bookmarklet
• Expiration date
• Disavow links export
• Tags and notes

Pricing

It is a paid tool (starting at $24.90/month) that offers a free 30-day trial. For agencies, you can request a custom quote, if you want to control more than 10 domains ($187.43/month).

5. Mention

The last tool from this roundup is a web and social media brand reputation management and monitoring solution called Mention. Evidently, unlike the other tools described here, this one isn’t a backlink analysis tool per se.

In fact, we included it in the list because it can really help you get good topical backlinks by notifying you of all online mentions you’re interested in. Say someone is discussing a client’s brand, product, service, or content, but doesn’t link out — join in on the conversation and request that a link to the target website be added.

The tool can easily keep track of keyword-based mentions in over 40 languages across billions of sources online in real time. But what you want to be on the lookout for are articles that mentioned your client but did not link out to the site. Plus, the tool’s influencer discovery features can assist you in finding popular people who can help you get the word out.

Fortunately, you don’t have to do this work manually. Set up to receive daily email alerts of all mentions on that day, or, alternatively, get notified via the desktop/mobile app. Plus, you can get laser-precise results by filtering them by sentiment, location, and gender.

The best part for agencies is that all the data, reports, and mentions can be white-labeled with the client’s logo and sent to them automatically.

What else comes with the package

• Filter out online resources you don’t want to track
• Share alerts with clients and assign tasks to colleagues
• Get notified about priority alerts
• The service studies your behavior to hide irrelevant alerts

Pricing

It is a paid tool (starting at $29/month) but it has a free 14-day trial that allows you to track 500 mentions for 3 search terms. The Enterprise package is available for $600/month or even more.

Summing up

Although all of these tools aren’t free, they offer some type of cost-free trial. For this reason, we’d recommend trying them all out before choosing one solution for your backlink analysis and monitoring needs.

The bottom line is that you should consolidate the data from all these tools to get a clear picture of your clients’ and their competitors’ backlink profiles. Even some of these solutions with huge amounts of data are lacking in user-friendliness and design, and may even provide different crawl depths, index stats, and other valuable metrics for the same URLs.

So, if you’re serious about backlink analysis, it’s best to start using several of the mentioned tools and deciding on those that suit your needs most as you go along.

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Everyone in attendance during the SMX Advanced presentation with Amy Bishop and Michelle Morgan got an amazing deep dive on using paid media channels to effectively guide users from discovery to conversion. There was a ton of information in this session I couldn’t fit into this recap, but I wanted to share my main takeaways Amy and Michelle presented.

Know your market

It all starts with knowing your market segmentation. You should conduct an exercise (links to the templates in the image below) and define in each area which product and service is the best fit based on which problems you are trying to solve.  Besides the best fit, you should also try and figure out which users may be the worst fit for your business.

We also must separate the buyer’s journey from the sales journey. Maybe people consider the two to be the same, but the journeys are completely different. The sales team is looking at their job performance and doing what is best to get users to close. The buyer is becoming aware of a problem and then researching what to buy and where to buy it from to solve their initial problem. It’s our job as marketers to figure out who the audience is, but since users’ paths can be completely different, we need to research audiences in ways that make sense for each user.

Using audiences in a meaningful way

As people take different turns in their buyer’s journey, we can utilize audiences to better craft our strategies and market to these users. One of the best things in our industry is most of the major advertising platforms offer audience insights tools. The biggest takeaway is that these tools tell you how your audience or personas translate into the exact targeting options on the platforms.

• Facebook Audience Insights – This is really great for creating targeting personas. Identify top converting demographics and zero in on those first. Further segment by layering interests and other demographics. Identify new interests to target, and then monitor performance to flesh out and validate your personas.
• Google Ads Audience Insights – We can look at any audience we have (must have at least 1,000 users in it) to see which in-market and affinity audiences your base audience belongs to. Look at customer lists, converters, high volume purchasers, etc. to get a better understanding of how these audiences are comprised.
• Google Analytics – Also has in-market and affinity data in a broader scope, but we can layer on many other demographic insights.

There are many ways to look at your audience data between the channels. Look for patterns in between the platforms to find which ones should be tested first depending on the persona and where that persona might be in the buyer’s journey.

Map it out to make sure you know the information each user needs, what device they typically use, what action you want the user to take, and how you can measure the success of that action. And as we create different actions from each persona, we can build audiences off of these actions to create remarketing audiences to use to keep guiding the user to eventual purchase.

Calls-to-actions that make sense

We need to always keep in mind what we are asking our users to do. It’s not about what we as business owners (or marketers) want the user to do; it’s about what’s best for the user in that moment. We already mapped out the path to purchase in the section previous, but what action is holding these users up that is preventing them from moving forward? We need to work to figure this out to make sure we can have the proper content and CTA to keep them moving further along.

Ideally, you want to have CTAs for all stages of the funnel. Video views are great for top of funnel marketing because we’re not asking for a firm commitment from someone who may not even know who your brand is. This is going to be more effective than asking for the demo on the first interaction because the user most likely doesn’t know who you are or why they need your brand. But as users get deeper in the funnel, we can be more aggressive with our CTAs as the user shows more interest as time goes on.

Messaging in multi-channel

We also have to back away from the thought that people only use one channel throughout the buyer’s journey. Users do not only use Google or only use Facebook. You can’t make people use a channel. Advertisers have to go where their users like to go. Many of these channels can be used from top to bottom of the funnel. And as we expand our marketing message throughout these channels, we need to make sure the CTAs also match across the channels to make sure we’re serving the same message to users depending on their persona.

Here are targeting suggestions from Amy and Michelle depending on where the user is in the funnel.

• Top of Funnel – Utilize interest-based targeting, lookalike/similar audiences, affinity and in-market audiences as well as other custom audiences to fill the funnel. Be sure to exclude your lower funnel targets to make sure the top of funnel message doesn’t get repeated as users continue the journey.
• Middle of Funnel – Go after visitor traffic, repeat purchasers and loyalists, video viewers, and anyone else who engaged with social media posts or your mid-funnel content.
• Bottom of Funnel – Cart abandoners, form abandoners, visitors of high-intent pages like pricing, low funnel customer match audiences.

Let the user convert on the channel of their choosing. Create identical audiences for each stage of the funnel on all applicable channels if you can. Also, don’t forget about creating identical exclusions to make sure you’re not showing users any ads outside of where they are in the funnel. The more we keep our ad message and audience targeting to the persona across each channel, the better chance we have of getting the user to move further along in the funnel to eventual purchase.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

June 13 saw the release of a new tool by London-based company Trint which can assist the crawlability and visibility of video content in search engines.

The Trint Player has been unveiled at the Global Editors Network Summit in Athens where it will be used to publish video and transcripts of keynotes by Google News founder Krishna Bharat and Bloomberg Editor-In-Chief John Micklethwait.

Video to dominate traffic and SERPs

In two years, video content is expected to make up 80% of online traffic. Google is increasingly returning video content in its SERPs and delivering it in a variety of ways, depending on device used and the type of content that is searched for.

To date, search engines can only find a video based on words in the title, the description and in a small amount of accompanying metadata. The embeddable Trint Player works by automatically attaching a transcript to videos using AI.

A search engine indexing a page with a video published in the player will be able to record all the words from the attached transcript and show the spoken words in search results.

The transcript functionality is interactive. Users can click on a word and the tool will navigate to that part of the video. It auto-scrolls as the video plays and you can easily follow along or view the text without image and/or sound.

I gave the searchability of the above Elon Musk video a quick test by Googling “we have an amazing product to show you tonight.” Indeed, the page on the Trint site which is hosting the video ranks very well – just below some news sites which have manually taken some quotes from Musk’s presentation. It is also worth noting that the embed in this instance is a fair way down the page.

Benefits for news sites and marketers

To date, manual transcription has been a very laborious and timely job. Understandably, taking time on such a task for SEO benefit is not necessarily a big priority for journalists. The Trint Player can do this job for them with minimal legwork from the user – and with 99% accuracy according to the press materials. Trint already boasts enterprise clients in The Associated Press, NBCUniversal, The Washington Post, Vice News and Der Spiegel.

It is also easy to see the potential for marketers and brands keen to get the most from their video content. According to Vidyard, 83% of marketers say video is becoming more important to them. Webinars and demos – precisely the types of videos which include a lot of unique content – are the most common types of video marketers are investing in.

Looking beyond YouTube

The player has been available to Trint customers in beta since February. It is currently compatible with videos published on YouTube and the company is awaiting feedback from users before exploring compatibility with other video hosting sites.

It builds on existing work the company have been doing with their productivity platform which uses automated transcription to change the way professionals work with audio/video to produce content and insights.

The company has been backed by Google Digital News Innovation Fund and the Knight Enterprise Fund. The launch of the Trint Player comes on the heels of the business closing $4.5 million in Series A funding, with follow-on investment from Horizons Lab, the Hong Kong-based seed fund operated by the managers of Horizons Ventures, as well as institutional investors including TechNexus and The Associated Press.

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VidMob has raised $25 million in its latest round of funding. The company said it will use the money to further develop its Agile Creative Studio, an API platform that curates first-party creative data to offer insights for optimizing video ad campaigns.

Why we should care

VidMob’s Agile Creative Studio employs, what the company defines as, first-party creative data to identify the creative assets within a video ad that yield the strongest performance. VidMob’s technology uses machine learning to analyze video ads and then uses that data to modify video ads in real-time so that they deliver more of an impact.

“The ad actually actually improves over time through this iterative process of creating and learning,” VidMob CEO Alex Collmer told TechCrunch. He said the company is trying to build what it thinks of as an API for creative, “Today, that friction point is frequently with our platform partners, with the Facebooks and Snaps, but we see it expanding to other areas where you see imagery as the central point of communication.”

The company’s video creation, analytics and optimization tools are designed for social video advertisers. VidMob is a certified creative partner with all of the major social networks, including Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn. With more money to put toward its Agile Creative Studio technology, it will be able to offer advertisers a more comprehensive platform for their video advertising efforts.

More on the news

• VidMob’s Agile Creative Studio platform is still in beta, but the company reports it has already analyzed more than 280,000 ad assets using the technology.
• This Series B funding was led by BuildGroup, with additional investments from Acadia Woods, Herington LLC, Interlock Partners, Macanta Investments, LP’s of Manifest and You & Mr. Jones.
• VidMob has now raised a total of $45 million since 2015 when it raised $2 million in seed funding to build out at marketplace for video editing professionals.

When you have a smaller digital marketing budget, every dollar counts, and you often need to get creative to make sure your ads show where you want.

In this post, I’ll walk through a few important tactics to utilize if you are launching a new program or if you have an established program with a smaller budget.

1. Retargeting site visitors and purchasers
2. Mid-funnel remarketing
3. Bid adjustments: Geo-targeting and ad scheduling
4. Search terms reports: Exact keywords and negative keywords
5. InMarket and Similar Audiences for competitive terms

1. Retargeting site visitors and purchasers

We all know that it takes more money to acquire a brand-new customer than it does a customer who has already purchased or otherwise engaged with the brand. Paid search and paid social can be a very competitive space, so it’s crucial to use audience targeting to the best of your abilities. One easy way to get the biggest bang for your buck, with lower CPAs (Cost per acquisitions) and higher ROAS (return on advertising spend), is to retarget site visitors and purchasers. These users have already shown intent and interest in your brand, making it easier for them to engage.

It is important within your search campaigns to either segment these users into their own campaign or bid-up on them within your current campaigns. For GDN (Google Display Network) and paid social, try to get in front of these users with a special message to bring them back to the site, and keep these campaigns separate from your acquisition campaigns. For both paid search and paid social, consider special messaging or discounts for these users to help them convert.

2. Mid-funnel remarketing

Many B2B or lead gen businesses will focus their paid search and paid social campaigns on just getting that upper-funnel lead and will then let their sales team and email convert that lead down-funnel. Another way to ramp up the success of your paid social campaigns is to create mid-funnel remarketing campaigns to target upper-funnel leads who have not converted down the funnel. Paid social can also help push users to convert and helps complement the efforts of your sales team and email. One tactic is to stay in front of leads with a case study or white paper that talks about some of your brand’s biggest value propositions and how they help the current problems of your target audience.

3. Bid adjustments: Geo-targeting and ad scheduling

When you have limited advertising funds, it is important to allocate those funds to the areas that are performing the most efficiently, just as you would for keywords. I recommend analyzing these segments and adjusting bids accordingly:

• Geographical
• Device
• Time of day and day of the week
• Audience
• HHI (Household Income)
• Demographics (Age and gender)

For example: If you are a B2B company, you might see that CPA rises during the weekend. To take advantage of this observation, pull back on Saturday and Sunday to save more money for more efficient days of the week. Our AdWords history has shown that clients lower CPA by up to 30% by smarter bidding according to performance in these segments.

4. Search query reports: Exact keywords and negative keywords

Search query reports should be your best friend. Review the search query reports specifically for your broad terms to monitor poor matches and new top performers. Long tail keywords can add value to the account and provide reductions in CPA, so it is important to build them out if they are performing well in matching to your broad keywords. These broad keywords can also lead to poor matching, though, so it is important to review the search queries and add irrelevant or poor matching search queries as negative keywords.  For example, let’s say you are a skincare company that sells facial oil and are bidding on the keyword “facial oil.” You begin seeing your click-through rate start to decrease. You look into search queries and start to see that you are matching to “olive oil,” which is not a relevant search. You would add that as a negative to the account to cut back on wasted spend for irrelevant queries.

5. InMarket and Similar Audiences for competitive terms

Broad keywords can lead to high competition, high CPAs, and lower impression share, especially if bigger brands are part of the mix. That doesn’t mean you should ignore them; bid on potentially valuable broad terms, but restrict bidding to InMarket and Similar Audiences so your ads only serve to audiences you’re confident are interested in your product or service.

Small budgets might seem to lead to initial challenges, especially if the market is highly competitive or efficiency targets are not currently being met. Make sure to incorporate these steps into your marketing to drive greater efficiency.

If you have other tactics or strategies that have worked for your SMB, leave a comment.

Lauren Crain is a Client Services Lead in 3Q Digital’s SMB division, 3Q Incubate.

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