Gringo Marketing Blog

All attribution reports in Google Ads will soon include information about cross-device activity and conversions.

This will provide marketers with insight into how people interact with ads on multiple devices.

Previously, only the Devices, Assisting Devices, and Device Paths attribution reports included cross-device activity.

Cross-device activity is being added to all reports to address an issue with inconsistent conversion counts across different reports.

When this update rolls out, Users should expect to see more consistent conversion counts. However, the existing data will not be changed.

This update is coming into effect on May 1, 2019. As mentioned, the reports will not include cross-device data prior to that date.

That means reports will contain data using different calculation methods.

“If your active date range extends before and after May 1, 2019, your conversion metrics will be based on two different calculations — one calculation for the days prior to May 1, 2019, and another calculation for subsequent days beginning with May 1, 2019.”

For a complete list of metrics that will be updated to include cross-device activity, see this Google Ads help article.

Facebook is expanding its Ad Library tool to include information about all active ads from any page.

Previously, Ad Library only included information for ads related to politics or issues of national importance.

It was also limited to searching by keywords. Now you can search by page.

In addition to finding all ads a page is running, you can also see details about total impressions, who saw the ad, and how much was spent on it.

Ad Library contains information about ads across all of Facebook’s platforms.

Here’s an example showing what I found when searching for ads that Google is running.

As you can see, there’s a drop-down menu to filter ads by country. Ad Library will also point out when an ad is dynamic and has multiple versions.

Be sure to make your searches count when using Ad Library. Apparently, you can get locked out for conducting too many searches in a short period of time.

More Information About Pages

Ad Library will now display more information about Facebook pages themselves, such as:

• Page creation date
• Previous Page merges
• Name changes
• Primary country location of people who manage the Page

All of the above information will be available within a new “Page Transparency” section on Facebook pages.

Previously, you had to click “Info and Ads” to find this information.

Ad Library Report

With this update, Facebook is making improvements to the Ad Library Report as well.

“Starting in mid-May, we’ll update the Ad Library Report for ads related to politics or issues daily, rather than weekly.”

Reports will be downloadable for everyone.

Software giant Adobe let fly a bevy of partnership announcements at its annual Summit in Las Vegas this week, confirming tie-ups with everyone from Microsoft to Drift to Roku to ServiceNow — with each deal involving data connections to fuel more efficient and powerful marketing.

B2B data integrations include LinkedIn. In addition to the Open Data Initiative details from Wednesday, Adobe has also expanded its relationship with Microsoft to bring together key data sources, including LinkedIn, Marketo, Adobe Audience Manager and Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales.

The linkages aim to provide B2B marketers with better information for their Account-based Marketing initiatives, so they can more easily identify buying groups within targeted accounts and deliver personalized content.

“Orchestrating the engagement of multiple individuals in a complex marketing and sales journey is at the heart of account-based experiences,” said Steve Lucas, senior vice president of Digital Experience business at Adobe. “With these new account-based capabilities, marketing and sales teams will have increased alignment around the people and accounts they are engaging.”

Specifically, Adobe said marketers would be able to use the predictive modeling and automation capabilities of Marketo Engage Account Profiling to find the correct targets to engage with LinkedIn Matched Audiences. Additionally, the audience data within Adobe Audience Manager DMP can be used with contact-based campaigns on LinkedIn and other channels.

Conversational ABM with Marketo and Drift. Adobe’s partnership with conversational marketing platform Drift is bringing even more ABM goodies to marketers’ toolboxes. Together, the companies are offering what they’re calling Conversational ABM for Marketo Engage, which will let marketers have real-time personalized conversations with members of a target account’s buying committee whenever they visit the brand’s website.

That “conversation” can take the form of a chatbot interaction, a relevant piece of content, or an opportunity to immediately book a meeting with the sales rep handling their account.

Because customers have more power than ever before in today’s environment, David Cancel, CEO of Drift said, “whoever makes it easier to buy, wins — yet most B2B websites add friction and force buyers to jump through hoops just to talk to someone. ”

WPP integration and consulting firm Verticurl has signed on to help customers quickly add this capability to their marketing stacks.

OTT with Roku. The Adobe partnership with Roku aims to arm advertisers with more tools to precisely target consumers watching OTT TV programming. Adobe says its customers using Adobe Advertising Cloud, Adobe Audience Manager and Adobe Analytics can employ the first-party data in those platforms to find their known targets on the Roku platform, reach them with ads and measure the results.

“Roku has a direct, first-party relationship with its consumers and the most advanced ad capabilities in OTT,” said Scott Rosenberg, general manager, Platform business, Roku. “This partnership gives Adobe clients a seamless way to activate their data and reach customers who’ve moved their TV viewing to Roku devices.”

Bringing customer service into the equation with ServiceNow. Meanwhile, Adobe has teamed with ServiceNow — a digital workflow and productivity player — to link customer service data with the other data marketers are gathering and employing. The idea is that the intelligence that goes into winning a customer could be leveraged by the customer service team after the purchase, and then marketers could employ that service data to up-sell or drive loyalty programs.

The companies say this kind of integration will bring together the Adobe Experience Cloud and the ServiceNow Now Platform,“…to provide enterprises with real-time actionable data across the customer journey so they can better manage and grow their digital businesses,” said Shantanu Narayen, president and CEO, Adobe.

Why you should care. Though each of Adobe’s partnership announcements are light on details, for now, they signal some of the areas where marketers can expect new capabilities to become available. The focus on data integrations that span areas of marketing from advertising to customer service points to a broader trend of helping marketers get data out of silos.

This article was originally published on MarTech Today. Check it out for more martech news and features.

About The Author

Pamela Parker is Content Manager at Marketing Land, MarTech Today and Search Engine Land. She’s a well-respected authority on digital marketing, having reported and written on the subject since 1998. She’s a former managing editor of ClickZ, and worked on the business side helping independent publishers monetize their sites at Federated Media Publishing.

Almost anyone running a B2B or B2C business knows that Google and other search engines like quality links, and could consider them as one of the top ranking factors.

So, if you want your website to rank higher than your competition on search engines, a proper link building strategy is not debatable.

However, if you’re going to implement link building in your 2019 digital marketing strategy, you have to do it the right way.

Search engines shroud their algorithms in secrecy, so the SEO and link building industry is flooded with many myths that will never get you results but can get you into a lot of trouble.

To avoid investing resources into wasted link building efforts, pay attention to these nine link building myths that won’t get you anywhere in 2019.

1. Guest posting is dead

This myth started to get really popular in 2014 when Google’s Matt Cutt said,

“Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company. So stick a fork in it: guest blogging is done; it’s just gotten too spammy.”

Because of how direct and stern this warning by Cutt was, it’s understandable that many people believe that guest blogging is genuinely dead.

However, Cutt later clarified this statement by saying that what he meant was spammy blog posts for the sake of SEO purposes was dead.

This means that publishing relevant and resourceful blog posts on authoritative sites for building links, exposure, branding, increased reach, and building a community is still very relevant in 2019.

2. Links not relevant to your niche are low-quality links

This is a prevalent myth that contradicts the fundamental idea of link building in 2019. To rank high, you need to get top authority sites to link back to your site. To get these sites to feature your link, you need to provide relevant content for them. Moreover, whether or not that content is related to your niche or not, it still improves your ranking.

So, when your site receives a non-relevant backlink from a non-relevant niche, Google will not frown upon these links.

3. Building tons of links to a single piece of content is spammy

Many people still think that building tons of links to a single piece of content could negatively impact their keyword rank. Again, this link building myth contradicts itself because it goes against the idea of organic link building.

If search engines do not penalize highly original and valuable webpage that other websites link to because of how helpful and informative their content is, why would they consider a piece of content with tonnes of backlinks spammy?

However, if your links are low quality (from spammy content networks and directories), you could be slapped with a manual penalty or significant link profile devaluation.

4. Link building is irrelevant if you already rank high in search queries

It’s sad, but many marketers still believe this. Link building, like other digital marketing strategies for social media marketing, blogging, and others should be consistent. Not only because it helps you maintain your position above your competition in search queries, but also because it helps you with the following:

• Increase your brand’s visibility across the web
• Increase traffic to your domain
• Showcase your brand’s authority and value

Link building is not just about increasing the volume of links to your site; it also exposes your business to new customers.

5. Google will always prioritize sites with higher backlinks over others in search queries

The truth is there isn’t a “one size fits all” for search engine ranking. There are about 200 ranking factors related to UX, mobile usability, technical performance, query intent, and many more.

Google’s ranking factors are very dynamic. According to Google Webmaster John Mueller, the search engine focuses on a particular query intent to select its ranking factors.

So, while link building is a valuable ranking factor, Google algorithms find a balance between its 200 ranking factors before displaying results to a search query.

6. All pages/posts/links on your site have an equal ranking value

When people talk about this myth, they usually mean either of these two things:

• Every post on your site has the same authority or
• All links on a page are of equal ranking value

Both statements are wrong. In the first instance, a post that has been linked back to by high authority sites will rank higher than others which have not. There are tools like website auditor which can be used to check the individual ranking value of your site’s posts.

As for the second statement, Google’s John Muller confirmed that their search algorithms take into account the position of a link on a webpage it appears.

So take advantage of link positioning. SEO experts like Bill Slawski and Rand Fishkin recommend positioning your links higher on the page because the higher a link is placed on the page, the more it weighs, and the more value it passes to the pages it links to.

7. Internal links don’t help you rank higher

While high-quality external links are one of the most important ranking factors, internal links also play a huge roll in helping you rank higher. This is because linking from higher to lower ranking pages can give a massive boost to weak pages. Interlinking related content on your website also creates what search engine experts call a “topic cluster”.

In 2019, topic clusters are significant because when a search query is made for a particular topic and search engines find relevant topic clusters on your website, your site will be considered an authority in this field and will automatically rank higher than other sites with relevant single pages.

8. Stuffing your image alt texts with relevant keywords helps you rank higher

Image links are not bad for SEO. However, too much of anything is never a good idea. And this applies to image link building. While there are no penalties for using image links, stuffing your image alt tags with keywords to manipulate rankings is against Google’s guidelines.

Before Google started using AI and machine learning to understand images, people had to stuff their alt tags with text to ensure the pictures appeared in relevant search queries. However, in 2019, both text and image are translated into the same language in coding.

9. Wikipedia and Wiki-like pages are the Gods of domain authority building

Many people are convinced that getting a link back from pages like Wikipedia will automatically give them a higher ranking authority because of the exceptionally high domain authority Wikipedia has. But sadly, digital marketing has as many facts as it does fallacies.

Information directly from Google’s Garry Illyes tells us that Google ranks Wikipedia just like any other website.

Wikipedia is ranked just like any other website.

— Gary “鯨理” Illyes (@methode) December 16, 2016

In conclusion

Don’t allow the fear of spamming keep you from harnessing the many fantastic benefits of implementing a link building strategy.

Also, although Google’s dynamic algorithms are usually hidden, SEO and link building agencies like seopow study them every day to let you know what’s a fact and what’s a fable.

Related reading

The most important steps to focus on for your customers when trying to improve your UX for SEO. Search query, design, navigation, snippets, content, etc.

Fuzzy Lookup is an Excel add-in that can be a clever solution for automating SEO tasks. Here’s how you can use it for 404 and site migration redirects.

What exactly agencies need when it comes to website audits and what to look for in choosing a tool. Five specific recommendations, screenshots, examples.

All you need to know about using APIs for better, more productive SEO tasks — content curation, keyword analysis, link monitoring, site performance, etc.

Google’s John Mueller recently “liked” a tweet by search marketing consultant Barry Adams (of Polemic Digital) that concisely stated the purpose of the robots.txt exclusion protocol. He freshened up an old topic and quite possibly gave us a new way to think about it.

Google Can Index Blocked Pages

The issue began when a publisher tweeted that Google had indexed a website that was blocked by robots.txt.

John Mueller responded:

“URLs can be indexed without being crawled, if they’re blocked by robots.txt – that’s by design.

Usually that comes from links from somewhere, judging from that number, I’d imagine from within your site somewhere.”

How Robots.txt Works

Barry (@badams) tweeted:

“Robots.txt is a crawl management tool, not an index management tool.”

We often think of Robots.txt as a way to block Google from including a page from Google’s index. But robots.txt is just a way to block which pages Google crawls.

That’s why if another site has a link to a certain page, then Google will crawl and index the page (to a certain extent).

Barry then went on to explain how to keep a page out of Google’s index:

“Use meta robots directives or X-Robots-Tag HTTP headers to prevent indexing – and (counter-intuitively) let Googlebot crawl those pages you don’t want it to index so it sees those directives.”

NoIndex Meta Tag

The noindex meta tag allows crawled pages to be kept out of Google’s index. It doesn’t stop the crawl of the page, but it does assure the page will be kept out of Google’s index.

The noindex meta tag is superior to the robots.txt exclusion protocol for keeping a web page from being indexed.

Here is what John Mueller said in a tweet from August 2018

“…if you want to prevent them from indexing, I’d use the noindex robots meta tag instead of robots.txt disallow.”

Robots Meta Tag Has Many Uses

A cool thing about the Robots meta tag is that it can be used to solve issues until a better fix comes along.

For example, a publisher was having trouble generating 404 response codes because the angularJS framework kept generating 200 status codes.

His tweet asking for help said:

Hi @JohnMu I´m having many troubles with managing 404 pages in angularJS, always give me a 200 status on them. Any way to solve it? Thanks

John Mueller suggested using a robots noindex meta tag. This would cause Google to drop that 200 response code page from the index and regard that page as a soft 404.

“I’d make a normal error page and just add a noindex robots meta tag to it. We’ll call it a soft-404, but that’s fine there.”

So, even though the web page is showing a 200 response code (which means the page was successfully served), the robots meta tag will keep the page out of Google index and Google will treat it as if the page is not found, which is a 404 response.

Official Description of Robots Meta Tag

According to the official documentation at the World Wide Web Consortion, the official body that decides web standards (W3C), this is what the Robots Meta Tag does:

“Robots and the META element
The META element allows HTML authors to tell visiting robots whether a document may be indexed, or used to harvest more links.”

This is how the W3c documents describe the Robots.txt:

“When a Robot visits a Web site,it firsts checks for …robots.txt. If it can find this document, it will analyze its contents to see if it is allowed to retrieve the document.”

The W3c interprets the role of the Robots.txt as like a gate keeper for what files are retrieved. Retrieved means crawled by a robot that obeys the Robots.txt exclusion protocol.

Barry Adams was correct to describe the Robots.txt exclusion as a way to manage crawling, not indexing.

It might be useful to thik of the Robots.txt as being like security guards at the door of your site, keeping certain web pages blocked. It may make untangling strange Googlebot activity on blocked web pages a little easier.

More Resources

Images by Shutterstock, Modified by Author
Screenshots by Author, Modified by Author

Email newsletters and marketing campaigns are considered to be a low-cost, effective way to reach your audience, making it a no-brainer for many brands. However, as inboxes fill up, email fatigue can set in and members of your audience may wish to unsubscribe.

No marketer wants to see the email list they worked so hard to build shrink, but mishandling the unsubscribe process can have dire consequences on your brand’s reputation and bottom line.

What’s at stake?

For starters, your company could be fined (up to $41,484 per violation), as outlined in the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) CAN-SPAM Act compliance guide.

The CAN-SPAM Act in a nutshell. Keep in mind that the CAN-SPAM law doesn’t just apply to bulk emails, it also includes “any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service.” It stipulates that you must:

• Use accurate header information and subject lines. This means the “From,” “To,” “Reply-to,” routing information, and subject lines should accurately reflect what’s in your email. Essentially, don’t try to trick recipients into opening the message.
• Identify your message as an advertisement.
• Provide a physical postal address.
• Provide a clear way to opt out of receiving future emails.
• Process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after the email was sent and honor those requests within 10 business days.
• Monitor third parties that may be handling your email campaigns on your behalf. Both the brand whose products or services are being promoted as well as the third party can be held legally responsible.

How hard is the FTC cracking down on offenders? Let’s just say, more likely than a fine are email deliverability problems.

“While the FTC has not had an enforcement action in recent memory, the deeper penalty is with the receivers (Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, etc.),”  said Ryan Phelan, co-founder of marketing consultancy Origin Email. “They see a higher standard when it comes to not only customer permission and engagement, but they are the true determination of your message being spam.”

“A simple fine from the FTC is not what’s going to get you. It’s when you cannot get any of your mail to people that may actually want it,” warned Phelan.

What it means to get flagged as spam. In addition to the legal consequences of ignoring proper opt-out procedures, you may also find your open rates (and by extension, revenue) plummeting as recipients turn to their email client’s “report spam” button.

When a recipient flags your communication as spam, Google says that it receives a copy of it, which it may analyze to protect others. That means that, over time, more reports might land your brand in the spam folder instead of in front of your audience — and, since “out of sight” often equates to “out of mind,” your email campaigns may become less effective and your brand less relevant.

Opt-out best practices

An email subscriber can opt out on good terms and provide you with actionable insights as to why they want out, or they can flag your brand as spam. Address the points below in your opt-out procedure to guide them to the former.    

Don’t make people jump over hurdles to edit their email preferences. On this topic, Phelan highlights two major points: “First, make it easy for the user to unsubscribe. By CAN-SPAM, it’s got to be one-click, but on a more important level, you want to make sure you don’t hide it and, in essence, force the user to hit the ‘spam’ button that is present with many ISP’s. Realistically, if people want to unsubscribe, why would you make it difficult and take a choice and change it to a negative brand experience? Second, regularly check your data processes and integrity. I have seen an increase in companies emailing opted-out customers and in some cases, the company made a mistake including an unsubscribed group.”

Schedule regular audits. Phelan recommends that marketers audit their opt-out and data selection processes annually. During your audit, ensure that you’re not frustrating recipients with unsubscribe links that blend into the background of the email or requiring them to log in before they can opt out — “These may seem simple, but from working with marketers and being on myself, these are the causes of many of the mistakes outside of the pure bad actors.”

Provide an “opt-down” option. Unsubscribing doesn’t have to be an all or nothing proposition. Consider giving users other options.

“By giving recipients the opportunity to dial up or dial down the frequency and cadence of emails they receive, they can literally tailor the mail flow to their needs thus decreasing the likelihood that they will unsubscribe and report spam,” advises Len Shneyder, VP of industry relations at SendGrid.

Clothing brand Bonobos is one example of a brand that does a great job of giving users other options. It can then tailor (and measure) campaigns for audience segments based on their interests.

And, remember, you still have to include a one-click option to unsubscribe to all your emails.

The example below from a different company takes giving users options to an extreme. Users may be more inclined to hit “spam” than go through all of these options.

Ensure that your unsubscribe link is safe. All your links should be safe and you should have an SSL certificate. If you don’t, and your opt-out link directs people to a page like the one below, that may cast doubt on the legitimacy of your brand as well as drive recipients to mark your messages as spam instead of risking a security breach to unsubscribe.

Make sure your opt-out isn’t getting snipped. Gmail clips messages that exceed 102KB. If you’re sending messages bigger than that, Gmail will simply show a “Messaged clipped” notice and link to view the entire message. When this message shows, your email doesn’t, and that includes your unsubscribe links and even tracking to register email opens.

“Senders have to be careful that messages are under 102KB to avoid clipping and cutting off the unsubscribe link,” said Shneyder. “Some senders have experimented with placing the unsubscribe in the header of the message to ensure it doesn’t get cut off and to encourage people who may be tempted to click the spam button. For marketers, a quality list of recipients who actively want to receive email vs. those that don’t is both healthier and will yield better engagement, if not ROI.”

Keep in mind that the “report spam” button is located at the top of most email interfaces, while unsubscribe links are generally in the footer of an email. Which one is more easily accessed? This is an example of what Gmail does when emails get too long.

Find out why they opted out. “Whatever the way in which you enable unsubscribes, be sure to set a baseline, measure and track unsubscribes over time as those trends can be signals of poor content, poor targeting etc.,” said Shneyder. An opt-out is an opportunity to gather data you can use to improve your content marketing efforts.

First and foremost, the example above lets the user know that they’re no longer subscribed. Then it provides enough options to inform the marketer without overwhelming the user. It also provides an accidental un-unsubscribe options for users to re-subscribe.

Proactively remove disengaged subscribers. If recipients aren’t opening your emails, then they’re definitely not clicking through to your site. That can skew your click through rates and impair your email deliverability. You can get more accurate metrics by removing subscribers who haven’t opened your emails or engaged with your brand in a long time, exactly how long will depend on your industry.

Ironically, you should email recipients to let them know they’ve been removed from the list due to inactivity. Lead with a clear subject line and provide a link to opt back in.

Remind them why you’re a match. We know users are inundated with email, so much so that sometimes they don’t remember signing up. Remind your recipients in your email header or footer how and when they opted in to receiving your emails in the first place.

Then there are the cases when users don’t want to opt out, but want to get your emails sent to a different account. Perhaps they’re switching jobs or have a separate email for newsletters. Provide a link in your emails for users to easily change their email addresses.

Following these practices can keep you off spam lists, ensure you don’t run into deliverability issues, generate audience segments for more effective messaging, and above all, keep your email efforts profitable.

About The Author

George Nguyen is an Associate Editor at Third Door Media. His background is in content marketing, journalism, and storytelling.

Among all social channels, Facebook is the one that has the most monthly active users, 2.23 billion.

This means more than 20% of the world’s population is active on Facebook every month.

Can you guess how many Facebook pages exist? 50 million? 60? 70?

Not correct.

As of May 2018, there were more than 80 million Facebook business pages.

And we as marketers have to try to be more unique than the other 79,999,999 marketers. Yeah, probably that sounds something impossible. Well, instead of being different, let’s try to give the best value we can to our audience.

Eight effective tips to help you as a marketer to get the most from your Facebook business page for 2019

1. Get rid of promotional content and make more educational, fun content

When people start complaining that their page posts are not getting enough engagement, I just take my phone, search their business name on Facebook and start analyzing their latest posts.

Post number 1: Promotional

Post number 2: Promotional

Post number 3: Promotional

And I’m like, well, you really think, that the people who’ve liked your page are interested in seeing only promotional and sales oriented posts from your page? And they’re like, “Hmm, what else should we post, if we just want to get new sales for our business by using Facebook?”

In such cases, I start explaining to people that users really don’t like seeing such kinds of posts because their feed is already filled with so many ads, that advertisers put on Facebook for promoting their products or services.

Promotional content isn’t something, that will engage your customers and make them hit the “Like” or “Share” buttons. It’s something, that will make them scroll down through their news feed or even browse your page and unlike it. 

Source: WritersWrite

And the reason why so many pages on Facebook fail, is the fact, that we want to get value from someone without giving it. Not fair, is it?

Promotional/sales oriented content isn’t valuable in most cases. The good thing is you can promote your product or service and at the same time provide valuable content for your audience.

They love to hear your company story more than what you are trying to sell to them. So, get rid of the promotional material from your page. Instead, start educating them with valuable and entertaining content.

Renderforest reports, that 86% of marketers are satisfied with their video marketing results and consider them successful. This means that you can use lots of videos in your content marketing strategy and have success in it. What about starting to produce videos right away?

2. Only use Facebook ads for selling your product or service

You read it correctly.

We’ve already talked on the first point, that you shouldn’t put any promotional content in your organic posts. People hate that.

Instead of it, you can run engaging ads on Facebook and get new users/sales for your product or service.

Of course, I agree that lots of small businesses might not have budgets for Facebook. But well, if you’ve started a company, then you should have at least $100 for testing Facebook ads.

And you may want to read carefully as I’m going to tell you an easy trick on the next line for not wasting that $100 on Facebook ads.

Let’s split the $100 into two $50. What’s your business about? Do a little research or analyze what ads your competitors currently run, if you can’t come up with an idea.

Think of that content and create content for two ad campaigns. Once you’re finished, start running the promotion at least for a week for each campaign.

Seems easy, right? Wait, you’re not done. Instead of sitting and smoking a cigar, while your ads run, start analyzing how they perform.

After your ad has been in the process of running for several hours, you may start optimizing it. By optimizing and measuring your ads every 24 hours, you can at least get your invested money back after the campaign ends. You can do this several times while you find out which ad type works the best for your product or service.

And this whole idea means that you don’t have to invest thousands of dollars to start Facebook ads. All you need to kick off is $100.

3. Conduct webinars and provide valuable information to your audience

Webinars can help you to:

– Stay connected with your current customers

– Make announcements about your products or services

– Talk about niche related topics

– Connect with a wider/new audience and tell them about your services

Webinars are a little bit underrated among Facebook marketing, but they can become a huge weapon for increasing your engagement and driving more sales.

And here comes a question. How to start conducting webinars? Well, the first step is to choose a topic, that can bring value to your audience.

Let me tell you some interesting webinars topics that might be interesting for any audience:

• Invite experts in your industry and conduct QA sessions with them
• Do a QA session by yourself during which the viewers can ask questions
• Announce new product updates and introduce why you made it and how it can help your customers
• Pick interesting news in your industry and go deep with it

These are really basic ideas that you can start with, and then you can make your webinars a big part of your digital marketing strategies.

After deciding what topic to choose, you have to think about the environment and the time you are going to shoot it. Be sure to make everything in high quality: Setup lights, camera, and voice.

There are lots of tools, which will help you stream your webinar in a professional way on your Facebook page.

After setting all these things up, it’s time to go and create an event for your webinar. Write an engaging description, pick an eye-catching title, create a beautiful cover pic or cover video for your event. Don’t forget to choose the right time. You have to understand your audiences’ timezone and pick a time that will be convenient for them to participate in your webinar.

Source: RightMixMarketing

4. Use Facebook insights wisely and make decisions based on your data

Make the most of the data that Facebook Insights provides about your right audience for targeting and marketing. Here is a short list:

• Page views, reviews, likes, reach, recommendations, post engagements, and followers.
• Audience behavior, buying patterns, demographic, and geographic locations.
• Posts reach for both organic and paid strategy. Here you can also add custom timing, to better understand post reactions.
• Traffic source like Google or your website.
• Activity details such as “get direction clicks”, “website clicks”, and “action button clicks”.
• Post engagements and shares.
• If you often hold events, it will show “people reached”, “event page views” and more.
• Videos’ performance and engagements.
• There are also other statistics that you can find when going through Facebook Insights in order to make better marketing decisions.

5. Use Facebook polls and get feedback from your audience

Conducting polls is a very interesting way of engaging your audience. Why?

Let me give you a quick example. People love playing games everywhere. And why not think about a game idea and give your customers something each week?

Why will it work?

• It’s fun. People like to have fun on social media, and you can give them that opportunity by conducting one for them.
• They’ll get something in return if they win the game. You have to think of interesting rules of your game.
• Engagement rate for polls is really high. And if you make the content of your polls interesting, you really have chances for getting good results from it.

Facebook gives you the opportunity to create polls with texts, photos or GIFs. You can publish them in your story or news feed. They’re a really cool way to increase your page engagement rate.

Source: HubSpot

6. Build a Facebook group in your niche and discuss interesting topics there

Facebook groups are a little bit underrated nowadays. But I can’t really find the reason why.

WordStream reports that more than 100 million Facebook users belong to meaningful Facebook communities. Why not build another great community on Facebook who can ask questions, discuss some topics, and gather an active community around your brand name?

People love communities. They love to meet new people on social media and discuss their problems, ideas with others. And also they love to hear what other people talk about their minds.

And you can build that emotional relationship between them. And when your community will become a little bit bigger, you can do other cool things, including the following:

• Conducting meetups with your community and sharing information with them
• Gathering them and discussing how your product could be better
• Doing an event and giving awards to the most active members of your community

This list can last long. I just want to give you the idea of how you can use the community for making a stronger emotional connection with your brand. It will also help you to get your brand name more popular on Facebook.

7. Reply to any activity on your page positively

Whatever happens on your page you must react promptly before any other person․ Any activity should be under your control.

In the past, where bots or automatic answers weren’t available in Facebook, it was a little bit harder to react to all the activity happening on your Facebook page in a short time.

But now you can set chat-bots and automate the whole messaging process of your page.

We have to realize that people who live in the 21st century, don’t like to wait even a minute more. They want their issues to be solved ASAP. If you can’t give the best experience to your users, then the chances are high that you’ll lose your customers. Just be with your customer whenever they need you.

You can set an auto-reply for any recommendation you’ll get for your product. If it’s a positive recommendation and your customer is happy, thank him/her and tell them something awesome.

If the recommendation was negative, don’t mess up. You have to find out the reason why the customer is angry with you and left a negative review on your page. When getting negative feedback for your company, you must dig very deep for finding out the real reason why your customer isn’t satisfied. Maybe someone from your employees did something bad to him/her? You should know about it.

Even if it is the worst feedback about your company (in a professional way), don’t remove or ignore it. If someone else comes and sees bad and unanswered feedback from someone, that can hurt your business a lot. Also, you can’t remove negative feedback, so you have to answer as clear as possible, for not negatively impressing others.

8. Always analyze your competitors and keep an eye on them

Do you know what’s the ranking of your page among your Facebook competitors? There are several tools and ways that you can use to analyze your competitors for generating new ideas for your page.

If we start from the beginning, the first thing to analyze is the kind of posts your competitors making on their page.

You can use the Facebook “pages to watch” report and add your competitors there.

Source: Buffer

What about the ads they are running? You can see that information publicly by checking their ads and info section. By doing this, you’ll know where and how your competitors target their ads. And it can give you lots of ideas for your next marketing campaigns.

If you do this analysis twice per month, it will be complete enough for knowing everything about your competitors.

Conclusion

Facebook marketing tips haven’t changed a lot since the last year. Usually, marketers underrate some tools Facebook provides, such as groups and polls. If you understand how you can bring value to your audience by using these tools, they’ll be effective for you.

Roman Daneghyan is the Chief Marketing Officer at Renderforest. He can be found on Twitter .

Related reading

Over 600 million users visit FB business pages every day. 52% of consumers have discovered a brand there. Why and how to optimize for Facebook local search.

New year, new chance to check out cool new toys. Here’s a roundup of seven social media monitoring tools that could revamp your 2019 strategy.

Webinar marketing has grown in popularity for loads of reasons. One way it’s quite useful is for reputation management. Here are four tips for how to do it.

As demand for ad impressions on social media increases, marketers need to take extra steps to optimize campaigns and maximize their ROI for paid social.